"Tu quoque" comments don't help any discussion. Both the US and Iran are wrong. Iran is wrong for the massacre and the US is wrong for starting a war with Israel against Iran. They are wrong for different reasons. Iran is run by a despotic regime and the US has lost the plot. Possibly Trump is trying to deflect from the Epstein files and create a rally around the flag effect as the midterms approach and doesn't have better ideas to get the public on side. Israel is in the wrong here too.
The new bottle neck isn't writing code, it's testing. You're right you can't blindly trust the output of an LLM but you can trust the testing regime to ensure a certain standard has been met. In hindsight this actually sort of obvious, the more things change the more they stay the same etc.
Well it’s not obvious that is true. If you ask LLM to write tests, it will generate versions of them that code passes, that doesn’t guarantee good code. If you write tests yourself and just pray for great LLM pull, it’s easier to just write code yourself, in my humble opinion
That's a useless approach as you point out but doesn't meant there isn't a valid testing regime to be explored and upheld. Manual testing is going to be a lot more important, I see QA teams/roles becoming very valuable assets in the coming years.
you can trust the tests that you have written, but what about the tests that you didn't write? can you be sure that your testsuite is complete?
when i do test driven development, all the thinking goes into the tests, and the actual code writes itself. LLMs hardly help make that any faster.
having a complete testsuite may make it easier to use LLMs for refactoring, and adding features, but then you still have to write he tests for the new functionality.
If cool means interesting then yes, it is cool because it's archaic and different but it's not effective. It's the equivalent of a verbal contract. It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one.
Irish democracy in contrast uses STV voting and a written constitution and is modeled between the best of what the UK, the US and France had to offer when it was drafted and is a very representative democracy with many political parties compared to the duopolies in the US and the UK. It's also why Ireland is largely immune to hard shifts to the left or right relative to the UK and US.
I love this about Ireland because they are such a young republic. And democratic systems are a technology. Something that we understand better over time, and somewhere new can pick and choose from what is best, where it is _extremely_ hard to change existing systems in established countries.
Yes, it's in my opinion one of the great tragedies of our time that some of our established countries are so hard to change. I don't mean this as the policy needs change, everyone will differ on those. I just mean the technology of government like you're saying. Efficient and more fair ways of voting on laws and electing representatives do exist.
For example my own (US) has a political system basically frozen in amber from a time before many of the political and policy challenges of our day were not even thought of yet. And they did their best to create a change mechanism, but I think anyone being truly fair of any political persuasion has to admit that while it has prevented nearly every harmful extremist constitutional amendment (I'd say Prohibition is the main one that sneaked in), it has proven to, within the lifetimes of most living Americans, be so hard to attain as to set the status quo in stone.
The framers didn't realize that most changes would be blocked by at least one party, out of fear that it would advantage the other guys. Same reason we stopped admitting states before letting Puerto Rico in, an absolutely absurd situation.
Do you not understand why PR isn't a state? Seems like you don't. Support for PR statehood is only about 50% (on the island). That largely has to do with the fact that their taxes would increase if they became a state. Additionally, they would have to switch to English (along with Spanish) which makes things a lot more complicated. They are already US citizens and can move to anywhere in the US if they want to vote in federal elections (and half of them do but mainly for work). They don't want independence either. So the current limbo state is actually desirable to them.
Even if the citizens of PR wanted statehood, you have to get both parties to agree. This means probably 2 states at the same time (one red, one blue). Since there isn't another potentially red state (Alberta but that's probably never going to happen) to join, that's hard to do. Look at US history, statehood has always worked this way. It has nothing to do with whatever you are implying.
PS The 27th amendment was 1992, probably during your lifetime. You would expect the rate of new amendments to slow overtime so the average of a new amendment about every 15-20 years seems about right.
27th amendment was about congressional salaries and had basically no effect on governance.
26th amendment lowered the voting age to 18 for state and local elections and had no effect on national elections (statute already set the national voting age as 18, but courts prevented it from applying to state and local elections).
25th clarified presidential succession to work exactly how everyone had already assumed it to work for over a century, so for practical purposes did nothing.
24th in 1964, which outlawed poll taxes as a criteria for voting, was the last amendment with any effect on national governance.
>> For example my own (US) has a political system basically frozen in amber from a time before many of the political and policy challenges of our day were not even thought of yet.
Please, please, please go read the Federalist papers. The Founders thought of a lot more than you realise.
The design of a constitution is the design of the distribution of power. The nature of power hasn't changed.
New and shiny is not always better. Science has spoiled us in the last century, but it has little to say about how a good government should operate.
Many of us have a popular set of ideals that we think are superior and have attempted to overlay those on every aspect of modern life, but they have little to no data behind them and are ultimately just beliefs that make us feel good. As such, there is no reason to expect they are optimal for governing either.
> "The framers didn't realize that most changes would be blocked by at least one party, out of fear that it would advantage the other guys."
Check out some of the founders' essays. This is no accident, or oversight. It's absolutely intentional and for good reason.
The Constitution grants power to all three branches of government, which is the same as granting power to none of them. The more they disagree, the less power they have. In this way power can only be wielded through cooperation (selflessness).
It's worked well as a honeypot, but I don't think it's working well as a device for paralysis. The executive has seized an alarming amount of power (with the tacit approval of the party in control of the legislature), and the constitution isn't doing much of anything to stop it.
Also, one of the reasons for choosing proportional representation with a single transferable vote (PR-STV) was to ensure that the substantial unionist minority (who wanted to maintain the link with the UK/Britain) would still have have their views represented in the new parliament. This system works for other minority views and provides new political parties with a chance to grow in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a first-past-the-post system.
The parliament of Northern Ireland also used STV for the same (er, well, inverted) reasons from 1921 until the Unionist majority forced a change to FPTP for most seats in 1929.
More generally, STV was the default choice for assemblies throughout the British Empire (and became known as 'the British system' as a result) from the late 19th century onwards.
It was even agreed on for use in Westminster in 1919 - though only the university seats ever actually used it - making it "more traditional" than the current single-member FPTP system which dates only from 1949. The failure to actually implement it was part of a more general reactionary movement in the aftermath of the war, when Lloyd George's promise of a "land fit for heroes" was thoroughly betrayed.
The Irish system seems to work well, and can be used as a comparator for considering what the UK might look like if that betrayal hadn't happened.
Huh! I didn’t know any of that. I presumed that Stormont elections had always been FPTP and that gerrymandering – particularly in Derry – was the worst abuse of the democratic process in Northern Ireland.
That’s really interesting that the British promoted STV within their sphere of influence and had intended to use it for elections to Westminster. Thanks for the informative comment and useful historical context.
Note that even though the U.S. has a Constitution, the entire U.S. government is still, like the UK, highly reliant on inexplicit norms many of which go back hundreds of years before the U.S. was founded. They’re both still English common law systems.
Documents are meaningless. In rotten countries they simply get rewritten or ignored. Nothing beats an electorate who value honesty over being told what they want to hear and who punish corruption.
> It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one.
No. As you have surely seen, the US written constitution just gets contorted to "clearly" mean whatever it is the partisan Justices decided suits their current purpose. The effect is extremely corrosive - they even decided it means their guy is above the law.
I agree that using a better voting system (STV) is a meaningful benefit and worth replicating elsewhere, but I don't agree that having a written constitution is better. I think Ireland would be in roughly the same place if it had the same arrangement as in Westminster in that respect.
For example when Ireland wrote a constitutional amendment saying abortion is illegal under basically any circumstances, the people the Irish were electing would also have voted against legislation allowing abortion, but by the time the poll was held to amend to say abortion must be legal, the legislators elected were also mostly pro-choice. So if there was no written constitution my guess is that roughly the outcome is the same, in 1975 an Irish woman who needs an abortion has to "go on holiday" abroad and come back not pregnant or order pills and hope they're not traced to her, and in 2025 it's just an ordinary medical practice. Maybe the changes happen a few years earlier, or a few years later.
Edited: Clarify that the abortion prohibition was itself an amendment, as was the removal of that prohibition.
The power of a constitution is in it being the highest law in the land, that legislation can't just override. It's only recently in the US that there is a blatantly corrupt kakistocracy who feels free to ignore it.
But it's not that the duopoly is disappearing. It's just that the previous two parties are being eclipsed by two different parities. That's occurred previously in both the UK and US.
The last time it happened in the US was 1856 and its only happened 2x in US history. The US democratic party is the oldest existing political party in the world. For reference, the UK is actually only about 90 years older than the Democratic party.
Forum mechanics have always shaped discourse more than policies. Voting changed everything. The response to LLMs should be mechanical not moral — soft, invisible weighting against signals correlated with generated text. Imperfect but worth the tradeoff, just like voting.
He deletes posts after they are no longer relevant. Given how people dig dirt up on people and take them out of context long after that context is forgotten, more people should do that (or delete social media altogether).
Paywall links shouldn't be allowed on Hacker News. It's not possible to subscribe to every service that could be theoretically be submitted. We're not all on $350k SV wages either.
That said it's hard to gauge this story as it's a one sided affair, author maybe 100% in the right but that can't really be determined.
Dang also indefatigably links various threads together with the clear intention of making things clearer for posterity. archive.is is great at the time of writing but will it be here a year from now or will there be another successor on another domain? I hope so but I would hate to think Hacker News will become discussions on articles people can't access. I think a good rule is if it can be archived on the wayback machine it's suitable. Will the wayback machine be here 1 year from now? I think much more likely than archive.is and there is no escaping that such bets have to be made.
"Circumvented easily" is more nebulous than people give it credit for.
You can support journalism independently of submitting to Hacker News. Paid sites aren't suitable for aggregators like this one including the likes of the nytimes et al. Even if they sometimes have great content we'd simply have to go without.
Non of these issues affect France because France had the foresight to invest in Nuclear tech that gave them energy independence from both the US and Russia while being green and sustainable. It's certainly not perfect e.g. France imports some Uranium from Russia but they are in a far better position than Germany. Germany has produced many brilliant people but it really has to self reflect on some of the major errors in big decisions it has made the past few decades.
Ireland is building the Celtic Interconnector with France next, will import a lot of her electricity from there which predominately uses nuclear power to generate her electricity. I fear you're making perfect the enemy of better and genuine progress.
I'm not the enemy of this progress at all and think it's a good thing. Same goes for the Celtic Interconnecter, though. My point is basically a) "coal-free" is misleading and this progress can be framed in other ways, and b) Ireland would have been better-served in terms of cost and environment to rely on even OCGTs than HFO.
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