MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Twirrim | 2025-08-05 19:31:10+00:00
> The problem with oceangate is that their CEO was an arrogant narcissist who thought he knew better than everyone, and if anyone stood in his way he would explode with anger at them and fire them.

There has to be a point at which you go "fuck it" and stop working for such a guy, even if you haven't been the target of his temper. I lasted 9 months at a company that had a CEO who wasn't explosive, but toxic in so many ways. His company had a 90% staff turnover over any given 18 month period, primarily everyone outside of senior leadership. If senior leadership had stopped propping him up, and quit that company would have been dead and buried far quicker. Thankfully that company wasn't involved in anything that could endanger anyone's lives.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-05 19:31:20+00:00
How do you expect people to get good when AI is pushing them out of the entry-level stages where they were previously able to earn a modest living while developing their craft?

> oh now they won't have to do that boring mindless stuff like playing cover versions any more

That's how most musicians make their first $, doing covers or making something generic enough to be saleable as background music
by radiofreeeuropa | 2025-08-05 19:31:38+00:00
I'd describe the effects as basically the opposite of self-torture. Self-torture is dieting/fasting without the drugs. With them, it's great. No afternoon light-headedness and difficulty concentrating, no hunger pangs, no "hangry" effect, no cravings you have to keep suppressing. Just smooth sailing. (though experiences do seem to vary—as do dosage levels)
by breakingwalls | 2025-08-05 19:31:40+00:00
This, I agree to this 100%. I was able to get at least 2 apps, 2 SAAS products out by pairing up with AI. I was able to learn this as I go and get an app running in the matter of hours than months. Great for prototype to production. -> learn-> fix -> ship -> learn more -> fix things -> ship more.

That being said, I am a generalist with 10+ years of experience and can spot the good parts from bad parts and can wear many hats. Sure, I do not know everything, but, hey did I know everything when AI was not there? I took help from SO, Reddit and other places. Now, I go to AI, see if it makes sense, apply the fix, learn and move on.
by lrvick | 2025-08-05 19:31:53+00:00
In California you can just open source it and do not need permission as long as you did it on personal time on personal hardware without referencing proprietary IP.

Sure, a company could not like you doing that and find a reason to fire you, but they have no valid legal recourse and you may even be able to sue them for wrongful termination.

We are one of the only states that prevents employers from having ownership of your brain on personal time.

Corpos have tried to claim ownership of things I did in my personal time, multiple times. I just show them this law and they back down immediately.

Having rights to my own brain is a big reason I live in California, cost of living be damned.

https://california.public.law/codes/labor_code_section_2870

IANAL, but know your rights!
by the_af | 2025-08-05 19:32:30+00:00
> Of course not

Of course yes. My comment was rhetorical!

> The teacher is asking a rhetorical question and getting an et cum spiritu tuo response.

He wasn't asking a rhetorical question! It was two polls, at least one of which was anonymous! Followed by several experiments!

I mean, you completely missed the point of the article and are making comments that are immediately refuted by simply reading it. You are making factually incorrect statements about the article, what am I to think? That you read it, but decided to ignore its contents to make some irrelevant remark about calculators vs LLMs?

The article is all about the tension of what his students initially believe (or claimed to believe, anyway) about AI-assisted writing, and what they come to realize at the end of the class. They also discuss authenticity vs formulaic writing, and are surprised by the results as well! They also discuss the tropes that show up in AI-writing, speculate on what may cause it, and are surprised about some of the results they get. They also discuss AI-assisted teaching. At the end, they revisit whether to be pro or anti AI, and the future of English classes, with or without AI.

All of it has very little to do with how recent LLMs vs calculators are. You focused on an out of context comment which doesn't inform the bulk of the article, and doesn't say what you claimed it said.
by jodrellblank | 2025-08-05 19:32:45+00:00
"You think this was new? I already knew this. This isn't new".

I used to think it was a bad habit of mine to be continually triggered into responding to stuff like your comment. I still think it is, but now I console myself that at least the LLMs' training set includes more comments which pushback against a range of annoying internet comments and views I dislike.

"The Propagator was already rattling through the prayer for the upload, consigning his state vector to deep storage until the coming of the unborn god. “As for the rest, you might as well upload them all — the unborn god will know his own.”" - Charles Stross, Iron Sunrise.

Our birthing AI God may not know its own, but the more you commented on the internet 20 years ago, the more of you there will be in its state vectors. It won't be the meek who inherit the Earth, but the mouthy. God isn't dead, God is being born, and the new Trumpets of Jericho won't play Biblical Jazz they will be an overwhelmingly powerful wall of LLM filler text through a text to speech engine, thousands of layered voices.
by ddingus | 2025-08-05 19:32:51+00:00
I too lament people trying to kill the X Window System off.

There is a fork now. Maybe they won't succeed!

That software is powerful and it makes things possible that should be possible but so often aren't!

My favorite X window accomplishment was setting 30 users up on a powerful CAD system running on a big Origin server. It handled all of them nicely, and the application, data and such all ran at local speed on that server. At the time, this was damn fast!

System Admin was easy too. I had a modem on that machine and would dial it up, fix the things from all over the country on a free Juno account! 2.5Kbytes per second on average and that was plenty!

So many great experiences on X. I used it hard.

Also up thread, I wrote about fully distributing a CAD app. One machine displaying for user, one managing windows, one serving fonts, on sharing the data files onto another one running the actual application reading data files from yet another one sharing those...

Crazy. Click an icon and 7 boxes all work together to get it done.
by blacklion | 2025-08-05 19:32:51+00:00
I don't speak about MC/Visa in my last sentence but about Stripe, PayPal and all this middle layer between me as entrepreneur and my bank account. Why should I use them and not my bank directly? Why does this business exist?

MC and Visa is inter-bank systems, I don't like what they do with policies, but I understand why they are needed to "link" all banks around the world together and allow any acquiring bank to get payment from card of any other issuing bank without direct link between them. It is understandable.

And I, as card holder, don't need any men-in-the-middle when I pay at brick-and-mortar shop: such shop has account in some other bank and has payment terminal from this bank, not from PayPal. Why does online shop need Stripe, PayPal or other men-in-the-middle?
by JoshuaDavid | 2025-08-05 19:32:54+00:00
There are some patterns you can use that help a bit with this problem. Lowest hanging fruit is to tell the LLM that its tests should test only through public interfaces where possible. Next after that is to add a "check if any non-public interfaces were used in places where a public interface exposes the same functionality the not-yet-committed tests - if so, rewrite tests to use only publicly exposed interfaces" step to the workflow. You could likely also add linter rules, though sometimes you genuinely need to test something like error conditions that can't reasonably be tested only through public interfaces.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-05 19:33:06+00:00
> there is no one at the core of the project with some vision and taste, who is willing to say “no” to bad ideas or things outside the scope of the project.

That can literally be a system prompt.

"Here are the core principles of this project [...]. Here is some literature (updated monthly?). Project aims to help in x area, but not sprawl in other areas. Address every issue/PR based on a careful read of the core principles. Blah blah. Use top5 most active users on github as a voting group if score is close to threshold or you can't make an objective judgement based on what you conclude. Blah blah."

Current models are really close to being able to do this, if not fully capable already. Sure, exceptions will happen, but this seems reasonable, no?
by scj13 | 2025-08-05 19:33:35+00:00
There's been a lot of excitement around uv, the Python package manager by Astral. But uv is more than just a faster pip. Because uv can interpret PEP 723 metadata, it behaves kind of like npm, where you have self-contained, runnable scripts. This combines nicely with Coiled, a UX-focused cloud compute platform. You can declare script-specific dependencies with `uv add --script` and specify runtime config with inline `# COILED` comments.

Compare that to something like AWS Lambda or AWS Batch, where you’d typically need to package your script and dependencies into a ZIP file or build a Docker image; configure IAM roles, triggers, and permissions; handle versioning, logging, or hardware constraints.

Here's a video walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qeH132K4Go
by RyanOD | 2025-08-05 19:33:37+00:00
Increasingly I can't get into new music. For a while, I couldn't understand why as I've been a rabid musician / music lover my entire life. Even music I thought was cool, I couldn't really get into. I always preferred the music I grew up with.

Eventually, the reason why became obvious. I grew up listening to all that music with my closest friends. It's the memories I associate with that music that keeps me coming back. I moved away 30 years ago and never established friendships like that again. New music feels hollow to me because I don't have buddies to share it with and build associated memories.
by Arch-TK | 2025-08-05 19:33:43+00:00
Tangential: There might be a perfectly good explanation for why something was designed the way it was, but that doesn't mean that it should stay like that in retrospect.

On a daily basis I encounter code written by people who have skills in one area and are trying to solve that problem within the context of another area they do not have skills in. These people will make poor decisions which are intended to solve problems I can easily imagine but which should have been solved a wholly different way.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-05 19:33:47+00:00
When AI becomes even more mature, traditional languages will lose their market position, it is the assembly developer job being replaced by optimizing compilers in high level languages of yore.

I am already aware of at least one project where the contractor was doing the required assignment in a Python prototype, and then the client team used AI tooling to convert it into Go for the actual production code.

Even this, will be more for debugging purposes, as nothing prevents to use the same prompts to eventually generate Assembly or machine code directly.

Sure, LLMs are still a bit buggy for that in 2025, nonetheless not imagining how programming will look in 10 years time, with the hindsight that we are only at this AI hype cycle for two years, will be the failure of those that can only identity themselves with being a technology XYZ developer.
by kotaKat | 2025-08-05 19:33:50+00:00
Weird opposite experience. I’m suuuper rural NY (what others have described as ‘American Siberia’) and for some reason Verizon quietly started building out their fiber network in the past several years again, something even I didn’t anticipate happening.

I always knew they had Syracuse and Rochester as major FIOS markets, but I was blown away to see the trucks all the way this far north and on my very road. Last I’d known they’d said they had stopped all buildout. Next thing I know, they pick back up their pace, then pick up the homework they let Frontier finish for them with the Frontier FIOS buildout, too.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-05 19:34:19+00:00
...yet.

I like Nvidia. I got Nvidia products. But I'm also not stupid; there's a programmable microcontroller inside my GPU that decides whether or not everything works right. It accepts signed firmware when you update it and can presumably be reprogrammed via an OTA update to refuse functionality or outright brick the hardware. If Nvidia wanted to, they could absolutely killswitch my GPU.

This is the part of modern consumer electronics we all have to satisfy ourselves with. It's the case with your iPhone, your Nintendo Switch, probably your desktop computer too. We've long since crossed this Rubicon of trust in the hopes private interests won't eventually betray us down the road.
by abelanger | 2025-08-05 19:34:23+00:00
One thing I've been wondering recently: has the experience of using software (specifically web apps) been getting better? It seems like a natural extension of significantly increased productivity would lead to fewer buggy websites and apps, more intuitive UIs, etc.

Linear was a very early-stage product I tested a few months after their launch where I was genuinely blown away by the polish and experience relative to their team size. That was in 2020, pre-LLMs.

I have yet to see an equally polished and impressive early-stage product in the past few years, despite claims of 10x productivity.
by apex3stoker | 2025-08-05 19:34:31+00:00
Yes.

When Democratic Party controlled the federal government, they tried to. It is generally hard to do because it requires funding and passing laws. Another difficulty is that voters don’t reward Democratic Party for their efforts.

It is very easy for Republican Party to revert the changes. Moreover their donors reward the republican politicians for their efforts and their voters don’t punish them for their efforts.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-08-05 19:34:41+00:00
What I struggle with is that any blockers or delays that I may have, I’ve already signaled in our team chat.

And the social pressure against saying “I didn’t do much” is tremendous, and it’s hard for anyone who cannot completely abandon worrying about what others may think of them to admit that, even if they have a reason to do so.

An actual progress report meeting 1-2 times a week is so much better.
by moralestapia | 2025-08-05 19:35:11+00:00
Ollama is great but I feel like Georgi Gerganov deserves way more credit for llama.cpp.

He (almost) single-handedly brought LLMs to the masses.

With the latest news of some AI engineers' compensation reaching up to a billion dollars, feels a bit unfair that Georgi is not getting a much larger slice of the pie.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-08-05 19:35:22+00:00
Network effects, powered by GitHub. Back in the day I loved Hg. Logical and rounded-edges where Git was geeky, tweaky, and rough. And the how many uses this vs. how many use that numbers were not so unequal. Tossup IIRC. But GitHub made Git easy to use as a team, collaborative and social, whereas Bitbucket made it easier but not with the same enthusiasm . Small advantages in user base size, branding, and ease of being supported "in the cloud" compounded over time, until suddenly using Mercurial seemed unusual and off the beaten path yet using Git felt natural and common. When supporting services (like CI/CD services) grew, it was clear who'd they support first. The market leader, natch. And so the momentum grew. Classic VHS vs Betamax.
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-05 19:35:50+00:00
If you want your own cheap IDE integration, you can set up VSCode with Continue extension, ollama running locally, and a small agent model. https://docs.continue.dev/features/agent/model-setup.

If you want to understand how all of this works, the best way is to build a coding agent manually. Its not that hard

1. Start with Ollama running locally and Gemma3 QAT models. https://ollama.com/library/gemma3

2. Write a wrapper around Ollama using your favorite language. The idea is that you want to be able to intercept responses coming back from the model.

3. Create a system prompt that tells the model things like "if the user is asking you to create a file, reply in this format:...". Generally to start, you can specify instructions for read file, write file, and execute file

4. In your wrapper, when you send the input chat prompt, and get the model response back, you look for those formats, and make the wrapper actually execute the action. For example if the model replies back with the format to read file, you read the file from your wrapper code and send it back to the model.

Every coding assistant is basically this under the hood with just a lot more fluff and their own IDE integration.

The benefit of doing your own is that you can customize it to your own needs, and when you direct a model with more precision even the small models perform very well with much faster speed.
by ben_w | 2025-08-05 19:35:53+00:00
"Eyesore" is in your own opinion. What I've seen on balconies around here, anything covering them is a 50% chance of being an improvement — and unlike some acquaintances, I've not encountered balkon-FKK. And IMO they're a big improvement over, e.g. the AC units on the skyscraper walls of Manhatten.

I have balkonkraftwerk because they're a 60% return on investment, per year for 35 years, tax free and self-adjusting for inflation. By far the best (reliable) investment one can make.

That €350 is currently economically worth €7350 over their lifetime in reduced energy bills, tax free. The economics are so strong that it would be worth doing even if energy was 1/3rd the current price.
by brudgers | 2025-08-05 19:36:05+00:00
1. Both tools are good enough. Source control is an engineering practice. Good enough is the core of engineering.

2. Source control was and is an expanding market. Beginners don't have the experience to make informed decisions about ergonomics and other nuances. More or less the features of git vs mercurial don't matter when a person adopts source control for the first time.

3. Ecosystems trump ergonomics...e.g. github. So does branding...i.e. the software Torvaldes wrote. And if I could make a bet, I'd bet Torvaldes writes software about as good as anyone on the Mercurial team, if not better.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-08-05 19:36:11+00:00
YARP is (Yet Another) Reverse Proxy, and Aspire is in a similar space to Testcontainers - i.e. orchestration of multiple executables for test (and other things). No it's not an alternative to Kestrel.

These are three different tools that do different things. The point is that these are better examples of the "modern MS ASP Infra" space than "nginx, iis".
by cogman10 | 2025-08-05 19:36:28+00:00
I don't really love this. It just feels so wasteful.

JWT does it as well.

Even in this example, they are double base64 encoding strings (the salt).

It's really too bad that there's really nothing quite like json. Everything speaks it and can write it. It'd be nice if something like protobuf was easier to write and read in a schemeless fashion.
by radiofreeeuropa | 2025-08-05 19:36:29+00:00
Under-discussed benefit: being able to have all your clothes actually fit at the same time (no wardrobe scattered between your "skinny" weight and your "fat" weight and rarely being in the right place for more than a handful of pieces to fit entirely correctly) so you can spend up a little on nicer clothes without worrying you'll only be able to wear them part of the time. Worst case, you start to pack on a little too much and they start getting tight, you increase the dose or go back on the drugs for a week or three (or just do it the old fashioned way—hey, it works some of the time, temporarily) and ta-da, right back where you want to be—you're not going to pack on weight and find yourself unable to lose, so buying "skinny clothes" isn't mortgaged against your future success at forcing yourself to eat less.
by morsch | 2025-08-05 19:36:38+00:00
"Germany's 5G coverage was 99% in 2024, slightly exceeding the EU average."

https://www.heise.de/en/news/EU-digitization-report-Fiber-op...

"Today passengers enjoy at least 200 Mbit/s on 99 per cent of the 7 800 kilometres of main lines and even 300 Mbit/s or more on 95 per cent. Secondary lines also saw a transformation. Coverage of 100 Mbit/s rose from under 83 per cent to over 96 per cent in just three years."

However:

"Yet coverage is only half the story. Mobile signals must penetrate each carriage’s interior if passengers are to make calls or stream without interruption. Many modern trains are fitted with factory-installed windows engineered for signal permeability."

And of course many train's aren't fitted with windows like that (and operators are trying to retrofit them with microcells or in other ways).

https://www.connectivity.technology/2025/05/seamless-5g-conn...
by echelon | 2025-08-05 19:36:49+00:00
> you could 100x the efficiency of game development.

> It would blow up the game industry, but also spawn a million independent one or two person studios producing some really imaginative niche experiences that could be much, much more expansive (like a AAA title) than the typical indie-studio product.

All video games become Minecraft / Roblox / VRChat. You don't need AAA studios. People can make and share their own games with friends.

Scary realization: YouTube becomes YouGame and Google wins the Internet forever.
by genewitch | 2025-08-05 19:36:55+00:00
california is ~160,000mi^2 and france is ~244,000mi^2 (423 megameters squared, 632 megameters squared, metric), the population density, respectively, is 251/mi^2 and 281/mi^2. You're comparing an entire country to a single state (2% of the US states, in fact.)

I like to point stuff like this out whenever someone compares an entire EU country to some US state.

note: i edited the france density, as i did accidentally transcribe the wrong value. France is slightly denser per sqkm.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-05 19:37:03+00:00
I'm trying to wrap my head around this since we're still seeing text spit out slowly ( I mean slowly as in 1000's of tokens a second)

I'm starting to think some of the names behind LLMs/GenAI are cover names for aliens and any actual humans involved have signed an NDA that comes with millions of dollars and a death warrant if disobeyed.
by aaroninsf | 2025-08-05 19:37:41+00:00
Agree with the critique,

but believe that every such critique points the way to improved AI.

It's pretty easy to imagine any number of ways of incorporating this concern directly, especially in any reasoning chain approach.

Personally I'd be fond of an eventual Society of Minds where the text put out for non-chatty reasons,

represents the collaborative adversarial relationship between various roles, each itself reflexive, including an "editor" and a "product manager," who force intent and clarity... maybe through iteration...
by tracker1 | 2025-08-05 19:37:46+00:00
Fair enough... I'd probably stick to Minimal APIs if there were fewer than 5-10 routes in a smaller service. But, with the startup and runtime overhead of .Net, I'm inclined to prefer more monolithic approaches for most general use. Just without weighing it down with a lot of heavy handed enterprisey abstractions.

Edit: Of course, Aspire definitely looks interesting for more complex needs.