skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We just published our 2025 Developer Skills Report. It combines survey responses from over 13,000 developers worldwide with platform data from millions of coding assessments on HackerRank.

Would love to hear your thoughts and responses.
Your use case is in fact in the top whatever percentile for AI usefulness. Short simple scripting that won't have to be relied on due to never being widely deployed. No large codebase it has to comb through, no need for thorough maintenance and update management, no need for efficient (and potentially rare) solutions.

The only use case that would beat yours is the type of office worker that cannot write professional sounding emails but has to send them out regularly manually.
I've been meaning to write more articles and not just about delinking or reverse-engineering. I've been hoarding some lower-grade cursed stuff, like a git proxy/cache written in a hundred lines of bash, or a Jenkins plugin that exposes a Debian source repository as a SCM provider and enables one to trivially create a Debian package build server with it (complete with dependency management).

Guess I'd better unbrick my Chromebook first. I still don't know how changing its battery managed to bork an unmodded, non-developer mode Chromebook so thoroughly that the official recovery claims it doesn't know what model it is ("no defined device identities matched this device.").
Throwing my hat in here. The sub millimeter difference in the length of a dash conveys no additional meaning or clarity. It is impossible to argue me out of this position.

It's not like you can reliably write these consistently by hand either without going over the top in length to make it extremely obvious.
Yuck. Do your users know that they are reading recycled LLM content? Is this long winded post generated by an LLM?
TV wasn't as engrossing when there were only three channels. Fewer people would be full time couch potatoes. Cable's growth in the 80s changed how society allocated their leisure time on passive activities.
They mention PE/PP which I don’t think are found in natural rubber?

This article is making the rounds on news media at the moment without any attention to this, seems a bit suspicious.
With respect to "not 100% ultra-processed" - how do you know?
I imagine this kind of thing well help understand how human brains work, especially as AI gets better and more human like.
>Depending on who you ask, the US is still the only country to have freedom of speech and the right to bear arms against a tyrannical government, (...)

I question the intellectual capacity of anyone who actually buys into this mythology.

Especially given the number of countries - presumably without freedom of speech or a right to bear arms - which have been far more successful at dealing with tyrannical governments than the US.
This article gave me unpleasant flashbacks to the first half of 2023. I resigned from planet.com in mid 2023 due to the stress caused by being on-call every second week. It took me six months to get my head into a healthy state again. Now I have a much better job, better paid and no possibility of on-call, ever.
Except it isn’t for the target customer base of VMware.
I honestly think this take on conservatives is pretty unhinged. It's completely baseless, too. Why not talk about one of the civil rights that they openly oppose?

The number one civil right that American conservatives are after is your reproductive freedom. Number two is your right to access [medicine/drugs/foods] you choose.
Toxic dust on Mars would present serious hazard for astronauts
"Yes, I have tried Gemini, and actually it was even worse in that it frequently refuses to even search for a source and instead gives me instructions for how to do it myself. Stopped using it for that reason."

Thank you Sabine. Every time I have mentioned Gemini is the worst, and not even worth of consideration, I have been bombarded with downvotes, and told I am using it wrong.
My experience mirrors hers. Asking questions is worthless because the answers are either 404 links, telling me how to use a search engine, or just flat out wrong and the code generated compiles maybe one time out of ten and when it does the implementation is usually poor.

When I evaluate against areas I possess professional expertise I become convinced LLMs produce the Gell Mann amnesia effect for any area I don't know.
Late reply but yes, very silent. The 4-bay DAS next to it gets a bit noisy though, unsurprisingly.
I agree with your points.

While US food codes focus on safety, they don't necessarily equate to healthy food either. Many processed items that meet regulations are loaded with unhealthy additives. Freshly made food, even if it contains a lot of salt, at least provides more control over ingredients and is often more digestible. The challenge is educating people on how to cook fresh food in a balanced and nutritious way. We need to look beyond just 'safe' and focus on whole, minimally processed foods.
At first I thought the same! Well, we're safer now.
That’s fair but it’s totally different use cases than the linked post discusses.
From what I hear from friends at Leetcode employers, they have barely any developers who can't develop for shit. That is better than average.
Housing in Toronto and Vancouver is very expensive, while pay is lower relative to the US. On a purely financial basis it would be hard for many people to move, and then of course there are many other factors. I would guess the bigger impact is how the current situation changes the less visible decisions as academics choose where to apply for positions and how they weight the options they do get. Any researcher facing a significant chance of the grant funding their research getting cut suddenly, or being detained on routine work or family travel, could rationally decide to lean towards a safer and more stable option. Compound that over the next decade and it will have a big effect that reaches far beyond academia.

Edit: Just looking at big tech CEOs, Microsoft, Google, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, all are run by people who came to the US for school.
That reminds me of all the SQL injection vulns that we used to blame on PHP. As PHP becomes less popular, and the same/similar vulnerabilities remain, I realise it's more just bad practices (though ~2000-early 2010s PHP really was pretty rough when it came to creating those holes, but that might just be a function of how popular it was!)

Nice work on finding it :)
> I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs.

I don't believe OP's thesis is properly backed by the rest of his tweet, which seems to boil down to "LLM's can't properly cite links".

If LLM's performing poorly on an arbitrary small-scoped test case makes you bearish on the whole field, I don't think that falls on the LLM's.
More often than not, when I inquire deeper, I often find their prompting isn't very good at all.

"Garbage in, garbage out" as the law says.

Of course, it took a lot of trial and error for me to get to my current level of effectiveness with LLMs. It's probably our responsibility to teach these who are willing.
> I can't imagine any of that since it relies on >99% of cars being self-driving whereas currently <1% are

Technology famously has a linear adoption curve, and convenience is famously not something that drives adoption /s

> We already have that. It's called public transport, walkability, bikeability.

Do we have that though? In the US, mostly not. So what's the path? Hoping that sprawled out cities somehow magically get the political will to build $billions in light rail? What do you think is the path of least resistance to these goal states?

> Even in your dream scenario, 50 or so years from now, cars would still have a lot of the same downsides they have today of using way too much space and causing way too much pollution per person for the utility they provide.

Read other comments, don't get stuck on the notion of 'cars' as-is.
If there's one common thread across LLM criticisms, it's that they're not perfect.

These critics don't seem to have learned the lesson that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

I use ChatGPT all the time for academic research. Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time. But has it pointed me to important research papers I might never have found otherwise? Absolutely.

The rate of inaccuracies and falsehoods doesn't matter. What matters is, is it saving you time and increasing your productivity. Verifying the accuracy of its statements is easy. While finding the knowledge it spits out in the first place is hard. The net balance is a huge positive.

People are bullish on LLM's because they can save you days' worth of work, like every day. My research productivity has gone way up with ChatGPT -- asking it to explain ideas, related concepts, relevant papers, and so forth. It's amazing.
Not passed, just introduced. It's a placeholder that can move forward to committee. Then, if it goes anywhere, details will be filled in by amendment. This is the legislative equivalent of a function stubbed out in code.
Work headset is fine. At home I have a Blue Yeti + Logitech Brio that sounds and looks good.
I wish somebody would make a browser add-on that automatically filters all "high temperature superconductor" news that's below 100C.
Waaay cheaper and easier than a tailored suit.
Did you also do that while mewing and listening to an AI abridged audiobook version of the laws of power in chinese? Don't forget your morning ice face dunks.
Here's an idea: Compensate any on-call work received during off hours at 10X the normal hourly rate. E.g., if my salary is $150K per year, then my hourly pay rate is about $75 per hour, so compensate my on call work at a rate of $750 per hour. Thus if I get a call at 10pm, log in to my laptop and work for 30 minutes to resolve the issue to a satisfactory level, then I pocket $375. That puts a financial incentive on companies to structure their on call protocols so that only the most important calls are handled. And I can envision variations on this theme. Different sorts of on-call disasters could offer bids for how much they're worth to fix based on some automated rubrick, and anyone on the ENG team could pick these up on a first-come, first-serve basis. Or various combinations of the above for a guaranteed backup person. But the companies should offer enough incentive to make it worthwhile. And this is in the companies' own best interest. To maintain a workforce that can think clearly during the normal work, to have a good reputation in the industry, to get good reviews on Glassdoor, etc.
CMYK -- Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK :)

(of course it originally stood for "key", but you don't see that much anymore)
Driver assist technology has been a pretty amazing improvement, but it's also getting "old".
Who it's transferred to is a subset of "what happens". That transfer includes legally binding agreements. How those are respected, and the consent involved for those changing, is more on the "what happens" side.
My experiences have all been like this too. I am puzzled by how some people say it works for them
> Why not talk about one of the civil rights that they openly oppose?

They openly oppose black civil rights; that's what the war on “Woke"/”DEI” is about, its what the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act protections (also through the courts, but gets less attention than dismantling of abortion rights) is about, and there are many other aspects of it.
Having you been paying attention to the news? People are being disappeared today for exercising their free speech.
Why does US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth have a Russian email address?
Would I sound better on Zoom if I took out one wireless earbud and spoke into it ?
Working for yourself is totally different.

It's like demands from tech executives for long hours: "I worked long hours to make myself rich; why won't all of you work long hours to make me richer?"
“Normal” people have no idea how to make that work though. They just want an app on their phone and not to have to buy something or maintain something or check something.

We could all run our own mail servers and there’s a good reason we don’t.
To be fair, it's the norm in most of the country to hit 15 over. If you're going with the flow of traffic at a safe following distance on a 70, I can easily see how someone would hit that. Especially right after the border.

Edit: the interstate, not city or back roads
It's not hard, but it's time consuming.
Being on-call forces the *desire* for the quality of software to improve. Shitty management can and will override that. We don't have time for QA or to waste an engineer adding monitoring, we gotta ship ship ship.
Nice to see a reasoned take.

The crazy takes are necessary; they serve a valuable purpose of making sure people mitigate the risks. For example, the invention of “AI alignment” was a response to AI doomers.

Or there’s the paperclip maximizer thought experiment. It doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. All that paperclip conversion will take a tremendous amount of energy. Maybe someone will notice when they get their energy bill, and maybe they’ll like, turn the machine off? Also, it’s a bad look if your company’s AI converts the world to paperclips. If someone started such malarky the media will notice quick smart. Then there’ll be a scandal and then maybe the company will.. turn the machine off? But sure let’s run around like headless chooks fearing the AIs that have off switches are going to keep using energy they’re not being provided with to do god knows what without any human oversight whatsoever.

When a smart person warns of the sky falling, ask if they truly believe themselves. Maybe they’re raising hell on purpose to scare boffins into inventing a mitigation.
Mostly random videos and memes that you never asked for. Updates from friends are legitimately difficult to find amongst the noise.
>how many people would be willing to take a 25-30% salary reduction to move across the world?

the wild card variable here is the value of dollar. The actions like protectionist tariffs and isolating of the economy with resulting inflation would be significant factors weakening the currency globally and domestically. So, it isn't the situation when there are countries better than US, it is just US is on track to become much worse than it has been so far, and it may fall close to the other developed countries, and in that case other considerations may become important too.
>> I am neither bullish or bearish. LLM is a tool...It's a hammer

If someone says, "This new type of hammer will increase productivity in the construction industry by 25%", it's something else in addition to being a tool. It's either a lie, or it's an incredible advance in technology.
I’ve tried to order Oriana Fallacis The Rage and the Pride 2 years ago on Amazon (Germany). No chance to get it … felt to me like censorship back then.
Less cheese powder since being bought out. (And probably lower-quality cheese … powder.)
agree, just looking for a service for now.
I had a good experience with the Java Lanterna library

https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna
It seems hard to be bullish on LLMs as a generally useful tool if the solution to problems people have is "use trial and error to improve how you write your prompts, no, it's not obvious how to do so, yes, it depends heavily on the exact model you use."
The most interesting thing about this post is how it reinforces how terrible the usability of LLMs still is today:

"I ask them to give me a source for an alleged quote, I click on the link, it returns a 404 error. I Google for the alleged quote, it doesn't exist. They reference a scientific publication, I look it up, it doesn't exist."

To experienced LLM users that's not surprising at all - providing citations, sources for quotes, useful URLs are all things that they are demonstrably terrible at.

But it's a computer! Telling people "this advanced computer system cannot reliably look up facts" goes against everything computers have been good at for the last 40+ years.
> Digital document signing almost feels like it should be baked into email systems by now

It is: S/MIME is well-supported.

Anything else is not a "real" signature, as far as I'm concerned.
Oh please, spare the drama.
Berkeley, CA in the 80s (90s?) a lady went into the hospital for an extended stay and rented her place. She had a verbal agreement that they'd leave when she got out. She got out, they didn't leave. Last I heard about the case it was 10 years later and they were still there.

Yeah, I know, Berkeley. Rent control was very anti-landlord. But "rents have total rights as long as they pay" sounds too harsh to me.
Nice project. A few miscellaneous notes:

> Kinda cool that you can see a lens flare effect in the shape of the lens grid array.

A lens flare is just a copy of the scene you are photographing, but strongly attenuated in brightness, and possibly rotated 180°.

> 100,000 lux

Your notation is correct, and there are other ways to write it. The SI unit "lux" has the symbol "lx". Your quantity can also be written as 100 kilolux or 100 klx.
Windows Roadmap
This morning I was using an LLM to develop some SQL queries against a database it had never seen before. I gave it a starting point, and outlined what I wanted to do. It proposed a solution, which was a bit wrong, mostly because I hadn't given it the full schema to work with. Small nudges and corrections, and we had something that worked. From there, I iterated and added more features to the outputs.

At many points, the code would have an error; to deal with this, I just supply the error message, as-is to the LLM, and it proposes a fix. Sometimes the fix works, and sometimes I have to intervene to push the fix in the right direction. It's OK - the whole process took a couple hours, and probably would have been a whole day if I were doing it on my own, since I usually only need to remember anything about SQL syntax once every year or three.

A key part of the workflow, imo, was that we were working in the medium of the actual code. If the code is broken, we get an error, and can iterate. Asking for opinions doesn't really help...
This is covered by the CRI95+ value, note that the LM301 you mentioned only has a color rendering index of 70. Maybe it has predominant wavelengths that are relevant for plant growth, I don't know, but a CRI of 70 isn't impressive at all.

For an accurate rendering of the suns spectrum you basically would like to simulate the spectrum of a blackbody radiator with a surface temperature of 5500°C minus the absorption bands of water vapors, atmospheric gases thst are typically inbetween the sun and us. Also note that the suns spectrum extends both above and below the visible range, which gives you the feeling of warmth (infrared) and tan/sunburn (ultraviolet).

In reality most commercially available LEDs still have a extremely spikey spectrum compared to sunlight — this can be somewhat fixed by mixing different LED types and adding filters. But this is only done in extremely expensive movie lights like Arri skypanels.
I saw "artificial sunlight" and thought "oh wow I'd love to see the spectrogram of the lighting solution this person came up with". I was disappointed to merely see "CRI 95+".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH_owRxupC0

This is great video on the shortcomings of "CRI" - it explains in detail CRI, CRI extended, TLCI, TM-30, and SSI.

Brightness and color temperature are only two small parts of lighting - more people should start investigating the utility of taking their own spectroscopy measurements to figure out what lighting works best for them personally. My friends have very, very diverse opinions on what spectral distributions they like/hate, but they lack the language and experience to identify or communicate their preferences except for "Ooh I like/hate this bulb".

I mostly use LED bulbs to keep heat generation down (I pay for the heat twice in Houston: once to generate it and again for the A/C to negate it). But I always mix in a bit of incandescents / halogens (2400-3000K) which provide full-spectrum blackbody radiation to see ALL the wonderful colors in my world.
By far the most interesting banned books are those about ideas. These never appear on banned books lists because they have been censored so successfully (usually > a hundred years ago) that journalists and researchers don't know about them and no english translations exist (indeed it is often those translations which are the banned versions). Most of them are in Russian or German, some Romanian or Hungarian.
"Money doesn't change hands for Russia launching astronauts or NASA launching cosmonauts"

did you see my parent comment or not??? I am not trying to question their ability for them get to space, it doesn't matter if you CAN go to space but you didn't have money for it

its clear that NASA and Roscosmos collaboration days is numbered and would not continue in the future because geo politic
I don't think it's a matter or liking or not. The use cases just differ considerably, and tools and not as useful or applicable across those. THe OP's use case is probably one of the worst possible for LLMs right now, imo...
okay, I think what I ultimately missed is that this is just a new language for the existing engine. I may not be the world's most careful reader.
>adapt their beliefs to accommodate it and retcon it

I believe this is called “learning” in common nomenclature. They do the same thing in science very regularly, and it’s a pretty obvious part of discovering the world around you.
Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
I feel for you, I’ve also suffered through this a lot over the years, and am finally at the stage of career and wisdom to start pushing back on the quality that I can’t control and ensuring that others are equally as accountable for their mess.

For one particular occasion , once we took blame out of the equation (at least within the engineering team) and started doing Post Incident Reports, the incentives finally became clear for the business as we were able to compile a list of recurrent issues during every issue, calculate a financial loss and present it for inspection each and every time they either began a witch hunt for downtime or refused to allocate time to backlog. Small wins.
The media does when writing such things up, stylistic choices.

It is also likely to be "one in two" rather than "one out of two", in speech "half", "three quarters", "seven eighths" etc is more likely.
The next iteration of The Anarchist Cookbook going to include a trans protagonist so it becomes unbannable
Don't know where you're from. Around here it's 5mph over.
AI Native Developer Tools Landscape
I wrote this article precisely for people who are having trouble getting good results out of LLMs for coding: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/
I half remember an articled or docu from a while ago where someone was analyzing the perspective in some studio Ghibli backgrounds, finding that many are artistically "distorted". When this was brought up to one of the artists, they responded along the lines of: "The western idea of 1, 2 and 3 point perspective is just one way of drawing perspective and not necessarily more 'correct'." (I guess that's true, even if you think of 1 and 2 point perspective as cropped versions of a 'true' perspective image, the lines wouldn't be completely straight in reality. It's all different kinds of artistic license).
Scientist who fled Russia for US after Ukraine war detained, faces deportation