MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scuff3d | 2025-12-16 19:47:10+00:00
A guy at work did a demo of an agent work flow for some higher ups (we have chatbots but haven't adopted agents yet). He raved about how after writing a several hundred line spec, being extremely specific about the technology to use, and figuring out where to put all the guardrails, he was able to get Claude to generate weeks worth of code. When all was said and done it was like 20k lines of code between implementation, tests, and helper tools. Along the way he acknowledged you have to keep a close eye on it, or it will generate functions that pass tests but don't actually do their jobs, tests that pass but don't test anything, and a bunch of other issues.

To people with little to no practical software experience, I can see why that seems incredible. Think of the savings! But to anyone who's worked in a legacy code base, even well written ones, should know the pain. This is worse. That legacy code base was at least written with intention, and is hopefully battle tested to some degree by the time you look at it. This is 20k lines of code written by an intern that you are now responsible for going through line by line, which is going to take at least as long as it would have to write yourself.

There are obvious wins from AI, and agents, but this type of development is a bad idea. Iteration loops need to be kept much smaller, and you should still be testing as you go like you would when writing everything yourself. Otherwise it's going to turn into an absolute nightmare fast.
by stuffn | 2025-12-16 19:48:00+00:00
I think the counter-point to that is what I experience.

I agree it can be energizing because you can offload the bullshit work to a robot. For example, build me a CRUD app with a bootstrap frontend. Highly useful stuff especially if this isn't your professional forte.

The problems come afterwards:

1. The bigger the base codebase generation the less likely you're going to find time or energy to refactor LLM slop into something maintainable. I've spent a lot of time tailoring prompts for this type of generation and still can't get the code to be as precise as something an engineer would write.

2. Using an unfamiliar language means you're relying entirely on the LLM to determine what is safe. Suppose you wish to generate a project in C++. An LLM will happily do it. But will it be up to a standard that is maintainable and safe? Probably not. The devil is in the mundane details you don't understand.

In the case of (2) it's likely more instructive to have the LLM make you do the leg work, and then it can suggest simple verifiable changes. In the case of (1) I think it's just an extension of the complexity of any project professional or not. It's often better to write it correct the first time than write it fast and loose and then find the time to fix it later.
by cameldrv | 2025-12-16 19:48:01+00:00
Yes it's one thing to say that game theory is inevitable, but defection is not inevitable. In fact, if you consider all levels of the organization of life, from multicellularity to large organisms, to families, corporations, towns, nations, etc, it all exists because entities figured out how to cooperate and prevent defection.

If you want to fix these things, you need to come up with a way to change the nature of the game.
by hylaride | 2025-12-16 19:48:11+00:00
Considering how much government spending goes to the elderly, either directly via programs like OAS and tax benefits or indirectly via healthcare, and it was only a matter of time before young people question their position in it all (higher schooling tuition/debt, bad job market, expensive housing, etc). OAS doesn't even start getting clawed back until personal income is over $90K and is only fully clawed back at $150K! And it's double that for a couple!

The timing of the last election was perfect for Carney when there was a window where the whole country was going WTF with Trump and PP was still railing against various "woke" grievances and mentioning Trudeau by name. The fact that he wasn't turfed after not only losing the election that was his to win, but also losing his seat, is everything wrong with the myopic federal Conservative Party (whose core members refuse to "compromise" with the rest of the country).

There is a real generational tilt happening and young Canadians no longer defaulting to left leaning ways of thinking (not that they ever were as much as people thought).
by trhway | 2025-12-16 19:48:28+00:00
great engineering effort was spent to make software at FAANG built on clear service oriented modular architectures, and thus easy to develop for. Add to that good organization of process where engineers spend most of their time doing actual dev work.

Enterprise software is different beast - large fragile [quasi]monoliths, good luck for [current] AI to make a meaningful fixes and/or feature development in it. And even if AI manages to speed up actual development multiple times, the impact would be still small as actual development takes relatively small share of overall work in enterprise software. Of course it will come here too, just somewhat later than at places like FAANG.
by simonw | 2025-12-16 19:48:43+00:00
This morning I attended and paid attention to three separate meetings and at one point had three coding agents running in parallel solving some quite complex problems for me.

It's now 11:47am and I am mentally exhausted. I feel like my dog after she spends an hour at her sniff-training class (it wipes her out for the rest of the day.)

I've felt like that on days without the meetings too. Keeping up with AI tools requires a great deal of mental effort.
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-16 19:49:22+00:00
I see people with no coding experience now generating PRs to a couple of repos I manage.

They ask a business question to the AI and it generates a bunch of code.

But honestly, coding isn't the part that slowed me down. Mapping the business requirements to code that doesn't fail is the hard part.

And the generated PRs are just answers to the narrow business questions. Now I need to spend time in walking it all back, and try to figure out what the actual business question is, and the overall impact. From experience I get very little answer to those questions.

And this is where Software Engineering experience becomes important. It's asking the right questions. Not just writing code.

Next to that I'm seeing developers drinking the cool-aid and submitting PRs where a whole bunch of changes are made, but they don't know why. Well, those changes DO have impact. Keeping it because the AI suggested it isn't the right answer. Keeping it because you agree with the AI's reasoning isn't the right answer either.
by mindcrash | 2025-12-16 19:49:30+00:00
Microsoft "suddenly" does not seem to want you to run your own CI, which is a key part of running your own SCM. And this decision miraculously happens the moment a lot of big orgs are looking at self-hosting a cost effective (because open source) near 1:1 alternative to GitHub (=Forgejo).

So they make CI a bit cheaper but a future migration to Forgejo harder.

In fact they could easily pull off some typical sleazy Microsoft bullshit and eventually make it a shit ton harder to migrate out of GitHub once you migrated back in.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-16 19:49:36+00:00
This study questions the fMRI method itself, not the statistical analysis (you're right that the dead salmon study was challenging the way statistical analysis is done). Basically, this study claims that the association between the BOLD signal measured by fMRI and actual brain activity is quite weak, and they are even anti-correlated in 40% of cases.

There is no statistical analysis that can save you if your interpretation of a signal is wrong (for example, you can't get information about personality from phrenology, regardless of what statistical analysis you try to apply to the data). That's not to say that we need to just trust this study implicitly - I'm just trying to describe how serious of a problem to the field their claim is.
by skdhshdd | 2025-12-16 19:49:44+00:00
How do you handle innate LLM biases? I forget which model, but when asked to edit pro Zionist vs pro Palestinian content it showed heavy bias in one direction.

LLMs let you cover more ground but the fundamental problem of “who to trust” still remains. I don’t see how one can ever be used to strip political spin. It’s baked in.
by chankstein38 | 2025-12-16 19:50:08+00:00
This is what I was going to say. My whole goal when setting up sensing projects is to eventually get it to a point that I can automate it. And I'm just a DIY dude in his house. I've been working on the detection of cars through vibrations detected by dual MPUs resonating through my house. I don't mean to imply I've had great success. I can see the pattern of an approaching car but I'm struggling to get it recognized as a car reliably and to not overcount.

But yeah, totally been doing projects like this for a long time lol not sure why OP implies you wouldn't do that. First thing I thought was "Oh man I want to put it in the lake near me and see if I can't get it detecting fish or something!"
by pferde | 2025-12-16 19:50:23+00:00
The two examples the grandparent post mentioned are not really evolution, but rather making everything sound bombastic and sensationalist. The end game for that trend is the cigarette brand ad billboard in Idiocracy, where a half-naked muscular man glares at you angrily and going "If you do not smoke our brand, f* you!"

Sounds more like de-volution to me.
by underlipton | 2025-12-16 19:50:37+00:00
Contemporary AI is bad in the same way a Walther P.38 is bad: it's a tool designed by an objectively, ontologically evil force specifically for their evil ends. We live in a world where there are no hunting rifles, no pea-shooters for little old women to protect themselves, no sport pistols. Just the AI equivalent or a weapon built for easy murder by people whose express end is taking over the world.

...Okay, now maybe take that and dial it back a few notches of hyperbole, and you'll have a reasonable explanation for why people have issues with AI as it currently exists. People are not wrong to recognize that, just because some people use AI for benign reasons, the people and companies that have formed a cartel for the tech mainly see those benign reasons as incidental to becoming middle men in every single business and personal computing task.

Of course, there is certainly a potential future where this is not the case, and AI is truly a prosocial, democratizing technology. But we're not there, and will have a hard time getting there with Zuckerburg, Altman, Nadella, and Musk at the helm.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-12-16 19:50:39+00:00
I've just had this topic with friends. How can finland and the nordics be further up than, say, spain? Have they ever been? Sure, materialistic safety is better up there. But the way of living, at least in my experience, is way higher. Look at suicide rates and alcoholism and such.

I'll spoil it: - Finland 38 - Norway 71 - Spain 137

(fun fact: USA is 31)

ranked by suicide. If you visit it, and the vibes and feelings you have don't match the statistics, the statistics are shit I'd say. And maybe cities and rural areas destroy this statistic. But what do I know (but the article agrees with me)
by xnx | 2025-12-16 19:50:44+00:00
Great to have continued competition in the different model types.

What angle is there for second tier models? Could the future for OpenAI be providing a cheaper option when you don't need the best? It seems like that segment would also be dominated by the leading models.

I would imagine the future shakes out as: first class hosted models, hosted uncensored models, local models.
by jrowen | 2025-12-16 19:50:54+00:00
> If they were getting taken down I'd heartily agree with you.

At some point it won't be worth it to maintain them, hopefully.

> I still largely get the experience that after I buy a toilet seat for example on Amazon, Amazon then regularly shows me ads for additional toilet seats, as though I've taken up throne collecting as a hobby or something.

This is definitely a thing, I feel like it's getting better though and stuff like that drops off pretty quickly. But it still doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching the same 30 second TV commercial for the 100th time, I just swipe or scroll past, and overall it's still much better than seeing the lowest common denominator stuff.

> I mean, I personally loathe the way my attention is constantly being redirected, or attempted to be, by loud inane bullshit. I tolerate it, of course, what other option does one have, but I certainly wouldn't call it a good or healthy thing. I think our society would leap forward 20 years if we pushed the entirety of ad-tech into the ocean.

I hear you, the attention economy is a brave new world, and there will probably be some course corrections. I don't think ads are really the problem though, in some ways everything vying for your attention is an ad now. Through technology we democratized the means of information distribution, and I would rather have it this way than having four TV channels, but there are some growing pains for sure.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-16 19:51:09+00:00
Oh I'm not at all joking. It's better at evaluating quality than producing it blindly. Tell it to grade it's work and it can tell you most of the stuff it did wrong. Tell it to grade it's work again. Keep going through the cycle and you'll get significantly better code.

The thinking should probably include this kind of introspection (give me a million dollars for training and I'll write a paper) but if it doesn't you can just prompt it to.
by tcyrus | 2025-12-16 19:51:20+00:00
Have you looked into using DynamicUser [0] with {Cache, Logs, State}Directory [1]?

[0] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
by reactordev | 2025-12-16 19:51:40+00:00
So your point is, Minecraft uses voxels on a unit scale. Red faction uses voxels differently, so Minecraft wins?

I get the appeal of Minecraft but Notch didn’t invent this stuff as much as you would love to believe. He simply used it in a way that made it easy to understand. To the point where people like you are explaining it to me like I have never played it. I have. I was one of the first testers.

Almost all of Minecraft is ripped off other games. World creation, dwarf fortress. Mining, dig dug. The only original thing was The Creeper.
by snovymgodym | 2025-12-16 19:51:43+00:00
For much of the last 5 years, I felt like the cost of computers and tech generally has been one of the few inflation debuffs I observed.

In terms of both inflation-adjusted and absolute dollar amounts, it seemed like Macbooks, prebuilt PCs, and Windows laptops were getting cheaper at the same time that specs and performance improved.

Looks like that's over now.
by pxc | 2025-12-16 19:51:51+00:00
My company uses GitHub, GitLab, and Jenkins. We'll soon™ be migrating off of GitLab in favor of GitHub because it's a Microsoft shop and we get some kind of discount on GitHub for spending so much other money with Microsoft.

Scheduling jobs, actually getting them running, is virtually instant with GitLab but it's slow AF for GitHub for no discernable reason.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-16 19:52:52+00:00
People bring up the concept of disincentivizing cars all the time. Many activists in local politics in urban areas have ideological problems with mass car use, and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies.

The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).

I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.

Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.
by bccdee | 2025-12-16 19:53:13+00:00
> This leads to authors having to re-explain their thinking in detail

What I like about RFCs (or similar documents) is the ways they work to prevent this. Recently I was involved in planning an initiative without a document like this, and we had to keep explaining and re-explaining the motivation for our decisions to stakeholders and higher-ups. With a document (assuming everyone reads the document before giving feedback), most questions get pre-empted; the ones that don't only need to be addressed once, because the answers end up in the version of the doc which you show to the next person.

Certainly I think it's worth being selective about who you're soliciting comments from, to avoid a too-many-cooks situation, but rare is the project that doesn't need anyone's approval or feedback. Presenting a big fat document gives a sense for the amount of thought that has gone into the design, which quells the kind of off-the-cuff "why not X?" comment you might get in response to a boxes-and-arrows chart and a high-level summary.
by thesuitonym | 2025-12-16 19:53:13+00:00
It was just the style at the time. There weren't a lot of HTML editors, even in 2001, and those that existed typically defaulted to an entirely blank page. People mostly wrote web pages in something like an emacs, vim, or notepad. Dreamweaver and Frontpage existed back then, but DW was only really popular with professionals, and nobody ever really used FP.

This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write, and could be displayed by just about any web browser. Compatibility and low resource usage was important back then.
by smt88 | 2025-12-16 19:53:18+00:00
Eich chose to resign due to internal and external protest in the form of petitions and resignations.

No one forced him to do anything, and Mozilla itself certainly didn't force him out.

His free speech was met with the free speech of others, and he decided it was too painful to stay in that spotlight.

How would you prefer it to have gone?
by inetknght | 2025-12-16 19:53:22+00:00
Even asking it to do little tests, Claude 4.5 Sonnet Thinking still ends up writing tests that do nothing or don't do what it says will do. And it's always fucking cheery about it: "you're code is now production-ready!" and "this is an excellent idea!" and "all errors are now fixed! your code is production-ready!" and "I fixed the compiler issue, we're now production ready!"

...almost as if it's too eager to make its first commit. Much like a junior engineer might be.

It's not eager enough to iterate. Moreover, when it does iterate, it often brings along the same wrong solutions it came up with before.

It's way easier to keep an eye on small changes while iterating with AI than it is with letting it run free in a green field.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-12-16 19:53:32+00:00
But Orion has the exact same issue that we are facing now with Chrome and Edge and Firefox. Orion is funded by Kagi, so it's a money losing venture. If Kagi folds tomorrow, who will pick the pieces and continue its' development?

Replace Orion with Chrome and Kagi with Google and you will find that we are in the same exact boat. Browsers cost money to maintain. Money has to come from somewhere. If the general public does not want to pay then who does?

Furthermore, what makes you think that Kagi will not one day do the same exact thing that Google has done with Chrome? Are you willing to bet that it won't happen?

And I am not here to bash on Kagi, I am one of their customers but I will not use Orion for the same reason I don't use Chrome.
by sunshine-o | 2025-12-16 19:53:34+00:00
Yes and he is writing like an MBA/Product Manager (or is it the AI?)

Actually he is most likely a drone. Meaning he is speaking like he believes he is the CEO of a public company talking to the shareholders, so of course he talks about how AI is changing software.

But guess what Mozilla is not a public company, there is no stock to pump and the thing it really miss is its users. Going from 30% to less than 5% market share in 15 years with a good product. Actually I am pretty sure the users who left just do not want to much AI.

But he is an MBA drone so he is just gonna play the same music as every other MBA drone.
by clickety_clack | 2025-12-16 19:53:36+00:00
On the ground you don’t have to fling tons of sensitive electronics to orbital speeds, you can have someone pop by to check whether everything is ok if you get an alert, you have a thick atmosphere cutting down solar radiation, you can cool everything relatively cheaply, and you can run fiber and power cables directly into the building. In space ou have to design super robust and self maintaining machinery. It’s a cool marketing stunt, but I don’t get the economics behind doing it for real.
by lapetitejort | 2025-12-16 19:53:42+00:00
Most of the places within public transportation range are also within biking range, so I prefer biking. The end result is the same: one less car off the road.

Now if you say "What about all the crazy drivers??" think about this: have you ever considered that you might be the crazy driver? Maybe not 100% of the time, but maybe one day you're stressed so you speed up to get through a red light, or you really need to read this text because it's important. You only need to be a crazy driver for 30 seconds to end someone's life. Something that's almost impossible to do on public transportation or on a bike.
by tarsinge | 2025-12-16 19:53:53+00:00
Yes the problem is not whether LLM have value, but whether they will add enough value in the next two three years to pay for the hundred of billions of trillions needed to match the expectations. OpenAI has to find more than a trillion by the end of the decade, project Stargate still has 500 billions to find, etc. Also add fast depreciation on everything invested. The ZIRP playbook of building a monopoly for years before turning a profit cannot work here, models are commoditizing fast so no moat there either, and capabilities as a function of compute have plateaued.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-16 19:53:59+00:00
> "vibe coding" only sounds cool if you don't know how to code but horrific if you do.

Disagree. Vibe coding is even more powerful if you know what you're doing. Because if you know what you're doing, and you keep up with the trends, you also know when to use it, and when not to. When to look at the code or when to just "vibe" test it and move on.