MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-06-17 22:38:47+00:00
A big difference is that compilers are deterministic, and coders generally don't review and patch the generated assembly. There's little reason to expect that LLMs will ever function like that. It's always going to be a back-and-forth of, "hey LLM code this up", "no, function f isn't quite right; do this instead", etc.

This mimics what you see in, say, Photoshop. You can edit pixels manually, you can use deterministic tools, and you can use AI. If you care about the final result, you're probably going to use all three together.

I don't think we'll ever get to the point where we a-priori present a spec to an LLM and then not even look at the code, i.e. "English as a higher-level coding language". The reason is, code is simply more concise and explicit than trying to explain the logic in English in totality up-front.

For some things where you truly don't care about the details and have lots of flexibility, maybe English-as-code could be used like that, similar to image generation from a description. But I expect for most business-related use cases, the world is going to revolve around actual code for a long time.
by legitster | 2025-06-17 22:39:08+00:00
Whether or not you like Google or their practices, I don't necessarily understand people who insist on getting something for free and also get upset about the service. There are many bad/unreasonable things YouTube does but this is the least objectionable, imho.

As the saying go, "if the product is free, you are the product". Pay for your stuff, or you degrade yourself.

I'll just say that Youtube Premium has been a good value and there's comfort knowing that creators get a ton more revenue from my views.
by guywithahat | 2025-06-17 22:39:57+00:00
But then we return to the premise of the article, which is that LLM's struggle with higher level code that has fewer examples. C is much more repetitive and has millions of examples from decades of use.

Plus if we assume the bottle neck on skynet is physical materials and not processing power, a system written in C can theoretically always be superior to a system written in another language if we assume infinite time can be spent building it.
by pohuing | 2025-06-17 22:40:09+00:00
In addition to the other concerns of evaporative cooling, there is one issue with a simple water cooled loop that just runs river water through a heat exchanger and then dumps it again. You can only raise a river's temperature so much before it becomes a problem for the ecosystem. This issue has in the past forced power plant shutdowns, so it's not that simple.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-6268/french-nuclear-plant-l...
by lordofgibbons | 2025-06-17 22:40:40+00:00
> WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, meaning a service provider in the middle can’t read a message.

I wish this meme that "whatsapp is secure because it uses e2e encryption" would die.

Why does it matter if the messages are e2e encrypted if the messages are managed on the two ends of the channel by a closed source binary that does who-knows-what.

The whatsapp app itself sees the clear text message. What it does with that information... or what "metadata" it extracts to send to their servers.. who knows.
by badc0ffee | 2025-06-17 22:41:05+00:00
There's a HDR video on that page, and on my built-in MBP display, it's much brighter/has noticeably more range than the rest of the UI. Moving the window to my non-HDR external 4k monitor, it looks like a regular YouTube video.

The video looks the same in both Safari and Firefox, whereas the images are dim in Firefox on both my MBP display and external monitor.
by gopiandcode | 2025-06-17 22:41:58+00:00
Arguably it really depends on your DSL right? If it has a semantics that already lies close to existing programming languages, then I'd agree that a few examples might be sufficient, but what if your particular domain doesn't match as closely?

Examples of domains that might be more challenging to design DSLs for: languages for knitting, non-deterministic languages to represent streaming etc. (i.e https://pldi25.sigplan.org/details/pldi-2025-papers/50/Funct... )

My main concern is that LLMs might excel at the mundane tasks, but struggle at the more exciting advances, and so now the activation energy for coming up with advances DSLs is going to increase and as a result, the field might stagnate.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-17 22:42:40+00:00
> new trend of defending American Imperialism by claiming that the other side doesn’t recognize the human beingness of the Other

It’s not defending or supporting but pointing out that not every foreign policy choice made on the planet is a result of our actions. There is a mixture of culpability, credit and thus obligation to fix things.

And I’m not going off on a humanistic arc. The criticism is in line with that of Big Man historical models, or conspiratorial ones involving all-knowing shadow governments. These models are simpler to apply than reality, which involves imperfect (and changing) actors acting through the fogs of war and history.
by reillyse | 2025-06-17 22:43:27+00:00
The only explanation that makes sense to me, is that there are some psychopaths in charge of American foreign policy and their thinking goes like this.

1) we want to control oil and oil prices because it’s crucial to our bank accounts. 2) if the Middle East unites we will lose control over oil 3) we must make sure they never unite 4) we need to support varying regimes to increase instability in the region. If we keep the Middle East fighting we can continue to extract oil.

Lots has changed since 50s so one would think this strategy would get updated, but it seems it has not.

(Also for the record I think this is abhorrent, but I think some people do think like this)
by janalsncm | 2025-06-17 22:43:55+00:00
Protests are usually messy and there’s not one single reason people are upset.

Some people are upset with the deportations (US law).

Some people are upset about rescinding visas due to political speech (violation of norms).

Some people are upset because due process is being violated (law).

Some people are upset because the law enforcers are hiding their identities (norm/law).
by kibwen | 2025-06-17 22:44:04+00:00
Wonderful and evocative article.

> We lounged at a nearby gas station to wait, sipping tea and reading the local newspaper. There was something very “old world” about this — here we were, in the largest town in our county, dressed well, idling with a purpose. Leafing through that newspaper, dipping the teabag up and down in my hot paper cup, watching the traffic, nodding at passers-by; we were in town on official business, and yet we were doing exactly nothing. I realized as we sat that this way of doing things used to be a great deal more common — that train stations, courts, libraries, street benches, barber shops, and so on simply used to have a lot more people waiting publicly.
by hollowturtle | 2025-06-17 22:44:17+00:00
> LLMs really are like combine harvesters; allowing one to do the work of many.

Heck I'm so tired of statements like this, many who? It's already a lot an LLM that automate/help the boring/tedious part of my job, I have yet to see taking over 2, 5 or 10 of my collegues, just knowing what a hawful lot these tiredlessly dudes do I couldn't ever imagine doing also their job. imo such statements have very short shelf life
by nis0s | 2025-06-17 22:44:24+00:00
> What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.

In general, I advise people against believing psychology study results unless those results have been confirmed by other groups. From what I can tell though, the primal tendencies of people exist at all levels of the socioeconomic strata, and believing otherwise is ill-advised.

Secondly, it’s not that billionaires are different, it’s the systems which support them that make them who they are. China and Russia routinely let their billionaires know exactly who’s in charge of power.
by platevoltage | 2025-06-17 22:44:46+00:00
I see your point, but I'm having personally having a different experience.

A client of mine has gotten quite good at using Bolt and Lovable. He has since put me on 3 more projects that he dreamed up and vibe coded that would just be a figment of his imagination pre-AI.

He knows what's involved in software development, and knows that he can't take it all the way with these tools.
by outofpaper | 2025-06-17 22:45:01+00:00
Depending on the size of a DSL all the more recent LLMs can be employed to work with them. LoRA/Finetuning are a heavier option, followed by RAG, and just setting them up as a big system prompt and caching. And once a model is able to work with a DSL tokens used in valuable code creation can dramatically drop.
by hansjorg | 2025-06-17 22:45:11+00:00
> Why are the right libertarians and 2A folks not speaking up right now

It has been entertaining listening to the people at Reason Magazine lately. They have convinced themselves thoroughly that they're not actually racist authoritarians, so now that they're getting what they really want, but it's so diametrically opposed to what they say they believe, they have to contort themselves endlessly.

Do not expect any kind of help from those kinds of people. Their anti-authoritarianism is largely performative or reserved to their in-group. When it's not performative, it's just rich kids complaining they're not allowed do to whatever they want.
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-17 22:45:15+00:00
Yeah, I don't expect that driving on wide laned, well-marked stretches of interstates like I-5 is problematic, especially in nice weather.

Let's try Pittsburgh in snow in December, and then see.

Mind you as recently as 12 months ago there were still videos of Teslas happily taking straight lines through roundabouts.
by whatshisface | 2025-06-17 22:45:22+00:00
You may know more about this than I do, but what happened in Iraq was that the first military governor held together the same people who were under Saddam in a semi-stable arrangement, but was replaced with someone else that had instructions from Washington to conduct "De-Ba'athification," for some reason. This lead quickly to the collapse of the state due to the persecution of everyone who had any authority, and the replacement of Iraqi systems with military administration at all levels down to the villages as far as it could be maintained, which created the ten year war.

I do not think it would be to the benefit of people who live in Iran, even if they were Christian, to live through the bombings and mass destruction of the proposed war in exchange for life under US territorial administration, which has not been very good historically.
by typewithrhythm | 2025-06-17 22:45:46+00:00
You seem to have the opposite perspective on the relationship between someone who makes a product and customers...

I am never looking at one specific person or group when planning what to invest time in, I'm looking for the best return.

Its not a fair start point to claim I'm thinking on the level of who deserves access. Usually I'm following my own plans to try to break even.
by NicuCalcea | 2025-06-17 22:46:01+00:00
While it's just anecdotal evidence, I have translator friends and work has indeed been drying up over the past decade, and that has only accelerated with the introduction of LLMs. Just check any forum or facebook group for translators, it's all doom and gloom about AI. See this reddit thread, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/comments/173okwg...

While professionals still produce much better quality translations, the demand for everything but the most sensitive work is nearly gone. Would you recommend your offspring get into the industry?
by kibwen | 2025-06-17 22:46:34+00:00
Yes, that's why I say it's a terrible analogy, but we live in a crap world with a fetish for waste and no incentive for quality, so I fear for a future where every night we just have the server farm spin up a thousand batch jobs to regenerate the entire codebase from scratch and pick out the first candidate that passes today's test suite.
by daneel_w | 2025-06-17 22:46:34+00:00
The trackers only deal with torrents' info hash. No names, no descriptions, no list of contents, no nothing. opentracker, to use OP's chosen software as example, can run in both white- and blacklist mode (or whatever equivalent terminology it uses today). The former is self-explanatory, and the latter allows all hashes except the blacklisted ones. All open trackers, such as torrent.eu and opentrackr.org to name a couple, always operate in a blacklist fashion in order to openly accommodate any users to congregate for (almost) any content.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-17 22:46:41+00:00
> Imagine if someone installed a puppet king in the USA to exploit the resources of the US for their gain

Literally the colonial governors.

> it’s still around because the only other option is being a puppet of the US

Iran didn’t have to become a hardline theocracy, or a state sponsor of terror, or a nuclear pariah. The IRGC didn’t have to be corrupt and autocratic [1].

The tragedy of the present is it still doesn’t have to be. And while we contributed to the malaise that gave rise to the Islamic Republic (and continue to contribute to its geopolitical insecurity), it’s a step too far to say we caused it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_th...
by daxfohl | 2025-06-17 22:46:45+00:00
This is somewhat my take too. The way most vibe coding happens right now does create a lot of duplication because it's cheap and easy for LLMs to do. But eventually as the things we do with coding assistants become more complex, they're not necessarily going to be able to deal with huge swaths of duplicate code any better than humans are. Given their limited context size, having a DSL that allows them to fit more logic into their context with fewer tokens, we could conceivably see the importance of DSLs start to increase rather than decrease.
by neilv | 2025-06-17 22:46:52+00:00
I was about to paste the same sentence, and say much the same thing in response.

To add to that... One limitation of LLM for a new DSL is that the LLM may be less likely to directly plagiarize from open source code. That could be a feature.

Another feature could be users doing their own work, and doing a better job of it, instead of "cheating on their homework" with AI slop and plagiarism, whether for school or in the workplace.
by fxtentacle | 2025-06-17 22:47:22+00:00
I believe the article is based on a wrong assumption. The author argues that everything could look more realistic and that VFX could pop more with stronger HDR, but in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to keep a stylized cartoon game also stylized in its brightness choices.

When you drive towards the sun, what is more fun? A realistic HDR brightness that blinds you, or a „wrong“ brightness level that helps the background stay in the background without interrupting your flow? Similarly, should eye candy like little sparks grab your attention by being the brightest object on screen? I’d say no.

The hardware can handle full HDR and more brightness, but one could argue that the game is more fun with incorrect brightness scaling…
by Avshalom | 2025-06-17 22:47:25+00:00
US internal politics are also US external politics and all of this shit has been cheerled by the biggest names in Silicon Valley.

Hey remember when Peter Theil said we should get rid of democracy and Paul Graham said "we aren't going to like, stop giving money to people because of their opinions"? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Remember when the A in A16Z ran the futurist manifesto through a thesaurus?

Remember when Musk spent a quarter billion dollars to ensure this exact outcome?
by qingcharles | 2025-06-17 22:47:40+00:00
I don't knock Banksy for making a buck here and there. I can't see he even licenses any of his art for merch. He says all his art is free for non-commercial use. I don't think there's any commercial aspect to his work. When I briefly knew some of his graffiti friends in the early 2000s they were struggling like crazy to try and make a quid or two from their art. They were all doing art-for-art's-sake. They were selling their best pieces on eBay for peanuts to pay their bills, or to buy other art they wanted to own. I just regret not buying one of his first pieces when he was selling them for about 100 quid a piece o_O
by Ryanwalker64 | 2025-06-17 22:47:45+00:00
Hey HN!

I built NextStep, a simple business process management tool.

NextStep, make it's easy create, document and run step-by-step business processes in minutes

Processes run everything, from landing planes to onboarding employees and resolving customer support tickets.

The crazy part is that often our most set up processes aren't even documented...let alone set up to be run repeatably

I wanted to create something simple. Something any person or team could actually use. Clean like Notion. Structured like Airtable. Easy to get up and running in minutes.

If you have time, give it a go, and let me know what you think!

-Ryan
by lproven | 2025-06-17 22:47:56+00:00
https://andrewzuo.com/apple-study-says-ai-cant-code-4ca19779...

https://leaddev.com/technical-direction/ai-models-cant-under...

https://www.codeflash.ai/post/llms-struggle-to-write-perform...

https://community.openai.com/t/llms-seem-to-be-flawed-at-the...

It's late, I couldn't be bothered to search for more than 30 sec.

Your statement is as incorrect as your others.
by nsriv | 2025-06-17 22:48:08+00:00
It comes down to insurance and salvage titles mostly. In PA, the vehicle I have experience with was valued by insurance at $11.5k, minus a $500 deductible, so $11k. That value determination was made by the insurance company by market factors, which is why market value comes into play. Looking around at comparable used vehicles of same make, model, year, mileage, I found that to be fair price.

The cost to repair from multiple shops within transportable distance (important consideration as I'm sure someone somewhere could have done it for less) was $16k. To get it to an ugly but functional state was about $10k, which would have to be paid out of pocket.

Even if repaired to "roadworthy" condition, it would need to be reinspected and if deemed to be roadworthy would hold a salvage title, meaning insurance would go through the roof, my liability coverage would be dropped, and the car could not be resold. If not deemed roadworthy, more cost.

Needless to say, I considered the car totaled and used the $11k for a down payment towards another Honda.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-17 22:48:18+00:00
I have a Samsung Galaxy S10e, and a ThinkPad T14s Gen4 (AMD). And stable internet. Every time I search Google on the phone, typing input into the search bar lags for ~20 seconds, so badly that the letters randomly jump around in the text box (away from where the cursor is). It happens on the laptop too (to a lesser extent) when I'm on battery with power saving.

When I complain about this, I get downvoted by angry people. They blame me for using "old" or "buggy" devices (they're not that old or slow), and blame my internet connection (it's fast and stable). Is it the CPU? The bandwidth? Latency? Some weird platform-specific bug? Who knows. But if every other web page I visit does not have this problem, then it's not my device, it's the website's design.

Whenever practical, you should design for efficiency. That means not using more resources then you have to, choosing a method that's fast rather than slow, trying to avoid unnecessary steps, etc. Of course people will downvote me for saying that too. Their first comment is going to be that this is "premature optimization". But it isn't "premature" to pick a design that isn't bloated and slow. If you know what you are doing, it's not hard to choose an efficient design.

Every year software is more bloated, more buggy. New software is released constantly, but it isn't materially better than what we had decades ago. New devs I talk to seem to know less and less about how computers work at all. Perhaps the enshittification of technology isn't the tech itself getting shittier, as it can't actually make itself worse. In an industry that doesn't have minimum standards, perhaps it's the people that are enshittifying.
by dale_huevo | 2025-06-17 22:48:36+00:00
They kicked off the article saying that no one uses bzip2 anymore. A million cycles saved for something no one uses (according to them) is still 0% battery life saved.

If modern CPUs are so power efficient and have so many spare cycles to allocate to e.g. eye candy no one asked for, then no one is counting and the comparison is irrelevant.
by crtified | 2025-06-17 22:48:45+00:00
Yes I think you're exactly right. In my case, the set wasn't there, because my heart was never in nightclubbing or its style of music, in general. Getting persuaded by friends to have enjoyable MDMA experiences with them in that setting didn't change those preferences, or magically turn on some Dance switch.

And in that sense, "MDMA is amazing to dance on" is as much of a general misconception as "Psychedelics give great spiritual experiences". They tend to apply to people who already pursue those particular ends.
by BugheadTorpeda6 | 2025-06-17 22:49:15+00:00
I work in Texas and this is definitely a real thing. In person and within the company, sometimes swearing happens. It would certainly get you in trouble if it happened a lot on customer calls though. We may not care personally about it, but who knows what your customers opinion on it is, so it is better to be polite. It is also very easy to just try not to swear unless you are one of those people that has been swearing like a sailor in every sentence your entire life, which would probably be interpreted as you having some kind of self control problem.

I should also mention that this attitude is not just a liberal vs conservative thing. I've lived in Austin and Houston and Dallas (all three are about as liberal as any other major city in the country) and swearing in a formal setting is frowned upon in all three.
by lukan | 2025-06-17 22:49:16+00:00
"Was the big bang just a spontaneous event that happened for no reason? Did some sentient being trigger it? I don't know, I can't know, there's nothing more to talk or think about."

Your decision, but other people do think and wrote papers about it.

https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/blogs/space-cos...

And mysticism isn't the same as superstition. In its broadest sense, it is a individual experience of the mysterium of the universe.
by chinabison | 2025-06-17 22:49:34+00:00
After suffering a mass layoff last year, one observation points to explicit and endemic ageism:

All my former colleagues and reports 15-20 years younger than me landed jobs within a matter of months. Those of us 50+ remain unemployed a year later. It isn't about skills; I was at the top of my game when a layoff robbed me of my livelihood. It isn't a matter of pay. One of my former reports whom I mentored when I was a senior IC left right before the layoff hit with a job offer making as much as I was at the time as a manager.

It was even explicitly revealed to me by an insider and former colleague who referred me to one position that I didn't get that the hiring committee wanted to go with someone younger, after which he caught himself and backtracked saying "earlier in their career". I was told on another occasion that I'd make a great addition as a manager or principal IC, but that they were reviewing their needs and deciding to search for someone less senior.

Ageism is 100% real.