MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cubefox | 2025-09-28 17:09:35+00:00
By the way, there seems to be a "standard" way to sort strings:

> Unicode Technical Report #10 also specifies the Default Unicode Collation Element Table (DUCET). This data file specifies a default collation ordering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_collation_algorithm

I assume this mainly aims at giving a reasonable compromise between the different dictionary and phone book sorting rules of various languages (and even locales), which should give reasonable results for most languages. I assume this also puts "Alice2" before "Alice10".
by JoshTriplett | 2025-09-28 17:09:56+00:00
> Because we all have to get along regardless of what you believe

False. Freedom of association is a human right. And nobody is obligated to donate their money to a cause or organization they do not support.

Refusing to associate with someone who would like to "Make Britain White Again" (among many other things) is a completely reasonable stance.

https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...

https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance

People are free to say whatever they want. And others are free to respond in a variety of ways, including choosing to not provide support.
by t0mas88 | 2025-09-28 17:10:00+00:00
Separate from AI, as your role becomes more tech lead / team lead / architect you're also not really "doing" as much and still get involved in a lot of thinking by helping people get unstuck. The thinking part still builds experience. You don't need to type the code to have a good understanding of how to approach problems and how to architect systems. You just need to be making those decisions and gaining experience from them.
by dvratil | 2025-09-28 17:10:09+00:00
It's more about having the LLM give you a plan of what it wants to do and how it wants to do it, rather rhan code. Then you can mold the plan to fit what you really want. Then you ask it to actually start writing code.

Even Claude Code lets you approve each change, but it's already writing code according to a plan that you reviewed and approved.
by teekert | 2025-09-28 17:10:17+00:00
Somewhere in the 2013-14's or something my MBP had a faulty GPU and I brought it in for free repair (that they put in another faulty GPU which failed after the same time as the first one, but it did get them over of the warranty period is besides the point), and they asked me for my root password. I gave it, and felt incredibly dirty. I would never do that again.
by jsnell | 2025-09-28 17:10:50+00:00
> but then why are we comparing such distinct and unrelated tasks as ...

Because a few years ago the LLMs could only do trivial tasks that a child could do, and now they're able to do complex research and software development tasks.

If you just have the trivial tasks, the benchmark is saturated within a year. If you just have the very complex tasks, the benchmark is has no sensitivity at all for years (just everything scoring a 0) and then abruptly becomes useful for a brief moment.

This seems pretty obvious, and I can't figure out what your actual concern is. You're just implying it is a flawed design without pointing out anything concrete.
by zahlman | 2025-09-28 17:11:22+00:00
> Look at this puzzle. WTF is this?

> The "stretch" ("correct move" according to this tutorial) seems wholly inappropriate compared to 1-point jump, horse-move, diagonal move .... or hell just running in the other direction (to the right, escaping towards the center).

The stretch is good shape here. I can't even tell which keima[0] you have in mind but that makes no sense here. A diagonal also just looks strange, unless you mean hane, which lets opponent cross-cut and will end with losing that stone. Similarly, a 1-point jump (I assume you mean upward) lets opponent wedge in and will end in gote, and running to the right (I assume you mean another 1-point jump) allows opponent to push you around.

The stretch is important here because it prevents opponent's hane, which is very severe. It also threatens to turn and block opponent's expansion decisively, so it may be sente depending on the rest of the board. In general it will make sense to push twice here, then make a one-point jump.

> Or this one is perhaps more egregious. This is simply the wrong direction of play entirely. 20+ point mistake to play the "correct" move here. The correct move is a 2-point jump (or greater) along the 3rd or 4th row northbound.

Per AI, on an empty board, the stretch is about 1 point worse than those jumps (establishing a base); a one-point jump in the same direction of the stretch is about as good as making a base; and best is tenuki. There is simply no urgency to settle those stones without anything else in the area. But stretching or jumping damages Black's shape and limits further expansion of that group. The point is simply to prevent Black's hane there.

Regardless, when they say "correct move", this is not supposed to be about what would be best overall to play in the position. It is supposed to be about a) recognizing the shape and its purpose and b) doing it in a sensible direction. And you really have to learn that sort of thing by example and by physically laying it out, because trying to give the rules for choosing a direction to stretch is harder.

[0] By the way, I'll spot you that Western teachers usually do use English for ikken tobi and kosumi; but "horse-move" is cringe. Most Western players who actually talk about the game will probably know "keima", but you can at least say "knight move".
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 17:11:26+00:00
I think we all know what the definition of a country is. If you decide to compare continents and countries as though they are one and the same that is on you.

But EU countries are closer to US states, except that any two US states are still far more homogeneous than any two EU countries are.

One good basic principle for arguing about stuff is to agree on the meaning of certain words. If you want to compare countries then do so. If you want to compare states with countries, you're welcome to do so too, but you have to take into account the whole range then. But you can't just lump 27 countries on a pile, compute an average and draw a conclusion when comparing it to a single continent sized country.

Besides that, if you take out California the US picture skews downwards considerably, so on that scale other US states have their work cut out for them. No need to compete with Switzerland or the Netherlands for GDP, compete with California first. And that whole discussion still ignores massive wealth generated in China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and other places.

The whole idea that you can just collapse a very complex comparison to a single number and call it a day is fatally flawed.
by troupo | 2025-09-28 17:12:07+00:00
> This is more than just a revenue calculation

Everything is a revenue calculation

> that has massive engineering implications for an ecosystem as vast as Apple’s.

That is Apple's problems. All Eu says is "do not deliberatly hamper competition and don't install artificial barriers to differentiate your products".

Apple has had no issues complying with every single request from any government.

> Simple features like Live Translation or iPhone Mirroring become 10x more complex to build when you need to test and support other vendor devices.

You don't have to test and support them on vendor devices. You either provide an API, or let "vendor devices" implement the same features. This has never been such big of an issue.

> In fact some features become downright impossible if you require interoperability.

Then those features are either not needed, or it's Apple's own fault (e.g. for preventing others from building the same feature set).

It's insane to me that Hacker News, of all places, would argue that walled gardens are good, actually. Ponder this article, for example: "Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones" https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...

> This is about slowing down the pace of development and adding engineering complexity to everything worldwide

The only ones insisting and making it so are Apple. A great example is this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/14/dma-compliance-default-ma... Apple lets users in the EU set their default maps and navigation app. But only in the EU. They literally made the whole thing more complex for themselves by restricting this feature just to the EU even though this clearly is a feature that benefits users.

It's the exact same thing with the rest of the "impossible features".
by SamInTheShell | 2025-09-28 17:12:38+00:00
Your prompt is incomplete. He only called out the system prompt. What you're missing in the user prompt, that only shows up in his code he shows off.

Edit: also as the other guy points out, you're going to get different results depending on the model used. llama3.2:3b works fine for this, probably because Meta pirated their training data from books, some of which are probably scifi.
by PessimalDecimal | 2025-09-28 17:12:58+00:00
> What's the difference between a messy codebase created by a genAI, and a messy codebase where all the original authors of the code have moved on and aren't available to ask questions?

The difference is the hope of getting out of that situation. If you've inherited a messy and incoherent code base, you recognize that as a problem and work on fixing it. You can build an understanding of the code through first reading and then probably rewriting some of it. This over time improves your ability to reason about that code.

If you're constantly putting yourself back into that situation through relegating the reasoning about code to coding agent, then you won't develop a mental model. You're constantly back at Day 1 of having to "own" someone else's code.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-09-28 17:13:12+00:00
I read this article two weeks ago (I would swear that it was on HN) and I was driving yesterday in the south of France, among plenty of wind turbines.

I was recalling the article as I was driving and -- surprise -- a two-bladed one appeared suddenly (two, actually).

This was the only time I saw two bladed wind turbines and could makr intelligent comments about why 3 and not 1 or 2 :)

So thank you!
by bearjaws | 2025-09-28 17:13:17+00:00
Was it an Nvidia GPU? I used to work for GeekSquad and we would gladly send the Mac to the Apple store to replace the whole thing with the newer model - always free.

People would come back and thank us for sending them to Apple.

They even honored them out of warranty due to the lawsuit they faced with Nvidia over the solder failures.
by general1465 | 2025-09-28 17:13:18+00:00
> Honestly even if Google somehow decided to stop selling Android to Europe, something which seems extremely unlikely, it would swiftly be replaced by Chinese alternatives with no obvious loss of functionality.

Exactly, it would be a brutal self own of Apple and Google and losing control over whole European market due to refusing to implement mild regulations. Pure bluff on Apple's and Google's side.
by jstummbillig | 2025-09-28 17:13:30+00:00
> The article sort of goes sideways with this idea but pointing out that AI coding robs you a deep understanding of the code it produces is a valid and important criticism of AI coding.

Why? Code has always been the artifact. Thinking about and understanding the domain clearly and solving problems is where the intrinsic value is at (but I'd suspect that in the future this, too, will go away).
by mordymoop | 2025-09-28 17:13:50+00:00
Broadly the critique is valid where it applies; I don’t know if it accurately captures the way most people are using LLMs to code, so I don’t know that it applies in most case.

My one concrete pushback to the article is that it states the inevitable end result of vibe coding is a messy unmaintainable codebase. This is empirically not true. At this point I have many vibecoded projects that are quite complex but work perfectly. Most of these are for my private use but two of them serve in a live production context. It goes without saying that not only do these projects work, but they were accomplished 100x faster than I could have done by hand.

Do I also have vibecoded projects that went of the rails? Of course. I had to build those to learn where the edges of the model’s capabilities are, and what its failure modes are, so I can compensate. Vibecoding a good codebase is a skill. I know how to vibecode a good, maintainable codebase. Perhaps this violates your definition of vibecoding; my definition is that I almost never need to actually look at the code. I am just serving as a very hands-on manager. (Though I can look at the code if I need to - have 20 years of coding experience. But if I find that I need to look at the code, something has already gone badly wrong.)

Relevant anecdote: A couple of years ago I had a friend who was incredibly skilled at getting image models to do things that serious people asserted image models definitely couldn’t do at the time. At that time there were no image models that could get consistent text to appear in the image, but my friend could always get exactly the text you wanted. His prompts were themselves incredible works of art and engineering, directly grabbing hold of the fundamental control knobs of the model that most users are fumbling at.

Here’s the thing: any one of us can now make an image that is better than anything he was making at the time. Better compositionality, better understanding of intent, better text accuracy. We do this out of the box and without any attention paid to promoting voodoo at all. The models simply got that much better.

In a year or two, my carefully cultivated expertise around vibecoding will be irrelevant. You will get results like mine by just telling the model what you want. I assert this with high confidence. This is not disappointing to me, because I will be taking full advantage of the bleeding edge of capabilities throughout that period of time. Much like my friend, I don’t want to be good at managing AIs, I want to realize my vision.
by BenjiWiebe | 2025-09-28 17:14:28+00:00
I decided to do a little searching myself, now that I'm at my PC. In 1984 there was 13 killed from derailment from hitting a cow, but that was a "push-pull" train and it wasn't the locomotive that hit the cow, but a much lighter "control car".[1] Another case where the train hit a cow and launched it through the air, and it struck and killed someone.[2]

Also, in [1] there weren't any cowcatchers on the train either. All the trains (besides possibly an old steam locomotive, IDR) that I've seen in my life have cowcatchers and also a locomotive in the lead.

[1] https://mx-schroeder.medium.com/unholy-cow-the-1984-polmont-... [2] https://morningsidekick.com/indian-man-killed-in-freak-train...
by lomase | 2025-09-28 17:14:29+00:00
In my country 45.6 million homes pay each month around +30€ to have fiber to the home.

That is around 162 billion a year in cash flow.

The biggest provider operational costs are aroud 37B. For everything, not only fiber. And controls 50% of the FTTH market.

I mean is quick maths but looks like it does pay for it.
by JoelJacobson | 2025-09-28 17:15:02+00:00
It made me happy to see the pg_get_acl() function that I was involved in adding, is appreciated by users. I think there is still much improvement in the space of querying privileges. I think most users would probably struggle to come up with the query from the article:

postgres=# SELECT (pg_identify_object(s.classid,s.objid,s.objsubid)).*, pg_catalog.pg_get_acl(s.classid,s.objid,s.objsubid) AS acl FROM pg_catalog.pg_shdepend AS s JOIN pg_catalog.pg_database AS d ON d.datname = current_database() AND d.oid = s.dbid JOIN pg_catalog.pg_authid AS a ON a.oid = s.refobjid AND s.refclassid = 'pg_authid'::regclass WHERE s.deptype = 'a'; -[ RECORD 1 ]----------------------------------------- type | table schema | public name | testtab identity | public.testtab acl | {postgres=arwdDxtm/postgres,foo=r/postgres}

What I wanted to really add, was two new system views, pg_ownerships and pg_privileges [1]. The pg_get_acl() was a dependency that we needed to get in place first. In the end, I withdrew the patch trying to add these views. If there is enough interest from users, I might consider picking up the task of trying to work out the remaining obstacles.

Do people here need pg_ownerships and/or pg_privileges?

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/bbe7d1cb-0435-4ee...
by hinkley | 2025-09-28 17:15:17+00:00
There are also stories of people losing all of their stuff by sending the device in. So the added benefit of suggesting a wipe is that it encourages you to assume total loss and plan ahead.

That doesn’t necessarily help with people sending in devices with special nostalgia for the physical hardware, such as a signature. Though whether those sorts of issues were from not paying attention to notes attached to the account or outright theft has rarely been clear.
by didibus | 2025-09-28 17:15:22+00:00
You want something that requires an engineering breakthrough.

Models don't have memory, and they don't have understanding or intelligence beyond what they learned in training.

You give them some text (as context), and they predict what should come after (as the answer).

They’re trained to predict over some context size, and what makes them good is that they learn to model relationships across that context in many dimensions. A word in the middle can affect the probability of a word at the end.

If you insanely scale the training and inference to handle massive contexts, which is currently far too expensive, you run into another problem: the model can’t reliably tell which parts of that huge context are relevant. Irrelevant or weakly related tokens dilute the signal and bias it in the wrong direction, the distribution flatten or just ends up in the wrong place.

That's why you have to make sure you give it relevant well attended context, aka, context engineering.

It won't be able to look at a 100kloc code base and figure out what's relevant to the problem at hand, and what is irrelevant. You have to do that part yourself.

Or what some people do, is you can try to automate that part a little as well by using another model to go research and build that context. That's where people say the research->plan->build loop. And it's best to keep to small tasks, otherwise the context needing for a big task will be too big.
by yosser | 2025-09-28 17:15:30+00:00
I used to live just down the road from Fred Dibnah's house when I was in my early 20's. It was quite an interesting old building with a fairly steeply sloping garden that led down to an old workshop packed with steam engines and similar mechanical bric a brac. Despite the layout you could easily see down to the bottom of the garden from the pavement as you passed by.

I had a sort of standing joke where I would wind my girlfriend up by pointing out that it was Fred Dibnah's place every time we walked past. I did this perhaps a little too often.

One day, she had had enough and told me in a very loud voice that 'she couldn't give a shit if it was Fred Dibnah's house'. That's when I saw his startled face peering up from behind a traction engine. Sorry Fred. I hope you can forgive me from that big old chimney in the sky.
by meesles | 2025-09-28 17:15:44+00:00
For now, my mind is still made up. I leave the door open to be shown any serious piece of software that is built primarily through agentic workflows. Having tried to use these tools over the past month to build a critical piece of infrastructure for my company, I agree with OP. I spent so much time wrangling back unnecessary garbage that the LLM found was important, that I wondered if just writing it in one shot would have been actually faster. Simple things like 'test all this workflow logic' resulted in the LLM inserting a non-sensical mock at the top of the test file that took me an hour or two to unwind.

Other than that, I keep hearing the same arguments - "LLMs free up more time for me to think about the 'important things'." Son, your system is not durable, your tests are misleading, and you can't reason about what's happening because you didn't write it. What important things are left to think about??
by rootusrootus | 2025-09-28 17:16:37+00:00
Living in Iraq, and unable to move somewhere that has the jobs you're looking for? That's a tough one. If you can't get a remote-only gig to work out, I'd be trying to start my own thing that I could do entirely over the Internet. The biggest problem, of course, is the coding is one job, and running a business is entirely different. Maybe you don't want that.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-09-28 17:16:57+00:00
> LLMs are lightning fast junior engineers

I cannot express how tired I am of seeing this beyond stupid take.

If you truly believe that, you have either only ever worked with the most piss-poor junior engineers, or you simply have never worked with junior engineers.

LLMs do not learn, LLMs do not ask clarifications, LLMs do not wonder if they're going in the wrong direction, LLMs do not have taste, LLMs do not have opinions, LLMs write absolutely illogical nonsense, LLMs do not ask themselves what is the best for the customer, LLMs have no context beyond what you have explicitely fed them for that one specific task, and much more.
by _1tem | 2025-09-28 17:17:02+00:00
EU consumers will travel to other countries or buy through second hand markets, which is what happens in Russia now. Apple will lose little revenue. Apple can easily spin this as a win to shareholders showing how much competitive advantage was preserved by not having to build the EUs interoperability demands.

In the end the EU consumer gains nothing from all of this but loses their beloved Apple devices.
by igor47 | 2025-09-28 17:17:09+00:00
Lol this makes sense. I really respect the author of mailman3's dedication, but the architecture of the system is insane. There are 3 services -- the actual mail delivery piece, the admin interface, and the archiver -- all talking over various public and local interface, configuration is a nightmare, logs are all over the place, it takes over your system with scheduled cron jobs, there's some kind of built in console that I can't figure out how to use due to virtualenv issues plus cli commands that cover only some of the necessary functionality. It's gotten better since I run the tool as two docker containers, but still ends up being the most difficult service to administer and I administer quite a few
by pron | 2025-09-28 17:18:05+00:00
> LLMs are tools

With tools you know ahead of time that they will do the job you expect them to do with very high probability, or fail (with low probability) in some obvious way. With LLMs, there are few tasks you can trust them to do, and you also don't know their failure mode. They can fail yet report success. They work like neither humans nor tools.

An LLM behaves like a highly buggy compiler that too frequently reports success while emitting incorrect code. Not knowing where the bugs are, the only thing you can try to do is write the program in some equivalent way but with different syntax, hoping you won't trigger a bug. That is not a tool programmers often use. Learning to work with such a compiler is a skill, but it's unclear how transferable or lasting that skill is.

If LLMs advance as significantly and as quickly as some believe they will, it may be better to just wait for the buggy compiler to be fixed (or largely fixed). Presumably, much less skill will be required to achieve the same result that requires more skill today.