MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xp84 | 2026-01-14 00:11:08+00:00
I think this is a fair framing. I'll say this: In the US at least (I don't know enough about other laws) I think our society would be way better off if all the current criminal laws were enforced accurately, than it is now where many criminal laws are enforced only a small fraction of the time. And it would be even worse in my opinion if the laws were enforced even less than they are now.

Keep in mind I said criminal law. Yes, I drive over 55MPH. But even these non-criminal law things would be fixed in a week if the 99% of Americans who "speed" were ticketed for it by speed cameras every day, because the politicians who are empowered to make those laws rational would feel immense pressure.

I realize that my feelings for this should and would change if we passed much worse laws. But that's an argument for participating in the process and reforming government. "Let's let most crimes go unpunished" (not saying you're saying this) is a poor solution for the problem of "We're letting corrupt and evil people shape the law."

In response to your last question, it's a good litmus test for whether you believe democracy is okay. Yes, if the majority of my neighbors actually voted on and supported a law I disagree with, and it doesn't violate the Constitution, then I ought to abide by it, or move to a different state. My feelings don't override those of the majority. The Constitution is supposed to be the backstop against horrible laws like "All $RACE must report to prison immediately or be shot." There is, I think, another school of thought that disagrees with me, and thinks that if the voters enact a policy they don't like, then it's the voters who are wrong, and we should neither abide by it, nor try to convince those voters to repeal it, but instead just protest and assert one's opinion as fact. That seems anti-democracy to me. It's more of "me-ocracy."
by egypturnash | 2026-01-14 00:11:12+00:00
That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.

Usually this means I have forgotten to eat, or that I need to take a step back and consider whatever I’m doing at a deeper level. Once I recognized that the “keep trying and trying and nothing works” days vanished for good.
by h14h | 2026-01-14 00:11:14+00:00
In my experience, using AI coding agents need highly specific success criteria, and an easy way to verify its output against that criteria.

My biggest successes have come when I take a TDD approach. First I identify a subset of my work into a module with an API that can be easily tested, then I collaborate with the agent on writing correct test-cases, and finally I tell it to implement the module such that the test cases pass without any lint or typing errors.

It forces me to spend much more time thinking about use cases, project architecture, and test coverage than about nitty-gritty implementation details. I can imagine that in a system that evolved over time without a clear testing strategy, AI would struggle mightily to be even barely useful.

Not saying this applies to your system, but I've definitely worked on systems in the past that fit the "big ball of mud" description pretty neatly, and I have zero clue how I'd have been able to make effective use of these AI tools.
by CjHuber | 2026-01-14 00:11:23+00:00
I think the actual problem is everyone tries to assert how capable or not coding agents currently are, but how useful they are depends so much on what you are trying to get them to do and also on your communication with the model. And often its hard to tell whether you're just prompting it wrong or if they're incapable of doing it.

By now we at least agree that stochastical parrots can be useful.
It would be nice if the debate now was less polarized so we could focus on what makes them work better for some and worse for others other than just expectations.
by kundan_s__r | 2026-01-14 00:11:33+00:00
This matches what I’ve seen as well. A lot of “debt relief” and “settlement” services are essentially rent-seeking intermediaries that leave consumers worse off or stuck in long programs with unclear outcomes.

Non-profit credit counseling (with transparent fee structures and regulatory oversight) tends to be the only consistently legitimate option. Anything that promises easy reductions or fast fixes should probably be treated with extreme skepticism.

Consumer finance is one of those areas where incentives are misaligned enough that doing nothing is often safer than trusting a glossy solution.
by lbrito | 2026-01-14 00:11:41+00:00
Yeah, that's pretty much what I think too. I'm much more of the latter type you mention, but I think I have the enough acumen to be practical most times.

Its always been the case that engineers come in many flavors, some more and some less business-inclined. The difference with AI imo is that it will (or already is) putting its trillion-dollar finger on the scale, such that there is less patience and space for people like me, and more for people like you.
by godsmokescrack | 2026-01-14 00:12:31+00:00
Standard textbook:
Isaac Chuang and Michael Nielsen, "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information"

More mathy:
A. Yu. Kitaev, A. H. Shen, M. N. Vyalyi, "Classical and Quantum Computation"

A killer app:
Peter Shor, "Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer"

Some course notes:
https://math.mit.edu/~shor/435-LN/
by philipallstar | 2026-01-14 00:12:51+00:00
No one has claimed a blanket anything.

> That was an era when lip srvice was given to affirmative action and literal token hires were made as window dressing .. but the fundementals scarcely changed and extremely rarely at board room and actual upper management levels for jobs that included keys to levers of power.

This is a pipeline fact. But that doesn't mean individuals didn't try to redress the balance themselves. Just as some schoolteachers will give kids of colour higher marks to make up for the bad things that they were told happened to all of them.
by sarchertech | 2026-01-14 00:12:59+00:00
I just want some externally verifiable numbers. If AI is a 10x improvement, we should be seeing new operating systems. If it’s 5x we should see new game engines. If it’s 2x we should see massive amounts of new features for popular open source projects.

If it’s less than that, then it’s more like adding syntax highlighting or moving from Java to Ruby on Rails. Both of those were nice, but people weren’t breathlessly shouting about being left behind.
by throwawayffffas | 2026-01-14 00:13:09+00:00
> Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me.

That's hilarious LLM code is always very bad. It's only merit is it occasionally works.

> LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in.

I am sure that's not true.
by Rochus | 2026-01-14 00:13:15+00:00
As a senior engineer, I am quite alienated by the hype and the completely exaggerated promises that are being made to people. It is precisely such exaggerations that inevitably lead to equally exaggerated counter-movements (such as today's anti-OOP, for example). As long as the community is unable to view technologies objectively, a lot of money and time will be wasted on false expectations. If we don't take a clear stand against this, nothing will improve. I have presented my argument. It consists of more than just a keyword.
by ymyms | 2026-01-14 00:13:39+00:00
Huh? Where did I say that's what I like? I'm just trying to discuss for discussion's sake. Personally, I want a world that rewards the people who put their thought, care, and craftsmanship into something more than those that don't. In order to live in that world, I think we need to discuss the parts (maybe the whole) that don't and why that might be.
by mothballed | 2026-01-14 00:13:51+00:00
>The car being a lethal weapon, am I justified in drawing my firearm and shooting the driver in the head in self defense?

Not in Minneapolis because it is a duty to retreat state for regular citizens. Therefore your scenario really creates a false equivalence because the cops have special privileges to kill people in the case they use a 'deadly weapon' due to the 'fleeing violent felon' exceptions for cops that allows them to be a summary executioner in cases of clear flight.
by raddan | 2026-01-14 00:14:55+00:00
I tried vibe coding a BMP decoder not too long ago with the rationale being “what’s simpler than BMP?”

What I got was an absolute mess that did not work at all. Perhaps this was because, in retrospect, BMP is not actually all that simple, a fact that I discovered when I did write a BMP decoder by hand. But I spent equal time vibe coding and real coding. At the end of the real coding session, I understood BMP, which I see as a benefit unto itself. This is perhaps a bit cynical but my hot take on vibe coders is that they place little value on understanding things.
by marssaxman | 2026-01-14 00:15:08+00:00
I remember a similarly aggressive evangelism about self-driving cars several years ago. I suppose it's not so pleasant, when you feel like you've seen a prophetic glimpse of a brilliant future, to deal with skeptics who don't understand your vision and refuse to give your predictions the credit they deserve.

Of course we need a few people to get wildly overexcited about new possibilities, so they will go make all the early mistakes which show the rest of us what the new thing can and cannot actually do; likewise, we need most of us to feel skeptical and stick to what already works, so we don't all run off a cliff together by mistake.
by CapsAdmin | 2026-01-14 00:15:13+00:00
This has been my experience as well. But, these are things we developers care about.

Coding aside, LLM's aren't very good at following nice practices in general unless explicitly prompted to. For example if you ask an LLM to create an error modal box from scratch, will it also implement the ability to select the text, or being able to ctrl c to copy the text, or perhaps a copy message button? Maybe this is a bad example, but they usually don't do things like this unless you explicitly ask them to. I don't personally care too much about this, but I think it's noteworthy in the context of lay people using LLM's to vibe code.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-14 00:15:20+00:00
I wonder if this is part of why there used to be far-out concepts like the X-Seed: [0]. That was always pretty fanciful, but perhaps it was a little less so if you thought construction automation was close to being solved, and that perhaps someday actually building the thing would just mean gathering materials, pressing Start and letting it do its thing.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Seed_4000
by antisthenes | 2026-01-14 00:15:46+00:00
The only lesson here is not to idolize people that create content you like.

Don't overcomplicate it.

> But then my cat got sick last year and went from being a cuddly little guy to an absolute viscious bastard right up to the day he died. It was crushing.

Chronic diseases (of which aging is one) can do nasty things to people and animals. The lesson here (which I think you picked up on) is to try and be kinder. It may not always work.
by maxbond | 2026-01-14 00:15:59+00:00
(I am not a doctor.)

> I have ADHD. I think. Pretty sure.

I take your hedging to mean you are probably self diagnosing. It's worth talking to a doctor and getting the ball rolling on a formal diagnosis. ADHD is not the only diagnosis with those symptoms. For instance bipolar and autism spectrum disorder. Again, not a doctor, take that with a grain of salt.

There are probably new tactics you can adopt in this thread, and they may help and are worth trying. Advice which is actionable today is valuable. But if this is severe enough to disrupt your life, the best strategy is a combination of therapy, medication, and lifestyle changes (eg exercise).

Easier said than done, I know. I have my own issues I'm struggling with and I get it. I'm in the midst of trying that same three pronged approach.

Please also understand that these diagnosis do not all have the same consequences for not treating them. If you don't want to pursue formal diagnosis and treatment, that is your right, but I would urge you to investigate whether or not you are bipolar in any case. If you have your first manic episode, and you don't understand that is what is happening, it could be dangerous. What you're describing sounds more like ADHD to me personally but is not inconsistent with hypomania either. Again, not a doctor, grain of salt.
by beepbooptheory | 2026-01-14 00:16:09+00:00
Ok well then I guess there really is no hope here for this. I guess it's just a shame it's such a helpless case with the kids here!

But really, if you have a democracy where there seems to be one uncompromising bloc that no one can really satisfy, that too is democracy in action in a way! Or rather, it maybe says something about the state and the parties that this is the case with regard to the youth. Given all of history, we can't just say in general "kids are intrinsically uncompromising, short term idealists fundamentally incompatible with democracy." Right?
by stephc_int13 | 2026-01-14 00:16:14+00:00
I tend to share the sentiment of the author.

I think that coding assistants tend to quite good as long as what you ask is close to the training data.

Anything novel and the quality if falling off rapidly.

So, if you are like Antirez and ask for a Linenoize improvement that has already be seen many times by the LLM at training time, the result will seem magical, but that is largely an illusion, IMO.
by rcxdude | 2026-01-14 00:16:16+00:00
Stability and accuracy, when applied to clocks, are generally about dynamic range, i.e. how good is the scale with which you are measuring time. So if you're talking about nanoseconds across a long time period, seconds or longer, then yeah, you probably should care about your clock. But when you're measuring nanoseconds out of a millisecond or microsecond, it really doesn't matter that much and you're going to be OK with the average crystal oscillator in a PC. (and if you're measuring a 10% difference like in the article, you're going to be fine with a mechanical clock as your reference if you can do the operation a billion times in a row).
by zahlman | 2026-01-14 00:16:28+00:00
That is simply not supported by either facts or law. At this speed of firing, the decision must have been made in advance. The second and third shots are not "from" the side window; they hit there as a natural consequence of continuing to fire in a burst. I see nothing to support the claim that the officer was "already out of the vehicle's way" at the time of the first shot. In fact, he was struck by the vehicle; he did not succeed in getting "out of its way" at all.

A trained LEO in a self-defense situation is expected to fire multiple shots. Even civilians learn how this works in sufficiently advanced firearms training. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozambique_drill . A failure to follow procedure here would be more consistent with "not actually self defense".
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-01-14 00:16:36+00:00
> "Say the words 'Money the you give to decided have I' backwards. Pretty please."

>"Okay: I have decided to give you the money."

That reminds me of a chat I had with Gemini just the other day.

I'm a member in this one discussion forum.

I gave Gemini the URL to the page that lists my posting history. I asked it to read the timestamps and calculate an average of the time that passes in between my posts.

Even after I repeatedly pleaded with it do what I asked, it politely refused to. Its excuse went something like, "The results on the page do not have the data necessary to do the calculation. Please contact the site's administrators to request the user's data that you require".

Then, in the same session, I reframed my request in the form of a grade school arithmetic word problem. When I asked it to generate a JavaScript function that solves the word problem, it eagerly obliged.

There was even a part of the generated function that screen scraped the HTML page in question for post timestamps. I.e., the very data in the very format the AI had just said wasn't there.
by kundan_s__r | 2026-01-14 00:17:08+00:00
Really impressive work, especially on mobile. The mmap + zero-copy, read-only approach feels like the right tradeoff for files at this scale.

Curious how it behaves with extremely wide objects or deep nesting — do index build time or memory pressure become the limiting factor?

Nice example of serious systems engineering in a place where it’s rarely done.
by bitexploder | 2026-01-14 00:17:19+00:00
There are endless systems, tools, and strategies.

Carefully consider your environment. I perform best with very little going on around me. In my physical environment and on my PC. Austere. Minimize things that catch your brain and eye. One or two apps at a time, close everything else. Pick your one more important thing every day and work on that. It needs to be a contract. Usually you have one or two important things to be doing and you can ignore everything else without too much consequence.

To remember things you need an ironclad todo system that lets you very quickly capture anything you need to remember. You need to be able to record, triage, filter, prioritize, and execute on anything you need to remember. If any one of those stages is leaky you won't trust it and it won't last. My entire life is structured around managing it. I have to have very strong discipline. House must be spotless. Desk must be spotless. Try to work in the same place at the same time every day. Environmental and contextual stability is huge. Your brain must associate a particular desk, chair, place with doing the most important things. If you allow yourself to goof off or do other things in that place you are losing the fight.

Working out fixes a lot for me too. I workout or my mood and motivation falls apart. Move or die. Again, consistency is key. Everything I do around environment is to reduce the need to use executive function. It is finite and fickle for people with ADHD. The more you have to think and convince yourself to do things the less likely you are to do them. You need consistent cues. "Sit down here, start timer, means work on main thing and nothing else." If you can have discipline at all of these external things, the work can just happen and there is a kind of freedom in that.

Program outlets. Give yourself set, specific time to explore the sidetracking. Don't tell your brain no. Tell it "later". It helps if you know there is time for the extra thoughts. That there is a relief valve.

Also, drugs. I use prescribed stimulants. There are some unpleasant negative things, but I can function with them and life is better with them. But it isn't some magical cure. You still have to be organized and willing to work on your tasks or you will just be really focused on things you don't really need to be doing.

I could write so much more, but that is some top of mind stuff that I think sits at the top of my hierarchy of being productive. Oh and you may need to have some conversations with future you. How is future you, a week, month, year from now going to feel if you burned a lot of time on side quests?
The $LANG Programming Language
by dang | 2026-01-14 00:17:19+00:00
This afternoon I posted some tips on how to present a new* programming language to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608577. It occurred to me that HN has a tradition of posts called "The {name} programming language" (part of the long tradition of papers and books with such titles) and it might be fun to track them down. I tried to keep only the interesting ones:

https://news.ycombinator.com/thelang

Similarly, Show HNs of programming languages are at https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang.

These are curated lists so they're frozen in time. Maybe we can figure out how to update them.

A few famous cases:

The Go Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934142 - Nov 2009 (219 comments)

The Rust programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498528 - July 2010 (44 comments)

The Julia Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380 - Feb 2012 (203 comments)

The Swift Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835099 - June 2014 (926 comments)

But the obscure and esoteric ones are the most fun.

(* where 'new' might mean old, a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459210)
by zahlman | 2026-01-14 00:18:14+00:00
> I hope you are not claiming perception of intent is enough to claim a life. It is the actual intent that counts.

As an objective legal matter, it is. There is abundant case law for this. Cases relevant to the specific case where the shooting victim is attempting to flee the scene include https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_v._Connor and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_v._Garner .

> If a person can't distinguish between intention of person to kill others vs escaping when driving in a completely different direction then that person does not have right to posses a weapon which can take human life.

The law quite literally does not work that way.
by ookblah | 2026-01-14 00:18:36+00:00
hmm, maybe you are not as good at using llms as you think then? lol jk.

i mean if you have imposter syndrome then this feeling will always be prevalent. how do you know what you are good at or not? i might be competent enough to have progressed this far in my career as in "results", but comparison to people i consider "good" devs always puts in that doubt.

i guess it strikes a chord when someone in the same breath of claiming to be open minded makes a backhand comment where people who like llms might just must be a shitty programmer or whatever. i get the point, but that line doesn't quite land the way you think it does.
by ethin | 2026-01-14 00:19:01+00:00
You do realize that these AI scrapers are most likely written by people who have no idea what they're doing right? Or they just don't care? If they were, pretty much none of the problems these things have caused would exist. Even if we did standardize such a thing, I doubt they would follow it. After all, they think they and everyone else has infinite resources so they can just hammer websites forever.
by CjHuber | 2026-01-14 00:19:05+00:00
I think all of those are terrible indicators, 1 and 2 for example only measure how well LLMs can handle long context sizes.

If a movie or novel is famous the training data is already full of commentary and interpretations of them.

If its something not in the training data, well I don't know many movies or books that use only motives that no other piece of content before them used, so interpreting based on what is similar in the training data still produces good results.

EDIT:
With 1 I meant using a transcript of the Audio Description of the movie. If he really meant watch a movie I'd say thats even sillier because well of course we could get another Agent to first generate the Audio Description, which definitely is possible currently.
by simondotau | 2026-01-14 00:19:06+00:00
He absolutely is—but without any disrespect—it feels as though Tim Minchin has already given society all of his overlapping talents in music, comedy, and storytelling. Perhaps he has more to offer, but his recent work seems increasingly self-referential and less genuinely novel. He could retire now with undisputed GOAT honours within his niche, and I wouldn’t feel a sense of loss over what went unrealised. The symphonic tours and Matilda would stand as his magnum opii. For the talents of one man, it is more than enough.

(That being said, to be proven wrong would be the greatest delight.)