MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anyonecancode | 2025-05-28 12:14:47+00:00
I think you could make similar arguments about mapping technology like Google and Apple Maps -- that using them decreases people's skills in navigating the physical world, atrophying our sense of direction and geography.

And actually, that's not wrong. People really do often struggle to navigate these days if they don't have the crutch of something like Google Maps. It really has changed our relationship to the physical world in many ways.

But also, a lot of people weren't especially good at navigation before? The overall average ability of people being able to get from Point A to Point B safely and reliably, especially in areas they are unfamiliar with, has certainly increased dramatically. And a small subset of people who are naturally skilled at geography and navigation have seen their own abilities complemented, not replaces, by things like Google Maps.

I think AI will end up being similar, on a larger scale. Yes, there are definitely some trade offs, and some skills and abilities will decrease, but also many more people will be able to do work they previously couldn't, and a small number of people will get even better at what they do.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-28 12:14:53+00:00
This is where free will comes in for me.

I have never seen economics or wealth as a goal in and of itself. Economics is a view of past performance and only really interesting to compare against other periods in the past or other countries/economies.

In my opinion people should do exactly the job they want to do and the economics of that will shake out however they shake out. People should be enjoying what they do, but more importantly they should be making whatever decision is best for them at the time.

This may just circle back to the question of central planning - I don't think we are ever better off in the long rum trying to plan the entire system rather than trusting every individual to do what's best for them (and trusting that decision to often include what is best for their community).
by lucideer | 2025-05-28 12:15:01+00:00
Your comment is talking about profitability, the op is talking about product quality. These two don't necessarily correlate.

Your examples of people "not giving a shit" about things the OP says are important & Google/Meta boasting about AI use are all revenue driven; people in leadership roles commonly place company revenue over product quality, in which case they shouldn't give a shit about the OP's topic.

As an engineer / IC I care about product quality because that's what gives me personal fulfillment. As a founder I care about product quality because I entered into this enterprise to solve a problem, not to sell a solution. Many people do the latter (very successfully) & this article isn't for those people. But it's relevant to me.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-28 12:15:05+00:00
> My #1 saying in coding is "simplicity is harder than complexity."

That's a great way of putting what I've been thinking for a few years now. It's the same reason I designed https://immaculata.dev so differently than Vite. Sure I could throw a ton of code at the problem, but carefully solving the problem correctly is both simpler and harder.

> It's gone downhill like the rest of Reddit though.

Exactly, which is part of the charm of HN. I want to capture that for 90s.dev but focused solely on software skill cultivation (and sharing the wonder and beauty and joy of writing software in the 90s) rather than the topic-soup of HN.
by smnc | 2025-05-28 12:15:12+00:00
Previous posts in the series:

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-windows-r...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-windows-r...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-windows-r...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-windows-r...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-windows-r...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-windows-r...
by lelanthran | 2025-05-28 12:15:20+00:00
> I'm a bit confused. Is anyone's website currently being DDOS'd by scrapers for LLMs or is this a hypothetical?

There are already a few dozens of thousands of scrapers right now trying to get even more training data.

It will only get worse. We all want more training data. I want more training data. You want more training data.

We all want the most up to date data there is. So, yeah, it will only get worse as time goes on.
by nicolaslem | 2025-05-28 12:16:05+00:00
Ryzen 6000 series user here. I run Arch and the past three years have been a roller-coaster. Suspend/resume works well but the amdgpu crashes are a constant pain. Sometimes it works well for a few weeks, until a kernel update introduces a regression. Regression that gets fixed after a few weeks. Rince and repeat for the past three years. I am seriously considering Intel for my next laptop.
by arp242 | 2025-05-28 12:16:14+00:00
1970s was also just a different time: documentation was harder to get, it was harder to do quality implementations for protocols, people had less of an idea what may or may not work because everyone was new at this (both in terms of protocols and implementations), shipping bugfixes took a lot longer, few people were writing tests (and there wasn't a standard test suite), few people had long experience with these protocols, and general quality of software was a lot lower.
by moooo99 | 2025-05-28 12:16:39+00:00
> Google and Meta also boast publicly +30% of new lines of code are AI-generated in their companies today.

Both are companies with heavy investment into their AI products, hence an extremely biased view. I’d take that with a huge grain of salt.

> assume in 5 years these AIs are 10x better... I simply cannot foresee a world

Over the last 3ish years the improvements to the performance were significant, but incremental. What makes you think that the models will continue to improve at a substantially faster rate than today? Especially considering past releases have already demonstrated the diminishing returns with larger models and more computational power. Then there is also the pressure on the training data: downwards quality as well as ongoing litigation. From my POV there is more reason to believe the future development of LLMs will slow down somewhat rather than accelerate significantly.
by beAbU | 2025-05-28 12:16:54+00:00
If you install Power Toys, you get a feature called "Quick Accent" which gives you a shortcut to get basically any symbol quickly. Hold down the key that's the most like the one you are looking for, and press space. A little menu pops up where you can cycle through all the variants.

So `- + space` brings up a menu with all the "dashy" characters. There's 12 of them!

There is also `Win + .` which brings up an emoji menu, where you can also access the symbols list.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-28 12:16:58+00:00
As long as they are insured. What's the problem?

Driverless vehicles dont need to be perfect drivers, they need to be as good as the worst driver who can get insured. The 16 year old kid who doesnt know how to drive at all and didnt do drivers ed...

Realistically the driverless vehicle AI is probably far better than the average driver already.

All cars and trucks will eventually be driverless.
by rbanffy | 2025-05-28 12:17:24+00:00
A key aspect of many Linux package managers such as DNF or APT is that the repository is just a static website. The server doesn't need to compute the delta between where the machine is and where it should be - that's done in the client.

That, of course, imposes some limits WRT package visibility and other policies you might want to enforce - you can't easily limit a certain set of users to a subset of your repo.
by btbuildem | 2025-05-28 12:18:03+00:00
I strongly agree with both the premise of the article, and most of the specific arguments brought forth. That said, I've also been noticing some positive aspects of using LLMs in my day-to-day. For context, I've been in the software trade for about three decades now.

One thing working with AI-generated code forces you to do is to read code -- development becomes more a series of code reviews than a first-principles creative journey. I think this can be seen as beneficial for solo developers, as in a way, it mimics / helps learn responsibilities only present in teams.

Another: it quickly becomes clear that working with an LLM requires the dev to have a clearly defined and well structured hierarchical understanding of the problem. Trying to one-shot something substantial usually leads to that something being your foot. Approaching the problem from a design side, writing a detailed spec, then implementing sections of it -- this helps to define boundaries and interfaces for the conceptual building blocks.

I have more observations, but attention is scarce, so -- to conclude. We can look at LLMs as a powerful accelerant, helping junior devs grow into senior roles. With some guidance, these tools make apparent the progression of lessons the more experienced of us took time to learn. I don't think it's all doom and gloom. AI won't replace developers, and while it's incredibly disruptive at the moment, I think it will settle into a place among other tools (perhaps on a shelf all of its own).
by pydry | 2025-05-28 12:18:13+00:00
Yeah, it happened at the end of the last outsourcing boom. It's often a very quiet transformation though - a tacit recognition that a fashion failed doesn't get the same PR as "groundbreaking new business fad" because to do so too explicitly would humiliate all of the executives who were the driving force the original fashion.

Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.

Publications like the Economist or the WSJ that drive a lot of this hype among the investor and executive classes are loath to point out that their readers and owners are the proverbial emperor not wearing any clothes.

One of the benefits of tech unions (if they existed in any meaningful way) would be to point out where the emperor is naked in a way that is a bit harder to ignore than the kerfuffle that occurs inside hacker news threads or subreddits dedicated to experienced devs.
by hannob | 2025-05-28 12:18:26+00:00
This is a justification that was made up after Git came under increasing criticism for its poor choise of a hash function after the shattered attack. It was already known that SHA-1 is weak before Git was invented.

The problem is... it doesn't line up with the facts.

Git has been using SHA-1 hashes for signatures since very early on. It also has claims in its documentation about "cryptographic security". It does not rigorously define what "cryptographic security" means, but plausibly, it should mean using a secure hash function without known weaknesses.
by iamacyborg | 2025-05-28 12:18:47+00:00
> I think you could make similar arguments about mapping technology like Google and Apple Maps -- that using them decreases people's skills in navigating the physical world, atrophying our sense of direction and geography. And actually, that's not wrong. People really do often struggle to navigate these days if they don't have the crutch of something like Google Maps. It really has changed our relationship to the physical world in many ways

Entirely anecdotal but I have found the opposite. With this mapping software I can go walk in a random direction and confidently course correct as and when I need to, and once I’ve walked somewhere the path sticks in my memory very well.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-28 12:18:48+00:00
Mostly if they are manufactured in Asia and if there is real competition (which is the case in Asia).

Much hailed privatization and automation of the postal services in. e.g., Germany has not led to lower prices. 30 years ago mailmen were literally civil servants with expensive salaries. Privatization and automation has just redirected the money to the stock holders.

There will be no real competition in trucking once a few large corporations divide up the pie and get special permissions to operate.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-05-28 12:19:00+00:00
The push to fragmentation and atomism is so strong with this generation of devs. The obsession with microservices, dozens of small repositories, splitting everything up from fear of "monoliths."

What they're doing is creating a mass of complexity that is turning org-chart problems into future technical ones and at the same time not recognizing the intrinsic internal dependencies of the software systems they're building.

Luckily my current job is not like this, but the last one was, and I couldn't believe the wasted hours spent doing things as simple as updating the fields in a protobuf schema file.
by talkingtab | 2025-05-28 12:19:12+00:00
If you have a new unknown, tool, things go wrong in two ways. For example a hammer.

If it works, like to hit a nail, you end up smashing everything in sight. If it fails, like digging a garden, you end up thinking it is stupid.

But there is a third case.

You use it to do something that you did not know you could do before. Like to planish metal.

People are experiencing the first case and second.
by jvanderbot | 2025-05-28 12:19:24+00:00
This article is one paragraph long and shows that the market for programmers has increased between 17% or 23% by total employment (not job postings), since 2019.

I think we've all been triggered into talking about how AI is taking our jobs, so much that any discussion of job market is inevitably about AI, but it's worth looking at real numbers, as presented in TFA, to challenge that narrative a little.

Aside from all that, if the market slows, it seems to be slowing everywhere. I have friends in non-tech roles that are being laid off as well. It's probably the economy.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-28 12:19:28+00:00
I'm very well-familiar with the literature in this area. I understand that computer scientists, with obscene and wild abandon, will just pick whatever word suits their agenda and define it opportunistically, without regards to the confusion it will cause -- indeed, seemingly with this aim -- to "impress" the reader and make their research seem extraordinary.

"Concept" is not a term from computer science, its use here has not only been "narrowed" but flat-out redefined. "Concept" as used in XAI (a field in which i've done research) is an extremely limited attempt to capture the extension of concepts over a given training domain.

Concept, as used by the author of this article that you are replying to, and 99.9999999...% of all people familiar with the term, means "concept". It does not mean what it has been asserted to mean in XAI.

And one of the most basic features of concepts is their semantic content, that they compose, that they form parts of propositions, and so on.
by snuxoll | 2025-05-28 12:20:36+00:00
Explaining the business is part of onboarding, both for employment as well as introducing somebody into an existing project IMO. It took me years to fully grasp everything with the team that I started with, and that’s not a knock on anything, but the reality of processes that grew organically for the 10+ years before I started there.

I love sitting down with newer employees, especially junior engineers, and going over stuff like that, along with explaining why specific design choices were made, and concepts they may be unfamiliar with. One of the ones that paired with me on many of my projects from my original team is now the maintainer of those very same projects now, and hot damn does it bring a smile to my face that somebody can send me a message about something and I can just @mention him and pass the buck without worrying. We’d mostly been a .Net+MSSQL shop and these projects were a mix of Python, Kotlin, and PostgreSQL, but he ran with it after I helped get him setup and walked him through the code and gave him some time to pick up the tools.

That success is what solidified my views that critical thinking skills, along with a commitment to lifelong learning, are the best indicators of success for new hires with my org. I can’t teach people these qualities, but those that have them will seek the answers and know how to apply them once they’ve picked them up.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-28 12:21:29+00:00
> Even if a robot vehicle could "just" match the performance of a human, we would still vastly prefer them because we want people to do higher complexity tasks than operate motor vehicles.

Sadly, this sounds like an anodyne ideal, tuned to rationalize "don't worry, feel happy" indifference in well-to-do people - who are conveniently far away from the affected workers, and the grim realities of how the change will actually play out in their lives and communities.
by cousin_it | 2025-05-28 12:21:34+00:00
I've worked for a company with a large monorepo. At first I was a fan, but now I'm not so sure. The web of dependencies was too much. Now I think teams should be allowed to reuse other teams' code only as libraries or APIs with actual release cycles. There shouldn't be any "oh let's depend on the HEAD of this random build target somewhere else in the monorepo". There should be only "let's depend on a released version of such-and-such library or API".

If you adopt this discipline, you basically don't need a monorepo. Every team can have its own repo and depend on other stuff as third party. This adds some friction, but removes some other kinds of friction, and overall I think it's a better compromise.
by bandoti | 2025-05-28 12:22:25+00:00
> Google and Meta also boast publicly +30% of new lines of code are AI-generated in their companies today.

You realize that Google and Meta sell AI products, right? So what you cited is effectively an ad campaign. Also the 30% NEW code is likely whittled down to 5-10% added to production after heavy edits. The devil is in the omitted details. :)

> In all the companies I've seen engineering leadership hardly really gives a shit about things OP says are important.

People put too much stock in “engineers” and “managers”. What we’re really talking about here is in the realm of sociology and psychology.

I think there’s a lot of evidence (just ask anyone in academia) that AI is already diminishing people’s ability to think for themselves.

There’s a lot of power in AI it’s true—but let’s not get blinded by the gold and leave everyone bloodied in the muck.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-28 12:22:35+00:00
I don't get the downvotes.

When I used the free trials of FSD, It kept doing dangerous things and I kept needing to intervene. It seems a lot of people conflate the fact that the technology is impressive with the fact that it's still quite dangerous.

> FSD is way more unreliable than an average drunk driver.

I'm thinking you mean something like someone who blows a 0.1 or 0.12, or possibly drank 2-3 beers. (IE, someone who is impaired but probably won't get into an accident.) That would be an interesting thing to try to test objectively, because there are way more people who drive in that state, (including off-duty police officers), than a lot of people realize.
by ak_111 | 2025-05-28 12:23:49+00:00
It might not lead to singularity but for people who work in academia, in terms of setting and marking assignments and lecture notes, for good or bad AI has had an enormous impact.

You might argue that LLMs have simply exposed some systematic defects instead of improving anything, but the impact is there. Dozens of lecturing workflows that were pretty standard 2 years ago are no longer viable. This includes the entirety of online and remote education which ironically dozens of universities started investing in after Covid, right around when chatgpt launched. To put this impact in context, we are talking about the tertiary and secondary sector globally.
by mooreds | 2025-05-28 12:23:58+00:00
Nooo! I spent a summer in college writing physics education applets. The scars are still there.

Seriously, I do wonder what the real value of some of this WASM stuff is. I mean, seems cool to run a java (or rust or <insert language here>) app in the browser, but what is the real world use case? If I run an app in the browser, I still have to do all the server side business validation because "you should never trust the client".

What am I missing?

Edit: on reading other comments, apparently this is direct-to-js compilation, not WASM. The intent of the comment still stands.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-28 12:24:04+00:00
Computer Shopper was basically 900 pages of adverts with some editorial and reviews here and there to make people want to subscribe.

BYTE was a little less obnoxious about it, and the quality of the writing was superb. I got it occasionally as a teenager in the UK and always looked forward to it, because the information density was insane. I have the "Best of BYTE" book, and often dip into it as a comforting, sentimental read. I really do wish a magazine like it existed today.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-28 12:24:26+00:00
Java Applets probably would've snuffed out WASM if it was added into a browser by default (instead of an extension).

However, they were pretty insecure and caused a ton of problems for the browser [1] and I'm guessing Oracle had no interest in providing free work in a secure solution. So they got eliminated.

[1]: https://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-...
by cultofmetatron | 2025-05-28 12:24:38+00:00
for small run manufacturing, 3d printing is absolutely killing it. the major limitation of 3d printing is that it will never be able to crank out thousands of parts per hour the way injection molding can and thats ok. creating an injection molded part requires a huge up front investment. if you're doing small runs of a part, 3d printing more than makes up for the slow marginal time with skipping the up front costs alltogether.
by jorvi | 2025-05-28 12:24:39+00:00
Because Microsoft isn't a software company anymore, and never was a hardware company. They're services-first now.

They make the majority of their money from businesses with lucrative support contracts, Azure, Active Directory + Office Enterprise suite, etc.

They make the majority of their money from consumers via stuffing Windows with "promotions" (ads) and from Office 365. It is services. Windows barely earns them anything.

Hell, the fact that they're thinking about opening up the Xbox to Steam and have official tutorials on running Gamepass on iOS and Linux should tell you that they don't care what OS on which device you use, so long as you are subscribed to their services.

In an environment like that, a vertical integration play makes little sense. You want your services to be on as many platforms as possible, not attract ire and roadblocks from your partners.

On top of that, they don't have a phone platform onboarding people to the whole hardware ecosystem. Even for Apple, Mac + iPad + AirPod profits are dwarfed by iPhone profits.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-05-28 12:24:53+00:00
If AI creates a mess, why won’t future AI be able to continue building a mess on top?

And if it does hit a dead end, just regenerate a new version of the entire system in minutes.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with AI coding, but it often seems to me that people are making fundamental errors when framing the problem.

“But how will humans maintain AI code?” Is one such example. Why would we expect one part (code creation) to change dramatically without all other parts equally undergoing a revolution?
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-28 12:25:23+00:00
Why hire internationally when you can hire someone remotely from the MiddleOfNowhere South Dakota that will happily work for peanuts and not have to deal with tax issues, time zones, etc?

Besides every opening for any remote job gets hundreds of applications within 24 hours. Most companies only need good enough CRUD developers. The market is flooded with unemployed “full stack developers”