MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by komali2 | 2025-07-18 03:47:07+00:00
Does anyone have any usage guides they can recommend to feel this way about using Claude code, other than the OP article? I fired it up yesterday for about an hour and tried it on a couple tickets and it felt like a total waste of time. The answers it gave were absurdly incorrect - I was being quite specific in my prompting and it seemed to be acquiring the proper context, but just doing nothing like what I was asking.

E.g. I asked it to swap all on change handlers in a component to modify a use State rather than directly fire a network request, and then add on blurs for the actual network request. It didn't add use states and just added on blurs that sent network requests to the wrong endpoint. Bizarre.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-18 03:47:16+00:00
>> What you're describing is called: programming.

> Is that the part of programming that you enjoy? Remembering logger vs logging?

If a person cannot remember what to use in order to define their desired solution logic (how do I make a log statement again?), then they are unqualified to implement same.

> But in the end, focus on the parts you love.

Speaking only for myself, I love working with people who understand what they are doing when they do it.
by AnonHP | 2025-07-18 03:48:07+00:00
(Not GP) After looking at the page and the problem description, I agree. The time limit of 25 minutes is way too short for this considering that the person may already be stressed and find it difficult to understand that big wall of requirements and implement it in this time span. It doesn’t matter if one is a self taught programmer or has a CS degree.

I don’t know if they’re looking for superheroes or people who can put in the work.

If the GP is reading this, I’d suggest increasing the timer a lot more (like one hour, what’s the big deal anyway?) and splitting the requirement and steps into smaller chunks. The “optimize for speed” remark in the instructions is also a bit confusing.
by bubblyworld | 2025-07-18 03:48:40+00:00
This isn't a language thing, it's a project thing. Language things I can do fluently (like the example of a for loop in the OP comment... lol). But I work on so many different projects that it's impossible to keep this kind of dependency context fresh in my head. And I think that's fine? I'm more than happy to delegate that kind of stuff.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-18 03:48:53+00:00
"Translation? Musk believes that the most successful AIs will be the ones that maximize things that matter to conscious beings; things that feel good, are rewarding, or extend life. In Musk’s view, that means aligning AI systems with long-term human flourishing, not short-term profits."

"MechaHitler"/Grok is not convincing me Musk is someone to listen to when it comes to LLMs.
by twosdai | 2025-07-18 03:49:06+00:00
There's no real proof in this article that anyone out proforms anyone else. The author lists a few notable cases with a few notable people, but I have to ask.

Didn't those people get an education? Didn't they go through school?

I did a quick search and linus has a masters in computer science.

What is a self taught engineer then?

I would expect that an article with this kind of claim in the title, would have some data about code quality, qualitative reivews from coworkers and managers, with different cohorts of devs, over some time frame.

This piece right now, just seems like an opinion without substance.

Additionally for what it's worth, I personally think of myself as a self taught engineer, so I'm biased to actually agree with the author. However I feel like this claim lacks substance.
by ReverseCold | 2025-07-18 03:49:31+00:00
The price shown is dynamically updated to today’s dollars, and the subscript is the original value at the publishing date of the source text.

> inflation adjustment: Inflation.hs provides a Pandoc Markdown plugin which allows automatic inflation adjusting of dollar amounts, presenting the nominal amount & a current real amount, with a syntax like [$5]($1980).
by userbinator | 2025-07-18 03:49:55+00:00
I suspect a lot of the flakiness is not the chip itself but the fact that, because it's cheap, the bottom-of-the-barrel manufacturers will always use it instead of the significantly more expensive alternatives, and then further cut corners with the board layout and design.

Ironically, the only problems I've had with NICs were on an Intel and a Broadcom.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-18 03:50:25+00:00
I was self taught from around age 12 with legit coding pre-ubiquitous internet and have a EE/CS degree. I was coding Mode X assembly demos in C, Pascal, and Assembly by 17. Most lower division courses were cake. I took 4 CS courses one time under a quarter system which is faster than a semester schedule. Many all-nighters, but got it done. The most important value of it is challenging your abilities and a common knowledge foundation. This is something self-taught only rarely or never receive. There are also too many people in STEM jobs to collect a paycheck while lacking passion.
by dkbrk | 2025-07-18 03:50:36+00:00
> I'm not sure about language design or system architecture but this is almost universally not true for any mathematical or algorithmic pursuit.

I don't agree. While starting with the simplest case and expanding out is a valid problem-solving technique, it is also often the case in mathematics that we approach a problem by solving a more general problem and getting our solution as a special case. It's a bit paradoxical, but a problem that be completely intractable if attacked directly can be trivial if approached with a sufficiently powerful abstraction. And our problem-solving abilities grow with our toolbox of ever more powerful and general abstractions.

Also, it's a general principle in engineering that the initial design decisions, the underlying assumptions underlying everything, is in itself the least expensive part of the process but have an outsized influence on the entire rest of the project. The civil engineer who halfway through the construction of his bridge discovers there is a flaw in his design is having a very bad day (and likely year). With software things are more flexible, so we can build our solution incrementally from a simpler case and swap bits out as our understanding of the problem changes; but even there, if we discover there is something wrong with our fundamental architectural decisions, with how we model the problem domain, we can't fix it just by rewriting some modules. That's something that can only be fixed by a complete rewrite, possibly even in a different language.

So while I don't agree with your absolute statement in general, I think it is especially wrong given the context of language design and system architecture. Those are precisely the kind of areas where it's really important that you consider all the possible things you might want to do, and make sure you're not making some false assumption that will massively screw you over at some later date.
by hyeonwho4 | 2025-07-18 03:50:49+00:00
Human infant intestines in the ancestral environment are natively colonized by bifidobacterium infantis, which completely metabolizes oligosaccarides present in human breast milk and outputs highly acidic byproducts. This acid kills most other gut bacteria, allowing B. infantis to consist of 50% of the intenstinal microbiome in healthy infants [1]. Oligosaccarides cannot be metabolized by babies without gut bacteria, but human mothers produce more of them than most other mammals we know of, and the specific oligosaccarides present depend on maternal generics [4]. NICU infants untreated with B. infantis are 5x more likely to fall into sepis as a result of necrotizing enterocolitis[2,3], probably due to increased intestinal permeability to pathogens.

But B. infantis is coevolved for the digestion of human oligosaccarides, and those are specifically genetically coded for in human milk [4]. As a result, "vegan baby formula" or even baby formula without the correct oligosacarides could be a disaster for baby intestinal health, and even cow's milk has a different oligosaccaride profile, and we don't know how adaptable the gut microbes are.

[1] doi.org/10.1038/s41390-020-01350-0 [2] doi.org/10.1542/peds.2004-1463 [3] doi.org/10.1038/s41372-019-0443-5 [4] doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45209-y
by chrisweekly | 2025-07-18 03:51:37+00:00
wow, was that a misplaced and unnecessary barb.

srsly, granted I didn't add a ton of value to the thread, but if a simple gesture of gratitude for a needed moment of human levity results in downvotes and attempts at judgy put-downs, something's wrong here. please look at my comment history before deciding who belongs on what forum. I love this place and will accept whatever further karma hits come for mentioning karma in addressing this incivility.
by chneu | 2025-07-18 03:51:40+00:00
There is an amazing book about this. The author interviewed hundreds of people down in Alabama to get an idea of how they felt about these things.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land

The gist of it is that people think short term. They can care about the environment/greater good but if you promise them jobs/prosperity in the short term they'll usually vote for that, despite their livelihood/environment being destroyed by the industry that promised them the jobs. Then when things don't work out they blame minorities, women, etc for "cutting in line" with the help of people like Obama and democrats.

It's really not that complicated which, imo, is kind of sad.
by skydhash | 2025-07-18 03:51:42+00:00
I think we need to abandon this idea of writing code like a scribe copying a book. There’s a plethora of tools ready to help you take advantage of the facts

- that the code itself is an interlinked structure (LSPs and code navigation),

- that the syntax is simple and repetitive (snippets and generators),

- that you are using a very limited set of symbols (grep, find and replace, contextual docs, completion)

- and that files are a tools for organization (emacs and vim buffers, split layout in other editors)

Your editor should be a canvas for your thinking, not an assembly line workspace where you only type code out.
by bubblyworld | 2025-07-18 03:54:49+00:00
I think the OP's article is saying that they are both good and bad depending on the context. You need to evaluate these things on a case by case basis. Writing a little TUI for yourself or your team? Sure, go nuts with escape codes. Making a well supported tool that runs on any developer's machine? Maybe consider curses, there are probably more edge cases than you think.

Trying to find product market fit as a startup? Who gives a duck, find some customers before you care too much about the tech =P cattle not pets etc
by t-writescode | 2025-07-18 03:56:21+00:00
Honestly, I think you think too little of people. A *lot* of people love to invent, create, explore, dream, participate and so on. I would argue the vast, vast majority.

People I know grow crops, make food, paint, draw, build worlds, write stories, create programs and so on. And these are people from every area in life.
by sodality2 | 2025-07-18 03:56:42+00:00
We’re comparing this to an LSP or intellisense type of system, how exactly are these probabilistic? Maybe they crash or get a memory leak every once in a while but that’s true of any software including an inference engine… I’m much more worried about the fact that I can’t guarantee that if I type in half of a variable name, that it’ll know exactly what i’m trying to type. It would be like preparing to delete a line in vim and it predicts you want to delete the next three. Even if you do 90% of the time, you have to verify its output. It’s nothing like a compiler, spurious network errors, etc (which still exist even with another layer of LLM on top).
by ReaperCub | 2025-07-18 03:59:23+00:00
> Tax is a means to an end (paying for civil services). Whether or not something is taxed twice is not inherently wrong, it's just a choice on how we choose to pursue our needs in a way that is effective and equitable.

Well in the UK, the civil services are crap, the police don't do anything, the NHS waiting times are extensive (my mother is waiting for over 2 years for knee surgery), the roads are full of pot holes, and we have more admirals than warships.

So the money doesn't seem to be used effectively. I don't know what you mean by equitable.

> I mean, reductively, saying something can't be taxed twice doesn't make any sense because all taxes work like that. A company sells products, those sales (and/or value add) are taxed. That money is paid as income, then that income is taxed. That income is spent on goods or services, where the sale (and/or value add) is taxed. Ad infinitum.

It almost like the tax man takes at every opportunity. Describing that they tax you many times isn't a justification for more taxes.

> A reasonable tax on inheritance, growing with wealth, makes sense in a society that has no effective wealth caps. Otherwise the "haves" accumulate wealth, which accumulates wealth, which accumulates wealth.

I don't think it is moral or fair to tax beneficiaries of inheritance. It is essentially a gift from the deceased to the beneficiaries.

That the entire point of building up an inheritance for your family/beneficiaries, is that you hope to leave your children better place. I don't know what is fundamentally wrong with building up wealth generationally.

> By imposing a tax on wealth that is not earned, but entirely dependent on the circumstances of one's birth, you create a redistribution scheme that's... Quite fair?

No it isn't fair. The wealth was earned at some point in time, presumably legally. I don't understand why it matters that the person receiving it may have done nothing more than been a family member, family friend or even someone/some organisation that the deceased thought was deserving? When they were alive it was their choice who would receive upon death.
Ask HN: How do you find free academic/scientific material?
by codeful | 2025-07-18 03:59:58+00:00
Over the years, copywriting, SEO, and other factors have made it increasingly difficult to find quality material on the internet. It takes more effort than ever to find what you're looking for.

When I need to learn about a new topic, I usually search for scientific articles. A few years ago, I discovered that I often got good results by searching for "KEYWORD PDF," as this led to static PDF files that aren't easily changed. Very often, they are written by academics or produced by government agencies.

Lately, however, I've gotten the feeling that the results more and more often lead to "zombie sites" that just redirect to ads and other junk.
by ilamont | 2025-07-18 04:00:28+00:00
I had one! I bought a used IBM ThinkPad 701 in a Hong Kong computer market in 1996 while backpacking through China and Southeast Asia. I think it was $800 or $900.

Although primitive by today's standards, it was a solid little laptop that served me well for the tasks I was engaged in at the time … writing, Web surfing (on a very slow modem), learning HTML, and playing Doom.

It had a color screen, a big improvement over the greyscale screen I had on my previous laptop (no name Taiwanese brand that cost $2000 new!)

The 701 also easily fit in a book bag, although it was a bit thick and heavy.

There are some more photos and historical information about the 701 here:

http://renaissancechambara.jp/2012/04/26/ibm-thinkpad-701/
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-18 04:01:05+00:00
> My two cents. If a dependency is paid, than it is usually bad. Because the company providing that dependency has an incentive to lock you in.

Vendor lock-in is a risk for both purchased components and FOSS ones where the organization is unwilling to assume maintenance. The onus is on the team incorporating third-party component(s) to manage their risk, identify alternatives as appropriate, and modularize their solutions.
by GloomyBoots | 2025-07-18 04:02:35+00:00
Even that is an incredibly vague and ahistorical definition. It’s strange how much ink is spilled over redefining ‘fascism’ in as vague a way as possible (thinking of Eco here, who remains perennially popular among those who tilt at hooked windmills).

Mussolini did a great job as delineating exactly what fascism was, and the NSDAP fit it, but in general it really doesn’t fit states outside of that particular time and place, including most regimes described as ‘fascist’ today.

The arguments for why Trump is somehow a fascist are among the most facile I’ve ever heard, and I say that having never voted for nor supported Trump, and having even more negative an opinion of him now than I did previously.

Political discourse will never be anything beyond laughable until we can get past screeching at each other over which side is the secret fascist.
by wyclif | 2025-07-18 04:04:51+00:00
I'm in the Philippines now, and that's how I know this is the correct take. Especially this part:

"Driving data is cultural data."

The optimists underestimate a lot of things about self-driving cars.

The biggest one may be that in developing and global south regions, civil engineering, design, and planning are far, far away from being up to snuff to a level where Level 5 is even a slim possibility. Here on the island I'm on, the roads, storm water drainage (if it exists at all) and quality of the built environment in general is very poor.

Also, a lot of otherwise smart people think that the increment between Level 4 and Level 5 is the same as that between all six levels, when the jump from Level 4 to Level 5 automation is the biggest one and the hardest to successfully accomplish.
by 1659447091 | 2025-07-18 04:04:52+00:00
TL;DR There are services that specialize in translating small phrases / paragraphs. Search tattoo translator services (but vet properly, there are fake ones too)

I found a few services while looking for a proper translator to turn a small phrase into Old Latin. I can't remember the services now (it was long ago) but there are professional translators, historians and college professors who moonlight on these sites doing small translations for a small fee. Some offer bulk translations of small phrases. One of the translators I got was a professor in classical text/literature/language (can't remember exactly) and another was some professor of ancient/classical history. The translations came back similar but worded a bit different because there was no way to do a 1 to 1 translation and they provided options for sightly different variants.
by spijdar | 2025-07-18 04:05:18+00:00
Thank you, I do intend to keep writing.

I typed my original comment in a despondent mood while eating. Born out of frustration with not having much time between my dayjob and family to practice/write, which gives the LLM's ability to effortlessly write prose a bitter taste.

Reflecting on it more, though, I'm not as bothered. I don't _really_ care if an LLM is "better" than me, now or in the future, because I do enjoy the process of reflecting my ideas and experiences onto page, or, word processor.

And, beyond that, the homogeneity and uniformity of the LLM output is kind of exhausting. I'm sure this is something that can be "improved" at various stages of the pipeline, but some imperfection and variety is nice too.
by dmix | 2025-07-18 04:05:35+00:00
Whatever it produces still needs to be carefully reviewed and guided. Context switching as a human programmer is very hard so you need to focus on the same specific task, which is harder to not switch to social media or IRL while waiting for it. And you're going to be on the same branch for the same ticket, git doesn't let you do multiple at once (at least I'm not set up to). Not sure where the productivity scaling would come from outside of rapid experimentation on bad ideas until you find the right one, and of course rapid autocomplete, faster debugging, much fancy global find/replace type stuff.

I use it quite aggressively and I'd probably only estimate 1.5x on average.

Not world changing because we all mostly work on boring stuff and have endless backlogs.
by ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 | 2025-07-18 04:06:52+00:00
I also have a masters in CS but I still consider myself to be “self taught” to a degree. I didn’t really learn anything in lectures or from my professors. Most of my learning came from doing homework, reading textbooks, studying for tests, exploring the material, being curious, experimenting with side projects.

I’m sure my education was more structured than a developer who didn’t go to school, but I don’t feel like there’s a huge fundamental difference.

Like if you’re only “learning” from what people teach you then how are you going to be successful in software?
by dehrmann | 2025-07-18 04:07:46+00:00
> The computer science graduate will generally not even try to figure out a problem in completely unfamiliar territory.

In my computer architecture class, there was a lab/test where you were expected to implement strlen() in SPARC assembly. It was open-doc, but they intentionally hadn't taught some of the opcodes you'd need to inspect a single byte. Maybe 25% of the class poked around the docs and found something, but the rest floundered and were quite angry at how "unfair" it was.
by trealira | 2025-07-18 04:07:57+00:00
>This is clearly dog whistle langauge and not intended to be taken literally, but it is starting to be a common trope and it makes me very curious as to how this industry operates?

It's clearly just dismissive language that doesn't have to make sense. The only purpose is to make climate change seem like a fake concept thought of by groups with nefarious intentions. It's like asking the author of a short story what the main character's favorite color is. That detail simply wasn't considered because it's not needed in the short story.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-07-18 04:08:21+00:00
I stopped using Pocket, Instapaper, and the likes in my ongoing effort to be able to walk out[1] whenever I want/need to. I tried out and still wanted to have something that keeps archives of the content I like to read. That is also largely resolved with Archive.org.

So, I end up with just a plain-text of some of the links I want as bookmarks. If they shut down or go away; its fine.

I have tested a few similar app. I'm currently happy with a minimal foot-print of Shiori.[2] I tried and liked the UI/UX of Readeck[3] better but it has its own convoluted saving and sharing (public) style and way of working. I didn't want to deal with that.

Shiori saves a local copy (my default), and I can read it later. I also default it to public share so I can share with people asking for similar topic and such. It is a single Go binary with support for sqlite3, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and MySQL as its database.

Most of the online services such as archivebox.io, raindrop.io, readwise.io, and the plethora of other replacements are cheap enough but I've been long enough on the Internet to know that I have to deal with the loss yet again.

Here is an example of Shiori Saved and Shareable article https://read.oinam.com/bookmark/39/content

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/can-i-walk-out/

2. https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

3. https://readeck.org/en/
by jampa | 2025-07-18 04:08:37+00:00
As someone who was self-taught and then changed my degree to CS, I think one thing that shows that someone learned by themselves is that they thrive without formal deadlines.

I see some fresh grads struggling when going to a professional environment where no professor is saying "I want <product> done by <deadline date>".

I think this is why some undergrads also struggled a lot when our role became remote. Suddenly, no one went to their desks for check-ins to see how their work was doing. The code was rushed at the end of the sprint to make it to the "professor's deadline."

At the same time, self-taught people generally succeeded because they are more oriented towards a "delivering when possible" and "pushing myself to learn" mentality.

After 3 years of experience, I think this equals out, unless you talk about lower-level CS concepts like mutexes, big O, or something they generally don't need to know for their daily job.