MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codebje | 2025-07-18 02:07:55+00:00
Guaranteed employment is tricky to get right.

How do you provide minimum wage jobs that are not soul-crushing, without destroying the private sector soul-crushing minimum wage jobs?

How do you even find productive jobs people would want to do (or at least find tolerable) that no-one in the private sector was willing to pay minimum wage to get done?

How do you provide jobs to a wide range of contextual needs, from ages 16 to 65, office workers to labourers, physical and mental impairment, neurodivergence, ability to travel, etc? How do you fund the administrative burden of matching jobs to people?

What do you do for the people who still cannot work for various reasons - total disability, caring for another, etc. You still need provide a wide gamut of social welfare programs for different needs and circumstances, with its concomitant bureaucratic cost and inefficiency - or let people starve, or give them "jobs" that have no productive output, just performative burdens.

What's the actual upside of guaranteed employment programs over a UBI?
by 9x39 | 2025-07-18 02:08:46+00:00
>Maybe I'm just a weird outlier?

I wouldn't quit either, but I assume you have wealth and are interested in continuing building it.

My anecdote that shaped my opinion was that I work closely with the bottom half to bottom quintile - who hold about 2% of the wealth in the US. During COVID, when unemployment was increased greatly and matched or even greatly exceeded weekly wages for frontline staff, they evaporated from the ranks. My interpersonal and social media experience (being friends or followers) interviewing people out of curiosity was basically that the yoke was off, and they're going to relax as long as the checks come in.

Professional career staff (finance, it, marketing, engineering, etc) had virtually no defections and returned like nothing happened as soon as work reopened.

My conclusion was that wealth holders have a long view that includes a future 'them', while non-wealth holding segments exist in the moment, and 5 years or 20 years from now might as well be someone else's problem. I think that means the bottom half of the systems we depend on crumble the moment we resume wages without work, and I don't see markets stepping in to raise unskilled wages to match skilled wages to compete for them, it simply wouldn't be permitted.
by brokencode | 2025-07-18 02:09:26+00:00
It’s only a hard dependency if you don’t know and never learn how to program.

For developers who read and understand the code being generated, the tool could go away and it would only slow you down, not block progress.

And even if you don’t, it really isn’t a hard dependency on a particular tool. There are multiple competing tools and models to choose from, so if you can’t make progress with one, switch to another. There isn’t much lock-in to any specific tool.
by throaway955 | 2025-07-18 02:10:16+00:00
>Sure there are. But unfortunately I have a mortgage and bills that need paying.

Hence the UBI.

>In theory yes, in reality no. One will exacerbates the other.

Big big big assumption that doesn't match my reality very well. People who keep active, have a social life and are happy are at less risk for addiction. Not people who "have a job." Those are not the same things.

>You asked me whether I thought it was better and I gave you two reasons why I believed it was better. I believe it is be a completely honest assessment based on my own experiences. If you have a critique that is objective of my position I am willing to listen to it, but moralising about how my assessment I am not interested in.

It is not "better" for people to go to work day in and day out as a way of paying back society while slowly killing themselves with addiction. The better thing is to treat the addiction, not get them working.
by _heimdall | 2025-07-18 02:10:27+00:00
> Graduated income taxes level the playing field

Well we definitely disagree there, but that's probably a deeper rabbit hole than is worth diving down here.

> Why should someone who knows nothing of field have a say in laws that over represents their knowledge and stake?

I don't think voting rights should be gated on education, experience, or opinions. I already hesitate with age, but saying a child shouldn't vote feels much less offensive than saying a person with money or education should get more votes.

> I don't think my vote for what you feed your kids should count the same as your vote on what you feed your kids.

I don't think either of us should have any say in what the other feeds their kids, the law should definitely not have a say in that either.

> We need a system that counters the negative effects if low informed masses.

I think we pretty well agree here, except for maybe the angle of a solution. I'm of the opinion that we can't force people to be better educated, nor should we prevent them from voting. In my opinion the government should only have as much authority as we are willing to hand over to an official elected by today's voting population. If we fear the mob or the uneducated voter than the issue is with how much power our government has rather than who does the voting.
by Qem | 2025-07-18 02:11:03+00:00
> It finds that developers spend only 5% of their time editing. It also finds they spend 14% of their time moving or resizing editor windows, so I don't know how clean their data is.

APL and similar array languages allows a lot of improvement on both metrics, as a handful of symbols may pack the equivalent of many LOC in more verbose languages, and it's common for the entire program to fit a single screen. That such languges failed to take over make me believe this probably not the narrowest bottleneck.
by dmix | 2025-07-18 02:11:22+00:00
> They don’t always make sure they explain what’s happening to the person in a language that they understand.

FWIW ICE detention facilities and removal proceedings in immigration courts are required to provide translators by US law, at no cost. https://www.ice.gov/detain/language-access

The main issue with due process with the current admin is the time pressure they are putting on the detainee by flying them to another state and rushing the deportation, which makes access to time lawyers difficult. Which is something the Supreme Court has already taken issue with.
by astrange | 2025-07-18 02:14:18+00:00
I spent a very long time getting into the weeds to learn everything about computer architecture, because at the time it seemed like it was the only way to do it and I wanted to have a career. In the meantime social media / cloud hosting / StackOverflow were invented, it became much easier for people to write online, and it turned out I didn't need to do any of that because the actual authors have all explained themselves on it.

Though, doing this is still the right way to learn how to debug things!

nb I actually just realized I never understood a specific bit of image processing math after working on ffmpeg for years, asked a random AI, and got a perfectly clear explanation of it.
by _heimdall | 2025-07-18 02:14:36+00:00
I agree that in that case the economy ended up moving in the direction one would expect given the economic policy response taken, but without any way of ever being able to scientifically support causality we simply can't make the claim.

Its too easy with economics to look backwards and retroactively attribute what happened to a cause that would have made sense. It seems likely that Covid and the Russian war were causes of inflation, but we don't really know even that. For one thing, during the pandemic in the EU most stores and restaurants were closed. One could look at the economic relief (money printing) and expect inflation, but one could also look at the massive drop in spending and expect deflation instead. Had we seen deflation I fully expect today's economic analysis would be that lockdowns and business closures were clearly going to lead to deflation.
by photonthug | 2025-07-18 02:14:44+00:00
> You also can't translate .. into Hellenistic Greek or some modern indigenous languages because there isn't enough shared context; you'd need to give humans speaking those languages a glossary for any of the translation to make sense

What? By substitution, this means you can translate it. As long as we're assuming a large enough basis of concept vectors of course it works.

> I'd say our current largest LLMs probably contain sufficient detail to explain a concept like a named race horse starting from QCD+gravity and ending up at cultural human events

What? I'm curious how you'd propose to move from gravity to culture. This is like TFAs assertion that the M+B game might be as expressive as 20 questions / universal. M or B is just (bad,sentient) or (good,object). Sure, entangling a few concepts is slightly more expressive than playing with a completely flattened world of 1/0 due to some increase in dimensionality. But trying to pinpoint anything like (neutral,concept) fails because the basis set isn't fundamentally large enough. Any explanation of how this could work will have to cheat, like when TFA smuggles new information in by communicating details about distance-from-basis. For example to really get to the word or concept of "neutral" from inferred good/bad dichotomy of bread/mussolini, you would have to answer "Hmmmmmm, closer to bread I guess" in one iteration and then "Umm.. closer to Mussolini I guess" when asked again, and then have the interrogator notice the uncertainty/hesitation/contradiction and then infer neutrality. This is just the simple case.. physics to culture seems much harder
by com2kid | 2025-07-18 02:14:46+00:00
> They've just done the work to tailor it specifically for proper tool using during coding. Once other models catch up, they will not be able to be so stingy on limits.

I don't subscribe to the $100 a month plan, I am paying API usage pricing. Accordingly I have learned how to be much more careful with Claude Code than I think other users are. The first day I used it, Claude got stuck in a loop trying to fix a problem using the same 2 incorrect solutions again and again and burnt through $30 of API credits before I realized things were very wrong and I stopped it.

Ever since then I've been getting away with $3-$5 of usage per day, and accomplishing a lot.

Anthropic needs to find a way to incentivize developers to better use Claude Code, because when it goes off the rails, it really goes off the rails.
by totetsu | 2025-07-18 02:16:41+00:00
It seems to be linked to an Indian E-commerce SAAS platform company. And most of the registrations are with Dynadot Inc, which is also a very big registrar so such trustworthy TLDs as .xyz and .top ..

https://icannwiki.org/.ooo https://ntldstats.com/tld/ooo
by strken | 2025-07-18 02:18:06+00:00
> Again, a diagnosis requires that you have care needs. If you don't, you will not be diagnosed. There is no slippery slope of lowering standards.

I don't understand how a slippery slope of lowering standards and not diagnosing anyone unless they have care needs are mutually exclusive. Our standard of care for basically everything has increased. I think you and I both agree that autistic people in the 1960s were less well cared for than in the 1990s, and that treatment has further improved today.

> There have always been neurodivergent people. Not long ago, here in Germany autistic children were systematically murdered during the Nazi regime...The difference is that neurodivergent people don't have to hide anymore as much. We finally have at least a bit of a voice.

This is interesting, because I agree with every individual statement, but it's still not supporting evidence for a change in diagnostic threshold.
by Spivak | 2025-07-18 02:18:14+00:00
Python programmers, don't use f-strings for your logs.

# yes logger.info("Super log %s", var) # no logger.info(f"Super log {var}")

I know, it's not as nice looking. But the advantage is that the logging system knows that regardless of what values var takes that it's the same log. This is used by Sentry to aggregate the same logs together. Also if the variable being logged also happens to contain a %s then the f-string version will throw an exception. It doesn't matter because f-strings are so fast but the % method is also lazy and doesn't interpolate/format if it's not going to be logged. Maybe in the future we'll get to use template strings for this.
by lxgr | 2025-07-18 02:19:12+00:00
> It seems like a very unnatural way to pose those two questions. Most humans would trip on that

I'd assume GP only gave an example. As a pretty frequent user, I can unfortunately only confirm that Siri trips over almost every multi-part question.

This would be forgivable if there weren't multiple voice-based AI consumer products available that can handle these kinds of requests perfectly.
by numpad0 | 2025-07-18 02:19:27+00:00
I doubt its discontinuation had that much to do with the price. A lot of Japanese market electronics until ~2010 were intended to capture that season's bonus pay in one big batch and then go out flush by the next one, more like movies than cars, or iPhones today. All all-new and groundbreaking every halves of years.

Moore's Law was in full effect too, everything was going obsolete as quick as time itself. Specifications values inflated in orders of 10^2 units per week, whether it was megahertz or megapixel or megabytes or grams. Making last year's new product, even with parts upgrades, was waste of time.
by plaguuuuuu | 2025-07-18 02:19:40+00:00
Seriously, sometimes I read stuff on here and it resonates a bit too much. Like this one, I've been playing 'just the tip' with buying some avant garde perfumes for ages (yes I would love to smell like a specific graveyard in Idaho did in the 1970s).

I don't know if everyone else has ADHD or what.
by _heimdall | 2025-07-18 02:20:40+00:00
I wasn't arguing anything about climate modelling, only weather predictions.

Regardless, modelling can be interesting to use as an indicator for future research but modelling is never scientific, or more specifically its never scientific in a way that is in anyway meaningful in the real world. A model isn't testing against reality and only ever factors in the conditions someone though to include and deemed relevant, and those factors are only as useful as the person's ability to accurately code them in.
by teeray | 2025-07-18 02:20:48+00:00
> you will have the results faster in most cases

You will have “results,” sure. The code is merged and deployed, tickets are closed, launch announcements are made, and attaboys are issued in semi-annual reviews. Those “results” were never quite right though. Now as that feature slowly gains adoption it begins to haunt the team, literally keeping them up at night. It’s already entrenched now though, and will be an absolute nightmare to correct. You shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but you also should not let the dubiously okay be the enemy of the good either. “The first draft of anything is shit” — Hemmingway
by lxgr | 2025-07-18 02:21:34+00:00
> Your usage of Siri today (probably on an old version of iOS) frankly has nothing to do with the article we are discussing.

Yes, but isn't that infuriating? The technology exits! It even exists, as evidenced by this article, in the same company that provides Siri!

At least I feel that way every time I interact with it – or for that matter my Google Home speaker, ironically made and operated by the company that invented transformer networks.
by RichardCA | 2025-07-18 02:22:14+00:00
It's turned into a generic term that usually means the ability to remove all corporate branding from the UI. A lot of it is in the ability to apply themes. For example the Icon style for Android 6 (Marshmallow) is now considered retro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Marshmallow#/media/Fil...

I particularly despise the way Samsung wants to use impose a "bulging squircle" icon shape and I always find a way to override that (Nova Launcher still works well for this use case).
by bayesianbot | 2025-07-18 02:22:16+00:00
Honestly, I've used a fully set up Neovim for the past few years, and I recently tried Zed and its "edit prediction," which predicts what you're going to modify next. I was surprised by how nice that felt — instead of remembering the correct keys to surround a word or line with quotes, I could just type either quotation mark, and the edit prediction would instantly suggest that I could press Tab to jump to the location for the other quote and add it. And not only for surrounding quotes, it worked with everything similar with the same keys and workflow.

Still prefer my neovim, but it really made me realize how much cognitive load all the keyboard shortcuts and other features add, even if they feel like muscle memory at this point.
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-18 02:22:18+00:00
Most of my big corporate world experience comprises CRUD apps like these tasks:

* query a database

* run a web server, typically spring boot or a C# equivalent

* run some ridiculously large browser framework like Angular or React

Typically the end goal was just put text on screen and you need an entire army of developers to do it. Any suggestions that deviate from common patterns were met with hostility by other developers and ignored by product owners. The name of the game was hiring and firing.

Almost no corporate developers were doing anything that could be called engineering. Most of the people that were interested in actual engineering were writing open source outside of work.
by sgentle | 2025-07-18 02:23:12+00:00
I think there are 3 fundamental misapprehensions that someone who thinks in abstract systems (like software) tends to make when considering about a human system (like the law).

1. The system doesn't make mistakes

2. The system represents the underlying reality

3. The system can be implemented

Let's see how that plays out here:

1. You're a US citizen. While returning from an overseas trip, a border agent thinks it's a bit weird that you have 3 laptops and flags you for extra screening. Unfortunately, the box for "extra screening" was right next to "fraudulent passport" and they checked the wrong one. You say you're a US citizen. The box says you aren't. No due process? Straight to gitmo.

2. You're in the US on a work visa sponsored by your benevolent megalithic software company. Unfortunately, they engage in some right-sizing by sizing you right out the door with zero notice. It's policy for immigration to retroactively extend your status if you find another sponsor or a different visa. But, on paper, the moment you were terminated you lost your legal status. And, just your luck, immigration agents are waiting outside as you carry your stuff to your car. No due process? Straight to gitmo.

3. You've never had a passport because you grew up in the US and have never travelled internationally. An immigration agent stops you and asks you for proof of your status. All you have is your old (pre-REAL ID) driver's license, but the agent says those are easily faked. Maybe you could go to your parents' house to look for your birth certificate, but the agent wants proof now. No due process? Straight to gitmo.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-07-18 02:23:37+00:00
> His public statements, urging the MAGA faithful to move on from Epstein, come across as an attempt to shut down discussion rather than encourage transparency.

That's all he can do. Just hope people forget or grow bored of nothing changing. How do you have your AG say there are thousands of hours of CSAM video and then not follow that up with, "... and here are the indictments".
by ta8645 | 2025-07-18 02:23:56+00:00
A lot of the anti-vax people felt like Covid was a made up and didn't warrant being called an emergency. Not saying they were right, but the point is, once you decide something is an emergency, all of a sudden, you're willing to put up with a lot of government intrusion, for the "good of society". That's the same thing the Trumper's _think_ they're doing, too. It doesn't feel made up to them.
by protocolture | 2025-07-18 02:24:06+00:00
In my experience:

Self taught people are naturally filtered. The ones that arent able to come up with a solution in unfamiliar territory arent employed.

People who come up through regular education channels arent bad but arent great either.

People who worked everything out themselves, and then undertook tertiary study to ensure that not only are they doing things well, but are doing them correctly, are absolute power houses and cannot be stopped.
by _heimdall | 2025-07-18 02:24:34+00:00
> What is this not testable about:

That's simple, QE wasn't tested in any scientifically valid study. They made predictions of what QE may do, they enacted QE policies in an uncontrolled economy with no control group, and stuff happened. Afterwards they attempted to read the tea leaves and claim what precisely causes economic changes.

That isn't scientific at all. That also doesn't mean they were wrong, you can absolutely be right when you go off educated guesses or plain old intuition. My claim is that how economics is studied is not scientific in that it never has, and never can, follow the scientific method.
by lxgr | 2025-07-18 02:24:35+00:00
As a user, I'd gladly opt into a slightly less deeply integrated Siri that understands what I want from it.

Build a crude router in front of it, if you must, or give it access to "the old Siri" as a tool it can call, and let the LLM decide whether to return its own or a Siri-generated response!

I bet even smaller LLMs would be able to figure out, given a user input and Siri response pair, whether the request was resonably answered or whether the model itself could do better or at least explain that the request is out of capabilities for now.
by xelxebar | 2025-07-18 02:24:39+00:00
9front has quite a nice implementation. It provides a unique, parsimonious UI. It's also very little code!

https://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/427e868e2be75f2...

Jj is arguably also in this vein, albeit much more heavyweight.

By virtue of almost universal adoption, git as an on-disk and interchange format give us an opportunity to treat is simply as an API and experiment with new UX on top. Would love to see more of this kind of thing.
by rsyring | 2025-07-18 02:26:03+00:00
The issue here is not one of self-taught vs formal education.

Nor is it one of motivation/passion, although that plays a bigger part.

It's rather a matter of gifting. Some people "get it" when it comes to programming in ways that make them profoundly more competent than others. This is regardless of education.

The other big factor is whether or not they enjoy the frustration and successes of programming.

The best developers are those who are gifted and enjoy the fundamental challenges involved in programming. Formal education is at best tangential.
by dmix | 2025-07-18 02:27:14+00:00
In so many words yes. The law you're being charged with can imply different procedures, but generally requires the same fundamental rights and also generally falls into some pretty broad buckets (civil, criminal, military, immigration, bankruptcy etc).

Immigration law demands they be given appropriate notice and opportunity to challenge it in front of a judge (+ appeals), but it doesn't give every person the right to something like a lengthy jury trial as in criminal law for example.

But all law ultimately involves tests of how reasonable is was, appropriate interpretations by judges, and it's chaotic nature will have failures over time that either needs to improved upon through legislative branch or be killed off by judicial branch as violating some higher rights like the constitution.