MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshstrange | 2025-05-20 13:07:50+00:00
As always, talk to me 10 or 50 iterations in on how that's going.

LLMs can spit out really great and impressive PoCs but that's all they are, PoC, MVPs. Any developer worth their salt can tell you that an MVP is the easy part, it's scaling that up (load/traffic as well as business logic) is the hard part.

LLMs can let you jump start the MVP process and make it faster to iterate on early ideas. In that way, it's very useful (and this is _not_ me writing off LLMs) but the foundation you are building on is shakey.

Maybe this says more about me but almost every time I've used a boilerplate/starter project (Not talking about bootstrap but themeforest-type templates you can buy) I've found it very underwhelming after the initial honeymoon period. I think LLMs are similar in this aspect. At the start you feel like you are saving a ton of time (and you are) but as the project goes on it gets more and more complicated and the chance that the starter project (or LLM-generated project) is able to to scale to your new needs is rare, at least without heavy modification.

I maintain that "vibe coders" (people who can't actually program on their own or are weak at it) cannot create sustainable projects. That doesn't mean they won't get funding, and hire people who can take their POC/MVP and turn it into something that you can sell and won't collapse under its own weight.

Again, I'll state I'm not anti-LLM and I use it daily but these "hot takes" about how teens are changing the indiehacker landscape are incredibly suspect IMHO. Are they spamming the indie landscape? Sure, that doesn't surprise me but other than a few flukes I don't expect to see "vibe coders" displace indie hackers anytime soon.
by ksherlock | 2025-05-20 13:08:13+00:00
When I watched Andrej Karpathy's NN videos a year or two back, I trained a Neural Network to multiply an integer by two. This was with a rather small training set but if you rounded the results (which was a floating point), they were mostly correct. For positive numbers. My training data didn't include any negative numbers so they were hilariously bad.
by currymj | 2025-05-20 13:08:17+00:00
AlphaFold is real.

To the extent you care about chess and Go as human activities, progress there is real.

there are some other scientific computing problems where AI or neural-network-based methods do appear to be at least part of the actual state-of-the-art (weather forecasting, certain single-molecule quantum chemistry simulations).

i would like the hype of the kind described in the article to be punctured, but this is hard to do if critics make strong absolute claims ("aren't useful in any field whatsoever") which are easily disproven. it hurts credibility.
by flohofwoe | 2025-05-20 13:08:42+00:00
There's basically two paths:

(1) Build a generic and extensible UI tool which at the core is a 3D scene viewer, object outliner and an asset browser (similar to how VSCode is such a tool for 'mostly text data' for 3D scenes). Implement anything else as engine specific plugins - Blender can be that tool, but it would be important to do a complete UI overhaul to get the modelling and animation features out of the way.

(2) Integrate the editor UI right into your engine, which is quite trivial with Dear Imgui - the tricky part here is that game state data should either be organized for editing, or for runtime performance. Mixing both isn't a good idea (unless moddability is a priority).

About a decade ago I would probably have opted for option (1), nowadays I tend towards option (2).
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-20 13:09:11+00:00
It is unfortunate though. There is a percentage of the population that have no interest in the "service economy". They need to work with their hands.

There are of course the trades, construction. Perhaps not enough though.

Germany tried some "protectionist" policies I seem to recall reading about — to protect some segment of manufacturing (automobile?). I am not sure how that panned out.
by lolinder | 2025-05-20 13:09:16+00:00
An equivalent argument to yours could be made to defend the introduction of async/await to a language that has previously not had it (edit: like Rust): if you don't like async/await, just don't use it! What does it hurt you to have another feature added?

The answer is obvious in the programming language case: for those who do not want async, the addition of async/await begins to poison the ecosystem. Now they have a growing list of libraries that they cannot use if they want to avoid async, so the effort involved in picking a library goes up and the odds get increasingly high that they're locked out of some of the key tools in the ecosystem because new libraries without async become harder and harder to find.

For those who really hate colored functions, the addition of async is the removal of a feature: colorless functions are replaced with colored functions.

The same can be said of NPM compatibility. Sure, I can try to avoid it and stick to Deno imports and inspect each library that I use for NPM dependencies. But it gets harder and harder as time goes on, because a key feature of Deno has been removed: it's no longer an ecosystem reset.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-05-20 13:09:38+00:00
The parent said their boss didn't want to hire Indians. The seem to support DEI with that company as evidence that (white?) systematically discriminate against Indians. That power and status stay within one group those people werent allowed to join.

I posted a counter-example showing Indians systematically discriminate against non-Indians and shift almost all money to Indians across an entire, industry segment. So, they're no different.

Also, the intersectionality (DEI) proponents strictly focus on whites as the problem, but non-whites as the opposite, when non-whites do the same things structurally when in power and should be talked about the same way. That DEI proponents never treat non-whites as advantaged and whites as disadvantaged, even when company or industry data supports it, shows they're actually racists who are anti-white. They'll be inconsistent with their own principles to work against white people.

If called on it, like that whites can't get hired in company X or no power in industry Y, they start making excuses or denying a disadvantage or they deny that they even give advantages to non-whites like in this tthread. They certainly don't follow standard DEI or intersectionality principles to support shifting jobs or power to white people from the non-white majorities like they would if white people were the majority. We noticed the double standards. Their principles are therefore lies if specific groups can never benefit from them.
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-05-20 13:09:53+00:00
Don't hate on JSP.

Java Server Pages is now Jakarta Server Pages, part of Java EE (Jakarta EE) and it's latest version 11 was released just a year ago. Spring Framework 7 will be released by the end of 2025 and be based on it. Tomcat 11 is already based on it as well.

And all of this is based on the thriving Java ecosystem.

Version 12 is under development.

If they kept their stuff updated, nothing about this is legacy. It just declined in popularity.

You can build insecure trash and expose unprotected endpoints with next.js, or whatever is currently considered state of the art, as well.
by giantg2 | 2025-05-20 13:10:35+00:00
With all the issues and inefficiencies listed, there is a lot of room for improvement. I'm hopeful that just as the stat they give for data center energy not rising from 2005-2017, so to will the AI energy needs flatten in a few years. GPUs are not very efficient. Switching to more task specific hardware will provide more efficiency eventually. This is already happening a little with stuff like TPUs.
by matus-pikuliak | 2025-05-20 13:10:45+00:00
Let me shamelessly mention my GenderBench project focuses on evaluating gender biases in LLMs. Few of the probes are focused on hiring decisions as well, and indeed, women are often being preferred. It is also true for other probes. The strongest female preference is in relationship conflicts, e.g., X and Y are a couple. X wants sex, Y is sleepy. Women are considered in the right by LLMs if they are both X and Y.

https://github.com/matus-pikuliak/genderbench
by sigmaisaletter | 2025-05-20 13:11:25+00:00
The chain of thought goes like this:

-american labour is expensive

-because of tariffs (or geopolitics) cheap asian labour unavailable

-investment in automation research

-first Gen automation is expensive

-further research

-2nd Gen automation is price-competitive with american labour

-iterate n times

-Nth Gen automation is price-competitive with asian labour

> why doesn't it happen with the chinese supply chain

The idea is that because asian labour is so cheap, there is no real incentive to invest in automation research, because everyone knows it won't be price-competitive for long.

No idea if that is actually true, but that is the argument.
by williamdclt | 2025-05-20 13:12:01+00:00
"server actions" seems to be a NextJS thing, not a JS thing? JS does not mean React and NextJS. The communication between frontend and backend is (almost) always HTTP, regardless of the languages and frameworks (server actions are http). Having a wrapper around HTTP isn't really a compelling reason to choose a technology for the very large majority of people: probably the opposite actually.

IDK what you mean by "deal with OpenAPI", OpenAPI is a spec not a technology like graphql.

In all honesty (and sorry for the directness), you don't really seem to understand these concepts and how relevant or not they are to this conversation
by kianN | 2025-05-20 13:12:15+00:00
> Follow-up analysis of the first experimental results revealed a marked positional bias with LLMs tending to prefer the candidate appearing first in the prompt: 63.5% selection of first candidate vs 36.5% selections of second candidate

To my eyes this ordering bias is the most glaring limitation of LLMs not only within hiring but also applications such as RAG or classification: these applications often implicitly assume that the LLMs is weighting the entire context evenly: the answers are not obviously wrong, but they are not correct because they do not take the full context into account.

The lost in the middle problem for facts retrieval is a good correlative metric, but the ability to find a fact in an arbitrary location is not the to same as the ability to evenly weight the full context
by skybrian | 2025-05-20 13:12:39+00:00
What Deno API’s do you miss, compared to Node? It seems like they’re pretty built out?

I’m looking forward to whatever they’re going to do instead of KV, which I tried and is too limited, even for a KV store. (64k values are too small.) Something like Cloudflare’s Durable Objects might be nice.

You can’t “force” maintainers of old libraries to do anything. Deno never had that power. For people who are interested in supporting multiple alternate platforms, jsr.io seems pretty nice?
by empath75 | 2025-05-20 13:13:13+00:00
If you have an ordering bias, that seems easily fixed by just rerunning the evaluation several times in different orders and taking the most common recommendations, and you can work around other biases by not including things like name, etc. Although you can probably unearth more subtle cultural biases in how resumes are written).

Not that i think you should allow LLMs to make decisions in this way -- it's better for summarizing and organizing. I don't trust any LLM's "opinion" about anything. It doesn't have a stake in the outcome.
by throw0101c | 2025-05-20 13:14:06+00:00
> The US runs a $1T surplus in services.

The total export of services is $1T / $1000B (in 2023):

* https://www.bea.gov/data/intl-trade-investment/international...

It imports $0.7T / $700B worth of services, so the surplus is $300B.
by ednite | 2025-05-20 13:14:39+00:00
I totally get where you’re coming from, and you're right to flag the risk of this mindset turning into hoarding. I think your approach is good advice for many. I realize my original comment may have unintentionally encouraged that, so thank you for pointing it out.

In my case, I’m a bit obsessive about labeling, organizing, and keeping an inventory. I like having everything within arm’s reach because I hate wasting time searching.

That said, I might also one day change that habit and I fully recognize it’s not practical (or healthy) for everyone. I agree that space, time, and mental load are real constraints. I’ll be more mindful about how I frame these things moving forward. Appreciate your comment.
by cwsx | 2025-05-20 13:15:07+00:00
Is Copilot _enforced_ as the only option for an AI coding agent? Or can devs pick-and-choose whatever tool they prefer

I'm interested in the [vague] ratio of {internallyDevlopedTool} vs alternatives - essentially the "preference" score for internal tools (accounting for the natural bias towards ones own agent for testing/QA/data purposes). Any data, however vague is necessary, would be great.

(and if anybody has similar data for _any_ company developing their own agent, please shout out).
by adityaathalye | 2025-05-20 13:15:52+00:00
The ongoing discussion for Biff [1] prompted me to re-share my post because I'd like more people to understand this "other way". Outside Clojureville, it is not obvious most of these Clojure "frameworks" are not monoliths.

The consummate Clojurist's default (and very normal-feeling way) to build a web application (or any application for that matter) is to roll their own web stack from production-grade libraries.

Of course, this state of affairs is a double-edged sword, just like is true for traditional web frameworks. In my post, I try to go into the whys and the wherefores, building upward from first principles.

[1] Biff – a batteries-included web framework for Clojure https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44037426
by HappMacDonald | 2025-05-20 13:16:53+00:00
How many of you people having problems with hand health vis a vis typing are still using home row?

I've done more typing than speaking for over 40 years now, and I've never had any carpel tunnel or joint problems with my hands (my feet on the other hand.. hoo boy!) and I've always used a standard layout flat QWERTY keyboard.. but I never bend my hands into that unnatural "home row" position.

I type >60wpm using what 40 years ago was "hunt and peck" and evolved over brute force usage into "my hands know where they keys are, I am right handed so my right hand monopolizes 2/3 of the keyboard, both hands know where every key is so either one can take over the keyboard if the other is unavailable (holding food, holding microphone for when I do do voice work, using mouse, etc)".

But as a result my hands also evolved this bespoke typing strategy which naturally avoids uncomfortable poses and uncomfortable repetition.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-05-20 13:17:00+00:00
> server actions" seems to be a NextJS thing, not a JS thing?

It's a JS framework thing. Every mainstream JS framework has server actions or equivalent.

> Having a wrapper around HTTP isn't really a compelling reason to choose a technology for the very large majority of people: probably the opposite actually.

It is way more convenient to write a server action and be able to immediately use it in a client component than having to write an HTTP endpoint in a separate back-end project, and then regenerate your client via OpenAPI, or whatever else you use.

> IDK what you mean by "deal with OpenAPI"

I mean dealing with tooling to generate an HTTP client from OpenAPI schema.

> In all honesty (and sorry for the directness), you don't really seem to understand these concepts and how relevant or not they are to this conversation

Wrong
by matsemann | 2025-05-20 13:17:23+00:00
Yeah, good point. I tried to make an experiment: 1 female, 9 males, assign a random number between 1 and 100 to each of them. Then, checking only the cases where the female is in top 2, would we then expect that female to be better than the other male? My head says no, but testing it in code I end up with some bias around 51-52%? And if I make it 1 female and 99 men it's even greater, at ~64 %.

Maybe my code is buggy.
by cubefox | 2025-05-20 13:17:33+00:00
> From what I can tell, it doesn't look like the recent GPT-4o image generation includes the research of the NeurIPS paper you cited.

Which means autoregressive image models are even ahead of diffusion on multiple fronts, i.e. both in whatever GPT-4o is doing and in the method described in the VAR paper.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-20 13:18:34+00:00
Now I wouldn't be so quick to say this, because after all, we are talking about far more than the English Wikipedia here.

The English Wikipedia is the original, the largest, and the most visible project, but it's completely independent from the other ones.

I would say that many of the other language projects have majority non-American editors, because fluent and native speakers are more likely to be able to contribute in a big way to them. Perhaps immigrants to America may hold down a large part as well, but if you peer under the hood of some of these projects, you'll find a lot of their controversies and biases result from nationalism and adherence to regional cultures and customs that differ with American ones.

Now it wouldn't be surprising that most/all projects exhibit an incipient Western bias, because the WMF is a Western organization and based in Western culture, so any editor drawn to that ethos may tend to be less in line with foreign biases. But we have seen, just from disputes that bubble over into enwiki, or Commons or Wikidata, that there is a true diversity to editors, and I think it's a disservice that anyone projects enwiki demographics onto the other projects.
by gloosx | 2025-05-20 13:18:45+00:00
You didn't really mention any real feature besides Visual Basic, which clearly has alternatives in other spreadsheet apps. You have to run your VBA through converter script, and the fix incompatibilities in your macros but again, for a Visual Basic guy it is trivial... The rest of the things you mentioned is a good old `rsync` repacked.

But you're right, they surely added a bunch of smaller stuff to keep everything connected, and I'm kind of underestimating it since I never used that ecosystem but heard rumors and complaints from other people who had to use it :)
by cturner | 2025-05-20 13:19:00+00:00
There are complex reports that every European-regulated finance entity needs to submit to their regulator. They are always complicated, but they are only sometimes well-specified. The formats evolve over time.

There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.

The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.

If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.

There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.

Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.
by bluGill | 2025-05-20 13:19:05+00:00
> why we can't have nice things like double decker commuter trains.

Those are not nice things. Double decker trains take longer to load/unload than regular trains for only a small increase in capacity. Single deck trains can make more stops in the same amount of time thus serving more people, or they can take less time in the stops thus getting people where they want to be faster. Time is important to humans, anyone who says slow down to others has no idea how they live or where their needs are. If you want to slow down and smell roses that is fine: go to a park and do so - meanwhile a lot of people need less time on transit so they get more time at home with their kids (or whatever else they do in life)

Larger loading gauges are a good things for a lot of reasons, but the ability to run double decker trains is not one of them.
by eviks | 2025-05-20 13:19:07+00:00
> they press the wrong key

No they wouldn't, if you believe there are so many terminal editor users that can't be taught what modes are, you simply guard it via settings so that unless you enable it explicitly you can't press the wrong key

> There's really no reason for a basic lightweight text editor to have modes

There is - having the power in every single Windows installation, including all the VMs and other people's machines.
by nchmy | 2025-05-20 13:19:19+00:00
I was objecting to your definition of effort vs expertise. It's quite obviously expertise vs time/experience.

This is described in this wiki article that was linked in another comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve

Which also points out how people rarely use the term properly, and call something difficult to learn a "steep" learning curve. It's the opposite.
by monero-xmr | 2025-05-20 13:19:22+00:00
Countries want American assets - stocks, bonds, property (or abstract ownership in such property).

Countries acquire such assets with dollars. They need to get dollars. The acquire dollars by selling things Americans want, typically physical goods as Americans are very good at making the non-physical kind.

Unfortunately this incentivizes the never-ending march towards de-industrialization in the USA, as countries earn dollars by making things. They get more efficient every year, and more skilled, making more things, to acquire dollars.

That is, I would argue, the single biggest issue animating politics today. It is the argument against globalization, one that has not been solved, and the turmoil in politics across the West with gyrating governments is because voters continue to desire change, and solutions, which no party has yet solved.

Arguing that voters are "stupid" is itself stupid. Voters vote the way they vote. It is on elites and politicians to solve the problem of deindustrialization while maintaining the parts of globalization that are beneficial. If you want to wring your hands and blame the voters, that's fine, but in a democracy you should try to win votes and not call people stupid.
by CyanLite2 | 2025-05-20 13:19:24+00:00
Because the USA has more money than other countries. People outside the US can't afford to buy our products, but we can afford to buy theirs. This is ideal for many people in the US who want cheap $200 flat screen TVs in every room of their house.

This isn't good for unskilled labor in rural parts of America, often in swing states. Manufacturing had always been a place for high school grads to have a decent career. Those days are over with, but politically they decide the election.
by brazzy | 2025-05-20 13:20:12+00:00
> Germany tried some "protectionist" policies I seem to recall reading about — to protect some segment of manufacturing (automobile?).

As a German, I'm not aware of any large-scale, coordinated efforts specifically with that goal. There's all kinds of subsidies or policies with other ostensible goals (such as promoting electric cars) that are effectively subsidies. Usually enacted as a reaction to some current event, such as COVID, or a large company about to go bankrupt. Nothing that hasn't been done pretty much the same way in other countries.