skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> there's a lot more involved in senior dev work beyond producing code that works.

Completely agree.

What I don't agree with is statements like these:

> LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test

To me, these (false) absolutions about chat bot capabilities, are being rehashed so frequently, that it derails every conversation about using LLM's for dev work. You'll find similar statements in nearly every thread about LLM's for coding tasks.

It's provably true that LLM's can produce working code. It's also true, that some increasingly large portion of coding is being offloaded to LLM's.

In my opinion, developers need to grow out of this attitude that they are John Henry and they'll outpace the mechanical drilling machine. It's a tired conversation.
https://archive.is/qOmvN
ChatGPT's integration with iOS 18 is supported by RevenueCat
Official RC account on Twitter shared this video, and a link to their new case study with ChatGPT, containing this paragraph:

"More recently, to support ChatGPT’s unique direct integration into Apple’s iOS 18 and Apple Intelligence feature, RevenueCat worked with OpenAI to provide users with a seamless experience by building out support for this new subscription path."
You only need to reconfigure 4-6 color-coded, low-voltage wires in exactly one spot (at the opener.) Clear picture instructions are provided.

If you're using Home Assistant at all, you are more than capable of installing this device.

The old MyQ HA integration was absolutely more difficult to configure and install.
I found that confusing also.

Is it linux kernel or bsd ?
Not sure what you mean by the heat exchanger core being a fraction of the price, but I've seen replacement cores cost around 1/3 of the total unit.

They should be made of high thermal conductivity material like resin or ceramic.
That's terrible. Hopefully the users can make backups (of at least what has already been posted, if not of their ongoing social connections) before the shutdown. It's good that you can provide such notice. Are you providing tarballs?
> I also couldn't wrap my head around why they didn't just pay whatever they thought it was worth and let me cover the rest.

Because insurance would then just lowball the cost of everything.

Insurance needs to either do what they say they do, cover x% of procedure cost with a maximum yearly deductible or we need to be talking about why we have insurance in the first place.

We need new regulations around health and insurance. Ideally, public insurance.
I would be in favour of the defaults being "prettified" or "modernised" a bit, but I don't agree that it's that big of an issue.

Actually, I'm not sure if there are any "major" issues... Development has been phenomenally good the last few years, the maintainers have been brilliant. There's a steady stream of contributors, new cool stuff (LSP support, native compilation, etc), improvements are happening regularly.

In summary, Emacs seems to be rock solid, and the quaint little splash screen when you run it for the first time does not seem close to keeping people away! Maybe we need to uglify it :)

But sure, yeah, prettier defaults, why not. I'm not convinced it'd suddenly get more people using Emacs, though, as Doom Emacs already exists, and that's very pretty and well-documented and modern-looking and so on.
In "Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters" id guys figure out that their product is the cutting-edge graphics, and being first, and are able to pull that off for a while. Their games were not great, but the product was idTech engines. With Rage however (id Tech 5) the streak ran cold.
It's called "Perverse incentive" and Wikipedia runs an illustrative set of examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
The problem is they compromised on both fronts (privacy, compute) and produced something that is ultimately a useless joke.

They could have produced something that was good and required accepting a privacy disclaimer to use. Or they could have waited until they managed to catch up with the rest of the industry wrt good 3B parameter models (the one they're using is incredibly terrible.)

Instead we got this half-assed compromise.

The execs in charge of Siri are demonstrably terrible at their job and should feel bad. It's incredible they get paid the millions they do while doing such a horrible job.
I agree with you tbh, and it also just misses something huge that doesnt get brought up: its not about your sniff test, its about your bosses sniff test. Are you making 300k a year? Thats 300 thousand reasons to replace you for a short term boost in profit, companies love doing that.
An insightful comment on this from an American context, but about basically the same problem [0]

> Read the regs and you can absolutely see how complying with them to allow for banana peeling could become prohibitively costly. But the debate of whether they are pro-fruit or anti-fruit misses the point. If daycares end up serving bags of chips instead of bananas, that’s the impact they’ve had. Maybe you could blame all sorts of folks for misinterpreting the regs, or applying them too strictly, or maybe you couldn’t. It doesn’t matter. This happens all the time in government, where policy makers and policy enforcers insist that the negative effects of the words they write don’t matter because that’s not how they intended them.

> I’m sorry, but they do matter. In fact, the impact – separate from the intent – is all that really matters.

[0] https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/stop-telling-constituents-the...
This is a great article.

There was a previous attempt to bring async io to Postgres, but sadly it went dormant: https://commitfest.postgresql.org/34/3316/

A more recent proposal was to make it possible to swap out the storage manager for a custom one without having to fork the codebase. I.e. extensions can provide an alternative. https://commitfest.postgresql.org/49/4428/

This would allow for custom ones that do async IO to any custom storage layer.

There are a lot of interested parties in the new proposal (it's come out of Neon, as they run a fork with a custom storage manager). With the move to separate compute from storage this becomes something many Postgres orgs will want to be able to do.

A change of core to use async io becomes slightly less relevant when you can swap out the whole storage manager.

(Note that the storage manager only handles pages in the heap tables, not the WAL. There is more exploration needed there to make the WAL extendable/replaceable)
There are a few things you can't do with docker (my case was an addon that I wanted). The install docs have a good grid of the differences.
I think this will be the original black and white Tintin.

The modern colored Tintin we see was made after WW2 and drastically rehabilitated Tintin's reputation.

For example - https://sauvikbiswas.com/2014/11/18/tintin-in-america-the-bl...

I love reading Tintin, but being honest about it's origins and baggage is important as well. Highly recommend reading "Tintin: The Complete Companion" as well.
I worked on CASE, and generally agree with this.

I think it's important to note that there were a couple distinct markets for CASE:

1. Military/aerospace/datacomm/medical type technical development. Where you were building very complex things, that integrated into larger systems, that had to work, with teams, and you used higher-level formalisms when appropriate.

2. "MIS" (Management Information Systems) in-house/intranet business applications. Modeling business processes and flows, and a whole lot of data entry forms, queries, and printed reports. (Much of the coding parts already had decades of work on automating them, such as with WYSIWYG form painters and report languages.)

Today, most Web CRUD and mobile apps are the descendant of #2, albeit with branches for in-house vs. polished graphic design consumer appeal.

My teams had some successes with #1 technical software, but UML under IBM seemed to head towards #2 enterprise development. I don't have much visibility into where it went from there.

I did find a few years ago (as a bit of a methodology expert familiar with the influences that went into UML, as well as familiar with those metamodels as a CASE developer) that the UML specs were scary and huge, and mostly full of stuff I didn't want. So I did the business process modeling for a customer logistics integration using a very small subset, with very high value. (Maybe it's a little like knowing hypertext, and then being teleported 20 years into the future, where the hypertext technology has been taken over by evil advertising brochures and surveillance capitalism, so you have to work to dig out the 1% hypertext bits that you can see are there.)

Post-ZIRP, if more people start caring about complex systems that really have to work (and fewer people care about lots of hiring and churning code to make it look like they have "growth"), people will rediscover some of the better modeling methods, and be, like, whoa, this ancient DeMarco-Yourdon thing is most of what we need to get this process straight in a way everyone can understand, or this Harel thing makes our crazy event loop with concurrent activities tractable to implement correctly without a QA nightmare, or this Rumbaugh/Booch/etc. thing really helps us understand this nontrivial schema, and keep it documented as a visual for bringing people onboard and evolving it sanely, and this Jacobson thing helps us integrate that with some of the better parts of our evolving Agile process.
The Cobra Effect is an example of a Perverse Incentive, which is where an attempt to incentivize a behavior ends up incentivizing the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

I think most of the examples fit this, but a few don't.
> if the stakeholders knew how to do what they needed to build and how, then they could use LLMs, but translating complex requirements into code is something that these tools are not even close to cracking.

They don't have to replace you to reduce headcount. They could increase your workload so where they needed five senior developers, they can do with maybe three. That's like six one way and half a dozen the other way because two developers lost a job, right?
As others have stated, I don't think we have anything to worry about.

As a SWE you are expected to neatly balance code, its architecture and how it addresses the customers' problems. At best, what I've seen LLMs produce is code monkey level programming (like copy pasting from StackOverflow), but then a human is still needed to tweak it properly.

What would be needed is General AI and that's still some 50 years away (and has been for the past 70 years). The LLMs are a nice sleight of hand and are useful but more often wrong than right, as soon as you delve into details.
> Your customers don't care how your code smells, as long as it solves their problem and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Software is interesting because if you buy a refrigerator, even an inexpensive one, you have certain expectations as to its basic functions. If the compressor were to cut out periodically in unexpected ways, affecting your food safety, you would return it.

But in software customers seem to be conditioned to just accept bugs and poor performance as a fact of life.

You're correct that customers don't care about "code quality", because they don't understand code or how to evaluate it.

But you're assuming that customers don't care about the quality of the product they are paying for, and you're divorcing that quality from the quality of the code as if the code doesn't represent THE implementation of the final product. The hardware matters too, but to assume that code quality doesn't directly affect product quality is to pretend that food quality is not directly impacted by its ingredients.
For me, a lot more entities from each device was correctly detected out-of-the-box. I think the wide compatibility is the biggest reason why you'd go with it.

But if you only have Phillips and Ikea devices for example, probably won't be much difference with Z2M.
Jacquard loom was indeed well-known, and one of the sources of inspiration for Babbage, but it is still fundamentally about designing a system around a specific task - the cards directly encode operations on hooks.

What Ada is saying here is that, once you have a machine that let you do generic operations on numbers, you can use it to do all kinds of non-math stuff so long as you can come up with ways to encode other things as numbers (= finite sets of symbols). This was not at all obvious to other people who worked on the Engine, including Babbage himself.
but the other 3 before the ia are no longer on the rise
/me clutches pearls but if we don’t do this, a teenage boy might see boobies on the internet
Ask HN: How Do You Handle Switching Between AI Providers/Models Efficiently?
Hey HN,

I’m part of a product team that relies on AI for tasks like generating metadata, creating thumbnails, translations, and labeling. We’re constantly experimenting with different providers—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.—to find the best fit for specific tasks.

The challenge? Every time we need to switch a model, add a new provider, or tweak something, it feels like starting from scratch. Updating APIs, reworking code, and dealing with billing—it’s a lot of overhead. This slows us down and makes rapid iteration harder, especially since our engineering team has to handle all the integrations manually.

If you’ve faced this, how do you manage it? Are there tools, frameworks, or approaches that make integrating and switching providers/models less painful? Would love to hear what’s worked for you.

Thanks for any advice!
Sounds like a market opportunity to me!
better link:

https://frame.work/blog/our-first-new-framework-laptop-16-ex...
this is a tangent for sure but I doubt you can find payday loans that lend for 30% APR (Apple Store takes 30%). People really have no idea what realistic rates are for people with bad credit. If you have a sub 580 credit score the average APR for unsecured loans is 100%.
It’s more than just politicians not caring: Big Tech firms hite people on millions of dollars per year to lobby and co-operate with governments, in order to ensure that processes like this result in favourable outcomes to them. See e.g. Nick Clegg.
I had an employee like that.

He'd want to do something, and hit a roadblock, so he'd design his own tool (He wrote his own font, once, because he didn't like the way the built-in ones worked at teeny point sizes).

Best damn engineer I ever knew, but I had to keep an eye out for rabbitholing.
Duchess: Silky smooth Java-Rust interop
Homo sapiens is subject to speciation just like every other animal.

Then there's cyborgs...
The Git-like merging functionality is a great start. Having something similar to OnShape PDM on Fusion/SW would be a game-changer for our team.
Oh, also, for new users who want to quickly smooth over a few papercuts, there's:

https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-11-28-basic-emacs-confi...

Also, a small point, you'll be thrilled to hear that an excellent "light/dark mode" is included in stock emacs since the modus-themes were beamed up into the mothership, which was several years ago at this stage.
How do you go to from that screen shot to this conclusion?
Usually you can find the price/lifespan ratio you want - by paying more.
What the customer wants is the cheapest item to last forever, but also be cheaper. There's obvious tradeoffs here, and the problem for everyone is the customers keep buying the cheapest ones.
I was being generous to the App Store vendors.

The better analogy is Tony Soprano with a migraine.
they have to do that to server different segments. how would you price a 4090 that can be used for crypto, gaming, ai, cad, video editing if you were to discover that is cheaper to create the same chips for all of them, but the segments are really different, 90% coming from datacenter and 10% from gaming

we're lucky they still do gaming by limiting the datacenter chips

it's like getting a ferrari speed limited for usd20,000 and then I complain I don't get the acceleration of a usd100,000 model. they sold the product cheaper, they cared, they adapted. I'm happy they are still improving year after year for the same dollar value
Several other countries also gave them up with better results. Including South Africa, Sweden, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
I won’t buy Sony TVs because their EULA says you have to indemnify Sony.
The actual rules are vulnerable to this attack. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50

If you think the attack won't be attempted, you've never been responsible for an internet forum.
The new age of the cyborg?
I'd love for something to come around that has the vast ecosystem of WP but without the atrocious security risks.
Just use a LiftMaster/Chamberlain jackshaft opener, never connect it to any network install the ESP32-based ratgdo device into the wiring harness, be done with this issue.

Nothing else compares due to the digital integration. ratgdo uses the simple serial protocol that the opener button uses, so it has access to a lot of information.
I hate this API and Go's handling of protocol buffers in general. Especially preparing test data for it makes for some of the most cumbersome and unwieldy files that you will ever come across. Combined with table driven testing you have thousands upon thousands of lines of data with an unbelievably long identifiers that can't be inferred (e.g. in array literals) that is usually copy pasted around and slightly changed. Updating and understanding all of that is a nightmare and if you miss a coma or a brace somewhere, the compiler isn't smart enough to point you to where so you get lines upon lines of syntax errors. But, being opaque has some advantages for sure.
Discussion (63 points, 3 hours ago, 102 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433177
The ideal towards which we all strive is, of course, the Dalek.
Linux kernel has been in development since the nineties, not just for the last ten years. Also 5000 contributors is a lot more than 2000 from gp's comment.

Let's ignore the years before dotcom boom since the dev community was probably much smaller, and assume an average of 3500 contributors since.

That's 25 years * 3500 contributors on average * 200k salary (total employee cost, not take home) = $17.5b

Napkin math, but order of magnitude checks out.
I want to add nvidia sales are 90% data center and 10% gaming, and the author being part of the 10% who wasn't abandoned is complaining they got a product at half the speed, way lower price, instead of half the price same specs as the datacenter client

man.
The reactor simulation was probably Scram. I had it on cassette. It was written in Basic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scram_(video_game)
Exactly this, hard to grok why people think somehow the fab is the boat anchor around Intel's neck. No, it was the golden goose that kept Intel ahead until it didn't.

BK failed to understand the moat Intel had was the Fab. The moat is now gone and so is the value.
1. Do you mean Firefox on GTK taking 64MB? Or the whole desktop environment?

2. I'd say many of seeds of radical wrongness were already planted then, but it took them a while to sprout.
My comment around IR-35 is that it has caused a lot of confusion and thus made contracting a lot more difficult as a result. A lot of freelancers and contractors have been affected by this.
I thought VSCode was supposed to be lightweight, though I suppose with extensions it can add up
I suspect he means it doesn't get reported in the main stream media. Independent media channels have reported this.
After reading the comments, the themes I'm seeing are:

- AI will provide a big mess for wizards to clean up

- AI will replace juniors and then seniors within a short timeframe

- AI will soon plateau and the bubble will burst

- "Pshaw I'm not paid to code; I'm a problem solver"

- AI is useless in the face of true coding mastery

It is interesting to me that this forum of expert technical people are so divided on this (broad) subject.
This is assuming I think you have to have radio communication with the drones at all times? I'd assume more that you have tethered trenches scattered throughout the ocean that you care about and can dispatch an absurd number of drones at will. No need to keep them moving on a regular basis. My general thought there was more that keeping an absurdly large fleet of mostly inactive drones a bit more hidden is almost certainly easier than keeping anything in motion and constant communication hidden.

Is it necessarily a good idea? Probably not? I was only poking at the "first principals" taking the assumption of constant radio communication as a given. Why? We don't even assume that for submarines with people on them.

Which, yes, we have people there so that they can think and respond with situational awareness to events. And I'm fully agreed that we don't want to jump straight to AI to replace people completely. But I also don't know why you wouldn't build a bit more smarts into deployments? And fully expect some of this to happen. (Realistically, I'm largely describing what science fiction used to imagine mine fields are like in the ocean?)
this is kind of an unfair comparison. Whats the endpoint of generating AI videos? What can this do that is useful, contributes something to society, has artistic value, etc etc. We can make educational videos with a script but its also pretty easy for motivated parties to do that already, and its getting easier as cameras get better and smaller. I think asking "whats the point of this" is at least fair.
They were calculating missile trajectories, everybody understood what they were useful for.
Amazon facing strike threats as Senate report details hidden widespread injuries
Don’t even get me started. We’re in wearable electronics, and somehow, we have to compete with devices priced under $15.

I know there are people who say, “Why pay more?” but honestly, at that price, you’re not just missing out on quality materials that have been thoroughly tested. You’re also missing proper support, reliable updates, and the peace of mind that comes with a product designed to actually last.
this sounds awful haha
When I looked at the title I imagined it was an AI plugin for idtech 5 for the next Wolfenstein game. Though I suppose the Berlin wall wouldn't have been a thing at all if Wolfenstein's Nazis had made it that far.
We tested the Nvidia App performance problems
Ha! Fair. I should have scoped my statement largely to arm chair quarterbacks on the internet. With the full understanding and endorsement of what that implies about my contributions! :D
Anti-trust laws, and their enforcement, are only feasible in the very-large-monopoly space. Even in smaller monopolies, where not a lot of a money is moving around, you'll get a crappy product. Do you see Linda Khan going after Workday?
The Supreme Court hasn’t and can’t say anything against laws being updated and changed. What they have prevented is those we have elected to make laws delegating that very authority to others.
Many dentists are money hungry psychopaths and some of them are highly incompetent.

This is probably true for all doctors, but I don't think there is any other essential specialty that can pull as much money out of your pockets via personal persuasion, besides hair transplant and plastic surgeons.

https://www.rd.com/article/how-honest-are-dentists/