MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hocuspocus | 2025-09-03 21:58:48+00:00
It's not that simple.

Google has quasi-monopolized RCS as a way to fix their haphazard mobile messaging offering. To put weight behind their argument, Jibe was rolled out almost worldwide and enabled for every Android phone running Google Messages. "Look, we have one billion active users".

Once Apple finally caved in, it became harder to hide a proprietary end-to-end solution behind a standard. While MNOs are still using Jibe, they have to support spec compliant IMS provisioning that allows the iOS client to register to Jibe. Some carriers have started migrating Android users to their new registration workflows and associated terms and conditions.

To my knowledge, Google provides P2P messaging for free but there must be conditions. MNOs need to agree on revenue share for A2P messaging, and while I don't know if iOS support will become mandatory, this would make sense from Google's point of view.

This is textbook drug dealer model and it makes sense that a few MNOs won't play along, especially in countries where WhatsApp dominates the market anyway.
by cwmoore | 2025-09-03 21:59:12+00:00
“The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them.

[0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/
by lazide | 2025-09-03 21:59:29+00:00
Thermal and deformation properties of the metal have no impact on ballistics at all?

Density sure does though.

Which is why 99% of the stuff you’re mentioning doesn’t really work.

Copper is quite dense, but still not as dense as lead, which is why it kinda works. Steel is terrible (but not completely useless). Tungsten works awesome (as does silver and gold), but is cost prohibitive except for specialized applications.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-03 21:59:37+00:00
This is absurd. Of course the executive can cancel grants from agencies that are directed by the executive. It is not an issue of speech, but whether the grant implements the goals the administration has. And in this case they don’t. Claiming that Harvard has to control who it hires for it to have free speech is inconsistent. Would the same judge agree then that federal contracts requiring ownership or quotas based on race and sex are also a violation of free speech? It’s also weird that the judge is guessing at the administration’s intent to make his case rather than on what the administration laid out (regarding discrimination against Jewish students and faculty).
by winrid | 2025-09-03 22:00:52+00:00
Seems like a great filter.

A while ago I was interviewing candidates for a senior frontend position. My filter question was to explain how to make a progress bar. Most candidates couldn't do this, one said it was "not what they were expecting" and that they were just expecting leetcode problems.

(for non frontend people, it's just a styled box in a box....)
by the_af | 2025-09-03 22:01:35+00:00
I don't follow the reasoning at all. Why is human experience not the neurological firing? Why can't a thought be reduced to neurons firing, what about that would make it absurd?

I promise I'm not being dense or rhetorical, I truly don't understand that line of thought.

It seems to me like begging the question, almost like saying "experience cannot be this, because it'd be absurd, because it cannot be this."
by Vanclief | 2025-09-03 22:02:02+00:00
While I like the self reflection from this article, I don't think his methodology adds up (pun intended). First there are two main axis where LLMs can make you more productive: speed & code quality. I think everyone is obsessed about the first one, but its less relevant.

My personal hypothesis is that when using LLMs, you are only faster if you would be doing things like boilerplate code. For the rest, LLMs don't really make you faster but can make your code quality higher, which means better implementation and caching bugs earlier. I am a big fan of giving the diff of a commit to an LLM that has a file MCP so he can search for files in the repo and having it point any mistakes I have made.
by groby_b | 2025-09-03 22:02:09+00:00
I think the author misses a few points

* METR was at best a flawed study. Repo-familiarity and tool-unfamiliarity being the biggest points of critique, but far from the only one

* they assume that all code gets shipped as a product. Meanwhile, AI code has (at least in my field of view) led to a proliferation of useful-but-never-shipped one-off tools. Random dashboards to visualize complex queries, scripts to drive refactors, or just sheer joy like "I want to generate an SVG of my vacation trip and consume 15 data sources and give it a certain look".

* Their own self-experiment is not exactly statistically sound :)

That does leave the fact that we aren't seeing AI shovelware. I'm still convinced that's because commercially viable software is beyond the AI complexity horizon, not because AI isn't an extremely useful tool
by mysterydip | 2025-09-03 22:03:24+00:00
Good article, gave me some points I hadn't considered before. I know there are some AI generated games out there, but maybe the same people were using asset flips before?

I'd also be curious how the numbers look for AI generated videos/images, because social media and youtube seem absolutely flooded with the stuff. Maybe it's because the output doesn't have to "function" like code does?

Grammatical nit: The phrase is "neck and neck", like where two race horses are very close in progress
by amradio1989 | 2025-09-03 22:03:25+00:00
You know the answer. The best way to prepare for any job market is to meet the demand. The demand right now is for AI knowledge and skills. There's no way around it if you want to be employed in a well-paying job with benefits and paid time off.

If that's not important to you, you can do whatever you want. Build systems, do contract work, join a small dev shop that shares your values, work on open source projects, etc. You don't have to touch AI if you don't want to.

There's more risk in that second option, and probably a lot less money (though not necessarily) but you'll be happier.
by Ken_At_EM | 2025-09-03 22:03:33+00:00
Erdos Miller (https://www.erdosmiller.com) | Hybrid (Houston, TX) | Senior Software Systems Engineer | $154k - $175k

I've got to be honest. At Erdos Miller, we’re good at software, but we’re not great—yet.

We build crazy products, including ToolHub, which is a web app that literally communicates directly to our embedded hardware.

We want to hire someone who truly cares about solving customer problems and bringing everything together to make great software products.

This is your chance to lead a small team, set the technical direction, make tough compromises, and commercialize real products that delight customers.

No red tape. No investors. No hype cycle. Just build and ship real products.

Sometimes even without AI features.

If you aim to be the best in the world at what you do, let's chat.

We work a lot of hardware, so this is a hybrid Houston-based role.

DM me or apply here: https://erdosmiller.bamboohr.com/careers/65
by bjackman | 2025-09-03 22:03:42+00:00
There is actually a lot of AI shovelware on Steam. Sort by newest releases and you'll see stuff like a developer releasing 10 puzzle games in one day.

I have the same experience as OP, I use AI every day including coding agents, I like it, it's useful. But it's not transformative to my core work.

I think this comes down to the type of work you're doing. I think the issue is that most software engineering isn't in fields amenable to shovelware.

Most of us either work in areas where the coding is intensely brownfield. AI is great but not doubling anyone's productivity. Or, in areas where the productivity bottlenecks are nowhere near the code.
by palata | 2025-09-03 22:04:02+00:00
Without passkeys, a service can force you to use their own proprietary app as a second factor. It's been like that for years with banks and at big companies.

They already do select the security they want. And it does make sense when security matters to them!

Say you managed to put into the law that "it's illegal to discriminate passkeys, either you accept all implementations or none of them". What would happen then? Those services would just not use passkeys, because they already have a solution they control today (with their own authenticator apps).

What the standard provides is a way to have certified/audited passkeys. So that instead of using the authenticator app of my bank to log into my bank and the Microsoft authenticator to log into my company SSO, maybe (just maybe) I will someday be able to use a passkey. Not any passkey, that's very clear, and it actually does make sense in terms of security. But maybe instead of using Apple or Google, you will be able to use a security key like Yubikey.

And the fight should be to give a fair chance to those third-party systems for getting certified. Not to refuse the passkey technology because instead of being forced to use the Microsoft passkey, we really like it better when we are forced to use the Microsoft authenticator app.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-03 22:04:28+00:00
This article is accurate. That's why I'm investigating a bayesian symbolic lisp reasoner. It's incapable of hallucinating, it provides auditable traces which are actual programs and it kicks the crap out of LLMs at stuff like Arc-Agi, symbolic reasoning, logic programs, game playing, etc. I'm working on a paper where I show that the same model can break 80 on arc-agi, run the house by counting cards at blackjack, and solve complex mathematical word problems.
by vehemenz | 2025-09-03 22:04:28+00:00
I'm sure you think you're well intended, but your attempts at rigor have me scratching my head a little bit. I don't understand the defensiveness given that you haven't done the bare minimum to explain your position.

And no, that's not what a non sequitur is. And no, coherence is not just a linguistic idea. Then you try to explain what I "really mean" by "quality of subjective experience," and you can't even give a good faith reading of that. I'm really trying here.
by quantummagic | 2025-09-03 22:04:35+00:00
How are the two cases you present fundamentally different? Aren't they both the same _type_ of knowledge? Why do you attribute "true understanding" to the case of knowing what the Dr said? Why stop there? Isn't true understanding knowing why we trust what the doctor said (all those years of schooling, and a presumption of competence, etc)? And why stop there? Why do we value years of schooling? Understanding, can always be taken to a deeper level, but does that mean we didn't "truly" understand earlier? And aren't the data structures needed to encode the knowledge, exactly the same for both cases you presented?
by com2kid | 2025-09-03 22:04:56+00:00
Multiple things can be true at the same time:

1. LLMs do not increase general developer productivity by 10x across the board for general purpose tasks selected at random.

2. LLMs dramatically increases productivity for a limited subset of tasks

3. LLMs can be automated to do busy work and although they may take longer in terms of clock time than a human, the work is effectively done in the background.

LLMs can get me up to speed on new APIs and libraries far faster than I can myself, a gigantic speedup. If I need to write a small bit of glue code in a language I do not know, LLMs not only save me time, but they make it so I don't have to learn something that I'll likely never use again.

Fixing up existing large code bases? Productivity is at best a wash.

Setting up a scaffolding for a new website? LLMs are amazing at it.

Writing mocks for classes? LLMs know the details of using mock libraries really well and can get it done far faster than I can, especially since writing complex mocks is something I do a couple times a year and completely forget how to do in-between the rare times I am doing it.

Navigating a new code base? LLMs are ~70% great at this. If you've ever opened up an over-engineered WTF project, just finding where HTTP routes are defined at can be a problem. "Yo, Claude, where are the route endpoints in this project defined at? Where do the dependency injected functions for auth live?"

Right tool, right job. Stop using a hammer on nails.
by 0_gravitas | 2025-09-03 22:04:59+00:00
'Hermetic' is an interesting word-choice, considering Clojure has a habit/raison detre of attaching to other host languages/ecosystems i.e. Jank (C++), ClojureScript (JS), Basilisp (Python), Phel (PHP), Babashka (general scripting), and of course, Clojure itself on the JVM.
by msarrel | 2025-09-03 22:04:59+00:00
This The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.

Yet the author concludes that this isn't what we want. I think it is actually what the average person wants. They're not thinking, why should they have to think. They read half a headline and share the article as if it's truth. If this is what social media users are asking for and it's actually mind-bogglingly easy to monetize, that's what we're going to get.
by bbreier | 2025-09-03 22:05:31+00:00
As far as I am aware, wealth inequality is significantly better in Europe than it is in the United States (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in... as an example) and I still wouldn't characterize democracy in Europe as "perfect" even if we narrowly define the rubrick to be only concerned with money tipping the scales of power
by thewarrior | 2025-09-03 22:05:38+00:00
While I agree with the points he’s raising let me play devils advocate.

There’s a lot more code being written now that’s not counted in these statistics. A friend of mine vibe coded a writing tool for himself entirely using Gemini canvas.

I regularly vibe code little analyses or scripts in ChatGPT which would have required writing code earlier.

None of these are counted in these statistics.

And yes AI isn’t quite good enough to super charge app creation end to end. Claude has only been good for a few months. That’s hardly enough time for adoption !

This would be like analysing the impact of languages like Perl or Python on software 3 months after their release.
by robocat | 2025-09-03 22:05:47+00:00
I wish I had your arrogant confidence.

I'm a vaxer But one community I hang with is strongly antivax. Many of them have been very harmed even if they didn't take the vaccines.

When something is that important to you (even for woowoo reasons or social media misinformation) then it is a fertile situation for mental health impacts.

Antivaxxers are a vulnerable population too (they have self selected into a circle by their beliefs and communities).

Disclosure: I've seen some good people severely harmed by overbearing government actions in New Zealand. I believe New Zealand did a good job of protecting everyone here from COVID, but that the collateral costs to everyone were very high (and extremely variable chronic costs to some).

Edit: apology that I've bucketed all vaccines together. E.g. Measles vaccine is quite different from covid vaccines.
by kenjackson | 2025-09-03 22:06:19+00:00
Shovelware may not be a good way to track additional productivity.

That said, I’m skeptical that AI is as helpful for commercial software. It’s been great for in automating my workflow because I suck at shell scripting and AI is great at it. But most of the code I write I honestly halfway don’t know what I’m going to write until I write it. The prompt itself is where my thinking goes - so the time savings would be fairly small, but I also think I’m fairly skilled (except at scripting).
by brailsafe | 2025-09-03 22:06:26+00:00
> There are non-trivial amount of people who discovered this on their own, got properly addicted and basically live in their western jobs to be able to afford as much travel ie in remote parts of south east Asia as possible.

I think it's a tricky balance, because the novelty can wear off, and by travelling all the time you do end up trading the other crucial component of life away for that novelty, which is some kind of roots and some kind of community.

Exploration and adventure is amazing, you can learn a lot about other cultures, but by not participating in your own nearly as much, you can end up ironically limiting yourself to shallow transient connections, depending on when and how long you do it for and where.

Atm I have basically zero interest anymore in living abroad for an extended time unless it offered me some unique environment for doing the outdoor stuff or other hobbies I enjoy, such that I'd be compelled away from my adopted home city that I'm quite fond of. But other than that, shorter travels that my outdoor hobbies direct me towards are usually amazing. So something like an extended backcountry hiking or climbing trip would be the type of thing that would excite me.
by bboygravity | 2025-09-03 22:06:28+00:00
The LLM can just write the Prolog and solve the sudoku that way. I don't get your point. LLMs like Grok 4 can probably one-shot this today with the current state of art. You can likely just ask it to solve any sudoku and it will do it (by writing code in the background and running it and returning the result). And this is still very early stage compared to what will be out a year from now.

Why does it matter how it does it or whether this is strictly LLM or LLM with tools for any practical purpose?
by captainkrtek | 2025-09-03 22:06:29+00:00
This tracks with my own experience as well. I’ve found it useful in some trivial ways (eg: small refactors, type definition from a schema, etc.) but so far tasks more than that it misses things and requires rework, etc. The future may make me eat my words though.

On the other hand, I’ve lately seen it misused by less experienced engineers trying to implement bigger features who eagerly accept all it churns out as “good” without realizing the code it produced:

- doesn’t follow our existing style guide and patterns.

- implements some logic from scratch where there certainly is more than one suitable library, making this code we now own.

- is some behemoth of a PR trying to do all the things.
by palata | 2025-09-03 22:06:33+00:00
> Niеther an ssh MITM can use your private key on a legit server

Of course they can: that's precisely the meaning of MITM.

They don't get direct access to your private key (because they wouldn't need to stay in the middle anymore at that point), but they will ask you to sign the challenge sent by the legit server, which you will happily do if you don't realise that you are not talking to the legit server.

WebAuthn prevents that MitM part.
Show HN: Validating demand for an AR and Agentic airport guide – would you pay?
by bengpepin | 2025-09-03 22:06:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a solo founder working on FlyX, an AR-Agentic assistant designed to simplify airport navigation using guided personalized help. Airports can be challenging and this project aims to change that by providing guidance through your phone.

I’m currently validating whether there’s real interest and willingness to pay before building the product.

If you frequently travel or work in the airport industry, I’d love to hear:

What are your biggest pain points when navigating airports?

How much would you value a tool that offered seamless real-time AR navigation and personal AI Agentic assistance?

What pricing model would feel reasonable to you? (e.g., lifetime access, subscription)

Any feedback or ideas that could make this truly useful?

This is purely market validation so I can build something that actually solves this problems and that people want to pay for.

Thank you for your honest input! bengpepin
by ksenzee | 2025-09-03 22:06:49+00:00
This doesn’t match my experience. I needed a particularly boilerplate module the other day, for a test implementation of an API, so I asked Gemini to magic one up. It was fairly solid code; I’d have been impressed if it had come from a junior engineer. Unfortunately it had a hard-to-spot defect (an indentation error in an annotation, which the IDE didn’t catch on paste), and by the time I had finished tracking down the issue, I could have written the module myself. That doesn’t seem to me like a code quality improvement.
by Ukv | 2025-09-03 22:06:52+00:00
> If you think it is possible then I'd like to see an implementation of a sudoku puzzle solver as Markov chain

Have each of the Markov chain's states be one of 10^81 possible sudoku grids (a 9x9 grid of digits 1-9 and blank), then calculate the 10^81-by-10^81 transition matrix that takes each incomplete grid to the valid complete grid containing the same numbers. If you want you could even have it fill one square at a time rather than jump right to the solution, though there's no need to.

Up to you what you do for ambiguous inputs (select one solution at random to give 1.0 probability in the transition matrix? equally weight valid solutions? have the states be sets of boards and map to set of all valid solutions?) and impossible inputs (map to itself? have the states be sets of boards and map to empty set?).

Could say that's "cheating" by pre-computing the answers and hard-coding them in a massive input-output lookup table, but to my understanding that's also the only sense in which there's equivalence between Markov chains and LLMs.
by slightlyoff | 2025-09-03 22:07:26+00:00
Original author of the article here; I went out on a limb to document a bit of this in a footnote to a post a few years ago. Saying that it is unusual to call this behaviour out is a drastic understatement:

https://infrequently.org/2023/02/safari-16-4-is-an-admission...

And it was only this year that I wrote up the broader thesis:

https://infrequently.org/2025/08/how-do-committees-fail-to-i...

Most of my current and former colleagues wouldn't dare for (legitimate) fear of reprisal in the form of even worse blockage in important design areas.
by bastawhiz | 2025-09-03 22:07:29+00:00
The amount of shovelware is not a reliable signal. You know what's almost empty for the first time in almost a decade? My backlog. Where AI tools shine is taking an existing codebase and instructions, and going to town. It's not dreaming up whole games from scratch. All the engineers out there didn't quit their jobs to build new stuff, they picked up new tools to do their existing jobs better (or at least, to hate their jobs less).

The shovelware was always there. And it always will be. But that's doesn't mean it's splurting out faster, because that's not what AI does. Hell, if anything I expect that there's less visible shovelware because when it does get created, it's less obvious (and perhaps higher quality).

At some point, the quality of uninspired projects will be lifted up by the baseline of quality that mainstream AI allows. At what point is that "high enough that we can't tell what's garbage"? We've perhaps found ourselves at or around that point.