MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by papapin777 | 2025-07-10 17:41:29+00:00
Hmm, I didn’t test this many tests. But you can run all tests in parallel — two at a time — and we should be good. The limitation isn’t the framework; it’s your budget and the tier you have on OpenAI. If you have Tier 2, which allows more requests to the OpenAI API, you could potentially run 1,000 tests in a single run.
by 01100011 | 2025-07-10 17:42:15+00:00
When I grew up back in the 80s there was a sense of more stability, I think. People didn't move around as much. American suburbs were more of a monoculture(for better and, mostly, for worse, but it was what it was). That stability and comfort let people be more at ease and more open to things. I think now there's a generally higher level of anxiety and it spills over into the need to plan every social interaction.

Even as someone who grew up in more spontaneous times I find I need more scheduling and such these days.
by alwa | 2025-07-10 17:42:16+00:00
I mean, honestly, I personally might think about consenting! Especially if they explained what about my physiology they’d want to educate people with.

I can see how it would be easier to skip that conversation and those years (hopefully) waiting for me to expire of natural causes… and how, from a curatorial perspective, it might be easier to acquire the full variety of human bodies if you can effectively just go shopping for them.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-10 17:42:30+00:00
It depends on what you expect from your engineers and how hierarchy works. It is a cultural thing I guess.

Do you expect engineers to do what you ask them to do, no matter how stupid. If you do and your engineers execute your stupid orders, then you are at fault. It was your job to have common sense, ask the right people, etc... You failed.

Now you may expect your engineers to call you and your stupid plans out, and if they didn't, it is their fault. They should have called you out and they didn't. They failed.

In the west, we usually expect the latter, so engineers should certainly be penalized. In India, I don't know.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-10 17:43:18+00:00
Environment variables are a non-standard, limited form of transferring data. Depending on the platform, they may be case-insensitive, there are reserved words, size limits, naming rules, restricted charsets, etc. And their values are always strings. So having a schema on an environment variable isn't very useful, unless you do things like dynamic typing and type assumptions (which run into bugs). It's not a bad idea to have an opinionated library that defines some restrictions on environment variables, but the applications will always need to add more restrictions that your library has thought of.

Schemas are application-specific. Applications all deal with data types differently. Some data types (defined in schemas) even use transforms and complex custom algorithms before their data is validated. So it's better to let the application handle schemas directly on an as-needed basis.

All of that can be done independent of environment variables. Just make a library that validates data types, and pass your environment variables (or any data, from anywhere) to it. This is better not only because you can validate any kind of data, but you can load your data from places other than environment variables (from disk, from database, etc). This kind of general abstraction is more useful for general purpose computing, rather than a complex solution tailored for only one use case.

Finally: A schema isn't a replacement for documentation. Just because you have a technical document that defines what data is allowed in a variable, doesn't mean that somebody then knows what the hell that thing does - what it affects, when it should or shouldn't be used, etc. Documentation is for humans, schemas are for computers.
by marze | 2025-07-10 17:43:44+00:00
Transmission lines are a interesting idea, but expensive.

Once solar is cheap (like now, as it already is), you can put in 3x what is needed on a sunny day, and power everything on cloudy days. Solar runs on cloudy days. Night obviously requires a different solution. Start by installing solar over all parking lots.

To think that you won't be able to run a 100% solar/wind grid is a bet against human ingenuity. If generation in excess of peak demand was installed of solar/wind, there are many promising approaches to deal with generation shortfalls. Batteries, load shifting, an electric vehicle fleet that charges during the day and powers the grid at night if the owner opts in, precooling a home with AC during the day to a low set point so AC isn't needed at night, H2 storage in salt caverns, pumped hydro, aluminum smelters that operate during excess power periods, the possibilities are infinite.

It won't be hard. Don't bet against human ingenuity.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-10 17:43:45+00:00
My brother is doing this right now, FWIW. He still works with at least one other developer but has been vibe coding two products simultaneously. I've seen them, they work great and will be genuinely useful when launched. One of them already has commercial interest from the intended users. He's launched a successful consumer app before pre-LLM, so has form.

Of course you could say that's not "huge", but it's clearly working and is allowing him to move at insane speed.
by duxup | 2025-07-10 17:44:21+00:00
That seems pretty cool.

Question tho, when people work with AI, do they need to work async like this? Just hand off a task and then check back later?

I feel like most AI interaction I have with code changes occur fairly quickly and I can address the changes right then and there. In fact it seems like I should address them at that time as a bunch of context switching means I might miss / forget something ...
by bell-cot | 2025-07-10 17:44:38+00:00
Tomayto, tomahto.

The important thing would be to block them from replacing "flushable" with something similarly deceiving. Ideally, they'd have to replace it with a big, scary warning label - about how flushing those wipes could stick you with a flood of backed-up sewage and/or a 5-figure plumbing or septic system repair bill.
by Enginerrrd | 2025-07-10 17:44:45+00:00
No. I'm a licensed civil engineer in the US. The license comes with an explicit duty to the public, to uphold public safety. I am in responsible charge of the work I produce and personally liable for the safety of that work, in perpetuity, and it SHOULD be that way. Any plans that I produce are subject to that standard.

India has a similar system for public works projects where a licensed engineer MUST supervise the work.

Frankly, sometimes I think the software world would be a lot better off with a similar system.
by alwa | 2025-07-10 17:45:23+00:00
I do not. I’m skeptical of the idea that there’s such a thing as a “bad guy” in the first place. Although I’ve met some pretty mean SOBs.

It does seem like one framing that comes up a lot when people try to explain why they support capital punishment.

But I’m more or less with lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson, who likes to phrase it “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” (Come to think of it I believe noted nightclub philosophers Sofi Tukker went on to borrow that formulation too...)
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-10 17:45:40+00:00
Sorry, I'm going to take this to the extreme. If you boss put a gun in your hand and told you to end someone's life, you would say no or go to prison for murder.

But somehow it's suddenly acceptable to debate when the gun is abstracted a tiny bit to say "make a bridge that absolutely will kill multiple people if it's used"?

The entire point of the "licensed" part of "licensed engineers" is to have someone we trust to say "absolutely not" and hold the line, or they personally get held accountable.

Did all of you conveniently forget the mandatory ethics courses in STEM education after the NYC scaffold incident killed a dozen people?
by BuckRogers | 2025-07-10 17:45:50+00:00
iPhone 12 mini lover and user checking in here. The haters will berate us for our choice stating that "no one wants a small phone", but that's a lie. Normal sized phones were never going to be instant day-one hits. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to launch them during Covid, offer them 2 years, and say no one wants them.

Give them a permanent place in the lineup, treating phones like every other very personal device meant for humans. Small, medium, and large.

If you do that, and give people time to see exactly why 5.42 screens are superior to 6.1"+ sizes, then I think the numbers will start to change from what we saw with the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 13 mini, which were both launched when people were less on the go than in 100 years.
by resource_waste | 2025-07-10 17:46:21+00:00
Yeah whenever I see people complain about some engineering thing, from catastrophic failure to difficulty to fix, I generally can assume it was constraint based rather than malicious intent.

Some hotel collapses? Do you blame the engineer who was rushed because they needed to open to begin making payments on the debt? If the engineer refused, they would have found someone else.

Some part of a car is difficult to fix? They needed to get 35mpg + have enough trunk space to fit a stroller.

When I see these stories, there is always a finger to point, but I don't think these are black and white. There are customers, governments, and financial considerations at play.
by Agingcoder | 2025-07-10 17:46:51+00:00
Well you don’t need enshittification for that : in the early 2000s Sony released a digital music player that didn’t read mp3 but ATrac instead, and the provided converter was slow and buggy. Let’s say that consumers didn’t like it.

I’ve always wondered how they came to shoot themselves in the foot like that - any basic consumer or journalist test would have flagged that.
by strogonoff | 2025-07-10 17:46:58+00:00
It might have been a bit of wishful thinking.

Put it this way: sometimes a licensed engineer, who can lose the license for shoddy engineering, is paid to say “no”. Say “yes”, lose your license, no longer get paid.

While there is no licensing in our industry, we can (should?) have our personal standards play a similar role.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-07-10 17:47:31+00:00
The real coup was perpetrated by the unelected judges of the supreme court all the way back in 2019.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39966382

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36543423

Their power keeps increasing to this day. It disgusts me every time they utter the word democracy.

I for one am very happy to see Trump sanction this place. Right now it looks like he's the only person in the world able and willing to put pressure on this dictatorship of the judiciary. I hope I'm around to see him personally sanction everyone involved.
by dannyobrien | 2025-07-10 17:47:53+00:00
Max! I'm so happy that you're doing this! I was a huge fan of Keybase, and have spent the last few years praying (and sometimes brainstorming funding) a decentralized, open source version of it. Looking forward to digging into the details of FOKS, but just wanted to say thank you and the Keybase team for all you've done -- including keeping Keybase going after the Zoom purchase.
by casenmgreen | 2025-07-10 17:47:55+00:00
I used TB for a decade or more, then in the end quit, because it was bloating too much. It was a browser doing email, not an email client.

I then used Claws for a while, but came to really dislike it - lots of small UI issues.

Then I wrote my own email client in Python, Postgres for store, Apache/HTML front-end. That's been fantastic. Python does all the heavy lifting, you need to design a decent database.

Now I add features as I need them - few days I added the ability to specify how many times an email should be sent, when you need to spam the recipient for some reason (say, a company which is spamming you and is not responding in a reasonable or timely manner to GDPR requests).

The basic client design I've not seen elsewhere - but I've not used many clients so it may very well exist. There's a single inbox of email, and you define sets, and a set defines what is shown. So you don't move emails around between folders, you define what's shown, and you can have multiple sets concurrently - so for example, "inbound", "last 24 hours".

There are also a bunch of other small features which I've had in time for a long time but have never seen. For example, the from/to addresses have the localpart and domain separately, so you can order by domain. There's immediate in-page filtering, too, for each column, so you can just enter a few letters of what you know is the origin domain and bingo, there you go.
by EGreg | 2025-07-10 17:48:12+00:00
The key to why this even works (and didn’t work before) is here: https://community.intercoin.app/t/paper-shows-relying-on-has...

Simply put, a reliable random oracle in an adversarial environment should be based on sources of randomness from multiple sources and participants, usually the sources are the participants’ meaningful actions to prevent collusion.

It has been known for quite a while that if the space of inputs being hashed is small, the hashing is relatively useless for most benefits of a true one-way function (eg hashing a phone number in USA).
by conductr | 2025-07-10 17:48:20+00:00
My son is starting 1st grade this fall, has been at same school since he was 3 and it goes through high school so, these are and will be his peers and it starts as major FOMO/it's the main way kids socialize outside of school hours. Good way to burn off their energies, etc. But it's also, they're young, we want to expose them to everything, they can find their "thing", etc. He does tons of non-Athletic stuff too (STEM, art, music, etc). So we've been playing soccer, baseball, flag football, basketball, lacrosse, swimming, etc. the last few years. It's getting to the point where some kids dropped a few sports based on disinterest or parent's inability to keep the schedule. We have one kid so really no excuses for us, but some people with multiple kids doing this is a scheduling nightmare. Anyways, what's already started to happen is we've brought in hired coaches. In no time, they'll be club/select league aged and people will faction off to do that. When it does, it will feel like gravity/inertia to do the same. Once you do, if you skip a beat, your kid is basically giving up the sport. They can't just join the baseball team in middle school, they won't make the cut against kids that have been playing non-stop since they were <6.

It is their entire friend group and becomes their identity. It would be hard to intentionally tell my son "you're not playing sports anymore". He may come to that conclusion on his own or coaches may cut him at some point; that's life. But, for those that stay active in it, the inertia of it is strong.
by laurencerowe | 2025-07-10 17:48:23+00:00
> The fact that British authorities picked a French word that the conquered would understand is significant.

That seems unavoidable given almost all English words related to government/law/administration (including "state") derive from French! The only counterexamples I can think of are "borough" and "riding".

> "Province" made allegiance to the crown oversea clear

There is a much clearer term for that though, "dominion" as in "Dominion of Canada". At least to my British English ear "province" simply doesn't have those connotations.
by zzzeek | 2025-07-10 17:48:37+00:00
As a project for work, I've been using Claude CLI all week to do as many tasks as possible. So with my week's experience, I'm now an expert in this subject and can weigh in.

Two things that stand out to me are 1. it depends a lot on what kind of task you are having the LLM do. and 2. if the LLM process takes more time, it is very likely your cognitive effort was still way less - for sysadmin kinds of tasks, working with less often accessed systems, LLMs can read --help, man pages, doc sites, all for you, and give you the working command right there (And then run it, and then look at the output and tell you why it failed, or how it worked, and what it did). There is absolutely no question that second part is a big deal. Sticking it onto my large open source project to fix a deep, esoteric issue or write some subtle documentation where it doesnt really "get" what I'm doing, yeah it is not as productive in that realm and you might want to skip it for the thinking part there. I think everyone is trying to figure out this question of "when and how" for LLMs. I think the sweet spot is for tasks involving systems and technologies where you'd otherwise be spending a lot of time googling, stackoverflowing, reading man pages to get just the right parameters into commands and so forth. This is cognitive grunt work and the LLMs can do that part very well.

My week of effort with it was not really "coding on my open source project"; two examples were, 1. running a bunch of ansible playbooks that I wrote years ago on a new host, where OS upgrades had lots of snags; I worked with Claude to debug all the various error messages and places where the newer OS distribution had different packages, missing packages, etc. it was ENORMOUSLY helpful since I never look at these playbooks and I dont even remember what I did, Claude can read it for you and interpret it as well as you can. 2. I got a bugzilla for a fedora package that I packaged years ago, where they have some change to the directives used in specfiles that everyone has to make. I look at fedora packaging workflows once every three years. I told Claude to read the BZ and just do it. IT DID IT. I had to get involved running the "mock" suite as it needed sudo but Claude gave me the commands. zero googling. zero even reading the new format of the specfile (the bz linked to a tool that does the conversion). From bug received to bug closed and I didnt do any typing at all outside of the prompt. Had it done before breakfast since I didnt even need any glucose for mental energy expended. This would have been a painful and frustrating mental effort otherwise.

so the studies have to get more nuanced and survey a lot more than 16 devs I think
by tonymet | 2025-07-10 17:49:57+00:00
Social media is obviously censored and editorialized. Twitter files was just a turning point – I’m not saying it was a liberation.

Yes it’s been corporate for a long time. Now it has a different sort of editorialization – hard to describe it. Yeah maybe influenced by a cabal of techno-libertarian VCs like Musk & Theil – hopefully that will be better revealed in a follow up expose

It was certainly corporate beforehand, though. Maybe you preferred that version if it– that’s fine. (Edit: grammar)
by mjr00 | 2025-07-10 17:50:00+00:00
> My intuition here is that this study mainly demonstrated that the learning curve on AI-assisted development is high enough that asking developers to bake it into their existing workflows reduces their performance while they climb that learing curve.

Definitely. Effective LLM usage is not as straightforward as people believe. Two big things I see a lot of developers do when they share chats:

1. Talk to the LLM like a human. Remember when internet search first came out, and people were literally "Asking Jeeves" in full natural language? Eventually people learned that you don't need to type, "What is the current weather in San Francisco?" because "san francisco weather" gave you the same, or better, results. Now we've come full circle and people talk to LLMs like humans again; not out of any advanced prompt engineering, but just because it's so anthropomorphized it feels natural. But I can assure you that "pandas count unique values column 'Foo'" is just as effective an LLM prompt as "Using pandas, how do I get the count of unique values in the column named 'Foo'?" The LLM is also not insulted by you talking to it like this.

2. Don't know when to stop using the LLM. Rather than let the LLM take you 80% of the way there and then handle the remaining 20% "manually", they'll keep trying to prompt to get the LLM to generate what they want. Sometimes this works, but often it's just a waste of time and it's far more efficient to just take the LLM output and adjust it manually.

Much like so-called Google-fu, LLM usage is a skill and people who don't know what they're doing are going to get substandard results.
by resource_waste | 2025-07-10 17:50:36+00:00
>which is not in any academic journal, or has no peer reviews?

As a philosopher who is into epistemology and ontology, I find this to be as abhorrent as religion.

'Science' doesn't matter who publishes it. Science needs to be replicated.

The psychology replication crisis is a prime example of why peer reviews and publishing in a journal matters 0.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-10 17:51:22+00:00
Nothing stops you continuously training a foundation model and serving checkpoints, but historically there were weird cliffs and instabilities where more training would make things worse rather than better. The trick is to introduce more data into the pre-training mix and keep training in ways that don't cause the model to regress. Presumably they've figured that out.

It's probably enabled by the huge datacenter xAI has. Most AI labs haven't built their own datacenter, and have to choose between doing experiments on new architectures, serving live traffic and doing more training on their existing models. Perhaps xAI can do all three simultaneously.
by geerlingguy | 2025-07-10 17:51:29+00:00
So far in my own hobby OSS projects, AI has only hampered things as code generation/scaffolding is probably the least of my concerns, whereas code review, community wrangling, etc. are more impactful. And AI tooling can only do so much.

But it's hampered me in the fact that others, uninvited, toss an AI code review tool at some of my open PRs, and that spits out a 2-page document with cute emoji and formatted bullet points going over all aspects of a 30 line PR.

Just adds to the noise, so now I spend time deleting or hiding those comments in PRs, which means I have even _less_ time for actual useful maintenance work. (Not that I have much already.)
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-07-10 17:51:53+00:00
Classic management failure where they throw the engineers under the bus. This is a textbook example of a high power distance culture. India has an incredibly high power distance, meaning that it is very rare to question those above you and subordinates are expected to execute orders without pushback. Anybody that's worked with offshore/nearshore teams in cost center environments knows exactly what I'm talking about. Such folks are very well meaning but will attempt to execute a ticket exactly as it's written even if what is written is impossible.

In all reality everybody down the food chain knew this was a stupid design but the culture prevented them from speaking up (go ahead, be the nail that gets hammered down! plenty of other people will gladly take your job and do what they are told. explain to your family why you can't put food on the table... or just smile, nod and do what you are told (which is probably some variant of pass that hot potato onto some other poor sap that will in turn do the same thing))

This isn't a blanket statement - there are plenty of Indian engineers I've worked with in real tech companies that are not at all afraid to push boundaries, cause fusses, say no to even the top of the food chain, etc. But the type of environment I'm describing is very different.

The real failure was at the management/political level where the impossible constraints were created, but the cultural dynamic ensured no engineer felt empowered to refuse the task. This is no different than any other case where management throws the engineers under the bus for a mess they caused.

Not acknowledging who is really at fault (hint: not the engineers) plays right into the corrupt politicians who greenlit this in the first thing. You think they were somehow in the dark about the design of this bridge? It doesn’t take a genius engineer to see that shits fucked. Everybody top to bottom knew it.