skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The same is true of say washing machine motors. You can predict that ~ 10% of them will fail in a certain amount of time (and even go into how they fail), but that doesn't tell you much about a specific motor. Or sports events, if you say there's a 25% chance of team A winning a single match; the results of the match don't support or refute your prediction... you'd have to run many matches to see if your prediction was empirically correct.
I’m a doctor — and I’ll say it proudly: the AMA deserves every royalty they collect, and probably more. They’ve done more to protect the integrity of American medicine than any other institution. Without them, we’d be working 80 hours a week and still struggling to afford a one-bedroom apartment — just like doctors in France, where a cardiologist makes less than a dental hygienist in Ohio.

People don’t realize how bad it is out there. In some countries, doctors are taking public buses to work, skipping lunch to see 50 patients before noon, and retiring with the same savings as a schoolteacher. Meanwhile, patients complain that a 15-minute consultation in the U.S. costs $300. You’re not paying for the time — you’re paying for the privilege of certainty, of safety, of knowing your doctor passed through the most rigorous, exclusive system in the world.

And who built that system? The AMA.

They’ve helped ensure that American medical training remains second to none. Not just in quality, but in difficulty. The years of unpaid labor, the crushing debt, the endless exams — it’s not a flaw, it’s a filter. Without those standards, the profession would lose its weight, its dignity. If becoming a doctor were simply a matter of competence and compassion, we’d all be wearing name tags and making $60,000 a year.

But thanks to the AMA, we’ve maintained the sanctity of the white coat. We’ve ensured that when a patient walks into an American clinic, they know they’re not seeing someone who just slipped through the cracks. They’re seeing someone who’s been tested, refined, and yes — financially punished enough to demand respect.

Let’s not pretend this work is trivial, either. Just last week I diagnosed a UTI, prescribed a $4 antibiotic, and quite literally saved someone’s life — that’s a bargain at $500. If I’d been compensated based on the value of that outcome, I’d be driving home in a McLaren, not a Lexus.

And let’s be clear: this system doesn’t just benefit doctors. Everyone in medicine — from PAs to NPs to specialists — benefits from the professional ecosystem the AMA has helped shape. We’re not just providers. We’re institutions.

So yes, I’ll keep paying my AMA royalties. I’m paying to be part of something that still means something. I’m paying for the architecture that keeps American medicine elite, untouchable, and worth every penny.

And if someone wants to pay $100 for a doctor visit? There are countries for that. You just might have to bring your own stethoscope.
> Can you please share what are your favourite tools and for what exactly? Would be helpful

I wrote my own open source one here: https://github.com/drivecore/mycoder. Covered on hacker news here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43177117

I've also studied coding with it and wrote a lot about my findings here:

- https://benhouston3d.com/blog/lean-into-agentic-coding-mista...

- https://benhouston3d.com/blog/building-an-agentic-code-from-...

- https://benhouston3d.com/blog/agentic-coder-automation

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43177117

- https://benhouston3d.com/blog/the-rise-of-test-theater

My findings are generally that agentic coders are relatively interchangeable and the reason they work is primarily because of the LLM's intelligence and that is a result of the training they are undergoing on agentic coding tasks. I think that both LLMs and agentic coding tools are converging quite quickly in terms of capabilities.

> Have you found a way to share knowledge packs? Any conventions? How do you manage chat histories / old tasks and do you create documentation from it for future work?

I've run into this wall as well. I am working on it right now. :) Here is a hint of the direction I am exploring:

https://benhouston3d.com/blog/ephemeral-software-in-the-era-...

But using Github as external memory is a near term solution:

https://benhouston3d.com/blog/github-mode-for-agentic-coding
> If I read from a file that doesn't exist, what should the returned object be?

First things first, how can you read from a file that doesn't exist? Even you questioned that later, so this is a strange question. – Do you mean if you try to open a file that doesn't exist? nil would be a reasonable value. It is how Go signifies the absence of something. nil is always useful and with `if file == nil` will tell you that the file isn't there. No need to observe the error.

If you need to know why the file isn't there then, sure, you're also going to have to look at the error. Sometimes that is important. In the case of opening a file you realistically will need to know why it failed to open so that you can resolve the condition, but in other cases you don't need to worry about why it failed. Checking the error would be unnecessary in those cases, assuming the function author has some understanding of how to make even half-decent APIs.

Let's assume here, for the sake of discussion, that you have no need to know why the file was unable to opened. Again, how do you envision garbage propagating into the rest of your program?
Could get that on cable in Ireland, i remember just leaving it on because it was just relaxing to listen to.
Great article as an outsider just to understand a bit what the open questions are in studies of the brain and how these open questions get discussed by researchers. Very easy to read and fascinating.
This is a technique used in "living off the land" in infosec circles. An attacker might not have root privileges, but there might be a bit of code in this program that does one thing with escalated privilege, and a bit of code in that program that does another thing with escalated privilege, and if you have enough of these you can stitch together a "gadget", a series of jumps or calls to these bits of privileged code, to get a shell or do what you want.
I want to do this someday, but I'm still trying to write an LC-3 emulator :D
GraphQL looks like an even better choice - it really looks like they re-invented the wheel here.
Google Shopping probably comes closest with its Vision Match feature: https://www.google.com/shopping/page/visionmatch
Why is this up upvoted?

This is flat out wrong and you link to a very poorly researched book with a lot of blatantly false populism in relation to energy politics.
Which company is willing to develop employees in deep technology for the long run? All of the frameworks were built with the explicit goal of abstracting the engineering part and ensuring they are easy enough for someone with a bootcamp experience to start contributing. Aka chew employees till they burn out and spit them. Rinse and repeat.

From an employee perspective, lets say I am a computer scientist, why should I spend precious time to develop myself in the fundamentals of Web when my manager just wants me to pump out React and Express.js code 24/7?

And for my promo? Well I will just point out that the system became slow and unmaintainable, propose adopting a new set of frameworks, cash the checks and move on to other pastures.

All the incentives are wrong.
We've heard this for many decades. I'm sure we will be hearing it for decades more...
The American Medical Association (AMA) was founded in 1847 to lobby for making competition to the Medical Doctors (M.D.) illegal. At the time, upstart approaches to medicine [0] did not believe bloodletting and calomel were effective medicine, and the doctors didn't like that their communities did not have faith in their omniscience.

Most states had AMA-approved licensing laws by the early 1900's. After outlawing competition, the Carnegie foundation (a proxy for the early pharmaceutical industry) financed the Flexner Report (1910) to help the M.D.s improve their standards for medical education. The report said, essentially, that all medical schools should be like John Hopkins.

The Doctors of Osteopathy (D.O.) was the only medical philosophy that was organized enough to secure equivalent licensing laws. Osteopathy founder A.T. Still required his students to at least be aware of pharmaceutical options as a 'last resort' for their patients. The modern D.O. license is legally equivalent to the M.D. license.

The AMA standardized on "allopathic medicine". While a lot of progess has been made at understanding and improvinghuman health, modern medicine still has sacred cows, which are quite profitable for the medical-industrial complex (Statin drugs, anti-dopamine drugs, overuse of steroids, etc).

At least modern doctors only bleed people when it's a useful treatment - for hemochromatosis (excess iron stores) and the use of leeches for limb reattachment, etc.

[0] "Herbal medicine, eclectic medicine, and homeopathic medicine were some of the pre-1850 approaches to health that, whatever faults they might have had, did not encourage practitioners to bleed their patients to death or poison them with mercury." - https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/07/theodoric-arizona/ 1444

[minor edits]

[edit 2] having finished the article, I think it’s a good take on the problems of American healthcare. Liked this quote towards the end: “There are two kinds of populist approaches to health care. [Bernie Sanders…] And the second is that of RFK Jr, who, to oversimplify, seems to think that expensive medicine itself is often a ruse by large corporations to keep Americans on an unhealthy sugar-and-seed-oil diet. Whether RFK Jr. is right or wrong is a less interesting question than why most of the powerful lobbyists in D.C. didn’t oppose him.”
> Essentially, the whole point of the article is that despite being "open source" you cannot run next.js at scale yourself without a massive investment of your own.

I don't know about that. Asking a service provider to provide an implementation for a cache interface isn't a "massive investment". It's an investment sure, but it's the type of investment that seems should be customizable per provider depending on their needs, technologies they want to bet on, etc. It seems to me the problem with Netlify isn't comfortable putting in the investment to have a NextJS specific cache service. It's understandable considering they don't control the framework and to them it's just another option, so they don't want to invest in it too much.
Why separate? It's not like there's limited capacity...you can have an assistant knowing all the languages at once.
Your conclusion is not connected to the first. Open source software has had many issues over the years and reading the technical details in this post should make it clear that there’s no magic solution to an adversary with this level of resources.
I am making rather overextended assumptions as to the ethnicity/nationality of the original poster based on their username.
i did say violently breaking the law is American.

and i did also say it was complicated and nuanced so please do not ignore that detail of my comment.

i’m glad to hear life is good, and to hear you’re humble enough to acknowledge it could be better. it could be better over here, too. are we doing it right or are you? i have no idea. :)

we’re probably both doing things right and wrong. should it even be solved? are we just living a Memento (great movie) like existence where we’re keeping ourselves busy and at war because if we all got along we would over-populate the planet and destroy earth?

what if our ignorant violent human behavior is actually an environmental mitigation technique?
- pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD

- wv/odt2txt and friends

- cp/m can read TXT files generated from gnuplot

- A Forth with Starting Forth it's hugely valuable, ditto with a Math Book like
the Calculus from Spivak.

Not a collapse, but a network attach on infra makes most modern OSes unusable, they need to be constantly updated. If you can salvage some older machine with DuskOS+networking, simple gopher and IRC clients/servers will work with really low bandwidth (2/3 KBPS and less).
> Does it need to be decoupled from package.json, etc.?

Knowledge packs should be decoupled from package.json just as eslint rules or commit-lint rules are. You can include them in package.json or in separate files. But including pointers to the main files in a package.json helps with discovery.

All packages across all languages should support AI friendly knowledge packages so a level of decoupling is required.

EDIT: After thinking about it I think README.md should just be written with Agentic Coders in mind. I wrote up my thoughts on that here: https://benhouston3d.com/blog/crafting-readmes-for-ai
The punitive tariffs were a unilateral violation of an existing trade agreement.
The red herring argument you're making here is your own. You were saying because ideas are here therefore humans must have been capable of creating them. There is no evidence of that other than saying because it's here therefore it had to come from a source of your own presupposing.

If you do not know where the original ideas came from or how they originated it is impossible to determine if AI is capable of doing the same thing. Even accepting the premise that humans did originate these ideas, there zero evidence that they did it spontaneously with no inputs. So with that premise in hand if AI is provided the same inputs it is likely they would produce the same outputs. Considering whatever those inputs where is completely unknown and unknowable at this point All of it is conjecture except for the fact that humans are effectively not creating net new ideas therefore there should be no expectation that AI is able to do that either.
The Aquabats are another band that are kooky magical fun for all ages.

Why don’t all concerts consist of a band of superheroes getting into fights against comic book villains?
Are you saying these things make you angry at Apple? I.e., I'm still having trouble understanding, e.g., why not just make software for the many other platforms that are more aligned with your values? E.g., if I made games, I'd probably ship on Steam and not even try to ship on Nintendo, but I wouldn't hate Nintendo for that, I'd just target platforms that I'm more aligned with. I'm just having a hard time picturing hating another platform for having values different than mine when there are so many options available, why not just focus on the other options?
> And because this can now happen at runtime, users (instead of developers) can add arbitrary functionality to applications.

I don't understand what you mean by this. Currently without MCP a server has an API that's documented and to interact with it(thus provide "arbitrary functionality") you call those APIs from your own application code(e.x. python script).

With MCP an LLM connected to your application code calls an API that's documented via MCP to provide "arbitrary functionality".

How are these different, and how does MCP allow me to do anything I couldn't before with API access and documentation? In both cases the application code needs to be modified to account for the new functionality, unless you're also using the LLM to handle the logic which will have very unpredictable results.
I don't see any clear examples in this article of people being laid off due to AI. I see one anonymous source who suspects his team was halved and that the higher-ups expect them to do twice the work using AI assistants. But, teams were slashed in half and expected to do more with less before AI, so I'm not sure that counts. I'm not naive enough to think AI companies wouldn't come after knowledge workers, but I'm waiting for confirmation that they are capable of doing that yet. If not, Betteridge's Law is confirmed in this case.
Well, you said:

> Assuming we do agree, there is no literal "if" being used when using the ternary operator. However, it doesn't take the concept to a higher level.

So does it mean that you take back your original claim of "if in a different syntax" then and move the goalpost to "higher level"?

If so, I think "higher level" is too subjective and I'm tired of discussing this topic.

> No need for an explanation. Code will suffice. Perhaps I cannot write it myself, but I will eventually be able to understand it.

Then please do me a favor and explain the requirements again, because I'm not sure what exactly you have in mind for the age constraint(s).

> That may be true in the first instant, but time marches forward and familiarity grows. This isn't an issue.

I don't think so. You have to actually use it yourself, over time. At least that's true for everyone I know. Otherwise the abstraction will not and can not feel better to you, because you assess it in the wrong context.

Its like showing someone prolog code who is used to C. That just doesn't work. I can write you the code, but I doubt it will help you. You already called the other example of the divide function to not look great, so from there it only gets worse for you if that style is unfamiliar to you.
There are several ways how a control character might inadvertently end up inside a text corpus.
Given enough millions of lines, it’s bound to happen, and you absolutely don’t want it to trip up your whole export because of that one occurrence. So yes, you have to account for it in text data, too.
If I'm expected to start doing something that they formerly paid employees to do, I'd expect to get something in return, like a grocery discount or something.

It's like if restaurants started making you cook your own food. Why even bother to go?
I've written a commercial, point and click, data wrangling tool (Easy Data Transform) that can deal with a lot of these issues:

-different delimiters (comma, semi-colon, tab, pipe etc)

-different encodings (UTF8, UTF16 etc)

-different line ending (CR, LF, CR+LF)

-ragged rows

-splitting and merging columns

And much more besides.

However, if you have either:

-line feeds and/or carriage returns in data values, but no quoting

or

-quoting, but quotes in data values aren't properly handled

Then you are totally screwed and you have my sympathies!
How to Save a Glacier
Yeah, not a huge fan of error handling in go - stuck relying on a linter to catch you and because of shadowing rules it's extremely difficult to make it look nice.

Rust's `?` operator on Result<T,E> types is flipping fantastic, puts all of the following to shame.

// can forget to check err
thing, err := getThing()
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}

// More verbose, now you could possible forget to assign thing
var thing Thing
if t, err := getThing(); err != nil {
panic(err)
} else {
thing = t
}

// What I end up doing half the time when I've got a string of many
// calls that may return err as a result of this

var whatIActuallyWant string
if first, err := getFirst(); err != nil {
return err
} else if second, err := doWith(first); err != nil {
return err
} else if final, err := doFinally(second); err != nil {
return err
} else {
whatIActuallyWant = final
}

It's actually to the point that in quite a few projects I've worked on I've added this:

func [T] must(value T, err error) T {
if err != nil {
panic(err)
} else {
return value
}
}
Yeah, that was where I had a problem — a shill in my mind always toes the line, cannot be objective.

(I'm too dense to understand your last sentence. :-) Sometimes when I take time to cogitate on a thing it will come to me though.)
I sorta agree and i think this approach is a good one. A bit from alvin toefflers mindset but i disagree on the conclusion that AI is a needed useful thing. We are adding more and more complexity and abstraction to our world.
This will simply end up in more stress and problems and not resolve anything.
Like an atom bomb we simply have more worries and even less solutions
Seller of AI product hypes AI - pretty transparent
The graph part , more so than the ast part, makes sense to me. We reason over programs as hairy dataflow/controlflow/etc dependency graphs that happen to originally be encoded as some sort of text->ast.

GNNs went down some roads here, but never felt like a path to reasoning. So how to get an RL reasoner flow to do what is easy for datalog, natively and/or as a tool?
> To begin with, the group that knew the story was AI-generated had a much more negative assessment of the work, rating it more harshly on dimensions like predictability, authenticity and how evocative it is. [...]

> Nonetheless, participants were ready to spend the same amount of money and time to finish reading the story whether or not it was labeled as AI.

Have they previously shown that participants willingness to spend money is actually related to "dimensions like predictability, authenticity and how evocative it is" though?

As someone who will usually finish a bad film or book just because I want to know what happens, I'd probably 'pay' to finish even if I wasn't really enjoying it. Getting bored would make me stop, but made-for-tv-christmas-movies are incredibly predictable and I'll usually end up sucked into watching one or two of those over the holidays.

All in all it seems a rather weird study.
I can't put it better than this comment: doctors will love the AMA, no matter what it does.

Their software vendor charging an $18/month is a pittance.

It dictates school credentials and # of seats, keeping doctors supply-constrained.

This works out from a doctor's perspective. It guarantees $400K/year or whatever you want to negotiate (ex. $280K/year for working 2 weeks on 2 weeks off, or $500/hour for 4 days for 2 weeks so the other 2 weeks, you can pick up locums shifts 2 hours away for $700/hr).

They also keep doctors informed that without this, they'd be conscripted to work 80 hour weeks for $70K.

(all of this is also why there's a long-term secular shift towards nurses, the second thing my doctor friends will do after being defensive about pay is complain about the low standards of education in nursing)

average schoolteacher salary according to Google
It’s good. Because it shows human bias.

They have to construct the study independent of the actual quality of the writing. And it’s clear here that many people are just biased.
On one hand, I think it would be useful to have a couple of benchmarks for super common tech stacks like Python, React, etc. that allowed comparing variants of rules to find the best ones. On the other hand, if something can be turned into a benchmark then it can probably be learned in the weights of a model.

A lot of the benefits of rules are completely unique to your situation and the definition of “better” is likely to differ between people. I think the videos above are the best way I currently have to display this.

There are potential solutions though to measure improvement, and we actually made it possible for you to obtain the necessary data. If you add a “data” block to your custom assistant you can capture all of the accept/reject, thumbs up/down, etc. data and use it to do an analysis. We definitely will be working more in that direction
Will also add - the 17k miles is a self reported number with no way to verify that. That's also alleged miles between "critical intervention" and doesn't account for remote operators intervening all the time.

Additionally, Waymo's most recent quartlery report for California lists over 1300 incidents that had mandatory reporting by law. This includes 47 collisions, 40 of them being with another vehicle, 1 against a pedestrian, and 2 against bicycles:

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transp...

That's for a single quarter, in very small sections of the state. If you made them operate globally like Tesla, there's be thousands of these.
That's kind of like saying storing files in a zip is worse than storing them uncompressed.
Or like the "what color are your bits": https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23