MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Dilettante_ | 2025-10-28 09:48:45+00:00
writing code is the easiest part of software development. Reviewing code is so much more difficult than writing it

A lot of people say this, and I do not doubt that it is fully true in their real experience. But it is not necessarily the only way for things to be.

If more time and effort were put into writing code which is easier to review, the difficulty of writing it would increase and the difficulty of reading it would decrease, flipping that equation. The incentives just aren't like that. It doesn't pay to maximize readability against time spent writing: Not every line will have to be reviewed, and not every line that has to be reviewed will be so complex that readability needs to be perfect to be maintainable.
by iainmerrick | 2025-10-28 09:49:50+00:00
I'm a fan of Solid for the same reasons.

I particularly like that (JSX aside) it's just JavaScript, not a separate language with its own compiler like Svelte (and by the sounds of it Marko, which I hadn't heard of before). You can split your app into JS modules, and those can all use Solid signals, even the internal bits that don't have their own UI.
by xenocratus | 2025-10-28 09:49:51+00:00
I do something similar. If I'm not anxious but awake, I try to just visualise random stuff, random worlds. Somehow my brain is decent at that and I slowly drift off, though I sometimes get a jolt from reality. Recently I found that when I'm anxious it's better to try and imagine doing a hobby. I just imagine myself trail running. Reduces anxiety, pushes me towards sleep.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-28 09:50:39+00:00
When was that past? People used to hate you for being from a different village.

Polarization could instead be because there are fundamental differences in how people see the world and what is right. And now that we've tangled ourselves through all the wars imaginable to dispel the old division lines, this is what we're left with. This is what we have, now that information has become available for the masses; the real differences which split people. Not based on phony dividers of the past.

Polarization also means that if you disagree with the ideology of your family or of your village, you have millions of friends on a national or international level who think like you, instead of being ostracized for life.
by imiric | 2025-10-28 09:50:56+00:00
But that's not the issue. The issue is that a kid is talking to a machine without supervision in the first place, and presumably taking advice from it. The main questions are: where are the guardians of this child? What is the family situation and living environment?

A child thinking about suicide is clearly a sign that there are far greater problems in their life than taking advice from a machine. Let's address those first instead of demonizing technology.

To be clear: I'm not removing blame from any AI company. They're complicit in the ways they market these tools and how they make them accessible. But before we vilify them for being responsible for deaths, we should consider that there are deeper societal problems that should be addressed first.
by mpeg | 2025-10-28 09:51:42+00:00
The article is a bit disappointing in that it focuses too much on bundle size. Bundle size is important for sure, especially in rural areas with poor mobile signal, but time-to-interactive is imho more important, and that's where resumable frameworks like qwik and marko6 shine

Solid is great for raw rendering speed, but it hydrates just like react (unless you use an islands framework on top like astro which has its own limitations), while qwik and marko are resumable out of the box
by fragmede | 2025-10-28 09:51:52+00:00
In the end, age comes for us all. I pay for the Mac version of this software. I bought concert tickets to something, but couldn't find the confirmation email, but did find the credit card charge. So where did the tickets go? Did I hallucinate buying them? In the end, I rewound to the late night buying session to find that I'd misspelled the email address and the platform didn't confirm my email before sending.

Of course, that would never happen to you, but it saved my bacon.
by croon | 2025-10-28 09:51:56+00:00
> they do. Covid vaccine doesn't significantly decrease infection rate [1] (that, if you think a bit about how immune system works and how covid infects, in particular is why viral load is the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated). The vaccine only softens, a lot, the symptoms.

No they don't.

> "The results suggest even those who are fully vaccinated have a sizeable risk of becoming infected, with analysis revealing a fully vaccinated contact has a 25% chance of catching the virus from an infected household member while an unvaccinated contact has a 38% chance of becoming infected."

A couple of points here:

1) 25% vs 38% is an enormous difference in compounding risk of transmission across populations.

2) Accepting the premise that viral load at peak is the same, multiple studies still show that vaccinations reduce duration of shedding and transmissibility. [1]

> Thus widely vaccinating healthy people, we do increase threat to immunosuppressed and the likes.

This is simply wrong based on above in both first and second order effects. On top of that, having fewer/less severe reactions in otherwise healthy people leaves more healthcare resources for immunosuppressed.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9499220/

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.10.22269010v...

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/monitoring-reports-of-the-effect...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8992250/
by yawboakye | 2025-10-28 09:52:04+00:00
the pursuit of truth doesn’t work by keeping so-called falsehoods up while a debate rages on about their veracity. especially given that there’s no indication on wikipedia of contested facts. i may not be involved in the debate but i’d love some indication and perhaps a hyperlink to where the debate is happening.

the proper discussion you want will never happen. it’s an exercise in persuasion ie trying to move people from one entrenched position to another, and there’s nothing more impossible than that. the only way out is to offer competition, and that’s what grokipedia seems to be doing. check the history of christianity, heresy, reformation. when the catholic church set itself up as the object to be won over persuasively it successfully stifled doctrinal progress. until the intolerants exited.
by lm28469 | 2025-10-28 09:52:47+00:00
These two dudes can train the next generation, you know, like we've been doing since humans exist... instead of relying on some centralised point of failure somewhere thousands of km away which might or might not break your company whenever they decide to update something.

You're one of the people who saw nothing wrong with moving all our industries to asia right ? "It's cheaper so it's obviously better", if you don't think about any of the externalities and long term consequences sure...
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-10-28 09:52:50+00:00
SAT solvers are rarely used directly, they're usually a core component of a more expressive solver type like an LCG solver or an SMT solver.

And if not that, then they are used as the core component of a custom solver that speaks some higher level domain language.

Encoding things in CNF is a pain (even with higher level APIs like PySAT). But it's not usually something you should be doing unless you are developing a solver of some sort yourself.
by cmsj | 2025-10-28 09:53:04+00:00
That sounds like a pretty risky and irresponsible sort of study to conduct. It would also likely be extremely complicate to actually get a reliable result, given that people with suicidal ideations are not monolithic. You'd need to do a significant amount of human counselling with each study participant to be able to classify and control all of the variations - at which point you would be verging on professional negligence for not then actually treating them in those counselling sessions.
by paulj5 | 2025-10-28 09:53:15+00:00
There are a lot of imaging and thought techniques you can use, eg imagine sittimg beside a small stream, while the water guegles by, watch the leaves and sticks flowing past. or imagine events im yoir life floating by, or imagine being a duck floating by, swimming, or flying, etc. There are also body relaxation techniques ( zen , meditation, etc ) There are many many techniques available.
by fjfaase | 2025-10-28 09:54:32+00:00
If you convert a sudoku to an exact cover you can usually solve it by finding colums that are a subset from another column and remove all rows that are only in one of them.

Sudokus that can be solved with reasoning alone, can be solved in polynomial time.

I recently discovered that solving exact covers, and probably also with SAT, using a generic strategy, does not always result in the most efficient way for finding solutions. There are problems that have 10^50 solutions, yer finding a solution can take a long time.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-28 09:55:39+00:00
Why isn't there a single study that would back up your observations? The only study with a representative experimental design that I know about is the METR study and it showed the opposite. Every study citing significant productivity improvements that I've seen is either:

- relying on self-assessments from developers about how much time they think they saved, or

- using useless metrics like lines of code produced or PRs opened, or

- timing developers on toy programming assignments like implementing a basic HTTP server that aren't representative of the real world.

Why is it that any time I ask people to provide examples of high quality software projects that were predominantly LLM-generated (with video evidence to document the process and allow us to judge the velocity), nobody ever answers the call? Would you like to change that?

My sense is that weaker developers and especially weaker leaders are easily impressed and fascinated by substandard results :)
by nosianu | 2025-10-28 09:56:50+00:00
> Now we'll have code that the devs don't even know what it's doing internally.

I think that has already been true for some time for large projects continuously updated over a long time, and lots of developers entering and leaving the project throughout the years because nobody who has a choice wants to do that demoralizing job for long (I was one of them in the 1990s, the job was later given to an Indian H1B who could not switch to something better easily, not before putting in a few years of torture to have a better resume, and possibly a greencard).

Most famous post here, but I would like to see what e.g. Microsoft's devs would have to say, or Adobe's:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

Such code has long been held together by the extensive test suites rather than intimate knowledge of how it all works.

The task of the individual developer is to close bug tickets and add features, not to produce an optimal solution, or even refactoring. They long ago gave up on that as taking too long.
by aitchnyu | 2025-10-28 09:57:02+00:00
In 2015, I promoted React as lightweight and bug-free, no plumbing 25 paths and callbacks between events, APIs, DOM for a page using jQuery. No late nights and angry clients like other projects. Everything went neatly for two weeks, till the induced demand of features brought us to the old late nights and angry clients baseline. For many, LLMs are yet another "you are now 10x better" blessing like Moore's law, SQL over binary files, Python over C, NPM/Pip over header files, React over jQuery etc.
by rolandog | 2025-10-28 09:57:05+00:00
This! I think we were all too naïve in having "we would never let it happen, right?" be the motto for our complacency and inaction.

I hope more people come around and recognize that Richard Stallman deserves a big, resounding "you were right, we're sorry" after being attacked for his dislike of "trusted computing" and TPMs [0].

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html
by OJFord | 2025-10-28 09:59:04+00:00
> Europe is an exception where the all-caps variety can be found

'can be found' is too weak, it just is all-caps & borosilicate. (Perhaps imported lower-case stuff 'can be found', but it's not the norm at all, you won't see it in shops, and - I just checked - I haven't been suckered with it on Amazon either.)
by foul | 2025-10-28 09:59:11+00:00
If you say "shady" because CEO is a Russian in Dubai and for years nobody really knew how the hell could he sustain the company, yeah you're right.

About the FOSS alternatives you're right, but to use a closed source SaaS is just a choice people make because they are not confident in their own infra.

If it's "shady" because of cybercriminals, I insist in saying that it's the same than using Discord (pedophile rings) or Whatsapp/Meta messenger (extensive history of terrorists, gangs, traffickers of any kind).
by cycomanic | 2025-10-28 10:00:50+00:00
> And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.

You obviously don't believe we should forget everything in the past, otherwise what does prevent me from taking your stuff today and tomorrow when you come back with the police I'd argue it's in the past "and everyone fucked over everyone at some point". So the question then becomes how far back should we go. Sure you can just say as far as it benefits me, but that is not a solution that works on the scale of a society is it?
by the_injineer | 2025-10-28 10:00:53+00:00
We (TEN Protocol) did this a few months ago, using blockchain to make the LLMs’ actions publicly visible and TEEs for verifiable randomness in shuffling and other processes. We used a mix of LLMs across five players and ran multiple tournaments over several months. The longest game we observed lasted over 50 hours straight.

Screenshot of the gameplay: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GpywKpDXMAApYap?format=png&name=... Post: https://x.com/0xJba/status/1907870687563534401 Article: https://x.com/0xJba/status/1920764850927468757

If anybody wants to spectate this, let us know we can spin up a fresh tournament.
by gjadi | 2025-10-28 10:02:48+00:00
There are several things I use:

- think of past enjoyable moments (for me it's hiking, I usually don't go very far until I fall to sleep)

- box breathing

- hold breath for N sec then release, then N+10, then ...

- try to relax your body from top to bottom (forehead, eyes, cheeks, mouth, ...)

- imagine your body is very light, like your floating in the air

- imagine your body is very heavy, like a block of concrete sinking into your bed

- pick TAOCP and try to solve the exercises ;)
by volkadav | 2025-10-28 10:02:57+00:00
Trip report of size one, fwiw: I have a JetKVM device at home and it's been super handy in my small homelab (half dozen or so older dells and lenovos). I haven't experienced any problems with my device. It seems solidly built, the software works well and is receiving updates, and the price was very fair from what I recall. One feature that I thought was particularly a nice touch was that you can store OS images on it and have it show up as storage on the target machine (though some of my older gear doesn't seem to want to boot from it for whatever reason -- which I suspect has more to do with decade+ old workstations that last got a firmware upgrade when Obama was president than anything JetKVM is or isn't doing).

Overall, I'd recommend them. :)
by trhway | 2025-10-28 10:02:58+00:00
>1) 25% vs 38% is an enormous difference in compounding risk of transmission across populations.

there is no compounding in a wide spread infection like Covid where you're guaranteed to meet a carrier several times a day, and thus there is no practical difference between 25% and 38%. You'll get it either way - say you meet 10 carriers, each time probability 25% or 38% (or even if were just 5% and 10%) - the end result is indistinguishably similar. And you meet carriers every day. So if not today, then tomorrow.

>2) Accepting the premise that viral load at peak is the same, multiple studies still show that vaccinations reduce duration of shedding and transmissibility. [1]

yep. Unvaccinated is sitting at home, feeling ill, shedding, yet not transmitting. While vaccinated is out and about, no symptoms, shedding and happily transmitting to everybody around during that "reduced duration".

>On top of that, having fewer/less severe reactions in otherwise healthy people leaves more healthcare resources for immunosuppressed.

That is another propagandistic BS. I've been to ER in the summer 2020 for a non-covid related issue - it was empty.
by wafflemaker | 2025-10-28 10:03:13+00:00
Let's look at the problem from perspective of regular people. YMMV, but in countries I know most about, Poland and Norway (albeit a little less so for Norway) it's not about ChatGPT vs Therapist. It's about ChatGPT vs nothing.

I know people who earn above average income and still spend a significant (north of 20%) portion of their income on therapy/meds. And many don't, because mental health isn't that important to them. Or rather - they're not aware of how much helpful it can be to attend therapy. Or they just can't afford the luxury (that I claim it is) of private mental health treatment.

ADHD diagnosis took 2.5y from start to getting meds, in Norway.

Many kids grow up before their wait time in queue for pediatric psychologist is over.

It's not ChatGPT vs shrink. It's ChatGPT vs nothing or your uncle who tells you depression and ADHD are made up and you kids these days have it all too easy.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-28 10:03:36+00:00
That's the reality from software development at scale, pretty soon no individual will know how everything works and you need high-level architecture overviews on the one side, and strict procedures, standards, tools, test suites etc on the other hand to make sure things keep working.

But the reality is that most of us will never work in anything that big. I think the biggest thing i've worked in was in the 500K LOC range tops.
by OJFord | 2025-10-28 10:04:43+00:00
I know nothing about the industry let alone in the era, but I imagine 'drawing glassware for Pyrex catalogue' wasn't a full-time job - but either a temporary contract, or just one project for an agency. So you might view it as an opportunity to perfect your drawing of glass, or just a boring gig but paying the bills.

If you reflect on your own profession & career though... Well, rather than speak for you, I too 'had imagined [myself] working in a more [x] capacity'!
by dominicrose | 2025-10-28 10:05:19+00:00
This is going to sound selfish, but I liked being a solo React Typescript developer. My colleagues worked on UI/UX, back-end, DB, specs, etc, but I was responsible for the React code and I could just iterate and iterate without having to submit every change as a pull request.

Now with Laravel, Blade and JQuery the IDE support is low but everything is easy enough and we work as a team and do merge requests and it's a chill job even if it's full stack.
by noduerme | 2025-10-28 10:05:37+00:00
I ran a casino and wrote a bot framework that, with a user's permission, attempted to clone their betting strategy based on their hand history (mainly how they bet as a ratio to the pot in a similar blind odds situation relative to the aggressiveness of players before and after), and I let the players play against their own bots. It was fun to watch. Oftentimes the players would lose against their bot versions for awhile, but ultimately the bot tended to go on tilt, because it couldn't moderate for aggressive behavior around it.

None of that was deterministic and the hardest part was writing efficient monte carlos that could weight each situation and average out a betting strategy close to that from the player's hand history, but throw in randomness in a band consistent with the player's own randomness in a given situation.

And none of it needed to touch on game theory. If it did, it would've been much better. LLMs would have no hope at conceptualizing any of that.
by iainmerrick | 2025-10-28 10:06:29+00:00
Does that involve shipping a native wrapper for your web app?

If so, you have the extra cost, effort and bureaucracy of building and deploying to all the different app stores. Apple's App Store and Google Play each have various annoyances and limitations, and depending on your market there are plenty of other stores you might need to be in.

Sometimes you do need a native or native-feeling app, in which case a native wrapper for JS probably is a good idea, other times you want something lightweight that works everywhere with no deployment headaches.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-10-28 10:06:48+00:00
Do any smart business people get locked into software ecosystems?

People seem very focused on the science to the expense of the business side.

Like it's possible to be pro-database but anti-Oracle. And if the Oracle guys called you anti-database it would be very transparent bullshit. Doubly so if they wrapped it in "databases are going to save the poor" rhetoric.
by jfengel | 2025-10-28 10:07:22+00:00
Just at the moment: a lot of people who consider themselves merely "right" voted for a candidate who is undeniably "far right". So for the moment I'm not drawing much distinction between "conservative values" and "outright Nazis".

That was not always true and I hope it will not remain true. But speaking at this specific time in history, this fact represents a genuine threat to life and liberty.
by sylware | 2025-10-28 10:07:29+00:00
Even if there are not that expensive to implement, I do not use official ABI register names, neither pseudo-instructions (I use a command to generate the code on the side).

Once RISC-V has performant silicon implementations (server/desktop/mobile/embedded), the really hard part will be to move the software stack, mostly closed source applications like video games.

And a very big warning: do NOT abuse an assembler macro-preprocessor or you will lock your code on that very assembler. On my side I have been using a simple C pre-processor to keep the door open for any other assembler, at minimal technical cost.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-28 10:09:21+00:00
it does feel like there's been a slow shift from the Internet being a place to make friends to a place to make enemies.

The article that sticks in my mind is "Internet of Beefs": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ - ironically I have vague memories of the author being on the wrong side of various beefs, but the description of the phenomenon is spot-on.

Some corners of bluesky are resisting this with trying to form the habit of aggresive blocking of clickbait and anyone who comes into your mentions to beef. But overall it's gone horribly mainstream, everyone is just promoting themselves by whom they have beef with.
by runj__ | 2025-10-28 10:10:32+00:00
Surely you don't always call up and pay for a lawyer any time you have an interest or question about law, you google it? In what world do you have the time, money and interest to ask people about every single thing you want some more information about.

I've done small plumbing jobs after asking AI if it was safe, I've written legal formalia nonsense that the government wanted with the help of AI. It was faster, cheaper and I didn't bother anyone with the most basic of questions.