MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by la_fayette | 2025-07-14 18:10:00+00:00
When you argued that it saved you time by a factor of 10, have you even measured that properly? I initially also had the feeling that LLMs save me time, but in the end it didn't. I roughly compared my performance to past performance by the amount of stories done and LLMs made me slower even if I thought I am saving time...

From several month of deep work with LLMs I think they are amazing pattern matchers, but not problem solvers. They suggest a solution pattern based on their trained weights. This even could result in real solutions, e.g., when programming Tetris or so, but not when working on somewhat unique problems...
by Animats | 2025-07-14 18:10:09+00:00
> Due to the lack of accountability of politicians and the greed of wealthy elites who own them, most of the democratic west became low trust societies, where people can't trust politicians to have their interest at heart anymore.

That is the core problem of the United States today.

In a low-trust society, it's hard to do anything low-margin but useful. The overhead of hostile action makes it unprofitable. Yet most of the goods and services people really need are low-margin.
by toast0 | 2025-07-14 18:10:14+00:00
> we got some spray paint and wrote messages all over the building ... he said the county got on his ass about it.

No surprise, messages in spray paint are generally discouraged. Had you drawn a mural, it may have been treated differently.

> All the land around a bus station is typically city-owned, I wouldn't give it a week before a work detail is despatched to remove it.

When the bus stop is on a gravel road next to a field, as depicted in the article, I doubt the land is city-owned. But yeah, no surprise, the city doesn't want you to dump your stuff on their land, and they'll remove it.

Edit: from the google maps picture, it's not even on a gravel road, it's next to gravel parking for a small building. What municipality is going to give you shit for putting a sculpture next to your parking lot, unless the sculpture is obviously dangerous, offensive, or subverting building codes (if your sculpture is occupiable space, it needs to meet building codes)
by sometimes_all | 2025-07-14 18:12:09+00:00
The more open-source code the LLM has read (ie is in its training data), the better it will be. Rust is not a very popular language compared to others, so Claude might not be able to perform as well as it does with, say, Python or Javascript. Also, the more recent models might be better than the older ones.

I've been having fun with Claude Code and VSCode's agent. Any reasonably experienced engineer should be able to use it for a subset of languages without too many issues, but they definitely need to hydrate the context (eg. using Claude.md) and have a sensible set of system prompts set up. Good, well-written and broken-down-into-steps user prompts are non-negotiable.
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-14 18:12:35+00:00
> Like which example are you referring to? Be specific. Because you haven't provided any reproducible arguments or specific facts to support your opinion, and I gave you a real life example that disproves your hypothetical one.

Your first paragraph, specifically.

> Same how the US's economy isn't stronger because Americans have more kids because we're not talking about agrarian civilizations here where every pair of hands on the farm ads proportional labor output. In service based economies, a smart person with a wealthy VC behind him can generate the GDP growth of tens of thousands of traditional labor jobs so population growth isn't the bottleneck.

> You don't need to be one to argue on this, if you have other arguments that can be substantiated with proof or facts to disprove mine.

I am not arguing with you about anything, I am stating why population is an important factor in economic growth. Are you disputing that this is the case?

> I'm not starting from the conclusion

You are starting from 'the US economy is better than Europe's because Europe is stifling high tech growth' and working backwards from there. It is incredibly obvious that is what you are doing.
by macNchz | 2025-07-14 18:12:47+00:00
I think the whole timeline of WWII is broadly misunderstood in the US. I imagine it’s related to the fact the US entered quite late, and that much of what’s taught in school is fairly US centric.

It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.
by almosthere | 2025-07-14 18:12:57+00:00
if you're targetting $200M, then I guess each round is to hire one or two engineers for one year lol

I'm curious if you're one of these AI engineers getting 100m, do you quibble over the health insurance? I mean at that point you can fully fund any operation you need and whatever long term care you need for 50 years easily.
by darkwizard42 | 2025-07-14 18:13:07+00:00
Actually from what I have heard, GLP-1 are maybe the first category of drugs which have impact within the median tenure of people on a medical plan (~2 years). It is so significant that you can see ROI within that window which justifies in subsidizing/encouraging patients to use it.

Doesn't disagree with your original claim that there is low incentive for any private insurance to care regarding longevity, but figured I could add some color
by Gormo | 2025-07-14 18:13:18+00:00
> the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens.

What do you base this on? How can you be sure that it's not a major impediment to the ambitions of certain political actors, and that their impact wouldn't be far worse if they had access to centralized sources of data?
by zanecodes | 2025-07-14 18:13:19+00:00
I understand that, but I think for an operating system it's more valuable to provide stability for applications than to be able to move fast.

Secondarily, do the same issues not apply to the Linux API as to a hypothetical ABI? If the API changes, don't userspace applications still need to be updated and/or recompiled accordingly, or suffer breakage? At some level, whether it's an ABI, a statically linked API, or a dynamically linked API, there always has to be some interface between applications and the operating system, and breaking changes to that interface must be managed with care.

It comes down to where you decide to draw that interface, and I think the ABI is just a better place to draw it from a user's perspective. This way, applications don't need to be recompiled to work on newer operating system versions, and given how challenging and painful it can be to compile applications reproducibly, and how many applications are only provided in binary form to begin with, this seems like a worthy goal.
by dang | 2025-07-14 18:13:36+00:00
Since someone pointed out https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1944753045146902721 to me, here's what happened:

Users flagged this post, presumably because they thought it was off topic for Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Moderators didn't see it or touch it. Also, we don't delete posts except in rare cases when the user who posted it asks us to.
by slg | 2025-07-14 18:13:59+00:00
>When it comes to encryption, it helps save actual lives.

So does the license plate data. It is used to find and bring justice to criminals. Does that not make us all safer?

> If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal.

Laws are pointless because the criminals will just break them is a silly argument that can be used against most laws. Why should we have any laws about gun control, money laundering, or drugs if the criminals will just do whatever they want anyway.

And the flip side of this argument should also be considered. Do we think the Nazis would have given up on their genocide if they didn't find this data?
by arevno | 2025-07-14 18:14:19+00:00
> These mega offers aren’t about “talent”, they are about “experience”

I'm sorry, but what's the specific distinction? When the Lakers pay Lebron $54MM per season, is that for his innate talent, or is it for the 20k hours he's spent perfecting his game?

This is a lot of hand-wringing over nothing. We've seen people paid outrageous sums of money for throwing a ball for DECADES without any complaints, but the moment a filthy computer nerd is paid the same money to build models, it's pitchforks time.

The only thing wrong with the current compensation kerfuffle is that it happened so late. People like Einstein, Von Neumann, Maxwell, Borlaug, etc should have been compensated like sportsball stars, as well.
by coliveira | 2025-07-14 18:14:56+00:00
The US has a long history of agencies that decide by themselves to do things that are frequently illicit with the excuse that they're protecting the public. From police to 3 letter agencies, they're all operating illegal programs that should be stoped by the public. Whenever someone tries it, they protect their power using the excuse that they're doing this for the "benefit" of democracy or some similar BS.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-14 18:15:06+00:00
> Federal law trumps state law.

Constitution trumps Federal law.

Tenth Amendment:

> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Feds are welcome to enforce immigration law. They cannot require California to participate. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt10-4-2/AL...
by samanthamartin | 2025-07-14 18:15:37+00:00
My name is Sam. I’m one of the co-founders of Left Field, a new no-swipe dating app designed to help people meet in real life. You can read about us in Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/new-dating-app-left-field-wa...

We're seeking a visionary designer to refine our interface and help us create an app that best matches our use case, while maintaining an innovative and cool aesthetic.

Salary: $2k/month.
by mindcrash | 2025-07-14 18:15:45+00:00
I've heard that a lot of people who made the switch to Linux lately really like the Framework Laptop 13* laptop. DHH is one of them.

As a plus if you know your way around hardware the whole thing can be disassembled and upgraded, you can even buy it as a DIY package if you want.

It's pretty high on my wishlist as a system for non-gaming purposes because I don't really think the integrated GPU in the Ryzen AI HX 370 can cope with that very well. But Linux and Wayland should run terrific on it.

What do you guys think?

*) https://frame.work/laptop13
by no-reply | 2025-07-14 18:15:47+00:00
Fascinating. I wonder if this is all run time or a mix of running+walking? I started running recently three days a week and this is my schedule-walk 5 mins , run 22 minutes, walk 5 minutes, another 22 min run, and then a final 5 min walk.

I cover about ~4 miles or so depending on my pace. I increase my running duration every other week by a few minutes.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-14 18:15:50+00:00
Seems like there's a need for github to create a separate flow for AI-cretaed PRs. Project maintainers should be able to stipulate rules like this in English, and an AI "pre-reviewer" would check that the AI has followed all these rules before the PR is created, and chat with the AI submitter to resolve any violations. For exceptional cases, a human submitter is required.

Granted, the compute required is probably more expensive than github would offer for free, and IDK whether it'd be within budget for many open-source projects.

Also granted, something like this may be useful for human-sourced PRs as well, though perhaps post-submission so that maintainers can see and provide some manual assistance if desired. (And also granted, in some cases maybe maintainers would want to provide manual assistance to AI submissions, but I expect the initial triaging based on whether it's a human or AI would be what makes sense in most cases).
by wrsh07 | 2025-07-14 18:16:16+00:00
Something I noticed early on when using AI tools was that it was great because I didn't get blocked. Somehow, I always wanted to keep going and always felt like I could keep going.

The problem, of course, is that one might thoughtlessly invoke the ai tool when it would be faster to make the one line change directly

Edit

This could make sense with the driving analogy. If the road I was planning to take is closed, gps will happily tell me to try something else. But if that fails too, it might go back to the original suggestion.
by rectang | 2025-07-14 18:16:31+00:00
> "You're absolutely right."

I admit a tendency to anthropomorphize the LLM and get irritated by this quirk of language, although it's not bad enough to prevent me from leveraging the LLM to its fullest.

The key when acknowledging fault is to show your sincerity through actual effort. For technical problems, that means demonstrating that you have worked to analyze the issue, take corrective action, and verify the solution.

But of course current LLMs are weak at understanding, so they can't pull that off. I wish that the LLM could say, "I don't know", but apparently the current tech can't know that that it doesn't know.

And so, as the LLM flails over and over, it shamelessly kisses ass and bullshits you about the work its doing.

I figure that this quirk of LLMs will be minimized in the near future by tweaking the language to be slightly less obsequious. Improved modeling and acknowledging uncertainty will be a heavier lift.
by skinnymuch | 2025-07-14 18:16:34+00:00
That name is a Trotskyist party name. In my humble opinion, left-wing means being against the hegemonic status quo. While you described a [European] stereotype/cliche.

Politics and life is about your actions and output than what you nominally say out loud. “literal communist” is a label. Labels in isolation are not meant for serious convos. The actions of many Trots is and was to collaborate with the right, collaborate with western hegemony, attack the left, and trash actual existing leftism in the world.

If your ex is a Nazi leftist (Strasserites etc) or a communist Zionist who loves apartheid you’d presumably understand how useless political labels can be and not wonder “Sooooo… who's the in-group?”
by rented_mule | 2025-07-14 18:16:43+00:00
Something that seems inherently different between GP's comment and encryption is that encryption is an algorithm / tool, not a dataset. Not creating literal tools because they might have bad use cases is clearly a bad idea (e.g., fire, knives, hammers, etc.).

I'd say that one thing inherently different about datasets is that they are continually used badly, including by well-meaning actors. Data is frequently misinterpreted, with good intent, to draw bad conclusions.

You might hit your thumb with a hammer. That hurts! People would be a lot more careful if misinterpreting data had such clear, immediate effects on them.

Also, there are many different groups with different passionate opinions in any community as large as this one.
by wduquette | 2025-07-14 18:16:45+00:00
A pet peeve of mine is theory-oriented texts that present code in a specific programming language...replacing the actual syntax with mathematical symbols. This is unhelpful for practitioners.

Another peeve is when authors present algorithm pseudo-code in terms of mathematical symbols, where it isn't at all obvious how to compute the value of the symbols in practice. You've shown that there is an algorithm, but not in a useful way.

I mean, I see the value of mathematical notation; I have a math degree. But still....
by toast0 | 2025-07-14 18:17:06+00:00
I use rust for work, and yeah, the compiler is slow, and that reduces the number of change / compile / test cycles I can do. But rust isn't the only slow part of my work, and some days, it's not even the slowest part of my work.

I've used other languages and environments with faster cycles, and I feel more productive and happy, but working isn't usually about maximizing my feelings of productivity and happiness, so there you go.

I've also worked with plenty of mainstream languages and environments that were about as bad or worse. You just adapt and post on HN while the compile / deploy is running, rather than getting things done quickly. I suspect compile times will improve at some point, perhaps when I get twice the number of cores; a lot of times software expands to fill the growing hardware, but my work project is well scoped and not likely to expand that much.
by Retr0id | 2025-07-14 18:17:33+00:00
I was trying out Copilot recently for something trivial. It made the change as requested, but also added a comment that stated something obvious.

I asked it to remove the comment, which it enthusiastically agreed to, and then... didn't. I couldn't tell if it was the LLM being dense or just a bug in Copilot's implementation.
by jahewson | 2025-07-14 18:18:26+00:00
You think the police have adequate resources to solve package theft? I’m sorry, what? That’s ridiculous. Here’s the 2023 stats for SF:

Porch thefts: 25,000 Cops: 2000

Obviously not all of those cops are on duty simultaneously, let’s assume they do a 12 hour shift every single day: they would have 25 porch thefts each to solve!

This isn’t a US centric phenomenon either: 70,000 cell phones were stolen in London last year.
by wslh | 2025-07-14 18:18:47+00:00
> Besides the curious absence of the word 'sortition'.

Do you mean in common use? Wikipedia has a nice page on that [1]. There are also many papers on that [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sort...
by jtrn | 2025-07-14 18:18:52+00:00
It's not just GI side effects. Semaglutide is genuinely GI TOXICITY. That's why it's EXTREMELY important to ramp slowly. So yeah, it's a thing. But for basically everybody, it's manageable with slow and controlled ramping of dosage. There has been hard to find any lasting danger if you ramp slowly.

There has been almost a hysteria, it seems, regarding "Pancreatitis." And when I see multiple diagnoses, medications, and reports associated with Pancreatitis, I recognize a pattern I have seen many times before. Both the mental health and medical fields have periodic fixations on certain symptoms or diffuse diagnosis, and when it has the "wave-like" pattern like this, I am willing to bet it's just the latest version of "Fatigue," "Whiplash," "Repetitive Strain Injury", "lactose intolerance" or the dental amalgam controversy. Don't get me wrong. These are real things. But sometimes they just balloon beyond anything reasonable, and an unreasonable amount of people suddenly get diagnosed with it or suspect they have it. Pancreatitis is giving me that vibe over the last year or so. Copy paste this for "Stomach Paralysis".

But let's say the social benefit of alcohol has a value of 100 and a health risk score of 100. I would say that GLP-1 agonists have a health value of 500 and a risk score of 20. Nothing is without risk, but mathematically speaking, if you are overweight, I would be 25x more positive about injecting myself with Ozempic than alcohol... mathematically at least.

And to answer your question, I personally haven't seen many people stop early due to GI symptoms. And if they did stop early, I would think it was because they genuinely had a physical negative response that was horrible for them. Anecdotally, I feel the people that stop so they can get back to eating usually last at least 6 months, and probably more. I am 100% in agreement with the studies that many stop at around 1 year. So if someone stopped at 2 months, I would belive them when they said it was due to GI symptoms. But if they stopped at 1 year and CLAIMED it was due to GI symptoms, I would doubt; and guess that it was driven by missing food.

Please note that I am speculating wildly, and this is just PURELY anecdotal and stream of consciousness.
by ineptech | 2025-07-14 18:19:41+00:00
Does the game "spoil" the movie? Like, is the movie's entire plot included or is it more of a prologue? And were you involved with the movie?

It's a neat idea with beautiful execution and I hope it gets more attention in other places than it got here. I'm not even sure what genre it is. It's not a game in the sense of requiring the player to solve anything, more of a novel in which the reader chooses a perspective and shapes the narrative but (AFAICT) cannot really direct the plot. Was the author of the game's text the same writer as the movie's plot and dialogue?

edit to add, also, was this built with an existing interactive fiction engine or was the site custom coded?
by acedTrex | 2025-07-14 18:19:59+00:00
Ya this kind of usecase is for sure straying into the "this is more of a pain than its worth" with regards to k8s. Esp when you can just do basic nfs mounts in nix anyways.

If you are already familiar with k8s volumes and csi's its not a huge problem but if you arent its not worth learning if your goal is simple. At least in my opinion.
by smashed | 2025-07-14 18:20:12+00:00
In an ideal world your code-base is always compatible with the previous migration state.

So new version can work with the previous version's DB schema.

Then, yes, simply run the migration in a transaction once the new code is deployed. Postgres has fully transactional DDL changes which helps.

Of course, it heavily depends on the actual change being made. Some changes will require downtime or must be avoided if it is too heavy on the db.

Another approach if the migration can be applied quickly is to just run the migrations as part of the deployment script. This will cause a downtime but can be short.

Easiest is just to do runmigrations in your docker image start commands, so DB is always migrated when the container starts.

tl;dr: It depends on the complexity of the migrations and your uptime requirements.
by larkost | 2025-07-14 18:20:16+00:00
I think in this case you just need to change your mailing address with them. There is a California law (and from other comments it looks like 4 other states) that requires them to allow easy cancelations to CA residents. And since it is probably too much work for them to prove you are a CA resident, they just have the logic check if your address is in CA to enable the online cancelation (since they have online signup)
by jdiff | 2025-07-14 18:20:26+00:00
GP is pointing out the distinct lack of AI driven development in the wild. At this point, agents should be visibly maintaining at least a few popular codebases across this world wide web. The fact that there aren't raises some eyebrows for the claims that are regularly made by proponents. Not just the breathless proponents, either. Even taking claims very conservatively, FOSS maintainer burnout should be a thing of the past, but the only noted interaction with AI seems to be amplifying it.
by OptionOfT | 2025-07-14 18:20:38+00:00
Now the question is: did you gain the same knowledge and proficiency in the codebase that you would've gained organically?

I find that when working with an LLM the difference in knowledge is the same as learning a new language. Learning to understanding another language is easier than learning to speak another language.

It's like my knowledge of C++. I can read it, and I can make modifications of existing files. But writing something from scratch without a template? That's a lot harder.
by Joeboy | 2025-07-14 18:21:02+00:00
Writing machine code without an assembler and having to reload everything from cassette every time it errored felt... sort of fun but also extremely frustrating. I think most actual commercial software was written on hardware that was out of reach for most of us.

Edit: Wikipedia tells me that at launch the Apple II cost the equivalent of $6700 for the 4k model or $13,700 for the 48k model.