MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-04 17:06:25+00:00
Humans will probably be cheaper than machines for a long time for some things. They reproduce themselves, they self-repair (up to a point), they are quite dexterous, they can be powered fairly cheaply by stuff that grows out of the earth, and they learn by example without explicit programming. They will do the menial but deceptively demanding of high dexterity tasks that need to be done. Laundry, dishes, housecleaning. New construction will largely be done by machines but repairs are more unpredictable so human mechanics, plumbers, etc. will continue to be in demand.

Software development as a career will evaporate in the next decade, as will most "knowledge" work such as general medicine, law, and teaching. Surgeons and dentists will continue a bit longer.

Bottom line, most of us will be doing chores while the machines do all the production and creative work.
by comrade1234 | 2025-08-04 17:06:42+00:00
I wish there some screenshots of the vandalism.

Here in Zurich there's a mural of maybe twenty dinosaurs (not accurate but something that looks like it would be in a children's book). One day someone drew a dick on every single dinosaur. Even the flying pterodactyl had a big dick hanging off of him. It was so puerile and primitive it cracked everyone up that saw it. No tags. No football club graffiti. Just dicks everywhere. Thankfully the mural was repaired pretty quickly.
by pkphilip | 2025-08-04 17:06:43+00:00
I have programmed using Php for at least 25 years. While PHP did start off being quite poorly designed for security, newer versions of Php and also the PHP frameworks like Laravel, Yii etc have become quite sophisticated over the years and is a really good alternative to frameworks like Rails etc.

The CMS frameworks have also improved quite a bit.

The improvements in PHP include big performance gains - PHP 7 was a huge improvement over PHP 5 and now PHP 8 also includes a JIT), improvements in the language such as a type system, object orientation, improved error handling etc.

PHP 8 is a lot faster (about 3x) faster than Python.

https://sailingbyte.com/blog/php5-to-php8-modern-programming...
by bityard | 2025-08-04 17:06:52+00:00
There was also no advice for the main problem posited in the first couple of paragraphs. That is, being asked to do more with less time.

The right answer to this is: speak up for yourself. Dumping your feelings into HN or Reddit or your blog can be a temporary coping mechanism but it doesn't solve the problem. If you are legitimately working your tail off and not able to keep up with your workload, tell your manager or clients. Tactfully, of course. If they won't listen, then its time to move on. There are reasonable people/companies to work with out there, but they sometimes take some effort to find.
by calebkaiser | 2025-08-04 17:06:59+00:00
I don't think this is an AI specific thing. I work in the field, and so I'm around some of the most enthusiastic adopters of LLMs, and from what I see, engineering cultures surrounding LLM usage typically match the org's previous general engineering culture.

So, for example, by and large the orgs I've seen chucking Claude PRs over the wall with little review were previously chucking 100% human written PRs over the wall with little review.

Similarly, the teams I see effectively using test suites to guide their code generation are the same teams that effectively use test suites to guide their general software engineering workflows.
by 9rx | 2025-08-04 17:07:08+00:00
> the infrastructure in other parts is quite lacking.

Meaning, passenger trains? I can't think of anything else that might be lacking in any rural area you'd reasonably consider living in.

While that did go out of fashion in rural areas some 100 years ago, even that infrastructure is still more or less there and could be resurrected if people really wanted to use it. The old train station around here became the clubhouse for the lawn bowling club, but I'm sure you could turn it back into the train station if the will was there.

But if you are working from home, how much do you really need a train anyway?
by jfengel | 2025-08-04 17:07:35+00:00
He did manage to get snagged by COVID. It's the only reason he lost in 2020. Were it not for the pandemic, he most likely would have won.

Weirdly, he lost running away from his accomplishments. Operation Warp Speed was a huge credit to him. Fauci managed the whole thing reasonably well, given the immense uncertainties. It could have been better, to be sure, but it could have been a heck of a lot worse.

But he's back, so clearly that didn't stick. In his first term, he was largely protected from his worst ideas. Now he's not. And we're here wondering when his bad policies will be obvious to everybody.

Aggravatingly, it could be never. Markets aren't the only thing that can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. There's every reason to think that a massive crisis is on the way, and it's hard to imagine how it could wait four years to materialize... but then again, maybe it can.
by alexpotato | 2025-08-04 17:07:50+00:00
Nowadays, computers are super fast and super huge and super always available.

But even in the early 2000s, that was not the case. I know this b/c one of my first jobs out of college was to build a regex based system to analyze spam emails sent to big providers (like Yahoo and Hotmail (Microsoft)".

IIRC, we only had ONE Dell 2600 box to do all of the above with literally millions of emails and the same box did the parsing and the database storage (via MySql).

You REALLY learn what makes regexes efficient versus not and I remember reading about "/o" and testing it to see if it made a difference for what I was doing. I don't remember either way what the results were but this was def a blast from the past.

PS If you want to read more about the spam work back the, I have a Twitter thread about it here: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1208948480867127296
by toast0 | 2025-08-04 17:07:55+00:00
Lately, some BIOS updates have been advertised as not revertable. I'm sure you can still program the old firmware with an external programmer, but "for security reasons", the in-system update won't let you revert some updates that fix security issues.

Even without that barrier, it's not great when you have to pick between things like the bus speed and memory stability or other updates you want.
by timeinput | 2025-08-04 17:08:01+00:00
Agreed, and after you've worked with them for a bit you can start to predict where they are going to fail, and do something silly like delete your code base, or have no trouble, and succeed, and add that feature you were after.

A good code review and edit to remove the excess verbosity, and you got a feature done real fast.

Ask it for something at or above its limit then the code is very difficult to debug, difficult to understand has potentially misleading comments, and more. Knowing how to work with these overly confident coworkers is definitely a skill. I feel it varies from significantly from model to model as well.

Its often difficult to task other programmers with tasks at or above their limits too.
by akudha | 2025-08-04 17:08:19+00:00
I'd hate being interviewed by a bot. Talking to these stupid automated answering machines is bad enough.

That said, the other side of the equation is also bad, for employers. I was asked to conduct some interviews recently. I asked the most basic of questions (like absolutely basic stuff, "what is an interface?" level basic). The number of people who said "I don't know" is far less than the number of people who tried to spin stories, make shit up on the fly etc. One guy boasted that he learned programming on his current job (never coded before) and now is a rock star leading a team of 5 people. His confidence was so high, I thought we might have a winner. For the next 20 minutes, he couldn't answer anything, even from his own resume. That is not even the worst part - while leaving, he had the audacity to ask "When can I start?".

Recruiting is broken from all sides. Recruiters working on commission are the worst, but employers and job seekers aren't far behind. I have no clue if this is true in other industries, but in tech it is bad, very bad
by marknutter | 2025-08-04 17:08:26+00:00
> We will never run out of the problems that need solving. The types of problems you spend your time solving will change. The key is to adapt your process to allocate your time to solving the right kinds of problems. You don’t want the be the person taking an hour to do arithmetic by hand, when you have access to spreadsheets.

And this has always been the case throughout all of human history.
by ryanackley | 2025-08-04 17:08:52+00:00
Is it <waves hands towards the sky> AI? or is it years of overhiring?

There was a great article I found on HN recently about how the recent layoffs in big tech are actually the result of overhiring for years in a talent arms race.

Like, is AI now doing the former work of 25,000 people at Microsoft? Probably not.
by thegrim33 | 2025-08-04 17:08:56+00:00
Scanning through the data,

The ultra-processed foods group had mean caloric intakes at baseline (2009kcal), 4 weeks (1763kcal), and 8 weeks (1769kcal).

Compared to the minimally-processed food group's intake amounts of baseline (1938kcal), 4 weeks (1334kcal), 8 weeks (1463kcal).

Ok? So the finding is that the fewer calories you take in, the more weight you lose. Do we really need yet another study about this?
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-04 17:09:23+00:00
I agree with this whole-heartedly.

Certainly some facts can imply a certain understanding of the world, but they don't require that understanding in order to remain true. The map may require the territory, but the territory does not require the map.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” ― Philip K. Dick
by rafaelmn | 2025-08-04 17:09:38+00:00
I've seen the worst impact on mid/junior level devs. Where they would have to struggle through a problem before - AI is like a magic shortcut to something that looks like it works. And then they submit that crap and I can't trust them again - they will give me AI code without even understanding what it does fully. It robbed them of the learning process and made them even less useful, while making it seem to them they were achieving something. I'm seeing these kinds of people getting removed from workforce fast - you can probably prompt the AI better on your own, have one less layer of indirection and it will be faster.
by ubicomp | 2025-08-04 17:09:43+00:00
Just like with "automatic checkout systems" at a grocery store. Passing the labor onto the individual, vs. the expert. We don't even get the same infrastructure professionals get. A PLU for a piece of fruit is a mind-blurring whisk of hands over a dial pad for a pro, and a bit of mind-numbingly arduously piss-poor series of taps for the ill-positioned entrant.
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-08-04 17:09:53+00:00
Free lunches and college aid are supposed to offset the costs of parenting?

All of the costs of parenting are privatized except for schooling, but even to do that one well costs an enormous amount from the parent

also you're asking which costs have been privatized in the last 200 years, but the entirety of the costs were (always) private and only a small amount has been socialized.
by alexpotato | 2025-08-04 17:09:55+00:00
About 10 years ago I had to write a script to reconcile trade entries from various brokers back into our central system.

You are 100% correct on the "100 to 10" ratio on test cases.

PLUS, the ways in which broker files can break due to:

- random carriage returns

- different date formats

- time zones

- etc etc

and regexes become both great and terrifying at the same time.

One pattern I did find useful:

regex + if/then

e.g. if (regex is true) then if (regex2 is true) then
by benregenspan | 2025-08-04 17:09:55+00:00
> The bots of Big Tech, namely Google, Meta and Apple are of course exempt from this by pretty much every website and by cloudflare. But try being anyone other than them , no luck. Cloudflare is the biggest enabler of this monopolistic behavior

The Big Tech bots provide proven value to most sites. They have also through the years proven themselves to respect robots.txt, including crawl speed directives.

If you manage a site with millions of pages, and over the course of a couple years you see tens of new crawlers start to request at the same volume as Google, and some of them crawl at a rate high enough (and without any ramp-up period) to degrade services and wake up your on-call engineers, and you can't identify a benefit to you from the crawlers, what are you going to do? Are you going to pay a lot more to stop scaling down your cluster during off-peak traffic, or are you going to start blocking bots?

Cloudflare happens to be the largest provider of anti-DDoS and bot protection services, but if it wasn't them, it'd be someone else. I miss the open web, but I understand why site operators don't want to waste bandwidth and compute on high-volume bots that do not present a good value proposition to them.

Yes this does make it much harder for non-incumbents, and I don't know what to do about that.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-04 17:10:18+00:00
> I’ll ask them something about the design and they’ll reply: “IDK Claude did that.”

"Then your job is to go ask Claude and get back to me. On that note, if that's what I'm paying you for now, I might be paying you too much..."

I'm really interested to see how the intersection of AI and accountability develops over the next few years. It seems like everyone's primary job will effectively be taking accountability for the AI they're driving, and the pay will be a function of how much and what kind of accountability you're taking and the overall stakes.
by armchairhacker | 2025-08-04 17:10:27+00:00
Depending on the implementation (a big if) it would help smaller websites, because it would make hosting much cheaper. ISPs don’t choose what sites users visit, only what they pay. As long as the ISP isn’t giving significant discounts to visiting big sites (just charging a fixed rate per bytes downloads and uploaded) and charging something reasonable, visiting a small site would be so cheap (a few cents at most, but more likely <1 cent) users won’t weigh cost at all.
by rmccue | 2025-08-04 17:10:27+00:00
I'm afraid I don't have the specific episodes burned into my brain well enough to remember the names of them all. :)

That said, one that's burned into my brain is when they're walking along the South Bank riverside; the episode is apparently called "Ice Cream". The shot at ~0:48 in this video: https://youtu.be/cBti7aQBMk4?si=o3sWwfKJwQ-VEa8e&t=48 Is approximately from here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y1UmtCK5si8drVaD7 - It's not exactly the same as the show, but that's more a limitation of Google Maps; I bet you could recreate the shot. There's also usually an ice cream vendor just about there. :)

The bridge in the background is Victoria Bridge, the clock on the right is the Suncorp building (I think now demolished), the weird multi-part building next to it is Brisbane Square Library (now also a Suncorp building), and the arched building to the right of that is the Treasury Building (formerly the casino).

The rest of the shots in that episode are from various other parts in the parklands if you walk along it, including the lagoon beach, fountains, and walkway. The whole area (and the ibises) are an iconic part of Brisbane, as a legacy of Expo 88.

Aside from that, I think quite a lot of the shots in the city take place in real places, whether recognisable places like Mt Coot-Tha or random shops in the suburbs.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-04 17:10:52+00:00
Yea, when it comes to the alt-right / manosphere stuff, I don't think there's a lot of self-selection going on. The social media algorithms are largely steering boys and young men down these paths. Log out and get a fresh IP (or VPN), and take a random walk on YouTube to see for yourself. Within 10 clicks or so on recommendations, you're likely to start seeing one or two alt-right videos, and once you click on one, you're done for--90% of your recommendations will be things like "Become Alpha Male by increasing Testosterone" "Arguing with women and liberals using facts and logic!" and "Mussolini wasn't that bad!"
by gus_massa | 2025-08-04 17:10:58+00:00
> The position of medicine the whole way was "we can't prove ivermectin works" which is a valid position. That position also means - "we can't show ivermectin DOESN'T work" either, which seems to be how people are running with it.

OK, I have to agree.

> The armchair science here is, "LOL ivermectin doesn't work against viruses". Absolutely true, but not how it is meant to work. It's meant to kill the consequent inflammation.

It's easy to prove that. Just do a double blind randomized controlled trial published in a serious peer review journal. (Bonus points for preregistering)

I read a lot of the ivermectin papers and preprints during peak ivermectin. IIRC neither of them had a double blind randomized control group. Do you know a paper where they show positive results with ivermectin?

For covid-19 is perhaps too late, because after the vaccines and omicron everyone has some level of inmunity. But every 10 years there is a new regional coronavirus outbreak (like SARS1 or MERS), so it would be easy to test this in 5 years and it would be even more useful to confirm the effect and use it. But it must be confirmed, because otherwise we will just give a coctail of 10 miracle drugs, with 10 side effects an iteractiosn, that nobody is sure any of them work.
by rocky_raccoon | 2025-08-04 17:10:59+00:00
I picked up on it very quickly as well. Here are some more phrases that match that same LLM pattern. Sure, you could argue that someone actually writes like this, but after a while, it becomes excessive.

- Your program continues running with a corrupted heap - a time bomb that will explode unpredictably later.

- You’re not just getting 64 bytes of memory. You’re entering into a complex contract with a specific allocator implementation.

- The Metadata Mismatch

- If it finds glibc’s metadata instead, the best case is an immediate crash. The worst case? Silent corruption that manifests as mysterious bugs hours later.

- Virtual Memory: The Grand Illusion

- CPU Cache Architecture: The Hidden Performance Layer

- Spoiler: it’s even messier than you might think.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-08-04 17:11:06+00:00
I was recently listening to Cloudflare CEO on the Hard Fork podcast. He seemed to be selling a way for content creators to stop AI companies from profiting off such leeching. But the way he laid the whole thing out, adding how they are best placed to do this because they are gatekeepers of X% of the Internet (I don't recall the exact percentage), had me more concerned than I was at the prospect of AI companies being the front of summarised or interpreted consumption.

He went on, upfront — I’d give him that, to explain how he is expecting a certain percentage of that income that will come from enforcing this on those AI companies and when the AI companies pay up to crawl.

Cloudflare already questions my humanity and then every once in a while blocks me with zero recourse. Now they are literally proposing more control and gatekeeping.

Where have we all come on the Internet? Are we openly going back to the wild west of bounty hunters and Pinkertons (in a way)?
by pogue | 2025-08-04 17:11:11+00:00
With browser extensions becoming new attack vectors, we need some reliable way to determine if they're running suspicious or malicious code in them before they're able to deploy. It seems like not even Google can properly vet their extension before they're added to the extensions store.

The only way I've found to try and detect these as an end user is by using an extension called Under New Management [1], which attempts to alert you if a browser extension has changed ownership, at which point you can pretty much assume they've been compromised.

Other than that, I know of no way to attempt to detect these malicious and problematic extensions. If anyone has any suggestions, please share them.

[1] https://github.com/classvsoftware/under-new-management
by Ajedi32 | 2025-08-04 17:11:58+00:00
The fact that Tesla doesn't have a process for making crash data available to investigators is pretty indefensible IMO, given they're retaining that data for their own analysis. Would be one thing if they didn't save the data for privacy reasons, but if they have it, and there's a valid subpoena, they obviously need to hand it over.

For context though, note that this crash occurred because the driver was speeding, using 2019 autopilot (not FSD) on a city street (where it wasn't designed to be used), bending down to pick up a phone he dropped on the floor, and had his foot on the gas overriding the automatic braking: https://electrek.co/2025/08/01/tesla-tsla-is-found-liable-in... The crash itself was certainly not Tesla's fault, so I'm not sure why they were stonewalling. I think there's a good chance this was just plain old incompetence, not malice.
by nradov | 2025-08-04 17:12:03+00:00
You seem to be confusing amount of money with actual control. Electrical contractors can charge any price they want (subject to customer demand). Hospitals, especially teaching hospitals, have no such freedom. Medicare reimbursement rates are fixed by government fiat. This is not a free market.

Residencies are already chopped up into tiers. Those with more experience have more clinical and administrative autonomy. But for the most part, Medicare doesn't allow hospitals to directly bill for work done by residents. With a few limited exceptions, all of their work has to be supervised and signed off by a qualified attending physician. This training and supervision is extremely expensive.

Any major reforms will have to come at the federal government policy level. This is not a problem that medical schools and teaching hospitals can solve by themselves.
by dhruvrrp | 2025-08-04 17:12:07+00:00
Well, not that great for current workers either. Microsoft RSUs are usually 20% (compared to 40-80% in other big tech) or less for most employees, and on average msft has 30-50% less total compensation than other big tech.

All this stock upside might put some people's compensation to their true market value, but even that is based on tenure and historical stock vests.
by skeledrew | 2025-08-04 17:12:18+00:00
This is why Perplexity is my preferred deep search engine. The no-crawl directives don't really make sense when I'm doing research and want my tool of choice to be able to pull from any relevant source. If a site doesn't want particular users to access their content, put it behind a login. The only way I - and eventually many others - will see it in the first place anyway is when it pops up as a cited source in the LLM output, and there's an actual need to go to said source.
by OptionOfT | 2025-08-04 17:12:18+00:00
I wonder if the LPG system is aftermarket, and as such doesn't know the amount of gas left in the tank.

It reminds me when I get into my car. Ding ding ding ding to put on your seatbelt. Yet I haven't even put the car in drive.

My phone is constantly sending me messages trying to get my attention to buy something (even though on iOS there should be a per-app marketing opt-out, it's not enforced at all)

Or spamming 10 emails if you abandon a cart...

I don't like the idea of 'levels' where we can set which messages to get (like TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR), because that inevitably changes how these companies set their levels. After all, marketing affects their bottom line, so that makes it ERROR for them.