MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by devmor | 2025-05-30 00:25:40+00:00
I have been evaluating LLMs for coding use in and out of a professional context. I’m forbidden to discuss the specifics regarding the clients/employers I’ve used them with due to NDAs, but my experience has been mostly the same as my private use - that they are marginally useful for less than one half of simple problem scenarios, and I have yet to find one that has been useful for any complex problem scenarios.

Neither of these issues is particularly damning on its own, as improvements to the technology could change this. However, the reason I have chosen to avoid them is unlikely to change; that they actively and rapidly reduce my own willingness for critical thinking. It’s not something I noticed immediately, but once Microsoft’s study showing the same conclusions came out, I evaluated some LLM programming tools again and found that I generally had a more difficult time thinking through problems during a session in which I attempted to rely on said tools.
by karaterobot | 2025-05-30 00:26:07+00:00
I don’t think designers hated Nielsen. I was doing web design at the time, and the general sentiment seemed to be: “Sure, he’s probably right—but the client wants it done their way instead, so…”

Still, his bite-sized advice stuck around and continues to shape the conversation. That’s where everyone learned about Fitts’ Law, Hick’s Law, optimal text column widths, the value of usability testing with just a few users, and the deep shame you should feel for making text hard to read. He may not have invented those ideas, but his articles popularized them. And because he was one of the few doing serious usability research and publishing it online, his authoritative voice gave those ideas real weight that designers could leverage to make the case to their bosses and clients.
by ivape | 2025-05-30 00:26:36+00:00
If God was so perfect, why would he create beings that have free will to destroy the life of another?

That is the ultimate intellectual question. But pay attention to the key word, intellectual. You cannot get spiritual answers from an intellectual question. That's what makes faith rather hard at times and often requires meditation.

It actually gives me reason to reject religion as a whole.

Christ, allegedly, died due to the pride of religion. He was very much on a mission to call out the pride, power and arrogance of organized religion. Again, the answers are simply not available in the intellectual domain and must be sought in the spiritual domain.

I'm not even a member of a Church as I mostly do my reading on my own and do my own reflection. I think one of the main things God tries to hammer home is that we are to all have an eternal life in the after-life (which is mercy, because he could just erase us). If eternity is what is at stake, it is probably in our interest to cleanse our soul of whatever makes us shitty humans, lest we enter eternity tainted and unreformed, for a soul like that will be shitty for all eternity.
by const_cast | 2025-05-30 00:26:39+00:00
> If technology makes us redundant, then we find new jobs. Same as it ever was.

Except, of course, it's not the same as it ever was because you do actually run out of jobs. And it's significantly sooner than you think, because people have limits.

I can't be Einstein, you can't be Einstein. If that becomes the standard, you and I will both starve.

We've been pushing people up and up the chain of complexity, and we can do that because we got all the low hanging fruit. It's easy to get someone to read, then to write, then to do basic math, then to do programming. It gets a bit harder though with every step, no? Not everyone who reads has the capability of doing basic math, and not everyone who can do basic math has the capability of being a programmers.

So at each step, we lose a little bit of people. Those people don't go anywhere, we just toss them aside as a society and force them into a life of poverty. You and I are detached from that, because we've been lucky to not be those people. I know some of those people, and that's just life for them.

My parents got high paying jobs straight out of highschool. Now, highschool grads are destined to flip burgers. We've pushed people up - but not everyone can graduate college. Then, we have to think about what happens when we continue to push people up.

Eventually, you and I will not be able to keep up. You're smart, I'm smart, but not that smart. We will become the burger flippers or whatever futuristic equivalent. Uh... robot flippers.
by SkyMarshal | 2025-05-30 00:27:41+00:00
Fwiw the associate here is Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad and a longtime HN'er:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sahillavingia

He posted about his experience here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116061
by Gb35643 | 2025-05-30 00:27:58+00:00
Thanks for this. Don't ask why but i just defaulted to Edit on Linux. I noticed there's no locking for edited files. Not even a notification saying "This file has been modified elsewhere since you opened it. Do you still want to save"

Can you confirm this? Is it some thing you intend to add? Curious to know why, if the answer is no
by JeremyNT | 2025-05-30 00:28:14+00:00
I'm in the same camp in that I don't use them because they don't work well enough for my own tastes. But I know what I'm doing, and I'm picky.

Clearly they do work in a general sense. People who don't want to code are making things that work this way right now!

This isn't yet replacing me, but I'm certain it will relatively soon be the standard for how software is developed.
by genewitch | 2025-05-30 00:28:27+00:00
> remove those versions, not put them in containers

I don't know how to fix this, but perhaps i can ai it and release something on my github if i manage to cobble something together.

These aren't "services" that anyone has access to, except myself; "clients", UIs, and things like whisper.

IF someone were to pay me, I'd figure it out. I'm friends with maintainers and that isn't my style. archiving is.

to wit, i expend no more energy than necessary maintaining other people's code.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-30 00:29:59+00:00
I'm not saying that there won't be small new additions to life that are fun, like better cameras (for me). But I think that you'd probably find something else equally enjoyable, like another new game that just isn't as advanced, and your life would not be significantly worse – in general, except for fringe cases. And on average, life isn't made better specifically because of technological improvement.
by therealpygon | 2025-05-30 00:30:20+00:00
LLMs follow instructions. Garbage in = garbage out generally. When attention is managed and a problem is well defined and necessary materials are available to it, they can perform rather well. On the other hand, I find a lot of the loosely-goosey vibe coding approach to be useless and gives a lot of false impressions about how useful LLMs can be, both too positive and too negative.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-30 00:32:00+00:00
> There is absolutely an ethical problem with charging people different prices for the same exact product/service

One, there isn’t. One party undercutting another for the same product is how competition generates consumer surplus.

Two, it isn’t the same product. When I fly with my family, we check in together. We board together. I collect their docs on my phone and double check they have them on theirs. I turn down upgrades so I can sit with them. If there is a change, it takes one customer service agent maybe 10% longer to adjust everyone in bulk. I’m not incurring 4 or 5x the cost on the airline for 4 to 5x the revenue, this is why bulk discounting exists for everything.

This isn’t an ethical problem. If it’s triggering an ethical system, that’s more damning for the system than for Delta. This is a communication and brand problem.
by noleary | 2025-05-30 00:32:26+00:00
It depends a bit on exactly what your use case is (i.e., which features are even relevant to you) and specifically what the alternate vendor would be. I really do try hard not to oversell what we offer.

I'll say this: if you're looking for an open source solution built to make B2B auth easy, we're the only option of the three. For Keycloak, for example, it's been an unresolved feature gap for many years that it can't support SCIM provisioning [0]; an unrelated characteristic -- not necessarily a flaw -- of Keycloak's is that it's quite agnostic to your use case and consequently requires some effort to implement.

On the other hand, we don't yet offer a huge amount of customization. We've instead -- for now -- prioritized building a relatively opinionated and therefore straightforward product. Similarly, if you're looking for some long-tail features, a longstanding vendor like Auth0 will very likely be able to help you.

Probably a few other considerations might be relevant that I'm neglecting. Send me an email if you're interested in chatting more (contact in HN bio) -- more than happy to help explore some of your options, even if that means we're not right for you.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58566587/does-keycloak-s...
by r_thambapillai | 2025-05-30 00:32:51+00:00
It looks like Slack updated their Terms, effective today for new apps and in 1 month for existing apps, to ban:

1. Commercially distributing an application that uses the Slack APIs without an explicit license to do that from Salesforce (Slack's parent company)

2. Indexing and storing data from Slack (from the actual API terms of service: https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/terms-of-service/api `you may not create persistent copies, archives, indexes, or long-term data stores`

3. For apps outside the marketplace, (inc. for ex. Glean) the rate limit is now 1 request per minute
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-30 00:33:46+00:00
Just an anecdote, which is probably meaningless on average but: I've found that caffeine is beneficial to me and I can still gain the benefits of caffeine by drinking very little of it every second or third day. I'm talking about 1-2 sips of a cup of regular coffee. No, it doesn't wake me up like a full cup would, but it allows me to function (especially in feeling stiff in my muscles) a little better without any noticeable downside. Just an anecdote though.
by bdbenton5255 | 2025-05-30 00:33:55+00:00
Especially when you consider that similar studies conclude that caffeine has an overall positive effect on brain function when consumed at 200mg per sitting and 400mg per day.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26677204/

100mg being equivalent to one cup of coffee or two cups of tea. I personally prefer tea as it is milder and the lower caffeine content means I can drink it all day.
by hagbard_c | 2025-05-30 00:35:34+00:00
It would have been more succinct to list the Germans who are allowed to use this product given the current polls:

~25% AfD ~25% CDU/CSU aka "AfD mit Substanz" CSU ??? Werteunion ??? Die Heimat ??? Die Basis ??? Freie Wähler ??? BündnisDeutschland ~4% Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht

This means more than half the German voting population is not welcome.

It seems that this software is only to be used by those on the left side of the political spectrum but not everyone on the left - Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) is certainly on the left but she does not pass the mustard. SPD/Linke (the former eastern German communist party for those who don't know their history - the party which was responsible for ordering people to be shot for the 'crime' of wanting to leave the country) and the Grüne ('Greens', just like water melons they are green only on the outside but deep red on the inside) are welcome as are those remaining few FDP (a liberal party) voters. I don't know the other parties - Werteunion, Heimat, Basis, Freie Wähler and Bündnis Deutschland - but since they don't show up in the polls they're not that interesting in this context.
by mikem170 | 2025-05-30 00:35:37+00:00
That's half the story...

As you said, McConnell and the Republican Senate refused to hold hearings on Obama's Supreme Court nominee, in March more than seven months before the election 2016 election - "Give the people a voice in the filling of this vacancy" said McConnell. [1]

The other half:

Four years later, they had no problem confirming Trump's nominee in late October, not two weeks before Trump's 2020 election - and McConnell said "The precedent only applies when different parties control the Senate and the White House." [2]

To me the inconsistency seems contrary to the spirit of democracy.

[1] https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/remarks/mcc...

[2] the precedent only applies when different parties control the Senate and the White House
by actualwitch | 2025-05-30 00:36:44+00:00
I've been coming to similar conclusions, but trying to change human nature is an impossible task. Throughout history we saw time and time again how any attempt at it was met with overwhelming rejection. Even in movies there are plenty of examples of people choosing messy human life over enlightened unification. Being aware of the power your instincts have over you is a privilege of the few, and taking action against it is a Sisyphean task. It all feels futile because nothing will ever change, time is a flat circle and wheel of samsara will keep turning nonetheless.
by seattle_spring | 2025-05-30 00:38:18+00:00
This has been my experience as well. The biggest problem is that the answers look plausible, and only after implementation and experimentation do you find them to be wrong. If this happened every once in a while then it wouldn't be a big deal, but I'd guess that more than half of the answers and tutorials I've received through ChatGPT have ended up being plain wrong.

God help us if companies start relying on LLMs for life-or-death stuff like insurance claim decisions.
by boroboro4 | 2025-05-30 00:38:57+00:00
I’m not arguing Trumps use of tariffs was legal (in fact I’m of an opinion it’s obviously not). Just arguing there are cases where executive have rights to set tariffs and it does fall under foreign policy in those cases.

As of blanket tariffs across all countries not being foreign policy I tend to disagree, it’s a policy of protectionism. I just don’t think this particular foreign policy falls under executive oversight, and should originate in Congress.
by rubit_xxx17 | 2025-05-30 00:40:50+00:00
Can also stream it at Internet archive:

https://archive.org/details/WeatherChannelMusic

https://archive.org/details/weatherscancompletecollection

https://archive.org/details/lfset1

https://archive.org/details/the-weather-channel-presents-the...

https://archive.org/details/the-weather-channel-presents-smo...

https://archive.org/details/weatherscanlocalmusic

YouTube has a few TWC playlists:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMUZjd023YBtp0iB962Uz...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYyTo0ex76Q&list=PL2UoJXK3rr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmGd-cx-dXc

It’s on Twitch:

https://m.twitch.tv/retroweatherchannel?desktop-redirect=tru...

There’s a nice Spotify playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0WEViIh23PGbLqGbjYNAZz

And the site dedicated to it mentioned earlier in the thread has some recordings:

https://twcclassics.com/
by dreghgh | 2025-05-30 00:41:15+00:00
Natural gas is perfect for peaking as it can spin up quickly and costs little when not burning fuel. Natural gas especially newer more efficient installations will probably be profitable for a while because as renewables become a bigger proportion of generation there will be less GWh delivered from gas but at higher prices. Or to reverse that, if you need the natural gas to be available, you have to pay what it costs to keep it around, regardless if that's for 10%, 1%, or 0.1% of the time that it's actually generating. But as that number drops - because of storage and overcapacity of renewables - you reduce emissions even if you don't reduce cost.

Fans of nuclear claim that sceptics are either radical leftists who want to reduce energy use, or anti-environmentalists don't care about emissions. But I see the pragmatic, diversified way of drastically cutting emissions being renewables + storage + gas turbines.
by const_cast | 2025-05-30 00:41:35+00:00
In terms of absolute safety the average driver is quite terrible. Following too closely, swerving in and out of lanes, not stopping at stop signs, driving 10 over. I see this daily.

On a typical Texas highway not only is everyone driving 10 over, and the typical following distance is about ~1 car length. At 80 miles an hour. Lord have mercy if anything happens on the road.
by drewbug01 | 2025-05-30 00:42:52+00:00
> It's not serious to say 'I'll communicate how I want, and it's up to other people to understand me'.

And yet, this is fundamentally the position the CTO took.

> That's just laziness on the part of the engineer who says that - it's not only unrealistic, it's intellectually lazy not to understand communication better, and it's going to apply to everyone they talk to, not just executives.

Of course all sides should try to understand better. But one side has a much bigger impact by putting in a little more effort.
by ttoinou | 2025-05-30 00:43:17+00:00
Thanks yeah that was my strategy I'm flexible with travels, I remember setting Paris and Lisbon after to see what flights I could have. Maybe it was focused on USA. Maybe their emails was getting my SPAM folder, IDK what happened but I never found what I was looking for.

I got my own flight tickets by looking on my own though.

550 USD for Tokyo is so cool, wow
by jdiff | 2025-05-30 00:43:18+00:00
As long as the AI people stay in their lane and work on their own projects, they're not getting yelled at. This is ignoring that AI has enough proponents to have enough projects of significant size. And even if they're getting shouted at from across the fence, again, AI has enough proponents who would brave getting yelled at.

We'd still have more than tortured, isolated, one-offs. We should have at least one well-known codebase maintained through the power of Silicon Valley's top silicon-based minds.
by allears | 2025-05-30 00:43:58+00:00
As Groucho said, I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.

Here's the thing -- by making it a 'club', and making prospective 'members' pass muster, you're just replicating HR at a big corporation. Friendship isn't so much about matching activities and interests as it is about finding someone whose sense of humor matches yours, or going through the same experience together. No matter how lonely I was, I would never audition for a 'club'. I'd much rather meet someone by just doing the activities I like, and noticing who else is around.
by nswizzle31 | 2025-05-30 00:44:38+00:00
Appreciate the thoughts - totally agree on those issues, but I don't think the problem is insurmountable. There is a real - albeit latent, maybe - demand for deep friendship and male-only spaces. Everyone recognizes it's an issue, at the very least, and is being more vocal about it in the face of the dramatic enshittification of the internet over the last few years.

It just takes too much self-discipline to break out of the internet consistently enough to build meaningful relationships without someone / something taking the initiative. I am sort of trying to replicate that at a larger scale by removing any friction to making plans.

Would love to hear your thoughts on if / what you think the solution is.
by BirAdam | 2025-05-30 00:44:38+00:00
This is fun to think about. I used to think that all software was largely garbage, and at one point, I think this _was_ true. Sometime over the last 20 years, I believe this ceased to be the case. Most software these days actually works. Importantly, most software is actually stable enough that I can make it half an hour without panic saving.

Could most software be more awesome? Yes. Objectively, yes. Is most software garbage? Perhaps by raw volume of software titles, but are most popular applications I’ve actually used garbage? Nope. Do I loathe the whole subscription thing? Yes. Absolutely. Yet, I also get it. People expect software to get updated, and updates have costs.

So, the pertinent question here is, will AI systems be worse than humans? For now, yeah. Forever? Nope. The rate of improvement is crazy. Two years ago, LLMs I ran locally couldn’t do much of anything. Now? Generally acceptable junior dev stuff comes out of models I run on my Mac Studio. I have to fiddle with the prompts a bit, and it’s probably faster to just take a walk and think it over than spend an hour trying different prompts… but I’m a nerd and I like fiddling.
by marcusverus | 2025-05-30 00:45:54+00:00
> That's why Jesus said "Better pick up a stone otherwise you're just encouraging adultery!"

Your implied argument is what, exactly? That JC opposed the death penalty for adultry, ergo he's against shaming single mothers, even if it leads to better outcomes? Bit of a stretch.

> I also think its bad for us to then go on and be hateful to those who have had an abortion, and I also think its wrong to firebomb places which give healthcare.

These opinions are shared by all mainstream Christian churches and the overwhelming majority of Christians.
by Loughla | 2025-05-30 00:46:50+00:00
People are getting chickens because they think it'll be cheaper than store bought eggs.

Spoiler: it is not.

About two years later, they don't want the things anymore because they're expensive in small flocks with no forage, and they're messy, so they try to get rid of them. Our local Facebook is full of people trying to sell their chickens for way more than they're worth, and their particleboard coops for crazy amounts.

It's kind of sad. The local farm store has changed their policy to not sell less than 4 chickens, because people were buying one or two and chickens need more than that to be happy.
by honkycat | 2025-05-30 00:48:03+00:00
#1 thing in command line shell scripting should be: "Do not use it for advanced scripts. If you have multiple if statements and for loops, rewrite it in a higher level language."

This is also the advice given in the google shell guide.

I say this after years of being a DevOps and Platform engineer. Bash is trash. It is great for 10-20 line scripts. Beyond that, it is worthless.
by p_j_w | 2025-05-30 00:50:08+00:00
If you actually meant revenue when you said revenue, then it shouldn't be surprising that PG&E has higher revenue compared to companies with half the population. Revenue is merely income, no costs will be deducted from that number. So, if PG&E has the same revenue but twice the customer base, that means they're extracting on average, half the money per customer as those other companies, which doesn't make them sound more expensive! Did you mean profit?
by bawolff | 2025-05-30 00:50:23+00:00
> First, how much of coding is really never done before?

Lots of programming doesn't have one specific right answer, but a bunch of possible right answers with different trade-offs. The programmers job isn't just to get working code neccesarily. I dont think we are at the point where llm's can see the forest for the trees, so to speak.
by ehansdais | 2025-05-30 00:50:27+00:00
Actually, you've reinforced their point. It's only bad at things the user is actually good at because the user actually knows enough in that domain to find the flaws and issues. It appears to be good in domains the user is bad at because the user doesn't know any better. In reality, the LLM is just bad at all domains; it's simply whether a user has the skill to discern it. Of course, I don't believe it's as black and white as that but I just wanted to point it out.
by zachlatta | 2025-05-30 00:50:42+00:00
Yeah, I’m saying that I expect us to have a world where we can cram almost all business knowledge into the context window for coding LLMs and we can get an early glimpse of that today by pasting in the full contents of 50+ files into Gemini 2.5 and only using 10% of its context window today, which is the worst it’ll ever be.