MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cratermoon | 2025-04-11 13:37:26+00:00
> if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants

Except you're making the mistake of thinking these services are optimizing for their userbase. They are not. They are optimizing for revenue and profit growth, a very different target. More ads, cheaper and easier-to-product content, lower opex.

They are converging to churning out the least offensive slop at the cheapest cost with the maximum revenue.

None of the analytics are about what people using the product want, they are about making the most money and growing the fastest. Nothing would look like the services mentioned in the article if they listened to what the users really preferred.
by Ray20 | 2025-04-11 13:37:34+00:00
>You assume the everyone's needs are solved together.

No, I am not assuming that. "Together" are not required. It's just combination of needs, ability to satisfy them and ability to exchange - creates jobs. And nothing of this will be thwarted by AI.

>More likely is that the property owning class acquire AI robots to provide cheap labor

Doesn't matter. Your everyday person either will be able to afford this cheap AI labor for themselves (no problem that required solving) or if AI labor for them are unaffordable - will create jobs for other people (there will be jobs on market everywhere)
by Someone | 2025-04-11 13:37:51+00:00
Less than a quarter of it, but over 50% of those who voted (Trump got 77.3 million votes on a population of around 340 million)

Those who didn’t vote will have had different reasons, including “don’t care”, “my candidate will win, anyways”, “no time”, and “registering to vote was too hard for me”. We don’t know the distribution of that.
by martinald | 2025-04-11 13:38:03+00:00
That's literally what has been happening forever though. Think how complex the abstractions are from something like SQL to the actual CPU instructions that are being executed on a modern OS.

The thing I'm most excited about with 'vibe coding' isn't really existing software developers making things. It's people with deep domain knowledge who can't program can now build stuff. It's more of an excel replacement imo as it gets into the mainstream.

I am sure that most LLM generated software projects are more easily understood at a code level than the average excel 'megasheet' created by this kind of person, and certainly will be less brittle to a certain degree.
by lazide | 2025-04-11 13:38:11+00:00
The US style also has much smaller and cheaper plugs, and the cords are all basically the same size anyway. I don’t recall any UK appliances being notably less bulky or anything either (though when running 220v, you can have electric kettles which aren’t lame, which is nice).

Notably, pretty much everywhere else in the world also uses similar branch circuit type designs and 220v and their plugs and appliances are also not notably more bulky either.

The difference in wire diameter between say 6amps and 15 amps isn’t that noticeable. 15 and 30 is.
by 101008 | 2025-04-11 13:38:15+00:00
I did this analogy in the past and I was way downvoted. Just for clarification, I use vibe-coding a lot in side projects where I don't know if I am going to release it at all, or when I know that a mistake in the code won't crash a business.

However, when I do vibe-coding, I feel like a PM asking a remote team to do code and I get back the response asap. It could be good or it could be bad, but if I don't check it, I am just a PM trusting 100% what my engineer (team) did. How did this work in reality before IA? Well, the engineers had to have some kind of responsability and testing, and assuring that what they did was OK. Now that part is completely "disabled", and the PM Is responsable for the tech aspect as well, without the knowledge (and I am avoiding all the deploy / infra perspective).
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-11 13:38:30+00:00
If you're trying to convince me that I was somehow part of the problem, it's not reaching me. I was as low(ly) as you can get in the "tech industry stack". While I still had some measure of agency as an engineer I added a crayon color picker to MacOS, added most of the PDF features people like in MacOS Preview. That was as much "driving the ship" as I was allowed — until I wasn't even allowed that.

I could have skipped sooner maybe?

Once I had kids though I found I had a higher tolerance for a job getting shittier, a lower tolerance for restarting in a new career. So I put up with a worsening job for them.

I quit the moment my last daughter left for college.
by sunshowers | 2025-04-11 13:38:42+00:00
I haven't used Bazel but I have used buck1 extensively, and the daemonized mode was quite buggy and often required the process to be killed. Quite frequently the process was just wedged, and even when it wasn't, memory leaks were quite common. Standard black box debuggers like strace and DTrace also become harder to use (e.g. you need to attribute a particular set of syscalls to a client, and a mindless "strace buck build ..." doesn't do what you want).

Daemonization is sometimes necessary, but it introduces lifecycle management problems that get in the way of robustness. Daemonization simply because your choice of programming language has bad startup times doesn't seem like a great idea to me.

I think on-disk cache invalidation and in-memory cache invalidation are distinctly different in practice.
by JohnPrine | 2025-04-11 13:39:11+00:00
Agreed, blind people and sighted people are able to experience different kinds of beauty that are inaccessible to each other. As a sighted person, if there was a technology that could describe the beauty that a blind person experiences in a given moment I would think that would be pretty cool to try.

> Please, don't hype accessibility just for your personal fun. There are people out there with real problems, and dangling impossible solutions before their "eyes" is pretty much cruel

Do you think it's going to be impossible forever? bandwidth and latency seem like the surest things to improve in AI tech
by aziaziazi | 2025-04-11 13:39:56+00:00
What methodology is used for lead testing ? I eared about blood sampling but that quote from the article make me wonder the effectiveness:

> the half-life of lead in the blood (meaning the amount of time needed for the concentration to drop to half) is relatively short, at only 28 days, that’s not the same as the half-life in the body. Some of the lead in the blood will not be eliminated, but it will actually go into the soft tissue, i.e. kidneys, liver, brain, where the half-life is a few months, and more annoyingly, into the bones, where the half-life is between 10 to 30 years. What’s more, from here, lead can leach back into the bloodstream, from where it can once again get into the soft tissue and cause more damage
by mushufasa | 2025-04-11 13:40:25+00:00
The examples in this blog are of online streaming media changing from a wide searchable library to an unsearchable tailored recommendation feed.

As I understand, licensing dynamics were the main reason for Netflix's change, not pure product design. In 2012, most movie studios licensed their catalog to Netflix, while 7 years later they took away the licensing to compete with proprietary walled streaming platforms. Due to the smaller catalog, Netflix could not design that open searchable streaming library; they changed their design to make the best of the more limited library.
by _kush | 2025-04-11 13:40:28+00:00
Vibe coding looks amazing at first, especially if you don't know how to code.

You click a few things, move stuff around, and it feels like you're building something real. But then it gets messy. You try to change one thing, and ten other things break. It becomes frustrating fast.

But if you already know how to code, it's actually great. You can tell what went wrong, fix it, and keep going. It’s fun when you can fall back on your skills. Not so fun when you can’t.
by lukev | 2025-04-11 13:41:00+00:00
Here's the thing. What you're doing when you're vibe coding is iteratively creating specifications for software, which the LLM is capable of converting to runnable code. Insufficient specs will lead to code that doesn't do the right thing.

Chat is fundamentally the wrong interface for this. My instructions to the LLM in a chat session are effectively the software specifications, but chat encourages to treat them as ephemeral.

It's analogous to writing code in a high-level language, then deleting the code after it's compiled and keeping only the low-level bytecode.

In the case of vibe-coding, my specifications to the LLM _are_ the code, and the LLM-emitted code is a _artifact_ that can in principle be discarded and re-generated, assuming my specs are precise enough to ensure consistent outputs (the nondeterminism of LLMs is definitely a issue here.)

So I want tools that let me persist my specs, help me iterate on them, check them into version control, and help me test how the LLM interprets them. Not a chat.
by wavemode | 2025-04-11 13:41:23+00:00
This post seems to suggest that no-code tools like Webflow and Retool are dead or dying. Nothing could be further from the truth - no-code is a booming business, moreso than many developers (who, by their nature, do not like or need such platforms) may realize.

Hearing professional developers talk about how no-code must be useless and/or dead, is kind of like hearing a professional swimmer say that floaties are dead.
by gregwebs | 2025-04-11 13:41:37+00:00
Often times prop 65 is a lead issue. But perhaps most often it means that the company doesn't want to bother testing for lead rather than that the item definitely has lead.

With all things, be strategic- the importance of avoiding prop 65 is relative to the likelihood of it ending up in the body- so items in your kitchen, your garden, that young children would touch.
by Ekaros | 2025-04-11 13:41:39+00:00
25% waste on single million is not bad. 25% waste on all millions spend is very bad... And that 25% is likely under estimated in many cases. Or at least some more from 75% is inefficiently used.

I admit probably not 25% of all millions is wasted. But even if that is half that would be 12.5% wasted... Or fourth 6.25%. Fixing of which would still be huge long term effect.

So my take is that this needs to be fixed on all levels and on all places.
by AustinCodeMonki | 2025-04-11 13:41:44+00:00
You keep trying. You may have to take a lesser job to pay the bills, but you keep trying until you succeed. You also need to understand that the CS market has something of a glut right now and with companies downsizing for various reasons, jobs in CS are tight. When I went through the same thing, I took jobs at small companies, startups, etc., to pay the bills and I kept applying to other companies until I landed a job with one of them. You might also consider talking to consulting firms for contract work, something I've done before.

If you give up, you will certainly fail, so don't give up and realize that the hardships you may experience will make you stronger, more resilient, and better prepared to deal with hardships in the future.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-11 13:42:56+00:00
I'm surprised that the services don't seem to have updated for that reality yet; it feels like there's only one or two "hits" on each service per year. They did already adapt a bit by no longer releasing a whole season in one go, so you need at least three months of subscription for a 10 episode weekly series.

But what they need is rolling releases across the whole year, so that once one production is "done", the next one rolls around.

(maybe they already do, I don't know, I'm just thinking of Stranger Things which seems to be Netflix' main seller at the moment)
by splitrocket | 2025-04-11 13:43:04+00:00
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." - Major General Smedley Butler

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

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." - President Eisenhower

Military Spending and Tax Cuts for the wealthy have some of the lowest economic multipliers of all government activities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics)

* Education spending: 2.4 (Federal Reserve research) Source: Federal Reserve

* Medicaid/healthcare: 2.0 Source: Congressional Budget Office Cbpp

* Food stamps (SNAP): 1.73-1.74 Sources: Mark Zandi/Moody's Analytics, Americanprogress, Manhattan Institute

* Unemployment insurance: 1.61-2.1 Sources: Blinder & Zandi; Urban Institute, Americanprogress

* Infrastructure spending: 1.0-2.5 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Feyrer & Sacerdote, Americanprogress

* Military spending: 1.5 (average) Source: Federal Reserve

* Middle-class tax cuts: 0.6-1.5 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Feyrer & Sacerdote, Americanprogress

* Upper-income tax cuts: 0.2-0.6 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Americanprogress

* Permanent extension of all Bush-era tax cuts: 0.35 Source: Moody's Analytics model, Cbpp

Dollar-for-dollar, social program spending consistently produces higher economic returns than military spending or tax cuts, especially tax cuts for the wealthy.

$1 billion spent on education or transit creates more than twice as many jobs (17,687-19,795) as the same amount spent on defense (8,555). -Cigionline

In fact, military spending can actually slow economic growth over time; a 1% military spending increase can reduce economic growth by 9% over 20 years.

Zandi's analysis of 2010 tax legislation found that 90% of economic growth and job creation came from unemployment insurance extensions and targeted tax credits, while high-end tax cuts had "only very small economic impacts." - Cbpp

Jack Ma was completely correct: US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-...
by insane_dreamer | 2025-04-11 13:43:09+00:00
> There are few unicorns in Europe

I don't think that unicorns, which tend to have a quasi-monopolistic position in their market segment, are healthy for society, or even for the economy (in the long run), vs many smaller companies.

So I see this as a good thing. The problem is that the draw of unicorns in the US does create a brain drain for those attracted by the prospect of becoming rich.

It's quite difficult to become rich in Europe, compared to the US. It's mostly "old money" that's passed down. But you can be successful and comfortable. Is it important to be "rich"?
by apercu | 2025-04-11 13:43:32+00:00
> The reason I moved forward with this role was because miscommunication or zero-communication bogged down my work and created potential hazards in the maintenance phase. I'd like to remove those obstacles so I stepped forward to clean it up.

Are you me? I'm a systems thinker and I, too, have to stop and analyze workflows and try to "fix" things. Probably why I ended up in process/management consulting.
by someguyorother | 2025-04-11 13:44:01+00:00
The dark humor in this is that any such technologically advanced future where humans have a meaningful say will eventually look like one of abundant luxury communism: it's just that the oligarchs' version will have a lot of people die first before the oligarchs enjoy their abundance.

The third option is that the oligarchy fully internalizes its pursuit of ruthless concentration of power. But in that case, someone will probably create an AI that's better at playing the power game, and at that point, it's over for the oligarchs.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-11 13:44:08+00:00
The peak of this was probably flying pallets of dollar bills into Baghdad and "losing track of them".

Honorable mention to running air conditioners in Afghanistan using gasoline that had to be trucked several thousand miles through loosely-held territory at the cost of several service member's lives over the years.

It's one of those situations where the roles have been briefly reversed, the left complaining about military spending and the right promoting it. Except the new budget is apparently going to spend MORE on the military, which is almost certainly going to be wasted since there's no clear justification or plan for it.

Since Eisenhower and before everyone has known that a lot of military spending was pork-barrel jobs programs for various states, plus a certain amount of overt corruption (see "Fat Leonard"). But the media environment and right-wing prevented any serious questioning of military spending.
by myself248 | 2025-04-11 13:44:18+00:00
I've heard this called the "Tyranny of the Marginal User".

To keep the line going up, platforms have to appeal to wider and wider swaths of a population, eventually lapping at the shores of a population that really doesn't care or want this service. But if you can hook them with some dopamine in a 5-second video, or a quest to rediscover some neat thing that they saw two page-loads ago but is now mysteriously gone from the very same list it appeared in, then you've clawed one additional user into your metrics and the VCs give you a treat.

These people don't care about the service and they're the worst users to cater to, but everyone caters to them because they're the only ones left. Hence, TikTokization.
by bluGill | 2025-04-11 13:44:18+00:00
Can can git rich by growing slowly in many cases - but it will be a long hard road. You could instead sell out today and get rich instantly.

If you start the slow growth path at 30 and retire at 65 you will overall make more money from that thing vs someone who sells out at 35. There are some catches though. The person who sells out can go on to the next thing which in sum total may be more sell out enough to make far more over their lifetime, while the slow growth plan you are stuck. The slow growth is over very slow at first, you often spend 10 years making far less than someone who is "working for the man", then 15 more years more or less even, and only then start making good money. There is no guarantee that you will be successful, some people spend their entire life making less than they could "working for the man"; others go bankrupt when a new VC competitor suddenly gets better by enough to take your customers.

There is no right answer. VC money sometimes is the best answer - but many people who reaching for VC money when their better long term answer would be to grow slow.
by _fat_santa | 2025-04-11 13:44:33+00:00
Just like with no-code, vibe-coding has the same "interface problem". With no-code you were locked down to using the provided editor and had to constantly flight it to get what you wanted. Now it's no different except you are not typing natural language into a prompt and fighting it to get the correct output.

Vibe coding just like no-code will work to a degree, as you can easily build simple apps with either solution. It's just when you start building something bigger that both systems completely fall apart. While I welcome both technologies and think that it will help non-technical folks write code and build stuff. The world is still powered by "large" software and that's the stuff that you can't just vibe code your way through.
by mailund | 2025-04-11 13:45:02+00:00
I think you're right!

A short while ago, I noticed I only used Netflix to watch 2 classic comfort shows, and I started to doubt if it was worth a 2-classic-comfort-shows-as-a-service subscription. I tried looking through the catalog to see what else I was paying for and ended up cancelling my subscription.

Netflix does an amazing job in giving the impression that they have an endless library of top quality content, but in reality, it seems like it's only a handful good shows and some filler, but presented in a way that makes it look like there's way more than it actually is.
by zpeti | 2025-04-11 13:45:15+00:00
Those subsidies also went to Boing and ULA, who also bid on those contracts.

This is such a debunked argument but I guess its undebunkable because its a branch you can hang onto about how the only reason SpaceX exists is the government. Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or Arianaspace in the EU.
by electrozav | 2025-04-11 13:45:28+00:00
This was written as VC fluff. It is impossible to agree with an argument of having control over code when theres a middleman which interprets natural language.

The human won't understand how the codebase works when the codebase is developed by AI. Coupled to the fact AI misunderstands and gets things wrong, any company worth an audit needs more assurances
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-04-11 13:45:52+00:00
The VM vs container debate is fascinating. They are separate yet slowly merging concepts that are becoming more blurred as technology becomes cheaper and faster. If the real bottleneck to scale is adaptable code, then it is foolish to dismiss the VM as outdated tech when it can be completely rehomed in 2 seconds. That megabyte of python code managing your containers would still be busy checking it's dependencies in that same timeframe.
by dtagames | 2025-04-11 13:45:59+00:00
It's a brilliant on-ramp for that, too, with high free usage caps that let you get projects up and running at no cost.

Firebase hosting only charges you when an actual thing you've deployed starts getting significant usage. It's a terrific option for small devs who still want custom domains, backend data, and the freedom to code in JS/TS in the browser.
by XCSme | 2025-04-11 13:46:23+00:00
This sounds like a useful tool, but why as a Chrome extension?

I don't want an extension to have access to all the websites I visit and all the content.

When I sign a contract, I can pass the document through a local LLM, without sending sensitive data to OpenAI/Google.

Does it support offline-mode and local LLMs (like Ollama)?
by Ray20 | 2025-04-11 13:46:31+00:00
>This remains to be seen.

No, that's just logic. AI doesn't thwart the ability of people to satisfy their needs (getting richer).

>Inequality is worse now than it was 20 years ago despite technology progressing.

And people are still richer than ever before (if we take into account the policies that are thwarting society's ability to satisfy each other's needs and that have nothing to do with technologies)
by rietta | 2025-04-11 13:46:35+00:00
Congratulations on getting into competition! I started competing and intentionally practicing to get better about 4 years ago after a long time of being a safe but casual shooter. In the last year I have won some major Glock-sponsored GSSF matches - 1st place Amateur out of 140 at their national championship Talladega, AL. One more win and they are going to bump me to master class. I do not reload my own ammo so I have less lead exposure there. I am very careful with my range routine though. I have dedicated cross trainer shoes as my range shoes that I put in a plastic bag in the trunk of the car on the way home. I wash my hands with the dlead soap right away (have wipes in my bag for outdoor use). Finally, I put my clothes directly in the wash when I get home to reduce tracking anything inside particularly since I have small children at home.