MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Rendello | 2025-12-09 17:29:52+00:00
These demos remind me of TweetCarts, little PICO-8 (Lua) programs designed to fit inside tweets [1]. A bunch were archived on Mastadon [2], and it appears they live on as "Postcarts" on the forum [3].

Since you had to record and upload the GIFs yourself (which to be fair was easy with PICO-8), I spent a month or so writing a Twitter bot to automatically respond to the Lua programs with a GIF of them running [4]. I was extremely proud of my shoddy little bot (that used Python, bash scripts, and a LXD container inside another LXD container, IIRC). Crazy coincidence: I released it just hours before someone else was to release their Twitter bot that did the same thing [5], despite this niche being unfilled for years and neither of us knowing of each other. His was better architected, and we kept in touch for a while.

1. https://twitter.com/search?q=%23tweetcart

2. https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Pico8TweetCarts

3. https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/superblog.php?mode=gifs&cat=0...

4. https://x.com/auto_tweetcart

5. https://x.com/tweetcartrunner
by re-thc | 2025-12-09 17:29:52+00:00
> How come only the EU needs to stifle existing companies to be able to have a chance to compete?

It's not required to compete. It's just their style and old fashioned. A 1 point hitting kids was the way to go. We all know how that went. The world has changed. Those kingdom eras no longer exist. The EU should bring out real substance.
by caymanjim | 2025-12-09 17:29:52+00:00
I used to complain (lightheartedly) about Claude's constant "You're absolutely right!" statements, yet oddly found myself missing them when using Codex. Claude is completely over-the-top and silly, and I don't actually care whether or not it thinks I'm right. Working with Codex feels so dry in comparison.

To quote Oliver Babish, "In my entire life, I've never found anything charming." Yet I miss Claude's excessive attempts to try.
by mvdtnz | 2025-12-09 17:30:05+00:00
Even with a perfectly free client you still need to perform computation on a remote machine that's outside of your control to post on (or read) reddit. Which is the same violation he moans about in this article,

> Doing your own computing via software running on someone else's server inherently trashes your computing freedom.

As always with Stallman he is dogmatic well past the point of reasonableness.
by esafak | 2025-12-09 17:30:10+00:00
> Or hell, why not do it in x86 assembly?

Because I want to be able to review it, and extend it myself.

edit: Pure vibe coding is a joke or thought exercise, not a goal to aspire to. Do you want to depend on a product that has not been vetted by any human? And if it is your product, do you want the risk of selling it?

I can imagine a future where AI coders and AI QA bots do all the work but we are not there yet. Besides, an expressive language with safety features is good for bots too.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-09 17:30:46+00:00
Claude Code has absolutely zero features that help me review code or do anything else than vibe-coding and accept changes as they come in. We need diff-comparisons between different executions, tailored TUI for that kind of work and more. Claude Code is basically a MVP of that.

Still, I do use Claude Code and Codex daily as there is nothing better out there currently. But they still feel tailored towards vibe-coding instead of professional development.
by eudamoniac | 2025-12-09 17:30:48+00:00
Which of the four lines of dialogue do you feel misrepresents the situation?

Line 1 is the premise of the OP; that's why it's "ironic".

Line 2 is what people feel the situation is, which is why the backlash in TFA is supported by a decent chunk of voters.

Line 3 is just describing the reaction, that they will try to change the situation from line 2.

Line 4 is essentially the post above mine.
by stared | 2025-12-09 17:31:11+00:00
There was a recent discussion, “Why AI Needs Hard Rules, Not Vibe Checks” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152838). We need as many checks as possible - and ideally ones that come for free (e.g., guaranteed by types, lifetimes, etc.) - which is why Rust might be the language for vibe coding.

Without checks and feedback, LLMs can easily generate unsafe code. So even if they can generate C or Assembly that works, they’re likely to produce code that’s riddled with incorrect edge cases, memory leaks, and so on.

Also, abstraction isn’t only for humans; it’s also for LLMs. Sure, they might benefit from different kinds of abstraction - but that doesn’t mean “oh, just write machine code” is the way to go.
Show HN: AI birthday invitations and free online RSVP (built as a parent)
by nedhuang | 2025-12-09 17:31:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I built BirthdayInvitation.ai, an AI-powered tool that creates birthday invitations in under a minute and includes a built-in online RSVP form.

Why I made this I’m a parent of two young kids, and every birthday party meant spending hours searching for templates, hiring designers, or manually collecting RSVPs through texts and spreadsheets. After repeating this every year, I wanted a faster, simpler, and more accessible way for parents to create invitations and track responses.

What it does a) Generates unique birthday invitation designs based on any theme (kids, teens, adults). b) Creates a shareable online RSVP form automatically. c) Guests can reply without signing up or installing anything. d) Parents get real-time headcounts and updates. e) Also supports a “bring your own design” option for people who prefer to upload their own artwork.

How it works (technically) 1, The design generation uses a prompt-oriented pipeline with post-processing to ensure text clarity and print-friendly layout. 2, RSVP tracking runs on a lightweight backend with email/SMS routing for notifications. 3, The system is optimized to produce invitations that can be printed or shared digitally.

What I’d love feedback on I want to improve the onboarding flow, the image quality, and the RSVP experience—especially for parents who are not tech-savvy. • Is the interface intuitive? • Are there moments where you feel “stuck”? • What would you expect such a tool to do that it currently doesn’t?

This project is still young, and I’d really appreciate any honest feedback from the HN community. You’ve helped me improve many things in the past, and I’m hoping to make this tool genuinely useful for other parents.

Thanks for reading, and happy to answer all questions.

— Founder of BirthdayInvitation.ai
by jandrese | 2025-12-09 17:31:32+00:00
It's very common with RPGs of that era (and all eras really) that the developers don't test every edge case and end up leaving ultra-powered (and just as many or more close to useless) builds in the game. Every feature added increases the possibility of breakage by some quadratic factor. Once your battle system hits a certain level of complexity it's close to inevitable.

Even carefully developed modern games like Baldur's Gate 3 have game breaking build options.
by Atlas667 | 2025-12-09 17:31:40+00:00
Understand the mind to then exploit it.

Why else would they put so much money into something if not to try and get more out of it?

Capitalists' morals are driven by their social position. To them this is right becauae its rewarding. To us its an akin abomination we create that destroys us

But the problem isnt inherently tech. Its how society is structured around it that allows it to be used against us.
by gruez | 2025-12-09 17:31:50+00:00
>I know this isn't a reputable source, however it's a popular source and there's an interesting debate to be had about Infowars' perspective, even if we can agree it's incorrect."

You can make the same argument for AI output as well, but to be clear, I'm referring to the case of someone bringing up a low quality source as the answer.
by derektank | 2025-12-09 17:32:08+00:00
>Is C the ideal language for vibe coding? I think I could mount an argument for why it is not, but surely Rust is even less ideal

I was really hoping you were going to make this argument, based upon the title of the piece! Still a good read, but if you have the inclination I hope you loop back around to weighing the pros and cons of vibe coding in different languages
by jetrink | 2025-12-09 17:32:22+00:00
Also, many of the posts seemed intended to be humorous and satirical, rather than merely 'futury.' They made me laugh anyway.

> Google kills Gemini Cloud Services

> Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM

> Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?

> Show HN: A text editor that doesn't use AI
by computably | 2025-12-09 17:32:28+00:00
Most LLMs, including Gemini (AFAIK), operate on tokens. lowercaseunseparatedname would be literally impossible for them to generate, unless they went out of their way to enhance the tokenizer. E.g. the LLM would need a special invisible separator token that it could output, and when preprocessing the training data the input would then be tokenized as "lowercase unseparated name" but with those invisible separators.

edit: It looks like it probably is a thing given it does sometimes output names like that. So the pattern is probably just too rare in the training data that the LLM almost always prefers to use actual separators like underscore.
by Espressosaurus | 2025-12-09 17:32:42+00:00
It doesn't have problems with undefined behavior, memory safety, or especially thread safety?

That has not been my experience when using Codex, Composer, Claude, or ChatGPT.

Things have just gotten to the point over the last year that the undefined behavior, memory safety, and thread safety violations are subtler and not as blindingly obvious to the person auditing the code.

But I guess that's my problem, because I'm not fully vibing it out.
by QuercusMax | 2025-12-09 17:32:49+00:00
I stopped using Doordash because they had absolutely no process to ensure drivers picked up the correct person's order, let alone actually making sure orders are correct. You give me another person's order with completely different things - I don't trust you again.

This is one of the most basic functions that a delivery service should have: making sure that you get the items you ordered, in good shape.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-09 17:32:51+00:00
The regulations were good, it's just that enforcement was and remains dysfunctional and basically non-existent.

Those business-ending GDPR fines HN loves fear-mongering about never materialized. Similarly with the DMA - Apple is still being allowed to stall and wage bureaucratic warfare to not comply.

In contrast, when in China people were found to be using AirDrop's "open to everyone" feature to share content the CCP deemed inappropriate, we quickly got a change where AirDrop would only stay open to everyone for 10 mins before reverting back to "contacts only".

If the EU had the same balls they would give Apple an ultimatum and you'd get alternate browser engines, app stores, and the right to "sideload" overnight.
by flatline | 2025-12-09 17:33:21+00:00
I also enjoy coding! It’s fun. It’s also only about 10% of my job as a software developer, and I can and do use an LLM for it whenever I can find an opportunity. The author is a professor. Not to disparage that perspective, but she paints a picture of the joys of programming that are overshadowed in environments where you are actually building real world robust systems with clueless users, vague requirements, shifting budgets and priorities, etc.

As to why not use C, or assembly, it’s not just about the code, but the toolchains. These require way more knowledge and experience to get something working than, say, Python - although that has its own rather horrible complexities with packaging and portability on the back end of the code authoring process.
by seec | 2025-12-09 17:34:09+00:00
Yeah, living to old age at the cost of overoptimizing every little thing in your life does not seem like a worthwhile endeavor. You'll only add years that won't be terribly useful or pleasant anyway, because anyone has to deal with some form of wear and tear regardless. At the very least, all the old people I know have to deal with some audition and sight loss, and even when they are in decent physical shape, they seem to be hurting somewhere.

It feels like trying to be immortal, which is a bit of a folly.

Anyway, the other day I noticed that Warren Buffett is just retiring at the age of 94. The man has eaten McDonald's for breakfast for much of his life. Diet cannot be that big of a deal.

What those epidemiological studies reveal is that food associated with higher class makes you live longer, which is reverse causation, at best.
by henwfan | 2025-12-09 17:34:16+00:00
Thanks for the kind words, and for taking the time to write concrete suggestions.

GitHub sign in is on the way. Right now it is Google only, but I am adding GitHub so it feels more natural for devs.

For languages, the drills are Python first. Java, C++ and JavaScript will be fully supported by the end of this year across all problems.

The site is dark by default today. A proper light and dark toggle is planned so people can pick what is more comfortable for longer sessions.

Really appreciate you trying it this early and sharing where you would like it to go.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-09 17:34:16+00:00
Strikes me as super-informal language as opposed to sycophancy, like one of those anime characters that calls everyone Aniki (兄貴) [1] I'd imagine that the OP must really talk a bit like that.

I do find it a little tiring that every LLM thinks my ever idea is "incisive" although from time to time I get told I am flat out wrong. On the other hand I find LLMs will follow me into fairly extreme rabbit holes such as discussing a subject such as "transforming into a fox" as if it had a large body of legible theory and a large database of experience [2]

In the middle of talking w/ Copilot about my latest pop culture obsession I asked about what sort of literature could be interpreted through the lens of Kohut's self-psychology and it immediately picked out Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, The Great Gatsby and Neon Genesis Evangelion which it analyzed along the lines I was thinking, but when I asked if there was a literature on this it turned up only a few obscure sources. I asked Google and Google is like "bro, Kohut wrote a book on it!" [3]

[1] "bro"

[2] ... it does, see https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Fox-Popular-Religion-Imperial/dp... and I'm not the only one because when I working down the material list from Etsy I got a sponsored result for someone who wanted to sell me the spell but bro, I have the materials list already

[3] ... this "bro" is artistic license but the book really exists
by willahmad | 2025-12-09 17:34:33+00:00
if it lasts even 1 year with on avg 1 min audio, I think it's nice disposable device to have.

Some ideas if you have an app which can be integrated to other services:

* I feel sick today, notify my manager about it, probably I will stay home

* schedule a task to pickup a trash

* something to remember, colleague X told me he is using service A for data clean up

...
by kevin061 | 2025-12-09 17:34:39+00:00
That is a valid and interesting discussion point. I do concede that OpenAI will probably not survive in the long term. Google and Microsoft on the other hand have dozens of independent verticals and revenue sources. Google can afford to be a loss leader with Gemini AI, and when every competitor goes out of business, they will jack up prices and enshittify a tool everyone depends on. Like what happened with YouTube once Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and the other sites essentially stopped being relevant.

But, and this is key, AI is not going away for as long as the potential to replace human labour remains there.
by henwfan | 2025-12-09 17:34:53+00:00
Good point, and that matches other feedback I am seeing.

You are right that in the current version the checker is still too literal about names and structure. In two sum for example it nudges you toward my map name instead of letting you use your own, which is not what I want to optimise for once you already know the idea.

The plan from here is to keep an editorial mode for people who want to follow the exact solution and add a more flexible mode that accepts your own names and structure as long as it is doing the same job. Over time the checker should recognise what you actually wrote and adapt its objectives and feedback to that, instead of forcing everyone into one naming scheme.
by vr46 | 2025-12-09 17:35:21+00:00
I left JetBrains in January after a very long time; with the new UI, there was realistically not a lot separating it from VSCode, and it was clear where all the fun was.

I didn’t really want to switch to VSC but the extensions made it easy to find things that you just couldn’t do in IntelliJ, and… I haven’t looked back. Haven’t really missed the suite at all.
by bildiba | 2025-12-09 17:35:46+00:00
I started reading this out of curiosity, thinking: that's such a far fetched thought, I'm curious about what the author wants to say. I think he makes a good point about execution vs. readability, and the actual need for the latter, drawing analogies to earlier abstractions. I'm still skeptical about low level language generation (tbh, letting an LLM handle memory at this point of maturity feels scary to me.. leaks etc)... But overall very interesting writeup and many points that I agree with.
by skapadia | 2025-12-09 17:35:54+00:00
But the AI coding agent can then ask you follow up questions, consider angles you may not have, and generate other artifacts like documentation, data generation and migration scripts, tests, CRUD APIs, all in context. If you can reliably do all that from plain pseudo code, that's way less verbose than having to write out every different representation of the same underlying concept, by hand.

Sure, some of that, like CRUD APIs, you can generate via templates as well. Heck, you can even have the coding agent generate the templates and the code that will process/compile them, or generate the code that generates the templates given a set of parameters.
by guywithahat | 2025-12-09 17:36:22+00:00
> why not do it in C?

A legitimate point, there are lots of performance and fine grain changes you can make, and it's a simple, common language many people use. Perhaps we could realize some of these benefits from a simple, fast language.

> Or hell, why not do it in x86 assembly?

A terrible take imo. This would be impossible to debug and it's complex enough you likely won't see any performance improvements from writing in assembly. It's also not portable, meaning you'd have to rewrite it for every OS you want to compile on.

I think there's an argument that if machines are writing code, they should write for a machine optimized language. But even using this logic I don't want to spend a bunch of time and money writing multiple architectures, or debugging assembly when things go wrong.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-09 17:37:31+00:00
No, I just don't there's a specification for what exactly a screen reader is supposed to with ARIA markup.

For example it could show you or read to you a list of all the nav landmarks on the page, which would be (1) helpful for end users, and (2) sure as hell helpful for me as a dev so I can know how the landmarks work as a system. All screen browsers really seem to do is blurt out "NAVIGATION LANDMARK!" randomly before or in the middle or after the <nav>
by NoGravitas | 2025-12-09 17:38:01+00:00
It's scheduling. WBD was set to spin off Discovery Global in April --- after the March congressional primaries. The hostile bid creates leverage to get the TV networks spun off sooner, rather than later, to ensure that the Ellisons can pick them up Q1, in time to set the narrative for the congressional primaries.

See: https://substack.com/@thedreydossier/p-180959723
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-09 17:38:17+00:00
> Nowadays models are trained with effective batch size of millions of tokens in total. Of course, this won't fit into memory, one uses gradient accumulations to that purpose, again as mentioned by Gemini.

I would be surprised if there is much/any gradient acc in modern large-scale pretraining runs. You can always just recruit more GPUs with DP/PP/TP rather than training for longer.
by l72 | 2025-12-09 17:38:45+00:00
And surprisingly, it was actually Piggly Wiggly that was the first grocery store to open up their warehouse and allow customers to self-service! [1]

> Piggly Wiggly was the first self-service grocery store.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly#History
by johannes1234321 | 2025-12-09 17:39:09+00:00
> Except for the physical buildings, permitting, and power grid build-out.

Those are extremely localized at a bunch of data centers and how much of that will see further use? And how much grid work has really happened (there are a lot of announcement about plans to maybe build nuclear reactor etc., but those projects take a lot of time, if ever done)

nVidia managed to pivot their customer base from crypto mining to AI.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-09 17:39:13+00:00
AI is moving so fast even people doing it full time can't always keep up... which is not a big deal because very little of this "AI" effort actually makes any money.

Let them burn their money figuring out what works and what doesn't, and then when you come back you can easily pick up the stuff that works without being distracted by what doesn't.

If you look back at the Cambrian explosion of frontend JS complexity, do you feel like you gained anything from being there, versus just jumping in now and focusing on the few technologies that stabilized? The same is gonna happen with AI.
by epgui | 2025-12-09 17:39:25+00:00
There’s a nugget of an idea in there, even if I disagree with most of it.

But code doesn’t only need to be understood for maintenance purposes: code is documentation for business processes. It’s a thing that needs to be understandable and explainable by humans anytime the business process is important.

LLMs can never / should never replace verifiability, liability, or value judgment.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-09 17:39:25+00:00
I've been on the family plan for a long while... was before they redid Google Music and YT Music, but it included YT ad free and Google Music, so I did that and dropped Spotify around a decade ago. I watch so much YT content, it's been worth it to keep... Though I'm glad that Rumble is there and seeing some improvements in UX, still not nearly as good as YT, but getting better.

Mostly watch via Android TV (NVidia Shield TV).
by justsid | 2025-12-09 17:40:12+00:00
RenderDoc is mostly a frame debugger, although it does support stepping through shaders as well which can be super useful. But for real performance analysis I would use PIX if you target D3D12 or RGP and Nsight for Vulkan. I'm at a Vulkan and Metal only shop and I wish I could use PIX for my every day work, since it also has excellent support for Intel GPUs.
by sneak | 2025-12-09 17:40:14+00:00
I wish everyone would read this paragraph:

> But this leads me to my second point, which I must make as clearly and forcefully as I can. Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. You can then tell yourself (as I did) that it’s good as a kind of alternative search engine for coding problems, but not much else. You are also wrong about that. Because when you start giving it little programming problems that you can’t be arsed to work out yourself (as I did), you discover (as I did) that it’s awfully good at those. And then one day you muse out loud (as I did) to an AI model something like, “I have an idea for a program…” And you are astounded. If you aren’t astounded, you either haven’t actually done it or you are at some stage of grief prior to acceptance. Perfect? Hardly. But then neither are human coders. The future? I think the questions answers itself.

This cannot be repeated enough. For all the AI hype, if you think AI isn't the most useful programming tool invented in the last 20 years, you're ignorant of the SOTA or deeply in denial.

As @tptacek recently wrote:

> All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career.