MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eichin | 2025-12-23 19:26:20+00:00
Usually I watch your stuff very closely (and positively) because you're pushing the edges of how LLMs can be useful for code (and are a lot more honest/forthwright than most enthusiasts about it Going Horribly Wrong and how much work you need to do to keep on top of it.) This one... looks like a crossbar of random things that don't seem like things anyone would actually want to do? Mentioning the sandboxing bit in the first post would have helped a lot, or anything that said why that particular modes are interesting.
by koolba | 2025-12-23 19:26:20+00:00
I can see this being a HomeJoy style situation (coincidentally actually backed by YC…), where they claim to clean up all your sloppy code for $40, burn through some more VC (extra funny as it’d be spending one VC’s money to try to clean up another VC’s mistakes), give up on AI and evolve into the usual outsourced body shop, and finally fold when everybody involved realizes the business model is not solvent.
by dijit | 2025-12-23 19:26:33+00:00
I work in gamedev, historically AAA gamedev.

If you think that the programmers are unmotivated (lazy) or incompetent; you’re wrong on both counts.

The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets.

The issue is that games have such high expectations that they didn’t have before.

There are very few “yearly titles” that allow you to nail down the software in a nicer way over time, its always a mad dash to get it done, on a huge 1000+ person project that has to be permanently playable from MAIN and where unit/integration tests would be completely useless the minute they were built.

The industry will end, but not because of “lazy devs”, its the ballooned expectations, stagnant revenue opportunity, increased team sizes and a pathological contingent of people using games as a (bad) political vehicle without regard for the fact that they will be laid off if they can’t eventually generate revenue.

—-

Finally, back in the early days of games, if the game didn’t work, you assumed you needed better hardware and you would put the work in fixing drivers and settings or even upgrading to something that worked. Now if it doesn’t work on something from before COVID the consensus is that it is not optimised enough. I’m not casting aspersions at the mindset, but it’s a different mentality.
by zahlman | 2025-12-23 19:26:34+00:00
> Yeah but it's very different from tests vrs code though, right? Every entry has two sides at least and you do it together, they are not independent like test and code.

The point of the current thread is that the use of AI coding agents threatens to disrupt that. For example, they could observe a true positive test failure and opt to modify the test to ensure a pass instead.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-12-23 19:26:56+00:00
My family cost 1000/month for each person and we have a 10k cross family out of pocket max. Have a kid or two means more than 50k a year. Only some can afford this if you're paying it for yourself. We chose to go cobra instead of ACA last year. If I wasn't in the software engineer world I wouldn't be able to continue.
by kbelder | 2025-12-23 19:27:21+00:00
Oh, they'll do that anyway, once they find the workaround (Oh... you can paste a credit card if you put periods instead of dashes! Oh... I have to save the file and do it from my phone! Oh... I'll upload it as a .txt file and change the extension on the server!)

It's purely illusory security, that doesn't protect anything but does levy a constant performance tax on nearly every task.
by duskwuff | 2025-12-23 19:27:27+00:00
The swirly background (especially on the main screen), shiny card effects, and the CRT distortion effect would be genuinely difficult to implement on a system from that era. Balatro does all three with a couple hundred lines of GLSL shaders.

(The third would, of course, be redundant if you were actually developing for a period 486. But I digress.)
by tharkun__ | 2025-12-23 19:27:37+00:00
Except when it doesn't. I can't upgrade my Intel graphics drivers to any newer version than what came with the laptop or else my laptop will silently die while asleep. Internet is full of similar reports from other laptop and graphics manufacturers and none have any solutions that work. The only thing that reliably worked is to restore the original driver version. Doesn't matter if I use the WHQL version(s) or something else.
by owenversteeg | 2025-12-23 19:28:06+00:00
I don't know when you want to define as the start of the microchip age (50s? 60s?) but the Soviets were always behind the Americans in advanced manufacturing. In 1931 Stalin said "We are 50–100 years behind the advanced countries" [1.] In WW2 the Soviets relied on the US for advanced machine tools and in 1943 Stalin said: "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war." Khrushchev echoed this in his 1964 memoirs and there is a 1963 recording of Zhukov concurring. Now onto the 50s; the US invents NC machines, transistor manufacturing, chemical processing, miniaturization. The Soviets really only have the lead here in a few metal-related subjects: titanium production and rocket engine metallurgy. This is probably the closest the Soviets came; at this point they did indeed mass produce more tonnage of simple heavy machinery, but cannot mass-produce almost _anything_ cutting edge; look at their cars or consumer electronics of this time period. Onto the sixties; now the gap widens once more, the US pulls far ahead with ICs, microelectronics, CNC manufacturing, advanced alloys and composites, extreme precision manufacturing and precision manufacturing on a large scale. Look at the Saturn V vs the N1 or anything else in the aerospace/space industry at the time; the US was lightyears ahead. They could do things the Soviets could not even dream about. By the 70s the game was lost entirely; the US had advanced electronics manufacturing on a massive scale, laser cutting, even wider deployment of CAD/CAM, and was building the Space Shuttle. The Soviets essentially stagnated and were relegated to making cheap copies years later that looked similar but didn't work well in practice; see the Buran, TU-144, etc.

The reality is that the Soviets never really managed cutting-edge mass manufacturing. There are only a few countries that have: first Britain from the screw-cutting lathe in 1800, then the US, then later Japan, Germany, China, Taiwan and South Korea. In 225 years it's a fairly short list of countries, and most only made the list for a few decades!

The closest the Soviets ever came, of course, was aerospace, but to use that as an example of advanced manufacturing leadership would be a stretch. Sputnik was impressive, but advanced manufacturing it was certainly not; it was a simple sphere with a simple radio transmitter. Look at the tolerances, finishes, materials, manufacturing methods, etc of N1 vs Saturn V, Buran vs the Space Shuttle, TU-144 vs the Concorde.

[1] https://www.hrono.info/libris/stalin/13-18.php - fascinating speech by Stalin on industrialization in 1931
by claar | 2025-12-23 19:28:19+00:00
I think many subscribe to this philosophy: https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-...

Your github research/ links are an interesting case of this. On one hand, late AI adopters may appreciate your example prompts and outputs. But it feels like trivially reproducible noise to expert LLM users, especially if they are unaware of your reputation for substantive work.

The HN AI pushback then drowns out your true message in favor of squashing perceived AI fluff.
by bitbuilder | 2025-12-23 19:28:27+00:00
I'm not sure that's a valid analogy. Light, composition and creativity are all experienced directly by viewer, and essentially describe what it is that we notice and appreciate in photography (even if subconciously). The best analogy I can think of to programming is the UX/UI of the application. Given equaly competent developers, nobody is going to notice or care if your application was written in Rust or Cold Fusion.

But the original analogy is flawed too. I wouldn't consider caring about the craft of programming to be similar to obsessing over your photography equipment. GAS is about consumerism and playing with gadgets, at the end of the day.

Caring about the craft of programming is more about being an artist who takes pride in crafting something beautiful, even if they're the only ones experiencing it. I am most definitley not one of those programmers, but have always had nothing but immense respect for those that are.
by bogwog | 2025-12-23 19:28:38+00:00
Valve has a weird obsession with maximizing their profit-per-employee ratio. There are stories from ex-employees out on the web about how this creates a hostile environment, and perverse incentives to sabotage those below you to protect your own job.

I don't remember all the details, but it doesn't seem like a great place to work, at least based on the horror stories I've read.

Valve does a lot of awesome things, but they also do a lot of shitty things, and I think their productivity is abysmal based on what you'd expect from a company with their market share. They have very successful products, but it's obvious that basically all of their income comes from rent-seeking from developers who want to (well, need to) publish on Steam.
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-23 19:28:41+00:00
This isn’t the real “why”. Holding the release back is a political decision. Why hold the story specially? Why not just issue any corrections later? It’s already gone through the same approval process other stories would. The choice to do something different here and treat Trump-damaging stories differently is by definition, biased.

To me, Bari’s response is a manufactured cover up. I’ve followed Bari for years and seen the progression from someone who was a balanced moderate to someone who is slowly developing a strong bias and letting the mask off a little bit at a time. The recent Turning Point townhall was the first big revelation of her bias to the public. But as someone who subscribed to her for years, I’ve seen the progression over time. And the language in here feels less like her usual journalism and more like something carefully put together to deflect.

As for the actual reason - here is what was shared by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Stelter

https://x.com/brianstelter/status/2002943384499925159
by square_usual | 2025-12-23 19:28:47+00:00
Every now and then someone posts the "X programmers (implied good) hate AI, Y programmers (implied bad) hate AI!" and every time people come out of the woodwork to point out that, no, X programmers can also use AI to take out things they can delegate and focus on stuff that's cool. Case in point, Steve Klabnik, a programmer who nobody can say doesn't care about the craft, is working on a new language primarily with AI: https://rue-lang.dev/
by tinco | 2025-12-23 19:29:06+00:00
The GP was talking about Unreal Engine 5 as if that engine doesn't optimize for low end. That's a wild take, I've been playing Arc Raiders with a group of friends in the past month, and one of them hadn't upgraded their PC in 10 years, and it still ran fine (20+ fps) on their machine. When we grew up it would be absolutely unbelievable that a game would run on a 10 year old machine, let alone at bearable FPS. And the game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-12-23 19:29:22+00:00
In order:

- People wanting more memory is not a novel feature. I am excited to find out how many people immediately want to disable the AI nonsense to free up memory for things they actually want to do.

- Same answer.

- I think the drive towards SOCs has been happening already. Apple's M-series utterly demolishes every PC chip apart from the absolute bleeding-edge available, includes dedicated memory and processors for ML tasks, and it's mature technology. Been there for years. To the extent PC makers are chasing this, I would say it's far more in response to that than anything to do with AI.
by to11mtm | 2025-12-23 19:29:39+00:00
I've seen both good and bad contractors in multiple industries.

When I worked in the HFC/Fiber plant design industry, the simple act of "Don't use the same boilerplate MSA for every type of vendor" and being more specific about project requirements in the RFP makes it very clear what is expected, and suddenly we'd get better bids, and would carefully review the bids to make sure that the response indicated they understood the work.

We also had our own 'internal' cost estimates (i.e. if we had the in house capacity, how long would it take to do and how much would it cost) which made it clear when a vendor was in over their head under-bidding just to get the work, which was never a good thing.

And, I've seen that done in the software industry as well, and it worked.

That said, the main 'extra' challenge in IT is that key is that many of the good players aren't going to be the ones beating down your door like the big 4 or a WITCH consultancy will.

But really at the end of the day, the problem is what often happens is that business-people who don't really know (or necessarily -care-) about specifics enough unfortunately are the people picking things like vendors.

And worse, sometimes they're the ones writing the spec and not letting engineers review it. [0]

[0] - This once led to an off-shore body shop getting a requirement along the lines of 'the stored procedures and SQL called should be configurable' and sure enough the web.config had ALL the SQL and stored procedures as XML elements, loaded from config just before the DB call, thing was a bitch to debug and their testing alone wreaked havoc on our dev DB.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-23 19:30:23+00:00
> corporate IT is run by morons

playing devil's advocate for a second, but corpIT is also working with morons as employees. most draconian rules used by corpIT have a basis in at least one real world example. whether that example happened directly by one of the morons they manage or passed along from corpIT lore, people have done some dumb ass things on corp networks.
by adamjs | 2025-12-23 19:30:23+00:00
They might want to check out what VNC has been doing since 1998– keep the client-pull model, break the framebuffer up into tiles and, when client requests an update, perform a diff against last frame sent, composite the updated tiles client-side. (This is what VNC falls back to when it doesn’t have damage-tracking from the OS compositor)

This would really cut down on the bandwidth of static coding terminals where 90% of screen is just cursor flashing or small bits of text moving.

If they really wanted to be ambitious they could also detect scrolling and do an optimization client-side where it translates some of the existing areas (look up CopyRect command in VNC).
by lanstin | 2025-12-23 19:30:34+00:00
I just can’t understand people whose life goal is like to be a CTO by some date; I have never tried for a promotion since I first shifted into a job where I was paid to make software. Due to the random walk of promotion rules (and most likely the good work of bosses that believed in me), I have been promoted enough that I had to put thought leader into my linked in, but I do believe just making sure whatever you are working on is useful and successful to other people is enough worry; if you are skilled in software and thinking, the other things will work them selves out.
by V_Shukla | 2025-12-23 19:30:38+00:00
Fair point, thanks for flagging this. The post isn’t meant to be a historical piece on Coca-Cola itself, but a discussion around design intent and long-term visual consistency in marketing. Coca-Cola’s red is often cited as an example of how consistency compounds brand recognition over time.

I’m exploring this question while building an image workflow tool, where the challenge isn’t generating good-looking visuals, but keeping intent and consistency intact across repeated use.
by epistasis | 2025-12-23 19:31:04+00:00
My worldview is to pursue truth above all else. If that results in arguments, fine, it's a price I'm willing to pay for honesty and reality!

If there was nuance, please provide it. I don't see any in your comment at all, but I dos see lots of generalizations and a very narrow take on the world and where wealth comes from.

I would love nothing more than to improve my world view through argumentation, but that requires providing facts rather than trafficking in the falsehoods of others, like those of DOGE.
by Animats | 2025-12-23 19:31:11+00:00
From the article: "(NVidia) AI data center revenue reached $51.2 billion versus just $4.3 billion from gaming in Q3 2025."

Moore Threads in China just announced a new GPU.[1] Announced, not shipped.

[1] https://wccftech.com/moore-threads-lushan-gaming-huashan-ai-...
by esseph | 2025-12-23 19:31:39+00:00
> Ubuntu just recently got a way to automate its installer (recently being during covid). I think you can do the same on RHEL too. But that's largely it on Linux right now. If you need to admin 10,000+ computers, Windows is still the king.

1. cloud-init support was in RHEL 7.2 which released November 19, 2015. A decade ago.

2. Checking on Ubuntu, it looks like it was supported in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS in April 2018.

3. For admining tens of thousands of servers, if you're in the RHEL ecosystem you use Satellite and it's ansible integration. That's also been going on for... about a decade. You don't need much integration though other than a host list of names and IPs.

There are a lot of people on this list handling tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of linux servers a day (probably a few in the millions).
by trinsic2 | 2025-12-23 19:33:10+00:00
I'm not understanding the need for this? I cant believe i'm parroting corporate lobbyists, but this seems like a solution in search of a problem.

It sounds more like a way to take freedom away from people. Commercial systems are designed in such a way that offering that convenience is at the expense of control and ownership. Just because people trade freedoms for this level of ease, doesn't make it right.
by gamblor956 | 2025-12-23 19:33:28+00:00
It's a good thing you edited for politeness because you seemed to be basing your understanding of what I said based on stuff you read on Reddit.

A number of studies show that, in humans, the keto diet (the medical keto diet[1] and not the meat heavy Internet version) causes metabolic stress in breast cancer cells and in several other types of cancer, due to their significantly increased metabolic needs. It's like the difference between a normal human and Michael Phelps during Olympic competition. The cancer cells can process ketones, but not efficiently enough to fuel their activity so they starve.

In humans this eventually results in the death or deactivation of the cancerous cells (deactivation being the primary way that tumors "adapt" to a starvation diet). There have been few, if any, reported cases of metastasis in the types of cancers studied in humans. This outcome is statistically significant enough that multiple cancer treatment centers recommend the medical keto diet to human patients as part of a treatment regime.

As mentioned, the recent study from 2024 shows that this type of metabolic stress can, in mice cause the cancerous cells to metastasize in a last-ditch attempt to survive. However, very little of the cancer research conducted on mice has applications to human cancers. For example, chemotherapy has also been shown to cause metastasis in mice, and a number of earlier studies attempting to replicate the keto research in humans shows that the keto diet in mice increases tumor growth, which is the opposite effect it has in humans.

[1] The medical keto diet is basically just fat and vitamins. No carbs, and minimal to no protein because protein can get converted into glucose by gluconeogenesis. It is not a diet anyone would want to be on longer than strictly necessary. One of my friends had stage 4 metastatic lung cancer, which she discovered during a company-sponsored mud run. Surgery was not an option and chemotherapy was not working. With less than 4 months to live, she went on the medical keto diet and the two-punch combo of keto and chemo put the cancer into remission for almost three years. (Note: She only maintained the diet for a few months after ending chemo treatment. Unfortunately not all of the cancer cells had died, some had merely deactivated. Four years after remission the cancer cells reactivated with a vengeance and she died the day after she started showing symptoms.)
by lbrito | 2025-12-23 19:34:04+00:00
That's good to know, thank you for the explanation.

Stories don't always get the chance to gather the sufficient amount of up votes before being nipped in the bud by dissatisfied flaggers though, depending on the time of day. Some of them, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887, clearly had great interest here and got a large number of upvotes that was, nonetheless, insufficient to prevent the flagging.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-23 19:34:08+00:00
If Jeff wants to maintain his job of making Youtube videos, youtube itself forces him to make clickbait thumbnails and titles.

They have A/B testing infrastructure available to creators for exactly that purpose.

If you say "Oh but he doesn't have to use that" you are wrong. If a creator's videos get low enough click through and "engagement", youtube just stops showing it to people.

Jeff, like every creator on youtube, is in an antagonistic deathmatch for your attention with people like Mr. Beast, and Youtube would rather five Mr Beasts than a thousand Jeffs. Youtube builds their platform to empower and enrich Mr Beast, and to force everyone else to adopt more of Mr Beasts methods to stay getting views, and getting their paycheck

It does not matter if you are "subscribed" to a channel for example. Youtube will still fail to show you new videos from your subscriptions if you don't play the stupid game enough.

Stop blaming the people who did not at all make this choice. Blame Youtube. Support platforms, like nebula and whatever that guntube service is called, with real money.

Did you know this video existed before it was posted to HN? I did, because it showed up in my feed even though I am not subscribed to jeff, because he plays the game well. I watched it too because I had no idea that weather was causing such a problem in Colorado and love hearing about NIST and the people who basically run the infrastructure of the internet that everyone takes for granted.
by streptomycin | 2025-12-23 19:34:26+00:00
Back when I had a job at a big old corporation, a significant part of my value to the company was that I knew how to bypass their shitty MITM thing that broke tons of stuff, including our own software that we wrote. So I could solve a lot of problems people had that otherwise seemed intractable because IT was not allowed to disable it, and they didn't even understand the myriad ways it was breaking things.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-23 19:34:38+00:00
Yes, and the problem in that picture is the belief (whichever level of the management hierarchy it comes from) that you can introduce technical impediments against every instance of stupidity one by one until morons are no longer able to stupid. Morons will always find a way to stupid, and most organizations push the impediments well past the point of diminishing returns.