MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aerhardt | 2025-05-24 17:29:40+00:00
I have literally seen dozens, if not hundreds of people claim here, on Reddit and LinkedIn things like "we have downsized our engineering team from 50 to 5 engineers", "I produce 5x the amount of code", etc. A few tech CEOs - both from frontier labs and traditional software companies - are also claiming software engineers are a thing of the past.

I think these two audiences - tech CEOs and random anons on the internet - tend to be full of shit and I give very little credence to what they say, but to your point, some people are at least claiming things of the sort.
by thechao | 2025-05-24 17:29:54+00:00
My problem with your interaction on this forum, so far, is that it kind of ignores the practical (artisan) craft of programming. The use of static type systems by working engineers isn't math; it's more akin to "fast, formal checking". You can assert that you don't like types, or they're useless all day long; but, every working engineer knows you're wrong: static type systems have solved a real problem. Your arguments need to be rooted in the basic experience of a working engineer. Single-level programming has its place, but runtime checking is too error prone in reality to build large software. If you think this isn't true, then you need to show up to the table with large scale untyped software. For instance: the FORTH community has real advantages they've demonstrated. Where's your OS? Your database? Your browser? If you have real advantages then you'd have these things in hand, already.

Otherwise, you're just another academic blowhard using a thin veneer of formalism to justify your own motivated reasoning.
by neuroelectron | 2025-05-24 17:30:14+00:00
My chatgpt doesn't like nyc that much:

New York City, as a global symbol, exports the myth of America—its exceptionalism, hustle culture, capitalism-as-dream, fashion, Wall Street bravado, media dominance, cultural swagger. NYC has always been a billboard for "brand America," selling a narrative of limitless opportunity, grit-as-glory, and urban sophistication. Think Times Square's overstimulation, Broadway's fantasy, Wall Street's speculation, and how these are consumed worldwide as aspirational content.

But what's exported isn't necessarily real—it’s hype. The marketed dream, not the lived reality.

“...and its biggest import is grime and grief”

In contrast, what flows into NYC is the cost of that image: the labor of the marginalized, the psychological toll, the physical debris. “Grime” evokes literal pollution, overwork, and class stratification; “grief” brings in the emotional fallout—displacement, burnout, violence, economic precarity, and cycles of trauma.

NYC absorbs the despair of a world it pretends to uplift. Refugees, artists, outcasts, and exhausted believers in the American Dream all converge here, only to be consumed by the very machine that exports the myth of hope.
by dontdoxurself2 | 2025-05-24 17:30:34+00:00
I didn't want to measure relative genitalia size with "friend of Big Harvard", but as it happens I was on the Executive Board of an Asian country's Harvard Club during a trump election campaign, and, duty-bound to attend multiple in-person events a month for the year, I accumulated plenty of anecdotes that confirm your experience. Instead of doxing myself with them, I crunched some central bank numbers from this unaligned Asian country for us instead: before trump (2016) the ratio of Western-sphere FDI to Chinese FDI was ~5:1 in favor of the West, but as of 2024 it had reached ~5:1 in favor of China. (Subjectively, the loss of soft-power has been order of magnitude more gradual than the abrupt swing in business influence here.) Regardless, the local Harvard Club has in fact already sent out a subsequent "support" email specific to this international issue, and I'm sure local elites are circling wagons full of generational wealth to defend their offspring's future Ivy credentials regardless of who they're going to end up in business with once they get back.
by echelon | 2025-05-24 17:30:39+00:00
Self-driving is solved and is scaling up.

They're deploying Waymo in Atlanta now and they're already driving around sans-humans.

Atlanta is not a grid. Atlanta has crazy and dangerous road design. Random roads built in random places. Potholes, lots of hills, sharp angles, lack of shoulders, no margin or protection from 45mph oncoming traffic (90mph delta with ZERO margin or division), weird infrastructure, five and six and even seven way intersections, pedestrians, jaywalkers, motorcycle gangs that ride in the wrong lanes. You name it, Atlanta's got it.

Atlanta has lots of weather. Tremendous amounts of subtropical rain in the summer, fog, and other low visibility and dangerous conditions. Intermittent summer rain that pours so hard that it's a literal rain curtain white out. Seasonal tornadoes.

Self-driving is here now. It'll be everywhere by the end of the decade. I can't wait to buy my own Waymo-equipped vehicle.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-24 17:31:06+00:00
Microsoft is painfully inept at design and it is barely usable for any kind of "power user". Besides that it is noticeably slower than Win 10 and even more full of garbage.

All around it is the worst computing experience I have ever had. KDE easily outclasses Microsoft at interface design and basically any Linux distro has a superior user experience for a tech literate person.
by mancerayder | 2025-05-24 17:31:18+00:00
Right. Except jobs are useful to help people pay rent/mortgage, food and other essentials. How is it good if companies fail?

Who gives a crap if bad companies fail or don't fail? And for that matter how is it good or bad for you and me if bad companies fail or succeed despite being poorly run?

I'm curious about the context of your judgment.
by muststopmyths | 2025-05-24 17:31:18+00:00
WER has been in the OS for about 20 years. Vista for sure, maybe even before that.

Writing your own minidump uploader in the unhandled exception filter is/was a very common practice in games, while obviously not ideal.

I think Unreal Engine might still do that. So I think that the claim that Direct3D captures exceptions is suspect.

It may trap them and return EXCEPTION_CONTINUE_SEARCH to pass it on to the next handler, but I have a hard time coming up with a reason why it would trap them in the first place. I have personally never seen Direct3D trap an exception in my long career.

Maybe you were expecting C++ exceptions to be caught, but these APIs are only for SEH.

Now Flash, I have no experience with.

Yes, I know it's a 16year old post. But I must stop myths.
by KAMSPioneer | 2025-05-24 17:32:32+00:00
No, my GP is correct: if the server's RSA private key is compromised it does not allow decryption of any previously-recorded sessions.

You would need to compromise the _ephemeral session key_ which is difficult because it is discarded by both parties when the session is closed.

Compromising the RSA key backing the certificate allows _future_ impersonations of the server, which is a different attack altogether.
by nntwozz | 2025-05-24 17:32:35+00:00
I changed my lifestyle from mainly indoor hobbies (series/movies/games/music) to mainly outdoor activities.

I bought a dog, I started riding mountainbikes again (as I did when I was a kid) and I got into bushcraft. Now I live off grid with solar and firewood.

In a sense I replaced the grinding part I did in the MMOs with taking care of the property.

I hand fell trees and process them for firewood, the branches go into a wood chipper. I trim the grass, use pruning shears etc.

I live in a timber house that's 125 years old, there's always something to work on be it painting, renovating etc. It's fun to develop real skills and use power tools. There's immense satisfaction in seeing the results of your own work.

When I want to play I ride my bikes (I also enjoy servicing them); I still enjoy music and movies/series but I no longer have any interest in actually gaming. I occasionally read/watch videos about it as a nostalgia trip.
by quesera | 2025-05-24 17:32:40+00:00
Large cities have vastly more cultural opportunities than rural areas.

More different kinds of culture (diversity), more examples of each kind (quantity), and usually better examples of any cultural component which is available in both (quality).

Rural areas certainly have cultures of their own. It is not binary.

But you cannot reasonably compare the cultural opportunities of urban vs rural and assert that rural is not lacking, unless you are thinking of your personal preferences only, and the rural area you're using for comparison happens to match up very well with your own preferences.
by panstromek | 2025-05-24 17:32:47+00:00
I'm not sure I understand your objection (or if it's even an objection), but just to illustrate what I mean - this is literally how the chat interfaces are implemented (or at least initially they were).

You're not talking with the model, you're talking with some entity that the model is asked to simulate. The system is just cleverly using your input and the statistic to output something that looks like chat with an assistant.

Whether that's real AI or not doesn't really matter. I didn't mean to make it sound like this is not real, just to point out where are the current shortcomings coming from.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-24 17:33:41+00:00
He’s like some startup guy or something, right? His blog posts are well written, and the arguments seem… I mean, fine. I think there’s a third dimension here; in 200 years people will probably be more likely to talk about Kant or Hegel because Graham’s subject matter is just inherently more ephemeral.

But, most of humanity’s endeavors have been ephemeral.
by tptacek | 2025-05-24 17:33:45+00:00
He just wrote a piece about the Lynn IQ maps that is practically a self-parody. Nobody needs to strawman him on this topic. Here is a direct quote:

Isn't It Super-Racist To Say That People In Sub-Saharan African Countries Have IQs Equivalent To Intellectually Disabled People? No. In fact, it would be super-racist not to say this!

The horse is completely out of the barn on this controversy about Alexander's views.
by mahirsaid | 2025-05-24 17:34:18+00:00
Depends! but Their selling the coming to investors on hopes of reinviting something that is already there. The data they're using isn't owned by them. All of these " unicorn " wanna be's are wasting investors money. This will be the norm for the upcoming years. Regulations are driving these AI companies to divert their efforts to something less substantial. First regulations has to be aligned with the goals of tech and see where this direction will head.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-24 17:34:45+00:00
> most important thing about definitions is that we apply them consistently

The most important consideration for a definition is its practical consequence.

In this case, whether the line is drawn at 1 bar or an order of magnitude more or less doesn’t materially change that, on the same measure, Jupiter was 2x larger in the past. (Less than 1% in both cases.)

In a different context, that difference may be meaningful and should thus be noted and tested for robustness.
by croes | 2025-05-24 17:34:56+00:00
> Yes, we're all tired of the endless parade of people who exaggerate the abilities of (current day) AI

You mean the people who create and sell these AIs.

You would blame the hammer or at least the manufacturer if they claimed the hammer can do it al by itself.

This is more a your-car-can-drive-without-supervision-but-it-hit-a-another-car case.
by FredPret | 2025-05-24 17:34:59+00:00
Bad companies tie up capital and talent unproductively.

If a CEO is making a tech product, but knows so little about tech that he's replacing engineers with 2025's AIs, we're all better off if that CEO goes and does something else, and those engineers go work for technical people.

Temporary stability is not a substitute for long-term prosperity. Creative destruction.
by aaron695 | 2025-05-24 17:35:11+00:00
> mostly a couple quick wraps and overhand knots.

"The toughest part of the job, though, is tying a proper knot to secure bamboo poles, which can take years to master"

Cool sketches of the knots - https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/culture/article/318...

I'm sure the years to master includes where and which way to do the knots.

> some flat nylon ribbon

Over 0.5 kN per strip, blah blah boring specs for the scaffolding which at 25 pages would be... 100 times shorter than the EU?

Any who, my bamboo wilted after cutting, you have to treat it it seems... so not even close to the knot stage, but did find the spec'ed lashes, then remembered I hate knots, like just the basic reef knot ones... screw years. Zip ties FTW
by bigyabai | 2025-05-24 17:35:18+00:00
> since GitHub may not respect the terms of licensed code that is hosted on their servers, not uploading the code of others there is, in fact, a deeply ethical choice.

Feels like a moot point, this goes for anything you upload anywhere (as reprehensible as it is). Perhaps all music and movie clips should be taken off YouTube lest someone train an AI on them? Analog video makes a return to stop the evil consequences of digital training?
by criley2 | 2025-05-24 17:35:36+00:00
If paying rent, mortgage and food is all that matters, why not just pay people to dig ditches and then pay them to fill them back in? Why go through the rigamarole of engineering at all?

If we accept that we should be productive, then it seems easy to justify that engineers should be working at good, well run companies producing real value for society.
by kragen | 2025-05-24 17:36:09+00:00
> I think it's okay for glyph generation to be slow as long as it doesn't block redraw and immediate user feedback such as scrolling

Incidentally, last night I loaded a page containing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44061550 in Fennec on my phone, and at some point when I scrolled to where some superscripts were in view, they were briefly displayed as gray boxes. My inference is that Fennec had loaded the font metrics so it could do layout but didn't do glyph rasterization until the glyphs were in view or nearly so.
by herodotus | 2025-05-24 17:36:19+00:00
Actually, you were not alone: https://www.patentlyapple.com/2010/12/apple-wins-patent-for-...

Steve Jobs was one of the inventors listed on this patent. As it happens, I and another Apple colleague filed an almost identical patent at around the same time. So, for a while, Apple owned two patents for simulating a rotary dial on a touch wheel. (My patent was eventually allowed to lapse. Steve's has been renewed).

I have to say that I had had a bit too much to drink at a dinner in SF when I suggested this idea to my colleague. I was thinking of the old pinball game that had really good physics making it feel amazingly real. I thought that the crucial part was doing the dialing physics in such a way that users could quickly dial any digit with the right gesture.

I was not disclosed on the iPhone when I came up with this idea, but my colleague sent the idea off to the patent committee and they agreed to it! They must have laughed when they saw the similarities to Steve's patent (which was still in progress too). We did have some big differences with Steve's, so it wasn't a duplicate. That being said, I think they wanted to boost the number of patents related to the iPhone as part of the initial marketing. (Steve said that there were already "over 200 patents" for it when he introduced it.)
by craftkiller | 2025-05-24 17:38:17+00:00
One of my teammates recently decided to us AI to explain a config option instead of reading the 3 sentences in the actual documentation. The AI told him the option did something that the documentation explicitly stated the option did not do. He then copied the AI's lies as a comment into our code base. If I hadn't read the actual documentation like our forefathers used to, that lie would be copied around from one project to the next. I miss having coworkers that are more than a thin facade to an LLM.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-24 17:38:24+00:00
Successful people outgrowing their jodhpurs and losing their reason is a thing, sure, but that does not apply in this specific case. Tech writing is still writing, my friend.

Have you read ANSI Common Lisp? Or even the introduction to it?

I have criticisms of Mr. Graham, but the man can write, and consistently. Some of the essays can be a tad too terse for me at times, but when he gets it right, his stuff can be exquisite.

Another example that comes immediately crashing to mind is Donald Knuth - have you read any of his tech writing? It's glorious.

Anyone who wants to claim there's a hard line between writing worthy of "literary merit" and tech writing is going to have their work cut out for them with those two already.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-24 17:38:32+00:00
I’m pretty sure that “Seeing Like a State” legibility and writing legibility are totally different concepts that happen to share a word. State legibility is all about categorizing and simplifying to allow information processing to happen in a distributed fashion among a large number of bureaucrats. Writing legibility is about conveying information to the individual reader. A hundred pages of prose about a single person is incompatible with the former but can be a great example of the latter if written well.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-05-24 17:38:43+00:00
> Instead, Heidegger compels us to do something much harder: to see the world as it is being reframed by technology, and then to consciously reclaim or reweave the strands of meaning that risk being flattened.

As a call to action this is inadequate. I have no idea what this is persuading me to do.

If I dig into how Heidegger solved this problem in his own life, well, I don’t think that should be replicated.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2025-05-24 17:39:14+00:00
Aren't {X}? -> isn't it true that {X}?

{X} = JSON parsers technically [are] not following the standard if {reason}

{reason} = [JSON parsers] don't reliably store a number that {what kind of number?}

{what kind of number} = number that is not representable by a IEEE754 double precision float

seems simple
by data-ottawa | 2025-05-24 17:39:54+00:00
My experiences with Copilot are exactly like these threads – once it's wrong you have to almost start fresh or takeover, which can be a huge time sink.

Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet seem much better for me. The models needed alignment and feedback but worked fairly well. I know Copilot uses Claude but for whatever reason I don't get nearly the same quality as using Claude Code.

Claude is expensive, $10 to implement a feature, $2 to add some unit tests to my small personal project. I imagine large apps or apps without clear division of modules/code will burn through tokens.

It definitely works as an accelerator but I don't think it's going to replace humans yet, and I think that's still a very strong position for AI to be in.
by skrebbel | 2025-05-24 17:40:05+00:00
Like I said, the joke wouldn't work as well without the "every". This is a super common joke style. I used to tell people that every company I work at goes bust (I had worked at 3 companies at the time and they all went bust), so obviously I've got a Midas touch of bankruptcy and they shouldn't hire me. It's the same joke. It's not particularly original but it's also not "an overhyped style". It's just a joke.
by mlochbaum | 2025-05-24 17:40:48+00:00
Author of BQN here, I agree with how section "What about APL?" describes the APL family as not fundamentally better (although details like indexing are often less messy). I outlined a system with lexically-scoped named axes at https://gist.github.com/mlochbaum/401e379ff09d422e2761e16fed... . The linear algebra example would end up something like this:

solve(X[i,_], Y[j,_], A[i,j,_,_]) = over i, j/+: Y * linalg_solve(A, X)
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-24 17:40:50+00:00
> The three biggest levers are (1) “N-1 backfills”, (2) requiring a business rationale for promotions into senior-most levels, and (3) shifting hiring into cost efficient hiring regions. None of these are the sort of inspiring topics that excite folks, but they are all essential to the long term stability of your organization.

There it goes. The mask comes off. The sad reality of it is that your average exec views their work, indeed their life, as strictly zero sum. We should not praise this. We should not celebrate this. If anything, we should call this out.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-24 17:41:34+00:00
Your framing here, while I admit is quite clever, is so overly cynical that I think it misses the point entirely.

I think a more generous interpretation of his point is:

1. Everyone (execs and others) needs to translate their true goals and motivations into language, and some people do this better than others. Even great communicators have some delta between what they say and what they truly mean.

2. Thus, it pays to keep this in mind, and think from the perspective of "OK, what is the top-priority, primary thing that this exec is really trying to get across", which can sometimes mean you need to separate the wheat from the chaff of what they're saying.

Frankly, I think this is good advice for anyone on the receiving end of a message. I think this HN guideline deserves a reminder: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Thus, you can either interpret his statement in a positive manner about how you can be more effective when on the receiving end of a message, or you can complain about needing to be a Kremlinologist.
by yencabulator | 2025-05-24 17:41:37+00:00
> Data from the Juno mission showed that Jupiter has a diffuse core that mixes into its mantle, extending for 30–50% of the planet's radius, and comprising heavy elements with a combined mass 7–25 times the Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter#Internal_structure

> This has resulted in the theory that Jupiter does not have a solid core as previously thought, but a "fuzzy" core made of pieces of rock and metallic hydrogen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)#Scientific_r...
by 13years | 2025-05-24 17:41:52+00:00
> AI is not inevitable fate. It is an invitation to wake up. The work is to keep dragging what is singular, poetic, and profoundly alive back into focus, despite all pressures to automate it away.

This is the struggle. The race to automate everything. Turn all of our social interactions into algorithmic digital bits. However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.

We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement. Not sure how that is going to play out, but we certainly aren't slowing down yet.

For example, take a look at the short clip I have posted here. It is an example of just how far everyone is scaling bot and content farms. It is an absolute flood of noise into all of our knowledge repositories. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale
by ChoGGi | 2025-05-24 17:42:23+00:00
I live in Alberta, I voted Carney not because I care much for the liberals, though him being from Edmonton was a nice touch.

It was a vote against Poilievre, I'm not a fan of career politicians, less of those who only seem to have slogans and no bills with their names on them (well okay he got one passed).

I was slightly hopeful he'd take his pension and fuck off, yeah I'm in the trades too.