MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flowerthoughts | 2025-08-29 06:36:38+00:00
I can understand the argument, but it's like your blood flow carrying the news that "cells are the point; not the human they make up." Every level of complexity thinks it's the main character.

I share the author's beliefs that organizations must be for the people, not the other way around. The big problem is not the existence of the tool, but that it's being used to explain layoffs instead of expansions, suggests that something else is broken in society. That could also just be media bias.

This idea that generative tools are bad is weird. I'm using Claude Code almost daily, and I find myself having to babysit it quite a lot because it keeps reverting fixes I made. Like an API URL that it strongly believes should be something it made up on its own. There's somewhat more time for sword fights, but it's not like I spend 10 minutes at the start of the day setting up Claude, and then come back at the end of the day to a finished solution.

It feels a bit like a practical P vs NP bruteforce attack on my problem space: applying heuristics to come up with solutions that I then simply verify the applicability, correctness and quality of.
by m463 | 2025-08-29 06:36:52+00:00
> you're barely driving them anymore

It's worse with tesla - the Plaid has removed most driver controls.

If you're a car guy and buy a 1000hp+ vehicle, I think you would want a drive select or turn signal stalk.

You can't flash your lights. wipers are not under your control. if you're sticking out into traffic, you don't know if the car will guess correctly that you want to back up... or pull out. nonsense.
by TheDong | 2025-08-29 06:37:16+00:00
And I used LLMs for months and didn't get massively depressed.

Conversely, at a previous job I was forced to code in Go, became massively depressed, and am still not over it.

I guess my point is that n=1 isn't enough to really know if it's that LLMs got to you, or if you were already on the verge of burnout or depression anyway.

I'd say "we'll see", except in reality there's very few robust studies on depression in cohorts like "developers", so probably the stats won't come out.

I personally recommend doing more of whatever sport it is you like (or if you don't have one, starting running and/or lifting at the gym), and using less social media.
by gherkinnn | 2025-08-29 06:37:38+00:00
> First, much like LLMs, lots of people don’t really have world models.

This is interesting and something I never considered in a broad sense.

I have noticed how the majority of programmers I worked with do not have a mental model of the code or what it describes – it's basically vibing without an LLM, the result accidental. This is fine and perfectly workable. You need only a fraction of devs to purposefully shape the architecture so that the rest can continue vibing.

But never have I stopped to think whether this extends to the world at large.
by locallost | 2025-08-29 06:37:40+00:00
I learned CSS 20 years ago. My strong opinion is that it should be renamed Crappy Style Sheets, but that would take away from its primary fault, that it's cascading. As we learned in many other things, "inheritance" is not a great idea. Especially for something that gets applied globally, by a team of five people. "I will now adjust this thing over here, which will mess up everything my colleague is doing over there" is not a good feature. Its main feature is to give you complex rules how to overrule a certain rule. As a feature it's a a headache, when that's what you base everything around, it's bad. It gives you complex ways to target things, and over time it became even more complex. If you're a sane person, you've learned to avoid most of these otherwise you'll end up with .foo > .bar:nth-child(2n) ~ .baz . Then you will adjust that and come full circle to my argument, which is that it will break Mark's completely unrelated thing.

At the same time doing the simplest imaginable layout was a headache. I've done it, and it was interesting as in, this is a challenge and I am taking it head on, but it never should've been a challenge. Things have improved exponentially here, but it should've been the idea all along. Not how to cascade rules.

All other criticism, the syntax etc. is nitpicky and not important. As long as it's allowing you to do something useful without much fuss, I am ok with any syntax. But it didn't and it never did. Making a webpage layout should not be a full time job.
by subscribed | 2025-08-29 06:38:32+00:00
No, they aren't begging?

They wrapped Google services into sandbox for users relying on done software (with great success, even Android Auto works), and raise Play Integrity lie/false security with developers and regulators (Google claims a handset without security updates for years is safe).

There's better (standard aosp) attestation mechanism GoS fully supports and which is supported by slowly growing number of developers (including banks).
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-29 06:38:58+00:00
Yes, a user could intentionally do something stupid. A user could also voluntarily wire the majority of his balance to a foreign account. That fact has no bearing on a discussion about the security impacts of attestation.

From a technical perspective device attestation doesn't add anything here. The typical user doesn't receive any additional protection. All of its supposed "benefits" ultimately stem from the restriction of end user choice but those same end users _already_ have a practically limitless selection of stupid choices available to them. And these are generally very deliberate choices that we're talking about here. Not subtle confusion.

> the majority of users have no clue what an app is able to do. If root is given to it then it can do anything.

If a user is stupid enough to seek out root, ignore all warnings, install a malicious app, and explicitly grant it root, then he was fated to fall for a much simpler scam regardless. Such as granting a malicious app admin on his laptop and then logging into online banking. Or installing a phishing app that proxies the session to the bank.

Typical users don't seek out root, don't install custom ROMs, and don't consent to the warning message about installing APKs from unknown sources. Grandma isn't ricing her mobile phone.

Support for hardware tokens or TOTP would address widespread real world attacks. Shutting down various customer service social engineering account reset tactics would also help, but that would actually cost money. In contrast attestation doesn't accomplish anything other than infringing end user choice. It's a highly unethical waste of resources.
by imiric | 2025-08-29 06:40:05+00:00
That's not the same flow state experienced by programmers.

While programming, it's possible to get into a trance-like state where the program's logic is fully loaded and visible in your mind, and your fingers become an extension of your mind that wire you directly to the machine. This allows you to modify the program essentially at the speed of thought, with practically zero chance of producing buggy code. The programmer effectively becomes a self-correcting human interpreter.

Interrupting someone in this state is incredibly disruptive, since all the context and momentum is lost, and getting back into the state takes time and focus.

What you're describing is a general workflow. You can be focused on what you're doing, but there's no state loaded into memory that makes you more efficient. Interruptions are not disruptive, and you can pick up exactly where you left off with ease. In fact, you're constantly being interrupted by those agents running in the background, when they finish and you give them more work. This is a multitasking state, not flow.

So the article is correct. It's not possible to get into a flow state while working with ML tools. This is because it is an entirely different activity from programming that triggers different neural pathways.
by motorest | 2025-08-29 06:40:09+00:00
> Most React sites do the same thing.

Citation needed.

> And most of those don't do anything you couldn't have done without JS.

Please explain how you plan to develop a webpage that fetches data from an API without using JavaScript. Explain what alternative you think there is, what resources you need to develop them, and enumerate your tradeoffs.

After you do that exercise, you will be aware of why the world gravitated towards SPA-like, client-side WebApps.
by caconym_ | 2025-08-29 06:40:11+00:00
You made this claim above:

> I don't know of any prose that relies on crutch dashes

If that's true then you are not widely read, and if it's false then you are a disingenuous troll and your comments here are exactly as worthless as they look. Either way your opinion is still bad. Sorry you're mad about it, but I'm done here.
by andai | 2025-08-29 06:41:32+00:00
I made a little multiplayer arcade game last year. I added a chat feature with TTS. About an hour after launch it was just the n word over and over again. (Also zalgo text, which somehow strained the browser more than a video game!)

I removed the chat feature.

At any rate, getting banned by OFCOM is starting to sound like a badge of honor these days.
by elevation | 2025-08-29 06:41:45+00:00
As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who:

* lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job,

* failed to grok requirements through the language barrier,

* were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base,

* committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim,

* and could not be held liable because their firm is effectively beyond the reach of the US legal system.

In a couple of projects I've seen a single US based developer replace an entire offshore team, deliver a superior result, and provide management with a much more responsive communication loop, in 1% of the billable hours. The difference in value is so stark that one client even fired the VP who'd lead the offshoring boondoggle.

Software talent is simply not as fungible as some MBAs would like to believe.
by globular-toast | 2025-08-29 06:42:29+00:00
Yep, my strong feeling is that the net benefit of all of this will be zero. The time you have to spend holding the LLM hand is almost equal to how much time you would have spent writing it yourself. But then you've got yourself a codebase that you didn't write yourself, and we all know hunting bugs in someone else's code is way harder than code you had a part in designing/writing.

People are honestly just drunk on this thing at this point. The sunken cost fallacy has people pushing on (ie. spending more time) when LLMs aren't getting it right. People are happy to trade convenience for everything else, just look at junk food where people trade in flavour and their health. And ultimately we are in a time when nobody is building for the future, it's all get rich quick schemes: squeeze then get out before anyone asks why the river ran dry. LLMs are like the perfect drug for our current society.

Just look at how technology has helped us in the past decades. Instead of launching us towards some kind of Star Trek utopia, most people now just work more for less!
by archerx | 2025-08-29 06:42:31+00:00
“I believe a lot of the negativity towards CSS stems from not really knowing how to use it. Many developers kind of just skip learning the CSS fundamentals in favor of the more interesting Java- and TypeScript, and then go on to complain about a styling language they don’t understand.”

from the article is talking about people like you, who refuse to learn something properly but have the arrogance to think they know better.
by versteegen | 2025-08-29 06:42:35+00:00
Of course they can. It doesn't take that long to learn CUDA/etc and hardware details, read through some manuals and performance guides, do some small projects to solidify that knowledge. What you need is talent, and some months. That's why at university I saw plenty of students pull off amazing projects, and there's nothing eyebrow-raising in the slightest about starting a PhD a year after getting a bachelor's and writing software more sophisticated than most programmers would write in their career.

I think the programming profession overvalues experience over skill. However, when I was young I had no appreciation for what the benefits of experience are... including not writing terrible code.
by rramadass | 2025-08-29 06:43:14+00:00
Very nice explanation!

In particular; the idea of breaking down a polynomial as a sum of terms, mapping each term to a graphical view (i.e. analytic to coordinate geometry) and then realizing such a sum of terms can be a complex curve (i.e. a complex graphical view) which can be an approximation of almost any function.

The teaching of mathematics has become so abstract that students are not taught how to map it to geometry which is THE way to build intuition. You can understand a lot by just imagining 2D/3D mappings before generalizing to n-dimensional vector spaces. Every student/beginner should study I.M.Gelfand's Functions and Graphs so that they can train themselves to imagine the graphs corresponding to a string of symbols.
by AHTERIX5000 | 2025-08-29 06:43:27+00:00
I've had similar experiences when working on non-web tech.

There are parts in the codebase I'd love some help such as overly complex C++ templates and it almost never works out. Sometimes I get useful pointers (no pun intended) what the problem actually is but even that seems a bit random. I wonder if it's actually faster or slower than traditional reading & thinking myself.
by yokoprime | 2025-08-29 06:44:41+00:00
CoPilot isn't anything Microsoft is trying to sell outside of their own products. And with GitHub Copilot there is no "copilot" model to choose, you can choose between Anthropic, OpenAI and Google models.

Sure UWP never caught on, but you know why? Win32, which by the way is also Microsoft, was way to popular and more flexible. Devs weren't going to re-write their apps to UWP in order to support phones.
by jona-f | 2025-08-29 06:44:44+00:00
Do you mean that you can mark files for which still the underlying filesystem is used? As far as I remember there were experiments with that about 20 years ago, but it was decided that the added complexity wasn't worth it. The implementation that replaced all of that has been very stable (unlike the ones before) and i'm using it heavily, so i think they had a point. Some write-through behavior can be scripted on top of that.

EDIT: So, wikipedia lists overlayfs and aufs as active projects and unionfs predates both. Maybe unionfs v2 is what replaced all that? Maybe I'm hallucinating...
by jmaker | 2025-08-29 06:45:23+00:00
But the manager gets to report a new feature, a boon to their career, at the cost of the devs’ careers and satisfaction. The manager might be glossing over or just muting any product satisfaction issues, particularly if no one in their line of report directly puts a KPI on that. That’s about company culture.

> "The sooner we get the feature out to the customers, the sooner we can gather feedback and change our product"

Maybe analyze the target audience before shipping? Also an org issue, where a the PO should put their business analyst hat on. I mean, to me it’s a question of competence if the team is supposed to ship something that must be changed (not fine-tuned or improved) - it’s about how much.
by mcv | 2025-08-29 06:45:34+00:00
> When was the last time you saw someone profile their code?

A year ago. I heavily relied on one to optimize a complex data import that took an hour for a million line Excel file. The algorithm translated it to a graph according to a user-specified definition and would update an existing graph in neo4j, keeping the whole thing consistent.

The only other guy who understood the algorithm (a math PhD) thought it was as optimal as it could get. I used the profiler to find all the bottlenecks, which were all DB checks for the existence of nodes, and implemented custom indices to reduce import time from an hour to 3 minutes.

It did introduce a bunch of bugs that I had to fix, but I also discovered some bugs in the original algorithm.

It was one of my best programming experiences ever. Especially the payoff at the end when it went down from an hour to 3 minutes is a dopamine rush like never before. Now I want to optimize more code.

I don't think users cared, though; originally this work would take days by hand, so an hour was already pretty good. Now I made something fiendishly complex look trivial.
by nis0s | 2025-08-29 06:46:48+00:00
I would have preferred to reserve the term AI psychosis for agentic or autonomous systems experiencing adverse effects from model collapse.

While people being impressionable and affected by forces of societal change is not a new phenomenon, I agree that this type of behavior deserves its own label.

As long as AI doesn’t have its own feelings, it doesn’t make sense to feel any kind of attachment towards it, or be influenced by its words in any social sense. The tool doesn’t have any capacity for being social, so the delusion is both self-rooted and self-driven. So, I think I would have preferred to call this AI-driven narcissism instead of AI psychosis.
by suslik | 2025-08-29 06:46:50+00:00
Yeah, perhaps I did not explain myself correctly (or, to be precise, explained myself incorrectly - I should not comment right after waking up). I want a tool that would take as input one or more RSS feeds and emits an aggregated RSS which I can then open in an RSS reader. I would then do certain things with the RSS entries (for instance, for some academic journals only the header of the article is emitted, so I can attach the full text or even an AI summary to it).
by goku12 | 2025-08-29 06:48:27+00:00
> Your explanation of the differences is excellent and eye-opening.

Thank you! I'm glad you liked it.

> I imagine a future where users will be able to tell a local AI to modify their software or make the comptuer do what they want. ..., but I suppose even LLMs would count as non-free software since they're basically blobs of unintelligible parameters...

Hmm! That's something I haven't considered before. A very good point!
by jkaptur | 2025-08-29 06:48:51+00:00
PowerPoint actually fine

- bad communication possible in any medium - pptx in NASA even today! - issue is managers/SMEs communication differences - issues with technical papers - long - boring - vs word, excel, pdf...

(Next slide please)

Manager/SME Differences

- context vs conclusion - tell a compelling story - but give away the ending FIRST - inherent personality differences - motivations/incentives/mindsets

(Next slide)

Learning from disasters

- medium guides message and messenger - blame tool - binary choice? - presentation aide vs distributed technical artifact

(Next slide)

Questions?
by Gud | 2025-08-29 06:51:03+00:00
The point of a vehicle was always to take you from point a to point b.

Perhaps a certain minority enjoys pushing buttons, pulling levers and pressing pedals to move your butt around, heck I enjoy it too.

But when I am leaving for work at 5:30AM I am much happier to be seated comfortably in a train and letting someone else move me around while I take a nap
by Zmey56 | 2025-08-29 06:51:10+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a small open-source repo in Go to compare two simple strategies (Dollar-Cost Averaging vs Grid). The project is for research/education only — no real keys, no promises of profit.

Motivation: Most strategy examples online are hard to reproduce. I wanted a minimal, clean repo that makes it easy to experiment.
by iamshs | 2025-08-29 06:52:25+00:00
I just had AI write me a scraper and download 5TB of invaluable data which I had been eyeing for a long time. All in ten days. At the end of it, I still don’t know anything about python. It’s a bliss for people like me. All dependencies installed themselves. I look forward to using it even more.

One frustration was the code changed so much in ChatGPT so had to be lots of prompts. But I had no idea what the code was anyways. Understood vibe coding. Just used ChatGPT on a whim. Liked the end result.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-29 06:52:37+00:00
Yes FIDO2 would be ideal. The stuff about TOTP was a digression regarding the relative security levels between the two. The extra hardware doesn't provide any practical benefit (at least IMO) for the typical person running a FOSS authenticator app on a mobile device with an up-to-date OS. Obviously if you're something like a high volume day trader then it might be a different story but the venerable $5 wrench attack still applies so even then it seems pretty questionable to me.
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-29 06:52:37+00:00
this is a silly thing, it would be trivial to detect compared to regular randomware (way smaller footprint / activities, way easier to hide...)

for ex. a lot of ransomware try to evade security mechanisms by masquerading as legit processes , or injecting into them and performing its activities from there.

more creepy/viable would be to exploit for instance agentic AI to encrypt someones data which is not accessible to you. (like how ppl get it to exfiltrade data). so you can email a company and co pilot encrypts their sharepoint (i really doubt such a thing would ever be possible. lets hope not :D)
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-08-29 06:53:15+00:00
> Programming and writing will become niche and humans will still be used where a quality higher than what AI can produce is needed. But most code will be done by minotaur human-ai teams, where the human has a minimal but necessary contribution to keep the AI on track... I mean, it already is.

Or alternatively, we will build bigger and better things with the power of AI. Everyone talks about it replacing us, but we aren't running out of things to build. It's not like we're gonna run out of ways to improve the world, and compared to other things the digital world is unconstrained.
by lIl-IIIl | 2025-08-29 06:53:29+00:00
The other interpretation that leads to 1/3 probably is also pretty intuitive. That's the fun part of this question is that it leaves crucial information unspecified.

I think this is a reasonable interpretation:

You meet a family at a party. They say "We have two children". You ask "Do you have any girls"? They say "yes!"

This will give you 1/3 probability that the other child is also a girl.

I think this interpretation is more intuitive because it doesn't make any assumptions about how you get your information. Usually in probability questions you assume any information you have is given to you from on high. For example, you just "know" that the family has two children, you don't somehow deduce it. Therefore I assume the same for "one child is a girl" information.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-08-29 06:54:17+00:00
Expressions of asceticism has always been popular with some personalities. It crops up in various new forms every once in a while, "monk mode" was big a while back, and 996 has a lot of the same appeal, you also had Steve Jobs famously living off the floor in his apartment.

I think the appeal is about structure more than anything else.