MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 112233 | 2025-12-11 04:50:06+00:00
I have yet to find the niche where it is "good at the beginning". So far I've mostly tried asking to build C tools that use advanced linux API.

Me: hey make this, detailed-spec.txt

AI: okidoki (barfs 9k lines in 15 minutes) all done and tested!

Me looks at the code, that has feature-sounding names, but all features are stubs, all tests are stubs, and it does not compile.

Me: it does not compile.

AI: Yes, but the code is correct. Now that the project is done, which of these features you want me to add (some crazy list)

Me: Please get it to compile.

AI: You are absolutely right! This is an excellent idea! (proceeds to stub and delete most of what it barfed). I feel really satisfied with the progress! It was a real challenge! The code you gave me was very poorly written!

... and so on.
Ask HN: Why are people using Claude or ChatGPT when Gemini is free?
by muunbo | 2025-12-11 04:51:32+00:00
Genuine question - I currently pay for ChatGPT Plus but I am wondering if I can just use Gemini for everything? What are the pros and cons in your experience. My main use cases are debugging web dev stuff, asking which tool is best for different parts of my side projects, generating an image once in a while for my blog posts/youtube videos, and sometimes just asking random questions / curiosities (the same as I would have asked on google/wikipedia back in the day)
by Fnoord | 2025-12-11 04:52:21+00:00
There's no irony in that: different medium.

The Dutch dev of Calibri commented on the history [1].

He makes a couple of good points, nuances. The main one I liked is related to your premise: it was that the Times New Roman font was optimized for printing newspapers whereas his successor was meant for computer screens.

Ultimately, IMO this is just bullying people with bad eyesight and dyslexia (and said bullying I can only regard as hatred towards minorities which reminds me of a different era). My father had MS and due to that bad eyesight. He had special glasses with a special lens to read. Of course any font change has a learning curve, but to me this just hits home as I've seen him struggle to read.

[1] https://nos.nl/l/2594021
by Daishiman | 2025-12-11 04:52:47+00:00
* Infra code description languages like Terraform and K8s/helm spec files are like magic; they get 90% of the code right 90% of the time. In my experience that's about half of the work; the other half is spent debugging and correcting details that matter, but still applies to the code that I write myself.

* SQL works almost as good. It's especially useful when you need to generate queries with long lists of fields and complex query criteria. Give it a schema and let it rip.

* Python code works reasonably well. If your description is terse and clear it will generally do the right thing. It has a knack for being excessive in comments and will sometimes do things in ways that feel unnatural, but business code will be as good as the context that surrounds it. For boring, repetitive tasks like setting up program args, annotating types, and writing generic request/response cycles with common frameworks it will do boring old vanilla code. You'll likely want to touch it up and adapt it to your personal preference.

* Debugging is very much or miss. It has been absolutely fantastic at troubleshooting failed and stuck k8s jobs and service configuration issues, having no qualms about creating its own shell or python scripts to investigate ports or logs, and writing JSON parsing scripts that are snoozefest for a human to write. The regexes that I'd barely be arsed to write to parse enormous logs it writes trivially. For business logic, the more convoluted your logic the harder the time it will have, and for most debugging issues I prefer to let it run and list some hypotheses and potential issues and my intent is to learn and understand the problem myself deeply before committing to a fix.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-12-11 04:53:04+00:00
This is kind of a shit article.

There is no "PCIe vulnerability" unless you think someone is shimming your PCIe devices on the data lines physically inside the machine.

The only people who need to consider this are people who think a state actor is putting trash chips on data lines in their expansion cards and mainboards just to perform the shim... which, yeah, encrypting it is a pretty decent way of stopping this, they already do it for both in-flight and at-rest data on SAS and NVMe drives, this just expands it to also cover everything that flows over PCIe; ex: exfiltrating unencrypted data inside a datacenter that is being sent to/from the HTTPS endpoint gateway via the NIC's unecrypted PCIe lanes.
by stego-tech | 2025-12-11 04:53:13+00:00
The fact the question has been asked before does not make it any less valuable or worthwhile to ask now, and history is full of the sort of pithy replies like yours masquerading as profound philosophical insights. I’d like to think the question is asked at every invention, every revolution, because we must doubt our own creations lest we blind ourselves to the consequences of our actions.

Nothing is inevitable. Systems can be changed if we decide to do so, and AI is no different. To believe in inevitability is to embrace fatalism.
by Helmut10001 | 2025-12-11 04:53:35+00:00
I recently had a similar experience, although not this size.

Pre-story: For 3 years I wanted to build a rack-gaming-server, so I can play with my son in our small apartment where we don't have enough space for a gaming computer (wife also doesn't allow it). I have a stable IPsec connection to my parents house, where I have a powerfull PV plant (90kWp) and a rack server, for my freelance job.

Fast forward to 2 months ago, I see a Supermicro SYS-7049GP-TRT for 1400€ on Ebay. It looks clean, sold by some IT reuse-warehouse. No desription, just 3 photos and the case label. I ask the seller whether he knows whats in it and he says he didn't check. The case alone comes new at 3k here in Germany. I buy it.

It arrives. 64GB ECC memory, 2x Xeon silver, 1x 500GB SSD, 5x GBit LAN Cards. Dual 2200 Watt PowerSupply. I remove the airshroud, and: A Nvidia V100S 32GB emerges. I sell the card on ebay for 1600€ and buy 2x Xeon 6254 CPUs (100€ each) to replace the 2x Silver ones that are in it. Last week, I bought two Blackwell RTX 4000 Pro for 1100€ each. Enough for gaming with my son! (and I can do some fun with LLMs and home assistant/smart home..)

The case fits 4x dual-size GPUs, so I could fit 4x RTX 6000 in it (384GB VRAM). At a price of 3k, this would come at 12k (still too much for me.. but let's check back in a couple of years..).

Buying used enterprise gear is fun. I had so many good experiences and this stuff is just rock solid.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-11 04:54:09+00:00
It's terrible at the niches I actually have expertise in, which are in mathematics. I'd guess an expert is going to find the flaws in anything it's doing in their field. That being said, if you're just trying to e.g. see what some GUI library can do then it's pretty useful to get something going. I personally would prefer not using it in anything that's not very much a throwaway test project though, but that is my luxury as a jobless bum.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-11 04:54:16+00:00
> Determining whether there is an actual labor shortage is pretty difficult.

The only hard part is nailing down what people mean by “labor shortage”; resolving whether one exists under either the normal economic definition or the one people are actually using is pretty easy, but since the whole point of using the term is to mask that the actual complaint is about wages being too high, its really difficult to get people to admit what they are talking about.
by Calavar | 2025-12-11 04:54:35+00:00
I think you hit the nail on the head with the analogy to Doctor GPT, but I think you missed it with gatekeeping. I don't think it's about gatekeeping at all.

A freelance developer (or a doctor) is familiar with working within a particular framework and process flow. For any new feature, you start by generating user stories, work out a high level architecure, think about about how to integrate that into your existing codebase, and then write the code. It's mostly a unidirectional flow.

When the client starts giving you code, it turns into a bidirectional flow. You can't just copy/paste the code and call it done. You have to go in the reverse direction: read the code to parse out what the high level architecture is, which user stories it implements and which it does not. After that you have to go back in the forward direction to actually adapt and integrate the code. The client thinks they've made the developer's job easier, but they've actually doubled the cognitive load. This is stressful and frustrating for the developer.
by antonvs | 2025-12-11 04:54:35+00:00
I can’t tell if you might be joking. If you are, the rest of this comment is irrelevant.

That general idiom is old and fairly widely used. There was a Seinfeld episode in 1997 in which Elaine talked about “…not lurching around like a caveman.”

If you’re objecting to criticism of writing code by hand, the phrase is almost invariably used in a self-deprecating way, acknowledging some inefficiency or old-fashioned behavior with comic hyperbole. It’s not criticizing people who write code by hand as such - the author is criticizing themselves for doing something the hard way.
by dang | 2025-12-11 04:54:49+00:00
I've addressed this question countless times, and am always happy to answer good-faith questions. But I'm not interested in being cross-examined.

> ps. obviously after i made 3 comments i am throttled and cant post this comment

Your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043551).

If you want to build up a track record of using HN as intended for a while, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we can take a look and hopefully take the rate limit off your account.
by ipdashc | 2025-12-11 04:55:54+00:00
> I'm particularly curious why when I say I use Rust and code faster everyone is fine with that, but saying that I use AI and code faster is an extremely contentious statement.

This hits the nail on the head, IMO. I haven't seen any of the replies address this yet, unless I missed one.

I don't even like AI per se, but many of the replies to this comment (and to this sentiment in general) are ridiculous. Ignoring the ones that are just insulting your work even though you admitted off the bat you're not an "advanced" programmer... There are obviously flaws with AI coding (maintainability, subtle bugs, skill atrophy, electricity usage, etc). But why do we all spring immediately to this gaslighting-esque "no, your personal experience is actually wrong, you imagined it all?" Come on guys, we should be better than that.
by simianwords | 2025-12-11 04:56:43+00:00
i'm willing to talk about absolute as well. lets try to understand how many lives can be saved if billionaires completely cut their frivolous spending. lets be clear that this has to be compared against how much wealth they brought for others and whether they could have done this if the incentive for personal spending did not exist.

assuming billionaires spend .1% of their wealth on frivolous purchases - you would net a one time amount of around 20 billion dollars. you can't do anything with this let alone save poverty. if you could then you can simply ask the government to move 20 billion around. they have tried it and it doesn't work.
by mhitza | 2025-12-11 04:57:21+00:00
Thanks for the perspective. I actually think the complex parts you mention are relatively easy nowadays.

If I were to implement it today I would probably use a centralized authorization service "authentication gateway" with something like forward_auth in Caddy to "tag along" configuration data with the request (teams, instance landing page etc. including encrypted database configuration storage, encoded as a JWT) https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/forward_au...

I think the hard part is having enough discipline within a team to mostly work with backwards-compatible database changes, the automation to make that seamless, and the will to be proactive with the possibilities of this setup.
by larusso | 2025-12-11 04:58:22+00:00
I think the HDMI connectors popped up at the same time screens switched from 16:10 (VESA compatible at the time) to 16:9 to be more cost effective for the manufacturers. But I’m not sure why. I looked at graphicscards and wondered why HDMI suddenly gained traction in the PC space even after the release of DisplayPort. I think this should never have happened.
by ares623 | 2025-12-11 04:58:24+00:00
We wouldn’t have this problem if the tech companies can “self regulate” (lol). But us engineers just can’t help ourselves but find even more effective and efficient ways to harvest eyeballs and stoke hate.

And yes, I mean engineers. Just a few “inventions” off the top of my head that got us here:

- infinite scroll - Facebook’s shadow profiles - recommendation algorithms

Don’t pretend it’s not engineers that came up with these.
by lurking_swe | 2025-12-11 04:58:27+00:00
I’m not sure if you read the same article as me. Or maybe you’re reading between the lines in an uncharitable way due to a bias. Who knows.

I’ll quote:

> All three women encountered by the Colorado hospital staff were reluctant to take their monitors off, fearing that doing so would trigger an alert to ICE or BI Inc, the staff said, even if removing the device was deemed medically necessary.

YOU think these pregnant women showed an INTENT to break the law (removing their monitors)? I see the opposite. Please quote or explain why you think they tried to “run away and break the law”.

Furthermore, and this is a question since i’m unsure, what laws protect the unborn child and its health during a medical emergency?
by lovich | 2025-12-11 04:58:49+00:00
ah yes, I remember the prime caveat of capitalism where having a few people with all the decision making power at the top causes the wisdom of the crowd to make better micro economic decisions.

There is no functional difference between a handful of plutocrats deciding capital allocation and a handful of monarchs deciding capital allocation. If you are pro capitalism you should be against letting wealth, and the associated decision power, accumulate in a few individuals
by keeda | 2025-12-11 05:00:26+00:00
I would agree with that premise, but at that point they are not engineers, they are founders! I guess in the end, to capture their full value engineers must escape the bonds of regular employment.

Which is not to say either one is better or worse! Regular employment does come with much lower risk, as it is amortized over the entire company, whereas startups are risky and stressful. Different strokes for different folks.

I do think AI could create a new paradigm though. With dropping employment and increasing full-stack business capabilities, I foresee a rise in solopreneurship, something I'm trying out myself.
by Fnoord | 2025-12-11 05:00:49+00:00
For aesthetic or other preferences you change the default font to whatever you please. The default font shouldn't be about aesthetics, it should be first and foremost about usability. Especially on printed media since there it cannot be changed in a whim.

A couple of years ago I went into archives of Dutch newspapers to learn whether and how the famine of hunger in Ukraine (known as Holodomor) was reported back in 1930's. Fuck me, it was hard to read those excerpts. But it is what it is. OCR could've converted the font. The problem is, is the OCR accurate? Like, is my search with keywords having a good SnR, or am I missing out on evidence?

Personally, Times New Roman was likely the reason I did not like Mozilla Thunderbird. I have to look into that.
by vel0city | 2025-12-11 05:00:50+00:00
You should read about the Chicago Parking Meters scandal. The City of Chicago leased all their meter rights to a private corporation on a 75 year lease for a bit over a billion dollars. The private company made it back in the first decade. The city even has to pay the parking company when they have to do construction or throw events that blocks the parking as revenue compensation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Parking_Meters

This doesn't apply to private pay lots though, so there's still some amount of "choice".
by 9rx | 2025-12-11 05:00:53+00:00
> If a compiler counts as AI then so does literally every other program out there (at least the ones with well-defined inputs and outputs).

You seem to be missing some context. We were talking about a system that takes a typed description of what you want as input and outputs code. There is plenty of software, even with well-defined inputs and outputs, which do not do that.

But there is a particular type of software that does exactly that. We call it a compiler in my circles. Maybe you do not in your circles, but it doesn't really matter as it was I who wrote "compiler". It was written to express my intent. Your (mis)interpretation does nothing to change my intent and is, frankly, irrelevant.
by Ozzie_osman | 2025-12-11 05:01:09+00:00
I was recently (vibe)-coding some games with my kid, and we wanted some basic text-to-speech functionality. We tested Google's Gemini models in-browser, and they worked great, so we figured we'd add them to the app. Some fun learnings:

1. You can access those models via three APIs: the Gemini API (which it turns out is only for prototyping and returned errors 30% of the time), the Vertex API (much more stable but lacking in some functionality), and the TTS API (which performed very poorly despite offering the same models). They also have separate keys (at least, Gemini vs Vertex).

2. Each of those APIs supports different parameters (things like language, whether you can pass a style prompt separate from the words you want spoken, etc). None of them offered the full combination we wanted.

3. To learn this, you have to spend a couple hours reading API docs, or alternatively, just have Claude Code read the docs then try all different combinations and figure out what works and what doesn't (with the added risk that it might hallucinate something).
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-11 05:01:41+00:00
> Printed documents - Use the original, which is digital.

> Images - Use the original, which is digital.

> horribly inaccessible pdfs - Use the original, which has real text in the PDF

> horribly inaccessible websites - All text on any web site is digital. Nobody uses OCR on a website.

A massive paper producer like the government shouldn't adopt their type setting to people who are using technology wrongly.
by nomilk | 2025-12-11 05:02:34+00:00
Delivery apps like Grab and Uber Eats are even worse since they have even more perverse incentives (minimising delivery time and maximising 'sponsored' listings).

Other than being willing to scroll a lot, I haven't found any great ways to find new restaurants when using delivery apps, and I'm sure I use them far less because of the tedium involved. I think scraping listings and re-doing the algorithm yourself (as per post) is perhaps the best approach. E.g. Just being able to rank by user rating and filter for no less than 200 reviews and within 5km would be an outstanding improvement on the status quo, which is always the 50 closest restaurants to the delivery address - what a coincidence! - with a few 'sponsored' listings thrown in.
by richardfeynman | 2025-12-11 05:02:56+00:00
Premise 2 is false. The vast majority of the injured were Hezbollah terrorists. You say The Times of Israel reported "many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatant" - show me a source, please.

It's also false that footage shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces. Again, show a credible source and explain how this happened to them.
by CSMastermind | 2025-12-11 05:04:40+00:00
It's so terrible. I cannot tell you the hours I've wasted trying to find a way to see all the Gemini API keys generated in my organization and I have been unsuccessful. I've tried AI Studio, GCP, and Google Admin.

We've reverted to everyone at the company just using the API key I created because I can't figure out a way to give anyone else visibility into keys and usage.
by tguvot | 2025-12-11 05:05:24+00:00
if by "addressed" you mean ignored - yes. I saw multiple people raising with you and with other moderator issue of "abuse of flagging of comments" (not submissions), and I never saw neither of you trying to address it. I saw you only trying to avoid it.

just like you did now twice, first time when I asked, you diverted it to different topic and second time you accused me of asking questions in bad faith.

ironically, you violated yourelf site guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

something funny i saw a couple of weeks ago: some dude that was here for 10-15 years and wrote only 200 or so comments (but really good comments. i went through his comment history and it was really good and insightful), wrote in one of discussions that abuse of flagging of comments is crazy and it used to suppress discussion and that he leaves the site.

his comment got flagged.

this is the atmosphere that you been fostering here. either by inaction against abuse or by "pardoning" people that according to you violate guidelines in multiple ways https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227648

edit. and how you decide "low quality comment" ? is it your objective opinion or is it all the downvoting from people that don't like facts that i preset (it's common here to downvote and flag comments with link to factual data) ?
by kinj28 | 2025-12-11 05:06:08+00:00
I run a low code platform for building internal tools & software. One of my prospect about to sign a contract came back telling me that his CTO has asked him to check vibe code tools and build a few internal tools with them. They are a large series D/E company and have over 250 internal tools built on retool (a service that they are migrating from). CTO is puzzled & is thinking if does he even need a platform to build & manage internal tools.

On other hand -- another customer of mine built a few internal tools with vibe code (& yes he does have subscription to my low code service) but then when newer requests came for upgrade thats where his vibe coded app started acting up. His candid feedback was -- for internal tools vibe code doesnt work.

As a service provider for low code --> we are now providing full fledged vibe code tooling on top. While I dont know how customers who do not wish to code and just have the software will be able to upkeep these softwares without needing professionals.
by dang | 2025-12-11 05:06:14+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363698 - Nov 2023 (143 comments)

Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25891435 - Jan 2021 (68 comments)

Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18297757 - Oct 2018 (150 comments)

Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10453850 - Oct 2015 (106 comments)

Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7665667 - April 2014 (1 comment)
by nemothekid | 2025-12-11 05:06:17+00:00
It's not so much that it's a catch 22, its that there's no financial incentive for them. TVs are a low margin item already, and Samsung/LG get their margin by being brand names and advertising fancy features.

I doubt they would meaningfully save money over investing in DP, and the opportunity cost is greater for them to spend that money on the next "Frame" TV or whatever.

LG, Samsung and Sony are the only actual panel manufacturers and they probably bake those license fees into the panels they sell back to HDMI Forum.