MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soraminazuki | 2025-06-04 09:23:33+00:00
Let's be real. Software engineers are skeptical right now not because they believe robots are better than them. Quite the opposite. The suits will replace software engineers despite its mediocrity.

It was just 2 weeks ago when the utter incompetence of these robots were in full public display [1]. But none of that will matter to greedy corporate executives, who will prioritize short-term cost savings. They will hop from company to company, personally reaping the benefits while undermining essential systems that users and society rely on with robot slop. That's part of the reason why the C-suites are overhyping the technology. After all, no rich executive has faced consequences for behaving this way.

It's not just software engineering jobs that will take a hit. Society as a whole will suffer from the greedy recklessness.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152
by nosianu | 2025-06-04 09:24:54+00:00
I would like to point to my comment in another AI thread not even a day ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=44168022

You can, just like you can theoretically use something else than Windows or MS Office. Until it's an entire ecosystem after a decade or two, and a workforce trained for that ecosystem, instead of right now easily substitutable AI providers.

The current huge investments into the AI providers are not made because the investors are looking forward to everlasting fierce competition far beyond the initial stage.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-04 09:25:01+00:00
> The social media company will buy all the “clean energy attributes” of Constellation Energy’s Clinton Clean Energy Center, a 1.1 gigawatt nuclear power plant in central Illinois, starting in June 2027.

Creative bookkeeping is a thing when it comes to carbon neutrality. They are still using electrons produced with gas power. But others in a place where Meta doesn't require much power get to use nuclear power now.

It's interesting that they feel like they need to spend on carbon offsets. But I don't think carbon offsets are a long term solution. The core issue for companies like Meta is that they need to get their hands on large amounts of preferably clean power.

Another interesting thing here of course is that this nuclear plant is hopelessly dependent on subsidies to stay operational. That's quite common with aging nuclear plants. It's apparently a deeply unprofitable business to be in. There's no such thing as a profitable nuclear plant that doesn't get heavily subsidized. Plenty of people in the nuclear sector are getting rich but very few under their own power (pun intended).
by noufalibrahim | 2025-06-04 09:25:37+00:00
There are compromise solutions that make it a pain to use which goes a long way to defeating addiction. Here are a few

1. Make the screen monochrome. It greatly reduces the appeal of the entire system.

2. Increase the font size so that things don't look as pretty and slick. You deliberately cripple the UX.

3. As much as possible, use a browser instead of an "app" (e.g. X, Amazon etc.) and then set a limit for the time you can use your browser per day.

4. I use this as a launcher on my phone https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qqlabs.min... which prevents has "mindfulness delays" for selected apps and other features that make the usage less smooth.

A combination of these has helped me reduce my attachment to the phone. There are also lots of times when I don't take it with me.
by redcannon218 | 2025-06-04 09:26:27+00:00
The claims about privacy are, at best, dubious.

While it's true that there are less opportunities to track you through leaky / malicious apps, "dumbphones" remain, well, phones, with data retention laws in almost all countries in the world (and the subsequent leaks / hacks, see the recent Salt typhoon events for a good example) plus extra vulnerabilities due to poorly-developed Operating Systems.
by card_zero | 2025-06-04 09:26:30+00:00
I use a dumbphone, but it's not because I'm worried I might be having too much fun, or because I want to have any healthy relationships or pay attention to things around me. It's just that every damn business wants to install its app in my pocket, often for flimsy reasons. It seems proper to resist. For instance my local shopping mall used to have maps, on physical boards. Then it installed big touchscreens. Do they display the map, and update every day? No! The only thing they show when touched is a giant QR code to get shoppers to install the app that has the map on it (and presumably ads and tracking too).
Show HN: I built an OSINT tools directory
by r00m101 | 2025-06-04 09:26:32+00:00
I work on R00M 101, a Reddit-based OSINT profiler. While building it, I realized most open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools are scattered across GitHub, outdated blog posts, or random Discords.

So I put together a public-facing directory of 100+ OSINT tools used by analysts, journalists, and security folks, free, filterable, and categorized by risk, platform, and use case.

The idea was to make something useful and no-friction.

Built with static HTML + SQL backend + a lot of caffeine. Would love feedback on how to improve the UX or tool curation.

If anyone wants to contribute tools or help moderate, that’s also welcome.

Thanks!
by brador | 2025-06-04 09:26:33+00:00
Using AI, the mental strain and toll of programming is reduced to what feels like 10% of usual. And that 10% is high level architecting and project planning.

The most valuable 10x $ per hour time for a software engineer right now is in the shower, on the toilet, or just before shut eye. Not at the keyboard. Thinking time. Unfortunately for now and many phone time.

The value of retaking that time is huge and growing.
by genocidicbunny | 2025-06-04 09:26:34+00:00
That doesn't mean it's not going to be difficult to use that parser. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to use third-party code, or having the time allotted to write a JSON5 parser. The JSON parser some places are using may have been written two decades ago and works well enough that there's little motivation to implement JSON5 support. Sometimes it's just company policy or internal politics that prevent the usage.

It's also just not that big a deal overall for the intended use of the DiffX format. It's mainly machine-generated and machine-consumed. There's human readability concerns for sure, but the format looks to be designed mainly for tools to create and consume, so missing a few features that JSON5 brings is not that big of a deal.
by lrvick | 2025-06-04 09:26:37+00:00
You do not even need it for OTPs and banking apps. Even if employees tell you it is, they are always wrong in my experience.

That QR code you are always shown when you setup an OTP? It usually uses the TOTP algorithm supported by a dozen password managers or hardware keychain devices that will generate codes for you on demand without a phone.

Say you do not have a compatible phone and the app requirement can be waived by a manager.

Not had a smartphone in 5 years. It is never a blocker.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-06-04 09:27:13+00:00
What's spot on is the trend to label anything or anyone in favour of cuts to immigration as "far right", and to extrapolate that being broadly "anti-immigration" means being effectively for "racial purity" with Mein Kampf on the bedside table. This is transparently false but insidious and it obviously seems to have taken roots as you show.

It does not help healthy debates on such important issues, but perhaps that's exactly the point.
by u_sama | 2025-06-04 09:27:15+00:00
In Europe, in order to be compliant with the new banking rules, you need to have a kind of external confirmation which is, ding ding ding your smartphone. You literally need to open your bank app in order to approve online transactions. And increasingly things are being digitalised thus you need will have an increasing need for smartphone because of such proposals.

The alternative is that the bank sneds you a clunky OTP machine with a code every time you want to make a purchase or transaction.
by ReptileMan | 2025-06-04 09:27:52+00:00
One of the things I learned after starting using AI - (can anyone give information WTF are coding agents Google is flooded by info presented by cryptobros btw) is that I have really hated the whole typist part of the development. To the point where I prefer to make 2 prompts to the AI instead of modifying something myself even though it will take comparable time.

Anyway the way it is going I was convinced that the oldest profession will be the only left standing when the AI runs its course in couple of decades. Now I am not sure even in its survival.

Edit: We will know we are in the endgame when AI can reverse engineer a piece of software just by observing it's inputs and outputs. Like a game. Or crack Denuvo
by myrmidon | 2025-06-04 09:28:15+00:00
You absolutely could do that if you wanted to basically burn money.

Datacenters and especially ML training hardware is highly capital intensive and depreciates at basically constant rate regardless of utilization.

I see currently no scenario where you wwould be willing to idle this expensive infrastructure just to save pennies on the dollar on a grid connection; carbon credits would have to be nonsensically expensive for this to happen.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-06-04 09:28:49+00:00
> You can, just like you can theoretically use something else than Windows or MS Office. Until it's an entire ecosystem after a decade or two, and a workforce trained for that ecosystem, instead of right now easily substitutable AI providers.

Author here: I had that thought for a while but I don't currently think that AI will unfold the same way (and I mentioned that in the post linked). I believe that at the speed this is going, and the innovation happening everywhere this will be a market with many models and players.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-04 09:28:58+00:00
We're talking about different things here I think. What does phones and apps being addictive have to to do with the fact that a parking lot requires me to install an app to park my car or charge my car? There are a million other issues here than addictive apps. The internet connection could be down, he backend of the app could be down, etc. This shouldn't stop people from being able to use an important service like parking, charging, refueling, transportation, etc. You should be able to slot in some coins in a machine, get a paper ticket out, and that's it, you're in.

>The wheels of time wont be turned back.

They can be turned back by laws if the direction they've been turning by the unregulated free market lead us to a bad place that's discriminatory and causing misery to consumers, especially for critical services.

We've been able to park and refuel cars fast and efficient for decades with no issues before apps and smartphones. Not all progress is good progress. Sometimes progress is just for the sake of cutting corners to increase profits for businesses at the expense of consumers. I don't want an "Bezos-fication" or "Musk-fication" of essential services.
by fhd2 | 2025-06-04 09:29:12+00:00
Yeah I have the same. In general, writing (and experimenting) is how I _think_. If I read code, it takes me a lot longer to understand.

Sure, I save some time by not having to do any trial and error, I'm looking at a solution that already works according to some testing. But then I start to wonder about edge cases, leaky abstractions and such, and not having done the work, that's where a lot of the effort saved by not writing it comes back, at a stage where the work is seemingly already done and "just" needs reviewing, which is somehow more frustrating.

Perhaps people are just different. I work great on a blank canvas. I know a lot of people struggle immensely with it. Hell, some people type so slow or have such low mastery of their tools, I really feel their pain watching them.
by debuggerson | 2025-06-04 09:29:48+00:00
I know someone who doesn’t use food delivery apps, doesn’t shop online, and lives very minimally. For them, a dumbphone works just fine.

But for most of us, life is already deeply tied to apps: banking, transport, messaging, work. A lot of things aren't even optional anymore — many services expect you to use an app.

Once you go convenient, it’s really hard to go back. You don’t just lose access to entertainment — you lose infrastructure.
by kragen | 2025-06-04 09:30:15+00:00
I don't know, but Jupiter has that kinetic energy now, and if you slow it down until it falls into the Sun, it won't have it anymore. The energy has to go somewhere.

Maybe you scoop up big balloons of gas, slingshot them to Mercury with a tether, catch them with another tether on the dark side of Mercury to decelerate them (thus generating electricity which you use to make some kind of fuel), and toss them Sunwards from there.

Or maybe you use an electromagnetic mass driver in the Asteroid Belt to launch an unbelievable number of small rocky masses to a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter back to the same mass driver again, but at a higher velocity, so they generate electric power when it catches them before launching them again. Each mass goes through this circuit tens of thousands of times.

There are lots of possibilities.
by WindyMiller | 2025-06-04 09:30:18+00:00
I was drawn to this idea but then I realised that the number of phone calls/texts I made/received was so low I would essentially be carrying the phone in case of emergencies. Or, more accurately, because I didn't feel comfortable being without a phone for any length of time. (Remember when people used to complain about all mobile phones, because they felt they shouldn't be contactable all the time? Kind of remarkable that the same device is now the 'disconnected' option!)

Now I carry an Android phone with an epaper display and a physical keyboard, which feels like a really good middle ground to me. It's good at the things that are important to me (reading, writing, communication), can do whatever other essentials I need it to in a scrape, and is absolute dogshit at scrolling through nonsense. The device itself feels rather less polished than the Pixel I was using before, but since I'm using it much less that doesn't seem like a problem. My old pre-smartphone phones always felt kind of janky too!
by oulipo | 2025-06-04 09:30:43+00:00
Exactly, it seems like for him all the controversy about AI is just "will AI get my very own (white privileged programmer) job"

and he doesn't even think about those:

- will it feed disinformation and disrupt democracies (like it has already proven to)

- will it be used to kill people (cf war in Gaza)

- will it require underpaid work from data labelers in Africa and Asia

- will it consume CO2 and energy resources that would be better allocated elsewhere (he doesn't care that he's now using much more energy for "not coding faster, but being able to read a book meanwhile" — well nice, one more privilege for the white western guy, and one more thing to suck up for the people living in climate-vulnerable locations)

etc

the fact that those guys are so naive and disconnected is really tiring
by intended | 2025-06-04 09:30:54+00:00
You, the producer of an intellectual good, are searching for a buyer for your output and your labor.

You, the consumer of intellectual good, have a machine that gives you average output.

Most of the conversations of AI which worry about the impact, become easier when the producer and consumer positions are split and separated.

If the tool is as good as the Hype claims (a high bar), then there is smaller space for human and human price matching.

This gets further complicated, when we bring in the impact over time.
by ankurdhama | 2025-06-04 09:31:25+00:00
> general designed to bother you as less as possible so you can just do your work

I have heard this so many times about Gnome yet no one explains how a desktop environment can "bother" a user so that they can't focus on their work. In fact, Gnome decision to show notification at the top middle of screen is the most distracting thing a DE can do.

I agree that plasmashell does have memory related issue but at least it is not part of the compositor (unlike gnome-shell which is the desktop shell and the compositor using mutter library) so that you can just kill it and restart it without having to logout.
by pyman | 2025-06-04 09:31:30+00:00
I agree. But using the "your data is secure" analogy, BuilderAI never actually told customers that development was done using AI, that's something people made up. If you look at their website (builder.ai) they explain that their virtual assistant "Natasha" assigns a developer (I assume from India). That part doesn’t sound like fraud to me, and it's the part everyone seems to be focusing on.

The company went into insolvency because the CEO and CFO were misleading investors by significantly inflating sales figures through questionable financial practices. According to the Financial Times, the Indian founders and accountants reportedly engaged in round-tripping with VerSe Innovation. That raised red flags for investors, regulators, and prosecutors, and led to bankruptcy proceedings.
by lrvick | 2025-06-04 09:31:42+00:00
Never experienced this in 5 years of shopping all over the world. I just say I do not have a compatible phone, am traveling, against my religion, or whatever, and they get a manager who can bust out some non-advertized alternative.

Take the time to do this so others do not have to.

I make restaurants print me menus, and I make theme parks get me a paper map and accept cash so I maintain my privacy.
by jajko | 2025-06-04 09:31:44+00:00
Swinging from one extreme to another without a good research to back it up, always a sign for a good long term move for sure. But its good, please do some research on your body for the rest of mankind, we thank and salute you. I just hope you get your meat consistently in standards that pretty much surpass what we consider "bio" in say EU or Switzerland in most aspects.

You know, there is some middle ground. In southern Europe, people have consistently healthy diets without resorting to such extremes, while eating food that tastes massively better than what a general US consumers buy / are willing to spend money on.

I just returned from 1 week vacation in Italy, thats always a trip to a small universe of healthy gourmet food. That experience is unfortunately not very transferable outside country borders but can serve as great inspiration - ie pasta ins't very healthy unless cooked al dente, then it becomes much better for the body.
by archagon | 2025-06-04 09:32:32+00:00
These parties are not far right for favoring cuts to immigration. They’re far right for harping on about native whites getting replaced and referring to migrants like they’re some sort of infestation.

> In a widely seen video on Twitter former UKIP leader Nigel Farage claimed that new census figures showed that "London, Birmingham and Manchester are all now minority white cities".

> “125,000 illegal migrants have crossed the English Channel in nearly 4,000 boats since 2018. You can use what ever word you like for it, but I think invasion is appropriate — and millions of people agree with me.”
by js8 | 2025-06-04 09:32:59+00:00
I see LLMs (AI if you will) as both regression and progression (and that's why I think people are so divided on it).

It's progression for obvious reasons - it automates natural language processing (human language), which even 5 years ago was an unsolved problem.

However, the regression part is less obvious. I think human progress, since enlightenment, was marked by increasingly externalizing human thoughts and judgement. That is, instead of relying on judgement of an authority (or intuition, lived and anecdotal experience, etc.), we increasingly demanded transparency and rigour in our thinking. This was facilitated by printing press and development of scientific method, but is seen everywhere (to the extent even philosophy split into analytical branch).

However, with LLMs, we return to internalized thinking, based on judgement, this time of an algorithm. There is no way extract formal argument from an LLM, and so no way to ensure correctness in some sense.

Whether you're an adopter or a skeptic depends where you stand on this issue (in a way, it's similar to type checking debate in programming). Personally, I think the correct way to use LLMs is to formalize the problem and then solve that using formal methods.
by al_borland | 2025-06-04 09:33:04+00:00
I only recently tried coffee for the first time in my 40s. I didn’t understand the appeal, but I suppose it’s an acquired taste.

What I’ve seen over the years from occasionally being around coffee drinkers in the morning didn’t look like joy. It looked like addicts, unable to function and singularly focused, until they acquired coffee in the morning. When outside of their normal environment with quick and easy coffee, this seemed like an annoying burden to deal with.

I had a caffeine addiction from soda when I was in high school, which I broke in college. It led to chronic headaches if I didn’t have enough. In high school I didn’t put 2 and 2 together to know why I was getting the headaches and my dad was trying to push to take me to a neurologist.

Nothing about my experience with was joyful, nor has it looked like joy when someone wakes up in an unfamiliar city and is frantically looking for the nearest cup of coffee before they can talk about anything else. I’ve seen this from multiple people on multiple occasions.
by ThatPlayer | 2025-06-04 09:33:26+00:00
I've done something similar with a static hosted site I'm working on. I opted to not reinvent the wheel, and just use WASM Sqlite in the browser. Sqlite already splits the database into fixed-size pages, so the driver using HTTP Range Requests can download only the required pages. Just have to make good indexes.

I can even use Sqlite's full-text search capabilities!
by veddox | 2025-06-04 09:33:30+00:00
I've been thinking about moving to a dumb phone again for the past few months, but so far I've decided against it, for three reasons:

1. Signal/Whatsapp/Threema: biggest reason by far - while I message much less than many others, these platforms are just the way a lot of (group) communication works nowadays. It is possible to go without, but it causes so much hassle when organising things or trying to stay up to date with what's happening in a group, and would disrupt my international friendships.

2. Maps & public transport apps: are just super useful to have available, especially if you regularly travel in places you don't know (well).

3. Camera: This one I'm still a bit undecided on, but I think I would miss not having it at hand.

However, I do try to actively give my phone as little space in my life as possible. I have no social networks on it (I don't have any left by now, anyway), and no other apps that involve scrolling. And I continue to think about how I can avoid distractions from it.
by scrapheap | 2025-06-04 09:33:58+00:00
I'm in my early 50s and each year I still feel I'm better at my craft than I was the year before, which was better than the year before that.

I think that in some ways I've been lucky as I started back when you could hold the entire knowledge of how your computer works in your head backed up by a single manual (seriously the old manuals for 8bit computers were some of the best documentation that I've ever seen).

That knowledge was then built upon bit by bit as the technology advanced. So I've never been overwhelmed by the mass of information that someone starting today would need to get their heads round (Respect to those who have started to learn their craft in the last 5 years and have a deep understanding of how everything fits together).
by _elephant | 2025-06-04 09:34:23+00:00
This is a very thorough technical analysis—thanks for sharing! It seems like even though Juicebox itself uses libSodium sealed boxes and HSMs, the security is ultimately constrained by the 32 rounds of argon2id for the PIN derivation and Twitter’s ability to access the encrypted key material. Perhaps its biggest selling point is deployment flexibility rather than being a true end-to-end encrypted platform.