MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-12-07 21:56:24+00:00
We can solve that question in an intuitive way: if human input is not what is driving the output then it would be sufficient to present it with a fraction of the current inputs, say everything up to 1970 and have it generate all of the input data from 1970 onwards as output.

If that does not work then the moment you introduce AI you cap their capabilities unless humans continue to create original works to feed the AI. The conclusion - to me, at least - is that these pieces of software regurgitate their inputs, they are effectively whitewashing plagiarism, or, alternatively, their ability to generate new content is capped by some arbitrary limit relative to the inputs.
by osigurdson | 2025-12-07 21:56:35+00:00
I've always found this sound, rational ROI driven approach to product management a little off the mark. Software isn't like real estate or investing in TBills - you don't invest $X in development and get a nice 10% annualized return on investment over the next 10 years or something like that despite how seductive such thinking can be.

It is largely a "hits" business where 1% of the activities that you do result in 99% of the revenues. The returns are non-linear so there should be almost no focus on the input estimation. If your feature only makes sense if it can be done in 3 months but doesn't make economic sense if it takes > 6 months - delete feature.
by rangestransform | 2025-12-07 21:56:39+00:00
You can absolutely put your money where your mouth is, today, right now. Upload a picture of your Framework 13 or Thinkpad T/X-series pre-T440, etc.

I presume most of the people on this site make enough to make purchases based on values instead of solely economics.

Alternatively, you can run for government on policies to price in externalities like this. Good luck winning your election!
by sph | 2025-12-07 21:57:25+00:00
Tongue in cheek here, but no wonder you produce little with so many distractions. Two shells full of text, music and IRC open - how is one supposed to concentrate?

I still produce little, but I have come to realize only pure, unadulterated silence free from any sort or distraction, however minimal, is worth anything. When I used IRC, not much was accomplished apart from chatting on IRC.
by pron | 2025-12-07 21:58:13+00:00
Ah, that's a great question, and the answer is in the JEP (https://openjdk.org/jeps/500#Mutating-final-fields-from-nati...).

When running with -Xcheck:jni, you'll get a warning when trying to mutate a final field with JNI.

Now, enabling this check by default without harming JNI performance proved to be too much of an effort. However, mutating final fields with JNI even today can already lead to undefined behaviour, including horrible miscompilation, where different Java methods can read different values of the field, for final fields that the JVM already trusts to be immutable, such as static finals, record components, or a few other cases (indeed, there are non-final fields that the JVM trusts to be assigned only once, and mutating those with JNI is also undefined behaviour). As the compiler starts trusting more final fields after this change, mutating almost all final fields will lead to undefined behaviour. Then again, using JNI can lead to undefined behaviour in many ways.

So to make sure your JNI code isn't mutating finals, test with -Xcheck:jni (as of JDK 26).
by antonymoose | 2025-12-07 21:59:10+00:00
I’ll bite…

I live in a rural area with a Dollar General about a half mile from my neighborhood. For staples, it’s honestly fine. You want a 6 pack and some hot dog buns because you missed it in the Wal-Mart run the other day (15 miles away), it’s great!

You’re not getting fleeced and if you are, the gas savings alone more than make up for it (0.65 per mile per the IRS.)

For folks who depend on the local DG for, idk, clothes and household goods it might be much worse, I don’t shop for those there ever, but on staples it’ll do, especially given the density of stores compared to major chains.
by pests | 2025-12-07 21:59:16+00:00
This is exactly it. There wasn't any complex logic. Just making sure the right fields were mapped, some renaming, and sometimes some more complex joins depending on the incoming data source and how it was represented (say multiple duplicate rows or a single field with comma delimited id's from somewhere else). I would have much rather scanned the LLM output line by line (and most would be simple, not very indented) then hand writing from scratch. I do admit it would take some time to review and cross reference, but I have no doubt it would have been a fraction of the time and effort.
by eagleinparadise | 2025-12-07 21:59:42+00:00
So I work in commercial real estate, obviously a large private equity influenced industry. I've worked in REPE and in other capacities.

There's degrees of PE. Some good, fine, and some worse.

Take real estate development. It's probably one of the suckiest businesses to be in. I know 3 developers who have committed suicide because when things go wrong, your entire life collapses (you put up all your assets in order to obtain construction loans). The litigation, brain damage, and risks are enormous. Increasingly, the payoff is awful (due to worsening legislation and NIMBYism and worse market condiditions)

However, private equity in development I think is a good thing. When there are investors willing to put this money at risk, we get much needed construction of housing (see Austin, TX where rents are falling off a cliff due to over building).

Now look at Los Angeles, which new permits are literally almost non-existent because LA is one of the most hostile places for developers. You can't make money in LA, so there's no capital available.

Then you end up with "affordable" housing developers adding the only supply at $600-900k/unit costs vs the market rate developer at $300-600k/unit.

----

On the other hand, "value add" private equity is much more suspicious. It's more cut throat, easier to end up in crony capitalist situations by operating with a "cut expenses, provide less, make big bucks" model. The people in this world are the kind of guys who have never done anything hard with their hands other than gotten a sore thumb from pounding too hard on their keyboards to adjust their excel model ("Mr. The Model is Always Right") too hard all night long.

This is how we end up with old properties who get flipped 4x each being sold with "upside the seller was too stupid to take advantage of" and ending up in situations where tenants get priced out due to private equity seeking infinite growing returns. Oh and by the way, every previous owner did "lipstick on the pig" jobs because why not try to save costs and make your levered IRR 16% instead of 12%? You cannot show that kind of return when you promised 18%... then it'll make it harder to fundraise your next deal!

This isn't to say that "value add" is a dirty business. We certainly need to balance the incentive to modernize and renovate properties. An d developers overbuilding isn't always a good thing.

So its nuanced. I think people need to fairly give credit that there are both good and bad. The capital efficiency is real and produces real world outcomes since there is a strong financial incentive at the end of the door.

But financial incentives sometimes bump up to issues causing harm in real life, which need to be recognized and called out.
by aiipassword | 2025-12-07 21:59:48+00:00
Thanks for the comment. You can lose access only if you clear your browser cache or lose the device and also did not save the notebook URL anywhere. The notebook lives at one unique link, so saving that link keeps it safe even if the device is gone.

If someone loses both the cache and the URL they can contact us at support@clipnotebook.com and we try to help recover it.

I wanted the tool to stay simple with no forced accounts, but I may add an optional backup option later for extra safety.
by DangitBobby | 2025-12-07 21:59:54+00:00
Dollar stores are crowding out grocery stores in areas that only have the clientele to support one grocery store. They sell only higher margin, long shelf-life shit food, whereas real grocery stores have to carry produce which cuts into margins considerably cause it goes bad. So it's easier for them to stay open. And they create food deserts there. They are a fucking scourge for small towns.
by dgunay | 2025-12-07 21:59:58+00:00
Besides the usual unknown unknowns, I've also seen this happen with tasks that involve a lot of coordination in the SDLC. Oh the PR went up at at 2pm PST? Coworkers in EST won't review it until tomorrow. Maybe some back and forth = another day until it clears review. Then QA happens. QA is heavily manual and takes a few hours, maybe with some false starts and handholding from engineering. Another day passes. Before you know it the ticket that took an hour of programming has taken a week to reach production.
by louthy | 2025-12-07 21:59:58+00:00
> The attitude with belief that software work cannot be compared with any other work in other domains, is not going to help.

I didn't say that, at all. But it is an extreme form of abstract complexity which is different to the more tangible and physical complexity that you might have in say a jet engine. That is not to say a jet engine isn't complex, it is and obviously so; but in many ways I think most people don't fully understand the extreme complexity of a medium to large software project because, on the surface, we've apparently captured a lot of it behind reusable libraries and the like. The reality is much more nuanced due to the fact that most software engineering is not following a technique of provably sound composition of components and therefore complexity emerges and is a sum of its parts. That summing of complexity creeps up on a development team and emerges as bugs, security issues, difficulty in planning, and difficulty in maintenance, etc.

My singular argument is: reduce complexity, improve predictability.

> But still, estimates can't be avoided.

I also didn't state that estimates can be avoided. I ran a tech company for 20 years and I needed to be able to tell everyone else in the company when things are likely to be done. That's just a fact of life.
by steer_dev | 2025-12-07 22:00:04+00:00
You're 100% right. For a "judgment" task like "Does this patient have cancer?", the final acceptance criteria must be a human expert. A purely deterministic verifier is impossible.

My thesis is that even in those "fuzzy" workflows, the agent's process is full of small, deterministic sub-tasks that can and should be verified.

For example, before the AI even attempts to analyze the X-ray for cancer, it must: 1/ Verify it has the correct patient file (PatientIDVerifier). 2/ Verify the image is a chest X-ray and not a brain MRI (ModalityVerifier). 3/ Verify the date of the scan is within the relevant timeframe (DateVerifier).

These are "boring," deterministic checks. But a failure on any one of them makes the final "judgment" output completely useless.

steer isn't designed to automate the final, high-stakes judgment. It's designed to automate the pre-flight checklist, ensuring the agent has the correct, factually grounded information before it even begins the complex reasoning task. It's about reducing the "unforced errors" so the human expert can focus only on the truly hard part.
by apt-get | 2025-12-07 22:00:13+00:00
How relevant is this (and the NSA's general spying capability) in 2025?

We hear a lot about local agencies perusing the services of private companies to collect citizens' data in the US, whether that's traffic information, IoT recordings, buying information from FAANG, etc. What's the NSA's position in the current administration? (e.g. we've heard a lot of noise in the past about the FBI and CIA getting the cold shoulder internally. I wonder how this applies to the NSA.)
by monerozcash | 2025-12-07 22:00:44+00:00
The most interesting detail about the whole XKeyscore story is that it was apparently not leaked by Snowden

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/nsa_targets_p...

https://www.reuters.com/article/opinion/commentary-evidence-...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/11/second-leake...

It is possible that the "second source" and the shadow brokers are one and the same.

https://www.electrospaces.net/2017/09/are-shadow-brokers-ide...

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/09/15/shadow-brokers-and-the...

And here's an interesting tidbit about a possible link between TSB and Guccifer 2.0

https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/11/01/show-me-the-metadata-a...
by hunterpayne | 2025-12-07 22:00:49+00:00
Many of the Scala projects got people fired. Something the Scala devs largely ignore. Plus Scala support is truly awful even by the low standards of an OpenSource project. Then there is the fact that the Scala specific libraries are largely dead.

Scala had/has a lot of promise. But how the language is marketed/managed/maintained really let a lot of people down and caused a lot of saltiness about it. And that is before we talk about the church of type-safety.

Scala is a more powerful language than Kotlin. But which do you want? A language with decent support that all your devs can use, or a language with more power but terrible support and only your very best devs can really take advantage of. And I say this as someone writing a compiler in Scala right now. Scala has its uses. But trying to get physicists used to Python to use it isn't one of them. Although that probably says more about the data science folks than Scala.

PS The GP is right, they should have focused on support and fixing the problems with the Scala compiler instead of changing the language. The original language spec is the best thing the Scala devs ever made.
by onedognight | 2025-12-07 22:01:49+00:00
This is a great result[0]:

> we found that there are 17 semantic rules in the core semantics which are not covered by the [ECMAScript Conformance Test Suite]

> we succeeded to manually write test programs that hit 11 out of 17 behaviors

> the remaining 6 semantic behaviors are infeasible, that is, they represent flaws in the language standard itself

[0] https://github.com/kframework/javascript-semantics/blob/mast...
by swatcoder | 2025-12-07 22:02:00+00:00
So you oblige yourself to an enormous long-term loan at high-interest, burn PMI on it because you have too little equity, secured against an overpriced-for-quality home whose value may already be at peak or plataeu, fixing yourself to one location, while all signs warn that you may be laid off at any time and facing a long period of unemployment.

I knew a lot of people who did almost exactly that ~18 years ago. It didn't go well for them.

And then it turned out that staying flexible as a renter and setting aside cash set me up to buy after a correction instead of before. That part went very well for me.

Be careful with the assumption coded into your "forecast spreadsheet"
by trollbridge | 2025-12-07 22:02:07+00:00
Right.

@@@@@@@@@@@MMBMBBHBMMBMBMMM@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@MHEENEN##KDWRRXXXRFPKNHM@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@BHNRWKAAFPZPQ*eXPeZUXSFDFFHM@@@@@@ @@@@@HEENRRREK#N#U#ShdKSASNRKK#KERHB@@@@ @@@@HEHHENRREEEBBENE#WEEFNENRWXQXHE#N@@@ @@@MEENNKFPPFFDXWW#EEE#FASUbehxxeRNPKB@@ @@@HNEEKDZedeheheheZZbehhxxxhhheeSNPXH@@ @@@HEHEWFbhhhhheedeeheeeeeeeehxhZhKXDH@@ @@@BBBBKDUeeehheddddddeeeehhhhhAZeRWWH@@ @@@MB@HKWZdbbeehhedeeeehxxeddehAAbHKKB@@ @@@EKHH##QPFDXR#UhheeehxZXKWFFPPFeKH#RM@ @@@HRKWKFDFSFFXNNXUeedSWRXFFQSZUXZUH#N@@ @@@BERQPeSPeFXUUW#XhhdQQQbFWUZPxSUbNRH@@ @@@MN#SUexxbZSSSePDhhx*+xZSZex**hhdKRM@@ @@@@WPAZh**xhh**hQUhhhhhx**x*++*xxbZD@@@ @@@@NWAZP*++;+hbUAxhxdehZbe+;;++dhQXK@@@ @@@@@@FbRFxxZUSXXXSdbQFSZdPPhdZSXe#@@@@@ @@@@@@MXKRWQPPRHBBHERFbeedUKKDDDXQ@@@@@@ @@@@@@@BWQXdbXM#ASPAdhbbS#EPUdeFDE@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@HAPQhU#RKPhxhhehUPdxehUXK@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@ESQxbE@BNDASSUZdhhh*dKR@@@@@@@@ @@@MBM@@@@XS#MEAXNWFPPQSbeh*eKH@@@@@@@@@ @BDFWxA@@@BNEKSDRPbdeehxx*xZ#M@@@@@@@@@@ @bbPdSHBHR#EBRXWKUdbeeehhZDE@@@@@@@@@@@@ @N##AxRBHEB@@@MHENNR#RR#RB@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@BBHbDBB@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@BBBBM@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
by xingped | 2025-12-07 22:02:10+00:00
I see you're not terribly familiar with Costco. Membership fees account for the vast majority of net operating income for Costco and they keep markups on items at no more than 14% over cost (15% for Kirkland brand).

So yes, Costco does make most of its profit by ensuring customers are happy and continue to renew their memberships every year.
by cm2187 | 2025-12-07 22:02:15+00:00
140 pages on coding style. This looks straight out of the CIA handbook for sabotage [1]. I am sure China or Russia have a version of that.

> (12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.

> (13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do..

> (14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
by dspillett | 2025-12-07 22:02:37+00:00
> what is a random tech employee supposed to do here?

My plan as someone who was thinking of leaving tech anyway (remote work is not for me, and practically any new tech job I get will be at least as remote as this one has become if not more so, and I want to program not manage programmers, artificial or otherwise) is to stay where I am pushing through to the other side if possible and if not, I'll find myself redundant. At that point I'll end up on a lower wage doing something else from the ground up, but if LLMs are going to be what we are told they are programming will become a minimum wage job for most anyway. Either way, sticking where I am for now, tightening the purse strings a bit, saving as much as I can, is the best course of action.
by aiipassword | 2025-12-07 22:02:42+00:00
You are right. Some users will forget to save the URL, and that is the main drawback of a no account system. I chose this approach first because I wanted people to start using it in one second with zero setup. But I also agree that an optional backup would help the people who want more safety.

I am testing a small optional backup flow that keeps the tool simple but gives an extra layer of protection for users who want it. The goal is to keep the zero friction feeling while giving a safe path for long term use.

Thanks for pointing it out.
by moffkalast | 2025-12-07 22:02:54+00:00
> A big chunk of our code was doing things that are very hard to do in other languages. The resulting software did things our competitors’ software couldn’t do.

I've never seen a general purpose programming language that couldn't do everything the underlying hardware is capable of. It could only be unperformant enough that you could call it unfeasible at worst. What's so hard to do in languages other than Lisp? Spam parentheses?
by astrange | 2025-12-07 22:03:06+00:00
Ah well, the evidence for my claim is that I just told you. This particular claim is not a Steve Jobs story, but he would agree I think.

I did tell a true and previously unreported Steve Jobs story on reddit the other day and was voted to -10 and someone told me I was off my meds. In conclusion, Steve Jobs is a land of contrasts.

> AFAIK motion is most easily perceptible.

That's how it works for predators, but you can see things that are still if you're focusing on them. It's important to see corners in real life because they actually can poke you. Like a paper cut.
by torginus | 2025-12-07 22:04:17+00:00
Which if you try to do - those agile people will kill you for it.

They wrangle a number out of you which goes into an user story estimate, which feeds into a Gantt chart they use to make their pretty powerpoints they present to upper management to say that the feature will make it into the Q4 release.

If you move this number around the whole estimation will crumble, not that it wont in real life but you deprave them of two things - an illusion of control and somebody to blame when things go south.
by tsoukase | 2025-12-07 22:04:38+00:00
Keeping the good parts of the traditional way of life in modern context is very difficult. Living a simple, frugal life without sacrificing hygiene and mental integrity, controlling consuming needs and enjoying the bare minimum presupposes deep philosophical insight, knowledge of self and of basic and advanced human needs, a maturity that only a few obtain in young age.

It is easier to approach the "mental singularity" of a free spirit if you are at the edge of survival that in the convenient, warm western style.
by ErrantX | 2025-12-07 22:04:39+00:00
I just feel this is a great example of someone falling into the common trap of treating an LLM like a human.

They are vastly less intelligent than a human and logical leaps that make sense to you make no sense to Claude. It has no concept of aesthetics or of course any vision.

All that said; it got pretty close even with those impediments! (It got worse because the writer tried to force it to act more like a human would)

I think a better approach would be to write a tool to compare screenshots, identity misplaced items and output that as a text finding/failure state. claude will work much better because your dodging the bits that are too interpretive (that humans rock at and LLMs don't)
by bri3d | 2025-12-07 22:05:27+00:00
https://web.archive.org/web/20111219004314/http://journal.th...

A large segment in this article (which is great overall) focuses on this decision. The short summary is "hiring Ada developers was hard and middleware and tooling were difficult to acquire."

While I've moved through a lot of parts of the software industry and may just be out of touch, I actually feel that this may be less the case today. I've seen a lot of school programs focus less on specific languages and frameworks and more on fundamental concepts, and with more "esoteric" languages becoming popular in the mainstream, I actually think hiring Ada developers would be a lot easier today (plus, big industry players like NVIDIA are back to using Ada since AdaCore have been so effective at pushing SPARK, which probably helps too).
by JohnLocke4 | 2025-12-07 22:05:30+00:00
It is often that seemingly irrelevant factors play a big role. In this case, a 141 page highly dense (and frankly boring to read) document is in its essence a liability. Engineers get bored too and it is obviously more fun to just code rather than to read a document that might aswell have been written by a lawyer.

This is also why car makers name their cars things like "Jeep Expedition" or "Ford Escape". The name doesn't change the car, but it does make it more exciting.
by seviu | 2025-12-07 22:05:38+00:00
Surprisingly prob yes

But still we are much better at estimating complexity

Time estimations usually tends to be overly optimistic. I don’t know why. Maybe the desire to please the PO. Or the fact that we never seem to take into account factors such as having a bad day, interruptions, context switch.

T-shirt sizes or even story points are way more effective.

The PO can later translate it to time after the team reaches certain velocity.

I have been developing software for over twenty years, I still suck at giving time estimates.