MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by csomar | 2025-07-19 17:48:36+00:00
They need "context engineering" which what I'll describe best as "railing" them in. If you give them a bit of a loose space, they'll massacre your code base. You can use their freedom for exploration but not for implementation.

In essence, you have to do the "engineering" part of the app and they can write the code pretty fast for you. They can help you in the engineering part, but you still need to be able to weigh in whatever crap they recommend and adjust accordingly.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-19 17:48:47+00:00
You really don't know if it could become a trend or not. Certainly trends happen in the opposite direction, such as everyone using AI. I think every little difference you can make is a step in the right direction, and is not virtue signalling if you really apply yourself across all domains of life. But perhaps it is futile, given that there are so many defeatist individuals such as yourself crowding the world.
by bitlax | 2025-07-19 17:49:13+00:00
You can't know much about Baltimore without knowing the problems it has, so I'd suggest you take some time and get caught up. I'm not going to waste my Saturday doing a writeup on the dirtiest city in America. I think it's more likely you do know what I'm talking about, so you might as well cut to the chase and share your paean to Baltimore's grittiness or your argument for how its problems are all the fault of Republicans.
by kergonath | 2025-07-19 17:49:18+00:00
> I've hosted, moderated and managed sites that were only obliquely related to porn or gambling, and you wouldn't believe the level of rejection for running ads or getting payment processing that they are faced with. And I ran a casino for 4 years. I coded it and I ran it 24/7, and believe me, I did everything by the book. The CC companies do not give a shit as long as they make money.

It is not really comparable. Steam is not a casino, and it is largely the same platform with or without perfectly legal porn. The presence of a few (not even that popular) adult games does not change the overall demographics that much, or the risk profile. I am not even ready to accept without proof that the risks are higher than with all the other, non-porn shovelware.

Sure, if Steam turned into an adult-only platform, then the risk profile could change significantly. But that is not what happened.

Also, as many people pointed out, Steam really does not incentive customers to ask for chargebacks. All the available information points to Valve managing its platform quite well for everyone involved.
by stefan_ | 2025-07-19 17:49:32+00:00
Where did they learn sensibility for higher-level of abstraction? AI is the opposite, it will do what you prompt and never stop to tell you its a terrible idea, you will have to learn yourself all the way down into the details that the big picture it chose for you was faulty from the start. Convert some convoluted bash script to run on Windows because thats what the office people run? Get strapped in for the AI PowerShell ride of your life.
by shreezus | 2025-07-19 17:49:48+00:00
LinkedIn is probably the worst culprit. It has always been a wasteland of “corporate/professional slop”, except now the interface deliberately suggests AI-generated responses to posts. I genuinely cannot think of a worse “social network” than that hell hole.

“Very insightful! Truly a masterclass in turning everyday professional rituals into transformative personal branding opportunities. Your ability to synergize authenticity, thought leadership, and self-congratulation is unparalleled.”
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-19 17:50:10+00:00
> There are many industries for which the vast majority of work done is closer to what I think you mean by "smart retrieval" than what I think you mean by "reasoning." Adult primary care and pediatrics, finance, law, veterinary medicine, software engineering, etc. At least half, if not upwards of 80% of the work in each of these fields is effectively pattern matching to a known set of protocols. They absolutely deal in novel problems as well, but it's not the majority of their work.

I wholeheartedly agree with that.

I'm in fact pretty bullish on LLMs, as tools with near infinite industrial use cases, but I really dislike the “AGI soon” narrative (which sets expectations way too high).

IMHO the biggest issue with LLMs isn't that they aren't good enough at solving math problem, but that there's no easy way to add information to a model after its training, which is a significant problem for a “smart information retrieval” system. RAG is used as a hack around this issue, but its performance can vary a ton with tasks. LORAs are another options, but they require significant work to make a dataset, and you can only cross your fingers the model keeps its abilities.
by toast0 | 2025-07-19 17:50:28+00:00
Because published books, depending on genre, have earned a presumption of being based on reality. And it's easy to reproduce a book lookup, and see if they link to sources. I might have experience with that book and know of its connection with reality.

ChatGPT and similar have not earned a presumption of reality for me, and the same question may get many different answers, and afaik, even if you ask it for sources, they're not necessarily real either.

IMHO, it's rude to use ChatGPT and share it with me as if it's informative; it disrespects my search for truth. It's better that you mention it, so I can disregard the whole thing.
by vidarh | 2025-07-19 17:50:38+00:00
> There are actually moral rights and rights of exploitation, in EU you can transfer the latter but not the former.

And when we talk about copyright we generally talk about the rights of exploitation, where the rationale used today is about the advancement of arts and sciences - a public benefit. There's a reason the name is English is copy-right, where the other Germanic languages focuses more on the work - in the Anglosphere the notion of moral rights as separate from rights of exploitation is well outside the mainstream.

> In the EU's view of copyright the public doesn't need to get a good deal, the creators of copyrighted works do.

Most individual nations copyright law still does uphold the pretence of being for the public good, however. Without that pretence, there is no moral basis for restricting the rights of the public the way copyright law does.

But it has nevertheless been abundantly clear all the way back to the Statute of Anne that any talk of either public goods or rights of exploitation for the creator are excuses, and that these laws if anything mostly exist for the protection of business interests.
by blfr | 2025-07-19 17:50:51+00:00
I find Signal just unbeatable on all fronts: security, UX, ease of use, general thoughtfulness put into the product. It has the best simple media editor (for video clipping, blurring faces, compressing) I have ever seen casually built into the sending flow.

Every time I use anything, from MS Teams to Whatsapp, I find myself wishing they were more like Signal.
by Arainach | 2025-07-19 17:51:11+00:00
A book is a credentialed source that can be referenced. A book is also something that not everyone may have on hand, so a pointer can be appreciated. LLMs are not that. If I wanted to know what they said I'd ask them. I'm asking you/the team to understand what THEY think. Unfortunately it's becoming increasingly clear that certain people and coworkers don't actually think at all very often - particularly the ones that just take any question and go throw it off to the planet burning machine.
by veeti | 2025-07-19 17:51:19+00:00
I don't see how any of that is relevant. Instead of addressing the fact that GNOME/evolution security issue number #2727 (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/2727) about remote content leakage remains open and valid to this very moment, you are grasping onto straws about the author initially reporting the bug from an old version. However, the issue has been reproduced on newer versions, and no patch is available to fix it.

It all really boils down to one thing: the Evolution mail client makes a promise of protecting your privacy, and then fails to uphold that promise. Whether the fault lies in the WebKit project, somewhere in the GTK bindings or the Evolution client's source code is utterly irrelevant. Instead of throwing their hands in the air and hoping that WebKit maybe fixes the issue one day someone needs to take responsibility and mitigate the issue.

Of course these are probably unpaid volunteers just hacking on open source so I don't want to dunk on anyone in particular. But as a whole the GNOME project positions itself as a competitor to proprietary software, and this sort of myopic security attitude to the end product does not inspire confidence in their offering. It should not come as any surprise that people giving you full access to their inbox will warn others about the known insecurity of your product.

I think I'll stick to Thunderbird, where security reports aren't met with such indifferent handwaving. But you can keep engaging in academic thought exercises whether the bug should have been reported by the blessed Debian maintainer or something.
by jaysonelliot | 2025-07-19 17:51:37+00:00
That's a great point. For example, my wife probably knows me better than anyone in the world. She's very good at seeing a book and knowing I'm probably going to like it. That includes your example of "this is a good book for a trip" vs "this is a good book to read at home, at night." But even she gets it wrong about 20% of the time.

In order to be able to really recommend something as multi-faceted as a book, movie, or song, you have to know a person on pretty much every level. I suppose seeing a person's entire social graph, search history, LLM history, media consumption history, and browser history might get you close, but it's still a Hard Problem™.
by lupusreal | 2025-07-19 17:51:52+00:00
> boring and uninteresting

Subjecting people to such slop is rude. All the "I asked chatbot and it said..." comments are rude because they are excessively boring and uninteresting. But it gets even worse than just boring and uninteresting when presenting chatbot text as something they wrote themselves, which is a form of lying / fraud.
by skepticATX | 2025-07-19 17:52:00+00:00
I’m not trying to take away from the difficulty of the competition. But I went to a relatively well regarded high school and never even heard of IMO until I met competitors during undergrad.

I think that the number of students who are even aware of the competition is way lower than the total number of students.

I mean, I don’t think I’d have been a great competitor even if I tried. But I’m pretty sure there are a lot of students that could do well if given the opportunity.
by smithbits | 2025-07-19 17:52:04+00:00
Yes. I just had a bad experience with an online shop. I got the thing I ordered, but the interaction was bad so I sent a note to their support email saying "I like your company, but I recently had this experience that felt icky, here's what happened" and their "AI Agent Bot" replied with a whole lot of platitudes and "Since you’ve indicated no action is needed and your order has been placed, we will be closing this ticket." I'm all for LLM's helping people write better emails, but using them to auto-close support tickets is rude.
Show HN: TypeSpider – A clean, fast typing practice site with live key feedback
by frydcircuit | 2025-07-19 17:52:18+00:00
I just launched Type Spider, a typing practice site I built to help improve speed and accuracy without the clutter or distractions found in some other tools. It's lightweight, mobile-friendly, and built using Vue and Tailwind.

One feature I’m especially excited about is the on-screen keyboard that highlights each key as you type. It’s useful for beginners and helps build muscle memory. The site tracks words per minute and accuracy, and it works smoothly on both desktop and mobile.

I built this solo and tried to keep things simple and fast. I’d really appreciate any feedback from the community. Let me know what you think or what features you’d like to see added.

Thanks for taking a look!

https://typespider.com
by bwfan123 | 2025-07-19 17:52:34+00:00
To me, this is a tell of human-involvement in the model solution.

There is no reason why machines would do badly on exactly the problem which humans do badly as well - without humans prodding the machine towards a solution.

Also, there is no reason why machines could not produce a partial or wrong answer to problem 6 which seems like survivor bias to me. ie, that only correct solutions were cherrypicked.
by aorloff | 2025-07-19 17:52:35+00:00
For decades the software industry wrestled with the ideas of copyright, that a creator had some power over their creation even after sharing it.

But the AI movement seems to believe all that is a big distraction instead of the foundation of how we got to where we are.

At some point we have to reckon with the notion that AIs, if we are to accept them, will destroy the foundation of what made public sharing possible (the notion that you could have some control over your creation - your copyright)
by sixothree | 2025-07-19 17:52:42+00:00
I agree. The status of a laptop is 100% defined by its current status and not by its history. Battery cycles and screen time don't need this.

If HP was actually serious about keeping laptops out of landfills they would stop selling machines with 4GB of RAM. BestBuy currently has 18 HP laptop models that sell with 4GB.

They are literally selling e-waste.
by ocrow | 2025-07-19 17:52:43+00:00
To unpack that a little, he looks to the writings of the early developers of object oriented programming and identifies the ways this assumption became established. People like Bjarne Stroustrup (developer of C++) took on and promulgated the view that the inheritance hierarchy of classes in an object oriented system can be or should be a literal instantiation of the types of objects from the domain model (e.g. different types of shapes in a drawing program).

This is a mistake is because it puts the broad-scale modularization boundaries of a system in the wrong places and makes the system brittle and inflexible. A better approach is one where large scale system boundaries fall along computational capability lines, as exemplified by modern Entity Component Systems. Class hierarchies that rigidly encode domain categorizations don't make for flexible systems.

Some of the earliest writers on object encapsulation, e.g. Tony Hoare, Doug Ross, understood this, but later language creators and promoters missed some of the subtleties of their writings and left us with a poor version of object-oriented programming as the accepted default.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-19 17:52:51+00:00
> How can you argue otherwise?

Because I know more about how integrated and complicated genetics is than you?

Now you’re talking about editing out polymorphisms, not even mutations? Did you know the COMT is only a minor risk for schizophrenia, right? And that it not only metabolize is catecholamines, but also estrogens? How did you know the COMT enzyme is stimulated by magnesium and SAMe? Maybe the person needs just more of those than needing to have genetic therapy.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-19 17:53:08+00:00
> although I don't back it up all the way to conception, just to a point in early pregnancy where it seems overwhelmingly clear the fetus has no attributes which could reasonably demand respect for rights.

Sounds like you're not actually using that deeply flawed argument then. You're making the distinction that not every day has the same effect.

And could you estimate how many weeks you put that point at?
by Bjorkbat | 2025-07-19 17:53:11+00:00
Somewhat related, but I’ve been feeling as of late what can best be described as “benchmark fatigue”.

The latest models can score something like 70% on SWE-bench verified and yet it’s difficult to say what tangible impact this has on actual software development. Likewise, they absolutely crush humans at sport programming but are unreliable software engineers on their own.

What does it really mean that an LLM got gold on this year’s IMO? What if it means pretty much nothing at all besides the simple fact that this LLM is very, very good at IMO style problems?
by dahart | 2025-07-19 17:53:39+00:00
This is an oft-repeated misconception. Germany is almost twice as litigious as the US. Sweden and Austria are also more litigious than the US.

> anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim

This is FUD, not reality. While it’s “possible” for anyone in any country to try to sue, it simply doesn’t happen in the US more often than elsewhere. The relatively high number of US lawsuits are filled with corporate litigation, contract disputes, bankruptcy filings, car accidents, and appeals, among many other things, and not people suing each other for minor grievances.

“Coffee spills, Pokemon class actions, tobacco settlements. American courts have made a name for themselves as a wild lottery and a money machine for lucky few lawyers. At least in part, however, the reputation is unfounded. American courts seem to handle routine contract and tort disputes as well as their peers in other wealthy democracies.

“More generally, Americans do not file an unusually high number of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts. And they do not pay unusually high prices for insurance against routine torts.

“Instead, American courts have made the bad name for themselves by mishandling a few peculiar categories of law suits. In this article, we use securities class actions and mass torts to illustrate the phenomenon, but anyone who reads a newspaper could suggest alternatives.

“The implications for reform are straightforward: focus not on the litigation as a whole; focus on the specifically mishandled types of suits.”

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/R...
by pqtyw | 2025-07-19 17:54:24+00:00
Not sure I get it. And it's different in Europe?

e.g. 20% of all 15 year old in the UK have at least one drink each week:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta...

Despite the legal age being 18.

Also what does this have to do with anything? e.g. adult-only games are simply unavailable on Steam in Germany. It doesn't matter at all how old you are.
by lxgr | 2025-07-19 17:54:55+00:00
I believe there was a very similar line of argument at the time photography was becoming popular. "Sure, it's a useful tool, but it will never be an art form like painting. It only reproduces what's already there!"

Yet today, we both cringe at forgettable food Instagrams and marvel at the World Press Photo of the Year.

I do fully agree with the conclusions on etiquette. Just like it's rude to try to pass a line-traced photo as a freehand drawing, decompressing very little information into a wall of text without a disclaimer is rude.
by scarmig | 2025-07-19 17:55:11+00:00
Women attend university at significantly higher rates than men (3:2 ratio).

Men's suicide rate is around 3x that of women's.

The ratio of the unhoused is even worse, more like 4:1.

Men work tens of thousands more hours during their lifetime than women. They enter the workforce earlier, and leave it later, than women. They work longer hours when employed, and suffer far more occupational injuries and stress. Even their commutes are longer on average.

Despite all that work, men report lower job satisfaction than women.

And despite that late retirement, men's life expectancies are years below women, and the gap continues to grow.

Does that make it easier for them to get jobs? No. Using synthetic resumes with randomized gender, female-coded applicants to software engineering roles receive 41% higher callback rates (https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley...).

Part of this is due to algorithmic discrimination: when LLMs are used to evaluate job applicants, they show a strong bias for women (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10922).

Men died at a rate roughly 2x that of women from Covid: this is comparable to the difference between white people and marginalized racial groups. Despite that, they were excluded from accelerated access to the Covid vaccine by the CDC. So you might have a 20 year old woman having access to the vaccine faster than a 60 year old man, even though the CDC's own framework required that groups at greater risk from it get faster access to it.

If these statistics applied to any other group, they'd be top line news stories.

Now, I'm sure you object to all of these as examples of men being marginalized, with the logic going something like "men are privileged, so if social structures harm them, it doesn't count as a social harm, and we know men are privileged because they don't suffer from social harms." That's entirely your prerogative. I'm empathetic: that itself is a result of you being socially harmed, because society has so thoroughly enforced the male gender role into your brain that it becomes part of your identity that you're strong and manly and need nothing from the world and heroically protect women. Take some time to unpack that internalized misandry.
by herval | 2025-07-19 17:55:11+00:00
have you tried sharing that feedback with them?

one of my reports started responding to questions with AI Slop. I asked if he was actually writing those sentences (he wasn't), so I gave him that exact feedback - it felt to me like he wasn't even listening, when he clearly jut copy-pasted clearly AI responses. Thankfully he stopped doing it.

Of course as models get better at writing, it'll be harder and harder to tell. IMO the people who stand to lose the most are the AI sloppers, in that case - like in the South Park episode, as they'll get lost in commitments and agreements they didn't even know they made.
by jayd16 | 2025-07-19 17:56:07+00:00
I suppose you'd have to make

SumAsync(F1(),f2());

Buy it's kind of intractable, isn't it? Your language has to assume order dependency or independency and specify the other. Most seem to stick with lexical ordering implies execution order.

I think some use curly brace scoping to break up dependency. I want to say kotlin does something like this.

This is why they say async is a viral pattern but IMO that's because you're adding specificity and function coloring is necessary and good.
by skeledrew | 2025-07-19 17:56:09+00:00
Not seeing a problem here as long as the one showing the output has reviewed it themselves before showing, and made the decision to show based on that review. That's what we should be advocating for. So far what I'm seeing is people slamming others or ignoring automatically on even the vague suspicion that something has been generated.

Just the other day I witnessed in a chat someone commenting that another (who previously sent an AI summary of something) had sent a "block of text" which they wouldn't read because it was too much, then went to read it when they were told it was from Quora, not generated. It was a wild moment for me, and I said as much.
by labrador | 2025-07-19 17:56:22+00:00
You could follow these thoughts into pure chaos and destruction. See Zizians. Frankly, I prefer not to follow the ramblings of mentally ill people about AI. I use LLMs as a tool, nothing more, nothing less. In two years of heavy use I have not sensed any aliveness in them. I'll be sure an update my priors if that changes.
by kazinator | 2025-07-19 17:56:29+00:00
> constexpr, as you suggest

I made no mention of constexpr.

Program start-up isn't compile time.

The idea is that since "static obj bar()" doesn't depend on anything in the function, it could in principle be moved outside of the function. So in actual fact, it can be treated that way by the loading semantics of the program (can be constructed without the function having to be called), except that the name bar is only visible inside the function.

I don't understand why C++ wouldn't have specified it this way going back to 1998, but that's just me.