MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-12 15:53:00+00:00
I don't really disagree with anything in this post, but the advice is so basic it could have easily been written by an LLM, and apologies for my jadedness but I've seen like a million other posts with the same advice. The advice is simply:

1. Write detailed prompts.

2. Don't trust generated code output - it must be thoroughly reviewed, and feedback should be given back to the LLM.

3. AIs are very helpful for those learning new architectural patterns.

4. Try different tools.

If you really want to learn about using AI to write code (including the pros and cons), I think this post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166, is excellent. Note the author of the Cloudflare OAuth component, kentonv, makes a lot of good, insightful comments in that thread IMO.
by adiabatichottub | 2025-06-12 15:53:27+00:00
I don't know why it rankles me to think that generated power should be fed into a dump load just to make the storage owners extra money. Even though it's inefficient at the system level, it shouldn't be harmful releasing energy that would have been eventually dissipated as heat anyways. And yet it still just feel wasteful to me.

I had to go search my bookshelf for this one:

"There has been an increasing awareness among engineers of the last two decades that machines can perform a useful purpose in many applications, even though their characteristics do not conform to the orthodox standards of goodness. The main objective of the engineer is to make money -- to exploit economically the physical properties of materials. Economic considerations, however, do not stop at the first cost of an article, nor at the running cost, but extend to everything connected with that article in the situation in which it is to be used."

Eric R. Laithwaite, Induction Machines for special purposes
by imiric | 2025-06-12 15:54:10+00:00
That is beside the point. Whether the forked project has any merits for existing doesn't explain the hostility towards its developer. All we know is that the developer was banned from freedesktop.org[1], but no reason was given.

We can argue whether their contributions were a net positive to the upstream project, and I'm aware that they were criticized for breaking the build on `master` more than once, but this doesn't explain the ban. Under these circumstances, forking is a sane choice if the developer plans to continue working on it.

With the recent news that GNOME and Ubuntu will be dropping support for Xorg in upcoming releases, I think it's great that someone is at least motivated to continue improving Xorg. All Linux users shouldn't be forced to use Wayland. This is similar to the forced systemd adoption we went through a few years ago.

[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/182...
by tdeck | 2025-06-12 15:54:35+00:00
The wiki article I linked goes into it a bit:

> Early English translations of the Bible used the familiar singular form of the second person, which mirrors common usage trends in other languages. The familiar and singular form is used when speaking to God in French (in Protestantism both in past and present, in Catholicism since the post–Vatican II reforms), German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic and many others (all of which maintain the use of an "informal" singular form of the second person in modern speech). In addition, the translators of the King James Version of the Bible attempted to maintain the distinction found in Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek between singular and plural second-person pronouns and verb forms, so they used thou, thee, thy, and thine for singular, and ye, you, your, and yours for plural.
by energywut | 2025-06-12 15:54:57+00:00
The area was partially clearcut about a decade back. Some areas are due for brush management and some for commercial thinning. Additionally, because it is alpine and contains a stream used by fish for spawning, it is interesting to see the variations in snow load and water flow in the stream year over year.

So there's at least a reason to get out each winter (snow load), spring (melt/brush growth/flowers), and summer/fall (stream health/identify trees once brush loses leaves).

I also like seeing if there's trees in stands dying at an unusual rate, which might indicate pine beetle infestations or sickness that I'd need to take care of.

Also, it's a fun hobby and a cool dataset to flip through.
by jandrese | 2025-06-12 15:55:09+00:00
Use taxes cover about 36%[1] of road construction and maintenance, the rest comes out of the general budget. If they were raised to cover all of the costs driving would be unaffordable to many people. Or at the very least Americans would suddenly be interested in small cars again. Some other countries do push more of the burden of road maintenance onto drivers and those countries tend to have far more robust public transit systems.

[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
by rep_lodsb | 2025-06-12 15:56:11+00:00
Those are usually disassembled binaries, not the original source code. Which used Intel style assembly and PL/M.

And Z80 syntax may be more common today, but Zilog made some rather bad choices IMO. If "LD A,(HL)" loads a byte from memory address HL, then you would expect "JP (HL)" to load the address to jump to from memory instead of directly from the HL register. "PCHL" is a lot clearer. Also in 8080 syntax, one mnemonic => one addressing mode and base opcode. No surprising syntax errors because some operand combination isn't allowed, or 4 clock penalty to fetch a prefix byte...
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-12 15:57:42+00:00
> The more I use LLMs to code, the farther I stray from the joy of coding.

I agree. The way I put it is that it feels like programming has been turned into the job of an editor, when it used to be an author. Of course, editing was always a huge part of programming, probably the biggest part, but I always kinda felt like reviewing and editing was more the "brussel sprouts" part of the job and authoring the "ice cream". I was fine to eat my brussel sprouts if I got to have some scoops of ice cream sprinkled throughout, but now it feels like just endless plates of brussel sprouts.
by rjpower9000 | 2025-06-12 15:57:53+00:00
> incremental search from a simple start point towards a solutions

Good point. More broadly than just TDD, we might characterize an "easy" problem as one where the surface from conception to completion is broadly visible and there's a logical set of steps (i.e. "differentiable"). Or maybe "easy" is I can see the full set of steps immediately, and "tractable" is that I've got a good guess.

But the set of steps you can take is highly dependent on your knowledge and skillset. For example, if I know how about completing the square, then deriving the quadratic equation is a basic algebra exercise. If I don't, then I might struggle for a long time before I manage to discover that key insight.

I'm sure there are coding methodologies which can lead to better or worse results, but they augment knowledge or skill, they don't replace it.
by bgwalter | 2025-06-12 15:57:57+00:00
No, I didn't try to claim that. I seem to see the influence in many people's writing and verbosity though. It could be as simple as a counter reaction: If an LLM is allowed to be verbose, so are humans. It could also be that people who use LLMs a lot subconsciously adopt the style.

I infer that you are the author of the post. Take it as a compliment, I think you have written many good pre-LLM articles.
by nipah | 2025-06-12 15:57:59+00:00
The second test scores 60%, the first was way higher. And I specifically said ""unless you are saying "I could not grasp it immediately but later I was able to after understanding the point" I think you and your friends should see a neurologist"", to which this person did not responded. I saw the tests, solved some, I suspect the variability here is more a question of methodology than an inherent problem for those people. I also never stated that my point depended on those people scoring 100% specifically on the tests, even if it is in fact extremely easy (and it is, the objective of this test is to literally make tests that most humans could easily beat but that would be hard for an AI) variability will still exist and people with different perceptions would skew the results, this is expected. "Significantly misrepresenting the numbers" is also a stretch, I only mentioned the numbers ONE time in my point, most of it was about that inherent nature (or at least, the intended nature) of the tests.

So on the edge, if he was not able to understand them at all, and this was not just a problem of grasping the problem, my point was that this would possibly indicate a neurological problem, or developmental, due to the nature of them. It's not a question of "you need to get all of them right", his point was that he was unable to understand them at all, that it confused them to an understanding level.
by linsomniac | 2025-06-12 15:58:28+00:00
I had a recent discussion with another member of the Python community (OA is written by a big name in Python).

He started off saying "learning to code with AI is like learning to cook by ordering off the menu". I know he meant "an AI being the way you learn how to code", but there's another meaning that I've been thinking a lot about because my 16yo son is really into coding and I'm trying to come up with how I can help him be successful in the world at the horizon where he starts doing it professionally.

In that way, "learning how to work together with an AI to code" is a really, really interesting question. Because the world is going to look VERY different in 2-6 years.

The thread in question: https://bsky.app/profile/alsweigart.bsky.social/post/3lr6guv...
by worldsayshi | 2025-06-12 15:58:40+00:00
Often in the past I have felt that software engineering contains a lot of reinventing the wheel again and again in slightly different ways. In an organisation that wants to achieve anything you're often stuck collectively fantasising about all the things you could do "if only" A, B, C and D were solved problems within the internal IT landscape. My hope is that the increased productivity can eventually translate into actually doing those things.

We fret about AI adding a bunch of bad code but I see that there are clear methods for avoiding/mitigating this. (Just make sure to test and otherwise verify that the code does the right thing. Make it transparent and easy to replace etc etc.)

Sure it can be used to add a bunch of technical debt but wielded right it can just add well be used to cut down the debt.
by hnbad | 2025-06-12 15:59:37+00:00
Considering the "Ancient Alien" stuff mostly exists because people find it more plausible space aliens did something than brown people in the past that we find complicated to explain nowadays, I'd say you're not too far off.

There is a lot of projection in a lot of so-called sci-fi media, especially with regard to "alien invasion" tropes. The idea that some foreign group arrives with vastly superior weapons and technology we don't understand to wipe us out or enslave us for some ulterior motives that possibly don't even make sense to us would sound a bit on the nose unless presented in a politically race-neutral way to a demographic of the historically culturally dominant group. There's certainly a degree of fear of revenge to it, though less blatant than in early zombie media (where zombies were more strongly associated with "voodoo" and implicitly a punishment for colonialism) or even exploitation/horror media like Cannibal Holocaust or Heart of Darkness (and a lot of the media inspired by it like Apocalypse Now) where the threat is explicitly more "primitive" (in the case of Heart of Darkness the threat being a form of contagious primitivism itself) but the dominant group (usually white people) are put in vulnerable positions through circumstance. It's no accident that Lovecraft was legitimately extremely racist.

It's important to remember though that humans are not intrinsically racist. Tribalist maybe, but kinship can spread all superficial boundaries of appearances and cultural differences. Whiteness is not a question of a specific skin color or ethnicity but the absence of "non-white" identifiers and thus ultimately just as arbitrary as Roman citizenship during certain time periods in what we now think of as Europe and Northern Africa. And of course just like Roman citizenship, those delineations exist because they benefited the dominant group within (or the colonial administration) by providing an other.
by ho_schi | 2025-06-12 15:59:41+00:00
It depends on the situation. Redundancy and additional power increase margins. More for the sake of more isn't necessary helping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ewa7R20MA

Lufthansa 747-8 after engine failure:

*We're not an emergency.*

It depends on what is causing the failure and how situation evolves. Let us take British Airways Flight 009 as example, the wiki says that all engines failed, all engines were restarted and engine number 2 surged again and was finally shut down. So even this awkward situation was relaxed a bit by the additional safety margin.

Most airlines avoid nowadays the invest into maintenance of four engines airliners. Others have prefer the additional transport capacity and margins. Lufthansa has it's own maintenance branch "Lufthansa Technik" and doesn't need to handle extra costs. Emirates needs the huge capacities of the A380.

PS: The 747 can and does - if necessary - ferry flights without passengers and only three engines. Not possible with twin engine planes.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-06-12 15:59:48+00:00
Yeah. Sometimes the reason you can't focus on something is that some part of your brain is trying to tell you that you shouldn't.

Unfortunately, that part of the brain usually sucks at coming up with an alternative plan, and "do something else, anything" is not very actionable. And you still need to pay your bills somehow.

The natural reward for work is work done. I don't need a motivational system to do the dishes. The motivation is seeing the dirty dishes gradually disappear, and the kitchen become cleaner. I don't need to create pieces of papers to represent that, because it is already happening right there, in real life.

If I work on a project, it helps to specify all things that need to be done (as opposed to working on something open-ended), so that I can see how I am getting closer to the moment of "done". A nice thing about test-driven development is that you produce a set of checkboxes first, and then you gradually check them off. Even if the work is open-ended, if I keep thinking about new features that would be nice add, it helps to specify a "version 1.0", and after achieving it, a "version 2.0", etc. The idea is that after each version I can take a break and feel that my work is done.

The least motivating thing is probably the job, as an employee. You work for 8 hours a day (generously assuming no overtime). There is no way to complete those 8 hours in e.g. 4 hours of working harder and then take a walk. In theory, if you do Scrum, you should have a certain reasonable amount of work assigned per sprint, and if you do it faster, then I guess you can take a short break and do something enjoyable (such as refactoring). In practice, almost no one does Scrum by the book; you will probably be randomly interrupted by extra tasks, and given unrealistic deadlines to avoid the possibility of completing the work earlier.

Another demotivating thing about the job is that there is no personal consequence of completing a project; you immediately start working on a new one. The natural response to completing a work is to congratulate yourself and take a break. But at work, the vacations are mostly unrelated to projects. Also, you are paid per time spent working, not by the number of projects finished. So it is all disconnected.

So I guess it all needs to be a part of some greater project, which can possibly be completed one day. Such as, putting your money in index funds, and planning to retire as soon as you reach a specified amount. Then each day you can congratulate yourself for getting 0.01% closer to the goal. (Or you can save money for other specific things, if that is what you desire.)
by tines | 2025-06-12 16:00:07+00:00
This is a topic that's really interesting to me, and I've thought a lot about it.

The approach that this guy is taking to break out of the addicting loop of gaming/scrolling/whatever is to try to take the principles that make those things appealing and port them to the things that we know we should be doing. Video games have these short feedback loops and quick rewards, so his idea is to make real life more like a video game, in some small way. I was surprised to see that even this website has little achievements in the bottom right corner, when you scroll or see a section for the first time you'll get a little popup congratulating you.

There's nothing evil or wrong about this on the surface, of course. But I wonder if it's not making the situation worse by ingraining a need for quick feedback and frequent external affirmation into wider and wider areas of our lives. In one of my favorite books of all time, Amusing ourselves to Death, Neil Postman talks about the "entertainmentification" of education. The book makes the brilliant and alarming insight that over the centuries, all of humanity's efforts have gone into dealing with the problem of lacking information (and, I would add, entertainment). But now we have the opposite problem: we are so flooded with information, and entertainment, we don't know how to handle it, and society is totally unprepared. If memory serves, Postman warns that we are becoming a people who can't do anything that isn't entertaining. And this was published in 1985, long before Tiktok and its ilk.

Another approach, which admittedly does require some mental strength, is to allow oneself to get bored. Boredom is the mother of invention. I have a theory that our brain has a preferred level of stimulation; if external stimulation is high, internal stimulation will diminish to achieve the desired total; and if external stimulation is low, internal stimulation will increase. The most productive and satisfying times I've ever had in my life have been when I cut myself off from cheap entertainment. When I do that, suddenly I enjoy the hard things again.

I have another theory, that great things are accomplished by people with nothing else to do. If we allow ourselves to swim in an environment of endless entertainment, we're effectively kneecapping our ability to do great things.

---

Also, isn't handling a lot of receipt paper bad for you or something?
by roenxi | 2025-06-12 16:00:26+00:00
1) That is NPIs, it doesn't break out the impact of lockdowns. There was a big drop in IMR across all the states, even though it seems rather unlikely that all states followed the same policies.

2) If we attribute all the change to lockdowns that would suggest the lockdowns were a minor disaster. If 32% of the population didn't get vaccinated - that is basically a 3rd of the population locked down for nothing, up to around 50% in some areas.

One obvious issue is lockdowns are always competing against people voluntarily choosing to stay home and isolate themselves and adopting special procedures in nursing homes. The high correlations between vaccination rate and IMR suggest it might actually just be picking up how concerned communities were with COVID and how much effort they put into protecting themselves.

It is an interesting study though, I like the approach.
by NoblePublius | 2025-06-12 16:00:41+00:00
Again, you have it backwards. Penn Station went bankrupt in the 1960s because rail passenger volume didn’t match the projections made in the 40s and 50s. Most American, even poor Americans, could afford cars, so they bought them. The only way mass transit (it doesn’t have to be public) works is either in dense urban environments or with a society too poor to afford alternatives. I’m not making a pro car argument or anti transit market. I’m just pointing out the actual forces that influence the creation and usage of all transit.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-06-12 16:00:41+00:00
That's the funny thing, I'm not out of the loop. When friends bring up current issues that matter, I'm generally better informed than they are, but I'm clueless if they bring up the latest controversial TV show or whatever is today's outrage narrative that will be replaced by the next outrage narrative tomorrow.

It turns out that by letting the people around me sort of curate the "news," and reading thinkers who write about bigger topics rather than what's in the headlines, I wind up with a pretty good filtered news feed.
by ofjcihen | 2025-06-12 16:00:44+00:00
Thanks for this.

I’ve recently become very interested in QC and purchased and read Quantum Computation and quantum Information which I think is the standard book on the subject right now.

I’m even more interested in applying what I’ve learned but I’m at a loss as to how to begin working in the industry. Aside from getting a new masters degree I wouldn’t know where to begin and resources on the matter are understandably sparse.
by bob1029 | 2025-06-12 16:00:52+00:00
I am curious if the author considered use of the built-in numerics library over hand-rolling types like Vector4F.

All of the methods defined here:

https://github.com/Helion-Engine/Helion/blob/20300d89ee4091c...

Are available in the kitchen sink:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.numerics...

Same idea applies to methods like GetProjection, which could be replaced with methods like:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.numerics...

Advantages of using this library are that it is uses intrinsics (SIMD) to accelerate operations. There is a lot of Microsoft money & time that has been invested into these code piles.
by ranma42 | 2025-06-12 16:01:06+00:00
The amount of power you can dump for balancing is just a fraction of the charge/discharge power (because it only needs to offset differences in self-discharge rate). So you still need a proper dummy load when you want to dump more.

Similarly, the heatsinking capacity of the battery is designed for charging/discharging losses (say 5% of charge/discharge power).
by aeze | 2025-06-12 16:01:07+00:00
For my past several jobs, I've put together a job satisfaction matrix that I fill out once a month. If it scores below a threshold three months in a row, that triggers a job search.

It helps me because I have a habit of fixating on the team’s mission and ignoring my own happiness, so the monthly check-in keeps me from staying somewhere longer than I should.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-12 16:01:47+00:00
> That's a serious amount of stand by power for absorbing excess power or dispatching power when needed.

... and a serious issue should one of the few large manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies get hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a small warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction. But now imagine this being used as a side track in an act of war? The first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by the hack of Viasat satellites, which led to 5.800 wind turbines shutting down due to a lack of remote control capabilities [1]. Now imagine the large Chinese inverter and power bank controller vendors that often enough just white-label for other brands? That's a whole lot of a different game now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack