MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by protocolture | 2025-12-09 10:16:07+00:00
>Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse.

I was working at a particular organisation 13 years ago, and we were tired. Everything was a half completed project. Everything needed work. One of the file servers was busted. We had cobbled together enough to make the customer experience ok, but the guts were on the deck.

The organisation expanded, hired a new CTO, moved the old Pseudo CTO to an architect role. New CTO sat down with everyone in the team for a 1 on 1 chat.

He asked what the biggest issue was, I said we needed time to fix everything and make it work. He said everyone on the team told him the same thing. That we have a solid environment and it just needs to be completed.

Next day he announces a shift to the cloud. We had all our priorities suspended as we forced 365 and Azure into everything. I bailed like 3 weeks later.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-12-09 10:17:08+00:00
FWIW, both OnlyOffice and LibreOffice support XLOOKUP. In fact LibreOffice has over 500 Excel formulae, which is very close to the number of formulae Excel has.

Unless you use a lot of VBA (and you can't translate it to Python), or you've got some proprietary COM addin that you can't live without, LibreOffice's Calc is a pretty damn good replacement for Excel for the majority of users.
by moulick | 2025-12-09 10:17:16+00:00
Confluent had great stuff but their prices were crazy. When we got a quote from them, it was 20x more than what we could run on our own. We got quoted something like ~500k/year and my math on running it on AWS came around 25k for the same sized cluster via Strimzi operator on dedicated K8s nodes. We could hire a dedicated 3 person team to manage the cluster for the same price lol.

Now AWS is eating Confluent's lunch with it's managed Kafka. AWS MSK is still a little rough like all AWS services but it's still cheaper and a no-brainer if you are already on AWS.
by exfalso | 2025-12-09 10:17:48+00:00
Although it's sad, I have to agree with what you're alluding to. I think there is huge overhead and waste (in terms of money, compute resources and time) hidden in the software industry, and at the end of the day it just comes down to people not knowing how to write software.

There is a strange dynamic currently at play in the software labour market where the demand is so huge that the market can bear completely inefficient coders. Even though the difference between a good and a bad software engineer is literally orders of magnitude.

Quite a few times I encountered programmers "in the wild" - in a sauna, on the bus etc, and overheard them talking about their "stack". You know the type, node.js in a docker container. I cannot fathom the amount of money wasted at places that employ these people.

I also project that actually, if we adopt LLMs correctly, these engineers (which I would say constitute a large percentage) will disappear. The age of useless coding and infinite demand is about to come to an end. What will remain is specialist engineer positions (base infra layer, systems, hpc, games, quirky hardware, cryptographers etc). I'm actually kind of curious what the effect on salary will be for these engineers, I can see it going both ways.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-09 10:18:31+00:00
I knew I remember your name working with something of sqlite and golang

https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3

Man I really enjoy golang and cross portability and wazero + sqlite could still be cross portable which is super fascinating

What are your thoughts on https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite (postgres in wasm)?

Also what were the goal behind a pure golang solution via wazero + wasm sqlite as you had made?

Was it cross platform support, if so, what are your thoughts on zig, I have seen a project use zig + golang to create cross platform C language support but I think that adding zig into the picture complicates the build process so there are tradeoffs and I am interested to hear your opinions about it!
by Artoooooor | 2025-12-09 10:18:52+00:00
>The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place.

Standards are the One True Path. That's why they are standards. I see no disrespect in enforcing them. Even more - the ones not following them and forcing users to burn additional CPU cycles because browsers have to assume they may be parsing crap are the disrespectful ones. Come on, it's not that hard, especially with help of IDEs.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-09 10:18:53+00:00
>Isn't the logical endpoint of this equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into your computer instead of copy-and-pasting?

when AI works well it is superior to Stack Overflow because what it replaces is not "Look up answer on SO, copy paste" but rather, look up several different things on SO that relate to your problem that you are trying to solve but which there is no exact definite solution posted anywhere, and copy those things together into a bit of code that you will probably just refactor a bit with a shorter time than doing all the SO look up yourself. When it works it can turn 2 hours of research into 2 minutes.

The problems are:

AI also sometimes replicates the following process - dev not understanding all parts of solution or requirements copies bits of code together from various answers making something that sort of works but is inefficient and has underlying problems.

Even with the working correctly solution your developer does not get in that 2 minutes what they used to get in the two hours before, an understanding of the problem space and how these parts of the solution hang together. This is the reason why it is more useful for seniors than juniors, because part of the looking through SO for what you want is light education.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-09 10:21:53+00:00
There are SO MANY Copilots

There's the Copilot cli, then we have the Copilot built in to VSCode, then we have the Copilot that's in Github, then we have th M365 Copilot and the Windows Copilot and maybe a few more.

All work very differently and have different skillsets.
by MEMORYC_RRUPTED | 2025-12-09 10:22:13+00:00
I live in a dense European city and all I ever do is order groceries online. I can order larger amounts in one go, so, batch order once every two weeks or so.

Instead of having to fight with a machine to give back my empty cans/plastic bottles, I can just give the delivery person a crate and get my money back.

Doesn't capture all my groceries, I love biking or walking to a smaller shop on occasion, or if I have a specific craving, but 90% of my groceries is delivery.
by albert_e | 2025-12-09 10:22:17+00:00
Back in the day MS office applications had toolbars (instead of ribbon)

Toolbars could be customized. You could select any item from any menu and place it on toolbar for quick access. So unique icons for every menu option were useful.

Even now i think MS office has a quick access toolbar on top that can be customized that way. Tad limited.
by a5c11 | 2025-12-09 10:22:49+00:00
I used to code at night with a kerosene lamp sitting on my desk. I love the light spectrum of a live fire.

"Portable" (they couldn't even fit in a pocket) CD players were the worst thing imho. Too sensitive to even small shocks, which was particularly annoying while taking longer walks, and draining batteries like crazy. I switched from cassette players to MP3 players, almost completely skipping the era of CD players. I've tried it once or twice because my sister had it, and never again.
by kace91 | 2025-12-09 10:23:13+00:00
>There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it.

Yes, it’s a god of the gaps situation. We don’t know what the ceiling is. We might have hit it, there might be a giant leap forward ahead, we might leap back (if there is a rug pull).

The most interesting questions are the ones that assume human equivalency.

Suppose an AI can produce like a human.

Are you ok with merging that code without human review?

Are you ok with having a codebase that is effectively a black box?

Are you ok with no human being responsible for how the codebase works, or able to take the reins if something changes?

Are you ok with being dependent on the company providing this code generation?

Are we collectively ok with the eventual loss of human skills, as our talents rust and the new generation doesn’t learn them?

Will we be ok if the well of public technical discussion LLMs are feeding from dries up?

Those are the interesting debates I think.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-09 10:24:52+00:00
I've used Copilot ih VSCode quite extensively, using both GPT-5(.1) and Sonnet 3.7 and Sonnet 4.5 as the LLM backend. (Before our company got the deals in place for OpenAI and Anthropic to use their tooling directly)

The results are measurably worse every time vs. doing the exact same operation with Codex Cli or Claude Code.

There's something in the Microsoft AI framework that makes the worse and more "stupid" than the competition.
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 10:25:05+00:00
> 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value.

They have more work to do until they don't.

The number of bank tellers went up for a while after the invention of the ATM, but then it went down, because all the demand was saturated.

We still need food, farming hasn't stopped being a thing, nevertheless we went from 80-95% of us working in agriculture and fishing to about 1-5%, and even with just those percentages working in that sector we have more people over-eating than under-eating.

As this transition happened, people were unemployed, they did move to cities to find work, there were real social problems caused by this. It happened at the same time that cottage industries were getting automated, hand looms becoming power-looms, weaving becoming programmable with punch cards. This is why communism was invented when it was invented, why it became popular when it did.

And now we have fast-fashion, with clothes so fragile that they might not last one wash, and yet still spend a lower percentage of our incomes on clothes than the pre-industrial age did. Even when demand is boosted by having clothes that don't last, we still make enough to supply demand.

Lumberjacks still exist despite chainsaws, and are so efficient with them that the problem is we may run out of rainforests.

Are there any switchboard operators around any more, in the original sense? If I read this right, the BLS groups them together with "Answering Service", and I'm not sure how this other group then differs from a customer support line: https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes432011.htm

> 2. Writing code continues to be a very late step of the overall software development process. Even if all my code was written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it written, I still have a full-time job.

This would be absolutely correct — I've made the analogy to Amdahl's law myself previously — if LLMs didn't also do so many of the other things. I mean, the linked blog post is about answering new-starter questions, which is also not the only thing people get paid to do.

Now, don't get me wrong, I accept the limitations of all the current models. I'm currently fairly skeptical that the line will continue to go up as it has been for very much longer… but "very much longer" in this case is 1-2 years, room for 2-4 doublings on the METR metric.

Also, I expect LLMs to be worse at project management than at writing code, because code quality can be improved by self-play and reading compiler errors, whereas PM has slower feedback. So I do expect "manage the AI" to be a job for much longer than "write code by hand".

But at the same time, you absolutely can use an LLM to be a PM. I bet all the PMs will be able to supply anecdotes about LLMs screwing up just like all the rest of us can, but it's still a job task that this generation of AI is still automating at the same time as all the other bits.
by PebblesHD | 2025-12-09 10:25:32+00:00
Rather than improving testing for fallible accessibility assists, why not leverage AI to eliminate the need for them? An agent on your device can interpret the same page a sighted or otherwise unimpaired person would giving you as a disabled user the same experience they would have. Why would that not be preferable? It also puts you in control of how you want that agent to interpret pages.
by account42 | 2025-12-09 10:25:45+00:00
a) __attribute__((warn_unused_result)) is non-standard in the first place, are you looking for [[nodiscard]] - GCC does not warn on cast to void with that?

b) A return value that is explicitly marked like this is very different from an unused variable that gp suggested the cast to void idiom for. GCC does not warn on variables that are unused except for a cast to void.
by nottorp | 2025-12-09 10:25:52+00:00
> Not everything NEEDS to be useful

... until the not-useful becomes distracting and/or causes information overload.

In the case of Apple, I've been a user of the Accessibility menu ever since they introduced the stupid parallax wiggling of the icons. Right now i use: reduce motion, bold text and reduce transparency. Because I want to see what I'm looking for when using the phone and not squint through pointless effects.
by lz400 | 2025-12-09 10:26:38+00:00
I have similar stories, I showed the Confluent consultants a projection of their Kafka quote vs Kinesis and it was like 10x, even they were confused. The ingress/egress costs are insane. I think they just do very deep discounts to certain customers. The product is good but if you pay full ticket it probably doesn't make sense.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-09 10:27:17+00:00
This. If I'm out looking for a "Save" button, I'm going to pattern match "ancient disk icon" without even thinking about it.

It's also the reason why some menu entries get icons and others don't.

If the icon doesn't convey information by itself (like a "move to top" icon example), then it's there as a visual anchor - and you don't really need to have 4 of the same "delete" icon if a menu has 4 different "delete" options next to each other. Just one is enough of an anchor to draw your attention to the "delete group", and having just one keeps the visual noise low.

Likewise, you don't need visual anchors for every single option - just the commonly used ones, the ones you expect people to be looking for, and the ones that already have established pictography.
by statusfailed | 2025-12-09 10:29:04+00:00
I saw a similar (I think!) paper "Grassmannian Optimization Drives Generalization in Overparameterized DNN" at OPT-ML at neurips last week[0]

This is a little outside my area, but I think the relevant part of that abstract is "Gradient-based optimization follows horizontal lifts across low-dimensional subspaces in the Grassmannian Gr(r, p), where r p is the rank of the Hessian at the optimum"

I think this question is super interesting though: why can massively overparametrised models can still generalise?

[0]: https://opt-ml.org/papers/2025/paper90.pdf
by j45 | 2025-12-09 10:29:10+00:00
Limited space seems like a surprising thing to lean on, especially when put next to a text label, with the increase pixel count/resolution on devices over the last 5-10-15 years.

Words create better beginners than icons alone.

UI/UX can evolve as the baseline digital literacy of users evolves usually very slowly, to remain maximally inclusive.

One thing that I'd consider is start with text labels, and the more they are used, start showing an icon. Just hold a left bar for them to start appearing so that learning can happen.

The screenshot where there was only some menu items with icons feels more memorable for that reason.
by chistev | 2025-12-09 10:30:33+00:00
React became popular, so companies adopted it because it was widely used and had a strong ecosystem. This led to more jobs requiring React. More developers learned React, which in turn led to more libraries, tutorials, and community contributions appearing. Increased resources and community support made it easier for new developers to start using React. Its popularity kept growing, which encouraged even more companies to adopt it.

The loop repeats.

Its popularity is self-reinforcing.

It’s also a major reason why React dominated the data that LLMs were trained on. You'll notice it's the default UI code when you prompt LLMs, unless you specify otherwise.

Personally, I prefer Svelte.
by exe34 | 2025-12-09 10:33:21+00:00
I don't get this "infinite amount of time" thing. in a steady state universe, yes, sure, but if the expansion continues and no new incidents like the big bang happens, then it just gets colder and colder, right? and even if atoms were to come together in that way again, the CMB would be lower, so that fragment of timeline would lead to Pensias and Wilson to finish work earlier that day and never get the Nobel prize - so that history would be very different.
by tmountain | 2025-12-09 10:33:27+00:00
Tapes are exceptionally durable when cared for properly. Here's a video of a guy that tests for loss of quality after 1,000 plays.

https://youtu.be/_dgJ4hRHBiw?si=IpjzdgAHJ4Q9yvb5

Quality is indistinguishable from the first playback. Tapes have a bad reputation because most people used them in the cars, which is the equivalent of storing them in an oven on a daily basis. A lot of car stereos were very cheap, and that lead to a lot of cassettes being damaged when they would have been fine otherwise.

Regarding the quality argument. Again, it's going to depend on the media and the equipment. I have a very nice Marantz tape deck, and I use chrome tapes with it. When recorded and played back with dolby noise reduction, it sounds pretty damn good!

https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA?si=db7QjRt37ENiLMFX

I say this as someone that also owns a very nice turntable and has a digital FLAC media collection, so I'm not married to tapes in any way. They're just something fun to goof around with (and mostly to give my kid a more tangible experience with playing music at home).

Regarding convenience, I can't argue that they're the least convenient media. That said, I'm an album guy, so I like to listen to recordings in their entirety most of the time.
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 10:34:16+00:00
> Sure, if you're content to stack shelves.

Why this example? One of the things automation has done is reduce and replace stevedores, the shipping equivalent of stacking shelves.

Amazon warehouses are heavily automated, almost self-stacking-shelves. At least, according to the various videos I see, I've not actually worked there myself. Yet. There's time.

> AI isn't automation. It's thinking. It automates the brain out of human jobs. You can still get a job that requires a body. My job doesn't require a body, so I'm screwed. If you're say, a surgeon or a plumber, you're in a better place.

Right up until the AI is good enough to control the robot that can do that job. Which may or may not be humanoid. (Plus side: look how long it's taking for self-driving cars, how often people think a personal anecdote of "works for me" is a valid response to "doesn't work for me").

Even before the AI gets that good, a nice boring remote-control android doing whatever manual labour could outsource the "controller" position to a human anywhere on the planet. Mental image: all the unemployed Americans protesting outside Tesla's factories when they realise the Optimus robots within are controlled remotely from people in 3rd world countries getting paid $5/day.
by mrvoodoodoll | 2025-12-09 10:35:41+00:00
Software engineer with over 5 years of experience architecting and delivering high-performance, cross-platform C++ applications. Proven expertise in developing real-time signal processing systems for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) and autonomous vehicles, with a strong focus on algorithm optimization and API design.

Location: Tbilisi, Georgia Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Not yet Technologies: * Languages: C++20, Python, Matlab, SQL, C# * Developer Tools: CMake, cppcheck, clang-format, Conan, vcpkg, Git, GitLab, CLion, XCode, Visual Studio, Doxygen * Libraries: Qt, ImGui, Boost, spdlog, fmt, nlohmann json, FlatBuffers, GTest, ZeroMQ, HDF5, cpr, unifex, ROS2, OpenCV Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13-JaGb1Mp7hIgsk0j2wOt7oR9_MfBSOg/view?usp=sharing Email: maksim.vinogradov@brknvddll.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maksimvinogradov/
by leg100 | 2025-12-09 10:35:51+00:00
> In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines.

I really doubt horses would be ambivalent about this, let alone about anything. Or maybe I'm wrong, they were in two minds: oh dear I'm at risk of being put to sleep, or maybe it could lead to a nice long retirement out on a grassy meadow. But they're in all likelihood blissfully unaware.
by jsumrall | 2025-12-09 10:35:52+00:00
Seems like a great day for Pulsar / StreamNative and Redpanda who are going to get a lot of new customers in the coming years.

When looking for alternatives to Kafka these are the most promising options I found, not counting RabbitMQ which needs no introduction.

Pulsar seems to be 'kafka done better'. The version of Kafka that Confluent used internally (Kora) seems closer to Pular as well. Pulsar has a lot of features that Kafka doesn't have, like per-message acknowledgement, similar to RabbitMQ. And it has protocol support for RabbitMQ and Kafka, so can be a drop-in replacement.

Redpanda seems like a great re-implementation of Kafka.

I'm hoping this boosts Pulsar's status and helps get some traction for StreamNative. It seems like the best technical solution for events and messaging. It just needs a bit more market adoption to make an easier choice for enterprise, in my opinion. This might be that moment.

https://streamnative.io/

*(yes I know about NATS)
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-09 10:37:34+00:00
I think it's just that HN audiences is generally detached from the harsh reality of the "money people" who make these purchasing choices and are generally choosing the safe low friction option, that lets the business free to focus on product development and sales that are the core of business, rather than wasting resources on building and managing IT infra from FOSS scratch for the sake of avoiding $BIG_TECH.

If your business is making and selling a new type of energy drink or gluten free bread, you're not gonna bat an eye on going all-in on Microsoft Office 365 and Azure for your IT infra so you can focus on the product.

Same story on how even software-first companies like Google just default to using SAP for ERP and be done with it instead of trying to write their own solution for no benefit even if they technically could, why bother when they can just focus on doing what they know best, getting you to click on ads, and outsource the annoying boring part of the megacorp business to SAP.