MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by decimalenough | 2025-06-03 03:37:12+00:00
The class of well-paid FAANG employees is not that large: I'd guessestimate that all five combined employ ~100,000 engineers in the US, give or take. Yes, they have many more employees in total, but many of these are not well-paid engineering roles and/or are not in the US.

If we generously assume that there are 3x as many engineers employed at various non-FAANGs that pay competitive salaries, we still only get ~400,000 people, or around 0.1% of the population of the US.

There's one, maybe two major cities in the US where this has visibly impacted the entire local market: SF and Seattle. Everywhere else tech employment is more or less a rounding error.

Just to confirm I'm not pulling these figures entirely out of my ass, Pew Research says the "upper-income tier" has grown from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021 (+7%), but the "middle class" (median income $90k in 2021 dollars) has shrunk from 61% in 1971 to 50% (-11%) in 2021.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a...
by rao-v | 2025-06-03 03:37:49+00:00
I’ve been playing a bit with toy robots and vision models and I can’t shake the sense that somebody has got to be close to simplifying the control game with high fps cameras. Why are there so many systems to control motors and ground positioning … shouldn’t it all be cameras on the arm figuring out if the motors have positioned the arm correctly and updating to fix?

This is obviously naive and computationally wasteful but I really want to see vision first rebuilds of most control and feedback systems.
by notnullorvoid | 2025-06-03 03:38:27+00:00
I like LLMs, it's legitimately impressive to see people vibe code solutions (some times even to novel ideas). Agents are a much better use of LLMs than auto complete (which is terrible).

However I've tried coding agents, and well they suck... for me. Nearly all of the code I write these days is performance sensitive, as well as design sensitive (making abstractions for others to use), and not close to what could be considered boilerplate. The boilerplate I do write usually takes a trivial amount of time to write by hand. I'll keep trying whatever is new in AI every few months, I certainly don't want to be left behind, but so far that strategy hasn't left me optimistic.

> but the code is shitty, like that of a junior developer

It's worse than a junior. Juniors learn and grow, if they're a good junior it's often fairly rapid and self directed. Juniors can also ask for guidance or help, this is something maybe agents will be capable of in the future, but I could see it going pretty poorly for reasons tied to the first point about not learning. While LLMs contain a ton of information, more than a junior could, the junior is a better reasoning machine; I don't consider LLM "reasoning" to be anything close to the meatbag version.

> but the craft

Craft matters, it's important to enjoy and take pride in your work. If you enjoy managing AI agents that's fine, lots of programmers end up on the manager career path, but it's not for everyone.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-03 03:39:11+00:00
The reaction to this article is interesting. I have found AI to be useful in software contexts that most people never exercise or expect based on their intuitions of what an LLM can do.

For me, a highly productive but boring use of LLMs for code is that they excel at providing midwit “best practice” solutions to common problems. They are better documentation than the documentation and can do a lot of leg work e.g. Linux syscall implementation details. My application domains tend to require more sophisticated solutions than an LLM can provide but they still save a lot of rote effort. A lot of software development exists almost entirely in the midwit zone.

Much more interesting, they are decent at reducing concepts in literature to code practice for which there are no code examples. Google and StackOverflow turn up nothing. For example, I’ve found them useful for generating specialized implementations of non-Euclidean computational geometry algorithms that don’t really exist in the wild that I’ve ever seen. This is a big win, it literally turns months of effort into hours of effort.

On the other hand, I do a lot of work with algorithms that don’t exist in literature, never mind public code, with extremely performance-engineered implementations. There is an important take away from this too: LLMs are hilariously bad at helping with this but so are human software developers if required to do the same thing with no context.

Knowledge for which there is little or no training data is currently a formidable moat, both for LLMs and humans.
by isaacremuant | 2025-06-03 03:41:09+00:00
You're very dishonest.

> I think that, ultimately, systems that humans use to interact on the internet will have to ditch anonymity. If people can't cheaply and reliably distinguish human output from LLM output, and people care about only talking to humans, we will need to establish authenticity via other mechanisms. In practice that means PKI or web of trust (or variants/combinations), plus reputation systems

Oh! I didn't use the expression "I propose" therefore "I'm not proposing it". Give me a break.

I'm glad you're done. Your final words were just denying your initial words. Fitting.
Show HN: Clai – Unixlike vendor agnostic LLM context feeder
by baalimago | 2025-06-03 03:41:25+00:00
Posting my tool clai again since tooling seems to be a buzz now a days.

Clai uses the conversation system and 'custom tools' when approaching coding tasks. This allows the LLMs to query the file system so that it builds the context specifically for the prompted usecase. Codex and Copilot etc usually takes entire repos as context, causing millions and millions of tokens, which of course is expensive. Clai, on the other hand, achieves the same result at lower cost, especially since it's possible to tweak which model to use and design specialized prompts in profiles to achieve certain tasks.

I wrote the majority of this tool over a year ago now, only now I've seen the big corporations 'catch up' with codex cli and claude sdk. So the benefit with clai here is that it's vendor agnostic.
by godelski | 2025-06-03 03:42:00+00:00
Didn't we quickly turn against TDD after it became unavoidably obvious that it doesn't work?

What is which this new paradigm where we act like everything is easily measurable and every measure is perfectly aligned with what we want to measure. We know these things aren't possible. It doesn't take much thought to verify this. Do you believe you are smart enough to test all possible issues? No one is. There'd be no CVEs if you could and we'd have solved all of physics centuries ago
by jakebasile | 2025-06-03 03:42:32+00:00
I'm an experienced engineer who is AI skeptical overall. I've continued to try these tools as they evolved. Sometimes they're neat, oftentimes they fail spectacularly and sometimes they fail in very pernicious ways.

If it keeps getting better, I'll just start using it more. It's not hard to use, so the FOMO "you have to be using this RIGHT NOW" stuff is just ridiculous.
by tpmoney | 2025-06-03 03:42:52+00:00
> This doesn’t even make sense. LLMs hallucinate things beyond simple programming language constructs. I commonly deal with allusions to functions or library methods that would be great if they existed, but the LLM made it up on the spot.

I think the author's point is your language (and more generally the tooling around it) should make this obvious, and almost all the AI agents these days will minimally run linting tools and clean up lints (which would include methods and library imports that don't exist) if they don't actively attempt to compile and test the code they've written. So you as the end user should (almost) never be seeing these made up functions.
by jryle70 | 2025-06-03 03:43:27+00:00
Huh? just because most of my day spent writing simple scripts for cleaning up data, to use as an example, doesn't mean I didn't have many many years honing my programming skills.

Someone who points out I'm mostly doing mundane things is telling the truth, not that they underestimate my knowledge or skills or don't appreciate the beauty of code.
by epiccoleman | 2025-06-03 03:43:30+00:00
Couldn't agree more. The first time I used Claude Code was for something very much like this. We had a PDF rendering issue with Unicode characters in one of our libraries. We ultimately needed to implement a sort of bespoke font fallback system.

With the help of the agent, I was able to iterate through several potential approaches and find the gaps and limitations within the space of an afternoon. By the time we got to the end of that process the LLM wrote up a nice doc of notes on the experiments, and *I* knew what I wanted to do next. Knowing that, I was able to give a more detailed and specific prompt to Claude which then scaffolded out a solution. I spent probably another day tweaking, testing, and cleaning up.

Overall I think it's completely fair to say that Claude saved me a week of dev time on this particular task. The amount of reading and learning and iterating I'd have had to do to get the same result would have just taken 3-4 days of work. (not to mention the number of hours I might have wasted when I got stuck and scrolled HN for an hour or whatever).

So it still needed my discernment and guidance - but there's no question that I moved through the process much quicker than I would have unassisted.

That's worth the $8 in API credit ten times over and no amount of parroting the "stochastic parrot" phrase (see what I did there?) would change my mind.
by DonHopkins | 2025-06-03 03:45:07+00:00
> John Waters could conjure up an intense feeling of kitsch by just naming his film Polyester.

Looking forward to scratch-n-sniff Odorama GenAI!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3WPpbEIYSs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B2HE-e8wYY
by evantbyrne | 2025-06-03 03:46:20+00:00
> Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs.

The cost is a pretty obvious indication that it's nowhere near the capability of an engineer. A robotic worker that can produce code 24/7 without tiring would be worth even more than a person of equivalent skill. I don't know what kinds of goofy hiring ya'll are doing, but all of the juniors I've been involved in hiring actually worked out great.
by joeld42 | 2025-06-03 03:47:59+00:00
hmm, i've played around a bit with level design in the past and honestly Arcol wouldn't be that great a fit. I like Probuilder in Unity for that, I think the key to any good workflow is immediate changes and fast iteration, so you really want something that's pretty tightly integrated into your game engine.

It could be useful for greyboxing or even just generating some rough shapes though. We do export GLTF which is easy to get into game engines.
by mkfs | 2025-06-03 03:48:16+00:00
> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

> The median dev thinks Star Wars and Daft Punk are a public commons. The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site. When they fail at policy, they route around it with coercion. They stand up global-scale piracy networks and sneer at anybody who so much as tries to preserve a new-release window for a TV show.

This is pretty disingenuous and mean-spirited. He's using SV startup types to smear all developers, including the typical, humble, un- or undercompensated FOSS dev who absolutely respects intellectual property, and quite reasonably, expects their own IP to be respected as well. But because Sam Altman types follow the "It's Better to Beg for Forgiveness than to Ask for Permission" rule, altruistic, non-sociopathic developers have no right to complain?
by jszymborski | 2025-06-03 03:48:33+00:00
The argument that I've heard against LLMs for code is that they create bugs that, by design, are very difficult to spot.

The LLM has one job, to make code that looks plausible. That's it. There's no logic gone into writing that bit of code. So the bugs often won't be like those a programmer makes. Instead, they can introduce a whole new class of bug that's way harder to debug.
by proc0 | 2025-06-03 03:50:02+00:00
Interesting analogy. The obvious reason so far is that GenAI has very generic output, and struggles massively with specific prompts. Errors aside, even when it gets it right it tends to be like some kind of average of the art style, character or scene. This still has its uses but for any interesting art project or product, the expectation is something unique and novel.

If GenAI can overcome its generic output issue and somehow can tap into some algorithm that gives it more creativity, then I think it will not be like polyester, and it will revolutionize art like photography or film did in the early 20th century.
by Suppafly | 2025-06-03 03:50:14+00:00
Even though they are African in origin (perhaps as birthing chairs), a lot of people know these as 'viking chairs' or sometimes as 'bog chairs' and you see them at SCA events and various sorts of old timey reenactment type gatherings, often decorated with celtic knots and such motifs.

Crazy to see them warrant a posting here, I had assumed most people had seen them before.
by rickcarlino | 2025-06-03 03:50:36+00:00
I got curious about OCR as a sort of poor man’s microfiche. I printed a test paragraph on high quality paper with a laser printer. The smallest font I could read under a USB microscope was 2.5pt, though I could probably have gone smaller if I used polymer paper. The fibers of the paper are quite apparent under a microscope. Transparency film paper was too smudgy.
by habosa | 2025-06-03 03:51:46+00:00
I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right.

Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of people who I don’t trust. And it will do all of this while consuming truly shocking amounts of energy.

Not only do I think these things will happen, I think the Altmans of the world would eagerly agree that they will happen. They just think it will be interesting / profitable for them. It won’t be for us.

And we, the engineers, are in a unique position. Unlike people in any other industry, we can affect the trajectory of AI. My skepticism (and unwillingness to aid in the advancement of AI) might slow things down a billionth of a percent. Maybe if there are more of me, things will slow down enough that we can find some sort of effective safeguards on this stuff before it’s out of hand.

So I’ll keep being skeptical, until it’s over.
by betocmn | 2025-06-03 03:52:02+00:00
Good Pair Days | Lead Engineer, Fullstack | Full-Time | REMOTE (Australia +- 1h) | https://www.goodpairdays.com | AUD $150,000 to $250,000 + Stock Options

Profitable wine-subscription scale-up (tens of millions ARR) that used ML for personalised recommendations before "AI" was cool. Own and scale the whole stack (React/React Native, Python/Django, GraphQL, Postgres, AWS), ship new AI-native features, chase latency spikes, and grow the team from 1 → 5+.

You're a commercial thinker who speaks unit economics, retention levers, and gross margin as fluently as REST endpoints; resourceful, data-driven, ops-literate, and never stops tinkering with the latest models.

Comp up to A$250k + meaningful equity.

You can email me directly ("beto" at our domain name specified above and the subject line as "From Hacker News | Remote | {your country}") with (1) a tech decision you owned and its business impact, and (2) the first AI experiment you'd run at GPD.
by alwa | 2025-06-03 03:52:11+00:00
So the [middle + upper] tier has shifted from 75% to 71%, for a 4% net drift downward? While 7% have drifted upward from [middle + lower] classes to upper?

The Pew link is fascinating me, thank you for sharing it! One thing that stands out to me is just how extreme the upper-class skew is—its median being 10x the median lower-class income. That helps me contextualize the types of graph that describe the “decline of the middle class” as a share of total wealth: it makes it seem more like a story of “lots of middle-class families’ wealth is wealthy in global terms and also growing, but a shocking number of families have shockingly much money too.” To some degree a story of middle class decline relative to the people richer than them—but to an even greater degree, a story of a burgeoning upper class.

Certainly you’re right that highly-paid tech workers are a drop in that bucket. To me, though, the overall numbers frustrate the “decline of the middle class” narrative to some extent. I guess it’s considerably worse to sink from prosperous classes to lower-class than it is to rise from the middle to the upper class—still, the net slice of the population affected by the change is smaller than I would have guessed.
by jaredsohn | 2025-06-03 03:52:35+00:00
Then as a junior you should ask the AI if there is a way to prevent the problem and fix it manually.

You might then argue that they don't know they should ask that; could just configure the AI once to say you are a junior engineer and when you ask the ai to do something, you also want it to help you learn how to avoid problems and prevent them from happening.
by RodgerTheGreat | 2025-06-03 03:52:52+00:00
At least when you mentor an actual junior developer they often learn, and you can take satisfaction in aiding the growth of a human being. All the time and effort spent coaxing an LLM to "do better" either disappears in a puff of smoke the next time it goes schizoid and needs to have its context cleared or- at best- is recorded to help a for-profit company train their next generation of products.

Like everything else about the "GenAI" fad, it boils down to extractively exploiting goodwill and despoiling the commons in order to convert VC dollars into penny-shavings.
by jsnelgro | 2025-06-03 03:53:53+00:00
I feel like this is a great practical example showcasing the value of static types and designing your data model up front. If you know the structure of the object, you can put in placeholders while the real thing loads in. Then you get to choose how it loads in. Ideally you can stream the patches via serialized actions. This is basically Redux/Elm in a nutshell where the action objects can come from events sent via SSE/websockets/polling/etc.

Reducing a change log is about as stateless, functional, and elegant as it gets. I love these sorts of designs but reality seems to complicate them in unexpected ways unfortunately. Still worth striving for though!
by zeroq | 2025-06-03 03:53:55+00:00
Holy cow!

My latest try with Gemini went like this:

- Write me a simple todo app on CloudFlare with auth0 authentication. - Let's proceed with a simple todo app on CloudFlare. We start by importing the @auth0-cloudflare and... - Does that @auth0-cloudflare actually exists? - Oh, it doesn't. I can give you a walkthrough on how to set up an account on auth0. Would you like me to? - Yes, please. - Here. I'm going to write the walkthrough in a document... (proceed to create an empty document) - That seems to be an empty document. - Oh, my bad. I'll produce it once more. (proceed to create another empty document) - Seems like you're md parsing library is broken, can you write it in chat instead? - Yes... (Your Gemini trial has expired. Would you like to pay $100 to continue?)

My idea was to try the new model with a low hanging fruit - as kentov mentioned, it's a very basic task that has been made thousand of times on the internet with extremely well documented APIs (officially and on reddit/stackoverflow/etc.).

Sure, it was a short hike before my trial expired, and kentov himself admited it took him couple of days to put it together, but... holy cow.
by skydhash | 2025-06-03 03:57:14+00:00
You can find some sample scenes on YouTube where Tony Start is using it as an assistant for his prototyping and inquiries. Jarvis is the executor and Stark is the idea man and reviewer. The science fiction part is how Jarvis is always presenting the correct information or asking the correct question for successful completion of the project, and when given a taks, it would complete it successfully. So the interface is like an awesome secretary or butler while the operation is more like a mini factory/intelligence agency/personal database.
by grumple | 2025-06-03 03:57:24+00:00
Where are the results? I keep hearing about how great these coding agents are. What have you built beyond the complexity of a disposable toy app? Where are the swarms of new apps built by these agents that are solving new problems and taking over markets? I’m just not seeing results. I guess I need to spend some time using cursor as an agent to see it for myself.

I am a believer that these tools will be (if they aren’t already) extremely useful. Game changing in many ways, and I worry about the future of knowledge fields. Definitely not a skeptic in the trajectory. I do wonder if that makes those of us who are on the cutting edge more valuable as AI can quickly reproduce things that are well understood.
by ttiurani | 2025-06-03 03:57:55+00:00
"You don’t believe in IPR. Then shut the fuck up about IPR."

As a software engineer, I need to call out this rhetoric. We are not all morally bankrupt. Many of the people with the most ethical backbone I know are also software engineers.

I don't use "AI" for the same reason I don't use amphetamine. I'm sure I could get stuff more stuff done faster if I used it, but I don't, because the manufacturing and the distribution of it is completely unethical.

The blatant stealing of intellectual property is only the tip of the shitberg. As bad are the giant ecological footprint[1], the colonialism of the grossly underpaid RLHF, and the conceding of even more of our digital lives to trillion dollar corporations.

We can and must ethically evaluate our work, and that includes our tools. Nobody's perfect, but doing one immoral thing does not mean you get a free pass to skip morality altogether.

1. https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/environmental-impact...
by tristenharr | 2025-06-03 03:58:23+00:00
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by tristenharr | 2025-06-03 03:58:54+00:00
from sympy import sqrt, isprime

T1 = (sqrt(5) - 1) / 4 J1 = (3 - sqrt(5)) / 4

def golden_prime_generator(limit): primes = [] for n in range(2, limit): Fn = ((T1 / J1) * n - (-J1 / T1) * n) / sqrt(5) val = int(Fn.round()) if isprime(val): primes.append(val) return primes

my_primes = golden_prime_generator(1000) print(my_primes)