MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerevarthelame | 2025-06-17 04:16:49+00:00
> I think people are getting addicted to not having to expend brain energy to solve problems, and they're mistaking that for productivity.

I think that's a really elegant way to put it. Google Research tried to measure LLM impacts on productivity in 2024 [1]. They gave their subjects an exam and assigned them different resources (a book versus an LLM). They found that the LLM users actually took more time to finish than those who used a book, and that only novices on the subject material actually improved their scores when using an LLM.

But the participants also perceived that they were more accurate and efficient using the LLM, when that was not the case. The researchers suggested that it was due to "reduced cognitive load" - asking an LLM something is easy and mostly passive. Searching through a book is active and can feel more tiresome. Like you said: people are getting addicted to not having to expend brain energy to solve problems, and mistaking that for productivity.

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-research2023-media/pubto...
by amlib | 2025-06-17 04:18:07+00:00
What do you even mean with a 10x increase in efficiency? Does that means you commit 10x more code every day? Or that "you" essentially "type" code 10x faster? In the later case all the other tasks surrounding code would still take around the same netting you much less than 10x increase in overall productivity, probably less than 2x?
by pfych | 2025-06-17 04:18:19+00:00
I had a frequent 1:30-hour train commute every couple of days to my previous role, and during that time, I learned how horrific our product was to use on a spotty connection.

Made me think more about poor & unstable connections when building out new features or updating existing things in the product. Easily parsable loading states, better user-facing alerts about requests timing out, moving calculations/compute client-side where it made sense, etc.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-06-17 04:18:50+00:00
I’ve been a believer in entropic gravity for a long time and believe it’s due to quantum foam. In a region of space with nothing in it the quantum foam in that space would be perfectly uniformly random. With mass and energy the state of the space would be biased and less random. This creates an entropic gradient. Further this doesn’t just explain gravity but explains why the space between galaxies seems to demonstrate negative energy and space expansion. I’m glad to see more research into the idea of entropic gravity as it’s IMO a more reasonable explanation than most other gravity theories I’ve heard.
by spcebar | 2025-06-17 04:19:48+00:00
Oh man. Early in my career I was working a job I didn't like and doing work that was by necessity incredibly hacky and tedious—not an interesting challenge, just a grinding one. It involved overwriting template files that weren't supposed to be overwritten and essentially writing multiple versions of the same code in multiple places because the system was so kludgey.

This project stretched on and on with brutally painstaking iteration, long hours, fires happening with other clients, etc, etc, long story short, I sort of lost my mind and left an Easter egg comment in the code in a state of minor madness.

Years after I had left the job, I got a message from a former coworker that said "Do you know anything about MOOL?"

I said I didn't know anything about something called MOOL, and he said, the client had found a long diatribe about a bovine god named MOOL in an obscure template file deep in the codebase, and I said, "ah, yeah, that was probably me."

The head of IT for the former client had found the code and gotten in touch with my coworker and said, "I assume this isn't a security breach, but I also don't know what the hell it is." He thankfully had a sense of humor about it, and it ended up being a nice opportunity to catch up. Pretty much the best possible outcome.

Now adays I would never do that, after experiencing real security breaches and dealing with that nightmare. But it was fun knowing A. My ancient horrible code was still in production and B. The comment I had left, which I'd forgotten about, and probably assumed no one would ever read, had been found like a flag in the moon or at least a time capsule.
by furyofantares | 2025-06-17 04:20:29+00:00
> No, it's not. It's something you can pick in a few minutes (or an hour if you're using more advanced tooling, mostly spending it setting things up). But it's not like GDB or using UNIX as a IDE where you need a whole book to just get started.

The skill floor is something you can pick up in a few minutes and find it useful, yes. I have been spending dedicated effort toward finding the skill ceiling and haven't found it.

I've picked up lots of skills in my career, some of which were easy, but some of which required dedicated learning, or practice, or experimentation. LLM-assisted coding is probably in the top 3 in terms of effort I've put into learning it.

I'm trying to learn the right patterns to use to keep the LLM on track and keeping the codebase in check. Most importantly, and quite relevant to OP, I'd like to use LLMs to get work done much faster while still becoming an expert in the system that is produced.

Finding the line has been really tough. You can get a LOT done fast without this requirement, but personally I don't want to work anywhere that has a bunch of systems that nobody's an expert in. On the flip side, as in the OP, you can have this requirement and end up slower by using an LLM than by writing the code yourself.
by bcrosby95 | 2025-06-17 04:20:50+00:00
When you say specification, what, specifically, does that mean? Do you have an example?

I've actually been playing around with languages that separate implementation from specification under the theory that it will be better for this sort of stuff, but that leaves an extremely limited number of options (C, C++, Ada... not sure what else).

I've been using C and the various LLMs I've tried seem to have issues with the lack of memory safety there.
by OccamsMirror | 2025-06-17 04:21:12+00:00
Maybe?

For most of history, the majority of people were born into rigid social positions with little mobility, owing labor, tribute, or service to elites who controlled land, resources, and political power. Personal autonomy as we understand it was rare.

As modern people, we see this backslide as impossible. Surely we'll fight back if this happens, right?

But what if we won't? What if we just make do, as we always have. Our ancestors adapted to feudalism, slavery, totalitarian regimes, caste systems - not just the beneficiaries, but the oppressed too. History suggests that people are remarkably capable of normalizing and accommodating to systems that previous generations might have found intolerable.

I don't have faith in the general public fighting back against this new wave.
by zmgsabst | 2025-06-17 04:21:20+00:00
I didn’t introduce it, you did — by positing that formal language is more objective, as you’ve again done here. My original point was that mathematics is human language.

> The further point is that the relative complexities of two systems will not switch orders regardless of basis, except perhaps in degenerate cases.

Two normal bases: Fourier and wavelet; two normal signals: a wave and an impulse.

They’ll change complexity between the two bases despite everything being normal — the wave simple and impulse complex in Fourier terms; the wave complex and impulse simple in wavelet terms.

That our choice of basis makes a difference is literally why we invented wavelets.
by Syzygies | 2025-06-17 04:22:34+00:00
No mention of Opus there or here (so far).

Having tried everything I settled on a $100/month Anthropic "Max" plan to use Claude Code. Then I learned how Claude Opus 4 is currently their best but most expensive model for my situation (math code and research). I limited out of a five hour session, switched to their API, and burned $20 in an hour. So I upgraded to $200/month "Max" and haven't hit limits yet.

Models matter. All these stories are like "I met a person who wasn't that smart." Duh!
by whoisyc | 2025-06-17 04:23:30+00:00
Kagi has a little over 50k paying users.

Hacker news has 5 million monthly unique users [1].

Given how hacker news constantly complain about google’s decline and the constant virtue signaling on the need to pay for software, you would expect a sizable chunk of the users (the vocal ones, at least) here pay for Kagi. And yet we are here. GP is absolutely right about it being all-talk.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140
by badsectoracula | 2025-06-17 04:24:05+00:00
It wont be the hippest of solutions, but you can use something like Devstral Small with a full open source setup to get experimenting with local LLMs and a bunch of tools - or just chat with it with a chat interface. I did pingponged between Devstral running as a chat interface and my regular text editor some time ago to make a toy project of a raytracer [0] (output) [1] (code).

While it wasn't the fanciest integration (nor the best of codegen), it was good enough to "get going" (the loop was to ask the LLM do something, then me do something else in the background, then fix and merge the changed it did - even though i often had to fix stuff[2], sometimes it was less of a hassle than if i had to start from scratch[3]).

It can give you a vague idea that with more dedicated tooling (i.e. something that does automatically what you'd do by hand[4]) you could do more interesting things (combining with some sort of LSP functionality to pass function bodies to the LLM would also help), though personally i'm not a fan of the "dedicated editor" that seems to be used and i think something more LSP-like (especially if it can also work with existing LSPs) would be neat.

IMO it can be useful for a bunch of boilerplate-y or boring work. The biggest issue i can see is that the context is too small to include everything (imagine, e.g., throwing the entire Blender source code in an LLM which i don't think even the largest of cloud-hosted LLMs can handle) so there needs to be some external way to store stuff dynamically but also the LLM to know that external stuff are available, look them up and store stuff if needed. Not sure how exactly that'd work though to the extent where you could -say- open up a random Blender source code file, point to a function, ask the LLM to make a modification, have it reuse any existing functions in the codebase where appropriate (without you pointing them out) and then, if needed, have the LLM also update the code where the function you modified is used (e.g. if you added/removed some argument or changed the semantics of its use).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/FevOm0o.png

[1] https://app.filen.io/#/d/e05ae468-6741-453c-a18d-e83dcc3de92...

[2] e.g. when i asked it to implement a BVH to speed up things it made something that wasn't hierarchical and actually slowed down things

[3] the code it produced for [2] was fixable to do a simple BVH

[4] i tried a larger project and wrote a script that `cat`ed and `xclip`ed a bunch of header files to pass to the LLM so it knows the available functions and each function had a single line comment about what it does - when the LLM wrote new functions it also added that comment. 99% of these oneliner comments were written by the LLM actually.
by bevr1337 | 2025-06-17 04:26:43+00:00
I recently had a coworker tell me he liked his last workplace because "we all spoke the same language." It was incredible how much he revealed about himself with what he thought was a simple fact about engineer culture. Your comment reminds me of that exchange.

- Employers, not employees, should provide workplace equipment or compensation for equipment. Don't buy bits for the shop, nails for the foreman, or Cursor for the tech lead.

- the workplace is not a meritocracy. People are not defined by their wealth.

- If $1,000 does not represent an appreciable amount of someone's assets, they are doing well in life. Approximately half of US citizens cannot afford rent if they lose a paycheck.

- Sometimes the money needs to go somewhere else. Got kids? Sick and in the hospital? Loan sharks? A pool full of sharks and they need a lot of food?

- Folks can have different priorities and it's as simple as that

We're (my employer) still unsure if new dev tooling is improving productivity. If we find out it was unhelpful, I'll be very glad I didn't lose my own money.
by foxglacier | 2025-06-17 04:28:08+00:00
That and the downsides to the sand battery. We don't need more biased new stories trying to promote everything as miraculously pure-good. Environmental concerns hardly matter for utility energy generation because if it's not cheaper, it will will either completely fail or be a tax on everyone if the government mandates it.

The obvious problem is it can only really be used for heating, not electricity. But heating is still a fine use when available.
by afarviral | 2025-06-17 04:28:13+00:00
This has been my experience as well, but there are plenty of assertions here that are not always true, e.g. "AI coding tools are sophisticated enough (they are not) to fix issues in my projects" … but how do you know this if you are not constantly checking whether the tooling has improved? I think for a certain level of issue AI can tackle it and improve things, but there's only a subset of the available models and of a multitude of workflows that will work well, but unfortunately we are drowning in many that are mediocre at best and many like me give up before finding the winning combination.
by smaudet | 2025-06-17 04:28:46+00:00
I guess my challenge is that "if it was a rote recitation of an idiomatic go function", was it worth writing?

There is a certain, style, lets say, of programming, that encourages highly non re-usable code that is both at once boring and tedious, and impossible to maintain and thus not especially worthwhile.

The "rote code" could probably have been expressed, succinctly, in terms that border on "plain text", but with more rigueur de jour, with less overpriced, wasteful, potentially dangerous models in-between.

And yes, machines like the eBPF verifier must follow strict rules to cut out the chaff, of which there is quite a lot, but it neither follows that we should write everything in eBPF, nor does it follow that because something can throw out the proverbial "garbage", that makes it a good model to follow...

Put another way, if it was that rote, you likely didn't need nor benefit from the AI to begin with, a couple well tested library calls probably sufficed.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-17 04:28:54+00:00
Sorry, but the original commenter is correct. They received relatively small amounts of seed funding in 2009 and later charged a nominal amount to cover text verification, but they still were a classic VC-funded play: receive tens of millions in VC dollars to operate at a loss for years to build market dominance. From the Wikipedia page:

> In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested about $8 million for more than 15% of the company, after months of negotiation by Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.[63][64][65]

> By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion.[26] Some time in 2013[66] WhatsApp acquired Santa Clara–based startup SkyMobius, the developers of Vtok,[67] a video and voice calling app.[68]

> In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month.[69] The year 2013 ended with $148 million in expenses, of which $138 million in losses.

I mean, when Facebook bought WhatsApp for billions, what did people expect? How else were they going to monetize?
by bilalq | 2025-06-17 04:29:45+00:00
I've found "agents" to be an utter disappointment in their current state. You can never trust what they've done and need to spend so much time verifying their solution that you may as well have just done it yourself in the first place.

However, AI code reviewers have been really impressive. We run three separate AI reviewers right now and are considering adding more. One of these reviewers is kind of noisy, so we may drop it, but the others have been great. Sure, they have false positives sometimes and they don't catch everything. But they do catch real issues and prevent customer impact.

The Copilot style inline suggestions are also decent. You can't rely on it for things you don't know about, but it's great at predicting what you were going to type anyway.
by lyu07282 | 2025-06-17 04:30:25+00:00
But why does Hollywood even care about this DRM in the first place? I don't really understand why all this wasted effort, going so far with HDCP encrypted video signals.. I mean every new release is pirated within hours despite all of these protections anyway, so what exactly is the point? It's even easier and faster to just download a 4K torrent than to get Netflix in 4k working on many system configurations because of these overbearing DRM requirements.
by harry8 | 2025-06-17 04:30:34+00:00
Cartoon about that which made me laugh.

https://www.altaonline.com/culture/cartoons/a42179654/weekly...

so hard to track these things down with google nowadays. Treats every word you add as an "or" like yahoo used to when google took their search market. The move from search engine to suggestion engine has been a disaster from my point of view. Hard to see how it would be more profitable.

edit: better link
by monero-xmr | 2025-06-17 04:30:37+00:00
I mostly just approve PRs because I trust my engineers. I have developed a 6th sense for thousand-line PRs and knowing which 100-300 lines need careful study.

Yes I have been burned. But 99% of the time, with proper test coverage it is not an issue, and the time (money) savings have been enormous.

"Ship it!" - me
by flaminHotSpeedo | 2025-06-17 04:31:50+00:00
I think the most damning thing here is the "what's our approach moving forward" section:

Every single bullet point there is basic stuff you expect a cloud provider to do correctly damn near every time. If you're not paying GCP for that expertise, or if that expertise is built on layers of cruft where that expertise was not applied... what are you paying them for?
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-17 04:32:24+00:00
If Sprint died, the other carriers or Comcast would have bought the carrier. T-mobile was also an also ran and its spectrum allocation was so bad you could never get a signal inside a building.

If Apple died who was going to make an alternate operating system to Microsoft? Do you think that would have caused “The Year of Linux on the desktop”. Apple was far from a huge player in 1996 when the Next acquisition happened. It was almost bankrupt.

A new company isn’t going to just come along and start a nationwide cell phone network and especially not with what was Sprint’s limited spectrum.
by andrewstuart | 2025-06-17 04:32:57+00:00
He’s saying it’s not faster because he needs to impose his human analysis on it which is slow.

That’s fine, but it’s an arbitrary constraint he chooses, and it’s wrong to say AI is not faster. It is. He just won’t let it be faster.

Some won’t like to hear this, but no-one reviews the machine code that a compiler outputs. That’s the future, like it or not.

You can’t say compilers are slow because I add on the time I take to Analyse the machine code. That’s you being slow.
by josephg | 2025-06-17 04:33:13+00:00
> "If you give tech bros a hit of psychedelics, all you get is tech bros on psychedelics."

This is an amazing line. I must admit: the first time I tried LSD I had some code open on my laptop. Before the trip I was curious what programming on LSD would be like, so at some point dutifully I sat down in front of my editor. I was immediately utterly transfixed by the colours of the text cursor as it pulsed. Then I lost myself watching hover states as I moved the mouse around. Needless to say, I didn’t get any programming done.

I remember thinking how strange and hilarious it was that, while sober, I care at all about programming. It all seemed so hollow.

A lot more happened on the trip - the whole thing was incredibly profound and insightful. But all these years later, I still have a crystal clear image of that pulsing cursor etched in my memory.
by foxglacier | 2025-06-17 04:33:21+00:00
Because a non-violent tribe will be destroyed by any violent neighbors it has. Even if it had a protected group of non-violent members, it would be militarily disadvantaged compared to its enemies with more fighters per population. And what are those non-violent people even doing all day in a world without any technological progress? Don't imagine you'd invent technology because almost nobody did much of that. If it was truly isolated like the Chatham Island Maori then yea, but they were eventually genocided by the mainland New Zealand Maori when they finally got to them.

I think you would be conscripted to fight whether you liked it or not, and inculcated with the belief that it's the right thing to do. Maybe even feeling shame are your unwillingness but forcing yourself to fit in anyway.
by tptacek | 2025-06-17 04:35:46+00:00
I don't find this to be the case. I've used (and hate) autocomplete-style LLM code generation. But I can feed 10 different tasks to Codex in the morning and come back and pick out the 3-4 I think might be worth pursuing, and just re-prompt the 7 I kill. That's nothing like interactive autocomplete, and drastically faster than than I could work without LLM assistance.
by wiseowise | 2025-06-17 04:36:51+00:00
You’re twisting results. Just because they took more time doesn’t mean their productivity went down. On the contrary, if you can perform expert task with much less mental resources (which 99% of orgs should prioritize for) then it is an absolute win. Work is extremely mentally draining and soul crushing experience for majority of people, if AI can lower that while maintaining roughly same result with subjects allocating only, say, 25% of their mental energy – that’s an amazing win.
by didibus | 2025-06-17 04:36:55+00:00
You could argue that AI-generated code is a black box, but let's adjust our perspective here. When was the last time you thoroughly reviewed the source code of a library you imported? We already work with black boxes daily as we evaluate libraries by their interfaces and behaviors, not by reading every line.

The distinction isn't whether code comes from AI or humans, but how we integrate and take responsibility for it. If you're encapsulating AI-generated code behind a well-defined interface and treating it like any third party dependency, then testing that interface for correctness is a reasonable approach.

The real complexity arises when you have AI help write code you'll commit under your name. In this scenario, code review absolutely matters because you're assuming direct responsibility.

I'm also questioning whether AI truly increases productivity or just reduces cognitive load. Sometimes "easier" feels faster but doesn't translate to actual time savings. And when we do move quicker with AI, we should ask if it's because we've unconsciously lowered our quality bar. Are we accepting verbose, oddly structured code from AI that we'd reject from colleagues? Are we giving AI-generated code a pass on the same rigorous review process we expect for human written code? If so, would we see the same velocity increases from relaxing our code review process amongst ourselves (between human reviewers)?
by yorwba | 2025-06-17 04:37:43+00:00
When people say that attention is quadratic, they mean that the cost to process n tokens is O(n²), so the amortized cost per token is indeed O(n). KV-caching is a way to maintain that amortized cost when appending tokens one at a time instead of ingesting the whole sequence at once. But in the end people want to be able to generate multiple tokens, so we're back at O(n²) total time again.

IIRC there are some FFT-based attention alternatives where encoding has complexity O(n log n), but there's no feasible way to cache anything and after appending a single token it costs O(n log n) again, so if you generate n tokens in sequence, the cost is actually O(n² log n).