MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by moron4hire | 2025-12-08 17:07:59+00:00
I'm not asking about averages. I'm asking about any. There is no need to perform an academic research study to prove that humans are capable of writing original code because the existence of our conversation right now is the counter-example to disprove the negation.

Yes, it is true that a lot of humans remix existing code. But not all. It has yet to be proven that any LLM is doing something more than remixing code.

I would submit as evidence to this idea (LLMs are not capable of writing original code) the fact that not a single company using LLM-based AI coding has developed a novel product that has outpaced its competition. In any category. If AI really makes people "10x" more productive, then companies that adopted AI a year ago should be 10 years ahead of their competition. Substitute any value N > 1 you want and you won't see it. Indeed, given the stories we're seeing of the massive amounts of waste that is occurring within AI startups and companies adopting AI, it would suggest that N < 1.
by rixed | 2025-12-08 17:08:33+00:00
I've seen similar behavior. I can understand that the relief that comes with having finaly a label put on the box one feels trapped into; But then the goal should be to climb out of that box. A diagnosis is only good if it helps fight the condition, after all.

I believe the issue is more broad than that though. I believe the issue comes from the very strong belief in our modern world that our behavior, our ideas and moods are what we are, what we have always been and always will be. That comes with our global theory of mind that one's character is given once and for all, from birth to death. I insist that this is a belief that is not universal, for some other cultures ideas and moods are transient external inhabitants of our minds. And indeed, people do change along their lifetime, and sometimes immensely; once you have witnessed these changes a few times you start to realize how even conditions that are usually considered impossible to cure, can actually be fixed.
by rpastuszak | 2025-12-08 17:08:55+00:00
Ha, it's been ages since I heard about Prezi, thanks!

Related to Prezi, but not my earlier comment: I'm actually messing with a little toy project: a Playdate (http://play.date) remote to control presentations/media/Claude Code

It would be (useless, but) fun to be able to control the animation transitions (like those in Prezi) using the crank!
by jpmattia | 2025-12-08 17:09:02+00:00
Maybe they could add a helpful paper clip to improve sales.

Edit: Or better still, convince all of their customers to throw away perfectly good hardware and upgrade to one with a single extra chip, creating a hazardous waste epidemic for landfills as a nice side effect. It's especially important to do this in the middle of a RAM and HDD shortage.

Really, I'll just never be half the great business strategist that these guys are. <sigh>
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-08 17:09:20+00:00
I'll preface this by saying I was never especially bothered or moved by the non-religious use of "Advent of X", for better or for worse. In fact, my remark is inspired only by your comment, concerning its consistency and who has the stronger case.

Specifically, while it is true that certain kinds of words can become decoupled from their original meanings (which is generally normal), in this case, the usage is not so decoupled, especially given that this usage occurs during the religious season of Advent and with the intentional allusion to the religious season of Advent. (Otherwise, what is "Advent of X" without its religious origin and which takes place at the exact same time during the year?)

You can make a much stronger argument that the non-religious usage is a kind of cultural appropriation. That would make your concern entirely backwards. Your wish is to keep it "neutral" to please those who don't practice Advent, as you show a simultaneous lack of concern for the tradition it appropriates from. This involves a tacit claim of possessing the authority to do so as well, but if anything, given the source, if anything, the authority belongs not to the appropriators, but to the Church.

One wonders how a "Ramadan of Code" or "Teshuvah of Shell" would be received.

"Neutrality" is, of course, a bunk concept, and the idea that we ought to be guided by what is "nice" rather than what is "good" is a grave misunderstanding of how decisions ought to be made.
by qwertox | 2025-12-08 17:09:40+00:00
Today I got served this video "Earthquake and Liquefaction his Urayasu, Chiba 3/11/2011" [0], which is from the earthquake which caused the huge tsunami in Japan.

I have rarely seen something as scary as this.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGblnPeOXJg
by whizzter | 2025-12-08 17:09:45+00:00
I think the point is that even drivers could be non-trusted and live outside of the kernel and just provide the exact service required with minimal access.

That said, why do we still need drivers in 2025? Most regular printers should be dumb, U-MASS should be dumb, webcams should be dumb, monitors are dumb, etc... very few devices coming really needs custom drivers anymore (even with many customizations we could provide class specific descriptors that drivers could adhere to).
by troyvit | 2025-12-08 17:09:46+00:00
Man they don't solve it for me. They charge much more for using a credit card vs a checking account, especially when going across currencies, and I consider it pretty dumb to share my checking account information around when I can control things much more easily with a credit card. And literally any fee they charge is more than what nano charges. It's just that nobody takes nano :(
by vel0city | 2025-12-08 17:10:56+00:00
I agree with this take. Win95's 4MB minimum/8MB recommended memory requirement and a 20MHz processor is seen as the acceptable place to draw the line but there were graphical desktops on the market before that on systems with 128K of RAM and 8MHz processors. Why aren't we considering Win95's requirements as ridiculously bloated?
by hashmap | 2025-12-08 17:11:18+00:00
I am literally asking you to show me what you are talking about.

Who retired early? What did they make with Lisp? Do you have a link to that thing they made? Was it actually something special about Lisp or did they just happen to use Lisp while making something that could have just been as easily - or more easily - done with something else? Is that real-world, specific, material outcome replicable by other people and they should know about it?
by NaOH | 2025-12-08 17:11:21+00:00
I would recommend the 2021 three-part Acquired podcast series on Berkshire. Episodes are long, though there are transcripts if you prefer reading over listening.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/berkshire-hathaway-part-i

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/berkshire-hathaway-part-ii

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/berkshire-hathaway-part-iii

That said, I'll note this quote from Buffett:

>“I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more money than I've ever made,” Buffett told the audience, referencing the remarkable 680% surge in Apple's stock since Berkshire first began acquiring shares in early 2016.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-says-embarrass...
by outside1234 | 2025-12-08 17:11:31+00:00
Microsoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of talent in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most expensive nor the bottom 20% least expensive.

But this also means they end up with average products. They don't have the talent to do something exceptional.

This has worked well for them when they can just come in and copy something (say AWS in Azure) and not pay the innovation cost, but AI seems different for some reason, perhaps in the same way search was. You need the top 20% in order to really be successful.
by prmoustache | 2025-12-08 17:11:38+00:00
I work for a company that has so much bureaucracy and silos that teams maintain wiki pages with links and routing on how to create tickets for specific tasks and wether there is a specific mandatory information needed in order to not have your ticket just closed as incomplete without an explanation.

Sometimes a team unilaterally decide to change the process, info is sent to a random number of mailbox/managers who may fail to pass the info. Some entire teams just put themselves in away status 24/7 and do not respond to direct messages.

So yes I can believe his story. Sometimes in these kind of companies you just don't know who and how to ask for something and you just hope someone knows someone who might know.
by TZubiri | 2025-12-08 17:11:52+00:00
>I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.

>Proceeds to provide their opinion.

At this point you are wayyyy behind schedule, even if you hold an anti-crypto position like me, you recognize the benefits of Bitcoin, otherwise you would claim that even the most popular/first/best coin is completely useless.

I'd invite you to seek to understand the initial arguments on Bitcoin instead of trying to convince us of your views on Bitcoin. Like, the topic is very deep and you are stuck in the first step.
by coldtea | 2025-12-08 17:11:52+00:00
>That assumes the status quo ante was a meritocracy.

No, it just assumes it was more of a meritocracy than actively hiring based on irrelevant guiding principles like counter-balancing historical wrongs.

A blind process would both be neutral to the ideology that caused the wrongs (racism and such bias) and based on far more meritocracy.
by yatopifo | 2025-12-08 17:11:53+00:00
The piano analogy is incomplete. First, of all, a piano constructs sounds by combining multiple string sounds in a unique manner. But the idea behind transforms (Fourier being a particular case) is that you can take a function (“sound”) that isn’t necessarily produced by combining components and you can still decompose it into a sum of components. This decomposition is not unique in the general case as there are many different transforms yielding different results. However, from the mathematical (and i believe, quantum mechanical) standpoint, there is full equivalence between the original function and its transforms.

The other important point is that Fourier doesn’t really give you frequency and loudness. It gives you complex numbers that can be used to estimate the loudness of different frequencies. But the complex nature of the transform is somewhat more complex than that (accidental pun).

A fun fact. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle can be viewed as the direct consequence of the nature of the Fourier transform. In other words, it is not an unexplained natural wonder but rather a mathematical inevitability. I only wish we could say the same about the rest of quantum theory!
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-08 17:12:04+00:00
> If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

The problems with the technologies is that the "robust database" guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.

Remove the currency from a blockchain and you have a merkle tree. (To be even further unfair, considering currencies in aggregate, blockchains are always a merkle tree. How many forks of Bitcoin are we up to now?)

Merkle trees are incredibly useful, and yes a sort of robust database. I use git every day, but I have to respect that git branches and git forks are real phenomena and coordination of branches/forks always a real ongoing concern when working with git. Not a lot of institutions want a "robust database" which is easily branched/forked. You still need a coordination engine to keep the tree a "chain" somehow. The currencies for better and a lot worse (given how many seem isomorphic to scams) are the coordination engine that still seems most (distributed/transactional/"robust") useful to making a "blockchain" out of a merkle tree.
by lxgr | 2025-12-08 17:12:25+00:00
You had a positive outcome, but yes, despite that, I don't know if that was based on a sound decision. It's possible to vastly misjudge the expected value of a trade and still come out ahead.

> This was the only singular "crazy gamble" I had ever made and I knew full well it was crazy.

The only thing that matters is whether it's positive EV (and whether your methodology of coming up with the EV itself is sound). If you didn't have any explicit or implicit notion of the EV at the time you made it... It was probably not a sound investment decision, despite being profitable.
by neilalexander | 2025-12-08 17:13:13+00:00
I would think that if they actually spent the time and money fixing the core functionality of their core products (like Windows and Office) that they might have a much easier time promoting things like Copilot. Instead they leave their users wondering why they're so hell-bent on shoehorning AI into a Start menu that takes whole seconds longer to open than it should or into Windows Search that regularly fails to find installed programs or local files.
by jasomill | 2025-12-08 17:13:17+00:00
While Cook isn't a product visionary, and never pretended to be, he's also not a mere caretaker: before he was CEO, he was responsible for the design and implementation of Apple's global supply chain and manufacturing operations as they exist today.

To torture your analogy, he designed and built the tracks and related infrastructure that kept Jobs' trains running on time.

Delivering products to customers, as you may recall, was always as important to Jobs as the design of the products themselves.
by aseipp | 2025-12-08 17:13:33+00:00
I think the biggest benefits of colocation are, in rough approximation of the order I encounter them:

1) Various read-only editor features, like diff gutters, work as they usually do. Our editor support still just isn't there yet, I'm afraid.

2) Various automation that tends to rely on things like running `git` -- again, often read-only -- still work. That means you don't have to go and do a bunch of bullshit or write a patch your coworker has to review in order to make your ./run-all-tests.sh scripts work locally, or whatever.

3) Sometimes you can do some kind of nice things like run `git fetch $SOME_URL` and then `git checkout FETCH_HEAD` and it works and jj handles it fine. But I find this rare; I sometimes use this to checkout GitHub PRs locally though. This could be replaced 99% for me by having a `jj github` command or something.

The last one is very marginal, admittedly. Claude I haven't had a problem with; it tends to use jj quite easily with a little instruction.
Show HN: Autoschematic is a Rust-y ops layer that works with existing infra [video]
by pfnsec | 2025-12-08 17:13:54+00:00
Greetings nerds,

I was an infra/devops consultant for several years and found that terraform et al were really bad fits for certain use-cases/teams. So, I wrote my own framework to target them.

Autoschematic is built around a push-pull model, just like git. It can automatically resolve state drift in either direction, and automatically scan and import existing infrastructure into code.

I'm taking it out of beta in the next release (0.12.0). Come try it out!

https://github.com/autoschematic-sh/autoschematic https://autoschematic.sh/
by delichon | 2025-12-08 17:14:02+00:00
> morals for machina that is grounded in physics

That is fascinating. How could that work? It seems to be in conflict with the idea that values are inherently subjective. Would you start with the proposition that the laws of thermodynamics are "good" in some sense? Maybe hard code in a value judgement about order versus disorder?

That approach would seem to rule out machina morals that have preferential alignment with homo sapiens.
by Zigurd | 2025-12-08 17:14:07+00:00
On consulting engagements, 0% of the time are Jira and git provisioned correctly for an outside consultant. I used to be appalled at being paid for two or three days of waiting for the IT guy to fix this. Now I use the time to find cleaning supplies and deep clean my cubicle and chair. People do look at me funny, but I feel better not just sitting there reading.
by TZubiri | 2025-12-08 17:14:25+00:00
>Crypto helped me step up my cybersecurity skills forever, when someone was exploiting a race condition in my AI app, I only knew how to prompt AI to do atomic operations because of popular smart contract hacks.

What? Prompting AI is barely a skill, let alone a cybersecurity one.

> I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage.

There's like 50000 of the former, and 1000 of the latter.
by TomasBM | 2025-12-08 17:15:13+00:00
The abuse of claims and citations is a legitimate and common problem.

However, I think hallucinated citations pose a bigger problem, because they're fundamentally a lie by commission instead of omission, misinterpretation or misrepresentation of facts.

At the same time, it may be an accidental lie, insofar authors mistakenly used LLMs as search engines, just to support a claim that's commonly known, or that they remember well but can't find the origin of.

So, unless we reduce the pressure on publication speed, and increase the pressure for quality, we'll need to introduce more robust quality checks into peer review.
by lcuff | 2025-12-08 17:15:21+00:00
I thought there was too much ambiguity to several of the challenges:

I gave up after the following exercise:

On the eighth day of Shell my true love gave to me Eight elves in Santa's Workhop/ ... Hint: Try finding files named after Elves and moving them to the Workshop/ directory.

It turns out, all they want is the files in the ./Elves directory to the ./Workshop directory. But I didn't figure that out.
by reenorap | 2025-12-08 17:15:28+00:00
Private equity is even more insidious than you can imagine.

How it works is that PE will buy a profitable company, and then strip out everything it can, and then load on the debt. In exchange for loading on the debt, the banks will give preferential treatment to the other companies in the PE fund's portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.

In addition, they will force the company to purchase services and even entire companies from the PE company's fund portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.

Then, after a year or so, PE will IPO the company and sell to retail suckers. Mutual fund companies will hold their nose and buy into the IPO even though everyone knows it's a shitty company. The reason why is because the PE company will give early access to investment in their other more promising companies. <---------- This is the part everyone misses.

So PE companies will make a lot of money by stripping every part of the company out, maximizing and leveraging its portfolio of other companies so that banks and mutual fund companies will dump money into them. It's literally like harvesting a farm animal and carving absolutely everything of value off of it, as well as leveraging other companies to dump into it with the promise of access to other companies in its portfolio.

And then they turn around and dump the carcass into the hands of retail suckers, either through their mutual funds like Fidelity or straight onto the markets.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-12-08 17:15:30+00:00
A successful cryptocurrent probably has to start by first having a market that is dissatisfied with the available traditional currencies. If that market were to introduce on (with good tech), then it could immediately see the cryptocurrency used for its intended purpose. At that point, if it avoided the attention of speculators (not forever, just long enough for it to get its feet underneath itself) or could discourage those speculators somehow, what happens then?

Is there some other failure mode waiting, or does it take off?
by Ancapistani | 2025-12-08 17:15:32+00:00
> It's like having your accounts synced into Apple Mail (or some other Google app). The difference is that it organizes your contacts and keep your data stored in the cloud

It's not the same, though - it's a non-standard service with the specific, stated purpose of data exfiltration.

The issue here isn't so much the fact that it keeps contacts available after the account is disabled; it's that it's the stated intent.

To put it another way - if I wanted this, why wouldn't I just sync my email via Thunderbird on a personal device?

> That's for sure, but, the idea here is more a CRM than a social network

I have something similar for myself, but it's just iCloud Contacts with lists and tags.

> The problem doesn't happen only to company emails...

I think this is your core issue - messaging. While I don't know if the problem you're trying to solve is one other people have, I do know that the value proposition of "you may lose your company email" is... well, it's clearly going to be a violation of contract at minimum for most employees, and potentially even a criminal act.
by KolmogorovComp | 2025-12-08 17:15:52+00:00
The point is that, your "investment" was pure gambling. See how I can replace bitcoin with lottery ticket.

> I am going to buy $1000 in lottery tickets one time and leave it alone because there seems to be some potential here. > I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10 hours or it will be worth a lot.
by toast0 | 2025-12-08 17:15:54+00:00
It really depends on your release plans.

If you are actually going to (attempt to) support multiple releases, semantic major.minor.patch is very useful.

If you're really just going to support only the latest, semantic versioning is probably not so helpful, year.version is easy to figure out chronological differences with.

githash as the only version identifier is a sign that you don't intend to help users track versions. This could be the right choice if you want to release something without expectations of use.
by manmal | 2025-12-08 17:16:33+00:00
Hey XY, Sorry for the cheeky reach-out. I‘ve already applied to the XZY role and just wanted to say I‘m really interested because it seems like it could be very good fit for both sides. I see you‘ve been using [tech] a lot, which I‘m personally a fan of, because it has [upside]. Btw, are you also using [tangential other tech]?

Or alternatively, ask some questions around team structure and roadmap - good leads like it when people are interested in what is likely their field of work.
by troupo | 2025-12-08 17:17:19+00:00
> No blockchain could prevent that type of lie.

Indeed

> What a blockchain could enable is honest transparency.

Wat?

> An attempt to pass off a lie as truth would be much more damaging to a company's reputation than would be just not addressing an issue.

Do you perhaps live in reality? When was the last time "reputation" of a company was in any way shape or form damaged by any lies?

> I would agree that as a regulatory measure, this would not solve any problem. But as a self-imposed measure, it builds consumer trust.

Indeed, it solves no problems except imaginary ones from the land of fairy tales.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-08 17:17:22+00:00
There were a series of Dilbert comics that spoke to this.

Dilbert’s company buys an “artsy” startup (represented by a chap with a goatee and a ponytail).

Dilbert comments something like “We get your energy and skill, and we provide … an endless supply of 3-ring binders.”

To which the chap replies “I hear that if your name goes into a binder, you lose your soul.”
by micromacrofoot | 2025-12-08 17:17:30+00:00
Very true, I would also caution this with test projects with real humans in the hiring process. Comparing one-shots from actual people is unfair too, and often the most valid assessment comes with giving them feedback and seeing how they respond to it.

Aside from that point: if you are reading this and making people do a project as part of the hiring process, you should absolutely be paying them for their time (even a token amount).