MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Disposal8433 | 2025-07-18 04:09:15+00:00
"I'm a chef, I hate cooking, I buy readymade meals in the supermarket."

You're right about the pride of writing actually good code. I think a lot about why I'm still writing software, and while I don't have an answer, it feels like the root cause is that LLMs deprive us of thoughts and decisions, our humanity actually.

I have never felt threatened by an LSP or a text editor. But LLMs remove every joy, and their output is bad or may not what you wanted. If I hated programming, I would actually buy software as I don't have such precise needs to require tools perfect for those needs.

No need to enjoy a good meal, AI will chew food for you and inject it in your bloodstream. No need to look at nature, AI will take pictures and write a PDF report.

Tools help because they are useful. AI is in a weird position to replace every job, activity, and feeling. I don't know who enjoys that but it's very strange. Do they think living in a lounge chair like Wall-E spaceship is good?

As for the article, it's yet another developer not using its tools properly. The free JetBrains code completion is bad, and using f-strings in logs is bad. I would reject that in a merge request, sorry. But thinking too much about it makes me sad about the state of software development, and sad about the pride and motivation of some (if not most) developers nowadays.
by northhnbesthn | 2025-07-18 04:09:15+00:00
I’m self taught from a single digit age and yet I went and got a degree and it was eye opening. It was mostly a vocational thing with an absolute assgrind of a program that drops most of the students in the first 2 years, and just beats down into a pulp the remaining ones for the next 1-2. 16 hour days of nothing but projects, individual and team.

By the time I landed my first job I think i worked harder on personal projects than I ever have at work. I also ended up tutoring proper CS nerds in things like graph theory and functional programming concepts.

So, YMMV.
by 7402 | 2025-07-18 04:10:32+00:00
If a dependency is paid and it is bad, then maybe you just aren't paying enough for it.

If my code has a dependency then I want there to be people whose feel it is their job to support it.

Either there have to be enough people who are paid to support it, or there have to be enough people whose self-worth and identity is so wrapped up in the code that they take it as a point of honor to support it.

I don't need a company that's likely to abandon a code product and leave me hanging. I also don't need a free software author who says "bugs are not my problem - you have the source, go fix it yourself." If those are my choices, I'd rather write it myself.
by pedalpete | 2025-07-18 04:10:40+00:00
As a self-taught engineer who made it pretty far as a career, getting to work at CSIRO (Australia's Science and Technology Research Centre), I can say I definitely did not outperform my peers there. However, engineers at CSIRO felt I outperformed the average engineer.

I was occasionally brought in to interview new potential hires, and I don't think there was a significant difference between the self-taught or the classically trained (either software engineering or computer science).

I think the difference was first of all, did they just love building, and secondly, did they ask the right questions as they went through the development process.

I think I struggled in the 2nd half of that, and I could run off on some far-flung direction not because I didn't know what needed to be done, or the "right-way", but sometimes because I wanted to try to prove that I was as capable as my peers. But the plain fact is, I just wasn't, and I'm ok with that. It's kinda how I ended up as a CEO, I can understand and direct the product/technology from a high level, and particularly now that we're in neurotech, I'm not the right person to be writing C.

So if you want to be self-taught, you can go far. But when you get to the top, you're probably going to want a great mentor who won't necessarily be teaching details about coding, but more about the approaches to engineering.
by Cagrikartal | 2025-07-18 04:10:59+00:00
curious, maybe one could go and spin up a study for using claculators instead of calculating manually and how it can lead to less x type of thinking and affect our abiltiy but maybe even if that is true(i am not sure maybe it is just in the domains we dont feel like we need to care much or etc) would people quitting clacutors a good thing for producing value in the world by the will of God?
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-18 04:11:16+00:00
> But you can't practically adapt an existing gasoline car to run on hydrogen.

You can do it pretty practically. Figuring out a supply is probably worse than the conversion itself.

> My point is that mobilizing terminology gives people with no knowledge of details the illusion they can speak reasonably about the topic.

"mobilizing terminology"? They just stuck two words together so they wouldn't have to say "training data that has the same features as a conversation with a malevolent therapist" or some similar phrase over and over. There's no expertise to be had, and there's no pretense of expertise either.

And the idea of filtering it out is understandable to a normal person: straightforward and a ton of work.
by 9rx | 2025-07-18 04:12:15+00:00
> The author cites examples such as Linus and Margaret, but IIRC they studied CS and/or math as part of their educational upbringing...

What is studying if not self-teaching? But, semantics aside, Linus, at least, was programming long before he attended university, and his claim to fame was built early in his time at university. It is true that he "studied CS", but that came later. He is unquestionably self-taught in the area for which he is best known.
by Jensson | 2025-07-18 04:13:55+00:00
I have never seen a person who self taught even the basics of math, some think they did but they just learned some fractions of the first course past what they currently know. Like nobody self teaches the equivalent of a basic math degree.

Programming though, there are plenty of people who can self teach programming and algorithms, since the theory there is much shallower and hands on than math.
by Izkata | 2025-07-18 04:14:39+00:00
> Now extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I don't believe the "Epstein was killed" has ever come close to meeting that standard. A disabled security camera is more likely the result of guards who wanted to sleep than do required rounds than they are of murder.

The failed security camera pointed down the hall Epstein's cell was in. No guard stations would have been visible from it. The security footage they did finally release was pointing directly at the guard station.

Also, that footage combined with the map shows if you entered the floor and went straight to Epstein's cell without going to the guard station, you wouldn't have been visible on the camera. So it doesn't even show what they wanted it to show by releasing it.
by smckk | 2025-07-18 04:15:56+00:00
The main reason for this is because self-taught programmers FOCUS ON ONE LANGUAGE. I realized that I went through all the courses I needed to learn from university in different programming languages for some strange reason, and that just left me all over the place as a developer.

It is an easy fix, teach only one language for the 6 core areas of programming, namely:

1) Intro to programming (variables, loops, conditions etc. up to functions) 2) Complexity management, usually OOP 3) Building a GUI (it is not trivial and needs to be a course on its own) 4) Connecting to a database (also not trivial) 5) Data Structures and Algorithms 6) Compilers and programming languages (basically popping the hood of programming)

In school, after learning OOP in Java we switched to web dev and learned javascript and php. We completely abandoned learning GUI and DB for java.

Algorithms was taught by a visiting lecturer in C++ and after mid-sem we switched to Data Structures in java??

The universities are doing a fine job, but please just stick to one programming language for these core areas and everything will be great.

I came to this conclusion before AI took over. It will be interesting to see how AI changes the Computer Science curriculum in the years to come.
by ReaperCub | 2025-07-18 04:16:09+00:00
> Look guy, your initial post was about how people sat around watching Netflix during Covid and how that's terrible for you and unproductive

No it wasn't. I suggest you re-read it. I was talking about people generally. I actually didn't speak that much about my own experience. I actually talked about what generally happened over COVID in my original reply.

> I did read what you said and I do understand. You said that you can't go do things other than go to the office because you chose an expensive lifestyle. Congratulations. UBI will not cover that and it shouldn't. It is a universal BASIC income.

Again you inserted things that I did not say. I never said I can't do other things. I don't live an expensive lifestyle. The only thing I said I need to go to work to pay the bills.

> That's your experience with one drug (alcohol). Frankly, it comes across as naive. Many people can not quit by themselves, even if they want to. Not to mention hard drugs like heroin, crack, meth, benzos. You really are trying to say that years of use of those drugs can be stopped by just "deciding?" For every individual? Simply untrue.

No it isn't naive. It is literally what every recovered addict says. "You have to want to quit". Whether people should get help or not has nothing to do with the justifications of why they abuse substances.

> I get it, believe me. Im saying your rationale is simplistic and that both choices are subpar and neither should not be acceptable.

I don't think you do. You didn't even bother reading what I said properly. So I think we will leave it there.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-18 04:16:41+00:00
Is Pinker high in dark traits?

(People are also upset abt PG & his wife doubling down on sama. Ofc I don't know much about these guys apart from hearsay, but the "public" rage is similar. Dark traits are associated with agency, the "elites" just happen to rationalize this bellyfeel better?)

Purely based on bellyfeel, there's something deep here..

Related to informal rules/institutions: these might be ways to filter out high Ds ..?

Building a framework to understanding false negatives/false positives with respect to different systems of rules would be the goal. Social proof is one such,surely there is some better tradeoff?
by WCSTombs | 2025-07-18 04:16:45+00:00
There could be some randomness to the points, but I definitely wouldn't call it a "random walk," which would have very jittery paths. These points are moving along some smooth curves.

I think it's probably computing a Delaunay triangulation and continuously updating it as the points move, but I didn't attempt to verify that.

The colors seem to be based on a simple color gradient going from top to bottom, but it's a bit more complex than that. The color inside each triangle is not constant. Interestingly the blue channel appears to be maxed out over the whole thing (not counting the vertices), which should simplify the analysis if you want to reverse engineer it, but I'll stop there.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-18 04:17:36+00:00
> It's not unreasonable to briefly forget details like that, especially when you're dealing with a multi-language codebase where "how do I make a log statement?" requires a different pattern in each one.

You make my point for me.

When I wrote:

... I love working with people who understand what they are doing when they do it.

This is not a judgement about coworker ability, skill, or integrity. It is instead a desire to work with people who ensure they have a reasonable understanding of what they are about to introduce into a system. This includes coworkers who reach out to team members in order achieve said understanding.
by jraph | 2025-07-18 04:20:32+00:00
I kind of understand your point, now my view would be that it should not be a reason not to delete the data from them, in case it actually helps. Otherwise:

1. Why take the chance?

2. Your DNA being out in the wild also impacts the privacy of your relatives (including those you might not know, and those who don't exist yet (a child, a nephew, a niece for instance)), so if not for you, do it for them.

It won't be a guarantee, but it maximizes the chances.
by jmcgough | 2025-07-18 04:21:17+00:00
I've experienced some bad paid dependencies forced on us by a non-engineering team. I've had a few good experiences with "open core" kinds of dependencies that are widely used by the community, e.g. sidekiq, and therefore less likely to suddenly vanish one day as they would almost certainly get forked and maintained by others in the same boat.

The upside of paying for something is that, assuming the owner or company is stable, I don't have to worry about some unpaid solo maintainer burning out and never logging back in.
by 9rx | 2025-07-18 04:21:46+00:00
> Seems the same logic like looking at Bill Gates or Zuckerberg and claiming college dropouts get rich.

Gallup's report on the "top 1%" kind of backs up the idea, to be fair.

Sort of. It shows that having a degree is significant when it is an advanced degree that offers exclusive access to a market (think medical doctors, lawyers, etc.), enabling monopolistic capitalization. But dropouts are more likely to be in the top 1% than those with only a bachelor or other insignificant degree.
by devjab | 2025-07-18 04:23:54+00:00
Being in the energy sector dependencies is something we intentionally avoid because we'd actually have to go through and review changes. What has helped this immensely is AI code assistance. One of the primary uses is to use it to write CLI tools for code and config generation in the tool chain. All of it is around making your life easier, without pulling external dependencies.

An example is that we create openapi docs with LLM's. Then we serve them with Go's net/http + FileServer, meaning that we never leave the standard library. Of course the LLM itself is a third party dependency, but when you use it to write CLI tools that then do the code generation, it never actually sees the code. That also means that the quality of those CLI tools are less important, because it is their output that matters.

It only goes so long of course. I'm not sure any of our front-end engineers would want to live in a world where they weren't allowed to use React, but then, their products are treated as though they are external anyway.

Anyway, it's a lot easier to make engineers stop using "quality of life" dependencies when you give them something that still makes their lives easy.
by DrewADesign | 2025-07-18 04:26:22+00:00
In general, using your own symbol forms for interactions rather than taking advantage of people’s existing mental models is a bad idea. Even straying from known libraries is shaky unless you’re a competent enough designer to understand what specific parts of a visual symbol signify that specific idea/action, and to whom. From a usability perspective, you’re much better off not using a symbol at all than using the wrong one.
by slg | 2025-07-18 04:27:04+00:00
The analogy I have used in the past is this fear is like thinking that health insurance companies were more likely to buy the old Marlboro Miles database rather than just making detailing your smoking history a required part of the application process.

If these companies have the legal clearance to use DNA data, why would they be satisfied only having secondhand access to that data for a relatively small subset of the population? They'll obviously want that data for everyone.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-18 04:27:25+00:00
Milk contains mostly 5 components: water, lactose, butter fat, casein and whey protein.

Of these, water does not matter, while lactose and butter fat are at best useless for nutrition and at worst harmful.

Casein and whey protein are the useful components of milk, which you can get separated from the undesirable components as milk protein concentrate (i.e. casein + whey protein) or whey protein concentrate (where butter fat has been removed by centrifugation, then water and lactose have been removed by ultrafiltration and drying).

Some years ago there where some scary claims that "casein causes cancer", but I have read the original claims and all the studies on which they were based, so I could determine that the claims were bogus, because they were based on invalid inferences from the results of otherwise very important studies, which were unjustly blemished by these sensational claims.

The real conclusions of those studies did not contain any information whatsoever about whether casein is good or bad, and their main correct conclusion was that certain kinds of malnutrition have protective effects against cancer. This is not at all surprising, because malnutrition behaves like a mild form of chemotherapy, i.e. it is much more harmful for cancerous cells than it is for normal cells. Unfortunately malnutrition also has bad health effects, so it is not an acceptable solution for avoiding cancer, but a compromise must be made between the risk of cancer and not eating enough essential nutrients.

If health were the only criterion, it would be better to avoid any milk-based products except milk or whey protein concentrates.

However milk and various dairy products, like cream and butter, are irreplaceable for obtaining the best taste in various dishes. I have experimented a lot with replacing dairy with various vegetable milks. While the results were decent, they were never as good as with real milk-based products (and they were also more expensive than with real milk). Still, it is better if such tasty dairy-based food is eaten only infrequently. Eating dairy daily is without doubt a bad habit.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-07-18 04:27:38+00:00
>I'm now more in camp 'solving problems', I want the job done and the task successfully finished to a reasonable level of quality

To split the definitions one step further: That actually sounds not like you 'enjoy solving problems'(the process), but rather you 'enjoy not having the problem anymore'(the result).

Meaning you don't like programming for itself(anymore?), but merely see it as a useful tool. Implying that your life would be no less rich if you had a magical button that completely bypassed the activity.

I don't think someone who would stop doing it if given the chance can be said to "like programming", and certainly not in the way GP means.
by noduerme | 2025-07-18 04:29:18+00:00
There is a definitely a phenomenon visible to anyone who has hired self-taught gunslingers versus companies stocked with highly educated CS grads. Part of it, I think, comes down to motivation and [needing to prove] self-worth when solving problems. This isn't just a phenomenon in code. My grandfather was a solo contractor, my dad was a solo lawyer (the first to graduate college in my family), I'm a solo and self-taught coder, 25 years in the industry (and the only of 4 brothers not to graduate college). There's a personality type that needs to prove something to themselves, has trouble with authority, isn't much of a team player, and never throws their hands up in defeat when faced with a challenge.

But I'd like to add that that's not really why I do this job. I do it because I find it vastly entertaining. Maybe you're right that CS grads are averse to unknown areas, and work better as team players ("cogs" is a bit harsh), and it's true that autodidacts try to save ourselves time instead of doing things twice. Sure, I hate boilerplate and drudgery. But for me the thing is, I love when I get a fresh problem to solve, that causes me to learn new techniques along the way. That's what makes my work feel like a joy, like a hobby, something I'm excited to wake up and do, and spend all night teasing out. And because of that, I self-select for the jobs that will give me that feeling, and I turn down the jobs that feel repetitious. After all, I should get something out of it more than money, and I can't sleep on improving my skills, right? So in those tasks, I'm doubly motivated and I'm probably far more productive for that reason than even needing to prove something, or because I'm aware that I'm being relied on as an irreplaceable part.

I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that once you decide to drop out, go independent, and live a certain way, the stakes are a lot higher, and the people who make it in that arena are people who will always put in a lot more effort. Giving up the 9-5 didn't mean I started choosing my own hours. It meant I became on-call 24/7 to my clients, for decades. And yet I wouldn't give up the freedom of being able to do that from any country in the world, or being able to choose my own projects and choose how I'd implement new ones. Dirty secret: A lot of times with a new project, I know how to do it with an existing technology, but I use it as an excuse to learn something completely new and implement it in a way I never would have. I don't charge extra time for my learning or trial and error, but I consider it a gift that I have the freedom to do that while I work.
by uludag | 2025-07-18 04:30:06+00:00
Maybe this discrepancy is down to something like Claude code reducing the amount of brain power exhorted. If you have to do 80% less thinking to accomplish a task but the task takes just as long, you may (even rightfully) feel five times more productive even though output didn't change.

And is this a good thing since you can (in theory) multitask and work longer hours, or bad because you're acquiring cognitive debt (see "Your Brain on ChatGPT")?
by fakedang | 2025-07-18 04:30:23+00:00
Nope. Legacy protection. Protection from state seizure and civil forfeiture. Protection from nationalization. Protection from a spouse or even your own children. Protection from takeovers of family businesses and assets.

There are a number of reasons why we might use offshore companies and apparent tax havens - while the taxes are an added sweetener, the main reason is that there is often concrete rule of law in these jurisdictions.

Did you know that for Russians and Chinese, the US is a tax haven? As long as you're not a US resident, you only pay US taxes (which can be easily optimized to be far below Russian or Chinese taxes). You enjoy a high degree of anonymity. You also get to gamble in the biggest equity markets of the world, which are backed by a strong financial system eager to lend you gambling money based on your assets.

Compare that to Russia, India or China, where your assets can be seized at a moment's notice, on the whims of some pencil pusher bureaucrat or judge.
by TXTOS | 2025-07-18 04:32:01+00:00
Good point! But honestly, if this were just “psychosis simulation,” there’s no way six different AI models would’ve all given it a perfect 100/100. That’s actually the breakthrough — it’s not just generating wild nonsense, it’s producing answers that every top model rates as highly consistent.

If you spot a true meltdown, let me know — but so far, it’s been more reliable than I expected!
by andutu | 2025-07-18 04:32:02+00:00
On the one hand writing logs can be tedious. Essentially logs are breadcrumbs signifying when significant state changes have logically taken place. From what I've seen, logs are added after every few lines and I always fantasized about creating a language where logging is "automatic".

On the other hand, writing logs is a skill worth mastering. Wrote too many and when a service crashes you have to shift through lots of noise and potentially miss the signal. I once went down a rabbit hole trying to root cause an issue in a Gunicorn application that had custom health check logic in it. An admin worker would read health check state from a file that worker threads wrote to. Sometimes a race condition would occur, in which an error log would be emitted. The thing was, this error wasn't fatal and was a red herring for why the service actually crashed. Of instead it would have been logged at the debug level a lot of time would have been saved.

Fine let LLMs write code but take logging seriously!!!