MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zwnow | 2025-12-09 08:03:13+00:00
> There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it.

Any sources on that? Except for some big tech companies I dont see that happening at all. While not empirical most devs I know try to avoid it like the plague. I cant imagine that many devs actually jumped on the hype train to replace themselves...
by karlkloss | 2025-12-09 08:03:42+00:00
As soon as recordable CDs were affordable, I switched completely, and never looked back.

Cassette tapes were nice when we didn't have anything better, but they were always a big pain in the back. Noisy, wearing out, skipping took a long time, making compilations took hours. I don't miss those times.

Nowadays, I can play mp3's on a $3 microcontroller, at excellent quality, and I love it.

Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?
by scotty79 | 2025-12-09 08:03:57+00:00
Let's assume we know a certain btc address belongs to Alice and the other one to Bob. If Alice transfers coins to Bob's address we can see that Alice transferred ownership of the coins to Bob.

But if Alice just gives private key to her address to Bob, then Bob generates new address (which we won't know is his) and transfers the coins there when we won't know for sure that the ownership of the coins changed. If we didn't see Alice passing the private key to Bob we have absolutely no reason to think that Bob owns any coins. We see that his known public address is still empty.
by marcher | 2025-12-09 08:05:29+00:00
I'm not negative on it exactly, but the idea of not being revived doesn't really bug me. If that had happened, then it's whatever, I guess?

But I agree with your sentiment about using the time we're given. I don't put much thought into what happens after death other than in a purely self-entertainment, "oh that'd be a cool what-if scenario..." type of way. My goal now is to minimize my suffering and maximize my happiness to whatever extent I can. If I can make others happy too in some way as I do that, that'd be neat too.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-09 08:06:08+00:00
Prompt engineering: just basic articulation skills.

Context engineering: just basic organization skills.

Verification engineering: just basic quality assurance skills.

And so on...

---

"Eric" will never be able to fully use AI for development because he lacks knowledge about even the most basic aspects of the developer's job. He's a PM after all.

I understand that the idea of turning everyone into instant developers is super attractive. However, you can't cheat learning. If you give an edge to non-developers for development tasks, it means you will give an even sharper edge to actual developers.
by weird-eye-issue | 2025-12-09 08:06:23+00:00
Your comment contradicts itself

You are saying there aren't more low cost alternatives coming out

You also say writing code isn't the big problem (which I agree with)

But both can be true and in fact the reason is because the second is true! You aren't seeing the alternate because marketing is hard. People generally don't care about new products and aren't willing to save a little bit of money risking their time on something new
by theknarf | 2025-12-09 08:07:17+00:00
I'm sure if you ab-tested a game with anti cheat vs a game with kernel-level anti cheat you would see negligible differences. There are a lot of types of anti cheat, stuffing it in the kernel isn't the only solution. You can't chose between security and freedom, the moment you make a choice you loose both, and other people stuffing stuff in the kernel is loosing you freedom.

We are moments away from one of these "kernel-level anti cheat" companies getting hacked and then you'll have the biggest security scandal on the planet (if they aren't already hacked and we just don't know about it yet).
by michaelevensen | 2025-12-09 08:08:36+00:00
Designer here. I agree that sometimes there is an over-emphasis of sticking to the rule of icon - title (if it's already been defined) and finding icons for features that are very hard to describe through a simple pictogram, thus leading to non-helpful visual cues for menus and menu items. But, icons to me has never been about being a perfect encapsulation of the meaning of the feature, it's more of a visual anchor, eg even the examples in this article without icons require me a couple more milliseconds to scan just to find the menu item I'm looking for. It's a visual anchor first, a descriptor second.
by booleandilemma | 2025-12-09 08:09:45+00:00
This is true. I've been anti-ai but I started using it recently as an alternative to stack overflow (because google is shoving it down my mouth via search results). It's pretty effective. It does get things wrong from time to time, but then I just fix it up manually. I can't claim it's making me 100x more productive or anything like that. It's just a nice alternative to scrolling through SO answers and looking for the one with the green checkmark.

I still find it sad when people use it for prose though.
by colinstrickland | 2025-12-09 08:10:05+00:00
Thanks for detailed reply. Yes, the marketing budget for Java was unmatched, but to my eye they were in retreat towards the Enterprise datacentre by 2001. I don't think the Python foundation had launched until 2001. Amazon was migrating off Perl and Oracle. JavaScript only got interesting after Google maps/Wave I think, arguably the second browser wars start when Apple launches Safari, late 2002.

So, I guess the counterfactual line of enquiry ought to be why Perl didn't, or couldn't, or didn't want, to pivot towards stronger commercial backing, sooner.
by hnfong | 2025-12-09 08:10:58+00:00
there is no flow per se, as it’s a subjective experience. it’s just that our current environment (specifically human environment) is predominantly structured in a way that the past makes an imprint on the present (in terms of biological memory, historical records, etc) and the future generally being unpredictable because we kinda don’t want it to be too predictable (eg you don’t want to be too predictable when a tiger is chasing you for example)

but in other environments (talking about same universe here!) the future is more predictable than here on earth, for example motions of planetary bodies can be predicted way in advance within error bars as in the past, and when you have that kind of relatively symmetrical system, any subjective experiences within those systems would be much less inclined to feel that time flows on way or the other. (of course, the only kind of subjective experiencers we know are made of biological stuff which structurally remembers the past and leaves the future open as form of evolved ability, so this timelessness experience may be harder to imagine for us)
by sahilagarwal | 2025-12-09 08:11:50+00:00
A playground for the zon format is great, but it would be amazing to see a few examples where zon has already been integrated into the LLM and see its responses to user queries. It doesn't even need to be a playground (as that becomes costly quickly), just some examples for the user to see how the black box will work when zon is integrated.
by perihelions | 2025-12-09 08:11:51+00:00
> "Nah, they are fine. They ate head of presidents office alive last week."

That's the same guy who tried to take over that anti-corruption office. He would be controlling it now, if it weren't for the massive country-wide protests about it. I'm not sure that they're doing fine.

Economist, July 2025:

> "On July 22nd the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, passed a bill that would place the country’s two main anti-corruption bodies—NABU, which investigates wrongdoing, and SAPO, which prosecutes it—under the control of the presidency. This was not the work of rogue MPs. It was orchestrated from the top by President Volodymyr Zelensky and his all-powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak."

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/07/23/volodymyr-zelen... ( https://archive.is/kYh4w )

BBC, last week: "...was forced to U-turn after mass demonstrations",

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz0nljm4y74o ("Andriy Yermak: How Zelensky's right-hand man fell from power" / "Fall of Zelensky's top aide - reboot for Kyiv or costly shake-up?")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_anti-corruption_protests_...
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-09 08:12:45+00:00
> Nice story, but Fatah actually negotiated and agreed to details for all-Palestine elections with Hamas; Israel declined to allow them to occur.

Was this like a case of them agreeing to something they knew Israel would never allow(letting Hamas officials run in Palestinian elections)?

> The US and Israel call all resistance to Israeli occupation terrorism;

I don't think this is true, it's generally the violent resistance that is called terrorism, probably because there's quite a lot of that going on.

> the PLO (not the Fatah faction but the whole umbrella organization), which is organizationally coextensive with the Palestinian Authority, is a Congressionally-designated foreign terrorist organization which has had Presidential waivers allowing certain interactions since 1993.

Presumably that would be due to the PLO having engaged in and supported terrorism[0]. The Martyrs Fund is not exactly small:

> These payments, total more than $300 million annually, representing approximately 7 percent of the PA's annual budget.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Authority_Martyrs_...
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-09 08:13:41+00:00
It is absolutely a different company. I had the opportunity to intern there twice in the late 70's and then was acquired by them in 2015, the IBM of 1978 and the IBM of 2015 were very different businesses. Having "grown up" so to speak in the Bay Area tech company ecosystem where companies usually died when their founding team stopped caring, IBM was a company that had decided, as an institution, to encapsulate what it took to survive in the company's DNA. I had a lot of great discussions (still do!) with our integration executive (that is the person who is responsible for integrating the acquisition with the larger company) about IBM's practice in terms of change.
by zwnow | 2025-12-09 08:13:48+00:00
> A piece of unsolicited career advice: at the work place, continue being enthusiastic about software technologies and keep opinions on infrastructure close to your vest.

I am a solo developer at a startup and at some point I'd like to be able to develop a full software product on my own, that entails code and infrastructure. My apps right now were all B2B apps which worked perfectly fine. The "biggest" app I've built was a cashless app for a festival with ~6k visitors and that went perfectly fine with a single server.

I never worked in an environment where infrastructure was handled by a dedicated person.

Ill take this advice to heart once I work for bigger companies again though.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-12-09 08:15:13+00:00
Cassettes were never the best for audio fidelity but I always really liked the physicality of pushing the play button to move the heads into position. In some ways the inability to easily skip around a recording made listening a different experience than a CD or streaming.

Which is why I wrote a web component[0] that wraps an html audio element in an interface that mimics a (cheap) tape player.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/3/a_cassette_audio_control_for_the_...
by AngryData | 2025-12-09 08:15:34+00:00
When Japan was bombed, nobody else in the world had nuclear weapons, the US only had 2, and there were only a handful of people outside of the US seriously researching nuclear weapons and were still years away from a test. By 1950 the USSR had working nuclear bombs, had proven so with a nuclear test, and a dozen other countries had started their own nuclear weapons programs.
by zwnow | 2025-12-09 08:15:43+00:00
I can choose whatever stack I see fitting. Our current app runs on an old Laravel version and an old Vue version. Its a monolith. Privately I have built microservices too, but this architecture only really makes sense with bigger teams. I have spent about 70% if 2025 learning Elixir and I'd love building some real life things with it.
by vignzviki | 2025-12-09 08:17:04+00:00
I just launched FeedBugs.com, a lightweight security scanner I built because I kept running into the same problem as a solo founder — there was no simple way to catch common security issues without using expensive, enterprise-level tools.

Those tools felt too complex, too heavy, and honestly way outside my budget. So I built something simple: You paste your URL → it scans your site → you get clear issues like missing headers, XSS risks, insecure cookies, etc.

No setup, no code, no configuration.

If you're an indie dev, early-stage startup, or someone who just wants a quick “is my site okay?” check, it might be useful.

Would love any feedback or ideas!
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-12-09 08:17:31+00:00
It might be better to think about what a horse is to a human, mostly a horse is an energy slave. The history of humanity is a story about how many energy slaves are available to the average human.

In times past, the only people on earth who had their standard of living raised to a level that allowed them to cast there gaze upon the stars were the Kings and there courts, vassals, and noblemen. As time passed we have learned to make technologies that provide enough energy slaves to the common man that everyone lives a life that a king would have envied in times past.

So the question arises as to whether AI or the pursuit of AGI provides more or less energy slaves to the common man?
by slyfox125 | 2025-12-09 08:18:04+00:00
We understand "time" in the context that we must: to subsist in order to procreate. The extent it exists outside of our own perception as we imagine it does, is debatable. Ultimately, time is our sensory interpretation of the world around us to facilitate our survival and thus, we may never make sense of it outside the constraints it exists within.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-09 08:18:20+00:00
Interesting question that the study can also answer, because it also asked about parental income!

---

1966 Median Household Income = $7400 [1].

51% of students in the $0-9999 bracket

Largest chunk of students (33%) in $6k-$9999 bracket.

Percent of students from families earning at least 2x median = 23%

---

2015 Median Household Income = $57k [1].

65% of students came from families earning more than $60k.

Largest chunk of students (18%) in $100k-$150k bracket.

Percent of students from families earning at least 2x median = 44%

---

So I think it's fairly safe to say that the average student at UCLA today comes from a significantly wealthier family than in 1966.

[1] - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1967/demo/p60-05...

[2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
by tdeck | 2025-12-09 08:18:22+00:00
This reminds me of the retail chain Service Merchandise which apparently used to operate this way. You'd walk around the store looking at display products, pick things out on a sheet, and then they'd appear on a conveyor belt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise

I have never been to one because they went out of business decades ago.
by noodletheworld | 2025-12-09 08:19:20+00:00
Yeah nah.

People posting stuff like this are clearly not doing it; they’re reading LinkedIn posts, toying with the tech and projecting what it looks like at scale.

That’s fair; but it’s also misguided.

Either try it yourself, or go and watch people (eg. @ArminRonacher) doing this at a reasonable scale and you can ground yourself in reality, instead of hype.

The tldr is: currently it doesn’t scale.

Not personally. Not at Microsoft. Not at $AI company.

Currently, as the “don’t change existing behaviour” constraint list goes up, the unsupervised agent capability goes down, and since most companies / individual devs don’t appreciate “help” that does something while breaking something else, this causes a significant hole in the “everyone can 10x” bed time story.

As mentioned in other threads; the cost and effort to produce new code is down, but the cost of producing usable code is, I guess, moderately on par with existing scaffolding tools.

Some domains where the constraints are more relaxed like image generation (no hands? Who cares?) and front end code (wrong styles? Not consistent? Who cares?) are genuinely experiencing a revolution like the OP was talking about.

…but generalising it to “all coding” appears to be like the self driving car problem.

Solvable? Probably.

…but a bit harder than people who don’t understands or haven’t tried to solve it themselves thought, or blogged about or speculated about.

Probably, there’s a much smaller set of problems that are much easier to solve… but it’s not happening in 2026; certainly not at the scale and rate the OP was describing.

You’ll notice, neither of us have self driving cars yet.

(Despite some companies providing cars that do drive themselves into things from time to time, but that’s always “user error” as I understand it…)
by cryptonym | 2025-12-09 08:19:32+00:00
Putting money in a company because you reviewed its business, the way it operates and add value to the society is more of an investment than gambling. Now things happens and I agree there is always a part of luck, called risk.

BTC isn't really adding value to the society, except the shady parts of it. I can't assess the part of luck in BTC gambling. Many lost money, many betted on the wrong coin. Did you bet on it because of the impact on dark economy or because you believed in unlocking the economy, blockchain everything which didn't happen?
by godelski | 2025-12-09 08:19:53+00:00
> Anthropic research has shown that alignment faking can arise even when the model wasn't instructed to do so

Correct. And this happens because training metrics are not aligned with training intent.

> to specifically fake that it is aligned when it is not.

And this will be a natural consequence of the above. To help clarify it's like taking a math test where one grader looks at the answer while another looks at the work and gives partial credit. Who is doing a better job at measuring successful leaning outcomes? It's the latter. In the former you can make mistakes that cancel out or you can just more easily cheat. It's harder to cheat in the latter because you'd need to also reproduce all the steps and at that point are you even cheating?

A common example of this is where the LLM gets the right answer but all the steps are wrong. An example of this can actually be seen in one of Karpathy's recent posts. It gets the right result but the math is all wrong. This is no different than deception. It is deception because it tells you a process and it's not correct.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1992655330002817095
by Terr_ | 2025-12-09 08:20:22+00:00
That kinda stuff is why I'm an incrementalist, as opposed to "Great Man" theories of civilization. A big impressive product or leap-forward is mostly luck and thousands of cascading preconditions on small improvements everywhere else, and often not even the first person to try.

It's not hard to imagine that if a fundamentally similar store today that took the world by storm, there would be a profusion of news stories asserting that the founder is a genius visionary, with nary a peep for Clarence Saunders et al.
by PeterCorless | 2025-12-09 08:20:33+00:00
So much that we presume in the modern cloud wasn't a given when Apache Kafka was first released in 2011.

kevstev wrote just above about Kafka being written to run on spinning disks (HDDs), while Redpanda was written to take advantage of the latest hardware (local NVMe SSDs). He has some great insights.

As well, Apache Kafka was written in Java, back in an era when you were weren't quite sure what operating system you might be running on. For example, when Azure first launched they had a Windows NT-based system called Windows Azure. Most everyone else had already decided to roll Linux. Microsoft refused to budge on Linux until 2014, and didn't release its own Azure Linux until 2020.

Once everyone decided to roll Linux, the "write once run everywhere" promise of Java was obviated. But because you were still locked into a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) your application couldn't optimize itself to the underlying hardware and operating system you were running on.

Redpanda, for example, is written in C++ on top of the Seastar framework (seastar.io). The same framework at the heart of ScyllaDB. This engine is a thread-per-core shared-nothing architecture that allows Redpanda to optimize performance for hardware utilization in ways that a Java app can only dream of. CPU utilization, memory usage, IO throughput. It's all just better performance on Redpanda.

It means that you're actually getting better utility out of the servers you deploy. Less wasted / fallow CPU cycles — so better price-performance. Faster writes. Lower p99 latencies. It's just... better.

Now, I am biased. I work at Redpanda now. But I've been a big fan of Kafka since 2015. I am still bullish on data streaming. I just think that Apache Kafka, as a Java-based platform, needs some serious rearchitecture,

Even Confluent doesn't use vanilla Kafka. They rewrote their own engine, Kora. They claim it is 10x faster. Or 30x faster. Depending on what you're measuring.

1. https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/kora/

2. https://www.confluent.io/blog/10x-apache-kafka-elasticity/
Show HN: Starsalign.eu
by pheelicks | 2025-12-09 08:22:45+00:00
70 years ago today, on December 9th 1955, the Council of Europe adopted the flag we all recognize . Hidden in plain sight for seven decades is a perfect geometric secret.

Central to the flag are 12 five-pointed stars. Take these stars, align them point to point, and you’ll get a dodecahedron - one of the 5 Platonic solids that have fascinated humanity since Ancient Greece.

It's a remarkable coincidence. Many designs were proposed before 1955, including variants with 1 or 15 stars. But only 12 stars create this hidden geometric harmony.

This was built using THREE.js and runs with WebGPU, including on mobile. The code is here: https://github.com/felixpalmer/starsalign
by amatecha | 2025-12-09 08:23:08+00:00
What left-wing extremism was that, exactly? Extreme upholding of human rights and equality? Extreme kindness and respect for fellow human beings? Extreme acceptance of people from all backgrounds, religious beliefs and sexual orientation? Extreme letting people live their damn life in whatever way they want as long as it doesn't harm others? Yeah, who wouldn't want to push back on that, sounds terrible eh?

So on this so-called extreme left, what exactly was/is so bad? You are expected to be nice to people when you meet them? You should consider the feelings of other human beings before you act? You had to rename a git branch because most of the people on your team agreed it's kinda lame to use a reference to slavery in a technical term? I've always wondered what people think the "extreme left" is and why they even remotely think it's somehow just as bad as the fascistic bullshit that sadistic, fear-driven socipaths keep working towards.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-09 08:24:38+00:00
This was perhaps my favorite part of Physics 390 ("modern physics") which was about quantum dynamics and relativity. The speed of light is defined in terms of a velocity (~300,000,000 m/s) but if you were traveling at the speed of light time stops (which keeps the rule that its constant in all frames of reference). That and time passes more quickly at higher altitudes and these days we can actually measure that. Wild stuff.