MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andyferris | 2025-06-03 04:44:35+00:00
To answer your question explicitly, we do have existing tools that help on that end, but they are nerdy and not hyped by beginners.

Type systems, LSPs, tests, formatters, Rust’s borrow checker, logs and traces, source control are examples of things that make experts go faster. This space is hardly neglected (but could always be better).

It is really nice to see LLMs helping on all skill levels.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-03 04:44:54+00:00
You can just ask it to undelete what you want back. Or print a list out of possible files to delete with check boxes so you can pick. Or one-by-one prompt you. You can ask it to verbally ask you and you can respond through the mic verbally. Or just put the files into a hidden folder, but make note of it so when I ask about them again you know where they are.

Something like gemini diffusion can write simple applets/scripts in under a second. So your options are enormous for how to handle those deletions. Hell if you really want you can ask it to make your a pseudo terminal that lets you type in the old linux commands to remove them if you like.

Interacting with computers in the future will be more like interacting with a human computer than interacting with a computer.
by pj_mukh | 2025-06-03 04:45:42+00:00
"It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze."

I keep hearing this but have yet to find a good resource to study the issues. Most of what I've read so far falls into two buckets:

"It'll hijack our minds via Social Media" - in which case Social Media is the original sin and the problem we should be dealing with, not AI.

or

"It'll make us obsolete" - I use the cutting edge AI, and it will not, not anytime soon. Even if it does, I don't want to be a lamplighter rioting, I want to have long moved on.

So what other good theories of safety can I read? Genuine question.
by imiric | 2025-06-03 04:46:12+00:00
> You have to factor in that these tools are new and everybody is still figuring out how to use them effectively.

I think that the skills required are highly overblown.

The user should be aware of what each model excels at, its context size, temperature, and other parameters; how to communicate well, set system prompts and phrase tasks in a clear, succinct yet informative way; how to refocus the session when it veers off track; keep up to date with the latest (<~6mo) concepts and tooling, and so on.

All of this is trivial for a competent software engineer. The idea that it requires some specialized training that couldn't be attained by experimentation and reading a blog post is absurd. "Prompt engineering" just isn't a thing.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-06-03 04:46:35+00:00
> but just doing a typing run at the beginning of the day feels like a really refreshing thing to do.

You might like typequicker.com - I added a daily typing test for this reason (has a daily leaderboard as well)

My friends now all ask each other “have you done the dsily?” lol

Give it a shot :)
by simonw | 2025-06-03 04:47:22+00:00
I doubt I had much influence at all on the spread of vibe-coding.

I stand by what I wrote about it though: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/

I think it's a net positive for regular humans to be able to build tools for their own personal use, and I think my section on "when is it OK to vibe code?" (only for low stakes projects, treat with extreme caution if private data or security is involved) is something I wish people had paid more attention to! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/#when-is-i...
by godelski | 2025-06-03 04:50:30+00:00
No, YOU misunderstand. This isn't a thing RL can fix

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068943

It doesn't optimize "good programs". It interprets "humans interpretation of good programs." More accurately, "it optimizes what low paid over worked humans believe are good programs." Are you hiring your best and brightest to code review the LLMs?

Even if you do, it still optimizes tricking them. It will also optimize writing good programs, but you act like that's a well defined and measurable thing.
by simonw | 2025-06-03 04:51:23+00:00
I can reconcile that. Joel is right. So is Thomas. If you're a professional programmer you should be able to do the harder thing.

Thomas was a bit more spicy about that:

> but you have no idea what the code is - Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you?
by HappMacDonald | 2025-06-03 04:51:32+00:00
Nah, both keywords and long sentences get meaningless results from Google these days (including their falsely authoritative Bard claims).

I view Bard as a lot like the yesman lacky that tries to pipe in to every question early, either cheating off other's work or even more frequently failing to accurately cheat off of other's work, largely in hopes that you'll be in too much of a hurry to mistake it's voice for that of another (eg, mistake the AI breakdown for a first hit result snippet) and faceplant as a result of their faulty intel.

Gemini gets me relatively decent answers .. only after 60 seconds of CoT. Bard answers in milliseconds and its lack of effort really shows through.
by tayo42 | 2025-06-03 04:52:29+00:00
Why can't there be a middle ground? Why does it need to be either a completely useless fad or some terrible tool for evil that destabilizes the world? Its likely we'll just use it to write unit tests, allow natural language to be an interface to more complex systems and an alternative to search.

I do think that this wave of AI should show we(society, the world, etc...) are not actually prepared for real significant AI break through. Kind of like covid19 in hindsight wasn't as bad as it could of be and we all got really lucky because of that, we really weren't prepared to handle that well either.
by varunpsr | 2025-06-03 04:54:58+00:00
Location: Pune, Maharashtra, India Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Maybe Technologies: Python, Django, React, Next.js, AWS, PostgresSQL Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/varunpsr/ Email: varun.rathore at outlook dot com

Full Stack Developer with 13+ years of experience building web and mobile applications.
by devjab | 2025-06-03 04:56:02+00:00
For me it's mostly about the efficiency of the code they write. This is because I work in energy where efficiency matters because our datasets are so ridicilously large and every interface to that data is so ridicilously bad. I'd argue that for 95% of the software out there it won't really matter if you use a list or a generator in Python to iterate over data. It probably should and maybe this will change with cloud costs continious increasing, but we do also live in a world where 4chan ran on some apache server running a 10k line php file from 2015...

Anyway, this is where AI's have been really bad for us. As well as sometimes "overengineering" their bug prevention in extremely inefficient ways. The flip-side of this is of course that a lot of human programmers would make the same mistakes.
by jychang | 2025-06-03 04:56:25+00:00
Yeah, that's exactly completely missing the point. A bayonet multiplies a person's power by 1.1x, a nuke multiplies it by more than 1,000,000x. Trying to be cute and lumping them together as "every technology is a force multiplier" is peak autistic literalism of 1.1x and 1,000,000x both technically being a multiplier even if they're clearly different.
by 112233 | 2025-06-03 04:57:38+00:00
Every time I have to work with text in C++ using stl feels like pulling teeth. It has gotten better over years, but even php gives one stdlib envy.

The idea to base everything on iterators instead of ranges, blowing up the code (and amount of errors) — it would have made sense for pure algorithms, but stl insists on having ownership of object placed in the containers.

No sane way to work with binary data. Inconsistent allocation and exception ideology through the years. Mysteriously missing functionality.

What little ruby, python, php I have written — nothing has felt as clunky as STL.

E.g. vector has no "sort" member function. What great benefit not adding it for convenience has brought?
by intended | 2025-06-03 04:57:40+00:00
The article really uses some rhetorical tricks.

The stuff that Disney does to extend copyright is not the same as assuming daft punk is public domain.

And there’s a difference between what is human scale infringement and what’s going on now.

Nor does it mean that people don’t have the right to point out that it’s piracy.

If being more in line with the espoused values is the issue, then it’s to make an effort to ensure that we stop consuming pirated content. Or building tools to encourage piracy - this turns out to be a relatively small group of people, compared to everyone in tech.

And people have already stopped piracy - once alternatives showed up. There is the issue that you don’t own the stuff you stream, but that’s a separate topic.

The moral arguments presented persuasive.
by hattmall | 2025-06-03 04:58:36+00:00
Ok, but do you not remember IBM Watson beating the human players on Jeopardy in 2011? The current NLP based neural networks termed AI isn't so incredibly new. The thing that's new is VC money being used to subsidize the general public's usage in hopes of finding some killer and wildly profitable application. Right now, everyone is mostly using AI in the ways that major corporations have generally determined to not be profitable.
by Riskofrain | 2025-06-03 04:58:47+00:00
The next step for thorvg for me would be to prove itself as useful at runtime as rive. I would really like to see a real implementation of this in game engines like Godot Engine. Just like there’s a Rive renderer for Defold. But I mean actually being able to render vectors, not that thing where you’re forced to rasterize a sprite sheet, lol.
by brokencode | 2025-06-03 04:59:50+00:00
AI feels particularly disruptive now because it’s new and we don’t know how it will affect society yet.

But people surely felt the same way about gunpowder, the steam engine, electricity, cars, phones, planes, nukes, etc.

Or look at specific professions that software has negatively affected in recent decades. Not a lot of people use travel agents anymore, for example.

I’m not saying that the negative effects are good. But that’s just the nature of technological advancement. It’s up to society to adapt and help out those who have been most negatively affected.
by mackmgg | 2025-06-03 05:01:02+00:00
> Is this right? Wouldn't it be base-3 encoding? Three bits of binary can count to 8. Three trits of base three can count to 27. Color has all sorts of disadvantages but maybe a much greater payoff (unless I m mistaken).

In this case they're not directly using the color to store information, they just have three differently colored QR codes overlayed on top of each other. With that method you can use a filter to separate them back out and you've got three separate QR codes worth of data in one place. The way they're added ends up using more than just three colors in that example.

If you were truly to use colored dots to store binary information without worrying about using a standard like QR, I think you'd be going from base-2 (white and black) to base-3 (red, blue, green) or more likely base-4 (white, red, blue, green) or even base-8 (if you were willing to add multiple colors on top of each other) in which case yeah you'd have way more than just 3x the data density.
by bjornsing | 2025-06-03 05:01:21+00:00
There’s some truth to that, but I think it’s even broader. Here in Sweden there’s a widely understood term (”bostadskarriär”) that roughly translates to ”housing career” and refers to building wealth through home ownership. It’s often more important to your financial success than your actual career, even for the working class.

All this is due to regulations of course. In Sweden its a combination of tax rules, laws around borrowing, zoning regulations and construction standards that has kept the gravy train rolling.

It’s a bit hard to see how it could continue though. Feels like it could come crashing down at any point. On the other hand: I’ve had that feeling for 15 years.

EDIT: Monetary policy is the big one actually.
by intended | 2025-06-03 05:02:26+00:00
> Research we published earlier this year showed that 60% of participants fell victim to artificial intelligence (AI)-automated phishing, which is comparable to the success rates of non-AI-phishing messages created by human experts. Perhaps even more worryingly, our new research demonstrates that the entire phishing process can be automated using LLMs, which reduces the costs of phishing attacks by more than 95% while achieving equal or greater success rates

Bruce Scheneir, May 2024

https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/2024/06/ai-will-i...

I am seeing a stream of comments on Reddit that are entirely ai driven, and even bots which are engaging in conversations. Worst case scenarios I’m looking at will mean it’s better to assume everyone online is a bot.

I know of cases where people have been duped into buying stocks because of an AI generated version of a publicly known VP of a financial firm.

Then there’s the case where someone didn’t follow email hygiene and got into a zoom call with what appeared to be their CFO and team members, and transferred several million dollars out of the firm.

And it’s only 2-3 years into this lovely process. The future is so bleak that just talking about this with people not involved with looking at these things call it nihilism.

It’s so bad that talking about it is like punching hope.
by ammmir | 2025-06-03 05:03:07+00:00
Location: Bangkok, Thailand

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, Lua, JavaScript, Next.js, OpenResty, Nginx, PHP, Docker, Podman, CRIU, Linux namespaces, Firecracker, Express, Deno, Bun, Node.js, HTTP, X.509, TLS/SSL, SMTP, OAuth, OIDC, JWT, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, MySQL, AI agents, LLM, RAG, vector databases, FastAPI, MCP, Streamlit, ELK, Terraform, OpenTelemetry, DevOps

Résumé/CV: https://amirmalik.net/resume

Email: amir@amirmalik.net

Hey HN! I'm a seasoned software professional with 15+ years of experience across the stack, from low- level systems and protocols to web and mobile apps to modern AI/LLM/agentic workflows. I like solving real business problems using stable and proven tools, as well as prototyping ideas, so whether you're looking to build a v1 of your product or looking for a CTO for a more established org, please reach out!

P.S. If you want a taste of how I think/work, check out this blog post I wrote on building secure code sandboxes for LLM agents: https://amirmalik.net/2025/03/07/code-sandboxes-for-llm-ai-a... -- also, a I open-sourced a more advanced sandbox server: https://github.com/ammmir/sandboxer
by kkylin | 2025-06-03 05:03:52+00:00
I found this comment especially interesting: "The code in an agent that actually “does stuff” with code is not, itself, AI. This should reassure you. It’s surprisingly simple systems code, wired to ground truth about programming in the same way a Makefile is. You could write an effective coding agent in a weekend. Its strengths would have more to do with how you think about and structure builds and linting and test harnesses than with how advanced o3 or Sonnet have become."

I haven't used coding agents. Can someone who has (or knows about these things) elaborate, or point me to a good resource? Thanks!
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-06-03 05:04:01+00:00
> I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil.

In so many ways too. I cannot fathom the scale of mass data collection and surveillance.

Multiple people I’ve recently spoken with (very smart and educated people) consistently are using it to discuss some of the most intimate things about their life.

Things that no existing social media platforms or any other tools are simply capable of that.
by amy_petrik | 2025-06-03 05:05:11+00:00
> But when I saw Java's syntax, I was like....this is not happening.

No, you're good, this is the natural reaction of basically all programmers except for those strange beasts known as Java programmers who believe verbosity and needlessly complex yet organized in a twisted sense is nirvana, in the same way the accountant sees the tax return as nirvana. Many other language enthusiasts such as C, python, or LISP, will also get a bad taste for Java. Of course there are other gnarly languages such as APL or SAS.
by r0s | 2025-06-03 05:05:28+00:00
Weird to claim the llm does all the boring learning and boilerplate for you as a selling point, but then also insist we still need to responsibly read all the output, and if you can't understand it's a "skill issue".

Also the emphasis on greenfield projects? Starting is by FAR the easiest part. That's not impressive to me. When do we get to code greenfield for important systems? Reminds me of the equally absurd example of language choice. You think you get to choose? What?

Imagine all the code these agents are going to pump out that can never be reviewed in a reasonable time frame. The noise generated at the whim of bike-shedding vibe coders is going to drown all the senior reviewers soon enough. I'll call that Cowboy Coders on Steroids. Anyone with skills will be buried in reviews, won't have time for anything else, and I predict stricter code gen policies to compensate.
by taurath | 2025-06-03 05:05:30+00:00
"Morally required to ... engage" with technologies that one disagrees with sounds fairly easily debunk-able to me. Everyone does what they can live with - being up close and personal, in empathy with humans who are negatively effected by a given technology, they can choose to do what they want.

Who knows, we might find out in a month that this shit we're doing is really unsafe and is a really bad idea, and doesn't even work ultimately for what we'd use it for. LLMs already lie and blackmail.
by jasonkenneth | 2025-06-03 05:05:33+00:00
Location: Indonesia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Open to Discussion

Technologies: Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, XCode, CoreData, Kotlin, Flutter, Dart, SQL, JavaScript, HTML, REST APIs, Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, Git

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oL-4JDjBxxHGpjxgw3eiob67xpc...

Email: jasonkenneth17@gmail.com

Portfolio: https://jaysonkaynneth.github.io

I'm Jason Kenneth Hauw, a mobile developer from Indonesia specializing in mobile app development with experience in Swift, Kotlin, and Dart (Flutter). I started my journey at the Apple Developer Academy, where I developed iOS apps. A notable app I contributed to was AppHear, an accessibility tool for deaf students. Since then, I've worked on iOS and Android apps for companies such as UENA (F&B app) and Flutter apps for OWL Plantations (ERP for palm plantations), contributing to development, UI improvements, and deploying the apps into the app store/play store. I'm passionate about mobile development and love to build impactful applications that can make a difference. I am currently looking for a remote position where I can contribute and grow. Thank you!
by bherms | 2025-06-03 05:06:24+00:00
Yeah I'm impressed with its ability to do stuff, but not quite with its results. We have been working on more AI assistance adoption so I asked it to do some decently complex things with json/yml schema definitions and validations (outside the typical json schema we wanted things like conditional validation, etc)... It wrote a LOT of code and took a long time, and kept telling me it would work, and it didn't. I finally stepped in and eliminated roughly 75% of the code in about 10 minutes and got it working. It's great at tedious stuff, but outside of that, I'm skeptical.
by motorest | 2025-06-03 05:07:36+00:00
> (...) your work started on 2025-02-27 and started trailing off at 2025-03-20 as others joined in. Minor changes continue to present.

Your analysis is far too superficial to extract anything meaningful. I know for a fact that I have small projects that took me only a couple of days to get done which have a commit history ranging a few months. Also, software is never done. There's always room to refactor, and LLMs turn that into trivial problems. Lastly, is your project still under development if your commits are README updates, linter runs, and renaming variables?

There is a reason why commit history is not used to track productivity.
by goloroden | 2025-06-03 05:08:09+00:00
After years of building systems with CQRS and event sourcing, we kept running into the same roadblocks: Missing concurrency control, unreliable ordering, complex snapshotting, no native replays. So we built a database purpose-built for event-sourced systems – and wrote up how it compares to Kafka, Postgres, MongoDB, and others.
by layla5alive | 2025-06-03 05:08:14+00:00
+65536

But, tech was not always a net negative.

As far as I can tell, the sharpest negative inflection came around the launch of the iPhone. Facebook was kind of fine when it was limited to universities and they weren't yet doing mobile apps, algorithmic feeds or extensive A:B testing..

It seems "optimizing engagement," was a grave initial sin...

Maybe some engineers should to go back to their childhoods and watch some Outer Limits and pay attention to the missed lessons..

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.
by seanhunter | 2025-06-03 05:08:53+00:00
There are so many misconceptions about what HFTs do and if anything they seem worse here than average.

HFTs do not (for the most part) have any kind of “valuation” of stocks based on the fundamentals of companies. To a first approximation most HFT strategies are market making- they buy from people who want to sell at 9 and they sell to people who want to buy at 10 and every time they successfully do that round trip they make a dollar.

There’s more to it than that because of course there is. Markets are complicated and there are a lot of market participants trying to do lots of things. So sometimes they make use of their knowledge of market microstructure to try to detect and preempt big market moves (eg index rebalances, big portfolio unwind trades etc).

But don’t think HFTs have a perspective or care about the value of TSLA or whatever as a company. They basically want people to trade TSLA a lot so they make the vig every time they do. As some sibling has pointed out, they don’t want toxic/directional flow though, they want balanced flow because that means they keep making a clip whereas directional flow leaves them holding a lot of risk one way or the other because they are on the other side of those trades.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-03 05:10:17+00:00
The reasoning here seems specious. My mother is an amateur artist who has presented her work at local art galleries and spaces as exhibitions and sold lithographs made from some of the pieces. She was welcomed by some and warned by others, mostly weird men who didn’t like her art, and others who said she wasn’t allowed to make that kind of art and attempted to take it down until my mother made clear she would not comply and would resist with force if necessary, after which they relented. It was quite bizarre. I’m reasonably certain that this would not have happened had she been a man. I think a lot of women in art and other fields experience sexism in the course of their careers from customers/clients and vendors. I don’t know if that is factored in to how hard you think it is to make it in art as a woman, but men are a reason more women aren’t making and showing art. I think it depends on the scene you’re in and who has the power.
by crabl | 2025-06-03 05:11:34+00:00
Everything old is new again: I came across a demo for Telescript [1] the other day that would not look out of place in a pitch deck today, save the references to AT&T. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtrs3jtY96k

[1] http://www.datarover.com/Telescript/Documentation/TRM/chapte...