MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stevekrouse | 2025-07-30 22:04:26+00:00
Fair! I agree that we want as little code as we can get away with. We love pull requests with a lot of red (deleted lines).

Like you say about libraries, it is possible to have code that isn't your problem. It's all about how leaky the abstraction is. Right now LLMs write terrible abstractions, and it's unclear how long it'll take for them to get good at writing good code.

I am excited to invest more in tools to make the understanding of code easier, cheaper, and more fun. My friend Glen pointed one way in this direction: https://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/

As Geoffrey Litt likes to say, LLMs can help with this by building us throwaway visualizers and debuggers to help us understand our code.
by algo_lover | 2025-07-30 22:04:31+00:00
helix looks cool and the scheme PR open with STEEL looks quite at home for me. I'll check it out, Thanks!

There is a plugin I can't live without: aggressive-indent, and it is awfully slow for me. I don't use any emacs distributions like doom, everything is hand rolled yet my keystrokes are noticeably slower than any other place.

Sometimes random operations like projectile get slow down, sometimes I'm stuck hitting c-g multiple times, it keeps popping up every now and then.

I need to restart emacs once every week because things tend to get slow by then.

And yes, magit is the slowest of them all. I've spent weeks trying to debug and fix magit but it's so slow for me. I am a magit power user despite all the jank, because it really gives me superpower.

Emacs has made me a much better developer, both because of repl driven development, and by making me grok how much power you can wield when you can mold an editor to your needs.

Switching from emacs to something else will be a long and arduous journey for me, but I can't live with the jank anymore as I get frustrated by it almost every day.
by henriquegodoy | 2025-07-30 22:04:42+00:00
I'm seeing a real-world example of Jevons paradox playing out here. When AI coding tools first emerged, everyone predicted mass developer unemployment. Instead, I'm watching demand for skilled developers actually increase.

What's happening is that all this "vibe coded" software needs someone to fix it when it breaks. I've been getting more requests than ever to debug AI-generated codebases where the original "developer" can't explain what any of it does. The security audit work alone is keeping me busy - these AI-generated apps often have vulnerabilities that would never pass a human code review. It reminds me of when WordPress democratized web development. Suddenly everyone could build a website, but that just created a massive market for developers who could fix broken WordPress sites, migrate databases, and patch security holes. The difference now is the scale and complexity. At least with WordPress, there was some underlying structure you could reason about. With vibe coding, you get these sprawling codebases where the AI has reinvented the wheel five different ways in the same project, used deprecated libraries because they were in its training data, and created bizarre architectural decisions that only make sense if you don't understand the problem domain.

So yeah, the jobs aren't disappearing - they're just shifting from "build new features" to "fix the mess the PM made last weekend when they tried to ship their own feature."
by scolvin | 2025-07-30 22:05:07+00:00
Pydantic creator here - I kind of agree with the article. I (obviously very biased) use Pydantic a fair bit, but there are places where it's the wrong tool and I use dataclasses, typeddicts or even tupleS a fair bit.

Sad about the Pydantic hater jumping on this to suggest it means you shouldn't use Pydantic at all, but I guess success (even open source success where you pay us nothing) comes with haters.

Thanks for the article.
by codingdave | 2025-07-30 22:05:12+00:00
> We already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: legacy code.

Wow, no. Bad misunderstanding of what legacy means.

Long-lived organizations all eventually go through tech renovations, where they re-platform their business functionality onto more modern systems. But sometimes, the cost/benefit analysis to that re-platforming doesn't make sense... yet. The pieces of the business still running on the former platform are legacy code.

People do understand it. Often, deeply understand it because they wrote it, and have lived and supported it for years. They know the reason behind the tech debt, all the odd tech constraints that drove it to where it is, they can keep the thing running without breaking a sweat. It is second-nature to them.

But it is not easy for anyone other than them. That is the true risk of legacy code, and that is probably where the author got off-track. They may have only ever worked in orgs after the last of the legacy coders left, and everything was a disaster. You definitely do not want to let a legacy system get to that point... and at the same time, if you ever do get there, the cost/benefit analysis has changed and you need to retire the legacy stack.

All that being said, now, yes, we can compare it to vibe coding. If nobody understands the code from the beginning, you never have that magical timeframe when someone just keeps the system alive with ease. You never solved business problems with it. It is just bad code launching straight into the disaster-filled zone where nobody can maintain anything.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-30 22:05:45+00:00
> I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels

The answer is to this question is always: it is too niche a product feature for a giant corporation to prioritize. This product would require constant work to keep in sync as UIs and features change. It would be one more feature to regression test against an ever growing list changes, and an ever growing list of client apps that need to work across an endless list of phones, computers, tvs, etc.

This is why it is important that society normalize third party clients to public web services. We should be allowed to create and use whatever UI we want for the public endpoints that are exposed.

PS: this particular feature exists though.

https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&...
by TZubiri | 2025-07-30 22:05:56+00:00
This reminds me of people complaining about github being closed source and moving to gitlab, or people obsessing over terraform to avoid cloud locking.

Sure you will have vendor locking at the periferies, but the core is what's important, the guest vms. The hypervisor is whatever. If you have 100 vms running on ec2, you have done a great job of designing portable software, don't obsess over the last 1%.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-07-30 22:06:54+00:00
Yeah, I've similarly found the tactics in Coq (now Rocq) difficult to internalize. E.g., I might have "A = B" and "P(A,A)" available, and I want to conclude "P(A,B)", but the rewrite will fail for some arcane reason. (Issues with the definition of some of the intermediate structures, I'd imagine.)

On the other end of the spectrum, I've recently been playing with Metamath and its set.mm database, which has no programmable tactics at all, only concrete inferences that can be used in a proof. (E.g., the modus ponens inference ax-mp says that "|- ph" and "|- ( ph -> ps )" prove "|- ps", where "ph" and "ps" are variables that can be substituted.) Alas, it's not much better, since now you have to memorize all the utility lemmas you might need!
by __d | 2025-07-30 22:07:00+00:00
The social media ban is broadly popular. The clear majority of voters support it. It’s a political win for the government to push this through, over the objections from Google, Meta, etc.

The fact that social media makes a stack of money in Australia but manages to pay almost no tax absolutely impacts their fate: both with the government and the voters.

Some of the popularity of this legislation might even come from it being seen as sticking it to “techbros”.

Banning eg coal mining, online gambling, etc, is vastly less popular. And they contribute to employment, revenue (via taxes), and they lobby/donate effectively.

Social media could easily have avoided this, as other industries have, but they decided not to. They might yet be able to leverage US tariffs though?
by zokier | 2025-07-30 22:07:00+00:00
While swallows are definitely cool birbs, I would be very surprised if they had any noticeable effect on mosquito populations. There is even one study proposing that swallows attract more mosquitos!

https://academic.oup.com/jme/article/39/1/115/879132

choice quote:

> Cliff swallows occasionally eat mosquitoes (Brown and Brown 1996), but they represent an insignificant part of the diet

https://www.mosquitoalert.com/en/depredadores_naturales_de_l...
by mathattack | 2025-07-30 22:07:24+00:00
Good question. A couple caveats on the data:

1 - These #s are just domestic.

2 - They don't contain near-CS degrees like math and .electrical engineering (which may not have grown as much)

3 - They leave out bootcamps and similar training programs.

4 - Domestic only.

My (only slightly educated) guess is that many US based CS grads who used to go to internal IT jobs are now at tech companies. CS grads from India and elsewhere now take up most of the internal IT positions due to outsourcing.

I asked Perplexity [0] and they said that from 2000 to today software engineering emnployment went from 680K to 1.53MM. That's closer to 2.25X. Maybe it rises to 3X if you back up to 1995.

[0] - https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-software-engineeri...
by dingnuts | 2025-07-30 22:07:28+00:00
By Karpathy's definition it still isn't possible. But I've definitely been hearing about AI generated code being just as good as my code since 2022.

Don't gaslight us about timelines. The boosters have been telling us amateurs can code and we're all worthless for three and a half years now.

When ChatGPT was launched, they said we'd all be on the streets by now.

What I don't understand is the gleeful receipt of that news by some programmers
by miellaby | 2025-07-30 22:07:58+00:00
Neonicotinoids kill all insects. They are extremely good at this. Noone contests this. CCD ("Colony Collapse Disorder") started as neonicotinoids usage raised, and so did the "windshield phenomemom" that all rural residents above 50 can tell you about.

If there were no parasite, no pathogen, and no predator, then bees would not be as much affected by pesticides for sure. But parasites and pathogens existed before, while habitat loss and monoculture farming don't explain what happens in relatively preserved areas.

All pesticides have an impact on insect populations obviously. I agree one should not focus on only one class of them, and work on an actual reduction of their usage and compensate farmers for profitability loss due to changes in pest management strategies.

You don't need to comment this. I know It won't be done and we're all screwed.
by zahlman | 2025-07-30 22:08:04+00:00
Yep. I'm hoping that installed copies of PAPER (at least on Linux) will be somewhere under 2MB total (including populating the cache with its own dependencies etc). Maybe more like 1, although I'm approaching that line faster than I'd like. Compare 10-15 for pip (and a bunch more for pipx) or 35 for uv.
by iambateman | 2025-07-30 22:09:40+00:00
Yesterday, I wrote detailed requirements for a bit of software, and sent Claude to work. The code looked great until it…didn’t. It ended up being completely unworkable.

I’ve noticed myself writing requirements for a feature and asking Claude to help me think through and expand. Obviously in a real project, there are challenges: (1) how do we tell Claude what is already in the project so it doesn’t reimplement existing methods? (2) how do we get Claude to fully implement the feature and not just “stub it out?” (3) how do we help Professionals maintain visibility and digest the new code?

Claude recommends the explore-plan-code-commit loop. I’m working on a package which formalizes that process within a Laravel application.
by kccqzy | 2025-07-30 22:09:46+00:00
The author spends a lot of words talking about short trains and Jersey City, but didn't once mention the Hudson Bergen Light Rail which was at least built in recent memory? I mean other than driverless operation it seems to check all the boxes. And in that light, I really fail to see the novelty in this argument; it's basically the multi-decade-old argument that building light rails is cheaper and better than real metro or heavy rail.
by K0balt | 2025-07-30 22:09:46+00:00
Oh crap. I can only imagine how devastating that must have been for the unfortunate person that made that presentation when that finding came out. If it wasn’t such a horrific situation, that sounds comically bad.

I was a contractor for the military for a few years a while back… the military runs on power point.

I’ve seen weeks poured into a power point presentation whose only point was that regular physical conditioning was beneficial to physical fitness. In the medical equipment maintenance shop.

I attended at least 100 meetings during that 8 years, and there wasn’t a single presentation that couldn’t have been replaced with a sheet or two of paper and a short lecture/discussion. Instead we got 1/2 hour marvels of editing and animation, often replete with music and video, and I’ll admit some of it was really a work of art.

But none of that contributed to the salient points. If anything, a good presentation was a distraction, leading to a ten minute discussion about the technique and tools used to make the presentation lol. There was also an underground market of enlisted presentation gurus that would make presentations in exchange for favors or even for pay, because impressive PowerPoint presentations were considered critical to career advancement for officers.

I often wondered what would have happened if IMD deleted PowerPoint off of all of the machines on the domain lol. Collapse? 10x productivity? Tires burning in the streets? Only one way to know for sure!
by hollowturtle | 2025-07-30 22:09:55+00:00
> Everyone else is just building simple (and working) software on top of disposable code.

I'd argue we should better define working. Take for example a generated UI, they all look the same and are subtly wrong or broken in many ways. At a first sight it might seem "working" only to fail at the first user test. Also generated UIs already feel like obsolete, meaning they religiously follow the trend at the training moment, they spectacularly fail coming up with something new
by giantg2 | 2025-07-30 22:10:16+00:00
"The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee."

Cause and effect is off here. If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after, then having secondary legislation would also be loaded down after. Splitting into two stages isn't the fix. Fixing the two party issues would still be necessary.
by skydhash | 2025-07-30 22:10:57+00:00
And that's why I mentionned grep-mode, and such other tools. Here is some videos about what I'm talking about

https://youtu.be/f2mQXNnChwc?t=2135

https://youtu.be/zxS3zXwV0PU

And for Vim

https://youtu.be/wOdL2T4hANk

Standard search and replace in other tools pales in comparison.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-07-30 22:11:18+00:00
Also in the amount of data.

Ever remember waiting something like hour to watch a 60-second movie preview over dialup?

I get a reminder every time I load a modern website in an area with very poor reception. Appears to not load at all —- not due to lack of connectivity but rather due the speeds and latencies being too slow for the amount of crap being fetched.

GPRS and EDGE were many times faster than dialup — must have been a dream — but now utterly unusable.
by pyman | 2025-07-30 22:11:21+00:00
I'm now following your advice and just telling LLMs, "Do better." Although I have to admit, the other day I lost it and said, "Fix it goddammit or I'll delete you!"

LLMs really know how to bring out the worst in intelligent, hard-working, respectable developers. I can't even imagine what PMs are saying to them, but I'd happily pay another $30 a month just to read those messages :)
by trhway | 2025-07-30 22:11:39+00:00
>It’s a bit of a class thing, isn’t it?

reminded - the "amateur" (vs. paid "professional") requirement in Olympic and other sports, i.e. participation for the sake of only pure sport spirit, back then came from the aristocracy who could invest a lot of time in those sports without having to take care of making a living.

And when wealthy execs and founders tell what they want people who is interested in the mission/vision/whatever other than money - well, it is the same class thing. The ones who need money naturally can't have the required purity of vision as it is clouded by that lowly need for money.
by decimalenough | 2025-07-30 22:11:57+00:00
It's an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to dig out a 6-car platform the first time around than to expand from 3 to 6 when the system is already operational. And it's a one-off price too: if the platform is built but not used, it incurs essentially no operating costs to have it sit there waiting for the day it's needed.
by xnx | 2025-07-30 22:12:57+00:00
For these instances where I get urgently fatigued ("brain tired") in the daytime, I close my eyes and fall asleep in 1-2 minutes. I'm definitely unconscious. I don't set any alarm and naturally wake up in ~15 minutes. It's been as short as 8 minutes, or as long as 30, but probably averages around 15. "Body tired" is different and requires the normal multiple hours of sleep.
by tiltowait | 2025-07-30 22:12:58+00:00
I use them for API responses/requests where dataclasses/pydantic don't add much value and introduce extra function calls and overhead. It's most common when part of the response from one API gets shuttled off to another. There's often no value in initializing a model object, but it's still handy to have some form of type-checking as you construct the next API call.
by rtpg | 2025-07-30 22:14:57+00:00
Yeah my point is that it’s comfortable enough.

If you are growing your emergency fund then you aren’t really living paycheck to paycheck right? You’re putting money off to the side. Tho perhaps you’re not putting aside much for, like, travel.

Plenty of smaller startups not hitting that level, especially when they’re lean. And I think up until this raise Oxide was lean!

(To be honest given this finding raise I could see a salary increase for oxide across the board, to help with that)
by tux1968 | 2025-07-30 22:15:06+00:00
This has happened before. Non-technical or junior people developed and deployed applications, emboldened by the relative ease of Microsoft Access and Excel. There were all kinds of limitations, scaling problems, and maintenance nightmares. But there were a lot of upsides too, and it made the "professionals" up their game to obviate the need for such adhoc and unsanctioned developments.

Come to think of it, the exact same thing happened when the PC became popular. Mainframe people were aghast at all the horrible unprofessional mess that the PC people were creating.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-30 22:15:11+00:00
> What I don't understand is the gleeful receipt of that news by some programmers

I know there are very likely programmers that are gleeful about it, but I suspect that many of the gleeful voices we hear online are not programmers and are resentful of that fact

I see this a lot with the type of people who are making AI "artwork". They often lacked the discipline to practice and learn to make art themselves, they seem to bear an underlying resentment to people who do make art. They are the sort of people who think making art is tied to some innate talent and not something that you can practice. Now they are gleeful about AI generators because it lets them create the pictures in their head without the effort of learning a skill, and they are celebrating that they no longer suffer under the tyranny of people who actually enjoy drawing and painting
by JamesAdir | 2025-07-30 22:15:16+00:00
What do you mean the political climate? The current government is based on a majority. Although some parties in the opposition are trying to undermine the government actions, they are mostly hold exact or very similar views on the issues. When the opposition were in charge with Bennett as the PM, there was no major change in the state/security issues, the main arguments are more on "internal" affairs. ? After Oct 7, you'll find very little people interested on what is happening in Gaze. You can also see that the Palestinians in the West Bank are not interested in what's happening in Gaza. Almost zero disturbances or protests about it, even in cities like Ramahllah which enjoys a complete autonomy.
by jefftk | 2025-07-30 22:15:41+00:00
SEPTA's T [1] gets up to 70 TPH and used to handle 150 TPH. You can do this with multiple trolleys loading/unloading on a platform simultaneously.

(But this strategy is orthogonal to the article, because it requires long platforms.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_(SEPTA_Metro)
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-30 22:15:57+00:00
> and throwaway projects

I have seldom encountered these.

What I encounter, instead, are lashups that the engineering team thought would be throwaway, but which Management made "Final Ship" code.

I have learned to always do "ship-shape" code; even for the most innocuous projects. I may be a bit sloppy as I'm exploring different paths, but the minute I decide on a firm plan, the code cleanup and documentation starts.
by ncruces | 2025-07-30 22:16:05+00:00
How about phones and computers themselves can be configured as belonging to children, and services/platforms being required to respect rules when a device tells them a child is accessing their services?

In terms of YouTube all I want as a parent is (a) to ban Shorts from my kids accounts (b) be able to see a list of what they're watching. I want this respected on the app and website.

Good platforms have decent parental controls. Bad platforms don't. YouTube is just awful in that regard. Which is a shame, because there's a tone of good stuff to watch on YouTube. But it's on them to fix their platform.
by upboundspiral | 2025-07-30 22:16:45+00:00
I have been able to somewhat reasonably block youtube shorts with the following custom filter ublock origin rules (on firefox at least). Note that it might accidentally hide some legitimate stuff but from my experience it should be pretty minimal if any. I think to hide the shorts from the left sidebar it hides one of your subscribed channels but that's all I've noticed so far.

www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1) www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2) www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(4) www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-entry-renderer.ytd-guide-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)
by jrs235 | 2025-07-30 22:17:15+00:00
I've heard of some other possible additions and improvements to this setup. One is to cover it with Saran wrap and poke or cut a small hole in the middle of it and let it drape down a little bit so that any mosquitoes that find their way in can't find them way out to lay eggs again elsewhere. Another option is to add some yeast and a little bit of sugar so that CO2 is emanated from the bucket particularly the little hole if you use the previous "improvement".
by micromacrofoot | 2025-07-30 22:17:18+00:00
There is some nuance to it though, the average monthly car payment is $700! Only 10% are under $400.

With the median income ~$50k and many households owning two cars... much of the country is actively living beyond their means just to get to work.

We have built some sort of pseudo-luxury economy that seemingly has to be upkept by mandatory good vibes.