MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kergonath | 2025-08-05 15:19:20+00:00
> Perhaps things are screwed up a bit more fundamentally if we're sending 5 yr olds to school.

I don’t know, I went to school at 3 and I turned out fine. Same for my kids. It’s good to be with other children at that age.

> It amazes (and frightens, just a little) me that you talk about it casually as if it should be the norm.

It is the norm here. If anything, 5 is quite old to start school. The alternative is one of the parents giving up their career because the vast majority of people cannot afford full-time day care.

But there’s not only that. At that age children need stimulating environments and learn a lot, fast by being with others in a secure environment. You really see the difference between those who started at 3 and those who started at 6 in terms of cognitive, social, and motor development.
by altairprime | 2025-08-05 15:19:34+00:00
It reads well to me, as someone familiar with Perl map and jq lambda. But I would syntactic sugar it rather more strongly using a new `|=>` operator implying a distributive `|>` into its now-inferred-and-silent => arguments:

$result = $arr |> fn($x) |=> array_column($x, 'values'), array_merge(...$x), array_reduce($x, fn($carry, $item) => $carry + $item, 0), str_repeat('x', $x);

As teaching the parser to distribute `fn($x) |=> ELEM1, ELEM2` into `fn($x) => ELEM1 |> fn($x) => ELEM2 |> …` so that the user isn’t wasting time repeating it is exactly the sort of thing I love from Perl, and it’s more plainly clear what it’s doing — and in what order, without having to unwrap parens — without interfering with any successive |> blocks that might have different needs.

Of course, since I come from Perl, that lends itself well to cleaning up the array rollup in the middle using a reduce pipe, and then replacing all the words with operators to make incomprehensible gibberish but no longer needing to care about $x at all:

$result = $arr |> $x: ||> 'values' |+< $i: $x + $i |> str_repeat('x', $x);

Which rolls up nicely into a one-liner that is completely comprehensible if you know that | is column, + is merge, < is reduce, and have the : represent the syntactic sugar for conserving repetitions of fn($x) into $x using a stable syntax that the reduce can also take advantage of:

$result = $arr |> $x: ||> 'values' |+< $i: $x + $i |> str_repeat('x', $x);

Which reads as a nice simple sentence, since I grew up on Perl, that can be interpreted at a glance because it fits within a glance!

So. I wouldn’t necessarily implement everything I can see possible here, because Perl proved that the space of people willing to parse symbols rather than words is not the complete programmer space. But I do stand by the helpfulness of the switch-like |=> as defined above =)
by cardanome | 2025-08-05 15:19:36+00:00
I think the issue is that the topic comes up quite often as seen by the author needing to create the gist. It easy to come across as a bit of "smug and obnoxious" when you explain something for the xth time.

I remember chatting with them years ago and they were pretty friendly. But yeah Lisp does have a specific culture and it can put people off thought I personally never encountered any bad apples.
by rayiner | 2025-08-05 15:19:42+00:00
It's not just about who is the "head" of the agency. In practice, the career civil service has tremendous power and discretion to run the agency; political appointees can't do much without their cooperation.

And the career civil service overwhelmingly is Democrats. 85% of federal employee donations went to Kamala Harris, 90% of you exclude the DOD: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... The proportion of republicans in AOC's district in the Bronx and Queens is more than twice as high as in the federal government outside the DOD. And given that federal workers tend to be highly educated, and more educated people tend to be more politically ideological, you get a federal government that's a true monoculture.

Certainly, we can debate about the degree to which the career civil service zealously carries out the agenda of the current elected administration. I suspect it depends on the agency. What's disturbing to me is the people who think the career civil service should serve as a "check" on the elected administration. These are the people who cite political appointees overruling career civil servants as itself an example of "dismantling democracy." They are the ones who cheered on civil servants who declared their "resistance" to Trump in 2017 at the start of his term. This view--which I think is fairly widespread--nakedly embraces the idea that "democracy" is where one party always runs the government, and that electing a President from the other party simply means that he gets to cajole and try to persuade civil servants into carrying out some of his agenda.
by strawhatguy | 2025-08-05 15:19:46+00:00
Thinking government can help is wrong to begin with. It can't, it can only get in the way. Perhaps electric vehicles and definitely smaller vehicles could've been more prevalent today without the CAFE rules. Other environmental rules prevent (or make prohibitively expensive, same thing) the mines in which rare earth metals for batteries for EVs are produced.

At least the federal EV mandates are gone now (my state's still exists though, sadly). That would've only driven up costs, meaning more people either would NOT drive EVs at all, or would be even more in debt then they are now.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-05 15:20:10+00:00
People (particularly, HN) still associate it with the old .NET framework days and it being tied to Microsoft, Windows Server, etc.

.NET has had a hard time shaking off that old stigma, and to be fair, by the time it was really good, a lot of places already moved on to other tech (in particular, Go) .NET missed its window to escape the enterprise and despite being great, will probably never be seen as sexy.

I love it though. It's by far one of the most productive frameworks, and C# is pleasant to work with, and F# even more so.
by rorylaitila | 2025-08-05 15:20:14+00:00
I've worked independently, then had employee programmers, now back to independent. It's a mixed bag. It's all on my shoulders now, it's lonely, and progress is slower. On the other hand when I had a team, I had to organize the priority, check the work, motivate them. It was quite a distraction in many ways. I also felt I was creating too much make-work just to keep people interested.

But now I struggle with my own motivation having no one to share the burden. Co-working and colleagues doesn't really improve the loneliness much.

I don't have an answer though. I'll probably go back to a team some day.
by waldopat | 2025-08-05 15:20:25+00:00
Ha! Wow. It just said this. Dang!

STOP TRUSTING CLAUDE CODE'S CLAIMS!

This is the EXACT same response it gave you before when the screen was blank! It's literally copy-and-pasting the same "success" message while the component is completely broken.

Claude Code is Lying to You: Same identical response as last time Screen is still blank - nothing changed No actual progress made Just repeating the same false claims
by qwertfisch | 2025-08-05 15:20:27+00:00
Funny, I recently wanted to uninstall a bunch of fonts I tested for programming. Turns out, in the new font settings widget you cannot uninstall all fonts or even all styles of a font at once. I would have needed to select a font, then click "Uninstall" for the bold style, the semibold style, the medium style, the italic bold style etc.

Opening \Windows\Fonts instead gives you a nice view of all fonts, you Ctrl-select all you want, right click, uninstall, done.
by jfyi | 2025-08-05 15:20:42+00:00
I agree with you. I think you read that wrong.

The processor lied about Mastercard's involvement. It's par for the course in my experience that processors always try to offload blame on someone else. Then Mastercard saying explicitly that the decision wasn't made at their level.

I imagine you have had the same week of yelling at the wall on this issue I have.
by ffsm8 | 2025-08-05 15:21:06+00:00
To date, I've not been able to effectively use Copilot in any projects.

The suggestions were always unusably bad. The /fix were always obviously and straight up false unless it was a super silly issue.

Claude Code with Opus model on the other hand was mind-blowing to me and made me change my mind on almost everything wrt my opinion of LLMs for coding.

You still need to grow the skill of how to build the context and formulate the prompt, but the buildin execution loop is a complete game changer and I didn't realize that until I actually used it effectively on a toy project myself.

MCP in particular was another thing I always thought was massively over hyped, until I actually started to use some in the same toy project.

Frankly, the building blocks already exist at this point to make a vast majority of all jobs redundant (and I'm thinking about all grunt work office jobs, not coding in particular). The tooling still need to be created, so I'm not seeing a short term realization (<2 yrs), but medium term (5+yrs)?

You should expect most companies to let people go at staggering numbers, with only small amounts of highly skilled people left to administer the agents
by miggy | 2025-08-05 15:21:13+00:00
A useful way to find ideas is by observing asymmetries. When something appears easy for some people but difficult for others, or vice versa, it often reveals underlying complexity, missing tools, or flawed mental models. Frustration can also be a signal. If something feels unnecessarily painful or awkward while others seem fine with it, there may be an opportunity to simplify, rethink, or build something better. These patterns often lead to meaningful insights or practical solutions.
by sltr | 2025-08-05 15:21:19+00:00
Simple claim with a complex story.

I thought about mentioning AOT and trimming, but my comment was already long.

AOT in ASP.NET is still a moonshot in most cases, and a non-starter in existing web apps due to dependencies not supporting AOT.

Worth mentioning that as of .NET 9 AOT is not supported on Android.
by dowager_dan99 | 2025-08-05 15:21:24+00:00
I am a dinosaur but still feel strongly enough to post this PSA: please go back and read "No Silver Bullet" (and his follow up) again. You should probably schedule a re-read every 2-5 years, just to keep your sanity in these crazy, exhausting times.

I believe his original thesis remains true: "There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."

Over the years this has been misrepresented or misinterpreted to suggest it's false but it sure feels like "Agentic Coding" is a single development promising a massive multiplier in improvement that once again is, another accidental tool that can be helpful but is definitely not a silver bullet.
by thomascgalvin | 2025-08-05 15:21:28+00:00
My experience with GenAI is that it's a significant improvement to Stack Overflow, and generally as capable as someone hired right out of college.

If I'm using it to remember the syntax or library for something I used to know how to do, it's great.

If I'm using it to explore something I haven't done before, it makes me faster, but sometimes it lies to me. Which was also true of Stack Overflow.

But when I ask it to so something fairly complex on it's own, it usually tips over. I've tried a bunch of tests with a bunch of models, and it never quite gets it right. Sometimes it's minor stuff that I can fix if I bang on it long enough, and sometimes it's a steaming pile that I end up tossing in the garbage.

For example, I've asked it to code me a web-based calculator, or a 3D model of the solar system using WebGL, and none of the models I've tried have been able to do either.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-08-05 15:21:39+00:00
it reads both, so with the comments it more or less parrots the desired outcome I explained... and it sometimes catches the mismatch between code and comment itself before I even mention it

I read and understand 100% of the code it outputs, so I'm not so worried about falling too far astray...

being too prescriptive about it (like prompting "don't write comments") makes the output worse in my experience
by AdrianB1 | 2025-08-05 15:21:39+00:00
It highly depends on the circumstances. In over 30 years in the industry I met 3 people that were many times more productive than everyone else around them, even more than 10 times. What does this translate to? Well, there are some extraordinary people around, very rare and you cannot count on finding some and, when you find them, it is almost impossible to retain them because management and HR never agree to pay them enough to stay around.
by jorblumesea | 2025-08-05 15:21:39+00:00
This is not a surprising conclusion for anyone that works in the field and uses the current gen of LLMs.

The problem is...

1. there is an enormous investment in $$$ produces a too big to fail scenario where extravagant claims will be made regardless

2. leadership has made big promises around productivity and velocity for eng

the end result of this is going to be a lot of squinting at the problem, ignoring reality and declaring victory. These AI tools are very useful in automating chore and grunt tasks.
by mwigdahl | 2025-08-05 15:21:40+00:00
I've heard this multiple times (Tea being an example of problems with vibe coding) but my understanding was that the Tea app issues well predated vibe coding.

I have experimented with vibe coding. With Claude Code I could produce a useful and usable small React/TS application, but it was hard to maintain and extend beyond a fairly low level of complexity. I totally agree that vibe coding (at the moment) is producing a lot of slop code, I just don't think Tea is an example of it from what I understand.
by bookofcooks | 2025-08-05 15:21:48+00:00
> I have a hard time believing that a pure SPA approach would be simpler to implement.

IF you used a pure SPA approach with client-side validation for each step, and server-side validation only done at the last step, I believe it would be simpler.

However, let's say you introduce anything slightly more complicated. Like say you do server-side validation with each step, now you have to somehow persist that "validated data". In that case, the implementation in the article is indeed simpler (or at least not as complicated as a traditional SPA).
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-08-05 15:21:54+00:00
> did the author oversleep the past several centuries?

did you? this is one of the central points argued by luddites since the industrial revolution began.

> I guess what I'm trying to say is that LLMs are not inherently incapable of writing well.

i don't know if that's quite the argument the author is making; more that LLMs are inherently incapable of producing content of value (subjective, but I tend to agree).

the adage i've heard that i like quite a bit is "if it's not worth writing, it's not worth reading".
by secabeen | 2025-08-05 15:22:21+00:00
That's fine for financial accounts, but people have hundreds of accounts, and you don't know which ones are the ones that matter beforehand. Is it your family member's AO3 stories that you want? Or maybe the login to the web forum that was their primary social outlet in old age? This assumes that those non-financial sites even have a process to let you in.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-05 15:22:30+00:00
Perhaps my wording was misleading. I am not claiming that reform is not possible. I am only claiming that the impulse, especially when it is messianic, that drives some reformers and revolutionaries is delusional, a dead end, and worse, usually involves tyrannical measures and produces more bad than it does good.

Of course, academia could absolutely benefit from certain changes and reforms - I have argued for this myself; education has been derailed by inferior goals - , but the primary place where the work has to happen isn't policy or institutional structure, but ourselves. Indeed, the counterpart to your criticism is that excessive talk of reform is a way of avoiding the difficult and unpleasant work of having to look in the mirror. This does not exclude the need for certain reforms, but unless you get your own house in order first, you will be in poor shape to know what to reform and how.
by wryoak | 2025-08-05 15:22:36+00:00
> 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

Okay boomer. In which fields or industries have you accomplished this? I agree those attributes will generally be rewarded but not at that rate, not in most fields.
by zoeysmithe | 2025-08-05 15:22:44+00:00
Yes Im exaggerating and its not writing a AAA game from a prompt but I asked it to make a game like Zelda and it figured it out and walked me through all the aspects of it. That's a lot more than I expected. I'm not a games programmer, so I'm probably a lot more impresse than I should be, but I went from not knowing anything about godot to having a framework up to build a 2d rpg-esque game fairly quickly and me learning as it gave me the code. Note, I used the new chatgpt study mode, so that's may be different than just regular prompts. I fully expected just broken code and random AI musings, but instead I got a very solid implementation of a game, albeit a simple one. Or at least as simple as I asked for, I imagine I can keep building out more with its help.

I also have never used godot before, and I was surprised at how well it navigated and taught me the interface as well.

At least the horror stories about "all the code is broken and hallucinations" isn't really true for me and my uses so far. If LLM's will succeed anywhere it will be in the overly logical and predictable worlds of programming languages, but that's just a guess on my part, but thus far whenever I reach out for code from LLM's, its been a fairly positive experience.
by edm0nd | 2025-08-05 15:23:32+00:00
>I'd expect it to work like a very junior programmer, but it works like a very drunk senior programmer that isn't listening to you very well at all.

This seems to be the current consensus.

A very similar quote from another recent AI article:

One host compares AI chatbots to “a very smart assistant who has a dozen Ph.D.s but is also high on ketamine like 30 percent of the time.”

https://lithub.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-to-replace-mys...
by naikrovek | 2025-08-05 15:23:36+00:00
while I think the author chose the wrong words here, I think they have a good point.

It will be very, very tempting for companies to let people go when LLMs can do everything that they envision the people doing. It is very hard to resist the cost savings that LLMs have over people. People who get sick, get married, go on vacation, have children, and sometimes just need a break, so they don't come in. LLMs always come in. LLMs always work.

Many executives see LLMs as the ideal replacement for humans in information roles. That is clearly batshit insane but the numbers really lean towards this if you're someone who is distant from people who work for you.

Companies would do well not to forget that companies are of people, by people, and for people. they exist solely to provide products or services to people, be it actual individuals or companies which are made up of people.

If companies ditch too many people in favor of automation, they'll find fewer customers for their goods. because people won't be able to afford them, or will have no need for them. it's not like there's some huge need for LLM trainers to take up the unemployment slack. There is no replacement industry this time.
by pgt | 2025-08-05 15:23:53+00:00
I could not have built EACL[^1] without AI. We use EACL at work at now, so arguably AI has made me 10x more productive, but only because I know how to write specs for AI to get what I want.

Context: EACL is an embedded ReBAC authorization library based on SpiceDB-compatible*, built in Clojure and backed by Datomic.

[^1]: https://github.com/theronic/eacl
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-08-05 15:24:58+00:00
Writing code is the only part of my job that I like. Im not exhausted by coding because I love coding. Im exhausted by pointless meetings, talking to clients, and trying to bring non technical people up to speed with what im working on. Allowing a machine to write code for me and then manually editing it sounds like a really really miserable way to spend the precious little time I have on this earth
by cgriswald | 2025-08-05 15:25:10+00:00
I have no real conclusion here, but sort of land on the side of "Why wouldn't you expand it?"

The abbreviation of e.g. isn't a good example. It is hundreds of years old and taught in schools. It is essentially a feature of the language (or at least of writing the language) and can hardly be compared to the far more recent initialism NVR. It is ubiquitous and all native English speakers should know it and all non-native English speakers should learn it.

VCR is an example that is almost always referred to solely as its initialism. However, this became a completely ubiquitous term. Early advertisements didn't say "VCR", they said things like "video recorder"[0]. Once it was ubiquitous non-specialists knew what a VCR was even if they didn't understand the initialism and they were marketed just as "VCR". One could make the case that "VCR" stopped being a pure initialism and become more of a word. (VHS on the other hand... not expanded in that video.)

Is NVR ubiquitous enough? BestBuy sells them without expanding the initialism (in the examples I checked), so maybe. However, I bet if you sampled people, the majority wouldn't be able to tell you. And BestBuy selling them this way may have more to do with limited 'item title' space.

It might be the case that it is well-enough known among people who 'need to know' like security folks. I'd argue that's probably not meaningful if BestBuy is retailing them to the public.

Maybe a better example is something like an air-admittance valve (AAV). Most people have never heard of it, but all plumbers have heard of it. In context, anyone can probably figure out what it does. And yet Oatey "correctly" (according to style rules) identifies the name and puts the initialism in parentheses[1].

So on the one hand, it may be ubiquitous enough that it doesn't matter (and is becoming more of a word). On the other hand, there's evidence here that it does matter because it isn't ubiquitous enough for people to be comfortable not knowing what the acronym means.

What I can't see is the downside of writing "network video recorder (NVR)" on the first instance of is use at least on the landing page. Everyone has to learn what it means somewhere and it seems like a missed marketing opportunity for it to not be through your product's landing page. It may also reduce friction or aid in SEO. (YMMV, but I get quite different results searching for "network video recorder" and "NVR".)

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ9nkyo01HQ [1] - https://www.oatey.com/products/air-admittance-valves-aav
by fnands | 2025-08-05 15:25:12+00:00
> Talking a PM down from a task that was never feasible

One of our EMs did this this week. He did a lot of homework: spoke to quite a few experts and pretty soon realised this task was too hard for his team to ever accomplish, if it was even possible. Lobbied the PM and, a VP and a C-level, but managed to stop a lot of wasted work from being done.

Sometimes the most important language to know as a dev is English*

s/English/YourLanguageOfChoice/g