MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oaiey | 2025-08-11 05:49:46+00:00
Worried about the next generation who - I think - will not learn normally (incl whatever it does to the brain) and may never reach the degree of engineering capability some of us have.

Tired of leadership who think productivity will raise.

Tired of AI summaries sent around unreflected as meeting minutes / action items. Tired of working and responding on these.
by tuatoru | 2025-08-11 05:49:47+00:00
If only it were that easy. Austria and Switzerland have nerly identical birth rates, but in one, childcare is almost free and in the other, it is very expensive.

South Korea and Hungary (among many others) have tried paying people to have children, without success. It pulls a few births forward in time, but then the birth rate declines again.

There is something more fundamental going on.
by exfalso | 2025-08-11 05:49:56+00:00
Mostly feeling like a caveman. I've been trying and failing to use it productively since the start of the hype. The amount of time wasted could've been used for actual development.

I just simply don't get it. Productivity delta is literally negative.

I've been asking to do projects where I thought "oh, maybe this project has a chance of getting an AI productivity boost". Nope. Personal projects all failed as well.

I don't get it. I guess I'm getting old. "Grandpa let me write the prompt, you write it like this".
by izacus | 2025-08-11 05:50:15+00:00
Nothing what you wrote makes much sense. It's like asking why buy a new MacBook for your company when an IBM/360 will do.

F-5 is a 70 year old plane that stopped being manufactured 40 years ago. F-16 was also introduced 45 years ago, predating most of computing industry.

We have learned a few things about designing planes since then which is why F-35 modernizes those designs.
by dalemhurley | 2025-08-11 05:50:17+00:00
You know Cursor is giving away unlimited GPT-5 this week?

You could just work 24x7 and Vibe code yourself to a trillion dollars.

In all seriousness, you need to rest properly, you will be more productive and make less mistakes and have less rework.

Finally, if you are using Claude to get your "React component to hydrate correctly", you are not being very efficient in using AI as a coding agent.

I wrote a post about using Full.CX MCP that will build complete features for you with test etc. https://dalehurley.com/posts/fullcxmcp
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-08-11 05:51:17+00:00
I think of LLMs as essentially translators - taking natural language and translating it into something else. It works great with writing HTML for example. The more declarative and high-level the language is, the better it does. Which makes intuitive sense, the closer the output is to the input the better it does imo.

So generally the people getting the most use out of LLMs are people who are using these higher levels of abstractions. And I imagine we will be building more abstractions like HTML to get more use out of it.
by jiveturkey | 2025-08-11 05:52:03+00:00
immobilizers that use a chip in a physical key, are to the best of my knowledge, all simple clonable protocols. the predecessor to a code was a simple resistor.

i specifically meant a kind that uses private key crypto. we absolutely could have that today but we've moved on to fobs.

please correct me if I'm wrong ... i haven't studied it that extensively.
by beambot | 2025-08-11 05:52:24+00:00
You don't use any AI - drafting documentation, write boilerplate code, transcribing meetings, simplifying team communications, searching product documentation, alternative to Google or StackOverflow, creating presentations, as a brainstorming partner? I would consider all of these "work".

If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous.
by svieira | 2025-08-11 05:52:51+00:00
Reified generics aren't on the board, but a solution to:

> And as a consequence, C# can pack the value types directly in the generic data structure, instead of holding references to heap-allocated objects.

is what Project Valhalla is all about. (Java doesn't have a good reason for being able to do `new T` at the moment, but being able to treat a generic container as optimizable-over-structs is an explicit goal).
by horttemppa | 2025-08-11 05:53:12+00:00
I work with rather 'basic' CRUD applications with CMS and user management portals + some integrations to CRM systems etc. There is a lot of legacy stuff and rather bad practices or no general style guidelines followed.

AI helps here and there but honestly the bottleneck for output is not how fast the code is produced. Task priorization, lacking requirements, information silos and similar issues cause a lot of 'non-coding work' for developers (and probably just waiting around for some who don't want to take initiative). Also I think the most time consuming coding task is usually debugging and AI tools don't really excel at that in my experience.

That being said, we are not hiring at the moment but that really doesn't have anything to do with AI.
by RossBencina | 2025-08-11 05:54:18+00:00
I wonder whether there are clock generators with on-chip temperature sensing...

Yes: "an advanced, low-power, high-performance mobile clock generator with four clock outputs. The device integrates a MEMS resonator, temperature sensor and a temperature-to-digital converter (TDC), which eliminates the need for external crystal and temperature-sensing crystal resonators." -- https://www.sitime.com/products/clock-generators/clock-gener...
by genocidicbunny | 2025-08-11 05:54:32+00:00
The case can be thrown out, but it's still going to cause you massive disruptions. Everything from just being arrested in the first place and being held in custody for some amount of time, to having to hire a lawyer, to the social consequences of your name being tied to being arrested. It's going to cost you time, money, stress, family and social relationships. And there's a non-zero chance that if your life starts being investigated after such an arrest, something could be found to still affect you or your family and friends.

And once you're on their radar, you're probably going to also end up being marked for extra scrutiny. You might find yourself being pulled over more often, or getting the SSSS on your airplane boarding pass.
by scubadude | 2025-08-11 05:54:33+00:00
> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.

If, like the meme, you just copied from SO without using your brain then yes AI is comparable.

If you appreciate SO for the discussion (peer review) about the answers and contrasting approaches sometimes out of left field, well good luck because AI can't and won't give you that.
by tiberius_p | 2025-08-11 05:55:36+00:00
I work in hardware design and verification. I've seen many AI-based EDA tools proposed at conferences but in the team that I'm working now I haven't seen AI being adopted at all. Among the proposed tools that caught my attention: generating SystemVerilog assertions from natural language prompts, generating code fixes from lint errors, generating requirements, vplans and verification metrics from specifications written in natural language, using LLMs inside IDE's as coding agents and chat bots to query the code. I think the hardware industry will be harder to penetrate by AI because hardware companies are more secretive about their HDL code and they go to great lengths to avoid leaks. That's why most of them have an in-house IT infrastructure and they avoid the cloud as much as possible especially when it comes to storing HDL code, running HDL simulations, formal verification tools and synthesis. Even if they were to employ locally hosted AI solutions that would require big investments in expensive GPUs and expensive electricity bills: the industry giants will afford it while the little players won't. The ultimate goal is to tapeout bug-free chips and AI can be a great source of bugs if not properly supervised. So humans are still the main cogs in the machine here. LLMs and coding agents can make our jobs a whole lot easier and pleasant by taking care of the boring tasks and leaving us with the higher level decisions, but they won't replace us any time soon.
by Topfi | 2025-08-11 05:56:58+00:00
Every individual user would have to be consistently paying attention to discussions outside their expertise and interest. Considering prior stories of LLM usage among multiple legal professionals, wherein the model repeatedly output the potential for errors/“hallucinations”, I highly doubt that will happen. Heck, part of the outcry to reintroduce my personally least useful model 4o was grounded in a preference for subjective agreeableness in the output.

The idea would/could be not intentional dissemination of missinformation, but purely financial. Models are expensive to run, hardware, rack space and power limited and making newer releases seem more robust subjectively can be a powerful incentive.

With prior models we already have seen quantization post release and it’s been a personal pet peeve of mine that this should be communicated via a changelog, with the router there is one more quite powerful, potentially even less transparent way for providers to put their thumb on the scale. For now, GPT-5 does very impressively in my limited use cases and testing, especially considering pricing, but the concern that this may (and past experience tells me likely) change soon enough remains.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-11 05:57:06+00:00
>We have to find some way to get the state of the art without spending our food money.

If it's not your job: Do we "have to" find this way? What's the oppotunity cost compared to a premium subscription or using not-state of the art tools?

If it is your job: it's putting food on the table. So it should be a relatively microscopic cost to doing business. Maybe even a tax write-off.
by solatic | 2025-08-11 05:57:36+00:00
Yeah, mainframes are all about cases where the uptime is critical. Most modern systems are good with offering 99.9% or 99.99% reliability, with the understanding that trying to offer more than that just gets more and more expensive. Well... spending huge amounts of money on mainframes is one of the strategies to get to reliability numbers like 99.9999999%.

Source: https://itic-corp.com/itic-2023-reliability-survey-ibm-z-res...

The legitimate usage is typically for workloads like relational databases (which are anyway single-machine architectures) that experience heavy load 24/7, part of fragile architectures that cannot tolerate downtime (remaining fragile as such because the original source code has been lost etc.), where "the system is down" causes tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people to stop work.
by webprofusion | 2025-08-11 05:59:32+00:00
I think currently once you get into the weeds of a project the AI can only really lend a helping hand, rather than do 30-50% of the work.

It can kickstart new projects to get over the blank page syndrome but after that there's still work, either prompting or fixing it yourself.

There are requirements-led approaches where you can try to stay in prompt mode as much as possible (like feeding spec to a junior dev) but there is a point where you just have to do things yourself.

Software development has never been about lines of code, it has always required a lot of back and forth discussion, decisions, digging into company/domain lore to get the background on stuff.

Reviewing AI code, and lots of it, is hard work - it can get stuff wrong when you least expect it ("I'll just stub out this authentication so it returns true and our test passes")

With all that in mind though, as someone who would pay other devs to do work I would be horrified if someone spent a week writing unit tests that I can clearly see an AI would generate in 30 seconds. There are some task that just make sense for AI to do now.
by strogonoff | 2025-08-11 06:00:17+00:00
For the longest time I believed that cell tower radiation’s negative impact on living organisms is strictly pseudoscience.

Turns out, back in 2016 a German study[0] has found damage to trees near the towers—starting on the side of the tree facing the tower, then spreading to the entire tree.

This study, of course, does not show whether that measurably harms humans, but I stopped thinking those fears and complaints are completely unfounded.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27552133/
by FreakLegion | 2025-08-11 06:00:17+00:00
It's the case. And the kicker is that if you understood the tax games we play with startup stock, you wouldn't want preferred shares.

Why? Because common shares have their price set by a 409A valuation, which through the first few rounds of funding especially will be a small fraction of the preferred share price, set by agreement between the company and its investors. Cheap common shares make early exercise practical, so you can file an 83(b), not worry about AMT, and benefit from the QSBS tax exclusion after five years. Cheap common shares also mean you capture most of the value of preferred shares as gains, rather than having it as basis, out of the gate, since in a successful exit preferred shares are simply converted to common.

What companies that care actually do is offer early exercise, so employees who want to can take advantage of the QSBS tax exclusion, and give 10-year exercise windows with ISO->NSO conversion, so employees who decide to leave aren't forced to exercise or forfeit their options within 30-90 days. There's a lot of uninformed talk about preferred shares on HN, and you really ought to ignore it.
by seanhunter | 2025-08-11 06:03:07+00:00
It’s not an abuse of language or meaning or communication. It’s a rule that you really want to be true for English but which unfortunately has exceptions. Irregardless is one of those exceptions. It’s not a word that I personally use because I don’t like it (probably for the reasons you’re articulating) but English doesn’t actually care what you or I think. Using “irregardless” as a synonym for “regardless” or “irrespective” is not incorrect.

OED calls it a “nonstandard or humorous use” https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=Irreg...
by webprofusion | 2025-08-11 06:05:19+00:00
Where it really does open your eyes is when dealing with stuff you just wouldn't have done otherwise: - Can't remember the name of that web tool you used to base64 decode locally, just ask for one. - Would love to have a quick tool that does X: done. - Wouldn't know where to start building a C++ VST plugin for audio processing: done - Point it an a protocol RFC and get it to generate an API implementation stub: done (that one went from "maybe one day", to "shipped" simply because the initial donkey work got done by AI.
by anonymoushn | 2025-08-11 06:06:07+00:00
Memory leaks are unrelated to memory safety. That is to say, code that leaks memory is memory safe. So I'm not sure what RAII is supposed to help with.

A problem not solved in C++ is the need to reserve a single bit-pattern per type that can be moved from, to indicate that it has been moved from (and is not a valid value for any other purpose).
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-11 06:06:59+00:00
>Going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live.

Isn't that the Hacker mindset, though? We want to trailblaze solutions and share it with everyone for free. Always in liberty and oftentimes in beer too. I think it's a good mentality to have, precisely because of your lens of selfish motivations.

Wanting money is fine. If it was some flat $200 or even $2000 with legally binding promises that I have an indefinitely license to use this version of the software and they won't extract anything else from me: then fine. Hackers can be cheap, but we aren't opposed to barter.

But that's not the case. Wanting all my time and privacy and data under the veneer of something hackers would provide with no or very few strings is not. tricks to push into that model is all the worse.

> If they promise those paying customers (in legally binding agreements, no less) that they won't train on their data... and are then found to have trained on their data anyway, they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too.

I sure wish they did. In reality, they get a class action, pay off some $100m to lawyers after making $100b, and the lawyers maybe give me $100 if I'm being VERY generous, while the company extracted $10,000+ of value out of me. And the captured market just keeps on keeping on.

Sadly, this is not a land of hackers. It is a market of passive people of various walks of life: of students who do not understand what is going on under the hood (I was here when Facebook was taking off), of businsessmen too busy with other stuff to understand the sausage in the factory, of ordinary people who just wants to fire and forget. This market may never even be aware of what occurred here.
by ai_assisted_dev | 2025-08-11 06:06:59+00:00
I have been in software for 20 years, and was just about to quit 2-3 years ago because of how mundane things became. And now I am actually loving it again because of AI. I'd say, AI writes 95% of my code, and I use it for 75% of the decisions during working on a project.

I am under MUCH more pressure to deliver more in shorter periods of time, with just me involved in several layers of decision making, rather than having a whole team. Which may sound scary, but it pays the bills. At one company I contract with, I now have 2 PMs; where I am the only dev on a production app with users, shipping new features every few days (rather than weeks).

It feels more like performance art, than it even feels like software development at this point. I am still waiting for some of my features to come crashing prod down in fantastic fashion, being paged at 3am in the morning; debugging for 12 hours straight because AI has built such a gigantic footgun for me.... but it has yet to happen. If anything I am doing less work than before - being paid a little more, and the companies working with me have built a true dependency on my skills to both ship, maintain and implement stuff.
by omoikane | 2025-08-11 06:06:59+00:00
I don't know how to link to just a specific part of the line, but the interesting bit is at the end of line 16 and the start of line 17:

x*=02//* */2 -1;

With C89, this is evaluated as "x *= 02 / 2 - 1", or "x *= 0".

With C99, this is evaluated as "x *= 02 / -1", or "x *= -2".
by II2II | 2025-08-11 06:07:06+00:00
In order to truly appreciate what you are looking at you may need to: acquire a teletype machine, purge your memory of everything you know about computers (except FORTRAN and COBOL), and travel back to 1976. I guarantee you that you will be astonished by this amazing leap in technology.

More seriously though, Lists and Lists is a concept game from 1996 based upon the text adventure games that were popular in the 1980's. It implements a subset of Scheme for the z-machine, which was an early virtual machine in the JVM sense of a virtual machine (both from a technical perspective, and the "write once, run anywhere" perspective). While it's ability to interpret language was quite limited, it was certainly sufficient for exploring complex virtual worlds.
by rerdavies | 2025-08-11 06:08:06+00:00
Isn't that what git tags are for? Just create a tag with something human-readable like, I dunno, a version number would be good. And that way ANYONE can see the state of your sources for a given build.

If you use github release workflow, you don't even have a choice about it. You cannot create a release without creating a matching tag.
by AstralStorm | 2025-08-11 06:08:30+00:00
The funniest part is that you can't get better than the input you put in.

Only when the thing can generalize from a few top notch examples would this problem be solved.

Throwing in a ton of garbage into an automated remixer will produce garbage output that cannot be helped by better classifying it. Even with the 0.01% false positive there is so much trash input the system will learn and reproduce that.

So the future should be developing few shot learning further...
by fcatalan | 2025-08-11 06:08:58+00:00
My org is always a decade behind, so I'm still just ignoring the official push for whatever Oracle low code crap is called.

Hiring is as haphazard and inadequate as it has been in the last 25 years, no change there.

AI usage is personal, widespread and on a don't ask don't tell basis.

I use it a lot to:

- Write bullshit reports that no one ever reads.

- Generate minimal documentation for decade old projects that had none.

- Small, low stakes, low complexity improvements, like when having to update this page that was ugly when someone created it in 1999, I'll plop it on aistudio to give it a basic bootstrap treatment.

- Simple automation that wasn't worth it before: Write me a bash script that does this thing that only comes up twice a year but I always hate.

- A couple times I have tried to come up with more complex greenfield stuff to do things that are needed but management doesn't ever acknowledge, but it always falls apart and starts needing actual work.

Morale is quite crappy, as ever, but since some of the above feels like secretly sticking it to The Man, there are these beautiful moments.

For example when the LLM almost nails your bimonthly performance self report from your chat history, and it takes 10 minutes instead of 2 hours, so you get to quietly look out of the window for a long while, feeling relaxed and smug about pocketing some of the gains from this awesome performance improvement.
by hakfoo | 2025-08-11 06:09:45+00:00
The address space didn't have to start at 0. In fact, address 0 contains interrupt vectors. I suspect most of the CP/M compatibility was about starting at specific addresses within a given segment (isn't that why .COM executables are placed at 0x100?)

I blame Intel by having the boot address at FFFF0. That guarantees you need ROM at the top of memory rather than loading boot code and sticking frame buffers in low memory, and starting user RAM at like 0x20000.
by alexanderchr | 2025-08-11 06:10:14+00:00
Something like ten years ago Facebook messenger would by default add the user’s location to every message visible to the recipient. And even worse, unless you disabled this feature, it would give away the distance from you to all your contacts, even ones you had never even had a conversation with. In real time, so someone could easily use it to triangulate you. Meta is a very creepy company.
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by onion2k | 2025-08-11 06:11:05+00:00
The course notes for MITs Statistics For Applications are online, so you can learn all you need to know what you need and to write the right prompts! Right?

Consultants prove their value in knowing which screw needs to be tightened, not in tightening the screws. (https://calvincorreli.com/blog/1397-knowing-which-screw-to-t...) LLMs won't replace that until they can guide a complete novice to the answer.