MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by QuiEgo | 2025-12-30 17:13:14+00:00
I think the only thing we can say about the future of LLMs is “we don’t know.” Everything is changing too fast. Models from a year ago are already obsolete. We seem to be hitting the top of an asymptote on improvements, but things have not been steady state for long enough to know. I also agree with the author that the VC money is driving all of this, and at some point the check is going to come due.

This thread is full of antidotes from “AI is useless for me” to “AI changes everythingfor me” I believe each and every one of them.

In firm wait and see mode.
by rewilder12 | 2025-12-30 17:13:30+00:00
I've tried Go scripting but would still still prefer python (uv is a game changer tbh). My go-to for automation will always be powershell (on linux) though. It's too bad PowerShell has the MSFT ick keeping people away from adopting it for automation. I can convince you to give it a try if you let me
by nickmonad | 2025-12-30 17:13:31+00:00
Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying! I guess I wasn't super concerned about the 'try' failing here since this code is squarely in the initialization path, and I want the OOM to bubble up to main() and crash. Although to be fair, 1. Not a great experience to be given a stack trace, could definitely have a nice message there. And 2. If the ConnectionPool init() is (re)used elsewhere outside this overall initialization path, we could run into that leak.

The allocation failure that could occur at runtime, post-init, would be here: https://github.com/nickmonad/kv/blob/53e953da752c7f49221c9c4... - and the OOM error kicks back an immediate close on the connection to the client.
by eichin | 2025-12-30 17:14:09+00:00
When I went from a 2006 mini to a 2021 polestar 2, there were a bunch of things that were either "up in class" or "15 years makes things better" - traction control, non-invasive lane-assist (with invasive options), per-driver (per-keyfob really) seat adjustment memory, charge-aware navigation, radar cruise-control, 360° camera fusion, headlight washers, kick-to-open trunk, interior pre-warm (including seats, as a software upgrade), smart (camera-based) auto-dim of high beams, mirror-retract when parked, mirror tilt when backing up, retractable trailer hitch... little of this is structural, it's just an accumulation of details and attention paid to them.
by alexfoo | 2025-12-30 17:14:12+00:00
Sure, the post I was replying to made it sound like it's a surprise that anything written in C could ever have been a success.

Not many people starting a new project (commercial or otherwise) are likely to start with C, for very good reason. I'd have to have a very compelling reason to do so, as you say there are plenty of more suitable alternatives. Years ago many of the third party libraries available only had C style ABIs and calling these from other languages was clumsy and convoluted (and would often require implementing cstring style strings in another language).

> Why would you do this separately every single time, then?

It was just an illustration or what people used to do. The "set the trailing NUL byte after a strncpy() call" just became a thing lots of people did and lots of people looked for in code reviews - I've even seen automated checks. It was in a similar bucket to "stuff is allocated, let me make sure it is freed in every code path so there aren't any memory leaks", etc.

Many others would have written their own function like `curlx_strcopy()` in the original article, it's not a novel concept to write your own function to implement a better version of an API.
Ask HN: Does reading HN make you happy?
by yakattak | 2025-12-30 17:14:20+00:00
Times change, and as they change so do communities you interact with. I used to like coming to HN because the discussions were often far away from the stresses of the world (politics, local news tragedies, etc.)

Lately though its article after article on LLMs. Pro LLM or Anti LLM. These discussions come closer to the stresses of the world than the typical HN post did historically. Well, at least to me.

They often quickly become “AI is bad” or “AI is amazing” in the discussions. I want to mention, I’m not pro or against either way. There doesn’t need to be sides to pick.

Do these posts that dominate the top make you happy? For me it’s turned HN into a place that stresses.

PS. I’m not asking for coping mechanisms, I’ve already cut my time here reading down a bunch :)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-30 17:14:39+00:00
I am not American so perhaps I am curious but I don't think that any Americans got a real say in it?

I was discussing this with my cousin today and about how here in my country, we have multi party system. Sure, there is still two major parties but there are definitely small parties as well and we were discussing that even India should move towards more decentralization akin to switzerland.

I really hope we have a more decentralized option and where people from all around the world feel that their vote, in fact, does matter.
by hollerith | 2025-12-30 17:14:42+00:00
>an attempt to reduce my argument to an absurdity

Definitely not. I am being sincere.

There is a lot of individual variation in susceptibility to a vice. For example, I never had any significant amount of trouble avoiding any food I believed was bad for me. It just never required much willpower, but it is so easy for me to fall into a habit of overconsumption of video entertainment that I haven't owned a television set in decades (and lichess.org is blocked 3 times in my /etc/hosts: near the top, again near the middle and again near the end of the file).
by neom | 2025-12-30 17:14:42+00:00
I thought your comment was hilarious so thank you for it. 20 year old me would have had a field day with it, especially the 24p stuff. ;)

On your presentation point, I think 20 year old me would have generally agreed with you but also argued strongly that people should be educated on the most ideal environment they can muster, and then should muster it! This is obviously silly, but 20 year old me is still in there somewhere. :)

Shrek was really well done, nice work.
by spacecow | 2025-12-30 17:14:46+00:00
> Sidetrack: I actually looked up what the point of arg0 even is since I failed to find any usecases some months back and found this answer[0]. Confused, and unsatisfied by the replies, I gave up trying to understand "why arg0?" as some sort of legacy functionality.

I struggle to think of how the answers provided here could be clearer or more satisfactory. Why write an article if you're going to half-ass your research? Why even mention this nothingburger sidetrack at all...? (Bait?)

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24678056/linux-exec-func...
by shevy-java | 2025-12-30 17:15:16+00:00
Try the following in sh:

////////usr/local/go/bin/go

Well, how about this: I use ruby or python. And not shell.

Somehow I have been doing so since +25 years. Never regretted it.
Never really needed shell either. (Ok, that's not entirely true;
I refer to shell scripts. I do use bash as my primary shell, largely
due to simplicity; I don't use shell scripts though, save for keeping
a few legacy ones should I be at a computer that has no support for
ruby, python or perl. But this is super-rare nowadays.)
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-30 17:15:16+00:00
Bro no one said 5x now or your fired that’s your own imagination adding flavor to it.

It’s obvious to anyone if your output is 5x less than everyone else you will eventually be let go. There’s no paradigm shift where the boss suddenly announced that. But the underlying unsaid expectation is obvious given what everyone is doing.

What happened was this, a couple new hires and some current employees started were using AI. There output was magnified and they were not only having more output but they were deploying code outside their areas of expertise doing dev ops, infra, backend and frontend.

This spread and within months everyone in the company was doing it. The boss can now throw a frontend job to a backend developer and now expect completion in a day or less. This isn’t every task but such output for the majority of tasks it’s normal.

If you’re not meeting that norm it’s blindingly obvious. The boss doesn’t need to announce anything when everyone is faster. There was no deliberate culture shift where the boss announced it. The closest equivalent is the boss hiring a 10x engineer to work alongside you and you have to scramble to catch up. The difference is now we know exactly what is making each engineer 10x and we can use that tool to also operate at that level.

Critical thinking my ass. You’re just labeling and assuming things with your premeditated subconscious bias. If anything it’s your perspective that is religious.
by tarentel | 2025-12-30 17:15:33+00:00
In a sense it is telling someone else that yes, but more importantly, it is telling the compiler. I am not sure what the alternative is here, is this not common in other languages? I know Java does this at least. In Python it is hidden and you have to know to catch the exception. I'm not sure how that is better as it can be easily forgotten or ignored. There may be another alternative I'm not aware of?
by maddmann | 2025-12-30 17:15:33+00:00
I do think Manus had a better approach than some of the competitors of the space, allowing for far more agentic flows (ie manus would run its own code, debug, write and run tests, etc). Lovable or v0 by contrast are quite primitive. Very unfortunate that they are a part of meta now, where mark will likely micromanage and destroy the core value of the product.
by modeless | 2025-12-30 17:15:40+00:00
FSD 14.2 is available to the public and anyone who has tried it can tell you it is an incredibly impressive system that is leaps ahead of where it was just six months ago and by far the best available to purchase worldwide. Driverless FSD robotaxis have been seen on the streets of Austin. I expect that this one is within two years of being done.

As has been pointed out, the Model 3 has been below $35k inflation adjusted many times. There's been a lot of inflation, you may have noticed. And if that's not good enough for you, they did actually sell a $35k model for a while, though I doubt they made money on it.

I don't recall Elon promising that he would build a hyperloop on any timeline. In fact I remember him saying that he wasn't going to work on it personally.

SpaceX is under contract with NASA to build a Moon lander, I don't know what else you want here.

Humans on Mars is still SpaceX's main objective and their actions are consistent with that. Nobody would have started the insanely ambitious Starship program just to launch things into Earth orbit or the Moon.

I won't list all the things that Elon has promised and achieved late, but the list is long and impressive.
by like_any_other | 2025-12-30 17:15:44+00:00
> The law is such that the choice of whether or not to admit an asylum seeker is a purely legalistic one with no political control afforded.

Right, and laws are not the result of politics, but are handed to us by God on stone tablets.

Your framing is also misleading - admitting refugees [0], and granting them citizenship, are very different. Relaxing citizenship requirements to a mere 5 years of residing in Germany (or just 3 with German language proficiency) is also very much political, as was the admission of 3 million explicitly economic migrant Turks.

We're asked to believe immigration and immigration policy is something that just happens, like the tides, in response to economic and geopolitical events, and politics can do nothing about it. Meanwhile Iran has deported 1.3 million Afghans, and plans to deport 2 million more [2]. So they are "afforded political control". As is China, which, despite being a growing economy and with significantly below-replacement fertility, has a population of just 0.1% immigrants [3].

[0] I wouldn't even call them that, since they passed through many safe countries before even reaching the EU, let alone Germany.

[1] https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/politik-inland/einbuerger...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/iran-plans-to-deport-2-million-afghan-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_China
by yunnpp | 2025-12-30 17:15:50+00:00
You say he's narrow-minded, but you focus on the least relevant thing of everything he said, speed, and suggest that, somehow, something with "fast" in its name will fix it?

Speed is the least concern because things like numpy are written in C and the overhead you pay for is in the glue code and ffi. The lack of a standard distribution system is a big one. Dynamic typing works well for small programs and teams but does not scale when either dimension is increased.

But pure Python is inherently slow because of language design. It also cannot be compiled efficiently unless you introduce constraints into the language, at which point you're tackling a subset thereof. No library can fix this.
by bell-cot | 2025-12-30 17:15:58+00:00
Or - one might interpret her comment as a very normal, human way to vocalize her displeasure with the really crappy hand she's been dealt in life. She's not a Law Lord, with actual power to restrict your freedom of speech. Nor a Philosophy Professor, whose statements should always be analyzed with the Pedantry control dialed up to 11.
by watwut | 2025-12-30 17:16:06+00:00
There is no equivalency bettween what Russia actually does here these days ... or between what was going on in Russia as Putin cemented his power, ressurected Stalins mythology about Stalin as a great leader and how communist Russia operated.

These false equivalencies amd attempts to hint that Ukraine war is anything else then a territorial expansion are not just "regardless".

They are the core issue.
by ratmice | 2025-12-30 17:16:12+00:00
I always feel that when saying lex/yacc style tools, it comes with a lot of preconceived notions that using the tools involves a slow development cycle with code gen + compilation steps.

What drew me to the grmtools (eventually contributing to it) was that you can evaluate grammars basically like an interpreter without going through that compilation process.
Leading to a fairly quick turnaround times during language development process.

I hope this year I can work on porting my grmtools based LSP to browser/wasm.
by ncouture | 2025-12-30 17:16:15+00:00
This is an awesome features for quick development.

I'm sure the documentation of this featureset highlights what I'm about to say but if you're attracted to the simplicity of writing Python projects who are initialized using this method, do not use this code in staging/prod.

If you don't see why this is not production friendly it's for the simple a good.reaaon that creating deployable artifacts packaging a project or a dependency of a project this uses this method, creating reproducible builds becomes impossible.

This will also lead to builds that pass your CI but fail to run in their destination environment and vice versa due to the fact that they download heir dependencies on the fly.

There may be workarounds and I know nothing of this feature so investigate yourself if you must.

My two cents.
by knlb | 2025-12-30 17:16:19+00:00
I've never really had the patience to fiddle a lot of with the hardware but have always wanted to use e-ink screens for working, specially on the move. (Tried the hacks for remarkable pro with a friend's recommendations, ultimately never kept using it).

The boox palma with android + (obsidian | termux + tailscale) when I need it has actually worked out well for me for writing | programming with a portable keyboard (nuphy). I even did this year's Advent of Code on it. (https://knlb.dev/logs/aoc25 has some photos)
by Brian_K_White | 2025-12-30 17:16:39+00:00
You don't understand the concept of people running software written by other people?

One of my biggest problems with python happens to be caused by the fact that a lot of freecad is written in python, and python3 writes _pycache_ directories everywhere a script executes (which means everywhere, including all over the inside of all my git repos, so I have to add _pycache_ to all the .gitignore ) and the env variable that is supposed to disable that STUPID behavior has no effect because freecad is an appimage and my env variable is not propagating to the environment set up by freecad for itself.

That is me "trying to install other people's scripts" the other people's script is just a little old thing called FreeCAD, no big.
by ectospheno | 2025-12-30 17:16:41+00:00
I use the following:

$ cat passgen.sh
#!/bin/sh
export LC_ALL=C
printf "%.16s\n" "$(/usr/bin/openssl rand -base64 32 | /usr/bin/tr -d 'lIOSBGZ')"

This way if it looks like a number then it is. I don't usually mess up q/g and u/v with my fonts but its easy enough to ban more characters.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-30 17:16:56+00:00
What is property and Das Kapital are even more relevant now than when authored.

Why? because the plurality of people in the late 19th century when all these things were being written was still primarily smallish groups with limited capacity to generate impactful externalities. Read: Engels formation of the family, property etc..

While there was global capitalism, it had not entirely consumed the entire globe at that point

Ad of today there are no parts of the globe that are free from the reach of some property owner attempting to extract a resource from property that they do not control. There are no indigenous peoples that are free from the effects and impact of global climate change as a function of global capitalism

That’s just as fact
by formerly_proven | 2025-12-30 17:18:03+00:00
> I can't think of another car brand that makes its own silicon, ships OTA updates weekly, runs an in-house OS that isn't an outdated Android skin, and tightly integrates media, navigation, charging, and energy management all in the same platform.

VW (ID software 3/4/5), Mercedes (MBUX).

They don't update weekly (I don't think so, anyway), but I don't see how that would be inherently positive. They should be able to update weekly (e.g. security patches), sure, but car software should probably not be changing week-to-week for years on end.

That being said, since the US is basically a captive and stagnating market for EVs now, it seems most models from European makers are not available in the US anyway.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-30 17:18:25+00:00
The main problem with python for system scripts is that's even in that domain it's not a very good choice.

Perl is right there, requires no installation, and is on practically every unix-like under the sun. Sure it's not a good language, or performant, or easy to extend, but neither is python, so who cares. And, if anything, it's a bit more expressive and compact than python, maybe to a fault.
by faidit | 2025-12-30 17:18:40+00:00
They're overpriced, gimmicky laptops anyway. Thought about getting one last month, really glad I noped out now. The only discrete GPU they sell with is woefully underpowered for gfx-intensive operations. You can get a 5090 laptop for less money.. or two functionally identical laptops for about the same price. Lots of people complaining about various issues with them like build quality also. The repairability selling point depends on them staying in business to sell replacement parts. I might consider paying extra if they seemed cool and dependable. But if they're throwing money at unprofessional, bigoted a-holes, forget it.
by dalberto | 2025-12-30 17:19:00+00:00
I generally agree that one database instance is ideal, but there are other reasons why Postgres everywhere is advantageous, even across multiple instances:

- Expertise: it's just SQL for the most part
- Ecosystem: same ORM, same connection pooler
- Portability: all major clouds have managed Postgres

I'd gladly take multiple Postgres instances even if I lose cross-database joins.
by Jtsummers | 2025-12-30 17:19:08+00:00
I'm not familiar with Swift's libraries, but what's the point of making this two lines instead of one:

let request = URLRequest(url: url)
let (data, response) = try await URLSession.shared.data(for: request)

// vs
let (data, response) = try await URLSession.shared.data(from: url)

That aside, your Swift version is still about half the size of the Go version with similar levels of error handling.
by hansmayer | 2025-12-30 17:19:20+00:00
> Your company and the people around you haven’t started using it because the culture hasn’t caught up.

We have been using LLMs since 2021, if I havent repeated that enough in these threads. What culture do I have to catch up with? I have been paying top tier LLM models for my entire team since it became an option. Do you think you are proselytizing to the un-initiated here? That is a naive view at best. My issue is that the tools are at best a worse replacement for the pre-2019 google search and at worst a huge danger in the hands of people who dont know what they are doing.
by philipkglass | 2025-12-30 17:19:35+00:00
You can assume that already-published open weights models are available at $0, regardless of how much money was sunk into their original development. These models will look increasingly stale over time but most software development doesn't change that fast. If a model can generate capable and up-to-date Python, C++, Java, or Javascript code in 2025 then you can expect it to still be a useful model in 2035 (based on the observation that then-modern code in these languages from 2015 works fine today, even if styles have shifted).
by KooBaa | 2025-12-30 17:19:46+00:00
The 12 vulnerabilities mentioned in “gpg fail” are somewhat exaggerated.

Here you can find a reply from GnuPG:
https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/12/29/9

And btw, it was mentioned in the talk that GnuPG does not sign commits. That’s just wrong. Everything, including the release tarballs, is signed.
by h1r1ms | 2025-12-30 17:19:55+00:00
I think this is a universal problem: after a break, you reopen a project and spend more time rebuilding context than actually coding. I’m thinking of a Cursor-style chat that acts as project memory, it can answer “what did I do last?” and “what changed since then?” using git/PR history, and also lets me drop quick ideas for Project A while I’m working on Project B, so it reminds me when I come back. Would you use something like this, or is there a simpler workflow that already solves it?
by tolerance | 2025-12-30 17:19:57+00:00
I hate for us to have to make it clear that any claim in favor of the typeface’s suitability should not be interpreted as direct support for those responsible for re-instituting it. This isn’t an admonishment, but a lament I hope you may share.

While TNR wasn’t designed to evoke banality in its less desirable connotations I do think the way that you’re describing it match sensibilities that the word “banal” can also carry; Ordinary, commonplace. I admit—it’s a stretch I’m taking. But how far from banal is the utilitarian?
by grepfru_it | 2025-12-30 17:19:59+00:00
Owner of an LG washer that failed here.

All the same diagnostics you can do at the machine, the phone home service allowed a remote engineer to diagnose as well. Things like drum rpm, tilt/knock sensors, uneven balance detection. Instead of paying a human $250 to come out and press buttons, they can do it remotely.

I understand in the pessimistic age of John Deere, all remote diagnostics are bad, but that is not the case here. I was able to do all of the diagnosis myself to determine it was a bad stator and then replace it myself.
by xvector | 2025-12-30 17:20:15+00:00
> So was most of what was done on October 7th by Hamas...

Yeah, I don't think mass executing partygoers at a music festival has anything to do with "the standard rules of war."

Israel's response was obviously disproportionate but certainly fell within the standard conventions of warfare (e.g. executing enemy commanders being housed/protected by the populace is fairly standard.)