MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Arainach | 2025-07-04 21:49:28+00:00
Amen.

At my job right now there is an imminent threat from a team empowered to say "what if we asked an AI to just build X instead of having a team build and maintain it?"

X is something where it's straightforward when N is below 50 but deeply complex when N is in the thousands, which for our team it is, and there is a huge risk that this team will get a demo with N=15 that attracts leadership attention and trying to explain why the AI-generated solution does not scale is a career-limiting move framing me as a naysayer, but this AI team would deliver the demo and go away and the inevitable failure of their solution at scale would ALSO be my team's problem, so..... I hate the future.
by peter422 | 2025-07-04 21:49:55+00:00
In my codebase in my proprietary project, it’s possible that LLMs write around half the code, but that’s just because a lot of the trivial parts of the project are quite verbose.

The really difficult and valuable parts of the codebase are very very far beyond what the current LLMs are capable of, and believe me, I’ve tried!

Writing the majority of the code is very different from creating the majority of the value.

And I really use and value LLMs, but they are not replacing me at the moment.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-07-04 21:50:23+00:00
One thing I find frustrating is that management where I work has heard of 10x productivity gains. Some of those claims even come from early adopters at my work.

But that sets expectation way too high. Partly it is due to Amdahl's law: I spend only a portion of my time coding, and far more time thinking and communicating with others that are customers of my code. Even if does make the coding 10x faster (and it doesn't most of the time) overall my productivity is 10-15% better. That is nothing to sneeze at, but it isn't 10x.
by WillAdams | 2025-07-04 21:50:31+00:00
Marshall Mcluhan called this out ages ago:

>every extension is also an amputation

that said, it is up to society, and to a lesser extent individuals to determine which skills will be preserved --- an excellent example of a rational preservation of craft teaching in formal education is the northern European tradition of Sloyd Woodworking:

https://rainfordrestorations.com/tag/sloyd/

>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with ... hand and ... eye and appreciate the labor of others.
by labrador | 2025-07-04 21:52:05+00:00
I'm a retired programmer. I can't imagine trusting code generated by probablities for anything mission critical. If it were close and just needed minor tweaks I could understand that. But I don't have experience with it.

My comment is mainly to say LLMs are amazing in areas that are not coding, like brainstorming, blue sky thinking, filling in research details, asking questions that make me reflect. I treat the LLM like a thinking partner. It does make mistakes, but those can be caught easily by checking other sources, or even having another LLM review the conclusions.
by Nextgrid | 2025-07-04 21:52:15+00:00
> tou can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.

At the time the RPi came out I don't believe Wi-Fi-enabled microcontrollers were a thing or were as widespread. RPi was the OG low-cost, popular Wi-Fi "microcontroller".

You are right that nowadays a lot of that can easily be done on an ESP32.
by yahoozoo | 2025-07-04 21:53:16+00:00
The thing is, the questions such as “are they an expert in the domain” … “are they good at coding to being with” … and so on only really apply to the folks claiming positive results from LLMs. On the flip side, someone not getting much value - or dare I say, a skeptic - pushes back because they _can see_ what the LLM gave them is wrong. I’m not providing any revelatory comment here, but the simple truth is: people who are shit to begin with think this is all amazing/magic/the future.
by tiew9Vii | 2025-07-04 21:53:30+00:00
The latest small M.2 NAS’s make very good consumer grade, small, quiet, power efficient storage you can put in your living room, next to the tv for media storage and light network attached storage.

It’d be great if you could fully utilise the M.2 speed but they are not about that.

Why not a single large M.2? Price.
by DaSHacka | 2025-07-04 21:53:45+00:00
> I'm from a different country. We have ID cards. You strictly need an ID card (or a different proof of citizenship or right to residence) from the age of 18 (or even sooner if you are attending schools, using the health system etc) to do basically anything.

That's essentially how it is in the states, we have the U.S. passport and individual State's drivers licenses as the primary forms of ID. And government bureaucracy is actually notorious for requiring tons of information (two forms of government ID, and proof of residence, sometimes the literal SS card or birth certificate itself) that everyone inevitability ends up running into an issue with forgetting some document at least once in their lives.

> It's not possible to live here your whole life as a full member of the society without that.

It's not really possible here either, even private companies usually require it in some way or another (such as LinkedIn[0]). The issue is illegal immigrants simply forego these things, or work for companies and live in blue states that don't check any form of ID in the majority of places, on purpose (such as when citizens vote in the presidential election, which is still insane to me)

> Once you have a clear, fast proof of right to reside in a country, you don't need to touch due process because it can go fast.

Well, once you have the undocumented migrants inside your borders, how are you supposed to get rid of them other than how the current administration has been attempting to (utilizing private intelligence and beefing up ICE)?

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1342692
Why Juggle 3 Platforms for Your Event? Meet Demfati
by demfati | 2025-07-04 21:53:56+00:00
70% of event organizers use multiple tools — Google Forms, Eventbrite, WhatsApp, and more — to manage a single event. It’s messy, time-consuming, and steals focus from creating epic experiences.

We get it. We’ve been there. That’s why we built Demfati, the all-in-one event engine that simplifies everything.
by Teever | 2025-07-04 21:54:17+00:00
I understand the concern about exploitation, but there’s a fine line between protection and paternalism. Just because some people overwork themselves doesn’t mean everyone else should be forbidden from choosing to work more and it isn't obvious that working 60 hours a week hurts your health.

Raising kids is but one kind of life stressor and it's not the state’s job to "equalize" life paths by punishing those who don’t have children or want to pursue different goals. Instead, the state should ensure a strong safety net so people are free to find their own balance.

Some pursuits genuinely take a monk-like dedication to see breakthroughs and we shouldn't hobble ambitious people who want to undertake them in the interest of fairness. You're describing a world where someone can't become a viruouso cellist, pioneer a life saving neurosurgery technique or revolutionize computer architecture because someone else decides to have kids. That doesn't sit right with me -- it's a little too Harrison Bergeron.

People might want to throw themselves into intense work for a decade before changing direction and focusing on raising a family or giving back to their community. Or maybe they want to do that the other way, start a family first and then once their kids are adults they want to pursue dreams that they spent decades dreaming of. Flexibility and dynamism in life roles is part of a healthy society.

The role of the state should be to ensure that no one has to 60 hours a week to survive and to ensure that everyone has real opportunities to live their best life that they choose -- not to make that choice for them.
by firstplacelast | 2025-07-04 21:54:29+00:00
Hiring managers and HR area increasingly only open to unicorn candidates that have the exact amount of experience in the exact tech stack. While a few of those people exist, it's definitely more likely they end up interviewing people that are open to lying. So now your pipeline is filled with 90% liars, some just small white lies and others who have made a resume that has exclusively tailored lies just for your org.

The jobs aren't that hard and many people that fudged their experience are capable, so the liars that are hired perform adequately and hiring team sees no reason to adjust their strategy.

Eventually this gets out-of-hand as people learn to further exploit these practices.
Show HN: I Turned PG's "How to Get Startup Ideas" into an Interactive Course
by hedayet | 2025-07-04 21:54:38+00:00
Most startup education is passive - you read essays or watch videos and hope the lessons stick.

But real learning happens through practice and decision-making, not just content consumption.

So I took Paul Graham’s classic essay, "How to Get Startup Ideas," and turned it into a 5-minute interactive course. Instead of just reading about how to spot good ideas, you make decisions like a founder — choosing between ideas, reflecting on user needs, and building pattern recognition.

Early feedback has been encouraging:

"I loved this!!! This was so fun to take." - ex-Google founder

"Simple but so effective! They really made me think." - corporate research analyst

It takes about 5 minutes to try. Would love any feedback on the format, UX, or value!
by ath3nd | 2025-07-04 21:54:54+00:00
> AI (LLMs) is probably 90% of the way to human levels of reasoning

Considering LLMs have 0 level of reasoning, I can't decide if it's a bad take, or a stab at the average human's level of reasoning.

In all seriousness, the actual numbers vary from 13% to 26%: https://fortune.com/2025/02/12/openai-deepresearch-humanity-...

My take is that there are fundamental limitations to try to pigeon-hole reasoning to LLMs, which are essentially a very very advanced autocomplete, and that's why those % won't jump too much too soon.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-07-04 21:54:56+00:00
And of course it says first law that applies here.

The people I have talked to at length about using AI tools claim that it has been a boon for productivity: a nurse, a doctor, three (old) software developers, a product manager, and a graduate student in Control Systems.

It is entirely believable that it may not, on average, help the average developer.

I'm reminded of the old joke that ends with "who are you going to believe, me or you're lying eyes?"
by Jordan-117 | 2025-07-04 21:55:15+00:00
- superficial emotion

- cliché phrasing

- em dashes

- abundant alliteration

- all comments suspiciously similar in length

- all posts pointing to the same website

Does HN not have a policy against vapid AI comment spam? If not, it needs one.

edit: It does:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37617714
by andy99 | 2025-07-04 21:55:48+00:00
I've always looked at it as we're not making software that can think, we're (quite literally) demonstrating that vast categories of things don't need thought (for some quality level). The problem is, it's clearly not 100%, maybe it's 90-some percent, but it doesn't matter, we're only outsourcing the unimportant things that aren't definitional for a task.

This is very typical of naive automation, people assume that most of the work is X and by automating that we replace people, but the thing that's automated is almost never the real bottleneck. Pretty sure I saw an article here yesterday about how writing code is not the bottleneck in software development, and it holds everywhere.
by hotpotat | 2025-07-04 21:56:12+00:00
I have to say I’m in the exact camp the author is complaining about. I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products which I started back when it was only ChatGPT and it was shitty. I started using Claude with copying and pasting back and forth between the web chat and XCode. Then I discovered Cursor. It left me with a lot of annoying build errors, but my productivity was still at least 3x. Now that agents are better and claude 4 is out, I barely ever write code, and I don’t mind. I’ve leaned into the Architect/Manager role and direct the agent with my specialized knowledge if I need to.

I started a job at a demanding startup and it’s been several months and I have still not written a single line of code by hand. I audit everything myself before making PRs and test rigorously, but Cursor + Sonnet is just insane with their codebase. I’m convinced I’m their most productive employee and that’s not by measuring lines of code, which don’t matter; people who are experts in the codebase ask me for help with niche bugs I can narrow in on in 5-30 minutes as someone whose fresh to their domain. I had to lay off taking work away from the front end dev (which I’ve avoided my whole career) because I was stepping on his toes, fixing little problems as I saw them thanks to Claude. It’s not vibe coding - there’s a process of research and planning and perusing in careful steps, and I set the agent up for success. Domain knowledge is necessary. But I’m just so floored how anyone could not be extracting the same utility from it. It feels like there’s two articles like this every week now.
by longhaul | 2025-07-04 21:57:39+00:00
Why can’t browsers/servers just store a standard English dictionary and communicate via indexes?. Anything that isn’t in the dictionary can be sent raw. I’ve always had this thought but don’t see why it isn’t implemented. Might get a bit more involved with other languages but the principle remains the same.

Thinking about it a bit more, we are doing this at the character level- a Unicode table, so why can’t we lookup words or maybe even common sentences ?
by garciasn | 2025-07-04 21:57:56+00:00
Well; I can't speak to your specific experience (current or past) but I'm telling you that while I'm skeptical as hell about EVERYTHING, it's blowing my expectations away in every conceivable way.

I built something in less than 24h that I'm sure would have taken us MONTHS to just get off the ground, let alone to the polished version it's at right now. The most impressive thing is that it can do all of the things that I absolutely can do, just faster. But the most impressive thing is that it can do all the things I cannot possibly do and would have had to hire up/contract out to accomplish--for far less money, time, and with faster iterations than if I had to communicate with another human being.

It's not perfect and it's incredibly frustrating at times (hardcoding values into the code when I have explicitly told it not to; outright lying that it made a particular fix, when it actually changed something else entirely unrelated), but it is a game changer IMO.
by martinald | 2025-07-04 21:58:14+00:00
I personally don't really get this.

_So much_ work in the 'services' industries globally comes down to really a human transposing data from one Excel sheet to another (or from a CRM/emails to Excel), manually. Every (or nearly every) enterprise scale company will have hundreds if not thousands of FTEs doing this kind of work day in day out - often with a lot of it outsourced. I would guess that for every 1 software engineer there are 100 people doing this kind of 'manual data pipelining'.

So really for giant value to be created out of LLMs you do not need them to be incredible at OCaml. They just need to ~outperform humans on Excel. Where I do think MCP really helps is that you can connect all these systems together easily, and a lot of the errors in this kind of work came from trying to pass the entire 'task' in context. If you can take an email via MCP, extract some data out and put it into a CRM (again via MCP) a row at a time the hallucination rate is very low IME. I would say at least a junior overworked human level.

Perhaps this was the point of the article, but non-determinism is not an issue for these kind of use cases, given all the humans involved are not deterministic either. We can build systems and processes to help enforce quality on non deterministic (eg: human) systems.

Finally, I've followed crypto closely and also LLMs closely. They do not seem to be similar in terms of utility and adoption. The closest thing I can recall is smartphone adoption. A lot of my non technical friends didn't think/want a smartphone when the iPhone first came out. Within a few years, all of them have them. Similar with LLMs. Virtually all of my non technical friends use it now for incredibly varied use cases.
Show HN: Code Cause – Online community building solutions for the greater good
by Brysonbw | 2025-07-04 21:58:18+00:00
Wassup everyone,

I've launched an online community and collective, called Code Cause.

-- Why did you create Code Cause?

I'm a purpose driven person who strives to do good. I'm far from perfect, but I work tirelessly to spread positivity and make a positive impact in all areas of my life.

With that being said, I created Code Cause to bring together people who share that same drive - to use technology as a force for good and build solutions that truly serve humanity.

I do not have all the answers nor do I know everything, so this community is for us to come together and merge our perspectives and ideas; asking questions in purpose to build solutions in the open.

-- Why an online community?

At first in January, 2025, I launched Code Cause but with similar features to Hacker News (almost an exact clone) as an MVP. Yet, after a few months I pivoted and thought an online community would be best.

-- Where is the online community and how can one join? As of right now, we are using Slack workspace for our community.

Code Cause slack workspace: https://codecause.slack.com

-- Will it just be an online community?

No, I've created a GitHub organization so we can create projects. Also, I envision and aspire to add the following:

- Build and create charters worldwide. Each charter will address issues specific to its geographic region.

- Additional features may be added to the main web app based on user suggestions.

Granted, this is a community, so creating new additions to Code Cause will be a collaborative effort.

In closing, I’d love to hear your thoughts, concerns, or anything else you’d like to share - much peace and love my brothers and sisters.
by o11c | 2025-07-04 21:58:19+00:00
> I'd argue there's more intentional lying in crypto

I disagree. Crypto sounds more like intentional lying because it's primarily hyped in contexts typical for scams/gambling. Yes, there are businesses involved (anybody can start one), but they're mostly new businesses or a tiny tack-on to an existing business.

AI is largely being hyped within the existing major corporate structures, therefore its lies just get tagged as as "business as usual". That doesn't make them any less of a lie though.
by anonfordays | 2025-07-04 21:59:28+00:00
The justice.gov site literally states:

The Department of Justice may institute civil proceedings to revoke a person’s United States citizenship if an individual either “illegally procured” naturalization or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a).

They're just going to enforce laws that have been on the books for decades, that's all they're stating. TPM is a far-left propaganda outlet, not surprising to find some histrionic takes on made up scenarios there to rile up the base.
by larve | 2025-07-04 21:59:40+00:00
Software methodologies and workflows are not engineering either, yet we spend a fair amount of time iterating and refining those. You can very much become better at prompt engineering. There is a huge differential between individuals, for example.

The code coming out of LLMs is just as deterministic as code coming out of humans, and despite humans being feckle beings, we still talk of software engineering.

As for LLMs, they are and will forever be "unknowable". The human mind just can't comprehend what a billion parameters trained on trillions of tokens under different regimes for months corresponds to. While science has to do microscopic steps towards understanding the brain, we still have methods to teach, learn, be creative, be rigorous, communicate that do work despite it being this "magical" organ.

With LLMs, you can be pretty rigorous. Benchmarks, evals, and just the vibes of day to day usage if you are a programmer, are not "wishful thinking", they are reasonably effective methods and the best we have.
by mystraline | 2025-07-04 22:00:03+00:00
Doesn't matter that much.

Management thinks they can do our jobs by replacing us with a shell scrip... LLM prompt.

We're always moving up and down the tech ladder, solving problems we thought were solved, and, we fix them. But some prompt is supposedly going to replace understanding of your infra?! Hardly.

But you'll save money for this quarter. Past that is definitely up for discussion.... With your shareholders.
by svdr | 2025-07-04 22:00:26+00:00
I've been programming for 40 years and have started using LLM's a few months ago, and it has really changed the way I work. I let it write pieces of code (pasting error messages from logs mostly result in a fix in less then a minute), but also brainstorming about architecture or new solutions. Of course I check the code it writes, but I'm still almost daily amazed at the intelligence and accuracy. (Very much unlike crypto).
by labrador | 2025-07-04 22:00:31+00:00
Prompting is more art than engineering. But understanding the basics of LLMs, which are engineered systems, helps you get better results. I think of it like being a good interviewer: you’re not controlling the conversation, but you know how to guide it. A good prompter, like a good interviewer, knows how to ask the kind of question that gets a meaningful answer. I think of LLMs like a giant library and my task is to steer it to the right sections for a good answer.
by chairmansteve | 2025-07-04 22:00:34+00:00
"the owner instructed everyone not to talk to me, I found out years later".

The guy was a sociopathic narcissist. I have been in similar situations a couple of times, thankfully not for too long.

The way I knew it wasn't a me problem, was that they later turned on other people in even more damaging and toxic ways. Also I have had a long career in many different environments where I was very appreciated.

I think they felt threatened by me first because I was quietly confident and independent minded. Not sure though.

If you come into an environment with a narcissistic and charismatic leader but you are an independent thinker, watch out...,
by sureglymop | 2025-07-04 22:00:47+00:00
Loosely related, but I find the use of AGI (and sometimes even AI) as terms annoying lately. Especially in scientific papers, where I would imagine everything to be well defined. If at least in how it is used in that paper.

So, why can't we just come up with some definition for what AGI is? We could then, say, logically prove that some AI fits that definition. Even if this doesn't seem practically useful, it's theoretically much more useful than just using that term with no meaning.

Instead it kind of feels like it's an escape hatch. On wikipedia we have "a type of ai that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks". How could we measure that? What good is this if we can't prove that a system has this property?

Bit of a rant but I hope it's somewhat legible still.
Show HN: Go-nagini fluent wrapper for Cobra
by grubinator | 2025-07-04 22:01:18+00:00
I've created this library to make usage of Cobra (the famous Go CLI lib) more fluent and also make better use of Go generics when registering command flags.

I'd appreciate feedback on the README and if you'd consider using such a wrapper.

Also tell me if you think that fluent API reads well.

If everything goes well, I'm planning to release a v1 soon! This depends on if I can implement a missing feature of elegantly defining mutually exclusive flags.