MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjburgess | 2025-06-02 22:49:12+00:00
I think you mistook my comment. Insofar as its anything, it was a concession to that use case.

I gave an example below: debugging a microservice-based request flow from a front-end, thru various middle layers and services, to a back-end, perhaps triggering other systems along the way. Something similar to what I worked on in 2012 for the UK olympics.

Unless I'm mistaken, and happy to be, I'm not sure where the LLM is supposed to offer a significant productivity factor here.

Overall, my point is -- indeed -- that we cannot really have good faith conversations in blog posts and comment sections. These are empirical questions which need substantial evidence from both sides -- ideally, videos of a workday.

Its very hard to guess what anyone is really talking about at the level of abstraction that all this hot air is conducted at.

As far as i can tell the people hyping LLMs the most are juniors, data scientists who do not do software engineering, and people working on greenfield/blank-page apps.

These groups never address the demand from these sceptical senior software engineers -- for obvious reasons.
by _dain_ | 2025-06-02 22:49:22+00:00
>rather than the awkward positioning for wrists elbows shoulders and fingers required to do it the "right way".

Biggest improvement to my typing QOL was getting one of those split keyboards[1]. I can rotate the two pieces independently so that my forearm-wrist-hand-fingers system form a straight, relaxed line, both pointing a little towards each other. This is much more comfortable than the outward-splaying pose that most single-piece keyboards force your wrists into. I'm convinced this will reduce the risk of RSI and other hand injuries as I age. Stops me from hunching and constricting my chest too; it allows for a better upper back posture and deeper breathing.

Secondary benefit is being able to remap the keys, particularly punctuation, into more reachable places.

[1] Moonlander Mk1, but really any split one will do.
by grey-area | 2025-06-02 22:49:30+00:00
Yes sure I’ve checked in code generated by AI myself. I’ve not experienced the excitement this article exudes though and it seems very limited in usefulness due to the by now well-documented downsides. Frankly I haven’t bothered using it much recently, it’s just not there yet IME and I’m not sure LLMs ever will be.

What I’m interested in really is just case studies with prompts and code - that’s a lot more interesting for hackers IMO than hype.
by rorylaitila | 2025-06-02 22:49:43+00:00
I love the web. You can build almost any UI. It's constantly getting new tools. I think it's a 100 year platform.

I stay sane by shipping HTML over the wire from server rendered handlebars templates (Java/Lucee) against a MySQL database. Forms and Links only for navigation. JS for spice. My apps never break. Backwards compatible.
by pedalpete | 2025-06-02 22:49:50+00:00
Women are twice as likely as men to get Alzheimer's.

The two current prevailing theories are, both of which focus on the amyloid hypothesis are

1) menopause changes in grey matter reduce the glymphatic systems ability to flush metabolic waste from the brain

2) sleep loss during child-rearing and menopause result in increased amyloid load, which begins the cycle of reduced ability of the glymphatic system to remove waste from the brain.

I know someone is going to come in complaining about the amyliod hypothesis, but it is unlikely to be "wrong", it is just incomplete. We are likely lumping multiple different diseases together under the label of Alzheimer's because we don't understand the disease well enough yet.
by codruterdei | 2025-06-02 22:49:56+00:00
Location: Romania

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Flutter, Go, Kotlin

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codruterdei

Email: codruterdei[at]gmail[dot]com

Project ending soon so I’ll be available starting August. I mostly worked in fintech, but I’m not bound to it.
by rconti | 2025-06-02 22:49:58+00:00
I'd never say I'm a classic home-rower, but I do use it as a starting point. My left hand mostly conforms, but I really only use my thumb and first two fingers on my right hand, so i get what you're saying about your hand moving all around.

And, yeah, 120-150wpm. I wonder if "kids these days" don't type as fast because they didn't grow up with IRC and AIM and so on. Of course, they're way faster with their thumbs than I am. My phone typing started bad and gets worse every year (somehow).
by CraigJPerry | 2025-06-02 22:50:20+00:00
> it has no ability, e.g., to trace a request through various apis

That's more a function of your tooling more than of your LLM. If you provide your LLM with tool use facilities to do that querying, i don't see the reason why it can't go off and perform that investigation - but i haven't tried it yet, off the back of this comment though, it's now high on my todo list. I'm curious.

TFA covers a similar case:

>> But I’ve been first responder on an incident and fed 4o — not o4-mini, 4o — log transcripts, and watched it in seconds spot LVM metadata corruption issues on a host we’ve been complaining about for months. Am I better than an LLM agent at interrogating OpenSearch logs and Honeycomb traces? No. No, I am not.
by anonymars | 2025-06-02 22:50:31+00:00
I imagine they're thinking of the Bundy standoff (which was federal BLM land but not a national park)

To wit:

> The Bundy standoff’s most significant legacy may be the precedent it established: that armed resistance against federal authorities could succeed without serious legal consequences for participants. This outcome has had a profound impact on antigovernment extremist movements, creating what experts describe as “a straight line” connecting Bunkerville to the Capitol riot.

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2025/apr/13/a-decade-of-defianc...
by hansvm | 2025-06-02 22:50:33+00:00
It depends on the value of x. I think it's safe to assume x <= 0.75, else they'd contribute negatively to their teams (happens from time to time, but let's be generous). Previously they'd be anywhere from a 0/10 to 3/10 programmer, and now they get up to 9/10 on a good day but sometimes are a net negative, as low as -2.25/10 on a bad day. I imagine that happens when tired or distracted and unable to adequately police LLM output.
by surgical_fire | 2025-06-02 22:50:35+00:00
> The author's central argument seems to be that the current state of LLM development is such that 1 Senior + LLM === 1 Senior + 4 juniors

This is such an outlandish claim, to the point where I call it plain bullshit.

LLMs are useful in a completely different way that a Junior developer is. It is an apples and oranges comparison.

LLMs does things in some way that it helps me beyong what a Junior would. It also is completely useless to perform many tasks that a Junior developer can.
by sanderjd | 2025-06-02 22:50:47+00:00
I think this is a reasonable response. But I also think it's worth taking the parent's compiler analogy seriously as a thought experiment.

Back when I was in college in the 00s, if I had developed a preference for not using compilers in my work, I might have been able to build a career that way, but my options would have been significantly limited. And that's not because people were just jerks who were biased against compiler skeptics, or evil executives squeezing the bottom line, or whatever. It's because the kind of software most people were making at that period of time would have been untenable to create without higher level languages.

In my view, we clearly aren't at this point yet with llm-based tooling, and maybe we never will be. But it seems a lot more plausible to me that we will than it did a year or even six months ago.
by antithesizer | 2025-06-02 22:51:03+00:00
Writing, making music, making art, and engaging with the public in any way is almost always a waste of time. So unless you want to keep it up even in light of knowing that it's a waste of time, you should stop wasting your time. If you have to arduously convince yourself over and over that "this is important" or if you require the affirmation and reassurance of constant positivity-oozing social media followers to keep going, then you should not keep going. If it's not an end in itself for you then you need to reckon with the fact that there will certainly be nothing for you in it except the thankless task itself.

That may sound depressing but there are other things in life that absolutely are worthwhile in these ways. Helping people is generally a better goal in life than self-expression is.
by biomcgary | 2025-06-02 22:52:11+00:00
Sometimes (often?) technical legal definitions considered without context lead to absurd conclusions that don't manifest in practice.

Does the FAA have jurisdiction over paper planes? What about the airspace in my house and does it matter if the doors are open?

On the other hand, I don't think government agencies have much incentive to preemptively limit the scope of their authority, but would be happy to hear of counter-examples.
by aykutcan | 2025-06-02 22:52:13+00:00
This is how I work:

I use Cursor by asking it exactly what I want and how I want it. By default, Cursor has access to the files I open, and it can reference other files using grep or by running specific commands. It can edit files.

It performs well in a fairly large codebase, mainly because I don’t let it write everything. I carefully designed the architecture and chose the patterns I wanted to follow. I also wrote a significant portion of the initial codebase myself and created detailed style guides for my teammates.

As a result, Cursor (or you can say models you selecting because cursor is just a router for commercial models) handles small, focused tasks quite well. I also review every piece of code it generates. It's particularly good at writing tests, which saves me time.
by bradlys | 2025-06-02 22:52:21+00:00
Not sure how almost any of this other than the catfishing is relevant to online dating only.

People presenting one thing and being another is common in every medium. For your age demo, maybe it’s more common for the women to show old/misleading photos. But, your demo is a much smaller one than the typical 18-35 demographic where most dating happens.
by pj_mukh | 2025-06-02 22:52:32+00:00
I think this is a misunderstanding coder productivity. A 10x engineer isn't 10x faster at popping out Unit tests, that stuff is mind-numbingly boring that turns out a next token predictor can do it with ease. In fact I would guess that really "productive" software engineers, slow down considerably when forced to do this important but slow work*.

The 10x engineer is really good at deducing the next most important thing to do is and doing it quickly. This involves quickly moving past 100's of design decisions in a week to deliver something quickly. It requires you to think partly like a product manager and partly like a senior engineer but that's the game and LLM's are zero help there.

Most engineering productivity is probably locked up in this. So yes, LLM's probably help a lot, just not in the way that would show on some Jira board?

*One could claim that doing this slow work gives the brain a break to then be good at strategizing the higher order more important work. Not sure.
by api | 2025-06-02 22:52:39+00:00
A big problem is that you're either hearing breathless over the top insane hype (or doomerism, which is breathless over the top hype taken to a dark place) or skepticism that considers AI/LLMs to be in the same league as NFTs.

Neither of these is accurate, but I guess nuanced thinking or considering anything below surface vibes is out these days.

So far after playing with them I'm using them as:

1. A junior intern that can google really really fast and has memorized a large chunk of the Internet and the library, and can do rough first-pass research and dig for things.

2. Autocomplete 2.0 that can now generate things like boilerplate or fairly pedestrian unit tests.

3. Rubber duck debugging where the rubber duck talks back.

4. A helper to explain code, at least for a first pass. I can highlight a huge piece of code and ask it to summarize and then explain and walk me through it and it does a passable job. It doesn't get everything right but as long as you know that, it's a good way to break things down and get into it.

For those things it's pretty good, and it's definitely a lot of fun to play with.

I expect that it will get better. I don't expect it to replace programmers for anything but the most boring mindless tasks (the ones I hate doing), but I expect it to continue to become more and more useful as super-autocomplete and all the other things I listed.
by AnnaPali | 2025-06-02 22:52:59+00:00
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Narraduct is a commodities focused consultancy and hedge fund, building tools for mining and energy companies, primarily in Central Asia and S. America. Knowledge of accounting, chemistry, geology or industrial engineering is a huge bonus. We appreciate knowledge of multiple languages and curiosity about exotic paradigms. More than anything, we look for people who will fit in and help us create value. We can make roles for good fits!

We primarily use Common Lisp, with some Go, Racket and Prolog running on Linux and BSD. Some client facing stuff may feature Tcl or Clojure. We are also looking for a graphic designer or ui/ux expert who like preweb style interfaces with prouser experiences.

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Send resumes to info @ our website with the subject line of "career"
by SatvikBeri | 2025-06-02 22:53:52+00:00
I don't think I would notice a 100% improvement in software productivity in most companies, from the outside. Most of the time, that would just translate to the company being able to hire fewer developers, and having slightly higher profit margins – but not enormously higher, because developers are only one part.

I recently used Claude Code to develop & merge an optimization that will save about $4,000 a month. It was relatively simple but tedious, so I probably wouldn't have done it on my own. I don't even expect most of my coworkers to notice.
by philajan | 2025-06-02 22:53:55+00:00
Location: St. Louis, Missouri, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Java, Typescript, Javascript, Cassandra(NoSQL), Terraform, Python, Guice, Spring, SpringBoot, Angular, GWT, JUnit, Cypress, React, React Native, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Keycloak, Kafka, RabbitMQ Résumé/CV: https://philljanowski.com/PhillJanowskiResume.pdf Email: philajan <at> pm <.> me

I'm Phill, a backend leaning, full stack software engineer with 7 years of experience building enterprise SaaS solutions. I have extensive experience planning and leading implementation of large scale features from cloud infrastructure to user interfaces. I have a strong background in software stability improvements, algorithm optimization, and K8s resource management using OpenTelemetry, Grafana Tempo, and Splunk. In my free time, I build software including GreekUtils[1], a Greek Life centric, cloud based CRM.

I'm capable of learning anything when met with the challenge. I'm looking for a full time position where I can contribute to meaningful projects while learning new technologies and methodologies in software engineering.

[1] https://greekutils.com/
by tedious-coder | 2025-06-02 22:55:32+00:00
AI makes me sad. When I started my CS degree, I didn't even know what silicon valley was. I was unaware of what the SWE job landscape was like. I went to school in a no-name town.

Computer science was an immensely fun subject to learn. I moved to one of the big cities and was bewildered with how much there was to learn, and loved every second of it. I gradually became good enough to help anyone with almost anything, and spent lots of my free time digging deeper and learning.

I liked CS and programming - but I did not like products built by the companies where I was good enough to be employed. These were just unfortunate annoyances that allowed me to work close enough to what I actually enjoyed, which was just code, and the computer.

Before LLMs, those like me could find a place within most companies - the person you don't go to for fast features, but for weird bugs or other things that the more product-minded people weren't interested in. There was still, however, an uncomfortable tension. And now that tension is even greater. I do not use an LLM to write all my code, because I enjoy doing things myself. If I do not have that joy, then it will be immensely difficult for me to continue the career I have already invested so much time in. If I could go back in time and choose another field I would - but since that's not possible, I don't understand why it's so hard for people to have empathy for people like me. I would never have gone down this path if I knew that one day, my hard-earned-knowledge would become so much less valuable, and I'd be forced to delegate the only part of the job I enjoyed to the computer itself.

So Thomas, maybe your AI skeptic friends aren't nuts, they just have different priorities. I realize that my priorities are at odds for the companies I work for. I am just tightly gripping the last days that I can get by doing this job the way that I enjoy doing it.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-02 22:56:18+00:00
Great, let's see it. If it works, it works.

For the first 10 years of my career I was a contractor walking into national and multinational orgs with large existing codebases, working within pre-existing systems not merely "codebases". Both hardware systems (e.g., new 4g networking devices just as they were released) and distributed software systems.

I can think of many daily tasks I had across these roles that would not be very significantly speed-up by an LLM. I can also see that there's a few that would be. I also shudder to think what time would be wasted by me trying to learn 4g networking from LLM summarisation of new docs; and spending as much time working from improperly summarised code (etc.).

I don't think snr software engineers are so scepticial here that they're saying LLMs are not, locally, helpful to their jobs. The issue is how local this help seems to be.
by pedalpete | 2025-06-02 22:56:29+00:00
Interesting to see they are rating dementia as the 7th leading cause of death[1]. In Australia the common understanding is Alzheimer's is currently the 2nd and will likely claim the 1st spot in the next decade [2].

The study seems to go against everything else I've seen which suggests that as people are living longer, the incidence are increasing, not decreasing. However, my understanding is that as we get better at curing cancers, reducing heart-disease, and generally increasing life-span, the longer a person lives, the more likely they are to get dementia.

[1]https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dementia [2]https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/australia...
by Fade_Dance | 2025-06-02 22:56:57+00:00
>Expected compound interest is not high enough to justify the risk of a catastrophic crash

That's just not the case. It may be a lower yield world, but you can still find companies with relatively stable and growing 10-15% cashflow to EV ratio even in the US. Outside of the US old-school "easy" Value is still very much alive as well.

What you were advocating for is market timing, and market timing demonstrably does not add alpha unless it's done very mindfully, mostly because the opportunity cost of sitting out is great. If you look at core alpha sources through a factor lens like trend following, most of the profit comes from participating in the big trends (read, most of the easy returns come from "expensive" getting "more expensive/"overbought"). From another lens that takes into account fragility/crashes - vol trading - selling vol is paradoxically highest sharpe when vol is low and most vulnerable to severe disruption.

Part of what you're disregarding is how market participants are far more sophisticated today than they were even 20 years ago. If you're building a 60/40, it doesn't look attractive, but even accounting for survivorship bias, the baseline has risen.

The "crash case" remains relatively similar when it comes to portfolio planning - you need to prepare for 60% crashes, and 10-year "lost decades." The tools to manage that equity risk and still access smooth returns are far more powerful and accessible than they were in the past though.
by greybox | 2025-06-02 22:57:04+00:00
> 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.

Yes we are, because the kind of work you need to do in C++ or Rust is probably entirely different from the work this person manages to get the LLM to do in Go.
by derefr | 2025-06-02 22:57:10+00:00
I am suspicious of this argument, because it would imply that you can’t understand the design intent / tradeoffs / etc of code written by your own coworkers.

Which: of course you can. Not least because both your coworkers and these coding agents produce changes with explanatory comments on any lines for which the justification or logic is non-obvious; but also because — AI PR or otherwise — the PR consists of commits, and those commits have commit messages further explaining them. And — AI submitter or otherwise — you can interrogate the PR’s submitter in the PR’s associated discussion thread, asking the submitter to justify the decisions made, explain parts you’re suspicious of, etc.

When you think about it, presuming your average FOSS project with an open contribution model, a PR from an AI agent is going to be at least strictly more “knowable” than a “drive-by” PR by an external one-time contributor who doesn’t respond to discussion-thread messages. (And sure, that’s a low bar — but it’s one that the average accepted and merged contribution in many smaller projects doesn’t even clear!)
by bilbo0s | 2025-06-02 22:57:18+00:00
What will be legal is to simply sue the owner of the drone for breaking your window when your neighbor shot it down. Let the owner and the neighbor sort it out if the owner can prove the neighbor shot it down. But until that proof is forthcoming, the owner is liable. Same as any plane crash. Oh, and Heaven help the owner if any humans or pets in the house are injured.

After a while, that will get so expensive that either they will stop using drones to deliver, or drone design will improve to the point that they become almost impossible to bring down.

Either way, hey, gets rid of the problem of drones dropping on your property.
by terminatornet | 2025-06-02 22:57:19+00:00
> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

Loved this style of writing in 2005 from Maddox on the best site in the universe or whatever.

Sorry if I don't want google and openAI stealing my or anyone else's work.
by gpm | 2025-06-02 22:57:38+00:00
Edit: Huh, didn't know whisper could translate.

Just whatever small LLM I have installed as the default for the `llm` command line tool at the time. Currently that's gemma3:4b-it-q8_0 though it's generally been some version of llama in the past. And then this fish shell function (basically a bash alias)

function trans llm "Translate \"$argv\" from French to English please" end