MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 08:23:27+00:00
The mistake was going after programmers, instead of going after programming languages, where the actual problem is.

UML may be ugly and in need of streamlining, but the idea of building software by creating and manipulating artifacts at the same conceptual level we are thinking at any given moment, is sound. Alas, we've long ago hit a wall in how much cross-cutting complexity we can stuff into the same piece of plaintext code, and we've been painfully scraping along the Pareto frontier ever since, vacillating between large and small functions and wasting time debating merits of sum types in lieu of exception handling, hoping that if we throw more CS PhDs into category theory blender, they'll eventually come up with some heavy duty super-mapping super monad that'll save us all.

(I wrote a lot on it in in the past here; c.f. "pareto frontier" and "plaintext single source of truth codebase".)

Unfortunately, it may be too late to fix it properly. Yes, LLMs are getting good enough to just translate between different perspectives/concerns on the fly, and doing the dirty work on the raw codebase for us. But they're also getting good enough that managers and non-technical people may finally get what they always wanted: building tech without being technical. For the first time ever, that goal is absolutely becoming realistic, and already possible in the small - that's what the whole "vibe coding" thing heralds.
by freehorse | 2025-06-17 08:23:34+00:00
> Best counter claim: Not all code has the same risk. Some code is low risk, so the risk of error does not detract from the speed gained. For example, for proof of concepts or hobby code.

Counter counter claim for these use cases: when I do proof of concept, I actually want to increase my understanding of said concept at the same time, learn challenges involved, and in general get a better idea how feasible things are. An AI can be useful for asking questions, asking for reviews, alternative solutions, inspiration etc (it may have something interesting to add or not) but if we are still in the territory "this matters" I would rather not substitute the actual learning experience and deeper understanding with having an AI generate code faster. Similar for hobby projects, do I need that thing to just work or I actually care to learn how it is done? If the learning/understanding is not important in a context, I would say then using AI to generate the code is a great time-saver. Otherwise, I may still use AI but not in the same way.
by neop1x | 2025-06-17 08:24:09+00:00
Hi, thanks for the nice idea and writeup. Just a newsletter tech tip from my experience - be careful with the subscription form. There are bots looking for email fields on websites and filling them with emails from credential leaks or bad-quality emails and spam traps. You may easily end up with a mixed subscription list which will be unusable / resulting in lots of spam reports, your domain reputation might get hurt. To solve, use a captcha or an invisible "honey-pot" subscription form before the real one, use services for checking emails, etc.
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-17 08:25:11+00:00
I use LLMs daily for coding. They are great. They are not a replacement for reading a book like the one linked here, or understanding image formation, lenses etc. Many people seem to imagine that all this stuff is now obsolete and all you need to do is wire up some standard APIs, ask an LLM to glue the json and that's all there is to being a computer vision engineer nowadays. Maybe even pros will self denigradinglybsay say say that but after a bit of chatting it will be obvious they have plenty of background knowledge beyond prompting vision language models.

So it's not disdain, I'm simply trying to broaden the horizon for those who only know about computer vision from OpenAI announcement and tech news and FOMO social media influencers.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-17 08:25:22+00:00
> wildfires are already significantly on the rise.

Wildfires at at relatively low levels, historically. US burn acreage is about 10M acres per year at the moment, same as it was in 1955. During the hot dustbowl years burn acreage was as high as 50M/year.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210129125036/https://www.nifc....

You're unaware of this because "scientists" like to truncate wildfire graphs at around 1983, knowing that insufficiently skeptical people won't check if there's data available from earlier years. The choice of 1983 isn't arbitrary, it's when the downward trend in the graph goes into mild reverse as people started to realize that suppressing wildfires isn't always the best policy. There follows a small, gentle rise to a level still far below what it was historically (and arguably, what it should be).

Now, obviously, they don't say that. They say oh dear, in 1983 we changed our process and - incredibly - that they have no idea where data came from before that, so please ignore all previously collected data. The numbers just, like, magically appeared in their spreadsheets. This sort of trick is common, and it correctly leads to distrust as obviously, if they genuinely believe data before 1983 is useless, they can't make statements about the effect of climate change on wildfires one way or another. But that would also be an enormous scandal given all the money spent collecting that data.

> I don’t believe this because science, I know this for a fact because it was proven.

You haven't actually gone out and monitored wildfires with your own eyes, that's impossible. When you say it's a "fact" and "proven", what you mean is, people you trust from institutions you aren't skeptical of told you that they did go out and count wildfire acreage, and that it's a "fact" that wildfires are getting worse. Then you assumed they're completely trustworthy and would never do things like drop data points to force a trend, so it became a fact in your mind and you became unable to understand why anyone might disagree.

Now repeat this problem 1000x. That's where the fighting comes from, where the distrust comes from.
by _jholland | 2025-06-17 08:25:34+00:00
I have made it my mission to conquer SAP and gain control of our own critical financial data.

As a business, they uniquely leverage inefficient and clunky design to drive profit. Simply because they haven’t documented their systems sufficiently, it is “industry standard practice” to go straight to a £100/hr+ consultant to build what should be straightforward integrations and perform basic IT Admin procedures.

Through many painful late nights I have waded through their meticulously constructed labyrinth of undocumented parameters and gotchas built on foot-guns to eventually get to both build and configure an SAP instance from scratch and expose a complete API in Python.

It is for me a David and Goliath moment, carrying more value than the consultancy fees and software licences I've spared my company.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-06-17 08:25:36+00:00
When somebody says "X is democratic" or "Y is not democratic" I find it's often very helpful to compare it to the original.

By that token, we're not a democracy right now, and ranked-choice voting -- far from making things worse -- is a small step in the right direction. (And plebiscites on all important bills would be far better still.)

Read the classics. Everything important about politics, and about the classification of political structures, has already been hashed out.

> relevant to anything today nor to how we define the word.

I take it you have a better definition?
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-17 08:25:47+00:00
Tbf, even a simple macro assembler gets you closer to a proper high level language dev-experience than programming in machine code. We're just not used to the idea of macro assemblers anymore because our only contact with assembly code is when staring at the messy disassembly of high-level-language compiler output.

But that's very different from working in a properly commented and 'macro-assisted' Z80 or 6502 assembly code base.
by rsanheim | 2025-06-17 08:26:05+00:00
It's just Pattern matching. Most APIs, and hell, most code is not unique or special. Its all been done a thousands of times before. Thats why an LLM can be helpful on some tool you've written just for yourself and never released anywhere.

As to 'knows the answer', I'm don't even know what that means with these tools. All I know is if it is helpful or not.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-17 08:26:58+00:00
You’re conflating eradicating disease-causing mosquitoes with eradicating all mosquitoes. To the extent that overinclusion occurs, it’s with traditional chemical pesticides. Not these novel methods.

No known species goes extinct if we eradicate disease-causing mosquitoes in the Americas. No known ecosystem collapses. Which is unsurprising, again, given they weren’t here until a few hundred years ago.
by moktonar | 2025-06-17 08:27:20+00:00
We live in a simulation and the random values are produced outside of it. "God" doesn't play dice, he knows the seed, while on the other hand we don't, and for us that noise is "truly random".That's why we can't simulate our own universe perfectly and predict our own future. Maths can do almost everything, except producing truly random values. The true laws of nature are actually "encrypted", a mathematical model will never be able to describe them. Computational irreducibility to the next level. The perfect sandbox for AI. The only thing that the Universe has ever produced is life (AGI), the rest is just a meaningless swirling pile of particles. QM is just an optimization strategy that defers computation until needed: when interactions that need definition of observables happen. GR is also an optimization strategy, it is just Adaptive Mesh Refinement on steroids, but grid cells are not divided, they are moved where more resolution is needed (where the energy is) and also the integration dt is adjusted based on the same metric.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 08:29:11+00:00
FWIW, you're likely right here; not everyone is a visual thinker.

Still, what both you and GP should be able to agree on, is that code - not pseudocode, simplified code, draft code, but actual code of a program - is one of the worst possible representations to be thinking and working in.

It's dumb that we're still stuck with this paradigm; it's a great lead anchor chained to our ankles, preventing us from being able to handle complexity better.
by ZeroTalent | 2025-06-17 08:29:37+00:00
LLMs enable amplified automation. Example: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.13.25329541v...

At my company, we use LLMs for financial analysis that previously required hundreds of employees, and that work would have been inferior anyway because it's so hard to make so many people to communicate well to identify correlations.
by chgs | 2025-06-17 08:30:00+00:00
I remember laughing with colleagues as the first edition of the evening standard came in with the 1G gmail on the front page. I remember the exact location I saw it too.

couldn’t believe they had fallen for an April fools.

But that was a limited time window when gmail massively outweighed the 10-20mbit of things like hotmail with effectively unlimited storage.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-06-17 08:31:22+00:00
There's high praise in some movies or animation where they depict the mundane; the long sequence in Ghost in the Shell just showing the city as it is, away from the main story (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARTLckN9e7I), most of Studio Ghibli's films, a lot of Breaking Bad and especially Better Call Saul, where there's a lot of scenes of people just going about their day, John Travolta getting a can of paint and a pizza in the opening of Saturday Night Fever (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfwQ_7xqO7Y), etc.
by paradox460 | 2025-06-17 08:31:59+00:00
I've felt this way for years, even wrote a blog post [1] about it nearly 2 years ago

It doesn't seem to be getting better, sadly. You get posts like the op, where the author realizes there's something wrong with how they're doing things, but then misses that tailwind is a big part of it. Emperor has no clothes, so everyone else strips naked as well

1: https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 08:32:47+00:00
> I want to engage with my coworkers, you know other humans?

I.e. the very species we try to limit our contact with, which is why we chose this particular field of work? Or are you from the generation that joined software for easy money? :).

/s, but only partially.

There are aspects of this work where to "engage with my coworkers" is to be doing the exact opposite of productive work.
Midway YC's AI Event – After LessWrong, Arbor, Manifest
by devonkennedy | 2025-06-17 08:32:47+00:00
We are midway through YC's AI start school and it would be great to meet more new people!

Planning on throwing the worlds first invasive and noninvasive neural hackathon.

[In the past week] I met many like-minded, awesome engineers. All interactions took place at LessOnline 2025, Manifest 2025 (From the prediction market company, Manifold) & the week in-between at Arbor Summer Camp located in Berkeley's Lighthaven venue.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-17 08:32:49+00:00
I think that this conflates two issues though. It seems obvious to me that in general, the more time and effort I put into a task, the deeper I will understand it. But it's unclear to me how this aspect of how we learn by spending time on a task is related to what LLMs are good at.

Intentionally taking this to a slightly absurd metaphor - it seemed to me like a person saying that their desire to reduce their alcohol consumption, led them to infer the rule of thumb that "waiters are good at bringing food, not drinks".
by rcxdude | 2025-06-17 08:36:11+00:00
Steel-manning their argument, 'distrusting science' doesn't mean they throw the whole thing out, they're just aware that there is disagreement and bullshit going around within the process. As far as I can tell, it's dangerous to try to assess a topic through reading papers alone. A scientist active in the field will have read more widely, be aware of the reputations and biases of the different groups, and likely will have tried some of the published experiments themselves (replication does happen, if it's an interesting result, it's just rarely worth publishing the result).
by tuatoru | 2025-06-17 08:36:17+00:00
Didn't realise the pedigree of the idea went back to 1983.

I read about this in a book "Our Robots, Ourselves". That talked about airline pilots' experience with auto-land systems introduced in the late 1990s/ early 2000s.

As you'd expect after having read Ironies of Automation, after a few near misses and not misses, auto-land is not used any more. Instead, pilot augmentation with head-up displays is used.

What is the programming equivalent of a head-up display?
Halfway YC's AI Event – After LessWrong, Arbor, Manifold
by devken | 2025-06-17 08:36:43+00:00
We are halfway through YC's AI startup school & it would be great to meet more new people!

Planning on throwing the worlds first invasive and noninvasive neural hackathon.

[In the past week] I met many like-minded, awesome engineers. All interactions took place at LessOnline 2025, Manifest 2025 (From the prediction market company, Manifold) & the week in-between at Arbor Summer Camp located at Berkeley's Lighthaven venue.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-17 08:36:52+00:00
> I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today.

AES is only 3 years shy of 30.

If you used MD5 as a keystream generator I believe that would still be secure and that's 33 years old.

3DES is still pretty secure, isn't it? That's 44 years old.

As for today's data, there's always risk into the future but we've gotten better as making secure algorithms over time and avoiding quantum attacks seems to mostly be a matter of doubling key length. I'd worry more about plain old leaks.
by panstromek | 2025-06-17 08:37:03+00:00
Interesting. This says a different thing than what I thought from the title. I thought this will be about cognitive overload from having to process and review all the text the LLM generates.

I had to disable copilot for my blog project in the IDE, because it kept bugging me, finishing my sentences with fluff that I'd either reject or heavily rewrite. This added some mental overhead that makes it more difficult to focus.
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-17 08:37:11+00:00
I get a colorful screen pattern when I try that on my emulator (which otherwise isn't very precise though):

https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/zx-ui.html?type=zx128

...you can open the step debugger after entering the command (in the menu "Debug => CPU Debugger") and see that execution is caught in an LDDR (reverse block copy) which essentially overwrites the entire RAM, and then gets caught in a loop which causes it to return to that LDDR.

The poke address 23641 is probably some state variable of the BASIC interpreter and by writing to it you're messing up the state in a way that a RUN jumps into a specific place in the ROM which happens to run that LDDR.
by overfeed | 2025-06-17 08:37:38+00:00
> You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value.

WhatsApp had payments (or a pilot) pre-acquisiton. At $1/year, it was an amazing value proposition even for those earning $1/day. IIRC, this was when WhatsApp had 3-500M users globally. Interestingly, they allowed people to pay the subscription on behalf of a contact, so the Indonesian expat in Australia could pay for friends and family in Indonesia, and the aervice could have reached a bullion users and 500M/year revenue with about 200 employees
by rendall | 2025-06-17 08:37:43+00:00
> you don’t think that’s a bit condescending?

Honest question: are you self-aware? That is, do you feel yourself to be of the world, or uniquely separate from the world?

I'm asking, again, sincerely, because I'm wondering how one could scold about condescension immediately after posting this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44295152
by Voultapher | 2025-06-17 08:37:44+00:00
I'm criticizing a paper called "A WORLD WITHOUT MOSQUITOES". I find it does a very poor job of explaining on what basis they claim that all the food web issues would go away simply by "would probably switch" citation needed.

The paper does not focus on disease-causing mosquitoes in the Americas. I'm more open to that case, especially since they are an invasive species here, but that paper simply isn't a good argument for that case.
by tzot | 2025-06-17 08:38:11+00:00
> On the other hand if you think that in 48Kb of RAM they had to fit the video RAM about 8 Kb, the BASIC compiler, my BASIC code, the compiled code and use some RAM for stack and variables ... crazy. Fun times...

I had a Spectrum, and then when the QL got relatively cheap, I got one too. Loved 68K assembly.

Given that the 68K instructions were always a multiple of 2 bytes, in its 48K ROM you could have a maximum of 24576 instructions. Now remove the space needed for the bitmap font and some lookup tables, and in the remaining space you had:

- A multitasking operating system (no memory protection, of course), with networking (not TCP/IP of course) and media (microdrive) management, and generic channels kind of in the Unix file spirit

- A (non-re-entrant, single instance) “SuperBASIC” with procedures and functions with LOCal variables, a switch construct (SELect ON), FOR loops with epilogues that would run if not broken out of the loop, and other goodies, which SuperBASIC was also the system shell

- A collection of system calls and a system library, from windowing functions to software floating point (the 40-bit format) operations

Not having a lot of money for software but with the help of some book from the library (titled something like Assembly Programming on the Sinclair QL, don't remember exactly) I even wrote a disassembler in SuperBASIC to decode and grok the ROM. My mind was blown with the density of the ROM code.
by nfrankel | 2025-06-17 08:38:17+00:00
I have a talk on OpenTelemetry that I regularly present at conferences. After it, I often get the question: "But what's the performance overhead?". In general, I answer by another question: "Is it better to go fast blindfolded or slightly slower with full visibility?". Then I advise the person to do their own performance test in their specific context.

I'm very happy somebody took the time to measure it.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-17 08:38:35+00:00
It feels, more and more, that LLMs will be another technology that society will inoculate itself against. It's already starting to happen in education: teachers conversing with students, observing them learn, observing them demonstrate their skills. In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people -- as authors of what they want to say. Authoring is two-thirds of the point of most communication.

Before this, of course, will be a dramatic "shallowness of thinking" shock that will have to occur before its ill-effects are properly inoculated against. It seems part of the expert aversion to LLMs -- against the credulous lovers of "mediocrity" (cf. https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/) -- is an early experience of inoculation:

Any "macroscopic usage" of LLMs has, in any of my projects, dramatically impaired my own thinking, stolen decisions-making, and worsened my readiness for necessary adaptions later-on. LLMs are a strictly microscopic fill-in system for me, in anything that matters.

This isn't like calculators: my favourite algorithms for by-hand computation arent being "taken away". This is a system for substituting thinking itself with non-thinking, and radically impairs your readiness (, depth, adaptability, ownership) wherever it is used, on whatever domain you use it on.
by latexr | 2025-06-17 08:38:53+00:00
> We've been told the world will be generally a better place if we only manage to get more women into management positions.

Which is probably true. Not magically because they’re women, but because they’re different from the status quo. Having people of different genders, races, backgrounds, life experiences in positions of power increases the pool of knowledge and understanding of the world and allows solutions to problems which the other groups are blind to. Diversity is the goal, not just specifically women.

> They are supposedly the better humans, and would never engage in manipulative tactics...

That is an argument no one is making. You’re attacking a straw man. Of course women can be bad leaders too. Anyone can.

> So whatever she is doing, it must be good and in good faith.

As opposed to your argument, I’d say. Using one single specific example from one single specific person on one single specific case to “counter” a general thought that doesn’t even correspond to what you claimed is disingenuous.
by smartmic | 2025-06-17 08:38:54+00:00
> As the educational impact of LLM use only begins to settle with the general population, in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of a likely decrease in learning skills based on the results of our study.

Fast forward 500 years (about 20 generations), and the dumbing down of the population has advanced so much that films like 'Idiocracy" should no longer be described as science fiction but as reality shows. If anyone can still read history books at that point, the pre-LLM era will seem like an intellectual paradise by comparison.
by landhar | 2025-06-17 08:38:55+00:00
June 18, 2012 -> https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads

Almost 13 years to the day!

I find it really frustrating that I am not able to avoid using whatsapp due to how popular it is to the point that it’s become the go-to communication channel for most things :/