MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by no_wizard | 2025-07-24 17:10:34+00:00
>The truth is, we know an immense amount about AI

We (as researchers and developers in the field) know alot about how its technically implemented, like building models, making improvements etc. These can be quantified and tracked.

The heart of the matter is this:

>societal outcome is uncertain

I think all speculation around AI is heavily weighted about that as opposed to what do we know about AI from a technical perspective? which isn't even usually part of the discourse, unless we're talking about AI safety, which the bad actors try to pretend the technology isn't built in a well known way or can have predictable results etc.

A good chunk of the problem (certainly more than half) is that you have bad actors that need to sell the world on AI, and you have actual technical implementors who really know alot about these systems but are most often employed by folks who benefit from gatekeeping the technology and refuse any attempts at oversight, often claiming we don't know alot about how these systems work while simultaneously employing people who definitely know how these systems work.

The industry has done this to itself, by making false claims and talking out of both sides of their mouth, while the actual technically skilled folks are for various reasons, largely stuck in the middle without much room at the broader discussion table
by phtrivier | 2025-07-24 17:10:36+00:00
Fred Brooks told us to "plan to throw one version away, because you will."

What he missed is that the one version that is not thrown away will have to be maintained pretty much for ever.

(Can we blame him for not seeing SaaS coming ?)

What if the real value of AI was at the two sides of this:

* to very quickly built the throwaway version that is just used during demos, to gather feedback from potential customers, and see where things break ?

That can probably be a speed-up of 10x, or 100x, and an incredible ROI if you avoid building a "full" version that's useless

* then you create the "proper" system the "old" way, using AI as an autocomplete on steroid (and maybe get 1.5x, 2x, speedup, etc...)

* then you use LLMs to do the things you would not do anyway for lack of time (testing, docs, etc...) Here the speedup is infinite if you did not do it, and it had some value.

But the power that be will want you to start working on the next feature, by this time...

* I don't know about how LLMs would help to fix bugs

So basically, two codebase "lanes", evolving in parallel, one where the AI / human ratio is 90/10, one where it's maybe 30/70 ?

AI for fast accretion, human for weathering ?
by palmfacehn | 2025-07-24 17:10:59+00:00
>...and positive, saying how things are

This presumes that the AI has access to objective reality. Instead, the AI has access to subjective reports filed by fallible humans, about the state of the world. Even if we could concede that an AI might observe the world on its own terms, the language it might use to describe the world as it perceives it would be subjectively defined by humans.
by whodidntante | 2025-07-24 17:11:05+00:00
I do not know why you need to bring political ideolgy into this. It is very easy to find contracts put together and run by Democrats that only serve to increase administrative bloat.

One example: $42.5B in the infrastructure bill to expand high speed internet access to rural communities.

Four years later, this funding is still in proposal stages, with final proposals due (not approved) at the end of this year. Absolutely nothing has been spent on broadband access, and it is likely to take at least another year or more before any real spending starts.

In the meantime, what has happened so far: - $810M spend on admin costs. Over $200M a year to run a program that does nothing. - there is a cap of 2% or $850M for admin costs, so there is already legislation on the way to exapnd this cap so that the program can continue.Admin costs will only increase after projects are underway because they need to be closely monitored. - Inflation has been 25% since this was approved, inflation for internet infrastructure has been 50%, so already, only half of the infrastructure envisioned will be implemented, but it will end up being more like 25% will see the light of day due to inflation and admin costs.

There are many other examples. Look up EV charging stations. Look were ARPA funds have gone.
by taylodl | 2025-07-24 17:11:44+00:00
I worked for decades in the utility space. After my utility had deployed their smart meters we had a company come in and show us a product they had where they could tell you if someone had an electric furnace, and if so, they could tell you the make and model! They were fairly accurate on refrigerators as well.

Mind you, we were looking at using that data to be able to determine whether to inform that customer that they could buy more efficient appliances and show them the amount of money they could save. We ended up not pulling the trigger on that initiative but that's not the point: we could have.
by ElectricalUnion | 2025-07-24 17:12:01+00:00
> I know what a UUID (or a String) is.

I now know I never know whenever "a UUID" is stored or represented as a GUIDv1 or a UUIDv4/UUIDv7.

I know it's supposed to be "just 128 bits", but somehow, I had a bunch of issues running old Java servlets+old Java persistence+old MS SQL stack that insisted, when "converting" between java.util.UUID to MS SQL Transact-SQL uniqueidentifier, every now and then, that it would be "smart" if it flipped the endianess of said UUID/GUID to "help me". It got to a point where the endpoints had to manually "fix" the endianess and insert/select/update/delete for both the "original" and the "fixed" versions of the identifiers to get the expected results back.

(My educated guess it's somewhat similar to those problems that happens when your persistence stack is "too smart" and tries to "fix timezones" of timestamps you're storing in a database for you, but does that wrong, some of the time.)
by bhaney | 2025-07-24 17:12:23+00:00
Neat approach. I make my anti-crawler HTML zip bombs like this:

(echo '<html><head></head><body>' && yes "<div>") | dd bs=1M count=10240 iflag=fullblock | gzip > bomb.html.gz

So they're just billions of nested div tags. Compresses just as well as repeated-single-character bombs in my experience.
by igouy | 2025-07-24 17:12:33+00:00
> This is how I was taught OOP …

That's unfortunate.

"The simplistic approach is to say that object-oriented development is a process requiring no transformations, beginning with the construction of an object model and progressing seamlessly into object-oriented code. …

While superficially appealing, this approach is seriously flawed. It should be clear to anyone that models of the world are completely different from models of software. The world does not consist of objects sending each other messages, and we would have to be seriously mesmerised by object jargon to believe that it does. …"

"Designing Object Systems", Steve Cook & John Daniels, 1994, page 6

https://archive.org/details/designingobjects0000cook
by timr | 2025-07-24 17:12:38+00:00
> aerobic sport forums are replete with examples of people who were considered extremely fit, right up until the moment they were in an ambulance due to an undetected issue that could have been anticipated with a scan.

The primary lesson from this is to ignore stories you read in aerobic sport forums.

This kind of (usually apocryphal) tale is an example of the turtles, rabbits and birds allegory [1]. Testing is like a fence around a farmer's field -- it may catch rabbits, but it's useless for turtles (who will be caught, but move too slowly to matter) and birds (since you can't catch them with a fence). The "super fit person who randomly drops dead" is the very definition of a "bird" -- even if you assume the test is sensitive enough to catch the rare thing before it happens (usually not), you have the dual problems of timing (i.e. are you going to test daily?) and false positives for whatever rate of testing you do choose.

In real life, almost nobody has an illness that moves so quickly that it requires special screening, but so slowly that it can be stopped, or at least, that has a positive risk/reward ratio for the testing required to detect it. It's the fundamental problem of medical testing, and even most of the recommended tests have a very small expected benefit.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4865494/
by wincy | 2025-07-24 17:12:44+00:00
Look, maybe I’m saying the quiet part out loud, but if software engineering isn’t where the money is at anymore, and those jobs go away, I’d be competent at something else. I’m a smart person. I work hard. I’m confident I’d be able to displace someone who isn’t as smart as me and just “take” their job.

There’s going to be a need for smart people with a good work ethic unless literally everyone loses their jobs, and at that point we’re living past the singularly event horizon as far as I’m concerned and all bets are off.
by rileymichael | 2025-07-24 17:13:08+00:00
i've been writing kotlin since 1.0 (2016) and my past few jobs have been at startups using kotlin entirely on the backend. it's really enjoyable, there isn't another language with as good of a development experience due to Jetbrains controlling both sides.

coroutines are the biggest downside imo. they're great for android and other environments, but now that we've got loom on the jvm they're needlessly complex (accidental blocking calls, coloring, headaches with libraries that use thread locals, reentrant lock, etc.)
by einrealist | 2025-07-24 17:13:13+00:00
It's hard "to tune out" from the topic when investments in LLM technology surpasses revenues of nation states, and when US policy is not trying to prevent harm to society, but making it more likely. By 'harm', I don't mean some 'rogue AI' sci-fi scenario. I mean a financial time bomb that far exceeds the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
by chambers | 2025-07-24 17:13:25+00:00
I think you're right. I'll add on: there's a lot of thinking that does not need writing, and there's a lot of writing that needs no thinking. Deng Xiaoping and other greats wrote pretty minimally for their own thinking, if at all. Whereas many of us not-so-greats seem to knee-jerk comment without a single thought.

It makes sense for our age. Amid a thousand distractions, typing on the keyboard gives the illusion of getting a grip. Note-taking on my computer gives the illusion of a second brain. Ululating on the internet gives the illusion of sharing thoughts.

Instead of "writing is thinking", I prefer "thought precedes speech" https://inframethodology.cbs.dk/?p=1127; it fits the small human mind better though I've yet to learn it properly.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-24 17:13:43+00:00
> Java and C# refute it.

No, they don't. They're using a different meaning for "thread safety" that's more useful in context since they do ensure data race safety - which is the only kind of thread safety OP is talking about. By guaranteeing data race safety as a language property, Java and C# are proving OP's point, not refuting it.
by ergocoder | 2025-07-24 17:13:46+00:00
With China, the issue isn't really the quality of the product. It's the geopolitical issues.

Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other countries even Philippines and Vietnam don't want to depend too much on China. A lot of island disputes and so on and so forth.

My guess right now is that China will never catch up because Europe, US, Australia, and many other developing countries will avoid depending on China critically. This doesn't mean 0% would buy from China but it'll never become a critical dependency.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-24 17:13:53+00:00
>How would you ever find out/enforce this though?

programmers really have a hard time understanding the law, how does any violation of the law ever get found out, or any law enforced? Generally someone says hey this company is doing X, and then the government gets a warrant to say let us look through your stuff to find out if you are doing X.

As a normal rule most companies work something like:

"excuse me, we have reports you are doing X"

"Not exactly, this is what we are doing - we call it X1, which is why we are totally ok under the rules governing X. Our legal dept. can totally explain"

Court case instantiates.

If the company is doing something that they will actually say "no we are doing nothing of the sort!" then it is likely someone in the company will at some time say "hey they are really doing X" and then the warrant thing I discussed first happens.

At any rate finding out enforcing things can happen without perfect technical access to everything, that's how justice systems have managed to work for centuries.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-24 17:14:02+00:00
> how long did you own your last EV car ? enough to pass the limit for the EV to become interesting ? You think all Tesla & BYD owners do that ?

Again, I reference your source:

"Yet when the MIT study calculated a comparison in which EVs lasted only 90,000 miles on the road rather than 180,000 miles, they remained 15 percent better than a hybrid and far better than a gas car."

Both of my cars have 100k+ miles on them, with plenty of life left. Modern vehicles seem to do 200-300k miles regularly.

I am not an outlier: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/americ...

"The average age of U.S. cars and light trucks this year rose to a record 12.6 years, according to the report by S&P Global Mobility on Wednesday, up by two months from 2023."

The average American drives 12k miles a year.

I'm not sure why you zeroed in on a source that openly debunks all of your arguments, but I do appreciate the assist.
by bakugo | 2025-07-24 17:14:18+00:00
"Undefined behavior" is not a meaningless made up term that you can redefine at will.

The word "undefined" has a clear meaning: there is no behavior defined at all for what a given piece of code will do, meaning it can literally do anything. If the language spec defines the possible behaviors you can expect (even if the behavior can vary between implementations), then by definition it's not undefined.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-24 17:14:37+00:00
Yeah, lat week switched to two eggs for breakfast (now ½ an English muffin so I have something to put the eggs on).

But I wonder if Ozempic is not a bad idea. My BMI is below 30 — which is what my doctor said is her threshold for recommending something like Ozempic. So I feel like I should just keep working on the self-discipline a little harder.

Intermittent fasting keeps coming up and I have not tried it. I think that will be my experiment in the coming months.
by o_nate | 2025-07-24 17:14:38+00:00
Maybe it's too soon to say that autonomous LLM agents are the wave of the future and always will be, but that's basically where I'm at.

AI code completion is awesome, but it's essentially a better Stack Overflow, and I don't remember people worrying that Stack Overflow was going to put developers out of work, so I'm not losing sleep that an improved version will.
by norir | 2025-07-24 17:14:52+00:00
The sad thing is that most languages with threads have a default of global variables and unrestricted shared memory access. This is the source of the vast majority of data corruption and races. Processes are generally a better concurrency model than threads, but they are unfortunately too heavyweight for many use cases. If we defaulted to message passing all required data to each thread (either by always copying or tracking ownership to elide unnecessary copying), most of these kinds of problems would go away.

In the meantime, we thankfully have agency and are free to choose not to use global variables and shared memory even if the platform offers them to us.
by d3ckard | 2025-07-24 17:15:20+00:00
Absolut (Swedish) is my go to vodka, as even in Poland it's widely available and good quality.

From Polish brands, black Żubrówka, Ostoya and Chopin are good. Normal Żubrówka (the one with grass) is nice as well, but it's not neutral vodka (recommend with apple juice).

And obviously Belvedere is the fancy brand.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-24 17:15:20+00:00
>The amount of typing it takes to describe a solution in English text is often less than the amount of typing needed to actually implement it in code

I don't find this to be true. I find describing a solution in English well to be slower than describing the problem in code (IE, by writing tests first) and having that be the structured data that the LLM uses to generate code.

Its far faster, from the results I'm seeing plus my own personal experience, to write clear tests which benefit from being a form of structured data that the LLM can analyze. Its the guidance we have given to our engineers at my day job and it has made working with these tools dramatically easier.

In some cases, I have found LLM performance to be subpar enough that it is indeed, faster to write it myself. If it has to hold many different pieces of information together, it starts to falter.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-07-24 17:15:27+00:00
> after being screamed at by my direct supervisor

It feels weird to me to ask for accommodations around an event that shouldn't happen in the first place, and should result in corrective action against the supervisor if it did happen...

It also feels very specific. Was being screamed at a regular issue with your supervisor in the job where you made this request for accommodation? Or was it at a prior job and you wanted to defend against that specific situation in this job?

As written it's like you're saying "My supervisor is a shouty asshole" or "I expect to be in conflict with my supervisor, and I expect that conflict to come to yelling." Neither of those are really about your disability, they're about your supervisor and your relationship with them. You can't fix either of those with disability accommodations.

Not that it helps much in your current situation, but next time consider different wording, maybe something like: "I need recovery time after stressful interactions, and I do not want to be penalized when I take that time."
Show HN: Generate high-width, near-ideal transverse field Ising model samples
by wrathfulspatula | 2025-07-24 17:15:30+00:00
Transverse field Ising model (TFIM) is the physical system at the core of most claimed cases of algorithmic "quantum advantage" (notably excluding Shor's integer factoring algorithm). It's easy to compare these results to Qiskit Aer Trotterization: see https://github.com/unitaryfoundation/qrack/blob/main/scripts....
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-24 17:15:40+00:00
sure but anyway the data collection is not that important, it is actually the data storage and data deletion parts that are going to make or break a GDPR case.

on edit: better clarify, I mean if you are fingerprinting, but not storing in such a way that you can actually identify someone (although not sure why you would use fingerprinting then) then I don't think there is a case.
by abalashov | 2025-07-24 17:15:56+00:00
> Whether you’ll get the high IQ or low IQ LLM on the next suggestion is a crapshoot

I have heard theories from people--whose ideas I don't ordinarily consider to be in the realm of purely uninformed speculation--that this can vary depending on system-wide GPU load, and is throttled accordingly based on real-time demand by the major LLM providers.

Whether it's true, I have no idea.
by 20k | 2025-07-24 17:15:59+00:00
The problem is, given the inherent limitations of natural language as a format to feed to an AI, it can never have enough information to be able to solve your problem adequately. Often the constraints of what you're trying to solve only crop up during the process of trying to solve the problem itself, as it was unclear that they even existed beforehand

An AI tool that could have a precise enough specification fed into it to produce the result that you wanted with no errors, would be a programming language

I don't disagree at all that AI can be helpful, but there's a huge difference between using it as a research tool (which is very valid), and the folks who are trying to use it to replace programmers en masse. The latter is what's driving the bubble, not the former
by convolvatron | 2025-07-24 17:16:08+00:00
there really isn't a fundamental difference between DSLs and libraries for the points that you brought up. where it really starts to get sketchy is when you do really funny things with the base syntax (looking at you lisp and rust). if not well thought out they can be fragile, confusing, and a real burden for new contributors.

I guess here's a question - do you consider regex libraries to be DSLs?
by mikewarot | 2025-07-24 17:16:31+00:00
My town has some people obsessed with "walkability" and the want to take the ONLY alternative to I 80/94/6/US 41 down to one lane each way... People will die if they get there way, as ambulance and fire vehicles become mired in congestion.

Not to mention that the weather for walking is only present for about 20 days per year.

Walking everywhere isn't a practical for most people in the Calumet Region of Indiana.

There are reasonable sidewalks already present and crossing buttons on the lights where needed. I've actually used them on occasion.

I don't see the need to push walkability further at the cost of everyone who passes through the area on the interstate.
by StarterPro | 2025-07-24 17:16:36+00:00
For text LLMs, on a basic level, isn't it just aggregating the percentage chance of a specific word order based on the topic/genre?

I've just started looking into them, but it feels like A BUNCH of stats hidden beneath a layer of if/else statements.

It only seems to work given an unlimited amount of money being thrown at it. Which would be possible if it were nationalized, but they're too greedy for that to happen.
by mattlondon | 2025-07-24 17:16:49+00:00
I don't think it even includes the ones at people's homes where probably "most" charging happens. No one has a gas station at home.

FWIW a fast charge is like 10-15 mins usually while you grab a coffee or something - in modern EV cars you have 100-200kw (or more!) charging where you can get like 400 or 500 miles in an hour, so 15mins gives you 100-125 miles extra range etc. If you time it, filling up a gas tank and going in to pay and all that is not like 40 seconds but more in the 5-10 mins mark, so 15 mins top up on a longer journey is not that much longer than filling up.

It's a bit of a different mentality really - with petrol/gas I'd fill up to the brim then drive until I was almost empty, but with an EV I wake up with a full tank and just do a quick top off here and there during the day (assuming I ever need it which 99% of the time I don't) until I can get home and charge overnight where is way way cheaper.

With petrol I'd never stop to just put in a few litres at a time, but doing it with an EV is so simple and easy, and you can go do something else while it's happening. Picking up some groceries, getting a coffee, bio break etc - perfect time for a top up
Show HN: Free AI tool to restore old, damaged photos – built solo
by fabione76 | 2025-07-24 17:16:57+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a solo developer and over the past few months I’ve built a simple web tool to restore old, faded, or damaged photos using AI. It:

- Removes scratches, dust, and tears - Clarifies blurry details (faces, textures) - Optionally colorizes or applies vintage/artistic styles

I originally built this for my own family albums — scanning old prints, restoring them in-browser with no Photoshop or plugins. I wanted anyone to be able to revive their memories with a click. There’s a free tier after signup, no hidden fees.

I’d love feedback on: - Restoration quality (sharpness, artifacts) - Color/vintage styles (too muted? too saturated?) - Usability (site performance, interface)

Thanks for checking it out — I’m happy to answer any questions or open to suggestions.

– Fabio