MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Kon5ole | 2025-07-15 06:58:32+00:00
>It's hard to think of any other major tech product where it's acceptable to shift so much blame on the user.

I have the opposite impression! I find it's hard to think of any other tech product where users expect to master it with no training at all. I think people get tricked into believing they need no training because the tool uses natural language as the UI.

You learn how to use a spreadsheet or a word processor, how to drive a car, sail a boat, play a guitar. In the 90s there were courses that spent hours teaching users how to work a mouse and keyboard!

Of course you need to learn how to use a coding assistant as well, it just makes sense.

There has already been a million words written about how to use LLMs from people who don't really know how to use LLM's. Everyone is learning, there is a boom, you can make a fortune selling knowledge about LLM's whether you have that knowledge or not.
by crinkly | 2025-07-15 06:58:46+00:00
Yep that. We are a fairly high spend customer which gives us direct access to engineering managers there. Some of the non-core products are run by what looks like two guys in a trailer protected by a layer of NDAs and finger crossing. Had some pretty crazy problems even with their core stuff over the years which absolutely knocked my confidence.

At the same time, I've had two separate Apple SREs in the last 5 years tell me that I should never trust their cloud services.

If you can't see it and can't control it yourself, then you accept these things silently.

My distrust for this goes as far as the only thing actually being subcontracted out for me is Fastmail, DNS and domains and the mail is backed up hourly.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-07-15 06:58:57+00:00
Ah.. now you are asking the right questions. If you can't handle 3-5 junior engineers.. then yes, you likely can't get 10-20x speed from an LLM.

However if you can quickly read code, see and succintly communicate the more optimal solution, you can easily 10x-20x your ability to code.

I'm begining to believe it may primarily come down to having the vocabulary and linguistic ability to succintly and clearly state the gaps in the code.
by sharkjacobs | 2025-07-15 06:58:59+00:00
- higher editorial standards and gatekeeping meant print media was generally of higher quality than internet publications

- print publications built reputations of spans of time that the internet still hasn't existed for, earning greater trust and authority, and helping to establish shared cultural touchstones and social cohesion

- copyright was clearer and more meaningful, piracy was more difficult

- selling physical copies and subscriptions was a more stable revenue source for creators and publishers than the tumult of selling ads in the 21st century

And all of this was nothing in the face of "receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read"
by godelski | 2025-07-15 06:59:12+00:00
The problem is Lemon Markets[0]

Lemon Markets do not happen because people do not want "peaches". Lemon markets happen because consumers cannot differentiate a lemon from a peach, at least at time of purchase. There can be high demand for peaches, and even producers of peaches. But if customers can't find out if they bought a lemon or peach until they get home and can take a bite, then peaches disappear.

We do not need a crystal ball to see what is going to happen. We've been watching it happen for more than a decade. We churn out shitty code that is poorly cobbled together, begging for the mercy of death. Yet, despite everyone having computers, phones, and using apps and software, how many can tell what is good and bad without careful inspection?

The bitter truth is that lemons are quick and easy to produce while peaches take time. If we split up software development as you propose, then it won't just be the AI coders who are eating lemons. Frankly, it seems that everything is sour these days. Even the most tech illiterate people I know are frustrated at the sour taste. There's demand for peaches, but it's a hard hole to dig ourselves out of. Even harder when building more shovel factories.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
by Paradigma11 | 2025-07-15 07:00:19+00:00
Yes, it can't change between edit and ask/agent without losing context but ask <-> agent is no problem. You can also change to your custom chat modes https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/chat/chat-modes without losing context. At least that's what I just did in VSCode Insiders.

Here are some nice copilot resources: https://github.com/github/awesome-copilot

Also, I am using tons of markdown documents for planning, results, research.... This makes it easy to get new agent sessions or yourself up to context.
by theodric | 2025-07-15 07:00:57+00:00
> Who is the product (LLM coding tools) actually for, and what is its purpose?

Ideally: it's for people who aren't devs, don't want to be devs, can't afford to pay devs to build their hobby projects for them, and just want to have small tools to unblock or do cool stuff. It's pretty incredible what a no-coder can knock off in an evening just by yelling at Cursor. It's a 3D printer for code.

But realistically, we know that the actual answer is: the people who already destroy companies for their own short-term benefit and regard all tech workers as fungible resources will have no problem undermining the feasibility of hiring good senior devs in 2050 in exchange for saving a ton of money now by paying non-devs non-dev money to replace juniors, leaning HARD on the remaining meds/seniors to clean up the resulting mess, and then pulling the ripcord on their golden parachute and fucking off to some yacht or island or their next C-suite grift before the negative consequences hit, all the while touting all the money they saved "automating" the development process at their last corp. And then private equity buys it up, "makes it efficient" to death, and feeds its remaining viable organs to another company in their portfolio.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 07:01:15+00:00
Maybe? Depends on what followed that thought process.

I've noticed this couple times with o3, too - early on, I'd catch a glimpse of something like "The user is asking X... I should reassure them that Y is correct" or such, which raised an eyebrow because I already know Y was bullshit and WTF with the whole reassuring business... but then the model would continue actually exploring the question and the final answer showed no trace of Y, or any kind of measurement. I really wish OpenAI gave us the whole thought process verbatim, as I'm kind of curious where those "thoughts" come from and what happens to them.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-07-15 07:01:49+00:00
Not to disagree, but WebAssembly intentionally does contain two equivalent descriptions (prose vs. mathematical) and two different formats (binary vs. text), plus a completely independent redefinition of IEEE 754 (!). The true size would be more like around 100 pages, where the instruction definitions would take about a half of them if my prediction from the table of contents is close enough. Maybe highly desugarable "WebAssembly Zero" might be defined and would be a good fit once SpecTec can produce a working modular interpreter.
by db48x | 2025-07-15 07:01:51+00:00
There’s no reason to expect that the properties of space are different inside the event horizon than outside. Of course the direction of time turns sharply as you go inside, but otherwise space is just space.

You only get an asymmetric black hole during the milliseconds of a merger. And that asymmetry is entirely due to the mass distribution inside the black hole. The black hole only becomes spherical again once the singularities have merged. Or in the more common case of rotating black holes, they only become properly oblate again once their ringularities have merged. Either way it happens quite quickly.
by Nevermark | 2025-07-15 07:02:03+00:00
> I know people calling "hype" are motivated by something.

You had me until you basically said, "and for my next trick, I am going to make up stories".

Projecting is what happens when someone doesn't understand some other people, and from that somehow concludes that they do understand those other people, and feels the need to tell everyone what they now "know" about those people, that even those people don't know about themselves.

Stopping at "I don't understand those people." is always a solid move. Alternately, consciously recognizing "I don't understand those people", followed up with "so I am going to ask them to explain their point of view", is a pretty good move too.
by westoncb | 2025-07-15 07:02:07+00:00
lol yep, fully get that. And I mean I'm sure o4 will be great but the '-mini' variant is weaker. Some of it will come down to taste and what kind of thing you're working on too but personal preferences aside, from the heavy LLM users I talk to o3 and gemini 2.5 pro at the moment seem to be top if you're dialoging with them directly (vs using through an agent system).
by defrost | 2025-07-15 07:02:31+00:00
Low PPM CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere affects IR in the atmosphere much as thin steel plate affects a bullet fired 5,000 yards through air .. it absorbs and scatters despite being a 'mere' PPM.

( Carbon Dioxide Absorbs and Re-emits Infrared Radiation - https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/carbo... )

You want science, testable and repeatable science?

Start with, say, Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity (1967)

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...

described as "the most influential studies of all time" ( https://www.carbonbrief.org/prof-john-mitchell-how-a-1967-st... )

There are others: https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-most-influential-climate-cha...

The real world physics of doubling a low CO2 concentration in representative air samples has been performed many a time .. it works as the cited paper says .. trapping more of heat energy radiated upwards by the land and sea that would otherwise diffuse outwards.
by ianred | 2025-07-15 07:02:41+00:00
The title should have been: AWS Lambda Works as Expected – An Application Architectural Bug [pdf]

If the designer expects a reliable system that guarantees processing of the request after the return of the status, they cannot rely on a server to not crash the moment the response was sent to the wire. Serverless enforces this well, yet people try to force their view of infinitely reliable infrastructure, which is not based in reality.
by mnsc | 2025-07-15 07:03:40+00:00
"AI" is good right now and feels inevitable. But the current models are trained on the extinct "pure" information state we had pre llm:s. Going forward we will have to start taking into account the current level of "ai slop" being added to the the information space. So I will have to trust my "detect ai generated information" LLM to correctly classify my main three llms responses as "hallucinating", "second level hallucinating", "fact based", "trustworthy aggregate" or "injection attack attempt". Probably should add another llm to check that response as well. Printed as a check list so that I can manually check it myself.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-15 07:03:47+00:00
"Heavy metal" in general is a bad term, but especially when used as a proxy for toxin. There is no universal definition of heavy metal and there is no inherent connection to toxicity in any specific organism.

Then again, pretty much every metal is toxic at some relatively low body-mass concentration, even iron (which actually can and does kill people, especially when children eat adult iron supplements).

Even lovely unreactive gold does have compounds that are toxic.
by com2kid | 2025-07-15 07:03:56+00:00
> Come back in a week and update us on how long you've spent debugging all the ways that the code was broken that you didn't notice in those 15 minutes.

Same as if I let a junior engineer merge code to main w/o unit tests.

Complete garbage, of course.

Oh wait, my code is also trash w/o good unit tests, because I am only human.

Instead I'll write out a spec, define behaviors and edge cases, and ask the junior engineer to think about them first. Break implementation down into a plan, and I'll code review each task as it is completed.

Now all of a sudden, the code is good, independent of who/what wrote it!
by yawpitch | 2025-07-15 07:04:21+00:00
> The horrors of Auschwitz, etc where not known at the time.

Oh, they were known, they were just able to be pushed out the mind until filmed, unredacted, and uncensored evidence started to be widely and publicly seen, after the fact. No one in the West sees Gazan children dying on their TV, they hear verbal descriptions (as they did from the very start of what became the Shoa) or they see a cut to black or a mosaic blur or a shot of aftermath rubble, maybe with a body covered by a sheet. Usually it’s just a number scrolling by on a chyron. One of the things the bastards of today learned is don’t make the mistake of the bastards of tomorrow and let your populace (or your enemy’s populace) see uncensored atrocities… anyone’s atrocities. Most Americans alive today have only seen the least horrible and most anodyne images from Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen or Sobibor (or My Lai, or Phnom Penh, or Baghdad, or on and on and on)… if they’d seen the bulldozers pushing naked children with holes through their skulls into pits they’d never have been able to vote for the bastard of today when he’s using the playbook(s) of the bastard(s) of yesteryear.

And yeah, we’re all complicit, especially in the other substantially equivalent, if not greater, atrocities happening with Western funding and Western weapons that we’ve been ignoring for equally long or longer. Yemen, Syria, Sudan, the DRC. The less the victims look like us, the easier it is for us to ignore… especially when our governments and our media do us the job we’ve asked them to do by not letting us see what’s really happening out there.

They’re going to do a much better job of getting us to be complicit in the future, given the confluence of AI, social media, and the progressively more authoritarian leaning of aging tech broionaires.
by Aachen | 2025-07-15 07:04:57+00:00
Why not on your home roof: because I don't have a home roof or a place to run the cable to the car. I could ask the landlord if they'll allow me to pay for solar panels on their building but I still don't have a driveway as mentioned

Why doesn't the Leaf have it: afaik the leaf is a normal car, not like the Aptera that I'd be looking to buy. Even the Lightyear One was claiming to be more efficient than normal but pretty disappointing in how much range you get from the solar roof. Still more than zero though, so yeah ask them why they don't sell that variant ¯\_:|_/¯ While we're at it, let's find out why there isn't a smartphone that fits my niche (modern chipset with dual frequency GNSS for less than twice the price that competitors charge for it, operable with one average-sized hand, sdcard slot, and ideally a headphone jack but at this point I'd settle just for a bit of storage and really don't feel like it should be a hard-to-find device) or a laptop that makes sense (arrow keys and no annoying tapered edges that don't fit a network port, for example, already limits your options to a tiny percentage of the available systems)
by PartiallyTyped | 2025-07-15 07:05:04+00:00
I work at lambda, and my team would be the one to engage with OP, it most likely would have been me actually to investigate this.

The fact that support didn’t engage us seems odd as we have gotten engaged for far more silly stuff.

However, in this case you should have awaited for the response from event emitter.

The lambda execution model clearly does not allow you to run things past the response as execution is frozen by the sandbox / virtualization software. From there, you’ve most likely caused a timeout when issuing the request.
by duckerduck | 2025-07-15 07:05:15+00:00
It seems that many in the field are converging to similar ideas. With AI the emphasis seems to be more on defining clearly what to build rather than how. I made a similar experiment [1] recently where I setup "rules" between code and spec and have the LLM check that they are the same, I think similar to how Kiro uses hooks.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44432215
by spauldo | 2025-07-15 07:05:18+00:00
It didn't feel finished to me - you could wander around the forest and interact with some stuff but I was never able to figure out what the "game" was. That might just be me, though - I'm not a gamer, really.

Note this was the old Blender before the UI rework and the game engine used here was removed from Blender. I believe the game engine stuff they have now is completely different code.
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-07-15 07:05:21+00:00
On my system grep is 136kb, dynamically linked to libc. Frankly, I don't use all its features and all its regex engines, can't remember when I searched for something more complex than fixed text. It supports coloring and references TERM variable. fgrep is 80kb, apparently supports all features except for coloring and pcre.
by const_cast | 2025-07-15 07:05:56+00:00
> Should allow pharma to sell drugs to the market. Allow people to sue if they are harmed.

This is a comical extreme vision of libertarian politics. Everything gets worse, lots of people die, but it's okay because we have a small principle of freedom. Yeah. Great.

If you're trying to persuade people you're doing a very shit job.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-15 07:06:29+00:00
Did anyone even read the article? Maybe you should get an LLM to bullet point it for you.

The author isn't arguing about whether LLMs (or AI) is inevitable or not. They are saying you don't have to operate within their framing. You should be thinking about whether this thing is really good for us and not just jumping on the wagon and toeing the line because you're told it's inevitable.

I've noticed more and more the go to technique for marketing anything now is FOMO. It works. Don't let it work on you. Don't buy into a thing just because everyone else is. Most of the time you aren't missing out on anything at all. Some of the time the thing is actively harmful to the participants and society.
by torginus | 2025-07-15 07:07:10+00:00
My numbers might not be accurate but the point stands, there's 'salary' kind of money, and 'startup valuation' money.

Hiring away key researchers costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars (an eye-watering never before seen amount of money before AI), but buying the startup costs billions.

Then again, I'm merely a pundit when it comes to this, there's money (the cash Apple has locked in its vaults), and 'money' (Google executes a merger with a stock swap arrangement, essentially costing them nothing, and the stock jumps 5% at the announcement, even making them money)
by godelski | 2025-07-15 07:07:39+00:00
I definitely have many of the same dreams as you. I've always been captivated by the holodeck. But I'm not convinced things need to be neural from top to bottom. There are many things I do not want my machine to hallucinate about. There are things I want to be static and uncompromising. You're also talking about compression, which, to be fair, is what current ML systems do best. Though I think we need some serious innovation to get to the point of generating world models.

That isn't to say that I don't think there shouldn't be neural OS's. But I do imagine them being something radically different. Do we really want them to mimic what we have now? Or is that not, in some vague way, more like a mind?

Regardless, I think this is really neat. I'm a big fan of doing things "just because" and "I wonder what would happen if". So I'm not trying to knock you down. I mean, I'm wrong about a lot of things haha
by rolandog | 2025-07-15 07:08:42+00:00
I do wonder if we could have some sort of deterministic/coordinated ⌈n⌉-level rotating hierarchy (think a rotating program cycle with period ⌈n⌉) such that n^n ≈ population. The aim would be to have ⌈n⌉-generation stewardship [0], without immediate-issue-deprioritization [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainabilit...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism#Deprioritization_o...
by mgaunard | 2025-07-15 07:09:08+00:00
So the solution is to have a thread waiting on the future. Technically you'd need a thread per future, which is not exactly scalable. The article uses a pool which has its own problems.

The article even mentions an arguably better approach (check on a timer), but for some reasons claims it is worse.

Those integrations are not exactly good designs regardless; simply don't use std::future is the solution, and use non-blocking async mechanisms that can cooperate on the same thread instead. Standard C++ has one albeit somewhat overcomplicated, senders and receivers. Asio also works.
by ssl232 | 2025-07-15 07:09:12+00:00
This is because space is _stiff_. Recall Hooke’s law from high school physics. The k constant represents the stiffness of the object. A rubber band is about 50. A sky scraper, about a million. Space? About 10^46 if I recall correctly. So it takes a truly enormous amount of energy in the form of gravitational waves to be able to move space enough for it to be detectable on Earth. And the only objects that can do that are the most massive ones moving at close to the speed of light: black holes, neutron stars, supernovae (the latter would have to be very close for us to see gravitational waves from - close enough that we’d likely see it with the naked eye as well).
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-15 07:10:54+00:00
Maybe?

In some cases, definitely. Then good luck making the business case to improve the framework or swap and refactor around a different framework. (Or you can do what I do during the more motivated/less busy times in my life: find undisturbed unpaid time to do it for your team.)

In other cases improving the framework comes at the cost of some magic that may obscure the intent of the code.

The nice thing about LLM code is that it's code. You're not monkey patching a method. You're not subtly changing the behavior of a built-in. You're not adding a build step (though one can argue that LLM generated code is akin to a separate build step.) You're just checking in code. Other contributors can just read the code.
by ebogdum | 2025-07-15 07:11:01+00:00
Will not argue, pro or against, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But this reminds me of the early 2000 interviews when every one was asking if you used Google search, and now we use "google it" as a verb.

There was a meme at one point with a dude at an interview answering that with something like this: If you google a recipe, it doesn't mean the food is done, you still need someone to cook it.

As for the "xx% LLM" or not, I would argue the same for "xx% Googled", "xx% Stackoverflow" "xx% Learned in school vs copied from the interned", "xx% actual development and engineering vs library importing and glueing".
by rgoulter | 2025-07-15 07:11:31+00:00
A couple of typical comments about LLMs would be:

"This LLM is able to capably output useful snippets of code for Python. That's useful."

and

"I tried to get an LLM to perform a niche task with a niche language, it performed terribly."

I think the right synthesis is that there are some tasks the LLMs are useful at, some which they're not useful at; practically, it's useful to be able to know what they're useful for.

Or, if we trust that LLMs are useful for all tasks, then it's practically useful to know what they're not good at.