MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palata | 2025-05-16 12:02:01+00:00
> Because they usually can.

I wonder if I can't write coherent English, or if you can't understand it. You keep fighting to not understand what people complain about.

They complain about good questions being closed, you say "that's because they are bad questions". They say that they don't complain about bad questions being close, you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".

Sure sounds like you don't really know what you are trying to say other than "we are great".
by wiseowise | 2025-05-16 12:02:47+00:00
> Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt.

Bean counters want their cake and eat it too.

I guess their brains go something like this: "if you're done already then work some more, I pay you for 8 hours!!!11" (when you're done early) and "we're not hitting deadlines, work more than 8 hours! I pay you for output, not for hours!!!11" (when you're not)
by roxolotl | 2025-05-16 12:03:14+00:00
> Some days I feel like we’re also being gaslit by LLM providers. Just look at any AI related subreddit, and you’ll see people having completely opposite experiences, with the same exact model, with the same prompt, on the same day. If you code with AI long enough you’ll be able to relate. One day it’s amazing, the next day it’s incredibly stupid.

> Are they throttling the GPUs? Are these tools just impossible to control? What the fuck is going on?

Money and dreams. As everyone knows there’s an obscene amount of money invested in these tools of course. The capitalist class is optimistic their money can finally do the work for them directly instead of having to hire workers.

But more than that, AI is something that’s been alluring to humans forever. I’m not talking about cyberpunk fantasies I’m talking about The Mechanical Turk, Automata in the Middle Ages, Talos[0]. The desire to create an artificial mind is, if not hardwired into us, at least culturally a strong driver for many. We’re at a point where the test of the computer age for determining if we built AI was so utterly destroyed it’s unclear how to go about judging what comes next.

The hype is understandable if you view if you step back and view it through that lens. Maybe we are at an inflection point and just a bit more scaling will bring us the singularity. Maybe we’ve seen a burst of progress that’ll mostly stall from a consumer perspective for another 5-10 years, like all of the major AI moments before.

If you want to use them effectively it’s the same as any tool. Understand what they are good at and where they flounder. Don’t give up your craft, use them to elevate it.

[0]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/02/ancient-myths-reve...

Not quite a source but it’s a fun read from 2019 about this.
by ColinWright | 2025-05-16 12:03:38+00:00
Quoting from a post on Mastodon:

"For weeks I have been telling reporters that Trump could have the power to switch off our tech in Europe. It felt a bit alarmist until I just read that Microsoft, on the behest of the US gov, has suspended the email account of Karim Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor.

"One of the most important international courts and a legal bulwark against genocide, crimes against humanity, and warcrimes is threatened by BigTech dependency."

-- https://mathstodon.xyz/@ilumium@eupolicy.social/114512433535...
by kleiba | 2025-05-16 12:04:05+00:00
> An analysis of the emails and meetings of 3.1 million people in 16 global cities found that the average workday increased by 8.2 percent—or 48.5 minutes—during the pandemic’s early weeks.

For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.
by bArray | 2025-05-16 12:04:05+00:00
Your reply reads as if you have skin in this game and are for some unknown reason offended by the idea of a fair test.

> This is being done to prove a point, that rust is just as efficient as c while being memory safe.

I understand that, but it could just end up being a measure of how much money we are willing to pour into libraries. If you start putting money in to any language, you should see efficiency increase and bugs decrease.

A nice result would be them being about the same speed, but Rust offering greater protections.

> Your idea is misaligned with the goals of the contest and more a moral complaint on “fairness”. Where do you get this notion that any entity offering their own funds in a contest needs to distribute it evenly?

It was an intrigue, not a demand.
by jack_pp | 2025-05-16 12:04:21+00:00
LLMs aren't free. The more garbage you accept into your code base the harder will be for LLMs to fix / extend it because it will have context issues.

At this point in history they aren't good enough to just vibe code complex projects as the author figured out in practice.

They can be very useful for most tasks, even niche ones but you can't trust it completely.
by foobarbecue | 2025-05-16 12:04:43+00:00
Telework. A whole class of jobs people don't have to move for, which was enabled by be technologies around the beginning of the study period.

How is it not even mentioned in the article?

By the way, studying geography in undergrad one of my favorite papers in this topic was "Sticky Places in Slippery Space" mostly because of the great title.

Markusen, A. (1996). Sticky Places in Slippery Space: A Typology of Industrial Districts. Economic Geography, 72(3), 293–313. https://doi.org/10.2307/144402
by dahauns | 2025-05-16 12:04:51+00:00
Hejlsberg's arguments for choosing go over c# sounded well founded and very pragmatic to me though, with things like battle tested AOT compilation (.NETs current iteration is very promising, but still relatively nascent) and the type system being a stronger fit (I really miss TS's structural typing sometimes in C# :) ).

As someone who has a lot of .NET projects at work it's a bit of a bummer since the dogfooding would have been a huge benefit for .NET, but I honestly can't argue with their choice.
by DarkCrusader2 | 2025-05-16 12:04:56+00:00
If the people who came up with this design can not make the demo site performant, site which will be the first impression of your new design language for most, I don't think there is much hope for the rest of us.

But since this has name of Google attached to it, many people will mindless ape it to the detriment of experience of their users.
by jdiff | 2025-05-16 12:05:05+00:00
Even limiting its scope can be risky, if it's a complex problem in a niche that's not well-represented in the training data. Been learning Gleam lately, and yesterday when wrapping my head around recursion was starting to give me a headache, I tried to ask Gemini Pro to write a function. It needed to recurse down a tree, perform a function on each child that requires information accumulated from each of its ancestors, and return all nodes in the tree as a flat list.

It returned over 600 lines of code across 3 code blocks, almost all of them commented out for some reason, each with an accompanying essay, and each stuffed with hallucinated and unnecessary helper functions. Apparently Gemini Pro struggles to wrap its weights around recursion more than I do. I just wrote it myself and only needed 26 lines. It's not using tail calls, but hey, my target platform still doesn't support tail call optimization in 2025 anyway.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-05-16 12:05:31+00:00
> I get the point you’re trying to make, LLMs can be a force multiplier for less experienced devs, but the sweeping generalizations don’t hold up. If you’re okay with a higher tolerance for bugs or loose guardrails, sure, LLMs can feel magical. But that doesn’t mean they’re less valuable to experienced developers.

Amen. Seriously. They're tools. Sometimes they work wonderfully. Sometimes, not so much. But I have DEFINITELY found value. And I've been building stuff for over 15 years as well.

I'm not "vibe coding", I don't use Cursor or any of the ai-based IDEs. I just use Claude and Copilot since it's integrated.
by abhisek | 2025-05-16 12:05:58+00:00
I think getting the initial domain modeling, structure and opinions that build up a code base is more of an art than science. It’s highly opinionated. Sure you have SOLID but in my experience no one follows it to the book.

Once the code base structure and opinions are in place, I think LLMs are decent at writing code that are bounded to a single concern and not cross cutting.

LLM generated code bases work initially but so will code written by college kids for an initial set of requirements. Even a staff+ level engineer will struggle in contributing to a code base that is a mess. Things will break randomly. Don’t see how LLMs are any different.
by golondon | 2025-05-16 12:06:07+00:00
Man, just let it go. More you try to block Epic or any other, more you are pushing people away from yourself.

Be Apple, innovate, give us second iPhone moment so you wouldn't worry so much about revenue drop in services. Or make payment via Apple so good, your customers would go for it even with price difference. Just stop stupid, monopolistic tactics.
by brookst | 2025-05-16 12:07:10+00:00
Not really a fan of the “failure to sufficiently deny an accusation is an admission of guilt” line of thought.

Maybe they’re getting a legal opinion. Maybe they’re leaving it open while they talk business to business. Maybe the right person to address the issue is on vacation.

Lots of people and companies choose not to engage in public battles. I don’t think that should be read as a sign of guilt (or innocence).
Show HN: For Art's Sake – I made a beautifully designed iOS app for art history
by archiepeach | 2025-05-16 12:07:25+00:00
I find creating an app around a subject is actually a great way to teach myself about something. I previously had success with a classic poems app then a philosophy app. Art history made sense to do next. I'm a web dev by trade but used ChatGPT to help me create a native SwiftUI app. Very happy with the look and feel of it. Feedback welcome!
by sublinear | 2025-05-16 12:07:38+00:00
Text works best when everyone involved in the chat is on the same level of deeper understanding. You're correct that this has pushed some forms of management away from the discussion, and I'm saying that's a net productivity gain for most workplaces. It accelerates the discussion towards results instead of constant hand holding and other unproductive social pressures.

Also, text and recordings hold people accountable and give reason to think more deeply about what is said. It's a huge improvement. If someone needs more time to focus on what to say or to understand what was said, they can now take it.
by bumby | 2025-05-16 12:07:52+00:00
FWIW I agree but I think it’s worth communicating a devils advocate position.

I don’t think anyone here is disagreeing that those with a disability should be protected. The distinction is that many don’t go so far as to assume someone has a disability when their behavior is maladaptive. In game theory, systems break down when they are too many people abusing the system. Giving everyone a break on all instances just in case they have a disability sets the table for creating an unstable system ripe for abuse.

You point out the specific case of sleep disorders. But the numbers of medical disorders is functionally infinite. If we apply the same rule across the board, we would be creating a world where nobody is held accountable because they might just have some obscure illness they aren’t aware of.

I think there are better approaches that don’t devolve like that. As another congener said, you can create a system where late-comers can quietly come in the back.
by fn-mote | 2025-05-16 12:07:56+00:00
I won't address the rest, but:

> b) I see no evidence that upstream arranged to ship any notice in their binaries, so I don't see how it's reasonable to expect downstreams to do it

Downstream is not in compliance. The fact that upstream has made that compliance hard/impossible is not relevant to the fact that downstream is infringing.
by stef25 | 2025-05-16 12:09:07+00:00
Recently I tried getting ChatGPT to help me build a Wordpress site (which I know nothing about), starting from an Adobe design file. It spent hours thinking, being confused and eventually failed completely.

However it's great for simple "write a function that does X", which I could do myself but it would take longer, be boring and require several iterations to get it right.

Having said that, blindly copying a few lines of ChatGPT code did lead to automated newsletters being sent out with the wrong content.
by shahbaby | 2025-05-16 12:09:24+00:00
Let's take a step back and think about how LLMs are trained.

Think about when chat gpt gives you the side-by-side answers and asks you to rate which is "better".

Now consider the consequence of this at scale with different humans with different needs all weighing in on what "better" looks like.

This is probably why LLM generated code tends to have excessive comments. Those comments would probably get it a higher rating but you as a developer may not want that. It also hints at why there's inconsistency in coding styles.

In my opinion, the most important skill for developers today is not in writing the code but in being able to critically evaluate it.
by kouteiheika | 2025-05-16 12:09:52+00:00
> Epic wanted their own store and they got their own store.

They don't. Quoting the article:

> "Apple has blocked our Fortnite submission so we cannot release to the US App Store or to the Epic Games Store for iOS in the European Union," Epic stated via its Fortnite account

If someone prevents me from selling my own product in my own store then it's not my store.
by amiga386 | 2025-05-16 12:10:02+00:00
Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions, and you'll find bird-spotters and gardeners doing it too thanks to Carl Linné's / Carolus Linnæus's love of Latin.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French - "attorney", "culprit", "grand jury", "tort", "voir dire" and so on

I think what you're trying to say is that people who are pretentious and middle-class (who in your experience are affluent white Americans) like to reach for Latin words because they sound grander. Orwell had a lot to say on that in Politics and the English Language:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

> Pretentious diction [is] used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. [...] Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones
by trollbridge | 2025-05-16 12:10:12+00:00
I’m planning to have someone from Australia do some work and was computing the amount paid per hour etc and the numbers didn’t add up. “This is too small.” Then I got a reminder their workweek is 38 hours (basically 8 hour shifts with unpaid 24 minutes’ of breaks). In America we tend to have 8.5 or 9 hour shifts with 30-50 minutes of lunch break.

Now with RTO, employers want the same productivity they had with WFH (basically more people on call, available outside of regular hours, and a standard workday almost an hour longer).
by fhd2 | 2025-05-16 12:10:45+00:00
Also noteworthy are the different terms for "German" in different languages, they're quite far apart: "Deutsch", "Allemagne", "Nemți", which all derive from the names of different Germanic tribes. Depending on which tribes surrounding countries (which were faster to establish nation states) were closest to, that's what they called all Germans. And it stuck.
by trebligdivad | 2025-05-16 12:10:54+00:00
There are a few stories on the 'max privacy' stuff; one of the stories goes that you have two companies each with something private that needs to combine their stuff without letting the other see it; for example a bank with customer transactions and a company with analytics software they don't want to share; a system like this lets the bank put their transaction data through that analytics software without anyone being able to see the transaction data or the software. The next level on that is where two banks need to combine the transaction data to spot fraud, where you've now got three parties involved on one server.
by horsawlarway | 2025-05-16 12:11:12+00:00
Just take the app store away.

From all of them - take it away from Google too. Frankly - Microsoft never actually got much buy in for their store, but take it away from them as well.

Hardware that has only a single approved distribution channel for software, that is owned by someone other than the owner of the hardware, shouldn't be legal.

Further - if you own a piece of hardware, you legally should own EVERY fucking key. If there's a lock in that device, hardware or software based, that has a key - you get a damn copy.

---

Some physical comparisons that show how outrageously unethical this setup is:

You buy a home, but your realtor gets the only copy of the keys. "Don't worry" they say, "I'll just pop by and open er up whenever you need to get in and out. Oh, and by the way, I don't like Ikea - so I won't open the door if you're trying to move Ikea furniture in. Great working with you guys, enjoy your new home!".

You've just bought a new car, you tried turning into your neighborhood, but suddenly the car stops. You call the dealer: "Oh, I see your neighborhood road was paved by PavingCo, They don't pay our manufacturers' yearly inspection fee, so we can't certify that our car can safely drive on that road. So we disable it when the GPS detects you're about to drive there."

---

This is fundamentally about ownership. Hardware manufacturers are playing with utter fire here, because this is the first time in history there exists enough infrastructure that a device can phone home and ask "Is this ok?" to the maker, rather than operating as the owner desires.

As far as I'm concerned - you don't own a device that does that. You're just renting it, and the manufacturer can and will extort you with rent-seeking behavior at EVERY turn.

Phones are only the first stop - this is going to spread to absolutely everything that uses electricity unless this gets extinguished real fast. We're already starting to see the same games in Cars, IoT devices, TVs, etc...

I'm eagerly awaiting the day my drill stops working because I'm not trying to drill the manufacturers' overpriced screws with it...
by rvz | 2025-05-16 12:11:31+00:00
As expected [0], it isn't over yet and Apple doesn't care.

They even went as far as to blocking downloads from third-party app stores:

> The Verge has confirmed that the game is no longer available to download on iOS from the Epic Games Store or the alternative marketplace AltStore PAL in the EU, where it had previously been available. It’s not yet clear if Apple blocked the game’s availability through those stores, or if Epic itself chose to make it unavailable. We’ve reached out to both Apple and Epic for comment.

That tells you the reach into how Apple can block app installs even from third-party app stores.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43896104
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-16 12:11:59+00:00
16 year python dev who's done all that, lead multiple projects from inception to success, and I rarely manually code anymore. I can specify precisely what I want, and how I want it built (this is the key part), stub out a few files and create a few directories, and let an agent run wild but configured for static analysis tools/test suite to run after every iteration with the instructions to fix their mistakes before moving on.

I can deliver 5k LoC in a day easily on a greenfield project and 10k if I sweat or there's a lot of boilerplate. I can do code reviews of massive multi-thousand line PRs in a few minutes that are better than most of the ones done by engineers I've worked with throughout a long career, the list just goes on and on. I only manually code stuff if there's a small issue that I see the LLM isn't understanding that I can edit faster than I can run another round of the agent, which isn't often.

LLMs are a force multiplier for everyone, really senior devs just need to learn to use them as well as they've learned to use their current tools. It's like saying that a master archer proves bows are as good as guns because the archer doesn't know how to aim a rifle.
by lucianbr | 2025-05-16 12:12:12+00:00
Couldn't agree more. It's basically a page with some pictures in it, and everything in it loaded so late for me that initially I wondered why they left so many large empty spaces in the page.

This could work and be fast with tech from at least 20 years ago, probably even more. It's really incredible this is output from a company valued in trillions.
by voidhorse | 2025-05-16 12:13:12+00:00
> Amen. Seriously. They're tools. Sometimes they work wonderfully. Sometimes, not so much. But I have DEFINITELY found value. And I've been building stuff for over 15 years as well.

Yes, but these lax expectation s are what I don't understand.

What other tools in software sometimes work and sometimes don't that you find remotely acceptable? Sure all tools have bugs, but if your compiler had the same failure rate and usability issues as an LLM you'd never use it. Yet for some reason the bar is so low for LLMs. It's insane to me how much people have indulged in the hype koolaid around these tools.
by MrJohz | 2025-05-16 12:13:12+00:00
On the other hand, as a Brit, I find German abbreviations oddly cutesy and childish — although I think that's just preferring what one grew up with!

That said, I don't think you can discuss German jargon without talking about Beamtendeutsch. I'm fairly comfortable reading in German — I'm slower than I am in English, but I can, say, read a book in German. Then I'll get a letter from some Amt somewhere and it'll be utterly unintelligible. Worse, I'll pass it to my German partner, and she has no idea what it says, and we'll need to go and find someone to translate the document we've just got back into regular German. I'll take "appendicitis" any day of the week over having to learn whole new grammar constructs just to interpret an official document!
by squigz | 2025-05-16 12:13:34+00:00
> Edit Edit: I can't reply to your comment below I think we've hit the leaf end of this post. But, to reply to your question are c-sections replacing natural births or are they just becoming more common? The research I've cited has indicated this is a genetic transfer among female-to-female births of a need for more cesareans.

To reply after a certain number of child comments, you have to open the comment by clicking the timestamp thing

I'm also afraid I don't understand your response. Can you elaborate?
by mritchie712 | 2025-05-16 12:14:32+00:00
my stance is the opposite of all-or-nothing. The note above is one example. How much value you get out of CURSOR specifically is going to vary based on person & problem. The Python dev in my example might immediately get value out of o3 in ChatGPT.

It's not all or nothing. What you get value out of immediately will vary based on circumstance.