MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kazinator | 2025-07-03 14:00:34+00:00
There are times when writing the code is a bottleneck. It's not everyday code. You don't quite know how to write the code. Whatever you try breaks somehow, and you don't readily understand how, even though it is deterministic and you have a 100% repro test case.

An example of this is making changes to a self-hosting compiler. Due to something you don't understand, something is mistranslated. That mistranslation is silent though. It causes the compiler to mistranslate itself. That mistranslated compiler mistranslates something else in a different way, unrelated to the initial mistranslation. Not just any something else is mistranslated, but some rarely occurring something else. Your change is almost right: it does the right thing with numerous examples, some of them complicated. Making your change in the 100% correct way which doesn't cause this problem is like a puzzle to work out.

LLM AI is absolutely worthless in this type of situation because it's not something you can wing from the training data. It's not a verbal problem of token manipulation. Sure, if you already know how to code this correctly, then you can talk the LLM through it, but it could well be less effort just to do the typing.

However, writing everyday, straightforward code is in fact the bottleneck for every single one of the LLM cheerleaders you encounter on social networks.
by the_af | 2025-07-03 14:01:07+00:00
I suppose everybody knows this is a riff on "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer" (1983), but I'm posting the link to the classic story here just in case: https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

(Actually, the reworked story in free verse style, which is its most popular form)

TFA is cute but it kinda misses the point, because the original Mel didn't write code that was simple or easy to understand. It was simple to him, and arguably there was some elegance to it once you understood it, but unlike the PHP from the updated story, Mel's code was machine code, really hard to understand or modify, and the design was all in his mind.

Mel would also scoff at PHP.
by elyase | 2025-07-03 14:01:19+00:00
This is similar to the tool call (fixed code & dynamic params) vs code generation (dynamic code & dynamic params) discussion: tools offer contrains and save tokens, code gives you flexibility. Some papers suggest that generating code is often superior and this will likely become even more true as language models improve

[1] https://huggingface.co/papers/2402.01030

[2] https://huggingface.co/papers/2401.00812

[3] https://huggingface.co/papers/2411.01747

I am working on a model that goes a step beyond and even makes the distinction between thinking and code execution unnecessary (it is all computation in the end), unfortunately no link to share yet
by cubefox | 2025-07-03 14:01:31+00:00
Yeah. Case in point: "Zelda: Ocarina of Time" was at the time and several years afterward often labeled as one of the best games ever made, despite the fact that it ran with 20 FPS on NTSC consoles and with 16.67 FPS on PAL machines.

I'm sure it would have been even more successful with modern 60 FPS, but that difference couldn't have been very large, because other 60 FPS games did exist back then as well, mostly without being nearly as popular.
by bluGill | 2025-07-03 14:02:21+00:00
Nobody is perfect, and I won't defend the many dumb things the US has done over the years. Some of them I opposed at the time, some of them on hindsight I now wish I had, but I didn't realize.

However when considering things, we don't know what might have been. Some of the dumb things were the best (at least close to best) among many bad options. As a large powerful country the US often doesn't get the choice of sitting out - those who hate "freedom" are forced to attack us either directly or indirectly since we are standing in the way of their goals, and we are taking those attacks for Sweden allowing you to face less of those bad choices (not none - since Sweden also generally stands for freedom you also face some of those attacks)

All you can do is look at the overall situation. I have concluded that China is worse for the world than the US. However I will not claim perfection. There are things I know of about Sweden that I believe would make the world worse if your country gets it way, but overall Sweden is on the right side and so I generally support them. (you may or may not support your country in those things)

I do what I can to make my country better, but I'm one vote and often outvoted. I'm not a very good writer so I rarely convince anyone of a better way. I have more than once found myself on the wrong side of an issue, and been forced to change my mind to my regret. Which is to say I'm human and trying my best. Hopefully you can be the same and make the world better.
by Sevrene | 2025-07-03 14:02:30+00:00
Sure no worries, I can see why that's not immediately obvious to everyone.

I think people see laws and institutions encroaching on the internet as removing the 'wild west' aspect that existed on the internet in the early days. I have personally felt and have heard others express, a keen sense of nostalgia for that era. To many, more developed = less wild west.

People think of this legislation as increasing the complexity by going further away from that the more simple model. "Oh great, now I have to sign in to Google to view this" sort of thing.

I too get annoyed at small stuff like how you can't quote search all of google anymore. Things are more complex and just... different. Social media used to be a simple feed of people who you followed and not much else. The thing is, I believe the fact it's more big and complex, the fact it's the primary place many people interact- is actually why we need to legislate it.
by cssanchez | 2025-07-03 14:02:40+00:00
I don't mean to be rude, but I don't get how this is any better. Feels too manual to type "uv -add dep script.py" instead, I feel the automation tool I'm waiting for will scan my script, auto-import all the deps I'm calling in the script while ignoring the ones that I forget to use, AND set up the env with all the deps AND run the code in the same one liner. To me, uv add X is no different than running env/pip install requirements.txt.
by fransje26 | 2025-07-03 14:02:49+00:00
Ah, I was looking at a Dyson a while back, and wondering if they were worth buying. Went for something else in the end, as I thought they were a bit pricey for what they offered, and didn't dare go for a clone.

Would you happen to have a link to the model you got (or one of the similar models), to get an idea of which clone could be worth considering next time?
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-07-03 14:02:50+00:00
Frosted glass doesn’t pass through light of objects that are simply near by it. It doesn’t make physical sense. I understand the defect, but neither does this solution correctly fix the problem.

Note the circle before it intersects with the rect, without accounting for pixels beyond the bounds, the blur is incorrect because the kernel doesn’t take into effect the circle.

Note the blur after extending the kernel beyond the visible bounds. While the blur is correct, the albedo of the shape passing through the rect no longer makes sense. The circle is not emissive, and yet despite this, you see the blur of the circle behind the rectangle without it intersecting in a full-bright environment. Why can we assume the environment is full-bright? Because there is no lighting. Only albedo.

Neither are correct.
by komali2 | 2025-07-03 14:03:59+00:00
This is strange to me. I have no difficulty seeing the difference between hate speech and criticism of the state. Of course if someone tries to muddy the waters, they should be criticized... but that's what you're trying to do here, so you're no better than a State that does the same. Hate speech very clearly has meaning, the legal definition may change a bit of course, but in Germany the meaning is quite clear, banning expressions that incite hatred or violence against people based on race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or disability. What's unclear about that?

I'm not sure what specific incident you're referring to, however I do know that if Germany was more willing to leverage the hate speech laws more strictly, the AFD would have been banned long ago. Now they're finally willing to leverage it to ban the new nazi party, which is a relief.
by csullivan107 | 2025-07-03 14:04:46+00:00
Never thought I’d get to do this but this was my masters research! Simulations are inherently limited and I just got tired of robotic research being done only in simulations. So I built a novel soft robot (notoriously difficult to control) and got it to learn by playing!!

Here is an informal talk I gave on my work. Let me know if you want the thesis

https://www.youtube.com/live/ZXlQ3ppHi-E?si=MKcRqoxmEra7Zrt5
by bluGill | 2025-07-03 14:04:51+00:00
Where I work there is a good mix of all ages. Part of that is we got burned far enough back that all the "senior citizens" retired and we were forced to suddenly replace them and the fallout is we changed our practices to ensure there is a mix of ages so that everyone has mentors and time to learn from mistakes.

I just don't know how to get the above into management studies that are taught in business school - there seems to be a lack of interest in long term expertise in those circles.
by viraptor | 2025-07-03 14:05:15+00:00
> They did not spend one second beyond the spec sheet and none of the common sense things that "follow" from the spec were there.

That's how lots of the early outsourced projects ended up. Perfectly matching the spec and not working.

> The whole thing was scrapped immediately.

And that's how it ended up too. everything old is new again.
by dmix | 2025-07-03 14:06:27+00:00
> The real motives of environmentalists is to erode capitalism? Respectfully: that's nuts.

Is that really controversial? Reducing consumption and crippling new economic developments like mining/pipelines/logging/large construction projects etc has always been a huge part of environmentalist movement.

Even here in Canada whose economy depends heavily on oil, lumber, and mines...One of the biggest responses to US aggression is to try to reverse that as opposed to years our of GDP growth declining in favour of climate activism and interference by native groups stopping any new projects.

You can't even build a road in BC without activists stopping it.

idk about the US but it's hard to find any industry not impacted by it here.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-03 14:07:02+00:00
Considering how bad LLMs are at understanding anything, and how they still manage to be useful, you simply don't need this level of complexity.

You need something that mostly works most of the time, and has guardrails so when it makes mistakes nothing bad happens.

Our brains acquire quite good heuristics for dealing with physical space without needing to experience all of physical reality.

A cat-level or child-level understanding of physical space is more immediately useful than a philosopher-level of understanding.
by azath92 | 2025-07-03 14:07:34+00:00
hackernews is such a rich source of "non trivial" content, and we are really seeing this when using it for a project compared with just consuming it as an individual.

We are focusing right now on how comments could be used to build up a better user context, and your comment has made me think about how we can feed comments in (instead of just titles and urls) for your selected preferences to make a better profile, without needing to scrape anything (expensive and slow).

But i think that would only work because of their quality and relevance generally, which would for sure make it an interesting knowledge source for pure LLM search. Feels like something someone should build or maybe already has! keen to see if anyone knows of projects like that.
by sublinear | 2025-07-03 14:08:01+00:00
The best part about a personal website is that you can do whatever you want.

A part of my mind is more convinced by the day that people don't want all this complexity and the AI nonsense might be the final straw.

By comparison, just writing the damn HTML yourself is a breeze. I get that most people don't really want to write code, but I'd compare it to cooking. You don't have to be a chef just to eat a decent meal made the way you like.

No, what's really wrong here is a lack of simple build tools and collections of stable libraries for web that don't try to lock you in. This is what pushes people to use crapware instead.

I can't find a decent pre-made pizza crust at the grocery store either, so sometimes I just order delivery instead of kneading dough.
by spacemule | 2025-07-03 14:08:17+00:00
I tried to get into OSM a few years ago, and the barrier to entry seemed a bit high. Maybe I'll try again. For all I know, the lanes are properly marked, it's just a routing issue. In Israel, the bus lanes are a bit odd. A lane can be a turn-only lane for cars and straight-only for busses. So, it's a bit complicated. Even Google Maps can't handle it.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-03 14:08:35+00:00
What is being missed here, and the actual blindside of LLMs, is that software devs will not be the sole gatekeepers of computer utilization in the future.

I cannot overstate this enough. It is the main thing to watch for. Even if LLM progress halts today, there will be 5-10 years of fundamental changes in how end users interact with computers.
by opennebula | 2025-07-03 14:08:35+00:00
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by josteink | 2025-07-03 14:09:10+00:00
> Among many things it’s improved, scripting with python finally just works without the pain of some odd env issue.

From what I can tell uv doesn’t (unlike poetry) assist with venvs what so ever.

What is a trivial «poetry run» becomes the same venv-horrors of Python fame when I use uv and «uv run».

Based on that, your comment strikes me as the polar opposite of my experience (which is why I still resort to poetry).

Care to outline how you use v to solve venv-issues, since from what I can tell, uv explicitly doesn’t?

I’m very curious.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-07-03 14:09:28+00:00
IMO management positions are mostly lobbied for/created by try-hard social climbers, at least initially. "We're taking a lot of X work, maybe I should lead a team to deal with that?" "Y has so many reports, maybe I can form a subgroup to help with that?" Creating new positions for people who want to be more important than they are right now is the main mechanism by which private orgs expand.

Doing this is considered proof that this person is a natural leader who steps up to solve organizational problems and get things done. You can guess why this leads to many many layers of management mostly just having meetings with each other, and a confused bottom layer of people who have to use this deliberately broken human telephone to communicate with their real ultimate bosses, the owners.
by bstsb | 2025-07-03 14:09:31+00:00
i found the "personal profile" that it created almost more interesting than the actual feed itself. from quite a small sample of posts it had mapped and summarised my interests really well.

i think the bit that needs the most work is classifying each post on the home page; quite a lot of posts that i would mark as "Dive" given its own classification of me ended up as "Skim".
by dahart | 2025-07-03 14:09:45+00:00
I’m confused by this comment, do you want to elaborate? Only the thirteenth author has an association with NASA at all, and that author lists two associations. This paper is primarily from U. Maryland and MIT. Why do you feel like this paper reflects to any significant degree on NASA’s mission?

What is NASA’s mission in your mind? What is the point of what they’re doing if not to use science and the knowledge resulting from practicing science to benefit humanity? NASA’s web pages, for one, do happen to say exactly that in multiple ways. Is there some congressional funding agreement you’re aware of that limits or prevents NASA from engaging in certain scientific topics?

Also what problem do have with this paper? It seems like it’s saying something that’s widely known and non-controversial. It maybe adds new kinds of data and support to the thing we already knew, but it’s largely a meta review of many other papers that also demonstrate what we already know, that it’s common for poorer people to live in worse conditions than richer people.
by collingreen | 2025-07-03 14:10:53+00:00
"All taxation is theft!" is a funny thing to claim in a world where standing alone is no longer viable.

I have a lot of libertarian tendencies but shouting that you're being robbed (from the safety of your stable, productive, society that protects even your right to complain like that) feels childish to me - the actual first step if you're going to act this way seems to be trying to get out from under this government that you never agreed to so you can start doing things your own way. The irony of people who say "if you don't like it, leave" is that they rarely take their own advice.

As a side note, I'm always curious when I see someone say that taxes are theft -- what is "theft" and "property" in your world view without the other systems underpinning it? It seems to always boil down to "stuff in your possession that you can keep someone else from taking away" which always boils down to violence at the end. Does " theft" even make sense in this context and, if so, did you "steal" everything first? It always seems like such a "rules for thee but not for me" kind of claim so I'm (genuinely) curious if you have a more substantial platform for your libertarianism.
by fhd2 | 2025-07-03 14:11:01+00:00
Tech and product are just small components in what makes the business profitable. And often not as central as we in our industry might _like_ to believe. From my perspective, building software is the easy, the fun part. Many bets made have nothing to do with the software.

And yes, there is enshittification, there is immoral actors. The market doesn't solve these problems, if anything, it causes them.

What can solve them? I have only two ideas:

1. Regulation. To a large degree this stops some of the worst behaviour of companies, but the reality in most countries I can think of is that it's too slow, and too corrupt (not necessarily by accepting bribes, also by wanting to be "an AI hub" or stuff like that) to be truly effective.

2. Professional ethics. This appears to work reasonably well in medicine and some other fields, but I have little hope our field is going to make strides here any time soon. People who have professional ethics either learn to turn it off selectively, or burn out. If you're a shady company, as long as you have money, you will find competent developers. If you're not a shady company, you're playing with a handicap.

It's not all so black and white for sure, so I agree with you that there's _some_ power in choosing who to work for. They'll always find talent if they pay enough, but no need to make it all too easy for them.
by softservo | 2025-07-03 14:11:16+00:00
Backstory: About one month ago while visiting us from overseas, my wife’s parents were in a terrible car accident. Everyone involved is alive and going to be okay. But what followed was a series of emotional, physical and logistical challenges that pushed my wife and her family to their limits.

For the first week we were practically glued to our phones, contacting family members, insurance companies and air ambulance services. I found myself obsessively checking my phone for updates, sending empty messages and mindlessly scrolling feeds. My screen time reached all time highs. I was spending 12 of my 16 waking hours staring at a screen instead of being there for my wife and her parents. It felt like I was hiding on my phone.

I don’t have a particularly addictive personality, but I am undeniably addicted to my phone. And this was the week I finally needed to deal with it.

I tried Apple Screen Time and a few popular screen time management apps, but found the blocks were too easy to bypass. I also realised that most apps (e.g. YouTube) were as useful as they were distracting depending on the context. I didn’t necessarily want to use my phone less: it’s an incredibly useful tool, and the distractions were sometimes helpful.

What I really needed was intentional stretches of time spent away from my phone. I built touchgrass.fm as a simple way to record and incentivize those stretches of time. It’s not quite finished (built in a few hours of downtime), but it helped me stay present during hospital visits, meals and important conversations.

I decided to share it on the off chance it helps others get some control back and be a bit more present in their day to day lives!

Link: https://www.touchgrass.fm

What Are You Working On (June 2025): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416093#44427955
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-03 14:11:38+00:00
We disagree on what good looks like, that's all. I care about humans, you care about capital. There is no long term strategy except a slow burn economically as populations rapidly age and decline over the next 100-150 years. Capital does not serve the human, broadly speaking, based on the evidence. It enslaves, always demanding more (4x productivity in growth in the last half century but 4 day work week is laughed at as unreasonable, for one example).

Figure out a strategy without growth and capitalism, because demographics will force it to happen. Also, importantly, be wise with the labor remaining looking forward; you'll never get it back at the scale previously had.

https://dunham.ghost.io/content/images/2024/04/2.JPG

https://rajawali.hks.harvard.edu/articles/a-rapidly-aging-wo...

(~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US)
by RaftPeople | 2025-07-03 14:13:06+00:00
The first set of questions was about code review timing in a workflow (background: was in a discussion about different styles of workflows):

Q1.1: "do most developers do code reviews before testing"

A1.1: essentially "yes most before..."

Q1.2: "do most developers do code reviews after testing"

A1.2: answer was essentially "yes most after..."

The 2nd set of questions was related to building a retaining wall. I've never used the type of wall block with a center notch and groove, only the type with a lip on the back. The center type creates a wall straight up but lip in back leans back a little. I was curious if one was more stable than the other:

Q2.1: "is retaining wall block with center groove more stable"

A2.1: essentially "yes, block with center groove is more stable..."

Q2.2: "is retaining wall block with back lip more stable..."

A2.2: essentially "yes, block with lip on back is more stable..."

When I finally found an engineering website with real details, the answer was that the lip on back was a little more stable due to the resulting angle of the wall. It also emphasized that the lip and the center groove are not factored in to stability calcs at all, they are only for alignment, gravity and friction of the blocks is what holds it in place.