MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FiniteIntegral | 2025-07-04 07:27:55+00:00
Apple released a paper showing the diminishing returns of "deep learning" specifically when it comes to math. For example, it has a hard time solving the Tower of Hanoi problem past 6-7 discs, and that's not even giving it the restriction of optimal solutions. The agents they tested would hallucinate steps and couldn't follow simple instructions.

On top of that -- rebranding "prompt engineering" as "context engineering" and pretending it's anything different is ignorant at best and destructively dumb at worst.
by atemerev | 2025-07-04 07:28:12+00:00
Because otherwise it would break syntax highlighting until you finish writing the string. And no, sorry, I like my syntax highlighting, I won't turn it off.

This feature is useful for me. So are LLMs. If someone doesn't want to use this or that, they are not obliged to. But don't tell me that features that I find useful "suck".
by rob_c | 2025-07-04 07:28:15+00:00
You would if you were able to do basic mental maths and you learned to engage and run basic sanity checks. That's still much faster than grabbing the slide rule. (And it's not like people are infallible)

Obviously if one product hallucinated and one doesn't it's a no brainer (cough Intel FPUs). But in a world where the only calculators were available hallucinated at the 0.5% level you'd probably have one in your pocket still.

And obviously if the calculator hallucinated at the 90% of the time for a task which could otherwise be automated you'd just use that approach.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-07-04 07:28:40+00:00
I submitted a PR to fix a bug in cloud-init a while ago.

It was in my interest to do so, because it means I benefit from fixed packages in the Linux distributions I use. This saves me a ton of time in not having to maintain my own packages with my fix included.

If it helps Canonical make money, then it’s no skin off my nose because I still got the benefit I wanted.

I’m not going around fixing bugs that don’t affect me, or adding features I don’t need.
by dalemhurley | 2025-07-04 07:29:15+00:00
> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal."

I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our banking system worse so they could compete, much like Uber.
by robertritz | 2025-07-04 07:29:54+00:00
As someone who isn't particularly religious, but grew up in a religious household, and as someone married to a very religious person (different religions), I believe it's all about outlook.

Religion tends to give you several quite positive beliefs about the world that aren't entirely logical. Things like karma, the golden rule, belief in a plan, etc.

Generally speaking I also believe that religious people are more willing to trust and forgive. These are all pretty positive things.

And finally I believe religious people have a higher sense of duty to others, but the better term is probably responsibilism.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-07-04 07:30:02+00:00
No one is losing that skill, as LLMs are wrong a lot of the time.

No one is becoming a retard omniscient using LLMs and anyone saying they are is lying and pushing a narrative.

Humans still correct things, humans understand systems have flaws, and they can utilize them and correct them.

This is like saying someone used Word's grammar correction feature and accepted all the corrections. It doesn't make sense, and the people pushing the narrative are disingenuous.
by bawolff | 2025-07-04 07:30:30+00:00
> If a corporation is selling an optimized binary, then it can be almost impossible to prove that there was any violation of the GPL without viewing the source.

I think you can notice that output looks similar, error messages are similar, etc. If the program is non-trivial its usually pretty obvious if its a copy or a reimplementation.

If it sounds plausible, presumably you could sue and read the source in discovery (ianal, not sure precisely how that works)
by sam1r | 2025-07-04 07:31:02+00:00
I love comments like this ^. It provides a solution to the table, rather than conversing the problem over dinner.

IMO This sounds pretty fair to me. Publicly apologize somewhere, and link OP to it. I like that. Or come on, at least Venmo "the kid" $1000 -- "a kid" who saved you time, and is putting food on your table.

"A kid" whose idea you took and profited on. Wow, just realizing upon writing this -- what if Pickle CEO has kids, and one your kid reads this?
by whatever1 | 2025-07-04 07:31:15+00:00
Except from all the investors who are literally dumping dollars and treasury bonds and use other things to transact and store value.

Good luck getting loans & investments for your 100% American business ideas.

Hint: Go to any country that is not called the USA and try to get a $1M equivalent loan/investment for your startup and let us know how it goes.
by thombles | 2025-07-04 07:31:20+00:00
Speaking as a grump who recently chilled out, put reservations on hold and gave Claude a crack... it turns out that the anti-AI crowd (which still includes me in many regards) gets a lot wrong about the experience of using it, as demonstrated in TFA. You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it. If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. None of the output is a surprise because you discussed the context and requirements first. It just gets there (probably) faster than you might have typing out keywords yourself. If the goal is Whatever, then sure, you will get that faster.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-07-04 07:31:26+00:00
Cool post, but:

> And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ

PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early.

Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actually work for their salary into Bitcoin is a fraud.

I don't think the blog author actually wants this, but vaguely calling for Bitcoin to become "real money" indirectly will contribute to this bailout.

And yes, I'm well aware that funneling pension funds money etc into this pyramid scheme is already underway. Any politician or bank who supports this should be sued if you ask me.
by nottorp | 2025-07-04 07:32:42+00:00
Emphasis:

-----

This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

"Content"... is Whatever.

-----

People, please don't think of yourself as "content consumers".
by rednafi | 2025-07-04 07:33:04+00:00
Software programming used to be a blue-collar thing in the early days, when hardware wiring was all the rage.

Then it became hip, and people would hand-roll machine-specific assembly code. Later on, it became too onerous when CPU architecture started to change faster than programmers could churn out code. So we came up with compilers, and people started coding at a higher level of abstraction. No one lamented the lost art of assembly.

Coding is just a means to an end. We’ve always searched for better and easier ways to convince the rocks to do something for us. LLMs will probably let us jump another abstraction level higher.

I too spent hours looking for the right PHP or Perl snippet in the early days to do something. My hard-earned bash-fu is mostly useless now. Am I sad about it? Nah. Writing bash always sucked, who am I kidding. Also, regex. I never learned it properly. It doesn’t appeal to me. So I’m glad these whatever machines are helping me do this grunt work.

There are sides of programming I like, and implementation isn’t one of them. Once upon a time I could care less about the binary streams ticking the CPU. Now I’m excited about the probable prospect of not having to think as much about “higher-level” code and jumping even higher.

To me, programming is more like science than art. Science doesn’t care how much profundity we find in the process. It moves on to the next thing for progress.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-07-04 07:33:33+00:00
I disagree with many of the points on LLMs (but broadly agree with 80% of the post). But regardless of agreeing or not, it was a pleasure to read this because it's beautifully written, the arguments are solid, it makes you think, and the website has a personality, which is rare nowadays.

I clicked halfheartedly, started to read halfheartedly, and got sucked into a read that threw me back into the good old days of the internet.

A pity that the micropayments mentioned in the post never materialized, I'd surely throw a few bucks at the author but the only option is a subscription and I hate those.
by zorton | 2025-07-04 07:34:21+00:00
It's easy to blame an individual administration but the reality is pure fiat currencies will always end in this way. When was the last time the US had a balanced budget? Clinton? If you don't have a constraint on printing new currency you will always print more.

A good example I heard today was this. Imagine if you have a legit money printer. Show me the most pure human and eventually they will hit that button and print new money. That's what we've been doing for a long time now to finance all the wars and bailouts.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

A good book: https://www.lynalden.com/broken-money/
by tptacek | 2025-07-04 07:34:42+00:00
Give me a break. First, that's not the claim the article makes. Second, that's not the experience of anybody who actually uses Claude Code or Gemini Desktop or whatever people are using this week. This is what I'm talking about: people just gaslighting.

LLMs can write truly shitty code. I have a <50% hit rate on stuff I don't have to rewrite, with Sketch.dev, an agent I like a lot. But they don't fail the way you or this article claim they do. Enough.
by blippage | 2025-07-04 07:35:10+00:00
I tried Zig some time ago to use with microcontrollers. It has a generator for the pins, which was nice. But subsequent versions broke as Zig changed syntax. So I started going down the rabbit-hole (it needed a newer version of llvm, for example) until I eventually decided that the game wasn't worth the candle.

The fact that another breaking change has been introduced confirms my suspicion that Zig is not ready for primetime.

My conclusion is to just use C. For low-level programming it's very hard to improve on C. There is not likely to be any killer feature that some other contender will allow you to write the same code in a fifth of the lines nor make the code any more understandable.

Yes, C may have its quirky behaviour that people gnash their teeth over. But ultimately, it's not that bad.

If you want to use a better C, use C++. C++ is perfectly fine for using with microcontrollers, for example. Now get back to work!
by whitehexagon | 2025-07-04 07:35:10+00:00
Another heatwave here last week, and I somehow found myself watching that DVD. It as aged quite well, but I found it annoying that they spent half the movie burning books to keep warm, and yet are sourounded by wooden furniture.

On that topic, the book series including 'Fifty Degrees Below' by Kim Stanley Robinson is worth a read. I think I got that reading tip from HN, or maybe it was his Mars triology, which also has some nice planetary science stuff.
by perihelions | 2025-07-04 07:35:19+00:00
You can read the text of the GPLv3 license itself; it has a specific provision for this case.

> "Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice."

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
by mirashii | 2025-07-04 07:35:22+00:00
It's not about sticking around on an old version, it's about ever being able to catch up, and what the rest of the ecosystem is going to do. Python did this major version bump that broke a lot of the ecosystem, and it went so poorly that they've effectively promised never to do it again and completely excised any thought of ever having a major version bump again, and other languages and communities now point to it regularly as a debacle to be avoided.

When you break things regularly, you're forcing a choice on every individual package in the ecosystem: move forward, and leave the old users behind, or stay behind, and risk that the rest of the ecosystem moves forward without you. Now you've got a whole ecosystem in a prisoner's dilemma. For an individual, maybe you can make a choice and dig in and make your way along without too much trouble. But the ecosystem as a whole can't, the ecosystem fractures, and if it doesn't converge on the latest version, it slowly withers and dies.
by dep_b | 2025-07-04 07:35:25+00:00
The flip flopping of the government is also a gigantic macroeconomic signal to not invest in the US as there is no long term prediction possible.

CHIPS act goes away, something else comes, trade deals are made, then tariffs, then no tariffs, then tariffs again.

You don’t offset a cheaper dollar against counter tariffs.

You’re one nationalization away from becoming the next Argentina.
by nottorp | 2025-07-04 07:35:37+00:00
> If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel.

But that's not what the marketing says. The marketing says it will do your entire job for you.

In reality, it will save you some typing if you already know what to do.

On HN at least, where most people are startup/hustle culture and experts in something, they don't think long term enough to see the consequences for non experts.
by sam1r | 2025-07-04 07:36:07+00:00
This situation truly enrages me and is likely the reason (IMO) why talented programmers (today, in 2025 versus, 2008-2013 where small founder startups thrived at places like 500 + YC).

Quite ironic how YC touts technical founders > "non-tech" ones -- when acts such as this strip ones chances of wanting to become one, or even continue showcasing their talent publicly on platforms like GH.
by hcfman | 2025-07-04 07:36:09+00:00
I really like the work that Microsoft did with Pytorch Wildlife but not brave enough to trust the MIT license they put on their code that uses Ultralytics code and all attempts to check if it was okay for them to change the licenses seem to indicate that they may not do this.

Love to know for sure. Maybe someone from Ultralytics can point out their view on this?
by dale_glass | 2025-07-04 07:36:10+00:00
I don't think there's a real difference. Thinking a job is "mundane" IMO is mostly a case of not working that job. Many "mundane" jobs have depth and rewards, even if not in every instance.

I've heard people express that they liked working in retail. By extension somebody must have enjoyed being a bank teller. After all, why not? You get to talk to a lot of people, and every time you solve some problem or answer a question and get thanked for it you get a little rush of endorphins.

Many jobs that suck only suck due to external factors like having a terrible boss or terrible customers, or having to enforce some terrible policy.
by moomin | 2025-07-04 07:36:39+00:00
GamerGate is well worth understanding. While some of the details are unique to the situation, it’s provided a template for right-wing radicalisation that’s been employed multiple times since. There’s also an entertaining “where are they now” aspect where some people have been almost forgotten and some are in the White House. KotakoInAction is still going and has (inevitably) morphed into a bunch of people complaining about the Lūgenpresse.
by bawolff | 2025-07-04 07:37:16+00:00
> Imagine I came up with a new algorithm to do Fourier Transforms 10% faster than FFTW (or whatever the current market leader is) and make a library and I release it as GPL. A company could fairly easily just import it to whatever project they’re doing, and it would be extremely difficult for me to prove anything, especially if I don’t have any obvious things like strings in there.

If you're doing something algorithmically different and unique, presumably that would show up in the assembly.

> That’s not even taking into account that it would be relatively easy for a corporation to just pay a junior engineer to do a direct “port” of the library to another language and pretending it’s their own independent work.

Important to keep in mind that copyright is not patents. If they are just stealing the "idea" of your algorithmic improvement, that probably isn't even a GPL violation. (This isn't fully right as they would probably have to use a clean-room design to avoid copyright infringement. My point is more that such a situation is pretty muddy and might actually be allowed)
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-07-04 07:37:24+00:00
I'm in my 40s and don't have a microwave oven because I don't see the point of it... when I lived in a rented apartment, I got gifted one because how could I not have one? I tried it for a few days and just didn't find it useful. When I bought my own apartment and renovated the kitchen, I didn't bother to install one.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-07-04 07:37:26+00:00
> LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline.

Yeah? What about what LLMs help with? Do you have no code that could use translation (move code that looks like this to code that looks like that)? LLMs are real good with that, and they save dozens of hours on single sentence prompt tasks, even if you have to review them.

Or is it all bad? I have made $10ks this year alone on what LLMs do, for $10s of dollars of input, but I must understand what I am doing wrong.

Or do you mean, if you are a man with a very big gun, you must understand what that gun can do before you pull the trigger? Can only the trained can pull the trigger?
by zmmmmm | 2025-07-04 07:38:39+00:00
The article is about the overall findings and their implications, not just the specific paper istelf. Scientists will always be conservative in what they publish, scoping it down to the minimum interpretation that is supported by their evidence. The article directly interviews authors of the study and quotes them, eg:

> We are witnessing a true reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—something we’ve never seen before,” explains Antonio Turiel, ICM-CSIC researcher and co-author of the study.

If you incorporate these statements it seems quite reasonable to me. You can argue with the author of the study saying that but I can't see an issue with an article reporting that they did, if that's what actually happened.
Show HN: ClientPort – A simple share-link client portal for freelancers
by simonsynnes | 2025-07-04 07:40:11+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a solo developer and freelancer. I built ClientPort to fix a recurring problem I kept running into: sharing files, updates, and invoices with clients usually meant bouncing between email, Drive, Notion, and random links. ClientPort is a branded, no-login-required client portal that:

1. Lets clients access project updates, files, and invoices through a single secure link

2. Looks professional without needing clients to “figure it out”

3. Doesn’t require setting up a whole CRM

It’s intentionally minimal — built and focused on freelancers & solo consultants.

Live today on Product Hunt (feedback welcome): https://www.producthunt.com/products/clientport?launch=clien...

I’d really appreciate feedback from others here — especially around what you'd expect from a tool like this, or features you feel are missing.

Happy to answer any questions or dig into the tech stack, onboarding, or what I struggled with during the build.

Thanks for reading
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-04 07:40:34+00:00
This is not ideal, but it's pragmatic - or at least was, for the last two years - since new models showed large improvements across the board. If your main problem was capability, not cost, then switching was an easy win - from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4, from GPT-4 to say Sonnet 3.5, to Gemini 2.5 Pro, now to Opus (if you can afford it); or from Sonnet 3.5 to Deepseek-R1, to o3 (and that doesn't even consider multi-model solutions). The jump in capability was usually quite apparent.

Of course, Hamel is right too. In the long run, people will need to take more scientific approach. They already do, if inference costs are the main concern.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-07-04 07:40:49+00:00
The truth is that it’s not a very useful abstraction in and of itself.

You can build some generic tooling on top of monads and applicatives and that tooling is useful and can give familiarity to new data structures but objectively that’s true mostly because monads are so common in Haskell. Thinking monads are common for this reason is reversing cause and consequence.

So why are monads so prevalent in Haskell, you will ask. Because there is sugar to make their use easy. And why is there sugar? Because I/O uses a monadic interface. That was Haskell new idea. You can easily keep track of side effects with the type system if you use a monadic interface and some sugar.
by rsynnott | 2025-07-04 07:41:19+00:00
Yeah, that's what they mean. Here's a euro-denominated S&P500 ETF: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSPX.AS/

and a USD denominated one: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/

Have a look at the 1 year view. Note the fairly dramatic difference.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-04 07:41:26+00:00
Context engineering isn’t a rebranding. It’s a widening of scope.

Like how all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares; prompt engineering is context engineering but context engineering also includes other optimisations that are not prompt engineering.

That all said, I don’t disagree with your overall point regarding the state of AI these days. The industry is full of so much smoke and mirrors these days that it’s really hard to separate the actual novel uses of “AI” vs the bullshit.
by whstl | 2025-07-04 07:41:27+00:00
I've also seen this exact thing happening about 15 years ago.

Second largest private university of my state, 30000 students. They cut 5 software development positions that were halfway on their rewrite, then purchased a blank slate ERP for 1 million (50% discount, imagine that!), and had spent a few years and around 2-3 million on customising said ERP with consultants by the time I left them.
by Scaevolus | 2025-07-04 07:42:27+00:00
Denoising generally removes signal too. Removing noise and reconstituting similar noise to maintain the apparent qualities of an input can help compression, but you are also cutting out true details (typically fine detail).

The effect GP is pointing out is how denoisers damage detail, which is true. This detail can persist over multiple frames, which is why many denoisers include a temporal comparison component to mitigate the damage, but you still lose detail.