MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-04 22:01:20+00:00
I do monthly scrubs on my NAS, I have 8 14-20TB drives that are quite full.

According to that 10^14 metric I should see read errors just about every month. Except I have just about zero.

Current disks are ~4 years, runs 24/7, and excluding a bad cable incident I've had a single case of a read error (recoverable, thanks ZFS).

I suspect those URE numbers are made by the manufacturers figuring out they can be sure the disk will do 10^14, but they don't actually try to find the real number because 10^14 is good enough.
by JZerf | 2025-07-04 22:01:20+00:00
This depends on how the organization configures things. My company used to allow TOTP so many TOTP apps could be used instead of Microsoft Authenticator but my company disabled that a while ago. Now the only authenticator app my company allows is Microsoft Authenticator using push notifications (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/authenticat... ). Consider yourself lucky if your employer allows you to use any TOTP app you want instead of forcing you to use Microsoft Authenticator.
by acranox | 2025-07-04 22:02:48+00:00
Don’t forget about power. If you’re trying to build a low power NAS, those hdds idle around 5w each, while the ssd is closer to 5mw. Once you’ve got a few disks, the HDDs can account for half the power or more. The cost penalty for 2TB or 4TB ssds is still big, but not as bad as at the 8TB level.
by anon-3988 | 2025-07-04 22:03:49+00:00
> Is it that the pi is slow?

Yes, its slow and its ARM-based. So if you want things to just work (tm), N100 is a much, much better choice. You don't have to fiddle around with the configs to reduce writes to the SD card, figure out how to fix issues with ARM ecosystem, yadda yadda yadda.

It also limits what you want to do. For example, it is simply not powerful enough to run a smooth personal computer (video watching + light browsing).
by leakycap | 2025-07-04 22:03:58+00:00
> But my issue was/is with you. I wanted you to stop engaging in the use of combative and emotionally charged language.

You seem very intelligent, I truly believe your time and energy would be better spent doing literally anything else than providing me feedback on my commenting etiquette. Please, I implore you to do more with your time that will provide value! You genuinely seem smart.

(See how that felt? That's the effectiveness of telling someone on the internet you want them to behave differently. It's really pointless.)
by 0x696C6961 | 2025-07-04 22:04:00+00:00
I find that the code quality LLMs output is pretty bad. I end up going through so many iterations that it ends up being faster to do it myself. What I find agents actually useful for is doing large scale mechanical refractors. Instead of trying to figure out the perfect vim macro or AST rewrite script, I'll throw an agent at it.
by imiric | 2025-07-04 22:04:02+00:00
It's not about learning how to interact with AI agents. The only required skills for working with these tools are basic reading and writing skills any decent English speaker would have. Knowing how and when to provide additional context and breaking down problems into incremental steps are common workflows within teams, not something novel or unique to LLMs.

"Prompt" or "context engineering" is what grifters claim they can teach for a fee.

What does make a difference is what has been obvious since the advent of LLMs: domain experts get the most out of them. LLMs can be coaxed into generating almost any thinkable output, as long as they're prompted for it. Only experts will know precisely what to ask for, what not to ask for, and whether or not the output aligns with their expectations. Everyone else is winging it, and their results will always be of inferior quality, until and if these tools improve significantly.

What's dubious to me is whether experts really gain much from using LLMs. They're already good at their job. How valuable is it to use a tool that can automate the mechanical parts of what they do, while leaving them with larger tasks like ensuring that the output is actually correct? In the context of programming, it's like pairing up with a junior developer in the driver seat who can type really quickly, but will confidently make mistakes or will blindly agree with anything you say. At a certain point it becomes less frustrating and even faster to type at normal human speeds using boring old tools yourself.
by AbrahamParangi | 2025-07-04 22:04:21+00:00
This reads like the author is mad about imprecision in the discourse which is real but to be quite frank more rampant amongst detractors than promoters, who often have to deal with the flaws and limitations on a day to day basis.

The conclusion that everything around LLMs is magical thinking seems to be fairly hubristic to me given that in the last 5 years a set of previously borderline intractable problems have become completely or near completely solved, translation, transcription, and code generation (up to some scale), for instance.
by foobarchu | 2025-07-04 22:04:50+00:00
I don't think you actually disagree with the authors quip. You seem to want to use crypto as a currency, while OP was most likely referring to the grifting around crypto as an investment. If you're using it as a currency, then the people trying to pump and dump coins and use it for a money making vehicle are your adversaries. You are best served if it's stable instead of a rollercoaster of booms and busts.
by NeutralCrane | 2025-07-04 22:05:10+00:00
Saving isn’t economically productive, on a societal level. Spending is. Investing is.

Deflation inherently disincentivizes doing anything with the currency other than sitting on it. Want to buy something? You’d be better off waiting and buying it tomorrow because it will be worth less in your deflationary currency at that point. No one has an incentive to lend their money to others to use it more productively, so no growth occurs. No one buys anything, producers can’t sell anything, and no one can get capital to start any business ventures. The sole, viable way to accumulate wealth is to take the currency and stuff it under the mattress.

This results in a society much like Europe described in a Jane Austen novel, where wealth is simply inherited and the upper class doesn’t actually serve an economic function. They just exist to perpetuate their wealth and dole out subsistence wages to those who work their estates and have absolutely no chance of improving their station.

It’s an inherently broken system and a perfect example of Chesterton’s fence by tech types assuming they know better than everyone else.
by daft_pink | 2025-07-04 22:05:25+00:00
I think that’s the goal. Trump wants to devalue the dollar to make imports more expensive and exports cheaper. It’s inline with his tarriff policy to reduce the balance of trade deficit.

It’s just that countries don’t admit when they are devaluing currency, because devaluing currency could cause a loss in market confidence, devaluing it could cause a tit for tat currency war, or it could result in speculative attacks against the currency.

But just to emphasize my point, the dollars decline is intentional.
by MertsA | 2025-07-04 22:05:53+00:00
You can shrink XFS, but only the realtime volume. All you need is xfs_db and a steady hand. I once had to pull this off for a shortened test program for a new server platform at Meta. Works great except some of those filesystems did somehow get this weird corruption around used space tracking that xfs_repair couldn't detect... It was mostly fine.
by wubrr | 2025-07-04 22:06:41+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.

Similar situation at my work, but all of the productivity claims from internal early adopters I've seen so far are based on very narrow ways of measuring productivity, and very sketchy math, to put it mildly.
by arendtio | 2025-07-04 22:06:46+00:00
I think it is more like googling: when the search engine appeared, everybody had to learn how to write a good query, even though the expectation was that everybody could use them.

With LLMs, it's quite similar: you have to learn how to use them. Yes, they are non-deterministic, but if you know how to use them, you can increase your chances of getting a good result dramatically. Often, this not only means articulating a task, but also looking at the bigger picture and asking yourself what tasks you should assign in the first place.

For example, I can ask the LLM to write software directly, or I can ask it to write user stories or prototypes and then take a multi-step approach to develop the software. This can make a huge difference in reliability.

And to be clear, I don't mean that every bad result is caused by not correctly handling the LLM (some models are simply poor at specific tasks), but rather that it is a significant factor to consider when evaluating results.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-07-04 22:07:11+00:00
Isn't part of the issue in this discussion, and maybe the controversy. Is that the knock on effects can take decades/100s of years to develop. An asteroid is 1 day, but the fallout and seasons changing can take years.

So by the time you look in geologic record, it is 10-100 of years of 'evidence'. And finding a single point event is difficult.
by troupo | 2025-07-04 22:07:30+00:00
Please re-read the article. Especially the first list of things we don't know about you, your projects etc.

Your specific experience cannot be generalized. And speaking as the author, and who is (as written in the article) literally using these tools everyday.

> 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.

This is where we learn that you haven't actually read the article. Because it is very clearly stating, with links, that I am extracting value from these tools.

And the article is also very clearly not about extracting or not extracting value.
by leakycap | 2025-07-04 22:07:44+00:00
This article goes much deeper than I expected, and is a nice recap of the last few years of "green" gpu drama.

Liars or not, the performance has not been there for me in any of my usecases, from personal to professional.

A system from 2017/2018 with an 8700K and an 8GB 2080 performs so closely to the top end, expensive systems today that it makes almost no sense to upgrade at MSRP+markup unless your system is older than this.

Unless you need specific features only on more recent cards, there are very few use cases I can think of needing more than a 30 series card right now.
by larve | 2025-07-04 22:08:28+00:00
Here's maybe the most impressive thing I've vibecoded, where I wanted to track a file write/read race condition in a vscode extension: https://github.com/go-go-golems/go-go-labs/tree/main/cmd/exp...

This is _far_ from web crud.

Otherwise, 99% of my code these days is LLM generated, there's a fair amount of visible commits from my opensource on my profile https://github.com/wesen .

A lot of it is more on the system side of things, although there are a fair amount of one-off webapps, now that I can do frontends that don't suck.
by mccoyb | 2025-07-04 22:08:29+00:00
Same experience here, probably in a slightly different way of work (PhD student). Was extremely skeptical of LLMs, Claude Code has completely transformed the way I work.

It doesn't take away the requirements of _curation_ - that remains firmly in my camp (partially what a PhD is supposed to teach you! to be precise and reflective about why you are doing X, what do you hope to show with Y, etc -- breakdown every single step, explain those steps to someone else -- this is a tremendous soft skill, and it's even more important now because these agents do not have persistent world models / immediately forget the goal of a sequence of interactions, even with clever compaction).

If I'm on my game with precise communication, I can use CC to organize computation in a way which has never been possible before.

It's not easier than programming (if you care about quality!), but it is different, and it comes with different idioms.
by analog31 | 2025-07-04 22:08:39+00:00
This doesn't explain why the currencies of different countries behave differently.

In my view, money is a technology. People use a technology if they find it to be useful. I know this sounds circular, but bear with me. A "major" currency is designed to be useful as a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government economic policy. For it to serve these purposes, a government has to moderate its own behavior to some extent.

Thus my view is that the value of a major currency is based, not on the expectation of paying taxes in the future, but on more general expectations of the future behavior of the government.

With that said, paying taxes is good use for money that's a short term store of value, because you rarely need to hold onto your tax money for more than a year before paying it.
by ThrowOregonAway | 2025-07-04 22:08:41+00:00
Technically you're not an engineer unless you're licensed and bonded and belong to a professional engineering society, or you drive a train, or have invented a unique engine. Period, end of discussion.

I know, I know. California changed their law so coders could puff themselves up and put on airs and make their resumes look more impressive. But this is a sad anomaly.
by ankit219 | 2025-07-04 22:08:41+00:00
"Done properly" anything can be science/engineering. Just make a process, give it a KPI on how well it's performing, and you have an engineering. Movie making done properly is where audience is engaged with every act, you test screen it, see audience reaction, tweak, have a specific set of evals, and then you have something scoring high on the metrics. Part of that happens today, but you would not call that science. It's not what people mean when they call something as science or engineering. Your's is too broad of a definition to mean anything specific.
by Sherveen | 2025-07-04 22:09:02+00:00
This is completely incoherent. 3 reasons:

1. he talks about what he's shipped, and yet compares it to crypto – already, you're in a contradiction as to your relative comparison – you straight up shouldn't blog if you can't conceive that these two are opposing thoughts

2. this whole refrain from people of like, "SHOW ME your enterprise codebase that includes lots of LLM code" – HELLO, people who work at private companies CANNOT just reveal their codebase to you for internet points

3. anyone who has actually used these tools has now integrated them into their daily life on the order of millions of people and billions of dollars – unless you think all CEOs are in a grand conspiracy, lying about their teams adopting AI
by gundmc | 2025-07-04 22:09:35+00:00
I have no problem taking issue with using the term "engineering" for this, but this reads like OP does not believe that you can get better results based on the way you structure your prompt and what information you include. That is wild to me and should be obvious to anyone who spends more than a few hours using LLMs.

For what it's worth, I think about the "engineering" in "Prompt/Context Engineering" almost more akin to how it's used in "Social Engineering". You are influencing the model to produce a desirable result.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-04 22:09:47+00:00
> It's not about learning how to interact with AI agents. The only required skills for working with these tools are basic reading and writing skills any decent English speaker would have.

This is flatly untrue, just as the same would be untrue about getting the most out of people (but the behavioral quirks of AI systems and the ways to deal with them do not follow human psychology, so while it is inaccurate in the same way as with people, the skills needed are almost entirely unrelated.)
by ZenoArrow | 2025-07-04 22:09:48+00:00
> I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port, for $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.

It's not a Raspberry Pi, but this Radxa board is more powerful than a Pi Zero 2 and has the form factor you're looking for. Price isn't that bad either (around $25 for the cheapest model).

https://radxa.com/products/zeros/zero3e/
by floppyd | 2025-07-04 22:09:49+00:00
This article is just gatekeeping the word "engineer" for no reason. When I was developing an agent recently I picked a model (thus fixing most of the "uncertainties" mentioned) and started to construct the system prompt, from simpler to more complex, sometimes back to simpler, discovering that to this particular model the name choice means a lot, observing how often I was or wasn't getting desired results, etc etc. I think it would be challenging to find a definition of the word "engineer" that wouldn't include this process, even if it, obviously, wasn't as complex as some other engineering projects.
by datpuz | 2025-07-04 22:10:28+00:00
It's just another tech hype wave. Reality will be somewhere between total doom and boundless utopia. But probably neither of those.

The AI thing kind of reminds me of the big push to outsource software engineers in the early 2000's. There was a ton of hype among executives about it, and it all seemed plausible on paper. But most of those initiatives ended up being huge failures, and nearly all of those jobs came back to the US.

People tend to ignore a lot of the little things that glue it all together that software engineers do. AI lacks a lot of this. Foreigners don't necessarily lack it, but language barriers, time zone differences, cultural differences, and all sorts of other things led to similar issues. Code quality and maintainability took a nosedive and a lot of the stuff produced by those outsourced shops had to be thrown in the trash.

I can already see the AI slop accumulating in the codebases I work in. It's super hard to spot a lot of these things that manage to slip through code review, because they tend to look reasonable when you're looking at a diff. The problem is all the redundant code that you're not seeing, and the weird abstractions that make no sense at all when you look at it from a higher level.
by Marsymars | 2025-07-04 22:11:07+00:00
Alright, so I can see it as a matter of scale.

Recently there was a local case of someone extorting people by leaving threats in the mailboxes to not burn people’s houses down in exchange for $1k in bitcoin.

But who would keep $8B in bitcoin without some protections in place to ensure that it can’t be easily transferred away, given the associated upside/downside? That’s... roughly as foolish as keeping $8B in actual cash/gold/gems (notwithstanding the logistical problems with the size/weight) under your mattress.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-04 22:11:40+00:00
> Is this a widespread systemic issue within the organization, or do you work somewhere large enough that it is easy to find examples like this due to the number of people involved?

Can't tell you for sure (would require me to have comprehensive knowledge of the language skills around the company). I do know a few folks with proper language skills, but they're a rarity (and I treasure them greatly). Could definitely be just my neck of the woods in the company being like this.

> If it is the former, I would not want to work somewhere [like that where] (...)

Yeah, it's not great. The way I solved this was by simply not caring and just talking to them in proper English, hammering them until they provide me (and each other) with enough cross-verifiable information that thus definitely cannot be wrong (or will be wrong in a very defendable way), with an additional serving of double-triple checking everything. Some are annoyed by this, others appreciate it. Such is life I suppose.

> I guess I don't have to tell you not to select them as the people to review your work output?

I don't really have a choice. I think you might misunderstand what it is that I deliver though. I work with cloud technologies, so while I do sometimes deliver technical writing, most of my output is configuration changes and code. When I speak of language barrier issues, that's about chat, email, and ticket communications. I think that's plenty bad enough to have these kinds of troubles in though, especially when it's managers who are having difficulties.
by hotpotat | 2025-07-04 22:12:02+00:00
I did read the entire article before commenting and acknowledge that you are using them to some affect, but the line about 50% of the time it works 50% of the time is where I lost faith in the claims you’re making. I agree it’s very context dependent but, in the same way, you did not outline your approaches and practices in how you use AI in your workflow. The same lack of context exists on the other side of the argument.
by leakycap | 2025-07-04 22:12:15+00:00
I remember when the "Tesla source code" leaked and I was a decent programmer, so I was curious and looked through some of the posted code... I have never sat in a moving Tesla vehicle since that day. Even if that code never drove a mile, the fact someone writing code for them saved it somewhere as progress scared me.

[Edit to delete references to LIDAR]: Then front radar was disabled/disconnected https://www.carscoops.com/2023/05/tesla-is-disabling-radar-s...

Then he stepped into his problematic political role.

It is hard to imagine any technically competent buyer getting past either of the first two, given they trust the vehicle with their mortal shell.
by jppope | 2025-07-04 22:12:30+00:00
yeah there was an analysis that came out on hackernews the other day. between low demand side economics, virtually no impact to GDP, and corporate/vc subsidies going away soon we're close to finding out. Sam Altman did convince Softbank to do a 40B round though so it might be another year or two. Current estimates are that its cheaper than search to run so its probabilistic that there will be more search features swapped. OpenAi hasn't dropped their ad platform yet though, so interested to see how that goes
by ibaikov | 2025-07-04 22:12:38+00:00
Crypto and NFT situation happened because of our society, media and vc/startup landscape who hype things up a lot for their own reasons. We treat massive technologies as new brands of bottled water. Or, actually, as a new hype toy as fidget spinners or pop it toys. This tech is massively more complex and you have to invest time to learn about its abilities, limitations and potential developments. Almost nobody actually does this, it's easier to follow hype train and put money into something that grows up and looks cool without obvious cons. Crypto is cool for some stuff. On the other hand, where's your Stepn (and move to earn in general), decentraland cities, Apes that will make a multimedia universe? Where's "you'll be paying using crypto for everything"?

Same for LLMs and AI: it is awesome for some things and absolutely sucks for other things. Curiously tho, it feels like UX was solved by making chats, but it actually still sucks enormously, as with crypto. It is mostly sufficient for doing basic stuff. It is difficult to predict where we'll land on the curve of difficult (or expensive) vs abilities. I'd bet AI will get way more capable, but even now you can't really deny its usefulness.
by troupo | 2025-07-04 22:12:53+00:00
> Ok. Claude Code produces most code at Anthropic.m

Does it? Or does their marketing tell you that? Strange that "most code is written by Claude" and they still hire for actual humans for all the positions from backend to API to desktop to mobile clients.

> How much babysitting and reviewing is undetermined; but the Ants seem to tremendously prefer the workflow.

So. We know nothing about their codebase, actual flows, programming languages, depth and breadth of usage, how much babysitting is required...