MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-14 16:46:02+00:00
I’m the last person to defend PE companies. I saw first hand what they were like when I was responsible for integrating acquisitions software. But there seems to be a lot more at play. Taxpayers too cheap to fund infrastructure. The article calls out fundraising drives needed to keep equipment up and running and training.

Why are firefighters volunteers anyway instead of getting paid?

Why should any company create software that they can’t do at a profit - ie rewriting software for a new federal standard?

Every problem is downstream of people wanting government services and not wanting to pay for them.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-14 16:46:40+00:00
I suspect that this is already a big reason why we get so many conflicting signals on "the best coding model". People tune into the style of the model they use the most, and hit snags and friction when they take another model for a spin.

Most iOS users report that Android is a disaster of an operating system, with layers and layers of user frustration. In reality, they actually are just totally in tune with how iOS does stuff. I can only imagine we have something similar going on here.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-14 16:47:02+00:00
1) Get 1Password, 2) use 1Password to hold all your SSH keys and authorize SSH access [1], 3) use 1Password to sign your Git commits and set up your remote VCS to validate them [2], 4) use GitHub OAuth [3] or the GitHub CLI's Login with HTTPS [4] to do repository push/pull. If you don't like 1Password, use BitWarden.

With this setup there are two different SSH keys, one for access to GitHub, one is a commit signing key, but you don't use either to push/pull to GitHub, you use OAuth (over HTTPS). This combination provides the most security (without hardware tokens) and 1Password and the OAuth apps make it seamless.

Do not use a user with admin credentials for day to day tasks, make that a separate user in 1Password. This way if your regular account gets compromised the attacker will not have admin credentials.

[1] https://developer.1password.com/docs/ssh/agent/ [2] https://developer.1password.com/docs/ssh/git-commit-signing/ [3] https://github.com/hickford/git-credential-oauth [4] https://cli.github.com/manual/gh_auth_login
by senordevnyc | 2025-12-14 16:47:09+00:00
This seems really vague. What does "totally unreliable" mean?

If you mean that a completely non-technical user can't vibe code a complex app and have it be performant, secure, defect-free, etc, then I agree with you. For now. Maybe for a long time, we'll see.

But right now, today, I'm a professional software engineer with two decades of experience and I use Cursor and Opus to reliably generate code that's on par with the quality of what I can write, at least 10x faster than I can write it. I use it to build new features, explore the codebase, refactor existing features, write documentation, help with server management and devops, debug tricky bugs, etc. It's not perfect, but it's better than most engineers I've worked with in my career. It's like pair programming with a savant who knows everything, some of which is a little out of date, who has intermediate level taste. With a tiny bit of steering, we're an incredibly productive duo.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-14 16:47:11+00:00
> You appear to be arguing that powerful, unpredictable tools like LLMs need to be run carefully with plenty of attention

I did not say that. I said that most metalworkers familiar with all the downsides (only 1 of which you are referring to here) would avoid using such an unpredictable, uncontrollable, uneconomical blast furnace entirely.

A regular blast furnace requires the user to be careful. A blast furnace which randomly does whatever it wants from minute to minute, producing bad output more often than good, including bad output that costs more to fix than the furnace cost to run, more than any cost savings, with no way to tell or meaningfully control it, is pretty useless.

Saying "be careful" using a machine with no effective observability or predictability or controls is a silly misnomer, when no amount of care will bestow the machine with them.

What other tools work this way, and are in widespread use? You mentioned horses, for example: What do you think usually happens to a deranged, rabid, syphilitic working horse which cannot effectively perform any job with any degree of reliability, and which often unpredictably acts out in dangerous and damaging ways? Is it usually kept on the job and 'run carefully'? Of course not.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-14 16:47:35+00:00
A part of me wants to learn it as well. It looks so alien that it seems interesting to learn.

Because of this conversation I've been reading up on it. There are multiple systems, but for English they all pretty much revolve around representing words phonetically. One form (Pittman) uses different line widths for different sounds, making it work best with a pencil or fountain pen. Gregg doesn't do that. Gregg is most common in the US and Pittman is common in the UK.
by buster | 2025-12-14 16:47:56+00:00
I've not used Claude Claude yet, but why would it be bad if it gains features that people use? Did people ever complain about Photoshop to have too many features demanding some cognitive load? Excel? Practically every IDE out there? There is a reason people use those tools instead of the plain text editor or paint. It's for power users and people will become power users of AI as well. Some will forever stick to chatgpt and some will use an ever increasing ecosystem of tools.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-14 16:48:15+00:00
So tell me why should I spend my time helping cities whose population are too cheap to fund necessary infrastructure? The article pointed out that firefighters are being forced to fundraise just to get their physical equipment fixed.

These same “rural departments” are in areas that claim to hate “big government” and are anti tax and aren’t willing to fund essential services and vote for national politicians who are defunding programs that could help them.

Yes I would be all in favor of my federal tax dollars being redirected to rural areas whose taxpayers can’t fund firefighters so they don’t have to fundraise to buy equipment.
by sherwin27 | 2025-12-14 16:48:18+00:00
OP here. I've been running AI agents in production and noticed they kept hallucinating the current date (thinking it was 2023) due to training data cutoffs. I just contributed a native TimeAwarenessTool and IDGenerationTool to the core CrewAI repo to fix this and enable proper log tracing. Happy to answer questions about agent infra.
by linsomniac | 2025-12-14 16:48:35+00:00
I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I'd really like to see something put together for the Commodore 64 Ultimate that is a, likely assembly based, environment that leverages LLMs to be able to build games and demos and the like. Looking back to my VIC-20 (I couldn't afford the C64, but wanted one desperately), the thing I loved the most about it really was the end result.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the process of programming, but these days I have so many things going on that I rarely have the time either during or after work to learn assembly or do any significant low level programming.

I like what they are doing with the C64 now, but for me to get any joy out of getting an Ultimate I'd really need something that would let me play with it at a higher level than assembly or basic. I could see that being a lot of fun for both my 16yo son and myself.
by firefax | 2025-12-14 16:48:38+00:00
Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police

https://search.worldcat.org/title/39256274

This book going into extreme detail about the East German surveillance state. People tend to hyperfocus on the Nazis due to a morbid fascination with bodycounts, but the GDR was closer in time in both history and comopositions. They had faxes, computers, and many other technologies that made them similar to us, and I worry we forget the lessons of that regime. I read his book during a middle school in school suspension and it was a formative read.

Another good book is "Eichman in Jerusalem", which details the trial of one of the architects of the Holocaust and his claims he was "just following orders... the book examines the "banality of evil".

https://search.worldcat.org/title/385389

Finally, to lighten things up, my most recent new favorite book that's fiction was Convenience Store Woman, about a woman who's been working at a 7/11 for 18 years. I read it during COVID and it's stuck with me as a favorite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convenience_Store_Woman
by DaveZale | 2025-12-14 16:48:45+00:00
It's very harsh to learn this after earning a couple science degrees and working in analytical and research environments where little "bullshitting" is done, although obviously those doing the selling, getting funding, seeking to get hired or promoted, can't avoid some degree of self-promotion as a necessary evil. But now, shameless self promotion and deception tends to be the rule, especially in online marketing, political posturing... we all know it very well now. Anything to get more eyeballs on the screen, better metrics. Of course we were all raised on television advertising, and now we are dealing with an obesity crisis due to heavily promoted junk food, so now, very expensive weight loss drugs are promoted heavily. First some ads make us sick, then others come to our rescue, in that perspective. What Charles Hugh Smith calls, burning the village to save the village. Downvote away, it won't hurt me a bit.
by preommr | 2025-12-14 16:48:46+00:00
Those charts are horribly misleading. There's random articles you can find [0], or just use steamDB to see that (now that steam requires games to disclose ai usage) there's like 10k+ games made that use AI. Also you can see that there's jump in the number of games released from 2023-2024.

Companies like lovable are reporting millions of projects that are basically slop apps. They're just not released as real products with an independent company.

The data is misleading - it's like saying high-quality phone cameras had no impact on the video industry. Just look at how much of network tv is filmed with iphone cameras. At best you might have some ads, and some minor projects using it, but nothing big. Completely ignoring that youtube or tiktok are built off of people's phone cameras and their revenue rivals major networks.

I am sorry, I just don't want to have this conversation about AI and it's impact for the millionth time because it just devolves into semantics, word games, etc. It's just so tiring.

[0] https://www.gamesradar.com/platforms/pc-gaming/steams-slop-p...

[1] https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
by rwmj | 2025-12-14 16:49:13+00:00
Some finance is needed and beneficial. The ability to form corporations and raise money through the stock market enhances many other fields of endeavour.

But this can go too far. In London during 2000-2008, finance consumed every spare IT worker, as well as mathematicians and physicists. Salaries were far higher working for a bank than working in any other IT-related industry or start-up. Did this produce great works? Is London now better off because of this? In a word, no.
by immibis | 2025-12-14 16:49:14+00:00
The problem with GDPR and cookie banners is that GDPR allows the cookie banners to be worded so indirectly. "To improve our service we share collected information with 5723 partners..."

If the law would force them to say "Do you want Larry Ellison to get richer by looking through your webcam? [Yes] [No]" it would be a good law.
by petcat | 2025-12-14 16:49:15+00:00
> The bad thing is that the companies are willing to bombard us with the worst possible cookie banners, in order to monetize our visits.

The EU's own government websites [1] are littered with the same cookie banners. They want the visitor data just as bad as everyone else.

> Maybe the next EU regulation

We don't need anymore EU regulations seeing how bad and thoughtless they already are.

[1] https://european-union.europa.eu/
by tinodb | 2025-12-14 16:49:36+00:00
The work needed for the “I included something in a commit I want split out” [0] seems really complex, and it is something I do often.

Eg with stacked git (stg) this is just: goto, spill, and then refresh/create the stuff I want.

[0] https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/faq/#i-accidentally-changed-f...
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-12-14 16:49:46+00:00
"With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you."

Well, not to me or the people I respect. It's getting very good, but it's like having a recent college grad who obsessively reads documentation. Someone with low skill but very high knowledge, often knowledge they are mixing up or not quite getting right.

I think if Claude is already 'better' at coding than you, maybe think about going back to college to be a lawyer or something. For the rest of us, lets just hope that Claude hits some natural limit before it gets better than us too. If it doesn't hit some limit I think we have a year or two.
by mvkel | 2025-12-14 16:49:51+00:00
I can't help but wonder if this is a bit like a few years ago when comedians were complaining that nobody was laughing at their jokes anymore. They realized that it was a mandate to figure out how to be funny again, because what was considered "funny" had changed.

In this instance, and probably most instances of art/craft, copywriters need to figure out what is creative again, because what is considered "creative" has changed.

I could also see this being the journey that AI customer support took, where all staff were laid off and customers were punted to an AI agent, but then the shortcomings of AI were realized and the humans were reintroduced (albeit to a lesser degree). I suspect the pendulum will swing back to AI as the memory problems are resolved though.
by senordevnyc | 2025-12-14 16:49:59+00:00
I built and grew a SaaS from $0 to $200k ARR in the last year. Putting aside that AI is at the core of the product (we replace some low-skill human labor in a super niche market), I never could have built this product in this timeframe without AI. So when I got laid off from my big tech job six months ago, I'd have just gone to look for another job.

I also know multiple non-technical people who have built little apps for themselves or for their company to use internally that previously would have purchased some off the shelf software.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-14 16:50:05+00:00
But the definition is what we're talking about, not whether you make mistakes. Of course it's important that safe Rust is checked by the compiler, but that's crucially not part of how safety is defined.

I would guess that somebody more on the pulse of C's safety efforts could tell you whether they have a definition of memory safety for C or whether they're comfortable with an existing definition from somebody else.
by grvdrm | 2025-12-14 16:50:37+00:00
Your first problem doesn’t feel new at all. Reminded me of a situation several years ago. What was previous Excel report was automated into PowerBI. Great right? Time saved. Etc.

But the report was very wrong for months. Maybe longer. And since it was automated, the instinct to check and validate was gone. And tracking down the problem required extra work that hadn’t been part of the Excel flow

I use this example in all of my automation conversations to remind people to be thoughtful about where and when they automate.
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-12-14 16:51:18+00:00
Seems to be one of the cases that the academic definition has been simplified in public (quite like theory/hypothesis from science) use and, consequently, adopted by dictionaries making it canonical for many. So your definition is correct from theoretical linguistics perspective but dictionaries also give the broader umbrella definition GP mentions. Ironically dictionaries may've been the reason this distinction was blurred with early lexicographers grouping homographs (logically, spelling in text not relevant) and homophones under an homonym heading.

It's also interesting checking their (Greek originating) etymologies and morphologies. Homo- from omós meaning same, -graph/-phone/-onym from gráphō/phōné/ónoma (ō becoming represented by letter ω in modern Greek) meaning writing/sound/name. And, syn-, equivalent to prefix co-, is from syn (preposition) meaning jointly/together. So respectively, literal meanings, being same writing, same sound, same name, co-named.

Hence about hom/synonym, their difference comes from "name" and "word" being distinct concepts. More specifically, in (Aristotelian) philosophy "name" was tied to essence of things, synonym being "same name, same essence" *, homonym being "same name, different essence". In time "name" and "word" were conflated. Moreover synonym evolved semantically, only retaining the "same essence" as "same meaning", and homonym retained its form. Result being one term being about "many words to same meaning" and the other about "one word to many meanings"**.

*So by ancient philosophy my choice of synonym will've been accurate! But you're right they stand opposite, both then and now.

**And then there's the homonym/polysemy distinction for specifying unrelated/related meanings, essentially reviving Aristotelean essence, and the reason why in dictionaries some words (e.g. bank, see[0]) have multiple entries each with multiple meanings.

[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bank
by pgt | 2025-12-14 16:51:28+00:00
With the help of AI, I made EACL (Enterprise Access ControL), a situated ReBAC authorization library based on SpiceDB, built in Clojure and backed by Datomic: https://github.com/theronic/eacl

EACL replaced SpiceDB at work for us, and would not have been possible without AI.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-14 16:51:50+00:00
> "massive fanfic archives"

Ye gods, that's like saying that youth may not be willing to consume a nutritious, balanced diet but we should rejoice that they are at least consuming vast quantities of sugar and fat. With vanishingly rare exceptions, fanfic is crap in textual form, laden to bursting with literary sins both venal and mortal.
by skydhash | 2025-12-14 16:52:24+00:00
> With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you. Opinionated but friendly. Zero ego.

> Claude was halfway through refactoring a complex auth flow[...] Then I realized: I'd forgotten to mention that one of those files was also used by a cron job.

That is the kind of research you do before you go to refactoring.

> Claude Code freed them from "the anxiety of the first step in programming constantly."

Is there a first step in programming? If there is, that would be thinking because you ought to get a good solution in mind before even typing the first line of code.

...

The whole article feels like someone roleplaying as software developer. Not that there's a barrier or a license to be one, but just that whole piece seems like as accurate as hackers portrayal in movies.
by allears | 2025-12-14 16:52:37+00:00
Well of course a font can't be "woke," that's just the not terribly clever line the government is handing out. What Calibri is, is accessible -- more easily read by people with vision problems. Not necessarily minorities, people of color, or poor people. Even a billionaire with poor vision would appreciate Calibri. In other words, it's helpful. And that's why this administration is determined to stamp it out.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-14 16:52:54+00:00
From an economic standpoint those are both very good reasons, because:

1. Burning the planet on your servers is expensive, offloading it to a client-side LLM is not.

2. Ethics means risk means you won't be SOC compliant, your legal department will be mad, your users will be mad, etc.

The current status-quo of a few giant LLMs on supercomputers operated by OpenAI and Google is basically destined to fail, in my eyes. At least from a business standpoint. Consumer stuff might be different.
by 9rx | 2025-12-14 16:52:57+00:00
> that doesn't throw if the email is invalid

Why can't it 'throw' if the email is invalid? You can — and would — encode that into the contract, detailing exactly what that means, so no problem for the user. They will write their code expecting that condition and everything will be fine. There is nothing special about failure cases. It is only a state, just like every other state.

> At this point, it's fairly clear that you are just thoroughly confused about how any of this works and what is actually possible.

Ad hominem is a logical fallacy. It is surprising that a comment that claims to understand programming language types in great detail would also commit an obvious logical error, given how important logic is in that context. But, stranger things have happened, I suppose. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can take from a logical error. Assuming it was trying to be written in good faith and free of errors, no doubt we'll get a meaningful explanation of what was actually trying to be expressed with code examples to follow. Looking forward to it.
by gipp | 2025-12-14 16:53:14+00:00
Those are completely deterministic systems, of bounded scope. They can be ~completely solved, in the sense that all possible inputs fall within the understood and always correctly handled bounds of the system's specifications.

There's no need for ongoing, consistent human verification at runtime. Any problems with the implementation can wait for a skilled human to do whatever research is necessary to develop the specific system understanding needed to fix it. This is really not a valid comparison.
by satisfice | 2025-12-14 16:53:41+00:00
I agree. A child is a million small datapoints. My son established a strong personality early on that defied our attempts to modify it. Meanwhile he was raised in a relaxed environment that certainly provided no environmental explanation for his fixations.

I was raised with five siblings, yet only I got into fights at school, and made my mother cry on a regular basis. Each of my sibs is similar and each of us is strikingly different, too.
by tmoravec | 2025-12-14 16:53:52+00:00
> In a monorepo, just loading the project consumes ~20k tokens

I don't work on a monorepo, and as an example, what I would consider a mid-size service in my mid-size company is 7M tokens.

I can't but ask: do all people who are so enthusiastic about AI for coding only work on trivial projects?