MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattmaroon | 2025-10-27 06:01:58+00:00
It does not match the stock market in any locale in the US. Artificial externalities may make it do so (government incentives, exorbitant energy rates) in Canada, in which case ok great. But I think you’re probably doing your math wrong.

I’m guessing you’re not counting the fact that if you buy a stock for $100 you still have the $100 (you can sell the stock) but that’s not true of solar because it’s an asset whose value quickly goes to near $0 as the cost of uninstalling the panels is more than they are worth or nearly so. You’d have to be getting near 20% ROI annually for it to match the stock market in that time frame. A quick google shows that even the Canadians selling solar don’t claim that. You don’t even get that in California, where the panels produce a multiple of what yours will and all of the other factors (incentives, latitude, high energy prices and net metering, etc.) lean toward solar so I’m guessing you’re erring.

Easy to verify though: what was your install cost and how much is it saving you on energy bills?
by spenczar5 | 2025-10-27 06:02:34+00:00
Frankly, yes.

The models are one part of the story. But the software around it matters at least as much: what tools does the model have access to, like bash or just file reading or (as in your example!) just a cache of files visited by the IDE (!). How does the software decide what extra context to provide to the model, how does it record past learnings from conversations and failed test runs (if at all!) and how are those fed in. And of course, what are the system prompts.

None of this is about the model; its all "plain old" software, and is the stuff around the model. Increasingly, that's where the quality differences lie.

I am sorry to say but Copilot is just sort of shoddy in this regard. I like Claude, some people like Codex, there are a bunch of options.

But my main point is - its probably not about the model, but about the products built on the models, which can vary wildly in quality.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-27 06:03:12+00:00
Moscow Times (7 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45710691

APNews (4 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711271

Reuters (2 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45714121

NY Times (15 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45715749
by vydra | 2025-10-27 06:03:24+00:00
Its definitely much harder to get into the industry than it was a few years ago and if its coding you were after, you may indeed be disappointed. But give Software Engineering a try! We need to rewrite many of our critical systems and we are afraid to do so primarily to the lack of truly skilled software engineers. IMHO, the AI agents are creating time for us to study what really matters. I would start with Modern Software Engineering by Dave Farley. DM me directly if you want to chat on this topic. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dvydra/
by hinkley | 2025-10-27 06:04:02+00:00
> If tons of PRs are being blocked, it’s usually a sign that there’s too much gatekeeping going on.

I would expand this and say if too many of the blocking statuses are coming from one reviewer, too much gatekeeping may be going on, even if the overall rate is low. Either they're going too far, or nobody else is going far enough. If you're shouting into the void, discretion is the better part of valor. You can't save people who don't want to be saved. Find people who will appreciate your efforts instead of resenting them.
by js8 | 2025-10-27 06:04:53+00:00
Actually, naive AGI such as LLM is way more intelligent than a human. Unfortunately, it does not make it smarter.. let me explain.

When I see your comment, I think, your assumptions are contradictory. Why? Because I am familiar with Russell's paradox and Riemann hypothesis, and you're simply WRONG (inconsistent with your implicit assumptions).

However, when LLM sees your comment (during training), it's actually much more open-minded about it. It thinks, ha, so there is a flavor of set theory in which RH is true. Better remember it! So when this topic comes up again, LLM won't think - you're WRONG, as human would, it will instead think - well maybe he's working with RH in naive set theory, so it's OK to be inconsistent.

So LLMs are more open-minded, because they're made to learn more things and they remember most of it. But somewhere along the training road, their brain falls out, and they become dumber.

But to be smart, you need to learn to say NO to BS like what you wrote. Being close-minded and having an opinion can be good.

So I think there's a tradeoff between ability to learn new things (open-mindedness) and enforcing consistency (close-mindedness). And perhaps AGI we're looking for is a compromise between the two, but current LLMs (naive AGI) lies on the other side of the spectrum.

If I am right, maybe there is no superintelligence. Extremely open-minded is just another name for gullible, and extremely close-minded is just another name for unadaptable. (Actually LLMs exhibit both extremes, during the training and during the use, with little in between.)
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-27 06:05:28+00:00
I still enjoy coding. AI mostly doesn’t produce adequate quality or correctness for the type of code I enjoy writing. There are several domains where AI is worse than useless because training data doesn’t exist. Obviously my experience doesn’t generalize but writing software is a vast, unbounded domain.

If you find coding boring, explore the frontiers. You will find a lot of coding wilderness where no AI has trod.
by popalchemist | 2025-10-27 06:06:08+00:00
Are you not an American? (Giving you the benefit of the doubt here)

In America, immigration enforcement is not a criminal issue but a civil issue. So the proper (as in, according to the laws and norms of the last many decades) and appropriate channels through which the enforcement of immigration is meant to be resolved is the courts. The current usage of ICE as a gestapo is literally illegal (it deprives "suspects" of due process and civil/human rights), in violation of Geneva conventions, and so on.

Furthermore even if we accept the blatantly immoral and illegal idea that federal agents should be able to break and enter into homes and kidnap, traumatize, and traffic people without the slightest pretense of legal justfiability (warrants etc), the fact is that they are not even attempting to choose people by any discernable metric other than their skin color. So it is objectively not about the enforcement of the law, it is about stochastic terrorism and ethnic cleansing, as that is the only thing their actions consistently demonstrate.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-10-27 06:06:16+00:00
I would have expected V8 sort() to be optimized for runs of presorted input, like other implementations nowadays. So O(n²) seems more likely than O(n² log n). Not that it matters much.

But then again, probably AI slop with "performance gain" numbers taken out of thin air. Who knows if the number 50 and 1-2ms are based on fantasy novels or not.

Like when I used Claude to build a door video intercom sytem, and first asked it to create a plan. It inserted how many weeks each milestone would take, and it was an order of magnitude off. But I guess milestone documents have time estimates, so that's how it's supposed to look, information accuracy be damned.
by genuineresponse | 2025-10-27 06:07:21+00:00
Covid is a serious illness. It can cause a wide range of effects from death, to myocarditis, to immune system resets, to long covid, to permanent scarring on the lungs, mood disorders, embolisms, and permanently reduced mental capacity.

Covid is not a tail risk.

Additionally, by not getting a vaccine, you potentially put people at risk who cannot get a vaccine -- immunocompromised folks, etc. Vaccinating your child also protects everyone in their communities.

Choosing not to vaccinate because you want to limit the number for no expressed reason is vaccine hesitancy. You have expressed a position of vaccine hesitancy here.
by kqr | 2025-10-27 06:10:07+00:00
I'm always in favour of simplifying things, and in our case complexity breeds further complexity. We are making software recursively, building software on software on software on software, and this has more inherent complexity than just hardware. Why do we do this? It allows anyone to sit in their bedroom and build something in no time at all, compared to the large groups of people with specialised, expensive hardware it would require in the 1960s.

With more complexity comes more interesting failure scenarios. Simple redundancy handles problems where components outright fail, but software never really ... fails, in that sense. It always performs exactly to design – but sometimes the design is inadequate. Replication and majority voting does not handle design flaws and errors of e.g. interaction, which are increasingly common the more softwareified a product is.

Thus we need more complicated ways to build fault tolerance into systems where we have to assume that the design is wrong somewhere, and we cannot just replicate ourselves out of the problem.
by gertlex | 2025-10-27 06:10:17+00:00
Feels like you're on a different tack here: improving your "own life" is different from solving "collective problems".

Further, setting up solar + batteries solves a non-modest individual problem, but is not by itself (i.e. reducing carbon footprint; an example mentioned in the parent's link) the solution to climate change. (yes it helps; but incentives leading to people installing solar have a much bigger impact; and the biggest incentive was maybe China building a solar panel industry, but I'm not trying to go down that tangent)
by dualogy | 2025-10-27 06:10:42+00:00
> My impression is that it was going to take a few years for things to shake out. Is that wrong?

I had that very impression in early 2020 after some months of Zigging (and being burned by constant breaking changes), and left, deciding "I'll check it out again in a few years."

I had some intuition it might be one of these forever-refactoring eternal-tinker-and-rewrite fests and here I am 5 years later, still lurking for that 1.0 from the sidelines, while staying in Go or C depending on the nature of the thing at hand.

That's not to say it'll never get there, it's a vibrant project prioritizing making the best design decisions rather than mere Shipping Asap. For a C-replacement that's the right spirit, in principle. But whether there's inbuilt immunity to engineers falling prey to their forever-refine-and-resculpt I can't tell. I find it a great project to wait for leisurely (=
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-27 06:11:47+00:00
> and have no verbal language

How do you define verbal language? Many animals emit different sounds that others in their community know how to react to. Some even get quite complex in structure (eg dolphins and whales) but I wouldn’t also rule out some species of birds, and some primates to start with. And they can collaborate; elephants, dolphins, and wolves for example collaborate and would die without it.

Also it’s completely myopic in terms of ignoring humans who have non verbal language (eg sign language) perfectly capable of cooperation.

TLDR: just because you can’t understand an animal doesn’t mean it lacks the capability you failed to actually define properly.
by hinkley | 2025-10-27 06:14:28+00:00
A navigable code base is one where people can either 1) guess where a particular bit of functionality should be implemented, 2) find a paper trail that leads them to the spot where it is.

If you can't find it, you can't fix bugs. If you don't find it, then you end up splitting related functionality across several places in the code. Which will introduce bugs, and make them a pain in the ass to diagnose.
by koliber | 2025-10-27 06:15:29+00:00
Software is still eating the world. It was always about efficiency. It was about getting rid of manual data entry by building CSV based export-import flows. It was about getting rid of hundreds of chatbot operators answering mundane questions with an AI bot that could do a decent job with the easy-but-voluminous conversations. Now it’s about getting rid of the tedious coding jobs and replacing them with code gen tools.

In each of these cases, lots of relatively low-value jobs were no longer needed and a few very-high-value jobs sprang into existence.

The author of the article loves coding. But software is about solving problems efficiently, not punching the keyboard. The other parts of the job might not be as fun for everyone, but they are even more valuable than typing code. Great programmers could always do both. Now they can focus on the higher value work more by leveraging tools that can do the lower-value work.

Work is not supposed to be fun. That’s why they pay you to do it. If it was fun, you would have to pay your employer. (Tongue in cheek advice).
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-10-27 06:17:33+00:00
Only stack and instruction pointer are explicitly restored. The rest is handled by the compiler, instead of depending on the C calling convention, it can avoid having things in registers during yield.

See this for more details on how stackful coroutines can be made much faster:

https://photonlibos.github.io/blog/stackful-coroutine-made-f...
by Someone | 2025-10-27 06:17:40+00:00
> Empty structs are supported in clang; I think it's a GCC extension to C.

Indeed. See https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.2.0/gcc/Empty-Structur....

That page also says “In C++, empty structures are part of the language”, and “G++ treats empty structures as if they had a single member of type char”. I think that means the size of empty structs differs between GCC C and GCC C++.
by noduerme | 2025-10-27 06:17:42+00:00
In my experience with both Copilot and Claude, Claude makes subtler mistakes that are harder to spot, which also gobbles up time. Yes, giving it CLI access pretty cool and helps with scaffolding things. But unless you know exactly what you want to write, and exactly how it should work, to the degree that you will notice the footguns it can add deep in your structures, I wouldn't recommend anyone use it to build something professional.
by throwaway290 | 2025-10-27 06:18:10+00:00
Tons of people never even touch git cli, they use some gui frontend/IDE.

Tons of people who DO use git cli don't know git init. Their whole life was create a project on github and clone it. Anyway initting new project isn't the most "basic" thing with git, it is used less than .01% of total git commands

if you combine the above easily MOST people have no idea about git init
by hinkley | 2025-10-27 06:18:47+00:00
> For many engineers - including me - it feels good to leave a blocking review, for the same reasons that it feels good to gatekeep in general.

Clearly this is not true for everyone, but I don't think I've ever felt good about gatekeeping, and a number of people I respect generally don't either. Blocking is a weapon of last resort. That someone has had to use it means either that the system isn't working, or they're abusing the tool.

Someone shouldn't arrive at the final phase of their ticket and be told to start it over. That's a retrospective item, and if it's happened multiple times then this is an agenda item at the retro meeting.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-27 06:19:03+00:00
> not signing off after commenting is equivalent to passively blocking the PR and can be a bit toxic depending on the circumstance

Blocking a PR can also be toxic "depending on the circumstance".

I see zero toxicity in leaving comments without blocking. It's never prevented the people I've worked with from getting work done.

I've worked at three large tech companies and none of them had this "block PRs" mentality but they all got stuff done. The reviewers understand their roles: they leave feedback, if there are questions, they answer them. If the feedback's handled, they re-review.

It works exactly the way you say it should, minus the "blocked/changes requested" status on a PR. Maybe precisely because we understand that a PR is blocked until it's approved anyway, and the green check is the goal.

All the opportunities for dysfunction are the same: people can still bikeshed, they can not review, they can not come back and re-review, etc. None of that is affected by the "changes requested" vs "comment" dichotomy.

Frankly, the "we can't collaborate without blocking PRs" take seems strangely dysfunctional to me.
by noduerme | 2025-10-27 06:19:14+00:00
All of life is an arms race. Look at fungi vs. bacteria. All those grasses in the fields and trees in the forests got there by outcompeting other organisms. We're actually the only species which can reason about our resource consumption as a whole, and which has a chance to do something about it. But while we find forests beautiful, they're a blight on grasslands, which are a blight on mosses, which are a blight on plain old rocks.

What's beautiful is complexity, what's ugly is the destruction of complexity. That's why we find the destruction of forests to be repellent. Because we appreciate the more complex over the less complex. Possibly because complexity is the universe's way of observing itself. None of that means that our own complexity is necessarily wicked or irrelevant. It may just be a natural stage in the evolution of a planet. Grassland had 3 billion years to change, and it largely stayed the same. What's a couple thousand years of us blowing shit up, really?
by empressplay | 2025-10-27 06:22:13+00:00
LLMs are a useful tool but they are basically idiot savants.

They still need someone with higher reasoning skills (eg humans) to verify what they cough up. This need is likely to continue for quite some time (since LLMs simply aren't capable of higher reasoning).

Learning to code effectively using LLMs is probably the best path forward, from a career standpoint.
by muldvarp | 2025-10-27 06:22:44+00:00
> AI mostly doesn’t produce adequate quality or correctness for the type of code I enjoy writing.

This assumes that companies care about "code quality" and customers care about bugs.

> If you find coding boring, explore the frontiers. You will find a lot of coding wilderness where no AI has trod.

There are a lot of software engineers and not a lot of frontier.
by throwaway290 | 2025-10-27 06:24:09+00:00
It is a fact that that type of asbestos is less bad (though still bad). But yes it's true it is common in roofs in russia and probably shouldn't be.

But if roofing material is exposed in your room you're doing something wrong. Also legal limit for asbest dust in air also apply to asbest used in "шифер" (according to wikipedia)
by fuglede_ | 2025-10-27 06:25:04+00:00
There's some good discussion here: https://old.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1h9cub8/discu...

But yes, you would have people openly share repositories for automatically ingesting the puzzle text, solving the puzzles, and submitting the results the moment the puzzles opened, leading to inhuman solution times. So, despite the rules stating that you can't do that, the result is that whenever the puzzles were easy enough for an LLM to solve them with high probability – and most of them are – the leaderboards would be overrun with such solutions.

In 2023, the LLMs would still struggle enough that the overall leaderboard (taking all 25 ⋅ 2 puzzles into account) would still be dominated by ordinary people (many of them recording their solutions), in 2024 that was no longer the case. Personally I would go from being able to top 100 regularly, to almost never being able to. I'm going to miss the thrill, and think it's a bit saddening that we can't have nice things, but also ultimately think that getting rid of it is the best option.
by qingcharles | 2025-10-27 06:25:33+00:00
I had Grok write a post-apocalyptic novel as a test, and I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of it. The problem was running out of context. The quality fell off drastically and I tried to come up with ways to continue it, e.g. asking it to summarize each previous chapter and feeding the summaries in, but they always lacked some tiny detail I thought was key to a character's personality and it ended up being too much work.

A year from now though...?

We're really cooked, though. Whenever I see a cool pic I wonder if it's AI and I have to spin up a TinEye or Google Images search and hope it was once posted to some random Facebook wall in 2011 so I can be pretty sure it's real.
by nl | 2025-10-27 06:26:36+00:00
Try OpenAI Codex with GPT5-codex medium

The technology is progressing very fast, and that includes both the models and the tooling around it.

For example, Gemini 2.5 was considered a great model for coding when it launched. Now it is far inferior to Codex and Claude code.

The Githib Copilot tooling is (currently) mediocre. It's ok as a better autocomplete but can't really compete with Codex or Claude or even Jules (Gemini) when using it as an agent.
by friendzis | 2025-10-27 06:26:36+00:00
> Try this exercise. Do not think and let your mind clear. Ideas will surface. By what process did they surface? Or clear your mind entirely then try to perform some complex task.

I do not have any even remotely practical definition for this, but this has to somehow involve the system being in a closed loop. It has to "run" in a sense that an operating system runs. Even if there is nothing coming on certain inputs it still has to run. And probably hallucinate (hehe) like humans do in an absence of a signal or infer patterns where there are none, yet be able to self-reflect that it is in fact a hallucination
by jabl | 2025-10-27 06:26:39+00:00
> Apparently there is still a large stock of "hot" building material that are sitting in warehouses and every once in a while they make it into the supply chain.

Not working in the industry, what do they actually do with asbestos that has been removed? I presume it can't be 'destroyed', so it needs to be stored indefinitely somewhere where it doesn't cause harm? Dump it in an unused mine shaft and seal the entrance?
by tgma | 2025-10-27 06:26:48+00:00
> Solving this is the primary purpose of the EU: unified single market. > China also big, unified.

Correct. It is a goal of the EU, but practically speaking, it isn't as nicely unified, and some reasons being inherent like the variety of languages.

China is much more protectionist and you can't sell into it from the outside easily. US tariffs don't even come close to their tariff and non-tariff barriers.

If you think of <20% tariff as Groupon discounts for US consumers buying a bunch of products together, it is likely a more than acceptable trade for many businesses.
by hinkley | 2025-10-27 06:27:22+00:00
I've seen a lot change. I used to have a seemingly bottomless list of things we are doing wrong and about half of them have dropped off in the last twenty years. Did they all turn out as well as we hoped they would? No. I don't think a single one did. We are half-assing a lot of things that we used to laugh off entirely. In most of these cases some is better than none, but could be a lot better.

What I worry about is that my list has gotten shorter not because everything is as it should be but because I have slowed down.

Quite a lot of things on that list were of the "The future is here but it's not evenly distributed" sort. XP was about a bunch of relatively simple actions that were force multipliers with a small multiple on them. What was important was that they composed. So the benefit of doing eight of them was more than twice the benefit of doing four. Which means there's a lot of headroom still from adding a few more things.