MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-07-21 00:09:35+00:00
I agree with both of you and disagree (as my earlier comment implies)

Expert systems can be quite useful, especially when there's an extended knowledge base. But the major issue with expert systems is that you generally need to be an expert to evaluate them.

That's the major issue with LLMs today. They're trained on human preference. Unfortunately we humans prefer incorrect things that sound/look correct than incorrect things that sound/look correct. So that means they're optimizing so that errors are hard to detect. They can provide lots of help to very junior people because they're far from expert but it's diminishing returns and can increase workload if you're concerned with details.

They can provide a lot of help but the people most vocal about their utility usually aren't aware of these issues or admit them while talking about how to effectively use them. But then again, that can just be because you can be tricked. Like Feynman said, the first rule is to not be fooled and you're the easiest person to fool.

Personally, I'm wary of tools that mask errors. IMO a good tool makes errors loud and noticeable. To complement the tool user. I'll admit LLM coding feels faster, because it reduces my cognitive load while code is being written but if I actually time myself I find it usually takes longer and I spend more time debugging and less aware of how the system acts as a whole. So I'll use it for advice but have yet to be able to hand over trust. Even though I can't trust a junior engineer I can trust that they'll learn and listen
by keeda | 2025-07-21 00:10:55+00:00
> After all the effort getting to the point where the generated code is acceptable, one has to wonder, why not just write it yourself?

Because it is still way, way, way faster and easier. You're absolutely right that the hard part is figuring out the solution. But the time spent typing is in no way trivial or cognitively simple, especially for more complex tasks. A single prompt can easily generate 5 - 10x the amount of code in a few seconds, with the added bonus that it:

a) figures out almost all the intermediate data structures, classes, algorithms and database queries;

b) takes care of all the boilerplate and documentation;

c) frequently accounts for edge cases I hadn't considered, saving unquantifiable amounts of future debugging time;

d) and can include tests if I simply ask it to.

In fact, these days once I have the solution figured out I find it frustrating that I can't get the design in my head into the code fast enough manually. It is very satisfying to have the AI churn out reams of code, and immediately run it (or the tests) to see the expected result. Of course, I review the diff closely before committing, but then I do that for any code in any case, even my own.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-21 00:12:03+00:00
If they got the same incentives offered to businesses, that would be interesting.

Coops are fairly common in Europe, mostly in agro-food and related areas.

They're actually better at innovation for their market segments, because they can make long-term plans for expansion instead of being hamstrung by the demands of ridiculous short-term marketing-driven hype bubbles.

But if you want to profit from frothy get-rich-quick hype and don't care if this year's unicorn is next year's "Our incredible adventure comes to an end", they're definitely not for you.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-07-21 00:12:19+00:00
We cannot legislate away this problem. We will try, we will fail, and the costs in this case are absolutely massive.

Just as an aside, the UK has been doing this for decades. One of the most permanent causes of legislative failure in the UK has been making laws based on media pressure that have potentially huge costs in the future. And as these costs emerge, guess what the only solution is? More interventions.

I would suggest that a country which cannot control crime, cannot control borders, has a collapsing economy, cannot house people, etc. has bigger problems than trying to arrest people for saying things on Twitter or shut down end-to-end encryption.
by dwd | 2025-07-21 00:13:21+00:00
Really enjoy Jesper's work. Especially "City of Rome".

I'd also recommend...

Gareth Coker (Ori & the Blind Forest)

"9999999" from the Portal 2 Soundtrack: Songs to Test By (composed by a Valve staffer)

Brian Tyler's Far Cry 3 is also a great listen (sure, he's a film composer but I like it)
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-21 00:14:12+00:00
Looking at the linked patches, you’ll note that the baseline (ff_detect_range_c) [1] is bog-standard scalar C code while the speedup is achieved in the AVX-512 version (ff_detect_rangeb_avx512) [2] of the same computation. FFmpeg devs prefer to write straight assembly using a library of vector-width-agnostic macros they maintain, but at a glance the equivalent code looks to be straightforwardly expressible in C with Intel intrinsics if that’s more your jam. (Granted, that’s essentially assembly except with a register allocator, so the practical difference is limited.) The vectorization is most of the speedup, not the assembly.

To a first approximation, modern compilers can’t vectorize loops beyond the most trivial (say a dot product), and even that you’ll have to ask for (e.g. gcc -O3, which in other cases is often slower than -O2). So for mathy code like this they can easily be a couple dozen times behind in performance compared to wide vectors (AVX/AVX2 or AVX-512), especially when individual elements are small (like the 8-bit ones here).

Very tight scalar code, on modern superscalar CPUs... You can outcode a compiler by a meaningful margin, sometimes (my current example is a 40% speedup). But you have to be extremely careful (think dependency chains and execution port loads), and the opportunity does not come often (why are you writing scalar code anyway?..).

[1] https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2025-July/346725.h...

[2] https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2025-July/346726.h...
by rsynnott | 2025-07-21 00:14:51+00:00
> What could be more compelling than reducing launch costs by 90%?

You, ah, might be overselling that a bit. An Ariane 5 (20 tonnes to LEO) launch cost about 150 million at the time it was discontinued (launch costs for the new ones are murky as they've only launched a couple of payloads so far). A Proton launch (similar size) costs $65m. Atlas V Heavy (18 tonnes) costs $110-$190m. A Falcon 9 reusable launch (17 tonnes) costs $70m.

Like, it's _cheaper_, but nowhere even remotely close to 90%.

> Regenerative braking was a crucial enabling technology.

Indeed! Given that it was invented in 1886, tho, I'm not sure what it has to do with Tesla. Apparently the first electric car with automatic regenerative braking was in 1967. The first really successful mass-market example would probably be the Toyota Prius (at least for cars; it's shown up in trams for a long, long time). The Leaf, of course, also had regenerative braking.

> Too bad they didn't take the world by storm like Tesla did.

Again, you're _really_ mostly talking about America. They're a little under 10% of the BEV market in Europe, about 5% in China. They were the best selling manufacturer in Europe for a couple of years, but were never enormously dominant.
by enknee1 | 2025-07-21 00:15:32+00:00
While the consumer will soon be irrelevant, I agree with the basic premise: neutered AI isn't helping.

At the same time, overrepresentation of evil concepts like 'Nazis are good!' or 'Slavery is the cheapest, most morally responsible use for stupid people' could lead to clear biases (ala Grok 4) that result in alignment issues.

It's not a clear-cut issue.
by phist_mcgee | 2025-07-21 00:15:44+00:00
The article refers to the banality of evil in realation to Eichmann. There's actually been quite a bit of historical push back on this assertion, which in some ways has been used to rehabilitate Eichmann's image as a bureaucrat. Eichmann while not the chief architect, was definitely partly responsible for the Holocaust's "success" and actively climbed the nazi hierarchy by finding a niche to fill - exterminating jewish people.
by ars | 2025-07-21 00:16:14+00:00
> to achieve some hack or optimization.

Or functionality. Happens to me all the time I have some Java class that's marked Final, so instead of just extending the class and moving on, I have to copy/paste the entire class wholesale to accomplish my goal.

Personally I hate "nanny" languages that block you from accessing things. It's my computer, and my code, and my compiler. Please don't do things "for my own good", I can decide that for myself.

(And yes, I am aware of the argument that this lets the original programmer change the internals, in practice it's not such a big problem. Or the cure is worse than the problem - for example my copy/paste example.)

Another example is a private constant. Instead of allowing me to reference it, I have to copy it. How is that any better? If the programmer has to change how the constant works then they can do so, and at that point my code will break and I'll .... copy the constant. But until then I can just use the constant.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-21 00:20:41+00:00
There's plenty of arguing about whether the entrepreneurial stages are more successful.

Financially? Of course, in the narrow stonks-go-up sense. But not so much in the kind of wealth distribution that accelerates inventiveness and creativity of all kinds at all wealth levels.

The kinds of products that are developed tend to be packaged digital (re)intermediations, fintech, and ad tech, all of which are more likely to be hype-boosted corporate slop with toxic consequences than a genuine boon to the culture around them.

It's a model that's more likely to create the next Theranos than the next Jonas Salk.
by bschwindHN | 2025-07-21 00:21:58+00:00
I use windows maybe once a year to see if some software builds or maybe play a game for a bit. It's almost comical how bad the experience is every time. Your comment on mental fatigue nails it - nothing on its own is _that_ bad but it all adds up and elevates the baseline stress level when you just want to get some stuff done.
by eukara | 2025-07-21 00:22:05+00:00
I think if it was easy for them to improve critical projects like ffmpeg, we'd have seen some patches that mattered already. The only activity I've seen is LLMs being used to farm sec-ops bounties which get rejected because of poor quality.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-f...
by dwattttt | 2025-07-21 00:22:21+00:00
This sounds about right. Under CHERI when you're returning a pointer from a function, you can choose to limit its valid dereferencable range, I imagine all the way to 0 (i.e. it can't be dereferenced).

When the pointer is passed back into libc, libc can combine the pointer with an internal capability that has the actual size/range of the structure.

This isn't _too_ different to having libc just hand out arbitrary integers as FILE; libc has to have some way to map the 'FILE' back to the real structure.
by splix | 2025-07-21 00:23:36+00:00
In the times of AI it's really easy to verify the question above. I had literally just copied it to the chat and made a research (also asked to cite and manually verified the links).

So it says there are 57 billionaires in UK with total worth of £182 billion. Non-billionaire wealth is £10.13 trillion, btw, so it's definitively not 50%. UK population is 68.3 million people. So everyone gets their £11,311 and that's it.

UPDATE there are £772.8 billions if you include non-UK citizens, but happen to live here. If you seize their money as well that will give you the total of £11K
by jerrysievert | 2025-07-21 00:24:01+00:00
most of the 80's and 90's?

around 1998, I was working at a regional ISP, my main workstation was a sparc 5, but I had picked up a conversion box from ps-2 to sparc so I could use a Microsoft natural keyboard. emacs was still considered "eight megs and constantly swapping", but I had 96mb of memory in my sparc, and was able to run it.

Microsoft paid a visit to our isp, trying to make a deal, saw no windows anywhere but were excited to see my Microsoft keyboard. they asked about my computer, I told them I was running solaris on a sparc, and they were excited to ask me if I had run internet explorer, that they had just released for solaris. I looked at them horrified, and said, "I only have 96mb of ram in this, I can't run internet explorer!" - but I was able to run multiple windows of emacs, many terminals, a window manager, and netscape (just not the web server, because we ran apache)
by enslavedrobot | 2025-07-21 00:24:28+00:00
So many posters I this thread are obviously child free. The idea of carting kids to soccer practice on the bus, or shopping for a family of 4 and taking the bus with 100 pounds of groceries is absurd.

I guarantee half the people posting here will change their tune as soon as they have any responsibility beyond themselves.

I rode the bus for 15 years...when I only had to take care of myself.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-07-21 00:24:57+00:00
I'm not exactly sure, anymore. I think I've first read about it, some years ago, at the time not using systemd anywhere, personally.

IIRC it was about the default dns servers pointing to cloudflare and google in upstream.

So it would rather be the other way around. The upstream default was(is?) privacy unfriendly. What the distros do with this is another matter.

Similar stuff arose with timesyncd (ntp), and some other small thing which I can't remember anymore, atm.
by smcleod | 2025-07-21 00:25:01+00:00
Claude 4 Opus when provided with the full paper, blog post and asked to perform a critical review:

The methodology contains several fundamental flaws that likely explain this anomalous result.

Most critically, the study examines a highly specific scenario - expert developers working on codebases they've contributed to for years (averaging 1,500 commits over 5 years) - which creates a ceiling effect where AI has minimal room to provide value.

The 30-minute Cursor training for developers, 56% of whom had never used the tool before, is woefully inadequate for learning effective AI pair programming techniques. With only 16 participants and a non-blinded design where developers knew their condition and were paid $150/hour, the study lacks both statistical power and ecological validity.

The restriction to a single tool configuration (Cursor Pro with specific Claude models) and acknowledgment that the tool doesn't optimise token sampling or prompting strategies further limits the findings' applicability to the broader question of AI's impact on developer productivity.

- Concerningly small sample size: Only 16 developers across 246 tasks provides insufficient statistical power for broad generalisations about AI's impact on millions of developers

- Inadequate AI training: 30-minute basic Cursor tutorial for developers where 56% had never used the tool - completely insufficient for developing effective AI collaboration skills

- Selection bias towards ceiling effects: Developers averaged 5 years and 1,500 commits on their repositories, creating an expertise level where AI assistance has minimal value-add potential

- Single tool learning: Study restricted to education Cursor Pro with specific Claude models, not representative of the diverse AI tooling ecosystem (Windsurf, Cline, Roo Code etc.)

- Artificial task constraints: Tasks were acknowledged as "shorter than average" and broken into ≤2 hour chunks, not representative of real development work

- No experimental blinding: Developers knew their condition and were being observed/recorded, potentially affecting natural work patterns

- Suboptimal AI usage: Study acknowledges Cursor doesn't sample sufficient tokens and developers reported overusing AI due to experimental conditions

- Narrow context: All repositories were large (1.1M LoC average), mature (10 years old), with high quality standards - a specific niche not representative of most development

- Self-reported metrics: Time tracking was self-reported with only 29% verified through screen recordings, introducing measurement bias

- Expertise mismatch: Focusing on experts contradicts established findings that AI tools provide greater benefits to less experienced developers

- Tool proficiency confound: No control for varying levels of AI tool proficiency or different prompting strategies between participants

- Limited generalisability: The specific combination of expert developers + familiar codebases + large repositories + short tasks creates an artificial scenario unlike typical development workflows
by nedt | 2025-07-21 00:25:43+00:00
„Smoke detectors don‘t lie“ might be true, but not everything they detect is always smoke.

In my building all flats have one. It gets triggered by workers cutting a hole in the wall or people cooking. We covered it when we had the fog machine for Halloween because that surely would have triggered it. Almost every time it went off it was a false alarm.

Which is also the second thing. It should never be silent. If it detects it needs to report audible and someone should come to your room. What happens if there is smoke because of a fire? We always had FD coming to our flat.

Algorithmic might sound smart but in the end it might just a boy that cries wolf.
by fleebee | 2025-07-21 00:26:21+00:00
It matters to me for so many reasons that I can't go over them all here. Maybe we have different priorities, and that's fine.

One reason why LLM generated text bothers me is because there's no conscious, coherent mind behind it. There's no communicative intent because language models are inherently incapable of it. When I read a blog post, I subconsciously create a mental model of the author, deduce what kind of common ground we might have and use this understanding to interpret the text. When I learn that an LLM generated a text I've read, that mental model shatters and I feel like I was lied to. It was just a machine pretending to be a human, and my time and attention could've been used to read something written by a living being.

I read blogs to learn about the thoughts of other humans. If I wanted to know what an LLM thought about the state of vibe coding, I could just ask one at any time.
by gf000 | 2025-07-21 00:26:23+00:00
Top cause for production outages? Like what, did you get OOM errors? Also, how can a GC be a productivity drag?

Anyways, besides your very questionable "experience" with java, it literally runs half of the internet, and has by far the most mature and performant GC out of any platform, no one else is even close in this category.
by trod1234 | 2025-07-21 00:26:24+00:00
Intelligence is misunderstood by a majority of people.

People think intelligence is this static thing that you are born with innately, and they cling to this belief, often to explain those that are so much better as natural talent/intelligence. This is mistaken.

Intelligence is a combination of speed of association, mental framework, and experience/exposure to differing and disagreeing ideas.

Believe it or not, you are more intelligent today, than you were when you were at 15 years old. The things you picked up along the way towards doing things successfully made you more intelligent, and there are things that can make you less intelligent too. Trauma and psychological stress as an example.

There are thresholds where people can't become smarter because the speed of association is so slow or the interference so high, that it doesn't provide a connection of ideas. IQ of less than 83 is the cutoff the military uses.

The framework/mental model you use is quite important as well, because intelligent people aren't delusional. They are methodical, and test the structures they use, and are right more often than they are wrong by a significant margin.

People who have been tortured, had significant trauma, or people who were forced to learn by rote false things, and then forced to unlearn those things repeatedly, all have significantly slower speed of association, which is a precursor for comprehension.

There are physiological factors that impact these things as well. How healthy you are, whether you take supplements, exercise regularly...

People are protean by nature, able to overcome quite a lot of deficiencies; but often not everything, there are limits; and things that can damage you permanently in life, sometimes without you even realizing it. Those things are the most insidious.
by lmz | 2025-07-21 00:26:39+00:00
Well, if we make it expensive enough to operate everywhere, then there will probably be one or two huge "global" sites and hundreds of small local, region-locked ones. Maybe that is the future.

Cyberspace is not, eventually, independent[1] if you plan to make money off it and use real world IDs.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
by therealpygon | 2025-07-21 00:27:28+00:00
How do you suggest simultaneous independent branches be worked on concurrently from a single repository copy, or is it that you would simply prefer the local work tree method of duplication? And, for example, how do you suggest the same node_modules be used if part of the task requires changing, removing, or updating dependencies? Additionally, how much time do you expect a developer to spend implementing this new system your suggesting across all platforms for the benefit of it taking you a bit less time, especially when pulling dependencies from a local caches as I’m sure you’re doing? Or are you making a suggestion that you plan to contribute?

I’m sure the authors would appreciate well-thought alternative suggestions and assistance.
by gf000 | 2025-07-21 00:29:51+00:00
> And now we have a whole wave of "rewrite something off of the JVM, or off of Go, or off of some other GC'd language in Rust" projects

I think you vastly overestimate the size of that wave. Rust is a novelty in a specific niche and is changing/will change the low-level programming niche, but it won't noticeably alter how general business programming goes, not at all.
by cb321 | 2025-07-21 00:30:46+00:00
Some data in support of @soraminazuki (who makes good points throughout this thread) on an i7-1370P linux laptop running Linux 6.15.7:

$ tim 'bash -lic logout' 'zsh -lic logout' 55.3 +- 3.7 μs (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead 7454 +- 26 μs bash -lic logout 7934 +- 39 μs zsh -lic logout

(Using https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/tim.md)

About 20,000 entries in the Zsh history slowing it a little. All completion activated (but zcompile'd, along with a very large digraphs.zwc).

I think most would not be troubled by taking 1.06X longer, though, especially at this 8 ms scale and for interactive session initiation. Note this test upper bounds Time To First Prompt { a different "TTFP" from Time To First Plot ;-) }, since it also exits as part of the `-c`.
by quotemstr | 2025-07-21 00:30:50+00:00
IOW, America also has a stagnant, risk-averse business culture, except that superimposed on this culture there's a thin, fragile, layer of risk taking, one geography- and sector-constrained, but in which ~all US value creation and economic differentiation happens.

It's like how the growth of a tree trunk happens in a thin layer beneath the bark and the rest is inert wood.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-21 00:31:07+00:00
> So let’s ask ourselves: would AI have told us this?

Why ask ourselves, when we can ask the AI? Here's the start of my conversation with Gemini:

> Me: What is known about fatty acid combustion in the brain?

> Gemini: The Brain's Surprising Use of Fat for Fuel For a long time, the brain was thought to rely almost exclusively on glucose for its immense energy needs. However, a growing body of research reveals that fatty acid combustion, or beta-oxidation, plays a more significant and complex role in brain energy metabolism and overall neurological health than previously understood. While not the brain's primary fuel source under normal conditions, the breakdown of fatty acids is crucial for various functions, particularly within specialized brain cells and under specific physiological states....

It cites a variety of articles going back at least to the 1990s.

So

> would AI have told us this?

Yes and it did