MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blazingbanana | 2025-12-19 16:56:14+00:00
Love the writeup and I feel your pain, I'm a big fan of using LLMs for coding (as you'll see from my history).

> Still need to know when to step back and question your assumptions

Did you ever let the AI question your assumptions? I've found myself in a rut before and just giving it the issue with as little of my own personal context has helped surface what I need.

I'm curious how you found the bug in the first place? Was it during a vibe-code session or did you have a lightbulb moment?

Cool app btw.
by pimanrules | 2025-12-19 16:56:33+00:00
It does, at least in theory. It displays the option to enable VR for me on Chrome for Android which pops you into Google Cardboard. I can look around fine but without a controller I don't think there's a way to move.

For Chrome on Windows, I had to enable "WebXR Incubations" (chrome://flags/#webxr-incubations), manually start Steam VR, then restart Chrome. The option to enable VR appears, but then in the headset it's just a white screen. Maybe I'm missing a step or maybe it's just broken.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-19 16:56:38+00:00
The American government, even today, simply does not have comparable cooperation with private companies. If Facebook and Twitter decide one day that they’ll no longer permit people to post mean things about American political leaders, a policy that is at least routine and I think universal in China, I think it would be a no-brainer for Europe to ban them. (Even if they release a special global version of the app that they promise isn’t subject to domestic censorship rules.)
by sorcercode | 2025-12-19 16:56:55+00:00
having spent a lot of time on finding the right monospace fonts, one of the things i've noticed, that's particularly important in the context of coding is a visual symmetry.

some fonts individually have beautiful glyps or characters but when you preview them with blocks and blocks of code, there's a quirkiness that throws of that symmetry.

I'll give a few examples:

- Mono Lisa font https://www.monolisa.dev/ (truly gorgeous font)

- Recursive https://www.recursive.design/ (particularly note the casual axis)

I bring this up because Google Sans Code, is super quirky; preview a few characters individually and they look good; put it all together in real code, and it's just not as smooth visually.
Ask HN: Is "Perfect" Synthetic Data the only way startups break the data moat?
by aryanutkarsh | 2025-12-19 16:57:23+00:00
Big Tech obviously has a massive moat of human interaction data. But as a founder looking at the unit economics of training, I keep wondering why we are so obsessed with human data given how inconsistent, biased, and noisy it is.

In theory, a startup could bypass that bottleneck by generating synthetic datasets that are actually better: internally consistent, fully labeled, and optimized for specific reasoning patterns. If we can define the rules of logic, math, and syntax, why not generate "ideal" training data at scale and avoid the long tail of human errors entirely?

For those who have actually tried this strategy, what breaks? Does it collapse diversity? Do you overfit to the hidden biases of the generator model? Or is "human messiness" actually a feature required for robustness?

Curious to hear from founders or engineers who have experimented with 100% synthetic pipelines—is the "Human Data Wall" real, or just a lack of better filtering?
by chankstein38 | 2025-12-19 16:57:25+00:00
Me too! I got into ESP32s and sensors thanks to AI. I wouldn't have had time or energy after stressful work all day but thanks to them I can get firmware written for my projects. Along the way I'm also learning how the firmware has to be written and finding issues with what the AI wrote and correcting them.

If people aren't learning from AI it's their fault. Yeah AI makes stuff up and hallucinates and can be wrong but how is that different than a distracted senior dev? AI is available to me 24/7 to answer my questions in minutes or seconds where half the time when I message people I have to wait 30-60min for a response.

People just need to approach things intelligently and actually learn along the way. You can easily get to the point where you're thinking more clearly about a problem than the AI writing your code pretty quickly if you just pay attention and do the research you need to understand what's happening. They're not as factual as a textbook but they don't need to be to give you the space to ask the right questions and they'll frequently provide sources (though I'd heavily recommend checking them. Sometimes the sources are a joke)
romeojuliet.love
by asquare14 | 2025-12-19 16:57:27+00:00
After getting rejected from YC we've pivoted! We came in the top 10% though so that's motivating. We are building a matchmaking app where there's no swiping, no faitgue, AI powered. Romeo (our algorithmic agent) works with Juliet(our voice agent) to send you curated matches.

We've opened up for waitlist in London and Edinburgh as well as have a survey. If you're single please fill in the survey or signup or do both(much appreciated). Please do try to share with your single friends as well. We would really be grateful for it!

Website: romeojuliet.love Survey: https://forms.gle/jwErsaZ1p9iEXT8Q9
by bjord | 2025-12-19 16:57:36+00:00
and if you're a chrome user on desktop (I use ff), helium might be worth a try

https://helium.computer

full disclosure: one of the devs is a friend of mine

if for some reason you want to use webkit on desktop (linux), there's always gnome web, but in my experience it can't handle anything beyond very basic browsing (for example, a youtube video will cause it to crash)
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-19 16:58:32+00:00
> This is just an appeal to complexity, not a rebuttal to the critique of likening an LLM to a human brain

I wasn’t arguing that LLMs are like a human brain. Of course they aren’t. I said twice in my original post that they aren’t like humans. But “like a human brain” and “autocomplete on steroids” aren’t the only two choices here.

As for appealing to complexity, well, let’s call it more like an appeal to humility in the face of complexity. My basic claim is this:

1) It is a trap to reason from model architecture alone to make claims about what LLMs can and can’t do.

2) The specific version of this in GP that I was objecting to was: LLMs are just transformers that do next token prediction, therefore they cannot solve novel problems and just regurgitate their training data. This is provably true or false, if we agree on a reasonable definition of novel problems.

The reason I believe this is that back in 2023 I (like many of us) used LLM architecture to argue that LLMs had all sorts of limitations around the kind of code they could write, the tasks they could do, the math problems they could solve. At the end of 2025, SotA LLMs have refuted most of these claims by being able to do the tasks I thought they’d never be able to do. That was a big surprise to a lot us in the industry. It still surprises me every day. The facts changed, and I changed my opinion.

So I would ask you: what kind of task do you think LLMs aren’t capable of doing, reasoning from their architecture?

I was also going to mention RL, as I think that is the key differentiator that makes the “knowledge” in the SotA LLMs right now qualitatively different from GPT2. But other posters already made that point.

This topic arouses strong reactions. I already had one poster (since apparently downvoted into oblivion) accuse me of “magical thinking” and “LLM-induced-psychosis”! And I thought I was just making the rather uncontroversial point that things may be more complicated than we all thought in 2023. For what it’s worth, I do believe LLMs probably have limitations (like they’re not going to lead to AGI and are never going to do mathematics like Terence Tao) and I also think we’re in a huge bubble and a lot of people are going to lose their shirts. But I think we all owe it to ourselves to take LLMs seriously as well. Saying “Opus 4.5 is the same thing as GPT2” isn’t really a pathway to do that, it’s just a convenient way to avoid grappling with the hard questions.
by kyledrake | 2025-12-19 16:58:38+00:00
Tiktok is not heroin. Tiktok does not make you vomit if you quit using it. Tiktok does not give you a 5 year life expectancy. You can't overdose on it and die. Tiktok does not make you rob a grandma to get your next fix of it.

I hate social media more than most people do, and I don't use tiktok and don't think anyone else should, but can we all please stop comparing a mobile phone app to using heroin? It's misinformed and dangerous to make rhetorical comparisons like that.
by kijin | 2025-12-19 16:59:07+00:00
Faster M.2 drives are great, but you know what would be even greater? More M.2 drives.

I wish it was possible to put several M.2 drives in a system and RAID them all up, like you can with SATA drives on any above-average motherboard. Even a single lane of PCIe 5.0 would be more than enough for each of those drives, because each drive won't need to work as hard. Less overheating, more redundancy, and cheaper than getting a small number of super fast high capacity drives. Alas, most mobos only seem to hand out lanes in multiples of 4.

Maybe one day we'll have so many PCIe lanes that we can hand them out like candy to a dozen storage devices and have some left to power a decent GPU. Still, it feels wasteful.
by mullingitover | 2025-12-19 16:59:10+00:00
> They'll learn how to do it, and when that happens what will the US do?

Continue coming up with even more advanced ideas. This is like the Winklevoss Twins getting mad at Zuckerberg for 'stealing their idea', and the dean of Harvard lecturing them about how they're Men of Harvard and as such they'll simply come up with another idea, because that's what Men of Harvard do. They don't just one and done with one good idea.

The US built the world's most advanced idea factory, but the people who hate smart people got into power and now they're stripping the copper out of the walls.

> And then, in the conflict

There won't be a hot conflict between nuclear powers. Or there will, and whoever can make the most drones will be irrelevant in the first 24 hours.
by jfengel | 2025-12-19 16:59:13+00:00
Basically zero. The DEA Administrator is a Trump appointee. If for some reason he decides to fight it, he'd be gone immediately.

They might try to slow-walk it, but there's really no point. This isn't a fight anybody wants to win any more. If it destroys some fiefdoms within the DEA, nobody above them is going to care.
by miloignis | 2025-12-19 16:59:14+00:00
I appreciate you giving it a shot, then! Our experiences are pretty different; I've almost always found solid working apps from F-Droid, and my main messenger, web browser, podcast app, ebook reader, RSS reader, calendar, tower defense game, and home screen launcher are all from F-Droid. I use the Play Store mostly for Google's own apps (namely Maps and YT Music) and my banking app.
by lumirth | 2025-12-19 16:59:42+00:00
Weird little critique, on the front page of the website you have the following text:

> Claude Code for navigating codebases and getting up to speed fast. It's not magic - it's just the pragmatic choice right now.

This text, with all due respect, sounds so obviously AI-written that it’s painful. The “it’s not [thing] — it’s [other thing]” is a huge AI smell. If you’re talking about the pragmatic choice and “getting up to speed”, it would ring less hollow if the text on your website wasn’t written (or didn’t sound like it was written) by AI. If I’m going to your website, it’s because I want to hear from you, not Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT.

That said, the blog post itself is an interesting reflection. Though, again, I’d appreciate more of the text being a reflection on your part and less of it just being a paste of the AI’s response.
by dredmorbius | 2025-12-19 16:59:57+00:00
That would again suggest that it's marketing (that is, the process of finding distributors and buyers) rather than production and design that are the principle cost-drivers. A seller of "dumb" devices has far fewer potential buyers (or at least perceives as such), and fewer channels for distribution, so they're going to have to focus more effort, and cost, on sales and marketing. It's not the cost of designing or producing the products, but of matching them to distributors and buyers, which would dominate.

I'm not certain of this, but I'm fairly confident it's a factor.
by avgDev | 2025-12-19 17:00:22+00:00
I love to code, like fun code, solving a relatively small concrete problem with code feels rewarding to me....however, writing business code on the other hand? Not really.

I do however, love solving business problems. This is what I am hired for. I speak to VP/managers to improve their day to day. I come up with feasible solution and translate them into code.

If AI could actually code, like really code(not here is some code, it may or may not work go read documentation to figure out why it doesn't), I would just go and focus on creating affordable software solutions to medium/small businesses.

This is kind of like gardening/farming, before industrial revolution most crops required a huge work force, these days with all the equipment and advancements a single farmer can do a lot on their own with small staff. People still "hand" garden for pleasure, but without using the new tech they wouldn't be able to compete on a big scale.

I know many fear AI, but it is progress and it will never stop. I do think many devs are intelligent and will be able to evolve in the workplace.
by ramesh31 | 2025-12-19 17:00:38+00:00
>It's probably fine--unless you care about self-improvement or taking pride in your work.

I did, for a very long time. Then I realized that it's just work, and I'd like to spend my life minimizing the amount of that I do and maximizing the things I do want to do. Code gen has completely changed the equation for workaday folks. Maybe that will make us obsolete, and fall out of practice. But I tend to think the best software engineers are the laziest ones who don't try to be clever. Maybe not the best programmers per se, but I know whose codebase I'd rather inherit.
by utopman | 2025-12-19 17:00:56+00:00
This.

I am mid career now.

High level langages like js or python have a lot of bad design / suboptimal code... as well as some java code in many places.

Some bad java code (it just needs to be a sql select in a loop) can easily perform thousand time worse than a clean python implementation of the same thing.

As said above, once c was high level programing language and still is in some places.

I do not code in python / go / js that much these days, but what made me a not so bad developper is my understanding of computing mechanism (why and how to use memory instead of disk, how to arange code so cpu can use it's cache efficiently...)

As said in many posts, code quality even for vibe coded stuff depends more on what was prompted and how many efforts the PR diff is human readable to get maintainable and efficient softwares at the end of the day.

Yet senior devs often spend more time reviewing code instead of actually writting some. Vibe coding ultimately feels the same for me at the moment.

I still love to write some code by hand, but I start to feel less and less productive with this approach while at the same time feeling I don't really lost my skills to do so.

I think I really feel and effectively am more efficient at delivering thing with appropriate quality level for my customers now that I have agentic coding skills in my belt.
by solutionsgirl39 | 2025-12-19 17:01:18+00:00
Holographic Horizon Shield v2

Imagine the event horizon of a black hole—not as an end, but as the ultimate boundary.

Nothing malicious crosses it unchanged. That’s the inspiration behind Holographic Horizon Shield v2: a sci-fi-themed defense system for LLMs, scanning the “horizon” for threats before they poison your model.

In v2, we’ve integrated Microsoft’s Phi-3 for smarter, on-device boundary scans + adversarial simulations.

Key upgrades:

• Automated testing for prompt injections, data poisoning, and backdoors

• “Holographic” layered shields (with epic visuals coming soon )

• Prototype dashboard for real-time threat simulation

• Prep for quantum-inspired features (QKD vibes) and semantic detection

Built in Python, MIT-licensed, and just hours fresh on GitHub
by username223 | 2025-12-19 17:01:31+00:00
> But the final bit in this post is really where I'm at: I have no idea where to go from here.

That's a good question. Mozilla has something like a half-billion dollars of assets, which is more than twice what the Linux Foundation reports. Does maintaining a web browser cost more than twice as much as maintaining an operating system? Hopefully not, but maybe it's time we find out.
by nebula8804 | 2025-12-19 17:01:41+00:00
We can't dismiss the role TikTok played in breaking the standard media narrative in the west. I grew up following this issue since I am in a group that is on the receiving end of this conflict.

I occasionally think about software that has truly transformed the trajectory of humanity. So much software is just disposable or is only useful for a small group of people. But the folks at TikTok should be commended in some ways for the drastic changes their algorithm made to the views of worldwide youth. Was it altruistic or nefarious? I suspect we won't know for sure until its written in the history books but man did it have an impact. Even though TikTok is probably gone now that its been taken over by the same people who used to shape the narrative its impact wont be easily forgotten.

How many of us developers get a chance to write software that really changes the direction the world takes?
by like_any_other | 2025-12-19 17:01:53+00:00
> That information breach happened after the UK instituted sweeping new “child safety” laws to protect the kiddos. Because collecting and leaking your identity is surely going to keep them safe, right?

We don't even have to speculate with scare quotes anymore - the UK government has admitted that the purpose was not child safety, but controlling "public discourse": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46314642

> Well, even if your data is safeguarded properly

Not very reassuring if it's the government itself you fear.
by jerf | 2025-12-19 17:01:54+00:00
The problem I have with a lot of these "oh I've heard it all before"-type posts is that some of what you heard is true. Yes, IDEs did make for some bad programmers. Yes, scripting languages has made for some bad programmers. Yes, some other shortcuts have made for bad programmers.

They haven't destroyed everyone but there definitely are sets of people who used the crutches and never got past them. And not just in a "well they never needed anything more" but worse programmers than they should or could have been.
by doublerabbit | 2025-12-19 17:02:19+00:00
Metaphorically speaking, Tiktok is heroin.

>Tiktok does not give you a 5 year life expectancy

12 year old life expectancy then?

> The lawsuit, filed in the US claims that Isaac Kenevan, 13, Archie Battersbee, 12, Julian "Jools" Sweeney, 14, and Maia Walsh, 13, died while attempting the so-called "blackout challenge". Four children died because of, compared to one, who injects?

Heroin invokes addiction, TikTok does that. Heroin can cause physical dependency, TikTok brews this. Heroin is highly addictive, isn't TikTok to the young viewer?

I still hold my point that TikTok can be distilled and viewed as a form of Digital Heroin. Evidence shows.

How else do you describe it's nature?
by hermitdev | 2025-12-19 17:02:51+00:00
> to 4 GB packets

Heh. Anyone remember the ping of death[0]? A lot (most?) of computers on the early internet didn't properly handle large packets, _especially_ from ICMP pings. Once upon a time, you could send a single ping w/ a packet size of 65536 and crash the remote.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death
by MangoToupe | 2025-12-19 17:02:53+00:00
> Both statements are false, Israel does not "kill americans on a regular basis"

Have you not turned on the news recently? The IDF regularly bombs american citizens living in palestine.

Then there's the USS Liberty bombing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

Not to mention the likely hundreds of americans assassinated by mossad, cf Rise First And Kill

> Saudi Arabia has not supported proxy warfare killing thousands of Americans.

Have you never heard of 9/11? Also Wtf are you referring to? None of the proxy wars allegedly funded by iran (as if we haven't done orders of magnitude more evil things with proxy wars, cf the war in ukraine) have killed "thousands of americans".

And frankly, even if this were credible, who could blame them given the sanctions? We're actively destroying their ability to live life for seeming no reason other than arbitrary geopolitical control.
by macinjosh | 2025-12-19 17:03:25+00:00
Wow folks really aren’t getting that your perfectly idiomatic, well formatted, agonized over code isn’t needed any more.

People care if their software works. They don’t care how beautiful the code is.

AI can churn out 25 drafts faster than 99% of devs can get their boilerplate setup for the first time.

The new skill is fitting all that output into deployable code, which if you are experienced in shipping software is not hard to get the model to do.
by perryizgr8 | 2025-12-19 17:03:39+00:00
I think Firefox is an excellent browser. Their problem is simply that they have too much revenue for too many years. They need a fraction of that. If I were the ceo, I would drastically cut back operations. Scale down the org to 10% of its current strength, keep shipping a solid and boring browser, accept donations that directly support development of the browser. No fads, no ai, just a high performance, bug free, standards compliant browser. The users and donations will come. Firefox will survive. One year of google revenue can kar them for 10 years of lean operation!
by maccard | 2025-12-19 17:03:44+00:00
But that’s not what OP asked for. They asked for

> As a hobbyist part of me wants the VM abstracted completely (which may not be realistic). I want to say “here’s my game server process, it needs this much cpu/mem/network per unit, and I need 100 processes” and not really care about the underlying VM(s), at least until later. The closest thing I’ve found to this is AWS fargate.

You can’t have on demand usage with no noisy neighbours without managing the underlying VMs.

I used hathora [0] at my previous job, (they’ve expanded since and I’m not sure how much this applies anymore) - they had a CLI tool which took a dockerfile and a folder and built a container and you could run it anywhere globally after that. Their client SDK contained a “get lowest latency location” that you could call on startup to use. It was super neat, but quite expensive!

[0] https://hathora.dev/gaming
by srtw | 2025-12-19 17:04:03+00:00
The Hyperion Cantos is such an incredible work of fiction. Currently re-reading and am midway through the fourth book The Rise Of Endymion; this series captivates my imagination and would often find myself idly reflecting on it and the characters within more than a decade after reading. Like all works, it has its shortcomings, but I can give no higher recommendation than the first two books.