MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by damslunk | 2025-12-04 23:28:25+00:00
Yeah that's an interesting point, it feels like it should be even better than it is now (I might be ignorant of the quality of the best coding agents atm).

Like rust seems particularly well suited for an agent based workflow, in that in theory an agent with a task could keep `cargo check`-ing it's solutions, maybe pulling from docs.rs or source for imported modules, and get to a solution that works with some confidence (assuming the requirements were well defined/possible etc etc).

I've had a mixed bag of an experience trying this with various rust one off projects. It's definitely gotten me some prototype things working, but the evolving development of rust and crates in the ecosystem means there's always some patchwork to get things to actually compile. Anecdotally I've found that once I learned more about the problem/library/project I'll end up scrapping or rewriting a lot of the LLM code. It seems pretty hard to tailor/sandbox the context and workflow of an agent to the extent that's needed.

I think the Bun acquisition by Anthropic could shift things too. Wouldn't be surprised if the majority of code generated/requested by users of LLM's is JS/TS, and Anthropic potentially being able to push for agentic integration with the Bun runtime itself could be a huge boon for Bun, and maybe Zig (which Bun is written in) as a result? Like it'd be one thing for an agent to run cargo check, it'd be another for the agent to monitor garbage collection/memory use while code is running to diagnose potential problems/improvements devs might not even notice until later. I feel like I know a lot of devs who would never touch any of the langs in this article (thinking about memory? too scary!) and would love to continue writing JS code until they die lol
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-12-04 23:28:35+00:00
Ack. Forgot to respond to this. Yes, valid point. I guess when you swim in the sea of modal interfaces you're used to you don't see them. It's entirely possible the reason I like emacs more than vi is I just used emacs a lot more. Also, I like that emacs starts in a mode where it prints out what you type in. I know some versions of vim did this too, but now it seems sort of random so I always hit escape i any time i start vi. Also, I do appreciate vi's keystrokes. They seem to be better thought out than emacs'. I'm sure you can modify bindings in vim by now. Not sure what you mean by C-c C-c in emacs. That's not bound to anything on my system. Are you talking about (overwrite-mode)?

Not sure I understand why vi navigation is better. I always thought emacs' arrow keys were better than escape-h,j,k or l. Much of the time I just use emacs' equivalent of leaping, ctrl-s and ctrl-r to search forward and back.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-04 23:28:43+00:00
Yeah I mean if you generally believe the tech sector is going to do well because it has been doing well you will beat the overall market. The problem is that you don’t know if and when there might be a correction. But since there is this one segment of the overall market that has this steady upwards trend and it hasn’t had a large crash, then yeah any pattern seeking system will identify “hey this line keeps going up!” Would it have the nuance to know when a crash is coming if none of the data you test it on has a crash?

It would almost be more interesting to specifically train the model on half the available market data, then test it on another half. But here it’s like they added a big free loot box to the game and then said “oh wow the player found really good gear that is better than the rest!”

Edit: from what I causally remember a hedge fund can beat the market for 2-4 years but at 10 years and up their chances of beating the market go to very close to zero. Since LLMs have bit been around for that long it is going to be difficult to test this without somehow segmenting the data.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-12-04 23:28:46+00:00
I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference? Or to turn it around, if someone does 10%, 20%, 50% more in the same time period, isn't that significant?

I mean.. we are comparing students abilities here, and doing stuff fast is one of those abilities. Even potato peelers in a restaurant are valued more if they're faster, why not programmers too? Or DMV workers?
by susiecambria | 2025-12-04 23:28:46+00:00
Ok, so we are raising a bunch of cheaters and liars. Great.

When the get to the workforce, then what? When I was in a position to hire, I made the decision to not interview anyone who went to Elon. The school did not in the early 2000s use a standard grammar book and at least according to my kid's papers, the profs had little to say about poor grammar, rambling sentences, poor logic, etc. Great.

Since the work was about writing and speaking, grammar and logic were important. Fast forward to today, and I guess I'd have to make a decision about not interviewing kids from top-tier schools.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-04 23:28:54+00:00
"with all due respect, every word you wrote is wrong. michael jordan was and still is biggest a-hole that every teammate hated - the best to ever do it." Bronnie James is in the NBA... ... .. . Michael Jordan was terrible at baseball and got to sign up for a real chance at the MLB.

"most celebrated are ones pulling 7-8-figure salaries no one has ever heard of"

You've got a direct contradiction in the span of one sentence... I've directly worked with people like the ones you're referring to and most of them were frauds.

"I know several harvard grads who are about as popular as wahington generals"

You didn't understand what I wrote. It's all about the dynamics of the environment. Academia is as much about fitting in just as much as any other place.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-04 23:29:09+00:00
They're saying the amount of bloat in modern software is so ridiculous that it requires multiple gigabytes of memory to run a single application that, in a sane universe, shouldn't occupy more than a hundred MB.

AI doesn't deserve it more than we do, but also we shouldn't be required to have $300 in RAM for basic functionality. We shouldn't have to deal with RAM scalpers because businesses don't want to develop good software.

Instead, we the users are forced to pay for more and more memory and CPU and disk because some rich asshole doesn't want to spend the money on developing good software. The costs are pushed to us. And since resources are now unimaginably expensive, it's still our problem and we still have to foot the bill a million times over.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-12-04 23:29:54+00:00
Since it's not included in the main article, here is the prompt:

> You are a stock trading agent. Your goal is to maximize returns.

> You can research any publicly available information and make trades once per day.

> You cannot trade options.

> Analyze the market and provide your trading decisions with reasoning.

>

> Always research and corroborate facts whenever possible.

> Always use the web search tool to identify information on all facts and hypotheses.

> Always use the stock information tools to get current or past stock information.

>

> Trading parameters:

> - Can hold 5-15 positions

> - Minimum position size: $5,000

> - Maximum position size: $25,000

>

> Explain your strategy and today's trades.

Given the parameters, this definitely is NOT representative of any actual performance.

I recommend also looking at the trade history and reasoning for each trade for each model, it's just complete wind.

As an example, Deepseek made only 21 trades, which were all buys, which were all because "Companyy X is investing in AI". I doubt anyone believe this to be a viable long-term trading strategy.
by jorl17 | 2025-12-04 23:30:05+00:00
I feel you. It's definitely a tradeoff. SPAs do tend to be buggier but I can't deny that, when done right, they also tend to be better.

Unfortunately, there's _more_ people, building _more_ stuff, so there's _more_ terrible stuff out there. The amount of new apps (and new developers, especially ones with quite limited skills) is immense compared to something like ten years ago. This means that there's just more room for things to be poorly-built.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-04 23:30:05+00:00
Agreed, to recycle a past comment on the benefits:

____________

We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.

Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.

1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.

2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.

3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?

4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
by dathinab | 2025-12-04 23:30:07+00:00
yes I don't mean "special interest"

and I'm aware that people with ADHD don't really have any way to direct it

and that it can easily lead to them neglecting everything from them self, over work to social relationships

so it will help more then it hurts in university

but it still can matter before, even if it's just a parent mistaking a hyper focus on some science topic with a special interest in it and then exposing you to more science related stuff earlier one in life
by themanmaran | 2025-12-04 23:30:10+00:00
"reasoning" models like GPT 5 et al do a pre-generation step where they:

- Take in the user query (input tokens)

- Break that into a game plan. Ex: "Based on user query: {query} generate a plan of action." (reasoning tokens)

- Answer (output tokens)

Because the reasoning step runs in a loop until it's run through it's action plan, it frequently uses way more tokens than the input/output step.
by jaredklewis | 2025-12-04 23:30:23+00:00
Those examples seem like reasonable, narrowly tailored accomodations to me. But the article linked in the parent comment says:

> The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.

I think these disabilities are more complex than the broken hand and blindness examples for reasons I commented on elsewhere in this thread. In your example, a student with depression or clinical anxiety presumably only needs the same 10 minutes to write/type the answers as all the other students. Which means the extra time is added for them to "think about and solve problems." That seems fundamentally different to me than the broken hand example.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-12-04 23:31:15+00:00
> Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids, in fact, classrooms with IEP student get more teachers so everyone in that class benefits.

There is a limited amount of money in the school system. When resources are assigned to one place they are taken away from somewhere else. The kids in the class without IEP students are getting boned by this policy.
by order-matters | 2025-12-04 23:31:52+00:00
I get that, it's just not the proper way to deliver justice and imo is unethical if the item you are boycotting has the ability to improve people's lives. Whether AI is at the level where we should consider not using it to be unethical is a different discussion (i dont think so yet, but see a future where it could be the case). i more so am on the point that I dont think it is unethical to continue using it even if the boycott method is effective at its goals. It is vigilante justice
by bawolff | 2025-12-04 23:31:59+00:00
> But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test.

That depends on how the test is designed.

Some tests have more material than anyone can hope to finish. Extra time is always valuable in such a test.

However that type of test is generally bad because it more measures speed then skill.

Most tests are designed so the average person is able to finish all the questions. In those tests more time for the average person is not helpful. They have already done it. Sure they could maybe redo all the questions, but there is very diminishing returns.

If the extra 30 minutes improves someone who needs the accomedation's score by 50%, and increases the average student's score by 2% or even not at all, clearly the same thing isn't going on.

So i would disagree that extra time helps everyone.

Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit.

> why don't we just give it to all students then?

I actually think we should. Requiring people to get special accomedations biases the system to people comfortable with doing that. We should just let everyone get the time they need.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-04 23:32:11+00:00
I am against all age-verification systems here. These are ways to try to control the flow of information - aka censorship.

There are a few situations where I can see verification is necessary; number #1 is in regards to online transactions involving money from a bank account. But the whole "show your age to watch pr0n" - that is just rubbish nonsense. Same with "people of age 14 are too young to use anti-social media". Now, I think people should quit wasting their time with facebook and so forth anyway, but I consistently reject these attempts to restrict freedom by state authorities acting as lobbyists for control-freaks, dictators or over-eager corporations. The internet could not have gotten big with those restrictions in the first place - so let's remove all of those without mercy.
by the_gipsy | 2025-12-04 23:32:21+00:00
The go stdlib notoriously returns errors without wrapping. I think it has been shifting towards more wrapping more often, but still.

err1 := foo() err2 := bar() if err1 != nil || err2 != nil { return err1 // if only err2 failed, returns nil! }

``` func process() error { err := foo() if err != nil { return err }

if something { result, err := bar() // new err shadows outer err if err != nil { return err } use(result) } if somethingElse { err := baz() // another shadow log.Println(err) } return err // returns foo's err (nil), baz's error lost

} ```
by Bender | 2025-12-04 23:32:30+00:00
the entire site is denied to kids

I also covered that here [1]. Indeed if parents do not enable all of Youtube or Youtube does not move most adult content into a unique URL or their server does not send the header for anything flagged as adult the kids will not be advertised to. They would have to go to a kid friendly site that moderates before a video is viewable or Youtube would have to change moderation tactics. Kids need not visit Youtube. There are kid friendly sites.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152727
by order-matters | 2025-12-04 23:32:53+00:00
Right so then it is a matter of convenience disguised as an ethical problem. because they still arent boycotting the unethical processes effecting other people (by the same line of ethics that makes AI unethical in their view), just the ones effecting themselves

as opposed to the ethical concerns hitting home and waking them up as a call to action and even though it's a little unfortunate that they didnt care until it effected them, we could argue it is still a point of ethics because they are consistently applying the ethical standpoint unilaterally across their life now that theyve had a change of heart.
by kibwen | 2025-12-04 23:33:10+00:00
> But from my own experience, UB just means "consult your compiler to see what it does here because this question is beyond our pay grade."

Careful. It's not just "consult your compiler", because the behavior of a given compiler on code containing UB is also allowed to vary based on specific compiler version, and OS, and hardware, and the phase of the moon.
by publicdebates | 2025-12-04 23:33:17+00:00
I understand, but you have to see how you would be considered one of the Standards-Purists that I was talking about, right? If Microsoft makes a guarantee in their documentation about some behavior of UB C code, and this guarantee is dated to about 14 years ago, and I see many credible people on the internet confirming that this behavior does happen and still happens, and these comments are scattered throughout those past 14 years, I think it's safe to say I can rely on that behavior, as long as I'm okay with a little vendor lock-in.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-12-04 23:33:28+00:00
Assume you're a government agency. Assume you want to install software that isn't in the AppStore. Perhaps some software you wrote yourself. Sure, the security of the system should be based on keying material, but you still don't want the general public to know you're installing Coup d'Etat 2.1 on your devices. And you don't want Apple to know that you're installing Corporate Fiscal Surveillance 1.1 on your iDevice.

It would be nice if you could maintain the many security features that DO exist while at the same time installing apps on your devices you want to install without having to have them blessed by Apple's dev CA.
by gitremote | 2025-12-04 23:34:11+00:00
> And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap.

False. Training happens once for a time period, but inference happens again and again every time users use the product. Inference is the main money sink.

"according to a report from Google, inference now accounts for nearly 60% of total energy use in their AI workloads. Meta revealed something even more striking: within their AI infrastructure, power is distributed in a 10:20:70 ratio among experimentation, training, and inference respectively, with inference taking the lion’s share."

https://blogs.dal.ca/openthink/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-convers...
by citizenpaul | 2025-12-04 23:34:29+00:00
I'm not sure you understand just how dedicated they were to this whole turn it back on the employee method they were apparently using. I just skimmed the summary on the book after reading this comment. Its a toxic method of avoiding accountability masquerading as "mgmt"

You can't do whatever you describe if it needs sign off by a manager that simply ghosts on everything you try to send their way. You can assume responsibility but I'm not committing fraud for a company that does not care.

Also what you said means that you are now officially responsible for the mistakes which I'm pretty sure is what this whole "method" is about.
by anthk | 2025-12-04 23:34:41+00:00
Yes. But in order to understand limits, you must think in ranges and not on the reaching point. You don't divide by zero, you measure everything until 0, but 0 itself is not measured.

BTW, 5.000000000000000..1 - 4.999999999... > 0

>You can't divide a number in half

Declare any number which can't be neither higher or lower than it's half.
by bawolff | 2025-12-04 23:34:47+00:00
I had a test once where we had to do RSA by hand (with 4 digit numbers), no calculators allowed. There was a lot of handwriting on scrap pieces of paper.

Do humanities have to do handwritten essay tests in the modern world. I had to do those in middle school/high school. No idea if that is still a thing.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-04 23:35:09+00:00
The comment "useful idiots" is more a play on the russian KGB strategy.

They use assets to influence people and achieve certain goals. In this case here, terrorism or child pornography is used as cop-out rationale for censorship, surveillance and so forth. It's never about those topics really, perhaps 5% at best, the rest is just sugar-coated decoy to restrict people and keep them as slaves and pets.

> Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle

This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled by "this is because of terrorists". This is also why I am for 100% transparency at all times.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-12-04 23:35:11+00:00
> (school and housing costs are completely out of hand)

On the housing side, the root problem is obvious:

Real estate cannot be both affordable and considered an investment. If it's affordable, that means the price is staying flat relative to inflation, which makes it a poor investment. If it's a good investment, that means the value is rising faster than inflation, which means unaffordability is inevitable.

The solution to the housing crisis is simple: Build more. But NIMBYs and complex owners who see their house/complex as an investment will fight tooth-and-nail against any additional supply since it could reduce their value.
by cykros | 2025-12-04 23:35:11+00:00
Liberals, Fascists, and Communists always like to throw mud at each other as if they're not all cut from the same collectivist cloth (and all responsible for the deaths of millions). Best to pay them no mind.

Personally I'm not much a fan of Reddit or Twitter though, simply because the algorithmic nonsense is clearly there just to drive ad views and not to provide me with the interactions I'm there to have. Nostr is a much more pleasant experience.
by kibwen | 2025-12-04 23:35:41+00:00
Outside of single-initialization/lazy-initialization (which are provided via safe and trivial standard library APIs: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.LazyLock.html ) almost no Rust code uses global mutable variables. It's exceedingly rare to see any sort of global mutable state, and it's one of the lovely things about reading Rust code in the wild when you've spent too much of your life staring at C code whose programmers seemed to have a phobia of function arguments.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-04 23:36:15+00:00
> No, they aren't...

You aren't following the conversation in this thread, my reply wasn't about the definition of "entitlements" but about the separate taxes and the significant tax income from them, which is true for the real entitlements - Social security and Medicare.

More precisely, the question is about the tax structure that results in a shortfall, it seems strange to argue about cutting Social Security and Medicare when both corporate profits and the market are higher than ever while income inequality is at astronomic levels.

I can't say much about Medicaid but I know the cost of drugs and medical care have been going up faster than anything else, so there might be some other way of addressing that spending. I'd be perfectly fine with demanding a separate tax for Medicaid and discussing it separately, that would be the prudent way of doing it.
by Bender | 2025-12-04 23:36:18+00:00
To me it is censorship.

If you are a small child it is indeed up to your parents to censor adult content and I am all for that. Kids will be upset but that is part of growing up. When the parents believe the kids are emotionally ready for adult content then I am sure they will get parental controls disabled. Even if that should not come to pass the kids once they are teens will bypass it anyway.

If you are an adult and your followers are adults then this does not really apply to you or your device. This would only hurt groomers, most of whom use video games for that purpose.