MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by the__alchemist | 2025-06-04 15:14:11+00:00
I agree with this article's arguments, and find in general, arguments philosophically opposed to extending human lifespan to be trivial to knock down (Ones listed in the article and otherwise). The elephant in the room appears to be more can we do it? And if so, will this involve genome modification (Through molecular bio techniques, or directed evolution as suggested by Dawkins). Optimists hope for treatments for the still-living... I'm not sure if this will ever be possible for significant extensions; we'll see.
by MisterTea | 2025-06-04 15:14:20+00:00
Moving a machine shop is not easy. A decent knee mill is about 2000 lbs. Disassembly is possible but you need a hoist or crane of some sort. Then you have to lift that into a vehicle like a pickup truck, trailer or box/flat bed truck. Then repeat the process at the storage location, then all again to move it to the new location. It seems the people involved did not want to or have the ability to tackle this. Paying a rigger is possible but the cost is very high.

I'll just assume they sold below cost to get people to bring their own equipment to take the machinery away at zero cost to them.
by andsoitis | 2025-06-04 15:14:48+00:00
> In the table below, I have summarized the pattern for the agricultural, financial, and four industrial revolutions

When you zoom out further, you might mark humankind’s progress a little differently like Yuval Harari does in Sapiens:

1. Cognitive Revolution (~70,000 years ago)

• Rise of abstract thinking and complex language • Enabled shared myths and large-scale cooperation

2. Agricultural Revolution (~10,000 years ago)

• Shift from foraging to farming • Led to food surpluses, social hierarchies, and sedentary life

3. Unification of Humankind (last few thousand years)

• Formation of empires,

global religions, and trade networks

• Created large-scale political and cultural systems

4. Scientific Revolution (~500 years ago)

• Birth of modern science and empirical inquiry • Fueled technological progress, capitalism, and global dominance
by dtagames | 2025-06-04 15:14:53+00:00
If your company is already profitable to the tune of billions annually, "cost cutting" isn't necessary. You're just cutting people out of jobs and out of economic participation in society -- which affects a far larger group than just themselves when those folks can't spend their salaries in other businesses.

There is no justification for "cost cutting" when it hurts the larger economy. If the company were losing money, that would be different, but these mass layoffs are all from firms that make obscene, enviable levels of profit. It's greed.
by abeppu | 2025-06-04 15:15:03+00:00
Sometimes the involvement or effort from an actual human is part of the perceived value / willingness of the customer to pay.

- People will pay more to go to a concert performed by live human musicians than they would to listen to a recording or to go see an artificial performer (e.g. chuck e cheese?)

- A "handmade" product, or a "made in house" dish is valued above a mass-production or factory-frozen meal

- A therapist, doctor etc may be valued partly for their bedside manner or ability for form genuine rapport with a patient

- Even in AI _defining and measuring value_ ultimately comes from people. E.g. we wouldn't have the LLMs we do if there hadn't been teams of humans providing input to the RL.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-04 15:15:16+00:00
My take is I have way too many windows open and I am always switching from this to that and the last thing I want is to do is add another web browser tab to make it harder to find other tabs.

For personal projects I write a lot of notes into .md files or comments but keep task lists as paper notes on letter pads. When the list gets too messy I copy the whole list by hand which means I keep on top of it. I'd argue that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONWIP

is the basic practice of management for small projects and that you can't really commit to more work than you can handle with a paper process.
by game_the0ry | 2025-06-04 15:15:20+00:00
I will likely be leaving tech bc of business execs getting horny and skeeting all over each other at the cost savings they perceive.

The flip side is that now I am using AI for my own entrepreneurial endeavors. Then I get to be the business exec, except my employees will be AI workflows.

And I never have to deal with a business exec every again.
by elliotbnvl | 2025-06-04 15:15:33+00:00
Nice.

FWIW, since I just realized my only main comment was a criticism, I found your article very insightful. It baffles me how many people will disagree with the general premise or nit-pick one tiny detail. The only thing more surprising to me than the rate at which AI is developing is the number of developers jamming their heads into the sand over it.
by guluarte | 2025-06-04 15:15:49+00:00
I'll create more work no less. I have a client with zero programming experience who is shipping slope UIs and then asking me to fix them. I barely have time as it is for all the low-quality work I have to fix that he sends me daily.

With AI, companies will ship more features, but their competitors will too. This will likely result in a net-zero gain, similar to the current situation.
by jdr23bc | 2025-06-04 15:15:56+00:00
A highly customizable split keyboard seems like the perfect solution for one handed typing.

I have one too & really enjoyed playing around with the layout editor. It makes it really easy to try out a new layout and revert changes. Expensive, but you're getting a ton of unique features for a niche market.

My coworkers have also recommended superwhisper for speech to text
by thomassmith65 | 2025-06-04 15:15:59+00:00
I saw the trailer for this show and had high hopes, but it's simplistic and tedious.

It doesn't feel like the writers (or actors, since the dialogue seems improvised) have intimate knowledge of the world they satirize.

It's a movie about how much the writer hates tech oligarchs, rather than a revealing satire of tech oligarchs.
by iforgotpassword | 2025-06-04 15:16:16+00:00
If you can pass on a chunk of customers sure. I've canceled a purchase more than once at checkout when I saw there is no PayPal available, if the website was unknown or looked a little shady, and I didn't desperately need the item. There are people who don't buy at all if there's no PayPal just because it's less convenient.
by registeredcorn | 2025-06-04 15:16:18+00:00
I mean this sincerely:

Your company should pivot into competing with PayPal. You've identified profound deficiencies in how they operate, know what type of services customers value, and have motive: someone is attacking your business and PayPal can't even comprehend that there is a problem, let alone protect you from it.

More than that, there are vast swaths of people that have horrendous horror stories about dealing with PayPal, having their accounts shutdown without explanation, being abused in the same or similar ways, and a wide variety of other concerns. There is a market for it. You just need to consider what made you go with PayPal Multiparty over whatever competition exists.

>We're struggling to find the motive or intended outcome by the attacker(s).

Unless you plan to sue, determining motive probably doesn't matter a whole lot. We could guess at different reasons, and even if we figured out a good one, it wouldn't change what is happening, just why it's happening. That's not much of a meaningful change.
by makmanalp | 2025-06-04 15:16:52+00:00
Counterthoughts: a) These skills fit on a double sided sheet of paper (e.g. the claude code best practices doc) and b) what these skills are has been changing so rapidly that even the best practices docs fall out of date super quick.

For example, managing the context window has become less of a problem with increased context windows in newer models and tools like the auto-resummarization / context window refresh in claude code make it so that you might be just fine without doing anything yourself.

All this to say that the idea that you're left significantly behind if you aren't training yourself on this feels bogus (I say this as a person who /does/ use these tools daily). It should take any programmer not more than a few hours to learn these skills from scratch, with the help of a doc, meaning any employee you hire should be able to pick these up no problem. I'm not sure it makes sense as a hiring filter. Perhaps in the future this will change. But right now these tools are built more like user friendly appliances - more like a cellphone or a toaster than a technology to wrap your head around, like a compiler or a database.
by lapcat | 2025-06-04 15:16:59+00:00
> What if it just makes most jobs worse, or replaces good jobs with more, worse jobs?

Right. Consider:

1) Senior engineer writing code

vs.

2) Senior engineer prompting and code reviewing LLM agent

The senior engineer is essential to the process in each case, because the LLM agent left to its own devices will produce nonfunctional crap. But think about the pleasantness of the job and the job satisfaction of the senior engineer? Speaking just for myself, I'd rather quit the industry than spend my career babysitting nonhuman A.I. That's not what I signed up for.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-06-04 15:17:03+00:00
Reading this thread leaves me with the impression that most posters advocating learning assembly language have never had to use it in a production environment. It sucks!

For the overwhelming majority of programmers, assembly offers absolutely no benefit. I learned (MC6809) assembly after learning BASIC. I went on to become an embedded systems programmer in an era where compilers were still pretty expensive, and I worked for a cheapskate. I wrote an untold amount of assembly for various microcontrollers over the first 10 years of my career. I honestly can't say I got any more benefit out of than programming in C; it just made everything take so much longer.

I once, for a side gig, had to write a 16-bit long-division routine on a processor with only one 8-bit accumulator. That was the point at which I declared that I'd never write another assembly program. Luckily, by then gcc supported some smaller processors so I could switch to using Atmel AVR series.
by CivBase | 2025-06-04 15:17:35+00:00
I think the AI job extermination narrative has so much traction right now because it's a convenient cover story for layoffs. Every tech CEO is talking about how they're replacing jobs with AI but I don't see stories on HN about how any of these jobs are being replaced with AI.

Thar doesn't mean AI won't replace jobs. I don't know the scale, but it certainly will replace some jobs at least. Just probably not the ones we're currently losing.
Show HN: OSS's Answer to Cursor's Codebase Level Context for Large Projects
by juanviera23 | 2025-06-04 15:17:57+00:00
Hey HN,

We've all seen tools like Cursor pull in context from an entire codebase to help LLMs understand large projects. I wanted an open-source way to get that same deep, structural understanding.

That's why I built Code-to-Knowledge-Graph.

It uses VS Code's Language Server Protocol (LSP) to parse your whole project and builds a detailed knowledge graph – capturing all your functions, classes, variables, and how they call, inherit, or reference each other. This graph is the "codebase-level context" to improve coding agents at scale.

The idea was inspired by research showing that knowledge graphs significantly improve retrieval-augmented generation and structural reasoning (such as "Knowledge Graph-Augmented Language Models" (Zhang et al., 2022 and "GraphCodeBERT")

Would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or ideas for improvement!
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-04 15:18:07+00:00
> A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI

Ok, what about an Average doctor with an AI? Or how about a Bad doctor with an AI?

AI assisted medcare will be good if it catches some amount of misdiagnoses

AI will be terrible if it winds up reinforcing misdiagnoses

My suspicion is that AI will act as a force multiplier to some extent, more than a safety net

Yes, some top percentage of performers will get some percentage of performance gain out of AI

But it will not make average performers great or bad performers good. It will make bad performers worse
by achierius | 2025-06-04 15:18:39+00:00
But to be clear, in this case the LLM has a full, direct, unobscured view of the chicken. A human, in that specific case -- i.e. looking at the same photo* -- would not have trouble discerning and reporting the third leg. Perhaps if they were forced to scan the photo quickly and make a report, or were otherwise not really 'paying attention'/'taking it seriously', but the mere fact that LLMs fall into that regime far more than an 'serious employee' already shows that they fail in different ways than humans do.
by mustermannBB | 2025-06-04 15:18:45+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong but a big part of the value proposition these days for Erlang/Elixir would be that it comes build in with a lot of the tools that other runtimes would require. For example a message bus is kinda integrated in the BEAM runtime or Erlang, while most other runtimes would have to use something like Kafka or AWS SQS etc. Or caching and some other things. Of course I'm not sure how good all the inbuilt solutions are compared to dedicated tools, overall or usually IMHO I prefer dedicated tools as opposed to all in one as the dedicated tools/services usually are more flexible. On the other hand of course it is also much overhead.
by marinmania | 2025-06-04 15:19:12+00:00
Agreed. By HN standards I am a very shitty programmer, and as of a year ago I would have said it takes up about 25% of my time. I pretty much just make demos to display some non-coding research.

I think with the rise of LLMs, my coding time has been cut down by almost half. And I definitely need to bring in help less often. In that sense it has raised my floor, while making the people above me (not necessarily super coders, but still more advanced) less needed.
by Boogie_Man | 2025-06-04 15:19:22+00:00
I think what is easy to overlook with Dostoevsky is that although he is arguably the inventor of the psychological novel, the characters in his novels are largely representatives of the impact of ideologies on the lives and psyches of real people or the impact of the psyches (as impacted themselves by their life experiences) on their choice of ideology. The taking of ideologies to their logical conclusion in his character's lives is what results in "hysterical characters".

I think to argue that Dostoevsky is not among the best psychological novelists is to slightly misunderstand what he was trying to achieve.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-06-04 15:19:26+00:00
I agree with most of what you’re saying—especially the Unix pipe analogy and the value of building a prompt library while understanding which LLM to use.

That said, I think there’s value in a catch-all fallback: running a prompt without all the usual rules or assumptions.

Sometimes, a simple prompt on the latest model just works—and often in surprisingly more effective ways than one with a complex prompt.
by ivewonyoung | 2025-06-04 15:19:40+00:00
> they were caused by a Tesla

It's not even that, it includes entries like where a Toyota Tacoma pickup was driving on the wrong direction on the highway, ran into a Tesla and someone died.

https://archive.is/GhYIs

It's not even just deaths that happened in a Tesla for any reason because it also includes deaths in other vehicles, it's just any death where a Tesla was in the vicinity or something.

Reminds me of the very popular "study" that did the rounds on all over the media and on here and Reddit where they counted suicides in a Cybertruck as being its fault to make it look artificially bad against the Ford Pinto.

These false claims go unchallenged on Reddit because moderators will permanently ban anyone posting inconvenient facts, and BlueSky is probably worse.

And given all the massive number of misinformed people, these propaganda tactics actually work pretty well.
by henning | 2025-06-04 15:19:45+00:00
Centering an interview around MCP and "building an agent" which often means "write a prompt and make HTTP calls to some LLM host service" is incredibly stupid unless that is what the product the company produces is.

MCP is a tool and may only be minor in terms of relevance to a position. If I use tools that use MCP but our actual business is about something else, the interview should be about what the company actually does.

Your arrogance and presumptions about the future don't make you look smart when you are so likely to be wrong. Enumerating enough predictions until one of them is right is not prescient, it's bullshit.
by skydhash | 2025-06-04 15:19:45+00:00
So what has changed about the realm of programming that make all the skill obsolete, including the skill to learn new programming thingies?

The DOM API is old, All the mainstream backend languages are old, unix administrations has barely changed (only the way to use those tools have). Even Elasticsearch is 15 years old. Amazon S3 is past drinking age in many countries around the world. And that's just pertaining to web projects.

You just need to open a university textbook to realize how old many of the fundamentals are. Most shiny new things is old stuff repackaged.
by whartung | 2025-06-04 15:19:57+00:00
Isn't the whole point of <abstraction> that we don't need to worry about the inner details?

A friend currently has an AI workflow that pits two AIs against each other. They start with an issues database. AI 1 pulls issues, and fixes them, and commits them. AI 2 reviews the work and makes new issues. And the cycle repeats.

After a bunch of work is complete and issues are flagged as done, the tests run green, he grabs all of the commits, walks through them, cleans them up if necessary, and crunches them into one big commit to the main branch.

He loves waking up in the morning to a screen filled with completed things.

He has, essentially, self-promoted to management over some potentially untrustworthy junior developers with occasional flashes of brilliance.

And I was pondering that, and it just reminded me of something I've been feeling for sometime.

A lot of modern development is wiring together large, specialized libraries. Our job is to take these things (along with their cascade of dependencies) and put our own little bits of glue and logic around them.

And, heck, if I wanted to glue badly documented black boxes together, I would have gone into Electrical Engineering.

But here's the thing.

While the layers are getting thicker, the abstractions more opaque, in the end, much like a CEO is responsible for that ONE PERSON down in the factory behaving badly, we, as users of this stuff, are responsible for ALL OF IT. Down to bugs in the microprocessor.

When push comes to shove, it's all on us.

We can whine and complain and delegate. "I didn't write the compiler, not my fault." "Not my library..." "The Manager assured the VP who assured me that..."

But doesn't really matter when you have a smoking crater of a system, does it?

Because we're the ones delivering services and such, putting our names on it.

So, yea, no, you don't have to be "as skilled", perhaps, when using something.

But you're still responsible for it.
by Notatheist | 2025-06-04 15:20:00+00:00
>the labor displacing effect of technology appears to be more than offset by compensating mechanisms that create or reinstate labor.

I don't buy into this at all:

>Assuming AI will have an effect similar to 20th Century farm equipment’s on agriculture, why will that labor force behave differently to their 20th Century counterparts (and either refuse to or be prevented from finding new jobs)?

Because "farm equipment" can't also perform the jobs it creates. I'm assuming if/once AI can do most current jobs, it can also do most if not all the jobs it creates.
by nwlotz | 2025-06-04 15:20:21+00:00
The ML research team at Voxel51 just released a paper showing that foundation models rival the accuracy of human annotators in labeling large visual datasets, at several orders of magnitude less time and cost.

We also found that models trained from these labels perform about as well as those trained from human labels when tested against public validation sets. Interestingly, setting a relatively low confidence threshold (0.2 - 0.5) for the auto-generated labels maximized downstream model performance. Very high confidence thresholds often produced worse results due to reduced recall.

The upshot is that zero-shot labeling can replace human annotation in many datasets. The massive cost savings can then be redirected toward training higher-parameter models.

Happy to answer any questions about the research. You can also read this blog we wrote that goes more in depth into the methods and tools we used. https://link.voxel51.com/HN-VAL-blog/
by ty6853 | 2025-06-04 15:20:32+00:00
Cody wilson was convicted in Texas after an age verification online service verified a sugar daddy escort was 18. The ID turned out to be fake, he was arrested, charged, and found guilty although I think he got 10 years probation with some sort of arrangement to expunge the offense if he completes probation.

IIRC the state of Texas was pushing for much worse, but basically the 'victim' was going to end up getting dragged through the mud and probably be forced to admit to all sorts of fraud and felonies involved in forgery, fraud secondary to forgery, and whatever other crimes are involved when you engage in crime with falsified government ID etc so they settled to avoid her having to testify.
by spacebanana7 | 2025-06-04 15:20:33+00:00
I found that learning prompt engineering was largely a waste of time. The value of the knowledge seems to depreciate so quickly.

I spent loads of time learning to use special syntax that helped GPT 3.5 or comfy ui for Stable diffusion. Now the latest models can do exactly what I want without any of those “high skill” prompts. The context windows are so big that we can be quite lazy about dumping files into prompts without optimisation.

The only general advice I’d give it to take more risk and continually ask more of the models.
by greesil | 2025-06-04 15:20:36+00:00
>If you needed to do security research

>If you needed to summarise a document

>If you needed a task runner, which LLM would you use? Why?

>How have the behaviours of each one of the LLMs changed? The more detail they can provide about emergent behaviours and how it has changed across the different iterations, the better.

Basically, are you into this as much as the author is into it is his hiring signal. Mkay.
by gus_massa | 2025-06-04 15:20:54+00:00
I solved it in one attempt! https://imgur.com/a/jklkc7F

Spoiler alert: There is a nice video by Captain Disillusion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou7KSmfC3lA (the relevant part is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou7KSmfC3lA&t=275s )
by cmatthieu | 2025-06-04 15:21:10+00:00
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by jmsdnns | 2025-06-04 15:21:21+00:00
A key thing that has been shown in research at Wharton is that LLMs elevate people with less experience a lot more than they elevate people a lots of experience.

If we take "operator skill" to mean "they know how to make prompts", there is some truth to it and we can see that by whether or not the operator is designing the context window or not.

But for the more important question, whether or not LLMs are useful has an inverse relationship with how skilled the person is in the context they are using for. This is why the best engineers mostly shrug at LLMs while those that arent the best feel a big lift.

So, LLMs are not mirrors of operator skill. This post is instead an argument that everyone should become prompt engineers.