MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-18 15:46:00+00:00
> But the LLM can tell meemaw to reset her dang router. If that's all you consider support to be (which is almost certainly the case if you outsource it), then you stand nothing to lose from using AI.

I worked in a call center before getting into tech when I was young. I don't have any hard statistics, but by far the majority of calls to support were basic questions or situations (like Meemaw's router) that could easily be solved with a chatbot. If not that, the requests that did require action on accounts could be handled by an LLM with some guardrails, if we can secure against prompt injection.

Companies can most likely eliminate a large chunk of customer service employees with an LLM and the customers would barely notice a difference.
by unethical_ban | 2025-08-18 15:46:03+00:00
Thanks to both for recommending roo, it is the closest I've gotten. I still can't get it to work the way I expect.

When I use qwen coder 30B directly to create a small demo web page, it gives me apl the files and filenames. When I do the same thing in roo chat (set to coder) and it runs around in circles, doesn't build multiple files and eventually crashes out.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-18 15:46:07+00:00
Yes, that and edge platform integration with cloud services.

It’s complicated and difficult - I say fail in the “fail fast” sense, not as an insult. Where are the line(s) between Excel as a component of Windows, as a web service and as a node on the office graph?

If I need AI help integrated with the product to write Excel formulas, I think the way to get that from Microsoft is with Copilot for Office 365, which also accesses all of my data on the graph and can potentially leak stuff with web grounding. (Which for companies means you need to fix SharePoint governance and do lots of risk assessment #godbless)

I just go to ChatGPT.
by bzmrgonz | 2025-08-18 15:46:11+00:00
I love this, I think this brings "block editing" capabilities to the masses, which is a big selling point for WordPress. In recent months, I've been looking at micro-sites and I concluded that Carrd is king for this type of landing pages/microsites. So this looks very promising for this respect. Either of you care to share or dispel security concerns or describe attack surface? For the past 6 months I've been looking at HUGO sites and the simplest deployment approach I found was alpine/sqlite/hugo containers at 5-10mb in size. Is there a way to delegate control/editing of sections/pages? I think the world needs a simple platform to build sites and delegates sections to respective departments/units. The only platform which seems solid for this is drupal, but it's kind of overkill for SMB orgs.
by eloisius | 2025-08-18 15:46:12+00:00
I deleted the apps too, but unfortunately I still like to use Instagram to follow photographers I'm interested in. These uBlock Origin filter rules have made it usable without being a black hole for my attention:

www.instagram.com##article:has( > div > div > span:has-text(Suggested for you)):style(opacity: 0% !important;) www.instagram.com##div:has(> span > div > a[href="/explore/"]) www.instagram.com##div:has(> span > div > a[href="/reels/"])
by thisisit | 2025-08-18 15:46:17+00:00
More and more companies are focusing on costs and timelines over anything else. That means if they are convinced that AI can move things faster and be cost efficient they are going to use more AI and revise cost and time downwards.

AI can write plausible code without stopping. So, not only you get sheer volume of PRs going up at the same time you might be asked to do things "faster" because you can always use AI. I am sure some CTOs might even say - why not use AI to review AI code to make it faster?

Not to mention previously the random people submitting malicious PRs needed to have some experience. But now every script kiddie can get LLMs to out the malicious PRs without knowledge and scale. How is that not a "security nightmare"?
by reactordev | 2025-08-18 15:46:47+00:00
maybe, maybe not. I don't want to live in a world where I can't develop software without the support of a massive corporation 3rd party. I think local model inference is going to pick up. Will it ever compete with the clusters? no, but it's good enough for a solo to get work done.

I could be wrong and we could be seeing the ladders being pulled up now, moats being filled with alligators and sharks, and soon we'll have no choice but to choose between providers. I hope we can keep the hacking/tinkering culture alive when we can no longer run things ourselves.
by hereme888 | 2025-08-18 15:47:18+00:00
AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees.

It also improves brand reputation by actually paying attention to what customers are saying and responding in a timely manner, with expert-level knowledge, unlike typical customer service reps.

I've used LLMs to help me fix Windows issues using pretty advanced methods, that MS employees would have just told me to either re-install Windows or send them the laptop and pay $hundreds.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-18 15:47:36+00:00
I've tried to express a similar sentiment to people in the past - that 443rd redesign of the UI for JIRA that moves a button from one side to another. It isn't actually for you. You aren't the user of the software. The user of the software is the product manager (or equivalent role). They need to justify their current role or their next promotion.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-18 15:47:44+00:00
Not if every manufacturing company in the world decided to use your software anyway.

ERP rollouts can "fail" for lots of reasons that aren't to do with the software. They are usually business failures. Mostly, companies end up spending so much on trying to endlessly customize it to their idiosyncratic workflows that they exceed their project budgets and abandon the effort. In really bad cases like Birmingham they go live before actually finishing setup, and then lose control of their books and have to resort to hiring people to do the admin manually.

There's a saying about SAP: at some point gaining competitive advantage in manufacturing/retail became all about who could make SAP deployment a success.

This is no different to many other IT projects, most of them fail too. I think people who have never worked in an enterprise context don't realize that; it's not like working in the tech sector. In the tech industry if a project fails, it's probably because it was too ambitious and the tech itself just didn't work well. Or it was a startup whose tech worked, but they couldn't find PMF. But in normal, mature, profitable non-tech businesses a staggering number of business automation projects just fail for social or business reasons.

AI deployments inside companies are going to be like that. The tech works. The business side problems are where the failures are going to happen. Reasons will include:

• Not really knowing what they want the AI to do.

• No way to measure improved productivity, so no way to decide if the API spend is worth it.

• Concluding the only way to get a return is entirely replace people with AI and then having to re-hire them because the AI can't handle the last 5% of the work.

• Non-tech executives doing deals to use models or tech stacks that aren't the right kind or good enough.

etc
by globular-toast | 2025-08-18 15:48:20+00:00
> How many programmer hours have been wasted because of trivial coding errors?

Historically probably quite a lot, but with a decent editor and tools like gofmt that became popular in the past 10 years I'd say syntax is just not a problem any more. I can definitely recall the frustration of a missing closing bracket in HTML in the 90s, but nowadays people can turn out perfectly syntactically correct code on day 1 of a new language.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-18 15:48:33+00:00
> they will test it regularly and if it doesn't work get it fixed.

What is your definition of regularly, and what qualifies as getting it fixed? I know lots of places that had things scheduled, but on the day of, something "came up" that the test was pushed. I've seen others where they tested by only firing up the generator, but didn't actually use it to power the facility. I've also seen repair tags that sat "unlooked" at for years.

Not every facility is managed/financed the same for such a blanket statement as yours.
by evklein | 2025-08-18 15:48:41+00:00
Well I'd probably consider myself a materialist but I'm not sure I'd agree. The evidence to me seems that it can really only come from two places: additional compute or new breakthroughs in AI learning. Compute's coming, certainly, but that only has the potential to improve things if it's added in conjunction with a commensurate AI breakthrough. I think the trend in improvement for transformer could be logistic, not exponential, like a lot of the snake-oil salesman like to state. And while there's plenty of evidence for compute there isn't much for the AI breakthrough that leads to an exponential jump, and if it does exist it's a trade secret, so until we know we don't know.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-18 15:49:06+00:00
> problem with MCP right now is that LLMs don't natively know what it is

Most models that it is used with natively know what tools are (they are trained with particular prompt formats for the use of arbitrary tools), and the model never sees MCP at all, it just sees tool definitions, or tool responses, in the format it expects in prompts. MCPs are a way to communicate information about tools to the toolchain running the LLM, when the LLM sees information that came via MCP it is indistinguishable from tools that might be built into the toolchain or provided by another mechanism.
by jbreckmckye | 2025-08-18 15:49:09+00:00
> 5% is pretty damn good, when AI clearly has a lot of room to get better.

That depends if the AI successes depended much on the leading edge of LLM developments, or if actually most of the value was just "low hanging fruit".

If the latter, that would imply the utility curve is levelling out, because new developments are not proving instrumental enough.

I'm thinking of an S curve: slow improvements through the 2010s, then a burst of activity as the tech became good enough to do something "real", followed by more gradual wins in efficiency and accuracy.
by jmyeet | 2025-08-18 15:49:44+00:00
I agree on time frames. This system can limp on for decades yet. Or fall apart in 5 years (though probably not).

As for the tech gap, I disagree.

The history of post-WW2 warfare is that asymmetric warfare has been profoundly successful, to the poin twhere the US hasn't won a single war (except, arguably, Grenada, if that counts, which it does not) since 1945. And that's a country that spends more on defence that something like the next 23 countries combined (IIRC).

Obviously war isn't exact the same thing but it's honestly not that different to suppressing violent dissent. The difficulty (since 1945) hasn't been defeating an opposing military on the battlefield. The true cost is occupying territory after the fact. And that is basically the same thing.

Ordinary people may not have reeaper drones and as we've seen in Ukraine, consumer drops are still capable of dropping a hand grenade.

Suppressing an insurrection or revolt is unbelievably expensive in terms of manpower, equipment and political will. It is absolutely untenable in the long term.
by more_corn | 2025-08-18 15:50:13+00:00
Rules like hardening your system to be resilient in high or low temperatures.

Super abusive. Let’s do away with safety systems that literally save human lives. Heck Texas doesn’t like them so let’s do away with them for the whole nation? How many people died during the last couple heat and cold induced grid outages in Texas? I lost count after a couple dozen. But those people were weak or poor anyway right? Texas strong!
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-18 15:50:18+00:00
> I always think I should do more work stuff, to attempt to get ahead on some project

Are you a manager? Are you, personally, responsible for this stuff working or not working?

If not, don't let it hang over your head. You work at the circus with the monkeys, but they are not in any way meaningfully your circus or your monkeys.
by strictnein | 2025-08-18 15:50:19+00:00
> "“Every single Monday was called 'AI Monday.' You couldn’t have customer calls, you couldn’t work on budgets, you had to only work on AI projects.”"

> "Vaughan saw that his team was not fully on board. His ultimate response? He replaced nearly 80% of the staff within a year"

Being that this is Fortune magazine, it makes sense that they're portraying it this way, but reading between the lines there a little bit, it seems like the staff knew what would happen and wasn't keen on replacing themselves.
by chubot | 2025-08-18 15:50:38+00:00
This seems to jump straight into type inference and bidirectional type checking, without a basic UNI-directional type checker

e.g. Featherweight Java (chapter 19 of TAPL by Pierce) is expressed with a simple unidirectional algorithm

And some of the languages in the PL Zoo - https://plzoo.andrej.com/

like https://github.com/andrejbauer/plzoo/blob/master/src/sub/typ... , although I am not quite sure

related thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/sq3z3...

---

I also think these statements are suspect:

We’re going to create minimal implementations of the most successful static type systems of the last 50 years.

As a result, many modern statically-typed languages have converged on a practical and elegant middle ground: bidirectional type checking.

I think what is missing in both statements is the word FUNCTIONAL.

e.g. Go, Rust, Swift, D, and Zig are modern statically typed languages, that are not functional. And I'm not sure if the authors would consider them "bidirectional"

I would like to see someone write about that. (I posed this query to 3 LLMs, and they mostly agree that those languages don't use bidirectional type checking; however I am wary of repeating AI slop)

e.g. this is a very good survey along those lines: https://thume.ca/2019/07/14/a-tour-of-metaprogramming-models...

---

This part also reminds me of Against Curry-Howard Mysticism - https://liamoc.net/forest/loc-000S/index.xml - https://lobste.rs/s/n0whur/against_curry_howard_mysticism

A deep insight has been unfolding since the late 1970s, a revelation that three immense, seemingly distinct realms of human thought are echoes of a single, deeper reality.
Show HN: I forced an AI Agent to write boring Java Unit Tests for me on IntelliJ
by surajkrajan | 2025-08-18 15:51:13+00:00
Docs : https://jaipilot.vercel.app Plugin link : https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/27706

My fellow Java software engineers - I know you work on large enterprise software and are forced to write JUnit Unit Tests for your repos to increase test coverage. I know and you know that we all collectively hate doing this - even those super senior java legends who advocate TDD.

I have spent a lot of my waking (and non-waking) hours on building this free plugin to make our lives easier. The plugin is open source. The plugin runs natively in IntelliJ and can simply be executed by a right-click. And there in one go the LLM generates a fully functional JUnit Test class for your source class.

You would need your own Google Gemini key though to execute it. If you don't have one - do signup & register for JAIPilot Pro ($20 for 10000 lines of code) (https://jaipilot.vercel.app/) and you will get a license key that you can use.

Do check it out - let me know if you need free credits here on this thread or contact me on (https://jaipilot.vercel.app/contact_us) I will get free credits arranged for you to try it out.

And don't worry - this is safe to run on your enterprise code. I don't store logs or your data mainly because my backend is vercel/supabase and they are charging me extra to store logs (:P). Since I don't save logs and am not tracking you - please contact me immediately in case of any issues or support so that I can help you out. I have just set up my discord - do join : https://discord.gg/BE579j7mKH

I hope this helps us all. Thanks.
by quantumcotton | 2025-08-18 15:51:21+00:00
What if, the software is significantly more robust than Dodge Chevy Honda or Kia. But! Check this out what if you were offered an additional layer of security? You can choose it or not. It's an option. I didn't see these being easier to steal than a car using a canbus.... If it is. Sure free upgrade. But if this is improving a system that is already less vulnerable than 50% of vehicles. I can see why they'd charge.
by torginus | 2025-08-18 15:51:52+00:00
I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue.

At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed vendor tools we were dissatisfied with, to an in-house solution.

I'm sure the company we were ordering from misses the revenue. The SaaS industry is full of products whose value proposition is 'it's cheaper to buy the product from us than hire a guy who handles it in house'
by lxgr | 2025-08-18 15:51:58+00:00
It's a real shame phones don't have something like this built in. I mean, we literally have satellite communication in every iPhone – or, depending on how you count, every LTE phone, period!

Technically, it seems like 90% of what's required is already there anyway, but due to commercial and political pressures, we'll probably never see it happen.
by reactordev | 2025-08-18 15:52:11+00:00
doubtful. I think this is a classic case of Sam downplaying it so that others get discouraged and exit the market. He's stated a few times that the improvements from GPT-3 to GPT-4 were "minimal" when they clearly weren't.

I also think they intentionally hamstrung GPT-5 to back this claim so that they can slow down and focus. Just my gut feeling though and I have nothing to back my claim.
by bmacho | 2025-08-18 15:52:12+00:00
I was annoyed too when they started to close off HTML as a local platform.

But! it is still very open (you complain about audio and javascript but they both work) also I've figured that it isn't really much of a problem to start a python/node webserver for the things I'm not allowed to do. Literally a fraction of a second. Just set up a "webserver_here" command in your terminal, or keep one running constantly. Also I'm starting to fear local HTML more and more, I'd actually be happier with a much stricter boundary.
by themaninthedark | 2025-08-18 15:52:12+00:00
But it's not like China had the skills, tooling and supply chain to begin with....and it's not like the US suddenly stopped having all those things. There are reasons manufacturing moved out of the US and it was not "They are soooo much better at all the things over there!"

Tim Cook had a direct hand in this and know it and is now deflecting because it looks bad.

One of the comments on the video puts it way better than I could:

@cpaviolo : "He’s partially right, but when I began my career in the industry 30 years ago, the United States was full of highly skilled workers. I had the privilege of being mentored by individuals who had worked on the Space Shuttle program—brilliant professionals who could build anything. I’d like to remind Mr. Cook that during that time, Apple was manufacturing and selling computers made in the U.S., and doing so profitably.

Things began to change around 1996 with the rise of outsourcing. Countless shops were forced to close due to a sharp decline in business, and many of those exceptionally skilled workers had to find jobs in other industries. I remember one of my mentors, an incredibly talented tool and die maker, who ended up working as a bartender at the age of 64.

That generation of craftsmen has either retired or passed away, and the new generation hasn’t had the opportunity to learn those skills—largely because there are no longer places where such expertise is needed. On top of that, many American workers were required to train their Chinese replacements. Jobs weren’t stolen by China; they were handed over by American corporations, led by executives like Tim Cook, in pursuit of higher profits."
by CPLX | 2025-08-18 15:52:23+00:00
It’s all this but don’t underestimate predictability. If you own a home with a fixed rate mortgage you know what your payment is and it doesn’t change. You know where your kids are going to grow up.

Sure you might need a new roof and insurance and taxes fluctuate but that’s a BIG BIG deal as anyone who’s rented and been at the mercy of markets can tell you.

This is even more true now as the rental market (like so many markets) is coming to be dominated by corporate landlord La using revenue extracting software.
by magnat | 2025-08-18 15:52:29+00:00
> LoRa can reach a range of up to 3 miles (4.8 km) in urban areas, and up to 10 miles (16 km) in rural areas

In mountainous area LoRa on 868MHz band reaches over 100km. Last month we had a stratospheric balloon with a Meshtastic node attached. It established direct (albeit intermittent) connection between Warsaw and Berlin.
by skmurphy | 2025-08-18 15:52:48+00:00
Key points

We had the DeepSeek Moment because of a confluence of factors misled people:

1. The ‘six million dollar model’ narrative gave a false impression on cost.

2. They offered a good clean app with visible chain of thought, it went viral.

3. The new style caused an overestimate of model quality.

4. Timing was impeccable, both in order of model releases and within the tech tree.

5. Safety testing and other steps were skipped, leaving various flaws, and this was a pure fast follow, but in our haste no one took any of that into account.

6. A false impression of ‘momentum’ and stories about Chinese momentum.

7. The ‘always insist open models will win’ crowd amplified the vibes.

8. The stock market was highly lacking in situational awareness, suddenly realizing various known facts and also misunderstanding many important factors.

GPT-5 is now having a Reverse DeepSeek Moment, including many direct parallels.

1. GPT-5 is evaluated as if it was scaling up compute in a way that it doesn’t. In various ways people are assuming it ‘cost’ far more than it did.

2. OpenAI offered a poor initial experience with rate caps and lost models and missing features, a broken router, and complaints about losing 4o’s sycophancy went viral.

3. The new style, and people evaluating GPT-5 when they should have been evaluating GPT-5-Thinking, caused an underestimate of model quality.

4. Timing was directly after Anthropic, and previous releases had already eaten the most impressive recent parts of the tech tree, so gains incorrectly looked small.

5. GPT-5 is a refinement of previous models optimized for efficiency, and is breaking new territory, and that is not being taken into account.

6. A false impression of hype and a story about a loss of momentum.

7. The ‘OpenAI is flailing’ crowd and the open model crowd amplified the vibes.

8. The stock market actually was smart this time and shrugged it off, that’s a hint.

What matters here is that we not fool ourselves into a Reverse DeepSeek Moment, in three ways:

1. America is still well out in front, innovating and making rapid progress in AI.

2. AGI is still probably coming and we need to plan accordingly.

3. Export controls on China are still vital.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-18 15:53:05+00:00
Road design in towns and cities is probably the biggest example of the POSIWID principle that people interact with daily. In some cases, we know from historical record that the disruption created to communities was actually intentional (highways in many major cities were built through minority communities because they were less politically distasteful to displace or destroy). But even when it wasn't, many American cities have been carved up by arterial roads that have converted livable areas to ghost towns; when a highway cuts you off from the grocery store, you suddenly need a car to buy food where you didn't before, and that forces people from their homes.

Now that we recognize these effects, we can start addressing them.