MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CommenterPerson | 2025-07-20 13:11:14+00:00
Few observations over the past few decades (my paycheck went up by slightly less than the US inflation rate during this time):

Air travel is much more affordable to me. It has become psychologically nasty which makes the overall deal feel worse, while it is actually better in $ terms.

Housing build quality is worse, things need more frequent repairs, cost is higher probably due to increase in land value.

Much more trashy food in the grocery store aisles, one needs to be aware and shop carefully.

Politics especially in the US has gotten FAR worse.

The internet after the early promise has gotten FAR worse (better in bandwidth and far worse via enshittification).

Cars improved till around 2010 and now worse for the dollar (too much electronics, and repairs are prohibitively expensive).
I coined the word "Distributable Expertize"
by chandan_maruthi | 2025-07-20 13:11:18+00:00
*Distributable Expertise: Why We’re Entering the Age of Shareable “Micro‑Robots”*

I’ve been thinking about a new pattern in our community: experts aren’t just writing blog posts or tutorials anymore—they’re packaging their entire workflow into runnable automation templates. I’m calling it *Distributable Expertise*: bundling domain know‑how and code into “micro‑robots” that anyone can import and run in minutes.

### What’s changing?

* *Implementation barrier gone.* Instead of reading a ten‑page guide and coding for hours, you download a ready‑made workflow (n8n, Zapier, Make, etc.) and have it in action almost instantly. * *Instant scaling.* One person writes an optimal lead‑gen or data‑cleanup bot; hundreds of teams can clone it, tweak it, and benefit immediately. * *Democratized specialist skills.* No data scientist? No problem—grab an AI‑analysis micro‑robot and get insights from your CSV in seconds.

### Real examples:

* n8n’s community library now hosts thousands of workflows—from scraping news sites into Slack to auto‑deploying servers based on load. * Zapier templates let you integrate CRM, email, and spreadsheets as a single chain. * RPA “bot stores” offer off‑the‑shelf bots for invoice processing or HR onboarding.

### Why it matters:

1. *Productivity boost:* We stop reinventing the wheel; best practices spread by copy‑paste, not lengthy docs.

2. *Learning in action:* You run the expert’s code, then dissect and learn from it.

3. *Future of work:* As these micro‑robots proliferate, our role shifts from implementer to curator and integrator of expertise.

*Bold take:* In five years, asking “Who can solve this?” will sound archaic. We’ll ask “Which automation template handles this?” and have it live in minutes.

What micro‑robot have you run lately? Where do you see this trend going next? Let’s discuss.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-07-20 13:12:04+00:00
You're not wrong about corporations crafting legislation in their interest, this exists, and continues to happen. I was responding to the view that 'government is the problem, laws hurt individual freedom - therefore all laws are bad' sentiment. Its an idea that is spread by these very same corporations to gain support for getting rid of the laws that bind them. Like why have any level at all for how much benzene I can dump in this lake? I should be able to dump all the benzene there. Get rid of the EPA because freedom is at stake! The government and the laws it can pass and enforce is regular peoples only protection against this power. We need to start using it again.
by nehal3m | 2025-07-20 13:12:11+00:00
I think this is a great insight. Also, from a personal perspective, one of the problems I regularly experience as a consumer of goods is that it is very difficult for me to judge quality, meaning I can explicitly not intuit value. For example, two years ago I bought 3 identical pairs of Levi’s jeans at considerable cost. Granted, they’re all I wear, but given that I follow the washing instructions and don’t put undue stress on them I’d expect them to last 5 years. Two are busted already. I am looking for replacements and apparently buying from what I considered to be a reputable brand at a high price (which I foolishly believed to be an indicator of quality which it no longer is) is not a viable strategy anymore.

I am faced with a choice, do I join the problem and go for fast fashion crap or do I risk being burned again? Who do I believe when I’m researching quality? Google and Reddit have long since been astroturfed and small scale forums are dead.
by exe34 | 2025-07-20 13:12:14+00:00
> a strong loyalty to Linux and a desire to drive people towards it

No loyalty here. It serves me. The moment it stops being useful, I will find something else. I don't care what other people use. I do care that they don't bother me for support. So I'm in the lucky position that whenever somebody has an issue with Windows, I can say "sorry, I don't understand how it works and I don't know how to fix it."
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-20 13:12:14+00:00
I’ve been building my own RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them

Then I can filter them and add actual content to them so I can determine whether the link is worth opening or can I just hit ‘j’ to get to the next one in FreshRSS.

For example my HN feed grabs the link’s open graph preview and embeds it to the feed. It also filters by comment count and score before even adding it.
by greatgib | 2025-07-20 13:12:25+00:00
Project Natick was a successful proof-of-concept, but now it's time for Microsoft to move on.

Corp-speak for a failure. If it was good, you would not stop it (after only 2 years) or not go on with the project in a visible way.

What I guess is that the thing was ok in terms of not being a giant disaster but it did not have any added value compared to a land based équivalent and the external factors costs like maintenance on the server, operating and monitoring the container, ... were terrible compared to a normal datacenter.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-07-20 13:12:52+00:00
What about milestones. Some gamification can make paying the high interest debt more of a buzz.

Maybe dont make it about paying off debt but make it about reducing interest. Each $10/m reduced is a gold star. You get to buy a frappe each time you do that. (Less than one month).

It's a good goal because you can reduce interest by paying off and also by consolidation and refinancing.
by rco8786 | 2025-07-20 13:12:53+00:00
I still don’t even know what an agent is. Everyone seems to have their own definition. And invariably it’s generic vagaries about architecture, responsibilities of the LLM, sub-agents, comparisons to workflows, etc.

But still not once have I seen an actual agent in the wild doing concrete work.

A “No True Agent” problem if you will.
by 8thcross | 2025-07-20 13:12:54+00:00
This is from their claude-code guide: "Claude Code is intentionally low-level and unopinionated, providing close to raw model access without forcing specific workflows. This design philosophy creates a flexible, customizable, scriptable, and safe power tool. While powerful, this flexibility presents a learning curve for engineers new to agentic coding tools—at least until they develop their own best practices". The agent is what makes the claud-code as good as it is. By not using it, you are using the model that is a hit or miss on several aspects a programmer would need.
by ericmay | 2025-07-20 13:13:22+00:00
> You can't tell consumers what they should want.

Why does marketing and advertising exist then?

> Government failure and cultural malaise are what "late stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse of the whole thing under its own weight.

If capitalism gives what the market demands, then you are suggesting that The People want government failure and malaise.

Either your premise is wrong or Late Stage Capitalism is wrong. Likely both.

Terms like Late Stage Capitalism are just there to give you something nice to hold on to and use as your scarecrow for anything bad you see in the world. An intellectual crutch, a helping hand into the graveyard. Car recall? Late Stage Capitalism! Forest fire? Climate change - late stage capitalism. Teeth fell out? Late Stage Capitalism. Covid-19 vaccines or a cure for cancer? Hmm somehow still Late Stage Capitalism.

And now you have your answer to why the world sucks and even better, Late Stage Capitalism says nothing about what comes next! No reason to do anything about it, like support the arts or educate a child, because it’s just Late Stage Capitalism after all.

Hopeless and failed ideologies (Communism/Socialism) love to generate destructive and useless distractions and slogans. Reject them!
by csande17 | 2025-07-20 13:13:25+00:00
Yeah, it's really just a user experience improvement. In particular, it makes AI look a lot better if it can internally retry a bunch of times until it comes up with valid code or whatever, instead of you having to see each error and prompt it to fix it. (Also, sometimes they can do fancy sampling tricks to force the AI to produce a syntactically valid result the first time. Mostly this is just used for simple JSON schemas though.)
by sureglymop | 2025-07-20 13:13:26+00:00
I tend to generally think the same as you, as I work in the same field. A long time ago I thought to myself, if AI adoption increases exponentially, there is a chance that the amount of security vulnerabilities introduced by it also increases at the same rate.

However, what we are maybe not considering enough is that general AI adoption could and almost certainly will affect the standards for cybersecurity as well. If everyone uses AI and everyone gets used to its quirks and mistakes and is also forgiving about someone else using it since they themselves use it too, the standards for robust and secure systems could decrease to adjust to that. Now, your services as a cybersecurity consultant are no longer in need as much, as whatever company would need them can easily point to all the other companies also caring less and not doing anything about the security issues introduced by the AI that everyone uses. The legal/regulation body would also have to adjust to this, as it is not possible to enforce certain standards if no one can adhere to them.
by authorfly | 2025-07-20 13:13:41+00:00
I would say I wouldn't agree, but maybe our language in common is why we don't agree - for example, the idea that coffee is 80% takeaway... this global report puts it at 65% in cafe. My experience in most of europe is about 75% in cafe: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/cafe-mar...

So maybe your use of coffee is just different to you know, the old world ways that developed it.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-07-20 13:13:45+00:00
If people have shown anything recently it’s the unwillingness to actually do what you just said.

If anyone cared enough to do anything, they would be burning everything down already

It’s a lot of impotent rage because the only virtue people have is consumption, they don’t actually believe in anything. The ones who do believe in fairy tales are part of a dwindling population (religion) that is rightfully crashing.

Welcome to the wasteland of the real
by stingraycharles | 2025-07-20 13:13:53+00:00
Right, I’ve been using it recently for writing a message queue -> database bridge with checkpointing and all kinds of stuff (I work for a timeseries database company).

I saw this as a chance to embrace AI, after a while of exploring I found Claude Code, and ended up with a pretty solid workflow.

But I say this as someone who has worked with distributed systems / data engineering for almost 2 decades, and spend most of my time reviewing PRs and writing specs anyway.

The trick is to embrace AI on all levels: learn how to use prompts. learn how to use system prompts. learn how to use AI to optimize these prompts. learn how to first write a spec, and use a second AI (“adversarial critic”) to poke holes in that plan. find incompletenesses. delegate the implementation to a cheaper model. learn how to teach AI how to debug problems properly, rather than trying to one-shot fixes in the hope it fixes things. etc

It’s an entirely different way of working.

I think juniors can learn this as well, but need to work within very well-defined frameworks and probably needs to be part of college curriculum as well.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-07-20 13:14:06+00:00
Waze (also owned by Google) seems to get it close(r), but it should be noted that actually driving to/from those addresses can't really be done. You can drive to where you might be able to SEE the destination, but not really get there.

https://www.waze.com/live-map/directions/us/va/arlington/alc...
by ben_w | 2025-07-20 13:14:08+00:00
If you want the British to take back control of the USA so that the British can enforce the superior* British education system onto the USA, that would be very very funny to watch, but I don't think it would be "easy" — especially when people realise it means no guns in schools or anywhere else.

* The British system may not be superior, I left uni in 2006 and the UK in 2018, and UK politicians have been fiddling with education seemingly forever.

But that just means you should substitute whichever country is doing education best at the moment; the point is, even obviously correct things are still hard in the world of politics.
by simgt | 2025-07-20 13:14:21+00:00
> the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.)

Are you abstracting away the technical complexity when stating that it's not complicated? GHG removal tech that would scale simply doesn't exist if we intend to have some energy left to do anything else, as for removing pfas and microplastics from the environment, we are at the stage of running experiments in petri dishes.

And even if we abstract away the technical complexity, good luck convincing anyone to stop burning the free fuel we have lying around doing nothing now that we have everything-nuclear-solar and GHG removal at scale. We can barely convince our councils to build cycle lanes in dense areas if that removes any space for SUVs.

I wish I'd share the blind optimism of people like you, it seems pleasant to live in your heads...
by Filligree | 2025-07-20 13:15:11+00:00
It’s best at small to medium projects written in a consistent style.

So. It’s a potential superpower for personal projects, yet I don’t see it being very useful in a corporate setting.

I used Claude Code to make this little thing: https://github.com/Baughn/ScriptView

…took me thirty minutes. It wouldn’t have existed otherwise.
by cpfohl | 2025-07-20 13:15:20+00:00
I mean, so do cows and chickens.

Moving a chemical process out of a living being and into a lab can make it safer: you’re doing it without the bacteria and viruses omnipresent in the natural world, and you know exactly what is going into the reaction…

When you “cook” a piece of fish in salt and lime (a la Ceviche) you are also altering the protein structures).
by johnisgood | 2025-07-20 13:15:52+00:00
I would have used libgit2 myself in any languages. If bindings do not exist, I would have made the bindings first. There is no way I would have called out to an external program.

Someone mentioned https://github.com/go-git/go-git. I would have definitely used it unless there are better alternatives. If - as someone who claimed - it turns out it is slow, I would have created my own bindings to libgit2 still, most likely.
by exe34 | 2025-07-20 13:16:03+00:00
> “we’re building X to reduce customer support staff by 20%,”

I've never understood the "do X to increase/decrease Y by Z%". I remember working at McDonalds and the managers worked themselves up into a frenzy to increase "sale of McSlurry by 10%". All it meant was that they nagged people more and sold less of something else. It's not like people's stomachs got 10% larger.
by shagie | 2025-07-20 13:16:05+00:00
The other part of the point I was trying to make that if there's a different technological solution to cookie banners, the europa.eu sites are not demonstrating it. Instead, companies that don't do it that way get fined for some inadequacy in their approach.

Thus, I hold that the GPDR requires cookie banners.

---

Another part to consider that if videos (and LinkedIn for job searches and Google Maps for maps and Internet Archive for whatever they embed from there) are sufficiently onerous 3rd party cookies ("yea, we're being good with our cookies, but we use 3rd party providers and can't do anything about them, but we informed and you accepted their cookies")... then wouldn't it be an opportunity for the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Ministry_for_Transport or similar to have grants https://www.foerderdatenbank.de for companies to create a viable GDPR friendly alternative to those services?

That is, if the GDPR and other EU regulations weren't stifling innovation and establishing regulatory capture (its expensive to do and retain the lawyers needed to skirt the rules) making it impossible for such newer alternative companies to thrive and prosper within the EU.

Which is what the article is about.
by neom | 2025-07-20 13:16:31+00:00
"The real challenge isn't AI capabilities, it's designing tools and feedback systems that agents can actually use effectively." - this part I agree with - I'd been sitting the AI stuff out because I was unclear where I thought the dust would settle or what the market would accept, but recently joined a very small startup focused on building an agent.

I've gone from skeptical to willing to humor to "yeah this is probably right" in about 5 months, basically I believe: if you scope the subject matter very very well, and then focus on the tooling that the model will require to do it's task, you get a high completion rate. There is a reluctance to lean into the non deterministic nature of the models, but actually if you provide really excellent tooling and scope super narrowly, it's generally acceptably good.

This blog post really makes the tooling part seem hard, and, well... it is, but not that hard - we'll see where this all goes, but I remain optimistic.
by dontlaugh | 2025-07-20 13:16:45+00:00
In several countries that I'm aware of, collective consultation is a requirement above a certain number of redundancies even if there is no trade union agreement in that workplace.

Collective bargaining could achieve far more than 2-3 months of pay. I've personally seen cases of over double that much pay, reduced numbers of redundancies, sacking a few directors instead of a few workers and in one case even preventing the redundancies entirely by forcing management to reduce other costs.

Of course, you are likely to fare much better if the workplace is already unionised, so join/build a union now!
by iamjackg | 2025-07-20 13:16:48+00:00
Technically speaking, Claude Code is an agent, for example. It's just a fancy term for an LLM that can call tools in a loop until it thinks it's done with whatever it was tasked to do.

ChatGPT's Deep Research mode is also an agent: it will keep crawling the web and refining things until it feels it has enough material to write a good response.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-20 13:16:59+00:00
> If they could magically ... it would take 20+ years ...

It's worse than that - 10% profit on $300M sales is only $30M/year.

Vs. "risk-free" US Treasury bonds currently yield 4% to 5% - so parking $1B there would earn you $40M to $50M per year.

Nobody's insane enough to loan money to Beyond Meat at US Treasury rates. And even if someone was - Beyond would still fall deeper into debt every year, because they couldn't even keep up with the interest.
by andrepd | 2025-07-20 13:17:00+00:00
> so you mean this policy isn't for the so called "1%"? Only for middle class folks and their stock portfolios?

What do you mean? This is a proportional tax (slightly progressive actually due to the 0% rate on the first bracket). It's for everyone with such assets.

> where the left proposed same destructive policy only a few months ago and almost came close to winning.

If you think either of the major parties in the USA can be in any way described as "left" then this is not a serious conversation.
by Apreche | 2025-07-20 13:17:19+00:00
You are out of your mind. Driving a bus in NYC is one of the most difficult jobs imaginable. Maybe someone who drives a big tractor trailer would be more prepared to do it, but someone who has only driven average cars will need extensive training and practice before they can be entrusted with the lives of real passengers on the streets of NYC in all traffic and weather conditions.

Not to mention, bus drivers have to do a lot more than just drive. It’s several jobs in one. Not only do they have to do the driving they also have to do customer service, fare collection, and deal with problematic passengers.

All hail the mighty bus driver. In a just society they would swap salaries with the CEOs.
by eth0up | 2025-07-20 13:17:34+00:00
Tell your parents a stranger somewhere faraway really, sincerely appreciates them. And you can tell them too, objectively, that they're 1 (or 2) in a million.

The Ring situation was already slimy, having smoothly accessible channels for LE to bypass customer's refusal to cooperate with informal footage requests. Live streaming at will, would really put things in perspective, exalting the morose, lone clinical cynic to an urban archetype.

I understand folks who are into traipsing through life before a perennial, unblinking audience of strangers. I've been afflicted with diseases myself. But foisting it on neighbors seems biblically ungood.

I know it's socially acceptable to mock and belittle snowballs, but I think this will be a big one.
by timonoko | 2025-07-20 13:17:37+00:00
Small numbers are "eq" in python. It saves space and time, because probably those numbers dont even exist, and the value is derived from the pointer value.

>>> a=3 >>> b=3 >>> a is b True >>> a=1e20 >>> b=1e20 >>> a is b False

But in Commonlisp all numbers are "eq". Very strange. Is there heap of numbers and once created, they reuse those?

[4]> (setq b 1E20) 1.0E20 [5]> (setq a 1E20) 1.0E20 [6]> (eq a b) T
by michaelcampbell | 2025-07-20 13:17:43+00:00
> The "confusion" seems to stem from the fact that no-one told the machine that human names are not singletons.

I mean, yes, but it's worse than that - the machine has no idea what a "name" is, how they relate to singleton humans, what a human is, or that "Dave Barry" is one of them (name OR human). It's all just strings of tokens.
by im3w1l | 2025-07-20 13:17:53+00:00
While saying "hardware issue not my fault not my problem" is a valid stance, I'm thinking that if you hear it again and again from your users, maybe you should consider if you can do more. Verify the file was written correctly is a low hanging fruit. Other possibilities is run some s.m.a.r.t. check and show warning, or adding redundancy to recover from partial failure.