MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grouchy | 2025-12-08 03:43:04+00:00
These apps will likely require extensive documentation.

The question is: Why expose it to the user if you can use an LLM to surface only the relevant information, contextualized to what they are doing?

We use this in our app, and it reads our docs to provide context when rendering the UI. I hope that most users never actually read our docs, and eventually learn to ask our app.

It can generally show the right UI, help them configure it, and use docs to ground it.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-12-08 03:43:49+00:00
I recently heard a C-suite executive at a unicorn startup describe a particular industry as made up of small-scale, prideful craftsmen who will be unable to compete with agentic AI.

I don't know how much "VCs and tech tycoons" want to undermine coders specifically, but they see a huge opportunity to make money by making things much more efficiently (and thus cheaper) than they can be made now. The way to they plan to do that is to reduce the cost of labor. Which means either automating away jobs or making jobs much less specialized so that you don't need a highly-paid craftsman.

Think about Henry Ford setting up an assembly line where a worker sits at the same location and performs the same action all day, every day. You don't need a highly-skilled, highly-paid person with leverage and power to do that job.
by NBJack | 2025-12-08 03:43:54+00:00
Perhaps the sky already fell a while back?

I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon, but Siri seems to have stagnated. The big "Apple Intelligence" capabilities of the iPhone 16 haven't exactly landed. The Vision Pro seems to be on at least a partial depreciation path.

The only real innovation I've seen in the last decade has been the M line of chips. Mind you, these are undeniably really good; but even that hasn't changed the market share that much (though it is going up and trending well).
by analog31 | 2025-12-08 03:44:34+00:00
I've worked in this business. Non-invasive blood glucose monitoring has been a holy grail of analytical science for 50+ years. I've known two people who have gone bankrupt trying to do it.

The spectrum contains signatures of hundreds of compounds. All of the variation has to be accounted for. It's actually a ridiculously hard problem.

Still, holy grails being what they are, I'm still excited when I see that someone is giving it another chance.
by youarentrightjr | 2025-12-08 03:45:03+00:00
> Where are you getting this from?

I seriously doubt you're operating sincerely in this thread, given your ability to cite Revlon. But on the off chance, start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

> And nothing about public companies says they can’t be structured in a way that sometimes undermines some shareholders.

See above.
by em-bee | 2025-12-08 03:45:26+00:00
the only way to improve education is to train more and better teachers. that's even completely independent of projects like OLPC. asking if training teachers is feasible is simply the wrong question. arguing that it is expensive is the wrong argument.

education and teacher training is the only way to achieve progress in this world. and if training is expensive or difficult to achieve then that's a challenge we need to overcome, not an excuse not to do it.
by gruez | 2025-12-08 03:45:51+00:00
>or even zero-click exploits.

You'd need a VM to safely contain any exploits, although you're probably safe from 0days if you're just doing some run of the mill ad clicking. Nobody is burning a 6-7 figure 0day on a public ad network, when they need to save that for targeted attacks like politicians/journalists, so keeping your browser reasonably up to date will be sufficient.
by terminalshort | 2025-12-08 03:46:02+00:00
> In practice, however, several of the programs that seem to offer the most generous benefits are severely underfunded, so relatively few families are actually able to obtain them. For example, according to congressional testimony from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 68 percent of poor families with children received Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996. By 2015, after the welfare reforms of the Clinton era, benefits from TANF, which replaced AFDC, reached just 23 percent of poor families with children, according to the same source. Similarly, just 8 to 12 percent of eligible families receive child care benefits from the CCDF, and just 24 percent of those eligible receive Section 8 housing vouchers.

This is complete insanity.
by thephyber | 2025-12-08 03:46:14+00:00
Dollar Tree and Dollar General are sometimes located in the poor part of a city, but most of their locations are in areas which are too poor to sustain good margin businesses. Rural towns with a single road and only 1-2 gas stations, etc. their core business is to offer smaller and smaller portions to maintain profits while rival stores go under. They are so prolific, they can get giant companies (think drinks, household items, and pharma) to create smaller and smaller portioned SKUs over time.

The businesses were originally just exploiting a gap in the market, but then PE realized that they could just buy out these local monopolies.
by jdironman | 2025-12-08 03:46:14+00:00
I am going to give this a shot, but using a method I have been using lately with subagents. Basically, what I do is have it create an Architect, Executor, Adjudicator subagents. Architect breaks any ask down into atomic and testable subtasks that take 1-3 minutes 'dev' time. Executor (can spawn more than one) implements them. Then adjudicator reviews that they are to spec / requirements. This all happens in subagent files + a runbook.json in the .claude folder of a project. Its based on a paper* that was featured on here a while back actually [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09030
by wpietri | 2025-12-08 03:47:17+00:00
I feel like I've already answered the how question elsewhere. But the short version is a product-driven kanban-ish approach with frequent releases, small units of work, and engaged product management focused on actual real-world goals. This approach originated 25 years ago in Kent Beck's "Extreme Programming". Which did start with estimates, but teams doing well at it quickly realized (via said regular reflection) that they could do without it and still deliver well.

That some random person on the internet who wouldn't have hired me anyhow will now not hire me is a blow I'll have to learn to live with. But I have literal decades of stakeholders happy working this way. One way that happens is that they pick a date and then we built what fits between now and then. So they get the date, but no promises about what will get delivered.

In practice people like this better because beyond a certain very coarse level, estimates are about feelings of engagement and control. What this approach gives them instead is not just feelings, but actual engagement and control. What they get from me is not some unreliable bullshit date, but a commitment to deliver useful things early and often, so that we can together discover something better than their initial visions.

And yes, of course I accept this from people who do work for me. My side hustle is starting a pinball museum. When volunteers take on repairing a just-arrived machine, I never ask them for estimates. I ask them to focus on doing it right. They discover problems, figure out how to fix them, and try it out to see if there are more problems. The work takes as long as it takes. Or I hired a friend to design the logo. I never asked for a date. We iterated on it, discovering an number of things along the way, including through user tests. It took a lot longer than I would have guessed, and that's great, because it turned out better than I could have hoped.

I understand that this is unfamiliar to people, and apparently it's quite upsetting. But I swear this works. There are more things, Horatio.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-08 03:47:47+00:00
My root-cause analysis:

I was visualizing Scala method definitions and associated the language's type inference with keyword use, thus bringing C++'s "auto" keyword to mind when the long-since deprecated "register" keyword was the correct subject.

It would appear LLM's are not the only entities which can "hallucinate" a response. :-D
by youarentrightjr | 2025-12-08 03:49:25+00:00
> All that means is that controlling shareholders can't use the company as a piggy bank and raid it to fund their other ventures

Yes, you're getting it now.

> It doesn't mean the business has to be "sustainable" or whatever. In fact, it's perfectly legal for the board to sell to a "vulture" PE firm that will sell the business off for parts, as long as the sale price is good enough.

As discussed elsewhere in this thread - the sale itself is required to maximally benefit the shareholders.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-12-08 03:49:42+00:00
It doesn't strike you as a bit...illogical to state in your first sentence that you "understand how humans work under the hood" and then go on to say that humans don't actually "understand" anything? Clearly everything at its basis is a chemical reaction, but the right reactions chained together create understanding, knowing, etc. I do believe that the human brain can be modeled by machines, but I don't believe LLMs are anywhere close to being on the right track.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-08 03:49:50+00:00
That's the upshot of what he's saying. But how the cross pollination happens -- crossing over to another plane of thought -- is I think the real point. That is: Cross-pollination between programming languages is a good thing, and therefore we must often force ourself to think outside of our narrow way of thinking in order to find new ways, or else we will dig ourselves into a trench (or find ourselves at a local maxima in the design space of languages).
by throw10920 | 2025-12-08 03:49:55+00:00
Here's one about an ex-Apple employee (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-10/ex-apple-...) stealing secrets, another about a series of hacks targeting aerospace companies (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/feds-say-chinese...), Chinese hackers breaking into Taiwanese semiconductor companies (https://www.wired.com/story/chinese-hackers-taiwan-semicondu...), another one about aerospace IP theft (https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21118569/ho...), and finally here's one from the EU (not the US - https://www.ft.com/content/0d48a5dc-9362-11ea-899a-f62a20d54...) how China abuses IP more than any of their other trading partners.

...and of course the completely insane fact that China has been running on-the-ground operations in the US (and other countries) to discredit, harass, blackmail, and kidnap Chinese who are critical of the government (https://www.npr.org/2020/10/28/928684913/china-runs-illegal-... and https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/eight-individuals-ch...) - INCLUDING CITIZENS OF OTHER COUNTRIES (https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/detained-blogger-revealed-...).
by tbrownaw | 2025-12-08 03:52:33+00:00
> If I ask you how long it'll take to add a new database field, and you've added a new database field 100s of times in the past and each time they take 1 day, your estimate for it is going to be very spot-on.

But in the software world, predictable and repetitive tasks are also the kinds of tasks that are most easily automated

The slow part isn't following a written "log in and run ALTER TABLE" runbook, it's the review of "does this solution make sense given what we're trying to do".
by 9rx | 2025-12-08 03:53:08+00:00
> the “equation of capitalism and markets” is a tragic misconception

Must be a big city isolation thing? In rural areas co-ops are a common part of every day life. The internet is provided by a co-op, the store is a co-op, the gas station is a co-op, etc. It is impossible in that environment to not see that shared ownership and markets fit together just fine.
by trueno | 2025-12-08 03:53:20+00:00
i don't really care about dye (or liquid glass) but i do feel like it's an alarm of sorts that Srouji stated he'd probably take off without tim cook at the helm. I dunno what that signals, i'm less inclined to think it's a "i just really like tim, man" and more of a "this incoming leadership can get bent". Apple also just picked up the meta lady that helped draft the patriot act. i dunno. What remains to be seen is whether or not Apple maintains its core tenets or if they start slipping on things like privacy, ads, and forcing AI in everyone's face. They undoubtedly leave a buttload of money on the table never pursuing these things. whole shakeup feels like it was driven by wall street earlier in the year, there were headlines about apple being in serious trouble for missing out on AI. I dunno feels like some game of thrones opportunism within apple leadership just played out. apple fans are dorks in that they think such a shakeup is in response to liquid glass and the iphone air being a boring phone. i like apple devices, this is kinda freaky i can't lie. it would actually suck if their chip division started stalling if srouji bounces, it would suck infinitely more if a new leadership was here to redefine apple values and suddenly we have a proverbial apple version of satya nadella at the helm who's here to blast you with ads and subscriptions and forced AI.
by techwizrd | 2025-12-08 03:53:27+00:00
I've had good results from the James Hoffman recipe [0], although I brew inverted. You can push the plunger down with just the weight of resting your arm on the plunger. For something very different, you can brew something not-quite-espresso using the Fellow Prismo cap for the Aeropress.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6VlT_jUVPc
by cameronh90 | 2025-12-08 03:54:46+00:00
The OLPC project clearly didn’t achieve its aims, but how would they have known that without trying?

More recently, the impact of smart phones on the developing world has been transformational, suggesting some of the ideas behind OLPC may have been good, but the specific implementation lacking. Thanks to smart phones, developing communities now have access to media in global languages, online education, finance, communication, markets (without having to travel for miles), disaster recovery, health resources and much more.

You can even now see rural villages themselves prioritise phone infrastructure over many things that on the surface seem more important - such as by fixing the phone charger before they fix the plumbing!
by wpietri | 2025-12-08 03:55:20+00:00
I addressed the rest elsewhere, but done well a lack of estimates makes people more accountable. If I am shipping something every week (or as is common for my teams, more often), stakeholders can directly evaluate progress. There's no snowing them with paperwork and claims of progress against semi-fictional documents. They see what they see, they try it out, they watch people use it.

The reality of use is what we in software are ultimately accountable to, and that's what I am suggesting people optimize for. Closing that feedback loop early and often builds stakeholder trust such that they stop asking for elaborate fantasy plans and estimates.
by throw10920 | 2025-12-08 03:55:21+00:00
> these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the journal for accepting the paper. they don't see the loss of reputation to be a personal scar because they instead attribute blame to the game.

I have a relative who lived in a country in the East for several years, and he says that this is just factually true.

The vast majority of people who disagree with this statement have never actually lived in these cultures. They just hallucinate that they have because they want that statement to be false so badly.

...but, simultaneously, I'm also not seeing where you see the authors of the papers - I only see hallucitation authors. e.g. at the link for the first paper submission (https://openreview.net/forum?id=WPgaGP4sVS), there doesn't appear to be any authors listed. Are you confusing the hallucinated citation authors with the primary paper authors?

In that case, I would expect Eastern authors to be over-represented, because they just publish a lot more.
by ehnto | 2025-12-08 03:56:26+00:00
It was a 2005 model, so it should have been possible. However the article isn't super clear on where exactly the software is running, and the transmission controller and engine control unit can be interlinked in various ways. Especially more modern vehicles, it would be entirely possible to write code that disallowed shifting if it was an automatic. We have no idea just how poorly orchestrated this system was and what features were affected.

I don't know enough about 2005 Camry's though, so I wouldn't speculate much further than that.
by coderenegade | 2025-12-08 03:57:38+00:00
What's the difference between autogenerated C code and compiling to assembly or machine code? Seems academic to me.

The main flaw of autocode is that a human can't easily read and validate it, so you can't really use it as source code. In my experience, this is one of the biggest flaws of these types of systems. You have to version control the file for whatever proprietary graphical programming software generated the code in the first place, and as much as we like to complain about git, it looks like a miracle by comparison.
by JimDabell | 2025-12-08 03:57:48+00:00
Yes, Claude Opus 4.5 recently scored 100% on SvelteBench:

https://khromov.github.io/svelte-bench/benchmark-results-mer...

I found that LLMs sometimes get confused by Lit because they don’t understand the limitations of the shadow DOM. So they’ll do something like throw an event and try to catch it from a parent and treat it normally, not realising that the shadow DOM screws that all up, or they assume global / reset CSS will apply globally when you actually need to reapply it to every single component.

What I find interesting is all the platforms like Lovable etc. seem to be choosing Supabase, and LLMs are pretty terrible with that – constantly getting RLS wrong etc.
by seizethecheese | 2025-12-08 03:58:51+00:00
> Low margins aren't an indicator of anything. They are a component of financial return in addition to capital. One does not make sense without the other. In high frequency trading, they are making 1/100000th of a percent on a trade, that is a very high return business if you can do this millions of times a day. Similarly, if I run a housebuilder then I need a 20% margin because I am going to be turning over my inventory across multiple years.

This is wrong because quarterly reporting normalizes for expenses in same period
by wpietri | 2025-12-08 03:59:30+00:00
I'm not upset. But as far as I can tell you've wandered off into some sort of philosophical space when I'm speaking of practicalities, without apparent recognition of the transition. I thought that was a bit ridiculous, something from the "wow dude have you ever really looked at your hand" school of conversation, so I made a joke. Apparently the joke didn't land for you. Alas.
by adolph | 2025-12-08 03:59:43+00:00
> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?

This is a bit like asking if public equity has ever done anything good for anyone outside of its investors. It really depends on what is meant by "anything good."

Has any company that has taken venture capital (a variety of private equity) ever done anything good for anyone outside the VCs?

Private equity is more often associated with late stage takeovers and reorganizations than with startups, however. An example might be the privatization and refocus of Dell. Was a refreshed Dell good for its workforce and customers?

https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/private-equity/the-lea...
by ctoth | 2025-12-08 04:00:49+00:00
> When you have a thought, are you "predicting the next thing"

Yes. This is the core claim of the Free Energy Principle[0], from the most-cited neuroscientist alive. Predictive processing isn't AI hype - it's the dominant theoretical framework in computational neuroscience for ~15 years now.

> much of our experience of the world does not entail predicting things

Introspection isn't evidence about computational architecture. You don't experience your V1 doing edge detection either.

> How confident are you that the abstractions "search" and "thinking"... are really equatable?

This isn't about confidence, it's about whether you're engaging with the actual literature. Active inference[1] argues cognition IS prediction and action in service of minimizing surprise. Disagree if you want, but you're disagreeing with Friston, not OpenAI marketing.

> How does Heisenberg's famous principle complicate this

It doesn't. Quantum uncertainty at subatomic scales has no demonstrated relevance to cognitive architecture. This is vibes.

> Companies... are claiming these tools do more than they are actually capable of

Possibly true! But "is cognition fundamentally predictive" is a question about brains, not LLMs. You've accidentally dismissed mainstream neuroscience while trying to critique AI hype.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045353/active-inference/
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-08 04:01:14+00:00
>Petrol cars are vastly more likely to catch fire, but are a bit easier to extinguish.

Petrol cars at most marginally more likely to catch fire, if at all. They cannot catch fire by simply being submerged in a foot of water, like an EV can. They are far easier to extinguish than EVs, which are practically unextinguishable and can reignite weeks or months later. You can use a fire extinguisher on a petrol car fire if you catch it early (they are usually electrical fires). If you catch an EV fire early, your best course of action is to run away as fast as possible.

Ships are not known to be subject to fires because the types of fuel they use are not generally so volatile, and they are literally surrounded by water which can be pumped to the deck or wherever to drown any fire. Some use diesel, which is difficult to light even with a match. Others use heavy crude oil that looks like tar and would be similarly difficult to ignite accidentally. A battery fire on a ship would be a HUGE problem, as we have seen with ships carrying EVs.

I think another often-overlooked risk of EVs is the arson risk. Even if batteries are less likely to catch fire (in the first few years of use, if you baby them), a bad actor can start an unextinguishable fire by shorting out or otherwise igniting a battery pack. This is easy to do and devastating.
by XorNot | 2025-12-08 04:01:48+00:00
It also leads to fundamentally wrong conclusions: a related issue I have with this is the use of anthropomorphic shorthand when discussing international politics. You've heard a phrase like "the US thinks...", "China wants...", "Europe believes..." so much you don't even notice it.

All useful shorthands, all which lead to people displaying fundamental misunderstandings of what they're talking about - i.e. expressing surprise that a nation of millions doesn't display consistency of behavior of human lifetime scales, even though fairly obviously the mechanisms of government are churning their make up constantly, and depending on context maybe entirely different people.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-08 04:02:16+00:00
In August, Ancestry revised the terms and conditions on its site to make it clear that its services were off-limits "for law enforcement purposes" without a legal order or warrant

Good. This is the minimum I expect from Ancestry (I have >30k names in it). If cops want to leverage the data compiled by volunteers, get a warrant and get the oversight that comes with that.

a legal order or warrant ... can be hard to get, because of privacy concerns.

"A legal order" implies a subpoena; they require a signature from a magistrate. This is typically the opposite of hard to get.

A warrant can be hard to get if police do not provide sufficient cause or are asking for and excessively broad scope.

The difficulty level of getting a warrant goes way, way down when police submit the information the judge needs to properly evaluate it.

But police really really prefer to search without agreeing to boundaries. Including cold case officers, it seems.