MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by janalsncm | 2025-07-15 21:58:05+00:00
> As insurers accurately assess risk through technical testing

If that’s not “the rest of the owl” I don’t know what is.

Let’s swap out superintelligence for something more tangible. Say, a financial crash due to systemic instability. How would you insure against such a thing? I see a few problems, which are even more of an issue for AI.

1. The premium one should pay depends on the expected risk, which is damage from the event divided by the chance of event occurring. However, quantifying the numerator is basically impossible. If you bring down the US financial system, no insurance company can cover that risk. With AI, damage might be destruction of all of humanity, if we believe the doomers.

2. Similarly, the denominator is basically impossible to quantify. What is the chance of an event which has never happened before? In fact, having “insurance” against such a thing will likely create a moral hazard, causing companies to take even bigger risks.

3. On a related point, trying to frame existential losses in financial terms doesn’t make sense. This is like trying to take out an insurance policy that will protect you from Russian roulette. No sum of cash can correct that kind of damage.
by ben_w | 2025-07-15 21:59:39+00:00
They've definitely improved in many areas. And not just the easily-gamed public metrics; I've got a few private tests of my own, asking them certain questions to see how they respond, and even on the questions where all versions make mistakes in their answers, they make fewer mistakes than they used to.

I can also see this live, as I'm on a free plan and currently using ChatGPT heavily, and I can watch the answers degrade as I burn through the free allowance of high-tier models and end up on the cheap models.

Now, don't get me wrong, I won't rank even the good models higher than a recent graduate, but that's in comparison to ChatGPT-3.5's responses feeling more like those of a first or second year university student.

And likewise with the economics of them, I think we're in a period where you have to multiply training costs to get incremental performance gains, so there's an investment bubble and it will burst. I don't think the current approach will get in-general-superhuman skills, because it will cost too much to get there. Specific superhuman skills AI in general already demonstrate, but the more general models are mostly only superhuman by being "fresh grad" at a very broad range of things, if any LLM is superhuman at even one skill then I've missed the news.
by iLemming | 2025-07-15 21:59:57+00:00
My team been discussing how Jira is the most-hated tool in the survey.

When I was less experienced, I despised Jira with an intensity that I didn't hesitate to express. My hatred burned with religious fervor, reaching such heights that my team lead once wrote on the whiteboard: "X days since [my-name] swore at Jira," promising pizza for the entire team if we reached two weeks. That pizza never materialized.

Eventually, I came to a realization that would shift my perspective entirely. Throughout my career, there would be countless hills to die on - tools, programming languages, ideas, and techniques that I simply couldn't avoid. While I couldn't control their presence, I could control my approach to them.

Jira deserves its criticism for legit reasons. The UI lacks intuitive flow, it's non-linear, keyboard navigation is cumbersome, simple tasks require clicking and clicking more, checking status or looking up information become unnecessarily complex.

But then, "a problem cannot be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.", right? So, instead of fighting the tool, I decided to minimize my interaction with its problematic interface. I've found go-jira, a CLI tool that transformed my work. I even developed custom integrations for my editor¹, so I can do thing even faster. Ping me if you're an Emacs user, I'll show you. Now I can search through Jira efficiently, hover over ticket references like SAC-12345 in my notes and quickly get a ticket description, instantly convert that text into a shareable URL for teammates, etc.

Don't just hate things blindly - do something about it, find workarounds.

___

¹ https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/ji...
by runjake | 2025-07-15 22:01:06+00:00
Normally, I like receiving information in bullet point style, but this post was really hard to read and wasn't well-thought out or well-organized.

For others: This is an advertisement for a product called Sweep AI, an AI assistant for JetBrains IDEs. It probably should have been a more well-written Tell HN post.

Here's the URL, since the OP forgot to include it: https://sweep.dev/

And here's the URL to grab the plugin: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/26860-sweep-ai
by init1 | 2025-07-15 22:01:23+00:00
Instead of just thinking about the proof in your mind or putting it in comments you can actually embed pre/post conditions and compile time proofs in actual code using ADA SPARK. You use Pre and Post aspects for subprograms and pragma Invariant for loops and such constructs. The spark toolchain will run provers against your code and show if it can show the proofs hold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYAod_61ZuQ
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-15 22:01:42+00:00
Bad faith apples to oranges comparison. Different times back then, law enforcement had a lot more power to retaliate to violence against them. What would have happened to you if you threw rocks at cops in the 1950s?

So of course today you need to hide your identity when you're being assaulted like this by deranged protesters who think they are on the right side of history, but the law enforcement isn't allowed to retaliate in defense to protect you or themselves without being called Nazis or fascists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVYe6537FWo
by pclowes | 2025-07-15 22:02:10+00:00
Interesting, could you show me a formal proof that can't be expressed in logic (ie. code) and then tested?

My thought here is that since proofs are logic and so is code you can't have a proof that can't be represented in code. Now admittedly this might look very different than typical say JUnit unit tests but it would still be a test validating logic. I am not saying every system is easily testable or deterministic but overall, all else equal, the more tested and testable a system is the better it is.

IME things that are very hard to test are often just poorly designed.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-07-15 22:02:13+00:00
"We gave 1000 lucky participants $3.50 and a used bubblegum wrapper to share between them, but it didn't measurably increase their marginal propensity to have kids at all! Clearly the root problem couldn't possibly have anything to due with economics!"

It's wild how quick and eager economists are to discard money as a driving factor when the solution could possibly involve more social spending. If this were about taking credit for success, they would be tripping over themselves to explain how economics drives the cultural factors, lol.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-07-15 22:02:18+00:00
Looking at this through transhumanist metaphors, like in any of dozens of scifi works to cover future cognitions well (my favourite is Eclipse Phase, if you want a recommendation).

Exocortices would be great if the modern technology was there to support it, but the current paradigms make memory-access too slow and unreliable to be worth the agency benefits, especially since current brain formats need internally-stored memories for default-mode idea generation in the background and can't make good use of location pointers for dreams.
by supportengineer | 2025-07-15 22:02:23+00:00
I have two teenagers and they are wonderful. But the world is NOT the same anymore. In the current moment, I would really think twice before bringing any more kids into this world. I feel sorry for everyone coming of age at this time. The world got very bad very quickly. There's no jobs, no one can afford a house, healthcare, or retirement, and the climate is toast.
by cpa | 2025-07-15 22:02:54+00:00
I don’t know why but nerds love typography. I sure do :)

Maybe something about the fact that it’s familiar for people working with computers. It’s approachable (needs a keyboard and some fonts), familiar (we spend our time typing and reading), well defined (it’s a succession of a finite number of shapes that are also well defined, not as Freeform as a drawing).
by freedomben | 2025-07-15 22:02:55+00:00
Could not agree more with everything you said. I hate code folding because it leads to giant functions and blocks that are way too big, but because of the folding people don't have to look at it and scroll (which if they did, they would be much less inclined to write and ship such shit in the first place). Same with type inference. It's almost no effort to write out the type, and it's eminently readable. With type inference, it's not at all obvious. I usually get "well you can just hover over it with the IDE and it will tell you the type." I don't want to have to hover over stuff just to see the type! Not only is that a major downgrade from the previous state where it was just "String some_str" or whatever, but having to pause and grab the mouse and move it over to the variable is majorly disruptive to reading and requires me to use a mouse (which I don't normally use). Also, I use neovim, not whatever IDE you use and think everyone else must use.

I likewise thought the final response linked to was great. It was straightforward and to the point.
by DeRock | 2025-07-15 22:03:04+00:00
Paying someone to watch your children full time so that you can do your full time job is inherently classist. Who takes care of the nannies kids?

The solution to "kids are expensive" being to just pay someone lower class to do it is absurd.

> You can also have the nanny watch other kids in the neighborhood if you only have 1 kid.

You're re-inventing daycare here.
by dang | 2025-07-15 22:03:05+00:00
Can you link to some specific examples of low-quality discussions?

As with any Major Ongoing Topic on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), the goal is to reserve frontpage space for the higher-quality stories and try to downweight the follow-ups and low-quality ones. We can't do this perfectly, of course, but we try.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-15 22:03:15+00:00
I am not a fan of Test Driven Development, not at all.

Having your invariants and pre/post conditions correct is not enough. You also need to do the right thing. For example, you have a function that adds two durations in the form hh:mm:ss, you have mm <= 60 and ss <= 60 as an invariant, testing it is a good thing, but it won't tell you that your addition is correct. Imagine your result is always 1s too much, you can even test associativity and commutativity and it will pass. Having these correct is necessary but not sufficient.

Problem is, when you write tests first, especially tight, easy to run unit tests, you will be tempted to write code that pass the tests, not code that does the right thing. Like throwing stuff at your tests and see what sticks.

I much prefer the traditional approach of first solving the problem the best you can, which may of may not involve thinking about invariants, but always with the end result in mind. And only when you are reasonably confident with your code, you can start testing. If it fails, you will have the same temptation to just pass the test, but at least, you wrote it at least once without help from the tests.

Maybe that's just me, but when I tried the "tests first" approach, the end result got pretty bad.
by IshKebab | 2025-07-15 22:03:17+00:00
I don't think that's a significant factor because it doesn't come into play until all of your children are at least like 8. Nobody is thinking "I'll have to drive them to music lessons in 10 years instead of letting them play outside".

I think the obvious factors are far more likely - people are poorer, childcare is more expensive, stay-at-home parents are less common.
by Rohansi | 2025-07-15 22:03:25+00:00
The M1 Max's GPU can only make use of about 90GB/s out of the 400GB/s they advertise/support. If the AMD chip can make better use of its 200GB/s then, as you say, it will manage to have better LLM tokens per second. You can't just look at what has the wider/faster memory bus.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
by dcreater | 2025-07-15 22:03:50+00:00
This is silicon valley culture on steroids: I really have to question if it is positive for any involved party. Codex almost has no mindshare and rightly so. It's a textbook also ran, except it came from the most dominant player and was outpaced by Claude code on the order of weeks.

Why go through all that? Instead what would have been a much better scenario is openai carefully assessing different approaches to agentic coding and releasing a more fully baked product with solid differentiation. Even Amazon just did that with Kiro
by mildlyhostileux | 2025-07-15 22:03:50+00:00
Anthropic just dropped “Claude for Financial Services”

-New models scoring higher on finance specific tasks

-MCP connectors for popular datasets/datastores including FactSet, PitchBook, S&P Global, Snowflake, Databricks, Box, Daloopa, etc

This looks a lot like what Claude Code did for coding: better models, good integrations, etc. But finance isn’t pure text, the day‑to‑day medium is still Excel and PowerPoint.Curious to see how this plays out in the long to medium term.

Devs already live in textual IDEs and CLIs, so an inline LLM feels native. Analysts live in nested spreadsheets, model diagrams, and slide decks. Is a side‑car chat window enough? Will folks really migrate fully into Claude?

Accuracy a big issue everywhere, but finance has always seemed particularly sensitive. While their new model benchmarks well, it still seems to fall short of what an IBank/PE MD might expect?

Curious to hear from anyone thats been in the pilot group or got access to the 1 month demo today. Early pilots at Bridgewater, NBIM, AIG, CBA claim good productivity gains for analysts and underwriters.
by _cwpi | 2025-07-15 22:04:09+00:00
I think noun-verb is worse; I'm unsure where the idea comes from that Helix's (or Kakoune's) editing model is better. Bear with my short rant. :-)

I don't want or need pre-emptive visual feedback on every keystroke, because it's a tool I use every day. I want an editing language that allows me to develop a mental model of it, so that I can _avoid_ round-tripping most edit actions visually. The primary advantage of the Vi editing language has never been speed (though that tends to be a secondary one), it's that it saves you from thinking about editing. Visual feedback also adds noise; it's especially distracting when you're moving around reading code. It's not an automatic win except when you're learning. Finally, if I really need it, I'm using a modal editor! I can simply switch into visual mode for complex edits. That's the modal solution.

And in exchange for (ime, annoying) visual feedback I have to give up things like the repeat last edit '.' key, and operator pending mode (see :omap), and more... which isn't palatable to me. Of course, everyone works differently; different strokes. But it's not obviously better, in a lot of ways.

I _am_ envious of the complete default configuration Helix has. Though it seems like that's planned from Neovim in the near future, alongside multicursor (filed under 'super macros'), looking at their roadmap.
by reconnecting | 2025-07-15 22:04:36+00:00
Borland's DOS IDEs represented what we might call brutalism in interface design. Windows (after 2000) arbitrarily became more like favelas with dozens of unnecessary panels in every application, a great example of when features win over rationality.

I just realized that I'm not sure if it's Borland or Norton who brought the blue interface to DOS first. Does someone remember who was first?

For some whom miss this deep blue and cyan. https://play.tirreno.com/game
by astrange | 2025-07-15 22:04:37+00:00
I thought the ghosts were the strongest part because it showed the story had the confidence to continue introducing new crazier ideas, and that one was particularly crazy but still fit into the SCP world. Sort of like why people liked Three Body Problem.

The weakest parts are when it focuses too much on the antagonist, where it tends to forget the actual definition of 3125 and just makes it something/someone that causes the world to end in random wacky crazy ways.

When it gets post-apocalyptic the writing also tends to forget how travel times and geography work. (Pretty common problem with old SF, where you'd go to a "planet" and there are like, 3 people who live on the planet. In this case the remaining living protagonist somehow manages to walk between very far places on his own without needing food and such.)
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-15 22:04:50+00:00
In my world there are multiple countries who each have an incentive to win this race. I know of no world where you can penalize AI researchers across international boundaries nor to believe your scenario could ever play out. You're dreaming if you think you could actually get all the players to co-operate on this. It's like expecting the world to come together on climate change. It's not happening and it's not going to happen.

Further, it doesn't take a huge lab to do it. You can do it at home. It might take longer but there's an 1.4kg blob in everyone's head as proof of concept and does not take a data center.
by v5v3 | 2025-07-15 22:04:57+00:00
Made a comment, it then asked me to sign up and couldn't be bothered.

The comment was: make the Firefox containers work in private mode.

In Safari private mode. Each tab has no knowledge of another (e.g. log into Gmail and then open a new tab and go to Gmail and you won't be signed in).

Firefox doesn't have this tab level isolation.

Also offer equivalent of safari's lockdown mode. So images and site features capable of loading malware etc are blocked by default.
by anonfordays | 2025-07-15 22:05:00+00:00
>Not to mention being a Nazi bar

It's not a Nazi bar, it's the complete opposite of that by welcoming anyone from any race and background. Ends up even worse, Wayland and Freedesktop are pedo bars, and they've been projecting about "safe spaces" this entire time. They were harboring a violent sexual predator. The Mastodon profile you linked is to a profile with ghoulish antisemitic screeds. Delusionally calling anyone and anything you disagree with "Nazi" and "far-right" has run its course.
by jpm_sd | 2025-07-15 22:05:42+00:00
I think this idea that we need more people is completely bonkers. Look at the housing market in any developed country; overcrowding at tourist destinations around the world; environmental impact of resource extraction, plastics manufacturing, fossil fuel consumption. There are WAY TOO MANY people in the world already. We had thriving communities with <1B people on the planet, we certainly don't need to go rocketing past 10B.
by hoppp | 2025-07-15 22:05:59+00:00
This is exactly my experience as I started heavily using LLMs for coding. It can feel like a trap,Im sifting through all the generated code instead of reading the docs and finding the correct way to do things, because I expect the machine to output the answer, I spend a lot of time prompting.

When it works on the first prompt its magic. I especially like to generate UI components, but for more complex things its a major time waster. Often complex functions just dont work and debugging is slower than rewriting it from scratch.
by blibble | 2025-07-15 22:06:21+00:00
it's certainly not that difficult to imagine international controls on fab/DC construction, enforced by the UN security council

there's even a previous example of controls of this sort at the nation state level: those for nuclear enrichment

(the cost to perform uranium enrichment is now less than building a state of the art fab...!)

as a nation state (not facebook): you're entitled to enrich, but only under the watchful eye of the IAEA

and if you violate, then the US tends to bunker-bust you

this paper has some ideas on how it might work: https://cdn.governance.ai/International_Governance_of_Civili...
by notfliz | 2025-07-15 22:07:25+00:00
Descripción: Peter Rabbit y su familia disfrutan de atormentar al señor McGregor por su jardín de hortalizas. Hasta que un día nadie puede impedirles de pasearse por su casa y sus tierras hasta que llega uno de los parientes de McGregor, el cual recibe más de lo que esperaba.

Sinopsis: ¿Quién dijo que el campo era tranquilo?
by Kambing | 2025-07-15 22:08:07+00:00
> A test is not a proof

Actually, a test _is_ a proof! Or more specifically, a traditional test case is a narrow, specific proposition. For example, the test `length([1, 2, 3]) = 3` is a proposition about the behavior of the `length` function on a concrete input value. The proof of this proposition is _automatically generated_ by the runtime, i.e., the proof that this proposition holds is the execution of the left-hand side of the equality and observing it is identical to the right-hand side. In this sense, the runtime serves as an automated theorem prover (and is, perhaps, why test cases are the most accessible form of formal reasoning available to a programmer).

What we colloquially consider "proof" are really more abstract propositions (e.g., using first-order logic) that require reasoning beyond simple program execution. While the difference is, in some sense, academic, it is important to observe that testing and proving (in that colloquial sense) are, at their core, the same endeavor.
by Lerc | 2025-07-15 22:08:17+00:00
Yeah, I guess The same problem exists with The Watchmen and Fight Club.

I found it fascinating how the term snowflake was changed because the character that people admired told their proxies that they were not snowflakes. The meaning at the time was that they were homogenous and unremarkable. Snowflakes represented the opposite where each individual snowflake has a unique pattern. That viewpoint was not empowering so they took the metaphor to be about the fragility of snowflakes.
by JohnKemeny | 2025-07-15 22:08:53+00:00
You’ve missed the most important point of TDD—and indeed, of tests.

Tests do not ensure that your functions are correct; they ensure that you are alerted when their behavior changes.

Second, TDD is a way to force dogfooding: having to use the functions you’re going to write, before you write them, helps you design good interfaces.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-15 22:11:00+00:00
No, no, nothing like that.

Every layer of an LLM runs separately and sequentially, and there isn't much data transfer between layers. If you wanted to, you could put each layer on a separate GPU with no real penalty. A single request will only run on one GPU at a time, so it won't go faster than a single GPU with a big RAM upgrade, but it won't go slower either.