MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshka | 2025-06-03 23:38:33+00:00
Some of my response comments were nits where the tooling didn't respect conventions in the code / brought in conventions that weren't in use. I'd expect that minding existing conventions would be something that LLM based code tooling would eventually incorporate explicitly into its context and guardrails. Intuitively this seems like it would be a difficult thing to push down a level into a model's training for various practical reasons.
by marcusb | 2025-06-03 23:39:05+00:00
I generally agree with your post. Many of the arguments against LLMs being thrown around are unserious, unsound, and a made-for-social-media circle jerk that don't survive any serious adversarial scrutiny.

That said, this particular argument you are advancing isn't getting so much heat here because of an unfriendly audience that just doesn't want to hear what you have to say. Or that is defensive because of hypocrisy and past copyright transgressions. It is being torn apart because this argument that artists deserve protection, but software engineers don't is unsound special pleading of the kind you criticize in your post.

Firstly, the idea that programmers are uniquely hypocritical about IPR is hyperbole unsupported by any evidence you've offered. It is little more than a vibe. As I recall, when Photoshop was sold with a perpetual license, it was widely pirated. By artists.

Secondly, the idea -- that you dance around but don't state outright -- that programmers should be singled out for punishment since "we" put others out of work is absurd and naive. "We" didn't do that. It isn't the capital owners over at Travelocity that are going to pay the price for LLM displacement of software engineers, it is the junior engineer making $140k/year with a mortgage.

Thirdly, if you don't buy into LLM usage as violating IPR, then what exactly is your argument against LLM use for the arts? Just a policy edict that thou shalt not use LLMs to create images because it puts some working artists out of business? Is there a threshold of job destruction that has to occur for you to think we should ban LLMs use case by use case? Are there any other outlaws/scarlet-letter-bearers in addition to programmers that will never receive any policy protection in this area because of real or perceived past transgressions?
by dcow | 2025-06-03 23:39:29+00:00
Where there’s a will there’s a way. Swift is almost universally compatible with objective-c and they are two entirely different languages no less. If an objective-c function has a trailing *error parameter, you can, in swift, call that function using try notation and catch and handle errors idiomatically. All it takes is for one pattern to be consistently expressible by another. Why can’t Result/Either types be api-compatible with functions that return tuples?
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-03 23:39:49+00:00
After digging a bit, it turns out that a concrete answer is a bit hard to find. There's a lot of discussion on the ethical details around cloning humans and human bodies, which is fair enough, but not much technical info on why a focus couldn't be made on just cloning parts of bodies. Specifically, the useful ones for the many thousands of people who die each year because they don't get replacement transplants on time to be saved from a medical emergency.

Edit: This article did however give some good answers, after first going all out on a dire description of future illegal organ donor markets.

"How would organ cloning work? Say you had a failing liver and you needed a replacement. Doctors couldn’t remove your liver and clone a new one and you couldn’t take The Island route (see Chapter 10.1007/978-3-662-43526-7_3) and use your clone’s organs—scientifically this might be feasible, but ethically it’s a no go. Instead, doctors would use stem cells. Stem cells are perfect for organ cloning because they can differentiate into more than 200 types of cells. Scientists extract these stem cells (Fig. 4.2) when an embryo consists of around 150 cells. Unfortunately, removing the stem cells effectively destroys the embryo, which is why many oppose this practice."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7122979/

That some people should oppose destroying mere embryos with just 150 or so cells for a procedure that can save many many thousands of fully developed, real human lives is beyond stupid.
by dahart | 2025-06-03 23:40:04+00:00
I assumed it might have been a statement made a long time ago, which is why I asked if that’s what was really said.

Not sure I understand what you mean about being hung up on “artist”. That’s the word you used. Do you want to suggest an alternative? Do you mean that Shelley did feel like the artist, and the computer meant something else to her?

Your very short story seemed to me to fit a pattern and language about digital art that I’ve seen many times elsewhere. It’s very common for people to say something very similar about computers being collaborators in the art process, rather than being what they are: inanimate tools, made by other people. I’m sorry if it it’s not really what you or Shelley meant.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-06-03 23:40:20+00:00
> I don't know if any of this applies to the arguments in my article, but most of the point of it is that progress in code production from LLMs is not a consequence of better models (or fine tuning or whatever), but rather on a shift in how LLMs are used, in agent loops with access to ground truth about whether things compile and pass automatic acceptance.

I very strongly disagree with this and think this reflects a misunderstanding of model capabilities. This sort of agentic loop with access to ground truth model has been tried in one form or another ever since GPT-3 came out. For four years they didn't work. Models would very quickly veer into incoherence no matter what tooling you gave them.

Only in the last year or so have models gotten capable enough to maintain coherence over long enough time scales that these loops work. And future model releases will tighten up these loops even more and scale them out to longer time horizons.

This is all to say that progress in code production has been essentially driven by progress in model capabilities, and agent loops are a side effect of that rather than the main driving force.
by protocolture | 2025-06-03 23:41:00+00:00
>Is the future mostly written by visionaries in fiction, or by the engineers and scientists bringing it to life?

I find Charles Stross' blog to be quite informative.

He has a tendency to predict a thing, write a book demonstrating how it will be good, and then absolutely hate the real world implications of the technology.

Famously he picked up Nick Szabo's old whitepaper on smart contracts, and envisaged a world where the technology would be used to disrupt an evil US government. Making it too hard for them to examine complex business structures.

By the time we got smart contracts, he was dead set against their use. And has written a lot about how corporations are in fact evil AI running on the operating system of the government.

He also has a variant of crypto currency in one of his novels, used to trade at light speed (so incredibly slowly) against distant space colonies. He is quite anti crypto, and I believe if such a system were deployed he would be quite against it.

The problem I guess is that its fun to imagine a thing, but not as fun always to live with it.
by throw234234234 | 2025-06-03 23:41:30+00:00
For me this is the "issue" I have with AI. Unlike say the internet, mobile and other tech revolutions where I could see new use cases or existing use case optimisation spring up all the time (new apps, new ways of interacting, more efficient than physical systems, etc) AI seems to be focused more on efficiency/substitution of labour than pushing the frontier on "quality of life". Maybe this will change but the buzz is around job replacement atm.

Its why it is impacting so many people, but also having very small changes to everyday "quality of life" kind of metrics (e.g. ability to eat, communicate, live somewhere, etc). It arguably is more about enabling greater inequality and gatekeeping of wealth to capital - where intelligence and merit matters less in the future world. For most people its hard to see where the positives are for them long term in this story; most everyday folks don't believe the utopia story is in anyway probable.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-06-03 23:42:19+00:00
> the previous government spent money like it was going out of style and put our country in a very precarious position.

The NZ external debt has been about about the same rate for a decade [0]. External debt has increased at about 2% per year, and the rate has been consistent under both the right and the left.

It's weird - the right consistently pushes "we are better economic managers than the left". There is stuff all evidence for either side being better managers. When the right pushes up debt, it seems to be by giving away tax breaks, usually to the rich. When the left pushes up debt seems to be by spending more, usually on the poor.

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/new-zealand/external-debt#:~:te... Settings: 10Y, Chg%.
by 00x-2 | 2025-06-03 23:43:26+00:00
A little distracting that the cookie dialog buttons on dam.org have black text on black backgrounds when I’m in dark mode.

The styling is not as annoying as the cookie dialogs themselves, though.

Google shot themselves in the foot by transferring the pain of privacy to the user for Google Analytics. No one wants this. It wastes so much time. It’s as if every storefront that previously had open doors got a half door added with a crappy combination lock.
by alisonatwork | 2025-06-03 23:43:53+00:00
Hypothetically, if you could daemonize javac, would JIT eventually kick in over multiple recompiles of the same code? The obvious use case for this would be IDEs, but I imagine it could work in CI too if you had some kind of persistent "compiler as a service" setup that outlived the runners.

Not to detract from the cool work done here, just curious if this other approach has been tried too.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-03 23:44:18+00:00
> You would have to have a very complete audit trail for the LLM and ensure the paper shows up nowhere in the dataset.

We can do both known and novel reproductions. Like with both LLM training process and human learning, it's valuable to take it in two broad steps:

1) Internalize fully-worked examples, then learn to reproduce them from memory;

2) Train on solving problems for which you know the results but have to work out intermediate steps yourself (looking at the solution before solving the task)

And eventually:

3) Train on solving problems you don't know the answer to, have your solution evaluated by a teacher/judge (that knows the actual answers).

Even parroting existing papers is very valuable, especially early on, when the model is learning how papers and research looks like.
by m463 | 2025-06-03 23:44:37+00:00
I just think of all the ways people can mess with email or tcp/ip, like dos attacks and joe jobs.

It would be pretty easy to do this to the physical phone of an ex or a journalist, where the phone company helps your attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-03 23:44:52+00:00
I don't follow? Your system is either routing packets or not. IPv6 vs IPv4 should not be a notable difference here.

I've never tested network namespace scalability on a mobile device but I doubt a few hundred of them should break anything (famous last words).

In the primary namespace you will need to configure some very basic routing. You will also need a solution for assigning IP addresses. That solution needs to be able to rotate IP assignments when the external IP block changes. That's pretty standard DHCP stuff. On a desktop distro doing the equivalent with systemd-networkd is possible out of the box with only a handful of lines in a config file.

Honestly a lot of Docker network setups are much more complicated than this. The difficult part here is not the networking but rather patching the zygote logic and authoring a custom build of android that incorporates the changes.
by spankibalt | 2025-06-03 23:45:30+00:00
Annoying feature bitch 'n' beg:

"Frictionless" text hoisting (incl. hoist-to-view document window capability) à la Symantec's GrandView (DOS) [1] is a must for me in a modern tool of this type. Table manipulation à la org-mode would be nice to have, text template import and export (e. g. screenwriting formats) a bonus. But lean and mean general-purpose text editors focusing on non-coding creators are just not a thing anymore.

Anyway, congratulations and good luck!

1. [https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview...]
by mistercheph | 2025-06-03 23:46:51+00:00
Arguably, Theranos was also somewhere in a gray area between marketing and fraud.

Everyone in the industry incentivizes and participates in this behavior, but once in a while, let's grab a few stand-out individuals to scapegoat once in a while for all the harm caused by/to the entire group with this behavior. Make sure you pick someone big/ugly enough to be credibly dangerous to the whole group, but who isn't too dangerous and well connected so that you can be sure that when the card flips on them everyone around them scatters.

It's the same reason groups of individual humans do it: Scapegoating is a much lower resistance path to follow than the horrifying alternative (self-consciousness, reflection, love)
by maxpr | 2025-06-03 23:47:32+00:00
Yep, Cursor indeed helps!

(Here's a battle tested prompt example we found working pretty nicely with claude o3 + claude 3.7: https://lingo.dev/cli/extract-keys)

> Then, you simply ask it to translate into other languages.

Yep! With Lingo.dev Compiler though, we were scratching our own itch, and particularly it was maintenance of the localized code. Turned out, extracting is fine, but then further down the road we found ourselves digging through the code and jumping back and forth between the code and i18n files.

I think it won't be a problem anymore after "Just In Time software" becomes a thing, and vibe coding tools seem to be getting us closer to that point.

Great example!
by zzrrt | 2025-06-03 23:47:32+00:00
> she clearly states the baby is being transferred to another hospital to release to the foster family

She mentioned a foster mom, not that the purpose of the transfer was to get the baby to the foster mom. And why would it be anyway? You think the state couldn't have released the baby from the first hospital directly to a foster parent? The only thing stopping them was the protesters' presence and knowledge of which locked doors the baby was behind? The baby was already forcibly taken by the state at this point, right? So why does it matter whether it's police, social workers, or foster parents that currently have the baby? The deception made a safe transfer easier perhaps, but it didn't directly enable the transfer.

> The whole point of the conversation was removing the child from the hospital into foster care but under a fraudulent premise of medical necessity while distracting the family.

Sure, she did say the transfer wasn't medically necessary. She said it was to get away from the protesters. Sneaky, probably not illegal. I believe she later said it was a higher standard of care too, but I'll admit that may been said to better justify it as you allude to.

Other things she said in the Idaho Statesman video: "Failure to thrive", lost 0.75lbs since last checkup. Not signs of a baby that was perfectly healthy at home, not something that surprises parents in a matter of hours, completely at odds with Bundy's attempts to say it was healthy. The state was going to move the baby from a hospital to foster care on the diagnosis and data alone, regardless of sneaky hospital transfers to try to defuse the protesters.
by anelson | 2025-06-03 23:47:49+00:00
You regurgitated Russian propaganda about Russian-speaking people in Ukraine which is clearly not based on your own experience and I provided a counterpoint based on actually living in Ukraine. If you think I have misrepresented the actual experience of actual Russian-speaking Ukrainians in actual Ukraine then by all means educate me.

Ukraine has a long history of resisting Russian subjugation, long before supposed CIA plots and conversations with Victoria Nuland. I wish there were some sinister plot to vanquish Russia via a proxy war in Ukraine; maybe then the Western powers would finally jock up and put an end to Russian imperialism once and for all. Sadly I’m afraid this narrative of Ukraine as pawn to destroy Russia is only a Russian propagandist’s fever dream.
by sgammon | 2025-06-03 23:49:03+00:00
> Hypothetically, if you could daemonize javac, would JIT eventually kick in over multiple recompiles of the same code?

This is actually how Gradle works by default; in fact, even if you pass `--no-daemon`, it will start a daemon, and just kill it after the build (lol). It's daemon-first, daemon-only, because of this exact issue.

As I understand it, Gradle's daemon timeout is typically 10 minutes, but can be extended. We are guessing that this style rarely hits the 10k class threshold where JIT performance converges with native, especially since Gradle also supports incremental compilation, and that further impedes the progress toward a warm JIT. Gradle focuses hard on build caching and incremental compilation, and this is conceptually in contention with reaching a warm JIT, ironically.

Native Image has JIT capabilities (just not as mature as Hotspot yet), and keeping the daemon alive would probably still yield wins. We haven't tried it yet and that's a good idea
by svpk | 2025-06-03 23:49:40+00:00
You can get people who want a manual to compromise on buying an automatic, but the opposite is rarely true. So economies of scales dictates that you're better off just making automatics exclusively. This is all the more true since many of the key advantages to manuals (cost, fuel economy, reliability) have been greatly reduced by technology improvements.

I'm sure its more complicated in practice but I imagine that's the core issue.
by cogman10 | 2025-06-03 23:50:21+00:00
The problem is memory colocation not RC management. But I agree, it'll likely be workload dependent. One major positive aspect of RC is the execution costs are very predictable. There's little external state which can negatively impact performance (like the GC currently running).

The downside is fragmentation and the CPU time required for memory management. If you have an A -> B -> C chain where A is the only owner of the B and B is the only owner of C, then when A hits 0, it has to do 2 pointer hops to deallocate B and then deallocate C (plus arena management for the deallocs).

One of the big benefits of JVM moving style collectors is that when A dies, the collector does not need to visit B or C to deallocate them. The collector only visits and moves live memory.
by dcow | 2025-06-03 23:51:32+00:00
Go’s philosophy is the problem: sometimes you need a few ways to do the same thing. And that’s okay. Sometimes the flow you’re trying to express in code just needs the error to go up and get handled at the top. Sometimes you want to act on it. Right now all you can do is act on it. So all the times you don’t need to act on it have to suffer? I call profuse bullshit. There is 100% a way to add terse compiler-enforced error handling (for the love of all things holy if nothing at all changed with the syntax at least there should be consensus that it’s a serious problem that the compiler can’t tell you “oops you forgot to handle that error”) to be added in a way that doesn't bifurcate API surfaces. You just have to do it even in the face of dissent. You have to compromise on your values for the good of the language. What is the damn problem with ? literally expanding to `if err != nil { \n return err \n }`? Just take small steps that improve everyone’s life. If you look for excuses not to improve error handling you’ll find them. Sadly that appears to be what has happened here. The entire language suffers because a vocal minority are sadists. Is it time for me to come back to Go? I think not.
by wpietri | 2025-06-03 23:51:54+00:00
>if respectable people with no stake in selling AI like @tptacek or @kentonv in the other AI thread are saying similar things, you should probably take a closer look.

Maybe? Social proof doesn't mean much to me during a hype cycle. You could say the same thing about tulip bulbs or any other famous bubble. Lots of smart people with no stake get sucked in. People are extremely good at fooling themselves. There are a lot of extremely smart people following all of the world's major religions, for example, and they can't all be right. And whatever else is going on here, there are a lot of very talented people whose fortunes and futures depend on convincing everybody that something extraordinary is happening here.

I'm glad you have found something that works for you. But I talk with a lot of people who are totally convinced they've found something that makes a huge difference, from essential oils to functional programming. Maybe it does for them. But personally, what works for me is waiting out the hype cycle until we get to the plateau of productivity. Those months that you spent figuring out what worked are months I'd rather spend on using what I've already found to work.
by Mawr | 2025-06-03 23:52:24+00:00
> I practically guarantee that for each idea you will be able to find a municipality that tried it and found that it didn't work for what in retrospect were very obvious reasons.

Really? Because the humanity's track record about anything that's brand new is horrible. Lead in gasoline? Seems to help a lot with engine function, let's deploy it planet-wide before making sure it's safe. Nothing can possibly go wrong!

> what are some ways that the laws could have evolved in this direction?

As for laws themselves, in the event of a driver hitting a pedestrian, the driver is found automatically at fault. If it turns out the pedestrian was at fault, the driver still remains liable for 50% of the damages. (Suprised? Think, which party is the source of the danger? Can the pedestrian ever harm the driver in any way? Then how can the responsibility ever not lay on the driver?)

But really, it's not laws that are needed here, but well designed infrastructure. Infrastructure that clearly communicates to everyone how to behave.

Speed limits are a great example. How exactly is putting up a sign saying "pls no speederino" supposed to affect a vehicle moving at 100mph through a residental street? Is the threat of potential consequences down the line in the unlikely scenario of getting caught supposed to do that? That'd require humans to be rational actors.

Now, if we put a bump on the road that will damage the vehicle if gone over at speeds of >50mph, then the speedster has only two choices: 1) go over it and immediately feel the consequences 2) slow down.

Some other such measures:

- raised crosswalks (The crosswalk simply continues, it's the road surface that comes up. That way it's the vehicle that intrudes on the space of the pedestrians, not the other way around. Note that this is the opposite of how it's almost always done.)

- roundabouts

- narrowing roads

- curb extensions

- chicanes

- changing the road surface to be less pleasant to drive on at speed

- adding and increasing curves in general