MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blurbleblurble | 2025-08-21 21:58:20+00:00
We need better social norms about disclosure, but maybe those don't need to be about "whether or not you used LLMs" and might have more to do with "how well you understand the code you are opening a PR for" (or are reviewing, for that matter). Normalize draft PRs and sharing big messes of code you're not quite sure about but want to start a conversation about. Normalize admitting that you don't fully understand the code you've written / are tasked with reviewing and that this is perfectly fine and doesn't reflect poorly on you at all, in fact it reflects humility and a collaborative spirit.

10x engineers create so many bugs without AI, and vibe coding could multiply that to 100x. But let's not distract from the source of that, which is rewarding the false confidence it takes to pretend we understand stuff that we actually don't.
by toephu2 | 2025-08-21 21:58:39+00:00
It's not even in RSUs. No SWEs/researchers are getting $100M+ RSU packages. Zuck said the numbers in the media were not accurate.

If you still think they are, do you have any proof? any sources? All of these media articles have zero sources and zero proof. They just ran with it because they heard Sam Altman talk about it and it generates clicks.
by baby_souffle | 2025-08-21 21:58:40+00:00
Assuming you’re talking about the same thing that PG&E does, it’s technically only zigbee at the transport layer. The power/utility aspect is all very different and relies on crypto/keys that are not trivial to get.

You will not be able to just point the radio in your zigbee stick at your meter. As far as I know, the only device that is even blessed with the keys to do this is the Rainforest/Eagle device. You _still_ have to get permission from your utility, though. PG&E has a web page where you plug in the MAC for the radio and submit it. Only some customers on some rate plans are allowed to access this.

I gave up and went with a power monitor that’s installed in the main breaker box. It uses CT clamps on each circuit to give very accurate and timely readings.
by Spivak | 2025-08-21 21:58:42+00:00
This is, broadly, the point I was getting at—you need the "other stuff" for all those bike lanes and sidewalks to be worthwhile. There is a tendency among proponents of walkable cities to downplay the comprehensiveness of the changes needed, and how firm the government's hand needs to be to get to the desired result. Your last point especially as "pricing in external costs" is a polite way of justifying a sin tax on behavior you don't want to see. It's necessary to tip the market forces in your favor and start the 'flywheel' so to speak but you can see how this might rub people the wrong way, making their current way of living more expensive to nudge them into a lifestyle they don't necessarily want. Nobody likes being told to eat their vegetables but especially no one likes being told to eat their vegetables by someone they see as a condescending adversary who presumes to know what's best for them.

All this is to say that I believe the discussion of this initiative is complicated by the framing that the current way is a problem and this is The Way to fix it.
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-21 21:59:03+00:00
> Do those concepts actually cause difficulty for anyone other than compiler engineers, compared to not having them? I haven't personally seen, e.g., newbies stumbling over them;

Pretty much all of the features in the list are things that either I have struggled with when learning Rust (the Copy trait and lifetime elision), or I've seen beginner struggle understanding (both new hires, or students at the place when I gave Rust lectures).
by taeric | 2025-08-21 22:00:15+00:00
My point is that, even in the cities that you are referencing, the more affluent people almost always have a car. Because they can afford it, and because it is more convenient.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this. Essentially, my assertion is that you get more people out of cars by making them expensive than you do with city design. (Unless, of course, you consider parking costs part of city design?)
by jmvldz | 2025-08-21 22:00:22+00:00
I don’t have much in the way of tests right now but I am building with Typescript and Rust so that catches many basic bugs.

I don’t find the issue to be breaking other parts of the app, more-so that new features don’t work as advertised by Claude.

One of my takeaways here is that I should give Claude an integration test harness and tell it that it must finish running that successfully before committing any code.
by nutjob2 | 2025-08-21 22:00:30+00:00
> I’m not saying future computing won’t be probabilistic

Current and past computing has always been probabilistic in part, doesn't mean it will become 100% so. Almost all of the implementationof LLMs is deterministic except the part that is randomized. Its output is used in the same way. Humans combine the two approaches as well. Even reality is a combination of quantum uncertainty at a low level and very deterministic physics everywhere else.

> We're moving away from deterministic mechanicism, a world of perfect information and perfect knowledge, and walking into one made of emergent unknown behaviors, where instead of planning and engineering we observe and hypothesize.

The hype machine always involves pseudo-scientific babble and this is a particularly cringey example. The idea that seems to be promoted, that AI will be god like and therein we'll find all truth and knowledge is beyond delusional.

It a tool, like all other tools. Just like we see faces in everything we're also very susceptible to language (especially our own, consumed and regurgitated back to us) from a very neat chatbot.

AI hype is borderline mass hysteria at this point.
by codyb | 2025-08-21 22:01:11+00:00
Engineers being completely out of touch with the macro picture of the end user experience is the norm, and it's bad.

Engineers work micro features which are sliced out of micro picture epics with maybe a vague Northstar.

Sitting engineers with users is a key thing I'm driving at my work since we're on internal tooling. Pretty much to a tee every participant comes out and goes "Wow... I had no idea that's how people were using our product"

Building user empathy results in greater connections within our organization, puts names to faces in our support channels, and results in more well rounded engineers who develop software with both technical and end user experience concerns in mind.

I mean, there's a reason most software interfaces are still shit, and often physical products too. It's cause we take tons of input from people who haven't extensively thought about user experience a day in their lives
by toephu2 | 2025-08-21 22:01:31+00:00
"according to people familiar with the matter."

aka, made up. They can make up anything by saying that. There are numerous false articles published by WSJ about Tesla also. I would take what they say here with a grain of salt. Zuck himself said the numbers in the media were widely exaggerated and he wasn't offering these crazy packages as reported.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-08-21 22:01:51+00:00
Not my experience. We have an ML engineer at work that has only worked with python. He wanted to contribute to our rust codebase so I spent about an hour going over the basics of rust with him, and answered questions as they came up, and he was able to get up and running very quickly. He quickly became quite productive in our rust codebase.

And theoretically, I'm not sure it's that very fun to run your game, have it crash because you passed a string to a function that expected an integer, stare at a backtrace, see where that variable came from, go up the call stack a few levels, and then realize "oh, i forgot to parse that string after the user typed it in". I'd rather get a compile error that underlines the problematic code and says "this is a string, but the function expected an integer". It may be debugging compiler errors all day, but the alternative is debugging runtime errors all week.
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-21 22:02:05+00:00
> VLMs are hugely significant. Not only are they great for product use cases, giving users the ability to ask questions with images, but they're how we gather the synthetic training data to build image and video animation models. We couldn't do that at scale without VLMs. No human annotator would be up to the task of annotating billions of images and videos at scale and consistently.

Weren't Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable diffusion built before VLM became a thing?
by davnicwil | 2025-08-21 22:02:28+00:00
When it works, it works well. Just don't spend any innovation tokens messing with it. Weight it likely that you will end up spending a bunch of time discovering its corners if you don't already know them.

Same goes for all tech choices. If you already know it, you understand its pros and cons and it still seems like the simplest best option for the concrete thing you need to build right now, use it.

Otherwise, use whatever alternative tech fits that description instead!
by cubefox | 2025-08-21 22:02:38+00:00
I mean if the wife says to her husband: The traffic light is green. Then this may count as an instruction to get going. But usually declarative sentences aren't interpreted as instructions. And we are perfectly able to not interpret even text with imperative sentences (inside quotes or in films etc) as an instruction to _us._ I don't see why an LLM couldn't learn to likewise not execute explicit instructions inside quotes. It should be doable with SFT or RLHF.
by NaOH | 2025-08-21 22:02:53+00:00
Previously:

Privately-Owned Rail Cars - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460052 - Nov 2022 (244 comments)

Ride in your privately-owned rail car to see North America - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10324823 - Oct 2015 (2 comments)
by rstuart4133 | 2025-08-21 22:03:15+00:00
> Into whose arms precisely? India into China's? Not likely!

Australia's trade with China in 2024: $102.63B

Australia's trade with India in 2024: $16.48B

Australia's trade with USA in 2024: $14.73B

Australia's trade with NZ in 2024: $8.24B

https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/exports-by-country

Australia and NZ are already in Asia's arms economically. That's why AusPost shutting down transit shipping to the USA won't be a huge hit. If it was to China, it would hurt. But not the USA.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-21 22:03:23+00:00
Intel had a massive R&D budget and 110,000 employees circa 2020. (Vs 12k and 14k for AMD and NVIDIA, both of which have higher market caps than Intel now).

It wasn't a money problem, it was a badly run company on all fronts. When it comes to R&D the sheer magnitude of the money they squandered is legendary. They lost billions on Larrabee, billions on mobile chips, helped invent phase change memory and even made drives with it, and then dumped it for nothing, the list goes on. It's bad management all the way down, and impressively so, considering that many of these initiatives were the right products for the right time just with a horrible execution (massively parallel compute/GPUs launched Nvidia to a 4 trillion dollar valuation, mobile chips are a huge industry, etc). Arguably they needed to streamline and downsize well before they did. They were full on old school IBM level bloat.

The last few years before their implosion was indeed MBA style running the company into the ground (they had a particularly awful CEO during that period), but that was just the capstone on a large decline, during which Intel had massive budgets that they squandered.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-08-21 22:04:02+00:00
The two button toilets are around, but I agree that they aren't the standard.

Also, wells are regulated in the US, with the exception of low-producing home wells. Even then, they require permitting (the degree of difficulty depends largely upon the state in question). Larger-producing wells have all kinds of reporting and usage requirements associated with them, and water rights can be the most valuable part of a plot of land.

Water and the control of it is the story of the modern American West. Even today, there are a couple of folks up in a coastal community in my county who are fighting to be able to build single family homes on property they bought decades ago. The issue is, you guessed it, water.
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-21 22:04:15+00:00
It's not a false equivalence. You can teach a beginner to become an intermediate (and later a master, if they stick to it). You can't teach an LLM to be better. Every piece of feedback you give to an LLM is like screaming into the void - it wastes your time, and doesn't change the LLM one iota.
Ask HN: Is anyone starting to use AI coding less?
by asdev | 2025-08-21 22:04:51+00:00
I recently semi vibe built a hobby project which went fairly well, however now that I'm actually productionizing it, I found so many things that I need to rewrite/restructure. I also don't have the same detailed context that I would have if I wrote the code. I find myself coding by hand more now as I restructure the initial state of the project. Anyone have similar experiences?
by charliermarsh | 2025-08-21 22:04:52+00:00
Yeah, you can definitely use `uvx ruff` (an alias for `uv tool run ruff`) to invoke Ruff. That's what I've done in my own projects historically.

The goal here is to see if users like a more streamlined experience with an opinionated default, like you have in Rust or Go: install uv, use `uv init` to create a project, use `uv run` to run your code, `uv format` to format it, etc. Maybe they won't like it! TBD.

(Ruff is installed when you invoke `uv format`, rather than bundled with the uv binary, so if you never use `uv format`, there aren't any material downsides to the experiment.)
by bithive123 | 2025-08-21 22:05:14+00:00
I went through a very similar thing at around the same age, and one of the insights that really helped me was meditating on impermanence, and cultivating more mental proprioception (awareness of one's subtle thoughts, "mindfulness", whatever you want to call it.

Put simply, it's fine to have goals. But chasing achievement can be unfulfilling. Why? Because all experiences are fleeting. Even if you train for 5 years and win the gold medal, you get to stand on the podium for a few minutes and then life goes on.

It's easy to get people to agree with this intellectually, but you have to really see it on a deep level. There is nothing really to achieve in life. We make goals and cast them out ahead of ourselves in the future, but if that future comes, it doesn't last. We put ourselves on a treadmill of achievement and becoming, then wonder why we feel stressed.

Instead of imagining some future state of completion, work on being aware of how your mind is moving, all the time. Don't chase goals as a way of disproving some fundamental negative assumption about yourself. Don't make happiness contingent on external conditions.
by stetrain | 2025-08-21 22:06:24+00:00
> (Unless, of course, you consider parking costs part of city design?)

Absolutely. The amount of space taken up by parking, and its related cost, and things like congestion charges, are part of city planning.

And you can still significantly reduce the number of cars and car-trips without eliminating car ownership. A household with one car used occasionally when it’s convenient needs less parking and driving space than one with two cars driven daily.
by RhysU | 2025-08-21 22:06:33+00:00
If my children had a $100K windfall this is precisely what I would tell them to do assuming they had an emergency fund and no debt. If not, I would tell them to create an emergency fund, pay off reasonable debt, and then to invest the rest for 40 years.

Read and internalize https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Prioritizing_investments. It is simple. It is immensely useful.
by gerdesj | 2025-08-21 22:07:06+00:00
So how do you interact with your LLM? (by hand perhaps?)

I find prompt fettling a great way of getting to grips with a problem. If I can explain my problem effectively enough to get a reasonable start on an answer, then I likely thoroughly understand my problem.

An LLM is like a really fancy slide rule or calculator (I own both). It does have a habit of getting pissed and talking bollocks periodically. Mind you, so do I.
by evanjrowley | 2025-08-21 22:07:10+00:00
Impressive research but I can't help feeling like it's fundamentally flawed. The analysis considered "essay ownership" a property of LLM, Search, and Brain-Only participants, but what would have been more valuable is flipping all of the graphs based on percieved ownership levels. On average, less LLM users felt a sense of ownership, and this should not surprise anyone. The researchers lumped together people who let LLMs do all of the writing vs using LLMs constructive ways. What would have been more interesting is studying the LLM users who maintained a sense of owership, because then we could learn more way to use LLMs that potentially make us smarter.

I also feel like there's more to be said about LLMs fostering the ability to ask questions better than you might if you primarily used search. If the objective was to write, for example, about an esoteric organic chemistry topic, and a "No Brain" group of non-experts was only allowed to formulate a response by asking real-life experts as much as they can about the esoteric topic, then would users more experienced with LLMs come out ahead on the essay score? Understanding how to leverage a tight communication loop most effectively is a skill that the non-LLM groups in this study should be evaluated on.
by blurbleblurble | 2025-08-21 22:07:39+00:00
"Every piece of feedback you give to an LLM is like screaming into the void - it wastes your time, and doesn't change the LLM one iota."

I think you just haven't gotten the hang of it yet, which is fine... the tooling is very immature and hard to get consistent results with. But this isn't a given. Some people do get good, steerable LLM coding setups.
by callahad | 2025-08-21 22:07:44+00:00
I found Florida's caves positively delightful at 21 C; never felt the need to dive dry.

I am envious of the speleothems in Yucatán cenotes. Florida's caves are all phreatic, so you don't get any real decoration beyond scalloping. Still fun to dive, just not much to see aside from water, wet rocks, and a line. And not even that if you blow the viz.
by mathattack | 2025-08-21 22:07:48+00:00
My experience is every layer between the communicator and the recipient adds noise. It's like the game of telephone we played as kids. Some PMs are terrible and are 100% noise. Even the best are only 50% signal.

Give an engineer a clear understanding of the end need, and you have a tremendous gain in efficiency. I think there is a 10X benefit here that's similar to the 10X benefit from stronger engineering skills.

You still need PMs, though it's a different job that passing papers back and forth.
by recallingmemory | 2025-08-21 22:08:04+00:00
My comment was just focused on total water use. I agree that location does matter, and that data centers should be placed where water is abundant.

It still doesn't change my concern about how unsustainable growing alfalfa is. Trillions of gallons to grow an inefficient animal feed crop while we're told by the evening news to take shorter showers (8 minute shower is ~16 gallons of water) and let our lawns die.
by herval | 2025-08-21 22:08:31+00:00
I personally reached the multi-cloud situation a handful of times - it's particularly common if you're doing anything on-prem, or with customers on certain regions (eg China). If you're truly married to AWS/GCP/whatever stack (fargate, lambda, etc), it's literally impossible to migrate. The successful migrations / multi-cloud setups I've seen all used the cloud provider's specific features sparingly (eg S3 encapsulated on a single library, so migrating is simple), etc

But I agree if you're doing something simpler, sticking to a single provider is fine
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-21 22:09:05+00:00
ML doesn't work like programming because it's not programming. It just happens to run on the same computational substrate.

Modern ML is at this hellish intersection of underexplored math, twisted neurobiology and applied demon summoning. An engineer works with known laws of nature - but the laws of machine learning are still being written. You have to be at least a little bit of a scientist to navigate this landscape.

Unfortunately, the nature of intelligence doesn't seem to yield itself to simple, straightforward, human-understandable systems. But machine intelligence is desirable. So we're building AIs anyway.
by bogwog | 2025-08-21 22:09:13+00:00
I'm not the best person to ask about this as I don't do much web dev these days, and my experience with podman is mostly limited to deploying existing software. If compose works for that use case, then you should probably stick with it. For actually deploying it somewhere though, you should be using quadlets instead (or kubernetes I guess)

> No copying files to ~/.config/systemd just run docker-compose to start and stop.

Naively, I'd say to create symlinks instead of copying, and run `systemctl daemon-reload`/`systemctl restart ...`. Although there are probably more streamlined web development options out there.

Maybe look into Podman Pods. They're probably closer to what you're looking for, but idk what kind of dev tools exist out there for it. Maybe a few custom shell scripts to run the pod management commands is all you really need?
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-21 22:09:19+00:00
<< But probably not an ideal workflow for real work.

Hmm. Ideal is rarely an option, so I have to assume you are being careful about phrasing.

Still, despite it being a black box, one can still tip the odds on one's favor, so the real question is what is considered 'real work'? I personally would define that as whatever they you are being paid to do. If that premise is accepted, then the tool is not the issue, despite its obvious handicaps.
by snackbroken | 2025-08-21 22:10:42+00:00
> Here in Sweden I can assure you that the government won't be able to do anything about prosecutions of this sort.

Tell this to Julian Assange, or to Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström. Though these are examples of government pressure in the opposite direction, they are still examples of how despite having no legal powers to intervene there is plenty of de-facto power being wielded by the U.S. over the Swedish justice system.
by stouset | 2025-08-21 22:11:34+00:00
I moved states, and changed my service to the new address. They started billing me for both addresses for several months.

Several calls and many, many hours later, I was finally able to get the double-billing resolved. But they didn't remove the charges that had accrued. Several calls later I was able to get someone who assured me they could deal with the issue. I demanded a $50 statement credit as compensation for my time.

They flipped the sign on the statement credit, and it was an additional $50 charge.

I got called by their collections department. I patiently explained the issue, and they were very sympathetic. Then they asked why don't I just settle up the outstanding balance now and then we can sort out the billing issue later. For the first time in this ordeal I lost my cool and flatly told them to go fuck themselves.

Several calls later it was finally resolved, but this entire experience was astounding. There was nobody qualified to escalate to. I was completely at the mercy of the random humans the system picked for me to interact with, and there were seemingly zero knobs I could turn or buttons to push to summon someone who could actually assist. To their credit, many of the support staff seemed just as frustrated as I was, but were equally hamstrung by the system they were interacting with.
by mathattack | 2025-08-21 22:11:50+00:00
Does this lower your likelihood to use them for other things? It's painful to switch.

Or is Dropbox hunkering down? Their market cap is $7.6bln on a roughly flat $2.5bln in revenue (compared to $4.5bln and $1.1 for Box) which suggests they're still relevant. Perhaps they're accepting that growth is gone, and time to focus on the cost side?