MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nalekberov | 2025-05-23 00:53:44+00:00
> I really think a lot of the reason some people say it doesn't give them as much productivity as they would like is due largely to a desire to write "clean" code based on years and years of our own training, and due to having to be able to pass code review done by your peers.

Machine doesn't get mad when an app takes forever to start or keeps constantly crashing, but we humans do. Writing "clean" code has the least importance when it comes to machine generated code.
by kristopolous | 2025-05-23 00:53:45+00:00
They don't have lower standards either.

I mean they will now with a candidate pool reduction of 96%...

The rest is kinda wild. I guess Ilya Sutskever should leave? Sergey Brin would have never started Google, Jony Ive would be in the UK, Jensen Huang and Nvidia would be hailing from Taipei, Elon Musk would be in Johannesburg, Linus Torvalds would still be in Finland, the Rasmussen brothers would have launched Google maps in the Netherlands, Satya Nadella would be in Hyderabad, the Broadcom CEO would be in Malaysia...

You're beheading like 50% of the S&P my friend...

Not to mention say, the faculty of engineering at places like MIT https://www.eecs.mit.edu/role/faculty-cs/

To me places like Stanford and Caltech are world class schools that happen to be in the US. Over 90% not being American born is what I'd expect from a globally renown world class institution because that's what the world population looks like.

China has many programs to attract top global talent. If you want to fast track the transition from Silicon Valley to Beijing, kicking out the foreigners is an excellent move.

Graduate level coursework at Peking is already in English. All these scholars have to do is get on a plane.
by randomor | 2025-05-23 00:54:46+00:00
I just did an export while trying to create an importer to my app DoubleMemory. Pocket actually does export tags. It’s probably a miscommunication.

Here is what the raw csv look like if you check my tool example: https://doublememory.com/posts/tools/pocket/

The text that’s separated by pipe are the tags.
by lukan | 2025-05-23 00:54:52+00:00
I lost all my snobism about that years ago and I do just follow the paradigm, "does it work". But for some reasons, even with AI I ain't on another level.

And those reasons are, it all collapses very quickly once the complexity reaches an medium amount.

And if I want to rely on things and debug them - I cannot just have a pile of generated garbage, that works as long as the sun is shining. For isolated tasks it works for me. For anything complex, I am faster on my own.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-05-23 00:55:06+00:00
I work in an enterprise company where we just recently got access to use cursor, before that copilot.

We have literally stood up entire services built practically entirely with AI that are deployed right now and consumers are using.

AI does work with competent people behind the wheel. People can't keep hiding behind saying that it always churns out code that doesn't work. We are way past those days. If you don't you will end up losing your job. Theres no way around it. The problem is we may end up losing our jobs either way.
by ghaff | 2025-05-23 00:55:27+00:00
CTO can be a funny position at companies. It sometimes does mean head of engineering and responsible for technical direction at a pretty granular level. But it often also can mean being sort of the public face for the company's technology vision. I've definitely seen companies where the two are largely one and the same. I've also seen companies where the CTO was more the outward-facing vision person.
by pen2l | 2025-05-23 00:56:27+00:00
I was recently banned from r/worldnews over a comment which I thought was relatively innocuous. Anyway, that made me start investigating and smelling things and suddenly when you see it, it's hard to ignore. r/worldnews is completely, unmistakably compromised. It's the third largest subreddit with about 50 million subscribers. The situation is so vivid and clear that it's unthinkable that owners are unaware that it is compromised, from moderations to the dominant commenting user base. So what in the world is happening and how did it come to be this way? Spez et al were compromised? How?

The most charitable and perhaps the most rational explanation is that the 'propaganda' effort is impressively, surprisingly, exhaustively grassroots [1] and that's why reddit's overlords cannot simply contain it -- after all, it's real people, very committed and very real indeed. Although I would think that even if this were true, were reddit's operators uncompromised, they'd at least feel compelled to investigate the moderators of the subreddit which has a readership of 50 million, because even if the activity is organic, what's going on crosses a certain threshold of what should be permissible, if only for the richness of debate and discussion. I won't approach the complex topic of whether grassroots led propaganda effort constitutes something that is illegitimate and whether it warrants management, moderation, or some sort of penalty.

I'm not extremely educated about the complex history of Israel and jewish people, though I'm trying to learn more these days. Knowing what I know so far: It is a unique group of people for sure, and 2000 years of oppression, I think, has resulted in a special kind of cohesion that even when scattered throughout the world, they partake in strong self-advocacy. In my experience, this kind of self-advocacy doesn't exist with any other group.

I apologize if my comment reads prejudiced or inappropriate, please tell me if it does, certainly and obviously it is not meant to be.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/24/gaza-is...
by padolsey | 2025-05-23 00:56:48+00:00
> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn.

But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick.

Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new under the sun. It's been seen before thousands of times, and so why not recall and use those old nuggets? For me coding agents are just code-reuse on steroids.

Ps. Ironically, the article feels AI generated.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-05-23 00:57:07+00:00
>Second, it is surprising to see that Wonka put little to no restriction both on who could win the contest and on what the winners could see inside the factory and do with that information after they left.

The author is making an unjustified assumption that Wonka had no contingencies in place. Consider the sadistic cruelty he shows towards children, and the fact that he's not worried about law enforcement. And consider his narcissistic personality.

There's more then enough evidence to suggest that he would and could ruthlessly silence any of the competition winners who would dare to leak his secrets.

That, really is the best method of preserving your trade secrets, and the reason why willy wonka is so successful.
by dmvdoug | 2025-05-23 00:57:54+00:00
Nah, this one is going to federal court for sure. It’ll all come out. But part of the rules are also that schools must provide the relevant information within 30 days of the start of an alien’s academic term. There’s a whole system set up to handle this. The system is not, government, go ask for this set of information whenever you feel like it and if the school doesn’t hop to it immediately, you may suspend. It says that if a school does not provide the information within the relevant period before the term starts, it shall be suspended. There is no discretionary wiggle room for the government to be like, well, I don’t think you’re giving me enough, or you’re not being cooperative enough.
by tails4e | 2025-05-23 00:58:00+00:00
Well doesnt this go somewhat to the root of consciousness? Are we not the sum of our experiences and reflections on those experiences? To say an LLM will 'simply' respond as would a character in a sorry about that scenario, in a way shows the power, it responds similarly to how a person would protecting itself in that scenario.... So to bring this to a logical conclusion, while not alive in a traditional sense, if an LLM exhibits behaviours of deception for self preservation, is that not still concerning?
by lyu07282 | 2025-05-23 00:58:17+00:00
these tools have no understanding of clean architecture, they are like geeksforgeeks or w3cschools, decades old shitty "tutorials" written by amateurs for amateurs condensed into a chatbot. If you work on cleanly architectured code they can still be useful, they can see the patterns and usually perform better in my experience. But not in a million years will you get to that clean architecture by starting them off from scratch. Keep it turned off until you have a solid foundation would be my advice.
by ndiddy | 2025-05-23 00:59:01+00:00
> Wick started his talk by saying that it looks like everything is great with the Flatpak project, but if one looks deeper, ""you will notice that it's not being actively developed anymore"". There are people who maintain the code base and fix security issues, for example, but ""bigger changes are not really happening anymore"". He said that there are a bunch of merge requests for new features, but no one feels responsible for reviewing them, and that is kind of problematic.

I think Red Hat should really be stepping up more here, especially since with RHEL 10 they stopped maintaining a ton of desktop packages with the advice for users of those packages being "get the package from Flathub instead of from us" (see https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_... , search for Flathub). If that's Red Hat's attitude towards desktop software, they should be providing the resources to make Flatpak a viable alternative.

> A user's Linux distribution may still be providing an older version of Flatpak that does not have support for --device=input, or whatever new feature that a Flatpak developer may wish to use. Wick said there needs to be a way for applications to use the new permissions by default, but fall back to the older permission models if used on a system with an older version of Flatpak.

I'm glad he brought that up as a problem. I maintain a game on Flathub that has audio and controller support. Because of the limited permissions granularity, that means that the game is displayed as requiring arbitrary device access (--device=input is too new, so the Flathub maintainers don't allow it in packages yet) and being able to listen to your device's microphone (the audio permission doesn't allow only accessing speakers but not microphones). I hope that Flatpak adds backwards compatibility for permissions so newer Flatpak versions can start having more granular permissions.
by ivape | 2025-05-23 01:00:09+00:00
I don’t know, this made me kinda laugh:

Because if that programmer—if that thing, that CREATURE—walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say "no blockers".

The description of the greenfield project first engineer. They are gone before you know it, or at the very least at some point offer a “well I had no choice you see, they really wanted to release something”.
by allthenopes25 | 2025-05-23 01:00:14+00:00
A sane person writes clean code because they are going to have to maintain it themselves one day a few years into the future when the baby kept them up all night for three nights in a row and coffee isn't working for them anymore and they can't remember anything about it and it's falling over so it's really urgent and f**** those guys they swore they'd get someone to take this on with a proper handover and surely there was a goddamn sent email somewhere about it but nothing is coming up when you search and goddamnit it used to compile did people ignore your comment about how it won't build with the new version yet so don't update the build tools and and and

You write good code because you own it.

If you get ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude or whateverthe****else to write it, you're going to have a whole lot less fun when it's on fire.

The level of irresponsibility that "vibe coding" is introducing to the world is actually worse than the one that had people pouring their savings into a shitcoin. But it's the same arseholes talking it up.
by chr15m | 2025-05-23 01:01:00+00:00
Yep, we have a new tool and it's making us more productive when we learn how to use it properly. The malloc/GC example is a good analogy.

One thing to note: understanding memory management as a Java programmer makes you a better programmer. Having used malloc in bare metal mode helps you understand issues like memory leaks more clearly. It gives you a model of what is going on grounded in experience.

So that knowledge and experience of the old ways isn't useless. It's very useful and makes you a better developer. This is true of many advancements in tech, including AI.

Knowing how to build software without AI makes you a better developer when building with AI.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-05-23 01:01:42+00:00
People keep reading off this nonsense that AI generated code is always bad or slow.

This is so far from the truth that I really think anybody who still says this has not actually used it for anything real in at least a couple years.

Yes, I'm not saying it will always generate you the best code, sometimes it may even be bad.

What I am saying is it CAN generate code that is reasonably performant, sometimes even more performant than you would have written it given time constraints, and fulfills requirements (even if sometimes it requires a little bit of manual effort) much faster than we ever could before.
by rester324 | 2025-05-23 01:01:55+00:00
Well that might be true, but I think the reason why they are blatantly acting like that because stakeholders and decision makers are detached from their decisions timewise.

That's why I bring such topics as maintenance and stability very early on into the discussions and ask those stakeholders how much system downtime they can tolerate, so that they can feel the weight of their decision making, and that gives me an opportunity to explain why quality matters.

Then it's up to them to decide how much crap they tolerate.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-23 01:01:56+00:00
Academic standards are kind of irrelevant when it comes to Harvard undergraduate admissions.

Harvard is a tiny university at the absolute top of the prestige hierarchy. As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student. At least to the extent it can be determined from the admission materials and a short interview. They could choose randomly from all good enough applicants with no noticeable impact on academic standards.

But Harvard is not in the business of educating the most deserving. Instead, they want to educate the ones who will be successful and influential in the future, and to give them the best networking opportunities possible. The standard joke is that if the admissions officer knew that the applicant would become a tenured professor at Harvard, they would reject the applicant for the lack of success. Most Harvard graduates fail to reach that standard, but it's better to choose a likely failure (and an unlikely unicorn) over a certain failure.

PhD admissions are another story. At that stage, Harvard starts caring a lot more about academic potential. They don't want to restrict their recruitment to the US, because Americans are only a small fraction of the people with access to good education. Especially because Americans are reluctant to do a PhD due to the low pay effectively mandated by public research funders.
by tzs | 2025-05-23 01:02:21+00:00
There are consequences that can follow in response to protected actions that don't rise to the level of prohibited retribution.

For example I can give a speech in a public square where I advocate some completely stupid conspiracy theory and I do it in the most offensive language possible pissing off everyone who hears, and be protected by the First Amendment.

That doesn't stop you from inferring from that speech that (1) I'm an idiot and (2) I'm a very unpleasant person to be around and then based on those inferences declining to hire me if I apply to you for a job. Neither idiots nor assholes are protected classes so you are free to discriminate against me. That you learned that I'm an idiot and asshole through my First Amendment protected speech shouldn't be relevant.

If someone lets it be known who they voted for and their reasons something similar could happen.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-23 01:02:24+00:00
They sure can! You can choose not to attend them. You can go stand on public property and yell at them.

Under the US Constitution, "the consequences" are absolutely not allowed to include weaponization of the State through coercion, punishment, or threat to control what the public thinks.

Fascist goobers skipping out on their "Basics of Being an American" course lmao
by jay_kyburz | 2025-05-23 01:03:07+00:00
In theory you need the infra V1 to help you design an improve infra v2, and so on and so on. This is a race, not fortification building.

Looking for moats makes sense in a commercial world. I thought the point of the article was that this time its different. You don't need a moat to prevent competitors moving into your market. Nation states are building their own castles, regardless of cost or business case.
by borplk | 2025-05-23 01:03:19+00:00
I'm deeply deeply against offering self-hosted SaaS. In summary because it takes you from a world where 1 instance of your application exists under your full control to a world where 1000 instances of your application exists all over the place outside of your control.

At that point you turn into a "classic" software vendor where you have to help people "operate" your software. After you have long moved on from something someone will still be on the version from 3 years ago and talking to you about "upgrade/migration path".

I firmly prefer a world where there is only "one operator" for the product and I fully manage 1 instance of the product as a total black box and the end users use it as a ... hello? ... "as a service".

My advice is unless someone cares enough to write you a life-changing check ... stay away from it.
by al_borland | 2025-05-23 01:04:32+00:00
I still use the Apple Music app with my own local files.

I turned off Apple Music (the steaming service), loaded everything into Apple Music (the app on macOS). I then plugged my phone into my laptop like it was 2007 and synced it over like an iPod. Everything works as expected. My music doesn’t change so much, so syncing hasn’t been an issue. I get a certain hit of nostalgia when syncing over the wire as well.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-05-23 01:06:19+00:00
Most replies here make the claim that all AI generated code is "garbage". And I can't help but think most of the people who say that do not actually use it in their day to day with the most recent models and actually give it good instructions/requirements.

No, it is not always perfect. Yes you will have to manually edit some of the code it generates. But yes it can and will generate good code if you know how to use it and use sophisticated tools with good guidance. And there are times where it will even write better more performant code than you could given the time requirements.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-05-23 01:06:26+00:00
I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay.

All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI generated. It's just good writing. Whether you buy the premise or not.
by zik | 2025-05-23 01:07:11+00:00
The Bellmac-32 was pretty amazing for its time - yet I note that the article fails to mention the immense debt that it owes to the VAX-11/780 architecture, which preceded it by three years.

The VAX was a 32-bit CPU with a two stage pipeline which introduced modern demand paged virtual memory. It was also the dominant platform for C and Unix by the time the Bellmac-32 was released.

The Bellmac-32 was a 32-bit CPU with a two stage pipeline and demand paged virtual memory very like the VAX's, which ran C and Unix. It's no mystery where it was getting a lot of its inspiration. I think the article makes it sound like these features were more original than they were.

Where the Bellmac-32 was impressive is in their success in implementing the latest features in CMOS, when the VAX was languishing in the supermini world of discrete logic. Ultimately the Bellmax-32 was a step in the right direction, and the VAX line ended up adopting LSI too slowly and became obsolete.
by slyfox125 | 2025-05-23 01:07:23+00:00
The answer is a resounding yes.

The article conflates philosophy with the formal study of philosophy.

In truth, philosophy necessarily exists just as math does, even if no one studies it. And also like math, even when people don't realize it, they utilize it. Both are foundational to reality, so much so that the very word reality invokes philosophy itself.
by robocat | 2025-05-23 01:07:31+00:00
> you'll get lucky once in a while

Gamification is based on variable rewards (BF Skinner's variable ratio schedule).

It is common to see women on the receiving end of a relentless conveyor of men (often trying and trying again).

It "randomly" works for the guys so perhaps it's a learned behaviour?

Spear targeting would be a worse alternative to the spray attack.

I also know women that are honestly oblivious to the come-ons. Although they eventually learn they have to forcibly say no (feeling uncomfortably rude even though they were given no alternative).
by ivape | 2025-05-23 01:07:40+00:00
It’s funny because I made a few funny clips (to my taste) on Google Whisk and figured, hey why not, let’s make a TikTok. Did you know that all of TikTok is full of millions of ai generated stuff or other people just copying each others stuff? I really thought there was something to this “original creation” stuff.

We are all so simply reproducible. No one’s making anything special, anywhere, for the most part. If we all uploaded a TikTok video of daily coding, it would be the same fucking app over and over, just like the rest of TikTok.

Elon may have be right all along, there’s literally nothing left to do but goto Mars. Some of us were telling many of you that the LLMs don’t hallucinate as much as you think just two years ago, and I think the late to the party crowd need to hear us again - we humans are not really necessary anymore.

!RemindMe in 2 years
by alephnerd | 2025-05-23 01:08:15+00:00
Oh easily! But the issue is Brian Ballard (their GOP lobbyist) stepped on a lot of feet and pissed people (primarily David Sacks) off, leading him to get metaphorically slapped by the Trump admin.

So they're frozen out from K-Street in the medium term.

On top of that, a couple extremely active and very wealthy alumni have continued to maintain a grudge and have an ear in the admin

And finally, it's an easy anti-establishment win.

Finally, this is specifically a Harvard College thing - the alumni of other schools at Harvard are much less... let's say idealistic.
by sanderjd | 2025-05-23 01:09:36+00:00
> A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the expertise of other people

I honestly really don't understand why this would be the case. Software isn't more complicated than any of the other aspects of the business. I think a "reasonably smart" CEO could just ... learn how it works? if it's really so critical to their business.

It's been a long time since I worked for a CEO who didn't understand software.