MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CommenterPerson | 2025-12-23 21:17:22+00:00
Hear hear. The word "Technology" has also been redefined to mean computer or phone stuff. As a real (manly) engineer, this pisses me off no end! :-)

To answer the OP, this Civil engineering blog / video site is really good. I always learn something new, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Well worth giving it a look:

https://practical.engineering/
by andai | 2025-12-23 21:17:50+00:00
So I'm hearing a lot of people running LLMs on Apple hardware. But is there actually anything useful you can run? Does it run at a usable speed? And is it worth the cost? Because the last time I checked the answer to all three questions appeared to be no.

Though maybe it depends on what you're doing? (Although if you're doing something simple like embeddings, then you don't need the Apple hardware in the first place.)
by djinnrutger | 2025-12-23 21:18:00+00:00
I use Nomacs Image Lounge as my default image view on windows. It works really well and it can convert images including HEIC too. Only issue is I think the newer HEIC may not work, but I saw that the newer version on the github may have addressed this but I have not tested.
https://nomacs.org/
https://github.com/nomacs/nomacs
by sombragris | 2025-12-23 21:18:04+00:00
> The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets.

I fully agree and I really admire people working on the industry. When I see great games which are unplayable in the low end because of stupidly high minimum hardware requirements, I understand game devs are simply responding to internal trends within the industry, and especially going for a practical outcome by using an established game engine (such as Unreal 5).

But at some time I hope this GPU crunch forces this same industry to allocate time and resources either at the engine or at the game level to truly optimize for a realistic low end.
by juliansimioni | 2025-12-23 21:18:05+00:00
Fellow bootstrapped founder for 8 years here, and I love and agree with your responses here.

Having previously existed in the VC-backed startup world, one thing I don't miss is the belief that its the _only_ rational way to run a business. In reality there are a lot of dangers to that approach, like you pointed out.

VCs _need_ promising businesses to join their portfolio, so they'll always be trying to convince you to raise money and have a tiny shot at making it big. If you fail, well, you're just one business in their portfolio, another one will pick up the loss. But it's the _only_ company you have, so you are doing the right thing by growing sustainably.

There's something extremely freeing about running a bootstrapped business and knowing you don't _need_ anyone to keep it running. Cheers to the next 10 years for you and your team.
by kvemkon | 2025-12-23 21:18:20+00:00
SQLite 3.51.1

$ wc -l ...
265908 sqlite-amalgamation-3510100/sqlite3.c

Is there any as large as possible single source (or normal with amalgamation version) more or less meaningful project that could be compiled directly with rustc -o executable src.rs? Just to compare build time / memory consumption.
by baq | 2025-12-23 21:18:39+00:00
See mac or windows: grow swap automatically up to some sane limit, show a warning, give user an option to kill stuff; on headless systems, kill stuff. Do not page out critical system processes like sshd or the compositor.

A hard lock which requires a reboot or god forbid power cycling is the worst possible outcome, literally anything else which doesn’t start a fire is an improvement TBH.
by rpdillon | 2025-12-23 21:18:55+00:00
Counterpoint to the sibling comment: posting your own site is fine. Your contributions are substantial, and your site is a well-organized repository of your work. Not everything fits (or belongs) in a comment.

I'd chalk up the -4 to generic LLM hate, but I find examples of where LLMs do well to be useful, so I appreciated your post. It displays curiosity, and is especially defensible given your site has no ads, loads blazingly fast, and is filled with HN-relevant content, and doesn't even attempt to sell anything.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-23 21:19:06+00:00
> its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature.

The real problem is that the hardware vendors aren't using its development model. To make this work you either need a) the hardware vendor to write good drivers/firmware, or b) the hardware vendor to publish the source code or sufficient documentation so that someone else can reasonably fix their bugs.

The Linux model is the second one. Which isn't what's happening when a hardware vendor doesn't do either of them. But some of them are better than others, and it's the sort of thing you can look up before you buy something, so this is a situation where you can vote with your wallet.

A lot of this is also the direct fault of Microsoft for pressuring hardware vendors to support "Modern Standby" instead of rather than in addition to S3 suspend, presumably because they're organizationally incapable of making Windows Update work efficiently so they need Modern Standby to paper over it by having it run when the laptop is "asleep" and then they can't have people noticing that S3 is more efficient. But Microsoft's current mission to get everyone to switch to Linux appears to be in full swing now, so we'll see if their efforts on that front manage to improve the situation over time.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-23 21:19:22+00:00
> that doesn't change anything; I still believe utilities should be run as non-profits

That's a valid position. My utility is a member-owned coöperative [1]. It pays me a dividend every year that I have the option of investing back into it for a return.

But that's not why its power is 10x cheaper than California's, despite my buying exclusively wind and hydro.

[1] https://www.lvenergy.com/my-account/unclaimed-patronage-capi...
by BeetleB | 2025-12-23 21:19:40+00:00
> Similar to a protection racket, they (Z.ai et al) raise a threat and then offer to relieve the same threat.

Eh? The notion of a protection racket applies when you have virtually no choice. They come on your territory and cause problems if you don't pay up. Nothing like that is happening here: The customer is going on their property and using their service.

If I offered a service for free, and you weren't paying me, I would very happily do all kinds of things with your data. I don't owe you anything, and you can simply just not use my site.

They are not training on API data because they would simply have fewer customers otherwise. There's nothing nefarious in any of this.

In any case, since they're releasing the weights, any 3rd party can offer the same service.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-12-23 21:20:06+00:00
>> 10Mbps is still way too high of a minimum. It's more than YouTube uses for full motion 4k.

> And 2-3 JPEGs per second won't even look good at 1Mbps.

Unqualified claims like these are utterly meaningless. It depends too much on exactly what you're doing, some sorts of images will compress much better than others.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-23 21:20:15+00:00
It made a lot more sense in the bygone years of users casually downloading and running exe's to get more AIM "smilies", or putting in a floppy disk or CD and having the system autoexec whatever malware the last user of that disk had. It was the expected norm for everybody's computer to be an absolute mess.

These days, things have gotten far more reasonable, and I think we can generally expect a linux desktop user to only run software from trusted sources. In this context, such a feature makes much less sense.
by bicx | 2025-12-23 21:20:27+00:00
To your first question: For me, yes. Although, If I’m going to use it in multiple places with that same style, I’d find the best way to declare it once (like in a React component). Generally I much prefer to keep the style close to the element it’s styling, and I’d rather it be done declaratively rather than native CSS with polyfills. CSS is such a core part of appearance and behavior that building and debugging structures and style together is much more effective.
by qayxc | 2025-12-23 21:20:40+00:00
Newton was a hypnotherapist. I'm sorry to say this, but hypnosis is precisely the kind of altering a person's state of mind to make it highly susceptible to both deliberate and unintentional suggestion. This has been well documented and researched for decades at this point.

The fact that to this day not a single so called "PRL" has uncovered hitherto unknown, yet verifiable information (e.g. archaeological sites like sunken cities or translations of ancient scripts) points to suggestion (even if unintentional) rather than paranormal phenomena.
by mdhb | 2025-12-23 21:21:07+00:00
I had to rely inline above because of some questionable circumstances but not here to debate that part at all.

But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.

When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.
by spankalee | 2025-12-23 21:21:31+00:00
The comments here sound like they're from people who don't work in tech or at large companies...

The Volvo software design team isn't responsible for fixing electronics bugs, and maybe not even responsible for the presence or lack of physical buttons. They didn't even make the font - it was contracted to a design studio. I seriously doubt this effort distracted too much from fixing the other things people care about. Big companies do multiple things at once.
by krukah | 2025-12-23 21:21:45+00:00
Tree Of Life is nothing short of a masterpiece IMO. Influential on me personally as my first exposure to how much editing and structure (or lack thereof) build directorial style. It left an impression on me to feel so much for a film that explicitly says so little.

Obligatory mention of that iconic low-angle shot of The Mother floating gracefully across the plains. One of the best of all time.
by rolfus | 2025-12-23 21:22:58+00:00
I get what you're saying - I personally scratch that itch by doing woodworking and hobby electronics; I just love doing it and the end product is often just a means to an end; to craft something and enjoying the process of it.

But programming doesn't give me that same feeling, and honestly; the scope of doing and learning everything needed to make my projects without LLM's are just way out of reach. Learning these things would not be relevant to my career or my other hobbies. So, for me I use LLM's the way a person who's not into carpentry might buy the services of a carpenter, despite the possibility of them doing the project themselves after investing tons of time into learning how.
by garganzol | 2025-12-23 21:24:10+00:00
JavaScript in 2010 was a totally different beast, standartization-wise. Lots of sharp corners and blank spaces were still there.

So, even if an implementation like MicroQuickJS existed in 2010, it's unlikely that too many people would have chosen JS over Lua, given all the shortcomings that JavaScript had at the time.
by apsurd | 2025-12-23 21:24:33+00:00
The worst thing that happened is LLMs make using tailwind _easy_. So now it's easier and easier to use and more and more tailwind.

CSS is pretty hard to be proficient in, and maintain, but there's an intentionality to it that improves the results, from my experience.

In contrast, tailwind is so easy to clone "beautiful" designs. A THOUSAND beautifully cloned designs slide into your app that nobody needs to care about. and it's a fucking nightmare of reality but no one cares because that's for the LLMs to sus out.
by BizarroLand | 2025-12-23 21:24:58+00:00
I agree. Patents are only useful in a court of law, and as a deterrent to prevent deep pocketed outsiders from stealing your idea (out of fear that they would lose any infringement lawsuits and therefore a lot of money).

If your patent is crap, like the one that could feasibly be put on a prompt, then there is only the thinnest veneer of protection for your prompt idea, so it's pointless to make one if there is any value more than the 10-30 lawyer hours needed to take it to court and destroy it.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-23 21:25:13+00:00
> Maybe they already had an account with that domain years ago and are trying to log back it.

This wasn't "log back in", this is a new account created.

> Or perhaps it is just some random spammer creating linkedin accounts with random email addresses

This is what I imagined, but I don't understand why someone would do this.

> Or perhaps the email doesn't actually come from linkedin and it is a phishing you to click though

No, these emails come from linkedin.
by dijit | 2025-12-23 21:25:22+00:00
the lead time for a new engine is about 7 years (on the low end).

I don’t think any company that has given up their internal engine could invest 7 years of effort without even having revenue from a game to show for it.

So the industry will likely rally around Unreal and Unity- and I think a handful of the major players will release their engines on license… but Unreal will eat them alive due to the investments in Dev UX (which is much-much higher than proprietary game engines IME). Otherwise the only engines that can really innovate are gated behind AAA publishers and their push for revenue (against investment for any other purpose).

All this to say, I’m sorry to disappoint you, its very unlikely.

Games will have to get smaller and have better revenues.
by tekkk | 2025-12-23 21:26:04+00:00
The blog post is actually much more rational than some of the comments here. There's a fine balance what I call fetishization of tools and just knowing your craft well. Sometimes, we want to use an abstraction even though simpler approach may be better because we are in hurry, want to learn new things or just dont care particularly.

Whose to judge if it works and ships on time? Well, the fool later down the road who has to maintain it probably. But I've never believed in gate-keeping or preaching without pragmatism - I rather put my energy in teaching what little i can and hope that joy of seeing things improve for better will motivate them towards learning. If not, well it's waste of time either way.
by literalAardvark | 2025-12-23 21:26:21+00:00
Apple has a 10-18% market share for laptops. That's significant but it certainly isn't "most".

Most laptops can run at best a 7-14b model, even if you buy one with a high spec graphics chip. These are not useful models unless you're writing spam.

Most desktops have a decent amount of system memory but that can't be used for running LLMs at a useful speed, especially since the stuff you could run in 32-64GB RAM would need lots of interaction and hand holding.

And that's for the easy part, inference. Training is much more expensive.
by rented_mule | 2025-12-23 21:26:41+00:00
It's subtle, but I think the use of "senior" rather than "Senior" in the article is an attempt to distinguish the concept of being a senior engineer from the title of Senior Engineer. The article is focused on actually being senior, not playing title games. I'd take it further and use the term "leader" instead of "senior engineer".

Leaders reduce ambiguity, so others can operate with more clarity. The ambiguity involved can be in many different domains. It can be focused on product and tech, as in the article. Another example is ambiguity around people and organizational structure, which is more common in management roles, where some in management are more effective leaders than others. It can be around finding ways for people to understand why they might want a product, which is more common in sales and marketing roles. And so on.
by linsomniac | 2025-12-23 21:27:04+00:00
I've run into a few odd instances of headscale not working where I'd expect it to and I don't understand how it's failing.

- Connected to my phone hotspot in the car outside my son's therapist, it worked for months, but then for 2-3 weeks tailscale wouldn't connect. Browsing worked fine. In the 6 weeks since then, it's worked fine.

- A couple nights ago I was in a Holiday Inn Express. I could successfully connect to tailscale, and ssh to machines at the office (which has tailscale on a public IP, but couldn't pass traffic to my machine at home (behind NAT, we have a DERP next to the machine at the office and also another one on the headscale node at AWS). Maybe they blocked the DERP port?
by lrvick | 2025-12-23 21:27:19+00:00
Yet another reminder that Nix does not sign commits, does not sign reviews, allows any maintainer to merge their own code, does not compile all packages from source, and Hydra admins can absolutely tamper with builds at any time. It is a massive supply chain attack waiting to happen.

The Nix team is aware of all of this and made these tradeoffs intentionally to maximize package support and reduce contributor friction. Nix, for all its good design choices, landed on a supply chain integrity threat model that unfortunately makes it suitable only as hobby OS that must not be used to protect anything of value.

Guix at least signs commits, but individual maintainers are still trusted so it is not much better, so there really is no production safe nix based package tree I am aware of.

Nothing should advertise itself as secure while being based on nix.

Just because something is popular, does not make it safe.
by brailsafe | 2025-12-23 21:27:57+00:00
My time as a barista doing various behind-the-counter jobs was kind of fascinating. I really couldn't do the job as well as other people, I'm not sure if it's because of memory problems from adhd or concussions or what, but I was most effective due to head-cache when I didn't switch from Frappuccinos to hot drinks to till very frequently.

I'd literally forget how to make cold drinks vs hot drinks when I switched, like I'd never done it, until I got into a new flow, and everyone found this to be hilarious, since I'd already been a software person and it was a regression being there.

I took the job because I needed some money and to make social connections, but I mostly just wanted to see if I could do it, and I couldn't.

Since then, I've learned to give myself a bit of grace when switching contexts. If I have a day zoned in on one part of the code, and someone brings up something I worked on a month ago, I'll have to stall for time while I hydrate my cache again. This limitation is somewhat debilitating, since adult life depends on constantly being anxious about invisible obligations and other bullshit that simply aren't in my conscious mind unless I'm specifically grinding on them.
by BalinKing | 2025-12-23 21:28:00+00:00
There's an ethos among certain circles (especially on HN, I feel) that basically boils down to "tools don't matter" (perhaps manifesting as "a tool isn't bad if it's ubiquitous" (e.g. Bash or CSS), or "learning curve and footguns don't matter" (e.g. C++)). Of course, it's true that there's a lot of essential complexity to many problems, and hey, maybe CSS really is a local maximum to layout design. And sometimes, a steep learning curve really is inherently necessary, like in functional programming or Rust or what have you. But if a tool is difficult to use due to historical accident, simply accepting that everyone should get good—when more ergonomic alternatives really do exist and are widely used—is simply defeatist. The mere fact that some mental model exists for a tool (in this case, maybe it's "HTML should be semantic") does not necessarily mean it's a good or useful one.

(I say all this as one who's been thoroughly Stockholm syndrome'd by Git, knowing full well that my own argument applies just as much to me in that regard....)
by Insanity | 2025-12-23 21:28:05+00:00
Disagree, it's not _just_ practice. You can do something for 10,000 hours but never actively try to improve. Does that mean you're now more senior because you had more volume of practice?

e.g, let's say someone spends 10k hours doing just 'addition and subtraction' problems on 2 digit numbers. Are they now better at maths than someone who spent 0.1k hours but doing a variety of problems?

To grow as a software engineer, you need to have volume + have this be outside of your comfort zone + actively try to improve/challenge yourself.

Apart from this, I do agree it's not 'innate talent' that drives someone to become a senior engineer, and I think anyone with the right attitude / mindset can do so.
by lioeters | 2025-12-23 21:28:11+00:00
> as my primary language

I'd love to hear more how it is, the state of the library ecosystem, language evolution (wasn't there a new major version recently?), pros/cons, reasons to use it compared to other languages.

About tail-calls, in other languages I've found sometimes a conversion of recursive algorithm to a flat iterative loop with stack/queue to be effective. But it can be a pain, less elegant or intuitive than TCO.
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-23 21:28:31+00:00
Can you be specific about what I said being a complete fantasy? I feel like you're trying to extrapolate some view of economics onto me when I was making the point that there are reasonable arguments that can be made against government intervention. Or is that it, you don't even think a reasonable argument can be made? If so I would call that ideological, not reasonable.
by BizarroLand | 2025-12-23 21:28:51+00:00
The defining feature of true AGI, in my opinion, is that the software itself would decide what to do and do it without external prompts more than environmental input.

Doubly so if the AGI writes software for itself to accomplish a task it decided to do.

Once someone has software like that, not a dog that is sicced on a task, but a bloodhound that seeks out novelty and accomplishment for its own personal curiosity or to test its capabilities, then you have a good chance of convincing me that AGI has been achieved.

Until then, we have fancy autocomplete.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-23 21:29:43+00:00
Strictly speaking, you don't need that much VRAM or even plain old RAM - just enough to store your context and model activations. It's just that as you run with less and less (V)RAM you'll start to bottleneck on things like SSD transfer bandwidth and your inference speed goes down to a crawl. But even that may or may not be an issue depending on your exact requirements: perhaps you don't need your answer instantly and can wait while it gets computed in the background. Or maybe you're running with the latest PCIe 5 storage which overall gives you comparable bandwidth to something like DDR3/DDR4 memory.
by cyberax | 2025-12-23 21:30:51+00:00
No, they're not for 100% (it's impossible with the current technology) but in the framework of a renewable grid.

> Also if renewables are so dumb and are so problematic why were they 95% of new power generation installed in the US last year?

Solar is not dumb in some parts of the US, like California or Nevada. It's dumb in the Pacific Northwest or Minnesota.

On the other hand, offshore wind is the _only_ form of renewable energy that is at least a bit reliable due to the inherent diurnal wind patterns near the shores.
by williamcotton | 2025-12-23 21:31:50+00:00
I have been writing my own DSL (and LSP) for making web apps and LLMs can do a pretty decent job of writing this new language.

https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe/tree/webpipe-2.0

https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp/tree/webpipe-2....