MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by koolba | 2025-07-20 11:52:35+00:00
> “Perhaps the best-known example of buying for convenience is paying around €75 per kilo for coffee just because it comes in capsules,” says Vinyals.

Maybe not the best example. If there’s ever a product where timeliness is a feature, it’s the morning coffee. A $.70 Nespresso pod may not match a freshly ground light roast pour over, but to the dreary eyed wage slave just rising to seize the day, the taste consistency and convenience are distinct features.

> Today, it’s easier to converse with a machine than with a real person. The problem is that no one likes these systems: according to a study by the Cetelem Observatory published last October, five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants.

People fail to realize the cost of interactions too. With minimum wage at nearly $20/hour, a six (6) minute phone call costs $2 more than the $0 marginal cost of an automated phone system. Would you pay a $2 human-interaction-surcharge to order a pizza?
by dlenski | 2025-07-20 11:52:52+00:00
Yes, this is true.

I had a great job in R&D at Intel, in a department full of PhDs, in the 2010s, then jumped to another semi company from 2015-20.

Just before the pandemic in 2020, I got a job at AWS as a software engineer. It wasn't the only reason, but it was clear that I could make a lot more money in software.

I quickly became disillusioned with almost everything about how large software companies work, and now back working as a data scientist for an advanced manufacturing company 5 years later.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-07-20 11:52:59+00:00
> But living in a highly legislated society, is not advancing anything for individuals - people will be far less free.

Legislation against polluting, for example, gives you the freedom to swim lakes and rivers and eat their fish without getting poisoned. Or to breathe the air without it destroying your lungs. Regulations can give the freedom to not have financial industries 'fee' you to death. Laws can be to used ensure that you have the freedom to push back against the many other encroachments that powerful companies and corporations will always be grabbing for. In fact its our only defense.

You look at laws as restricting individuals, and while that is sometimes the case, their real power is restricting and holding back the worst behaviors of tech companies, factories, banks, insurance companies, tele-service providers, mega-retail chains, property owners, health service providers and all the other key components that make our society run. If they have free reign to do whatever whenever, they will inevitably consolidate, monopolize, and then use that power to squeeze every last bit of an individual's freedom. Not just because they could set any arbitrary pricing (see drug companies), but also dictate behaviors through TOS. All of this will be for their benefit only, at the expense of your freedom.

We need all of these industries to make everything work, but without laws and regulations, things can pretty dystopian for the freedom of the average individual. The heads of these industries will be doing great though, so there's that.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-20 11:53:09+00:00
> There's this moment in every new technology where everyone pretends they know what they're doing.

Perhaps that is true, but without any examples I was immediately suspicious of this line.

> Either way, we're in this delicious middle ground where nobody can pretend expertise because the whole thing keeps changing under our feet.

Upon reflection this does in fact remind me of the early days of rocketry when we were just reaching into the upper atmosphere and then orbit. Wild things were being tried because there was not yet any handrails. Exploding a huge tank of water in the ionosphere just because, launching giant mylar balloons into orbit to try and bounce radar signals off of them, etc.
by rollcat | 2025-07-20 11:53:24+00:00
That "old" Internet is still here, alive and kicking, just evolved. It's easier to follow people's blogs and websites thanks to ubiquitous RSS (even YouTube continues to support it). It tends to be more accessible, because we collectively got better at design than what we've witnessed in the GeoCities-era.

Discovery is comparatively harder - search has been dominated by noise. Word of mouth still works however, and is better than before - there are more people actively engaged in curating catalogues, like "awesome X" or <https://kagi.com/smallweb/>.

Most of it is also at little risk of being "eaten", because the infrastructure on which it is built is still a lot like the "old" Internet - very few single points of failure[1]. Even Kagi's "Small Web" is a Github repository (and being such, you can easily mirror it).

[1]: Two such PoFs are DNS, and cloudflarization (no thanks to the aggressive bots). Unfortunately, CloudFlare also requires you to host your DNS there, so switching away is double-tricky.
by archi42 | 2025-07-20 11:53:48+00:00
Yesterday I bought some oat-based milk-like at Aldi for 90c/l (regular price). It's labeled "oat drink", so might not substitute milk. The (literal) "almost milk" product is listed online for 1,09€/l. They also had options based on other stuff for a similar price.

First time I noticed them there, but mind I don't go to Aldi that often.
by moffkalast | 2025-07-20 11:54:27+00:00
Along that line of thought I've noticed this recently:

I can buy an expensive tool for say $200 that will last me 10 years. Or I can buy a cheap tool that costs $20 but will only last me two years. But if I want to use that tool for the duration of 10 years it then makes more sense to buy five of the cheap tool and save half in costs. Which one is really providing more quality over time?

For some things this doesn't hold at all, the cheap entry level offerings just don't get the job done or break relatively immediately, but for others the premium offer doesn't really improve a whole lot over the cheapest.
by whoisyc | 2025-07-20 11:54:36+00:00
> I admit that I am surprised that I am finding myself wishing that we, the Western world, were poorer again.

Luxury belief.

Doesn’t it feel a little suspicious that the only people to ever say “we should become poorer” are people from rich countries where even the poor can afford cars and gadgets? Go to the countries actually manufacturing your goods and ask the average factory worker if he wants to be poor and prepare to get flipped off.
by csomar | 2025-07-20 11:54:54+00:00
This is true but flawed. Think about the iPhone. If you wanted the model of today but 5 years ago, it would have cost you millions? If that’s even possible.

What you are saying will be correct if we had no technological advancement whatsoever. But we had significant advancement. Everything should, must, be better if we applied the same cost. But while that’s the case in some things, lots of things have degraded in different ways.
by ath3nd | 2025-07-20 11:54:56+00:00
> Apple's slowing down the clock speed allows people to use a phone with an old and dying battery for longer before they need to replace either the device or the battery.

That's laughable. Apple before 2023 didn't even allow you to replace yourself unless you had their crappy plan.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8306588?sortBy=rank

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253345955?sortBy=rank

https://www.wired.com/story/iphone-16-battery-is-easier-to-r...

And their lightning adapters were a deliberate strategy so they keep you on their system and sell you commodity hardware at a premium pricing.

Until the EU forced them to use standard chargers to reduce the mountain of e-waste that's directly tied to Apple's shady practices.

> Lightning cables are superior to the "standard" USB-C. It's a travesty against freedom of choice that the EU has legislated against them.

You have the freedom of choice to use an old IPhone with an old Lightning cable, since they are "superior" to USB-C, and old IPhones are apparently of such high quality.

OR you can go with the far worse (according to you) USB-c standard which allows charging, video and data transfer and internet connectivity.

> 2018 and 2021 and still I think look the same as new. Colours haven't faded

Wow, a shirt lasting 4 years, impressive!

> I don't find the complaints valid about anything else either. The tshirts in my weekly rotation were bought -- I just checked my emails ....In short: yes, there is plenty of cheap crap around -- I actually think this is a good thing for people who will not be using it heavily.

"who will not be using it heavily" is a reference to the fact that sometimes cheap nowadays crap is poisonous and you might not live to see another day?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/20/eu-commissi...
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-07-20 11:55:13+00:00
> What point were you trying to make?

The point is that software developers can't evaluate their own work. (Especially the kind of n00b developers that use LLMs.)

You initially made wild claims about insane productivity gains that turned out to be just one small product and a lot of wasted time under scrutiny.

(Asking LLMs to write tests is a waste of time. LLMs can't evaluate risks, which is the only reason to write tests in the first place.)
by kkfx | 2025-07-20 11:57:00+00:00
It's a scale problem and a targets one: we are damn many, if we all want a fillet a day we haven't enough cows to satisfy such demand, and that's valid for essentially anything. So far we prove to be very skilled in doing identical stuff on scale, which enable industry hyper-growth but we can't feed production lines with enough raw materials, we can't produce most things in circular manner and even some production naturally renewable can't be completely renewable due to the scale of the demand. In an ideal world we cultivate and farm in proportions where the guano and manure from the species we raise provide enough fertiliser for what we grow. But there are many of us, and to feed everyone, this balance is impossible, so we must crush rocks to nourish plants sufficiently, which is obviously not renewable... We know how to makes wood-frame homes and trees grow up again, but again the demand much surpass the capacity of trees to grow up again and so on.

The result it's finding new way to do more with less, and finding them quickly. Some do works well, some do works a bit, many gives only the illusion to work enough and people buy them anyway because an illusion it's still something more than nothing.

The target issue is the model, capitalism, issue, in the past we have used money as a means to barter things counter something we all accept. Nowadays we use money to makes more money, so goods are just a mean not a target, and the result is that we do not care about quality, being just a mean if we can sell them it's enough to milk money. To solve this we need to makes money public, creating by governments without fractionary reserves and public debt mechanism, taxed to keep the supply limited enough following the availability of any specific resources, so essentially like Swiss we need to tax just VAT with continuously variables rates following nature and tech, while taxing local properties just to assure local consumption does not exceed a sustainable threshold of resources usage.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-20 11:57:30+00:00
> don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand

It’s not. The premium options for plant-based foods are vast, fresh and more expensive than BM.

Beyond Meat isn’t serving premium. It’s premium to the lowest-grade ground beef. But that’s like saying a basic economy seat is premium to Greyhound. Technically true. But misleading relativism.

> The poor will live on rice and tofu or pinto beans

Globally? Sure. In developed countries, of course not.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-20 11:58:16+00:00
Following the guidance of another article that was just posted here, I’m going to just share a ChatGPT conversation…

https://chatgpt.com/share/687cd655-1cd8-8010-926d-645cefe928...

When I write, I now go out of my way not to use lists or em dashes. I learned before LLMs, that using lists in writing was lazy. Even when I do use an LLM for writing, I tell it to explain everything in paragraph form. I start off with my own outline and then “discuss” what I want to emphasize.

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/10-reasons/

The second thing about LLM generates text especially when doing technical writing, is that anytime it explains something, even with a lot of context of what I’m working on, it always adds lines about “benefits”.

In my use case something like “this provides a secure, adaptable environment…”. I have had to remove wording I had like that on my resume before LLMs and definitely don’t put it in my own writing now.

Ironically enough, out of the four examples ChatGPT generated about “what makes a good leader” in the link above, the example of “AI generated”, is the one I would lean toward in my own writing.

Also, putting AI assisted writing back through a new session with ChatGPT and asking it does it sound AI generated multiple times, and taking its suggestions will make it sound less like it’s AI generated.

When I do write something “thought leader”ish which unfortunately is part of my job now as a staff architect, I give a lot of real world examples that couldn’t easily be fabricated by AI and lean on those examples as I make my points.
by wkjagt | 2025-07-20 12:00:04+00:00
I have nothing against networks that are actually social. I hate the ones that are only social in name, but are actually just a way to serve ads to people, and are filled with low quality (often AI generated) content. That's why I put quotation marks around social. Maybe I should have said "so-called-social-networks", but I thought it was commonly understood.
by camgunz | 2025-07-20 12:00:16+00:00
Just searching for "programming language popularity":

- TIOBE [0]: Go 7 :: Rust n/a (> 10)

- IEEE Spectrum [1]: Go 8 :: Rust 11

- Stack Overflow [2]: Go 13 :: Rust 14 (they're pretty close here)

- GitHub [3]: Go 10 :: Rust n/a (> 10)

- PYPL [4]: Go 12 :: Rust 10

- HackerRank [5]: Go 8 :: Rust n/a (> 13)

- Pluralsight [6]: Go 9 :: Rust n/a (> 10)

- Redmonk [7]: Go 12 :: Rust 19

Although I admit we probably don't have great measures of this, there's clearly a sizable gap here.

Maybe you'd want to argue about TypeScript, Swift or Kotlin? I consider TypeScript JavaScript (because TypeScript wouldn't be popular unless all JavaScript programs were TypeScript programs), and I think Swift and Kotlin only survive because of their mobile platforms (they're also all below Go in these lists, on average).

[0]: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

[1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024

[2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology

[3]: https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-2024/#...

[4]: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

[5]: https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/most-popular-languages-2024/

[6]: https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/upskilling/top-pr...

[7]: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...
by inglor_cz | 2025-07-20 12:00:39+00:00
I once supported an expensive application for Symbian OS and the customers had plenty of problems with Nokia smartphones. Not dumb phones, but smartphones. HW keyboards failed constantly, wi-fi quality fluctuated randomly from piece to piece, displays developed weird errors, loudspeakers developed tin sound etc.

Oh, and my favorite, problems with microUSB charging ports were eternal.
by zzzeek | 2025-07-20 12:01:22+00:00
This thread is not about flaws and shortcomings. I use Claude code all the time, it's great, it's fun. But "the most incredible technology ever created by this point in our history" (OP quote, we assume "our history" means "human history", as opposed to "history of the past couple of years in the Valley-scape, sure), please. This is a delusional and dangerous point of view.
by GianFabien | 2025-07-20 12:01:23+00:00
There are several dimensions to your question. I can only touch upon a few that immediately come to mind.

The easiest and quickest is to throw up your hands, give up and do something else. I suspect your question doesn't expect that option, but it usually is an option.

Why not AI? If what you are working with has been around for a while and is widely used, then with a bit of careful context setting AI beats searching by other means. AI is only as useful as the information that was scrapped from numerous sources correlates to your context and question.

You could raise a support ticket with the product and hope that somebody can solve your problem.. In my experience this can be rather fruitful or futile yelling into the void.

Then you could attempt to solve your problem by going about it in a different way. This requires backing up and trying different directions. It is always possible that the way you are trying to solve a problem is an edge case that the original designers / implementers didn't anticipate.

If you are really determined, then you have the option of digging into the code, determining how it works, etc. This can be a very deep dive into a rabbit hole. At the bottom of the rabbit hole you will have studied and understood stuff you didn't even know existed and grappling with disassembled machine code. Going this deep is rare but not unheard of.
by bluescrn | 2025-07-20 12:01:50+00:00
> I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible.

Until you need to replace the battery.

Battery replacement has been intentionally made not just a pain, but actually dangerous, by using excessive amounts of adhesive to hold in batteries that may spontaneously combust if physically damaged while trying to remove them.

Replaced a battery in a Nintendo Switch not too long ago, and what an absolute fucking pain that was to get the old battery out, IPA, dental floss (to try and get under the battery and cut through the glue), and still needed a worrying amount of levering out.

(It's not as if these batteries have any significant space in which to move around, why do they need adhesive at all, and not just some foam/rubber pads to hold them in place?)
by kelnos | 2025-07-20 12:02:45+00:00
There are plenty, but they're all very DIY and I don't think there are any turnkey solutions that you can just plug in and have work.

I think a better question is... why do we all need this? I get that everyone these days is afraid of everyone and everything, but it's not rational. Very few people actually need a doorbell camera.

And if something actually does happen where you think video evidence might be useful, nine times out of ten the police aren't going to help you anyway.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-20 12:02:50+00:00
> then real price gouging is... what, when you charge more than everyone else

Honestly, a myth. It’s aesthetically pleasing (outside perishable personal essentials, like staples in a crisis). But if you have less housing than the population, the problem is the lack of housing. Getting uppity about pricing while builders wait months to get permits issued is performative at best.
by jakobnissen | 2025-07-20 12:03:05+00:00
Author here. In scientific computing, there isn't much of a security implication of UB, and the most dangerous kind of error are when your program silently computes the wrong thing. And that is especially likely when you use indices manually.

You could say that UB enables all behaviour, including silently wrong answers, and you'd be right. But it's more likely to crash your program and therefore be caught.

Most importantly, the comparison to a raw pointer is not relevant. My blog post states that integers come with zero safety (as in: preventing bugs, not risk of UB) and zero language support and that is true. My blog post compares Rust with GC languages, not with raw pointer arithmetic. And it's clear that, when you compare to using GC references, manual indices are horribly unsafe.
by camgunz | 2025-07-20 12:03:06+00:00
I wrote a reply to a sibling comment here [0], but wanted to reemphasize that Rust and Swift are far from popular. I think it bears repeating because the gap between a Rust/Swift and Go is notable, but the gap between a Rust/Swift and Java is a chasm. I would guess this isn't the intuition of an HNer (it wasn't mine until I dug in for this discussion haha)
by bell-cot | 2025-07-20 12:04:05+00:00
Problem #1 - to "save it", you first have to define the idealized and/or snapshot-in-time web that you want to save. Don't expect much agreement here, especially on the details.

Problem #2 - if you aren't the Emperor of Earth or some such, how could you make your ideal web stable over time, in today's world?
by bartread | 2025-07-20 12:04:41+00:00
We have a number of Ring devices and are overall happy with them but your 12 menus deep comment is on the money.

Even workaday settings for devices are scattered haphazardly hither and thither through the many pages of their app’s interface and I regularly find myself having to Google for the location of settings.

It’s crying out for, at least, some sort of smart search box.

So “hard to find” for something like this is practically guaranteed.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-20 12:04:56+00:00
> Everything comes down to world population

This is nonsense. The consumptive, energy and material intensity of GDP, as well as GDP/capita, have varied greatly across time and countries.

> even many of the climate catastrophists can't get away from the mentality of 'we still need growth at any cost'

Degrowth is an extremist dead end. If an environmental movement falls for it, it should be ignored.
by kkfx | 2025-07-20 12:05:14+00:00
We are many, search engines are the mean to discover things because even with usenet it's impossible for a human to discover via URLs and links enough information on the web, that's the real revolution: links are useful but not enough. Search engines are the best tool we have had so far to find knowledge around the web, now LLMs try to surpass traditional search engines milking knowledge from web contents, like we have many articles about wildfires in a region, but let's say not one about wildfire trends in that region, an LLM could try to spot a trend milking all articles in a significant timeframe. The Conrad Gessner's Biblioteca Universalis dream.

So well, LLMs do not kill the web, eat it. We are still almost the sole valid source of data for LLMs.

What really killed the web are social networks as proprietary walled gardens instead of an open Usenet with a web companion for stuff to be preserved for posterity or too long/complex for a mere post. What killed the web is the fact that ISPs do not offer an open homeserver instead of a closed box called "router" even if it's a limited homeserver. With an open version, with IPv6, anyone could buy a domain name and publish from his/shes own iron a blog with a ready-to-write software, with automatic RSS feeds, newsletters etc. If we give such tool to the masses the original web will be back but it would mean free speech and giants/politicians etc have free speech preferring ways to master public topics through their platforms to hide from most stuff they dislike and push ideas they like...
by corimaith | 2025-07-20 12:05:32+00:00
Instead of using vague abstractions like "pouring unlimited money" and "hiring the right people", I'd hope that predictions would be predicated more on the actual specifics of the progress being made, i.e what are specific engineering problems to be overcome and what is their progress in doing so. If it's not, it's really just astrology one is using.

The Chinese perspective itself certainly isn't anything close to these vague abstractions, outside of vague anti-western polemics or nationalist chest-beating. After all with the same logic we're pouring a "manhattan's worth of funding" into "AI", dosen't mean we're going to be reaching Gen-AI anytime soon!