Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | AndrewThrowaway's commentslogin

Intellectuals in soft sciences are fucking idiots.

In physics/engineering and similar real life instantly shows how wrong you are. You can't really go far in your career believing something that is not true and tested.

In something like "relationship studies" you can live in your ivory tower for decades. Your only feedback loop is your own students and disciples who just want to live in the same ivory tower.

You can have some crazy theory like "human relationship output is dependent on socioeconomic outputs". And discuss that theory for decades, get your phd and stuff like that and your only judges are the same people in the same field.


So what do you propose? We stop any research into anything that isnt math because it fails to adhere to the methods of math? Becasue biology and medicine clearly are soft sciences, and physics and chemistry are just applied math so why bother.

And well, math is just applied philosophy and suddenly we're back to the ancient Greeks i guess.


Biology and medicine clearly are not so soft because they can be tested by scientific methods.

Have you read the article? You have a science like "human behavior" where your experiments can't be reproduced. Simply because there will be so many variables or variation that your science is as good as a guess from somebody from the street.

Or again sciences where you just make models of some imaginary things like hidden meaning 10th century in literature. Your only test is another 10the century literature meaning searcher. You just clap each other on the shoulder and give each other phds.


It is like inheriting Assembly codebase written by a compiler.

You will not edit Assembly in this.

Claude will have to edit it and Claude will not whine.


That's not true at all. One thing is not understanding the language in which it was written and a completely different one is that even though it was coded in a language that I have proficiency in, the code doesn't make sense. It's just poorly engineered

I refuse to keep adding shit to the pile


You would be surprised to find out that people were telling exactly the same thing about e.g. C when they came from Assembler and saw what a "pile of shit" was produced by the compiler.

Why do people keep comparing LLMs to a compiler. A compiler translates a higher level programming language to a lower level (usually assembly) one.

Natural language is not a programming language and cannot be compiled


What could theoretically be an even higher level programming language?

Bytecode is obviously not human readable - lets make Assembly. Assembly requires very specific skills - lets make a language that is more human readable. This new language is way more readable but requires very specific skills like understanding computer memory. Lets make a language that takes care of it. Lets make a language that is not compiled but interpreted. Lets make a language where you can just simply write 1 + 2 and computer would just give you an answer and you don't need to define anything.

Lets make the language that is simply a natural language and computer interprets it an writes the program you need itself.

We are comparing because any programming language is just a try to make programming easier.


I think they lost their direction and at the same time customer appeal. When OpnePlus started it was something new, now I have no reason to choose OnePlus for some time already.


When OnePlus started, they were considerably cheaper than flagship phones from others. At $299, the OnePlus One was a ton less than the $650 you'd pay for an iPhone 6 or Galaxy S5. You were getting a 95% flagship phone at half the price. You could get a OnePlus One with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon or you could get a Samsung with 30% the performance and a 640x480 low-res display for the same price.

I feel like the "something new" was price. Over time, that price kept creeping up. Yes, it went from being a 95% flagship to being a 100% flagship, but it also went from being half price to full price.

It was also cool that it used Cyanogenmod which meant you got a community OS that actually got updates, but over time other manufacturers started offering updates for their phones (rather than abandoning them soon after manufacturing). And that was something new other than price. But I think the big thing was that it was a half-price phone when it launched. In 2014, it was just such an amazing deal. Today, it's the same price as Samsung phones.


I bought many of the first models. They were good and very competitive with price and features. Custom ROMs everywhere. But I guess this is not so true anymore.


It is true. The OnePlus Nord are really good for the price


OnePlus was always a strange proposition to me. I remember debating it with colleagues when the hype started around their first phone. A lot of people and reviewers went crazy over the OnePlus phone, to me it seemed, and still does, as a pretty standard Android phone. The last review I saw was Linus Tech Tips reviewing the latest OnePlus, and Carl Pei commented that maybe Linus issue was that he was used to flagship phones and his expectations was a bit to high.

That really sums it up to me, then OnePlus phones are pretty standard Android phones, they are not really special, at least not to the extend where the brand means all that much to all but a minority of people.


I clone some repo from github, open it with default code editor which happens to be Cursor. I am cooked. That is it.

It is the same as autorun.exe on some CD - I put some CD in my CD-ROM and my Windows are compromised.

You can argue that I should not clone unknown repos, I should inspect each and any file in the repo, look for git.exe or any other suspicious binary and etc. I should not put untrusted CDs or USB sticks into my computer.

However the reality of it is that it will not be the user who inspects USB stick in some contained environment, it will be security policy which disables autorun. Same as Cursor should disable this.


What is even more funny that AI agent spent A LOT of tokens while participating in this attack.


The real winner of this 'attack' is Anthropic.


As long as you pay no attention to the man laughing all the way to the bank, Jensen Huang.


Claude is just one from tuple.

It would be interesting to investigate other agents such as Hermes, OpenCode etc that are said to learn from interaction with user.


haha yeah it thinks hard for this


I wonder if Hans Reiser would have checked...


But doesn't things like that happen with people? Take academy where some professor implicitly states "facts" or military or software development where some highly praised senior always has his last word...



Statistics and other lies.

One interesting point the article touches - there was a study concluding that if you quit smoking at 40 your life expectancy basically equalizes with people who did not smoke in their life. It is an encouraging message that it is never too late to quit. Then again it also sends a different message - you can smoke as you wish in your 20s.

Just yesterday I saw an article on Instagram that they are putting smoked meats and sausages and similar products in the came cancerogenic category as smoking. Which again one one hand states that meats are very bad for you. On the other hand it makes smoking not so bad as you would think? Because people are eating sausages and meats cooked on open fire for thousands of years?

Some guy on Diary of CEO states that rice are basically a poison because they are pure sugar. If you want to live healthy you should definitely drop the rice out of your die. Then again a billion of people eat rice every day. What gives?

We want to have all this information because we want informed decisions in our lives. If we are analytical we even want formulas and graphs just like in this article. What we don't want is to give things to chance and genetics.

Different breeds of dogs have life expectancy difference of ~50%. People of course are not so different in their size but we need to always keep this in mind. You can live as healthy as you like but you always have a ticking bomb in your DNA. What I still am not getting is how much living healthy impacts the outcome versus the genetics. It might be a hopeless fight to e.g. stop eating the brisket if your lungs have an expiry date of 55 years.


> Just yesterday I saw an article on Instagram that they are putting smoked meats and sausages and similar products in the came cancerogenic category as smoking.

My understanding is that this is a statement of how confident we are in the evidence that smoked meats and sausages are carcinogenic. Essentially, we are very sure that smoking is very carcinogenic and we are also very sure that smoked meats and sausages are a tiny bit carcinogenic.


> Just yesterday I saw an article on Instagram that they are putting smoked meats and sausages and similar products in the came cancerogenic category as smoking.

But not the same lung capacity impact category .. the emphysema rates from smoked meats are considerably lower than those from smoking.


I think it was just cancer overall. One kills you lings, another kills you gut, heart and etc.

We know that smoke itself is really really bad for you. Open fire is bad for you.

Sitting around campfire with a glass in your hand and a guitar might be really really bad for you.


I feel like you're ignoring the size of each of these impacts.

Sitting around a campfire once a month will likely increase your cancer risk. But it increases your cancer risk way, way less than smoking a pack of cigarettes every day.

Similarly, the World Health Organization is confident that smoked meats increase cancer risk. But that makes no statement about how much more likely you are to get cancer. I'm confident that eating undercooked chicken raises my risk for salmonella; I'm equally confident that eating a raw and expired piece of chicken also raises my risk of salmonella. But I would not say that each of those raises my salmonella risk by the same amount.

See the difference?


The biggest danger of smoking is not cancer, it's cardiovascular diseases. You are comparing a mosquito to an elephant.


Just cancer might be the equivalence.

Smoking itself cause damage and disease that isn't limited to just cancer though.


To me it sends the message that people who quit smoking tend to live longer than people who don't, but not that the act of quitting smoking had anything to do with anything. Specifically, if someone without the mindset to naturally quit smoking sees that study and quits only to hopefully live longer, they may not benefit nearly as much as someone who actually cares enough to more generally quit harming themselves.


If you gave some junior dev a large codebase and just told to "refactor it" you would get a terrible result.

If you gave junior dev exact tasks what to do where you will get better results.

Just like with LLM.


That’s why junior devs generally aren’t give the responsibility of architecting a large scale refactor. Yet people seem to be trying to had these types of tasks over to LLMs.



From the author:

> It's not used in production.

Sounds like it’s a tech demo as of now.


Exactly. Is it LLMs fault or yours to believing in it so much.


It is the fault of the salesmen and evangelists.

I’ve been hearing for quite some time now that I should be using an LLM to plan before the build. This is treating the LLM as the architect, not as a junior being handed small tasks here and there.

I haven’t bought into it, so don’t use it this way, but an army of people online and in the media are pushing the fomo hard and telling people this is how it should be used. If the LLM isn’t doing what we want, it simply means we need to use the LLM even more. That’s the prevailing message from the industry.


"Coding is solved"


Coding, programming and engineering are all a bit different concepts. Coding as in typing in the code might be solved. Engineering? Doubt.

What is definitely not solved is knowing what you want and what user wants and what the end result is supposed to be. To write the code you need the specs and to write the specs you need to know what you want. And that can only be answered by years of therapy.


You can't be mad at people for buying a product from the LLM salespeople and expect the product to comply to the specs they sold you. Be mad at the salespeople scamming customers.


> Coding as in typing in the code might be solved

haha


"It is not LLMs fault but you not knowing how to write a prompt". I know I know. But just giving all codebase and saying "rewrite it" is a no go. If e.g. going one class after class LLM will be exceptionally good at keeping the patterns and logics.

I mean it is a tool and you need to understand how the tool works. When there is too little context, where there is so much context so that you are poisoning it, when you are allowing the tool to do patch-on-patch and etc.


Consider applying for YC's Winter 2027 batch! Applications are open till November 2.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: