MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hatthew | 2025-06-03 06:26:03+00:00
A human might see a gap in guardrails and avoid it, or upon seeing unexpected behavior they might be able to tell that a guardrail was breached and have some intuition of where. An LLM will happy burst through a gap in the guardrails, claim it has solved the problem, and require just as much human effort to fix and even more long-term maintenance because of less code familiarity.
by simoncion | 2025-06-03 06:26:32+00:00
> Software engineers aren't on that same spectrum because the vast majority of programming is not artisinal creative work...

That's irrelevant. Copyright and software licensing terms are still enforced in the US. Unless the software license permits it, or it's for one of a few protected activities, verbatim reproduction of nontrivial parts of source code is not legal.

Whether the inhalation of much (most? nearly all?) of the source code available on the Internet for the purpose of making a series of programming machines that bring in lots and lots of revenue for the companies that own those machines is either fair use or it's infringing commercial use has yet to be determined. Scale is important when determining whether or not something should be prohibited or permitted... which is something that many folks seem to forget.
by aeneas_ory | 2025-06-03 06:26:37+00:00
Very impressive, and at the same time very scary because who knows what security issues are hidden beneath the surface. Not even Claude knows! There is very reliable tooling like https://github.com/ory/hydra readily available that has gone through years of iteration and pentests. There are also lots of libraries - even for NodeJS - that have gone through certification.

In my view this is an antipattern of AI usage and „roll your own crypto“ reborn.
by humility | 2025-06-03 06:27:03+00:00
Great post OP.

I myself took my type from ~65 wpm to 124 average wpm[1] in about 6 months as opposed to 1 year by OP by moving to zsa moonlander. If anyone wants I can share the journey in a post. But can definitely recommend improving your typing speed for all the reasons already outlined!

[1] https://monkeytype.com/profile/navxio
by michaelbrave | 2025-06-03 06:27:37+00:00
I think it will be used for evil, as you said, but I think it will be used for good too, things like: - In theory it has the potential to democratize business, making any 1 person capable of running/owning their own business and thus spread wealth too. - more access to healthcare and psychological care - advances in medicine - tutoring and learning - insane amounts of scientific research - empower anyone with an idea
by palmotea | 2025-06-03 06:28:05+00:00
> One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies.

And if your summary is correct, he was right. If you don't remember what you've learned (i.e. integrate it into your mind), you haven't learned anything. You're just, say, a book operator.
by ipnon | 2025-06-03 06:28:06+00:00
An extremely simple hypothesis: The world of today is more cognitively demanding. To take a very simple empirical example, 7% of 25 year olds had a college degree in 1960, 36% in 2020! You have to wonder what the neuroprotective effects are of being able to write an essay, analyze a novel, perform a chemical experiment, prove a theorem, whatever, over a lifetime. But it's well-established that the brain, like all other organs of the body, is "use it or lose it."
by tptacek | 2025-06-03 06:29:48+00:00
Sure, you need to be able to make the jig. But what does that have to do with anything? Once you do, you have it. Is your point that LLMs are problematic for less-skilled programmers, who need the rote tasks to build up fluency? That's probably true! It doesn't change anything for skilled programmers, though.
by rienbdj | 2025-06-03 06:30:13+00:00
The commits are revealing.

Look at this one:

> Ask Claude to remove the "backup" encryption key. Clearly it is still important to security-review Claude's code!

> prompt: I noticed you are storing a "backup" of the encryption key as `encryptionKeyJwk`. Doesn't this backup defeat the end-to-end encryption, because the key is available in the grant record without needing any token to unwrap it?

I don’t think a non-expert would even know what this means, let alone spot the issue and direct the model to fix it.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-06-03 06:31:12+00:00
> A lot of the value added by various intelligent tab completion and LLMs

Saving typing was never a value add for intelligent tab completion, it is mostly used for discovery and recall (what members does the type of this expression have?), not to accelerate your WPM. After around 20-30 wpm, typing speed is not a bottleneck in programming, but size of the API and how much you can fit into your head most definitely is.
by godelski | 2025-06-03 06:31:21+00:00
> to an abstract academic definition here

Besides the fact that your statement is self contradicting, there is actually a solid definition [0]. You should click the link on specification too. Or better yet, go talk to one of those guys that did their PhD in programming languages.

> They have proven

Have they?

Or did you just assume?

Yeah, I know they got good scores on those benchmarks but did you look at the benchmarks? Look at the question and look what is required to pass it. Then take a moment and think. For the love of God, take a moment and think about how you can pass those tests. Don't just take a pass at face value and move on. If you do, well I got a bridge to sell you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correctness_(computer_science)
by motorest | 2025-06-03 06:31:26+00:00
> I didn't frame it that way - perhaps you are thinking of the person you replied to?

You did. You explicitly asserted the following.

> If a business has the budget for 1 or 2 engineers though, they might be able to task them with work that previously required 5-10 engineers (...).

In your own words, a project that would take 5-10 engineers is now feasible to be tackled with 1 or 2. Your own words.

> (...) The point is that making software development easier can actually increase the demand of software engineers in some cases (...)

I think that's somewhere between unrealistic and wishful thinking. Even in your problem statement, "making software development easier" lowers demand. Even if you argue that some positions might open where none existed before, the truth of the matter is that at the core of your scenario lies a drop in demand for software engineers. Shops who currently employ engineers won't need to retain as many to maintain their current level of productivity.
by TuringTest | 2025-06-03 06:31:54+00:00
I've always wondered why this capability (detecting repetitive patterns and offering an auto-complete option to apply it to the whole collection) is not more pervasive.

It's a very good interaction pattern, it would be more and more viable given increasing computing power and better understanding of context thanks to LLM, and would increase productivity and reduce boredom with little intrusive effects.

So why is nobody offering this feature in data-heavy UIs? (Except for Excel's column auto complete, which it's hit or miss but incredibly useful when it works).
by rcarmo | 2025-06-03 06:32:19+00:00
Food. Kids’ school, clothing, etc. Cheap AliExpress microcontrollers to play with, tools, 3D printing gear, occasional music gear, a new Mac every four years. Have recently decided to not buy any more gaming consoles and just use Steam on beefy mini-PCs, so am budgeting for another four-year upgrade cycle (1080p gaming is fine today, 1440p should be perfect in two years, there is no reason to buy expensive games today when they’re on sale in two year’s time).

Would love to buy some top-of-the-line compute for my homelab and a few machines that just don’t exist yet and a house in a country town to retire to. None of that is ever going to happen.

Am in South Europe so my income is way less than it should be considering what I do for a living, have somewhat made my peace with that by just enjoying my free time.
by cess11 | 2025-06-03 06:32:28+00:00
Right, I should have been more clear, perhaps.

2006 is the year multicore CPU:s were broadly introduced, it's the year of Core Duo and Athlon 64 X2. Before then clustering of cores looked different. Releasing support for such CPU:s pretty much as soon as they were available rather than a few years later probably says something about the required effort.

One might make a comparison with OCaml.

Edit: A friend of mine mentioned that Björn Gustafsson recently did a talk on optimising the move-instruction at a Code BEAM event. With a bit of luck it was recorded and will be published sometime soon, should be some interesting information in there.
by tptacek | 2025-06-03 06:33:00+00:00
An LLM, which has deep advantages over humans in rote pattern recognition, will see gaps in guardrails that humans miss. In the end, it's a wash. What's not a wash is all the rest of the instrumentation and formal methods stuff an LLM agent enables, all of which is available to every dev team today but doesn't get used because type safety, semgrep rules, advanced linters, and TLA+ specs are too time-consuming for humans to deploy. Not a problem for an LLM agent.
by un_ess | 2025-06-03 06:34:08+00:00
UN - Graph database data engineer | Full-time | Valencia(ES) or Remote(EU timezone) or Bangkok(TH)

Looking for a data engineer to help us scale our Graph db. We use JanusGraph. You are expected to have prod experience with a graph DB, working knowledge of Gremlin (or at least Cypher). Python would be good.

Please apply through https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4233355677
by lynx97 | 2025-06-03 06:34:20+00:00
> where all you got was the outline of the island

As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.
by strgcmc | 2025-06-03 06:34:28+00:00
To your last point -- I didn't say large number of junior contractors would write good code or whatever. The change that is happening in the startup scene now, as compared to say 10 years ago, is more about lowering the barrier to MVP and making it easier/cheaper for startups to experiment with finding product market fit, than anything to do with "productivity" or code quality or whatever.

We're probably just talking past each other, because the thing you care about is not the thing I care about. I am saying that, it used to cost some reference benchmark of $X/idea to iterate as a startup and experiment with ideas, but then it became 0.5X because gig workers or overseas contractors became more accessible and easier to work with, and now it's becoming 0.1X because of LLMs and coding agents. I am not making any sort of argument about quality being better/good/equal, nor am I making any sort of conversion chart between 10 interns or 100 LLM agents equals 1 senior engineer or something... Quality is rarely (never?) the deciding factor, when it comes to early pre-seed iteration as a startup tries to gasp and claw for something resembling traction. Cost to iterate as well as benefits of having more iterations, can be improving, even if each iteration's quality level is declining.

I'm simply saying, if I was a founder, and I had $10k to spend to test new ideas with, I can test a helluva lot more ideas today (leveraging AI), vs what I could have done 5 years ago (using contractors), vs what I could have done 10-20 years ago (hiring FTEs, just to test out ideas, is frankly kind of absurd when you think about how expensive that is). I am not saying that $10k worth of Claude Code is going to buy me a production grade super fantastic amazing robust scalable elegant architecture or whatever, but it sure as heck can buy me a good enough working prototype and help me secure a seed round. Reducing that cost of experimentation is the real revolution (and whether interns can learn or will pay off over time is a wholly orthogonal topic that has no bearing to this cost of experimentation revolution).
by pjbster | 2025-06-03 06:34:52+00:00
Hard agree. (2) is all about building out the test suite; once you have this (3) becomes a cake walk.

I've worked in a lot of places where end to end testing is performed manually by a SIT team who absolutely do not like to re-run a test once it's been passed. These people hate the idea of (3) and will overestimate the costs to the PM in order to avoid having to do it.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-06-03 06:35:44+00:00
9th grade for me. The teacher actually just graded us on speed and accuracy, that was my only C in high school. It served me well, however, I got up to 40 WPM and have kept to around 30 during my career (always fast enough it seems). Also, model M PC Jr. keyboards, so I can’t really complain too much.
by _huayra_ | 2025-06-03 06:36:18+00:00
The other thing I would encourage folks here to do is self-advocate.

We may deride the bloviations of the folks who are "all talk and no code" and how they seemingly ride the coattails of folks actually in the trenches, but honestly a lot of people do great work and sorta expect it to get "naturally noticed" in the corporate environment.

Not saying ditch your IDE and just throw around buzzwords in boring could've-been-an-email "sync meetings", but don't forget that demonstrating the value you have is also important and often neglected skill.

If a clever PR hotfix merges in the forest, does it make a sound?

I am telling on myself here, in a way, as this article hit hard and with great serendipity: I was part of a RIF at a well-known company this very morning, and I most definitely did not advocate very well for myself despite really holding the projects I was on together technically in the background / shadows.
by throw310822 | 2025-06-03 06:36:53+00:00
Yes, interesting introduction since the entire article is about the proof of US meddling in Ukraine's internal affairs.

Also the article:

> The US says that it is working with all sides in the crisis to reach a peaceful solution, noting that "ultimately it is up to the Ukrainian people to decide their future". However this transcript suggests that the US has very clear ideas about what the outcome should be and is striving to achieve these goals

> Various officials attempting to marshal the Ukrainian opposition [...] US Vice-President Joe Biden clearly being lined up to give private words of encouragement at the appropriate moment.

> the US expresses frustration at the EU's efforts. Washington and Brussels have not been completely in step during the Ukraine crisis. The EU is divided and to some extent hesitant about picking a fight with Moscow.

The year is 2014
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-06-03 06:37:00+00:00
Except I argue that such a choice is emotional. And you captured the essence of what I was saying in other comment.

And I am not sure but like, I have got this one life. Why can't I just be a good guy who wants to help others while still being in the system.

Why do I have to suffer for other peoples decision and have to bear the mental responsibility to.

Nobody's perfect. Neither do I intend to be. We are all gonna die. I just want to leave my community a little bit more charming place. Not bring revolution.

I can't escape the system because this thought terrifies me. It terrifies me because you have to pick your battles wisely. I won't leave my coding job because of llms.

Instead if I am really feeling like trying do good. I can donate extensively and live a frugal life for some time and donate to people who are dying due to hunger and such

And I would still have the freedom to go back at any I stant and stop donating.

The same can't be said about leaving a job. Its hard to reenter

I am not sure lol. But I would much rather build stuff that I like with llms and then donate instead of the project not existing or taking way longer time imo
by selivanovp | 2025-06-03 06:37:15+00:00
That’s not true. Russia was perfectly fine with a sovereign Ukraine, as long as it respected their own constitution and terms of separations from USSR: to be a military non aligned country.

It’s not so hard to notice, that all the problems started when the other side of Budapest memorandum decided to not respect it anymore. Since 2004 Ukraine became less and less sovereign, resulting in a puppet government installed in 2014 and starting the hot phase. It’s also not hard to notice, that at every step Ukraine could chose negotiations, but was pushed towards more confrontation by Western bakers.
by rcarmo | 2025-06-03 06:37:19+00:00
The Kindle is still amazing value for money at any price - especially when compared to others with a smaller ecosystem. And being able to sideload DRM-free books I get on other stores (while I can) is just icing on the cake since I want to actually own my books and read them in future devices.

That said, I am very happy with my Supernote Nomad as an e-reader as well (it is a note taking device, but runs the Kindle Android app) even if it is completely out of the price range the OP discusses.
by kmarc | 2025-06-03 06:39:01+00:00
Switzerland has something similar these days (UBS-CS merger, big tech layoffs, too expensive local workforce)

I applied to 39 jobs (mostly through LinkedIn)

Out of which 29 in Switzerland, the rest mainly fully remote in Europe and US.

I got in total around 6 companies' 20-something interviews. Exactly ONE interview ouf of those was in Switzerland. Crazy

(I might just not be enough for this competitive market, I know. Eventually I ended up with a consulting job within the EU, obviously for lower daily rate, which is fine)

Fun thing is, the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly
by TomasBM | 2025-06-03 06:39:11+00:00
They're not really comparable.

AI is not only a general-purpose technology (such as, e.g., electricity or computers), but also the only one that can self-improve. Also, its potential for diffusion is much bigger, because unlike for electricity and computers, barriers are much more easily overcome [1].

But I'd suggest looking at this not as a separate "technology" like airplanes or smartphones, but rather as a software breakthrough. Everything that worried people about software [2] in the 20th and the early 21st century - or anything that came to pass on a smaller scale - is now much more worrisome.

[1] Pretty much any person or machine today that has access to electricity and computers can use AI, thanks to subscription models, cloud computing, VC subsidies, web access, etc.

[2] For example, large-scale automation and job loss, mass surveillance, robot swarms, etc.
by jeenuv | 2025-06-03 06:39:24+00:00
Location: UK/India.

Remote: Yes / mostly. Can travel to London semi-regularly or on a need-basis.

Willing to relocate: no.

Technologies: C++, C, Python, Rust, Java, Javascript, Typescript, Haskell, Elm, React, Shell script.

Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cGqBYZpKeafuxQAtyqW1mQRHfgM....

Email: See CV.

Headline: Strong system software background (ARM architecture). Currently works in low-latency/high-frequency trading. Interests: low-level programming, functional programming, distributed systems, formal modelling, web UI tooling, command-line.
by hatthew | 2025-06-03 06:39:35+00:00
Having an LLM code for you is like watching someone make a TAS. It technically meets the explicitly-specified goals of the mapper (checkpoints and finish), but the final run usually ignores the intended route made by the mapper. Even if the mapper keeps on putting in extra checkpoints and guardrails in between, the TAS can still find a crazy uberbug into backflip into taking half the checkpoints in reverse order. And unless you spend far longer studying the TAS than it would have taken to learn to drive it yourself normally, you're not going to learn much yourself.
by croes | 2025-06-03 06:39:38+00:00
Who said use of trade? The threat are sanctions to ban the use of the software, like they cancelled the ICC investigators bank account on behalf of the US.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/world-news/british-icc-chief-prosecuto...

You're the only western country that enforces their sanctions on third party countries.

For instance a german customer can't pay a german merchant via PayPal if he buys Cuban cigars, despite it's done by PayPal Europe S.a.r.l. et Cie s.c.a.

And don't forget the things with Greenland.
by quantpedia | 2025-06-03 06:40:23+00:00
In two of our previous articles, we explored the idea of using artificial intelligence to backtest trading strategies. Since then, AI has continued to develop, with tools like ChatGPT evolving from simple Q&A assistants into more complex tools that may aid in developing and testing investment strategies—at least, according to some of the more optimistic voices in the field. Over a year has passed since our first experiments, and with all the current hype around the usefulness of large language models (LLMs), we believe it’s the right time to critically revisit this topic. Therefore, our goal is to evaluate how well today’s AI models can perform as quasi-junior quantitative analysts—highlighting not only the promising use cases but also the limitations that still remain.
by 7bit | 2025-06-03 06:40:34+00:00
"Appeal to" and "being understood by" are two different things.

You can write a text that appeals to a small audience, but is understood by a big audience.

You can also write a text that would appeal to a big audience - but doesn't because no one understands it.

It's not hard to write a text that can be understood by a large audience. Using an analogy that only some people understand is counter productive as analogies are used exactly to allow the audience to illustrate the problem.
by kavalg | 2025-06-03 06:40:43+00:00
I think it is not so much about capitalism, but about the coupling of democracy with money. Money -> Media/Influencers -> election -> corruption -> go back to 1. To make a meaningful change, the society must somehow decouple democracy from money. With current technology it shall be possible to vote directly for many things instead of relying on (corrupt, pre-bread) representatives. Something like democracy 2.0 :)
by SKILNER | 2025-06-03 06:41:52+00:00
Let's just imagine we're critiquing cars or planes in about 1910. They're so flawed. No one can say with certainty whether or how they will improve.

Side note of interest, from Wikipedia: "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly" is an editorial published in the New York Times on October 9, 1903. The article incorrectly predicted it would take one to ten million years for humanity to develop an operating flying machine.
by selcuka | 2025-06-03 06:43:28+00:00
Also related [1]:

> "This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable."

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?SecondSystemEffect
by Animats | 2025-06-03 06:43:37+00:00
I tried some LLMs about six months ago, and got a halfway decent translation between Linden Scripting Language and Lua. I didn't expect that to work at all, but it did, despite very different syntax. The parent article says that if you haven't tried this in six months, it's time to try again. It looks like it's going to be useful for game geometry wrangling, at least.

LLMs seem to be good at finding obscure library functions from a description of the function needed, something where where keyword searches aren't too helpful. Previously, searching Stack Overflow helped, but nobody is posting there any more. Good reference manuals are almost historical artifacts now.