skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was! (Along with co-author Dave Pacheco.) And I still have the dream that we'll finish it one day: we had written probably a third of it, but then life intervened in various dimensions. And indeed, as part of our preparation to write our book (which we titled The Joy of Debugging), we read Wheeler's Debugging. On the one hand, I think it's great to have anything written about debugging, as it's a subject that has not been treated with the weight that it deserves. But on the other, the "methodology" here is really more of a collection of aphorisms; if folks find it helpful, great -- but I came away from Debugging thinking that the canonical book on debugging has yet to be written.

Fortunately, my efforts with Dave weren't for naught: as part of testing our own ideas on the subject, I gave a series of presentations from ~2015 to ~2017 that described our thinking. A talk that pulls many of these together is my GOTO Chicago talk in 2017, on debugging production systems.[0] That talk doesn't incorporate all of our thinking, but I think it gets to a lot of it -- and I do think it stands at a bit of contrast to Wheeler's work.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30jNsCVLpAE
Oh, and IME it doesn't ask clarifying questions that a human translator would know are necessary (at least without explicit prompting to do so, which I admittedly haven't tried). So when translating from a high-context language like Japanese, it'll come up with a translation that works in some contexts but is meaningless in others. I figure this is related to the overconfidence issue that's prevalent with (current) LLMs.
Yeah, I have a problem with general statements like that ". It was inventing/creating something new."

This simply is not the case as far as we know.. I'm yet to be convinced that anything under the hood is more than a clever predictive generator for now.

It can appear to do really impressive things, but that's only while it's behaving correctly. All it takes is one bad line and the snowball effect of the problem is in motion.

Lastly, it is true :

> "the better the type system of the programming language and verbosity of compiler errors the harder LLM's go"

The LLM has the best opportunity to succeed in this case. Nice to have but inventing, I doubt.
The problem with (La)TeX is that it's designed for fixed layout documents.

Great for print and slides, bad for most digital documents.
On the contrary, I have spent thousands of hours interacting with MSFT support.

What I'm getting at with my post is the dev teams support has to talk to, which they just forward along their responses verbatim.

A lot of MSFT support does suck. There are also some really amazing engineers in the support org.

I did my time in support early in my career (not at MSFT), and so I understand well it's extremely hard to hire good support engineers, and even harder to keep them. The skills they learn on the job makes them attractive to other parts of the org, and they get poached.

There is also an industry-wide tendency for developers to treat support as a bunch of knuckle-dragging idiots, but at the same time they don't arm them with detailed information on how stuff works.
Maybe I'd give a little thought to why selling their daughters was or seemed like the only solution to those families. And I'd definitely want to track down and prosecute the people who are going around buying children.

I don't disagree with any of your bullets, but none of those bullets actually require saying "playing cards are evil." They all work just as well with a theme of "Gambling can be fun, but it's addictive, and you might not know you've lost control til it's too late."
Euphemism treadmill is real and never stops.
Listen close, please. The end goal of AI coding assistants is not

> convert this rust library at https://github.com/RustAudio/cpal/tree/master to a haskell library using ghc2024.

The end goal is something more like

> Build me a website where users can make and share a link to a text document like a shopping list and edit it collaboratively

This guy thinks LLMs are so great, but if he grew up with LLMs, not only would he not have the skill set to competently ask the LLM to produce that output, he wouldn't have any idea the output he's trying to produce.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft are not trying to sell the idea of helping out your senior engineers. They are trying to sell the idea that any of your interns could be senior engineers, so that you no longer have to pay for expensive senior engineers.
Maybe it’s besides the point, but ChatGPT gives this now

> ”First, list out Samantha’s siblings explicitly:
• Brothers (2 total): Alex + one other brother
• Sisters (4 total): Samantha + three other sisters

Since Alex shares all siblings with Samantha, let’s see it from Alex’s perspective. Alex himself is one of the 2 brothers. Therefore, from Alex’s point of view:
• He has 1 other brother (the second brother besides himself).
• He has 4 sisters (including Samantha).

Thus, Alex has 1 brother and 4 sisters.”

This just moves the goalpost. I’m sure someone can give the next example where it fails. I find it useless as well, but at the same time it really feels like criticizing a talking dog about their lack of understanding.
$30 is like five pens on that site, and that's if you get cheap ones. I don't even use pens often, and I still buy them from there.
FWIW C++ in FreeBSD is a little contentious. The overall system build time is dominated by Clang, with the rest of FreeBSD "a wart on the side." In base, the C++ compiler was pretty much only used for devd (something vaguely like Linux' udev), and devd is written in a pre-C++11 dialect -- no new features. Using more of it isn't exactly encouraged; it's not allowed in the kernel.

There are two significant barriers to Rust in FreeBSD base -- first, cultural: it's just a bunch of greybeards opposed to anything and everything new; and second, technical: Rust just doesn't (or didn't) have compiler backends for the same subset of platforms FreeBSD does (or did). (This situation is improving as FreeBSD finally drops official support for obsolete SPARC, 32-bit ARM, MIPS, and 32-bit PowerPC platforms, but obviously cultural barriers remain.)
The only advantage AI code assistants have over competent humans is speed in generating code.

But speed doesn’t matter. When code is going to live for several years, no one will care if it took minutes to create vs a week.

If you are an incompetent human, you might never be able to generate the same code some LLM generates. This will cause you to sing it’s praises and worship the LLM as your savior.

In general, there is a correlation between weak developers and how hyped they are by LLM coding assistants.
TLDR: ai can be helpful, anyone who doesn’t use it hasn’t realized it’s helpful, SWE’s who disagree “are frankly not gonna make it”

Review: great fun story, I agree with the first part of the take and I like the post and I like some ai tools, I disagree with the last bit. There are really good SWE’s who are in spaces where ai is not that useful. SWE is too big now, it’s too vague, ai doesn’t apply to all. You don’t need to use ai to survive, but I agree you should try it out and see before dismissing it. And retry it every so often cuz it’s developing and changing.
Binary, polarizing language for clicks. I've had a few mild versions of the "oh fuck" moment they're talking about in the past 1-2 years but outside of some specific cases (writing test data generators, scaffolding, etc.) LLMs havent massively changed the way I do things. They're cool and all but, c'mon. I've been programming for 25 years, 15 of which were professional. This is a majorly creative job and while I'm down for Butlarian Jihad as much as the next guy you need to actually have a machine which can be self-sufficiently creative to start talking about it.
Customer Success Account Manager. And I would agree - it is very unfortunate.

Definitely in my top 5 questionable acronym choices from MSFT.
Of all the (valid) downsides of LLMs, this is maybe the weakest one. I'm not even sure what would qualify as "new" for you.

Anything I've ever done at work could have been pieced together from StackOverflow. Anything you have ever done can most probably be pieced together from StackOverflow as well.
Thanks for putting this better than I could have.
They didn't say to buy a book just for this.
That was never a good strategy. Even before GPT-4 and Claude, those folks were losing their jobs to Wordpress, Google Sheets, Wix, SquareSpace, etc.
Uff, yeah. I used to work with a guy who would immediately turn the panic up to 11 at the first thought of a bug in prod. We would end up with worse architecture after his "fix" or he would end up breaking something else.
...and you are building and running the correct clone of a repository
Can't get it to load... an intriguing title though to me as a former New Yorker.
Could be, lots of pros and cons to each scenario - doubt either are easy by any measure.

E.g. for about 20% we didn't even have a single piece of documentation other than the server name for who might actually care about the VM going down for the migration we wanted to schedule. Let alone how to test the migration, when it is best to do it, what software was actually running on it, if it's actually managed/monitored integrated with/by other systems whoch need to be looked at too, or if it could just be shit down instead (yay healthcare mergers and acqs). Our migration was also to VMware from (mostly) Hyper-V at the time, so not as much custom tooling needed.

On the flip side a cloud provider is going to have all of the owner contact info but no direct control of the guest OS to effect the change so the battle is more with trying to get the customers to care enough to do the migration with you but not be so bothered by it all they up and leave your hosting.Not exactly a walk in the park either.

In either case - almost never the tech that's the hard part for sure :).
"belief". lol
But that’s not really descriptive of anything discussed, is it? The cargo cult story names no names, and talks about a general group (south sea islanders). Calling out a specific individual raises a swath of other issues, but even that’s fairly commonly done with little issue for famous people… and it’s fine — especially when they’re famous & dead
Ironically, the reason some states allow “video poker” gambling machines and not slot machines that look like slot machines is that poker is at least partially a game of skill.

Even though video poker as it’s typically implemented and played is essentially indistinguishable from a slot machine — if there is user choice of what cards to swap in a hand, the machine will indicate and default to the option with highest expected value, so user skill is irrelevant.
In a perfect world maybe, but we don't code there.
I used to wear HP t-shirts in the era of this article; "ENTER > =" and would earnestly argue about the wonders of RPN over algebraic notation. This is a wonderful glimpse at the algorithm that made that magical "Solve" button work. A couple of years ago I saw but neglected to save an article about how HP implemented all this in the chips of the day.

40+ years later I note that my day-to-day work either never uses the capabilities of an HP-34C or requires crunching more tabular data than a calculator can handle. While I still like RPN, I would not like to enter RPN expressions into the programming languages I do use. As great as it is in calculators, it is damn hard to revisit and figure out what I had intended let alone what someone else's code may have intended.

Damn shame what happened to the HP company and reputation in the intervening years.
The second last photo labelled "Thames garnets tend to appear in specific spots along the riverbank, but those locations are carefully guarded among mudlarks. Courtesy Jason Sandy" you can see a big one. It has what looks to be a five-sided facet that's reflecting light.
You're still not listening.
If this is what Claude was trained on. Maybe they could filter this out from the training data. Or somehow detect if it writes something like this, and do one more chain-of-thought expansion on it.
I'd much rather write my own code while thinking through the implications and pitfalls of it than have a virtual junior coder vomit out some code I have to check carefully.

If I want to invest time in fixing some junior developer's probably broken code, I'd much rather do it with a real junior developer who has the potential to learn over time and become a not junior developer
Yeah. Is basically like claiming that current autopilot/automation in planes make pilots superfluous. Basically every part of the flight can/could be completely automated today, but still you need those 2 guys, for the event that something goes wrong. Now, before someone comes with a snarky “like in Korea”: that was one of thousands emergencies in the last couple of years, where that 2 humans made the difference.

May some day need no pilots? Yes. Not today, no tomorrow.
One of the tricks of using AI effectively is getting a good feel / mental model of it. And that mental model is in fact extremely weird, because you have this thing, which quacks like a human, has an immense (superhuman) amount of knowledge, and can read/write very quickly (tokens / s), but at the same time, logic wise, is often extremely dumb, and is happy to bullshit with full confidence.

What I've learned is that it's good primarily for tasks like the following:

- Tasks which take time to do, but are then easy to verify.

- Tasks which effectively boil down to translating something from one format to another. Which might e.g. be "read this technical document and implement it in code, as for style, look at these sample code files as a reference”.

- Tasks which are about exploring unknown unknowns. E.g. I write down a design, and then I ask the AI to roast it. The point is not that all the points it'll make are good and I need to please the AI, it's that out of 20 points it will list, 2-3 might both make sense, and haven't been thought of by myself.

Finally, AI requires good writing skills, and asking questions in an unbiased way, otherwise the AI will gladly hallucinate to reinforce your bias.

Logic exercises which are easy to verify are a moderately good fit for "reasoning models" which will go through many iterations of an LLM and basically write out the whole reasoning process. In practice though, this can be very expensive to get good results with.
Thanks for this -- have been using Cody a lot and just tried Windsurf on my hobby project. So far it seems immediately like a step up. Has anyone paid for it? The free version is doing good work.
How often do you need to solve a problem like that in practice? Try asking it something that actually comes up in your day-to-day and you might have a different experience.

By the way, o1 has no trouble with this problem: https://chatgpt.com/share/6785429c-d1d4-800c-8209-02c542468a...
This is no ingenious feat by any standard, except probably for someone in the Dunning–Kruger dip.

https://gwern.net/creative-benchmark

I can't wait to see if AI can get past its centripetal plateau.
It is basic reasoning. How do you expect it to produce useful programs with any consistency without it?
Because they have twelve thousands vms and are themselves a provider that can't afford to have downtime for its customers.

So the thinking here was probably "there is no way they can refuse to sign right now and destroy their business in the process, so we might as well take the cake and also force them to stay after so they don't leave in 11 months and 29 days".

Turns out that thinking is wrong for that specific customers, but for how many did it work ?
They did the same thing during the hurricane in North Carolina. "FEMA is giving funds to illegals!!!".

The lack of any sort of fact checking and relying on community notes to do fact checking is just inherently flawed and works in favor of the disinformation artists. It's going to get worse.
I was on a team at Citibank, in the late 1990's that built an ATM that was a full-on virtual bank that you walked around within and transacted your business.

Nobody liked using it and we were eventually all fired. The end.
What are you "learning"? "Prompt engineering" is hardly a skill and varies LLM to LLM.
Oh, I didn't expect that much skepticism. I love the idea and I love companies that are trying to create beautiful and sustainable things. They even try to give people a place that usually don't fit in.

Yes, you can fold one yourself (will it be stable enough though?). Yes, I wouldn't use it for a laptop either. But for a tablet it could work really nice.

Also shipping it around the world is a bit silly, like with most things. Too many people will order on Amazon or buy fruits from the other side of the world without a second thought. Get off your high horse.
If he sold his rights then it's not really against his wishes anymore.
> Autorun has been disabled since the release of Windows 7 in 2009.

No. Microsoft just said it will disable it. On some systems, i've seen it disabled (i don't know if by default or by AD policy) but, on the majority of Windows 10, it was not disabled.
It's true: https://chatgpt.com/share/678542c5-ebf0-8011-91f2-2b68ddcc73...
Tech companies are turning to 'synthetic data' to train AI models
Not being able to drive on a public road sounds good to you?
In fact there are already programs (w/o AI) that do that (wrappers) . Is called a groveller.
Or "to annex" [1], as in all your VMs (are) belong to us [2]

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/annex

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
If you could move all WP plugins & plugin developers to a different domain at once, sure, there's no problem! But unless you have a magic wand, this won't happen. Then the question is: can you move enough at once to clear the network effect?

If you cannot do that, every developer that moved with you potentially just lost their livelihood. That's the crux of it. There's no technical issue to solve here, it's purely a social and economical one.
Isn’t that what most developers do?
Few are really inventing something new, afaict almost everyone is plugging together existing solutions to solve the same old use cases
I used to manage a team that supported an online banking platform and gave a copy of this book to each new team member. If nothing else, it helped create a shared vocabulary.

It's useful to get the poster and make sure everyone knows the rules.

https://debuggingrules.com/download-the-poster/
> Sovereign AI compute, owned and/or allocated by the public sector, will enable the UK to quickly and independently allocate compute to national priorities. [...] Sovereign AI compute will almost certainly be the smallest component of the UK’s overall compute portfolio.

> NB: this review has not considered the requirements of non-AI high-performance computing, for which there is already a well-established case, including the need to deliver an exascale capability. Government should seek to resolve this as soon as possible, noting that these systems will play a crucial role in supporting AI science and research.

What an interesting addendum to add to that. The government, or at least who ever is writing this report, seems to imagine "AI" as a uniform and distinct process, where you turn on the AI machine, electricity goes in and AI comes out. "Can't use a non-AI machine. It doesn't make AI." The government should already be investing in computational resources for a huge number of government projects and services. The N.B. makes a good point.

The fact someone needed to add this note, and it made it into the final public document, written in that tone, seems like this isn't really a plan, more so just a vibes-based promise for innovation from 1 team in the government.
The limbo facing IVF embryos
Probably because this almost begs for accusations of shill-ing, worthless altercations via comments and generally degraded discussion.

I had heard about the book before, but just found out that they printed 3 millions of them (which is a lot for whats probably mostly ideological drivel)... Distribution via semi-official channels is also concerning.

This is generally an interesting datapoint. I used to believe that 2010s European policy (treating Russia as somewhat flawed democracy, and trying to positively influence via mutual trade) was generally a good idea that could've worked, but have realized that this was probably pretty doomed from the outset and almost negligiently naive from European leaders.

2014 was a wake-up call that Russian imperialism is alive and well, but it was conveniently ignored because Russian gas was such a nice pillar for EU electricity.
Camouflaged motorcycle hides from bike thieves in plain sight
First satellite tracker for dogs keeps tabs on your pet anywhere
RRT2 leaned heavily into the financial aspects, it was quite different to the original railroad tycoon.

Personally I preferred railroad tycoon 1 to transport tycoon, but either way railroad tycoon 2 was different.

I miss A-Train.
Facebook Marketplace and the niche groups are great. Too bad forums are dying, it’s still much better than a discord chat.
*if they become ready
I meant: how is actual testing carried out?
I commuted the NJ/USA daily for a while and loved - https://njtranshit.com/ - there's always room for sites that deliver something extra to the official one :)
what HN post were they referring to ?
Hmm, this is a completely generic and unreflective rant about ‘wokeness’ that could have been cobbled together from YouTube comments and Jeremy Clarkson columns. What is PG thinking?

The most striking thing about it is that it makes absolutely no attempt to consider how there might be a link between the undeniable social progress that’s been made on race and gender over the past decades and the aspects of ‘wokeness’ that PG finds distasteful. He simply assumes that you can automatically get all of the progress without any of the stuff he doesn’t like.
I sincerely doubt it; but I also work in an Org that has highly internal code with none to poor documentation.

Also, I never said it was a "downside". I'm simply stating that the author is exaggerating what the LLM is doing. It isn't creating novel code.

I used LLMs all the time to spit out boilerplate when it makes sense.
It’s much easier for people to shame their coworkers over nothings than to do things of actual value for society. Feel good activism.
I am referencing water regulations, I never said anything about blood.
Note this is a huge improvement from 'binary is guaranteed to not work in the future, probably not too distant' of the standard model of Linux distributions.
I don't know much about them. It would be interesting to see how the manage all the usual pitfalls.
Upskilling as a Professional Programmer
Does anyone remember when standing desks started taking off…maybe 2016ish and there was that company making cardboard props to convert your desk into a standing desk. Amazing how well those worked for being cardboard.
> N period on from now, software engineers who haven't adopted or started exploring software assistants, are frankly not gonna make it. Engineering organizations are right now are split between those who have had that "oh fuck" moment and are leaning into software assistants and those who have not.

I'm looking at coders coming out of University who chat-GPT'd every coursework and they can't program their way out of a paper bag. I think what is being lost is the ability to solve non-chat-GPT-able problems. I'm having my 'oh fuck' moment, but I'm looking at the new coders.

Maybe I am just super behind the progress train, and that programmers will become a thing of the past. Maybe we can setup some adversarial LLM training scenario and have LLMs that reliably code better than humans. My concern remains valid though, that there is now a generation being created that turns to an LLM rather than reasoning about a problem [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hun3e4/my_little_...
Have you tried killing all the poor?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE