MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dotancohen | 2025-12-09 21:58:48+00:00
I'd love to see more ALTER TABLE functionality, and maybe MERGE, and definitely better JSON validation. None of that warrants a version bump, though.

You know what I'd really like, that would justify a version bump? CRDT. Automatically syncing local changes to a remote service, so e.g. an Android app could store data locally on SQLite, but also log into a web site on his desktop and all the data is right there. The remote service need not be SQLite - in fact I'd prefer postgres. The service would also have to merge databases from all users into a single database... Or should I actually use postgres for authorisation but open each users' data in a replicated SQLite file? This is such a common issue, I'm surprised there isn't a canonical solution yet.
by sebastianconcpt | 2025-12-09 21:59:26+00:00
> Why vibe code with a language that has human convenience and ergonomics in view?

Because you would not be able to audit the code if you don't (you'll be terribly slow to read and understand the inner flows correctly and that's if these aren't so bad that would do you some brain damage).

Dang, AI is pushing us all to become managers.
by pedalpete | 2025-12-09 21:59:27+00:00
I wonder why they added this to the finger rather than adding this capability to the watches they are already making? One handed operation is one reason, though I'd think a UX could be designed to make this an app on the watch, rather than a stand-alone device.

Seems like overkill, particularly when other rings do bio-metric tracking, so is this focused on a big enough problem to want to solve?
by somnium_sn | 2025-12-09 21:59:48+00:00
It has little to do with financing. In addition to the development cost there is now also a membership fee.

What a donation to the Linux foundation offers is ensuring that the trademarks are owned by a neutral entity, that the code for the SDKs and ownership of the organization is now under a neutral entity. For big corporations these are real concerns and that’s what the LF offers.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-12-09 22:00:03+00:00
Disclaimer: not a doctor (obviously), ask someone who is qualified, but this is what the ID doctor told me:

Lyme is a bacterial infection, and can be cured with antibiotics. Once the bacteria is gone, you no longer have Lyme disease.

However, there is a lot of misinformation about Lyme online. Some people think Lyme is a chronic, incurable disease, which they call "chronic lyme". Often, when a celebrity tells people they have lyme disease, this is what they mean. Chronic lyme is not a real thing - it is a diagnosis given to wealthy people by unqualified conmen or unscrupulous doctors in response to vague, hard to pin symptoms
by shaftway | 2025-12-09 22:00:13+00:00
I think everyone uses jj a bit differently. Personally I don't like having a staging area; for me it's an opportunity to forget to add a change to a commit. I don't keep files in my work tree that I'm not going to commit or ignore.

But when I first moved to jj I tried to make it work as closely to git as I could. The model I used back then was to have a commit that I meant to upload eventually, and then a working commit on top of that. Then `git commit --all` was `jj squash` and `git commit foo bar` was `jj squash foo bar`.

Eventually I got lazy. It was an extra command, and I almost never have the situation where I don't want to include a file. In the rare case that I do, I'll create a new commit with `jj new` and squash that file into there (you could have a shortcut for it, but the long form is `jj new -m "foo changes" --no-edit && jj squash --to @+ foo`, and then keep working.
by ebbi | 2025-12-09 22:00:49+00:00
It sounds like a lot of your opinions are formed within a very niche bubble.

Airpods for example - I see them everywhere, and every person I know that uses them, love them! Especially Airpods Pro 2.

iPad - I think the sales figures speak for themselves. It may not be popular among tech people, given they're used to a desktop environment, but I know many people that use iPads and love them.

Apple Watch, I admit is more of a mixed bag among the people I know and spoken to. But I'd say the majority like it, and have bought another one after their first one gave out/upgraded. Again, the sales figures speak for themselves.
by bombcar | 2025-12-09 22:01:14+00:00
WC2, SC1, and things like Heroes III (and somewhat today with Factorio) perfected that 2D art-style. It might not have as many pixels as WC3, but every single one of them was thought about and considered by someone with artistic merit.

It wasn't until nearly 20 years after WC2 that a 3D game got "graphics that look almost 2D in quality (SC3)".

I think it's also very telling that World of Warcraft made infinity money, but World of Starcraft never happened. High fantasy always lends itself to the "I can make a difference as a mortal man" but sci-fi seems to always trend toward "too big for human consumption."
by roxolotl | 2025-12-09 22:01:42+00:00
I think the point is a bit more nuanced and has to do with the authors conception of the self. He argues that even if you got immortality and lived a great life at some point You would stop being You so you might as well have died anyways. I think it’s a bit silly. But if you believe that enough alteration of the self results in its death, a sort of Self of Theseus, then I think it’s a consistent opinion.

> His argument is precise: the desires that give you reason to keep living (he calls them categorical desires) would either eventually exhaust themselves, leaving you in a state of "boredom, indifference and coldness", or they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway. Either way, the You that wanted immortality doesn't get it. You just die from a lack of Self rather than through physical mortality.
by kens | 2025-12-09 22:01:44+00:00
Having given a zillion interviews, I expect that they weren't looking for the One True Answer, but were interested in seeing if you discussed plausible reasons in an informed way, as well as seeing what areas you focused on (e.g., do you discuss compiler issues or architecture issues). Saying "I dunno" is bad, especially after hints like "what about ..." and spouting complete nonsense is also bad.

(I'm just commenting on interviews in general, and this is in no way a criticism of your response.)
by observationist | 2025-12-09 22:01:48+00:00
Economists are a short hop up from astrology along the line of how much science things are.

The entire field is five nines of vibe, with an occasional legitimate universal mathematical insight.

If economology were practical and useful, economists would be rich from successfully modeling markets and economies and arbitraging asynchronous information advantages. Instead, the economists that get rich do so by prognosticating and pontificating.

This guy's pet theory probably wasn't viewed as compatible with anything OpenAI wanted to be doing.

If your theory or perspective runs against the commodification of human level AI, then you probably aren't going to be a great fit at any of the big AI labs.
by zmmmmm | 2025-12-09 22:02:21+00:00
> I don't want to be tied to just one model.

Very much this for me - I really don't get why, given a new models are popping out every month from different providers, people are so happy to sink themselves into provider ecosystems when there are open source alternatives that work with any model.

The main problem with Aider is it isn't agentic enough for a lot of people but to me that's a benefit.
by twoodfin | 2025-12-09 22:02:38+00:00
I’m much more optimistic on device-side matmul. There’s just so much of it in aggregate and the marginal cost is so low especially since you need to drive fancy graphics to the screen anyway.

Somebody will figure out how to use it—complementing Cloud-side matmul, of course—and Apple will be one of the biggest suppliers.
by CaliforniaKarl | 2025-12-09 22:02:43+00:00
IMO, this article is written weirdly, so have the main quote:

During an interview with CTV News, Canadian immigration law specialist Warren Creates said: “The adjudication at the border is a lot more thorough, a lot more detailed, and perhaps at times a lot more hostile. It’s (...) because there are fewer travelers. Which means these same officers have more time to spend on each examination, that is to say, each person presenting in front of them.”

Personally, I don't know if that's the case: If CBP are told to be more thorough, then I'd expect them to be more thorough, regardless of how that affects the number of vehicles processed per unit time.
by bigiain | 2025-12-09 22:02:52+00:00
Awww man - I miss n-gate.

I hope whoever they are is doing well. I like to think they're "recovered" in the alt.sysadmin.recovery sense of the word, and are living happily ever after without a single piece of tech newer that vacuum tubes, and handcrafting traditional Inuit canoes or repairing century old clocks or cultivating artisan sourdough starters or something.
by black3r | 2025-12-09 22:02:54+00:00
> Development stared in the first months of 1995, and the game was released in North America and Australia on December 9, 1995.

This feels absolutely insane for today's standards. And not just in the gaming world. Somehow with all the advancement of libraries, frameworks, coding tools, and even AI these days, development speeds seem so much slower and it seems like too much time is spent on eye candy, monetization and dark patterns and too few times on things people actually like to see - that's what made us buy games and software in the old days.

(But also in the gaming world, especially the past few years when almost no game studio develops its own engine, assets don't look more detailed than what was used 3 years ago, stories seem hastily written and it feels like 80% of developer's time is spent on making cosmetic items for purchase which often cost more than the base game price)

Also somehow we spend lots of times researching UX and developing tutorials (remember when software had the "?" button next to the close button and no software "tutorials" were needed?) and yet all the games and software are harder to learn than what we had in the 90s and 00s.
by s17n | 2025-12-09 22:02:59+00:00
Idk why the author thinks that C would be a better language than Rust for vibe coding. Intuitively, I would have thought that the more formal constraints the system imposes, the better for vibe coding (since the more powerful static checks make it harder to write incorrect code).

Of course in practice I think the author is actually correct - LLM's struggle more than humans with sophisticated formal constraints and less than humans with remembering to write a bunch of boilerplate. But I think it's a pretty counterintuitive result and I'd love to have seen more discussion of it.
by jasoneckert | 2025-12-09 22:03:02+00:00
From my experience as a Canadian who has travelled to both the US and within Canada recently, I find that two of the bold statements made in this article are simply not true:

#1 "Many Reddit users in Canada have been claiming they can no longer afford domestic travel. This has created a paradoxical situation in which flying to Europe can be cheaper than traveling to a different Canadian province." Flights in Canada this year are a bit cheaper than I've seen them in a while. I actually scored a last-minute flight to Calgary from Toronto for $94 in August (return trip was double - also a last minute deal). Gas is cheaper as well (for road trips!).

#2 "Still, the more detailed border controls are only one of the ways Canadians are also experiencing the consequences of the travel boycott." I have yet to experience a delay at the border that is much longer than what I would have expected on average over the last 2 decades.

That said, my desire to travel to the US for pleasure has definitely nosedived this year given the political climate and statements made by the current US administration. And I'm not alone - most Canadians feel as if they are not welcome in the US from this messaging. In other words, you won't find MAGA merch in Canada... but you will find MAGBA (Make America Great Britain Again) merch, because we haven't lost our sense of humour!
by GeekyBear | 2025-12-09 22:03:17+00:00
The thing that people seem to have forgotten is that the companies that previously attempted to monetize data center based voice assistants lost massive amounts of money.

> Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year... “Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather.” Those questions aren’t monetizable.

Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google Assistant business model last month. There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make, and all of Google’s attempts to monetize assistants with display ads and company partnerships haven’t worked. With the product sucking up server time and being a big money loser, Google responded just like Amazon by cutting resources to the division.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

Moving to using much more resource intensive models is only going to jack up the datacenter costs.
by akudha | 2025-12-09 22:03:37+00:00
One of my colleagues (he is in his mid forties now) joked that he was raised by TV, not his parents. I suppose today’s kids are raised by social media. It is super easy to give an iPad to a 10 year old, so they don’t bother you while you’re working. Feels like parenting is a bit outsourced to electronics and the internet
by WorldPeas | 2025-12-09 22:03:42+00:00
I think it's closer in proximity to the "glasshole" trend, where there social pressure actually worked to make people feel less comfortable about using it publicly. This is an entirely vibes based judgement, but presenting unaltered ai speech within your own feels more imposing and authoritative(as wagging around an potentially-on camera did then). This being the norm on other platforms has degraded my willingness to engage with potentially infinite and meaningless streams of bloviation rather than the (usually) concise and engaging writings of humans
by lunar_mycroft | 2025-12-09 22:03:50+00:00
Some (partial) counter points:

- I think given public available metrics, it's clear that this isn't translating into more products/apps getting shipped. That could be because devs are now running into other bottlenecks, but it could also indicate that there's something wrong with these studies.

- Most devs who say AI speeds them up assert numbers much higher than what those studies have shown. Much of the hype around these tools is built on those higher estimates.

- I won't claim to have read every study, but of the ones I have checked in the past, the more the methodology impressed me the less effect it showed.

- Prior to LLMs, it was near universally accepted wisdom that you couldn't really measure developer productivity directly.

- Review is imperfect, and LLMs produce worse code on average than human developers. That should result in somewhat lowered code quality with LLM usage (although that might be an acceptable trade off for some). The fact that some of these studies didn't find that is another thing that suggests there shortcomings in said studies.
by evanelias | 2025-12-09 22:03:58+00:00
So on the one side, we have a famous widely-respected 70-year-old software engineer with a lengthy wikipedia bio and history of industry-impactful accomplishments. His statements on depreciation here are aligned with things that have been discussed on HN numerous times from my recollection; here are a couple discussions that I found quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29005669 (search "depreciation"), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45310858

On the other side, we have the sole comment ever by a pseudonymous HN user with single-digit karma.

Personally I'll trust the former over the latter.
by polivier | 2025-12-09 22:04:15+00:00
> And that's the real problem for the nay-sayers. They know that they don't have to live forever if they don't want to. They just don't want other people to live forever. They want to live in a world where other people die.

If one can make a good argument that people living forever would have too many downsides in the long run, one might reasonably not want others to live forever. This is similar to environmental policies. Even though one may not live through most downsides of current bad environmental policies, one may still want good environmental policies for the sake of their children.
by themadturk | 2025-12-09 22:05:05+00:00
I don't miss cassettes, but they were an important thing to me in the 1980s. When my wife and I got married we were as poor as could be. Our first stereo was a little radio/cassette deck with four inch speakers. We played a lot of cassettes on that thing.

I moved to digital players as soon as I could afford them. The most memorable (before the iPod) was the Creative Nomad with its 5GB hard drive. It was too big to fit easily in my jacket pocket, but I shoved it in there anyway. I didn't have to choose the tapes I had on my long bus commute anymore. And when the second-gen iPod came along, it was like heaven.

I'd never go back to cassette...but it was great when there was little else available.
by yesb | 2025-12-09 22:05:08+00:00
IIRC it was originally built for Saturn and there were a number of graphical downgrades in the conversion to PS1 along with reduced sound quality. Loss of shadows on 3d buildings, loss of various 2d effects, issues with textures, less stable frame-rate, maybe more that super fans have documented online. It also came with a couple minor upgrades e.g. better video bitrate. Nothing is different enough to affect playing the game. The completion of the English patch is relatively recent so that probably explains the renewed interest in the Saturn version.

The HD version spruces up the PS1 version but didn't go as far as restoring everything lost from the Saturn one.

So none are really definitive but the Saturn version is usually said to be the best. The PS1 has the advantage of greater availability and can be emulated on a potato. And the HD one is on sale for modern consoles.
by charlesbarbier | 2025-12-09 22:05:09+00:00
I didn't express myself well but what I meant by force is that by building a standardized to automate way manage certificate, ACME imposed itself and became mandatory.

Previously, most CA had no programmatic way to order certificate, it was all done manually.

As far as I know, the only providers with that would let you automate certificate provisioning at the time where Comodo, GlobalSign and Digicert.

They all had their own quirky API. Just to give you an idea, we ended up selecting GlobalSign at Shopify a few years before LetsEncrypt, and it was this SOAP nightmare: https://www.globalsign.com/en/repository/GlobalSign_Client_A...

At first none of them were warm at the idea of providing an ACME endpoint. I'm assuming part of it is the cost of implementing it but they probably liked the stickiness of their custom APIs too tied to million dollars contracts.

Nowadays they all implement ACME. At some point, they where effectively forced to implement it to acquire new customers and keep their existing base around because nobody would accept poorly designed custom made protocol anymore.
by simonw | 2025-12-09 22:05:33+00:00
I've vibe coded a few things in C now as experiments, but I haven't been brave enough to put any of them into production code yet. I don't trust myself to review them properly.

C extensions for SQLite: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/23/building-c-extensions-...

This one is closest to something I might use because it's C compiled to WebAssembly, so the blast radius for any dumb bugs is strictly limited: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/cmarkgfm-in-pyo...
by NickC25 | 2025-12-09 22:05:35+00:00
The idea is that tracking it is effectively impossible for a foreign government...and we've made that whole infrastructure incredibly easy via making it legal for LLCs to purchase homes. We don't prevent foreigners from forming LLCs, and often times there are brokers that make their vig on doing just that for wealthy foreigners - they set up a myriad of LLCs to protect the identity of a buyer, who then drops $1mm+ on a property that they will never actually use in a country they will likely never visit.

Plus, to buy stocks or ETFs or bonds or whatever, you have to register with a broker, who has to legally report each sale and transaction to the government. The point isn't the liquidity. The point is that a family can drop 200k-500k in a pretty stable asset in an incredibly less volatile environment and effectively not report it. That is worth it in the age of hyperinflation in LatAm economies. Plus, if the unit in question is in a decent location, they can escape at the first sign of trouble.
by rudimentary_phy | 2025-12-09 22:05:38+00:00
I wish I could convey my thoughts that well!

On the topic: I feel like we still need at least a few more innovations in the space before we can rely on them to work in areas where we as humans still have trouble (that pesky training data!). Even when providing documentation, I still find LLMs to often have trouble creating code in newer versions of libraries.

My biggest fear with LLMs is that it will steer a lot of development into a more homogenous space over time (even just with the types and versions of libraries it chooses when vibing).
by crest | 2025-12-09 22:05:44+00:00
My best improvment was just bit-interleaving both axes of a 2x32bit integer coordinate (aka z-curve). I obtained factor ~100x (yes factor not percent) throughput improvement over locality in only one dimension. All it took was ~10 lines of bit twiddling. The runtime went from a bit above 300ms to slightly less then 3ms.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-12-09 22:05:57+00:00
I think it was a lot earlier than 2013 - SSL was inevitable by the late 2000's, as soon as major ISPs decided they could make more money by injecting ads into http connections (e.g., [1]). It obviously took a while for the infrastructure to scale up ... but I'd imagine that concerns about stolen ad impressions drove a lot more HTTPS adoption than concerns about the NSA.
by TrnsltLife | 2025-12-09 22:06:07+00:00
This writer has lost the plot. Humans have been storing up for winter for millennia. The author wants us to live in a magic fairy tale where heat in the winter "just happens", and in fact, fairy tale style, a friendly woodcutter shows up to cut firewood for you in this article, but somehow that's a sign of societal collapse. The author needs to get out and not touch grass, but touch a tree, and maybe chop it down.
by keeda | 2025-12-09 22:06:31+00:00
I feel like this bubble actually has two bubbles happening:

1. The infra build out bubble: this is mostly the hypescalers and Nvidia.

2. The AI company valuation bubble: this includes the hyperscalers, pure-play AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and the swarm of startups that are either vaporware or just wrappers on top of the same set of APIs.

There will probably be a pop in (2), especially the random startups that got millions in VC funding just because they have a ".ai" in their domain name. This is also why the OpenAI and Anthropic are getting into the infra game by trying to own their own datacenters, that may be the only moat they have.

However, when people talk about trillions, it's mostly (1) that they are thinking of. Given the acceleration of demand that is being reported, I think (1) will not really pop, maybe just deflate a bit when (2) pops.
by carsoon | 2025-12-09 22:06:42+00:00
I think even when this is used they should include "(translated by llm)" for transparency. When you use a intermediate layer there is always bias.

I've written blog articles using HTML and asked llms to change certain html structure and it ALSO tried to change wording.

If a user doesn't speak a language well, they won't know whether their meanings were altered.