MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-07-20 14:52:07+00:00
Have used Claude's GitHub action quite a bit now (10-20 issue implementations, a bit more PR reviews), and it is hit and miss so agree with the enhanced coding rather than just letting it run loose.

When the change is very small, self-contained feature/refactor it can mostly work alone, if you have tests that cover the feature then it is relatively safe (and you can do other stuff because it is running in an action, which is a big plus...write the issue and you are done, sometimes I have had Claude write the issue too).

When it gets to a more medium size, it will often produce something that will appear to work but actually doesn't. Maybe I don't have test coverage and it is my fault but it will do this the majority of the time. I have tried writing the issue myself, adding more info to claude.md, letting claude write the issue so it is a language it understands but nothing works, and it is quite frustrating because you spend time on the review and then see something wrong.

And anything bigger, unsurprisingly, it doesn't do well.

PR reviews are good for small/medium tasks too. Bar is lower here though, much is useless but it does catch things I have missed.

So, imo, still quite a way from being able to do things independently. For small tasks, I just get Claude to write the issue, and wait for the PR...that is great. For medium (which is most tasks), I don't need to do much actual coding, just directing Claude...but that means my productivity is still way up.

I did try Gemini but I found that when you let it off the leash and accept all edits, it would go wild. We have Copilot at work reviewing PRs, and it isn't so great. Maybe Gemini better on large codebases where, I assume, Claude will struggle.
by DennisP | 2025-07-20 14:52:50+00:00
Would Musk's argument about sensor fusion have made any sense back when they were doing lots of hand-coded C++?

I've been thinking maybe vision-only was a reasonable decision, back when lidar was expensive and the software was hand-coded. Now it doesn't, because lidar is cheaper and the software is and end-to-end neural net, and additional sensors are just more inputs to the network which will learn to use them. But Tesla is locked in because of the promises they made to early FSD buyers.
by eviks | 2025-07-20 14:52:56+00:00
> The project we’re announcing today, XMLUI, brings the VB model to the modern web

But this ugly XML was the worst part of the old UI building experience, and you've made it worse by turning into a poor man's programming language without all the tooling proper languages have to support the poor user.

The good part was the immediate visual feedback in a GUI editor where you couldn't break anything by forgetting to close an XML tag! And you didn't even have to know all the types to type in because you had a visible list of UI elements you could pick from
by hannofcart | 2025-07-20 14:52:59+00:00
> Let's do the math. If each step in an agent workflow has 95% reliability, which is optimistic for current LLMs,then: 5 steps = 77% success rate 10 steps = 59% success rate 20 steps = 36% success rate Production systems need 99.9%+ reliability.

(End quote)

Isn't this just wrong? Isn't the author conflating accuracy of LLM output in each step to accuracy of final artifact which is a reproducible deterministic piece of code?

And they're completely missing that a person in the middle is going to intervene at some point to test it and at that point the output artifact's accuracy either goes to 100% or the person running the agent would backtrack.

Either am missing something or this does not seem well thought through.
by motorest | 2025-07-20 14:53:11+00:00
> That's the main problem with vibe coding.

It's not a problem. It's in fact the core trait of vibe-codig. The primary work a developer does in vibe coding tasks is providing the necessary and sufficient context. Hence the inception of the term "context engineering". A vibe coder basically lays out requirements and constraints that drives LLMs to write code. That's the bulk of their task: they shift away from writing the low-level "how" to instead write down the high-level "what".

> The whole point is having the LLM figure out what you want from vague hand-wavy descriptions instead of precise specification.

No. The prompts are as elaborate as you want it to be. I, for example, use prompt files with the project's ubiquitous language and requirements, not to mention test suites used for acceptance tests. You can half-ass your code as much as you can half-ass your prompts.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-07-20 14:53:48+00:00
People are insane, you can artificially pine for the simpler betters times made up in your mind when you could give oracle all your money.

But I would stake my very life on the fact that the movement by developers we call open-source is the single greatest community and ethos humanity has ever created.

Of course it inherits from enlightenment and other thinking, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, but it is an extension of the ideologies that came before it.

I challenge anyone to come up with any single modern subcultures that has tangibly generated more that touches more lives, moves more weight, travels farther, effects humanity more every single day from the moment they wake up than the open source software community (in the catholic sense obviously).

Both in moral goodness and in measurable improvement in standard of living and understanding of the universe.

Some people's memories are very short indeed, all who pine pine for who they imagined they were and are consumed by a memetic desire of their imagined selves.
by vintermann | 2025-07-20 14:53:55+00:00
The only thing they couldn't do with C418's music, was to publish "Minecraft: the official soundtrack" and take all the royalties themselves. Nor could they claim YouTube videos for having Minecraft's original music in it (they did it several times "accidentally" when the movie came out, and stole a couple of million from YouTube makers).

So no, I don't buy the "they'd have to go through lawyers" excuse. They could still have had blanket licenses for using the music in all sorts of ways, they just wouldn't own it.
by hellcow | 2025-07-20 14:54:08+00:00
> 'we can do it and it may get more people to eat vegetarian.'

That's a noble goal in and of itself. Every step to reduce environmental impact and animal cruelty has value.

Beyond and Impossible were my "off-ramp" from eating meat every meal to exploring vegetarianism and veganism. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
by marcosdumay | 2025-07-20 14:54:10+00:00
HDMI is a piece of shit designed to keep device owners hostage of the spec consortium and manufacturers, and USB-C is a badly brand collection of specs with infinite diversity that shouldn't even work but somehow some times does.

But there is a reason nobody puts analogical signals in cables anymore. Beyond some bandwidth, the only way to keep cables reasonably priced and thin is to have software error correction.
by alwillis | 2025-07-20 14:54:34+00:00
If LLMs were actually useful, there would be no need to scream it everywhere. On the contrary: it would be a guarded secret.

LLMs are useful—but there’s no way such an innovation should be a “guarded secret” even at this early stage.

It’s like saying spreadsheets should have remained a secret when they amplified what people could do when they became mainstream.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-20 14:54:38+00:00
Actually, we'd expect better health outcomes on a plant-based meat patty than real meat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32780794/

Or you could take the position that it's at least noninferior. But you'd have to show the work for how you got to the idea that it's inferior.
by ChiMan | 2025-07-20 14:54:42+00:00
Seems possible that one possible unintended consequence of AI could be a rebirth of the Web as something closer to what we knew. Because why use search at all for general inquiry when AI can satisfy much of that?

More critically, it’s not hard to imagine that, with AI-boosted boosted coding, a thousand bespoke search engines and other platforms being just around the corner, radically changing the economics of platform lock-in. When you can build your own version of Google Search with the help of AI and do the same with social media or any other centralizing Internet force, then platforms cease to be platforms at all. With AI, the challenges of self-hosting could become quite manageable as well. And while we’re at it, some version of the same, individual-centered computing economics on your own devices seems possible.

In these senses, it’s quite possible that Jobs’s vision of computing as extensions of individuals rather than individuals being extensions of computing is again at hand, with the magic of self-curated order from a chaotic Net not far behind.
by zamanpasha123 | 2025-07-20 14:55:01+00:00
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by airstrike | 2025-07-20 14:55:35+00:00
100% and it seems like we need a whole new architecture to get there, because right now training a model takes so much time.

At the risk of making a terrible analogy, right now we're able to "give birth" to these machines after months of training, but once they're born, they can't really learn. Whereas animals learn something new every day, got to sleep, clean up their memories a bit, deleting some, solidifying others, and waking up with an improved understanding of the world.
by LeftHandPath | 2025-07-20 14:55:47+00:00
I picked up Player Piano, which had been collecting dust on my shelf, yesterday, and quickly found myself having blitzed through it in its entirety by the evening.

The book has many elements and predictions that feel dated, and a lot more that feel like they might've been made yesterday. Highly relevant to the cultural effects of automation. It puts its finger on the nose of the obvious questions that have somehow gone un-asked in current dialogues -- importantly, as the linked article quotes, "What are people for?"
by dylan604 | 2025-07-20 14:55:53+00:00
The sad thing is that based on your telling of it, if it detects a small child in a weird costume in the middle of the road but doesn't recognize it as a small child that it's not at least recognizing that something is in the road that should not be regardless of what it is. That should be the minimum in recognizing the road and then recognizing any object within the road.
by anovikov | 2025-07-20 14:56:07+00:00
After all, one of the first things AI will improve is law enforcement. It must be totally achievable to do very precise crime prediction basing on analysis of people's movement and faces in the streets from cameras, it's just that we no longer have algorithms for this, but AI will for sure help create it. It's a lot easier than say, level 5 self-driving, at least it looks like this to a layman like me.

If crime won't be a big problem, and entertainment for sure won't be, either (everyone will watch an AI-tailored TV program best suiting themselves, even with movies self-customising based on individual viewers' learned preferences), then what else is the problem about inequality? At least as long as the overall economy does not fall, and for sure it won't, because there's no "replacement of people" unless AI vastly improves productivity.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-20 14:56:16+00:00
That is a long explanation, but generally even human binocular disparity incorrectly guesses 3D structures and distances. Our brains automatically fill in a lot of missing information that computers just can't know a priori (example: you know a dog hidden behind a car doesn't actually vanish nor remain stationary.)

Most guidance platforms would use LIDAR/SLAM to describe the local road surface, and overlap camera vision data to extrapolate distant surfaces and objects. Note distant objects also have lower resolution, unknown non-distinctive features (speed bump, or open man-hole cover etc.), and increasing sparse data as velocity effectively lowers world-state sampling rates.

The world-state is constantly changing at every intersection, sampling constraints add latency, and the navigation way-point goals may reach contradiction with immediate path-planning due to ambiguous/expired information.

Cheers =3
by thisislife2 | 2025-07-20 14:56:44+00:00
Seems like we keep reinventing the wheel - the previous version of of HTML, XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) is a direct subset of XML. Also, related - Mozilla Firefox used to have something called XUL (XML User Interface Language - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL - using which you could build complete desktop web applications with the Firefox / Gecko web engine (something that is now popular with the Chromium Embedded Framework). (After Mozilla abandoned the XUL codebase, it has been forked and is now maintained as the Unified XUL Platform (UXP) implementation - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=30840 ).
by thelastgallon | 2025-07-20 14:57:08+00:00
Looks like this experiment is conducted in US. If you are walking in US, you'll end up on nextdoor and if you went one way, changed your mind and went the other way, your picture will be on nextdoor from many people's ring/etc cameras, reporting a suspicious person walking on the street and if other neighbors have seen this suspicious person.
by rpdillon | 2025-07-20 14:57:45+00:00
As a skeptic, I think that they have defined too broad of an umbrella in the research, and so they're sweeping up huge swaths of people's diet under one label and then claiming it's bad.

Up thread, people are talking about using minced soy protein. I'm kind of surprised that itself is not ultra processed, given that bread flour is considered to be ultra processed.
by druskacik | 2025-07-20 14:58:27+00:00
Okay, I genuinely thought that consuming as much protein powder as you describe would make person feel sick, you surprised me. To each his own. The fact remains, research suggests overdosing on protein supplements has potential health hazards.

"According to international consensus, the daily reference intake of protein for the healthy adult population is 0.8 g/kg body weight. However, individuals who engage in physical activity may require more protein, ranging from 1.2 to 2 grams per kilogram of body weight. To fulfill these requirements, many athletes and active individuals opt for whey protein (WP) supplements to increase their protein intake. The appropriate amount of WP intake for individuals depends on their objectives, current level of physical activity, and body composition. Research suggests that a dosage of 20 to 25 g/day of WP provides the desired benefits, while amounts >40 g/day may lead to adverse effects on the body"[0]

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10761008/
by hungryhobbit | 2025-07-20 14:59:09+00:00
Did you even finish the article? The end is all about the trade-off of when "a person in the middle is going to intervene".

In fact, the point of the whole article isn't that AI doesn't work; to the contrary, it's that long chains of (20+) actions with no human intervention (which many agentic companies promise) don't work.
by lastcat743 | 2025-07-20 14:59:23+00:00
The opposite silly man. I have traveled the world, studied the past 10,000 years of humanity through casual self interest. Climbed tiers of modern success (money, profession), taken my ten years to reflect and now share something that even your fellow intellectual has not fully decoded for themselves; and you say this to me.

You’re very sad to let your pride get in the way of your learning. There are more wonders, you will find and process them. This one is a lost leader. Amend your epistemological ladder (potential then state [Truth] then perception and interpretation (“truth” or “truthiness” depending on the quality of the mind) and move on

There is an art and utility to the newly emerging ways of thought. We have all been working upon these same problems (separately and together) for a very long time. You have not cracked this one.

What I say is “truth before Law.” When it comes time to end men’s lives and take away the casual liberties of people among civilization, we must turn to Law. Law must exclusively rely upon true Truth, not thoughts feelings and beliefs, no matter how articulate and systematic.

And pray (to whatever you will) that Law only ever accepts true Truth (existential reality) for wicked clever men have been know to bury even the most honest beneath the words of convincing lies.

“Those who can lie more convincingly the the honest could ever hope to tell the truth.” Such have always existed among us.

The true Truth is an accurate rendering of some aspect of existential reality. Everything else is a fiction or lie.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-07-20 14:59:34+00:00
Some people got into coding to code, rather than build things.

If the AI is doing the coding then that is a threat to some people. I am not sure why, LLMs can be good and you can enjoy coding...those things are unrelated. The logic seems to be that if LLMs are good then coding is less fun, lol.
by ethbr1 | 2025-07-20 15:00:06+00:00
A lightbulb is a fascinating example, because there’s an argument to be made that a “minimum government specification” lightbulb would be superior to what the market provides (read: under-spec’d cheap caps that die due to heat https://www.edn.com/ensure-long-lifetimes-from-electrolytic-... ).
by rainsford | 2025-07-20 15:00:06+00:00
The real key is that things like LIDAR are designed to work well with the types of tasks computers are good at, like taking a bunch of precise measurements every second and performing complex calculations, while a binocular vision based understanding of the world is something humans are good at because we evolved that ability over millions of years.

You can probably eventually ("never" is a long time after all) get a computer to understand the world as well as a human purely through camera based sensors, but it's a much more difficult task than taking an approach that uses tools computers are already good at. Similarly, I suspect it would be an uphill battle to have a human drive using raw LIDAR input.
by ivape | 2025-07-20 15:00:07+00:00
If you want to keep a house painted white, you have to keep painting it white.

Society does get more progressive and ethical, but it's only one coat of paint. America had a real fresh coat of paint after the Civil War, Civil Rights, and progressive reform movements of the early 20th century. The things you are mentioning is the in between periods between new coats of paint. We're sort of due for one. And, yes, that coat of paint will start to look yellow and chipped too, where you'll notice all the failed promises.
by simianparrot | 2025-07-20 15:00:34+00:00
I’ve just learned to discern quality better. For clothes, I learned from a friend who designs them how to tell fabric quality and seam quality. But there’s online resources to learn that as well. For electronics it can be hard but if I can’t tell from first principles and my knowledge of electronics design I’ll research brands via online reviews and tear-downs. Eventually you get a pretty good “instinct” that makes it less tedious.
by eviks | 2025-07-20 15:00:35+00:00
This doesn't make sense generically since not every software has all the features of other software.

But to be more specific - pick their concern, describe the replacement workflow with Sheets, then explain how it's a good replacement

> The only question is wether they want to learn doing things differently.

Of course it's not the only question, among many other questions could be whether they can afford to spend a lot of time/money after learning (though this investment also shouldn't be ignored) to do the same thing, and whether they can do the same for all the people depending on the current workflow
by righthand | 2025-07-20 15:00:50+00:00
Cool looking but it uses JSON? Weird choice to slap another data scheme on-top of your data scheme. I will stick with XSLT for the time being as it is pure XML.

> return { name: stop.commonName, zone: getProp('Zone'), wifi: getProp('WiFi'), toilets: getProp('Toilets'), // A comma-separated list of line names that serve this stop lines: stop.lines ? stop.lines.map(line => line.name).join(', ') : '' }; }); }
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-20 15:01:06+00:00
Yeah, there is a camp of people who see headlines like this and (giddily) think it spells the demise of plant-based alternatives, probably because since they don't shop plant-based products, their mental concept is stuck 15 years ago where BM was new and experimental, so now they think "heh, not surprised that flopped and we can move on".

But what they don't get is that the market has exploded with competition. Even grocery stores in places like Houston have gone from a couple shelves of vegan products to half-aisles or full-aisles of plant-based food.

Beyond Meat might die in spite of the success of the market it entered into or helped create.
by coliveira | 2025-07-20 15:01:10+00:00
He's not wrong. The numbers are too pessimistic, however when building software the numbers don't need to be as high for a complete disaster to happen. Even if just 1% of the code is bad, it is still very difficult to make this work.

And you mention testing, which certainly can be done. But when you have a large product and the code generator is unreliable (which LLMs always are), then you have to spend most of your time testing.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-07-20 15:01:29+00:00
The economy will absolutely survive, not least because we have the technology for automation. There is no reason to suspect otherwise.

Some sectors will be hit. For instance real estate because obviously overall demand will fall. So you may no longer sell your house at a profit... small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.

Growth has to be seems per capita, not overall. It is possible to have a decreasing population while people keep getting better off individually.

I would argue that we don't have much of a choice, anyway, as the enrlvironment will collapse and/or we will live dystopian lives if we keep growing the population (and probable even if the population stays at current levels).
by lmeyerov | 2025-07-20 15:01:46+00:00
I think he says he checks for both

It's interesting as a weaker safety guarantee. He is guaranteeing write integrity, so valid WAL view on restart by throwing out mismatching writes. But from an outside observation, premature signaling of completion, which would mean data loss as a client may have moved on without retries due to thinking the data was safely saved. (I was a bit confused in the completion meaning around this, so not confident.)

We hit some similar scenarios in Graphistry where we treat recieving server disk/RAM during browser uploads as writethrough caches in front of our cloud storage persistence tiers. The choice of when to signal success to the uploader is funny -- disk/RAM vs cloud storage -- and timing difference is fairly observable to the web user.
by bgwalter | 2025-07-20 15:02:25+00:00
Yes, and what is worse is that the same mega-corporations who have been ostensibly promoting equity until 2025 are now pushing for a gated development environment that costs the same as a monthly rent in some countries or more than a monthly salary in others.

That problem does not even include lock-in, surveillance, IP theft and all other things that come with SaaS.