MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jameslk | 2025-05-31 05:09:33+00:00
Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d be working 15 hour workweeks, with the rest of the time used for leisure. Instead, we chose consumption, and helicopter money gave us bullshit jobs so we could keep buying more bullshit. This is fairly evident by the fact when the helicopter money runs out, all the bullshit jobs get cut.

AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more bullshit jobs and consumption, not more leisure.
by adithyassekhar | 2025-05-31 05:09:45+00:00
I know I'm being extremely ignorant here, you are seeing my thought process live, but antivirus/firewall for AI? I'm sure the likes of Bitdefender etc. will start including something like this if it's real. I just can't believe any of this is real. After computers and phone, is AI the next market for antiviruses, 1 click optimizing tools and registry cleaners?

Kudos to you for making something, but if this is the next gold rush I want a piece of it too. Never took this AI, mcp, cursor business seriously because I thought of them as just poor boiler plates for web dev. I was wrong.
by pdonis | 2025-05-31 05:10:34+00:00
> Nation states naturally emerged as the technology that allowed nation states (printing press, railroads, etc) emerged.

Nation states were around long before railroads or the printing press; they were around before the pyramids were built. Arguably the original technology that made them viable as an alternative to hunter-gatherer tribes was agriculture.

Modern technology has made modern nation states harder to dislodge in some ways, but that doesn't mean they're a good idea.

> A one world government is at least a feasible possible future

Yes, but I disagree that it's the only feasible option. For one thing, technology can also make it harder for nation states to lie to their people about what they're up to (the technology that is allowing us to have this conversation being the prime example). And once mation states lose the ability to do that, their viability becomes much more problematic, since without being able to tell and sustain such lies, the extent to which they make things worse instead of better becomes more and more widely known, and people are less and less willing to put up with that. A single government that was supposed to rule the entire world would have even worse problems in that regard.
by josephcsible | 2025-05-31 05:11:08+00:00
tl;dr: the New Jersey Turnpike Authority granted Applegreen New Jersey Welcome Centres LLC a monopoly on EV charging along the turnpike, in exchange for 5-10% of their revenue, so the existing charging stations on it (this post is about the Tesla Superchargers specifically) are all being torn down in favor of theirs.
by mikewarot | 2025-05-31 05:12:45+00:00
We've seen this a few times already, and we know how it'll play out. A little actual change, and a lot of failed initiatives, and resulting clean up work.

AI is just the latest version of "no code", that promises results with little skill. The details required to have a good and accessible web site that works reliably on all the popular viewing platforms, can't be delivered with oversimplified requirements, especially when you through hallucination into the mix.

However, the old saying "Garbage In, Garbage Out" still applies.
by dietr1ch | 2025-05-31 05:14:19+00:00
I really don't like the wording about multiple solutions not being logical. I get that instances where resolution doesn't lead you to the unique solution are annoying and don't scratch the right part of your brain, but I feel this audience could be more precise.

Here's a simple Nonogram to annoy everyone

# 1 1

1 . .

1 . .
by echelon | 2025-05-31 05:16:11+00:00
Yes, making money is bad. Open source is only in service of the monopolies.

Only AWS and the hyperscalers deserve to make millions from Redis. Screw the Redis authors and maintainers.

Lesson to all DB startups: fair source your license. Put in anti-hyperscaler clauses into your licenses to preserve your ability to make money and be sustainable.

You can let your customers have unlimited access to your code, but stamp out the ability for AWS or Google to offer managed versions. They need to pay you.

Don't be Redis or Elasticsearch. For them it's too late. They went uber permissive and now their fate is sealed. They're hundred million dollar cash cows for the giants, and the main committers see none of that.
by bonzini | 2025-05-31 05:16:55+00:00
What's the alternative that is efficient, feature complete(*) and more secure?

(*) For example, Android uses SELinux to confine apps, virtual machines (pKVM) to run DRM code, and so on. All these increase the overall security of the system and decrease the cost of kernel bugs, so there's a tradeoff that's not easy to evaluate.
by John7878781 | 2025-05-31 05:17:26+00:00
Generally, it is true that writing by hand is better for recall and memory. However, teachers often use this as a justification to force students to handwrite everything, which can be very counterproductive for a subset of students.

I am currently in high school and have taken 17 AP classes. I have tried taking notes time and time again and have consistently found that they do not help me at all. I have a 3.99 GPA, 1570/1600 SAT, and have received 5s on all of my AP Exams. I know how to study and know what works best for me. I am not a notes person, and when teachers force their "scientific" teaching methods upon me, it does nothing but harm my learning and waste time.

I love the idea of science being incorporated into learning but we need to make sure students are allowed to discover what works best for them.
by csomar | 2025-05-31 05:17:30+00:00
Elon Musk experiment is the worst anchor that can be used for comparison since the dude destabilized Twitter (re-branding, random layoffs, etc...). I'd be more interested in companies that went leaner but did it in a sane manner. The Internet user base grew between 2022 and now but Twitter might have lost users in that time period and certainly didn't make any new innovations beyond trying to charge its users more and confusing them.
by calmbonsai | 2025-05-31 05:17:36+00:00
Well-done on learning how you best learn. A book I recommend to any/all college students is "What Smart Students Know" https://a.co/d/iB8LNNW . It still has, sadly, a very click-baity title and marketing, but it has enormous practical study advice for different subjects.

Wow. I kid you not, we never were offered any extra credit aside from the occasional lab follow-ups.

I found my Humanities classes usually not worth attending due to the large lecture hall environment and so much route-memorization. It was far more time-efficient to speed-listen through the lectures on audio recordings and "attend my class of 1" while taking notes.

I found office hours very hit-or-miss depending on the professor. My electronics professor was a horrid lecturer, but awesome 1-on-1. His office hours ended up being "my class". The exact opposite of my physics professor who was a real showman with whiteboard diagrams and connecting desperate topics during lecture, but an absolute ass in person.

I ended up applying "selective neglect" to a two junior year courses as they weren't in my major, didn't stack, and the entire grade was based on only 3 exams. I just crammed for each exam. It suuucked at the time and was super-stressful, but looking-back it really ended up being the best use of my limited resources.

I do wholeheartedly concur with physically writing down lecture notes and doing as much work as possible "on paper". It helps with both retention and concept synthesis.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-31 05:17:46+00:00
Proper async architecture requires designing a scheduler appropriate for your workload. Many (most?) async applications ignore or skip this part and try to delegate it to a runtime or the OS, usually with mediocre results. Designing a robust scheduler usually requires excellent visibility into the real-time distribution of available resources so that you can dynamically schedule load away from the resources under the most pressure at every instant in time. If you aren’t going to do that work, async may not be the best architecture choice.
by chatmasta | 2025-05-31 05:18:00+00:00
That’s a good point but perhaps you underestimate the ingenuity borne from constraints.

If you’ve got trucks arriving with meat that’s going to expire in a week, and all your stores have empty shelves, surely there is a system to get that meat into customer mouths before it expires. It could be as simple as asking each store, when they call (which they surely will), how much meat they ordered last week, and sending them the same this week. You could build out more complicated distribution mechanisms, but it should be enough to keep your goods from perishing until you manage to repair your digital crutch.
by silisili | 2025-05-31 05:18:37+00:00
There's like 3 things basically the same (ISA brown, Golden Comet, Cinnamon Queen), all red sex links, and they are the best all rounder you can ask for. Best layers, not broody, docile. I've had just about everything, but this year just raising random mixes I got as eggs to let the kid incubate.

So I think you already found the best. I didn't mean to refute anything you wrote, just adding some context for passer-bys.
by sirbread | 2025-05-31 05:20:16+00:00
greed, the emotion, is now a simple game of psychology and numbers.

every round, pick an integer between 1 and 10. at the end of the round, points are calculated as: (number you picked) / (number of people who picked that number) if multiple people pick the same number, they split the points. for example, if 4 people choose 8, each gets 2 points (8 / 4). if only you pick 7, you get all 7 points. so, the more greedy people are, the less points they get.

it has a built-in chat so you can bluff about the numbers you chose, and a stat record (people vs points graphs). and a leaderboard...

open source at: https://github.com/sirbread/greed
by sbierwagen | 2025-05-31 05:21:19+00:00
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/30/ascended-economy/

Robot run iron mine that sells iron ore to a robot run steel mill that sells steel plate to a robot run heavy truck manufacturer that sells heavy trucks to robot run iron mines, etc etc.

The material handling of heavy industry is already heavily automated, almost by definition. You just need to take out the last few people.
by hattmall | 2025-05-31 05:25:54+00:00
I think that's true in software development. A lot of the focus is on coding because that's really the domain of the people interested in AI, because ultimately they ARE software. But the killer app isn't software, it's anything where the operation is formulaic, but the formula can be tedious to figure out, but once you know it you can confirm that it's correct by working backwards. Software has far too many variables, not least of which is the end user. On the other hand things like accounting, finance, and engineering are far more suitable for trained models and back testing for conformity.
by neepi | 2025-05-31 05:26:10+00:00
Amazon pricing isn't always that good and they lie about the discounts and retail prices, at least here in the UK. My US colleagues tell me the same is true in the US. I've actually found that general high street crap seller Argos here tends to have better retail prices than Amazon. I can just amble on down the road and get what I needed same day pick up in person rather than wait for a delivery to turn up.
by petersellers | 2025-05-31 05:27:37+00:00
If replacing Jira is really as easy as you claim, then it would have happened by now. At the very least, we'd be getting hit by a deluge of HN posts and articles about how to spin up your very own project management application with an LLM.

I think that this sentiment, along with all of the hype around AI in general, is failing to grasp a lot of the complexity around software creation. I'm not just talking about writing the code for a new application - I'm talking about maintaining that application, ensuring that it executes reliably and correctly, thinking about the features and UX required to make it as frictionless as possible (and voice input isn't the solution there, I'm very confident of that).
by elif | 2025-05-31 05:27:50+00:00
with autonomous vehicles, the narrative of imperceptibly slow incremental change about chasing 9's is still the zeitgeist despite an actual 10x improvement in homicidality compared to humans already existing.

There is a lag in how humans are reacting to AI which is probably a reflexive aspect of human nature. There are so many strategies being employed to minimize progress in a technology which 3 years ago did not exist and now represents a frontier of countless individual disciplines.
by sneak | 2025-05-31 05:27:58+00:00
No, nonfree licenses are bad. Nobody has any issue with people making money with free software.

We have issue with people not respecting software freedoms.

You seem to be intentionally conflating the two things.

Why make source available at all if you are just going to release proprietary software? It’s open source cosplay at that point. Just make commercial proprietary software like a normal software company; don’t pretend you are open source just because your source code is readable on GitHub.
by Nasrudith | 2025-05-31 05:28:01+00:00
The worst case for such a cycle is generating new jobs in reverse engineers. Although in practice with what we have seen with machinists it tends to just accelerate existing trends towards outsourcing to countries who haven't had the 'entry level collapse'.

We've already eliminated certain junior level domains essentially by design. There aren't any 'barber-surgeons' with only two years of training for good reason. Instead we have surgery integrated it into a more lengthy and complicated educational path to become what we now would consider a 'proper' surgeon.

I think the answer is that if the 'junior' is uneconomical or otherwise unacceptable be prepared to pay more for the alternative, one way or another.
by goku12 | 2025-05-31 05:28:02+00:00
Touch typing is a very underrated skill. Few people feel the need to learn it. But it's immediately useful. The keyboard simply disappears from your mind, sparing your entire attention for the task at hand and increasing your productivity noticeably. It reduces the strain on your eyes too. Even allows you to close your eyes in between long typing sessions.

Learning the first layout is a bit hard and may take upto a month. Subsequent layouts are easier to learn. And you can use the same keyboard for all those layouts. I can handle US Qwerty and my native language effortlessly now. Now considering Colemak-DH. Touch typing is something I feel every programmer, writer, journalist, documenter and secretary must learn.
by worthless-trash | 2025-05-31 05:28:04+00:00
I'm having vrsjmp crash on start:

vrs git:(main) ./target/debug/vrsjmp

thread 'main' panicked at /Users/Username/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-1949cf8c6b5b557f/tao-0.16.10/src/platform_impl/macos/window.rs:268:21: null pointer dereference occurred note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace thread caused non-unwinding panic. aborting. [1] 31647 abort ./target/debug/vrsjmp

Do you accept PR's for fixes ?
by codr7 | 2025-05-31 05:33:10+00:00
Yeah, anyone who's seen it trying to improve code could tell you what that optimization looks like.

Oh, this part is taking too long, let's replace it with an empty function.

Oh wait, now it's not working, let's add the function.

Oh, this part is taking too long...

It would be hilarious if this world wasn't full of idiots.
by d1sxeyes | 2025-05-31 05:33:29+00:00
> The point is if you're outsourcing to India you want low cost and are not concerned with quality

First part is a reasonable assumption, the second is not, and this is what’s opening you up to allegations of xenophobia.

The allure (and promise) of outsourcing is the idea that you can pay less for a comparable service due to the cost of living disparity between your location and the outsourcing provider. Whether any individual provider achieves that or not is another question, but saying “if your service is provided from India you are not concerned about quality”, or “if your service is provided from India you will have a constant cycle of low quality staff” does sound a lot like xenophobia.

> No one there wants to work for those outsourcing chop shops

This is simply not true. There are a lot of benefits to working for a company like this, although as with any company, it’s not all upside. Of course turnover is high because you have a lot of entry level folks. Regardless of where you are in the world, no-one wants to work a level one help desk until they retire.

> We can all pick and choose good stories. What about Tata Steel's total mismanagement of Tata Steel Europe? And JLR isn't exactly in good shape as you say it is. You just picked some numbers that sound good.

Yeah odd example, JLR is not doing great, and Tata Steel is also struggling, but overall the Tata Group are doing well.
by Arainach | 2025-05-31 05:34:23+00:00
I disagree. The first Trump administration showed that not only were some competent people interested in working in the Trump cabinet, plenty of other competent people were content to keep doing their non-political jobs well for the government, running things, fighting for normal people and what they right, pushing back against overreach.

The second Trump administration took aggressive measures against all competent people - selecting a horrifying cabinet with literally no one qualified for the role they fill and working as fast as possible to fire as many as possible, even through illegal means later rejected by the courts, and punishing any who remain. It's a one-direction causation.
by csomar | 2025-05-31 05:35:06+00:00
I think the takeaway is that interest rates have to be maintained relatively high as the ZIRP era has showed that it breaks the free market. There is a reason why the Trump wants to lower the interest rate.

Sure it is painful but a ZIRP economy doesn't listen to the end consumers. No reason to innovate and create crazy ideas if you have plenty of income.
by gitaarik | 2025-05-31 05:35:54+00:00
Ok, this is interesting indeed and I'll investigate more into it. But I think my points still stand. Let me elaborate.

An LLM only learns through input text. It doesn't have a first-person 3D experience of the world. So it can't execute physical experiments, or even understand them. It can understand the texts about it, but it can't visualize it, because it doesn't have a visual experience.

And ultimately our physical world is governed by physical processes. So at the fundamentals of physical reality, the LLMs lack understanding. And therefore will stay dependent on humans educating and correcting it.

You might get pretty impressively far with all kinds of techniques, but you can't cross this barrier with just LLMs. If you want to, you have to give it senses like humans to give it an experience of the world, and make it understand these experiences. And sure they're already working on that, but that is a lot harder to create than a comprehensive machine learning algorithm.
Show HN: I built a free Chrome extension to merge and split PDF files
by puskark4 | 2025-05-31 05:36:46+00:00
Hi all, I built this extension as I was speaking to a user about needing expensive licence just to manipulate PDFs. This is fully local and works offline. I've tests with large files and works quite well. Let me know what you think or if you'd like any features.
by itishappy | 2025-05-31 05:39:41+00:00
John Maynard Keynes (1930) - Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren

> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

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

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/cont...
by intended | 2025-05-31 05:40:04+00:00
This is my favorite thing to point out from the day we started talking about autonomous vehicles on tech sites.

If you took a Tesla or a Waymo and dropped into into a tier 2 city in India, it will stop moving.

Driving data is cultural data, not data about pure physics.

You will never get to full self driving, even with more processing power, because the underlying assumptions are incorrect. Doing more of the same thing, will not achieve the stated goal of full self driving.

You would need to have something like networked driving, or government supported networks of driving information, to deal with the cultural factor.

Same with GenAI - the tooling factor will not magically solve the people, process, power and economic factors.
by John7878781 | 2025-05-31 05:40:29+00:00
> How is your learning harmed?

One's goal when studying is to optimize learning as a function of time. When note-taking is forced, this goal becomes impossible for me. I spend time taking notes when I could be spending time on more impactful study techniques (videos, practice sets, etc). To be clear, I think the notion that "notes are useless" only applies to specific groups of people. The bottom line is that everyone learns differently, and forcing a certain approach is an awful idea.

> How have you been disallowed from discovering what works best for you?

I would not say that I have been directly "disallowed," but undeniably, there are bandwidth constraints for students. If I'm taking multiple hard courses, I only have so much time to spend. If I am spending my time note-taking, which my teacher requires to turn in to him/her, then I have less time to do other, more productive things with my time. I think naturally, freedom spurs efficiency. Free and competitive markets are more efficient than command economies. Arguably, this same principle holds true on an individual level.
by bigiain | 2025-05-31 05:40:55+00:00
> I would love my phone to know I’m in Church for a wedding or at a play and not have to remember to switch.

I kinda have the opposite problem. I turn my phone to silent because I'm at a restaurant or cinema or whatever, then 3 or 4 weeks later discover I never remembered to turn it back.

And I'm 100% OK with that, I've gotten good enough at turning the ringer on when I'm expecting a call, and not worrying about "missing calls" from people who aren't in my VIP list or who don't leave voicemail.
by geraneum | 2025-05-31 05:41:11+00:00
It’s true that there are similarities between what you mentioned and what’s happening in this case. From the article:

> The result is a test-time loop that looks less like “chat with a compiler” in the case of sequential revision, and more like structured exploratory search, guided by explicit optimization hypotheses and aggressively parallel evaluation.

My conclusion would be that we’ve now learned to apply LLMs’ capabilities to shrink solution space where we have a clear evaluation function as well as solutions to problems that might follow similar patterns. This applies in this case as well.

IMO, It’s not about model X gaining on other models or model Y being able to reason about the solutions, etc. in a way that other models couldn’t.
by drodgers | 2025-05-31 05:41:54+00:00
No doubt from me that it’s a sigmoid, but how high is the plateau? That’s also hard to know from early in the process, but it would be surprising if there’s not a fair bit of progress left to go.

Human brains seem like an existence proof for what’s possible, but it would be surprising if humans also represent the farthest physical limits of what’s technologically possible without the constraints of biology (hip size, energy budget etc).