MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by data-ottawa | 2025-12-30 03:02:22+00:00
I write a lot of SQL and I haven't had these issues for months, even with smaller models. Opus can one shot most of my queries faster than I could type them.

Instead of stuffing the context with DDL I suggest:

1. Reorganize your data warehouse. It needs to be easy to find the correct data. Make sure you use ELT clear layers, meaningful schemas, and have per-model documentation. This is a ton of work, but if done right the payoff is massive.

2. I built a tool for myself to pull our warehouse into a graph for fuzzy search+dependency chain analysis. In the spring I made an MCP server for it and Claude uses that tool incredibly well for almost all queries. I haven't actually used the GUI or scripts since I built the MCP.

Claude and Devstral are the best models I've used for SQL. I cannot get Gemini to write decent modern sql -- even the Gemini data science/engineer agents in Google Cloud. I occasionally try the paid models through the API and still haven't been impressed.
by lovich | 2025-12-30 03:02:42+00:00
Ah, and the calculation for what is “essentials” has stayed the same all this time?

Does this capture if more people are renting and part of their expenditure on shelter each month is just spent vs a mortgage payment where the principal paid off gets you equity? I legitimately don’t know, but I know that single value graphs trying to summarize a complex situation are useless on their own and need more data to draw any conclusions from
by minebreaker | 2025-12-30 03:03:22+00:00
When our team decides to hire a new programmer, each team member always writes a short letter, which tells the applicant why we want to hire them. How well they did in the interview, why they'd be a good fit for our team, etc, etc. I'm not naive enough to believe this is a genuine attempt but a some human engineering of persuasion, but I liked this tradition. At least it has some heart warming vibe.

Until I noticed that my coworkers were using LLMs to write these letters.

I lost hope in humanity.
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-30 03:05:38+00:00
That photo is horrendous, so I sure hope for the artists sake it was a 30s prompt job.

I will push back slightly on the idea that slop is only slop because it's bad. AI art will always be slop because of its very nature, it's not even possible to describe ai art as "good" because that's not a quality it can even possess.
by surfacenexus | 2025-12-30 03:05:41+00:00
“Google is dead” feels overstated. What is actually breaking is the click based retrieval and attribution model once answers start getting synthesized upstream.

When discovery is mediated by LLMs, ranking a page is no longer sufficient because the system is not choosing a single best document. It is assembling an answer from spans that fit its internal representation of the problem, which quietly invalidates many of the assumptions SEO and ads were built on.

You can see this shift in the kinds of services being offered now. Instead of focusing on links, keywords, or bid optimization, teams are spending time on structured content that breaks cleanly into answerable fragments, on entity relationships and schema that make concepts legible to models, and on persona driven content that anticipates how questions will be interpreted rather than how pages will rank.

Measurement is shifting as well. Instead of impressions and clicks, people are running prompt level tests, checking whether their content shows up across different models, and tracking inclusion and citation patterns rather than traffic. In many cases, strong traditional pages disappear entirely from answers while smaller, better structured sources surface.

From the outside this looks like traffic declining. Internally it feels more like a loss of observability, where you cannot tell whether you were excluded, partially used, or summarized away into latent knowledge.

Google will likely face the same issue as AI Mode expands. Generating answers is not the hard part. Defining what visibility means when the retrieval layer is no longer exposed is.
How can they claim millions in ARR under a year?
by haebom | 2025-12-30 03:06:02+00:00
Recently, I've seen several AI startups claiming millions in ARR when they've barely been around for a year. How is this possible? It reminds me of a retail investor trading with $1,000 who boasts about 'hundreds of thousands in monthly trading volume' just because they trade frequently. Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't add up to me.
by bri3d | 2025-12-30 03:07:03+00:00
LG appliances at least used to use acoustic signaling for diagnostics: hold a phone up and the washer makes some modem-esque (I think it’s 4-tone / 4-FSK) noises and the app or technician can diagnose issues. It was originally engineered to even work over voice codecs, so a customer without a smartphone could relay the diagnostic session to a technician.
by aforwardslash | 2025-12-30 03:07:08+00:00
Reusable rockets are a rehash of old tech that was considered - at the time - not economically feasible; Given how subject to interpretation spacex commercial numbers are, there is nothing indicating a clear cost or efficiency advantage compared with traditional launch systems so far. What we clearly know is that using software development methodologies to building critical hardware is as a bad idea as it sounds.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-30 03:10:32+00:00
There are a few problems with this post:

1 - In C++, a struct is no different than a class
other than a default scope of public instead of
private.
2 - The use of braces for property initialization
in a constructor is malformed C++.
3 - C++ is not C, as the author eventually concedes:

At this point, my C developer spider senses are tingling:
is Response response; the culprit? It has to be, right? In
C, that's clear undefined behavior to read fields from
response: The C struct is not initialized.

In short, if the author employed C++ instead of trying to use C techniques, all they would have needed is a zero cost constructor definition such as:

inline Response () : error (false), succeeded (false)
{
;
}
by brigandish | 2025-12-30 03:11:45+00:00
I noticed a few people on HN have started complaining that anyone arguing with them is a bot. I think it's a coping mechanism at finding people who challenge them, but maybe they've been on too many bot-infested forums lately, or are just young (that might overlap with both users of bot-infested forums and those who haven't had their ideas challenged much).
by the_af | 2025-12-30 03:11:56+00:00
Because talk is cheap, but when pressed, a crackpot like Puthoff cannot provide a single relevant detail. Had he been involved in actual top secret projects, he would shut up about them; instead he fantasizes.

He also has a history of quackery, belief in the paranormal, and being duped by Uri Geller.

I mean, he's the worst kind of crackpot: a sucker who believes magic tricks are real and will evangelize about it.
by vishnugupta | 2025-12-30 03:12:38+00:00
> my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions

I can attest to this based on my circle of friends and acquaintances. Email not so much but yeah WA etc. I think people are done putting content that matters to them on public platforms. So all we see now on FB/Insta is memes, influencers or ads.
by fennecbutt | 2025-12-30 03:12:54+00:00
I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to ignore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)

Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.
by saghm | 2025-12-30 03:14:26+00:00
> It uses the exact same assembly language.

> The profiler showed that the identical assembly language itself was taking more cycles when called from C.

No, again, it showed that using a certain wrapper type around the same assembly had more overhead. My argument is that there's no reason to assume that this single type is representative of the entire ecosystem. I don't understand what you could possibly mean if that's not what you're saying.

> The point is that they did the absolute normal expected thing in Rust, and it slowed down the external assembly language library, and after a _lot_ of digging and debugging, they changed the Rust code to be a lot less flexible and more convoluted, and now the assembly language is almost as fast as when it is called from C.

> Look, the people doing this _obviously_ know Rust, and it took them a _long_ time, and some _really_ ugly concrete low-level concrete code, to take external code and make it perform almost as well as if it had been called from C++.

Sure, and you'd probably need a lot of similar ugliness to do the same in reverse to call a random Rust library that wasn't explicitly designed to be called from C/C++. You seem to be inferring that Rust on the whole can't be performant because the boundary between C/C++ isn't as easy as staying on the same side of the boundary, but that works both ways. If your argument is "I only want to use a language that lets me call all of these C/C++ libraries I want", that's totally reasonable. That's not the same as "Rust doesn't have zero cost abstractions" though, unless you think "calling a C/C++ library directly" is what abstraction means.

> Look, the people doing this _obviously_ know Rust, and it took them a _long_ time, and some _really_ ugly concrete low-level concrete code, to take external code and make it perform almost as well as if it had been called from C++.

> To me, that looks like a high-cost non-abstraction.

I don't understand this argument at all. You don't think that a type called `WithOffset` that wraps a pointer to provide an offset is an abstraction? From what I can tell, they were using an abstraction that was implemented inefficiently, and they switched to one written efficiently. I guess we just have completely incompatible definitions of what "abstraction" means, given that from my perspective, you genuinely seem to be arguing that the presence of this one abstraction that someone wrote being inefficient happens to be representative of the entire language and ecosystem.
by measurablefunc | 2025-12-30 03:15:42+00:00
Might have something to do with "memory" feature. I have it turned off so when I extended your conversation I didn't notice any repetition: https://chatgpt.com/share/695343a9-8fa4-8009-b35f-fcb5d1471c...

In any event, I don't think you're going to get any kind of support from OpenAI by posting it here. They don't understand how any of it works either so they won't be able to tell you why you get "echoes" of previous answers.
by Arainach | 2025-12-30 03:15:52+00:00
How often can you get that week off? Most people I know working in the service industry have to fight to get that even once a year. Hopefully someone's OK not going home and seeing their family in a year to take a vacation like this. Hopefully they don't get sick and need the week for that.

To the cost: $6500 for two is low. Just getting there will be a significant amount, especially if you don't live in a major travel hub like LA or NYC.

"My Galapagos excursion took place on a boat with over a dozen other travelers."

Most ships are significantly more than $4000 per person, not including travel to the area: https://www.galapagosislands.com/cruises/ship

The absolute cheapest is the 100-passsenger Galapagos Legend at $2000 per person for 4 days, 3 nights - but a flight to Baltra Airport from, say, Pittsburgh will add another $1800 per person, and even from Chicago it's $1500 on a mix of airlines.

If you want a small ship with only a dozen others it will be significantly more expensive. If you want a week on something of that size you're looking at $4700 per person and up - plus travel. https://www.galapagosislands.com/cruises/catamaran/tiptop-ii
by aforwardslash | 2025-12-30 03:16:02+00:00
> There’s only upside for shareholders

On the other side of the coin, they really don't have a choice; either they attempt to provide leverage (and using non-realistic goals is excellent to avoid actually having to pay it), or any major misshap with any of the other businesses that may have as collateral tesla stock (either directly or indirectly) would basically bankrupt the company. And the scenario where Elon would attempt to do a sort of firesale on purpose just to take revenge isnt far-fetched either;

IMO The only way forward for them is to keep him happy for now, while attempting to either do damage control or graceful exits.
by Buttons840 | 2025-12-30 03:16:30+00:00
Plumbing seems like a relatively popular AI-proof pivot. If AI really does start taking jobs en masse, then plumbers are going to be plentiful and cheap.

What we really need is a lot more housing. So construction work is a safer pivot. But, construction work is difficult and dangerous and not something everyone can do. Also, society will collapse (apparently) if we ever make housing affordable, so maybe the powers-that-be wont allow an increase in construction work, even if there are plenty of construction workers.

Who knows... interesting times.
by bee_rider | 2025-12-30 03:16:53+00:00
Possibly this is a hot-take, but: Divinity Original Sin 2 was better than Baldurs Gate 3. The combat is so much better (DnD combat in a video game is always too swingy, the system relies on having a sentient DM who can make a story happen even after you critical fail). The things people like about BG3 (the story and characters) could have been done just as well Larian’s system. DnD probably hindered the actual quality of the game.

But, the DnD IP really got them a massive audience. I’m glad they got a hit, they deserve it. Looking forward to see what they do with their own system and a massive budget.
by anonzzzies | 2025-12-30 03:17:29+00:00
I wish I got out more. I used to go a lot to meetups and sit next to people 'closer to the hype' showing me the cutting edge stuff; often it was just a 'meh' experience vs the 'this is like seeing god' type of comments on hn/reddit and sometimes it is an eye opener (rarely). The 'meh' is usually when people claim it is 10000x more productive: I sit next to them and seeing them struggle to get even the basics done; after that, they struggle with the same issues I do when I try it while they are the 'experts' and I learn that people call things productive when they are kept 'busy' not actually producing results faster.

Anyway:

> agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations,

give me extreme Emacs 'setup' feelings: I was at a meetup in hk recently where there was someone advocating this and it was just depressing; spending hours on stuff that changes daily while just my vanilla claude code with playwright mcp runs circles around it, even after it has been set up. It is just not better at all and until someone can show that it is actually an improvement WITH the caveat that when it is an improvement on t(1), it doesn't need a complete overhaul at t(n) where n is a few days or weeks just because the hype machine says so. This measured against a vanilla CC without any added tooling except maybe playwright mcp.

People just want to scam themselves in feeling useful: if the ai does the work, then you find some way of feeling busy by adding and finetuning stuff to feel useful.
Ask HN: Why did Python fail to evolve?
by fud101 | 2025-12-30 03:17:40+00:00
I was listening to an old podcast (because all the current ones are obsessed with the AI) and they compared Python to Javascript. At the time and even now that comparison made sense. They're both considered general purpose languages even though they originated as specialized languages, one for the browser and the other for the Unix shell. However Javascript has evolved much better than Python. It has a rigorous standard document in EC6+ which means you can have multiple compatible implementations. It has evolved functional programming features like arrow functions, map and reduce etc are actually ergonomic and idiomatic in modern JS but avoided in Python which clings to destructive loops and assignment. JS has embraced immutability as a core concept while Python has defied it even well into 2025 when languages like Java and Rust have made it an established, mainstream concept. Python has bolted on asyncio but it remains underappreciated and hard to use compared to Javascript and C#. Typescript has given static typing benefits to JS but Python still drags its feet with multiple incompatible typing efforts, none really taking off in a big way, due to Python itself not having much of an opinion on it.

If my assessment is unfair, i'd like to hear about it but from my perspective Python has failed to evolve and we can see that clearly in the path Javascript has taken in the same amount of time, it's evolved into a much better language.
by godelski | 2025-12-30 03:17:50+00:00
I feel like "abstraction" is overloaded in many conversations.

Personally I love abstraction when it means "generalize these routines to a simple and elegant version". Even if it's harder to understand than a single instance it is worth the investment and gives far better understanding of the code and what it's doing.

But there's also abstraction meaning to make less understandable or more complex and I think LLMs operate this way. It takes a long time to understand code. Not because any single line of code is harder to understand but because they need to be understood in context.

I think part of this is in people misunderstanding elegance. It doesn't mean aesthetically pleasing, but to do something in a simple and efficient way. Yes, write it rough the first round but we should also strive for elegance. It more seems like we are just trying to get the first rough draft and move onto the next thing.
by cdmckay | 2025-12-30 03:18:04+00:00
I really wanted to switch to the Proton stack and even tried it for a couple weeks but the search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets. I had to switch back to Google Workspace.

It doesn’t seem like Proton even really cares about the how bad their mail search is and is more focused on releasing new products.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-30 03:19:39+00:00
You are not alone. You like coding. That's where all the fun is. You code things uou want, things that interest you. Since you like to, you know, eat occasionally, you start thinking about monetizing your code.

Unfortunately, as you are learning, this is 100% backwards. Writing something that is commercially successful starts by identifying a potentially commercial product.

In other words, you need to start by Marketing, not programming. You're looking for 3 things;

A market you can reach;
That have money to spend;
That are prepared to spend money to make some pain go away.

It might be obvious that a market might exist (say something that makes govt more effective) but selling to govt requires enormous resources you don't have.

It might be obvious a market exists (a tool for refugees to apply for aid) but they have no money to buy anything from you.

It might be obvious a market exists (trips to the moon) but you can't build that.

Once you have found a market you can reach, who have some money, and are willing to spend (perhaps with a deposit) then (and only then) should you start coding.

Commercializing stuff you have already made is hard because the product was tailored to a specific user, and he already has it (aka you).
by exq | 2025-12-30 03:19:50+00:00
I use this on my 42-key Corne: https://mark.stosberg.com/markstos-corne-3x5-1-keyboard-layo...
It's a sensible starting layout that I've made very few changes to. I added a mousekeys/macro layer, moved single quote to put semicolon on pinky, added print screen bind, and added a homerow combo J+K for esc.
by CosmicShadow | 2025-12-30 03:20:38+00:00
Yet if I turn off my ads my sales drop to nearly nothing, but when I turn them on again I get a steady flow of new customers as well as some repeaters who either forgot about us or needed a reminder to buy again, sometimes literally years later.

It all depends on how big you are, what you sell, and how people can or will find you. I sell something that some people REALLY want, but they will never think to Google if it exists, they just think it's not available anymore/end of story, and I rank #1 unpaid, it's frustrating.

Now I only have one ad platform I can get to work at this point and I've wasted so much money on others, trying again every few months, but they all seem to suck or I don't have the patience and pockets to try and figure them out compared to how I've figured out the one that works enough to make a living off of.
by TheDong | 2025-12-30 03:20:57+00:00
In my opinion this is a solution at the wrong layer. It's working by trying to filter executed commands, but it doesn't work in many cases (even in 'strict mode'), and there's better, more complete, solutions.

What do I mean by "it doesn't work"? Well, claude code is really good at executing things in unusual ways when it needs to, and this is trying to parse shell to catch them.

When claude code has trouble running a bash command, it sometimes will say something like "The current environment is wonky, let's put it in a file and run that", and then use the edit tool to create 'tmp.sh' and then 'bash tmp.sh'. Which this plugin would allow, but would obviously let claude run anything.

I've also had claude reach for awk '{system(...)}', which this plugin doesn't prevent, among some others. A blacklist of "unix commands which can execute arbitrary code" is doomed to failure because there's just so many ways out there to do so.

Preventing destructive operations, like `rm -rf ~/`, is much more easily handled by running the agent in a container with only the code mounted into it, and then frequently committing changes and pushing them out of the container so that the agent can't delete its work history either.

Half-measures, like trying to parse shell commands and flags, is just going to lead to the agent hitting a wall and looping into doing weird things (leading to it being more likely to really screw things up), as opposed to something like containers or VMs which are easy to use and actually work.
by arvid-lind | 2025-12-30 03:21:55+00:00
I think it's at least partially because we can't agree on what terms like "democracy" and "fascism" mean anymore, and that doesn't seem like it's going to get any better. Things like diplomacy, bipartisanship, and cooperation can't compete with conflict and aggression in the algorithms. What do we expect will be guiding future generations of voters' opinions and decisions on this kind of stuff?
by RogerL | 2025-12-30 03:22:05+00:00
Claude does these things even though you have explicit instructions not to do them, this isn't a tool for you asking it to delete files.

Just today Claude decided to do a git restore on me, blowing away local changes, despite having strict instructions to do nothing with git except to use it to look at history and branches.

Why jump to the conclusion that the person is so incompetent with no evidence?
by Brajeshwar | 2025-12-30 03:22:28+00:00
I love hearing stories from a people way senior my age and I love befriending them. Here is a story from one of the seniors I occasionally helped out with their tech/phone/internet. He was once stationed in a rural part of India to lead a team for a once-popular phone service provider. There was a local person who would barge into their office and complain a lot, arguing about the quality of the connections and the drops in areas around the town.

Eventually, he became the benchmark of their team’s work: “What would he say? We need to fix that. What were his complaints?”

He swears by this and has repeated the story a few times. One of the angriest customers becomes the benchmark for the team and the service. There are no bad customers; there are only passionate ones.