MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pvtmert | 2025-12-31 21:45:56+00:00
In the Will traditional software survive? section the author describes "Boutique-sofware" as the low-value high-cost software [1]. However, the examples in the following paragraphs are quite contrary to that statement.

- Tailored suit: This is a high-cost and high-value thing. Both quality and fit are much better than fast-fashion.

In the similar sense, maybe LLMs will produce the frameworks or libraries in the future. Akin to the "fabric" used by the tailors. But at the end, craftsmen or women are the ones architecting and stitching these together.

Verbatim [1]:

> Will traditional software survive?
> Ultraprocessed foods are, of course, not the only game in town. There is a thriving and growing demand for healthy, sustainable production of foodstuffs, largely in response to the harmful effects of industrialisation. Is it possible that software might also resist mechanisation through the growth of an “organic software” movement? If we look at other sectors, we see that even those with the highest levels of industrialisation also still benefit from small-scale, human-led production as part of the spectrum of output.
> For example, prior to industrialisation, clothing was largely produced by specialised artisans, often coordinated through guilds and manual labour, with resources gathered locally, and the expertise for creating durable fabrics accumulated over years, and frequently passed down in family lines. Industrialisation changed that completely, with raw materials being shipped intercontinentally, fabrics mass produced in factories, clothes assembled by machinery, all leading to today’s world of fast, disposable, exploitative fashion. And yet handcrafted clothes still exist: from tailored suits to knitted scarves, a place still exists for small-scale, slow production of textile goods, for reasons ranging from customisation of fit, signalling of wealth, durability of product, up to enjoyment of the craft as a pastime.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-31 21:46:15+00:00
Right, that’s the strange part. I originally thought that the split was caused by the old shell APIs requiring honest-to-goodness HMENUs with all that implies, but File Pilot[1] does have reskin the old menu with some success so evidently that’s not completely impossible.

[1] https://filepilot.tech/
by tyre | 2025-12-31 21:46:26+00:00
Oh boy are you going to love learning about felony murder. You can be convicted of felony murder without having:

1. Killed anyone

2. Been in the same location of where the killing took place

3. Known about the crime taking place

John Oliver does an excellent segment on how batshit these laws are, but suffice to say you can absolutely be convicted without intent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y93ljB7sfco
by renewiltord | 2025-12-31 21:46:39+00:00
This is one of the reasons I think that people shouldn't be permitted all rights of citizenry. e.g. to gamble, invest in the stock market, or buy into a Kickstarter, use an LLM, or social media you should first have to take tests. It's fine to have escape hatches. Should schizophrenics be allowed to purchase things? One bought a fridge with ads and then lost their mind when shown an ad. The right thing to do is to create a second class of citizens that have a mandatory cool-down period on non-essential spending, reviewed either by a human or some automated program with a reasonable error rate.

One should be able to opt-out with a reasonable net worth. If you have $1m, we will assume that you can spend that in your own care and you have the right to opt out. Sort of like accredited investors or qualified purchasers.

The majority of humans are not free-willed beings and they know this. They will likely prefer to have their lives managed so that they do not harm themselves. So we should give them tools to do so. Presumably many Hacker News users would choose to opt-out of AI technology like this.
by weslleyskah | 2025-12-31 21:46:41+00:00
I can definitely understand you. Interesting you mentioned Victoria's Secret, another area that I am highly interested and could make money is fashion. I could mention the cases of models (Tatjana Patitz, Gisele Bundchen) climbing this money ladder of luxury, but too off-topic for this site.

Different adventures, different life obsessions...
by delaminator | 2025-12-31 21:47:01+00:00
In Victorian London, electricity was distributed around the home using bare wires with an air gap. It was 32v though.

Later it was superseded with lead wrapped in paper, until the Knob and Tube system. This comprised of single-insulated copper conductors installed within walls and ceilings, this wiring was encased in porcelain insulating tubes with cloth-lined sleeves.

One knob for Live and one knob for Neutral. The wires were held in place by porcelain knobs nailed to the house frame. Where wires passed through wood framing, they were threaded through porcelain tubes to prevent them from contacting the wood.
by RajT88 | 2025-12-31 21:47:59+00:00
Exactly. I never ever buy a product advertised on Facebook. Almost without a doubt, the ad turns out to be misleading.

If something looks cool, I will search it instead of clicking through. I have been seen malvertising campaigns on FB (some not even requiring a click).

If the product seems legit and fair priced, I will buy it. Rarely do I find both are true when I learn about it via Facebook. My default is: scam, or at least scamm-y.

Are most people less careful? I wonder.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-31 21:48:19+00:00
If your only value proposition is “I write good code and pull well defined stories from Jira”, your career was in danger a decade ago as an enterprise dev. The commodization between its not hard to be a good enough developer and outsourcing and plateauing of comp was happening then.

Yes I am aware of BigTech comp - I’m talking about boring old companies like banks, airlines, etc where most developers work.

AI is just making the problem worse for the “ticket takers”. No matter what your title is if you are pulling tickets off the board - that’s mid level behavior.

On the BigTech and adjacent side which is a completely different industry with separate rules to enter and different comp, being able to do leetCode to get a job isn’t enough as of 2022.
by JackYoustra | 2025-12-31 21:48:45+00:00
I mean there should be _some_ sugar in a language like swift, no? It has sugar in many parts of the language, being able to define a simple type union should not require custom declaration of every forwarding accessor, a protocol, an enum, bridging back and forth between them, etc.

It would be one thing to say that the vertical bar is a shortcut for these more exhaustive constructs (setting aside whether these constructs are actually exhaustive - they're not really for the purposes they're used for in practice), but as it is right now, you have no bar! If it were simple and easy to use you'd have enums dictate the state of every app which, as any app developer knows, is not how its currently done! Swift enums are so hard to use you have just a mess of optionals on view state instead of how it should formally be done, where almost every non-trivial view has a single state that's an enum of all possible configurations of valid states.

Indeed, if you put in a ton of effort to try and go down this route defining views "properly" with something like Swift TCA, you're not going to be able to get there even if you break up your app into 40 different targets because incremental recompilation will take a few minutes for something as simple as a color change.
by robocat | 2025-12-31 21:48:46+00:00
Yeah. I bought an expensive XPS since I couldn't get a Toshiba any more. I have always disliked Dell consumer product engineering but it was the best choice for Linux at the time. Unfortunately it eventually got flickering vertical pixel wide lines on the 4k screen (looked like a hardware issue - but might have been drivers). I had hoped they had fixed the transformer squeel mentioned as an issue on the older models: however the fucking thing squeeks with load (Dell didn't listen to user complaints, and didn't fix the problem).

I disabled sleep and hibernation because it never worked well (hot laptop in bag or flat battery).

On purchase I felt I needed to install a WiFi module with better Linux support (even though that interferes with warrantee?).

Admittedly Dell had superb ongoing Linux support for updating the BIOS - I would worry about that issue with other brands.

However I suspect overall I would never buy another Dell again.

I would help friends install Linux, however most of my friends either get a laptop through work or they have Macs.
by eisfresser | 2025-12-31 21:49:03+00:00
We use the CO2 to synthesize methanol with the H2 we electrolyze using surplus solar energy. The methanol we burn in winter for heat. Yes, that releases the CO2 again. The goal here is not to save the planet. It is to bring solar energy to winter. My house produces many times the electricity that it needs per year, but most of it is wasted in summer. Efficient conversion is not a factor. If I can get 20% of the energy input back as heat in winter, it is worth it: that is oil or wood I don't have to burn for heat.
by apwheele | 2025-12-31 21:52:34+00:00
The such low royalties make folks seriously consider self-publishing if you think you can get any sales. (And if you do not need a copy-editor.)

So I have only around 150 sales of my book (see notes at https://andrewpwheeler.com/2024/07/02/some-notes-on-self-pub...). I make around ~$30 though net (average between on-demand print and epub). So my measly sales are about the same as the advance here (not clear if this was ever paid out, presume they would get it back if it was paid out).

If you really think you can sell thousands of copies the economics of it really should hit you.

I get going through a publisher will increase sales, but if you have a popular platform already to advertise it (like a blog or other popular social media), I just don't get it.
by newuser999999 | 2025-12-31 21:55:16+00:00
> I use Cloudflare's DNS because I trust them more than other companies; purely based on their business and how their incentives align

The author fails to mention that they are currently working at Cloudflare, I think that should be made clear otherwise I see it as misleading to the reader, like so many pointed it out, Cloudflare is just a corporation like any other corporation out there...
by sbondaryev | 2025-12-31 21:56:20+00:00
yeah, i learned this the hard way. I tried producthunt, indie hackers, linkedIn, twitter even instagram thinking distribution was the issue.

Turns out it was mostly audience and presentation. Math/educational content just doesn't travel well on those channels unless it’s tailored very carefully. Being right wasnt enough if the delivery didn’t match how people consume it.
by jmspring | 2025-12-31 21:56:54+00:00
This sort of reminds me of those single powder or whatever meals they were awhile back - for those that need to eat but take no pleasure or dedicate no time.

For me, cooking (prep and cleanup included) is about enjoying the process, understanding what I am making and taking time doing it.

If I want quick, sure there are options around.

Cooking for me is relaxation and time away not thinking about tech and the like.
by godelski | 2025-12-31 21:57:05+00:00
Yeah I'm actually with you on this. The government is part of the market no matter what. Through action or inaction they are still a critical player.

But I think we often miss the messaging on regulators. In some way I agree with the right. It's a waste of money. But ones creating the waste isn't the government, it's those that need to be regulated
by pessimizer | 2025-12-31 21:57:06+00:00
> a professional, who has taken the time to divide it up into easily digestible chunks which form a coherent narrative, with runnable intermediate stages in-between.

Tangentially related, but I think the way to get to this is to build a "learner model" that LLMs could build and update through frequent integrated testing during instruction.

One thing that books can't do is go back and forth with you, having you demonstrate understanding before moving on, or noticing when you forget something you've already learned. That's what tutors do. The best books can do is put exercises at the end of a chapter, and pitch the next chapter at someone who can complete those exercises successfully. An LLM could drop a single-question quiz in as soon as you ask a weird question that doesn't jibe with the model, and fall back into review if you blow it.
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-31 21:58:16+00:00
> I like that this relies on generating SQL rather than just being a black-box chat bot.

When people say AI is a bubble but will still be transformational, I think of stuff like this. The amount of use cases for natural language interpretation and translation is enormous even without all the BS vibe coding nonsense. I reckon once the bubble pops most investment will go into tools that operate something like this.
by refulgentis | 2025-12-31 21:58:26+00:00
There’s a bunch to explore on this but im thinking this is a good entry point. NYT instead of OpenAI docs or blogs because it’s a 3rd party, and NYT was early on substantively exploring this, culminating in this article.

Regardless the engagement thing is dark and hangs over everything, the conclusion of the article made me :/ re: this (tl;dr this surprised them, they worked to mitigate, but business as usual wins, to wit, they declared a “code red” re: ChatGPT usage nearly directly after finally getting an improved model out that they worked hard on)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/technology/openai-chatgpt...

Some pull quotes:

“ Experts agree that the new model, GPT-5, is safer. In October, Common Sense Media and a team of psychiatrists at Stanford compared it to the 4o model it replaced. GPT-5 was better at detecting mental health issues, said Dr. Nina Vasan, the director of the Stanford lab that worked on the study. She said it gave advice targeted to a given condition, like depression or an eating disorder, rather than a generic recommendation to call a crisis hotline.

“It went a level deeper to actually give specific recommendations to the user based on the specific symptoms that they were showing,” she said. “They were just truly beautifully done.”

The only problem, Dr. Vasan said, was that the chatbot could not pick up harmful patterns over a longer conversation, with many exchanges.”

“[An] M.I.T. lab that did [a] earlier study with OpenAI also found that the new model was significantly improved during conversations mimicking mental health crises. One area where it still faltered, however, was in how it responded to feelings of addiction to chatbots.”
by jimnotgym | 2025-12-31 21:58:38+00:00
I use Excel a lot, and run a team that use it more. One of biggest tips I give is to not write complex formulae if you can help it. Split it into more cells, so it goes step by step. It looks less cool, but when you have to edit it in 6 months you will thank me.

It is not always possible, of course. But it normally is. For the edge cases a helper like this must be nice. Maybe some fields have lots of edge cases, mine has few.
by ycombiredd | 2025-12-31 21:58:55+00:00
I think he's saying that he (GlenTheMachine) is Glen Henshaw, "space roboticist", and (understandably) was a bit excited that a somewhat famous document contains a "law" bearing his name as attribution was posted by this water cooler. A way to get some minor attention for it in a comment thread full of like-minded users, and probably offer a genuine (and also maybe coy/tongue-in-cheek) offer to answer questions about that specific line item law.

I like that he waved from the crowd in this way, if only for the "huh. Small world" moment I had reading his comment.
by redserk | 2025-12-31 21:59:37+00:00
ChatGPT is marketed as a tool to assist with real-world scenarios like looking up information, vacation planning, and other non-fiction scenarios.

Why do you find it surprising to find someone may utilize the tool in a non-fictional way or that someone could interpret it’s output as non-fiction?

It’s unreasonable to apply this bizarre standard of “it should be treated as fiction only when I want it to be”
Happy New Year
by DenisDolya | 2025-12-31 22:00:06+00:00
Happy New Year everyone. I’m a programmer, and I just want to wish that the next year will be a bit safer than the last one. Even in 2025, we’ve seen how many risks are still around us in networks, devices, services, and in how easily people can be misled. At the same time, new ideas and tools keep appearing that can truly make things better, if we focus not only on speed and features, but also on protecting people. I really hope that next year we make security the default, not the exception. Wishing you all a calm and safe year ahead.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-31 22:00:37+00:00
So, who invented the Satellite then? What about the steam engine? The helicopter?

Sometimes the inventors are so far ahead of their time that the materials science first has to catch up (in some cases only a few millenia) before they can realize their devices. Effectively it is then the first person after whoever did the materials science part to create the device that gets to claim the invention.

So we get Sikorski, and not Da Vinci.

We get Arthur C. Clarke who claims the 'communications satellite' even though the moon was there all along and the Sputnik was the first working very crude device (it was one way only, it said 'you lost the space race' in a single bit of message).

We get Newcomen, Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (I had to look that up, I can never remember the man's full name), and Hero of Alexandria competing for the steam engine title, with all of them holding some part of the credit.

Pointing at an inventor is hard, and 'who built the first working device' is one way of doing this but it assumes a singular effort whereas most things are team efforts and misses the bit that the idea itself can be an instrumental step in getting your 'true' inventor to make their claim, standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. In isolation, we all probably would invent the hammer in our lifetimes, if that.
by eduction | 2025-12-31 22:01:52+00:00
I’ll also note that the publisher was right to bring up AI, even if they did not do it in an artful way. He himself comes to doubt the need for his book in the era of LLMs and he says that is part of why he cancelled. To his publisher’s credit they raised the issue early in the process where a pivot would have been more practical.

In fairness to the author, he presents a reasonably balanced view and it did not read to me like “my publisher sucked.”
by biztos | 2025-12-31 22:02:08+00:00
I’ve found Darren Mostyn’s videos quite helpful:

https://youtu.be/YbDRl_xugJo

Also Daniel Batal, more in the “tips and tricks” category but very accessible:

https://youtube.com/@daniel_batal

These are both DaVinci Resolve specific. For more general info I found it useful to do some googling around LUTs.

I find the big downside of color grading is it makes you really want a camera that records RAW video.
by Xyra | 2025-12-31 22:02:24+00:00
What is hyperbole? We are collectively experiencing a software intelligence explosion (people are shipping good software at prolific rates now due to Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2-Codex-xhigh). With Scry, you can run arbitrary SELECT SQL statements over a large corpus and have an easier time composing embedding vectors in whatever mathematical ways you want, than any other tool I've seen.
by Grimblewald | 2025-12-31 22:02:40+00:00
It comes back, or at least it did for me. Holding shift when rightclicking will get you to the menu you want reliably tho. Vetter yet, if at all an option, swithc to linux or start putting pressure internal to drive a switch. There's nothing left in windows but network effects, but the loss in productivity due to a switch to linux is readily be offset by not being hobbled by W11 anymore. Invest 1 unit of time now to recoup 1 unit of time per month ad infinitum.
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-31 22:04:03+00:00
I think it's more likely that the newer gens swear it off than the older ones, who have become thoroughly brain rotted by it. It's like they have no immunity. At least gen-z is more aware of the damage it does.

We're at the "hmm, I think smoking is probably bad for us" stage. Next up, serious attempts at quitting.
by mmooss | 2025-12-31 22:04:08+00:00
I agree about the significance of those large-scale changes; still ...

> Reversing the subsidies for things like car-dependency would positively benefit millions of people but it’s a generational change, not something most individuals can do.

Individuals frequently can chose to not use a car, of course. Still, it's not realistic for everyone or all the time, especially in a society built for automobile use.

> by the time people are confronted with the health impacts of cars, agriculture subsidies, for-profit healthcare, etc. it is likely that drugs will be necessary

My point is that there are other treatments for illness. I doubt it's a coincidence that this patentable technology is so relied on in a hyper-capitalist society; other countries with better health outcomes use far fewer pills, iirc. Who will fund the large-scale study that says a valuable pill is unnecessary?
by beloch | 2025-12-31 22:04:31+00:00
"The Wizard and the Prophet" by Charles C Mann sets up an interesting duality that I think more people should be aware of.

Mann describes "Prophets" as people who see a problem and then try to prod people to change their behaviour in order to avoid it. e.g. Thomas Malthus observed that exponential population growth had humanity on track to experience severe famine, conflict, etc. that would violently and savagely bring our numbers back within the carrying capacity of the Earth. Multiple people have made predictions about when humanity would reach the brink at numerous points in the years since Malthus, but were always wrong about when the Malthusian trap would finally spring...

...because of "Wizards". Wizards are people who set about solving problems with tech. Advances like the use of fertilizer, first bat guano and then the Haber-Bosch process, followed by scientific crop breeding have effectively raised the carrying capacity of the Earth so much that, despite our exponentially ballooning numbers, there are far more calories per person available now than in Malthus' day.

Prophets are valuable for their ability to observe and raise awareness about problems. The Earth does have an ultimate carrying capacity too, which we should keep in mind even if we don't know what it is. However, the track record undeniably favours the Wizards. They get things done. Prophets hate this, because it makes it look like they were wrong. They weren't wrong. They were just too focused on an approach to the problem that rarely works.

The modern environmentalist movement is dominated by prophets. So much so, that wizards are often portrayed as the enemy. History has shown that this is wrong-headed. We should value prophets for what they do, but ignore them when they tell us not to fund the wizards.
by vlod | 2025-12-31 22:04:40+00:00
Why should I optimize my code? To save 420ms for what?

I dunno. I try to optimize everything in life, maybe it's the engineer in me (I find it fun and interesting how people do things inefficiently). I also try and measure ingredients exactly (e.g. 420g of flour, not 419g or 421g), however that might be some low form of OCD. /shrug

Whether I use that extra time or not doesn't really matter for me.