MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ksec | 2026-01-01 03:39:32+00:00
Edited for Formatting.

My take on the timeline; ( Roughly I think some of them are in between but may be best not to be picky about it )

1950s: Machine code

1960s: Assembly

1970s: C

1980s: C++

1990s: Java

2000s: Perl / PHP / Python / Ruby

2010s: Javascripts / Frameworks

2020s: AI writes, humans review

But the idea is quite clear once we have written this out, we are moving to higher level abstraction every 10 years. In essence we are moving to Low Code / No Code direction.

The languages for AI assisted programming idea isn't new. I have heard at least a few said may be this will help Ruby ( Or Nim ) . Or a Programming languages that is closest reassembling of the English language.

And considering we are reading the code more that ever writing it, since we are mostly reviewing now with LLM. I am thinking if this will also changes the pattern or code output preference.

I think we are in a whole different era now. And a lot of old assumptions we have about PL may need a rethink. Would Procedure Programming and Pascal made a comeback, or the resurgence of SmallTalk OO Programming ?
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-01 03:39:47+00:00
Do you think those people just starved to death? They had to find other jobs and they did. Now I'm sure I could find you 10 such examples if I trawl through historical records for a few hours but I'm not going to waste my time like that on New Year's Eve.

Why are you constructing a strawman in your second paragraph? No one said or even implied that, you just made up your own quote you're attacking for something reason?
by Syzygies | 2026-01-01 03:40:41+00:00
Mathematicians get enamored with particular ways of looking at things, and fall into believing this is gospel. I should know: I am one, and I fight this tendency at every turn.

On one hand, "rational" and "algebraic" are far more pervasive concepts than mathematicians are ever taught to believe. The key here is formal power series in non-commuting variables, as pioneered by Marcel-Paul Schützenberger. "Rational" corresponds to finite state machines, and "Algebraic" corresponds to pushdown automata, the context-free grammars that describe most programming languages.

On the other hand, "Concrete Mathematics" by Donald Knuth, Oren Patashnik, and Ronald Graham (I never met Oren) popularizes another way to organize numbers: The "endpoints" of positive reals are 0/1 and 1/0. Subdivide this interval (any such interval) by taking the center of a/b and c/d as (a+c)/(b+d). Here, the first center is 1/1 = 1. Iterate. Given any number, its coordinates in this system is the sequence of L, R symbols to locate it in successive subdivisions.

Any computer scientist should be chomping at the bit here: What is the complexity of the L, R sequence that locates a given number?

From this perspective, the natural number "e" is one of the simpler numbers known, not lost in the unwashed multitude of "transcendental" numbers.

Most mathematicians don't know this. The idea generalizes to barycentric subdivision in any dimension, but the real line is already interesting.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-01 03:40:57+00:00
> Perhaps an industrial car is better than your or my artisanal car, but I'm sure there's people who build cars by hand of very high quality (over the course of years). Likewise fine carpentry vs mass produced stuff vs ikea.

I think automobiles are a bad example: I'd trust the reliability and quality of a mass produced Toyota or Honda over a hand-made Ferrari. (Of course there are bad mass produced cars as well.)
by johnfn | 2026-01-01 03:41:25+00:00
I believe the spikiness in response is because AI itself is spiky - it’s incredibly good at some classes of tasks, and remarkably poor at others. People who use it on the spikes are genuinely amazed because of how good it is. This does nothing but annoy the people who use it in the troughs, who become increasingly annoyed that everyone seems to be losing their mind over something that can’t even do (whatever).
by wholinator2 | 2026-01-01 03:41:42+00:00
I don't have a dog in this disagreement, but putting the bar at "dig up the personal details of 10 different individual people and the changing dynamics of their lives over decades _starting from 1880_" is a pretty insane ask I'd imagine. How many resources for reliable and accurate longitudinal case studies from the 19th century are there really? I suppose we could read a couple dozen books written around then but that's just making a satisfactory reply so prohibitively time intensive as to be impossible.
by Moto7451 | 2026-01-01 03:43:01+00:00
Exactly this. When I was in my best shape my deadlift and squat were in/on the way to 2.5-3x my body weight. You don’t want to fail that without a lot of help and safeties.

Note for the uninitiated: That figure is not even impressive or competitive with competition lifters. This is just “guy who put in the time and work” numbers.
by karim79 | 2026-01-01 03:43:08+00:00
> As part of its ongoing genocide, which started on 7 October 2023

The genocide started decades ago. The retaliation for Oct 7th began soon after.

"> When some of the residents went out to investigate and tried to help, they were shot at by Israeli quadcopter drones.

> And another easy debunk - Israel uses explosive drones. Mounting a firearm to "shoot at" things from a drone is basically a fools errand.

> Provide video. That should be trivial."

Incredibly disingenuous post altogether. Also please do clue yourself up on logical fallacies, particularly "burden of proof". Countless surgeons from The West have testified that Israeli drones have shot the hell out of people of all ages, to the extent that it seems indiscriminate.

If Israeli drones were kamikaze-only that would be a well understood thing by now.
by lovidico | 2026-01-01 03:43:13+00:00
Further to this, you can trivially observe two further LLM weaknesses:
1. that LLMs are bad at weird syntax even with a complete description. E.g. writing StandardML and similar languages, or any esolangs.
2. Even with lots of training data, LLMs cannot generalise their output to a shape that doesn’t resemble their training. E.g. ask the LLM to write any nontrivial assembler code like an OS bootstrap.

LLMs aren’t a “superior intelligence” because every abstract concept they “learn” is done so emergently. They understand programming concepts within the scope of languages and tasks that easily map back to those things, and due to finite quantisation they can’t generalise those concepts from first principles. I.e. it can map python to programming concepts, but it can’t map programming concepts to an esoteric language with any amount of reliability. Try doing some prompting and this becomes agonisingly apparent!
by mvkel | 2026-01-01 03:43:30+00:00
Berkshire's investment in Apple is responsible for ~50% of its portfolio success in the last 20 years.

The rest is insurance.

Respect to the man for running an operation for 60 years. That's a helluva feat that deserves a lot of admiration.

Still surprised at HN's glazing of someone whose life's mission was to make a number go up and to the right via insurance packages.
by hulitu | 2026-01-01 03:44:24+00:00
> Windows 10/11 UX is very slow in general.

Drawing gray rectangles is a very resource intensive operation. It is a wonder how a Pentium was able to draw also a 3D border around the rectangle.

There were some sick people who, in 4 Megs of RAM were also letting you choose colors while presenting a Win10/11 interface (Apollo) but those were some heretics.
by raincole | 2026-01-01 03:44:43+00:00
The early internet and smartphones (the Japanese ones, not iPhone) were definitely not "immediately" adopted by the mass, unlike LLM.

If "immediate" usefulness is the metric we measure, then the internet and smartphones are pretty insignificant inventions compared to LLM.

(of course it's not a meaningful metric, as there is no clear line between a dumb phone and a smart phone, or a moderately sized language model and a LLM)
by Night_Thastus | 2026-01-01 03:46:03+00:00
LLMs hold some real utility. But that real utility is buried under a mountain of fake hype and over-promises to keep shareholder value high.

LLMs have real limitations that aren't going away any time soon - not until we move to a new technology fundamentally different and separate from them - sharing almost nothing in common. There's a lot of 'progress-washing' going on where people claim that these shortfalls will magically disappear if we throw enough data and compute at it when they clearly will not.
by protimewaster | 2026-01-01 03:47:26+00:00
I understand that, but the thing I've never understood is that banking apps only care about meaningless measurements like whether a device passes Play Integrity. I have a tablet that passes Play Integrity but is also over 6 years behind on security updates. That device should not be allowed to run banking apps.

Why not refuse to run on devices that don't have current security updates? How useful is Play Integrity actually for avoiding these types of problems?
by lmm | 2026-01-01 03:48:10+00:00
Sometimes you really can't separate the business logic from the imperative operations; in that case you use monads and at least make it a bit more testable and refactorable (e.g. https://michaelxavier.net/posts/2014-04-27-Cool-Idea-Free-Mo...).

That said:

> It pulls customer metadata, checks the customer type, and then based on that it computes their latest usage charges, and then based on that it may trigger automatic balance top-ups or subscription overage emails (again, depending on the customer type).

So compute those things, and store them somewhere (if only an in-memory queue to start with)? Like, I can already see a separation between an ETL stage that computes usage charges, which are probably worth recording in a datastore, and then another ETL stage that computes which top-ups and emails should be sent based on that, which again is probably worth recording for tracing purposes, and then two more stages to actually send emails and execute payment pulls, which it's actually quite nice to have separated from the figuring out which emails to send part (if only so you can retry/debug the latter without sending out actual emails)
by BobbyJo | 2026-01-01 03:51:40+00:00
I would have agreed with this a few months ago, but something Ive learned is that the ability to verify an LLMs output is paramount to its value. In software, you can review its output, add tests, on top of other adversarial techniques to verify the output immediately after generation.

With most other knowledge work, I don't think that is the case. Maybe actuarial or accounting work, but most knowledge work exists at a cross section of function and taste, and the latter isn't an automatically verifiable output.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-01 03:54:38+00:00
You might as well argue: "Part of my brain thought A at time Y. A different part of my brain had a different thought B, at a different time Z. Why the accusations of hypocrisy?"

The problem arises when an individual or group tries to represent themselves as more credible/consistent/coherent than they really are.

If you freely admit that you have multiple personality disorder, hypocrisy is to be expected from you as an individual. People know what they're in for.

If you respond to accusations of hypocrisy by saying: "Hm, that's a good point. I'll have to reflect and see if I can reach consistency here." Then people recognize you are making a good-faith effort.

I've observed that modern progressivism represents itself with a strong us/them boundary. The vociferousness of the rhetoric vastly outstrips the quality of the underlying reasoning / decision mechanism. And I've never seen a progressive say: "You make a good point, we'll have to debate on that."

You are correct that individual progressives may, in principle, be credible if they have a coherent philosophy which is consistently applied (including to critique their own "team" when appropriate). (Aside: I haven't seen many individual progressives who are principled in this way.)

Empirically, modern progressivism is more of a "meme ideology" where precepts are invoked when convenient, against whatever outgroup is currently fashionable. Progressive rhetoric, and progressive reasoning, is so flexible and untethered that if you're sufficiently talented at wielding it, it can be used to reach virtually any conclusion. The selective application of principles at the group level has strong parallels to how hypocrisy works at the level of an individual.

A movement can be meaningfully described as hypocritical, even if its individual members are not.
by lmm | 2026-01-01 03:54:39+00:00
"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

> It's just so... dogmatic. Inexpressive. It ultimately feels to me like a barrier between intention and reality, another abstraction.

On the contrary, it's a much more effective way to express intention when you have a language that can implement it. Programmers in C-family languages waste most of their time working around the absence of sum types, they just don't realise that that's what they're doing. Yes it is an abstraction, all programming is abstraction.
by jackvalentine | 2026-01-01 03:54:54+00:00
Right? As a teenager on overclocking forums there was a strong mod presence and you knew them. They were quick to delete any shit and keep a lid on the drama - playing a very effective ‘big brother’ role for the rest of us to have a great time.

What makes this impossible is the scale that people assume you need to cater for. When you limit your population to a reasonable size then moderation is easy and everyone gets to know the expectations of the community.
by junghoon_son | 2026-01-01 03:56:06+00:00
Decided to take a page from “explained in cows” from an old BoringPanda blog and make a spoof with AI companies. I clearly omitted some but hope you had a good laugh.

Exploded on Threads (https://www.threads.com/@drjunghoon/post/DS0BZlPkV1_?xmt=AQF...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_have_two_cows
by jibal | 2026-01-01 03:56:44+00:00
> I think the elements of the base need to be enumerable (proof needed but it feels natural)

Proof of what? Needed for what?

The elements of the number system are the base raised to non-negative integer powers, which of course is an enumerable set.

> transcendental numbers are not enumerable

Category mistake ... sets can be enumerable or not; numbers are not the sort of thing that can be enumerable or not. (The set of transcendental numbers is of course not enumerable [per Georg Cantor], but that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about.)
by legostormtroopr | 2026-01-01 03:59:22+00:00
> If you are correct, that implies to me that LLMs are not intelligent and just are exceptionally well tuned to echo back their training data.

Yes.

This is exactly how LLMs work. For a given input, an LLM will output a non-deterministic response that approximates its training data.

LLMs aren’t intelligent. And it isn’t that they don’t learn, they literally cannot learn from their experience in real time.
by tylerchilds | 2026-01-01 03:59:26+00:00
This is a great first step, but I’m actually interested in

1. Getting a list of everyone that bought my records from data brokers
2. Reverse record linking to know who joined me, when, where, and how

Just deleting myself from 500 of these databases is a good start that’s decades over due.

Time to flip the scripts.
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-01-01 04:00:20+00:00
>>> people will definitely use LLMs to revise and refine posts

>> Using an LLM to generate a post

> You are talking about an entirely different situation that I purposely avoided in my comment.

By that logic, if I hand a s/w engineering team a PostIt note saying "add feature X", then all they are doing is "revise and refine" the solution I made, not generating a solution.

Gotcha.
by mahdi7d1 | 2026-01-01 04:00:37+00:00
If it's not painfull you are not exerting enough effort at least that's the case in the gym. People who are refreshed and more energetic after going to the gym are the same people who won't improve beyond intermediate levels. The ones who let go of the any set at the first feelings of unease and never take a set close to failure.

It's actually fascinating how an ancient proverb could line up with modern science so perfectly.
by rajman187 | 2026-01-01 04:01:33+00:00
Re: cerebras, they filed a S1 [1] last year when attempting to go public. It showed something like a $60M+ loss for the first 6 months of 2024. The IPO didn’t happen because the CEO’s past included some financial missteps and the banks didn’t want to deal with this. At the time the majority of their revenue came from a single source in Abu Dhabi, as well. They did end up benefiting by the slew of open source model releases which enabled them to become inference providers via APIs rather than needing to provide the full stack for training.

[1]
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2021728/000162828024...
by badlibrarian | 2026-01-01 04:02:07+00:00
Buffett's restraint was legendary and his transparency even more so.

Bill Gates also initially dismissed him, thinking he had nothing to learn.

General Electric also tried to "make a number go up" and effed up the insurance part despite having Buffett as a model and putting 10,000 people through their custom management training facility every year.

Raise a glass to the man and read his letters.
by probably_wrong | 2026-01-01 04:02:14+00:00
Speaking for myself: because if the hype were to be believed we should have no relational databases when there's MongoDB, no need for dollars when there's cryptocoins, all virtual goods would be exclusively sold as NFTs, and we would be all driving self-driving cars by now.

LLMs are being driven mostly by grifters trying to achieve a monopoly before they run out of cash. Under those conditions I find their promises hard to believe. I'll wait until they either go broke or stop losing money left and right, and whatever is left is probably actually useful.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-01 04:03:07+00:00
sleepguy’s comment mentions the fact that Russia has converted its shadow fleet from simply a commodity transfer system to a military asset, so while I respect the caution, not only do I agree with drone killers (as Ukraine has been successful with), I think it’s also fine to start sinking these vessels from a safe distance with US military platforms (ideally subs, sufficiently advanced that sailors won’t be at harm against decrepit tankers, but something that can deliver a Tomahawk works as well from a cost efficiency perspective). Someone’s going to run out of rounds first, and it isn’t the US (in this scenario). Don’t seize them, just sink them. They’ll run out of tankers eventually.

Alarm over ‘exploding’ rise in use of sanctions-busting shadow fleet - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/21/alarm-over-exp... - December 21st, 2025

Sweden Confirms Armed Guards Aboard Russian Shadow Tankers - https://gcaptain.com/sweden-confirms-armed-guards-aboard-rus... - December 16th, 2025
by byte_0 | 2026-01-01 04:03:11+00:00
Exactly. This is the best example of what Windows 11 is. I have the feeling that Microsoft is trying to bring change at the same time that it cannot, and has to come up with workarounds like this one. This would explain the Settings panel like someone mentioned in this thread.
Another thing that I dislike (with all due respect to developers of React) is this migration to React and Reactish behavior of Windows. We have been fine with Win32 after so many years. Why change that, other than wanting to stay "relevant" or "modern"? Just my opinion.
by throwaway150 | 2026-01-01 04:03:53+00:00
> By that logic, if I hand a s/w engineering team a PostIt note saying "add feature X", then all they are doing is "revise and refine" the solution I made, not generating a solution.

Way to stretch my comment and make it mean something I didn't mean! You have gone from me talking about just "revising and refining a post" to someone generating whole software features using LLM.

First, I wasn't talking about generating whole software features. Second, pretending as if I implied anything like that even remotely is a disingenuous and frankly a bad-faith style of debating.

You are looking for some sort of disagreement when there is none. I detest LLM-based plagiarism too. So really confused why you've to come here and look for disagreements when there is none and be combative, no less? If this is your style of debating, I refuse to engage further.

Next time, you might want to review the HN guidelines and be less combative: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
by safety1st | 2026-01-01 04:04:55+00:00
There are a few issues with taking every set to failure, the most important being that it will substantially increase your risk of injury. It sounds great until you consider compounds like the deadlift that can ruin your back if your form is bad, and by definition, going to failure means your form will be imperfect at some point. There are lots of macho powerlifters out there with permanently ruined spines who will probably die earlier than they would have otherwise, due to mobility degradation.

Particularly as you get older you become more injury prone and your recovery time slows down. This necessitates being cautious about how quickly you increase weight and how often you go to failure.

The better goal to target is increasing volume, where volume is defined as Sets x Reps x Weight. The literature doesn't conclusively establish that any one of these is "more important" than the others for hypertrophy. The only real caveat when you follow this rule is that at a certain extreme of low weight / high reps (like 50 reps) you wouldn't actually be doing resistance training anymore, it'd be cardio.
by vladgur | 2026-01-01 04:04:57+00:00
All lies?

Hamas and Islamic Jihad shooting thousands of rockets before, during and after October 7 massacre is documented[1] by Wikipedia (that does have documented anti-israel bias[2])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_the_Israeli%E2%8...
by varenc | 2026-01-01 04:05:02+00:00
update: Looked it up and this seems right. The credit bureaus have specific exemptions in the Delete Act, specifically because they're already covered by the "Fair Credit Reporting Act". But it does apply to adjacent "people search" features from the same credit bureaus.

Also you can't delete your own credit history data unless it's proved inaccurate. Though you can't delete freeze it.
by anukin | 2026-01-01 04:05:26+00:00
There was a genocide committed against Bangladeshi Hindus by Pakistan and another being done right now by Bangladeshi govt in power now.
A genocide is being committed in Nigeria by boko haram. Another in Sudanese war committed and funded by uae and other Arab nations.

But let me guess, the only genocide worth committing your verbiage is the one where a certain people belonging to the favorite religion is facing issues after voting in a terrorist organization by the name of Hamas which went in and attacked a community which was persecuted and butchered for close to 2500 years. All provoked by a religious ideology and Arab theocratic pan nationalism.
by simonw | 2026-01-01 04:05:29+00:00
The way I've been handling the deafening hype is to focus exclusively on what the models that we have right now can do.

You'll note I don't mention AGI or future model releases in my annual roundup at all. The closest I get to that is expressing doubt that the METR chart will continue at the same rate.

If you focus exclusively on
What actually works the LLM space id a whole lot more interesting and less frustrating.