MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spencerflem | 2025-06-09 17:20:10+00:00
You're missing the point, which is that the group with a lot more money to start have their voices heard more.

It matters some that their multiplier is different , but in absolute numbers its still more to the program that benefits fewer people. The "utility function" is not accurate because the wealthy's utility starts out with a massive advantage.

So yes, I think it would still be unfair if you switched it given the poor majority genuinely would rather have art than lead free pipes.

The problem is that their voices are counted less due to not starting with money.

But regardless, that would be a silly thing to switch because that's not a situation that ever comes up, while the original framing is a genuine problem in our society right now.
by jsemrau | 2025-06-09 17:20:21+00:00
Up until a few weeks ago, my LinkedIn seemed to become better because of AI, but now it seems everything is lazy AI slop.

We meatbags are great pattern recognizers. Here is a list of my current triggers:

"The twist?",

"Then something remarkable happened",

That said, this is more of an indictment of the lazyness of the authors to provide clearer instructions on the style needed so the app defaults to such patterns.
by drivingmenuts | 2025-06-09 17:20:25+00:00
How do you trust the generated vibe code? With human coding and review, you know what's in the code and what it's doing behind your back. How does that work with vibe code?

It seems like something that should NEVER be trusted - you don't know the source of the original code inhaled by the AI and the AI doesn't actually understand what it's taking in. Seems like a recipe for disaster.
by homefree | 2025-06-09 17:20:50+00:00
I suspect none of this stuff will matter in the near term. People will just take ozempic or whatever the best iteration is and be done with it.

I’ve lost substantial weight (75lbs) the hard way multiple times, it’s doable but it sucks. If the drugs make it easy with seemingly no downside then why waste time with this other stuff.

Use the drugs, lose the weight, then when thin add in an exercise regimen if you don’t have one.
by levimalott | 2025-06-09 17:21:19+00:00
Weave Bio | https://www.weave.bio/ | Remote (US timezones) | Backend Engineer | Full-time

We're building the first AI-enabled regulatory platform for drug development. The existing processes to submit regulatory submissions to government bodies are extremely time consuming and expensive (plus no one likes paperwork). We're building a SaaS platform powered by LLMs to dramtically reduce the time spent producing regulatory documents (97% reduction in current benchmarks).

We're looking for a backend engineer to join our team to work on our backend service, data pipelines, and production LLM capabilities. Apply at https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/weave/jobs/4003308009

We run django + postgres + redis + celery.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-06-09 17:21:20+00:00
AFAICT, that $450K is refundable and transferable. IOW, if you make $0 in year two and have expenses of $0 in year two, you'd get a tax refund of $100K because $200K of your expenses from year one would be applied to year 2.

And it's transferable -- if your company fails, there are companies out there that will buy the rump of your company to realize the unrealized tax refunds.

Which is why it's usually fairly straightforward to get a factor loan to pay those $450K in taxes -- it's backed by an asset.

Factor loans are usually expensive with a high interest rate. Because you can get a factor loan, the taxes are not going to immediately bankrupt the company in the short term, but the high interest rates are going to hurt in the long term.

Not a lawyer nor an accountant. Not even an American.
by andrewl-hn | 2025-06-09 17:21:25+00:00
AFAIK there are a handful of companies that gobble the whole yearly allowance of H1B visas among them. Usual suspects are BigTech and large consulting groups. The later act as intermediaries: they sell worker hours at a higher rate, skimming the difference between their prices and employee's salary. If they were somehow barred from H1B program the H1B visa holders would presumably find better paying jobs elsewhere.

H1B rules around changing jobs means that even if the employee joins at a market-level salary when they come to the US, they tent to stay at the same company much longer and can be exploited. The new company has to go through a lengthy paperwork process to allow the visa holder to switch jobs. Also, since the tech world tends to use things like stock options / RSUs / monetary bonuses for large parts of compensation package and those do not count towards "salary" you may have a situation where an h1b holder on paper seems to be paid fairly but in practice get only about 40-50% of what their peers get.

If they were allowed to change jobs freely they would be able to negotiate their compensation fairly. The companies would be less intensified to hire H1Bs to save money and would also consider local talent for same positions. Everybody would win: both H1B visa holders and their families and American workers, too. The only losers would be consulting firms (not a huge loss, to be honest, most of their employees are overseas anyway, so the can absorb the cost) and BigTech (they have enough money, anyway).

There are other problems for H1B holders, like getting a green card is something their employer, and not them, can do - another area for abuse. And then some nationalities have to wait much longer to go through this process then others (essentially, the US migration service says that the country has too many people from India and Pakistan already, thank you very much), and there are other issues I don't recall.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-09 17:22:25+00:00
It's not that different from managing a few junior developers and getting them to do stuff for you. Sometimes doing it yourself is faster but letting them do it is a good investment because it makes them better prepared for the next time you want something from them. That's how they become senior developers.

With AIs/vibe coding/whatever you want to call it, there is no such benefit. It's more an opportunistic thing. You can delegate or do it yourself. If delegating is overall faster and better, it's an easy choice. Otherwise, it's your own time you are wasting.

Using this stuff (like everybody else) over the last two years has definitely planted the thought that I need to start thinking in terms of having LLM friendly code bases. It seems I get a lot better results when things are modular, well documented, and not too ambiguous. Of course that's what makes code bases nice to work with in general so these are not bad goals to have.

Working with large code bases is hard and expensive (more tokens) and create room for ambiguity. So, break it up. Modularize. Apply those SOLID principles. Or get your agentic coding tool of choice to refactor things for you. No need to do that yourself. All you need to do is nudge things in the right direction. And that would be a good idea without AIs anyway. So, all this stuff does is remove excuses for you to not have better code.

If you only vibe code and don't care, you just create a big mess that then needs cleaning up. Or for somebody else to clean up because what's your added value at that point? Your vibes aren't that valuable. Working software is. The difference between a product that makes money and a vibe coded thing that you look at and than discard is that one pays the bills and the other one is just for your entertainment.
by pj_mukh | 2025-06-09 17:22:37+00:00
"If we need immigrant labor, give them Green Cards instead of precarity."

This is counter-intuitive but absolutely the right answer. Giving immigrant employees full bargaining power will murder H1B mills. And no waiting periods in precarious limbo either. If you want an immigrant worker, they automatically get all bargaining power as an American and then you make your decision based on the market forces.
by chermi | 2025-06-09 17:22:55+00:00
Can someone steelman the positives for me? I don't see how it's anything but pure regulatory capture favoring established tech firms. A small company ramping up revenue simply can't handle this amortization while a large, established company can.

That being said, I do think there's a little sloppiness in what is categorized as "R&D" in the software development. Is code maintenance R&D? Bug fixes? Performance improvements? Is it a "capital asset" no longer under R&D once it hits production? This aspect has always seemed too gray given how much money is at stake in taxes.

But again, this complexity is an advantage for more established firms with legal departments and the infrastructure in place to document everything in order to handle audits. Which, in my view, is a form of regulatory capture; this presentation of symptoms of regulatory capture is pretty common.

One potential argument I can see is that maybe this balances out since presumably the more established firms would have less "R&D" as a fraction of expenses to deduct in the first place?

Edited to fix some typos and clarity.
by ufmace | 2025-06-09 17:23:01+00:00
I've tended to agree with this line of argument, but on the other hand...

I expect that anybody you asked 10 years ago who was at least decently knowledgeable about tech and AI would have agreed that the Turing Test is a pretty decent way to determine if we have a "real" AI, that's actually "thinking" and is on the road to AGI etc.

Well, the current generation of LLMs blow away that Turing Test. So, what now? Were we all full of it before? Is there a new test to determine if something is "really" AI?
by sudobash1 | 2025-06-09 17:23:04+00:00
I expect that plenty of these apps are or will be mining these photos for data about their users. I know the cat is already out of the bag as far as online tracking goes, but until now, tracking every meal & snack someone eats has been impossible (except perhaps for the most consummate doordash user).

And the companies most interested in the data would be the large food corporations who bear a lot of responsibility for getting us into this obesity crisis in the first place.
by sam0x17 | 2025-06-09 17:23:19+00:00
We have formal definitions, it’s anything that can have a grammar, these definitions are incredibly broad, big endian two’s compliment integer encoding has a grammar consisting of two tokens, 0 and 1. All you need is something that can form a sentence and something that can parse it and the thing going on between them is language. Languages vary in complexity but the floor for that is way lower than you are thinking. Simple languages consisting of one or two tokens are still languages.
by johnea | 2025-06-09 17:23:20+00:00
The most amazing thing to me, is how human pet "parents" ignore the fact that the dog has an actual parent, and the puppy is stolen off of it's actual mother's suckling tit, and handed to a human while it's still an infant, so that it bonds with the human, not it's actual mother.

As in many things, most people are willing to ignore any aspect that is not what's in their face, and appealing to them.

There are many other aspects to the thoughtless use of other animals to assuage a human's mental illness.

One of the main ones is projection: the animal can't speak, or otherwise precisely express themselves. Into this silence, the human is able to inject whatever narrative they desire. This leads to people claiming that the animal is much more responsive to their needs, and provides greater solace than another human. This solace is purely in the mind of the beholder. No one knows what the dog is thinking, therefore it's thinking exactly what we want it to think.

Another aspect of the entire pet issue, that I haven't seen otherwise mentioned in the comments, is the disruption to the public peace caused by many dogs. I have seen a couple of comments about dog shit, which is a major problem, but noise is also a significant issue.

Both of these are primarily the fault of negligent owners, which are the overwhelming majority of modern US pet owners.
by b112 | 2025-06-09 17:23:51+00:00
Not sure if you remember MUI, but I was thinking about how extensible the OS was with lib patching.

I mean, how is it that MUI is still superior to every window manager I use, decades later??

There's surely been changes with all the OS updates over the years, but I wonder what a modern amigaos would have been like.

And if MUI was possible, what else could be with backwards compatibility? Imagine a modern AmigaOS. It could be neat.

But I agree, that battle is lost. And sadly I bet if it wasn't, Commodore execs could have turned it into an online nightnare like Windows is these days.

Oh well. It's a nice memory at least.
by nkmnz | 2025-06-09 17:23:51+00:00
I've never heard of the specific mechanism the article talks about, but it is so full of flaws that I do not consider it a good source of thought about the topic. Just the most obvious example where the author didn't put much effort into understanding their own text:

> Three art patrons each contribute [money] to the local public art museum. [...] They each expect to experience [money] worth of individual utility from enjoying the [...] art.

> [...] utility of saved lives is experienced only once by each of the cancer patients – the three contributors don’t experience that utility (other than feeling good about those lives being saved, but that’s not the kind of utility we’re trying to maximize).

This approach of intellectual unsoundness - i.e., accepting the social and individual utility of enjoying the arts, but denying any such utility for enjoying the saved lives – is present throughout the article. And I haven't started with the author comparing random cases of contributions that differ in multiple dimensions where using a ceteris paribus approach would immediately show that his arguments are shallow...
by paxys | 2025-06-09 17:23:57+00:00
Some Windows Vista designer is shedding a tear right now. Got such a huge nostalgia hit watching the "liquid glass" demos during the keynote. Installing a leaked "Longhorn" OS on a PC back in 2005 and seeing all the translucent refractive glass really felt magical and futuristic. 20 years later, everything old is new again.
by logifail | 2025-06-09 17:25:14+00:00
> Normally, when you have expenses, you deduct them off your revenue to find your taxable profit. If you have $1 million in sales, and $900k in costs, you have $100k in profit [..]

I'm not sure it's helpful to simplify quite that much, doesn't this usually depend on whether we're talking about operating expenses (typically rent, utilities, salaries, supplies) or capital expenditures (typically buildings, land, intangibles...)?
by benoau | 2025-06-09 17:25:31+00:00
He was a favourite author of mine when I was young, many great novels.

> The Day Of The Jackal was turned into a 1973 film starring Edward Fox as the Jackal, and then became a TV drama starring Eddie Redmayne last year.

It was also the 1997 Bruce Willis movie "The Jackal": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119395/

The Dogs of War was also a 1980 movie as well: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080641/
by theonething | 2025-06-09 17:25:49+00:00
> people will do nothing but work and tend to their 3 dogs, which inhibits personal development or meaningful progress in life.

GP was referring to this group of people whose lives consist of only work and their pets. Clearly you do not fall into this group. In fact, given your lifestyle (a healthy, balanced one), I'd say a pet has great potential to further enhance personal development.
by jerf | 2025-06-09 17:26:07+00:00
This is the fundamental reason why I am in favor of a ban on simply posting AI-generated content in user forums. It isn't that AI is fundamentally bad per se, and to the extent that it is problematic now, that badness may well be a temporary situation. It's because there's not a lot of utility in you as a human being basically just being an intermediary to what some AI says today. Anyone who wants that can go get it themselves, in an interactive session where they can explore the answer themselves, with the most up-to-date models. It's fundamentally no different than pasting in the top 10 Google results for a search with no further commentary; if you're going to go that route just give a letmegooglethat.com link. It's exactly as helpful, and in its own way kind of carries the same sort of snarkiness with it... "oh, are you too stupid to AI? let me help you with that".

Similarly, I remember there was a lot of frothy startup ideas around using AI to do very similar things. The canonical one I remember is "using AI to generate commit messages". But I don't want your AI commit messages... again, not because AI is just Platonically bad or something, but because if I want an AI summary of your commit, I'd rather do it in two years when I actually need the summary, and then use a 2027 AI to do it rather than a 2025 AI. There's little to no utility to basically caching an AI response and freezing it for me. I don't need help with that.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-06-09 17:26:08+00:00
That's nuts, since a payroll should never be considered an asset. That's trying to put a material value on software, and doing it based on the salaries of developers is as crazy as valuing it in lines of code.

The value of software could be based on something more realistic, like a percentage of actual revenue, but I suppose tech giants would be against that.
by daxfohl | 2025-06-09 17:26:19+00:00
The other side of me thinks that maybe the eventual landing point of all this is a merger of engineering and PM. A sizeable chunk of engineering work isn't really anything new. CRUD, jobs, events, caching, synchronization, optimizing for latency, cost, staleness, redundancy. Sometimes it amazes me that we're still building so many ad-hoc ways of doing the same things.

Like, say there's a catalog of 1000 of the most common enterprise (or embedded, or UI, or whatever) design patterns, and AI is good at taking your existing system, your new requirements, identifying the best couple design patterns that fit, give you a chart with the various tradeoffs, and once you select one, are able to add that pattern to your existing system, with the details that match your requirements.

Maybe that'd be cool? The system/AI would then be able to represent the full codebase as an integration of various patterns, and an engineer, or even a technical PM, could understand it without needing to dive into the codebase itself. And hopefully since everything is managed by a single AI, the patterns are fairly consistent across the entire system, and not an amalgamation of hundreds of different individuals' different opinions and ideals.

Another nice thing would be that huge migrations could be done mostly atomically. Currently, things like, say, adding support in your enterprise for, say, dynamic authorization policies takes years to get every team to update their service's code to handle the new authz policy in their domain, and so the authz team has to support the old way and the new way, and a way to sync between them, roughly forever. With AI, maybe all this could just be done in a single shot, or over the course of a week, with automated deployments, backfill, testing, and cleanup of the old system. And so the authz team doesn't have to deal with all the "bugging other teams" or anything else, and the other teams also don't have to deal with getting bugged or trying to fit the migration into their schedules. To them it's an opaque thing that just happened, no different from a library version update.

With that, there's fewer things in flight at any one time, so it allows engineers and PMs to focus on their one deliverable without worrying how it's affecting everyone else's schedules etc. Greater speed begets greater serializability begets better architecture begets greater speed.

So, IDK, maybe the end game of AI will make the job more interesting rather than less. We'll see.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-06-09 17:26:44+00:00
So it applies to software engineers but under what definition of software engineer?

This [1] is the only definition the code actually give.

> (3) Software development

> For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure.

1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174

-----

Is a test or QA engineer considered a software engineer?

Is an FPGA or ASIC engineer still considered a software engineer if they are writing in HDLs?

Is a systems engineer, electrical engineer, or mechanical engineer considered a software engineer because they use MATLAB, etc and use programming to do their design work?

Is a sysadmin, DB admin, or other IT staff considered a software engineer because they write software as part of their job?

What about a quantitative analyst, data scientist, accountant, actuary, or any of the other maths and analysis adjacent job roles that regularly use some level of programming to do their job (and therefore write software)?

What about HR, etc who use excel documents? Excel is fundamentally just a graphical array programming language (and the design of spreadsheet tools is heavily inspired directly from APL). Is anyone who uses excel or builds/maintains spreadsheets considered a software engineer?

Like software engineering is such a broad field and programming bleeds into every part of modern business at this point.
by sam0x17 | 2025-06-09 17:26:54+00:00
Show me two rocks where one forms a sentence and another one parses it and sure.

Now if your definition of language is something arrogant like “a system of communication where combinations of tokens are given semantic meaning that correspond with conscious states and phenomena” then I would say that is incredibly limiting and ignores the preponderance of language all around you both in nature and technology. If someone builds a computer that can parse x86 assembly, it doesn’t cease to be parsing language if I stipulate that humans never existed and this computer just happens to exist. The tree still falls in the forest even if there is no human consciousness there to perceive it and the same goes for language. If it is encoded by something and decoded by something else fairly consistently (fuzzy is fine if the communication is still generally effective) then you have language.

More importantly the existence of unconscious systems that can generate and parse sentences in arbitrary languages means consciousness isn’t very relevant or necessary when analyzing language and perhaps focusing on it too much actually gets in the way of meaningful research and discovery.
by jonmil | 2025-06-09 17:27:30+00:00
Yeah that's what I was afraid of; the perception of the US (and US managers) is not great, which puts me at a disadvantage. There are a ton of very well-qualified people already in Europe, which really makes it very difficult to immigrate.

I was initially thinking that a startup might be the best bet, but it seems like very few of them provide sponsorships. The best bet is looking more like trying an internal transfer at my big-tech firm instead. Thanks for your insight!
by rietta | 2025-06-09 17:27:41+00:00
This US tax code change directly impacted my small business in a very real way that was directly felt by my household. In the past, it was a big boon for us and helped me afford to pay for some open source work and experimental things that helped our customers in the long run. Now we are back to mostly doing work-for-hire consulting. Even the experimental work I am doing, I am just paying for it and writing it off as typical business expenses. I cannot afford to take the credit because that means no deduction for this year. I don't have the cash in this small business context.