MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jtsummers | 2026-01-14 00:04:51+00:00
I picked out that example because it weakened your article. It comes across as a claim that Rust can't help with logic errors, which is false (whether your intent or not that's how it reads). Using bad examples that are easily countered weakens your overall thesis.

Your thesis is interesting, and something I've applied in work (formal methods, or informal-formal methods without the full rigor, to code). But you spend a large amount of the article bashing Rust and its community instead of building up an interesting discussion. I mean, your conclusion section is literally titled "Conclusion: The End of the Cult". Your intent is clear there, to bash a community and language. That's not productive.
by ztjio | 2026-01-14 00:04:58+00:00
This is pure nonsense. The moral distance between a good deed and the level of bad deed that receives a meaningful penalty, socially (e.g. felonies) is enormous and there is plenty of fungibility of good vs. bad actions in that space.

That said, it is strange to even consider being good, which is generally a rather easy thing to be, to be some kind of task you should be paid for even virtually. Being basically good is the trivial cost to avoid becoming anti-social. Why should a social group even tolerate you otherwise? With that in mind, as mentioned before, I think you'll find that social groups are highly tolerant of many misdeeds.
by kundan_s__r | 2026-01-14 00:05:04+00:00
That’s a very sane stance. Treating LLM output as untrusted input is probably the correct default when correctness matters.

The worst failures I’ve seen happen when teams half-trust the model — enough to automate, but still needing heavy guardrails. Putting the checks outside the model keeps the system understandable and deterministic.

Ignoring AI unless it can be safely boxed isn’t anti-AI — it’s good engineering.
by captn3m0 | 2026-01-14 00:05:14+00:00
We use at endoflife.date, and are fairly happy. We had to add a workaround to get some search terms working (because of how it does stemming, searching for BSD wouldn't show openbsd earlier): https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/issues/4924), but it is still not 100% perfect: searching for fusion still doesn't get you coldfusion.
by zephen | 2026-01-14 00:05:17+00:00
LoC is a terrible metric for comparing productivity of different developers, even before you get to Goodhart's Law.

OTOH, for a given developer to implement a given feature in a given system, at the end of the day, some amount of code has to be written.

If a particular developer finds that AI lets him write code comparable to what he would have written, in lieu of the code he would have written, but faster than he can do it alone, then looking at lines written might actually be meaningful, just in that context.
by jraph | 2026-01-14 00:05:27+00:00
You are right, I went a bit too quickly so let me expand a bit my chain of thoughts.

The article is against the set of LLM evangelists who are hostile towards the skeptics.

I 100% agree with the part that basically says fuck you to them.

However, explaining the hostile part with there being the feeling of insecurity (which is plausible but would need evidence) is not fully convincing and it seems dangerous to accept this conclusion and stop looking for the actual reasons this quickly.

And the fact that there are actually good programmers persuaded that LLMs help them weakens the "insecurity" argument quite a bit, at least as the only explanation.

As someone currently pretty much hostile to LLMs, I'm quite interested in what's currently at play but I'm suspicious of claims that initially feel good but are not strongly backed.

Like, if these hostile people were actually shills, we would want to know this and not have closed the eyes too early because of some explanation that felt good, right? Or any actual reason.
by tbrownaw | 2026-01-14 00:05:48+00:00
It mocks diversity policies by presenting race as arbitrary and surface-level, rather than some deeply unchangeable thing that pervades every aspect of your being. Since diversity policies are a way to push back against judging people differently based on race (aka racism), mocking them is inherently supportive of racism.

And as the other commenter says, it also mocks trans people. By applying their language to something presented as arbitrary and surface-level.
by 0xC0ncord | 2026-01-14 00:05:56+00:00
I'm also curious what others' takes are too. Lately I have found myself completely unable to remember things without writing them down or completely losing focus on a task and instead going off on "side quests." A close friend familiar with ADHD hinted that I probably have "late developing ADHD" and advised that I get evaluated/diagnosed.

The thought of that kind of scares me---I'm in my late 20s and tend to think I have functioned my whole life without needing any kind of coping strategy or technique to keep myself on top of my work, but now I am facing the possibility that I might just have to start doing things differently, and I'm not sure where to start.

Aside from actually getting diagnosed, are there any strategies I ought to try to help focus on work without getting sidetracked? And ways to help remember things?
by owisd | 2026-01-14 00:06:00+00:00
> I think you can go back further

Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 —

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”
by hershkumar | 2026-01-14 00:06:12+00:00
1) Generally the two models of QC are the digital/circuit model (analogous to digital logic gates, with some caveats, such as reversibility of operations, no-cloning theorem), and analog computation (tuning the parameters of a continuous-time quantum system in your lab such that the system produces useful output)

2) The physics/architecture/organization depends heavily on the type of computer being discussed. In classical computing, one "type" of computer has won the arms race. This is not yet the case for quantum computers, there are several different physical processes through which people are trying to generate computation, trapped ions, superconducting qubits, photonics, quantum dots, neutral atoms, etc.

3) There are several ways that you can simulate quantum computation on classical hardware, perhaps the most common would be through something like IBM's Qiskit, where you can keep track of the degrees of freedom of the quantum computer throughout the computation, and apply quantum logic gates in circuits. Another, more complicated method, would be something like tensor network simulations, which are efficient classical simulators of a restricted subset of quantum states.

4) In terms of research, one particularly interesting (although I'm biased by working in the field) application is quantum algorithms for nuclear/high energy physics. Classical methods (Lattice QCD) suffer from extreme computational drawbacks (factorial scaling in the number of quarks, NP-Hard Monte Carlo sign problems), and one potential way around this is using quantum computers to simulate nuclear systems instead of classical computers ("The best model of a cat is another cat, the best model of a quantum system is another quantum system")

If you're interested in learning more about QC, I would highly recommend looking at Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information", it's essentially the standard primer on the world of quantum computation.
by zzo38computer | 2026-01-14 00:06:19+00:00
There some other possibilities, such as:

Require some special header for accessing them, without needing a API token if it is public data. HTTPS will not necessarily be required. Scrapers can still use it but it seems unlikely unless it becomes common enough; but if they do then you can remove that and require proper authentication.

Another is to use X.509 client certificates for authentication, which is more secure than using API keys anyways; however, this will require that you have a X.509 certificate, and some people might not want that, so due to that, perhaps it should not be mandatory.
by paodealho | 2026-01-14 00:06:47+00:00
I worked for a relatively large company (around 400 employees there are programmers). The people who embraced LLM-generated code clearly share one trait: they are feature pushers who love to say "yes!" to management. You see, management is always right, and these programmers are always so eager to put their requirements, however incomplete, into a Copilot session and open a pull request as fast as possible.

The worst case I remember happened a few months ago when a staff (!) engineer gave a presentation about benchmarks they had done between Java and Kotlin concurrency tools and how to write concurrent code. There was a very large and strange difference in performance favoring Kotlin that didn't make sense. When I dug into their code, it was clear everything had been generated by a LLM (lots of comments with emojis, for example) and the Java code was just wrong.

The competent programmers I've seen there use LLMs to generate some shell scripts, small python automations or to explore ideas. Most of the time they are unimpressed by these tools.
by bspammer | 2026-01-14 00:06:50+00:00
The bug-free code one feels unfalsifiable to me. How do you prove that 10,000 lines of code is bug-free, and then there's a million caveats about what a bug actually is and how we define one.

The second claim about novels seems obviously achieved to me. I just pasted a random obscure novel from project gutenberg into a file and asked claude questions about the characters, and then asked about the motivations of a random side-character. It gave a good answer, I'd recommend trying it yourself.
by falloutx | 2026-01-14 00:06:54+00:00
Novel is different from a codebase. In code you can have a relationship between files and most files can be ignored depending on what you're doing. But for a novel, its a sequential thing, in most cases A leads to B and B leads to C and so on.

> Re: movies. Get YouTube premium and ask YouTube to summarize a 2hr video for you.

This is different from watching a movie. Can it tell what suit actor was wearing? Can it tell what the actor's face looked like? Summarising and watching are too different things.
by czhu12 | 2026-01-14 00:06:57+00:00
To be fair to both sides, it really is hard to tell if we're in the world of

"you'll be left behind if you don't learn crypto" with crypto

or

"you'll be left behind if you don't learn how to drive" with cars

One of those statements is made in good faith, and the other is made out of insecurity. But we'll probably only really be able to tell looking backwards.
by CoastalCoder | 2026-01-14 00:07:47+00:00
What's worked for me:

1) Good, regular sleep. ADHD symptoms are way more controllable when I'm well rested.

2) Stimulants: caffeine and Vyvanse. I also had a prescription for Adderall, but it has some nasty side effects for me so I rarely take it.

3) Accept that it's hard to focus on stuff that doesn't interest me, and plan accordingly. (Including career choices.)

4) Work in person, rather than remotely. I'm too tempted to screw around when I'm not around coworkers.
by casey2 | 2026-01-14 00:07:50+00:00
Look into the Motte-and-bailey fallacy.
That set seriously doesn't exist. Even the people on youtube doing "vibe coding" benchmarks mostly say it's crap. (Well they probably exist on twitter/linkedin.)

This article just functions as flamebait for people who use LLMs to implement whole features to argue the semantics of "vibe coding". All while everyone is ignoring the writing on the wall. That we will soon have boxes going through billions of tokens every second. At that point slopcoding WILL be productive, but only if you build up the skill to differentiate yourself from the top 10% of prompters.
by zahlman | 2026-01-14 00:07:57+00:00
> Use of force was totally unjustified, esp. when you combine it with: Change the intetion of the driver to really want to harm the person ~2m in front of the car.

Such intent is not legally relevant and the legal standard for use of force here is simply not what you appear to think it is. Please watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDda-L_ZOE8 .

> Cop get trained, that you should not use your gun on close encounters with knives, bc the short distance <5m will give you not enogh time to stop a knive attacker reliably.

No, the point of the training is not "don't use the gun in close quarters".

They are trained to not fuck around, and to shoot while they have the chance at range; and to not approach the person who brandishes a knife.

But "not approaching the person who brandishes an SUV" is unreasonable. By this standard, pedestrian crossings would be impossible. And in fact he was not "standing" in front of the SUV. He was in the process of circling back around it, while reasonably expecting the car to remain put, while regrouping with his allies as they demanded Good exit the vehicle.

> It is _very_ obvious. 2/3 shots hit the side of the car

This is also explained by the fact that the car is moving and turning such that the side of the car would face the gun. It does not in any way suggest malicious intent. The timing of the gunshots makes it clear that the officer fired three rounds continuously, most likely on instinct from training for that exact sort of firing pattern. There is enough time for the car to turn slightly (simply from the gun's mechanics), but not enough to allow for any kind of premeditation or even really conscious thought.

> the front wheel _never_ pointed at the PO.

I do not understand how it's possible to watch the video and come to this conclusion in good faith.

Of course, this does not mean that the wheel orientation was deliberate. But if the wheel "never pointed" that way and then continued to turn further right, the officer could not plausibly have been struck. Multiple videos make it abundantly clear that he was struck, and required considerable time (I would say more than a full second) to regain his balance.
by Havoc | 2026-01-14 00:08:16+00:00
> It required an immense amount of baby sitting, for small code changes, made slowly, which were often wrong.

Can’t speak for others but that’s not what I’d understand (or do) as vibecoding. If you’re babysitting it every inch of the way then yeah sure I can see how it might not be productive relative to doing it yourself.

If you’re constantly fighting the LLM because you have a very specific notion of what each line should look like it won’t be a good time.

Better to spec out some assumptions, some desired outcomes, tech to be used, maybe the core data structure, ask the llm what else it needs to connect the dots, add that and then let it go
by cmcaleer | 2026-01-14 00:09:40+00:00
I don’t really see how this is an AI issue. We use AI all the time for code generation but if you put this on my desk with specific instructions to be light on review and it’s not a joke, I’m probably checking to see if you’re still on probation because that’s an attitude that’s incompatible with making good software.

People with this kind of attitude existed long before AI and will continue to exist.
by nomel | 2026-01-14 00:09:41+00:00
I suspect a subpopulation of software development is going to become a bit religious, for a short while, split into "morally pure anti AI" and those who are busy using software as a means to an end to solve some real world problem. I think the tools will eventually be embraced, out of necessity, as they become more practically useful (being somewhere around "somewhat useful" right now).

As a result, I think we'll eventually see a mean shift from rewarding those that are "technically competent" more towards those that are "practically creative" (I assume the high end technical competence will always be safe).
by oliyoung | 2026-01-14 00:09:50+00:00
Asgard's Wrath 2 got critical acclaim for being a good *game*, not just a good VR game.

If they can't make it work with something that got a 10 on IGN, then maybe they just can't make it work, but I think we're coming to the end of the age where tech companies can't just "start a game studio" and it be successful, looking at you Amazon and Netflix
by kevin_thibedeau | 2026-01-14 00:10:02+00:00
INA §212(a)(2)(D) renders inadmissible any alien who:

(i) is coming to the United States solely, principally, or incidentally to engage in prostitution, or has engaged in prostitution within 10 years of the date of application for a visa, admission, or adjustment of status,

(ii) directly or indirectly procures or attempts to procure, or (within 10 years of the date of application for a visa, admission, or adjustment of status) procured or attempted to procure or to import, prostitutes or persons for the purpose of prostitution, or receives or (within such 10-year period) received, in whole or in part, the proceeds of prostitution, or

(iii) is coming to the United States to engage in any other unlawful commercialized vice, whether or not related to prostitution

Obviously these people should be applying for EB-1s since that is the established visa program for prostitutes.
by Kesseki | 2026-01-14 00:10:10+00:00
No. Absolutely not. The vast majority of such "debt relief" or "debt settlement" offerings are scams, including several of the ones this article promotes. If you're looking at a debt relief plan, you should only consult a licensed non-profit that's a member of a credible organization like the Financial Counseling Association of America or the National Foundation for Credit Counseling.
by throwawayffffas | 2026-01-14 00:10:28+00:00
> But doing "prompt-driven development" or "vibe coding" with an Agentic LLM was an incredibly disapointing experience for me. It required an immense amount of baby sitting, for small code changes, made slowly, which were often wrong. All the while I sat there feeling dumber and dumber, as my tokens drained away.

Yeah I find they are useful for large sweeping changes, introducing new features and stuff, mostly because they write a lot of the boilerplate, granted with some errors. But for small fiddly changes they suck, you will have a much easier time doing these changes your self.
by Aerroon | 2026-01-14 00:10:30+00:00
I, erroneously, thought that "when Alice and Bob agree there's a 96% chance of them being correct, then surely you can leverage this to get above the 80% chance. What if we trust them both when they agree and trust Alice when they disagree?" Did some (erroneous) napkin math and went to write a simulation.

As I was writing the simulation I realized my error. I finished the simulation anyway, just because, and it has the expected 80% result on both of them.

My error: when we trust "both" we're also trusting Alice, which means that my case was exactly the same as just trusting Alice.

PS as I was writing the simulation I did a small sanity test in-between of 9 rolls. I rolled heads 9 times in a row (so I tried it again with 100 million and it was a ~50-50 split). There goes my chance of winning the lottery!
by Marsymars | 2026-01-14 00:10:33+00:00
I don't know that opinion numbers really back that up: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...

i.e. Abortion is generally supported by 63% of the overall population, 85% of Democrats and 67% of moderate/liberal Republicans. I don't see how you'd ever convince Democrats to drop it to cater primarily to conservative republicans.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-14 00:10:42+00:00
I don't think it is possible to talk about fractions of nanoseconds without having an extremely good idea of the stability and accuracy of your clock. At best I think you could claim there is some kind of reduction but it is super hard to make such claims in the absolute without doing a massive amount of prep work to ensure that the measured times themselves are indeed accurate. You could be off by a large fraction and never know the difference. So unless there is a hidden atomic clock involved somewhere in these measurements I think they should be qualified somehow.
by Jamesbeam | 2026-01-14 00:10:52+00:00
I respect the work of Scott Adams as one of the greatest cartoonists of my lifetime, and I wish his family and friends the strength to move forward and to keep the good memories of him in their hearts and thoughts until they hopefully meet again. Everyone we lose to cancer is a tragedy.

My very limited personal memories of him are not the one of a kind person, though.

He might have had just a very bad day, but I had to endure this guy on a six-hour flight in the early 2000s, and after he insulted basically everyone from Hispanic people to people of colour and even shushed the lady behind us when she said she can’t listen to his bullshit anymore, I took a deep breath, looked him in the eyes, and told him I fought in two wars, and the only thing that happens if you keep hate for your "enemies" in your heart is that it will eat you from the inside. Let it go.

I wished him the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.

He laughed right in my face and told me I don’t get it and that he is going to die of old age. He was for sure a fighter and stubborn of his own views.

But in the end, he died at a young age, with hate-fuelled cancer inside his prostate and bones suffering from the same mental condition millions of people on the Internet do day by day.

People are disturbed not by things but by their view of things.
And People already knew 1846 years ago it is how it is.

Marcus Aurelius started each day telling himself: ‘I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people.’

Nothing has changed but the Theater.

People now decide to be disturbed by their view of things over the internet, things that will not matter in their whole lifetime for them personally in real life, and Scott Adams is unfortunately the perfect example.

He was disturbed by his view, that half of people of colour in the US were ungrateful and "anti-white", tho he lived to the age of 68 without ever being harmed by a single black person in his life, as far as I know.

The death of Scott Adams is many things at once. A tragedy, a warning, and a foreshadowing of what happens if you cannot accept the world as it is and just be happy with what you got.

Life is precious. Don’t throw it away keeping hate in your heart and enemies in your head, trying to change how the world works or what our species is, a bunch of assholes all sharing the same fate.

Deal with it or die miserably like Scott. You have a choice here.
Choose your friends, enemies and fights wisely is all the advise I can give anyone.
by dandano | 2026-01-14 00:10:53+00:00
Interesting how you write the code first then put it into claude. What's the reason there?
I guess that is where I find the most benefit is not writing out the syntax, even though I could I just can't be bothered. I often start with the snippet then refactor to the style of code I like. For code I don't know that well like c++ I like to get a snippet so I can then research into those functions that is used and go from there.