No one here actually cares about Cycle Double Cover Conjecture. I can demonstrate this by pointing out that the only time this conjecture was ever mentioned on the website was 14 years ago in a submission[1] that linked to a (now retracted) proof paper. That story received exactly zero upvotes. No one cared enough to upvote it and no one cared enough to ever mention this conjecture again.
I care. I was a math student in my undergrad when I try to solve a particular problem on paths, in the end it uses a path version of cycle double cover conjecture (which was solved in the 90s).
Don’t bother. This is the third or fourth time AI has solved an open conjecture, and once again the comment sections everywhere are full of people explaining how this doesn’t really matter at all, how it’s an irrelevant, obscure problem, how any mediocre grad student could probably have solved it if only they had bothered to try, and how of course, human mathematicians will still be vastly superior to machines 100 years from now because they have that magic spark for which nobody can say what it supposedly consists of.
These discussions have nothing to do with mathematics, and everything to do with ego and fear. I’ve never been less impressed with humans than since AI started challenging them.
I think "importance" here is just being rated as 1 to 4 stars. So it's not "second-most important" but rather "one of the top 5 most important". That doesn't change much, but FWIW.
This doesn't contradict anything he said though. People on HN care only because an LLM proved a very difficult conjecture, not because we are independently interested in this conjecture.
To be clear, I am not agreeing that people only upvote their favorite billionaires, just that if this particular thing was done by a Chinese model it would not have gotten the same attention
We absolutely care about the implications of AI solving hard problems. I'm sure you can find thousands of posts on HN deriding AI progress the entire time, trivializing it as nothing more than a 'stochastic parrot'
This was one of the most famous open graph theory problems lol. I am not a mathematician and even I ran into this when doing generative map design for game dev.
The only thing you've demonstrated here is some very funny confidently incorrect coping behavior.
Thanks for the fun facts? Indeed, this is not a math forum. Good morning.
> I can demonstrate this [that literally nobody cares about the CDCC here]
No, you cannot. Mindreading the readers of this site by sifting through people's comments is a barely passable proxy for this at best, especially when that audience has changed dramatically over even just those 14 years, and continues to do so.
the real world problems we care about are straightforward, the main challenge is wealth distribution and control over the power to do something about them
> If people cared they would [have mentioned it before]. What are YOU on about?
I explained why and how I think this is both wrong (especially in the ridiculously absolute form it was posted in), and a weird point of contention.
This is a tech (startup) forum, with an increasing pull towards more general audiences. Math and sciences have strong ties to tech, but you won't see people discussing specific math conjectures here much, save for the ones that make the popsci or tech mainstream. It is only chance encounters like this where a person from the relevant neck of the woods might engage, provided they happen to be readers here, e.g. because of a passing interest in technology.
Given this, being surprised that you cannot find a mention of this conjecture in the post history of the site is difficult to describe as any kinder than just plain daft.
> If it’s so good at solving hard problems
A problem being hard (in the relevant sense here) doesn't mean they're lucrative to solve, or hold direct and broad societal relevance. Kind of a theme with maths and logic problems, and not by coincidence.
Conversely, a lot of practical hard problems are, well, practical. They're not logically hard, but in some empirical way. You're conflating different avenues of difficulty, and rejecting that there's even a multitude of them.
> Why is there no real world progress on things we do care about?
We?
Well, there's been very real progress on things I - and I'd think most this community - care about. I've been shipping tickets end-to-end with minimal involvement via LLMs agentically for a while now. It's been great, and an honest game changer. I've been delivering faster, more, and better. Exactly what you'd expect from a breakthrough technology: a wholesale improvement across normally competing dimensions. In a number of cases, the difference was outright stepfunction like. That is to say, if it wasn't for these models, they would simply not have happened.
This is its latest iteration and its newest - alleged - tour de force. That's why it's posted here to extensive reception. That it is nice to hear it being a boon in other sectors too. If this somehow escaped you two, I don't know what to tell you.
I don’t care if AI solves the collatz conjecture either, why should I?
If, after stealing all human knowledge, spending $1T+ on compute, hiring the best in the world while also stalling progress in other fields by pulling funding from fundamental research is a bunch of lousy math proofs then thats terrible trade. There is an opportunity cost here.
I don’t have anything against AI, and I do think it will progress a lot just like all other human endeavors. But this doomer permanent underclass humans are worthless myopic view of AI is not where its at
Languages designers will have to make a choice whether to continue to design for humans or for big slop machines. The design goals are not compatible. This is obvious. I don't understand how anyone can miss such an obvious point.
Another obvious point is that an industry that runs on code slop will stagnate in terms of language an human tooling design.
>Which frame inspires a more productive research program?
This question depends on how you define research productivity. There is close to two hundred AI papers published every weekday. Most of them are about GenAI. Most don't seem to be all thay good. The progress in actual model improvement had mostly stalled. If you interact with the latest "raw" models they display all of the issues we've seen in GPT-3.5, just at a smaller rate. The "amazing gamechanger breakthroughs" I read about on social media every week do not seem to lead anywhere. It's all kind of boring, really.
The new "hotness" in AI is clearly building more and more elaborate harnesses. This is not at all the direction AI boosters have predicted couple years ago.
Personally, I think the "stochastic parrot" mental model is far more useful for science, because it primes people for proper testing, skepticism and researching alternatives. If you want useful AI, you want people working on it being skeptical, not credulous.
> Anecdotal, but I'm convinced it screws up sleep quality.
It absolutely does.
>I'd just accepted for the longest time that waking up groggy with a slight headache and tired was the norm until I put a CO2 monitor in my room. With the door closed, it climbed up to 1500ppm in under an hour.
Same experience here. Opening windows just a bit totally changed my sleep quality.
"Valve will not be making and providing their own e-ink display for the Steam Machine"
Too bad. The picture in the articles looks awesome. Like a device from some alternate reality. Neither retro nor the standard flat-panel LCD.
I don't want to mod a pre-build $1,049 device. I want it to be good our of the box and I'd rather pay more to get more. (If it was a $3K top-of-midrange machine, I would buy it in a second.)
You're not modding a pre-built $1049 device. The faceplates are removable and swappable with no disassembly needed, and this fancy one connects via bluetooth and is powered via a battery. Entirely non-invasive.
The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis.
A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code.
The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.
AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive.
The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features).
But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved the needle and contributed the bulk of net new code.
Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.
It doesn't help that most management has been pushing on LoC over quality the past year.
I truly believe most companies as they exist today are not structured for AI. The amount of technical debt that will be created at a rapid pace is basically time delayed self destruction for most codebases if you let people run amok with low contribution standards and rubber stamped approvals.
If you treat each AI output as a small well-scoped, well-tested module, which interoperate with each other through well designed APIs, you can have high confidence in quality. But majority of people are pseudo-vibe coding and creating spaghetti monster codebases, and there's really no way to stop it without strong and tight technical oversight.
I like to imagine a similar dynamic happening when previous transformative technologies were invented: when the power tools like the chainsaw were invented, I wonder if there was a cohort of carpenters that dismissed them because of how much damage they could do in unskilled hands.
Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that such a prolific developer has only managed to produce a PR for a new Redis type, and a olama fork, despite having a 100x productivity booster machine for the last 8 months?
There are several other examples that come to mind, of prolific and respected developers turning to AI-based workflow and ever since then just constantly producing mediocre content and code. The spark is gone, the taste, the genius - whatever you call it, the human quality that made them interesting in the first place. Sure they may be more "productive" superficiallly, but they all sound the same now. Any other decent dev with access to a corporate code-generation service can get basically the same result.
False dichotomy much? The tools can be force multiplying without being “100x productivity boosting,” which I’ve never once heard claimed except from critics.
This is a good observation. Antirez is one my favorite authors and software developers. I'm 100% sure he could have made the same Redis PR and ds4 (or something else) without LLMs in about the same time with the same quality or higher.
> Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.
You could say that AI turned them from stupid and lazy to the famously dangerous combination of stupid and hardworking.
> They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code
If someone told you this (their coworkers generate bad PRs, but they generate good PRs) in the age before LLMs would you have also declared it psychosis?
Having to deal with lazy coworkers who submit bad PRs has been a feature of workplaces since the dawn of programming. Programming languages are a tool and they can be used or misused by the operator.
The difference now is that a lazy developer with an LLM can become prolific with their sloppy output and it’s harder for a lazy manager to notice.
If you’re trying to imply that nobody can use LLMs to good effect then that’s just denial at this point. The way good developers use AI isn’t to prompt and then submit PRs. It’s used as a pair programming partner. The developer still writes, reads, edits, and is responsible for the code.
> fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing
There is a lot of dumb money chasing the AI dream. That money is not asking hard questions about return on investment yet. But, the narrative is starting to shift as evidenced by this article. Even Meta is questioning the value of AI Agents.
In response, we see Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). The idea is to keep the AI dream alive one way or another because once that dies, the whole thing comes crashing down. So, dumb money is going to put up a strong fight in the marketing-sphere, and articles like these are needed to counter that.
I am not forced to use it, but I am a peculiar type of dev. Very lazy. Can go for weeks without producing anything of value while I think of stuff, delete stuff and generally just cogitate. I would work for 3-5 hours if I could but I have to sit in a chair for 8 hours to please the pointy haired people.
My colleagues are absolute work horses. They work for 8-10 hours minimum. Always responding to emails, putting out fires. Always typing furiously, producing lots of code. You are waiting for it, I know it and yes, it's all shit and all those fires are of their own making.
I picked up stuff in a month or two that took my colleagues years and I'm not a genius, as you can undoubtedly tell. I am just exceedingly lazy and I honestly think it's pathological. It got me in a lot of trouble in the past, but now, with the way AI is going I'm having a blast.
I have some proclivity for architecture and directing large complex projects. I hate typing code, but I love pointing out how it should be done. This shit is a life saver but for the love of God if you are not supremely lazy and averse to code, don't use it. My productive colleagues + AI = goddamn disaster.
For most developers OOP seems to be just a handful of memes they are vaguely aware of and a kind of generally irritating sense of things not quite working in Java. No amount of writing, discussions, examples and history will change this.
I felt this way for years until I decided (for fun) to work through the extremely excellent and recommended Pharo "MOOC" (https://mooc.pharo.org/) to learn Smalltalk.
I'm now OO pilled and feel it has really improved my Python and my golang.
"Microsoft will contribute expertise, resources, and AI technologies to help responsibly identify and fix vulnerabilities"
As a reminder, Microsoft runs NPM and GitHub. Microsoft has access to the best AI models and massive data centers. Despite that, their own products are rapidly getting worse at security and their services are central hubs through which various exploits are propagated. They are not making things better, they are actively and rapidly making things worse.
--
For a great example of how Microsoft deals with security issues within their own Open-Source projects, I recommend reading this GitHub thread:
EF core currently distributes a version of SQLite that has a severe vulnerability. The issue was discovered over a year ago. It was fixed by SQLite within one week. EF core didn't mark their driver as vulnerable until a user recently reported it, got bounced around and argued with developers. The current stable version of .NET core will only get a fix in roughly two months.
> a version of SQLite that has a severe vulnerability
Calling CVE-2025-70873 a severe vulnerability is a bit overplaying it imo. The vulnerability requires that you allow an attacker to import an arbitrary ZIP file
I looked at the vulnerability in question by the way, CVE-2025-70873, and it really is not that severe unless you're allowing users to import arbitrary ZIP files
> So, MS builds VSCode - doesn't even fork Atom to do so. Looks identical to it. They built it from scratch. Bigger. Slower.
Someone needs to fix a memory leak here.
Atom was famously slow. Even among people using it and championing it.
VSCode totally wowed people not just because it was faster, but because it was essentially the first «real» Electron-app which proved Electron-apps could have near native performance.
Also, big chunks of VSCode predated Atom. (The Monaco code editor was embedded inside IE10/11/Spartan Edge and parts of the Azure Portal and Azure Dev Ops.) Electron was the excuse to make it its own deliverable and not just only embedded inside other web projects. (Which is also why VSCode was not even a fork of Atom and easily beat Atom's performance at launch because it was already a battle hardened editor.)
What you're describing is people who fail to follow the most basic principles of academic research. (Check existing academic literature, mention and give credit to prior work.) This would be fine if these people didn't claim to be doing scientific research, didn't boast their academic credentials, didn't publish their finding as original work and didn't demand credit for their work in academia. Of course, they do all of these things. They benefit from a system they're actively denigrating (and in some ways degrading).
To put it more simply, people with academic credentials should not demand acknowledgement of their current intellectual work while denigrating and ridiculing the importance of very similar work done in the past.
It's an interesting project, but the discussion on HN looks weird. It gets brought up every few weeks[1] and everyone just spams comments with messages about how "fast" it is.
DuckDB is fast for some specific workloads. If you use it for most other things, it is at least an order of magnitude slower than SQLite. It also has some limitations in terms of what SQL it will currently run (e.g. I immediately ran into an issue with recursive queries). That will probably get better with time.
[1] If you search HN for "sqlite" and "duckdb" you get 4,310 hits and 2,398 hits respectively. That's a very heavy skew, considering SQLite is everywhere and had been around for a quarter century, while DuckDB effectively appeared on the scene two years ago.
I'm going to sound like a broken record but... different use cases. They're analogous in the comparison "sqlite for analytics" but completely different architectures and implementations. Part of this is the fault of the developers, but I feel they were trying to highlight the similar focus on in-process, zero dependencies, simplicity and test coverage - not a direct "vs" comparison. IME recursive queries in analytical workflows are not very common; they typically work against the fundamental data layout on disk.
SQLite is awesome and I would love to see more posts about it, but the reality is one of the major reasons it's awesome is the no-drama/stability/it just works. DuckDB is seeing a lot of development on many fronts so there's a lot more to learn and talk about right now.
Yes, it's specifically promoted as DBMS for OLAP workload. And it's usually compared to ClickHouse, another analytical DBMS. So people who use it know why it's good.
The article has an explanation for what kind of database it is. After reading that one sentence you wouldn't write the second paragraph.
> it's optimized for the kind of queries that scan millions of rows to filter, aggregate, and join — not the kind that look up a single record by primary key
I’m sure the use of duckdb may seem weird for normal developers, but for data people it really is game-changing, especially for data scientists or business analysts.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3556175