MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brap | 2025-12-23 23:05:34+00:00
Great vision for 2030.

But as for today, have we all just collectively decided to pretend that the LLMs we have are capable of writing good software?

I use LLMs a lot in my workflow, I probably spend a whole day per week learning and fiddling with new tools, techniques, etc. and trying to integrate them in all sorts of ways. Been at it for about a year and a half, mainly because I’m intrigued.

I’m sorry but it still very much sucks.

There are things it’s pretty good at, but writing software, especially in large brownfield projects, is not one of them. Not yet, at least.

I’m starting to believe many are just faking it.
by analogpixel | 2025-12-23 23:05:40+00:00
I find that most of the time, programming is just procrastination, and having the LLM there breaks through that procrastination and lets me focus on the idea I was thinking on without going into the weeds.

A lot of the time, the LLM outputs the code, I test my idea, and realize I really don't care or the idea wasn't that great, and now I can move on to something else.
by zahlman | 2025-12-23 23:05:57+00:00
Originally, sort of. But also to work around limitations in GIF (which is palette-based; but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#True_color) and because people didn't always have true-colour monitors (or ran the monitor in a different mode due to VRAM restrictions) anyway.

In today's context, more for the aesthetic, presumably.
by mdhb | 2025-12-23 23:05:59+00:00
I’m not here to try and make you feel bad but if this place doesn’t work for you anymore I hope you’re able to do something about that.

I’m going to wrap this up here. You unfortunately responded in exactly the way I’d expected to just hand wave away everything, find reasons to not respond to any of the points and then seemed to misrepresent what I was even asking for.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.

Life is hard enough already and I’m not looking to make it worse for you. I hope you have a nice holiday season and good luck out there.
by notahacker | 2025-12-23 23:06:26+00:00
Looks like NASA is to blame for these
https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/2page23.pdf

I do agree much of the categorisation is baffling (I could nitpick several others). In that respect it's a shame to start off with that lesson when some of the others are so much more relevant to the mission concept, interesting and less debatable
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-23 23:06:46+00:00
Thank you for your response :)

I would push back a bit on the ideological comment, just to say that ideological acceptance of regulation is also probably wrong. This is different from a philosophical opposition/acceptance of political authority, although it often appears the same.

I think it's fairly obvious that the base prerequisites for market economies are property rights and some form of legal system to handle disputes. I don't consider that to be "regulation", especially not government regulation, but if that is what you mean by the term then of course I would concede that markets require it. However since even the most fervent proponents of laissez-faire economies accept the necessary role of property rights and a legal system, I would consider those to be separate from what we commonly refer to as regulation.

Ok to respond to your main point: It seems reasonable to me that in a competitive market there is an incentive to win, and companies can win by preventing others from being able to compete. This is commonly done via regulation, for example the big companies are lobbying for regulation on AI to help cement their position at the top. The thing is, just because companies are incentivized to win doesn't mean that it's possible to sustain a monopoly position for a significant amount of time. Unlike other competitive activities there isn't a time clock with winners declared at the end. Economists have shown that absent of external cofounders, a position where a company can charge monopoly prices is unsustainable.

There is of course a stronger position to be made for regulating so called natural monopolies, but even then there isn't much evidence that they really exist. Some of the most cited examples, like telecom providers, end up not being true - look at Eastern Europe and what happened when they deregulated that industry for example.
by bahmboo | 2025-12-23 23:07:19+00:00
This code was likely written on a Macintosh Plus with a 9 in (23 cm) monochrome display that had a resolution of 512 × 342. Something to keep in mind. That's very little screen real estate (tiny!) and something that had to be respected. Writing long winded stuff had a cost in performance and maintainability. We sometimes wrote the documentation separately when needed. Sometimes that was printed out for ease of consumption. Then we have the issue that the Mac had only just been upgraded to 1MB of memory (4MB potentially) and only 800 KB floppy drive. And an 8 mhz processor.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-23 23:07:30+00:00
> Why is it always so difficult to find the details?

"There’s a new podcast, 'Killer in the Code', from author Michael Connelly that details Baber’s supposed solution tying both cases to the same guy. All the publicity about this today stems from the debut of that podcast yesterday" [1].

[1] https://daringfireball.net
by hs586 | 2025-12-23 23:07:30+00:00
I used it once since COVID, last year, didn't seem too bad.

Given the mood in the thread, I do indeed think that I may have a high tolerance for such practices and pay careful attention to fine prints. After all, I had all the training while applying for numerous Schengen and other visas, immigration paperwork. After those, dealing with Ryanair that faces at least some competition and scrutiny is not that bad.
by kazinator | 2025-12-23 23:07:59+00:00
One answer is that all you wanted was bright, sixty inch monitor for your living room, into which you could plug your HDMI sources, but all you could get (subject to various other constraints: price, quality, availability, non-smart features you do care about, ...) was a smart TV, whose "smart" features you explicitly don't want.

You don't have to use every feature of something for it to make sense. I have a "dumb" TV. It has built-in speakers, but I don't use those. Volume is set to minimum. My streaming box connects to decent bookshelf speakers.
by nunodonato | 2025-12-23 23:08:25+00:00
my laptop is 4 years old. I only have 6Gb VRam. I run, mostly, 4b and 8b models. They are extremely useful in a variety of situations. Just because you can't replicate what you do in chatgpt doesn't mean they don't have their use cases. It seems to me you know very little about what these models can do. Not to speak of trained models for specific use cases, or even smaller models like functiongemma or TTS/ASR models. (btw, I've trained models using my 6Gb VRAM too)
by zingar | 2025-12-23 23:08:46+00:00
About 15 years ago I thought of writing custom software for friends and family instead of paying for gifts in order to save money (and give something more “meaningful”). For instance a fun guessing game using photos from a group holiday.

I never did it because I imagined the pain of supporting every device or screen size, or dealing with someone who wants to know why their gift stopped working 6 months later.

The gains I’ve seen from LLM code - making me personally more productive in languages I’ve never used before - don’t erase the support burden so I think I’d still avoid this.

Still, I wonder if soon ordinary people will find it easy enough to make software for their own amusement (not just us nerds doing side projects to stay current), and will my job ever morph into being a software “mechanic“ who is paid to fix what someone else built? Not just “someone else working at the company who owns the software”, but a different company or individual entirely?

Will software maintenance become the job that big industry stops wanting to take because it’s so cheap to write something new that they’ll never fix this year’s model?

Or is software maintenance being democratised by LLMs such that a corner software shop could realistically offer maintenance for this one copy of a piece of software on this one device that the customer brings in?

I think we’ve never discussed a “software right to repair” because changing software is expensive, but we might see that change.
by JohnMakin | 2025-12-23 23:09:07+00:00
This shows very visibly in the devops/platform engineer/whatever-the-hell-we're calling-it-these-days world.

Often you will get a request, sometimes (or quite often) you have no idea what is driving it, like for example "reduce rate limiting for xyz service." Lots of ops guys will just blindly do this ticket shuffle, even very senior ones - maybe for their own sanity, maybe out of preservation - but the best ones I've ever worked with, will often question "Wait, why do you need that?" Then you find out there is some other really trivial solution to fix that underlying problem that doesn't involve as drastic of a change, or maybe even none at all. Especially if it doesn't involve code change on their side, you're not going to face much headwind in pushing back.

The reason this is important is that, no disrespect to developers, they often live in a world where they treat infrastructure as a blackbox (as I believe they should). The problem sometimes is they want to also control the behavior of that blackbox. So while the request may seem to solve the problem, often there is a much easier/simpler/safer/scalable way to fix whatever underlying problem got tossed over the fence to you.

The senior guys I've respected the most always will ask the "wait, why?"
by nameless_me | 2025-12-23 23:09:08+00:00
I have been electrocuted twice once as a kid (which I don't remember but my parents reminded me) and once as a teenager which I definitely remember. My country's voltage was 240 volts at 50 Hz. I remember screaming uncontrollably as the current flowed through my arm and chest but managed to drop the live wire. The floor was parquet: wood.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-23 23:09:32+00:00
Read them and buy them in physical form. Don't just feed the coffers of Amazon. I have read two backs in the last two days: Paul Laird's
"Birth and Impact of Britpop: Mis-Shapes, Scenesters and Insatiable Ones" in hardback and Sally Rooney's novel "Normal People" in paperback. I'm currently reading a book about female Scottish painters.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-23 23:09:39+00:00
> i cant imagine it being illegal to do madlibs

Of course not illegal. When filled out with the official unredaction font [0], time stamped by the Ministry of Information, and delivered in triplicate, personally to Interrogation within 46 hours.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(decorative_type...
by cyberax | 2025-12-23 23:10:04+00:00
> Unlike TLS over TCP, QUIC is still not able to be offloaded to NICs.

That's not quite true. You can offload QUIC connection steering just fine, as long as your NICs can do hardware encryption. It's actually _easier_ because you can never get a QUIC datagram split across multiple physical packets (barring the IP-level fragmentation).

The only real difference from TCP is the encryption for ACKs.
by markus_zhang | 2025-12-23 23:10:05+00:00
It is from a distinguished engineer, not from the executives. In fact, some in MSFT are not aligned.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7407863...

BTW in a comment he mentioned that Rust offers concurrency safety. Can someone elaborate on the concurrency model of Rust? I completed the xv6 lock lab a few days ago and it was one of the most difficult labs. Hard to debug and easy to mess up.
by kburman | 2025-12-23 23:10:11+00:00
My rule for modern TVs:
1. Never connect the TV panel itself to the internet. Keep it air-gapped. Treat it solely as a dumb monitor.

2. Use an Apple TV for the "smart" features.

3. Avoid Fire TV, Chromecast, or Roku.

The logic is simple, Google (Chromecast) and Amazon (Fire TV) operate on the same business model as the TV manufacturers subsidized hardware in exchange for user data and ad inventory. Apple is the only mainstream option where the hardware cost covers the experience, rather than your viewing habits subsidizing the device.

[Copied my comment from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268844#46271740]
by drschwabe | 2025-12-23 23:10:23+00:00
Unironically JavaScript is quite good for single file projects (albeit a package.json usually needed)

You can do a huge website entirely in a single file with NodeJS; you can stick re-usable templates in vars and absue multi-line strings (template literals) for all your various content and markup. If you get crafty you can embed clientside code in your 'server.js' too or take it to the next level and use C++ multi-line string literals to wrap all your JS ie- client.js, server.js and package.json in a single .cpp file
by whitehexagon | 2025-12-23 23:10:30+00:00
I was pleasantly surprised at the speed and power of my second hand M1 Pro 32GB running Asahi & Qwen3:32B. It does all I need, and I dont mind the reading pace output, although I'd be tempted by M2 Ultra if the secondhand market hadn't also exploded with the recent RAM market manipulations.

Anyway, I'm on a mission to have no subscriptions in the New Year. Plus it feels wrong to be contributing towards my own irrelevance (GAI).
by gerdesj | 2025-12-23 23:11:15+00:00
I have an actual original C-64 from around 1986. I got it recapped a few years back and it worked! Now the floppy and tape drives gather dust: it has USB 8)

Oh and I have an original Quickshot II, which still works despite "Daley Thomson's Decathalon".

I'm going to give it to my son in law this Chrimbo - "Attack of the mutant camels" and "Matrix" etc needs new players.
by windexh8er | 2025-12-23 23:11:36+00:00
The difference is that ByteDance's product is not the same here as in the homeland. It's designed to be a misinformation canon only outside of China. Instagram is a misinformation canon everywhere. Did I say I thought Instagram shouldn't be burned to the ground just the same? No. But I'd rather start with foreign nationals if you really have to know. We're not getting rid of Instagram anytime soon, but one less platform is a win regardless.
by dang | 2025-12-23 23:12:47+00:00
You're not making me feel bad! I just mentioned that HN regularly makes me feel bad as a way of letting you know that I definitely don't think this place is perfect.

I'm not disinterested in answering your questions—that's why I've been replying repeatedly! Nor am I interested in making hand-wavey responses; that would be a waste of time. We must be working with different assumptions, though, because I feel like I'm answering your questions and you feel like I'm not.

If you want to try again, I'd be happy to, but maybe we could take a different approach? I would like to know what principle you care about here. What principle are we failing to abide by, that you think we ought to?
by themafia | 2025-12-23 23:12:52+00:00
> To LG's credit, the TV automatically detected all of my devices -- my PC, PS5, Switch 2, and Fire TV Stick 4K Max -- and applied the best settings for each.

So.. they can take the time to do this properly.. but won't bother to ask you privacy preferences out of the box.

This should be illegal. If you collect data from customers then you need to be up front about that and the setting must be opt in. They clearly have the capability to do this. Their products need to be taken off the market if they can't act in a civilized manner.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2025-12-23 23:13:54+00:00
What we really need is well-built open source software base with flexible and well-documented plugin SDKs where people can just vibecode their own extensions on top of them. The software needs to be designed from scratch expressly for the purpose of being extended in this way, and the SDK should place appropriate limits to allow multiple extensions to be combined easily.

Otherwise, there is too much you have to do right before you have a suitable software base to start building your extra personalized features on. Building on existing open-source software (not designed to be extended on) isn't great either because you would need to merge any changes from the original software into your fork, as opposed to a purpose-built SDK that would better tolerate plugins on different base software versions.

I'm working on this for gaming but the idea is really applicable to any kind of software, if the goal is to allow people to easily create and run personalized versions of them without as much effort and chance for things to go wrong.
by foldr | 2025-12-23 23:14:06+00:00
> So what's his progress? Everything that I see turns inward, valuable only within the framework that he himself constructed.

It's really not true that the whole of generative linguistics is just some kind of self-referential parlor game. A lot of what we take for granted today as legitimate avenues of research in cognitive science were opened up as a direct consequence of Chomsky's critique of behaviorism and his insight that the mind is best understood as a computational system. Ironically, any respectable LLM will be perfectly happy to cover this in more detail if you probe it with some key terms like "behaviorism", "cognitive revolution" or "computational theory of mind".

> Pirahã

It's very unlikely that Everett's key claims about Pirahã are true (see e.g. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/94631/Nevins-...). But anyway, the universality of recursive clausal embedding has never been a central issue in generative linguistics. Chomsky co-authored one speculative paper late in his career suggesting that recursion in some (vague) sense might be the core computational innovation responsible for the human language faculty. Everett latched on to that claim and the dispute went public, which has given a false impression of its overall centrality to the field.

> So what's his progress?

I don't see how we can discuss this question without getting into specifics, so let me try to push things in that direction. Here is a famous syntax paper by Chomsky: https://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/On_WH-Movement.pdf It claims to achieve various things. Do you disagree, and if so, why?

> Japanese

A generative linguist studying Japanese wouldn't claim to be an expert on the structure of Japanese in your broad sense of the term. One thing to bear in mind is that generative linguistics is entirely opportunistic in its approach to individual languages. Generative linguists don't don't study Japanese because they give a fuck about Japanese as such (any more than physicists study balls rolling down inclined planes because balls and inclined planes are intrinsically fascinating). The aim is just to find data to distinguish competing hypotheses about the human language faculty, not to come to some kind of total understanding of Japanese (or whatever language).

> I guess most experts in LLMs are busy becoming billionaires right now; but if anything resembling Chomsky's universal grammar ever does get found to exist, then I'd guess it will be extracted computationally from models trained on corpora of different languages and not any human insight, in the same way that the Big Five personality traits fall out of a PCA.

This is a common pattern of argumentation. First, Chomsky's work is critically examined according to the highest possible scientific standards (every hypothesis must be strictly falsifiable, etc. etc.) Then when we finally get to see the concrete alternative proposal, it turns out to be nothing more than a promissory note.
by kibwen | 2025-12-23 23:14:25+00:00
This subthread is about the Macbook Air, which tops out at 32 GB, and can't be upgraded further.

While browsing the Apple website, it looks like the cheapest Macbook with 64 GB of RAM is the Macbook Pro M4 Max with 40-core GPU, which starts at $3,899, a.k.a. more than five times more expensive than the price quoted above.
by dijit | 2025-12-23 23:14:36+00:00
and if a new game
came out today that looked and played the same as Ultima online… What would you (and the rest of gamers) think about it?

Your expectations of that game are set appropriately. Same with a lot of Indy games, the expectation can be that its in early access for a decade+. You would never accept that from, say, Ubisoft.
by debarshri | 2025-12-23 23:14:52+00:00
I have recently realised bootstrapping is interesting way to build business. More so now with advent agentic stuff. Hear me out.

I think you should create a bootstrapped business in established domain. In this case it is CMS, it could be very specific domain like network security, ci/cd, paas etc. Where VC is not pouring money and they think it is not forward looking, your alpha of building a big bootstrapped business is huge. Another key thing is that you should have the muscle to generate and collect revenue with discipline. If the revenue cycle is off you have trouble as a bootstrapped org.

I would use AI but not build an AI bootstrapped started business at this moment in time as there is huge growth capital invested in the market. But theres always an exception for eg. Midjourney et al. But thats that.
by PlanksVariable | 2025-12-23 23:15:32+00:00
Of course smaller companies exist — there are 1 person companies! But in a world where many tech companies have 50,000+ employees, 300 is much closer to 100 or 10 and they can all be considered small.

And then you consider it in context: a company with huge impact, brand recognition, and revenue (about $50M/employee in 2025). They’ve remained extremely small compared to how big they could grow.
by 6510 | 2025-12-23 23:15:39+00:00
> If you can provide an acceptable source....

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/the-perl-foundation-...

https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/13/perl_dev_quits/

20 seconds.

If I ran Wikipedia I would ban everyone involved in this spectacle.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-23 23:16:17+00:00
They can't produce those designs or even gun parts without risking the death penalty, so no private business will go near them, and they definitely won't specialize in it.

> any random Chinese millshop can't produce a 100-year-old design just as well as any American one.

Once. They do it once, then there is a huge death penalty trial that is rehashed on CCTV for weeks. You definitely won't get any scale out of it, no one will invest in something that will get them executed, so definitely nothing near to what the Americans can produce as the world's most economical gun producers.

These days, it feels like America basically sucks at making anything besides guns. For guns, no one else really compares, and if it weren't for the Darien Gap the whole of the Americas would be overflowing with guns from the USA (also, Brazil also makes lots of guns, meaning the production is roughly divided between the USA in the north and Brazil in the south).