MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JoeMattie | 2025-06-15 16:23:56+00:00
I would also like to know this. I've only very briefly looked into Claude code and I may just not understand how I'm supposed to be using it.

I currently use cursor with Claude 4 Sonnet (thinking) in agent mode and it is absolutely crushing it.

Last night i had it refactor some Django / react / vite / Postgres code for me to speed up data loading over websocket and it managed to:

- add binary websocket support via a custom hook - added missing indexes to the model - clean up the data structure of the payload - add messagepack and gzip compression - document everything it did - add caching - write tests - write and use scripts while doing the optimizations to verify that the approaches it was attempting actually sped up the transfer

All entirely unattended. I just walked away for 10 minutes and had a sandwich.

The best part is that the code it wrote is concise, clean, and even stylistically similar to the existing codebase.

If claude code can improve on that I would love to know what I am missing!
by quantadev | 2025-06-15 16:24:08+00:00
English Language is the best general purpose conveyance of arbitrary ideas, and it has syntax rules just like programming languages. It's "best" by the metric of being "easiest for humans to understand". That's what I mean by best, in this case.

I think one can argue that LISP is the "best" computer programming language based on a set of metrics that revolve around simplicity and composability. There's no simpler language. There simply cannot be, because there's nothing "extra" in LISP. It's the most compact (while still being human readable) way to define and/or call functions.

You can also argue that LISP is closer to English than any other programming language, because in English we use parenthesis's and lists to enumerate things related to what has been said. For example "(add, 1, 2)" is axiomatically the best way to express adding two numbers, in a way that scales to arbitrary numbers of operations. It's superior to "(1+2)" because the plus sign is a single character (cannot scale), and therefore there are a limited number of them, and using symbols means humans have to memorize them rather than simply reading their name. But "add" is a name one can read. Also "add one and two" is a valid English sentence, so all LISP programs are similarly valid English language expressions, where the parenthesis is merely used for grouping language "clauses".

If the world were ever to be forced to agree on one single high level programming language, it would necessarily need to be LISP for about 10 other huge reasons I could name: Everything from ease of writing parsers, to compression of code, simplicity, ease for learning, even as a young child, etc.
by karmakaze | 2025-06-15 16:24:12+00:00
Before Wolfenstein 3D (1992) there was already Rescue on Fractalus! (1985) for the Atari 8-bit computer and 5200 console. I remember playing a pre-release titled "Behind Jaggi Lines" in a reference to aliased edges. The Eidolon was a first-person shooter (but not fast paced) that released in Dec the same year.
by akharris | 2025-06-15 16:24:21+00:00
My dad started his work as a Pediatric Hematologist Oncologist in the late 60s. He had a firm belief that cure rates could and would climb as a result of research and better clinical care. He spent his life pursuing both.

When people would ask him how he managed to stay so positive - he was one of the happiest people I’ve ever known - he’d reference the trends highlighted in this article.

That didn’t change how hard it was when he lost a patient, but I know he always had his eyes and his mind on the future.

This is an incredible example of science and medicine. Thanks OP for posting it.
by jplusequalt | 2025-06-15 16:25:10+00:00
>we can continuously try to make things better

Who is "we" here? Because the current system is ran by people who have a vested interest in keeping things the same.

Also, I disagree on my comment being a fallacy. I'd almost argue the comment I replied to is a fallacy because it's comparing a theoretical well regulated market to the reality of what we actually have.

It's clear to me that such a thing could never truly work because it would require near omnipotence by whomever the regulating body is in order to prevent actors gaming the market.
by kubectl_h | 2025-06-15 16:25:23+00:00
* Node bringing JS to the backend.

* Python won in data science/analytics and AI/machine learning

* Python also seems to be the high level language used most in academia for non CS engineering (and CS too)

Rails continues to be relatively popular in early stage companies. Plenty of well known companies started with Rails in the last 10+ years and it continues on as part of their stack.
by kbos87 | 2025-06-15 16:25:31+00:00
Fair point and I absolutely acknowledge that the future AI will usher in is still very much an unknown. I do think it's worth recognizing that there is one part of the story that is very predictable because it's happened over and over again - the part where some sort of innovation creates new efficiencies and advantages. I think it's fair to debate the extent to which AI will completely disrupt the white collar working class, but to whatever extent it does, I don't think there's much argument about where the benefit will accrue under our current economic system.
by thom | 2025-06-15 16:25:56+00:00
Fastmail adds a header to every email with any sort of unsubscribe link. I send those to their own folder (except ones I add to contacts). My main inbox is basically 100% things I expect to see there at this point. I view the mailing list stuff less regularly and unsubscribe anything I don’t want there. If it keeps coming (or if the unsubscribe process requires more faff than doing it through my mail client) I delete it and mark as spam. In 30 years I don’t think I’ve ever felt more in control of my email.
by lazystar | 2025-06-15 16:26:49+00:00
> it’s going to eliminate jobs.

that's the part i'm not sold on yet. it's a tool that allows you to do a year's work in a week - but every dev in every company will be able to use that tool, thus it will increase the productivity of each engineer by an equal amount. that means each company's products will get much better much faster - and it means that any company that cuts head count will be at risk of falling behind it's competitors.

i could see it getting rid of some of the infosec analysts, i guess. since itll be easier to keep a codebase up to date, the folks that run a nessus scan and cut tickets asking teams to upgrade their codebase will have less work available.
by danans | 2025-06-15 16:26:55+00:00
> Your imaginary dystopia is certainly possible, but I would warn against having complete conviction it is the only possible outcome.

Absent some form of meaningful redistribution of the economic and power gains that come from AI, the techno-feudalist dystopia becomes a more likely outcome (though not a certain outcome), based on a straightforward extrapolation of the last 40 years of increasing income and wealth inequality. That trend could be arrested (as it was just after WW2), but that probably won't happen by default.
by heyjamesknight | 2025-06-15 16:28:08+00:00
You read too many comic books.

You think your average, low-level gang member, willing to murder a random person for personal status, thinks what they're doing is "for the greater good"? They do what they do because they value human life less than they value their own material benefit.

Most evil is banal and pedestrian. It is selfish, short-sighted, and destructive.

"Privation of good" explains all evil.
by Arainach | 2025-06-15 16:28:10+00:00
Productivity per capita is dramatically up since the 1970s. Wages are flat. Employers are greedy and short sighted.

Employers would rather pay more to hire someone new who doesn't know their business than give a raise to an existing employee who's doing well. They're not going to pay someone more because they're more productive, they'll pay them the same and punish anyone who can't meet the new quota.
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-15 16:28:24+00:00
> English Language is the best general purpose conveyance of arbitrary ideas, and it has syntax rules just like programming languages. It's "best" by the metric of being "easiest for humans to understand". That's what I mean by best, in this case.

Given that most people alive today don't understand English at all, I don't think this claim holds up very well.

> For example "(add, 1, 2)" is axiomatically the best way to express adding two numbers, in a way that scales to arbitrary numbers of operations. It's superior to "(1+2)" because the plus sign is a single character (cannot scale), and therefore there are a limited number of them, and using symbols means humans have to memorize them rather than simply reading their name.

I'd be willing to wager that "1+2" is understood by far more people across the globe than "(add, 1, 2)".
by derektank | 2025-06-15 16:29:22+00:00
>The sperm competition then discards the random choices that happened to be bad, implementing an optimum search algorithm.

Only a very small percentage of sperm (less than 5%) are chromosomally abnormal. Meanwhile, the vast majority of sperm are morphologically abnormal in some way. So there's not really a tight relationship between genetic problems and sperm fitness. Men with infertility due to low motility, for example, are capable of having perfectly healthy children with those low motility sperm through IVF.

>The DNA of the sperm cells is generated by a random generator, which is the meiosis mechanism, which randomly shuffles then randomly discards half of the father DNA.

Meiosis also occurs in women (technically in the female fetus), but women generally produce only a single egg each ovulation.

>Many embryos will die very soon, without ever developing, rejecting other bad random choices.

A very large number of zygotes/blastocysts survive until implantation, upwards of 50%. And of those that do, maybe 20-40% are miscarried before 12 weeks. All things considered, about 1 in every 4 fertilized eggs results in a successful pregnancy.

So yes, it's absolutely true that the body filters out chromosomally abnormal germ cells and zygotes. But an egg is orders of magnitude more likely to survive than a sperm (even if you take into account the eggs that die in the uterus without being released). And the overwhelming reason is that the egg is simply in a much less hostile immune environment.
by tom_m | 2025-06-15 16:29:55+00:00
It is a huge issue for FAANG. I'd think moreso than startups. They employ so many more people. The numbers add up quick. Big companies are not laying people off because of the AI boogie man. AI is still rapidly changing and hasn't been adopted as much as people think. What? Companies are being pre-emptive here? No. They are letting people go because of many reasons, least of all is AI. If you could magically go twice as fast you don't say ok let's not do that. Instead let's go as fast as we were going before. Not if you have the budget. If it was part of your plan. Your plan that you wouldn't change overnight. Nope. This is all part of the plan at these companies. They hired knowing the tax breaks would run out. They literally hired to fire people and they aren't going to admit that. How convenient the AI boogie man came about around the same time...but for anyone who understands budgets and how things work, this was all set into motion BEFORE AI.
by WXLCKNO | 2025-06-15 16:30:14+00:00
My best comparison is that it's like MacBooks/iPhones etc.

Apple builds both the hardware and the software so it feels harmonious and well optimized.

Anthropic build the model and the tool and it just works, although sonnet 4 in cursor is good too but if you've got the 20$ plan often you're crippled on context size (not sure if that's true with sonnet 4 specifically).

I had actually heard about the OpenAI Codex CLI before Claude Code and had the same thought initially, not understanding the appeal.

Give it a shot and maybe you'll change your mind, I just tried because of the hype and the hype was right for once.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-15 16:30:34+00:00
This theory that if AI becomes sufficiently advanced and cheap, company productivity will go up and they will in fact need to hire more people because of it is completely false.

If AI becomes sufficiently advanced and cheap productivity will go up and companies will as a result need to hire more AI.

Let’s be clear. If an AI is developed that is equal to a human in intelligence and cheaper than a human to employ capitalism in general is impacted in a major way.

If that happens just pray that robotics doesn’t become sufficiently advanced such that jobs requiring crafting or manual work doesn’t get replaced.

Also to be clear I’m not advocating or saying whether or not any of these things will happen. I am simply saying that hypothetically if AI progresses in a certain way then the following consequence is inevitable.
by maxlin | 2025-06-15 16:30:54+00:00
If you have actual feedback on the points go ahead. If you even opened the link, It contains sources. What I wrote, I wrote from memory as I've read plenty of articles and first-party takes while fighting stupid misinformation on this specific issue so much, and just added the fact check as I think that is doing a lot more than 90% of commenters.

Replying (trolling?) in the lines of just "lol AI stupid" isn't helpful or aiming towards anyone being better informed.
by pepinator | 2025-06-15 16:31:46+00:00
Even if not all LLMs are equal, almost all of them are based on the same base model: transformers. So the general idea is always the same: predict the next token. It becomes more obvious when you try to use LLMs to solve things that you can't find in internet (even if they're simple).

And the testing does not always work. You can be sure that only 80% of the time it will be really really correct, and that forces you to check everything. Of course, using LLMs makes you faster for some tasks, and the fact that they are able to do so much is super impressive, but that's it.
by raron | 2025-06-15 16:31:47+00:00
Resistors doesn't "limit the current flow", they just (let's say) make it harder to "push" the same amount of current through. (If you increase the voltage you will get higher current flowing through any resistor.)

There are ways to limit the current through some components regardless of the applied voltage (to a sane level) without producing much heat. These are active switching mode DC-DC converters widely used eg. for driving LEDs in (higher quality) light bulbs and charging batteries.
by throw10920 | 2025-06-15 16:33:00+00:00
Objectively speaking, computers back in the 90's were not capable of organizing the information that a single human being would be interested in, let alone the information of a community or state or country or the world.

I am happy with the potential that we have available today to do things that we couldn't in the past. And it's always possible to improve software on top of more capable hardware and OSes.
by RajT88 | 2025-06-15 16:33:40+00:00
Comcast gives you the illusion of being able to talk to a human being if you are persistent enough.

What ends up happening is at some point they send you a link to talk to their support bot and tell you they are hanging up on you.

Threatening cancelation is the only way. The only reason they will not care is because of their captive markets. This is what you get with no competition.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-15 16:34:01+00:00
I'm not sure I understand the entire point of the exercise. There's already an RJ45 jack on the Mini, so no need to hack the unit to get access to an Ethernet PHY. And the WiFi router can be turned off via the setup page.

Did they remove support for the Ethernet jack on the Minis available in Ukraine? It looks like it's still present on the WiFi board, next to the power jack.
by azuanrb | 2025-06-15 16:34:13+00:00
Similar experience. Although, recently just tried Claude Code and it seems to be a pretty good upgrade (both Sonnet and Opus). I'd suggest you to give it a try if you haven't. For UI, Playwright MCP helps a lot. And since it can run rspec too, it can get faster feedback.

To me it is better now, but not as good as certain languages. Since that I'm using Go as well, I do notice Claude Code perform better with Go.
by timr | 2025-06-15 16:34:23+00:00
> What caused the drop in popularity in RoR? It seemed like ~10-12 years ago RoR was the de-facto startup standard. On any given day there were multiple items on the HN front page having something to do with RoR

New things are "simple", and old things are inevitably complex, which always attracts the new generation of inexperienced coders (I include myself in this). This continues until all of the complexity of the domain are captured in the "new" thing, and the cycle begins again. Rails is vastly more sophisticated than when I started using it in ~2007, when things like CSRF attack mitigation weren't even built in. So it's a better framework now, but you have to understand a lot more to get started.

Also, from ~2012 until recently, bootcamps have been pumping out new programmers who only know Javascript because it was possible to do a full-stack web app with JS, and the bootcamps would rather not teach another language.
by mjr00 | 2025-06-15 16:35:14+00:00
The USA has "presently" been offshoring software development jobs since around 2001.

I remember, because the same type of people dooming about AI were also telling me, a university student at the time, that I shouldn't get into software development, because salaries would cap out at $50k/year due to competition with low-cost offshore developers in India and Bangladesh.
by Rendello | 2025-06-15 16:35:32+00:00
For what it's worth, the Unicode Consortium seems to be trying to reign in the emoji explosion in the last few years. For example they won't process any new proposals for flags [1][2]:

> The Unicode Consortium will no longer accept proposals for flags. Flags that correspond to officially assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 region codes are automatically added, with no proposals necessary.

And they decided against adding Multi-skintoned Families to the RGI, as in, vendors can encode them if they really want to, but it's not recommended. Apple for example replaced their more complex family emoji with the recommended silhouettes afterwards [4].

1. https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag...

2. https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Flags

3. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20114-family-emoji-explor.p...

4. https://blog.emojipedia.org/ios-17-4-emoji-changelog/
by phamilton | 2025-06-15 16:35:54+00:00
(not trolling) Would that undefined behavior have occurred in idiomatic rust?

Will the ability to use AI to write such a solution correctly be enough motivation to push C++ shops to adopt rust? (Or perhaps a new language that caters to the blindspots of AI somehow)

There will absolutely be a tipping point where the potential benefits outweigh the costs of such a migration.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-15 16:36:37+00:00
> I think the more realistic argument is that the model can generalize, but only by learning shortcuts (e.g. how to pattern match a problem to a likely answer) and simple algorithms (e.g. how to propagate carries in a multiplication).

This is exactly what humans do too. Anything more and we need to use tools to externalize state and algorithms. Pen and paper are tools too.
by akpa1 | 2025-06-15 16:36:40+00:00
I see the contradiction there!

The bit about the "aims of the module" comes from its aims to get people thinking in a certain way about security, something I definitely already had. But that doesn't mean it had nothing to teach me - it was quite a while ago that I took it, but one exercise about the nuances of the setuid bit and how misconfigurations could be exploited stands out as something I doubt I'd have come across otherwise. There was also plenty of content on cryptography and basic binary reverse engineering/attacks that I'd not seen before.

My level of ability and knowledge isn't consistent - some places I'd dug into more, and some less. With tech, there's always a more detail to be explored and more learning to be done, even in areas I'm familiar with.

(I wrote the article)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-15 16:36:55+00:00
It's too bad it doesn't actually work like that. If unions were like a plague of locusts you could unleash on some monopolist and have them pick the bones clean in an afternoon, they'd be an extremely useful tool in getting rid of those companies.

Meanwhile in practice they do what they did to the 20th century US automakers, i.e. decades-long stagnation while their customers suffer from the continued consolidated market until some foreign competition finally shows up to eat their lunch.
by zer00eyz | 2025-06-15 16:37:22+00:00
> and a pretty short view of history

Great lets see an example!

> To claim that all of the benefit isn't going to naturally accrue to a thin layer of people at the top isn't a speculation at this point - it's a bold faced lie.

Except that innovation has lead to more jobs, new industries, and more prosperity and fewer working hours. The stark example of this: you arent a farmer: https://modernsurvivalblog.com/systemic-risk/98-percent-of-a...

Your shirts arent a weeks or a months income: https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt...

Go back to the 1960's when automation was new. It was an expensive, long running failure for GM to put in those first robotic arms. Today there are people who have CNC shops in their garage. The cost of starting that business up is in the same price range as the pickup truck you might put in there. You no longer need accountants, payroll, and your not spending as much time doing these things yourself its all software. You dont need to have a retail location, or wholesale channels, build your website, app, leverage marketplaces and social media. The reality is that it is cheaper and easier than ever to be your own business... and lots of people are figuring this out and thriving.

> Do we really think that most of the American economy is just going to downshift

No I think my fellow Americans are going to scream and cry and hold on to dying ways of life -- See coal miners.
by seadan83 | 2025-06-15 16:38:07+00:00
We're just 3 years after a giant hiring binge, a similar amount of time post zero interest rates, the US economy has been threatening recession for two years, and economic uncertainty is very high, and post Covid had a glut of junior engineers coming onto the market. Between all of these plausible explanations for why hiring is way down, is there macro economic evidence it really is AI and not anything else?
by visarga | 2025-06-15 16:39:25+00:00
> My tolerance for AI style "knowledge" is lower and lower every day.

We like to think humans possess genuine knowledge while AI only learns patterns. But in reality do we learn medicine before going to the doctor? or do we engage the process in an abstract way - "I tell my symptoms, the doctor gives me a diagnosis and treatment". I think what we have is leaky abstractions, not genuine knowledge. Even the doctor did not discover all his knowledge directly, they trust other doctors who came before them.

When using a phone or any complex system, do we genuinely understand it? We don't genuinely understand even a piece of code we wrote, we still have bugs and edge cases we find out years later. So my point is that we have functional knowledge, leaky abstractions open for revision, not Knowledge.

And LLMs are no different. They just lack our rich instant feedback loop, and continual learning. But that is just a technical detail not a fundamental problem. When a LLM has an environment, like AlphaProof used LEAN, then it can rival us, they can make genuinely new discoveries. It's a matter of search, not of biology. AlphaZero's move 37 is another example.

But isn't it surprising how much LLMs can do with just text and not having any of their own experiences, except RLHF style? If language can do so much work on its own, without biology, embodiment and personal experience, what does it say about us? Are we a kind of embodied VLMs?