MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by techpineapple | 2025-05-20 13:55:16+00:00
I'm curious how new technologies that make things easier, sort of bifurcate the populous. I guess on the one hand, the calculator made it so that you could do a job that required a little bit of math, without having to be good at math. And that's good! Maybe there are a bunch of jobs that only require a little bit of math.

But like, a person who is good at math with a calculator will probably go much farther. If you think that LLM's mean you don't have to learn coding, you're never going to do as well as the person who goes above and beyond. And the existence of new technologies doesn't change this underlying behavior. Maybe in the end nothing much really changes, either you're the type of person who wants to learn the underlying skill or not.

There's probably a third category of people, and I don't know how big it is, but like, being able to make music on your computer probably radically altered the number of people making music, partially because, if your core skill was wanting to compose music and not play music, the computer actually enabled a new skill. Not only did you not have to learn how to play a traditional instrument (though those that do are probably at a significant advantage) but it would be super expensive to have a band or orchestra at your disposal to play that music, prior to computer music.

I'm curious how big this third group is in the AI world. Probably not tiny, especially if your goal is to say test the viability of a bunch of CRUD app ideas. And lots of businesses are CRUD apps.

But actually, there may be another use case for LLMs and that's really modular applications. I had this idea for a new kind of in-browser DAW a while ago. I got the basics going, but adding on to it was going to be a slog and I kind of got disinterested, but since the DAW is modular and wants to include a whole mess of relatively simple components, that's probably a great problem space for LLMs, since each component requires relatively little context.

I've already experienced this success building myself a custom dashboard for work. Each dashboard component is basically just a really simple repeatable application (RSS reader, todo list, music player etc.). So, if the app design is modular, it's pretty easy for an LLM to successfully create the dashboard panels.
by Arubis | 2025-05-20 13:55:18+00:00
I know that's a bit kneejerk, but I actually think that's a pretty reasonable question.

Automating the reputation and network of an individual person doesn't seem like a good fit for an LLM, regardless of the person. But the _decisionmaking_ capacities for a position that's largely trend-following is something that's at the very least well-supported by interacting with a well-trained model.

In my mind, though, that doesn't look like a niched service that you sell to a company. That looks like a cofounder-type for someone with an idea and a technical background. If you want to build something but need help figuring out how to market and sell it, you could do a lot worse than just chatting with Claude right now and taking much of its advice.

That might just by my own lack of bizdev expertise, though.
by CrociDB | 2025-05-20 13:55:39+00:00
That's a topic I actually put a lot of thought, coming from South America living in Europe, I see an extreme contrast in shower habits. In the north of Brazil, people would take 2~3 "cold" showers a day--most people don't even have warm water, because it's over 30 degrees Celsius pretty much at any time of the day, at any time of the year, so you sweat a lot. Now here, I see people are mostly fine with 2~3 showers a week. Sometimes less.

Initially that was a shock for me, until I understood it's a lot related to climate, job, activities, social life, etc, but also because in South America people rely more on the showers for their overall hygiene. They just shower for anything. Ate something too fatty that got your hands and face greasy? Time for shower. In Europe I see people taking more care of their hygiene other ways, like washing themselves, changing underclothes more often, etc.
by b3lvedere | 2025-05-20 13:55:54+00:00
I hear you. I don't like that ecosystem as well.

I have more than 2000 games on Steam and i love my Steam Deck which i got for pretty cheap. It's a very fun game system and you can tinker a lot with it. Upgrading (bigger disk capacity) is very easy.

Just bought Black Mesa for two bucks. Works almost flawlessly. Ten year old game , but much fun to be had. Most games i buy on the very very cheap. Bought Skyrim couple of weeks ago for five bucks.

Sure, i click on the free thursday game on the Epic Games store, but i hate that interface with great passion.
by transpute | 2025-05-20 13:55:57+00:00
> Malicious hardware can fake a successful BIOS flash.

Intel TXT DRTM measured launch can verify BIOS hash.

Which non-Chinese router hardware would you recommend? PC Engines (Taiwan, Switzerland) is no more.

On a related note, "US House Passes Bill to Assess Threats Posed by Foreign Network Routers", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43889149

https://protectli.com/about/

> Protectli was founded in 2016 in a Southern California garage with a clear mission: providing reliable, cost-effective, and secure computer equipment that free users from proprietary vendor lock-in and expensive contracts. Today, we’re a global leader in network security hardware with offices across the United States, Canada, and Europe. We are trusted by thousands of customers worldwide, from home users to international corporations.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-20 13:56:06+00:00
Seems at least equally probable (IMO far more) that was due to the whole invading Kuwait thing.

Carter ten years prior: "Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force"
by h2zizzle | 2025-05-20 13:56:29+00:00
I'm all for it. It's clear that inequality warps socioeconomic structures and incentives, from interpersonal relations to the functioning of a democracy. The pushback will be massive, but the work and research that gets us to a given number will be invaluable in understanding the state of the world as we move towards developments that could drive the gulf between the haves and have-nots to astronomical levels (AI and commercial space development).
by Callicles | 2025-05-20 13:56:31+00:00
Hi!

We are built on top of them. Right now the techs above are what’s backing the implementation but we want to add different compatibilities. So that you can eventually have for example airflow backing up your orchestration instead of temporal.

You can think of moose as the pre-built glue between those components with the equivalent UX of a web framework (ie you get hit reloading, instant feedback, etc…)
by mrtksn | 2025-05-20 13:56:34+00:00
US doesn't just get political influence. It gets massive amounts of products and services enabling the US residents live well beyond their means.

China for example, sends huge number of electronics and all kind of other consumer goods that Chinese produce by sweating in 12 hours shifts in 6 day work weeks in exchange for imaginary numbers.

US is definitely not the victim here. There's the risk of this system stop working and that's when the US might have hard times due to being forced to live by its means and have no ability to kickstart its own production when that time comes.

It makes sense to be worried for such an eventuality but US is definitely not being taken advantage here. The situation is more like selling your startup at young age and live a lavish lifestyle with the money without working and studying and risk becoming penniless and unemployable by the 50s.
by latchkey | 2025-05-20 13:57:18+00:00
This is rather technical, but SCALE is a solution to enable Nvidia CUDA code run on AMD GPUs, without modification of the original codebase. The results in this early experiment show that even though performance hasn't been a focus yet (it is compatibility and functionality first), it is actually quite good compared to AMDs own native code (HIP).

SCALE as a solution to enable developers to write code once for CUDA, and run anywhere (AMD is the first target), is very bullish for AMD. We have been watching their progress over the past year and things are improving at a steady pace.
by mg | 2025-05-20 13:57:19+00:00
Seeing 20 years into the future is quite possible in some aspects.

I remember how me and my friends discovered email in 1999 and were like "Yay, in the future we'll all do this instead of sending letters!". And it took about 20 years until letters were largely replaced by email and the web. And when the first videos appeared on the web, it was quite clear to us that they would replace DVDs.

Similar with the advent of self driving cars and solar energy I think.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-20 13:57:28+00:00
This is the second article in a week where someone is writing about how "AI" has failed them in their field (here it's physics, the other article was radiology), and in both articles they are using now ancient mid 2010's deep learning NNs.

I don't know if it's intentional, but the word "AI" means different things almost every year now. Its worse than papers getting released with "LLMs unable to do basic math" and then you see they used GPT-3 for the study.
by chollida1 | 2025-05-20 13:57:32+00:00
You are correct and the original poster is wrong in this specific regard.

Infact one of the most interesting/scary incidents for the US dollar was China selling USD denominated bonds and getting almost the same rate as the US government gets, which essentially means China can compete for USD with US government.

The implications of this is that if CHina wants, they now have another level to compete with the US. They can now issue USD denominated debt along the yield curve in areas where it would hurt the US hte most.

In the short term that is the frond end of the yield curve(short term under a year) where the US has to roll about $8 Trillion in debt over the next year.

With China competing by offering bonds here they will force up the interest rate the US has to pay pushing yields up with is the exact opposite of what Trump has publicly stated that he wants and making the US's already large fiscal deficit an even larger problem.
by duxup | 2025-05-20 13:57:57+00:00
It's useful as a political tool, that's about it.

Up until now it was a fairly harmless political distortion. I suspect in the past we maybe had some executives who themselves bought into it but they took input from folks more educated on the matter and just let sleeping dogs lie.

But now we have an administration who at least seems to believe it whole heatedly and isn't interested in anyone who is educated on the subject providing input.
by ergsef | 2025-05-20 13:58:36+00:00
Speaking out against the hype is frowned upon. I'm sure even this very measured article about "I tried it and it didn't work for me" will draw negative attention from people who think AI is the Second Coming.

It's also very hard to prove a negative. If you predict "AI will never do anything of value" people will point to literally any result to prove you wrong. TFA does a good job debunking some recent hype, but the author cannot possibly wade through every hyperbolic paper in every field to demonstrate the claims are overblown.
by k__ | 2025-05-20 13:58:45+00:00
It might just be my perception, but I had the impression Deno got his ass whooped by Bun and Node.js.

While some people whine about the Node.js compat, I'd assume it's the main point that kept Deno on life-support in the long run.

Bun did it right from the start and it seems people love it. Being quite a bit faster than Node.js (even with the compat APIs) and Deno obviously helps too. If they keep that going, they'd enter Go level of performance.
by asoneth | 2025-05-20 13:58:49+00:00
I published my first papers a little over fifteen years ago on practical applications for AI before switching domains. Recently I've been sucked back in.

I agree it's a problem across all of science, but AI seems to attract more than it's fair share of researchers seeking fame and fortune. Exaggerated claims and cherry-picking data seem even more extreme in my limited experience, and even responsible researchers end up exaggerating a bit to try and compete.
by palmotea | 2025-05-20 13:58:58+00:00
> The system is already badly misaligned. Even ambitious students may consider it a better use of their time to use tools like LLMs to grind out more standardised points than use them to gain deeper understanding of a subject they may not consider important. Any STEM student targeting finance is basically uninterested in most of the subject matter, for example. This also far predates AI.

That's not a misalignment. That's your "ambitious student" is being unwise and stupid. To this day, I have gaps in my knowledge and skills that I regret because I avoided things that I, in my childishness, did not consider "important" or "interesting." AI is going to make that far worse.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-20 13:58:58+00:00
China's nuclear plans are based on targets set by the government: they are not necessarily economically competitive. They initially planned to have 18% of their electricity generation produced by nuclear in 2060, which they estimate as 400GW. Those (percentage) targets don't seem realistic anymore given how relatively quickly their renewable deployments are moving. But even if we just consider the 400GW target, they'll need to speed up nuclear construction by an order of magnitude: for the past five years, nuclear additions have been averaging between 1.2-2.3GW per year for the (down from higher numbers before), which is really not enough to meet those targets.

As for the construction learning curve: the main element that made PV inexpensive was the ability to build it in factories at scale. For nuclear the equivalent is SMRs. China is building experimental versions of those too! To the extent that China perfects SMRs and brings the costs way down, they could definitely put nuclear back on track. In a world where cheap SMRs may be a few years away, I question whether building additional AP1000/EPRs is a cost-effective move (even ignoring the possibility of dirt-cheap storage.) China's relatively slow construction rate also makes me wonder if they've come to the same conclusion.
by iggldiggl | 2025-05-20 13:59:59+00:00
> There were a number of gauge changes, but they were usually quite early on, when the infra was less critical and you could get away with closing lines for months.

It was also a time when railways used wooden sleepers, so you could simply drill new holes at the new track gauge for moving the rail fasteners, thereby minimising the work required for changing the gauge, at least on the plain line, switches and crossings excepted.

Plus it was a time when a lot more manpower for that kind of massive manual work was available, plus railways were the dominant transport mode and could actually commandeer that kind of manpower.
by Fokamul | 2025-05-20 14:00:16+00:00
Heh, such an American response. Sue everyone and everything, lawyers gets paid. But at the end of day, nothing changes.

Meanwhile in EU, we have laws like NIS2, where if negligent in non-compliance. Fines are 10mil. EUR or 2% of global annual revenue. Eg.: If Apple gets $8bil. fine, yep that changes quite a lot I think. :)
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-20 14:00:29+00:00
Indeed. We should not confuse manual labor with manufacturing.

Some assorted observations:

1. Most services are dependent on the use of manufactured goods.

2. Trade exists precisely, because no domestic economy is entirely self-sufficient with respect to the demands of its market. However, when manufacturing is entirely outsourced, you become somewhat of an economic rump state. In the best case, you are now an administrator of manufacturing possessions somewhat like a colonial overseer. This creates a condition of economic imperialism rather than one of economic exchange. It creates incentives to capture the political systems of foreign countries and to depress standards of living in order to maintain low costs.

3. When everything is imported, then the only thing you can exchange for them are services. The alternative is printing fiat money or borrowing.

4. When manufacturing is moved abroad, experience and expertise withers and dies. Entire supply chains and intertwined sectors of industry fade. This creates an economic and even political dependence that goes beyond the mere inability of manufacture. As technology becomes increasingly complex, this creates security exposure. The interdependence of these supply chains is nontrivial.

5. Manufacturing is a basis for technological development. This is the result of not just manufacturing capacity, but the combined and communicated expertise that manufacturing enables and propagates. Once a tradition of expertise dies, it is difficult or impractical to replace.

6. Domestic manufacturing creates redundancy that buffers both the domestic economy and the global economy against single points of failure. It also helps drive prices down.
by conartist6 | 2025-05-20 14:00:54+00:00
It's still a tool for regression to the mean. It actively discourages human innovation by saying anything worth having should come to you with ease.

Roko's Fallacy is that the basilisk eats the people who didn't appease it. It eats the people who did appease it!

Keep generating your own original creative work and ideas like AI doesn't exist, and in theory it will learn from you and amplify your contribution.

Spend a lot of time using AI, and you won't even be exposed to new viewpoints anymore or new styles, not even new people. You won't ever be inspired again, but rather your brain will learn to follow the AI, the very AI it thinks is following it. Both the content you produce and consume will be warm milk: very low standard deviation from blah. In an information theory sense, you will be producing and consuming almost no information, but rather you will have been reduced to an entity easily modeled, which incidentally is the moment at which you will be replaced by someone using that model.
by afavour | 2025-05-20 14:01:02+00:00
> Why do you treat adding a feature (npm compatibility) like you’re losing something?

Because you are losing something: a better ecosystem. Standardizing around… standards is a good thing. When I dive into the dependencies of any given Node app it’s a mess of transpiled code, sometimes minified even, there’s no guarantee what API it’ll be using and whether it’ll run outside Node (is it using the W3C streams API or the Node streams API?). But inertia is a powerful force. People will just use what’s there if they can. So the ecosystem never gets made.

> But it turns out that few people care that much about purity, so it’s fortunate that they’re not relying on that.

By that logic we never build anything newer or better. Python 3 is better than Python 2 and sets the language up for a better future. Transitioning between the two was absolutely torturous and if they just prioritised popularity it would never have happened.
by JdeBP | 2025-05-20 14:01:57+00:00
Actually, there is Windows-specific stuff in the new EDIT. When built for Windows, it uses a one-foot-in-each-camp mixture of high-level and low-level console I/O, high-level for output and low-level for input.

https://github.com/microsoft/edit/blob/main/src/sys/windows....
by msarchet | 2025-05-20 14:02:18+00:00
Some of the other commenters have pointed this out. But this just doesn’t quite work.

I’ve been doing Game Dev for the better part of 15 years now which is almost all of my career. I’ve been almost solely focused on building Tools and almost always building Editor internals and the interactions with the engine/assets systems.

There’s just so so much nuance to how editing works. You also want to be as close to how the engine will render so there’s also the need to either embed or have an api on your game to edit content live. People need hot reloading, people need things to look and act correct.

Just rendering a model accurately can be a challenge. Don’t get me started on animations
by ramesh31 | 2025-05-20 14:02:56+00:00
>And it’s boring.

This is a feature. Once upon a time, Node was the new hotness that all the cutting edge hackers were excited to play around with, and needed a hard sell to management. It has since graduated to IBM status - i.e. "no one ever got fired for...". And thank god for that. It's the most mature possible ecosystem choice at this point for the niche it fills, and we are able to build rock solid maintainable systems with it (and hire people who know it deeply). That didn't come cheaply or easily (IO.js drama anyone?), and anything that wants to take its place will need to make it through the same process.
by chrisnolet | 2025-05-20 14:03:07+00:00
I made a post about this the other day! I think it's a sliding scale – you can use agentic coding in a more-professional or less-professional way.

Post as follows:

—

I have a take on vibe-coding for professionals. TL;DR: If you’re not loving AI editors, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Vibe-coding isn’t just for mock-ups.

It pains me when I hear high-level SWEs say that LLMs are only good for projects ‘up until a point,’ before it all supposedly falls apart.

—

I use Cline. It’s the dark horse of AI code editing. It’s an open source VS Code plugin and you should absolutely try it.

The best part about Cline is that it forces you to think about PLANNING and ACTING as two distinct phases. When I meet people who don’t love AI coding, it’s usually because they stay in the equivalent of ACT mode the whole time.

(Other IDEs are capable of doing this, too, to varying degrees. Cline just makes it very explicit.)

If you’re not spending at least 4x the amount of time PLANNING vs. ACTING in your AI code editor, you’re probably doing it wrong!

The best engineers will spend more than 20 minutes planning before they unleash AI to make any changes whatsoever.

If you’re one-shotting absolutely everything, you’re absolutely doing it wrong. When you try to one-shot complex changes, the AI is going to mess them up. And it’s going to take forever for you to have the opportunity to intervene.

This is where people get really frustrated: ‘I have to wait forever, and then the code is completely wrong anyway.’

The better approach is to treat Cline like a thought-partner. ‘Let’s add this class.’ And then review the plan before it submits one line of code. It’ll say, ‘I’m thinking of doing it this way,’ or ‘I’ll use this library.’ It’s often wrong – but that’s okay, it’s a quick turn-around to nudge it back on track and nothing’s set in stone in PLAN mode!

That’s when you have the opportunity to coax the AI into doing something more salient. And after three or four back-and-forth exchanges, you’ll have a really great plan for how Cline should execute.

Then you’ll press ACT, and go make a coffee. Most of the time, when you come back, it’ll have finished with near-perfect edits across many files.

And that’s it! If you do that, you should be able to leverage your years of experience, and your AI coding partner will do all the busy work, while you’re thinking through edge cases and architecture.

*chef’s kiss*