MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keeda | 2025-07-20 01:32:54+00:00
Nobody knows how to build with AI yet, and the corollary (which TFA concludes with) is that everybody should figure out for themselves how to best work with AI.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: there likely isn't a "golden workflow" or "generally accepted best practices" on how to code with AI. The new models and agentic capabilities seem to be very powerful, and they will conform to whatever methodologies you currently use with whatever project you're working on, but that may still be under-utilizing what they are truly capable of.

A true optimum may even require you to adjust the way you work, down to structuring your code and projects differently. In fact you may need to figure out different approaches based on the project, the language, the coding style, the model, the specific task at hand, even your personality. I am convinced this aspect is what's causing the bimodal nature of AI coding discussions: people who stuck at it and figured it out, or just got lucky with the right mix of model / project / task / methodology, are amazed at their newfound superpowers -- whereas people who didn't, are befuddled by the hype.

This may seem like a lot of work, but it makes sense if you stop thinking of this as just a tool and more like working with a new team-mate.
by ameliaquining | 2025-07-20 01:32:58+00:00
I can't really get over Gleam's position that nobody really needs type-based polymorphism, real programmers write their own vtables by hand.

(It also needs some kind of reflection-like thing, either compile-time or runtime, so that there can be an equivalent of Rust's Serde, but at least they admit that that needs doing.)
by actinium226 | 2025-07-20 01:34:09+00:00
Here's one version of what a great leap forward could look like, but it's simply one of many: an LLM that understand the CPU it's running on and can turn prompts into assembly, taking full advantage of the hardware. Or maybe it could target a virtual CPU like Java, but the point is that if the LLM can write code, why do it in Python or C? Just let it understand the CPU and let it rip. The only reason we have C/Python/etc. in the first place is because assembly sucks for humans to work with.

As to the shovelware, if it benefits people that's great, and I think the net benefit will likely be positive, but only slightly. The point in calling it shovelware is to suggest that it's low quality, and so it could have bugs and other performance issues that add costs to using which subtract from the benefit it provides (possibly in a net positive way, but probably not as fundamentally game changing as, say, Docker).
by timmy3443 | 2025-07-20 01:34:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I just published a small but useful Chrome extension called ChatGPT PDF Exporter, and I wanted to share it here with fellow builders and AI users.

The extension helps you save entire ChatGPT conversations as clean PDFs in one click. It handles the annoying stuff—like loading all the messages by auto-scrolling—before triggering Chrome's native PDF export.

It’s currently live on the Chrome Web Store and has just crossed 6 users! That might not sound like much, but for a small tool like this, it means a lot. If you're one of those early users, thank you for trying it out.

Features: Auto-scrolls to load your full ChatGPT conversation

One-click print to PDF (no need to copy, paste, or screenshot)

Lightweight, no ads, no analytics, no bloat

Works great for archiving research, brainstorming, or study notes If you find it helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a review or give it a rating—it helps a lot, especially early on.

Open to feedback, ideas, or feature suggestions!
by yalogin | 2025-07-20 01:34:51+00:00
I had a similar experience with meta’s AI. Through their WhatsApp interface I tried for about an hour to get a picture generated. It kept stating everything I asked for correctly but then it never arrived at the picture, actually stayed far from what I asked for and at best getting 70%. This and many other interactions with many LLMs made me realize one thing - once the llm starts hallucinating it’s really tough to steer it away from it. There is no fixing it.

I don’t know if this is a fundamental problem with the llm architecture or a problem with proper prompts.
by ameliaquining | 2025-07-20 01:35:23+00:00
Different meanings of "unsafety". A cool thing about Rust's references, when used idiomatically, is that not only are you guaranteed no memory corruption, you're also guaranteed no runtime panics. These are not "unsafe" by Rust's definition, but they're still a correctness violation and it's good to prevent them statically when you can. Indices don't give you this protection.
by crackrook | 2025-07-20 01:35:25+00:00
Personally I like my programs to be as performant as is reasonable, not just as is necessary. Rust's low-cost abstractions strike the right balance for me where I feel like I'm getting pretty solid ergonomics (most of the time) while also enjoying near-peak performance as the default.

> It is nicer to write in those other languages, why choose Rust?

Honestly I don't think it is nicer to write in those other languages you mention. I might still prefer Rust if performance was removed from the equation entirely. That is just to say I think preference and experience matters just as much, if not more, than the language's memory model.
by atombender | 2025-07-20 01:35:27+00:00
Have you gotten any feedback from the core Postgres team about whether any of the improvements might make it into the mainline, or do you think it will remain an extension for ever?

I haven't studied the design super closely, so there might be shortcomings or design compromises that aren't immediately obvious. But from where I'm sitting the performance improvements seem so extreme that it's hard to see why anyone would not want to replace the current MVCC heap with this.

An undo log-based system is essentially the way Oracle structures its core row storage, with each row mutated in place and containing a header listing the chain of transactions currently holding different versions of it. This means you avoid the bloat that comes with Postgres-style MVCC, by sacrificing some read performance whenever someone needs to read a row that has been mutated but not committed, as the reader has to follow the chain to find the old committed version in the undo log. That's always seemed to me to be a better design. Moving the dead tuple bloat away from the main heap and into a separate undo log makes a lot of sense.

But I wonder if the core team, which is famously quite conservative about introducing big changes, sees this as too different to adopt as a replacement for what's been the state of the art since forever.
by chatmasta | 2025-07-20 01:35:52+00:00
American infrastructure is legitimately bad. I say that as someone who grew up there and spent the last half decade in UK.

What’s different about America is that we find different ways of dealing with the crap infrastructure, based on how much we’re willing to spend.

Want to circumvent the awful public transit system? Just pay for an Uber. ($70 JFK to Manhattan vs. the worst experience of your life taking public transit x3 if you’re lucky…)

Not happy with Medicare? Pay for private insurance. (btw - this happens in UK too.)

Public schools not up to par? Pay for your kid to go to private school.

Drinking water icky? No problem, buy some Evian from Whole Foods (Amazon delivers!)

Don’t like your Broadband? Well unfortunately in this case you’re SOL…

Some of this stuff is bad with no alternative, like the bridges and the broadband… those are the weaknesses that worry me. You can’t privatize bridges.

Meanwhile in the UK: trains run nonstop to every city, broadband is 500mbps on average (and $50), healthcare is free (slow, but not much slower than US)… but everything else is same problems and they pay less here.
by SlowTao | 2025-07-20 01:36:56+00:00
This is true but it has been fascinating seeing them trying to catch up. Necessity being mother of invention, all of that.

It is still hard to get much of a clear picture on how well they are doing on this stuff. Chinese companies are saying they are near parity, the opposition says they are 15 years behind, the reality is probably somewhere in between.

While they have made a lot of quick progress, that is no guarantee for future gains.
by poonenemity | 2025-07-20 01:37:33+00:00
Ha. That quote made me chuckle; it reminded me of a performance by the band Alice in Chains, where a similar quote appeared.

Re: BCDR solutions, they also sell trust among B2B companies. Collectively, these solutions protect billions, if not trillions of dollars worth of data, and no CTO in their right mind would ever allow an open-source approach to backup and recovery. This is primarily also due to the fact that backups need to be highly available. Scrolling through a snapshot list is one of the most tedious tasks I've had to do as a sysadmin. Although most of these solutions are bloated and violate userspace like nobody's business, it is ultimately the company's reputation that allows them to sell products. Although I respect Proxmox's attempt at cornering the Broadcom fallout, I could go at length about why it may not be able to permeate the B2B market, but it boils down to a simple formula (not educational, but rather from years of field experience):

> A company's IT spend grows linearly with valuation up to a threshold, then increases exponentially between a certain range, grows polynomially as the company invests in vendor-neutral and anti-lock-in strategies, though this growth may taper as thoughtful, cost-optimized spending measures are introduced.

- Ransomware Protection: Immutability and WORM (Write Once Read Many) backups are critical components of snapshot-based backup strategies. In my experience, legal issues have arisen from non-compliance in government IT systems. While "ransomware" is often used as a buzzword by BCDR vendors to drive sales, true immutability depends on the resiliency and availability of the data across multiple locations. This is where the 3-2-1 backup strategy truly proves its value.

Would like to hear your thoughts on more backup principles!
by ameliaquining | 2025-07-20 01:38:19+00:00
There's no avoiding that in a language that's designed to offer low-level control of runtime behavior, regardless of whether it's memory-safe or not. You have to tell the compiler something about how you want the data to be laid out in memory; otherwise it wouldn't know what code to generate. If you don't want to do that, use an interpreted language that doesn't expose those details.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-07-20 01:38:41+00:00
The core problem is that there are no single people who cannot be held legally responsible for the fraud. The responsibility is, by design, diffused across many actors.

This problem has already been solved in engineering domains, like electrical or civil. There is a single engineer who has to sign off on the design of an electric product or a bridge. If the bridge collapses and the problem was with the design, the engineer loses their license or may go to jail. Similarly, in EU, every company that deals with customer data needs a Data Protection Officer. Customer data leaks, the person is responsible.

This model has to be expanded to every other domain. Once people fear going to jail, a lot of fraud will go away.
by deadbabe | 2025-07-20 01:38:47+00:00
The entire premise of using AI to build stuff is founded on the idea that building faster is somehow automatically better.

I’m starting to believe that’s not necessarily true. And if some study finds out later that stuff built slowly by hand is actually better in every way except time-to-market, then it means AI is not really a competitive edge, it’s just a Quality of Life improvement that allows software engineers to be even lazier. And at future price points of $200, $400, even $1000 a month per head, that becomes a hard sell for most companies. Might be easier to have engineers pay for their own AI if they want to be lazy. And of course whether they use AI or not, you can still measure productivity under the assumption that every engineer does…
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-20 01:38:58+00:00
>It’s also not bad to run your important emails through multiple edits via AI.

The issue is that we both know 99% of output are not the result of this. AI is used to cut corners, not to cross your T's and dot your I's. It's similar to how having the answer banks for a textbook is a great tool to self-correct and reinforce correct learning. In reality these banks aren't sold publicly because most students will use it to cheat.

And I'm not even saying this in a shameful way per se; high schoolers are under so much pressure, used to be given hours of homework on top of 7+ hours of instruction, and in some regards the content is barely applicable to long term goals past keeping their GPA up. The temptation to cheat is enormous at that stage.

----

Not so much for 30 year old me who wants to refresh themselves on calculus concepts for an interview. There also really shouldn't be any huge pressure to "cheat" your co-workers either (there sometimes is, though).
by creata | 2025-07-20 01:39:00+00:00
> At the cost of making the use of the resulting heap significantly slower and larger than if you just wrote the thing in Java to begin with, though!

Lower throughput, probably. But it introduces constant latency. It has some advantages over doing it in Java:

* You're never going to get latency spikes by adding a counter to each allocation slot.

* If you really want to, you can disable them in release builds and still not give up memory-safety, although you might get logical use-after-frees.

* You don't need to use such "compromises" for literally everything, just where it's needed.

> It starts from a marketing position of "Safety With No Compromises"

I haven't seen that marketing, but if it exists, sure, it's misleading. Yes, you have to compromise. But in my opinion, the compromises that Rust lets you make are meaningfully different from the compromises in other mainstream languages. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. Probably worse for most applications than a GC language, tbh.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-20 01:39:35+00:00
There is such a thing of languages that align with human intuition. C++ and Rust are not these languages so you have to really learn these languages in depth. Languages like typescript or python or go align more with intuition and you don't really need to learn as much about the details or patterns as these just naturally flow from your intuition. This is a huge huge thing as it makes the language literally take about a week to develop proficiency and two weeks to develop mastery. A language like C++... you can't even develop mastery in a year.

That is not to say these languages are better. Intuition is just one trade off.
by strken | 2025-07-20 01:39:50+00:00
Four things: do meaningful novel work, learn over the course of a long conversation without poisoning its context, handle lies and accidental untruths, and generally be able to onboard itself and begin doing useful work for a business given the same resources as a new hire.

This isn't an exhaustive list, it's just intended to illustrate when I'd start seriously thinking AGI was possible with incremental improvements.

I take AI seriously in the sense that it's useful, can solve problems, and represents a lot of value for a lot of businesses, but not in the sense that I think the current methods are headed for AGI without further breakthroughs. I'm also not an expert.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-07-20 01:40:04+00:00
If, say, a megarich person who only operated their business in that country left, would the economic system be hurt after the initial shock wore off? They aren’t like doing charity work; in principle it’s either net zero into and out of their companies or producing value by the function of the company, and if the latter then shouldn’t whatever niche they occupied before be quickly filled? I don’t really understand the economic logic, and I’d genuinely appreciate an explanation because maybe I’m just not informed.
by maxlin | 2025-07-20 01:40:15+00:00
I can easily say they are obsolete. The same way old tech is obsolete. Sure, given a catastrophe, eventually maybe we'll be driving around in easier-to-fix old cars and such, and making communications with whatever simpler analog methods. For the use highlighted, geostationary satellites are absolutely obsolete, unless a catastrophe happens.

Questioning my premise is like saying its perfectly logical to plan your kitchen around eating MRE's because "they aren't obsolete". Today's satellite internet isn't yesterday's satellite internet.
by armchairhacker | 2025-07-20 01:40:16+00:00
I take it seriously, but I'd take it more seriously if I could use it to solve real problems without encountering issues, or see others use it solve real problems without issues.

There are many good tasks improved by AI, e.g. generic writing, brainstorming, research and simple tasks. However, I keep finding it struggle with more complicated or open-ended problems, making obvious mistakes. If it stops making obvious mistakes, or even if we simply discover automated ways to correct them, I'd take it more seriously.

AI is also not creative IMO: I find AI-generated art noticeably lower-quality than real art, even though it looks better on the surface, because it doesn't have as much semantic detail. If I find an AI-generated art that would be almost as good as the human-talent equivalent, or an especially impressive AI-generated art that would be very hard to generate without AI, I'd also take it more seriously.
by SlowTao | 2025-07-20 01:41:07+00:00
Personally I wouldn't argue Moore's law is dead but I do wonder about the cost per chip. WE can still push smaller for a lot longer but the costs are starting to creep up a bit.

I am not too worried though because adjusted for inflation, we are still saying a lot less for this tech than we were in pre-2000's tech.

Economy of scale used to drop prices, complexity of manufacturing will slowly increase them again.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-07-20 01:43:27+00:00
Do you think my personal interpretation of people's sensibilities with respect to the subject matter of a question invalidates the question itself? I was noting how many smart people dismiss concrete evidence of AI progress. I feel it's useful to note the potential ego-preserving elements of certain beliefs since they prevent otherwise smart people from accepting reality.

I too wish AI progress wasn't happening as fast as it is. I, as a software developer, want to imagine a future where my skills are useful. However I haven't seen much convincing evidence or arguments on this site that appropriately critique short-term AI timelines that don't resort to logical fallacies, name calling, ad-hominems, or other tired attempts at zingers that contribute nothing to the discourse.
by al_borland | 2025-07-20 01:43:57+00:00
It’s still a bad plan. Who is going to buy their stuff, with what money, when all jobs are replaced by robots and AI?

Capitalism is driving this hype around cost cutting with AI, but capitalism requires people have capital to buy various goods and services. Where is that going to come from when unemployment hits 100%? Who are the customers?

Why would anyone be excited about this future before solving for this problem?
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-20 01:45:19+00:00
> the one showing the output has reviewed it themselves before showing

Now let's really asks ourselves how this works out in reality. Cut corners. People using LLM's are not using it to enhance their conversation; they are using it to get it over with.

It also doesn't help that yes, AI generated text tends to be overly verbose. Saying a lot of nothing. There are times where that formality is needed, but not in some casual work conversations. Just get to the point.
by h3half | 2025-07-20 01:46:48+00:00
They are either thinking of Vladimir Komarov (who died during Soyuz 1, in 1967 - six years after Gagarin's orbit, for whom Gagarin was the backup crew) or referencing the conspiracy theory that the Soviets tried a couple times to orbit a human, covered up initial failures, and only made Gagarin's success public because it worked.

Afaik there's not any evidence of this. The Soviets did have a bent towards secrecy so it's plausible, I guess, but it's definitely more the realm of creepypasta ("there could be dozens of old Soviet capsules in orbit with corpses inside!") than historical fact.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-07-20 01:47:03+00:00
USA is a very, very large place.

> American infrastructure is legitimately bad. I say that as someone who grew up there and spent the last half decade in UK.

"the last half decade in UK" -- so what is that, the last 3-5 years? Where did you live? That matters.

> Want to circumvent the awful public transit system? Just pay for an Uber.

Again, USA is a very large place. Which city are you talking about? Only NYC?

> Public schools not up to par? Pay for your kid to go to private school.

What does "up to par" mean? Which public schools, where? The quality varies significantly state-to-state, and even county-to-county.

> Drinking water icky? No problem, buy some Evian from Whole Foods (Amazon delivers!)

Where are you talking about? (we know about Flint, MI)
by Timwi | 2025-07-20 01:47:14+00:00
The proposed approach has a large number of drawbacks:

* It's not reliable, the project’s own readme mentions false positives.

* It adds a source of confusion where an AI agent tells the user that the CLI tool said X, but running it manually with the same command line gives something different.

* The user can't manually access the functionality even if they want to.

Much better to just have an explicit option to enable the new behaviors and teach the AI to use that where appropriate.
by w10-1 | 2025-07-20 01:47:49+00:00
TLDR: earlier than Hammurabi's eye-for-an-eye justice was Urukagina, who presented himself as a savior for the people, including getting them out of debt and protecting them from corrupt officials. (But OP is most excellent and worth reading.)

It reminded me of Solon's changes in Athens, to broker some fairness, wipe prior debts and outlaw debtor's prisons, require military service (paid for the lower classes), and of course opening decisions beyond to hereditary aristocrats (land owners) to those with wealth (traders). In both cases, leaders seemed to be responding to stasis borne of economic oppression.

However, ideology is not evidence of justice; both Putin and Xi present themselves as champions of the people against the corrupt bureaucracy (and discipline their governments via discretionary application of high standards).

But the brutality of eye-for-an-eye might obscure the point: Hammurabi seems to be distinct in not associating power with the person, but establishing settled expectations so people could sort out their differences directly (freeing the leader from the no-win situation of judging disputes). That makes it easier for the laws to continue largely the same, regardless of the style of government (much as we in the US and EU still apply English and Roman law).

It's a shame our sampling of ancient governance is limited to stone and clay tablets from the middle east. There's evidence of other societies of a similar sophistication but without the hierarchical dependence on gods and beer.
by walterbell | 2025-07-20 01:49:15+00:00
100 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44611098

> After years of innovation and community collaboration, we’re ending support for Clear Linux OS. Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS, and the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository will be archived in read-only mode.. Intel remains deeply invested in the Linux ecosystem, actively supporting and contributing to various open-source projects and Linux distributions to enable and optimize for Intel hardware.