MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jweir | 2025-06-03 04:34:15+00:00
Polyester is still used extensively but it isn’t the replacement industry wanted. Folks overdid it and found a good balance.

We will overshoot with GenAI and over use it. Eventually rolling back and finding a better balance.

Lewis Mumford had an essay about this - how we don’t need turn the speakers up to 10 just because we can.
by abraae | 2025-06-03 04:34:25+00:00
> I don't think we can stop it, but I do think (hope) we can show people how to use it in a way where the good applications outweigh the bad.

That feels idealistic. About as realistic as telling people how to use semiconductors or petrochemicals for good instead of bad.

No-one knows where AI is going but one thing you can be sure of - the bad actors don't give two hoots what we think, and they will act in their own interests as always. And as we see from historical events, there are still many, many bad actors around. And when the bad actors do bad things with the technology, the good actors have no choice but to react.
by alex989 | 2025-06-03 04:34:42+00:00
>And it will do all of this while consuming truly shocking amounts of energy.

You need to lookup how much an "average" human consumes. When I replace 2 humans with a ChatGPT subscription, I can guarantee you that OpenAI is generating less co2 than what these two interns were creating with their transport to the office (and back). That's before we consider things like the 25 years it took to raise and train them or the very expensive tastes (eg. Travelling around the world) they get after they earn a large salary.
by rmason | 2025-06-03 04:35:12+00:00
No way you could have predicted that four years ago. I remember being told as a college freshman that if I majored in Journalism (my first choice) that there would be four jobs for every graduate when I graduated. But I would have an almost impossible time getting a job in electrical engineering after graduating.

In four years time Journalism jobs were virtually unavailable. Meanwhile a friend with a 2.0 GPA snagged an EE job with a Fortune 500 company. Moral of the story is college counselors cannot see four years in advance even nearly fifty years later!
by davidtranjs | 2025-06-03 04:35:21+00:00
Yes, I know. There are toooooo many Pomodoro timers out there. But most of them have bad UI, are pricey, or just feel clunky for Gen Z users.

So I built https://studyfoc.us — a beautiful, aesthetic, no-login Pomodoro timer with built-in site blocking and a Chrome extension. Simple enough to just hit "start" and focus.

In 7 days: - 800 users - 1.9k pageviews - Avg session ~1 min - No ads, just posted on some communities on Facebook and Reddit

Next: building an iOS app with app blocking + premium tools. Web stays free.
by sriram_malhar | 2025-06-03 04:35:24+00:00
There may be many disruptive technologies, but none come remotely close to AI when it comes to rate of change. Crypto has been around for a while, and hasn't really made a dent to the world

We had friends over for dinner a couple days back; between us we had two computer scientists, one psychologist, one radiologist, one doctor. Each of us were in turn astonished and somewhat afraid of the rapid pace of change. In a university setting, students are routinely using Claude and ChatGPT for everything from informal counseling to doing homework to generating presentations to doing 'creative' work (smh).

At the end of they day, we all agreed that we were grateful that we are at the tail end of our working life, and that we didn't have to deal with this level of uncertainty
Show HN: Agent-Oriented Programming next programming paradigm
by gurvinderd | 2025-06-03 04:35:31+00:00
Hi HN, I've been thinking about the current state of AI development and see a familiar pattern emerging. We're in the same situation mobile development was in 2007 – hundreds of fragmented frameworks and SDKs that don't interoperate. Today we have LangChain, OpenAI SDK, CrewAI, Vercel AI SDK, Mastra, and dozens more appearing weekly. Each has different APIs, integration patterns, and tool definitions. I'm proposing Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) as a solution: making AI agents first-class citizens in programming languages, similar to how Object-Oriented Programming elevated objects from structs. Key concepts:

agent keyword instead of class for AI constructs tool keyword instead of def for agent capabilities Native HTML elements like <agent> and <tool> New HTTP methods for agent operations (CHAT, TOOL, COMPOSE) Universal syntax across Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust

Instead of this complexity: pythonclass MyAgent: def __init__(self): self.openai = OpenAI(api_key="...") self.search = SearchAPI(...)

def search_and_analyze(self, query): results = self.search.query(query) response = self.openai.chat.completions.create(...) return response.choices[0].message.content

You'd write: pythonagent ResearchAgent(): def __init__(self, model="gpt-4", provider="openai"): super().__init__(model=model, provider=provider)

tool search_web(self, query: str) -> SearchResults: return web_search(query) tool analyze_content(self, content: str) -> Analysis: return llm_analyze(content)

This follows the same evolutionary pattern: Procedural → Object-Oriented → Agent-Oriented. The proposal includes implementation roadmap, cross-language syntax examples, and how this could standardize the fragmented AI ecosystem. Would love to hear HN's thoughts on this approach. Is this a natural evolution or am I overthinking the fragmentation problem? https://www.aiop.dev/aop_intro.html
by ken47 | 2025-06-03 04:35:33+00:00
Let’s not conflate LLM’s with AI. LLM’s are a kind of AI that can be a software engineer’s assistant, at best. But the degree of hype is undermining belief in AI among many professionals who the hypesters claim are going to be replaced. No, this iteration is not going to replace doctors or engineers. But the degree to which the hype train wants to do so is alarming.
by bccdee | 2025-06-03 04:35:46+00:00
It's not really a matter of wanting to escape them. I've used them. They're not good for writing code. They feel zippy, but you have to constantly clean up after them. It's as slow and frustrating as trying to walk a junior engineer through a problem they don't fully understand. I'd rather do it myself.

If the AI agent future is so inevitable, then why do people waste so much oxygen insisting upon its inevitability? Just wait for it in silence. It certainly isn't here yet.
by atonse | 2025-06-03 04:36:18+00:00
You can keep seeing this through an adversarial lens. And I could just respond with some flippant remark like “well, they’re the ones that pay the bills” - but all that does is create a false battle between parties that have a shared interest (that of making a living and providing value)

Either way, I do care tremendously about the power of efficiency. That can sometimes lead to better profits, but more likely leads to happier customers and more business, which helps the employees.
by energy123 | 2025-06-03 04:36:39+00:00
> but it’s bad at rust

Is it really? I scraped all HN comments with the words "Rust" and "LLM" from the last 6 months, put it into Gemini and asked it to surface quotes of people saying they had a good time, versus quotes of the opposite. It was about 60% positive and 40% negative.

Does anyone have recent personal experience with this they can talk about?
by devmor | 2025-06-03 04:36:48+00:00
For some reason, every hardcore AI proponent I hear from resorts to gaslighting and namecalling to convince everyone it's so useful for everything.

When that doesn't work, they start inventing hyper-specific scenarios and graphs with grounding that exists only in their imagination to push the topic further. If the AI can't solve a problem in a domain for you, well, it's that domain that's the problem, not AI. You simply need to re-invent the paradigm around your entire problem - easy stuff.

Finally, when they've failed to convince anyone with a modicum of rationality, they resort to some version of "well, fuck you, it's the future and I'll just be leaving you behind!"

Interestingly, this article has all three.
by teruakohatu | 2025-06-03 04:36:57+00:00
I can confirm this is the case when my organisation advertises roles they get inundated with applications.

But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand.

I the past year I have turned down an unsolicited job offer and I am also aware of two or three roles in two organisations that are not being advertised for due to lack of available talent.

New Zealand has a *lot* of potential, but this potential eventually ends up in Australia, London or the USA.

Countries should aspired to be an anode, not a cathode.

The politicians [1] I have spoken to about this issue generally don't consider it to be a pressing matter and are happy for New Zealand firms to move the HQ overseas if they are employing kiwis locally, in much the same way US firms might open an office in Asia to take advantage of lower wages.

[1] One nice thing about New Zealand is that you can get face to face time with a Member of Parliament easily, and Cabinet Minister if you are persistent.
by motorest | 2025-06-03 04:37:30+00:00
> I think there's a huge huge space of software to build that isn't being touched today because it's not cost-effective to have an engineer build them.

LLMs don't change that. If a business does not have the budget for a software engineer, LLMs won't make up budget headroom for it either. What LLMs do is allow engineers to iterate faster, and work on more tasks. This means less jobs.
by bccdee | 2025-06-03 04:38:09+00:00
> The idea that you can't specify the load bearing pillars of your structure to the AI

But English is a subjective and fuzzy language, and the AI typically can't intuit the more subtle points of what you need. In my experience a model's output always needs further prompting. If only there were a formal, rigorous language to express business logic in! Some sort of "programming language."
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-06-03 04:38:57+00:00
> The problem here is that LLMs are optimized to make their outputs convincing.

That may be true for chat aligned LLMs, but coding LLMs are trained w/ RL and rewards for correctness, nowadays. And there are efforts to apply this to the entire stack (i.e. better software glue, automatic guardrails, more extensive tool-use, access to LSP/debuggers/linters, etc).

I think this is the critical point in a lot of these debates that seem to be very popular right now. A lot of people try something and get the wrong impressions about what SotA is. It turns out that often that something is not the best way to do it (i.e. chatting in a web interface for coding), but people don't go the extra mile to actually try what would be best for them (i.e. coding IDEs, terminal agents, etc).
by mjgs | 2025-06-03 04:39:17+00:00
SEEKING WORK, Europe / Asia, remote work OK, I am very flexible with working hours and can accommodate most time zones, experienced remote worker.

Willing to relocate: Yes

Hi I’m Mark, a Web Developer, Consultant and Automation Engineer originally from the UK. I specialise in devops/system tools, workflow automation integrations, and NodeJS web development.

10+ years working in IT, experienced delivering large projects for Fortune 500 companies internationally, and working remotely.

Most recently I’ve been developing social media SaaS and statically generated (a.k.a Jamstack) websites, built using GitHub Actions, deployed to Netlify.

Technologies:

NodeJS, Perl, Python, Bash, Git, Express, Eleventy, Passport, Mocha, HTML/Javascript/CSS, ES2015-2020, JQuery, Backbone, Bootstrap, AWS, Digital Ocean, Netlify, Heroku, Docker, Lambda, Serverless, Message Queues, Stripe, Mailgun, Linux, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Nginx, Letsencrypt, GitHub Actions

About me: https://markjgsmith.com/about

Portfolio: https://markjgsmith.com/portfolio

Recommendations: https://markjgsmith.com/recommendations

Résumé/CV: On request via email

Email: markjgsmith@gmail.com
by nelsonfigueroa | 2025-06-03 04:39:31+00:00
Location: Los Angeles, California, USA

Remote: Remote preferred, I'm ok with going into an office a few times a week if it's nearby.

Willing to relocate: If I really like your company, yes.

Technologies: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Pulumi, Ruby, Rails, Python, Bash, Go, HTML, CSS, MySQL, PostgreSQL.

Résumé/CV: Check out LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nelsonfigueroa1/, or my personal site: https://nelson.cloud. Happy to send over a PDF via LinkedIn as well.

Email: nelsonfigueroa07@gmail.com

I would describe myself as a mid-level engineer with Infrastructure/Cloud and Backend experience. My current role isn't as technical as I'd like it to be so I'm looking around.
by motorest | 2025-06-03 04:39:33+00:00
> What’s the company gonna do now? Release 10 products in 10 months without AI 10 engineers (each using AI).

Software is often not the bottleneck. If instead of 10 engineers you just need the one, the company will shed headcount it doesn't need. This might mean, for example, that instead of 10 developers and a software testing engineer, now a team changes to perhaps add testers while firing half of the developers.
by honestthrow1 | 2025-06-03 04:39:49+00:00
I'm in a nearly identical boat as you.

I'm tired. I'm tired of developers/techies not realizing their active role in creating a net negative in the world. And acting like they are powerless and blameless for it. My past self is not innocent in this; but I'm actively trying to make progress as I make a concerted effort to challenge people to think about it whenever I can.

After countless of times that the tech industry (and developers specifically) have gone from taking an interesting technical challenge that quickly require some sort of ethical or moral tradeoff which ends up absolutely shaping the fabric of society for the worse.

Creating powerful search engines to feed information to all who want it; but we'll need to violate your privacy in an irreversible way to feed the engine. Connecting the world with social media; while stealing your information and mass exposing you to malicious manipulation. Hard problems to solve without the ethical tradeoff? Sure. But every other technical challenge was also hard and solved, why can't we also focus on the social problems?

I'm tired of the word "progress" being used without a qualifier of what kind of progress and at the cost of what. Technical progress at the cost of societal regression is still seen as progress. And I'm just tired of it.

Every time that "AI skeptics" are brought up as a topic; the focus is entirely on the technical challenges. They never mention the "skeptics" that are considered that because they aren't skeptical of what AI is and could be capable. I'm skeptical if the tradeoffs being made will benefit society overall; or just a few. Because at literally every previous turn for as long as I've been alive; the impact is a net negative to the total population, without developer questioning their role in it.

I don't have an answer for how to solve this. I don't have an answer on how to stop the incoming shift in destroying countless lives. But I'd like developers to start being honest in their active role in not just accepting this new status quo; but proactively pushing us us in a regressive manner. And our power to push back on this coming wave.
by aloha2436 | 2025-06-03 04:39:56+00:00
> Domain discovery is so underrated. LLMs remove so much friction that makes everything so incredibly accessible.

And, unfortunately, a lot of friction from not having access to information in the first place. I've read a bunch of docs from people talking to Glean in order to explore a new topic; if it's a topic I'm actually very familiar with then four out of five times it is somewhere from misleading to catastrophically wrong. Any internal terminology that doesn't match the common usage outside of our organization poisons the whole session and it will make up things to join the meanings together, and the prompter is none the wiser.

I trust AI only as a gap filler in domains that I'm already an expert in or where there's little internal context, anything else is intellectual suicide.
by godelski | 2025-06-03 04:40:17+00:00
> 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 doesn't need to be a good coder to do that.

Look at common scams. You get those texts from "Jane" who sent you an iMessage from an email address offering you a part time job and asks you to contact them on WhatsApp, right? (Well... Android does a better job at filtering spam) Or calls from "the IRS". Or anything else that's bullshit. This even includes legal scams like charging you for canceling your service or making it hard to cancel your subscription.

There's no skill needed for this. You don't need a brilliant coder. You need the equivalent of a call center in India. You need the equivalent of a poorly worded Nigerian scam email.

Shitty coding LLMs make this shit easier to mass produce. High quality LLMs only make it worse.

Personally, I'm just tired of all the shitty lemons[0] everywhere. I wanna buy a peach, but everything being sold is a lemon. All the lemons have done is make me annoyed and frustrated at all the extra work I have to do.

I now have 4 entries for my GF's birthday because when I merged a duplicated contact it just created more instances. I can't even delete them! Shit like this sounds petty and minor but when you're hitting 20-100 new issues like this daily, it isn't so minor anymore. I can't make any more lemonaid. There are just too many lemons...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
by layoric | 2025-06-03 04:40:52+00:00
> Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania.

> 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.

So it starts with a humble strawman, and then the author illustrates how dumb they think their fellow developers really are if they have the make different decisions based on different values.

Most developers I interact with who are what you might call 'AI skeptic', are most concerned with how this tech will be used, especially since its creation is rooted in mass scale disregard for ownership of anything.

> "The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site.... They stand up global-scale piracy networks",

IMO the author is here projecting or something, cause I literally never met someone with this opinion, and I've also been in tech/developer circles for over 20 years. Personal use of pirated content is very different from commercial distribution or making money of share sites. Not everyone's values are so rooted in making money with complete disregard to the impact of their actions in doing so.

I get it, the author wants to keep using LLMs are for people to stop trying to make them feel bad but trying to make a case for how their arguments are just dumb. But the author completely missed the 'why' behind the arguments. In the end, LLMs are a tool. Use them or not is up to the individual. But that doesn't give a blanket social license to use them in any way people, or more importantly, companies want.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-06-03 04:41:31+00:00
> There’s special pain involved in watching someone type slowly. Even worse when there’s repeated mistakes.

Oh yeah - it’s rough. I’ve gone fully down the rabbit hole lol.

Typed on various sites, then built my own (typequicker.com if you want to give it a shot), then discovered vim, then QMK, then built my own keyboard and completely modded, etc, etc. Got really comfortable navigating with shortcuts, etc

Having to screen share and someone who is sharing then struggles for a while looking for the pipe character when they’re typing out a shell command I told them…it’s rough.

I feel folks though - typing correctly and typing fast is never taught. There are no standardized systems in place that emphasize this. (Which is another reason I built the app lol )
by ggm | 2025-06-03 04:42:12+00:00
In part because the decline in arts degree recipients meant there was less competition for the (albiet smaller) pool of arts degree roles. But mostly because the "10% cuts good" madness swept through the FAANG.

Before this term of government you might have said "pick a job in Government it's more secure" but alas in the US, even that isn't true any more. It's both less rewarding AND more precarious.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-03 04:42:21+00:00
That is impressive, but it also looks likely to be misinformation. SLS isn't a chelator (as the quote appears to suggest). The concern is apparently that it might compete with NaF for sites to interact with the enamel. However, there is minimal research on the topic and what does exist (at least what I was quickly able to find via pubmed) appears preliminary at best. It also implicates all surfactants, not just SLS.

This diversion highlights one of the primary dangers of LLMs which is that it takes a lot longer to investigate potential bullshit than it does to spew it (particularly if the entity spewing it is a computer).

That said, I did learn something. Apparently it might be a good idea to prerinse with a calcium lactate solution prior to a NaF solution, and to verify that the NaF mouthwash is free of surfactants. But again, both of those points are preliminary research grade at best.

If you take anything away from this, I hope it's that you shouldn't trust any LLM output on technical topics that you haven't taken the time to manually verify in full.
by tuatoru | 2025-06-03 04:42:40+00:00
I have Horowitz & Hill, and they (two volumes now) are probably overkill for hobby repair. There's a large-format book called "Practical Electronics for Inventors" by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk which is a good intro to the physical side of electronics.

For troubleshooting power audio electronics Rod Elliott (sound-au.com) has a large number of useful articles both on simple theory (no poles and zeros) and on practical matters. Bob Cordell's and/or Doug Self's books on designing power amplifiers are good for a bit more "practical theory" (how the blocks are arranged, what goes wrong with poor design and/or a too-small budget for protection).

I don't have recommendations for radio frequency because I've not spent time with it. The ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) has several books that are well regarded, I believe.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-06-03 04:43:37+00:00
> When there is almost zero friction getting thoughts into code it's very easy to enter a flow state

Couldn’t have said better myself - I learned touch typing and vim in parallel early in my early days and doing any text work is a bliss

I literally wrote about this a couple days ago: https://www.typequicker.com/blog/how-to-type-faster
by tstrimple | 2025-06-03 04:44:08+00:00
This is the same as every other transformative tool which has come to market. You've got a certain segment of the population who will embrace it and push the boundaries of what is possible with the current tools and those in the future. And you've got the curmudgeons who won't let go of the one tool and one non-cloud hosting solution they so desperately cling to and deny the utility of anything else.