MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jongjong | 2025-07-07 03:26:11+00:00
Likely the result of 50+ years of a pure fiat money system. The system has been supported by an unprecedented acceleration of technology and increasing globalization; likely why it kept going for so long. We could speculate that the fiat system may have helped to accelerate tech innovation in its early days (since decoupling from the gold standard) but now it seems to be causing stagnation due to systemic wealth concentration.

It may be the same kind of stagnation people faced under the gold standard; all the gold and assets had made their way into the hands of a select few people and so the appetite for risk dropped along with number of new opportunities and class mobility. Fiat money creation allowed elasticity of the money supply and thus the creation of new opportunities outside of the existing power structure. People started being empowered to make funding decisions using "Other people's money" and this facilitated investment and risk taking.

Now the issue is that the money flows themselves have been monopolized. It's still largely "Other people's money" being created and invested, but the anti-competitive dynamics are very strong. People aren't thinking about just numbers anymore (as they did with gold), they are concerned about 'rates of change' in money flows. I think that's what's driving the urge to control money flows and prevent risky spending and prevent competition. It's all about growth numbers and monopolizing growth itself.

This might explain why tech companies are laying off staff whilst having record profits and stock prices. It's about maintaining a leading position in a race, not about satisfying anybody's needs. It has become a zero-sum game about who can take control of existing money flows 'more efficiently'; meaning with less risk and less effort than anyone else. Unfortunately, the winning 'shortest path' to getting money does not align with risk-taking or value-creation.
by theossuary | 2025-07-07 03:27:03+00:00
I don't think anyone is being laid off because of AI. People are being laid off because the market is bad for a myriad of reasons, and companies are blaming AI because it helps them deflect worry that might lower their stock price.

Companies say "we've laid people off because we're using AI,x but they mean "we had to lay people off, were hoping we can make up for them with AI."
by chrismorgan | 2025-07-07 03:27:22+00:00
Just tried playing the game, and found my very first actual breakage due to blocking custom fonts in over five years of using the web like this.

It just puts up a “NetworkError: A network error occurred.” error and doesn’t start.

The reason is this:

await document.fonts.load(`14px ${font_family}`)

Since this isn’t actually necessary for page functionality, it would be better wrapped in a try { … } catch {}, or just with .catch(() => {}) appended.

My bizarre workaround is a user stylesheet to remove the offending font:

:root { --glkote-mono-family: monospace; }

Honestly, I’m a little surprised it took five years to find something that actually broke completely from this.
by lmm | 2025-07-07 03:30:29+00:00
Like every other stakeholder, workers and their representatives have their own interests, and sometimes those are in tension with other stakeholders. But while it's very easy for workers and management to end up blaming each other in the aftermath of a failed company, in my experience the failure is usually for more fundamental reasons. When the business is sustainable and growing, the pie is growing for everyone and the conflicts are manageable, and when it's shrinking you're probably doomed anyway. But then I tend to feel the same about most cases of private equity.
by klooney | 2025-07-07 03:30:41+00:00
> “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” Cook said on stage. “In China you could fill multiple football fields.”

From 2005-2022 it became silly to not switch from any random engineering field to software, you could double your money slinging HTML. Hardware can't really compete with software's margins.

Our almost universal cost inflation also provided a heavy push with that pull- unless you lived in Houston, you kind of needed to if you didn't want to get priced out.
by CJefferson | 2025-07-07 03:30:58+00:00
I agree, you seem to be claiming to be an expert on something.

"PhD by publication" is a specific thing, it's in italics in the previous post.

My Universities offer a "PhD by publication". You basically staple together a bunch of your publications, and write a brief intro. It saves you writing a full PhD document. But, the standard on those publications is quite high -- you certainly wouldn't get one from preprints to arxiv at any University I've ever worked at.

Of course, you can get a PhD with no publications, just write a good PhD. Lots of students do taht.
by waterproof | 2025-07-07 03:31:25+00:00
Here's a combined file of all the non-locale-specific rules, for easier review: https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...

It was generated as part of this PR to consolidate the metadata.json files: https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
by windows2020 | 2025-07-07 03:31:28+00:00
This is an example of classic software engineering. It's when the person writing the code understands why they're doing it, succeeds in that, then tastefully adds a little more, and has some fun, which in turn makes the product delightful.

Not to dismiss the importance of a strong Product lead, but often the role is a permanent stopgap for engineers who lack the talent and discipline demonstrated in this article. (Easter egg aside.)
by ThrowawayB7 | 2025-07-07 03:31:52+00:00
Meanwhile, outside of the Redmond bubble, people keep hitting bugs in MS products that never would have gotten past the STEs and SDETs back in the day. Microsoft was forced to build its QA discipline in the '90s and early '00s because they were being torn to shreds by the press and public for the legendary bugginess of their products. Now we're seeing that bugginess creep back in thanks to Nadella.

Whenever it comes up among my co-workers as a Microsoft product falls on its face yet again, most recently MS Project Online screwing up something as simple as completion percentages during a meeting, I just sigh and quip "Maybe Microsoft ought to consider hiring a QA department."
by jcranmer | 2025-07-07 03:32:15+00:00
This often gets trotted out, but it's not really true. English is a solidly Germanic language, which merely happened to lose the core attribute of Indo-European languages (extensive verb inflection), and in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words. So 'technology' instead of 'craftlearn' or 'television' instead of 'farsight'.

Even among major languages, English isn't anywhere near the worst offender of copulating with other languages for features--it never really adopted foreign grammar, the way you see with, e.g., Turkic languages.
by solumos | 2025-07-07 03:32:17+00:00
There's an argument that the only truly decentralized money is Bitcoin. I don't necessarily disagree with that.

Centralization has its perks though. A lot of things are priced in dollars, and it's somewhat convenient to not have to worry about rampant speculation and boom/bust cycles affecting the medium of value transfer.

There may be a future where rather than a claim on fiat, there are tokens that provide a claim on some underlying stable-priced commodity or similar asset that isn't tied to a specific government. I think that would be a step in the right direction.

But yeah — "Web3" was a buzzword, and thinking that a peer-to-peer programmable payment network was the next version of the internet was a bit misguided.
by handfuloflight | 2025-07-07 03:32:20+00:00
Vibe coding is something other than what I'm referring to, as you're conflating natural language programming, where you do everything that a programmer does except reading and writing syntax, with vibe coding without understanding.

Traditional programming also requires iteration, testing, and debugging, so I don't see what argument you're making there.

Then when you invoke 'token burn' the question is then whether developer time costs more than compute time. Developer salaries aren't dropping while compute costs are. Or whether writing and reading syntax saves more time than pure natural language. I used to spend six figures a month on contracting out work to programmers. Now I spend thousands. I used to wait days for PRs, now the wait is in seconds, minutes and hours.

And these aren't to do apps, these are distributed, fault tolerant, load tested, fully observable and auditable, compliance controlled systems.
by 65 | 2025-07-07 03:33:31+00:00
I have a different perspective on this. I've always been interested in reading about the science of left handedness, because I am one. It's interesting to see how my brain is literally wired differently than others. How motivation and language processing are in different hemispheres of my brain compared to righties. But I never thought something was "wrong" with me, I just thought it was interesting.

Those who actually have diagnosed afflictions like autism and ADHD may also be interested in their brain wiring.

I think the trend comes from completely normal people who want to find an excuse to be a victim, which means they can defer responsibility of their lives to their "mental disorders," which of course has the effect of making highly insufferable people.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-07 03:33:59+00:00
I don't know, I think there's a real possibility that this ends up increasing the demand for software engineers rather than decreasing. The lower barrier to entry will mean lots more projects pursued by lots more people, and they'll eventually need help. And all the things non-tech companies would like to do but can't afford a whole software team, now they can launch with a couple engineers. All the stuff that has been on tech companies' backlogs forever, they can start tackling and then start the new initiatives they've been dreaming about but too busy managing firedrills and KLO.

I think as software gets cheqper to build then there's just going to be a lot more of it, for use cases we aren't even thinking about yet. And the more software there is, the more challenges it will create to manage it. Our jobs will be a lot different, but I think anyone who is laying off humans right now to save a bit of cash is really short sighted. It's going to be a long time before AI can do everything a software engineer does. (think about accountants, seems like they could have been replaced long ago, but it's still a huge industry). But the time between now and then, software engineers will be the highest ROI employees there are.
by tptacek | 2025-07-07 03:34:18+00:00
To answer the author's question: because the crayon picker rules! It's genuinely useful.

The article covers this but I think it's worth saying again: this was a different era in software development. In 1995 "shipping" meant literally "shipping": they had to produce real inventory, and then get it out into a bunch of different distribution channels. A problematic Easter egg caught too late could ultimately require an actual physical recall.

It's not surprising people freaked out over it.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-07 03:35:46+00:00
Reposted to address: labels on clusters of belief such as "free will" and "determinism"

tlb or pg has a pithy saying that I can't find now goes smth like

"we should avoid labels [on people] not because they are useless (they aren't) but they are hard to get right. Adding the cost of being wrong to that makes them not worth it"

There's some connection to the "build skill or taste?" dilemma threaded earlier

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44469163

You can make proper use of labels-- that requires taste. To build skill, you try to find new labels that can go viral ;)

E.g you combine them like Hobart :)
by jordanb | 2025-07-07 03:36:42+00:00
When I lived in Uptown I could typically get one just by standing on Broadway for a little while. When I lived in Logan Square I'd call and they'd be there in 20 minutes. This is well before either Uptown or Logan Square were particularly gentrified.

I can believe if you were going to/from the suburbs it may have been harder. The cabbies could know your destination and could just ignore the dispatcher if they didn't want to run the trip.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-07-07 03:36:58+00:00
Even if it were in DSM-5-*, would that mean it's a standalone disorder?

I haven't read much psychology, but this article suggests a lot of psychological diagnoses are just labels for symptoms:

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/06/the-mind-in-the-whe...

Imagine that your car breaks down and you bring it to a mechanic and he tells you, “Oh, your car has a case of broken-downness.” You’d know right away: this guy has no idea what he’s talking about. “Broken-downness” is an abstraction; it doesn’t refer to anything, and it’s not going to help you fix a car.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-07 03:37:19+00:00
> Thousands are being laid off, supposedly because they're "being replaced with AI," implying the AI is as good or better as humans at these jobs.

I don't think the "implying the AI is as good or better as humans" part is correct. While they may not be saying it loudly, I think most folks making these decisions around AI and staffing are quite clear that AI is not as good as human workers.

They do, however, think that in many cases it is "good enough". Just look at like 90%+ of the physical goods we buy these days. Most of them are almost designed to fall apart after a few years. I think it's almost exactly analogous to the situation with the Luddites (which is often falsely remembered as the Luddites being "anti-technology", when in reality they were just "pro-not-starving-to-death"). In that case, new mechanized looms greatly threatened the livelihood of skilled weavers. The quality of the fabric from these looms tended to be much worse than those of the skilled weavers. But it was still "good enough" for most people such that most consumers preferred the worse but much cheaper cloth.

It's the same thing with AI. It's not that execs think it's "as good as humans", it's that if AI costs X to do something, and the human costs 50X (which is a fair differential I think), execs think people will be willing to put up with a lot shittier quality if the can be delivered something much more cheaply.

One final note - in some cases people clearly do prefer the quality of AI. There was an article on HN recently discussing that folks preferred Waymo taxis, even though they're more expensive.
by unscaled | 2025-07-07 03:37:44+00:00
Some employees can be replaced by AI. That part is true. It's not revolutionary (at least not yet) — it's pretty much the same as other post-industrial technologies that have automated some types of work in the past. It also takes time for industries to adapt to these changes. Replacing workers couldn't possibly happen in one year, even if our AI models were more far more capable than they are in practice

I'm afraid that what we're seeing instead are layoffs that are purely oriented at the stock market. As long as layoffs and talk about AI are seen as a positive signal for investors and as long as corporate leadership is judged by the direction the stock price goes, we will see layoffs (as well as separate hiring sprees for "AI Engineers").

It's a telltale sign that we're seeing a large number of layoffs in the tech sector. It is true that tech companies are poised to adapt AI more quickly than others but that doesn't seem to be what's happening. What seem to be happening is that tech companies have been overhiring throughout the decade leading up to the end of COVID-19. At that time hiring was a positive signal — now firing is.

I don't think these massive layoffs are good for tech companies in the long term, but since they mostly affect things that don't touch direct revenue generating operations, they won't hurt in the near-term and by the time company starts feeling the pain, the cause would be too long in the past to be remembered.
by sillysaurusx | 2025-07-07 03:37:46+00:00
People were skeptical that 120Hz vs 60Hz made any difference in gaming. I’m still not sure how skeptical I should be. The threshold seems somewhere between 60 and 240, and it’s really hard to believe that 240 makes a measurable difference in real world performance (e.g. competitive games). But I can believe 120Hz matters vs 60Hz.

There’s also confusion over human response time vs whether you can perceive something. Even if 240Hz looks slightly different, if a human can’t react to that difference (other than to say it looks nicer, which is a personal preference rather than an empirical assessment of “better”) then it doesn’t really matter anyway. Kind of like how Avatar looked different in 48Hz instead of 24Hz, and at the time it was hailed as some revolution in movies, and then it came and went. Personal preference.

As a direct answer to your question, I was a gamedev from 2005 to 2012, and back then people were arguing that 120Hz couldn’t make a difference and that 60Hz was fine. It stuck with me, since it seemed mistaken. So I shouldn’t have said “generally accepted,” just “I vaguely remember the world arguing a decade or so ago that 60Hz was good enough in all situations, e.g. competitive gaming.”
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-07 03:38:44+00:00
I did.

In one of my early jobs, I spammed a bunch of the company customers, trying to promote my music. This was before the Internet (1987 or so), and before spam, so I was a “proto-spammer.”

It became a watershed in my life, and I took my work and career, very, very seriously, after that.
by joules77 | 2025-07-07 03:39:03+00:00
The bandwidth of the info channel to the brain doesn't increase no matter what AI or anything else magically does.

Therefore we transition to what we have already seen every time there is a leap in tool - division of labor and specialization.

The wolf learns the limitations of its own physical and mental abilities to survive and from there the law of the jungle emerges - the strength of the wolf is the pack.

Focus shifts from what the Wright Brothers can do to what the industry can do.

So the group that surrounds you has to rebalance load and you have to have convos about that with them.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-07 03:39:42+00:00
This article is here to tell us that stablecoins give us what we wanted all along: a faster, more convenient, and more secure value transfer experience.

Those things are nice I guess, but if you had asked me in 2021 what people wanted out of Web3, I'd not have listed those things. We wanted an economy based in types of value which better align with our values than fiat does.

Stablecoins are just a fresh coat of paint on the same problem as before: Money that is issued by a select few in furtherance of schemes that will make that few richer, with no reason to expect that those schemes will benefit the masses--masses who are expected to value that money just because we're told to.
by gregmac | 2025-07-07 03:40:27+00:00
Am I the only one struggling to decipher this?

I thought web3 was supposed to be some kind of decentralized compute, where rather than run on your own hardware or IaaS/PaaS you could make use of compute resources that vary wildly day-to-day in availability, performance, and cost, because they were somehow also mining rigs or something? But it's "decentralized" because there's not one entity running the thing.

There is not a mention of that in the article.

Is it actually supposed to just be microtranscations paid with cryptocurrency? Where's the "decentralized" part of that?

Anyway, instead the best I can see this article seems to be talking about how it turns out people aren't using blockchain for buying things, and makes the (apparently) shocking conclusion "the one thing people always wanted: money that just works."
by joe_the_user | 2025-07-07 03:40:49+00:00
But I find it interesting how willing certain people are to confidently claim that a model does or does not accurately model human cognition when we clearly still _barely understand human cognition_.

Wait a second. Certainly being confident of some claim of understanding some very-not-understood thing is dubious.

But consider some rando who says "I understand X very-not-understood-thing" without strong evidence of one sort or another. Yes I feel moderately confident they are wrong. And I think your statement is presently a rather problematic false-equivalence between these situations.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-07 03:40:53+00:00
> I don't think anyone is being laid off because of AI.

I think that's demonstratively false. While many business leaders may be overstating it, there are some pretty clear cut cases of people losing their jobs to AI. Here are 2 articles from the Washington Post from 2 years ago:

https://archive.vn/C5syl "ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners."

https://archive.vn/cFWmX "ChatGPT provided better customer service than his staff. He fired them."
by almostgotcaught | 2025-07-07 03:41:22+00:00
Did you know that there are universities outside of Europe? And that in those universities, "3 publications plus intro and conclusion for a PhD" is also called (usually) PhD by publication (sometimes it is called a kitchen-sink PhD). And my point was that that rule of thumb does not apply to theory students.

Note the italics please.

So I'm sorry you're right I'm not in expert in Europe's monopoly on the phrase "PhD by publication" but who would want to be an expert in trivial bs like that (answer: apparently you and the other guy!)
by noduerme | 2025-07-07 03:42:00+00:00
I'm not angry, I'm just extremely skeptical. If a programming language varied from version to version the way LLMs do, to the extent that the same input could have radically different consequences, no one would use it. Even if the "compiled code" of the LLM's output is proven to work, you will need to make changes in the "source code" of your higher level natural language. Again it's one thing to divorce memory management from logic; it's another to divorce logic from your desire for a working program. Without selecting the logic structures that you need and want, or understanding them, pretty much anything could be introduced to your code.

The point of coding, and what developers are paid for, is taking a vision of a final product which receives input and returns output, and making that perfectly consistent with the express desire of whoever is paying to build that system. Under all use cases. Asking questions about what should happen if a hundred different edge cases arise, before they do, is 99% of the job. Development is a job well suited to students of logic, poorly suited to memorizers and mathematicians, and obscenely ill suited to LLMs and those who attempt to follow the supposed reasoning that arises from gradient descent through a language's structure. Even in the best case scenario, edge case analysis will never be possible for AIs that are built like LLMs, because they demonstrate a lack of abstract thought.

I'm not hostile to LLMs so much as toward the implication that they do anything remotely similar to what we do as developers. But you're welcome to live in a fantasy world where they "make apps". I suppose it's always obnoxious to hear someone tout a quick way to get rich or to cook a turkey in 25 minutes, no knowledge required. Just do be aware that your intetnet fame and fortune will be no reflection on whether your method will actually work. Those of us in the industry are already acutely aware that it doesn't work, and that some folks are just leading children down a lazy pied piper's path rather than teaching them how to think. That's where the assumption comes from that anyone promoting what you're promoting is selling snake oil.