MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-08-21 23:28:18+00:00
> when people post how many LoC they introduced.

Pretty ironic you and the GP talk about lines of code.

From the article:

Garman is also not keen on another idea about AI – measuring its value by what percentage of code it contributes at an organization. “It’s a silly metric,” he said, because while organizations can use AI to write “infinitely more lines of code” it could be bad code. “Often times fewer lines of code is way better than more lines of code,” he observed. “So I'm never really sure why that's the exciting metric that people like to brag about.”

I'm with Garman here. There's no clean metric for how productive someone is when writing code. At best, this metric is naive, but usually it is just idiotic.

Bureaucrats love LoC, commits, and/or Jira tickets because they are easy to measure but here's the truth: to measure the quality of code you have to be capable of producing said code at (approximately) said quality or better. Data isn't just "data" that you can treat as a black box and throw in algorithms. Data requires interpretation and there's no "one size fits all" solution. Data is nothing without its context. It is always biased and if you avoid nuance you'll quickly convince yourself of falsehoods. Even with expertise it is easy to convince yourself of falsehoods. Without expertise it is hopeless. Just go look at Reddit or any corner of the internet where there's armchair experts confidently talking about things they know nothing about. It is always void of nuance and vastly oversimplified. But humans love simplicity. You need to recognize our own biases.
by simianwords | 2025-08-21 23:28:25+00:00
Fair, lets then count income tax which makes it more like $500 assuming net taxes around 40%. I'm ignoring salary increase due to stock valuation going up because it complicates things and there is equal force from both sides of the argument.

So you decide: 20,000 companies running with a CEO being paid like an average person. And every citizen gets $500 in their account per year.

Edit: its not just a CEO but the C suite. 20,000 running without a C suite.
by iLemming | 2025-08-21 23:28:36+00:00
I wonder if the choice of programming language for vibecoding actually would become more relevant rather than less so. Initial collective instinct suggests that perhaps languages don't really matter anymore since LLMs help promote PL egalitarianism, but then if it's as the OP describes it - humans are now becoming code reviewers, maybe different aspects of various languages start granting practical advantages, like Clojure connected to a REPL allowing rapid execution/validation of generated code blocks, or advanced static type systems (Haskel, Rust, etc.) providing an edge from another angle?
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-08-21 23:29:11+00:00
> Once the buyback is done, what's keeping that share price from sliding right back down to earth?

The plan really seems for the buyback never to be done. Or only in case of economy-wide disruption when there is something to blame— a kind of reverse-Buffet.

In fact , adding more punch to the bowl is a key advantage over the legacy tender offer process— tenders directly compete for shares for just a little while. Buybacks, while they have limits, are much more persistent and flexible.

Perhaps it was some historical accident that when the SEC made reacquiring shares easier, everyone started doing more of it … but at some point the explanations of efficient capital allocation just become too much.
by danudey | 2025-08-21 23:29:24+00:00
TL;DR having a class that determines if some other class is a subclass of itself based off of arbitrary logic and then using that arbitrary logic to categorize other people's arbitrary classes at runtime is sociopathic.

Some of these examples are similar in effect to what you might do in other languages, where you define an 'interface' and then you check to see if this class follows that interface. For example, you could define an interface DistancePoint which has the fields x and y and a distance() method, and then say "If this object implements this interface, then go ahead and do X".

Other examples, though, are more along the lines of if you implemented an interface but instead of the interface constraints being 'this class has this method' the interface constraints are 'today is Tuesday'. That's an asinine concept, which is what makes this crimes and also hilarious.
by justinrubek | 2025-08-21 23:29:39+00:00
I'm not convinced that diluting it this far is a fully effective thought experiment. If you took half of that $900 and distributed it amongst 500,000 instead of 300 million, then it'd be a more formidable amount. I'm not sure why it needs to be equally distributed. Just putting it back into the economy otherwise is good enough.
by Herring | 2025-08-21 23:30:43+00:00
Is distributing it to individuals the best option? My suggestion would be to first identify the best option, eg improving education usually has a fairly high ROI. That's how taxes are supposed to work.

> “Every dollar we put into high-quality early childhood education we get $7 back in reduced teen pregnancy, improved graduation rates, improved performance in school, reduced incarceration rates. The society as a whole does better.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/04/...
by taeric | 2025-08-21 23:31:01+00:00
I mean, cars per household is 2+ in large portions of the US.

Again, I'm largely inline with what you are speaking towards. The only change I'm making to the discourse is that, if you want fewer people owning cars, you pretty much have to make it more expensive. You can't just make the city more walkable. You have to make it expensive to own cars.

As I say downthread, this is inline with cheaper dense housing. If you want cheaper dense housing, you wind up with smaller living units. Often without dedicated parking allotments for all residents.
by Forlien | 2025-08-21 23:31:04+00:00
You might be interested in https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/giving-people-money-helped-... which talks about the studies showing low effects for just giving money to Americans. It seems like just giving people money is still unproven to have impacts to make people healthier, happier (beyond the year they start giving money), get them better jobs, or improve their children’s intellectual development. There's still hope for targeted programs, but it changed my view on blanket payments.
by athenot | 2025-08-21 23:31:06+00:00
The irony is you can scan a URL with a phone camera and it's clickable, with the nice side-effect that the domain is human-inspectable. Just make the font a little bigger and it scans easily.

QR codes are fascinating though, as they can encode more than mere URLs. But the vast majority in the consumer space are links. For that purpose, I'm rooting for OCR.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-08-21 23:31:12+00:00
> This mechanism isn't dependent on CEO pay, because the CEO is always beholden to the shareholders, and shareholders always want more money

Legally the CEO has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. In practice, can we honestly say that every CEO of a publicly traded corporation acted in the long term interests of EVERY shareholder and didn't just parasitically extract value from the company for themselves and a handful of LARGE shareholders? Facebook is essentially the personal property of Mark Zuckerberg
by sho_hn | 2025-08-21 23:31:31+00:00
There's a lot of discussion about the ethics of AI disclosure going on here, but this maintainer is writing this from a place I recognize - community-driven, participatory development by people who enjoy programming, talking about it, and teaching each other how to do it.

Not every software project needs to attempt to maximize productivity. Not every software project is a business. Some are just created by people who enjoy programming. By hand. It's OK to set that as a culture. I guess I get it.

I don't mind AI tools, I use them judiciously, but sometimes I just want to do some coding - for me it's a genuinely relaxing and mentally satisfying activity to write some good code -, and I'm happy there's still others around me who do as well. Gardening context prompts and what not just isn't nearly as fun as just doing it, and not every project has to be economical. This one is yet another terminal emulator; it's not going to be the next unicorn. But I bet it's fun to hack on.
by ianhawes | 2025-08-21 23:31:50+00:00
Similarly if you seized 100% of the wealth of the top 400 Americans[0] and liquidated all of their assets to cash, then you'd have ~$5.4T (assuming you didn't completely destroy the economy in the process, which you would but for the sake of the argument assume you wouldn't), which is around 15% of the US Public Debt OR about 3 years worth of the U.S. Budget Deficit.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-21 23:31:56+00:00
> Another way to look at it is every single person, including children, are paying $75 a month for executives of 5000 public companies.

No they are not. The economy isn’t a zero-sum game where the only way an executive can get paid is by taking money from a household.

Executive compensation is largely equity based. The mostly equity is new value created in the economy.

Using zero-sum thinking for economic topics like this is very misleading.
by latexr | 2025-08-21 23:32:02+00:00
> Even when you live and breathe AI, the job titles can feel like a moving target. I can only imagine how mystifying they must be to everyone else.

> Because the field is actively evolving, the language we use keeps changing. Brand new titles appear overnight or, worse, one term means three different things at three different companies.

How can you write that and not realise “maybe this is all made up bullshit and everyone is pulling titles out of their asses to make themselves look more important and knowledgeable than they really are, thus I shouldn’t really be wasting my time giving the subject any credence”? If you’re all in on the field and can’t keep up, why should anyone else care?
by nneonneo | 2025-08-21 23:32:56+00:00
I'm confused, because d4d4d4d4 doesn't look like a trap in 32-bit ARM either:

0x0000000000000000: D4 D4 D4 D4 ldrble sp, [r4], #0x4d4

(from https://shell-storm.org/online/Online-Assembler-and-Disassem...)

This is "load byte at [r4 + 0x4d4] into sp, then add 0x4d4 to r4, but only if the condition flags signal a comparison result of less-than-or-equal". It is unlikely to be a useful instruction, since it causes the stack pointer register SP to be less than 0x100 (if [r4+0x4d4] is even a valid address), but it sure as heck isn't a trap. And, if the condition flags are right, this is just a NOP instruction.

As far as I can tell, 0xd4d4d4d4 is only invalid on AArch64, and only because it happens to not yet be a defined instruction. 0xd4 does in fact introduce an exception generation instruction, but 0xd4d4xxxx is invalid as it is an unallocated combination of bits. However, nothing prevents this from being a defined instruction in the future, which makes 0xd4d4d4d4 a really bad choice as it could turn out to be a valid instruction in the future that performs an unexpected operation.

In all, 0xd4 looks like a terrible choice for a padding byte for any ARM architecture, so it's a real mystery why this specific choice was made.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-08-21 23:33:05+00:00
To add to this, Java and other GC languages in some sense have manual memory management too, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise.

It's easy to fall into a trap where your Banana class becomes a GorillaHoldingTheBananaAndTheEntireJungle class(to borrow a phrase from Joe Armstrong), and nothing ever gets freed because everything is always referenced by something else.

Not to mention the dark arts of avoiding long GC pauses etc.

It's possible to do this in rust too, I suppose. The clearest difference is that in rust these things are explicit rather than implicit. To do this in rust you'd have to use 'static, etc. The other distinction is compile-time versus runtime, of course.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-21 23:34:13+00:00
> So you decide: 20,000 companies running with a CEO being paid like an average person. And every citizen gets $500 in their account per year

In these contrived scenarios people will always choose the anti-CEO scenario.

You could restructure your hypothetical scenario such that the money was lit on fire instead of being paid to executives and you’d still find support from people who are just angry at executives getting paid a lot.
by halfcat | 2025-08-21 23:34:23+00:00
> What is the return value of boxplotContainer.append("line")? How do I debug it?

I don’t know D3, but usually in these chaining approaches it would be something like:

boxplotContainer .append("line") .debug(callable_thing) .attr(…)

Where debug() might be pipe() or some variation that lets you provide a callable where you can inspect the data (or drop into an interactive REPL, or whatever).
by herewulf | 2025-08-21 23:35:43+00:00
Best way to get into it is to pick one use case and stick with that for a while. Before you know it, you will want more.

For me it was org mode (with evil mode because I was coming from 15+ years of Vim). Then..

"Oh, I can manage files and edit a directory like a file buffer.."

"Oh, I can SSH into systems and edit files but it doesn't even feel like SSH.."

"Oh, this makes a great, distraction free IDE.."

I recommend a batteries included distro like Doom Emacs or Space Emacs.
by beambot | 2025-08-21 23:36:15+00:00
Forced liquidity and the tax implications can absolutely be bad for investors.

If my option is a 5% dividend or a 5% share buy-back, the net-of-taxes benefit of the 5% dividend is 15%-20% less due to capital gains taxes than the share buy-back. The effect with annual compounding over many years is quite material...
by tomrod | 2025-08-21 23:37:05+00:00
Neoclassical economics recognizes, under the standard macro model, that labor taxation is second best. The first-best is capital taxation, once and for all time, but due to time inconsistency (nothing prevents a government from taxing again in the future) it fails to be useful outside of theory. There is some squishiness once you consider overlapping generations model, arguably more realistic than infinitely lived agents (which I always felt represent companies or familial dynasties more than real people).

Land value taxation is different because there is no meaningful growth or loss of the capital stock.
by kevinrineer | 2025-08-21 23:37:15+00:00
I was able to follow Dan Walsh's example [0].

I tried with Ubuntu just know and there's a 404 for buildah to install via apt at this exact moment. Here's my working Fedora WSL2 (which I prefer and use daily).

$ cat /etc/os-release NAME="Fedora Linux" VERSION="42 (WSL)" RELEASE_TYPE=stable ID=fedora VERSION_ID=42 VERSION_CODENAME="" PLATFORM_ID="platform:f42" PRETTY_NAME="Fedora Linux 42 (WSL)" ... VARIANT="WSL" VARIANT_ID=wsl

[0] - https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/quadlet-podman
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-21 23:37:41+00:00
>Don’t you think it’s selfish when a small minority of people hold on to some fading ideals in a world where people are genuinely better off with more efficiency?

I'm all for more efficiency. Me fumbling with self-checkout is the opposite of efficiency.

What's that? I should learn to do it better? How much would that cost in terms of both time and money? Multiply that by several hundred million, as compared with a few hundred thousand cashiers.

You're saying that (x)250,000,000 < (x)500,000, where x = the cost in time and money to become proficient in checking stuff out. Is that correct?

If so, your math seems a little off. AFAICT, the only folks who get the benefit of this "efficiency" are the store owners who, instead of paying folks to do the job, makes the customer do it instead.

What's that? Those savings are passed along to the customer? Give me even one example of this being the case. I've certainly never seen it.
by drweevil | 2025-08-21 23:38:10+00:00
To me the biggest problem is the over-financialization of almost all aspects of our lives. Our financial sector is much larger now than it was during WWII, when we were facing a national emergency. The emphasis is always on money and double-digit profits; whether it is our health care system, which always weighs our health against investor returns (and are happy to medicate our resulting mental distress, for a nice profit); our jobs, which are structured for "maximum efficiency"--for the owners, of course, at the expense of workers, who get low pay, low satisfaction, and burnout; all the products which we "buy" but don't own; automakers who have "innovated" new ways to squeeze every penny they can out of customers (subscribe to heated seats!).

Tech is not at all exempt from this. If anything tech is more affected by this phenomenon than most other industries due to the nature of its products, which are particularly susceptible to enshitification. Tech has no shame in actively manipulating its users to their ends, as we have seen with social media, and now with this phenomenon of AI psychosis. Further, tech leaders and investors are much more interested in the next unicorn than in meeting real needs and providing genuine user satisfaction. So yes, this is a hot mess. And it is driving people mad. To me, the interesting question is, what can we do to fight back?
by ayyeye2 | 2025-08-21 23:38:13+00:00
While I'm sure this question is being asked in good faith, and this site is certainly the place for discussion regarding such matters, anyone replying might want to consider that you are assiting both sides in the development of this tech by pointing out it's identifying features. All clues to how LLMs generate and display output can then be better hidden from their next iteration.

Think twice; don't feed the beast.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-21 23:38:15+00:00
Tired: advocating for independent third party app stores on behalf of users

Wired: advocating for state-owned third party app stores on behalf of Big Brother

I’m sure there are even groups who would say that all app stores should be state-run, but I think the jokes write themselves in such a scenario, and they’re generally less funny, so I can’t really lampoon it as well as I’d like.

I’d be happy with APT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APT_(software)

Instead we got APT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat
by blurbleblurble | 2025-08-21 23:38:17+00:00
https://youtu.be/klW65MWJ1PY?t=3234

https://youtu.be/klW65MWJ1PY?t=1320

X sucks and should not be allowed to proceed with what they're doing in Memphis. Nor should Meta be allowed to proceed with multiple Manhattan sized data centers.
by danbmil99 | 2025-08-21 23:38:19+00:00
Has anyone else had the experience of dreading a session with Claude, because his personality is often chirpy and annoying; he's always got positive things to say; and working with him as the main code author actually takes away one of the joys of being a programmer -- the ability to interact with a system that is _not_ like people -- it is rigid and deterministic, not all soft and mushy like human beings.

When I write piece of code that is elegant, efficient, and -- "right" -- I get a dopamine rush, like I finished a difficult crossword puzzle. Seems like that joy is going to go away, replaced by something more akin to developing a good relatioship with a slightly quirky colleague who happens to be real good (and fast) at some things -- especially things management likes, like N LOC per week -- but this colleague sucks up to everyone, always thinks they have the right answer, often seems to understand things on a superficial level, and oh -- works for $200 / month...

Shades of outsourcing to other continents...
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-08-21 23:38:22+00:00
But available labor is available labor, for new businesses.

I don't understand why people sit around saying oh the minimum wage is going to increase unemployment and therefore treat minimum wage legislation as apostasy, but some radical new technology which results in a lot of unemployment is just the economy getting more efficient and it will absorb all the excess labor with new enterprises.

Is there something about minimum wage legislation that makes the labor completely unusable? Wouldn't it be equally as temporary as some large efficiency gain in the economy?
by FredPret | 2025-08-21 23:39:09+00:00
If you had a $100B asset, like Starbucks Inc, how much would you pay to search for and keep the right guy to run it?

The Venn diagram of people who have the diversity and depth of skills to pull off a major CEO role has a very small overlapped area.

If you choose your CEO well, you turn Apple in 1997 into Apple in 2010. If you choose poorly, your investment stagnates or evaporates.

So a couple of tens of millions in stock options are a bargain for investors. The value-add of any particular minimum wage employee, despite their equal human dignity and worth, is never going to even be in the same league.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-21 23:39:17+00:00
> As a French, it's funny seeing references to the French revolution as some kind of rebellion against the rich

As an American with basic history knowledge I find it funny as well.

The internet angry mob ideal of the French Revolution has become a meme in itself. It’s not actually about improving conditions or raising wages, it’s just an outlet for impotent internet rage.
by missedthecue | 2025-08-21 23:39:20+00:00
There aren't always infinity positive return ideas to invest in. Sometimes there really aren't any. Garrett Motion is a company that manufactures turbochargers and sells them to the big three automakers. It's a decently steady and profitable business but it's slowly on the way out. EVs don't need turbochargers. They have a small R&D division looking into EV inverters, and they'll continue to make turbochargers for non-auto applications, but for the most point, they are a melting ice cube and their CEO tells you this in plain terms on earnings calls.

But their stock is priced like it too, so they are plowing most of their free cash flow into buying back shares, and it more than offsets the melt. The result? Their shares are steady and up about 95% over the past 5 years despite overall revenue decline across this period.

Sure, you could have this sleepy turbocharger factory start investing in real estate, or get into uranium mining, or begin trying to write and sell cloud computing software. But their strategy is to keep making a good product and regularly eat up stock to overcome declining earnings per share, and it's working rather nicely.
by astrange | 2025-08-21 23:39:22+00:00
> The problem is his paper doesn’t make testable predictions.

Do physicists do this? String theorists mostly don't seem to try, and the most common point I've seen Sabine make is that particle physicists are happy to tell you their theories are falsifiable as long as you give them essentially infinite money to build bigger colliders, when they could possibly be doing something cheaper.

I also wonder if people believe Roger Penrose is a crank; he seems to be doing the same thing when he goes around claiming consciousness is because of quantum brain tubules.
by bkettle | 2025-08-21 23:39:39+00:00
I think you're probably right that eventually, most people will own a car. But I think the time in your life where you decide to buy one matters substantially, and is modulated quite a lot by city design.

I'm pretty young now, and I could afford a car. I expect that I will probably buy one at some point in the future. But I can easily live my life without one for now, so I have decided to save that money instead. If I lived in Houston, I don't think that would be the case.

None of my friends that I know in NYC own cars. All of my friends that live in my hometown own cars.