MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ImHereToVote | 2025-06-08 07:27:52+00:00
I don't think it matters whether an LLM will get us there or some sort of causal transformer that we don't have the training data for yet.

What happens to the majority of the planet's biomass when we get there? If it's a new paradigm that does the trick. It might sneak up on us like the GPT-2 capabilities.
by ang_cire | 2025-06-08 07:28:16+00:00
> "but if we don't know how to shoe our own horses any more because we got cars, soon nobody will know how to shoe horses!"

No, this would be more akin to saying, "if we don't know how to change our car's oil anymore because we have a robot that does it, soon nobody will know, while still being reliant on our cars."

For your analogy to work, we would have to be moving away from code entirely, as we moved away from horses.

> It means that I never need to write tests any more. If I do need to write tests, for some reason (maybe because the LLM is bad at it) then I won't forget how to!

Except that once you forget, you now would have to re-learn it, and that includes potentially re-learning all the pitfalls and edge cases that aren't part of standard training manuals. And you won't be able to ask someone else, because now they all don't know either.

tl;dr coding is a key job function of software developers. Not knowing how to do any key part of your job without relying on an intermediary tool, is a very bad thing. This already happens too much, and AI is just firing the trend into the stratosphere.
by HocusLocus | 2025-06-08 07:28:31+00:00
It's CREEPY to imagine the Internet is under a mandate to protect your privacy. Don't be CREEPY.

The EU cookie fiasco is just that. All of a sudden, your every day experience was derailed extremely in a way that 'broke' HTML standards and sites at first in hundreds of ways. All of a sudden sites that never did track users were forced to start tracking them -- in order to set the flag to suppress the harassing cookie warning. Ironically, they will remember your cookie settings if you 'sign up'. Meanwhile nothing became more secure or private. It was just a way for the EU to virtue signal out loud and be annoying. It throws the user into sitespace to navigate the site's own cookie settings. It's theater.

Meanwhile, advanced fingerprinting is, well uhm, advanced. If the EU cared about cookie privacy a better course of action would have been to see whether browsers were locked down with best anti-fingerprinting possible and local cookie dialogues... and certify the ones that were. Educate users, harass them one time.
by ManuelKiessling | 2025-06-08 07:29:09+00:00
This has been growing on me very slowly, but very steadily over the decades: we really need to base the digital aspects of our society and our governments on Open Source, Free/Libre software. I don’t want to take away anyone‘s iPhone or PS5 or PC with Windows and Photoshop and Steam, that’s all fine.

But stuff like registering an appointment with my local Citizens Office, or the people at the Citizens Office workers writing a letter to some other government agency, or this other government agency storing said letter on a hard disk somewhere — this whole „digital operating system“ of a country and its people must work without any involvement of closed-source Microsoft, SAP, Apple, Google, AWS stuff being involved.

It was okay to depend on products of Big Corp back when Computers and Networks and Data where a small side quest to everyone‘s life.

But this stuff is now a fundamental building block of society.

Every line of this building block must be publicly available for everyone under a OSS license, period.

I‘m naively hopeful that stuff like the „Deutschlandstack“ is going to be tackled in all seriousness.

I pray that the EU ramps up investment in OSS projects into billions of Euros rather sooner than later.
by buovjaga | 2025-06-08 07:29:13+00:00
> But that doesn't mean that I have to lay any more credence to the guys who have, since time immemorial, said "this new thing makes something easier; it will make us worse because we do not slog as much".

I don't use LLMs myself, but the anecdotes about skill atrophy seem credible. From the OP: "Even for me it shows. I tried to write some test code recently and I absolutely forgot how to write table tests because I generate all that. And it’s frightening."

An article about the topic that tries to stay positive: https://addyo.substack.com/p/avoiding-skill-atrophy-in-the-a...
by kassner | 2025-06-08 07:29:14+00:00
My laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs. I have an Intel 10th-gen mini PC that idles at 5W with one SSD. 3W is not groundbreaking, but for a computer you paid $0, it would take many years to offset the $180 paid on a mini PC.
by cyberax | 2025-06-08 07:30:11+00:00
> Even if you focus only on emissions this completely ignores the cost of congestion, which is huge.

Congestion should be fixed by removing buses, de-densifying city cores, and forcing companies to build offices in a distributed fashion.

Meanwhile, replacing buses with shared taxi-style vehicles will do most of the job, while _reducing_ congestion. It's a bit complicated, but it's entirely possible.

The reason is simple, there is an unavoidable tension between the density of bus stops and the average speed. As a result of frequent stops, in most cities buses move at an average speed of less than 20 km/h.

For example, in Seattle it's 15 km/h. This is just 3 times faster than a rapid walk!

If we reduce the number of cars by 2x by adding mild car-pooling during the rush hour, then we'll have more than enough throughput to eliminate congestion _and_ buses in Seattle. This does not generalize to all cities in the US (e.g. Manhattan needs a serious demolishing to become sane) but usually, it's in the same ballpark.

> Your complaint about self driving buses makes no sense either. If the most polluting part of the bus is the driver then removing the driver makes the bus far, far less polluting.

Sure. But why stop there? Buses have an INCREDIBLE impact in the number of lifetimes wasted during commutes.

> When your arguments don't even make sense on their own terms it suggests that you're making them from an emotional position instead of a rational one. That's ok: if you don't like buses just say so, but be honest about it instead of making spurious arguments.

Nope. There are no rational arguments _for_ urbanism. It's a failed obsolete ideology, and it's leading to the downfall of democracty and the rise of populism.
by whstl | 2025-06-08 07:30:32+00:00
As a 90s teen growing up with Grunge and in a DYI punk scene, I remember my youth being a lot about authenticity, and it felt weird reading about how the 80s were all about money and fame and how selling out was ok.

To me that sounded absolutely absurd and a freaking caricature, something out of "American Psycho".

Today I was just discussing with a friend how we're perhaps even more materialistic and cut-throat...
by delusional | 2025-06-08 07:30:42+00:00
> I read that as a typo given the next sentence.

Thank you for the courtesy.

> I think some very clever people can make cubic work despite my warnings.

I think you're selling yourself short. You don't need to be that clever to make these algorithms work, you have all the tools necessary. Asymptotic analysis is helpful not just because it tells us a growth, but also because it limits that growth to being in _n_. If you're doing matmul and n is proportional to the size of the input matrix, then you know that if your matrix is constant then the matmul will always take the same time. It does not matter to you what the asymptotic complexity is, because you have a fixed n. In your program, it's O(1). As long as the runtime is sufficient, you know it will never change for the lifetime of the program.

There's absolutely no reason to be scared of that kind of work, it's not hard.
by spencerflem | 2025-06-08 07:31:20+00:00
Idk, the Wikipedia link said he approved the patriot act including warrantless wire taps. "As of 2015 the administration's proposals have not been implemented and the NSA retains the authority to collect and store telephone record metadata"

SVB doesn't exist in name, but they sure pulled all the stops to save the day with free money (from everyone else! I don't care if its from a tax on income or the arguably more regressive tax on all bank account holders that they went with)

The companies who put their money in the bank uninsured were taking a risk and rather than face any consequence the government decided to swoop in and bail them out.

Imagine this happening to an individual who had any sort of uninsured catastrophe.

My memory of the TPP at the time was that it forced countries to extend copyright to match our draconian measures and let companies sue countries if their laws caused lost profits.

Re: inequality, & congress, he had a super majority. I read the article, it was fine? But I don't remember there being any sort of big comeuppance. Obamas financed by the same billionaires as everyone else.

For the public option they did have the votes if they were willing to get rid of the filibuster.

& if the problem was the courts, the Democrats had a way to change that but they decided not to and refused to ever even speculate about doing so.
by ianks | 2025-06-08 07:31:24+00:00
> I feel like this article makes the same tired point I see every time a new technology comes

I sympathize with this viewpoint, but I do think it’s important to recognize the differences here. One thing I’ve noticed from the vibe-code coalition is a push towards offloading _cognition_. I think this is a novel distinction from industrial innovations that more or less optimize manual labor.

You could argue that moving from assembly to python is a form of cognition offloading, but it’s not quite the same in my eyes. You are still actively engaged in thinking for extended periods of time.

With agentic code bots, active thinking just isn’t the vibe. I’m not so sure that style of half-engaged work has positive outcomes for mental health and personal development (if that’s one of your goals).
by kassner | 2025-06-08 07:31:38+00:00
Absolutely!

> if you want the resilience offered by RAID

IMHO, at that stage, you are knowledgeable enough to not listed to me anymore :P

My argument is more on the lines of using an old laptop as a gateway drug to the self-hosting world. Given enough time everyone will have a 42U rack in their basements.
by ImHereToVote | 2025-06-08 07:31:40+00:00
I would posit that social media has made us worse. Hell, TV made our minds worse. I know it rotted mine to an extent. maybe there are externalities to search too. Maybe it devolved critical thinking skills. having a source at our fingertips made us source obsessed. Your cognitive dissonance just needs a good source to be placated.
by spwa4 | 2025-06-08 07:32:00+00:00
The problem is that the opposite is as destructive. Doing new things WILL cause accidents. And in the case of Boeing, of course it will result in planes failing.

And the "solution" to any level of this kind of criticism is really easy: do less, eventually do nothing at all anymore. But, in truth, that's even more destructive, in fact that that's happening is what this whole thread is about.

We need a balance. There needs to be some tolerance for risk, certainly at companies like Boeing.
by mixermachine | 2025-06-08 07:32:10+00:00
The big problem is that LLMs not only replace "shoeing your horse" or some other singular task. If you let them they can replace every critical thought or every mental effort you throw at them. Often in a "good enough" (or convincing enough) way Especially for learners this is very bad because they will never learn how to come to any proper thought process on their own. How should they be able to check the output?

We basically are training prompt engineers without post validation now.
by sokoloff | 2025-06-08 07:32:13+00:00
How many times per year do you hear people saying something so obviously flawed that you first wonder how they feed themselves, only to realize with horror that no one else seems to notice and instead is transmitting and discussing the idea as it was some grand insight they’d just never thought about it that way?

Critical thinking skills are skills that I think are incredibly useful and, if never taught or allowed to atrophy you can get, well, this...<gesturing dejectedly around with my cane>

People not understanding basic science, arithmetic, and reading comprehension at what was once an 8th grade level, can be easily tricked in everyday situations on matters that harm themselves, their family, and their community. If we dig deeply enough, I bet we could find some examples on this theme in modern times.
by vaxman | 2025-06-08 07:33:43+00:00
He said a lot more than that. It's reported he lost $34B last week, so maybe it was a human reaction, but his security clearance is still going to be toast.

The Pentagon has had to deal with once-trusted contractors going off the rails before and they will have to deal with it again. There are two key issues: what does the USA need from SpaceX to meet contracted Defense needs and what are the new national security risks associated with current SpaceX operations under the staff that's loyal to this guy. Will the military take control while the Pentagon figures out how to transfer permanent control to trusted parties and the bean counters resolve the accounting?
by pell | 2025-06-08 07:33:43+00:00
> The elephant in the room here is that, like so many issues, AI has become political for some people. In this case your "AI skeptic friends" are your "defund the police" and "abolish ICE" friends. For 95% of people AI is just a new technology to be loved and feared.

I really don’t think there is this “elephant” at all. If you reduce critique, skepticism and fear people might have to political slogans of mainly fringe online activists, I wonder how objective your assessment of those attitudes can actually be.

I recommend you take a look at this research published by Pew. You can see that concern about AI is much higher than 5% and is shared across the political spectrum: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p...
by eviks | 2025-06-08 07:35:30+00:00
> Upgrades for the sake of it

> Material 2 was deprecated for Material 3. No clear migration guide was provided. I tried to upgrade

Why would you do that? This is a self-inflicted wound that exactly matches the title. This isn't like another example of some important system library you need that gets removed, forcing changes

> Crucial third-party libraries have been deprecated

Since you've used them at this state for the whole of app's existence, you can continue to do so without any extra maintenance?

I mean, if you view any non-breaking changes as breaking, especially when it comes to UI, the amount of maintenance is infinite anywhere.
by antics | 2025-06-08 07:37:00+00:00
The legacy of the electric motor is not textile factories that are 30% more efficient because we point-replaced steam engines. It's the assembly line. The workforce "lost" the skills to operate the textile factories, but in turn, the assembly line made the workflow of goods production vastly more efficient. Industrial abstraction has been so successful that today, a small number of factories (e.g., TSMC) have become nearly-existential bottlenecks.

That is the aspiration of AI software tools, too. They are not coming to make us 30% more efficient, they are coming to completely change how the software engineering production line operates. If they are successful, we will write fewer tests, we will understand less about our stack, and we will develop tools and workflows to manage that complexity and risk.

Maybe AI succeeds at this stated objective, and maybe it does not. But let's at least not kid ourselves: this is how it has always been. We are in the business of abstracting things away so that we have to understand less to get things done. We grumbled when we switched from assembly to high-level languages. We grumbled when we switched from high-level languages to managed languages. We grumbled when we started programming enormous piles of JavaScript and traveled farther from the OS and the hardware. Now we're grumbling about AI, and you can be sure that we're going to grumble about whatever is next, too.

I understand this is going to ruffle a lot of feathers, but I don't think Thomas and the Fly team actually have missed any of the points discussed in this article. I think they fully understand that software production is going to change and expect that we will build systems to cope with abstracting more, and understanding less. And, honestly, I think they are probably right.
by hakfoo | 2025-06-08 07:37:11+00:00
There are plenty of Facebook/mobile "play casinos" which produce a fair amount of revenue by not refilling the customers' "free chips" fast enough to be fun so people will pay for more.

There's also a bunch of fun dark patterns (side currencies, battle pass and leaderboard features, and account evolution you need to play X amount to unlock different games, and once you've played that much you can no longer scale down to very low wagers to make the free tokens last longer.)

At least Genshin Impact has a fairly high quality game with some play value attached to the shitty casino.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-08 07:37:52+00:00
This is the essence of stipulative definitions (<-- do this) vs. commonly-agreed definitions (which probably don't exist in any meaningfully-precise or accurate form, so don't do this).

It's reductively conflationary to assume "left (or ring) wing" means the same thing to all readers around the world, or even in America or as small of a gathering as a local book club.

Define one's definitions of words clearly, or better yet, talk about specific aspects rather than collecting people into over-simplified, divided-and-conquered, hivemind duopolies that are somehow inflexible, unmovable teams set on an inevitable course of perpetual conflict.
by ethagnawl | 2025-06-08 07:39:24+00:00
I've heard people justify working there (often to themselves) by saying things like, "If I don't do it, someone else will. So, I may as well do it and make virtuous use of the money."

I think some people also tell themselves that they'll be agents of change and fix things from within but that almost always winds up being another self delusion at worst and impossibility at best. There was a certain amount of this on display in Careless People.
by rat87 | 2025-06-08 07:39:47+00:00
The counterpoint is that there is no rational or sane defense of Trump. The rest of the media criticized Biden plenty, arguably way too much in their attempts to be seen as neutral. Meanwhile there is almost nothing good about Trump. So if they write like 90% stories that seem to be against Trump it means they're biased towards Trump.

Almost regardless of political positions it's hard to argue Trump is fit or qualified to be president. He is openly corrupt, persuing an economic policy the vast majority of Conservative economists think is idiotic, and has called our veterans losers. Has never held any other government post has no knowledge of government policies and worse doesn't care to learn. Even though his ignorance is causing a lot of damage including to his voters he doesn't seem to care to learn about how any policy stuff works.

To counter that you need media like Fox or worse OAN/News Max to put out propaganda because it's impossible for even the most partisan person to defend him if they're an honest and thoughtful person
by ksec | 2025-06-08 07:39:57+00:00
The first thing in my view is reliable storage medium. The professional CD you bought ( likely not the one you burn with CD-R ) 20 - 30 years ago would still work in a CD player today. The same going with Gaming CD / DVD / Cartridge.

But Network has completely taken over and we loss that. Even Nintendo Switch 2 Game Card is now only going to be a Game Key.

I am not entirely sure we could solve that with technology. Network has gotten so cheap, and will continue to get faster and cheaper that I think may be in a way there is no point competing.

And if we cant do that. Let say we cant make a write once / a few times 128GB NAND product that last 50 years and cost less than a dollar to make.

May be then the only solution is a law to protect consumer that the digital things we buy would still be available for us to download for at least x number of years. Especially when considering hosting it and the bandwidth is so cheap it isn't really a big risk for companies.

It is getting ridiculous that both Google, Apple thinks they own everything I paid for. They think they are merely renting out their tech to me, both hardware and software.
by tomtau_ | 2025-06-08 07:40:22+00:00
Great write-up!

1. Did you consider camping in one of Hong Kong’s official free campsites instead? I don’t remember seeing any rules that would prevent long-term camping. So, besides the less convenient location and perhaps raised eyebrows of their staff (if they regularly saw you at the campsite registration desk), it seems like a safer option?

2. I assume you were a taught student, not a research student, right? (If you were a research student, you could have slept in your assigned office, I guess.)
by seadan83 | 2025-06-08 07:41:04+00:00
I would quibble a bit with some of your examples, but I think the points are conveyed well.

Though, it does seem ironic. A skeptic is someone that demands convincing evidence before believing an assertion. "AGI is around the corner", "self driving will replace human drivers", "don't learn how to code", "AI will replace developers", "AI cars will eliminate car accidents." The skeptics are the ones simply asking for evidence that any of that is true. A system that can barely count the 'R's in strawberry is supposed to be AGI in 3 years from now?? Let alone deliver on any of those other promises? Incredulity aside, let us see the evidence for any of it.

Though, those that are AI nay-sayers; that say AI will be a bad thing - they are not skeptics. They are making their own assertion. Namely that AI will be used as a crutch - that the lack of a slog will be a detriment. That is a claim, not skepticism. So, just ironic to be skeptical of the 'skeptics' and the lack of evidence from the 'skeptics' is used to dismiss the 'skeptics'.
by energy123 | 2025-06-08 07:41:36+00:00
You could argue it's a maladaptation in a modern setting, now that many non-zero-sum games are available, and now that existential risks are a thing. It worked by many definitions of the word in ancestral environment which was very different to the modern environment. Our brains are now trying to apply those chimp heuristics in an environment that they're not designed for.
by motorest | 2025-06-08 07:42:36+00:00
> Why do you need to update docker?

For starters, addressing security vulnerabilities.

https://docs.docker.com/security/security-announcements/

> I kept my box running for more than 1 year without upgrading docker.

You inadvertently raised the primary point against self-hosting: security vulnerabilities. Apparently you might have been running software with known CVEs for over a year.
by prox | 2025-06-08 07:44:36+00:00
A fear of mine is that we are speedrunning Cyberpunk 2077. And that’s not something to expire to. It’s a bleak no-hope hell.

Hope is about finding and using that moral compass. To change worse outcomes to better outcomes for everyone. The “I’ll take mine” or “My group needs to win” attitude is poison to yourself and to the world, and if you don’t see that your conscience is blind or broken.

This is nothing new, in numerous books on moral philosophy and people who have been in these situations have spoken out on it.