MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dsiegel2275 | 2025-09-13 13:33:54+00:00
So I have all kinds of problems with this post.

First, the assertion that the best model of "AI coding" is that it is a compiler. Compilers deterministically map a formal language to another under a spec. LLM coding tools are search-based program synthesizers that retrieve, generate, and iteratively edit code under constraints (tests/types/linters/CI). That’s why they can fix issues end-to-end on real repos (e.g., SWE-bench Verified), something a compiler doesn’t do. Benchmarks now show top agents/models resolving large fractions of real GitHub issues, which is evidence of synthesis + tool use, not compilation.

Second, that the "programming language is English". Serious workflows aren’t "just English." They use repo context, unit tests, typed APIs, JSON/function-calling schemas, diffs, and editor tools. The "prompt" is often code + tests + spec, with English as glue. The author attacks the weakest interface, not how people actually ship with these tools.

Third, non-determinism isn't disqualifying. Plenty of effective engineering tools are stochastic (fuzzers, search/optimization, SAT/SMT with heuristics). Determinism comes from external specs: unit/integration tests, type systems, property-based tests, CI gates.

False dichotomy: "LLMs are popular only because languages/libraries are bad." Languages are improving (e.g. Rust, Typescript), yet LLMs still help because the real bottlenecks are API lookup, cross-repo reading, boilerplate, migrations, test writing, and refactors, the areas where retrieval and synthesis shine. These are complementary forces, not substitutes.

Finally, no constructive alternatives are offered. "Build better compilers/languages" is fine but modern teams already get value by pairing those with AI: spec-first prompts, test-gated edits, typed SDK scaffolds, auto-generated tests, CI-verified refactors, and repo-aware agents.

A much better way to think about AI coding and LLMs is that they aren’t compilers. They’re probabilistic code synthesizers guided by your constraints (types, tests, CI). Treat them like a junior pair-programmer wired into your repo, search, and toolchain. But not like a magical English compiler.
by prime_ursid | 2025-09-13 13:34:04+00:00
Finally, someone in this thread says this. Thank you!

This opinion column from The Hill is written by a Fox News contributor. Of course it’s going to leave out certain inconvenient facts in service of a nativist agenda. The HN community time and time again shows that they are ready to be whipped up into an anti-immigrant frenzy at the drop of a hat.
by mentalgear | 2025-09-13 13:34:06+00:00
France, heavily invested in nuclear, now has to shut down their reactors each summer as, due to climate change, the cooling water from rivers cant be used any more to cool the reactors. So much about being future proof. And let's not even get into the argument why no private company ever financed a nuclear reactor, but only build them with huge subsidies from states. Hint: it is because they are completely uneconomically. (and dont come with the argument of experimental small scale reactors, they are all just experimental and none proven)
by Chris2048 | 2025-09-13 13:35:23+00:00
Despite the origin of HN being in the US, given that the current community has expanded to a large array of multinational English speakers, I'd rather country-specific posts like these were tagged such, in a international context: e.g. "The US treasury is expanding.."

even if mention of "the patriot act" is an obvious signal, there are many such contexts but an explicit tagging makes quick parsing easier. Same for mention of the government/authorities/police/military/administration/constitution/president etc.
by misiti3780 | 2025-09-13 13:37:03+00:00
I was bored yesterday and I tried to vibe code a simple react app yesterday using claude code and it was basically useless. It created a good shell of a code initially, but after 10 minutes I basically had to take over (It would be a feature, then regress the previous.)

Am I the only one convinced that all of the hype around coding agents like codex and claude is 85% BS ?
by tomatocracy | 2025-09-13 13:37:29+00:00
The article doesn't really explain what the lawsuit was over. It's about rules for private sector investment fund reporting. What the court ruled on is whether nuclear (and gas) can be classified as "sustainable investments" under the "EU taxonomy" rules[0].

This may mean that more private investment capital will end up in nuclear power, although my guess is that the impact of the EU taxonomy in driving investment decisions on this type of thing is likely quite small (I suspect the few funds which are out there which have hard requirements around EU taxonomy likely wouldn't invest in nuclear anyway).

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_taxonomy_for_sustainable_ac...
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-13 13:39:07+00:00
I am not s lawyer, or an "Intellectual Property" expert, but if it looks "AI", I personally will not watch it, and I grew up with garbage animation like The Jetsons, Rocky and Bullwinkle, a Scooby Doo. At least on those shows, grizzled schlockmeisters would re-use cels and sequences they did in a tearing hurry to meet ridiculous deadlines.
by peterfirefly | 2025-09-13 13:39:37+00:00
UTF-16 is a hack that was invented when it became clear that UCS-2 wasn't gonna work (65536 codepoints was not enough for everybody).

Almost the entire world could have ignored it if not for Microsoft making the wrong choice with Windows NT and then stubbornly insisting that their wrong choice was indeed correct for a couple of decades.

There was a long phase where some parts of Windows understood (and maybe generated) UTF-16 and others only UCS-2.
by spookie | 2025-09-13 13:39:51+00:00
There are pretty clean combustible sources out there or even alternative electrical sources out there, but somehow humanity has gone with big, heavy, rare mineral hungry batteries.

What's the deal against hydrogen? Toyota made a car that made it to market, it can't be that dangerous if it was sold in certain regions with extensive safety testing procedures. I know the problem is getting hydrogen at the pump station but other fully battery dependent cars have had that same issue before.

I'm sure hydrogen has other problems (conversion efficiency?) but what about ethanol? Better than gasoline, no? At least 40% less greenhouse gases out of the tail pipe, and its production is pretty mild for the environment compared to batteries. It wouldn't make cars that much more complicated either, and you could "easily" convert your ICE car. Of course, at the scale we are talking about the gains would be way lower given a 5 year timespan vs batteries

Hell, there are others.

Such a weird set of events dictating the future of cars ngl, some of the alternatives may have had come sooner if someone focused there (I know Brazil has some minimum ethanol requirement that seems like a good idea while transitioning).
by sublinear | 2025-09-13 13:42:03+00:00
I think you're describing things we already knew long before this era of AI. Less code is better code, and the vast majority of bugs come from the devs who "hate the boring easy bits".

I disagree that this has anything to do with people needing a break. All code eventually has to be reviewed. Regardless of who or what wrote it, writing too much of it is the problem. It's also worth considering how much more code could be eliminated if the business more critically planned what they think they want.

These tensions have existed even before computers and in all professions.
by dtagames | 2025-09-13 13:42:08+00:00
If this is supposed to a simple or approachable (or even correct) explanation of LLMs, I think it misses the mark, especially in the last paragraph where the author seems to confuse the transformer's work of putting values into a model with the later, predictive steps of returning tokens when prompted.

Folks that say an LLM cannot "introspect on itself" are correct because the model's "learning" process consists of a series of combinations of assignments and adjustments to the model data. In other words, it's predictive soup all the way down.

I'm biased because I wrote it, but I think this is a better article[0]. I did so specifically because most explanations are awful, and on that point I agree with this author.

[0] Something From Nothing: A Painless Approach to Understanding AI -- https://medium.com/gitconnected/something-from-nothing-d755f...
by runekaagaard | 2025-09-13 13:42:09+00:00
Nope, I've really, really tried to like modal editing, because the programmable command chaining is super cool, but even though I became proficient with it I never really enjoyed it.

Starting out emacs i got super fatigued with all the long pinky driven commands for mostly used commands. It felt usable after I added keybindings for commands like switch buffer, close buffer, duplicate line(s), move line(s), find in project, find file in project, indent (wrote my own sane (for me)) indention code). The windows/apple key is great for those things because they are not used by emacs.

On linux I settled on using emacs vanilla key commands for copy/paste/cut but that took a looong time to feel comfortable with and I still mess it up sometimes, also with the ctrl+shift-X version of them in the terminal. On iOS, using the apple key like for the rest of the system is sweet relief.
by liqilin1567 | 2025-09-13 13:42:12+00:00
You're right to point that out, thanks for keeping things honest. My intention was simply to offer a helpful TL;DR for a very long thread, as it's a feature of a project I'm working on (mentioned in my profile).

I'm trying to contribute value without being spammy. If this crosses a line for the community, I'm happy to listen and adjust.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-09-13 13:43:57+00:00
> can wipe a continent

Sorry, but no.

Chernobyl exclusion zone is less than a single area of the Agent Orange usage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial-herbicide-spray-mi...
by Epa095 | 2025-09-13 13:44:27+00:00
Sony MDR 605LP is an example of a very open design. I used to own a pair, and I quite enjoys listening to them (by myself). Seems like today Open-Back Headphones is more popular, they are still open in the back.

The sound of the open air headphones are a bit hard to describe with other words than 'open' :-P It's just a bit more like listening to speakers.
by chuckadams | 2025-09-13 13:44:45+00:00
Package advisories are seen as a content moderation issue: repositories and clients will be able to subscribe to one or more streams of digitally signed "labels" that can be interpreted by a policy mechanism that can render a verdict anywhere from "show this warning" to "do not install" to "remove immediately". The architecture is based on the system used by BlueSky: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/blueskys-moderation-architecture.

It's also not implemented yet: the initial release of the FAIR package manager is aimed at the package distribution parts, both mirroring the themes/plugins on wordpress.org and using W3C DIDs on BlueSky's PLC server as an indirection in front of raw URLs for hand-curated packages not hosted on .org, such as the FAIR client and server plugins themselves.

My own role in FAIR is a lot simpler, and it's maintaining AspireCloud, the project from AspirePress (now a working group of FAIR) that implements enough of api.wordpress.org to enable a searchable mirror of all its downloadable assets. AC is usable on its own without the FAIR ecosystem, but also makes up a good chunk of it while things are getting bootstrapped. So while I have a pretty good grasp of the planned architecture, I'm still not the best person to give the details. There's a public Slack server on https://chat.fair.pm which is still the best place to go for answers, and discussion boards on Github for less synchronous discussion (though the problem with GH is there's so many repos it's hard to find the right one).
by maltelau | 2025-09-13 13:44:47+00:00
That is a fantastic question, and you've hit on a very good balance between a curious and non-confrontational tone. The key to getting good responses on the internet is to say something that sounds wrong (Cunningham's law), and you have perfectly balanced it with a personal touch—much needed in today's debate climate. Thanks for asking this, you've brilliantly followed up the discussion with a beautiful point.

(The above is my human sarcastic attempt at hitting a sycophantic tone common to chatbots today)
by pxoe | 2025-09-13 13:44:55+00:00
It's totally fine if people would just say it like "bad algorithms" or "good algorithms", but somehow the meaning of the word "algorithm" in itself got so twisted that it apparently means "bad" just on its own. Which looks idiotic if you realize that everywhere there are algorithms, even in those platforms that claim to be "no algorithm/algorithm-free" or whatever other meaningless duplicitous marketing drivel they dress it up with. From where I see it, it's some other people that purposely mix the meanings there, while also overlooking how some arbitrary "good" or "unremarkable" things just kinda silently get a pass, despite being functionally the same thing. Almost to the point where you could just advertise as "no algorithms" (whatever that means) and just have algorithms anyway, and it's kind of whatever.

It's not "evil" to be showing an algo feed per se. But mastodon and a bunch of other platforms refer to algo feeds as "bad/evil" or something of the sort, market themselves as not having them, and yet thoroughly employ multiple algo feeds. Is that not just hypocritical? It looks glaringly dishonest. They could at least have some integrity to say "we don't like the yucky algorithms, but here we only have good™ algorithms", when that's literally what it is.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-09-13 13:47:12+00:00
The source they cite was retracted, just as the WSJ had to retract their similar reporting.

The shooter is a Groyper, a far right sect that has been "warring" with Kirk for a while and disrupting his appearances because they disagree about exactly how openly Fascist they should be.

A far right killer from a hardcore MAGA family.

The other school shooting that day was also far-right, btw.
by pron | 2025-09-13 13:47:44+00:00
The only thing that's paid is support, and the OpenJDK folks are Oracle employees (well, the ~90% of them who do ~95% of the work on OpenJDK). OpenJDK is an Oracle project in the same sense that Chromium is a Google project. In fact, OpenJDK (even more precisely - the OpenJDK JDK) is the name given to Oracle's implementation of the Java SE specification, but we do get contributions from other companies, such as this particular great enhancement to JFR (even external contributions also involve significant work by Oracle employees).

Anyway, if you don't want to buy a support service, either from Oracle or any of the other companies that sell it, the use of the JDK is free. There is no "enterprise" flavour of the JDK, paid features, or use restrictions as there used to be under Sun's management. Java is obviously freer now - as in beer or in speech - than it was 20 years ago.
by duckdriver | 2025-09-13 13:47:49+00:00
> Untrue because 'very often' should instead be stated as 'sometimes'?

No, because he WAS reaching across an intellectual divide.

Would be curious to your reply to hnewsenjoyer's comment, as it captures my thoughts well. His willingness or lack of willingness to change his mind doesn't mean he wasn't facilitating the exchange of ideas or bridging intellectual gaps. He was doing politics the way it was supposed to be done in a liberal democracy.
by bitshiftfaced | 2025-09-13 13:48:34+00:00
What explains not changing jobs because you find it distressing and claiming that you're being paid below what you're worth? It seems like if that were true, then you'd be motivated to find a job that pays market rate. And if you couldn't, then you could at least find another job that pays less than market rate, like your current job, but isn't so distressing.
by FjordWarden | 2025-09-13 13:48:59+00:00
From the paper:

Structured State Space Models and Mamba. Models like Mamba [Gu and Dao, 2023] can be in- terpreted within GWO as employing a sophisticated Path, Shape, and Weight. The Path is defined by a structured state-space recurrence, enabling it to model long-range dependencies efficiently. The Shape is causal (1D), processing information sequentially. Critically, the Weight function is highly dynamic and input- dependent, realized through selective state parameters that allow the model to focus on or forget information based on the context, creating an effective content-aware bottleneck for sequences.
by duckdriver | 2025-09-13 13:49:20+00:00
The right does not have a monopoly on hateful, violent people/rhetoric. The idea that they do is a soothing story people on the left like to tell themselves.

I don’t defend those things he said, or those things hateful rightwing things you cited. The fact that you think of them as a response to “look at this bad thing on the left” is very telling. The existence of bad things on the right have no bearing on the observation that there are bad things on the left.

You should think more deeply about what to do about all those Americans who agree with Charlie Kirk. “Force them to change their minds” is not an option available to you.

I encourage you to read the thread you jumped in on, which begins with the example you asked for. The first comment you responded to, which perhaps you stopped reading partially through, explains my position, and it’s not “Charlie Kirk is the good guy here.” You don’t have to like him, you can disagree with everything he thinks, but he was doing politics the right way: through debate and discussion. Classifying that as somehow invalid is an attempt to insulate yourself from challenges to your worldview.
by onlinehost | 2025-09-13 13:49:56+00:00
I'm a contractor for one of these companies. It pays okay ($45+/hour) if you can pass qualifications for your area of expertise but the work isn't steady and communication is non-existent. The coding qualifications I did were difficult FAANG algorithm analysis questions. The work has definitely gotten harder over the last year and often says we need to come up with Masters/PhD level work or problems that someone with 5+ years of experience in a field would have difficulty solving. I wish I had a regular job but I live in rural North Carolina and remote work is hard to come by.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-13 13:50:01+00:00
This has been confusing because if it's a grift, the playbook is to keep an equilibrium where the "threat" never gets solved, because its usefulness is its existence.

And if it's not a grift to him, if he's a true believer/victim of it, the people running the grift don't usually let those people all the way to the top to upset the equilibrium.

It's like we're a decade into watching the dog who caught the car.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-09-13 13:50:16+00:00
> the cooling water from rivers cant be used any more to cool the reactors. So much about being future proof.

There are more reactor types than water-cooled reactors, and modern energy plants should use cooling towers even if some water reservoir is available, nuclear or not.

> it is because they are completely uneconomically

This is why private sector cannot provide infrastructure. State is not a company.
by Retric | 2025-09-13 13:50:41+00:00
> That is insane.

Hindsight plus other people doing the analysis always makes things seem more obvious.

The people designing this system were not trying to kill the operators. They made tradeoffs that seemed reasonable at the time and then things failed badly because something unexpected happened. The only way to avoid that is to be extremely cautious which then feeds back to nuclear being expensive.

Risk aversion gets expensive, but so does taking risks. That’s the nuclear dilemma. It seems reasonable to say just take more risks, but that’s how you get accidents that people look back on and think how could they be so dumb.
by Xylakant | 2025-09-13 13:51:25+00:00
The license does not bind the original copyright owner, who can do anything with the code - fee example relicense and distribute under another license.

The license only binds the licensee that received the code under the respective license.

Things get more complicated if there are external contributors that may have contributed under specific legal arrangements, but in the simple case there’s no legal way to force the original copyright owner to publish sources.
by alehlopeh | 2025-09-13 13:52:21+00:00
Well, it doesn’t say universal so it’s clearly going to be a specific set of human values and preferences. It’s obviously referring to the preferences of the humans who are footing the bill and who stand to profit from it. The extent to which those values happen to align with those of the eventual consumer of this product could potentially determine whether the aforementioned profits ever materialize.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-09-13 13:52:45+00:00
If you import cheap labor, you hit your economy by lowering the wages in that sector. When you have immigration, there are a few very top talents and a lot of average people coming, the average ones are not a net benefit in most cases. In US migrants don't create huge problems of integration and culture clashes, in Western Europe there are problems with that so the overall impact is negative.
by pandaman | 2025-09-13 13:54:39+00:00
The company is free to tailor the minimum requirements to its liking however it must be able to persuade the government that the job cannot be done without these requirements and a foreigner meets them. If you could just require a Nobel Prize in Physics and 50 years of experience for your PM or JS-jockey job then we would not be seeing articles like this. So I don't see why would you be pointing it out.

>and companies have lawyers who are good at following the text

Apparently not very good lawyers at Apple: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/ier-apple_settlement_agre...

Or Meta: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-labor-depart...

Just a couple of recent high-profile busts. The problem is not "good lawyers" but the fact that the only punishment for breaking the law is a pittance of a settlement.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-13 13:56:02+00:00
On Max and also find it slower recently.

Also yesterday tried to use it to debug some AWS issue and it tried to send me down so many wrong paths, and suggested changes that were either plain wrong or had unintended consequences, that if I didn't actually know my stuff and had followed blindly, the results would have been pretty bad or at least a huge time waster. When I called it out it would quickly reverse course ("You're right of course!") and it did provide some helpful snippets but I was unimpressed.

What I find it excellent at is for throw-away scripts to do small jobs or automate little things--stuff I could do but would take me a lot longer (especially in bash).
by brookst | 2025-09-13 13:56:03+00:00
Claude’s utility really drops when any task requires a working set larger than the context window.

On the one hand, it’s kind or irritating when it goes great-great-great-fail.

On the other hand, it really enforces the best practices of small classes, small files, separation of concerns. If each unit is small enough it does great.

Unfortunately, it’s also fairly verbose and not great at recognizing that it is writing the same code over and over again, so I often find some basic file has exploded to 3000 lines, and a simple “identity repeated logic and move to functions” prompt shrinks it to 500 lines.