MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Night_Thastus | 2025-12-09 18:23:03+00:00
I'd imagine most people aren't 100% positive on what they want to get beforehand. Sometimes you only realize you want something after passing by it. Maybe it's something you haven't gotten in awhile and hadn't considered beforehand.

And even if you are completely sure on what you want in advance, having someone else do it is not always great. At least with Instacart, the person doing the shopping frequently didn't know where something was and just assumed it was 'out' and tried to substitute it (badly). There was all this awful delay and back-and-forth and crappy picures with the person shopping to try to get the right thing.

Doing it yourself doesn't have that problem. You know what you want, why you want it, and what you're willing to bend on. No, X brand cheese is not a substitute for Y branch I wanted, never do that. But yes, Z brand and type of milk is fine compared to what I wanted and I know they are frequently out.

Grocery store employees aren't any better at this, btw. Especially since the stores like to re-arrange on a monthly basis.
by vidarh | 2025-12-09 18:23:03+00:00
When I think "IDE but better", a Claude Code-like interface is increasingly what I want.

If you babysit every interaction, rather than reviewing a completed unit of work of some size, you're wasting your time second-guessing that the model won't "recover" from stupid mistakes. Sometimes that's right, but more often than not it corrects itself faster than you can.

And so it's far more effective to interact with it far more async, where the UI is more for figuring out what it did if something doesn't seem right, than for working live. I have Claude writing a game engine in another window right now, while writing this, and I have no interest in reviewing every little change, because I know the finished change will look nothing like the initial draft (it did just start the demo game right now, though, and it's getting there). So I review no smaller units of change than 30m-1h, often it will be hours, sometimes days, between each time I review the output, when working on something well specified.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-12-09 18:23:05+00:00
I write a library which is used by customers to implement integrations with our platform. The #1 thing I think about is not

> How do I express this code in Typescript?

it's

> What is the best way to express this idea in a way that won't confuse or anger our users? Where in the library should I put this new idea? Upstream of X? Downstream of Y? How do I make it flexible so they can choose how to integrate this? Or maybe I don't want to make it flexible - maybe I want to force them to use this new format?

> Plus making sure that whatever changes I make are non-breaking, which means that if I update some function with new parameters, they need to be made optional, so now I need to remember, downstream, that this particular argument may or may not be `undefined` because I don't want to break implementations from customers who just upgraded the most recent minor or patch version

The majority of the problems I solve are philosophical, not linguistic
by roughly | 2025-12-09 18:23:09+00:00
I've been working to get more involved with, eg, mutual aid groups and other forms of local capacity and resiliency building over the last year - one thing that's stuck out to me is how many of these groups' public face is an Instagram site. That might not have been existential a couple years ago, but given what we're seeing now with, for instance, Paramount making a rival bid for Warner based solely on their coziness with the current administration, it doesn't feel like the corporate media ecosystem is going to be an even "squint and you can kind of pretend" neutral territory for organizing and information dissemination going forward.

For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value - we need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100+.
by jpmcb | 2025-12-09 18:23:09+00:00
It feels far too early for a protocol that's barely a year old with so much turbulence to be donated into its own foundation under the LF.

Alot of people don't realize this, but the foundations that wrap up to the LF have revenue pipelines that are supported by those foundations events (like Kubecon brings in ALOT of money for the CNCF), courses, certifications, etc. And, by proxy, the projects support those revenue streams for the foundations they're in. The flywheel is _supposed_ to be that companies donate to the foundation, those companies support the projects with engineering resources, they get a booth at the event for marketing, and the LF can ensure the health and well-being of the ecosystem and foundation through technical oversight committees, elections, a service-desk, owning the domains, etc.

I don't see how MCP supports that revenue stream nor does it seem like a good idea at this stage: why get a certification for "Certified MCP Developer" when the protocol is evolving so quickly and we've yet to figure how OAuth is going to work in a sane manner?

Mature projects like Kuberentes becoming the backbone of a foundation, like it did with CNCF, makes alot of sense: it was a relatively proven technology at Google that had alot of practical use cases for the emerging world of "cloud" and containers. MCP, at least for me, has not yet proven it's robustness as a mature and stable project: I'd put it into the "sandbox" category of projects which are still rapidly evolving and proving their value. I would have much preferred for Anthropic and a small strike team of engaged developers to move fast and fix alot of the issues in the protocol vs. it getting donated and slowing to a crawl.
by millerm | 2025-12-09 18:23:14+00:00
Yeah, I'm not a paid shill. I have been using IntelliJ since version 2 way back in 2003(?). Yes, it's had its performance issues, but people tend to forget the feature set they brought to market, and have continued to do so. But, my career is dead now, as I am an unemployed loser. So, 2026 will probably be the first year that I no longer have an updated IntelliJ.
by phkahler | 2025-12-09 18:23:19+00:00
>> If these corporations can't invest in housing, they'd direct their money elsewhere.

I think that's why they're buying residential - there aren't any other traditional investments that aren't in a bubble or just have low returns. If you anticipate economic collapse or hyper inflation or whatever, physical assets make sense - when you measure wealth in houses you don't care what the dollar does. Gold people can do without, housing not so much. Whatever happens next, people will need a place to live. OTOH the population collapse is also coming so housing doesn't make much sense beyond 2030 or so.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-09 18:23:54+00:00
> find a way to monetize it

If only there were a smart way to build a cryptocoin without the environmental mess of miners, but where you earn coinage from seeding videos. I feel like you'd want people to have a desktop client to let you seed in the background then award some sort of virtual currency that can be sold later. I hate to sound like a crypto-bro but I can't think of anything else more fitting for something already decentralized.
by jedbrooke | 2025-12-09 18:24:10+00:00
I’ve had a similar (likely non original) thought too that eventually LLMs could lead to something more akin to a compiler that would take human language instructions and go straight to a executable binary, possibly even with more traditional compiler analysis for performance and safety etc.

But then again LLMs in their current form are trained on mountains of human language so maybe having them output human readable code makes sense at least for now
by Elfener | 2025-12-09 18:24:19+00:00
My favourite thing about the "Copilot" branding is that Microsoft had to rename their existing Xbox feature named "Copilot": https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-profile/accessib...

Obviously so no one confuses their slop generator (which they want everyone to know about) with a (probably, I don't have an Xbox) useful feature.
by dlivingston | 2025-12-09 18:24:39+00:00
> And that's exactly the point, it increases engagement and stickiness, which they found through testing. They're trying to make the most addictive tool

Is this actually true? Would appreciate further reading on this if you have it.

I think this is an emergent property of the RLHF process, not a social media-style engagement optimization campaign. I don't think there is an incentive for LLM creators to optimize for engagement; there aren't ads (yet), inference is not free, and maximizing time spent querying ChatGPT doesn't really do much for OpenAI's bottom line.
by oersted | 2025-12-09 18:25:28+00:00
> graph based policy adjudication

What do you mean by this? Does the method involve playing with output token probabilities? Or modifying the prompt? Or blocking bad outputs?

> how uploading a custom policy would work

Do you have more info on this? Is this something you offer already or something you are planning? How would policies be defined, as a prompt? As a dataset of examples?
by starkparker | 2025-12-09 18:25:30+00:00
most recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDnXe6N8h_c on why FPS is flawed specifically for GPU benchmarking

most specifically, an ongoing attempt to understand and debunk frame generation (DLSS, etc.) as a performance gain due to introducing latency despite high FPS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh1FHR9fkJk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDvfIbRIb3U

More broadly than frame pacing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj-wZ_KGcsg is a recent example of one of _many_ interviews going back years on why both frame times and frame rates are all flawed for explaining why some games feel smoother/lag more than others (there are GN videos dating back to 2016 on the subject)
by colechristensen | 2025-12-09 18:25:38+00:00
I've been wondering if this kind of annoying affirmation is actually important to model performance and maybe should just be hidden from view like the thinking sections.

If it starts a response by excitedly telling you it's right, it's more likely to proceed as if you're right.

Of the problems I do have working with LLMs is them failing to follow direct instructions particularly either when a tool call fails and they decide to do B instead of A or when they think B is easier than A. Or they'll do half a task and call it complete. Too frequently I have to respond with "Did you follow my instructions?" "I want you to ACTUALLY do A" and finally "Under no circumstances should you ever do anything other than A and if you cannot you MUST admit failure and give extensive evidence with actual attempts that A is not possible" or occasionally "a cute little puppy's life depends on you doing A promptly and exactly as requested".

--

Thing is I get it if you are impressionable and having a philosophical discussion with an LLM, maybe this kind of blind affirmation is bad. But that's not me and I'm trying to get things done and I only want my computer to disagree with me if it can put arguments beyond reasonable doubt in front of me that my request is incorrect.
by cxr | 2025-12-09 18:26:11+00:00
Different people have different lives. I myself can't imagine the type of life where at any given moment during the day I'm in a position to "immediately pull out my phone" when I want to create a record of something. I'm not a Pebble customer, past or present, and I have owned exactly zero smartwatches. Excluding portrayals of futuristic wrist-mounted computers I saw during childhood that seemed cool just because they seemed cool, this is the only worthwhile thing I've ever seen anyone actually propose a smartwatch could be good for. The fact that smartwatches could be (and are) widely embraced but that this seems like pure novelty to someone strikes me as very strange.

It sounds, though, like it doesn't solve a problem you have. I guess the only recourse you have about its existence is to not buy it.
by swatcoder | 2025-12-09 18:26:13+00:00
That sounds like papier mache more than bridge building, forever pasting more code on as ideas and time permit without the foresight to engineer or architect towards some cohesive long-term vision.

Most software products built that way seem to move fast at first but become monstrous abominations over time. If those are the only places you keep finding yourself in, be careful!
by lanfeust6 | 2025-12-09 18:26:20+00:00
Yes, and for as much as that's an annoyance, games are far worse now. This has infected everything AAA, not just JRPGs. See: the God of War reboot, Tomb Raider, etc.

Narrative is one thing, but at least with 90s JRPGs you could go through dialog on the field screen at your own pace, generally. It doesn't take long to get to the action.
by teach | 2025-12-09 18:27:20+00:00
Normally I try to go with the most charitable interpretation, but this article makes it difficult.

> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything....

China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.

I _do_ think there's a place for more efficient use of the fossil fuels we do have. People are going to continue to burn natural gas for a while, so we might as well do it better I guess. But America isn't going to make up the energy deficit with fossil fuels, no matter how "clever" we are.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-09 18:27:26+00:00
> Moreover, even if big investors are purchasing thousands of homes, they don’t own significant numbers of homes compared with small-scale landlords and individuals.

> Last month, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions published a report showing that corporations now own a remarkable one in 11 residential real-estate parcels in the 500 urban counties with data robust enough to analyze. In some communities, they control more than 20 percent of properties.

They're invoking a false dichotomy. Small scale landlords (i.e. the guy who owns a second home and rents it out) are part of the corporations. From the linked report:

> A corporate investor, also referred to as a nonindividual investor, is a business entity that owns residential property, usually for the purpose of generating income. This broad category ranges from small entities such as family trusts and limited liability corporations (LLCs) to larger outfits like real estate investment trusts (REITs), endowments, and pension funds.

Many/most "ordinary" folks who buy a house to rent fall in this category - they form an LLC or something similar. Many reasons for this. Percentage-wise, my guess is that institutional investors (not just individuals who formed an LLC) are still a relatively small minority, but I don't have the data.

There is a common misconception on HN that it's rich people who mostly buy houses/units to rent out. In my experience, that's just not the case. Everyone is doing it across the board, and just by virtue of there being more non-rich people, they are likely the majority.

Also, higher income folks don't feel a great need to make more money. Median or lower income want to make a lot more, and real estate is actually one of the fewest options available to them (and also really easy to learn/understand). A lot less work than a second job (although some get a second job just to bootstrap the RE purchase process).

Just 3 days ago I spoke to a friend. Engineer (not software). Decent income, but not FAANG level. Non-working spouse and multiple kids. Rents out two houses, and is buying 2 more.

I took an AirBnB course from a guy who has lots of listings on AirBnB. He got there with almost no money down (most of his money was spent on furnishing the place). He was educated, but fairly low income ($50-60K in California). When I took the course he was making over $300K/year net from his AirBnBs.

When I used to listen to the Bigger Pockets podcast, the majority of people who owned 10+ homes to rent had very average incomes (less than a typical non-FAANG engineer).

I've been in the real estate space for a few years now. I don't own other units, but I do invest in them, and am moderately active in a local real estate club. I know how these things work.

If you want to solve this problem, stop pointing fingers at "rich people", and stop allowing multiple ownership for a decade or two.
by cryzinger | 2025-12-09 18:27:31+00:00
Respectfully, I'm not sure you can draw meaningful conclusions about a 100+ paragraph deep-dive article after reading the first eight or nine. The biography stuff is definitely relevant to the takeaways about Sacks' methodology and style:

> Other doctors had dismissed these patients as hopeless, but Sacks had sensed that they still had life in them—a recognition that he understood was possible because he, too, felt as if he were “buried alive.”

[...]

> Another patient is so aroused and euphoric that she tells Sacks [according to his telling in Awakenings], “My blood is champagne”—the phrase Sacks used to describe himself when he was in love with Vincze.

[...]

> “I know, in a way, you don’t feel like living,” Sacks tells her, in another recorded session. “Part of one feels dead inside, I know, I know that. . . . One feels that one wants to die, one wants to end it, and what’s the use of going on?”

> “I don’t mean it in that way,” she responds.

> “I know, but you do, partly,” Sacks tells her. “I know you have been lonely all your life.”
by amatecha | 2025-12-09 18:27:36+00:00
I remember it felt like AGES for the Mac version to come out -- my friends with DOS/Win machines were playing and of course I was out of luck, still clinging to my precious WarCraft 1 in the meantime (apparently the Mac vers came out 8mo later)... I remember visiting a couple friends and playing the game at their house and being so jealous they can just play this amazing game any time. WC2 was such a leap forward and such an improved game (though I did miss the gritty/darker feel from WC1). Great memories of playing modem games with my friends in the area, and AppleTalk LAN games as well of course.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-09 18:28:07+00:00
Would you want the “law” deciding that you had to license software code to anyone and have the law set the price?

How does the law decide how much Disney should license the Avengers for compared to my cat videos I’m going to put on my website?

Should we expand the law so if I post open source code under AGPL, I must license it to at a certain price?
by Asooka | 2025-12-09 18:28:11+00:00
In that case you can use bit fields in a union:

union slot { uint64_t keyvalue; struct { uint64_t key: 32; uint64_t value: 32; }; };

Since both members of the union are effectively the exact same type, there is no issue. C99: "If the member used to access the contents of a union is not the same as the member last used to store a value, the object representation of the value that was stored is reinterpreted as an object representation of the new type". Meaning, you can initialise keyvalue and that will initialise both key and value, so writing "union slot s{0}" initialises everything to 0. One issue is that the exact layout for bit fields is implementation defined, so if you absolutely need to know where key and value are in memory, you will have to read GCC's manual (or just experiment). Another is that you cannot take the address of key or value individually, but if your code was already using uint64_t, you probably don't need to.

Edit: Note also that you can cast a pointer to slot to a pointer to uint64_t and that does not break strict aliasing rules.
by indemnity | 2025-12-09 18:28:29+00:00
I also cancelled my All Products subscription a while ago. I have been an IntelliJ user since the early 2000s and gave up after in 2025, it would still forget how a Maven project with some generated files should be built, with everything turning to a sea of red until you reimported the project and redid all your settings again. Job #1.

There was always a regression like this in every new build, along with the performance issues. Also switched to Zed + Claude Code/Codex.

I will miss the debugger (a little bit).
by jellyotsiro | 2025-12-09 18:29:01+00:00
Not quite “better RAG for code”. The core idea is agentic discovery plus semantic search. Instead of static chunks pushed into context, the agent can dynamically traverse docs, follow links, grep for exact identifiers, and request only the relevant pieces on demand.

No manual chunking. We index with multiple strategies (hierarchical docs structure, symbol boundaries, semantic splitting) so the agent can jump into the right part without guessing chunk edges.

Context is selective. The agent retrieves minimal snippets and can fetch more iteratively as it reasons, rather than preloading large chunks. We benchmark this using exact match evaluations on real agent tasks: correctness, reduced hallucination, and fewer round trips.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-12-09 18:29:24+00:00
it is stymied in part owing to regulatory requirements that makes getting loans at good rates impossible for small developers.

Notwithstanding that, the populist fantasy is that developers won't build more "because they are greedy", as though that math works out. If developers don't leave money on the table, then they'd want to build where the demand exists and it does. They face a number of constraints and bottlenecks, not just for materials/labor, but managing risk. Risk makes loans expensive, everything is built on credit. Some of that risk is compounded by the threat of litigation by NIMBYs, or regulatory requirements, or environmental review, etc.
by neom | 2025-12-09 18:29:51+00:00
Not addressing your question directly, but when I got flagged last year I emailed Dan and this was the reply: " John Edgar <je@h4x.club> Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 8:08 AM to Hacker

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36735275

Just curious if chatGPT is actually formally banned on HN?

Hacker News <hn@ycombinator.com> Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 4:12 PM to me

Yes, they're banned. I don't know about "formally" because that word can mean different things and a lot of the practice of HN is informal. But we've definitely never allowed bots or generated comments. Here are some old posts referring to that.

dang

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984470 (May 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35869698 (May 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503 (March 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35206303 (March 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747 (Dec 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33911426 (Dec 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571890 (Aug 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27558392 (June 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693590 (April 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22744611 (April 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427782 (Feb 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774797 (Dec 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325914 (March 2019)"

(Edit: oh, it's not 2024 anymore. How time flies!)
by jefecoon | 2025-12-09 18:30:00+00:00
I'm impressed by the depth of snark from GPro3 here, e.g. - Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com) - The unexpected return of server-side rendering (htmx.org)

And, how GPro3 clearly 'knows' HNews and knows what makes it to frontpage, e.g.: - Restoring a 2024 Framework Laptop: A retrospective (ifixit.com) - Show HN: A text editor that doesn't use AI (github.com) - Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig? (github.com)

Good laughs.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-09 18:30:32+00:00
Okay, and if they move ownership and production outside of the country and stream it from their website ate yoi going to block them from streaming to the US?

How is that law going to apply to Sony who is Japanese owned and CrunchyRoll?

Do we force PluralSight and Udacity to share their content? YouTube creators?