MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jweb_Guru | 2025-11-10 00:03:19+00:00
I can point to individual sentences that were clearly generated by AI (for example, numerous instances of this parallel construction, "No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.", "Not corrupted. Not misaligned. Not reading wrong offsets.", "Not a segfault. Not the T_NONE error from #1079. There it is, the exact error from production"). The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text. And there are a number of other tells as well.

The reason I don't usually bother to bring these specific things up is that I already know the response, which is just going to be you arguing that a human could have written this way, too. Which is true. The point is that if you read the collective whole of the article, it is very clear that it was composed with the aid of AI, regardless of whether any single part of it could be defensibly written by a human. I'd add that sometimes, the writing of people who interact heavily with LLMs all day starts to resemble LLM writing (a phenomenon I don't think people talk enough about), but usually not to this extent.

This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible to use "this was written with the help of an LLM, and the person posting it did not even bother to edit the article to make that less obvious" as a heuristic to not bother wasting more time on an article.
by StackRiff | 2025-11-10 00:04:57+00:00
My friends and I have been hacking on http://dateit.com for a while. It's an event planning app (works best on iOS and android, but there is a web app) with lots of fun features:

- Calendar sync - Photo upload - post/comment/reactions - Recurring events - SMS notifications - Greeting card maker (and a lot more)

We started working on this all the way back during the Covid lockdown when we wanted to capture that "facebook events" experience without the facebook.

It's grown into something much more than our original idea. Most of the features are free and we have a fair pricing model that doesn't nickel-and-dime you like many of the competing apps do. Would love your feedback!
by titanomachy | 2025-11-10 00:05:18+00:00
The particle simulation approach to generating an organic "tree-like" support structure is super creative! If I'm understanding correctly, you defined some laws of physics and then ran a simulation with the "time" dimension mapped to the z-axis? Is this a well-known approach, or something you came up with?

Either way, it produces a beautiful aesthetic. I'd love to play around with this idea.
by scuff3d | 2025-11-10 00:06:17+00:00
I restarted my career in my 30s. I'm literally working in a field right now where people almost half my age are at the same level I am, and people my age or younger are my boss. Have never had a problem all through the career transition.

I'm not just saying me personally. I'm saying I have never even heard a creditable case of "reverse discrimination" in all my years, across all my colleagues.

DEI initiatives seek to put minority groups on the same level as majority groups. So they get the same consideration as everyone else, not more consideration. If that bothers you I don't really know what to tell you.
by 9rx | 2025-11-10 00:06:24+00:00
> And finally, you will have to be located in Tier 1 tech hubs now

Exactly. Adjusted for cost of living, $300,000 in SF or NYC is about $170,000 where I lived back then, so ~$80/hr. Which is, after adjusted for inflation to that time... You guessed it: $50.94/hr!

And you're pointing at high quality talent with considerable experience, not some kid out of high school. Said kid out of high school like I was back then isn't going to find that much in today's market. As you point out, the market has tanked big time — and has been tanking for decades.

As before, we're only just now starting to notice how far behind we’ve fallen because of things recently becoming exceptionally more expensive.
by OfflineSergio | 2025-11-10 00:06:30+00:00
I'm still working on WithAudio (https://desktop.with.audio). A one time payment Text To Speech Desktop App. Because I think everything doesn't have to be a subscription.

In October I finished the PDF parser. It was a big challenge extracting PDF contect with correct paragraph breaks on user's computer locally. I'm gonna write about this soon.

Now I'm working on a web extension that talks to the app that run locally on your system so you can use WithAudio in your browser with very good performance, 100% local and private.
by jclarkcom | 2025-11-10 00:08:09+00:00
I've been enjoying the breadth of projects made possible with AI, I've cataloged over 200 of them created in 2025 here: https://jonathanclark.com/posts/ai-coding-million-lines-2025...

A few of my recent favorites: - swim lap counter in html/JS that uses the camera to watch you swim and count laps/timing - video recorder that records your window/desktop and uploads a file to S3 - video conferencing app that allows a 2 year to click on a family member face and initiates a video conference using webRTC, STUN, and browser audio/video capture with automatic bandwidth adjustments (works on all platforms with pure HTML/JS). - CUDA based ray tracer with HTML UI that can trace over 2m rays per second on my laptop for scientific study, allowing real-time display of optical parts. - chat front-end for image models like gemini-pro and openai that take other images and text as references and generate a big library of options to chose from in seconds, I've been using photoshop for decades but I tend to use this more now.
by jazzcomputer | 2025-11-10 00:08:18+00:00
As someone who has eaten way too much sugary food I think my gut-brain coupling may have had enough of this. A few weeks ago I had a sugar binge one night and the cognitive effects were impossible to ignore the next day. Fortunately after 2-3 days I was back to normal but of my sample size of one, and in my condition (which is pre-diabetic) I observed a clear link.

It was a good experience as it's prompted me to get more serious about cutting back sugar, implemented as long term, achievable habit change.
by paul7986 | 2025-11-10 00:08:30+00:00
Im sorta beginning to think some LLM/AI stuff is the Wizard of Oz(a fake it before you make it facade).

Like why can an LLM create a nicely designed website for me but asking it to do edits and changes to the design is a complete joke. Lots of the time it creates another brand new design (not what i asked all) and it's attempts at editing it LOL. It makes me think it does no design at all rather it just went and grab one from the ethers of the Internet acting like it created it.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-10 00:08:57+00:00
> when I say I'm a SWE people sneer - the respect for the profession IMO due to "efficiency/AI" has crashed over the last decade.

Tbf, a lot of SWEs sneered at other professions getting automated by AI - even on HN.

There isn't much sympathy to be given to SWEs and techies simply because we are paid significantly higher than other white collar roles with comparable or worse working hours like accounting, marketing, other engineering disciplines, dentistry, nursing, and even various subfields of medicine like primary care physicians.

A lot of techies who are complaining on HN need to realize that in reality they are the elite even though they don't think they are.

Why does Jeff in Cary NC deserve a $200K TC working 40 hours and remote first and just a BS in CS when a CPA at PwC makes $120K TC with added debt from a masters in accounting, a Management Consultant at BCG makes $175K TC with added MBA debt, an Biomedical Engineer at Biogen earning around $120K TC with added debt from bio undergrad and grad school, a journalist working for a local newspaper earning $30k-50k with debt from journalism school, and a teacher earns $50K with debt from getting an education credential on top of a bachelors?
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-10 00:10:02+00:00
> It wasn't exactly the Streisand effect, but I remember thinking the whole flourishing of trans rights and acceptance between 2017 and 2021 never would have happened if Hillary had won. Is there a name for this phenomenon?

2017-2021 wasn't a flourishing of trans rights and acceptance, it was the big wave of active discrimination by, particularly, state-level Republican governments against previous progress in that dimension. That made the issue more visible, but specifically because it was the exact opposite of a flourishing of trans rights and acceptance.

But, sure, it probably would have looked a bit different if there had been a federal administration likely to defend rather than abandon that progress (but it probably still would have happened.)
by rekabis | 2025-11-10 00:10:05+00:00
> Verifying control of an email address is a frequent activity on the web today and is used both to prove the user has provided a valid email address

LOL WUT??

This is also ideal in “war dialling” eMail servers to get accurate lists of what eMail accounts exist on said server. This has been the case since marketing first hit the Internet.

Do you really want all of your legitimate eMail addresses to end up on spam lists? Because this is how you get complete and unabridged lists of your domain’s valid eMail addresses onto spam lists.

It’s why my own eMail server is set up to quietly confirm and accept any and all eMail sent to the domain - regardless of username employed. Even invalid eMail accounts get confirmed and incoming eMails to them get accepted.

Anything not sent to a valid account then drops into a catch-all account for further processing. Occasionally I’ll get eMail where the username was misspelled - it happens - and I just forward it to the appropriate family member.

The rest get reported as spam. And I enjoy making every last report. Enjoy ending up on a blacklist.
by AuthAuth | 2025-11-10 00:10:11+00:00
It is the computer people. The 'owning' people were computer people that founded these companies. Its computer people that sit in these meetings and go through designing these changes and building these systems. I'm a privacy person and yesterday my boss asked me to pull up records on a users device to see a record of what they were doing and I did it even though its disgusting micromanagement that I hate.
by romaaeterna | 2025-11-10 00:11:40+00:00
> So, for example, when a Florida driver on Autopilot drops his phone and blows through a stop sign, hitting a car which then hits two pedestrians, killing one, Tesla will claim “this driver was solely at fault.” In that case, a judge agreed that the driver was mostly at fault, but still assigned 33% of blame to Tesla, resulting in a $243 million judgment against the company.

His foot was on the gas though

Looking at this author's other articles, he seems more than a bit unhinged when it comes to Tesla: https://electrek.co/author/jamesondow/ Has Hacker News fallen for clickbait? (Don't answer)
by dm03514 | 2025-11-10 00:12:03+00:00
Still hacking on some data tools:

DuckDB for stream processing:

https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow

Lightweight kafka stream processing using DuckDB as the execution engine. 300MiB runtime can easily handle thousands of messages / second.

Working on a Kafka Connect alternative:

https://github.com/turbolytics/librarian

Right now mongo replication (through changestreams) is supported to kafka. Working on Postgres support right now.
by gboss | 2025-11-10 00:12:22+00:00
I’ve had two experiences with off-shoring. The first time my former CTO brought in a near shore firm and they worked independently on a large project. There was no knowledge transfer or collaboration with the on shore devs. They built what was asked, it was over engineered and much was built of little value. We still have the software they wrote but it is a liability. The second time, I’m now in the CTO position, instead of having the nearshore people silo’d we work integrated. Everyone is on the same team, code reviews, pull requests, all mutually understood. It’s so much better. It all starts from the top and if you don’t have vision you’re doomed to fail.
by Noumenon72 | 2025-11-10 00:12:36+00:00
So this isn't really "visualize FastAPI endpoints", it's "visualize the inheritance cascade caused by using the pydantic-resolve approach to data fetching/transformation, which involves adding post-hooks to compositions of Pydantic objects". A vanilla FastAPI user like myself is going to have trouble understanding it without realizing how tied it is to that framework.
by danans | 2025-11-10 00:12:49+00:00
> For most white collar jobs like tech here in the US, your out-of-pocket as percentage is income doesn't play a role in how we decide salary bands.

Most people here in the US don't have white collar jobs nor compensation of a software engineer. They work in retail or other blue and pink collar professions.

A Canadian retail worker has much more affordable access to healthcare than their US counterpart.
by laterium | 2025-11-10 00:13:27+00:00
The reason housing is extremely expensive in the US is the current old NIMBY home owners. The country has 66% home ownership rate thanks to the long term policy of US government to promote homeownership. But this has the undesirable side effect that for most Americans, their house represents all their wealth and they will fight to the bitter end to protect that from anyone else, especially newcomers.

It's nice to think of newcomers as Airbnbs, investment firms, and Chinese immigrants to justify this NIMBY stance to themselves and sleep well at night. But in fact the newcomers are their own children. Left likes environment as a reason to block construction and right neighborhood character (racism). This ensures that nothing gets built and the home prices stay high, exactly what the electorate, majority homeowner and majority old desires.

From the voter's perspective it's not a housing problem. It's a housing bonanza where it's old people complaining about a problem supposedly others created while wiping their tears with dollars. There's so many red herrings in the housing debate that they can sleep sound that it will never change thanks to the next guy blaming Airbnbs for why housing is expensive.
by buran77 | 2025-11-10 00:13:41+00:00
> have you tried

I've heard this so many times it's starting to be a meme. The system was claimed to be very capable from the beginning, then every version was a massive improvement, and yet we're always still in very dangerous, and honestly underwhelming territory.

Teslas keep racking up straight line highway miles where every intervention probably counts at most as 1 mile deducted from the total in the stats. Have one cross a busy city without interventions or accidents like a normal human driver is expected to.
by tippytippytango | 2025-11-10 00:15:23+00:00
Ultimately, anecdotes and testimonials of a product like this are irrelevant. But the public discourse hasn't caught up with it. People talk about it like it's a new game console or app, giving their positive or negative testimonials, as if this is the correct way to validate the product.

Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment.

This gets especially relevant when it gets into an intermediate regime where it can go 10,000 miles without a catastrophic incident. At that level of reliability you can find lots of people who claim "it's driven me around for 2 years without any problem, what are you complaining about?"

10,000 mile per incident fault rate is actually catastrophic. That means the average driver has a serious, life threatening incident every year at an average driving rate. That would be a public safety crisis.

We run into the problem again in the 100,000 mile per incident range. This is still not safe. Yet, that's reliable enough where you can find many people who can potentially get lucky and live their whole life and not see the system cause a catastrophic incident. Yet, it's still 2-5x worse than the average driver.
by jollyjerry | 2025-11-10 00:15:50+00:00
Correct and performant way to calculate historical value of a portfolio. I want a pure function, but taking a date as input is insufficient because users can edit holdings, and securities can split.

Weighing the tradeoffs of doing this calculation server or client side. That'll be an architecture shift away from my current set of background jobs fetching state and towards something more functional and on-demand.

https://jch.app
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-10 00:16:11+00:00
> Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster)

You’re describing an introduced aerodynamic instability. Not an airframe issue. (Misconfiguring the airframe with non-airframe modifications doesn’t count as an airframe failure.)

Analogy: most Linux kernels are not real time. If I run a non-RT Linux in a real-time use case, that doesn’t make the kernel crap. (You probably used it because it’s popular!) It does mean you used it wrong.

737 Max was fundamentally fucked. But it was fucked because it tried to retain a great and proven airframe with incompatible components. The problem isn’t Boeing producing bad airframes. (787 is also a great airframe.) It’s Boeing integrating terribly.

Missing this distinction misses a critical point about the 737 Max’s failure. (It’s also not necessary to understand it the way an aerospace engineer and pilot might. But then don’t misuse, and then double down on misusing, technical terminology.)
by redserk | 2025-11-10 00:17:32+00:00
I partially agree. FSD seems fine to me but I wouldn’t buy a second Tesla. Tesla seems to have stopped caring about being a car company that caters to nerds/tech enthusiasts.

Mine has been an extremely well done vehicle and I was (and kind of am) bullish on FSD as a driver assistance technology, but a car is a 6-7 year investment for me and I have big doubts about their direction. They seem to have abandoned the idea of being a car company, instead chasing this robotaxi idea.

Up until 2023/2024 was fine for my 6-7 year car lifecycle. Tesla was really cool when they let you do all sorts of backwards-compatible upgrades, but they seemed to have abandoned that.

I’ve found it incredibly disappointing seeing their flailing direction now.

Rivian seems to still have a lot of the magic that Tesla had. They’re definitely a strong contender for my next vehicle in a year or two.
by irjustin | 2025-11-10 00:17:58+00:00
> Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment.

100% agreed, and I'll take it one step further - level 3 should be outright banned/illegal.

The reason is it allows blame shifting exactly as what is happening right now. Drivers mentally expected level 4 and legally the company will position the fault, in as much as it can get away with, to be on the driver, effectively level 2.
by georgemcbay | 2025-11-10 00:18:15+00:00
> They should be panicking.

I'm sure they would be if the stock price had ever showed any signs of being based in reality.

But for now Elon can keep having SpaceX and xAI buy up all the unsold Teslas to make number go up.

If that ever stops working, just spin up a new company with a hyper-inflated valuation and have it acquire Tesla at some made up number. Worked for him once, why not try it again.

And at this point he can get even fraudier, with the worst possible realistic outcome being that he might get forced to pay a relatively small bribe and publicly humiliate himself for Trump a bit.

But there's really no more consequences to any sort of business fraud (for now) as long as you can afford the tribute.

#WorldLibertyFinancial
by mattfrommars | 2025-11-10 00:19:01+00:00
I can assure you a lot of veteran devs in my company who had major impact were let ago because of off shoring to India and Poland. My employer is a very well known financial institution, think Blackrock, Bloomberg etc.

Public press paints picture of the firm laying off due to adoption of AI. Yet, I can assure you without doubt its not because of it but due to continued offshore.

I think we are at the brink of opening another large campus in India, not sure which city. Oh another thing is these full time position in NA were eliminated and replaced with employees from TCS.

My own boss is against it but its coming from higher ups. I have no idea what's driving them. We made billion in net revenues last year and we are actually part of the org that is in 'cash cow' category - upper management literally said this too in our town halls
by FilosofumRex | 2025-11-10 00:19:03+00:00
Chomsky and Pinker (I don't Fodor), are entertainers and their theories are good only for PhD pumpers. How human brain works and the associated neuroscience has absolutely nothing to do with LLMs which simply are empirically defined function approximations.

The problem with Sam Altman is that he is a shyster and leech feeding off the hard work of thousands of programmers and engineers.
by dangus | 2025-11-10 00:20:33+00:00
It’s not that unheard of. Does anyone make a better $999 laptop than Apple? Nope, the MacBook Air is faster and gets better battery life with zero fans and basically nothing on the market compares. That doesn’t make Apple “suspicious” more than any other company.

TP-Link is the best for the same reason Apple is the best. They just have the momentum of being in the lead.

I would also say that TP-Link isn’t wildly and unrealistically cheaper or anything.

Their prosumer/business Omada lineup is clunky and kinda sucks compared to Ubiquiti.

Zyxel WiFi 7 APs are more competitively priced than basically anything last I checked.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-11-10 00:21:38+00:00
>Is it really hard to understand that the infrastructure for remote work, which I think everyone would agree got a major upgrade during the pandemic, would also make it much easier for companies to outsource software dev work?

No, because it wasn't actually upgraded.

Like be honest, the shift into remote work wasn't surrounded by massive tech advances or upgrades. All the tools that existed for remote work had been there, largely in the same fashion and capability, for decades.

So when you say the infra. and tooling has improved, you need to be specific because it's very hard to point to anything that was fundamentally or notably improved in the pandemic around remote work.

It all existed before. It was all used before. If you weren't using it before the pandemic that was by choice, not because it didn't exist.

Everything from our communication software, to developer collaboration tools, to how org's track and manage their employees all existed well, well before the pandemic.

It was a cultural change -- not a technological one.

> And that is a change that only happened around the beginning of the pandemic

I'm not sure what you're basing this on. Especially someone's that's had to work with peers across the globe for 4+ decades -- the tools have always been there.