MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to Reduce Time Spent Crimping?
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-02-07 20:31:34+00:00
I've worked on the design-end of engineering for some time, and have done my share of crimping for prototyping / development, but have never done electrical design for mass production. I'm now working with a small company who is scaling up their early prototypes, and we're going to assemble the early ones in house -- think 10s of units. This is the first time that I'm involved in this scale of manual assembly. I find I'm spending significant time _just making crimps_, and this makes me wonder if I can get better at making crimps, or make a design change to simplify the assembly. I take about 60 sec per crimp, and I don't have the exact tools in this guide, but it is basically what I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHfYzrSF4pY

Here's the design constraints that come to mind:

1. We have about 15 connections to make

2. Most of our connections are JST-XH, some are JST-SM. We could maybe simplify to just JST-XH and then buy pre-crimped wires, but we like having the locking connections for wire-to-wire connections

3. Sometimes we need different connectors at opposing ends of wire, but if we buy pre-crimped SM and SH we could splice the appropriate lines together.

4. We want to keep the 2.54mm pitch, to interface with simple OTS boards

My best ideas:

1. Buy pre-crimped JST-XH wires, and change one end to JST-SM as needed. This should get rid of ~80% the crimping effort.

2. Move entirely to JST-XH, buy pre-crimped wires, and accept slightly worse wire-to-wire connections.

3. Buy better crimp tools, practice like hell, and 'git gud'

Are there other ideas I should consider? Is there a secret or a better guide to crimp faster? I know this is a noob-ish question, any help is appreciated. I have googled, searched youtube, and asked the various LLMs, and the ideas listed above are the result.
by bopbopbop7 | 2026-02-07 20:31:46+00:00
> Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code

It shows, increased outages, increased vulnerabilities, windows failing to boot, windows task bar is still react native and barely works. And I have spoken to engineers at FANG companies, they are forced to use LLMs, managers are literally tracking metrics. So where is all this amazing new software and software quality or increased productivity from them?
by kelnos | 2026-02-07 20:31:47+00:00
A big component to coding is typing. If you aren't doing the typing, then, unless you are dictating code to someone else to mechanically, verbatim type out for you, you are not coding.

I do believe directing an LLM to write code, and then reviewing and refining that code with the LLM, is a skill that has value -- a ton of value! -- but I do not think it is coding.

It's more like super-technical product management, or like a tech lead pair programming with a junior, but in a sort of mentorship way where they direct and nudge the junior and stay as hands-off as possible.

It's not coding, and once that's the sum total of what you do, you are no longer a coder.

You can get defensive and call this gatekeeping, but I think it's just the new reality. There's no shame in admitting that you've moved to a stage of your life where you build software but your role in it isn't as a coder anymore. Just as there's no shame in moving into management, if that's what you enjoy and are effective at it.

(If presenting credentials is important to you, as you've done, I've been doing this since 1989, when I was 8 years old. I've gone down to embedded devices, up through desktop software, up to large distributed systems. Coding is my passion, and has been for most of my life.)
by mathfailure | 2026-02-07 20:32:02+00:00
> if you end up in a directory that's not under your control, and you do a "ls", it might execute "./ls" instead of /usr/bin/ls,

Not if if you APPEND the dot path to the PATH env: the system traverses the dirs specified in the PATH env from left to right and stops at first match. Your system's ls binary is in the dir that's to the left of your '.' dir.
by cedilla | 2026-02-07 20:32:09+00:00
There are a few exceptions though, like most mobile games, visual novels (many of which use Python of all languages, due to an excellent framework called ren'py), and of course games written using Unity or XNA, which use .NET languages.

Also, three decades is going a bit too far back, I think. In the mid nineties, C was still king, with assembly still hanging on. C++ was just one of several promising candidates, with some brave souls even trying Java.
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-07 20:33:26+00:00
The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems.

Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did.

And software that’s open and can be modified.

Instead what we have is:

- AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to fully reason.

- perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”.

- hardware that is completely undocumented to all but a small few who are granted an NDA before hand

- operating systems that are trying harder and harder to prevent us from running any software they haven’t approved because “security”

- and distributed systems become centralised, such as GitHub, CloudFlare, AWS, and so on and so forth.

The only thing special about right now is that we have added yet another abstraction on top of an already overly complex software stack to allow us to use natural language as pseudocode. And that is a version special breakthrough, but it’s not enough by itself to overlook all the other problems with modern computing.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-07 20:33:30+00:00
And your ability to go your own way is only temporary and due to inertia. Today, for a while, you can still buy a vehicle that requires a driver and doesn't look and perform exactly like every other waymo.

But that's only because self driving cars are still new and incomplete. It's still the transition period.

I already can't buy the car I want with a manual transmission. There are still a few cars that I could get with one, but the number is both already small and getting smaller every year. And none of those few are the one I want, even though it was available previously.

I already can't buy any (new) car that doesn't have a permanent internet connection with data collection and remote control by people that don't own the car even though I pay full cash without even financing, let alone the particular one I want. (I can, for now, at least break the on board internet connection after I buy the car without disabling the whole car, but that is just a trivial software change away, in software I don't get to see or edit.)

It's hardly unreasonable to suggest that in some time you won't be able to avoid having a car that drives itself, and even be legally compelled to let the car drive itself because you can't afford the insurance or legal risk or straight up fines.

And forget customizing or personalizing. That's right out.
by treis | 2026-02-07 20:33:33+00:00
I'm not so sure either have much impact. Economic policy doesn't change much between administrations and Congress has been ineffective for a long time. Politics is mostly culture war things these days.

The Fed seems to be the big driver of the economy. Other than that, the government is moving things at the margins. Even Trumps tariff shenanigans don't seem to have rocked the boat much.
by coder23853 | 2026-02-07 20:34:12+00:00
> Every technique is just a renamed existing concept. Digital Twin Universe is mocks, Gene Transfusion is reading reference code, Semport is transpilation. The site has zero benchmarks, zero defect rates, zero cost comparisons, zero production outcomes. The only metric offered is "spend more money".

Repeating for emphasis, because this is the VERY obvious question anyone with a shred of curiosity would be asking not just about this submission but about what is CONSTANTLY on the frontpage these days.

There could be a very simple 5 question questionnaire that could eliminate 90+% of AI coding requests before they start:

- Is this a small wrapper around just querying an existing LLM

- Does a brief summary of this searched with "site:github" already return dozens or hundreds of results?

- Is this a classic scam (pump&dump, etc) redone using "AI"

- Is this needless churn between already high level abstractions of technology (dashboard of dashboards, yaml to json, python to java script, automation of automation framework)
by cheema33 | 2026-02-07 20:34:41+00:00
> an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition...

Nobody credible is promising you a perfect future. But, a better future, yes! If you do not see it, then know this. You have your head firmly planted in the sand and are intentionally refusing to see what is coming. You may not like it. You may not want it. But it is coming and you will either have to adapt or become irrelevant.

Does Copilot spit out useless PR comments. 100% yes! Are there tools that are better than Copilot? 100% yes! These tools are not perfect. But even with their imperfections, they are very useful. You have to learn to harness them for their strengths and build processes to address their weaknesses. And yes, all of this requires learning and experimentation. Without that, you will not get good results and you will complain about these tools not being good.
by onion2k | 2026-02-07 20:35:22+00:00
This feels right when you're looking forwards. The perfect AI bot is definitely not 6 months away. It'll take a lot longer than that to get something that doesn't get things wrong a lot of the time. That's not especially interesting or challenging though. It's obvious.

What's much more interesting is looking back 6, 12, 18, or 24 months. 6 months ago was ChatGPT 5, 12 months ago was GPT 4.5, 18 months ago was 4o, and 24 months ago ChatGPT 3.5 was released (the first one). If you've been following closely you'll have seen incredible changes between each of them. Not to get to perfect, because that's not really a reasonable goal, but definite big leaps forward each time. A couple of years ago one-shotting a basic tic tac toe wasn't really possible. Now though, you can one-shot a fairly complex web app. It won't be perfect, or even good by a lot of measures compared to human written software, but it will work.

I think the comparison to the internet is a good one. I wrote my first website in 1997, and saw the rapid iteration of websites and browsers back then. It felt amazing, and fast. AI feels the same to me. But given the fact that browsers still aren't good in a lot of ways I think it's fair to say AI will take a similarly long time. That doesn't mean the innovations along the way aren't freaking cool though.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-07 20:35:28+00:00
In J2ME feature phones Java was all there was, and even today many indies do use it on casual titles on Android.

Which is why after so much resistance not wanting to use the NDK for Vulkan, and keeping using OpenGL ES from those devs, Google is bringing WebGPU to Java and Kotlin devs on Android.

Announced at last Vulkanised, there is already an alpha version available, and they should talk more about it on upcoming Vulkanised.
by gamblor956 | 2026-02-07 20:35:44+00:00
If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want.

Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks.

This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly paid programmers who fix all the broken parts.
by scoofy | 2026-02-07 20:36:05+00:00
I'm just using Gemini in the browser. I'm not ready to let it touch my code. Here are my last two prompts, for context the project is about golf course architecture:

Me, including the architecture_diff.py file: I would like to add another map to architecture_diff. I want the map to show the level of divergence of the angle of the two shots to the two different holes from each point. That is, when your are right in between the two holes, it should be a 180 degree difference, and should be very dark, but when you're on the tee, and the shot is almost identical, it should be very light. Does this make sense? I realize this might require more calculations, but I think it's important.

Gemini output was some garbage about a simple naive angle to two hole locations, rather than using the sophisticated expected value formula I'm using to calculate strokes-to-hole... thus worthless.

Follow up from me, including the course.py and the player.py files: I don't just want the angle, I want the angle between the optimal shot, given the dispersion pattern. We may need to update get_smart_aim in the player to return the vector it uses, and we may need to cache that info. We may need to update generate_strokes_gained_map in course to also return the vectors used. I'm really not sure. Take as much time as you need. I'd like a good idea to consider before actually implementing this.

Gemini output now has a helpful response about saving the vector field as we generate the different maps I'm trying to create as they are created. This is exactly the type of code I was looking for.
by quotemstr | 2026-02-07 20:36:05+00:00
Plenty of people cycle on a fixie too. So what? C, especially modern C, does provide metaprogramming and abstraction facilities. In practice, you can even get things like the "defer" construct from other languages: https://lwn.net/Articles/934679/

The question isn't "Can I write a game in C?". Yes, of course you can, and it's not even that painful. The question is "Why would you?", and then "Why would you brag about it?"

> C++ covers my needs, but fails my wants badly. It is desperately complicated. Despite decent tooling it's easy to create insidious bugs. It is also slow to compile compared to C. It is high performance, and it offers features that C doesn't have; but features I don't want, and at a great complexity cost.

C++ is, practically speaking, a superset of C. It being "complicated"? The "insidious bugs"? It being "slow to compile"? All self-inflicted problems. The author of this article can't even fall back on the "well, my team will use all the fancy features if I let them use C++ at all!" argument pro-C-over-C++ people often lean on: he's the sole author of his projects! If he doesn't want to do template metaprogramming, he... just doesn't want to do it.

I don't read these sorts of article as technical position papers. People say, out loud, "I use C and not C++" to say something about themselves. ISTM that certain circles there's this perception that C is somehow more hardcore. Nah. Nobody's impressed by using it over a modern language. It really is like a fixie bicycle.
by vixen99 | 2026-02-07 20:37:03+00:00
Is this actually true? Anyone care to comment on the claim (from some quarters) that offering free access to ChatGPT allows OpenAI to 'collect a gold mine of real-world interaction data to improve the underlying language model. Every conversation users have with ChatGPT – every question asked and every task requested – provides valuable training data for refining' the model.

If false, I'm thinking - there's me, thinking I'm doing my bit to help . . .
by kingstnap | 2026-02-07 20:37:06+00:00
It comes from batching and multiple streams on a GPU. More people sharing 1 GPU makes everyone run slower but increases overall token throughput.

Mathematically it comes from the fact that this transformer block is this parallel algorithm. If you batch harder, increase parallelism, you can get higher tokens/s. But you get less throughput. Simultaneously there is also this dial that you can speculatively decode harder with fewer users.

Its true for basically all hardware and most models. You can draw this Pareto curve of how much throughput per GPU vs how many tokens per second per stream. More tokens/s less total throughput.

See this graph for actual numbers:

Token Throughput per GPU vs. Interactivity
gpt-oss 120B • FP4 • 1K / 8K • Source: SemiAnalysis InferenceMAX™

https://inferencemax.semianalysis.com/
by chongli | 2026-02-07 20:37:14+00:00
I think a better comparison is painting and photography. Prior to the invention of photography, painting portraits of individuals and families was a real profession. Today it’s practically unheard of outside of heads of state and the like. Sure, there are plenty of people who could afford to commission a painted portrait but few do when a quick session in a photographer’s studio is so much cheaper and more convenient.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2026-02-07 20:37:24+00:00
The first capture of the page on Internet Archive Wayback Machine is from January 9th, 2016. So it’s at least that old.

Also here is a snapshot of the main page of his website from that time, which has screenshots of his games and thereby provides context into what kind of games he had made and published when the blog post was written.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160110012902/http://jonathanwh...

This one looks like it’s 3d and has a pretty unique style:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160112060328/http://jonathanwh...
by thwarted | 2026-02-07 20:37:32+00:00
And not just the definition, but the assumption that a specific toil is necessarily universal. I've had more than one conversation that started with someone else saying "using the LLM saves me soooo much time typing, think of how much time typing you'd save by using an LLM". But when I examine my processes and where I'm spending my time, typing isn't even on my list, so this claim is talking right past me and I can't see it all. Even when I was a hunt-and-peck typer on the c64 I didn't consider the typing to be a/the major factor in how long something took to program so much so that I continued with two-finger typing until I was forced to take a touch-typing class in highschool (back when that was still a thing, and we split the exercises between typewriters and computers).

"I'm able to put my shirt on so much faster with this shirt-buttoning machine, and I don't spend time tediously buttoning shirts and maybe having to rebutton when I misalign the buttons and buttonholes. You should get one to button your shirts, you're wasting time by not using a buttoning machine".

"I wear t-shirts."

(Obviously a contrived and simplistic example for fun)
by bloppe | 2026-02-07 20:37:47+00:00
I expect it to, eventually. But then the cutting edge will have simply moved to something else.

I agree that it's very destabilizing. It's sort of like inflation for expertise. You spend all this time and effort saving up expertise, and then those savings rapidly lose value. At the same time, your ability to acquire new expertise has accelerated (because LLMs are often excellent private tutors), which is analogous to an inflation-adjusted wage increase.

There are a ton of variables. Will hallucinations ever become negligible? My money is on "no" as long as the architecture is basically just transformers. How will compiling training data evolve with time? My money is on "it will get more expensive". How will legislators react? I sure hope not by suppressing competition. As long as markets and VC are functioning properly, it should only become easier to become a founder, so outsized corporate profits will be harder to lock down.
by collingreen | 2026-02-07 20:38:35+00:00
Roughly this happened to me once. Got a horrible review after doing what I felt was a heros effort. I'll skip the details but the cherry on top was "you did all this work but it didnt build on the cloud server so we're not going to count it for anything" - the "cloud server" (of the live project) was the ctos laptop and it could only build his local stuff (you could even see the local paths in the web output). As if that wasn't enough, literally all he had to do was git pull and it would have all the new work on it.

Cto was eventually fired for trying to steal the company IP and he went on to fail upward making a security camera company infra famously insecure and got a ton of very valuable stock for it.

Life is weird!
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-07 20:39:39+00:00
From a blog post last month by the same author:

> Today, I would say that about 90% of my code is authored by Claude Code. The rest of the time, I’m mostly touching up its work or doing routine tasks that it’s slow at, like refactoring or renaming.

> I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Maybe it’s because the initial tribal battle lines have clouded everybody’s judgment, or maybe it’s because we inhabit different worlds where the technology is either better or worse (I still don’t think LLMs are great at UI for example), but there’s just a lot of patently unhelpful discourse out there, and I’m tired of it.

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/24/ai-tribalism/

If you're responding to this with angry anti-AI rants (or wild AI hype), might want to go read that post.
by blackcatsec | 2026-02-07 20:39:47+00:00
Sort of. I've done a lot of thinking about this one, and realize that it's really not just "one person" but a very large team of individuals, along with the "politics" of everything. If the President brings on a good staff, makes solid cabinet appointments, and they themself being a singular large part of the legislative process in modern years--given that it's usually fairly difficult to get 2/3rds of Congress to agree on anything--you can see the President actually has significantly more influence than you'd think.

In addition, it's the circles that person runs in and the circles that person's people run in. Do you think judge or cabinet appointments are decided on by one person? Sure, the President is a figurehead in this position and ultimately has to say yes or no, but there's a large pool of candidates out there and it's up to the staffers, maybe friends, maybe people in the know to propose those people to the President.

So while on paper the President doesn't, or shouldn't have that much power--in actuality with our current political process it's certainly much more.

Now, that said, just like the billionaires--they can only control so much. At least in the United States, there are competing interests even among the wealthy class, and sometimes shit just sort of happens--like a meteor killing the dinosaurs....or the release of decades of e-mails, videos, documents, and communications surrounding their pedophile behavior on a secret island in the Caribbean.