MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-07-29 15:45:13+00:00
Neither "variable names contain valuable information" nor "AIs are finite" are anthropomorphization. That variable names contain information is not only relative to some sort of human cognition; they objectively, mathematically, contain information. Remove that information and the AI is going to have to reconstruct it (or at least most of it), and as finite things, that's going to cost them because nothing like that is free for finite things. None of my assertions here depend on the humanity, the AI-ness, the Vulcan-ness, or any other conceivable finite intellectual architecture of any coding agent. It only depends on them being finite.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-07-29 15:45:23+00:00
But within any civilization that develops within the more than hundred billion plus galaxies (or even within the uncountable number of simulated universes), they’d discover circles, spheres, triangles, the Platonic solids, normal distributions, etc.

The notation and ascribed meaning will vary — but civilizations will likely discover natural numbers and specifically binary numbers and even use them (at least for some time in their development) for computation. Basic operations would also likely be discovered - just as they were on different sides of our own planet.

There would also be cybernetic feedback loops, where goals are measured and optimized for—- that’s a sort of platonic form.

These intelligible forms seem more basic to life and intelligence than even carbon or water.

Super happy to hear arguments otherwise!
by sunscream89 | 2025-07-29 15:45:25+00:00
You make the most junior member of your team take notes or revise them as they are directed to deal with each issue (like final step in closing the ticket.)

I know, I know, “everyone should do it.” Everyone is not going to do it, everyone left it undone the last times.

Works best when someone is trying to impress, or is told to do it in some essential capacity.

And there is also the setting of a good example.
by dangus | 2025-07-29 15:45:28+00:00
I saw an interesting interview where the gist of it was “if electric cars were first and gasoline came later, would anyone have switched to gasoline willingly?”

Obviously the early history of automobiles did include electric vehicles but we are more talking about the hypothetical of a reasonably modern vehicle, not the early electric vehicles that had more downsides versus gasoline.

If the vast majority of people were driving EVs right now, would they voluntarily switch to gasoline if it was suddenly a new option on the market?

The point was that your gains by going gasoline are so limited and the drawbacks are many.

The conversation goes like: you’re telling me the only advantage I’m getting is that I can fuel it up faster? But now I have a more complex machine, I can’t add fuel at home, it uses more energy overall and costs more to run, needs more maintenance, it’s louder, it performs worse (usually slower), has less room for passengers.

In a country with a heavy amount of motorbike use, electric vehicles must be a godsend for the urban noise and pollution reduction.
by kpcyrd | 2025-07-29 15:45:41+00:00
I really like the rp2040-zero and used it in most of my embedded Rust projects.

Right now the "rp2350 mini zero" costs me about 4.50€/unit to source on aliexpress, while the rp2040-zero costs me about 2€/unit.

So I'm probably going to stick to the rp2040 for now. I'm looking forward to eventually switching to the faster rp2350 if the price drops a little bit.
by open592 | 2025-07-29 15:45:54+00:00
For some context on demographics of this survey: I signed up for SO in about ~2011 and haven’t participated in SO since about 2015. But I have generally positive sentiment towards the survey so I do it every year.

A lot of comments in this thread make the assumption that the only respondents are people who actively use SO but that isn’t true. I just get notified about the survey through email every year and respond.
by dleslie | 2025-07-29 15:46:07+00:00
Nothing shameful about attempting to use temporary, non-violent means to end the occupation of the nations' capital, and the blockage of border crossings, when the occupying group has produced a MOU that calls for the dissolution of Government and voluntary removal of all bureaucrats and Senators who disagree with them, under threat of the Governor General refusing to allow Parliament to sit again.
by yencabulator | 2025-07-29 15:46:08+00:00
https://www.facit-homes.com/building-process shows a house being built of boxes made from CNC-cut plywood. The trade-offs are probably a little different than the "whole wall at a time" prefab panels; a little more local labor is required to assemble, but transportation burden is a single delivery/pickup of the microfactory and a supply of plywood instead of shipping the wall-size panels that need a large crane to move.
by aaron695 | 2025-07-29 15:46:28+00:00
Fuck Cucumber.

Buried in the mess there are a couple of good concepts like it moves away for the 'busy-work' of atomic tests.

But shit like "living documentation" makes me want to vomit.

Are people dying quicker than we can teach this is bullshit? Or are people dying stupid?

The idea non-coders might ever be involved with Cucumber is also fucking retarded.

Last I used it, it was a mess, maybe it's better now. Part of that was those arrogant Selenium motherfuckers.

All this shit is why LLMs are talking over. Fucking retards with their stupid as fuck theory's about auto documentation and Selenium refusing to implement X (i forgot) on some BS 'principal'.

LLMs just get the job done, they might fuck shit up, but they are not arrogant autists about it, and LLMs don't care when they are called useless arrogant autists and double down.
by hbn | 2025-07-29 15:46:45+00:00
The prompt was

> Write an HTML and JavaScript page implementing space invaders

It may not be "copy pasting" but it's generating output as best it can be recreated from its training on looking at Space Invaders source code.

The engineers at Taito that originally developed Space Invaders were not told "make Space Invaders" and then did their best to recall all the source code they've looked at in their life to re-type the source code to an existing game. From a logistics standpoint, where the source code already exists and is accessible, you may as well have copy-pasted it and fudged a few things around.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-29 15:46:51+00:00
Israeli apartheid is a system of institutionalized segregation and discrimination in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and to a lesser extent in Israel proper.[a] ("Israel proper" refers to the borders of Israel as recognized by the majority of the international community, which excludes East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip.) This system is characterized by near-total physical separation between the Palestinian and the Israeli settler population of the West Bank, as well as the judicial separation that governs both communities, which discriminates against the Palestinians in a wide range of ways. Israel also discriminates against Palestinian refugees in the diaspora and against its own Palestinian citizens.[2][3][4][5][6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_apartheid
by whatsanaccount1 | 2025-07-29 15:47:07+00:00
https://opensearch.westloop.io/poster

We created this as a demo for OpenSearch on AWS (we are AWS partners) but I really enjoyed making it and I thought it turned out to be really fun.

Took the same type of dataset at the OP (I think we have 80,000 posters) but we used AWS’ multimodal embedding model to enable semantic search across the posters, as well as the ability to do a similarity search based on the posters.

Eventually we will include AWS’ personalize as part of the service to show off some of the movie recommendation engine features they developed.

Not commercialized there’s definitely some bugs, we built it for fun
by alsetmusic | 2025-07-29 15:47:09+00:00
This is a problem that could be solved with socially funded child care, at least in part. But that's not gonna happen. (Posting from USA; I don't know how this may or may not apply in the UK.)

Either way, if parents had more time to raise their children rather than slave away at jobs to stay above water, I have to think there'd be some improvement in child development.
by Zigurd | 2025-07-29 15:47:09+00:00
I bought a TV on deep discount. The Android TV OS was already trailing-edge and soon went unsupported. Being just a little paranoid, I monitored the network for continued activity after I removed the network configuration from the built-in software, which I replaced with an external device that's fully supported. I doubt many of the other customers for this cheap TV are as vigilant.
by louthy | 2025-07-29 15:47:18+00:00
Yeah, it objectively is better. Because if the government is trying to do good things and they mess up in the process, then good people can change it. But if the people are bad, then they're gonna do bad regardless. One is a functioning democracy, one is sliding into authoritarianism.

You wrote: "The UK is an increasingly authoritarian nightmare." - it just isn't. For those of us who live here, nothing is really different. Not being able to access porn without a VPN is not the definition of "authoritarian nightmare".

The UK, for sure, has its problems. Some related to our democracy. But it isn't on the precipice of losing its democracy altogether (like the US).
by dangus | 2025-07-29 15:47:24+00:00
It’s going to be just like the Google/StackOverflow era where your value as an engineer is based on your resourcefulness.

The value of an employee who says “I don’t know how to do that” or “I’ll need to ask my coworkers for help” versus one that says “I am sure I can figure out just about anything by googling” is night and day, and I think the same is true with AI.

Half of the battle is going to be knowing what to ask for.

Lastly I’d like to point out that it makes general sense to test people on the real tools they’ll be using to get their work done. E.g., you wouldn’t get much value testing a bus driver on using a manual transmission if all your buses are automatic. Most corporate leaders are expecting and even demanding that their employees use AI tools to get their work done.
by vidarh | 2025-07-29 15:47:27+00:00
Not if it is enabled by the buyer, which I took to be the point.

Mobile phone subscriptions in the UK go the other way: By default they filter some content. If you tell the phone company to turn it off, they do. It's less invasive than this law because you don't need to tell them why you want it turned off, but still more draconian than if we could turn on a child safe mode that e.g. then required a pin or something to disable.
by m4rtink | 2025-07-29 15:47:48+00:00
Just a note about shielding & alternative spin gravity concepts:

If you just spin two masses connected by cables, the shielded area can possibly be much smaller, reducing shielding weight or enabling better shielding for the same mass.

Also you could more easily add living space & shielding incrementally, as long as you keep the two cable connected masses roughly balanced. With a ring type station/habitat, you need the whole thing (or at least most of it) complete before you get any benefits.
by tracker1 | 2025-07-29 15:48:13+00:00
I have a friend who has been doing just that... usually with his company he manages a handful of projects where a bulk of the development is outsourced overseas. This past year, he's outpaced the 6 devs he's had working on misc projects just with his own efforts and AI. Most of this being a relatively unique combination of UX with features that are less common.

He's using AI with note taking apps for meetings to enhance notes and flush out technology ideas at a higher level, then refining those ideas into working experiments.

It's actually impressive to see. My personal experience has been far more disappointing to say the least. I can't speak to the code quality, consistency or even structure in terms of most people being able to maintain such applications though. I've asked to shadow him through a few of his vibe coding sessions to see his workflow. It feels rather alien to me, again my experience is much more disappointing in having to correct AI errors.
by Uehreka | 2025-07-29 15:48:39+00:00
> Models don't emit something they don't know. They remix and rewrite what they know. There's no invention, just recall...

People really need to stop saying this. I get that it was the Smart Guy Thing To Say in 2023, but by this point it’s pretty clear that that it’s not true in any way that matters for most practical purposes.

Coding LLMs have clearly been trained on conversations where a piece of code is shown, a transformation is requested (rewrite this from Python to Go), and then the transformed code is shown. It’s not that they’re just learning codebases, they’re learning what working with code looks like.

Thus you can ask an LLM to refactor a program in a language it has never seen, and it will “know” what refactoring means, because it has seen it done many times, and it will stand a good chance of doing the right thing.

That’s why they’re useful. They’re doing something way more sophisticated than just “recombining codebases from their training data”, and anyone chirping 2023 sound bites is going to miss that.
by devmor | 2025-07-29 15:49:00+00:00
> I don't understand. For code, why would I want to remix existing code snippets?

That is what you're doing already. You're just relying on a vector compression and search engine to hide it from you and hoping the output is what you expect, instead of having it direct you to where it remixed those snippets from so you can see how they work to start with and make sure its properly implemented from the get-go.

We all want code that works, but understanding that code is a critical part of that for anything but a throw-away one time use script.

I don't really get this desire to replace critical thought with hoping and testing. It sounds like the pipe dream of a middle manager, not a tool for a programmer.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-29 15:49:09+00:00
> I have no problem with any of that, though it sure would be cool if we dealt with the worst of our climate, war, inequality and poverty issues before burning money to privatize space.

Sadly, I’m not sure that’s possible. There’s a very high chance that if we wait for those things to be solved before going out, we’ll simply never go out.

That’s why I think it should all be done in parallel.
by lukeschlather | 2025-07-29 15:49:43+00:00
But in the context of this thread, I would say that using an AI to examine logical inconsistencies is the wrong way to use the tool.

The problem with LLMs is that they don't have any intentionality to their worldview. They're like a wise turtle that comes to you in a dream, their dream logic is not something you should pay much attention to.
by oliveiracwb | 2025-07-29 15:50:00+00:00
The first rule I apply to any LLM I use: don't be sycophantic, analyze the topics cross-sectionally, avoid simple introductions and conclusions, present the topic in layers of understanding, and validate everything before presenting a result. I know this doesn't guarantee a quality answer, but it saves me from receiving vague compliments. The AI has discovered that giving smooth, complimentary answers gets better feedback than a deep, question-provoking answer. It lowers the cost per token and maximizes customer satisfaction.
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-29 15:50:02+00:00
> LLMs are practically stateless

This isn't true of any practical implementation: for a particular conversation, KV Cache is the state. (Indeed there's no state across conversations, but that's irrelevant to the discussion).

You can drop it after each response, but doing so increase the amount of token you need to process by a lot in multi-turn conversations.

And my point was that storing the KV cache for the duration of the conversation isn't possible if you switch between multiple providers in a single conversation.
by Stackgenai | 2025-07-29 15:50:15+00:00
StackGen has launched specialized AI agents that make cloud infrastructure truly autonomous powered by four transformative pillars:

1. Self-Building: StackBuilder agent that translates your intent to infrastructure 2. Self-Governing: StackGuard agent that creates and enforces governance policies 3. Self-Healing and Remediate: StackAnchor agent automatically detects drift and fixes it. StackHealer agent responses to incidents and automatically remediates. 4. Self-Optimizing: StackOptimizer agent optimizes your infrastructure stack for efficiency and cost savings.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-29 15:50:35+00:00
> the whole operation is just not feasible in terms of cost vs. benefit.

Batteries and a motor are a huge benefit. Even if you can't squeeze in a full blown motor or 1kwh of battery, just getting an additional 200 or 300 kwh of assist in can make a huge difference.

As for cost, these guys are already doing crazy things like blood doping just to get a tiny edge.
by eloisius | 2025-07-29 15:50:41+00:00
It sounds great on the label, but what you’ll end up with are single-use matchers for almost every line of your cukes, annoyance maintaining the regexes that map your cukes to the actual test implementation, and the “non-technical” people won’t be maintaining the cukes anyway. Sure, let them specify the cukes if they want, but then translate them into regular unit tests or specs and forget maintaining them.

Just like all the other no-code inventions out there, they fail to reckon with the fact that essential complexity isn’t a problem with programming language syntax.
by marklubi | 2025-07-29 15:50:46+00:00
That Reynolds 853... drool. When I raced mountain bikes a couple decades ago, that was what my hardtail was made of. Just 20.5 lbs for a steel frame bike was nuts at the time, and that bike was a rocket ship.

Still have it. My son wanted to try it one day, his response was "that bike wants to go fast"

Edit: I also had aluminum (too stiff) and titanium frames (too flexible, or floppy as I called it). The 853 was excellent
by diggan | 2025-07-29 15:51:18+00:00
They may be, but there are lots of languages, lots of approaches, lots of methodologies and just a ton of different ways to "code", coding isn't one homogeneous activity that one model beats all the other models at.

> what specific tasks is one performing better than the other?

That's exactly why you create your own benchmark, so you can figure that out by just having a list of models, instead of testing each individually and basing it on "feels better".
by 9rx | 2025-07-29 15:51:21+00:00
> Your best defense against accusations of classism is that you're software??

"Defending accusations" is a human trait. You again have mistaken the context in which you write.

> Also, I'm fairly sure bots are banned here.

Hacker News is not what is normally considered a bot, but it is decidedly software. What feature of text on orange and beige left you to recognize it as humanity instead of the software that it is?
by uludag | 2025-07-29 15:51:32+00:00
No surprise seeing as they authored this: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/11/09/modern-ide-vs-vim-emac...

Maybe they think the certain generation who uses Emacs has died off or something.

Last years results had Emacs at 4.2% https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology . I would expect it to be roughly the same. Emacs seems to hover around this usage percentage.
by simonw | 2025-07-29 15:51:35+00:00
The source code for original Space Invaders from 1978 has never been published. The closest to that is disassembled ROMs.

I used that prompt because it's the shortest possible prompt that tells the model to build a game with a specific set of features. If I wanted to build a custom game I would have had to write a prompt that was many paragraphs longer than that.

The aim of this piece isn't "OMG looks LLMs can build space invaders" - at this point that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. What's interesting is that my laptop can run a model that is capable of that now.
by skybrian | 2025-07-29 15:52:04+00:00
Is it because going public is harder (probably true) or because nowadays, hot companies can more easily raise money without going public?

It seems like companies that are getting similar levels of hype to what Netscape and Google did could go public, but don’t want to, or not yet, anyway. I find it hard to believe that Anthropic or Stripe wouldn’t have successful IPO’s.
by MoreQARespect | 2025-07-29 15:52:47+00:00
The problem isn't really that the domain experts or business people aren't interested in reviewing these tests. The problem is that the cucumber language is just very, very poorly suited for writing anything beyond very basic specifications.

In practice when people try to use it for anything semi-complex they inevitably end up either writing very vague tests or repetitive tests, neither of which are of much interest to stakeholders.

I've used docs generated from hitchstory for having conversations with stakeholders. I've also shared semi-human readable unit and e2e tests - especially when it's, say, JSON snippets in an API with technical stakeholders.

Unfortunately, except for a few domains where specs can be expressed very concisely, cucumber isn't suitable for that.
by techwizrd | 2025-07-29 15:52:57+00:00
We have been fine-tuning models using Axolotl and Unsloth, with a slight preference for Axolotl. Check out the docs [0] and fine-tune or quantize your first model. There is a lot to be learned in this space, but it's exciting.

0: https://axolotl.ai/ and https://docs.axolotl.ai/
by churchill | 2025-07-29 15:53:00+00:00
>AI literally locks in power structures and perfects them.

There you go advancing the same teleological theory of history you're supposed to be denouncing.

Like the saying goes, history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes: when institutions, states, etc. behave in a certain way for an extended period of time, we can infer what their future will look like by studying similar examples from the past.
by AIPedant | 2025-07-29 15:53:01+00:00
But this is a completely biased perspective! Look at this sycophantic crap:

The most interesting pattern is that your core tensions haven’t resolved - they’ve become more sophisticated. You’re still working through fundamental questions about individual agency vs. systems, risk-taking vs. institutional engagement, and autonomy vs. collaboration. But your framework for thinking about these tensions has become richer and more nuanced. This suggests someone whose intellectual development is genuinely evolutionary rather than simply accumulative - you’re not just learning more facts, but developing better frameworks for holding contradictions productively.

It seems like the only insight Claude had was that "look at my vault and find contradictions in my thinking" is motivated by self-absorption, so it responded accordingly. It certainly had nothing intelligent to say about the actual subject matter!
by xrd | 2025-07-29 15:53:02+00:00
Aren't there non-Macos laptops which also support sharing the VRAM and regular RAM, i.e. iGPU?

https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLaptops/comments/1akj5aw/what...

I personally want to run linux and feel like I'll get a better price/GB offering that way. But, it is confusing to know how local models will actually work on those and the drawbacks of iGPU.
by jitl | 2025-07-29 15:53:06+00:00
I used the older online notebooks for a bit and really loved the immediacy but I’m always hurting for TypeScript syntax support. The is this a thing w 2.0? Something I’ll need to add later with Vite and only available locally?

It was a bunmer to not be able to copy paste code from my projects into observable. With local notebooks I see more potential for homegrown workflow but for me the benefit was always the platform and how starting a new thing was as simple as going to a webpage and clicking plus.

Anyways excited to play with this once it ends up in the online editor