MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freetime2 | 2025-12-08 22:00:23+00:00
This isn’t something that I personally wish to debate, but I’ll leave link to the wikipedia page for the July 2025 prophecy [1] for anyone who may not know what we are talking about.

And also point out that last night’s earthquake in Northern Japan was not a “prophecy”. Just a regular, large earthquake - which do occur pretty frequently in Japan. And I say "large" not just because of the magnitude, but because parts of Aomori experienced 6+ shaking on the shindo scale [2] which is categorized as "brutal" [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2025_Japan_megaquake_prop...

[2] https://www.data.jma.go.jp/multi/quake/quake_detail.html?eve...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_se...
by jhallenworld | 2025-12-08 22:00:39+00:00
I'll say this about IBM: because it's so old, it was the most diverse company I ever worked for- including age, nationality, race, sex, and any other category you can think of. Basically you had all types of people in all stages of life, not just young white workaholic tech-bros. The founders are long gone, so everyone there (including CEO) is a professional- meaning nobody has any kind of personal attachment to the company. We were all in the same boat, as it were. When your older coworker suddenly disappears due to a stroke, it puts things in perspective.

The fast-paced startup is really the hack, combining the energy of youth with the ego-mania of their founders. Ask yourself, is it healthy?

Anyway, IBM's customers tend to be other fortune 100s and governments- basically other similar organizations, and my experience was that we took care of them pretty well. The products were not pretty (no Steve Jobs-like person to enforce beauty), and rather complex due to all the enterprise requirements. But they were quite high quality, particularly the hardware.
by scottlamb | 2025-12-08 22:01:05+00:00
Strange question.

The July megaquake prophecy scare was dumb because it originated in a work of fiction, not intended to be taken seriously by its author and not based on any scientific evidence. If the "prophecy" had come true, it'd be by luck alone. fwiw, I'd say it didn't come true; the 8.8 magnitude earthquake was near Kamchatka and didn't actually damage Japan, though a tsunami seemed plausible enough that there was a precautionary evacuation.

This "strong quake" is a thing that happened, not a "smart prophecy" [1]. Talk of aftershocks is not a prophecy either; it's a common-sense prediction consistent with observations from many previous earthquakes.

[1] smart prophecy is an oxymoron. A prediction is either based on scientific evidence (not a prophecy) or a (dumb) prophecy.
by gherkinnn | 2025-12-08 22:02:50+00:00
GitHub primer is an interesting resource to read through, thanks. You don't have to agree with everything that is said to gain something from it and certainly beats winging it based on vibes.

For comparison, Apple and Android have their own documentation:

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

https://developer.android.com/design
by thesuitonym | 2025-12-08 22:03:01+00:00
Wikipedia articles, and encyclopedia articles in general, are not meant to be "proper long-read" articles. They're meant to be short, descriptive passages that give you enough of an overview to know what the subject is, and directions on where to find more information should you want it. This is not a sorry excuse, it's just the nature of what an encyclopedia is.
by Agingcoder | 2025-12-08 22:03:04+00:00
> One objection I hear a lot is that LLMs are only good at greenfield projects. I'd push back hard on this. I've spent plenty of time trying to understand 3-year-old+ codebases where everyone who wrote it has left.

Where I am, 3 year old is greenfield, and old and large is 20 years old and has 8million lines of nasty c++. I’ll have to wait a bit more I think …
by devilbunny | 2025-12-08 22:03:28+00:00
> too many libertarian nutjobs out here think that the market here will magically fix all issues

I'll see your libertarian market nutjobs and raise you reflexive "regulation will fix it" liberals (I don't really know the right term here, but I guess it's the one that fits most closely with US politics for the last 60+ years). Neither group has much room in its worldview for the simple fact that some people are just jerks and will abuse any system.

Regulation can be done well, but doing so in a way that doesn't just hand the entire segment to the current incumbents is hard and regulatory capture isn't just something market worshipers conjured out of thin air.
by to11mtm | 2025-12-08 22:03:44+00:00
> This is how databases like Postgres work by default--see the `commit_delay` option here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/runtime-config-wal.html

I must note that the default for Postgres is that there is NO delay, which is a sane default.

> You can batch up multiple operations into a single call to fsync.

Ive done this in various messaging implementations for throughput, and it's actually fairly easy to do in most languages;

Basically, set up 1-N writers (depends on how you are storing data really) that takes a set of items containing the data to be written alongside a TaskCompletionSource (Promise in Java terms), when your stuff wants to write it shoots it to that local queue, the worker(s) on the queue will write out messages in batches based on whatever else (i.e. tuned for write size, number of records, etc for both throughput and guaranteeing forward progress,) and then when the write completes you either complete or fail the TCS/Promise.

If you've got the right 'glue' with your language/libraries it's not that hard; this example [0] from Akka.NET's SQL persistence layer shows how simple the actual write processor's logic can be... Yeah you have to think about queueing a little bit however I've found this basic pattern very adaptable (i.e. queueing op can just send a bunch of ready-to-go-bytes and you work off that for threshold instead, add framing if needed, etc.)

[0] https://github.com/akkadotnet/Akka.Persistence.Sql/blob/7bab...
by wisty | 2025-12-08 22:03:48+00:00
It needs something mathematically equivalent (or approximately the same), under the hood, to guess the next word effectively.

We are just meat eating bags of meat, but to do our job better we needed to evolve intelligence. A word guessing bag of words also needs to evolve intelligence and a world model (albeit an impicit hidden one) to do its job well, and is optimised towards this.

And yes, it also gets fine trained. And either its world model is corrupted by our mistakes (both in trining and fine tuning), or even more disturbingly it simplicity might (in theory) figue out one day (in training, impicitly - and yes it doesn't really think the way we do) something like "huh, the universe is actually easier to predict if it is modelled as alphabet spaghetti, not quantum waves, but my training function says not to mention this".
by samdoesnothing | 2025-12-08 22:04:00+00:00
Also blind leading the blind here but I see two paths.

1) Specialize in product engineering, which means taking on more business responsibility. Maybe it means building your own products, or maybe it means trying to get yourself in a more customer-facing or managerial role? Im not very sure. Probably do this if you think AI will be replacing most programmers.

2) Specialize in hard programming problems that AI can't do. Frontend is probably most at risk, low level systems programming least at risk. Learn Rust or C/C++, or maybe backend (C#\Java\Go) if you don't want to transition all the way to low level systems stuff.

That being said I don't think AI is really going to replace us anytime soon.
by chemotaxis | 2025-12-08 22:04:21+00:00
I think the author is speaking authoritatively about things they may be less familiar with, or where they really want to push a particular doomsday / degrowth agenda (the only prescription at the end the article is that we need to stop technological progress). This paragraph in particular caught my eye:

> Bah! Who needs copper anyway, when we have so much aluminum?! > Have you thought about how aluminum is made? Well, by driving immense electric currents through carbon anodes made from petroleum coke (or coal-tar pitch) to turn molten alumina into pure metal via electrolysis. Two things to notice here. First, the necessary electricity (and the anodes) are usually made with fossil fuels, as “renewables” cannot provide the stable current and carbon atoms needed to make the process possible. Second, all that electricity, even if you generate it with nuclear reactors, have to be delivered via copper wires.

This seems to be trying to say that we can't make aluminum without copper, but that seems nonsensical. First, power can be delivered by wires made out of aluminum and indeed, it often is - I don't think that much of the transmission grid is copper. Second, the comparatively tiny amount of material needed for electrodes is a completely wacky argument. And renewables not being able to provide "the stable current" needed for smelting?

I'm not cherrypicking here, there's a lot of assertions of this type in the article. Essentially, everything is doomed and there's nothing we can do, because we're going to run out of copper. And fossil fuels. And there's absolutely nothing that can replace them, ever. And therefore, we shouldn't build AI datacenters? That's what it says...
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-08 22:05:01+00:00
> No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI

Not true. Gemini in Google Apps (Gemini for Workspace) is included by default as a set of core features (Help me write in Docs, Gemini side panel in Docs/Sheets/Meet, etc.). The AI Pro tier of Google One adds additional AI functionality, (billed annually, which seems the correct comparison given all your other price quotes are per year and seem to use annual billing pricing, it is $199, or $100 more than the 2TB tier without AI Pro.)
by alivetoad | 2025-12-08 22:05:28+00:00
Replying to both comments here

You're all good in my book, don't sweat it. I really do welcome the feedback. I am just some yokel from the internet, the burden is on me to write ~well enough so that reading 10k words isn't an enormous waste of time. Definitely rusty, but a little less so after wrestling with this one. I'm still ironing out my process, but writing more is the only way to get that sorted.
by jrapdx3 | 2025-12-08 22:06:12+00:00
Having been an "investigator" in a few phase 3 and 4 trials, it is true that all actions involving subjects must strictly follow protocols governing conduct of the trial. It is extremely intricate and labor intensive work. But the smallest violations of the rules can invalidate part of or even the entire trial.

Most trials have long lists of excluded conditions. As you say, one reason is reducing variability among subjects so effects of the treatment can be determined.

This is especially true when effects of a new treatment are subtle, but still quite important. If subjects with serious comorbidities are included, treatment effects can be obscured by these conditions. For example, if a subject is hospitalized was that because of the treatment or another condition or some interaction of the condition and treatment?

Initial phase 3 studies necessarily have to strive for as "pure" a study population as possible. Later phase 3/4 studies could in principle cautiously add more severe cases and those with specific comorbidities. However there's a sharp limit to how many variations can be systematically studied due to intrinsic cost and complexity.

The reality is that the burden of sorting out use of treatments in real-world patients falls to clinicians. It's worth noting level of support for clinicians reporting their observations has if anything declined over decades. IOW valuable information is lost in the increasingly bureaucratic and compartmentalized healthcare systems that now dominate delivery of services.
by mmaunder | 2025-12-08 22:06:16+00:00
Big projects that are hard. Rust and CUDA for example. Particularly where you have many files that need to be fully read in for context, before planning or implementing something.

Also very hard algorithmic problems. Also bugs that Claude Code or Codex CLI are completely stuck on and can't find, Gemini 3 using Gemini CLI will go in and find the impossible. It's incredible when it does this.

Claude Code burns through context like crazy. With or without Serena.

Codex CLI using GPT 5.1 Codex Max Extra High is really good and uses context more efficiently. But Gemini 3/CLI is 10X more efficient with context.

But for the past 3 days I've had to endure absolute torture and I think it's the actual Gemini 3 back-end model that is having major issues.
by mindslight | 2025-12-08 22:06:26+00:00
That wasn't me venting. That was me earnestly reaching across the partisan divide, hoping that some more people have fallen out of the reality distortion field. In real life, I've met people who have, and they're quite apologetic about it. Online, they're rarer.

I get the red tribe's general frustration! I'm a libertarian who was both sidesing up until Covid. Heck, I had still thought there was a good chance of Trump coming around to actually leading until through like June of 2020.

My comments were not meant to be inflammatory. They are dispassionate technical descriptions. The strength of the words reflects how bad this guy is for our country.
by exabrial | 2025-12-08 22:06:36+00:00
I was out there for a rock climbing trip a few weeks ago (didn't manage to set a foot inside a casino).

The taxes on nearly everything are also exorbitant, on top of the inflated prices for everything in the city.

We won't be going back, and it's unlikely they'll ever be able to retreat from both the high taxes and inflation.
by 2xic | 2025-12-08 22:07:36+00:00
Location: Oslo, Norway Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Maybe Github: https://github.com/2xic Homepage: https://2xic.xyz Email: me@2xic.xyz

Open to chatting with companies doing machine learning or offering a job that involves some research and experimentation, not pure engineering. Particularly interested in ranking algorithms and building more value-aligned feed/recommendation systems.

As a teenager, I played CTFs and was into reverse engineering (I still am, just doing it less). I've been working with production systems for over half a decade and close to the EVM for the past two and a half years, with a strong interest in machine learning on the side (implementing papers and doing experiments). Currently training my own transformer on multiple GPUs for custom embeddings.

I've written mostly Go over these years, plus Rust for the past year and Python obviously for the ML. Experienced with the production infrastructure you'd expect: Postgres, Redis, Kubernetes, etc.
by Veserv | 2025-12-08 22:07:52+00:00
Except that the medical system already does that for various types of common cancer screening such as breast cancer. It is frequently detected extremely early when it is medically insignificant and patients may be recommended to just wait and watch with more frequent screening. Increased vigilance would have been impossible without early detection and early detection for breast cancer is viewed very positively and is very positive for society.

We have a system that partially results in anxiety because cancer screening is frequently only done when cancer would already be medically significant. A positive result usually means medically significant cancer because as a society we already chose to not screen when it would be medically insignificant. This is perfectly reasonable if the test is expensive, inaccurate, or harmful as even just the harms from doing the test in bulk could result in societally worse outcomes than occasional early detection. However, the rise in "medically unnecessary" screening indicates that we have turned the corner on that in many cases; that or it is easily billed corruption which is a separate problem.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-08 22:07:57+00:00
Some of them are, when the country you're in is oppressive. But having something that can do that is good.

And many of them aren't things that are illegal, they're false positives or limitations that the existing system doesn't care about because they affect minorities or disenfranchised people instead of anyone with significant political power. It's not illegal to have the same name as someone on a list. In the US it's not illegal to buy many things but people are still deterred from doing it if they know it won't be private. Prohibiting donations to Wikileaks was never claimed as an official government requirement -- probably because it would've been unconstitutional -- but the major payment networks still did it. Transferring money to someone in South America isn't inherently illegal, the existing system just makes it a pain through normal channels.

It does the things the existing system doesn't. Which isn't always because they're illegal. Sometimes it's just because the existing system sucks and doesn't care about you.
by kevstev | 2025-12-08 22:08:07+00:00
I also find that docs have gotten a lot better over time as well. I feel that Y2K era of numerous large tomes was largely to fill in the gap left after software publishers stopped shipping even their full price boxed software with meaty manuals, assuming I guess that help menus and GUI context (or maybe even Clippy) would get you there. Even some of the enterprisey software- Oracle comes to mind- would ship with like 6-10 volumes of reference information but very little in the way of a getting started guide that showed you how to get basic stuff up and running or what best practices were.

The web got a little better, and what drove brainshare and usage was a good experience getting started with reasonable defaults and good docs to get you started. API design is also much better these days- I was trying to find some examples of how unintuitive say MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes- big in the win9x days) apis were, but a lot of those docs seem to have disappeared- here is a stackoverflow/experts-exchange links that show how non-intuitive it was: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3255207/window-handle-in... https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/10018203/How-to-g...

Motif on the Unix side of things was a bit better, but not much. You really needed a good book to walk you through things in a more understandable way.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-08 22:08:10+00:00
Yeah, but that's the same lax descriptivist school that also tell you "literally" and "I could care less" should somehow be accepted as the exact opposites, they're just wrong. :p

Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural? At what point does something that began as an unambiguous error become rescued by the popularity of the mistake?
by sublinear | 2025-12-08 22:08:39+00:00
Perhaps the cost will drop over time, but it will be because writing code is becoming more accessible. It's not just because of AI, but the natural progress of education and literacy on the topic that would have happened anyway.

What I see are salaries stagnating and opportunity for new niche roles or roles being redefined to have more technical responsibility. Is this not the future we all expected before AI hype anyway? People need to relax and refocus on what matters.
by iamdavidmt | 2025-12-08 22:08:39+00:00
Hey hacker news, this is my second product I've launched, I'm pretty excited about this as it sits closely to my core as an engineer. Octiew is a tool that will help drive ownership to PR's, saving dev teams time and reducing review bottlnecks. I'd love to hear everyones thoughts, feedback, and any feature requests. I plan on adding more integrations in the coming months and more exciting a dashboard for viewing review metrics. I also wrote a blog post giving more reasoning to why I think this is a problem: https://octiew.com/blog/the-hidden-costs-of-stale-prs. Anyways keen to know what people think, David.
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-08 22:08:39+00:00
I think that the replies I am getting are demonstrating why developers have estimates used against them - people forget that they are estimates, and they also forget that when new information comes to hand that invalidates that estimate a completely new one may need to be created to take into account the new data.

If developers (or anyone giving estimates) discovers that the initial estimate was based on faulty information then they need to push that information back to whomever they are reporting it to (Team Lead, Product Owner, Manager, customer, angel investor...). The receiver of that information then needs to decide on how to react according to the changes.
by meelo_c | 2025-12-08 22:08:40+00:00
Fair point - most people may just want the sounds and that's fine.

But right now the algorithms decide everything. I can't tell people when new sounds exist, understand what's actually helping, or point them toward tracks that might work better for them.

Even 1% of 328K is 3,000+ people. If a fraction of them want to go deeper, I'd like to have a presence there.
by cloogshicer | 2025-12-08 22:09:32+00:00
> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests)

I'd love to see someone do this, or a similar task, live on stream. I always feel like an idiot when I read things like this because despite using Claude Code a lot I've never been able to get anything of that magnitude out of it that wasn't slop/completely unusable, to the point where I started to question if I hadn't been faster writing everything by hand.

Claiming that software is now 90% cheaper feels absurd to me and I'd love to understand better where this completely different worldview comes from. Am I using the tools incorrectly? Different domains/languages/ecosystems?
by darth_avocado | 2025-12-08 22:10:26+00:00
The point I was trying to make was that cancer screening is expensive only because we have a highly inefficient healthcare system. (India was an example and their healthcare system has its own flaws) Sure we can point to PPP, but the reason why screening is that cheaper elsewhere is not ONLY because of PPP. Since you mentioned Germany, public health insurance covers early detection cancer screen every 3 years (2 for skin cancer) once you’re 35. The concern about “raising insurance costs significantly for everyone” in US only exists because of the way healthcare is set up here. It shouldn’t be that expensive to screen and it shouldn’t be that expensive to treat.

https://www.informedhealth.org/what-screening-tests-does-ger...
by TheRoque | 2025-12-08 22:10:34+00:00
But in the past, you knew the codebase very well, and it was trivial to implement a fix and upgrade the software. Can the same be done with LLMs ? Well from what I see, it depends on your luck. But if the LLMs can't help you, then you gotta read the whole codebase that you've never read before and you quickly lose the initial benefits. I don't doubt someday we'll get there though.