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> If your job is to translate requirements into code manually - and that's it - you're the generalist travel agent.

I’ve been a full-stack web programmer at five different companies over the last fifteen years, big and small, e-commerce and B2B, junior to senior to staff, and that has never fully described my responsibilities.


Which responsibilities do you figure are a combination of highly valuable in your role, and resistant to automation?


Knowing what to implement, and having the social skills to perform various tasks in a company?


I would love for SWE Verified to put out a set of fresh but comparable problems and see how the top performing models do, to test against overfitting.


> most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are

“Google Gemini” is the No 2 ranked app in the Apple App Store (behind ChatGTP) and has been for some time


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

I'm also curious what results we would get if SWE came up with a new set of 500 problems to run all these models against, to guard against overfitting.


Won’t those models gradually become outdated (for anything related to events that happen after the model was trained, new code languages or framework versions, etc) if no one is around to continually re-train them?


They should be fine for things that don't change. (which is a lot of stuff)

If you are feeding the LLM a report, and asking it for a summary, it doesn't need the latest updates from Wikipedia or Reddit.


How about denying the Fourth Amendment rights of US citizens to be secure in their homes in the recent Chicago apartment raid? https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-sufferable-evil

How about detaining US citizens without warrants for days at a time and then releasing with no charges? https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/george-...


Let's hope the people not subject to a warrant sue ICE's pants off. As far as I can tell, most of the dragnets are either in public places or with the permission of the property owner.

I'd love to be wrong because it means the judciary has a chance to shut this down but I fear outside of a few civil rights suits this will have to be remedied at the ballot box.


It's essentially impossible to sue ICE, they have qualified immunity. Police have been doing similar things for years.


The officers do, not the agency or police department. People sue and win against police departments all the time.


There is a hard limit on the number of atomic elements, and an even smaller limit on the number of soluble compounds that facilitate chemical reactions, and water is demonstrably both the best and the most common in the universe.

So while it may be possible for life to exist without water, any alternatives should be reasonably expected to be even more rare than water-based life


I have stared at a Blue Jay mimicking while Merlin repeatedly labeled it Red-Shouldered Hawk. I’ve seen it pop up a bunch of suspicious one-offs around a mockingbird as well (same with Gray Catbird, another mimic).

But I agree with you that it gets those things correct most of the time and it also seems to be improving over time.


Seek by iNaturalist has the same problem: if you wiggle your camera around enough, it will give you a species identification. But that species identification will be spurious. It's not reliable at all.

Pointing this out on HN has sometimes resulted in a lot of upvotes and sometimes in a lot of downvotes. I don't know why. In all cases, Seek identifications are unlikely to be correct.

(I also got one response saying I was wrong to try to tar iNaturalist by association with the unaffiliated app "Seek by iNaturalist". As the name of the app suggests, they are not in fact unaffiliated.)


As a heavy user of Merlin, it definitely isn’t perfect - especially with all the mimic birds - to the point that there are complaints about beginners polluting the citizen science database with erroneous IDs from Merlin.

But it’s very very good.


Yeah, it's generally pretty accurate.


Doesn't "average" = "middle class" by definition?

US median individual income in 2022 was $48k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

> The “average person” doesn’t make enough money to pay rent or afford groceries

<1% of the US population is homeless, and ~10% receive food stamps. The average person makes enough money to pay rent and buy groceries.


Just because people aren’t homeless and don’t qualify for food stamps doesn’t mean they can afford things.

You need to make less than $33k for a family of 3 to even qualify for food stamps and then get disqualified if your total assets are above $4.5K. If you’re an adult without children, your food stamps eligibility is capped at 3 months every 3 years. A lot of people who need food stamps, do not qualify for them.

Credit card debt is $1.2T, out of which 10% is delinquent for more than 90 days. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/may/broad-con...

Student loan debt is at $1.7T.

People are going into debt to buy groceries. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/20/americans-are-going-into...

The average American life is way worse than what people generally make it out to be.


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