MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindslight | 2025-10-28 02:17:36+00:00
> that this would change my position

I'm not asking you to change your position, but rather to be honest about the effects of it.

> "I like to exploit immigrants and underpay them, because my out-of-season fruit will be too high for my smoothy frappucinos!"

I did not say anything of the sort, rather I acknowledged the current reality. One can also say "I want farm workers to be system legible, primarily Americans, and paid a living wage, even though it will make grocery prices go up". That's a consistent position. We can have honest discussions about those things. I don't think anybody actually likes the status quo.

> Silly things leftists say, haha

I know fascists have defined everything short of gushing praise for Dear Leader as the rAdIcAl lEfT, but I'm actually a libertarian.

> I live in a country being held hostage by lunatic ideologues who think non-citizens should have the absolute right to live here

Please explain how it's being "held hostage" when the party in power is enacting the exact opposite.

> So there's not really that many options left. Things will have to get far worse before they can get any better.

Sorry no, there are plenty of other options to institute the immigration policy you want here - which wouldn't require adding to the surveillance pantopticon, further empowering a domestic military, or trampling the Constitution and our natural rights.

So what we've actually got is a second issue of how those things are being carried out, supposedly in the name of doing something about immigration. But given how wholly anti-liberty and anti-American those actions are, and how there are already policy floaters on relaxing the hardline stance for "critical" industries reliant on cheap illegal labor, it begs the question of whether the immigration topic is even the main thrust here - or whether it's simply a pretext for autocratic authoritarian power for power's sake.

> I'm not especially a big fan of government power

Sorry, but yes you are. You're shunning the entire idea of limited constitutional government and inalienable constitutional/natural rights, seemingly because you like these particular results of crass authoritarianism. That's statism 101.
by bobthepanda | 2025-10-28 02:18:52+00:00
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/fehmarnbelt-delayed-...

> Sund & Bælt, the Danish transport company overseeing the project, has now confirmed that IVY has not yet completed full testing and has not received final approvals from relevant authorities, despite arriving on site last October. The preparatory delay is about 18 months, a setback that project managers say makes meeting the original 2029 opening target difficult.

> There is also an issue with restrictions around the working conditions. Contracts for the main construction works were signed in 2016, before German planning approval had been granted. That timing meant certain later-imposed requirements – notably restrictions on underwater noise from work vessels and limits on sediment spill in German waters – were not written into the original contracts, complicating attempts to speed up work now that the rules are in place.
by GianFabien | 2025-10-28 02:19:13+00:00
The general idea is appealing. But I wonder whether it could be accomplished a lot simpler. For example, why not register and administer a TLD, .indie ? Then the policy for registering domains under that TLD would have the principles that you have mentioned. Any domain failing to abide by the policies would be terminated. I think such a scheme could attract a variety of domains and would require far lot less work on your part. Of course, you could always create and administer some specific interest sites under that encompassing TLD.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-10-28 02:21:33+00:00
I've got my own gripes about leadership, but I'm finding that even when its a goal I've set for myself, watching an AI fail at it represents a refinement of what I thought I wanted: I'm not much better than they are.

That, or its a discovery of why what I wanted is impossible and it's back to the drawing board.

It's nice to not be throwing away code that I'd otherwise have been a perfectionist about (and still thrown away).
by paulcx | 2025-10-28 02:21:42+00:00
What if the Wright brothers had to pass a “bird exam”? That’s how we’re defining AGI today. Stop grading feathers; start designing thrust. Check out my new post: "If This Is How We Define AGI, I'm Out" - https://open.substack.com/pub/paulochen/p/if-this-is-how-we-...
by lanfeust6 | 2025-10-28 02:21:46+00:00
This stat is for AMI, for any mental disorder ranging from mild to severe. Anyone self-reporting a bout of anxiety or mild depression qualifies as a data point for mental illness. For suicide ideation the SMI stat is more representative.

There are 800 million weekly active users on ChatGPT. 1/800 users mentioning suicide is a surprisingly low number, if anything.
by ewoodrich | 2025-10-28 02:24:03+00:00
> aren’t yet seeming to train on how to build maintainable software.

A while ago I discovered that Claude, left to its own devices, has been doing the LLM equivalent of Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V for almost every component it's created in an ever growing .NET/React/Typescript side project for months on end.

It was legitimately baffling seeing the degree to which it had avoided reusing literally any shared code in favor of updating the exact same thing in 19 places every time a color needed to be tweaked or something. The craziest example was a pretty central dashboard view with navigation tabs in a sidebar where it had been maintaining two almost identical implementations just to display a slightly different tab structure for logged in vs logged out users.

I've now been directing it to de-spaghetti things when I spot good opportunities and added more best practices to CLAUDE.md (with mixed results) so things are gradually getting more manageable, but it really shook my confidence in its ability to architect, well, anything on its own without micromanagement.
by rpcope1 | 2025-10-28 02:24:08+00:00
I've had to generate "bill of materials" for software I've shipped, and often certain end users will beat you over the head for "vulnerabilities" even if they're a low CVSS score or do not apply to your own code. I get the resistance to wanting CVEs for everything, as regardless of the initial intentions, there's a LOT of people/enterprises that just see "oh shit there's a CVE, the whole thing is garbage, we're not going to accept this/pay you/etc." Basically CVEs are often weaponized in a really counterproductive way.
by mfrye0 | 2025-10-28 02:24:54+00:00
Hey, good question. Yeah, we're aware of many companies that can have thousands of subsidiaries.

We found that going both up the chain and down / sideways in the chain was too much for the agent to handle - they are two distinct operations. The #1 use case was customers trying to understand the ultimate parent, so we decided to focus on that first.

We have something roughly working on subsidiaries, but it's not ready for prime time yet. It would likely be a separate API.
by simondotau | 2025-10-28 02:25:28+00:00
Critically, the benefits of audio dithering come with a single side-effect (i.e. audible artefact): an increase in the noise floor. In most cases, however, this elevated noise floor remains below the threshold of audibility, or more practically, quieter than the ambient noise of any reasonable listener’s playback environment.

What's important to appreciate is that dithering digital audio should only ever be performed when preparing a final export for distribution, and even then, only for bit-perfect copies. You shouldn't dither when the next step is a lossy codec. Encoders for AAC and Opus accept high bit depth originals, because their encoded files don't have a native "bit depth". They generate and quantise (compress) MDCT coefficients. When these encoded files are decoded to 16-bit PCM during playback, the codec injects "masking noise" which serves a similar function to dither.
by rileymichael | 2025-10-28 02:25:33+00:00
reactive is on the decline in the java world post-loom (virtual threads) and should be nobody's first choice. writing plain old imperative code is vastly simpler to write / debug / reason about.

Brian Goetz even went as far as saying loom is going to kill reactive entirely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9si7gK94gLo&t=1165s
by Animats | 2025-10-28 02:26:25+00:00
OK, he makes a statement, and then just stops.

In some ways, this seems backwards. Once you have a demo that does the right thing, you have a spec, of sorts, for what's supposed to happen. Automated tooling that takes you from demo to production ready ought to be possible. That's a well-understood task. In restricted domains, such as CRUD apps, it might be automated without "AI".
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-10-28 02:26:47+00:00
> I’m not sure the best response to “the reconciler had a bug, and other reconcilers might, too” is to replace it with an entirely new and untested service discovery protocol

That is not what I am proposing. The current state is that there are two reconcilers (DNS and internal service discovery) and collapsing those into one reconciler protocol will simplify the system.

> especially one that had nothing to do with the protocol itself

Part of the problem is the increased system complexity by layering multiple service discovery systems on top of each other.

> A proposed compensating control to this bug might be as simple as “if the result would be to delete the zone or empty it of all RRs, halt and page the on-call.”

You cannot pre-emptively predict all possible bugs and race conditions. How can I create alerts for all of the failure conditions I have not thought of? A better assumption is that all systems will fail, and one of the things you can do to reduce failure rate is to simplify the system. Additionally, you can segment the system into shards/cells and roll out config and code changes serially to each cell to catch issues before they affect 100% of customers.

I am not hand waving or yelling at the clouds here. I have worked on service discovery for hyperscalars and have witnessed similar outages where the impedance mismatch between internal service discovery and DNS causes issues.
by ben_w | 2025-10-28 02:28:45+00:00
I personally take no opinion about whether or not they can actually solve anything, because I am not a psychologist and have absolutely no idea how good or bad ChatGPT is at this sort of thing, but I will say I'd rather the company at least tries to do some good given that Facebook HQ is not very far from their offices and appears to have been actively evil in this specific regard.
by danparsonson | 2025-10-28 02:28:56+00:00
Your rhetorical questions don't constitute an argument so forgive me if I misrepresent you but what I think you're saying is:

1. Conditions in the UK might not be good enough, so we should prevent people from immigrating, for their own good, and 2. Fixing problems that create refugees is more important and therefore another reason we should prevent people from immigrating.

To which I say

1. That's a reason we should clean our own house, so we create a safe environment for people looking to come to the UK, and 2. That's a non sequitur at best, and honestly callous; you should try fleeing from war and persecution, and then see how you would feel about returning home to wait for a few more years while 'things get sorted out back home'.

Again, correct me if I have misrepresented your implied argument.
by rayiner | 2025-10-28 02:29:11+00:00
Your point is well taken. Not everyone was violating the law. But meanwhile Microsoft was setting explicit numeric targets on hiring employees from particular racial groups: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wells-fargo-microsoft-diversity....

Companies were also demanding race-conscious staffing practices at the law firms they used: https://www.wsj.com/business/law-firm-clients-demand-more-bl.... Microsoft offered financial bonuses to law firms for promoting lawyers from specific racial groups: https://today.westlaw.com/Document/If3eb4570033e11eb8e48d387....
by fragmede | 2025-10-28 02:30:13+00:00
We're both closer than any of us believe. Insofar that ChromeOS is and isn't Linux, it's already locked down signed boot. But also we're further from it because general computing isn't going anywhere soon as long as people keep buying general purpose computers. Still until Qubes or similar sandboxed computing becomes the norm, blaming victims for getting malware onto their system only goes so far, and even if banks don't require it, regular people will start having a banking only computer because oh god please don't steal all my money.
by punchfunk4lyte | 2025-10-28 02:31:03+00:00
> If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM

Biological sciences are STEM of course. But if we're going to extend the definition, why not include all fields that involve technical skills? How about accountants and lawyers?

I'm concerned that you only proposed adding medical and nursing students because it's the only additional field that would support your argument. That strikes me as goalpost moving, so I hope it was just an omission.
by Cyborgowski | 2025-10-28 02:31:43+00:00
Hey Hacker News!

I just finished a prototype of a short game project called Grand Theft Toronto where you deliver Tim Hortons orders to actual Toronto locations while dodging robbers trying to jack your car.

I'm working on an "AI video game studio" - a team of AI agents that can design a fun viral game for you, create the graphics & sounds, and write the code. You give the studio a description of the game and it brings it to life. I used my first version of this AI studio to create the game.

FEEDBACK: This is my first prototype of the game. Any recommendations on how to make it more fun, feel better, look more nice, or be more funny is welcome!
by gnabgib | 2025-10-28 02:33:30+00:00
Related:

Chegg to lay off 22% of workforce as AI tools shake up edtech industry (12 points, 6 months ago, 5 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43965564

Chegg is on its last legs after ChatGPT sent its stock down (108 points, 1 year ago, 97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103576

Chegg stock sinks after CEO says ChatGPT hurt growth (52 points, 2 years ago, 54 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35929011
by kaashif | 2025-10-28 02:33:38+00:00
If an LLM can get you 90% of the way there, you need fewer engineers. But the engineer you need probably needs to be a senior engineer who went through the pain of learning all of the details and can function without AI.

If all juniors are using AI, or even worse, no juniors are ever hired, I'm not sure how we can produce those seniors at the scale we currently do. Which isn't even that large a scale.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-28 02:33:44+00:00
TDD has always been about two things for me; be able to move forward faster because I have something easy to execute that compares it against the known wanted state, and in the future preventing unwanted regressions. I'm not sure I've ever thought of unit testing as "prevent potential future bugs", mostly up front design prevents that, or I'd use property testing, but neither of those are inside the whole "write test then write code" flow.
by punchfunk4lyte | 2025-10-28 02:34:33+00:00
You've never heard of programs to encourage men to be nurses or teachers? I certainly have.

Here's what I found after a quick search. If you're interested I'm sure you could research and find more information.

https://www.arizonacollege.edu/blog/men-wanted-new-efforts-t...

> Only 12% of the nurses providing patient care at hospitals and health clinics today are men. Although the percentage of nurses has increased — men made up just 2.7% of nurses in 1970 — nursing is still considered a “pink collar” profession, a female-dominated field.

https://www.belmont.edu/stories/articles/2025/men-in-educati...

> A critical shortage of male teachers continues to affect K-12 education across America, with men making up just 23% of elementary and secondary school teachers today, down from 30% in 1987, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Belmont University's College of Education is addressing this gender gap through intentional recruitment, mentorship and innovative program design.
by dang | 2025-10-28 02:36:31+00:00
I don't have any problem with this argument* and if you had posted this comment originally I wouldn't have replied. The "absolutely horrifying" bit at the end is a bit beyond the pale, but not, er, absolutely horrifying.

(Btw, that makes your comment a case of the so-called rebound effect (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) - one of the more interesting phenomena we've noticed.)

* I mean qua moderator of course. Qua reader, I have no opinion.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-10-28 02:36:36+00:00
I've worked in a few teams where some member of the [human] team could be described as "Joe can code, but he can't build software."

The difference is what we used to call the "ilities": Reliability, inhabitability, understandability, maintainability, securability, scalability, etc.

None of these things are about the primary function of the code, i.e. "it seems to work." In coding, "it seems to work" is good enough. In software engineering, it isn't.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-10-28 02:36:57+00:00
> When Solis and Garcia had enrolled their kids at Alpha, they say they told the school that their youngest needed help with reading. Alpha staff had told them not to get a tutor and to trust the process, they say. (An information packet from a parent orientation night that year says: “We are creating self-driven, 2x learners and having a tutor spoon feed you help is the opposite of that.”)

Of course when it's a (much cheaper) "AI tutor" it's a totally different matter. The whole framing of a 2h day feels inherently bizarre to me. A "life coach" supervisor hovers around while you click through a lesson packet for 2h. Then you spend the rest of the day in "life skills" workshops learning entrepreneurship or something. The notion that learning math or reading might be more than perfunctory regulatory obligations or that you could learn academic topics in the workshops is totally absent from the model.

Of course they have the same responses as Lambda School or other such grifters. If you want a real human being to teach your child about multiplication so they stop self-harming you just don't have what it takes, you "don't believe in high standards or high support".
by MangoToupe | 2025-10-28 02:37:12+00:00
> this issue was caused by a framework that's trying to do too much, relying on "magic" interfaces to supposedly reduce developer burden. the function is very unambiguously written and the language did nothing wrong

The function is unambiguously written, but the runtime functions differently, and this is not a language problem? This is incoherent; one of these statements is incorrect.
by superkuh | 2025-10-28 02:39:03+00:00
It is not like 'unlimited crack' because that is a chemically addictive substance that bypasses any need for stimuli enjoyment and directly increases wanting. Multi-media screens do not and cannot do this. Can we agree on that? Science does. At the very least they have to initially be intrinsically rewarding. They are a very different kind of stimuli and pretending they are chemical drugs that immediately bypass perception and directly cause wanting is dangerous misinformation. I am not saying people don't have problems. But this is not at all an addiction like chemical addictions. Applying chemical addiction paradigms will lead to the same calls for use of government violence in regulation. An outcome far more damaging than the situation.
by fernly | 2025-10-28 02:39:05+00:00
Questions while watching the video.

Calendar is central, but I use a Google calendar which is important to me. Connect it?

Seems like a "dlog" is a calendar entry. So is my "journal" broken up into separate pages, not a sequential document or blog?

2:30 ff, strongly suggest that for your next video you pre-script it to avoid fumbling and mumbling.

5:10 side note, interesting that your personality(?) model was from 2018, well before LLMs.

7:50 for an app to produce such output (impact of a friend on mood) you surely must do a copious amount of extremely frank journaling. When, and in what format? As scattered calendar entries? I'm confused how I fuel the app.

10:40 relating diary entries (reported activities and attitudes) to one's stated goals -- this is what I would expect an AI to do, and tell me about them rather than the reverse.

I'm sorry, I just don't see how I could use or adapt to something like this when I have a well-established diary/blog and calendar, it would mean changing many daily habits and adding what looks like a lot of detail work.
by zb3 | 2025-10-28 02:39:24+00:00
I don't want "coding for white guys", if I could decide, I'd want for example "coding for people who work manual labor jobs living in rural America" (I live in Poland so it's not directly about me).

It seems you're also making a false assumption that since "white guys" make the majority of the industry that means all kinds of "white guys" are properly represented there. But I don't see colors or genders like that.
by lewismenelaws | 2025-10-28 02:39:57+00:00
Looking up the Republican Party "controversies" vs the Democratic Party "controversies" should let you know exactly what this projects intentions are.

That being said, my biggest issue with it is how Grok is writing everything. It's like it is trying REALLY hard to be neutral but it's conversational training slips up and starts "spicing" things up a little. For example on Elon's article:

"...at age 12 in 1983, developing a space-themed video game called Blastar, which he sold to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500. *This early entrepreneurial act foreshadowed Musk's later pursuits in technology and business*."

Sentences like that are designed to subtly bring emotion to certain topics.
by acdha | 2025-10-28 02:40:21+00:00
> Almost always when you take the top N of something, there is a higher proportion of males than the general set of participants.

Try to support this with data and you run into some real messy analysis: in a few cases where testosterone matters such as sports or hand grip strength, this is true and there’s a well-understood biological explanation for it. In most other cases, however, there isn’t a known mechanism and the data usually has shifts over time which strongly suggest that it’s either an issue with data collection or learned behavior (e.g. the famed engineer gender gap showing very different results in former communist countries where girls were socially encouraged to strive for those jobs).

Programming is a complex intellectual activity so it’s pretty clear that not only is there not a simple biological factor but there isn’t even a single test which would allow for there to be one. People have a wide range of skills used to find success in different areas and even if some of the low-level cognitive skills that have been speculated about such as ability to rotate 3-D shapes turned out to have a genetic component, that would be shown with something like a gender bias in people writing simulation or game engines rather than across the board.

Lastly, even if there was a proven biological link between gender and peak performance, we haven’t established that Pycon talk slots only go to the top 1% performers on such a narrow metric. I don’t think even the angriest internet dudes try to make that claim, and once you’re saying something isn’t Olympic Games-level elite you’re saying there are a ton of women who perform just as well as the median man giving a conference talk.