MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-05-24 17:15:05+00:00
Agreed. AI looks to be a war between professional opinion-havers and fact-rememberers and the future. They finally see automation as dangerous because no one will need their opinion or their recall any more. The working class were already automated to death (and the opinion-havers cheered it on), because their working class opinions hasn't been taken into consideration since Taylor and Ford figured out that we can eliminate individual knowledge in physical work and push that knowledge upwards into the institution itself. They can just lay you off and train some new ones, and the new hires will have a worse contract than you had.

The reason working people's jobs haven't been automated away is because people are cheaper and more conscientious than robots. Even worse, the robots are owned by famous rent-seekers who see you as prey, so defending yourself against the robots as a customer adds to the overhead of choosing them. How do you know it's not going to cost you 10x as much to fix/update them as it cost you last year? You don't, because you were locked into a scammer who unilaterally decided to raise rates on you or the entire industry, or simply got in over their head and shut down, leaving you without a vendor. Minimum wage employees don't do that.

Now asking some dipshit McKinsey consultant or some social media expert for 10 ideas to increase sales? LLMs can give you 100, summarize them, and rank them with references. They are only getting better at this. We criticize them because they only give us a list of obvious answers, but the reason we hire recent graduates is for them to give us the list of obvious answers they learned while being educated in their specialty. "Creativity" gets assigned to whoever has the social capital to be seen as a legitimate and worthy "creative," or, more accurately, the person with the money either chooses somebody to run the show who they suspect has a magic secret formula or aura, or they take on that identity themselves.

That white collar middle-class magic is gone. People who could do difficult arithmetic quickly used to make a lot of money, too.

> No political force will fight for onshoring services jobs or incorporating barriers to reduce automation in most white collar jobs.

Only people who get protection would be the ones that are unified enough to have the institutions to launder cash to give to politicians. Doctors, realtors, etc.
by horhay | 2025-05-24 17:15:30+00:00
I think what I genuinely have an issue with is that extrapolation ignores the finer details of research work being taken to understand the current issues that may affect the future goals of a technology. It basically just ignores the science of it in favor of "well we've seen this level work before". The thing is, sometimes the more these experts learn about the current goal to beat in their product, the more things previously unknown and unplanned for present themselves as new issues. Extrapolating is a bit past-facing when you see it this way, because those new problems are entirely new challenges that haven't been considered in the equation and may require an entirely new approach. Every success is different, every failure, and every challenge is different. So extrapolating seems pointless.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-24 17:15:33+00:00
In a competitive market, prices tend to fall to the zero profit point. Of course nobody survives on zero profit for long, so that's not exactly the reality, but it is the pressure. If an Item becomes cheaper to produce, and Company A and Company B both produce the item, one of them will drop the price to get more sales at a slightly lower profit per Item. And back and forth.
by BizarreByte | 2025-05-24 17:15:47+00:00
> You say that, until you start spending those hundred dollar bills on therapy.

The only people who wouldn't prefer that are ones who haven't endured true poverty.

I have little sympathy for those folks unhappy with their conventionally successful lives when that same kind of life allowed me to escape. When you grow up without basic needs being met they come off as having a severe lack of perspective.

I mean sure I hate my job, but I like having heat in the winter more than I hate my job.
by SillyUsername | 2025-05-24 17:16:02+00:00
I have seen it for millions of add/del operations, an analytics framework actually for a big American games company (first guess and you'll probably say it), which is where I originally did the analysis about 10 years ago.

I've also written a a video processor around that time too that was bottle necked using ArrayLists - typically a decode, store and read once op. It was at this point I looked at other collections, other list implementations and blocking deques (ArrayList was the wrong collection type to use, but I'd been in a rush for MVP) and ultimately came across https://github.com/conversant/disruptor and used that instead.

The ArrayList Vs Linkedlist was a real eye opener for me in two different systems this same behaviour was replicated when using ArrayLists like queues or incorrect sizing of the buffer increments as load increases.
by cardanome | 2025-05-24 17:16:05+00:00
Because the productivity growth in the last decades thanks to automation and many other factors has benefited workers? (Hint: It has not.)

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

The questions of who will benefit from AI is a political questions. As power is currently firmly in the had of the capital class, AI will only make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Wages are not based on how much value you produce but how much it cost to reproduce your labor. How much it cost for you to stay alive and be able to work and feed your family. What kind of living standard that entails is a political matter and depends on how strong your unions are, how willing you are to fight for it and so on.

Same with welfare. It is something which was fought for and if the power balance is such that they can get away with giving you less, they will do. In fact some rich pricks would gladly turn you into soylent green if they could get away with it.
by mcpherrinm | 2025-05-24 17:17:12+00:00
I'd take ASN.1/DER over JWS any day :) It's the weekend and I don't feel I have the energy to launch a full roast of JWS, but to give some flavour, I'll link

https://auth0.com/blog/critical-vulnerabilities-in-json-web-...

Implementations can be written securely, but it's too easy to make mistakes.

Yeah, there's worse stuff from the 90s around, but JOSE and ACME is newer than that - we could have done better!

Alas, it's not changing now.

I think ASN.1 has some warts, but I think a lot of the problems with DER are actually in creaky old tools. People seem way happier with Protobuf, for example: I think that's largely down to tooling.
by locallost | 2025-05-24 17:17:40+00:00
Heh, I'm kind of in the same or similar boat. I changed jobs specifically last year to join a smaller company, thinking we'll get a lot done without a lot of fuss and stakeholders, which was bothering me in my previous job -- it was impossible to get something going. But it turned out my new small team spends a lot of time trying to do the work of 50 people with 1/10th the resources, essentially cosplaying a large brand. I said we're not X, we're Y, and let's be that because it has its advantages, but people are busy with case studies, UX, patterns etc. The funniest part is they are laser focused on a competitor and a lot of the talk ends up being "do it like competitor X does".

So yeah, you're a little company, act like one.
by Jordan-117 | 2025-05-24 17:18:01+00:00
The fruits of virtually all the productivity gains in the last 40 years has gone straight to the top while the 99% has stagnated amidst rising costs in essentials. Broadly-shared prosperity has only come about through strong unions, regulation, and redistributive taxation, which seems politically farther away than it's been in decades. The wealthiest elite don't just want wealth, they want power over others -- why would they tolerate an economic system where anyone can live a decent life independent of work?
by echelon | 2025-05-24 17:18:30+00:00
Self-checkout won.

Every time I go to Target there are two lanes manned by staff. Everything else is self-checkout. This is every Target I go to in my state.

Every time I go to Home Depot, there is one person manning the checkout. Everything else is self-checkout.

Even fast food places have self-checkout stalls that seem to be growing in popularity. In the last few years, McDonalds has been rapidly deploying the tech.

Boba places. Self-checkout has been promoted to first-class and is the only way to order at several of them.

It's everywhere. When I was growing up, Kroger used to have every single checkout aisle staffed. Now they have one or two.

I'm honestly shocked that the perception is that self-checkout hasn't won. It's everywhere and dominates the checkout modalities.

> the shoplifting deterrence effect of staffing

This is all cost modeled. They have lots of cameras and security staff by the door. Even if the tech doesn't work, the mere threat of getting caught is enough to stop most losses. The business accepts that they won't catch everything. They're still saving money by using automated checkout.
by rvz | 2025-05-24 17:18:44+00:00
> Microsoft’s .NET runtime,

That is why, it's not a web app. (As Javascript is the most used language on the internet)

This sort of software (language runtime) requires that it HAS to be correct and no room for clumsiness.

Why do you think almost every AI copilot "demo" is on typical web apps and not on the Linux kernel or on the PyTorch compiler?

It would ruin the "AGI" coding narrative.

The AI boosters need to show that the hype train isn't slowing down. Tell it to replace the Linux kernel developers and watch it struggle in real time.
by skrebbel | 2025-05-24 17:18:44+00:00
In case the author reads HN, I just wanted to share that I was rather irked by the writing style, the way it adds all kinds of weird irrelevant bits of info that don't actually clarify anything (eg "the same phenomenon Einstein won a Nobel Prize for explaining") and ways to make things sound more spectacular than they are (eg "Blu-Tack (yes, really)" or the whole story about "community trust").

I read on your about page that you use LLMs to assist your writing. Consider this comment a suggestion to depend on them less, or at least be more critical with their output. I've never been so frustrated reading a blog post as when I read yours as I flashed from interest to annoyance and back again many times.
by stickfigure | 2025-05-24 17:18:50+00:00
I'll be honest, it sounds like you're trying to control my relationships with my friends and it sounds totally toxic.

I like the 1000 mutual connections only limit - that seems enough to get the job done. But "likes" are the online equivalent of the little "uh huh" sounds and head nods we make during real-life conversations to make the speaker feel heard and understood. This is normal healthy human interaction.
by amarant | 2025-05-24 17:19:54+00:00
I feel like this whole "but sure, let's fire the engineers" part is just anti-ai narrative. Like, is anyone actually firing engineers because they have AI now? Does anyone know anyone who's lost their job as an SWE due to being replaced by AI?

I sure don't, and noone I've asked so far knows anyone who's had that happen to then either.

I want to say it's a sign of the times to try and make technology a political issue, but my understanding is the same thing happened during the industrial revolution, so maybe it's just human nature?

Well the industrial revolution didn't make us all homeless beggars, so I doubt AI will, either.
by criley2 | 2025-05-24 17:19:55+00:00
CEOs laying off engineers for AI is a good thing.

It's a natural selection mechanism whereby poorly run companies will fail extremely quickly.

These are bad companies with horrible leadership that are wasting resources. Their existence is a net negative to society and our industry. Good bye to the garbage Klarna's and DuoLingos. No one will miss you.
by kevincox | 2025-05-24 17:20:27+00:00
But locks and shared memory aren't necessary for deadlock. You can easily deadlock with high level concepts. For example you can deadlock reading from channels, or the classic deadlock of waiting for a process to end before reading its output (which works if the output is small!).

There are definitely coding patterns that can help with deadlocks, like unbounded queues and avoiding cases where you are waiting on events from multiple sources in one task. But I haven't heard of a comprehensive way to solve them completely.
by yusina | 2025-05-24 17:21:08+00:00
That view is refreshingly naïve and equally wrong. Prices are determined by the market, not by how hard something was to produce.

And as exhibit A I provide progress in automation in the last decades (enormous) in relation to the median buying power of the population in developed nations.

It just doesn't work the way you describe, but I have sympathies for naïvely believing that it does.
Show HN: Templated – add a graphic editor to SaaS/App without rebuilding Canva
by fieldspeter | 2025-05-24 17:21:54+00:00
Hey HN!

While building our own SaaS we kept running into the same problem: customers wanted a real design editor (think Canva/Figma-lite) *inside* their product, but rebuilding all that UI from scratch is a quarter-million-dollar distraction.

So we turned our internal tool into *Templated Embed* — a drop-in image & PDF template editor you can add to any web app with an <iframe> tag.

- What it does?

• Full WYSIWYG editor for text, images, SVGs, brand colours, Google Fonts

• Outputs static images (PNG/JPG), layered PDFs, or keeps the design JSON so you can re-render via API

• Multi-page + multi-size templates (social banners, receipts, posters, etc.)

• Webhooks & API to push finished designs straight to your backend

• White-label mode and granular permission rules for end-users/teams

- How to embed?

<!-- Add this to your HTML -->

<embed src="https://app.templated.io/editor?embed=YOUR_EMBED_ID" width="100%" height="100%" />
by adamgordonbell | 2025-05-24 17:22:45+00:00
If you understand some area and would like to explain it and use writing as a tool, you need to make it legible to the reader. Good writing is distilling and simplifying and forcing things through an explanatory process that rubs off some of the rough edges while at the same time clarifying.

That loses specific things. Understandability and nuance can be in conflict. Legibility is not specific to governments.
by rst | 2025-05-24 17:23:10+00:00
In all those respects, the VAX was just following on to the IBM 360/67 and its S/370 successors -- they all had a register file of 32-bit general purpose registers which could be used to index byte-addressed virtual memory. It wasn't exactly an IBM knockoff -- there were a bunch of those, too (e.g., Amdahl's) -- but the influence is extremely clear.
by ninalanyon | 2025-05-24 17:24:20+00:00
> Ford and General Motors are a rare sight in Germany.

It's not even true that Ford is a rare sight. Ford outsells Toyota in Germany, employs 28 000 people in Germany, and has been incorporated there since 1925.

US Fords are of course a rare sight but that has nothing to do with tariffs, it is simply that most buyers don't want them.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-24 17:25:07+00:00
See, that's just stupid on the FDA's part. What did they expect them to do? The FDA's job is not to tell bakeries that they must produce sesame free products. They can only regulate that if there might be sesame in the product, then the product must be labeled as such. If a company wants to make some products with sesame and some without sesame while not being able to guarantee that there is no sesame contamination, then stating that on the label is the best option.

Definitely feels like overreach to me, and slapping the overreaching hand is not a bad thing. That overreach is not valid reason for shuttering the overreaching agency though.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-24 17:25:16+00:00
> AI looks to be a war between professional opinion-havers and fact-rememberers and the future

I disagree. I personally think SWEs (who are what most people think of as tech bros), accountants, back-office roles, and others are at the upper economic tier of society now - as wage and educational data has clearly shown.

These are the roles most at risk for automation, not because jobs will be 100% automated, but because automation now exists to reduce headcount by 20-30% and still generate the same output. This is what already happened in skilled trades over the last 40 years.
by antonvs | 2025-05-24 17:26:43+00:00
Haha yes, that does probably dwarf any other factors.

But still, I think if the original JSON spec had been longer and more comprehensive, along the lines of Rivest's, that could have limited JSON's popularity, or resulted in people just ignoring parts of it and focusing on the parts they found useful.

The original JSON RFC-4627 was about 1/3rd the size of the original Rivest draft (a body of 260 lines vs. 750); it defines a single representation instead of four; and e.g. the section on "Encoding" is just 3 sentences. Here it is, for reference: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt
by yusina | 2025-05-24 17:26:43+00:00
> As power is currently firmly in the had of the capital class, AI will only make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

I have hope in decentral technologies. Solar power is a rare example. If things gp right then in a few decades, your typical household will just not depend on anybody anymore in terms of energy needs. That's a significant shift.

That is, if big corps don't manage to capture that somehow, though I can't currently see how. But it has happened before. The www and email used to be as decentralized as you could imagine. Nowadays rarely any email gets sent that doesn't come from or go to a gmail server, or definitely not outside one of the biggest 3 providers. Similarly with the www. Everything is so centralized now, it's a great success of big tech.
by ChoGGi | 2025-05-24 17:27:08+00:00
> Looking at the map, it splits Canada in two.

I'll admit it'd be a little cool in the winter but NWT is still a part of Canada.

Since you said looking at a map; almost all of Alberta is treaty land, be a very interesting and long court case before anything comes of it, no matter what our lobbyist Premier wants to do.
by theospeak | 2025-05-24 17:27:16+00:00
This was the dream. How it was supposed to be. Speak and it becomes. But developers found a way to gatekeep the whole process by inventing thousands of different languages/wheels over time.

And they held the keys. Now that they are steadily working most of themselves out of a job, they are still stuck with their hubris-tainted glasses, unable to move on.

6 months ago I had no idea how Github works. Now I have thousands of commits and I have learnt to git reset --hard as second nature now :-) Hell, yesterday I figured out by chance, how to only revert a particular file. So yeah, baby steps.

I am "building" every day, talking to my AI Coder friend. We are having a lot of fun. I don't go full Agent Mode. I am always on Ask Mode. (Because - hard lessons - you know)

I am learning about Lighthouse (97% aggregate for my Next.js app)

Yesterday I made my site an "App", because someone asked if "there's an app for that"

Now I know about PWA and all it's requirements. Cool.

The point is. I am having fun building stuff. And that would not have been possible for me a year ago.

Ask yourself. If you as a coding genius had to develop a program without any internet access, how far would you get?

So stop crying that the bar has been lowered. Raise the bar. Be the guy that can outsmart the AI when it tries to take over the world. There will be few of you needed, but the need will be critical. We will always need a few Myron Aubs. Just not millions of them.

Happy building (Even if you are not "coding")
by gedy | 2025-05-24 17:27:16+00:00
I do agree that "assisted writing" is going to get old fast. Though your comment did made me think of as an alterative to chatting with LLMs, AI could be used to present search results on a particular topic in whatever format you prefer. E.g. these breezy writeups, tiktok style clips, youtube, podcast, "just the facts", etc. Different strokes and all that.

As long as it's clear it's the machine or UI, I don't mind LLM output that much.
by kevincox | 2025-05-24 17:28:05+00:00
I generally say something like "You can use whatever libraries you like but I reserve the right to ask you to implement them yourselves". This allows them to focus on the part they want to focus on and shows good decision making about not re-inventing the wheel, but if they "outsource" the core of the problem (or we just have extra time) there is an obvious step deeper that can be taken.

I usually even say that they can make up library APIs if they want, because I don't really care if they have memorized the python stdlib, I just want to seem them think about and work on a coding problem.
by currymj | 2025-05-24 17:29:17+00:00
software is really weird as a test case for understanding AI automation on white collar work.

it seems exceptionally well-suited to AI-based automation because software engineering has already needed to figure out how to efficiently cope with humans who sometimes produce code which may have defects. most obviously automated testing and type systems. also a lot of programming tasks have verifiable solutions so it's also better for training. it seems natural that the most obviously successful AI tools are for coding.

yet the software industry has also been absorbing waves of automation for 70 years. Fortran and COBOL were referred to as "automated programming" and there was a narrative that these new tools would make it easy for non-specialists to program. this time may be different, or it may just be another wave of automation.

i think software has pretty unique properties among white collar jobs, and I would hesitate to draw conclusions about other industries based on AI progress in software engineering.
by masklinn | 2025-05-24 17:29:29+00:00
The tower was ultimately demolished in 2022, though the capsules were removed first and two dozen are preserved.

FWIW even ignoring the issue with maintenance of the commons, the capsules were originally designed with a 25 years lifespan, but neither refurbishement nor replacement was done during the tower's life.

At opening each capsule cost $110k (in 2024 dollars), during the update proposal 20 years ago renovation costs were estimated at $50k (in 2024 dollars), per capsule.

> The highly complex geometry involved

In my understanding the superstructural geometry was relatively simple, it's a pretty standard core with a lift and a stairwell around it.

The apparent external complexity is because capsules can be attached both longitudinally and transversally, and each "floor" is composed of a large landing for the lift stop and two smaller ones (aka there are three small flights of stairs per floor), and the capsules are attached to each landing, which creates a staggered appearance.

IIRC the tower also had a massive design flaw for mass market: access to the top of a capsule was necessary to remove it, so the capsules were not easily swappable for refurbishment or replacement, or just to move to a different tower with your capsule, something you'd imagine would be an advantage of the design.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-05-24 17:29:37+00:00
You’ve recast my argument, which was about a specific lack of legal culpability, as one about climate change and conspiracies: “global warming money,” if it does exist, has not paid me any.

Pipelines could very well be safer, I don’t have the data in front of me. But that’s irrelevant if when they fail their operators refuse to make the ones whose lives they’ve ruined, whole. East Palestine, Ohio is as good an example as the North Dakota border as far as I’m concerned.