MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stego-tech | 2025-04-24 04:22:45+00:00
I don't, because such a model presumes every human has similar entrepreneurial capabilities and spirit. Neurodivergent humans may lack the social skills necessary for success in entrepreneurship, some humans may place a higher valuation on relationships than they could effectively trade upon via entrepreneurship, and others still may be of a persecuted group for whom entrepreneurship brings more risk than would be offset through income gains.

Even if we did restructure society around everyone being their own business owner (and man, are the powers that be trying to do so for a whole slew of awful, worker-screwing reasons), the level of competition OP tries to describe (of sole proprietors competing 1:1 against corporate behemoths, as if corporations somehow wouldn't also benefit from such AI-amplification of output) is highly unlikely. The driver of massive AI investment at present is to lessen the impact of workers in an attempt to drive down wages and consolidate power within the hands of the few, prime corporate players; such a future filled with self-starting entrepreneurs would still be limited to those who can afford the tokens or subscription plans to the largest AI models (or have the hardware and expertise at home to roll their own), and so you'd just have a global gig economy for workers with three or four companies hoovering up most of the excess for themselves through AI costs.

Look, I'd love nothing more than to run my own little IT Services firm with a sociable partner to handle the social networking aspect, while I get to tinker, build, and make people smile all day long at how cool technology can be. AI, however, ain't it. If anything, it threatens the survival of corporate knowledge workers and entrepreneurs both, by grossly devaluing their labor at a time of massive wealth inequality and severe employment precarity.

We can do better than that.
by tpmoney | 2025-04-24 04:24:11+00:00
> The person who paid for the sdk is the person who bought the iphone.

Are they? Then why did companies previously charge per seat annual licenses for their SDKs? Were the people who bought the computers and products back then not also paying for the SDK?

Clearly the answer is "who is paying" depends on the model you set up. You can take your income stream from the initial hardware sales, or you can take it from subscription fees, or you can take it in revenue sharing models. Apple chose the latter, and so every developer that finds some way to use the platform and not share their revenue is a "free rider" relative to the other developers who are now subsidizing them.

>If apple made $0 off the app store, would they still make iphones? I would assume yes since they are profitable devices. Hence this isn't free riding.

It's not "would they still make phones" they might. It's "would they still make phones that 3rd parties can develop applications for at the same price they currently charge and without per seat annual $1k+ up front license fees to prospective developers."
by lud_lite | 2025-04-24 04:25:31+00:00
Fixing things requires more finess than adding features. Because it needs to be fixed. Not fixed means you are out of business. Vibe coding is rolling a dice to see if something works. The question is whether these systems can stack that dice to converge to self healing within the time needed.

Maybe they will maybe they won't, or maybe it depends on the problem.

I think you need a expert human in the loop. Maybe fewer of them for a given weight of functionality.
by zonkerdonker | 2025-04-24 04:27:38+00:00
I appreciate that you have given this some thought, but it is clear that you dont have much or any professional experience in 3D modeling or mechanical design.

For the guitar amp, ok. Maybe that prompt will give you a set of surfaces you can scale for the exterior shell of the amp. Because you will need to scale it, or know exactly the dimensions of your speakers, internal chambers, electronics, I/O, baffles, and where those will all ve relative go eachother. Also...Do you need buttons? Jacks/connectors/other I/O? How and where will the connections be routed to other components? Do you need an internal structure with an external aesthetic shell? Or are you going to somehow mold the whole thing in one piece? Where should the part be split? What kind of fasteners will join the parts and where should they be joined? What material is the shell? Can it be thinner to save weight? Or need ribs or thickness for strength? Where does it need to be strong?

These are the issues from 30 seconds of thinking about this. AI (as suggested) could maybe save me from surfacing an exterior cosmetic cover, given presice constraints and dimensions, but at that point, I may as well just do it myself.

If you have a common, easy, already solved an mechanical design problem (hinge e.g.), then you buy an off the shelf component. For everything else, it is bespoke, and every detail matters. Every problem is a "wine glass full to the brim"
by jrvarela56 | 2025-04-24 04:28:08+00:00
My first reaction was to look for MCP server so that I could connect it to Cursor. Just pointing this out in case it helps with new user onboarding. MCP server would work to hook it up to the Claude Desktop Website and most agentic-IDEs (Cursor, Cline, Roo, Windsurf, etc).
by benoau | 2025-04-24 04:28:45+00:00
I think it's amazing working with Cursor. Sometimes it's dumb as shit but I can keep it focused and on track and working so fast I feel like the bottleneck is my 100+ WPM typing speed. I am looking forward to making software like never before. I am using AI for art, for video, for 3d, for writing tests, for proofreading and revising, and so much more. I feel like "full-stack" is a much broader set of technologies this year.

But I am also not considering this as a "career" anymore, at best there will just be continuous attrition from now on and maybe some of the time I can have a job. I don't see a path to retirement as a programmer. I don't know how much of my software will be written for or on behalf of other people moving forward.

But I am also optimistic, the main thing AI does is give me the output of an entire team even if I have to find my own avenues to publish and monetize it.
by frosted-flakes | 2025-04-24 04:29:30+00:00
Most of the books weren't very good though. They tended to be glorified audiobooks and didn't make effective use of the technology.

By far the best one I ever saw was the sample book that came with my family's Quantum Leap. It was quite thick and had a wide variety of different topics, all of which were extremely well produced, and every page was filled with things to explore. As a child, I particularly liked the pages on US presidents (including well-known quotes or recordings of many of them), Europe (with the national anthems of every European country and memory games to learn each country), and the super cool Parts of the Body (with translucent pages showing each layer, and funny sound effects when you explore each body part).

Some of the Magic School Bus books were decent too. The Solar System in particular had excellent games—you wouldn't think audio-only games pointing at a static page would be very fun, but some of them were very creative.
by aurareturn | 2025-04-24 04:29:54+00:00
Power requirements and hardware costs doubled every year. If current trends continue, the largest AI supercomputer in 2030 would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and require 9 GW of power.

The recent AI demand for energy got me thinking philosophically about life. Life, it seems, want to maximize the use of available energy in its environment. Humans is a form of life. Therefore, humans naturally want to spend all the energy available to it. This goes back to entropy & life in which life increases entropy. The life form that increases entropy the most is the most successful because it should in theory be the most efficient.

AI energy use is just another giant leap in energy demand for our life form.

I also want to point out that cyanobacteria converted so much carbon dioxide into oxygen that it suffocated itself in an event known as The Great Oxidation Event. Now humans are doing the reverse and it is suffocating itself. I wonder if this cycle is irreversible and that our "consciousness" and higher intelligence does not matter when it comes to laws of physics/life. IE. We can't stop ourselves from generating too much CO2 because our laws of nature is no different from the cyanobacteria that made the best use of available energy in such an efficient manner.
by ethn | 2025-04-24 04:30:47+00:00
I try to address this in the article. I think the same could have been expected of plumbing, electricians, landscaping, etc but through a different means, standardization, the corporations simply don't have a good position.

In this world the neurodivergent is empowered, they no longer are charged with persuasion of their ideas to a team or corporation. They can build their ideas themselves and form a limited partnership with someone with the talents they lack.

Though I make it a point to describe the new economic order without regard to its desirability. However, other authors on the subject (e.g. Lysander Spooner, Rothbard, etc) would be pleased by the development in terms of its social welfare.
by serpix | 2025-04-24 04:30:48+00:00
What I've found with agents is that they stray from the task and even start to flip flop on implementations, going back and forth on a solution. They never admit they don't know something and just brute force a solution even though the answer cannot be found without trial and error or actually studying the problem. I repeatedly fall back to reading the docs and just finishing the job myself as the agent just does not know what to do.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-24 04:31:21+00:00
It's uses a simple, purpose-focused template of a type that is a common recommendation for clear communication, outline numbering, and highlights keywords using monospaced text, as is common practice in technical writing. None of that is unusual for a human, especially writing something that they know is going to be high visibility, to do.

Modestly competent presentation is now getting portrayed as an "AI tell".
by bix6 | 2025-04-24 04:32:18+00:00
Fascinating read, very unique writing style. I’m not sure I agree that it will make people more entrepreneurial. People desire the stability a wage provides; it is incredibly difficult to set out on your own. Most people don’t have financial security to start one company so just because they can trial 20 in the same time now doesn’t change that. I do think it enables rapid prototyping via fast access to experts or code generation. But if you’re starting a biotech you probably still need a lab which is expensive or tied to an institution so AI can only provide so much there.

I’m not sure I understand your argument for early stage venture going away? There’s more proven before funding with AI so the round has to be bigger since it’s inherently later stage by the time it reaches VC?
by db48x | 2025-04-24 04:33:04+00:00
There are proposed cpu architectures that work that way, like the Mill <https://millcomputing.com/>. Where most cpus support multiple calling conventions the Mill enforces a single calling convention in hardware. There is a hardware `call` instruction that does all the work directly, along with a corresponding `ret` instruction for returning from a function call. It also uses its equivalent of the TLB to ensure that each function is only granted permission to read from that portion of the stack which contains its arguments; any attempt to read outside that region would result in a permission error that causes the read to return a NaR (Not a Result, akin to a floating point NaN).

As an additional protection, new stack frames are implicitly zeroed as they are created. I assume this is done by filling the CPU cache with zeros for those addresses before continuing to execute the called function. No need to wait for actual zeros to be written to main memory.

https://millcomputing.com/wiki/Protection#Protecting_Stacks
by wincy | 2025-04-24 04:34:18+00:00
Think of all the jobs we’re missing out on by fentanyl being a controlled substance! All the pharmaceutical jobs and good middle class workers that could help with the injections, the poor needle makers. And think of the poor morticians and doctors losing out on the income from the overdoses!

Just because something costs a lot of money or takes a lot of effort doesn’t mean it’s good? It’s a non sequitur.
by bawolff | 2025-04-24 04:35:00+00:00
> It's not "would they still make phones" they might. It's "would they still make phones that 3rd parties can develop applications for at the same price they currently charge and without per seat annual $1k+ up front license fees to prospective developers."

The answer still seems like a very obvious yes. Certainly in the modern context where most of the value of the phone comes from apps and app devs can go to android if ios becomes to onerous.

Which is probably exactly why apple chose this model instead of per seat.
by SECProto | 2025-04-24 04:36:20+00:00
> Yes, weak beer will turn sour, but it takes a lot to make it harmful.

While I agree in general with what you've said, this line is wrong. Strong beer will turn sour too. Acetobacter is good up to 10-15%, it's how we get malt vinegar and wine vinegar. All it needs is ethanol, oxygen, and time.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-24 04:38:00+00:00
GPTs' historically aren't great at identifying their own work; if they could, AI-based cheating wouldn't be the problem it is at present.

Assuming you're the OP, and this is your blog, let me give you some feedback:

* Choosing your words carefully and communicating your ideas clearly are separate skills. You may have chosen the most precise language, but your ability to communicate ideas to as wide an audience as HN is lacking (judging by the comments)

* If you're going to invoke half a dozen rules, principles, laws, and/or proofs in the span of two pages, then you'd better link the associated Wikipedia articles for folks to follow along, at least until you've established a readership baseline. People read blogs for learning or entertainment, and if you're trying to teach a perspective, then you need to include copious links to this material; otherwise, your readership is going to turn into an echo chamber of similar academics (or people cosplaying as such, which is dangerous)

* Your narrative structure leaves a lot to be desired. Are you sharing an opinion piece about a potential AI-energized future? Or are you mocking AI detractors? Or are you digging up old memes? Maybe you're getting into the philosophy angle of capitalism and entrepreneurship? Or perhaps making a judgement about the perceived lack of "startup spirit" of modern workers? I honestly can't tell, because at times it feels like this single piece is touching upon all of them, but not going into anything more than surface-depth about any of them

* As far as reads go, it's a strugglebus. Your blog gives no insight into the author as a person, but the piece reads as if we should already know you and respect your authority on the topic because of credentials. Its sentences meander far too long before stopping, as if you're trying to consolidate complex thoughts that demand a paragraph of context into a single, lengthy, concise sentence - and leaving readers to figure it out on their own time, like a University Professor with tenure.

* Personal nitpick here, but your application of the Pareto Principle to human labor within corporations betrays your inexperience (at best) or your absence of empathy (at worst). More than likely, it displays a profound level of distance from work "in the trenches", and the associated lack of understanding of why corporations are formed, grow, function, struggle, wither, collapse, and die. Talk to more workers, and not just ones at your present company/title/rank/experience level/demographic brackets. Humans are messy creatures, not machines, and assuming they will behave as machines inside other machine-like structures is ignoring the inherent chaos of existence.
by ethn | 2025-04-24 04:39:15+00:00
For some industries such as chemistry and biotech there is little change to be expected.

The self-employed is now able to rapidly develop their ideas while employed reducing their risk and cost.

Per VC, that's right and secondarily it's more difficult to justify earlier funding when one no longer needs to hire a substantial team. I expect the current major VC firms to get even bigger.
by ghaff | 2025-04-24 04:39:26+00:00
I have used LLMs for some simple text generation for what I’m going to call boilerplate, eg why $X is important at the start of a reference architecture. But maybe it saved me an hour or two in a topic I was already fairly familiar with. Not something I would have paid a meaningful sum for. I’m sure I could have searched and found an article on the topic.
by lolinder | 2025-04-24 04:40:01+00:00
This is a user agent, not a recursive web crawler, so robots.txt explicitly does not apply [0]. As long as I'm not abusing your services you shouldn't care if my instructions to my user agent come in the form of a click of a button, a keyboard shortcut, a script, or an LLM agent.

If it's abusive behavior you are worried about you should be able to detect and block it with rate limits or other tools that target the malicious behavior. If you can't distinguish between my usage and a regular browser then I'm not sure what moral ground you have to claim my usage is hurting you.

[0] "A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced." https://www.robotstxt.org/faq/what.html
by nailer | 2025-04-24 04:41:41+00:00
I don’t want to sound like a paid shell for a particular piece of software I use so I won’t bother mentioning its name.

There is a video editor that turns your spoken video into a document. You then modify the script to edit the video. There is a timeline like every other app if you want it but you probably won’t need it, and the timeline is hidden by default.

It is the only use of AI in an app that I have felt is a completely new paradigm and not a “horseless carriage”.
by figassis | 2025-04-24 04:41:45+00:00
You’re right in principle, but taking this out of the context it should be viewed in. The only reason such policies were created is because there was already bias against certain groups. So we can claim that disparate impact policies create another bias, but seems like we’re just addressing one source of bias, not the original offender. What is the solution to that?

Politics should not be handled in a stateless manner without understanding root cause. You pick an issue, with 10 imperfect solutions over 50 years and decide to remove only the things you don’t like, you will leave it in a terrible state that will need to be fixed by your replacements.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-24 04:42:10+00:00
I don't know why HN is down voting you; you're right.

That said, your gray-status is exactly why I long since stopped pointing out that's what people want, and instead shifted my argument towards educating readers why that's bad. The dearth of informed electorates is a crisis plaguing humanity as a whole, and we sorely need to start shining a light on the practices that create this harm ("answer engines") rather than shaming users that engage with those traps alone.
by cc101 | 2025-04-24 04:42:15+00:00
When I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, they started giving me dopamine supplements (carbidopa-levodopa). Now, all of a sudden, I'm getting things done after spending most of my life vegetating lacking the motivation to do more than get by. I insist that it is not the disease that has motivated me. Remarkable improvements in lifestyles are known when folks are given carbidopa-levodopa. Were there relic Puritanical values that led society to keep this away from me or just lack of understanding? I don't know, but it does seem a pity as I can't do anything about it now. Others might consider this as a strategy to improve their lifestyle. For those with ADHD like myself who never got much from Ritalin, this might be especially worth considering.
by pchangr | 2025-04-24 04:43:33+00:00
Having tried the whole startup thing in Berlin.. then comparing financing opportunities in say.. London… honestly I don’t think there’s much in favor of deep tech startups in Berlin other than .. a lot of universities being physically present in Berlin. The business mindset is just.. too narrow. The only path I could think of is a phd thesis turn company via private investment… and I fail to see how Berlin is different than say .. Freiburg on that regard. IMHO, what you get in Berlin is a lot of little copycats of successful American companies on the consumer level .. with recent graduates being paid poorly because that is what berlin allows.. low pay.. low tech.. low risk startups.. or just people attracted to the “cool” vibe of the city.. hardly an incentive for deep tech. To me, the perfect case study is Rocket Internet. There is no way any deep tech startup would come from there. To get a deep tech startup to work you need to pay good wages to highly specialized people working on a project for a few years and there’s nothing special about berlin to enable that… except a lot of universities. But then again.. you could do the same thing in any other German city and it wouldn’t be any different.
by ericmay | 2025-04-24 04:46:28+00:00
> And yes I know we can all scoff and say “oh poor multi-billion dollar Apple can’t get paid but getting paid is exactly how Apple is a multibillion dollar company.

The entire discussion there could be summed up as people have become convinced that Apple the multi-billion dollar company should shift revenue to Facebook or Netflix (or whoever), the other multi-billion dollar company. Fantastic marketing by them to convince people this is a moral thing to do and must be done. It has nothing to do with small developers or better experiences for customers, just an increase in X for Netflix.
by vunderba | 2025-04-24 04:46:32+00:00
Sometimes the cuter the animal - the worse it seems to get. If you're in the mood for a little body horror light reading - check out baylisascaris (aka raccoon roundworm).

The official recommendation by the CDC is exercising safe hygiene protocols, oh and also a "propane flame gun".

https://www.cdc.gov/baylisascaris/about/index.html
by mcny | 2025-04-24 04:46:58+00:00
I found this source about pixel phones and bypass charging. I also know anecdotally that leaving phones plugged in with screen on, I have gotten spicy pillows more than once. I would love to learn how to avoid this spicy pillow problem.

https://old.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1ha8tv9/pixel_...
by aurareturn | 2025-04-24 04:49:08+00:00
For those voted for Trump and you do not gamble your money on crypto, how do you feel about all this?

I'm biased but I think Trump found an easy way to grift money and he's milking it. He found out how easy it was for crypto bros to scam money from common people since Etherem's smart contracts came out and decided to do it as well.
by serf | 2025-04-24 04:50:59+00:00
>On top of that, it would be hard to design an API for every possible camera hardware, apart from a high level API for apps to acquire an image.

APIs themselves are hard to make, but why is a camera one especially so? The language is well understood, the math and science are well understood. There are only a few ways that cameras themselves work, and even few ways that cell phone cameras work.

Why is it hard?

In advance -- No, Sony/Panasonic/Toshiba/Apple/Whoever locking functions behind magic numbers and proprietary blobs and other 'un-Gentlemanly' things shouldn't count as difficulty in making a Camera API; that's just shit companies being shit to people, not an API problem.