MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-08 10:35:07+00:00
I'm working in corporate and haven't seen it yet. The main thing I see is blogs and whatnot of people building new weekend projects with LLMs, that is, greenfield, non-critical software - the type of software that, if I were to write it, I wouldn't bother with CI, tests, that kind of thing with. Sloppy projects, if you will.

But happy to be corrected - is someone using these agents in their paid / professional / enterprise / team job?
by Sammi | 2025-10-08 10:35:23+00:00
Yeah I make maybe two or three attempts at getting it to write a plan that it is able to follow coherently. But after that I pull the escape hatch and *gasp* program by hand.

I've made this mistake of doubling down after a few initial failures to solve an issue, by trying to make this super duper comprehensive and highly detailed and awesome plan that it will finally be able to implement correctly. But it just gets worse and worse the more I try, because it fundamentally is not understanding what is going on, so it will inevitably find an opportunity to go massively off rails, and the further down you lead it the more impressible the derailment will be.

My experience is that going around in endless circles with the model is just a waste of time when you could have just done it yourself in the time you've wasted.
by DaSHacka | 2025-10-08 10:35:27+00:00
Right now the party still seems to be scrambling. I really hope we get a decent candidate next time around so we don't get another geriatric oldfuck who just sweeps the election with little competition.

If they're even considering Harris again though, I have no hope whatsoever.

Newsom may be a minor improvement, but they really need to do some soul searching if they think neoliberal policy is going to win an election in 2028.

It really is quite astonishing to see how disconnected they are from their base. They should really have future elections in the bag with the way demographics and polls are looking.
by tchantchov | 2025-10-08 10:35:29+00:00
I appreciate the feedback, and you raise important points about authenticity in relationships.

To clarify, this isn't about replacing genuine communication or being deceptive. It's more like having a writing assistant when you're genuinely stuck.

Think of it like: - Using Grammarly to improve your emails doesn't make them less "you" - Getting advice from friends before important conversations doesn't make you fake - Using translation apps when traveling doesn't mean you don't care about connecting with locals

The tool suggests starting points - users still choose what resonates with them and edit accordingly the answer.

This is just a tool to help people express themselves better when they're stuck, not to replace authentic connection.
by benterix | 2025-10-08 10:36:16+00:00
But this just doesn't correspond to reality. Most interesting algorithms in optimization etc. are metaheuristics as precise solutions are either proven to be impossible to get or we haven't found a solution yet. In the meantime, we get excellent results with "close-enough" solutions. Yes, the pedantic aspect of my soul may suffer, and we will always strive towards better and better solutions, but I guess we accepted already over a century ago that approximate solutions are extremely valuable.
by gambiting | 2025-10-08 10:37:11+00:00
>> People who make millions of dollars (freelancers, company shareholders, etc) pay capital gains taxes of 25%. High earning people have capital, not a wage, either by way of company shares or asset payouts. They pay a tiny bit more tax and no social obligations

Yes, obviously - it works the same way here. You just said that "anywhere in Germany" you will pay 50% of your income in taxes, so I'm asking if your average worker actually pays that, or even a high earning IT worker/lawyer/doctor, or just somone who takes home millions in pay(not capital gains) so that the averages catch up.

>>You forget that the 42% band kicks in at 68000 (up until 280k) not 10k from the median wage.

I didn't forget, but like I said 3 comments earlier - your average will work out closer to 30% not 50%(I'd guess) because you only pay it on anything above the threshold, not on your entire income. Again, Germany seems very generous here - in the UK you start paying 40% once you cross £50k/pa.
by philipallstar | 2025-10-08 10:37:20+00:00
> It'd probably help if you stopped focusing on your pencil story, it's frankly off-topic.

I've no idea what this italicisation is meant to do; nor why this is off-topic. Stating things isn't explaining them.

> Even if the businessmen sell you cheap, perfect pencils (which I do not grant), swimming in them in your off hours won't help with the other half of your time.

It helps in that I don't have to spend as much of my time working to buy pencils. It's the same with everything. There's no reason why a laptop doesn't cost $1m except that the incredible, detailed, cross-continent cooperative work is done by experts and coordinated by a market for that work driving costs down and quality up.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-10-08 10:37:36+00:00
Everything in EU is overpriced and worse than things coming from outside the EU, and that is by design. EU basically has no choice but to become more dystopian and adopt policies similar to the USSR to keep itself viable. This includes extreme trade barriers (with exceptions for China, because of course) and extreme restrictions on speech.

Europe is like some rich kid who thinks he somehow has merit of his own, instead of just being well-off because his parents were well-off. Basically Europe is the Greta Thunberg of continents.
Ask HN: AI feels like the new radium fad, how should we regulate it?
by hamburgererror | 2025-10-08 10:38:14+00:00
It feels like with LLMs we are living a new craze similar to the popularization of cocaine in the late 19th-century [1] or the radium fad in the 20th-century [2]. Both of these products were sold without control in drugstores under the promise of unrealistic results. Then, only when people realized how dangerous they are, legislation appeared and they were forbidden.

Since ChatGPT is only 3 years old, it feels like we are living the start of the hype. Currently we are slowly starting to understand the downsides of this technology: internet filled with AI slop, study on cognitive decline, increasing polarisation on social media, users reporting terrible behaviors like encouraging self-harm, etc.

Cocaine and radium have disappeared from consumer grade goods thanks to legislation. It's hard to imagine how much damage they would have caused if they were still in use nowadays but no wonder it would be huge.

I think AI is here to stay but maybe we should hurry in regulating it before it damages society too much. What do you guys think about this?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cocaine#Popularization

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_fad
by vasco | 2025-10-08 10:38:46+00:00
Isolationism doesn’t work as a policy, that is proven by history. Or if it works it needs some radically different ideas. The aspect about ignoring defense is also naive, what happens when your neighbours that do have a military decide your land and self sufficiency are something they want? The best thing to prevent that, and the first step, is to have established trade with them, which in your plan you don't want or need.

Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" (at whatever size this is applied to) after a few generations if nobody is involved in trade.
by rpdillon | 2025-10-08 10:38:48+00:00
Yep, I had two different models that had been running for about seven years each and had an excellent experience overall until Synology tried to change their drive policy.

I get all the points about EOL software and ancient hardware, but the fact of the matter is I treat it like an appliance and it works that way. I agree that having better transcoding would be nice. But my needs are not too sophisticated. I mostly just need the storage. In a world with 100+ gig LLM models, my Synology has suddenly become pretty critical.
by devjab | 2025-10-08 10:39:11+00:00
Regardless of how you view the current political climate in USA, it's simply become a major risk-management factor for almost any European organisation. We're heavily invested into Azure, but we've had to work out plans on how we could potentially exit within 30 days because we're part of the European energy sector. (We're really part of the global energy sector, but we're based in the EU.) We still view US tech companies as more reliable and secure than a lot of other non-EU places, but it's not like it was 5 years ago. I'm not sure any of us are really happy with this. Mistral is fine, but it's not as good as Claude and similar. It is what it is though.

Ironically there are no current exit strategies for our public sector mobile apps which rely solely on Google play or the Apple store. I've written a plan for how we can move our resources from Azure to Hetzner, luckily I'm not involved with how we would move any 365 products so it was not too bad. Only the plan involves me using our digital national ID app on my phone, which would not work if I wasn't running android with Google Play (or apple). I mean, in the extreme it wouldn't be impossible to use my passport in person, but still.
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-10-08 10:39:19+00:00
Trying to buy an Ikea pax: Some major but simple components I need to complete it are not available. I'd be happy to have everything delivered a month or two in the future, but no, I can't: Either I order now or I manually check back in the future.

Why is everything so shit? Isn't getting me to buy their pax with as many interior elements as possible how they make money?
by bryceneal | 2025-10-08 10:39:22+00:00
I am in the same boat. I'd prefer something that just works, but I am at the point now that setting something up with TrueNAS seems like it may be worth the effort in the long term.

Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also fairly underwhelming for the price tag.
by kakacik | 2025-10-08 10:39:54+00:00
You are arguing with a person who doesn't care what people say, facts are just other's propaganda against their emotionally held beliefs, the story is set in their head and thats it. Not a discussion really. Usual avoiding of hard facts that challenge their fantasies.

A fairly typical behavior I've seen countless times in topics about russian war in Ukraine in recent years. No point at all, a wasted time.
by doix | 2025-10-08 10:39:59+00:00
I don't get this line of reasoning. The average person doesn't grow their own food, everyone has already externalized the things they need to survive.

The difference between going to the supermarket and then cooking your food vs going to eat at a restaurant is just relying on the restaurant existing.

The restaurant existing relies on people visiting it, so by visiting it, you are helping the restaurant and they are helping you. I just cannot agree that this lifestyle is "subsidized" by society. Enabled, sure, but modern lifestyle is enabled by society and that's generally a good thing.
by phdphd | 2025-10-08 10:40:02+00:00
Despite the common misconception that a PhD involves a narrow focus, this seems broad: coursework and rotations in various research groups to interdisciplinary work in computational biology, chemistry, and physics, starting with ML theory but then moving on to practical application with protein sims.

All the collab is impressive also- Google, Pfizer, Merck, and some startups.

I’m a fan of PhDs open-sourcing and providing open datasets also. DeepChem, MoleculeNet, etc. I heavily referenced open PhD work in one of my last jobs that I wouldn’t have been able to do myself. I’d bet many solutions provided by LLMs are based on published PhD work also.

It would’ve been nice to get a PhD. It takes more focus and discipline though than I think I’ll ever have.
by NikolaNovak | 2025-10-08 10:40:16+00:00
What kind of tasks?

I am not necessarily disagreeing with you but context is important. I've had 918+ and 923+ and the cpu has idled through all my years of NAS-oriented usage.

Originally I planned to also run light containers and servers on it, and for that I can see how one could run out of juice quickly. For that reason I changed my plan and offloaded compute to something better suited. But for NAS usage itself they seem plenty capable and stable (caveat - some people need source-transcoding of video and then some unfortunately tricky research is required as a more expensive / newer unit isn't automatically better if it doesn't have hardware capability).
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-08 10:40:47+00:00
I doubt it will, because there will always be a need for understanding the code, especially when it comes to things like security, certification, etc.

I mean COBOL has not been a relevant programming language for anyone coming into the field in the past 20-40 years because it's been superseded, yet there's still a significant demand for COBOL developers, because the newer generation can't or doesn't want to work with it.

Not to completely dismiss your claim, of course; I'm sure a segment of software engineering will be agent based now or in the near future. But I don't think it'll take over as comprehensively, since the previous existential crisis - outsourcing - also hasn't decimated the software engineering market.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-08 10:41:14+00:00
This name makes no sense. "Vibe" means you're just vibing, just taking in vague impressions, just YOLOing, hoping it works out and just chilling and providing little input and effort. It's part pejorative and part ironic self-deprecation. "Vibe X" now means doing X by just giving vague instructions to the computer, not checking the output much and hoping it works out and it kinda does in part, at least enough times that it feels like it's a fine way to do stuff you just want to get over with anyway.

Vibe engineering would mean giving access to Google Computer Use API to your engineering design software and letting it design the industrial component you're working on, without even looking at what it does and just telling it to "fix it" if it seems bump into problems.
by naikrovek | 2025-10-08 10:41:20+00:00
> there's nothing in W11 that actually relies on a TPM, it's just an artificial restriction from Microsoft to kill old hardware

untrue; bitlocker, an important thing for businesses, is far more secure with a TPM. Lots of things are more secure with a TPM, but people who think that Microsoft requires a TPM to sell more copies of Windows will never, ever, believe that to be the case.

Windows is a relatively small portion of Microsoft's revenue generation these days. Windows used to be the main breadwinner for Microsoft, but that has all changed now that Office is a subscription and Azure exists. That smaller portion of the revenue pie is why Windows has stupid shit like suggestions and tons of preinstalled crap: it matters a lot less who is put off by Windows than it used to.

The TPM is a genuinely good thing. Windows DOES use it. You can write applications which use it as well, if you want to. Short of any hardware bug in the TPM (which did happen once) it is capital-S Secure, as I understand it.
by slightwinder | 2025-10-08 10:41:30+00:00
> And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing.

What about cheap AI for toys and gadgets? Maybe the next Furby or some smart Toaster could run on their chips. AI is spreading, moving into casual corners outside of hobbyists and high professionals, maybe they aim to get a foothold there?
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-08 10:41:58+00:00
But then "Hemnes bedroom series" also has beds in it...it sounds like the focus is as much on "bedroom" than "Hemnes"

https://www.ikea.com/jp/en/cat/hemnes-bedroom-series-58619/

And the other Hemnes lines include book stands, dish cabinets, TV stands.

I totally agree IKEA doesn't give a damn about series and collection consistency.
by perching_aix | 2025-10-08 10:42:04+00:00
Git is generally insufferable when it comes to these. Diffing YAMLs is even worse, and it gets downright hideous when the specific document you're working with betrays YAML's rules about orderedness (the document is order invariant, while YAML is ordered). In that case, even most semantic diffing tools become unusable. This is a thing with JSON too, arrays are ordered.

I've been recently using dyff [0] to diff YAMLs in an order invariant way, and it's been absolutely liberating. Couldn't help with version control, but it's still night and day.

[0] https://github.com/homeport/dyff
by onli | 2025-10-08 10:42:07+00:00
You can not deal with toxic waste easily, as all attempts to do so have shown. See https://web.archive.org/web/20140508211057/http://www.bfs.de... for a report.

Nuclear energy is decidedly not a flexible backup option for anything. Those plants are slow to regulate, have never been and will never be a backup. The solution is energy storage and producing so much more at the peak that at the low end is enough. Also, there is no problem importing from countries that do have more geothermal or hydro energy.

> But they would not grow comparable to burning actual stuff. Not even close. You are being disingenious

The comparison is invalid in the first place. It's not about nuclear vs fossil, I never did argue for fossil energy. So the comparison you opened up is bs anyway. It's a propaganda talk point of nuclear proponents that tries to mislead from the actual comparison to make, which is renewables vs the other options.

The decision of the EU court was unfortunate, stupid, and that appeal to authority does not function.
by shevy-java | 2025-10-08 10:42:25+00:00
My problem with the EU overall, aside from being inefficient, is that they don't really push towards intrinsic perfection. They kind of look what others do, try to simulate and copy it, usually fail - and then the same pattern is repeated.

Just take the issue of a european chip industry. Or literally anything China is doing now. The EU just isn't really a driver - it is a maintainer at best. And that also means it will successfully lose out to e. g. China or the USA.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-08 10:42:34+00:00
And also, that with React you are not only buying into React, but also a JavaScript dependency manager/package manager. Be it NPM, or any other. Installing JS package itself already comes with its own problems. And then probably people buy into more stuff to install through that package manager. Some component library and a "router" here, some material style and a little library to wrap the root node with some styling provider or what it is called there, ... before you know it, a typical FE dev will have turned your stack into 80% React and related dependencies and the maintenance on that will continue to grow, as new features "can be solved sooo easily, by just adding another dependency" from the NPM/React world.
by sgt101 | 2025-10-08 10:42:46+00:00
Maybe it's in my head, but I have completed coding projects that I believe would have taken a team of five offshore maybe 12 weeks to do in the past in about ten working days while juggling calls and living normal corporate life.

The win is that I don't have to share the vision of what needs to be done and how it should all work, and then constantly monitor and reframe that in the face of the teams missteps and real findings. I work with the agents directly, and provided I set the architecture and build up systematically I can get really good results. The cycle time between me identifying an issue and the issue getting fixed by me and the agents is now minutes rather than hours or days with an off shore team. Even better the agents can provide bug fixing expertise much quicker than stack overflow - so I can figure out what's wrong much faster so as to specific what needs fixing.

It is no good walking in and requesting functionality, you need to know how the thing you want should work, and you need to know what good looks like, and what bad looks like, and how good is separated from bad. Then the normal process of discovery ("eep that doesn't actually work like I thought") can take place and you can refactor and repair as required.

Sometimes I start something that just doesn't work, you have to recognise that you and the agents are lost, and everything needs to be torn down. You then need to think properly about whats gone wrong and why, and then come back with a better idea. Again - just like with dev teams, but much more clearly and much faster.
by erikhansenwong | 2025-10-08 10:43:07+00:00
John Clarke is the father of Liz, one of my close friends from college. Liz and I were physics undergrads at Berkeley and her father was a professor there. Thanks to HN I had the pleasure of being the first one to tell her that her dad had just won the Nobel Prize (I saw the news before she woke up, due to time zone differences). I wish I could post photos here, she sent me a beautiful picture of him filled with joy as he received a free parking pass from Berkeley with the expiration date "NEVER" later that afternoon :-D
by frumiousirc | 2025-10-08 10:43:18+00:00
> AAC / Agent Assisted Coding is a good term.

Yes, please don't push "vibe engineering" to mean how you defined it in your blog post. To me, it means exactly the opposite.

I see "vibe" as pejorative. Adding "engineering" does not elevate it from "vibe coding", as I think is your intention in the post, it just shifts "vibe" term to a different domain.

To me, "vibe engineering" means using LLM to develop "design" with no care as to its validity just like "vibe coding" means for "code".

"Agentic xyz" or "Agent assisted xyz" is more fitting.

FWIW, I do not see "vibe" as always pejorative, rather it depends on goals. When quick results and not long term quality matter, "vibing" is a legit tactic.

Anyways, just my interpretations. Please, keep up the good work. Remember, the two hardest things in software are naming, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. It's good you continue to tackle the zeroth one.
by jart | 2025-10-08 10:44:21+00:00
Yes that's a big part of it. Goldman said last month (when gold was at $3500):

> “We estimate that if 1% of the privately owned US Treasury market were to flow into gold, the gold price would rise to nearly $5,000 an ounce, assuming everything else constant,” the analysts said. “As a result, gold remains our highest-conviction long recommendation in the commodities space.” https://archive.is/2WjSc#selection-1491.0-1494.0

In terms of geopolitics, a lot of the demand has been driven by Asia, such as the Reserve Bank of India. The end of the petrodollar pact with Arabia hurt. https://archive.is/t2Ttm When USD went off the gold standard, that pact gave it oil as a leg to stand on. Now that's gone as of 2024. In 2020 the fractional reserve requirements for banks went to zero too. The only thing that gives the USD value is a faith in the American people, which is aged population that flouts its fiduciary duty to debt holders by debasing everyone's currency to fund their own retirements.
by shevy-java | 2025-10-08 10:44:37+00:00
It is a bit hypocritical of the EU to push tariffs against the EU citizens, forcing higher prices. Tariffs can sometimes make sense, such as for an emerging industry, but counter-tariffs are often the outcome and we here are punished by higher prices. If the EU wants to be relevant, they also need to produce at a lower price; China is conquering markets because it simply is more competitive now.