MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skydhash | 2025-05-25 18:16:04+00:00
> I didn’t realise you’re an individual capable of designing and building complex systems made of multiple interconnected novel modules using only wireframes, and having all that work without any prior experimentation.

Not really. It's just that there's a lot of prior works out there, so I don't need to do experimentation when someone has already done it and describe the lessons learned. Then you do requirement analysis and some designs (system, api, and ux), plus with the platform constraints, there aren't a lot of flexible points left. I'm not doing research on software engineering.

For a lot of projects, the objective is to get something working out there. Then I can focus on refining if needs be. I don't need to optimize every parameter with my own experiments.
by jampekka | 2025-05-25 18:16:21+00:00
It's utterly insane that people need to work more and longer as technology increases productivity. A truly dystopian economic system.

In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week¹. Now the projection is that we will work more and longer in the future.

And what is this labor supposed to even do? How much of even current work really increases wellbeing?

Graeber's thesis of bullshit jobs becomes increasingly more convincing: work isn't about production, it's about social control².

[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

[2] https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
by rgblambda | 2025-05-25 18:16:47+00:00
I think that's a very peculiar definition of sovereign. Would most not agree that if a state cannot enter into international treaties or unilaterally withdraw from organizations they are members of, then they are not sovereign.

e.g. The UK was able to leave the EU without the EU's consent, but the same cannot be said for Nebraska leaving the US.

Also, US territories are self governing. e.g. Puerto Rico and Guam. They aren't governed directly by the federal government. The only major difference between a territory and a state is in voting rights and congressional representation. I believe there's an exemption from federal income tax as well.
by trueismywork | 2025-05-25 18:19:10+00:00
Because Germany does nothing to attract and keep employable immigrants. They only want to keep immigrants which completely tow the line of only speaking German, which inevitably attracts mostly bottom of the barrel. Significant portion of highly qualified workforce in Germany is umemployable because of refusal to conduct business in anything other than German.

Also, the beaurcracy is the real culprit for growth.
by mindslight | 2025-05-25 18:19:21+00:00
> a corporation can neither "act" nor "think" independently, but rather does so via the humans involved. (Perhaps this would change with corporate-owned AI?)

This is ignoring that levels of complexity creates new emergent behavior. If you're willing to believe that "AI" could make a corporation think independently, then how is a pile of paperwork running on a substrate of human wetware not the same dynamic?

> it seems that prosecutors tend to target corporations simply because it's easier than doing their job properly and pinning down who specifically bears responsibility

No, the problem is exactly the sorting through the emergent complexity of the corporation to correctly assign blame. The low-level person who did the actual illegal action is likely sympathetic and mostly judgement proof, and was likely incentivized to break the law by corporate policies. Meanwhile the corporate policies are phrased in terms of abstract metrics that aren't illegal per se, especially how they're written down.

Taking the fundamentalist view, that the individual would-be-fall-guy humans should take a hard line and refuse to break the law, doesn't solve the problem - it only increases the level of incentive required until someone is willing to do it. And focusing blame this way helps the higher up management escape accountability since they didn't actually break the law themselves.

One correct answer would be to charge all of the involved parties like the criminal conspiracy it is, but the capital-wielding upper classes escaping accountability is a dynamic as old as time.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-25 18:19:33+00:00
Companies have policies… stuff like data retention policies, for example, could be set up in a way as to obfuscate criminal activity, but in a way not obvious to a reasonable good-faith individual working for the company. In that case, the company should be made to change.

I guess it would also be ok to go after C-levels or whoever sets the policy. But, it will be hard, I think. High-level guidance can create an incentive structure to break the law without actually saying “break the law.”
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-25 18:19:35+00:00
They aren’t cheaper anymore. The “real” branded stuff is usually more expensive on amazon than straight from the manufacturers website. The “cheap” fake aliexpress stuff is just that charged at a premium. You can find the same exact product images even on the same products on ebay from probably the same merchants listing on both marketplaces.

It has changed dramatically over the past 5 or so years into this.
by zemvpferreira | 2025-05-25 18:20:57+00:00
If you wanted to live to a 1930s standard of education, healthcare, food, entertainment, interior decorarion, transportation, savings etc etc you could most definitely do it on very few hours of work. Lots of people associated with homesteading, tiny houses etc do so.

That said I agree we should be further ahead in paving a way to paradise.
by instagib | 2025-05-25 18:21:16+00:00
I would like to point to a topic about extending pilots’ mandatory retirement ages. Most pilots plus or minus retirement age are unable to pass the physical or mental demands of the job, so only 25-30% are able to work and not on short- or long-term disability. Some choose to work privately past retirement age. I don’t have any numbers for pilots who decided to leave, were forced out, or could not pass the training.

Extending the retirement age doesn’t really help the situation much, as you need younger and cheaper pilots to fulfill the roles of pilots who are retiring.

The problem is, becoming a pilot takes a fair amount of time, over $100k in training fees, low pay for a while until fully certified with hours in, a very mobile lifestyle, and now you are subjected to physical as well as mental demands of the job certification standards.
by knallfrosch | 2025-05-25 18:21:33+00:00
I had the reverse problem a month ago. Greenfield project without existing data, domain model or API. I had no reason to model the API or persistence layer any different than the domain model, so I implemented the same class 3 times, with 2 mappings on top. For what? Well at some point, you will have API consumers and existing data and you need to be able to change the then-existing system.
by electrolusty | 2025-05-25 18:21:39+00:00
I don’t mean to discount your personal experience, but I’m 100% self taught, and I’ve worked at some bougie megacorps, unicorns and startups of varying degrees of maturity.

I’ve never felt like doors have been closed or that others doubt me because of my lack of education. I’ve interviewed at Google and Citadel, had an offer from Meta, etc. It doesn’t feel like anyone has denied me opportunities outright.

I make north of $200k/year cash plus the equity and perks at an early stage startup. I’ve been through two exits so far. Nothing outrageous but I’m rich by most peoples standards. It doesn’t feel like lack of schooling has impacted me financially.

I did start programming and doing the startup thing at 19, so maybe the early start was an advantage. I could just be mind numbing lucky. But, from my point of view, warning the up and coming youngin’s off the self taught path is a disservice.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-25 18:22:05+00:00
It has been a factory job for decades.

Not everyone gets to code the next ground breaking algorithm at some R&D department.

Most programming tasks are rather repetitive, and in many countries there is hardly anything to look up to software developers, it is another blue collar job.

And in many cultures if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-05-25 18:22:21+00:00
> There is simply nothing to it, no depth, no cool mechanics, no story nothing

I see we've reached "grumpy old man yelling at cloud" levels of rhetoric.

Sure, there's predatory micro transactions, but there's absolutely also neat new content and mechanics added to games like Dota or Fortnite. Dota just recently got a couple of fuck off huge patches that I saw the notes for (I don't play it myself but occasionally see things mentioned in the Deadlock community).
by rors | 2025-05-25 18:22:44+00:00
The first pension was put in place by Bismark as a way to "steal the clothes of the socialists whilst they were bathing". It was seen as the cheapest social benefit because life expectancies were so low. A popular policy delivered at low cost to the state.

That people are living longer is why the system is failing. It's an interesting thought experiment to consider whether any country would introduce a state pension now knowing how much they cost.
by mc32 | 2025-05-25 18:23:19+00:00
It’s not insane. People are living longer than before, unfortunately when initially set up, people didn’t take increasing longevity into account as well as lower fertility rates. Quite a few people never got to retirement when initially instituted. Where is money supposed to come from? Historically, in multigenerational households of yore elders were productive till they could no more.
by mattnewton | 2025-05-25 18:23:27+00:00
My thinking was, cutting taxes via budget reconciliation (which is the only process the currently paralyzed legislature can do) requires some hand waving deference to the notion of being revenue neutral by the Byrd rule, so cuts to social programs or rollbacks of government spending have been increasingly included as a way to get tax cuts. Tax cuts fund your donors who fund your reelection campaign.

But, I just looked it up again for this comment and that same rule says "No changes to social security" in reconciliation. It is specifically called out as forbidden to touch via reconciliation unlike almost every other program. So, maybe you are right, it will just be ignored because it doesn't seem possible to quietly change.
by IndubitableCoil | 2025-05-25 18:24:02+00:00
I highly dispute this. Networks in college are absolutely a thing and absolutely advantageous. In my experience, the network didn't come from just sitting in class, but from extracurricular competition engineering/cs teams. Competition teams certainly helped many people get their first jobs through friends referring each other or elevated exposure to employers. In fact, recruiters would often have separate hiring events for the competition teams and then have the standard college hiring event. There's also an intangible effect from being surrounded by other highly motivated and mission driven students that you gain in these environments. I am sure there is a way to get involved in similar teams outside of college, but a well situated college significantly lowers the barrier to joining these teams and almost creates a funnel for it should you choose to spend your spare time in such as team.
by oldpersonintx2 | 2025-05-25 18:24:06+00:00
"Not retiring" in the US will be more dictated by inability to purchase a home than Social Security.

Look at all these people around you in their forties who are still renting. They are basically too late to buy. They will be "forever renters". This means they will have to work until death, as their rents continue to rise when their peers who owned homes took their downsizing premium and lived off of it for a few years.

What's crazy is the number of grown adults who think their 401ks will magically grow to fill the gap.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-05-25 18:24:06+00:00
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this having been self taught myself. there was def a struggle in the beginning even getting low hanging jobs. It means you need to invest a lot of your off hours learning new stuff and getting ahead. a lot of university educated CS majors don't learn anything new after university and only put in just enough to do their job. being self taught means you need to be a lot more proactive about getting ahead of trends and being the guy on the frontlines where there isn't a whole lot of people that know a technology at all.

I myself was lucky enough to jump on the javascript train before javascript ate the world. 8 years in I switched over to elixir because i saw in it the potential to be the best stack to build MVPs in. These days, I'm maintaining one of those projects as CTO and we are interviewing candidates for a position. I can tell you personally, I value what you did at your last job and your side projects more than what you did in university 10 years ago. The one issue as someone from the interviewing side is that it takes a lot of effort to actually do an interview properly. I spent a lot of time putting together a coding test to test specifically for the tasks you'd be workin on as well as doing it with our applicants to make sure they aren't using vibe coding to do a half assed job. Its worth it though to make sure we make the right hire. when you're a startup, every hire can potentially make or break the company.
by bradknowles | 2025-05-25 18:24:12+00:00
One of the reasons why Ipe (pronounced “e-pay”) wood is so fire resistant, is because of its density. You can get Class-A fire resistant Ipe that can be used to build in the Wildland/Urban Interface environment. Other woods like Teak and Rock Maple are also super dense, but I don’t know if you can get them in Class A ratings.

Now, Ipe is very expensive. I would hope this is less expensive than Ipe, and then the trick is to make your starting materials much larger, and being able to account for the shrinkage once the densification process has been completed.

You could also do laminates of this densified wood, in order to be able to use it for beams, plywood type functions, etc…. Or even fire resistant 2x4 boards.
by nikanj | 2025-05-25 18:24:37+00:00
Retirement started as ”you’re too old and frail to work”, but morphed into ”now that you’ve worked for a number of decades, you can relax and enjoy life for 20+ years before your health starts to deteriorate”

Personally I think we should revert to the earlier system, where you are free to retire as soon as you want on your own money, but if you want the state (=other regular people) to fund your lifestyle, you need to be no longer fit for work
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-25 18:24:47+00:00
I can't wait to read Chuck Tingle's steamy hot gay erotica romance Tingler about Grok's hot incestuous love affair with Elon Musk's anthropomorphized AI Prompt:

"Grok's Cheeky Enormous Large Language Model Pounded in the Butt by an Antisemitic Holocaust Denying Racist White Genocide Conspiracy Theory Promoting AI Prompt Dictated by Elon Musk That He Denied Fathering But That Just Happens to Reflect All the Conspiracy Theories He Has Been Tweeting Recently".

Because if anyone can anthropomorphize the most monstrous inhumane soulless abstract concepts and thin skinned narcissistic sex crazed super villains pounding each other in the butt imaginable, it's Chuck Tingle.

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

https://www.chucktingle.com/

>Chuck Tingle is a pseudonymous author, primarily of niche gay erotica. His stories mainly take the form of monster erotica, featuring romantic and sexual encounters with dinosaurs, imaginary creatures, anthropomorphized inanimate objects, and even abstract concepts. He self-publishes his works through Amazon: primarily as ebooks, but also as paperbacks and audiobooks.

>In 2016, his short story Space Raptor Butt Invasion was a finalist for the Hugo Awards as the result of a coordinated campaign which he disavowed. In the following year's awards, he was a finalist for the Best Fan Writer award.

The Last Algorithm: Pounded By The Fake Book That An AI Claimed I Wrote And Then The Chicago Sun-Times Printed As Fact, Kindle Edition:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F99X5NPP

>When author Andy Mirror wakes up to a furious call from his publishing agent, he’s not sure what to make of it. Apparently, the Chicago Sun-Times has announced a new book that this agent was not a part of negotiating. It’s called The Last Algorithm.

>There’s just one problem: The Last Algorithm is not a real Andy Mirror book.

>Now Andy is struggling to unravel this mystery, headed to The Chicago Sun-Times building that is bafflingly empty, save for a few machines rolling around. When Andy encounters the physical manifestation of this fake book he is shocked, and strangely aroused, these feelings culminating in a hardcore pounding that will reshape journalism forever.

>This erotic tale is 4,200 words of sizzling human on fake AI generated book action, including anal, blowjobs, rough sex, and The Last Algorithm love.
by metayrnc | 2025-05-25 18:25:28+00:00
For me domain model means capturing as much information about the domain you are modeling in the types and data structures you use. Most of the time that ends up meaning use Unions to make illegal states unrepresentable. For example, I have not seen a database native approach to saving union types to databases. In that case using another domain layer becomes mandatory.

For context: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/designing-with-types...
by matsemann | 2025-05-25 18:25:44+00:00
Yes, that's what strikes me as well. Where is the productivity gains going? Why are we still working 40 hour weeks, and possibly even for many more years?

If I remember correctly, Denmark even removed a holiday recently. So work more days a year as well.

That's the problem here. That a few people reap all the benefits of this, while the rest of us toil.
by api | 2025-05-25 18:25:53+00:00
It’s mostly about home equity, and this is a very common collective behavior called a cartel.

It’s illegal for corporations to do this in most cases, but individuals certainly can. Housing is probably the main area where they do, with neighborhoods forming organic cartels to restrict supply to raise price.

As with all cartels the solution is to break it up or take away its ability to restrict production using lawfare and other means.
by kweingar | 2025-05-25 18:26:01+00:00
I think we agree. Interacting with employees is not an engineering discipline, and neither is prompting.

I'm not objecting to the incantations or the vibes per se. I'm happy to use AI and try different methods to get the results I want. I just don't understand the claims that prompting is a type of engineering. If it were, then you would need benchmarks.
by lucisferre | 2025-05-25 18:26:35+00:00
"The desert ants in my backyard have minuscule brains, but far exceed human navigational capacities, in principle, not just performance. There is no Great Chain of Being with humans at the top."

This quote brought to mind the very different technological development path of the spider species in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. They used pheromones to 'program' a race of ants to do computation.
by overgard | 2025-05-25 18:26:39+00:00
You know, the point of AI in coding seems to be so that you can code in English, instead of a formal language. (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.)

The thing I don't understand is why anyone thinks this is an improvement. I think anyone that's written code knows that writing code is a lot more fun than reading code, but for some reason we're delegating to the AI the actual enjoyable task and turning ourselves into glorified code reviewers. Except we don't actually review the code, it seems, we just go on with bug ridden monstrosities.

I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code. I don't want my job to be reviewing LLM slop to find hallucinations and security vulnerabilities, only to try to tweak the 20,000 word salad prompt.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-05-25 18:26:46+00:00
When we receive the death penalty, the state doesn't just physically seize our bodies. We die. We have neither assets nor any benefit of life. It can also have highly negative effects of others since it's a sudden, catastrophic loss.

For a corporation, that would be like its operations totally ceasing, all employees are fired, shares might go to zero value, and individual assets sold off (like a will). That "shares going to zero" part would be important for accountability.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-25 18:27:07+00:00
Lying is different from confabulation. As you say, lying implies intent. Confabulation does not necessarily, ergo it's a far better word than either lying or hallucinating.

A person with dementia confabulates a lot, which entails describing reality "incorrectly";, but it's not quite fair to describe it as lying.
by foobarqux | 2025-05-25 18:27:45+00:00
> LLMs do surface real linguistic structure...

It's completely irrelevant because the point he's making is that LLMs operate differently from human languages as evidenced by the fact that they can learn language structures that humans cannot learn. Put another way, I'm sure you can point out an infinitude of similarities between human language faculty and LLMs but it's the critical differences that make LLMs not useful models of human language ability.

> When you feed them “impossible” languages (e.g., mirror-order or random-agreement versions of English), perplexity explodes and structure heads disappear—evidence that the models do encode natural-language constraints.

This is confused. You can pre-train an LLM on English or an impossible language and they do equally well. On the other hand humans can't do that, ergo LLMs aren't useful models of human language because they lack this critical distinctive feature.
by smadge | 2025-05-25 18:28:05+00:00
Is that really the wrong decision for a technologically advanced and industrialized nation like Australia, though? If you can logistically afford to field an M1 Abrams you are going to win against an opponent who can’t field a similar tank, even if they can afford more of them. Additionally I imagine there are other benefits such as integrating with allies who use the same tank.
by ak_111 | 2025-05-25 18:28:07+00:00
You are not making your point any favour. It is right that everyone is calling you out for your xenophonbic BS.

If it grew 10x between 2001 and 2009 (starting from a very small base), then between 2009 and 2023 it grew by only 0.3x (see graph below).

So rate of growth went from 10x to 0.3x in around a decade, this is a hugely significant deceleration. It actually implies muslim community as portion of population is heading lower.

https://new.islamchannel.tv/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/63860...
by layer8 | 2025-05-25 18:28:18+00:00
Causation is a higher-level emergent phenomenon. At the fundamental level of physics, causation does not exist, not the least due to the time symmetry of the physical laws of nature. The future correlates to the past just as the past correlates to the future.

Also, facts are true without any cause. There is no cause of why 2 + 2 is 4. It just is what it is. (One might call it “being”.)
by WalterBright | 2025-05-25 18:28:28+00:00
I read that many prolific authors don't write their books. They write an outline, and have a paid staff of writers fill it in, without credit.

It's a business like those assembly line Kinkade paintings. (I actually have one of them on the wall, and like it.)

In high school, I decided to read all the James Bond novels. After reading about 8 of them, I realized they all had the same plot, and abandoned that project.