MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-12-30 03:57:33+00:00
Things like this can often be assessed on a macro level. When you start to get the number of users sites like Facebook have and sites like Reddit claim they have, you end up with content that's reflective of a broad sample of society. You do have that on Facebook, you do not have that on Reddit.

I suspect Reddit is intentionally overcounting by doing things like counting multiple devices as different users, multiple accounts as different users, making minimal efforts to remove bots, counting dynamic IPs as distinct users, and so on. You could even count API callers as users, but that is stretching the limits of plausible deniability. The thing is - their content isn't reflective of the popular town bar, it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'
by zx8080 | 2025-12-30 03:59:16+00:00
> more output for less $$

That's a trap: it's not obvious for those without experience in both business and engineering on how to estimate or later calculate this $$. The trap is in the cost of changes and fix budget when things will break. And things will break. Often. Also, the requirements will change often, that's normal (our world is not static). So the cost has some tendency to change (guess which direction). The thoughtless copy-paste and rewrite-everything approach is nice, but the cost goes up steep with time soon. Those who don't know it will be trapped dead and lose business.
by eimrine | 2025-12-30 04:00:08+00:00
I would rather have a no device then having to even discuss its usage with an old fart. The most important knowledge of using the Internets is where to find a good porn and not able to admit it makes you a shitty person who wants to promote its shitty morale using technical means for that. Just buy some GNU/Linux computer with VPN, ready for torrents, - don't be the wannabe marionette keeper.
by gbnwl | 2025-12-30 04:00:54+00:00
I think maybe the point they were trying to make is that despite people on HN being very technically experienced, skepticism and distrust of LLM-assisted coding tools may have prevented many of them from exploring the space too deeply yet. So a project like this may seem novel to many readers here, when the reality for users who've been using and following tools like Claude Code (and similar) closely for a while now is that claims like the one's this project is making come out multiple times per week.
by fennecbutt | 2025-12-30 04:01:09+00:00
I have commented on Todd's failure to deliver on such promises in skyrim before.

But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust.

I'd love exactly the same; the game should still tell a story or have a point (unless it's a complete sandbox), so key plot points can be included but otherwise it's a simulation and the player can do things with their agency, but so can the npcs.

Would be cool to come back to a village, and now the leader has changed because the previous one insulted someone at the tavern, who killed the leader in a fit of rage. The village then chose a replacement leader, the assailant was publicly executed for their crimes. But the villagers decided this was too brutal a punishment so they removed the leader, who resisted but got driven out of town. The ousted leader wants control of the village back so they've been planning to enter with a crew of mercenaries.

When you get to the village you get given a quest to go take care of the problem, based on the hearsay. Hell, when you get to whatever hideout they're holed up in maybe the npc has even decided to just give up and move somewhere else.

So many opportunities for awesome narratives. I've done experiments with this stuff in text, but not in engine with an actual game.
by abustamam | 2025-12-30 04:01:36+00:00
I think a lot of people pirate for a lot of different reasons. I don't pirate games anymore because I just play PS5. But I definitely did so as a teenager because I was broke, not because the experience of buying games was bad.

Now I'll pirate if providers make it hard to do things right. I know I never "have" to pirate, but my wife once "bought" a movie on Amazon. A few years later, she was no longer able to access it. And she didn't get refunded for her purchase. So guess what? Screw you Amazon, I downloaded that movie and saved it on my home media server.

Another example, I was playing a mobile game that allowed me to watch ads to get a bonus. I'd always say no because they use one of the shittiest ad provider in existence. Then they started showing me ads even if I elected not to get the bonus, with a fun "pay $20 for ad free forever!"

Well screw you game dev, I'm pirating the ad-free version of your game.

> Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.

I think this is true, but I don't think this is necessarily causing piracy. Why would people want to pirate a shitty game?
by cameronh90 | 2025-12-30 04:02:03+00:00
Rather, the problem more often I see with junior devs is pulling in a dozen dependencies when writing a single function would have done the job.

Indeed, part of becoming a senior developer is learning why you should avoid left-pad but accept date-fns.

We’re still in the early stages of operationalising LLMs. This is like mobile apps in 2010 or SPA web dev in 2014. People are throwing a lot of stuff at the wall and there’s going be a ton of churn and chaos before we figure out how to use it and it settles down a bit. I used to joke that I didn’t like taking vacations because the entire front end stack will have been chucked out and replaced with something new by the time I get back, but it’s pretty stable now.

Also I find it odd you’d characterise the current LLM progress as somehow being below where we hoped it would be. A few years back, people would have said you were absolutely nuts if you’d have predicted how good these models would become. Very few people (apart from those trying to sell you something) were exclaiming we’d be imminently entering a world where you enter an idea and out comes a complex solution without any further guidance or refining. When the AI can do that, we can just tell it to improve itself in a loop and AGI is just some GPU cycles away. Most people still expect - and hope - that’s a little way off yet.

That doesn’t mean the relative cost of abstracting and inlining hasn’t changed dramatically or that these tools aren’t incredibly useful when you figure out how to hold them.

Or you could just do what most people always do and wait for the trailblazers to either get burnt or figure out what works, and then jump on the bandwagon when it stabilises - but accept that when it does stabilise, you’ll be a few years behind those who have been picking shrapnel out of their hands for the last few years.
by gnabgib | 2025-12-30 04:02:09+00:00
They've been saying it a few months

First Murder-Suicide Case Associated with AI Psychosis (42 points, 3 months ago, 35 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088651

OpenAI investor suspected to fall into ChatGTP-induced psychosis (51 points, 5 months ago, 14 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598052

In Search of AI Psychosis (214 points, 4 months ago, 235 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45027072

Ask HN: What's Going on with AI Psychosis? (9 points, 5 months ago, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44855226

People Are Being Involuntarily Committed After Spiraling into ChatGPT Psychosis (63 points, 6 months ago, 89 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44405464

Let's Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis (95 points, 6 months ago, 89 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44285426
by BonoboIO | 2025-12-30 04:02:41+00:00
Different approach: I continuously refine my global CLAUDE.md (~/.claude/CLAUDE.md) instead of external memory systems.

I work primarily in Python and maintain extensive coding conventions there - patterns allowed/forbidden, preferred libs, error handling, etc. Custom slash commands like `/use-recommended-python` (loads my curated libs: pendulum over datetime, httpx over requests) and `/find-reinvented-the-wheel` to catch when Claude ignored existing utilities.

My use case: multiple smaller Python projects (similar to steipete's workflow https://github.com/steipete), so cross-project consistency matters more than single-codebase context.

Yes, ~15k tokens for CLAUDE.md + rules. I sacrifice context for consistency. Worth it.

Also baked in my dev philosophy: Carmack-style - make it work first, then fast. Otherwise Claude over-optimizes prematurely.

These memory abstractions are too complicated for me and too inconsistent in practice. I'd rather maintain a living document I control and constantly refine.
by psidium | 2025-12-30 04:02:55+00:00
Yep, bugs are already just another cost of doing business for companies that aren’t user-focused. We can expect buggier code from now on. Especially for software where the users aren’t the ones buying it.

Disclaimer because I sound pessimistic: I do use a lot of AI to write code.

I do feel behind on the usage of it.
by fennecbutt | 2025-12-30 04:04:18+00:00
Settlements in FO4 were a letdown, the gameplay loop is so pointless. It's the same as your buildings being attacked in Valheim and Grounded.

Occasional attacks, but no real frequency or point to it - because they don't want to annoy players with it. At least in grounded it's based on how much you've attacked a type of insect in some regards.
by reactordev | 2025-12-30 04:04:55+00:00
It’s a great game, much like its predecessor. However, it’s still linear in most ways. You miss out on those small side quests but that was true of the first game too.

I’d love for a game to set the stage like: “Bad person/thing does bad stuff to good town” like intro, then it’s just you in a field by a small village where you live that is now in ashes due to bad event that happened while you weren’t there. Game On…

From there, don’t give a single hint until a player did something that could actually do something if they do it right.

An example would be early days of Minecraft before notch sold his soul, you wouldn’t have a guide or achievements or anything to help you. There were no wikis, only a small forum of people asking why are people punching trees?

Games need to feel more exploratory without giving everyone GPS direct to the next XP machine.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-30 04:04:57+00:00
Maybe not “need” in the strictest sense, but there have been more times than I can count where digging up old mail has either made things much faster and easier or helped me answer a random question that popped into my head about something that happened ages ago.

Old SMS, iMessage, Telegram etc messages have been useful from time to time too for similar reasons.

Both can also serve as exceptional time capsules that provide windows into past “eras” of life. I occasionally kick myself for not having archived mail and messages from a couple of defunct email addresses and chat apps… without them there’s a hole spanning a few years where visibility is limited.
by darksaints | 2025-12-30 04:05:12+00:00
warning: incoming generational stereotypes

The original phrase "The customer is always right" had an important caveat: "... in matters of taste". Somehow boomers managed to forget the caveat and created a culture of treating customer service workers like personal slaves and demanding to be treated like royalty. I don't know that Millenials think the customer is always right, but I do see that the Zs think anybody can be wrong, especially customers, and I love that about them.
by stevenhuang | 2025-12-30 04:06:33+00:00
His analysis is flawed.

> Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report.

If the phenomenon we are trying to study is somehow intelligent, then the observer effect will see to it that skeptics will never progress towards understanding until they're somehow "ready", whatever that means.

https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html
by itissid | 2025-12-30 04:06:39+00:00
The general process feels very much like having kids over for a birthday party. Except you have to get them all to play nice and you have no idea what this other kid was conditioned on by their parents. Generally it would all work fine, all the kids know how the party progresses and what their roles are — if any.

But imagine how hard it would be if these kids had short term memory only and they would not know what to focus on except what you tell them to. You literally have to tell them "Here is A-Z pay attention to 'X' only and go do your thing". Add in other managers for this party like a caterer, clowns, your spouse and they also have to tell them that and remember, communicate what other managers have done. No one has solved for this, really.

This is what it felt like in 2025 to code with LLMs on non trivial projects, with some what of an improvement as the year went by. But I am not sure much progress was made in fixing the process part of the problem.
by Culonavirus | 2025-12-30 04:07:03+00:00
Basically any online shop with decent volume / revenue is going to be spending 100s of thousands if not millions of dollars a month on Google ads. (Not just Google Ads, also Facebook ads etc.)

It used to be possible to get by with "organic" search traffic and some SEO... but google search looked completely different back then. Now when you look for something it's an AI box, products (google merchant) ad box, ad (promoted results) box, ... then there's a couple of (like two) results that are "organic" (whatever that means these days) and that's it. And we all know that when you want to hide something, you put it on the second page of google search results. So the space for doing online business "ad free" has been squeezed out over time.

And the K shaped economy is totally true in this ecomm space. These days say 15% of your revenue gets eaten by ads, but you also have say 50% higher revenue overall. At some point it becomes a margin game and the bigger players will start squeezing out the smaller ones because the biggers ones can operate on tighter margins (making up the difference with volume) which the smaller ones simply can't afford. The difference in operating costs of an eshop that sells 10000 items a month is not that different than that of an eshop selling 100000 items a month (i.e. not 10x, more like 2-3x). But selling 10x items gives you the volume you need to be able to lower your margins and put the difference into ads.

BTW all of this is handled by professional online marketing people with increasingly widespread use of AI so there's no room for the small players to make it big while not being optimized to the gills. This is why most small advertisers are seeing small or negative returns while Google and Meta are making tens if not hundreds of billions in ad revenue... The ads work, but the amounts you need to spend and the optimization level you need to have is in a completely different galaxy than it was 10 years ago.
by sholladay | 2025-12-30 04:07:22+00:00
When people say “creator’s intent”, it sounds like a flavor. Like how food comes out of the kitchen before you put toppings on it to make it your own.

But vivid mode (et al) literally loses information. When the TV tries to make everything look vibrant, it’s effectively squishing all of the colors into a smaller color space. You may not be able to even tell two distinct objects apart because everything is similarly bright and vibrant.

Same with audio. The famous “smile” EQ can cause some instruments to disappear, such as woodwinds.

At the end of the day, media is for enjoyment and much of it is subjective, so fine do what you need to do to be happy. But few people would deliberately choose lower resolution (except maybe for nostalgia), which is what a lot of the fancy settings end up doing.

Get a calibration if you can, or use Filmmaker Mode. The latter will make the TV relatively dark, but there’s usually a way to adjust it or copy its settings and then boost the brightness in a Custom mode, which is still a big improvement over default settings from the default mode.
by jv22222 | 2025-12-30 04:08:20+00:00
With my old saas app (now sold, and then the new owner killed it) I used to love getting angry emails. Almost every time the user ended up turning into an advocate and product champion. I don't know if they were "haters" per-se but they were almost always suprised to get an email back from a real person who cared about their concerns, and over time they changed their opinion. That may just be an artifact of early saas in 2010. Not sure if the same thing can happen these days.
by pron | 2025-12-30 04:08:34+00:00
You're right. My point was that there isn't necessarily a connection between UB-ness and danger, and stuck together two separate arguments:

1. In the context of languages that can have OOB and/or UAF, OOB/UAF are very dangerous, but not necessarily because they're UB; they're dangerous because they cause memory corruption. I expect that OOB/UAF are just as dangerous in Assembly, even though they're not UB in Assembly. Conversely, other C/C++ UBs, like signed overflow, aren't nearly as dangerous.

2. Separately from that, I wanted to point out that there are plenty of super-dangerous weaknesses that aren't UB in any language. So some UBs are more dangerous than others and some are less dangerous than non-UB problems. You're right, though, that if more software were written with the possibility of OOB/UAF (whether they're UB or not in the particular language) they would be higher on the list, so the fact that other issues are higher now is not relevant to my point.
by BonoboIO | 2025-12-30 04:08:50+00:00
This is pretty much the thinking across all German-speaking countries. It especially applies to anything related to energy (combustion engines, coal, gas, oil) and IT.

Case in point: fax machines are still an important part of business communication in Germany, and many IT projects are genuinely amateurish garbage — because the underlying mindset is "everything should stay exactly as it is."

This is particularly visible in the 45+ generation. It mostly doesn't apply to programmers, since they tend to find new things interesting. But in the rest of society, the effects are painful to watch: if nothing changes, nothing improves.

And then there's mobile infrastructure. It's not even a technical problem — it's purely political. The networks simply don't get expanded. It's honestly embarrassing how far behind Germany is compared to the rest of Europe.
by cocoa19 | 2025-12-30 04:09:12+00:00
Qt Widgets is fantastic, but now dated since it has not been updated for the modern world. Plus it is C++, which a lot of devs dislike.

QML feels like a refresh with great ideas, bringing declarative UI and reactive programming. Where it falls short for me is it does not have feature parity with Qt Widgets, so you end up having to roll up your own components, wasting a ton of time. Dealing with layouts in QML is also an exercise in frustration.
by cryptica | 2025-12-30 04:09:16+00:00
As an engineer who bills by the hour, I like how LLMs are affecting codebases.

I've been preaching the benefits of well designed code for a long time, explaining that 10x engineers exist but only if the codebase permits... Nobody got it. Now when people start with a poorly architected project and the AI starts generating slop code on top at a rapid rate, they finally learn the lesson I've been trying to get across. The effect was always there but AI makes it even stronger and allows people to understand the problem of compounding technical debt faster.
by johnnyfived | 2025-12-30 04:10:14+00:00
I've said this before here, but "best practices" in code indeed is very typical even with different implementations and architectures. You can ask a LLM to write you the best possible code for a scenario and likely your implementation wouldn't differ much.

Writing, art, creative output, that's nothing at all like code, which puts the software industry in a more particular spot than anything else in automation.
by goatlover | 2025-12-30 04:12:33+00:00
> but there’s no real choice here. AI has “happened” to us. The world has become extremely fast and extremely competitive. It’s capitalism. Only performance matters.

It's disturbing how often the economic determinism argument is trotted out that have no choice. The current US administration was voted into office supported by tech billionaires who did not want AI to be regulated. Sounds like they have a choice.
by zephen | 2025-12-30 04:12:36+00:00
I dunno. This sort of thing gives me pause:

https://danluu.com/julialang/

But the first thing that gave me pause about Julia? They sort of pivoted to say "we're general purpose" but the whole index-starting-at-one thing really belies that -- these days, that's pretty much the province of specialty languages.
by ilaksh | 2025-12-30 04:13:17+00:00
You didn't really read what he wrote or think about it and just took it as an opportunity to dismiss him as old. He was just being humble. It's relatively new to everyone. At least you are honest about your ageism.

I am sure Karparthy can and does everage AI as well or better than you. Probably I do also and I am 48.
by throw_m239339 | 2025-12-30 04:14:33+00:00
> Do you believe we can automatically detect AI generated videos

Of course they can detect enough of these, Google literally has a AI video generator in Gemini. It's not a matter of detecting every single ones, but enough to weed out the most egregious use of AI.

> It's not possible and it's not economically viable.

It's absolutely possible and it's about the very future of Youtube as a platform, what isn't economically viable is letting people upload tons of AI generated garbage on their platforms.