MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pton_xd | 2025-06-19 17:11:21+00:00
> Think about all the domain experts, entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, and creative people who have incredible ideas but have been locked out of software development because they couldn't invest 5-10 years learning to code.

> it's about unleashing all the pent-up innovation from people who understand problems deeply but couldn't translate that understanding into software.

This is just a fantasy. People with "incredible ideas" and "pent-up innovation" also need incredible determination and motivation to make something happen. LLMs aren't going to magically help these people gain the energy and focus needed to pursue an idea to fruition. Coding is just a detail; it's not the key ingredient all these "locked out" people were missing.
by Detrytus | 2025-06-19 17:11:31+00:00
> There isn't much in the way of passenger service, granted, but that's because people in the US aren't, well, poor. They can afford better transportation options.

This is so misguided view... Trains (when done right) aren't "for the poor", they are great transportation option, that beats both airplanes and cars. In Poland, which isn't even close to the best, you can travel between big cities with speeds above 200km/h, and you can use regional rail for your daily commute, both those options being very comfortable and convenient, much more convenient than traveling by car.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-19 17:11:36+00:00
What other serious business to business agreements can you enter into without spending at least $100? The fee is not to cover technical costs, but administration costs.

Welcome to the world of having a small business. Be happy it's only $100. Your fees for cost-of-doing business is many times higher for a hot dog stand or any other thing you can come up with.
by lubujackson | 2025-06-19 17:13:03+00:00
Yes, my codebase has gotten bigger and I hit a rut where every change was blowing up one way or another. The fix was to create a few Cursor rules files. You can have Cursor make this - one to define the overall structure of the project, one to define where dataclass types are (I have a Python codebase), a few different ones for generic patterns for what needs updating when adding new code paths. In Cursor you can also select when Cursor consults these files, every time or when doing specified changes.

This has made the biggest difference with o3. If I want to "add a new module" I first explain the goal and have it create a plan (no code). Then I have it save that plan to a TODO.txt. And I just have it start implementing it. I spot check the code along the way to make sure its going down the correct path. I run a few "continue implementing" until it has created tests that pass. Then I test things myself. If all that checks out, I actually look at the code. Most of the time now everything is functioning and I have just a few minor tweaks.

Because I'm working on a new project I let some things stay a little wrong because I know I can focus on an across-the-board solution to it later, with a single prompt. The most important thing is to have everything well-typed and well-structured. LLMs thrive in structure.
by delusional | 2025-06-19 17:13:37+00:00
> it reflects something about the default human position

No it doesn't. Nothing that comes out of an LLM reflects anything except the corpus it was trained on and the sampling method used. That definitionally true, since those are the very things it is a product of.

You get NO subjective or objective insight from asking the AI about "technical debt" you only get an opaque statistical metric that you can't explain.
by agentultra | 2025-06-19 17:13:37+00:00
Buzzword soup. A lot of mixed analogies and metaphors. Very little justification for anything.

"We need to rewrite a lot of software," ok... why?

"AI is the new electricity" Really now... so I should expect a bill every month that always increases and to have my access cut off intermittently when there's a rolling AI power outage?

Interesting times indeed.
by Bender | 2025-06-19 17:14:18+00:00
That is a good idea and valid point. I have weighed the costs and benefits of having my own freeze dryers and potentially selling it locally. For me personally it just does not work out as I am retired and wish to enjoy my retirement. There are many others that do this on a much larger scale than I could. I would also first have to build my new home and have enough room / power for all the freeze dryers. They are noisy and have to run anywhere from 1 to 2 days depending on what I am cooking and drying. They have to be protected from critters here that would destroy them. I would also be competing with the LDS church. Some of the locals know to turn to them if they need freeze dried foods.

At the moment and for me personally it just makes sense to let others do the work. There are companies that at the moment and for some time now have been freeze drying massive amounts of food for my government so I just piggy-back off their work when they have enough reserves. Freeze Dry Wholesalers. Their food is very fresh and high quality. When they are out I get the lower echelon of freeze dried foods on Amazon.
by 9rx | 2025-06-19 17:14:25+00:00
> We had either a language extension or a compiler flag to disallow incomplete implementations in Haskell

"Better flag choices would have caught it" is a poor take given what came before. Of course that's true, but the same as your "better tests would have caught it". However, that really has nothing to do with our discussion.

Again, the premise here is that you are writing tests to close the gaps where the type system is insufficient to describe the full program. Of course you are as the astute observation of "My hair is too shiny and my muscles are too large to have to deal with [error prone things] everywhere. Can't do it." is true and valid. Null checks alone, or even all type checks alone, are not sufficient to satisfy all cases of [error prone things]. That is at least outside of formal proof languages, but we already established that we aren't talking about those.

So... Given the tests you are writing to fill in those gaps (again, not tests specifically looking for null pointer cases, but the normal tests you are writing), how would null pointer cases slip through, even if the compiler didn't notice? What is the concrete example that demonstrates how that is possible?

Because frankly I have no idea how it could be possible and I am starting to think your rejection was just made up on the spot and thrown out there without you giving any thought, or perhaps reiterating some made up nonsense you read elsewhere without considering if it were valid? It is seemingly telling that every attempt to dismiss that idea has devolved into bizarre statements along the lines of "well, if you don't write tests then null pointer exceptions might make it into production" even though it is clear that's not what we are talking about.
by kunzhi | 2025-06-19 17:15:11+00:00
Reading this article I couldn’t help but remember the Key & Peele skit about joke theft - “high on potenuse.” All this AI training feels similar to me on some level. Yeah, it’s “just making a copy” on the other hand the person who originated the idea doesn’t get to participate in the success.

Life is hard, but at least on the other hand, it’s also unfair.
by pugworthy | 2025-06-19 17:15:18+00:00
> If someone at Valve had taken 10 second to …

Looking up some quick stats, Steam has 132 million monthly active users and 69 million people use Steam on a daily basis. Not all those games are using VAC, but just looking at CS2, it routinely has over a million players playing it.

Nobody is going to “take 10 second to review” anything with those numbers.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-19 17:15:30+00:00
If there’s really a market for linux distros that have been pre-infected by rootkits, it seems one of the major game studios could provide it.

Of course the well known gaming company that releases a distro is Valve. But, rootkits don’t seem like they fit their particular ethos (they are well known for their less annoying DRM scheme, right?). TBH, it seems like a rare opportunity to break the hold they have on the “game store” concept.
by tudorizer | 2025-06-19 17:16:51+00:00
Entertain me in an exercise:

First, instruct a friend/colleague of how to multiply two 2 digit numbers in plain English.

Secondly (ideally with a different friend, to not contaminate tests), explain the same but using only maths formulas.

Where does the prompting process start and where does it end? Is it a one-off? Is the prompt clear enough? Do all the parties involved communicate within same domain objects?

Hopefully my example is not too contrived.
by mariusor | 2025-06-19 17:17:12+00:00
> you just know they actually mean "MoreRight".

I'm not affiliated with the rationalist community, but I always interpreted "Less Wrong" as word-play on how "being right" is an absolute binary: you can either be right, or not be right, while "being wrong" can cover a very large gradient.

I expect the community wanted to emphasize how people employing the specific kind of Bayesian iterative reasoning they were proselytizing would arrive at slightly lesser degrees of wrong than the other kinds that "normal" people would use.

If I'm right, your assertion wouldn't be totally inaccurate, but I think it might be missing the actual point.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-19 17:17:16+00:00
No. But you interpreting and evaluating the demo in question as suggesting the things you described - frankly, yes. It takes a deep gravity well to miss a point this clear from this close.

It's a tech demo. It shows you it's possible to do these things live, in real time (and to back Karpathy's point about tech spread patterns, it's accessible to you and me right now). It's not saying it's a good idea - but there are obvious seeds of good ideas there. For one, it shows you a vision of an OS or software you can trivially extend yourself on the fly. "I wish it did X", bam, it does. And no one says it has to be non-deterministic each time you press some button. It can just fill what's missing and make additions permanent, fully deterministic after creation.
by kanbankaren | 2025-06-19 17:17:46+00:00
> And when was the last time you found a bug in C-family code caused by someone who didn’t correctly use concurrency primitives because the programmer incorrectly believed that a certain piece of mutable data would only be accessed on a single thread? I’ll give you my answer: it was yesterday.

You answered my question. My original argument was using concurrency primitives "properly" in C++ prevents memory issues and Rust isn't strictly necessary.

I have nothing against Rust. I will use it when they freeze the language and publish a ISO spec and multiple compilers are available.
by qjack | 2025-06-19 17:18:04+00:00
> One implication would be to skip college, take that money and invest it in the stock market. Why invest in labor when capital grows faster? Although I don't think anyone with this mindset would offer that advice, but rather dwell in the fact that they are laborers by design with no hope of ever breaking that.

As a student, I could easily get a loan to cover my tuition, but the bank would not let me barrow money to gamble in the stock market. Even if they would, I of course would have also not taken that route. There were experiences I was interested in having and things I was interested in learning.

Now I have the capital to invest and those experiences I sought, but I still don't wish to become a capitalist or a landlord or a day trader. I take great pride in being a labourer.
by anthony-eid | 2025-06-19 17:18:55+00:00
Hey Laserbeam, I'm one of the devs that made the debugger and the one that wrote the article.

We do have a basic stack trace view that basically all debuggers support. What's coming out in the near future is a stack trace view in our multi buffer system. In fact, you can use the "show stack trace" action while in an active debug session to expand the call stack in a multi buffer, where each excerpt is a frame. It's just not up to the quality that I and several others expect from Zed, so I didn't advertise it.

There's also a PR for a watching variables/expression that is going to be merged in a couple of days. The functionality is done, but we didn't want to add a feature so close to launch that wasn't fully tested.

Support for data breakpoints will come in the near future. I can't say when because we're planning on focusing on automatic configuration for a while, but it is a priority.

We do support simultaneously debugging multiple sessions at the same time and multithreaded debugging too. There's still more to do with it, but the support is definitely there!
AI startup analyzer with 99.999% accuracy (always says "don't invest")
by MarkinK | 2025-06-19 17:19:25+00:00
Revolutionary AI-powered startup analysis platform with breakthrough predictive capabilities and enterprise-grade neural networks.

Our proprietary algorithm delivers unparalleled precision in risk assessment using advanced machine learning models. Beta testing demonstrates 99.999% accuracy in predicting negative outcomes.

Always says "don't invest, this will end badly"
by mdaniel | 2025-06-19 17:19:49+00:00
CRDs are not tied to golang in any way whatsoever; <https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/writing-custom-controller-pyt...> and <https://metacontroller.github.io/metacontroller/guide/create...> are two concrete counter-examples, with the latter being the most "microservices" extreme. You can almost certainly implement them in bash if you're trying to make the front page of HN
by diggan | 2025-06-19 17:20:10+00:00
> you also have to have enough domain knowledge

I'm a bit 50/50 on this. Generally I agree, how are you supposed to review it otherwise? Blindly accepting whatever the LLM tells you or gives you is bound to create trouble in the future, you still need to understand and think about what the thing you're building is, and how to design/architect it.

I love making games, but I'm also terrible at math. Sometimes, I end up out of my depth, and sometimes it could take me maybe a couple of days to solve something that probably would be trivial for a lot of people. I try my best to understand the fundamentals and the theory behind it, but also not get lost in rabbit holes, but it's still hard, for whatever reason.

So I end up using LLMs sometimes to write small utility functions used in my games for specific things. It takes a couple of minutes. I know exactly what I want to pass into it, and what I want to get back, but I don't necessarily understand 100% of the math behind it. And I think I'm mostly OK with this, as long as I can verify that the expected inputs get the expected outputs, which I usually do with unit or E2E tests.

Would I blindly accept information about nuclear reactors, another topic I don't understand much about? No, I'd still take everything a LLM outputs with a "grain of probability" because that's how they work. Would I blindly accept it if I can guarantee that for my particular use case, it gives me what I expect from it? Begrudgingly, yeah, because I just wanna create games and I'm terrible at math.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-06-19 17:20:16+00:00
> it has nothing to do with being private or public

It has everything to do with being public or private. Private companies exist to generate a positive ROI; that's literally their whole purpose. Companies with high ROIs attract massive investment and expand, companies with low or negative ROIs cease to exist. It's a self-optimizing system.

Government programs have no concern for ROI and that's precisely the problem; they just siphon more resources out of the private sector and keep going regardless of whether there's any return or not.
by badsectoracula | 2025-06-19 17:21:24+00:00
IIRC Rufus can actually download the necessary ISOs so it isn't THAT complicated.

On the other hand, if someone finds that part too complicated to follow perhaps they may not be able to install Linux - or Windows for that matter - by themselves and come across other issues down the line. Ultimately replacing your OS with another one does require some minimum level of technical knowledge that you either need to have or be fine with learning during the process.
by haiku2077 | 2025-06-19 17:22:17+00:00
Like I said I'm hazy on the details, this was a small thing I did a long time ago. But I do remember our on-call having to deal with a lot of manual repair of etcd quorum, and I noticed the runbook to fix it had no steps that needed any human decision making, so I made that wrapper program to automate the recovery. It wasn't complex either, IIRC it was about one or two pages of code, mostly logging.
by trod1234 | 2025-06-19 17:23:14+00:00
> There's already nothing preventing it with paper signage.

This is mistaken. There is the cost in labor to replace signage, and the delay in time for that replacement to completely occur, as well as the regulatory required related to signage.

The point of sale is bound to the signage price. There are laws against bait and switching, and other deceptive business practices where electronic instantly updated prices would fall afoul when they get to the register and the mechanics of a bait and switch are in full force (violating law).

Online orders following dynamic prices also run into the same issues.

Dynamic pricing is just bait and switch pricing, and the courts will eventually confirm this. The method adjusts the price upwards when it shows more demand (as they claim), and they define demand as the number of people visiting, or more accurately the number of clients connecting. This can be sockpuppet clients of a vendor that algorithmically join to boost the price like any shill.

I've seen this happen with items where they adjust it up 15-25%, and don't show that adjustment till after they've charged you. 15% for a $10 item is a lot less than 15% for a $1300 item. Would you find it acceptable if they just tacked on $195 in surge pricing or more.

To understand this clearly, you need to understand this isn't demand. Demand as a cohort only includes the number of people that would make an exchange at a given price level. What they are actually measuring is a Need cohort, and they misleadingly conflate and assume that this is demand because it is in their interest so they can charge a higher price deceptively.

A Need Cohort includes all the people who will not make that exchange. That's everyone that visits and leaves without purchasing, and in reality, its the entire population that wouldn't purchase the item but would find some marginal need for that item if they had it (including the entire secondhand market).

Consolidated monopolies aren't about screwing customers out of pennies. Its all about screwing them out of the percentages based on the goods they sell, and what they think they can get away with given their position which is capable of holding a geographic region hostage.

For an example, the Egg price fixing where they claimed they had to cull all these birds because of avian flu, they raised the egg prices to roughly $15/dozen, and somehow produced more eggs than birds alive in the same time period. The same thing happened with expiring meat where the meat manufacturers negotiated a lower-price buyback for all expiring meat products to limit those loss lieder sales making it to the public. It was speculated the meat was repurposed/processed and sold as pet food.

Price discovery for goods has requirements that must be met, and aren't met under monopolies engaging in dynamic pricing. There are also well known methods for identifying price inflexibility in demand which do not include price confusion.
by mindslight | 2025-06-19 17:24:45+00:00
Ah, I got you. I hear session layer and think something a bit more ingrained in the core network, but I can see how that would work. Relying on a secret 32 bit nonce chaffs me a bit, but there is a similar problem with guessing sequence numbers (modulo source IP spoofing, which has been greatly clamped down on). And there could always have been some extensions adding cryptographic security, timeout the roaming functionality if lots of wrong packets trying to guess session identifiers were received, etc.

Developing on that last bit I threw out, especially since you're lamenting the non-adoption of SCTP. With the retrospective from NAT, it feels like it would have been good to factor out the "port" part of TCP/UDP and put it in the IP header instead ("flow ID" or something). Then define (saddr, daddr, protocol#, flowID) as a "flow tuple" for middle boxes to operate on. TCP/UDP/SCTP could then define and present those bits as port numbers.

This could even be size-negative if you threw out that whole fragmentation thing in favor of completely punting it to a higher layer instead.

(I realize this goes against the end to end principle and strict layer separation, but the fact is that despite the goal, middle boxes are mucking with packets, and when that mechanism cannot be prevented, facilitating it would be better for maintaining flexibility)
by the_af | 2025-06-19 17:25:06+00:00
> I'm not affiliated with the rationalist community, but I always interpreted "Less Wrong" as word-play on how "being right" is an absolute binary: you can either be right, nor not be right, while "being wrong" can cover a very large gradient.

I know that's what they mean at the surface level, but you just know it comes with a high degree of smugness and false modesty. "I only know that I know nothing" -- maybe, but they ain't no modern day Socrates, they are just a bunch of nerds going online with their thoughts.
by TheBicPen | 2025-06-19 17:25:19+00:00
> You can be free to modify the game client, but you aren't entitled to play with others using it.

For a multiplayer game, I'd argue that playing with others (even if you're restricted to private servers, not that most games support that anymore..) is running the software. Being able to use a piece of software for its intended purpose is more relevant than a literal reading "you are allowed to exec the binary and nothing more"
by charcircuit | 2025-06-19 17:25:40+00:00
>The xz backdoor was successfully caught before it landed in mainstream release branches

What? It literally got included with several distros. It wasn't caught before it shipped to end users. Just because it got caught before slower to update distros got it, that doesn't mean it is okay. It reveals how low the barrier is for an anonymous person to get code into the OS.

>I never claimed you should have the right to cheat against other players.

Attestation doesn't take away your ability to modify and run software which means that you still have freedom 0 and 1. It just means that you can not prove to a remote server that you bare running unmodified software. To me you were implying that the server being able to kick people who modified the client to cheat was violating their freedom.

>Perhaps you want to run your own server, with different moderation policies.

Nothing would stop you from running your own server like that.
by qualeed | 2025-06-19 17:26:14+00:00
Sure.

My point isn't that this isn't a biometric or something.

My point is that it is the weakest biometric, full of noise, constantly contaminated, easily forged with no skill set or technology required, with a very high false-positive rate when used for anything privacy-related.

There are so many more things (technology, policy, etc.), literally violating people's right to privacy at this very moment, that trying to spin this as a theoretically privacy-damaging technology strikes me as a bit ridiculous.