MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxemitchell | 2025-06-07 15:29:01+00:00
I did human notes -> had Claude condense and edit -> manually edit. A few of the sentences (like the stinky one below) were from Claude which I kept if it matched my own thoughts, though most were changed for style/prose.

I'm still experimenting with it. I find it can't match style at all, and even with the manual editing it still "smells like AI" as you picked up. But, it also saves time.

My prompt was essentially "here are my old blog posts, here's my notes on reading a bunch of AI generated commits, help me condense this into a coherent article about the insights I learned"
by staticman2 | 2025-06-07 15:29:22+00:00
>Artists enjoy doing their art, whether it's writing, reading out loud, playing music.

I guess this is probably generally true. It's really not always true, though. Neil Gaiman told an anecdote on his blog about knowing some writers who hate writing and are miserable.

The fictional TV show The Larry Sanders Show does a good job of finding comedy in the misery of showbusiness: the main character is a neurotic talk show host who is desperate for top rating, jealous of his rivals, and gets no joy from the process of making a hit tv show. I'm not saying most stars are like that, but there's probably some truth there.
by akritrime | 2025-06-07 15:30:31+00:00
Imagine if writers complained that stuff they wrote were being used in literature classes that teaches people how to read and write because how sentences they once toiled over for hours would now be used in mundane letters.

AI can't take away an artists creativity, just like how photography didn't kill painting. Yes, it closes up certain avenues on how artists make money but it will most probably make up for that by making them more productive.
by dagw | 2025-06-07 15:30:32+00:00
I think this whole thing is as stupid as the next person, but let's be real about it. This is a small handful of students at a small handful of universities in one country being overly weird. There is no way this is in any way indicative of the vast vast majority of university students in the world. Most of them are just putting their heads down and diligently studying their chosen subject, and will come out smarter and better equipped for working in the real world than when they went in.
by the_af | 2025-06-07 15:31:48+00:00
You got me wrong: I'm not talking about the veracity of the accusation, I'm asking about what it says about Musk (regardless of its truth).

Especially in the eyes of Musk fans.

This guy is now effectively claiming he helped get someone elected president whom he knew was a pedophile. Musk claims Trump got elected thanks to his support (again, Musk claims this). He also claims Trump is a pedophile.

So what do Musk fans think about Musk (not Trump) in light of this?
by safety1st | 2025-06-07 15:32:14+00:00
This isn't the first time Musk has baselessly accused someone of pedophilia on social media.

He did it randomly to some guy he didn't like in Thailand who saved some kids trapped in a cave. He's probably done it other times.

It's just an Elon Musk thing. Go totally unhinged on social media and defame people without evidence. He does it all the time.

The only guy more famous than Musk for saying absolute nonsense on social media, is Trump.

It is all fake, lame, and nonsense.

What's shocking is that the people running our country are behaving like absolute children. I feel like they wouldn't be able to hold down a job at my company because they're so unhinged, they would have been fired long ago, and yet here they are, billionaires, deciding the fate of 350M people.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-07 15:32:22+00:00
Yet, Python, JS, Ruby, etc, are still missing the JIT/AOT toolchains in the box like Lisp languages, even with V8, you need a debug build for something as basic as (disassemble ....), and then there are the IDE tooling, live coding experience, that for having something remotely close, means getting one of the JetBrains IDE, and still not the full stack experience like Lisp.

One would have expected that after all these years, dynamic languages would have learned a bit more from Lisp than only the type system, and having a GC.
by BurritoKing | 2025-06-07 15:32:39+00:00
When you consider the "tool" as more than just the LLM model, but the stuff wrapped around calling that model then I feel like you can make a good argument it's improving when it keeps context in a file on disk and constantly updates and edits that file as you work throguh the project.

I do this routinely for large initiatives I'm kicking off through Claude Code - it writes a long detailed plan into a file and as we work through the project I have it constantly updating and rewriting that document to add information we have jointly discovered from each bit of the work. That means every time I come back and fire it back up, it's got more information than when it started, which looks a lot more improvement from my perspective.
by cardanome | 2025-06-07 15:33:02+00:00
Your brain does not work the same way as my brain works. I am sorry, I know this is hard to believe but you will develop some actual emphathy once you accept the fact.

General advice for running a marathon will not for for someone who has no legs. I can't will my brain to work differently than it does. I can just learn to cope with my ADHD brain. And you being judgemental about it will not change that.
by achenatx | 2025-06-07 15:33:02+00:00
If your payroll ends up being about the same, after 5 years it all evens out in the sense that you will be expensing 100% of your payroll each year (but the expensing will be 20% from each of the prior 5 years).

If your payroll is quickly growing You experience the problem on all payroll growth.

If your payroll is decreasing, you get a tax benefit. Your outgoing cash is less, but you are getting deductions from prior year expenses.
by jchw | 2025-06-07 15:33:18+00:00
Okay I'm a Nix enthusiast but you'll have to trust me when I say that I'm not criticizing them for moving away from Nix; it isn't that strong of an emotional attachment. However, I'm not really sure I understand some of these complaints and they really could use more explanation. For example:

> The biggest problem with Nix is its commit-based package versioning. Only the latest major version of each package is available, with versions tied to specific commits in the nixpkgs repo.

While Nixpkgs is an amazing resource, Nix != Nixpkgs. Nixpkgs is highly unideal for cases where you want to be able to pull arbitrary versions of toolchains, but it is not the only way to go. For example, there is amazingly good Nix tooling for pulling an arbitrary version of Rust. Other Nix-based developer tools have shown how you can do this well.

> no way of splitting up the Nix dependencies into separate layers

That doesn't make any sense. You can literally just split them into separate layers in whatever arbitrary fashion you'd like. The built-in Nixpkgs docker tooling has some support for this even.

> We also changed the codebase from Rust to Go because of the Buildkit libraries.

This part is not related to Nix, but I find it interesting anyways. Obviously most people don't transition programming languages on a whim, it's generally something you do when you're already planning on building from scratch anyways. To me it almost sounds like different people worked on Railpacks vs Nixpacks.

(I've definitely seen what happens when people not familiar with Nix wind up having to deal with unfinished Nix solutions within an organization. It is not pretty, as most people are unwilling to try to figure out Nix. I don't generally use Nix at work out of fear of causing this situation.)
by dnemmers | 2025-06-07 15:33:51+00:00
While there is plenty of valid criticism, the author is clearly doing their best to pump the article up with complex vernacular and sentence structure to dazzle the reader, without lending much to clarity, brevity, or understanding:

“The worst reactionary prose, on the other hand, is often the precise inverse, its most recognizable hallmark being the needless adornment of extremely banal thoughts or truisms with pompous verbiage designed to make them sound smart.”

This seems to apply to this article?
by totalperspectiv | 2025-06-07 15:35:34+00:00
My impression is that this is on purpose on their part. They’ve repeatedly stated that by 2026 they will open source the compiler, and I think they’ve wanted a slow adoption ramp in order to spend some more time getting it right first.

Possibly rose-tinted glasses on my part, but I’m optimistic for 2026. Chris Lattner has a pretty strong track record of getting these things right.
by bredren | 2025-06-07 15:35:47+00:00
Cursor and other IDE modality solutions are interesting but train sloppy use of context.

From the extracted prompting Cursor is using:

> Each time the USER sends a message, we may automatically attach some information about their current state…edit history in their session so far, linter errors, and more. This information may or may not be relevant to the coding task, it is up for you to decide.

This is the context bloat that limits effectiveness of LLMs in solving very hard problems.

This particular .env example illustrates the low stakes type of problem cursor is great at solving but also lacks the complexity that will keep SWE’s employed.

Instead I suggest folks working with AI start at chat interface and work on editing conversations to keep clean contexts as they explore a truly challenging problem.

This often includes meeting and slack transcripts, internal docs, external content and code.

I’ve built a tool for surgical use of code called FileKitty: https://github.com/banagale/FileKitty and more recently slackprep: https://github.com/banagale/slackprep

That let a person be more intentional about what the problem they are trying to solve by only including information relevant to the problem.
Bill Atkinson has passed away
by hyperhello | 2025-06-07 15:36:08+00:00
From the family:

Dear Friends and Family, We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home in Portola Valley in his bed, surrounded by family. We will miss him greatly, and he will be missed by many of you, too. He was a remarkable person, and the world will be forever different because he lived in it. He was fascinated by consciousness, and as he has passed on to a different level of consciousness, we wish him a journey as meaningful as the one it has been to have him in our lives. He is survived by his wife, two daughters, stepson, stepdaughter, two brothers, four sisters, and dog, Poppy.
by mromanuk | 2025-06-07 15:37:00+00:00
I procrastinate all the time, listen to much to your mind or chase the fun stuff only, would not get you traction, probably it’s a distraction, because the mind is lazy. Most of our systems wants to conserve energy or expend at little as possible. Going to the gym in a cold morning is not something that the mind or body is seeking, so listen to the idea of not going would be bad for you. Muscles are lazy too, they just want to chill. But if you make them do a little work, they like it and ask for more. We are weird and we need to force us to do stuff. That’s your job, you command your body
by thenthenthen | 2025-06-07 15:37:26+00:00
The app is destroyed, but it has some candy coat that distracted me for clearly stating my confusion after the initial shock. One of the most insane interactions with the photo app now is that, the basic(?) view offers you a chronological view of your pictures, top to bottom, bottom being most recent. Fine. But any other section, pinned, albums, etc, the order is reversed! Not to mention every ‘section’ has its own visual effects going on, radically different between albums and pinned things etc. If this is what they mean with ‘disruptive’ i am out ;)
by Fade_Dance | 2025-06-07 15:37:59+00:00
Proc gen can be engaging if emergent content is complex, dynamic, and novel. But again that goes back to Radiant AI being a vessel for generic fetch quests in the newer games, while in a proc gen game you would think there would be a major, if not the major dev focus on fleshing out the system in other ways (from dynamic tribes and factions to more fully fleshed out STALKER-esque persistent fellow space travellers with agency). The final missing component would be inspiration in design of the pieces, so they interact together in interesting but emergent ways, which is of course another element that the game sorely lacks.
by supermatt | 2025-06-07 15:38:26+00:00
It’s entirely possible that Radiant AI in its entirety is actually in the original oblivion and the remaster.

It’s just that they either forgot to enable the build flag, or part of their production release is to pick a random commit as gold master.

As people had already parted with their money it’s been given the same priority as the game breaking bugs - which is to say it was left for the community to fix.

Maybe they will put out a “hotfix” in another 15 years to enable it.

I strongly believe that no bethesda employee has ever played a release version of their games.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-07 15:38:33+00:00
> Isn't it folly to bet against the advancement of technology?

I just like good art. I don't have any strong feelings for or against AI, but I do epistemically reject art that lacks composition or intent. AI-generated art doesn't understand rhythm, symbolism or image arrangement. This is an obvious problem when trying to generate a photoreal subject without six fingers per hand, but especially troubling if you want to give Starry Night a run for it's money.

You will be perpetually disappointed if you portray this as a "luddite vs enlightenment" problem. If you enjoy AI art, more power to you! The rest of us are overwhelmingly disinterested, AI art isn't filling out any gallery I've ever visited.

> Why is a significant subset of HN so confident when it comes to their view that the exponential improvement curve

Which scaling law has ever promised an "exponential improvement curve" for image generation, let alone AI as a whole? I think you're making stuff up here, or we're reading different research papers.
by foooorsyth | 2025-06-07 15:38:55+00:00
>The biggest problem with Nix is its commit-based package versioning.

I am naive about Nix, but...

...isn't that like...the whole selling point of Nix? That it's specific about what you're getting, instead of allowing ticking time bombs like python:latest or npm-style glibc:^4.4.4

Odd to attach yourself to Nix then blog against its USP.
by vkou | 2025-06-07 15:40:09+00:00
Remember when the other faction in the US was declaring fake emergencies, brutalizing their political opponents, kidnapping them without trial, ignoring lawful court orders to release them, and imprisoning people for political speech after seizing power?

Me neither, because it didn't happen, and any attempts to both-sides this are dishonestly partisan.

Neither has a problem brutalizing foreigners in other countries, of course.
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-07 15:40:29+00:00
I’m not sure I really understand this point. I believe that the scientific method (hypothesis, repeated tests, reality check) is the only successful method we’ve developed to advance our understanding of how the world works. I never claimed it’s perfect but that’s shaky footing that’s being injected onto this position. A counterclaim has to show that there’s something better than the scientific method that humans have been engaging in for attaining a better understanding of reality.

Often such attempts try to just wholly put themselves outside the realm of science which I don’t think puts them on strong footing. Just like updates to standard models still have to explain our current understandings of quantum and relativity, alternate methodologies for observing reality have to hold up to scientific scrutiny.

But I claim ignorance here. What better mechanisms has humanity developed for observing and understanding reality?
by hliyan | 2025-06-07 15:40:45+00:00
Funnily enough, this same year (1999), I wrote an essay for a university AI subject where I concluded "Intelligence is a label we apply to information processing for which we have not yet identified an algorithm. As soon as an algorithm is discovered, it ceases to be intelligence and becomes computation". I thought I was very clever, but later discovered that this thought occurs to almost everyone who thinks about artificial intelligence in any reasonable depth.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-07 15:40:59+00:00
Past discussions:

(220 points, 2 years ago, 58 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36176198

(433 points, 3 years ago, 133 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32077823

(2595 points, 5 years ago, 397 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21871026

Related: My business card runs Linux and Ultrix (2022)

(192 points, 9 months ago, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41516476

(155 points, 1 year ago, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39268460
by constantcrying | 2025-06-07 15:41:31+00:00
>nasa paid for seats on Soyuz for many years, and I’m sure they could go back to doing the same

No. Obviously not.

>Perhaps China would be willing to sell seats on their launches.

That would be an extreme humiliation of the US and NASA. Abandoning civil space programs entirely would be preferable.

>Maybe India will be in a position to offer human launches to the U.S. fairly soon - should be up and running by 2027, and they seem to hit their objectives most of the time.

India is nowhere close to the capabilities of the US, China or Russia.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-07 15:42:00+00:00
Exactly. Also, OP pointedly avoided addressing the fact that the existing Somali institutions are responsible for the fact that their "democracy" devolved into warlords brutally shooting each other.

OP is saying that the old system is clearly better because when they tried the new system the old system fought back and killed people, so they shouldn't have tried to replace the old system in the first place. It's democracy's fault that Somali warlords had to be brutal to keep democracy from working. Everyone would have been better off if they had just continued to put up with the warlords' old way of working.

This logic isn't comparable to the logic of Western democracies, it's comparable to the logic of criminal mobs everywhere. Play along and no one has to get hurt.
by bediger4000 | 2025-06-07 15:42:15+00:00
> It’s pretty common for me to open vim, do some editing, press Ctrl-Z to put it in the background, run some commands, and go back to vim with fg, but Elvish doesn’t support that.

I use the i3 window manager, and I rarely, if ever, do this. I see why folks would want to, I'm not saying it's foolish or bad. I'm interested in how features of larger components interact, this is a good example of doing the same thing many ways.
by jmyeet | 2025-06-07 15:42:40+00:00
6 of the people who think all this is completely fine are Supreme Court justices.

All of this is enabled by the completely illegitimate Supreme Court decision that made the president a god-king by inventing out of thin air the concept of "presidential immunity".

Not only is the scope of "official duties" so broad to make prosseuction next to impossible but the majority went out of its way to say you can't even examine the communications between the president and the DoJ.
by Jackpillar | 2025-06-07 15:43:08+00:00
No, you made a point that your LLM chat would be worse than your browser/search history being leaked. Which is insane for a multitude of reasons given what you can/can't search on LLMs vs browsers. This then prompted incredulous responses, so to explain you used examples that described how a person who doesn't go outside communicates with an LLM.
by thrance | 2025-06-07 15:43:28+00:00
Please stop it with your insufferable patronizing. This whole conversation is a waste of time.

You keep ignoring the basic material fact that respecting fascists' free speech is a sure path to losing it for everyone, as is the case in the US, and in many places before it.

You suggest nothing except "holding oneself to a higher standard" (whatever could that mean?). Can this help you face ICE agents when they abduct you in the streets and ship you to a foreign black site?

> I am assuming a fair bit about your mental model of the world, but, ehkm, the United States of America.

Ok, you're completely deluded. Do you seriously think hate speech policing was what led to Trump's government?? Fascists have been able to say whatever they want for ages now in this country.
by bwfan123 | 2025-06-07 15:43:46+00:00
> If not, what fundamental building blocks are missing to get there

If I were to guess, the missing building block is the ability to abstract - which is the ability to create a symbol to represent something. Concrete example of abstraction is seen in the axioms of lambda calculus. 1) ability to posit a variable, 2) ability to define a function using said variable, and 3) the ability to apply functions to things. Abstraction arises from a process in the brain which we have not understood yet and could be outside of computation as we know it per [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computer...
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-07 15:44:17+00:00
I can’t tell if they’re trying to refute the point (ie the list being long means that it’s definitionally not being hid) or support (ie the list I made is finite and therefore the corruption is hid).

But I think of it like trying to estimate the size of an iceberg by observing the tip. Just because you know a little bit doesn’t mean you actually know about the scale. And there’s every reason to believe it’s quite extensive given how easily money flows from corrupt countries through USD and US persons and companies (eg the major bank that’s constantly getting fined for laundering terrorist and drug cartel money - either they’re the only ones and they’re making a killing providing this service anyway or they’re the only ones anyone is bothering to investigate, but that business is clearly lucrative to continue to engage in).
by gortok | 2025-06-07 15:44:59+00:00
> A startup isn't likely to be making a profit yet, under either accounting rule. Is there a benefit to reporting a larger loss?

As an example, A two person software startup; both drawing a salary, each making $100,000 per year. Each doing things related to software development.

Startup brings in 200,000K in revenue.

Under pre Section 174 changes, the profit is zero. Both salaries are expensible in the year they were incurred.

Post Section 174, the profit is now $160,000 each year. Now they pay taxes on $160,000, even though they literally have no money left over because revenues equaled expenditures.

At 25% tax rate, that’s $40,000 in taxes, for a business that made literally no money.

That’s why this is so devastating to small software businesses; unless you’re highly profitable and have cash reserves, this change hits hard.
by hoppp | 2025-06-07 15:45:06+00:00
No need for staff for me, I can do it myself. Been doing it for many years, for small projects. On prem is worth it. A 35 euro/ month hetzner server beats any SaaS at the same price range and can host many projects.

And if I hit the jackpot and get millions of users, I prefer to pay employee salaries than vendor lock-in SaaS fees.
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-07 15:45:19+00:00
The closest thing we got to the idea of Radiant AI is probably Dwarf Fortress.

But entirely goal-driven (and thus unpredictable) game AI systems like this are usually at odds with story-driven gameplay where the outcome needs to be deterministic (or at least "winnable") and the player is the hero which the story is built around (while games like Dwarf Fortress don't have a pre-defined story, and also no player character to take care of, and the whole fortress being wiped out because of comically unpredictable events is a large part of the "fun").