MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Incipient | 2025-12-28 10:29:02+00:00
Depends hugely on the task - anywhere from -50% to +1000%. This is copilot in vscode for vuejs+fastapi in docker. The trick is getting the right degree of handsoffness for the task.

I'd say on average, probably around the +100% mark, mostly as a lot of the work I'm doing currently are simpler tasks - "please add another button to do X". The backend logic is simple, and easy to security check.

Where I'm really not sure on productivity is when I get it to help generate tests that involve functionality across multiple domains of the application - possibly +0%.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-12-28 10:29:06+00:00
The golden rule to understand the success of uv is to remind yourself how big and diverse the python community is. Your context is only a tiny fraction of the contexts in which python is going to be executed.

E.G: if you compare it to your machine, it's a different thing that if you compare it to a locked down corporate machines.

I have clients that have Python setup so bad installing all deps for a project takes... 18 minutes. Those are not crazy projects either. It's just the context that is bad. And you won't be able to change the context. But we are in talk to change the package manager to uv.

There are so many different setups that are different than yours. If you are a professional trainer, and you get a new group every week, having 12 people installing their env in a blink is a win. If you are a researcher and you want to download the top 100 pypi packages and attempt to install them, speed is a bliss. If you are a blogger and try a lot of new stuff for an article, it's great. If you are working at repl.io and you get millions of venv created every day, boy does that matter. If you are sysadmin in charge of deploying kub pods, you might be looking at serious savings. Etc.

Speed affects many things:

- CI runs

- AI iterations

- docker builds

- isolated builds over multiple versions of python

But it also unlocks some use cases.

E.G:

- uvx is great only because uv is fast. Because uv calls are virtually instants, using uvx feels like magic.

- "uv run --with" exist only because overlaying a new venv on top of the other is basically free. And it's a killer feature.

- You never create lock files in uv. Because the operation is transparently done in the background since it's so fast. I can't recall the last time I ran uv sync. Because uv run automatically call it, since it's so fast you don't notice. So you just skip the middle man and go straight to coding.

I was a big proponent of "speed is not that important". Until I got speed.

And then I realized I missed a lot, because they are things you just can't do if you are slow.
by sgt101 | 2025-12-28 10:29:46+00:00
There's a loop between adoption of a technology and adaptation of a technology. For some domains that loop is fast, the adaptations prove to be easy and the feedback from adopters is easy to get. For other domains it's slow, especially towards the end of the process of going from something interesting to something useful. A good example of a slow loop is self driving, it's hard to get feedback about self driving in safety critical real world situations... another example is medicine.

The other issue is that the value is more or less all in the LLMs (at the minute). For example, I built a data engineering toolkit using LLMs, it created synthetic data from examples, it created ingestion pipelines given different source filed and a target, it created data test rules. I liked my little toolkit and some people were impressed, but the value was all in the models that underpinned it. The crust of clever bits that added value was thin, very thin. Ok, we used the llms to generate some python that then created the synthetic data and testing rules to reduce costs, we had three or four "agents" that worked together to create the pipelines. We decorated target code with open provenance code to create provanance... But just by saying these things or letting you use the toolkit and you seeing what it made - that's enough for any half competent person to relicate it (with AI assistance) in an afternoon, or maybe a couple of afternoons. Maybe.

So, to create a viable company is going to take significant effort (if you can think of a value add) because the value add still has to be real.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-12-28 10:30:29+00:00
>I also feel that this could maybe contradict what we learned from evolution theory.

It doesn't, but the article doesn't go into this detail, so people unfamiliar with the field wouldn't understand why. The keyword is epigenetics. I.e. how certain genes become activated or deactivated through behaviour and/or environmental influences. But the DNA sequence itself remains unaltered. So no evolution necessary. There are basically a bunch of molecules than sit on top of your DNA that regulate gene expression. They don't just tell a cell to behave like a skin cell or a brain cell, they also regulate the entire cellular metabolism. The discovery that male sperm can also transmit this epigenetic information to offspring is relatively new, but now that we know that, it makes total sense that these gene-expression-modifying behaviours in fathers could affect their children. After all, they simply get to start with a good (or bad) bunch of epigenetic markers. They will not persist across many generations though, so it has no real long term effect on evolution. It may even be an evolved mechanism that allows organisms to respond to environmental changes on timeframes that would be prohibited by evolution.
by saubeidl | 2025-12-28 10:30:35+00:00
There is no left wing politician in power anywhere in the US.

Democrats are a center-right party, they do not argue for any left wing position - like nationalizing industry, abolishing markets etc etc. In Europe, their equivalents in terms of economic policy would be conservative parties like the CDU.

The fact you consider them left wing is only evidence of above overton window shift happening.
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-28 10:30:39+00:00
I was working with Bitcoin in my job back in 2013 when it was around 40-50 USD - if I see the charts today, it makes me cry every day - esp. since I was in that role, on the institutional side - and I didnt believe in it.

(though, I have to admit I was a student back then, but just a few weekends less with the colleagues would have made me a wealthy person)
by empiko | 2025-12-28 10:30:40+00:00
Working as ML engineer/researcher:

- LLMs are absolutely abysmal at PyTorch. They can basic MLP workflows, but that's it more or less. 0% efficiency gained.

- LLMs are great at short autocompletes, especially when the code is predictable. The typing itself is very efficient. Using vim-like shortcuts is now the slower way to write code.

- LLMs are great at writing snippets for tech I am not using that often. Formatting dates, authorizing GDrive, writing advanced regex, etc. I could do it manually, but I would have to check docs, now I can have it done in seconds.

- LLMs are great at writing boilerplate code, e.g. setting up argparse, printing the results in tables, etc. I think I am saving hours per month on these.

- Nowadays I often let LLMs build custom HTML visualization/annotation tools. This is something I would never do before due to time constraints, and the utility is crazy good. It allows my team to better understand the data we are working with.
by IcePic | 2025-12-28 10:31:47+00:00
And if you time travel to the 90s, this is what amiga owners with 1M ram said about PC/Win users needing 8,16,32M of ram to paint a few icons on the monitor.
But noone listened then, because ram was cheap and you should not stand in the way of "progress".

So here we are, needing gigs to paint a single pixel. Congratulations everyone that chose bloat, you won.
by techblueberry | 2025-12-28 10:32:01+00:00
A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a team staffed with ten engineers much less replaced by two seniors and a chatbot, where are these stories coming from?
by nomercy400 | 2025-12-28 10:33:10+00:00
This fix sounds more like a hack.
Effective, but not a long term solution, and it has negative effects like the firewall.

It is almost guaranteed that people will not be able to call, due to firewall blocks or process not running or some other issue.

It feels kind of strange to pull the main feature/usecase of your application out of your application. I would reconsider my design by then.
by rzmmm | 2025-12-28 10:33:51+00:00
> In 2013, meanwhile, researchers in the Netherlands subjected 17 healthy adults to temperatures of 15-16C (59-60.8F) for six hours a day.

It seems that that these articles often discuss cold plunges, cold showers etc. but the rigorous research is often conducted simply via rooms with reduced temperature combined with light clothing.
by barnabee | 2025-12-28 10:34:45+00:00
My objection is that Palantir are close to a US regime that if not actually evil is at times indistinguishable from it.

Combine that with people like Peter Thiel (who has publicly stated beliefs that are deeply incompatible with free and democratic society) in positions of power/influence there, and opening up our citizens' and/or government's data to that company feels particularly risky[0].

So yes, I guess it's "political", but at some level everything is. We don't get to "just" make technology.

[0] Honestly, right now I would put most or all large US tech companies in the same bucket (though for now, less vehemently so) as large Chinese or Russian companies when it comes to sharing nationally important data or assets. We have to assume they're potentially compromised by a government that (by its own statements) can no longer be assumed to remain friendly. Palantir just happens to be both very visible and particularly risky in this regard.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-28 10:36:05+00:00
It’s not about battle testing but that eBPF is has specific restrictions that a) won’t lock up your kernel b) won’t cause a security exploit by being loaded. Now Spectre throws a wrench in things, but the framing is weird; why compare it to eBPF vs just making a mechanism to load kernel modules written in Rust.
by jstummbillig | 2025-12-28 10:36:28+00:00
I don't think it's that different to what I observe in humans I work with. Things that happen regularly (and I have no reason will change in the future):

1) Making the same bad decisions multiple times, and having no recollection of it happening (or at least pretending to have none) and without any attempt to implement measures to prevent it from happening in the future

2) Trying to please people (I read it as: trying to avoid immediate conflict) over doing what's right

3) Shifting blame on a party that realistically, in the context of the work, bears no blame and whose handling should be considered part of the job (i.e. a patient being scared and acting irrationally)
by nosianu | 2025-12-28 10:36:33+00:00
As a former child, I'm not sure I would have wanted the adults mimicking my behavior. Back then I loved the occasions where the adults and us kids got together, such as festivities, and I got to hear their stories. They were all interesting and serious people though, with interesting lives and jobs (I was born in the 1970s and many of the adults had experienced WWII, or, the parents, the hard years following it - I am [East] German). No strange opinions about science or politics.

I think that's similar to when politicians try to "be like the people". I think "normal people", and children, prefer that their "betters" are actually examples of something better.
by Broken_Hippo | 2025-12-28 10:36:38+00:00
If you want AAA games, you are going to have a safe game. You get the same with movies - Bigger budgets cause safer behavior with less risk taking. You wind up with a pretty game, a somewhat safe story (that they think will sell) and gameplay they think is just good enough to keep you going.

It isn't that the other games are bad, though. It isn't like we are talking "handheld camcorder student-written movie" vs "polished hollywood blockbuster" but more.... Beautiful painting by a mostly unknown artist vs beautiful large, publically displayed and privatly funded artist. Big budgets get you more assistance and more/better tools and more space and more human help and more connections.

It is probably important to remember that a large portion of a blockbuster's budget is advertising. Advertising is often 50-100% of the production budget and I'm guessing AAA games have similar advertising budgets. I'm not sure how a large advertising budget gives you better products, though it might get you more folks if your game is online.

Of course, I'm guessing if you limit your search to FPS games, your experience might be a different.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-28 10:39:05+00:00
Another day, another round of this inane "Anthropic bad" bullshit.

This "soul data" doc was only used in Claude Opus 4.5 training. None of the previous AIs were affected by it.

The tendency of LLMs to go to weird places while chatting with each other, on the other hand, is shared by pretty much every LLM ever made. Including Claude Sonnet 4, GPT-4o and more. Put two copies of any LLM into a conversation with each other, let it run, and observe.

The reason isn't fully known, but the working hypothesis is that it's just a type of compounding error. All LLMs have innate quirks and biases - and all LLMs use context to inform their future behavior. Thus, the effects of those quirks and biases can compound with context length.

Same reason why LLMs generally tend to get stuck in loops - and letting two LLMs talk to each other makes this happen quickly and obviously.
by Fizzadar | 2025-12-28 10:40:36+00:00
The key here is a singleton sequencer component that stamps the new versions. There was a great article shared here on similar techniques used in trading order books (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192181).

Agree this is the best solution, I’d rather have a tiny failover period than risk serialization issues. Working with FDB has been such a joy because it’s serializable it takes away an entire class of error to consider, leading to simpler implementation.
by mavamaarten | 2025-12-28 10:40:56+00:00
It's awful :(

I saw a video I wanted to share with someone, but it was part of a compilation. So you just search for it, right?

So I searched "cat lets brick fall onto mouse" and got... 100000 AI generated videos of cats with bricks? And cats with mice and cats being rescued by people (like you said). But not the video I was looking for.

We've totally passed the point where real information is impossible to find anymore. Video generation was really out of reach / delayed for a long time, and honestly all of those probably have a digital watermark in them that could be detected. YouTube could have prevented this if they'd have just been more proactive with detection and filtration. A simple "AI generated" and "not AI generated" filter would have prevented this.
by TZubiri | 2025-12-28 10:42:00+00:00
>paying about $500-600 for a 14 day course. I only co-mentor for 2 days - the days we teach fundamentals of software development and then show how to code with Replit, Bolt, Lovable, Emergent, etc.

Wow.

Do these tools require training to use? Are they not really designed such that a 5 year old can use it? "build me a thing that does Y" style.
by Pooge | 2025-12-28 10:43:20+00:00
I know this is an anecdote and very subjective but I've really never discovered something that I loved with a recommendation algorithm.

Whether it be videos, music, livestreams, books... Everything that I've considered a "10/10" has been recommended by a human or a non-personalized algorithm—such as "Most popular". Whether that's a direct recommendation by a friend, a comment on HackerNews, someone that I already follow that mentioned the thing in question.

My RSS client fetches my YouTube "subscriptions" and it's been years since I've been on the homepage.

Surely I'm not alone but it surely feels like it.
by Karliss | 2025-12-28 10:43:51+00:00
Ligatures like in "stuffing" isn't the worst case for mid ligature styling. You could introduce a split between stuff and ing preventing the forming of ligature and it would likely still look reasonable. That's actually one of the most straight forward things you can do for text layout, split text into runs with same style and then shape each run separately. That's also how you end up with mess shown in Safari screenshot.
In non English scripts where ligatures are less optional things are trickier. Not applying the ligature can significantly affect the look. In some fonts/scripts where ligatures are used for diacritic marks or syllable based combinations of characters into single glyph.

Another aspect of mid ligature color changes is that if you allow color you probably allow any other style change including font size or the font itself, which in turn can have completely different size and shaped glyph for the corresponding ligature and even different set of ligatures. Thus making drawing of corresponding characters as single ligature impossible.

One of the most warranted and also one of the trickiest cases for wanting mid ligature style change is language education materials. You might want to highlight individual subcomponents of complex character combinations to explain rules behind them. For these cases the firefox splitting hack is not good enough. Although it seems like in current version of Firefox on Linux न्हृे is handling much better than in 2019 screenshot. This might be as much as improvement in Firefox and underlying libraries as it was in font. At the end of day if font draws a complex character combination as single shape there is nothing font rendering software can do to correctly split into logical components. Instead of ligatures you can draw such characters as multiple overlapping and appropriately placed glyphs (possibly in combination with context aware substitutions). Kind of like zalgo text, no font has separate glyphs for each letter with every combination of 20 stacked diacritic marks. That way the information about components isn't lost making it technically possible to correctly style each of them, but it's still not easy.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-12-28 10:44:42+00:00
It will probably get displaced but it will take another 20 years of enshittification and a new generation thinking differently.

But it is more sticky than say a social network like FB. Why? You cant split by age. Make a hip Linkedin but the older people you want to impress, work for or sell to wont be there.
Designing Tor-only services by treating privacy as a hard constraint
by onionlab | 2025-12-28 10:45:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m working on OnionLab, an experimental ecosystem of services built around a strict constraint:

All user-facing services are accessible exclusively via Tor (.onion).
Clearnet is used only to publish static, official information.

This is not because Tor is a “feature”, but because treating privacy as a hard constraint
simplifies some design decisions while making others explicit.

By committing to Tor-only access, we intentionally avoid:
- IP-based assumptions
- user tracking or profiling
- identity binding through accounts or social graphs

Instead, we focus on:
- minimal and explicit state
- short-lived session state only where strictly required
- cryptographic verification (PGP) rather than identity claims
- append-only records instead of mutable histories

One example is OnionLab Trust, which records references
(e.g. URLs, onion services, external account identifiers)
declared by PGP key holders.

Trust does not verify ownership, legitimacy, or truth.
It only guarantees that a reference was registered or updated
by the holder of a specific PGP private key.

The goal is not to create authority, but to allow others to observe
continuity and intent over time without weakening anonymity.

I’m sharing this here not as a product launch,
but as a concrete exploration of what service design looks like
when privacy is treated as a non-negotiable requirement.

I’d be interested in hearing from people who have built Tor-only systems,
or who considered this approach and decided against it.

Thanks for reading.
by scaramanga | 2025-12-28 10:45:13+00:00
Billionaires have sabotaged pretty much every aspect of life by using their enormous wealth, power, and influence to hijack our public institutions. They're destroying our country and our way of life. We don't have to bend over passively to receive a shafting.

The insinuation is that they'll use their market position and political influence to extract funds for costly products and services that should be being spent on improving the NHS instead, happily driving the NHS towards a crisis so that they can privatise it. This is the project, and has always been the project of the billionaires. And even if all the current billionaires die and are replaced tomorrow, it will still be the project of the billionaires who replace them. The only solution is to eradicate billionaires.
by troad | 2025-12-28 10:45:41+00:00
> You're overthinking [noun]

Yes, almost certainly!

> I do some fairly complex stuff with no extra partials. Trick is just always rerender and use hx-select and hx-target to slice out the bits you want to update on the current page.

That is a good trick. My only experience of HTMX in production was a port of some Stimulus code, hence the partials, but your approach is obviously neater.
by ChaosOp | 2025-12-28 10:46:17+00:00
Hey! Thanks for the detailed feedback, really appreciate it.

I agree with you that making games that appease everybody will not work in the long run. Did your friends give any examples of why they hated 75% of the games? Was it too much the same (e.g. too many variations of the Party Car games) or just didn't overall like the competitivness?

Wrt the lag you mentioned, that's interesting if you had such a varied experience in the same network. Is it possible that some had VPN's in use? That could be one explanation for the variance.

Also, not sure if applicable but just putting it out there that I've noticed a bug with Android+Firefox browser where the ping-indicator does not work and keeps showing +1000ms regardless of what the actual ping is. But sounds like that was not the issue here.
by roryirvine | 2025-12-28 10:46:19+00:00
Yes, exactly. Taking mental health leave should be seen as a positive step: an opportunity to overcome whatever difficulties you've been facing, leading to - amongst many other benefits - better performance at work.

Mental health problems are tricky; they tend to creep up on us gradually, and often some form of external trigger is needed in order to prompt us to seek help. So it shouldn't be at all surprising that an employee in receipt of a PIP might take mental health leave as part of a genuine effort to improve their situation.

gp's cynical "counterfactual" suggests that they view PIPs as being purely a sham, intended to always result in dismissal rather than improved performance. Now, that might occasionally be true - but we should be blaming the abusive employer (who is likely acting outside the law) in that situation, not the employee.
by DanexCodr | 2025-12-28 10:46:34+00:00
Most languages force you to choose: either compute everything upfront (O(n) memory) or write complex lazy evaluation code. Coderive gives you declarative intent with automatic optimization. You write what you mean (for i in [0 to 1Qi]), and the runtime figures out the optimal execution strategy. This is like having a JIT compiler that understands mathematical patterns, not just bytecode."