MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kouteiheika | 2025-11-15 09:35:17+00:00
When it comes to compute cost the choice of activation function makes little difference nowadays (and it can often be fused with whatever operation comes before it, which makes it effectively free).

The real reason is simple: it was inherited.

The relu^2 was used in the nanogpt speedrun[1] because it produced the best empirical results, then Andrej based his nanochat on the nanogpt speedrun without changing the activation function, and then this project was based on nanochat.

[1] -- https://github.com/KellerJordan/modded-nanogpt
by rdtsc | 2025-11-15 09:35:34+00:00
$6.5k for a water heater? Does it make coffee and give back massages?But seriously, is it going to recoup the extra 4.5$ in 10 years or so or however often people replace water heaters.

And hopefully the smart part is not relying on external connections or services. Otherwise next time the cloud service goes down you end up taking cold showers, both figuratively and literally.
by yoz-y | 2025-11-15 09:38:14+00:00
It seems to me that most people (myself included) never experienced the actual Waterfall elsewhere than in school curriculum descriptions.

It's a bit funny to see people describe a spec written in days (hours) and iterations lasting multiple weeks as "waterfall".

But these days I've already had people argue that barely stopping to think about a problem before starting to prompt a solution is "too tedious of a process".
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-11-15 09:38:47+00:00
If OpenSSL were dispoed of,^1 then where would that leave "TLS"

1. For example if software stopped linking to OpenSSL libraries instead of alternatives

"OpenSSL" (the library as well as the binary) is quite "bloated" compared to WolfSSL, LibreSSL, BoringSSL, etc.

If the name "TLS" signifies something meaningful then why do the majority of TLS-implementing projects still include "SSL" in their name
by yibg | 2025-11-15 09:39:29+00:00
I think also perhaps the reasons for being poor. My family was poor but so was everyone else. It was structural. So as a result (my hypothesis), there wasn’t even the hope of being rich, just not so poor. So for instance the mentality was always to save, not invest, because no one has the money to invest could afford to lose whatever meager savings there was.

As a result my up bringing was filled with lessons to play it safe, don’t take risks, get a stable job etc.
by sandruso | 2025-11-15 09:40:17+00:00
That's nice summary of the space and how large it is. My recommendation is to just start with math expression parser and evaluator. You can start with Pratt but I would even recommend going with infix to reverse polish using stack.

Adding construct like IF or variables is naturally next step but you will have code in place and idea where to put it and how approach it.

I learned a lot about JVM runtime, how Zig is parsing itself, how Lua represents values... Too many good rabbit holes to fall in.
by refurb | 2025-11-15 09:40:39+00:00
I think the issue is you’re confusing social media comments with broad, overall opinions.

I’d bet most Americans don’t even know they are getting rid of the penny. Or if they saw it on the news, they forgot about it a day later. It ranks pretty low on general concerns.

Social media commentary about the issue are a tiny minority - first people need to come across the topic, then they need to muster up the effort to actually comment. People who don’t care don’t comment.

I see this mistake with a lot of people. Issues they think are top of mind across people aren’t even known by the vast majority.
by midnitewarrior | 2025-11-15 09:40:39+00:00
I see rapid, iterative Waterfall.

The downfall of Waterfall is that there are too many unproven assumptions in too long of a design cycle. You don't get to find out where you were wrong until testing.

If you break a waterfall project into multiple, smaller, iterative Waterfall processes (a sprint-like iteration), and limit the scope of each, you start to realize some of the benefits of Agile while providing a rich context for directing LLM use during development.

Comparing this to agile is missing the point a bit. The goal isn't to replace agile, it's to find a way that brings context and structure to vibe coding to keep the LLM focused.
by hnlmorg | 2025-11-15 09:40:46+00:00
Defining the goal is the easy part: as I said in my OP, the goal is unit tests passing.

It’s the other weights that are harder. You might want execution speed to be one metric. But how do you add weights to prevent cheating (eg hardcoding the results)? Or use of anti-patterns like global variables? (For example. Though one could argue that scoped variables aren’t something an AI-first language would need)

This is where the human feedback part comes into play.

It’s definitely not an easy problem. But it’s still more pragmatic than having a human curate the corpus. Particularly considering the end goal (no pun intended) is having an AI-first programming language.

I should close off by saying that I’m very skeptical that there’s any real value in an AI-first PL. so all of this is just a thought experiment rather than something I’d advocate.
by laserlight | 2025-11-15 09:40:58+00:00
> There is a spec, but there is no waterfall required to work and maintain it.

The problem with waterfall is not that you have to maintain the spec, but that a spec is the wrong way to build a solution. So, it doesn't matter if the spec is written by humans or by LLMs.

I don't see the point of maintaining a spec for LLMs to use as context. They should be able to grep and understand the code itself. A simple readme or a design document, which already should exist for humans, should be enough.
by jcynix | 2025-11-15 09:41:37+00:00
If you control your own Apache server and just want to shortcut to "go away" instead of feeding scrapers, the RewriteEngine is your friend, for example:

RewriteEngine On # Block requests that reference .php anywhere (path, query, or encoded) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (\.php|%2ephp|%2e%70%68%70) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} \.php [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \.php [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Notes: there's no PHP on my servers, so if someone asks for it, they are one of the "bad boys" IMHO. Your mileage may differ.
by aorth | 2025-11-15 09:41:47+00:00
True! I've been doing this for years on Linux. I use a dedicated Chromium instance in app mode:

/usr/bin/chromium --ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform,WaylandWindowDecorations,WebRTCPipeWireCapturer --user-data-dir=/home/myuser/.config/chromium-ilri --app=https://teams.microsoft.com

Works incredibly well (put this in a `.desktop` file with `Exec=` and you can launch it via your desktop's launcher). Some of the settings may not be needed anymore, as Chromium has come a long way in terms of Wayland support. I use Firefox for everything else, but haven't tried Teams there.
by autoexec | 2025-11-15 09:41:54+00:00
> Seriously though, break a law that no one is interested in enforcing?

I wouldn't put it past any one of the companies who think they might maybe have some rights to the game to sic their hired copyright goons on gamers who aren't too careful about how they go about pirating the game, their ISPs, and anyone else they think they can threaten into a settlement offer for a few bucks.

The copyright enforcement regime has no morals and they're happy to make it your problem to prove in court that they don't actually have the rights the material they claim was infringed. When a bunch of record labels sued Cox for a $1 billion in damages Cox eventually found that the labels never had the rights to many of the songs they were successfully sued for.

They were willing to threaten Nightdive. I certainly wouldn't call them disinterested in enforcing the copyrights they may or may not have.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-11-15 09:41:56+00:00
Just to clarify, are you starting from the point of view that AI simply does all the jobs we currently have? Were this the case, they’d also surely build robots and design AI themselves yeah? Labor as we know it wouldn’t exist anymore, because would simply be impossible to do useful work.

We’re willing to fork over money for things because those things require human effort to obtain, and we’d rather not expend it. In this new world, everything from the extraction of raw materials to the production of advanced technology would require no human effort. If our modern notions of property still persisted, however, then this doesn’t mean that people would simply have whatever they wanted. You need trees to get apples, you need a hole in the ground to get coal. Ultimately the limiting factor on everything would come down to land. Labor-time is replaced with land-time, because the land works itself. Not having land in this society would be like not having limbs or a brain in ours. You would have nothing to exchange in order to get the things you needed.

So I’d say that either the notion of property itself would change, or people without property would die until everyone had some amount of it, and people would generally occupy their time with various games that shuffled around the limited amount of land available as a proxy for social status. The flawed assumption that you make is that people would all have some amount of land in which to make their microfactory, but this would only be the case after lots of people died.
by rgovostes | 2025-11-15 09:42:54+00:00
I made a brief attempt of splitting each character into a separate <span style="transform: scale(<random>, <random>)">c</span>, but it doesn't look good because the transform is applied after the glyph is rasterized. I didn't see a way to scale the font size itself in two different axes, and applying a single scaling factor of 97-100% does not perfectly recreate the effect. text-rendering: geometricPrecision probably helps.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-15 09:43:41+00:00
A lot of those failings (i.e. COT faithfulness) are straight up human failure modes.

LLMs failing the same way as humans do on the same tasks as humans is a weak sign of "this tech is AGI capable", in my eyes. Because it hints that LLMs are angling to do the same things human mind does, and in similar enough ways to share the failure modes. And human mind is the one architecture we know to support general intelligence.

Anthropic has a more recent paper on introspection in LLMs, by the way. With numerous findings. The main takeaway is: existing LLMs have introspection capabilities - weak, limited and unreliable, but present nonetheless. It's a bit weird, given that we never trained them for that.

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.ht...

You can train them to be better at it, if you really wanted to. A few other papers tried, although in different contexts.
by lpellegr | 2025-11-15 09:44:04+00:00
This is mostly just basic IP geolocation. I work for Ipregistry (ipregistry.co), and this kind of lookup is something we provide: country, region, city, ASN, hosting provider, VPN usage and similar signals. Any service that sees your IP can request that information in a single query.

ChatGPT receives your IP when you connect. The model itself does not know your location, but the system around it can add location context before the model answers. Many products do this because it helps with weather, time zone handling or local recommendations.

Accuracy depends on your network setup. VPNs, mobile networks and corporate proxies can make the location drift quite a bit, but at a general level it is often good enough to shape responses.

The more important part is transparency. Inferring location from an IP is normal, but it should be clear to users when that information is being used.
by Twisol | 2025-11-15 09:45:00+00:00
UDP pretty much just tacks a source/destination port pair onto every IP datagram, so its primary function is to allow multiple independent UDP peers to coexist on the same IP host. (That is, UDP just multiplexes an IP link.) UDP as a protocol doesn't add any additional network guarantees or services on top of IP.

QUIC is still "their own protocol", just implemented as another protocol nested inside a UDP envelope, the same way that HTTP is another protocol typically nested inside a TCP connection. It makes some sense that they'd piggyback on UDP, since (1) it doesn't require an additional IP protocol header code to be assigned by IANA, (2) QUIC definitely wants to coexist with other services on any given node, and (3) it allows whatever middleware analyses that exist for UDP to apply naturally to QUIC applications.

(Regarding (3) specifically, I imagine NAT in particular requires cooperation from residential gateways, including awareness of both the IP and the TCP/UDP port. Allowing a well-known outer UDP header to surface port information, instead of re-implementing ports somewhere in the QUIC header, means all existing NAT implementations should work unchanged for QUIC.)
by Jensson | 2025-11-15 09:45:15+00:00
No they think "its bullshit that you can't get out of it, since I did it myself". The argument from the left is not "we should help poor people since they are miserable" its that "its impossible for poor people to help themselves", why do left wing people try to make that bullshit claim that will just create more oponents?

I think we should help poor people, but I also think that its not hard for poor people to work hard and stop being poor today. If you want my support just say you wanna help poor people, don't try to tell me that its impossible for poor people to help themselves because then I will argue against you.

Like, why equate the two opinions "you can work yourself out of poverty" and "we shouldn't help poor people", those are two entirely different kinds of opinions.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-15 09:45:24+00:00
What LLM tools are folks seeing that do the most or the best to integrate specs?

Amazon's Kiro is incredibly spec driven. Haven't tried it but interested. Amplifier has a strong document-driven-development loop also built-in. https://github.com/microsoft/amplifier?tab=readme-ov-file#-d...
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-11-15 09:45:42+00:00
Yeah, that was a sneaky one on my part.

One thing I learned from the video was how do water heaters get away with giving higher capacity numbers than they actually have. Well, apparently, kind of like air, hot water also rises and the heater keeps working while in use and it also has secondary heater element it can switch to, so it can follow the cold-hot water separation line.
by dijit | 2025-11-15 09:46:59+00:00
Farming is an invention, the majority of human history was spent without farming of any kind, something like 80% of human history was in the hunter/gatherer phase.

We should not underestimate the fact that where we excel is that we are better at passing off information to our offspring. This makes improvement over long periods possible as we can build off the backs of our ancestors.
by astralshard | 2025-11-15 09:47:28+00:00
I hate writing SEO titles and meta descriptions.

So I built MetaMagic:

- Paste any public URL - AI crawls the page - Returns 3 optimized titles + 3 descriptions in ~10 seconds - CTR scoring (0–100), power word highlights, Google SERP preview - 12 languages - Free tier: 3 URLs/day forever - Pro: $35 one-time (first 100) — unlimited, bulk CSV, API

Tech: - Scraping: Jina Reader → Firecrawl → cheerio fallback - AI: OpenRouter (DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral) - Frontend: Next.js 15 + shadcn/ui - Payments: Stripe Checkout - No user accounts, no tracking beyond Vercel Analytics

Try it free: https://metamagic.vercel.app

I’m using it on my next launch (RankList v2). Feedback welcome, especially on crawling edge cases or API use.

@astralshardio | Romania | Building in public
by schainker | 2025-11-15 09:47:36+00:00
Color me skeptical but the lack of mention about data privacy on that website screams this to me:

Pay EXTRA for an over engineered water heater whose company sells your data about how much water you use, when you use it, and at what temperature, so that costco or someone can serve you a towel ad on your smart fridge screen after you get dressed or do the dishes.
by selenehyun | 2025-11-15 09:47:52+00:00
It is not open source, but I am still proud of a message delivery system I designed and built alone two years ago. It consists of six independent components and guarantees at least one successful delivery as long as the database remains available. It supports AWS SES, Twilio SMS and MMS, Webhook, Discord messages, and can easily add new providers through an adapter pattern.

Messages are queued through an API, captured by Debezium, produced to Kafka, delivered by workers, logged, and updated through DSNs received via webhook. Failures go to a DLQ where they are retried until the limit is reached.

Each stage runs independently, so any failure only causes minor delay without risking unintended drops. With Prometheus metrics in place, this system has processed more than two hundred thousand messages per day in production for two years without a single reported loss.
by yoz-y | 2025-11-15 09:48:15+00:00
To add to this: I've worked on projects that came out of waterfall process, and on projects that came out of too hasty agile iterations.

They both have issues but they are very different. A waterfall project would have inscrutable structure and a large amount of "open doors" just in case a need of an extension at some place would materialize. Paradoxically this makes the code difficult to extend and debug because of overdone abstractions.

Hasty agile code has too many TODOs with "put this hardcoded value in a parameter". It is usually easier to add small features but when coming to a major design flaw it can be easier to throw everything out.

For UI code, AI seems to heavily tend towards the latter.
by spinningslate | 2025-11-15 09:48:39+00:00
Extend your reasoning.

> it's really just a spec that gets turned into the thing we actually run. It's just that the building process is fully automated. What we do when we create software is creating a specification in source code form.

Agree. My favourite description of software development is specification and translation - done iteratively.

Today, there are two primary phases:

1. Specification by a non-developer and the translation of that into code. The former is led by BAs/PMs etc and the output is feature specs/user stories/acceptance tests etc. The latter id done by developers: they translate the specs into code.

2. The resulting code is also, as you say, a spec. It gets translated into something the machine can run. This is automated by a compiler/interpreter (perhaps in multiple steps, e.g. when a VM is involved).

There have been several attempts over the years to automate the first step. COBOL was probably the first; since then we've had 4GLs, CASE tools, UML among others. They were all trying to close the gap: to take phase 1 specification closer to what non-developers can write - with the result automatically translated to working code.

Spec-driven development is another attempt at this. The translator (LLM) is quite different to previous efforts because it's non-deterministic. That brings some challenges but also offers opportunities to use input language that isn't constrained to be interpretable by conventional means (parsers implementing formal grammars).

We're in the early days of spec-driven. It may fail like its predecessors or it may not. But first order, there's nothing sacrosanct about the use of 3rd generation languages as the means to represent the specification. The pivotal challenge is whether translation from the starting specification can be reliably translated to working software.

If it can (big if) then economics will win out.
by sholain | 2025-11-15 09:50:06+00:00
Don't really think the thesis is fair.

SDD as it's presented is a bit heavy weight, if you experimented with a bit, there is a lighter version that can work.

For some mini modules, we keep a single page spec as 'source of truth' instead of the code.

It's nice but has it's caveats but they are less of a concern over time.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-11-15 09:50:19+00:00
Commercial third parties intermediating use of the web don't solve problems of "privacy"

They might interfere with the businesses of other third party intermediaries like "Big Tech"

Paying the middleman (intermediary) might in theory discourage it from conducting commercial surveillance but it doesn't solve the problem presented by using third parties as middlemen

The possibility to profit from surveillance remains

An effective solution would remove the possibility, and thereby the incentive, by removing the third party
by Twisol | 2025-11-15 09:51:36+00:00
That would be IP over some lower level physical layer, not some custom content stuffed into an IP packet :)

(It's absolutely worth reading some of those old April Fools' RFCs, by the way [0]. I'm a big fan of RFC 7168, which introduced HTTP response code 418 "I'm a teapot".)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...
by hdgvhicv | 2025-11-15 09:52:29+00:00
Voting doesn’t help. You need to win hearts and minds, and the synergy of resources available between the trillion dollar industries like AI and Marketing and you makes that a losing battle too.

People want this stuff. People want ring doorbells, they want age verification, they want government control. Think of the children/criminals/immigrants.

Voting won’t help.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-15 09:53:16+00:00
You missed his point. He's not saying "why bother why a new language if this one is fine", he's saying "why bother with a very similar language if this one is fine".

I think that's fair. Even if you are just doing a hobby language there are plenty of unexplored niches, e.g. that compile-to-shell language I've forgotten the name of.
by laserlight | 2025-11-15 09:53:25+00:00
> the problem with waterfall wasn't the detailed spec

The detailed spec is exactly the problem with the waterfall development. The spec presumes that it is the solution, whereas Agile says “Heck, we don't even understand our problem well, let alone understanding a solution to it.”

Beginning with a detailed spec fast with an LLM already puts you into a complex solution space, which is difficult to navigate compared to a simpler solution space. Regardless of the iteration speed, waterfall is the method that puts you into a complex space. Agile is the one you begin with smaller spaces to arrive at a solution.
by renewiltord | 2025-11-15 09:54:24+00:00
I really need to go back and get some old HN posts and see if Hacker News always had LinkedIn style content. I feel like it didn't, but people are always claiming "things have changed; it wasn't like this back in the day". I feel like this is true on this count, even ten years ago.

Then again, did LinkedIn always have LinkedIn content? Perhaps some future LLM will ingest everything and capture trends for us in a pretty Google Trends way and we can say "yes, that's the moment image macros became a thing!" and "oh yeah, aug 27 2013 is when disillusionment posters died".