MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by halfcat | 2025-10-28 14:24:19+00:00
I could not disagree more strongly with everything you’ve said in this comment.

> The way to code going forward with AI is Test Driven Development.

No. TDD already collapses under its own weight as a project grows.

> The code itself no longer matters.

No. Definitely no. That’s absurd. You can’t box in a correct solution with guard rails. Especially since, even if you could get something close to that, you would also lose the ability to understand the tests.

> You give the AI a set of requirements, ie. tests that need to pass, and then let it code whatever way it needs to in order to fulfill those requirements. That's it. The new reality us programmers need to face is that code itself has an exact value of $0.

No. The opposite. When code is cheap, understanding and control become expensive. Code a human can understand will be the most valuable going forward.

> That's because AI can generate it, and with every new iteration of the AI, the internal code will get better.

No. All code is technical debt. AI produces code faster. Therefore AI produces bugs faster.

”Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it” -Brian Kernighan

This is literally where we’re at. AI writes code just beyond its ability to fix.

> What matters now are the prompts.

No. This is such a dead end. It’s a roll of the dice, and so we have examples of people who seem to get it to build something faster. That’s like saying there are people who win the lottery. It’s true, and it also says nothing of your ability to repeat their process. Confirmation bias of the wins. But in building something reliable, we care more about the floor (minimum quality) than the ceiling (the peak it can reach sometimes).
by appreciatorBus | 2025-10-28 14:24:26+00:00
“Society will accept deaths caused by vehicles, regardless of whether the driver is human, robot, dog, alien species, so that people with vehicles can go vroom vroom” - every car company since cars have existed.

The issues of vehicles and the risk they post to people outside the vehicles are straightforward externality problems which we could solve or optimize if we really wanted to.

Every vehicle driven above a certain speed for a unit of time, whether with an human or robot driver, imposes a risk on everyone around it. (whether they are inside or outside of a vehicle) Make a ballpark, even lowball, estimate for that risk, and simply require the people inside the vehicle to compensate others for the risk being imposed on them. Of course this is simplistic and not perfect, but it would be a lot more honest than what we are doing today, and would align incentives to a safe future a lot better than what we do today.
by ojkelly | 2025-10-28 14:24:40+00:00
Until such a point where have agents not trained on human language or programming languages, I think something that’s also really good for people as well. - one obvious way to do things

- memory safe, thread safe, concurrency safe, cancellation safe

- locality of reasoning, no spooky action at a distance

- tests as a first class feature of the language

- a quality standard library / reliable dependency ecosystem

- can compile, type check, lint, run tests, in a single command

- can reliably mock everything, either with effects or something else, such that again we maintain locality of reasoning

The old saying that a complex system that works is made up of simple systems that work applies. A language where you can get the small systems working, tested, and then built upon. Because all of these things with towards minimising the context needed to iterate, and reducing the feedback loop of iteration.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-28 14:24:55+00:00
https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...

The PE ratio is about 28x for large cap orgs.

The typical PE ratio is 15x; typically the 'safe' range 10-20x.

The markets are over valued compared to history. But then again that's not taking into account that you can be a stock trader on your cellphone and tons more people have entered the market. To be a 'bubble' though you need to be 100x to 200x. So no, there's no bubble at all and the 'overvaluation' is more likely due to the modern easy access to the stock market. 30x is probably the new normal; but there's a secondary check.

Go down the list of the S&P 500 and check the insiders: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AKAM/holders/

Typically 20-30% of a corporation needs to be held to maintain control; but the majority of the SP500 are not held by insiders anymore. like 1-2%. Akamai has essentially no defense against takeover. It's not even a hostile takeover in this case. It's just ready to be picked up by someone and remanaged.

But that's not what we're worried about, we're worried that the people in control, the owners, managers, insiders, whatever. They dont want to hold what they manage? Typically a bad sign for individual stocks but when essentially the entire SP500 is like this. It indicates powerful people who know the markets well are out. That's indicating some serious bad mojo.
by mjburgess | 2025-10-28 14:25:04+00:00
No one in this partisan political thread has explained why the foundation for a programming language has a mission involving 'diversity' of people in any sense.

The laywers for the PSF decided that this mission is inconsistent with the government mandate. The PSF did NOT just decline the money.

This entire thread is one big group-think hate dump and has nothing to do with the PSF or why they were legally unable to accept goverment funding conditioned on non-discriminatory practices.
Ask HN: Would you use (and pay for) a waitlist form creation service?
by suryasish | 2025-10-28 14:25:24+00:00
While building a waitlist form for one of my products, I realized that others might be spending the same few hours I did creating something similar. So I’m considering building a service that helps users quickly create custom, embeddable waitlist forms — for products, events, services, or anything else.

I can share more details about how it would work, and I’m ready to start building and deploy as early as the first week of November. But before I dive in, I’d like to know: is this something you would actually use (and possibly pay for)?
by martinald | 2025-10-28 14:25:33+00:00
I've heard this a lot, and personally I've had a lot of good success with a prompt that explains some of my personality traits and asking it to work through a stressful situation for me. The good thing with this rather than a therapist/coach is that it understands a lot of the subject matter and can help with the detail.

I wonder if really what we need is some sort of supervised mode, where users chat with it but a trained professional reviews the transcripts and does a weekly/monthly/urgent checkin with them. This is how (some? most?) therapists work themselves, they take their notes to another therapist and go through them.
by ramses0 | 2025-10-28 14:25:35+00:00
Jesus, we've gone from Eliza and Bayes Spam Filters to being able to hold an "intelligent" conversation with a bot that can write code like: "make me a sandwich" => "ok, making sandwich.py, adding test, keeping track of a todo list, validating tests, etc..."

We might not _quite_ be at the era of "I'm sorry I can't let you do that Dave...", but on the spectrum, and from the perspective of a lay-person, we're waaaaay closer than we've ever been?

I'd counsel you to self-check what goalposts you might have moved in the past few years...
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-28 14:26:10+00:00
At least you get some message about why. I'm on Vodafone and the only thing I saw was "Por causas ajenas a Vodafone, esta web no está disponible".

Fucking censorship sucks, and seemingly people still see Spain as a modern democracy when shit like this happens in public and everyone knows about it, yet here we are. Because of football we can't browse the web when there are matches...
by crazygringo | 2025-10-28 14:26:27+00:00
Most people didn't think we were anywhere close to LLM's five years ago. The capabilities we have now were expected to be a decades away, depending on who you talked to. [EDIT: sorry, I should have said 10 years ago... recent years get too compressed in my head and stuff from 2020 still feels like it was 2 years ago!]

So I think a lot of people now don't see what the path is to AGI, but also realize they hadn't seen the path to LLM's, and innovation is coming fast and furious. So the most honest answer seems to be, it's entirely plausible that AGI just depends on another couple conceptual breakthroughs that are imminent... and it's also entirely plausible that AGI will require 20 different conceptual breakthroughs all working together that we'll only figure out decades from now.

True honesty requires acknowledging that we truly have no idea. Progress in AI is happening faster than ever before, but nobody has the slightest idea how much progress is needed to get to AGI.
by mcv | 2025-10-28 14:27:33+00:00
I too prefer Vue over React. I still haven't checked out Svelte, and I'm completely over Angular by now.

React looked great when I first used it for something really small. It looked horrific when I used it on a massive project with ridiculous amounts of data and tons of middleware. Although the real horror was the useEffect spaghetti. Vue keeps looking reasonable in every project I encounter it in. Even when people use it poorly, it's never Vue itself that's the problem. Well, maybe when people start working around the reactivity. That can get really bad.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-28 14:27:41+00:00
I wouldn’t be surprised to see this at all.

And in a really dystopian world, the AI could review everyone’s PRs and documentation and rank engineers based on their contributions. It could even make compensation decisions based on that. Much of the performance management can be automated (with human in the loop).

Then you could have fewer managers managing more people (and get rid of a bunch of layers of management overhead). They could focus on the higher value parts of management like coordinating between teams, making tough execution decisions, resolving technical blockers / ambiguity, etc
by perihelions | 2025-10-28 14:28:56+00:00
892 mbar / 185 mph (295 kph) winds—tied as 3rd strongest Atlantic cyclone by minimum pressure, and (I assume) tied as 1st strongest at landfall (tied with the 1935 Labor Day hurricane),

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCUAT3+shtml/281401...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlantic_hurricane_rec...
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-28 14:29:03+00:00
My favorite wildlife joke:

You know that geese fly in V's to reduce air resistance, right? Ever notice that one side of the V is often longer than the other? You know why?

(At this point, you will get a pause, followed by a hesitant but very carefully worded explanation about northern hemisphere rotation, rising air, sun glints, or what-have-you.)

Nope. It's because geese can't count.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-10-28 14:29:10+00:00
Agreed. Sometimes such rage/engagement-bait titles get changed on HN, but it's risky to do as a submitter cause it's unclear when you are "allowed" to change the title. And I suppose if you want upvotes, why would you change the ragebait title?

Usually engagement-bait titles are cover for uninteresting articles, but yeah in this case it's way more interesting than the title to me anyway.

i guess it makes it even more obvious when people are discussing the title instead of the actual piece, which is routine on HN but not always obvious! Although to be fair, the title describes one part of the piece, sure. the part with the least original insight.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-28 14:29:10+00:00
I think they hope they will because if they don't at some point people are going to expect a return and get tired of throwing good money after bad.

The longer they go without that and the more the sentiment starts to shift away from what they convinced people LLM's where vs what they actually are the riskier it becomes, are they are useful tool yes, are they not what they've been hyping for the last four years, also yes.

They either crack it or they become an also ran.

At which point Microsoft investors are going to be staring really hard at the CEO.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-28 14:29:36+00:00
I don't mind the reason being "the right reason" or not, getting rid of Microsoft will be a net-positive regardless.

And it's a process that will take years, and be step-by-step, you can't just "torn out and replace everything" in one go, not to mention how bad of an idea that would be regardless.

I'm happy we continue to do this step by step, making sure it's working alright and is the right thing along the way.
by jonfw | 2025-10-28 14:29:43+00:00
MCP provides a convenient packaging for tools, and generally workflows, for LLM clients.

You can debate all day whether bringing your own tools is a good thing vs giving the LLM a generic shell tool and an API doc and letting it run curls. I like tools because it brings reproducibility.

MCP is really just a json RPC spec. json RPC can take place over a variety of transports and under a variety of auth mechanisms- MCP doesn't need to spec a transport or auth mechanism.

I totally agree with everybody that most MCP clients are half assed and remote MCP is not well supported, but that's a business problem

Every LLM tool today either runs locally (cursor, zed, IDEs, etc.) so can run MCP servers as local processses w/ no auth, or is run by an LLM provider where interoperability is not a business priority. So the remote MCP story has not been fleshed out
by pjmlp | 2025-10-28 14:30:06+00:00
Sometimes it isn't that folks are confortable skipping steps, rather they aren't even available.

As so happens in the LLM age, I have been recently having to deal with such tools, and oh boy Smalltalk based image development in the 1990's with Smalltalk/V is so much better in regards to engineering practices than those "modern" tools.

I cannot test code, if I want to backup to some version control system, I have to manually export/import a gigantic JSON file that represents the low-code workflow logic, no proper debugging tools, and so many other things I could rant about.

But I guess this is the future, AI agents based workflow engines calling into SaaS products, deployed in a MACH architecture. Great buzzword bingo, right?
by LPisGood | 2025-10-28 14:30:07+00:00
> There really isn't anything special about poker in comparison to chess

They are dramatically different. There is no hidden information in chess, there are only two players in chess, the number of moves you can make is far smaller in chess, and there is no randomness in chess. This is why you never hear about EV in chess theory, but it’s central to poker.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-28 14:30:24+00:00
Would including Canadian RN/healthcare jobs be in scope? Tod Maffin has https://engageq.notion.site/The-Nanaimo-Healthcare-Infusion-... for example, to create a pipeline for US healthcare workers looking to immigrate to Vancouver Island, Canada. You have a "City or state" location input box, consider a Country as well.

Great work regardless!
by freedomben | 2025-10-28 14:30:28+00:00
> Most people who have worked with a professional therapist understand intuitively why the only helpful feedback from an LLM to someone who needs professional help is: get professional help.

This is only helpful when there is a professional therapist available soon enough and at a price that the person can pay. In my experience, this is frequently not the case. I know of one recent suicide attempt where the person actually reached out to AI to ask for help, and was refused help and told to see a professional. That sent the person into even more despair, feeling like not even AI gave a shit about them. That was actually the final straw that triggered the attempt.

I very much want what you say to be true, but it requires access to professional humans, which is not universally available. Taking an absolutist approach to this could very well do more harm than good. I doubt anything we do will reduce number of lives lost to zero, so I think it's important that we figure out where the optimal balance is.
by DirkH | 2025-10-28 14:30:43+00:00
This was a once unscripted statement that she never repeated again her entire campaign. She expressed regret immediately after making it (not after losing) explaining how it was grossly generalistic but stood by that it does describe a large chunk of Trump's base.

Can you name one time Trump immediately regretted what he said about the Left and explained that it was an overgeneralization? Also again, in Clinton's case it was a single unscripted statement. By contrast Trump has a pattern of calling opponents vermin, the anti-christ, evil, warning of a bloodbath to come... Yea the left's attacks on the right just don't seem nearly as bad especially if it is just being called "deplorable" once. I could write a book that is just hateful Trump quotes. Ganna print it and give it to my son one day as inspiration for how to be an honourable leader. /s

I say all this as a Canadian that would have voted for Trump in 2016 if I could have.
by cal85 | 2025-10-28 14:31:18+00:00
True. But it feels like a fairer comparison would be with a huge healthcare company that failed to vet one of its therapists properly, so a crazy pro-suicide therapist slipped through the net. Would we petition to shut down the whole company for this rare event? I suppose it would depend on whether the company could demonstrate what it is doing to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-10-28 14:31:23+00:00
I think "we" have accidentally cracked language from a computational perspective. The embedding of knowledge is incidental and we're far away from anything that "Generally Intelligent", let alone Advanced in that. LLMs do tend to make documented knowledge very searchable which is nice. But if you use these models everyday to do work of some kind that becomes pretty obvious that they aren't nearly as intelligent as they seem.
by bmelton | 2025-10-28 14:31:36+00:00
That very much depends on the group.

Years ago, my wife founded two chapters of a national organization who did "girls who code" sorts of things. There was (to her) a surprising amount of infighting about how to handle registrations from males. Leadership felt that men should not be allowed to attend, but there were at least a couple of chapter leads (including my wife) who felt that men should be allowed to attend, but where spots were scarce, they should be prioritized to women.

Disregarding the politics of it, there was definitely not a shortage of men who were discouraged from signing up because they were somehow icked out over the name. I'm sure some men were, and I'm sure others probably deferred on the grounds that they didn't want to take spots away from those for whom the mission was intended -- but because the organization was unwilling to publish official guidance for reasons I won't bother to opine on, my wife was routinely in the position of having to explain her attendance policies to men who had signed up
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-28 14:31:41+00:00
As a doctor I can't support full legalization of drugs. Nobody who's seen up close what opioid addiction does to a person ever could. It's not even a question of allowing people to ruin their own lives. The drugs themselves absolutely cause crime all on their own. Many violent robberies are perpetrated by people whose reward systems are so warped by drugs they'd sell their own mother for their next dose. I had one such person as one of my neighbors for decades.
by mothballed | 2025-10-28 14:31:48+00:00
I'm not sure if it's required, but it's a common retort used to argue why someone thinks HIPAA is a private contract law rather than regulation of factual speech, so I prefer to just nip that scenario in the bud from the get go.

In any case I wasn't arguing for or against regulating factual speech. Only pointing out that it is done in the USA. This seems to get peoples feathers real ruffled, for whatever reason.
by plastic3169 | 2025-10-28 14:31:50+00:00
There is a new book by Owen Flanagan ”What is it like to be an addict”[0] where he goes through the phenomenon of addiction from many different angles and argues that rat park type findings are true but only give partial view to the problem. His view is that it is very multifaceted subject and can’t be understood or tackled with any one easy fix.

[0]https://academic.oup.com/book/59281
by Twisol | 2025-10-28 14:32:01+00:00
Yep! I remember the phrase "functional core, imperative shell" being popularized by Gary Bernhardt in ~2012 [0][1]; in his talk Boundaries [0] (around 31:00), he even mentions "hexagonal architecture" by name.

[0]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries

[1]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/funct...
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-28 14:32:05+00:00
> Correct title would be Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos.

From the article:

> The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and organizational requirements.

So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced whatever they used Microsoft for, with NextCloud, the process which was executed by Atos.

That's how I understood it from the article at least. And I'm guessing more people are likely to have heard about NextCloud before while probably not heard about Atos before, unless you're Austrian. So for a web article, it makes sense to highlight what people might understand and recognize.
by torqu3e | 2025-10-28 14:32:50+00:00
Here's the 20 line bash version I whipped up a while back cuz yes lazy about writing good commit messages.

Supports claude and gemini with model selection and goes into the githook such that when you type `git commit` it invokes and generates the message.

https://gist.github.com/torqu3e/c08f4aa4e80fba66dce6c35d63dd...
by me-vs-cat | 2025-10-28 14:33:34+00:00
Regarding out-of-home access, I'll drop a note about connecting your phone to your home network with a VPN. Now you're always connecting the same way for this and everything else.

It's not perfect because wifi networks might block the VPN, but for the one wifi network I use the most, Wireguard on port 53 works splendidly, for now.
by roryirvine | 2025-10-28 14:33:41+00:00
I've spotted surprising amounts of confidently-stated nonsense even in fairly neutral articles where Elon / xAI is unlikely to have a particular political slant.

Many of the most glaring errors are linked to references which either directly contradict Grokipedia's assertion or don't mention the supposed fact one way or the other.

I guess this is down to LLM hallucinations? I've not used Grok before, but the problems I spotted in 15 mins of casual browsing made it feel like the output of SoA models 2-3 years ago.

Has this been done on the cheap? I suspect that xAI should probably have prioritised quality over quantity for the initial launch.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-28 14:33:50+00:00
Don't get me wrong, they do work with lisps already, had plenty of success having various LLMs creating and managing Clojure code, so we aren't that far off.

But I'm having way more "unbalanced parenthesis" errors than with Algol-like languages. Not sure if it's because of lack of training data, post-training or just needing special tokens in the tokenizer, but there is a notable difference today.
by hdkrgr | 2025-10-28 14:33:51+00:00
As a corporate customer, the main point for me in this is Microsoft now retaining (non-exclusive) rights to models and products after OpenAI decides to declare AGI.

The question "Can we build our stuff on top of Azure OpenAI? What if SamA pulls a marketing stunt tomorrow, declares AGI and cuts Microsoft off?" just became a lot easier. (At least until 2032.)