MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by petsfed | 2025-07-24 16:32:12+00:00
You're not wrong that such things make a city less walkable, but there's also a strong argument that just punishing people, instead of, you know, addressing the underlying problem doesn't solve the problem either. It just sets up a situation where people bounce from jail (due to the realities of living on the streets) to the homeless encampment (due to unpaid fines preventing them from earning any money).

Like, the whole reason the West Oakland homeless encampment has such an enormous garbage pile problem is because nobody living there can sign up for trash service, since they lack an actual address (and likely can't afford trash service anyway). So as soon as the single 30-gallon courtesy trash can gets filled up (within hours of delivery, if experience is any guide), they're on their own until that that can gets emptied. And they provide that single can for all the trash needs of the 30 or so people living adjacent to it.

One of the core drivers of homelessness is the absence of affordable housing within efficient reach of public transit to get to where people work. So by setting up communities that are designed specifically for walking and public transit and are affordable for most directly addresses the main driver of homelessness, which in turn starves the friends-couch-to-homeless-encampment pipeline. Nobody goes directly from evicted to homeless encampment. Its a long fall from grace. Preventing the first step, by ensuring there's adequate housing near where the jobs are, helps prevent the final step.
by jasongill | 2025-07-24 16:32:35+00:00
Hulk Hogan was my business partner in an ill-fated web hosting business called Hostamania. While he ultimately had a lot of troubled, old-fashioned thinking that I don't agree with, he was a genuinely friendly person who was nice to everyone despite crowds following him around constantly.

He was an odd character but was truly a character - he was Hulk Hogan as you know him (bandana, the mustache, the yellow muscle shirt) from the moment he got up to the moment he went to bed; unlike some stars who had a life outside of their character, his character became his life which was really something interesting to behold up close.

I've been getting a lot of calls and talking to friends today; and again - while Hogan was not exactly a "good person" in all regards - he was a friend and brought a lot of joy to a lot of people and he will be missed.
by LocalH | 2025-07-24 16:32:52+00:00
The original point of cable was Community Antenna TV, where you'd get a much better quality signal (and often even additional out-of-market but nearby channels). Then broadcasters decided to go into specifically seeking nationwide coverage (Ted Turner was a pioneer in this area). They also decided, due to the sports leagues, that cable should only deliver local stations in the same market as your location through blackouts (through my childhood I went from getting three ABC affiliates and two CBS affiliates, to one of each). It became unprofitable to manage blacking out the out-of-market station any time they were both running network or sports programming, so the out-of-market stations were generally removed (I also wouldn't be surprised if negotiations for retransmission consent included terms preventing carriage of out-of-market stations).
by _fat_santa | 2025-07-24 16:32:58+00:00
I don't know why more municipalities don't jump on this. In my area (I live in the US) we have a number of neighborhoods that are very walk-able and they are consistently the most competitive areas for housing. In all the spots, homes are expensive and that's even if they make it on the market because hardly anyone wants to sell when they live in a place like this.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-07-24 16:32:59+00:00
This is a good post and I agree with it in full, but I just wanted to point out that (safe) Rust is safer from data races than, say, Haskell due to the properties of an affine type system.

Haskell in general is a much safer than Rust thanks to its more robust type system (which also forms the basis of its metaprogramming facilities), monads being much louder than unsafe blocks, etc. But data races and deadlocks are one of the few things Rust has over it. There are some pure functional languages that are dependently typed like Idris, and thus far safer than Rust, but they're in the minority and I've yet to find anybody using them industrially. Also Fortnite's Verse thing? I don't know how pure that language is though.
by d4mi3n | 2025-07-24 16:33:03+00:00
I’m of the opinion that LLM assisted coding tools have a few general effects in the domain of software development:

1. Increases in productivity for experienced software engineers.

2. Raised industry expectations around productivity of individual software engineers.

3. Lowered ratio of human engineers to other parters in the development process (customers, stakeholders, etc.)

I’ve found the net result is an environment where we can churn out code easily, but producing the right code becomes harder. Fewer eyes on the production of a product means most of the validation later in the development process.

How much an issue this is remains to be seen. Engineers will presumably have more time to review and debug things. Debugging will be easier. That said, I have no idea if any of that makes up for retroactively realizing design assumptions were bad or that some subtle constraints about your software were violated.
by almog | 2025-07-24 16:33:08+00:00
Yet when you look beyond boilerplate code generation, it's not all that LLMs increase experienced developers productivity (even when they believe that it does): https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

Edit: Hello downvoters, would love to know if you found any flawed argument, is this just because this study/comment contradicting the common narrative on HN or something else entirely?
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-07-24 16:33:32+00:00
No. It doesn’t.

Your display says that. And your display is bullshit.

I work with the people that make the displays man. There are entire groups dedicated to deciding what is indefensible lies, and what “could be true under the right circumstances so we’re allowed to say/show that”

> Why are you talking about charging from 0 to 100 % when that's NOT how you charge an EV,

lol, go to a charging station sometime and see the people sleeping or watching tv. If it’s your primary vehicle and you want to go somewhere, you are going from 0 to 100.
by Loic | 2025-07-24 16:33:50+00:00
The full advice:

My advice, for the moment:

- Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric.

- Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI—read widely and ask people you trust about what they’re seeing.

- Beyond that, however, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All of this is too new for anyone to really understand what they’re saying.

AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why.

With that, it shows that he is not really using the AI tools, he would be using them he would have given this advice :

- try the tools and look where they can improve your life.
by cloverich | 2025-07-24 16:34:17+00:00
What i want to know more about is "clicking" with people. I traversed social isolation and anxiety in my youth to get pretty decent at small talk and for a while that was all there was it seemed. Then as the environments changed i found i was able to more fully connect and establish friendships with people.

But whats always stood out to me is the people I ended up persisting with, how quickly that small talk phase passed, sometimes it seems like within the first encounter. My most recent developing friendship i distinctly remember it was within the first few words, both my wife and I just knew oh this person fits. I always expect and still believe getting to know someone better can lead to shared understandings, better conversations, friendships. But at the same time, my anectdotal experience has been the people that worked out and persisted, it was obvious within five minutes or less (ie that initial gut feeling never changed).

I guess the social cues or mannerisms or something like that which is perhaps hard to consciously describe but to an expert would be likely obvious, that perhaps reveals far more about you than your words can impart. Im sure its not that complicated but also think if you are forcing the small talk and really struggling to connect, dont be afraid to branch out and look for those clicks.
by 20k | 2025-07-24 16:34:22+00:00
The key is to look at the long term structural changes the industry is going through, and whether or not AI helps, or hinders that goal

In general, the industry has been making huge efforts to push errors from runtime, to compile time. If you imagine points where we can catch errors being laid out from left to right, we have the following:

Caught by: Compiler -> code review -> tests -> runtime checks -> 'caught' in prod

The industry is trying to push errors leftwards. Rust, heavier review, safety in general - its all about cutting down costs by eliminating expensive errors earlier in the production chain. Every industry does this, its much less costly to catch a defective oxygen mask in the factory, than when it sets a plane on fire. Its also better to catch a defective component in the design phase, than when you're doing tests on it

AI is all about trying to push these errors rightwards. The only way that it can save in engineer time is if it goes through inadequate testing, validation, and review. 90% of the complexity of programming is building a mental model of what you're doing, and ensuring that it meets the spec of what you want to do. A lot of that work is currently pure mental work with no physical component - we try and offload it increasingly to compilers in safe languages, and add tests and review to minimise the slippage. But even in a safe language, it still requires a very high amount of mental work to be done to make sure that everything is correct. Tests and review are a stop gap to try and cover the fallibility of the human brain

So if you chop down on that critical mental work by using something probabilistically correct, you're introducing errors that will be more costly down the line. It'll be fine in the short term, but in the long term it'll cost you more money. That's the primary reason why I don't think AI will catch on - its short termist thinking from people who don't understand what makes software complex to build, or how to actually produce software that's cheap in the long term. Its also exactly the same reason that Boeing is getting its ass absolutely handed to it in the aviation world. Use AI if you want to go bankrupt in 5 years but be rich now
by ksec | 2025-07-24 16:34:47+00:00
>What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked?

I dont know if I count, but at least I wrote about TSMC before most if anyone knew much about TSMC. Which is when Apple brought them to spotlight.

It depends on how you define or count as being able to compete with TSMC?

If Intel technically leapfrog TSMC and their 18nm is better than TSMC 20nm this year but;

It is 30 - 40% more expensive.

It has lower Gross margin, or even negative margin.

It has much lower volume and capacity.

It is slower in ramping up capacity for future capacity planning.

It has limited IP range for its foundry.

It has less packaging options.

It does not have other high speed, low power or analog node options.

At what point does it count as competing? Because right now there isn't a single metric that Intel Foundry is winning. And they are feeling exactly the same as Global Foundry or AMD when Intel Foundry advancement is getting all the oxygens.

And even if they did, with a magic wand got them to compete with TSMC on every single one of the item above, in medium to long term there isn't a single chance Intel could compete with their current board and management.

TSMC leadership and management team is Nvidia's level great. I cant think of any other tech company that could rival them. Their only risk is China.
by dguest | 2025-07-24 16:34:59+00:00
For better or worse they did actually cite statistics:

> 77 percent of educators reported young students having greater difficulties handling pencils, pens, and scissors. In comparison, 69 percent noted increased struggles with tying shoes compared to five years ago.

But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has remained unchanged in the last 30 years.

That said, I wouldn't doubt the claim, only the methodology.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-24 16:34:59+00:00
> I really struggle reading these threads because the "it's a private company that can do what they want and if you don't like it build your own" argument is seared into my memory from when this started happening years ago.

My answer to that has always been - if a "private company" is so important and critical to a nation or economy, like a payment processor, then that company has lost the right to be private and needs to be nationalized and become a public service. Had this argument all the time back in '08; if a company needs bailed out by the government or the nation/economy will collapse, its clearly too important to be a private for profit enterprise and should be nationalized and become a public service

Not everything needs, nor should be, a private enterprise for profit. Payment processors, utilities, etc. should just be public services, available to all equally and for all legal purposes.
by reedf1 | 2025-07-24 16:35:00+00:00
Chesterton's Fence always bothered me as an argument unto itself. Without providing (or attempting to a provide) a test for the destruction of the fence along with the argument, you are performing a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand. When you do this you are shifting a potentially infinite burden of proof to the other side. It's Chesterton's fence not Chesterton's infinite fucking barrier.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-24 16:35:02+00:00
I think the issue with bounties is that to do a proper bounty program you want a third-party escrow agent that can decide when the issue/request has been addressed sufficiently to warrant paying the bounty. I don't think GitHub wants to be directly in that business as a third-party escrow agent hiring people to review issues/requests versus changelogs, but they probably could find ways to help people find such third-parties in the Sponsors flows.
by JimDabell | 2025-07-24 16:35:09+00:00
Recurse Center made a good observation:

> I expected to find vastly differing views of what future developments might look like, but I was surprised at just how much our alums differed in their assessment of where things are today.

> We found at least three factors that help explain this discrepancy. First was the duration, depth, and recency of experience with LLMs; the less people had worked with them and the longer ago they had done so, the more likely they were to see little value in them (to be clear, “long ago” here may mean a matter of just a few months). But this certainly didn’t explain all of the discrepancy: The second factor was the type of programming work people cared about. By this we mean things like the ergonomics of your language, whether the task you’re doing is represented in model training data, and the amount of boilerplate involved. Programmers working on web apps, data visualization, and scripts in Python, TypeScript, and Go were much more likely to see significant value in LLMs, while others doing systems programming in C, working on carbon capture, or doing novel ML research were less likely to find them helpful. The third factor was whether people were doing smaller, more greenfield work (either alone or on small teams), or on large existing codebases (especially at large organizations). People were much more likely to see utility in today’s models for the former than the latter.

— https://www.recurse.com/blog/191-developing-our-position-on-...
by sofixa | 2025-07-24 16:35:20+00:00
> Do you have any idea how many hours the average person uses their phone

Irrelevant on the topic of there being more efficient modes of transportation of humans in dense environments.

> There is no other object that has been a greater detriment to mental and physical health in human history

While potentially true, that's entirely ignoring all the extremely useful things people do with their phones.

> only using public transport

The fact that you take a mention of providing alternatives to cars as a stance on "only using public transport" indicates to me that you're not interested in having an actual discussion, and your car is part of your core identity. None of that is healthy, so again, step back and consider the benefits. Even purely selfishly, more people out of cars because they can bike or take the train is better for you because there will be less traffic for you.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-24 16:35:24+00:00
> If you are getting lower MPG than the EPA rating, you are also burning up your brakes from heavy deceleration. Improve your MPG to 15% over EPA and your brakes will last a lot longer.

100%.

People need to understand that the brake pedal is an evil device that converts your cash into brake dust and heat, so use it as little as possible.

Stop accelerating so much in stop-and-go traffic. Drop the "You have to tailgate or else people get in front of you" nonsense attitude. Release the gas sooner when approaching a red light. And for fuck's sake, stop hitting the brakes when you're only trying to shave off a couple mph, especially when going up hill.

I've gotten better-than-EPA mileage on every car I've owned, and I don't even drive slow. Always at or slightly above the speed limit. Economy is all about speed management, not absolute speed, until you're going 75+ mph.
by tristor | 2025-07-24 16:35:42+00:00
Yes, I've made it with Calvados and also with French pear brandy, which was pretty good, but Calvados and Applejack aren't exactly the same. Calvados is done with "cider apples" and Applejack was done with "eating apples" (from my understanding when I was reading into this), which meant Applejack was supposed to be sweeter and was often drunk straight, but it's pretty much disappeared after we learned to make Bourbon in this country.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-07-24 16:35:44+00:00
You're correct that this is far from a new idea.

Relevant terms are "Value object" (1) and avoiding "Primitive obsession" where everything is "stringly typed".

Strongly typed ids should be Value Objects, but not all value objects are ids. e.g. I might have a value object that represents an x-y co-ordinate, as I would expect an object with value (2,3) to be equal to a different object with the same value.

1) https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ValueObject.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_object
by tensor | 2025-07-24 16:35:57+00:00
A CPU factory may (because of high margins), but, for example, a car factory may not. A factory isn't just the labour, it also requires inputs, and tariffs that change weekly means that you can't rely on being able to source the inputs reliably. When your margins are smaller, random input costs can easily sink you.

If you want to bring back manufacturing you need to consider the entire supply chain, and make sure that inputs for whatever factory you are bringing in are secure and will be equal or cheaper in 20 years. These things need to be predictable.

Also, let's not pretend the MAGA movement listens to anything other than the propaganda.
by florianherrengt | 2025-07-24 16:36:15+00:00
This feels like a comment shot from the hip. You fundamentally misread my argument while proving my core point.

You crystallised the disconnect yourself: "with the help of Claude."

The article’s first line states: "LLMs are helpful." My stance is clear. I’m not anti-AI. When I wrote "I use Claude on a VERY short leash with a specific purpose" ... that is "with the help of Claude."

My experiment tested the opposite: "let Claude build it".

The 'telegram bot' is a fullstack app with non-trivial db schema, state management and 3rd party integration. Instead of dismissing it, show me a better alternative and explain why it’s superior.

You defend expertise in your domain (research synthesis), describing how you "constrained the robots" using your expertise to guide Claude. Yet you dismiss equivalent expertise in software engineering, reducing it to "$100k+ to write crappy JavaScript."

How did you "constrain" Claude without knowing what needed constraining, why it mattered and how to evaluate if the output was valid?

That is expertise. The salary is a symptom of it.
by amradio1989 | 2025-07-24 16:36:31+00:00
It will just be different. No profit train lasts forever. Google is about to be made utterly irrelevant after 20+ years or so as a company. And they were the best.

If you still have a connection to your readers (e.g. email) you can still reach them. If they've formed a community, even better. If not, its a good time to work on that.

Google doesn't really have that. I have zero sense of community with Google. And that's why they'll die if something doesn't change.
by jmyeet | 2025-07-24 16:36:38+00:00
The answer is obvious: it never has been about free speech. Just replace "free speech" with "hate speech" in all of these missives [1][2][3].

[1]: https://theconversation.com/how-do-you-stop-an-ai-model-turn...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-p...
by bombela | 2025-07-24 16:36:39+00:00
It took months to finally solve a data race in Go. No race detector would see anything. Nobody understood what was happening.

It ultimately resulted in a loop counter overflowing, which recomputed the same thing a billion of time (but always the same!). So the visible effect was a request would randomly take 3 min instead of 100ms.

I ended up using perf in production, which indirectly lead me to understand the data race.

I was called in to help the team because of my experience debugging the weirdest things as a platform dev.

Because of this I was exposed to so many races in Go, from my biased point of view, I want Rust everywhere instead.

But I guess I am putting myself out of a job? ;)
by antiframe | 2025-07-24 16:36:42+00:00
I get the impression that Apple would rather have lower hardware manufacturing costs than ensure fair working conditions, as an example of harming people in the pursuit of profit. [1]

Perhaps that's not "bad enough" but I think the general sentiment that corporations value profits over harms to people (especially since they often try to distance themselves by offshoring, etc) applies to Apple as well.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-30532463
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-07-24 16:36:48+00:00
I performed many experiments on that family prius and with complete honestly, my experiments weren't even in the top ten worst things that car survived.

Trees, multiple motorcycles, final destination esque road debris, an accident that should have totalled it if not for an insurance mistake, leading to repairs worth more than the car. Three teenage drivers and two adult drivers with heavy feet. Not to mention many many hardware store runs hauling various sacks of yard materials, baby trees, lumber, etc.

My favorite times were rallying on compacted un-plowed snow. The thin tires and light weight meant it absolutely shredded.

It's my opinion that the Toyota Prius is one of the greatest vehicles ever built and they should be respected and feared.
by ARandumGuy | 2025-07-24 16:36:57+00:00
This is something that's always baffled me about Teslas. I have a Prius, and regenerative breaking being tied to the break pedal is easy and intuitive. It also means I can easily lift my foot of the gas pedal to coast. IDK it just seems like a much better design to have one "stop" pedal and one "go" pedal, vs one "stop" pedal and one "go/stop" pedal.