MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by didibus | 2025-07-24 17:59:09+00:00
> Nothing in that paper said that AI can't speed up software engineering

I mean, the paper did provide tangible data that at least in their experiments, AI slowed down software engineering.

What they said is that it's not a proof that there's isn't a scenario or a mechanism where AI could result in speeding up software engineering. For that more research would be needed in measuring productivity of AI in more varied contexts.

For me at least, their experiment seem to describe the average developer's use of AI. So it's probably telling you that currently on average AI might be slowing things down.

Now the question is, can we find good data of outliers, and is it a simple matter of figuring out how to use it effectively, so we can upskill people and get the average to now be faster. Or will the outlier be conditioned on like, only for newbies, only for prototypes, only for the first X weeks on a greenfield code base, etc.

Edit: That said, the most fascinating data point of that study is how software engineers are not able to determine if AI makes them faster or slower, because they all thought they were 20% faster but were 19% slower in reality. So now you have to become really skeptical of anyone who claims they found a methodology or a workflow where their use of AI makes them faster. We need better measurement than just "I feel faster".
by nluken | 2025-07-24 17:59:32+00:00
I would say that in practice 99% of people can't outrun a bad diet, but not because of any sort of physiological reason. You simply need to train so much that most people won't ever approach the level of running/cycling/lifting they would need to do so.

If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+ miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight. Most people can't fit that much training into their lives without making it their life's primary focus at the expense of everything else, and couldn't sustain that level of training if they did, so it becomes a practical impossibility.

I do miss that aspect of running so much mileage, though I appreciate the freedom that stepping back from competition has afforded me in other areas. To maintain weight now, I eat 1-2 meals a day, but back then? I ate whatever got put in front of me, sometimes 4 meals a day.
by lxgr | 2025-07-24 18:00:01+00:00
What about all classes of durability errors that do not manifest in corrupted checksums (e.g. "cleanly" lost appends of entire transactions to the WAL)?

It seems like you're focusing on a very specific failure mode here.

Also, what if the data corruption error happens during the write to the actual database file (i.e. at WAL checkpointing time)? That's still 50% of all your writes, and there's no checksum there!
by NortySpock | 2025-07-24 18:00:11+00:00
The demo is good, through I wish you had presented it as text rather than as a gif.

I do see your point of wanting an option to refuse to delete the wal so a developer can investigate the wal and manually recover... But the the typical user probably wants the database to come back up with a consistent, valid state if power is lost. They do not want have the database refuse to operate because it found uncommitted transactions in a scratchpad file...

As a SQL-first developer, I don't pick apart write-ahead logs trying to save a few bytes from the great hard drive in the sky, I just want the database to give me the current state of my data and never be in an invalid state.
by pas | 2025-07-24 18:00:25+00:00
it's absolutely not a problem that people are writing more JS/TS than Rust.

if that Rust is for decades and the JS/TS gets thrown out in 1 year.

there's a lot of shitty C being written still around the world yet the Rust that goes into the kernel has real value long term.

there's an adoption cycle. Rust is probably already well over the hype peak, and now it's slowly climbing upward to its "plateau of productivity".

(and I would argue that yes there are pretty good things happening nowadays in the industry. for many domains efficient and safe libraries, frameworks, and platforms are getting to be the norm. for example see how Blender became a success story. how deterministic testing is getting adopted for distributed databases.)
by muzani | 2025-07-24 18:00:26+00:00
Not all PIPs are firings. But combined with the contract amendment (which sounds illegal) and the disrespect, especially being excluded from the launch channel, it sounds like it is. Harassing people to quit is also illegal in many places.

I would say lawyer up. They're treading near illegal grounds here and the lawyer should give you advice on what you evidence you need. And they'd likely help you stay strategic.
by notatoad | 2025-07-24 18:00:48+00:00
yeah, chesterton's fence has fully crossed the line from useful rhetorical tool to frequently mis-applied aphorism.

don't remove the fence until you know why it was built is a simple, useful thought experiment. but it doesn't mean "don't remove the fence until you know about every single side effect that it could possibly have had since it was built, including things the builder could never have possibly imagined, and fully accounted for the consequences of each of those effects."

if you sell the bull in chesterton's field, then you can tear down chesterton's fence. whether or not that lets the coyotes access the neighbour's chickens isn't part of the metaphor.
by bwfan123 | 2025-07-24 18:00:50+00:00
thanks for articulating so nicely what needs to be said in this debate.

Pushing errors leftward vs rightwards is such a nice metaphor, not to mention the metaphor on mental models. Also, your comment on why natural language is unable to describe the problem adequately (later in this thread), since sometimes constraints are discovered during the solution process, and otherwise, and if problems could be described adequately, thats what we call a programming language is very nice - ie, for natural language to adequately describe a problem, that becomes a formal language.

Only experienced engineers who have been through failed projects will understand what you are saying, and the rest of those in the grip of the ai-mania will come to terms with it soon.
by roguecoder | 2025-07-24 18:00:59+00:00
In twin studies the only things that have been associated with obesity are past calorie restrictive diets and soda consumption. All these other studies are usually picking up on either socio-economic or environmental factors, rather than actual behaviors we can control.

The reason to exercise isn't to avoid obesity: it is because the health benefits of exercise have nothing to do with weight. Careful, moderate exercising is good for our bodies, all on its own.

Whereas there is shockingly little evidence that obesity itself causes most correlated health conditions, rather than being a symptom (of stress, alienation, environmental contamination, inflammatory conditions, etc) correlated with the causes of those conditions. The weight with the lowest all-cause mortality is being "overweight".

But of course, "work less" is a lot harder to make money off of than "lose weight", so any science that can be twisted to prop up the weight loss industry will get spread far and wide.
by ksenzee | 2025-07-24 18:01:05+00:00
The quote in the article seems to come from nowhere. It’s not in the post they link, and Google doesn’t find it. I went looking because I was uncomfortable with the way Chesterton’s Fence was being used here: it’s not supposed to be “that fence is important!” It’s supposed to be “that fence may be important, and until you know whether it is or not, leave it up.” I’ve probably written a lot of code that looks like a fence across a road, and I would hate to think everyone I ever worked with is leaving it up regardless of whether it’s still useful.

In this case I happen to agree with the author’s premise: it seems clear that kids have a developmental need to interact with the world physically. But I’m not comfortable with a made-up blockquote that slightly twists the meaning of the original parable.

ETA: I’m not accusing the author of the Medium article of fabricating their quote; their source may have changed in the interim. I’m just saying someone made up this story, there’s no apparent source for it, and it’s not a good representation of the principle it purportedly explains.
by reactordev | 2025-07-24 18:01:52+00:00
Union types!! If everything’s a type and nothing works together, start wrapping them in interfaces and define an über type that unions everything everywhere all at once.

Welcome to typescript. Where generics are at the heart of our generic generics that throw generics of some generic generic geriatric generic that Bob wrote 8 years ago.

Because they can’t reason with the architecture they built, they throw it at the type system to keep them in line. It works most of the time. Rust’s is beautiful at barking at you that you’re wrong. Ultimately it’s us failing to design flexibility amongst ever increasing complexity.

Remember when “Components” where “Controls” and you only had like a dozen of them?

Remember when a NN was only a few hundred thousand parameters?

As complexity increases with computing power, so must our understanding of it in our mental model.

However you need to keep that mental model in check, use it. If it’s typing, do it. If it’s rigorous testing, write your tests. If it’s simulation, run it my friend. Ultimately, we all want better quality software that doesn’t break in unexpected ways.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-07-24 18:02:01+00:00
> How is it socialism? ... There's no löntagarfonder

And yet that's also you:

> Yes, but in this case the investors will be ordinary people, and the payment will effectively be the products that ordinary people want.

Well, this is essentially löntagarfonder but worse because it's funded by the people under the threat of violence (mandatory savings), not from corporate profits.

> that these people who are now required to be capital owners would likely buy at this reduced price, but it is not a socialist idea.

So, the people are forced to buy the ridiculously inflated marked at ridiculously inflated prices for the faint hope that "likely" they'll get lower prices on something far in the "glorious bright future" (tm). And that's not socialism?

Well, a careful analysis reveals that "likely" is quite unlikely, the people forced to "invest" are going to lose their shirts and inflation will actually accelerate, only the well connected will benefit because they will be in control of this devious scam.

You are obviously not familier with the many forms of socialism and you argue about irrelevant details. Mandatory savings equals socialism, monopolization equals socialism - it's not Stalin's socialism, it's Mussolini's socialism - lets not forget, he was the Duce of the Italian Social Republic. As Hitler was the head of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
by jsbisviewtiful | 2025-07-24 18:02:11+00:00
Personal take, but I think some people also understand that the hype machine around AI is coming from the rich and C-level people. Meanwhile companies are widely and openly axing jobs and or not paying artists, citing AI as the source of their new fortune. Personally, my use of AI in my job has so far not been that fruitful and for something that has so far dramatically underdelivered on its promises of utopian ideas we are instead actively seeing it used to undercut the 99% - and that’s not even getting into the environmental impact or the hellscape it’s made of the Internet.
by fragmede | 2025-07-24 18:02:16+00:00
The thing about open source, is that it came from a programmer in the halls of academia, MIT. But imagine the idea came from a Harvard Business School MBA instead. "You should do a bunch of work for free, and then give it to me for free, and uh, you can figure out a business model later." Does that sound remotely sane?

I have no leg to stand on, I owe my career to proprietary software building on top of open source code, but lately I have been wondering what that alternate world would look like. As it stands, if you want to write software and sell it, you've got at most a couple of months before someone open sources a clone of your project. Sure, there's no guarantee it'll be anywhere near as good. Photoshop is still king. But one can't help but wonder what the proprietary IBM world would have been like.
by margalabargala | 2025-07-24 18:02:16+00:00
> 1) "We're out of easily extractable oil" maybe, but I've heard it before and technology does have a way of marching forward.

You've heard it before because it's been true for a long time. Technology marches forwards, yes, but technology is expensive, and like I said, a lot of domestic production has fairly high price levels below which they will not operate.

> 2) "Rest of world's oil demand will drop" is possible but certainly not happening today and far from certain.

That's totally fair.

> 3) "Then Oil prices will plummet in the US Domestic market" is far from a sure thing even if 2) comes to pass. How do the other producers - who don't have large domestic markets! - react? What happens to global petrochemical demand? And what sort of Industrial policy could shield our markets, even if this happens globally?

Assuming (2) does happen, then I think this follows naturally. The cost to produce a barrel of oil varies wildly by country. If global demand drops, then the cheapest producers eat the market that they currently cannot fully supply.

Could industrial policy shield this? Sure, but at great cost to the US; that would have the side effect of pushing down energy prices for the rest of the world even more, making it even harder for us to keep up.

Uranium absolutely could save us, but I think we're a couple decades out from the political will being there to really get a lot of nuclear online.
by pempem | 2025-07-24 18:02:31+00:00
The thing is some of these tools have enduring 100s of years. Multiple generations. Others have changed in just a single generation to be nearly unrecognizable (ipod -> iphone)and their existence can be wiped away by trend/market making/capitalism.

Learning how to use a screwdriver helps even when the electric is out, the internet is offline, etc. etc. Learning cursive may not be as immediately helpful but we have all come to accept that developing more neural pathways is important and "smooth brain" is bad
by throwaway290 | 2025-07-24 18:02:35+00:00
> I mean, I can tell when a page contains advertisements, but I still use an ad-blocker

Yep, because why let people make money from their work right? You should just get content for free!

> this race can't be won by the ad-pusher LLM if the user uses the ad-blocker LLM.

As per my comment it literally can.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-24 18:02:35+00:00
We're definitely seeing an age where cost-is-no-limit, and the properties here look amazing.

Still, I guess I'm more interested in what Nikon is doing. Simplifying the process—eliminating the need for masks—could significantly decrease initial costs. https://www.techpowerup.com/339060/nikon-introduces-600x600-...
by tshaddox | 2025-07-24 18:02:39+00:00
> I don't know what an AccountID, UserID, etc. is. Now I need to know what those are (and how to make them, etc. as well) to use your software.

Presumably you need to know what an Account and a User are to use that software in the first place. I can't imagine a reasonable person easily understanding a getAccountById function which takes one argument of type UUID, but having trouble understanding a getAccountById function which takes one argument of type AccountId.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-24 18:02:43+00:00
Sure, prior to the C++ 11 memory model there just isn't a memory ordering model in C++ and all programs in either C or C++ which would need ordering for correctness did not have any defined behaviour in the language standard.

This is very amusing because that means in terms of the language standard Windows and Linux, which both significantly pre-date C++ 11 and thus its memory model, were technically relying on Undefined Behaviour. Of course, as operating systems they're already off piste because they're full of raw assembly and so on.

Linux has its own ordering model as a result, pre-dating the C++ 11 model. Linus is writing software for multi-processor computers more than a decade before the C++ 11 model so obviously he can't wait around for that.

[Edit: Corrected Linux -> Linux when talking about the man]
by TheDong | 2025-07-24 18:02:52+00:00
Even if you use channels to send things between goroutines, go makes it very hard to do so safely because it doesn't have the idea of sendable types, ownership, read-only references, and so on.

For example, is the following program safe, or does it race?

func processData(lines <-chan []byte) { for line := range lines { fmt.Printf("processing line: %v\n", line) } } func main() { lines := make(chan []byte) go processData(lines) var buf bytes.Buffer for range 3 { buf.WriteString("mock data, assume this got read into the buffer from a file or something") lines <- buf.Bytes() buf.Reset() } }

The answer is of course that it's a data race. Why?

Because `buf.Bytes()` returns the underlying memory, and then `Reset` lets you re-use the same backing memory, and so "processData" and "main" are both writing to the same data at the same time.

In rust, this would not compile because it is two mutable references to the same data, you'd either have to send ownership across the channel, or send a copy.

In go, it's confusing. If you use `bytes.Buffer.ReadBytes("\n")` you get a copy back, so you can send it. Same for `bytes.Buffer.String()`.

But if you use `bytes.Buffer.Bytes()` you get something you can't pass across a channel safely, unless you also never use that bytes.Buffer again.

Channels in rust solve this problem because rust understands "sending" and ownership. Go does not have those things, and so they just give you a new tool to shoot yourself in the foot that is slower than mutexes, and based on my experience with new gophers, also more difficult to use correctly.
by pitpatagain | 2025-07-24 18:02:57+00:00
I cook basically all my meals but also have no fear of "unnatural" ingredients (I have a shaker of msg right next to the stove, I have cooked mac and cheese with sodium citrate, etc) and no, this ingredient list is not like normal home cooked meals.

Some of it is typical flavoring stuff, onion powder, etc, that could easily show up on a list of spices in a home dish.

But a big part of the list is the stuff you see in highly engineered food product only: maltodextrin, dextrose monohydrate, yellow 5, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, sodium phosphate, etc.

No "home cooked meal of home grown fruits and vegetables" has a similar ingredient list to this.
by mikemac29 | 2025-07-24 18:03:13+00:00
You're misunderstanding the question. It's not that you get more work done, it's that the AI creates work that wasn't there before that is now required to be done. Exanple - AI generates an email faster than I could type it without question, but now I need to go line-by-line to make sure nothing in it is inaccurate before sending it, versus typing it myself and only putting in information I know is accurate. Which scenario takes more time? That's what I think many of the measures are missing. Too many are looking at how quickly the email is typed and calling it a gain, and ignoring the part where you review it. That might still be more productive, but I've yet to see a single AI sales demo that acknowledges this in a realistic way.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-24 18:03:14+00:00
> No title bars, no status bars, no buttons, no borders, no menus, etc.

> All windows are full-screen, just one is visible at any given time.

Oh, it's like cage ( https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage ) for X11. I was wondering ex. how you'd even move windows around in that little code; the answer is "you don't":)
by Terr_ | 2025-07-24 18:03:27+00:00
Trying out an analogy:

The time is the early 2000s, and the Segway™ is being suggested as the archetype of almost all future personal transportation in cities and suburbs. I don't hate the product, there's neat technology there, they're fun to mess with, but... My bullshit sensor is still going off.

I become tired of being told that I'm just not using enough imagination, or that I would understand if only I was plugged into the correct social-groups of visionaries who've given arguments I already don't find compelling.

Then when somebody does a proper analysis of start/stop distance, road throughput, cargo capacity, etc, that's awesome! Finally, some glimmer of knowledge to push back the fog of speculation.

Sure, there's a nonzero amount of confirmation bias going on, but goshdangit at least I'm getting mine from studies with math, rather than the folks getting it from artistic renderings of self-balancing vehicles filling a street in the year 2025.
by taeric | 2025-07-24 18:03:32+00:00
I'm not sure I understand the question? You get the engine to hit its sweet spot and to hold it there. That gain outweighs the loss from the new transmission.

This would be similar to hitting the optimal torque point. The idea there would be that you can get out of the acceleration phase faster, so that you can transition to a more efficient gear to maintain the speed for longer.

The wikipedia looks to cover this well. One of the cites is specific on the efficiency of the CVT. I think I overstated how much higher the loss is, so maybe that is confusing things? I thought it was 10-20, but the cite on the page shows it solidly around 10.
by pempem | 2025-07-24 18:03:47+00:00
Is it the tyranny of the majority? Is the majority really pushing for chromebooks or to get work emails at 9pm or the LLMs which -we breathlessly read every day for 4 years now- will make people jobless?

There are certainly conveniences - world changing improvements - but I dont think the majority ever defined or was asked what they were willing to trade. I dont think EULAs and buried opt-outs or binding arbitration across a product portfolio was what they had in mind.
by compiler-guy | 2025-07-24 18:03:49+00:00
Err, billions of people use the web everyday in ways that make them vastly more productive. Looking up random docs is now trivial whereas before the web, if you were luck your library might have an old copy.

And even then, the web was over-hyped at various points in its life. And it took a terrible crash to sort out what was real from what wasn’t. It’s not that the web wasn’t absolutely transformative (it was!) but it wasn’t what a huge number of proponents thought it would be either.
by honkycat | 2025-07-24 18:03:52+00:00
Intel needs to course correct.

I live in the area and know a LOT of intel fab workers.

The issue is not the workers: Intel has been captured by corporate raiders and toxic management.

They aren't interested in making chips or an innovative company. They just want to squeeze the juice out of the company until it is dry.

That is why it is so bad.
by amluto | 2025-07-24 18:03:53+00:00
> when was the last time you heard of a modern application backend being exploited through memory corruption, in any language?

It happens all the time, but it’s a bit hard to find because “modern application backend[s]” are usually written in Go or Python or Rust. Even so, you’ll find plenty of exploits based on getting a C or C++ library on the backend to parse a malformed file.
by munk-a | 2025-07-24 18:04:08+00:00
This feels like a great thing for the government to do which is why NOAA/NWS have traditionally maintained these services. The data these stations produce nationally is valuable but hard to quantify on an individual station level - should the station that detects vital data about a hurricane be given a large bonus for it? If so we'll end up with extremely lopsided coverage while the information from nearby weather systems can be invaluable.