MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yomismoaqui | 2025-07-14 16:17:50+00:00
Someone on X said that these agentic AI tools (Claude Code, Amp, Gemini Cli) are to programming like the table saw was to hand-made woodworking.

It can make some things faster and better than a human with a saw, but you have to learn how to use them right (or you will loose some fingers).

I personally find that agentic AI tools make me be more ambitious in my projects, I can tackle some things I didn't tthougth about doing before. And I also delegate work that I don't like to them because they are going to do it better and quicker than me. So my mind is free to think on the real problems like architecture, the technical debt balance of my code...

Problem is that there is the temptation of letting the AI agent do everything and just commit the result without understanding YOUR code (yes, it was generated by an AI but if you sign the commit YOU are responsible for that code).

So as with any tool try to take the time to understand how to better use it and see if it works for you.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-07-14 16:17:51+00:00
I get that, I have VMs for various linux distros as well, all purpose-built. i wouldn't use Kali RockyLinux for office use cases for example. there is a lot to a distro than merely downstreaming ubuntu. it can run libreoffice but can it support (not run,support!) other workloads? I can run netbsd on anything, i can theoretically port any software to it or run a VM in it, that doesn't mean it can support what I'm doing with it well.
by seanw444 | 2025-07-14 16:18:22+00:00
I'm of the opinion that we chose the wrong term for concurrency. Concurrency means multiple things going on simultaneously, which is not what's happening with our version of it. Only one thing is happening at any given time, but the tasks are being multiplexed on a shared resource. Parallelism = concurrency, "concurrency" = multiplexing.

Maybe there's a more appropriate term than multiplexing, but I think that's certainly better than concurrency at describing it.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-07-14 16:18:24+00:00
however you want to spin it, the source is always important. again, especially if it tends to fabricate things. don't be lazy and research a proper, first order source and not a parroted parody of a source.

you're intellectually lazy, so why would anyone want to discuss with you?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db522.htm > 105,007 in 2023 heavily picking up since around 2015
by _jholland | 2025-07-14 16:18:30+00:00
Obligatory Tom7 recommendation: [How I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c8i5SABqwU).

In this "expert mode running" video the protagonist, Tom Murphy VII, of computer science comedy YouTube fame, runs 3661 miles across 269 runs in this mammoth 16 year project to run every street in Pittsburgh, thus "completing" it Pac Man style.

If you are not familiar with Tom7 and his whimsy, I cannot recommend enough that you check his videos out.
by hackeraccount | 2025-07-14 16:18:56+00:00
If you run regularly there'll be nice days. The temperature will be 55F with no breeze and cloudy enough so the sun isn't annoyingly bright. You'll feel great the whole time and the only regret will be that it wasn't a longer run.

Those aren't the days that matter.

The days that matter are rainy. They'll be bastard hot and humid. Cold and windy. You'll be annoyed because you don't have time. Something will hurt and there'll be a thought in the back of your head that maybe if you skip today (and the next run too?) then you'll feel better.

Those crap days are the days that count. Those days are money in the bank. Enough of them and you get great days. Every day like that is a day where you can think that running for you is like a smoke to a pack a day man. It's not something you do it's something you are.
by uticus | 2025-07-14 16:19:05+00:00
It is simple until you need something complex - working on a team, call stack management, memory management (allocate, track, free), working on a team, event handling / non-synchronous interrupts, and working on a team.

For a little 8-bit microprocessor with program size < 8k it can be quite easy and even a joy. Anything else and your compiler will outperform you, better to inline hand-coded assembler as needed.
by lessurliu | 2025-07-14 16:19:25+00:00
I can't live without it now. I think its ability to develop a new project(I use it to build websites) from zero to one is very strong, but for refactoring old projects, it might need to get more familiar with the context first. You can open multiple treminal simultaneously to execute tasks in parallel. Also, I recommend using the ultrathink keyword - this is very useful when Claude Code needs to understand complex problems.
by Cheer2171 | 2025-07-14 16:20:14+00:00
Continue with the rest of the paragraph: "Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times — providing reasons such as “FBI investigation” for the searches — which appears to mirror a strategy first reported by 404 Media, in which federal agencies that don’t have contracts with Flock turn to local police for backdoor access."

These were approved by governments that promised the data would never be shared with the feds. Only in the most lawyer bullshit word gymnastics could you arrive at the conclusion there is nothing to see here. You are being intellectually dishonest.
by NathanKP | 2025-07-14 16:20:21+00:00
I love Claude Code too, and it definitely has it's place. I think that IDE's have a few advantages over CLI tools though. In specific the IDE has a lot more contextual information such as what files you have open, warnings from linters or type checkers, information from LSP, etc.

I think it is entirely possible to build a fantastic CLI tool for coding, and the CLI tools for coding already work well enough, but there is just more context info available inside of an IDE, therefore the ceiling is higher when working with an agent that runs inside of the IDE. Context is king for LLM results, and IDE's just have more context.

Over time I'm sure we'll see tools like Claude Code support everything that an IDE can do, but for now if you want to reach the same ceiling you still have to glue together a very custom setup with MCP tool use, and that has the downside of introducing additional tool use latency, compared to an IDE that is able to source context directly from the IDE's internal API, and provide that to the LLM nearly instantly.
by lupire | 2025-07-14 16:20:28+00:00
They were 20% underestimating how long it took them to do a 1-8 hr task that they had just completed.

It's like Tog's study that people think Keyboard is faster than the mouse even when they are faster with the mouse. Because they are measuring how they feel, not what is actually happening.

https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
by senkora | 2025-07-14 16:20:48+00:00
The article is about Nike. I think that Nike is an interesting case study but I don’t really like this article.

A fitness YouTuber / influencer who I follow thinks that part of Nike’s issues was that they never had a good strategy for influencer marketing, which has became very important recently for apparel brands.

Video, but I summarized the main point: https://youtu.be/TXEB0iC2UbA?feature=shared
by chubot | 2025-07-14 16:20:59+00:00
> there is no interop between powershell and nushell

FWIW I wrote a post about this design issue:

Oils Is Exterior-First (Code, Text, and Structured Data) - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/06/ysh-design.html#survey...

That is

- Powershell and nushell have an "interior" design (within a process/VM)

- while POSIX shell, bash, OSH, and YSH have an "exterior" design (between processes)

And I'll claim that the exterior design is the glue you need in large, heterogeneous systems. Making the shell "interior" and "easy to use" is at odds with the role as essential glue -- it creates pressure for something else to be used instead.

---

Maybe the more pithy statement is here:

A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html

The lowest common denominator between a PowerShell, Elvish, Rash, and nushell script is a Bourne shell script (and eventually a YSH script)

I also claim this isn't theoretical -- there are probably a non-trivial number of bash scripts gluing together PowerShell and other shells. IMO it's better to have 1 type of glue, than 2 or more types, which I call "Unix sludge / Cloud sludge".

---

And I disagree with this part, which references protocol buffers:

> how do you get a schema? well, you establish in-band communication. RPC is ...

Protocol buffers transmit schemas OUT of band, usually via a monorepo. The data sent over the wire can't be interpreted without the schema information compiled into the binary.

The monorepo works well enough within Google, but even there it failed to scale (probably around the time of "Alphabet", e.g. Waymo and other companies)

Also, protobufs are biased toward C++; users of other languages feel this friction to varying degrees. In general, they'd rather use .gob for Go, pickle for Python, JSON for JS, Java serialization, etc.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-14 16:21:10+00:00
Also ADHD here, and same thing for me. Hyperfixating on meal planning and strength training has pretty much saved me. It's hard, and I still have to fight food noise daily, but having everything pre-prepped means I have easy, friction free healthy choices instead of reaching for a bag of chips and downing the entire thing while sitting at my desk, or not having the executive function necessary to cook an un-prepped, unplanned dinner and just eating a whole pizza instead.

I also used to binge, and meal planning and pre has also helped with that, as I tend to have periods of either really high food drive, or almost no food drive at all leading to not eating for an entire day, then downing 3000+ calories in one meal.

ADHD sucks. It's often trivialized in pop culture, but it makes life so difficult, and those real difficulties are almost never talked about.
by ILovePopUps | 2025-07-14 16:21:31+00:00
We built I Love PopUps because we were tired of tools that do everything except help you actually convert. Most are bloated, confusing, or force you to upgrade just to access the features you really need.

https://ilovepopups.com/

We wanted something different: a simple, fast, and effective way to create popups and banners in minutes. No plugins, no complex builders, just a small script you install once and you’re ready to go.

What makes I Love PopUps stand out is its focus on speed and clarity. You get a growing catalog of ready-to-use templates you can customize in seconds. Built-in analytics help you see what’s working, and A/B testing lets you optimize your messaging without guessing.

It’s also built with agencies and project managers in mind: you can control multiple sites or brands from a single dashboard, without limitations or added costs.

What we’re most proud of is that, even though we’re still in the MVP stage, people are already seeing results and validating the concept. From day one we made it fully unlimited, with no locked features or "Pro" plans. We want anyone to be able to jump in and get value right away.

If you try it, let us know what works and what doesn’t. Every bit of feedback helps us improve.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-07-14 16:22:24+00:00
So I can deploy steam at any random company? or if I'm a graphic designer can I use it to replace my macos? is it a good distro if I'm working on embedded sofware development? Should I use it as a web server? it can after all run nginx or apache on it. If I have a VPS with 1GB ram, is this a good OS for it? or a laptop from 2011? all I'm saying is it can do lots of things, but it isn't built to support all those things. it's built for gaming. if it really is a general purpose OS, the litmus test (in my opinion) is that someone starts shipping it with general purpose computing hardware and people actually start using that.
by taeric | 2025-07-14 16:22:33+00:00
It is amusingly frustrating to finally learn this. Trying to convince my kids of it, and they don't believe me. At all.

Spouse is also dubious. Remarks that spending 20 minutes on a treadmill or out walking is actually somewhat hard to do. Not wrong, but it only gets easier if you do it. And then it starts to get a lot easier.
by NaOH | 2025-07-14 16:22:43+00:00
Related:

The legacy of the iconic Nakagin capsule tower - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080820 - May 2025 (27 comments)

Decaying but beloved, Tokyo’s Capsule Tower faces uncertain future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29158311 - Nov 2021 (77 comments)

A Year in the Metabolist Future of 1972 (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798881 - July 2021 (6 comments)

Letter of Recommendation: The Nakagin Capsule Tower - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12613173 - Oct 2016 (8 comments)

The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27299363 - May 2021 (112 comments)

Living in the Nakagin capsule tower (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638448 - Nov 2015 (2 comments)
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-14 16:23:05+00:00
I can imagine the feature set the native Windows driver advertises is different from the feature set DXVK reports. If DXVK doesn't support or implement certain features that the engine then doesn't request of it (or if the API call translates to a noop), you could quite easily end up in a scenario where graphic fidelity is lowered, accidentally boosting battery life and performance. There were bugs where certain games wouldn't render certain shadows, for instance, which might not get noticed but still offers an accidental performance uplift.
by narush | 2025-07-14 16:23:33+00:00
Hey HN -- study author here! (See previous thread on the paper here [1].)

I think this blog post is an interesting take on one specific factor that is likely contributing to slowdown. We discuss this in the paper [2] in the section "Implicit repository context (C.1.5)" -- check it out if you want to see some developer quotes about this factor.

> This is why AI coding tools, as they exist today, will generally slow someone down if they know what they are doing, and are working on a project that they understand.

I made this point in the other thread discussing the study, but in general, these results being surprising makes it easy to read the paper, find one factor that resonates, and conclude "ah, this one factor probably just explains slowdown." My guess: there is no one factor -- there's a bunch of factors that contribute to this result -- at least 5 seem likely, and at least 9 we can't rule out (see the full factors table on page 11).

> If there are no takers then I might try experimenting on myself.

This sounds super cool! I'd be very excited to see how you set this up + how it turns out... please do shoot me an email (in the paper) if you do this!

> AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

Nit: I appreciate how hard it is to write short titles summarizing the paper (the graph title is the best I was able to do after a lot of trying) -- but I might have written this "Early-2025 AI slows down experienced open-source developers. Peter Naur can give us more context about one specific factor." It's admittedly less of a catchy-title, but I think getting the qualifications right are really important!

Thanks again for the sweet write-up! I'll hang around in the comments today as well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772

[2] https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study.pdf
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-14 16:24:01+00:00
Don't get me wrong, I love aider and I've been using it since the early days. I'm just commenting on the overall "gains" and imo they are higher with the latest tools (claude code, gemini, etc).

As for 1), I agree but you force the model to work within aider's constraints. Claude4 for example excels at the agentic flow and it's better at that than providing the diffs that aider expects.

As for the last sentence, I disagree. They are evolving the stack, and more importantly they are evolving both at the same time, stack + LLM. That's the main reason they all subsidise use atm, they are gathering data to improve both. If I were to place a bet right now, I'd say that provider_tool + provider_LLM > 3rd party tool + same model in the short, medium and long term.
by ElFitz | 2025-07-14 16:24:07+00:00
Honestly, regarding the whole "LLM slop" thing, I don’t care. I get why others do, but I just don’t.

I don’t care how that sausage is made. Heck, sometimes gen AI even allows people who otherwise wouldn’t have had the time or skills to come up with funny things.

What annoys me is all the spam SEO-gamed websites with low information density drowning the answer I’m actually looking for in pages of empty sentences.

When they haven’t just gamed their way to the top of search results without actually containing any answer.

And that didn’t need LLMs to exist. Just greed and actors with interests unaligned with mine. Such as Google’s former head of ads, apparently. [0][1]

[0]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

[1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/
by 8note | 2025-07-14 16:25:06+00:00
i dont think its that far off.

suppose every team needs to do a similar 10 story points of maintenance, like a java major version update from 5 to 21.

if youve got 100 teams, thats about 1000 story points, and if an engineer automated that change, theyve still done 1000 story points overall, even if what they implemented was only 10 story points itself
by neuroelectron | 2025-07-14 16:25:09+00:00
Good article and it makes sense. I wish I had sometime in my career worked on a codebase that was possible to be understood without 10 years of experience. Instead most of my development time was spent tracing execution paths through tangles of abstractions in nested objects in 10M LOC legacy codebases. My buddy who introduced me to the job is still doing it today and now uses AI and this has given him the free time to start working on his own side projects. So there's certain types if jobs where AI will certainly speed up your development.
by runako | 2025-07-14 16:26:31+00:00
Exactly this. Let's spell it out:

Customs & Border Patrol. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Domestic travel does not involve immigration or customs. No international borders are crossed.

Giving CBP line-item access to the movements of Americans makes as much sense as giving the SEC access to healthcare records.

There is virtually no reason at all for these organizations to have any knowledge about the movements of people inside the US. They do not get to be super-police just because they want to be.
by tomasz_fm | 2025-07-14 16:26:53+00:00
Only one developer in this study had more than 50h of Cursor experience, including time spent using Cursor during the study. That one developer saw a 25% speed improvement.

Everyone else was an absolute Cursor beginner with barely any Cursor experience. I don't find it surprising that using tools they're unfamiliar with slows software engineers down.

I don't think this study can be used to reach any sort of conclusion on use of AI and development speed.
by NathanKP | 2025-07-14 16:27:10+00:00
Kiro does have autocomplete. It's just not advertised on the product page as a star feature.

In my experience using Kiro you are still going to be hands on with the code. Personally I choose to turn AI powered autocomplete off because when I do touch the code manually it's usually for the purposes of working on something tricky that AI would likely not get right in autocomplete either.

However, the Kiro autocomplete is average in capability in my experience, and you can absolutely use it to write code by hand as well.
by throwaway77385 | 2025-07-14 16:28:38+00:00
Alphabet has unfortunately reached a size where it is completely self-sustaining and acts outside of 'normal' market forces affecting businesses that need to make something or sell a certain volume of products. They just keep growing because now it's a good investment to have. There's a few companies like this now. They could just completely stop doing anything tomorrow and they'd probably remain one of the biggest market-caps in existence for decades.
by londons_explore | 2025-07-14 16:28:43+00:00
I suspect the main issue is the north american 2 split phases+neutral design.

Specifically, without the neutral, the car can already generate that with the onboard charger. A bidirectional charger costs no more than a unidirectional one if you are designing it.

But generating that neutral is expensive. You either need a hundred lbs of transformer, or some expensive power electronics.
by Roscius | 2025-07-14 16:28:49+00:00
> I've found that asking AI tools to generate a changeset in this case is actually a pretty solid way of starting to learn the mental model.

This. Leveraging the AI to start to develop the mental model is an advantage. But, using the AI is a non-trivial skill set that needs to be learned. Skepticism of what it's saying is important. AI can be really useful just like a 747 can be useful, but you don't want someone picked off the street at random flying it.
by methuselah_in | 2025-07-14 16:29:01+00:00
Those of current generation students who have access to ai might become slow over time. Because when things are not readily available then they have to struggle and work harder in that process, at that time I thing human a lot of secondary things ! Now when everything is easily available especially knowledge without knowing how to struggle with basics. It will eventually make kids dumb. But can be opposite also. Eventually even I become slow even I keep on using chat gpt or gemini.
by figoshi | 2025-07-14 16:29:18+00:00
WeSellRemotely.com is a specialized job board dedicated entirely to remote sales jobs. It aggregates thousands of listings from across the web, making it a go-to resource for anyone in sales looking to work remotely. Whether you're an SDR, AE, account manager, or sales leader, the site offers a wide variety of roles across industries and experience levels.
by narush | 2025-07-14 16:29:27+00:00
Thanks for the feedback! I strongly agree this is not the only measure of developer productivity -- but it's certainly one of them. I think this measure as speaks very directly to how _many_ developers (myself included) understand the impact of AI tools on their own work currently (e.g. just speeding up implementation speed).

(The SPACE [1] framework is a pretty overview of considerations here; I agree with a lot of it, although I'll note that METR [2] has different motivations for studying developer productivity than Microsoft does.)

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3454122.3454124

[2] https://metr.org/about
by jlokier | 2025-07-14 16:29:40+00:00
Several comments point out this doesn't happen on Android.

I'm using Android, with my default browser set to Firefox Focus, and I found:

- Every few months, the default browser gets reset to Chrome. I don't know this has happened until I realise I'm looking at something in Chrome. Then I look at the default browser setting, see it changed to Chrome (without my consent, and as far as I know, no notification), and I change it back to Firefox Focus. This has happened at least twice in the last year.

- For a while, when opening things from Google Search it opened them in Chrome. However I'm unable to replicate that now.