skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Half of the work is specification and iteration. I think there’s a focus on full SWE replacement because it’s sensational, but we’ll more end up with SWE able to focus on the less patterned or ambiguous work and made way more productive with the LLM handling subtasks more efficiently. I don’t see how full SWE replacement can happen unless non-SWE people using LLMs become technical enough to get what they need out of them, in which case they probably have just become SWE anyway.
Still not necessarily a good idea, having the entire FBI's personnel info going to a potentially insecure sink outside their organization. I would hope any FBI agent with a modicum of common sense would realise that, and would investigate thoroughly before replying at all.

And of course, all government employees ideally should do that same.

It seems unlikely that that will happen by the deadline, and this whole thing is just going to cause a whole lot of inefficiency.
Unpopular opinion: Only those who truly care and spend the time to research issues and candidates should vote.
Case in point

Total party skills, arguably the most balanced astute commentary of current events… definitely that I’ve come across. Hidden behind a game master facade.

https://youtube.com/@totalpartyskills
I'm particularly talking about in the context of teaching someone what electrons are and how they behave at the subatomic level. High level overview? Sure, use analogies or models that aren't 100% accurate. But if we're talking about students in a university, then it shouldn't really be an issue to get into the nitty gritty.

I see this as well when it comes to teaching programming to freshman CS students. For some reason, we've strayed away from lower level languages like C and don't introduce the low level details until students are quite far into their curriculum. Abstracting away the details just muddies the waters in my opinion.
Latent computing by biological neural networks: A dynamical systems framework
I believe the outcome of this type of article is actually positive. The ‘SWE-Lancer’ benchmark provides visibility into a more pragmatic assessment of LLM capabilities.

Ironically it actually refutes Altman’s claims mentioned in the same article . Hard to replace engineers when you create a benchmark you can’t score decently on.
There isn’t an mmorpg game to date that has recreated the PK experience of UO.
Think from an information theory perspective. It is rarely true that you cannot say anything more about the data than what is assumed by classical algorithms. We almost always have some more information depending on the specific domain under consideration. Eg: Sorting a list of ages might be very different from sorting a list of account balances.

Any time I have information that reduces the entropy of the dataset, I want to be able to leverage that into runtime improvements of algorithms for pertinent questions. And it would be great to develop a structured framework for that instead of handling special cases in an ad-hoc manner.
You left out "luck", and "monetary buffer" (plan B, C, D, and beyond for people like Zuck).
Interesting; one thing you may have learned researching existing tools and libraries: many of them serialize markdown to html before running structured extraction/manipulation - even stuff like converting to pdf.

The core assumption here is that Markdown was/is designed to be serializeable to html - this is why a markdown document/AST is mostly not a tree structure, for tree-ish elements such as sub-sections. Instead, it is flat, an array of elements in order of appearance in the document. Apparently this most closely matches the structure of html, at both the block and inline levels. Only Lists and Blockquotes (afair) support nesting.

Ex: h1 -> paragraph -> h2 -> paragraph is not nested, it is an array of four ordered elements.

Anyway, you might throw a task at Cursor or Copilot to see how an equivalent implementation using html fares against your test suite, you may be able to develop more quickly.
Ask HN: Does having founder experience affect the resume negatively?
I'm an electrical engineer with more than 10 years of experience in the fields of systems, integrations, embedded systems, robotics, and other cool stuff. I also have expertise in fields like cybersecurity, project management, and various other skills and tools I have learned on my own that enhance my overall work.

Around 2 years ago, I left my job, which might have been a mistake, but I left because the environment was so toxic that it was mentally exhausting on top of the stress of doing technical work. It's a shame because I really liked and enjoyed the work itself, but the people ruined it. I noticed, talking to some friends, that a lot of robotics companies somehow manage to hire difficult middle managers who turn work into hell.

I took 4 months off after leaving to relax, as I was burnt out. I had worked more than two years with zero vacation and even worked on holidays (I was never paid for my vacations or overtime, by the way). After this much-needed four-month break—during which I even noticed some grey hairs colored back after relaxing a bit—I made my personal portfolio showcasing my great work, updated my resume, and linked parts of it to my portfolio to verify my experience. Then I started a company to do contracts in the same field. Whether it's due to the bad Canadian economy or failing to acquire proper leads, I barely got any substantial contracts. I even had some great ideas I shared with investors, but none were interested.

So, after almost a year, I decided it was better to do damage control as I was burning through my savings and look for a full-time job in the meantime. Since last October, I have been applying for jobs that either completely fit my resume or most of it, and I rarely apply randomly. For many applications, I write cover letters too. Out of hundreds of applications, I had only two interviews. In the first one, the interviewer was interested that I was doing entrepreneurship, and I was honest about it, and they liked that. However, they never called back. The other interview was with the government, and Canadian government jobs take forever. Not to mention, they require a security clearance that might take nine months to get, so it's not really an option to rely on.

This made me wonder, talking to a friend, if having "founder" on my resume is really a negative thing. Even if I remove it, there will still be a gap that I will need to explain, and I was technically working for myself despite the outcome. Secondly, what other job sites are there besides the very popular ones? I feel the popular ones are flooded with applications and have auto-screening out, so no real humans actually read them, which might be another explanation for this situation.
I know HN is mostly software folks and software world is probably more fixable but still it's great to get some feedback.
> But if I have _no_ idea things go wildly off course.

This is the key to getting some amount of productivity from LLMs in my experience, the ability to spot very quickly when they veer off course into fantasyland and nip it in the bud.

Then you point out the issue to them, they agree that they made a dumb mistake and fix it, then you ask them to build on what you just agreed to and they go and reintroduce the same issue they just agreed with you was an obvious problem... because ultimately they are more fancy auto complete machines than they are actual thinking machines.

I have found them to be a time saver on the whole even when working with new languages but I think this may in large part be helped by the fact that I have literally decades of coding experience that sets off my spidey senses as soon as they start going rampant.

I can't begin to imagine how comical it must be when someone who doesn't have a strong programming foundation just blindly trusts these things to produce useful code until the runtime or compile time bugs become unavoidably obvious.
I asked Grok3, it recommended DeepSeek. DeepSeek said go hit up its big brother ChatGPT. ChatGPT told me to ask cousin Gemini. Cousin Gemini told me to hit up Uncle Claude, and Uncle Claude just looked at me with Perplexity.

Now for the love of all that is holy, will you answer the damn question?
Well, the code in question is also written by the same LLM, so it could just output something it knows the answers to already. On its own, this result doesn't really seem to prove anything.
Crusader Kings and Stellaris always felt more like… story-generation games than strategy games, to me. Sorta like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld at a different scale.
That's true of all of human history. Alliances shift between nations, disagreements occur, war breaks out and the map gets redrawn.
I like this idea - even for little tips I find along the way when trying to solve challenges.

But then the new issue I have is I end up cluttering my blog with these lower effort posts that get in the way of the longer pieces. How do others solve this? Like separate feeds or something?

Here’s an example: https://varun.ch/posts/macos-keyboard/ I don’t think this should be among by “posts” but do others have a “firehose” section or something, for random thoughts and tips?
Ah, got it. So it’s not to much that Scala went away, as that Java became Scala?
Could you elaborate on this.
I’ve recently seen a couple of interviews with Alex Carp on YouTube. He seems like someone who addresses ideas with a strict logical sense of thinking. I haven’t given a look at his book he just released but from the preface it seems he promotes this kind of logic first reasoning.
And in Civ 4:

- you can destroy roads (needed for some resources)

- you can also occupy the tile or destroy the improvement (mine/plantation/camp/quarry/etc) needed to harvest a resource

- you can use diplomacy to deny a resource

- you can use a spy to destroy an improvement
Yes, it is bogus on its face, I was wrong. I also accidentally miswrote that tau might lead to amyloid beta aggregation, when the "both matter" hypothesis usually argues the opposite relationship. I misspelled Eliezer Masliah's name, I didn't qualify that those are the big three scandals I'm aware of, I'm sure there's more. Thanks for forum peer review, don't take everything I say 100 percent, I will be bothering people senior than me to comment on this more broadly and with editing in more official forums, though, because what this tells me is that we are not keeping the public sufficiently informed on the state of the field, challenges, and current research directions.
The benchmark for AI models to assess their 'coding' ability should be on actual real world production-grade repositories and fixing bugs in them such as the Linux kernel, Firefox, sqlite or other large scale well known repositories.

Not these Hackerrank, Leetcode or previous IOI and IMO problems which we already have the solutions to them and reproducing the most optimal solution copied from someone else.

If it can't manage most unseen coding problems with no previous solutions to them, what hope does it have against explaining and fixing bugs correctly on very complex repositories with over 1M-10M+ lines of code?
How to Learn Go for Webdev?
Hello, I wanted to get into Go and I wonder if there are any good project based courses available that you know of.
Good question! I'll need to think back a few years.

Based on my experience on a couple of govt organizations, the IT departments are very small, compared to the total workforce, and has to deal with decades of legacy. In this environment, any change in direction is considered (way too) carefully - a big ship turns slowly and all that.

Since the team was experienced in dealing with Windows VMs, practically everything else was MS-based and MS offers lucrative bundling, Azure was thought to be the natural continuation on the infra side. One major outsourced software project nailed that trajectory, and due to the small headcount, multicloud was not desireable.

And this is where I jumped in. I'd like to think I was promoting improving our on-prem capabilities until a question of "could we have a reverse proxy so we could access some internal databases from the Internet instead of relying on overnight database copies" hit a steel wall. Having heard murmurings of achieving the same via Azure APIM and ExpressRoute, I clung on, since as an architect I needed that capability for multiple projects.

And after that, it was only natural to take more steps in. Slippery slide and all :p

But as I mentioned, luckily all this has been so slow that reversing is not the end of the world. Unlike some of our sibling organizations who have little to no on-prem capabilities left
When I post SWE roles, I get hundreds of applicants from people outside the US who pretend to already be in the US, by putting SF in their LinkedIn. I also get a ton of people who lie about needing work authorization.
MHGA making hopper great again
"better safe than sorry" is the definition of a slippery slope.

but I'm curious: what event do you think taught us that?

IMO, there's far mode damage being done to the world by, say, mercury in batteries than by nuclear accidents (of which chernobyl is the only serious one).
The Haskell type `[x] -> [x]` (the equivalent of `List[A] -> List[A]`) tells you an incredible amount about the function. It tells you that the function must calculate a subset of a permutation of the input list. The function cannot be anything else (or else it will crash or hang). In a language with stricter requirements you can omit even the crash/hang caveat.

Don't underestimate the amount of information even simple type signatures contain!
Civilizations switching is a bad idea stolen from Humankind.
It solved a lot of mines
Link to the original paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12115

TL;DR:

They tested with programming tasks and manager's tasks.

The vast majority of tasks given require bugfixes.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet (the best performing LLM) passed 21.1% of programmer tasks and 47.0% of manager tasks.

The LLMs have a higher probability of passing the tests when they are given more attempts, but there's not a lot of data showing where the improvement tails off. (probably due to how expensive it is to run the tests)

Personally, I have other concerns:

- A human being asked to review repeated LLM attempts to resolve a problem is going to lead that human to review things less thoroughly after a few attempts and over time is going to let false positives slip through

- An LLM being asked to review repeated LLM attempts to resolve a problem is going to lead to the LLM convincing itself that it is correct with no regard for the reality of the situation.

- LLM use increases code churn in a code base

- Increased code churn is known to be bad the health of projects
Have you tried A/B testing a version where you use an IC or manager role title instead of founder? This forum can give you general advice, but the only way to know for sure is to test.
Interesting, thank you! Care to link any OpenStack providers? Do you have experience working with any of them?
what I'd like LLMs to do is present examples using acceptable design standards, e.g. whats the pythonic way to do this, and what are exceptions that might yield better performance/optimization (at what does it cost), or what is the best go(lang) JSON parser (since the built-in isn't very good).

But instead, I get average to below-average examples (surprise surprise, this is what happens when you train on a high noise-to-signal set of data), which are either subtly or wildly incorrect. I can't see this improving, with reddit and other forums trying to introduce AI bot written posts. Surely these companies are aware of how LLM output degenerates when fed its own input within a few (not even dozen) generations?!?
People will give you different answers, but I think the answer is yes.

Employers don't like to see any "gap" in a resume in general, but founding a company also tells them your real dream is to be an entrepreneur and you're just back in industry to build your funds back up.

This effect will definitely be less pronounced at smaller companies, which will be happier to hire someone who understands early-stage struggle and having to wear a lot of hats.

As for less-popular job sites: make sure you use HN for its intended purpose, which is as a honeypot for YC job postings.
"If you need to improve speed, add Hash Tables."
I found multiple compiler bugs at my first real programming job in 1997.

MSVC did not do a good job of maintaining the FPU stack in those days…
Diffusion Models Learn Low-Dimensional Distributions via Subspace Clustering
From the guidelines…

> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did

Just flag it and don’t mention that you did so.

Also:

> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.

You seem to be familiar enough with HN to @dang; nothing you’re saying here is sensitive, so please don’t defend Musk with some alt account.
OSS local rest API server for frontend developers
> no _way_ is binary search the first algorithm people learn. For binary search to even be intelligible you already have to know, at a minumum linear search and the concept of sorting

Almost every 6-10 year old kid who had to use physical dictionaries intuitively learned (probably even discovered by themselves) something like binary search. It's a different matter whether they could formalize that into an algorithm and write code to handle all the edge cases. But the basic idea is very intuitive. Kids can also pick up the intuition to incorporate improvements even beyond balanced binary search eg. there might be a lot of words starting with "S" so split into two groups at a little less than the middle, etc.
There's millions of much stronger reasons to hold grudges against Google and Microsoft, yet their browsers are somehow fine? It's incredibly arbitrary. For what it's worth I think crypto has been a scourge on society so I'm not making this point for any crypto shilling reasons.
What do you mean over engineered? Genuinely very curious, I thought the problem boiled down essentially to 'lack of will' and that there exist very safe reactor designs.
This has been obvious for a couple years to anyone in the industry that has been faced with an onslaught of PRs to review from AI enabled coders who sometimes can't even explain the changes being made at all. Great job calling it AI.
For that case, a better 'n' to use could be the number of digits in the number.
I am very curious, if these bugs are that common then why don’t we see more programs with weird bugs when they are running and especially having them be documented? Is it because when an unknown bug turns out to be a compiler bug and not a code error it gets fixed right away and with little fanfare? Or that there is some sort of resiliency built into the compiled code that can mask compiler bugs? Or is there some other factor?

Also how easy is it do discover a compiler bug and how easy is it to identify that a bug in your executable is due to a compiler bug?
similar to mockoon but minimal and easy to use.
dowload now for windows and linux here:

https://github.com/therealrinku/roboserver/releases/tag/v0.0...
I found this similar project recently as well: https://danielpecos.com/2022/12/25/mastodon-as-comment-syste...
Are you bothered by the fact that software engineers might be easier to automate?
I am too young to have lived through it and understand my observation is likely not novel, but it is new to me. I am a millennial born in the 90s, which means I didn’t really practically absorb any dotcom fallout either. Even 2008 was an insignificant blip to me - I'm outside the US as well.
That's a good question. Unfortunately I haven't tried it because I am not really familiar with pandas.
This is my only account. I do not have a "flag" button.
> The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this.

I haven't played Civ VII, and I don't think I played much of Civ II or III, but tile improvements is still a thing in Civ IV, V, and VI. In Civ I, the settler unit would do tile improvements and found cities, and at some point they switched to a settler that only founds cities and a worker unit that does tile improvements. In Civ VI, the worker only has a certain number of charges and then disbands, and they separated out road construction to happen with trade routes, but you still need workers to irrigate and add mines and whatever you need for special resources (in Civ I, there was one special resource and it was called resources; later games there's like spices and bananas and coffee and gold and what have you)
You're Not Late. You're Just Early for Your Own Timeline
I would be surprised if the NSA did _not_ have a [Room 641A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) in OpenAI and the other AI companies.
Seriously? I think I've been most productive pre-internet days when stuck on a trans-atlantic flight with a java (shudder, talk about PTSD) reference manual and laptop that could barely last 2 hours on battery, with emphasis on the measure-twice, cut once mentality.

It's painful to watch junior coders copy-n-paste from SO or W3schools (including code samples clearly labelled not-for-production) with little effort to understanding what they are doing.
I'm talking about something like electrical or mechanical engineering.
The goal is to have more researchers that will do high impact research. You cannot do that if you take all the resources and spend on managers and administrative staff.
Ugh, this is horrible writing.

For instance, "Data centres cause pollution through high eletricity use" - high relative to what, residential housing? Aluminum smelting?

It's fine to be skeptical of the AI bubble, but this article (ironic for FT) reads like veiled de-development.

We also don't need any fizzy-drinks - shall we calculate the deaths due to pollution caused by that, let alone the primary effect on health of drink-victims? If you don't like what electricity is being used for, argue for specific regulation to make it more expensive.
Just looked it up and Ukraine is still in Kursk - how is that even possible?
I’ve got 15 years of coding experience at some of the biggest tech companies. My personal opinion is that most people have no clue how good these AI coding systems already are. If you use something like RepoPrompt, where you selectively choose which files to include in the prompt, and then also provide a clear description of what changes you want to make—along with a significant portion of the source code—a model like O1Pro will nail the solution the first time.

The real issue is that people are not providing proper context to the models. Take any random coding library you’re interfacing with, like a Postgres database connection client. The LLM isn’t going to inherently know all of the different configurations and nuances of that client. However, if you pass in the source code for the client along with the relevant portions of your own codebase, you’re equipping the model with the exact information it needs.

Every time you do this, including a large prompt size—maybe 50,000 to 100,000 tokens—you dramatically improve the model’s ability to generate an accurate and useful response. With a strong model like O1Pro, the results can be exceptional. The key isn’t that these models are incapable; it’s that users aren’t feeding them the right data.
Check this out:

https://polatkaya.net/Native_Americans.htm
I saw this

still, chain of thought is great for LeetCode 75

Since interviewers “want to see how you think” (and get the right answer in less time than other candidates on average)

I can now see how you’re supposed to think (and get the right answer in less time than other candidates on average, for now)