MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raj_khare | 2025-12-14 17:28:28+00:00
OP here. a few clarifications based on questions we usually get:

What do you mean by “agent”? Not an autonomous bot. It’s a constrained system that operates over spreadsheet primitives (tables, ranges, dependencies) with explicit actions.

How is this different from Copilot / formula generation? Most tools generate formulas or text and stop there. This operates on sheet structure directly — extraction, normalization, multi-sheet modeling — and leaves behind editable, inspectable spreadsheets rather than opaque outputs.

Why not Excel + Python? That works well for some workflows, but many users want everything to stay inside the spreadsheet execution model where recalculation, auditing, and collaboration already live.
by wafflemaker | 2025-12-14 17:28:35+00:00
>People were offended when Google launched YouTube Premium because it encroached on their right to "free" everything from Google.

Nope. At least I was offended, because YT Premium wanted $15 from me for hosting other people's videos. That's more than streaming services that pay for production of TV shows and movies.

Don't think they really need THAT much to cover hosting costs. Not when they operate on that scale and in addition can hover up and profit on all the usage data.

If YT Premium costed $3 or $5, I'd pay and I'd bully any friends and family that watch YT and don't pay into supporting the service. As it is now, my appraisal skill says "SCAM" and I pirate YT with clean conscience.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-14 17:28:36+00:00
You could literally buy this at Egghead software for $3 from the bargain bin in 1992. I know, because I did. I fed it 5 years worth of my juvenile rants, and laughed at how pompous I sounded through a blender.

https://archive.org/details/Babble_1020

A fairly prescient example of how long ago 4 years was:

https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/12953/software-spotl...
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-14 17:28:47+00:00
Formal verification methodologies are more important than some cure-all, one-ring-to-own-them-all specification.

Formal specification by itself has been tried and failed as far back as Z notation. This is a perennial problem that cannot be solved with a panacea single specification standard because it is a process problem requiring a suite of tools to verify the products plus human habits, intention, and human effort to achieve, maintain, and improve upon excellence. While standards, simplicity, and uniformity help, there is still much too much irreducible complexity and minutiae that cannot be wished away by some sort glorified Cucumber testing or inventing the N+1 thing on top of (Isabelle, Idris, Coq, etc.) that wasn't invented here.

An uncomfortable truth is that 99.99% of current software development is nowhere close to rigorous. This isn't remotely a good thing™, especially for essential components.

See also: seL4.
by SubmarineClub | 2025-12-14 17:29:00+00:00
> Actually, if you're just looking for "a skilled job" trade school is a better bet than college now.

Better for whom? And better in what sense?

Long-term, on average, post-college careers still blow the trades out of the water in earnings.

In my case certainly, if I had bought into the “trades are better!!” online rhetoric I would be making far less money than I am now, and I get to work remote.
by lfittl | 2025-12-14 17:29:11+00:00
I think there are two aspects to that:

1) When do pages get removed? (file on disk gets smaller)

Regular vacuum can truncate the tail of a table if those pages at the end are fully empty. That may or may not happen in a typical workload, and Postgres isn't particular about placing new entries in earlier pages. Otherwise you do need a VACUUM FULL/pg_squeeze.

2) Does a regular VACUUM rearrange a single page when it works on it? (i.e. remove empty pockets of data within an 8kb page, which I think the author calls compacting)

I think the answer to that is yes, e.g. when looking at the Postgres docs on page layout [0] the following sentence stands out: "Because an item identifier is never moved until it is freed, its index can be used on a long-term basis to reference an item, even when the item itself is moved around on the page to compact free space". That means things like HOT pruning can occur without breaking index references (which modify the versions of the tuple on the same page, but keep the item identifier in the same place), but (I think) during VACUUM, even breaking index references is allowed when cleaning up dead item identifiers.

[0]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/storage-page-layout....

Edit: And of course you should trust the parallel comment by anarazel to be the correct answer to this :)
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-14 17:29:31+00:00
> I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.

> The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.

Reading the expected books for school is very different from reading a lot privately at home.

I know quite many fellow pupils who read a lot privately, but detested reading the required books for school (they at best got some summaries somewhere, which in my opinion actually prepared you better for the tests since the people who write summaries typically know quite well which parts/topics of the books teachers consider to be important, and thus do quite some explanations on these).

On the other hand, I know fellow pupils who barely read anything in their free time (they had different interests), but for some reason actually liked (and liked reading) the books that you had to read for some classes.
by lkjdsklf | 2025-12-14 17:29:44+00:00
Similar here, but most of what I've removed was pointless ai generated code that made it through lazy reviewers.

So much dead and useless code generated by these tools... and tens of thousands of lines of worthless tests..

honestly I don't mind it that much... my changed lines is through the roof relative to my peers and now that stack ranking is back........
by Sharlin | 2025-12-14 17:30:00+00:00
Yes, this is (outdoors, stray, or feral) domestic cats, which is exactly what I mentioned. And as I said, it's largely the females and their juvenile offspring that form colonies – unfixed adult males, while certainly capable of having friendly social encounters on "no cat's lands", definitely don't willingly share their territory with other adult males.

But my point was that their immediate ancestor (and practically still the same species – they easily interbreed) the African wildcat is not similarly gregarious, and neither is almost any other felid, big or small.
by codingdave | 2025-12-14 17:30:33+00:00
That is just how being a PM goes. You need to take all those inputs and synthesize a vision that meets as many needs as possible, without delegating control to the stakeholders.

The most important thing to learn is how to say "No", and that saying "No" should be the default answer.

You add features when multiple stakeholders agree they are needed, not when one new guy shows up in a meeting. You listen deeply to them all and understand why they are asking for things, and devise a solutions that solves their underlying problem - do not just take their requests at face value and implement them. Then you get to surprise them in UAT, when instead of them telling you that you failed to solve their problems, they tell you: "Wow, not what we asked for, but this is even better than what we had thought of."

It is your job to be the expert in what the customers and stakeholders need, so take all those pain points and embrace them as opportunities to learn more deeply what the correct product to build actually is.

It is also your job to set the priority, so there is no situation where everything is priority #1. People can tell you their own opinions on what is most important to them, but the actual priority is set by you.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-14 17:30:40+00:00
Surely batteries will be used in conjunction with solar, and as solar is already distributed (except for high latitudes), the need for power distribution will diminish as once you're setup with solar and batteries, you only really need the transmission lines to sell any excess power. Presumably, once solar is rolled out at scale, there will be little demand for purchasing excess power.
by xienze | 2025-12-14 17:30:47+00:00
> And then we should be helping them on the state and federal level.

That’ll just lead to people on the opposite side of the spectrum (politically and in terms of being more urban) asking why their tax dollars are going towards a bunch of rednecks living in the middle of nowhere and destroying the earth with their heavily car-dependent lifestyles. _They should move to the city if they want a fire department! Otherwise, pay for it yourself or quit yer bitchin!_

> Unfortunately, they overwhelmingly vote for politicians that believe just the opposite on the state and federal level.

Perhaps the reason is because the people they “should” be voting for, according to you, are tied to a lot of social policies that these rural folks find deeply disagreeable. In a similar vein, if the 2024 Republican president campaigned on true free healthcare and massive taxes for the rich, you wouldn’t chide Democrat voters for not voting for that candidate on account of his social policies, now would you?
by pcmaffey | 2025-12-14 17:30:52+00:00
From my post:

> Staring at the errors in my CLI, I realized I did not want to use another framework. It's why I had already discarded the idea of switching to Astro. Twiddling around someone else's abstractions and incentives, frustrations fitting together the final 20% of a project... I've been down that road too many times before. It's never fun. The tradeoffs _you don't know you're making_ are the biggest risk.
by bccdee | 2025-12-14 17:30:59+00:00
> Why didn't they? Hint: it's not because it would have taken them longer without AI.

Yes it is. "How much will this cost us to build" is a key component of the build-vs-buy decision. If you build it yourself, you get something tailored to your needs; however, it also costs money to make & maintain.

If the cost of making & maintaining software went down, we'd see people choosing more frequently to build rather than buy. Are we seeing this? If not, then the price of producing reliable, production-ready software likely has not significantly diminished.

I see a lot of posts saying, "I vibe-coded this toy prototype in one week! Software is a commodity now," but I don't see any engineers saying, "here's how we vibe-coded this piece of production-quality software in one month, when it would have taken us a year to build it before." It seems to me like the only software whose production has been significantly accelerated is toy prototypes.

I assume it's a consequence of Amdahl's law:

> the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used.

Toy prototypes proportionally contains a much higher amount of the type of rote greenfield scaffolding that agents are good at writing. The sticker problems of brownfield growth and robustification are absent.
by underlipton | 2025-12-14 17:31:03+00:00
There is a rather infamous old tactic to fight back against this. When Brown v Board of Education made segregation illegal in public schooling, many white families started private academies, avoiding regulations by stripping everything they could from the public systems and transplanting them into private ones. Obviously heinous, but perhaps a path forward here.

People decry extreme, scorched-earth approaches, except it seems to work mighty well for conservatives. You're just not allowed to do it if you're "woke", I guess. (Who says? Do it anyway.)
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-14 17:31:11+00:00
Yes, but (to write the second half of your post for you!) regulation and incentives are very different in the aviation industry, because safety and planning for long-tail risks is paramount. Therefore airlines can afford to have their pilots spend thousands of hours training on manual control in various scenarios. By contrast, I don’t think the average software development org will encourage its engineers to hand-roll a sizable proportion of their code, if (still a big if) there are major productivity costs in doing so. Rushing the Next Big Feature out the door will almost always beat out long-term investment in dev training, unfortunately.

Don’t get me wrong - manual practice is in some sense the correct solution, and I plan to try and do it myself in the next decade to make sure my skills stay sharp. But I don’t see the industry broadly encouraging it, still less making it mandatory as aviation does.

Addendum: as you probably know, even in aviation, this is hard to get right. (This is sometimes called the “children of the magenta” problem, but it’s really Bainbridge again.) The most famous example is perhaps Air France Flight 447[0], where the pilots put the plane into a stall at 35,000ft when they reacted poorly after the autopilot disconnecting, and did not even realize they had stalled the plane. Of course, that crash itself led to more regulations around training in manual scenarios too.

[0] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
by ctoth | 2025-12-14 17:31:38+00:00
Hi. I am not an evangelist -- I'm quite certain it's going to kill us all! But I would like to think that I'm about the closest thing to an AI booster you might find here, given that I get so much damn utility out of it. I'm interested in reading, I probably read too much! would you like to suggest a book we can discuss next week? I'd be happy to do this with you.
by AH4oFVbPT4f8 | 2025-12-14 17:31:42+00:00
I’m about the same age as you. I was raised in a strict christian home. For a long time, I thought that was normal. It wasn’t. I didn’t see it clearly until my late thirties, sitting in therapy for depression. That’s when I learned it was abuse.

The best thing my therapist told me was to cut off contact. I did. And I’ve never been happier. I’ve got my own family now. We live with love, not fear. We tell the truth. We don’t play mind games.

If my parents ever want to make peace, they’ll have to admit they were dishonest and tried to control me. But they won’t. They still say they did what they thought was best.

For me, I just look forward to the day I stop thinking about them, or the day I hear they’ve passed.
by yannyu | 2025-12-14 17:32:01+00:00
I think it's even more pernicious than the paper describes as cultural outputs, art, and writing aren't done to solve a problem, they're expressions that don't have a pure utility purpose. There's no "final form" for these things, and they change constantly, like language.

All of these AI outputs are both polluting the commons where they pulled all their training data AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment, which means that general purpose models are starting to run out of contemporary, low-cost training data.

So either training data is going to get more expensive because you're going to have to pay creators, or these models will slowly drift away from the contemporary cultural reality.

We'll see where it all lands, but it seems clear that this is a circular problem with a time delay, and we're just waiting to see what the downstream effect will be.
by LightBug1 | 2025-12-14 17:32:02+00:00
Perhaps if the choice was "forced", it would encourage actual competition.

I'm pissing in the wind, but I'd prefer it if the use of personal data - sold for adverts - was banned outright. Particularly for large companies.

This would forced Google et al to charge for their services, creating the market that would stimulate competitors (Open Source or otherwise).

People will argue against this, but online advertising that got us to where we are is the absolute scourge of modern society ... it's poisoned every decent well of humanity.

Even for things like Youtube Premium, I'm certain Google are double dipping ... likely quadruple dipping.
by hansmayer | 2025-12-14 17:32:18+00:00
Whether its blast furnaces or carbon fiber, the wear and tear (macroscopic changes) as well as material fatigue (molecular changes) is something that will be specified by the manufacturer, within some margin of error and you pretty much know what to expect - unless you are a smartass billionaire building an improvised sub off of carbon fiber whose expiry date was long due. However, the carbon fiber or your blast furnace wont break just on their own. So it's a weak analogy and a stretch at that. Now for your experiment: it has no value because a) you and me both know if you told your LLM that their output was shit, they would immediately "agree" with you and go off to produce some other crap b) For this to be a scientifically valid experiment at all, I'd expect on the order of 10.000 repetitions, each providing exactly the same output. But also on this you and me both know already the 2nd iteration will introduce some changes. So stop fighting the obvious and repeat after me: LLMs are shit for any serious work.
by 13415 | 2025-12-14 17:33:01+00:00
IMHO, AI can spot errors in an instant when I give it the files. This can be a real time-saver. I also use it as a glorified autocomplete, it's amazingly good at converting programming code in a mechanical fashion, like adding some lines in every function or changing some API.

The problem is that it can give very bad general advise in more complex cases, and it seems to be especially clueless about software architecture. I need to learn to force myself to ignore AI advice when my initial reaction is "Hm, I don't know." It seems that my bullshit detector is better than any AI so far even if I know the topic less good.
by mmooss | 2025-12-14 17:34:00+00:00
Your comment finds ways to make it adversarial. What are you trying to build?

> What about things that are morally wrong?

That takes possibly the most certain path toward evil: I think what they do is morally wrong so I can act without morality toward them. It's the rationalization of many awful acts and people and ideologies. Just look at the worst of what religions do.

We should not think we are somehow above or exempt from that error, or so above sin generally that we can preach.
by m0llusk | 2025-12-14 17:34:22+00:00
This is the biggest red flag for me. In contrast, as Ruby and Rust were adopted they generated many tools, libraries, frameworks, and full applications which answered unmet needs in clever and interesting ways. What has generative LLMs produced? Apparently it is nearly all slop or minor iterations. In some cases there are significant bug fixes accumulating which is about as good as it gets. Still many powerful tools coming from the generative LLM wave, but probably worth waiting for best practices to emerge and pricing to stabilize.
by lkjdsklf | 2025-12-14 17:34:28+00:00
If you read hte post, he didn't ask it to delete his home directory. He misread the command it generated and approved it when he shouldn't have.

That's literally exactly the kind of non-determinism I'm talking about. If he'd just left the agent to it's own devices, the exact same thing would have happened.

now you may argue this highlights that people make catastrophic mistakes too, but I'm not sure i agree.

Or at least, they don't often make that kind of mistake. Not saying that they don't make any catastrophic mistakes (they obviously do....)

We know people tend to click "accept" on these kinds of permission prompts with only a cursory read of what it's doing. And the more of these prompts you get, the more likely you are to just click "yes" or whatever to get through it..

If anything this kind of perfectly highlights some of the ironies referenced in the post itself.
by underlipton | 2025-12-14 17:34:41+00:00
Right. Either you directly regulate activity, or you adjust incentives. If you suggest one, detractors say you can't do that, you have to do the other thing, and then work as hard as possible to block your efforts to do the very thing they suggested you do. That's because they don't want things to change at all. But that's obviously not an option, so I tend to suggest trying both and seeing what sticks.
by echelon | 2025-12-14 17:35:03+00:00
Point to the single inventor of AI. You're going to have trouble.

Maybe you give it to the authors of a few papers, but even then you'll struggle to capture even a fraction of the necessary preconditions.

The successes also rely on observing the failures and the alternative approaches. Do we throw out their credit as well?

The list would be longer than the human genome paper.
by simonw | 2025-12-14 17:35:27+00:00
You might be talking about this one: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/

I stand by my opinion that if a major AI company says they aren't training on something it means they aren't training on that thing.

I continue to be annoyed that they won't confirm what they ARE training on though. Saying "we don't train on data submitted is our API" isn't exactly transparent, I want to know what they ARE training on.

That lack of transparency is why they have a trust crisis in the first place!
by kmelve | 2025-12-14 17:35:29+00:00
(I wrote the response) Just because it's marketing, doesn't mean it can also be educational?

I am a marketer and a developer. But I also know that you don't get far by trying to trick people into your product. As a marketer, I also get front row seat seeing how software plays out for a lot of businesses out there, and I have done so for a lot of years. I wanted to share those perspectives in response to Lee's write-up.

So yes, obviously both these pieces make a case for how the software we're employed by solves problems. And anyone who has been in developer marketing for a while knows that the best strategy is to educate and try to do so with credibility.
by steveBK123 | 2025-12-14 17:35:42+00:00
My mental model for high/low inflation goods/services are really just what % of their cost is driven by local on-shore labor which isn't / can't be automated to be more efficient. The "can't" is sometimes regulatory or cultural.

So for example childcare & education both fall into high inflation because we almost demand that it be inefficient. Customers demand to know the worker:customer ratios, and expect them to be low. It's held up by universities as a measure of quality!

Similarly with medical care, you don't see a lot of efficiency-increasing changes over time. The process of going to the doctor when you are sick, getting a prescription, and picking it up at the pharmacy is about 90% the same as it was in the 1980s. Maybe Amazon's efforts with telehealth&pharmacy can help here, tbd.

Housing is partially land use / zoning, increased regulatory burdens with time on multi-family housing, and that home construction itself is still something of an artisan craft than an industrial automated process.
by fragmede | 2025-12-14 17:35:50+00:00
Well, actually, what if my own words make me come across as a raging pedantic asshole, you feckless moron!? I don't actually think you're a feckless moron, but sometimes I'll get emotional about this or that, and run my words through an LLM to reword it so that "it's not assholey, it's nice". I may know better than to use the phrase "well actually" seriously these days, but when the point is effective communication, yeah I don't want my readers to be put off by AI-isms, but I also don't want them to get put off by my words being assholey or condescending or too snarky or smug or any number of things that detract from my point. And fwiw, I didn't run this comment through an LLM.