MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shakna | 2025-07-15 05:51:43+00:00
I don't really use CLI for any of that. Despite using it almost exclusively. (Email on my phone - rarely need to move files.)

I use it for:

Arbitrary deep searches in specific root trees. (Where did I make my definitions of foo last time?)

Generating 20 different formats of documents. (Yay for supporting a bunch of platforms.)

Rewriting codebases - this might be the closest to "writing documents". (Mostly git things. And most git GUIs are... Trash.)
by aurareturn | 2025-07-15 05:52:20+00:00
Framework laptops are very costly, more than an equivalent Macbook but they have inferior screens, keyboards, speakers, touchpad, processor speed, GPU, build quality to Macbooks. They sell you on upgradability and repairability but Macbooks tend to last a decade.

So it's a no for me.

Only plus is that it can run Linux well.
by crinkly | 2025-07-15 05:52:55+00:00
Whilst this is a combination of user error and shitty support (not unexpected) I’ve seen Amazon directly not understand how their own lambda stuff works before. There is a pretty horrible bug in one of their higher level products that used lambda because they didn’t know that an execution environment can be reused between invocations. Their software assumed entirely incorrectly that it was stateless resulting in us having to, as the first line in the lambda, clean up the previous invocation’s data on the filesystem. After 3 years they haven’t fixed this as far as I am aware. Getting the actual engineers who wrote this on a call was unproductive as well suggesting it would take months to sort out. We built our own in the end.
by pixelfarmer | 2025-07-15 05:53:59+00:00
The problem is that it permeates writing in so many places. For example, games get more and more littered with this sort of nonsense, too. And worse, it is often also used as a vehicle to convey all sorts of ideologies. Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.

The other problem with it: To me, as an adult, it feels like whoever wrote this made the assumption I'm stupid. This sort of writing is ok, up to a certain degree, for kids. But for adults? A lot of anime are aimed at the younger generations. Anime written for adults are done very differently.

The Matrix is heavily influenced by manga / anime, which you see in quite a few scenes in how they are shot. But many of the explanations that are done are part of the development of Neo, so they never really feel out of place.

Cyberpunk 2077, which does have on the nose dialogue here and there as part of random NPCs spouting stuff. But by and large it tells a story not just through dialogues but also visually. And the visual aspect is so strong that some reviewers completely failed at reviewing the game, they were unable to grasp it. Which is a huge issue, because we are talking about adults here.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-15 05:54:22+00:00
> Every time you call a JS function, it's blocking; if it internally busy-looped, you'll die just as much as if you do the loop yourself.

But in a very temporary way. If it takes seconds that's a bug, while if blocking I/O takes seconds that's normal behavior.

And I've never seen a javascript busy loop in non-malicious code.

> I expect it to have the same guarantees and risks of calling a non-async JS function.

The main guarantee is that the function will be done and have all its temporary data cleaned up before your (non-worker) execution switches to other code. And in practice you can expect it to return within .1 seconds.

That guarantee is going to be an issue if you try to introduce some kind of "block on promise". And the timing expectation is meaningful too.
by withinboredom | 2025-07-15 05:54:29+00:00
I was having a discussion with someone, they said, “let me ask ChatGPT. If it says it’s true, it must be true.”

I also worked with a fellow manager who used to tell the engineers they were wrong because ChatGPT said so. That one was actually entertaining to watch. The coming humbling of that manager was so satisfying.

People put a lot of stake in what it says, not realizing it isn’t always right.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-07-15 05:55:39+00:00
Yeah, I can't wait for this slop generation hype circlejerk to end either. But in terms of being used by people who don't care about quality, like scammers, spammers, blogspam grifters, people trying to affect elections by poisoning the narrative, people shitting out crappy phone apps, videos, music, "art" to grift some ad revenue, gen AI is already the perfect product. Once the people who do care wake up and realise gen AI is basically useless to them, the internet will already be dead, we'll be in a post-truth, post-art, post-skill, post-democracy world and the only people whose lives will have meaningfully improved are some billionaires in california who added some billions to their net worth.

It's so depressing to watch so many smart people spend their considerable talents on the generation of utter garbage and the erosion of the social fabric of society.
by rafaelmn | 2025-07-15 05:55:43+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.

This so much - can't believe how much of these "I am not even reading the LLM code anymore it is that good" comments I am reading. Either you are all shit programmers or your "You are an expert senior software developer" prompts are hitting the LLM harder. Because I'm here LLMing as much as the next guy, hoping it will take the work away - but as soon as I start being lazy, jumping over the code and letting it take the wheel it starts falling apart and I start getting bug reports. And the worst part is - it's the code "I wrote" (according to git blame), but I'm reading it for the first time as well and reading it with attention to detail reveals its shit.

So not sure what models you guys are getting served - especially the OpenAI stuff for coding, but I'm just not getting there. What is the expert prompt sauce I am missing here ?
by godelski | 2025-07-15 05:55:54+00:00
> It would be utopian

People wrote about this. We know the answer! I stated this, so I'm caught off guard as it seems you are responding to someone else, but at the same time, to me.

London Times, The Naked Sun, Neuromancer, The Sockwave Rider, Stand on Zanzibar, or The Machine Stops. These all have varying degrees of ideas that would remind you of social media today.

Are they all utopian?

You're right, the downsides are harder to imagine. Yet, it has been done. I'd also argue that it is the duty of any engineer. It is so easy to make weapons of destruction while getting caught up in the potential benefits and the interesting problems being solved. Evil is not solely created by evil. Often, evil is created by good men trying to do good. If only doing good was easy, then we'd have so much more good. But we're human. We chose to be engineers, to take on these problems. To take on challenging tasks. We like to gloat about how smart we are? (We all do, let's admit it. I'm not going to deny it) But I'll just leave with a quote: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
by bee_rider | 2025-07-15 05:56:03+00:00
I never really get the cryptocurrency comparison. AI has an application beyond grift. Like, even if they stopped developing it now, an AI “style hints” in the style of spellcheck and grammar rule check would be a no-brainer as a thing to add to an office suite.

The valuations are totally and completely nuts. But, LLMs have little legitimate applications in a way that cryptocurrencies never will.
Smart Tax and E-Invoicing Software
by Anusaar | 2025-07-15 05:56:13+00:00
Anusaar is a next-gen AI/ML enabled SaaS-based e-invoicing software that automates financial operations, ensures tax compliance and improving cash flow.

Revolutionize e-invoicing with AI—secure, seamless, and compliant. Optimize workflows and automate business document exchange.
by no_time | 2025-07-15 05:57:19+00:00
>In various jurisdictions, a trademark that doesn't get defended makes it much more likely that you'll lose your trademark all together when trying to stop actual infringement. If the infringers can point at others and say "look, they let others infringe on their trademark for years and only now they're going after us" that can have an impact on the viability of your case.

Oh, I didn't know that. At least now it makes some sense. Thanks.
by ehnto | 2025-07-15 05:57:31+00:00
> For example, I love Cursor. Especially for boilerplating. But SOTA models with tons of guidance can still not reliably implement features in my larger codebases within the timeframe it would take me to do it myself. Test-time compute and reasoning makes things even slower.

Importantly it also takes you guiding it to complete the task. Meaning you still need to pay a human and the cost of the LLM, so it's slower and a bit more expensive.

I am not convinced either that AI working on complex programming tasks could be guided by less skilled devs, meaning you still need to pay the skilled dev.

In my experience so far, the cost analysis doesn't work for more complex application development. Even if the cost of the LLM was free it is often wasting the skilled dev's time.

All these metrics will change over the years and maybe the math works out eventually, or in specific circumstances, and I forsee LLMs assisting in development into the future.

I am not seeing the cataclysmic wholesale replacement of humans in the workforce some are predicting, at this stage.
by kragen | 2025-07-15 05:58:19+00:00
Wirth did it before BCPL in EULER, but virtual machines of various kinds predate EULER; Schorre's META-II output a textual assembly language for a fictitious processor, and Short Code predated that, but was intended to be written by hand. Simulators for one real computer on another were already commonplace by the 01960s, so that you could keep running your programs for an obsolete machine, and I don't remember anyone specifically saying so, but I would assume that designers of planned computers were writing such simulators for their designs by the end of the 01950s.
by enjo | 2025-07-15 05:58:45+00:00
100% agree. I have so much trouble squaring my experience with the hype and the grandparent post here.

The types of tasks I have been putting Claude Code to work on are iterative changes on a medium complexity code base. I have an extensive Claude.md. I write detailed PRDs. I use planning mode to plan the implementation with Claude. After a bunch of iteration I end up with nicely detailed checklists that take quite a lot of time to develop but look like a decent plan for implementation. I turn Claude (Opus) loose and religiously babysit it as it goes through the implementation.

Less than 50% of the time I end up with something that compiles. Despite spending hundreds of thousands of tokens while Claude desperately throws stuff against the wall trying to make it work.

I end up spending as much time as it would have taken just to write it to get through this process AND then do a meticulous line by line review where I typically find quite a lot to fix. I really can't form a strong opinion about the efficiency of this whole thing. It's possible this is faster. It's possible that it's not. It's definitely very high variance.

I am getting better at pattern matching on things AI will do competently. But it's not a long list and it's not much of the work I actually do in a day. Really the biggest benefit is that I end up with better documentation because I generated all of that to try and make the whole thing actually work in the first place.

Either I am doing something wrong, the work that AI excels at looks very different than mine, or people are just lying.
by dasil003 | 2025-07-15 05:58:58+00:00
Two things are very clearly true: 1) LLMs can do a lot of things that previous computing techniques could not do and we need time to figure out how best to harness and utilize those capabilities; but also 2) there is a wide range of powerful people who have tons of incentive to ride the hype wave regardless of where things will actually land.

To the article's point—I don't think it's useful to accept the tech CEO framing and engage on their terms at all. They are mostly talking to the markets anyway. We are the ones who understand how technology works, so we're best positioned to evaluate LLMs more objectively, and we should decide our own framing.

My framing is that LLMs are just another tool in a long line of software tooling improvements. Sure, it feels sort of miraculous and perhaps threatening that LLMs can write working code so easily. But when you think of all the repetitive CRUD and business logic that has been written over the decades to address myriad permutations and subtly varying contexts of the many human organizations that are willing to pay for software to be written, it's not surprising that we could figure out how to make a giant stochastic generator that can do an adequate job generating new permutations based on the right context and prompts.

As a technologist I want to understand what LLMs can do and how they can serve my personal goals. If I don't want to use them I won't, but I also owe it to myself to understand how their capabilities evolve so I can make an informed decision. I am not going to start a crusade against them out of nostalgia or wishful thinking as I can think of nothing so futile as positioning myself in direct opposition to a massive hype tsunami.
by trod1234 | 2025-07-15 05:59:07+00:00
In many ways, the market for laptops has collapsed.

My latest laptop purchase I view largely as a bonfire where I burned $1200 in effigy, and not from lack of marketing, but from lack of real options.

Lenovo has lost a customer in me for life, and it taught me a very important lesson. If the options don't exist anymore at a reasonable price point or reliability you just have to build your own.

For the recent purchase (2 or 3 years ago), here is a running list of failures. A required Lenovo Advantage firmware update (same day as delivery), bricked default power charging preventing charging and running while plugged in. This forced an RMA when the battery died without any way to power the device on.

The new one received 2 weeks later headphone jack failed. 2 months later and several separate USB PHY ports had failed requiring a USB hub on the remaining functional port. by 6 months, HDMI became intermittent. 7 months the Webcam microphone and video had failed enumeration. Just shy of a year the WIFI, and especially bluetooth became intermittent.

I sought out a business laptop capable of video editing. I got a dumpster fire, and worse it didn't function at all under Linux so I didn't even try; the failures were W10 the entire way.

Anyways, nowadays you just have to build your own cyberdeck using distributed computing principles. The old macs used several chips in parallel, why not RISC?

I know some people have already done it, and the performance they are getting isn't half bad and the work I've seen seems light years beyond where security is today providing peace of mind that people once had with regards to firmware malware/bad state (you could always reset to a known working safe state where it wasn't accessible to the internet).

Imagine the peripherals, basic display, attachments, boot all controlled by an elevated privileged FPGA that you dock to which oversees the other equipment that does the performant work which is offloaded to a distributed backbone.

Most off-the-shelf mainboard chip combos today run ~$500 minimum, for a ton of features that aren't needed, or wanted, and just slapped together. Even a basic case runs at least $100 now with fans that fail. within a month.
by Roark66 | 2025-07-15 05:59:26+00:00
Unless like me you live 8h travel by road away, and there are no reasonable flights, to the nearest office.

I made a decision long ago. Either a job is remote (I apply) in which case it has to really be remote. Or it is hybrid(I don't apply). If there is a day in a week/month/year that you're required to visit it is no longer 100% remote. This especially applies if it requires international travel, doubly so to certain places that make such travel even a bigger hassle than it needs to be (I didn't think US will be on this list in my lifetime, but here we are).

Perhaps I'm just annoyed it is very common in this job market (at least when I looked last ~2 years ago) to advertise 100% remote jobs, have 3 interviews during which you're assured "yes,100% remote" and then either get a contract that has provisions allowing for it to be revoked, or even being told verbally, or not even being told, but pressured as time goes by, no actually you're expected to visit. I had a client like this once. Otherwise a good job. The manager of my team got constantly a lot of crap that his people are "never in" despite the company hiring the whole team as a remote.

There are plenty of people in business that would love that whole remote thing to dissappear. It starts with "come to the office once a month for a night out, we'll pay for your hotel", then it's just "come to the office once a month", then it's 2 weeks, 1 week, then it's 3 days a week, and then it's just Friday you work from home, but no one actually works on that day, but you so you're blocked on most of what you do.

Who are these people? Managers that never learned how to manage remote teams, HR that worries their dept will be cut down, branch/country directors that can't show the visiting "leadership" an office buzzing with activity, and that guy who decided it's a good idea to buy a huge office building in the city centre a month before covid started (I've already worked fully remote for 3 years before covid started, but it was just me and another guy in a team of 9, now it is much better when the entire team is remote, there is no "us and them").

Sorry, just as luditites wanted to go to the power of muscle from the power of steam, there is no going back. The advantages to everyone are too great. To the employee, don't have to explain I hope, to the employer, lower cost and much bigger hiring market, to the entire world there is less travel and entire generations of people not wasting 20% of their waking hours on travel...
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-15 06:02:24+00:00
You can do this with no tracking SDKs.

Everyone leaves telemetry breadcrumbs everywhere. Almost everyone radiates a ton of different kinds of data, RF, optical, etc fingerprints that are incidentally picked up everywhere they go. In fact, there have been interesting papers on tracking entities that don’t leave any breadcrumbs because they visibly perturb the entities that do! Existing in the world has side effects that are picked up by all kinds of systems and it is analytically possible, with sufficient large quantities of data, to start attributing those side effects to specific entities. That’s the game.

The caveat is that it requires large quantities of data. Many, many petabytes is table stakes.

What you are not grokking is that this can be done with data that is not designed to track anyone but which can reconstruct identity with sophisticated analysis across many innocuous data sources. This has been one of the unexpected headaches of GDPR; you can often identify people with boring industrial sensors that were designed for industrial purposes with sufficiently sophisticated analytics. The fact that this is possible has made this data (legally) PII.

A person that literally doesn’t own a mobile phone is still trackable. The whole “burner phone” was always a movie trope, that hasn’t worked for decades if ever.

The ability to do graph reconstruction across dirty, noisy spatiotemporal events that may have nothing to do with the target in question is robust. It isn’t trivial, but at this point it is a mature field of endeavour.
by godelski | 2025-07-15 06:03:17+00:00
I don't blame people for being optimistic. We should never do that. But we should be aware how optimism, as well as pessimism, can so easily blind us. There's a quote a like by Feynman

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

There is something of a balance. Certainly, Social Media does some good and has the potential to do more. But also, it certainly has been abused. Maybe so much that it become difficult to imagine it ever being good.

We need optimism. Optimism gives us hope. It gives us drive.

But we also need pessimism. It lets us be critical. It gives us direction. It tells us what we need to fix.

But unfettered optimism is like going on a drive with no direction. Soon you'll fall off a cliff. And unfettered pessimism won't even get you out the door. What's the point?

You need both if you want to see and explore the world. To build a better future. To live a better life. To... to... just be human. With either extreme, you're just a shell.
by mlsu | 2025-07-15 06:03:37+00:00
My intellectual strategy to get to the bottom of these grand questions is very straightforward: look at my own life and evaluate what’s important.

In my life, I have found the answer to these questions. Telling a joke and making a colleague laugh. Looking at my 1yo niece crawling toward me. Hanging out in the garden with my wife and my dogs.

I look at these things, and it’s just so obvious. AI boyfriends? Ai email readers or AI taxi drivers or AI app makers? I can talk to a Tesla robot behind the counter at Wendy’s instead of a bored teenager? And that’s gonna ~transform~ my life? What?

You are right to point out that these questions are not adequately resolved. They never will be, not in the abstract and certainly not by technology. In some sense this dialogue has been happening for thousands of years, starting with Plato or before. “What is the point?”

When I was younger I used to wonder a lot intellectually about this stuff as many do but I’ve realized pretty recently that the answer is right here in my own short life and it has god damn nothing to do with technology.

I like solving puzzles and programming and I have a half built robot in the garage. But I will never confuse that with my living breathing niece. They just aren’t the same, my god isn’t it obvious!?

> now we're trying to create AGI by turning humans into robots

Very succinctly put.
by kragen | 2025-07-15 06:03:51+00:00
I like things like this.

One of the big differences from Uxn is the introduction of undefined behavior; by design, you can break it, unlike Stanislav's legos. So presumably Bedrock programs, like C programs, will do different things on different implementations of the system. That's not fatal to portability, obviously, just extra write-once-debug-everywhere work.
by boogieknite | 2025-07-15 06:03:52+00:00
what i like about your last jokey comment is that discussions about ai, both good and bad, are incredibly boring

went to some tech meetups earlier this year and when the topic came up, one of the organizers politely commented to me that pretty much everything said about ai has been said. the only discussions worth having are introductions to the tools then leaving an individual to decide for themselves whether or not its useful to them. those introductions should be brief and discussions of the applications are boring

back in the bar scene days discussing work, religion, and politics were social faux pas. im sensing ai is on that list now
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-07-15 06:04:22+00:00
It's time itself that stops there. No matter what you want to move, you will have a problem moving it. It might be easier to understand that Democritean idea of space as literal nothingness is a bit old, in modern science space is field, i.e. solid matter (universe), particles move in it like sound for which steel is the most transparent medium, and nothingness is the most impenetrable, because there is no foothold there, we think it's empty because we can move freely in it.

Also most black holes have matter on the event horizon, because something fell on them. Maybe it can even touch, because this matter is frozen slightly above even horizon.