MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-07-03 09:32:50+00:00
>Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code

I think it's credible to say that it was just market demand. Marc Andreessen's main complaint before the AI boom was that "there is more capital available than there are good ideas to fund". Personally, I think that's out of touch with reality, but he's the guy with all the money and none of the ideas, so he's a credible fist-hand source.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-03 09:33:10+00:00
No, this will force you to either install Microsoft Edge on your phone or switch to one of the many other password managers that do offer autofill on iOS.

If you weren't synchronising your passwords through the Microsoft authenticator app, you won't be affected at all. If you were, Microsoft has decided to be annoying and make you install their browser to get password autofill support back.

Microsoft prefers synchronising passkeys between devices because passkeys are immune to credential stuffing attacks, but you don't have to do what Microsoft wants.
by diggan | 2025-07-03 09:33:15+00:00
> It's a lifestyle Europeans have chosen where you don't need to work a lot, everything is paid for you but don't expect to get rich either.

That some chose, true. Europeans have a choice if to "work and still have a life" or "work a bit more, have a bit less free-time", but just like in many other places, if you put in the time and effort, you can get "rich" too, if that's so important for you.

> If you've ever been to Spain, you will have certainly noticed these graffitis "tourists go home" a bit everywhere

That is true, you go to the hotspots of tourism in Spain, you'll notice that people are being fed up with it. If you visit the rest of 80% of Spain, you'll notice they aren't overloaded by tourists, and the sentiment is different.

Next time, try visit less popular places, it'll be more unique and fun too :)

> ambitious entrepreneurs don't start business in Spain

We absolutely do, the work/life balance is unmatched, and living in a state that actually cares about its people makes it better for everyone, not just "The Poor". There are no "vicious circles" of going bankrupt because of taxes, if you have friends where that commonly happens with their companies in Spain, they're doing something seriously wrong.

> keeping the economy competitive is the one thing that all US administrations have understood correctly, whether Dems or Reps or MAGA

I don't know if you're American, keeping up with American politics or what's going on, but "economy competitiveness" is clearly off the table with the current administration, I think if anything is clear that's the thing. They're just starting to see the effects of their choices, but maybe it'll also be clear to you in a bit.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-07-03 09:33:19+00:00
Sweden has more billionaires per capita, because it’s fairly friendly to businesses and there have been quite a few success stories over the last century.

The US however have more millionaires per capita and SUBSTANTIALLY more people in poverty per capita.

Sweden’s Gini coefficient is 0.276 (2024), the US’ is 0.418 (2023). The US has a lot more income inequality.
by gpderetta | 2025-07-03 09:34:15+00:00
In C++:

template<template<class> class Container, class T, invocable<T> Fn> Container<invoke_result_t<Fn, T> > map(Container<T> container, Fn fn) { return to<Container>(transform(container, fn)); }

(Although idiomatically you wouldn't write the code this way).

Whether that counts as HK types, I'll leave it to others to discuss.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-03 09:35:15+00:00
Most of the examples are correct decisions by the model. The headline is the most arguable, the rest are pretty clearly improvements, at least to people who actually want unbiased journalism. And as the article is itself highly biased, written in an antagonistic tone that takes the side of the journalists, we must assume they picked the worst examples they could find. So nearly all of them being clearly correct implies the model is doing a great job overall. Given the evidence presented here, it's not surprising that Law360 is mandating journalists accept the edits.

For example: "the bias indicator flagged a line that said the suit spotlighted challenges with ableism and sexism in the healthcare industry. This copy was flagged because it “frames the lawsuit as a representative example of systemic issues.” Instead, the bias indicator said the story should “state the facts of the lawsuit without suggesting its broader implications.”

The model made the right decision. That's the kind of language that makes people distrust journalists: a passive voice assertion of a radical belief, which adds nothing to the story and isn't supported by any evidence. It doesn't belong in a professionally written report.

And yet we read, "that edit is at odds with any attempt to deliver legal analysis. In most cases, reporters chose not to accept these edits, but they were still required to go through the motions."

Claiming the healthcare system is challenged by "ableism" isn't legal analysis, that's pure politics. But more importantly it's also just absurd. Of course people who work in healthcare want people to be "able". Why would you become a surgeon if you thought disability and sickness was fine? No surprise their bosses are placing the LLM's judgement over that of their own employees, when the journalists have gone so far off the rails. The union should be careful of picking a fight over this because frankly the next step is to just automate away the journalists entirely.
by xlii | 2025-07-03 09:35:52+00:00
Probably worth mentioning that force is a ref-related activity not a snapshot related activity. Garbage collection might remove unreferenced commits.

This should be done through history rewrites but as other commenters mention - GitHub has its own rights (and GitHub != git).

I’d recommend looking at simpler alternatives. IMO Jujutsu is mature enough for daily usages, and Fossil is a neat alternative if one wants to drop GitHub completely (albeit not very easy to use).
by scrollaway | 2025-07-03 09:36:00+00:00
I remember being a kid on the internet 20-something years ago, understanding how passwords worked, and thinking the whole of the internet must be crazy for accepting a "pinky-promise we don't store that secret password you're sending us in plaintext, let alone use it for nefarious purposes" as the status quo.

I then discovered SSH and how it worked, asked in some public forum why there isn't a way to log in to websites using an ssh keypair, and was ridiculed for it.

Ah well, glad times change.
by scrubs | 2025-07-03 09:36:26+00:00
Great great list. Nice write up. Refreshing. Bookmarked. Will share. Cheers to hn for getting this on the list.

To quickly reflect on two items.

(2,3,4) speak to me and I can say my father was a great model of it

Plaudits to OP. Never seen it so well engaged and summarized.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-03 09:36:55+00:00
I've also read a thing (dunno if it was opinion or fact) that posited that people's reading ability is directly correlated to a preference for video, I suspect it's the same with meetings. I read / write all day (including on here lmao), meetings are draining in comparison. But the people in those meetings don't read / write nearly as much as I do.

I did once think that if the meeting were to be transcribed, people are outputting paragraphs of text in a short amount of time, just verbally. But keeping up with that is pretty draining, as you have to listen and process it, whereas with reading you can skim and re-read things easily.

I sometimes think people's basic skills - reading and typing - are underdeveloped or not assessed, and they should be assessed when applying for a job that involves reading and typing. But I don't even think people consider reading/writing skills when looking for staff since the assumption is that everyone's is good enough.
by afiodorov | 2025-07-03 09:37:16+00:00
I think the "more capital than ideas" problem is highly contextual and largely a Silicon Valley-centric view.

There is immense, unmet demand for good software in developing countries—for example, robust applications that work well on underpowered phones and low-bandwidth networks across Africa or Southeast Asia. These are real problems waiting for well-executed ideas.

The issue isn't a lack of good ideas, but a VC ecosystem that throws capital at ideas of dubious utility for saturated markets, while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model.
by dspillett | 2025-07-03 09:37:46+00:00
> about science by a population of people who probably mostly failed high school science

Your assumption that actors (and writers, those where the ones “preaching” more than the people on screen) have failed highschool at a higher rate than the general population is, I think, rather flawed¹. There are some very bright people in the entertainment industries for one reason or another (doing what they enjoy, and presumably are good at, instead of something else they are good at, being a common situation, there being more money in stardom being another).

Hence a number successful stand-ups who have degrees (in the sciences, not necessarily “media studies” before someone pipe up with that), PhDs, law certifications, and such.

Hedy Lamarr is the best known poster child for this, but too many think she is a singleton exception rather than an indicator that we shouldn't make too many assumptions about what acting talent might imply about other mental abilities.

----

[1] And, in fact, more snobby than the film you are critiquing as being snobby!
by kd5bjo | 2025-07-03 09:38:29+00:00
> There’s no difference with a password, except that the sign-in process can be streamlined when everything works

There is one other major difference behind the scenes: With passkeys, the service you’re logging into never has enough information to authenticate as you, so leaks of the server-side credential info are almost (hopefully completely) useless to an attacker.
by andrelaszlo | 2025-07-03 09:38:36+00:00
My most recent example of this is mentoring young, ambitious, but inexperienced interns.

Not only did they produce about the same amount of code in a day that they used to produce in a week (or two), several other things made my work harder than before:

- During review, they hadn't thought as deeply about their code so my comments seemed to often go over their heads. Instead of a discussion I'd get something like "good catch, I'll fix that" (also reminiscent of an LLM).

- The time spent on trivial issues went down a lot, almost zero, the remaining issues were much more subtle and time-consuming to find and describe.

- Many bugs were of a new kind (to me), the code would look like it does the right thing but actually not work at all, or just be much more broken than code with that level of "polish" would normally be. This breakdown of pattern-matching compared to "organic" code made the overhead much higher. Spending decades reviewing code and answering Stack Overflow questions often makes it possible to pinpoint not just a bug but how the author got there in the first place and how to help them avoid similar things in the future.

- A simple, but bad (inefficient, wrong, illegal, ugly, ...) solution is a nice thing to discuss, but the LLM-assisted junior dev often cooks up something much more complex, which can be bad in many ways at once. The culture of slowly growing a PR from a little bit broken, thinking about design and other considerations, until its high quality and ready for a final review doesn't work the same way.

- Instead of fixing the things in the original PR, I'd often get a completely different approach as the response to my first review. Again, often broken in new and subtle ways.

This lead to a kind of effort inversion, where senior devs spent much more time on these PRs than the junior authors themselves. The junior dev would feel (I assume) much more productive and competent, but the response to their work would eventually lack most of the usual enthusiasm or encouragement from senior devs.

How do people work with these issues? One thing that worked well for me initially was to always require a lot of (passing) tests but eventually these tests would suffer from many of the same problems
by metalman | 2025-07-03 09:38:38+00:00
France was able to provide full domestic electrical power inspite of these shut downs, though they had to reduce power exports. Bieng dependent on cool river water shows a significant weakness in nukelear power, and is another reason to discredit claims to bieng a "green" power source or reliable. It should be noted that the European grid stayed up durring the worst of this heat wave, which is a significant achivement that d3monstrates the ability to integrate and distribute power from all of the different(much malligned) power sources.
by Arnt | 2025-07-03 09:39:07+00:00
If wealth is accreting is individuals… but is it really?

When you have a nice job in a company, then as a matter of accounting, the shareholders have wealth. As I see it, that's just a matter of accounting. The first sentence of this paragraph says "you have a nice job" and IMO that description is closer to reality. The wealth actually is your skills and their integration into an organisation.

It follows from this view that "some shareholders accrete too much wealth" is more a complaint about accounting practices than about how goods are distributed in society. You do have that nice job, right? A few million nice jobs may be accounted for as one person's wealth, but the millions do have the jobs.

And indirectly that if you shape taxation based on accounting rather than reality, its effect on reality will be haphazard.
by xlii | 2025-07-03 09:39:15+00:00
Aye.

I made shameful mistake of submitting private key (development one so harmless) only because it wasn’t gitignored and prehook script crashed without deleting it). More of a political/audit problem than a real one.

I guess I’m old enough to remember Murphy Laws and the one saying "safety system upon failure will bring protected system down first".
by scott_w | 2025-07-03 09:40:01+00:00
How? Meeting notes can never contain all the detail of the meeting and, if they do, there would be so much content that you'd likely miss them when you read the documentation. That's to say nothing of the time investment of the person to catch up on every document produced.

In that case, you're essentially relying on the people in the meeting to know they should document that thing as important which, given the person who knows it's important isn't there, is pretty unlikely.

Even in an ideal world, we'll have developers not in the meetings they need to be in. My contention would be that we should try to get people in the right meetings and, over time, the number of issues where someone isn't in the right meeting will be lower than if we just don't have those meetings.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-03 09:40:16+00:00
What a terrible article. The text suggests that Microsoft wants to force you to use passkeys, followed by an attempt by the writer to convince you to use passkeys, when the actual news is "you need to install another app to get autofill from Microsoft's password sync service".

You can just install Edge. From what I can tell, you don't even need to browse using Edge to use passwords.

If you don't use Microsoft Authenticator, nothing changes. If you do, probably because IT makes you, you've already seen the warnings about this.
by Ray20 | 2025-07-03 09:42:46+00:00
> #1 among high income countries in Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, drug overdose deaths, Deaths from violence and accidents, Infant mortality, Obesity-related mortality.

It's all originates from each person's decisions. If a person wants to pay attention to their lifestyle and health, then in the US he will get one of the best results in the parameters you listed. That is just a fact.

And if we want to maximize these parameters among everyone, we need a ultratotalitarian government that will put all the people into concentration camps where they will work under threat of execution in the open air and eat a specially designed low-calorie diet.

> It also has its lowest-ever World Happiness Rankings.

Yeas, and North Korea has the highest.

> The U.S. is currently leading in global declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence.

And that's good thing. For decades US has been doing atrocities all over the world, to the approving cries of other Western countries. So the only problem with US declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence I see is that this should have happened decades earlier
by rgoulter | 2025-07-03 09:43:11+00:00
I think the better question is, "do I benefit from improving the speed here, for the cost it takes".

Improving typing speed from "fast" to "faster" is very difficult. I think it's worth distinguishing between "typing faster is not useful" and "it's not worth the effort to try to type much faster".

There are sometimes cases where it's worth paying a high cost even for some marginal benefit.
by OjotCewIo | 2025-07-03 09:43:19+00:00
> The trick works on any Abelian group

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_group -- I'll use ⋆ as the Abelian group's operation, and ~ for inversion, below.)

I believe you are implying:

(g(1) ⋆ ... ⋆ g(n)) ⋆ ~(g(i(1)) ⋆ g(i(2)) ⋆ ... ⋆ g(i(n-1))) = g(m)

where "m" is the group element index that is not covered by "i".

However, for this to work, it is requried that you can distribute the inversion ~ over the group operation ⋆, like this:

~(g(i(1)) ⋆ g(i(2)) ⋆ ... ⋆ g(i(n-1))) = ~g(i(1)) ⋆ ~g(i(2)) ⋆ ... ⋆ ~g(i(n-1))

because it is only after this step (i.e., after the distribution) that you can exploit the associativity and commutativity of operation ⋆, and reorder the elements in

g(1) ⋆ ... ⋆ g(n) ⋆ ~g(i(1)) ⋆ ~g(i(2)) ⋆ ... ⋆ ~g(i(n-1))

such that they pairwise cancel out, and leave only the "unmatched" (missing) element -- g(m).

However, where is it stated that inversion ~ can be distributed over group operation ⋆? The above wikipedia article does not spell that out as an axiom.

Wikipedia does mention "antidistributivity":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributive_property#Antidist...

(which does imply the distributivity in question here, once we restore commutativity); however, WP says this property is indeed used as an axiom ("in the more general context of a semigroup with involution"). So why is it not spelled out as one for Abelian groups?

... Does distributivity of inversion ~ over operation ⋆ follow from the other Abelian group axioms / properties? If so, how?
by ozim | 2025-07-03 09:43:44+00:00
All kinds of "low code"/"no code" tools that are out there which main selling point is that you won't have to write code.

Loads of business people also think that code is some magical incantations and somehow clicking around in menu configuring stuff is somehow easier.

For a lot of people reading is hard but no one will admit that. For years I was frustrated and angry at people because I didn't understand that someone can have trouble reading while they are proper adult working business role.

I also see when I post online how people misread my comments.
by oytis | 2025-07-03 09:44:25+00:00
If you define good idea to be limited to SaaS, then sure you'll reach saturation pretty soon. But, say, anything that involves hardware could definitely benefit from a little more funding.

Also, he's a VC, but where more funding even in pure software is needed are sustainable businesses that don't have ambition to take over the world, but rather serve their customer niche well.
by dspillett | 2025-07-03 09:45:49+00:00
> Sad to see the USA transition to a banana republic.

I'm not sure banana republic is the best description of what is happening, the definition of the term only cover part of where things are heading.

A comparison with NK seems more complete, especially given the current twits at the top, so I've taken to referring to the US as DPR-US.
by kulahan | 2025-07-03 09:46:02+00:00
This shouldn't be surprising to anyone in software development. Regardless of how essential your software is, you can just shit out any stupid-ass thing that vaguely works and you've finished your ticket.

Who thought lazy devs were the bottleneck? The industry needs 8x as much regulation as it has now; they can do whatever they want at the moment lol.
by crocowhile | 2025-07-03 09:46:12+00:00
- the only real comparisons they make are with the parental model, llama 3.7-70b without fine tuning. That tells us what is the added value of fine tuning the dataset but it is hardly state of the art. I guess it should be seen as an indication of how difficult it is to stay afloat in this world when you are in academia and the tech barrier stands billion dollars tall.

- Fig 4a shows Centaur clusters more closely to humans than any other model in a cognitive benchmark (CogBench) but also shows that parental llama cluster closer than claude and openAI thinking models which makes me a bit sceptical of using this measurement at all and reinforces the need for further comparisons.

- the fMRI stuff makes no sense and transforms the paper into a propaganda stunt, IMHO.

- At the end of the paper, the comparison with an "informed" Deepseek-R1 (not shown in data?) shows that a modern reasoning model matches Centaur-performance even without any fine tuning.

The latter point is incredibly interesting in principle but it has nothing to do with the claims of the paper. It basically concludes that a modern reasoning model with CoT can outperform out of the box a "simpler" model that was specifically fine-tuned with a huge dataset of human cognitive behaviours. Bigger claim than the title itself basically IMO.
by bubblyworld | 2025-07-03 09:47:37+00:00
I have - somebody in my mushroom foraging group wrote an app that predicts what kinds of mushrooms you are likely to find in different spots in our area, based on weather forecasts and data he's been collecting for years. It's a dead simple frontend/backend, but it works, he built and deployed it himself and he had zero coding experience before this. Pretty impressive, from my perspective.

As a programmer I can see all the rough edges but that doesn't seem to bother the other 99% of people on the group who use it.
by som | 2025-07-03 09:47:38+00:00
I was hosting around this time too (and surfing a bit, but less so), it was a great experience. Never got up to 12 but we always had someone with us, someone crossing over ... and probably someone we were doing a favour for. At one point had two Italian climbers in a tent in our living room for multiple weeks, who ended up moving to our city and becoming good friends.

I tended to go out my way to try and accept people to stay who were either very new the the platform (which usually made it hard to find a place as karma was low) or were very different to my normal group of friends. Which definitely made for some interesting experiences and conversations. Price of entry was usually a list of their favourite albums. I discovered so much great music out of it.

Finally gave it all up when I moved back to Australia and wasn't in a position to host anymore. So many fond memories tho. I miss it.