MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by necheffa | 2025-05-30 21:50:36+00:00
> Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do?

AI can barely provide the code for a simple linked list without dropping NULL pointer dereferences every other line...

Been interviewing new grads all week. I'd take a high performing new grad that can be mentored into the next generation of engineer any day.

If you don't want to do constant hand holding with a "meh" candidate...why would you want to do constant hand holding with AI?

> I often find myself choosing to just use an AI for work I would have delegated to them, because I need it fast and I need it now.

Not sure what you are working on. I would never prioritize speed over quality - but I do work in a public safety context. I'm actually not even sure of the legality of using an AI for design work but we have a company policy that all design analysis must still be signed off on by a human engineer in full as if it were 100% their own.

I certainly won't be signing my name on a document full of AI slop. Now an analysis done by a real human engineer with the aid of AI - sure, I'd walk through the same verification process I'd walk through for a traditional analysis document before signing my name on the cover sheet. And that is something a jr. can bring to me to verify.
by deadbabe | 2025-05-30 21:51:11+00:00
Something I’ve come to realize in the software industry is: if you have more smart engineers than the competition, you win.

If you don’t snatch up the smartest engineers before your competition does: you lose.

Therefore at a certain level of company, hiring is entirely dictated by what the competition is doing. If everyone is suddenly hiring, you better start doing it too. If no one is, you can relax, but you could also pull ahead if you decide to hire rapidly, but this will tip off competitors and they too will begin hiring.

Whether or not you have any use for those engineers is irrelevant. So AI will have little impact on hiring trends in this market. The downturn we’ve seen in the past few years is mostly driven by the interest rate environment, not because AI is suddenly replacing engineers. An engineer using AI gives more advantage than removing an engineer, and hiring an engineer who will use AI is more advantageous than not hiring one at all.

AI is just the new excuse for firing or not hiring people, previously it was RTO but that hype cycle has been squeezed for all it can be.
by thorum | 2025-05-30 21:52:04+00:00
My takeaway - from this article, from Google’s AlphaEvolve [1], and the recent announcement about o3 finding a zero day in the Linux kernel [2] - is that Gemini Pro 2.5 and o3 in particular have reached a new level of capability where these ideas that were tried unsuccessfully with other models, suddenly just work.

[1] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-p...

[2] https://sean.heelan.io/2025/05/22/how-i-used-o3-to-find-cve-...
by alephnerd | 2025-05-30 21:52:09+00:00
The labor protections are basically ignored (you will be expected to work off the clock hours in any white collar role), and the free healthcare portion gets paid out of employer's pockets via taxes so it comes out the same as a $70-80k base (and associated taxes) would in much of the US.

There's a reason you don't see new grad hiring in France (where they actually try to enforce work hours), and they have a subsequently high youth unemployment rate.

Though even these new grad roles are at risk to move to CEE, where their administrations are giving massive tax holidays on the tune of $10-20k per employee if you invest enough.

And the skills gap I mentioned about CS in the US exists in Weatern Europe as well. CEE, Israel, and India are the only large tech hubs that still treat CS as an engineering disciple instead of as only a form of applied math.
by dasil003 | 2025-05-30 21:52:19+00:00
You said exactly what I came here to say.

Maybe some day AI will truly be able to think and reason in a way that can approximate a human, but we're still very far from that. And even when we do, the accountability problem means trusting AI is a huge risk.

It's true that there are white collar jobs that don't require actual thinking, and those are vulnerable, but that's just the latest progression of computerization/automation that's been happening steadily for the last 70 years already.

It's also true that AI will completely change the nature of software development, meaning that you won't be able to coast just on arcane syntax knowledge the way a lot of programmers have been able to so far. But the fundamental precision of logical thought and mapping it to a desirable human outcome will still be needed, the only change is how you arrive there. This actually benefits young people who are already becoming "AI native" and will be better equipped to leverage AI capabilities to the max.
by gopher_space | 2025-05-30 21:53:05+00:00
I'm not aware of any turtles, that was just the first thing I found when trying to see if VirtualBox and Hyper-V were still a problematic combo.

Again, it was a few years ago, but we didn't solve the problem or identify an actual root cause. We stopped banging our heads against that particular wall and switched technologies.
by scarlehoff | 2025-05-30 21:53:13+00:00
This is what I fear as well: some companies might adopt a "sustainable" approach to AI, but others will dynamite the entry path to their companies. Of course, if your only goal is to sell a unicorn and be out after three years, who cares... but serious companies with lifelong employees that adopt the AI-first strategy are in for a surprise (looking at you, Microsoft).
by hollerith | 2025-05-30 21:53:13+00:00
I will buy grass-fed beef from NZ and Australia, but not from the US because of how often it contains toxins (probably mostly heavy metals, hard to say because I never had any analyzed, but I am unusually sensitive to heavy metals) in my personal beef-buying experience.

Grain-fed US beef doesn't have the problem.

My guess is that there has just been much more industrial activity in the US than in Aus and NZ.
by neRok | 2025-05-30 21:53:24+00:00
Thanks for sharing. I've been questioning the validity of my own ADHD "diagnosis", but I had only been considering things with regards to dopamine and the "reward-system", and not the executive-function and mental "optimisations" side of things like he explained. This finally gives reason to all my traits/quirks/problems!

I called it my "diagnosis", because even the psychiatrist that prescribed me didn't seem convinced, but he's also a bit old and thus maybe out of date (ie, only considering the traditional "ADD" style symptoms). So I've been on the drugs for a year now, and up to a BIG dose, but besides some very minor concentration and motivation improvements, the only worthwhile improvement was not being tired in the afternoons (I regularly used to nap on the train on the way home from work, which was at only 4pm! Sometimes from 3->4pm I would even struggle to keep my eyes open whilst at my desk!). So when the presenter said he had tiredness problems too, that was further confirmation for me (of a problem being fixed). Because I had been wondering if "the opposite" was happening, in that my improvement was simply the "stimulants" keeping me awake (ie, just being a "tweaker"), which would imply that the tiredness was normal (and to further confuse things - I have reviewed the traits reported by ancestrys dna test, and one of them says that I am very likely to take naps!).

Unfortunately I doubt this revelation will change anything for me, and that's because I've got decades of "optimisations" baked-in. For example, socialising is a big problem. Thinking back, and by 10 years old I was known to be "shy" - but recently I have come to consider this as "learned" behaviour (based upon a few memories). This new explanation about executive-function and "optimisations" is an even better explanation. Long story short - socialising is hard, and failures are bad, so I've optimised away the failures by not talking much! It's exactly like the example the presenter gave of Test Driven Development @ 23:00;

> ...suddenly there'll be 500 broken tests and you're like where did that > come from what's going on and it turns out there's actually nothing wrong with what you've done to the code but you > have just broken all of the mock setup of all of the tests and this is something which > I find unbearable almost literally unbearable because I'm end > up I end up in this situation where I'm put in a position where either I go and > fix all of those tests which in my mind are obviously pointless and which is mind-numbingly boring or I have to have > the discussion in the pr review of why the code coverage has gone down on the CI > server and it drives me nuts and yes I will stop ranting now on that.
by diogolsq | 2025-05-30 21:54:03+00:00
Those zealots, gosh.

Nonsense. When AI gets stuck in a suboptimal topology, it’s the human who nudges it out.

How will you maintain code if you’re not even able to read it?

Using AI to read introduces noise with every iteration. Did you see that trend of people asking AI to reproduce someone self over 70 times? The noise adds up—and the original meaning shifts.

AI is non deterministic.
by agarren | 2025-05-30 21:54:07+00:00
> The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.

Which ones, specifically? I’m genuinely curious. The ones about “[an] unfalsifiable disease-free utopia”? The one from a labor economist basically equating Amodei’s high-unemployment/strong economy claims to pure fantasy? The fact that nothing Amodei said was cited or is substantiated in any meaningful way? Maybe the one where she points out that Amodei is fundamentally a sales guy, and that Anthropic is making the rounds saying scary stuff just after they released a new model - a techbro marketing push?

I like anthropic. They make a great product. Shame about their CEO - just another techbro pumping his scheme.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-30 21:54:38+00:00
I can think of one - there's a bunch of newsletters/substacks I subscribe to that occasionally contain stuff I really care about somewhere in them, but are too long and dense to quickly skim them. An AI summary of most important points and topics would help me decide whether to invest time and read it in full, or archive it and forget.

That's all theoretical anyway. I'm not on GMail; I technically have this feature in the e-mail client on my phone, but I never even use it.

EDIT: The article mentions those summaries would apply to email threads too. I think that could be helpful. I've got tons of threads from some mailing lists that tend to grow large (10-20+ messages); catching up with them or revisiting old ones is tedious; an AI TL;DR of such threads actually sounds useful.

Also I'd love for e-mail clients to have a feature reminding normies when they've "forgotten" to address some questions from the sender.
by abletonlive | 2025-05-30 21:54:43+00:00
What I mean by that is that you have even more power to start your own company or use LLMs to reduce the friction of doing something yourself instead of hiring someone else to do it for you.

Just as the internet was a democratization of information, llms are a democratization of output.

That may be in terms of production or art. There is clearly a lower barrier for achieving both now compared to pre-llm. If you can't see this then you don't just have your head stuck in the sand, you have it severed and blasted into another reality.

The reason why you reacted in such a way is again, a lack of imagination. To you, "work" means "employment" and a means to a paycheck. But work is more than that. It is the output that matters, and whether that output benefits you or your employer is up to you. You now have more leverage than ever for making it benefit you because you're not paying that much time/money to ask an LLM to do it for you.

Pre-llm, most for-hire work was only accessible to companies with a much bigger bank account than yours.

There is an ungodly amount of white collar workers maintaining spreadsheets and doing bullshit jobs that LLMs can do just fine. And that's not to say all of those jobs have completely useless output, it's just that the amount of bodies it takes to produce that output is unreasonable.

We are just getting started getting rid of them. But the best part of it is that you can do all of those bullshit jobs with an LLM for whatever idea you have in your pocket.

For example, I don't need an army of junior engineers to write all my boilerplate for me. I might have a protege if I am looking to actually mentor someone and hire them for that reason, but I can easily also just use LLMs to make boilerplate and write unit tests for me at the same time. Previously I would have had to have 1 million dollars sitting around to fund the amount of output that I am able to produce with a $20 subscription to an LLM service.

The junior engineer can also do this too, albeit in most cases less effectively.

That's democratization of work.

In your "5% unemployment" world you have many more gatekeepers and financial barriers.
by mrkramer | 2025-05-30 21:55:31+00:00
Poetry is full of figures of speech which are words and phrases that intentionally differ from common logic and common knowledge so LLMs can actually be probabilistic and accidental generators of figures of speech. Every nonsense that LLMs generate can be interpreted as a protentional metaphor or an oxymoron. The sentence that you mentioned sounds like a badass metaphor to me "Once upon a time, in a small town, there was a huge town" or in another words: town might be small in size but it has soul.
by kelnos | 2025-05-30 21:55:58+00:00
My experience is a bit different from yours, and I wonder what happened with you vs. me that made it that way. (Granted, while I'm a man, the friend groups I'm about to describe are mixed-gender groups, so it's a little different from the overall discussion.)

I have three friends from high school that I still keep in touch with. We have a Whatsapp group that isn't super active, but we chat once or twice a month there. Even though we all live in different places now, we meet up roughly once per year, for a few days, to see each other and hang out, and our chat traffic jumps in frequency for a couple months after that meetup.

I have three friends from college that I still keep in touch with. We have a Signal group that's a bit more active than my high school friend group, with weekly activity. In-person meetings are rare; two of the friends have larger than average family obligations. In college we originally bonded over scifi TV shows, and when new episodes of some shows we all enjoy come out, we'll try to do group watches of them on Zoom (usually with a general chat/hangout before we start watching).

I have three friends from a previous job that I still keep in touch with (I have other friends from this same job that I still keep in touch with and see often enough, but this particular group struck me as a true "friend group" and not just a random collection of people who sometimes see each other in various combinations). We have a Slack workspace that was originally created for one of the guys' bachelor parties in 2018 (this is the only all-male group out of the three). Two of us still live within a ~30 minute drive of each other, but the other two have moved away. The Slack is very active, with near-daily activity, even though one of the four of us lives in a drastically different time zone now. In-person meetups are a bit more informal (and rare for the one of us who lives across the world); often it will just be two or three of the four, depending on who is visiting someone else's city at the time.

While I'm not involved in the day-to-day lives of these friends, they are still dear to me, and maintaining these connections is important to me. I guess it's important to all of us; in the past I've been a member of group chats where there are one or two people who never participate, even though the others do regularly, and it always feels like a bummer to see their name in the list but never hear from them (the former co-worker group I described is like this). It's a tough thing, though, when you think about it: to make these sorts of things successful, the friendships need to be of roughly the same importance to everyone in the group, and I expect that's a difficult bar to meet sometimes.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-30 21:56:53+00:00
You can find old film reels from random places. I used to work at a film post house where people would bring us film they purchased without really knowing what it was. One person scored several features from an old broadcaster from when they would actually broadcast straight from the telecine. Some of these might be in the public domain now, but most were not. A lot of them reeked of vinegar and beyond saving.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-30 21:57:12+00:00
Zionism has a definition.

political support for the creation and development of a Jewish homeland in Israel https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/Zionism

Historically the majority of jewish people fall into this definition.

So off the bat you creating your own incorrect definition proves it IS hard to understand what a ban on 'Zionists' mean. You've called me a liar for no reason previously so I won't bother responding to you beyond pointing out how flawed your starting premise is.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-30 21:57:16+00:00
It's a 4D spacetime, not a 3D space.

Start with a tiny sphere. Expand it. The sphere gets bigger, but no point on the 2D-like surface is the centre.

It's like that, but the surface is a 4D spacetime.

You can't use your imagination to visualise this. But you can use math to describe it.

Whether there's some kind of ultradimensional hypercentre is a different question. Even if there was, it wouldn't be accessible from this universe.

And don't forget we don't have a clue what spacetime is. Relativity has some nice descriptions of what it does, but there's no fundamental explanation of how the universe generates the phenomena we call position, time, and distance.
by water-data-dude | 2025-05-30 21:57:17+00:00
You have one misfolded protein that “teaches” other proteins to misfold in the same way[1]. It’s very slow initially because you’re talking about individual proteins, and it takes a while for each prion to bump into a normal protein of the correct type. The immune system can’t do anything about them though, so once a protein is converted there’s permanently another prion. The conversion rate is very slow, but it never ever ratchets back - the number only increases. It’s a geometric progression.

Once symptoms show up there’s a TON of them, and it goes downhill fairly quickly. That’s why there’s such a long latency period.

[1]It’s like Ice-9, if you’ve read Cat’s Cradle.
by xp84 | 2025-05-30 21:57:39+00:00
> It could take a couple of decades to really feel the heat from it, but could lead to massive collapse

When you consider how this interacts with the population collapse (which is inevitable now everywhere outside of some African countries) this seems even worse. In 20 years, we will have far fewer people under age 60 than we have now, and among that smaller cohort, the percentage of people at any given age who have useful levels of experience will be less because they may not be able to even begin meaningful careers.

Best case scenario, people who have gotten 5 or more years of experience by now (college grads of 2020) may scrape by indefinitely. They'll be about 47 then and have no one to hire that's more qualified than AI. Not necessarily because AI is so great; rather, how will there be someone with 20 years of experience when we simply don't hire any junior people this year?

Worst case, AI overtakes the Class of 2020 and moves up the experience-equivalence ladder faster than 1 year per year, so it starts taking out the classes of 2015, 2010, etc.
by cowboylowrez | 2025-05-30 21:58:10+00:00
supposedly you can demodulate FM with "slope detection", off tuning slightly so as the signal varies in and out of the resonance of the tuned circuit you can get an audio signal. Its gonna be mono lol. The "Q" of the tuned circuit needs to be pretty good and its interesting to see that they use copper tubing as the coil wire or more technically in the linked page, a resonator.

https://electronbunker.ca/eb/FMCrystalSet.html
by lukan | 2025-05-30 21:58:30+00:00
It is because if you throw enough things at the wall, some hopefully will stick.

I do see lots of potential AI to improve my workflows, but this ain't it.

I am also very annoyed by google chromes dev tools recent new AI features. Don't need them, Don't want them - but I cannot get really rid of them. They are in the way. And they are in the way, so people use it, so some internal metrics make someone happy. Just not me.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-05-30 21:58:30+00:00
The Big Bang is not a physical explosion and the universe is not a balloon. All space was condensed together, but space is (to our current ability to measure it) topologically flat and infinite. It was still infinitely big in every dimension, it was just unfathomably dense.

The expansion that's occurring is that the space between things is growing. But it's every space between everything all at once, everywhere.

There is no physical equivalent.
by lougarou | 2025-05-30 21:59:16+00:00
Hi I am the creator of KurrentDB's MCP Server. KurrentDB (formerly known as Event Store) keeps data as a stream of events. This allows you to keep state transitions. We also have something called a projection engine which does a left fold on that stream using Javascript.

This is unique to our database and this allows us to have a feedback loop back to the frontier model. You can use the MCP Server to generate a projection code, which is then tested by the model by writing input events and reading the resulting events, then debugging the projection based on the feedback and repeat.

The source code is pretty small around 200 lines of code and easily extensible. We have an article to show how to do that https://www.kurrent.io/blog/mcp-server-adding-your-own-promp...

The repo can be found at: https://github.com/kurrent-io/mcp-server

Thanks, Lokhesh
by sfRattan | 2025-05-30 21:59:33+00:00
> It seems like the AI revolution hit as interest rates went insane...

> ...I'm wondering if we would be having the same conversation if money for startups was thrown around (and more jobs were being created for SWEs) the way it was when interest rates were zero.

The end of free money probably has to do with why C-level types are salivating at AI tools as a cheaper potential replacement for some employees, but describing the interest rates returning to nonzero percentages as going insane is really kind of a... wild take?

The period of interest rates at or near zero was a historical anomaly [1]. And that policy clearly resulted in massive, systemic misallocation of investment at global scale.

You're describing it as if that was the "normal?"

[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-c...
by kelnos | 2025-05-30 21:59:42+00:00
You specifically mention building friendships. What it takes to build and maintain friendships can be different. Once friendships are built on the back of a shared experience, they can survive the loss of that shared experience, if the parties recognize that things have changed, continue to value the friendship, and understand that maintaining the friendship will require a different kind of commitment and different levels and styles of interaction.

I'm not saying this is always easy, and sometimes one or more people in the friend group just decide that the friendships aren't that important to them to maintain. But it's absolutely possible, and can be very rewarding.