MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nunez | 2025-12-16 23:04:38+00:00
Case in point: subscription costs for everything going up to justify the "additional value" that AI is bringing _whether you use it or not_.

This would have been an additional, more expensive, subscription tier in the past.

Anecdote: Literally this morning, krisp.ai (noise cancellation software that succumbed to slop-itis two years ago and added AI notetaker and meeting summarization stuff to their product that's really difficult to turn off, which is insulting seeing how most people purchased this tool JUST FOR NOISE CANCELLING, but I digress) sent an email to their customers (me) announcing that they would no longer offer a free tier and will, instead, offer 14-day trials with all features enabled.

Why?

"As AI has become central to everyday work, we’ve seen that most people preferred the unlimited workflow once they tried it."

This bait-and-switch era is tiring.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-12-16 23:04:57+00:00
> AI will solve the thing entirely and let people follow their honest desires and live reasonably in the world.

I always find hilarious that people treat transformer tech as a public good. Transformers, like any other tech out there owned by large tech companies. Short of forcing the few companies who own the top models to abide to your rule, there is no chance OpenAI is going to give itself up to the government. And even if they did, it means nothing if Microsoft/Amazon/Google/etc do not provide you with the facilities to deploy the model.

A much realistic solution is that Big Tech will collude with governments to keep certain autonomy and restrict its use only for the elites
by observationist | 2025-12-16 23:05:45+00:00
Not all LLM assisted coding is vibe coding. Vibe coding goes something like , throw it a prompt, then repeat "it works" or "it doesn't work" or "it works, but I want Feature XYZ, also" or repeated "ok, but make it better."

Vibe implies missing knowledge or experience - LLMs are a great equalizer, on the level of handguns or industrialization. Everyone can use them, some can use them well, and the value of using them well is enormous.

A real SWE is going to say "ok, now build a new function doing XYZ" and in their agents.md they'll have their entire project specs and baseline prompt framework, with things like "document in the specified standard, create the unit test, document how the test integrates with the existing features, create a followup note on any potential interference with existing functionality, and update the todo.md" and so forth, with all the specific instructions and structure and subtasks and boring project management most of us wouldn't even know to think of. Doing it right takes a lot of setup and understanding how software projects should be run, and using the LLMs to do all the work they excel at doing, and not having them do the work they suck at.

I only know the binary "that works" or not, for most things I've vibe coded. It'd be nice to have the breadth of knowledge and skills to do things right, but I also feel like it'd take a lot of the magic out of it too, lol.
by caseyohara | 2025-12-16 23:06:19+00:00
> I can't see how a font could have or lack a "feature"

Oh boy. Everything about a typeface is a feature, and many of them are functional and not just stylistic choices.

- Monospace glyphs are a feature almost everyone here is familiar with and appreciates.

- Serifs are a feature for readability

- Open apertures like in humanist fonts are more readable

- Closed apertures in grotesque fonts make the text more dense

- Stroke contrast

- X-height

- Variety of weights

- Ligatures

- Dotted or slashed zero to distinguish it from capital O

- Features to distinguish capital I and lowercase l glyphs

...these are all features of a typeface.
by aeve890 | 2025-12-16 23:06:19+00:00
>The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.

From the about page:

>Free subscribers get previews of these essays and occasional full posts. Paid subscribers get all essays, the most useful ideas, conversations, and community access.

So maybe you're right.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-12-16 23:06:50+00:00
Prediction: AI hypers - both those who are clueless and those who know perfectly well - will love this because it makes their "AI replaces every developer" wet dream come true, by shifting the heavy lifting from this thing called "software development" to the tiny problem of just formally verifying the software product. Your average company can bury this close to QA, where they're probably already skimping, save a bunch of money and get out with the rewards before the full damage is apparent.
by fragmede | 2025-12-16 23:07:01+00:00
This assumes income still exists.

Automation drives goods toward zero while destroying the wage base, as Ricardo warned: gains flow to owners (das capital) of scarce resources. Today that’s Ricardian rents on land, housing, zoning, healthcare, education. $2 TVs ain't gonna pay rent.

Antitrust decides who captures surplus, not how people access it once wages stop working. And UBI would just be stapling cash onto a broken distribution system. So what actually replaces labor as the primary claim on surplus?
by 8note | 2025-12-16 23:07:14+00:00
i could see formal verification become a key part of "the prompt is the code" so that as versions bump and so on, you can have an llm cpmpletely regenerate the code from scratch-ish and be sure that the spec is still followed

but i dont think people will suddenly gravitate towards using them because they're cheaper to write - bugs of the form "we had no idea this sould be considered" is way more common than "we wrote code that didnt do what we wanted it to"

an alternative guess for LLMs and formal verification is that systems where formal verification is a natural fit - putting code in places that are hard to update and have well known conditions, will move faster.

i could also see agent tools embedding in formal methods proofs into their tooling, so they write both the code and the spec at the same time, with the spec acting as memory. that kinda ties into the recent post about "why not have the LLM write machine code?"
by syiblet | 2025-12-16 23:07:35+00:00
The codebase has none of the rust code. In fact even the python code in the code base is mostly just scripts for updating version tags and etc...

Seems like the code isn't actually open source which to me is a bit concerning. At the very least, if ya'll want to release it like this please be clear that you're not open source. The MIT license in the repo gives the wrong impression.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-16 23:07:41+00:00
Obvious option would be the law firm handling your business license. But can we also take a minute to appreciate the absurdity of a PO box ever being deemed unacceptable? It literally exists for this exact purpose, and there are any number of "PO box except not a PO box" schemes out there due to this issue. It ought to be illegal to treat PO boxes differently IMO.
by rgmerk | 2025-12-16 23:08:05+00:00
(sarcasm on)

Woohoo, we're almost all of the way there! Now all you need to do is ensure that the formal specification you are proving that the software implements is a complete and accurate description of the requirements (which are likely incomplete and contradictory) as they exist in the minds of the set of stakeholders affected by your software.

(sarcasm off).
by mmooss | 2025-12-16 23:09:19+00:00
Thanks for clarifying - I didn't know what you were after.

> Even if they weren’t individually “necessary” to that advancement, it seems like being fairly insensitive to such outcomes has been a feature of the approach that has made the U.S. successful. So why fix what isn’t broken?

To say taking away people's freedoms and lives "isn't broken" is obviously part of the philosophical game.

If you mean to posit the old Faustian choice: If doing such things is required for power, should we do them? Do the ends justify the means? It's a challenging hypothetical, of course, but these days it's extremely overdone, widely used by bad people as a propaganda assault in order to seize power, and now some fools take them seriously. I'm bored with it, and taking them seriously is obviously ridiculous and dangerous.

The interesting part gets little discussion, and is far more interesting because it applies to reality: How do we take care of all of people's needs: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for all? Cutting the specs down to 'my needs' or 'many people's needs but destroy the rest' is just the corruption of power.

Some of the answer is low-hanging fruit, provided by generations before us, especially in our free democracy. Some needs to be discussed. Shall we start?
by throwaway17_17 | 2025-12-16 23:09:55+00:00
I am not certain that technical argumentation is required on many, many threads on HN. In fact, TFA is just a blog post about the concept of compiler backends generally. Also, the comment I replied to was not a technical question so I just wrote the response in the same tone. I will maintain that it is absolutely alright to just dislike a programming language for any reason and those reasons if they exist outside of aesthetics don't have to be well formed or technical. But assuming your assertion of genuineness was intended to mean you want a response to those questions:

1) I had no ideal imagined outcome to writing that comment. The parent asked what the GP meant by not liking Rust but that at least Rust could be compiled by gcc. I was just explaining why it may be preferable to someone that does not use (or in this case "like" Rust) to see it able to be compiled by a GPL piece of software that has been a part of the Linux core for almost all of Linux's existence. As to the rest of that question, of course, I don't think that anyone using/enjoying/designing/supporting Rust in any way would be convinced by anything I think or say (I'm just some guy on HN).

2) If I had the power to change what? The issue with Rust not being able to compile using gcc or more broadly concerning change things regarding Rust? I don't think a list of changes I'd make to Rust is what you wanted, so I'll assume you meant regarding compiling Rust via gcc. If I had the power to change Rust from being only compiled using rustc and moved to primarily gcc based I would. And the why is not particularly interesting, I will always prefer actions and decisions that take mind and market share away from anything that can be used to advance the interest of multi-national conglomerate corporations via permissive licensing of the core technologies of computing.

I know that is not a technical argument, but it is the reason I'd make the change. I will assert that such a reason is absolutely valid, but I don't take disagreement with my position to be a character flaw in someone.
by oxag3n | 2025-12-16 23:10:25+00:00
No, I'm in academia and the goal is not code or product launch. I find research process to struggle a lot once someone solves a problem instead of you.

I understand that AI can help with writing, coding, analyzing code bases and summarizing other papers, but going through these myself makes a difference, at least for me. I tried ChatGPT 3.5 when I started and while I got a pile of work done, I had to throw it away at some point because I didn't fully understand it. AI could explain to me various parts, but it's different when you create it.
by pron | 2025-12-16 23:10:46+00:00
> to me it seems like high-level programming languages are already close to a specification language

They are not. The power of rich and succinct specification languages (like TLA+) comes from the ability to succinctly express things that cannot be efficiently computed, or at all. That is because a description of what a program does is necessarily at a higher level of abstraction than the program (i.e. there are many possible programs or even magical oracles that can do what a program does).

To give a contrived example, let's say you want to state that a particular computation terminates. To do it in a clear and concise manner, you want to express the property of termination (and prove that the computation satisfies it), but that property is not, itself, computable. There are some ways around it, but as a rule, a specification language is more convenient when it can describe things that cannot be executed.
by autoexec | 2025-12-16 23:10:48+00:00
> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt

Literally nobody skeptical of Mozilla is giving MS and Google the benefit of the doubt. Mozilla gets skepticism from people exactly because they don't want Mozilla to become like those companies.

Pocket in particular was a breech of trust. It brought ads and surveillance to firefox, when many users had turned to firefox in the first place to avoid those same things. Of course that was going to draw criticism.

Google and MS are never going to do anything other than sell out their users for profit. Firefox users are more fiercely critical of the introduction of anti-features and enshittification because they don't really have anywhere else to turn to. Every other browser is just openly collecting your personal data, pushing ads in your face and shoving AI down your throat. The best alternatives we have to Firefox as a browser that respects its users at all are forks of Firefox. If firefox fails because it becomes a chrome clone that's also bad for privacy people will stop using Firefox and if Firefox dies off there are real questions about how many of the forks will continue to be actively maintained.

The browser ecosystem needs an alternative to chrome. Users want a browser that doesn't push ads, collect data, and allows customization. People complain about Firefox because the stakes are high.
by tobyjsullivan | 2025-12-16 23:10:58+00:00
Reading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read.

Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.

Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.
by bitexploder | 2025-12-16 23:11:24+00:00
You are mixing up the duties and rights a government has vs. the duties and rights citizens have. The one area I might start to agree is corporate personhood and giving corporations the same rights as a private citizen in this regard because their interests are very different from a private citizens. The whole point of the constitution is largely what the government can't do to its citizens. The goal is to protect citizens FROM its government by carving out our rights. These of course apply broadly, but I can't, for example, as a private citizen really violate your 4A rights very easily.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-16 23:11:51+00:00
Telegram is also the best at first class support of all the platforms it runs on. In addition to the Qt-based app that's popular on Windows and Linux, the predominant client on macOS/iOS is AppKit/UIKit-based, and there exist numerous other native clients (such as UWP/WinAppSDK on Windows, GTK on Linux, and CLI for anything with a command line).

In comparison everything else puts reasonable effort into the mobile clients and phones in the rest with bloated, half-baked web apps or if you're lucky an iOS Catalyst port.

Along with UI/UX quality, this stuff matters and impacts adoption, even if most users can't put their reasoning into words.
by promiseuzoechi | 2025-12-16 23:12:08+00:00
Why build another focus tool? Because the top ones are actively tracking you, logging your 'focused' time on their servers, or selling premium features you don't need.

The core promise:

100% Zero-Telemetry. Your focus data stays local. We don't track anything.

Open Source. Verify the privacy policy yourself.

Core features: Website Blocker and an integrated Pomodoro timer.

Tired of focus tools that profit from monitoring your attention? So were we.

Feedback appreciated!
by muvlon | 2025-12-16 23:12:31+00:00
I'll let you decide whether it counts as "mainstream", but the principal implementation of Nix has a very old school setup using bison and flex:

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/blob/master/src/libexpr/parser....

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/blob/master/src/libexpr/lexer.l
by shrumm | 2025-12-16 23:12:45+00:00
Thanks Astral team! We use Pydantic heavily, and it looks like first class support from Ty is slated for the stable release, we'd love to try it.

While we wait... what's everyone's type checking setup? We run both Pyright and Mypy... they catch different errors so we've kept both, but it feels redundant.

https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/python/typ... suggests that Pyright is a superset, which hasn't matched our experience.

Though our analysis was ~2 years ago. Anyone with a large Python codebase successfully consolidated to just Pyright?
by lrvick | 2025-12-16 23:12:55+00:00
Unfortunately if it takes you 4 years to significantly upskill in tech, you are learning way too slow to survive in this industry. Most of the major innovators I know are dropouts, because they realized college is suited to train you to work in academia, where very few jobs exist, almost no one worth working for cares about degrees anymore, and the debt only makes surviving harder.

IMO the best education and credentials come from picking interesting projects you have no idea how to do, then learn everything in your way to ship them as open source so potential employers can see your work.

If you can get a degree on a scholarship for free, wonderful, but college should be viewed as more of a hobby or a way to network, rather than a way of obtaining marketable technical skills.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-16 23:13:07+00:00
Reminds me of a customer that had in their contract requirements GHz amount so after we won the contract we digged out some old P4 based Xeons (everything after for a long time had lower clocks) and they got their stuff ran on old junk because it would be breach of contact not to.

It was govt thing and they are required to put a new bid every few years and their bid was EVIDENTLY "just list what our current hosting provider has, we can't be arsed to spend months migrating infrastructure every few years", but the clever weasels in the sales managed to get them.
by happytoexplain | 2025-12-16 23:13:19+00:00
That's what I meant by "must be O(1)". I.e. constant time. String's Index type puts the non-constant cost of identifying a grapheme's location into the index creation functions (`index(_:offsetBy:)`, etc). Once you have an Index, then you can use it to subscript the string in constant time.

Like I said, you can easily extend String to look up graphemes by integer index, but you should define it as a function, not a subscript, to honor the convention of using subscripts only for constant-time access.

It's also just not a normal use case. In ten years of exclusive Swift usage, I've never had to get a string's nth grapheme, except for toy problems like Advent of Code.
by arjie | 2025-12-16 23:13:38+00:00
I believe that this is just the typical pattern of groupies being more toxic than band-members or crew. If you go to /r/rust, every announcement of a donation to the Rust Software Foundation is met with derision for the donor. In fact, if you go there today, you'll see it's got some extraordinary drama going on - primarily from non-programmers. If you look at the latest Arduino developments, it's the same story with non-users enacting some purity ritual and users being more sedate.

The reality of the thing is that community-oriented projects have the problem that the groupie-layer of the community are a group that are so marginally attached to the organization that the death of the organization won't affect them but are sufficiently attached to the organization that they can affect the org.

A population like that will naturally tend towards extraction of all surplus from the organization - if the org dies as a result, it doesn't matter, but if they don't do this they're "leaving money on the table" so to speak. With the rise of social media, the groupie layer of people can be extraordinarily large since forums with centralized sign-on allow for a variety of subjects to be posted and consequently being in the fandom is cheap - you don't have to seek news, it'll be there for you to have an opinion on. Hacker News, Reddit, etc. lead to a grouping point for people to have opinions on things they care so little about they would never seek it without it being thrust upon them by The Feed.

So I agree with you. It's challenging. I don't think it's because the community is special, though. I think it's just the structure of communities today because of the dynamics of social media.
by danudey | 2025-12-16 23:13:43+00:00
I googled how to disable ACR on my new Samsung TV. Followed the instructions only to find out that it was disabled already. That, combined with a built-in physical microphone switch (which I noticed in the quick start guide before I'd even attached the wall mount) made me quite impressed with Samsung off the bat.

It does have some weird behaviors, though, like occasionally letting me know it has some kind of AI features or something, or bringing up a pop-up on the screen letting my kid know how to use the volume control on the remote every time he uses the volume control on the remote for the first time since power-on.

Still, a pretty decent TV nonetheless.
How is Google's AI Mode so fast and so good?
by nthypes | 2025-12-16 23:14:07+00:00
I've been trying out Google's new AI Mode in Search and I'm genuinely curious about the technical architecture behind it. The response times are incredibly fast - often sub-second - and the quality of answers seems consistently high.

What's particularly impressive: - Speed: Near-instant responses even for complex queries - Quality: Accurate, well-sourced answers with citations - Integration: Seamlessly pulls from the knowledge graph and fresh web results

I'm wondering: - What model(s) are they running under the hood? - How are they achieving such low latency at scale? - Are they using some kind of speculative execution or caching strategy? - How does their infrastructure differ from standalone LLM APIs?

For those who've worked on similar systems or have insights into Google's approach, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what makes this possible.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-12-16 23:14:12+00:00
> What if law enforcement were required to "pay per search" a la PACER or journal subscriptions?

My immediate reaction is that it changes the nature of the surveillance enough to require further reflection. It would put a time-bounded window on the ability of law enforcement to abuse the data (albeit assuming the ALPR companies actually removing data per their stated policies).

I appreciate your comment, for sure. I'll have to ruminate on it and see how it meshes with my more-strongly-held-than-I'd-like reactionary (and probably not well thought out) beliefs. >smile<
by mmooss | 2025-12-16 23:14:23+00:00
I'm aware of all that. I didn't say there was no competition, but I don't think it adds up to nearly the sum that you say. A border skirmish is a long way from a war, and fits with symbolic conflict.

> China is building capabilities that would let it unilaterally shut down the Indian economy

They can cause problems, but again, that's overstating it imho.
by dotancohen | 2025-12-16 23:14:37+00:00
The first versions of Anki used the SuperMemo algorithm if I'm not mistaken.

I've actually since graduated to a 10.3" Boox E-ink tablet. It's too big for AnkiDroid or book reading, but it is terrific for note taking during meetings or lectures, reading and annotating technical documentation, calendar management, and web browsing. My next gift to self will either be a Tesla Roadster or a 7" E-ink device for AnkiDroid and books!