MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thisoneisreal | 2025-07-03 09:54:35+00:00
I think this is going to look a lot like the same problem in education, where the answer is that we will have to spend less time consuming written artifacts as a form of evaluation. I think effective code reviews will become more continuous and require much more checking in, asking for explanations as the starting point instead of "I read all of your code and give feedback." That just won't be sustainable given the rate at which text can now be output.

AI creates the same problem for hiring too: it generates the appearance of knowledge. The problem you and I have as evaluators of that knowledge is there is no other interface to knowledge than language. In a way this is like the oldest philosophy problem in existence. Socrates spent an inordinate amount of time railing against the sophists, people concerned with language and argument rather than truth. We have his same problem, only now on an industrial scale.

To your point about tests, I think the answer is to not focus on automated tests at first (though of course you should have those eventually), but instead we should ask people to actually run the code while they explain it to show it working. That's a much better test: show me how it works, and explain it to me.
by DharmaPolice | 2025-07-03 09:55:01+00:00
This matches my experience, with email in particular every organisation I've worked for it's been normalised that it's OK to not read every email, particularly if it's long or detailed. Clearly if the CEO emails you alone about something important that doesn't hold but for the vast majority of emails it was seen as acceptable to not read them and to even openly admit that. I remember being phoned by a department head once asking what an email was about - they weren't going to read it until I explained why they should.

It's a side effect of the information noise we're all subjected to, if we all received 6 messages a day we'd probably read them all but as we often get hundreds (thousands if you're getting automated messages) it's "OK" to miss a few.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-03 09:55:56+00:00
I would argue that the taliban's scorecard in Afghanistan is pretty good.

Taliban insurgency vs USSR (technically vs "People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan", who, one might add, killed more people in peacetime than the Taliban did in wartime). They had the support of the entire population, because, frankly, the Taliban are an improvement over these communists. Communists left to make the terror attacks stop, and because the USSR collapsed.

Taliban insurgency vs US/International Coalition. They certainly did not have widespread support, with constant claims that it's much less than 50% (in an election, not that 50% of the population was prepared to fight). Essentially the coalition left and the Afghan government surrendered to make the terror attacks stop.

There's 2 lessons here. First, what matters is who's willing to fight (and equipment, to a lesser extent). Afghans are willing to vote against Taliban, but that's just not enough. The Taliban are some 10-20% of the population, and have since betrayed part of their own groups, so it's less now. Part of the problem is that nobody sees a future in Afghanistan under a decent government (or under the Taliban, but that doesn't matter, it's mostly people who can't leave). Two: terror and destroying everything and everyone until you're the only option left ... at least that can work. Communists demonstrated it doesn't work if you keep killing everyone but the Taliban don't do that. Life is terrible under the Taliban, but they don't kill large amounts of people, or at least not quickly. And the UN doesn't mind working with the Taliban, they're even prepared to exclude women from UN departments that work with the Taliban, so I guess that means they're "accepted".

I believe it's fundamentally an economic problem. Either there is some way to give Afghanistan a decent economy that depends on it's people, at which point the Taliban will have to make big concessions, or everyone basically "exchanges terror" with Afghanistan (not the Taliban, the entire population, the same problem as in Gaza if you will) to maintain some kind of balance. They kill/attack/kidnap/... people around the world, effectively in schemes to get money. The rest of the world attacks Afghans and Afghanistan to keep their terror below a reasonable level.
by noelwelsh | 2025-07-03 09:56:37+00:00
> The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication. All of this wrapped inside the labyrinth of tickets, planning meetings, and agile rituals.

Most of these only exist because one person cannot code fast enough to produce all the code. If one programmer was fast enough, you would not need a team and then you wouldn't have coordination and communication overhead and so on.
by 2dvisio | 2025-07-03 09:57:59+00:00
In the UK, Newborn hearing screening (https://www.nhs.uk/baby/newborn-screening/hearing-test/) is a mandatory test that happens in the first weeks of life.

Genomics-driven diagnosis of several (treatable) conditions is not science fiction anymore, but requires support from governments and national health systems. The technology is there, and can be scaled up.

With studies like this: https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/initiatives/newborns

and initiatives like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1ljg7v0vmpo#:~:text=Eve...
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-03 09:58:40+00:00
Writing software is like a combination of writing a short story, cleaning your room, and planning a vacation. The bottleneck is always low confidence, much like work anywhere else.

I have watched for almost 20 years employers try to solve and cheat their way around this low confidence. The result is always the same: some shitty form of pattern copy/paste, missing originality, and delivery timelines for really basic features. The reasons for this is that nobody wants to invest in training/baselines and great fear that if they do have something perceived as talent that its irreplaceable and can leave.

My current job in enterprise API management is the first time where the bottleneck is different. Clearly the bottleneck is the customer’s low confidence, as opposed to the developers, and manifests as a very slow requirements gathering process.
by Foreignborn | 2025-07-03 09:59:23+00:00
I have a team that’s somewhat junior at a big company. We pretty much have everyone “vibe plan” significantly more than vibe code.

- you need to think through the product more, really be sure it’s as clarified as it can be. Everyone has their own process, but it looks like rubber ducking, critiquing, breaking work into phases, those into tasks, etc. (jobs to be done, business requirement docs, domain driven design planning, UX writing product lexicon docs, literally any and all artifacts)

- Prioritize setting up tooling and feedback loops (code quality tools of any and every kind, are required). this includes custom rules to help enforce anything you decided during planning. Spent time on this and life will be a lot better for everyone.

- We typically making very very detailed plans, and then the agents will “IVI” it (eg automatic linting, single test, test suite, manual evaluation).

You basically set up as many and as diverse of automatic feedback signals as you can.

—-

I will plan and document for 2-4 hours, then print a bunch of small “PRDs” that are like “1 story point” small. There’s clear definitions of done.

Doing this, I can pretty much go the gym or have meetings or whatever for 1-2 hours hands off.

—-
by blublblu | 2025-07-03 10:00:20+00:00
At this point it's a misconception. In the past it was true that people rarely left before their managers, but this has mostly changed. Most managers aren't strict about or care about it anymore. Working conditions drastically improved in the last 10-20 years. The horror stories of japanese work enviorments come from the time of the economic boom a few decades ago (Like OP said when he was working) and have been left behind. There still are companies, reffered to as "black" companies, that have very abusive work enviorments, but they are now rare. Even just in the last 5 years it has improved a lot. It's still not perfect and a lot of things can still be changed to help make workers life better and easier, but at least it's improving.
by mrtksn | 2025-07-03 10:05:32+00:00
>end of Europe

How do you picture this? People in Paris disappear with a flash of light and baguettes falling on the ground? Or is ot more like the earth shakes and it all goes under the water? Or maybe something like Europeans collectively decide to do whatever Putin tells them? Or maybe suddenly adopt American and Russian way of life, like Italians burn their Fiat 500's and order Ford F-150's, throw away their wines and start brewing votka? Or maybe turn against each other and break down their functioning trade and cultural relations and just buy Russian and American stuff instead and pay with what?

BTW the blaming immigrants and tearing down the social state doesn't work for long because you have finite number of immigrants and social services. If you actually get rid of those and things don't improve people start to notice. A common strategy is to keep blaming those when not doing anything about it or even increase it but the problem with that is, people get tired and actually change you with someone who actually will do something about it and you end up doing something. This something can be to fix the issues and remove the pressure or remove the immigrants and the social sistem and you get a very strong counter action and flushes away those who did it. However way it goes it's not an end or beginning of anything as EU isn't an empire like the US, just bunch of sovereign states in coordination.
by imiric | 2025-07-03 10:05:51+00:00
Well said. That has been my experience as well, but from the perspective of using these tools on my own. Sure, I can now generate thousands of lines of code relatively quickly, but the hard part is actually reviewing the code to ensure that it does what I asked, fix bugs, hunt for security issues, refactor, simplify and remove code, and so on. I've found that it's often much more productive to write the code myself, and rely on the LLM for simple autocomplete tasks on the way. I imagine that this workflow would be much harder when you have to communicate with a less experienced human who will in turn need to translate it to an LLM, because of the additional layers of indirection.

I suspect that the majority of the people who claim that these tools are making them more productive are simply skipping these tasks altogether, or they never cared to do them in the first place. Then the burden for maintaining code quality is on the few who actually care, which has now grown much larger because of the amount of code that's thrown at them. Unfortunately, these people are often seen as pedants and sticklers who block PRs for no good reason. That sometimes does happen, but most of the time, these are the folks who actually care about the product shipped to users.

I don't have a suggestion for improving this, but rather a grim outlook that it's only going to get worse. The industry will continue to be flooded by software developers trained on LLM use exclusively, and the companies who build these tools will keep promoting the same marketing BS because it builds hype, and by extension, their valuation.
by skydhash | 2025-07-03 10:06:18+00:00
> instead we should ask people to actually run the code while they explain it to show it working. That's a much better test: show me how it works, and explain it to me.

There’s a reason no one does it. Because it’s inefficient. Even in recorded video format. The helpful things are tests and descriptives PRs. The former because its structure is simple enough that you can judge it, and the test run can be part of the commit. The second is for the simple fact that if you can write clearly about your solution, I can the just do a diff of what you told me and what the code is doing, which is way faster than me trying to divine both from the code.
by kingraphaii | 2025-07-03 10:06:22+00:00
Totally fair.

And I think the tension lies in that baking in value often means limiting choice. You win on simplicity but sacrifice modularity.

This is the tradeoff Brave makes here.

For the average user, that’s a win. For the power user? Sometimes it sucks. Now, is the average internet surfer a power user?

Brave gives you a sealed box of "it just works", but that also means you can’t always reach under the hood.

So yeah, you can’t install your own bitwarden plugin on Android Brave (for now). Jumping paywalls may not be part of their business model.

This doesn’t contradict the "frictionless wins" principle, but rather reinforces it:

Brave optimizes for default outcomes, not universal flexibility. Cursor does the same. So does Apple. So does Linear.

And like with Apple: Hackers will jailbreak. Some will use something else. But the majority will take what works by default and keep moving.

So if you’re designing tools, this is the real takeaway:

You can’t frictionlessly serve everybody and you have to pick who you’re frictionless for.
by 3D30497420 | 2025-07-03 10:06:42+00:00
> We are all, collectively, building a giant, shared brain. Every time you write a blog post, answer a question on a forum, or push a project to GitHub, you are contributing to this massive corpus of human knowledge.

I would be more excited about this concept if this shared brain wasn't owned by rich, powerful people who will most certainly deploy this power in ways that benefit themselves to the detriment of everyone else.
by sublinear | 2025-07-03 10:06:49+00:00
If you're talking about personal websites I think that ship sailed almost 20 years ago with the rise of social media.

If you mean business websites, they are just about the most volatile code out there with crazy amounts of work that never stops. It's still a form of publishing after all. Every marketing decision has to filter through design agencies, legal and compliance, SEO, etc. before it gets handed off to web devs. Then the web dev has to push back when a ton of details are still wrong. Many decisions after testing are left unresolved by the time it goes live and those pages still need maintenance until its expiry.

Smaller businesses also have these problems with their websites, but with less complexity until they get more attention from the public.
by aredox | 2025-07-03 10:06:57+00:00
Who is "we"?

The big welfare state was born in the post-war boom, a period of big, strong families that believed in the future.

The dismantling of the Family and of the Welfare State, and of Unions, and of any kind of support and collaboration between salaried people go hand-in-hand. Late stage capitalism needs to extract everything from everyone, without opposition. Having people desperate for a job at any cost because they don't a a support network is the ideal state for our managers and bosses.

Welcome to the anti-neoliberalism camp :)
by mjburgess | 2025-07-03 10:06:59+00:00
This is an analysis of the term "man" which is, at the very least, overly specialised to a technical reading in rhetorical or cultural analysis.

In areas of cultural analysis, terms are often read rhetorically, meaning as merely social actions with a persuasive or claim-making intent. E.g., to say "I know that ball will go in the net!!" isn't a claim involving actual knowledge, but something like a rhetorical act which appeals to the literal meaning of "know" in, say, something like an ironic/exaggerated/fabricated/social way. If one analysed the term "know" as-if this rhetorical context were its primary meaning, then one would conclude that all knowledge is merely a social presentation, knowing itself is no real thing in the world, only a game of making claims.

This is a deeply implausible primary meaning of "know", because it makes inexplicable why anyone would claim to know (ie., why would playing this game have any persuasive force?). It only makes sense if a literal meaning is available in which it is possible, and indeed quite common, to actually know things in an ordinary way. Then claiming to know, and being ironic/etc., makes sense.

It's no coincidence then that from this fields of analysis, in which any term whatsoever can take this merely rhetorical meaning, are terms like "man" given such a reading. However, the claim that this constitutes the only or even primary meaning of "man" is quite implausible. Since in the vast majority of cases, e.g., in biology, law, science, medicine etc. the authors are not taking "man" to be a kind of social rhetorical assertion. For example, pension ages differ in law across men/women -- its implausible to suppose that this law concerns itself with merely rhetorical actions of individuals insofar as they make claims to be men/women.

Indeed, as above, unless there is a literal meaning of "man" the social act of claiming to be one in a variety of non-literal contexts becomes meaningless. Consider eg., "I'm not really a man, I'm just playing one on stage with a lot of makeup". Here I'd suppose "man" has to have a literal meaning of having the characteristics of (human, adult) males in order for social claims of the sort, "I am a man!" to make any sense.

The very contemporary move to re-read these terms as primarily rhetorical claims might make some sense from a political/cultural perspective; but its quite important to remember that this cannot be their literal meaning -- or else a vast amount of derivative rhetorical meaning, and indeed existing law/textbooks/discourse/etc. becomes meaningless.
by noodletheworld | 2025-07-03 10:07:32+00:00
How do you test edge cases?

You think about the implementation and how it can fail. If you don’t think about the implementation, or don’t understand the implementation, I would argue that you can earnestly try to test, but you won’t do a good job of it.

The issue of LLMs here is the proliferation of people not understanding the code they produce.

Having agents or LLMs review and understand and test code may be the future, but right now they’re quite bad at it, and that means that the parent comment is spot on; what I see right now is people producing AI content and pushing the burden of verification and understanding to other people.
by latexr | 2025-07-03 10:08:22+00:00
> We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site, we will assume that you are happy with it.

You are likely violating the GDPR. You can’t just assume consent (that applies to other areas of life), that’s the whole point.

Either you only use cookies which are essential for basic usage—in which case you don’t even need to tell users about it—or you need to provide a way to refuse everything else which has to be at least as easy as the way to accept.
by karel-3d | 2025-07-03 10:09:16+00:00
I like this part from Register article

> When I click “add key,” three different bits of software compete for my attention.

> First up is the password manager, offering to store a passkey. (This is the first time passkeys have shown up in this process – you can begin to see how a casual user might be getting confused.) I don’t want the password manager to be involved in this case, so I dismiss the window.

> Next up, a window appears from macOS asking me if I would like to use TouchID to “sign in” (to what? – I am already signed in to the website) and to save a passkey. Again, note the different terminology. When I dismiss that window, it is time for the browser to have a go, offering me four ways to save a passkey, including finally the option to store it on the hardware token. I insert the USB key and proceed.

> I think we can all agree that this is a confusing experience, with three different systems fighting to be the One True Place To Store Passkeys, along with the inconsistency of terminology (passkeys or security keys) and use cases (password replacement or strong second factor?)

> It’s like every piece of software wants to “help” but there is noone looking at the system-level behavior where these different bits of software interact with each other and the end user. I’ve encouraged my wife (a social scientist not a computer scientist) to adopt a password manager and 2FA, and she’s very willing to follow my lead, but the confusion of terminology and bewildering arrays of options frequently (and understandably) leads to complete frustration on her part.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/17/passkeys_passwords/
by WhereIsTheTruth | 2025-07-03 10:10:44+00:00
I am an avid fan of D, but they seriously need to massively invest into tooling

The current LSP is _that_ bad, it doesn't even recognize most notable D features such as templates and named arguments..

This should be their #1 priority, as the language is starting to get steam again, they should not miss tat opportunity

I know Walter does not use that kind of tools, but that's becoming a requirement nowadays for young developers

Please, invest into tooling!
by latch | 2025-07-03 10:11:00+00:00
I don't disagree. It's like 13 years old. `GetWithoutPromote` was added in 2022, I assume someone asked for it, so I added it. That kind of stuff happens, especially when you stop building it for your own needs.

For the most part, you use a default config and use Get/Fetch/Set. Besides the excuse of its age, and not being seriously worked on for a long time (a decade?), I do think we both have a bias towards what's more familiar. What are the `ExpiryCalculator`, `Weigher`, etc... configuration options of Otter? (or `GetEntryQuietly`, `SetRefreshableAfter` ...)
by diggan | 2025-07-03 10:11:19+00:00
> The only way passkeys make sense is in terms of vendor lock in.

This is what I've figured as well, and even if my password manager claims "eventually we'll support it, once it's available" (https://blog.1password.com/fido-alliance-import-export-passk...), I've been putting it off until the implementation is actually in place.

But the question is when that'll be. Last I've heard about the whole "Risk of lock-in from export blocking" is:

> The general vibe is supportive and language has been added to this effect, though it looks like we haven't done a public working draft in some time so I don't think that's externally visible yet. Also usual caveats about in-progress work subject to change.

https://github.com/fido-alliance/credential-exchange-feedbac...

I guess time will tell. But for now, considering the history of lock-in on the web, it's best to stay away from Passkeys for now, until they figure out a proper way of avoiding it.
by blublblu | 2025-07-03 10:11:31+00:00
Japan is improving. Horror stories of horrible working conditions come mostly from the economic boom era. The situation has drastically changed since then and the last 5 years have also brought a lot of improvement. Only outliers are "black" companies that have gotten rarer and rarer. It's still not perfect but most people complaining about horrible conditions are people that are bad at finding good jobs and the same is true for Germany. Even though the workers protection laws are the only good thing Germany still has, there are still a lot of companies that can be worse to work for then average japanese ones.

Also I don't think your Linke political opinion rants really fit here.
by rooftopzen | 2025-07-03 10:14:25+00:00
I'm the author and updated this post - after looking into this, the larger bills contain entire pages with only headings that contain emdashes - removed the headings from analysis so that the emdashes per page are only from the legislative text itself. For the baseline, over 50% of bills found on congress.gov are 1-2 pgs, after reading a few I decided some rationale could exist to remove them from the baseline - even after all these adjustments, we're still looking at a 30% increase from a decent baseline of similar bill size. It's evident when reading the text below headings (as a human!)