skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How many software developers could solve most even simple programming problems (except 'Hello world') with zero shot style (you write in notepad then can compile only once and execute once) without access to internet (stackoverflow, google search, documentation), tools (terminal, debugger, linter, cli)?

Many, there was a time when SO did not exist and people were able to solve non trivial problems. There was a time coding problems on exams had to be solved on paper and if they were not compiling you would not pass.
Tell me you don't know how to do a WBS rollup and dependency linking without telling me.

And if you don't know how they are dependent on each other, then how the hell are you estimating each of the 16 different things anyway?
a self organizing scrapbook! focused on zero stress for storage, searching, synthesizing and sharing a personal library

https://yourcommonbase.com/

(and some philosophy on the subject :))

https://www.bramadams.dev/tag/personal-library-science/
What would searching the Internet provide the models that they don’t already have? Most likely data sources such as stack overflow, documentation on the language it’s targeting, and a variety of relevant forum posts are already part of its training set.

Unless someone else came along and said “here’s how to solve x problem step by step”, I don’t see how additional information past its cutoff point would help. (Perhaps the AI could post on a forum and wait for an answer?)

Yes, iterative programming could help via access to tools- I can see that helping.
A permanent immutable ledger can be a pretty big negative when commiting crimes within your own country, such as purchasing drugs.
Isn't point of the training that they already have all the information they could have. So they do not need the Internet as on Internet there would only be information they already "know"...
Yes and no. The history is pretty fucked, but on the other hand nobody currently alive screwed them over. In a lot of cases, people's ancestors weren't even living here back then. I think that it's not as fair in light of the lack of culpability.
Key Transparency for the Fediverse (so that we can build E2EE for DMs atop it)

https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/public-key-directory-specificat...
Depends what you mean by evolve. I don't think we'll get general AI by simply scaling LLMs, but I think general AI, if it arrives, will be able to trace its lineage very much back to LLMs. Journeys through the embedding space very much feel like the way forward to me, and that's what LLMs are.
I was never on board with it. It feels like the same step change google was - there was a time when it was just miles ahead of everything else out there around 1998. The first time you used it, it was like "geez, you got it right, didn't know that was possible". It's big, changed things, but wasn't an end of history event a bunch of people are utterly convinced this is.
https://archive.ph/hbmM5
I think this is good use for microblogging platforms like Mastodon and the others, to which you can link to from within your blog. If you've written a lot of mini-posts[1] that fit a theme you can edit them together into larger blog post eventually. If you have complete control over your website you could even feature some of your most recent or popular mini-posts on your front page.

[1] I don't know what the best term is to describe theses kinds of posts that distinguishes them from long form blog posts. What do people do on Mastodon--toot? I'm just going with mini-post for now.
That should be fixed, but don't shunt he problem off onto women. Men belong in sex-appropriate prisons.
I think about this a lot. AI in the current state is like working with an intern who is on a stranded island with no internet access or compiler, they have to write down all of the code in forward sequence on piece of paper, god help them if they have to write any UI while also being blind. None of the "build an app with AI start-to-finish" products work well at all because of this.
I'm building an interactive, web-based Python tutorial site intended to help with learning basic syntax. Originally it was for my kids who wanted to learn to code, but... might be useful to others.

https://learnpy.dev

The content needs some work, but I'm pretty happy with the framework / UX. I would love to get any feedback from folks who check it out!

(The first section is just multi-guess questions as part of the introductory content. Try any other section to get the full in-browser-code-execution experience, which uses client-side Pyodide under the hood.)
Show HN: PageZERO – Full-Stack Web App Starter for Cloudflare
I built PageZERO, an open-source full-stack web app starter that runs entirely on Cloudflare platform. It’s designed to help developers quickly build and deploy modern web apps using Cloudflare’s edge computing.

Tech Stack

Core:

- Vite + React + React Router v7
- Cloudflare Pages (hosting) + D1 (database)
- TypeScript + TailwindCSS + Drizzle ORM

Tooling:

- GitHub Actions (CI/CD)
- Prettier + ESLint (code quality)
- Vitest + Playwright (testing)
- Storybook + MDX (docs & components)

Why I Built It

I wanted a simple yet powerful way to build and deploy full-stack web apps on Cloudflare, fully leveraging its edge computing stack. Existing solutions felt too complex or weren’t optimised for Cloudflare-first development, so I built PageZERO.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/02/13/cosmic-distance-la...
Why haven't the real wages risen to match inflation since the 1970s?
A tool to interact with news using ML and AI. Kinda like an rss reader but with less focus on organizing news at the feed level.
(Just to say that I went to your profile to check out your writings but found no link!)
A platform for technical founders to accelerate their journey to PMF http://buildrappo.com/founders
I believe it. I couldn't even get o1 or claude 3.5 to write a tampermonkey script that would turn off auto-scroll to bottom in LibreChat, even when uploading the html and javascript as context.

Apparently it has to do with overflow anchor or something in React? Idk. I gave up.
I'm pro-nuclear but the idea that insurance fixes everything is strange to me. How much insurance money fixes you getting killed, would you say?
> unless non-SWE people using LLMs become technical enough to get what they need out of them

Non-SWE person here. In the past year I've been able to use LLMs to do several tasks for which I previously would have paid a freelancer on Fiverr.

The most complex one, done last spring, involved writing a Python program that I ran on Google Colab to grab the OCR transcriptions of dozens of 19th-century books off the Internet Archive, send the transcriptions to Gemini 1.5, and collect Gemini's five-paragraph summary of each book.

If I had posted the job to Fiverr, I would have been willing to pay several hundred dollars for it. Instead, I was able to do it all myself with no knowledge of Python or previous experience with Google Colab. All it cost was my subscription to ChatGPT Plus (which I would have had anyway) and a few dollars of API usage.

I didn't put any full-time SWEs out of work, but I did take one job away from a Fiverr freelancer.
> We divide inmates by more than just sex. We put sex offenders, literal rapists and pedophiles, in separate accommodation for their safety. Why can’t we do the same for trans folk? Even if you believe they’re deranged, what right does anyone have to extend their disgust to damnation?

That seems like a super reasonable compromise: a separate, segregated unit in a men's prison.
You can only have the digital version with real people logged in, living in the area and running the Square.
AI models are trained on the data from the internet, so sure, they couldn't do their search feature to scour the internet, but I doubt the material is much different than what the models were already trained on.

Additionally, before the age of stackoverflow and google, SWEs cracked open the book or documentation for whatever technology they were using.
Nice, probably saved a bunch of FANG devs a lot of hours of work trying to knock this off.
Grok offering fact checking of Elon’s own tweets about rampant fraud in the USAID will cite Elon Musk and trumps EOs as “proof” I wish I was joking.
DeepSeek is just the gift that keeps on giving. I now agree with people who say open source AI will win: https://open.substack.com/pub/transitions/p/deepseek-is-comi...
100 upvotes, if I could. There is too little positive feedback in peoples' lives, if any. For this reason, I habitually cold email people who's stuff has moved me in some way (think, feel, pause etc...). Universe knows, I need it too :D So I put a "standing invitation" [1] front-and-center on my site, copying Derek Sivers and patio11. I get maybe a handful of "hello from an Internet stranger" emails, but every time it makes my day / week / longer if the conversation rambles on languidly. Email is so great for slow-mo thoughtful banter.

[1] https://www.evalapply.org/index.html#standing-invitation
The problem is, I don't think their new ideas are good ideas. Civ switching was really not fun when Humankind did it, and the eras system doing a lot of progress resetting seems to undermine the entire point of playing well in the early eras. And to make matters worse, these things are in service of solving a problem I don't even agree is a problem. I think late game Civ has always been fun and enjoyable, it didn't need them to completely overhaul the formula to make it so.

I do want to be open minded - maybe these things are more fun than they seem to me. But I'm also not going to drop $70 just to find out. So until they release a demo, put it on game pass, or have a deep discount sale, I'm not going to risk my money on this one.
This is the philosophy I use for my TIL posts - if something took me a few hours to figure out despite searching for a solution first it's a very strong signal that it is worth writing about.

Here's my most recent one, about using a Tailscale exit node to proxy scraping traffic from GitHub Actions: https://til.simonwillison.net/tailscale/tailscale-github-act...
I mean it’s been a couple of years!

It may or may not happen but “scam” means intentional deceit. I don’t think anyone actually knows where LLMs are going with enough certainty to use that pejorative.
I just had this conversation with a customer. And it’s hard to avoid anthropomorphizing ai. Once you equate the ai system with a human - a human who creates perfectly pep8 formatted python is probably a decent python programmer, whereas someone who bangs out some barely readable code with mixed spacing and variable naming styles is most likely a novice.

We use these signals to indicate how much we should trust the code - same with written text. Poorly constructed sentences? Gaps or pauses? Maybe that person isn’t as knowledgeable.

These shortcuts fail miserably on a system that generates perfect grammar, so when you bring your stereotypes gleaned from dealing with humans into the ai world, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise when you unpack the info and find it’s only about 75% correct, despite the impeccable grammar.
The new Lancer benchmark is on actual problems and that is where it is failing by a huge margin.
i built something similar for my needs: https://gourav.io/devtools
> But when they see semi-regular news of shootings at schools resulting in large amounts of children being slain...

But they don't. Look at the history e.g. on Wikipedia [0]. It tracks school shootings with >= 4 victims in the last 300 years.

To call 10 times in the last 10 years semi-regular is a stretch. Most of those didn't make it into the public consciousness. People will remember Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Columbine, but those were 12, 18, and 26 years ago.

To call them large numbers of slain is a stretch, that Wikipedia article is events >= 4 deaths. Those 4 include perpetrators, the number of innocent victims is lower.

To call them children is a stretch, because a lot of the victims are adults/employees/shooters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
We seem to be talking past each other, sorry.
Reminds me of the various "be the American that Chinese propaganda thinks you are" memes
Fuses not transistors.
If the llm can’t find me a solution in 3 to 5 tries while I improve the prompt I fall back to mire traditional methods and or use another model like Gemini.
When techniques are misused they are misused.

The fact that there are bad project managers that don't know how to use a schedule are just as bad as the crappy "scrum masters" and "product managers" that don't know what "agile" actually means.

A good project manager will be continuously revising their schedule, based on updated estimates on the tasks. They will know how to compare it to, and update, the baseline.

Not sure what you mean specifically by "bus number" but happy to learn.

The GANTT chart is just a format of displaying tasks, their resources and dependencies. The actual DAG is a pure data structure.

If you put a confidence level indication on the estimates, a good project management tool will also be able to do analysis of the critical path (ie the length in time of the longest path) with a level of confidence on earliest/latest predicted end dates.

People think that nonsense like "t-shirt sizing" actually means anything other than "wild-assed guess" or that burndown charts are useful when adjusting future estimates.

All techniques to avoid doing the hard work of scheduling and project management.
I do something like this every day at work lol. It's a good base to start with, but often you'll eventually have to Google or look at the docs to see what it's messing up
Everyone is a typist now, so I don't think it is farfetched that everyone is a SWE in the future.
> but this article (ironic for FT) reads like veiled de-development.

Hard to tell if they're singling out AI because it's the current hot thing that everyone's talking about (and afraid of being replaced by), or if they're singling out "big tech" because they're rich and cool to hate on.
In Dutch, a porcupine is called a "spike-pig" (stekelvarken)

Edit: and a turtle is also a "shield-toad" (schildpad)
It’s quite a nerd hobby to go and defrag your bootloader nvram
>How did AI learn to code?

It didn't, it's just very good at copying already existing code and tweeking it a bit.

>Did AI receive mentoring from an experienced senior

It doesnt even comprehend what an experienced senior is, all it cares about is how frequently certain patterns occurred in certain circumstances.

>Did the AI learn through hands-on coding or just by reading Stack Overflow?

it "learnt" by collecting a large database of existing code, most of which is very low quality open source proofs of concept, then spits out the bits that are probably related to a question.
Yahoo, MySapce and Friendster are services.

Bitcoin is a protocol.

Like TCP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol
Given the stupid focus on "stories have to be shrunk to fit a sprint" nonsense, you don't need to estimate more than 2 weeks at a time :)
The Finnish example translation is wrong: "an example" should be "esimerkki". (There are no articles in Finnish.) The map shows "esimerkiksi" which means "for example". (Prepositions are relatively rare in Finnish.)

Edit: Ah, it says the data is from Google translator. So no suprise here, Google translator produces poor results. It's said that Deepl is much better. I can't really tell because I don't need machine translation Finnish English. Both are roughly equally strong foreign languages for me.
Why do programmers search for specific questions rather than always relying on their inherent knowledge?

I’m a crappy hobbyist programmer but for me it is useful to see if someone has implemented exactly what I need, or debugged the problem I’m having. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect programmers or LLMs to know everything about every library’s use in every context just from first principles.
Fair argument, but death stacks (however realistic) were boring. There was no gameplay there, it was just "mash your stack into the other stack". Perhaps the 1UPT system wasn't the right answer, but they needed to do something to make warfare be an actually interesting part of the game.
Several years ago Technicolor split into separate technology and media production businesses. TFA is about the media unit; the tech part now operates under the name Vantiva.
> How big do you think a single square in civ takes up?

On the largest map size in the last game to have squares at all (Civ 4), about 278km east-west if you assume that the cylindrical map has the same circumference as earth does at the equator. Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference. (The answer you linked is based on the hexes of a later civ game, but based on Earth’s land area.)

Later Civ games the answers are larger, since, as well as switching to hexes, the largest map size is smaller in each subsequent Civ iteration (5 is smaller than 4, 6 smaller than 5, and 7 uses the same sizes as 6 but cuts off the two largest.)
RAG is dead, long live RAG
I find the framing of this story quite frustrating.

The purpose of new benchmarks is to gather tasks that today's LLMs can't solve comprehensively.

It an AI lab built a benchmark that their models scored 100% on they would have been wasting everyone's time!

Writing a story that effectively says "ha ha ha, look at OpenAI's models failing to beat the new benchemark they created!" is a complete misunderstanding of the research.
Easier to scuttle in the case of a Fukushima-style nuclear accident: haul it out to sea and sink it. Then bring a new one in.
Makes perfect sense why it couldn't answer your question, you didn't have the vocabulary of relational algebra to correctly prime the model. Any rudimentary field have their own corpus vocabulary to express ideas and concepts specific to that domain.
If something crashes in between the "wipe" and "restore" steps, or something goes wrong with the restore, your computer is now a brick.
Sorry, what exactly is nonsense about the linked paper?

> The point is that shitheads think that "just stopping oil" at the drop of a hat (by 2030) _is_ an option

Dream big!
AI-powered color palette generator
One of the lovely "features" of embedded work is that after a while of doing this sort of thing, sometimes you get good enough at the crazy hacks that it becomes faster and easier to do something like this than to track down who has the J-Link (okay, they've usually got more than one) and can they spare it/where did they put it/why does that person have a J-Link at all/is the J-Link still alive....
This is utter garbage; a thinly-disguised dogwhistle sales propaganda targeting Trump's ear so Palatir will get picked to build new AI systems that the government will ultimately use to against the US and global population. FU Karp.
Oh I agree it is not foolproof, in fact I never understood why saturated math isn't 'standard' somewhere, even as an operator. Given we have 'normalisation' operator there's alway a way to find a natural looking syntax of sort.

But again, if you don't like the generated code, you can take the generated code and tweak it, and use that; I did it quite a few times.
A parser combinator library. I'm writing a tool that will do static analysis of SQL (in a very limited fashion, it's a build tool and not a static analyzer, but I need to understand dependency relationships between statements). I started out using `nom`, but found it imperfectly matched to my needs (underpowered in areas I desired and overpowered in areas I didn't need for my project). `nom 8` came out with some interesting simplifications, but it happened to break my code in a way that would be awkward to fix. So I bit the bullet and started writing my own library.

My library is specialized for parsing text. That had enabled some cool capabilities.

It comes with a `Span` primitive, which tracks where in a file a token came from, for implementing error messages. A `Span` can be the input or the output of a parser. At the front end a `Span` is an entire file, and as you slice and dice it, it tracks the metadata of where it came from.

Along with the standard `Sequence` (combining parsers in a set order) and `Choice` operations (branching between many parsers) that parser combinators are built around, I have come up two operations that are very handy. I suspect that others have made them before, they are both patterns I used in `nom`. (I've also only skimmed the original paper, they could be in there and I didn't see them.)

One of them is called `Compose`. As an alternative to a `Sequence`, instead of a group of parsers consuming the input in order, the first parser consumes the input, and the subsequent parsers consume the return of the previous parser. This is useful for instance when implementing escapable strings; the first parser grabs the entire string, the second one transforms escape sequences. (There is a mechanism for transforming the content of a `Span` while retaining it's metadata.)

The other is called `Fuse`. This is a small twist on `Sequence`, where after matching the parsers in order, the result is all concatenated together into a single token. This is useful for a "pattern matching" primitive, where you want to find a series of tokens in order, but you don't want to split them into different tokens, you want them all together.

It's been a wild ride, there's been a lot of thorny issues. I often think I should've just stuck with `nom 7` instead of shaving this yak. But I've learned a whole lot about writing especially abstract/DSL-yy Rust by combining tuples, traits, and declarative macros. There are also other programming language projects I'd like to pursue, and it will be nice to have a tailor fit tool for parsing text.

Special thanks to dtolnay's `paste,` the real MVP.
Sorry, I had to reread the grandparent and you are out course correct
The effect is the purpose. Everything else is marketing.

A city 15 minutes outside one of the richest cities in the entire world is closing down schools. Know why? The old people who live there and their landed gentry children who inherit their title (I mean ability to legally contribute no tax) from their elders don't pay any property tax, so the schools have no money, and anyone who moves in has to foot the entire bill. Only people who can do that put their kids in private schools. And on and on.

So, so many of the QoL issues people suffer in California are because of this prop, and people defend it with this senior folks exemption. I'm sorry. If you become a multimillionaire sitting on your bum, the government should not offload your tax burden onto other people's because you're old. It's too destructive to society to do that.
tools.deps is less complicated mostly because it just flat-out does much less. To mimic everything lein can do required adopting half a dozen other libs and writing your own build scripts.

It's better now, but people are pretty uncritical of the core team, and adopted tools.deps before its surrounding ecosystem was ready to fully replace lein.

The upshot was, everyone got to rebuild the wheel for a couple years. And I say this as someone who once lost a week debugging a subtle lein/maven classpath AOT bug.
This is why I recommend to put all devices on 5ghz and deploy additional APs for coverage. 2.4ghz is only good for low speed IoT devices.
As an individual, I have a Lulu account, which is effectively a savings account like a normal bank (i.e. I loaned my money out to other people and receive interest) with a much higher rate.

As an angel investor, I use USDC to instantly send money to companies I am investing in.

I personally don’t have an interest in a money market account, but the money market account on crypto works exactly like a money market account outside of crypto except available 24 hours a day.

I might rent in Brooklyn in future, so I might wish to be able to access the parcl account for Brooklyn and be able to offset Brooklyn rent increases by buying tokenized Brooklyn Real Estate.