MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pshirshov | 2025-11-26 18:01:35+00:00
Claude won't handle a project of that scale. Even with Java 7 modernization project, which is much simpler than full javac translation, I constantly hit context limits and Claude throws things like "API Error: 400 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"invalid_request_error","message":"messages.3.content.76: `thinking` or `redacted_thinking` blocks in the latest assistant message cannot be modified. These blocks must remain as they were in the original response."},"request_id":"req_011CVWwBJpf3ZrmYGkYZLQVf"}" at me.
by pirates | 2025-11-26 18:01:56+00:00
AI-generated docs, charts, READMEs, TOE diagrams. My company’s Confluence is flooded with half assed documentation from several different dev teams that either loosely matches or doesn’t match at all the behavior or configuration of their apps.

For example they ask to have networking configs put into place and point us at these docs that are not accurate and then they expect that we’ll troubleshoot and figure out what exactly they need. It’s a complete waste of time and insulting to shove off that work onto another team because they couldn’t be fucked to read their own code and write down their requirements accurately.
by cr1st1an | 2025-11-26 18:02:02+00:00
Thanks for the follow up. I think the main difference is that I am not trying to build another offloader or a full image optimization service. WordPress stays in control of storage and transformations. The plugin only rewrites the final URL so the request goes through a Worker and then Cloudflare’s edge cache. That is the entire scope.

I am not deleting anything from the server and I am not replacing the media library with R2. If someone needs real offloading, there are already plugins built for that and they make sense for bigger or more storage heavy sites.

Using Cloudflare’s native image service is also an option, but it requires Cloudflare setup inside WordPress and user credentials. The Worker avoids that and keeps the whole Cloudflare side in one place. For technical users your approach works fine. The plugin exists for people who want CDN level delivery without touching any of that.

And yes, I am moving away from the flat fee idea. I appreciate you pointing it out. If you have thoughts on what kind of limits feel reasonable for small to medium sites, I am open to it.
by k6hkUZtLUM | 2025-11-26 18:02:14+00:00
I'm really excited that the current AI tools will help lots of people build small and useful projects. Normal people who would otherwise be subject to their OS. Subject to vendor options. Help desk, HR, or finance folks will be able to compose and build tools to help them do their jobs (or hobbies) better. Just like we do.

I think of it like frozen dinners. Frozen dinners are not the same as home cooked meals. There is a place for frozen dinners, fast foods, home cooked meals, and nice restaurants. Plus, many of us spend extra time and money making specialty food that may be as good as anything. Frozen dinners don't take away from that.

I think it's the same for coding and AI use. It might eventually enhance coding overall and help bring an appreciation to what engineers are doing.

Hobby or incidental coders have vastly expanded capabilities. Think of the security guy that needs one program to parse through files for a single project. Those tasks are reasonably attainable today without buying and studying the sed/awk guide. (Of course, we should all do that)

Professionals might also find value using AI tools like they would use a spell checker or auto-complete that can also lookup code specs or refer to other project files for you.

The most amazing and useful software, the software that wows us and moves us or inspires us, is going to be crafted and not vibed. The important software will be guided by the hands of an engineer with care and competence to the end.
by echelon | 2025-11-26 18:02:21+00:00
Rust needs to get rid of .unwrap() and its kin. They're from pre-1.0 Rust, before many of the type system features and error handling syntax sugar were added.

There's no reason to use them as the language provides lots of safer alternatives. If you do want to trigger a panic, you can, but I'd also ask - why?

Alternatively, and perhaps even better, Rust needs a way to mark functions that can panic for any reason other than malloc failures. Any function that then calls a panicky function needs to be similarly marked. In doing this, we can statically be certain no such methods are called if we want to be rid of the behavior.

Perhaps something like:

panic fn my_panicky_function() { None.unwrap(); // NB: `unwrap()` is also marked `panic` in stdlib } fn my_safe_function() { // with a certain compiler or Crates flag, this would fail to compile // as my_safe_function isn't annotated as `panic` my_panicky_function() }

The ideal future would be to have code that is 100% panic free.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-26 18:02:32+00:00
What are the "interesting parts" is hard to quantify because my interests vary, so even if a machine can do those parts better than me, doesn't necessarily mean I'll use the machine.

The arts is a good example. I still enjoy analog photography & darkroom techniques. Digital can (arguably) do it better, faster, and cheaper. Doesn't change the hobby for me.

But, at least the option is there. Should I need to shoot a wedding, or some family photos for pay, I don't bust out my 35mm range finder and shoot film. I bring my R6, and send the photos through ImagenAI to edit.

In that way, the interesting parts are whatever I feel like doing myself, for my own personal enjoyment.

Just the other day I used AI to help me make a macOS utility to have a live wallpaper from an mp4. Didn't feel like paying for any of the existing "live wallpaper" apps. Probably a side project I would never have done otherwise. Almost one shot it outside of a use-after-free bug I had to fix myself, which ended up being quite enjoyable. In that instance, the interesting part was in the finding a problem and fixing it, while I got to outsource 90% of the rest of the work.

I'm rambling now, but the TL;DR is I'm more so excited about having the option to outsource portions of something rather than always outsourcing. Sometimes all you need is a cheap piece of mass produced crap, and other times you want to spend more money (or more time) making it yourself, or buying handmade from an expert craftsman.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-11-26 18:02:33+00:00
> Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.

YT needs a button to the effect of "I will never, ever, EVER, buy or use this product, stop spending money on this ad"

the obviously-AI created slop or the mobile games that I will never play, etc. is just a waste of time for basically everyone (except YT making that money, I guess)
by jjcm | 2025-11-26 18:02:49+00:00
You forget that the vast majority of the web in the 2005 era was blogs hosted on wordpress by either service providers or shared hosting providers, neither of which dedicated significant attention to performance. Many of them were hitting quota limits, but many still were truly just going down because of the oversubscribed hardware they were running on. Even an independent server that was properly set up though could hit issues. I had a few of my posts get slashdotted at that time, and the spike was real. Apache hosting wordpress couldn't quite keep up with the spike - I had to use varnish to set up a reverse proxy cache to properly handle the influx.
by riku_iki | 2025-11-26 18:02:51+00:00
> the real-world stupidity of these models such as his example of a coding agent toggling between generating bug #1 vs bug #2, which in fact largely explains why the current economic and visible impact is much less than if the "AI is PhD level" benchmark narrative was actually true.

this could be true in the past, but in recent weeks I started more and more trust top AI models and less PhDs I work with. Quality jump is very real imo.
by underlipton | 2025-11-26 18:02:57+00:00
So, unfortunately, even in the best case scenario, the damage is already done. There's already far too much of the economy built on top of the inflated rents and property valuations. The only way to fix things is straight-up deflation. Which will obviously be very painful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbztr5FDZtg
by iepathos | 2025-11-26 18:03:06+00:00
These hyper paranoid statements like "I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain", are fairly worrisome for a technical person who claims to have any understanding of AI and undermines the credibility of the critique. There is some truth in here but it's beneath a lot of paranoia that's hard to sift through.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 18:03:10+00:00
> Programming has been devalued because more people can do it at a basic level with LLM tooling

But just because more people can do something doesn't mean it's devalued, or am I misunderstanding the word? The value of programs remains the same, regardless of who composes them. The availability of computers, the internet and the web seems to have had the opposite effect so far, making entire industries much more valued than they were in the decades before.

Neither do I see ASM, compilers, and all your other examples of devalualing, it seems like it's "nichifying" the industry if anything, which requires more experts, not fewer. The more abstractions we have in reality, the more experts are needed for being able to handle those things.
by sholain | 2025-11-26 18:03:12+00:00
"don't have anything else of any value. " ?

OpenAI is still de facto the market leader in terms of selling tokens.

"zero moat" - it's a big enough moat that only maybe four companies in the world have that level of capability, they have the strongest global brand awareness and direct user base, they have some tooling and integrations which are relatively unique etc..

'Cloud' is a bigger business than AI at least today, and what is 'AWS moat'? When AWS started out, they had 0 reach into Enterprise while Google and AWS had infinity capital and integration with business and they still lost.

There's a lot of talk of this tech as though it's a commodity, it really isn't.

The evidence is in the context of the article aka this is an extraordinary expensive market to compete in. Their lack of deep pockets may be the problem, less so than everything else.

This should be an existential concern for AI market as a whole, much like Oil companies before highway project buildout as the only entities able to afford to build toll roads. Did we want Exxon owning all of the Highways 'because free market'?

Even more than Chips, the costs are energy and other issues, for which Chinese government has a national strategy which is absolutely already impacting the AI market. If they're able to build out 10x data centres at offer 1/10th the price at least for all the non-Frontier LLM, and some right at the Frontier, well, that would be bad in the geopolitical sense.
by mr_00ff00 | 2025-11-26 18:03:21+00:00
I don’t know if this is ridiculous, but I’m curious if access to LLMs will one day be priced like the Bloomberg Terminal or something. Where access for one user is like 20,000 dollars. Maybe less than that, but like 5k per person.

Seems crazy by most software standards, but when Bloomberg became a software only program (they stopped selling physical terminals) and people were shocked when they paid almost nothing for excel but then so much for the second tool they needed as traders.

Yet it still is priced so high and people pay.
by jfengel | 2025-11-26 18:03:25+00:00
You should avoid "any" like the plague. I strongly recommend putting that into your linter.

Unknowns are also a code smell. I'm not sure they're ever necessary, but they can save a lot of grief when fighting with the type system isn't the best use of your time.

As for exceptions... I agree, but a lot of programmers hate checked exceptions.

I will add one beef: fetch should return unknown rather than any.
by pshirshov | 2025-11-26 18:03:52+00:00
Ah, by the way. I've tried to do the same with Codex (gpt-5.1-codex-max) and Gemini (2.5 pro), both failed spectacularly. This job was done mostly by Sonnet 4.5. Java 6 did not require intensive supervision. Java 7 parts are done with Opus 4.5 and it constantly hits its limits, I have to regularly intervene.
by cr1st1an | 2025-11-26 18:03:53+00:00
Thanks, that is exactly the angle I am leaning into. The whole point is to give users most of the benefits of Cloudflare without having to move nameservers or deal with caching rules or the dashboard. For people who already use Cloudflare directly, this might not be needed. For everyone else, it removes a lot of the steps that usually cause support tickets or confusion.

I agree about the positioning. I am updating the wording so it is clear that this is not trying to compete with Cloudflare’s full feature set or with full image optimization plugins. It is more of a simple “use Cloudflare as your image CDN” switch for the long tail of WordPress sites that will never touch DNS settings.

If you have thoughts on how to phrase that more clearly, I am open to ideas.
by observationist | 2025-11-26 18:03:55+00:00
You have to take into consideration the source. FT is part of the Anthropic circle of media outlets and financial ties. It benefits them to create a draft of support to OpenAI competition, primarily Anthropic, but they(FT) also have deep ties to Google and the adtech regime.

They benefit from slowing and attacking OpenAI because there's no clear purpose for these centralized media platforms except as feeds for AI, and even then, social media and independents are higher quality sources and filters. Independents are often making more money doing their own journalism directly than the 9 to 5 office drones the big outlets are running. Print media has been on the decline for almost 3 decades now, and AI is just the latest asteroid impact, so they're desperate to stay relevant and profitable.

They're not dead yet, and they're using lawsuits and backroom deals to insert themselves into the ecosystem wherever they can.

This stuff boils down to heavily biased industry propaganda, subtly propping up their allies, overtly bashing and degrading their opponents. Maybe this will be the decade the old media institutions finally wither up and die. New media already captures more than 90% of the available attention in the market. There will be one last feeding frenzy as they bilk the boomers as hard as possible, but boomers are on their last hurrah, and they'll be the last generation for whom TV ads are meaningfully relevant.

Newspapers, broadcast TV, and radio are dead, long live the media. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
by necovek | 2025-11-26 18:03:57+00:00
This bug might not have, but others would. Formal verification methods still rely on humans to input the formal specification, which is where problems happen.

As others point out, if they didn't really ship fast, they certainly would not have become profitable, and they would definitely not have captured the market to the extent they have.

But really, if the market was more distributed, and Cloudflare commanded 5% of the web as the biggest player, any single outage would have been limited in impact. So it's also about market behaviour: yet "nobody is fired for choosing IBM" as it used to go 40 years ago.
by Johnny555 | 2025-11-26 18:04:29+00:00
Oh I remember those days. In our case, it was because we had so much website data that we couldn't keep it all in cache, so when the site became busy enough, performance fell off a cliff as we became disk I/O bound. We had maxed out our main server with 512MB of RAM.

We couldn't afford the new Sun Ultra 2's that would have given us a spacious 2GB of RAM, so we ended up coding a front-end to shard requests across the 2 web servers and used a Sparcstation 5 to run that front-end.

Eventually we rearchitected the entire site to move the static HTML websites into an Oracle database. (by then we had upgraded to a Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000, which could handle up to 6GB of memory, more than we could ever use)
by goranmoomin | 2025-11-26 18:04:53+00:00
I'm genuinely curious on how well this is working, is there an independent Java test suite that covers major Java 5/6 features that can verify that the JOPA compiler works per the spec? I.e. I see that Claude has wrote a few tests in it's commits, but it would be wonderful if there's a non-Clauded independent test suite (probably from other Java implementations?) that tracks progress.

I do feel that that is pretty much needed to claim that Claude is adding features to match the Java spec.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-11-26 18:04:56+00:00
Alternative to archive.is

x="\"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Lamarr\"" y=https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/11/26/investors-expect-ai-use-to-soar-thats-not-happening busybox wget -U "$x" -O 1.htm $y firefox ./1.htm
by pzo | 2025-11-26 18:04:57+00:00
not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch? I also wished one day to make cluster out of Apple TVs - they are very cheap (~150usd for version with ethernet) and most likely the new upcoming version will have more powerful A-series apple sillicon. I guess tvOS is just very restricted.
by cr1st1an | 2025-11-26 18:05:14+00:00
Thanks for the detailed perspective. Your setup makes sense for agencies or teams that can manage their own caching, droplets, image formats, and traffic patterns. In that environment a plugin like this is not really needed.

The plugin is aimed at a different group. A lot of WordPress users are not on Cloudflare, do not want to touch DNS, and are not comfortable running their own CDN proxy or tuning image formats. They just want their existing media to load faster without changing their hosting stack.

If you are already keeping everything optimized and have a CDN pattern you like, then you are already covered. This is more for the long tail of smaller sites that will never set up their own caching rules or droplets. It is just a simpler path for them.
by mlmonkey | 2025-11-26 18:05:14+00:00
So IIUC RL is applicable only when the outcome is not immediately available.

Let's say I do have a problem in that setting; say the chess problem, where I have a chess board with the positions of chess pieces and some features like turn number, my color, time left on the clock, etc. are available.

Would I train a DNN with these features? Are there some libraries where I can try out some toy problems?

I guess coming from a classical ML background I am quite clueless about RL but want to learn more. I tried reading the Sutton and Barto book, but got lost in the terminology. I'm a more hands-on person.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-26 18:05:21+00:00
You are simplifying the control software of an insulin point to a degree that does not match reality. I'm saying that because I actually reviewed the code of one and the amount of safety consciousness on display there was off the charts compared to what you usually encounter in typical web development. You also under-estimate the dynamic nature of the environment these pumps operate in as well as the amount of contingency planning that they embody, failure modes of each and every part in the pump were taken into consideration, and there are more such parts that you are most likely aware of. This includes material defects, defects as a result from abuse, wear & tear, parts being simply out of spec and so on.

To see this as the typical firmware that ships with say a calculator or a watch is to diminish the accomplishment considerably.
by dspillett | 2025-11-26 18:05:29+00:00
I'm firmly in the “don't want to use it; if you want to, feel free, but stop nagging me to” camp.

Oh, and the “I'm not accepting 'the AI did it' as an excuse for failures” camp. Just like outsourcing to other humans: you chose the tool(s), you are responsible for verifying the output.

I got into programming and kicking infrastructure because I'm the sort of sad git who likes the details, and I'm not about to let some automaton steal my fun and turn me into its glorified QA service!

I'd rather go serve tables or stack shelves, heck I've been saying I need a good long sabbatical from tech for a few years now… And before people chime in with “but that would mean dropping back to minimum wage”: if LLMs mean almost everybody can program, then programming will pretty soon be a minimum wage job anyway, and I'll just be choosing how I earn that minimum (and perhaps reclaiming tinkering with tech as the hobby it was when I was far younger).
by ineedasername | 2025-11-26 18:06:09+00:00
Nothing craftsman? The detail required to setup a complex image gen pipeline to produce something the has the consistent style, composition, placement, etc, and quite a bit more-- for things that will go into production and need a repeatable pipeline-- it's huge. Take every bit as much creative vision.

Taking just images, consider AI merely a different image capture mechanism, like the camera is vs. painting. (You could copy.paste many critiques about this sort of ai and just replace it with "camera") Sure it's more accessible to a non professional, in AI's case much more so than cameras wear to years of learning painting. But there's a world of difference between what most people do in a prompt online and how professionals integrating it into their workflow are doing. Are such things "art"? That's not a productive question, mostly, but there's this: when it occurs, it has every bit as much intention, purpose and from a human behind it as that which people complain is lacking, but are referring to the one-shot prompt process in their mind when they do.
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-11-26 18:06:10+00:00
>Today, Google's advertising revenue is around 260B / year or about 60% of the entire global advertising spend circa 1998.

Or about 30% of the global advertising spend circa 2024.

I wonder if there is an upper bound on what portion of the economy can be advertising. At some point it must become saturated. People can only consume so much marketing.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 18:06:14+00:00
It isn't though, none of our lives are happening in isolation, even if you don't believe it, there are other humans out there, with real responsibilities outside of computers.

Even if the competition is fierce, do you think it isn't for other professions, or what's the point? Of course a job that is well-paid, has few drawbacks and let you sit indoors in front of computer, probably doing something you enjoy in general, is popular and has competition.
by storyinmemo | 2025-11-26 18:06:23+00:00
2003: http://www.geology.smu.edu/~dpa-www/attention_span. 22 Requests / second was a big deal.

Perhaps the best benchmark for the maximum potential traffic of the community at that time comes from a Slashdot post by Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) on September 14, 2001 (https://news.slashdot.org/story/01/09/13/154222/handling-the...), detailing the site's traffic following the 9/11 attacks. This load on Slashdot itself represents the full attention of the userbase and was higher than the site normally experienced:

Normal Load: 18–20 dynamic page views per second.

Peak Load: 60–70 page views per second.

Daily Volume: 3 million page views (up from a daily average of 1.4 million).

To handle this higher load, Slashdot itself had to disable dynamic content and serve static HTML to survive this load. Their database could not handle the query volume.

A typical "Slashdotting" pushed 5 to 10 Mbps of traffic. Since many sites were hosted on T1 lines (1.5 Mbps), the pipe was instantly clogged, resulting in 100% packet loss for legitimate users.

I remember when Slashdot broke because they used an Unsigned Mediumint counter for a primary key and finally overflowed it with 16 million comments over the life of the site on Nov 6, 2006.

It was a different time back then when we still measured our installed RAM in megabytes.