MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kibibu | 2025-06-17 09:12:27+00:00
We've automated bullshit tedium work, like building and deploying, but this is the first time in my memory that people are actively trying to automate all the fun parts away.

Closest parallel I can think of is the code-generation-from-UML era, but that explicitly kept the design decisions on the human side, and never really took over the world.
by usef- | 2025-06-17 09:14:17+00:00
This isn't about being AGI or not, and it's not "out of thin air".

Modern implementations of LLMs can "do research" by performing searches (whose results are fed into the context), or in many code editors/plugins, the editor will index the project codebase/docs and feed relevant parts into the context.

My guess is they either were using the LLM from a code editor, or one of the many LLMs that do web searches automatically (ie. all of the popular ones).

They are answering non-stackoverflow questions every day, already.
by ritz_labringue | 2025-06-17 09:15:08+00:00
AI is really useful when you already know what code needs to be written. If you can explain it properly, the AI will write it faster than you can and you'll save time because it is quick to check that this is actually the code you wanted to write. So "programming with AI" means programming in your mind and then using the AI to materialize it in the codebase.
by eadmund | 2025-06-17 09:15:10+00:00
At the end of the day, servers and software engineers cost money. One way to pay for things is ads, but ads are hostile to integrations (because there is no good way to guarantee ads will be shown) — I believe this is why Twitter and Reddit killed their third-party clients. But there are alternate ways to pay for things, e.g. subscriptions. The good news here is that the sorts of things one pays for are IMHO more likely to be the sorts of things worth MCPing together. Using MCP to post to Reddit or Twitter? Low value, to oneself and to society. Using MCP to work with one’s AWS account? Higher value.

Incidentally, why do the article’s links all use strikethrough rather than underlines? Is this a deliberate style choice, or some Chrome/Firefox/Safari incompatibility? It’s pretty ugly.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-17 09:15:24+00:00
It's not about getting it right, its about having thought about it. Authoring means thinking-thru, owning, etc.

There's a tremendous hollowing-out of our mental capacities caused by the computer science framing of activities in terms of input->output, as-if the point is to obtain the output "by any means".

It would not matter if the LLM gave exactly the same output as you had written, and always did. Because you still have to act in the world with thoughts that you needed have when authoring it.
by rwmj | 2025-06-17 09:15:29+00:00
> The poke address 23641 is probably some state variable of the BASIC interpreter and by writing to it you're messing up the state in a way that a RUN jumps into a specific place in the ROM which happens to run that LDDR.

Yes, it's the least significant byte of "E LINE Address of command being typed in" in the scratch area: https://worldofspectrum.org/ZXBasicManual/zxmanchap25.html It's cool that they documented all that stuff in the manual!
by elric | 2025-06-17 09:16:21+00:00
Can we get a federated messenger already?

Sure, we have email, but the MS/Google duopoloy has effectively unfederated that, with their inscrutable block lists and nonexistent appeals processes, allegedly in order to protect you from spam.

Sure, XMPP is a thing, which has been mostly dead for well over a decade.

Sure, Matrix is a thing, but every time I look at it, all I see is criticism of its specifications and poor interoperability between implementations?

What would it take to sort out this mess? More money for Matrix or XMPP? Someone with enough clout to promote them? I'm sure organizations like the UN or the EU would, in theory, be in favour of an effective global communicator. But those same organizations would like rail against encryption and decentralisation.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-17 09:16:36+00:00
> I mean, they found brain atrophy.

Where did you get that from? While the article mentions the word "atrophy" twice, it's not something that they found. They just saw less neural activation in regards to essay writing in those people who didn't write the essay themselves. I don't anything there in regards to the brain as a whole.
by latexr | 2025-06-17 09:16:44+00:00
> You can usually get a full refund if your play time is less than a few hours.

The explicit rule is you can get a refund on any game for any reason if both of these are true:

* You have played for less than two hours.

* You bought it in the past two weeks.

https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/
by eru | 2025-06-17 09:17:34+00:00
LLMs are great for the poor!

If you are rich, you can afford a good mentor. (That's true literally, in the sense of being rich in money and paying for a mentor. But also more metaphorically for people rich in connections and other resources.)

If you are poor, you used to be out of luck. But now everyone can afford a nearly-free mentor in the form of an LLM. Of course, at the moment the LLM-mentor is still below the best human mentors. But remember: only rich people can afford these. The alternative for poor people was essentially nothing.

And AI systems are only improving.
by leokennis | 2025-06-17 09:18:07+00:00
> I simply say "I'm on Signal" and if it's important enough, they go and install it; it's been fairly frictionless, after all how hard is it to download an app and go through the fairly minimal registration process

Genuinely curious. I am in WhatsApp groups for my kids soccer teams (who will be there at the game, can my kid drive together with you to the match), my kids school classes (Johnny lost his headphones did anyone see them), my work teams "social chat" (happy birthday, I am at conference XYZ) etc. etc. In your situation, which of the three scenarios applies?

1 - You are not in such groups

2 - You were in such groups, and the entire group moved over to Signal

3 - You were in such groups, but the entire group did not move over to Signal and now you are not in these groups anymore
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-06-17 09:18:40+00:00
> against the credulous lovers of "mediocrity" (cf. https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/)

I read that article when it was posted on HN, and it's full of bad faith interpretations of the various objections to using LLM-assisted coding.

Given that the article comes from a person whose expertise and viewpoints I respected, I had to run it through a friend; who suggested a more cynical interpretation that the article might have been written to serve his selfish interests. Given the number of bugs that LLMs often put in, it's not difficult to see why a skilled security researcher might be willing to encourage people to generate code in ways that lead to cognitive atrophy, and therefore increase his business through security audits.
by elric | 2025-06-17 09:19:45+00:00
> It’s much easier for software devs to agree not support enshittification

Is it? Most software developers I know prefer having a job to not having a job. You don't want to implement ads? You're fired.

Blaming the users is also the wrong thing to do, of course. The blame lies squarely with Meta. And with regulators. Any communications platform that has as much market penetration as Whatsapp should be open to use by third parties, just like the telephone system.
by bayindirh | 2025-06-17 09:20:36+00:00
This is not about Signal. This about being spread too thin. To be able to keep up with all the work projects I'm involved in, I need to use Slack, Discord, Matrix at the same time. Add WhatsApp on top of that. That's 4, but not all. Add e-mail and ordinary phone calls.

6 methods to just keep up with work. I also have at least three ways to reach required documents and meeting notes. I really don't want to jump like a platformer character from point to point to be able to communicate and get things done.

In my personal life, I prefer "1 task, 1 application" model. Communications, one application. Personal information storage? Everything in one place, etc.

Application hopping has a very big mental overhead, and kills my flow. Many colleagues are in the same boat.

It's not Signal, it's any app, account, for any reason.
by absurdo | 2025-06-17 09:20:49+00:00
I foresee in the near future, in addition to the archive.is link (which is not needed here thankfully), a summary.is link will be present (which is needed here unfortunately).

It’s an okay article but there’s no real magic to it. It amounts to wordy trivia and you spend your time reading it as I have at your peril. Zero-calorie content is easily forgotten.
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-17 09:21:10+00:00
The capabilities needed for a phd are quite different from regular engineering college though. You can mostly pull through college using cognitive horsepower and hard work directed at obvious and explicitly defined things. Grad school (PhD) is much more about nebulous skills (in addition to hard work and smartness), taste, "reading the room" of the research community, networking, acting according to unwritten and unspoken conventions and "just knowing", branding, self-marketing, confidence etc.
by pantalaimon | 2025-06-17 09:21:38+00:00
> We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program! Our Jihad is a "dump program." We dump the things which destroy us as humans!

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
by vbezhenar | 2025-06-17 09:22:30+00:00
We need to keep trying and support alternative implementations. Fighting complexity with money is like fighting fire with gasoline. It does not work.

But messaging apps are especially tricky to take off, because the most important feature of the messaging app is how many friends already using it. So I don't really believe in independent open-source apps becoming popular. It's always startups, funded with billions, pouring those billions into marketing.
by botanical | 2025-06-17 09:23:40+00:00
As much as I like WhatsApp, I hate that it's been bought by a company like Meta. Its voice-calling quality is the best from all similar apps, companies use it to communicate with people, and my entire family solely uses it.

I just wish there was something else with such far reach and capability. We can only hope for interoperability with other chat apps.

At least the ads are in Updates, where I never bother looking at
by trod1234 | 2025-06-17 09:23:41+00:00
The statements you made are quite reductionist and dismissive based in fallacy. You provide no definition for your use of an inherently relative and ambiguous word that lacks a distinct meaning on its own.

Sorry, but it seems you didn't really want to have a rational conversation after all, and may have been just eliciting a response from me for some other purpose. Its disappointing when people engage in discussions and then act in bad faith to muddy the water.

You disagree that these examples, which include the prescriptive properties established by experts on the subject matter to define torture are what you would consider torture, a contradiction of established facts, and you don't define what you mean.

At the point where you start contradicting yourself, or worse, are reasoning circularly (rational discourse requires metaphysical objectivity/identity) there really isn't anything of value that can be had. Such examples include harassment and bullying if you missed it.

It does a disservice to the victims when the water seems to get purposefully muddied towards noise.

Here are three different victims, the more you dig the more bodies you find, more than ever make national news:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/11-year-old-was-bullied... https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/12/us/new-jersey-teen-suicide-af... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Rebecca_Sedwick
by jumploops | 2025-06-17 09:24:43+00:00
> It is absolutely true, and AI cannot think, reason, comprehend anything it has not seen before.

The amazing thing about LLMs is that we still don’t know how (or why) they work!

Yes, they’re magic mirrors that regurgitate the corpus of human knowledge.

But as it turns out, most human knowledge is already regurgitation (see: the patent system).

Novelty is rare, and LLMs have an incredible ability to pattern match and see issues in “novel” code, because they’ve seen those same patterns elsewhere.

Do they hallucinate? Absolutely.

Does that mean they’re useless? Or does that mean some bespoke code doesn’t provide the most obvious interface?

Having dealt with humans, the confidence problem isn’t unique to LLMs…
by mandmandam | 2025-06-17 09:25:22+00:00
Further evidenced by the ridiculous claim that America was "one of the most welcoming countries on earth" before Trump - as if Harris didn't just run on a platform of being harsher on immigrants than Trump, or as if Biden didn't deport more immigrants than anyone ever before, or as if Obama wasn't nicknamed the deporter-in-chief, or as if every Dem admin for 17 years hasn't increased ICE funding.
by jajko | 2025-06-17 09:25:23+00:00
Given current major religions are visibly inventions of men to cover basic existential fears we all face and were done during roughly iron age era with corresponding illogical parts and conflicting statements, no amount of drugs are going to move any normal person to whatever god or God represents in this universe.

The introspection part is where true gold is - and to be honest that tells a lot about where we feel above topic is in our cores (and as you yourself confirmed from your experiences, like it or not).

More religion and preaching got us medieval dark ages and tons of endless wars and genocide, I think mankind deserve a bit more these days.
by higeorge13 | 2025-06-17 09:25:40+00:00
TBH the product team in whatsapp needs to find some way to be meaningful. What could justify being a head of product or product manager in a chat app? New emojis? Gif support? New backgrounds? No, let's just make whatsapp like instagram. She's going to get a promotion now or move on to some new business as chief product officer.

No offence to the product team, i know that this is how it works in tech. It's the same for engineering and design teams in every single b2b/b2c business. There is no concept of feature completeness anymore, every single service has to copy from others or be something instead of 10 other services.
by layer8 | 2025-06-17 09:25:42+00:00
Would you use a library that was written by AI without anyone having supervised it and thoroughly reviewed the code? We are using libraries without checking its source code because of the human thought process and quality control that has gone into it, and existing reputation. Nobody would use a library that no one else has ever seen and whose source code no human has ever laid their eyes on. (Excluding code generated by deterministic vetted tools here, like transpilers or parser generators.)
by latexr | 2025-06-17 09:26:01+00:00
Anecdotally, as a counterpoint, I asked for refunds on the iOS App Store maybe twice in a row and since then every purchase was met with a dialog where I had to confirm I waved my right to a refund.

This was over a decade ago, so may be very outdated. I don’t even think in-app purchases were yet a thing. I wasn’t trying to abuse the apps (I pay for software) and was in fact trying to use the refund policy to allow me to buy more apps because I could test without the fear of paying for duds. Their policy had the opposite effect and I basically stopped buying on the App Store.
by codeduck | 2025-06-17 09:27:01+00:00
> In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people

I believe that one of the most underappreciated skills in business is the ability to string a coherent narrative together. I attend many meetings with extremely-talented engineers who are incapable of presenting their arguments in a manner that others (both technical and non-technical) can follow them. There is an artistry to writing and speaking that I am only now in my late forties beginning to truly appreciate. Language is a powerful tool, the choice of a single word can sometimes make or break an argument.

I don't see how LLMs can do anything but significantly worsen this situation overall.
by endymion-light | 2025-06-17 09:27:33+00:00
Honestly, my general feeling with LLMs and large language models is that they cure very man-made issues.

They're brilliant in what I always feel is entangled communication, beurocratic maintenence. Like someone mentioned further down, they work great at Concept Processing.

But it feels like a solution to the over saturation of stupid SEO, terrible google search, and overall rise in massive documents that write for the sake of writing.

I've actually found myself beginning to use LLMS more to find me the core sources of information that are useful rather than terrible SEO optimization, rather than as a personal assistant.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 09:28:32+00:00
It's worse than that. Accessibility is actually opposite to what the business wants, and the combined cultural and (occasionally) legal backing it has is our last line of defense of user autonomy.

Assistive software is just a different user agent. A non-standard browser interpreting the page in ways different than the vendor intended. The very same feature that enables a screen reader to help a blind person navigate, enables everyone else to identify and snip off ads and upsells, escape the thick sewage that's called "web design", and get straight to the actual thing one came for in the first place. Accessibility is the only thing that prevents the web from becoming Flash again, entirely unparseable through automated means[0].

Again, were it not for cultural and legal insistence to cater for the disabled, we'd all already be completely without agency on the web, dumb riders in a theme park paying for something at every turn. Cutting curbs and such? Why, so the users complete their "journey" faster and leave less money behind?

--

[0] - LLMs changed the equation here recently, mostly in our favor, for now. In the immediate term, they can make any website machine-interpretable no matter what the vendor does. But that's just the beginning, we don't yet know how vendors will abuse GenAI to thwart the users.
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-06-17 09:29:16+00:00
> It's not about getting it right, its about having thought about it. Authoring means thinking-thru, owning, etc.

So much this.

At my current workplace, I was asked to write up a design doc for a software system. The contents of the document itself weren't very relevant as the design deviated significantly based on constraints and feedback that could be discovered only after beginning the implementation, but it was the act of putting together that document, thinking about the various cases, etc. that lead to the formation of a mental model that helped me work towards delivering that system.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-17 09:29:32+00:00
QDOS even had non-blocking I/O at the individual read/write call level.

I had to mention this when I learned of Daniel J. Bernstein advocating, almost 20 years after QDOS, non-blocking nonblock_read()/nonblock_write() additions to the POSIX model, so that your I/O model wasn't something that you had to coördinate and share with every process that might have the same open file descriptor.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/dont-set-shared-file-descriptors-to-non...

There were all sorts of little innovations in the operating systems world back then. Helios was another interesting one, with capabilities.
by kace91 | 2025-06-17 09:29:48+00:00
Thankfully it’s not intrusive - you can pretty much ignore the bottom menu and have adfree chat, I’ve been doing it for years.

The moment they start placing calls to action and distraction in that view is the moment people will move - telegram is a drop in replacement with more features, I won’t argue it’s the ideal choice but at least it keeps meta on their toes as a potential competitor.
by account42 | 2025-06-17 09:29:55+00:00
> Where we once got stories where the writers were smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for the writers to preach to us about their views on the world.

This is really the main thing wrong with almost all modern entertainment - writers won't let you analyze anything themselves for fear that you will come to the "wrong" conclusions.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-17 09:31:18+00:00
The motorcycle/car metaphor here is really interesting. We really don't know yet, but it could indeed be that lack of access to AI would be similar to how teenagers growing up in a small town without good public transport or access to a car or motorcycle would have a different adolescence experience from those growing up with a convenient mode of travel. You can argue that either experience is "better" but they are inarguably different.
by koliber | 2025-06-17 09:31:46+00:00
Here's a piece of advice that has helped me many times over.

Learn how to manage up.

Another one that goes hand in hand: help your manager help themselves.

In you case, I would pick one of those things from your list of grievances and help them improve. I would pick something that you think your manager would see as helping her potentially get some benefits for herself.

Potentially, this might involve you doing the work for them.

I've done it, and had it done to me. In all cases it worked out decently well.

Sometimes the manager saw what I was doing and let me have freer reign. Everyone won. In some cases I moved into their role when they left it.

Be careful: this might lead to you becoming a manager one day. You said that internal movements are non-existent, but an internal movement caused you to have a new manager. They might be rare, but they apparently do happen.
by eadmund | 2025-06-17 09:31:46+00:00
> code - not pseudocode, simplified code, draft code, but actual code of a program - is one of the worst possible representations to be thinking and working in.

It depends on the language. In my experience, well-written Lisp with judicious macros can come close to fitting the way I think of a problem. But some language with tons of boilerplate? No, not at all.
by rwmj | 2025-06-17 09:32:41+00:00
> What I think happens is that these people save time because they only spot review the AI generated code, or skip the review phase altogether, which as I said above would be a deal breaker for me.

In my experience it's that they dump the code into a pull request and expect me to review it. So GenAI is great if someone else is doing the real work.
by imiric | 2025-06-17 09:33:16+00:00
Vibecoding is entirely antithetical to demos.

Demos aren't just pretty visuals. Their entire purpose is to showcase the skills of the programmer in accomplishing something remarkable within a constrained environment, or within artificially imposed constraints. Using exorbitant amounts of resources to run a machine learning model to generate a muddy mixture of existing demos goes completely against this spirit. The idea of the two together is, frankly, repulsive.
by swarnie | 2025-06-17 09:34:05+00:00
You're always going to send the message on the app with 100% coverage.

I'm not switching apps to send the same message to 50% of people and then again to 100% resulting in some switchers getting it twice.

And lets be honest, people dont walk around recommending chat apps to each other. It hasn't been 2010 for at least five years.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-06-17 09:34:21+00:00
I know, tell me about it, we’ve been debating this, tbh. We landed on pico8 to introduce the ideas of creativity within constraints as there is a very active community and nice tooling. We’ve done NES workshops before, but always with CS students and eproms. 6502 assembly isn’t that complicated, but can be scary.