MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timewizard | 2025-06-03 20:24:50+00:00
> Generative AI elevates the value of humanistic skills

No. It just steals them, whitewashes their copyright, then passes them off as a "machine creation." If there were no humans actively using language there would be no language models.

> Generative AI makes it harder to teach humanistic skills

Yea. That's what happens when you steal for a living.

> For this reason, it is vitally important that educators learn how to personally create and deploy AI-based assignments and tools that are tailored directly for the type of teaching they want to do.

All with zero evidence that this will improve outcomes for them. For this reason you should TEST YOUR HYPOTHESIS.

I hate AI hype.
by pyman | 2025-06-03 20:24:56+00:00
Microsoft invested £250M in Inflection AI, £250M in Builder.ai, and has backed several other companies working on LLMs. They’ve been placing strategic bets across the AI space, but only a few of those companies actually had the talent, infrastructure, and funding needed to build real models.

The VP of AI was Craig Saunders, the same person who helped create Amazon Alexa. The problem is, they ran out of money. $500 million sounds like a lot, but it's not even close to what you need to build and train a real LLM. You need billions. Most people just don't realise that.

See: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Bui...
by jfengel | 2025-06-03 20:25:05+00:00
I wouldn't expect there to be any.

Sometimes your presentation varies depending on the data, in ways that are ultimately Turing-complete. Any domain-specific-language is eventually going to grow to incorporate some kind of logic.

React seems to have found a sweet spot for that with JSX, which presents as if it's mostly HTML with some Javascript mixed in. (In reality, it's actually Javascript with HTML-esque syntactic sugar, but it works very hard to present the illusion.) That means that it's working in two well-understood and widely-supported languages, rather than creating yet another presentation language.

HTML+CSS has deep flaws as a presentation language, but it's also universal. I don't expect React to reinvent that particular wheel.
by dreadnode | 2025-06-03 20:25:28+00:00
When attacking Large Language Models (LLMs), are manual or automated attacks more effective? We set out to answer this question in our latest research paper, analyzing data from Dreadnode’s Crucible platform and observing patterns in LLM attack execution methods.

We found that automated approaches achieve significantly higher success rates (69.5%) compared to manual techniques (47.6%) when leveraged against the AI Red teaming challenges in Crucible. However, only 5.2% of users are employing automation.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-06-03 20:25:43+00:00
>thoughtful design by someone who understands what makes a good GUI and what the goals of the interface are from the user's perspective.

This is critically overlooked too many times.

>People build wild shit in Excel that only they can understand.

I resemble that remark ;)

In one respect, that's what excel is really helpful for.

With no other GUI, the default of a mouse on an electronic spreadsheet is one of the oldest and most familiar to those who need wild math to be accomplished immediately without delay, in spite of its drawbacks. And quite popular, most likely by "default".

Remember before they had a gooey all they had was an ooie.

Should have seen what it was like before people had a mouse ;)

How about back when almost all prospective users wanted computerized calculation abilities, but computers were so uncommon none of them had ever used a computer (other than a first-generation game console), yet. They were of course well aware of what computers could do but wouldn't be actually touching one until sometime in the (very near) future.

They were looking forward to it which was a good sign, but when you handed one to them, the ideal situation was if they could simply be directed to the power button on the device. Everything else needs to logically follow and be completely intuitive to those familiar with the domain, with no further guidance or support from the author. Budding operators who were absolutely computer illiterate must be able to get it right the first time. Would you settle for anything less when it's somewhat confusing industrial high-stakes computation under the hood?

That's just text but when you think about it, even the most complex logic & code might benefit from first making sure it can be well-navigated from a text-based UI, before adding the desktop & mouse to complete the "picture".

Remember, a text-based UI must ask the right questions, or there will be no correct response.

Any other UI which doesn't ask the same questions in one way or another, is unlikely to provide the same correct response.
by flyingbuilding | 2025-06-03 20:25:52+00:00
I'm currently working with a couple of interns and thinking a lot about how to create the kind of environment where they don’t just do assigned tasks but actually grow — ideally into people who can make decisions, run projects, and mentor others down the line.

So far, here’s what seems to be working:

Giving them ownership of a small but real project (not just assisting on tasks)

Weekly 1:1s focused on feedback, not just updates

Getting them involved in how we measure success (analytics, performance metrics, not just outputs)

Letting them sit in on other parts of the business — sometimes just listening helps connect dots

Encouraging small experiments, and treating mistakes as part of the learning loop

Having them present or write up what they’re learning helps sharpen thinking

It’s not perfect, but I’ve seen some real growth already.

Curious to hear from others here: What habits, tools, or approaches have helped your interns step up?

Especially in environments where things move fast and the learning curve is steep — what’s worked (or not worked) for you?
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-03 20:26:10+00:00
>and why should they?

Because modern life is radically more complicated than humans can naturally deal with.

Your average peasant for millenia didn't need to understand Information security to avoid getting phished, didn't need to understand compounding interest for things like loans and saving for retirement (they'd just have kids and pray enough of them survive), didn't need to have some kind of mental model for the hordes of algorithms deployed against us for the express purpose of taking all of our available attention (a resource that people before a couple decades ago had so much excess of that boredom was a serious concern) for the express purpose of selling it to people who want to extract any dollar you may have access to, did not need to understand spreadsheets(!), etc etc etc etc

Like, being productive in modern society is complicated. That's what education is for.
by marklubi | 2025-06-03 20:26:33+00:00
Totally agree with finding the source of the bug (there are some that I've spent weeks tracking down, there are millions of people that have my fixed code on their devices).

If you've going to catch an error with a noop, there better be a comment explaining why you're not doing anything. It's not often, but sometimes, failing gracefully is just swallowing the error and moving on.
by swah | 2025-06-03 20:27:06+00:00
In terms of tools, there is (recently) Raycast Focus which is a very lightweight implementation of the idea of removing distracting apps and sites. For me the issue is internal - if I'm having a distracted day, its very hard to turn it into a focused day.

And a focused day (wake up, have something to eat, focus on tasks) must be handled with care... it very easily becomes a distracted day.
by bediger4000 | 2025-06-03 20:27:25+00:00
My answer is just what you've implicitly said: "my life is compressed". Your brain "compresses" information better as you get older. It builds up a dictionary of experiences, thoughts, sights, sounds. Encounter the same or similar sensation again, you just get an index of the previous experience.

I suppose if you forgot a lot, you'd have to rebuild your "dictionary".
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-03 20:27:37+00:00
This comment seems to mostly be describing avoiding undefined behavior. You can learn the rules to do that, though it's very hard to completely avoid UB mistakes.

But I'm talking about code that has undefined behavior. If there is any at all, you can't reliably learn what optimizations will happen or not, what will break your code or not. And you can't check for incorrect optimization in any meaningful way, because the result can change at any point in the future for the tiniest of reasons. You can try to avoid this situation, but again it's very hard to write code that has exactly zero undefined behavior.

When you talked about doing "a deep dive in your CPU architecture and the gcc docs and codebase", that is only necessary if you do have undefined behavior and you're trying to figure out what actually happens. But it's a waste of effort here. If you don't have UB, you don't need to do that. If you do have UB it's not enough, not nearly enough. It's useful for debugging but it won't predict whether your code is safe into the future.

To put it another way, if we're looking at optimizations listing gotchas, when there's UB it's like half the optimizations in the entire compiler are annotated with "this could break badly if there's UB". You can't predict it.
by username223 | 2025-06-03 20:27:40+00:00
> Java has had AOT compilation for a while, so traditional GC and its massive overhead are no longer a strict necessity.

You mean it does escape analysis and stack-allocates what it can? That would definitely help, but not eliminate the GC. Or are you thinking of something else?

Thinking about it more, I remember that Java also has some performance-hostile design decisions baked in (e.g. almost everything's an Object, arrays aren't packed, dynamic dispatch everywhere). Swift doesn't have that legacy to deal with.
by enragedcacti | 2025-06-03 20:28:46+00:00
It's still pretty trivial to trick them. 4o-mini, 2.5 Flash, and 2.5 Pro all still fall for variations of this:

> A boy is in a car crash and is taken to the hospital. The surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy, I'm his father!" Who is the surgeon to the boy?

> The surgeon is the boy's mother.
by maxpr | 2025-06-03 20:29:12+00:00
Exactly, this is a great direction!

We believe automatic discovery + i18n processing is the most natural next step for i18n on the web, since LLMs now exist.

And we feel that not only will industry standard i18n libraries like i18next or react-intl adopt it soon, but frameworks like next.js or remix.js themselves will make it one of their core features.

We originally built Lingo.dev Compiler scratching our own itch, but we're really excited to see how the industry will evolve from here!
by mikewarot | 2025-06-03 20:29:33+00:00
The thing I keep finding in old stuff, with point to point wiring, is connections that just aren't. One time I found a ground lug on a chassis of a grounded grid amplifier that didn't ground! Another time I found a bad solder joint that left the TV factory like that in 1947 and somehow escaped repair ever since.

It's usually something stupid.
by tharmas | 2025-06-03 20:29:57+00:00
What about the Russian speaking Ukrainians? How do u think they felt when they tried to ban Russian?

West good, Russia evil? Cmon its way more nuanced than that. And the Ukrainian speaking Ukrainian elites are no better than the Russian elites. Or the Western elites for that matter.

Ukraine is a pawn in the Geopolitical power game. The people have been sacrificed on both sides.

Its the morally bankrupt and corrupt Elites who should be in the firing line.
by MechaDave | 2025-06-03 20:29:58+00:00
I knew Dean Sutherland at CMU, nice guy. And dad was right. Turns out an advanced grad-student software group had brought me in (back in 2004) because their grad students couldn't build reliable software for the real world, and their military "research partners" were getting rather p.o.'d. But I'm a non-degreed Mechatronics Systems Engineer, in the truest sense of the word. I'm old enough to predate software engineering programs. I learned robotics and automation because I was curious, it fueled my ADD, and I kept at it... in the beginning I used plug-in cards for the IBM PC, but I knew basic electronics as a hobby (ham radio, telephonics, heathkit, etc.) and I devoured books. Anything I could get my hands on. Especially Byte magazine and Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar columns. So get copies of Forest Mims III stuff, and get an arduino or raspberry pi (you can even get/run Codesys on a pi, to learn PLC stuff) and get magazine issues/books from Make: and watch lots of youtube from ElectroBoom and AvE and get your hands dirty. Remember, you can be skilled at robotics without building Optimus. Currently I'm building and programming high speed mail handling equipment. Not sexy, but it pays the bills and fuels my dopamine. It's all servomotors and sensors and decision logic. And challenging too, paper's moving at 1/8" per millisecond at mid-speeds, you need to be an efficient coder and pre-optimizing your logic, and it's all state machines, all the way down. Good luck. I make bank, but I'm driven in a thousand directions and I push and I try and while I may be wrong 70% of the time, that would get me into the allstar game if it was baseball! Never give up, and never surrender! LOL
by evan_ | 2025-06-03 20:29:58+00:00
> I would expect "I'm from Earth" to get about as much respect as "I'm from Olduvai Gorge".

Maybe that's because we don't have cultural traditions that identifiably connect us to that. (We probably do, but they're so deeply ingrained that we can't even identify them as "culture").

People of Italian extraction have a certain affinity for Italians, German-descendants for Germans, etc- Unless we just totally forget about Earth-That-Was I think it's reasonable to think we'd find it interesting in 1000 years.
by mulmen | 2025-06-03 20:30:06+00:00
> I wonder how quickly this will fall apart as LLM content proliferates. If it’s bad now, how bad will it be in a few years when there’s loads of false but credible LLM generated blogspam in the training data?

There is already misinformation online so only the marginal misinformation is relevant. In other words do LLMs generate misinformation at a higher rate than their training set?

For raw information retrieval from the training set misinformation may be a concern but LLMs aren’t search engines.

Emergent properties don’t rely on facts. They emerge from the relationship between tokens. So even if an LLM is trained only on misinformation abilities may still emerge at which point problem solving on factual information is still possible.
by benhurmarcel | 2025-06-03 20:30:43+00:00
> I feel like the most sensible policy is requiring licenses for e-bikes above a certain power level (not easy!)

It’s already the case in the EU and the UK. An e-bike is limited to 250 W and 15.5 mph (25 km/h). Above that it’s a speedbike and require a license, helmet, insurance, licence plate, and cannot use cycle lanes.

Also, actual e-bikes aren’t that much heavier than normal city bikes, maybe 5 kg extra.
by haiku2077 | 2025-06-03 20:31:13+00:00
On every project I ship I require golangci-lint to pass to allow merge, which forces you to explicitly handle or ignore errors. It forbids implicitly ignoring errors.

Note that ignoring errors doesn't necessarily lead ti a crash; there are plenty of functions where an error won't ever happen in practice, either because preconditions are checked by the program before the function call or because the function's implementation has changed and the error return is vestigal.
by maxpr | 2025-06-03 20:31:17+00:00
we've added support for both these cases actually! :)

1. `data-lingo-skip` - excludes a jsx node from i18n 2. `data-lingo-override-<locale code>` - overrides version in <locale code> language with a custom value 3. also `data-lingo-context`

(docs, perhaps, aren't yet the best, but here they are: https://lingo.dev/compiler/configuration/advanced)
by atombender | 2025-06-03 20:31:18+00:00
> The only situation where you need to get precise error types is when you need to provide specific details from those specific types to the consumer, which is rare.

It's not rare in my experience. All they apps I work on have a central unhandled error handler in the API that converts Go errors to HTTP or gRPC error responses, and then falls back to a general "internal error" if no specific error could be mapped. I can think of many other instances where we have a switch over half a dozen error typed in order to translate them into other types across RPC or pub/sub boundaries.

> And even in those rare cases, user code does that work via errors.As, not this manual Unwrap loop process you're suggesting here.

As() does not work with switch statements unless you pre-declare a ton (in our case, often a couple of dozen) error variables. Secondly, it is deeply inefficient. As() traverses the cause tree recursively for every single error, so if you have 30 possible error types to compare, and an error typically wraps 3 layers deep, that's a worst case of 30 loop iterations with 90 cases, as opposed to my method, which is 3 loops.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-03 20:31:41+00:00
I think there are enough examples of genuine AI-facilitated rapid application development out there already, honestly. I wouldn't have anything to add to the pile, since I'm not a RAD kind of guy.

Disillusionment seems to spring from expecting the model to be a god or a genie instead of a code generator. Some people are always going to be better at using tools than other people are. I don't see that changing, even though the tools themselves are changing radically.
by kentonv | 2025-06-03 20:33:24+00:00
That's me. I'm the expert.

On my very most productive days of my entire career I've managed to produce ~1000 lines of code. This library is ~5000 (including comments, tests, and documentation, which you omitted for some reason). I managed to prompt it out of the AI over the course of about five days. But they were five days when I also had a lot of other things going on -- meetings, chats, code reviews, etc. Not my most productive.

So I estimate it would have taken me 2x-5x longer to write this library by hand.
by airspeedswift | 2025-06-03 20:33:32+00:00
Swift, Rust, and C++ all share the same underlying techniques for implementing zero-cost abstrations (primarily, fully-specialized generics). The distinction in Swift's case is that generics can also be executed without specialization (which is what allows generic methods to be called over a stable ABI boundary).

Swift and Rust also allow their protocols to be erased and dispatched dynamically (dyn in Rust, any in Swift). But in both languages that's more of a "when you need it" thing, generics are the preferred tool.
by realitybit3z | 2025-06-03 20:33:57+00:00
IN RESPONSE TO: Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP

there are like 4 factors besides ZIRP i've witnessed as a hiring manager

- Layoff or dont hire locals in favor of H1b/H4

- Layoff or dont hire locals in favor of Nearshore and Offshore

- Section 174 Tax code on software: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

- More productivity via LLMs, Code Assist
by taylodl | 2025-06-03 20:34:25+00:00
There's a time and a place for everything.

AI-generated jingles? Absolutely! Nothing says "buy now" like a robot with perfect pitch.

AI-generated ad copy? You bet! Soulless selling from a soulless source.

AI-generated news synopsis? Sure! So long as it’s labeled clearly and doesn’t start quoting Nietzsche.

But when it comes to music, poetry, fiction, or art-I draw the line. I don’t ask my hammer to write me a sonnet, and I don’t need my toaster composing symphonies.

Let the machines handle the mundane. The messy, beautiful, human stuff? That’s ours.
by adammarples | 2025-06-03 20:34:42+00:00
The drone scenario is very different, all you have to do is get close-ish to your target. This is very different than having a stick of c4 sit on your target for months. You have to get them to drone-range, say in the back of a lorry, on a roof somewhere, in a box. Then the programming and or AI can kick in and do the last mile for you, whenever you need. Case in point is the Ukrainian attack on the air fields, they parked a lorry nearby.
by amarcheschi | 2025-06-03 20:34:55+00:00
They can establish better base conditions so that the top performers that individually bargain would obtain better conditions - ie 4 work days rather than 5 -. It's a silly example, it might not be 4 work days, but given that we have the actual 40hrs week thanks to striking and unions the gist remains. You are actually benefitting of the advances made by unions even if you're not part of one - in addition to your performance
by andrewla | 2025-06-03 20:35:21+00:00
Without doing further research, what are some ways that the laws could have evolved in this direction?

I practically guarantee that for each idea you will be able to find a municipality that tried it and found that it didn't work for what in retrospect were very obvious reasons.

The fact of the matter is that society was changing, and that was it. Places where cars go are not compatible with places that people go and cars were getting cheaper and more common and more necessary all the time.
by prmoustache | 2025-06-03 20:35:26+00:00
I am just...asking. Are people outside of IT not able to have a comfortable life there and all living in misery? I am in a way different country probably but there are lots of people living with a third or a quarter of my current salary in the same city I live and while none of us is considered rich, they are not in total misery and seem to be relatively comfortable as long as they manage their expense wisely. People here don't seem to need to buy/consume whatever thing or service is deemed new/cool/trendy like in more "consumption focused countries". I don't know about NZ but here we enjoy spending most of our non working hours outside.

I moved nearly 6 years ago from one very wealthy country to another much less wealthy. I chose a job with a 3 times lower salary. While I miss parts of my life in that previous country and understand my retirement will be lower, I still find a lot of positives in that life change for various other reasons.

When you move from one country to another, reaching the maximun salary you can obtain is not necessarily the most important parameter/goal.
by realitybit3z | 2025-06-03 20:35:40+00:00
IN RESPONSE TO: There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'.

This one is really bad. I have waves of local grads begging for unpaid internships or work now. They all were AP students, good GPAs, good schools, "learned to code", took on 200k of college debt -- only to find the promised job is just not frigging there at the end of the line. Meanwhile, they are told there is a "massive shortage of coders" and see overseas workers hired into those same jobs. How do younger people trust the system anymore? Further, in light of this, why would any steel-worker (metaphorically speaking) want to retrain and learn to code if even the geeks learning to code face dismal outcomes?
by tomnipotent | 2025-06-03 20:36:07+00:00
> but instead trying to use the IP-hostile conduct of Google and certain startups (like Scribd or GrooveShark) to smear all developers

I challenge you to point out the language in his post making this claim. Otherwise you're just making stuff up.

He's specifically addressing high-level arguments used against LLM's, and this case he's calling out the fact that one group of people are railing against LLM providers for "IP theft" while simultaneously encouraging and using pirated content. It's perfectly reasonable to call out the hypocrisy in these contradictory positions, to demonstrate that the "IP theft" argument is mostly virtue signaling.