skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience is anecdotal, based on a sample size of one. I'm not writing to convince, but to share. Please take a look at my resume to see my background, so you can weight what I write.

I tried cursor because a technically-minded product manager colleague of mine managed to build a damned solid MVP of an AI chat agent with it. He is not a programmer, but knows enough to kick the can until things work. I figured if it worked for him, I might invest an hour of my time to check it out.

I went in with a time-boxed one hour time to install cursor and implement a single trivial feature. My app is not very sophisticated - mostly a bunch of setup flows and CRUD. However, there are some non-trivial things which I would expect to have documented in a wiki if I was building this with a team.

Cursor did really well. It generated code that was close to working. It figured out those not-obvious bits as well and the changes it made kept them in mind. This is something I would not expect from a junior dev, had I not explained those cross-dependencies to them (mostly keeping state synchronized according to business rule across different entities).

It did a poor job of applying those changes to my files. It would not add the code it generated in the right places and mess things up along the way. I felt I was wrestling with it a but too much to my liking. But once I figured this out I started hand-applying it's changes and reviewing them as I incorporated them into my code. This workflow was beautiful.

It was as if I sent a one paragraph description of the change I want, and received a text file with code snippets and instructions where to apply them.

I ended up spending four hours with cursor and giving it more and more sophisticated changes and larger features to implement. This is the first AI tool I tried where I gave it access to my codebase. I picked cursor because I've heard mixed reviews about others, and my time is valuable. It did not disappoint.

I can imagine it will trip up on a larger codebase. These tools are really young still. I don't know about other AI tools, and am planning on giving them a whirl in the near future.
I think the downside of this approach is you can’t ie split the waves with a ship.
> Honest question, is blog spam still a huge problem today if you’re not running a buggy old Wordpress stack, or better yet, not using Wordpress at all?

Yes, the most basic ones just go by form fields, easy to see if you expose some sort of comment form and add a hidden "first_name" field users don't see, but the bots are stupid enough to fill out all fields no matter their visibility.

The more advanced ones won't get caught in that, but there are tons of general tools for automatically spamming even hand made forms/fields on the fly.
Am I wrong in thinking of your company not as Robinhood for Sports Betting, but rather Expedia for Sports Betting?

If you are successful in getting a majority of OSB companies to allow bets to be placed via your app, then I would think this would lead to the various odds and payouts all converging as price discovery becomes much simpler through one app. This would make OSB less profitable as an industry, right? I see this as a good thing, but then I think you’d run into issues with getting (the bigger) OSB companies pulling their API access from you so that they can’t be compared and bet on as easily.
I've dabbled in animation in the past and this has some pretty powerful features. I'll be saving this for a rainy day. Looks great.
I think they mean the literal opposite of things staying the same, not the "helping people" idiom.
There was a paper written by a couple of Germans on the Botometer stuff. The first version of the paper cited me, they spent a year or two trying to get a version published and it was eventually cut down and got into obscure social science journal and ignored. Nothing ever came of it really.

The stuff on PCR test false positives went somewhat viral and got some attention from outside of academia but of course it was during COVID so it was ignored by the institutions.

The stuff on epidemiology and the history of Neil Ferguson was triggered originally by an article in the Telegraph. It went no further than that.

The fake lesion surgery got noticed on Twitter and I think it was eventually retracted but the perps still work for the NHS.

The paper mills and fake biology papers gets published about occasionally in mainstream press. But nothing happens.

So... no. Not really.
Trigger (Willie Nelson's Guitar)
Years ago we had five Kroger stores. One in each neighborhood.

Kroger systematically closed them one by one. Offered employees transfers to other stores.

As the last hurrah, they built a new Kroger, towards the "nice" side of town. It was larger than any of the other stores, but since the other five were closed, everyone has to go to the one store. It's a huge mess, it's packed, they are understaffed, things are always out of stock...

We also had A&P and a couple smaller regional chain stores but they are all gone now.
You bring up a good point! These tools are useless if you can't prompt them effectively.

I am decent at explaining what I want in English. I have coded and managed developers for long enough to include tips on how I want something implemented. So far, I am nothing short of amazed. The tools are nowhere near perfect, but they do provide a non-trivial boost in my productivity. I feel like I did when I first used an IDE.
Slightly off topic: does anyone have a link to recent work done toward automatic parallelization?

(Write single threaded code and have a compiler create multithreaded code)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_parallelization_to...
Ken Klippenstein: "I redacted the JD Vance Dossier. Surprise: I'm still banned"
True story: CEOs, cops,and politicians (and their appointees) are good at it as well.
I am really surprised that this isn't higher up in here. I know people have suspected this to be a thing or have known this to be a thing but just seeing it confirmed with graphs and that it even works with HDMI connected is going to make me work a little bit on my router today just to make sure things are set up right still.
Unpoly – Progressive Enhancement for HTML
Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants
Signal has reproducible builds on Android. If they have on IOS like Telegram then I have missed it.

I realize now that while I wrote reproducible builds on both Android and iOS further up the thread I forgot to in my last reply. It was an honest mistake, I forgot.

Telegram is open source.

And has reproducible builds.

So anyone can audit it and verify that

a) end-to-end encryption either works or does not (but I guess someone had told us if it was broken)

b) it is not enabled by default

c) in the default mode data is sent encrypted to Telegrams data centers, after that you have to trust Telegram not to snoop in it.

Does not mean it is perfect or even good, but for its use cases it is a lot better than HN gives it credit for.
You could already easily parallelize with the multiprocessing module.

The real difference is the lower communication overhead between threads vs. processes thanks to a shared address space.
This doesn’t include the apparently over 350,000 Home Owner Associations in the USA that are effectively another layer of local government with the powers to tax and regulate like other special districts
That correct. Fundamentally the problem is foundations and government science budgets don't care. As long as voters or Bill Gates or whoever believes they're funding science and progress the money flows like water. There's no way to fix it short of voting in a government that totally defunds the science budget. Until then everyone benefits from unscientific behaviour.
shameless plug

wrote a elaborate doc on using wal-g on nixos, might be useful if someone finds themselves in same boat. has some catches.

https://github.com/geekodour/nix-postgres-docker
This looks really awesome! But same question here:

GSheets has let me write JS (Google Script) in the spreadsheet (w/ multiplayer, free db & API hosting like features with a little bit of JS, ++) and now has some Gemini support rolling in.

Excel is rolling out support for Python and Jupyter as well.

I'm trying to wrap my head around who the ideal user/customer is here w/ a hair on fire problem, and what problems are being addressed that are overlooked by the 2 most popular spreadsheet tools.
We don't want Python programs to become the same kind of security swiss cheese as C/C++ programs.
The War on Drugs is now considered a failure because it was unable to eliminate drug usage and led to a large number of people being incarcerated for drug offenses. But as drugs have been increasingly legalized/decriminalized in certain areas of the country, the results are even worse. I’m now becoming more convinced that the war on drugs wasn’t a failure, and in fact might be the best that can feasibly be accomplished. I think the “war” terminology doomed it from the start, as it primed us all to think complete and total victory was actually attainable, instead of a scenario where we are instead simply trying to keep society afloat.
Hope it tells you to buy more AMD HW because that would be so funny.
I'm not sure I understand the reasoning here. Either they are licensee or they're not. The history leading up to that doesn't convey any special rights or exceptions.

And referring to that transfer as "very above board" makes it sound like you're talking about the same thing as the commenter above when in fact you're talking about different things. Because however gracious you find that decision to be, that's a different subject than whether it's above board to, subsequently commingle those responsibilities. And whether or not you feel it's practical, in some sense, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything. Either Automatic has The authority to collect licensing payments on behalf of WordPress or they don't and that should be reflected in a charter or something, somewhere.

I don't think referencing the history of Automatic previously owning the trademark has anything to do with anything in this context.
prj play bin
Thanks, seems you're talking about the OpenELM family of models: https://github.com/apple/corenet/tree/main/projects/openelm
Count me in the club of failed scientists. In my case it was the geosciences, I would spend hours trying to make all my analysis reproducible and statistically sound while many colleagues just published preliminary simulation results obtaining much more attention and even academic jobs. On the flip side, the time spent improving my data processing workflows led to good engineering jobs so the time wasn't entirely wasted
Except “like you would do with your C#, your Java…” does not happen w.r.t. native components - you just write faster code and in 98% situations it’s more than enough. Now, Java and C# are different between each other when it comes to reaching top end of performance (Java has better baseline, but C# can compete with C++ when optimized), but we’re talking about the level far above the performance ceiling of Go.
I have an alarm clock like this and still use it almost daily. The one that I use has an alternate dismissal method for anything fixed to a certain location. (Barcodes, etc.)

My sleep has gotten consistent enough over the years that I could probably get by without it, but it did help significantly with building the habits in the first place.
Great! I've shared this with every physicist I know who's not directly involved in animations.

Quick question from my swimming class yesterday: We know that professional swimmers use a range of technologies, both old and new, in their training. Is there currently a model that fully simulates the physics of swimming across different styles? If not, this seems like a great project idea!
Read my above comment again. 0 can be too many or a million can be too less. What's the problem with choice?
I think that one of the issues that really hurts the advertising is that the sports betting adverts will pay above and beyond what anyone else pays and it prices everyone out. It's the same problem we had with crypto and cigarettes. They need to spend infinite money to normalize their desired behavior. I feel like advertising for casinos around there being interesting non-gambling activities (e.g. concerts) is the right kind of indirect advertisement, but by necessity the online slots and online sports betting is monotone towards the outcome.
Is Product Hunt Dying?
Product Hunt is clearly featuring fewer products than before:
- Last year between 60% and 98% of launches were featured.
- The share dropped to 25% from the 25th of January.
- In September 2024 only 10% of launches are featured

That leads to several issues:
- Launches do not provide exposure to makers
- This is killing Product Hunt’s viral loop as many founders will stop promotion activities if their launch is not featured
- As the reasons to be featured aren’t transparent it adds a lot of uncertainty

Overall Product Hunt become a less interesting channel for founders, which can lead to a slow death of the platform.

Should you still consider launching on Product Hunt?
Yes, but you need to go no-frill with your preparation. I provide recommendations about how to do so in the last part of my article.
> I think there are two types of developers: those who are most excited about building things, and those who are most excited about the craft of programming.

Love this. You hit the nail right on the head.

I don't know if I fit into one or the other. However, I do know that at times I feel like one, and at other times, the other.

If I am writing another new app and need to build a slew of CRUD code, I don't care about the craft. I mean, I don't want sloppy code, but I do not get joy out of writing what is _almost_ boilerplate. I still want it to reflect my style, but I don't want to type it all out. I already know how it all works in my head. The faster I get it into an IDE the better. Cursor (the AI IDE) allowed me to do this much faster than I would have by hand.

Then there is time where I do want to craft something beautiful. I had one part of this project where I needed to build a scheduler and I had very specific things I wanted it to do. I tried twice to describe what I want but the AI tool did not do what I wanted. It built a working piece of code, but I could not get it to grasp the nuance.

I sat down and wrote the code for the scheduler, but then had to deal with a bunch of edge cases. I took this code, gave it to the AI and told it to implement those edge cases. After reviewing and iterating on it, I had exactly what I wanted.
That's true for the rare case that something turns into a professionally run and controlled trial (incidentally there's evidence for many published clinical trials also being fake). But very little research output is ever tested that way. Most doesn't even claim it could have real world impact in principle.
There are only two good moments to plant a tree: 20 years ago and today.
Elsewhere in this thread I'm seeing people say that Automattic is the exclusive commercial licensee with the ability to sub license.

So it's possible that that's the answer there.
Generally, you can just give the disk to someone else. The physical disk contains the license key for the game.

The issue is that all modern games need to be installed on the internal SSD. So you're not playing of the disk, you're just copying the files from it. And many games require a day-1 patch to work properly. Some even require a constant online connection.

doesitplay.org is a useful database for that information.
Back when I graduated I was still holding my breath for the patent expiration on marching cubes, GPUs were still being made for PCI and even ISA slots, you could find some game engines but you would have a better time writing one specialized for the type of game or graphics you were targeting.

Things really have improved a lot.
I don't have this problem, but Cursor was an excellent companion yesterday while I was scripting in Python. It was always ready with function suggestions—sometimes just typing the function name and hitting tab twice. Other times, I used cmd+k for descriptions. What worries me is that writing functions is easy, but keeping everything in my head to write more functions later, especially after 20 days, is challenging.

(When I tried with Zig it was a disaster..)
Irrelevant to the article/topic, but this title reminded me the phrase "Those are not Mountains. Those are Waves."
Because it's fun (:
Based on my experience, that statement is not only wrong, but obviously so. Because of that, I assumed it was not what you meant.
We observe larger and more power hungry at the high end, because those models are selected for maximum performance - at the expense of everything else.

But GPU power efficiency (gflops/watt) has been increasing at an exponential pace as well - over the last decades it has been consistent doubling every 2-3 years. So over 10 years we have had 10-30x improvements in power efficiency. The same is true for cost efficiency (gflops/dollar).
My experience is that it varies a lot by model, dev, and field — I've seen juniors (and indeed people with a decade of experience) keeping thousands of lines of unused code around for reference, or not understanding how optionals work, or leaving the FAQ full of placeholder values in English when the app is only on the German market, and so on. Good LLMs don't make those mistakes.

But the worst LLMs? One of my personal tests is "write Tetris as a web app", and the worst local LLM I've tried, started bad and then half way through switched to "write a toy ML project in python".
All the answers were good, but I think this explained it the best. Thank you
I'm not sure what the bin collection schedule in Vienna is but what's really nice here is that I just don't have to think about it. There is a garbage room in our building that the recycling agency has a key to and they get the bins themselves. I would guess they come twice a week to our building but the garbage truck is in the street probably every day. Big difference to my experience in London.
> The exclusion of it seems to undermine their point?

I’m shocked, shocked, that a newspaper would exclude information that would undermine the editorial point it was making!
The Product Hunt acquisition and the new wave of AI apps didn't help the platform.
Or for corporations that produce things of negative value and force people to waste a big chunk of their lives on administrative tasks.
Let’s not tout abysmal state of multi-tasking in Python as an advantage.

Somehow, it’s perfectly fine in C#, Java, now Go, Rust and many other languages, with relatively low frequency of defects.
also lived in the midwest my whole life, mix of rural and cities; this is false
Do you have a product you recommend? Ideally one with built-in AirPlay Support?
>If they want to play hardball about what’s required instead of acting generously, like Matt has done for decades, then they are getting their just deserts.

I can't help but notice that once it gets to the question of whether there's any actual authority to demand a licensing fee, the conversation stops being about what is or isn't legal, who is authorized to do what, considerations of proportionality or collateral damage or any of that, and just start slipping into this mode of speaking like mobsters from the 1920s. If that's the cadence you find yourself slipping into it might be an indicator of whether you're the good guy.
If you haven’t already, you should check out the amazing realtime* PETSCII art of Raquel Myers, e.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=DCP-DbkbiLA

More can be found on her website: https://www.raquelmeyers.com/

*) Realtime meaning that she‘s typing in the images as you watch them come into existence
Literacy too!
If you need to sleep more, but need to get up at a specific time, you could…
Cloudflare: Reaffirming Our Commitment to Free
As I'm getting older (and have seen more of my "smart" solutions turn into terrible maintenance nightmares) I'm now fully on board with that general idea. The simple things just keep working and it's great.
Plenty of laptops have a built in modem and this is becoming more ckmmoj every day. Those connect directly to the internet.

NAT only makes a difference if you use. IPv4 only. If you have dual stack, then your host is on the public internet.
You're lucky, I only own one pair of regular shoes (i.e. not my hiking shoes), but since I walk a lot and I think I walk "incorrectly" I have to buy a new pair every few months because the previous pair is ruined (as in full of holes, soles falling out)
I think we can pretty safely say bitcoin was a dead end other than for buying drugs, enabling ransomware payments, or financial speculation.

Show me an average person who has bought something real w bitcoin (who couldn’t have bought it for less complexity/transaction cost using a bank) and I’ll change my mind
In somewhat delicious irony, I find this PDF almost unreadable on my iPhone screen due to the tiny font.

Hah: “The students were randomized into two groups, where the first group read two texts (1400–2000 words) in print, and the other group read the same texts as PDF on a computer screen.”

Maybe they should try the experiment again using a non-hostile format for presenting information on a computer.

(In case anyone else was wondering about resolution, this 2012 study used 15” LCDs at 1280x1024 running Windows XP - so definitely not retina.)
there's openscad
The 14 BibTeX Entry Types
> This is usually not what you want.

very interesting comment considering I'm literally fighting with stupid languages with this kind of permissive rules right now, which definitely just create more bugs (for instance silently dropped values because an upstream API changed, added an element at the end of the list, you updated but since you get no error you now have to go through all the calls to check them one-by-one)
A while ago, when thinking about syntax design for a new language, I considered this combination (`:` and `end`, as opposed to `do` and `end` as used by Lua etc).

Are there any languages that use it, or is Python unique in using `:` to begin a block?
The Trick to Future-Proof Your Coding Career Against AI
Being sued yet? Mr Issac hasn't had much fun either.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/17/politics/hunter-biden-counter...
>shouldn’t have left their customers wellbeing up to the whims of an organization they were antagonizing.

The point of the article is that it's precisely these actions that have damaged the integrity of WordPress for everybody, because we can now no longer look at WordPress as having stable stewardship, but as something ready to whimsically descend into unpredictable retaliatory actions, without any rhyme or reason or structure.

Once you start talking that way, it seems to me you've completely lost sight of what it is to be the healthy steward of a norms driven foundation. The reason you work out things in charters, and in terms of service and so on is precisely to avoid situations like this, where there are spirals of escalation all hinging on subjective interpretations of everything.
What you're describing here is actually a much more broad problem in the book industry, in my opinion. Almost every book written today is written with only one goal in mind, selling as many copies as possible.

People don't have to use LLMs (they don't seem to be AI yet) because they can simply choose not to. For authors, write books that you want to write because you believe you have a story to tell. Worry about perfecting your stories and enjoy the process of writing, don't be an author just for the sales. Once you peek behind the curtain and learn the economics of the book industry, you'll realize there's very little opportunity for making enough cash to even worry about shotgunning a mountain of LLM books into the world anyway.
I tried the Q_8, but it was all over the place, so not really trained for instruction and chat yet, I think :)
What a weird way to say "a weeks wages"
You can also just attach a 3:1 gear.