MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-28 11:52:52+00:00
> If you're a skilled, experienced engineer and you fear that AI will make you unemployable, adopt a more nuanced view. LLMs can't replace human engineering.

I don't think LLMs were ever meant to completely replace human engineering, at least in the way we think of engineering as a craft. But the truth is the world is changing, and with LLMs/AI, the goalposts are changing, too. With massive economies of scale and huge output, the goal is less and less good engineering and more and more pure output.

Put it another way, the post-AI world considers a reduction of quality to be an acceptable tradeoff for the massive short-term gains. Moreover, although quantity over quality is not exactly a new concept, what AI does is magnify and distill that concept as a prime directive.

Code doesn't have to work well to be profitable given how cheaply in can be produced, and that's a general effect of technology that can reach global audiences, and AI is the apex of that technology.

I don't think there is a nuanced view: AI is an all-around bad thing and its positives in the short-term will be vastly dwarfed by its negatives except for those who have become specialized at concentrating wealth at the expense of the common good.
by simiones | 2025-05-28 11:53:03+00:00
> They’re claiming they have a material that will do it at higher temperatures. Assuming such a material gets hotter as it works, there’s no thermodynamics problem here.

That's ok, but the amount of water you get is fixed - the process can't continue. You install the device into your room, it condenses 1L of water as droplets on its surface (or, more likely 1ml of water), and it's now done, that's all the water it's going to remove/produce, if this is the right explanation. It would be perfectly equivalent to bringing in a cold slab of metal from your fridge into your room - it will condense some water as it gets hotter, and it will eventually get as warm as the room and stop condensing anymore water, forever.

Conversely, if the process were continuous (say, as long as you remove the condensed droplets, new droplets form), as they seem to claim, that would very likely violate thermodynamics again.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-05-28 11:53:05+00:00
I’ve never understood the fascination with perceiving Secure Boot as ushering in an age of tech serfdom. From almost the beginning, they signed Red Hat’s boot shim which made it totally useless for locking people to Windows. I don’t think this was ever the plan, and the motivations aren’t there unless you buy all that stuff about every huge tech company hating “universal computers” on principle. Linux is not a measurable thorn in Microsoft’s side on the desktop market, and they don’t have nearly enough leverage to make OEMs stop selling Linux servers.
by westurner | 2025-05-28 11:53:26+00:00
GR does not describe the interior topology of black holes, beyond predicting a singularity. Is there a hard boundary with no hair, or is there a [knotted or braided] fluidic attractor system with fluidic turbulence at the boundary?

SQR Superfluid Quantum Relativity seems to suggest that there is no hard event horizon boundary.

I don't understand how any model that lacks descriptions of phase states in BEC superfluids could sufficiently describe the magneto-hydro-thermo-gravito dynamics of a black hole system and things outside of it?

It is unclear whether mass/energy/information is actually drawn into a supermassive or a microscopic black hole; couldn't it be that things are only ever captured into attractor paths that are outside of the event horizon?

Does Hawking radiation disprove that black holes don't absorb mass/energy/information?
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-28 11:53:36+00:00
Yeah I was thinking there's gonna be a lot of work for us in a couple years when AI makes a giant mess and corporations come crawling back to us with their tails between their legs. Now I really need to jumpstart repurposing 90s.dev to become essentially a community of the people you're describing. What would we need to start with? Mailing list? bboard? [edit] posted a top level comment with this question
by conartist6 | 2025-05-28 11:54:49+00:00
I think it stems from there not being enough engineers. In aggregate, companies have been able to take over the market for engineering labor and ensure that the only good-paying jobs on the job market at any given time are working for companies that want to use engineers to corner some consumer market so that they can enshittify it.

The cure is to make so much new engineering talent that this is simply impossible
by eXpl0it3r | 2025-05-28 11:55:08+00:00
> Also do not forget that performance is easily solved by hardware: Moore's law

"Just write slow algorithms, hardware will eventually get faster" doesn't really work when talking about performance implications now. If the hash algorithm used million of times doesn't perform on current user hardware, then the algorithm is simply not a good fit.

> and then custom hardware extensions are a thing.

That's the kind of trade-off I eluded to as well. As a developer of a tool (e.g. git), I'd pick hash algorithms that do have hardware extensions on the most common hardware and not use something, that may eventually get hardware extensions.

I guess developing such protocols right now for the future might still be advisable, but it seems odd to critic software that use well-optimized algorithms and fulfill the requirements.
by muro | 2025-05-28 11:55:44+00:00
Lots of interesting points, e.g.:

any potential remuneration for facilitating the initial acquisition of end users [...] does not remunerate the gatekeeper for gatekeeper value (= the value a service provided by a gatekeeper on top of the market value of the service, because of its position)

Apple can only charge for initial user acquisition, not for "value" of the user (e.g. if they spend more in app later)
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-28 11:55:50+00:00
> I use LLMs for annoying shit that used to take an inordinate amount of time. For example an analyst gives me a CSV, it has some data clean up issues, eventually it needs to become a series of SQL inserts.

But that has a flip-side too: analysts are more likely to give you CSVs with more issues because they know you can clean it up with AI. And pretty soon people will put less care in general in what they do until something goes wrong with this translate-with-AI paradigm.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-28 11:56:07+00:00
> Further, sentence (or clause) initial "and" can means if/as though, also existing in other Germanic languages

Does this exist in English? An can mean "if" - not in the modern language, that's not a possibility at all, but in archaic texts - and this an does apparently derive from the word and, but I've never seen and itself used that way.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-28 11:56:08+00:00
> Input Risk. An LLM does not challenge a prompt which is leading...

(Emphasis mine)

This has been the biggest pain point for me, and the frustrating part is that you might not even realize you're leading it a particular way at all. I mean it makes sense with how LLMs work, but a single word used in a vague enough way is enough to skew the results in a bad direction, sometimes contrary to what you actually wanted to do, which can lead you down rabbit holes of wrongness. By the time you realize, you're deep in the sludge of haphazardly thrown-together code that sorta kinda barely works. Almost like human language is very vague and non-specific, which is why we invented formal languages with rules that allow for preciseness in the first place...

Anecdotally, I've felt my skills quickly regressing because of AI tooling. I had a moment where I'd reach out to it for every small task from laziness, but when I took a real step back I started realizing I'm not really even saving myself all that much time, and even worse is that I'm tiring myself out way quicker because I was reading through dozens or hundreds of lines of code, thinking about how the AI got it wrong, correcting it etc. I haven't measured, but I feel like in grand totality, I've wasted much more time than I potentially saved with AI tooling.

I think the true problem is that AI is genuinely useful for many tasks, but there are 2 camps of people using it. There are the people using it for complex tasks where small mistakes quickly add up, and then the other camp (in my experience mostly the managerial types) see it shit out 200 lines of code they don't understand, and in their mind this translates to a finished product because the TODO app that barely works is good enough for an "MVP" that they can point to and say "See, it can generate this, that means it can also do your job just as easily!".

To intercept the usual comments that are no doubt going to come flooding in about me using it wrong or trying the wrong model or whatever, please read through my old comment [1] for more context on my experience with these tools.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44055448
by barrkel | 2025-05-28 11:56:47+00:00
It's an incredibly complex problem, when you take into account drivers, system extensions, shared library versoning and so on, and even harder to solve when you can't rely on the presence of an internet connection.

Then, once you've built it out, you need to convince software vendors to use your gatekeeping installation mechanism, and hope they believe the executives won't see this as leverage to extract rents later.
by Anamon | 2025-05-28 11:56:57+00:00
One anecdote doesn't support that conclusion. Talk to anyone who travelled to Canada and the U.S. frequently, about how the two compare. I used to work in academia, and know many people who travelled to both places every year for the past 20. Of course there are exceptions on both sides, but the default is overwhelmingly: Canadian border is friendly and welcoming, U.S. border is hostile and depressing.
by ben_w | 2025-05-28 11:57:24+00:00
I don't think the rest of the west besides the USA is all that interested in the strategic value of Israel; I'm not even sure the USA is strategically interested… well, not economically and militarily at least, I think the politicians care about the country for the sake of their own re-election.

If the US only cared about power-projection in that area, Cyprus would also be an easy option (like the UK does with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri_and_Dhekelia), as would Turkey (a NATO member), and these days they could probably have an easy time working with Egypt.

Sure, Israel has a lot of stuff going for it (nukes that won't necessarily be blamed on the USA; MOSAD is infamous; etc.), but counting on them alone is an all-eggs-in-one-basket strategy that comes with risks.
by samus | 2025-05-28 11:57:42+00:00
It would be interesting to break down these figures across age group and income levels.

Cities are expensive because people want to move there. They do it because of quality of life or because of work opportunities.

In the long run the issue might indeed disappear as the population shrinks. But it will probably just leave behind lots of unoccupied houses in the countryside that nobody buys. This is already happening in Japan.
by teo_zero | 2025-05-28 11:57:59+00:00
Is there an explanation why BEVs fare better than hybrids in terms of brake dust? They use the same principle, so I expected similar performances.

The article gives no clues, only these results:

> It turns out that BEVs reduce the amount of brake dust by 83% [...] Other vehicles that use regenerative braking reduced brake emissions too, with Hybrids reducing them by 10-48%, and PHEVs by 66%.
by paradite | 2025-05-28 11:58:11+00:00
> LLMs as they currently exist cannot master a theory, design, or mental construct because they don't remember beyond their context window. Only humans can can gain and retain program theory.

False.

> An LLM is a token predictor. It works only at the level of text. It is not capable of working at a conceptual level: it doesn't reason about ideas, diagrams, or requirements specifications.

False.

Anyone who have spent time in machine learning or reinforcement learning understands that models are projections of higher dimension concepts on to lower dimensions as weights.
by ralfd | 2025-05-28 11:58:13+00:00
This is muddled thinking. Automated trucks will lower costs for everyone.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/

> If that digging would give work to a hundred men with shovels and picks, why not get a thousand men and give them teaspoons with which to dig up the dirt?”
by runeks | 2025-05-28 11:58:28+00:00
> Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute.

Firstly, no one is offering for sale enough compute to attack e.g. Bitcoin.

Secondly, and more importantly, this would be a temporary attack, during which the blockchain in question is rendered unusable. Once an honest majority of hashing power is reestablished, everything is back to normal. But a compromise of a majority stake is a permanent compromise of a chain. No honest actor can conjure up more stake to gain an advantage over the attacker who now sits on a majority.
by close04 | 2025-05-28 11:58:37+00:00
> Moving humans from lower to higher complexity tasks generally correlates to increased productivity, higher efficiency, or "getting more with less." Generally, this leads to a wealthier society and other positive things.

This is the idealistic take. What's your practical take for moving hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from truck driving jobs to higher complexity tasks? Do those jobs exist today and truckers just refuse to take the step up? Are we creating new jobs that are just the right amount of "more complex" to be realistic for a truck driver?

In a world where AI is doing away exactly with the lower complexity jobs, how are we bridging the gap between the average skill level and expertise of a trucker compared to high enough complexity job that keeps them safe from being replaced by AI in 5 years? What's the reskilling or upskilling plan for these people's skills and career to advance at a faster pace than AI is catching up?
by Willingham | 2025-05-28 11:58:37+00:00
> How often have you witnessed an LLM reduce the complexity of a piece of code?

I would add that AI often makes far too clever code as well, and would defer to Kernighan's law: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-28 11:58:49+00:00
It's occurred to me more and more that I need to repurpose 90s.dev into a non-AI community, focused on the ancient art of writing software well, and welcoming to all who honed that craft. What would it need to start with? Forum? Mailing list? Aggregate blog from multiple authors like hackernoon?

[edit] Makeshift mailing list for those interested: https://github.com/sdegutis/90s.dev/issues/2 (subscribe or comment to "sign up for emails" on the topic)
by countWSS | 2025-05-28 11:58:52+00:00
From viewpoint of security and separation of concerns giving unlimited access to everything by virtue of "everything" being stored in one giant repo sounds exceptionally short-sighted. A single rogue actor would be able to insert code to any component of choice instead of working on isolated repo with people who specifically know it and approve the code: the monorepo is a "big ball of mud" with vague shared responsibility that defers to people who worked on "specific parts" but they lack any authority or control, auditing the entire codebase doesn't scale.
by like_any_other | 2025-05-28 11:59:29+00:00
No, the WIPO Copyright Treaty is separate from the Berne Convention, and did not modify it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty

Furthermore, this whole discussion began with claiming it's impossible to undo anti-circumvention/reverse-engineering, without abandoning copyright entirely, because international treaties. Yet these treaties were modified multiple times, as well as new ones entered into. If it's possible to change these treaties to further encroach IP laws into our lives, why would it not be possible to change them in the other direction?
by clejack | 2025-05-28 11:59:30+00:00
This article can be summed up with two thoughts for me.

First, perpetual work is hard work, but not all hard work is perpetual. The ground on which she is basing her article on seems to be primarily focused on perpetual work .

Second, violence exists, so hard work will always be required. A society of people who doesn't want to work, is a society of people who are ready to be exploited by an antagonistic actor. The author mentioned the aristocrats and the peasants, but didn't mention the soldiers, unless I missed while skimming through.

For the record, I'm not a fan of hard work. I just accept it is sometimes necessary. Not because of some ruler class conspiracy that has psychologically taken hold of me, but because that is life.
by munksbeer | 2025-05-28 11:59:38+00:00
> It is so tiring to have to explain this every time on every HN thread, but I guess it's always so easy to convince oneself there is a simple solution to very hard problems. "Just shut Bitcoin down, I don't see a use for it so it's useless."

It must feel tiring to you, because you're at an impasse. You clearly believe what you believe, but that doesn't mean you are correct. You could consider, you could be completely incorrect, and wasting enormous amounts of energy on a concept that achieves almost nothing.

Put it this way, if bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, the world wouldn't stutter, it wouldn't even blink. "The unbanked" argument is largely bunkum, a few anecdotes thrown together to create a moral for the bitcoin narrative.

But in the end, it could disappear, and nothing of value would have been lost.

So, there are a small subset of people (like yourself) who value bitcoin. The rest don't. When you look at it from their perspective, it is easy to see why they think burning huge amounts of energy every day for nothing is a waste. An enormous waste.

PS. For what it is worth, I am a long term bitcoin holder (well, since 2017, still relatively late). I wait for the day when I can cash out to retire in style, and I sincerely hope that people keep pretending that it is worth something other than to sell it to the next person for more fiat money.
by bluGill | 2025-05-28 11:59:47+00:00
We have a person deditated to bringing in changes to our polyrepo. Nothing is considered done until it is in his mainline branches so there is incentive to get things integrated. Nothing goes in until it passes the full test suite, whith he verifies you ran before integrating and then runs again to be sure.

as someone who works on core parts that are lively to break everything I spend half of my time just integrating things and anouther quarter trying to figure out how to make my things either less core or not need changes so often.
by parsley | 2025-05-28 12:02:47+00:00
I call it fast-food software, but that doesn’t mean everyone holds the tool in the same way, the collaboration and use of an assistant to research or modify specific things is the key value-add.

But many people will use unrestrained tool-enabled agents to do all of their work. And so be it, there’s already bad software out there, always has been. It’s easier to make and distribute software. It’s high calorie and tastes great and is FAST.

But you have to hope it will be more of a tool than a full meal.
by bandoti | 2025-05-28 12:03:09+00:00
From my experience so far it is helpful for me to get another opinion on how to solve a problem—and I do the work in the end. Or, I am extremely specific, and give it a relatively small problem to solve, and it solves it—writes the code for me—and then I code review it, and make changes to uphold my standards.

In other words, AI is my assistant, but it is MY responsibility to turn up quality, maintainable work.

However, to put things in perspective for the masses: just consider the humble calculator. It has ruined people’s ability to do mental math. AI is going to do that for writing and communication skills, problem solving skills, etc.
by pama | 2025-05-28 12:03:55+00:00
I have nothing against random anecdotes per se, but a lot of academic code does not correctly optimize computation on GPU hardware. If you can estimate by pen and paper how many FLOPs/s your code was using because of the main operations it had to do and how that number compared to the theoretical limit of bfloat16 performance on the NVIDIA GPU (about 2.6 * 10^15 for the 8 A100 IIRC) then you can see a bit better how close your code was to optimality. I have seen low effort performance scaling reach less than 1% of these theoretical numbers and people were super happy because it was sufficiently fast anyways (which is fine) and it showed the GPU utilized all the time (but with only 1% of these possible ALU doing anything useful at all times).
by djoldman | 2025-05-28 12:04:08+00:00
Some will retire early.

Some will take on more and more of the much more complex logistics jobs like delicate loads, large loads, etc.

Some will switch professions.

Some will go to school to switch professions.

Some new professions will open up exactly because it will become cheaper to move stuff by truck. For example, if a business can now afford to move X to their location, now they can do more business. Perhaps that business hires former truck drivers.
by keepamovin | 2025-05-28 12:04:46+00:00
This was a good read. Can relate to that vibe of working in 'hospitality', until early morning, and ending shift with that exhausted buzz high, and the relaxation and sense of accomplishment that comes after that, and with a way to unwind.

And now working in software and company-building like the author. It's funny and nice that many people have similar experiences. We both value that "esprit de corps" that you really feel in a busy restaurant or place.

The tie-in with Anthony Bourdain was the icing on the cake, to see that the great man himself, so valued and missed, had such similar experiences and appreciations too.
by johnecheck | 2025-05-28 12:04:56+00:00
Great engineers can quadruple their productivity with LMMs? Strong claim.

If their whole job is throwing together disposable demos and 1-use scripts, I could believe 4x. But in the normal case, where the senior engineer's time is mostly spent wrangling a legacy codebase into submission? I just don't see LLMs having that level of effect.
by sunshine-o | 2025-05-28 12:04:58+00:00
> Applets were executed completely outside of the browser sandbox. An absolute disaster from the security standpoint.

It is easy to forget Java (applets, web start) was a thing during the Windows 98 era, meaning a time when there was (almost?) no security. People were downloading and running random .exe files all the time.

There was no browser sandboxing and you could run wild Basic code in IE.

Sun with Java were the first one to try to solve that problem. It was imperfect but way better than what others were doing at the time.
by Etheryte | 2025-05-28 12:05:00+00:00
This is an easy quip to make, but it's also pretty wrong. 3D printing has been a massive breakthrough in many industries and fundamentally changed the status quo. Aerospace is a good example, much of what SpaceX and other younger upstarts in the space are doing would not be feasible without 3D printed parts. Nozzles, combustion chambers, turbopumps etc are all parts that are often printed.
by Moomoomoo309 | 2025-05-28 12:05:36+00:00
And if it's not the same infrastructure, we can lower the fuel cost by reducing rolling resistance by switching to steel wheels on steel tracks, and then since no other vehicles will be on this infrastructure, we can chain multiple of the trailers together, aaaand we've invented trains.

All transportation alternatives converge into trains over time, it's like carcinization but for transport.