MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rvz | 2025-05-25 13:17:52+00:00
> Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions?

Yes. We don't need to pay $$$ for simply changing elements on a page or adopting the next web framework to replace another. The hype in many web technologies that lots of developers that have fell for also contributed to the low quality of the software that you use right now.

All of this work to pay developers to over-engineer inefficient solutions and to give a false sense of meaningful work contributed to the "psyop" of how highly inflated their salaries were to do their jobs in the ZIRP era.

And AI has shown which developer jobs it is really good at, and it is consistently good at web developer roles.

So I'd expect those roles to be significantly less valuable.
by specialist | 2025-05-25 13:18:49+00:00
I honestly can't answer your questions.

I can say, from experience:

1. Everything gets better the more technical people are involved with customers. Sales, biz dev, tech supp, trade shows, etc. Probably not as the point person, probably not solo, but mosdef involved. And not every tech has the aptitude, or desire, to be customer facing. YMMV. Still, conversations are shorter, more productive. Customers respond very well. It's been a huge win-win, every time.

2. It's always been hard to convince (commission driven) sales people to loop in techs. It's two separate cultures. eg Upon success, sales person gets a new Porsche and the tech gets more work. Which causes resentment. I don't begrudge high rewards for sales (it's a tough gig). But some perks for the grunts would be nice too. Just saying.
by sylware | 2025-05-25 13:19:16+00:00
thumbs up for this project (everything RISC-V is usually).

I write rv64 assembly (nearly core only, without memory reservation instructions) and run it on x86_64 with a very small (x86_64 assembly written) interpreter.

And your are right, I have had thoughts about a "RISC-V" x86_64 compiler (but it will probably require some runtime unfortunately).

Hopefully, rv22+ hardware with ultra-performant µ-architecture and with the latest silicon process will happen sooner than we expect. One less PI toxic lock and cleaner, _really standard_ assembly (the end game of much software).
by wrp | 2025-05-25 13:21:16+00:00
TFA indulges in a type of fallacious reasoning I see way too much of in philosophical discussion. The general trend of the argument goes:

1. "A" proposed theory "X".

2. "B" interpreted "X" as "Y" and used that as a guide to action.

3. Since "X" and "Y" are different, the actions of "B" are somehow illegitimate.

If the actions of "B" are of interest, the proper focus of study is what "Y" really consists of and how it relates to the actions and outcomes of "B". What "A" did or did not propose really is of no interest unless you are specifically studying "A" instead of "B".
by AlienRobot | 2025-05-25 13:22:34+00:00
Another important point about old games is their file size. When games are under 1 megabyte, you can literally cram thousands of games in a thumb drive and forget about it. It makes them resilient. Someone probably has a copy of the abandonware not because it looked worth preserving but because it was extremely cheap to preserve. By contrast, if your game is several gigabytes, that's several orders of magnitude more expensive to preserve and distribute.
by dangus | 2025-05-25 13:23:16+00:00
Assuming your vehicle got around 25mpg you spent about $8000 CAD on gasoline over those 50,000km of driving. Where did that money come from?

How much did your legally required car insurance cost? The median rate seems to be around $200 a month from a quick google.

Just adding in the most modest vehicle completely destroys the author’s budget.

I believe your reality, but I don’t believe in the amount you are romanticizing it. If it is so amazing why are you not doing it anymore? Because you just told me there’s no need for internet out there because it’s so jaw-dropping amazing, you wouldn’t spend any time on the internet arguing with a loser like me?
by AngryData | 2025-05-25 13:24:16+00:00
Saying they weren't perfect is still elevating Harris considerably above what many people saw her as in my opinion. The people who want police reform or support the defund police movement aren't enthusiastic about electing a hard-ass prosecutor. People who have no investment portfolios don't care about the stock market doing alright. People who care about social services don't like someone who is supported by and courting rightwing personalities. And progressives don't want "nothing would fundamentally change" after watching little substantial changes or reforms over the last 2+ decades while many people are barely hanging on by their fingertips.

Someone making $100K+ in a prosperous urban area might not see those things as too big of a problem. But someone making the median US wage or less while home prices continue to rise and police departments extort locals and basic education standards fall while secondary education prices rise have a big problem both for themselves and their children. I am not surprised people weren't enthusiastic voters, because many saw it as lose-lose. When people are offered either a slow death or a fast death, many will refuse to choose at all.
by pbw | 2025-05-25 13:24:26+00:00
Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead.

The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer. But "work for yourself" probably means direct competition with others who are just as expert as you with AI, so that's no panacea.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-05-25 13:26:02+00:00
I'm a software engineer at Amazon and I'm directly and indirectly involved a lot in programs related to GenAI tooling.

I can safely say this article is bullshit. While there are a lot of programs ongoing to allow builders to adopt GenAI tooling, and while there is definitely a lot of communication ongoing around those programs, nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools. None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere, and everyone is free to completely ignore them.

That said, is there an increase in expectations? Yes. But that's just normal Amazon in an employer's market, and has nothing to do with LLMs and GenAI.

The comparison to Microsoft where we can witness in public the .Net maintainers fighting with the shit code generated by Copilot on their repos is ridiculous. Amazon is probably one of the companies pushing the least and being the most prudent about GenAI adoption.
by A1kmm | 2025-05-25 13:26:20+00:00
Software development is the most automated career in the history of all time.

Assemblers, Linkers, Compilers, Copying, Macros, Makefiles, Code gen, Templates, CI & CD, Editors, Auto-complete, IDEs are all terms that describe types of automation in software development.

LLM-generated code is another form of automation, but it certainly isn't the first. Right now most of the problems are when it is inappropriately used. The same applies to other forms of automation too - but LLMs are really hyped up right now. Probably it will go through the normal hype cycle where there'll be a crash, and then a plateau where LLMs are used to drive productivity but expectations of their capability are more aligned to reality.
by baxtr | 2025-05-25 13:27:35+00:00
>This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.

This feels like we are forcing people who rather look at code to start talking in plain language, which not every dev likes or is proficient in.

Devs won’t be replaced by AI. Devs will be replaced by people that can (and want to) speak to LLMs.
by gortok | 2025-05-25 13:28:06+00:00
> Companies seem to be persuaded that, like assembly lines of old, A.I. can increase productivity. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers’ use of an A.I. coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25 percent.

> The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines.

There are two issues this article brings to mind:

1. Feels like we are back when lines of code was a measure of productivity.

2. We’ve heard this tune before, and the problem we have now is that you don’t understand what you didn’t write. Software development is in large part about understanding the system from the highest level to its smallest details, and this takes away a key part of how our world works, in favor of a “cattle not pets” view of code.

Now, if you don’t expect your programmers to have an understanding of the system they built, and you treat code as disposable, then you’ll center around a world where folks aren’t trained to learn a system, and I don’t see that as a world that is compatible with increased reliance on A.I.
by specialist | 2025-05-25 13:28:10+00:00
Have you ever negotiated having the source code (etc) put into escrow, should the vendor abandon the product?

Working in healthcare (electronic medical records), that was a standard line item for our customers.

Good thing too; after acquisition, our grandparent company's execs quickly found a new leprechaun to chase after, and our product died on the vine. Despite first mover advantage, great revenue, and pipeline of prospects, our tiny effort was less than a round off error to the grandparent (Quest Diagnostics).
by vhodges | 2025-05-25 13:28:30+00:00
I seem to recall that it's a reference in Protector (the first half) when the belters are going to meet the Outsider and they had a 'brain' to help with translation and needing an expert to keep it sane.

I just googled and there was a discussion on Reddit and they mentioned some Frank Herbert works where this was a thing.
by lapcat | 2025-05-25 13:28:53+00:00
> 2. "B" interpreted "X" as "Y" and used that as a guide to action.

This is missing something essential: did B correctly or incorrectly interpret X as Y?

The argument is that if B had correctly interpreted X, and used X as a guide to action, then B's actions would have been quite different from what they are.

It would be strange to say, "Who cares about what Jesus said? We're only interested in what contemporary Christians are doing." It's strange because contemporary Christians themselves claim that they are following Jesus and care what Jesus said. If they've grossly misinterpreted Jesus, then that's a legitimate criticism of their beliefs and actions.
by randallsquared | 2025-05-25 13:28:58+00:00
> They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day.

Based on my experience with sprint teams, breaking things down into just a couple hours of work per ticket implies that someone else is doing an enormous amount of prep work to create a dozen tickets per feature. I agree that your friend is performing the work of a development system. I've heard this called "programming in Developer" as opposed to whatever language the developer is using.
by devnullbrain | 2025-05-25 13:29:07+00:00
This is the message between the lines of much of the anti-dev schadenfreude, but actually spelling it out makes it obvious: it's not true.

Only a minority of dev jobs are automating people out of work. There are entirely new industries like game dev that can't exist without it.

Software development has gained such a political whipping-boy status, you'd be forgiven for forgetting it's been the route to the middle classes for a lot of people who would otherwise be too common, weird or foreign.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-25 13:29:34+00:00
Why do you think he's not?

It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea.

I definitely don't think these documents are just "written speech". Some emails are—a quick message asking if you'll be in the office tomorrow, for example—but major ones require significantly more thought.
by braiamp | 2025-05-25 13:29:39+00:00
Then how are we supposed to discuss these kinds of misinterpretations then? The central point is that Girard was proposing that a maxim like "protection of the victims" was used to dispense violence against the innocent, to then someone using that as a template to further the violence against the innocent, by portraying some kind of in-group victim (usually, the victim is the same that dispenses the violence).
by Y_Y | 2025-05-25 13:30:03+00:00
> Historically, the Underground infrastructure offered a respite from warm weather, indicated in Austin Cooper’s ‘It is cooler below’ poster, issued in 1924 by the Underground group to promote a more comfortable experience of travel during warm weather.

A century of burrowing commuter-worms unfortunately managed to bake all the beautiful wet clay that kept the tunnels tolerable when the sun was shining about.

It seems straightforward to me that it would be enough to rehydrate the ground. Just need (approximately),

400km of track * 25m average depth * 3m tunnel width * 20% moisture content of wet clay = 6 billion litres of water

Sounds like a lot but it's only about 1/300th of the yearly flow of the Thames.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-25 13:30:09+00:00
> or the translation layer is bad

There's no translation layer - you don't understand how/what hipify and CUDA are. CUDA is a C/C++ extension and it connotes APIs. 90% of CUDA kernel code (ie the stuff that actually runs on the SMs) does compile for AMD without any changes (intrinsics diff). hipify goes the extra step of remaining APIs to their HIP variants.

Again, all of this is to say there's no vendor lockin like clueless whiny people complain and just a superior product.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-05-25 13:30:29+00:00
The transfer was wireless. I presume WiFi given the amount of data that could be moved in 15-20 minutes. I don't think NFC has very much throughput.

When the transfer was almost done, it told me I could use a USB cable between the phones to make the transfer faster. At that point, given how close it was to being done, I just let it continue versus risking an interruption to the process by changing media.
by HideousKojima | 2025-05-25 13:30:49+00:00
A game doesn't need to be live service to support cloud saves, though. There are completely DRM free games on Steam that support cloud saves. And PC games that released on discs back in the day still could get updates.

Edit: I also almost forgot, even for users without internet patches for popular games were often distributed on demo discs included with magazines like PC Gamer.
by leoedin | 2025-05-25 13:31:39+00:00
I've had plenty of colleagues who expect the job to be that. Just working on a small ticket and moving it to "to test" when done.

It's incredibly frustrating to try and get anything done in a team like that. The reality of most software jobs I've had is that problem discovery is part of it. The only people who know the code well enough to know the problens it has are the developers.
by azernik | 2025-05-25 13:31:50+00:00
"The average temperatures on the Victoria line have risen by almost seven degrees since 2013 – nearly a *30%* increase.

Conversely, the increase in the average annual temperatures across all Underground lines from 2013 to 2024 was merely *seven percent*, placing Victoria’s temperature rise vastly above that."

Using percentages to talk about changes in non-Kelvin temperatures is crazy.
by smokel | 2025-05-25 13:32:12+00:00
I have been in this industry for some time, and over the years I have only seen more people being glued to electronic devices, not less.

It might have been a selling point, but the status quo is that we are inventing new jobs faster than phasing out old ones. The new jobs aren't necessarily more enjoyable, though, and there are no more smoking breaks.
by NeutralCrane | 2025-05-25 13:32:18+00:00
The point is that you can’t do that. That’s the entire conundrum with Frequentism. They object to stating anything about the probability of Saturn, because from an objectivist point of view, any statement is either true or it isn’t, and therefore all probabilistic statements about it must be 0% or 100%. Instead they resort to statements about the frequencies over the long term from repeated processes, like the one you have. There are two problems with this:

1. They aren’t answering the original question. The question is about the probability of a property of Saturn. Not about the process of repeatedly forming thousands of alternative Saturns. This seems like a subtle difference but that’s only because Frequentism has been the default for so long. It doesn’t attempt to answer the questions people are actually asking.

2. The assumptions it makes to answer that alternative question are just as flawed. We can’t go back in time and change the conditions surrounding Saturn’s creation. We can’t run 1000s of repeated trials of the creation of Saturn. For a group of people so ideologically opposed to a statement as simple as “the probability of this flipped coin being heads is 50%”, it seems absurd that they are fine with their entire framework being built around a premise that doesn’t exist and cannot exist.
by telesilla | 2025-05-25 13:33:55+00:00
Will AI also start developing creative tools such as new VST plugins or photoshop filters? What about low-level low-latency tools needed for some industries or for aerospace. I guess at some point we won't need so many humans to run our Kubernetes clusters or maintain our WordPress sites but won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?
by softwaredoug | 2025-05-25 13:34:01+00:00
I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term

What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embraced.

Now there will eventually be a generation of coders just "born" into AI, etc, and they will do great in this new ecosystem. Eventually education will catch up. But the cohort currently coming up as juniors will feel the most pain.
by placardloop | 2025-05-25 13:34:25+00:00
If you truly believe what you’re saying, then you’re uninformed as to what is going on outside your own team. And just because it’s not happening in your team does not mean it isn’t happening.

Q is installed by default in all browsers on Amazon laptops now, and literally cannot be uninstalled. If you don’t have it installed in your IDE, you get a non-dismissible popup nagging you to install it until you do. Many teams are being told they must use AI every single day (some VPs have sent out org-wide emails saying that AI must be used), and engineers have to tell their managers how they are making use of it day-to-day. In my org, OP1 docs must include at least one section about how the team will increase use of AI. Hackathons aren’t allowed to happen anymore unless they are AI-themed. I could keep going. Amazon is absolutely forcing AI usage, and the article undersells how egregious it is.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-05-25 13:34:49+00:00
With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing. I am sure there will always be devs who are doing interesting work but I feel these opportunities will be less and less.

In a way it's only fair. Automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete or miserable. Software devs are a big contributor to automation so we shouldn't be surprised that we are finally managing to automate our own jobs away,
by panstromek | 2025-05-25 13:35:16+00:00
Yea, absolutely.

I think 1 or 2 could potentially be addressed by one of the companines who operates in this space now. SteamOS basically forces this by locking down the system (but provides the option to open it up I believe). System76 has their own distro. I can imagine RedHat or Oracle creating something similar for businesses if they really wanted to (which I doubt). Cross distro standardization and compat doesn't seem likely, though.

3. This depends a lot on the business, but these days a lot of this work moved online so I don't think it needs to be a big blocker necessarily.

To be fair, I doubt Linux will ever become dominant like Windows, at least not in the current form. I think that space is more likely to be addressed by other alternatives - notably Mac or maybe ChromeOS/Android. Partially because a most users simply can't utilize Linux unique features because they don't have a use case for them. The year of Linux desktop my view happens when it becomes a no brainer to use Linux if you're a power user.
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-05-25 13:35:28+00:00
This write up is very interesting to me for one main reason. It underscores how incredibly important it is for anyone dealing in this stuff to do the following…

Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.

Pseudo-anonymity, with the emphasis on the pseudo part, is only as good as you. If you truly believe in Bitcoin and all that implies, it really is in your best interest to be quiet and keep it to yourself, and this knife cuts in more ways than you might expect. You don’t have layers of security like at a traditional bank. You are the weakest link wrt private keys and storage.

Also, even talking about it amongst folks you think are your friends, like fellow Bitcoin users, isn’t wise either. Hypothetically, if you became exceedingly wealthy on paper, it would be in the interest of others to take you out of the equation so you can’t cash out. If that means a five dollar (or whatever they cost these days) wrench to the head so you stop moving… now that value is locked up in the blockchain! Could this happen to any given bitcoin users with just a few satoshi or whatnot? Very unlikely, but don’t forget that a decade and a half ago, a handful of bitcoins could cost you very little money. Now it has gone up exponentially in value and would make you a big fat target.

There are those on /r/bitcoin that think a wrench won’t ever break their wills and spirits. That math is invincible. Don’t think they’ve ever been on the wrong side of one before. Math might be bulletproof, but wetware is very fragile.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-25 13:36:05+00:00
> Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular

Strange enough the people that have the most to gain from keeping things the same, are really successful at convincing the masses who have the most to benefit from change in this regard to vote against it.

https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w...
by curiousgal | 2025-05-25 13:36:06+00:00
> One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.

I am sick of these verbose articles that boil down to nothing basically. What the f does it mean to "produce code"? Like are we just churning out LoCs daily just for the sake of doing so?