MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hoten | 2025-04-23 20:49:22+00:00
You both may be right. It could be that ASAN is not instrumenting scanf (or some other random standard lib function). Though since 2015, it certainly has been. https://github.com/google/sanitizers/issues/108

The simpler policy of "don't allow unintialized locals when declared" would also have caught it with the tools available when the game was made (though a bit ham-fisted).
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-23 20:49:32+00:00
> Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away.

Depends what you write. What I work on isn't about eliminating jobs at all, if anything it creates them. And like, actual, good jobs that people would want, not, again, paying someone below the poverty line $5 to deliver an overpriced burrito across town.
by layman51 | 2025-04-23 20:49:44+00:00
I haven’t tried it yet but it is an interesting idea for an app. My initial thoughts are: if I have something that seems to be important or significant that I wrote down near the start of my note, I would probably type gibberish or nonsense if I wanted to prevent it from being erased. Is there some way to ameliorate this situation where I would end up padding the note with fluff? My guess is to just make the timer shorter. Or maybe have some “checkpoint” for a longer timer.

Also, when it comes to handwriting, is there a way to support this input? I’ll say that a lot of left-handed writers have the opposite issue when writing with ink on paper. If they write too fast, most of them will end up smudging what they just wrote. This is not an issue on electronic writing devices of course.
by skeptrune | 2025-04-23 20:49:51+00:00
>As I mentioned above, however, a better System Prompt still won't save me much time on writing emails from scratch.

>The thing that LLMs are great at is reading text and transforming it, and that's what I'd like to use an agent for.

Interestingly, the OP agrees with you here and noted in the post that the LLMs are better at transforming data than creating it.
by stale2002 | 2025-04-23 20:50:07+00:00
Of course nothing applies if there are no derivatives works.

So, once again, the point stands.

It's funny because you can just look at the current legal landscape about how people using these AI models are doing fine.

You can download whatever AI model you want and you aren't going to get in trouble and there are trillions of dollars worth of companies being created.

Yet despite the fear mongering, the government isn't shutting them all down.

The AI companies won. AI is everywhere. And it's not being taken down by the government. Game over.

And this has been obvious for over a year now.
by dleary | 2025-04-23 20:50:20+00:00
> ...except Chrome was not and is not an illegal enterprise.

> The charges were against search and ads.

The textbook definition of “monopolistic behavior” is “using your monopoly in one sector to extend your power in another sector”.

It’s not illegal to have a monopoly. That can happen if you are completely innocent, just because no competitors choose to compete with you.

It’s illegal to abuse the power of your monopoly.

What was the biggest browser when Chrome launched? It was Firefox. Where are they now? On death’s door.

What was the biggest commercial browser when Chrome launched? It was Opera. Where are they now? Also on death’s door.

Do you ever remember seeing ads for Chrome in any of Googles other offerings?

A better question would be, “Before 2020 or so, do you think it was possible to use Google Search without having Chrome advertised to you?”

Chrome got special treatment above and beyond anything available to anyone else. Even more than anyone else with an unlimited Google ad budget. It got special placement in the Google search interface. “Try chrome!” On the otherwise bare Google search page. You know, the one that was famously minimalistic and “ad-free”.

Google leveraged its search and ads pseudo-monopolies to help Chrome become its own pseudo+monopoly.

And now that Chrome is its own pseudo-monopoly, what is their behavior?

Well, now, you can’t install (good) ad blockers anymore. Does that benefit users, or is that abusing their browser monopoly to help Google’s other business lines?

And until approximately yesterday, they were saying they were going to disable third party cookies. That’s nice. It probably would help some users. Note that it will definitely hurt Google’s competitors.

And it’s interesting timing, isn’t it? They could have done this, to help users, at any point in the past 15 years, but they only decided to do it recently, when their search and ad businesses are a little shaky compared to where they used to be.

Google absolutely used its search and ad monopolies to build a browser monopoly. And now that they have a browser monopoly, they’re using the power of that monopoly to act in ways contrary to their users interests.
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-23 20:50:30+00:00
Yeah, they're currently horrible at debugging -- there seems to be blind spots they just can't get past so end up running in circles.

A couple days ago I was looking for something to do so gave Claude a paper ("A parsing machine for PEGs") to ask it some questions and instead of answering me it spit out an almost complete implementation. Intrigued, I threw a couple more papers at it ("A Simple Graph-Based Intermediate Representation" && "A Text Pattern-Matching Tool based on Parsing Expression Grammars") where it fleshed out the implementation and, well... color me impressed.

Now, the struggle begins as the thing has to be debugged. With the help of both Claude and Deepseek we got it compiling and passing 2 out of 3 tests which is where they both got stuck. Round and round we go until I, the human who's supposed to be doing no work, figured out that Claude hard coded some values (instead of coding a general solution for all input) which they both missed. In applying ever more and more complicated solutions (to a well solved problem in compiler design) Claude finally broke all debugging output and I don't understand the algorithms enough to go in and debug it myself.

Of course I didn't use any sort of source code management so I could revert to a previous version before it was broken beyond all fixing...

Honestly, I don't even consider this a failure. I learned a lot more on what they are capable of and now know that you have to give them problems in smaller sections where they don't have to figure out the complexities of how a few different algorithms interact with each other. With this new knowledge in hand I started on what I originally intended to do before I got distracted with Claude's code solution to a simple question.

--edit--

Oh, the irony...

After typing this out and making an espresso I figured out the problem Claude and Deepseek couldn't see. So much for the "superior" intelligence.
by otikik | 2025-04-23 20:50:44+00:00
I suspect the "System prompt" used by google includes way more stuff than the small example that the user provided. Especially if the training set for their llm is really large.

At the very least it should contain stuff to protect the company from getting sued. Stuff like:

* Don't make sexist remarks

* Don't compare anyone with Hitler

Google is not going to let you override that stuff and then use the result to sue them. Not in a million years.
by codingdave | 2025-04-23 20:50:46+00:00
Certifications never held value for developers. They hold value other types of people:

- For the companies who offer the certs - people pay them to test to prove they have skills, then tie themselves to using that company's product. Free organic marketing.

- For consulting firms who are business partners with the company who offers the cert. More certs = better partner programs.

- For people trying to get their first tech jobs: A cert with no experience is better than no cert and no experience.

But if you are a dev, just doing your work... they are at best a training tool, at worst an outright scam.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-23 20:50:56+00:00
> Those of you who are Gen X and grew up with parents who bought you computers at a young age, you are so fortunate.

Indeed it was a golden age, when microarchitectures could really be grokked in their fullness by teenagers.

The C64 user manual was like a goldmine for me. I don't know how many supplementary materials I used (I read Compute!'s Gazette a lot) and I had already owned a VIC-20. By the time my IBM PC came along, I knew the C64 inside and out, really well. I knew the sprites subsystem and I'd programmed entire games. I knew bank switching, ROM/RAM, Kernal routines, font mapping, ASCII table, assembly and BASIC alike. I was never an electrical engineer, but I could tell you, more or less, how the 6510/6502 processed any given program and how that machine code used registers, memory, I/O, etc.

By the time I hit college I was learning Pascal and systems architecture, assembly on M68000 systems, and we were really off to the races. I was illicitly using accounts to program MU* servers and learning C, gdb, Unix. I could install and configure software and really got noticed, in my first job, for basically becoming a "shadow Unix admin" who got stuff done.

Sadly I never had the chops to be an actual IT professional or have a career. All of that knowledge and talent could've landed a career and a very stable lifestyle for someone else, but for me it was sort of an albatross. My aspirations to a corporate office job as a knowledge worker, weren't in line with what I could actually sustain.

But indeed they were golden years. I don't regret getting to know computers like that. I just wish that they had stayed as pets, rather than enslaving us like today.
by pdimitar | 2025-04-23 20:51:29+00:00
1. I work on enjoyable problems after I let the LLM do some of the tasks I have to do for money. The LLM frees me bandwidth for the stuff I truly love. I adore solving problems with code and that's not going to change ever.

2. Some of the modern LLMs generate very impressive code. Variables caching values that are reused several times, utility functions, even closure helpers scoped to a single function. I agree that when the LLM code's quality falls bellow a certain threshold then it's better in every way to just write it yourself instead.
by archagon | 2025-04-23 20:51:45+00:00
> In my opinion, mainstream outlets should have scrutinized President Biden’s son and the president’s cognitive health more aggressively.

The problem is that right-wing think tanks are constantly trying to spin the tiniest little controversies into full-blown media frenzies by way of sheer vitriolic repetition. This is not something I’ve seen the left do very much of — at least, not with any lasting success.

Both of these stories struck me as a lot of smoke without a fire, and any responsible newspaper would say as much. I should also point out that Biden consistently made a lot more sense in his speeches than Trump, and yet the “cognitive health” label stuck to one and not the other.
by phforms | 2025-04-23 20:51:56+00:00
I am not sure if this is what you mean, but the original UCBLogo (which I think is used in the Turtle Geometry book) is still alive and maintained[1] (not by the original authors, but Brian Harvey seems to chime in every now and then) and it does run well on modern computers.

Now that I think about it, Logo seems to be pretty much a livecoding environment (not surprising given that it is a Lisp, but with less parentheses). You can define and edit functions from the REPL while the program continues with the same state, the same canvas. You can even pause e.g. a running procedure that draws a polygon, rotate and move the turtle and then continue the polygon procedure with that new state (at least this is possible with UCBLogo).

[1]: https://github.com/jrincayc/ucblogo-code
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-23 20:52:46+00:00
There is something really big about sports.

It is on my bucket list to see a Premier League game in the UK not because the play is better in the UK but because the atmosphere of UK fans who go in to hate each other for 90 min is really electric and a little bit dangerous and not something I am going to get at college or MLS or even Premier League exhibition games in the States.

There still are soccer snobs who have no idea you can see a great game with great fan experience at Red Bulls Stadium for very reasonable ticket prices, but it sitting in the same stadium as those season ticket holders that would make it worth it for me to go all the way to the UK to see a game at Arsenal Stadium.
by larsga | 2025-04-23 20:52:47+00:00
This is complete and utter nonsense. The water used in beer often had bacteria (and other stuff) but to brew beer you must mash, at 65C for an hour or more, which pasteurizes the beer. Hops protect the beer against bacteria, and the yeast also makes it hard for other organisms to multiply in the fermented beer. Alcohol is one of those ways, but only one.
by bluGill | 2025-04-23 20:55:00+00:00
The problem is your claim is false in my experience. Every email I've got from the CEO reads more like the second, while all my coworkers write things like the first. Again though I only get communications from the CEO in formal situations where that tone is demanded. I've never seen a coworker write something like the second.

I know what you are trying to say. I agree that for most emails that first tone is better. However when you need to send something to a large audience the second is better.
by smj-edison | 2025-04-23 20:55:35+00:00
Bit of a tangent but...

Haven't we been automating jobs away since the industrial revolution? I know AI may be an exception to this trend, but at least with classical programming, demand goes up, GDP per capita goes up, and new industries are born.

I mean, there's three ways to get stuff done: do it yourself, get someone else to do it, or get a machine to do it.

#2 doesn't scale, since someone still has to do it. If we want every person to not be required to do it (washing, growing food, etc), #3 is the only way forward. Automation and specialization have made the unthinkable possible for an average person. We've a long way to go, but I don't see automation as a fundamentally bad thing, as long as there's a simultaneous effort to help (especially those who are poor) transition to a new form of working.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-23 20:55:42+00:00
There were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galectin proteins embedded in a thin lipid layer on the surface of the water. The goal was to understand what conditions triggered various conformational changes. I'm under the impression that such details end up in databases and get selected for further inquiry by drug design processes, particularly those targeting autoimmune diseases. Or at least, that's what I got from his talk on it. I'm still working my way up to the biochemistry classes.

But yeah I get your point about avoiding that delusion. Honestly I'd be happy enough to be doing something that I suspect is not actively harmful (this should be easy but SaaS tends to converge on products that control their users and not the other way around). I don't need to be humanity's savior. More helpful than harmful will be enough.
by tpmoney | 2025-04-23 20:56:08+00:00
Come on. USB-C has been shipped on MacBooks since 2015, and most of their other systems since ~2020. Heck they caught a bunch of flack when they killed MagSafe on their MacBooks and went USB-C only (not just for the lack of mag safe, but also plenty of grief for lack of Ethernet and HDMI too). With or without the EU mandates they were clearly on a trend moving their devices to USB-C
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-23 20:56:19+00:00
Their stance is actually more that saving these lives didn't benefit them and so it's good. Here go look https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1j2ykmz/its_o...

There's also a lot of smugly intentional misunderstanding of what usaid actually did. But plenty of clear-eyed cold blooded gloating about the money saved by these deaths.
by larsga | 2025-04-23 20:56:33+00:00
First of all, many types of beer were historically not boiled. Quite a few still aren't. The mash, however, pasteurizes the beer.

That, however, doesn't last forever. In the conditions of the 18th century or whatever, microorganisms will get into the beer after mashing/boiling, so the heat treatment only helps for a while. The fermentation really does protect the beer afterwards, but it's a combination of low pH, alcohol, low oxygen, little nutrients, CO2, etc. Hops also help against gram-positive bacteria.
by tptacek | 2025-04-23 20:57:17+00:00
This to me is like every complaint I read when people generate code and the LLM spits out an error, or something stupid. It's a tool. You still have to understand software construction, and how to hold the tool.

Our Rust fly-proxy tree is about 80k (cloc) lines of code; our Go flyd tree (a Go monorepo) is 300k. Generally, I'll prompt an LLM to deal with them in stages; a first pass, with some hints, on a general question like "find the code that does XYZ"; I'll review and read the code itself, then feed that back to the LLM with questions like "summarize all the functionality of this package and how it relates to other packages" or "trace the flow of an HTTP request through all the layers of this proxy".

Generally, I'll take the results of those queries and have them saved in .txt files that I can reference in future prompts.

I think sometimes developers are demanding something close to AGI from their tooling, something that would do exactly what they would do (only, in the span of about 15 seconds). I don't believe in AGI, and so I don't expect it from my tools; I just want them to do a better job of fielding arbitrary questions (or generating arbitrary code) than grep or eglot could.
by teruakohatu | 2025-04-23 20:57:25+00:00
> Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.

Do you have a citation for that?

Printing a book costs just about nothing, it’s astonishingly cheap to print a quality book in volume. Author royalties are not that high (I suppose famous authors whose name alone sell books is another story), then you have retail margins and overhead.

The top three book publishers’ have sales in the low billions with operating margins in the 10 - 20% range.

It is a healthy industry even if it is smaller than it used to be.

The one problem with books is that shipping an individual book to a single consumer costs a far more than printing the book, but there is zero shipping and zero printing costs for ebooks, just the retailer margin.
by Centigonal | 2025-04-23 20:57:38+00:00
> The population (especially the younger generation, who never seen a different kind of technology at all) is being conditioned by the tech industry to accept that software should behave like an unreliable, manipulative human rather than a precise, predictable machine. They're learning that you can't simply tell a computer "I'm not interested" and expect it to respect that choice. Instead, you must engage in a perpetual dance of "not now, please" - only to face the same prompts again and again.

Part of the population is learning that -- but I think another part is learning that application providers are not incentivized to design around the users' best interest, and that if you want your software to behave in a predictable, user friendly way, you need to seek out third party tools (like uBlock Origin, UnTrap for Youtube, ReVanced, Invidious etc) to enforce that behavior.
by itissid | 2025-04-23 20:58:06+00:00
> and I want a 3mm hole in one side of the plate. No the other side. No, not like that, at the bottom. Now make it 10mm from the other hole. No the other hole. No, up not sideways.

One thing that is interesting here is you can read faster than TTS to absorb info. But you can speak much faster than you can type. So is it all that typing that's the problem or could be just an interface problem? and in your example, you could also just draw with your hand(wrist sensor) + talk.

As I've been using agents to code this way. Its way faster.
by bluGill | 2025-04-23 20:59:43+00:00
Written records are only accurate if they are carefully reviewed. Humans make mistakes all the time too. We just are better at correcting them, and if we review the record soon after the meeting there is a chance we remember well enough to make a correction.

There is a reason meeting rules (ie Robert's rules of order) have the notes from the previous meeting read and then voted on to accept them - often changes are made before accepting them.
by simonw | 2025-04-23 20:59:56+00:00
Yeah, 50,000 lines sounds about right for 1m tokens.

If your codebase is larger than that there are a few tricks.

The first is to be selective about what you feed into the LLM: if you know the work you are doing is in a particular area of the codebase, just paste that bit in. The LLM can make reasonable guesses about things the code references that it can't see.

An increasingly effective trick is to arm a tool-using LLM with a tool like ripgrep (effectively the "interactively probe the project in a way that a human would" idea you suggested). Claude Code and OpenAI Codex both use this trick. The smarter models are really good at deciding what to search for and evaluating the results.

I've built tools that can run against Python code and extract just the class, function and method signatures and their docstrings - omitting the actual code. If you code is well designed and has reasonable documentation that could be enough for the LLM to understand it.

https://github.com/simonw/symbex is my CLI tool for that

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/23/llm-fragment-symbex/ is a tool I released this morning that turns Symbex into a plugin for my LLM tool.

I use my https://llm.datasette.io/ tool a lot, especially with its new fragments feature: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/7/long-context-llm/

This means I can feed in the exact code that the model needs in order to solve a problem. Here's a recent example:

llm -m openai/o3 \ -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news/refs/heads/main/llm_hacker_news.py \ -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/tools/refs/heads/main/github-issue-to-markdown.html \ -s 'Write a new fragments plugin in Python that registers issue:org/repo/123 which fetches that issue number from the specified github repo and uses the same markdown logic as the HTML page to turn that into a fragment'

From https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/20/llm-fragments-github/ - I'm populating the context with the exact examples needed to solve the problem.
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-23 21:00:02+00:00
> If you're a master mason crafting amazing brickwork, you're exactly the same as some amateur grabbing some bricks from home depot and slapping a wall together.

IDK, there's still a place in society for master masons to work on 100+ year old buildings built by other master masons.

Same with the robots. They can implement solutions but I'm not sure I've heard of any inventing an algorithmic solution to a problem.
by themusicgod1 | 2025-04-23 21:00:08+00:00
Copyright has always been based on moral principles. 'Moral rights' have been part of copyright longer than "encourage innovation and hustle" has been something the government has considered worth promoting. The original copyright laws were about controlling who could print the bible, and the statute of anne was about encouraging learning while controlling what booksellers could and couldn't do. Copyright if anything was about preventing innovation from the very beginning, and slowing the hustle of culture down so that incumbents could edge out newcomers - a drama that has played out generation after generation