MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grayhatter | 2025-12-03 22:54:50+00:00
I'm talking about the ideas, threads and conversations that are occupying the head space of others.

> then they have completely lost the plot as engineers.

I think most people who would call themselves software engineers have lost the plot of engineering.

That applies equally to those who are blind to the fact that engineering only exists to create stuff for humans. Most engineers are ignorant to the ability to consider the humans they're supposedly build for.

The point is to make shit better, not worse, and not more inhuman.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-12-03 22:55:15+00:00
Now you may claim "but Windows is 70% of users!" but this issue doesn't impact anyone wanting to run Zig applications, only those writing them.

No one is confused about how a compiler works. Those people being intentionally trolled are called your users when you make a language.

If you're an inexperienced dev that's super curious about Zig, this type of error might be another good nudge that maybe Windows isn't the OS you want to be working on.m

Then why did they make a windows version? Any normal person just sees that they shouldn't invest time in a language intentionally annoying it's own users for trying it out.

You still haven't come up with any explanation, your whole tangent about internet explorer has no relevance. There isn't one part of your comment that makes sense. Why would you even care about other people's OS and text editors? What kind of fanaticism would lead to wanting to use a language because they intentionally annoy users of something you aren't even involved in?

The whole thing is basically a case of "this things doesn't stand on any merits, I've just decided that I don't like certain people and they did something to upset them even though they are really just shooting themselves in the foot".
by cube2222 | 2025-12-03 22:55:17+00:00
Same.

I've recently described how I vibe-coded a tool to run this single background agent in a docker container in a jj workspace[0] while I work with my foreground agent but... my reviewing throughput is usually saturated by a single agent already, and I barely ever run the second one.

New tools keep coming up for running fleets of agents, and I see no reason to switch from my single-threaded Claude Code.

What I would like to see instead, are efforts on making the reviewing step faster. The Amp folks had an interesting preview article on this recently[1]. This is the direction I want tools to be exploring if they want to win me over - help me solve the review bottleneck.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970668

[1]: https://ampcode.com/news/review
by kace91 | 2025-12-03 22:55:30+00:00
>You have to shift to almost a QA person and ignore all code and just validate the output.

The obvious answer to this is that it is not feasible to retry each past validation for each new change, which is why we have testing in the first place. Then you’re back at square one because your test writing ability limits your output.

Unless you plan on also vivecoding the tests and treating the whole job as a black box, in which case we might as well just head for the bunkers.
by groby_b | 2025-12-03 22:55:45+00:00
There are plenty of good tasks left, but they're often one-off/internal tooling.

Last one at work: "Hey, here are the symptoms for a bug, they appeared in <release XYZ> - go figure out the CL range and which 10 CLs I should inspect first to see if they're the cause"

(Well suited to AI, because worst case I've looked at 10 CLs in vain, and best case it saved me from manually scanning through several 1000 CLs - the EV is net positive)

It works for code generation as well, but not in a "just do my job" way, more in a "find which haystack the needle is in, and what the rough shape of the new needle is". Blind vibecoding is a non-starter. But... it's a non-starter for greenfields too, it's just that the FO of FAFO is a bit more delayed.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-03 22:55:53+00:00
> Turns out experience can be self-limiting in the face of paradigm-shifting innovation.

It also turns out that experience can be what enables you to not waste time on trendy stuff which will never deliver on its promises. You are simply assuming that AI is a paradigm shift rather than a waste of time. Fine, but at least have the humility to acknowledge that reasonable people can disagree on this point instead of labeling everyone who disagrees with you as some out of touch fuddy-duddy.
by torginus | 2025-12-03 22:55:53+00:00
I remember reading that Microsoft is trying to crack down on kernel level anti-cheats. Just like anti-virus, they mess with the operating system on a deep level, redirecting/intercepting API calls, sometimes on undocumented and unstable internal APIs.

Not only does this present a huge security risk, it can break existing software and the OS itself. These anti-cheats tend not to be written by people intimately familiar with Windows kernel development, and they cause regressions in existing software which the users then blame on Windows.

That's why Microsoft did Windows Defender and tried to kill off 3rd party anti-virus.
by dboreham | 2025-12-03 22:56:08+00:00
Micron had infinite brand awareness in the electronics industry long before they made SSDs. Heck they don't even use their own name for those products. They've been a memory vendor for more than 40 years and they're the only vendor with US domestic memory fabs. Something tells me their future will be just fine. Disclosure: Micron stock holder.
by evil-olive | 2025-12-03 22:56:11+00:00
in the first paragraph, he drops a link to the startup he's working on:

> I wanted her take on Wanderfugl, the AI-powered map I've been building full-time.

this seems to me like pretty obvious engagement-bait / stealth marketing - write a provocative blog post that will get shared widely, and some fraction of those people will click through to see what the product is all about.

but, apparently it's working because this thread is currently at 400+ comments after 3 hours.
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-03 22:56:18+00:00
This is why AI is the perfect management Rorschach test.

To management (out of IC roles for long enough to lose their technical expertise), it looks perfect!

To ICs, the flaws are apparent!

So inevitably management greenlights new AI projects* and behaviors, and then everyone is in the 'This was my idea, so it can't fail' CYA scenario.

* Add in a dash of management consulting advice here, and note that management consultants' core product was already literally 'something that looks plausible enough to make execs spend money on it'
by baranul | 2025-12-03 22:56:43+00:00
The arguments against EVs in the U.S. are both weird and funny. Meanwhile, many other countries have figured out that promoting the switch from ICE to EVs, is the better option for the future of humanity. Not to mention, China will use America's temporary insanity against it, to become the dominate force in EVs for the next decade or more.
by rasz | 2025-12-03 22:56:55+00:00
It was BS considering countless other games having no problem with sound. Decoding something like Opus takes ~30MHz of a single CPU core[1], meaning even an unreasonable situation of decoding 16 simultaneous uninterrupted 128Kbit Stereo streams would only eat half of one core.

[1] iPod Classic (1998 era ARM9) decodes 128 kbps stereo Opus at ~150% real time at stock cpu frequency. Opus is not the lightest choice either https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison#ARM
by jdboyd | 2025-12-03 22:56:56+00:00
Just like car people buy off the shelf cars the customize them, many of us will buy off the shelf computers and upgrade their RAM, SSD, GPU, or CPU. Maybe all 4, or more. For desktops that aren't Macs, I usually buy used and plan on bring my own SSD and GPU at a minimum. For laptops (again that aren't Macs), I also tend to buy used and plan on upgrading the RAM or SSD or both.
by cibyr | 2025-12-03 22:56:58+00:00
The extra fun thing about this is that eval has different semantics if it's assigned to a different name, in order to allow JavaScript implementations to apply extra optimizations to code that doesn't call a function literally named "eval": https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Andy Wingo (of course!) has a good explanation of this: https://wingolog.org/archives/2012/01/12/javascript-eval-con...
by mhast | 2025-12-03 22:57:15+00:00
Jim Keller goes into some detail about what difference the ISA makes in general in this clip https://youtu.be/yTMRGERZrQE?si=u-dEXwxp0MWPQumy

Spoiler, it's not much because most of the actual execution time is spent in a handful of basic OPs.

Branch prediction is where the magic happens today.
by nikeee | 2025-12-03 22:57:39+00:00
GCC also has an extension to support references to other parameters of the function:

#include <stddef.h> void foo(size_t n, int b[static n]);

https://godbolt.org/z/c4o7hGaG1

It is not limited to compile-time constants. Doesn't work in clang, sadly.
by the_af | 2025-12-03 22:57:44+00:00
I cannot speak for the Steam console and I don't care about playing PC games on my phone: it's not the form factor for me.

But I'm really grateful for Valve and Steam.

Increasingly, more and more Windows-only games "just work" with Linux (or work with minor tweaks taken from ProtonDB).

I bought a Lenovo Legion a couple of weeks ago and I'm having a terrific experience with Linux+Steam so far. I don't claim to play the latest AAA games, but I don't feel the need to live at the edge anyway.

One game that has resisted running so far is Space Marine 2. Eventually I'll get it going. Some people report success.
by pico303 | 2025-12-03 22:58:10+00:00
This somewhat reflects my sentiment to this article. It felt very condescending. This "self-limiting beliefs" and the implication that Seattle engineers are less than San Francisco engineers because they haven't bought into AI...well, neither have all the SF engineers.

One interesting take away from the article and the discussion is that there seem to be two kinds of engineers: those that buy into the hype and call it "AI," and those that see it for the fancy search engine it is and call it an "LLM." I'm pretty sure these days when someone mentions "AI" to me I roll my eyes. But if they say, "LLM," ok, let's have a discussion.
by Arch-TK | 2025-12-03 22:59:00+00:00
That weird feeling when you realise that the people you hang out with form such a weird niche that something considered common knowledge among you is being described as "buried deep within the C standard".

What's noteworthy is that the compiler isn't required to generate a warning if the array is too small. That's just GCC being generous with its help. The official stance is that it's simply undefined behaviour to pass a pointer to an object which is too small (yes, only to pass, even if you don't access it).
by cratermoon | 2025-12-03 22:59:06+00:00
OK, so my example is flawed, but the scenario remains valid. I was going off charts like https://nursing.duke.edu/sites/default/files/documents/SCD-O...

I don't know anything about the bug other than my provider who I'd communicated and demonstrated the behavior to came back to me confirming that it was a real bug and was being fixed.
by protocolture | 2025-12-03 22:59:09+00:00
>Perhaps I'm just lacking in imagination, but I'm not sure how having smartphones in class meaningfully enhances the educational experience.

It doesnt unless a teacher can meaningfully incorporate and teach to smart phone users.

>Kids can prepare to live in a world with these things in their pockets outside of school.

Kids can meaningfully prepare for their entire lives without school. But school is designed to meaningfully prepare them for their adult lives, so if you inflict a school upon a child you should hope that it would, try somewhat to prepare them for their adult lives which will undoubtedly include smart phones. I remember hearing similar complaints when laptops were being handed out, and now in parts they are mandatory. Adults without basic computer skills were at a heavy disadvantage in the workplace. At least universities are stepping up, and forcing phones into classrooms for MFA.

>I think it's fair to make the call that the distraction caused by smartphones (especially with all the apps designed to addict users) outweighs any positive teachable moments with them present.

If kids are distracted, they aren't being meaningfully engaged. It should be seen as a litmus test for quality educators.

>Maybe your classmate just didn't care about math, but enjoyed English and reading, and found that much more engaging.

That english teacher was a former national AFL coach who was exceedingly good at educating difficult kids. When he retired, he had several wayward kids who graduated based on his impact on their education breaking down in tears. He definitely made an effort. He used a lot of peer to peer communication styles rather than falling back on more authoritative methods.

Writing off some kids as simply disinterested in some subjects is specifically the laziness I was referring to.

>That's really the big flaw here. If he hadn't been able to do that, his grades would suffer, and someone, whether the teacher or his parents, would have (hopefully!) stepped in to see what was going on, and find a way to curb his game-playing in class.

He failed or scraped past most of his math assessments, kid had money and trauma. Winning combo at a private school.

>I know quite a few teachers, and calling teachers lazy is so mind-blowingly, disrespectfully inaccurate that it's really hard to take your opinions seriously. Sure, in every walk of life you'll find lazy people, but I see no evidence that teachers are on average lazier than people in any other profession. My take on it is that teachers might be on average less lazy than your average human.

All you have to do is ask them to adapt, and you will get a massive bucket full of excuses and finger pointing.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-12-03 22:59:18+00:00
Did I miss some sort of formal directive from Microsoft or is this just outrage that someone dared do something not up to your standards?

It's just the way it works, it isn't my standards, it is literally any piece of software that detects line breaks.

Nobody's being punished. Configuring your dev environment is something people do for every language.

No one has to configure around this issue because it is trivially solved and dealt with by every piece of software on the planet. It takes longer to write an error message than it does it just split a line correctly.

Let's add some perspective here: we're talking about a single runtime option for your text editor of choice.

Let's add some perspective here: they intentionally broke their own software to upset 72% of their potential users.

More to the point, why isn't your editor or IDE properly supporting Zig files?

No one has to care about zig, it's a niche language that doesn't care about its users, it's irrelevant except for hacker news threads.

If some language started demanding you save all your text files with carriage returns or will will error out, what would you think?

You sound like a lawyer grasping at straws instead of someone with a reasonable perspective that wouldn't be hypocritical when flipped around.
by saghm | 2025-12-03 22:59:18+00:00
I recently bought a Legion Go S because the primary way I game nowadays is streaming from my desktop to a handheld, and the higher quality display (1900x1200 resolution with 120 Hz over the 1280x800 and 90 Hz on the Steam Deck OLED) seemed worthwhile given that my desktop can easily provide enough throughput to play with relatively high graphics settings. It came with SteamOS preinstalled, and from a software perspective, everything does seem pretty close to identical. The only things I've slightly missed from the Steam Deck are slight hardware nits with the Legion Go S; the placement of the equivalent of the two SteamOS-specific buttons (not sure exactly how to refer to them, but they're labeled "Steam" and "..." on the Deck) just above the Start and Select buttons while looking and feeling the same mixes me up sometimes in a way that never happened on the Deck, and I miss having four unmapped buttons on the back of the device that I can set up however I like in games rather than only two. I also tend to prefer having symmetrical thumbsticks higher up on the device rather than having one high and one low; I've noticed that my hands aren't quite as comfortable when using the D-pad for extended amounts of time, which is unfortunate given my preference for it when playing stuff like emulated GBA games (incidentally one of the few things I tend to do locally instead of streaming; the low power profile setting already is an easy battery life win when streaming, and in practice it make the battery life when GBA emulation also much more tolerable, along with keeping the fans much quieter without seeming to impact performance of the emulation, given that even with this setting the fast-forward function can go far faster than I'd ever need it to).
by doug_durham | 2025-12-03 22:59:31+00:00
Isn't it "The only winning move is to do good work"? If non-AI aided work is superior then it should win out in the long run because companies that do that type of research will be able to make superior decisions and thus be rewarded in the market. The argument isn't really AI versus non-AI, it's quality work versus shoddy work. It is right to lose patience with people who submit shoddy work whatever the source.
by k__ | 2025-12-03 22:59:58+00:00
Before it was a fast AI chat that would explain tech stuff and help me with issues.

I used it quite often, even instead of GH Copilot.

Now, it's much slower and has some kind of solution view that gets updated with every new message.

Found myself to resorting to GH Copilot chat quite often today, because Phind felt like a different/worse service.
by ajross | 2025-12-03 23:00:04+00:00
> What a disaster for Micron.

Almost certainly this is because of a windfall for Micron, at least in the short term. Datacenter memory demand is going through the roof, and that was where margins were highest already. It makes no sense to continue to try to milk a consumer brand that can be sold at, what, a 20% markup over generics?

Most likely Micron was planning this forever, and the current market conditions are such that it's time to pull the trigger and retool everything for GPU memory.
by evil-olive | 2025-12-03 23:00:06+00:00
from your post:

> Bring up AI in a Seattle coffee shop now and people react like you're advocating asbestos.

can you please share the methodology you used to reach this conclusion?

in other words - what is the sample size? how many Seattle coffee shops did you walk into and yell out "hey, what do people think about AI?" (or did you gather the data in a different way, such as by approaching individual people at the coffee shop?)

what is your control group? in other words, how many SF coffee shops did you visit and conduct the same experiment?
by triceratops | 2025-12-03 23:00:36+00:00
I wish they would ringfence the money needed to run Wikipedia's service in perpetuity. Some kind of trust fund that throws off enough income from investments to fund just the servers and a couple employees to maintain them. About $200m should be more than enough.

I don't know if they've done that already. But it means they can be around forever, no matter what foolishness they get up to with the remainder of their donations.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-12-03 23:00:49+00:00
I suspect AI appeals very strongly to a certain personality type who revels in all the details in getting a proper agentic coding environment bootstrapped for AI to run amok in, and then supervises/guides the results.

Then there’s people like me, who you’d probably term as an old soul, who looks at all that and says, “I have to change my workflow, my environment, and babysit it? It is faster to simply just do the work.” My relationship with tech is I like using as little as possible, and what I use needs to be predictable and do something for me. AI doesn’t always work for me.
by moregrist | 2025-12-03 23:00:51+00:00
This was not the case for much of the 20th century, where layoffs were seen as an embarrassment.

For decades, engineers at IBM, HP, Xerox, etc assumed that they had a job for life; because they did.

The management culture you describe may predate Jack Welch, but certainly came into vogue with him. It has all the well-known downsides: management often lays off critical staff because they can’t really measure productivity, it destroys morale, many of the remaining high-performers leave, and is often followed by hiring replacements in the next year or two because the people cut were actually necessary.

So it is odd to see it happen for highly profitable companies.
by Lerc | 2025-12-03 23:01:13+00:00
> In my experience, when people promote AI, its sold as just having a regular conversation and then the AI does thing.

This is almost the complete opposite of my experience. I hear expressions about improvements and optimism for the future, but almost all of the discussion from active people productivly using AI is about identifying the limits and seeing what benefits you can find within those limits.

They are not useless and they are also not a panacea. It feels like a lot of people consider those the only available options.
by mattnewton | 2025-12-03 23:01:14+00:00
If management can measure it. But in practice, the problem of course is the extra marketing of your good work against the marketing of all the ai firms trying to sell to your boss.

Many firms are unable to accurately measure the quality of research work and so they will be duped by the alternative marketing. The market can correct for this on a long enough time horizon if a competitor takes the opposite bet on whether this job is automate-able that way, but in the meantime you are probably out of a job and your equity goes down.
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-03 23:01:43+00:00
My internal mnemonic for targeting AI correctly is 'It's easier to change a problem into something AI is good at, than it is to change AI into something that fits every problem.'

But unfortunately the nuances in the former require understanding strengths and weaknesses of current AI systems, which is a conversation the industry doesn't want to have while it's still riding the froth of a hype cycle.

Aka 'any current weaknesses in AI systems are just temporary growing pains before an AGI future'
by groby_b | 2025-12-03 23:01:55+00:00
Yeah. Well. There are company that require TPS reports, too.

It's mostly a sign leadership has lost reasoning capability if it's mandatory.

But no, reporting isn't necessarily the problem. There are plenty of places that use reporting to drive a conversation on what's broken, and why it's broken for their workflow, and then use that to drive improvement.

It's only a problem if the leadership stance is "Haha! We found underpants gnome step 2! Make underpants number go up, and we are geniuses". Sadly not as rare as one would hope, but still stupid.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-03 23:02:43+00:00
There have been plenty of times where the opposite is true: Storing highly compressed data and decompressing it in RAM is much faster than loading uncompressed assets.

Which is the primary problem: Computers are so varied and so ever changing that if you are optimizing without hard data from your target hardware, you aren't optimizing, you are just doing random shit.

Add to that, game devs sometimes are just dumb. Titanfall 1 came with tens of gigabytes of uncompressed audio, for "performance", which is horse shit. Also turns out they might have been lying entirely. Titanfall 1 was made on the source engine, which does not support the OGG audio format their audio files were in. So they decompressed them at install time. They could have just used a different audio file format.