MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Waterluvian | 2025-12-09 20:57:11+00:00
There have been many, many stories over the millenia that try to empart the wisdom that mortality is necessary. Some present it as being a gift.

I don't think any one source made it click for me, but I think some combination of watching The Good Place, Sandman, and a lot of Black Mirror got me really stretching my imagination of what it would feel like to be truly immortal. I had a moment that felt like my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt this severe dread for maybe half a second. A feeling of being inescapably trapped.

There's also this PC game called The Coin Game that's just a solo-dev making lots of arcade games. They exist on an island where you have a home and some hobbies and a few arcades and I think even a mall. But the entire island is devoid of humanity. There's just a bunch of robots. I don't know if the game has a backstory, but the one my brain filled in is that this is a sort of playground for you to live in forever... and it's got a San Junipero feel, but far more bleak. Gave me the chills. I'm happy to be mortal.
by bell-cot | 2025-12-09 20:57:22+00:00
There's a fine line between parasites short-term maximizing how much blood they can suck out of their host, and parasites ending up net losers because they got too greedy and undermined their host's longer-term health.

Historically, military grafters and war profiteers haven't been know for either their long-term thinking, or their judgement about fine lines.
by zahlman | 2025-12-09 20:57:36+00:00
Yep. Same reason people keep getting taken off guard by Setuptools breaking changes, even though they follow semver. (Of course, it's often not their fault that they upgraded, thanks to isolated build environment systems.)

> Warning categories that are primarily of interest to Python developers (rather than end users of applications written in Python) are ignored by default.

The idea is that the person running the application shouldn't see cryptic messages at runtime because the application developer didn't respond to the deprecation. But you know, maybe they should. Best way to put pressure on that developer is to get user issue reports.
by imilev | 2025-12-09 20:57:38+00:00
Really cool blog. I have been thinking about this recently as I was a center piece of our startup, and to me the hardest part of giving away responsibilities has been 2 phase: firstly that suddenly I feel like I am not in control, and second that people are spending time on things they don't like and because of that we are not leveraging their true potential/string sides (moneyball).

Curious to hear what other think about that - should you leave people focus only on their strong sides, or they should still help out with e2e things.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-09 20:57:47+00:00
It's a problem.

I see it the most with blogs, I'd say there is a "2025 voice" which you hear a lot on LinkedIn that will get people to accuse you of using an LLM -- when I made this accusation of one blogger he told me that he'd gotten a lot of pushback for writing a blog post with AI and he'd resolved never to do it again.

But yeah, you're doing the right thing to show your creation process, sooner or later the haters will look bad.
by yandie | 2025-12-09 20:58:46+00:00
> My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.

My husband has a Fitbit and it's so buggy he left it sit on the shelf most of the time - the only times he'd wear it is for exercise.

Siri is bad though, but I have found Google Voice Assistant and Alexa both really have become bad over time, to the point of us just giving up on them completely. My husband is on Android and I'm really surprised how bad voice assistant is despite all the Gemini launches! (mind you he has an Australian accent)
by cwmoore | 2025-12-09 20:59:11+00:00
Yes. Embarrassing cringe, whether or not it is noted.

But this is a text-only forum and text (to a degree, all digital content) has become compromised. Intent and message is not attributable to real life experience or effort. For the moment I have accepted the additional overhead.

As with most, I have a habit of estimating the validity of expertise in comments, and experiential biases, but that is becoming untenable.

Perhaps there will soon be transformer features that produce prompts adequate to the task of reproducing the thought behind each thread, so their actual value, informational complexity, humor, and salience, may be compared?

Though many obviously human commentors are actually inferior to answers from “let me chatgpt that for you.”

I have had healthy suspicions for a while now.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-12-09 20:59:20+00:00
- C takes a lot more context than a high-level language

- a lot of C code out there is not safe, so the LLM outputs that

- C encodes way less of the programmer's intention, and way more implementation details. So unless the author is extremely good at naming, encapsulating and commenting, the LLM just has less to work with. Not every C code is Sqlite/redis/ffmeg quality.

- the feedback loop is slower, so the LLM has less chance to brute force a decent answer

- there is no npm/pypi equivalent for C on which to train the LLM so the pool for training is less diverse

- the training pool is vastly Linux-oriented, with the linux kernel and distro system libs being very prominent in the training data because C programs on Windows are often proprietary. But most vibe coders are not on Linux, nor into system programming.

Sure, you can vibe code in C. Antirez famously states he gets superb ROI out of it.

But it's likely you'll get even better results with other languages.
by oldjim798 | 2025-12-09 20:59:38+00:00
Yes, the natural state of every resident is to live in their own home. To be clear by home I don't mean "single family detached house on a suburban street", I mean a place to live with water, electricity, and a roof.

Landlords provide no 'service'; they are merely an existence tax.

The market already does not build dense multifamily; what is there to halt?
by twodave | 2025-12-09 21:00:17+00:00
Not low-value or it just wouldn't be on the board. Lower value? Maybe, but there are many, many reasons things get pushed down the backlog. As many reasons as there are kinds of companies. Most people don't work at one of the big tech companies where work priorities and business value are so stratified. There are businesses that experience seasonality, so many of the R&D activities get put on the backburner until the busy season is over. There are businesses that have high correctness standards, where bigger changes require more scrutiny, are harder to fit into a sprint, and end up getting passed over for smaller tasks. And some businesses just require a lot of contextual knowledge. I wouldn't trust an AI to do a payroll calculation or tabulate votes, for instance, any more than I would trust a brand new employee to dive into the deep end on those tasks.
by mekael | 2025-12-09 21:00:25+00:00
I've predominantly worked in two industries, healthcare/public health and insurance where policies terms are measured in decades. The software for both ranges from 20 to 40 years old, and it hasn't been upgraded because to do so poses an existential risk to either the business or, in the case of healthcare, to human life. Upgrades are measured in terms of human generations because of said risk, but I wouldn't call these systems legacy due to not moving beyond java 1.6.

also, the Hyperion Cantos was a great series.
by tmsbrg | 2025-12-09 21:00:26+00:00
Not the argument I expected. I'm also against people living forever, but more because it's a way for society to go forward and get rid of old ways of thinking. There's a saying that science advances one death at a time. And can you imagine a world where current leaders are still in power 1000 years later? Or where the leaders of 1000 years ago were still in charge? Whenever I hear people talk about living forever I think of how it'd be something tech billionaires and autocrats would use to oppress us forever. No thanks.
by capitainenemo | 2025-12-09 21:00:36+00:00
Well, when I saw the first Supreme Commander video it looked a lot like Sprint RTS running Balanced Annihilation to me. Right down to how the terrain deformation worked and the command queuing.

Was there any particular reason for the fork? There's a lot of Spring RTS projects but they all use the same codebase. http://springrts.com/wiki/Games
by photonic34 | 2025-12-09 21:00:44+00:00
Two major counterpoints, the second borrowed from de Grey.

1. I am young enough that a sense of mortality is not a true motivation to start things now. While I know about my mortality, I do not, in the visceral sense, believe it. My motivation to start things now instead of later is to experience the rewards sooner, not a foreboding panic of losing finite time. I suspect this is true for at least very many people.

2. The argument doesn’t survive a simple inversion test. Let’s concede every single disadvantage immortality might bring— lack of motivation, innovation, housing. Suppose we already live in that world. Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a massive, rolling holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the concept of death)?
by lowsong | 2025-12-09 21:01:09+00:00
> Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong.

This is such a bad take. I'm convinced that engineers simply don't understand what the job is. The point was never "does it output code that works", the point is "can it build the right thing in a way that is maintainable and understandable". If you need an LLM to understand the output then you have failed to engineer software.

If all you're doing is spitting out PoCs and pure greenfield development then I'm sure it looks very impressive, as the early language models did when it looked like they were capable of holding a conversation. But 99% of software engineering is not that kind of work.
by tptacek | 2025-12-09 21:01:14+00:00
This is a retcon. Facebook rolled out TLS in 2011, 2 years before Snowden, and went TLS-by-default within a month of the Snowden disclosures. Google Mail was TLS-by-default in 2010. TLS was a universal best practice long before 2013 --- by 2010, you'd have gotten a sev:hi vulnerability flagged on your site if you hadn't implemented TLS. SSLLabs was 2009; BEAST was 2011, and was a huge global news story because of how widely deployed TLS was.
by zmmmmm | 2025-12-09 21:01:58+00:00
I think Aider is closest to what you want.

The chat interface is optimal to me because you often are asking questions and seeking guidance or proposals as you are making actual code changes. On reason I do like it is that its default mode of operation is to make a commit for each change it makes. So it is extremely clear what the AI did vs what you did vs what is a hodge podge of both.

As others have mentioned, you can integrate with your IDE through the watch mode. It's somewhat crude but still useful way. But I find myself more often than not just running Aider in a terminal under the code editor window and chatting with it about what's in the window.
by benjiro | 2025-12-09 21:02:12+00:00
> It is also equally odd to me that people want to cling so hard to C, when something like Rust (and other modern languages for that matter), have so much nicer eco systems, memory safety aside.

Simplicity? I learned Rust years ago (when it was still pre release), and when i now look at a lot of codebases, i can barely get a sense what is going on, with all the new stuff that got introduced. Its like looking at something familiar and different at the same time.

I do not feel the same when i see Go code, as so little has changed / got added to it. The biggest thing is probably generics and that is so rarely used.

For me, this is, what i think, appeals for C programmers. The fact that the language does not evolve and has been static.

If we compare this to C++, that has become a mess over time, and i know i am getting downvoted for this, Rust feels like its going way too much in the Rust++ route.

Like everybody and their dog wants something added, to make Rust do more things, but at the same moment, it feels like its repeating the C++ history. I have seen the same issue with other languages that started simple, and then becomes monsters of feature sets. D comes to mind.

So when you see the codebase between developers, the different styles because of the use of different feature sets, creates this disconnect and makes it harder for people to read other code. While with C, because of the language limits, your more often down a rather easier way to read the same code. If that makes sense?
by tmsbrg | 2025-12-09 21:03:05+00:00
As I said in another comment, I'm against immortality because old people need to make way for new generations. But this comment is cute. I like the idea that we'd be there and we're able to see how people are doing, but we're not influencing the world anymore. Though I could also imagine at some point it could become depressing in bad times when there's nothing you can do, or boring after tens of thousands of years of repetition. I can also imagine some bad spirits trying to break out and influence worldly affairs.
by quesera | 2025-12-09 21:03:09+00:00
A corporation does not provide services to shareholders.

A municipality is charging residents for services. Obligations are progressive (by necessity), and indexed to assessed property value (as a practicality), rather than equity or income.

Municipal operations get more expensive with inflation, and with resident demands (ballot initiatives, etc). They are never zero, and must be tied to something in the real world.

These payments are collected as a tax, because that is the only lever available to municipalities.

I see your point, but I think it's a category error.

You are taxed on realized property capital gains, beyond a certain amount ($500K?) for principal residence (anywhere you've lived two of more of the last five years). And for a non-principal residence there is no threshold.
by porksoda | 2025-12-09 21:03:14+00:00
The first time i asked it about some code in a busy monorepo and it said "oh bob asked me to do this last week when he was doing X, it works like Y and you can integrate it with your stuff like Z, would you like to update the spec now?"... I had some happy feelings. I dont know how they do it without clobbering the context, but it's great.
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 21:04:19+00:00
> Saudi Arabia and the US are bound by oil but Saudi Arabia is not a reliable ally beyond that.

Oil is not an important part of the future. Why does Trump think it is?

> The relationship with Europe is very different and a much deeper alliance and cultural alignment (the Western world).

Ce n'est plus le cas.

Trumps Agenda schadet den europäischen Wirtschafts- und Militärinteressen.

La agenda de Trump es muy visible en sus intentos de interferir en las agendas políticas internas de la UE.

Trumps dagsorden ses endda som en trussel mod suveræniteten, da den ikke udelukker militær magt til at tage kontrol over Grønland.

(Meanwhile, the US loses its mind over Spanish; Και χρησιμοποιεί μόνο ελληνικά για αδελφότητες και γυναικείες αδελφότητες, which are strange and alien to us).

The extent of cultural alignment today is that we use American software and online services and watch American shows, and through those services the use of the term "Black Friday"; but when we try to enforce our standards on online services, the Americans get all upset and how dare we have our own rules.

Religiosity may be officially quite high in much of Europe, but in practice, we don't take it anything like as seriously as the USA seems to (and I'm saying that as someone who even went to a Catholic school when I was growing up in the UK); E anche quando le nostre valute hanno qualcosa da dire su Dio, troviamo un po' sciocco dire "una nazione sotto Dio". By and large, we don't want things like the 2nd Amendment, which the USA considers to be a "god given right"; and Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, even the UK are a lot more open about sex and sexuality than anywhere I've seen in the USA. Completely different relationship with alcohol and food and cars and planes and national parks. The EU is what "small-government" Republicans say they want from the US federal government, while EU Republicans want to get rid of kings. EU nations are sovereign and free to leave, US states are not. Nie wszyscy używamy tej samej waluty. We celebrate the founding of universities multiple times older than the nation of the USA. Instead of fireworks for Independence Day as in the USA, the UK has them for "remembering a Catholic who failed to blow up the houses of parliament night". The USA does not care for Morris dancing and cheese rolling any more than the UK cares for the Superbowl or Thanksgiving.

Trade just isn't that much of a tie, and what tie it does bring is weakened by Trump's tariffs.

The historical connections are mostly the USA being filled with people whose ancestors fled Europe rather than current knowledge, and again this is likely to get worse thanks to Trump's behaviours here.
by lynndotpy | 2025-12-09 21:05:38+00:00
Good point, I worded that incorrectly and should have been more specific. OP trained an LLM from scratch, but it's GPT-2 and with even worse performance than the GPT-2 which OpenAI shipped a few years ago.

I can't edit it now, but OP did not train a useful LLM from scratch. In editing for clarity and tone I think I omitted that away. Somebody searching for a reproducible way to produce a usable model on their own 3090 won't find it in this post. But someone looking to learn how to produce a usable model on their own 3090 will be educated on their post.

"Not a useful LLM" is not a knock on the OP! This is an _excellent_ educational and experiential post. It includes the experimentation with different models that you'll never see in a publication. ANd it showcases the exact limitations you'll have with one 3090. (You're limited in training speed and model size, and you're also limited in how many ideas you can have cooking at once).

The "experiment at home, train a model, and reproduce or fine-tune on someone elses better GPU" is tried and true.

(Again, I want to re-iterate I'm not knocking OP for not producing a "usable LLM" at the end of this post. That's not the point of the post, and it's a good post. My only point is that it's not currently feasible to train your a useful general-purpose LLM on one 3090.)
by Arodex | 2025-12-09 21:05:41+00:00
>But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point.

And how is that supposed to happen once the rich and powerful who finance and own the rights to that immortality tech succeed in their research?

In a world where basic health care is barely accessible in the US and under constant attack, how is immortality supposed to be given to the common men and women? Through asinine "work requirements", like Medicaid? Through UnitedHealthcare's insurance?
by icoder | 2025-12-09 21:05:41+00:00
Totally agree if the AI or search results are a (relatively) direct answer to the question.

But what if the AI is used to build up a(n otherwise) genuine human response, like: 'Perhaps the reason behind this is such-and-such, (a quick google)|($AI) suggests that indeed it is common for blah to be blah, so...'
by ModernMech | 2025-12-09 21:05:54+00:00
My favorite use for LLMs with Rust is using them as a macro debugger; they provide better error messages than the errors Cargo can provide. It's cool to take a macro and ask the LLM to do an expansion of it, to see what it would look like. Or, to take Rust code and ask the LLM to create a macro for it.
by gh02t | 2025-12-09 21:05:55+00:00
To be fair to e.g. Baldur's Gate, finding game breaking builds appeals to many people in the core audience of that sort of game along with classic TTRPG players. Making those builds harder to achieve by accident is a good thing, but doing away with them entirely would probably be detrimental for the intended audience. True brilliance is also have systems that make that sort of build still fun to play, e.g. BG3 has some pretty amusing hidden interactions if you steamroll events you're not supposed to be able to win.
by benjiro | 2025-12-09 21:06:03+00:00
I can feel ya ... Nothing more fun then vibe coding b-tree, ART, LSM, Double pointer b-tree, bw-tree, ... and so many other storage solutions relying on different indexes, compressions etc.

And having them fight it off between each other. To see where the issues are with each methode, what works better. Doing that without vibe coding the hell out of it, will take months of work, but with vibing and some cash, you do it in a few days.
by JellyBeanThief | 2025-12-09 21:07:30+00:00
> One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.

Other commenters here are doing that too, more or less. But yeah, no one's proposing forced immortality. We have a cultural habit of assuming our right to choose for everyone else, we see people doing it even when they're actually advocating for universal rights to choose.

If you're sufficiently bored at age 450 or 45, go ahead and end your life. Your life belongs to you, not to other people. Just don't harsh the mellow of the person who's happy reading books until age 45,000.
by still_grokking | 2025-12-09 21:07:36+00:00
Just for context, a lot of people in the community think that this syntax change was the best thing that happened to Scala since its inception.

Also the silent majority thinks that the people who still lament over that change are just a very vocal minority.

Almost all Scala 3 code uses the new syntax, no matter how loud a few people cry. Similar situation to systemd on Linux…
by godelski | 2025-12-09 21:07:55+00:00
Hard to say but to back his claim that he was programming since the 90's his CV shows he was working on stuff that's clearly more than your basic undergraduate skill level since the early 2000's. I'd be willing to bet he has more years under his belt than most HN users. I mean I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's, and this guy has been programming most my life. Though that doesn't explicitly imply experience, or more specifically experience in what.

That said, I think people really under appreciate how diverse programmers actually are. I started in physics and came over when I went to grad school. While I wouldn't expect a physicist to do super well on leetcode problems I've seen those same people write incredible code that's optimized for HPC systems and they're really good at tracing bottlenecks (it's a skill that translates from physics really really well). Hell, the best programmer I've ever met got that way because he was doing his PhD in mechanical engineering. He's practically the leading expert in data streaming for HPC systems and gained this skill because he needed more performance for his other work.

There's a lot of different types of programmers out there but I think it's too easy to think the field is narrow.