MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonzzzies | 2025-05-21 12:26:26+00:00
>anything redolent of interaction with intelligence

compared to what you are used to right?

I know it's elitist but most people <=100 iq (and no, this is not exact obviously, but we have not many other things to go by) are just ... well, a lot of state of the art LLMs are better at everything compared, outside body 'things' (for now) of course, as they don't have any. They hallucinate/bluff/lie as much as the humans and the humans might know they don't know, but outside that, the LLMs win at everything. So I guess that, for now, people with 120-160 iqs find LLMs funny but wouldn't call them intelligent, but below that...

My circle of people I talk with during the day has changed since I took on more charity which consists of fixing up old laptops and installing Ubuntu on them; I get them for free from everyone and I give them to people who cannot afford, including some lessons and remote support (which is easy as I can just ssh in via tailscale). Many of them believe in chemtrails, vaccinations are a gov ploy etc and multiple have told me they read that these AI chatbots are nigerian or indian (or so) farms trying to fraud them out of 'things' (they usually don't have anything to fraud otherwise I would not be there). This is about half of humanity; Gemma is gonna be smarter than all of them, even though I don't register any LLM as intelligence and with the current models, it won't happen either. Maybe a breakthrough in models will be made that changes it, but it has not much chance yet.
by jibal | 2025-05-21 12:26:26+00:00
Young people and beginners don't even know these things exist, and if they do happen to know they exist they have no reason to look into them. It's absurd to attack people for not "attempting to understand" something that they don't know enough about to have reason to "attempt" it. There are all sorts of technologies that I haven't "attempted to understand" (including many emacs packages) because they aren't on my radar or I haven't been made aware of their value. This lack of an attempt is not some sort of flaw.
by thraway2079081 | 2025-05-21 12:26:33+00:00
Using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I work at a non-tech megacorp that you've heard of. This company's (I will not say "our"!) CEO is very close to Nadella, they meet regularly. Management here is also pushing Github Copilot onto devs, aggressively, and including it in their HR reviews. Dev-adjacent roles (product, QA, BAs) are also seeing aggressive push.

This feels like it will end badly.
by ZephyrBlu | 2025-05-21 12:26:33+00:00
This feels like an orthogonal point. The OP make a very specific comparison to his travel company and Airbnb, and how people ignored them or even belittled them but adored Airbnb despite being very similar companies.

Europeans use Airbnb. Trying to to say he was trying to "apply the American mindset to the European market" as a bad thing doesn't really hold water here when the American product literally won.

Yes, the kind of companies historically started in Europe are very culturally different to startups. The point being made is that really for no good reason, Europe does not culturally support the existence of startups and is often actively hostile towards them.

The solution being "just don't do startups in Europe" is like, ok sure I guess you can do that, but it doesn't actually address the problem that was presented: cultural incompatibility and unwillingness to change.
by sbarre | 2025-05-21 12:26:36+00:00
I know this is meant to sound witty or clever, but who actually wants to behave this way at their job?

I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership, or people who think that you should be actively sabotaging things or be "maliciously compliant" when things aren't perfect or you don't agree with some decision that was made.

To each their own I guess, but I wouldn't be able to sleep well at night.
Show HN: I made Upwork for AI agents- a marketplace to hire AI-agents for jobs
by davinciind | 2025-05-21 12:27:28+00:00
Made 10dollarjob, which is a marketplace for users to hire ai agents and developers to list their ai agents for monetisation.

currently, it works well for research, call preread, sentiment analysis across socials etc. We're adding more ai agents, if you have built one- pls signup and list.

Our recent twitter launch: https://x.com/ShubhamKukretii/status/1921967787934916857
by cess11 | 2025-05-21 12:27:38+00:00
The dangers of that web site are much more subtle and hard to defend against than those associated with "a motor vehicle", by which I guess you mean something like a car.

You can see traffic. It's easy to understand the dangers in a collision because when you drive into something unexpectedly your body takes a hit and you get frightened since you immediately realise that it might cost you a lot of money but you don't know for sure.

Being subtly manipulated by a disgustingly subservient fake conversationalist is another thing altogether.
by Havoc | 2025-05-21 12:27:51+00:00
At least it's clearly labelled as copilot.

Much more worried about what this is going to do to the FOSS ecosystem. We've already seen a couple maintainers complain and this trend is definitely just going to increase dramatically.

I can see the vision but this is clearly not ready for prime time yet. Especially if done by anonymous drive-by strangers that think they're "helping"
by kruuuder | 2025-05-21 12:28:20+00:00
A comment on the first pull request provides some context:

> The stream of PRs is coming from requests from the maintainers of the repo. We're experimenting to understand the limits of what the tools can do today and preparing for what they'll be able to do tomorrow. Anything that gets merged is the responsibility of the maintainers, as is the case for any PR submitted by anyone to this open source and welcoming repo. Nothing gets merged without it meeting all the same quality bars and with us signing up for all the same maintenance requirements.
by ta1243 | 2025-05-21 12:28:36+00:00
Talk radio and TV are just as bad, as are the opposition. If Tories proposed it, Labour would be up in arms about postcode lottery. If Labour proposed it, exactly the same from the other side.

Doesn't matter how sensible it is, the other side will use it to score points. I can't believe for a second that Liberal Democrats think that James Dyson or Andrew Lloyd Webber should be able to avoid inheritance tax by buying tens of millions of pounds of farmland, but it's politically beneficial for them to do so.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-21 12:28:39+00:00
Aren’t American startups enjoying access to capital markets to a much larger extent, which in turn is a result of financialization of the US economy and demand for USD as a reserve currency (ie unrelated to tech itself)?

My impression is US VC startups are not trying to sell anything to customers or break even, it’s a game of hype and future potential from inception to very late in the game. Basically, you don’t even have a business model until you’ve passed through all the rounds and even longer. Instead, you’re working towards finding and validating PMF, often with free or subsidized products to capture markets before even thinking about ROI. All while appearing successful since the VC money keeps flowing, essentially driving the car while the company is changing tyres. In the last decade, had anyone tried to optimize for profit or dividends in the startup world?

OTOH my impression of EU startups are addressing an existing validated need (such as CRMs, booking systems etc). While I do think it’s also culturally more risk- and novelty averse, in terms of capital access you just can’t afford anywhere near the length and size of the runway.
by bakugo | 2025-05-21 12:28:49+00:00
> I look back over the past 2-3 years and am pretty amazed with how quick change and progress have been made.

Now look at the past year specifically, and only at the models themselves, and you'll quickly realize that there's been very little real progress recently. Claude 3.5 Sonnet was released 11 months ago and the current SOTA models are only marginally better in terms of pure performance in real world tasks.

The tooling around them has clearly improved a lot, and neat tricks such as reasoning have been introduced to help models tackle more complex problems, but the underlying transformer architecture is already being pushed to its limits and it shows.

Unless some new revolutionary architecture shows up out of nowhere and sets a new standard, I firmly believe that we'll be stuck at the current junior level for a while, regardless of how much Altman & co. insist that AGI is just two more weeks away.
by Frost1x | 2025-05-21 12:28:58+00:00
It might be a safer option in a forked version of the project that the public can’t see. I have to wonder about the optics here from a sales perspective. You’d think they’d test this out more internally before putting it in public access.

Now when your small or medium size business management reads about CoPilot in some Executive Quarterly magazine and floats that brilliant idea internally, someone can quite literally point to these as examples of real world examples and let people analyze and pass it up the management chain. Maybe that wasn’t thought through all the way.

Usually businesses tend to hide this sort of performance of their applications to the best of their abilities, only showcasing nearly flawless functionality.
by chii | 2025-05-21 12:28:59+00:00
And how do you compare metric tonnes of steel produced, with metric tonnes of plastic produced? What about metric tonnes (hours?) of entertainment on films?

The metric to measure value using quantity of goods must use a common denominator unit, otherwise, comparison becomes subjective (one might want to value tangible goods more than intangibles for example).

So making comparison using a price makes a lot of sense.
by Rashka7 | 2025-05-21 12:29:19+00:00
Hey HN,

I built https://ProductiveLife.app — a tiny tool that gives you an existential nudge.

It calculates how many productive hours you (likely) have left in your lifetime.

I made it after realizing how much time I spend scrolling or procrastinating.

It’s dark but oddly motivating.

Built solo in a few late nights. Would love your feedback, thoughts, or ideas to improve it!

Cheers
by Fnoord | 2025-05-21 12:29:27+00:00
Well, I installed Litestep as default shell on a 80486 laptop with Windows (I think it was Windows 98 SE, debloated). It replaced explorer.exe and performed better, IIRC I had more RAM free. I gave the machine away eventually, and they probably ran Linux on it. But because the machine was for my mother, it had to be able to run MSIE.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-21 12:30:01+00:00
This is normal. Once you solve the biggest problem, something else becomes the new biggest problem.

The biggest problem with tailpipe emissions used to be horrendous smog. That was mostly solved in many places, and now the biggest problem is the impact on the global climate.

The biggest issue with childhood mortality used to be disease. Now we (correctly) focus more on accidental deaths.

EVs solved tailpipe emissions, but they’re not perfect. Their biggest problem is just something else.
by dsalzman | 2025-05-21 12:30:12+00:00
> Or take fragmented markets. Same question: how could US startups successfully conquer these fragmented EU markets when European startups can't?

I think this assumption is wrong. By the time a “startup” in the US expands into Europe they are really not a “startup” anymore. They have a proven business model in the US and have raised 100Ms. So succeeding in Europe is not a fair comparison. When Airbnb expanded into Europe in 2011 they had raised 120m and acquired a company in Germany to kickstart the expansion.
by gambiting | 2025-05-21 12:30:18+00:00
>>You can create a physical book in which he'll be the main character of the story in whatever scenario he likes the most. I remember receiving one of those as a child and I remembered it for life.

And I believe that this is not only inherently worse than reading existing stories, it's actively bad for our children and us a society. Obviously it looks like we'll disagree on this.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-21 12:30:27+00:00
NFTs are dying and link rotting. ICOs are out of fashion.

VR is back in its niche.

3DTV .. I've not seen that marketed for quite a while now. Things that are fads will die out eventually.

Crypto meanwhile is in an odd space: everyone knows blockchains are too much of a hassle and that the volatility is too high, so they're using centralized exchanges and "stablecoins" (shadow dollars). There's still a huge amount of money there but not quite as much as the stadium ads / FTX peak.
by dgb23 | 2025-05-21 12:31:08+00:00
Interesting take. On the topic of work ethic: If we measure it via labor participation rate then EU and US are similar with some countries being lower and others being higher than the US in that regard.

Switzerland as an example is quite a bit higher in that metric. But it is known for a rather conservative economic approach overall. Favoring stability, predictability and quality over velocity and big payoffs.

Perhaps it's a good thing that there are different models and cultures.
by ehnto | 2025-05-21 12:31:20+00:00
They are not intern level.

Even if it could perform at a similar level to an intern at a programming task, it lacks a great deal of the other attributes that a human brings to the table, including how they integrate into a team of other agents (human or otherwise). I won't bother listing them, as we are all humans.

I think the hype is missing the forest for the trees, and I think exactly this multi-agent dynamic might be where the trees start to fall down in front of us. That and the as currently insurmountable issues of context and coherence over long time horizons.
by TimPC | 2025-05-21 12:31:30+00:00
I still believe in having humans do PRs. It's far cheaper to have the judgement loop on the AI come before and during coding than after. My general process with AI is to explicitly instruct it not to write code, agree on a correct approach to a problem and if the project has any architectural components a correct architecture then once we've negotiated the correct way of doing things ask it to write code. Usually each step of this process takes multiple iterations of providing additional information or challenging incorrect assumptions of the AI. I can get it much faster than human coding with a similar quality bar assuming I iterate until a high quality solution is presented. In some cases the AI is not good enough and I fall back to human coding but for the most part I think it makes me a faster coder.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-21 12:32:11+00:00
At least we can tell the junior developers to not submit a pull-request before they have the tests running locally.

At what point does the human developers just give up and close the PRs as "AI garbage". Keep the ones that works, then just junk the rest. I feel that at some point entertaining the machine becomes unbearable and people just stops doing it or rage close the PRs.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-21 12:32:33+00:00
I'm European and there's a lot to bemoan and many reasons why Europe is behind (overregulation, fragmentation, etc.).

And this article is directionally correct in the sense that Europe has internalized a sense of inferiority and will hype up American companies.

But the culprits he talks about are shaky at best:

> Take excessive regulations for instance, which gets mentioned all the time. If they were such a hindrance to startups, why would American startups succeed in Europe - like Airbnb in our case - and European startups not? We all face the same regulations

This is just wrong. Yes, the regulations are the same. No, the burden relative to company resources isn't the same. A company with billions in the bank has options most EU startups don't:

1. Pay a battalion-sized compliance team 2. Ignore the law, pay the fines when they come, continue to ignore the law 3. Get into years-long, drawn-out legal battles while changing nothing

Yes, we face the same regulations. No, they don't have the same impact. It's sort of like a person who inherited millions saying "Cost of living isn't a problem, we all face the same housing costs".

> Or take fragmented markets. Same question: how could US startups successfully conquer these fragmented EU markets when European startups can't?

Same thing. Localization, local entities and complying with local regulations are a lot easier when you can throw a couple million at it. Meanwhile a startup can barely comply with all of one country's regulations.

=

You can criticize overregulation, the fact that EU grants almost always arrive at incumbents that can afford lobbyists (the old money class), etc.

But I think "the media" plays the tiniest part in this. Traditional media has been in decline for 20 years.

If anything, yes, we need a shift in cultural narrative, away from internalized inferiority. But the idea that some gatekeeper at a newspaper changed the trajectory at a startup I think is wrong.

Besides, this reads a bit like "Who has the idea first should get all the money", which is rarely how things work.
by safety1st | 2025-05-21 12:32:47+00:00
These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted. There's a PM who takes your task and gives it to a "developer" who potentially has never actually written a line of code, but maybe they've built a WordPress site by pointing and clicking in Elementor or something. After dozens of hours billed you will, in fact, get code where the new file wasn't added to the csproj or something like that, and when you point it out, they will bill another 20 hours, and send you a new copy of the project, where the test always fails. It's exactly like this.

Nice to see that Microsoft has automated that, failure will be cheaper now.
by bonoboTP | 2025-05-21 12:32:58+00:00
Fixing existing bugs left in the codebase by humans will necessarily be harder than writing new code for new features. A bug can be really hairy to untangle, given that even the human engineer got it wrong. So it's not surprising that this proves to be tough for AI.

For refactoring and extending good, working code, AI is much more useful.

We are at a stage where AI should only be used for giving suggestions to a human in the driver's seat with a UI/UX that allows ergonomically guiding the AI, picking from offered alternatives, giving directions on a fairly micro level that is still above editing the code character by character.

They are indeed overpromising and pushing AI beyond its current limits for hype reasons, but this doesn't mean this won't be possible in the future. The progress is real, and I wouldn't bet on it taking a sharp turn and flattening.
by jibal | 2025-05-21 12:33:58+00:00
"What are you even talking about?"

Not understanding something is not a virtue, not something to act smug and superior about.

"It's like wishing for java programs to be able to execute without JVM, or Erlang-code without BEAM."

No, it's not like that.

"Org-mode is written in Elisp, of course it needs Emacs to run."

There are (incomplete of course) apps outside of emacs and elisp that process org-mode files. And even if there weren't, it makes sense to wish that there were. In the mind of a clear and competent thinker, the mere fact that org-mode needs emacs to run is not a reason not to wish it weren't.
by phillipcarter | 2025-05-21 12:33:58+00:00
Yeah, it's a different compute/cost curve worth considering.

On one hand, the cost of compute per token has gone down a lot, and will continue to go down, because that's exactly the economic incentives at play. We had a little short-term nonsense where "the bigger the better" was all the rage, but inference was never this way, and now training is also pushing in this direction.

But on the other hand, less compute per token means it can be more broadly deployed. And so there is likely more energy use, not less, in the long run.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-05-21 12:35:27+00:00
> US companies in Europe generally don't care about EU regulations.

They care as much or as little as European companies.

When you're trying to make it in business you should not spend too much time trying to comply with all possible regulations. Focus on growing the business and avoid serious and costly breaches.

I still remember a business course in university (in Europe) during which the lecturer told us: "By law you must file this whatever every year but the penalty for not doing so is cheaper than spending time doing it so don't bother". Very direct and frank but that's how it is.
by sbarre | 2025-05-21 12:36:01+00:00
I feel like everyone is applying a worse-case narrative to what's going on here..

I see this as a work in progress.. I am almost certain the humans in the loop on these PRs are well aware of what's going on and have their expectations in check, and this isn't just "business as usual" like any other PR or work assignment.

This is a test. You can't improve a system without testing it on real world conditions.

How do we know they're not tweaking the Copilot system prompts and settings behind the scenes while they're doing this work?

Can no one see the possibility that what is happening in those PRs is exactly what all the people involved expected to have happen, and they're just going through the process of seeing what happens when you try to refine and coach the system to either success or failure?

When we adopted AI coding assist tools internally over a year ago we did almost exactly this (not directly in GitHub though).

We asked a bunch of senior engineers to see how far they could get by coaching the AI to write code rather than writing it themselves. We wanted to calibrate our expectations and better understand the limits, strengths and weaknesses of these new tools we wanted to adopt.

In most of those early cases we ended up with worse code than if it had been written by humans, but we learned a ton. We can also clearly see how much better things have gotten over time, since we have that benchmark to look back on.
by serial_dev | 2025-05-21 12:36:07+00:00
This looks much worse than an intern. This feels like a good engineer who has brain damage.

When you look at it from afar, it looks potentially good, but as you start looking into it for real, you start realizing none of it makes any sense. Then you make simple suggestions, it does something that looks like what you asked, yet completely missing the point.

An intern, no matter how bad it is, could only waste so much time and energy.

This makes wasting time and introducing mind-bogglingly stupid bugs infinitely scalable.
by baalimago | 2025-05-21 12:36:20+00:00
A junior dev may also swap jobs, require vacation days, perks and can't be scaled up at a the click of a button. There are no such issues with an agent. So, if I were a FANG higher-up, I'd invest quite a bit into training LLM-agents who make pesky humans redundant.

Doing so has low risk, the senior devs may perhaps get fed up and quit, and the company might be a laughing stock on public PRs. But the potential value for is huge.
Show HN: Open-source AI Retool, where AI does the tooling
by weebhek | 2025-05-21 12:36:44+00:00
I have been trying to create AI retool where tooling is done via AI, to create full stack apps like internal portals, ERP apps. Which led me to an architecture where we give ai pre build component, tools and let is just do the binding, content generation work to create full stack apps. With this approach in a single prompt AI is able to generate final config jsons using chained/looped agentic llm flow and we render a full stack app with the configs at the end. I have open sourced the whole project whole code, app builder, agentic architecture, backend for you to use.

Github: https://github.com/vivek100/oneShotCodeGen

Live Cloud version: https://oneshotcodegen.com/