MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alexriddle | 2025-05-11 12:06:26+00:00
Lots of insurance covers these types of situation which are the result of careless acts...

Don't take the right safety precautions and burn down a customers house - liability insurance

Click on a link in a phishing email and open up your network to a ransomware attack - cyber insurance

Forget to lock your door and get burgled - property insurance

Write buggy software which leads to a hospital having to suspend operations - PI (or E&O) insurance

Fail to adequately adhere to regulatory obligations and get sued - D&O insurance

Obviously there will be various conditions etc which apply but I've been in Insurance a long time and cover for carelessness and stupidity is one of the things which keeps the industry going. I've dealt directly with (paid) claims for all of the above situations.

It doesn't absolve responsibility though, it just protects against the financial loss. I suspect if you leave a child alone with an AI and the house burns down that's going to be the least of your problems.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-11 12:06:29+00:00
I think ASUS' turnaround time on this was quite good, I don't see the problem here. ASUS didn't deny the bug, didn't threaten to prosecute anyone for reverse engineering their software, and quickly patched their software. I have no doubt that before the days of responsible disclosure, this process would've taken months and might have involved the police.

Normal people don't care about vulnerabilities. They use phones that haven't received updates in three years to do their finances. If you spam the news with CVEs, people will just get tired of hearing about how every company sucks and become apathetic once there's a real threat.

The EU is working on a different solution. Stores are not permitted to sell products with known vulnerabilities under new cybersecurity regulations. That means if ASUS keeps fucking up, their motherboards become dead stock and stores won't want to sell their hardware anymore. That's not just computer hardware, but also smart fridges and smart washing machines. Discover a vulnerability in your dish washer and you may end up costing the dish washer industry millions in unusable stock if their vendors haven't bothered to add a way to update the firmware.
by casey2 | 2025-05-11 12:07:05+00:00
I'm so very impressed by your capacity for rationalization the way you surgically dismantle this world view that no one actually proposed is very good and the way that you swipe at the poor is very. good. The way that you don't actually argue for anything is good too. The way you ramble on about imagined conversations between you and your young self, while it did nothing to clarify your point... actually it did, it let everyone know that this was just a trite exercise in performative rationalism so masquerading as philosophy so you can signal and maybe gain some social points in whatever less-wrong adjacent tribe you find yourself in. Be honest you don't want to help anybody with this you just want to string words together until you get undeserved respect. Gross and stinky.

Seriously why is lesswrong dogshit so popular here? Are they all they sons of VC investors or do they just all have Theil as a surrogate father? Total crap.
by boricj | 2025-05-11 12:07:07+00:00
Sometimes it's useful to be able to run modern software on ancient hardware.

I once made an image of a hard disk so old it wouldn't work on anything newer than a Pentium. I plugged in a USB PCI card+USB stick and booted a modern-ish at the time Debian Live CD.

It took over 5 minutes to decompress just the kernel and a hour to copy the HDD to the USB stick, but it did work. The time delta between the oldest and newest component on that system was well over 20 years, sometimes this is what you have to do with what you have on hand.
by Veen | 2025-05-11 12:07:28+00:00
Science isn't the only form of empiricism. In this case, the writer is reporting what she has learned through a long process of observation, a useful form of experience. No doubt in the process she has formed ideas, watched to see if they bear out, changed her mind, examined events in context and their outcomes, come up with generalizations based on observations over time, and so on. You know, how most people learn most things.

Could she be wrong, sure, but as we have learned over the past few years, so can more "scientific" approaches to psychology and sociology. But that doesn't really matter because what she's doing isn't failed science, but taking part in a sort of humanistic shared inquiry. It's a woman reporting her observations and thoughts, not as claimed facts, but as suggestions readers can integrate into their own developing understanding, so they can build on them to make their own observations and inferences.
by necovek | 2025-05-11 12:08:38+00:00
The point is that splitting Google Ads business from eg. Google Maps business will make GAds company and GMaps company set up a mutually beneficial business arrangement — not much needs to change there!

The problem with monopolies is that a company like Google, by dominating one space (be it Maps tech or Advertising marketshare), it can use that as a moat to start dominating other areas, even at a loss (which is what it has done starting from Google Search which it never really monetized as a business but instead jumped into advertising even though it was set up because founders hated online ads).

It's tricky to stop this from the get go, because you want to encourage investment into different markets from established companies.

Free markets are known not to be able to stop this, which is why we've got anti-monopoly laws all around the world.
by gorbachev | 2025-05-11 12:09:00+00:00
In every interaction with anyone they're reading you. How deeply varies by occasion and whom you're interacting with.

For example, a sales person will be reading you with everything they got to find the best angle to sell you stuff.

On a first date, you can bet both people involves are trying to read each other every minute of the date, whether intentionally or unconsciously. They even often talk about how they read you afterwards with their friends.

A long-time partner probably doesn't try to read you every time you talk.
by AndrewDucker | 2025-05-11 12:09:32+00:00
Telling home users to check that their existing smart devices will still work in 13 years seems like overkill. It seems unlikely that more than a tiny fraction of them will still be in use then, if any.

Businesses installing new smart infrastructure and devices will need to pay attention to this, and in 10-15 years they'll need to work out what to replace, of course.
by angusturner | 2025-05-11 12:09:44+00:00
I think this is article is too generous about the use of stdio - I have found this extremely buggy so far, especially in the python sdk.

Also if you want to wrap any existing code that logs or prints to stdout then it causes heaps of ugly messages and warnings as it interferes with the comms between client and server.

I just want a way to integrate tools with Claude Desktop that doesn’t make a tonne of convoluted and weird design choices.
by fluidcruft | 2025-05-11 12:11:09+00:00
Honestly, I haven't used either of ChatGPT or Perplexity seriously. They haven't performed particularly well when I tested them and dun-dun-dun in my uses Gemini has been growing on me. And another odd thing at the moment is that Google's search has somehow become better at giving me the results I'm looking for and DDG is giving a lot of annoying crap.
by josephg | 2025-05-11 12:12:05+00:00
I went to a google users' group meeting once - maybe 15 years ago. I got to chatting with this smarmy ~22 year old googler who was there. We somehow got onto the topic of ruby on rails - which I've barely used. He very loudly and confidently told me rails was bad technology, and people who used it were idiots. I asked him about his experience using rails - and he said he's never used it before. I asked him the obvious question - why does he thinks its bad if he's never used it before? "I don't need to use it."

We went back and forth. He readily admitted he didn't know anything about rails. But his position was essentially that because he worked at google, he was smart enough to know rails is bad without needing to actually know anything about it. He was beyond needing any facts or experience to know it was bad.

It was amazing. I've never seen someone convince me they were an absolute tosser like that before. Nothing I could say would make him think twice about his stupid opinion.

But, Google isn't that one guy. They have 183 000 employees. Thats a really large number of people - more people than most of us will meet in our lifetime. They have some entitled wankers for sure. But also, some of the best people I've ever worked with are googlers or ex-googlers. I'm sure Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc are just the same. You don't really work with the hundreds of thousands of people at the company. You work with the dozen or so people on your team. At the end of the day, getting on with them is what actually counts.
by jeffrallen | 2025-05-11 12:12:15+00:00
Same as it did it 10 years ago.

Generalists will be undervalued, but will always be able to find a job.

There will be pockets of extraordinary cruelty and pockets of extraordinary grace.

Where you find yourself on the cruelty/grace/specialist/generalist surface will still be up to you, but also, just as it has been for thousands of years, also up to fate.

Do your best, control the things you can, and accept the things you can't. Remember that work is just work, not living.

Hang in there, it's only 10 years more to get there...
by perlgeek | 2025-05-11 12:13:23+00:00
Let's take Android. Who has a revenue stream and needs Android? All the major phone vendors except Apple.

They could join up and finance Android development, and presumably Android Auto too.

Yes, there would be a disruption, a consortium likely isn't going to work as efficiently as google did, but it won't be Android's death.

Google Drive has competitors (Dropbox, OneDrive), so it to be possible to operate without sponsorship from other business units.

And so son...
by okanat | 2025-05-11 12:15:16+00:00
> I don't think you can fathom the amount of people that have phones with roughly 3 years of no android updates as their primary device with which they use all the digital services they use, Banking, Texting, Doomscrolling, Porn, ...

I do. I'm an embedded software developer in a team that cares about having our software up-to-date a lot.

> Users, especially the most likely to be exploited are already vulnerable to so much shit and even when there's a literal finished fix available, these vendors do shit about it. Only when their bottomline is threatened because even my mom knows "Don't buy anything with ASUS on it, your bank account gets broken into if you do" will we see change.

Yes individuals are quite exploitable. That's why I really like EU's new regulations Cyber Resiliency Act and new Radio Equipment Directive. When governments enforce reasonable disclosure and fixing timelines, then threaten your company's ability to sell things in a market alltogether, if you don't comply, it works wonders. Companies hate not being able to make money. So all the extra security policies and vulnerability tracking we have been experimenting with and secure-by-default languages are now the highest priority for us.

EU regulation makes sure that you're not going to be sold a router that's instantly hackable in a year. It will also force chip manufacturers to have meaningful maintenance windows like 5-10 years due to pressure from ODMs. That's why you're seeing all the smartphone manufacturers have extended support timelines, it is not pure market pressure. They didn't give fuck about it for more than 10 years. When EU came with a big stick though...

Spreading word-of-mouth knowledge works until a point. Having your entire product line being banned entering a market works almost every time.
by stingraycharles | 2025-05-11 12:15:48+00:00
Yes, the point is that the ad company should become the middle man, like things used to be before everything consolidated into Google.

People have valuable data? Sell it to a middle man.

People want to display targeted ads? Sell it to a middle man.

People want to buy targeted ads? Buy it from a middle man.

Not everything consolidated into a single company.

The whole infrastructure and market already exists, the problem is that Google has a monopoly on certain data and it’s abusing its position.
by StefanBatory | 2025-05-11 12:16:49+00:00
I think there will be a crash of any sort of junior positions and the employment numbers will fall down. There will be need for experienced, intelligent developers, but only highly below average.

Average devs will be no longer needed as all they can do a senior will be able to do in the same time with LLM.

I think we'll go back to the system as in the Mythical Man-Month - one lead developer, one below them to do less important tasks, and a few domain experts not related to programming. Ironically I think good front-end developers may remain useful as UI/UX experts.
by darajava | 2025-05-11 12:17:07+00:00
I managed to sign up to the free version (by altering the URL to not point to localhost) and I uploaded a sample computer science exam paper. That's as far as I got though - its status is "Pending" (No idea what that means). There's a button with a play icon saying "Select" (No idea what that should do, it does nothing). The "Smart study assistant" doesn't work. I'd suggest fixing the functionality first, and then doing an audit on all the buttons in your main interface and login flow and removing as many buttons as you possibly can. Seems like it could be a good idea.
by furrball010 | 2025-05-11 12:17:30+00:00
I share your concern, but perhaps for a different reason. I think the more code is added, the more problems/bugs emerge, whether a human or AI codes it.

However, with AI coding tools it's becoming a lot easier to write A LOT of code. And all this code (similar to when a human would write it) adds complexity and bugs. So it's not just the quality, it's also the quantity of code that damages existing code bases (in my view).
by wiradikusuma | 2025-05-11 12:18:01+00:00
Sometimes, because the service sneakily shortens the link. I wanted to share a WIP whitelabel ticket sales platform ( https://pentas.id ) with a friend. I didn't have time to build the logic to generate QR code, so I just googled "online QR generator". I pasted my link, a QR code was generated. When I tried it using Pixel's Camera app, the preview is NOT my link. Although when I tap it, it eventually goes to my link.
by calrain | 2025-05-11 12:18:07+00:00
I think they are useful as long as you use them the right way.

Dig into problems, try to understand why it was solved a specific way, ask what are the con's of doing it another way, and let it know you are a learning and want to understand more of the fundamentals.

LLMs are just a tool, so try and use them to help you learn the fundamentals of the language.

It could also be argued that using StackOverflow to solve a problem doesn't help you understand a problem, and equally, just asking an LLM for answers doesn't help you understand the language.
by api | 2025-05-11 12:18:19+00:00
The alternative is autocracy entrenched by censorship… but…

We seem to be facing a situation where autocrats, with the help of technology, are now very good at hacking free speech by either using targeted manipulation or just DOSing the public square. The latter is Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” and Putin’s “firehose of falsehood.” It’s a variant of the Gish gallop at scale.

I am deeply concerned about the existence of any kind of free society in the future. Maybe that’s what drives humans into space finally: to escape the corrupt decadent technofeudal autocrats on Earth.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-05-11 12:18:23+00:00
What’s your reference on this? I’ll admit it is very difficult to say what Plato thought, rather what ideas he discussed. I know very little about how he viewed physics, apart from the Timeaus.

There, I’m familiar with how Plato associated the four classical elements—earth, air, fire, and water—with specific geometric solids:

Fire: Tetrahedron

Air: Octahedron

Water: Icosahedron

Earth: Cube

The geometrical properties corresponded to the physical properties; for instance, the sharp points of the tetrahedron caused the penetrating nature of fire; whereas the cube produced solidity, etc.
by casey2 | 2025-05-11 12:18:34+00:00
Firstly you forgot YouTube. The vast majorities of these have alternatives that have existed before and currently, and of course none of these will "die". If they can’t be profitable without a monopoly, then consumers and businesses shouldn’t be overcharged for the services they depend on just to keep "Fitbit" afloat.

>In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple

Then Apple will be broken up.
by NegativeK | 2025-05-11 12:18:52+00:00
For any timeline the company can't hit, whether it's a week or 90 days, they should come up with compensating controls, detections, etc that users can implement. Managing vulnerable software isn't a new science.

> The security researcher should have an approx. idea of how or what to do to fix

Any expectation put on the security researcher beyond "maybe don't cause unnecessary shit storms with zero days" needs to be met with an offer of a fat contract.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-05-11 12:19:07+00:00
There's already skill issues in the field even with senior people and without AI. It's why we test people to witch hunt for those imposters. Lots of talk about how one bad hire can ruin the whole team or something. Even competent developers stretching across multiple skillsets (front end, back end, ops) that they aren't experts in. And plenty of bad code and technical debt from bad off/on-shore contractors due to skill issues and communication barriers.

I'm not saying you're wrong though, but just that it won't be much different.
Ask HN: I want to give coding AIs a fair shot, where do I start?
by thiht | 2025-05-11 12:19:15+00:00
I use VSCode and for the past few months the release notes have been largely about AI features. I use Copilot to autocomplete some code (the passive tab autocomplete feature) and sometimes generate unit tests with right click->Copilot->Generate tests. That’s it. I also use ChatGPT on the side to discuss higher level decisions or to understand some stuff I don’t know about in details.

I know there are many more features (chat, agent mode, MCP, add files to context…) but I struggle to understand how it works and how to integrate it in my flow.

How do you use AI on an existing codebase? I work on a monorepo with ~15 microservices, how to make it understand how it works? How do you give it more context? What am I missing on and what can I try?

I have a surprisingly hard time finding good and recent resources actually explaining what to do in a real, professional context, beyond generating a todo app from scratch.
by gardnr | 2025-05-11 12:19:40+00:00
It's difficult to imagine what it will be like, but it will be radically different. There will always be a need for a programmer to be able to review code and make sure things are going in the "right" direction. One can speculate if this one human + AI will replace 10, 100, or 1,000 human workers.

Recently, there was an analysis of when we might get to Post-Labor Economics:

> 2025 to 2030: Collapse of knowledge work. The "KVM Rule" applies: any job you can do entirely with a keyboard, video, and mouse will be fully replaced.

https://x.com/daveshapi/status/1916188978727784847?t=9YNl90V...
by exe34 | 2025-05-11 12:19:49+00:00
I think there's always been entrepreneurial kids - back in my days they bought a 6 pack of pepsi and sold them individually at a markup. Today the hustling is done by making apps and websites.

Where do you get the "next Bill Gates" part from? I can only see a run-of-the-mill "professional" website, of which there are countless on the web nowadays. The product itself seems to be something that the OP wanted for himself and managed to turn into something others can use. I seriously doubt its utility myself, but I don't see how this makes him "pretend to be the next Bill Gates"?
by idiotsecant | 2025-05-11 12:20:13+00:00
The idea that you could just learn python and make an upper 5% salary in the first place was absolutely wild in the first place. I've been screaming at anyone who would listen for the last 2 decades that programming is a skilled trade and it's practitioners should be unionizing. This is more true than it ever was. It won't happen, the HN cadre will continue to turn up its nose at the idea until they are slowly incinerated by the roaring flame of capital exploitation.
by segmondy | 2025-05-11 12:20:48+00:00
Again, you are playing around with an idea that's not concrete. So perhaps you won't need that person. Perhaps AI agents will be so good, you can control all of them via conversion/prompting. In which case, any individual could control multiple agents.

So the question should be,

"Will AI agents get good enough, where any individual with just a conversion can get a fully functional AI agent such as a coding agent, a legal review agent, a design agent?"
by giantg2 | 2025-05-11 12:22:24+00:00
In 10 years, I suspect we will have more off-shoring, extremely few entry/mid jobs on-shore, and an increasing push towards being tech lead like guides. I think companies will use off-shore labor and LLMs to do most of the grunt work while we have senior+ engineers focused on guiding those people/agents.

It's just one more step in the multi-generational trend of eliminating/outsourcing lower skilled jobs and increasing the barriers to entry for the remaining jobs. I'm not optimistic.
by alok-g | 2025-05-11 12:22:50+00:00
More generally, which all tools that can target multiple platforms, produce relatively small binaries for simple applications? And which of these are lean themselves?

May be I am doing something wrong, but I had installed Android Studio, then Android emulator, SDK, etc., and before I could get a hello-world app to compile, some 30 GB were gone from my disk space.

If it comes to it, I do not personally mind using multiple tools and code for different target platforms, as much as (a) both the tools themselves and the binaries generated are lean, and (b) the development tooling itself is on a single platform just so that I do not need to maintain multiple hardware. (I currently use Windows, would likely need to move over).

Thanks.
by jpc0 | 2025-05-11 12:22:51+00:00
> Forget to lock your door and get burgled - property insurance

I’m pretty sure this will be the same for the other insurance you mentioned but for property insurance if you left your front door open you will have a hard time getting the insurance to actually pay out your claim. At least here they require a burglar alarm and they require it to be armed when nobody is on site or they will absolutely decline the claim.

Insurance insures against risk, but there’s a threshold to that and if you prove to be above it they will decline your claim or void your insurance in totality.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-11 12:23:39+00:00
10 years is a long time.

Enough time for LLMs to see marked improvement and possibly the hallucination issue to be significantly reduced or solved.

When then happens the remaining software engineers won’t be skilled. Like many people in the principle or staff position or managerial position… technical skills don’t matter. AI now handles technical skills and the people controlling the AI are people who can navigate the politics.