MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danieka | 2025-12-30 00:04:24+00:00
I thought that the article would be about if we want AI to be effective, we should write good code.

What I notice is that Claude stumbles more on code that is illogical, unclear or has bad variable names. For example if a variable is name "iteration_count" but actually contains a sum that will "fool" AI.

So keeping the code tidy gives the AI clearer hints on what's going on which gives better results. But I guess that's equally true for humans.
by snuxoll | 2025-12-30 00:04:44+00:00
We don't have go go to the extremes of employers that pay what is effectively poverty wages relative to cost of living.

The household that brings home $80K/yr would always spend a larger percentage of their income on taxable consumption, than an executive that takes home multiple million per year. Progressive income tax brackets are a better tool for making sure those who are able to pay a larger share of the common good, do so.

Unfortunately, we still have not come up with a realistic way to deal with the hoarding of wealth - both by individuals, as well as corporations like Apple with massive warchests. Even some more broadly accepted ideas like a LVT have some issues if the future really does trend towards "AI" displacing people from their jobs.

One way or another, the reality is that the tools we have right now have persisted because they do their job well when politicians act in good faith and don't implement poor fiscal policy emphasizing short-term gains that result in long-term pain. But, they're still fundamentally flawed, and something is going to have to change if we do see dramatic changes to society in the coming decade due to developing technologies.
by toss1 | 2025-12-30 00:04:58+00:00
The solution is to stop taxing human labor/income and to start taxing every financial transaction, from buying a piece of candy, a computer component, a service, a house, a data center, or a share of stock, etc.

Just the volume of Equities + TRACE fixed income/structured + munis + real estate is over $200Trillion. A mere 3% tax on those would put the $6T US budget in large surplus. Add $1.7 Quadrillion of ovrerall payments and a 0.3% tax on transactions (yes, $3 per $1000) would also put the US budget in surplus.

All of it would also involve far less tracking and bureaucratic overhead, and indeed far less govt intrusion into people's lives (i.e., not digging into every source and amount of income).
by aspenmartin | 2025-12-30 00:05:22+00:00
Nope, you read their code, ask them to summarize changes to guide your reading, ask it why it made certain decisions you don’t understand and if you don’t like their explanations you change it (with the agent!). Own and be responsible for the code you commit. I am the “most senior”, and at large tech companies that track, higher level IC corresponds to more AI usage, hmm almost like it’s a useful tool.
by casualscience | 2025-12-30 00:05:54+00:00
If you work at a megacorp right now, you know whats happening isn't people deciding to use less libraries. It's developers being measured by their lines of code, and the more AI you use the more lines of code and 'features' you can ship.

However, the quality of this code is fucking terrible, no one is reading what they push deeply, and these models don't have enough 'sense' to make really robust and effective test suites. Even if they did, a comprehensive test suite is not the solution to poorly designed code, it's a band aid -- and an expensive one at scale.

Most likely we will see some disasters happening in the next few years due to this mode of software development, and only then will people understand to use these agents as tools and not replacements.

...Or maybe we'll get AGI and it will fix/maintain the trash going out there today.
by pca006132 | 2025-12-30 00:06:23+00:00
> as tasks that junior developers might perform don't match your skills, and are thus boring.

Yeah this sounds interesting, and matches my experience a bit. I was trying out AI for the Christmas cuz people I know are talking about it. I asked it to implement something (refactoring for better performance) that I think should be simple, it did that and looks amazing, all tests passed too! When I look into the implementation, AI got the shape right, but the internals were more complicated than needed and were wrong. Nonetheless it got me started into fixing things, and it got fixed quite quickly.

The performance of the model in this case is not great, perhaps it is also because I am new to this and don't know how to prompt it properly. But at least it is interesting.
by lovich | 2025-12-30 00:06:31+00:00
I was being facetious.

The original capitalist philosophers were incredibly optimistic about how we could use the system to reduce scarcity. I agreed with that viewpoint.

If our current system is one where I put in a dollar of effort, and get 99 cents in return at best, it seems like that optimistic viewpoint no longer applies.

If that’s the case why should I continue to lend my energy to this system instead of lending it to one that gets me removed from the conversation because it’s against our current leaders desires?
by londons_explore | 2025-12-30 00:06:32+00:00
The roofing industry might put 50,000 grams of lead on your roof, slowly dissolving into groundwater around your house from the acidic rainfall and nobody bats an eyelid.

Shoot kilogrammes of lead shot or lead bullets all over national parks and mountains feeding drinking water to cities of millions of people. Go ahead.

Yet use 0.001 grams of lead in a compound to make electronics work, encapsulated in plastic, and suddenly everyone is worried about toxicity.

We are dumb. We should not worry about tiny quantities with big benefits when we haven't yet eliminated huge quantities with small benefits.
by arm32 | 2025-12-30 00:07:23+00:00
Busted. I am a human-in-the-loop.

I think everybody should use LLMs to polish their language. This topic is important to me and I want to communicate as effectively as possible.

I stand by every character of the article regardless of which fancy autocomplete I used to polish it. I use spellcheck, too, and a digital tuner for my guitar.

Just want to reiterate: https://alec.is/posts/ai-employees-dont-pay-taxes/#:~:text=I...
by ear7h | 2025-12-30 00:08:02+00:00
I'm not trying to _convince_ a stranger on the internet whether to use AI for their vibe shelf hobby project; I'm engaging with a project being presented by it's creator. Interesting that you think continuing to use AI is some enormous own against my presumed attempt at persuasion. Sounds like maybe you're the one needing validation for your viewpoint. It's clearly easy to achieve such validation given the evidence in this comment section so, I'm not sure why you're seeking it from me.

As for the main concern in your comment, I did in fact read the blog post; see how I quoted multiple parts, verbatim ("word for word")?. I now understand this audience may not be entirely familiar with literature or reading beyond basic instructions from their preferred datacenter or advertising company, but generally the beginning of a piece of writing (the "introduction") serves as the premise while the end (the "conclusion") describes the abstract ideas a reader should take away from the entire piece. I'll even let you in on a little secret: the word "conclusion" is synonymous with "a judgement following logical steps". As I mentioned in my original comment there is also a middle section which can often be more important or meaningful (to both characters and readers) than the introduction or conclusion. Howver, in this piece of writing it amounted to "I didn't know how to do something so I asked AI and when it didn't do the right thing I asked it again" which isn't a very engaging story (there's a similar famous premise about an "oracle" that can respond to three "queries", however the entertainment relies on this limitation). Anyways, the badic premise seems to be well received already and lacking any interesting description of the process, I chose to engage with the conclusion. The question of taste.

The author believes, or rather instructed an LLM to generate an article from the perspective in which someone belives, generative AI can enable the good taste of someone in prototype hell to come to fruition. But in my original comment I'm making the point that creating something of good taste is inextricably linked to engagement with the medium. But the author shows a willful lack of engagement, with their medium whether that be software or a book shelf.

If you'd like to engage with my original comment in good faith, here are some questions:
* do you really think this project constitutes good taste? for software? for book shelves?
* can someone with an apathy for a craft as extreme the author have good taste?
* might this even be considered bad taste given the technological sensibilities of this forum? (disdain for js bloat, foss, "elegant solutions")
by array_key_first | 2025-12-30 00:08:08+00:00
Look, I'm not looking down at your life choices, I'm just saying it probably sucks and you would probably prefer it if it wasn't like that.

Meaning, I don't think people are commuting 2 hours or three or whatever because they LIKE to. Rather, they're victims of poor poor urban design, and most of them, too, would prefer not that.

I don't think a single soul is moving to Houston because of the commute. They're doing it in spite of the commute. But wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to do that?

Ultimately its optional, it's a choice. We could have Houston without the commute. Everyone could live the life they want without a commute, if we just put in the time and effort to design our urban spaces around that. And, if people really do want to commute - more power. I don't think that's a desire that will ever be rare to find. But we probably shouldn't be optimizing for shit, right? Or, at least, what I think we both agree most people think is shit.
by dimitri-vs | 2025-12-30 00:08:22+00:00
I'm in Claude Code 30+ hr/wk and always have a at least three tabs of CC agents open in my terminal.

Agree with the other comments: pretty much running vanilla everything and only the Playwright MCP (IMO way better than the native chrome integration) and ccstatusline (for fun). Subagents can be as simple as saying "do X task(s) with subagent(s)". Skills are just self @-ing markdown files.

Two of the most important things are 1) maintaining a short (<250 lines) CLAUDE.md and 2) having a /scratch directory where the agent can write one-off scripts to do whatever it needs to.
by zuminator | 2025-12-30 00:08:34+00:00
AR glasses coupled with a sophisticated input device (fingertap? tounguetap?) will eventually be able to fully replace a touchscreen interface. And from then on it'll eventually become dated and rude to resort to pulling out touch screens during a social event.

Mind you, inconsiderate people will be as distracted as ever, and will continue to halfheartedly pretend they're listening to those around them. They'll just need to find a new method to achieve maximal obnoxiousness.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-30 00:08:49+00:00
That's not the endorsement you think it is. Quite the opposite really.

Warren was "cool" 10+yr ago when she was a fairly niche issue academic on the fringes of federal politics. Obama should have made her head of the CFPB as that was here whole thing.

Instead she sold her soul to the DNC and became a useless unremarkable senator who just spews whatever party line drivel the consultants say the median voter is receptive to that day.
by flumpcakes | 2025-12-30 00:09:01+00:00
I personally think that everyone knows AI produces subpar code, and that the infallible humans are just passing it along because they don't understand/care. We're starting to see the gaslighting now, it's not that AI makes you better, it's that AI makes you ship faster, and now shipping faster (with more bugs) is more important because "tech debt is an appreciating asset" in the world where AI tools can pump out features 10x faster (with the commensurate bugs/issues). We're entering the era of "move fast and break stuff" on steroids. I miss the era of software that worked.
by yooogurt | 2025-12-30 00:09:05+00:00
> companies that can afford inflated prices will take advantage of the situation to pull ahead of competitors who can't afford tech at inflated tech

These big companies are competing with each other, and they're willing and able to spend much more for compute/RAM than we are.

> I don’t know what we can do as normal people other than making do with the hardware we have and boycotting Big Tech, though I don’t know how effective the latter is.

A few ideas:

* Use/develop/optimise local tooling

* Pool resources with friends/communities towards shared compute.

I hope prices drop sooner than projects dev tools all move to the cloud.

It's not all bad news: as tooling/builds move to the cloud, they'll become available to those that have thus far been unable or unwilling to afford a fast computer to be mostly idle.

This is a loss of autonomy for those who were able to afford such machines though.
by AndyNemmity | 2025-12-30 00:09:16+00:00
I'm the opposite, I find it straight forward to use all these things, and am surprised people aren't getting it.

I've been trying to write blogs explaining it recently, but I don't think I'm very good at making it sound interesting to people.

What can I explain that you would be interested in?

Here was my latest attempt today.

https://vexjoy.com/posts/everything-that-can-be-deterministi...
by hi_hi | 2025-12-30 00:09:31+00:00
> AI changes that. Now you don’t need to know anything at all.

This is democratisation. Is the cheating the problem, or is the system the problem?

If it's so easy to cheat that a person with no previous knowledge or experience can appear to be very knowledgable and/or experienced by typing a few words into a computer, I would probably suggest the system, and all the gatekeeping and profit extraction that has gone into that system over the years, is the problem.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-12-30 00:09:39+00:00
Not taxing anyone under 500k would remove a very large share of tax revenue. Combining that with higher corporate taxes would be nice, but if it got pushed too high (which it would in this scenario) we would simply see corporate flight from the US to elsewhere or it would eliminate practically all the benefit of lower taxes from the less wealthy as the cost of goods would skyrocket.

There isn't really a silver bullet unless people in the US as a whole culturally become less consumerist and our entire economy is restructured around that fact.
by araes | 2025-12-30 00:09:52+00:00
Standard reply.

In the most recent tax filing season data available (2024), there were tax returns of:

Top 1% Top 5% Top 10% Top 25% Top 50% Bottom 50% All Taxpayers
Number of Returns 1,535,899 7,679,495 15,358,991 38,397,477 76,794,954 76,794,954 153,589,908
Average Income Taxes Paid $653,730 $187,468 $108,251 $50,963 $27,891 $667 $14,279
Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $6,182,180 $7,745,525 $10,613,602 $13,191,209 $1,531,038 $14,722,247

If we then break those into the actual groups, and numbers per group, then we find their Average Per Capita Income

1 2-5 6-10 11-25 26-50 51-100
Number of Returns 1,535,899 6,143,596 7,679,496 23,038,486 38,397,477 76,794,954
Income Taxes Paid (Millions) $1,004,063 $435,594 $222,966 $294,234 $185,068 $51,225
Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $2,309,785 $1,563,345 $2,868,077 $2,577,607 $1,531,038
Average Tax Rate 25.9% 18.9% 14.3% 10.3% 7.2% 3.3%
Average Per Capita Income $2,521,256.28 $375,966.29 $203,573.91 $124,490.69 $67,129.59 $19,936.70

Numbers slightly differ from 2024 IRS Data Book that was published later. 161 million total returns, 2.7T vs 2.2T. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p55b.pdf

From those numbers, being generous with the $100,000 to $200,000 return category, I get 16.6% (26.8M / 161M) made more than $150,000
by throwatdem12311 | 2025-12-30 00:10:08+00:00
I have a hell of a time just getting any LLM to write SQL queries that have things like window functions, aggregates and lateral left joins - even when shoving the entire database schema DDL into the context.

It's so frustrating, it regularly makes me want to just quit the profession. Which is why I still just write most code by hand.
by danparsonson | 2025-12-30 00:10:10+00:00
Well of course it was a figure of speech - if you meant it literally then I would not by prodding you about your medical condition. I was posting in response to your story that a colleague proposed a way of working or technical solution to something, and that this in some way enraged or otherwise upset you. And then you thought that made a good story to share online. That is, as I said, an immature response to a disagreement.

Unless that whole paragraph was a figure of speech, in which case what I said doesn't apply, and we can both go about our days.
by rootusrootus | 2025-12-30 00:10:12+00:00
They are as good as any Tesla, however, and in some areas better. Source: I own a Tesla Model 3 (my second) and I have owned a Bolt in the past, and currently own a Lightning. Aside from towing range, I prefer the Lightning the majority of the time. Tesla does some things better, while Ford excels in other ways. Both definitely have glaring faults.
by strange_quark | 2025-12-30 00:10:17+00:00
I’m also not convinced that any of these models are going to stick around at the same level once the financial house of cards they’re built on comes tumbling down. I wonder what the true cost of running something like Claude opus is, it’s probably unjustifiably expensive. If that happens, I don’t think this stuff is going to completely disappear but at some point companies are going to have to decide which parts are valuable and jettison the rest.
by its_ethan | 2025-12-30 00:10:59+00:00
In those thousands of years of history, did we ever have multiple cities with populations over 10 million people? Did we have electricity demands? Were the agriculture/ food expectations the same?

Are you really trying to make the argument that if a significant chunk of the population is forced into unemployment, that's fine we'll just tax all the stuff that automated jobs away and it'll all just work out? Panic sets in if unemployment hits like 10% because of all the negative consequences it has on societal outcomes. Just assuming the government is gonna magically be able to reallocate resources it gets from taxing the automated systems that replace human work is a pretty insane thing to expect to work imo.

There are a hell of a lot of assumptions baked into your thinking that need to be explained and probably put under more scrutiny.

Take "We don't have to all commit to back breaking labor for ~100% of our functional life just because this is the system most of us were born into and we don't know any better" for example.

No we don't need to do manual labor 24/7, but what people generally do need is a purpose. Purpose here meaning something akin to meeting an expectation that they contribute to their own survival and to the benefit of society, even if abstractly. Take a look at most NEETs and I don't think you're going to find healthy thriving individuals, I think you're going to find people who are resigned to life and checked out. We didn't evolve to sit on our hands.
by pastage | 2025-12-30 00:11:29+00:00
My experience is that very few people understand what I am saying if I really explain things. It is usually better to say obvious nonsense that gets people work in the same direction. I most masscommunication is meaningless until you find the meaning yourself, there are some rather wonderful educators that prove I am wrong. I can only think of one that I have met, and he spent 50% of his time talking about "unrelated" topics. He died, teaching to the end.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-12-30 00:11:34+00:00
It's only a matter of time until the zero-employee unicorn becomes technically possible.

The path there looks like Uber's early playbook:

* Run the company as if AI outputs are attributable corporate acts with liability clearly sitting at the corporate entity level.

* Scale faster than attribution doctrine can be practically enforced.

* Cross the "too big to fail" line. ie: become economically and operationally indispensable.

* Force doctrinal clarification, where courts recognize AI-mediated decision systems as a basis for corporate attribution, without inventing new legal persons.
by azangru | 2025-12-30 00:11:36+00:00
I don't get it either.

Since LLMs emulate human writing, what is it about that sentence that gives away that it was written by an LLM rather than human? Haven't we seen plenty of hollow-sounding self-aggrandizing marketing copies like this one pre-LLMs? What is it that is wrong with this sentence?

Please don't say it's an em-dash...
by notreallyauser | 2025-12-30 00:12:04+00:00
People will make frequent mistakes if you put the privacy decision at a per post level. (And not just average users: see stevey's Google Platforms rant)

Having different apps, chats (Discord servers), accounts (at-a-push) for each privacy circle is much clearer to average users. Migrating a whole group of any size to another platform is hard, hence many of us are stuck with Facebookk in case we get invited to something we don't want to miss on it, but new platforms will continue to emerge and some will succeed.
by fuzztester | 2025-12-30 00:12:14+00:00
Don't worry, all. They (the madmen, er, badmen) will come up with an AI-currency (like crypto) that AIs can "pay" to the govt. as taxes, and all will be hunky-dory - for them and their masters, that is.

For the rest of us - well, life is finite, anyway. So might as well make it finito.

;)
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-30 00:12:14+00:00
My very vibes-based take is that setting up home servers is the dad jeans of tech hobbies. It's kind of arresting how bewildered many young people are when confronted with anything below the UI layer. I think peak tech savviness happened a bit younger than me: maybe mid-late millennial. After that you start getting into the iPad-from-birth generation for whom tech was rarely a challenge. Tech savviness among young folks feels more like it was in the mid-90s. They're infinity more online-savvy, no doubt, but when it comes to knowing anything about how that works, they're cooked.

I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of any that actually made their own and hosted it on their own network.

Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then, where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came into existence which is a lot easier with the base knowledge of how the building blocks worked.
by austinbaggio | 2025-12-30 00:12:39+00:00
You can use it with summaries for sure, but summaries often miss edge cases and long sessions drift. This makes it easier to jump between tasks, come back days later, and reorient without missing something that the summarization or compaction might have gotten rid of. I've often found post-compaction, the memory of even the current session feels so much dumber.
by squigz | 2025-12-30 00:13:17+00:00
> Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio?

Because they didn't know about such a vaccine. We know that remote viewing "exists"

I think that GP's point - that, if such things exist, they would actually be utilized - is a good one. The framing might not be great but it's also not entirely relevant. You could just as easily make a non-capitalism example - like why don't fire departments use them