MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by panick21_ | 2025-05-16 19:49:31+00:00
The papers results are only barley accounted for in reality, as it misses many real world tactics and heuristics people actually use to get around the problem. Let alone many other market mechanism that exist around that market.

The real effects are way smaller then claimed in the paper and market collapses don't or almost never happen for that reason.

And in real live many people drive reliable used cars. And may people buy used cars over and over again. Because its not about verification, only about picking one of the better options, and many heuristics can be applied to do that.

If market forces push everything towards lower quality. Why are cars (and everything else) today so much more energy efficient and more comfortable. Why are phones so much better? Why is pretty much every product today so much better then it was 50 years ago?

Somehow everything gets worse, yet my operating system on my computer crashes far less often. Despite many more features. My hardware fails less often to, harddisk, then and now, its a joke.

The food is better, both in quality and diversity when I go to restaurants.

I really don't understand how people can argue against this claiming quality is going down over time. Outside of very specific things very temporarily, like twitter, this isn't the case.

There are many reason for this, and only focusing on finding a list of as many 'market failures' as economist can come up with, misses so much about how in the real world people (including governments) deal with many of these things.
by mindslight | 2025-05-16 19:50:03+00:00
The fundamental problem is that all of these lofty natural rights we love to champion in the US are legally framed solely in terms of negative restrictions on The Government. This was a workable approach when non-government entities were roughly comparable in power, there were many fully-competing options for businesses, and our society was not so interconnected (eg cash vs electronic transactions, and the surveillance databases read/written on every single interaction). The workability went out the window with massive scaling of centralization, especially as facilitated by the government created corporate liability shield.

Banking is one of the areas where the nominally democratic government has not only failed at addressing this broken dynamic, but has eagerly embraced it to implement authoritarian mandates that couldn't possibly pass the substantive bar set by the legal system. For example you'd have a hard time passing a law that anybody with a scary sounding name is prohibited from doing something, but at a bank that kind of arbitrary capriciousness is routine and encouraged.

[0] you might reflexively think that framing rights positively is unworkable because it creates contradictions between the same right of different parties. But what it actually does is leave the contradictions remaining front and center so they can be equitably weighed by courts. The negative framing of rights does not resolve these contradictions, but rather scuttles them in the background to be ignored until the hypocrisy grows so apparent that it boils over.
by malux85 | 2025-05-16 19:50:14+00:00
> I genuinely feel I need a break and need to work on other things. And I feel jumping into a similar tech job would make my mental health situation worse.

You just answered your own question. 6 months off, now. You can afford it.

Don’t try and answer all the other questions about getting another job or who to work for or retrain in another field or all that stuff - you’re not in the right frame of mind to answer those questions until AFTER you have had your rest. You will still think about all of this a lot during your rest period, and by the end of it you will have your answers.

So there you are, rest and work on those physical and mental health issues you mentioned above. There’s your answer.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-16 19:50:26+00:00
It's unclear how you believe the label attached to something to be useful.

Suppose there is an "artist" and you like their "art" and want to commission a piece. You send them money for "art", they email you some doodle or AI-generated image and simultaneously mail you some drugs.

Assigning the label "art" or "code" to the payment doesn't provide any information more than having no label whatsoever, because the label is a lie but the only way to prove the lie is to uncover what the transaction is actually for, which the existence of the fabricated label doesn't help you to do any more than having no label at all.

Establishing what a payment is actually for is not something the payments system is suited to do and attempting to use it for that causes only problems, because the honest users who put down something legitimate that makes the bank skittish are unjustly harmed, whereas the actual illicit users simply lie because there are several easy lies with no viable way to verify the contrary.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-16 19:50:58+00:00
The entire organization was made up of rich idiots with no domain expertise throwing money at a young lady because she wore a turtleneck and claimed to be the next steve jobs. Meanwhile there were actual scientists involved, including the CSO and a former director of the CDC, and they never blew the whistle, so they either never thought to ask for a demo of the magic science product, or they were in on it.

It was never going to do anything productive. It wasn't even an elaborate con, she just lied to people's faces and they never even considered whether they should verify her claims.

Theranos is a great example of how pathetically incompetent and stupid you can act as a rich person and STILL come out pretty well. Nobody did any due diligence because they almost never do due diligence and it almost never hurts them.

Meanwhile I have to do due diligence on the damn clothing I buy or it probably won't even fit.
by amenghra | 2025-05-16 19:51:44+00:00
If it’s updated daily, maybe host it on GitHub pages (public repo) and have a job push an update on a daily basis?

If you want to be more fancy, you could do private GitHub repo+ Cloudflare pages enabling you to prepare puzzles in advance.

You can get quite far with both service’s free offering or Cloudflare’s $5/mo stuff.

Full disclosure: I work for neither companies but I have regularly been a happy paid customer of both products.
by vasusen | 2025-05-16 19:51:50+00:00
Very cool evolution!

Really great to see the fallback to the agentic run when the automation breaks. For our e2e testing browser automation at Donobu, we independently arrived at the same pattern and have been impressed with how well it works. Automatic self-healed PR example here: https://github.com/donobu-inc/playwright-flows/pull/6/files

edit: typo
by onepremise | 2025-05-16 19:52:37+00:00
Hey Peter, what are your thoughts on networks states and the methods tech CEOS and VCs are using to push the working class towards Techno feudalism? Do you think Peter Thiel using Palantir to mine US tax payers information, to help drive and target innocent civilians towards their vision, is legal? Should the constitution exist or do we need to be conquered and lead by monarchies? Most importantly, do you believe the supreme court should exist to serve its purpose in our system of checks and balances?
by proberts | 2025-05-16 19:52:43+00:00
Almost certainly, even if you did overstay, it's not an issue but for peace of mind, you should speak with an attorney because it sounds like you didn't overstay in a way that would have impacted your H-1B, green card, or citizenship applications. (F-1 students are admitted until D/S - duration of status - so they almost never considered overstays.)
by jebarker | 2025-05-16 19:52:54+00:00
> nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will.

No LLM can ever express your unique human experience (or even speak from experience), so on that axis of competition you win by default.

Regurgitating facts and the mean opinion on topics is no replacement for the thoughts of a unique human. The idea that you're competing with AI on some absolute scale of the quality of your thought is a sad way to live.
by martin-t | 2025-05-16 19:53:10+00:00
This resonates with me deeply.

I used to write open source a lot but lately, I don't see the point. Not because I think LLMs can produce novel code as good code as me or will be able to in the near future. But because any time I come up with a new solution to something, it will be stolen and used without my permission, without giving me credit or without giving users the rights I give them. And it will be mangled just enough that I can't prove anything.

Large corporations were so anal about copyright that people who ever saw Microsoft's code were forbidden from contributing to FOSS alternatives like wine. But only as long as copyright suited them. Now abolishing copyright promises the C-suite even bigger rewards by getting rid of those pesky expensive programmers, if only they could just steal enough code to mix and match it with enough plausible deniability.

And so even though _in principle_ anybody using my AGPL code or anything that incorporates my AGPL code has the right to inspect and modify said code; yet now tine fractions of my AGPL code now have millions or potentially billions of users but nobody knows and nobody has the right to do anything about it.

And those who benefit the most are those who already have more money than they can spend.
by LauraMedia | 2025-05-16 19:53:23+00:00
I am incredibly confused why the Material 3 project is growing further and further from a coherent design system to "do whatever you want, there are no rules".

The linked "Start building with Material 3 Expressive" article has an example at the bottom for a payment type app where virtually every text element has a different font or text size. It also has an enormously big FAB at the bottom that covers MULTIPLE rows of data.
by cratermoon | 2025-05-16 19:56:19+00:00
The writing is the work, though. The words on paper (or wherever) are the end product, but they are not the point. See chapter 5 of Ahrens, Sönke. 2017. How to take smart notes: one simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking - for students, academics and nonfiction book writers., for advice on how writing the ideas in your own words is the primary task and improves not only writing, but all intellectual skills, including reading and thinking. C. Wright Mills in his 1952 essay, "“On Intellectual Craftsmanship" says much the same thing. Stating the ideas in your own words is thinking.
by indrora | 2025-05-16 19:56:21+00:00
And if you ever find yourself in Alamagordo, New Mexico, the NM Air and Space Museum is nice: https://nmspacemuseum.org/#

They have, IIRC, one of the Gemini capsules, but also some really cool demonstrations. It is worth it to time that and one of the Trinity test site tours if you're interested in nuclear history as well, then take a trip north to Albuquerque for the Nat'l Nuclear History Museum and (for the kids and kidlike adults) Explora is a neat little hands on museum.
by lucb1e | 2025-05-16 19:58:20+00:00
Words like beamer for projector... but isn't that similar between all countries? Even within English-speaking countries? You don't know what some Australian-specific or AAVE word means until someone tells you, no matter where you're from. Every version of English is a dialect of English so long as it's still a complete language (having semantics and all that)
by colechristensen | 2025-05-16 19:58:38+00:00
$1000 drones laden with explosives aiming for just above the waterline would seem to put holes in appropriately dangerous places.

You could launch a thousand of them for the cost of a single anti ship missile.

A reasonable thing to do in a modern war would be to launch 10,000 drones all at once at an aircraft carrier, even at a very low success rate that's a lot of little holes.

Just ask yourself how many you're going to need and what defense exists for them currently.

Shitty self-guided weapons can be made very easily these days and in tremendously large numbers. The defense industry focus is presently on very advanced things that it seems could trivially be overwhelmed by volume.
by electrondood | 2025-05-16 19:58:55+00:00
> doing the basic job of knowledge workers

If you extrapolate and generalize further... what is at risk is any task that involves taking information input (text, audio, images, video, etc.), and applying it to create some information output or perform some action which is useful.

That's basically the definition of work. It's not just knowledge work, it's literally any work.
by palmotea | 2025-05-16 19:59:24+00:00
> My reading of your comment is that you have a strong opinion, you're injecting that opinion, but you're not open to discussion on your opinion. This statement makes me feel like my time spent replying to you was a waste.

Eh, whatever. I was just trying to prevent the possibility of a particularly tiresome cookie-cutter "argument" I've seen a million times around here. I don't know if you were actually going to make it, but we're in the context where it's likely to pop up, and it'd just waste everyone's time.

Also this isn't really opinion territory, it's more values territory.
by tibbar | 2025-05-16 19:59:29+00:00
AI is far better in style than in substance. That is, an AI-written solution will have all the trappings of expertise and deep thought, but frankly is usually at best mediocre. It's sort of like when you hear someone make a very eloquent point and your instinct is to think "wow, that's the final word on the subject, then!" ... and then someone who actually understands the subject points out the flaw in the elegant argument, and it falls down like a house of cards. So, at least for now, don't be fooled! Develop expertise, be the person who really understands stuff.
by yubblegum | 2025-05-16 19:59:51+00:00
iirc at least 3 Russian empresses (and also Russian duchesses) started out as German princesses. The court spoke French. And Russia looked to the West as a role model and source of expertise for modernization and development. It could have been one or the other but France post revolution didn't have princesses to spare, so there is also the political aspect in terms of an absolute monarchy.

Would be interesting to know when these words entered Russian vocabulary: before or after Napoleon.

"From its inception, Russia has desperately needed foreign professionals—to teach Russians about governance, manufacturing, military, mining, and other trades. The Dutch, Swedes, Brits, and French were among the foreigners who came to Russia. But Germans certainly dominated, becoming a privileged nationality in Russia.

"The ruling Romanov dynasty, which shared a lot of the German bloodline, became a branch of the Oldenburg dynasty under the name of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. Many of its members were born in Germany and spoke Russian with an accent. Germans, especially the Baltic ones, rapidly advanced through the ranks of the Russian society thanks to their talents, persistence, discipline, and loyalty to the throne (as of 1913, approximately 2,400,000 Germans lived in Russia)."

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/27/russias-lov...
by Terr_ | 2025-05-16 19:59:59+00:00
> Chauffeur Knowledge

Going into this piece, I expected an analogy where the user is like an out-of-touch wealthy person, who builds a shallow model of the world from what they hear from their LLM chauffeur or golf-caddy.

That is something I fear will spread, as people give too much trust to the assistant in their pocket, turning to it at the expense of the other sources of information.

> That's when it hit me: this is going to change everything; but not in the utopian "everything is magical" sense, but in the "oh, God, what have we done" sense.

I think of it like asbestos, or leaded-gasoline. Incredibly useful in the right situation, but used so broadly that we regret it later. (Or at least, the people who didn't make their fortunes selling it.)
by recursivecaveat | 2025-05-16 20:00:15+00:00
I think there is a personality trait that makes you absolutely obsessed with the idea of 'proving everybody else wrong'. I think this trait is very common, if not downright necessary, to be at the very top of some fields. Once you have that bug, the more ridiculous the idea, the higher the emotional reward if it pays off, so there's no limit on what you will consider pursuing.

That's my theory for why certain classes of people: VCs, film producers, dictators, pro athletes, are often dumping money into extremely transparent and audacious scammers.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-16 20:00:28+00:00
It's money. PR companies are the ones who place those "Look this person who we all hate because they did blatantly antisocial and greedy crime is actually a human" articles in the New York Times and similar.

It really only takes like ten million dollars to ensure that the narrative you want prevails, as long as there is no monied force working against you with a different narrative.

Even shithole kids of rich assholes get this treatment.

And this was the case BEFORE half the country decided that the "good guys" are all hated by "the mainstream" anyway, and voted (a third time) for a guy who literally sells presidential pardons for $2 million, and has already pardoned outright fraudsters who don't even have fan clubs.
by uludag | 2025-05-16 20:00:48+00:00
What happens to conversation in this case? When groups of people are trained to use LLMs as a crutch for thinking, what happens when people get together and need to discuss something. I feel like the averageness of the thinking would get compounded so that the conversation as a whole becomes nothing but a staging ground for a prompt. Would an hour long conversation about the intricacies of a system architecture become a ten minute chatter of what prompts people would want to ask? Does everyone then channel their LLM to the rest of the group? In the end, would the most probable response to which all LLMs being used agree with be the result of the conversation?
by lispisok | 2025-05-16 20:00:49+00:00
As much as I support community developed software and "free as in freedom", "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits for others. Your comment is just one example of that.

For that reason all my silly little side projects are now in private repos. I dont care the chance somebody builds a business around them is slim to none. Dont think putting a license will protect you either. You'd have to know somebody is violating your license before you can even think about doing anything and that's basically impossible if it gets ripped into a private codebase and isnt obvious externally.
by nico | 2025-05-16 20:00:58+00:00
I can relate, been in a very similar situation

Some recommendations: take care of yourself, it might feel like a chore, but it’s important. Personally, exercising regularly (15-45 min mon-fri) helped me get out of a very long rut

Also, pace yourself, but keep going, try to apply to 1-2 jobs every day to keep consistency

If/when you are out of a job, try to keep a project going that makes you feel productive, even if you are not making money, feeling like you got something done makes a huge difference

Edit: use ChatGPT voice mode on your phone to prepare for interviews, it’s pretty good at role playing, coaching and encouraging

A bit of a plug: I built this command line tool that uses AI to help you find jobs and track applications - https://github.com/nicobrenner/commandjobs

Feel free to use it, and would me more than happy if you want to contribute or collaborate on it

Finally, a lot of people go through what you are going through, especially people in the spectrum. Try to stay connected to friends, family, loved ones, or even join a group related to one of your interests

Good luck and contact me via GitHub if you want to talk in more detail about anything
by caseyohara | 2025-05-16 20:01:11+00:00
I've been working on the same product for ~13 years and I can confidently say the most important thing to ensure the longevity and long-term maintainability of a codebase is aggressive minimization of dependencies.

Engineering is all about compromises. If near-term velocity is more important to you than long-term evolution and maintainability, then go ahead and use all of the dependencies if it allows you to ship faster. But that is a form of technical debt that you will have to pay down eventually.
by cjcenizal | 2025-05-16 20:01:17+00:00
You make a good point! There are many common input configurations that will come up again and again, as forms and other types on input (like maps as you mentioned). How can we solve for that?

Maybe a solution would look like the server expression a more general intent -- "shipping address", and leaving it to the client to determine the best UI component for capturing that information. Then the server will need to do its own validation of the user's input, perhaps asking for confirmation that it understood correctly.
by spinach | 2025-05-16 20:01:42+00:00
I've had the same experience but with drawing. What's the point when AI can generate perfect finished pieces in seconds? Why put all that effort in to learning and drawing something. It's always been hard for me but it used to feel worth it for the finished piece, but now you can bring a piece of computer art into being with a simple word prompt.

I still create, I just use physical materials like clay and such, to make things that AI can't yet replicate.
by regurgist | 2025-05-16 20:02:15+00:00
You are in a maze of twisty little passages that are not the same. You have to figure out which ones are not. Try this. The world is infinitely complex. AI is very good at dealing with the things it knows and can know. It can write more accurately than I can, spell better. It just takes stuff I do and learns from my mistakes. I'm good with that. But here is something to ask AI:

Name three things you cannot think about because of the language you use?

Or "why do people cook curds when making cheese."

Or how about this:

"Name three things you cannot think about because of the language you use?"

AI is at least to some extent a artificial regurgitarian. It can tell you about things that have been thought. Cool. But here is a question for you. Are there things that you can think about that have not been thought about before?

The reason people cook curds is because the goal of cheese making was to preserve milk, not to make cheese.
by pchristensen | 2025-05-16 20:02:23+00:00
Context: I've read this and The Vital Question and watched several interviews with Nick Lane, so a lot of his ideas have blended together in my mind. A lot of the detail in this book went over my head, but it was well written enough to overcome my shortcoming in biochemistry. Similar in depth to Siddhartha Mukherjee's Song of the Cell and The Gene.

This book was a fascinating walk through evolutionary history and the way that different organisms handle energy, and how earlier, less efficient metabolic paths were limited but sufficient to bootstrap the much more efficient and flexible Kreb's cycle. I remember the term and the loop diagram from high school biology, but to actually dive into the elegant chemical pathways felt like discovering the rocket equation or the path from radioactivity to atomic bombs. If you're at all interested in Biology or Chemistry, I highly recommend this book.