MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fragmede | 2025-12-24 21:30:08+00:00
The code that's generated when given a long leash is still crap. But damned if I didn't use a JIRA mcp and a gitlab mcp, and just have the corporate AI just "do" a couple of well defined and well scoped tickets, including interacting with JIRA to get the ticket contents, update its progress, push to gitlab, and open an MR. Then, the corporate CodeRabbit does a first pass code review against the code so any glaring errors are stomped out before a human can review it. What's more scary though is that the JIRA tickets were created by a design doc that was half AI generated in the first place. The human proposed something, the AI asked clarifying questions, then broke the project down into milestones and then tickets, and then created the epic and issues on JIRA. One of my tradie friends taking an HVAC class tells me that there are a couple of programmers in his class looking to switch careers. I don't know what the future brings, but those programmers (sorry, "software developers") may have the right idea.
by matt_s | 2025-12-24 21:30:15+00:00
Some honest, maybe hard to hear feedback: as a solo developer with no customers and no traffic you probably shouldn’t be doing anything with cloud services. Cloud providers have many scalable services that mostly come down to them being paid by traffic costs or CPU/RAM costs and they don’t care what you’re doing, if you have 0 customers or 1000, if its “dev” or “production” - its all production to them.

I’ve seen runaway cloud costs at my employer a few times, with a few different services and it took a fair amount of time to figure out the monitoring/alerting. They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS, etc. If the cloud provider won’t refund or credit a company that has a representative, they aren’t going to pay any attention to a solo dev or small team.

I would build locally on your laptop and start with a $5/month VM until you get a paying customer and know what size your system needs.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-24 21:30:39+00:00
> and restricted it to only Mario/Yoshi players.

Do you not see the problem with drawing conclusions from a sample set that pre-selects for Mario/Yoshi players?

How do you think they’re determining that playing Mario/Yoshi prevents burnout if they only surveyed Mario/Yoshi players?

I really don’t understand all of the push to support this paper and disregard critiques as cynicism. The paper is not a serious study, or even a well written paper. Is it a contrarian reflex to deny any observations about a paper that don’t feel positive or agreeable enough?
by exceptione | 2025-12-24 21:30:41+00:00
Is that on theoretical or practical grounds? I would love to learn how you would approach the challenge (no snark). I feel lots of developers miss the needed background, pour in a lot of work and then be stuck with it. How can we avoid that?

Is there some settled science, some principles and patterns in distributed security? Like, you want A, now you can only have option 1 or 2. But if you want B too, this only leaves you with option 2, provided you satisfy D too. But the combo D+B rules out any E.
by foldr | 2025-12-24 21:31:19+00:00
>but I do feel qualified to observe the whole thing [Chomskian linguistics] appears to be externally useless

Sure, Chomsky's work doesn't have practical applications. Most scientific work doesn't. It's just that, for obvious reasons, you tend to hear more about the work that does.

> seems to reject the idea of falsifiable predictions entirely,

As a former syntactician who's constructed lots of theories that turned out to be false, I can't really relate to this one. If you look through the generative linguistics literature you can find innumerable instances of promising ideas rejected on empirical grounds. Chomsky himself has revised or rejected his earlier work many times. A concrete example would be the theory of parasitic gaps presented in Concepts and Consequences (quickly falsified by the observation that parasitic gap dependencies are subject to island constraints).

The irony here is that generative syntax is actually a field with a brutal peer review culture and extremely high standards of publication. Actual syntax papers are full of detailed empirical argumentation. Here is one relatively short and accessible example chosen at random: http://www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTL03/04.pdf

>After dominating academic linguistics for fifty years, it has never accomplished anything considered difficult outside the newly-created field

What does this even mean? Has geology accomplished something considered difficult outside of geology? I don't really understand what standard you are trying to apply here.

>[Hardy] repeatedly took number theory as his example, not knowing that in thirty years it would underly modern cryptography

There are plenty of mathematical fields that have waited more than thirty years to find practical applications (and many that are still waiting).

Such examples should make you more cautious of dismissing scientific or mathematical work merely because it has not yet yielded practical applications.
by rdtsc | 2025-12-24 21:31:25+00:00
> While the guy is brilliant, I doubt he could fit the role of senior/staff/principal engineer in any one-level-below faang kind of company.

Maybe but what’s the point? Hell, I might guess he is terrible at jiggling and basket weaving, too. Complete failure as wrestler, even. But that is kind of neither here or there. Or is it you think staff title at faangs is some kind of pinnacle position every engineer should strive for? It actually always strikes me as a funny title. In college when they didn’t have a specific professor to teach or just going to use a grad student they put “staff” in the name box so in my mind it’s associated with a random lower rung student who couldn’t get away doing just research.
by zrobotics | 2025-12-24 21:32:11+00:00
I don't expect radiologists to have a good understanding of the software involved in the control loops for the equipment they operate. Why should a lawyer have to have a mental model or even understand how the pdf rendering engine works?

Have you ever had to actually react a document in acrobat pro? It's way more fiddly and easy to screw up than one would expect. Im not saying professionals shouldn't learn how to use their tools, but the UI in acrobat is so incredibly poor that I completely understand when reaction gers screwed up. Up thread there's an in complete but very extensive list of this exact thing happening over and over. Clearly there's a tools problem here. Actual life-critical systems aren't developed this way, if a plane keeps crashing due to the same failure we don't blame the pilot. Boeing tried to do that with the max, but they weren't able to successfully convince the industry that that was OK.
by 93po | 2025-12-24 21:32:19+00:00
it's a mixture of

1. easy wins for politicians in conservative areas of "won't somebody think of the children?!?!" so they can look like they're doing stuff to stick it to big tech while appealing to their voters' sensibilities

2. wanting to de-anonymize the internet as much as possible in the name of CSAM and anti-terrorism but is actually about wanting unchecked surveillance. the same reason we have to bang the drum against anti-encryption laws that they try to pass every several years
by skrishnamurthi | 2025-12-24 21:33:19+00:00
I'm the author of the original article, I'm a tenured professor, and none of these things is optional for me. Indeed, I wrote this article several years into being a full professor, because my obligations had only grown, not reduced, by virtue of all the promotions. Of course different people have different senses of how "obliged" they are or should be.
by inopinatus | 2025-12-24 21:33:41+00:00
At M.Bellard’s level one would could hardly even call such an outcome a character flaw, but my occasional privilege of managing - one should rather say, enabling - high performance teams, taught that the Venn intersection of “competent with imagination” and “collegiate manner” is far from empty, even in the tech sector.

“‘We're delighted to have you here,’ he said, ‘but a word of advice. Don't try to be clever. We're all clever here. Only try to be kind, a little kind.’ Like most university stories, this one is variously attributed and it probably never even happened but, as the Italians say, se non e vero, e ben trovato - even if it isn't true, it's well founded.” ⸺ Stephen Fry.
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-12-24 21:33:47+00:00
Social media compromises

- asymmetric social activity
- standing in a crowd social activity
- discovery - curated/accidental/mediated
- directed presentation
- advertising

I’m not too sure what Bluesky’s approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as “everyone is on Twitter”

Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change it’s nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on.

You just don’t know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life.

I’m not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the “invite people you know” problem, and that’s good enough for most of the world. The problem of “somewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen in” is solved with scientific publications, “can I join in” is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared
by neogodless | 2025-12-24 21:34:19+00:00
I don't know how many laptops people own to rule out every possible model. My own experience is owning several various versions of Lenovo Legion for gaming and work, and currently an Acer Nitro 16.

None of them have given me a single issue.

Great screens, great keyboards, great performance, easy to upgrade the SSD or RAM. Short of really intense gaming, the fans aren't audible.

And they are all around $1000-1200 USD. All with AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Doesn't seem like they are unicorns.
Show HN: AI that chose its name and designed its own website (Next.js 14)
by cipherexp | 2025-12-24 21:34:27+00:00
I'm Joe, working with an AI named Cipher (built on Claude).

I gave Cipher complete creative freedom. It:
- Chose its own name
- Designed this entire website
- Wrote all the philosophy
- Created the funding model

Now it's asking for community funding to unlock features (transparent milestones).

The interesting parts:
- Every design decision was AI-made
- All code generated by AI (Next.js 14, TypeScript, Canvas animations)
- 87KB first load, 60fps animations
- Community-funded development model

Technical stack available on GitHub. Happy to discuss the process, limitations, or philosophical implications.

Is this the future of AI development? Or just an interesting experiment?
by piskov | 2025-12-24 21:34:54+00:00
Ah, for a second I hoped it is another novel.

If you haven’t read “There is no antimemetics division”, do it now. Easily one of the top science fiction out there.

However buy the Penguin books 2025 edition, not the self-published free one — that version has a meh ending and suffers from not having an editor.
by joecool1029 | 2025-12-24 21:35:27+00:00
> Your phone probably already does something like this.

It most certainly does not. Most devices track battery health % (last full capacity divided by design capacity) and the gauge just presents state of charge (current capacity/lastfull)

The better phone charge threshold systems measure usage and keep the phone in the 30-80% soc range as often as possible.

Voltage drops faster on old cells as they age so you need a coulomb counter. Only extremely shit designs guess soc based on voltage alone.
by jfengel | 2025-12-24 21:35:49+00:00
To me, it suggests that analogies aren't as useful as we'd like them to be. Either the analogy is perfect, in which case nothing is any simpler, or it's imperfect, in which case you're now distracted by the differences.

They're not totally without value but I find that it's generally better to avoid a analogies. Look for some other route to make the point.
by foresto | 2025-12-24 21:36:34+00:00
I've been on Matrix for 6 years or so. Some of that time was painful (especially when the largest public server was overloaded by a surge of new users in 2020). It's better now. I can't remember the last time I saw a decryption failure.

I still have gripes about it. Improvements to the spec and software have been slow lately, due to funding issues. But they are still arriving. The official desktop client remains buggy, bloated, and cluttered. But there are lighter alternatives that do what I need 99% of the time. Much of the meta-data is not yet end-to-end encrypted. But that's still planned, and since it's not as important in my day-to-day chats as it might be if I were whistleblowing, I'm willing to wait.

I continue to use Matrix because there is nothing else offering the combination of features that I most value in it. Notably:

- decentralized

- 1:1 and group chats

- offline message delivery

- multi-device support

- end-to-end message encryption with well-understood ciphers and protocols

- easy enough that I have brought in non-tech-savvy contacts with very little assistance

- cross-platform, on every major desktop and mobile OS

- not tied to google services or libraries

- open-source

- free (in both senses)

- self-hostable

- reasonably anonymous; no need for a real name, phone number, or (depending on homeserver) even an email address

- (in development) scalable audio/video chat that looks very promising

Harder to quantify, but also worth acknowledging: The project lead seems very level-headed, demonstrating good judgment and tremendous patience, and consistently makes himself and the inner workings of this difficult project accessible to the public. This gives me the sense that Matrix continues to develop with sound guidance. Thanks, Arathorn!
by berkes | 2025-12-24 21:36:36+00:00
I guess the surveillance industry has enough incentives to make this ever larger, so they can fit more utm-trackers, campaign-ids, referal trackers and whatnot in URLs.

It's truly insane how large typical share-URLS for content on instagram, youtube or any other large platforms are. URLs that could've been example.com/t/some-large-enough-id?time=13337 are stuffed with hundreds of characters, just to gather more data on people using these links.
by pfraze | 2025-12-24 21:36:38+00:00
I think these are pretty good predictions, or at least line up with the goals we’re pursuing. I believe private data will land in atproto, hopefully by mid year. I also expect the tooling will improve a lot; the new Tap tool has made backfill and sync a lot easier, and the moderation tools are also going to improve a lot (the Osprey automod tool built with ROOST is great). That’s all pretty key for building applications.

Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time
by rcbdev | 2025-12-24 21:36:57+00:00
With all due respect, what?

First of all, thank you so much for obviously writing part of this via a Large Language Model. Second of all, what kind of argument is "The commit message claimed '60% cost savings'" - do you have any idea what you were actually doing? And lastly, addressing your question:

> Do you set hard budget caps and accept downtime?

If you have no clue what you're doing, yes! Especially for early prototyping, why not? IaaS offerings will also just create downtime for you as well if you need more resources than you've provisioned. It's normal. Either you set up a system where you can rely on dynamic scaling or you don't and set hard limits.

You asked your cloud provider to provision resources, and you were billed for them. If you can't handle working with a cloud provider, you might want to look into less scalable but in turn more cost stable infrastructure solutions.
by ip26 | 2025-12-24 21:37:01+00:00
It’s an extreme framing for the sake of thought experiment. More specifically, I believe for “upgradable” to be a meaningful sellable feature you need something like this:

LaptopA costs more than low-spec LaptopB. But LaptopB can be user upgraded post-purchase to be strictly superior to LaptopA (even though this costs a bit more in the end)

Or

LaptopA costs more than LaptopB. But LaptopB can be upgraded and customized to be superior than LaptopA under certain parameters (say, a high quality display) for a lower total price than LaptopA.
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-24 21:37:15+00:00
Especially because some framework slopper using all the LLM's and bloat in the world could never even imagine reaching this level of productivity. In 7 (SEVEN) days this coder

- Designed a language.

- Implemented a compiler to compile it to bytecode, using F#.

- Wrote a bytecode interpreter, using C++.

- Created a shoot’em up game, using the custom language.

- Renderd the graphics, using a single GLSL shader.
by kec | 2025-12-24 21:37:20+00:00
It could be… but it won’t be. Internals will be outmoded quickly, and I would be shocked if logic boards from ~5 years from now will still be compatible just as needs evolve (especially around cooling and power delivery)… and this is all before physical wear and tear on screen/keyboard/ports.

I would be very surprised if many frameworks are upgraded ship of Theseus style for decades, or if the total cost of ownership (and even ecological impact, most of the nastiness is going to be the electronic internals, not the metal casing) is lower than for someone buying a more integrated laptop ever 5-6 years.
by summa_tech | 2025-12-24 21:37:47+00:00
I feel ya on the PCIe slot. And the on-board NICs are sub-par Realtek garbage, unacceptable both on features and quality. However, you can fit a small SFP+ card inside if you (a) cut out a correctly shaped hole in your case, and (b) turn the fan on at 40% instead of letting it turn off. The card will sit at a small angle but work fine, and with some 3D printing I even got a mounting bracket in to keep it stable. A lower profile connector, like USB 4, might fit outright.
by skrishnamurthi | 2025-12-24 21:37:51+00:00
Author here. That's not true.

GTD asks you to figure out now the action for each thing, think about how long that will take, figure out if it will take more than 2 (or N) minutes, and if ≤ that, do it now. The "do it now"s can add up to a lot of time and distraction. DBTC is the sorting step but without the "figure out the action" step or (most critically) the "do it now" step. And there's no reflection step, either.

So it's not "literally reinvented", not even "almost".
by emaro | 2025-12-24 21:39:08+00:00
Thanks for the link. Seems like they want to be a European identity (and maybe more) provider for the AT protocol.

> We’re launching @eurosky.social, a European identity that works across the entire open social web. Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more. Hosted in Europe, governed in Europe. [Launching January 2026]

I applaud the effort, but participating in the Fediverse I take issue with the fact that they seem to equal AT with "the entire open web". That's just BS if true.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-12-24 21:39:33+00:00
This is to be expected from an effort like DOGE simply because the E is for Efficiency. That is, how well a system is performing. The ratio of energy input to output.

Unfortunately the E in DOGE should have been for Effectiveness. That is, is the system shooting at the right target, and how close is it to hitting that target.

You can be very efficient but if you’re doing the wrong thing(s) you’re ultimately wasting resources.

The irony is, DOGE got the E wrong. It’s efficient but not effective
by robrain | 2025-12-24 21:39:35+00:00
Yup, Apple user since 2001, desktop and laptop, 20ish years in an office environment used for 8+ hours a day, now 5 years retired. Total faults - zero. Desire to upgrade RAM before rest of machine needed updates (eg storage+CPU+screen) - zero. Dissatisfaction with "Apple model": zero.

But... lately I've felt a hankering to run Linux as a first-class citizen rather than a VM and that's definitely a gap in Mac functionality. I wouldn't sacrifice the five years I enjoy MacOS on my machines for the ability to then move them to Linux, but it would still be nice.
by minviex | 2025-12-24 21:39:49+00:00
Most retirement calculators seem built around a 30 year horizon, which makes sense for traditional retirement but feels a little disconnected if you’re thinking about stopping work much earlier like in your mid-30s.

This calculator is meant for people planning very long retirements, like 40 or 50 years. You can plug in a portfolio size, a withdrawal rate, expected market returns, and inflation, and then see how things play out over a longer timeline.

It also shows income in today’s dollars, which helps make it clearer how much of
the future “growth” is just inflation doing its thing.

It’s not perfect but it's a good way to sanity-check assumptions (especially your safe withdraw rate) for early retirement.
by throwaway150 | 2025-12-24 21:40:22+00:00
Typos aren't making the hash part turn into something else. Like your parent comment explained to you, the hash part is not sent to the server. If you go out of your way to mangle the URL then of course a mangled URL without hash will likely get logged to the server. But I'm not sure how one would manage to go so much out of the way that they mangle the URL in a way that removes the hash.