MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ruszki | 2025-08-21 18:33:01+00:00
Some gave. Some even recorded it, and showed it, because they thought that they are good with it. But they weren’t good at all.

They were slower than coding by hand, if you wanted to keep quality. Some were almost as quick as copy-pasting from the code just above the generated one, but their quality was worse. They even kept some bugs in the code during their reviews.

So the different world is probably what the acceptable level of quality means. I know a lot of coders who don’t give a shit whether it makes sense what they’re doing. What their bad solution will cause in the long run. They ignore everything else, just the “done” state next to their tasks in Jira. They will never solve complex bugs, they simply don’t care enough. At a lot of places, they are the majority. For them, LLM can be an improvement.

Claude Code the other day made a test for me, which mocked everything out from the live code. Everything was green, everything was good. On paper. A lot of people simply wouldn’t care to even review properly. That thing can generate a few thousands of lines of semi usable code per hour. It’s not built to review it properly. Serena MCP for example specifically built to not review what it does. It’s stated by their creators.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-08-21 18:33:19+00:00
Reject the connection based on what?

IP address (presumably after too many visits) ? So now the iptables mechanism has to scale to fit your business model (of hammering my git repository 1 commit at a time from nearly a million IP addresses) ? Why does the code I use have to fit your braindead model? We wouldn't care if you just used git clone, but you're too dumb to do that.

The URL? Legitimate human (or other) users won't be happy about that.

Our web-fronted git repo is not part of our business model. It's just a free service we like to offer people, unrelated to revenue flow or business operations. So your behavior is not screwing my business model, but it is screwing up people who for whatever reason want to use that service, who can no longer use the web-fronted git repo.

ps. I've used "you" throughout the above because you used "my". No idea if you personally are involved in any such behavior.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-21 18:33:31+00:00
The exponential growth of parameters did pause. open weights are catching up, but for the most part that growth ended. The capability of the models did rise exponentially but where are we now? We hit a hardware limit. Even with datacenters full of huge gpus, we dont have good cases for 5 trillion parameter models.

Then came MOE, which in my opinion is like multiplying the parameters; but I'm pretty sure at that same time, the MOE models shrunk the size. It's organized better.

If you're still looking at that exponential growth, you're looking at giant CAT mining dump trucks and thinking sports cars arent big enough. This exponential growth is hiding now.

Then reasoning happened and it again shrunk the total size in parameters vs quality.

qwen3-coder 480 B is night and day better coder than say Llama 3 405B. Not even comparable and nobody debates. The exponential growth is happening, but not parameters.

How about AI usage? Stats are showing AI usage is 4x larger than January 1st of this year. Might not be exponential but wow! We dont even really know the private stats but openai has hundreds of billions in spend for 2x stargate datacenters. They know whats up.

>Did top insider tech people and VCs lied to us again?

Yep, all lies. You should ignore AI and stop using it.
by WorldMaker | 2025-08-21 18:33:31+00:00
> What makes you think they actually care about productivity?

I've seen at least a few economists suggest we've been living in the "post-productivity" world for a while now. Some companies are too divorced and abstracted from actual, specific products to care about marginal productivity or track it. Other companies have scaled to absurd sizes that productivity is enough guaranteed that marginal productivity boosts/detriments rarely are noticeable anywhere close to the bottom line. Employee happiness from closed door offices is a productivity rain drop against the ocean of too-easy productivity from modern software and tools and processes and abstractions and shareholder-oriented quarterly reports cultures.
by MisterTea | 2025-08-21 18:33:33+00:00
> I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something was forsaken.

I cant sum it up properly but three things come to mind: Fear - we have been filled with fear, this in turn leads to more people forsaking responsibility and wanting the government to act as a nanny to protect them, which leads to a lot of childish behavior whether it be people acting helpless or people aping being big and tough. So fear leading to a lack of responsibility leading to childish behavior. This makes people more self centered and less considerate of others around them.

Edit, to add: This lack of responsibility is also tied to legal liability of being sued. Cant take down a crook because they might get hurt and sue which makes me wonder what kind of legal system we have which ignores the irresponsible act of criminality. To me it's "live and die by the sword" - you fuck around and you find out. Of course this can be reversed, a person taking action against a criminal can be hurt and then who is responsible? The liability cuts deeply both ways. There is no way to win unless that changes or we install a safety net.
by stockresearcher | 2025-08-21 18:33:56+00:00
There's been a lot of articles lately and they're getting a lot of traction because they are exactly what a lot of people want to hear. Expect the "success" in collecting clicks to result in even more articles reinforcing it.

Are we in an AI bubble, and if so, is it about to burst? If the answer to both of those questions is Yes, we will not know for months. Looking back is the only way to really know.

So be careful with your investments and other decisions. There aren't many things more dangerous than hearing what you want to hear. Don't let your guard down, and maintain your critical thinking.
by eikenberry | 2025-08-21 18:34:15+00:00
> If we suppose that ANNs are more or less accurate models of real neural networks [..]

IANNs were inspired by biological neural structures and that's it. They are not representative models at all, even of the "less" variety. Dedicated hardware will certainly help, but no insights into how much it can help will come from this sort of comparison.
by hamaluik | 2025-08-21 18:35:01+00:00
This feels like a fairly uncharitable take. The author conveniently left out all of the things needed to understand that JavaScript version, including async/await, promises, modules, string interpolation, lambda syntax, not to mention the runtime that is running this, etc.

You also don’t have to start with a program that invokes 20 concepts at once, every one of those rust concepts can have its own hello world, introducing one concept at a time. Frankly several of them are just fundamental CS concepts.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-21 18:35:03+00:00
Well, if you are law abiding then you really should abide by the law and this particular thing has the force of law in many countries. Not doing it is by definition not being law abiding!

I've been in business for 42 years now. In all that time I have never seen more than 1000 Euros cash in any kind of business transaction, and I have never been offered to be paid in cash. It's always bank transfers on invoice. I've never bought a vehicle cash, I can't even begin to understand why or how someone would want to buy real estate cash. Besides the obvious risks of being robbed the whole idea of keeping that much money or more around in physical form feels strange to me.

Even in the 1980s when I would buy a vehicle it would be through a bank transfer. The only people that sometimes insist they want to do some transaction in cash are usually marketplace sellers that I suspect are professional sellers that are keeping their income out of sight of the taxman and restaurants where the POS machine 'just broke' that are doing the same. And when I say I do not have any cash and it's ok they can send me an invoice or give me their bank account number suddenly their machine starts working again. Ditto with cab drivers.
by leeoniya | 2025-08-21 18:35:10+00:00
heh, im currently working on an svg pathstring to canvs2d command compiler [1] and had to dive into this topic last week, including converting arc commands from centerpoint parameterization to endpoint parameterization [2]

[1] https://github.com/leeoniya/uMarks (WIP!)

[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/implnote.html#ArcConversionCenterT...
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-21 18:35:15+00:00
> but when no one wants to train juniors any more (because they immediately get poached by the big ones)

Can we stop pretending that we don't know how to solve this problem? If you hire juniors at $X/year, but they keep getting poached after 2-3 years because now they can get $X*1.5/year (or more!), then maybe you should start promoting and giving raises to them after they've gotten a couple years experience.

Seriously, this is not a hard problem to solve. If the junior has proven themselves, give them the raise they deserve instead of being all Surprised Pikachu when another company is willing to pay them what they've proven themselves worthy of.
by zamalek | 2025-08-21 18:35:44+00:00
(I'm a bigger podman stan)

I agree about quadlets, amazing.

Docker has one of the most severe cases of not-invented-here. All solutions require a combination of a new DSL, a new protocol, a new encryption scheme, a new daemon, or any combination there-of. People are sleeping on using buildah directly; which OP alluded to with Bakah (but fell short of just using it directly).

Ever wish you could run multiple commands in a single layer? Buildah lets you do that. Ever wish you could loop or some other branching in a dockerfile? Buildah lets you do that. Why? Because they didn't invent something new, and so the equivalent of a dockerfile in buildah is just a script in whatever scripting language you want (probably sh, though).

This will probably give you the general idea: https://www.mankier.com/1/buildah-from

I came across this when struggling and repeatedly failing to get multi-arch containers built in Circle CI a few gears ago. You don't have access to an arm64 docker context on their x86 machines, so you are forced to orchestrate that manually (unless your arm64 build is fast enough under qemu). Things begin to rapidly fall apart once you are off of the blessed Docker happy path because of their NIH obsession. That's when I discovered buildah and it made the whole thing a cinch.
by seszett | 2025-08-21 18:35:55+00:00
> What does your country or its neighbors face? How about 10 countries over?

Well my country sometimes has storms that do lead to power cuts for a few hours in the worst case, it's happened to me in 1999 and 2010 (but then there was also flooding that time). It's not happened since except for a couple of scheduled cuts that lasted a minute or so.

About five countries over, there is a special military operation that you might have heard of. About ten countries over there's another one. I'm pretty sure some neighbouring countries also have ice, forests, wind and wildfires.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-08-21 18:36:03+00:00
speaking as someone who clawed their way up out of the support mud...

sometimes it's a lack of accessible escalation procedure (no, a bug report is not the same thing as "this feature sucks to use and needs to be revisited), and sometimes it's just the unfortunate fact that those support reps most capable of clearly explaining these issues (or better yet, understanding the underlying mechanisms that cause the issues) get promoted out of front-line support roles (hi)... or move on because they're not satisfied with remaining in support (hi).

obviously there are a ton of exceptions to this rule but i've personally covered just about all those bases throughout my career. i would have loved to have seen engineers get involved with the burden of support, but maybe that's just because i came out of dysfunctional shops... not that they're not all dysfunctional in one way or another.
Show HN: Simple Golang Ragserver
by richardknop | 2025-08-21 18:36:15+00:00
A small RAG server written in Golang with sqlite and weaviate used for Corpus/knowledge base and Gemini model. It provides API to upload PDF files to the corpus and to query for an answer from specific documents. Returned answer contains references with specific pages where the answer was sourced from. Hopefully at least somebody will find it useful. Please provide any feedback, suggest new features to work on etc.
by eqvinox | 2025-08-21 18:36:27+00:00
> Packet loss over ICMP can be artificial based on the backplane load of routers.

This doesn't generally apply to the end host; note the last hop in the trace I posted is the web server itself. Also, the second last hop having very similar loss% makes it likely that neither of the two systems is hitting rate limits (as they would be different).

> Are you seeing TCP retransmits to port 443?

If the webpage loaded normally, I wouldn't have investigated to begin with ;).

Right now, the loss on TCP SYNs is about 70%. (mtr -T -P 443) Second to last hop still has roughly the same loss. Something's h0rked at americanis.net.
by trentnix | 2025-08-21 18:37:26+00:00
"Success rate" is a tricky metric.

I had to use an Amazon chatbot a few weeks ago. It introduced itself as "Deepshikha". After that facepalm, I started down the path with its various preferred responses to get a refund on an item I bought that never arrived, had no tracking information, and was almost certainly a scam by a third-party seller. I eventually, after a few tries, selected the right combination of things to get the refund processed. But the chatbot wasn't helpful, it didn't make any decisions, and it simply served as a filter for scam refund requests.

I guarantee you that some middle-management PM and some VP at Amazon counted that interaction as a success. I'm sure that's how it ended up on their quarterly graphs and charts. After all, the customer (me) got what they wanted and the right decision was made. And, !bonus!, it used "AI", reduces cost, and had low latency. Raises and promotions are almost certainly incoming!

But the experience was abysmal and insulting, contibuting to the ongoing ensh*ttification of the Amazon experience.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-21 18:37:28+00:00
Unfortunately this kind of stuff will eventually kill C# adoption in gaming.

With Unreal on one side, and Godot on the other, where while C# is supported, it is mostly for Unity refugees, there are very few other options left.

Yes there are MonoGame, FNA, Stride and so on, but they lack the same kind of mindshare across the industry.
by wiether | 2025-08-21 18:37:48+00:00
Part of my job is to do migrations for customers, so, to me at least, it's not uncommon.

Using all the bells and whistles of a provider and being locked-in is one thing. But the other big issue is that, as service providers, they can (and some of them did more often than not) stop providing some services or changing them in a way that forces you to make big changes in your app to keep it running on this service.

Whereas, if you build your app in a agnostic way, they can stop or change what they want, you either don't rely on those services heavily enough for the changes required to be huge, or you can just deploy elsewhere, with another flavor of the same service.

Let's say you have a legacy Java app that works only with a library that is not maintained. If you don't want to bear the cost of rewriting with a new and maintained library, you can keep the app running, knowing the risks and taking the necessary steps to protect you against it.

Whereas if your app relies heavily on DynamoDB's API and they decide to drop the service completely, the only way to keep the app running is to rewrite everything for a similar service, or to find a service relying on the same API elsewhere.
by mindslight | 2025-08-21 18:37:50+00:00
The real official answer is to register/allocate a new subnet, with no intention of putting it into the global routing tables. IPv6 only comes into play because doing that with IPv4 is mostly impractical these days.

The author lost me when they got into raw iproute commands. Not because I'm not acquainted (I run my own custom complex router using a standard Linux distro). But rather if someone knows enough to configure things at this level, then they would just come to this solution on their own. Most people trying to solve this problem will not - eg think that mobile video rack belonging to a touring musician.

Readily-accessible solutions I can come up with off the top of my head:

1. Two off the shelf routers and double NAT. The middle network can be changed if it conflicts with the outer network

2. One router/NAT, but two IP networks on the inner network - one statically assigned for devices to communicate with each other, and one assigned via DHCP for accessing the horizon through NAT. That second network can then easily be changed.

3. Play battleship more strategically using class E address space, DOD/BigCo address space, and/or smaller subnets in the middle of the customary size for a range (eg 192.168.1.160/27).
by MeetingsBrowser | 2025-08-21 18:38:26+00:00
I didn’t mean business processes, but the actual knowledge on how to do something.

Saying we know how to weld so we can build a tank is like saying we know C++ so we can build a new unreal engine.

If epic games went out of business, and no one worked on game engines for 30+ years, the knowledge would be lost. Even if the source code or “schematics” are available.

You need to know why things are the way they are, why decisions were made, what the limitations are, etc.
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-08-21 18:38:34+00:00
I literally just had a conversation with my CEO this morning where he told me not to disclose the projects I’ve been working on, so I can only speak about it obliquely.

We identified some problems our customers have, and I’ve come up with interesting ways to use LLMs as part of an automated system to solve some of those problems. It’s not the kind of thing where we just dump some data into the ChatGPT API and get an answer. We’re doing fairly deep integrations that do some interesting/powerful things. It’s been a big deal for our prospective clients and investors.
by nunez | 2025-08-21 18:38:44+00:00
Very risky strategy with engineers that don't have good "customer presence" depending on the kind of sales calls they "ran." This is something I would expect product managers to do. I would say that this is more of a product management failure than anything else. Unless it's a super small early-stage startup, in which case all bets are off and I'd expect everyone to kind of do everything.
by xcf_seetan | 2025-08-21 18:38:45+00:00
I think we memorize the understanding. For me it also works better understanding how something works than memoryzing results. I remember in high school, in maths trigonometrics, there were a list of 20 something formulas derived from a single one. Everyboby was memorizing the whole list of formulas; i just had to memorize a simple formula and the underdtanding of how to derive the others from the fundamental one on the fly.
by ezst | 2025-08-21 18:38:54+00:00
> There's also no evidence that it won't

There are signs, though. Every "AI" cycle, ever, has revolved around some algorithmic discovery, followed by a winter in search for the next one. This one is no different and propped up by LLMs, whose limitations we know quite well by now: "intelligence" is elusive, throwing more compute at them produces vastly diminishing returns, throwing more training data at them is no longer feasible (we came short of it even before the well got poisoned). Now the competitors are stuck at the same level, within percent points of one another, with the difference explained by fine-tuning techniques and not by technical prowess. Unless a cool new technique come yesterday to dislodge LLMs, we are in for a new winter.
by haburka | 2025-08-21 18:39:22+00:00
It’s not just you, I think some engineers benefit a lot from AI and some don’t. It’s probably a combination of factors including: AI skepticism, mental rigidity, how popular the tech stack is, and type of engineering. Some problems are going to be very straightforward.

I also think it’s that people don’t know how to use the tool very well. In my experience I don’t guide it to do any kind of software pattern or ideology. I think that just confuses the tool. I give it very little detail and have it do tasks that are evident from the code base.

Sometimes I ask it to do rather large tasks and occasionally the output is like 80% of the way there and I can fix it up until it’s useful.
by Bender | 2025-08-21 18:39:59+00:00
If you are confident where the loss is then the only thing you could really do within HN is email Daniel (dang) and ask him to replicate the issue and open a ticket with their upstream provider to check routes and for losses. hn@ycombinator.com

Outside of HN I suppose you could check the Nanog mailing lists [1] and chat servers to see if there is any discussion ongoing for those networks.

[1] - https://lists.nanog.org/mailman3/
by bonzini | 2025-08-21 18:40:01+00:00
Rust without safety-by-default, and hence without the borrow checker, is not Rust. A smaller Rust should either remove unsafe constructs (and then you get something more like a new Java/Scala/Kotlin except with aliasing XOR mutability) or keep the pointer/reference distinction (which Zig doesn't have).

Zig is more like a smaller C++ than a smaller Rust.
by jordanpg | 2025-08-21 18:40:22+00:00
Sure, academia is the worst system except for all the other ones.

Academia is what she is criticizing, btw, not the "scientific enterprise," even if she doesn't say it all the time. You know what else she doesn't say? What we should do instead.

Here's what she thinks we should do instead: privatize academic research. Can you think of any problems with that?
by brobdingnagians | 2025-08-21 18:40:35+00:00
I had a chatbot attempt to answer an issue I had with setting up a Shopify site yesterday. All of the information was correct, but I had already done it. A customer support rep was able to retrigger the TLS query. The chatbot knew that needed to be done, but couldn't actually do it. It suggested ways of doing it which didn't exist in the UI, which was even more frustrating
by doorhammer | 2025-08-21 18:40:40+00:00
Yeah, if I were running a QA department I wouldn't let llms anywhere near actual customers as far as trying to resolve a customer issue directly.

And, this is just a guess, but it's not uncommon that whale customers like that have their own dedicated account person and I'd personally stick with that model.

The use-case I'm like "huh, yeah, I could see that working well" is mostly around doing sentiment analysis and call tagging--maybe actual summaries that humans might read if I had a really well-design context for the llm to work within. Basically anything where you can have an acceptable false positive/negative rate.
by libraryatnight | 2025-08-21 18:41:02+00:00
Sometimes there will be a loop that's tough to break out of where the "Contact us" tells you to talk to a chat bot before putting in a ticket or showing you a phone number, and the bot won't be able to help but will spit you out to the page that tells you to talk to the chat bot rather than give you info for actual support until you find the special event chain that leads it to let you talk to people, or attempt to.
by nunez | 2025-08-21 18:41:18+00:00
you're not wrong, but i don't think forcing engineers to take sales calls is the right move either. there's lots of soft skills involved in running a successful call that engineers aren't trained or even interviewed on.

(i'm definining "sales calls" as the initial discovery call before a demo or proof of concept is agreed upon. i would be okay with having engineers _ride along_ for complex presales demos, but even then, product should really be serving that role.)