MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjmarr | 2025-12-28 02:10:10+00:00
I've been unable to convince any "businessy" or liberal arts people to vibe code. I've attempted with everyone in my immediate family, friends, etc. Even when they sit on the computer and watch the AI type out a script for them that saves them hours/day, they get an "ick" factor that prevents them from trying again.

They'd rather ask me to talk to the AI for them and pay me money to do so. Heck one of my cousins offered me $5 to edit a photo with AI tools? It's a 1000% markup for clicking 4 buttons.

I can't square this with the alleged tidal wave of non-tech people replacing SWEs with AI. Non-tech people largely refuse to use the technology right in front of them to improve their productivity. They'd rather ask me to spend 20 seconds on a task and pay me to do so.

More likely than an SWE crash is an SWE dispersal. Lots of non-tech fields have automation opportunities that haven't been seized upon since one can make $500k risk free in FAANG.

If that goes away, I'd start a consulting business and ruthlessly automate Excel-based business processes with AI coding agents.

It takes me half an hour to vibe code a proof of concept web scraper and immediately demonstrate value to someone now willing to throw money at me to maintain it for them at insane profit margins since I've replaced a human repeatedly clicking on things.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-28 02:10:35+00:00
Because new drugs are what make the federal spending pie larger. Slower growth also does. Wars can also make budgets balloon, but then you’d be like “well Clinton wouldn’t want wars.” Okay, so would he want faster medical progress? Of course, and that turns out to be budget busting!

The drugs could have existed back then. You’d have to read the link. And today they do, and under Clinton, would he pay? All great things to talk about.

I am trying to have an interesting conversation and instead it’s just, downvote this downvote that.
by john01dav | 2025-12-28 02:10:36+00:00
I think that the person to whom you replied is speaking of outdoor installations, while you are speaking of controlled (maybe datacenter) installations. I have outdoor fiber running aerially between buildings on my property, in a region with massive seasonal temperature changes. Multiple local FTTH and Coaxial ISPs also run fiber on shared utility poles (the same ones that the electrical grid maintains) and when I look at the poles I see communications lines all in the same general area, often mere centimeters apart, if that.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-28 02:10:49+00:00
> When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again

I just tried this from two different devices, neither logged in, both on separate IPs from different states.

Got the exact same answer.

These are almost certainly cached. It would be naive to think Google is performing the same LLM requests over and over again for the same terms for no reason.
by nivix_zixer | 2025-12-28 02:10:57+00:00
This is what I have experienced as well. My employer (large SaaS company) declared a "code red" concerning AI about 6 months ago and built a team responsible for laying the foundation for how we will be using AI. They built a RAG framework for development which is scary efficient and accurate.

Developers who are testing the waters with cursor or warp have no idea what is possible.

I am scared for all devs, newer and older. Newer devs will have a harder time gaining experience. And the older devs who don't adapt will be looking for jobs in another line of work within 5 years.
by martinald | 2025-12-28 02:11:23+00:00
I don't think the benchmarks catch this very well. Opus 4.5 is _significantly_ better than Sonnet 4.5 in my experience, far more than the SWE Bench scores would say. I can happily leave Opus 4.5 running for 20-30 minutes and come back to very high quality software on complex tasks/refactoring. Sonnet 4.5 would fall over within a couple of minutes on these tasks.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-28 02:11:35+00:00
damn shit is really bad, sky is failing, bubbles are bursting… any other clickbait I need to read up on before I go spend the last of the good days with my kid…?

coolest thing about us in the 50’s is that we’ve seen and read this shit many times before and don’t fall the “bubble du jour” or “shit’s really bad this time…” - especially readers here on HN, bubbles be bursting for yeeeears now, recession is coming, crashes are coming… genuinely am sitting here scared and shook about Buffet hoarding cash, that never happened before…
by lloydatkinson | 2025-12-28 02:11:55+00:00
For fun I decided to try something similar to this a few weeks ago, but with Bitcoin instead of a vending machine business. I refined a prompt instructing it to try policies like buying low, etc. I gave it a bunch of tools for accessing my Coinbase account. Rules like, can't buy or sell more than X amount in a day.

Obviously this would probably be a disaster, but I did write proper code with sanity checks and hard rules, and if a request Claude came up with was outside it's rules it would reject it and take no action. It was allowed to also simply decide to not take any actions right now.

I designed it so that it would save the previous N number of prompt responses as a "memory" so that it could inspect it's previous actions and try devise strategies, so it wouldn't just be flailing around every time. I scheduled it to run every few minutes.

Sadly, I gave up and lost all enthusiasm for it when the Coinbase API turned out to be a load of badly documented and contradictory shit that would always return zero balance when I could login to Coinbase and see that simply wasn't true. I tried a couple of client libraries, and got nowhere with it. The prospect of having to write another REST API client was too much for my current "end of year" patience.

What started as a funny weekend project idea was completely derailed by a crappy API. I would be interested to see if anyone else tried this.
by brendyn | 2025-12-28 02:12:30+00:00
You can download the entirety of Wikipedia. YouTube is blocking YouTube downloaders. It's a crime against humanity that they lured people into to contribute videos to this platform. By losing money for years before being acquired, they ensured nobody could possibly compete with their own video platform. Its not a nonforprofit or library. They can freely censor, restrict, and edit videos as they please, especially for deceased accounts.
by konmok | 2025-12-28 02:12:33+00:00
The problem with this thinking is that the US government regularly engages in actual conspiracies, which the public only finds out about much later. COINTELPRO, MKULTRA, the Tuskegee experiments, Operation Paperclip, the list goes on [1].

So, while it's true that the overwhelming majority of conspiracy theories are dumb nonsense, it remains unwise to dismiss a theory just because it is a "conspiracy theory".

[1] This is almost certainly true of other governments as well! I'm just less informed there.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-28 02:13:10+00:00
> 1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”

Did you miss the trend in the 2010s of announcing you were quitting social media? This was already a thing. All it did was annoy people. Also 90% of the people I know who did it are back on social media.

If you want to use social media less, just use social media less. Hang out with other people who socialize instead of burying their face in their phone. Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
by C4K3 | 2025-12-28 02:13:21+00:00
There was an ffmpeg drag-and-drop GUI that let you create ffmpeg commands visually instead of having to remember all the right arguments. Inputs, filters and outputs are all nodes in a graph, and then you connect them together. When done you would export it as an ffmpeg command to run.

As an occasional user this was a lot easier to use than having to remember all of the commands, and it did it all without hiding the complexity from the user.

Unfortunately it looks like they tried to monetize it but then later shut down. It doesn't look like they posted the source code anywhere.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230131140736/https://ffmpeg.gu...
Ask HN: Can systems function correctly without memory?
by SpicyG | 2025-12-28 02:13:51+00:00
I’ve been thinking about whether memory is actually a runtime requirement for correctness, or just a training signal whose effects persist even when recall is no longer needed.

In practice, many distributed systems accumulate complexity because they treat state as something to negotiate with rather than something to enforce against. When systems attempt to reconcile past states in order to act in the present, they often generate retries, reconciliation logic, and coordination overhead just to stay consistent.

I’ve been experimenting with an enforcement-first pattern where every interaction is treated as a first-time request, invalid states are refused rather than repaired, and state is carried explicitly by the request itself. I put together a minimal reference implementation to make the idea concrete.

I’m curious where people think this model breaks down in practice, and which classes of systems truly require narrative state rather than local constraint enforcement.

https://github.com/SvengsFuture/stateless-substrate
by jesse__ | 2025-12-28 02:14:04+00:00
> "tagged" unions of ADT languages like Haskell are arguably pretty clearly inferior to the "untagged" unions of TypeScript

dude .. wut?? Explain to me exactly how this is true, with a real world example.

From where I stand, untagged unions are useful in an extremely narrow set of circumstances. Tagged unions, on the other hand, are incredibly useful in a wide variety of applications.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-28 02:14:14+00:00
> Witness any cause which involves protesting by blocking the street. You get an army of internet trolls talking up the idea that this is somehow evil.

"Evil" is a stronger word than I would use, but I think it's fair to say that blocking the streets is both reckless and extremely antisocial. Making my life harder when I didn't do anything to wrong you doesn't make me more sympathetic to your cause, it makes me think "wow the people who support X are real dicks".

Also I like how you label this as a position espoused by "Internet trolls", as though no normal decent person could be irritated when they get screwed over by protesters.
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-12-28 02:14:43+00:00
You get dangerously into the "wart" territory from C++.

Another example - in ruby. I really like the Pathname library and use it a lot. Even in my OWN programs, where I almost ALWAYS immediately turn a path into a Pathname, I still find myself calling Pathname functions and getting errors because the type is a string. I've found myself naming parameters - lets say it's a data file - "data_pn" to reassure myself that i should indeed pass in a pathname and not a string.

This is just re-engaging the hungarian notation "warts" pattern in another place and time.
by infecto | 2025-12-28 02:17:28+00:00
> You Americans are so funny.

People like you are funny too but its easy to make posts like yours. Density in most urban parts of Japan and Taipei are wildly higher than say a Houston Texas. Again like I said, you are oversimplifying the problem which I get it, its easy to do. I don't think this is as simple as "build the rail, then upzone the area around stations", would happy to be wrong but I think like all of the world there are cultural and historical reasons for the difference.

It would take decades, you need buy in from both tax payers, commercial buildings, retail spaces, home builders etc.

It would be great if you could have a central planner like a China to just build a city with all the infrastructure in place but in places like America, that does not happen and so its a very tough egg to crack. Keep in mind its not just about being hot, definitely lots of Japan and Taiwan are very humid but you are also in city centers that have 8-9x the density of Houston. Lots of things to do and often you are most likely not walking that far, relative for city walking. I could walk a mile in Houston and still have not left my starting spot.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-28 02:17:51+00:00
I've lived through the '00 crisis, the '08 crisis, and a global pandemic. In all cases, there were signs the event was upon us, but you won't know for sure until the event is in full swing. The advice remains the same as it always does: carry as little debt as reasonably possible, don't overextend yourself without good reason, ensure sufficient liquid reserves, maximize employment and income opportunities, and have a strong network, both professional and community. Stay healthy to the best of your ability. Humans have existed for some time, we're going to exist for a while longer. I have many people who depend on me, and I'm prepared for anything short of global unexpected nuclear conflict. As long as you care, that's half the battle. Wishing you a favorable outcome.
by breadwinner | 2025-12-28 02:18:14+00:00
> that tends to get in the way of complex error handling.

Agree. In Java, Streams allow you to process collections in a functional style. This feature enables concise, expressive data manipulation with operations like map, filter, and reduce.

Some people point out that Java's checked exceptions spoil the simplicity and elegance of Streams by forcing you to handle exceptions.

But that's not a reason to not have checked exceptions, it is a reason to not do functional style composition when methods can throw exceptions. Streams was invented for collections, which tend not to throw exceptions. If proper error handling is important don't do Streams.
by wewtyflakes | 2025-12-28 02:18:29+00:00
I cited sources; you are trying to redefine the word "explode" to not mean explode. Regardless, litigating about the word "explode" is the least interesting part of what happened to this plane; at at the end of day, nobody wants to fly on a plane that has its engine exp... err, suffer catastrophic failure that is totally not an explosion.
by dbmnt | 2025-12-28 02:21:05+00:00
I’m struggling with the utility of this logic. The argument seems to be "because malware can intercept /proc output, any tool relying on it is inherently unreliable."

While that’s theoretically true in a security context, it feels like a 'perfect is the enemy of the good' situation. Unless the author is discussing high-stakes incident response on a compromised system, discarding /proc-based tools for debugging and troubleshooting seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If your environment is so compromised that /proc is lying to you, you've likely moved past standard tooling anyway.
by Jensson | 2025-12-28 02:22:59+00:00
> If you are doing FP on the other hand, at least change always results in new objects, with structural sharing at most. This excludes a whole category of bugs.

Not if you program it with a mutable god object to mimic creating a new big state, then you have exactly the same kind of issues.

The issue is if you try to program a transaction flow using object oriented programming, that is not very good, and most work programmers do revolves around involves flows. But when it doesn't then functional programming isn't a very good or reliable solution.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-28 02:24:29+00:00
20 years ago I'd say that "free-to-play" would have been necessary because of the N² value that social sites create, just getting the idea mainstream was difficult enough and you can very much see the phases we went through, how Facebook inspired Twitter and back, etc. Like, of my family and friends who are on Facebook I think very few of them would become subscribers.

Today people believe in the value of social media and selling a subscription would be easier but the barriers I see are

- from the viewpoint of incumbents, the people who would pay to have an ad-free experience are the people you most want to show ads to! Or to the converse, the person who won't spend $10 to block ads is cheap and won't spend money on anything else

- incumbents will get in the way of any kind of "aggregator" service which adds value

In a Fediversal system there would be a possible markets for a product that helps a consumer have a better consuming experience or a publisher have a better publishing experience (e.g. I post links and photos to 9 services) and would some pay, yes. But incumbents are threatened by openness and price API access at punitive, not profit-maximizing levels. Even in a more open world I'd have a lot of fear that the revenue and the costs won't line up and the profits in some part of the systems will be at the expense of unsustainable losses elsewhere and the mechanism design to make that work is tough.

(e.g. I did some biz dev with a guy who had a track record in influencing freakin' telecoms to do better with mechanism design who thought "freedom isn't free" is the problem with the internet who struggled to get calls with anyone)
by DannyBee | 2025-12-28 02:26:29+00:00
"I kinda don’t like PTP. Too complicated and requires specialized hardware."

?????

I run PTP on everything from RPI's to you name it, over fiber, ethernet, etc.

The main thing hardware gives is filtration of PTP packets or hardware timestamping.

Neither is actually required, though some software has decided to require it.

Additionally, something like 99% of sold gigabit or better chipsets since 2012 support it (I210 et al)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-28 02:26:48+00:00
To be early or late is the same as being wrong, and I had a friend who lost everything trying to be right take their life when they were wrong. It is true, you have the potential to make money, and if you can afford it, who am I to stop you? But, you can also lose it all, and I hope that those who try don't. It's just numbers in a database after all. Gamble responsibly. There is always someone smarter or faster on the order book.
by pdeva1 | 2025-12-28 02:27:29+00:00
AWS has the Google TrueTime equivalent precision clock available for public use[1] which makes this problem much easier to solve now. Auora DSQL uses it. Even third party db's like YugabyteDb make use of it.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/set-time...
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-28 02:27:36+00:00
Thanks!

On adding new characters to Unicode, as for any commitee there will be rejection and cases where going through the whole process is cumbersome/not worth it.

It's more commonly discussed in the CJK circles, it reminded me of the Wikipedia entry (unsurprisingly with no English equivalent)

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%A1%A8%E7%A4%BA%E...

> minority languages

More archaic that minority, but one language I had in mind was one using color coded strings and knots representation. There are latin alphabet mappings, so as long as we trust the translation record keeping per se works in Unicode, but if one wanted to keep the exact original writing it would obviously not work out in plain text. I imagined it's not an isolated instance, but I'm also way out of my depth on this one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
by jesse__ | 2025-12-28 02:29:52+00:00
Granted, my reply was somewhat offensive, but that was kind of the point.

That said, it's easy to throw shade from a new, blank account. Nothing to lend credibility to your statements, not even bushleague itch.io stuff, or a cute, toy engine. Give me the goods, otherwise you're just blowing smoke.

> your reply is simultaneously naive and a non-sequitur

Basis? Pretty watery rebuttal for someone so sure of themselves.
by ThunderSizzle | 2025-12-28 02:29:55+00:00
"We" don't have passkeys now. Many functional android devices are not being upgraded to the latest Android versions, and simply will never get true passkey support that isn't locked away inside of Google's vault.

Passwords are much better than the OAuth2 coolaid, and passwords will still be better as long as older devices can't support passkeys due to arbitrary restrictions.
by manwe150 | 2025-12-28 02:30:26+00:00
To follow up on that, I think that 50 year horizon number has even been the case for something well over 50 years now. It seems we are incentivized currently to extract from deposits around that threshold of years? One professor I had even claimed this will always hold true indefinitely, since at some point we’ll switch away from oil, this holding constant there being about 50 years of known reserves left, once it become economically infeasible to extract that oil.
by jacob019 | 2025-12-28 02:30:58+00:00
I get where you're coming from, especially since role playing was so vital in early models in a way that is no longer necessary, or even harmful; however, when designing a complex system of interactions, there's really no way around it. And as humans we do this constantly, putting on a different hat for different jobs. When I'm wearing my developer hat, I have to reason about the role of each component in a system, and when I use an agent to serve in that role, by curating it's context and designating rules for how I want it to behave, I'm assigning it a persona. What's more, I may prime the context user and assistant messages, as examples of how I want it to respond. That context becomes the agent's personality--it's persona.
by kace91 | 2025-12-28 02:31:28+00:00
>This is unsubstantiated.

It is substantiated enough to have its own article on Wikipedia:

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

>This says a lot about Trump, but pardons? That's it?

Do we really need an enumeration of cases where corporations and the rich and are intertwined with political power in the west?

If political pardons are too tame, or trump is considered an anomaly, we can just point in the general direction of Iraq.
by thundergolfer | 2025-12-28 02:31:54+00:00
All the line items are decent things, worth doing, but the claim about how much following the line items would improve reliability is super exaggerated.

> [Most production incidents] are due to the code entering a state that should never have been possible.

I have never seen evidence that this is even remotely true, and I've been looking at software reliability research in the last few months.

Instead, it is more true that most production incidents are due to the system entering into one of thousands of unsafe states which were possible and latent in production potentially for years. In a sufficiently complex system—all interesting and important software projects—functional programming is not strong enough a tool to prevent even a sliver of potential accidents.

> Arguments that these degraded conditions should have been recognized before the overt accident are usually predicated on naïve notions of system performance. System operations are dynamic, with components (organizational, human, technical) failing and being replaced continuously. — https://how.complexsystems.fail/