MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-18 21:06:10+00:00
> Re hype: Why is it that so many people are completely obsessed with replacing all developers and any other white-collar job? They seem to be totally convinced that this will happen. 100%

Because the only thing that gets the executive class hornier than new iPhone-tier products is getting to layoff tons of staff. It sends the stock price through the roof.

It follows from there that an iPhone-tier product that also lets them layoff tons of staff would be like fucking catnip to them.
by ferguess_k | 2025-07-18 21:06:30+00:00
As a side (but arguably related) topic:

Is there any webpage or book or any media that analyzes the technical aspects of a game? Take HOMM3 as an example -- what are the most difficult technical problems and how did the developers solve them? What are the algorithms that run aspects of the game (e.g. how is path-finding implemented? How is AI implemented?)? What is the architecture of the engine? Does it have a scripting engine and if so how is it implemented?

I like post-mortems but mostly are given by designers, directors, not programmers -- and even by programmers they did not go very deep like "John Carmack" type deep. The "Black books" by Fabien came into mind but these are few and far between.
by phil21 | 2025-07-18 21:06:38+00:00
Many of these companies are very interested in small nuclear tech as a means to power these facilities. The major bottleneck now for most of them is finding sites where grid capacity exists to power them.

Talking to anyone in the space for more than 30 minutes and nuclear with come up.

I very much hope the hype cycle lasts long enough for some of this capital raining down from the sky to get these reactors deployed in the field, because those will be a lasting positive from this hype cycle - much like laying railroad infrastructure and fiber optic cables came from other hype cycles.

I've often said that the robber barons sucked, but at least they left massive amounts of physical infrastructure for the average person to benefit from. The hype cycles of late leave very little in comparison.
by rikthevik | 2025-07-18 21:07:45+00:00
Love to see some Might and Magic articles.

Earlier this year I found a boxed copy of Might and Magic IV: Clouds of Xeen on Marketplace. Everything is in the box and it's all pristine. It goes very nicely with my boxed copy of Might and Magic III that I bought (used!) to play on my first computer, my 386.

I think I'm going to get these maps framed.
by rpcope1 | 2025-07-18 21:08:06+00:00
Notice how it wasn't and isn't a big deal when it's not in your own back yard (i.e. destroying blue collar professions); our chickens have just come home to roost. It's amazing the number of gullible, naive nerds out there that can't or won't see the forests for the trees. The number of ancap-lite libertarians precipitously drops when it's their own livelihood getting its shit kicked in.
by jacquesm | 2025-07-18 21:08:30+00:00
Compilers generate code in another, usually lower level language that is executed by reading all of the code that could be executed first. Interpreters (such as the BASIC interpreter we are discussing here) read only that part of the code that gets executed and typically call functions rather than that they generate code (never mind JIT). Tokenization prior to interpretation is technically an optional step (it's just an efficiency boost) and is not normally confused with compilation even if there are some superficial similarities.

You of all people should know this, come on.
by pixelmonkey | 2025-07-18 21:08:50+00:00
I use https://libib.com for this use case. I didn't see it mentioned here, so figured I'd share.

I'll also mention a fun coding project that I used ChatGPT on. I created a data enriched spreadsheet out of my physical books. This could then be used to bulk import into libib for a searchable and visual digital bookshelf.

First I took photos of my bookshelves such that the spines were visible. Then I had ChatGPT vision model transcribe visible titles and authors, and guess the books based on that. Then I turned that into a CSV. Finally I had ChatGPT generate a Python script that used the Google Books API to enrich the spreadsheet with ISBNs. Finally I bulk uploaded that CSV with ISBNs to libib, and voila, I had a digitized library.

Just in case this gives you any ideas!
by JPLeRouzic | 2025-07-18 21:09:00+00:00
I have worked with people from Polytechnique, ENS, INSA, and other schools like Supelec. They are above ordinary people, but this is to be expected; however, most of the people I met are unable to create like Fabrice Bellard did.

I guess something has changed several times in the past, for example, the number of Nobel prizes per inhabitant in France dropped in the first half of the 20th century, and I don't know why.

I also remember reading a text in the 2000' by a Polytechnician who complained about the new generations.
by Alupis | 2025-07-18 21:09:09+00:00
Which... has the consequences of stifling innovation. Regulations/policy is two-way street.

Who's to say USB-C is the end-all-be-all connector? We're happy with it today, but Apple's Lightning connector had merit. What if two new, competing connectors come out in a few year's time?

The EU regulation, as-is, simply will not allow a new technically superior connector to enter the market. Fast forward a decade when USB-C is dead, EU will keep it limping along - stifling more innovation along the way.

Standardization like this is difficult to achieve via consensus - but via policy/regulation? These are the same governing bodies that hardly understand technology/internet. Normally standardization is achieved via two (or more) competing standards where one eventually "wins" via adoption.

Well intentioned, but with negative side-effects.
by jonas21 | 2025-07-18 21:09:45+00:00
I don't know... 1.2% of GDP just doesn't seem that extreme to me. Certainly nowhere near "eating the economy" level compared to other transformative technologies or programs like:

- Apollo program: 4%

- Railroads: 6% (mentioned by the author)

- Covid stimulus: 27%

- WW2 defense: 40%
by eastbound | 2025-07-18 21:10:23+00:00
> completely obsessed with replacing all developers

I’m paid about 16x an electronics engineer. Salaries in IT are completely unrelated to the person’s effort compared to other white collar jobs. It would take an entire career to some manager to reach what I made after 5 years. I may be 140IQ but I’m also a dumbass in social terms!
by kpil | 2025-07-18 21:10:27+00:00
I think you got most details from the others, but insurance is two basically two different things:

Life Insurance is mostly a savings product, and the insurance part protects you if you live too long.

Property and casualty insurance protects you from losses, including someone's life, but also houses, cars, etc.

The domains are quite different, but they both have specific "insurance business" computing that's related to actuarial science or analysis, i.e. the statistics needed to calculate reserves, policies, prices etc.

I doubt COBOL is used for any actuarial analysis. I think SAS is still strong, but I suspect R is used now. Maybe Python is used in the more static calculations that are handed over to developers, but the actuaries are typically coding whatever they need when they create their models.

The rest is just case management, automating business rules, bookkeeping, payments, and for life insurance also systems for trading securities and funds, and possibly in-house tools for asset management.

There isn't really a strong case for COBOL. The only reason COBOL still is used is that the insurance companies where early adopters and saw computing as a way to reduce the administrative overhead. The investments were made at a time when trusting some hippies running UNIX wasn't really on the table, and even less so trusting some nerds and their rickety PCs. They built up a workforce with COBOL devs that also gained quite a lot of business knowledge.

The digitalisation created another problem - a lot of the older employees were hired to do simple administrative tasks. Even big corporations aren't totally psychopathic so it actually has taken a long time to shift out the employees, and retrain the remainder for the jobs that got more demanding. Even the employees that didn't really have that much high-value domain-specific knowledge to begin with. So the case for more automation was actually not as strong as it could have been.

Even still, although especially life insurance is a totally digital product (damage claims is not), they primarily see IT as a cost centre at heart although they probably claim they do not.

This has shaped their systems and they have tended to replace their old systems when they're forced by external factors, as the upsides - better digital sales, more automated decisions, better trading experience for their customers,etc are not as easy to achieve as the more tangible administrative automation cost savings they started out with.

Actually, this also applies to banks. You could totally run an insurance company or bank without any mainframes or a single line of COBOL. But the organisations still have COBOL developers and maybe more important an upper management that come from that tradition.
by dvt | 2025-07-18 21:10:36+00:00
> Or to put it simply, to argue that the border is synonymous with the law, that a violation of it is a violation of law and order, is to ultimately posit that law and order is inseparable from a hierarchy decided by birth. It is an identification not with the ideal of law as equality, as applicable to all, but to the reality of law as that which enforces hierarchy.

The whole thing reads a bit like an undergrad paper, but it's profoundly uncharitable to interpret the idea of a "border" in this way. Taken to its logical extreme, you simply cannot have a coherent and functional society (my premise here is that we don't want anarchy) without borders, unless we have a world government (which we do not have). How could you even enforce laws (even the most moral of laws, e.g. punishing a mass murderer) if someone can hop in and out of your jurisdiction willy nilly?

Obviously borders are important for many reasons, and they are trivially synonymous with the law, as they often delineate legal jurisdictions (unless we want to go to war to enforce our laws where our neighbors want to enforce theirs).

In short, there are much better arguments against mass deportations.
by phil21 | 2025-07-18 21:10:59+00:00
Same reason so many people got excited in the early Internet days of how much work and effort could be saved by interconnecting everyone. So many jobs lost to history due to such an invention. Stock trading floors no longer exist, call centers drastically minimized, retail shopping completely changing, etc.

I had the same thought you did back then. If I could build a company with 3 people pulling a couple million of revenue per year, what did that mean to society when the average before that was maybe a couple dozen folks?

Technology concentrates gains to those that can deploy it - either through knowledge, skill, or pure brute force deployment of capital.
by dinfinity | 2025-07-18 21:11:11+00:00
> Everybody will either benefit or at least not be left worse off from eating high fiber and low saturated fat.

Depends on what you replace the saturated fat with.

Remember that the claim that saturated fat is 'bad for you' is based on correlations (nutritional research is hard, yo) and that saturated fat is in a lot of trash food. If you keep eating trash food with low levels of saturated fat, your health will still suffer. If you eat lots of saturated fat from healthy sources, you improve your nutritional situation.

tl;dr: 'Saturated fat' is a misleading proxy for 'unhealthy food'.

Lots of dietary fiber being healthy is pretty uncontroversial, though.
by ncruces | 2025-07-18 21:11:31+00:00
If they didn't want to get caught, don't do that in public, cameras or no cameras.

Could've been 20 years ago in a concert and they bump into someone who knows them while hugging.

So what's different here? That people on the internet where “quickly” able to figure out who they are because it went viral?

I'm sure randomly getting caught on national TV 20 years ago could have had the same effect. All it takes is one person to know them.
by nocsi | 2025-07-18 21:11:47+00:00
Why renewables? These guys don't have an energy problem. The states have made sure give them energy credits and other assurances on that. The problem they do have though is siphoning the water from everyone around them.

Microsoft actually has a design for mini datacenters that stay cool in the ocean and collect tidal energy. But it's way more fun to have states trying to court you into building datacenters cause it'll bring some jobs.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-07-18 21:11:53+00:00
>it’s easy for the job to get “done” and work. It’s hard to do it properly in a way that it has a lasting durability. With A.I. we can spit out these programs that work and look done. And for prototypes or throwaways and such, that’s probably wonderful! But that’s not going to fly if you’re building a house to spec for people who are going to live in it for 30 years.

Let’s be honest, that’s what most companies pay good salaries for most software developers for.

When staring at a new job or project, do you more find yourself praising the architecture and quality? Or wondering how it got to this point?
by sterlind | 2025-07-18 21:12:47+00:00
my experience using LLM-powered tools (e.g. copilot in agent mode) has been underwhelming. like, shockingly so. like not cd-ing to the wrong dir where a script is located, and getting lost, disregarding my instructions to run ./tests.ps1 and running `dotnet test`, writing syntactically incorrect scripts and failing to correct them, particularly being overwhelmed by verbose logs. sometimes it even fails to understand the semantic meaning of my prompts.

whereas my experience describing my problem and actually asking the AI is much, much smoother.

I'm not convinced the "LLM+scaffolding" paradigm will work all that well. sanity degrades with context length, and even the models with huge context windows don't seem to use it all that effectively. RAG searches often give lackluster results. the models fundamentally seem to do poorly with using commands to accomplish tasks.

I think fundamental model advances are needed to make most things more than superficially automatable: better planning/goal-directed behavior, a more organic connection to RAG context, automatic gym synthesis, and RL-based fine tuning (that holds up to distribution shift.)

I think that will come, but I think if LLMs plateau here they won't have much more impact than Google Search did in the '90s.
by rscho | 2025-07-18 21:13:56+00:00
Honestly, you don't have access to the necessary data to make rational decisions. That's not gatekeeping, it's logic. I don't have access to it either, although I'm indeed a healthcare pro. Screening strategies are a hyperspecialized domain and only experts somewhat understand what they're doing. It's just like making theories about what the CERN guys should be doing while not having passed physics 101 with no access to experimental data. That's why I'm just saying: you're certainly allowed to question, but you certainly can't make up assertions either.
by adrianwaj | 2025-07-18 21:14:04+00:00
Has there been any lawsuits for people such as yourself? "Can't get my mail but will get some money." There must be millions of people unhappy about the situation.

Surely, an AI can check each shut-off account, work out the identity, and then allow the claimed user to send in a picture of themselves holding some ID.... some variation on that anyway. A Gmail employee can do the final checking after voice chat, and the user could even pay for this.

They could ask questions like: Has person X ever emailed you? When did you meet that person? What's their email address?

Also, generally speaking, are voice biometrics ever used? That could work well. "Please send us a sound file of you saying _______" or call some number and speak to an automated checker. I suppose so many companies could get voiceprints by this stage of people they have recorded.
by MBCook | 2025-07-18 21:14:41+00:00
Autopilot isn’t cruise control. It’s ADAS. Apples and oranges.

Other ADAS systems have much better driver monitoring. My 2016 Honda did. My 2021 Ford does.

The government has forced Tesla to strengthen their monitoring at least twice.

Tesla called it Autopilot. Tesla (seemingly) didn’t care about reckless behavior. Tesla repeatedly had misleading claims about being far safer than humans driving. Tesla didn’t even keep the data that would be needed to prove that for the first 2 years.
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-18 21:14:44+00:00
Touche as one might say, you make a good point.

I think my bias comes from starting out with japanese sword styles and then moving to european. Instead of huge wide swings, it was all about jabbing someone on the wrist, or intercepting and controlling the blade.

I think because I tried Epee first, foil just seemed slow.
by paul7986 | 2025-07-18 21:15:54+00:00
So say you are a startup are you going to now hire a designer or use WAY Less Expensive & quicker AI to design logos, website, an app, etc? Print design.. all types of design it can do.

So You and all other people like to save money are going to continue spend the same thousands on such a resource when AI can do what they do in a few minutes or more for WAY LESS? UX Design was supposedly a growing field ... not at anymore! Definitely one can do the same thing in that field that 10 did.

Further, future mobile AI devices will pull the information and put it all on the lock screen of your AI device visualizing the data in a fun new way. Technology that makes things simpler and more magical get adopted yet visits to websites will significantly decline.

For federal workers who have lost their jobs they are feeling this pain competing for jobs against each other and now AI. It will only get worse for designers because it's now cheaper and faster to use AI to design logos, sites, apps to even including do vibe coding for the front end development to possibly the backend but that's not my specialty yet no doubt I vibe coded front-ends.
by phil21 | 2025-07-18 21:15:54+00:00
One of the more annoying parts about being in the tech community was listening to the tone-deafness of these sorts of folks. Coming from a very blue collar background and family.

It's difficult to have much empathy for the "learn to code" crowd who seemingly almost got a sense of joy out of watching those jobs and lifestyles get destroyed. Almost some form of childhood high school revenge fantasy style stuff - the nerd finally gets one up on the prom king. Otherwise I'm not sure where the vitriol came from. Way too many private conversations and overheard discussion in the office to make me think these were isolated opinions.

That said, it's not everyone in tech. Just a much larger percentage than I ever thought, which is depressing to think about.

It's certainly been interesting to watch some folks who a decade ago were all about "only skills matter, if you can be outcompeted by a robot you deserve to lose your job" make a 180 on the whole topic.
by topheman | 2025-07-18 21:15:55+00:00
WebAssembly Component Model is super promising, but the examples out there are either too simple or way too complex.

I made a project to demonstrate its power, with more than a simple hello world. It's a basic REPL with a plugin system where you can run plugins written in any language that compiles to WASM:

- same plugins work in both CLI and web implementations

- plugins are sandboxed by default (implemented a Deno like security model)

- the REPL logic itself is compiled to WASM, like the plugins, you could swap its implementation

- a few built-in plugins available, some of them to demonstrate the access to the filesystem and the network
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-18 21:15:59+00:00
- The birth of the space age, and more realistically the birth of the ICBM and satellite age. Both key to national security, and in the context of a cold war.

- 40% of long-distance ton miles travel by rail in the US. This represents a VAST part of the economic activity within the country.

- A literal plague, and the cessation of much economic activity, with the goal of avoiding a total collapse.

- ...Come on.

So we're comparing these earth-shaking changes and reactions to crisis with "AI"? Other than the people selling pickaxes and hookers to the prospectors, who is getting rich here exactly? What essential economic activity is AI crucial to? What war is it fighting? It mostly seems to be a toy that costs FAR more than it could ever hope to make, subsidized by some obscenely wealthy speculators, executives fantasizing about savings that don't materialize, and a product looking for a purpose commensurate to the resources it eats.
by mattigames | 2025-07-18 21:16:16+00:00
Like covid wiped us all right? A deep understanding of our genes means we are more likely to quickly create successful defenses against future hostile organisms, again, the most "hackable" specimens, those in which we could accurately predict the effects of our changes in their genes (including its interactions with virus and vaccines).

And the same homogeneity means that developing a defense for any future hostile organism is much more straightforward, just like e.g. developing software that works on windows is much easier than developing software that works on windows, Linux and mac.
by lm28469 | 2025-07-18 21:16:40+00:00
So all these things that skyrocketed in the span of 75 years are immutable facts of life, but magic drugs are somehow in the realm of possibilities?

What's easier, educate your people and feed them well to build a strong and healthy nation OR let them rot and shovel billions to pharma corps in the hope of finding a magic cure?
by siliconc0w | 2025-07-18 21:16:41+00:00
Sadly health insurance in the US is unlikely to pay for most preventative care because the followup costs of false-positives and that they are betting that down the line someone else will pick up the tab when you get sick decades later (like the government).

It's kind of why I'm favor of universal option to align financial incentives. Like given how sick the US population is, it probably makes sense to put a lot more people of GPL-1s and invest in improving their efficacy and permanence. Like nationalize-the-patent COVID-operational-warp-speed level urgency. There are over 100M Americans that are pre-diabetic, the cost of treating a diabetic is about 20k/yr. So $4 trillion in new costs, on top of the misery and human suffering.
by trhway | 2025-07-18 21:17:07+00:00
We're already seeing it with DeepSeek's and other optimizations - like that law with highways - the wider the highway the even more usage of it. Dropping by 90% would open even more use cases.

For white-collar jobs replacement - we can always evolve up the knowledge/skills/value chain. It is the blue-collar jobs where bloodbath with all the robotics is coming.
by haunter | 2025-07-18 21:17:12+00:00
Counter Strike skins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling

It's the whole ecosystem, Valve selling keys (making $1b in 2023 alone [0]) and the numbers are only going up since [1]

On top of that they take a cut form every single transaction so even just people selling cases between each other makes Valve a fuckton of money.

And there are the 3rd party sites which are running on the SteamAPI where people can bet these cases, keys, and skins on CS matches. It's an insane system running freely without any oversight from anyone

0, https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/

1, https://www.dexerto.com/counter-strike-2/valve-made-insane-a...
by raincole | 2025-07-18 21:18:07+00:00
Yeah that's my first reaction to. 1.2% doesn't sound much. It's just people making headlines out of thin air. If it lists the water and energy consumption I might be more concerned.

Slightly off-topic, but ~9% of GDP is generated by "financial services" in the US. Personally I think it's a more alarming data point.