MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-19 17:25:45+00:00
There is certainly much innovation to come in this area.

I'm thinking about Personal Knowledge Systems and their innovative ideas regarding visual representations of data (mind maps, website of interconnected notes, things like that). That could be useful for AI search. What elements are doing in a sense is building concept web, which would naturally fit quite well into visualization.

The ChatBot paradigm is quite centered around short easily digestible narratives, and will humans are certainly narrative generating and absorbing creatures to a large degree, things like having a visually mapped out counter argument can also be surprisingly useful. It's just not something that humans naturally do without effort outside of, say, a philosophy degree.

There is still the specter of the megacorp feed algo monster lurking though, in that there is a tendency to reduce the consumer facing tools to black-box algorithms that are optimized to boost engagement. Many of the more innovative approaches may involve giving users more control, like dynamic sliders for results, that sort of thing.
by Nifty3929 | 2025-07-19 17:26:50+00:00
Let's just remember that this is a ballot-box issue, not a payment-type issue.

A lot of folks I'm sure will say this is what crypto is for, but if that ever gained enough traction then (the US) congress would clamp down on it. They'd probably call it "money laundering" or something like that. Remember the guy that went to jail for exchanging crypto for fiat?

Are you mad at Visa/Mastercard? They don't care about porn, they care about not having congress smash them.

You want regulations that would prevent MC/Visa from doing this? You've got it backwards. Regulation is on the side of surveillance and morality police.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-19 17:27:07+00:00
A lot of the reason why I even ask other people is not to get a simple technical answer but to connect, understand another person's unexepected thoughts, and maybe forge a collaboration –– in addition to getting an answer of course. Real people come up with so many side paths and thoughts, whereas AI feels lifeless and drab.

To me, someone pasting in an AI answer says: I don't care about any of that. Yeah, not a person I want to interact with.
by ivape | 2025-07-19 17:27:08+00:00
I can buy into this. I always thought it was rude or at least insulting when Hollywood robotically creates slop movies. As in, of course they can do it, but damn is it insulting. There really are two types of people in the world:

a) Quantity > Quality if it prints $$$.

or

b) Quality > Quantity if it feels like the right thing to do.

Witnessing type A at scale is a first-class ticket into misanthropy.
by recipe19 | 2025-07-19 17:27:20+00:00
It reminds me of a hotel I stayed at that had a stocked mini-fridge. Removing any item from the fridge resulted in an automatic, silent charge. Putting it back did not remove the charge. So if you simply took something out to check it in, or if you wanted to chill your own beverage, they counted that as consuming the item.

They removed the charges if you checked the bill and objected at checkout. But how many people don't look? I'm sure it generated enough revenue to pay for the sensors. No one is going to say it out loud, but false positives are the point.
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-19 17:28:22+00:00
I agree that there's both cynicism and denial, but when I've explained my views I have usually been able to get through to the complainers.

Usually my go-to example for LLMs doing more than mass memorization is Charton's and Lample's LLM trained on function expressions and their derivatives and which is able to go from the derivatives to the original functions and thus perform integration, but at the same time I know that LLMs are essentially completely crazy with no understanding of reality-- just ask them to write some fiction and you'll have the model outputting discussions where characters who have never met before are addressing each other by name, or getting other similarly basic things wrong, and when something genuinely is not in the model you will end up in hallucination land. So the people saying that the models are bad are not completely crazy.

With the wrong codebase I wouldn't be surprised if you need a finetune.
by swax | 2025-07-19 17:28:26+00:00
Throwing this out there, I have a command line driver for LLMs. Lots of little tricks in there to adapt the CLI to make it amiable for LLMs. Like interrupting a long running process periodically and asking the LLM if it wants to kill it or continue waiting. Also allowing the LLM to use and understand apps that use the alternate screen buffer (to some degree).

Overall I try to keep it as thin a wrapper as I can. The better the model, the less wrapper is needed. It's a good way to measure model competence. The code is here https://github.com/swax/NAISYS and context logs here for examples - https://test.naisys.org/logs/

I have agents built with it that do research on the web for content, run python scripts, update the database, maintain a website, etc.. all running through the CLI, if it calls APIs then it does it with curl. Example agent instructions here: https://github.com/swax/NAISYS/tree/main/agents/scdb/subagen...
by em-bee | 2025-07-19 17:28:57+00:00
for most people that is an irrelevant threat model. people can steal my laptop, but if they don't know my passport they can't access my data. end of story. they would have to break into my laptop without stealing it to install any kind of tool that can read the password. how/when is that going to happen ever without you knowing it? you would have to be working on highly sensitive, and sought after stuff for someone to try that.
by ho_schi | 2025-07-19 17:29:03+00:00
Same here. Nowadays we've switched from Exchange and use IMAP. I stay with Evolution because the client and integration is good. I like some design decisions in the UI. Evolution allows to use client-side decorations and a traditional menu bar, at the same time. And they've added integrated Markdown support lately. While an upgrade to Gtk4 is hopefully coming. I would love to see support for notes via IMAP, similar to how iOS does for many years.

PS: If your E-Mails are stored on an Exchange-Server (or: worse Azure) the discussed problem is the least issue.
by jon-wood | 2025-07-19 17:29:23+00:00
My ongoing concern is that most of us probably got to being able to do good work via several years of doing mediocre work. We put in the hours and along the way learned what good looks like, and various patterns that allow us to see the path to solving a given problem.

What does the next generation do when we’ve automated away that work? How do they learn to recognise what good looks like, and when their LLM has got stuck on a dead end and is just spewing out nonsense?
by rapnie | 2025-07-19 17:29:25+00:00
For some particular areas of development there is strong incentive to be on matrix. For instance most ActivityPub / Fediverse related projects favor matrix. One example of a space that has a big collection of rooms here is "ActivityPub community" space [0], but there are plenty more. Also for the FOSS projects I'm interested in I find them mostly on matrix, and Discord, Zulip, or Slack are the exception (you could say that Discord/Slack are mostly chosen by OSS projects, and FOSS prefers Matrix, IRC, Zulip, XMPP).

[0] https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com
by msgodel | 2025-07-19 17:29:45+00:00
The biggest thing that makes communism just completely non-viable is the simultaneous demand for socialism/democracy and internationalism.

Different people just aren't going to agree on social norms and some groups are going to abuse certain things more than other groups. In the past between freedom of association and low levels of migration people could kind of work that out but when you force people to use public services for everything that's completely impossible.

You get one or the other at most. Both at the same time is an immediate non-starter for pretty much everyone.
by jlarocco | 2025-07-19 17:29:46+00:00
There used to be, when new laptops were thousands of dollars, and it was easier to swap out parts and the batteries were removable. I learned a ton about Linux playing with Slackware on a $50 used laptop back in the mid 2000s.

Not so sure I'd bother with one any more, though. Hard to justify when there are $200 new options on Amazon.
by asadotzler | 2025-07-19 17:29:48+00:00
I seem to have missed the part where he successfully prompted for security, internationalizability, localizability, accessibility, usability, etc., etc.

This is a core problem with amateurs pretending to be software producers. There are others, but this one is fundamental to acceptable commercial software and will absolutely derail vibe coded products from widespread adoption.

And if you think these aspects of quality software are easily reduced to prompts, you've probably never done serious work in those spaces.
by mnky9800n | 2025-07-19 17:30:15+00:00
If anyone can clone most SaaS products in a week, then I already am pretty impressed. But assuming it's true, I would also assume that "anyone" is somewhat exclusive to people who already understand or have the ability to understand how existing SaaS products work. So that just means every company should have a team of people creating whatever SaaS products they need that week. Except that would create so much unreasonable amount of codes to support that the point would be that coding would simply be a race to build edge case scenarios to account for everything. which is also a huge issue. and so i think that the true skill to have that will offer competitive advantage is people management. alternatively some domain knowledge. since domain knowledge will give you the standpoint to decide what you should be doing. but i think a lot of this is kind of overblown. like you aren't really going to want an AI generated on the fly payments system like Stripe or an HR system like tripletex. You are going to want one that simply works and solves your problem and not something your team hacked together in a week with AI.
by throw_a_grenade | 2025-07-19 17:30:27+00:00
In upstream-unsupported versions, which are bore than 2 years old? Sure it is responsibility of the distro.

Even if it is unpatched upstream, it's perfectly fine to push the fix to master branch only and let distros backport. That's also why the bugs should be filed downstream, and distro maintainers will forward the bug upstream but only if not already fixed (so upstream won't get N duplicate bugs, where N is the number of packages).

At in any case, distro maintainers tend to behave better in upstream bugtrackers.
by tbatchelli | 2025-07-19 17:31:01+00:00
I find it as yet another way to externalize costs: I spend 0 time thinking, I dump AI slop on you and ask you to review it or refute me with the nonsense that I just sent you.

Last time someone did this to me I sent them a few other answers by the same LLM to the same prompt, all different, with no commentary.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-19 17:31:05+00:00
This is an interesting take.

Cause all an LLM is, is a reflection of its input.

Garbage in garbage out.

If we're going to have this rule about AI, maybe we should have it about... everything. From your mom's last Facebook post, to what is said by influencers to this post...

Say less. Do more.
by ModernMech | 2025-07-19 17:31:13+00:00
I did some digging, and this seems to be the project the author is using AI to work on: https://github.com/sublayerapp/sublayer

You look at the PRs... there are 786(!) AI generated pull requests and an associated AI generated code review for each one. Each PR is about ~20-100 lines of Ruby (including comments) that implements an "action" for the sublayer system as a Ruby class. So probably something that could be handled by a macro expander. Or at least it's AI used as a fancy macro expander.

But yeah, there's about 20k lines of code right there easily. Although, because it's Ruby, it's not (much) of an exaggeration to say ~50% of the generated lines are a single "end" keyword.

The author is someone who before AI, would publish ~300 commits a year to Github. This year they are on track for 3000 commits using AI. But the result seems to be that PRs are accumulating in their repo, implementing hundreds of features. I'm wondering why the PRs are accumulating and not getting merged if the code is good? Is the bottleneck now review? What would happen if AI took over PR merging as well as PR creation?
by dang | 2025-07-19 17:32:16+00:00
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
by hannofcart | 2025-07-19 17:32:21+00:00
> It does not do the thing it promises to do. Software that sometimes works and very often produces wrong or nonsensical output...

Is that very unlike humans?

You seem to be comparing LLMs to much less sophisticated deterministic programs. And claiming LLMs are garbage because they are stochastic.

Which entirely misses the point because I don't want an LLM to render a spreadsheet for me in a fully reproducible fashion.

No, I expect an LLM to understand my intent, reason about it, wield those smaller deterministic tools on my behalf and sometimes even be creative when coming up with a solution, and if that doesn't work, dream up some other method and try again.

If _that_ is the goal, then some amount of randomness in the output is not a bug it's a necessary feature!
by vitaflo | 2025-07-19 17:32:31+00:00
>I don't want to work with somebody who works like this.

You will most likely get your wish but not in the way you want. In a few years when this is fully matured there will be little reason to hire devs with their inflated salaries (especially in the US) when all you need is someone with some technical know-how and a keen eye on how to work with AI agents. There will be plenty of those people all over the globe who will demand much less than you will.

Hate to break it to you but this is the future of writing software and will be a reckoning for the entire software industry and the inflated salaries it contains. It won't happen overnight but it'll happen sooner than many devs are willing to admit.
by thomashabets2 | 2025-07-19 17:32:37+00:00
I got a feature request in the form of a PR a few months that said "chatgpt generated this as a possible implementation, does it work"?

I stopped there and replied that if you don't care enough to test if it works, then clearly you don't actually want the feature, and closed the ticket.

I have gotten other PRs that are more in the form of "hey I don't know what I'm doing. I used GPT but and it seems to work but I don't understand this part". I'm happy to help point in the right direction for those. Because an least they're trying. And seem like this is part of their learning.

... Or they just asked jippity to make it seem that way.
by MrGilbert | 2025-07-19 17:32:57+00:00
It gets interesting once you start a discussion about a topic with someone who had ChatGPT doing all the work. They often do not have the same in-depth understanding of what is written there vs. someone who wrote it themselves. Which may not come as a surprise, but yet - here we are. It‘s these kind of discussions I find exhausting, because they show no honesty and no interest by the person I'm interacting with. I usually end these conversations quickly.
by bilekas | 2025-07-19 17:34:23+00:00
In the sense of hosting and "cloud" when it was the craze at the time, yes. Absolutely. But what you developed and ran on the aws platform was not dictated by aws. If it didn't suit, you could adhoc it.

Great example though, so many companies grew from the IAC movement. Those were startups though, doing what Amazon probably didn't have the resources to do themselves and also didn't need to.

This AI craze feels to hit at a bit of a lower level, I feel awful for any junior or new Devs entering the market.

Edit for clarity : Hashicorps terraform wouldn't be here without making aws infra easier.
by rhdunn | 2025-07-19 17:34:23+00:00
I'm using AI assistants as an interactive search and coding assistant. I'm still driving the development and implementing the code.

Where I use it for is:

1. Remembering what something is called -- in my case the bootstrap pills class -- so I could locate it in the bootstrap docs. Google search didn't help as I couldn't recall the right name to enter into it. For the AI I described what I wanted to do and it gave the answer.

2. Working with a language/framework that I'm familiar with but don't know the specifics in what I'm trying to do. For example:

- In C#/.NET 8.0 how do I parse a JSON string?

- I have a C# application where I'm using `JsonSerializer.Deserialize` to convert a JSON string to a `record` class. The issue is that the names of the variables are capitalized -- e.g. `record Lorem(int Ipsum)` -- but the fields in the JSON are lowercase -- e.g. `{"ipsum": 123}`. How do I map the JSON fields to record properties?

- In C# how do I convert a `JsonNode` to a `JsonElement`?

3. Understanding specific exceptions and how to solve them.

In each case I'm describing things in general terms, not "here's the code, please fix it" or "write the entire code for me". I'm doing the work of applying the answers to the code I'm working on.
by majormajor | 2025-07-19 17:34:51+00:00
LLMs are very very good at adding words in a way that looks "well written" (to our current mental filters) without adding meaning or value.

I wonder how long it will be before LLM-text trademarks become seen as a sign of bad writing or laziness instead? And then maybe we'll have an arms race of stylistic changes.

---

Completely agree with the author:

Earlier this week I asked Claude to summarize a bunch of code files since I was looking for a bug. It wrote paragraphs and had 3 suggestions. But when I read it, I realized it was mostly super generic and vague. The conditions that would be required to trigger the bug in those ways couldn't actually exist, but it put a lot of words around the ideas. I took longer to notice that they were incorrect suggestions as a result.

I told it "this won't happen those ways [because blah blah blah]" and it gave me the "you are correct!" compliment-dance and tried again. One new suggestion and a claimed reason about how one of its original suggestions might be right. The new suggestion seemed promising, but I wasn't entirely convinced. Tried again. It went back to the first three suggestions - the "here's why that won't happen" was still in the context window, but it hit some limit of its model. Like it was trying to reconcile being reinforcement-learning'd into "generate something that looks like a helpful answer" with "here is information in the context window saying the text I want to generate is wrong" and failing. We got into a loop.

It was a rare bug so we'll see if the useful-seeming suggestion was right or not but I don't know yet. Added some logging around it and some other stuff too.

The counterfactuals are hard to evaluate:

* would I have identified that potential change quicker without asking it? Or at all?

* would I have identified something else that it didn't point out?

* what if I hadn't noticed the problems with some other suggestions and spent a bunch of time chasing them?

The words:information ratio was a big problem in spotting the issues.

So was the "text completion" aspect of "if you're asking about a problem here, there must be a solution I can offer" RL-seeming aspect of its generated results. It didn't seem to be truly evaluating the code then deciding so much as saying "yes, I will definitely tell you there are things we can change, here are some that seem plausible."

Imagine if my coworker had asked me the question and I'd just copy-pasted Claude's first crap attempt to them in response? Rude as hell.
I created a tool to solve my hate of internationalization
by arnaudambro | 2025-07-19 17:35:11+00:00
I really HATE setting up i18n in my project, because 1. it takes too much time 2. I HATE keys all around my code because it's making my debug much slower (when I read a sentence in the browser, I copy it, look for it in the code - then I'd see a key, need to copy the key and look for the key in the code, this is one step too much) 3. forgetting a translation is really annoying 4. i18n translation services (locize and all) are really expensive, and I don't like spending money to much

SO I created my own, https://i18n-keyless.com/ - no keys, just natural language - I actually use natural language as a key, easy as fuck - no translation management, it's AI made of course, and if you forget one, then only one user would be impact for a few ms (time to translate), all the next one would benefit from the new translation. Usually for most of the translations in happens in dev mode of course. - no CI involved - it's just one API call that brings the JSON of the translations and that's fucking it

Now, I setup i18n from start begginning, then I stop worrying about i18n for the REST OF MY PROJECT

Sorry, I'm in love with my project. i18n was a pain, it's now a non problem.

I hope you'll like it too.

Cheers
by AllegedAlec | 2025-07-19 17:35:22+00:00
I have one of those coworkers. I tell him I have a problem with a missing BIOS setting. He comes back 2 minutes later "Yeah I asked an LLM and it said to go into [submenu that doesn't exist] and uncheck [setting I'm trying to find].

What's even more infuriating is that he won't take "I've checked and that submenu doesn't exist" for an answer and insists to check again. Had to step away for a fag a few times in fear of putting his face through the desk.
by beefnugs | 2025-07-19 17:35:45+00:00
This doesn't make aaaaany sense: IF this actually worked, then why would all the biggest companies in the world be firing people? They would be forcing them all to DO THE TIDE and multiple their 10 billion dollar dominance to 100 billion dollar or more dominance.

The truth is something like: for this to work, there is huge requirements in tooling/infrastructure/security/simulation/refinement/optimization/cost-saving that just could never be figured out by the big companies. So they are just like... well lets trick as many investors and plebs to try to use this as possible, maybe one of them will come up with some breakthrough we can steal
by mandeepj | 2025-07-19 17:35:51+00:00
> The Democrats are not good

You are commenting on a thread about Republican Party gutting one more scientific research department. But you have audacity to say Democrats are bad. One of the commenters on this thread had described very appropriately the current political environment- mass weaponization of stupidity. Those people are running at a very high speed in the opposite direction that there’s no coming back for them.

> They work for their donors not their voters

Voters are donors too. Maybe you meant big donors like Musk. You know how that turned out.
by nine_zeros | 2025-07-19 17:36:02+00:00
>Oh, that's a common misunderstanding, but they can't sue me in court – by accepting me as a customer, they accepted my binding arbitration agreement! It clearly said so on my luggage tag their authorized agent (i.e. the bellboy) handled as part of check-in.

Why can't there be a human membership union that sets these automatic binding arbitration agreements on service providers on behalf of members? Is there any law preventing a class of people from creating such a customer's union?