MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by j45 | 2025-08-10 22:38:55+00:00
> "When I tried to fix the security issues, I quickly realized how this whole thing was a trap. Since I didn't wrote it, I didn't have a good bird's eye view of the code and what it did. I couldn't make changes quickly, which started to frustrated me. The easiest route was asking the LLM to do the fixes for me, so I did. More code was changed and added. It worked, but again I could not tell if it was good or not."

Maintaining your own list of issues to look for and how to resolve them, or prevent them outright is almost mandatory, and also doubles as a handy field reference guide for what gaps exist in applying LLM's to your particular use when someone higher up asks.
by hackyhacky | 2025-08-10 22:39:30+00:00
> Hungarian works the same, well I guess the few agglutinative languages do share this element

Not sure what you mean. In Hungarian, the verb meaning "to try" is (meg)próbálni, which does not mean "to see." Its argument is typically given as an infinitive verb, which would never be translated using the pseudocoordination described above, and there is no related form that would be translated as "and".
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-10 22:39:34+00:00
> they clearly don't have any world model whatsoever

Then how did an LLM get gold on the mathematical Olympiad, where it certainly hadn’t seen the questions before? How on earth is that possible without a decent working model of mathematics? Sure, LLMs might make weird errors sometimes (nobody is denying that), but clearly the story is rather more complicated than you suggest.
by laurencerowe | 2025-08-10 22:40:18+00:00
My Minisforum M780 XTX has been rock solid for 20 months now. Bought it as a remote development box since I needed more RAM than my MacBook Air and didn't feel like shelling out $3K for a 64GB MacBook Pro. Generally prefer the remote development experience since it means the laptop stays cool, just a pain not being able to work at a cafe now and then.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-10 22:40:32+00:00
According to this [0] thread, typical car travel speeds were between 10 and 20 mph. They even mention specifics like:

> in 1904 in NYC the limit was set to 12 mph inside of the city and 15 mph outside of it.

With that 12 mph figure being a little under the average running speed of the record holder marathon runner (26.2 miles in 2 hours flat, so 13.1 mph).

Now of course, most people are not record holding athletes, so sustaining these speeds on foot is not really happening for most. But you can definitely at least keep up for the duration of a sprint. So no real need for a horse even, your own legs can make do, despite these speeds being supposedly unnatural.

You can also sustain these speeds with a bicycle today, not sure about the bicycles of then.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Writeresearch/comments/hmy0h4/what_...
by tremon | 2025-08-10 22:40:46+00:00
I usually work on infrastructure as code, and I usually swap out the third layer of the design for the first layer of the implementation. You need a fully-specced functional design and a high-level technical design, but I've found that in many cases the technical implementation details can change as the project is developed, and that means either the low-level technical design and the implementation go out of sync, or there a heavy bureaucratic process in place to prevent that -- but the natural solution is to have the low-level design and the high-level implementation to live in the same place.

That still requires the rest of your process, and perhaps even places more emphasis on those documents. The infrastructure implementation needs to follow from the high-level technical design which needs to follow from the functional specification. Because as you say, the implementation needs to be reviewed against a specification. What are you reviewing if the spec is incomplete?
by basch | 2025-08-10 22:41:06+00:00
Two other good books are

The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world.

The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham

About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 22:41:33+00:00
A good remark, but also a word of caution.

The Syrian situation is not directly comparable. With modern logistics, it is way, way easier to feed even big masses of displaced people. We can produce food efficiently and we can move it over long distances before it spoils. If you run away from active fighting, chances are that you actually survive, even though the refugee camps are miserable.

Neither was true in the Early Middle Ages and if an invader displaced tens of thousands of people from somewhere, they would just die of hunger. The capacity to take care of sudden crowds of refugees just wasn't there.
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-10 22:41:58+00:00
>I think the Cold War played a role too.

Yes, definitely. The USA wanted as many allies as it could get against the USSR, even former enemies.

>German factories were, on average, equipped with more modern machines than British ones.

Thankfully the Germans wasted amounts of resources on not very useful weapons, such as the V2 rocket (technologically brilliant, strategically pretty useless) and the King Tiger (unreliable and IIRC cost somewhere around 20 times as much to make as a typical allied tank).
by ponector | 2025-08-10 22:42:24+00:00
>> every pro maternity policy has failed to bring TFR

Because that policies are bluff to say politicians support family without actually spending much of the budget.

Like give a 100€ rebate for a childcare while it costs 1000€ per month. And also it is closed for a month in summer, so you should care about the baby by yourself.

Real pro-maternity policies will be like this: 1. Free childcare. 2. Free healthcare, including all medicine and vaccination. 3. Free public transport for kids and adults with them. 4. Subsidized shops with items for kids: from nappies to clothes. 4. Subsidized costs of housing for families with kids. 5. Subsidized costs of sport activities. 6. Fully paid maternity leave untill children can be full day in daycare.

Even with generous European policies, having one kid is a huge hit to the lifestyle and savings. But we need to have 2-3 kids to keep the population.
Show HN: Squiddly, Disable the GitHub merge button based on checks or a label
by joshcartme | 2025-08-10 22:42:55+00:00
I've been working on a hobby project in a private repo on Github. I'm not at the point where I want to convert to a Github team so I can't enforce branch protection rules. I did want to prevent merging if some CI check I have setup failed so I don't end up with type-errors in main.

To solve for this I made this extension which disables the Github merge button when checks are failing and/or a user defined label is on the PR.

There's a content script that uses a MutationObserver to know when to disable/enable. That content script also listens to chrome.storage.sync.onChanged to know the values set in the configuration pop-over.
by lexandstuff | 2025-08-10 22:43:09+00:00
I'm a CS professional of 15 years, getting a CS degree for visa purposes. I'm doing it via the University of London's World Class on Coursera [1], and it costs around ~20-25K USD for the whole thing. If all continues to go well, I'll be done in 3.5 years, all while working full time.

So that's another option to consider: do the CS degree part-time while working on breaking into the industry. You can adjust your workload each semester depending on circumstances, so it's flexible for someone job hunting.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/degrees/bachelor-of-science-compute...
by karpour | 2025-08-10 22:43:42+00:00
This really makes clear how boring web design has become. 99% of websites use the same standard layout, there's almost nothing distinct or exciting about any of the designs. I remember web design being an art form, with books being printed with the best designs... I'd visit brand websites just to look at the design itself, even if I wasn't interested in what they were selling.

Of course not all is bad, but I'd love to see some creativity again, it seems like almost no one dares to break the norm anymore.
by andy99 | 2025-08-10 22:44:04+00:00
First, insurance companies should be the last thing we consider when setting policy, this is propaganda for them trying to protect their racket, not anything more telling.

Second, governments and private companies should be looking at (socializing) mitigations that will keep risk within tolerable levels (without caring whether some legacy insurer continues to be able to gouge cusotmers). If there's a clear and identifiable threat, we can build dikes or sea walls or spillways or whatever it is that can alleviate the issue. "Think of the insurance implications" is a silly distraction.
by soganess | 2025-08-10 22:44:28+00:00
I did acknowledge it? I said best in the x86 space and second overall. The "raw" iGPU ordering is M4, Lunar Lake, Strix Point, and finally 8 Elite. Of course, numbers aren't everything. If one actually were to pick an iGPU for gaming they would be best served by Strix Point.

I think the M4 is a fanless marvel of a chip and noticeably more interesting than the M4 Max. A fanless 6+2+10 configuration M5 with 128gb of ram would the most interesting thing in the mobile space.

But since we are splitting hairs, how good is an iGPU if you can't play most games? x86 -> windows or proton. One can't even run Linux, let alone proton, on an M4 (Asahi support stops at the M2).
by ben_w | 2025-08-10 22:45:28+00:00
Eyeballing a sigmoid curve for TRL development times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

There's several things that it depends on which are TRL 1-3, but are known to be at least theoretically possible. Based on how long it takes to get other things from TRL 1 to working device, I think it's most likely to take longer than my current remaining life expectancy even to be even odds, but not by such a large margin as to be infinitesimal odds.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-10 22:46:11+00:00
That's a bingo card of a blog post:

- We are a cult: Check - Align with the mission: Check - Be obsessed: Check - Abandon everything for the obsession: Check - Overwork and get underpaid: Check

I mean, I deeply care about what I do, yet I also care deeply care about my work/life balance (slow careers be damned, I gotta live once, and my passion needs cooling down, and my family is equally important to me). I will pull all-nighters if I see them as a necessity, not because you force me to do so, and I'm not shy of doing them.

This mentality of the author is deeply flawed. Yes, success requires hard work, but doesn't necessitate a burnout.

I'll pass, thanks.
by awesome_dude | 2025-08-10 22:46:27+00:00
There are employers that care - they genuinely try to keep their staff engaged, and happy. They also, when times are hard, are the ones least likely to make people redundant, they hold on as long as humanly possible.

Then there are the employers at the other end of the scale, those who couldn't care less about their staff, they think that they pay the staff and that's all that's required of them, and everything that goes wrong is the staff's fault.

So, in practice, the employers that see their staff as human beings rather than "resources" to be exploited is a bloody good start.
by whatwrongwyou | 2025-08-10 22:46:53+00:00
"The article makes it sound like", which I used to emphasize the seeming misunderstanding that the author seems to have. Insurers aren't stupid. I don't think the author is stupid either; I think they're just not a SME. And unless you have credentials, neither are you or anyone else here. We have to be better at listening to the experts who dedicate their lives to this stuff, and we need to fund them whatever they need to do their work.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 22:47:23+00:00
With two exceptions (Britain and Dacia), the Roman empire mostly ran out of interesting neighbours to conquer by 1 AD.

Britain was considered Claudius' vanity project and probably was, on the net, an economic loss. Dacia was abandoned quite early precisely because it wasn't interesting enough to defend.

The legions remained pretty big long (centuries) after the expansion phase ceased.
by mhalle | 2025-08-10 22:47:26+00:00
You might also like "When Old Technologies Were New", which describes about how electricity and communication in the home changed society.

For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it.

https://a.co/d/fnBimUx
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-10 22:47:46+00:00
>By the time of Western Roman Empire collapsing, the realm was Christian for two centuries and gladiator games et al. were banned for so long that no one alive would remember them happening.

That is a fair point. But I believe the Romans were still a pretty brutal and repressive regime right up the the end. And also levied high taxes. Whether the regional powers that replaced them were any better, was a matter of luck I suppose.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-10 22:48:49+00:00
You can play the same game and call them "Americans" or "adults" or "politicians" but the reason you want to call them Republicans is that you're stuck in a partisan frame.

If you need majority support in a state where Republican candidates get 60-70% of the vote then you need to get some "Republicans" on your side, which in turn means you need to distinguish between the ones who are your enemies and the ones who could be your friends.
by wslh | 2025-08-10 22:48:56+00:00
CoinDesk is ignoring the elephant in the room: for most protocol owners, revenue is almost irrelevant. Early investors in crypto startups often get tokens worth many times their cash investment. Once the protocol is live and popular, the money pours in. Vesting rules? A few years is plenty. The real kicker is that there's no transparency about how many tokens these investors get, only the round investment totals make it into public reports.
by atoav | 2025-08-10 22:49:49+00:00
This is my experience as well.

As a former freelancer the standards I hold myself to are exceptionally high. Then I got employed and carried that standard with me (still do). The problem is that this means work will be pushed my way, because I am sometimes literally the only person who can do it within a day instead making it a month long project.

This led then to such an amount of work that I could mo longer hold that quality level, which made me unhappy. Of course I complained all the way, with no real change.

The only thing that worked was a strategic leaking of the fact that I was looking for positions elsewhere, suddenly a whole lot of concessions were made, and since then it has gotten better and I got much better at rejecting work.

Care too much and you burn out and get replaced.
by ZunarJ5 | 2025-08-10 22:50:23+00:00
You know what caring looks like. You experience it in your personal relationships every day. The disconnect isn't knowledge, it's incentives. The practical answer is straightforward: predictable schedules that people can plan around, living wages that are indexed to the COL, transparent paths for advancement, respect for work-life boundaries, investment in employee development beyond immediate productivity needs (i.e. good healthcare for the worker and their dependents), genuine sick leave without retaliation, respect for physical and cognitive limitations, and protection from arbitrary termination.

But you're asking the wrong question. The real question is why, despite decades of evidence showing these practices improve retention and performance, they remain exceptional rather than standard. The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as designed. It is optimized for wealth extraction, not value creation.

Public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. Every dollar spent on employee wellbeing that doesn't directly boost quarterly metrics is arguably a breach of fiduciary duty. Middle managers who genuinely care get promoted out or pushed out. The few companies that do care either have unusual ownership structures (co-ops, private ownership with values-driven founders) or are temporarily buying talent in hot markets. Once conditions change, watch how quickly that 'caring' evaporates.

So yes, we all know what caring looks like. The question is why we keep pretending the current system has any mechanism to deliver it at scale.
by xoa | 2025-08-10 22:50:28+00:00
FWIW and depending on where you are this could be down to local regulations. A lot of (most?) polities do not allow insurance companies to simply set prices based on their assessment of risks and the market, but rather place extremely heavy restrictions on the process (which further inevitably get politicized). They may also have regulations around minimum numbers of people to offer coverage to in an area and endless other related issues. So an insurance company that does the math and thinks it has to raise premiums 200% or whatever to make it work, unless somebody meets specific XYZ criteria around fire resistance (which are expensive), it may find that it simply is not allowed to at all, or not without long delays and a burdensome legal/PR battles. They always have the right to leave though.
by ben_w | 2025-08-10 22:50:30+00:00
> Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit

Not by itself. I basically agree with your broader point, of course, but on this particular detail, if someone's goal is to turn the moon into something like a Culture Orbital with the Earth at the centre*, the overall momentum of the system doesn't need to change.

* Or the old barycentre at the centre. This is also a terrible idea, please don't do this. Apart from anything else, mistakes are inevitable and large chunks of moon/O will rain down on us.
by 827a | 2025-08-10 22:50:36+00:00
I think that's an extreme characterization. Existing AIs are intelligent enough to be able to form immediately executable API requests based on the content of an OpenAPI schema. OpenAPI defines everything they need; endpoint names, human descriptions, arguments, authorization, etc. With proper prompting and a well designed harness, which MCP also needs, it would have solved the problem. Conversely: MCP doesn't really have much over OpenAPI in the domain of helping LLMs identify which tools to call; it has tool names, tool descriptions, input parameters, and that's basically it. OpenAPI has all that.

The reason why MCP was invented is hard to reverse-engineer, but from what I've seen I suspect its mostly: it was stdio/stdout first, and there isn't really a great standard like OpenAPI in the local-first stdio/stdout world. Interesting, LSP (Microsoft) took the opposite approach; despite having far less reason to be hosted on the web, LSP is just localhost http calls. MCP could have done that, but they didn't, without good reason, which leads me to the second reason why I suspect it was invented: they didn't know, and thus couldn't learn from prior art that they didn't know. Most of these AI labs are not rigorous engineering shops, they're better characterized as: a bunch of kids with infinite money trying to reignite the spirit of the early internet startup boom. Many believe that what they're building will replace everything, so why even try to build on what already exists?

But why it was invented doesn't matter, because anyone can invent anything. The reason why MCP has gotten popular is because its AI. That's it. Its a marketing and SEO system that enables companies who are otherwise struggling to find a way to prioritize AI use-cases for their apps to say "look, we're AI now". You don't get the same market impact if all you need is that boring old OpenAPI schema you already have.

And again: I like MCP. What I stated sounds pessimistic, but its only intended to be realistic. There is almost zero technical reason for MCP to exist beyond that.
by kibwen | 2025-08-10 22:51:14+00:00
> Second, governments and private companies should be looking at (socializing) mitigations that will keep risk within tolerable levels

The moral hazard is killer here. I fear that in practice what this means is that the rest of the US will end up bailing out the gormless Floridians who refuse to stop building McMansions on the coast. Insert the gif of Bugs Bunny cutting off Florida and letting it drift off into the Caribbean.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-10 22:51:22+00:00
I rather have the impression that many bosses/companies actively avoid people who do care: this kind of people is often rather inconvenient to manage, since because of the fact that they do care, they are very willing to fight (also or even particular to superiors) for their vision.

Thus, hiring people who do care requires very particular kinds of bosses who can accept/handle people who care. Companies who do not have those are in my opinion often better served with people who don't give a fuck, but hardly ever (because they don't really consider it to be worth their time) actively disagree with orders from above. If the description of such people sounds passive-aggressive to you, I don't disagree: such people sometimes are this way. So, it might actually (surprisingly) make sense for companies to scout for passive-aggressive people. :-)
by almog | 2025-08-10 22:52:20+00:00
I think it tries to compare the export tax to the last week news about chips/semis to be subject to 100% tariffs unless they also have manufacturing in the US.

So yes, they won't have to pay tariffs because they also manufacture in the US, not because they'd (supposedly) have to pay the export tax (though it's hard to see how these two could be mutually exclusive).
by rikafurude21 | 2025-08-10 22:52:29+00:00
He freely admits that the LLM did his job way faster than he could, but then claims that he doesnt believe it could make him 10x more productive. He decides that he will not use his new "superpower" because the second prompt he sent revealed that the code had security issues, which the LLM presumably also fixed after finding them. The fact that the LLM didnt consider those issues when writing his code puts his mind at rest about the possibility of being replaced by the LLM. Did he consider that the LLM wouldve done it the right way after the first message if prompted correctly? Considering his "personal stance on ai" I think he was going into this experience expecting exactly the result he got to reinforce his beliefs. Unironically enough thats exactly the type of person who would get replaced, because as a developer if youre not using these tools youre staying behind
by hazek112 | 2025-08-10 22:52:29+00:00
The first step to hiring people who care is paying them enough that they have a reason to care.

Frankly, during my time at Amazon I was never really that worried about a service going down. Wasn't paid enough to lose sleep over someone else's problem.

Founders care because they have the most skin in the game - unless it's for a family or a huge ego I don't find it surprising when employees don't care outside of 40hrs a week. I even support that line of thinking.
by martinald | 2025-08-10 22:52:47+00:00
Exactly. _So much_ software dev is "throwaway" in my experience. Of course some isn't. Landing pages, A/B tests, even a lot of feature work is very speculative and gets put in the trash.

I do wonder if this is why there is such a gulf in LLM experience. If you're doing hardcore huge scale distributed systems then I can (maybe?) see why you'd think it is useless. However, that is very niche imo and most software dev work is some level (unfortunately) of virtually throwaway code. Of course, not all is - of all the ideas and experiments, some percentage is hopefully very successful and can be polished.