MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by afro88 | 2025-07-20 15:33:46+00:00
> Error rates compound exponentially in multi-step workflows. 95% reliability per step = 36% success over 20 steps. Production needs 99.9%+.

This misses a key feature of agents though. They get feedback from linters, build logs, test runs and even screenshots. And they collect this feedback themselves. This means they can error correct some mistakes along the way.

The math works out differently, depending on how well it can collect automated feedback it is doing what you want.
by baxuz | 2025-07-20 15:34:04+00:00
Quality has become something reserved for the rich. To get a garment or an item of the same quality that was available 20-30 years ago, I'd have to pay 10-100x the price. And I wouldn't even know where to start looking or how to get them.

You can by a "professional" set of Zwilling or Fissler cookware from Germany, which is actually made outside of Germany, and corrodes and warps way worse than a set of pots from the 1990s. Pitting from dishwashers, bad welds, delamination that occurs when using the boost function on the induction hob... The quality that was present in those pots from the 90s are now reserved for actual professional cookware sets not found in regular catalogues, which costs upwards of 300€ per pot.

Same goes for garments. If you want cotton spun from high-quality yarn that won't pill or fray within 1 year, the only place you will find it is by the yard at the tailor's, or in brands you don't even know the name of. Meanwhile, I am still rocking the same T-shirt that I wore in elementary school 30 years ago.

Office chairs — I have an Italian one from early 2000s and it's a beast. Both the mechanism and the upholstery. Today's "best" office chair — the SteelCase Leap is a rickety piece of trash by comparison. You can see the same decline in materials if you compare a Herman Miller Aeron from the early 2000s and ones built today.

Look at the Kitchen Aid stand mixer. The old ones had metal internals, and powerful, reliable motors. The new ones are much weaker, have nylon load bearing parts, and have a life span of 5 years tops.

Cutlery, tools... Everything has become worse, and there is a new category of "premium" items which are anything but.

And the biggest problem is that people's standards have been lowered to incredibly low levels. It's like they don't even understand how bad the things they are using actually are.
by anonreeeeplor | 2025-07-20 15:34:22+00:00
I was a self taught software developer that was very advanced. I remember applying to Microsoft dozens of times. Your resume goes right in the trash … unless you are a foreign indentured servant. These companies are not our friends. I was permanently shadow banned and limited on LinkedIn for mentioning this. It’s a racket. Intel laying off 30K people a quarter. Who do they replace them with?
by umvi | 2025-07-20 15:34:22+00:00
> The fight against DEI, policies meant to maximize corporate success by taking the best talent no matter race or gender, is clear indication of that.

That's not how DEI looked to me. In the places I've worked, DEI consisted of policies meant to force organizations to hire underqualified applicants so long as they were members of certain demographics, i.e. a variant of affirmative action.
by dham | 2025-07-20 15:34:23+00:00
It's not "Musk's argument," it's Andrej Karpathy's.

Also, if you've ever done any ML you would note that more data isn't always better. Plus there's the piece about which thing to believe when you get conflicting data. It's a lot more to it than what random Hacker News people are saying in this thread.
by delichon | 2025-07-20 15:35:23+00:00
Steam appears to have concluded that while depicting non-violent incest between consenting adults in a video game is unacceptable, graphic depictions of mass murder can remain their bread and butter. I have no problem with a private company choosing their own curation criteria freely. If they want to ban depictions of people who, e.g., wear glasses, that's up to them. But I'm not clear on how playing an incest game is more damaging than playing a homicide game.
by somewhereoutth | 2025-07-20 15:35:26+00:00
The deeper issue this site highlights, is that failure modes for these kinds of complex automations (and LLMs are automations, not intelligence) are not only non-linear, non-local - but unbounded and 'super-causal' (I'm trying to reach for some proper terminology to say that output y may have no relation at all to input x).
by fwn | 2025-07-20 15:36:06+00:00
> And yet, that is very far from the majority.

Remember that our parent said, "Many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government." You denied that, and I suggested that the turnout for the AfD might be a useful proxy for institutional distrust. I don't know how the reference to majorities fits here or what argument it is intended to support. Presumably, there are also people in other parties who distrust public institutions, right? Why are we talking about majorities now?

I argued that the SEPA system has several flaws, one of which is the lack of privacy surrounding transaction descriptions. This can have consequences far more serious than receiving a call from a bank. While banks do check flagged transactions, if a certain number of criteria are met, they will definitely escalate your transaction to the authorities. This is a legal requirement, by the way — it's not specific to any particular bank. This can be mitigated almost entirely by using cash.

As you did not answer my question about why to gamble on institutional consistency, I wonder: Would you actively argue in favour of greater surveillance of the payment sector?

This would align with your seemingly tongue-in-cheek suggestion to manually encrypt transaction descriptions. Payment privacy can only foster democratic resilience if it is enabled by default. It's like saying an instant messaging app doesn't need end-to-end encryption for personal communication because users can encrypt the text by hand.

> There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example.

Liberty is not usually defined in monetary terms. For instance, regular elections are costly. We still do not eliminate them for economic benefit. Similarly, I think the idea of removing the option of payment privacy to reduce transaction costs is cynical, or very radical.

> Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen.

I don't know why intention would be relevant here. The use of cash has been declining in Germany (and the EU) for quite some time now. This basic fact is not new or disputed by anyone in this field. To deny the decline of cash as a proportion of overall payments would be counterfactual.

Problems arising from reduced cash usage, such as the vulnerability of civil society and the reduced resilience of democratic institutions, occur regardless of whether someone is actively working to abolish cash payments.
by rolisz | 2025-07-20 15:36:08+00:00
I was a hardcore vim user 10 years ago, but now I just use PyCharm to work. I'm paid to solve problems, not to futz around with vim configs.

Can you make vim work roughly the same way? Probably you can get pretty close. But how many hours do I have to sink into the config? A lot. And suddenly the PyCharm license is cheap.

And it's exactly the same thing with LLMs. You want hand crafted beautiful code, untainted by AI? You can still do that. But I'm paid to solve problems. I can solve them faster/solve more of them? I get more money.
by positron26 | 2025-07-20 15:36:09+00:00
If the models are getting cheaper, better, and freer even when we use paid ones, then right now is the time to develop techniques, user interfaces, and workflows that become the inspirations and foundations of a future world of small, local, and phenomenally powerful models that have online learning, that can formalize their reason, that can bake deduction into their own weights and code.
by airstrike | 2025-07-20 15:36:14+00:00
I think it's important to note that not all H-1B jobs are the same. There are many companies that abuse the system, and this is one of main reasons to revamp it.

But there are also companies that are just looking for talent that they can't easily find in the US. I had an H-1B working in Investment Banking and was paid a high salary after business school. Most of my classmates did not want to go into banking. I was ranked a top performer year after year, put in hundred-hour weeks and provided actual value to the bank, clients, and the US economy.

Economies generally want high-skilled, high-salary immigrants. The H-1B can and should be a program for that. Literally everyone benefits.

It should also enable a path to citizenship. Right now, those high-skilled workers get a lottery with ~30% odds, another try at 40% odds if they have a graduate degree, and then six years working for Uncle Sam before they're kicked out of the country.

There's no path to a green card unless your employer chooses to sponsor you, at which point you are even more at their whims than during your H-1B stint and obviously there's a massive imbalance in that relationship.

And because I believe offering solutions is more valuable than just criticizing, here's my relative non-controversial suggestion for the program:

• Country quotas

• Minimum salary of [$175-200k/year] (pick your number)

• H-1B workers should be allowed to easily switch jobs, so long as the job is still above the minimum salary. (Giving workers flexibility reduces the possibility of abuse. Currently you have 30-days to find a job or you have to leave the country.)

• Spouses of H-1B workers (H-4 visas) should get a work permit with no minimum salary (They're currently not allowed to work at all. They don't need a salary minimum because their visa is tethered to the H-1B already, and it's better (for everyone) to have them work some job rather than no job.)

• H-1B can self-petition a green card after X years working in the US (personally I'd say 3 years, but 5 may be more palatable to the general public)

• H-1B visas should be good for 5 years instead of the current 3. They should also be allowed to extend for another 5 years, so 5+5 instead of 3+3.
by e1g | 2025-07-20 15:36:25+00:00
Here's a bulletproof working visa policy: automatically approve everyone who will be in income tax (state and federal) more than the median gross income (~$60k). Sort of minimum-income-tax personal guarantee, which all highly-skilled migrants for in-demand occupations will easily match (OTE >$200k). Alternatively, earning 2x of the median income in their profession, with a national floor of $200k pa.

It won't solve all immigration woes, but it will do a great deal to keep the country competitive.
by clickety_clack | 2025-07-20 15:36:43+00:00
I don’t disagree with that at all, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The market for serving information goes where the people want to consume it. The old portals of the 90s gave way to search because it was easier for people to find what they wanted. LLMs give people an even easier way to find information. The downstream effects don’t factor into most people’s decision to use an LLM over source material.
by majkinetor | 2025-07-20 15:37:38+00:00
Jeez, learn to read and learn and stop with this BS already:

From your first article:

> The amount of alcohol a person drinks affects their risk of cancer. An important factor is the overall amount of alcohol consumed consistently over time.

That, sure as hell, means that you can drink small amounts sometimes, not 0, as there is no such thing. Again, read about hormesis. Here it is for you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Alcohol
by ffitch | 2025-07-20 15:37:45+00:00
I’m curious what the policy with the highest long-term benefit would be. The country needs external talent, but would skewing H-1B towards high skill be good? The economy seems to need unskilled labor for the jobs Americans are not interested in. Should the government try to curb hi-tech outsourcing instead, to create more jobs in the States, both for the citizens and the skilled immigrant workers? But that would be protectionism, and protectionism rarely play out well economically.
by murukesh_s | 2025-07-20 15:37:46+00:00
Java served it purpose and served it well.. remember it was replacing large mainframe systems and developers needed their fair share of confidence - Types, JIT compiler, JDBC, JMS, EJB (I hated it though - but had the "enterprise" word in it to sell!), transactions, especially distributed transactions which was uncommon in other languages. In many languages the logic was scattered across multiple libs and frameworks - providing inconsistencies.

Even now in fortune 100 I don't think they use anything other than Java to perform daily tasks. Yea they are now more open to use Python for ML related tasks and Node.js for compiling React and all but anything backend its Java
by vidarh | 2025-07-20 15:38:04+00:00
2005-2007 I worked on a webapp where the app layer rendered to XML, and then optionally server-side applied an XSLT transform to generate either HTML, RSS, or Atom, but you could also request the raw XML (and browsers could apply the XSLT client side, but for debugging/testing it was great to be able to then also see the underlying XML.

It had some benefits in terms of enforcing strict separation as well, but it was also painful to deal with the many deficiencies of XSLT (e.g. try reformatting dates...) that meant the XML ended up having annoying redundant values where it was easier to provide multiple versions of the same value than doing the conversions in XSLT.

These days I'm doing something similar by having apps return JSON and having the I built dynamically from the JSON with javascript, and I like that better than the XML => XSLT as much as "in principle" I agree with you that the pure approach of XSLT feels "correct". It's just too painful to apply as-is.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-07-20 15:38:12+00:00
The obesity crisis, and metabolic syndrome issues, has far more to do with sugary drinks and snacks made up of flour and oil devoid of fiber and protein. The risk attributed to processed meat is cancer, and CVD by extension of being meat and fatty, not BC its processed.

People don't really consume that much "processed meat" on the daily in the form of salami or w/e.
by AceLewis | 2025-07-20 15:38:20+00:00
I have encountered this problem at work a few times, the worst was someone asking if a list of pros and cons from something we were developing and asking if the list was accurate…

I spent a long time responding to each pro and con assuming they got this list from somewhere or another companies promotional material. Every point was wrong in different ways, not understanding. I was giving detailed responses to each point explaining how they are wrong. Initially I thought the list was obtained from someone in marketing who did not understand, after a while I thought maybe this was AI and asked… they told me they just asked the pros and cons of the product/program to ChatGPT and was asking me to verify it it was correct or not before communicating to customers.

If they had just asked me the pros and cons I could have responded in a much shorter amount of time. ChatGPT basically DOSed me because the time taken to produce the text was nothing compared to the time it took me to respond.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-07-20 15:38:29+00:00
It would have come in handy yesterday. Entire webpage full of 'dynamically generated content'. The issue was not the content. The issue was that whoever prepared it, did not consider failing gracefully so when the prompt failed, it just showed raw prompt as opposed to the information it could not locate.

But I suppose that is better than outright making stuff up.
by vkou | 2025-07-20 15:38:29+00:00
In any place where I worked, all it influenced was where the intake funnel was sourced from. Once someone was in the recruiting funnel, it had exactly zero bearing on interviews and hiring decisions.

From observing the public behavior of the current regime and it's war against DEI, it itself seems to be lazer-focused on hiring unqualified morons whose most important quality is loyalty to the supreme leader. Methinks merit was never the goal, and DEI was just a figleaf to get angry culture warriors to turn out and vote for them.
by jorangreef | 2025-07-20 15:38:46+00:00
Thanks! Great to hear you enjoyed our talk. Most of it is simply putting the spotlight on UW-Madison’s work on storage faults.

Just to emphasize again that this blog post here is really quite different, since it does not fsync and breaks durability.

Not what we do in TigerBeetle or would recommend or encourage.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44624065
by kaladin-jasnah | 2025-07-20 15:39:04+00:00
The company's products in my and other people's views have caused a significant wane in vegetarian and vegan burger diversity. Gone are the chickpea and black bean burgers on menus—your only choice is Beyond Meat-esque burgers.

As someone who doesn't actually really like how Beyond Meat tastes, it's unfortunate that it's the only option sometimes. As someone who likes food variety and practically needs it, eliminating choice is the worst.

I have to concur about processing as well. Indian cuisine has so many unprocessed and nutritious meals that are vegetarian. So does Ethiopian cuisine. Mediterranean foods, Tex-mex, and lots of South American food can be made vegetarian. There are great ideas for burgers from here too. See https://www.shopdeepfoods.com/product/aloo-tikki-141-oz?pid=....

I've wanted to try some of the NYTimes vegetarian and vegan burger recipes when I get the chance. My point is, Beyond Meat seems to reduce the better-testing and less processed competition.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-20 15:39:38+00:00
>Tesla told the public that they could do that.

Lol, really? They either developed superman x-ray vision, or just tracked object occlusion with a common re-acquisition mitigation (so worthless when physical inertia carries a vehicle into an object collision.)

>So, it doesn't "grow exponentially",

The further the object... the more possible choices will need to be made in the guidance system. Note, guidance and navigation are related, but different problem domains. Roughly, the possible choices (and errors) if I recall grew by:

((m cars) * (k lanes ) * (r occlusions) * (s sign laws) * (1 + world_sate_delta_error(t)) ) ^ (n intersections + w way-points) = 1/hype_correction

...but that doesn't even cover the projected future risk(t). =3
by throw0101c | 2025-07-20 15:39:40+00:00
> And RIIJ also gives you memory safety

I think Java helped in the mainstreaming of memory safe and GC languages, especially in more corporate spaces where C/C++ was still mostly still a thing.

Certainly sysadmins were using a lot of Perl during that time, but for "real" enterprise software, I don't think dynamic-ish languages were as accepted. The use of Perl and rise of Python widened the Overton window.
by ghm2180 | 2025-07-20 15:39:53+00:00
> but rather to learn how to conduct research

Further, I always assumed PhD level of knowledge meant coming up with the right questions. I would say it is at best a "Lazy Knowledge Rich worker", it won't explore hypothesis if you don't *ask it* to. A PHD would ask those questions to *themselves*. Let me give you a simple example:

The other day Claude Code(Max Pro Subscription) commented out a bunch of test assertions as a part of a related but separate test suite it was coding. It did not care to explore — what was a serious bug — why it was commenting it out because of a faulty assumption in the original plan. I had to ask it to change the plan by doing the ultra-think, think-hard trick to explore why it was failing, amend the plan and fix it.

The bug was the ORM object had null values because it was not refreshed after the commit and was fetched before by another DB session that had since been closed.*
by atoav | 2025-07-20 15:39:54+00:00
This is my current thought as well. The neo-fascist movements throughout the west all do not have a positive vision, beyond it being a narrative vehicle to convince the people who bought into the rethoric.

Returning a nation to former greatness is a strong story, especially among those who never benefited from that hypothetical greatness. If you ask those politicans to make their promise of a return to greatness more concrete, they often can't even point at a point in time where the nation was great. And when they do you it usually involves prior atrocities where one class of people was beneath the others.

Excuse me for being vague and open here, but I purposely tried to tell it in a way that works for all countries with whose neo-fascists movements I had experiences with, so Geemany, Austria, Italy, Serbia and now unfortunately also the United States of America.
by hash872 | 2025-07-20 15:39:55+00:00
Basically all of the problems with the H1-B system could be fixed overnight by simply banning visa holders from working for consulting companies. 'No visa holder may be employed by a company whose main business is consulting for other firms, or staffing'. We'd keep the highly skilled folks who are going to the FAANGs, and at least letting the midmarket companies bid for everyone else. But there's no compelling national or economic interest in importing a class of Accenture/Cognizant/Wipro/Infosys workers who work on 6 month contracts at Wells Fargo or whatever.

I'd actually support more skilled immigration if we could get rid of the consulting firms

Edit to clarify slightly: if your concern is 'skilled immigration', I would like to gently but firmly state that most of the developers that work for the consulting firms are just not very good. Sorry. If you're in a hiring capacity at a tech company at all, everyone knows that the Wipro guys who work on 6 month contracts doing Java at Fortune 100 companies cannot pass even the simplest tech screen. Yes it makes me sound like a jerk to say this, but they're not 'highly skilled'
by somenameforme | 2025-07-20 15:40:11+00:00
You can buy garbage for high prices. You can buy great stuff for low prices. And you can buy great stuff for high prices.

For a market to function properly people need to hone in on the great stuff for low prices quadrant, but that is, increasingly frequently, not what's happening. And it's not like some esoteric art - just check reviews. It's not too hard to ignore fake reviews.
by hinkley | 2025-07-20 15:40:13+00:00
That’s not the only one it’s just the easier one.

When people tear down new models of gaming systems they find fewer chips on the boards because they’ve found some chip that does two things for less than the price of both - below a certain point it’s financially infeasible to make simple parts because the capacity they consume makes a chip that does half as much only 15% cheaper. See also when people started putting Linux rescue disks into the EEPROM, because appropriately sized ROMs no longer existed.

You can find better equipment and processes that get you more product per hour out the door without necessarily making the product shittier.
by lxgr | 2025-07-20 15:40:20+00:00
Somebody will still need to have the entire context, i.e. the full end-to-end use case and corresponding cross-service call stack. That's the biggest disadvantage of microservices, in my experience, especially if service boundaries are aligned with team boundaries.

On the other hand, if LLMs are doing the actual service development, that's something software engineers could be doing :)