MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coltonv | 2025-08-05 14:41:38+00:00
Hi there! I appreciate your comment, and I remember reading your article about AI and some of the counterarguments to it helped me get over the imposter syndrome I was feeling.

To be clear, I did not classify "all the AI-supporters" as being in those three categories, I specifically said the people posting that they are getting 10x improvements thanks to AI.

Can you tell me about what you've done to no longer have any hallucinations? I notice them particularly in a language like Terraform, the LLMs add properties that do not exist. They are less common in languages like Javascript but still happen when you import libraries that are less common (e.g. DrizzleORM).
by simonw | 2025-08-05 14:41:45+00:00
I found myself agreeing with quite a lot of this article.

I'm a pretty huge proponent for AI-assisted development, but I've never found those 10x claims convincing. I've estimated that LLMs make me 2-5x more productive on the parts of my job which involve typing code into a computer, which is itself a small portion of that I do as a software engineer.

That's not too far from this article's assumptions. From the article:

> I wouldn't be surprised to learn AI helps many engineers do certain tasks 20-50% faster, but the nature of software bottlenecks mean this doesn't translate to a 20% productivity increase and certainly not a 10x increase.

I think that's an under-estimation - I suspect engineers that really know how to use this stuff effectively will get more than a 0.2x increase - but I do think all of the other stuff involved in building software makes the 10x thing unrealistic in most cases.
by jerf | 2025-08-05 14:41:49+00:00
"Nothing prevents them from incrementally starting to add proper parallelism, multithreading, ..."

In principle perhaps not. In practice it is abundantly clear now from repeated experience that trying to retrofit such things on to a scripting language that has been single-threaded for decades is an extremely difficult and error-prone process that can easily take a decade to reach production quality, if indeed it ever does, and then take another decade or more to become something you can just expect to work, expect to find libraries that use properly, etc.

I don't think it's intrinsic to scripting languages. I think someone could greenfield one and have no more problems with multithreading than any other language. It's trying to put it into something that has been single-threaded for a decade or two already that is very, very hard. And to be honest, given what we've seen from the other languages that have done this, I'd have a very, very, very serious discussion with the dev team as to whether it's actually worth it. Other scripting languages have put a lot of work into this and it is not my perception that the result has been worth the effort.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-05 14:42:01+00:00
> Slowly your ability to do work begins to evaporate.

To be clear about this, you can still physically do the work same as before, it's just become uneconomic/not competitive. It's not all bad though. Having another country take the bulk of the market leaves you free to differentiate and specialize in one or more profitable niches that are not being served well by what is now the main supplier. You might end up dominating some fraction of what's now a vastly bigger market, with improved economies of scale that you're free to exploit as well.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-08-05 14:42:17+00:00
I don't think it is yet. I set up a GBP payment with GoCardless last month, and it was fulfilled by a Direct Debit[1] mandate. It would be fantastic if GoCardless have already added support for Wero, but I suspect they are still using manual SEPA for Euro payments.

[1]: https://www.directdebit.co.uk/
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-05 14:42:31+00:00
Prompts are worth mastering. AI autocomplete is better than older autocomplete systems but of course it only works based on what you started to type.

Prompts are especially good for building a new template of structure for a new code module or basic boilerplate for some of the more verbose environments. eg. Android Java programming can be a mess, huge amounts of code for something simple like an efficient scrolling view. AI takes care of this - it's obvious code, no thought, but it's still over 100 lines scattered in XML (the view definitions), resources, and in multiple Java files.

Do you really want to be copying boilerplate like this across to many different files? Prompts that are well integrated to the IDE (they give a diff to add the code) are great (also old style Android before Jetpack sucked) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40584424/simple-android-...
by Goronmon | 2025-08-05 14:42:34+00:00
As I suspected, the problem seems to be Stripe and Paypal as this information comes out.

I'm not convinced that VISA and Mastercard are totally hands off about content and that Stripe and Paypal are going against their wishes to enforce content restrictions completely on their own.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1mf7uei/steam_update...
by suzzer99 | 2025-08-05 14:42:40+00:00
Apple Podcast search never fails to enrage me. There's no way to search within a specific show, just all your followed shows at once. Even if you know the exact episode title, if it has common words in it, you'll get a stream of garbage. It treats any match in the episode description with the same weight as an exact match of the episode title. So I have to go on the web, search the specific podcast to figure out the date, then just scroll to it in Apple Podcasts.
by Kinrany | 2025-08-05 14:43:03+00:00
I'm saying that Mastercard/Visa being able to do this on their own is one half of a free speech issue. It's not a free speech issue of its own, but it creates a free speech issue when combined with them being vulnerable to government pressure.

Imagine that the government instituted a private organization that had the power to cripple any business, with no recourse, and had control over it. The first amendment does not literally prohibit this, yet this would have clearly been a violation of the first amendment in spirit.
by neprotivo | 2025-08-05 14:44:15+00:00
TLDR:

* Debugging takes 35%-50% of a developer's time

* In the study 79% of the time was spent on the top 26% of the bugs

* Fresh bugs appearing during ongoing work take 3 minutes to fix on average. Committed bugs appearing in the issue tracker take 29 minutes on average

* When running/testing during debugging sessions devs run the code manually (84%) rather than relying on automated tests

* When inspecting program state devs rely on looking at logs and print statements 70% of the cases and in only 30% use a debugger
by strawhatguy | 2025-08-05 14:44:53+00:00
The motivation of a bureaucrat isn’t the effectiveness of the policies they produce, but instead the political ramifications of those policies.

The safety minded “take no risks” at all approach has been if not popular, tolerated because it’s hard to argue against safety, even if the safety gains are dubious, and expensive. And so they keep their jobs.

Fast forward a few decades of this, and now nothing much new can be developed.

But of course the bureaucrats are “smart” so they’re never to blame.

Frankly they deserve the ire they get for being part of the problem. When is the last time they got rid of an ineffective rule in the EU?
by jltsiren | 2025-08-05 14:44:53+00:00
It's not about being better or outperforming someone. A doctor is not supposed to be a better nurse. Similarly, engineers in the academic track are taught different things and prepared for different roles than engineers in the vocational track.

If you just need an engineer, someone from the vocational track will probably be more productive than an academic engineer due to more relevant education. Assuming a similar level of talent, of course. You only hire an academic engineer if you have an actual need for theoretical education. Or if you have a job where the specifics of the education don't really matter. Or if the academic engineer is from a higher-tier institution and likely more talented, despite the education.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-08-05 14:45:04+00:00
You're forgetting that code quality also requires time. Developers make tradeoffs all the time on how much time to invest into improving the quality of what they write, for both new and existing code. When someone claims that LLMs can produce higher-quality code it can include quality levels that may be unjustifiably slow to hand-craft depending on constraints and needs.

Related - agentic LLMs may be slow to produce output but they are parallelizable by an individual unlike hand-written work.
by echelon | 2025-08-05 14:45:06+00:00
That's a bit like an exercise left to the reader. Or wishful thinking.

We hope that it works out that way, but there's simply no guarantee. It's not an economic law.

If the country supplying said thing can have domestic companies deliver at lower margin, you're still kind of screwed. Their internal competition fills out the niches, which they can then export.
by throwanem | 2025-08-05 14:45:38+00:00
> See also Germany post-World War One

Yes, exactly.

The instrument concluding Germany's surrender and nominally ending the First World War, and for which my prior use of the name is metonymous, is known to history as the Treaty of Versailles [1]. Its terms were notoriously punitive largely at the insistence of the French, who regarded themselves with some justification as having paid the majority of the victory's cost, and Germany was denied any participation in the negotiations which determined the surrender terms to be imposed.

Combined with the Dolchstosslüge ("'stab in the back' lie") serviceably excusing the military failure and logistical collapse which made further hostilities impractical for Germany to pursue, thus leaving no options but to sign or be occupied, so were the conditions laid for "World War 2: The Sequel," as of course eventuated in practice. The actions taken with respect to the defeated powers thirty years later were designed with enormous and successful care to avoid a second, nuclear-armed, repeat. In this connection and as minimally an example of earnest intent, consider the so-called "Marshall Plan." [2] (Therein also see 'Aid to Asia' within 'Areas excluded'.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
by Another_Act_ | 2025-08-05 14:45:42+00:00
> In other words, inflation means what you're paying back to the bank is worth less and less as the time goes on.

Well yes, that's exactly my point. The $1 you pay back to the bank 25 years ago is worth MORE than the 1$ you paid yesterday. But you still only need to pay back a fixed $300k.

Obviously agree that interest paid is where the bank charges you for the loan, but your original point about inflation meaning your actually paying back the inflation adjusted value of the loan makes no sense.
by toss1 | 2025-08-05 14:46:00+00:00
Yikes

You entirely miss the distinction between trained professional and ignorant consumer, "industrial use only" equipment and materials vs everyday consumer goods, things that require technical training and even certification to use properly, vs goods sellable to any consumer, prescription drugs vs otc.

The technical goods carry a much higher risk and must be used with specific training and context. Using them outside those contexts is likely to harm or kill people, and creates legal liability.

In contrast, consumer goods must be engineered to be safe in ORDINARY circumstances with UNTRAINED people using them.

Tesla is trying to paper over those differences and use technical terms in a common environment and unleash tools requiring skilled supervision to prevent death into a consumer environment, for profit. You are either failing to make the distinction or consciously going along with it.
by samfeldman | 2025-08-05 14:46:27+00:00
Thank you!

There's currently no simple way to import via Facebook, but a workaround should let you do it.

(as a disclaimer, you'll need an unrelated Chrome extension that I didn't build. Hope I can built an official birthdays.app version at some point)

Essentially, you can: 1. Export your Facebook friends to a .ics file using the extension called "Birthday Calendar Exporter for Facebook" from https://chromewebstore.google.com

2. Upload your friends and their birthdays to your Google Calendar

3. Go to https://birthdays.app, login via text code, and click "import via Google Calendar"

Let me know if any thoughts or questions come up :)
by cogman10 | 2025-08-05 14:46:35+00:00
From what I recall in the 90s (and this is just my own memory). I remember enjoying the cartoons even with the E/I regulations. None of the cartoons I got were really the GI Joe style advert cartoons.

But what I also remember is that the broadcast networks over the years started reducing the number of cartoons they broadcast. I remember watching cartoons until like noon in the heyday. By the end of our broadcast cartoons, they were strictly a 1-to-2-hour event.

I suspect that part of the reason for that is cartoons became a lot less lucrative with advert requirements.

It wasn't until my parents got satellite TV (which got a LOT cheaper over my childhood. The old behemoth dishes were a sight to behold) that I experienced cartoons more like the GI Joe period. Cartoon network, nick, disney all had hours of unregulated cartoon nonsense with hours of kid targeted commercials.

And, by then, Saturday morning was dead as a cartoon time. Why wake up early for cartoons when you could simply turn on the cartoon channel?
by rtkwe | 2025-08-05 14:46:36+00:00
There are more adult oriented payment processors but they usually charge much higher rates because that sector attracts way more "I totally didn't buy that honey it must be fraud, I'm contesting it" that costs them more and they get charged more by the big upstream processors like Visa and Mastercard. Plus you're still liable for their rules the same way itch's current processor is if you want to process their card transactions.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-08-05 14:46:38+00:00
The only people who get 10x productivity are people who are either:

- solo projects

- startups with few engineers doing very little intense code review if any at all

- people who don't know how to code themselves.

Nobody else is realistically able to get 10x multipliers. But that doesn't mean you can't get a 1.5-2x multiplier. I'd say even myself at a large company that moves slow have been able to realize this type of multiplier on my work using cursor/claude code. But as mentioned in the article the real bottleneck becomes processes and reviews. These have not gotten any faster - so in real terms time to ship/deliver isn't much different than before.

The only attempt that we should make at minimizing review times is by making them higher priority than development itself. Technically this should already be the case but in my experience almost no engineer outside of really disciplined companies and not in FAANG actually makes reviews a high priority, because unfortunately code reviews are not usually part of someones performance review and slows down your own projects. And usually your project manager couldn't give two shits about someone elses work being slow.

Processes are where we can make the biggest dent. Most companies as they get large have processes that get in the way of forward velocity. AI first companies will minimize anything that slows time to ship. Companies simply utilizing AI and expecting 10x engineers without actually putting in the work to rally around AI as a first class citizen will fall behind.
by imtringued | 2025-08-05 14:46:48+00:00
It doesn't, because nothing in the article indicates performance hits. It doesn't even mention "proxying every operation through another indirection layer".

The article is about organizing a distributed/multithreaded system for deterministic execution and fault injection. It's like refactoring a codebase for unit testing. It shouldn't slow anything down and even if it does, the overhead should be laughably small.
by tsvetkov | 2025-08-05 14:46:49+00:00
I don't understand how your comment relates to what I've been responding to.

>> I know many who have it on from high that they must use AI. One place even has bonuses tied not to productivity, but how much they use AI.

> How does maximizing AI use prevents developers from reading their code?

In my mind developers are responsible for the code they push, no matter whether it was copy pasted or generated by AI. The comment I responded to specifically said "bonuses tied not to productivity, but how much they use AI". I don't see that using AI for everything automatically implies having no standards or not holding responsibility for code you push.

If managers force developers to purposefully lower standards just to increase PRs per unit of time, that's another story. And in my opinion that's a problem of engeneering & organisational culture, not necessarily a problem with maximizing AI usage. If an org is OK with pushing AI slop no one understands, it will be OK with pushing handwritten slop as well.
by BoxFour | 2025-08-05 14:46:50+00:00
> I still think complaining about "hallucination" is a pretty big "tell".

The conversation around LLMs is so polarized. Either they’re dismissed as entirely useless, or they’re framed as an imminent replacement for software developers altogether.

Hallucinations are worth talking about! Just yesterday, for example, Claude 4 Sonnet confidently told me Godbolt was wrong wrt how clang would compile something (it wasn’t). That doesn’t mean I didn’t benefit heavily from the session, just that it’s not a replacement for your own critical thinking.

Like any transformative tool, LLMs can offer a major productivity boost but only if the user can be realistic about the outcome. Hallucinations are real and a reason to be skeptical about what you get back; they don’t make LLMs useless.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting you specifically are blind to this fact. But sometimes it’s warranted to complain about hallucinations!
by duxup | 2025-08-05 14:46:58+00:00
>Of the alleged $21.7 billion in waste generated by DOGE, the report says the bulk of that — $14.8 billion — went toward the “Deferred Resignation Program” that is “paying approximately 200,000 employees not to work for up to eight months.” It says another $6.1 billion of that waste was designated “for over 100,000 employees” who have been fired or are in the process of being fired, “many of whom were paid to not do their jobs for weeks or months.”

It's sad how often folks who take things to an extreme without any thought about it become exactly what they complain about.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-05 14:47:05+00:00
I intentionally doesn't keep detailed analytics on my homepage server and my digital garden, because I respect my users and don't want to push unnecessary Javascript on them. The blog platform I use (Mataroa) keeps rudimentary analytics (essentially page hit counters, nothing more) on index, RSS and per post.

Both my blog homepage and posts see mostly human traffic. Sometimes bots crawl the site and they appear as spikes in the analytics.

Looks like my homepage which doesn't have anything but links is pretty popular with crawlers. My digital garden doesn't get much interest from them. All in all, human traffic on my sites are pretty much alive.

I don't believe in missing the bus in anything actually, because I don't write these for others, first. Both my blog (more meta) and digital garden (more technical) are written for myself primarily, and left open. I post links to both when it's appropriate, but they are not made to be popular. If people read it and learn something or solve one of their problems, that's enough for me.

This is why my software is GPLv3, Digital Garden is GFDL and blog is CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. This is why everything is running with absolutely minimum analytics and without any ads whatsoever.

Lastly, this is why I don't want AI crawlers in my site and my data in the models. This thing is made by a human for humans, absolutely for free. It's not OK somebody to sell something designed to be free and make money over it.
by dragontamer | 2025-08-05 14:47:05+00:00
And did you read that?

Mastercard never talked to Steam directly. That means all the discussion about Mastercard (from Steams point of view) is practically hearsay.

Meanwhile, we have itch.io being VERY clear here that it's Stripe that has a no-porn policy. That gives us a DIRECT cause. And Stripe ALSO admits that they don't allow porn on their payment network.

--------

Has Steam even said who their payment processor is yet?
by LAsteNERD | 2025-08-05 14:47:07+00:00
Fascinating look into the dynamic imaging capabilities at Los Alamos National Lab—essentially, how the U.S. is able to analyze nuclear-level explosive events without actually conducting nuclear tests.

The Lab uses multiple systems to image these high-speed events:

• pRad uses proton radiography to get 20–40 frames of a detonation, with material-level resolution based on density.

• DARHT uses dual-axis x-ray imaging to create 3D snapshots from two angles, ideal for testing whether the computational models built from pRad hold up.

• Scorpius (in development) will take this a step further by using subcritical plutonium in a new accelerator at NNSS, capturing multiple high-resolution frames just nanoseconds apart.

The fact that they can tailor experiments based on frame-by-frame behavior of individual materials under explosive stress feels like the real-world version of “bullet time” physics modeling. The margins of error come down to billionths of a second.
by brettgriffin | 2025-08-05 14:47:19+00:00
You should be focusing on working your ass off at your job and increasing your earning potential there.

You don't say what you do or where you are, but you're earning $20 an hour. In virtually any industry you should be able to work your way into something much closer to $75k-100k within 24 months if you exhibit any significant agree of professionalism, attitude, and work ethic.

I would stop messing around with these side hustle ideas and just work like a motherfucker.
by fainpul | 2025-08-05 14:47:32+00:00
These comments here about more or less clever text processing tools, each with their own syntax, feel like archaic hacks. Using something like Nushell or PowerShell makes this trivial.

E.g. for the `ps aux` example, using PowerShell, selecting a certain column:

gps | select id

The output of gps is an array of objects. Selecting a property does this for all elements in the array.
by shortformblog | 2025-08-05 14:47:57+00:00
Your point is illogical. It’s like you’ve invented a theory as to how companies advertise that has zero tethering to reality.

It’s especially stupid because it doesn’t include publishers in the equation at all. It’s just you looping over yourself attempting to validate your choice for running an ad blocker.

Admit you’re doing it because you want to callously screw over publishers. You certainly haven’t put their thoughts into consideration here.

To be clear: Run an ad blocker if you want, but stop acting as if you bought those ads. The chicken dinner I ate the other night has no say how I live my life after our transaction has ended.
by bilbo0s | 2025-08-05 14:47:58+00:00
I think you're misinterpreting here..

First, this product only funds one thing, an account at coinbase. You then have to transfer money to people from whom you would like to buy. No protection from fraud. No nothing. Second, even if it did the real time purchase from the vendor directly from Chase with all the attendant protections, (which it doesn't, but even if it did), we'd really need all banks and credit unions to be using it. If it's just Chase, it's going to be inconvenient for a sizable number of people.

(By "sizable", I mean the majority.)