MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burningChrome | 2025-07-02 16:24:23+00:00
> Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s (compared to now)?

Nope.

I had plenty of hand me downs, but the majority of stuff I owned lasted for years and years, and I beat TF out of my clothes; so getting three or four years out of a pair of jeans was an achievement. I remember being constantly upset with my parents because when I would ask to get something new, they would tell me I had to wear out the stuff I already had first.

So at the time, paying more for a pair of Levi's or Nike's were worth it because they were built to last for years, not months like they are now. I was in college during the late 90's and even then I had three pairs of shoes that lasted my entire 4 years in college.

Back then stuff was durable and was meant to last for years. The "fast fashion" and "disposable fashion" trends essentially ended monopolies that brands had because kids weren't wearing stuff for more than a few months before discarding it or having it fall apart so they can wear the latest thing.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-02 16:24:25+00:00
It took us decades to get to this outcome (since the Reagan era), I assume it'll take decades to get out of it. Mental models are rigid, progress occurs one funeral time (Max Planck), ~2M people 55+ in the US age out every year (~5k per day), so the opportunity is with young folks who will or already are in the workforce, etc. It ain't happening overnight.

Solutions such as "try harder," "be more lucky," or "just find another job" are...not very actionable when you consider that ~60% of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life and the current labor macro.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/what-you-need-to-kn...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/12/majoritie...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.asp...

https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Labor-Unions-And-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...

(i am once again asking you to think in systems)
by PleasureBot | 2025-07-02 16:25:27+00:00
The fundamental limitation of LLMs writing code is that reading and understanding code is harder and slower than writing it. With other engineers that I work with there is an established level of trust where I do not need to deep dive into every PR. With LLMs it is like I am constantly doing code reviews for someone with whom I have zero trust. This is fundamentally a slow process, especially if you need to maintain this code in the long term and it is part of your 'core business code' that you work on 90% of the time. It also comes with all the downsides of no longer being an expert in your own codebase.

Ultimately I am responsible for any code I check in even if it was written by an LLM, so I need to perform these lengthy reviews. As others have said, if it is code that doesn't need to be maintained, then reviewing the code can be a much faster process. This is why it is so popular for hobby projects since you don't need to maintain the code if you don't want to, and it doesn't matter if you introduce subtle but catastrophic bugs.

Ultimately the tech feels like a net neutral. When you want to just throw the code away after it is very fast and good enough. If you are responsible for maintaining it, its slower than writing it yourself.
by darth_avocado | 2025-07-02 16:25:42+00:00
If you have a large sales team for products that are not selling, and you want to invest in building a brand new product, you are not going to be able to move the sales folks into R&D. If you end up building the new product, you may eventually need the sales team, but most businesses in the meantime would reduce the headcount in sales instead of retaining them. I’m not saying that not bad for employees, but shifting focus isn’t always about changing what employees work on.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-07-02 16:26:04+00:00
> until all that is left is a person to watch the Machine, and a dog to bite the person if they touch the Machine

Hey that's actually a great line. It might be even better than the original, where the person is there to feed the dog.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/
by jqpabc123 | 2025-07-02 16:26:09+00:00
An automaker so valuable, it's worth more than Toyota, BYD, GM, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Ford and Honda COMBINED.

Yes. Wildly overvalued for an automaker that it has never accounted for more than 2% of light vehicles world wide --- and instead of the wild growth projections they sold to investors, sales over the last 2 years have actually declined.

Any "potential" here remains largely unrealized.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-02 16:26:20+00:00
You're so right. I'm not afraid of the cops, especially not ICE flunkies, but interactions with law enforcement has never made my day more convenient and pleasant. It's not that I'd hide anything from them, as much as for me it's a bureaucratic hassle I'd just as soon not have to deal with.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
by gwynforthewyn | 2025-07-02 16:26:35+00:00
I’ve worked with Azure for a few years now, AWS and classic data centres for 15 years before that.

It’s pretty clear if you check github that Azure’s services and documentation are written by distributed teams with little coordination. We have a saying in-house that the info is all in their docs, but the sentences and paragraphs for even trivial things are split across ten or fifteen articles.

I see a problem like granting */read in an innocuously named role and am left wondering if it was pragmatism, because figuring out least privilege was tough, or a junior who didn’t know better and was just trying to make progress.

I’m on a phone and can’t search git effectively, but I’d swear there was a comment or note on the golang implementation of msal saying that it used non-idiomatic go with no real support for many of the auth flows in v1 because it was written by an enthusiastic junior dev and released with little review. The modern version looks better, but I felt like I got a window into Azure back when I read that.

Building large services is hard, my hat is off that Microsoft is making it work, but sometimes we get to see that it’s just teams of developers doing it for them and those teams look a lot like the teams we work with every day. There’s no secret sauce, except that MS has the resources to iterate until the thing mostly works most of the time.
by bko | 2025-07-02 16:26:48+00:00
I think there's more to work than just taking home a salary. Not equally true among all professions and times in your life. But most jobs I took were for less money with questionable upside. I just wanted to work on something else or with different people.

The best thing about work is the focus on whatever you're doing. Maybe you're not saving the world but it's great to go in to have one goal that everyone goes towards. And you get excited when you see your contributions make a difference or you build great product. You can laugh and say I was part of a 'cult', but it sure beats working a misearble job for just a slightly higher paycheck.
by lend000 | 2025-07-02 16:27:10+00:00
I had long covid which manifested as post-exertional malaise and general brain fog, and which was not improving for 2 years, and I essentially solved it with a combination of a low sugar paleo diet (starting as an autoimmune protocol diet for a few weeks to determine some other things that caused flare ups for me like nutritional yeast and capsaicin), lots of walking, light and increasing exercise (especially outdoor exercise), and a dedication to sleep hygiene. Many of which were referenced in the post.

It's a ton of work at first but it's completely worth it -- post-exertional malaise sucks.

Other things that helped me personally: daily cold plunges up to the chin (so you feel it in your vagus nerve), HRV reset breathing exercises, and daily meditation. Wish you the best of luck.
by spacemadness | 2025-07-02 16:27:16+00:00
That’s just not true. I’ve been lifting heavy for many years and have had my share of injuries, sure. But they heal. My body feels great. I’m almost 50 and I have no back pain, or other pains I see people constantly complaining about that are near my age and don’t do any resistance training. The only reason I injured myself is because I overreached. So that’s in ones control. I tend to overdo it from time to time if I’m trying to hit a goal. But nobody needs to push that hard and there are many ways to avoid it.

The fact is resistance training is vital for able bodied folks to avoid feeling pain later. And of course it has many other benefits than that. Even just pulling on some resistance bands can save your back and shoulders and the chance of injury there is minuscule.
by lesuorac | 2025-07-02 16:27:17+00:00
Musk's companies literally exist because

Obama pushed for EV credits which allows Tesla to make any money.

Obama pushed for Commercial Crew Contract which allowed SpaceX to get Gov. contracts.

And Trump is trying to undo that lol ...

Also there's like 300 million people in the USA. You could definitely find at least a dozen "left" serial killers. Doesn't make it representative of registered democrats.
by transpute | 2025-07-02 16:27:53+00:00
Indeed. Speedrunning an LLM variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law.

Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?

> there's a fundamental shift when a system can no longer be held in a single mind

Should LLM users invest in both biological (e.g. memory palace) and silicon memory caches?
by rovr138 | 2025-07-02 16:28:32+00:00
I think the links just need to be longer vs a couple of words.

We are used to small areas, but the problem is that you end up with 'click here', like in the example. But if you linked the whole text, it's basically the same thing as adding aria.

IMO, most cases that I see using aria seem like a fix after the fact vs doing it the right way.

There are use cases for it, but in the case of the example, making the whole sentence a link would be good.

Regarding screen readers, you can have it read all links, which is why the 'click here' is an issue. So you want a balance. Change "for x, <a href=...>click here</a>" "<a href=...>for x, click here</a>"... ta-da?

You need to optimize for people using accessibility tools, but also for the people looking at the site...
by rank0 | 2025-07-02 16:28:48+00:00
Look, I am not saying life is inherently better in America vs France. This thread started as a debate about wages and social benefits. If you're truly interested in a good faith discussion on that topic, the metrics I'm highlighting are essential. If you've already cemented your opinion and just have a bone to pick with the United States there's probably not much common ground we can find.

> Disposable income is a poor metric to use though.

Hard Disagree. It's directly related to standard of living. You're also leaving out the other parts. It's adjusted for PPP, taxes, essential household costs (healthcare, shelter, etc), and social benefits.

> Money isn't everything. The french have better public transport, more social stability, a life expectancy that's higher by five (!) years etc etc.

Of course money isn't everything...but again we started off by talking about it.

> By pretty much whatever standard you use, their quality of life is much higher.

Except for household income, wealth, affordability, and others. See for yourself! This is an excellent resource: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&tm=NAAG&pg=0&snb=12...

As another random (non-definitive) data point take the homelessness rate: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/homelessn...

I stand by my statement. Too many Americans don't appreciate how good they have it. Cultural differences are real.
by AR-sh1n0b1 | 2025-07-02 16:29:05+00:00
Location: Missouri - US | Central timezone

Remote: Yes. Don't mind occasional on-site visits though.

Willing to relocate: Not really, but I will consider it. Does it add value being on-site?

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I've been a software developer for 20+ years, (mostly) remote since 2011.

Looking for freelance linux-based contract work, B2B (yes, I'm incorporated) or 1099. Open to part-time contracting.

I have a can-do attitude and have the ability to be hands on, mentor, work collaboratively and autonomously.

I prefer to do things as opposed to talking about doing things and am able and willing to gather requirements, create stories and define projects.

I'm punctual (I value everyone's time), reliable (I stick to what we agree upon), dependable (I'll be there when you expect me to), adaptable (I'm not stuck in one tech area) and accountable (no issues with ownership of things I work on) and all the other good -ables.
by liuliu | 2025-07-02 16:29:33+00:00
That's the point of experiments right? From my own experience, I found these who use image / video generators are mainly in e-comm and advertisement. Only recently creative works (such as YouTubers) start to use these (they were early adopters for audio / speech generation, and lipsync. But image / video generators, even just for YouTube thumbnails are recent phenomenon).
by ffsm8 | 2025-07-02 16:30:32+00:00
> games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.

Historically, games have actually performed extremely well in economic downturns.

Likely because they're extremely cheap entertainment if you count $ per hour of entertainment, but that's just my view on it.

And gaming as a whole is doing great. The only part that's falling off a cliff is the woke garbage life service games AAA studios have been releasing for the last ~10 yrs or so.

Whenever the studios didn't make dumb political messaging the core of the game... And instead made a good gameplay loop first, they've generally succeeded pretty well. It takes skill to make a game centered around political messaging and have it be good, (e.g. spec ops the line, MGS, metaphor:refantazio ), and none of the woke garbage that flopped ever had anything even attempting to create a world in which this messaging made sense. So we're left with completely nonsensical catering to politics no average person cares about whatsoever.

I mean we've even got single dev games that got to the charts of steam (schedule I).
by darth_avocado | 2025-07-02 16:30:49+00:00
> Median disposable household income is probably the best measure

If I used to make $78k as a full time IT employee, but now have to work two jobs to make $78k, I still have same household income but I’m considerably worse than before.

A combination of hours worked, wages earned and household debt together would paint a much more accurate picture.
by bbor | 2025-07-02 16:30:55+00:00
Legally speaking, they need signed arrest warrants. Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK. In this way, they have much less power than local PD or Sheriffs.

Practically speaking, of course, there's news stories every week about them arresting citizens, even when they're saying stuff like "please, check my wallet, my ID is in there!". I haven't followed up, but I'd be shocked if any of these incidents resulted in any sort of reparations for the victim.

As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement. Getting arrested is bad, but getting shot by someone with terrible trigger discipline and no training is worse... At best, they're especially aggressive, masked cops with absolutely zero accountability.
by oceanplexian | 2025-07-02 16:31:04+00:00
This might come as a weird take but I'm less concerned about the Chinese logging my private information than an American company. What's China going to do? It's a far away country I don't live in and don't care about. If they got an American court order they would probably use it as toilet paper.

On the other hand, OpenAI would trivially hand out my information to the FBI, NSA, US Gov, and might even do things on behalf of the government without a court order to stay in their good graces. This could have a far more material impact on your life.
by masswerk | 2025-07-02 16:31:23+00:00
Interesting: On MacOS, with the option "Check for updates but let you choose to install them" chosen in the Firefox preferences, the experience is exactly that, update in the background without further notifications. That is, I get a prompt that an update is available and whether I want to download it now or not. If so, it starts a download in the background and applies the update on the next start of the program. (You can also check for updates and restart in the "About" dialog.)

(Note: I've set new tabs and windows to open with a blank view, which may also make a difference, as there is no default content.)
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-02 16:31:43+00:00
The only way I've found LLMs to be useful for building real software, which isn't included in your list of use cases, is for "pseudo boiler-plate". That is there are some patterns that are tedious to write out, but not quite proper boiler-plate in the traditional sense, as so not as amenable to traditional solutions.

One example I deal with frequently is creating Pytorch models. Any real model is absolutely not something you want to leave in the hands of an LLM since the entire point of modeling is to incorporate your own knowledge into the design. But there is a lot of tedium, and room for errors, in getting the initial model wiring setup.

While, big picture, this isn't the 10x (or more) improvement that people like to imagine, I find in practice I personally get really stuck on the "boring parts". Reducing the time I spend on tedious stuff tends to have a pretty notable improvement in my overall flow.
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-02 16:31:43+00:00
The issue is they are laying off US workers and then importing Indian workers to replace them via 3rd party contractors. I saw a post on X today which essentially said "Ai will not replace your job, an Indian with Ai will replace your job" - this was posted by an Indian and he was completely right. Microsoft is actively laying off people with 150k salaries and replacing them with offshore workers earning a 10th of the salary.

At the same time our politicians appear to be looking everywhere for a solution to increasing US jobs except for right where the issue is. Everyone else sees it but our politicians are willfully blind.
Ask HN: Is it worth building a comparison site when people can just use AI?
by mmarian | 2025-07-02 16:31:57+00:00
I've been looking into building a comparison site for a certain kind of service. The service is well-established, and commoditized; nothing innovative.

I was initially surprised that there isn't an aggregator out there for it. But now I'm starting to wonder if there's a reason no one's doing it: because everyone is now looking up the answer using ChatGPT & co.

The data for this product rarely changes - whether it's pricing, availability, or product offering. Which means people don't have to worry about the AI answers being out of date. Very unlike the hotel booking comparison sites, which are still thriving.

I probably won't have much special insight, compared to an AI. I'm just a casual user of this service.

The only benefit for my hypothetical comparison site would be the filtering/sorting UI. Problem is, it would be hard to nail it, so asking ChatGippity might be better anyway.

What do you guys think? Is it still worth launching comparison sites these days?

And yes, I already asked Claude about this; it said don't bother - but I don't trust its answer because this topic isn't discussed much online.
by NotAnOtter | 2025-07-02 16:32:24+00:00
If one wished, could they do something like

`save adults to "adults.json" as XML`

The expected output would be a file with the name "adults.json" containing XML data. I don't see much benefit in this specific use case but I do have a 'code smell' in having the language automagically determine the output structure for me.
by j45 | 2025-07-02 16:32:24+00:00
This is interesting. I'm a fan of Cloudflare, and appreciate all the free tiers they put out there for many.

Today I see this article about Cloudflare blocking scrapers. There are useful and legitimate cases where I ask Claude to go research something for me. I'm not sure if Cloudflare discerns legitimate search/research traffic from an AI client vs scraping. Of the sites that are blocked by default will include content by small creators (unless on major platforms with deal?), while the big guys who have something to sell like an Amazon, etc, will likely be able to facilitate and afford a deal to show up more in the results.

A few days ago, Cloudflare is also looking to charge AI companies to scrape the content, which is cached copies of other people's content. I'm guessing it will involve paying the owners of the data at some point as well. Being able to exclude it from this purpose (sell/license content, or scrape) would be a useful lever.

Putting those two stories together:

- Is this a new form of showing up in the AISEO (Search everywhere optimization) to show up in an AI's corpus or ability to search the web, or paying licensing fees instead of advertising fees.. these could be new business models which are interesting, but trying to see where these steps may vector ahead towards, and what to think about today.

- With training data being the most valuable thing for AI companies, and this is another avenue for revenue for Cloudflare, this can look like a solution which helps with content licensing as a service.

I'd like to see where abstracting this out further ends up going

Maybe I'm missing something, is anyone else seeing it this way, or another way that's illuminating to them? Is anyone thinking about rolling their own service for whatever parts of Cloudflare they're using?
by athjad | 2025-07-02 16:32:55+00:00
Location: Santa Clara, CA (willing to relocate)

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Software engineer with 3+ years building scalable backend systems and AI-powered applications. Recent focus on autonomous agents, multi-agent systems, and agentic workflows. Looking for backend, full-stack, or AI engineering roles at startups and growth companies. Recent MS in Software Engineering from SJSU.