MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Balgair | 2025-07-26 14:06:08+00:00
I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology

I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that.

Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at least 10x (today), if not 100x.

Bio people hate coding. Its not their scene, its not their interest, and they stink at it. They're not going to take a 4 year detour in their career to learn how to code. I've been 13 layers deep in 'if' statements before with colleagues before I've had to up the price of 'help me real quick' from a 6-pack to a case. They really do not care at all for code, let alone anything resembling 'passable' code. They want their results and they want out.

Most of you have probably never worked with MatLab before. It's pseudo-code that complies. The help docs are famously good. Baby's first program level stuff. Its all over bio. And still, the bio people hate it.

And bio these days is just filled with data. There's so much of it being collected and mostly badly processed, if at all. You'll get grad students spending 6 months just trying to code up their experiment and it's results for some stupid solenoid valve pair, a laser, and a diode. It's stupid how much time is just wasted. Just dumb.

Vibe coding has changed all of this.

Yeah, it doesn't work on the bespoke rig the first time out. But it does work, at all, within a week. The code is not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than what was there before. There are comments in the code, at all! They have for loops now! The can ask the LLM how to make it faster or smaller or what the code is doing, bit by literal bit! And the LLM doesn't have a meeting to weasel out to. It's patient! Even at 2am!

Vibe coding is not for programmers, its for the rest of us. Its not going anywhere and it is affecting your health.
by jt2190 | 2025-07-26 14:06:31+00:00
Before Tailwind, every web designer I’ve ever worked with invented their own version of this.

Yes, CSS in theory is powerful and has everything necessary to avoid using Tailwind, but in practice CSS has a major flaw: You’re almost required to build a semantic model to get the full power. But this ignores that designers are working with mood and emotion just as much as document structure and information architecture. Capturing these more nebulous concepts as logical semantic rules is very difficult if not impossible. Tailwind just codified what everyone already did: Skip the semantic dance (“Making that text bold would be really cool, but what does it mean to be cool, as a general rule?”) and just create semantic rules like “bold” and “red”.
by dfadsadsf | 2025-07-26 14:07:04+00:00
European salaries are laughably low even compared to low ball offers from US startups.

Essentially options for good (but not great) sr engineers are

1. Get 120k salary in Europe (on higher end)

2. 500k at FAANG in US (salary + RSU)

3. ~200k at startup in US + lottery tickets

Both option 2 and 3 strictly beat option 1 (especially after taxes) so European should get off the high horse and recognize reality that they are poor and exploited by companies and government.
by a99c43f2d565504 | 2025-07-26 14:08:10+00:00
As far as I understand, there was a similar mess with CPUs some 50 years ago: All computers were different and there was no such thing as portable code. Then problem solvers came up with abstractions like the C programming language, allowing developers to write more or less the same code for different platforms. I suppose GPUs are slowly going through a similar process now that they're useful in many more domains than just graphics. I'm just spitballing.
by westurner | 2025-07-26 14:08:11+00:00
From "The Drying Planet" (2025-07-25) https://www.propublica.org/article/water-aquifers-groundwate... :

> [Global map of Water Loss (in mmSLE)]

> In the far north, the detected loss is due largely to glaciers melting and subarctic lakes drying.

> But farther south — where most people live — it is largely the race to suck groundwater from aquifers that is removing the water from the continents.

> So much groundwater is now being pumped that it is filling the oceans as it drains off land, becoming one of the largest drivers of global sea level rise.

[...]

> Water From Land Has Become a Leading Driver of Sea Level Rise

> Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans.
by happyopossum | 2025-07-26 14:08:30+00:00
> She couldn't understand what I was saying

I don’t buy this for one second. The web is well known, and well understood - I’ve never run into anyone, in any age group, with any level of education, who wouldn’t understand what a website is.

Either you’re being overly dramatic and exaggerating here, or you had a very difficult time pronouncing the words you were intending to say.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-26 14:10:19+00:00
> We must also teach people not only how to use AI, but how to preserve their humanity while using it.

One of the best things you can do is just not use it. There is no way to preserve your humanity while using it, at least not in the long run. Because its nature of mechanizing creativity creates feedback loops in our brains and reduces the magic of having the unclimbed mountain...so to speak. It's like trying to teach your body to feel good after having eaten too much sugar. It is beyond our capabilities and fundamentally incompatible with us.
by bevr1337 | 2025-07-26 14:10:20+00:00
> But everyone else? You're voluntarily breaking yours. I need medication to feel what you could feel naturally if you stopped training your brain that effort gets you nowhere.

> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.

This ending is worse than a TV show revealing a dream sequence.

We get it, you're special, we're sheep, thank you for enlightening us.

I was truly enjoying it until the author decided to throw out a middle finger.
by tucnak | 2025-07-26 14:10:24+00:00
The mainstream writing assistants are dog-shite, but so is everything else! If your idea of writing with AI is ChatGPT and no harness, you're only making a statement about the largest common denominator of AI tooling—from a position of ignorance. I'd previously helped multiple pen-pals of mine to properly harness the AI tooling with low-code platforms such as Dify. I'm sure there's plenty more out there, but re: Dify specifically, they took to it rather well. When carefully prompted, some models excel in "editing" moreso than writing from scratch. Not having to rely on professional editors is a huge advantage for aspiring authors that would otherwise struggle with keeping on-form. In my experience, progressively refining ideas, maintaining notes on development of characters in long-winded stories, and soon enough, persistent agents with proactivity, interruptible work capabilities—would vastly reduce the cognitive load that has very little to do with "creativity," that writers have to deal with all the time.

You cannot blame "AI" for your own lack of trying...
by jacob019 | 2025-07-26 14:10:29+00:00
I've been seeing AI slop being used as ad-hominem. If I'm writing a couple paragraphs, I'll often run it through a model and ask it to make minimal edits for spelling and grammar. It makes it more readable and saves me time editing. If someone doesn't like my thoughts and they see an em dash, they can call it AI slop instead of responding, which is really annoying because the model otherwise does a good job of editing. In some cases I've been accused of AI slop for original unedited content.
by macNchz | 2025-07-26 14:10:40+00:00
Businesses want you to use their app for a few reasons: it’s stickier because they can start sending you push notifications right away without even signing in/making an account, they get their logo right on your home screen, there are expedited login methods available like FaceID, they bypass most normal ad blocking so they can show users ads but also get much more reliable telemetry, they get access to APIs that allow them to request/slurp additional user data like your contacts list, persistent location services, and camera roll metadata, plus they can access a broader set of system APIs for fingerprinting purposes (even if against the ToS).

Then there’s a measurement element where app installs became an important KPI around the time ad blocking became more popular and interfered with detailed website engagement tracking, creating a self-fulfilling kind of thing.

On top of this I think another factor is that many websites are in terrible shape, super bloated by ten thousand tracking pixels and third party snippets added willy nilly by marketing teams using Tag Manager, so apps benefit from gatekeeping that bloat to a degree.
by xg15 | 2025-07-26 14:11:06+00:00
> Yet, it's still vexing to see another example of a company changing the capabilities of its products after people already bought them.

Seems to me, this is the key point. From a user perspective, it's completely mindboggling that after a decade+ of internet-connected devices, legislation still pretends they don't exist.

Of course from a political, "corporate-first" perspective, it's very easy to understand...
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-26 14:11:12+00:00
> The AI helps, but it doesn’t replace the work. The dopamine’s still there — because I’m still in the loop.

The problem is that most people need to feel that they are doing something original, and AI takes that away. AI doesn't help anything, except in the short term and maybe for some people who can compartamentalize it. But those people are few and far between indeed.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-26 14:11:33+00:00
And you still refuse to answer the question - have you personally put yourself out there to talk to people that hate you because of who you are - the color if your skin? Your sexuality? Your religion?

Or do you think it’s the same thing about talking to people who believe differently on policy decisions and someone who fundamentally doesn’t believe that certain people have no right to exist “in their space” or don’t care or actively wants someone to suffer because who they are?

I can’t “address people’s grievances” that think I don’t belong to their group because of the color of my skin anymore than a gay person can “address grievances” of someone who thinks because of their sexuality that God is going to rain down hellfire and brimstone on the nation.

It’s about as bad as the conservatives “thoughts and prayers”. And honestly for you (because after repeatedly asking I assume) are a person who doesn’t have to deal with a systemic “ism” can tell a minority/non straight person or a non Christian that we should go out of our way to spend time with people that hate us is insulting.

I don’t “complain”. Were my still living parents generation who grew up in the Jim Crow south right to spend time and energy to fight for laws about equal access and treatment under the law? Of course. Should I champion policies that give everyone universal healthcare, fair treatment by the justice system, hiring practices, etc? - of course.

But why should I care about people’s attitude toward me not because of who I am but because of the color of my skin (and they probably see me as one of these “tech elites” too) or even 10 miles in the city of the suburbs I use to live in (look up Forsyth County GA being visited by Oprah Winfrey)? If they choose to remain ignorant and choose to suffer because they care more about politicians hurting others than helping them - so be it.

And what “attitude” should I change? That there are some “good Klansmen”? That there are some good people laughing about illegal immigrants getting eaten by alligators?

You can’t change these people’s minds. The best you can do is hope they don’t have a position of power and if they don’t, let them wallow in their own ignorance.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-26 14:11:57+00:00
This is an incidental annoyance, but I have to ask somewhere: why have we decided that the FOUC (“flash of unstyled content”) caused by laying out the page twice, once without and once with the fonts, is such a dire problem that it’s worth blocking the page’s first usable render behind a ~1MB resource? If memory serves, that decision is from before the twilight of the Web of documents, a time when div soup and inline styles (now replaced by Tailwind) were widely frowned upon.

Why is it OK to leave a user on a slow or high-latency connection staring at a blank skeleton of a page, as though written in invisible ink, for several seconds? I still remember using Opera because it had a toggle for “cached images only”. What happened?
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-07-26 14:12:23+00:00
100% feel this. Also even if you are doing something you enjoy, your brain goes into redirection mode when you hit the hard parts.

Is the language I’m using bad? Should I rewrite this other thing? Is it my colleague’s bad? Is this codebase rotten?

I see a lot of people label this as “I’m creative, I don’t do grunt work”, “I’m good at greenfield projects”, “I’m a builder” etc.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-26 14:13:10+00:00
> But everyone else? You're voluntarily breaking yours. I need medication to feel what you could feel naturally if you stopped training your brain that effort gets you nowhere.

> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.

This blog pushes the idea of “dopamine deficiency” as a real scientific concept, but it’s not an actual medical diagnosis (unless you have Parkinson’s disease). To be fair, the linked blog post implies that a doctor gave them this idea, which can happen when you go to a doctor who feels like they’re doing patients a favor by telling them they have a “chemical imbalance” or a deficiency of a neurotransmitter to alleviate objections for taking medication.

The other post also implies that a brain scan was used as part of the diagnosis process, so this is a good place to point out that brain scans are not diagnostic for ADHD. There have been a few notable quack doctors who tried to push fMRI misinterpretations as specialty ADHD diagnostic tools such as Dr. Amen, but these aren’t actually validated by anything nor have they even been shown to be repeatable.

As always: When someone starts talking about dopamine as the chemical that explains everything in life or makes claims to have a deficiency of it, realize that they’re talking about dopamine as a metaphor rather than actual science. Unfortunately people start taking the dopamine metaphor too literally and believe that any lack of motivation is equivalent to a physical lack of dopamine, which is not true.
by anovikov | 2025-07-26 14:14:17+00:00
They can't see number of days spent, due to GDPR. In some countries even provinces don't exchange that information with one another, let alone countries. Withdrawn residence permits stay valid for all countries except those who originally issued them i.e. can still be used for entry and exit through all other Schengen countries until their validity dates expire. This is a mess. I travel with two nationalities and 3 residence permits issued by 3 EU countries, and if it was coordinated i'd have a hard time explaining myself every damn trip, in reality, no one gives a damn. If EU countries believe they don't have a problem of illegal immigration on the scale US does perhaps this is simply because they don't know.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-26 14:15:19+00:00
for one, it's a nice little icon on the desktop of their device. you click it, and it launches the very thing you are looking to do. a browser means you have to click to open the browser. then you have to type the specific URL which is already something way more demanding than clicking the single icon even if they do remember the URL.

for another, devs are definitely making the web experience subpar which has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread. most websites are just adverts for their apps if they function at all any more. loading a website on mobile is even worse than desktop as they pester you with "it's better in the app" pop ups.

people find browsing an app store much easier than browsing the web. in fact, do people browse the web at all any more. search is shit now, so discovery by search is not what it used to be. click through from search is also plummeting as "search assistant" type responses means no reason to click through to sites.

how many more reasons do you need?
by Aurornis | 2025-07-26 14:15:31+00:00
They link to a blog post where they say they claim to have been diagnosed with “dopamine deficiency”, which is not a real diagnosis.

This is a classic example of someone misinterpreting the science and coming to believe that their state is not their fault. They believe it is entirely inflicted upon them by a medical condition, whereas other people are responsible for their actions and outcomes.
by ndepoel | 2025-07-26 14:15:57+00:00
I had this epiphany last year when I went through some old holiday pictures and saw a photo of a monument in a location that I had no memory of. So I spent some time retracing our steps on that day, based on other pictures from around the same time, and places that I knew we visited. It took a while, but eventually I managed to zero in on the place and felt pretty satisfied as I starred the location on Google Maps.

Since the monument in question was somewhat relevant to my work, I shared the picture in my company chat and asked if anyone had seen it and knew from the top of their head where this was. Almost immediately one colleague threw the picture into an AI reverse image search and instantly came up with the answer where it was and what the monument represented. I was incredibly annoyed at that; not because someone was able to come up with the answer much faster than I did on my own, but because it took the FUN out of the whole thing.

That's when I realized that my instinctive dislike for AI is because it takes the fun out of everything for me. The process of figuring out where this photo was taken was much more rewarding than the eventual answer. Similarly, when programming I take pleasure out of figuring out difficult problems and coming up with elegant solutions for then. Writing the actual code isn't the interesting or difficult part, and I don't need an AI to do that for me. AI is being hyped up by people who are not interested in the process of learning and understanding and who just want a quick shortcut to the answer, completely missing the point in my opinion.
by jdiff | 2025-07-26 14:16:04+00:00
Automating what's boring to spend more time on what brings you joy is a great idea. But using AI for that end seems counterproductive, as it seems to be reducing productivity rather than enhancing it.

A similar narrative, that we can automate tedium and focus on joy as a society are also kneecapped by the fact that these tools are being used to automate people out of jobs. Those people are not being supported by the tools that are eliminating their paid positions, leaving them with actually 0 time to enjoy their lives. It also further empowers the employers in the employer-employee relationship which was already being abused to hell and back.
by anonymars | 2025-07-26 14:16:05+00:00
Do you see the irony of stereotyping a large and diverse group of people based on the actions of an extreme few?

I take away a very different lesson. Folks who are shocked at the outcomes aren't listening to what others are saying. In fact I think that it's precisely because they have been ignored, dismissed, and treated with condescension that things have come to this and this anger has festered. Folks left behind by a system that has sold them out and left them without hope for a better tomorrow. I feel Bernie would have beat Trump in 2016, because he was speaking to the same message and was also not part of that status quo system. As FDR said in 1938, "I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism...will grow in strength in our land."

Of course malign actors have taken advantage of this and lied to people and told them what they wanted to hear, and the naked sabotage of the bipartisan immigration reform bill is par for the course from the same crew that sabotaged Vietnam peace talks in '68 (and possibly the Iran hostages in '80). Nevertheless, too often any concerns about immigration are immediately dismissed as racist. (This theme holds for other topics but I don't want to dilute the point). The politically connected know this stuff, but the "garbage in, garbage out" rule applies to humans and media consumption too. I blame the liars more than those who were lied to.

PS, I found that Davis himself has addressed this topic:

> “Every racist that I know—and I know a lot of racists—every racist that I know voted for Donald Trump,” Davis said near the end of the interview. “However,” he added, “that does not, and I expressly repeat it, that does not mean that everybody who voted for Donald Trump is a racist. There are plenty of people, including good friends of mine, who are not racist, and who voted for Trump. A lot of people wanted a change from what they were accustomed to for the last decades … they wanted a change of the status quo, a changing of the guard. And they were willing to overlook his misogyny, his racist or bigoted comments. They just wanted that change. They were are not racist people. But every racist I know did vote for him.”
by akdev1l | 2025-07-26 14:16:07+00:00
We have really complex web applications like Photopea.

They work fine performance-wise. The example of Reddit’s website being shit is just pointing out that Reddit’s website is shit.

Google maps web applications also works really well. Both Photopea and Google Maps are far more complex than reddit.

At this point I am sure reddit’s website is shit so people are forced to use their app so they can track users better. Not because of some underlying limitation of web technologies.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-26 14:16:14+00:00
> I think the key is that you are supposed to automate whatever feels boring for you

I disagree with that. The problem is, if you really think about it, even some of the initially boring tasks can be interesting if understood in a certain light, and the fact that we couldn't automate them before meant that we had the opportunity to stumble upon them.

Also, there is also satisfaction for many people to finally finish a task that they really slaved over.

Automating wasn't a problem when computers did only truly rote tasks. But AI spilled over into the creative domain and people should not automate even the boring parts of that because there are hidden rewards to sticking through those, because they are not truly as rote as they seem to be.
by bobajeff | 2025-07-26 14:16:26+00:00
I applaud the attempt this project and the GPU Working Group are making here. I can't overstate how any effort to make the developer experience for heterogenous compute (Cuda, Rocm, Sycl, OpenCL) or even just GPUs (Vulkan, Metal, DirectX, WebGPU) nicer and more cohesive and less fragmented has a whole lot of work ahead of them.