MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RobinL | 2025-07-27 16:56:30+00:00
I have had similar experiences to OP. All of these apps (mostly maths learning, but also the bus one) were coded using a mix of copilot and Gemini CLI: https://rupertlinacre.com/

I'm probably capable of building all of them by hand, but with a 6yo I'd have never had the time. He loves the games, his mental arithmetic has come on amazingly now he does it 'for fun'.

All code is here: https://github.com/rupertlinacre

Much of this built out of a frustration that most maths resources online are trying to sell you something, full of ads, or poor quality. Just a simple zoomable numberline is hard to find
by another_twist | 2025-07-27 16:57:01+00:00
I think there is something happening here and whats needed is your own independent opinions of the technology. I think a lot of people dont like the idiots hyping the tech up and the incessant nonsense. Thats what turns them away from AI. But its a very useful bit of technology and your relationship to it should be direct with no middlemen.

So if you want to work and adopt AI, make your own workflows. Interact directly with ChatGPT or even the API as opposed to learning cursor shortcuts or Lovable prompts.

I use AI very frequently and I love to spell out my thinking and even have AI critique it. Once done, I generate code in phases to save typing. I dont think anything will replace software engineers but engineers with more knowledge will replace those with less. You have to snatch that knowledge. Moronic VCs and tool vendors wont help, direct involvement will.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-07-27 16:57:41+00:00
Awesome thanks. Added to my libraary. Interesting that the Coloradan study was asking a slightly different question regarding wolves in Colorado vs the magnitude of the wolf impact in Yellowstone. I felt the experimental setup was also good but might quibble that Elk have more impact than just eating, they can squash saplings just by walking on them. The point that Colorado maintains its Elk population by hunting was relevant as well, any impact of wolf predation would be less than it would be on a previously un-predated population. All in all though, I quite agree that the stories of Yellowstone’s wolves likely overstate the specific impact of wolves and understate the system dynamics that had other mechanisms also affecting them.

I also recognize that ‘popular’ writing is more about persuasion than facts :-) and it was important to persuade people that wolves weren’t “bad/evil” just predators that had lived there before. Telling that story as a rebalancing is certainly more palatable than saying “Yeah, if we had allowed hunting Elk (and perhaps Bison) in Yellowstone it would have similarly improved.” Generally keeping the human role as apex predator out of the headlines :-). Thanks again, great links.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-07-27 16:58:11+00:00
Sure. I'll show something. I'm working on an app to help teach myself french. I work at a busy startup so I only have a few hours to spare here and there, but I've managed to make an app that works very well for me, mainly because of the help I receive from Claude Code. I can't make the github repo public because it contains some copyright material [^1]. but maybe I'll make a censored version public if there's interest. It's at https://yap.town .

[^1]: to be clear, nothing in the frontend is copyrighted. I use some copyrighted works to figure out how common various words are, which I need because I wanted the app to teach the most common words first.

Edit: the site uses the FileSystemWritableFileStream API, so Safari/iOS users will need Safari 26.
by Sytten | 2025-07-27 16:58:34+00:00
I would like to rectify that LLRT is mostly community contributed and one guy from AWS (Hi Richard!). There are many businesses using LLRT modules (I worked a lot on making it modular) and rquickjs.

I am a maintainer of both and I wrote a couple of modules myself. There is no better JS runtime for Rust IMO, it is based on quickjs-ng (a fork of quickjs initially due to quickjs inactivity but not both projects are active and have diverged) with a lot of the major Node/WinterJS APIs.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-07-27 16:58:49+00:00
> I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying.

It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—and I like designing user interfaces (not necessarily graphical ones).

And I just love using Claude Code! I can tell it what to do and it does the annoying part.

It still takes work, by the way! Even for entirely "vibe coded" apps, I need to think through exactly what I want, and I need to test and iterate, and when the AI gets stuck I need to provide technical guidance to unblock it. But that's the fun part!
by mindslight | 2025-07-27 16:59:04+00:00
Because they're never fucking satisfied by what they've actually voted for. It's essentially the fundamentalist dynamic of blind faith, applied to the real world and making for terrible results.

The con artists they vote for are plainly not going to help their interests (and often work against them), yet they reject understanding this and instead buy into simplistic emotional propaganda that validates their frustrations and absolves their responsibility. Then after some years go by when the mess has set in and Democrats have the nominal power, the Republican media machine goes to work highlighting everything they've broken and pinning it on the current administration. Rinse and repeat.

(context: I'm a libertarian and I have many criticisms of the Democrats as well, but at least they haven't been directly sabotaging the country for the past several decades, culminating in this)
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-07-27 16:59:19+00:00
I let it write boilerplate, or other low impact stuff like html/css. It worked nicely converting Svelte components from Svelte 4 to 5 for example. And AI autocomplete has been a genuine productivity win although not without the occasional subtle bug. But I can't imagine trusting it for an entire codebase. If you're letting the AI write your code you're not thinking about it deeply enough to critique it imo. Which is fine for CSS or whatever but not most code.

It's such a great tool for learning, double checking your work, figuring out syntax or console commands, writing one-off bash scripts etc.
by smokel | 2025-07-27 16:59:31+00:00
You touch upon an interesting phenomenon that is quite pervasive throughout the world of software development, and possibly many other fields as well.

To avoid heated discussions, allow me to illustrate the concept with why enterprise software is mainly built with Java, whereas most blog posts are about writing backends with TypeScript, Python, or Rust. The reason for this is at least twofold:

1. Professional programmers don't get paid to write blog posts, and typically want to spend their free time doing other things. Hobbyists do have the time, but they typically do not see the added value of a boring language such as Java, because they don't work in teams.

2. When something is already known, it is boring for people to read about, and therefore less interesting to write about. When something is new, many people write about it, but it's hard to tell who is right and who is wrong.

Given that good writing, and the additional marketing to find the respective audience, take energy, it is not strange that we find weirdly biased opinions when reading blog posts and forums on the internet. I typically find it better to discuss matters with people I know and trust, or to experiment a bit by myself.

The same might happen now with reporting on AI assisted coding.

Edit: might as well just have said "visibility bias" and "novelty bias" if I had consulted an LLM before commenting.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-07-27 16:59:57+00:00
> threw their full weight at a lawyer

I used Steven as an example if private prosecution, where a private organization can take away your freedom outside of public prosecutors.

Steven did similar work to an investigative journalist at a high level, he brought attention to, and fought for a marginalized group. He did it through the court system rather than through publication. Despite doing it legally.

I don't see much of a difference. As recent times have shown, much of the legal system(and legal protections) depend on someone enforcing. Without that, there's little difference between the government boot and the corpo boot.
by hinkley | 2025-07-27 17:00:05+00:00
I was surprised when I found out my fancy RAID5 card was using DMA for all of its disk accesses instead of having its own memory. Just the dumbest design. I had a power issue fry the last memory stick in my machine so it would come up clean and then under load report disk corruption. The disk was fine. Memory was broken. I rebuilt that fucking array three times before I ran a memory analyzer on the box.
by _the_inflator | 2025-07-27 17:00:24+00:00
Beetroot juice is legal “doping”.

Of course nothing illegal, only natural, a disadvantage if you don’t utilize it for you.

There are beetroot parties at almost any Triathlon event for the runners, apnea divers also get a huge natural and healthy boost.

I use it for long runs I don’t really feel the difference every time, but stats and data speak their own language.

Give it a try, timing is a bit tricky depending on your feast.

But caution: don’t overdo it due to oxalate as potential risk.

And mustn’t be the juice, the beetroot itself already does the job.
by roryirvine | 2025-07-27 17:01:04+00:00
As I understand it, there's currently evidence for arable farming in Britain between 4000BC - 3300BC, and again from 1500 BC onwards (those dates are very approximate, obviously!)

What happened between is anyone's guess. There may have been a wholesale shift to pastoralism, or farming may have continued in some form that doesn't show up in the archaeological record that we've been able to decipher so far.

Stevens and Fuller (2012) is the usual reference for the maximal claim for the abandonment of agriculture: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/ab...
by SubiculumCode | 2025-07-27 17:01:45+00:00
As a cognitive psychologist, I highly suspected that, broadly speaking, this was the needed direction for AI. See Fuzzy Trace Theory[1].

Fuzzy Trace Theory basically suggests that memory (and cognition generally) works at multiple levels spanning verbatim representations to gist-level representations, that get bound together into memories. Recalling gist, the general idea, along with specific details, allows for powerful generalization and flexible retrieval pathways.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4979567/
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-07-27 17:01:59+00:00
I worked on visual studio at Microsoft 20 years ago, and once had the opportunity to go to a trade show to represent the company.

While I was manning a booth, this software developer came up to me and said VS had gotten too good at code generation to automate data access, and we should cut it out because that was the vast majority of what he did. I thought he was joking, but no, he was totally serious.

I said something to him about how those tools were saving him from having to do boring, repetitive work so that he could focus on higher value, more interesting development, instead, but he wasn’t having it.

I think about him quite often, especially these days. I wonder if he’s still programming, and what he thinks about LLMs
by parineum | 2025-07-27 17:02:12+00:00
Actually, a single point can prove you wrong but a lot of data is needed to prove you right. The reply mostly agreed with you, they said 4/5 was cheaper but 1/5 wasn't. Your statement implies 5/5 is cheaper, the other poster is the one that only needs one data point.

> USPS and FedEx both serve meaningful markets.

You from two replies ago would be shocked to hear that.
by nicce | 2025-07-27 17:03:24+00:00
I have just fought 4 days with Claude 4 Sonnet because it generates too much garbage for my usage, and I am considering stopping the AI usage altogether. No matter what system prompt, rules et. all you give, they don't want to do as I said, but instead do something which compiles (Rust) but is not performant or is extremely verbose and includes all kinds of unnecessary things. They have too much assumptions that some function is used/not used in async context, or it is okay to clone, or whatever. Is the Opus really that big leap?
by brabel | 2025-07-27 17:03:33+00:00
> Regarding your fence, 20 years is very far from enough to establish "urminnes hävd".

I was thinking of adverse possession, for which the time limits are 20 years or even 10 years in some cases:

https://jdc-definitions.wikibase.wiki/wiki/Adverse_Possessio...

Original Swedish text: https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...
by kmeisthax | 2025-07-27 17:03:40+00:00
The Roman Empire did not fall because of lead pipe. It fell because the empire's elites ran out of territory to conquer and turned against one another.

Also, the Roman Empire didn't fall, either. It split in two. The Western half continued splitting into a bunch of competing kingdoms while the Eastern half slowly shrank over about a thousand years. It eventually wound up being rolled into the Ottoman Empire, which lasted until WWI.
by misja111 | 2025-07-27 17:03:57+00:00
> AI coding tools supercharge this, allowing you to bring whole machineries to life by waving your hands around, offloading the understanding for much longer

I guess you could use them like that, but you'll do much better if you try to get an understanding of the problem beforehand. This way you can divide the problem into subtasks with reasonably clear description, that Claude will be able to handle without getting lost and without needing too many corrections.

Also, you'll still need to understand pretty much every task that Claude has implemented. It frequently makes mistakes or does things in a suboptimal way.

When you use AI properly it's a great tool, it's like an IDE on steroids. But it won't take away the need to use your brains.
by dare944 | 2025-07-27 17:04:09+00:00
Not sure what your point is. The ability to manufacture silicon chips will only ever be in the hands of a relatively small group of people worldwide. So of course all of us are dependent on these people/businesses to do any form of modern computing.

The question isn't how can we live without dependencies. It's how many dependencies must we have? And of those that aren't strictly necessary, what are the benefits (and costs) of breaking them?
by westurner | 2025-07-27 17:04:48+00:00
> That's fair, they are relabelling colours and rotating the boards.

Photometric augmentation, Geometric augmentation

> I meant more like mass generation of novel puzzles to try and train specific patterns.

What is the difference between Synthetic Data Generation and Self Play (like AlphaZero)? Don't self play simulations generate synthetic training data as compared to real observations?
by qsort | 2025-07-27 17:05:44+00:00
I think I partially agree, your first paragraph is exactly how I feel. Boilerplate and trivial stuff absolutely should be automated. It's also true that people have been pushing a narrative where programming is some dark art and you should use Methodology X or Theory Y. Bro, chill, you're writing a website.

On the other hand software development in the high sense, i.e. producing solutions for actual problems that real people have, is certainly intellectually demanding and also something that allows for several standard deviations in skill level. It's fashionable to claim we all have bullshit jobs, but I don't think that's a fair description at all.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-07-27 17:05:50+00:00
> It doesn't work, not for Moon missions. It was never designed for Moon missions in the first place, the original plan was unspecified "deep space" missions without any clear plan of what it would actually be doing (because it's actual purpose is to keep money flowing to old Shuttle contractors.)

Maybe I'm missing some details but I thought the entire purpose of first-stage rockets was to get a certain payload with certain max dimensions (what can fit inside a cylinder of a certain height and radius) to LEO, or the equivalent delta-V. At that point first stage is discarded anyway. So what exactly the payload is (beyond its dimensions) and you do with your payload after getting to LEO (or equiv delta V) that shouldn't really make a difference, and you can't blame the first stage (which SLS is) for that if it did its job.

In the case of SLS, Block I can get 95 metric tons, Block I-B can get 105 tons and Block II 130 tons.

The Falcon Heavy in comparison can only get max 64 tons to LEO, less if you want to recover boosters and the core to save money

The real winner is the Saturn V which could get 140 tons to LEO. I know it was expensive per launch (about $1 billion in 2025 dollars) but given all the billions we've blown on trying to develop cheaper tech it seemed like we could have just stuck with what we know worked
by deaddodo | 2025-07-27 17:06:04+00:00
Yeah, the person you're responding to is taking "taint" to mean a literal ban situation; versus the very real status that exists in Linux Kernel development.

"TAINTing" a driver/code doesn't mean it's blacklisted, it means it can't be upstreamed into the GPL codebase. It means that if you build a Kernel with it, it's no longer considered OSS-friendly.

There are plenty of legitimate and viable codebases that use TAINTed kernels. The DoD, various government entities around the world, some commercial interests, etc.
by jebarker | 2025-07-27 17:06:13+00:00
OK, I apologize if I misunderstood. My core belief is that it’s possible for humans to continue to prosper without causing a mass extinction of other species. I believe that largely happens through managing our impacts on the environment in which the species live and not just through direct intervention in the lives of those species, e.g. reducing deforestation and rewilding, reducing ocean acidification to save coral reefs. So I don’t think we have to choose specific species we wish to save and those we are willing to let go extinct.
by marcosdumay | 2025-07-27 17:06:24+00:00
> In contrast, language modeling requires storing a large number of arbitrary phrases and their relation to each other

A person has some ~10k word vocabulary, with words fitting specific places in a really small set of rules. All combined, we probably have something on the order of a few million rules in a language.

What, yes, is larger than the thing in this paper can handle. But is nowhere near as large as a problem that should require something the size of a modern LLM to handle. So it's well worth it to try to enlarge models with other architectures, try hybrid models (note that this one is necessarily hybrid already), and explore every other possibility out there.
by crq-yml | 2025-07-27 17:06:35+00:00
I don't disagree, but I think the optimization potential tends to be limited to trivial automations in practice. The idioms we use to code at a higher level are mostly wrappers on something we know how to do at a lower level with a macro. The compiler still helps because it guard-rails it and puts you on the path to success as you build more complex algorithms, but you have to get into very specific niches to reach both of "faster than C" and "easier to code the idiom".

As ever, hardware is an underappreciated factor. We have make-C-go-fast boxes today. That's what the engineering effort has been thrown towards. They could provide other capabilities that prefer different models of computing, but they don't because the path dependency effect is very strong. The major exceptions come from including alternate modalities like GPU, hardware DSP and FPGA in this picture, where the basic aim of the programming model is different.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-27 17:06:44+00:00
> The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.

Actually for products, a lot of people just go to Amazon has a thriving ad business.

> Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.

The problem with Google is that they can’t produce good profitable products. Innovation means nothing for a for profit company if it doesn’t make money.
by conradev | 2025-07-27 17:06:46+00:00
Iroh is much better suited for the application layer. You can multiplex multiple QUIC streams over the same connection, each for a specific purpose. All you need is access to QUIC, no virtual network interface.

It’s a bit like gRPC except you control each byte stream and can use one for, say, a voice call while you use another for file transfer and yet another for simple RPC. It’s probably most similar to WebRTC but you have more options than SCTP and RTMP(?).
by AlecSchueler | 2025-07-27 17:06:58+00:00
> development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening.

For years I've had this issue with pretty much everything happening in China, from business to politics to culture. For me personally, getting a window into China has been the number one game changer with LLMs. It's easier than ever to find and digest Chinese sources.
by FergusArgyll | 2025-07-27 17:07:01+00:00
I think a lot of people are missing a crucial point here; the main problem with llm's (as far as wiki is concerned) is these ways of writing are biased, weasel wordy, puffery etc etc. which wiki doesn't want to have regardless of who wrote it.

Technically speaking, if an llm can write wp style prose and source it correctly, that wouldn't be a problem (imo)
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-27 17:08:00+00:00
Just because it's called authentication doesn't mean that all possible applications of it qualify. Following directions provided by the owner isn't breaking into the system. Clicking "Yes I'm over 18" when you aren't isn't a violation of the CFAA any more than any other ToS violation is.

What matters isn't the box presenting the challenge but rather the nature of the challenge itself.
by MattGaiser | 2025-07-27 17:09:17+00:00
Hackathons are generally pretty superficial.

I attended lots of hackathons in university and learned pretty quickly that I should spend 9/10ths of my time on the dashboard or an impressive demo.

I once won a prize for scalability by using a serverless end point.

Nobody’s checking, nobody really wants to judge in detail, so you need to make it easy.
by joshtbradley | 2025-07-27 17:09:50+00:00
Fair point. Except for “don’t even serve as much of a purpose as wild wolves.” I’d argue dogs, bees, and let’s say cars, all serve an enormous purpose to humanity. The pros/cons of replenishing an ecosystem is a good framework to analyze this through. I am selfishly an advocate for humanity, and safer forests with more wild game for hunting seems like a bigger pro to me. Of course, I could be disastrously wrong. But we don’t know yet.
by misja111 | 2025-07-27 17:09:53+00:00
As someone who has been using Java for enterprise software for over 25 years, but who likes to program his pet projects in Python, let me give you another reason:

3. Python has a very fast feedback loop. You type, run and see the result immediately. This is great for small projects and prototypes. Java needs much more work, not just for the compiling but it also needs more boilerplate. This is fine for enterprise projects which typically are very large and prefer stability over speed of development. But at home I don't have the time or the patience for that.