MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-24 16:40:20+00:00
I've commented many times before how I've become a bit disillusioned with pg's writing over the past decade or so, because it always seemed to lack anything beyond a surface level of introspection. He always seemed to be pushing the idea that qualities that make a person great at startups are the most important thing in the world - not surprising given his industry, but to me many of his essays just felt more and more self-serving, while never commenting on (or, in my opinion, really even understanding) the real societal negatives that I think have been a consequence (admittedly unexpected) of the startup boom.

But, in pg's defense, when it comes to his writing style and the quality of his prose, I think he's generally top notch, and even though I may disagree with him more often now, I appreciate the structure and clarity of his writing. Given how influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified to write about how his communication style makes an impact.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-24 16:42:37+00:00
No.

Most of the recent (5 years) labor shocks from automation have been in white collar industries. White collar professions are those most likely to be impacted by AI/ML driven automation gains [0]

Industrial automation has already taken over skilled manufacturing jobs and HN's demographic of white collar professionals didn't complain then. Those who were impacted during that era of automation and outsourcing will not come out to the streets in solidarity with white collar employees getting impacted by Copilot or domain-specific models. Frankly, they mostly vote for Trump and HNers mostly voted for Harris.

Imo, a major undercurrent of the current culture war across the west is that it is morphing into a class war due to economic segregation leading to echo chambers in consumption [1] along with vocations [2]. As a result, White collar professionals live in an entirely different ecosystem from blue collar professionals.

No political force will fight for onshoring services jobs or incorporating barriers to reduce automation in most white collar jobs. We've already seen this realignment with skilled trades dominated unions like the UAW backing the current admin, but white collar leaning unions like AFL-CIO opposing them.

This article itself falls into the same trap of failing to recognize that HNers jobs are most exposed to AI and automation [3]. Low skill jobs have already been automated and commodified significantly over the last 25 years.

[0] - https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smj.328...

[1] - https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/how-did...

[2] - https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/19/red-doc-bl...

[3] = https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u...
by mjr00 | 2025-05-24 16:42:40+00:00
> What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do?

Part of the problem is the definition of "AI" is extremely nebulous. In your case, you seem to be talking about an AGI which can self-improve, while also having some physical interface letting it interact with the real world. This reality may be 6 months away, 6 years away, or 600 years away.

Given the current state of LLMs it's much more likely they will create jobs, or change workflows in existing jobs, rather than wholesale replace humans. The recent public spectacle of Microsoft's state-of-the-art Github Copilot Agent[0] shows we're quite far away from AI agents wholesale replacing even very junior positions for knowledge work.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152
by raincole | 2025-05-24 16:43:19+00:00
Paul Graham's essays read like typical self-help books. Considering how popular self-help books are, I guess you can call that "good writing" for general population?

[0]: a typical example: https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

If you didn't tell me this is from PG I would think it's from some self help book.
by tzury | 2025-05-24 16:44:32+00:00
Paul Graham doesn’t moon-light as a writer, rather, writing is one of the core skills that made YC what it is.

He spends months chiseling each essay because he understands that clear thinking is expressed through clear prose. Dismissing that craft because he also knows Lisp is like trashing Stephen King’s storytelling because he can ride a bike.

If you only grant “literary merit” to people who never shipped a line of code, your definition’s too narrow for the real world—where ideas, not résumés, decide who we read.
by fithisux | 2025-05-24 16:46:17+00:00
I think we are blessed to have good experimental languages Odin/Zig/C3/Mercury and

more established like D/Nim/Rust in addition to C/C++.

We have choices. What we do not have is interoperability because of the C monopoly.

PS: There are others for sure, I have not used them Jai/V/Austral/Vale .....
by amluto | 2025-05-24 16:46:49+00:00
I can guess a few reasons:

Cost. This may not be cheap.

Rebar is often part of a structure’s electrical ground. Any protective current supplied might end up exiting through other connected grounds and doing little good.

How do you do this on a bridge? The rebar is one electrode. Where’s the other?

Even if you get it working, I would be a bit nervous about the reaction products. If there’s any current flow, then something is being reduced. If the medium is moist concrete, then it might well be water that gets reduced to hydrogen gas and hydroxide ions. The hydroxide ions may be harmless, but the hydrogen could be problematic.
by skywhopper | 2025-05-24 16:47:47+00:00
You’re just making things up here. LLMs or other forms of “AI” can’t do most jobs, so it’s silly to speculate what will happen when it replaces humans in those jobs it can’t actually perform.

To the extent it can automate tasks under the direction of humans, it’s not even clear it makes those humans more productive, but it is clear that it harms those humans’ own skillsets (beyond prompt engineering).
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-05-24 16:48:28+00:00
It's important to note that compared to human labor, AI is extremely cheap.

Society as a whole will produce more products and services and have to work less for this.

In other words, products and services will become much cheaper.

In the future, living on social welfare might offer a lifestyle more luxurious than working full-time is now.

So if most peoples life goes from "I have to work hard to pay my bills" to "I don't have to work as hard and can afford more", that will not drive people to go fight on the streets.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-24 16:49:01+00:00
> it can partially or completely miss what its supposed to find in the discovery process and lead you to believe that there just isn't anything worth pursuing in that particular venue.

The problem is that American and UK legal systems never got forced to prune the sometimes centuries-old garbage. And modern Western legal systems tend to have more explicit laws and regulations instead of prior case law, but still, they also accumulate lots of garbage.

IMHO, all laws and regulations should come with a set expiry date. If the law or regulation is not renewed, it gets dropped off the book. And for legal systems that have case law, court rulings should expire no later than five years, to force a transition to a system where the law-passing body is forced to work for its money.
by chickenbig | 2025-05-24 16:49:18+00:00
> > Moreover the dust escaping from a nuclear plant may be ... > > What sort of dust is this? > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radionuclide

So this not dust escaping during normal operation. This is an important qualification to your original statement.

> Moreover quite different hypothesis are more and more widespread

I would expect the presence of strong data to reduce the number of viable hypotheses. Chris Busby was very creative coming up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Busby#Second_event... but it looks like overfitting to scant data.

> If all the reactors in the fleet were N4, they would all have been shut down!

If they were all N4 they would have been kept running and had a rolling program of repairs. So I do not agree with your desire to have a heterogeneous fleet of reactors.

> nobody dies due to the lack of electricity

we estimate that the energy-saving campaigns could have led to nearly 7,710

premature deaths annually in Japan

https://epic.uchicago.cn/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/...

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
by visarga | 2025-05-24 16:50:24+00:00
> What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do?

AI lack skin-in-the-game, they cannot bear responsibility for outcomes. They also don't experience desires or needs, so they depend on humans for that too.

To make an AI useful you need to apply it to a problem, in other words it is in a specific problem context that AI shows utility. Like Linux, you need to use it for something to get benefits. Providing this problem space for AI is our part. So you cannot separate AI usefulness from people, problems are distributed across society, non-fungible.

I am not very worried about jobs, we tend to prefer growth to efficiency. In a world of AI, humans will remain the differentiating factor between companies.
by nicolaslegland | 2025-05-24 16:50:44+00:00
The "GSM shield" (https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/#:~:text=GSM%20shi...) link target was likely hijacked, you might want to replace it with a snapshot (https://web.archive.org/web/20150524if_/www.gsmlib.org/).
by andrewfromx | 2025-05-24 16:52:22+00:00
kinda cool, we just added this OCR feature to our tv show / movie tracking app. I did it in iOS first and then asked claude for pseudo code to capture all the logic:

https://gist.github.com/andrewarrow/b6a20109ccb96dd7336419c8...

demo video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2qwPTsa82x4

beta testing info: https://www.reddit.com/r/showffeur

Now adding it to android will be easy!
by tel | 2025-05-24 16:52:58+00:00
They're pretty similar, but with different ergonomics. Algebraic effects are similar to some kind of "free" monad technique, but built in. For being built in they have nicer syntax and better composability, often. You can achieve the same in a language suitably dedicated to monadic approaches (Haskell being the poster child here) but it helps to have type class inference (giving you mtl-like composability) and built-in bind syntax a la Haskell's `do` or Scala's `for`.
by eloisant | 2025-05-24 16:53:03+00:00
Exactly, I've had this exact discussion with a friend who bought a house in a cheaper town.

Fake numbers but for the sake of arguments: he bought a $100k house, I bought a $300k house in a more expensive city. Real estate did a 2x, his house is worth $200k and now he can't afford to move to a $600k place like mine - while I can move to an area with a similar cost of living as where I live now.

The gap is even bigger because prices go up faster in big cities.
by theptip | 2025-05-24 16:53:07+00:00
Thanks! So, how does this impact Deliberative Alignment[1], where IIUC the intermediate tokens are assessed (eg for referencing the appropriate policy fragment)?

Does you see your result as putting that paradigm in question, or does the explicit reasoning assessment perhaps ameliorate the issue?

[1]: https://arxiv.org/html/2412.16339v2
by wlonkly | 2025-05-24 16:53:58+00:00
The Caddy[1] webserver also has built-in ACME. It has all the problems Rachel mentioned, of course, because now it's an ACME client embedded in an even bigger piece of software, but it's handy for sure!

I don't know much about Caddy scalability but it's worked great for my personal sites.

[1] https://caddyserver.com/
by insin | 2025-05-24 16:54:00+00:00
The published version appears to be CommonJS only:

$ node index.mjs import { isString } from 'super-utils-plus' ^^^^^^^^ SyntaxError: Named export 'isString' not found. The requested module 'super-utils-plus' is a CommonJS module, which may not support all module.exports as named exports.

You might also need to update some of your type checks to handle wrapper objects like new String() - Object.prototype.toString.call(...) is your friend.
by bitshiftfaced | 2025-05-24 16:55:00+00:00
German car makers deduct VAT on machinery, equipment, factory supplies, and sometimes even utilities or specific components. Some US states offer car manufacturers tax exceptions on things like raw materials, but it is by no means apples to apples. When BMW builds a car in Germany, it enters the show floor free of embedded taxes on inputs. Thats not necessarily the case for US cars

Another important difference has to do with the size of the VAT tax compared to single-stage taxes. For example, in the US if you taxed 19% on inputs every step of the way, no one would be able to afford the final sticker price. Instead, the US taxes a much smaller amount but does not refund this like the VAT system, and the end consumer tax is the same small percentage. VAT can be much higher because it avoids the cascading tax effect. In the end maybe 19% tax was collected on the manufacture and sale in both the US and Germany, and all you changed was one having a higher tax versus cost but the sticker price evened out in the end.

Because of this difference in the two tax systems, VAT can be, and is, much higher than US state/local tax. But then, this means that differences in tariffs creates a compounding effect. A German manufacturer can sell to a US end consumer on average about: 100% cost + 2.5% tariff + 102.5% * (8.5% consumption tax) = 111% after tax cost. On the other hand, if Ford builds in the US and sells to a German end consumer, then the calculation goes: 100% cost + 10% tariff +110% * (19% VAT) = 131% after tax cost. So while Germany's VAT is 10.5% higher than the average US sales tax, and equal to the VAT any German would pay in Germany, its actually almost double that amount when you take into account the compounding affect of Germany's higher tariffs.

In short, the differences in the two tax systems result in systemically higher tax rates for VAT. And this means that EU car manufacturers do see a trade advantage in terms of selling to EU end consumers compared to US manufacturers selling to EU end consumers (when compared to either selling in the US) since the final after-tax cost calculation is multiplicative.
by thundergolfer | 2025-05-24 16:55:06+00:00
Dialogue and conversation are not the same thing, though they’re related, just in the same way that stress and anxiety are related but not the same. The task of reading comprehension involves being able to track important distinctions between synonyms.

The second is a counterfactual, and it is correctly deployed to help show the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument. Graham is saying that a good liar presents pleasing and valid but unsound arguments, or rather sophistry.

I think your confusion here is from reading comprehension problems.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-05-24 16:55:39+00:00
Wait what? Outside of ISIS and groups like that there is no slavery legal in any country. Kafala isn’t actually slavery, despite its abuses. And middle eastern countries have become substantial more liberal humanist during the last 50 years which is assuredly a result of cultural exchange. King Abdullah II in Jordan, Malik Dalan, Osama El-Baz, etc the list of active reformers that are Harvard alum and power brokers in Arabic counties is long. Longer still are the people who don’t get headlines for liberal reform but push the society leftward year over year. Even hard core counties like Saudi Arabia are significantly more open and liberal than they were 50 years ago.
by NanthAI | 2025-05-24 16:55:44+00:00
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by mjr00 | 2025-05-24 16:56:12+00:00
Self-driving vehicles are the perfect example of how something that seems so close can be so far away.

April 29, 2014 - "Milken 2014: Driverless cars due in five years"[0]

Nov 24, 2015 - "Ford is 5 years away from self-driving cars"[1]

Oct 20, 2016 - "A Driverless Tesla Will Travel From L.A. to NYC by 2017"[2]

Now general consensus is level 5 autonomous self-driving is decades away, at least.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/04/29/milken-...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-is-5-years-away-from-se...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
by brokencode | 2025-05-24 16:56:46+00:00
Even regular sync functions in JavaScript can do lots of computations that take a long time. And others perform effects like starting a timer or manipulating the DOM. Should these be indicated with keywords too?

I agree that await is a nice hint in the code that something more substantial is happening, but ultimately it’s limited and quite opaque.

Great IDE support for algebraic effects would probably include inline hints to show effects.
by lumenwrites | 2025-05-24 16:57:03+00:00
I have learned about YCombinator, hacker news, Paul Graham, and startups in general through one of his essays. I was first blown away by the brilliance and clarity of his writing, and only then did I learn that he's a prominent tech figure.

So many years later, I still haven't read a better writer (except maybe Scott Alexander). So, at least from my perspective, if anyone has the authority to write about good writing, it's this guy.
by horhay | 2025-05-24 16:57:07+00:00
The thing about that recent rollout of self-driving trucks is they picked a stretch of road connecting Houston to another shipping point in a very straight line. And they bragged about 2000 "unassisted" miles on that stretch of road which is ~250 miles in length. So they're basically championing the idea that their trucks which have driven about less than 10 trips without an on-vehicle driver in that area is competent enough to be relied upon in a real work capacity.

Whether this amount of success is proof that there won't be any issues with the tech in that area, remains to be seen. Hell, they're not even interested yet in talking about how this may pan out outside their Houston trial runs.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-24 16:57:27+00:00
Numpy seems somewhat constrained here… it grew out of the matrix ecosystem, and matrices map naturally to two-dimensional arrays (sidenote: it’s super annoying that we have n-dimensional matrices and n-dimensional arrays, but the matrix dimension maps to the width of the array).

Anyway, the general problem of having an n-dimensional array and wanting to dynamically… I dunno, it is a little tricky. But, sometimes when I see the examples people pop up with, I wonder how much pressure could be relieved if we just had a nice way of expressing operations on block or partitioned matrices. Like the canonical annoying example of wanting to apply solve using a series of small-ish matrices on a series of vectors, that’s just a block diagonal matrix…
by swyx | 2025-05-24 16:58:47+00:00
i understand the criticism but i also wonder at how to improve the status quo. Lethain is regarded as an authority because he has such a wide experience and writes so much and so thoughtfully. The truth is we just barely and rarely get such insight from people at his level so we just take whatever we can get.

the people who are in-deep for decades 1) have no time or motivation to write/build a brand^, 2) have political reasons you can't write anything insightful esp while your own house is messy (and it never isn't).

so how to change this?

my approach is to run a conference where practitioners do short ted-talk-like-but-technical talks about their work and learnings while still on the job. but ofc they all have their own motivations to speak.

^ though i will be the first to say that you CAN be primarily self-motivated to write-to-think-out-loud and this is a thing, do not let jaded HN people tell you different
by bbminner | 2025-05-24 16:58:52+00:00
Always wanted to experiment with a syntax like this myself, thanks to author! I completely agree with you reasoning re complexity of mental model for indexing vs broadcasting. Moreover, it appears to me that such a representation should allow for finding more optimal low level impls (something like deeper "out of order" op fusing, idk)? I've seen a paper from either nvidia or meta around five years ago doing exactly that - translating an index-based meta-language built on top of python into cuda kernels (usually several variants and picking the best), can't find the reference unfortunately.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-24 16:59:34+00:00
Slots at Harvard may be limited but slots at excellent institutions of higher education are not. Seats at ball games are not. Medical residencies are only limited by fiat. That could be fixed if we wanted to. The problem is the artificial limit, not the people getting the limited placements.

What people fail to understand is that immigrants add to both the supply and demand side. An immigrant sitting in a stadium seat is taking a place that could have gone to someone else. But their presence also drives the capacity to build more seats. More demand for higher education results in more capacity for higher education.
by PUSH_AX | 2025-05-24 16:59:53+00:00
Will it? Will it really?

I’ve been writing JS for so long I’ve forgotten all these language quirks, I feel like it’s fair for most people, these language choices are kind of meaningless in day to day, what’s meaningful is a function returning things that will make sense to most people. Or at least have two functions, languageStrictIsObject()
by gist | 2025-05-24 17:00:02+00:00
> The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything.

I think at the core the problem (if you want to call it that) can be boiled down to the following:

"I am smart. That's why I was successful at what I did. So I need to prove to myself and others that it wasn't luck it was I am damn smart"

The problem with hubris is that if you took someone like Musk or PG and you kept them in some off the beaten path place ie not Silicon Valley, not NYC pick your hot location (and stipulate they couldn't move because of family or other obligations) and they weren't surrounded by others who were top notch (as a result of also being in the right place at the right time) there wouldn't be anything particularly notable about them.

Having gone myself to one of those 'good' universities I will say that Paul being at Harvard would certainly amplify this type of behavior by being surrounded early on at a formidable age by accomplished members of that community.