MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palata | 2025-06-02 23:15:56+00:00
> They will still be forced to understand the code.

But understanding is just one part of the learning process, isn't it? I assume everybody has had this feeling: the professor explains maths on the blackboard, and the student follows. The students "understands" all the steps: they make sense, they don't feel like asking a question right now. Then the professor gives them an exercise slightly different and asks to do the same, and the students are completely lost.

Learning is a loop: you need to accept it, get it in your memory (learn stuff by heart, be it just the vocabulary to express the concepts), understand it, then try to do it yourself. Realise that you missed many things in the process, and start at the beginning: learn new things by heart, understand more, try it again.
by greedo | 2025-06-02 23:16:00+00:00
The Poseidon can carry the LRASM, which is a longer ranged version of the JASSM-ER, weighing in at over 2700lbs. True, it's designed as a stealthy anti-ship missile, but a land attack variant would be easy to manage. And the P-8 can carry four LRASM, so carrying capacity isn't an issue (though mount point capacity would be eventually.)

Most strategic bombers today are just cruise missile carriers; TU-95, TU-160, B-52, none of these are expected to be penetrating air defenses. The only bombers that are going to venture into an IAD are all stealth. Everything else will just die (and stealth bombers will too, just in lesser numbers).

https://www.navalnews.com/event-news/sea-air-space-2023/2023...
by adolph | 2025-06-02 23:16:39+00:00
> You do not own your airspace. The FAA owns your airspace.

This kinda begs the question of what is meant by "airspace." If the term means a geometric volume that is generally occupied by materials in a gaseous state, then does the FAA own the airspace within one's home? Does the FAA control how cars drive down the airspace of a road? No, that is absurd.

The common use of aircraft smaller than humans and capable of performing navigation faster than humans is expanding a previously relatively stable boundary of what Federal law and rules call "navigable airspace." Thus, I think it is incorrect to say "The FAA owns your airspace." since the FAA explicitly does not control airspace below a certain altitude over most people's houses.
by threePointFive | 2025-06-02 23:17:22+00:00
Can someone comment on the cost of running agentic models? Not for a company but for an individual. I tried "vibe coding" a personal project I was struggling with and left even more frustrated because I kept running into token rate limits with Claude (used inside of Zed if it matters). Did I pick the wrong model, the wrong editor, or do I just need to not be so tight with my money?
by anxoo | 2025-06-02 23:17:25+00:00
name 5 tasks which you think current AIs can't do. then go and spend 30 minutes seeing how current AIs can do on them. write it on a sticky note and put it somewhere that you'll see it.

otherwise, yes, you'll continue to be irritated by AI hype, maybe up until the point where our civilization starts going off the rails
by hansvm | 2025-06-02 23:18:23+00:00
It's similar, but the advice should be good for a software professional. It's an actionable, well-documented goal which takes you through the basics you're likely to care about. If any step needs some extra explanations, the choice of project guarantees you can find hundreds of good resources for that step in particular. With that basic background, next steps will be easier to find and understand.
by photonthug | 2025-06-02 23:18:27+00:00
> unable to find utility.. aren’t using them correctly

Tfa makes this argument too then later says:

> All this is to say: I write some Rust. I like it fine. If LLMs and Rust aren’t working for you, I feel you. But if that’s your whole thing, we’re not having the same argument

So reasonable people admit that the utility depends on the use case.. then at the same time say you must be an idiot if you aren’t using the tools. But.. this isn’t actually a reasonable position.

Part of the issue here may be that so many programmers have no idea what programmers do outside of their niche, and how diverse programming actually is.

The typical rebuttals of how “not everyone is doing cliche CRUD web dev” is just the beginning. Author mentions kernel dev, but then probably extrapolated to C dev in general. But that would be insane, just think about the training sets for Linux kernel dev vs everything else..

It’s dumb to have everyone double down on polarizing simplistic pro/con camps, and it’s rare to see people even asking “what kind of work are you trying to do” before the same old pro/con arguments start flying again.
by overfeed | 2025-06-02 23:18:33+00:00
> On the flip side, it has allowed me to accomplish many lower-complexity backlog projects that I just wouldn’t have even attempted before

This has been my experience at well - AI coding tools are like a very persistent junior-- that loves reading specs and documentation. The problem for AI companies is "automated burndown of your low-complexity backlog items" isn't a moneymaker, even though that's what we have. So they have to sell a dream that may be realized, or may not.

The benchmark project in the article is the perfect candidate for AI: well defined requirements with precise technical terms (RFCs), little room for undefined behavior and tons of reference implementations. This is an atypical project. I am confident AI agent write an HTTP2 server, but it will also repeatedly fail to write sensible tests for human/business processes that a junior would excel at.
by mrep | 2025-06-02 23:19:00+00:00
Those CIWS are designed to take out much more hardened targets than shitty drones. I bet you a shotgun shell can easily take out one of those drones.

Upgrade your drone defenses and now your drones cost more...

I don't work in the military so take everything I say with a massive grain of salt but I bet offense and defense scale in cost similarly and NATO + allies have WAY more money than the russians.
by jedberg | 2025-06-02 23:19:00+00:00
That loop is still there. They have to get the AI to write the right code.

And beyond that, do they really need to understand how it works? I never learned how to calculate logarithms by hand, but I know what they are for and I know when to punch the button on the calculator.

I'll never be a top tier mathematician, but that's not my goal. My goal is to calculate things that require logs.

If they can get the AI to make working code and explain why it works, do they need to know more than that, unless they want to be top in their field?
by gyomu | 2025-06-02 23:19:09+00:00
The author also wrote

“Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed.”

This tells you all you need to know about the kind of work the author values.

Next time you wonder why so much software is buggy, slow, half considered slop, you’ll know exactly who it was made by.
by mmooss | 2025-06-02 23:19:23+00:00
Weak parties are often more dangerous and unpredictable than strong parties. They are backed into a corner, with no way out. Lecturing them on what they should do accomplishes nothing, of course.

Why not find solutions that work?

> back down in fear.

It's not about fear - it's not about blame, or 'should', or anything but consequences, lives and property, blood and treasure. The destruction of a war with Russia would be immense.

Why don't you find solutions that protect Ukraine and prevent war with Russia?
by sgarland | 2025-06-02 23:19:59+00:00
Mostly on the administrative side. MySQL doesn’t have VACUUM to deal with, and that inevitably catches people by surprise in Postgres if they aren’t already experienced with it.

Postgres is far more flexible and capable, but it requires a lot of care and feeding, as well as deeply reading its docs to get the most out of it. MySQL is good enough for 99.99% of tech companies, and requires little to no maintenance in comparison.

Both will require you to know how to design a performant schema and query, however.
by mrbungie | 2025-06-02 23:20:30+00:00
> Here's the deal: Reasonable people aren't claiming this stuff is a silver bullet or a panacea

This article and vocal supporters are not being reasonable at all, they make a not so between-the-lines separation between skeptics (which are nuts) and supporters ("My smartest friends are blowing it off." in a smug "I'm smarter than my smarter friends").

I mean, come on.
by Mofpofjis | 2025-06-02 23:20:34+00:00
> Understanding code takes more effort than writing it

yes!

> somehow

not difficult to explain. Coding is a creative activity where you work top-down; you decompose the abstract/high-level into the detailed/low-level. You dictate the "events" happening to the code, you are in control. Reviewing is reactive; the code you review dictates what happens in your brain (you are under control, not in control), and you need to work bottom-up: you try to re-compose the whole from the fragments. Even for human coders, a detailed commit message is a pre-requisite before their code can undergo review. The reviewer is in the worse position, so he needs to be supported as much as possible.
by palata | 2025-06-02 23:21:25+00:00
Without AI, software is getting worse every year. My question is: will AI resolves that problem, or will it make it worse?

My feeling is that AI will keep the software industry in the same trend: produce more software of lower quality while being more profitable.

People sometimes say "perfect is the enemy of good". But this implies that putting less effort is "good enough". I believe it goes the other way: why would a company put efforts into selling you something good, if it can make you pay the same for something worse? It's all about maximising profit, and AI is no exception there.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-02 23:22:09+00:00
"If free will does not exist, then punishing people for wrong doing doesn't make sense. They should be isolated from society and rehabilitated if possible — just like people found not liable due to mental illness."

I mostly agree with you but punishing people for wrong doing does make sense if it's aligned with your definition of rehabilitation - i.e. if you think it will have a deterrence effect.

But I guess, and maybe it's because I'm a compatibilist, I personally think it's morally wrong to punish people for for purely moral reasons.
by scottbez1 | 2025-06-02 23:22:18+00:00
Two bits of advice: just jump in, and set reasonable expectations for yourself.

Robotics is a field filled with layers upon layers of complexity, theory, and real-world problems. Those at the top of the game (think robust dog robots, walking bipedal star wars droids, high-speed and high-torque many-DOF arm platforms) are leveraging learnings and expensive prototypes from decades of work/research to achieve those feats. This is not to be discouraging, but to say - they all started somewhere - you too can start, and maybe you won't build things like that today, but you can get there.

And the cool thing is all that robotics work by experts has made the barrier to entry much lower - today you can choose to apply money to solve problems you don't want to learn and focus on the things you do want to learn, in ways that weren't possible 10 years ago. Need a powerful closed loop motor system? Buy an ODrive or closed-loop stepper platform off the shelf, and focus on how to apply those systems to build something higher level.

But the big difference with learning hardware/robotics compared to software (speaking from experience having watched a lot of really smart people struggle to get robots working when I ran an MIT robotics competition, 6.270, and was a lab assistant for another course, 6.141) is that the real world is unforgiving in a way that software is generally not. So if you come from a software background, you will find that robotics can have so many more setbacks because nothing ever moves/behaves/reacts in a precisely predictable way in physical space. This is why I say just jump in - you'll have fun learning all the ways things go wrong, and they faster you get that learning out of the way, the sooner you can build things that work reliably!

Try things and figure out how and why they don't work, and iterate. But don't set unrealistically high expectations or it will just be frustrating.
by mmooss | 2025-06-02 23:22:33+00:00
> Most "military analysts" are literally just former soldiers trading on fake prestige.

What is fake about it if they are actually former soldiers who have practiced in this field? Who are you and why should anyone listen to you? As far as I can tell, you are just some commenter on the Internet.

> ideology

I see - you mean to ridicule everyone and hope something sticks. Your ideas are similarly ignorant.

Maybe you should learn what you are talking about. It's a serious subject.
by ryukoposting | 2025-06-02 23:22:46+00:00
>you think you have a full hold of all that AI offers today?

I absolutely don't, and I'd love if you could highlight a spot where I suggested I was. As I said, the problem isn't that I don't want to try using an agent, the problem is that I can't because one incredibly basic feature is missing from VS Code's agent thing.

I'll occasionally use chatbots, mostly for spitballing non-professional stuff. They seem to do well with ideation questions like "I'm making X, what are some approaches I could take to do Y?" In other words, I've found that they're good at bullshitting and making lists. I like R1-1776, but that's only because Perplexity Playground seems less restricted than some of the other chatbots.

It's also nice for generating some boilerplate bash stuff, when I need that kind of thing. I don't need that very often, though.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-06-02 23:23:30+00:00
If you really think that feel free to continue with business as usual. I just hope you're not at a stack ranking company, or you are politically savvy though, because otherwise you're going to be in for a real shock in the next few years as your peers build their AI skills, tooling matures and models improve. A skilled dev with a well tuned agentic workflow can already finish non-trivial 5k LoC projects in a day, complete with copious tests and documentation, just imagine when the ecosystem has matured and the majority of your coworkers are hip to the game.
by layer8 | 2025-06-02 23:23:33+00:00
This relates to the analogy that an LLM is like a junior developer that you have to instruct and guide, and whose work you have supervise and review. Working with an LLM is similar to managing people as a tech lead. And once LLM agents get smart enough and reliable enough, the work will be similar to that of a product manager, project leader, CTO, or even CEO.

If you like being an entrepreneur, you’re already different from most professional software developers.
by eGQjxkKF6fif | 2025-06-02 23:23:48+00:00
Looking at all of these arguments and viewpoints really is something to witness.

Congratulations Cloudflare, and thank you for showing that a pioneer, and leader in the internet security space can use the new methods of 'vibe coding' to build something that connects people in amazing ways, and that you can use these prompts, code, etc to help teach others to seek further in their exploration of programming developments.

Vibe programming has allowed me to break through depression and edit and code the way I know how to do; it is a helpful and very meaningful to me. I hope that, it can be meaningful for others.

I envision the current generation and future generations of people to utilize these things; but we need to accept, that this way of engineering, developing things, creation, is paving a new way for peoples.

Not a single comment in here is about people traumatized, broken, depressed, or have a legitimate reason for vibe coding.

These things assist us, as human beings; we need to be mindful that it isn't always about us. How can we utilize these things to to the betterment of the things we are passionate about? I humbly look forward to seeing how projects in the open source space can showcase not only developmental talent, but the ability to reason and use logic and project building thoughtfulness to use these tools to build.

Good job, Cloudflare.
by energywut | 2025-06-02 23:23:59+00:00
We differentiate based on scale all the time. If I steal a pack of gum I expect a very different legal outcome than if I steal the entire contents of a best buy. In violent crime scale matters -- manslaughter is very different from mass murder.

In financial crimes ripping off my friend by not paying back a dinner is very different from embezzling millions from my company. Possessing a dime bag of marijuana is a very different crime from possessing 100 kilos of marijuana.

And in many cases, scale reaches a level of either not being enforced as a crime or not being a crime at all.

Federal sentencing guidelines specifically call out scale several times: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/about/overview/...
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-02 23:24:33+00:00
"Despite computer science being ranked as number one by the Princeton Review for college majors, the tech industry may not be living up to graduates' expectations.

When it came to undergraduate majors with the highest unemployment rates, computer science came in at number seven, even amid its relative popularity.

The major saw an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, just under those top majors like physics and anthropology, which had rates of 7.8 and 9.4 percent respectively.

Computer engineering, which at many schools is the same as computer science, had a 7.5 percent unemployment rate, calling into question the job market many computer science graduates are entering.

On the other hand, majors like nutrition sciences, construction services and civil engineering had some of the lowest unemployment rates, hovering between 1 percent to as low as 0.4 percent.

This data was based on The New York Fed's report, which looked at Census data from 2023 and unemployment rates of recent college graduates."

Source:

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market (requires Javascript)

Data: (no Javascript required)

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/research/interactive...

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/research/interactive...

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/research/interactive...

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/research/interactive...

Civil Engineering 1.0%

Aerospace Engineering 1.4%

Mechanical Engineering 1.5%

Chemical Engineering 2.0%

Electrical Engineering 2.2%

General Engineering 2.4%

Miscellaneous Engineering 3.4%

Computer Science 6.1%

Computer Engineering 7.5%
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-02 23:24:55+00:00
Well, I assume it’s not “abandoned”, as such, while it’s in operation so I wouldn’t think it’s free to claim. If it’s being flown recklessly I might try to capture it with the justification that it threatened the personal safety of myself and those around me. I do not know if that justification would fly (heh) and I’m pretty sure I’d be on the hook for proving it.

But that’s really all assuming; I’m not a lawyer, just a layman with an interest in logical systems.

Edit:

I should add that I generally think about the regulations for small drones (<.55 pounds and some other things) rather than the <55-pound ones because I have looked into flying one. I still think it’s maybe not the best idea to net a 30+ pound piece of flying machinery but the pilot certainly has more things to worry about.
by KyleBerezin | 2025-06-02 23:25:03+00:00
It is impossible to secure IoT due to the awful state of lan security (thanks to google and apple's browser ssl policy). If an IoT device wants to host a web app, or .local page, all https/ssl content is off limits. This is because browsers won't allow a webpage to send encrypted content to a client unless the client has a valid SSL cert. The issue is you cannot issue a valid ssl cert to a lan ip address. It must target a dns address. This means that ALL DATA ON THE LAN MUST BE SENT VIA PLAINTEXT!

It's complete nonsense, and the only workaround is to install your own certificate authority on your network and add it as a trusted root cert. Imagine buying a device from amazon and being told to add their root ca to your machine. No non-tech person should ever be touching root ca's, and is 10x more dangerous than whatever this insane policy is trying to protect us from.

I believe all IoT devices should exist beyond a virtual airgap, and the router should by default, prevent the device from communicating with the internet. In order to send data to-and-from the cloud, it should pass through some kind of intelligent/auditable gateway. One that the router maintains, and can be updated independent of the devices.
by tedious-coder | 2025-06-02 23:25:05+00:00
I agree with your assessment of the value of the skills, at least for the time being. What I dislike is the way that we are being encouraged to work now. I simply do not find any joy, at all, in reviewing LLM-written code and then typing in the next prompt.

A sentiment I see often is that it's work, it's not supposed to be fun, and you work at the pleasure of the employer. And I accept that. But I still am really just crushingly sad that this is what my job is becoming.

In the article, Thomas wrote:

> LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don’t get tired; they’re immune to inertia.

I see this as a massive downside, because I loved writing tedious code. I loved reading docs on something I previously didn't understand. I loved forming the mental models strong enough to say "yeah I see why that's there" in the previously-inscrutable APIs of the frameworks and such that I was using. It was precisely the _way_ that I approached that work that allowed for that knowledge to accrue. It was because I almost never just copy/pasted something without spending a lot of time to understand it.

I do some of the same with ChatGPT. I type the code in myself after trying to internalize the ChatGPT response. But even that is starting to feel like company time-theft, as the attitude is shifting even further away from "knowing how to do things is good" toward "getting shit done is all that matters."
by cesarb | 2025-06-02 23:25:17+00:00
This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence.

Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to operate. And since, according to this article, only the latest and greatest LLM is acceptable (and I've seen that exact same argument six months ago), running locally is not viable (I've seen, in a recent discussion, someone mention a home server with something like 384G of RAM just to run one LLM locally).

To those of us who like Free Software because of the freedom it gives us, this is a severe regression.
by sethherr | 2025-06-02 23:25:32+00:00
I think tptacek is generally worth reading. He is one of the users with the highest karma on this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek)

I’m happy to have read this, which is reason enough to publish it - but also it’s clearly generating debate so it seems like a very good thing to have published.