MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ck2 | 2025-07-27 18:18:24+00:00
Well no if it changed it then you wouldn't need to keep drinking it for the same effect

It's the nitrates which have a short half-life

And the thing is high quality Beet juice is very expensive because it has to be grown in good soil with lots of nitrates, most of the stuff coming out of China is poor quality with just the name and people don't know any better
by nosianu | 2025-07-27 18:19:30+00:00
> Here is a German podcast on the high quality "Deutschlandfunk".

I forgot the actual URL! It's German though. And a podcast (19. July 2025, 29 minutes) But it's good and quite thorough and has a lot of details, so if you understand German, it is worth a listen.

They say the "elite" is about 4,000 people in Germany, defined as those having significant and real influence in politics, law, media (highly concentrated ownership), business.

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eliten-seit-dem-kaiserr...
by leptons | 2025-07-27 18:19:45+00:00
There are many ways to describe LLMs and coding assistants. The slot machine is a pretty good one.

I also compare "AI" to using a Ouija Board. It's not meant for getting real answers or truth. The game is to select the next letter in a word to create a sequence of words. It's an entertainment prop, and LLMs should be treated similarly.

I have also compared "Artificial Intelligence" to artificial flavors. Beaver anus is used as artificial vanilla flavoring (that is a real thing that happens), and "AI"/LLMs are the digital equivalent. Real vanilla tastes so much better, even if it is more expensive. I have no doubt that code written by real humans works much better than AI slop code. Having tried the various "AI" coding assistants, and I am not at all impressed with what it creates. Half the time if I ask for "vanilla", it will tell me "banana".
by RulerOf | 2025-07-27 18:20:36+00:00
> Because at some point I decided LVM is just like flexible partitions and didn't pay much attention to the huge amounts of other stuff in the manpages.

I remember when I was first learning to use Linux, I was mystified by the convention of LVM on top of md. I was reading the LVM man pages and it was clear I could just do all that stuff with LVM without having to involve another abstraction layer.

But I had a hardware raid controller and just used that instead.
by kragen | 2025-07-27 18:21:45+00:00
This doesn't do most of what dumbpipe claims to do: it doesn't use QUIC, doesn't avoid using relays when possible, doesn't pick a relay for you, and doesn't keep your devices connected as network connections change. It also depends on you doing the ssh key management out-of-band, while dumbpipe appears to put the keys into random ASCII strings.

WireGuard is more similar.
by ben_w | 2025-07-27 18:22:04+00:00
I don't know if there's a correlation between the groups as you say, but I will add some contradictory anecdata.

I started learning to program at about the same age I learned to read, so since the late 80s. While I was finishing secondary school, I figured out from first principles (and then wrote) a crude 3D wireframe engine in Acorn BASIC, and then a simple ray caster in REALbasic, while also learning C on classic Mac OS. At university I learned Java, and when I graduated I later taught myself ObjC and swift. One of my jobs, picked up a bit of C++ while there; another, Python. I have too many side projects to keep track of.

Even though I recognise the flaws and errors of LLM generated code, I still find the code from the better models a lot better[0] than a significant fraction of the humans I've worked with. Also don't miss having a coworker who is annoyingly self-righteous or opinionated about what "good" looks like[1].

[0] The worse models are barely on the level of autocomplete — autocomplete is fine, but the worst models I've tried aren't even that.

[1] I appreciate that nobody on the outside can tell if me confidently disagreeing with someone else puts me in the same category as I'm describing. To give a random example to illustrate: one of the people I'm thinking of thought they were a good C++ programmer but hadn't heard of any part of the STL or C++ exceptions and wasn't curious to learn when I brought them up, did a lot of copy-pasting to avoid subclassing, asserted some process couldn't possibly be improved a few hours before I turned it from O(n^2) to O(n), and there were no unit tests. They thought their code was beyond reproach, and would not listen to anyone (not just me) who did in fact reproach it.
by dekhn | 2025-07-27 18:22:43+00:00
I loved Lehrer growing up- my parents had his record "That Was the Week That Was" which I think is his finest work. Anyway, when I went to college (UCSC), I took his 'Nature of Math' course, which was quite enjoyable. He was a great presenter, I learned all sorts of neat stuff like the the quartic factoring challenge and the pigeonhole principle/birthday paradox (at the time, I didn't know much about hash tables and didn't make the connection).

I almost ended up TA'ing his class the next year but I had to focus on my undergraduate thesis instead. I would have loved to get to know him better, as his sense of humor was incredible.

I also had Ralph Abraham- a chaos theory guy and psychonaut who taught hist class (Nature of Math) in a natural amphitheater- at points, I could almost picture him wearing a toga, lecturing us on greek math.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-27 18:23:21+00:00
> Could you provide some evidence to support your assertion that highly enriched foods are degrading health?

Getting nutrients from whole foods is generally superior, for absorption and balance and avoiding overdosing, than getting it from supplements, whether taken directly or via enrichment.

That said, getting a nutrient any way is better than running a deficiency. For most of agricultural human history, in most societies, most of the population was nutritionally sufficient [1]. That changed with enrichment. It’s healthier to eat whole over enriched food; it’s better to have enriched food versus a vitamin decency.

It’s ahistoric to claim we’re unhealthier today than we’ve been over most of human history. But we can do better. In that way, Roman pipes brought clean water to its populations in a way that made them healthier than people had been in cities to date. But it also gave them lead poisoning, which while better than cholera, is worse than no lead.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9460423/
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-27 18:23:30+00:00
I've been hearing this a lot, but I kinda disagree. They aren't plateauing IMO, they are getting better at new things, and that enables new capabilities. This doesn't often show in the traditional benchmarks (which are becoming less and less useful indicators of capabilities).

Take gemini 2.5 for example. It has enormous useful context. There were gimmicks before, but the usefulness dropped like a stone after 30-40k tokens. Now they work even with 100+k tokens, and do useful tasks at those lengths.

The agentic stuff is also really getting better. 4.1-nano can now do stuff that sonnet 3.5 + a lot of glue couldn't do a year ago. That's amazing, imo. We even see that with open models. Devstral has been really impressive for its size, and I hear good things about the qwen models, tho I haven't yet tried them.

There's also proof that the models themselves are getting better at raw agentic stuff (i.e. they generalise). The group that released swe-agent recently released mini-swe-agent, a ~100 LoC harness that runs Claude4 in a loop with no tools other than "terminal". And they still get to within 10% of their much larger, tool supporting, swe-agent harness on swe-bench.

I don't see the models plateauing. I think our expectations are overinflated.
by uecker | 2025-07-27 18:23:35+00:00
When I implemented this, I did some minimal benchmarking. Realloc was easily fast enough to cover all my use cases. I am not Facebook who need to optimize the single last byte of their string type. For the fast case, there is the alternative API which allows one to keep track of the capacity, without having the cost of storing it in the type.

But realloc also does overallocate a little bit, and for large blocks it would remap the pages. The inlining argument makes sense though. (Edit: Pushing and then popping a billion integers takes about 2 seconds with std::vector<int>, 10 with vec(int) and realloc each time, and 4.3 seconds with a simple preallocation logic that does not require a capacity on my laptop. Having a call to "rand" in it already adds more overhead.).
by metalman | 2025-07-27 18:23:38+00:00
.......attain strait and level flight, reduce airspeed to 65knots.....pull main controls aft till they hit the stops while applying full rudder......bieng able to recover from the "unusual attitude" quicky and cleanly is the skill needed to procede to all of the technological fiddling and gadgetry.....or is this all just a song and dance working up to just eliminating general aviation and making one of the passengers sit up front and wear a nice hat? if not, then what on earth are all of these fancy accelerometers for?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zgfna12Rt-k
by fleebee | 2025-07-27 18:23:56+00:00
I on the other hand find agentic LLMs mentally draining.

I can't enter a flow state since the workflow boils down to waiting and then getting interrupted, and then waiting again. Often the LLM does the wrong thing and then instead of moving to implement another feature, I'm stuck in a loop where I'm trying to get it to fix poor decisions or errors.

It's possible I get a feature implemented faster thanks to agentic LLM, but the experience of overseeing and directing it is dreadful and pretty much invariably I end up with some sort of tech debt slop.

I much prefer the chat interfaces for incorporating LLMs into my workflow.
by fragmede | 2025-07-27 18:24:10+00:00
Was all that snark, the cloud to ass" string replacement firefox extension; was it actually helpful? We're still trying to sell the masses (and ourselves) on the benefits of self-hosting, and the cost of cloud hosting vs on-prem has never really been answered. Don't get me wrong, a trawl through my comments here will find I don't always manage to hold my tongue when I'm feeling snarky, so I very much understand the desire, but at the end of the day, what has that actually helped? My friends who were Unix and Linux sysadmins who didn't manage to upskill are still out of a job when their employers moved the servers they were babysitting into the cloud, and my data is still swimming around somewhere in Facebook and Google's data centers.

Sure let's call the AI names, behind its back and to its face if we're feeling particularly bold, but is that actually going to amount to anything?
by hakunin | 2025-07-27 18:24:49+00:00
I love experiences folks shared in response to this. Makes me realize that there are many significant factors that influence how people see programming. My own experience for most years has been a combination of the joy of clear/convincing writing with the joy of a high level ergonomic language (Ruby) to express the code. In Ruby and its frameworks, you almost never write boilerplate, so everything is the interesting part. And the surest way to have good understanding of the code is to type it out. (That's why most books ask you to manually type the example code). Figured I'd share my experience too.
by bdangubic | 2025-07-27 18:25:02+00:00
I am both 1) and 2) and totally in love with AI dev… I am just one soul of course, your general observation might be right.

With 3 decades under my belt in the industry I can tell you on trait that THE BEST SWEs ALL have - laziness… if I had to manually do something 3 times, that shit is getting automated… AI dev took automation of mundane parts of our work to another level and I don’t think I could ever code without it anymore
by BlueTemplar | 2025-07-27 18:25:32+00:00
It's not that any more. Or at least not just that :

Visa Japan’s CEO says disabling card payment for legal adult content is “necessary to protect the brand” :

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/visa-japans-ceo-says-dis...

(And from what I have understood, there's very little or perhaps even no shame in Japan about these things, so that applies even less there.)
by thehappypm | 2025-07-27 18:26:11+00:00
In my opinion, diamonds really are the best jewel for a engagement ring. They are really the only gem that will really never chip, fade, or cloud over time. Alternatives like moissanite are great, don’t get me wrong, but they’re just not quite as good on the longevity scale. When you buy someone a diamond, they could literally do zero maintenance on it and 100 years later they still have a diamond that looks basically exactly the same.
by quotemstr | 2025-07-27 18:26:12+00:00
Thanks for putting in all this work. People should get more credit for writing good survey articles like yours.

One of the regrettable quirks of our industry is the way we replicate theoretically language-neutral components separately in multiple language ecosystems and verticals. I wish we didn't a separate npm and cargo. I wish the polyglot runtimes you mention (especially Graal) would see more adoption. I wish we didn't have both Duktape and MicroPython. There's nothing language-specific about efficient garbage collection or compact bytecode or package dependency resolution.
by tmtvl | 2025-07-27 18:26:29+00:00
What do you do if 'a.<tab>' doesn't work because it's not 'a.fun(b, c)' but 'b.fun(a, c)' or 'c.fun(a, b)'?

Also think of autocompletion for 'var x = new' to 'var x = new ByteArenaFactory()', the way you get from nothing to 'ByteArenaFactory' is the same way you get from nothing to '(fun a b c)'.
by tickettotranai | 2025-07-27 18:26:37+00:00
It's a question of timescales and degrees and magnitudes, not of binary "did or didn't destroy". If we hadn't stopped redwood logging in the 20th century, yeah, the ecosystem would be replaced... But probably by something smaller and faster growing. Victory! Redwoods got replaced by smaller trees, mission success.

Monocultures are a scary thing (I'm sure you've heard about how we had to completely switch banana varietals), and having resilient ecosystems is important. I think ATM the consensus is having an apex predator does actually help the stability of these sorts of ecosystems and leads to outcomes most would consider favorable (greater diversity, better density, closer to an equilibrium). Now, we could surely fix this problem by doing it ourselves (eg by subsidizing deer and rabbit hunting and venison), but wolves are probably cheaper.
by wbobeirne | 2025-07-27 18:26:38+00:00
> they allow author monetization they take a very large cut

It could definitely change in the future, but Substack's cut seems to be 10% minus credit card fees. That definitely seems pretty reasonable in comparison to other platforms (Most app stores tend to be around 30%.)

Maybe there are other creator-hostile elements, but most of the creators I follow that have started on or switched to Substack don't seem to have an adversarial relationship with it.
by unshavedyak | 2025-07-27 18:26:45+00:00
I'm a bit different in your list, imo. I'm ~25years camp, did it long before it was my career and it's been my obsession for most of it.

I use Claude Code for two primary reasons:

1. Because whether i like it or not, i think it's going to become a very important tool in our craft. I figure i better learn how to use this shovel and find the value in it (if any), or else others will and leave me behind.

2. Because my motivation outweighs my physical ability to type, especially as i age. I don't have the endurance i once did and so being able to spend more time thinking and less time laboring is an interesting idea.

Claude Code certainly isn't there yet for my desires, but i'm still working on finding the value in it - thinking of workflows to accelerate general dev time, etc. It's not required yet, but my fear is soon enough it will be required for all but fun hobby work. It has potential to become a power tool for a wood workers shop.
by potatolicious | 2025-07-27 18:27:33+00:00
+1, and also to add: this isn't even a new phenomenon. My hot take is that AI coding is only the latest in a trend that has been running in the industry for literally decades. The technology itself might be novel but what it's doing is very, very old!

You used to have to write tons of real code to stand up something as simple as a backend endpoint. Now a lot of this stuff is literally declarative config files.

Ditto frontends. You used to have to imperative manage all kinds of weird bullshit, but over the last decade we've gradually moved to... declarative, reactive patterns that let the some underlying framework handle the busywork.

We also created... declarative config files to ensure consistent deploys every time. You know, instead of ssh'ing into production machines to install stuff.

We used to handle null pointers, too, and tore our hair out because a single missed check caused your whole process to go poof. Now... it's built into the language and it is physically impossible to pull of a null pointer dereference. Awesome!

We've been "putting ourselves out of work" for going on decades now, getting rid of more boilerplate, more repetitive and error-prone logic, etc etc. We did it with programming languages, libraries, and frameworks. All in the service of focusing on the bits we actually care about and that matter to us.

This is only the latest in a long line of things software engineers did to put themselves out of work. The method of doing it is very new, the ends are not. And like every other thing that came before it, I highly doubt this one will actually succeed in putting us out of work.
by chrisg23 | 2025-07-27 18:27:42+00:00
It's my sense that globalism kicked off this trend of anti-globalism.

If it benefitted more people, or more accurately if it benefitted people in a more equitable way instead of concentrating the gains in the hand of the wealthy and powerful, globally, then maybe there would be less of a pullback.

I'm not arguing for or against globalism, it has many benefits and drawbacks, but the undercurrent of opposition has existed long before Trump of Brexit, as seen for example in the various GX (G8, G20, etc) protests that took place around the world in the 2000's and 2010's, preceding the Trumpers and Brexit.

I agree the sentiment has picked up in recent years, accelerated since Covid, and that politicians are doing what politicians do, trying to get elected.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-27 18:28:00+00:00
JWST is a great achievement. No question about that. But we could have easily made good use of a dozen of them. NASA could have built a dozen with only a small incremental cost, because once you have a design and tooling and test rigs and test plans and machine shop setups, the incremental cost is pretty small.

For example, when I worked at Boeing, sinking a die for a forging cost $250,000. Stamping out a forging cost a few dollars. When I was putting together a stack of identical electronic circuit boards, the first one took 2 hours. The last one took 15 minutes.
by wyldfire | 2025-07-27 18:28:43+00:00
Love it or hate it, at the very least you can grant it this: Claude Code can mitigate some of the cost of Yak Shaving [1]. You need this digression/distraction feature, even though it's not the main attraction. Testing/infrastructure etc -- whatever it is, let's just have the automaton do the tedium.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving
by philodeon | 2025-07-27 18:29:10+00:00
As sad as today is, the one ray of sunshine here is that Tom Lehrer’s obit was written so long ago (and saved for the day it would be needed), that no one updated it with the subsequent revelation that his work at the Atomic Energy Commission was actually a cover story for his far more sensitive work at the fledgling National Security Agency.

Seeing the New York Times publish wrong out-of-date information has been funny since Judith Miller.
by bostonvaulter2 | 2025-07-27 18:29:53+00:00
> glove80 has far and away the most comfortable thumb cluster for my hands

If I'm reading your reply further down the page right then you only use two of the 6 keys. Is that right? For me, I think I'd want to use at least 4 or 5 keys in my thumb cluster before I could call it comfortable.
by quotemstr | 2025-07-27 18:31:10+00:00
> Apple has a JIT restriction because JIT introduces native code that was not present during app review, and app review is where they prohibit calling non-public APIs, at least historically.

Another regrettable thing about our industry is the proliferation of locked-gate-in-an-open-field-tier security theater. Apple's PROT_EXEC restriction has zero security benefit: anything JIT-compiled code can do, interpreted code can do too.

(In the same vein, macOS Santa (used by many a tech company to police programs runnable on Apple developer endpoints) doesn't restrict script launches at all. The interpreters that Apple ships with macOS have built-in FFIs like Python ctypes that enables programs launched using these interpreters to do anything a Mach-O binary can do.)

While I respect the sweat and cleverness that went into making JS runtimes work efficiently while wearing Apple's no-PROT_EXEC hairshirt, none of this work ought to have been necessary. Imagine how much further ahead the industry would be if these big brains had focused on solving some other problem.
by potatolicious | 2025-07-27 18:31:19+00:00
> "producing solutions for actual problems that real people have, is certainly intellectually demanding and also something that allows for several standard deviations in skill level"

Absolutely agreed, but I think the idea is that coding tools (or languages, or libraries, or frameworks) frees us to do the actually hard, skill-intensive bits of this, because the thing that's intellectually demanding isn't marshaling and unmarshaling JSON.
by Swizec | 2025-07-27 18:33:09+00:00
> To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev:

> 1) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day)

> 2) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)

> I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.

I’ve been programming for almost 30 years. Started when I was 9 years old and I’ve been looking at code pretty much every day since then.

I love AI coding and leading teams. Because I love solving big problems. Bigger than I can do on my own. For me htat’s the fun part. The code itself is just a tool.
by potatolicious | 2025-07-27 18:33:55+00:00
Worth adding that sometimes I will spend an ~equivalent amount of time doing something in Claude Code, but the result is better.

Case in point recently I was working on a mobile app where I had to check for a whole litany of user permissions and present UI to the user if any particular permission was missing, including instructions on how to rectify it.

Super annoying to do manually, but Claude Code was not only able to exhaustively enumerate all possible combos of missing permissions, but also automatically create the UIs for each edge case. I reviewed all of it for accuracy, which took some time.

I probably would've missed some of the more obscure edge cases on my own.

Overall maybe not much faster than doing it myself, but I'm pretty sure the results were substantially better.