MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elteto | 2025-09-28 16:36:29+00:00
That is a really silly take. The US has had "advisors" embedded with Ukraine forces since the beginning of the war. Multiple high level Pentagon officials (think multi-star generals) have mentioned in interviews over the years how valuable is the intel they have been learning and collecting from the war. I can guarantee you that somewhere in Langley there are many analysts constantly churning out reports about battlefield lessons and techniques from the Ukrainian war.

I like to think that there is core of career public servants inside the US government who take their jobs seriously and they perform it well. Whether decision makers take their inputs into account is a different matter.
by fainpul | 2025-09-28 16:36:46+00:00
> I put absolute LLM negativity right up there with comments like "i never use a debugger and just use printf statements". To me it just screams you never learnt the tool.

To me it just feels different. Learning to use a debugger made me feel more powerful and "in control" (even though I still use a lot of print debugging; every tool has its place). Using AI assisted coding makes me feel like a manager who has to micro-manage a noob - it's exhausting.
by didibus | 2025-09-28 16:36:51+00:00
> If the thinking bit is your favorite part, AI allows you to spend nearly all of your time there if you wish, from concept through troubleshooting

I think this depends. I prefer the thinking bit, but it's quite difficult to think without the act of coding.

It's how white boarding or writing can help you think. Being in the code helps me think, allows me to experiment, uncover new learnings, and evolve my thinking in the process.

Though maybe we're talking about thinking of different things? Are you thinking in the sense of what a PM thinks about ? User features, user behavior, user edge cases, user metrics? Or do you mean thinking about what a developer thinks about, code clarity, code performance, code security, code modularization and ability to evolve, code testability, innovative algorithms, innovative data-structure, etc. ?
by AnEro | 2025-09-28 16:37:40+00:00
Largely agree, given your definitions and clarifications, but I see some things are just co-related issues not directly a death of that programming approach. Where I see it is the gap between programmers and end users, scope of 'users' expanding to other programmers, and the increased complexity causes more abstract soft skill code delivery/management roles are entirely co-existing issues. Where they didn't cause the death directly, more a co-morbidity situation, didn't help, but it didn't cause the death. I'd say the primary cause is cost and complexity of operations, forcing the perspective shift from 'help at least one actual human being' to 'help at least <MINIMUM VIABLE MARKET SHARE> of users/developers'. I'd also as an aside argue frameworks and items directed at devs (that are well-designed), are still abstractly utilitarian, because, if they didn't exist a human would have to do the work of programming or doing the work manually so it would directly help at least 1 human.
by bikamonki | 2025-09-28 16:38:09+00:00
Not in my experience. I still spend much of the time thinking before prompting. Then I spend time reviewing the AI written code before using it. Does not feel like a trap. It mostly feels like having a super experienced pair programmer. I may be using it differently than others since I do not have it integrated to my IDE. I use it like I used google + stackoverflow before it.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-28 16:38:22+00:00
It's not a nice thought - how much of human thinking is just down to wiring. Pre-set connections somewhere in the big switchboard of human mind.

How much of whether you're right or wrong on a given issue is not down to knowledge, intelligence or rigor - but to pre-set biases that happen to be set the right way or the wrong way. How the same knowledge and intelligence that can guide you to truths can instead lead you to be more entrenched in wrongs, and just how hard it is to know the difference.

You can try to be better than that, but even if you do, you aren't going to escape your own nature. And most people don't even seem to try.
by skwee357 | 2025-09-28 16:38:38+00:00
I got used to naming files/folders with leading zeros when I want them to be sorted alphabetically (for example payslips/invoices, etc).

But I'm a tech guy, I know what does "alphabetically" mean in the tech world. And it probably is not what common folks mean when they think "alphabetically" outside the tech world.

Edit: in fact, if I recall correctly, the proper term for this kind of sort (the one OP wants) is alphanumeric sort.
by cameronh90 | 2025-09-28 16:38:43+00:00
I don’t know about the components they’re selling, but with electronic components, it’s on the buyer to properly read the data sheet and understand what the quoted nominal specs mean.

Unless it’s safety critical, you usually don’t want a system with a bunch of active electronics to prevent someone wiring it up wrong, because those components will interfere with whatever you’re hooking it up to, such as the MPPT, the battery, or whatever else.

This is like how AA batteries have a nominal voltage of 1.5V but the actual open circuit voltage is 0.9V~1.65V depending on charge level, temperature, etc. If you connect an AA to something that’ll explode at a voltage of 1.55V, that’s on you.

Similarly if you buy a 470 ohm resistor, you will find in on the data sheet that’s usually at 20°C. To know what it’ll be at any other temperature, you’ll need to use the temperature coefficient to calculate it.
by sebtron | 2025-09-28 16:38:43+00:00
> And they choose the interpretation that (per their reasoning, and possibly some actual data) seems most likely to correspond to what the user wants.

Yes, that make sense, but the problem is that this interpretation changed in the last 10 (15? 20?) years. It used to be that "by name" meant "by name, il alphabetical / lexicographical order" in pretty much every file manager.
by my_corp_is_big | 2025-09-28 16:39:11+00:00
Why would you point out two tool obsessed companies as something positive? Meta and Google are overstaffed and produce all sorts of tools that people have to use because someone's performance evaluation depends on it.

The open source code of these companies is also not that great and definitely not bug free. Perhaps these companies should do more thinking and less tooling politics.
by mothballed | 2025-09-28 16:39:12+00:00
I don't believe you can 'solve' the tragedy of the commons by increasing the size of the commons. Public government is a tragedy of the commons and shrinking it as close to, if not to the size zero, would reduce not increase the tragedy of the commons.

I'm not opposed to say, privatizing many functions of government so that they are no longer commons. I feel this would solve that problem better than making the commons larger.
by surgical_fire | 2025-09-28 16:39:36+00:00
> That's not to say that LLMs as good as some of the more outrageous claims. You do still need to do a lot of work to implement code. But if you're not finding value at all it honestly reflects badly on you and your ability to use tools.

You are in a forum full of people that routinely claim that vibe coding is the future, that LLMs already can fully replace engineers, and if you don't think so you are just a naysayer that is doing it wrong.

Rephrasing your claim, LLMs are just moderately useful, far from being the future-defining technology people invested in it wants it to be. But you choose to rally against people not interested in marketing it further.

Given the credentials you decided to share, I find it unsurprising.
by didibus | 2025-09-28 16:39:43+00:00
> The reason is pretty simple which is with these AI tools you for the most part replace writing code with writing a prompt

I'm convinced I spend more time typing and end up typing more letters and words when AI coding than when not.

My hands are hurting me more from the extra typing I have to do now lol.

I'm actually annoyed they haven't integrated their voice to text models inside their coding agents yet.
by jijijijij | 2025-09-28 16:40:22+00:00
It's a bit of a weird thing, really. I think, I have not seen any comprehensive, basic tutorial on the matter. I presume a lot of people who've become victim of the LaTex bug, but dislike its overhead, independently found bliss in this pandoc compromise. It's definitely a bit of coping with LaTex Stockholm syndrome, you probably need a specific set of experiences, know some struggle to fully appreciate it.

If anyone here hasn't messed with it, but thinks "I wonder, if LaTex could ruin my life, too", I suggest to start learning pandoc first (it can do various markup conversions, it's useful by itself). Get familiar with pandoc metadata headers on a RTFM basis. A LaTex intro is all you need after that, if you are up for a bit of trial and error. Or learn LaTex first, but not both at the same time, as the layered processing involved is a bit confusing (e.g. pandoc showing pdflatex errors). In any case, I strongly advice to bite the bullet and install the full LaTex package of your distro (no idea about macOS, or windows), as fighting dependencies is suuuper annoying. However, the trade-off is it's truly a behemoth, consequently frequent upgrades for a lot of packages you don't ever use. (I configured dnf to download upgrades automatically, so I can do a quick `dnf upgrade --cacheonly` when opportune.)

Speaking of... I wish pandoc could do Tex package management and dependency resolution.
by itsnowandnever | 2025-09-28 16:40:24+00:00
the flaw in the article is acting like engineers always have a choice. the writers presents the contrasts of "fair delegation vs mollycoddling" mirroring "ai-driven development vs vibe coding"... but that sacrifice for short-term gain at the expense of scale is often draconically enforced.

obviously good and experienced engineers aren't going to be vibe coders/mollycoddlers by nature. but many good and experienced engineers will be pressured to make poor decisions by impatient business leaders. and that's the root of most AI anxiety: we all know it's going to be used as irresponsibly and recklessly as possible. it's not about the tech. it's about a system with broken incentives.
by dpflan | 2025-09-28 16:40:47+00:00
Has anyone read up on the recent paper from Meta/FAIR -- CWM: An Open-Weights LLM for Research on Code Generation with World Models

Which looks to attempt to give better "coding" understanding to the model instead of mere tokens and positioning and hence improve the coding capabilities of these "brilliant but unpredictable junior engineer" coding agents:

- https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/cwm-an-open-weight...
by _fat_santa | 2025-09-28 16:40:48+00:00
I had a friend a few years back that got taken for close to $50k and this feature would have prevented it.

- He was at a bar and got to talking to one girl.

- There was another girl watching him and his phone and figured out his passcode. The bar was dimly lit so FaceID didn't always work and at some point he entered his passcode and she saw.

- They all left to "go back to their place" and in the process the girls stole his phone.

- Mid ride they kicked him out of the Uber.

- He goes home and realized his bank accounts have all been cleaned out via Venmo and CashApp.

Had those apps been inside the "secure folder", they would have not been able to access them and thus would not have been able to clean him out like they did.
by m-hodges | 2025-09-28 16:40:53+00:00
Thanks, I’ll look into Jumper!

On Overcast: it works, but I find that I spend more time trying to trim the clip than anything else. Probably takes me at least 5 minutes to get the 1-minute clip right. Maybe that’s just a normal and expected amount of effort.

But I think the larger point is it doesn’t surface the information well. I doubt many people ever listen to even the short clip. I’m thinking of a sharable speech-to-text clipper, or something.
by hnlmorg | 2025-09-28 16:40:53+00:00
My point is that the limits of LLMs will be hit long before we they start to take on human capabilities.

The problem isn’t that exponential growth is hard to visualise. The problem is that LLMs, as advanced and useful a technique as it is, isn’t suited for AGI and thus will never get us even remotely to the stage of AGI.

The human like capabilities are really just smoke and mirrors.

It’s like when people anthropomorphisise their car; “she’s being temperamental today”. Except we know the car is not intelligence and it’s just a mechanical problem. Whereas it’s in the AI tech firms best interest to upsell the human-like characteristics of LLMs because that’s how they get VC money. And as we know, building and running models isn’t cheap.
by vips7L | 2025-09-28 16:40:55+00:00
This was discussed over on /r/java when it came out. The tl;dr is that it’s a poorly worded blog post about the OracleJdk (the one you pay and subscribe to). Graal isn’t going anywhere.

https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/1niamuc/detaching_gra...
by ndriscoll | 2025-09-28 16:41:41+00:00
Sure, but it reminds us that we are dealing with an S-curve, so we need to ask where the inflection point is. i.e. what are the relevant constraints, and can they reasonably sustain exponential growth for a while still? At least as an outsider, it's not obvious to me whether we won't e.g. run into bandwidth or efficiency constraints that make scaling to larger models infeasible without reimagining the sorts of processors we're using. Perhaps we'll need to shift to analog computers or something to break through cooling problems, and if the machine cannot find the designs for the new paradigm it needs, it can't make those exponential self-improvements (until it matches its current performance within the new paradigm, it gets no benefit from design improvements it makes).

My experience is that "AI can write programs" is only true for the smallest tasks, and anything slightly nontrivial will leave it incapable of even getting started. It doesn't "often makes mistakes or goes in a wrong direction". I've never seen it go anywhere near the right direction for a nontrivial task.

That doesn't mean it won't have a large impact; as an autocomplete these things can be quite useful today. But when we have a more honest look at what it can do now, it's less obvious that we'll hit some kind of singularity before hitting a constraint.
by szopa | 2025-09-28 16:41:57+00:00
Thank you for herding all the cats! :)

Some other interesting aspects of the camp:

The event’s currency are Łosie, which you get by taking part in classes and winning tournament games. By the end of each week there’s an auction where you bid for prizes. You can use your Łosie from previous years, but Tasuki implements an inflationary monetary policy to keep old-timers from becoming too rich (every year Łosie rewards get doubled).

Some people have been coming from abroad for many years, and at some point just figured out it makes sense to learn Polish (not the easiest of languages).
by mikeyouse | 2025-09-28 16:42:04+00:00
Those ‘two cases’ were from the first months of this term - needless to say there have been many further cases since then. And more to the ‘systemic collapse’ point, Appeals Courts staffed by Trump-appointed flunkies are gutting the contempt proceedings and the Supreme Court is refusing to step in..

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna223873
by stockresearcher | 2025-09-28 16:42:25+00:00
Maybe it’s different in the rest of the world (I doubt it), but the fuel nozzles for gasoline and diesel are different. You can’t put a diesel nozzle into the opening on a gasoline car, so it’s rather difficult to fill a gasoline car with diesel fuel.

The other way around is possible. You can fill a diesel tank with gasoline. Whether it destroys the engine or not depends on how much gasoline you put in. A gallon or two that is then diluted by filling the rest of the tank with diesel is not likely to cause any lasting damage. If you fill a tank 3/4 of the way with gasoline and try running it in a diesel you are probably going to need a new engine.

So yeah, the analogy is not good. Slightly exceeding the rated voltage and breaking the whole thing is usually not the same as putting a little gasoline in your diesel tank.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-28 16:42:26+00:00
Pretty common in all UNIXes, which is why projects like GNU and Linux even had a starting point what to compare themselves to.

IBM systems have the famous Red Books, but ok it isn't included.

Windows before the Internet days, when the SDK came in CD, having a MSDN subscription meant receiving a box with all documentation from Microsoft.

Inferno as Plan 9's successor also included all documentation.

Niklaus Wirth OSes for Modula-2 and Oberon, had the OS documentation as hypertext.

All Xerox PARC OSes, across Smalltalk, Interlisp-D and Mesa/Cedar had online help with the system documentation.
by sema4hacker | 2025-09-28 16:42:34+00:00
THere is always a top 1%. Even if those with the top 1% of the wealth disappeared today there would just be a different top 1% replacing them. The problem is the 50% of the population that's being kept sleepwalking, too uneducated and uninformed to prevent the autocrats from getting stronger, and how the policies of those in power are making it worse each day. We may be the land of the free, but that includes being free to be taken advantage of. Fixing that is difficult.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-09-28 16:42:37+00:00
> “Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal

Replacing human heart valves with pig valves has been a thing at least as far back as the 1970s with decade-ish survival rates.

Granted TFA is about a whole organ -- not just a piece of tissue -- but xenotransplantation per se is not new.
by bityard | 2025-09-28 16:43:21+00:00
"There should only be one way to do it" has not really been a thing in Python for at least the last decade or longer. It was originally meant as a counterpoint to Perl's "there's more than one way to do it," to show that the Python developers put a priority on quality and depth of features rather than quantity.

But times change and these days, Python is a much larger language with a bigger community, and there is a lot more cross-pollination between languages as basic philosophical differences between the most popular languages steadily erode until they all do pretty much the same things, just with different syntax.
by rapind | 2025-09-28 16:43:39+00:00
I find myself often writing pseudo code (CLI) to express some ideas to the agent. Code can be a very powerful and expressive means of communication. You don't have to stop using it when it's the best / easiest tool for a specific case.

That being said, these agents may still just YOLO and ignore your instructions on occasion, which can be a time suck, so sometimes I still get my hands dirty too :)
by thisisit | 2025-09-28 16:44:02+00:00
The current admin tries to portray themselves as "strong man" but have the thinnest of skins. It is likely the EPA bosses don't want any studies which oppose their agenda. Be it renewables or coal mining. Don't follow the science, follow the agenda.

Case in point - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBllzAb_vAk

Kevin Hall's study didn't find ultra processed foods being addictive like cocaine. It seemed to have rubbed the RFK MAHA agenda the wrong way.
by Inufu | 2025-09-28 16:44:03+00:00
Well, growth has been on this exponential already for 5+ years (for the METR eval), and we are at the point where models are very close to matching human expert capabilities in many domains - only one or two more years of growth would put us well beyond that point.

Personally I think we'll see way more growth than that, but to see profound impacts on our economy you only need to believe the much more conservative assumption of a little extra growth along the same trend.
by busterarm | 2025-09-28 16:44:06+00:00
Be that as it may, they effectively entirely handed governance of Ruby Central over to a single party and manufactured a funding crisis that that party used to make drastic change.

This directly damaged the entire Ruby community. Their dollars had influence that they could have used to steer the organization elsewhere, but instead they took their toys away and gave control to the very people they disagreed with.
by dangus | 2025-09-28 16:44:33+00:00
Programmers need to grow up and dispense with this belief.

They’d like to imagine a world where there’s no such thing as sales and marketing, where they can interact with humans and especially business manager types who tell them what to build as little as possible.

So many developers seem to genuinely not understand why their contributions to software used by millions don’t magically generate income.

If you’re a FOSS developer you need to grow up and do one of the following rather than moaning about not being paid:

1. Accept that you’re not getting paid and do the work as an exercise in personal growth and enjoyment. Don’t make it your job and don’t do burnout-inducing things like providing support for free.

2. Come up with a business model. Learn something about sales and marketing. E.g., nginx plus.

3. Get a corporate sponsor and deal with having a manager type telling you what to do and/or corporate employees steering the direction of your project.
by doublerabbit | 2025-09-28 16:46:26+00:00
A job is a job. Your just a number, no business cares about you. You cost them money and as soon as your out the door your forgotten. Even if you create some super script that powers that business. On rare occasions where you do you make outside work friendships the chances are high that you'll end up leaving them or they'll leave you.

Whenever you start to question your job, start looking to jump. The energy of "I am dedicated to my role because the company treats me well" is an pathological lie and psychological demoralizing. The more you cater to this the more you're giving them control over you.

It may seem cushy, it may be cosy and you could be okay with that but at any point they can and will throw your role away. Plus at that stage if you ever want to progress, further progression becomes finite. Don't fall in to that trap.

They want you with your skill set because training someone up, you, to that of a higher level costs resources. Either that or they then lump someone junior that you have to manage. So now your working two jobs destroying the coziness you once had. What was the first reason for this job in the first place? Money? Skills? Friends?

It's always money and that's why we work. Anything else positive is just an added bonus. So yes, quit your job if you're turning unhappy.

Interview while your employed, and don't be afraid. Employers prefer you jumping ships when your employed. It's the way forward in getting higher wage, new skills plus a new better you. You can use your current employment as bargaining chip or vice versa. On the former you'll find they're be happy to kick you out as soon as it's mentioned.

A interviewer is more interested in the skills you bring than why you're leaving your current job. The interviewer is human too, well for now anyway.
by mmaunder | 2025-09-28 16:46:35+00:00
If you know, understand that you are in possession of a massive and temporary information asymmetry advantage, and you should run with it as hard and fast as you can to gain the biggest lead possible, before the author and the rest of the world gain that advantage too. Go, go now, go fast, do it in parallel, and don’t stop until you win. Opportunities like this are extremely rare not just in your life, but in the history of our society. Best of luck.