MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Mikho | 2025-12-30 10:37:57+00:00
That kind of M&A shenanigan without actual M&A to not attract scrutinization is pretty popular this year. E.g., Meta's "acquisition" of ScaleAI for $14.8 billion and Alphabet's "reverse acquihire" of key talent from Windsurf in July 2025 for $2.4 billion for non-exclusive technology licensing rights and the hiring of top executives. Apparently, in all deals employees lost while founders gained personally but didn't explicitly try to make good for people who actually took a risk by trusting them.
by roryirvine | 2025-12-30 10:38:26+00:00
To be "mere puff", the claim needs to be so obviously untrue that no reasonable bystander would suppose it to be meant literally.

But Musk often acts as if he does actually intend to be taken seriously. In the case of the current story, consider the marketing resources Tesla have poured into their previous "Battery Day" events and look at the press reaction; it's clear that at least some people believed that the claims stacked up.

A quick search of the hn archives for "4680" shows a similar picture. Yes, there were always some sceptical voices, but they were often shouted down as being from people motivated by an anti-Elon grudge. Nevertheless, the sentiment tended to be overwhelmingly positive with many posters actively reinforcing the hype.

Now, whether or not a self-selecting sample of hn posters can be seen as "reasonable bystanders" is certainly debatable - but it does seem that we're getting close to the point where Musk is going to have to start branding those who believe him as being exceptionally gullible in order to escape a charge of misleading advertising.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-30 10:38:49+00:00
> Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me.

They don't do any of that better than me; they do it poorer and faster, but well enough for most of the time.
by hackerInnen | 2025-12-30 10:39:19+00:00
Okay looks like proton does a lot nowadays.
But if someone wants a nice email provider that just works I can't stop to recommend posteo. A german email provider. 1€/month and they are just great. Been using them for 15 years now or something like that and I never had any problems. At least I can't remember any. They also always give out a transparency report[1] and apparently can't hand out much data to governments, because the data is just encrypted and they can't access it.

The only down side I have heard, that people have, is that you cannot use your own domains.

- [1] https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report
by scotty79 | 2025-12-30 10:39:27+00:00
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

Piracy is what makes games a viable business. Even now marketing budget for a game can exceed development costs. Each pirated copy is not a lost sale. It's marketing brain worm implanted in a person that you didn't have to pay for.

The fact that most pirated games become bestsellers is not an accident. And it's not the other way around.

It's the same thing as with Windows. It wouldn't be most used and best selling operating system if it wasn't amply pirated.

Apple, to have anyone use a copy of their OS, has to bundle a device with it. And Linux has to give it all for free to buy its mindshare. Piracy makes Windows business model viable.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-12-30 10:39:51+00:00
Very weak article. I do all of these things in the terminal not because they’re better, but because of muscle memory. I’m under no illusions that me typing my git commands by hand makes me a better programmer. I didn’t become one with the machine.

For junior devs: don’t worry about which tools you use. Ultimately make sure that what you’re shipping is tested and reliable. Make sure of it before sending it for review and you’ll be fine. You don’t need to mess around in neovim to prove anything to anyone.
by low_tech_love | 2025-12-30 10:40:04+00:00
And quite frankly, they don't give a fuck. They have been conditioned not to give a fuck from an early age; the system works 99% of the time, so nobody really has to care about each other. There is literally no benefit in giving a fuck about another person, in fact it is quite possible that you'll end up being punished by the system for breaking the rules. It is a Leviathan whale state swimming through the sea with millions of little fish sucking on it, and they sure as hell don't care about the few who fall off during the trip.
by trashb | 2025-12-30 10:40:35+00:00
> Edgar Dijkstra called it nearly 50 years ago: we will never be programming in English, or French, or Spanish. Natural languages have not evolved to be precise enough and unambiguous enough. Semantic ambiguity and language entropy will always defeat this ambition.

This is the most important quote for any AI coding discussion.

Anyone that doesn't understand how the tools they use came to be is doomed to reinvent them.

> The folly of many people now claiming that “prompts are the new source code”,

These are the same people that create applications in MS Excel.
by vanviegen | 2025-12-30 10:40:40+00:00
Watch cartoons if you don't want 'real'. Those made by Disney are said to be 'magic'.

Sorry for being snarky. It's just that I have large difficulties enjoying 24 fps pan shots and action scenes. It's like watching a slide show to me. I'm rather annoyed that the tech hasn't made any progress in this regard, because viewers and makers want to cling on to the magic/dream-like experiences they had in their formative years.
by wishfish | 2025-12-30 10:40:58+00:00
Reddit is a bunch of bar districts in a large city. You can find any sort of bar you want. Some of the bars you'll love. Some of them you'll hate. Some of them will make you say "what the hell is any of this?"

It's an almost infinite variety. Fractal even with how many subreddits are the results of splits from an older subreddit.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-30 10:41:01+00:00
> The issue is it had the range of a golf cart. So it basically ruled out 98% of the population that needs a car that can go on road trips.

You're trying to use weasel words to try to hide the fact that the Nissan Leaf, which was elected world car of the year, was the world's most successful electric car and top-selling electric car until 2020.

That does not happen if 98% of anything doesn't like it.

For over a decade, the whole world has been buying Nissan Leafs more than any other electric car. How do you explain it?
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-30 10:41:40+00:00
This isn't just about being a customer to a multinational bank: this also includes European banks who do business with American banks. For instance, most credit/debit cards in Europe are based on either Mastercard or Visa. All banks I know of will allow you to pay in dollars through online banking.

I don't think there are any European banks that don't communicate with American payment providers in some way by default. It's possible that there are some that trust their feature gates enough to take on these sanctioned people (like government-run banks for those who can't get a normal bank account, i.e. because of a history of fraud and crime), but I don't think these banks will advertise that ability.

Perhaps if she'd take an Iranian, North Korean, or Russian bank account, she might be able to do America-free banking, but that's not very practical outside of Iran, North Korea, or Russia at the moment.
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-30 10:41:44+00:00
I love it. I'm using Go to handle building full stack javascript apps, which actually works great since esbuild can be used directly inside a Go program. The issue is that it's a dependency, so I settled for having a go mod file and running it directly with Go. If somehow these dependencies could be resolved without an explicit module configured (say, it was inline in the go file itself) it would be perfect. Alas, it will probably never happen.

That being said...use Go for scripting. It's fantastic. If you don't need any third party libraries this approach seems really clean.
by georgeecollins | 2025-12-30 10:42:03+00:00
Since I am completely embarrassing myself:
- Review of a DRM free game I sold in 1980 https://archive.org/details/BallyArcadeAstrocadeArcadianAltS...
- That you tube link is pretty old, I was on a panel at Games Beat this year, I think because a more interesting person got sick.
by Flere-Imsaho | 2025-12-30 10:42:52+00:00
The trolling that happened on IRC would put modern day trolling to shame. Imagine posting a link to an exe claiming to be one thing but would actually contain Back Orifice (a Trojan that gave you remote access to the victim's pc). People would blindly download exes and run them on completely unprotected Windows 98.

To be fair I do miss the "old Internet". Less corporate, money grabbing, more freedom.
by eru | 2025-12-30 10:43:47+00:00
You are right, but still I'd be much more concerned about snake oil from companies that no one can short.

The persistent short interest in Tesla shows at least that the critics are voicing their concerns in the market.

You and I might think that Tesla is overvalued, maybe. But if it's a bubble, at least it's not a fragile one that pops at the slightest pin prick like a few shorts.
by rmw-link | 2025-12-30 10:43:56+00:00
size_lru achieves 1.85M/s effective throughput (100% baseline) - highest among tested libraries. The LHD algorithm asks 'Which item has the lowest expected hits per byte?' not 'least recently used?' LHD quantifies hit density = expected_hits/size via 16 age classes and 4096 buckets. Random sampling of 64 candidates achieves 69.83% hit rate vs 54-55% for LRU with O(1) operations.
by rwmj | 2025-12-30 10:44:26+00:00
The problem (for the bank) is they are now liable in the UK[1] if you are defrauded because someone installs malware on the phone. There's basically zero upside for the bank to allow customers to use F-Droid, since probably 0.0001% of their customers would do this, compared to a vastly greater number of customers being tricked into installing random malware on their phones.

Accessibility settings are a tricky one since that's a separate law, but it's not the case for the original article.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy94vz4zd7zo
by ben_w | 2025-12-30 10:44:31+00:00
> The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.

AFAICT, SpaceX are not the bottleneck holding this back. Or at least, not the only one.

And they do have something to show for it, just not a complete final version. Starship is not yet fully reusable, and I will not make any bet on if they even can make it so as this is not my domain, but if you skip the re-use it is already capable of yeeting up a massive payload to LEO, enough to do a lunar mission.
by aebtebeten | 2025-12-30 10:44:48+00:00
the french on the good hunter^W vibe coder vs the bad vibe coder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuGcoOJKXT8

given that the 3 hares seem to currently lack a signification, I'd be up for squatting? Or would Paul prefer 3 fennecs? Should anyone wish to oppose us, as Bigwig said: "silflay hraka u embleer rah"

on shunya as revolutionary, I have a slightly more pragmatic story: just as we now routinely have our calculations done for us in binary, but record results in decimal (in PDF invoices, say), ancient romans (among other cultures) would have someone do their calculations on a counting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_board board, but recorded (only the non-zero) results in roman numerals.

> « Les hommes sont comme les chiffres : ils n'acquièrent de valeur que par leur position. » —NB
by arnley | 2025-12-30 10:44:55+00:00
Greatest products with such an impact on people should not be behind closed doors. And delegating complex tasks to AI is clearly what's next.

That's one of the reasons I'm building out in the open:

- https://github.com/codename-co/devs
- https://devs.new/

It's not ready for orchestration yet, but most fundamental layers are already working great.

Create your agents using the LLMs of your choosing, directly from your smartphone of you want full privacy, and with no ads, no paywall, no sign up required.

Manus was ahead of its time. But the directions are parting ways.
by jvanderbot | 2025-12-30 10:45:45+00:00
I think any further discussion about quality just needs to have the following metadata:

- Language

- Total LOC

- Subject matter expertise required

- Total dependency chain

- Subjective score (audited randomly)

And we can start doing some analysis. Otherwise we're pissing into ten kinds of winds.

My own subjective experience is earth shattering at webapps in html and css (because I'm terrible and slow at it), and annoyingly good but a bit wrong usually in planning and optimization in rust and horribly lost at systems design or debugging a reasonably large rust system.
by roenxi | 2025-12-30 10:46:12+00:00
Unless California has seceded from the US when I wasn't watching it has quite a lot to do with the US federal government. Ignoring the federal budget would be like a family going broke claiming they have budget for a holiday because they've decided to think about it differently from their regular finances. They can say that if they want, but nobody is going to take them seriously except maybe the person selling holiday supplies.

There is a reason Ro Khanna and Newsom are the ones being tapped to give opinions on this as opposed to talking to anyone in the Californian legislature or someone actually involved. It matters a lot in context of the financial problems the US has federally.

Do the Californians use different taxpayers than the federal government? No. They're the same people. California is one of the big US wealth engines.
by vjk800 | 2025-12-30 10:46:58+00:00
Speakers haven't gotten a lot cheaper either. Almost every other kind of technology has fallen in price a lot. A good (single) speaker, though, costs a few hundred euros, which is the same it has pretty much always costed. You'd think that the scales of manufacturing the (good) speakers would bring the costs down, but apparently this hasn't happened for whatever reason.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-30 10:47:01+00:00
That's not really necessary, though I understand why banks are doing this when they're held responsible for their customers' inability to spot fraud before hitting the "transfer my life savings into a Bitcoin wallet" button.

Having a dedicated "banking device" is a good solution for power users, though I'd probably just switch banks if my bank tries to pull that bullshit on me.
by eru | 2025-12-30 10:47:05+00:00
I'm fairly sure this was not a pump-and-dump.

My evidence is that in America people sue for these things left and right all the time. It's a popular pastime for lawyers to get a class action lawsuit for securities fraud together. But as far as I can tell, Musk / Tesla weren't convicted of these things in conjunction with the sale of Tesla stock to buy Twitter.
by hansmayer | 2025-12-30 10:47:46+00:00
I am a bit tired of explaining, but I run my own company, so its not like I have to fear my "roles and responsibilities" changing - I am designing them myself. I also am not a general skeptic of the "YAGNI" type - my company and myself have been early adopters on many trends. Those that made sense of course. We also tried to be early adopters of LLMs, all the way since 2021. And I am sorry if that sounds arrogant to you, but anyone still working on them and with them to me looks like the folks who were trying to build computers and TVs with the vaccuum tubes. With the difference that vaccuum tubes computers were actually useful at the time.
by hkt | 2025-12-30 10:48:02+00:00
Visa and MasterCard, for a start: if a bank issues any kind of commonly accepted debit card to someone who is sanctioned then what is at stake is that bank's ability to continue issuing those cards. Realistically, the bank would be destroyed by being excluded from payment networks and card issuance. So only very little banks that don't interact with anything American (you might manage this with a credit union in the UK, potentially) would be your best bet.
by trashb | 2025-12-30 10:49:27+00:00
I agree the ELIZA effect is strong, additionally I think it is some kind of natural selection.

I feel like LLM's are specifically selected to impress people that have a lot of influence. People like investors and CEO's. Because a "AI" that does not impress this section of the population does not get adopted widely.

This is one of the reasons I think AI will never really be an expert as it does not need to be. It only needs to adopt a skill (for example coding) to pass the examination of the groups that decide if it is to be used. It needs to be "good enough to pass".
by master_crab | 2025-12-30 10:49:29+00:00
Of all the victims, people should have the least sympathy on taxation (double or otherwise) on the estate. The US (federal - states have different limits) already sets the minimum threshold for estate tax collection at about $14 million. At that level, we dont, and should not care about double, triple, or n-level taxation on the estate (which is what it sounds like you are implying).
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-30 10:50:04+00:00
This is "protect the users from themselves" as-a-feature to prevent scammers from using malware to obscure their scams. Letting the user override the warning would make the entire feature useless.

Using overlay permissions, it's relatively simple to trick someone into transferring money by overlaying a different UI that the malicious app makes the user type or paste into. I believe blocking access to the app while such an overlay is present makes a lot of sense. Trusting apps from Google Play to do this while blocking other install sources would be an obvious mistake, though.

I'd argue this feature shouldn't exist (because of things like the API you mention) but having a user override doesn't make sense here.
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-30 10:50:43+00:00
> are these tools really that hard to use?

Exactly! If people have 'never felt this far behind' and the LLM's are that good. Ask the LLM to teach you.

Like so many articles on 'prompt engineers' this (never felt this behind) take too is laughable. Programmers having learnt how to program (writing algorithms, understanding data structures, reading source code and API docs) are now completely incapable of using a text box to input prompts? Nor can they learn how to quickly enough! And it's somehow more difficult than what they have routinely been doing? LOL
by antonvs | 2025-12-30 10:50:57+00:00
The title should be more like "Juniors shouldn't rely entirely on VS Code." The author wrote:

> "I've seen countless junior developers freeze when their IDE isn't available or when they need to work on a remote server."

This is a valid point: juniors are limiting themselves if they rely on an IDE for everything, to the point of not being able to perform coding-related operations from the terminal effectively, or not even being aware of what the IDE is doing for them.

But once you have that knowledge, using an IDE tends to make a lot of sense. That also allows you to make an informed choice about which operations make sense in an IDE vs. the terminal.

Also VS Code has a good integrated terminal, so it's not an entirely either-or choice. Some of the new AI coding assistants integrate terminal operations with VS Code very well. The real advice should be learn both.
by sdoering | 2025-12-30 10:51:33+00:00
Imagine me standing next to the fence of the White House, calling the Meta Office. "I am calling from the White House", while technically true would be a lie, as my intent would be to make the other person believe something that isn't true, that I would be calling in some kind of official role.

So the statement does not necessarily be false to be a lie - if the intent is to deceive.
by mekoka | 2025-12-30 10:52:12+00:00
Indeed, discussions on LLMs for coding sound like what you would expect if you asked a room full of people to snatch up a 20 kg dumbbell once and then tell you if it's heavy.

> I think the real risk is that dumping out loads of boilerplate becomes so cheap and reliable that people who can actually fluently design coherent abstractions are no longer as needed.

Cough front-end cough web cough development. Admittedly, original patterns can still be invented, but many (most?) of us don't need that level of creativity in our projects.
by mamonster | 2025-12-30 10:52:19+00:00
>Swiss law requires one bank (Postfinance) to offer banking irregardless but if you are sanctioned you can't use the wire system, no other currencies, no credit cards and you cant use Twint either so it's in effect useless. You can't pay for your health insurance or rent.

What's funny is that this particular jurispudence was actually enforced due to a Russian oligarch (Vekselberg) on a C permit.

I am not sure regarding the rent and the health insurance, the health insurance especially as it is a legal requirement.
by debois | 2025-12-30 10:52:38+00:00
I agree that Google (and in the above comment MS) failed to fulfill their lofty promises (“don’t be evil” etc.)

But the blame is on us: we should have known better than to entrust our data to free services run by a company whose entire revenue comes from ads.

Proton is funded by our subscription payments. I think there’s reasonable hope that their incentives will remained aligned with those of their paying users.
by barishnamazov | 2025-12-30 10:53:16+00:00
The author touches on performance & understanding tools, which are mostly valid points (though not very important when existing tools are already good). But for me, the friction of VS Code is more cognitive than computational. I call it the "searching with your eyes" [0] problem.

VS Code's heavy reliance on the file explorer tree forces you to constantly visually scan nested directories to navigate. When I switched to Neovim (with Telescope/jump lists), I moved from visual scanning to mental mapping. I don't look for where a file is; I type what the file is. It sounds subtle, but removing that micro-latency of "eye-to-mouse-to-tree" keeps you in the flow state much longer.

[0] https://barish.me/blog/stop-searching-with-your-eyes/
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-30 10:53:18+00:00
> because of selection effects

We're literally measuring a selection effect: that of pursuing a graduate degree.

> there was a study showing that those offered Ivy admission but deciding to go to a state school made just as much

Source?

I'm not rejecting the hypothesis that this is a measurement error. But it's been observed across multiple countries for several generations. The burden of proof is on the hot take that graduate degrees in general are a bad economic bet. (Note: I don't have a PhD. I went to a state school. So you're hypothesis is tempting to believe, hence my scepticism.)
by ant6n | 2025-12-30 10:53:44+00:00
This used to irk me too. And I liked the epic stories that really became mainstream in the 2010s. But the problem is, nowadays the progression in each episode has become minuscule. It’s not an epic told in 15 stories, it’s just one story drawn out in 15 chapters. It’s often just a bridge from one cliffhanger to the next.

For example most of new the Star Trek stuff, none of the episodes stand by themselves. They don’t have their own stories.