MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rustcleaner | 2025-04-27 22:10:54+00:00
I would explicitly patronize a cafe with a counter I had to walk up to if it had a sign up explaining that they banned tips and offered 30-50% over min-wage but nobody applies. I would chalk it up to entitled service workers who really should be converting material taken out of the ground into something useful instead of waiting tables.

We won't see any real increases to our standards of living in the US again until we bring electric prices down and we start converting more things in the ground into things which make our lives even easier. Climate Change™ has been a wonderous success in slowing down Western inertia, though don't mistake my sentiment as faith in the current administration (lol).
by janice1999 | 2025-04-27 22:11:03+00:00
I guess it depends on how it's used, what the rule of law is like in the country and what protections are in place. In Ireland naturalised citizens can have citizenship revoked but it's been used less than 10 times since 1956. The law was recently changed to add even more oversight after a Supreme Court ruling:

https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/oireachtas/2024/07/17/ne...
by rcarmo | 2025-04-27 22:12:41+00:00
4 lines of JS. A screenful of “reasoning”. Not much I can agree with.

Meanwhile I just asked Gemini in VS Code Agent Mode to build an HTTP-like router using a trie and then refactor it as a Python decorator, and other than a somewhat dumb corner case it failed at, it generated a pretty useful piece of code that saved me a couple of hours (I had actually done this before a few years ago, so I knew exactly what I wanted).

Replace programmers? No. Well, except front-end (that kind of code is just too formulaic, transactional and often boring to do), and my experiments with React and Vue were pretty much “just add CSS”.

Add value? Heck yes - although I am still very wary of letting LLM-written code into production without a thorough review.
by charmitro | 2025-04-27 22:14:09+00:00
Nice work!

If you want to appeal to power users and developers, consider adding these features:

* Support for development mailing lists * Good patch/diff syntax highlighting for code reviews via email * Plain text compose and reading experience (many devs prefer this over HTML)

These additions would open your app to a whole different segment of mailbox users who rely heavily on email for technical collaboration.

That is, if these features aren't already included.
by entropie | 2025-04-27 22:16:04+00:00
> PrepperDisk is similar to a DIY, open-source project that started in 2012 called Internet in a Box and which has become popular in rural areas in developing countries where internet access is sparse. The idea is basically that you can carry around an external hard drive-sized, mini version of the internet with you that creates a local network your phone or laptop can access.

> https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-drives-prepper-disk-fo...

From the hn-thread. You might be right.
by flaburgan | 2025-04-27 22:16:06+00:00
With the crazy news we have those past months, I actually started to wonder what would happen if internet went offline "for real" (let's say, several weeks) here in developed countries. I know we can easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. But what else? And how to share it? I can do a hotspot home, but would my neighbors understand it? I would need some kind of captive portal to tell them when they connect to me. And then, could they repeat the hotspot, to build a mesh? I know there are projects to do that, but what do they accomplish exactly? I remember 10 years ago, in Ubutu, Empathy was allowing me to chat with people connected to the same network than me. No account, no registration. That would be very useful. Does the Pirate box do all of that? How extensible is it?
by quintes | 2025-04-27 22:16:18+00:00
I’m still working on these.

SaaS - I'm working on this mostly marketing that tech.. harder than it looks am I right? https://prfrmhq.com - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538744 [Show HN: My SaaS for performance reviews setting goals and driving success]

- Shows I can use AI and I've integrated into AWS Bedrock

- Shows I can integrate with Stripe for payments

Consulting (Architecture, Strategy, Tech) - I'm working on getting my consultancy started. If anyone wants the kind of skills I offer here let’s talk https://architectfwd.com

Next SaaS - Starting a SaaS for managing core strategy and tech concepts. I created goals for it but I’m failing to kick the tyres

Last night I actually also started playing with firebase studio, though the app I prompted isn’t even doing save of the document properly. I figure can’t be me but will try again and work through the errors.

And playing drums, must get better
by kristopolous | 2025-04-27 22:16:45+00:00
It's the "Day-50" problem.

On Day-0, AI is great but by Day-50 there's preferences and nuance that aren't captured through textual evidence. The productivity gains mostly vanish.

Ultimately AI coding efficacy is an HCI relationship and you need different relationships (workflows) at different points in time.

That's why, currently, as time progresses you use AI less and less on any feature and fall back to human. Your workflow isn't flexible enough.

So the real problem isn't the Day-0 solution, it's solving the HCI workflow problem to get productivity gains at Day-50.

Smarter AI isn't going to solve this. Large enough code becomes internally contradictory, documentation becomes dated, tickets become invalid, design docs are based on older conceptions. Devin, plandex, aider, goose, claude desktop, openai codex, these are all Day-0 relationships. The best might be a Day-10 solution, but none are Day-50.

Day-50 productivity is ultimately a user-interface problem - a relationship negotiation and a fundamentally dynamic relationship. The future world of GPT-5 and Sonnet-4 still won't read your thoughts.

I talked about what I'm doing to empower new workflows over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814203
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-27 22:17:05+00:00
I haven't been using AI for coding assistance. I use it like someone I can spin around in my chair, and ask for any ideas.

Like some knucklehead sitting behind me, sometimes, it has given me good ideas. Other times ... not so much.

I have to carefully consider the advice and code that I get. Sometimes, it works, but it does not work well. I don't think that I've ever used suggested code verbatim. I always need to modify it; sometimes, heavily.

So I still have to think.
by ben_w | 2025-04-27 22:17:35+00:00
> Hitler’s successors would reign Europe.

> Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.

> No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.

The other problem is that literal Hitler thought the exact same thing, which is why Mein Kampf got written in a prison.

I wonder if the people four years ago chanting to hang Trump's VP (for accepting having lost the election) also thought they were in the right…

(Not that it matters either way if those people are "mistake theory" (power) rather than "conflict theory" (truth), because I expect all clothes to eventually be worn by various conflict theorists).
by pron | 2025-04-27 22:17:51+00:00
Isn't C++ already a serious contender to C? It clearly has not replaced C everywhere, but it's taken over much of C's market. And if C++ could do it, I don't see why another language couldn't do the same (that's not to say that the next language to do that already exists today).

One thing that's important to notice, I think, is that low-level languages' combined market share has fallen sharply since the 1970s, and it doesn't seem that the trend is about to sharply reverse direction. To me that suggests that if a low-level language wants to be more popular than C++, it should focus on low-level programming and shouldn't try to also be a good applications programming language (as C++ has tried to do that, but the overall market share of C and C++ is lower now than it was in, say, 1990), but I could be wrong about that.
by nico | 2025-04-27 22:18:23+00:00
Compilers, for the most part, made it unnecessary for programmers to check the assembly code. There are still compiler programmers that do need to deal with that, but most programmers get to benefit from just trusting that the compilers, and by extension the compiler programmers, are doing a good job

We are in a transition period now. But eventually, most programmers will probably just get to trust the AIs and the code they generate, maybe do some debugging here and there at the most. Essentially AIs are becoming the English -> Code compilers
by charlie-83 | 2025-04-27 22:18:47+00:00
Out if interest, what kind of codebases are you able to get AI to do these things on. Everytime I have tried it with even simpler things than these it has failed spectacularly. Every example I see of people doing this kind of thing seems to be on some kind if web development so I have a hypothesis that AI might currently be much worse for the kinds of codebases I work on.
by parpfish | 2025-04-27 22:19:05+00:00
> Which is dumb, because sometimes I'm legitimately better at the strategy half too

A semi-related thought I've had recently:

I've run into a number of non-technical product people that say that they're primary skill is that they have a great "product sensibility" that engineers lack so they need to step in and provide guidance. It's true that many engineer-designed products are terrible, but I'd argue that most engineers have pretty good product sense.

The problem is that engineers have a conflict of interest that leads to them making sub-optimal product decisions. A non-technical product person gets the "luxury" of only thinking "what is the best product for the user?", so they end up with a good design. But an engineer can't help but also factor in "i'm the one that has to build this, so how much extra work am i giving myself?" so they're design will be a compromise of what's good for the user and what can be built easily.

this can have big consequences for how an org should divide work. If somebody has a broad set of responsibilities, they can't help but make tradeoffs (that they might not even be cognizant of) because they're weighing multiple objective functions.

So, when it comes time for figuring out who should be in charge of strategy, it might not just be an issue of "who's better" but more an issue of "who has the least conflict of interest"
by moshegramovsky | 2025-04-27 22:19:09+00:00
It doesn't seem like the author has ever used AI to write code. You definitely can ask it to refactor. Both ChatGPT and Gemini have done excellent work for me on refactors, and they have also made mistakes. It seems like they are both quite good at making lengthy, high-quality suggestions about how to refactor code.

His argument about debugging is absolutely asinine. I use both GDB and Visual Studio at work. I hate Visual Studio except for the debugger. GDB is definitely better than nothing, but only just. I am way, way, way more productive debugging in Visual Studio.

Using a good debugger can absolutely help you understand the code better and faster. Sorry but that's true whether the author likes it or not.
by awesome_dude | 2025-04-27 22:19:10+00:00
I don't (use AI tools), I've tried them and found that they got in the way, made things more confusing, and did not get me to a point where the thing I was trying to create was working (let alone working well/safe to send to prod)

I am /hoping/ that AI will improve, to the point that I can use it like Google or Wikipedia (that is, have some trust in what's being produced)

I don't actually know anyone using AI right now. I know one person on Bluesky has found it helpful for prototyping things (and I'm kind of jealous of him because he's found how to get AI to "work" for him).

Oh, I've also seen people pasting AI results into serious discussions to try and prove the experts wrong, but only to discover that the AI has produced flawed responses.
by citizenpaul | 2025-04-27 22:19:41+00:00
My experience with tools like this is that they have only one single outcome. Piling work onto the most talented or desperate(ie need money or visa) people until they leave the org/company. Eventually leading to total skill erosion and a very low average skill/productivity across the company as people leave or hide their abilities.

Why? because there is never a reward attached. Oh you want to make me the AI resource for the agency but not remove former duties or increase my pay? Ummmm no thanks. Also things tend to happen in waves ie "AI" so everyone needs a lot from a very few people at the same time. No one ever asks how those people can be empowered. Just how can we put the screws to them so they work harder.

HR and Mgmt can f-off with their "skill resource bank" or whatever nonsense they call it this year. My skills are what I was hired for on the job description. If you want to discuss a new position or higher pay for different skills I'm very happy to talk about how I can work with the org to make that happen. Thats never the case though.
by rustcleaner | 2025-04-27 22:19:57+00:00
Tie pay to performance then. As for Fridays, start a baserate bidding market for your workers and the lowest asks win the given shift. If pay for the shift scales with number of plates served (without tips) AND Fridays pay more because the lowest ask on Fridays is typically higher than on other days, then it should not be much different than now except your customers don't feel mugged. Just ban customer tipping!

Probably best to tie this all together in a "Lowest listed price is final price" law that includes a hotline for customers to report businesses/staff who retaliate over no tipping. Mainly it's so the agency can send secret shoppers of their own to test for social retaliations/pressure.
by robertclaus | 2025-04-27 22:20:03+00:00
In the past I've worked at startups that hired way too many bright junior developers and at companies that insisted on only hiring senior developers. The arguments for/against AI coding assistants feel very reminiscent of the arguments that occur around what seniority balance we want on an engineering team. In my experience it's a matter of balancing between doing complex work yourself and handing off simple work.
by asadotzler | 2025-04-27 22:21:07+00:00
"If you want to be good at lifting, just buy an exoskeleton like me and all my bros have. Never mind that your muscles will atrophy and you'll often get somersaulted down a flight of stairs while the exoskeleton makers all keep trying, and failing, to contain the exoskeleton propensity for tossing people down flights of stairs."
by bastawhiz | 2025-04-27 22:21:11+00:00
I have not had the same experience as the author. The code I have my tools write is not long. I write a little bit at a time, and I know what I expect it to generate before it generates it. If what it generates isn't what I expect, that's a good hint to me that I haven't been descriptive enough with my comments or naming or method signatures.

I use Cursor not because I want it to think for me, but because I can only type so fast. I get out of it exactly the amount of value that I expect to get out of it. I can tell it to go through a file and perform a purely mechanical reformatting (like converting camel case to snake case) and it's faster to review the results than it is for me to try some clever regexp and screw it up five or six times.

And quite honestly, for me that's the dream. Reducing the friction of human-machine interaction is exactly the goal of designing good tools. If there was no meaningful value to be had from being able to get my ideas into the machine faster, nobody would buy fancy keyboards or (non-accessibility) dictation software.
by thenaturalist | 2025-04-27 22:21:48+00:00
While I tend to agree with your premise that the linked article seems to be reasoning to the extreme off the basis of a very small code snippet, I think the core critique the author wants to make stands:

AI agents alone, unbounded, currently cannot provide huge value.

> try asking cursor for potential refactors or patterns that could be useful for a given text.

You, the developer, will be selecting this text.

> try giving them an abstract jira ticket or asking what it things about certain naming, with enough context

You still selected a JIRA ticket and provided context.

> ask any engineer that saves time with everything from test scaffolding to run-and-forget scripts.

Yes that is true, but again, what you are providing as a counterfactual are very bounded, aka easy contexts.

In any case, the industry (both the LLM providers as well as tooling builders and devs) is clearly going into the direction of constantly etching out small imoprovements by refining which context is deemed relevant for a given problem and most efficient ways to feed it to LLMs.

And let's not kid ourselves, Microsoft, OpenAI, hell Anthropic all have 2027-2029 plans where these things will be significantly more powerful.
by karmakaze | 2025-04-27 22:22:28+00:00
My favorite one is Conway's Game of Life. It's perhaps the least surprising one, but it's also the most visually appealing. Really like this video that leads up to making the Game of Life in itself[0]. It's something you can show a non-technical person and they can get a sense of how crazy it is that something so simple can do anything.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk2MH9O4pXY
by mrtksn | 2025-04-27 22:24:08+00:00
Software ate the world, it's time for AI to eat the software :)

Anything methodical is exactly what the current gen AI can do. Its phenomenal in translations, be it human language to human language or an algorithm description into computer language.

People like to make fun with the "vibe coding" but that's actually a purification process where humans are getting rid of the toolset that we used to master to be able to make the computer do what we tell it to do.

Most of todays AI developer tools are misguided because they are trying to orchestrate tools that were created to help people write and manage software.

IMHO the next-gen tools will write code that is not intended for human consumption. All the frameworks, version management, coding paradigms etc will be relics of the past. Curiosities for people who are fascinated for that kind of things, not production material.
by quesera | 2025-04-27 22:24:57+00:00
> Most people claiming LLMs are limited just rent using the tools enough

The old quote might apply:

~"XML is like violence. If it's not working for you, you need to use more of it".

(I think this is from Tim Bray -- it was certainly in his .signature for a while -- but oddly a quick web search doesn't give me anything authoritative. I asked Gemma3, which suggests Drew Conroy instead)
by verelo | 2025-04-27 22:24:58+00:00
It’s all good to me - let these folks stay in the simple times while you and i arbitrage our efforts against theirs? I agree, there’s massive value in using these tools and it’s hilarious to me when others don’t see it. My reaction isn’t going to be convince them they’re wrong, it’s just to find ways to use it to get ahead while leaving them behind.
by einpoklum | 2025-04-27 22:25:28+00:00
Reading just the title:

It is _because_ a programmer's job is to think that AI Coding assistants may provide value. They would (and perhaps already do) complete the boiler plate, and perhaps help you access information faster. They also have detriments, may atrophy some of your capabilities, may tempt you to go down more simplistic paths etc., but still.

Reading the post as well: It didn't change my mind. As for what it actually says, my reaction is a shrug, "whatever".
by sillywalk | 2025-04-27 22:26:41+00:00
Somewhat related, HP did (does?) have a FreeDOS option, although it was a FreeDOS VM running under Debian:

The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option (2022) (tmm.cx)

107 points by wibbily 55 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 33 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43232057

https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...
by tangotaylor | 2025-04-27 22:26:52+00:00
I think there's some truth here in that AI can be used as a band-aid to sweep issues of bad abstractions or terse syntax under the rug.

For example, I often find myself reaching for Cursor/ChatGPT to help me with simple things in bash scripts (like argument parsing, looping through arrays, associative maps, handling spaces in inputs) because the syntax just isn't intuitive to me. But I can easily do these things in Python without asking an AI.

I'm not a web developer but I imagine issues of boilerplate or awkward syntax could be solved with more "thinking" instead of using the AI as a better abstraction to the bad abstractions in your codebase.
by Glyptodon | 2025-04-27 22:27:11+00:00
I don't know. Cursor is decent at refactoring. ("Look at x and ____ so that it ____." With some level of elaboration, where the change is code or code organization centric.)

And it's okay at basic generation - "write a map or hash table wrapper where the input is a TZDB zone and the output is ______" will create something reasonable and get some of the TZDB zones wrong.

But it hasn't been that great for me at really extensive conceptual coding so far. Though maybe I'm bad at prompting.

Might be there's something I'm missing w/ my prompts.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-27 22:27:34+00:00
We could look at the print world for reference.

Everything is perfectly static and linear, and instead of popups we get full-page ads, double-full-page ads sometimes, and ad inserts in the rest of the pages, with stealth marketing for the content left.

The fundamental issue is not technology IMHO. Scripting can make it worse, but it wouldn't have been great in the first place.
by skydhash | 2025-04-27 22:28:02+00:00
> “It won’t deal with abstractions” -> try asking cursor for potential refactors or patterns that could be useful for a given text.

That is not what abstraction is about. Abstraction is having a simpler model to reason about, not simply code rearranging.

> “It doesn’t understand things beyond the code” -> try giving them an abstract jira ticket or asking what it things about certain naming, with enough context

Again, that is still pretty much coding. What matters is the overall design (or at least the current module).

> “Reading code and understanding whether it’s wrong will take more time than writing it yourself” -> ask any engineer that saves time with everything from test scaffolding to run-and-forget scripts.

Imagine having a script and not checking the man pages for expected behavior. I hope the backup games are strong.
by tptacek | 2025-04-27 22:28:14+00:00
There really is a category of these posts that are coming from some alternate dimension (or maybe we're in the alternate dimension and they're in the real one?) where this isn't one of the most important things ever to happen to software development. I'm a person who didn't even use autocomplete (I use LSPs almost entirely for cross-referencing --- oh wait that's another thing I'm apparently never going to need to do again because of LLMs), a sincere tooling skeptic. I do not understand how people expect to write convincingly that tools that reliably turn slapdash prose into median-grade idiomatic working code "provide little value".
by bl4ckneon | 2025-04-27 22:28:21+00:00
Well there is nothing stopping any school in the developed world from loading this on to a pi or something and having everyone use it too. It's free and open source (from what I can tell).

It's aimed at places with little to no, or unreliable, internet. So if you have normal internet speed there is nothing you can't get that's on the box. Also it seems that its not even a curated Wikipedia, it's just a full clone of it (assuming for whatever language your downloading)