MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zdragnar | 2025-07-03 03:01:48+00:00
Feature development is rarely so cut and dry that you can hand a developer a task and let them run with it.

To get there, you need a confluence of context and expertise from several domains:

- what problem needs to be solved (user story)

- what options are available (interaction design, technical capabilities)

- what the cost of implementing each option is, and the opportunity cost of each level of implementation / each option (technical capability, resource management, sales, user research)

- managing group consensus on the path forward (communication to technical and non-technical audiences)

- break down of any large chunks of work into smaller tasks that can be done and planning the work to be done in series or parallel (resource management, technical capabilities)

Finally, after all of that, you have a task (or several) that can be handed off.

There's really no way to get here without at least some thought into the implementation details, as the business can't make the decision on which options without knowing rough timelines.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-07-03 03:02:22+00:00
Welcome to the world of grayscale where almost anything is never a clear win or loss. If Trump’s ideas sounded like clear losses why would he win, if they were all clear losses why would he have so many people against him? The parties aren’t at a 50-50 split by chance, American politics pushes division in the electorate where about half think the idea is bad and about the other half thinks the idea is great.

The parties definitely shift over time as well, with moderates pushing for more trade and far left and right pushing against, we just see the far right in form control of the red side while the blue side is still moderate.
by jjtheblunt | 2025-07-03 03:02:56+00:00
> The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.

there was no such conclusion that i saw having read this.

they are talking of genetic admixture...so the person shared ancestors with someone else sequenced from the mesopotamian area...maybe they both were kids with a parent elsewhere, for example.
by hopelite | 2025-07-03 03:03:04+00:00
I agree, among the many things that need way better measurements, chief among them besides unemployment, being economic preference, is an alternative to the nonsensical GDP.

But regarding unemployment, another absolutely bizarre fact of that measure of whether people have a means of producing in order to be compensated and become consumers, is the fact that is an American citizen loses his job and cannot find one after 90 days… poof, he’s not counted and therefore the unemployment rate increased. Furthermore, if now a foreign person comes into the USA, whether legally or internally, and is employed, the unemployment rate decreases, and it is not really captured that the lower wage the foreigners are willing to take, also further undermines all other wages.

Frankly, we should really be assessing why the heck we are even allowing ourselves to be managed as a vector in a database of numbers like some widget. The only real reason the ruling class cares about the “unemployment rate” is primarily to gauge whether they need to put more bodies on the fire to suppress wages and keep the anxiety and stress of the peasants competing high enough to keep profits maximized.

If it was actually “we need high skilled workers, the ruling class would have done things a long time ago to foster developing high skilled workers over the last 30+ years that they’ve been complaining about that while just using it as an excuse to fall back onto their old ways of importing brown people to suppress wages and to serve them and their decadent lives. “Who will cut our grass and raise our children” they cry out, just like when their slaves we’re taken from them.
by nerdsniper | 2025-07-03 03:03:28+00:00
Any dopamine booster (agonist / reuptake inhibitor) has wildly different effects on different people. Or across different times in their life. Anecdotes are good to share, because they illuminate the variety of experiences that one should be prepared for.

Even Vyvanse vs Adderall XR are reported to have markedly different effects on the same person -- and after metabolic conversion, they're supposed to be the same active ingredient with fairly similar time release duration.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-03 03:05:40+00:00
Is that dichotomy really appropriate anymore? To me a terminal really has no power. Everything has to be rendered on the server. Photoshop or Blender over a "terminal" would suck.

Google Maps doesn't render on the server. It sends that data to your device and your device renders it, in 3d if you want

https://postimg.cc/LnBtLfWf

That seems far removed from "terminals" to me. You could say it's just a smarter terminal but then is multiplayer Edlin Ring just a smarter terminal that just happens to cache some data locally?
by dclowd9901 | 2025-07-03 03:07:13+00:00
Lots of leaps of logic here. I'm certainly not fine with Sweden having a higher disparity of wealth but I don't live in Sweden so I can't effect much change there. We're also ignoring how many safety net benefits Sweden provides its population, ostensibly because it reasonably taxes its wealthy. If Swedes are ok with their situation, it's probably because it's being handled adequately.

The issue with disparity is it's a reflection of the unfair conditions of compensation. Elon Musk's employees make him that money, not Elon. He could make all of his employees multi-millionaires overnight by granting more generous stock plans commensurate with the money they've made the company. Reasonable profit sharing plans basically ensure this, but since companies all collude to not grant them, we see them as relatively rare in the working world. The state should be requiring companies to grant profit sharing. Not gonna bike shed it here, but it needs to be done yesterday.
by hopelite | 2025-07-03 03:08:18+00:00
I’m just going to pile on by suggesting you really concern yourself with looking into why GDP is absolutely not a good measure. You may want to start with the fact that the economist that developed GDP has long been outspoken against how it has been used and wished he had never developed it.

The fact that the government printing money and then squandering it on some thing useless makes the GDP go up, should be your first clue.

I don’t think you are a great success in life if you take on debt from organized crime, spend it on hookers and blow, and then tell everyone how rich you are based on how much you spent, i.e., squandered.
by leakycap | 2025-07-03 03:09:31+00:00
> I sometimes accept suggestions without fully understanding them

Why? This is a choice, and you can choose to change this behavior. You should! It will feel better and might avoid catastrophe.

> On hard problems, I feel less confident in reaching a solution independently.

I think you need to involve your independent sense of troubleshooting and problem solving, but that naturally involves using tools that help you. Let AI be that, if it helps you reach and verify solutions. Just don't stop involving yourself in a real way or you're risking a lot!

> Junior engineers rely on AI outputs without questioning edge cases, leading to subtle bugs.

See the first statement of yours I quoted. If you struggle with this as an experienced dev and can't lead on the matter by practice, how could you expect a junior dev to not struggle much more in the same shoes? This seems like something you address after dealing with your own shortcomings in your reliance on AI-provided solutions you do not comprehend fully.

> Have you experienced skill atrophy or decreased ownership since adopting AI tools?

Absolutely the opposite. I have made so much progress in areas I was struggling to overcome a lack of understanding. AI does not tire of discussing different angles, metaphors for understanding, etc. There's no reason to not understand AI, it will walk you through it to the point it points out its own errors sometimes.

> What practices help you preserve deep understanding while still leveraging AI speed?

Take copious notes on a whiteboard or paper. Do not take these notes digitally. You will not retain information you copy and paste from AI, you must have a physical note taking process where you synthesize the essentials and deal with them. After you have made paper/whiteboard notes, you can distill them into digital notes (do not directly retype them, summarize and clarify and make the digitized note concise)

> Should we treat AI copilots as “draft generators” or as true programming partners?

Work with AI like you'd share a project with an intern: you're in charge. You keep it on track, redirect it when it is off-course, and have it explain the decisions it makes. The more I treat AI like an intern the happier I have been with the experience, too.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-07-03 03:11:06+00:00
https://fosstodon.org/@georgetakei@universeodon.com/11478482...

(proposed/desired reductions in federally funded (NSF) science positions for FY 2026. 250,000 (75%) reduction in numbers)

EDIT: see also: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/american-science-bra...
by prmph | 2025-07-03 03:11:49+00:00
I think you misunderstand my point. You are kind of confirming my point.

What I am saying is that for some reason, this finding somewhere else is not applied consistently. Either we should keep finding the somewhere else for all cultures for as far back as we can, or else stop with this nonsense that just because a culture has some roots from elsewhere, so therefore it cannot have made innovations by itself beyond its supposed origins.
by hopelite | 2025-07-03 03:12:42+00:00
I hope you have saving to draw on. It’s been very bad for folks AB’s it’s only going to get worse from here.

I know people who don’t have to work so they have all but stopped even trying since they are just enjoying a kind of mid life retirement and working on whatever the heck they want to, including mental health and those projects they put on the back burner.
by nmfisher | 2025-07-03 03:12:55+00:00
I'm a heavy user of exhaustive pattern matching with sealed classes, definitely a great feature. You can achieve the same outcome as union types, but it's a lot more leg work, e.g.:

```

sealed class MyParam {}

class Bar extends MyParam { String val; }

class Baz extends MyParam { int val; }

void foo(MyParam param) {

switch(myParam) { case Baz(val: final val): case Bar(val: final val): }

} ```

compared to:

```

void foo(Bar | Baz myVar) {

switch(myVar) { case Bar: case Baz: }

} ```

I hadn't seen the extension_type_unions package, though, I'll check it out.
by retrac | 2025-07-03 03:13:05+00:00
The low population density of central Canada is not because it's not fertile.

A few hundred kilometres south of the area in the article, is a vast clay belt of about half a million square kilometres. It's fertile. You can grow potatoes and oats and the usual garden vegetables up there. Somewhat settled on the Quebec side, and there are farms, but less than 5% of the area suitable for agriculture, is currently used for agriculture. It's a region about the size of France, and there are no large cities, and the total population is about 100,000.

You can even see the Quebec/Ontario border from space in some spots, because the Ontario side is wholly undeveloped: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.7805302,-79.5591059,52996m/
by timewizard | 2025-07-03 03:13:25+00:00
No. I mean Quakers. Their global humanitarian work and connections to communists and socialists the world over made them particularly interesting to the CIA. The CIA has directly used and manipulated Quakers for these purposes. This was especially true during the Cold War.

The majority of people "recruited" by the CIA are used for information or for their specific field of expertise.

A forgotten history I guess.
by leakycap | 2025-07-03 03:13:33+00:00
Not using AI tool seems to be a point of pride for some, I don't get it but I keep seeing it.

Remember "borrowing" javascript on Geocities to make something work, or finding a library that helped you achieve your AJAX web 2.0 upgrade later on? How is AI different than starting with a ZIP file of some starter created by a person?
by rs186 | 2025-07-03 03:14:32+00:00
I don't see any concern of accessibility in the article, and to my knowledge there is no accessibility issue in any of the examples.

So who is w3 to say how people should and shouldn't use links? All that I see are just opinions, with no objective metrics/theories to back up their recommendations.

W3 should be in the business of setting up technical standards that go through rigorous processes, not creating nonsense like this.
by tom_m | 2025-07-03 03:14:33+00:00
Honestly, they produce what they were trained on -- mediocre code. That doesn't mean people can't use that to make money, deliver customer value, etc. but is it code that's going to win any awards or be inspiring? No. Not in the slightest. Probably never. Because you are what you eat.

The question is, what do you expect from an LLM? What do you want to use it for?

They're plenty useful but, with anything, you need to use it responsibly and with proper expectations.
by dumpsterdiver | 2025-07-03 03:14:34+00:00
Without reading the article I visualized the analogies mentioned in these comments as a house that you still have the potential to get several windows out of reliably, and importantly - you wouldn’t be missing a corner from an otherwise perfect window.

The house soaks up environmental damage to keep identifiable windows intact, vs a pile of mostly broken / not-up-to-spec windows.
by temp4827482 | 2025-07-03 03:15:34+00:00
Google just got hit with a $314 million fine for secretly tracking Android users’ locations. Sounds big, right? Not really. In 2024, Alphabet made $62 billion in net income — this fine is just 0.5% of that.

History shows fines this small don’t change corporate behavior.

Take HSBC. In 2012, they paid $1.9 billion for laundering cartel and sanctioned-country money — 11% of their profit that year. Still, they were later linked to another $4.2 billion laundering ring between 2014–2017[1][2].

Or Pfizer. In 2009, they were fined $2.3 billion for illegally marketing drugs — about 25% of that year’s profit. Yet more settlements followed in the years after[3][4].

If 10–25% fines didn’t deter repeat offenses, a 0.5% fine won’t even register. Google will just move on and likely continue the same behavior.

People here think the fine is trivial because it is. Unless you include some sort of regulatory oversight or criminal charges, corporate behavior doesn't change, it's just the cost of doing business to them.

Sources: [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-20673466 [2] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-07-28/mon... [3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-... [4] [5]links weren't working unless through google, leaving the wiki page here instead on the lawsuits: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer particularly the section on Illegal marketing of Bextra settlement (2009): it required a "corporate integrity agreement with the Office of Inspector General that required it to make substantial structural reforms within the company, and publish to its website its post approval commitments and a searchable database of all payments to physicians made by the company." Finally something more than just a fine.
by mandevil | 2025-07-03 03:15:59+00:00
401(k)'s almost always have terrible choices for funds, because of the principal-agent problem. The agent of the company makes the choices on what funds are available but it is the principals as employees who pay the fees. In half-a-dozen career stops over 20 years, I've seen good fund choices in the 401(k) maybe twice? Which is why whenever I leave a job I always roll it over into my trusty Vanguard IRA as quickly as I can, and get to have my choices for funds.

(401(k)'s and IRA's are treated differently in a divorce, which fortunately has not been a problem for me, otherwise having a IRA is so much better than a 401(k). If it wasn't for the employer matching funds I would never do a 401(k) and just do a IRA.)
by Dig1t | 2025-07-03 03:17:44+00:00
The creation of CSAM is a crime because an underage person must be harmed in its creation by definition. Making an AI video of an offensive stereotype does not harm anyone in its creation. It is textbook free speech.

Clutch your pearls as much as you want about the videos, but forcibly censoring them is going to cause you to continue to lose elections.
by jahsome | 2025-07-03 03:20:25+00:00
C'mon bud, you've got a PhD. You don't really need some uneducated filth to point out how you were disengenous.

But just in case: you made a prejudiced assumption and then boldly claimed you didn't. And you didn't state an opinion, you presented it as (probable) fact. You can couch it with all the adverbs you want, your own snobby disdain shines right through.
by woah | 2025-07-03 03:20:29+00:00
> Engineers need a task, time to think, and write about the solution and its cost. Period. Talking in a room full of people who love to hear their own voices and love to stroke their egos does not actually help engineers do their job. When engineers need to communicate, they communicate with their colleagues.

Seems like when you say "engineers", you mean "people with my exact personality"
by Arainach | 2025-07-03 03:21:17+00:00
This is a rational take, which is why it is wrong.

I agree that we're not about to be all replaced with AGI, that there is still a need for junior eng, and with several of these points.

None of those arguments matter if the C suite doesn't care and keeps doing crazy layoffs so they can buy more GPUs, and intelligence and rationality are way less common than following the cargo cult among that group.
by proc0 | 2025-07-03 03:21:33+00:00
Absolutely. There is currently no accountability for companies making bad decisions. They can hire people make bad decisions and then let them go. This feels wrong in a system where worker rights are supposedly championed. At-will employment has an inherent asymmetry that benefits employers. Individuals more often than not have a harder time quitting and finding a new job rather than staying, but companies have an incentive to try things and then do layoffs if it didn't work out.

At the very least this is grounds for never trusting or being loyal to companies. Why should the individual sit back and let companies get the upper hand like this? Smart employees would also play the game and try to get hired and do the minimum so long as they're getting paid. There's no loyalty after all. To add insult to injury companies are always talking about trust, loyalty and have all kinds of silly culture where employees have to pretend to be excited and pretend to be a good employee that loves the company.
by Leo-thorne | 2025-07-03 03:21:38+00:00
I use AI to take meeting notes too, and it really makes things easier. I can focus more on listening. But sometimes it changes the vibe a bit, like we’re all just talking to a bunch of bots. Now I only use it when I’m leading the meeting, and I always ask if others are okay with it. The tool is helpful, but real human connection still matters.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-03 03:22:13+00:00
You can loop over the range and then do result ^= i ^ A[i]. If adapters are slow you don't need them here.

Having only one loop gives you a better memory access pattern, because it's 2 XOR operations in between each memory access. Two loops is the same number of instructions, but it spends one loop ignoring memory and then another loop doing rapid-fire memory accesses. In python there's enough overhead that it's unlikely to matter. But in a faster language running on a busy machine that could make a real difference.
by drdaeman | 2025-07-03 03:24:08+00:00
That’s not what I meant, though. When I wrote “not really racist” I meant “the primary cause for posting this is not racism[, but engagement solicitation]”, rather than “not racist”. And it’s not an implication, but only an observation paired with my (and article authors’) guess about the actual intent. I’m sorry for the confusion, I guess I worded that poorly.

But, yeah, as weird as it may sound, you don’t have to be racist (as in believing in racist ideas) to be a racist troll (propagate racist ideas). Publishing and agreeing with are different things, and they don’t always overlap (even if they frequently do). He who had not ever said or wrote some BS without believing a single iota of it but because they wanted to make some effect, throw the stone.

And not sure how sarcastic you were, but nothing I’ve said could possibly mean if something is offensive it’s what somehow makes it less racist.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-03 03:24:40+00:00
I mostly just wish there was an open casting protocol that was in use. I want screens abound, and the ability to fast from my phone to the various devices about. But also for one of those screens to be a tablet that I can pick up and use to cast to a TV.

There's all these appliance-ifications on computing. Casting is from X types of computers to Y types of computers. The relationships are always weirdly specifically predicated.

I don't really want thin clients. I like the cast model where we can send web pages at screens, have them be remotely commanded thicker clients to wherever we want. I want home services too, want headless services. I think there's some roles for VDI, h264 (and newer) desktop streaming; I use sunshine/moonlight for game streaming! Maybe much more! But generally I don't want centralization, don't want a big pet; I want ubiquitous computing that can be orchestrated and controlled, I want mobile ambient code and agents that can go to the devices they are wanted on. The pool of resources a server can offer is great but it's the most uncreative most inflexible unambitious model; I want us getting good at expanding out (which we also don't do well in 99% of cases!!)

Also let's talk connectivity. With wifi 7 I think we're finally at the point where multiple devices can share the airwaves reasonably well (multi ru). This feels to me like a minimum start for this future we (might) want.
by recursive | 2025-07-03 03:25:45+00:00
Yes.

If you don't already know category theory, learning it is hard. The terms on wikipedia seem to form a dense graph of links. It's hard to get a foothold of comprehension. For people that already know C++, or are at least familiar with this syntax, this is more useful than describing it in haskell syntax or category theory. There seems to be a chicken and egg problem regarding haskell and monads. Learning c++ may be harder or easier than category theory. I'm no sure, as I don't understand either one of them. But this syntax makes more sense to me than something expressed in terms of category theory vocabulary.
by rvz | 2025-07-03 03:26:04+00:00
> Yes, I'm very sure.

You do understand that you are proving my entire point? It is still not a reason to *NOT* test or check your code implementation at all or to only rely on an LLM to check it for you.

What it really means is that software testing is extremely more important.

For running formally verified code every day, seL4 runs on the iPhone's security chip (secure enclave) in the hands of billions of users and it is a formally verified microkernel used for cryptographic operations from payments to disk encryption everyday.

This kernel is also used on medical devices, cars and in defense equipment, relied on by hundreds of millions of users.

> Just curious, how much time have you spent in (a) industry, (b) a CS classroom, or (c) both?

Lots of decades to know that no process developing safety critical system software would allow AI-generated code that isn't checked by a human or is only checked by other LLMs and using that as a substitute to writing tests.