MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by K0balt | 2025-04-24 16:42:12+00:00
Something like that would BOM at about $30usd as an assembled board with a 128gb SD card. A 3d printed case maybe another $30 with key caps. If it became popular it could wholesale for $29 in injection molded batch production. I could see it at $69 retail.

At that price it could compete favorably with other “laptop” toys, but with vastly more depth. I guess the real question is whether you could find enough of the software for free, or even maybe to a parental managed App Store with legacy stuff selling for <5 so that rights holders would get something? Is dos 6 or windows3.11 open source yet? Qbasic?

I could see a toy company doing something like this profitably, especially with an App Store model, but it would be niche to parents who are actively taking responsibility about what goes into their kids education, so that would limit the market quite a bit. I still think it’s a big market though, I mean, educational toys are definitely a segment. If it was well built it could last a kid for quite a few years. Might have to make it water resistant though, so conformal coating and add $20 to the build. Still less than $100 retail I think.

I would buy it at that. But I’m probably not a good sample.
by randcraw | 2025-04-24 16:42:14+00:00
This article resonates with me like no other has in years. I very recently retired after 40 years writing software because my role had evolved into a production-driven limbo. For the past decade I have scavenged and copied other peoples' code into bland cookie cutter utilities that fed, trained, ran, and summarized data mining ops. It has required not one whit of creative expression or 'flow', making my life's work as dis-engaging as that of... well... the most bland job you can imagine.

AI had nothing to do with my own loss of engagement, though certainly it won't cure what ailed me. In fact, AI promises to do to all of software development what the mechanized data mining process did to my sense of creative self-expression. It will squeeze all the fun out of it, reducing the joy of coding (and its design) to plug-and-chug, rinse, repeat.

IMHO the threat of AI to computer programming is not the loss of jobs. It's the loss of personal passionate engagement in the craft.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-24 16:42:40+00:00
Sure you can slowly, over a long time, convert already dense areas into being less car centric, but you aren't going to make the rest of the country that way. Parking minimums, when they exist, are set by super local governments, they already don't exist or are set very low in areas of high density. The solution is to increase density, but again you aren't going to do that in the rest of the country. Random bars in Ohio are still going to have large parking lots, because land is cheap and given the choice, most people prefer less density.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-24 16:42:41+00:00
One of the best pieces of business advice I ever got was that a small business has advantages that a large business can only dream of. Ignoring those advantages and instead trying to act like a large business acts means that you're not playing to your strength and are instead playing a game that the large business is likely to crush you at.

If you're a small business, lean into being that and you'll have a much larger chance of success. Don't try to pretend that you're something you're not.
by Someone | 2025-04-24 16:42:47+00:00
> I'm sure someone in the 90's was using rockets without wires, the exhaust from the rocket made the trail. I cannot source it.

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/rocket-guided-lightning/:

“A patented new rocket design eschews the copper wire and chemically creates the lightning path. The rocket fuel is doped with small amounts of salt. Sodium chloride, calcium chloride, or cesium chloride is pulled through the motor, heated, and broken into charged ion components spewed out in the exhaust. The positively charged Cs, Ca, or Na atoms cool and bond with water molecules in the air, forming saltwater droplets. These droplets are far more electrically conductive than freshwater droplets, leaving a high-conductivity trail in the rocket’s wake.”

Patent link (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/af/69/e2/0303f86...) says it was filed in 2001, however, not the ‘90s.
by siavosh | 2025-04-24 16:43:07+00:00
I broadly agree with your point, but you’re overlooking a critical dimension: once someone successfully identifies and exploits a niche (through a combination of skill and luck), the subsequent growth >can< often become largely independent of further skill or luck. At that stage, wealth through some basic intelligence compounds itself, regulatory capture can then occur, monopolistic behaviors can emerge—none of which are necessarily admirable traits in a society. But we're talking about different parts of an elephant and I don't think we disagree, but stepping back what we may disagree about is my opinion that ultra wealth (I'm not talking about millionaires or low level billionaires) but the wealth of Musk/Bezos/Zuck is a bug of the system, not a feature.

Humorous analogy: Imagine you’re playing a video game where, through a mix of skill and luck, you stumble upon an incredibly overpowered weapon. With even minimal competence, this weapon lets you easily acquire even more powerful gear, initiating a self-reinforcing loop that rapidly propels you to dominance. Soon enough, your advantage reshapes the entire game—limiting access to similar weapons for other players. The game stops being fun, or as some might put it, it becomes fundamentally unfair.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-24 16:43:13+00:00
The best case is 15% for subscription apps after the first year of service, or if you're a "small business" developer under a certain sales threshold. The latter goes away after you reach a certain size, after which you pay 30%; the former requires you to adopt a subscription business model.

I still think calling it a "30% cut" is accurate, even though there are discounts now. 30% is the base rate. You mentioned Steam, which also has discounts too, except they're the opposite ones of Apple. The cut starts at 30% and goes down the more sales you make. This "costs game developers more" only in the sense that it would be incredibly difficult to qualify for both Apple and Steam discounts at the same time. But the base rate is the same.
by dexwiz | 2025-04-24 16:43:15+00:00
Banks and real estate. Commercial real estate, not just the offices but the also the surrounding businesses, is a large portion of investment funds like pensions and mutual funds. Something like 15% of the overall investible market is commercial real estate. Online shopping has already done damage to this portfolio with places like Malls massively devaluing.

Also if you are going into the office less then things like air travel and hotels also suffer. If you don't go into to your own office, why travel to another company's office?

Adults spent a lot of time at work. A surprising portion of the economy exists just to support this second space, often in high cost areas.
by genewitch | 2025-04-24 16:43:23+00:00
I actually was asked by Vermin Supreme to hand-caption some videos, and i instantly regretted besmirching the existing subtitles. I was correct, the subtitles were awful, but boy, the thought of hand-transcribing something with Subtitle Edit had me walking that back pretty quick - and this was for a 4 minute video - however it was lyrical over music, so AI barely gave a starting transcription.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-04-24 16:43:23+00:00
It's very odd that we consider corporations to have personhood in the U.S., if you were to actually describe most of these top, predatory companies like Nestlé, Meta, etc. and their action as something "a person" did we would all immediately say that person should be jailed, is evil and that allowing them to interact with the general population is too risky. That person once in jail would assuredly never pass a parole board.

Companies should either be treated as people or as companies, what we have is a ongoing classification error that makes all natural persons lives worse as our rights are subordinate to unnatural persons. It's insane how we build our own cages.

That being said, the environment is bad but not all individual companies are the same and saying so is not only false but creates an environment of acceptance and equivocation. "Pay ratio" is often a good indicator of where on the evil spectrum a company is... If only every company could have the moral standards of a HEB or Costco the world would be better than it is.
by hermitShell | 2025-04-24 16:43:45+00:00
Agreed, our whole computing paradigm needs to shift at a fundamental level in order to let AI be 'magic', not just token prediction. Chatbots will provide some linear improvements, but ultimately I very much agree with you and the article that we're trapped in an old mode of thinking.

You might be interested in this series: https://www.youtube.com/@liber-indigo

In the same way that Microsoft and the 'IBM clones' brought us the current computing paradigm built on the desktop metaphor, I believe there will have to be a new OS built on a new metaphor. It's just a question of when those perfect conditions arise for lightning to strike on the founders who can make it happen. And just like Xerox and IBM, the actual core ideas might come from the tech giants (FAANG et al.) but they may not end up being the ones to successfully transition to the new modality.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-24 16:44:04+00:00
Sounds like one heck of a loophole for those individuals, propped up by the institutions themselves (as usual). It reminds me of all the loopholes with the H-1B visas- for example, employers can get around both the "you need to hire U.S. citizens ahead of H-1B visa-holders" and the "you need to pay H-1B employees the same as U.S. citizens" stipulations?

That said, I have personally only known Asian SWEs whom I worked with in person to be very talented and hardworking, perhaps to a fault. Definitely to the detriment of their health and time with their families.

I don't doubt there remains a significant number of "0.1x devs" that are somehow still employed despite everything, and it's a shame because that heavily implies there are a significant number of unemployed "10x" or "1x" devs who can't find a job- so, again, as always, the institutions are supporting the status quo (in this case, by not really giving a fuck if they have quality talent working for them).
by dheera | 2025-04-24 16:44:38+00:00
> house

I can't afford a house ($2M+ where I live), so I don't have one of those mailboxes. My apartment complex doesn't have a visible USPS pickup anywhere that I know of.

If you meant those inverted U shaped things that look like they are from WW2 (maybe WW1?), I forgot about those, but somehow I never know how frequently they are checked ... there is no indicator about when they were last opened and I wonder whether the mailman might just forget about a couple of them in odd parts of town, which is why I always feel more "secure" dropping it at a USPS.

I was once walking down the street when I saw a presumably-GenZ person who thought they were a trash can and casually dumped trash in it so there's also that concern, if everyone is using them as trash cans now ...
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-04-24 16:45:22+00:00
On what time horizon does this happen?

My estimation is that it is one or two generations away.

Ray Kurzweil thinks about the timing more than me, has a pretty good track record in terms of his predictions, and estimates it to happen around 2045.

trade is always gonna have value

We don't trade much with apes and birds, do we? And we don't let them invest in our stock markets. We also don't pay them dividends for the land we took from them.

As soon as one country achieves way higher intelligence than the rest of the world, things might change in a fundamental way.
by yencabulator | 2025-04-24 16:45:53+00:00
> The Papers PDF reader replaces Evince with a modern design and better performance.

That link seems to go to some proprietary application. The correct link is https://apps.gnome.org/Papers/

This seems like pretty miserable quality blogspam.

Better link: https://fridge.ubuntu.com/2025/04/17/ubuntu-25-04-plucky-puf...
by DrBazza | 2025-04-24 16:46:00+00:00
> Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because there's no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm shite anymore?

Well, there is a 'tab' (at least on mobile) that is eventually marked 'Friends' buried inside 'Feeds'. The irony is lost on Zuck I suppose, as that used to be the front 'page' and KSP of Facebook.

All of my friends and family just have big whatsapp groups instead.

Guess what will be the next target of randomly inserted ads?
by asimpletune | 2025-04-24 16:46:03+00:00
Honestly, everything would be much better if either a.) people just paid for stuff or b.) governments decided ad-tech in its present form should not be a thing, and regulated the retention of personal data as a liability, to make targeted advertising less-personalized/unprofitable.

As a system for discovering price, free markets work really well. The downsides comes from politicians not understanding/caring the limitations of free markets and what kinds of problems they're simply not intended to solve. These are the economic factors beyond price. More broadly, they're our values.

If we outsource the need for philosophy/wisdom to the free markets then there is no reason why the market will not demand child labor, 7 day work weeks, single use everything, and privatized security forces. We failed to take action earlier, and the same kind of stuff has already happened to the environment. Not to mention that gambling and security fraud are making a comeback.
by simonw | 2025-04-24 16:46:04+00:00
AI generated tests are genuinely fantastic, if you treat them like any other AI generated code and review them thoroughly.

I've been writing Python for 20+ years and I still can't use unittest.mock without looking up the details every time. ChatGPT and Claude are great at that, which means I use it more often because I don't have to deal with the frustration of figuring it out.
by rcruzeiro | 2025-04-24 16:46:05+00:00
I spent over one year being served sponsored content advertising sales of firearms, cloned credit cards and drugs. Last time I logged in, I’ve noticed that I was being served content based on interests of my close friends. For example, a close friend got really into rock climbing, so I got tons of rock climbing meme accounts.

I have now grown tired of all of that and, when I realised that it had been ages since I had seen someone I actually know post anything, I deactivated it all.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-24 16:46:23+00:00
> It's only magic if you don't understand how it works.

That’s why I used scare quotes around the term ;)

> To me it is awkward to describe but simple to understand.

It’s not awkward to describe though. It’s literally just syntactic sugar for chaining functions.

It’s probably one of the easiest programming concepts to describe.

From our conversation, I’m not sure you do understand it because you keep bringing other tangential topics into the fold. Granted I don’t think the article does a great job at explaining what pipelining is, but then I think it’s point was more to demonstrate cool syntactic tricks you can pull off when writing functions as a pipeline.

edit: just realised you aren't the same person who wrote the original comment claiming pipelining was about iteration. Apologies for getting you mixed together.
by lordnacho | 2025-04-24 16:46:24+00:00
> otherwise people born wealthy would dominate the startup world. Instead its people born to upper-middle class families that dominates it.

Those are just two different points on the "wealthy" scale. If you zoom out on a global level, they are not very far apart.

The kind of upper-middle class family that produces startup founders tends to be from the rich countries.

It makes perfect sense that it's the pretty wealthy and not the super-wealthy. There's more of the UMC, and they only need a certain amount of social/economic capital to roll the dice.
by CopyOnWrite | 2025-04-24 16:47:24+00:00
I do not rule out, that I am just very bad with prompting.

It just surprises me, that you write you had massive successes with "java, js/TS, html css, go, rust, python, bitbucket pipelines/GitHub actions, cdk, docker compose, SQL, flutter/dart, swift etc.", if you include the usual libraries/frameworks and the diverse application areas for these technologies, even with LLMs support it seems to me crazy to be able to make meaningful contributions in non trivial code bases.

Concerning SQL I can report another fail with LLMs, in a trivial code base with a handful of entities the LLM cannot come up with basic window functions.

I would be very interested if you could write up a blog post or could make a youtube video demonstrating your prompting skills... Perhaps demonstrating with a bigger open source project in any of the mentioned languages how to add a non trivial feature with your prompting skills?
by data4lyfe | 2025-04-24 16:47:53+00:00
Relevant anecdote from Bill Gurley's talk: https://youtu.be/7PkWc-IDTHk?si=p8AUBHqXa76HuA6A&t=3228

"If the the average CIO is committing 10 or 15% of their budget to AI. If you're not in that you're getting shrunk."
by hermitcrab | 2025-04-24 16:48:01+00:00
We seem to be stuck at a local maxima[1]. The current system works great for the 0.001% who have all the money and the power, so it isn't in their interest to change it. But there definitely seems to have been a failure of the imagination amongst the 99.999%. Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps?

[1] There is a lot to dislike about the current system, but there have been far worse ones (feudalism, communism etc).
by ben_w | 2025-04-24 16:48:14+00:00
The best that current LLMs can do is PhD-level science questions and getting high scores in coding contests.

Your job? Might be secure for a lifetime, might be gone next week. No way to tell — "intelligence" isn't yet so well understood to just be an engineering challenge, but it is so well understood that the effect on jobs may be the same.
by trundle-drit | 2025-04-24 16:48:19+00:00
Awesome, always wanted something like this! Do you have any plans for open source (beyond Imba)? I think it would be worth it, for the sake of education, and growing a community. And personally I really only want to get invested in using tech that has some open source "peace of mind", even if I do pay for it (e.g. supabase, posthog). Although I understand open source is challenging for a business when you're trying to make a living.
by vintermann | 2025-04-24 16:48:20+00:00
We know Musk spends time on X. We also know he reads as well as writes, because he often replies to random things.

But even for a slightly wiser billionaire who does what you suggest - they wouldn't do that unless they knew they would get public hate, and were bothered by it. You don't have a thick bubble unless you understand that you need it.
by yndoendo | 2025-04-24 16:48:20+00:00
I too am looking for a Linux phone as a daily to decouple from Google.

Currently using a Fairphone with \e\OS. microG is prone to crash on the latest system update but not a big issues. Navigation work just fine too across the USA.

Ordered the FuriPhone and tried to get it in before the Tariff Wars. Currently waiting for it to enter shipping limbo from the manufacturer.

Hoping that the USA Government's treatment of foreign counties helps ignite the push to move away from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others. Linux and BSD are most likely to benefit in the tech transition. Lower cost to bring up infrastructure and features allow for removing larges USA corporations as daily drivers.

I'm getting tired of all the Enshitification those companies are jumping on to as the new business model.

P.S. We need to stop using the "Gated Community" analogy when speaking of Apple and Google with phones. A real gated community allows owners the addition of more personal security; guards, cameras, and security systems. Apple and Google do not allow owners to improve security; firewall, direct backups, and removal of useless applications. The closet analogy I can come up with is "Prison Community".
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-24 16:48:21+00:00
I think it's more that every single post about Musk or Trump gets flagged to oblivion these days. (I mean, that's about the same thing, because just about every post that's about them is critical of them.)

Some of it is Musk fanboys and Trump shills and Russian political operatives and such. I'm sure some of that is going on.

But some of it is just regular HN users who are sick and tired of political stories. There have been a huge increase in political stories in the past three months. And even if some of the stories are interesting, to some people, the second story in 12 hours isn't interesting, and the third similar story this week also isn't interesting.

Some people are here instead of Reddit for a reason. They don't want HN to turn into Reddit. So they tend to flag political (or politics-adjacent) stories, unless they are directly tech-relevant - and maybe even then.
by gwen-shapira | 2025-04-24 16:48:24+00:00
When you run ALTER TABLE test DROP COLUMN c Postgres doesn't actually go and remove the column from every row in the table. This can lead to counter intuitive behaviors like running into the 1600 column limit with a table that appears to have only 2 columns.

I explored a bit what dropping columns actually does (mark the column as dropped in the catalog), what VACUUM FULL cleans up, and why we are still (probably) compliant with the GDPR.
by ivape | 2025-04-24 16:48:31+00:00
The larger the company, and the more they're ballooned out with abstract drones chomping on abstract work items

I was actually thinking about this the other day. When an employer implements an "aloof" layer between the work done and the bottom line, the employer and employee don't get to bond. You and your company should be on the same page when it comes to generating business and on the same page when it comes to concerns. Shipmates, for real. With layers of management of all varieties (middle management, project management, developer management (this is tricky because the Dev Lead becomes your only connection to the bottom line)), the "aloofness" leads to unfulfilled lives. That's when the employee doesn't feel fulfilled or understands who they are on the ship. And it follows that the captain(s) of the ship (leadership) are unfulfilled because they are no longer in love with the crew (can easily fire, hire, layoff, disconnect from the employees lives). I haven't fully thought this thought out so I will probably expand on it as time goes on, but this is my line of thinking at the moment.

It's a love issue due to a lack of direct bonding (and no, company social gatherings and "fun" is not the bonding I am talking about. I am talking about taking on Moby Dick together). The love is indirectly routed through these other layers until it's been fully diluted and misunderstood, unfulfilling to all. Everyone must love the ship, the crew, the captain, the ocean, and the whale they are hunting.
by simonw | 2025-04-24 16:48:36+00:00
"I struggle to think how one person is supposed to interact with that many languages on a daily (or even weekly) basis."

LLMs. I've expanded the circle of languages I use on a frequent basis quite dramatically since I started leaning on LLMs more. I used to be Python, SQL and JavaScript only. These days I'm using jq, AppleScript, Bash, Go, awk, sed, ffmpeg and so many more.

I used to avoid infrequently used DSLs because I couldn't hold them in my memory. Now I'll happily use "the best tool for the job" without worrying about spinning up on all the details first.