MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ednite | 2025-06-07 21:46:06+00:00
Great read. For me, this topic brings up such a mixed bag of questions. I do think there’s real truth in the idea that relying too early on LLMs can stunt creativity. Like the author, I believe that if you skip the messy part of writing, figuring out what you actually want to say, you miss out on developing your own voice. That struggle matters.

At the same time, I can’t help but think about calculators. I know it’s a primitive comparison to what we’re dealing with today, but in some ways it’s still relevant. People once worried calculators would kill mental math. Debates were endless and sure, maybe we did lose something, but we also gained a lot. We adapted.

What feels different now is the speed. AI is moving fast and hitting every industry at once. Some are diving in, others are holding back, and most people are somewhere in between, trying to keep up while figuring out what it means for their work, their kids, or their creativity.

I do worry about the younger generation, especially those growing up with this tech baked into daily life. If AI ends up doing the thinking, writing, and problem-solving for them, how will that shape their ability to reason, learn, or build original ideas?

To me, the real challenge isn’t AI itself, it’s the pace of adoption. It’s simply outpacing our current education systems and frameworks for developing human skills. So I get why it feels threatening. It’s not fear of the tool, it’s fear of what gets lost if we skip the part where we teach people how to use it meaningfully.

That’s why, at least for myself, I try to see it for what it is: a powerful tool. As someone new to blogging, I approach it the same way I’ve approached my IT work, use the best tools available, but don’t forget the purpose. I still want to write in my own voice, to work through ideas and get better at expressing them. If AI can help sharpen that process, that’s great. But it can’t do the work for me.
by AIPedant | 2025-06-07 21:46:36+00:00
What this really reflects is that before these problems were solved it was assumed (without any real evidence) the solutions required something like intelligence. But that turned out to not be the case, and “AI” is the wrong term to use.

There’s also the effect of “machine learning” being used imprecisely so it inhabits a squishy middle between “computational statistics” and “AI.”
by axi0m | 2025-06-07 21:47:16+00:00
>> what if we treated prompts as the actual source code?

And they probably will be. Looks like prompts have become the new higher-level coding language, the same way JavaScript is a human-friendly abstraction of an existing programming language (like C), which is already a more accessible way to write assembly itself, and the same goes for the underlying binary code... I guess we eventually reached the final step in the development chain, bridging the gap between hardware instructions and human language.
by kiitos | 2025-06-07 21:47:33+00:00
> I'm still deciding what gets built and how it is designed, which is the interesting part.

How, exactly? Do you think that you're "deciding what gets built and how it's designed" by iterating on the prompts that you feed to the LLM that generates the code?

Or are you saying that you're somehow able to write the "interesting" code, and can instruct the LLM to generate the "boring and obvious" code that needs to be filled-in to make your interesting code work? (This is certainly not what's indicated by your commit history, but, who knows?)
by Stratoscope | 2025-06-07 21:48:42+00:00
HyperCard was great, but it wasn't the inspiration for Visual Basic.

I was on the team that built Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "Visual" side of Visual Basic.

Alan Cooper did the initial design of the product, via a prototype he called Tripod.

Alan had an unusual design philosophy at the time. He preferred to not look at any existing products that may have similar goals, so he could "design in a vacuum" from first principles.

I will ask him about it, but I'm almost certain that he never looked at HyperCard.
by nicoburns | 2025-06-07 21:48:50+00:00
> If you "just" rely on them not to do that, then your internals will effectively be frozen forever.

Or they will be broken when you change them and they upgrade. The JavaScript ecosystem uses this convention and generally if a field is prefixed by an underscore and/or documented as being non-public then you can expect to break in future versions (and this happens frequently in practice).

Not necessarily saying that's better, but it is another choice that's available.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-07 21:49:14+00:00
>China is a socialist democracy

What in the world have you been smoking? One single political party has run the country with no major dissent allowed since 1949 and you consider this a socialist democracy? Hint: it's not very democratic if your voting ballots only allow candidates from one legally permitted party.

>Russia is a brutal Bourgeois dictatorship

"Bourgeois"? Care to define that a bit. Did you cut off all your reading about contrived social labels with books from the early 20th century?
by throwanem | 2025-06-07 21:49:58+00:00
I've replaced my D5300's viewfinder focusing screen a couple of times, back before I outgrew the need for focusing aids. I also wouldn't try debayering its sensor! But that sort of thing is what cheap beater bodies off your friendly local camera store's used counter, or eBay, were made for. Pixel count isn't everything, and how better to find out whether the depth of your interest would reward serious investment, than to see whether and how soon it outgrows unserious? Indeed, my own entire interest in photography has developed just so, out of a simple annoyance at having begun to discover what a 2016 phone camera couldn't do.
by ecesena | 2025-06-07 21:50:26+00:00
I'm not surprised, I don't think it has anything to do with AI, it's the same in blockchain and prob in all other fields.

I think ppl underestimate the cost of context switch between languages, even if you're really proficient in more than one.

If you're a team with 1-2 eng and have to build a frontend, you are forced to use js/ts. Now, if you can keep everything in a monorepo in the same language, you're simply moving faster. And I'm sure people will criticize and bring counter examples... but statistically 60-70% of the teams will just be faster working this way.

My first startup was frontend php, backend python, 2 eng; soon we specialized one working on frontend, the other on backend, it's tedious to context switch. My last startup was typescript for everything, again 2 eng, same code base, same coding style, both iterating on all code. (And daily I work in rust & C, I'm definitely not a frontend eng nor a js/ts enthusiast, I'm just reflecting on efficiency.)
by 57473m3n7Fur7h3 | 2025-06-07 21:51:41+00:00
In his defence, that attribute has been available in browsers since March 2017 according to your link [1], whereas the most recent commit in the repo for the dithering tool was in March 2016 by the looks of it.

https://github.com/gazs/canvas-atkinson-dither

He’s still active on GitHub though, in other repos. Maybe he will accept a pull request? :)

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorE...
by gulaydin | 2025-06-07 21:52:21+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve been working on Nurofile, a tool to replace resumes with AI-powered professional identities.

I spent years in hiring and marketing, and realized how outdated and broken resumes are. While ATS and AI systems evolved to help companies, candidates are still stuck formatting PDFs and guessing keywords.

Nurofile builds a dynamic, AI-driven profile that adapts to each job you apply for. It generates tailored resumes, learns from your background, and eventually speaks for you, so you don’t need to rewrite your story for every application.

I just launched the beta. Would love any feedback, feature ideas, or critique. It’s very early, but I’m trying to push the format of “resumes” into the future.
by gffrd | 2025-06-07 21:52:25+00:00
Agree. There will always be operators … the goal would be to get numbers as low as possible while also forcing/keeping illegitimate operators out.

I acknowledge this means funneling those left to a small number who will make lots of money … hey look, now I’m describing Vegas.

Agree on permissiveness. I think reducing ease of access would cut users down to 1/5 … though not sure if that’s realistic with the cat out of the bag.
by rsync | 2025-06-07 21:52:27+00:00
Wow this has gone off the rails quickly.

To wit: Arsenic is not an essential micronutrient.

"Trace quantities of arsenic have been proposed to be an essential dietary element in rats, hamsters, goats, and chickens. Research has not been conducted to determine whether small amounts of arsenic may play a role in human metabolism." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic
by serf | 2025-06-07 21:52:30+00:00
Cursor is the only product that I have cancelled in 20+ years due to a lack of customer service response.

Emailed them multiple times over weeks about billing questions -- not a single response. These weren't like VS code questions , either -- they needed Cursor staff intervention.

No problem getting promo emails though!

The quicker their 'value' can be spread to other services the better, imo. Maybe the next group will answer emails.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-07 21:52:45+00:00
San Diego has the worst tap water for drinking I have ever experienced in the US. When I lived there, pretty much everyone had a reverse osmosis system installed to make it drinkable.

Fortunately, I live in the Pacific Northwest currently, which generally has some of the best tasting water you’ll find anywhere. No one would dream of not drinking the tap water.
by sumanthvepa | 2025-06-07 21:54:21+00:00
Here's a neat trick: Section 174 US tax code changes make purchasing a SaaS license a better deal than building in house. So do the R&D in a jurisdiction like India where the you can still deduct 100% of R&D under section 35. And purchase the SaaS in the US. (You have to be a non-US company for this to work and there are more details. Talk to your accountant.) Edit: fixed typos
by sltkr | 2025-06-07 21:55:26+00:00
You claimed:

> laws and “audits” do little more than nothing to meaningfully protect data

I asked you for evidence for this claim and you provided none.

Please either put up or shut up. I'm not going to keep engaging with you while you spout incendiary catch phrases while doing absolutely nothing to support your claims with evidence.

Case in point:

> look at how absurdly common it is for user data to get leaked - financial institutions, romance services, transportation services, everyone.

I disagree that this is common. Personally I haven't had any of my personal data leaked by any of these types of institutions. If you want to claim it's common that banks leak their customer's data, then you need to provide the evidence that supports that claim. It's how the burden of proof works.
by jorams | 2025-06-07 21:56:20+00:00
Bespoke version soup is unsustainable, but part of why people keep doing it is that it tends to work fine. It tends to work fine in part because OS-level libraries come from a different, much more conservative world, in which breaking backwards compatibility is something you try to avoid as much as possible.

So they can take a stable, well-managed OS as a base, use tools like mise and asdf to build a bespoke version soup of tools and language runtimes on top, then run an app on top of that. It will almost never break. When it does break, they fiddle with versions and small fixes until it works again, then move on. The fact that it broke is annoying, but unimportant. Anything that introduces friction, requires more learning, or requires more work is a waste of time.

Others would instead look for a solution to stop it from breaking ever again. This solution is allowed to introduce friction, require more learning, or require more work, because they consider the problem important. These people want Nix.

Most people are in the first group, so a company like Railway that wants to grow ends up with a solution that fits that group.
by kortilla | 2025-06-07 21:56:31+00:00
>For starters, Trump can simply revoke Elon's security clearance. There's no recourse for this. And that makes SpaceX's military contracts real awkward.

This isn't an issue. Execs nor shareholders are required to have clearance and even the ones that have clearance aren't read in to top secret stuff without a need to know. Elon's focus was starship which is quite far removed from any of those contracts (falcon gov launches or starshield). Gwynne Shotwell runs and will continue to run those parts of SpaceX just fine without Elon having clearance.
by gytrcrt | 2025-06-07 21:56:59+00:00
Thanks!

I agree that AI is a tool like calculators in history. Also, the education system and infrastructure are not ready to deal with the impact yet. I hope our awareness and conversation here is a small step forward to readiness.

I worry that major players like tech firms use the tool inappropriately and hurt the next generation more. For example, recommendation system enabled Instagram and TikTok, and Instagram and TikTok make us addicted. The firms are using the technology to exploit our human weakness. I can see how AI will be used in a similar way...
by gambiting | 2025-06-07 21:57:07+00:00
I remember when certain social media networks argued that having a real name policy will lead to a more polite, kinder internet, because people won't be as rude with their real names attached to their posts. Turns out, people really don't care. I see the most vile, disgusting, racist, xenophobic shit on Facebook every single day, with real names and pictures showing smiling happy people hugging their kids on every one of them. Like you said - people don't feel any need to care about honesty, character, or even appearance of politeness or good manners.
by grep_name | 2025-06-07 21:58:06+00:00
Eh. I've been using nixOS for years now and still find that I often desperately, desperately wish I could upgrade just one program that I need a new version of without risking that, you know, any individial single one of my installed packages has a change between the last update and now that messes up my workflow. Or that I could pin a version of a software that I'm happier with that version of without essentially rolling my own package repo. It is, in fact, the only package manager I'm aware of that makes it such a pain to do that. It's only because people in this thread are insisting it's doable that I say 'such a pain' instead of just 'impossible'.

A few weeks ago I needed to update firefox for a bug fix that was causing a crash, but of course that meant updating all of nixpkgs. When I finished the switch, the new version of pipewire was broken in some subtle way and I had to roll it back and have been dealing with firefox crashing once a week instead. I can't imagine pitching this to my team for development when I'm having this kind of avoidable issue just with regular packages that aren't even language dependencies.

To those who say 'if you want to lock your dependencies for a project, you can just build a nix flake from a locked file using the <rust | python | npm> tools' I say, why the hell would I want to do that? Being able to manage multiple ecosystems from the same configuration tool was half the draw of nix in the first place!
by dfc | 2025-06-07 21:59:04+00:00
I dont know how you came to that conclusion. Just looking at the top 4 contributors over the last 2 years[1] it looks like one works for google(gitster), two work at Github and one works at GitLab(pks-t).

[1]: https://github.com/git/git/graphs/contributors?from=6%2F3%2F...
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-07 22:00:32+00:00
I've thought about this, but I don't think so. My last two paragraphs addresses what I think are RO's risks.

First there has to be bacteria in the municipal water. The city does a pretty good job there,

Second there has to be organic matter for the bacteria to grow. Again, cities are good with that.

But even if you have bacteria in your water, a good RO system's pores should be smaller than a virus (really smaller than a prion) or it won't be able to remove metallic ions.

But let's assume after two years these assumptions fail because the filters get old. Replace the filters and flush the system with bleach.

My fear with RO are bad filters. I once had a Zero pitcher and it tasted bad, acidic. A few weeks later there was a recall that the RO membrane was leaking ionomers.

Moral of the story- trust your senses. If municipal water tastes bad, it's bad. If bottled water tastes bad, it's bad. If RO water tastes bad, it's bad.
by baobun | 2025-06-07 22:01:39+00:00
I think the part that's easy to miss is that their users are devs who will want to specify their own dependencies and versions for arbitrary packages.

The way nix works with the way nixpkgs is structured, pinning a version of any package means pinning a commit of the entire nixpkgs tree. Since package builds of node/python/ruby packages depend on stuff outside of the package dir in the tree, you need that mapping between versions and commits. It is also a leaky abstraction, so they will need to expose that to their users, who now may run into situations where they need to align various states of the nixpkgs repo when they just wanted to "yarn add new-fancy-nodejs-package-with-linked–native-deps".

Using nix without nixpkgs may be fine for more scoped use but seems hard to justify for a platform like Railway.
by JCattheATM | 2025-06-07 22:01:53+00:00
> my apologies, I did not mean to imply that dictionary definition of the terms are the same

You didn't, but you are saying there is no difference in supporting indrect evil from supporting direct evil, while there clearly is, since the terms have very different meanings and connotations.

> only financially supporting someone doing so much malicious damage to a country which is same if you buy a Tesla or use Google Chrome and have an iPhone…

Simply not true. Musk is no where near as malicious as other tech elites.
by vunderba | 2025-06-07 22:02:22+00:00
Thanks. OpenAI's docs are frustratingly vague about the whole thing. It seems (assuming the 15 minute hard limit holds true) that I must have been conversing with advanced mode for 15 minutes since Advanced is the default for Plus subscribers on the mobile app, and then it must have possibly handed it off to the standard voice mode after that.

Advanced https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9617425-advanced-voice-m...

Standard https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8400625-voice-mode-faq
by username223 | 2025-06-07 22:02:33+00:00
> If I was going to use AI to write my novel, I would literally be robbing myself of the pleasure of making it myself.

The same would be true if I were going to use AI to read it. If we just wanted to trade Clif Notes around, why bother with novels at all?

Cyber-Leo-Tolstoy types a three-page summary of "War and Peace" into ChatGPT and tells it to generate an 800-page novel. Millions of TikTok-addled students ask ChatGPT to summarize the 800-page novel into three pages (or a five-paragraph essay). What is the point of any of this?
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-07 22:03:57+00:00
What system are you using? My five stage filter system has me replace the charcoal filters once a year and the RO every... three? Maybe five?

But let's assume it costs you $150 a year. Thats less than $0.50 a day for drinking and cooking water. I doubt you could buy any significant amount of bottled water for fifty cents.
by analog31 | 2025-06-07 22:04:15+00:00
This was my experience too. My mom had a subscription to Byte Magazine, and I remember trying to read the articles on OOP when they came out. It was utterly opaque to me. When I started using HyperCard, the light bulb turned on.

I think a subtle factor is that when learning HC (or Visual Basic, or LabVIEW), you started using objects before you learned how to create them. All of these packages came with lots of pre-written objects that were easy to use. In the case of VB, you had to buy a special version if you wanted to create your own objects, and very few people did.

I think when teaching newer languages like Python, this is done as a matter of course. For instance if you show someone how to calculate a function and graph it, you're probably using objects from something like Matplotlib, before being shown how to create your own. And once again, among casual programmers, relatively few people define their own classes.
by dkersten | 2025-06-07 22:04:26+00:00
Funny you say that -- my month renews in a few days and in that time I used ~350 messages. But yesterday I went through 200 messages with burn mode. So, yeah, I get it now! It very much depends on what I'm doing. Normally, I give it the context as much as I can (tag the files I want it to work with) and it generally gets it done in a few messages. However, yesterday, I didn't tell it where to find things (I wanted it to do sweeping changes across the project - configuration related refactoring) and it had to use a lot of tools to find things, and wow did it burn through credits...
by carlmr | 2025-06-07 22:04:53+00:00
>requires either "unsafe" (which is strictly more dangerous than even C, never mind Zig)

Um, what? Unsafe Rust code still has a lot more safety checks applied than C.

>It’s important to understand that unsafe doesn’t turn off the borrow checker or disable any of Rust’s other safety checks: if you use a reference in unsafe code, it will still be checked. The unsafe keyword only gives you access to these five features that are then not checked by the compiler for memory safety. You’ll still get some degree of safety inside of an unsafe block.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch20-01-unsafe-rust.html
by dwattttt | 2025-06-07 22:08:02+00:00
> the moment you hit something like that, it becomes a massive pain, and requires either "unsafe" (which is strictly more dangerous than even C, never mind Zig) or patterns like using indices instead of pointers

If you need to make everything in-house this is the experience. For the majority though, the moment you require those things you reach for a crate that solves those problems.
by dasil003 | 2025-06-07 22:08:20+00:00
You mean that people lie and cheat? That's always been the case. The point of honesty and character is precisely that they reflect a person's ability to value a higher good than their immediate self-interest. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The fact that reputation has been subjected to unprecedented arms race in the face of the internet and social media doesn't fundamentally change the game, it just makes it more exhausting and overwhelming to pay attention to.
by bredren | 2025-06-07 22:08:50+00:00
I suggest starting with their tutorial with a decent LLM to help. The workflows can be represented in written syntax which you can export repeatedly, pasting into a chat for feedback from the LLM based on your goal.

For example, I wanted help setting up the use of a lora and batch iteration. The LLM can figure out where you've hooked things up incorrectly. The UI is funky and the terms and blocks require familiarity you won't have to start.

I think learning the basics of it this way would be useful because you'll get some positive feedback loop going before trying to make use of someone's shared, complex workflow.
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-07 22:09:02+00:00
I don't trust the manufacturer, but I can test the manufacturers water.

I don't trust my municipality because they cheaped out on the corrosion inhibitors chemistry, leached lead into the water and my house is now filled with developing pinhole leaks. I've had five in four years.

Hint, I don't live anywhere near Flint MI.