MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by techpineapple | 2025-08-21 19:39:47+00:00
“ Pew Research Center found that between January and June, the foreign-born population in the United States — both lawful and unlawful residents — declined by nearly 1.5 million. In June, the country was home to 51.9 million immigrants, down from 53.3 million six months earlier.”

Is this something you can really reasonably study? The response rate for illegal immigrants must have tanked right? I know there are techniques for this but they must be disrupted by like major environmental and legal changes. I would doubt you would get it right on your first attempt.
by bix6 | 2025-08-21 19:39:53+00:00
It’s not irrelevant because those are fundamentally different modes of operating / troubleshooting. You say they have someone drive it. I say they don’t. We aren’t arguing about pure autonomy, we are arguing about the method by which humans resolve the problems.

Furthermore 2 miles of autonomous driving is… autonomous. And over time that will become 3 then 4 then 5. Perhaps it never reaches infinite autonomy but an hour of autonomous driving is more than enough to get most people most places in a city and I’d bet you money that we’ll reach that point within a decade.
by lblume | 2025-08-21 19:39:56+00:00
I was thinking the same thing. Currently all my cards try to all follow the same pattern, making it necessary to really remember at based on differences between them. (For example, I would never ask "What happened in 1914?" but instead just "1914" and have "Start of WWI" on the back, as a reversible card). LLMs could take such cards and provide the user with an endless stream of questions: What year did WWI begin? What happened in 1914? Which event took place in 1914? And so on. For vocabulary this might of course be even better when the word/phrase itself will always be contextualized in practice.
by jopsen | 2025-08-21 19:40:00+00:00
> Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?

Good question? Is that necessary, or is it sufficient for AI to be integrated in every kind of CAD/design software out there?

Because I think most productivity tools whether CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc will benefit from AI. That's a huge market.
by devmor | 2025-08-21 19:40:07+00:00
There are plenty of argumentative and opinionated reasons to say it matters, but there is one that can't really be denied - reviewers (and project maintainers, even if they aren't reviewers) are people whose time deserves to be respected.

If this rule discourages low quality PRs or allows reviewers to save time by prioritizing some non-AI-generated PRs, then it certainly seems useful in my opinion.
by nosignono | 2025-08-21 19:40:15+00:00
> I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR.

I can generate 1,000 PRs today against an open source project using AI. I think you do care, you are only thinking about the happy path where someone uses a little AI to draft a well constructed PR.

There's a lot ways AI can be used to quickly overwhelm a project maintainer.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-21 19:40:20+00:00
AI tools seem excellent at getting through boilerplate stuff at the start of a project. But as time goes on and you have to think about what you are doing, it'll be faster to write it yourself than to convey it in natural language to an LLM. I don't see this as an issue with the tool, but just getting a better idea of what it is really good for.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-08-21 19:40:37+00:00
Drebbel patented his device as a "perpetuum mobile." However, the definition of a perpetual motion device as a "machine that operates at 100% energy efficiency in perpetuity from an initial one-time energy input" — well, that idea came hundreds of years later.

Obviously, Drebbel was on the scene long before the laws of thermodynamics... so my upshot is definitely not that we should reconsider entropy because of his patent!

I suppose my upshot is that scientific establishments absolutely can expel excellent people for the wrong reasons. "Everyone knows" that perpetual motion is impossible... I'm actually a little surprised that you didn't understand my point — but you instead concluded I was a crank trying to attack entropy? Oh well, it happens, it's the internet, I don't blame you.

Another historical tidbit: the Royal Society of Hooke, Newton, etc all loved Drebbel's works. No wonder: Drebbel had a staring role in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis which was the model for the Royal Society.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-08-21 19:41:27+00:00
I lived ON a four lane 55mph road that was a heavily trafficked arterial road and crossed it all the time at 7.

Roads 100% are community killers, it's insane that people put up with such extreme infantilization and isolation, no wonder deaths of despair and chronic loneliness is on the rise. We've cultivated our own sad fragility.
by reactordev | 2025-08-21 19:41:51+00:00
>All this set me up well to understand that the future of learning would change when in late 2022 the LLM kicked down the door, tracked mud across the carpet, ate everything in the fridge, and demanded more snacks.

Thanks for the laugh, I like your writing style but to echo others, I think you went a little extreme on the Anki.
by rane | 2025-08-21 19:41:53+00:00
Using Anki myself for language learning and can definitely recognize the pitfall of unrelated cues triggering the recall, but so far it's been working quite well. I'm mainly using it to practice output though, so the front side of the card is in English.

On semi-related note, currently making on a language app (gengengo.com) if anyone wants to check it out.
by xpe | 2025-08-21 19:41:57+00:00
Grain of truth acknowledged, though much exaggerated -- to the point of forgetting history.

> No - you just got a glimpse of 2009 Google with autocomplete.

Go look at the kinds of "answers" you got in 2009 with Google's autocomplete.

Time to drop this convenient nicely-packaged narrative.

> These things don’t think, don’t learn, don’t adapt.

Perhaps some don't -- for some intentionally constructed definitions of these terms. Adding a feedback loop (chain of thought, etc) challenges even such definitions though.

> if you expect parrots to run your company, you get birdshite for returns.

If this is a reference to "stochastic parrots" metaphor, then I would encourage you to read these articles and HN comments below, which push-back against misunderstandings or overuse of that metaphor:

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HxRjHq3QG8vcYy4yy/the-stocha...

[2]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7aHCZbofofA5JeKgb/memetic-ju...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44299996

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44926540

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44967655

[6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43676755

[7]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43585572

[8]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42351348
by ovaistariq | 2025-08-21 19:42:08+00:00
I don’t see much benefit from the disclosure alone. Ultimately, this is code that needs to be reviewed. There is going to continue to be more and more AI assisted code generation, to the point where we see the same level of adoption of these tools as "Autocomplete". Why not solve this through tooling? I have had great effect with tools like Greptile, Cursor's BugBot and Claude Code.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-21 19:42:48+00:00
I know this... my point was in that Rust didn't have this feature 5-8 years ago when I first started reading/learning about it. A lot of languages haven't had an active scripting-capable usage that can do this until fairly recently. C# even has it in .Net 10, though I'm not sure about dependency handling in that case.

I like and was commenting that rust has the cargo frontmatter instead of a separate cargo file, same for deno in that it can reference the repo/url directly instead of requiring a separate modules file/folder (like node package.json/node_modules) or even with python. You can reference the modules you need directly.
by h-bradio | 2025-08-21 19:43:41+00:00
This is a fun little set of commands to run live-captioning on my Macbook! Nothing serious.

A tutorial and demo video are in the link.

I saw a post on HN that introduced me to Whisper.cpp. I’ve been excited to see so many AI tools start to support my M3 Macbook/Metal/whatever so I can put my 96GB of memory to use.

I don’t have the timing windows tuned perfectly. Feel free to play with it!
by themafia | 2025-08-21 19:43:52+00:00
> But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.

I understand this line of thinking but I don't feel that it's particularly relevant. It seems to be born out of a point of view that physics theories are a binary. We either fully support them with everything we have or we completely denigrate them to the point of demonizing anyone who shows any interest in them.

Surely this can't be the best approach to discovering new physics?

Which is how I view these people. The result of a natural frustration that physics discoveries do not seem to be happening at the rate that they should. I'm not sure they have _the_ answer but I understand _why_ they're acting as they do.

Why this outcome bothers anyone is completely beyond me and now makes me genuinely wonder if there is simply too much gatekeeping within the field.
by jbstack | 2025-08-21 19:44:03+00:00
I can't agree with this when it comes to language learning specifically. I've used all sorts of tools to learn the language of my in-law side of the family: books, audio lessons, videos, tutoring, apps, etc. I've never made as much progress as I have with Anki. My language skills have improved in leaps and bounds so much with Anki that I now rarely bother with anything else, other than for sentence mining to create more Anki cards (e.g. from grammar books or apps) or just for a bit of variety to make the process more enjoyable. I actually find classes/tutoring (traditionally seen as the "best" method) frustrating because of how slowly I learn with them compared to Anki. In a 1 hour lesson we might cover a handful of concepts and words/phrases that I will almost certainly have forgotten most of by the time the next lesson comes around. In that same hour I can create and review a ton of Anki cards and I'll remember most of them.

With tools like Google and Microsoft's neural TTS and Anki's AwesomeTTS add-on my cards have audio that is so realistic that I am also constantly exposed to near-native listening. I do 3-way cards (Writing only -> English, Audio only -> English, and English -> Other language) so I'm actually getting a reasonable simulation of real life practice (reading, listening, speaking) on an individual sentence basis. My process is: (1) find a high quality sentence from a book / app / website / ChatGPT (with verification from a native speaker); preferably one that is fairly simple apart from a single word or verb conjugation that I haven't learned yet, in keeping with the i+1 rule, (2) create an Anki card for that sentence using my own custom note templates, (3) add audio with AwesomeTTS. Creating a card like this takes me perhaps 10-20 seconds as its mostly just copy-pasting and clicking a few buttons.

Of course to become truly fluent you need practice. But when I practice I'm already able to follow the gist of conversations and I can stumble my way through speaking in most situations: I've got a huge head start thanks to all the latent vocabulary and grammar that my brain knows thanks to Anki, instead of having to constantly look blankly at the other person while I pull out Google Translate.
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-08-21 19:44:15+00:00
> AI is only as smart as the human handling it.

I think I'm slowly coming around to this viewpoint too. I really just couldn't understand how so many people were having widely different experiences. AI isn't magic; how could I have expected all the people I've worked with who struggle to explain stuff to team members, who have near perfect context, to manage to get anything valuable across to an AI?

I was original pretty optimistic that AI would allow most engineers to operate at a higher level but it really seems like instead it's going to massively exacerbate the difference between an ok engineer and a great engineer. Not really sure how I feel about that yet but at-least I understand now why some people think the stuff is useless.
by bsimpson | 2025-08-21 19:44:25+00:00
When Francisco Tolmasky launched Objective J, he wrote a really interesting article that still impacts how I think about this stuff more than a decade later.

Francisco was working on an in-browser slideshow tool like Google Slides, but in the late 00s. To power it, he invented his own language: Objective-J. It had its own toolchain, in the days when most developers were just writing JavaScript inline or maybe in .js files.

Remember, it took React a few years to catch on because it required command line tools to translate JSX to JS. This had the same friction, but years earlier.

This was the thesis behind Objective-J: In the late 1900s, C was the foundation of a good language, but it needed another layer of abstraction on top of it to be more ergonomic. The developers at NeXT/Apple built that layer and called it Objective-C. Objective-J saw the same potential in JavaScript, and ported the ergonomics of Objective-C atop it. It basically tried to do for JavaScript what Objective-C had done for C.

This was the critical part of the argument:

JavaScript (in the era before modules, => functions, and the other current niceties) was the core of a useful language, but it needed a more ergonomic layer on top. Libraries like jQuery were building de-facto DSLs, but calling them libraries. Objective-J was taking conceptual responsibility for being a language on top of JavaScript, instead of being "just" a library. By owning up to being its own language, they could take syntactical liberties that they couldn't under the constraints of being just another JS library.
by mothballed | 2025-08-21 19:44:42+00:00
I said weapon, not gun, but theoretically if it were a gun, it wouldn't feel any different than shopping without one. Put a small watergun down your waistband and walk around for a couple days. After a couple you won't notice it, and no one else is going to notice it either. It will become utterly mundane, it similarly applies to a dagger or whatever concealable weapon one may be able to get ahold of.
by mystraline | 2025-08-21 19:44:49+00:00
Crime itself is 100% political issue as well, and you show a case of that.

Someone steals enough from big box store, and the cops DO RESPOND and charge etc.

Individual has proof of multiple thefts, and cops don't give one fuck, as in your case.

Now speaking of retail theft, by far the biggest retail theft is time-theft against employees. Do you know wwhat happens when you report that? You're told its a civil matter.

Individual wronged == civil matter

Big company == criminal matter
by alexeiz | 2025-08-21 19:45:06+00:00
Here's what I see:

* PM asking a client: "Do you want beautiful logging, metrics and shit?" - "Hell yeah we want logging, metrics and shit!"

* PM telling devs: implement beautiful logging, metrics and shit

* Devs spend half a year implementing all that shit

* The client looks at the final product: "What is this shit? We need a freaking green checkmark!"
by hinkley | 2025-08-21 19:45:16+00:00
Perverse incentives. They are judged by how long the call takes, and every time they escalate a common problem that the devs could fix, now their numbers will go down and they'll get punished for their good work.

Dell at one point pulled the plug on outsourcing their tech support. They spotted this moral hazard partway through the process and decided it was better to keep it in house.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-08-21 19:45:20+00:00
> makes me wonder if there's something the "wisdom of the crowds" knows that I'm not aware of.

As I alluded to earlier, its really hard to scale a dev team when the language does nothing to keep you on the rails. As an engineer, I hate go for its lack of abstractions and verbosity. As a CTO, I can appreciate that its trying to reduce the friction in making sure all code looks familiar and that any engineer can be rotated into it. TLDR: the things that make common lisp so good for a lone dev are what make it hard for larger projects and most projects nowadays have multiple contributors. I wouldn't start a startup on common lisp today unless you were trying to do something truly novel and your team was all seasoned and experienced devs. throwing a bunch of vibe coding juniors on common lisp is a recipe for disaster while you might make it to a series A using a language like go.

Personally, I love elixir as I think it strikes a really good balance. My team is all older programmers. Our youngest guy is 32 and we have all developed a pretty good intuition for maintaining a descent code base.

> Does it only work on source codes or can I distribute a binary and let my users debug the code like this? Should I distribute the 'image' for it to work?

I wouldn't hand it to the end user but paul grahm famously did cowboy debugging on live servers. A user would cal complaining of a error and paul could go in and patch it in real time while observing the runtime of the system the user was on.

I think it goes without saying that that was a different time and we def can't do that kind of thing today.

> And is the fix temporary (until the program dies) or permanant?

you patch teh code and reload it into your running vm. so its permanent.
by koolba | 2025-08-21 19:45:22+00:00
> You must ask "Do I trust where this came from?" And to answer that, you need to know where it come from.

No you don’t. You can’t outsource trust determinations. Especially to the people you claim not to trust!

You make the judgement call by looking at the code and your known history of the contributor.

Nobody cares if contributors use an LLM or a magnetic needle to generate code. They care if bad code gets introduced or bad patches waste reviewers’ time.
by hnfong | 2025-08-21 19:45:40+00:00
I have a feeling that you believe "translation, grammar, and tone-shifting" works but "code generation sucks" for LLMs because you're good at coding and hence you see its flaws, and you're not in the business of doing translation etc.

Pretty sure if you're going to use LLMs for translating anything non-trivial, you'd have to carefully review the outputs, just like if you're using LLMs to write code.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-21 19:46:10+00:00
> I have been at countless places where the engineers are out of sync with the product.

Me too, but surprisingly it happens more often at places with the most Product Managers.

My worst experience was at a company that tried to enforce a specific ratio of Product Managers and "Product Designers" to engineers. If you added up the designers, product, project, and program people the total was higher than the number of engineers.

It only made everything worse. Fighting your way through the Product Management bureaucracy while trying to avoid having one of the PMs view your input as a threat was a job in itself.

Great Product Managers are invaluable additions to a company. The modern version of Product Management has attracted a lot of people who thrive on bureaucracy and process. The proliferation of Product Management influencers has made it much worse.
by Nextgrid | 2025-08-21 19:46:15+00:00
The role of a software engineer is to condense the (often unclear) requirements, business domain knowledge, existing code (if any) and their skills/experience into a representation of the solution in a very concise language: a programming language.

Having to instead express all that (including the business-related part, since the agent has no context of that) in a verbose language (English) feels counter-productive, and is counter-productive in my experience.

I've successfully one-shotted easy self-contained, throwaway tasks ("make me a program that fills Redis with random keys and values" - Claude will one-shot that) but when it comes to working with complex existing codebases I've never seen the benefits - having to explain all the context to the agent and correcting its mistakes takes longer than just doing it myself (worse, it's unpredictable - I know roughly how long something will take, but it's impossible to tell in advance whether an agent will one-shot it successfully or require longer babysitting than just doing it manually from the beginning).
by bornfreddy | 2025-08-21 19:46:20+00:00
> In the IT world it's entirely possibly to learn everything yourself and learn it better than one-fits-all course ever could.

Strong disagree. However, this is closer to truth:

In the IT world, if you have learned everything yourself, it's entirely possible to think you have learned it better than one-fits-all course ever could.

There is lots of theoretical knowledge that comes with the degree that, while mostly useless in day-to-day work, is priceless in those rare moments that it comes handy. A self-taught developer won't even know they are missing this knowledge. Example of this is knowing how compilers work (which is surprisingly useful) - without the theoretical background one might attempt to parse HTML with regex and expect correct results.

Not that all degrees are created equal. But those X years do give you an edge over self-taught developers. You still need to work on other skills too, of course.
by stouset | 2025-08-21 19:46:26+00:00
> I have money from my grandad, received 40 years ago. No one really has records going back that far but you try buying a house and they want proof of the origin of the funds.

This makes zero sense.

I have bought a house, and they want bank records going back like a few months or maybe a year at most. If that money has been sitting in an account for that long, nobody gives a shit where it originally came from. Like, if you had $100,000 for a down payment, they’re not checking the last twenty years of your paystubs to make sure the math checks out.

The only thing they really are interested in is knowing this money didn’t just appear out of nowhere because you got a personal loan from someone or because you got a conventional loan from a lender that hasn’t reported it to a credit reporting agency yet, and which would affect the decision to underwrite your loan.

If you’ve just been holding on to large sums of literal cash dollar bills for the last 40 years, that is such a comically ridiculous financial decision I don’t even know what to tell you.
by pixl97 | 2025-08-21 19:46:38+00:00
40,000 people live within a few miles of me. That isn't a city, that's a suburb or a town.

Also the leaving guns in vehicles thing could also be affected by another number here. And that is miles driven per capita and vehicles owned per household averages. That is you could have the same total number of thieves that steal guns, especially among those with more poverty, but as you increase the number of cars groups that could no longer afford them have them. Also the number of miles driven means the potential thieves are covering way more territory.

Anecdotally I heard about things like this in the late 80s and early 90s. Farmers were complaining that groups out of Chicago were running off with all the stuff they'd leave around all over the farm.

In addition starting in the mid 70s was a long recessionary period (stagflation) after decades of a good economy in the 60s that shook the US to the core.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-21 19:46:42+00:00
Exactly, that alone makes it far more useful/portable in practice than a lot of other languages for this type of thing. A python file can have a shebang, but it'll need a bunch of other files around it for module references, etc. Not to mention initialization/setup, etc.

The fact that dependencies are referenced in the file and automatically handled at runtime (first or repeated) is a really nice feature to have... it's expressly why I started using Deno over other options for this.