MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gf000 | 2025-08-22 17:40:25+00:00
Only those reflection targets that are not "visible" from straight forward code. If you have code that accesses the "stringLiteral" field of a class, then it will be auto-registered for you. But if you access it based on user input, then you have to register it manually.

Also, quite a few libraries have metadata now denoting these extra reflection targets.

But nonetheless you are right in general, but depends on your use case.
Show HN: Gen Commit – AI generates your Git commit messages
by ragp | 2025-08-22 17:40:33+00:00
I was tired of writing commit messages and wanted something more intelligent than Cursor's suggestions.

Gen Commit is a simple CLI tool that automatically generates git commit messages. Just run gencommit instead of git commit and it analyzes your staged changes to craft a (proper) descriptive commit message and description. Especially nice to use an agent to figure out where things went wrong, since the description is pretty verbose with details about what changed.

You can configure it to use different AI providers and models. Available via Homebrew or pip.

GitHub: https://github.com/raghavpillai/gen-commit
by Retr0id | 2025-08-22 17:40:45+00:00
New generations are always leapfrogging those that came before them, so I don't find it too hard to believe even under more pessimistic opinions of LLM usefulness.

They are young and inexperienced today, but won't stay that way for long. Learning new paradigms while your brain is still plastic is an advantage, and none of us can go back in time.
by vinkelhake | 2025-08-22 17:40:56+00:00
I live in the bay and occasionally ride Waymo in SF and I pretty much always have a good time.

I visited NYC a few weeks ago and was instantly reminded of how much the traffic fucking sucks :) While I was there I actually thought of Waymo and how they'd have to turn up the "aggression" slider up to 11 to get anything done there. I mean, could you imagine the audacity of actually not driving into an intersection when the light is yellow and you know you're going to block the crossing traffic?
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-08-22 17:41:52+00:00
> Unlike the USA, we're generally incapable of successfully demanding everyone everywhere go along with whatever overreach we might think up.

I can understand why someone might think the UK still has as much influence as it did 50-75 years ago when you consider how prevalent that "UKCA" symbol is (the one that was introduced to replace the "CE" mark post-Brexit).
by suchuanyi | 2025-08-22 17:42:11+00:00
I built a virtual pet that lives in your Claude Code status line and reflects your AI usage patterns.

The pet's energy decays over time (~3 days from full to death), and you feed it by consuming tokens through Claude Code. As energy drops, the pet shows different expressions: (^_^) when happy, (o_o) when hungry, (u_u) when sick, and (x_x) when dead. What makes it interesting is the death mechanic - when your pet dies (energy hits 0), all your statistics reset to zero and you start completely fresh. It's like a gentle reminder of the ephemeral nature of our AI interactions. Setup is simple: just add `"command": "npx ccpet@latest"` to your Claude Code status line config. The pet persists across sessions and gives you a live view of your current session stats (input/output/cached tokens). It's written in TypeScript, fully tested, and published to npm. I found it surprisingly motivating to keep my "pet" alive while coding!
by kqr | 2025-08-22 17:42:12+00:00
After reading just the title I was going to make a crack that the skills of parents and managers largely overlaps.[1] Turns out the author did also make that connection, and that's what spawned the article!

[1]: I even have a draft article on similarly transferred learning: https://entropicthoughts.com/transparent-leadership-beats-se...
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-08-22 17:42:39+00:00
Here's the problem. Companies need workers. And society needs it's people to be bought into society. So you can't really say to the majority of your people 'you are sucker loser idiots for working these jobs, you should really do something else'. Long term, that isn't going to work for society.

Look at China. The people were fine with whatever, as long as incomes were going up. America was the same. Give people the American dream, and you can do what you want at the top. Take it away and at the same time say 'yeah, of course your life is going to suck, you are a dumb worker who deserves nothing, have you tried not being that?' isn't a winning tagline for a company/a society.
by setgree | 2025-08-22 17:43:35+00:00
Semi-related, but just once in my life, I want to hear a mayoral candidate say: “I endorse broken windows theory, but for drivers. You honk when there’s no emergency, block the box, roll through a stop sign — buddy that’s a ticket. Do it enough and we’ll impound your car.”

Who knows, maybe we’ll start taking our cues from our polite new robot driver friends…
by leptons | 2025-08-22 17:43:36+00:00
It takes way more time to explain, and then re-explain, and then re-re-re-explain to the LLM what I want the code to do. No, it isn't because I don't understand LLMs, it's because LLMs don't understand, period. Trying to coax a fancy word predictor to output the correct code can be extremely frustrating especially when I know how to write the code.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-08-22 17:44:31+00:00
As a tech lead I have reviewed code written by junior engineers and written by AI, and there is a very clear difference between the two.

You also seem to be missing the point that if vibe coding lets your engineers write 10x the amount of code they previously could in the same working hours, you now have to review 10x that amount.

It's easy to see how there is an instant bottleneck here...

Or maybe you're saying that the same amount of code is written when vibe-coding than when writing by hand, and if that's the case then obviously there's absolutely no reason to vibe-code.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-22 17:45:05+00:00
While I get the point... to be pedantic though, Napster (first gen), Gnutella and iPod were mostly download and listen offline experiences and not necessarily live streaming.

Another major difference, is we're near the limits to the approaches being taking for computing capability... most dialup connections, even on "56k" modems were still lucky to get 33.6kbps down and very common in the late 90's, where by the mid-2000's a lot of users had at least 512kbps-10mbps connections (where available) and even then a lot of people didn't see broadband until the 2010's.

that's at least a 15x improvement, where we are far less likely to see even a 3-5x improvement on computing power over the next decade and a half. That's also a lot of electricity to generate on an ageing infrastructure that barely meets current needs in most of the world... even harder on "green" options.
by MostlyStable | 2025-08-22 17:45:09+00:00
I'm someone who enjoys figuring out the details of making a nice looking plot (in base R, I can't stand ggplot), but even as someone who enjoys it, LLMs are pretty much good enough that if I explain to them how I want the plot to look and how my data is structured, they can generate code that works first shot. It seems to me that, at this point, if you are already doing some coding in one of the above languages but either don't like or aren't comfortable making the plots using them, that LLMs can solve it for you. Unless they are significantly worse in the non-R options (which could be the case, It wouldn't surprise me if R has more plotting examples in the training set than the other languages).
by tonymet | 2025-08-22 17:45:50+00:00
If AI is truly this effective, we would be selling 10x-10Kx more stuff, building 10x more features (and more quickly), improving quality & reliability 10x. There would be no reason to fire anyone because the owners would be swimming in cash. I'm talking good old-fashioned greed here.

You don't fire people if you anticipate a 100x growth. Who cares about saving 0.1% of your money in 10 years? You want to sell 100x / 1000x/ 10000x more .

So the story is hard to swallow. The real reason is as usual, they anticipate a downturn and want to keep earnings stable.
by roscas | 2025-08-22 17:46:11+00:00
No surprises there.

I think by now we all know how Twitter operates.

I only used Twitter during the last few months and only on race day. One day reported some girls because they wanted Max to die like Senna did, just because they were HUGE fans of some other driver... it is number 44, don't know the name.

Guess who was banned for some days? Yep, not them.

I noticed that when I enter back a few weeks later, so the ban was over already.
by potatolicious | 2025-08-22 17:47:03+00:00
> "Why does having launched in other cities matter if the new city brings up things that none of the other launched cities do?"

New requirements come up all the time in technology. The existence of a new requirement isn't in and of itself justification for skepticism - is there a particular reason to believe that Waymo is not capable of solving for the new requirement?

The answer may be yes, but simply "ahah! It would need to do [new thing]!" is insufficient. "[new thing] is likely intractable because [reason]" would be more justification for skepticism.

> "It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice."

Sure, but like above - is there a reason this is an intractable problem?

I'll throw this out there: your human-driven car already accounts for acceleration and braking on slippery roads, without the need for the human. Traction control systems and electronic stability control systems exist! They're in fact incredibly common on modern cars.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-08-22 17:47:37+00:00
A fair point about weather, but a lot of the assertions are like "how will they handle the double parking and suicidal pedestrians jaywalking across the street??" I'd say most of the concerns just don't sound very unique at all.

For weather, Waymo has clearly started out in warmer climates while slowly building out towards places with colder and colder weather, I'm guessing they're just incrementally getting better at it.
by filmgirlcw | 2025-08-22 17:47:44+00:00
For Mac users, ffWorks [1] is an amazing frontend for FFmpeg that surfaces most of the features but with a decent GUI. It’s batchable and you can setup presets too. It’s one of my favorite apps and the developer is very responsive.

Handbrake and Losslssscut are great too. But in addition to donating to FFmpeg, I pay for ffWorks because it really does offer a lot of value to me. I don’t think there is anything close to its polish on other platforms, unfortunately.

[1]: https://www.ffworks.net/index.html
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-22 17:47:49+00:00
I appreciate the answer. I guess "attending a protest" falls under "public awareness" or "cultural legitimacy" if the protest is specifically about the organization being unpopular or demonized. Sticking with the Gaza situation example, most protests are along the lines of "Israel shouldn't do that" and not "Hamas needs more support". Claiming otherwise seems massively disingenuous; it's obvious that people oppose terrorism and Israel's actions for largely the same reasons.
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-22 17:48:00+00:00
I think the article could be more accurately titled "A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Programmers who hate their job"

To me, someone who actually love programming, it makes vibe coding look like hell.

> The workflow of vibe coding is the same as managing scrums or helping a student through a research thesis

Which programmer wants that?! Just hearing the word "scrum" makes me want to run away and I know I am not alone here. Helping a student through a research thesis doesn't sound so bad, because as a human, helping people feels good. But here, there is no student, no human feelings, and you are not even helping the AI become better in the long term.
by boringg | 2025-08-22 17:48:03+00:00
I can't wait to hear how it goes in NYC -- its going to be a total cluster - with the significantly more chaotic behavior on the streets, bike scooters, pedestrians and then the oddness of the streets/aggressive driving necessary behavior.

Give it one month if they saturate it too much there will be political blowback on waymos causing traffic chaos. Queue track record in SF as datapoints.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-08-22 17:48:09+00:00
>If I freeze 40 yo Einstein and make it so he can't form new memories beyond 5 minutes, that's still an incredibly useful, generally intelligent thing.

But every time you tried to get him to do something you'd have to teach him from first principles. Good luck getting ChatStein to interact with the internet, to write code or design a modern airplane. Even in physics, he'd be using antiquated methods and assumptions, this getting worse as time progresses(like sib comment I believe was alluding to).

And don't even get me started on the language barrier.

I recently read this short story[1] on the topic so it's fresh on my mind.

[1]https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
by 47282847 | 2025-08-22 17:48:11+00:00
Personal anecdote: when I was 10 or so, a relative passed away and all children in the family inherited around 20k each. It was put into a fund. I think I got full authority over my share at 16 or so. It always felt like I was rich — that was a lot of money for a child to “own“. I have never touched it to this day, only ever adding savings to it, but it gave me a lot of peace of mind to know that I could, if I ever needed to. So, ultimately, it wouldn’t have mattered if I ever had it, or it was just a made up number on some paper; I am certain it fundamentally influenced my life in very positive ways.

Another trait about money that I inherited is all generations in my family since and including my grandparents never had any debt. Being in debt even just for a short period would totally stress me out. I only ever buy what I can afford to without credit.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-08-22 17:48:13+00:00
NYPD cops don't like enforcing traffic violations: https://i.redd.it/w6es37v1sqpc1.png (License holders and drivers on the road are up in the same period that summonses are down, too. Traffic is up since pre-covid.)

Now that I live in Toronto we face the same challenges. Politicians may introduce traffic laws to curb dangers and nuisances from drivers, but police refuse to enforce them. As they don't live in the city, cops seem to prefer to side with drivers over local pedestrians, residents or cyclists who they view antagonistically. Broken window works for them because they enjoy harassing pedestrians and residents of the communities they commute into.

So there is a bigger problem to solve than legislation.
by rollcat | 2025-08-22 17:48:17+00:00
That's a bit unfair to the modern compilers - there's a lot more standards to adhere to, more (micro)architectures, frontends need to plug into IRs into optimisers into codegen, etc. Some of it is self-inflicted: do you need yet-another 0.01% optimisation? At the cost of maintainability, or even correctness? (Hello, UB.) But most of it is just computers evolving.

But those are not rules. If you're doing stuff for fun, check out QBE <https://c9x.me/compile/> or Plan 9 C <https://plan9.io/sys/doc/comp.html> (which Go was derived from!)
by simonw | 2025-08-22 17:48:23+00:00
Couldn't agree more. The only way to really get effective at using this stuff is to spend time with it, building up intuition about what it can and cannot do.

Playing with it is a great way to do that.

If there is something you are certain it won't be able to do, it's worth giving it a go anyway. Most of the time you will be right - and will still learn something new in confirming that and watching the way in which it fails. Very occasionally you'll be wrong and you will discover a new capability that surprises you.
by binoct | 2025-08-22 17:48:27+00:00
Launching in other cities with new problems gives experience dealing with new problems, and the meta-learnings transfer to better processes for adapting to new issues. But yeah, ice and snow are definitely major new environmental factors for New York (and DC, and many other places we are starting to see more serious testing).

Autonomous vehicles can and do take into account surface conditions, there’s not really any reason not to. There are pretty good generative models of the physics of vehicles with different surface conditions, and I imagine part of the data collection they are doing is to help build statistical of vehicle performance based on sensed conditions.
by throwway120385 | 2025-08-22 17:48:50+00:00
And I believe all of this conflation of entering the country illegally with overstaying a visa or violating the restrictions on a visa having passed through a Border Control checkpoint is at the heart of a lot of what's happening right now. The whole concept of "illegal immigration" was expanded to contain this other category of person who went through Border Control properly, they have a passport from their home country with a stamp or a visa, but they are not complying with the requirements of the visa or for the entry stamp. These people are not criminals and many of them have put down roots here and would be model citizens if they had citizenship.

Because ICE is having a lot of trouble finding enough people who crossed illegally to round up and put in concentration camps, they're scouring the country for people in the other category. And in many cases the threat of visa cancellation is being used to suppress political speech. A lot of people don't know that because they don't understand that there's a way to get here legally that doesn't involve getting citizenship or a green card. I think if you've never left the country it probably doesn't occur to you that there's a whole system of checkpoints that you can use to enter the country but almost zero control after that other than your own good faith efforts. And this is true just about everywhere else in the world.
by therobots927 | 2025-08-22 17:49:01+00:00
Pretty telling how you dismiss what appears to be the majority opinion online just because it’s a majority opinion. Irrational exuberance is defined in the context of market participants. On a wealth adjusted basis commenters online make up a very small % of shareholders in AI related tech stocks. At least on HN many users are engineers meaning they are close to the metal so to speak whereas the people making investment decisions pride themselves on being detached from technical work even if they pretend to be technically competent in public.
by kevincox | 2025-08-22 17:49:03+00:00
I think taxis have a place even in cities with great transportation. I live in Toronto and 90% of my commuting is walking, 8% public transit and 2% driving. But there are some trips that would be very difficult to do a way other than driving (for example carrying lots of stuff or awkward cargo) and taxis fill that gap wonderfully. Especially if self-driving taxis could handle long trips a lot better as inter-city is a place where Toronto public transit unfortunately sucks (for example visiting my parents in cottage country).
by dang | 2025-08-22 17:50:18+00:00
Related. Others? (Also, anybody know the answer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987514?)

It’s not wrong that " ".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443 - June 2023 (303 comments)

String length functions for single emoji characters evaluate to greater than 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591373 - March 2021 (127 comments)

String Lengths in Unicode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914184 - Sept 2019 (140 comments)
by takkatakka | 2025-08-22 17:50:24+00:00
The method I've been going with recently is to just clone an existing app. I was inspired by max rozen blogging about building the '200th uptime checker'. https://maxrozen.com/#bootstrapping-onlineornot

I've made a pdf bankstatement to csv app and now working on a session recording app.

The bank statement tool hovered around break even, but ultimately I shut it down since I hit a point where I was just grinding out integrations with different pdf bank statements, which got old, and had no end in sight.
by cma | 2025-08-22 17:50:42+00:00
These tariffs may have representation, but constitutionally not from the right representative. Congress has the authority and only delegated it to the president in limited circumstances that don't apply. Trump says the ones on China are imposed for fentanyl being shipped in by mail and other means, and within days of saying that pardoned the largest opiates by mail operator in US history, Ross Ulbricht.
by ofrzeta | 2025-08-22 17:50:50+00:00
LLMs just can't learn or understand from the context. The context is there to somehow statistically affect the token production but there is no real understanding. You can provide an LLM a full specification of a problem including all elements that are needed to solve it, for instance all specific functions of a programming library (that is not on the Internet). An competent programmer could read this and implement the solution straightforward. With LLMs this does not work - they still confidently continue producing wrong solutions, though.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-22 17:51:08+00:00
There's no fairy dust there, but that doesn't mean we understand how it works. There's no fairy dust in human brain either.

Today's mathematical background applied to frontier systems is a bit like trying to understand how a web browser works from knowing how a transistor works. The mismatch is palpable.

Sure, if you descend to a low enough level, you wouldn't find any magic fairy dust - it's transistors as far as eye can see. But "knowing how a transistor works" doesn't come close to capturing the sheer complexity. Low level knowledge does not automatically translate to high level knowledge.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-08-22 17:51:12+00:00
> it doesn't believe VPNs should be outlawed

That still leaves space for a lot of unpleasant, but plausible, alternatives:

* Banning under-18s from using VPNs; enforced by ordering Visa+Mastercard to deny UK-originating payments to VPN operators that don't verify their users' identity.

* Introducing a "VPN license"; initially only granted to large corporate users. All encrypted VPN traffic will be required to periodically broadcast their VPN license-number in cleartext so that ISP-based traffic monitoring will let it pass, otherwise the connection will be reset.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-08-22 17:51:38+00:00
By the ballot box, the less complex system of values that is the right did not lose out to the more complex system of values one may call the left. But that's not within the realm of cybernetics.

The business cycle model of yours might have be fully understandable within cybernetics, especially in the time series respect. But are we not also interested in competing/interacting "peer" systems "beyond mean field"? How Apple and Desktop Linux gained ground against MSoft by reducing fragmentation, how MSoft responded by diversifying. You might have other examples for and against?
by uncircle | 2025-08-22 17:51:38+00:00
> I think the article could be more accurately titled "A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Programmers who hate their job"

Given how “vibe coding” is all about explaining clearly the requirements and defining context, it’s for programmers who should have chosen middle management as a career.

To actual programmers that enjoy the craft, using an LLM means ruining the beautiful art of abstraction and mental visualisation of a complex piece of logic, by putting it through the very lossy process of explaining it into words. It would be a bit like a composer or a painter having to use words instead of leveraging their well-honed instinct.