<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: davebren</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davebren</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:08:33 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=davebren" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes a test showing an LLM can reproduce an app in its training data and not an equivalent complexity app that is not in its training data is equivalent to proving the statement I made that having your codebase trained on will allow a competitor to copy your product.<p>And yes, you are obviously a fraud.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:42:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48602420</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48602420</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48602420</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have neural net applications I programmed entirely myself from 16 years ago and all I see from you are some python scripts so I guess I win this stupid game I wasn't even trying to play.<p>You haven't made a single technical point outside your bloviated claims to authority. I can safely assume you're a fraud because this is exactly how frauds speak. Actual scientists and engineers don't argue from authority they go and test the hypothesis for themselves, the fact that you balk at my suggestion to do this is amusing.<p>I said you can do a basic test because this is the best way to see it directly for yourself. It's very easy to do especially for an eminent machine learning visionary leader as yourself. You ask the LLM to produce two apps of similar complexity and technical challenge from a software perspective, one that is already in its training data and one that isn't and see which its more successful at. This isn't some controversial take, nor is it "unfalsifiable".<p>There's also hundreds of benchmarks demonstrating where the limitations are for LLMs, or you can study the progression of LLMs in mathematics and where the gains have been made and see that this also agrees with me. You can watch Chris Hay's videos demonstrating exactly how LLMs perform math layer by layer. Why is everyone using LLMs for search? Because it's an extremely efficient compression of all its training data. Did they figure out the Studio Ghibli art-style all on their own spontaneausly? No, they were trained on Studio Ghibli content. There's so many ways to come to this conclusion. But you seem to be too busy sniffing your own farts to be interested in learning anything about the field though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:46:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601791</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601791</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601791</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "Modos Color Monitor Pushes E-Paper Displays Further"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wasted 2k on a color e-ink monitor that ended up being pretty much unusable. Reviews said as much but the risk was worth it to me for the chance to spend my days looking at something that doesn't feel like a screen. I believe it's an "if you build it they will come" thing especially for anyone working on a computer all day.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:42:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598489</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598489</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598489</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>First I never made any claims about myself or appealed to my authority, that was you. I still don't see any evidence of any technical expertise in ML or in programming anything more complicated than python scripts. Maybe you weren't aware but often on the internet people make false claims about their expertise on something. There's thousands of "Visionary leader driving ethical AI innovation and strategic growth" CEOs that know next to nothing about the actual technology.<p>Anyway like I said you can just test it out yourself and find out that I'm correct. Every skilled programmer already knows this and can predict what kind of complexity an LLM won't be able to handle. And anyone working on LLMs should know that they are completely dependent on their training data. The entire scaling hypothesis was based on this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:24:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597779</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597779</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597779</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "Ask HN: What tools are you using for AI-assisted code review?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't use these tools, but wouldn't it be better to use them only after you do a manual review to see if they find anything you missed? Otherwise I could see reviewers getting false confidence and doing a less thorough review. This happens with seeing that unit tests pass.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:56:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593210</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593210</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593210</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You could just test it for yourself if you're actually interested in finding out (assuming you are a decent programmer, but your bio suggests you have no technical expertise in the area).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:10:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588432</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588432</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588432</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It has. LLMs being able to one-shot any higher-order complexity is entirely dependent on it already being in the training data.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:21:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48571720</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48571720</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48571720</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You trust those?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 01:39:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48564692</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48564692</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48564692</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't really use LLMs myself, but if someone wants to have any kind of software business then having the models trained on their products isn't ideal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:57:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562722</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562722</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562722</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Who are you quoting?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:41:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562528</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562528</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562528</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you think that everyone using it and their employers are aware that they are giving their competition the ability to copy straight from their codebase when they ask it to replicate their product?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:40:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562516</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562516</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562516</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not theft in the same way a con artist convinces you to give him all your money. The people using it or their employers just don't realize any competitor will be able to ask the LLM to replicate their product and it will copy the codebase they uploaded to them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:37:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562483</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562483</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562483</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One of the funniest things is how hard it was to get approval for a $100 software license but now people are being encouraged to burn thousands on tokens.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:27:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560621</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560621</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560621</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> "In its IPO filing, the company had said Cursor's access to developers' data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve its AI models such as Grok."<p>They're all stealing your IP and selling it back to your competitors in the form of tokens.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:11:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560418</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560418</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560418</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "Did Anthropic ask for this?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> "to practice what happens if a much more serious event occurs"<p>A pair of bolt cutters should do.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:35:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48534289</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48534289</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48534289</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "Nvidia announces new AI chip for personal computers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Uploading your IP to the biggest IP thieves in human history seems bad idk.<p>2. Eventually we'll get to where local models that don't have sycophancy and slot-machine mechanics trained into them will perform better.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:28:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355927</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355927</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355927</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This seems to be a good middle ground then. It allows for a way to prevent political projects getting grants under the guise of "scientific research", at least when they directly oppose the voters. I don't see any push to defund basic research, and if politicians start doing that there's at least a way for people to voice their disapproval through voting.<p>Aside from that, so much money was wasted on Alzheimer's research based on fraud.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:18:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355845</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355845</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355845</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Instead of programming something yourself now you'll be forced to program through the interface of someone that doesn't speak English putting what you say into an LLM. We've peaked.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 17:59:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297990</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297990</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297990</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "Shunning AI is the human choice"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Seems more like a materialist religious project to me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 16:08:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225065</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225065</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225065</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by davebren in "Shunning AI is the human choice"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.<p>The barrier to entry to make slop is lower, but it's gotten much higher for developing the skill of programming. There was already an issue with a lack of mentorship and path for juniors when agile attempted to turn software engineers into assembly line workers, among other issues with the industry becoming hyper short-term focused.<p>Now you have educational barriers where students are competing with other students that are cheating with LLMs. There are psychological barriers with learned helplessness. The 100k lines of vibecoded slop produced hits a wall but they've gained no understanding of the code in the process or ability to make changes themselves. At the first job juniors and interns get they're being told not to take the time to learn and understand the problem they're working and instead they need to hit the LLM slot machine or risk getting fired.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 15:56:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48224878</link><dc:creator>davebren</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48224878</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48224878</guid></item></channel></rss>