MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mdickers47 | 2025-07-24 17:29:41+00:00
It is as small as it says. BGP/IPSec might be silly at its size, but it was also the path of least resistance given the background of the people in the Bureau of Lan Management. I guess it was also for lolz to see if these things could be made stable and reliable without the big-organization clownery that we constantly run into.
by qsort | 2025-07-24 17:29:42+00:00
I don't think AI lives up to the current hype but this article is garbage.

They're obviously talking about the METR paper, but the main takeaway according to the authors themselves was that self-reporting productivity increases is unreliable, not that you should cancel your subscription.

Nothing in that paper said that AI can't speed up software engineering.

Why are we responding to hype with nonsense?
by ken47 | 2025-07-24 17:30:07+00:00
The overarching problem is that signal:noise ratio in contemporary discussions of AI is absurdly low. This is thanks in large part to a media complex whose primary goal seems to be the pumping of AI investments and stocks, and the associated cacophony of mendacious exaggerations. If only we could have a reasonable discussion without the "contributions" of the non-technical and/or salespeople...
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-24 17:30:17+00:00
Chromebooks in school seemed like a great idea before attention economy destroyed society. If your kid is spending their time playing with legos, drawing, etc, and for homework they use the chromebook, which develops rudimentary computer skills and vastly reduces teacher workload, then it's great. Different picture when their past time is tiktok, roblox, etc

Inb4 "I grew up gaming all day and I'm fine" millenials: the social fabric of your life didn't depend on the games, they were games. Social media is vastly different. (also you arguably could have done better with better activities)
by Mars008 | 2025-07-24 17:30:20+00:00
> “The results surprised us,” research lab METR reported. “Developers thought they were 20pc faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19pc slower when they had access to AI than when they didn’t.”

They forgot about training and practice. Try it with airplanes. "The results surprised us. Given Boeing 777 they thought they will get from London to New York in 7 hours, but they actually couldn't even get off the ground. In fact they couldn't even start the engines."
by freeopinion | 2025-07-24 17:30:25+00:00
Obvious math:

Population of US: ~340M

1 percenters of US: ~3.4M

1% of 1 percenters of US: ~34K

Population of India: ~1.4B

0.1 percenters of India: ~1.4M

1% of 0.1 percenters of India: ~14K

So if you only target the extreme top of the wealth demographic in India, the numbers still matter. If you somehow convinced 1/2 of 1% of the millionaires in India to purchase a Cybertruck and donate it to a local mobile health clinic, you would increase global sales of Cybertrucks by 100%.

Is there any way sales in New Mexico will have a meaningful impact on Tesla's bottom line? West Virginia? South Carolina? There are more Tesla dealerships in New Mexico than in all of India.
by chadaustin | 2025-07-24 17:30:42+00:00
Every time this conversation comes up, I'm reminded of my team at Dropbox, where it was a rite of passage for new engineers to introduce a segfault in our Go server by not synchronizing writes to a data structure.

Swift has (had?) the same issue and I had to write a program to illustrate that Swift is (was?) perfectly happy to segfault under shared access to data structures.

Go has never been memory-safe (in the Rust and Java sense) and it's wild to me that it got branded as such.
by happytoexplain | 2025-07-24 17:30:50+00:00
(Note: This is an American take, and uses software jobs as the primary example, but a lot of this applies to other jobs)

Yes, well said - with one caveat: "Money and social status" is subtly but crucially different from "livelihood". You correctly identify the group of people whose lives are affected, but lump those people along with CEOs and AI companies under the umbrella of "money and social status" in your summarization, which maybe undersells the role of the masses in this equation.

The software job - traditionally one of the few good career options remaining for a large chunk of Americans - is falling. There are many different reasons, and AI, while not the apocalypse, is a small but crucial part of it. We need to get over the illusion that a large piece of that fall consists of wildly luxurious incomes reducing to simply cushy incomes - "boo hoo", we say, sarcastically. But the majority of software folks are going from "comfortable" to "unhappy but livable", while some are going from "livable" to "not livable", while others are no longer employed at all. There were already too many people across the job spectrum in these buckets, and throwing another gigantic chunk of citizens in there is going to eventually cause big, bad things to happen.

We need to start giving a shit about our citizens, and part of that is avoiding the implication that just because something disruptive is inevitable, doesn't mean the affect isn't devastating and we should just do absolutely nothing about the situation. Another part of that is avoiding the implication that the average person can just successfully change careers without enormous suffering. We can ease, assist, REGULATE (which the party in power would like to make illegal), etc. It's important to understand that none of that means "stopping" AI or something ridiculous like that.

We need to start giving a shit about our citizens.

A third time: We need to start giving a shit about our citizens.

And sorry, most of this was not directed personally at you. Just the first note about your wording.
by ahlCVA | 2025-07-24 17:31:01+00:00
While this leaves a lot to be desired as a window manager, it illustrates one of my main gripes about the Wayland ecosystem: By effectively bundling the window manager and X server, it makes it much harder for more niche/experimental window managers to come about and stay alive. Even with things like wlroots, you have to invest a lot more work to get even the basics working that X11 will give you for free.
by refulgentis | 2025-07-24 17:31:25+00:00
Not OP, not sure what you mean but curious.

- Snark?

- Is "the issue" that anyone who claims any productivity gain is using magical thinking?

- How does the linked article "deal with" "the issue"?

- What title did they mention?

- What did they link to that has that title?

> Edit: SimonW? Really? I didn’t see the name but I didn’t expect you to be like that.

Like what? I think you're getting a bit emotional & personal here, I don't read anything remotely inappropriate into Simon's comment. Been here 15 years. OP's was odd for HN in that it admits 0 argument: if you think you have productivity gains, it's magical thinking.
by palmfacehn | 2025-07-24 17:31:55+00:00
There's nothing in the pure argument for private property which contradicts a moral obligation to support the downtrodden. The purists would only insist that the support be offered voluntarily. I'm somewhat disappointed to see the assumption to the contrary repeatedly made on this site.

Advocacy for private property doesn't start from a motive of greed. Rather, proponents regard it as the best way to responsibly manage scarce resources and create abundance. After all, there is no charity without abundance.

Private property and open markets create the incentives for value creation and increased productivity. While central planning may be able to achieve these ends theoretically, in practice we find that the incentives of the bureaucrats and insiders often limit productive opportunities. The "Economic Calculation Problem" is another huge barrier for successful state management.

So while the sales pitch for socialized management of resources often involves "equality of outcome", it often results in the lowering of productivity generally. Worse yet, centralized bureaucratic control of scarce resources incentivizes favors to large industrial concerns, politically connected classes and elites.

Obviously there will be those who disagree with this analysis. I only object to the misstating of intent.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-07-24 17:32:05+00:00
I didn't know about this knot, but I'm pretty sure I tried it when I was kid, messing around with different ways to tie laces.

I tried it just now, and it's indeed very secure.

I almost always wear sneakers, and don't have any problem with laces getting untied, so I'll stick with the Ian Knot.

I will suggest this secure knot to my son, though.
by jstarks | 2025-07-24 17:32:15+00:00
> If you want to claim that a language is memory-unsafe, POC || GTFO.

There's a POC right in the post, demonstrating type confusion due to a torn read of a fat pointer. I think it could have just as easily been an out-of-bounds write via a torn read of a slice. I don't see how you can seriously call this memory safe, even by a conservative definition.

Did you mean POC against a real program? Is that your bar?
by jtrn | 2025-07-24 17:32:20+00:00
And you do realize I was specifically contrasting how much and how we know about AI versus how much we know, for instance, in the field of productivity psychology. In addition to how idiotic it is to say we know nothing.

If we know nothing about AI, then by the same standard, we know nothing about anything.

Or let me put it simply to you. If we had a random average firm, and we either gave them a copy of Newport's book on productivity or a subscription to Gemini, with all we surely must KNOW regarding productivity, the book version of the firm would become massively more productive, no?
by ikmckenz | 2025-07-24 17:32:31+00:00
> They forgot about training and practice. Try it with airplanes. "The results surprised us. Given Boeing 777 they thought they will get from London to New York in 7 hours, but they actually couldn't even get off the ground. In fact they couldn't even start the engines."

If your "AI Assistant" is as hard to operate as a trans-Atlantic flight on a Boeing 777, perhaps it's not a very good assistant?
by legitster | 2025-07-24 17:32:35+00:00
That chart of Net Approval coincides with roughly the time that the NYTimes decided to change how it reported on tech:

> Instead of covering [tech] with a business‑press or consumer lens, they shifted to a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair … This was a very deliberate top‑down decision.

(Per Matt Yglesias - former journalist at NYT)

Even outlets like Wired which literally started as industry mouthpieces followed suit at almost exactly this time period. It's also roughly this time where Google went from beloved and open to distrusted and defensive.

It could be a lot of what kicked off enshittification of tech was largely a change in perception. Eating from the tree of knowledge - and now we must all wear clothes.
by ewgoforth | 2025-07-24 17:32:47+00:00
As an anecdote, the summer after I graduated kindergarten I worked very hard to learn to tie my own shoes, because I didn't want to be the only student in first grade who couldn't tie his own shoes.

When my kids went into first grade around ten years ago, they couldn't tie their own shoes, but if they had been able to, they would have been about the only kids in their grade who could. Also, very few kids nowadays can whistle compared to when I was a kid. My kids didn't have as much access to screens as a lot of kids do, but they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets, etc.
by FredPret | 2025-07-24 17:33:19+00:00
Well, they decided which sites were OK, and then people SEO'd a bunch of crap into Google's idea of a good website.

I'm no fan of Google but it's not so simple to figure out what's relevant, good content on the scale of the internet, while confronted by an army of adversarial actors who can make money by working out what you value in a site.
by subscribed | 2025-07-24 17:33:55+00:00
>> What feature? > Google services

You can have sandboxed Google services on GOS in 10 minutes. Almost everything except for NFC payments works.

>> Samsung can only offer [...] > The only app I use is the camera and gallery app and they are fine

You literally said you need Google services. You don't need this for camera and gallery app? Anyway, GOS also has camera and gallery (the latter is pretty....barebones to say it mildly), and also allows use, for example, of ProShot, which may offer better results than the default camera. Or Pixel Camera :)

Other than that your rationale for not getting Pixel is completely fair. Let's hope 2026 will bring support (= secure hardware) from other OEMs.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-24 17:34:08+00:00
California had a court decision which would have done that generally, so they sponsored a ballot measure that excepted them, in exchange for other regulations. I'm not aware of any US jurisdictions where they haven't managed to avoid employer designation as a general rule.

But I know there are some wrinkles like workers comp disputes where individual drivers were found to be employees for workers comp purposes.
by evanelias | 2025-07-24 17:34:14+00:00
Have you ever spent a huge amount of unpaid time to create an innovative, successful open source project and then had it forked in this manner? If not, I don't think you can accurately predict how this feels. Especially if the forker takes credit for your work, raises large amounts of venture capital, and uses their fork in a way which directly competes with your original project.
by ofjcihen | 2025-07-24 17:34:22+00:00
To be fair that thirst probably comes from people who aren’t seeing the gains the hype would lead you to believe and are reaching into the void to not feel like they’re taking crazy pills.

It’s also probably not coming from a place of “I’m scared of AI so I want it to fail” but more like “my complex use case doesn’t work with AI and I’m really wondering why that is”.

There’s this desire it seems to think of people who aren’t on the hype train as “against” AI but people need to remember that these are most likely devs with a decade of experience who have been evaluating the usefulness of the tools they use for a long time.
by dubbel | 2025-07-24 17:34:57+00:00
You are looking at LLMs for code generation exclusively, but that is not the only application within software engineering.

In my company some people are using LLMs to generate some of their code, but more are using them to get a first code review, before requesting a review by their colleagues.

This helps getting the easy/nitpicky stuff out of the way and thereby often saves us one feedback+fix cycle.

Examples would be "you changed this unit test, but didn't update the unit test name", "you changed this function but not the doc string", or "if you reorder these if statements you can avoid deep nesting". Nothing groundbreaking, but nice things.

We still review like we did before, but can often focus a little more on the "what" instead of the "how".

In this application, the LLM is kind of like a linter with fuzzy rules. We didn't stop reviewing code just because many languages come with standard formatters nowadays, either.

While the whole code generation aspect of AI is all the rage right now (and to quote the article):

> Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI
by chmod775 | 2025-07-24 17:35:02+00:00
> A map showing reports of EE outage reports made to DownDetector suggests that those in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow are the worst affected.

No. Those are the most densely populated areas of the UK - obviously they appear as bright red spots on the map.

What you have is essentially a population map: https://xkcd.com/1138/
by ben_w | 2025-07-24 17:35:25+00:00
Our upper level Skypad allows you to enjoy views of the city or the megascreens while you recharge.

I would ask how bad someone's sense of taste must be to try to promote somewhere specifically because of the view, ~ 3m above ground, of parking lots and AC units mounted on the rooftops of warehouses*… but people have already been making that joke about Cybertruck since the announcement.

* I checked with Google Maps
by jtrn | 2025-07-24 17:36:02+00:00
No, I didn’t. I am getting tired of the accusations every time I write something I believe is thoughtful. I challenge every person who throws this at me to a live debate to see if it’s me thinking these thoughts or just an AI. If you decline, I assume it’s because you are so limited that you can’t imagine anyone thinking for themselves, because you project your own inabilities onto others.
by simonw | 2025-07-24 17:36:02+00:00
I stand by what I said.

I don't think the response from troupo that nayshins's personal experience is invalidated by a "randomised controlled trial" was well argued, so I imitated what I saw as their snarky wording with my own reworded version of it.

I do take the "AI isn't actually a productivity boost" thing a little bit personally these days, because the logical conclusion for that is that I've been deluding myself for the past two years and I'm effectively a victim of "magical thinking".

(That said, I did actually go to delete my comment shortly after posting it because I didn't think it added anything to the conversation, but it had already drawn a reply so I left it there.)
by jchw | 2025-07-24 17:36:05+00:00
Rust can yield a higher quality solution, but we can't make a perfect solution, we can only approach perfection. If we want to go further, we could introduce formally-proven code, too. Personally I'm interested in the intersection of proof assistants and Rust, like creusot-rs, and have been investigating it.

But as much as I love LARPing about correctness (believe me I do,) it's just simply the case that we won't right perfect software and it's totally OK. It's totally OK that our software will have artificial limitations, like with Go, only accepting filenames that are valid UTF-8, or taking some unnecessary performance/latency hits, or perhaps even crashing in some weird ass edge case. There are very few domains in which correctness issues can't be tolerated.

I don't deal with domains that are truly mission critical, where people could die if the code is incorrect. At worst, people could lose some money if my code is incorrect. I still would prefer not to cause that to happen, but those people are generally OK with taking that risk if it means getting features faster.

That's why Go has a future really. It's because for most software, some correctness issues are not the end of the world, and so you can rely on not fully sound approaches to finding bugs, like automated testing, race detection, and so on.

Rust can also make some types of software more productive to write, but it is unlikely to beat Go in terms of productivity when it comes to a lot of the stuff SaaS shops deal with. And boy, the software industry sure is swamped in fucking SaaS.
by abalashov | 2025-07-24 17:36:08+00:00
I do a lot of work in a rather obscure technology (Kamailio) with an embedded domain-specific scripting language (C-style) that was invented in the early 2000s specifically for that purpose, and can corroborate this.

Although the training data set is not wholly bereft of Kamailio configurations, it's not well-represented, and it would be at least a few orders of magnitude smaller than any mainstream programming language. I've essentially never had it spit out anything faintly useful or complete Kamailio-wise, and LLM guidance on Kamailio issues is at least 50% hallucinations / smoking crack.

This is irrespective of prompt quality; I've been working with Kamailio since 2006 and have always enjoyed writing, so you can count on me to formulate a prompt that is both comprehensive and intricately specific. Regardless, it's often a GPT-2 level experience, or akin to running some heavily quantised 3bn parameter local Llama that doesn't actually know much of anything specific.

From this one, can conclude that a tremendous amount of reinforcement for the weights is needed before the LLM can produce useful results in anything that isn't quasi-universal.

I do think, from a labour-political perspective, that this will lead to some guarding and fencing to try to prevent one's work-product from functioning as free training for LLMs that the financial classes intend to use to displace you. I've speculated before that this will probably harm the culture of open-source, as there will now be a tension between maximal openness and digital serfdom to the LLM companies. I can easily see myself saying:

I know our next commercial product (based on open-source inputs) releases, which are on-premise for various regulatory and security reasons, will be binary-only; I have never customers looking through our plain-text scripts before, but I don't want them fed into LLMs for experiments with AI slop.
by gpderetta | 2025-07-24 17:36:12+00:00
Interestingly, at least in C++, this was changed in the recent past. It used to be that evaluation of arguments was not sequenced at all and if any evaluation touched the same variable, and at least one was a write, it was UB.

It was changed as part of the C++11 memory model and now, as you said, there is a sequenced-before order, it is just unspecified which one it is.

I don't know much about C, but I believe it was similarly changed in C11.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-24 17:36:20+00:00
Writing needs a conceptual split analogous to the split between math and calculating.

Just as a calculating can be implemented on a computer which has low cognitive abilities but high algorithmic and procedural abilities, we need to extract out the word-smithing capabilities from writing separate from the thinking portion. Our lack of distinction in terms reflects a muddled conceptual framework.

LLMs are excellent wordsmiths completely divorced from the concept of thinking. They break the correlative assumption - that excellent writing is corresponds with excellent thinking. Until now, we've been able to discern poor idea because they have a certain aesthetic, think conspiracy rants in docx saying something about a theory of everything based on vibrations. But that no longer holds. We have decent enough word-smithing coupled with a deficit of thinking. Unfortunately this breaks our heuristics with consequences ranging from polluting our online commons to folks end up believing nonsense like ChatGPT named itself Nova and they are a torchbearer for spiritual gobbledygook.

My point is that we're in the process of untangling these two and as a result, we're likely to see confusion and maybe even persistent misunderstanding until this distinction becomes a more common part of how we talk about and evaluate written work. They're living in an AGI-world and we're just..not.
Show HN: Local Email Client for AI Horseless Carriages
by shahahmed | 2025-07-24 17:36:55+00:00
The AI Horseless Carriages article spurred a lot of conversation about how we should just be giving users the system prompt box [0], and we were pretty surprised that a bunch of email clients didn’t pop up following this pattern [1].

So we went ahead and created a local [2] email client that you can run that processes your inbox with your own handwritten rules. It lets you label and archive based on natural language rules. You can draft responses with your own drafting prompt, and there’s a “research sender” option that uses web search to get public info on a sender. You can customize any of the prompts to fit your needs. We’d love to hear what you think and PRs/issues are welcome!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43773813 [1] Superhuman seems to be pulling on this thread [2] uses OpenAI for this version, client runs locally, ollama support soon!
by nonameiguess | 2025-07-24 17:36:58+00:00
At least this one is not. I've broken my dominant hand before and then separated the same shoulder, both in the same year, and was surprised to find using scissors to be the single most difficult thing to do with my non-dominant hand, other than writing. It took a few months to get it right, but that's it. Not like it's a lifelong deficiency. You just learn later. Presumably, kids with their inherently more plastic neuromuscular systems learn faster than a 44 year-old, too.