MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rickydroll | 2025-12-29 22:52:29+00:00
> The question is whether 401k plans and job-hopping still works out in the end.

It can, but it is a fragile "still works out in the end." It fails when a damaging event occurs near the time you need the money, such as a late-in-life divorce, job loss, illness, or financial collapse of investment vehicles. Winning at the 401(k) game means enough people losing their money through unlucky investments, and you get a cut of their losses.

Thought experiment: imagine everyone had enough income that they could save 10% in a 401 (k). BLS numbers say 10% of us wages is 1.1 trillion. Can you imagine the impact on the stock market if it received $1.1 trillion every year for 30 years? Where would that money be invested?
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-29 22:52:47+00:00
From this thread it's pretty clear:

1. You've come up with your own unique definition of "zero cost" which isn't what the term means, at least as popularized by C++ where the concept of "zero cost abstractions" comes from. It means zero runtime cost, not zero cognitive cost.

2. Rust generally has more "zero cost abstractions" than C++ in terms of shifting traditional runtime checks into compile-time checks (e.g. while unique_ptr exists in Rust as Box, it's far more rarely used because ownership is easier to transfer).

3. Rust generally has faster defaults in the standard library so the abstractions are lower-cost than equivalents in C++ (e.g. C++ took forever to add a hash table via unordered_map and then proceeded to really fuck up the definition to inhibit high performance designs despite this being raised during standardization & haven't since revisited the issue).

4. Rust offers far more opportunities for "zero cost abstractions" than C++. Notably it's ownership rules prevent aliasing which allows the compiler to do more aggressive optimizations that can't generally be done in C++. It provides abstractions like NonNullPointer and NonZero so that unused bit patterns can be leveraged for enums (e.g. Option<NonNullPointer> is the size of a raw pointer but in C++ it's harder to pull off). Functional style and iterators are implemented to be aggressively inlined and overheads like bounds checking elided by the compiler, whereas C++ can't elide as easily and various bounds checks have to be inserted. Could go on and on.

Anyway, Rust as the base language vs C++ has simpler cognitive abstractions, it has more zero cost abstractions, and it has more efficient abstractions overall, both in the language and the standard library.
by eithed | 2025-12-29 22:53:08+00:00
In gemini:

> The reverse of the string 'gssssyeekxxuoaqaaaiooo9aaa7zjx' is:

xjz7aaa9oooiiaaaqauxxkyeessssg

> Youve made a mistake

```
I see where I tripped up! Let's re-examine that long string carefully.

The original string you gave me was:
`gssssyeekxxuoaqaaaiooo9aaa7zjx`

Let's look at the end of that string: `...aaa7zjx`.
When we reverse it, it should start with: `xjz7aaa...`

Here is the precise character-by-character reversal:

*xjz7aaa9oooiiaaaqauxxkyeessssg*

Wait—I see it now. In my previous response, I included an extra *'i'* and missed one *'o'* in the middle section. Let's do a strict count to get it perfect:

* *Original:* `g` `ssss` `y` `ee` `k` `xx` `u` `o` `a` `q` `aaa` *`iooo`* `9` `aaa` `7` `z` `j` `x`
* *Correct Reverse:* `x` `j` `z` `7` `aaa` `9` *`oooi`* `aaa` `q` `a` `o` `u` `xx` `k` `ee` `y` `ssss` `g`

The correct reversed string is:
*xjz7aaa9oooiiaaaqauoxxkyeessssg*

Thank you for catching that. It’s easy for the eyes to glaze over when there are so many repeating vowels!

Since I've stumbled a bit on these, would you like to give me one more string to see if I can get it right on the first try?
```

So, even after correcting it didnt produce correct string
by jmogly | 2025-12-29 22:53:18+00:00
I would say it varies from 0x to a modest 2x. It can help you write good code quickly, but, I only spent about 20-30% of my time writing code anyway before AI. It definitely makes debugging and research tasks much easier as well. I would confidently say my job as a senior dev has gotten a lot easier and less stressful as a result of these tools.

One other thing I have seen however is the 0x case, where you have given too much control to the llm, it codes both you and itself into pan’s labyrinth, and you end up having to take a weed wacker to the whole project or start from scratch.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-29 22:53:33+00:00
Fwiw i thought the (anti)symmetry behind the German "pun" feels kind of forced. Only the [very] modern Korean examples passed my intuition test. Example 2 was certainly ironic, but the idea of businesses being loyal to the customer comes closest to the (less ironic) vibe I was looking for. Noted also the level of emotionality compared to the others (including "amanah"?)

https://m.sohu.com/a/234156713_100184887/?pvid=000115_3w_a

This is not standard; urex "ren" urex (emotional, love--) is usually juxtaposed with "yi" (rationalistic, but more emotional than "solidarity"?)

Btw 義理 was the (rationalising?) Japanese example that ai mode returned to me.

"Xin"/"trust"/"amanah" seem to be comparable as emotions (to ask LLMs later)

PS- I tend to view/use LLMs as a realtime debugger for social media, not a therapist (yet) :)

What is that painting? A biblical allegory?
by lostlogin | 2025-12-29 22:53:45+00:00
> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended

I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up.

They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It’s awful.
by levocardia | 2025-12-29 22:54:01+00:00
I think it is mostly a good thing that LLMs have "WEIRD" values. We are at a very fortuitous point in history, where the modal position in extant written text is classically liberal and believes in respecting human rights. Virtually no other point in history would be that way, and a true modal position among values and moral beliefs held among all 8 billion people currently alive on earth -- much less the modal position among all ~100 billion humans ever -- would, I'd hazard to guess, not be a very nice place to end up.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-12-29 22:54:27+00:00
This is a thoughtful piece, and I'm surprised that most of the comments here are focusing on the evangelicals who are thirsty for the Rapture. While misguided, those people aren't much of a problem, as they are mostly waiting for the end times, grandiosely sure that they are among the chosen.

All that discussion of evangelicals is really a setup for the real focus of the article: people like Yarvin, Musk, and Theil, who have the power to actually have the influence and money to cause significant damage to society. And they are acting on it. Although there are cranks on the left who think the solution to the problems of capitalism is its demise, they are not in a position of power. It is ironic it is the so called conservatives who are actually trying to destroy society as we know it.
by why-o-why | 2025-12-29 22:54:56+00:00
Reminds me of the whale oil business being replaced by petroleum. Except the ad-based economy was effectively a google monopsony. I'm surprised the OP managed to make ad revenue for a decade, but to me at always seemed about casino-ish and snake-oily. A decade is impressive but I think we all knew where this was going. I think the question is: will another monopsony for ads arise or will it be content based only? It seems YouTUbe is poised to be the next google since more people watch YouTube than cable, so the audience is captive since there's no alternative (yes I realize Google owns YouTube). But that's still a parasitic economy sucking from google. "Where to go now?" depends on if another ad server can gain dominance, otherwise the answer is "nowhere".
by simonw | 2025-12-29 22:55:00+00:00
I'm not arguing for using LLMs as an abstraction.

I'm saying that a key component of the dependency calculation has changed.

It used to be that one of the most influential facts affecting your decision to add a new library was the cost of writing the subset of code that you needed yourself. If writing that code and the accompanying tests represented more than an hour of work, a library was usually a better investment.

If the code and tests take a few minutes those calculations can look very different.

Making these decisions, effectively responsibility as one of the key characteristics of a senior engineer, which is why it's so interesting that all of those years of intuition are being disrupted.

The code we are producing remains the same. The difference is that a senior developer may have written that function + tests in several hours, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Now that same senior developer can produce exactly the same code at a time cost of less than $100.
by senordevnyc | 2025-12-29 22:55:04+00:00
Not really at all like this, more like being a tech lead for a team of savants who simultaneously are great at parts of software engineering, and limited at others. Though that latter category is slimmer than a year ago…

The point is, you can get lots of quality work out of this team if you learn to manage them well.

If that sounds like a “complete and utter nightmare”, then don’t use AI. Hopefully you can keep up without it in the long run.
by tsunamifury | 2025-12-29 22:55:10+00:00
As someone who leads large parts of ad tech for TikTok and worked at Google for 10 years, it’s the K shaped economy that is pressing SMBs out. Pure and simple

Everyone can make up some complex theories but I see it in the numbers every day. Spend distribution is now k shaped and SMBs simply can’t compete at top end performance levels.
by hinkley | 2025-12-29 22:55:12+00:00
One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG.

Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business.

Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-29 22:55:23+00:00
The kind of mocks the OP is arguing against are not really a model of the dependency, they're just a model of a particular execution sequence in the test, because the mock is just following a script. Nothing in it ensures that the sequence is even consistent with any given understanding of how the dependency works, and it will almost certainly need updating when the code under test is refactored.
by ManicInventor | 2025-12-29 22:55:29+00:00
What I so far have noticed, is that when people that are not software developers innovate prototypes using vibe coding, it will result in more projects that will require someone understanding how to continue developing and maintaining it.

It will be about the projects architecture and it's alignment with the will of the users. Since AI is not able to do that yet, and probably won't be there in a long time. We as programmers has to contribute with that part. It's our intuitive system thinking, and user understanding that have taken years or decades to form.

Because of this, my prediction is that in the short term, there will be an increase in the need of programming / system thinking skills
by 29athrowaway | 2025-12-29 22:56:03+00:00
If you like this then you will probably like "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage", a 1989 book by Clifford Stoll.

Also available as audiobook, and a documentary ("The KGB, The computer and Me"). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe5AE-qYan8
by timbit42 | 2025-12-29 22:56:12+00:00
There is no rapture coming. The idea of the rapture didn't even exist until Morgan Edwards came up with the idea in 1788. It didn't become popular until John Nelson Darby developed and popularized it starting around 1827-33 by conflating verses from different books of the Bible.

In Matthew 24:40-41 (also Matthew 13) it speaks of one being taken and one being left, but the people being taken are being destroyed by an invading army, like happened in Jerusalem in 70AD when the temple was destroyed. You want to be the one left behind. You also see this in Genesis when the people were taken away by the flood and they perished.

In 1st Thessalonians 4:17, it talks about being caught up but it isn't speaking about what we understand as the rapture today. It is referring to a convention where a Roman ruler would triumphantly return to a city and the people would go out to greet him and return with him to the city.

The beast was Nero (his name in Gematria adds up to 666). All of the end times events either happened 1900 years ago or aren't ever going to happen.
by Zambyte | 2025-12-29 22:56:35+00:00
It's surprising that it doesn't seem like the X-ray mechanic (which is the main thing I remember from that game) was really picked up by any other game. There were way fewer cheating accusations than in other games, because what would normally be a "cheat" was a core game mechanic, and IMO that made it really enjoyable. It's a shame that game died.
by Avshalom | 2025-12-29 22:56:52+00:00
Left Behind is a very poorly written series so it doesn't address any of this well but: most christians don't get raptured but also any child under 12? does regardless of religion. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25011483-the-anti-christ... (which uses the left behind books as a jumping off point) is worth reading as an explanation of the political world we live in.

The book sort of constantly forgets that every child under 12 in the world means that every one on the planet should be deeply traumatized.
by merlincorey | 2025-12-29 22:57:13+00:00
Thank you for the explanation, but I did fully understand that is what you were saying.

What I don't fully understand is how you can characterize that as "not limited" with a straight face; then again, I can't see your face so maybe you weren't straight faced as you wrote it in the first place.

Hopefully you could see my well meaning smile with the "absolutely right" opening, but apparently that's no longer common so I can understand your confusion as https://absolutelyright.lol/ indicates Opus 4.5 has had it RLHF'd away.
by globnomulous | 2025-12-29 22:57:26+00:00
> This sounds unbearable.

I can't see the original post because my browser settings break Twitter (I also haven't liked much of Karpathy's output), but I agree. I call this style of software development 'meeting-based programming,' because that seems to be the mental model that the designers of the tools are pursuing. This probably explains, in part, why c-suite/MBA airheads are so excited about the tools: meetings are how they think and work.

I suppose LLMs/chatbots and 'agents' are just the latest phase of a trend that the internet has been encouraging for decades: the elimination of mental privacy. I don't mean 'privacy' in an everyday sense -- i.e. things I keep to myself and don't share. I mean 'privacy' in a more basic sense: private experience -- sitting by oneself; having a mental space that doesn't include anybody else or invite the outside world; simply spending time with one's own thoughts.

The internet encourages us to direct our thoughts and questions outward: look things up; find out what others have said; go to wikipedia; etc. This is, I think, horribly corrosive to the very essence of being a thinking, sentient being. It's also unsurprising, I guess. Humans are social animals. We're going to find ourselves easily seduced by anything that lets us replace private experience with social experience. I suppose it was only a matter of time until someone did this with programming tools, too.
by whstl | 2025-12-29 22:57:41+00:00
Once again, that's only true at the surface level.

If you dig deeper you'll realize that it's possible to categorize techniques, tools, libraries, algorithms, recipes, whatever.

And if you dig even deeper, you'll realize that there is foundational knowledge that lets you understand a lot of things that people complain about being too new.

The biggest curse of software is people saying "no" to education and knowledge.
by zyan1de | 2025-12-29 22:57:48+00:00
I mostly use it during long Claude Code research sessions so I don’t lose my place between days.

I run it in automatic mode with decent namespacing, so thoughts, notes, and whole conversations just accumulate in a structured way. As I work, it stores the session and builds small semantic, entity-based hypergraphs of what I was thinking about.

Later I’ll come back and ask things like:

what was I actually trying to fix here?

what research threads exist already?

where did my reasoning drift?

Sometimes I’ll even ask Claude to reflect on its own reasoning in a past session and point out where it was being reactive or missed connections.
by 9dev | 2025-12-29 22:58:24+00:00
That’s a totally fair take IMHO, and I’m very much conflicted on several ends on this topic—for example, would I want my juniors to use an agent? No; not even the mid levels, probably. As you say, it’s easy to form bad habits, and you need a good intuition for architecture and complexity, otherwise you end up with broken, unmaintainable messes. but if you have that, it’s like magic.
JavaScript Debugger – A tool that explains JavaScript errors in plain English
by adham_monged | 2025-12-29 22:59:05+00:00
I’ve been learning frontend development, and one thing that consistently slowed me down was trying to understand JavaScript error messages. Some are clear, but many feel cryptic when you’re still early in your journey. I wanted something that didn’t just tell me what the error was, but why it happened and what I should look at next.

So I built a small browser‑based tool that takes a JS error and explains it in simpler language. It also suggests possible causes and things to check. Everything runs locally in the browser — no backend, no data stored.

What it does:

Parses the error message

Explains it in plain English

Suggests likely causes

Offers possible next steps

Simple, minimal UI

Works entirely client‑side

I'd appreciate feedback on literally anything on the tool.

Link: https://jsdebugger.netlify.app

There’s a feedback section on the site as well. I’m actively improving it and would love to hear what the HN community thinks.
by CPLX | 2025-12-29 22:59:19+00:00
I absolutely love this concept! It's like the thing that I've been looking for my whole life. Well, at least since I've been using Claude Code, which is this year.

I'm sold.

With that said, I can't think of a way that this would work. How does this work? I took a very quick glance, and it's not obvious at first glance.

The whole problem is, the AI is short on context, it has limited memory. Of course, you can store lots of memory elsewhere, but how do you solve the problem of having the AI not know what's in the memory as it goes from step to step? How does it sort of find the relevant memory at the time that that relevance is most active?

Could you just walk through the sort of conceptual mechanism of action of this thing?
by levocardia | 2025-12-29 22:59:19+00:00
Your experience is 100% compatible with the linked article: the seven-figure spender is presumably running a much higher margin business and can scale narrowly profitable ads much more effectively. The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue: a perfectly efficient market with no profit for the advertiser. Google (and Meta et al) are so good that for many SMBs they are completely cornered at the zero-point: spend as much as you can just to stay in the same place financially.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-29 22:59:27+00:00
I can relate with odd bits of this story. I grew up in a rural town during the time when it's Nike missile base was being decommissioned. The base was constructed on penitentiary property and those cold war buildings were taken over by the prison. This was the setting for my boyhood. Endless places for exploring and mischief.

I went back after 2 decades and find the entire area was unrecognizably transformed. The prison moved and most of the area was developed. The town was renamed to distance itself from it's past. Forests were developed into McMansions while some century old fields became forests. The paved road I'd walked thousands of times (connected to our dirt road) was rerouted. It was a super disorienting experience.
by jact | 2025-12-29 22:59:35+00:00
>In heaven the body has no more purpose

This is not the biblical teaching about the body. The hope emphasized in the Bible is for the resurrection of the body. This is why Jesus is resurrected bodily, and not as some kind of ghost. If the body was some kind of superfluous thing like clothes, this would make no sense. This is also why the Nicene Creed says “I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the World to Come.” The World to Come likewise is a renewed version of this world, where Heaven and Earth are united, in the same way that the body and soul are. This idea of the soul shedding the body is Platonic, not Christian.

As for the rapture itself, it is considered to be nonsense by virtually all biblical scholars, both secular and religious, but how it became such a widespread belief among Americans is probably for another website.
by brynary | 2025-12-29 22:59:38+00:00
Strong agreement with everything in this post.

At Qlty, we are going so far as to rewrite hundreds of thousands of lines of code to ensure full test coverage, end-to-end type checking (including database-generated types).

I’ll add a few more:

1. Zero thrown errors. These effectively disable the type checker and act as goto statements. We use neverthrow for Rust-like Result types in TypeScript.

2. Fast auto-formatting and linting. An AI code review is not a substitute for a deterministic result in sub-100ms to guarantee consistency. The auto-formatter is set up as a post-tool use Claude hook.

3. Side-effect free imports and construction. You should be able to load all the code files and construct an instance of every class in your app without a network connection spawning. This is harder than it sounds and without it you run into all sorts of trouble with the rest.

3. Zero mocks and shared global state. By mocks, I mean mocking frameworks which override functions on existing types or global. These effectively are injecting lies into the type checker.

Should put to tsgo which has dramatically lowered our type checking latency. As the tok/sec of models keeps going up, all the time is going to get bottlenecked on tool calls (read: type checking and tests).

With this approach we now have near 100% coverage with a test suite that runs in under 1,000ms.
by consumer451 | 2025-12-29 23:00:14+00:00
The answer is that most people vote based on the title/headline without ever clicking through. [0]

> We find that most users do not read the article that they vote on, and that, in total, 73% of posts were rated (i.e., upvoted or downvoted) without first viewing the content.

In this case, I totally guess that people are noticing less and less utility from Google search, and that was why they voted like they did.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05267
Ask HN: What if an entire city banned home cooking?
by amichail | 2025-12-29 23:01:14+00:00
Every meal would come from centralized kitchens, automated meal factories, or restaurant-style delivery. No chopping, no dishes, no cooking smells, just ready-to-eat meals at your doorstep.

Pros:

* Guaranteed nutrition and food safety

* No more time wasted cooking or cleaning

* Potentially less food waste with centralized meal prep

* Economies of scale make ready-to-eat meals as affordable as home cooking

Would you live in a city like this?