MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-12-08 22:37:02+00:00
When I worked with bounded Redis streams a couple of years ago we had to implement our own backpressure mechanism which was quite tricky to get right.

To implement backpressure without relying on out of band signals (distributed systems beware) you need to have a deep understanding of the entire redis streams architecture and how the the pending entries list, consumers groups, consumers etc. works and interacts to not lose data by overwriting yourself.

Unbounded would have been fine if we could spill to disk and periodically clean up the data, but this is redis.

Not sure if that has improved.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-08 22:37:20+00:00
Doesn't work for YOU, because Uber burned many billions across 15 years making sure they killed all their competitors.

In most places, your options for a taxi service are Uber or go fuck yourself. That's how they're able to get away with their price gouging, privacy recklessness, and share-cropped labor.

Free market dynamics only work if you are in a free market. We're not, there's one player, and they won the market by literally just cheating and breaking the law. Sorry, sorry, "disrupting".
by rio-popper | 2025-12-08 22:37:29+00:00
For the record, it was two basements -- we moved office in the middle -- and a bigger issue was actually overheating. But your point is basically right! The model is a lot better at certain kinds of ideas than others. Particularly concerning was the fact that the first cluster I noticed getting good was all the different variations of 'the headset is uncomfortable/heavy' etc. But this makes sense -- what participants talk about has a lot to do with what kinds of ideas the model can pick up, and this was more or less what we expected
by phantasmish | 2025-12-08 22:37:33+00:00
Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so.

You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards.

Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget about native, it’s webshit or else you can double those figures… for one platform. What’s that? Your TAM is only (the size of the entire home PC market circa 1995)? Oh forget about it then, you’ll never get funded”

It seems like we’ve gotten far less efficient.

I’m skeptical this problem has to do with code-writing, and so am skeptical that LLMs are going to even get us back to our former baseline.
by dzonga | 2025-12-08 22:37:37+00:00
pretty decent article - but what it misses is most of these agents are trained on bad code - which is open source.

so what does this mean in practice? for people working on proprietary systems (cost will never go down) - the code is not on github, maybe hosted on an internal VCS - bitbucket etc. the agents were never trained on that code - yeah they might help with docs (but are they using the latest docs?)

for others - the agents spit bad code, make assumptions that don't exist, call api's that don't exist or have been deprecated ?

each of those you need an experienced builder who has 1. technical know-how 2. domain expertise ? so has the cost of experienced builder(s) gone down ? I don't think so - I think it has gone up

what people are vibecoding out there - is mostly tools / apps that deal in closed systems (never really interact with the outside world), scripts were ai can infer based on what was done before etc but are these people building anything new ?

I have also noticed there's a huge conflation with regards to - cost & complexity. zirp drove people to build software on very complex abstractions eg kubernetes, nextjs, microservices etc - hence people thought they needed huge armies of people etc. however we also know the inverse is true that most software can be built by teams of 1-3 people. we have countless proof of this.

so people think to reduce cost is to use a.i agents instead of addressing the problem head-on - built software in a simpler manner. will ai help - yeah but not to the extent of what is being sold or written daily.
by xnx | 2025-12-08 22:37:50+00:00
1) "Take over" is slanted language. More accurately "Some residents complain about delivery robots on sidewalks"

2) Remote control delivery carts are much safer and less intrusive than double parked delivery cars (sometimes unlicensed, untagged, and uninsured) or even delivery bikes (riding 20+ mph in the bike line or against traffic on 100+ pound "bikes").
by anonymous908213 | 2025-12-08 22:39:10+00:00
This is a terrible overview. The actual primary benefit of toasts is that they provide feedback on low-importance events without requiring the user to interact with them and without permanently taking up UI space. The web application I use most frequently would be infuriating if I had to deal with a modal window every time a toast would have been used, and UI space is at a premium for useful functionality, so occupying a permanent spot to relay those messages isn't a good solution either.

I wish software developers could drop this dogmatism. Same as the old Goto considered harmful trope outliving its usefulness and all that. It's always black and white - "people can misuse this tool, so this tool is inherently bad and should be eliminated from usage completely" - rather than acknowledging that many tools have great use cases even if they can also be abused.
by still_grokking | 2025-12-08 22:39:29+00:00
Python's approach is one of the most confusing ways to possibly do it. Not having proper, discoverable methods is super annoying, and I need to look it up every time anew I use Python because it's so unintuitive.

Of course you can write a generic version of `mkString` (as this method is called in Scala), so it's also just one method no matter the container count.

The Python weirdness is actually a direct result from the language lacking generics…
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-08 22:40:26+00:00
The optimality results are drawn from modeling assumptions that happen to be fairly general, not from any specific political views. For instance, much of the real-world political advocacy of UBI or cash transfers towards low-income folks is downstream from arguments about the predicted efficacy of this as a kind of redistribution; the arguments are not themselves politically motivated. The argument for taxing pure rents only, as opposed to productive capital, is structurally quite similar; as is the general argument for paying careful attention to incentive effects at the top end of the income distribution.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-08 22:40:55+00:00
I came to say something similar. Office 2000 seems more than sufficient for everybody outside of some very specific niches. The success of the comparatively much more basic Google Docs and Sheets are proof of this.

Similarly I could live happily ever after with Photoshop 7.x or CS1 if they took full advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.
by devin | 2025-12-08 22:41:02+00:00
Does that mean you don't think you learned anything valuable through the experience of working through this complexity yourself?

I'm not advocating for everyone to do all of their math on paper or something, but when I look back on the times I learned the most, it involved a level of focus and dedication that LLMs simply do not require. In fact, I think their default settings may unfortunately lead you toward shallow patterns of thought.
by simonw | 2025-12-08 22:41:07+00:00
The idea that LLMs were trained on miscellaneous scraped low quality code may have been true a year ago, but I suspect it is no longer true today

All of the major model vendors are competing on how well their models can code. The key to getting better code out of the model is improving the quality of the code that it is trained on.

Filtering training data for high quality code is easier than filtering for high quality data if other types.

My strong hunch is that the quality of code being used to train current frontier models is way higher than it was a year ago.
by bitwize | 2025-12-08 22:41:38+00:00
Let's say LLMs add 50 "skill points" to your output. Developer A is at 60 skill points in terms of coding ability, developer B is at 40. The differential between them looks large. Now add LLMs. Developer A is at 110 skill points, developer B is at 90. Same difference, but now it doesn't look as large.

The (perceived, alleged) augmentation by LLMs makes individual differences in developer skill seem less important. From the business's perspective, you are not getting much less by hiring a less skilled developer vs. hiring a more skilled one, even if both of them would be using LLMs on the job.

Obviously, real life is more complicated than this, but that's a rough idea of what the CEO and the shareholders are grappling with from a talent acquisition standpoint.
by crooked-v | 2025-12-08 22:41:47+00:00
I feel like part of this is people not being comfortable with the idea that they don't have to be deferent to the robots (i.e. do what you want, it will avoid you). That's perfectly understandable (nobody wants to walk in front a moving industrial robots), but is something these companies will have to work on if they want people comfortable around their bots.
by dabockster | 2025-12-08 22:42:29+00:00
The failed merger and similar clawback clause between Kroger and Albertsons is currently destroying a significant part of the supply chain for food in the Pacific Northwest. Grocery stores that have been open for 50-75 years - stores where whole neighborhoods and towns were built around - are closing forever, leaving those areas as food deserts.

Either way, this entertainment merger is going to get ugly. Consumers are absolutely going to get harmed either way with that clawback clause.
by brailsafe | 2025-12-08 22:42:30+00:00
> Millennial wasn't a generation.

It's as much of a generation as people broadly accept it to be, and I'd think a majority of people who bother to have an opinion don't attribute the delineating factor to the specific criteria of graduating during that exact year. Ironically, my sense of Gen Xers is that they're entirely defined by closely associating with their high school culture and not being boomers, who incidentally created a majority of Gen X culture.

Boomers are the selfish entitled "me" generation who had it the easiest economically, hold all the wealth now, and have killed the economy, Gen Xers are the latchkey kids who we forgot about and yet created the biggest tech companies we all rely on (carrying in the boomers footsteps), Millenials are the snowflakes who grew up on the cusp of the burgeoning internet, were given trophies for losing and yet are more competent and educated than anyone before, and will be responsible for paying for the boomers as they die through taxes and sacrifices (aka "The we're fucked, but like actually" generation), and then there's the rest who carry some of the same millenial issues (because damn those boomers, and the "don't call us boomers" generation are still out ruining everything) but were born late enough that they don't remember 911 or the millennium and have never known a life without the internet or something
by ux | 2025-12-08 22:42:30+00:00
> What's a good way to get started learning to build/customize shaders with GLSL?

I gave some directions and resources in a comment here, it might help you: https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1pgqis...

> And GLSL syntax looks a bit tedious to be honest, but I'd love to dive in.

With the vectorization everywhere, it's surprisingly convenient given how simple the syntax is. I personally just miss some sinpi/cospi/etc, and/or a PI and TAU constant.
by bloppe | 2025-12-08 22:42:44+00:00
"Building software" is a bit too general, though. I believe "Building little web apps for my son's school" has gotten at least 10x easier. But the needle has not moved much on building something like Notion, or Superhuman, or Vercel, or <insert name of any non-trivial project with more than 1000 man-hours of dev work>.

Even with perfect prompt engineering, context rot catches up to you eventually. Maybe a fundamental architecture breakthrough will change this, but I'm not holding my breath.
by lisbbb | 2025-12-08 22:42:49+00:00
This article was more of an advertisement for...something than any meaningful commentary.

How good are tests written by AI, really? The junk "coverage" unit tests sure, but well thought out integration tests? No way. Testing code is difficult, some AI slop isn't going to make that easier because someone has to know the code and the infrastructure it is going in to and reason about all of it.
by neom | 2025-12-08 22:43:23+00:00
DigitalOcean version 1 was a duck taped together mash of bash, chron jobs and perl, 2 people out of 12 understood it, 1 knew how to operate it. It worked, but it was insane, like really, really insane. 0% chance the original chatgpt would have written something as bad as DO v1.
by schlauerfox | 2025-12-08 22:43:44+00:00
I had a couple senior FPGA classes with a JPL engineer who had worked on F-Prime, it was awesome to see the project and learn embedded from it. I think he suffered layoffs shortly thereafter when JPL did a big RIF. I'm grateful they put such work into it and make it public, their support is a significant part of the curriculum at the upper division computer engineering where I went.
by pezezin | 2025-12-08 22:44:16+00:00
I live in Misawa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misawa,_Aomori) and work in Rokkasho (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rokkasho), which is the area where the earthquake hit the strongest. It was quite violent, apparently the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the region. My house suffered no damage other than a few things falling off the cabinets, and I could sleep soundly afterwards, but lets see today at work.
by fsflover | 2025-12-08 22:44:26+00:00
> You made a general statement about attacks from GOS on GNU/Linux.

No, I provided two specific examples, one quoted and another linked to. None of them happend in the context of wrong comparisons being made.

> You say you dont trust Google at all. Thats your position. Then my argument is to not trust their code, regardless of which project its submitted to. How is that unreasonable.

Your argument is completely unreasonable. Google has full control over Android and therefore GrapheneOS. It has very little control over Linux. All their contributions to Linux are carefully verified by many independent parties and suspicious things not accepted by community are rejected. The latter doesn't happen in Android, see my examples above.

> The issue gets patched. Whether the code is published doesnt change the code...

Only if you 100% trust Google. I see you do and promote them. I wonder why you would defend a trillion-dollar, monoppolistic megacorp hostile to its users.

> People can also sti reverse engineer the code.

This takes huge effort and time. One can't rely on it to be secure.

> If Google were to put the restriction in AOSP, GOS can simply remove it from the code...

The effort to keep a hard Android fork up-to-date will grow exponentially. I don't expect that GOS team will manage to do it for long.

> This metaphor doenst make any sense in relation to the planned sideloading restrictions.

This is exactly what is happening with Android right now. Users are constantly loosing their control over the device in the name of the false sense of security.

> I suggest reading the blogposts from Google about what the process will look like.

This is not even funny. Are you working at Google? I suggest you to read blog posts by a non-profit instead: https://eff.org.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-08 22:44:53+00:00
I mean, you can dismiss me by calling me a cynical curmudgeon (which is not inaccurate), but from my perspective their website doesn't try to convince -- it tries to bamboozle. I don't think it's idiosyncratic at all to expect that claims made should be proven and supported, and that companies should present themselves with integrity and be genuine in their representations.

> Curmudgeons and cynics can't be convinced in the first place so it's not a good idea for a founder to put too much time into indulging them.

I'd say we're just not convinced by marketing lingo and puffery. I was convinced by the simple README containing code and transparent evidence that a fellow HNer put up in their personal capacity, so maybe you can direct the Nia team to that as an example of how to properly convince curmudgeons and cynics.
by swatcoder | 2025-12-08 22:45:44+00:00
40 years ago, those were the same people who "hated" how cavalier the French supposedly were regarding marriage and sex. That is to say, these are people who don't really care about Europe in the first place. They weren't watching French cinema or mingling with Parisians then, regardless of France's actual culture, and they're not watching Eurovision now.

They're already just nationalist folk reaching for for an example of what makes their culture the better one. Those people exist all over the world, and will always exist in some influential share, and don't change their mind based on fiddly little details like who wins a little talent search pageant they never cared about in the first place.

These people do need to be engaged with if we want international fraternity and open trade and stable military relationships, but that engagement is about finding reasons for those nationalists to think bigger to to make sure they can see benefits to pursuing those ends with weirdos half a world away, because the people half a world away are always going to look like weirdos when that's what you want to see.
by ux | 2025-12-08 22:45:44+00:00
> Thanks for putting this together.

I'm glad it reaches an audience :)

> Only critique is.. if you're sharing to teach, your compact/one line [460] char GLSL code is a poor delivery mechanism.

Understandable. Though, the demos are here to illustrate "what you can do with the trick I'm sharing". It's like, I'm teaching you how to do watercolor, and illustrate it with some paintings you won't be able to perform just with that knowledge. They're meant to inspire you to create. You're not looking at a tutorial, you're looking at art.
by nvader | 2025-12-08 22:46:12+00:00
I think this is an example of the emojification of communication. I suspect that trend is being sustained, at least, by LLMs who are prone to abusing vapid emojis everywhere.

I think that to a certain superficial level of analysis, a matched set of icons looks "complete" and indeed impressive. Designers and implementers of the interface can fool themselves through customary use that they're creating a language of ideograms. Their users, who interact with their product only a few hours per week, only perceive visual noise and clutter.
by acituan | 2025-12-08 22:46:29+00:00
> An objective and grounded ethical framework that applies to all agents should be a top priority.

I mean leaving aside the problem of computability, representability, comparability of values, or the fact that agency exists in opposition (virus vs human, gazelle vs lion) and even a higher order framework to resolve those oppositions is a form of another agency in itself with its own implicit privileged vantage point, why does it sound to me that focusing on agency in itself is just another way of pushing protestant work ethic? What happens to non-teleological, non-productive existence for example?

The critique of anthropocentrism often risks smuggling in misanthropy whether intended or not; humans will still exist, their claims will count, and they cannot be reduced to mere agency - unless you are their line manager. Anyone who wants to shave that down has to present stronger arguments than centricity. In addition to proving that they can be anything other than anthropocentric - even if done through machines as their extensions - any person who claims to have access to the seat of objectivity sounds like a medieval templar shouting "deus vult" on their favorite proposition.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-12-08 22:46:33+00:00
Yep. Software construction was branded a team sport. Hence, social coding, tool quality being considered more important (good thing for sure), and, arguably, less emphasis on individual skill and agency.

This was in service of a time when tech was the great equalizer, powered by ZIRP. It also dovetailed perfectly with middle managers needing more reports in fast growing tech companies. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back from the overly collective focus we had during the 2010s.
by xdc0 | 2025-12-08 22:46:39+00:00
Betteridge's law proven correct once again. The answer to the headline is: no. Perhaps it will be true in the future, nobody knows.

I'm skeptical the extent to which people publishing articles like this use AI to build non-trivial software, and by non-trivial I mean _imperfect_ codebases that have existed for a few years, battle tested, with scars from hotfixes to deal with fires and compromises to handle weird edge cases/workarounds and especially a codebase where many developers have contributed to it over time.

Just this morning I was using Gemini 3 Pro working on some trivial feature, I asked it about how to go about solving an issue and it completely hallucinated a solution suggesting to use a non-existing function that was supposedly exposed by a library. This situation has been the norm in my experience for years now and, while this has improved over time, it's still very, very common occurrence. If it can't get these use cases down to an acceptable successful degree, I just don't see how much I can trust it to take the reins and do it all with an agentic approach.

And this is just a pure usability perspective. If we consider the economics aspect, none of the AI services are profitable, they are all heavily subsidized by investor cash. Is it sustainable long term? Today it seems as if there is an infinite amount of cash but my bet is that this will give in before the cost of building software drops by 90%.
by polishdude20 | 2025-12-08 22:46:39+00:00
I thought about death the other day and how maybe it's akin to the feeling of going under before a surgery.

When you go under and then wake up some hours later, often you feel like no time has passed at all.

What if death is just that same feeling or lack thereof for Millenia, an infinite amount of time, but at some point from your perspective, you wake up instantly far in the future.

Like a photon travelling for millions of years, you don't perceive time passing at all.

Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact.

To you, it feels like you woke up in an instant. To the universe, it took an infinite amount of time to wake up you again.
by darth_avocado | 2025-12-08 22:46:57+00:00
> you need 2-3 months to see any kind of specialist in germany, 5-10 hours before someone sees you in the emergency room

That’s like pretty much the standard in the US as well? The unless you’re dying, you’re pretty much in an extremely long wait before you get seen in an emergency room, and then later get sent a $10k+ bill at the minimum. And there’s very few specialists that you can see immediately. In fact, for the majority of people, the step before “how fast can I see my specialist” is the “what specialists are in network”.

And as far as costs are concerned, I pay $2000/month for two people and it will only go up once we have a family of 4. This isn’t even the top tier plan, just a good enough one. Not to mention the thousands of dollars in deductible that you have to pay before the plan kicks in.

And we have an aging population as well. And that’s not going to change regardless of who’s paying for the care.

You’re being taxed for it, we’re paying out of pocket. The only difference is that you get shittier services when taxed, and here you don’t get the care if you can’t afford it. And if you end up in the ER and they have to treat you despite you not having the coverage, the taxpayers cover it anyway.