MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phil21 | 2025-12-04 02:22:33+00:00
Inspections are fairly worthless if you are remotely handy and competent at basic stuff. I don’t need someone to go through and catalog the make and models of all the appliances, and I can visually inspect my own water heater and furnace pretty trivially.

You can get “real” inspections done but they cost thousands of dollars and take a full or more day to do with multiple subject matter experts. Almost no one does this.

Waiving inspection other than for major material defect is what I’ve done for all my real estate transactions. I’m not putting in an offer to nickel and dime someone over trivial bullshit like a busted GFCI circuit. My offer simply accounts for the trivial odds and ends I’ll have to take care of. Plus I’d much rather get the work done myself since I don’t trust a seller to do anything but the bare minimum.

Every one of my friends who have had five figures or more of surprise repair work on homes they purchased all had an inspection done. None of those could have found the various hidden damages for those buildings short of destructive stuff like pulling drywall out or lifting up shingles from a roof. Don’t worry though, the inspectors found stuff like a bathroom faucet with a crack in the knob.
by tigeba | 2025-12-04 02:23:00+00:00
I have two cats that I have clicker trained. They can: shake, high-five, fist bump, stand up, and will "go here" and come and touch your finger. They won't do any of the tricks without treats :)

One of the cats had seemed interested in fetch for several years but it never quite worked. I tried a bunch of different toys and finally found a plastic spring that she will fetch very well.
by bayarearefugee | 2025-12-04 02:23:57+00:00
If AI is making developers (inside Anthropic or out) 10x more productive... where's all the software?

I'm not an LLM luddite, they are useful tools, but people with vested interests make a lot of claims that if they were true would result in a situation where we should already be seeing the signs of a giant software renaissance... and I just haven't seen that. Like, at all.

I see a lot more blogging and influncer peddling about how AI is going to change everything than I do any actual signs of AI changing much of anything.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-04 02:24:01+00:00
> Should countries have an upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction?

You mean a central planning, command and control economy? There is a lot of history of countries trying these things and they don’t have the outcome you want.

DRAM manufacturing is a global business. If one country starts imposing purchase limits for whatever reason, the DRAM consumers are going to laugh as they move their data centers and operations to another country that doesn’t try to impose their laws on a global market.

> It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportunity to make a counteroffer.

Good news: That’s not how markets work. DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up. Contracts are negotiated. Market prices fluctuate.

No supplier of anything is going to let all of their inventory disappear to one buyer without letting the market have a chance to bid the price higher.
by xoogthrowkappa | 2025-12-04 02:24:05+00:00
Excuse the throwaway. It's not even just the employees, but it doesn't even seem like the technical leadership seriously cares about internal AI use. Before I left all they pushed was code generation, but my work was 80% understanding 5-20 year old code and 20% actual development. If they put any noticeable effort into an LLM that could answer "show me all users of Proto.field that would be affected by X", my life would've been changed for the better, but I don't think the technical leadership understands this, or they don't want to spare the TPUs.

When I started at my post-Google job, I felt so vindicated when my new TL recommended that I use an LLM to catch up if no one was available to answer my questions.
by jonners00 | 2025-12-04 02:24:44+00:00
In our case:

over there; bed; basket; lead; walk; wait at the door; go to [room]; go to [family member]; stay; stay on the path; paw; paws up; sit; lie down; heel; don't pull on the lead; no more poo poo; no more wee wee; this is the commute; up; where's your piggy?; treat?; buscuit?: up for a cuddle?; want to come up?; permission; okay; no; stop; this way; stay close; hungry for some food?; water?; down; don't lick; who did this?; come here; shall we go the pub; let's go;

and probably 5 or 6 more words/phrases. I don't include words like catch/fetch where accompanying action may trigger the response.

It's definitely not a three year old's grasp of language, but it's probably a point that a baby crosses somewhere between 9 and 15 months old.
by fencepost | 2025-12-04 02:25:02+00:00
From someone who's mostly avoided the AI craze so far, I think it comes down to a combination of two things.

1) "AI" is in many ways like the unreliable coworker so many of us have had in the past - maybe someone who talked a good game in interviews, but after you'd worked with them for a while you realize that you have to double-check everything they do for stupid/careless problems. In the worst case, you also have to do some hand-holding as they ask you for help with things that they should know how to do. They can produce good output but they can't be trusted to produce good (or even marginal) output so they're a net time sink.

2) In a frightening number of companies right now, that problem coworker is the owner's or manager's relative and cannot be avoided.

So boom, there you go, bad coworkers and a toxic culture that not just protects but promotes them.
Ask HN: Anyone writing code from scratch or mostly doing architecting and LLM?
by mattfrommars | 2025-12-04 02:25:12+00:00
I'm assuming most firms have access to LLM, is it true? If so, is anyone really writing code from scratch lately or relying on the tool to write code for them?

At work, I have access to Github Copilot but it has a lot of guardrail. It is great to debug issues. Minor fixes and enhancement, it is useful. I mostly double check what it wrote and make sure it's code that I can read and understand. If it uses too many shortcut, I tell it to become more 'human readable'.

Now, I've been wanting to learn Python coming from Java and picked up Automate Boring Thing with Python Book. I'm looking at one its exercise which is to walk a tree directory. I can either memorize how its done in Python or just rely on LLM to write it.

Am I wasting time doing these exercises when they can easily be done with LLM within one or two shots? Because doing these exercise from scratch is very time consuming and I have to go back and forth to remember the syntax & libraries.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-12-04 02:25:20+00:00
> If it’s true, someone ought to be able to demonstrate it.

This is not a truism.

> Again, extraordinary evidence required.

Yeah, whatever, dude. I'm not trying to convince you, just pointing out the irrelevance of the point that humans are physically capable of speaking like humans. That's moot to the claim that had been made in the parent comment.

I could go on about other points you made. For example, you seem to be conflating working memory ("multi-part instructions") with understanding of language, given that was what the parent commenter had claimed.

> He’s also being to ask insightful questions as he observes the world around him.

Cats don't have the same mental capabilities as a 3-4 year-old but that is not under contention. That doesn't strictly mean they don't have a similar capacity for language as a 3-4 year-old. Put another way, you were not talking about your son's capacity for understanding language but rather his general mental capacity, which is not an apt refutation of what was claimed.

This isn't to convince you of some belief (indeed, you're entitled to your opinion, friend) but to point out the illogic in your argument.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-04 02:26:12+00:00
For a while, yes. But I'm sure they will want to sell it for longer than a year or so.

Even Samsung is running into this issue now: their own internal foundry is refusing to give them a long term contract now so the S26 series will become more expensive.

If this happens to Samsung, what leverage will a player like Valve have?
by jacquesm | 2025-12-04 02:26:41+00:00
That's true, but we already know that a bunch of stuff about the universe is quantized. The question is whether or not that holds true for everything or rather not. And all 'fully continuous models of computation' in the end rely on a representation that is a quantized approximation of an ideal. In other words: any practical implementation of such a model that does not end up being a noise generator or an oscillator and that can be used for reliable computation is - as far as I know - based on some quantized model, and then there are still the cells themselves (arguably quanta) and their location (usually on a grid, but you could use a continuous representation for that as well). Now, 23 or 52 bits (depending on the size of the float representation you use for the 'continuous' values) is a lot, but it is not actually continuous. That's an analog concept and you can't really implement that concept with a fidelity high enough on a digital computer.

You could do it on an analog computer but then you'd be into the noise very quickly.

In theory you can, but in practice this is super hard to do.
by queenkjuul | 2025-12-04 02:27:21+00:00
This is basically me at my job right now. My boss used Claude Code in his spare time to write a "proof of concept" Electron app. It mostly worked but had some weird edge case behaviors. Now it's handed off to me, and fixing those edge cases is requiring me to refactor basically every single thing Claude touched. Vast majority I'm just tossing and redoing from scratch.

The original code "looks" fine, and it works pretty well even, but an LLM cannot avoid critical oversights along the way, and is fundamentally designed to its mistakes look as plausibly correct as possible. This makes correcting the problems down the line much more annoying (unless you can afford to live with the bugs and keep slapping on more band aids, i guess)
by ryanbeem | 2025-12-04 02:27:34+00:00
I'm the author of this note. While digging through the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) Cycle 7 technical documentation, I found a logic flowchart (Fig 1 in the linked PDF) that explicitly instructs the pipeline to "renormalize" signals that exceed the expected dynamic range.

Essentially, if a spectral line is "too bright" relative to the off-source calibration, the correlator software treats it as a gain error and mathematically suppresses it.

I've identified that this seems to be happening systematically at 344 GHz (Band 7). I also found corroborating logs from the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, where engineers patched the code to handle "huge amplitudes" in the same frequency band that were breaking their 16-bit integer file format.

It looks like we might be filtering out a genuine physical anomaly (super-radiance) because it violates the noise model of the sensors. Curious if any DSP / RF engineers here have seen similar "hard-coded normalization" logic in other sensor arrays?
by nerevarthelame | 2025-12-04 02:27:43+00:00
This video is a great overview of spaceships\gliders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yLcsaewxJQ

The level of engineering necessary to do this in 1 dimension is still beyond me, as is the "simple" explanation posted on the Conway forums. But I feel like I appreciate the achievement a little bit more now.
by komali2 | 2025-12-04 02:27:44+00:00
> and that’s when the Fex compatibility layer was started, because we knew there was close to a decade of work needed before it would be robust enough people could rely on it for their libraries.

In a recent Linus Tech Tips video, Linus Torvalds (original Linus) was asked, "if you could go back in time and start the Linux project from scratch, what would you do differently?" He had two answers, one was "nothing," and the other was "if I knew how much work this was going to take, I never would have started this project."

It makes me wonder, is there some kind of blissful ignorance required to kick off a project that will take you years to see through? How many times have I self limited myself, stopped myself from starting something, because I put on my lead hat and did some estimations and thought eh, not worth it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA
by skissane | 2025-12-04 02:28:20+00:00
> If you ask for an endpoint to a CRUD API, it'll make one. If you ask for 5, it'll repeat the same code 5 times and modify it for the use case.

I don’t think this is an inherent issue to the technology. Duplicate code detectors have been around for ages. Given an AI agent a tool which calls one, and ask it to reduce duplication, it will start refactoring.

Of course, there is a risk of going too far in the other direction-refactorings which technically reduce duplication but which have unacceptable costs (you can be too DRY). But some possible solutions: (a) ask it to judge if the refactoring is worth it or not - if it judges no, just ignore the duplication and move on; (b) get a human to review the decision in (a); (c) if AI repeatedly makes wrong decision (according to human), prompt engineering, or maybe even just some hardcoded heuristics
by nradov | 2025-12-04 02:28:58+00:00
Monopolies never last in the tech industry. IBM had a monopoly on mainframes. And they even kind of still do, but now no one cares because disruptive innovations in other computing platforms have made mainframes nearly irrelevant. Now startups like OpenAI and Perplexity are using disruptive innovations to rapidly make Google's traditional web search business irrelevant.
by jarjoura | 2025-12-04 02:30:14+00:00
"no conflict of interest" is basically meaningless if your day job is writing software. These clauses you sign are quite broad in what that scope of conflict could be.

Every company I've worked for has had very explicit rules that say, you must get written permission from someone at some director or VP level sign off on your "side project," open source or not.

You might want to check your company guidelines around this just to make sure you're safe.
by supern0va | 2025-12-04 02:31:11+00:00
I think by the time these things tend to happen, projects have outgrown their singular founder and usually have a large developer community (because issues usually take a long time to bubble up after an acquisition). So, it's hard to find a specific case of the founder driving the fork.

Monty forking MySQL after the Oracle acquisition is the only real example that comes to mind. Oracle being Oracle resulted in OpenOffice getting forked, too, but that was mostly driven by Canonical.
by sateesh | 2025-12-04 02:31:15+00:00
Not op,I agree that hotels doesn't do any face matching.

However for getting a new mobile connection the flow is similar to what op has mentioned. It seems one can get a mobile connection by not opting for face recognition, but the process is cumbersome. Similarly for property registrations fingerprints (atleast in some of the states) of the concerned parties is matched against the ones that are associated with their Aadhar.
by bthallplz | 2025-12-04 02:31:57+00:00
I've suspected that, too, while looking at DAWs and how people make music with them. It seems a bit boring to me.

To kinda get away from that or even just experiment, I was interested in the possibility of writing music with code and either inject randomness in places or at least vary the intervals between beats/etc using some other functions (which would again just be layering in patterns, but in a more subtle way).
by pabs3 | 2025-12-04 02:32:13+00:00
Clean room reverse engineering always involves a wall of some kind between the person figuring out how the tech works, and the person creating the new tech. Usually the wall is only allowing one-way communication via a specification of the behavior of the old tech, perhaps reviewed by a lawyer to ensure nothing copyrighted leaks across.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall
by komali2 | 2025-12-04 02:32:50+00:00
Valve's employee handbook: https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1074301/Valve_Handbook_Lo...

They seem to have a high ownership, consensus driven organizational structure. The only time I'm aware the consensus model was violated was when Gabe overruled a veto to ship Steam with half life 2.

It's very interesting to me because it seems to operate similarly to a lot of anarchist shit I've been involved in, but at a highly effective level. And they make oodles of money.
by nicoburns | 2025-12-04 02:33:11+00:00
From what I can see, it's often when the founder loses control of the company (either voluntarily (e.g. retirement) or not) and it falls to the board (representing the shareholders) to appoint the CEO. At that point it's at best a toss up whether they'll appoint someone who actually intends to create value or someone who intends to extract value.

> The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?

Abolishing public equity is quite drastic, but there are lots of other things we could (and IMO should) be doing to protect society from the negative externalities it causes. For example:

- Mandating worker representation on company boards. So shareholders still have some power, but less.

- Progressive corporation tax (larger companies pay more tax). This would bias the economy towards smaller companies which generally have less problematic externalities.
by charlietran | 2025-12-04 02:34:10+00:00
I did this recently, though on a much lower budget. You don’t need to buy a new $150 magic keyboard or a 3d printer.

1. Buy an old A2449 keyboard, ideally one with broken keys or battery but working touch ID. I got mine for $45 shipped. Recent listing example: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=magic+keyboard+a2449&_s...

2. Pry it apart as described in the article (really, there is so much glue) and then use some spare Legos to make an enclosure like this person: https://grepjason.sh/2022/standalone-touch-id-part-2

The standalone Touch ID key button is just under the size of 2x2x1 Lego. I integrated mine into a space diorama set for better vibes: https://imgur.com/a/Im7t9Xb
by nbbaier | 2025-12-04 02:35:28+00:00
- Location: Chicago, IL, USA - Remote: Yes - Willing to relocate: No - Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, SQLite, PostgreSQL, SPARQL, HTML/CSS, Tailwind, Git, Node.js, Bun, Deno, React, Astro, HTMX, Hono, Cloudflare, Vercel, MCP, AI - Résumé/CV: https://bit.ly/4cXoofS - Email: nico.baier@gmail.com - Github: https://github.com/nbbaier - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicobaier - Website: https://nicobaier.com

I'm a former academic researcher (in linguistics) turned self-taught software engineer who'd like to transition into professional software development. I'm experienced across the stack using Javascript/TypeScript, Python, and SQL with platforms like Cloudflare and Val Town. I bring a research-driven approach from my Ph.D. in linguistics. I'm especially interested in working on AI tooling and integrations.
by almosthere | 2025-12-04 02:35:36+00:00
I think we should be honest and consistent about losing our jobs to AI. For decades we justified automation by saying things like: "Sure, the toothpaste tube machine replaced 30 workers, but someone will need to maintain and operate it." And whenever someone pointed out that one mechanic doesn't replace those 30 lost jobs, everyone went quiet.

Now we're using the same logic again: "Well, you just need to learn to use the AI before someone else does."

And if anyone doubts that the world can move on without the software engineer, remember that it moved on just fine after eliminating the toothpaste tube fillers. The world kept turning, just a little colder and more indifferent each time another role disappeared.

Maybe instead of pretending this time is different, we should focus on writing the best epitaph we can.
by pragmatic | 2025-12-04 02:36:40+00:00
This is why the US housing market is deadlocked (live locked?).

Sellers arent willing to lower prices AND lose a low rate and buyers aren't willing to pay those prices and expect a buyer's market.

Nothing is moving and realtors are hurting.

Something has to pop the bubble, will it be massive job loss that forces relocation or sale for cash and move to apartment?

Who knows?
by stogot | 2025-12-04 02:37:35+00:00
> And then came the final insult: everyone was forced to use Microsoft's AI tools whether they worked or not.

Copilot for Word. Copilot for PowerPoint. Copilot for email. Copilot for code. Worse than the tools they replaced. Worse than competitors' tools. Sometimes worse than doing the work manually.

This is revolting. Three years ago I’d have said this is a terrible black mirror plot
by kstrauser | 2025-12-04 02:38:12+00:00
They absolutely can revoke the license on all their own code, or any code signed over to them with a CLA. But really, they don’t have to revoke anything. The license does that automatically: you’re only allowed to redistribute GPL/AGPL licensed software as long as you comply with the terms. If you stop complying, the license ceases granting you permission automatically.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-12-04 02:39:21+00:00
If they offer an option to just pay more, then the need for the new ID can't actually be legitimate. If it was actually important for some real safety reason, then it would be crazy to allow a terrorist to just pay $45 to get around it.

It's like when they take the supposedly dangerous potential bomb bottle of liquid from your bag, and just put it in a trash can right there still in this crowded airport with hundreds of civilian victims all around.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-04 02:40:32+00:00
So, 1) a public service, 2) with no authentication, 3) and no encryption? (http only??), 4) sent every single response with a token, 5) giving full admin access to every client's legal documents. This is like a law firm with an open back door, open back window, and all the confidential legal papers sprawled out on the floor.

Imagine the potential impact. You're a single mother, fighting for custody of your kids. Your lawyer has some documentation of something that happened to you, that wasn't your fault, but would look bad if brought up in court. Suddenly you receive a phone call - it's a mysterious voice, demanding $10,000 or they will send the documents to the opposition. Neither of them knows each other; someone just found a trove of documents in an open back door and wanted to make a quick buck.

This is exactly what a software building code would address (if we had one!). Just like you can't open a new storefront in a new building without it being inspected, you should not be able to process millions of sensitive files without having your software's building inspected. The safety and privacy of all of us shouldn't be optional.
by runako | 2025-12-04 02:42:07+00:00
They don't eat all of it anymore, even for Prime members. To the extent they do, it's largely to reduce friction for what is still a purchase that will generally take longer to arrive than going to the store. Plus, it's a nice perk that makes you feel like you're getting a deal.

As for profits, I haven't looked recently, but IIRC profits are mostly:

1. AWS

2. Prime membership fees

The latter drives loyalty and therefore volume and predictability, which allows Amazon to e.g. operate their own mini-UPS in the quest to make money on most parcels. They also rolled back free shipping on everything over the years and use it more surgically and with minimum order sizes.