MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by permo-w | 2025-04-27 22:48:44+00:00
it built the meat of the code, you spent 5 minutes fixing the more complex and esoteric issues. is this not the desired situation? you saved time, but your skillset remained viable

> AI's fine for well-trodden roads. It's awful if you're beating your own path, and especially bad at treading a new path just alongside a superhighway in the training data.

I very much agree with this, although I think that it can be ameliorated significantly with clever prompting
by SkyPuncher | 2025-04-27 22:49:09+00:00
I get massive value out of Agentic coding.

I no longer need to worry about a massive amount of annoying, but largely meaningless implementation details. I don’t need to pick a random variable/method/class name out of thin air. I don’t need to plan ahead on how to DRY up a method. I don’t need to consider every single edge case up front.

Sure, I still need to tweak and correct things but we’re talking about paint by number instead of starting with a blank canvas. It’s such a massive reduction in mental load.

I also find it reductionist to say LLM don’t think because they’re simply predicting patterns. Predicting patterns is thinking. With the right context, there is little difference between complex pattern matching and actual thinking. Heck, a massive amount of my actual, professional software development work is figuring out how to pattern matching my idea into an existing code base. There’s a LOT of value in consistency.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-27 22:49:40+00:00
If WGS84 was correcting for tectonic drift it would imply that the coordinates of the terrestrial fixed points used to compute the reference meridian never change under WGS84. Rebasing the coordinates of terrestrial fixed points prior to calculation disregards tectonic drift in the reference meridian calculation, it doesn’t correct it. It is a noise reduction exercise to minimize the influence of plate tectonics on meridian drift. The meridian uses non-terrestrial fixed points too that don’t have a concept of tectonic drift (but may introduce their own idiosyncratic sources of noise).

Basically, these are corrections to their “fixed points” to make them behave more like actual fixed points in the reference meridian model. It doesn’t eliminate tectonic drift effects when using coordinates in that spatial reference system.
by madars | 2025-04-27 22:49:50+00:00
Oxford Music Online has a great article that goes into a lot of detail - https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.44010 and fittingly remarks that

>The organ is, together with the clock, the most complex of all mechanical instruments developed before the Industrial Revolution. Among musical instruments its history is the most involved and wide-ranging, and its extant repertory the oldest and largest. Despite its essentially indirect and therefore relatively inflexible production of sound, no other instrument has inspired such avowed respect as the organ, ‘that great triumph of human skill … the most perfect musical instrument’ (Grove), ‘in my eyes and ears … the king of instruments’ (Mozart, letter to his father, 17–18 October 1777).

Stephen Malinowski's famous YouTube channel of animated graphical scores has a great selection of organ pieces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXaCmhAMnHs&list=PLA20FE13E9...

St. Cecilia, pray for us!
by codr7 | 2025-04-27 22:49:55+00:00
I've found that just writing code only takes me so far, I need to share as well to feel good about it. But sharing anything outside of the ordinary with the world means painting a pretty big target on your back. On the positive side, it also opens up an avenue for getting paid.

My point is that if you start with the fun and let it grow from there, and you're willing to go through the discomfort of sharing, it doesn't have to be either or.
by arp242 | 2025-04-27 22:50:29+00:00
The only "sigh" here is the boring and predictive act of someone linking that xkcd as the most laziest and unimaginative content-free put-down that you can do.

Lots of people post ideas to Hacker News. Lots of good ideas, lots of bad ideas, and lots in-between. It's very much against the hacker spirit to be such a dismissive lazy jerk about it.
by Bengalilol | 2025-04-27 22:51:24+00:00
You pinpoint a truly important thing, even though I cannot put words onto it, I think that getting lost with AI coding assistants is far worse than getting lost as a programmer. It is like doing vanilla code or trying to make a framework suit your needs.

AI coding assistants provide 90% of the time more value than the good old google search. Nothing more, nothing less. But I don't use AI to code for me, I just use it to optimize very small fractions (ie: methods/functions at most).

> The future world of GPT-5 and Sonnet-4 still won't read your thoughts. Chills ahead. For sure, it will happen some day. And there won't be any reason to not embrace it (although I am, for now, absolutely reluctant to such idea).
by snapplebobapple | 2025-04-27 22:51:58+00:00
I have to respectfully disagree. My behaviour and precautions are the same at 6k or 3k homicides a year because both are extremely terrible. Its also way easier to drop that large number because there will be glaringly obvious things to do that will have big effects. That last drop from 18 to 2 will be far harder, this is pretty much universally true for all changes like this. Its also the biggest life improvement for people there. at 18 you still need decent precautions. At 2 you dont really
by NoahZuniga | 2025-04-27 22:52:10+00:00
AI "art" feels soulless because basically always there's very little thought and effort put into it. Some people have experienced so much low effort AI media that their default response to it is just "this is bad".

There is of course interesting thought provoking art you can do with AI, but oftentimes it isn't.

Code on the other hand is supposed to be effective, so it being "soulless" doesn't matter.

Also relevant, people value art because it evokes feelings. This means that something just looking nice isn't the only or most important piece of art.
by viraptor | 2025-04-27 22:53:19+00:00
In lots of jobs, the person doing work is not the one selecting text or the JIRA ticket. There's lots of "this is what you're working on next" coding positions that are fully managed.

But even if we ignored those, this feels like goalpost moving. They're not selecting the text - ok, ask LLM what needs refactoring and why. They're not selecting the JIRA ticket with context? Ok, provide MCP to JIRA, git and comms and ask it to select a ticket, then iterate on context until it's solvable. Going with "but someone else does the step above" applies to almost everyone's job as well.
by susiecambria | 2025-04-27 22:53:58+00:00
Having spent 25+ years working on policy with a local government and then 3 years working in that government, this idea excites me. I mean, the idea that the government tests something with actual users or at least potential users. So much better than testing with people somewhere else, where terminology might differ, etc.

It's for this reason that I loathe the use of an app the county sheriff's office wants to use. The community is old and older and young folks leave. The SO will not explain why they chose an app versus something old school like an email list.
by ivape | 2025-04-27 22:54:34+00:00
There are plenty of people that have thought like this on all kinds of issues from the past and now currently as well. I suspect someone like Wesley and the Abolitionists were called unrealistic and unpragmatic in their time period, just as people who speak out about certain things today are called delusional and idealistic. Pacified and moral opinions are very much available, you just have to be willing to be part of a minority that regularly gets derided as naive.
by charlie-83 | 2025-04-27 22:54:53+00:00
I have tried on a lot of different projects.

I have a codebase in Zig and it doesn't understand Zig at all.

I have another which is embedded C using zephyr RTOS. It doesn't understand zephyr at all and even if it could, it can't read the documentation for the different sensors nor can it plug in cables.

I have a tui project in rust using ratatui. The core of the project is dealing with binary files and the time it takes to explain to it how specific bits of data are organised in the file and then check it got everything perfectly correct (it never has) is more than the time to just write the code. I expect I could have more success on the actual TUI side of things but haven't tried too much since I am trying to learn rust with this project.

I just started an android app with flutter/dart. I get the feeling it will work well for this but I am yet to verify since I need to learn enough flutter to be able to judge it

My dayjob is a big C++ codebase making a GUI app with Qt. The core of it is all dealing with USB devices and Bluetooth protocols which it doesn't understand at all. We also have lots of very complicated C++ data structures, I had hoped that the AI would be able to at least explain them to me but it just makes stuff up everytime. This also means that getting it to edit any part of the codebase touching this sort if thing doesn't work. It just rips up any thread safety or allocates memory incorrectly etc. It also doesn't understand the compiler errors at all, I had a circular dependency and tried to get it to solve it but I had to give so many clues I basically told it what the problem was.

I really expected it to work very well for the Qt interface since building UI is what everyone seems to be doing with it. But the amount of hand holding it requires is insane. Each prompt feels like a monkey's paw. In every experiment I've done it would have been faster to just write it myself. I need to try getting it to write an entirely new pice of UI from scratch since I've only been editing existing UI so far.

Some of this is clearly a skill issue since I do feel myself getting better at prompting it and getting better results. However, I really do get the feeling that it either doesn't work or doesn't work as well on my code bases as other ones.
by esseph | 2025-04-27 22:55:39+00:00
"This generation has the lowest mental toughness"

If you are in the US, in the past 25yr:

* 9/11

* 25y of constant combat deployments around the world

* 2008 recession

* 2026-ish recession

* Loss of company pensions and stability

* Massive housing crisis in availability of type of homes needed, and costs - builders are only incentivized to build upper middle class+ housing in many areas

* Gig work where people are working 3 jobs with no benefits or retirement becoming more popular

* College financial cost unsustainable

* Massive increase in school and public shootings

* Covid

Any ideas of stability in US society that may have come from their parents simply do not exist anymore. The path of a middle class life for most people in the US is gone.

A gazillion more things I'm not thinking of.

I'm getting close to 50, and any time somebody talks about how "x,y,z generation is weak", not even 99% of the time, but 100% of the time, I know the person saying that is simply incompetent.
by squiffsquiff | 2025-04-27 22:56:05+00:00
Scheuer allegedly went into action quickly following his termination, and by early July was said to have used his work credentials, which still functioned after his termination, to access the menu creation system Disney contracted another company to create and change all the fonts in the system to wingdings symbols.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/30/fired_disney_employee...
by crazygringo | 2025-04-27 22:56:07+00:00
> While true, there is zero promises that what you meant to save and what gets saved are the same things. All the drive mostly promises is that if the drive safely wrote XYZ to the disk and you come back later, you should expect to get XYZ back.

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. It's using ECC, so they should be the same bytes.

There isn't infinite reliability, but nothing has infinite reliability. File checksums don't provide infinite reliability either, because the checksum itself can be corrupted.

You keep talking about promises and guarantees, but there aren't any. All there is are statistical rates of reliability. Even ECC RAM or file checksums don't offer perfect guarantees.

For daily consumer use, the level of ECC built into disks is generally plenty sufficient. It's chosen to be so.
by atombender | 2025-04-27 22:56:07+00:00
That is neither here nor there. Nobody has ever claimed evil started (or ended) with the Nazis. The US has committed unspeakable evil before and after, as have many other governments.

The parent presumably singled out the Gestapo because it is one of the prime examples of a secret police detaining and punishing citizens without due process. The fact that the Gestapo didn't spring out of completely new ideas doesn't seem particularly relevant in this context.

There are more apposite comparisons: The US internment programs of 1942–1945, or McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
by didibus | 2025-04-27 22:56:55+00:00
That study is at risk of the same effects of diagnostic rules, case-finding, service incentives, record linkage and diagnostic substitution as any other. So it can explain the increase shown here as well. That said, you're right, we don't know if there is within that an increase or not being masked. But it's very possible there isn't, or if there is, it's pretty small. Which wouldn't really mandate as much worrying as is happening now.

For me, the question might be, can we get the data in check? Don't want to go another 20 years and still not be able to know the real data because we kept changing the definitions, the rules around diagnosis, who is eligible to be diagnosed, the cost of diagnosis, etc.
by merizian | 2025-04-27 22:57:15+00:00
I prefer a more nuanced take. If I can’t reliably delegate away a task, then it’s usually not worth delegating. The time to review the code needs to be less than the time it takes to write it myself. This is true for people and AI.

And there are now many tasks which I can confidently delegate away to AI, and that set of tasks is growing.

So I agree with the author for most of the programming tasks I can think of. But disagree for some.
by dang | 2025-04-27 22:57:32+00:00
Related:

Zeynep Tufekci: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026203 - Oct 2021 (2 comments)

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads (2017) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16684860 - March 2018 (170 comments)

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014 - Dec 2017 (50 comments)

We're Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15572578 - Oct 2017 (12 comments)
by clement_fare | 2025-04-27 22:57:59+00:00
Hi HN!

A few months ago, I was struggling to get traction for my side project. As a tech guy, I'm quite a noob in marketing.

I built a waitlist, posted on Twitter and LinkedIn… but nothing really moved.

I realized the issue wasn’t just about getting traffic — it was about giving people a reason to share.

So I created WaitlistBoost:

Turn your waitlist into a viral leaderboard game where users earn rewards by inviting others. Incentivize your early users to become your best promoters. See some analytics and track engagement. You have your best referrers on a leaderboard.

It’s free to start.

If you’re launching something and struggling to grow your audience, maybe this can help.

I hope so Clement
by clone1018 | 2025-04-27 22:58:18+00:00
I'm working on a workflow automation tool that lets devs write workflows in simple yaml files, and then deploy them to the cloud _or_ on premise. Each workflow is a set of actions and a trigger that can transform data, make api calls, run AI models, or really anything (via docker!). Each step relies on the output of the last step, and the workflow framework is engineering to be declarative, testable, and versioned. Similar to GitHub actions, but for *anything*. Think webhook to slack, email to support ticket, nightly aws backup & restore, mirror a file each night, etc.
by charlie-83 | 2025-04-27 22:58:35+00:00
I suppose saying that I've only seen it in web development is a bit of an exaggeration. It would be more accurate to say that I haven't seen any examples of people using AI on a codebase that looks like on of the ones I work on. Clearly I am biased just lump all the types of coding I'm not interested in into "web development"
by queenkjuul | 2025-04-27 22:59:30+00:00
Funny enough, I've been compiling a lot of stuff for 386 Linux lately. You can build a kernel with built in software floating point, at which point it doesn't matter what your library/compiler do. If your kernel isn't built to handle that, you can build glibc with floating point emulation.

At least this is my impression, working with 2.2.x/2.4.x kernels, gcc 2.7~3.3, and glibc ~2.2
Agentic File Explorer
by sftechdude | 2025-04-27 22:59:36+00:00
We all deal with files every day — tax documents, contracts, engineering designs, project plans, and more. Yet, somehow, managing them is still painfully slow and manual. Even simple tasks, like renaming 100 files to add a prefix, can feel exhausting. Existing systems promised to make file management easy, but they missed the mark.

At https://thedrive.ai, we’re rethinking everything from the ground up. We’re building the world’s first fully agentic file management system — where you can simply tell your system what you want done, and it happens. Organizing, renaming, moving, sharing, and managing thousands of files will finally be effortless, fast, and human-first.

Here's an early peek into our experiments. If you’re curious and want a demo or early access, reach out at bigyan@thedrive.ai
by EdwardKrayer | 2025-04-27 23:01:09+00:00
I'm not an expert in embedded systems, but I do work on them at a very low level, and I can't be sure 100% of my code would differential from the RTEMS code base any more than libogs's. That doesn't mean they didn't do it - but the concepts behind Real Time Operating Systems in general are well known, and nearly standardized.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-27 23:01:20+00:00
> How much "reverse engineering" these days really is clean room and how much of it is just ripping off proprietary software?

I did mine clean room. When I reverse engineered my laptop's features, I intercepted the proprietary software's communications with the hardware, compiled my findings into a whole bunch of notes and then wrote my own free software to do the same thing based on those notes.

> But when the Nintendo copyright czar wakes up, they're the bad guys...

They are always the bad guys. Copyright owners are monopolists. Copyright as a whole should be abolished. I don't care what the so called "pirates" are doing, they are always less morally wrong than eternal copyright monopolists who rob us of our public domain rights and turn perfectly good computers into locked down digital fiefdoms where we are serfs.

20 year old games you grew up with? Give me a break. These companies have all made their fortunes multiple times over. This "intellectual property" should already be in the public domain by all reasonable accounts. God forbid Nintendo be unable to sell you the exact same Mario ROM for the 10th time though. We're all going to be long dead before our culture returns to us. That means it effectively never will.
by alexjplant | 2025-04-27 23:01:54+00:00
No idea why you're being downvoted for asking a simple question about an acronym. From Wikipedia [1]:

> ASDF (Another System Definition Facility) is a package format and a build tool for Common Lisp libraries. It is analogous to tools such as Make and Ant.

Contemporary developers using more mainstream languages are likely more familiar with asdf [2], the "Multiple Runtime Version Manager".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_System_Definition_Faci...

[2] https://asdf-vm.com/
by 827a | 2025-04-27 23:01:55+00:00
> some of the best value that a business co-founder can contribute is disproportionately building the relationships.

The other subtle thing I take issue with on this is: What relationships, exactly? Most of the time I've seen this surface as a few early customers you might not have otherwise gotten, which is great and necessary, but IME that well runs dry pretty quick, and those customers oftentimes don't stick as well as ones that were found on merit. A better relationship with vendors? Again, weird, merit should trump that personal relationship.

If you're building a business that relies on a small number of very high value contracts, I think I could see a world where having a foot in the door on those high value customers is worthy of elevating the body that foot is attached to toward Founder. That isn't, generally, how most software companies sell software though.
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-27 23:02:01+00:00
There are people at the gym I go to benching 95 lbs and asking what does it take to get to 135, or 225? The answer is "lift more weight" not "have someone help you lift more weight"

If you already know how to code, yes AI/LLMs can speed you along at certain tasks, though be careful you don't let your skills atrophy. If you can bench 225 and then you stop doing it, you soon will not be able to do that anymore.
by WiggleGuy | 2025-04-27 23:02:06+00:00
Still working on https://theretowhere.com since I announced it to HN in February.

It's an website who's goal is to make it easier to find apartments/hotels/etc that fit your housing preferences (starting with places that are close to the people and things you care about). It's flagship feature is the ability to make heatmaps of cities based on your preferences.

Since February I've slowed down on feature development temporarily as I try and find a way to sustainably increase it's popularity and learn what's the most important thing to focus on next.
by lelandfe | 2025-04-27 23:03:42+00:00
"Accessible," like so many words, means different things to different people.

You're saying this page seems inaccessible: how did anyone find this page? How is a person meant to access this stranded corner of the web?

They're saying this page has good accessibility: those with impaired vision, who use text to speech tools and the like, would not face difficulty with this simple HTML.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-04-27 23:03:50+00:00
Here's an experience I've had with Claude Code several times:

1. I'll tell Claude Code to fix a bug.

2. Claude Code will fail, and after a few rounds of explaining the error and asking it to try again, I'll conclude this issue is outside the AI's ability to handle, and resign myself to fixing it the old fashioned way.

3. I'll start actually looking into the bug on my own, and develop a slightly deeper understanding of the problem on a technical level. I still don't understand every layer to the point where I could easily code a solution.

4. I'll once again ask Claude Code to fix the bug, this time including the little bit I learned in #3. Claude Code succeeds in one round.

I'd thought I'd discovered a limit to what the AI could do, but just the smallest bit of digging was enough to un-stick the AI, and I still didn't have to actually write the code myself.

(Note that I'm not a professional programmer and all of this is happening on hobby projects.)
by cyberpunk2066 | 2025-04-27 23:06:31+00:00
> won’t even contemplate building something similar to protect NYC

Perhaps not as ambitious as a barrier spanning the entrance to NY Harbor (comparable to Venice's system), NYC did build extensive storm surge barriers along the East River:

https://www.nyc.gov/site/escr/about/resiliency-and-flood-pro...

https://www.nyc.gov/site/ddc/about/press-releases/2021/pr-10...