MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codeflo | 2025-07-20 09:47:33+00:00
This joke is a closer analogy to reality with a small addition. After the friend is suitably impressed:

> "Holy shit a talking dog!" says the friend "This is the most incredible thing that I've ever seen in my life".

this happens:

"Yes," says Fred. "As you can see, it's already at PhD level now, constantly improving, and is on track to replace 50% of the economy in twelve months or sooner."

Confused, the friend asks:

> "What's 3+3?"

> "Eight" says the dog.

> "What is this bullshit you're trying to sell me Fred?"
by NoboruWataya | 2025-07-20 09:48:29+00:00
As a meat eater trying to casually reduce my meat consumption, I find myself buying more tofu, lentils and beans, rather than processed meat-like substitutes. I think that is the issue. People who want to eat meat will just eat actual meat, and people who don't want to eat meat will not feel compelled to eat a meat lookalike.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-20 09:49:22+00:00
More than lack of features, what puts me off is the whole anti-intellectualism in language design from these communities, than kind of sprung of Go designers.

So while as language geek, I will spend the time to understand and play with them long enough to be able to know what I am actually talking about, using said languages for project delivery only if it is a customer requirement of some sort.
by apple1417 | 2025-07-20 09:50:07+00:00
On one of the projects I worked on, I brought a PIC16 down to ~20nA - where our fancy meter only went down to 10nA precision. It was completely unnecessary, but I'm still quite proud of it.

For more standard cases, the 43uA from the article is roughly the same order of magnitude you'll get from pretty much any micro in sleep mode, after doing your first pass low power optimisation. The stuff I normally work with gets about 10. The thing is just, most of the time, that's low enough already - for this project 2500mAh/43uA = 6 years of sleeping. The bigger factor is the current it consumes while awake - and that's where the Arduino's a bit of a letdown, the stuff I normally use is only in the order of 100uA while awake.
by fn-mote | 2025-07-20 09:50:25+00:00
> The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants.

I don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand.

The whole dismissal doesn’t make sense to me. It’s marketed at well-off former meat eaters.

The poor will live on rice and tofu or pinto beans just like they have for the last hundred plus years.
by OJFord | 2025-07-20 09:50:26+00:00
I'm by no means a super keen or heavy user, I've barely dabbled really, but if we were hiring at the moment I think I'd ask about it - it's suddenly a huge part of understanding how a person works and what they might be like to interact with. Up there with considering cover letter/email/CV writing style, and commit messages from any take-home or their public repos.
by naniwaduni | 2025-07-20 09:51:02+00:00
"Go is on the frontier of recency vs popularity (i.e. newer than all more popular languages, and more popular than all newer languages)" is honestly an "interesting" statement in its own right, but would be a distinction it has to share with Python, Java, some of JS/C#/VB/PHP depending on your popularity (and age...) metrics, and yes, Swift and Rust. And a long tail of very new languages, I suppose.
by ageitgey | 2025-07-20 09:51:03+00:00
I used to use a grammar and punctuation checking browser plugin that worked in any text box. Among all the normal suggestions, it would always insist that instead of using a - dash, that it was proper to use an — emdash. I would accept the suggestion until people on Reddit accused me of being chatgpt because I wrote "too properly" with emdashes. So now you can't do that anymore.
by kqr | 2025-07-20 09:51:32+00:00
I think this has less to do with age and more what we are taught. The printing press, steam engine, and the wheel were repeatedly drilled into me as world-changing technologies, so those are the ones I'd think of.

But there are more. Rope is arguably more important than the wheel. Their combination in pulleys to exchange force for distance still astound me, and is massively useful.

Writing lets us transmit ideas indirectly. While singing and storytelling lets ideas travel generations, they don't become part of the hypothetical global consciousness as immediately as with writing, which can be read and copied by anyone once written.

I'd put statistics in this bucket too, its invention being more recent than 600 years. Before that, we just didn't know how useful information is in aggregate. Faced with a table of data, we only ever looked up individual (hopefully representative) records in it.
by m_fayer | 2025-07-20 09:51:52+00:00
Because I can never focus on just one thing, I have a philosophy degree. I’ve worked with product teams and spent lots of time with stakeholders. I’ve written tons of docs because I was the only one on the team who enjoyed it.

I’ve always bemoaned my distractibility as an impediment to deep expertise, but at least it taught me to write well, for all kinds of audiences.

Boy do I feel lucky now.
by latexr | 2025-07-20 09:52:07+00:00
Sounds like a good way to ensure society never “reboots”.

A “frozen snapshot” of reliable knowledge is infinitely more valuable than a system which gives you wrong instructions and you have no idea what action will work or kill you. Anyone can “explain complex ideas in simple terms” if you don’t have to care about being correct.

What kind of scenario is this, even? We had such a calamity that we need to “reboot” society yet still have access to all the storage and compute power required to run LLMs? It sounds like a doomsday prepper fantasy for LLM fans.
by can16358p | 2025-07-20 09:52:20+00:00
> Could there be anything more insulting for a writer than someone assuming that their writing is an output of generative artificial intelligence?

Not sure if this is a bad thing. AI uses very professional and correct language (unless otherwise instructed) with well-structured paragraphs. If a system can't distinguish my writing from AI, it means that I'm doing a great job as humans sometimes make typos and structural/grammatical errors and AI generally excels against those.
by vdupras | 2025-07-20 09:52:45+00:00
In inflation calculation, is quality taken into account? I guess not, given the inherent problem stated in the article.

If that's the case, even if it's true that we can say "sure, quality is declining, but it's fine, just fine", it would follow that inflation is actually much higher than reported.

When you buy a fridge today, it buys you the "fridge service" for a much shorter time span, forcing you to invest a lot more money into that service over a given time span. That's a steep inflation of fridge price that isn't counted in official statistics.

This should be taken into account in inflation calculation. If this was, it would give a much fairer view of the decline in purchasing power.
by jakubmazanec | 2025-07-20 09:52:55+00:00
My experience is different (and I doubt that Ikea ever sold anything that wasn't made of particle boards). For example in Czechia, I bought the same bed in Ikea in 2010 and in 2021, and the price was nominally the same, so because of inflation, it is actually cheaper. But the quality went down and it's really bad.
by spauldo | 2025-07-20 09:52:57+00:00
I'm staying at a Candlewood in southern California and they've got motion sensing light switches for everything. They mostly go to plugs, though, and whoever stayed in the room before me unplugged all the lights. I left 'em that way. The bathroom light came on automatically blinded me three times a night when I'd get up to pee until I got in the habit of reaching in and hitting the button before stepping into the bathroom.

Automatic lights in private spaces are just a hassle.
by Paradigm2020 | 2025-07-20 09:53:00+00:00
Debt pile visualizer...

The financial advise tends to be to pay off your smallest debt first, even if the interest is low, because it will give a mental boost...

So yeah the website would ask you to list your debts in order. (Student loan, car loan,...) And the interest rate.

Than it would make a (not too depressing) visual and ask you how much you can pay per month.

Bonus points for using Google sheets as a backend.

But main thing would be that people would be able to get helpful reminders / tips.

"You've saved yourself 500$ over the next 10 years, keep up the good work".

Christmas time "If you got a Xmas bonus and can double your loan pay off this month you'll speed up your debt freeness by 2.5 months"

"Did you know:A Starbucks frappucino cost 0.55c to make, and in ventti size costs 8$ and 400kcals (more than 2 ice creams). The coffee of the day cost 0.40c to make and cost 3$ and 10kcal. Caffeine the same.

Anyway v 0.1 probably only takes a day to make.

Cool initiative good luck
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-20 09:53:02+00:00
> According to a 2024 report by the software company Salesforce, 62% of these services in Spain are already automated. Today, it’s easier to converse with a machine than with a real person.

Whats adorable is that the author thinks this has anything to do with AI. Shitty AI is an excuse to get rid of customer service. It's a move that most of tech made a long time ago.

How many times BEFORE AI have you heard the lament from someone that "Thank fully I am internet famous, or blew up on social media. because other wise google/etsy/ebay/Facebook would never have fixed their automated decision to pull the rug out from under me"

> The conclusion is clear: society isn’t adapting to the pace of technological advancement.

Uhhh, the change already happened, in the attention economy the only thing that matters is your social clout (credit?).

> packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients.

Heirloom tomatoes in the grocery store. Avocado year round, Brussel sprouts that dont taste like ass. Whole Foods, and other more 'local' choices.

> According to the expert, the main factor driving this criticism is that the great promise of capitalism — if you work

The problem is that there are lots of people all over the globe who are willing to do MORE for LESS and we are in a global marketplace. Adapt or die.

> buy a house

Except you can have all this. Plenty of people do: "buying a house" is very literally the same as it ever was: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

> The real problem isn’t buying pants that don’t last or traveling in an uncomfortable plane. The real problem is that, with each purchase, we support two of the most polluting industries on the planet.

The author could have done a far better job in highlighting all the waste that goes into a pair of pants. Oil for synthetics, Waste from fabric making and dying. Scraps from the cutting process only to have them thrown away after a year to make another pair. Instead we got a bunch of "feel good" talking points that you can nod along to even if they are misinformed.
by avinassh | 2025-07-20 09:53:46+00:00
I don't get this scheme at all. The protocol violates durability, because once the client receives success from server, it should be durable. However, completion record is async, it is possible that it never completes and server crashes.

During recovery, since the server applies only the operations which have both records, you will not recover a record which was successful to the client.
by nly | 2025-07-20 09:54:08+00:00
Food is one of the joys in life that people can enjoy no matter where they are on the socioeconomic spectrum.

In the modern age, if you're poor, or just time poor, you can enjoy a tasty meal thanks to cheap food coming out of the modern food industry.

Why would you pay more for a less enjoyable experience when tasty food might be one of the only joys in an otherwise mundane or hard-up existence?

This is exactly why McDonalds is popular. It tastes relatively good, it's comforting, and it's cheap.
by dmezzetti | 2025-07-20 09:54:53+00:00
It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable". Publicly traded companies are driven by quarterly earnings and increasing net margins. You do that by selling products at the lowest cost possible where buyers will still buy it.

A bigger decline is coming if we let "vibe coding" and what we call AI replace human workers at scale. The technology isn't there yet for full automation but everything is blindly surging ahead due to the allure of it and the same reason as the first paragraph above.
by ck45 | 2025-07-20 09:55:10+00:00
I guess it depends. There are items for which there's just no margin for cutting quality. Take for example a Hermes bag. While some buyers would probably settle for less quality, the brand depends on the image of a high quality product, thus the bags have increased in price by 5%+x annually for the past 20 years. That's a rate which is unsustainable for non-luxury items. Another example is Miele washing machines, which most likely deserve to be considered top notch and high quality. The prices have barely increased in the same timespan, which technically means they are 25%-30% less expensive after inflation. It's hard to imagine that the production process was improved by that much.
by dottjt | 2025-07-20 09:55:21+00:00
I'm not sure if this is quite related, but I can't help but feel that a lot of the ills of society that we're witnessing is simply coming down to the fact that we're living a lot longer as people.

I feel like knowing that we might live well-beyond our working age has caused all sorts of odd/irrational behaviours in the way we approach life. I think for example, having to save for retirement makes us rethink how we spend our money. Which then means people are ultimately spending less on other things i.e. clothing. Then it becomes a kind of vicious cycle of hoarding wealth, but then expecting everything else to be cheap (at any cost).

Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-20 09:55:28+00:00
That won't work, Youtube is fundamentally dependent on massive storage, massive compute and massive internet connectivity PLUS a revenue mechanism for creators. A whole lot of infrastructure.

Monopoly laws and taxes are punitive. In other words: they can only ever create a situation where there is fundamentally less available. They cannot create a second Youtube, they can only destroy Youtube. Unless the government builds the infrastructure, which is a nonstarter.

If you cannot use state power and/or resources to create a second and third Youtube, then letting Youtube be a monopoly is probably the best option. The big difference between competitors and a monopoly is that a monopolist can only improve outcomes by growing the market ... which is exactly what we want.

Unfortunately it is very much not what the government wants. Well, it is not what governments (plural) want. Governments think they're god, and of course like two people in a madhouse that both think they're god, there is a rather fundamental disagreement here. They will realize, eventually, just how stupid it would be for god to let other gods (anyone but themselves, other governments, but also private people) control mass media. This means we will get closer and closer to the situation that Youtube cannot satisfy multiple governments. This could even apply to multiple parties within one state structure. You would hope this means they'll build infrastructure, but we all know what will really happen: they'll destroy it. Youtube will end because governments will see it as a threat to them, and they just won't care how much damage they're doing. Just look at the current government.

There are a LOT of economy texts, some quite old that warn about the dangers of letting private interests control the only market for anything. They suggest the government should make sure they own or at least control the market itself, but that includes paying for infrastructure. This has it's own problems (like censorship), but there is really no alternative. Either you do that or eventually the monopolists will BE the government.
by makingstuffs | 2025-07-20 09:55:35+00:00
It allows you to add some pressure to the patty while providing it a restricted space in which it can expand. By doing so the ingredients seem to form a much stronger bond (from my experience). I used to do the same with beef when I ate it.

Also, rolling it into a ball and then wrapping before flattening gives a much better shape to the resulting patty
by nabla9 | 2025-07-20 09:56:13+00:00
Otherwise good WSJ article makes a mistake in the end:

"Less labor regulation and unions in China results less restrictions to automating."

Typically its just the opposite. Japan, ROK, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan are ahead of the US in robotization because there is more regulation, high education, and not enough people. That's why these countries are exporters and have higher manufacturing sector.

Japan (FANUC) had first dark factory in 2001. Netherlands in 2016.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-20 09:56:48+00:00
Exactly. I would not like to be called a vibe coder for using an LLM for tedious tasks though, is it not a pejorative term? I used LLMs for a few projects and it did well, because I knew what I wanted and how I wanted. So yeah, you do have to be an experienced programmer to excel with LLMs.

That said, you can learn a lot using LLMs, which is nice. I have a friend who wants to learn Python, and I have given him actual resources, but I have also told him to use LLMs.
by bitter_michael | 2025-07-20 09:57:13+00:00
This article's thesis is all over the place, but the discussion here brings up an interesting topic: the decline in quality is relative to your evaluation function.

If you want long lasting products, then maybe the cheaper furniture is of lower quality. If you want something light weight and affordable, then ikea is higher quality.

Assuming there is a uniform product evaluation function seems like lazy journalism. The addition of AI was also odd
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-20 09:58:22+00:00
I'm not sure the billionaire ever cared about the durability of things. Pretty sure most of them have people managing their things, who will throw anything to the bin at the first sign of degradation.

Here's an anecdote:

As a student, I visited one Hermes (French luxury brand) manufacture in Paris. They showed us how crocodile skin was worked with to make hand bags and showed us the finished products. They had two finishes for the bags: - with protective coating (brilliant) - without (mate)

Without coating the crocodile skin was very fragile they told us, and even water droplets would stain the skin. We were quite surprised that anyone would spend a five figures amount of money in a bag that will get stained by anything, but the guy guiding us told us that their customers simply considered their products to be disposable item that would quickly be thrown away anyway.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-07-20 09:58:37+00:00
Isn’t it possible to just use trait objects for this?

You can have default implementation for some methods and implementors of the trait can specialise.

Specifically, you can have couple functions that takes a type that implements some stuff (different based on the wanted specialisation) and gives you a trait object.

This should be simpler and should have better compile time than doing macros or adding more generics
by palata | 2025-07-20 09:58:49+00:00
> It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable".

I like this wording better than "programmed obsolescence". I don't really believe that "programmed obsolescence" is common. If anyone in a company leaked that the company actively designs the product to stop working after some time, it would make the news.

I call it "premature obsolescence", which sounds more passive to me: the product doesn't last as long as it could because the company doesn't actively work on making it last as long. Because it's cheaper of course. Hence "lowest cost technically acceptable".

"It's not that we make a bad product, but rather that we don't make a good product", in a way. There is no need, consumers buy it even if it's not good.
by amelius | 2025-07-20 09:59:11+00:00
"Having FP features" does not mean "allow an idiomatic FP programming style". If this were the case, we'd be seeing a revolution in functional programming now. It's not like the FP community is slow to adopt good ideas. In fact, many innovations that lead to the invention of the borrow checker came from the functional programming world (linear, affine types, effect systems).
by d1sxeyes | 2025-07-20 09:59:47+00:00
Mostly not. I am a fan of the em-dash, which a lot of people now see as absolute evidence of LLM usage. I occasionally think about swapping it out if I’m desperate not to be mixed up with an LLM, but in principle, I don’t really care if someone thinks I used an LLM to help me write something or not.

I work with a lot of non-native English speakers (with English as a lingua franca) and I’m more than happy for them to use LLMs to help them phrase their thoughts in a way that I can understand more easily.

I also sometimes use LLMs myself for low-stakes stuff, tidying up sloppy notes, etc.

I think it’s a bit Ludditical to want people to always write every word themselves. Should they also hand write it using a quill pen and ink they made themselves from oak galls?

There are some types of writing (creative writing, writing to persuade, etc) where the writing itself benefits from being hand crafted, but most writing is just an imperfect way of sharing thoughts.
by torginus | 2025-07-20 09:59:58+00:00
One of the issues with supersonic jets (certainly the Concorde), is that their takeoff speeds, and required runway lengths are much higher due to different aerodynamics, about 1.5x of what's needed for a 737.

This means these VIPs might not be able to land where they want.

Another issue is that these planes fly higher and take longer to reach travel speed, which eats into the the travel time benefits for shorter flights.
by spauldo | 2025-07-20 10:00:25+00:00
Cleaning staff are weekly in every hotel I've spent more than one night in for the last several years. It's "eco friendly," they say. I'm sure getting to fire most of the cleaning staff has nothing to do with it...

I could probably get away with smoking in the room for the day or two after they clean. Not that I would - I stay at hotels that have covered smoking areas outside and I enjoy the company I meet.
by makingstuffs | 2025-07-20 10:01:09+00:00
No, nothing to do with hysteria. We simply have not had access to the substance long enough to be able to accurately say what the long term effects on health are and I cannot help but to assume that there has been a lot of unnatural processing in-order to turn a small, green, pea into a patty which resembles beef.

Processing isn’t bad, as such. Turning beef from a steak into mince is processing and it is fine. But unnatural processing (as I call it) which requires labs and loads of chemicals which we wouldn’t otherwise consume is only logical to presume as unhealthy.
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-20 10:01:12+00:00
It is, in theory (hedonic price adjustment can go both ways), but I don't know how accurate their measurement is.

Edit, now that I checked it looks like hedonic price adjustment measurements are performed on only 7.5%[1]of the goods in the CPI basket, and the main goal seems to be to avoid overestimating inflation by tracking quality improvements better.

[1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/20239/correcting-quality-change-...
by badpun | 2025-07-20 10:02:13+00:00
Right now, every responsible country that is even vaguely threatened by their neighbor has a concrete plan in place on how and where to evacaute their most valueable cultural artfacts, in an event of an invasion. And likewise, every serious invader has special units that include historians, whose role is to locate and plunder those valuable artifacts. I'd say we're pretty far from your desired state.