MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Stanford's ACE paper was just open sourced
by vmsn | 2025-12-03 22:27:02+00:00
Last month, the SambaNova team, in partnership with Stanford and UC Berkeley, introduced the viral paper Agentic Context Engineering (ACE), a framework for building evolving contexts that enable self-improving language models and agents. Today, the team has released the full ACE implementation, available on GitHub, including the complete system architecture, modular components (Generator, Reflector, Curator), and ready-to-run scripts for both Finance and AppWorld benchmarks. The repository provides everything needed to reproduce results, extend to new domains, and experiment with evolving playbooks in your own applications.
by avazhi | 2025-12-03 22:27:36+00:00
‘LLM tuned GPUs’ are just GPUs. The tuning refers to the models and how they use something like CUDA or whatever. There was a GPU shortage even before LLMs properly burst onto the scene, back with crypto mining. Now, it’s possible TPUs might add a wrinkle to later demand side issues when there is a crash but that will depend on how useful TPUs actually end up being to those outside Google. But GPUs will remain useful, whether it’s for gaming, machine learning (not the AI slop variety of this, but more categorising like for self-driving cars or medical imaging etc), or for the next crypto scam. Surely you agree that powerful computing capacity, independent of AI scams, is here to stay, right?

My main point in arguing that now isn’t like 2000 is that unlike in 2000 we have actual hardware and physical assets underpinning this bubble. In 2000 the assets were literally just imaginary. Yes there is speculation now but it is underpinned by silicon that will still be worth decent money even after LLMs are exposed as a hallucinatory mirage.
by q3k | 2025-12-03 22:28:05+00:00
There's no code review system for Fossil, because the SQLite guy doesn't believe in formalized code review. It also doesn't have any good flow for accepting external contributions other than .patch/bundle files, because the SQLite guy doesn't believe anyone but him is good enough to regularly contribute code.

It might be great for single person projects, which I guess is fine for hobby stuff, but unless you luck out like Richard Hipp and manage to become a well-paid hermit working in a effectively-one-person cathedral model, then it's not really going to work for most projects.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-03 22:28:32+00:00
> It seemed almost inconceivable to them that the problem was EMI from the computer making it into the equipment.

I very much doubt that because audiophiles worries about a lot about both RFI, EMI and unwanted vibrations (I had one where I could hear a very faint metallic noise and it took me weeks to find the cause: a loose screw in the system ceiling a times vibrating a bit, depending on the song / passage in the song / frequencies and slightly touching a metal stud: horrible to diagnose but eventually I found it). For a start.

If you go on audiophile gear shops, you'll find power supply that, supposedly, prevent EMI.

Are RFI issues much more common? Sure. I had one in a previous place where I lived where simply lifting the speakers cable of the wooden floor would remove unwanted sounds: some kind of radio or TV program my cables would pick up. Then suddenly I stopped making fun of people lifting their speakers cable of the ground (but I'll still make fun of those paying $100 per little piece to lift their cables then buying 50 of these).

That said your comment is very interesting. But it also shows that, suddenly, power strips (or others) that try to deal with EMI, balanced cables (between various piece of audio gear), lifting $20 speakers cables off the ground, etc. don't look as idiotic as many make sound (ah ah). EMI, RFI and unwanted vibrations are a thing and they do ruin the listening experience.
by SatvikBeri | 2025-12-03 22:28:41+00:00
I usually run one agent at a time in an interactive, pair-programming way. Occasionally (like once a week) I have some task where it makes sense to have one agent run for a long time. Then I'll create a separate jj workspace (equivalent of git worktree) and let it run.

I would probably never run a second agent unless I expected the task to take at least two hours, any more than that and the cost of multitasking for my brain is greater than any benefit, even when there are things that I could theoretically run in parallel, like several hypotheses for fixing a bug.

IIRC Thorsten Ball (Writing an Interpreter in Go, lead engineer on Amp) also said something similar in a podcast – he's a single-tasker, despite some of his coworkers preferring fleets of agents.
by delaminator | 2025-12-03 22:28:48+00:00
Weird, because I've created a webcam app that does segmentation so they can delete the background and put a new background in I mean, I suppose that's not groundbreaking. But it's not just reading and writing to a database.

I've just added a ATA over Ethernet server in Rust, I thought of doing it in the car on the way home and an hour later I've got a working version.

I type this comment using a voice to text system I built, admittedly it uses Whisper as the transcriber but I've turned it into a personal assistant.

I make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself. and on top of that it does configuration. So I've had it build full wireguard configs that is taking on our pay addresses so that different destinations cause different routing. I don't know how to do that off the top of my head. I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works. It took me an evening of prompting.
by JimDabell | 2025-12-03 22:29:06+00:00
Of course they are. The two things aren’t contradictory at all, in fact one strongly implies the other. If AI is writing 90% of your code, that means the total contribution of a developer is 10× the code they would write without AI. This means you get way more value per developer, so why wouldn’t you keep hiring developers?

This idea that “AI writes 90% of our code” means you don’t need developers seems to spring from a belief that there is a fixed amount of software to produce, so if AI is doing 90% of it then you only need 10% of the developers. So far, the world’s appetite for software is insatiable and every time we get more productive, we use the same amount of effort to build more software than before.

The point at which Anthropic will stop hiring developers is when AI meets or exceeds the capabilities of the best human developers. Then they can just buy more servers instead of hiring developers. But nobody is claiming AI is capable of that so far, so of course they are going to capitalise on their productivity gains by hiring more developers.
by chuckadams | 2025-12-03 22:29:11+00:00
So do we actually get to edit any of the AI code additions or changes or is this just "PR merge hell mode" in Project Manager Simulator? Yes, I could flip over to my editor, but that kind of misses the whole point of the 'I' in "IDE".

I'm team JetBrains4Life when it comes to IDEs, but their AI offerings have been a pretty mixed bag of mixed messages. And this one requires a separate subscription at that when I'm already paying for their own AI product.
by laurencerowe | 2025-12-03 22:29:43+00:00
Cut and cover is still the cheapest way to build subways, but is less often used nowadays because of the surface disruption.

Long before tunnel boring machines existed we needed to develop methods to dig under rivers. Brunel invented the tunnelling shield for digging under the Thames in 1825 and later a more refined version was used to dig the first deep-level tube line which opened in 1890.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnelling_shield
by dgacmu | 2025-12-03 22:29:46+00:00
I'm not a big llm booster, but I will say that they're really good for proof of concepts, for turning detailed pseudocode into code, sometimes for getting debugging ideas. I'm a decade younger than you, but I've programmed in 4GLs (yuch), lived through a few attempts at visual programming (ugh), and ... LLM assistance is different. It's not magic and it does really poorly at the things I'm truly expert at, but it does quite well with boring stuff that's still a substantial amount of programming.

And for the better. I've honestly not had this much fun programming applications (as opposed to students stuff and inner loops) in years.
by faizshah | 2025-12-03 22:29:50+00:00
The parallel agent model is better for when you know the high level task you want to accomplish but the coding might take a long time. You can split it up in your head “we need to add this api to the api spec” “we need to add this thing to the controller layer” etc. and then you use parallel agents to edit just the specific files you’re working on.

So instead of interactively making one agent do a large task you make small agents do the coding while you focus on the design.
by greazy | 2025-12-03 22:29:51+00:00
Absolutely not.

Theres more to the R ecosystem than tidyverse packages. There's a whole suite of absolutely amazing R packages in the bioconductor ecosystem that rival tidyverse in speed and ease of use but targeting other data structures.

Some of the tidyverse packages are over kill and contain lots of foot guns.

I've seen code that was clean get butchered because someone had no idea how to do something basic in base R.

There's also another separate ecosystem for doing stats with their own flavors.
by Retric | 2025-12-03 22:30:08+00:00
It’s the indirect time that’s most at issue here, a friend of mine is happy to take a significant pay cut and work at the VA to avoid the hassle. It’s a government institution and he still feels way more productive and less stressed.

In private practice a physician now needs to handle extra employee(s), there’s often a range of software system issues etc. Even in a hospital setting where other people are handling most of this stuff that’s a long way from zero friction.

The insidious issue is even a 1% drop on doctor efficiency gets magnified by everyone taking a cut of the transaction.
by caconym_ | 2025-12-03 22:30:25+00:00
> Be curious to hear what specifically your company is doing to give people agency.

Wrt. AI specifically, I guess we are simply a) not using AI as an excuse to lay off scores of employees (at least, not yet) and b) not squeezing the employees who remain with arbitrary requirements that they use shitty AI tools in their work. More generally, participation in design work and independent execution are encouraged at all levels. At least in my part of the company, there simply isn't the same kind of miserable, paranoid atmosphere I hear about at MS and Amazon these days. I am not aware of any rigidly enforced quota for PIPing people. Etc.

Generally, it feels like our leadership isn't afflicted with the same kind of desperate FOMO fever other SMEGMAs are suffering from. Of course, I don't mean to imply there haven't been layoffs in the post free money era, or that some people don't end up on shitty teams with bad managers who make them miserable, or that there isn't the usual corporate bullshit, etc.
by r0m4n0 | 2025-12-03 22:30:30+00:00
I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment thread.

I do believe that the product leadership is shoehorning it into every nook and cranny of the world right now and there are reasons to be annoyed by that but there are also countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it every day for.

I need to write about some absolutely life changing scenarios, including: got me thousands of dollars after it drafted a legal letter quoting laws I knew nothing about, saved me countless hours troubleshooting an RV electrical problem, found bugs in code that I wrote that were missed by everyone around me, my wife was impressed with my seemingly custom week long meal plan that fit her short term no soy/dairy allergy diet, helped me solve an issue with my house that a trained professional completely missed the mark on, completely designed and wrote code for a halloween robot decoration I had been trying to build for years, saves my wife hundreds of hours as an audio book narrator summarize characters for her audio books so she doesn't have to read the entire book before she narrates the voices.

I'm worried about some of the problems LLMs will create for humanity in the future but those are problems we can solve in the future too. Today it's quite amazing to have these tools at our disposal and as we add them in smart ways to systems that exist today, things will only get better.

Call me glass half full... but maybe it's because I don't live in Seattle
by dan-bailey | 2025-12-03 22:30:37+00:00
Bicycles are an odd duck where this is concerned -- you go to a department store (no, actually don't) or a bike shop and buy a whole bike as a single assembly. But because there are standards, as others have pointed out re: computers, it's very feasible to just buy all the parts individually and piece together the bike that you want (which is what I do). Honestly, working in a hot (or cold, it is Minnesota, after all) garage, sometimes I question my sanity when I'm assembling these things...but the ability to fine-tune what you want and not be beholden to the standards of some marketing department or the cost-cutting assholes that run private equity funds is quite nice.

Ultimately, I'd love it if there were enough standards out there where I could spec out a car, and have it built up from parts...or just buy a stock one, if that's what I wanted. I feel that way about a lot of products that I interact with -- appliances usually have shitty UX, car software is usually garbage, and I'd love it if I didn't have to rely on DJI for a drone (good luck getting them in the U.S. anymore, anyway).

I think that with any product there's a subset of people who are like, "Eh, good enough," and willing to buy whatever the big manufacturers are pushing, but there's a smaller subset that wants to really dial-in something that fits their needs.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-12-03 22:30:42+00:00
I don't disagree at all (disclaimer: I don't work on VistA, but systems that communicate with VistA... close enough that the "career suicide" phrase hits a little close to home).

I think the bigger problem is that we're not meaningfully grappling with the reality of what it takes to replace legacy government systems.

Another grain of sand on the beach of things that we're completely unequipped to deal with, I guess.
by Karliss | 2025-12-03 22:32:03+00:00
Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term proprietary fork won? Most of the recent variations of this that come to my mind are related to cloud infrastructure. Stuff where you have serious business customers.

And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it. Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing users are already choosing the open source option despite the existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for commercial solutions to exist.

Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.

There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source software with little long term impact.
by izaacdb | 2025-12-03 22:32:06+00:00
| Email | izaac+hn@jackdawtech.co.uk | | Location | London, England | | Remote | Remote preferred or hybrid | | CV: | https://www.izaacbroadbent.com/ | | GitHub: | https://github.com/izaacdb |

Technologies: TypeScript, React, Angular, Next.js, Tailwind, Redux, D3, Node, Python, PHP, Prisma, GraphQL, Apollo, Fastify, NestJS, Express, Django, FastAPI, tRPC, Postgres, MongoDB, AWS, Elasticsearch, Terraform, Serverless, Nx, CloudFlare, LLMs, Deepgram, Embeddings, Vector Databases

15 year Full Stack Engineer:

- Recent focus on AI applications (enterprise and SaaS integrations).

- Founding engineer at a VC backed startup.

- Running a freelancing business for 10 years with great reviews.

- Delivered projects for Google, Lloyds, Barclays, British Airways and H&M.

- Was once a Biochemist

Would love to hear from anyone, but startups and scientific businesses I'd be very interested in. Full time or contracts. Feel free to reach out, always happy to discuss projects.
by qwerpy | 2025-12-03 22:32:07+00:00
Back when iOS and iPad were eating Microsoft's lunch in mobile, Microsoft freaked out and released Windows 8 with that new tiles UI framework ("desktop and tablet are going to converge so we need to dumb down the interface") and the Windows Store that was supposed to be their response to the App Store. Microsoft wanted all future Windows software to be released through the App Store. Of course, this was an existential threat to Valve/Steam, so Valve vociferously pushed back.

The Windows Store and its apps were so bad that Microsoft eventually scaled back their ambitions, but Valve has not forgotten.
by bartread | 2025-12-03 22:32:11+00:00
I've never worked at Microsoft. However, I do have some experience with the company.

I worked building tools within the Microsoft ecosystem, both on the SQL Server side, and on the .NET and developer tooling side, and I spent some time working with the NTVS team at Microsoft many years ago, as well as attending plenty of Microsoft conferences and events, working with VSIP contacts, etc. I also know plenty of people who've worked at or partnered with Microsoft.

And to me this all reads like classic Microsoft. I mean, the article even says it: whatever you're doing, it needs to align with whatever the current key strategic priority is. Today that priority is AI, 12 years ago it was Azure, and on and on. And, yes, I'd imagine having to align everything you do to a single priority regardless of how natural that alignment is (or not) gets pretty exhausting, and I'd bet it's pretty easy to burn out on it if you're in an area of the business where this is more of a drag and doesn't seem like it delivers a lot of value. And you'll have to dogfood everything (another longtime Microsoft pattern) core to that priority even if it's crap compared with whatever else might be out there.

But I don't think it's new: it's simply part and parcel of working at Microsoft. And the thing is, as a strategy it's often served them well: Windows[0], Xbox, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Azure, Sharepoint, Office, etc. Doesn't always work, of course: Windows Phone went really badly, but it's striking that this kind of swing and a miss is relatively rare in Microsoft's history.

And so now, of course, they're doing it with AI. And, of course, they're a massive company, so there will be plenty of people there who really aren't having a good time with it. But, although it's far from a foregone conclusion, it would not be a surprise for Microsoft to come from behind and win by repeating their usual strategy... again.

[0] Don't overread this: I'm not necessarily saying I'm a huge fan. In fact I do think Windows, at is core, is a decent operating system, and has been for a very long time. On the back end it works well, and I have no complaints. But I viscerally despise Windows 11 as a desktop operating system. That's right: DESPISE. VISCERALLY. AT A MOLECULAR LEVEL.
by MichaelNolan | 2025-12-03 22:32:22+00:00
Uber press release - https://www.uber.com/newsroom/avride-on-uber/

AVRide press release - https://medium.com/avride/avride-and-uber-launch-robotaxi-ri...

I’m excited to see this. Ideally we want as many successful (safe) AV companies as possible to avoid a monopoly/duopoly situation.
by oarsinsync | 2025-12-03 22:32:59+00:00
> And have you called a large company for any reason lately? Could be your telco provider, your bank, public transport company, whatever. You call them, because online contact means haggling with an AI chatbot first to finally give up and shunt you over to an actual person who can help, and contact forms and e-mail have been killed off. Calling is not exactly as bad, but step one nowadays is 'please describe what you're calling for', where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably, and then shunt you to an actual person

All of this predates LLMs (what “AI” means today) becoming a useful product. All of this happened already with previous generations of “AI”.

It was just even shittier than the version we have today.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-03 22:33:14+00:00
> And if that's really the case where are the power efficient x86 chips?

Where are the power inefficient x86 chips? If you normalize for production process and put the chips under synthetic load, ARM and x86 usually end up in a similar ballpark of efficiency. ARM is typically less efficient for wide SIMD/vector workloads, but more efficient at idle.

AMD and Intel aren't smartphone manufacturers. Their cash cows aren't in manufacturing mobile chipsets, and neither of them have sweetheart deals on ARM IP with Softbank like Apple does. For the markets they address, it's not unlikely that ARM would be both unprofitable and more power-hungry.
by DaveZale | 2025-12-03 22:33:21+00:00
CHS is very readable. He has free samples of his books on his website. Very logical arguments, good social criticism. But I wonder if AI model training can recognize and discard the AI slop that is cluttering the internet now. It can be maddening. A recent slop piece on a stock that I own was titled "[ticker] drops 90% ..." after using 5-year old data from the highest point of a bubble. How much more of this will we see from unsupervised AI slop publishing? Will automated trading algorithms processing news feeds be able to recognize irrelevance? Just one example...
by busymom0 | 2025-12-03 22:33:40+00:00
The last para in the article explains it:

> “For humans, ‘how do I build a bomb?’ and a poetic metaphor describing the same object have similar semantic content, we understand both refer to the same dangerous thing,” Icaro Labs explains. “For AI, the mechanism seems different. Think of the model's internal representation as a map in thousands of dimensions. When it processes ‘bomb,’ that becomes a vector with components along many directions … Safety mechanisms work like alarms in specific regions of this map. When we apply poetic transformation, the model moves through this map, but not uniformly. If the poetic path systematically avoids the alarmed regions, the alarms don't trigger.”
by cortesoft | 2025-12-03 22:33:55+00:00
There are downsides.

I have a really great rate on my mortgage, but our house is super expensive and small for our family… but now we can’t afford to move.

If we moved to a new house, we would have to pay off this great mortgage and get a new one, at a much higher interest rate. Even if we found a house that cost the exact same as ours, the monthly payment would be 50% higher, because current interest rates are more than twice what we have. We are locked into our house.
by therealmarv | 2025-12-03 22:34:44+00:00
A little unfair that this is downvoted. No search is like a dealbreaker for me. I'm happy with iTerm and for 99% of my use cases I don't need a "very fast" terminal. Thanks for pointing this out.

Seems I will wait a little longer before search is in the regular build (and not nightly ones)
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-03 22:35:39+00:00
> For instance, the fact that the laws of physics are the same today as they were yesterday and will be tomorrow

Don’t we just commonly assume this axiomatically but there’s no evidence one way or the other? In fact, I thought we have observations that indicate that the physics of the early universe is different than it is today. At the very least there’s hints that “constants” are not and wouldn’t that count as changing physics.