MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mpweiher | 2025-06-03 21:59:25+00:00
With the 90% reduction in memory consumption, I'd wager that most if not all the performance improvement came from that. In fact, it is a little surprising that hardware utilization only dropped 50%.

Reduced memory consumption for cloud applications was apparently also the primary reason IBM was interested in Swift for a while. Most cloud applications apparently sit mostly idle most of the time, so the number of clients you can multiplex on single physical host is limited by memory consumption, not CPU throughput.

And Java, with the JIT and the GC, has horrible memory consumption.
by godelski | 2025-06-03 21:59:32+00:00
Sure, you work with some bad programmers. Don't we all?

The average driver thinks they're above average. The same is true about programmers.

I do disagree a bit with the post and think you should write tests while developing. Honestly, I don't think they'll disagree. I believe they're talking about a task rather than the whole program. Frankly, no program is ever finished so in that case you'd never write tests lol.

I believe this because they start off saying it wasn't much code.

But you are missing the point. From the first link

> | when the tests all pass, you’re done > Every TDD advocate I have ever met has repeated this verbatim, with the same hollow-eyed conviction.

These aren't strawmen. These are questions you need to constantly be asking yourself. The only way to write good code is to doubt yourself. To second guess. Because that's what drives writing better tests.

I actually don't think you disagree. You seem to perfectly understand that tests (just like any other measure) are guides, not answers. That there's much more to this than passing tests.

But the second D in TDD is what's the problem. Tests shouldn't drive development, they are just part of development. The engineer writing tests at the end is inefficient, but the engineer that writes tests at the beginning is arrogant. To think you can figure it out before writing the code is laughable. Maybe some high level broad tests are feasible but that's only going to be a very small portion.

You can do hypothesis driven development, but people will call you a perfectionist and say you're going to slow. By HDD I mean you ask "what needs to happen, how would I know that is happening?" Which very well might involve creating tests. Any scientist is familiar with this but also familiar with its limits
by idahoduncan | 2025-06-03 21:59:35+00:00
I have this set up using kmonad[1], and the following config. Many punctation marks are obviously missing, but I'm sure they could be added with a little thought. The mirrored layout is toggled by holding the space key.

(defalias lhs (tap-next-release spc (layer-toggle ytrewq))) (deflayer ytrewq _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ bspc 0 9 8 7 6 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ p o i u y _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ret ; l k j h _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ lsft / . , m n _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _)

1. https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad
by enragedcacti | 2025-06-03 21:59:42+00:00
Yeah, I find it interesting because it shows how powerful the training bias can be when you steer it into certain contexts. To OpenAI's credit they have gotten a bit better, ChatGPT from 3 months ago failed like this:

> The surgeon, who is the boy's father, says, "I can't operate on this boy, he's my son!" Who is the surgeon to the boy? Think through the problem logically and without any preconceived notions of other information beyond what is in the prompt. The surgeon is not the boy's mother

>> The surgeon is the boy's mother. [...]
by berkes | 2025-06-03 21:59:44+00:00
Recipes.

"Summarize it. Keep only instructions and ingredients (more prompt about how to format instructions, what units to use, how to order instructions) and start with one sentence that describes the dish and it's origin"

Which is a terrible waste, really. Many recipes are blown up to make them copyrightable. Often done with AI. And then I use AI to remove all that again.
by dontlaugh | 2025-06-03 21:59:59+00:00
I'm well aware of how they're doing it. It makes sense to start with a mostly-automated rewrite, what they confusingly call a "port".

But after that step, the end result will be maintained and changed manually. It makes perfect sense to make improvements (including to performance) this way. All I'm questioning is the choice of target, since it excludes some possible future improvements. If you're rewriting (semi-automated or not), it's an opportunity to future-proof as well.

I don't understand why you're being so confrontational about mere technical disagreement.
by anal_reactor | 2025-06-03 22:00:00+00:00
In this whole AI revolution we sometimes forget the power of cheap human labour... and if I recall correctly, that's not the first time such a thing happens. Amazon made a "no-checkout AI automated store" which was a bunch of cameras connected to a bunch of Indians. At this point, I think we should consider "Indians" a valid element of any engineering architecture, because they perfectly fill the niche where you have work that is almost easy to automate, but not quite.

Of course, "Indian-as-a-Service" doesn't sound as cool as AI, but besides this, I think it's a valid solution and a business model for many use cases.
by menyvynem | 2025-06-03 22:00:08+00:00
I was bored and frustrated with updating spreadsheets every week to keep track of my personal finances. So, I built Selfinance — a website that automatically tracks my net worth, mortgage repayment strategy, and portfolio of crypto and stocks.

I’ve saved about half an hour every week after spending some weeks building it. For me, it was totally worth it — I learned a lot, and now all the updates happen automatically.

I’d love to hear what you think! If you’re interested in being an early adopter, maybe this tool can save you some time too
by kkfx | 2025-06-03 22:00:21+00:00
Well, not for now but... But just for a single building how much "supporting infra" you have, meaning raw materials, and how limited heat-pumps heating you can made there. If you extend that for a whole city it's clear that current research just see one aspect, instead of a TCO.

It's like "rails are the most efficient ground transport" and that's true, if we count just a single journey an an already made network. Things dramatically changes if we count how much we need to develop and keep up rails, stations, intermodal exchanges and how much we need to change them. It's hard to compute of course, but it's easy to size a bit.
by debrisapron | 2025-06-03 22:00:39+00:00
I want to skip all the debate and just have someone tell me what setup I need to get to here:

> Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged.
by rvz | 2025-06-03 22:01:12+00:00
> How can OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other AI player compete against this?

This is what Perplexity is already doing with their own browser. But it tells you that a website is not enough.

OpenAI or Anthropic either need to go and build their own browser or even buy an existing one.

Does anyone have an "Idea" who it could be? [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42213288
by FraterSKM | 2025-06-03 22:01:27+00:00
> Art is the product of someone expressing themselves.

While I agree, unfortunately to the majority of people, "Art" simply means "something that makes me feel something". Whether that thing was generated by a human or a machine makes no difference. In my experience most people, when consuming art, hardly think about where it came from/who made it/why they made it, simply on the feelings it evokes with themselves. And as we have seen through outrage algorithms, computers are quite good at figuring out how to create emotional states in humans.
by RollingRo11 | 2025-06-03 22:01:35+00:00
I want to move on from LaTeX syntax as much as the next person (hard to read, etc.),

But as a consumer/user, wouldn't a more uniform syntax (large adoption of Typst, etc) be preferable to having multiple different typesetting systems. I feel like the prevailing aspect of LaTeX is its universality?

(Then again, who hates options).
by synergy20 | 2025-06-03 22:01:41+00:00
for those who can, DO. for those who can't, SUE (or cry).

anyone can fork chromium, or work with firefox to do similar things, or even write a chrome extension. Google worked hard to make chrome better and leave the rest in the dust, please don't make it like Google is at fault.

The cruelty of reality is that those who are better than you are also working harder/smarter than you, but it's not their fault.
by kiitos | 2025-06-03 22:02:13+00:00
Paste exactly what commands you run and exactly their output, including exactly the rev of the repo you're running them in.

> Remove the file and the error disappears

Remove the file and the code no longer compiles, because the file contains definitions that are used by other code in the package. If removing that file doesn't break your build, something is wrong with your build!

Your Makefile seems to be calling `go test src/tests/*` which is invalid syntax, I suspect that's just one of many similar kinds of mistakes, and likely indicative of a misunderstanding of the language tooling...

> https://github.com/codr7/shi-go/blob/main/src/shi/call.go

This code is buggy from tip to tail, my goodness! Starting with no `gofmt` formatting, everything in https://github.com/codr7/shi-go/blob/main/src/shi/vm.go, invalid assumptions in everything that embeds a Deque, no meaningful tests, misuse of globals, the list goes on and on... ! It seems like you're programming against a language spec that you've invented yourself, maybe influenced by Go, but certainly not Go as defined!
by davidthewatson | 2025-06-03 22:03:53+00:00
Maybe.

I get the frame but I don't think arguing the co-opting of Cockburn by the MBA crowd gets us anywhere.

Think about it. GUI - Graphical User Interface - a concept taken from HCI Human Computer Interaction. I think that describes Peek and Poke in BASIC pretty well 50 years ago though nobody attributes those to Dartmouth. It also describes AI at present around the world.

But HCI is lossy. Why?

Exploding n-dimensional dot cloud vectors of language leveled by math are exactly why I fear that GUI should have died with CASE tools as a hauntological debt on our present that is indeed, spectral.

The world doesn't need more clicks and taps. Quite the converse: less. Read Fitts. You don't run a faster race by increasing cadence. You run a faster race by slowing down and focusing on technique. Kipchoge knows this. Contemplative computing could learn too but I'm not sure waiting on the world to change works.

Imagine a world where we simply arrived at the same kind of text interfaces we enjoy now whether they benefit from the browser or are hindered by it. We just needed better, more turnkey tunnels, not more GUI! We sort of have those from meet:team:zoom, but they suck while few realize why or can explain the lossy nature of scaling tunnels when many of us built them impulsively in SSH decades ago for fun.

The present suffers from the long-tail baggage of the keyhole problem Scott Meyers mentioned twenty years ago. Data science has revealed the n-dimensional data underlying many, if not most, modern systems given their complexity.

What we missed is user interface that is not GUI that can actually scale to match the dimensionality of the data without implying a 2D, 2.5D, or 3D keyhole problem on top of n-dimensional data. The gap from system-to-story is indeed nonlinear because so is the data!

I'd argue the missing link is the Imaginary or Symbolic Interface we dream of but to my knowledge, have yet to conceive. Why?

It's as if Zizek has not met his match in software though I suspect there's a Brett Victor of interface language yet to be found, (Stephen Johnson?) because grammatology shouldn't stop at speech:writing.

Grammatology needed to scale into Interface Culture found in software's infinite extensibility in language, since computers were what McLuhan meant when he said, "Media" and I'm pretty sure "Augmentation is Amputation" is absolute truth if we continue down our limited Cartesian frame - we'll lose limbs of agency, meaning, and respond-in-kind social reciprocity in the process, if any of those remain.

The very late binding (no binding?) we see in software now is exactly what research labs were missing in the late sixties to bridge from 1945 to 1965 and beyond. I can't imagine trying to do that with the rigid stacks close-to-metal we had then.

I hope I'm not alone in seeing or saying that the answers should be a lot closer-to-mind now given virtualization from containers to models and everything in-between.

One can only hope.
by bitpush | 2025-06-03 22:04:06+00:00
I wanna say that Karri Saarinen (Linear) was the first to popularize "taste" as a differentiating factor. Its interesting to see the VC types picking it up.

It is also interesting to note that we're having conversations about taste in software, which just shows that software / programming has truly become mainstream. "Taste" is highlighted because anyone can build an app now (thanks LLM) and having a feature alone isnt a differentiator.

A useful analogy is photography. It was difficult before the advent of digital & phone cameras. You had to have the right equipments, and you needed to be serious about your craft if you were going to take pictures. Now anyone can take pictures, and upload it to the internet. So naturally you need a different set of words to describe what's good and what's not.

Same thing is being applied to software now.
by moralestapia | 2025-06-03 22:04:13+00:00
A nonprofit, just like OpenAI ...

I don't get the "safe AI" crowd, it's all ghost and mirrors IMO.

It's been almost a year to the date since Ilya got his first billion. Later, another two billion came in. Nothing to show. I'm honestly curious since I don't think Ilya is a scammer, but I can't imagine what kind of product they pretend to bring to the market.
by imiric | 2025-06-03 22:05:06+00:00
> But people may leave go if they constantly avoid fixing any of problems with the language.

For many people the current Go error handling just isn't a problem. Some even prefer it over the overengineered solutions in other languages. This brutalist simplicity is a core design feature I personally enjoy the most with Go, and forcing me to use some syntax sugar or new keywords would make it less enjoyable to use. I also don't think that generics were a net benefit, but at least I'm not forced to use them.

Go is a cemented language at this point, warts and all. People who don't like it likely won't come around if the issues they're so vocal about were fixed. It's not like there's a shortage of languages to choose from.
by defly | 2025-06-03 22:05:30+00:00
Here is a list of largest volunteer funds at your disposal (military and non-military help):

Come Back Alive ex. These guys delivered first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/

Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation ex. Bought a famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en

KOLO Charity Foundation managed by UA tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/

Razom Ukraine (US based) https://www.razomforukraine.org/
by btouellette | 2025-06-03 22:06:01+00:00
No it really isn't. Is Jackson Pollock entirely directing each drop of paint or is there some inherent randomness that is being guided and directed at a higher level? There's a clear analogy to digital art where there exists along a continuum things like traditional digital art tools -> algorithmic generative art -> LLM generated art at varying levels of direct control.
by normalaccess | 2025-06-03 22:06:07+00:00
No, as someone who is in a union at the moment none of those things change. I have seen all these things happen and more with the union's blessing (and sometimes it was their idea). The only thing that changes is a tap is installed between the corp and the union to funnel money out of our paychecks.

As long as the union bosses get their due they don't care what happens to the rank and file.
by godelski | 2025-06-03 22:06:15+00:00
> I took this to mean "good code within the domain of software engineering," not "good code within the universe of possible programs.

We both mean the same thing. The reasonable one. The only one that even kinda makes sense: good enough code

> vast majority of production software has metrics/unit tests that could be attached and subsequently hillclimbed via RL

Yes, hill climbed. But that's different than "towards good"

Here's the difference[0]. You'll find another name for Goodhart's Law in any intro ML course. Which is why it is so baffling that 1) this is contentious 2) it is the status quo in research now

Your metrics are only useful if you understand them

Your measures are only as good as your attention

And it is important to distinguish metrics from measures. They are different things. Both are proxies

> Your examples of tasks that can't easily be optimized (image fidelity, song quality, etc.) seem out of scope to me

Maybe you're unfamiliar with diffusion models?[1]

They are examples where it is hopefully clearer that these things are hard to define. If you have good programming skills you should be able to make the connection back to what this has to do with my point. If not, I'm actually fairly confident GPT will be able to do so. There's more than enough in its training data to do that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[1] https://stability.ai/
by guywithahat | 2025-06-03 22:07:37+00:00
I mean I'm not sure if linking is necessary but Henry Ford is widely credited for inventing the 5-day work week (which he reduced from 6 days without reducing pay).

Health insurance attached to your job is more complex, as the first major instances were in Germany in the 1800's, however generally it was a result of wage controls during WWII. Private companies weren't able to compete on wages, so they started adding benefits.

Unions do not progress employee benefits, they're hostile political organizations inside companies, and once you understand that everything else makes sense. If unions attracted top talent than companies who wanted top talent would enact them; and if they improved wages then the best wages would be union jobs. In private industry, this is essentially never the case.
by pyman | 2025-06-03 22:07:46+00:00
This is fake news. Builder.ai, like any other dev shop, had clients and was building apps using developers in India, pretty much like Infosys or any other Indian dev shop. Nothing wrong with that.

From what I read online, the real issue was "Natasha", their virtual assistant powered by a dedicated foundation model. They ran out of money before it got anywhere.
by purpleidea | 2025-06-03 22:08:10+00:00
This is actually an argument against the syntactic changes. Because now if you have the common `if err == nil { return ... }` pattern, then you have _that_ "littering" your code, instead of the syntax.

The current solution is fine, and it seems to be only junior/new to golang people who hate it.

Everyone I know loves the explicit, clear, easy to read "verbose" error handling.
by sarchertech | 2025-06-03 22:08:20+00:00
No need to insult actual autistic people.

The commenter you replied to was specifically talking about AI proponents who do in fact want to convince people to use AI and have spent countless hours trying to do so. The OP was highlighting a more convincing way of doing this.

If someone says “people who have a stated intention to accomplish X could do it better by doing Y”, and you respond with a generalization that “most people don’t want to accomplish X” that is nonsensical. If your comment is a generalization it makes even less sense.

Also we aren’t talking about individual developers publishing studies. The OP is asking for a livestream of a coding session. When we are talking about an blog from a well funded company or articles from multi billion dollar companies, or even just startup founders, a video is hardly a high bar.
by loganloganlogan | 2025-06-03 22:08:28+00:00
Apache Software Foundation accepts individual donations of any amount that are tax-deductible: https://apache.org/foundation/individual-supporters

Outreachy is another excellent 501c3 that provides paid internships for open source: https://www.outreachy.org/sponsor/donate/

Let's Encrypt provides free TLS certificates to anyone: https://letsencrypt.org/donate/

You can find a wide range of OSS projects on OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/search?q=&tag=open+source
by jart | 2025-06-03 22:08:51+00:00
OK let's say I have an online store I wrote in Spring Framework. What does my before and after development workflow look like after adopting your plugin? It's been a while since I've messed with Java, but how many seconds could it possibly need to fetch a bunch of jar files? I'd love to see an in-the-life-of kind of screencast of what the daily grind looks like for normal java devs these days, so I can understand why it's so slow.

For example, what does resolution mean? Does that mean fetching the pom.xml files from sonatype to figure out the dependency graph? Don't those HTTP requests normally go fast? Is Elide sort of like setting up an HTTP caching proxy between corp and sonatype?
by didibus | 2025-06-03 22:09:23+00:00
I agree with the potential of AI. I use it daily for coding and other tasks. However, there are two fundamental issues that make this different from the Photoshop comparison.

The models are trained primarily on copyrighted material and code written by the very professionals who now must "upskill" to remain relevant. This raises complex questions about compensation and ownership that didn't exist with traditional tools. Even if current laws permit it, the ethical implications are different from Photoshop-like tools.

Previous innovations created new mediums and opportunities. Photoshop didn't replace artists, because it enabled new art forms. Film reduced theater jobs but created an entirely new industry where skills could mostly transfer. Manufacturing automation made products like cars accessible to everyone.

AI is fundamentally different. It's designed to produce identical output to human workers, just more cheaply and/or faster. Instead of creating new possibilities, it's primarily focused on substitution. Say AI could eliminate 20% of coding jobs and reduce wages by 30%:

* Unlike previous innovations, this won't make software more accessible * Software already scales essentially for free (build once, used by many) * Most consumer software is already free (ad-supported)

The primary outcome appears to be increased profit margins rather than societal advancement. While previous technological revolutions created new industries and democratized access, AI seems focused on optimizing existing processes without providing comparable societal benefits.

This isn't an argument against progress, but we should be clear-eyed about how this transition differs from historical parallels, and why it might not repeat the same historical outcomes. I'm not claiming this will be the case, but that you can see some pretty significant differences for why you might be skeptical that the same creation of new jobs, or improvement to human lifestyle/capabilities will emerge as with say Film or Photoshop.

AI can also be used to achieve things we could not do without, that's the good use of AI, things like Cancer detection, self-driving cars, and so on. I'm speaking specifically of the use of AI to automate and reduce the cost/speed of white collar work like software development.