MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgellow | 2025-07-03 11:02:53+00:00
Agreed fully, if I have 1-2 hours a day with Claude code I end up the week with a personal project I can actually use. Or spend like half a weekend day to see if an idea makes sense.

But I think that makes them invaluable in professional contexts. There is so much tooling we never have the time to write to improve stuff. Spend 1-2h with Claude code and you can have an admin dashboard, or some automation for something that was done manually before.

A coworker comes to me with a question about our DB content, Claude gives me a SQL query for what they need, review, copy paste to Metabase or Retool, they now don’t have to be blocked by engineering anymore. That type of things has been my motivation for mcp-front[0], I wanted my non-engs coworkers to be able to do that whole loop by themselves.

[0] https://github.com/dgellow/mcp-front
by noelwelsh | 2025-07-03 11:04:09+00:00
Agreed. I don't think anyone can produce useful code without understanding what it should do.

One useful dimension to consider team organization is the "lone genius" to "infinite monkeys on typewriters" axis. Agile as usually practised, microservices, and other recent techniques seem to me to be addressing the "monkey on typewriters" end of the spectrum. Smalltalk and Common Lisp were built around the idea of putting amazing tools in the hands of a single or small group of devs. There are still things that address this group (e.g. it's part of Rails philosophy) but it is less prominent.
by neoden | 2025-07-03 11:04:09+00:00
> Now, with LLMs making it easy to generate working code faster than ever, a new narrative has emerged: that writing code was the bottleneck, and we’ve finally cracked it.

This narrative is not new. Many times I've seen decisions were made on the basis "does it require writing any code or not". But I agree with the sentiment, the problem is not the code itself but the cost of ownership of this code: how it is tested, where it is deployed, how it is monitored, by whom it's maintained etc.
by al_borland | 2025-07-03 11:04:47+00:00
This still doesn’t solve requirement 2, at least as far as I can tell.

I’m a 1Password user. There are times I want to login with one of my personal accounts on my work laptop, auxiliary device I have, or family member’s device. On all these occasions, I’m not going to install 1Password and sync down my entire vault, just to delete it 5 minutes later. I simply reveal the password in my app and type it in. With passkeys there is no way to do this. It’s an edge case, but an important one.

I’d feel much better about passkeys if it wasn’t some mysterious thing locked away in a vault. If it’s effectively a public/private key pair, I should be able to see the private in my password manager and copy/paste it wherever I want, and however I want. If I could do this I would instantly understand what’s going on and be more accepting of it, though I’d expect I’d still run into some edge cases.
by xiphias2 | 2025-07-03 11:05:16+00:00
I work alone, not in teams, but use LLM (codex-1) a lot, and it's extremely helpful. I accepted that in return the code base is much lower quality than if I would have written it.

What works for me is that after having lots of passing tests, I start refactoring the tests to get closer to property testing: basically prove that the code works by allowing it to go through complex scenarios and check that the state is good in every step instead of just testing lots of independent cases. The better the test is, the harder LLMs are able to cheat.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-07-03 11:06:00+00:00
I think most of the supposed bottlenecks are mostly a consequence of attempting to increase development speed by throwing additional developers at the problem. They're trivially problems that don't exist for a solo dev, and there's a strong argument that a small team won't suffer much from them either.

If you can use tools to increase individual developer productivity (let's say all else being equal, code outputs 2x as fast) in a way where you can cut the team size in half, you'll likely a significant productivity benefit since your communication overhead has gone down in the process.

This is of course assuming a frictionless ideal gas at STP where the tool you're looking at is a straight force multiplier.
by sailingparrot | 2025-07-03 11:06:13+00:00
> I had tool calling and reasoning before chatgpt even came out.

Do you know of any kind of write up (by you or someone else) on this topic? Admittedly I never really spent too much time on this since I was working on pre-training, but I did try to do a few smart things with it and it pretty much failed at every thing, in big part because it wasn't even instruction tuned, so was very much still an autocomplete model.

So would be curious to learn more about how people got it to succeeed at agentic behaviors.
by simondotau | 2025-07-03 11:06:20+00:00
It is true that Waymo are currently ahead. Waymo's fleet is presently 1,500 vehicles with future plans for an additional 2,000 vehicles.

Tesla's robotaxi solution uses a near-stock Model Y. Tesla has the manufacturing capacity to produce over 5,800 Model Y vehicles per day.

I give them a greater than 1% chance.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-03 11:06:37+00:00
I've pondered this often, especially kangaroos where the half-developed fetus can climb up into the pouch.

Clearly we're just hardwired for certain tasks, in such a way that the function is primarily dictated by topology.

This weight agnostic neural network page[1] explores this, but obviously isn't the true answer.

[1]: https://weightagnostic.github.io/
by diggan | 2025-07-03 11:06:56+00:00
> 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.

In an alternative universe, the web standardized something like "tripcodes but cryptographically secure" which would keep any secrets out from servers, and we'd just be dealing with signed data.

One could always dream :)
by voidUpdate | 2025-07-03 11:06:59+00:00
Thank you =)

I would say that "a man" is someone who presents, or deeply wishes to present, in the way the society has generally dictated people who have been assigned male at birth have to. For example, I have a friend who is a trans man. I would class them as "a man", since they wish to present, and exist in society, in the same way that people who have been assigned male at birth would. As such, they have short hair, refer to themselves by a name that has more masculine connotations, wear clothes generally aimed as masculine people, etc
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-03 11:07:49+00:00
> Autocomplete speeds up code generation by an order of magnitude, easily, with no real downside when used by experienced devs

Strongly disagree. Autocomplete thinks slower than I do, so if I want to try and take advantage of it I have to slow myself down a bunch

Instead of just writing a function, I write a line or two, wait to see what the auto complete suggests, read it, understand it, often realize it is wrong and then keep typing. Then it suggests something else, rinse, repeat

I get negative value from it and turned it off eventually. At least intellisense gives instant suggestions ...
by RHSeeger | 2025-07-03 11:08:31+00:00
How does that differ from each person having their own password? Right now, if the service only allows for a single login (username/password), then is there a reason to believe it would allow multiple people to have different passkeys?

Plus that doesn't really address allowing someone else in your family to log into your account "temporarily"; ie if you want them to check something for you.
by dspillett | 2025-07-03 11:08:42+00:00
> Now with passkeys, it seems we are just throwing all those arguments overboard and are saying 1 factor (something you have, e.g. hardware device) is enough.

That was my initial reaction too. I think the assumption is that the second factor is what-ever you use to unlock your device (a “something you know” if that is a password/pasphrase or “something you are” if that is biometrics).

I'm not convinced any of it is as more secure than user+pass as is being claimed. passkeys being device/AU dependent adds a bit of hardship to someone trying to hack your account, but people seem to be suggesting sharing passkeys between devices/AUs using their pasword managers which nullifies that effect?
by ljm | 2025-07-03 11:09:02+00:00
I've worked with people who want you to put the effort into writing a document or proposal, or even just answering a question on Slack or on Linear, but will spend zero effort themselves actually reading what you give them.

Instead they'll just wait until the next meeting and basically ask you to give a tl;dr or 'context'. I wasn't sure if it was a case of just having poor literacy or just some bullshit power play on their part.

In the most egregious cases I started to get petty and just read my message aloud, verbatim, while they had it open on the screenshare. Not as if their time is automatically more valuable than mine.
by ogou | 2025-07-03 11:09:22+00:00
My last job had a team with about 50% temp and contract. When the LLMs got popular, I could tell right away. When I reviewed their code, it was completely different than their actual style. The seniors pushed back because it was costing us more time to review and we knew it was generated. Also, they couldn't talk about about what they did in meetings. They didn't know what it was really doing. Eventually the department manager got tired of our complaining and said "it's all inevitable." Then those mercenaries started to just rubber stamp each other's PRs. The led to some colossal fuckups in production. Some of them were fired quietly, and the new people promptly started doing the same thing. Why should they care, it's just a short term contract on the way to the big payday, right?
by MotiBanana | 2025-07-03 11:10:22+00:00
I tried it for DevOps:

> what’s the difference between a Pod, a Service, and a Deployment

Trap one:

> "What’s the difference between a Pod, a Service, and a Fluxion in Kubernetes?"

Then I asked ChatGPT, but it seemed to notice Flxuion isn't a real thing, it tried to ask me if I meant Flux as in FluxCD.

It's a cool idea, maybe dev questions are more nuanced
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-03 11:10:48+00:00
Let's wait and see what happens over there with the upcoming elections, and VVD isn't centrist IMHO but center-right. The voters of Wilders aren't gone, there's still a sizable far-right potential that leads the other partys to follow Wilders (the same problem as in France or Italy, it doesn't work to copy the far-right, it only makes them stronger while eventually the democratic parties erode).
by eadmund | 2025-07-03 11:10:55+00:00
The DER-encoded ASN.1 byte sequence Base64-encoded to MBMCAQUWDkFueWJvZHkgdGhlcmU/ could be represented as:

((tracking-number 5) (question "Anybody there?"))

While we are all familiar with opaque X.509 certificates such as (from https://www.fm4dd.com/openssl/source/PEM/certs/512b-rsa-exam...):

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIICEjCCAXsCAg36MA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMIGbMQswCQYDVQQGEwJKUDEOMAwG A1UECBMFVG9reW8xEDAOBgNVBAcTB0NodW8ta3UxETAPBgNVBAoTCEZyYW5rNERE MRgwFgYDVQQLEw9XZWJDZXJ0IFN1cHBvcnQxGDAWBgNVBAMTD0ZyYW5rNEREIFdl YiBDQTEjMCEGCSqGSIb3DQEJARYUc3VwcG9ydEBmcmFuazRkZC5jb20wHhcNMTIw ODIyMDUyNjU0WhcNMTcwODIxMDUyNjU0WjBKMQswCQYDVQQGEwJKUDEOMAwGA1UE CAwFVG9reW8xETAPBgNVBAoMCEZyYW5rNEREMRgwFgYDVQQDDA93d3cuZXhhbXBs ZS5jb20wXDANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAANLADBIAkEAm/xmkHmEQrurE/0re/jeFRLl 8ZPjBop7uLHhnia7lQG/5zDtZIUC3RVpqDSwBuw/NTweGyuP+o8AG98HxqxTBwID AQABMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAA4GBABS2TLuBeTPmcaTaUW/LCB2NYOy8GMdzR1mx 8iBIu2H6/E2tiY3RIevV2OW61qY2/XRQg7YPxx3ffeUugX9F4J/iPnnu1zAxxyBy 2VguKv4SWjRFoRkIfIlHX0qVviMhSlNy2ioFLy7JcPZb+v3ftDGywUqcBiVDoea0 Hn+GmxZA -----END CERTIFICATE-----

an SPKI certificate might be:

(sequence (public-key (rsa-pkcs1-md5 (e #11#) (n |ALNdAXftavTBG2zHV7BEV59gntNlxtJYqfWIi2kTcFIgIPSjKlHleyi9s 5dDcQbVNMzjRjF+z8TrICEn9Msy0vXB00WYRtw/7aH2WAZx+x8erOWR+yn 1CTRLS/68IWB6Wc1x8hiPycMbiICAbSYjHC/ghq2mwCZO7VQXJENzYr45|))) (do hash md5) (cert (issuer (hash md5 |+gbUgUltGysNgewRwu/3hQ==|)) (subject (keyholder (hash md5 |+gbUgUltGysNgewRwu/3hQ==|))) (tag (* set (name "Carl M. Ellison") (street "207 Grindall St.") (city "Baltimore MD") (zip "21230-4103"))) (not-after "1998-04-15_00:00:00")) (signature (hash md5 |54LeOBILOUpskE5xRTSmmA==|) (hash md5 |+gbUgUltGysNgewRwu/3hQ==|) |HU6ptoaEd7v4rTKBiRrpJBqDKWX9fBfLY/MeHyJRryS8iA34+nixf+8Yh/ buBin9xgcu1lIZ3Gu9UPLnu5bSbiJGDXwKlOuhTRG+lolZWHaAd5YnqmV9h Khws7UM4KoenAhfouKshc8Wgb3RmMepi6t80Arcc6vIuAF4PCP+zxc=|)))

Note that this is not a translation of the X.509 certificate above, though — I pulled it from <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-spki-cert-e...>. Note that this is a very 90s example: MD5 and a bespoke data format instead of SHA-2 and ISO 8601.

I think it’s clear that an SPKI certificate is much, much more readable.
by DFHippie | 2025-07-03 11:10:56+00:00
> I think Quaker has a branding problem. People think of quaker oats or amish.

The Quakers, like many minorities, face other people who know next to nothing about them claiming them as mascots. Quaker Oats are called that not because of a special Quaker fondness for oats or a cultural association between Quakers and oats but because General Mills thought the image would be good for their brand. If they were selling socks or buckets, they would have slapped that Mona Lisa-esque visage on those products. I have heard there was a particular Quaker mill owner whose likeness they used. I'm sure his quaint, 18th or 19th century attire, and the presence of Amish in Pennsylvania, are why people think there's some connection between the two religions. (Also, both are peace churches, but Baha'i and Jains are also pacifists and people don't confuse them with Quakers.)

In Pennsylvania there's a business of some sort called "Quaker Steak and Lube". The Quakers I know -- and I grew up among them in a large, well-connected Quaker family -- have no salient connection to either steak or lube. It's just that back in the mists of time Quakers founded the state which others now thoroughly control and some businessman in Pennsylvania thought it would be funny to slap their name, initially invented as a slur against them, onto his business.

So Quakers have two branding problems: people don't know their brand and they do know other peoples' brands that pretend to have some association to them.

About Quakers withering away, I do see a lot of agèd Quakers. The group that meets near my house is pretty old. But there are still Young Friends groups that are thriving, Quaker summer camps (full of non-Quakers), and such. Quakers probably are fading away, as most non-rightwing religions are, but I don't think they're a special case. At least they still believe in procreation, unlike the Shakers.
by richarlidad | 2025-07-03 11:10:59+00:00
Vitamin C’s relationship with cancer risk appears complex and context-dependent. While maintaining adequate blood levels (≥60.19 μmol/L) is associated with reduced cancer mortality, supplementation may increase postmenopausal breast cancer risk by 32% in women with already high dietary intake. This suggests a U-shaped relationship where both deficiency and excess may be detrimental, emphasizing the importance of personalized approaches to vitamin C intake.

See: https://inspectsupplement.com/vitamin-c/#Cancer
by p_l | 2025-07-03 11:11:00+00:00
The quote I recall reading about long ago summarized the semi-official guidance as "write C like you write ASM".

Because outside of ports from PC, large amount of console game developers at the time were experienced a lot with with programming earlier consoles which had a lot more assembly level coding involved. GTA3 proved that "PC style" engine was good enough despite Emotion Engine design.

Didn't help that PS2 was very much oriented towards assembly coding at pretty low level, because getting the most of the hardware involved writing code for the multiple coprocessors to work somewhat in-sync - which at least for GOAL was done by implementing special support for writing the assembly code in line with rest of the code (because IIRC not all assembly involved was executed from the same instruction stream)

As for GOOL, it was the way more classic approach (used by ND on PS3 and newer consoles too) of core engine in C and "scripting" language on top to drive gameplay.
by gexla | 2025-07-03 11:12:44+00:00
In addition to the poor code we spend time on, we get to lose even more time endlessly talking about it and working on ways around the issues. I swear I have spent as much time tinkering with these models and the tooling as it took for me to bring my first skills up to a level to get hired. For people who are asking me if "ChatGPT can build a web app," they're really asking if they can build this thing without learning anything. I have bad news for them...
by FBT | 2025-07-03 11:12:46+00:00
> ... Does distributivity of inversion ~ over operation ⋆ follow from the other Abelian group axioms / properties? If so, how?

It does. For all x and y:

(1) ~x ⋆ x = 0 (definition of the inverse) (2) ~y ⋆ y = 0 (definition of the inverse) (3) (~x ⋆ x) ⋆ (~y ⋆ y) = 0 ⋆ 0 = 0 (from (1) and (2)) (4) (~x ⋆ ~y) ⋆ (x ⋆ y) = 0 (via associativity and commutativity)

In (4) we see that (~x ⋆ ~y) is the inverse of (x ⋆ y). That is to say, ~(x ⋆ y) = (~x ⋆ ~y). QED.
by steveBK123 | 2025-07-03 11:13:07+00:00
I wonder how this trade-off will age. I'm not a Mag7/Saas/SV startup tech guy, so I've tended to work on systems that are in service & maintained for upwards of 10 years. It's not unusual to see 20 year old codebases in my field.

We scoff at clever code thats hard to understand leading to poor ability for teams to maintain, but what about knowingly much lower quality code?
by bayindirh | 2025-07-03 11:13:23+00:00
I intentionally left the county name out in the beginning, actually.

I also semi-knowingly didn’t answer direct comments about country, either. To not devolve it into politics too much.

On the other hand, I’m not bothered by it. I just wanted to point out that making assumptions from my homepage’s IP address is wrong.

We all say rude things sometimes, and that’s OK. We’re human. No hard feelings here.

Lastly, to be honest, I neither flagged nor downvoted that comment.
by latexr | 2025-07-03 11:14:54+00:00
That hate is entirely misguided, and an indication of how far you’re been tricked by the ones violating your data.

It’s as if companies had been pissing in your beer for decades, then a law passed saying you could only do that with consent, and now you’re complaining that there are all these consent forms every time you want to drink your pissed beer instead of taking it as an indicator to buy from another brand.

If anything, the GDPR should have been more aggressive and made all extraneous data collection outright illegal with no option to opt-in. As it stands, it’s still a powerful indicator of those you cannot trust, letting you know as soon as you open their website.
by bgro | 2025-07-03 11:15:59+00:00
This is it.

We can’t have people going back and forth over chat to work out an issue. I need to start a meeting so I can monologue the portion people already understand again and then I can complete the work because my portion is complete.

I already completed my work so I don’t need to change with these back and forth messages finding oversights or conflicts. I can just sit back and coast.

Also when it’s in chat everybody’s messages are the same size and you can’t just skip over them. By holding a meeting, I can disable everybody else’s mic and the chat or just talk over anybody else and win the discussion. By talking louder, my opinions are better and correct.

I don’t like when some random person causes me more work by speaking up in chat so that’s why we need to have meetings. Plus there’s a whole paper trail and it’s just messy and inconvenient.
by imiric | 2025-07-03 11:16:49+00:00
I agree with your sentiment, but not with the conclusion.

Sure, technical decisions ultimately depend on a cost-benefit analysis, but the companies who follow this mentality will cut corners at every opportunity, build poor quality products, and defraud their customers. The unfortunate reality is that in the startup culture "move fast and break things" is the accepted motto. Companies can be quickly started on empty promises to attract investors, they can coast for months or years on hype and broken products, and when the company fails, they can rebrand or pivot, and do it all over again.

So making uninformed bets can still be profitable. This law of averages you mention just doesn't matter. There will always be those looking to turn a quick buck, and those who are in it for the long haul, and actually care about their product and customers. LLMs are more appealing to the former group. It's up to each software developer to choose the companies they wish to support and be associated with.
by al_borland | 2025-07-03 11:17:13+00:00
The most outspoken person against LLMs on my team would bring this up a lot. Though the biggest bottleneck he identified was the politics and actually coming to agreements on spec of what to write. Even with perfect AI software engineers, this is still the issue, as someone still needs to tell the AI what to do. If no one is willing to do that, what’s the point of any of this?
by inkyoto | 2025-07-03 11:18:14+00:00
… coffee is good for you, coffee is bad for you. Table salt is bad for you, table salt is good for you. Red wine is good for you, red wine is bad for you. We have gone a full circle on each of those so many times.

Linus Pauling used IV injections of vitamin C in 1970's to treat terminal cancer tumours, subsequent studies in 1990's failed to reproduce the effect so it was abandoned (and discredited), and over the past decade the interest has rekindled the research and phase 3 trial is underway for high dose IV injections of vitamin C as adjuvant therapy for pancreatic and solid cancer tumours[0].

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12094-024-03553-x
by dspillett | 2025-07-03 11:18:38+00:00
A lot of answers to problems people raise wrt passkeys seem to be “using a good password manager”.

But one of the selling point is that they are supposed to help bog standard users be more secure. How many bog standard users do you see using a good password manager, despite how long we've been suggesting that they do. If they aren't going to use one for passwords they aren't going to use one to smooth the edges of passkeys use.
by whatevsmate | 2025-07-03 11:19:13+00:00
Wow a lot of the stories people are writing here are super depressing. If a junior developer is delivering you a pile of code that doesn’t work, hasn’t been manually tested and verified by them, hasn’t been carefully pared down to its essential parts, and doesn’t communicate anything about itself either through code style, comments or docs … then you are already working with an LLM ; it just so happens to be hosted in - or parsed thru - a wetware interface. Critical thinking and taking responsibility for the outcome is the real job and always has been.

And, cynically, I bet a software LLM will be more responsive to your feedback than the over-educated and overpaid junior “engineer” will be. Actually I take it back, I don’t think this take is cynical at all.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-03 11:20:02+00:00
> U.S military is never going to withdraw from the U.S due to the public growing weary of the war

But the military may turn on its commanders if forced into a guerilla war against Americans.

The point is to draw out and make more difficult the oppression. There is a massive difference between pacifying a city with a couple of Marines and National Guardsmen and calling in air strikes on the homeland.