MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spivak | 2025-06-07 03:56:35+00:00
I think it's more, "you might think as a programmer writing software that models the world of aviation that you could assume the following things— but alas."

Software unfortunately follows rigid rules so the challenge is finding a set of rigid rules that can encompass reality. It would be pretty natural if you were writing a database schema that a flight would have a departing airport and an arriving airport— but alas.
by danck | 2025-06-07 03:57:46+00:00
In figure 1 bottom-right they show how the correct answers are being found later as the complexity goes higher. In the description they even state that in false responses the LRM often focusses on a wrong answer early and then runs out of tokens before being able to self-correct. This seems obvious and indicates that it’s simply a matter of scaling (bigger token budget would lead better abilities for complexer tasks). Am I missing something?
by mcdeltat | 2025-06-07 04:00:22+00:00
Bit of a rant: what annoys me about these lists is how they just give off a huge "you are dumb for making any assumptions, how could you not think of <extremely obscure edge case>" vibe. I'd be interested to see what the effects are of these assumptions failing, because often they are pretty reasonable assumptions for a reasonable subset of the universe. Software is imperfect and you can't cover every possibility. Like ok technically 10 flights with the same number could leave the same gate at the same time, but if 99.99% of the time they don't and you assume that, what is the real impact to people?

Reminds me of a list that came up ages ago that presented an assumption of "X code always runs" with the counterpoint that you could unplug the computer. Ok sure, but then why write software at all? Clearly no point assuming any code will ever run since you can just terminate the program at any random time.
by colechristensen | 2025-06-07 04:00:34+00:00
shrug clans are small states (or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires), that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society. There is a tendency everywhere towards larger, more complex states and a path up and down the scale locally as the bigger ones are created and fall.
by kelnos | 2025-06-07 04:00:45+00:00
I personally think of gambling as entertainment, but that's a luxury of mine, as I don't have a gambling problem. On the (infrequent) occasions I gamble, I pre-set a limit and never spend/lose more than that. If it's gone, I'm done. Every now and then I lose that money so quickly that it's not fun, but that happens so rarely that I generally feel like I've enjoyed myself and have paid an appropriate amount for that enjoyment.

Paying for entertainment is a normal activity. People do it every day. But gambling feels different: you can pay a nearly unlimited amount for it. There are usually limits in other forms of entertainment. I can only see so many movies in a theater in a day. I can only go to so many concerts. The number of board games I can buy is limited by the storage space in my house.

I'm sure there are exceptions in some types of entertainment I haven't thought of, though.
by proc0 | 2025-06-07 04:02:21+00:00
This is so true. I have MinGW, WSL, MSYS, Clang, VSCode, and VS. I have to juggle between them. I also hate VS, it does way too much for you and you get a bunch of garbage IDE files. I imagine MS engineers in every meeting: "should we make this simple? Nah, let's just add several layers of unnecessary bullshit, yeah that sounds good."
Ask HN: Do we need a language designed specifically for AI code generation?
by baijum | 2025-06-07 04:03:11+00:00
Let's run a thought experiment. If we were to design a new programming language today with the primary goal of it being written by an AI (like Copilot) and reviewed by a human, what would its core features be?

My initial thoughts are that we would trade many of the conveniences we currently value for absolute, unambiguous clarity. For example:

- Would we get rid of most syntactic sugar? If there's only one, explicit way to write a `for` loop, the AI's output becomes more predictable and easier to review.

- Would we enforce extreme explicitness? Imagine a language where you must write `fn foo(none)` if there are no parameters, just to remove the ambiguity of `()`.

- How would we handle safety? Would features like mandatory visibility (`pub`/`priv`) and explicit ownership annotations for FFI calls become central to the language itself, providing guarantees the reviewer can see instantly?

- Would such a language even be usable by humans for day-to-day work, or would it purely be a compilation target for AI prompts?

What trade-offs would you be willing to make for a language that gave you higher confidence in the code an AI generates?
by dclowd9901 | 2025-06-07 04:04:09+00:00
Meta: god articles like this drive me crazy. What ever happened to the inverted pyramid hierarchy of information? I have to read 3 paragraphs of unmitigated filler before they actually tell me what's changed. It's not just this article, it seems like every article on newer media sites is like this. I understand why, but fuck them very much and the incentives that drive this behavior.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-07 04:04:33+00:00
No. It went into effect in 2022 [0], which means the timeline absolutely does track with OP's theory. That gives a hypothetical Trump term 2 a full year to fix it but also imposes enough of a time crunch that they could plan on sabotaging attempts to fix it by another party.

I'm not saying it's the actual story, but the timeline does track.

[0] Page 60, Sec 1306(e) sets the date: https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/hr1/BILLS-115hr1enr.pdf
by Mawr | 2025-06-07 04:05:02+00:00
> Guns are not safe. No matter what you do, accidents will happen.

By that reasoning, nothing is safe. Not a useful statement.

Guns are certainly safer than e.g. cars - you control everything about your gun, but have no control over the environment you drive in.

> I don’t think Youtube is the place to look for education, and neither does youtube apparently.

Then you're horribly wrong of course. Youtube just hosts videos, which are a medium like any other. There's no reason why some piece of information couldn't be encoded in a video instead of in a book.

> It’d be pretty bad if someone watched youtube videos and thought they could handle guns safely and ended up hurt.

This is different from learning from literally any other source how?

It's worth mentioning that gun safety rules are super simple and obviously correct, so there's nothing to get wrong anyways:

#1 Treat all guns as if they are always loaded.

#2 Never let the muzzle cover anything that you are not willing to destroy.

#3 Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target and you have made the decision to shoot.

#4 Be sure of your target and what lies beyond it.

There's more to it of course, but these go a long way.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-06-07 04:07:31+00:00
thats the only reasonable way to do business. Its not a grocery store. if you don't get enough money, you need to cut your fixed costs. So he did. After buying, a selection of highly competent individuals knowing their systems decided on the (future) tech-stack and on that what is not needed and what can be done recoded/rebuild to save money on tech-stack even more. And then you just don't need that much work force anymore.

rule no. 1 in business: If you pay, you decide.

rule no.2 in business: If you pay more than you earn: close the company.

key-insights:

- it wasn't musk alone to decide. He had twitter's qualified employees and system architects -> pick the most skilled ones

- it was a power meeting where the groups & members brainstormed excessively for longer then just 3 days in a row -> let them think about a better, simplified system design on a minimal viable tech-stack

- they were accompanied by qualified stuff from tesla to uncover blind spots in the design and to bring fresh ideas / integration-knowledge / synergies & work-force -> check & start building. pivot if neccessary

I really don't undersand, why arguments like yours are still & always brought up. Is it the lack of understanding how to do business? Is it pure "hate" & ad hominem @ musk, because it's musk? What is it that is strong enough to let one show absolute lack of either economical or technical thinking publicly? The -SANE- economical and technical mindset craves for Optimization of tech and fin. Thats the only differentiator to the competition: do it better, do it cheaper.

So why was it bad exactly?
by danpalmer | 2025-06-07 04:07:48+00:00
This is all very fair, and yet I think many would agree that the “frontend ceiling” is a thing, that many candidates are not skilled enough for the roles, and that the general state of frontend engineering is not great.

This is perhaps less true in 2025 than it was in 2012, but I feel it was largely the same until maybe 2022, and is still not far off this.

I think the engineering is underestimated, but also I think job applicants are very bimodal - some coming from a design or boot camp background, able to be productive but not run scaled engineering projects, and some from perhaps a backend/etc background and can scale a codebase, but who are prone to trivialising frontend development and giving less consideration to design and UX.
by kelnos | 2025-06-07 04:11:24+00:00
In reality, though, it will end up being cheaper for society (and therefore cheaper for you) to just protect people from being exploited by others who know who to manipulate the human psyche.

There's a vague parallel with the homelessness problem in my city: I would rather my tax dollars go toward giving people stable housing for free (along with job placement, drug addiction treatment, etc.), because any other use of that money (clearing out tent encampments, jailing addicts, etc.) doesn't actually fix the problem, and ultimately costs more in the long run. (And meanwhile, the city is dirty and I feel less safe walking around in it.)

Sure, giving someone housing for free isn't "fair" to all the people who work hard to pay their rent or mortgage, but sometimes fairness doesn't give us (all of us, not just the people involved) the best outcomes. And it may not be "fair" to limit what businesses are allowed to "sell" to consenting adults, but I am willing to accept that some businesses will not be as profitable if it means society is healthier.
by georgemcbay | 2025-06-07 04:12:24+00:00
> Yes, but every large company in the US would view the nationalization of SpaceX as “shots fired” and investors would likely panic worrying that their stock portfolios would be at arbitrary whims of a tiff between the administration and the CEO.

I don't agree with this.

Like if it were merely a "tiff" between the administration and a CEO, then yes that would be destabilizing, but there is important context here that you are entirely glossing over.

Elon threatened to take his ball and go home in a literally life threatening (to astronauts) way after making SpaceX an essential aspect of the space program. If he didn't walk back that threat I think it would have been very easy for large companies to see the outcome as entirely Elon's fault and maybe just double-check in on their own CEOs to make sure they make sane decisions.

I'm personally convinced Elon realizing the likelihood of this outcome (probably because someone else reminded him of it) is exactly why he started walking the threat back.

And as a side effect of this mess, Elon also unintentionally gave everyone a pretty good reason to reconsider if its a great idea to allow any privatized entity to become "too big to fail" (or, more exactly, too big to easily replace if their CEO goes crazy) within any important government function.
by nilirl | 2025-06-07 04:12:57+00:00
Misleading title. Has nothing to say about working, i.e paid employment, with AI apps.

The main claim in the post: Their portfolio companies have shown an improved rate of accumulating revenue ever since LLMs took off.

Weakest part of the post: No attempt at explaining how or why a LLM affects these numbers. They allude to 'shipping speed' and 'product iteration', but how an LLM helps these functions is left unexplored.

There's an implied deductive argument that a LLM can write some code, so obviously shipping speed is faster, so obviously revenue is faster. But the argument is never explored for magnitude of effect or defended against examples where shipping faster or using LLMs doesn't equal faster revenue.

Also, nothing about sampling bias, size or spread.

Overall: Probably meant as a confidence boost to the sleep-deprived founders out there. But teaches nothing.
by saurik | 2025-06-07 04:13:20+00:00
I don't agree that this list has the attitude you describe--if anything, they just seem proud that they have many fewer of these corner case bugs than anyone else--so it is difficult to work with your example of the flight number. These are, in fact, misconceptions made by programmers, often without having the in-depth knowledge of this specific area that comes from being an actual expert (the kind that often people don't allocate for in their budgets), and this list isn't an over-the-top portrayal of such: it feels weird to become offended?

That said, I do appreciate some of these lists--which maybe has put you on edge to the paradigm--do have an edge to them... but, in all honesty, I think they should? The bugs and edge cases that these lists tend to expose aren't random glitches that equally affect every user: they usually segment users into the ones whose lives "follow the happy path" (which often just means "are intuitive and familiar to the culture near the developer") and the users who get disproportionately (or even continually!) screwed every time they dare interact with a computer.

And like, it is actually a problem that the other side of this is almost always a developer who doesn't really give a shit and considers that user's (or even an entire region/country's) existence to somehow be a negligible statistic not worth their time or energy, and I really do think that they deserve to take some flak for that (the same way I try to not get offended if someone points out how my being a cis-het white male blinds me to stuff: I think I deserve to get held to task harder by frustrated minorities rather than force them to be nice all the time in a world that penalizes them).
by kelnos | 2025-06-07 04:15:47+00:00
We don't get to decide individually, but we as a society get to decide, via our (hopefully representative) governments.

This kind of argument is not particularly interesting; the entire point of a discussion board is for everyone to post and discuss their opinions, which will naturally differ sometimes. Asking what amounts to, "why are you allowed to have that opinion?" is pretty pointless.
by paulmooreparks | 2025-06-07 04:15:50+00:00
A use case is already stated in the article:

"So far, paper packs have been the most common alternatives to plastic containers. But business experts have pointed out that consumers are less willing to buy goods in paper packs because they cannot see the contents. Transparent paper could overcome this problem, but bringing the material to market will require factories with the technology to mass-produce it."
by perching_aix | 2025-06-07 04:16:14+00:00
I disagree, in my view they do not inherently give off such vibes at all. In this post for example, they specifically broach the topic like so:

> There are a lot of assumptions one could make when designing data types and schemas for aviation data that turn out to be inaccurate.

Sounds like a pretty explicit acknowledgement of the notion that these are otherwise reasonable assumptions that just happen to fail when put to the test, I'd say.

It's very easy to self-deprecate, especially if one has insecurities. But that doesn't mean that articles like this actually mean to do so. I think it's worthwhile for everyone involved to always evaluate whether the feeling is actually coming from the source you're looking at, or if that source just happened to trigger it inside you. More often than not, in my anecdotal experience, it's the latter.

I'd also find it interesting to learn what happens when these falsehoods nonetheless make it into an implementation though.
by mythz | 2025-06-07 04:16:15+00:00
Good to see with that war chest they'll be competing in this space for some time yet - which we'll need more of to keep the pricing down (aka subsidized).

Never tried Cursor since I'm not prepared to leave my IDEs, but still got a full AI toolbox with augmentcode.com, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Gemini Code Assist enabled in both my primary VS Code and Rider IDEs.
by dclowd9901 | 2025-06-07 04:16:52+00:00
I have to say that you sound very biased in the way you're talking about the bill. If a primary goal of this administration is to cut and make government more efficient, this bill is about as big of a failure as one could conceive. Any reasonable person would have to admit that.

I'm fine admitting that I would benefit greatly from this bill. I also hope to heaven it doesn't pass because an additional trillion dollars to suit me sounds asinine. I don't need help.
by 65 | 2025-06-07 04:17:47+00:00
I do full stack stuff at my job but front end is my favorite thing to work on, particularly if it's an interesting UX.

I think a good understanding of design is also something people don't get about front end. Limited designs from designers means I fill in the gaps in some places.

Dealing with every possible edge case. Breaking out the advanced web APIs when they can easily solve certain problems, e.g. Intersection Observers or Mutation Observers.

Breaking out the advanced CSS APIs like @property rules for super easy and smooth animations.

Improving tooling and JS builds. Making sites fast and reliable.

On and on. Front end can get looked down upon if you're making the same old stuff over and over again. A modal here, a toast there.

But when you get assigned the crazy shit designers come up with, it becomes a very intricate challenge to create the the simplest solutions you can.
by const_cast | 2025-06-07 04:18:01+00:00
> When you say this is plainly true, how do you back that up exactly? I am unaware of any control tests that would prove out those claims with high certainty.

Well... they exist. All the covid vaccines were tried against placebo, and I mean true placebo as in saline. But even if you're distrustful of that it's just common sense.

I don't want to get the flu. Okay, the less people I'm around the lower the chance I have of getting the flu.

When I was immunocompromised during cancer treatment I greatly limited the amount of people I'm in contact with because that obviously lowers your risk of contracting an illness.

Again it's just not... rocket science.

If I say "you don't need to wear seat belts" and then that results in a bunch of people not wearing seat belts, then there's gonna be a lot more brains on the interstate.

Well... we know seat belts are effective. We know isolation is effective. We know vaccines are effective. So put two and two together. After a certain point it feels like being contrarian for the sake of it.

And, as an aside, most people are truly unbelievably bad at risk-assessment. People can't get it to click in their head that doing risky thing doesn't mean bad things will happen to them.

You can party, ignore all the vaccines, have people spit in your mouth, whatever - and be perfectly fine. Everything in life is risk analysis. I'm not saying that not getting a vaccine or not following guidelines will kill you. But it will increase your risk.

But you, your family, hell, everyone you know, might be perfectly fine. Or they might end up like that guy I knew in highschool who died at 20 MPH because he wasn't wearing a seat belt. It's all risk analysis.
by ketyung | 2025-06-07 04:18:25+00:00
I wanted a quick way to split images into equal parts for content creation and testing.

So I described the logic and flow to ChatGPT, then vibe-coded the UI into my React template. Took less than an hour.

It supports column/row sliders, downloads as a ZIP, and has no backend — it's fully client-side.

Completely free to use, no sign-up needed. Happy to hear feedback or questions!
by demosthanos | 2025-06-07 04:18:27+00:00
> clans are small states

Nope, clans are definitionally not states for several reasons. A state has definite territory, whereas clan-type structures have tended to overlap with each other geographically because they're usually embedded in some larger society. A state by definition has centralized authority whereas clans may not.

> or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires

There is no such label because these organizations are not just shades on the same theme at different sizes, they're fundamentally different in character.

> that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society

True, but there are wide variances in how long in the past that form of organization was dominant.

You won't see Egypt reverting to decentralized non-state clan-oriented governance any time soon because they've been ruled by one state or another for 5000 years.
by ttfkam | 2025-06-07 04:19:53+00:00
Day by day it feels less and less like regular data modeling and more like a debate with Jordan Peterson where you argue for ten hours what a "name" is.

Eventually you end up having to make choices and deal with the consequences. Otherwise Jordan Peterson would have you chasing your tail for days about what a "choice" is, and nothing would ever get done.

tl;dr: just make your best guess and always include an extra "notes" column where things can get leaky.
by Cyberdogs7 | 2025-06-07 04:21:19+00:00
Pretty good stuff! I took the opposite journey and started in games then went to big tech, though I have continued to stay with the game industry the whole time with an indie game company I run on the side.

I did take up the challenge of trying to prompt an image generator into giving me a useable 2d sprite <https://nlevel.ai/images/K4oeERN4a0By/view)> and it's much harder than it looks.

I assume you are running some type of LLM to specially format the prompts to the image models, or is it more complex than that?
by inkyoto | 2025-06-07 04:22:13+00:00
It has been catching up but is still inadequate, at least from the compiler optimisation perspective.

The lack of high-performance RISC-V designs means that C/C++ compilers produce all-around good but generic code that can run on most RISC-V CPU's, from microcontrollers to a few commercially available desktops or laptops, but it can't exploit high-performance CPU design features of a specific CPU (e.g. exploit instruction timings or specific instruction sequences recommended for each generation). The real issue is that the high-performant RISC-V designs are yet to emerge.

Producing a highly performant CPU is only one part of the job, and the next part requires compiler support, which can't exist unless the vendor publishes extensive documentation that explains how to get the most out of it.