MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Epa095 | 2025-08-22 16:54:21+00:00
This is a false dichotomy though, as I linked previously in this thread, adult Sweeds are above Koreans, and only slightly below Japanese in both literacy, numeracy, and problem solving.

Personally I think it's easy to overestimate how important it is to be good at something at 16 for the skill at 25. Good university is infinitely more important than 'super elite' high school.
by gf000 | 2025-08-22 16:54:34+00:00
Any production-grade project will use either Maven or Gradle for builds. There are CI/CD pipelines, lints, etc, how would all these work if you could only build through an IDE?

Sure, there are some awfully dated companies that still send changed files over email to each other with no version control, I'm sure some of those are stuck with an IDE config, but to be honest where I have seen this most commonly were some Visual Studio projects, not Java. Even though you could find any of these for any other language, you just need to scale your user base up. A language that hasn't even hit 1.0 will have a higher percentage of technically capable users, that's hardly a surprise.
by sethammons | 2025-08-22 16:54:47+00:00
I agree with just about everything in the post. I've been bit a time or two by the "two flavors of null." That said, my most pleasant and most productive code bases I've worked in have all been Go.

Some learnings. Don't pass sections of your slices to things that mutate them. Anonymous functions need recovers. Know how all goroutines return.
by tliltocatl | 2025-08-22 16:54:53+00:00
> If I freeze 40 yo Einstein and make it so he can't form new memories beyond 5 minutes, that's still an incredibly useful, generally intelligent thing

A "frozen mind" feels like something not unlike a book - useful, but only with a smart enough "human user", and even so be progressively less useful as time passes.

>Doesn't seem like a problem that needs to be solved on the critical path to AGI.

It definitely is one. I know we are running into definitions, but being able to form novel behavior patterns based on experience is pretty much the essence of what intelligence is. That doesn't necessary mean that a "frozen mind" will be useless, but it would certainly not qualify as AGI.

>We don't have visibility into the IMO/IOI medal winning models.

There are lies, damn lies and LLM benchmarks. IMO/IOI is not necessarily indicative of any useful tasks.
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-08-22 16:55:18+00:00
I think this is mostly true, but when it gets cheaper and faster, it will be able to complete much larger tasks unsupervised.

larger != more complex

The widespread adoption of cheap agentic AI will absolutely be an economic revolution. Millions of customer support jobs will be completely eliminated in the next few years, and that's just the beginning.

Soon it'll be easy to give an AI all the same things you give a new employee: an email address, a slack username, a web browser, access to the company intranet, a GitHub account, a virtual machine with mouse and keyboard control, etc. and you'll be able to swap it out one-for-one with pretty much any low-level employee.
by anothermathbozo | 2025-08-22 16:55:43+00:00
Given how much capital has already been committed to infrastructure development I find it very unlikely that even a Black Monday style market correction will do much to alter the medium and long term outlook for ai development and investment.

Too many people talk about a bubble almost wish-casting that such a thing will make this all go away. It’s probably safest to assume your political enemies won’t be hoisted on their own petard anytime soon.
by PUSH_AX | 2025-08-22 16:55:46+00:00
You’ve made a sweeping statement there, there are swathes of teams working in startups still trying to find product market fit. Focusing on quality in these situations is folly, but that’s not even the point. My point is you can ship quality to any standard using an llm, even your standards. If you can’t that’s a skill issue on your part.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-22 16:55:49+00:00
>Democracies can and do correct.

Yes, but when you ignore citizens' demands for too long, they will then over-correct in the opposite direction: see Hitler, Brexit, Trump, AFD, LePenn, Meloni, etc. History has proved this to be correct 100% of the time.

>For example the progressive movement in the US

Can you provide more details, I'm not an US citizen.
by 827a | 2025-08-22 16:55:57+00:00
I deeply, seriously, believe that you should have written the words "Its super confusing", meditated on that for a minute, then left it at that. It is super confusing. That's it. Nothing else matters. I understand why it is the way it is. I'm not stupid. As you said: Its super confusing, which is relevant when you're picking languages other people at your company (interns, juniors) have to write in.

> “The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-22 16:56:24+00:00
From your ref [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/

> we show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D.

That seems high, but I can't contextualize it based only on these results. What would the figures be for doctors, blacksmiths, farmers, computer programmers, etc.? I guess you're likely to find disproportionate numbers of children who followed in their parents' footsteps in any profession. It's likely not something special to academia.

In any case, there are plenty of other factors that contribute beyond nepotism: early guidance and encouragement, support and understanding of career choices, parental expectations or pressures, genetics, and so on.

> Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years.

Ok, this is a bit more suggestive, but it's also plausible to me that the factors I mentioned above are amplified for children of parents working at prestigious universities.

> Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction.

This seemed a bit of a non sequitur to me. The results show that children of academic parents go into academia more than others, not that "socioeconomic privilege" predisposes to going into academia. For example, are the children of billionaires (or millionaires) more likely to go into academia than the children of humble academics at non-prestigious universities? I doubt it.

(I only read the abstract so please let me know if these points are addressed in the article)
by rhelz | 2025-08-22 16:56:30+00:00
Reminds me of Karl Marx's critique of work under capitalism, describing how workers feel alienated from their own labor:

"The worker therefore only feels himself outside of work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home."

I had my own version during the COVID shutdown: "The worker therefore feels like they are at work even when they are at home, and when they are at home they feel like they are at work."
by kstrauser | 2025-08-22 16:56:36+00:00
Who would be qualified to judge their those critics’ writing as good or bad? Critics already qualified as good writers? Who vetted them, then? It’d have to be a stream of certified good authors all the way back.

No, I stick by my position. I may not be able to do any better, but I can tell when something’s not good.

(I have no opinion on Go. I’ve barely used it. This is only on the general principle of being able to judge something you couldn’t do yourself. I mean, the Olympics have gymnastic judges who are not gold medalists.)
by gf000 | 2025-08-22 16:56:37+00:00
Google is 100% writing a whole load of new services, and Go is 13 years old (even older within Google), so it surely has had ample opportunities to take.

As for hot swap, I haven't heard it being used for production, that's mostly for faster development cycles - though I could be wrong. Generally it is safer to bring up the new version, direct requests over, and shut down the old version. It's problematic to just hot swap classes, e.g. if you were to add a new field to one of your classes, how would old instances that lack it behave?
by Cheer2171 | 2025-08-22 16:56:48+00:00
You have LinkedIn lunatics saying exactly this for years, AI startups are a money printer, that we're months away from AGI that gives drop in 1000x (or even infinite asymptotic) return. Adding 'AI' to your name bumps your valuation even if it is Actually Indians behind the scenes. THAT bubble needs to burst.
by stouset | 2025-08-22 16:57:01+00:00
Go doesn't acknowledge that. It punts.

Most of the time if there's a result, there's no error. If there's an error, there's no result. But don't forget to check every time! And make sure you don't make a mistake when you're checking and accidentally use the value anyway, because even though it's technically meaningless it's still nominally a meaningful value since zero values are supposed to be meaningful.

Oh and make sure to double-check the docs, because the language can't let you know about the cases where both returns are meaningful.

The real world is messy. And golang doesn't give you advance warning on where the messes are, makes no effort to prevent you from stumbling into them, and stands next to you constantly criticizing you while you clean them up by yourself. "You aren't using that variable any more, clean that up too." "There's no new variables now, so use `err =` instead of `err :=`."
by profsummergig | 2025-08-22 16:57:31+00:00
Just seeking a clarification on how this would be done:

One would use gemini-cli (or claude-cli),

- and give a natural language prompt to gemini (or claude) on what processing needs to be done,

- with the correct paths to FFmpeg and the media file,

- and g-cli (or c-cli) would take it from there.

Is this correct?
by timmytokyo | 2025-08-22 16:57:46+00:00
In my opinion, the section on data ownership contained the most egregious and unforgivable example of go's flaws. The behavior of append in that example is the kind of bug-causing or esoteric behavior that should never make it into any programming language. As a regular writer of go code, I understand why this particular quirk of the language exists, but I hope I never truly "grasp" it to the extent that I forgive it.

I'm surprised people in these comments aren't focusing more on the append example.
by biomcgary | 2025-08-22 16:57:52+00:00
The language around emotion often obscures the underlying reality that needs to be addressed. Emotions are the physiological manifestations of expectations and desires. (Emotion is etymologically related to motive.)

The person your responding to clearly has a desire to do productive work with minimal roadblocks. In one person the roadblock to that desire/expectation might manifest physiologically as depression, in another person as anger, and in another as detachment. Getting rid of the roadblock is what needs to happen regardless of how the emotion manifests.

This does not mean that emotions are not addressed, but that they are addressed primarily as signifiers of a mismatch between the world and one's underlying desires/expectations, not the thing itself.

Sometimes, the desire/expectation of an individual is counter to the good of the overall system and group of people. In this case, a good manager might start by explaining the larger situation so that an individual can update their desires and expectations through the additional knowledge. Then new thinking/perception shifts the physiological experience of those desires (i.e., emotions).

In other cases, the gap between desires/expectations and reality is too big to bridge, which means emotions cannot be resolved in the current context.
by pembrook | 2025-08-22 16:58:06+00:00
A good sign the bubble is not actually bursting: a mainstream news publication predicting it. [1]

It's still 1994. We won't be near the top until the Telegraph publishes an article overly exuberant about AI and saying AGI is here.

If every idiot commenting on Reddit, HN, X, and mainstream news publications is pessimistic and constantly shouting "bubble!," then definitionally, we have not reached irrational exuberance and we're not even remotely near the top.

[1] https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/566807/theinternetbah3.webp (1995)
by corytheboyd | 2025-08-22 16:58:35+00:00
> For the AI, you want to give it some room to generalize/bullshit.

Totally! In my mind I’ve been playing with the phrase: it’s good at _fuzzy_ things. For example IMO voice synthesis before and after this wave of AI hype is actually night and day! In part, to my fuzzy idea, because voice synthesis isn’t factual, it’s billions of little data points coming together to emulate sound waves, which is incredibly fuzzy. Versus code, which is pointy: it has one/few correct forms, and infinite/many incorrect forms.
by therealpygon | 2025-08-22 16:58:38+00:00
I don’t believe this to be entirely the case, having served as President of a HOA for 10 years. HOAs are generally incorporated and hold said property. Should the Mandatory HOA be banned, the corporation could simply switch to private membership and offer access to amenities to those outside the community. If the residents don’t want that, they’d need to pay up. Condos, however, likely have different needs because of shared construction, but I’m certain a solution for that could be found.

I absolutely HATE living in an HOA for private property reasons; I don’t enjoy being told what I can do on and to my own private property and being bound by decisions other people make about my own private property. Things like being forced to use a specific (terrible) trash service and specific lawn care company (charged at 2x what I pay for lawncare with 4x the property), which are things friends complain about in nearby communities.

However, I also fully understand their value for communal property/amenities and see nothing wrong with maintaining mandatory membership for those features. The biggest problem is that those costs continue to be inflated in the HOAs around us, and now our own after I stepped down. For many of them it is the unnecessary improvements or using a board members cousin contractor, or a member, who charges 1.5x while providing .5x the value. That, or it gets turned over to a management company that takes a 30% cut and milks the budget with their own in-house contractors doing a similar overcharge/underperform thing.
by mrbungie | 2025-08-22 16:58:47+00:00
> Given how much capital has already been committed to infrastructure development I find it very unlikely that even a Black Monday style market correction will do much to alter the medium and long term outlook for ai development and investment.

So let's bet on sunken cost fallacy? That didn't work out during the dotcom era.

When people talk about the bubble is mostly about ending the LLM hype, not making everything associated just disappear. The infrastructure, ideas and developments will stay and probably end up being a lot more useful without the noisy hype surrounding it right now.
by turnsout | 2025-08-22 16:59:03+00:00
> “When will the internet bubble burst?” the cover story of Barron’s asked on March 20 2000. “That unpleasant popping sound is likely to be heard before the end of this year.”

Again—the internet was a bubble, and yet it eventually far surpassed even the frothiest expectations.

If you're investing for the short-term, do what you gotta do. The AI bubble will burst and lots of superficial companies will be washed away. But we're just getting started. This next wave will make a new round of companies like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, etc.
by 827a | 2025-08-22 16:59:09+00:00
I think our end-state decision, IIRC, was to just expand our usage of TypeScript; which also has Golang beat on all those verticals you list. More mature, way better tooling, way more libraries, easier to hire for, etc.

Though, thinking back, someone should have brought up TypeScript's at least three different ways to represent nil (undefined, null, NaN, a few others). Its at least a little better in TS, because unlike in Go the type-checker doesn't actively lie to you about how many different states of undefined you might be dealing with.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-08-22 16:59:16+00:00
I worked in both Elixir and Go. I still think Elixir is best for concurrency.

I recently realized that there is no easy way to "bubble up a goroutine error", and I wrote some code to make sure that was possible, and that's when I realize, as usual, that I'm rewriting part of the OTP library.

The whole supervisor mechanism is so valuable for concurrency.
by abullinan | 2025-08-22 17:00:01+00:00
The stock market has been a bubble since the 90’s but the bursts have been minimal because the elite class uses the stock market to extract wealth from normal people. Once they find something new (enshittification) they will suck all the value out of the market and leave its husk to peasants and their meager 401ks (if they even have that). I say this because there are so many millionaires in the US, and we can’t have too many people with extra wealth or it ruins things for the elite. The 0.01% must extract every penny from the 10%, too. It used to be every millionaire felt entitled to be a billionaire, but now centibillionaires feel entitled to be trillionaires and who do you think that money is stolen from?
by BobbyJo | 2025-08-22 17:00:01+00:00
> The, "if you get left behind, that's on you, because we're not holding up the bright kids," mentality was catastrophic for me

Your one bad year doesn't invalidate the fact that it was good to allow you to run ahead of slower students the other 9 years. It wasn't catastrophic for you, as you say yourself you just retook the class in college and got a high grade. I honestly don't see how "I had a bad time at home for a year and did bad in school" could have worked out any better for you.

> So, I don't buy that America/Sweden/et al. are full of hopeless demi-students. I was deemed one.

A bad grade one year deemed you a hopeless demi student? By what metric? I had a similar school career (AP/IB with As and Bs) and got a D that should have been an F my senior year and it was fine.
by manoDev | 2025-08-22 17:00:18+00:00
AI makes it quicker and cheaper to ship something. The problem with most companies is shipping the wrong thing.

VCs hope that with AI they can have a larger portfolio, shipping more things, so that by sheer luck, one is a success. That's why many employees are critical of the AI hype while VCs and C-level love it. The whole discussion about maintainability doesn't even register on the radar, employees vs. VCs and C-level are operating at a different definition of "failure".
by kace91 | 2025-08-22 17:01:01+00:00
Counterintuitive argument:'No one left behind' policies increase social segregation.

Universal education offers a social ladder. "Your father was a farmer, but you can be a banker, if put in the work".

When you set a lower bar (like enforcing a safe environment), smart kids will shoot forward. Yes, statistically, a large part of succesful kids will be the ones with better support networks, but you're stil judging results, for which environment is just a factor.

When you don't set this lower bar, rich kids who can move away will do it, because no one places their children in danger voluntarily. Now the subset of successful kids from a good background will thrive as always, but succesful kids from bad environments are stuck with a huge handicap and sink. You've made the lader purely, rather than partly, based on wealth.

And you get two awful side effects on top:

- you're not teaching the bottom kids that violating the safety of others implies rejection. That's a rule enforced everywhere, from any workplace through romantic relationships to even prison, and kids are now unprepared for that.

- you've taught the rest of the kids to think of the bottom ones as potential abusers and disruptors. Good luck with the resulting classism and xenophobia when they grow up.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-08-22 17:01:07+00:00
I know this comment isn't terribly helpful, so I'm sorry, but it also sounds like Go is entirely the wrong language for this use case and you and your team were forced to use it for some corporate reason, like, the company only uses a subset of widely used programming languages in production.

I've heard the term "beaten path" used for these languages, or languages that an organization chooses to use and forbids the use of others.
by MKuykendall | 2025-08-22 17:01:30+00:00
After watching developers struggle with 200ms+ vector database queries for context retrieval, we realized RAG was fundamentally backwards. Why compute expensive embeddings when you can find context in 0.3ms with SMT-powered reasoning?

ContextLite uses SMT (Satisfiability Modulo Theories) solvers + BM25 heuristics to mathematically prove optimal context matches instead of guessing with similarity scores. We process 2,406 files/second with formal verification - understanding imports, dependencies, and code relationships that vector embeddings completely miss.

No GPU required, no embedding models, no vector databases. Just blazing fast context that actually reasons about your codebase structure using constraint satisfaction and theorem proving.

We're live in production with npm, PyPI, VS Code marketplace, and 8 other package managers. 14-day SMT trial with full formal reasoning, then $99 lifetime license. Enterprise teams get advanced analytics, multi-repo support, and custom deployment options.

The future of AI context isn't more computation – it's mathematical precision. SMT solvers can prove correctness; vector databases can only guess similarity.

Try the math: contextlite.com/downloads
by NoFunPedant | 2025-08-22 17:01:35+00:00
I don't know how you imagine longtermism is relevant to this discussion -- the crisis is happening right now in front of all of us and the need for action is right now.

The threat against libraries is just one part of a broader threat against all freedom of thought, speech, and criticism of the government in the United States. The key issue is not just the one question of whether children have access to books (although that is very important); the key issue is that the government has no right, authority, or business trying to control what is said and thought.

I love how you write "ideals" as if it's a dirty word. In a general political crisis like the current moment, ideals really do matter. You can't fight an authoritarian government unless you're willing to stick your neck out, and people only stick their necks out when they believe that principles are more important than their immediate self-interest. The whole purpose of an authoritarian government is to silence opposition through threats and bribes. If you don't believe that some principles are more important than possible losses and gains, you're always going to be vulnerable to being victimized by authoritarian government. This has concrete, practical results -- idealists can win because they take action; cynics will always lose because they won't act. In a time like this, cynicism is not the smart play.