MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Terr_ | 2025-07-10 20:18:01+00:00
That's not the issue. Their complaint is that proponents keep revising what ought to be fixed goalposts... Well, fixed unless you believe unassisted human developers are also getting dramatically better at their jobs every year.

Like the boy who cried wolf, it'll eventually be true with enough time... But we should stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.

_____

Jan 2025: "Ignore last month's models, they aren't good enough to show a marked increase in human productivity, test with this month's models and the benefits are obvious."

Feb 2025: "Ignore last month's models, they aren't good enough to show a marked increase in human productivity, test with this month's models and the benefits are obvious."

Mar 2025: "Ignore last month's models, they aren't good enough to show a marked increase in human productivity, test with this month's models and the benefits are obvious."

Apr 2025: [Ad nauseam, you get the idea]
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-10 20:19:43+00:00
I see a massive jump every time.

Just two years ago, this failed.

> Me: What language is this: "esto está escrito en inglés"

> LLM: English

Gemini and Opus have solved questions that took me weeks to solve myself. And I'll feed some complex code into each new iteration and it will catch a race condition I missed even with testing and line by line scrutiny.

Consider how many more years of experience you need as a software engineer to catch hard race conditions just from reading code than someone who couldn't do it after trying 100 times. We take it for granted already since we see it as "it caught it or it didn't", but these are massive jumps in capability.
by scott_w | 2025-07-10 20:19:51+00:00
This simply isn’t true. Yes, teenagers are morons by the standard of a well adjusted 30 year old, but they’re more than capable of understanding consequences for their actions.

I hate to sound like my parents/grandparents but I absolutely knew that causing millions of pounds of damage and attempting to blackmail a major corporation could have huge negative consequences for people and myself at 17.
by ieie3366 | 2025-07-10 20:20:02+00:00
LLMs are godtier if you know what you’re doing, and prompt them with ”do X”, where x is a SELF-CONTAINED change you would manually know how to implement

For example, today I asked claude to implement per-user rate-limiting into my nestjs service, then iterated by asking implementing specific unit tests and some refactoring. It one-shot everything. I would say 90% time savings.

Unskilled people ask them ”i have giant problem X solve it” and end up with slop
by roywiggins | 2025-07-10 20:20:03+00:00
> They had to reinstall a lot of things due to backups weren't up to par.

"After a frantic search that entailed calling hundreds of IT admins in data centers around the world, Maersk’s desperate administrators finally found one lone surviving domain controller in a remote office—in Ghana. At some point before NotPetya struck, a blackout had knocked the Ghanaian machine offline, and the computer remained disconnected from the network. It thus contained the singular known copy of the company’s domain controller data left untouched by the malware—all thanks to a power outage... So the Maidenhead operation arranged for a kind of relay race: One staffer from the Ghana office flew to Nigeria to meet another Maersk employee in the airport to hand off the very precious hard drive. That staffer then boarded the six-and-a-half-hour flight to Heathrow, carrying the keystone of Maersk’s entire recovery process."

https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-rus...
by igorkraw | 2025-07-10 20:20:06+00:00
Cool, thanks a lot. Btw, I have a very tiny tiny (50 to 100 audience ) podcast where we try to give context to what we call the "muck" of AI discourse (trying to ground claims into both what we would call objectively observable facts/évidence, and then _separately_ giving out own biased takes), if you would be interested to come on it and chat => contact email in my profile.
by floxy | 2025-07-10 20:20:59+00:00
>the money we should have been using to subsidize and kick-start American automakers

Does anyone have a good source for the amount of U.S. Federal and State governments EV subsidies since, say 2011? I guess it would be good to break out the consumer subsidies (like the $7,500 tax credit for new vehicles, $4,000 for used vehicles), and manufacturer's direct subsidies and loans like the $6 billion loan to Rivian, for battery manufacturing plants, etc..
by kubectl_h | 2025-07-10 20:21:15+00:00
> You'll often find that if you write ops scripts in, say Python, it's largely calling external commands.

That's a totally fine trade off for actual sane array/list functionality, robust string manipulation etc. I'd rather form shell commands in a programming language than in bash. People seem to love it.

I do not think for a second though that the average person that "knows bash well" can read and comprehend a multi hundred line bash script written by someone else as fast or even correctly has a seasoned python dev reading python written by someone else.
by spacecadet | 2025-07-10 20:21:26+00:00
I own a bunch of impractical cars, but my daily driver is a 2005 Honda. I always explain to people exactly this. It's the last good year before everything became too digitized and wireless. It's got physical controls, a real horn, a cable driven throttle and at 350,000 miles with so little maintenance and no sign of stopping.

I also own a 05 55 AMG, also all mechanical, but oh so impracticable :D
by theZilber | 2025-07-10 20:21:29+00:00
When I read the first meaty chapter about graphs and commutativity I initially thought he just spends too long explaining simple concepts.

But then ai realized I would always forget the names for all the mathy c' words - commutativity commutativity, qssociativity... and for the first time I could actually remember commutativity and what it means, just because he tied it into a graphical representation (which actually made me laugh out loud because, initially, I thought it was a joke). So the concept of "x + y = y + x" always made sense to me but never really stuck like the graphical representation, which also made me remember its name for the first time.

I am sold.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-10 20:21:36+00:00
If you want true insanity there's a way it could be done.

As you say, the span is too great for anything to be strong enough to hold itself up without the taper becoming completely impossible. You have to break it up into much smaller chunks--impossible, you say? No. Build a ring around the Earth at the equator inside an evacuated tunnel. Spin the ring at a speed sufficient to generate an outward force (maglev setup to transfer the force) sufficient to put supports in tension. Do the same thing again a bit farther out. Again and again. I haven't done the math on it but as the strength requirement goes to zero as the towers/rings go to infinity it's simply a matter of building enough of them. Yes, orbiting rings are unstable, but this is tethered.

And you can also build the Ringworld that way--no super materials, just an extremely massive stationary track underneath to provide the support. But, not being tethered it has the same instability problem. You can't make the walls but you can slope it without undue forces.
by redeeman | 2025-07-10 20:22:15+00:00
are you being for real? did you see anything as such in the bug listing? but even IF they did put safeguards in place, the fact that this is SEVENTEEN YEARS, no warning, functionality still enabled without ANY WARNING losing people data. unforgivable.

How can you possibly justify this behavior? I understand they dont owe the world any software, fine, but dont knowingly publish stuff that KILLS PEOPLES DATA without atleast a warning
by tome | 2025-07-10 20:22:28+00:00
You get that on top of do notation, with no additional syntax required for example `IORef` or Bluefin's `State`:

https://www.stackage.org/haddock/lts-23.27/base-4.19.2.0/Dat...

https://hackage-content.haskell.org/package/bluefin-0.0.16.0...
by mapt | 2025-07-10 20:22:29+00:00
Right now there's a lot of

"In-state tuition: $10,000

Out-of-state tuition: $25,000

International student tuition: $50,000".

going on. Being the world's academy is one of our most overlooked, but most significant industries. Eliminate the moneymakers trying to escape the Gaokao and the cash has to come from somewhere; It certainly isn't going to be this administration.
by tim333 | 2025-07-10 20:22:44+00:00
This stuff might work https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wallrock-Fireliner-20m-x-0-55m/dp/B... Wallrock Fireliner ?

Looks kinda paper dart capeable https://youtu.be/YBpd2StDP_o?t=522

fire resistance https://youtu.be/amQFBYjOQ4w?t=47
by pkulak | 2025-07-10 20:23:25+00:00
> artificially constrained supply

Rent control artificially constrains supply...

> power asymmetry

This, and its cousin "information asymmetry" are generally applied to negotiations. Are you implying that housing isn't a fair market because landlords know so much more about their property than the buyers, and that price controls can solve that? I don't even think I agree with the premise, let alone the solution.

> cost of switching vendors

Sure, but price controls don't solve this. If you don't want the renter to shoulder the cost of moving, you make the landlord reimburse them for moving expenses, just like lots of cities do right now.
by zaptrem | 2025-07-10 20:23:40+00:00
Claude Code converted me from paying $0 for LLMs to $200 per month. Any co that wants a chance at getting that $200 ($300 is fine too) from me needs a Claude Code equivalent and a model where the equivalent's tools were part of its RL environment. I don't think I can go back to pasting code into a chat interface, no matter how great the model is.
by petsfed | 2025-07-10 20:23:54+00:00
I'll respond to this on its face, because its important:

The "socialist" part of the moniker was 2 things.

First, it was misdirection. Hitler believed that Bolshevisim, and left-wing revolutions in general, were Jewish plots. He was stridently anti-communist, yes, but also anti-socialist, and anti-democratic. The party he took over called themselves "socialist" because they needed a way to telegraph that they were the party of the workers, and at the time, workers' parties were socialist parties, at least in name. Mussolini did the same thing (although, he did start out as a socialist, so that's a bit more complex).

Second, the nazis were all about socializing the property of the outgroups. Vis the banning of Jewish businesses, the confiscation of Jewish property, etc etc. Several pretty prominent Nazis were tried, convicted and imprisoned or executed for stealing Jewish property for themselves (Amon Goth was dismissed from his role as commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp of Schindler's List fame over exactly that). The Nazis considered such theft to be stealing from the Reich.

All of that to say, fascists are happy to exercise socialism, provided the people they are taking from are part of the vilified outgroup that the fascist identity opposes.
by smarx007 | 2025-07-10 20:24:00+00:00
I am afraid the choice in many OSS projects is not slop vs expert-written content but LLM-assisted content or nothing.

I recently produced a bunch of migration guides for our project by pointing Claude 4 Sonnet at my poorly structured Obsidian notes (some more than 5 years old), a few commits where I migrated the reference implementation, and a reasonably well-maintained yet not immediately actionable CHANGELOG. I think the result is far from top-notch but, at the same time, it is way better IMO than nothing (nothing being the only viable alternative given my priorities): https://oslc.github.io/developing-oslc-applications/eclipse_...
by keeda | 2025-07-10 20:24:11+00:00
> My personal theory is that getting a significant productivity boost from LLM assistance and AI tools has a much steeper learning curve than most people expect.

Yes, and I'll add that there is likely no single "golden workflow" that works for everybody, and everybody needs to figure it out for themselves. It took me months to figure out how to be effective with these tools, and I doubt my approach will transfer over to others' situations.

For instance, I'm working solo on smallish, research-y projects and I had the freedom to structure my code and workflows in a way that works best for me and the AI. Briefly: I follow an ad-hoc, pair-programming paradigm, fluidly switching between manual coding and AI-codegen depending on an instinctive evaluation of whether a prompt would be faster. This rapid manual-vs-prompt assessment is second nature to me now, but it took me a while to build that muscle.

I've not worked with coding agents, but I doubt this approach will transfer over well to them.

I've said it before, but this is technology that behaves like people, and so you have to approach it like working with a colleague, with all their quirks and fallibilities and potentially-unbound capabilities, rather than a deterministic, single-purpose tool.

I'd love to see a follow-up of the study where they let the same developers get more familiar with AI-assisted coding for a few months and repeat the experiment.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-07-10 20:24:16+00:00
The Germans announce over the wireless that as the inhabitants of a Czech village called Lidice [...] were guilty of harbouring the assassins of Heydrich, they have shot all the males in the village, sent all the women to concentration camps, sent all the children to be “re-educated”, razed the whole village to the ground and changed its name. [...] It does not particularly surprise me that people do this kind of thing, nor even that they announce that they are doing them. What does impress me, however, is that other people’s reaction to such happenings is governed solely by the political fashion of the moment. [...] In a little while you will be jeered at if you suggest that the story of Lidice could possibly be true. And yet there the facts are, announced by the Germans themselves and recorded on gramophone discs

In our age of social media, that phenomenon is no longer surprising.
by djaychela | 2025-07-10 20:24:23+00:00
A friend of mine is senior management at one of these companies. His life has been a real nightmare trying to get things back on track - there are so many interconnected systems that they needed to get back up 'clean' and running just to get their normal business running, let alone the online side. And he's not even directly responsible for any of this, but it's all so embedded in a modern retail business that if something like this happens it's your problem to deal with to a degree. The stress caused by this sort of thing is immense.
by foobarqux | 2025-07-10 20:24:25+00:00
That's not the argument being made though, which is that it does "work" now and implying that actually it didn't quite work before; except that that is the same thing the same people say for every model release, including at the time or release of the previous one, which is now acknowledged to be seriously flawed; and including the future one, at which time the current models will similarly be acknowledged to be, not only less performant that the future models, but inherently flawed.

Of course it's possible that at some point you get to a model that really works, irrespective of the history of false claims from the zealots, but it does mean you should take their comments with a grain of salt.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-07-10 20:24:25+00:00
Interesting, thanks for that. After reading a bit more, it seems, rather than "threat to national security" as claimed by NPR, Trump is more likely using "threat to U.S. foreign policy interests" as defined in Section 237(a)(4)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which became law as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) signed by Bill Clinton. Perhaps that law needs to go.
by diegof79 | 2025-07-10 20:24:33+00:00
From the article:

“(…) officers have been instructed to look for any indication of 'hostility' toward the U.S. or its people, although it did not provide further details of what exactly that could mean.”

When the search is open-ended and under the officer's criteria, anything can be an excuse to revoke a visa. Recently, there was news about a visitor rejected because of a JD Vance meme, so this is not hypothetical. It is also the perfect excuse for racism: If I don’t like your face, then let me do a deep search of any comment or meme that you liked in your social media history.

For example, this comment in a public thread can be read as “hostile,” as I’m implying a critique of the current government. Even if that happens in exceptional cases when the officer has a bad day, it has a chilling effect because you’ll be extremely careful of what you say on Internet forums if your goal is to apply for a visa.
by toast0 | 2025-07-10 20:24:48+00:00
I would think informed consent would include some specific categories relating to how the body may be used, and specific approval or disapproval of those; then actually following through on those uses, and if there's no need for a body for those uses, either returning it to the estate or disposing of it through burial or cremation as per the wishes of the donor.

When donor bodies get used in ways that weren't generally practiced when donated and weren't specifically consented to, that's almost certainly not informed consent, even if there is a blanket consent 'to science'. IMHO, being exhibited in novel ways is fine if it's specifically consented to, but not otherwise. Especially in cases where the body was preserved for many years and then a novel use is made, it seems like you'd need new and specific consent, which maybe you can obtain from the estate, but certainly not from the donor.
by duxup | 2025-07-10 20:25:23+00:00
Unfortunately that's the goal. Your call and I respect that, but the current administration doesn't care, they want folks who they determine have the wrong point of view out.

It's not just international students either, in their demand to Harvard the Trump administration demanded Harvard hire an outside group to survey Harvard staff and STUDENTS for "viewpoint diversity" and if they felt the diversity wasn't what the administration wanted, adjust staff and students to fit their view.
by deathanatos | 2025-07-10 20:26:22+00:00
Yes? I don't find that that odd.

Certainly, it would be better to trust the upstream completely, but let's not kid ourselves? See the entire current state of software supply chain in the industry.

But when I visit a website, I don't expect the website to LCE me. Why should turning a YAML adlib into YAML LCE me, regardless of the trust of the upstream. This is not a privilege I'm expecting to give the upstream ever, and this behavior is a clear security bug, to me…
by burnte | 2025-07-10 20:27:08+00:00
> Current LLMs just are not as good as they are sold to be as a programming assistant and people consistently predict and self-report in the wrong direction on how useful they are.

I would argue you don't need the "as a programming assistant" phrase as right now from my experience over the past 2 years, literally every single AI tool is massively oversold as to its utility. I've literally not seen a single one that delivers on what it's billed as capable of.

They're useful, but right now they need a lot of handholding and I don't have time for that. Too much fact checking. If I want a tool I always have to double check, I was born with a memory so I'm already good there. I don't want to have to fact check my fact checker.

LLMs are great at small tasks. The larger the single task is, or the more tasks you try to cram into one session, the worse they fall apart.
by watwut | 2025-07-10 20:27:33+00:00
Some did out of mental health necessity. Some did not and were profoundly lonely and unhappy (my case). And some did indeed ended up having that period to be super happy.

My point is that it is profoundly unsocial way of life for the parent at home. The party even twice a week do not really make up for being completely alone with nothing challenging to do whole day. You can easily end up loosing social skills and those parties end up unfulfilling.

If you go to work and then someone else organizes a party once in a while, it is cool effortless way to keep friends. But, if the stay at home person is extroverted, there is very little social about their lifestyle.
by bojan | 2025-07-10 20:27:42+00:00
> The EU has zero tech companies that rival FAANG et al here in the US. Zero. Because of it's (well-intentioned but harmful) business regulations.

Not really, it's because the EU has 28 sets of business regulations, those of the 27 members states and of the EU itself. The single market is not yet all that single, especially when it comes to digital services. The now abandoned project of the ever closer union wasn't some idealistic bs, it was the plan to gradually fix this.
by sailfast | 2025-07-10 20:27:44+00:00
While freedom of speech is obviously a right of citizens, I would argue that in order to preserve that right the US should be extending it to those coming into the country - outside of currently excepted threat settings of course.

Saying you don’t like the President should not deny you entry to the United States. This is, straight up, horse shit and I do not approve of it nor do I believe it should be permitted by the executive.
by condensedcrab | 2025-07-10 20:28:28+00:00
The US is squandering its huge advantage in higher ed - every country has its top schools, but the US academic scene has so many top-tier schools/universities for research. Visa issues for international students have always been a pain - great talent for graduate schools, but with so many added shenanigans that were annoying at best and a major hurdle to next steps (postdoc, jobs, etc.) at worst.

Seems like instead of making it easier for smart and talented people to come to US, we are making it harder... cause terrorism?
by barbazoo | 2025-07-10 20:28:39+00:00
> If you posted social media saying you wanted to overthrow the Japanese government, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

You're cherry picking and assuming they only look for obvious criminal offences like "government overthrow" and not dissenting views, criticism of the people in power, views against the economic order, etc. For some of those I can imagine the answer being "no" in Japan and "Yes" in the US.
by basisword | 2025-07-10 20:28:57+00:00
Privacy is very important to me. And having to verify your age/identity in anyway online seems very risky, open to abuse, blackmail etc. The privacy conscious can work-around the verification or decide not to access restricted websites anymore.

It's hard to deny the negative impact that unfettered access to inappropriate material has had on the younger generations. Some sort of verification seems like a net-positive for society.

The problem is that bypassing it whether via VPN's or accessing sites that don't comply will be so easy that the whole thing will be ineffective to a large degree. But maybe a little effectiveness is enough. If it helps prevent very young kids from accidentally stumbling upon inappropriate content maybe that will have a meaningful impact.
by kubectl_h | 2025-07-10 20:29:03+00:00
> OK, but, you know... those tools were created by literal devs.

All `kubectl` does is create REST API calls to the control plane. So to be fair, what I'm grousing about can be accomplished just fine by a developer like me constructing API calls from python to update objects in k8s.

The problem is I work in devops where tooling written in proper languages with standard libraries that have things like useful arrays or robust string manipulation or ergonomic concurrency is a non-starter for some reason. The argument against that being mostly "I have to install the interpereter first".