MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-07 16:51:14+00:00
An LLM can give you working code if you're lucky but putting it to work takes some skill and probably the code it gives you doesn't quite work right and you need the skill and insight to figure out why and fix it yourself or give a detailed explanation of what it has to do.

I skipped the regular CS requirement as an undergrad because I'd been coding since I was 9 in BASIC and Assembly and Turbo Pascal and C and it would have been silly to take another Pascal course like the one I had in high school. I wound up taking 1-credit courses in C and TeX instead from John Shipman [1] [2]

There was a time though when I was helping out a friend with CS 101 and we decided to try to steal somebody else's code. Well, finding a home directory which had been

chmod o+rx 'ed

was not hard at all but the program that we stole didn't work properly and we had to spend time debugging and fixing it, not to mention changing things around a little so it wouldn't be obvious we stole it. Looking back though, I see this was better preparation for being a professional programmer since a professional programmer spends a lot of time fixing bugs in programs other people wrote. Vibe coding has plenty of that.

[1] https://www.nmt.edu/news/2022/shipman-honorary-doctorate.php

[2] 1-credit classes with 3 credits worth of homework
by nathan_compton | 2025-05-07 16:51:23+00:00
I think the commenter was definitely somewhat glib in their statement, but I don't think the case is as clear cut as you think.

The way I've come to think of the current moment in history is that capitalism allocates resources via markets and we use this system because in many situations its highly efficient. But governments allocate resources democratically exactly because we do not always want to allocate resources efficiently with respect to making money.

Whether it "makes sense" or not, most people believe there is more to life than the efficient allocation of resources and thus it might be a reasonable opinion that making 100,000 people suddenly unemployed is bad. I doubt seriously that the OP believes having 100,000 people working indefinitely when the labor can be done more efficiently by machines is good. I think most reasonable people want to see the transition handled more smoothly than a pure market capitalism would do it.
by airstrike | 2025-05-07 16:51:28+00:00
glad to hear it and thanks for the kind words!

I'll be waiting for you on Discord ;-) my username is the same there so ping me if you need anything

and I forgot to link to a ridiculously cool new feature that dropped last week: time travel debugging for free

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/pull/2910

check out the third and fourth videos!
by kaoD | 2025-05-07 16:51:29+00:00
Still a draft, experimental and not widely used[0], but WebGPU[1] will bring support for actual compute shaders[2] to the web.

It's much more low level than these "web monkeys" but I'd say if you really need GPU performance instead of toy examples like squaring a list of numbers, you really need to go low level and understand how GPU threads and work batching works.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGPU_API

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU

[2] https://webgpufundamentals.org/webgpu/lessons/webgpu-compute...
by ashoeafoot | 2025-05-07 16:51:35+00:00
They did transport those nukes in unmarked army trucks in normal traffic with only light guard , out of fear other nations (like the us) could step in to take the toys away, which was a constant background noise during the Afghanistan war. This nations secret service (ISI) has trained,armed and send terrorist groups into other nations. Bin Laden was found in a compound in a garrison city. Those djihadis do believe in that paradise afterlife of theirs no matter how much you belittle their faith. They say how little they value lifes proud and openly . Please stop projecting western sentiments on another culture for once and listen, just listen to what they say. I dont want to eat closed loop greenhouse produce for the rest of my halflife just because somebody who grew up in a golden surplus time is unwilling to engage in grim realities, to prevent them .
by ben_w | 2025-05-07 16:51:50+00:00
While I get the vibes, and have had experience of human customer support being very weird on a few occasions, replacing mediocre humans with mediocre AI isn't a win for customers getting actual solutions.

And right now, the LLMs aren't really that smart, they're making up for low intelligence by being superhumanly fast and able to hold a lot of context at once. While this is better than every response being from a randomly selected customer support agent (as I've experienced), and when they don't even bother reading their own previous replies when the randomiser puts the same person in the chain more than once, it's not great.

LLM customer support can seem like a customer win to start with, when the AI is friendlier etc., but either the AI is just being more polite about the fixed corporate policy, or the LLM is making stuff up when it talks to you.
by georgeburdell | 2025-05-07 16:52:15+00:00
Not responding about the article, but I remember interviewing with McKinsey as a graduating PhD. I had just passed their test and was going through the case study interview and I got paired with a PhD in physics from MIT. I think the study was something about cognac sales and I just got disgusted with the waste of training and talent, and after I got home from the airport that evening I pulled out of the interview process even though I had no other employment options at the time.

Somewhat ironically, over the past 20 years I’ve come to reject PhD-type career tracks after seeing how much PhD overproduction there is and how my older colleagues only had a BS or MS. These days, I yearn to leave my Big Tech job to start a “boring” business. Right now I’m taking Accounting 101 at a local university to understand business financials better.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-05-07 16:52:15+00:00
So, only positive feedback allowed in this thread?

As a Linux user, I am sadly accustomed to some software working in only a just-so configuration. A datapoint that the software is still Mac first development is useful to know. Zed might still be worth trying, but I have to temper my enthusiasm from the headline announcement of, “everything is great”.
by toast0 | 2025-05-07 16:52:16+00:00
If I'm being generous to the director, they've got a lot of experience in this specialty and they are probably familiar with how people bullshit their way into specialty positions when the people interviewing for it don't know different.

It's not unreasonable for them to be involved in hiring decisions for people that report into them; right? Maybe try to get them involved in earlier, so it feels more like collaboration and less like second guessing. If they're an up or down vote, it would be better for them to be involved before an offer; and it would be better if they're in the main loop. You may want to put them towards the end of the day and end the loop early if there's a clear consensus no from early interviews.

As an unrelated 3rd party, I would say, go ahead and lean in and ask for help with the specialty work that needs doing that your team is missing expertise in. If they get roped into doing specialty work and they'd rather be directing, then they're more motivated about finding an acceptable candidate.
by gopalv | 2025-05-07 16:52:26+00:00
> had to chuckle at the 20k IOPS AWS instance, given even a consumer $100-200 NVMe gives ~1million+ IOPS these days

The IOPS figure usually hides the fact that it is not a single IOP that is really fast, but a collection of them.

More IOPS generally is done best by reducing latency of a single operation but the average latency is what actually contributes to the "fast query" experience. Because a lot of the next IO is branchy from the last one (like an index or filter lookup).

As more and more disks to CPU connectivity goes over the network, we can really deliver a large IOPS even when we have very high latencies (by spreading the data across hundreds of SSDs and routing it fast), because with the network storage we pay a huge latency cost for durability of the data simply because of location diversification.

Every foot is a nanosecond, approximately.

That the tradeoff is worth it, because you don't need clusters to deal with a bad CPU or two. Stop & start, to fix memory/cpu errors.

The AWS model pushes the latency problem to the customer and we see it in the IOPS measurements, but it is really the latency x queue depth we're seeing not the hardware capacity.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-07 16:52:44+00:00
Right, the non-drug solution that would actually work (we can observe it working in countries with different infrastructure, healthcare, culture, city design, food quality and costs and cost structures, and more—we can be fairly sure it's some combination of that stuff because the folks who live there put on weight if they move to the US) is "upend US society in a bunch of ways" so is, realistically, not workable, at least not on the scale of human lifetimes, though it still wouldn't be a bad thing to try to move somewhat closer to.
by lolinder | 2025-05-07 16:52:54+00:00
No, those are the rankings that are immaterial to measuring the success of a school system.

Raw score rankings do not as a rule measure the output of schools, they measure the involvement of parents, which will always have a much larger impact on child outcomes than the schools do. Schools are an important marginal add-on that we want to make better, and in order to measure their value add we have to find ways to account for parental involvement and remove it as a factor. Socioeconomics is a passible proxy for involvement.
by bArray | 2025-05-07 16:54:09+00:00
> That would be terrible UX and is exactly contrary to Ubuntu's philosophy, which is to do the right thing by default.

Even in Windows (or at least it used to be), the decision to perform an update now was a user decision. Just killing off applications without warning is the worst UX ever. Randomly killing stuff off is the opposite of what I want my OS doing.

> The alternative is to bombard the user with questions that they're generally not in a position to understand, and force them to receive an education on stuff that doesn't matter to most users before they can use their computer.

It doesn't have to be like that. It could be: "Do you want to update now? The following programs are affected and will be restarted: X, Y, Z. [Learn more]" The answers could be "Yes", "Remind me on next boot", "Remind me later" (offers common delays, i.e. 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week).

What is should never do is take the power away from a user. I saw an Ubuntu user's system restart their snap programs in the middle of delivering a conference presentation without warning. That was the worst way that could have been handled.
by spyrja | 2025-05-07 16:54:24+00:00
Seems to me that the simplest solution would be to repeatedly divide the range of numbers into two halves, then randomly selecting either one until it converges onto a single value. In C this might look something like this:

double random_real(double low, double high, int (*random_bit)(void)) { if (high < low) return random_real(high, low, random_bit); double halfway, previous = low; while (true) { halfway = low + (high - low) / 2; if (halfway == previous) break; if (random_bit() & 1) low = halfway; else high = halfway; previous = halfway; } return halfway; }

That should theoretically produce a uniformally-distributed value. (Although perhaps I've missed some finer point?)
by sargstuff | 2025-05-07 16:54:35+00:00
Aspects of coding not the primary focus for non-programers. aka unless need/require 'new' coding method(s), 'old'/know/paid-for stuff works just as well. Similar concept to, can not find someone in 'coding' field that's offering service, so "non-coder" comes up with something to fit situation. aka unix, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, python, matlab, etc.

For areas 'not focused exclusvely/around coding', takes a bit more time for things (experience, rules, resources, training, how 'new' fits in) to move into main stream. Libral Arts coding perspective : https://medium.com/@markguzdial/learning-to-program-matters-...

'time' tech example (concept: why can't AI cameras serve as traditional punch clock) : https://tcpsoftware.com/blog/time-clocks/

Historical -> requirement to take a class in formal logic as part of undergraduate degree (vs. more degree specific formal logic)
by whistle650 | 2025-05-07 16:54:40+00:00
Looking at the home page of Meanwhile only made me think of how life insurance is such a different thing than, say, a mortgage. With life insurance, counterparty risk matters. You don't care about your mortgage counterparty. I'm not going to buy life insurance from an insurer with Youtube videos of Anthony Pompliano on their home page. Know your enemy.
by cubefox | 2025-05-07 16:54:41+00:00
> Third — I’m left wondering if a true “Deep Research” like tool would be able to provide the same analysis.

Note that this analysis was performed by Dynonight, a rather bright blogger whose articles appeared several times on the HN front page. The vast majority of humans (I include myself here) probably wouldn't be able to achieve a result of comparable quality, even if it doesn't look that hard in retrospect.

LLM Deep Research can already exceed the performance of not-so-bright humans, but it is a quite different matter to outperform smart people like Dynomight. (I guess "research experts" isn't quite the right term here. The mentioned journalist from The Economist apparently was unable to research the topic to a similar degree, even though research is a main part of his/her job.)
by donclark | 2025-05-07 16:54:49+00:00
Great observation. I also have had the same feeling. Upon reading your experience, it jogged my memory to the 1998 film SPHERE.

Are humans mature enough to handle the secrets of the universe? Or are we but an infant species, whose fears and phobias prevent us from embracing the big picture?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120184/

*My apologies for being cheesy by mentioning that movie, but I do agree - that maybe AI is exposing who we are as a person.
by zoogeny | 2025-05-07 16:55:05+00:00
Just tangentially related, but a few days ago I did a quick analysis on lint/format options for a TypeScript project and I ended up picking eslint and prettier over BiomeJS. The main reason was eslint/prettier are a bit more battle tested and according to Gemini Pro, Biome is still adding new features to catch up to eslint/prettier which makes me feel it will be a bit less stable for now.

But what I wanted to comment on actually was eslint and how it nudged me down the path of ESM support. I had to fight and fight to get it to work with my Typescript project. The resolution proposed by the tool was strongly biased towards re-structuring my project away from commonjs modules towards the newer ESM. But when I started down that rabbit hole I found it frustratingly hostile to TypeScript based projects. I was playing whack-a-mole between my package.json, tsconfig, my vite config, my eslint config. Most of it had to do with ts-node and the esm module loader (or something). Eventually it wanted me to rename all of my imports with .js extensions?

In the end I just gave up and went back to commonjs and added strategic "ignores". The modern JS ecosystem has mostly been turn-key, but this was a remembrance of the old days where it felt necessary to wave dead chickens over things to get them to work. I would seriously consider BiomeJS in the (near) future if it's Typescript story was better than what I've experienced with eslint.

And as for ESM, right now it is leaving a really bad taste in my mouth. I will have to dedicate some time soon to figure out how to setup a very basic TypeScript project using ESM and incorporating the basic tools that I require.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-05-07 16:55:18+00:00
> require apps to be signed could not contain LGPL components, since you would not be able to modify the LGPL components.

You COULD make the changes, but you MUST keep the changes to the LGPL'd software made available in some way. This is not going to affect the rest of your project, only the LGPL'd library. I think not including any private keys or signed files will still satisfy the LGPL as long as any code changes you made are included. I don't think configuration that compromises your security is within scope, and I'd feel like RMS would agree there.

Its really interesting the goal of the LGPL is to allow for LIBRE libraries to exist where there's proprietary components that already do a solid job, so in order to convince people to use GPL / LGPL tools / libraries it was thrown in that umbrella.

The FAQ is worth a read every now and then, you get a feel for what is intended in plain English.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
by csm_csu_student | 2025-05-07 16:55:20+00:00
I'm a current student at CSM and will be attending SFSU next semester after initially dropping out and working in tech for a decade. So I have some exposure to this and regularly discuss the topic with faculty and participate in remote courses where this phenomena is most likely to occur. While CSM is not City College, I think its a fair comparison.

I really think this problem is being overblown and I am concerned politicians, voters, faculty, and students, will be negatively impacted by this kind of click bait journalism.

This article sucks.

> These “ghost students” are artificially intelligent agents or bots that pose as real students in order to steal millions of dollars of financial aid that could otherwise go to actual humans.

This claim is completely unsubstantiated. It links to a generic and unrelated SF Gate article. As technologists this claim is plausible given the current state of AI technology, but can we please provide evidence - is it the interviewed teacher making this claim or the SF Gate writer? Are there other sources substantiating this claim?

> A spokesperson for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office directed SFGATE to a Public Records Request Act request to obtain the exact numbers. However, the office estimates that 0.21% of the system’s financial aid was fraudulently disbursed, the spokesperson said.

0.21% estimate of Community College disbursements. Not UC disbursements or CSU disbursements. Notice no monetary amount is mentioned.

---

There are real issues with "flighty" students who don't engage with the material, prolific AI use for many if not most assignments, and some really broken incentives.

There is also amazing free education for almost all income groups. Hard working students who have study groups and engage with faculty and eschew the use of AI because it detracts significantly from their education.

Happy to answer any questions about my experience over the past year completing an Associate Degree for Transfer - it is an excellent opportunity for California residents and I encourage folks of all backgrounds and age groups to explore the services they offer.

EDIT:

Calmatters [1] reported ($10 million) in fraud from community colleges in 2024, that's my bad in my haste to post a response I missed this point.

[1]: https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2025/04/fi...
by xp84 | 2025-05-07 16:55:40+00:00
In theory yes? But if state actors, the ones with the sophistication to literally build a signature based on your fonts using your IDE, and then infiltrate a second application to do... whatever... if they want you that bad, they're eventually just going to get you, even if they have to just send someone to your house with a rusty wrench to retrieve all your passwords. Those guys can get the job done much more cheaply anyway.
by chollida1 | 2025-05-07 16:55:47+00:00
For the same reason that most people who aren't writers aren't interested in vibe writing or the same reason why most non artists aren't interested in vibe art creation.

How many novels have you written using AI?

How many art shows have you had from your ai generated art?

People ignore vibe coding for the same reason they aren't vibe writing or vibe art creation, because either they don't know they can do these things or they just have other interests.
by matwood | 2025-05-07 16:55:48+00:00
> The point of a consultant is they have a lot of experience in a specific domain

This is your mistake. The point of a consultant is to tell the business to do what the business was already planning to do anyway. This way the consultant takes the risk/blame of the decision. It's similar to the classic 'no one was ever fired for buying IBM' "I did what the McKinsey consultant told me" is CYA. The last piece is that since everyone is in on the game, when a decision leads to bad outcomes they don't blame the consultant, but something they could not have foreseen.
by csallen | 2025-05-07 16:55:48+00:00
Some relevant and timeless facts:

- Generating revenue from customers is about more than just creating a great product. You also have to reach lots of customers and convince them of your value. Many naive idealists think only product matters (or should matter), and neglect distribution. But most people eventually come to understand that both are necessary, and that this is practically a law of physics, not something to moralize about. (FWIW JetBrains is quite good generating revenue, and I'm fairly certain their revenue dwarfs that of Cursor and Windsurf.)

- Whoever is paying you is your customer, no matter what alternative word we use for it. If you're an employee, your customer is your "employer." If you're being acquired, your customer is your "acquirer."

- In most cases, acquirers are playing the role of investor. Investors value returns. If you want to provide value for an acquirer, then, you need to convince them of the future value of your business should it be acquired. That's usually best done through growth trajectories.

- It's perfectly valid to continue generating revenue year after year without being acquired for eye-watering sums. It's a waste of your emotional energy to become jealous or indignant when others get acquired or succeed with less work. Good for them, just keep doing you. That also goes for the rest of us in the peanut gallery. We don't need to attack recent successes to defend the honor of our favorite incumbents.
by autoexec | 2025-05-07 16:55:53+00:00
It seems like they're attacking the wrong end of the problem by trying to detect fake students in the classrooms. If the issue is that people are signing up for financial aid and then disappearing with the cash they'd be better off making sure that the people who get financial aid actually are who they say they are before sending them money, or better yet stop giving cash as financial aid and instead give some type of credit that can only be spent on/at the school.

Once scammers can't get access to the money the problem of bots in the classroom will mostly go away.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-07 16:55:57+00:00
Apparently 172,824 people die per day,

https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/deaths-per-day

So actually 100,000 employees put it surprisingly close to just having one case handled per day per employee.

Of course, a ton of people don’t have life insurance. And also, a lot of deaths are pretty straightforward.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-07 16:55:59+00:00
Been trying out Zed here and there for a few months. There's lots to like about it. Nice clean UI. Extremely fast. No endless indexing (looking at you, PyCharm). It doesn't include a python debugger UI, and the type inspection is far behind PyCharm, so it doesn't take me away from PyCharm yet for serious work, but it might once it's competitive on those features.

I have run into some problems with it on both Linux and Mac where zed hangs if the computer goes to sleep (meaning when the computer wakes back up, zed is hung and has to be forcibly quit.

Haven't tried the AI agent much yet though. Was using CoPilot, now mostly Claude Code, and the Jetbrains AI agent (with Claude 3.7).