MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ylee | 2025-08-21 03:36:49+00:00
>but you could just plug MX-80 series in to Windows 9x and pick any of the same fonts as you would for a laser printer, and it went bi-directional laying down overlapping dots like Adobe bricks, near-letter-quality enough to where they could hardly tell the difference once you faxed the page to somebody

I am happy to report that I was doing the same thing in 1986 with GEOS on Commodore 64! And again in 1990 with PC/GEOS on Tandy 1000!

(Although I mostly used SpeedScript on C64, and WordPerfect or pfs:Write on DOS.)
by ehnto | 2025-08-21 03:37:01+00:00
> work you literally would have never bothered to do before done in 2 minutes.

That has been a nice outcome I didn't expect. Some of the trivial "nice to haves" I can get done by Claude, stuff I just don't have time for.

To your other points I agree as well, I think what's important isn't so much stuffing the context with data, but providing the context with the key insights to the problem you have in your head.

In your first example, perhaps the insight is knowing that you have a special snowflake data structure that needs to be explained first. Or another example is properly explaining historical context of a complex bug. Just saying "hey here's all the code please fix this error" yields less good results, if the problem space is particularly complex.
by bccdee | 2025-08-21 03:38:17+00:00
Yeah I especially would not expect a lost college student to be able to plan what a solid footing in the industry looks like. If you don't know what a "product manager" is, you're not going to have any idea what a reasonable career path might involve.

It's much better to understand your current position and which direction you're heading in than to have a long-term plan. Good questions for juniors to be asking are stuff like, "how can I get my foot in the door," "how can I tell a good offer from a bad offer," "what can I do to stop being a 'junior' (i.e. how can I become an asset instead of a gamble)"?
by jchw | 2025-08-21 03:38:49+00:00
Tangentially: LLMs are really impressive at translation. I guess it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise given where a lot of the most pivotal research came from, but still, the leading edge LLMs are extremely good for situations where having a human translator is infeasible or too expensive, and if you're worried about correctness you can go through and verify the translation using reference material and asking the LLM for more information about a given excerpt, which you can also verify against references and online discussions.

I think my only concern is that I'm not sure how to make sure I'll always have an untainted set of reference material to check against in the post-LLM Internet. We've had LLM hallucinations result in software features. Are we possibly headed towards a world where LLM hallucinations occasionally reshape language and slang?

I feel bad for human translators right now. For various use cases, current-day machine translations and especially LLM translations are sufficient. For those not versed in the world of otaku and video game nerds, one extremely fascinating development of the last few years is the one-shot commission platform Skeb, where people can send various kinds of art commission requests to Japanese artists. They integrate with DeepL to support requests from people who don't speak Japanese fluently, and it seems to generally work very well. (The lower-stakes nature of one-shot art commissions helps a bit here too, but at the least I think communication issues are rarely a huge problem, which is pretty impressive.) And that kicked off before LLMs started to push machine translations even further.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-21 03:38:52+00:00
I am all in on the Apple ecosystem with 5 Apple devices. My Apple ID which I’ve had since 2003 (iTunes) is attached to a Yahoo email address.

iCloud email just uses standard protocols and can be used with any email app. You just have to go on the web and create an “app specific password”

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102654

But why move to iCloud? I even use Apple’s Hide My Email with my yahoo account.
by selcuka | 2025-08-21 03:39:24+00:00
> they aren't being used by 80% of the world's population.

I said "iPhone is more appealing to 80%+ of world's population". I didn't say everyone who wants it can afford it.

It's pure speculation, of course, but given its current market share (27% of all devices sold) and its price point, I don't think it's too far fetched to say that its market share would be much higher if price wasn't an issue for people. This is somewhat hinted by the fact that it has a 78% market share in the $1,000+ segment [1], and most iPhone models are over $1K.

Also it still ships more phones than any other single vendor (unless you lump all Android phones into one bucket). In terms of revenue, it's by far the leader with 43% [2].

[1] https://www.netguru.com/blog/iphone-vs-android-users-differe...

[2] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-smar...
by jebarker | 2025-08-21 03:40:25+00:00
This is the opposite of what helped me to stop feeling lost in life. I grew up very goal oriented and executed towards those goals with focus and determination. Around when I turned 40 I realized I wasn't all that happy and I'd spent my entire life so far living for rewards that would come in the future. The problem is that those rewards didn't give sustaining satisfaction. They pass remarkably quickly when you get to them. I stopped feeling lost when I gave up trying to plan my life out and gave up setting goals. Instead I now just trust my instincts and follow what seems interesting or meaningful to me right now. This keeps me living more contentedly in the present and I still get things done.

Having said all that, I came to this realization only after ticking a whole bunch of societal and cultural expectation boxes which means I can afford to take my foot off the gas. Trusting your instincts is a much scarier proposition earlier in life, but I still think it's probably the right thing to do.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-08-21 03:40:44+00:00
The immigration numbers so far looks pretty encouraging. Illegal immigration is down 92%. The proposed budget works out to 37.5 billion dollars a year.

While that sounds overly excessive, the UK at a fifth of the population size is spending 6.5, billion pounds a year to encourage illegal immigrants to come into the country. I understand it's not a perfect comparison but I think it's worth pointing out that there are far stupider and more expensive ways that other countries are dealing with the same situation.
by RajT88 | 2025-08-21 03:41:20+00:00
I am not a SWE, although I wrote a lot of code for ~5 years as a release engineer/devops guy.

Start at the bottom, at first, say yes to things.

AI cannot say yes to things. It sucks at solving problems. It is good at vomiting up pre-determined solutions

AI cannot smooth over things with customers. AI even if it could, would suck at it.

Get into a support role; it is a fine job and as much as they want to automate it away, they cannot. It often has a path to FTE SWE and the pay is OK.
by kmoser | 2025-08-21 03:42:04+00:00
No disrespect for your ability to read Arduino code, but no amount of experience will tell you why the code was written a certain way. Did the programmer not know of any alternatives? Did they specifically choose this one method because it was superior to the alternatives? Did they just run out of time? Is it due to regulatory requirements? The list goes on. To expand further:

FTA:

> but ultimately reading code remains much more complex than writing it no matter what.

I disagree. If reading code is complex, it's because that code was not documented well. If you've written a complex algorithm, that presumably took you hours or days to develop, the proper documentation should allow somebody to understand it (or at least grasp the major points) in a few minutes.

If you're not documenting your code to that level, i.e. to allow future devs to take less time to read and understand than it took you to write--let alone add additional information went into why you made the decisions you did--then you're doing something wrong.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-21 03:42:08+00:00
> The people who founded Israel were almost 100% Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe.

Israelis like Geulah Cohen, Moshe Barzani, Eliyahu Hakim, Shimon Tzabar, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, Mordechai Alkahi, Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar, Eliezer Kashani, and Shmuel Tankus were all prominent Mizrahi leaders and commanders in Lehi, Irgun, and the Haganah.

Kurdish, Iraqi, Levantine, and Turkish Jews had been a prominent demographic in what became Israel well before 1948 due to it's former Ottoman status along with communal incidents in Kurdistan, Iraq, Syria, and Turkiye well before 1948.

In addition, in the late 19th and early 20th century, most of the Ashkenazi who arrived in the Levant at the time aligned with "Ottomanization" [0] or assimilating into Ottoman Turkish culture and dropping any trappings of European culture, hence David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi becoming students at the Dârülfünûn-ı Şâhâne in Istanbul and assimilating into Turkish culture during their formative years.

The Labor Zionist movement tended to be primarily Ashkenazi, but they were not alone in founding Israel. Mizrahis were overrepresented in the Irgun and Lehi, both of who's political wings became the Likud.

[0] - https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/16111/13/16111%20TALBOT_Jew...
by h4ny | 2025-08-21 03:42:33+00:00
> you MUST get very good at reviewing code that you did not write.

I find that interesting. That has always been the case at most places my friends and I have worked at that have proper software engineering practices, companies both very large and very small.

> AI can already write very good code. I have led teams of senior+ software engineers for many years. AI can write better code than most of them can at this point.

I echo @ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7's opinion. For well defined refactoring and expanding on existing code in limited scope they do well, but I have not seen that for any substantial features especially full-stack ones, which is what most senior engineers I know are finding.

If you are really seeing that then I would either worry about the quality of those senior+ software engineers or the metrics you are using to assess the efficacy of AI vs. senior+ engineers. You don't have to even show us any code: just tell us how you objectively came to that conclusions and what is the framework you used to compare them.

> Educational establishments MUST prioritize teaching code review skills

Perhaps more is needed but I don't know about "prioritizing"? Code review isn't something you can teach as a self-contained skill.

> and other high-level leadership skills.

Not everyone needs to be a leader and not everyone wants to be a leader. What are leadership skills anyway? If you look around the world today, it looks like many people we call "leaders" are people accelerating us towards a dystopia.
by tptacek | 2025-08-21 03:45:22+00:00
Contrary to the sibling commenters, I found this pretty tricky to do; I was always too close to the curb or the lane marker, I lost my natural sense of where my car was positioned on the road. I have the same general surprise that you can just use a US license to drive in Europe --- but you can. The IDP seems pretty silly, especially knowing what little it takes to pick one up.
by jongjong | 2025-08-21 03:46:22+00:00
The project foundation is everything. LLMs are sensitive to over-engineering. The LLM doesn't have an opinion about good code vs bad code.

If you show it bad code and ask it to add features on top, it will produce more bad code... It might work (kind of) but more likely to be buggy and have security holes. When the context you give to the LLM includes unnecessary complexity, it will assume that you want unnecessary complexity and it will generate more of it for you.

I tried Claude Code with both a bad codebase and a good codebase; the difference is stark. The first thing I notice is that, with the good code base without unnecessary complexity, it generates a lot LESS code for any given feature/prompt. It's really easy to review its output and it's very reliable.

With a bad, overengineered codebase, Claude Code will produce complex code that's hard to review... Even for similar size features. Also it will often get it wrong and the code won't work. Many times it adds code which does literally nothing at all. It says "I changed this so that ..., this should resolve the issue ..." - But then I test and the issue is still there.

Some bad coders may be tempted to keep asking Claude to do more to fix the issue and Claude keeps adding more mess on top. It becomes a giant buggy hack and eventually you have to ask it to rewrite a whole bunch of stuff because it becomes way too complicated and even Claude can't understand its own code... That's how you get to bus factor of 0. Claude will happily keep churning out code even if it doesn't know what it's doing. It will never tell you that your code is unmaintainable and unextendable. Show it the worst codebase in the world and it will adapt itself to become the worst coder in the world.
by kmoser | 2025-08-21 03:47:06+00:00
As the cost of AI-generated code approaches zero (both in time and money), I see nothing wrong with letting the AI agent spin up a dev environment and take its best shot. If it can prove with rigorous testing that the new code works is at least as reliable as the old code, and is written better, then it's a win/win. If not, delete that agent and move on.

On the other hand, if the agent is just as capable of fixing bugs in legacy code as rewriting it, and humans are no longer in the loop, who cares if it's legacy code?
by ehnto | 2025-08-21 03:48:16+00:00
I think that you got it right, expectations for cylcing are different. Even avid cyclists could never hit the kilometres travelled by your average car user in a year. Being a lot more expensive as well cars need to last longer for the cost benefit math to make sense. If your car broke every in 10,000kms you'd be livid, out of action constantly. If your bike breaks down, you can probably fix it that afternoon if not on the spot. Worst case you can probably walk it the rest of the trip.

That's where the e-bike is crossing barriers a bit. People will ride them much further, and getting the e-drivetrain repaired can be a real time and money sink. So you want it to be reliable, more reliable than the rest of your bike even.
by jrowen | 2025-08-21 03:48:53+00:00
Part of the problem is that businesses treat reviewing as a second class citizen. It's not "actual work" so shouldn't be given preference, which excuses the LGTM style reviews.

I've been out of the industry for a while but I felt this way years ago. As long as everybody on the team has coding tasks, their review tasks will be deprioritized. I think the solution is to make Code Reviewer a job and hire and pay for it, and if it's that valuable the industry will catch on.

I would guess that testing/QA followed a similar trajectory where it had to be explicitly invested in and made into a job to compete for or it wouldn't happen.
by majikaja | 2025-08-21 03:52:16+00:00
I think an important thing for something like Lean to gain traction is the availability of learning resources (math 'textbooks') based on the technology so people actually use it for day to day mathematics instead of just formalizing what has already been proven without it.

I don't think many people are going to read Rudin (etc.) then try to rewrite the book or do the exercises in Lean by themselves or read through the mathlib files to see how everything is defined/proved in full generality.

Like a lot of people (I imagine), I'm not a professional mathematician working on advanced, complex problems but I would like to have the ability to have the computer check my solutions to exercises and maybe even aid me with hints for tackling problems if needed.

If math textbooks gave free use for people to rewrite them into computer format and post online it would make life a lot easier.
by josephg | 2025-08-21 03:52:26+00:00
> so you mean replacing the Lamport timestamp for the node/operation with a pointer to the element adjacent to the right, correct?

Yeah thats right. Its a GUID, because they need to be sent over the wire. For text editing, we usually use {site ID, transaction sequence} because they compress better than random IDs.

> One alternative way to approach it that comes to mind is to introduce transaction semantics so that you can consider a node to be identified by a [Lamport timestamp, site ID, transaction sequence] and the parent, and use a sequence number within the transaction to sort, ...

Maybe? I don't fully understand what you mean. And even if I did, I'm not clever enough to infer all the implications of that construction. But yes, I suspect you're right that in the best case, it would be equivalent to fuguemax. And in the worst case, it would introduce new bugs.
by renewiltord | 2025-08-21 03:53:16+00:00
Plebs absolutely do not. That’s such a small fraction of elite people. Plebs barely know how to operate a computer. You have no interaction with a 70th percentile intelligence let alone a 50th.

The plebs are making SQLite make their default extension etilqs so that no one blames them when software that uses SQLite creates temporary dbs.
by pama | 2025-08-21 03:53:29+00:00
I agree. Your estimate for (2), about 0.0022 kWh, corresponds to about a sixth of the charge of an iPhone 15 pro and would take longer than ten minutes on the phone, even at max power draw. It feels about right for the amount of energy/compute of a large modern MoE loading large pages of several 10k tokens. For example this tech (couple month old) could input 52.3k tokens per second to a 672B parameter model, per H100 node instance, which probably burns about 6–8kW while doing it. The new B200s should be about 2x to 3x more energy efficient, but your point still holds within an order of magnitude.

https://lmsys.org/blog/2025-05-05-large-scale-ep/
by somenameforme | 2025-08-21 03:53:35+00:00
You have, and continue to, make endlessly false claims, only to shift the goal posts onto more false claims each time you're debunked, with plentiful ad hominem on top.

If you would like to continue this discussion then (1) acknowledge the falsehoods you make instead of just endlessly shifting the goal posts and (2) in order to prevent an endless series of #1, cite things instead of continuing to just 'invent' false facts. And I mean actual data, not some Ted Talk, Reddit, pop media, or wherever you're getting much of the nonsense you're saying like calling Islamic fertility rates 'memetic' or now deciding to claim that fertility rates change faster than they effect populations which is going absurdly far off the deep end.

So if you have some meaningful citations for these things, great. Perhaps I can see what you missed - maybe you yourself might even see that. Or maybe indeed I'm the one missing something. But otherwise, I can only assume that you're just randomly stating, as fact, whatever you happen to want to be true.
by mjamil | 2025-08-21 03:54:22+00:00
It’s interesting that people pay close attention to one-size-fits all number (regardless of the pros and cons of the methodology used to derive said number). I find RT really useful for collating the reviews from “top” reviewers in one place: over the years, I know how my interests align with the tastes of particular reviewers, and I don’t have to look in multiple places to get a snapshot view of their opinions.
by chamomeal | 2025-08-21 03:55:31+00:00
I hadn’t thought about it that way but it’s an interesting point. The cursor folks probably have 99% of the work already done for them, for free, funded by Microsoft, probably in perpetuity.

And on top of that, since it’s essentially just vscode, it costs users almost zero effort to make the switch. It’s the perfect crime!!

I hope zed does well though. I love their blog, and all of the cool open source stuff they’ve made. I recently heard they added a “helix mode” which might be enough to get me to switch from vscode…
by failiaf | 2025-08-21 03:56:53+00:00
for those who just caught the headline, the real gem here isn't the investment, but what zed's doing different: rather than using git for version control, they're announcing deltadb which incrementally stores all changes as crdt [1] while being interopable with git.

this feels pretty important; git is definitely not the right primitive for version control with ai and that pain is obvious with existing solutions. zed seems to be going all in on collaboration with realtime, git, and now something in between and it'll be interesting to see where they end up-to me three solutions feels overcomplicated but that may be necessary given how teams work now.

- [1]: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
by MeetingsBrowser | 2025-08-21 03:57:19+00:00
> Everywhere I look there is someone preserving ...

You don't know what you don't know. Just because you know of some things being preserved doesn't mean all knowledge is being preserved.

For example, the US has lost its ability to do all sorts of manufacturing.

Businesses don't tend to document internal processes publicly. As those businesses die out and the people who worked for them retire, there is no one left to pass the skills along.

That's why the Army always keeps one tank factory open. So the knowledge and skills are not lost.
by 4mitkumar | 2025-08-21 03:57:34+00:00
It's fascinating ...didn't think about the Bus Factor at all wrt vibe coding. Feels obvious in retrospect. But I feel there's the other side of software beyond the maintanable, professional-grade software requirements. There are a lot of use cases for basic software to solve that one problem in that one specific way and get it over with. A bit like customized software with little scope and little expectation of long-term support. Vibe-coding excels there.

In a way, I have been thinking about it [1] as the difference between writing a book and a writing a blog post - the production qualities expected in both are wildly different. And that's expected, almost as a feature!

I think as “writing” and distributing new software keeps getting easier - as easy as writing a new blog post - the way we consume software is going to change.

[1]: https://world.hey.com/akumar/software-s-blog-era-2812c56c
by Keyframe | 2025-08-21 03:57:53+00:00
My guy here did what Sega Saturn's VDP1 did. Instead of triangle based rendering, which most did, Saturn used quads, or "distorted sprites" to do 3D. Trivia: Nvidia's first accelerator NV1 was based on what VDP1 did and also used quads and failed on the market (mostly due to it).
by ETH_start | 2025-08-21 03:58:17+00:00
This kafkaesque nightmare is the same dysfunction you see in large corporations.

It happens for the same reason: when organizations get too large, the people running different parts stop communicating effectively, and no one feels directly accountable. But there’s also a reason some companies grow so large in the first place. Scale brings benefits: standardized systems, the ability to hire specialists for every niche role, resources to build infrastructure, etc. These advantages can outweigh the downsides of size for a while.

The difference is that companies hit a natural ceiling. Once the inefficiencies of size outweigh the benefits, they stop being competitive. Smaller firms hold their ground against them. Governments don’t have that check. There’s no competition forcing them to stay efficient, so they can grow far beyond their optimal size and never correct. Our best hope is what happened here: the courts striking down these government overreaches as unconstitutional.