MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pzo | 2025-12-09 17:40:41+00:00
> Devstral 2 is currently offered free via our API. After the free period, the API pricing will be $0.40/$2.00 per million tokens (input/output) for Devstral 2

With pricing so low I don't see any reason why someone would buy sub for 200 EUR. These days those subs are so much limited in Claude Code or Cursor than it used to be (or used to unlimited). Better pay-as-you-go especially when there are days when you probably use AI less or not at all (weekends/holidays etc.) as long as those credits don't expire.
by naths88 | 2025-12-09 17:40:55+00:00
I have been coding as an autodidact for 20 years now. In the past months, I have been vibe coding a lot, with multiple AIs at the same time. I have achieved to code a full webapp (React and Next.js for the front, RestJS for the back) in five days. Refactoring, adding features and writing the right tests for everything to work has been procuring me with the same problem solving and endorphin kicks as usual programming. Just don't vibe code something which you could do yourself, maybe that is the issue of the author.
by xandrius | 2025-12-09 17:41:03+00:00
Alright, the whole article stands on the lifting done by the concept of "vibe coding", which is not just asking an LLM to write some code, scan it quickly to check if it at least makes somewhat sense and then accept it. It is based on pure vibe coding, where the user literally has no idea what's being produced.

After having understood the context, I still believe that a strongly typed language would be a much better choice of a language, for exactly the same reason why I wouldn't recommend starting a project in C unless there is a strong preference (and even then Rust would probably be better still).

LLMs are not perfect, just like humans, so I would never vibe code in any other environment than one in which many/most logical errors are by definition impossible to compile.

Not sure if C is worse than python/js in that respect (I'd argue it is better for some and worse for other, regarding safety) but Java, Swift, C#, Go, Rust, etc. are great languages for vibe coding since you have the compiler giving you almost instant feedback on how well your vibe coding is going.
by Cpoll | 2025-12-09 17:41:09+00:00
> For example, why is it 'isometric overhead'?

That's design exactly. There's no technical obstacle to making it over-the-shoulder instead, but it changes the aesthetic. The animations focus on what the jeep does to things, so a racing view that helps you avoid running into things wouldn't be appropriate. It also changes how you see the assets. And you'd lose that 'RC Pro-Am' feel.

> Rather, it's just easier to program a camera that never changes angles and input controls that never have to re-interpret camera position/rotation (lookat vector) to function correctly.

Not really, you just put the camera on a spring arm attached to the vehicle. Vehicle movement isn't harder either. You get this stuff practically for free with any game engine.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-12-09 17:41:29+00:00
I think you have to make a distinction between indvidual experience and claims about general truths.

If I know someone as an honest and serious professional, and they tell me that some tool has made them 5x or 10x more productive, then I'm willing to believe that the tool really did make a big difference for them and their specific work. I would be far more sceptical if they told me that a tool has made them 10% more productive.

I might have some questions about how much technical debt was accumulated in the process and how much learning did not happen that might be needed down the road. How much of that productivity gain was borrowed from the future?

But I wouldn't dismiss the immediate claims out of hand. I think this experience is relevant as a starting point for the science that's needed to make more general claims.

Also, let's not forget that almost none of the choices we make as software engineers are based on solid empirical science. I have looked at quite a few studies about productivity and defect rates in software engineering projects. The methodology is almost always dodgy and the conclusions seem anything but robust to me.
by bloomingeek | 2025-12-09 17:42:16+00:00
In the "old" days, unused land was there to be had, but, depending on where you were, it was heavily treed or rock infested. There may have been hostel natives or bandits, making isolation potentially dangerous. Cattle ranchers, who would claim umpteenth thousands of acres were particularly testy. In the mid parts of the nineteenth century, "good" free land was hard to find for farming.
by roughly | 2025-12-09 17:42:31+00:00
I actually like the device and can see the purpose of it - I’ve tried to kick together similar solutions in the past, but I like the very “one thing only” nature of this.

That said, I absolutely cannot buy a device like this without a replaceable battery. I don’t actually care about the recharge, I get what you’re trying to do with it, but given the state of the e-waste world and, bluntly, the history of hardware brands - a big, big part of the sales pitch for the pebble is the OSS nature of the device because we need to hedge against any one company for longevity. I’d seriously consider this if I knew the battery was replaceable, but I can’t bet on you being around in 4, 6, or 8 years, and I’m not willing to buy intentionally disposable tech anymore.
by 9rx | 2025-12-09 17:42:37+00:00
> Not sure why the snark is necessary.

Not sure why you think a computer screen is giving you snark, but you do you.

> I'm not an expert

You read through all of that data and research, as told earlier, and haven't become an expert...? Yeah right. No need to be so modest with me. Be proud of your achievements!

> Its pretty easy to look up academic achievement stratified by socioeconomic status.

It may be, but no need to waste time sauntering off on another, rather uninteresting, subject. We're talking about R&D, not academic achievement. Stay focused, by friend.

> Most people, given the option, engage in leisure in their free time.

R&D is the leisure activity of many people. We'll leave your data sources to quantify exactly what that means, but it is clearly large enough to be a recognizable set of the population.

> Research is generally a race

It can be where you are trying to be first to build a moat around something that scales massively. But not all R&D scales, or even wants to scale. Despite your unquantified "generally" claim, it remains unclear if most R&D is even trying to scale. There are a lot of hobbyists out there carrying out R&D with no plans for it beyond doing something for themselves.

> there would still be a smarter and harder working subset of people.

There is seemingly no end to how much R&D is possible. I guess at some point there is a pinnacle of human achievement, but it seems highly unlikely that we'll reach that point in the next thousand years. Humans are pretty shortsighted — the people from the year 1200 would have never imagined digital computers being a thing — but when the time comes we always find something new to immerse our thoughts in.

So what if someone is smarter and harder working?
by incrudible | 2025-12-09 17:43:24+00:00
I came to this article expecting an investigation on how C or assembly performs with an LLM, but it is just musings. The article claims the LLM is better at memory management than a human, which I find dubious, but even then it would not be a good argument in favor of C.

My experience with LLMs is that they are not good at tracking resources and perform much better with languages that reduce cognitive load for humans.
by barrister | 2025-12-09 17:43:28+00:00
This author, like many others on this site, seem to imply that AI generates "good" code, but it absolutely does not---unless he's running some million dollar subscription model I'm unaware of. I've tested every AI using simple Javascript programs and they all produce erroneous spaghetti slop. I did discover that Claude produces sufficiently decent Haskell code. The point is that the iterative process requires you know the language because you're going to need to amend the code. Therefore vibe in the language you know. Anyone that suggests that AI can produce a solid application on its own is a fraud.
by sergiotapia | 2025-12-09 17:43:54+00:00
Amp blew me away and was my primary workhorse. Much better than anything out there for a time.

But then I switched to GLM 4.6 using Claude CLI tool and that was good enough and significantly cheaper/faster.

Then Opus 4.5 came out with better pricing and might as well just use that directly. Still working great.

With Amp I was spending $5 here and there every day. Great, but pricey.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-09 17:44:18+00:00
Can someone please tldr me what digital public goods alliance means and how peertube can benefit from being recognized as a digital public good.

From what I can tell, it is UN affiliated/related project where basically it tries to make countries integrate these digital public goods in their country's ecosystem/ work on these (products?)

Is there any amount of sponsorship money that come with this classification or more tax benefits?

Or does UN (thus countries who fund UN) itself fund DPGA?

I find this idea fascinating now thinking about it if that can be the case, for these countries a few millions or even billions collectively might not mean much but it can mean a lot towards open source and digital soveriegnity in my opinion too.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-12-09 17:44:25+00:00
That's what this discussion made me think of. To take it further -- if you were going to design a language expressly for AI-generated code, what might some of it's features be?

I think strong static typing probably? Which is, well, not javascript in fact! (And I have bucked the trend on this previously, liking ruby -- but I'm not sure I'd want AI-generated code without it?)
by gitremote | 2025-12-09 17:44:26+00:00
Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive.

In my work, the bigger bottleneck to productivity is that very few people can correctly articulate requirements. I work in backend, API development, which is completely different from fullstack development with backend development. If you ask PMs about backend requirements, they will dodge you, and if you ask front-end or web developers, they are waiting for you to provide them the API. The hardest part is understanding the requirements. It's not because of illiteracy. It's because software development is a lot more than coding and requires critical thinking to discover the requirements.
by acituan | 2025-12-09 17:44:27+00:00
It is a black box. We don’t know what happens on the other side of the RPC call; good and bad, therefore it could be any number of knobs.

User has two knobs called the thinking level and the model. So we know there are definitely per call knobs. Who can tell if thinking-high actually has a server side fork into eg thinking-high-sports-mode versus thinking-high-eco-mode for example. Or if there were two slightly different instantiations of pro models, one with cheaper inference due to whatever hyperparameter versus full on expensive inference. There are infinite ways to implement this. Zero ways to be proven by the end user.
by adamc | 2025-12-09 17:44:56+00:00
I dislike Home Depot's politics so much that I make a point of never going there.

In general, I prefer buying local, because it makes my community healthier -- more jobs, directly and indirectly, more options to buy something this afternoon if I really need it. But the reality is that many items are already very difficult to buy. Some of that was true 20 years ago, but it's gotten much worse.
by jacobr1 | 2025-12-09 17:45:14+00:00
Honestly it feels like what I, or many of my colleagues would do if given the assignment. Take the current front page, or a summary of the top tropes or recurring topics, revise them for 1 or 2 steps of technical progress and call it a day. It isn't assignment to predict the future, it is an assignment to predict HN, which is a narrower thing.
by devmor | 2025-12-09 17:45:21+00:00
I was about to respond with a similar comment. The majority of the underlying systems are the same and can be understood if you know a decent amount of vector math. That last 3-5% can get pretty mystical, though.

Honestly, where stuff gets the most confusing to me is when the authors of the newer generations of AI papers invent new terms for existing concepts, and then new terms for combining two of those concepts, then new terms for combining two of those combined concepts and removing one... etc.

Some of this redefinition is definitely useful, but it turns into word salad very quickly and I don't often feel like teaching myself a new glossary just to understand a paper I probably wont use the concepts in.
by rottytooth | 2025-12-09 17:45:23+00:00
Hi, I’m the creator of Velato, the programming language (which is at http://velato.net/ ). Velato multicodes with music, much like Piet does with images. The challenge is to write a piece that works musically and programmatically. I have some better example programs I’ll post when they’re released, by an actual composer (it sounds much better than my sample Hello World).

Meanwhile, there’s a variation of the language at http://velato.net/HandsFree/ where you can whistle code live into the browser, rather than using MIDI. It has a somewhat different lexicon and a very different feel.
by josalhor | 2025-12-09 17:45:47+00:00
"Right to Human Verification" is something I have actually thought about a lot.

I want to able to verify my identity against a system. I also want to be able to not do that.

So for instance, on Twitter/X, I could verify myself and filter only other verified people / filter those goverments that have validated the identities of the users. I want to be able to do that. But I also want to be able to log in into Twitter anonymously.

I would love a "Right to Anonymity and Right to Human Verification"
by graemep | 2025-12-09 17:45:54+00:00
The definition of AI is a lot broader than LLMs, and probably a lot broader than machine learning. From Recital 12

> The techniques that enable inference while building an AI system include machine learning approaches that learn from data how to achieve certain objectives, and logic- and knowledge-based approaches that infer from encoded knowledge or symbolic representation of the task to be solved.

That is just a snippe t and I do not know how to interpret it as a whole but it sound as though it atleast extends to expert systems and genetic algorithms? Prolog maybe?
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-09 17:46:08+00:00
> imo this is a hill people need to stop dying on.

As someone who was born and raised on FOSS, and still mostly employed to work on FOSS, I disagree.

Open source is what it is today because it's built by people with a spine who stand tall for their ideals even if it means less money, less industry recognition, lots of unglorious work and lots of other negatives.

It's not purist to believe that what built open source so far should remain open source, and not wanting to dilute that ecosystem with things that aren't open source, yet call themselves open source.
by yannyu | 2025-12-09 17:46:22+00:00
And that's exactly the point, it increases engagement and stickiness, which they found through testing. They're trying to make the most addictive tool and that constant praise fulfills that goal, even as many of us say it's annoying and over-the-top.

My own experience is that it gets too annoying to keep adding "stop the engagement-driving behavior" to the prompt, so it creeps in and I just try to ignore it. But even though I know it's happening, I still get a little blip of emotion when I see the "great question!" come through as the first two words of the response.
by mhitza | 2025-12-09 17:46:25+00:00
> And if the US doesn't jump to your aid?

Pretty banal answer, countries will "just" fight.

Even without NATO, the EU countries already have a defensive pact.

Which as a sidenote is why the dismantlement of EU looks like appealing proposition to both Russia, and the US (for different reasons).

The US would make such a war easier, and fewer lives would be lost, given it's tech, and intelligence network. With or without the US, Russia would lose such a war.

Only way nukes play into it is if a shithead like Putin says "fuck it", seals himself in the bunker and hits the nukes. But then we are all cooked, whichever country does that, since mutual assured destruction comes into play.

In terms of political and societal effects, really interesting question worth pondering about. How would the other NATO member countries retaliate if the US wouldn't join in defense. That would be a big betrayal, so I hope that at the very least all US assets are seized, and US companies nationalized across the EU.
by jmclnx | 2025-12-09 17:46:44+00:00
>When companies buy expensive stuff, for accounting purposes they pretend they haven’t spent the money; instead they “depreciate” it over a few years

I thought there was a US IRS Law that was changed sometime in the past 10/15 years that made companies depreciate computer hardware in 1 year. Am I misremembering ?

I thought that law was the reason why many companies increased the life time of employee Laptops from 3 to 5 years.
by neogodless | 2025-12-09 17:46:52+00:00
Firefox, Windows 11.

It loads, I can navigate (drag), and click the white diamonds.

There are things like the RC truck and bowling ball that are not interactive and look like they should be, so I suspect it's a bug?

EDIT: OK it's a learning curve. With mouse/keyboard, you can click the hamburger icon in the top right, and get to an explanation of controls. I am able to use WADS to drive the truck and push the bowling ball (with the truck.)
by hnarn | 2025-12-09 17:46:55+00:00
I continue to be unimpressed by LLMs when it comes to creative work, they're certainly useful sometimes for "reference digging", but maybe I just don't understand enough about how they work and this is actually something that can already be "fixed" or at least optimized for; anyway, one of the headlines is:

> Debian 18 "Trixie" released

While it correctly derives that a likely version number in ten years would be 18, as there are new releases approximately every two years which means +5 from today's version 13, it then goes on to "make up" that the name of it would be "Trixie" -- the same name as the current release in 2025.

Debian has never re-used a release name, and I think we can be pretty confident they won't (as will no other Linux distro), so I would expect it to "understand" that:

- The next Debian release always uses a previously non-used Toy Story character

- Based on this information, _any_ name of a Toy Story character that hasn't been used is fair game

- At the very least, it certainly won't be the same name again, so at least make up a name
by f1shy | 2025-12-09 17:47:30+00:00
> Make sure that you turn on warnings as errors

I’m seeing this way too often. It is a good idea to never ignore a warning, an developers without discipline may need it. But for god’s sake, there is a reason why there are warnings and errors ,and they are treated differently. I don’t think compiler writers and/or C standards will deprecate warnings and make them errors anytime soon, and for good reason. So IMHO is better to treat errors as errors and warnings as warnings. I have seen plenty of times this flag is mandatory, and to avoid the warning (error) the code is decorated with compiler pacifiers, which makes no sense!

So for some setups I understand the value, but doing it all the time shows some kind of lazyness.
by dang | 2025-12-09 17:47:38+00:00
Whoa - no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, or how strongly a topic makes you feel, you can't post like this to Hacker News. It's vastly against the site guidelines.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly lately - for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46166929 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836368 - and we've already warned you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682844). If you keep posting like this, we're going to end up banning you. I don't want to ban you because your account also posts good things, so if you'd please fix this, we'd be grateful.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-12-09 17:47:39+00:00
I've talked and commented about the dangers of conversations with LLMs (i.e. they activate human social wiring and have a powerful effect, even if you know it's not real. Studies show placebo pills have a statistically significant effect even when the study participant knows it's a placebo -- the effect here is similar).

Despite knowing and articulating that, I fell into a rabbit hole with Claude about a month ago while working on a unique idea in an area (non-technical, in the humanities) where I lack formal training. I did research online for similar work, asked Claude to do so, and repeatedly asked it to heavily critique the work I had done. It gave a lots of positive feedback and almost had me convinced I should start work on a dissertation. I was way out over my skis emotionally and mentally.

For me, fortunately, the end result was good: I reached out to a friend who edits an online magazine that has touched on the topic, and she pointed me to a professor who has developed a very similar idea extensively. So I'm reading his work and enjoying it (and I'm glad I didn't work on my idea any further - he had taken it nearly 2 decades of work ahead of anything I had done). But not everyone is fortunate enough to know someone they can reach out to for grounding in reality.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-09 17:47:42+00:00
Wow, I had just observed that this seemed very common in religions I didn't know I was this accurate as that was called the golden rule!

Now hearing it, I remember hearing something similar but thanks for refreshing and thanks for letting me know

Now that we are talking about golden rule, I often wonder, if this is the case, then why not skip all the other aspects of religion which were meant in tribal times or have issues which still persist to put more emphasis on this "golden rule"

Is this what humanitarianism is (sort of?)
by adamc | 2025-12-09 17:48:10+00:00
I buy from Amazon:

1) When I really need it within a couple of days and can't quickly find it locally 2) When it isn't carried locally (the local retail stock is a lot thinner than 20 years ago) 3) If there is a BIG price difference -- used to be common but now much rarer. As you say, Amazon's prices are often worse than buying locally. 4) When I need it shipped somewhere else. I usually spend Christmas, for example in another city, and it is impractical to bring a bunch of presents. Amazon is good for situations like that.

I dislike Amazon, but they are now so dominant it is hard to avoid them.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-12-09 17:48:54+00:00
It's a huge part of it's longevity. I still watch Brood War tournaments today and it's so cool to go back one, five, ten years and watch a classic game. Compare that to the other game I love, DOTA, it's hard to watch old games because everything is so different. BW really is lightning in a bottle.

PS: Flash is coming back very soon apparently.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-12-09 17:49:30+00:00
Yes. LLM copy/paste strongly indicates karma/vote farming, because if I wanted an LLM's output I could just go there myself.

Someone below mentions using it for translation and I think that's OK.

Idea: Prevent LLM copy/pasting by preempting it. Google and other things display LLM summaries of what you search for after you enter your search query, and that's frequently annoying.

So imagine the same on an HN post. In a clearly delineated and collapsible box underneath or beside the post. It is also annoying, but it also removes the incentive to run the question through an LLM and post the output, because it was already done.