MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adminadminadm1n | 2025-06-02 21:25:42+00:00
Location: Charlotte, NC

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by Pet_Ant | 2025-06-02 21:25:44+00:00
> from the social perspective, is -- how many people can enjoy creating art and what kind of a society we will have, where only a few can earn a living by doing so.

1) Only a few people can make a living out of doing it today

2) It's already the case with woodworkers, knitters, and so many other arts. How many people can make a living making pottery?

> how long we can create more ways to create art to outrun the oncoming reign of night that strips away all of the fun thing we had before.

You can still create the art. When your girlfriend cheats on you and runs away with your best friend and your dog, your still gonna want to write your own country song. Not because it'll sell, but because you want to tell your own story in your words.
by stock_toaster | 2025-06-02 21:25:48+00:00
> pull in arbitrary code from the tree, or from other trees online, into their context windows,

I guess this presupposes that it is ok for 3rd parties to slurp up your codebase? And possibly (I guess it ostensibly depends on what plan you are on?) using that source code for further training (and generating that same code for others)?

I imagine in some domains this would not be ok, but in others is not an issue.
by sneak | 2025-06-02 21:26:08+00:00
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not, but if you are, the real world is not far behind. I can imagine a world where a mixture of AI agents (some doing hypercritical code review) can return you tested and idiomatic PRs faster than you can describe the new architecture in issues.

I think a lot of people are unfamiliar with the (expensive) SOTA.
by briandrupieski | 2025-06-02 21:26:08+00:00
> with poor arguments every week

This roughly matches my experience too, but I don't think it applies to this one. It has a few novel things that were new ideas to me and I'm glad I read it.

> I’m ready to write a boilerplate response because I already know what they’re going to say

If you have one that addresses what this one talks about I'd be interested in reading it.
by adamgordonbell | 2025-06-02 21:26:11+00:00
you are giving it instructions but it's running a while loop with a list of tools and it can poke around in your code base until it thinks it's done whatever you ask for.

See Claude Code, windsurf, amp, Kilcode, roo, etc.

I might describe a change I need to have made and then it does it and then I might say "Now the tests are failing. Can you fix them?" and so on.

Sometimes it works very great. sometimes you find yourself arguing with the computer.
by thousand_nights | 2025-06-02 21:26:14+00:00
i feel like surprisingly, front end work which used to be viewed by programmers as "easier" is now more difficult of the two, because it's where LLMs suck the most

you get a link to a figma design and you have to use your eyes and common sense to cobble together tailwind classes, ensure responsiveness, accessibility, try out your components to make sure they're not janky, test out on a physical mobile device, align margins, padding, truncation, wrapping, async loading states, blah blah you get it

LLMs still suck at all that stuff that requires a lot of visual feedback, after all, you're making an interface for humans to use, and you're a human

in contrast, when i'm working on a backend ticket ai feels so much more straightforward and useful
by BoorishBears | 2025-06-02 21:27:06+00:00
It will, or it might? Because if every time you use an LLM is misinterprets your input as something easier to solve, you might want to brush up on the fundamentals of the tool

(I see some people are quite upset with the idea of having to mean what you say, but that's something that serves you well when interacting with people, LLMs, and even when programming computers.)
by leoh | 2025-06-02 21:27:10+00:00
>but it’s bad at rust

I have to say, my ability to learn Rust was massively accelerated via LLMs. I highly recommend them for learning a new skill. I feel I'm roughly at the point (largely sans LLMs) now where I can be nearly as productive in Rust as Python. +1 to RustRover as well, which I strongly prefer to any other IDE.
by scheibo | 2025-06-02 21:27:10+00:00
The C API provided here is unquestionably anemic, though perhaps makes more sense when understood to exist more to facilitate bindings written in other languages (Python, C++, Rust, etc) and not as an API intended to be used by developers setting out to write an application in C. The two main reasons the C API kind of sucks is that (1) C does not support namespaces/modularization (2) C does not have convenient standardized bitfield support that works cross platform. Finally, I can't really imagine someone wanting to leverage this engine from C and balking at spending an afternoon writing a friendlier wrapper API specific to their use case. That being said, if you have suggestions for improvements please open an issue on GitHub to discuss it.

Team validation is an an orthogonal problem, and is almost completely solved by PKHeX (https://github.com/kwsch/PKHeX) which already does a better job at it than the original game developers. Pokémon Showdown's custom rules are almost all enforced at team validation time, and the standard clauses/rules which require modifications to the engine (e.g., EBC, Sleep/Freeze Mod, Desync Mod) are all supported already by this engine when -Dshowdown compatibility mode is enabled. Your other requests (Unown/Spinda/PP UPs) are all client concerns and thus would be implemented at a higher level than the engine shared here. Your switching scenario will also be handled whenever the generations it is relevant to get implemented. Pokémon Showdown already supports the concept of "maybe trapped" so presumably handles the scenario you're detailing, though if not I'm sure they would appreciate being made aware of any bugs that might exist.
by spapas82 | 2025-06-02 21:28:44+00:00
Heidi is the best gui for mysql/mariadb. It's really great and I don't change it with anything when i need to work on mysql servers.

Unfortunately it's not that good on postgres or ms sql server. Feels more buggy and slow for these databases but I'm not sure if it's Heidi or the db drivers.

I'm also one of the people that used heidi on Linux with wine (along with notepad++) so a native version is more than welcome!
by TrackerFF | 2025-06-02 21:28:51+00:00
My take is: It is OK to don't buy into the hype. There's a lot of hype, no denying that.

But if you're actively avoiding everything related to it, you might find yourself in a position where you're suddenly being left in the dust. Maybe not now, not next month, not next year, but who some time in the future. The models really are improving fast!

I've talked with devs that (claim they) haven't touched a model since ChatGPT was released - because it didn't live up to their expectations, and they just concluded it was a big nothingburger.

Even though I don't follow the development religiously anymore, I do try to get acquainted with new releases every 3 months or so.

I hate the term "vibe coding", but I personally know non-tech people that have vibe coded products / apps, shipped them, and make more money in sales than what most "legit" coders are making. These would be the same "idea people" that previously were looking for a coder to do all the heavy lifting. Something is changing, that's for sure.

So, yeah, don't sleepwalk through it.
by tptacek | 2025-06-02 21:28:54+00:00
I cut several paragraphs from this explaining how agents work, which I wrote anticipating this exact comment. I'm very happy to have brought you to this moment of understanding --- it's a big one. The answer is "yes, that's exactly what people are doing": "turning LLMs loose" (really, giving them some fixed number of tool calls, some of which might require human approval) to do stuff on real systems. This is exactly what Cursor is about.

I think it's really hard to undersell how important agents are.

We have an intuition for LLMs as a function blob -> blob (really, token -> token, but whatever), and the limitations of such a function, ping-ponging around in its own state space, like a billion monkeys writing plays.

But you can also get go blob -> json, and json -> tool-call -> blob. The json->tool interaction isn't stochastic; it's simple systems code (the LLM could indeed screw up the JSON, since that process is stochastic --- but it doesn't matter, because the agent isn't stochastic and won't accept it, and the LLM will just do it over). The json->tool-call->blob process is entirely fixed system code --- and simple code, at that.

Doing this grounds the code generation process. It has a directed stochastic structure, and a closed loop.
by pie_flavor | 2025-06-02 21:28:54+00:00
I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the line of code where it comes from, because I wrote it or something next to it (or can immediately ask someone who probably did). You don't get that with AI. The codebase is always new. Everything must be investigated carefully. When stuff slips through code review, even if it is a mistake you might have made, you would remember that you made it. When humans do not do the work, humans do not accrue the experience. (This may still be a good tradeoff, I haven't run any numbers. But it's not such an obvious tradeoff as TFA implies.)
by fakedang | 2025-06-02 21:29:29+00:00
But there might also be a positive effect on billionaire B's employees, who might be able to work even more efficiently than billionaire A's.

I noted a recent statistic, which states that the revenue of Chick-fil-A per outlet is more than the revenue of the next three fast food chains combined. And they're not even open on Sundays!
by helloplanets | 2025-06-02 21:29:38+00:00
You need to be pushing much more data in than you're getting out. 40k tokens of input can result in 400 actual quality tokens of output. Not giving enough input to work off of will result in regressed output.

It's basically like a funnel, which can also be used the other way around if the user is okay with quirky side effects. It feels like a lot of people are using the funnel the wrong way around and complaining that it's not working.
by ghc | 2025-06-02 21:29:41+00:00
Yes, you can still encounter this in the New England wilderness, particularly in central to northern Maine. But in New England at least, the settlers essentially clear cut the forests and filled in the swamps. Most of the wetlands and old growth forests have been completely erased. For the most part, what forests we have are not much more than a century old, and you constantly run across old foundations and property boundaries when you hike through them.
by Ukv | 2025-06-02 21:29:59+00:00
> While a punishment in a deterministic universe can have a deterrence effect, it might not be the morally right thing to do.

I feel whether it's the morally right thing to do depends on your ethical framework, not really whether the universe is deterministic. For instance in terms of maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering, you'd want to punish when you estimate the suffering relieved by enacting the punishment (deterred crime, long-term precedents encouraging benevolence, etc.) outweighs the suffering caused by the punishment itself.
by ahmadtbk | 2025-06-02 21:30:06+00:00
Location: remote or North Texas

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Technologies: go, python, k8s, profiling, grpc, rest

Resume: upon request

In my site https://blog.atbk.dev you'll see links to my LinkedIn and GitHub.

Hello my name is Ahmad tabbakha I've been writing backend code for almost ten years now. From real time virtual assistants (at Toyota) to building qr code apis for Bitly I've worked on products that are used by millions of people around the world. My primary strength is golang and I excel at teaching others what I know.
by Arainach | 2025-06-02 21:30:08+00:00
>pull in arbitrary code from the tree, or from other trees online, into their context windows, run standard Unix tools to navigate the tree and extract information, interact with Git, run existing tooling, like linters, formatters, and model checkers, and make essentially arbitrary tool calls (that you set up) through MCP.

....for the vast majority of my career, anyone who suggested doing this - much less letting code that no one in the world (much less the company) truly understands the logic flow of do this - would be fired.
by pixl97 | 2025-06-02 21:30:10+00:00
Honestly LLMs are a great canary if your documentation / language / whatever is 'good' at all.

I wish I would have kept it around but had ran into an issue where the LLM wasn't giving a great answer. Look at the documentation, and yea, made no sense. And all the forum stuff about it was people throwing out random guessing on how it should actually work.

If you're a company that makes something even moderately popular and LLMs are producing really bad answers there is one of two things happening.

1. Your a consulting company that makes their money by selling confused users solutions to your crappy product 2. Your documentation is confusing crap.
by tptacek | 2025-06-02 21:30:27+00:00
I'm ~8,000 XP into MathAcademy right now, doing the calculus stuff I skipped by not going to college. I'm doing a lot, lot, lot of tedious practice. But I know why I'm doing it, and when I'm doing doing it, I'm going to go back to using SageMath to do actual work.
by jsnell | 2025-06-02 21:31:06+00:00
> Almost nothing it spits out for me merges without edits. I’m sure there’s a skill to getting a SOTA model to one-shot a feature-plus-merge!

How does this section fit in with the agent section just after? In an agentic model, isn't the merge getting done by either the model or a tool, and the retry-loops on failures would be mostly invisible?

E.g. when using Aider + Gemini Flash 2.5, probably 90% of the changes apply cleanly from my perspective (maybe half actually apply cleanly, the other half after a couple of roundtrips of Aider telling the model that the patch didn't apply). The 10% that only apply partially I usually throw away and redo the prompt, it's really rare that I start merging the code manually.
by xeonmc | 2025-06-02 21:31:25+00:00
Next time you can just do

winget install 9nzvdkpmr9rd

which installs Firefox from the Microsoft store. Or `Mozilla.Firefox` to install from winget-pkgs if the ID is too hard to remember, but the msstore install is cleaner IME.

You could also use the Microsoft Store directly which is still better than wading through Edge.
by kakadu | 2025-06-02 21:31:54+00:00
A hammer hammers.

It hammers 100% of the time, with no failure.

It requires the same amount of labour from my part but it delivers the same outcome every time.

That is what tools do, they act as an extension and allow you to do things not easily done otherwise.

If the hammer sometimes hammers, sometimes squeaks and sometimes screws then it requires extra labour from my part just to make it do what purpose specific tools do, and that is where frustrations arise.

Make it do one thing excellent and we talk then.
by steveklabnik | 2025-06-02 21:32:37+00:00
> Is this what people are really doing?

Some people are, and some people are not. This is where some of the disconnect is coming from.

> Who is just turning AI loose to modify things as it sees fit?

In the advent of source control, why not? If it does something egregiously wrong, you can throw it away easily and get back to a previous state with ease.

> If I'm not directing the work, how does it even know what to do?

You're directing the work, but at a higher level of abstraction.
by voxl | 2025-06-02 21:32:42+00:00
I have a very simple counter argument: I've tried it and it's not useful. Maybe it is useful for you. Maybe even the things you're using it for are not trivial or better served by a different tool. That's fine, I don't mind you using a tool far away from my codebase and dependency tree. It has not been useful for me, and it's very unlikely it's ever going to be.

Except that's not the argument people are making. They are arguing it will replace humans. They are arguing it will do research level mathematics. They are arguing this is the start of AGI. So if you want to put your head in the sand and ignore the greater message that is plastered everywhere then perhaps some self reflection is warranted.
by itssoap | 2025-06-02 21:32:51+00:00
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4 years of experience in working and collaborating with multi-national clientele.

Currently working as a Junior architect for my client's project, where my daily activities include formulating and discussing Business' requirements and designing an optimum solution for the same.

I spend my time working on Python projects in my free time. Most of my work-related repetitive tasks are automated by me with Python. Apart from that, I love FastAPI and always tinker with it.

https://github.com/itssoap
by tptacek | 2025-06-02 21:33:02+00:00
I use Codex CLI for casual stuff, because of the ergonomics of just popping open another terminal tab.

I use Zed as my primary interface to "actually doing project work" LLM stuff, because it front-ends both OpenAI and Google/Gemini models, and because I really like the interface. I still write code in Emacs; Zed is kind of like the Github PR viewer for me.

I'm just starting to use Codex Web for asynchronous agents because I have a friend who swears by queueing up a dozen async prompts every morning and sifting through them in the afternoon. The idea of just brainstorming a bunch of shit --- I can imagine keeping focus and motivation going long enough to just rattle ideas off! --- and then making coffee while it all gets tried, is super appealing to me.
by espinchi | 2025-06-02 21:33:05+00:00
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We’re backed by top VCs (Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures, YC, Picus Capital), and work with customers like Eight Sleep, Webflow, Turo, Notion, Zapier and others.

Our tech stack: TypeScript, React, Python, Mongo, GCP

See all open positions and more details in https://www.getaleph.com/careers#open-roles
by clvx | 2025-06-02 21:33:09+00:00
I feel you. In the late 00's/early 10's, downloading and getting American movies were fairly easy but getting the subtitles was a challenge. It was even worse with movies from other regions. Even now I know people that record conversations to be replayed using Whisper so they can get 100% the info from it.

Disclaimer: I'm not praising piracy but outside of US borders is a free for all.
by el_memorioso | 2025-06-02 21:33:15+00:00
I agree with this. People who are writing Python, Javascript, or Typescript tell me that they get great results. I've had good results using LLMs to flesh out complex SQL queries, but when I write Elixir code, what I get out of the LLM often doesn't even compile even when given function and type specs in the prompt. As the writer says, maybe I should be using an agent, but I'd rather understand the limits of the lower-level tools before adding other layers that I may not have access to.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-06-02 21:33:17+00:00
Store shelf screens are extremely tiny. If a 1 inch by 2 inch screen costs a dollar to manufacture. Then a 7 inch x 6 inch screen by linear scaling should cost 21 dollars to manufacture. But I think manufacturing costs are more than linear since the control electronics become more complicated and yields become lower (more pixels, more screens have dud pixels that need to be thrown away).
by mountainriver | 2025-06-02 21:33:43+00:00
I feel the opposite, and pretty much every metric we have shows basically linear improvement of these models over time.

The criticisms I hear are almost always gotchas, and when confronted with the benchmarks they either don’t actually know how they are built or don’t want to contribute to them. They just want to complain or seem like a contrarian from what I can tell.

Are LLMs perfect? Absolutely not. Do we have metrics to tell us how good they are? Yes

I’ve found very few critics that actually understand ML on a deep level. For instance Gary Marcus didn’t know what a test train split was. Unfortunately, rage bait like this makes money
by meroes | 2025-06-02 21:33:45+00:00
> LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write.

But, you still have to read it:

> Reading other people’s code is part of the job...I have to read the code line-by-line anyways.

So instead of writing the tedious code, I only have to read it. Oh but don't worry, I don't have to read it too carefully because:

> Agents lint. They compile and run tests. If their LLM invents a new function signature, the agent sees the error

But remember...

> You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main.

So now I have to oversee this web of agents and AI ontop of coding? Am I doing more now for the same pay? Am I just speedrunning myself toward lower pay? Is AI adoption a prisoner's dilemma toward lowing my wages hardest?

Because is good at coding compared to many other disciplines (e.g. math), it makes the internal AI politics among programmers more of an issue. Add fuel to that fire baby!
by TheCraiggers | 2025-06-02 21:33:47+00:00
> "For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields."

You've already lost me, because I view programming as an art form. I would no more use AI to generate code than I would use it to paint my canvas.

I think the rest of the article is informative. It made me want to try some things. But it's written from the perspective of a CEO thinking all his developers are just salt miners; miners go into the cave and code comes out.

I think that's actually what my hangup is. It's the old adage of programmers simply "copying and pasting from stack overflow" but taken to the extreme. It's the reduction of my art into mindless labor.
by nico | 2025-06-02 21:33:53+00:00
I'm not sure about giving specific metrics or kpis of efficiency or performance

It definitely feels different to develop using LLMs, especially things from scratch. At this point, you can't just have the LLM do everything. Sooner or later you need to start intervening more often, and as the complexity of the project grows, so does the attention you need to give to guiding the LLM. At that point the main gains are mostly in typing and quickly looking some things up, which are still really nice gains