MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SamInTheShell | 2025-12-22 22:27:43+00:00
Nothing against you personally, just so you know. But I have to point out that anyone caring about the reason for the short coming of flock on stuff like this are just crafting soft reasons they can use to justify things later. Being up front here I care not for their reason because the entire business model is frankly disgusting and an affront to a functioning society. This is the type of tech that evolves into social credit scores and precog crime units, stoping crime before it happens.

At the end of the day your rationalization only affords comfort to those that have a vested interest in this stuff being successful and it needs to be clear to those people driving this that they’re not doing something popular or even good.
by Tostino | 2025-12-22 22:27:48+00:00
Well, i'd look but it seems that they have scrubbed it:

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access Denied</Message>
<RequestId>2VT1FGB801CA2MSW</RequestId>
<HostId>
03B37vLmm7+N0QTw3FC7oSFMaTatIxCzOX875IrNXiHR/0hkWjCvpWat2uP0fdb4KYxmYa4JlhE=
</HostId>
</Error>
by 9rx | 2025-12-22 22:27:53+00:00
> C has numeric enums and tagged unions

C has unions, but they're not tagged. You can roll your own tagged unions, of course, but that's moving beyond it being a feature of the language.

> How would you model this in Go?

I'm committing the same earlier sin by trying to model it from the solution instead of the problem, so the actual best approach might be totally different, but at least in staying somewhat true to your code:

type OpComponent interface { op() }
type Op = []OpComponent

type Skip struct { Value int }
func (s Skip) op() {}
type Insert struct { Value string }
func (i Insert) op() {}
type Delete struct { Value int }
func (d Delete) op() {}

op := Op{
Skip{Value: 5},
Insert{Value: "hello"},
Delete{Value: 3},
}
by switz | 2025-12-22 22:28:14+00:00
Yup, I echo this sentiment. We're about to flourish.

It's never been cheaper and easier to build real value. It's also never been cheaper and easier to build real crap–but, the indie devs who care will build more value with higher velocity and independence. And good indie development will come with it an air of quality that the larger crap will struggle to compete with (at the edges). Not that they'll care, because the big players be making more money off the entrenched behemoths.

But as an indie dev, your incentive structures are far different and far more manageable.

Betteridge's law applies here – if the author truly believed the thesis, they would have declared it as a statement rather than a question.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2025-12-22 22:28:20+00:00
I think that, at a minimum, if you're going to describe your thing as "like X, but Y", then you should have a link to a description of X (especially if X is a generic, non-Googleable term), or, better, an independent description for people who are interested in finding out what your thing is but don't necessarily care about X. Otherwise, people who know nothing about X end up clicking through, finding nothing helpful, and now they still don't know what X is, and they don't know what your thing is, either.
by brikym | 2025-12-22 22:29:01+00:00
I did try slack. Maybe the problem is it was launched much too early. A certificate expiry issue caught me out because there wasn't an automatic process on this version to roll them over. Ironically a single database instance would have been much much more stable. I upgraded but this didn't bring up the database, restoring through the portal failed, so I had to create a new PG cluster to get my site up and I never ended up recovering the data as the process was very tedious involving PVCs rather than just pointing to my bucket.
The ratio of open to closed issues on the repo is much worse than CNPG so I would simply start there.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-12-22 22:29:21+00:00
Is there a similar ostensible classified reason why OCO-2 and OCO-3 are requested to shut down operations? 700+ M invested in space based observatories with ~ 15M yearly operating cost. Just doesn't make sense to disable perfectly working observatories to save less than ~75M in a timespan of 5 years while losing a 700+M investment.
by spondyl | 2025-12-22 22:29:25+00:00
RIP Vince. Whether you're a fan of FPS titles or not, the work of him and his teams have undoubtly helped to shape pop culture in some sense. One of my favourite games as a teenager (Battlefield: Bad Company 2) was arguably a reaction to his work (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) so in that sense, Vince played some small part in making me who I am today, even if I'd never thought about it before
by xienze | 2025-12-22 22:29:33+00:00
> Zero evidence was provided to support this, but I guess facts don't matter anymore.

What do you think the whole thread was about?

Apple makes a proprietary connector: anti-consumer behavior according to the EU. Use a standard connector or get fined to oblivion.

BMW makes a proprietary, patented _screw_: perfectly acceptable according to the EU.

Are you being intentionally obtuse here or what? The proof is that you have an instance of the same behavior in two different domains, with the main difference being one company is American and one is European.
by Pepp38 | 2025-12-22 22:29:40+00:00
I think part of the disagreement is how “the golden age” is being defined.

If it meant building something decent, ranking on Google, and pushing a few ads, then yeah, that probably is over.But if it means a single person being able to explore ideas, iterate quickly, and build software closely tied to a real, lived problem, I’m not sure we’ve seen that era peak yet.

What seems to be shrinking is generic attention.
What seems to be growing is the number of specific problems that are now cheap enough to try solving.

That probably hurts copycat SaaS.
It might actually help people with strong taste and proximity to a niche.
by piva00 | 2025-12-22 22:29:54+00:00
> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers

Meaning they tried to skirt around the regulations, including regulatory capture by pushing self-certification because competition caught up to them while they spent money on buybacks instead of investing in R&D, perhaps even investing in absorbing some costs of certification of pilots into a new type they could develop into the future instead of relying on a design from 60 years ago.

Mismanagement is what created Boeing's issues, not regulation.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-12-22 22:30:42+00:00
This person has said that 1gb/s ethernet is as high as networking will go because of power constraints (yes obviously 2.5gb is common and a 10gb networking card is $25).

They have said that DDR3 RAM causes mouse stuttering and that a 2011 atom is the best CPU that will ever be made. Unfortunately I think they are serious.
by charlescearl | 2025-12-22 22:31:01+00:00
“Private property” in the socialist sense is property which is used for production (note that socialist countries - Laos, Vietnam, USSR before the destruction of socialism - typically have 80%+ rates of home ownership). Collective control of factories, land used for commodity & social (i.e. feeding people) production.

There are many writings that address this misconception. Communist Manifesto https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man... provides a succinct response. You might also search for what class owns most of the property in the united states.
by bastard_op | 2025-12-22 22:31:13+00:00
Never underestimate the propensity for lazy windoze admins everywhere to ride with defaults for decades. They could fix it, but they typically don't know any better.

There's still medical, hospitality, government, and industrial that probably runs off a nt4/2000 dc's somewhere, or at least xp era things they've said to kill but see above. Microsoft technically supported xp until 2019 in "iot" versions probably mostly for oracle pos systems that would never die after they acquired micros 20 years ago, probably still in your fav restaurant until around then.

The joys of a windoze world, thanks microsoft for the advent of the lazy admin.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-12-22 22:31:18+00:00
Web site is still up, resistors.org . It looks like John and Margy Levine (first generation Resistors) are running it now. I think Dave Fox (2nd generation I guess) took care of it before. The linked article looks pretty good. There were a bunch of paper archives kept around that are probably still interesting. I don't know who has them now or if they still exist.

I didn't know about Trac64 or that Trac even really had the concept of bits. It was all string operations, including string arithmetic in arbitrary precision, I thought. But I never used it much. It could be seen as a weird take on both Forth and Lisp.

#(ps,#(rs))
by the_af | 2025-12-22 22:33:09+00:00
> It doesn't change the very trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact that virtually everyone has choices.

Quite the contrary, it does change it.

> As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice.

It's very hard to take you seriously after this.

> Arguments from extremes are not helping you.

This isn't about me or you; I don't need help. And you've just made an extreme argument which I quoted above.

By the way, it amazes me you consider the real world "an argument from extreme". I suppose from a very limited sample one might draw the same conclusion as you.
by fasterik | 2025-12-22 22:34:06+00:00
I may have misinterpreted your original post as saying we should be going full renewables. I think we're basically in agreement about prices. We might just disagree about the percent of energy that should come from nuclear.

I don't see nuclear as a distraction, I see it as a piece of the puzzle. We will always need a source of reliable, uninterrupted power. Whether that comes from natural gas, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, etc. depends on geographical considerations and what tradeoffs we are willing to make in terms of cost and carbon emissions. I'm still optimistic that small modular reactors are going to see success in the coming decades.
by Barrin92 | 2025-12-22 22:34:09+00:00
You have to distinguish between two different versions of "indie" software. What the author is describing, small business products really heavily reliant on marketing and traffic to me don't even fall under that label. That's not indie software, that's just software.

I had a CS teacher in school who spent a lot of his free time on software for people who take part in pidgeon racing competitions. He spent a whole decade on this because he was interested in it and it did even net him enough money eventually to pay part of his house off. That kind of thing to me is indie software and whether that is viable has nothing to do with LLMs or the web or what have you, because it's genuinely niche and serves an authentic community of people and enthusiasts that no company cares about anyway.

If you're in that kind of space and you don't care about attention next week desperately you don't need to be worried about some random technology because it's about people anyway, you're just the guy or girl who happens to be able to write software to help out.
by indigo945 | 2025-12-22 22:34:33+00:00
It's strange to read so many countries listed in an article about deliberate internet shutdowns, and even India called out as the world's shutdown capitol, and not one mention of China. Internet shutdowns during important political events, or even just national holidays, are common practice in China, have been for decades, and this is widely known. How is it not China that wins the great prize here?
by jrm4 | 2025-12-22 22:34:35+00:00
When I saw the headline, I genuinely could not picture what could possibly be meant by "A Golden Age Of Software In Which We Currently Reside."

So, I suppose it means SaaS-as-viable-income-maker. Which, well -- I suppose is fine if you can do that, no individual hate. But honestly -- funny enough -- it's pretty equivalent to me in terms of what is going on in hip-hop.

Rappers are making less money and also the art is improving back to a state that it once was in.

Seems like LLMs will actually help that as well.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-12-22 22:34:36+00:00
> force private owners of water rights to list their rights on an open market

You don't need to force them, they've done it for decades to the extent it is allowed. I've owned titled water rights in Nevada. They are worth something but not nearly as much as many people likely assume.

Nevada has additional complications due to the structure of the aquifers. It is difficult/impossible to move water from where it is to where it may be needed.
by uhhhd | 2025-12-22 22:34:52+00:00
Nowhere in the article does he explain why the use of AI is inherently problematic or why it necessitates rewriting the project plan. Work product is either good or bad, and responsibility for its quality rests with the person delivering it. The tools used to produce the work are irrelevant. In fact, for those who prioritize execution speed, the use of labor-saving tools should be encouraged wherever feasible.

This comment was generated by chatgpt (inspired by me).
by rane | 2025-12-22 22:36:40+00:00
You don't want to run tests after every file change, because that will distract Claude from finishing whatever it's doing and add noise to the context window. Of course the tests will be broken if Claude hasn't finished the full change yet.

Running tests makes most sense on the Stop hook event, but personally I've found CLAUDE.md instruction of "Run `just check` after changes" to be effective enough. The Stop hook has the issue that it will run the checks every time Claude stops responding, even after without any changes.
by Alifatisk | 2025-12-22 22:37:41+00:00
In my experience, Grok 4 expert performs way worse then what the benchmarks say.

I’ve tried it with coding, writing and instructions following. The only thing it excels at currently and searching for things across the web is+ twitter.

Otherwise, I would never use it for anything else. At coding, it always includes an error, when it patches it, it introduces another one. When writing creative text and had to follow instructions, it hallucinates a lot.

Based on my experience, I am suspecting XAI for bench-maxing on Artificial Analysis because no way Grok 4 expert performs close to Gpt-5.2, Claude sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 pro
by chickenbig | 2025-12-22 22:37:53+00:00
> 8.4 million gallons of water per year

8.4M US gal/year * 3.785 US gal/litre / (365 24 60 * 60) = 1 litre per second.

Put another way, if the average US household uses 138 US gal/day [0] then this is 8.4M / 365 / 138 = 168 average households.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U...
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-12-22 22:38:12+00:00
I like to separate concerns. Unix philosophy and all that. That was the primary concern on my mind when writing my comment above.

I think the feature is there not necessarily because it’s the best technical idea but instead because of its ability to pull in less educated developers. That makes sense financially because there are fewer people out there with a higher degree of expertise. But from my perspective it shows that it’s not meant for me.
by ozgung | 2025-12-22 22:38:20+00:00
I think the biggest problem is that most tutorials use words to illustrate how the attention mechanism works. In reality, there are no word-associated tokens inside a Transformer. Tokens != word parts. An LLM does not perform language processing inside the Transformer blocks, and a Vision Transformer does not perform image processing. Words and pixels are only relevant at the input. I think this misunderstanding was a root cause of underestimating their capabilities.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-22 22:38:35+00:00
In our current system, which is, without a doubt, a corpocracy, it's easy to forget that before the 1970s, corporations didn't have that much power at all, and they were regularly overruled by other organizations - labor unions, government social welfare programs, religious institutions, grassroots movements, etc. Allowing corporations to maintain access to the US market while outsourcing jobs to countries with slave labor is the exploit/loophole that allowed corporations to amass wealth and MADE corporations as powerful as they are today.
by ramoz | 2025-12-22 22:38:43+00:00
> Histotripsy generally seems to stimulate an immune response, helping the body attack cancer cells that weren’t targeted directly by ultrasound. The mechanical destruction of tumors likely leaves behind recognizable traces of cancer proteins that help the immune system learn to identify and destroy similar cells elsewhere in the body, explains Wood. Researchers are now exploring ways to pair histotripsy with immunotherapy to amplify that effect.
by gruez | 2025-12-22 22:39:21+00:00
>This Whataboutism[0]

Not every counterexample you don't like is "Whataboutism".

>because the vaccine mandates "melted away" due to the checks and balances of the government operating to make them go away.

No, it would be "checks and balances" if there was actually some conflict between the branches of government. If like in most jurisdictions, the restrictions were imposed by the executive, and then lifted by the executive, it's just the executive changing its mind. The Trump administration starting a trade war against china, and then backing down isn't "checks and balance", for instance. The supreme court telling the executive to stop, would be "checks and balance".
by JacobiX | 2025-12-22 22:40:03+00:00
>> it is getting harder for small software vendors

I think maybe this trend will continue and not specifically for indie developers, but for all software vendors. If AI becomes capable of producing genuinely highquality software, competition will intensify, and the industry will start to resemble the music industry. Alternatively, AI may continue to generate software that is not necessarily high quality but is largely indistinguishable from competing products; in that case, the market for lemons dynamic will apply. In either scenario, the value of software will decline...
by simonsarris | 2025-12-22 22:40:19+00:00
I hope you realize that China's coal and oil use for electricity is at an all-time high and increasing. They have installed more coal capacity since 2020 than the US has total. US coal usage peaked circa 2000 and has decreased for the last 2 decades.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
by schultzer | 2025-12-22 22:40:34+00:00
SQL is great, but what is even better is a SOTA client. https://github.com/elixir-dbvisor/sql the BEAM can give you superpowers that no other platform can, handle massive concurrency with the performance that rivals bare metal and c https://erlangforums.com/t/elixir-dbvisor-sql-needs-a-sota-p...
by johnh-hn | 2025-12-22 22:40:40+00:00
Dapper is fantastic, and I'm happy to see it getting some love. It does exactly what I want: provides strongly-typed mapping and protects against SQL injection. It makes it easy to create domain-specific repositories without leaking anything.

In contrast, every company I've joined that used Entity Framework had enterprise products that ended up being a tightly coupled mess from IQueryable<T> being passed around like the world's favourite shotgun.
by cat_plus_plus | 2025-12-22 22:40:59+00:00
It's a shift towards what was known to be indie software as personal software and what used to be products of big corporations as indie software. It remains to be seen how big corporations will adjust with their bigger inertia.

I don't use canned native OR web apps much anymore. What I do is load Google Antigravity and ask for a flutter app with specified screens and functionality then run on mobile, desktop or web. What I get is equivalent of old indie software, except I do not depend on anyone to add the next feature I decide I need. What changed is not the software, but the business model - profit vs in house necessity. Hopefully indie game companies can benefit from same upscaling to develop their ideas into AAA feel titles which are beyond my personal AI assisted coding ability?
by username223 | 2025-12-22 22:41:17+00:00
That's not a solution, either. See William Mulholland buying up the water rights in the Owens Valley to feed Los Angles, thus turning Owens Lake into toxic dust that is costing $1 billion and counting to manage. Mulholland is long dead, and we're just getting started paying for that.

Water rights in the West are hard, and we've known that since John Wesley Powell was in charge, as a nearby commenter explained. The Colorado was divided up during an unusually wet year a long time ago, and rising demand and falling supply have only made things worse ever since.
by epistasis | 2025-12-22 22:41:24+00:00
Nuclear is expensive because of the large amount of high-skill labor, including welding, that's required. For less economically advanced countries, that labor is cheap. For more economically advanced countries, that labor becomes more expensive. Regulation is a red-herring being pushed as an excuse, mostly by startups that are desperate to get the next round of funding, because it plays very well to the investor class, but it's not based in reality. I ask about this all the time and even if there are some half-baked critiques of things like ALARA, nobody has a path to actually making the Nth build of a reactor cheaper from changing regulations.

Even France, which is known for having far lower construction costs than the US on big projects, and for being very good at building out their nuclear fleet in the past, is at ~$12/W with their newest round of 6 reactors. And that's before they have even started construction:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-estimate...

This is roughly the cost of the latest US nuclear reactor at Vogtle, which is viewed as unrealistically expensive energy.

And even the most optimistic plans for reducing the cost of nuclear from the Liftoff report in 2023 from DOE doesn't place regulations as having much of a role in lowering costs:

https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/11/DOE-Advanced-...

There's significant political interest in having regulation be the reason that nuclear is expensive, but I find almost zero people in the nuclear industry that are able to articulate where regulations increase the cost of builds or whether there's anything that could or should be changed about the regulations.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-22 22:41:34+00:00
I believe you when you say that nobody at YC put their thumb on the scale for this story in particular.

However, YC very much has control over the algorithm used to rank stories on the Hacker News front page, and this algorithm very commonly downranks threads which are detected as being "controversial."

If the algorithm "working as intended" consistently downranks stories that cast a bad light on YCombinator, the sorts of people y'all mingle with, or the tech industry in general...is that any better than putting your thumb on the scale?

This is kind of why I feel obligated to use https://news.ycombinator.com/active - after all, it's a very good indication of what Hacker News' algorithm and certain cohorts of its readership wants to hide from the casual viewer. And given the sorts of stories it tends to hide, it doesn't reflect well on this site or its users.