MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaw12 | 2026-03-03 23:36:58+00:00
> Ideally, you’re working with teammates you trust.

I do trust them, but code is not theirs, prompt is. What if I trust them, but because how much they use LLMs their brain started becoming lazy and they started missing edge cases, who should review the code? me or them?

At the beginning, I relied on my trust and did quick scans, but eventually noticed they became un-interested in the craft and started submitting LLM output as it is, I still trust them as good faith actors, but not their brain anymore (and my own as well).

Also, assumption is based on ideal team: where everyone behaves in good faith. But this is not the case in corporations and big tech, especially when incentives are aligned with the "output/impact" you are making. A lot of times, promoted people won't see the impact of their past bad judgements, so why craft perfect code
by MoonWalk | 2026-03-03 23:37:04+00:00
"...backed by formidable fraud protections"

Laughable, at least in the USA. It took decades for us to finally get cards with chips in them, and when we finally did... the issuers "forgot" to implement the other half of the equation: PINs.

"Chip-&-PIN" was standard through the rest of the industrialized world for ages, while card companies abetted theft in the USA by neglecting to implement PINs.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-03-03 23:37:22+00:00
You are correct but it still takes time. You can start using cloud today but you need to:

* sign the papers for server colo
* get quote and order servers (which might take few weeks to deliver!), near always a pair of switches
* set them up, install OSes, set up basic services inside the network (DNS, often netboot/DHCP if you want to have install over network, and often few others like image repository, monitoring etc.)

It's "we have product and cashflow, let's give someone a task to do it" thing, not "we're a startup ,barely have PoC" thing
by jemmyw | 2026-03-03 23:37:48+00:00
I'll note that I have gone a slightly different path for the main app I wrote: I've written adapters on the js side that generate SQL or API calls depending on where the code is running and I wrote my own select/insert/update/delete tauri commands. The reason I ended up with what seems like a hybrid of the approaches I suggested above is that the js side knows more about what it wants and therefore generates SQL/api calls with the appropriate joins and preloads. On the tauri side I wanted to intercept at the data layer for a custom sync engine, which the frontend doesn't need to know about. However, I've ended up at that solution maybe because I added the tauri side after writing for the web.
by wat10000 | 2026-03-03 23:38:11+00:00
What is "correct"? If you write code that stores two values and the compiler emits two stores, that's correct. If the programmer has judged that the order of those stores is important, the compiler may not have any obligation to agree with the programmer. And even if it does, the compiler is likely only obligated to ensure the ordering as seen by the current thread, so two plain load instructions in the proper order would be enough to be "correct." But if the programmer is relying on those stores being seen in a particular order by other threads, then there's a problem.

Compilers can only be relied on to emit code that's correct in terms of the language spec, not the programmer's intent.
by hungryhobbit | 2026-03-03 23:38:13+00:00
I find chatbot conversations to be incredibly similar to dreams.

It's human nature to want to share your dreams, because they are fascinating to you.

However, it's also human nature to want to punch someone in the face when they start talking about this crazy dream they had last night ... because it has nothing to do with you, and doesn't interest you at all.

Similarly, when an AI says something useful to you, in response to your prompts, it's very particular to you. When you try to share it with others ... you get the article.
by gobalini | 2026-03-03 23:38:24+00:00
Yeah that is pretty bad I guess. For decades 99% has been achievable for many orgs. 92% phew.

But “waste” is arguable. If folks have literally nothing to do when GitHub is down, I question that a bit. For example, design, administrative work (everyone has that), lunch. You know?

Critical CI/CD can use Jenkins, but in that case folks might end up with 89% uptime!
by lacoolj | 2026-03-03 23:38:27+00:00
The examples given in the video about "over-caveating" are more like bug fixes than enhancements to the model. You don't see those kind of responses on most newer models ("Sure! Let's look at your physics question, but remember - it can't be used for evil, so don't ask!!!")

OpenAI, yet again, launching something so it can pat itself on the back. Just merge with Anthropic and kill ChatGPT.
by allreduce | 2026-03-03 23:38:34+00:00
That's a deficit of most programming languages. One solution is to pass every error value up and let the caller decide. Rust does this to some extent. This leads to verbose code however.

For modules inside your application, designing a good interface involves exposing the right errors and crashing for the rest. This creates some coupling of course (shared assumptions of which errors need to be handled across modules). Trying to avoid that probably just leads into the circle of hell where you have more abstract beancounting than useful code.

In the end, this is another reason why overreliance on external libraries leads to mediocre, buggy software.
by jongjong | 2026-03-03 23:39:21+00:00
The root problem is that these big companies are not capable of serving the customers that they have but because they have a monopoly, the customers are forced to use them.

All alternatives which are capable of actually serving the customer are systematically driven out of business.

Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs.
by roncesvalles | 2026-03-03 23:39:58+00:00
>why does American tech organise itself this way, a completely different way to other professions?

The massive shortage of software engineer talent over many decades has created a situation where any work that a SWE doesn't like to do is carved out into its own role so that the SWE's job description stays fun and attractive.

DE, DS, BI, SDET, SRE, QA, FDE, SE and to some extent even PM are all roles that emerged from the boring stuff that SWEs don't like doing.

>Do SWEs value the input of their EM? Does it really add value, or a bunch of busy work?

Depends on the EM. Usually though, no. Usually EMs earn the respect of their reports by doing the people side of things really well, not by having extraordinary technical inputs.
by hidelooktropic | 2026-03-03 23:39:58+00:00
It matters less to me that the helper is an AI/human than the kind of help I'm getting.

The bigger problem to me is "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated, not a problem with the service. This is especially prevalent for technical customers who are legitimately trying to draw attention to a bug in the platform only to get how-to help articles pasted back to them.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-03-03 23:40:29+00:00
They are used for VMs because the load is pretty spiky and usually not that memory heavy. For just running single app smaller core count but higher clocked ones are usually more optimal

>Anyway, I wasn't able to test using proxmox or vmware on there to split up cpu/memory resources; we decided instead to just buy a bunch of smaller-core-count AMD Ryzen 1Us instead, which scaled way better with my naive approac

If that was single 384 (192 times 2 for hyperthreading) CPU you are getting "only" 12 DDR5 channels, so one RAM channel is shared by 16c/32y

So just plain 16 core desktop Ryzen will have double memory bandwidth per core
by josephg | 2026-03-03 23:40:36+00:00
Early versions of google docs didn't even implement OT correctly. There were various cases where if two people bolded and unbolded text in a certain order, while connecting and disconnecting their wifi, the documents would go out of sync. You'd end up looking at different documents, even after everything reconnected.

I (obviously) care a lot about fixing these sort of bugs. But its important to remember that in many applications, it matters a lot less than people think.
by to11mtm | 2026-03-03 23:40:43+00:00
It's a few things; mostly along the lines of data caching (i.e. hyper threading may mean that other thread needs a cache sync/barrier/etc).

That said I'll point to the Intel Atom - the first version and refresh were an 'in-order' where hyper-threading was the cheapest option (both silicon and power-wise) to provide performance, however with Silvermont they switched to OOO execution but ditched hyper threading.
by tzs | 2026-03-03 23:40:47+00:00
Here's is what Carr is asking:

> That is why I am inviting broadcasters to pledge to air programming in their local markets in support of this historic national, non-partisan celebration. As an example, this could include:

> • Running PSAs, short segments, or full specials specifically promoting civic education, inspiring local stories, and American history.

> • Including segments during regular news programming that highlight local sites that are significant to American and regional history, such as National Park Service sites.

> • Starting each broadcast day with the “Star Spangled Banner” or Pledge of Allegiance.

> • Airing music by America’s greatest composers, such as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, or George Gershwin.

> • Providing daily “Today in American History” announcements highlighting significant events that took place on that day in history.

> • Partnering with community organizations and other groups that are already working hard to bring America’s stories of unity, perseverance, and triumph to light

With the exception of the one with the Pledge of Allegiance, those bullet items are things I would be completely unsurprised to find on a local PBS station. They would actually be pretty good things to include in a country's 250th birthday celebration.
by wagwang | 2026-03-03 23:41:07+00:00
That's cc propaganda; merchant fraud is a tiny portion of the overall transactions so you'd save more overall if the cc fee wasnt passed onto the consumer. The counter argument is that the aggregate data allows payment processors to ban merchants if they are bad actors. But the counter to the counter is that the level 2 payments work very well in other countries (some with a lot more fraud) and data aggregation/centralized ban power is bad.
by autoexec | 2026-03-03 23:41:17+00:00
Microsoft is a company that has very little right to complain about support costs. They'd save themselves a fortune if they stopped releasing bad software and updates that required support in the first place. Nobody wants to call Microsoft for support. They do it because they've been forced to, usually by Microsoft. This kind of support can hardly be called "free" because even when Microsoft isn't charging customers to speak with the person on the other end of the line the customer has already paid in time and suffering (and sometimes lost data)
by chairmansteve | 2026-03-03 23:41:22+00:00
His spreadsheet example is very telling. The difference in energy requirements between an actual spreadsheet program and an AI spreadsheet simulator would be multiple orders of magnitude (at least 6, probably more). So the spreadsheet simulator makes no sense. I bet you have the same problem with a world simulator. The energy requirement is so huge you will have to just write a program. With the help of an LLM of course.

So I'm not buying his thesis.
by OtomotO | 2026-03-03 23:41:24+00:00
Yeah, right. I mean, I'm so happy that only one of my clients is using GitHub as their GitForge. Every single other one hosts their own GitForge. And I can't state how much better every single other GitForge is.

GitHub was the pinnacle of GitForge a couple of years back, and it seems like they wanted to hit a wall.

Otherwise, you cannot explain how you can enshittify a software that much.
by tempaccount5050 | 2026-03-03 23:41:56+00:00
I think this might miss the point. We put off upgrading to an new RMM at work because I was able to hack together some dashboards in a couple days. It's not novel and does exactly what we need it to do, no more. We don't need to pay 1000's of dollars a month for the bloated Solarwinds stack. We aren't saving lives, we're saving PDFs so any arguments about 5 9s and maintainability are irrelevant. LLMs are going to give us on demand, one off software. I think the SaaS market is terrified right now because for decades they've gouged customers for continual bloat and lock in that now we can escape from. In a single day I was able to build an RMM that fits our needs exactly. We don't need to hire anyone to maintain it because it's simple, like most business applications should be, but SV needs to keep complicating their offerings with bloat to justify crazy monthly costs that should have been a one time purchase from the start. SV shot itself in the face with AI.
by madrox | 2026-03-03 23:41:58+00:00
If you give an agent a task, the typical agentic pattern is that it calls tools in some non-deterministic loop, feeding the tool output back into the LLM, until it deems the task complete. The LLM internalizes an algorithm.

Another way of doing it is the agent just writes an algorithm to perform the task and runs it. In this world, tools are just APIs and the agent has to think through its entire process end to end before it even begins and account for all cases.

Only latter is turing complete, but the former approaches the latter as it improves.
by SockThief | 2026-03-03 23:42:02+00:00
I usually skip WSJ articles because of that, but this worked when I checked:

https://smry.ai/proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Ftech%2...

PS. I can't be sure if it's the whole article, not just some AI summary thou.
by sjajzh | 2026-03-03 23:42:29+00:00
I’m not a bot.

> No, I was not aware. Nothing comes close to the scale of 'coherent looking' code generation of today's tech.

Are you talking about “I’m overwhelmed by code review” or “we can now produce code at a scale no amount of humans can ever review”. Those are 2 very different things.

You review code because you’re responsible for it. This problem existed pre AI and nothing had changed wrt to being overwhelmed. The solution is still the same. To the latter, I think that’s more the software dark factory kind of thinking?

I find that interesting and maybe we’ll get there. But again, the code it takes to verify a system is drastically more complex than the system itself. I don’t know how you could build such a thing except in narrow use cases. Which I do think well see one day, though how narrow they are is the key part.
by OJFord | 2026-03-03 23:42:36+00:00
> L5 or Senior is usually considered a “terminal” role. That means all engineers should be able to get to this role.

Doesn't it mean more like it's an acceptable end, a destination - obviously not everyone's career track is to take over the company as CEO one day, but nor is it necessarily to progress to Staff and beyond.

The idea being that it's a bit of a role change, to a greater extent than the levels before it which could be seen as advancement. Or, we've long had the idea of 'technical' and 'management' tracks, the more recent (I think?) idea here being that actually maybe they're both specialist tracks you switch onto, and you don't necessarily have to do either.

But I think, outside FAANG et al., whether companies subscribe to that sort of thinking is vastly more varied (or it's more niche) than titles and 'track' splits (or lack of them) already are.
by tdi001 | 2026-03-03 23:44:11+00:00
The root of this evil is the deal the card companies made with the EU some 10 years ago: A cap on the interchange fees in exchange for the ban on card surcharges.

If the card processing fees could be added to the customer's bill, it would be in the customer's interest to support a cheaper/free alternative. But since card payments are "free" in the eye of the consumer, why should he be using anything but the most convenient option? And what is more convenient than just touching your card/phone to the terminal?
As long as this deal stands, EU merchants will be slaves to the card companies.
by andrewaylett | 2026-03-03 23:44:19+00:00
That does somewhat depend on the size of the context.

LLMs won't add information to context, so if the output is larger than the input then it's slop. They're much better at picking information out of context. If I have a corpus of information and prompt an extraction, the result may well contain more information than the prompt. It's not necessarily feasible to transfer the entire context, and also I've curated that specific result as suitably conveying the message I intend to convey.

This does all take effort.

My take is also that I am interested in what people say: I have priors for how worthwhile I expect it to be to read stuff written by various people, and I will update my priors when they give me things to read. If they give me slop, that's going to affect what I think of them, and I expect the same in return. I'm willing to work quite hard to avoid asking my colleagues to read or review slop.
by game_the0ry | 2026-03-03 23:44:23+00:00
This is so lame.

Don't judge employees for what their CEOs do bc they do not have a choice in the matter.

That resume you toss might be someone that needs to pay a mortgage, has a sick wife, or autistic kid that needs the insurance. Or it could come from an employee who genuinely disagrees with mission and quit, but its not like you would know or even care.

What if your CEO went politically rogue and started openly supporting Trump? Would you quit? I doubt that.

What a childish attitude. Get your politics TF out of the office and remember the fact that we live in a democracy where sometimes you do not get your way.
by llsf | 2026-03-03 23:44:25+00:00
In US also... but here in US, my bank (Bank of America) would print a check, put it in an envelop, send it to the other bank (e.g. US Bank). So, it is not instantaneous, but it is still free.

The drawback is when the US Bank office down the street that hosts the account closed for water damage, it stopped receiving the checks, and it took forever to bounce, so I had no idea that I was not paying my HOA... And this happened in San Francisco, California where the Bank of America and the US Bank are on the same street, a block away...

I cannot wait for FedNow or anything trying to fix this mess.
by keybored | 2026-03-03 23:44:31+00:00
This is correct. And at this point (and I think you agree?) we have to take that critical thinking skill and stop letting it just happen to us.

It might seem hopeless. But on the other hand the innate human BS detector is quite good. Imagine the state of us if we could be programmed by putting billions of dollars into our brains and not have any kind of subconscious filter that tells us, hey this doesn’t seem right. We’ve already tried that for a century. And it turns out that the cure is not billions of dollars of counter-propaganda consisting of the truth (that would be hopeless as the Truth doesn’t have that kind of money).

We don’t have to be discouraged by whoever replies to you and says things like, oh my goodness the new Siri AI replaced my parenting skills just in the last two weeks, the progress is astounding (Siri, the kids are home and should be in bed by 21:00). Or by the hypothetical people in my replies insisting, no no people are stupid as bricks; all my neighbors buy the propaganda of [wrong side of the political aisle]. Etc. etc. ad nauseam.
by throwaw12 | 2026-03-03 23:44:38+00:00
> That's poor encapsulation

That's the reality of most software built in last 20 years.

> If the changes in D respect its contract, and C respects D's contract, your changes in D shouldn't affect C, much less B or A.

Any changes in D, eventually must affect B or A, it's inevitable, otherwise D shouldn't exist in call stack.

How the case I mentioned can happen, imagine in each layer you have 3 variations: 1 happy path 2 edge case handling, lets start from lowest:

D: 3, C: 3D=9, B: 3C=27, A: 3*B=81

Obviously, you won't be writing 81 unit tests for A, 27 for B, you will mock implementations and write enough unit tests to make the coverage good. Because of that mocking, when you update D and add a new case, but do not surface relevant mocking to upper layers, you will end up in a situation where D impacts A, but its not visible in unit tests.

While reading the changes in D, I can't reconstruct all possible parent caller chain in my brain, to ask engineer to write relevant unit tests.

So, case I mentioned happens, otherwise in real world there would be no bugs
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-03-03 23:44:52+00:00
I don't get it. Interesting problems are interesting problems. Granted, I don't think you see those at X, but xAI, Tesla or Meta? Sure. I am not even arguing 'money' or 'man gotta eat', but just seems like such an arbitrary thing to flag.. especially since it won't be documented anywhere ( 'we are anti-Tesla house' banner on main page for example).

It is silly.
by deathanatos | 2026-03-03 23:45:13+00:00
Again, I'm asking about generalized freedom of association. I get the hate for corporations, I do, but if you ban freedom of people to associate, and through that association, to pool money for a common cause: are you just straight up good with that?

The underlying law in Citizen's United didn't just target corporations: it targeted unions, it targeted non-profits. That's why I'm asking about those other cases that would be banned. I understand wanting to ban Evil Inc., but are you ready to ban World Peace Non-Profit, too? Not only that, but Citizens United itself wasn't a corporation.

If you have a defensible case, that, yes, that'd be fine, go ahead. But when only individuals can spend money on politics, are we not in the same situation, where Bezos or Musk can afford an ad, but I cannot?
by jolmg | 2026-03-03 23:45:35+00:00
That can be inconvenient because of NAT, etc. One can have a terminal open with an alternate connection should one consider what they're pushing risky. If it wasn't considered risky and you're locked out unexpectedly, it's nice to have a very different mode of access like IPKVM or similar.

If you just pull out of habit without thinking it risky, you might not notice you're locked out until it's too late and you've closed the terminal.
by GlacierFox | 2026-03-03 23:45:40+00:00
"Generally, I think that most people believe that the more intelligent you are, the more empathetic you are..."

Okay, you might need to re-evaluate the life lessons you seem to have selectively taught yourself. This is base line culture war 'You must be mentally deficient if you don't align with what I deem to be empathetic right now or I don't think you're nice enough' type stuff.

High school type shit.
by JeremyNT | 2026-03-03 23:45:45+00:00
The idea of copyright is to prohibit unauthorized use and reproduction, but none of this actually happens with a proprietary software SaaS backend. You don't actually give anybody the code - they connect to the service.

Access to the service is already governed by computer access laws, which don't depend on copyright. And if you never intentionally distributed your code outside of your org, you can call it a trade secret and nobody else has any legitimate right to access it - whether or not it is copyrightable.

There are other things that aren't copyrightable that are trade secrets already. This would be true of any kind of automated data collection for example. You couldn't copyright it but you can call it a trade secret.

And for any of that stuff, if you want to share it and limit distribution, you just have whoever wants access explicitly agree to be bound by contract law.