MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vatsachak | 2025-12-01 06:34:21+00:00
I know the problem the AI solved wasn't that hard but one should consider math toast within the next 10-15 years.

Software engineering is more subtle since you actually care about the performance and semantics of a program. Unless you get really good at program specification, it would be difficult to fully automate.

But with math the only thing you care about is whether the moves you made were right.
by voodooEntity | 2025-12-01 06:34:34+00:00
Well we are as sadly so often in the world of only "black and white" discussion without ignoring gray areas.

While i pointed out that i think that the claim of public qr codes are always safe and cannot pose any danger is wrong, i also didn't state you should wall yourself in and handle like everything is f0rk3d.

You, as with everything in life, should evaluate whats worth risks and what not. Scanning a QR code in a museum linking an audio track to describe the exhibt, scanning a qr code in a restaurant for a menu, scanning a qr code from a sticker on a traffic light.

These are 3 completly different scenarios that can be weighted different and therefor not be answered with a single "yep good/bad" for every situation. My initial point regarding the article was that i don't think stating scanning public placed qr codes is always safe. People should not just NEVER scan a public qr, but they should understand possible risks, they should learn how to evaluate which risks are worth taking, and also learn what thinks they should look for. My point is that of make the public more informed.
by almosthere | 2025-12-01 06:35:29+00:00
> Housing, their neighborhoods, their schools

All of these can be great, but the class of people that make a neighborhood in "the heights" won't have dog barking, basketballs, drugs and gunshots. The people that don't live in "the heights" could decide tomorrow to no longer have those 4 things either - but they don't because - it's a different class of people.
by pyuser583 | 2025-12-01 06:35:56+00:00
sorry your math seems strange. You graduated from college in ‘08 - 17 years ago. You’re nearing 40. So let’s say you graduated at 23 … you’ve only had a college level job for five years?

The economy has been moving upward since 2013 - 12 years ago. What were you doing from 2013 to 2020?

I ask because I also graduated around ‘08. I’ve been a software developer since 2016. I’m currently a senior dev with almost a decade of experience.

There were really crappy years to start with, but I feel I’ve made up for it substantially.

My own parents graduated in the late 70s during a terrible economic recession.

It seems weathering economic recessions have been a tradition for several generations.

I still remember articles almost identical to the ones I see now; “this generation is screwed and there is no possible salvation.”

It’s getting old.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-01 06:36:11+00:00
> How would a criminal enterprise use Bricklink to launder money?

AML laws aren't required to make sense in order to be enforced. Their effectiveness is basically zero:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

The overall premise is that they order someone who has no real way of knowing if a transaction is a ruse or not to stop doing transactions if they're a ruse. This doesn't work so the entity ordered to do it gets yelled at unless they do a bunch of stuff that negatively impacts innocent people, at which point it still doesn't work but now they've checked their compliance box.
by AIorNot | 2025-12-01 06:36:22+00:00
Sorry for them- after I got laid off in 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work to the point my unemployment ran out - 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, including stints as a EM and CTO

Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- money is tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job…
by voodooEntity | 2025-12-01 06:36:50+00:00
Well i just listed the O.MG cable to show that there are alot of people not knowing that such things exist. My point is that of : people should be better informed about what vectors of attacks exist. So mentioning the cable (in relation to a coworker coming to my desk and asking about it) was just an example of how informed average Joe/Jane are and that i think this is the more important part - educate the public not just tell them not to worry.
by llmthrow0827 | 2025-12-01 06:39:31+00:00
It's totally true. I was doing Advent of Code before I had any training or work in programming at all, and a lot of it can be done with just thinking through the problem logically and using basic problem solving. If you can reason a word problem into what it's asking, then break it down into steps, you're 90% of the way there.
by defrost | 2025-12-01 06:39:42+00:00
Good grief .. you're serious?

Flour comes in sacks, meat comes in cuts - we've a quarter lamb in the freezer, part of that in the fridge, and yeast and flour enough for bread for the next six months.

We shop cheap, like the family has done for the past 100+ years, much of our food comes from the garden - our excess gets swapped with others excess (we have a lot of fruit, we never buy eggs, they come from people that can be bothered to run chickens).

It's a bit of work, we save money by not going to a gym and our life expectancy and cancer survival rates are much better than, say, middle north America.
by fragmede | 2025-12-01 06:39:57+00:00
It's two words with no qualifiers from someone we don't think it's technical. If it was, say, Karpathy, then sure, let's waste a whole thread discussing his farts, but I'm sure I'm not alone in having Claude Code having created an MCP, and I use it most times I use Claude Code. To move the conversation forwards though, what limitations and issues have you run into with MCPs? I wouldn't say mine are 100% bug free, but I wouldn't say it "barely works" either. Mostly works?
by gravypod | 2025-12-01 06:40:01+00:00
I've heard this mentioned a few times. Here is a summarized version of the abstract:

> ... We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) > ... AI tools ... affect the productivity of experienced > open-source developers. 16 developers with moderate AI > experience complete 246 tasks in mature projects on which they > have an average of 5 years of prior experience. Each task is > randomly assigned to allow or disallow usage of early-2025 AI > tools. ... developers primarily use Cursor Pro ... and > Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet. Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing > AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the > study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. > Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases > completion time by 19%—AI tooling slowed developers down. This > slowdown also contradicts predictions from experts in economics > (39% shorter) and ML (38% shorter). To understand this result, > we collect and evaluate evidence for 21 properties of our setting > that a priori could contribute to the observed slowdown effect—for > example, the size and quality standards of projects, or prior > developer experience with AI tooling. Although the influence of > experimental artifacts cannot be entirely ruled out, the robustness > of the slowdown effect across our analyses suggests it is unlikely > to primarily be a function of our experimental design.

So what we can gather:

1. 16 people were randomly given tasks to do

2. They knew the codebase they worked on pretty well

3. They said AI would help them work 24% faster (before starting tasks)

4. They said AI made them ~20% faster (after completion of tasks)

5. ML Experts claim that they think programmers will be ~38% faster

6. Economists say ~39% faster.

7. We measured that people were actually 19% slower

This seems to be done on Cursor, with big models, on codebases people know. There are definitely problems with industry-wide statements like this but I feel like the biggest area AI tools help me is if I'm working on something I know nothing about. For example: I am really bad at web development so CSS / HTML is easier to edit through prompts. I don't have trouble believing that I would be slower trying to make an edit to code that I already know how to make.

Maybe they would see the speedups by allowing the engineer to select when to use the AI assistance and when not to.
by frankhsu | 2025-12-01 06:40:10+00:00
I agree that this year has been extremely difficult, but as far as I know, a large number of companies and individuals still made a fortune.

Two fundamental laws of nature: the strong prey on the weak, and survival of the fittest.

Therefore, why is it that those who survive are not the strong preying on the weak, but rather the "fittest"?

Next year's development of AI may be even more astonishing, continuing to kill off large companies and small teams unable to adapt to the market. Only by constantly adapting can we survive in this fierce competition.
by edf13 | 2025-12-01 06:40:15+00:00
Ah, never knew about this injection…

<system-reminder> IMPORTANT: this context may or may not be relevant to your tasks. You should not respond to this context unless it is highly relevant to your task. </system-reminder>

Perhaps a small proxy between Claude code and the API to enforce following CLAUDE.md may improve things… I may try this
by reddalo | 2025-12-01 06:41:19+00:00
Fun fact: that's not true for all Windows localizations. For example, it's called "Programmi" (one word) in Italian.

Renaming system folders depending on the user's language also seems like a smart way to force developers to use dynamic references such as %ProgramFiles% instead of hard-coded paths (but some random programs will spuriously install things in "C:\Program Files" anyway).
by cchianel | 2025-12-01 06:41:38+00:00
I thought "No Free Lunch Theorem" was a joke from its name (although I should know better since "Hairy Ball Theorem" exists).

So if I understand correct, it states that all optimization algorithm must choose an order to evaluate solutions, and the faster it evaluates the "best" solution, the "better" the algorithm.

For example, say the search space is {"a", "b", "c"} and the best solution is "c". Then there are 3! (6) ways to evaluate all solutions:

"a", "b", "c"

"a", "c", "b"

"b", "a", "c"

"b", "c", "a"

"c", "a", "b"

"c", "b", "a"

(of course, in a real problem, the search space is much, MUCH larger).

The way Timefold tackles this is move selectors. In particular, you can design custom moves that uses knowledge of your particular problem which in turn affect when certain solutions are evaluated. Additionally, you can design custom phases that runs your own algorithm and then pass the solution found to local search. One of the projects we are working on currently is the neighborhood API, to make it much easier to write your own custom moves. That being said, for most problems that humans deal with, you don't need to configure Timefold and just work with the defaults (which is best-fit followed by a late acceptance local search with change and swap moves).

For what it's worth: metaheuristics solvers tend to be better than linear solvers for shift scheduling and vehicle routing, but worse for bin packing. But it still works, and is still fast.
by orbital-decay | 2025-12-01 06:41:54+00:00
Side note, that CoT summary they posted is done with a really small and dumb side model, and has absolutely nothing in common with the actual CoT Gemini uses. It's basically useless for any kind of debugging. Sure, the language the model is using in the reasoning chain can be reward-hacked into something misleading, but Deepmind does a lot for its actual readability in Gemini, and then does a lot to hide it behind this useless summary. They need it in Gemini 3 because they're doing hidden injections with their Model Armor that don't show up in this summary, so it's even more opaque than before. Every time their classifier has a false positive (which sometimes happens when you want anything formatted), most of the chain is dedicated to the processing of the injection it triggers, making the model hugely distracted from the actual task at hand.
by venturecruelty | 2025-12-01 06:42:53+00:00
Look, this is obviously terrible for someone who just lost most or perhaps all of their data. I do feel bad for whoever this is, because this is an unfortunate situation.

On the other hand, this is kind of what happens when you run random crap and don't know how your computer works? The problem with "vibes" is that sometimes the vibes are bad. I hope this person had backups and that this is a learning experience for them. You know, this kind of stuff didn't happen when I learned how to program with a C compiler and a book. The compiler only did what I told it to do, and most of the time, it threw an error. Maybe people should start there instead.
by beloch | 2025-12-01 06:43:34+00:00
The distributed nature of Wiki's makes them hard to "shut down", but they can be blocked and the editors/contributors can be harassed, arrested, deported, etc..

Is it paranoid to think this might happen in the U.S.? Now? No, I think it's become depressingly plausible. As I said, consider what might have happened if Musk had stayed in Trump's good graces. If you don't think such a thing is plausible for this administration, then what about the next, or the one after it? One that's a little bit more competent in making use of all the power that's just seems to continue being concentrated in the executive branch?
by HiPhish | 2025-12-01 06:45:17+00:00
That's what I do as well, but that defeats the purpose of the secret question being something only I know and will not forget. And that's because I am aware of the flaw of this system; someone naive might actually fill out that question with the honest answer and leave himself wide open to being exploited. Password manager are not a solution, they are a band-aid fix to a problem we should not be having in the first place.
by Puzzled_Cheetah | 2025-12-01 06:46:11+00:00
Ah, someone gave the intern root.

> "I also need to reproduce the command locally, with different paths, to see if the outcome is similar."

Uhm.

------------

I mean, sorry for the user whose drive got nuked, hopefully they've got a recent backup - at the same time, the AI's thoughts really sound like an intern.

> "I'm presently tackling a very pointed question: Did I ever get permission to wipe the D drive?"

> "I am so deeply, deeply sorry."

This shit's hilarious.
by voodooEntity | 2025-12-01 06:46:37+00:00
Well even tho i think at the end of your comment you went a bit out of the way, i get your point and i agree to a certain point.

You cannot reduce the risks to 0 - that's a matter of fact and i would never claim you could.

I tend to say its a question of cost/gain. If the cost the attacker has to pay (work/invest/...) is higher than the possible gain (data/funds/...) you are on a good track for your companies security.

Im btw not working for an ISP, rather something you would see as a smaller sized IT company. Therefor i also have certain points where i in theory could go alot harder on security, but i don't because its not feasible.

Another thing especially in that regard i find important is trying to educate your users, at least we work on that. We don't just enforce hard rules on them, but we also try to make sure they understand why we have these rules and mechanisms in place - not to annoy them but to protect them.

Finally, thats my favorite point of your article, "force users to use lots of passwords ".

Well our business has to undergo regular audits by partners which are lets say rather meticulous when it comes to the security of our systems. These enforce certain things on us we have to than enforce on our users even if we don't think its good.

So ye, now you can blame on me that i enforced something on our users, but keep in mind - it was also enforced on me - i even discussed certain things with these partners trying to explain to them why some measures sound cool on paper but in reality are just impractical - not that anyone would care. So we implement it.

Therefor the next time you argue that some security measure is just an CISO that doesn't really care about its users, maybe keep in mind that some things are forced upon us even tho we don't like and don't support them.
by tirant | 2025-12-01 06:49:05+00:00
I have lived in 3 countries with socialized health care system and the public systems were just average to poor, and costing me a lot.

In Germany if you’re mid to high earner, a private insurance can cost you less than half than the public healthcare system and you get much better service. Starting with appointments with specialists, who always give preference to privately insured people.

In this day and age public healthcare system are not efficient and bill the wrong people.

They are mostly payed by young population, between 18 and 65 years old. Specially the highest earners.

However most of the usage comes from 65+ citizens, which are starting to become majority. And also tend to be the ones concentrating the wealth of the country.

These public systems work great when most of the population is young and is paying into the system. But modern western societies are not like that anymore. Wealth is not owned mostly by older people while they barely pay into the system.

Private systems work better because each citizen pays into his old age health coverage during his young years.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-01 06:49:32+00:00
This entire subthread is full of people missing the point: no removing features.

You can add them, you can even move them, but you don't get to take back something you already sold me, unless I also get to take back the money I gave you.

Really not super interested in excuses and whining. Either support the features you sold me, or refund my money. It really is that simple... and it really should be the law.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-01 06:49:52+00:00
As for why, my bet is to prevent "counterfeit" (as Lego would call them) lego parts being shipped by vendors. They target low-income countries, as it is profitable there to import China-made bricks and sell them on Bricklink to make a living.

As a background, there are plenty of chinese lego alternatives, operating mostly legally in the west as the lego patent has expired long ago. Brands such as Mouldking, Cobi, Bluebrixx, CaDa, etc. are available here in Germany even in retail stores and online, and it is perfectly legal to sell "alternative" bricks. Cobi itself manufactures all of its part in the EU (mostly Poland) and creates original designs (mostly War-themed models such as tanks, fighting jets etc. as Lego does not do those).
by nradov | 2025-12-01 06:49:53+00:00
Nah. It's not different. Money in the tech industry has always chased the hype cycle. We're approaching the peak of inflated expectations for LLMs and then in a few years the AI industry will crash into the trough of disillusionment. That doesn't mean that LLMs are useless but in many sectors of the real economy they will have only a slow and limited impact.

https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...
by HiPhish | 2025-12-01 06:50:14+00:00
Yeah, I was referencing XKCD 936. Of course everyone should use a set of dice to roll their own truly random diceword passphrase and use five or six worst. My point was that adding numbers and other special characters does not actually make the password more secure than four, five, six or however many random plain English words that just use lower-case characters, so this rule should never be enforced.
by Brystephor | 2025-12-01 06:51:10+00:00
What other resources would you recommend for learning about optimizations?

I use multi armed bandits a lot at work, and I wonder what other algorithms I should look into. Its hard to read the name of an algorithm or category and get a sense of whether or not its applicable. It seems like the general process of "which path out of N options is the best?" can be reframed in many ways depending on contextual details such as how large is N, what's the feedback latency, what are the constraints around evaluation and exploration, etc
by saturatedfat | 2025-12-01 06:51:54+00:00
unfair characterization.

think about how this thing is interacting with your codebase. it can read one file at a time. sections of files.

in this UX, is it ergonomic to go hunting for patterns and conventions? if u have to linearly process every single thing u look at every time you do something, how are you supposed to have “peripheral vision”? if you have amnesia, how do you continue to do good work in a codebase given you’re a skilled engineer?

it is different from you. that is OK. it doesn’t mean its stupid. it means it needs different accomodations to perform as well as you do. accomodations IRL exist for a reason, different people work differently and have different strengths and weaknesses. just like humans, you get the most out of them if you meet and work with them from where they’re at.
by AIorNot | 2025-12-01 06:52:12+00:00
Well as a single datum:

After I got laid off in late 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work (despite having AI experience) to the point my unemployment ran out -

And I was 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, (never had trouble finding work) including stints as a leading EM and CTO, I’ve been an industry award winning innovation lead,a digital studio director, switching tech stacks and cloud certs all my career..mentoring juniors and doing podcasts and writing white papers etc, but peanuts - nothing

Getting ghosted by 25 year olds in interviews and doing rounds and rounds and leetcode and all that but no success- for example I had a 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023 and then got ghosted (I probably doged a bullet since they had subsequent layoffs)

a 12 month stint with nothing - we lost our savings as my wife got laid off too

Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- joining incubators and finally got some work or at least cofounded some AI startups- now money is tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job… it sucks as a over 45 year old as I have so much experience but no one cares.. still dont have much grey hair so I can pass for 40 to get noticed

No one stable is hiring or your resume just goes to a dead letter queue or is lost in ether or lost amid all the ai generated resumes out there - young ML and PHds and people under 40 seem to be getting work in Gen AI but thats about it

networking is the only game left and most good recruiters I know got laid off too

At least I’ve built up production experience in agents and context engineering RL, pytorch, langchain/LangGraph, RAG, KGa, etc python, BAML, LLM and LLMops to add to my years of full stack work
by mvr123456 | 2025-12-01 06:52:27+00:00
> The data shows millennials as a whole are better off than boomers were at their age.

Perhaps true if you go east far enough, seems objectively wrong for the majority of the west though. Honest question, if you think this and it isn't just rage bait.. what data supports it? Scott Galloway disagrees and offers hard data, and goes as far as calling it intergenerational theft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E
by cwbriscoe | 2025-12-01 06:52:55+00:00
Being FI helped me out greatly in December 2020 when My company laid off half of my team and expected me to take on double the load, including lots of extra after hours on-call support. I had a pretty great time not working for ~3 years during Covid. However, I am back to work after an old friend and boss offered me a WFH job that I couldn't refuse. He has since retired so I will stick around until current management pisses me off again, they downsize me or I just get sick of logging into teams/outlook at 7AM every morning.