MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rcruzeiro | 2025-12-11 04:35:44+00:00
Back when I saw doing freelance work, the worst type of client was the one who was semi-technical, meaning they were technical enough to write code that they wanted to contribute to the project or to have strong architectural opinions, but not technical enough to understand the nuances and the implications of their suggestions.

I guess that, with vibe coding, it is very easy for every client to become like this.
by wtallis | 2025-12-11 04:36:13+00:00
There also weren't H100s available to scavenge. GH200 puts the Grace CPU and H100 GPU on a big module with a custom form factor and connectors, so the only viable route for using those GPUs was to keep all the electronics together and build a suitable case and cooling system around them. There wasn't any way to adapt any of this for use in an ordinary EATX case or with a different CPU, because the GPUs weren't PCIe add-in cards.
by moomoo11 | 2025-12-11 04:36:50+00:00
Man some you guys are lame. Seriously.

Remember 2019-2021 when y’all were sure the fed would be dissolved and the dollar would crash and everyone would be poor if they didn’t have a bored ape and 80% bitcoin portfolio?

Relax.

AI is a tool. Just ride the wave. It’s gonna crash some people out. It’s entertaining watching them. You’re not being crashed out, right? Ride the wave dawg.
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-11 04:38:02+00:00
Not related to other types of clients, but for doctors and patients specifically, I have heard stories where doctors dismissed patients' concerns until the patients themselves googled and found out exactly what issue they had and then the doctors were much more amenable to solving it [0].

Indeed, [1]

> researchers found that searching symptoms online modestly boosted patients’ ability to accurately diagnose health issues without increasing their anxiety or misleading them to seek care inappropriately [...] the results of this survey study challenge the common belief among clinicians and policy-makers that using the Internet to search for health information is harmful.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/man-googles-rash-discover...

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8084564/
Are there Proton Drive alternatives with true client-only key handling?
by hasanur_m | 2025-12-11 04:38:12+00:00
I’ve been researching encrypted cloud storage, especially Proton Drive, Tresorit, Sync, etc.

One thing I noticed is that even in some zero-knowledge systems, the server still receives an encrypted version of the user’s key.

I'm curious: are there any cloud storage systems where the encryption key never leaves the client device in any form?

Bonus question: what do people think about a system where users can reset passwords without losing access, by separating login credentials from encryption keys?

Would love to hear the community's thoughts.
by polalavik | 2025-12-11 04:38:42+00:00
similar experience - i freelanced recently (embedded systems) where i was to interface to a "software engineer" doing the backend.

Every. single. time. we hit an interface problem he would say “if you don’t understand the error feel free to use ChatGPT”. Dude it’s bare metal embedded software I WROTE the error. Also, telling someone that was hired because of their expertise to chatgpt something is crazy insulting.

We are in an era of empowered idiots. People truly feel that access to this near infinite knowledge base means it is an extension of their capabilities.
by sshadmand | 2025-12-11 04:38:57+00:00
I feel like it allows me do more of the fun bits of coding and creating. It's not too different than giving the easy/basic/annoying stuff to consultants and less senior engineers. Do people get mad when the hire more devs? You still get to machinate over how to attack a problem in clever ways. Also, you can give 4 out of 5 tasks to the AI and leave the fun bits for yourself.
by hilbert42 | 2025-12-11 04:39:08+00:00
"...simplifying tracking and surveillance by corporations and governments."

Decades ago when the Australia Card—an ID system for Australians—was first proposed there was an almighty outcry from the citizenry and the project was seemingly shelved. What's happened since is that our Governments quietly ramped up their computer systems and collected the data anyway, this Law will only enhance that collection further. Moreover, recently Government introduced what at the moment are voluntary digital IDs which it sold under the guise that having a single ID will make it easier to deal with government services, etc. Unfortunately, most will unquestioningly swallow the official line and miss the fine minutiae.

I've never heard any politician or Government official come out and say "We'll never introduce an Australia Card because we're free people" or such and I'd bet that I never will. Fact is, we Australians already have had an 'Australia Card' for years, it's just that we don't carry it around in our wallets as we do with our credit cards.

Our democracy would be vastly improved if those whose governance we're under would actually tell us the truth.

Edit: Despite my comment about this new law, I agree kids need protection—so we're damned either way. I see no easy solution.
by sergiotapia | 2025-12-11 04:39:22+00:00
The only thing that matters anymore in corporate is: does the code solve the problem.

Also, is it just me or has the feeling of victory gone away completely 100% ever since AI became a thing? I used to sweat and struggle, and finally have my breakthrough, the "I'm invicible!" Boris moment before the next thing came into my task inbox.

I don't feel that high anymore. I only recently realized this.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-11 04:39:31+00:00
Good question, with a little searching I found that, in true DOGE fashion, there exists an executive order announcing a new "National Design Studio" which is tasked with updating USWDS

So why fonts are being managed by Rubio and not the Chief Design Officer is anyone's guess

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/08/fact-sheet-pr...
by kretaceous | 2025-12-11 04:39:31+00:00
Interesting things from this:

- Smallest animal: Myxobolus Shekel. Smaller than a WBC at 10 micrometeres.

- Biggest butterfly: Queen Alexandra's Birdwing. Bigger than human brain at 18cm.

- Largest insect to ever live: Meganeura (283 MYA). At 40cm long, a dragonfly larger than a house cat.

- Rafflesias are larger than German Shepherds

- Earth's largest crab: Japanese Spider Crab. 1m, legs pan of 3.75m. More than half the size of a human.

- Always thought Mososaurs were largest animal to ever live but it's the Blue whale at 26m. I don't think I ever appreciated how unfathomably huge they are. (The largest Mosasaur found was 13m. There's a speculated size of 17m as well.)

- World's largest living tree: Hyperion - a giant redwood in california at 115m.

Love seeing something so polished and inspiring. Amazing illustrations and even better music.

Thanks Neal for these projects!
by qsort | 2025-12-11 04:39:32+00:00
As someone who does consulting, it's more about the attitude than the tool itself. Clients trying to understand the problem by themselves with whatever tools they can use are generally well-disposed and easy to work with. Those who email you stuff like "Why don't you have chatgpt do this???" as if it's a revolutionary thought are mostly a PITA. I assume doctors feel largely the same.
by sebastiennight | 2025-12-11 04:39:39+00:00
> There is no best practices anymore, no proper process, no meaningful back and forth.

Reality check: none of that ever existed, unless either the client mandated it (as a way to tightly regulate output quality from cheaper developers) or the developer mandated it (justifying their much higher prices and value to the customer).

Other than that: average customer buying code from average developer means:

- git was never even considered

- if git was ever used, everything is merged into "master" in huge commits

- no scheduled reviews, they only saw each other when it's time for the next quarterly/monthly payment and the client was shown (but not able to use) some preview of what's done so far
by ideavo | 2025-12-11 04:40:04+00:00
Hello HN,

This is the third time posting this link. I have been trying to learn more and more on how to post here.

I've been digging into the "Cold Start" problem for early-stage feedback. On platforms like Reddit, Product Hunt, or YouTube, visibility follows a brutal Power Law: the top 1% of posts get 99% of the visibility. If you don't bring an initial "upvote army" (or get lucky in the first 10 minutes), your post dies in the 'New' tab regardless of quality.

I'm running an experiment (currently in beta with ~100 local users) to enforce "Algorithmic Fairness" using a sequential queue rather than a ranked list.

The Mechanism:

Forced Exposure: Replaced the "List View" with a "Deck View." Users must interact (Vote/Pass) with the current item to see the next one.

Guaranteed Test Flight: Every new submission is inserted near the top of the queue for a set number of impressions (e.g., 50 views) to gather baseline data.

Latency Checks: Added a 1.5s interaction delay to prevent rapid-fire swiping/spamming.

The Question: Does a system like this inevitably degrade user experience? "List Views" are popular because they let users scan and ignore noise efficiently. By forcing sequential viewing, we reduce the noise for the creator (they get views), but we increase the friction for the consumer (they can't skip easily). Now if we take TikTok reels/instagram as an example of this "fair" view, they send a reel to couple of people, if they like it then it goes on to other users and so on and suddenly the reel or post is 'viral'.

Has anyone successfully balanced "Guaranteed Visibility for Creators" with "Low Friction for Consumers" without resorting to a pay-to-play model or know how to do this or give me a push in the right direction?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the mechanics of fair ranking systems.
by mjevans | 2025-12-11 04:40:36+00:00
I agree about nearly all of this, but in my fantasy I think the 'unsafe' library should be how to break the abstraction layer and adjust things directly when a good language model isn't provided.

JSON's just a nightmare though. The inane legacy of UCS2 / UTF16 got baked into Unicode 8, and UTF16 escapes into JSON.
by Daishiman | 2025-12-11 04:40:45+00:00
> The claims of AI writing significant chunks of code come from these sort of people with little experience in programming or engineering in general, SPA vibe coders and what not.

I'm sorry man but I've been doing this for 25 years and I've worked and studied with some extremely bright and productive engineers. I vouch for the code that I write or that I delegate to an LLM, and believe it or not it doesn't take a magician to write a k8s spec file, just patience to write 10 levels of nested YAMLs to describe the most boring, normal and predictable code to tell your cluster what volume mounts and env variables to load.
by tptacek | 2025-12-11 04:40:52+00:00
I feel like my consulting bona fides are also pretty strong, and while I get how annoying this must feel, it's hard for me personally to be irritated either at clients or at frontier models for enabling clients to do this.

To me it's more like the board, in some small way, being shaken up, and what I mostly see is an opportunity for consultancies to excel at interfacing with clients who come to them with LLM code and LLM-generated ideas.
by sothatsit | 2025-12-11 04:41:43+00:00
We already have digital IDs in Australia, and it seems like a natural fit for this. The digital ID doesn't need to share much information with social media companies, it just needs to confirm your age. And then we don't need new 3rd-parties holding our personal information.

Also yes, voting is mandatory in Australia. You get a small fine if you don't vote.
by jaw0 | 2025-12-11 04:42:24+00:00
at a previous workplace, every new hire would discover the handwritten bubblesort in our codebase, freak out, and submit a pull request to fix it.

and every new hire got taken to the whiteboard to learn about sort algorithm performance: bubblesort is O(n) in the best case.

and in our codebase, the data being sorted fit that best case (the data was already sorted or almost sorted).
by popinman322 | 2025-12-11 04:43:08+00:00
It doesn't look like the code anonymizes usernames when sending the thread for grading. This likely induces bias in the grades based on past/current prevailing opinions of certain users. It would be interesting to see the whole thing done again but this time randomly re-assigning usernames, to assess bias, and also with procedurally generated pseudonyms, to see whether the bias can be removed that way.

I'd expect de-biasing would deflate grades for well known users.

It might also be interesting to use a search-grounded model that provides citations for its grading claims. Gemini models have access to this via their API, for example.
by vorpalhex | 2025-12-11 04:44:02+00:00
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499956/ cites >200,000 from one estimate. Harvard Health throws out 700,000 deaths per year in hospitals total. ~0.28 according to my quick math.

I generally expect such counts to be under-representative. I'm also probably conflating cases of "this person was going to die regardless but the hospital screwed something up" with "this person was not going to die but did die because the hospital screwed up." It's not clear how any source would avoid that conflation though.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-11 04:44:03+00:00
Yes, you are right, this is a real problem. But it really is just a variation on 'the internet never forgets', for instance in relation to teen behavior online. But AI allows for weaponization of such information. I wish the wannabe politicians of 2050 much good luck with their careers, they are going to be the most boring people available.
by the_sleaze_ | 2025-12-11 04:44:03+00:00
Now you're relying on Jimmy "Buck" Rawgers born and raised in Billton county working at the DOT setting the speed limits and the traffic light cadence.

How many roads are 35 when they should be 50 simply because some local yokel asshole made a stink at city counsel 10 years ago and now it's impossible to change?
by UltraSane | 2025-12-11 04:44:18+00:00
What is really annoying is the same people saying this incredibly targeted attack on Hezbollah is a horrible act of terrorism are completely silent on WHY Israel did it, which is because Hezbollah started shooting thousands of missiles at Israel in support of Hamas after the horrific attacks on Oct 7 2023. Just imagine the reaction the US would have if Mexico started shooting thousands of missiles at a US city?
by Incipient | 2025-12-11 04:45:20+00:00
I'm very confused on the debate of semver here - the fundamental principle seems very simple, and important.

"give me all updates to my core version that's still compatible"

Semver simply puts a 'protocol' to this - define your major version and off you go.

While in practice you could go and search for each and every library you use to check when/how they do breaking versions, but semver just allows matching a single number across the board - it makes it more consistent and error proof.
by the_sleaze_ | 2025-12-11 04:45:45+00:00
I have the same in my area, but instead the lights are synchronized to slow traffic as much as possible. They literally coordinate to make you stop at as many lights as possible and grid lock at rush hour so the highway doesn't get flooded.

I walk my kids to school, but when I do drive the 1.1 miles there are no less than 12 stoplights/stop signs.
by edent | 2025-12-11 04:45:51+00:00
When I occasionally venture I to standards-land, I always ask "what user research have you done on this?"

So many weird design choices in computing are because one person said "this seems right to me" without considering other viewpoints or consulting with the wider community.

Sure, you probably dont want death by committee, but a tiny cabal engaging in groupthink often produces unhelpful results.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-12-11 04:46:23+00:00
I don’t want hacker news to be neutral or biased, I want it to be a site or I can nerd out about tech stuff. Then when I feel like reading about the news of the day or arguing about politics, I’ll leave hacker news, and go to Twitter.

I don’t want hacker news to become Twitter. I don’t want hacker news to become a 24/7 critical theory struggle session.

All I can do as one person, acting within the guidelines, is to exercise my ability to flag stuff too focussed on politics.
by joecool1029 | 2025-12-11 04:46:24+00:00
> Aren't all text messages routed through a server?

For SMS, no not a central server for all carriers. When SMS service originally launched it wasn’t even cross-carrier.

MMS acts like a mailserver at each carrier, sends a push notification and your device has like a day to download full message.

For RCS it’s supposed to be federated but carriers gave up and it’s now centralized through Google Jibe.
by 9rx | 2025-12-11 04:47:56+00:00
> Determining whether there is an actual labor shortage is pretty difficult.

Using the technical definition, it's actually pretty easy. There is also a colloquial definition. But under the colloquial definition it is not just pretty difficult, its is actually impossible as it isn't real thing.

> But that means that one person gets to do the farming for a higher margin and everybody else loses their profession.

Here's what happens here: One large farmer captures most of the market and then relies on farm workers to get the job done, while small farmers are left under-utilized. It seems the same is true in Japan. After all, we're talking about farm laborers, not famers. The small-plot farmer who is also doing all the work doesn't need legions of employees.

Which is all well and good, but when the larger farmer reaches the limits of how many people they can hire, the solution is simple: Cut back. The under-utilized farmers will happily step in to fill the gap.

> It's difficult to predict whether that will happen.

It might not happen, but if it doesn't happen, it wasn't ever needed. Do you see a reason for farmers to farm for no reason? I don't mean no reason like overproducing to ensure there is still food in the event of a catastrophe. That is actually a valid reason, even if it doesn't always seem like it. I mean like produce it and then immediately turn it back into the ground.
by keeda | 2025-12-11 04:48:16+00:00
I really do not want to impose on anyone, but I do want different perspectives so I appreciate all these discussions!

I think we are actually in two bubbles -- see sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46211400 -- 1) AI infra + hyperscalers, and 2) pure-play AI company / startup valuations.

My take is only the second one will pop and cause a temporary deflation in the first one, and the GPU depreciation story is going to influence when it happens, how painful it will be, and how long it will last.

However, I'm convinced this will be a temporary blip. By all the data points I can find -- academic studies, quarterly earnings, government reports, industry surveys, not to mention my daily experiences with AI -- the AI growth story looks very real and very unstoppable. To the extent I'm concerned for my kids' prospects when they say they're interested in software engineering!
by qsort | 2025-12-11 04:48:16+00:00
Sure, that's a great point. If the LLM code/ideas they come with are actually valuable, they tend to fall into the first bucket though.

I'm not saying we need to dismiss people for using LLMs at all, for better or for worse we live in a world where LLMs are here to stay. The annoying people would have found a way to be annoying even without AI, I'm sure.
by rendaw | 2025-12-11 04:48:19+00:00
The value of CDK was always that it allowed you to write in a fully orthogonal language rather than the poor pseudo-language of hcl.

When writing stacks you need normal language features: loops, yes, but also if statements, reuse (functions), being able to do stuff like complex string parsing and re-formatting, etc etc.

HCL supports loops, modules can be kind-of used as functions with lots of footguns, there are awful hacks for some other things, and some stuff just couldn't be done.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-11 04:48:27+00:00
Video/audio production here and the exact same rules apply. You can’t let clients dictate your tools any more than you feel you should tell your plumber what they can use to fix your sink.

“We use Premiere.” Cool. I use Resolve. If we aren’t collaborating on the edit then this is an irrelevant conversation. You want a final product, that’s what you hired me for my dude. If you want me to slot into your existing editing pipeline that’s a totally different discussion.

“Last guy shot on a Red.” Cool. Hire them. Oh right you hired me this time. Interesting! Should we unpack that?

Freelancers: Stand your ground! Stand by your work! Tell clients to trust you!
by tptacek | 2025-12-11 04:48:32+00:00
That's not the argument. Presumably a broad cross-section of Lebanese people have pagers. But only Hezbollah combatants had these pagers, which were specifically procured by Hezbollah through an idiosyncratic suppler, linked to Hezbollah's own military encrypted network, and triggered by a pager message encrypted to that network.
by simianwords | 2025-12-11 04:48:59+00:00
1. if we are talking about billionaire's wealth like Bezos, Musk etc - all their wealth is in their own company. you can decide for yourself as to whether these companies are productive or not

2. private equity is a necessary evil that tries to make something out of companies that never had a good future anyway. not a lot of billionaire wealth is in PE. in fact pension firms are one of the largest stakeholders in PE which means the common people have stake in them too. what is your take on that?

3. i want other people to succeed too - our society is built such that any rando can convince YC and get funding.
by Uptrenda | 2025-12-11 04:49:38+00:00
This is all over linkedin now. Basically, idea bros manage to get their ideas seemingly working with vibe coding but the moment it breaks they expect they can just "pay to fix the small broken part" and get back to work quickly. Not realising the cost that the developer has to get up to date on the project, then probably fix a mountain of poorly done, insecure work to "quickly finish" the project. A lot of them are also scammers and try to get you to start work on it without even having an contract.

Not really worth working on any of these project.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-11 04:49:48+00:00
> sales people

> talk to people

There will clearly be a gap in understanding, when their whole job is to talk to people, and you come to them to argue for clients to not do that.

As you point out it's not that black and white, most companies will have tiers of client they want to spend less or more time with etc. but sales wanting direct contact with clients is I think a fundamental bit.
by minitech | 2025-12-11 04:50:05+00:00
> Why don’t the textbooks explain why the algorithm is correct?

The good ones do!

> Should I be familiar with every step of Dijkstra’s search algorithm and remember the pseudocode at all times?

If it’s the kind of thing you care to be familiar with, then being able to rederive every step of the usual-suspect algorithms is well within reach, yes. You don’t need to remember things in terms of pseudocode as such, more just broad concepts.