MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elgrantomate | 2025-08-21 21:01:45+00:00
Earlier this year, I fell into a trap with AI-assisted writing. I did find my way out—and the experience was more than a bit scary, as well as educational, cathartic—and humbling. It also cemented my conviction that while AI can be helpful, there's a real risk of it acting as an accelerant for our self-destructive impulses.
by Lerc | 2025-08-21 21:01:49+00:00
I had an experience like this in a real-life non technical situation.

Walking down the street I receive a text to say my glasses were ready to be picked up. I had not purchased any glasses, and the store that I was to collect them from was not in the city I live in. By coincidence I was approximately 30 meters from a branch of the same store in my town. I popped in to tell them that someone had entered a phone number incorrectly and someone might need to told by other means that their glasses were ready.

The response? "Certainly sir, can I have your name, and address". Explaining how this information was not relevant was not fruitful. I was reluctant to provide this information because about the only thing they could have done with it was to add it to the account that matched the phone number. I wasn't in the mood to engage in identity theft for a free pair of glassees, but the conversation was going in circles. Eventually another staff member observed the rising tension and offered to take care of this difficult situation. She took my phone number, and the address of the branch that had sent the text, said thank you for the notification and she would sort it out with the other branch. I was out of the store within 30 seconds of her taking over.
by armchairhacker | 2025-08-21 21:01:51+00:00
Agreed. As someone who uses AI (completion and Claude Code), I'll disclose whenever asked. But I disagree that it's "common courtesy" when not explicitly asked; since many people (including myself) don't mind and probably assume some AI, and it adds distraction (another useless small indicator; vaguely like dependabot, in that it steals my attention but ultimately I don't care).
by lucideng | 2025-08-21 21:01:53+00:00
imo, really depends on what you're doing, what your team's skills are, growth trajectory, money, etc. if you need to scale a ton of compute up and down, k8s might be a good fit, but for most startups, it's using a sledgehammer to drive a finishing nail.

* how much downtime can be tolerated during a deploy or outage? load balancing and multi-region is more $$$.

* if you have a bunch of linux nerds and an efficient app -- a nginx webserver + your app + Postgres DB and Ansible to manage a single VM with Cloudflare in front of it might be a good option. Portainer in the VM is nice if you want to go with containers.

* if you have a bunch of desktop devs, containers and build pipelines with PaaS are a good option. many are resilient and have HTTPs built in.

* the smaller your infra/devops team, the more i would leverage team knowhow and encourage PaaS offerings.

* the smaller your budget, the more creative you need to be (ec2/storage accounts as part of hosting, singular monolithic VM has relatively flat costs, what free stuff do i have on my cloud provider, etc)
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-08-21 21:02:30+00:00
Not making the thing is a point in favor of LLMs for some of these people I suspect. So the pride in work thing is just not high on the list of incentives.

I don’t get it at all. Feels like modernity is often times just inventing pale shadows of things with more addictive hooks to induce needlessly dependent behavior.
by alkh | 2025-08-21 21:02:44+00:00
I enjoy using uv a lot but am getting afraid that it is getting bloated for no reason. For ex., the number of niche flags that a lot of subcommands support is very high + some of them seemingly achieve the same result(uv run --no-project and uv run --active). I'd rather them working on improving existing tools and documentation than adding new (redundant) functionality
by pipes | 2025-08-21 21:02:50+00:00
I've been a paying user for years. Their desktop UI is awful. They introduced a feature that took me hours and hours to disable (the file not downloaded until you try to open it thing). One bit of documentation pretty much lied about turning it off. Turned out it had to be disabled in more than one place.

I still use them as I don't have time to move else where. Plus they run on Linux and windows which is what I need.

I wish they had "I'm only interested in file sync" mode so that the whole mess of other features is hidden from me.
by blurbleblurble | 2025-08-21 21:02:50+00:00
That's just not true. I have 20 years of dev experience and also am using these tools. I won't commit slop. I'm open to being transparent about my usage of AI but tbh right now there's so much bias and vitriol coming from people afraid of these new tools that in the haze of their fear I don't trust people will actually take the time to neutrally determine whether or not the code is actually slop. I've had manually written, well thought through, well conceived, rough around the edges code get called "AI slop" by a colleague (who I very much respect and have a good relationship with) who admittedly hadn't had a chance to thoroughly understand the code yet.

If I just vibe-coded something and haven't looked at the code myself, that seems like a necessary thing to disclose. But beyond that, if the code is well understood and solid, I feel that I'd be clouding the conversation by unnecessarily bringing the tools I used into it. If I understand the code and feel confident in it, whether I used AI or not seems irrelevant and distracting.

This policy is just shoving the real problem under the rug. Generative AI is going to require us to come up with better curation/filtering/selection tooling, in general. This heuristic of "whether or not someone self-disclosed using LLMs" just doesn't seem very useful in the long run. Maybe it's a piece of the puzzle but I'm pretty sure there are more useful ways to sift through PRs than that. Line count differences, for example. Whether it was a person with an LLM or a 10x coder without one, a PR that adds 15000 lines is just not likely to be it.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-21 21:02:56+00:00
I don't know if future generations will agree with this sentiment, in which case we lock ourselves out of future talent (i.e. those that use AI to assist, not to completely generate). The same arguments were made about Photoshop once upon a time.

> Do companies want to hire "honest" people whose CVs were written by some LLM?

Unfortunately yes, they very much seem to. Since many are using LLMs to assess CVs, those which use LLMs to help write their CV have a measured advantage.
by cabbagebird | 2025-08-21 21:02:57+00:00
yes - if you meant people sitting at a desk typing lines of code. no - if you meant engineer as a profession will be gone.

the nature of the job simply changes. people moved from punching cards to program computer to typing on keyboard. Although it becomes a lot cheaper to write programs, programmer/engineer as a profession didn't die. It evolved. When it becomes cheaper, people want more of it.
by ux266478 | 2025-08-21 21:03:11+00:00
The background noise that those social interactions constitute is valuable and important of itself. Bonded relationships are important, but it's a separate matter entirely. Otherwise relationships lived out over the internet would be equal and interchangeable with those lived out in person. It wouldn't matter if you talked to someone face-to-face or over email. The human experience shouldn't be picked apart piece meal with overrationalization and naive maximalism.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-21 21:03:58+00:00
For my scope documents I spend hours questioning users and validating each step and asking “why don’t you just…?”, and try and boil that down.

Doesn’t matter if you drive VS Code every day though, because that means You Know Better (tm), and to hell with the discovery process.

I actually wouldn’t have a problem with pulling engineers into those discovery exercises directly, except when I have, they’ve just refused to engage. Come out without asking many questions and seemingly haven’t listened to a thing.

It’s like engineers just think it’s all beneath them, (and I accept I was a bit like that when I was engineering), so forcing them to do the calls isn’t an awful idea.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-21 21:04:10+00:00
Yes. https://i.ibb.co/8gFNPcwX/temprp.png - Goldman chart.

Luckily we have the lockdown era as a benchmark, when everyone was locked inside and Robinhood style option and stock trading, the SPAC craze, etc, was at mania levels. App proliferation today is close enough to the same as the 2020-2022 period, but it's a good point and sure, a portion of the increase probably does come from further online trading market penetration.
by ankit219 | 2025-08-21 21:04:47+00:00
Building with non deterministic systems isnt new. It does not take a scientist. Though people who have experience with these systems are fewer in number today. You saw the same thing with TCP/IP development where we ended up developing systems that assumed the randomness and made sure that isnt passed on to the next layer. For every game, given the latency involved in previous networks, there is no way on the network games were deterministic.
by bkettle | 2025-08-21 21:05:29+00:00
No, that isn't "okay". A key part of walking- and biking-friendly infrastructure is ensuring that there are places to go (in many places it is flat out illegal to build places to go near housing!). This definitely means changing zoning and land use regulations to make distributed commerce legal, but likely means adjusting development incentives to incorporate the external costs of, e.g., people driving to a big-box store vs visiting a neighborhood grocery store.
by cyanydeez | 2025-08-21 21:05:51+00:00
the problem is ISP became a Utility, not some fountain of unlimited growth.

What you're arguing is that AI is fundamentally going to be a utility, and while that's worth a floor of cash, it's not what investors or the market clamor for.

I agree though, it's fundamentally a utility, which means theres more value in proper government authority than private interests.
by tamimio | 2025-08-21 21:06:01+00:00
Who cares? The word "engineer" is meaningless now and anyone can be a self-proclaimed engineer whenever they feel like it. Will anyone double check or even reject you for an engineering job when you are not? Absolutely not! Take a bootcamp, submit plenty of PRs correcting typos, and pass the interview with the help of AI and you basically made it, dreams come true!!
by dfxm12 | 2025-08-21 21:06:04+00:00
Maybe there are regs on appliances in Europe, or maybe the prices are high enough that the market demands efficient appliances (like gas/petrol). Whenever I stay in an airbnb in europe, whether it is a fancy place or a cheap apartment, all the appliances look similarly small and water efficient. The washing machine, flushing, hot water heaters, etc. can all add up. To wit, there is no uniform water efficiency requirements in the US.
by chankstein38 | 2025-08-21 21:06:12+00:00
Because they do it all for us and they frequently do it wrong. We're not offloading the calculation or the typing to the thing we're using it to solve the whole problem for us.

Calculators don't solve problems, they solve equations. Writing didn't kill our memories because there's still so much to remember that we almost have to write things down to be able to retain it.

If you don't do your own research and present the LLM with your solution and let it point out errors and instead just type "How do I make ____?" it's solving the entire thought process for you right there. And it may be leading you wrong.

That's my view on how it's different at least. They're not calculators or writing. They're text robots that present solutions confidently and offer to do more work immediately afterwards, usually ending a response in "Want me to write you a quick python script to handle that?"

A thought experiment, if you're someone who has used a calculator to calculate 20% tips your whole life, try to calculate one without it. Maybe you specifically don't struggle because you're good at math or have a lot of math experience elsewhere but if you have approached it the way this article is calling bad, you'd simply have no clue where to start.
by ipdashc | 2025-08-21 21:06:14+00:00
While this article is a little overenthusiastic for my taste, I think I agree with the general idea of it - and it's always kind of been my pet peeve when it comes to ML. It's a little depressing to think that's probably where the industry is heading. Does anyone feel the same way?

A lot of the stuff the author says resonates deeply, but like, the whole deterministism thing is why I liked programming and computers in the first place. They are complicated but simple; they run on straightforward, man-made rules. As the article says:

> Any good engineer will know how the Internet works: we designed it! We know how packets of data move around, we know how bytes behave, even in uncertain environments like faulty connections.

I've always loved this aspect of it. We humans built the entire system, from protocols down to transistors (and the electronics/physics is so abstracted away it doesn't matter). If one wants to understand or tweak some aspect of it, with enough documentation or reverse engineering, there is nothing stopping you. Everything makes sense.

The author is spot on; every time I've worked with ML it feels more like you're supposed to be a scientist than an engineer, running trials and collecting statistics and tweaking the black box until it works. And I hate that. Props to those who can handle real fields like biology or chemistry, right, but I never wanted to be involved with that kind of stuff. But it seems like that's the direction we're inevitably going.
by iLemming | 2025-08-21 21:06:19+00:00
> I am not going to completely change my editor and rebuild two decades of optimization just to use two Emacs tools.

Fair point on the surface, it's missing the key aspect of what Emacs actually is. Emacs is not just an editor - to a degree it's philosophy is that your computing environment should be malleable. Those two decades of optimization don't get thrown away; they get encoded directly into the system. Instead of learning to work around the limitations of separate tools, you're investing in a platform that can absorb and amplify all that accumulated knowledge. The question isn't whether you want to abandon your workflows, but whether you want to be limited by them forever.

The key insight is reframing it from "starting over" to "finally having a place where all that expertise can compound indefinitely."

I mean, I get it - not everyone wants their editor to be infinitely customizable; sometimes you just want something that works out of the box. Yet I do honestly think every programmer should give Emacs a serious try at some point in their career - not because they'll necessarily stick with it, but for the same reason why everyone should learn at least one OOP language and get introduced to an FP language. It expands your thinking about what's possible.

Even if you go back to your previous tools, you'll understand computing differently, having seen what a truly malleable environment looks like, the idea of a truly personal computing environment - one that grows with you rather than constraining you. Dismissing Emacs as "just another editor" misses what makes it fundamentally different.

I completely understand your impulse (been there myself), but I'd encourage you to keep an open mind about what Emacs actually offers. When you get a chance maybe explore the philosophy behind it. You might discover something unexpectedly rewarding.
by tptacek | 2025-08-21 21:06:29+00:00
I buy this for writing. There's a very limited set of things GPT is good at for improving my writing (basic sentence voice and structure stuff, overusing words), but mostly I find it makes my writing worse, and I don't trust any argument it makes because, as the post observes, I haven't thought them through and had the opportunity to second-guess them myself.

Also it has a high opinion of Bryan Ferry. Deeply untrustworthy.

But I don't buy this at all for software development. I find myself thinking more carefully and more expansively, at the same time, about solving programming problems when I'm assisted by an LLM agent, because there's minimal exertion to trying multiple paths out and seeing how they work out. Without an agent, every new function I write is a kind of bet on how the software is going to come out in the end, and like every human I'm loss-averse, so I'm not good at cutting my losses on the bad bets. Agents free me from that.
by palata | 2025-08-21 21:06:41+00:00
I don't think it will, for multiple reasons:

1. AIs are really good at doing the equivalent of copy-pasting code you don't understand from many places, running the compiler and moving stuff around until it compiles. But whenever I find something slightly challenging, no AI remotely gets close to the solution. I can literally put everything in one function, explain to the AI why it doesn't work and why the solutions generated by the AI don't work over and over, and the AI never gets to the actual solution. For that, we need a human.

2. It's true that software quality is generally bad already and has been declining even before AIs. Security is really bad. But we at least need some basic sanity. You can't have an AI include random unchecked libraries forever, and you can't even provide a list of allowed libraries because AIs may well end up generating the malware in your code. You need someone who can read and understand the code to keep the bad security we have today, otherwise it will get even worse.

3. All the examples of vibe coding nowadays seem short-sighted: what happens when you vibe code millions of lines? How does that work, when does it just implode entirely? We already talk about how Microsoft may have just lost skill and how they may not be able to produce the same quality as they did at their peak, what happens when literally nobody understands the code?

4. For the better or worse, being more productive has never meant working less. When humans get a new tool that makes them more productive, they just produce more instead of working less. Companies will keep hiring programmers even if those are more productive because of AI.

AI will probably stay as a tool for programmers. But it won't take their jobs.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-08-21 21:07:26+00:00
I support every single word of this comment. Good product managers are unicorn masters of discovery and delivery who are so rare that they climb up quickly in corporate hierarchy to strategic positions leaving holes in product operations. I have seen products running A/B tests without understanding how they work, designing UI sketches without any knowledge of UX, pushing features to roadmap based on a feedback of a single user etc. Maybe it makes more sense to abandon this role instead of fixing it and split the required skills between UX designers, business analysts, marketers, engineering and project managers etc.
by pyman | 2025-08-21 21:07:35+00:00
Time.

Most of my 10-hour workday people bombard me with messages and meeting requests. Messages I can usually ignore, but meeting requests get abused by some. Anyone can send one anytime and it hijacks your focus.

I wish companies would set a limit on how many meeting requests employees can send per month. At least then people would think twice before stealing someone else's time and attention.

Time thieves are the real productivity killer.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-21 21:07:58+00:00
The April meltdown was a great example of how markets react to net capital outflows from global investors. Interestingly enough, since the foreign buyer strike, money has been roaring back into US financial markets. I'll zip my mouth when it comes to judging their decision on that front, but I'll at least say that I suspect that the AI narrative has a strong pull, and much of the world really has no good option to participate in this apparently extremely intoxicating investing narrative other than to buy US tech. To be fair, the US has these sorts of narratives running more often than not, so we'll see how it plays out long term. As of now, talk of foreign money being pulled from the US was a flash in the pan.
by tzs | 2025-08-21 21:08:15+00:00
Many top STEM schools have substantial humanities requirements, so I think they agree with you.

At Caltech they require a total of at least 99 units in humanities or social sciences. 1 Caltech unit is 1 hour of work a week for each week of the term, and a typical class is 9 units consisting of 3 hours of classwork a week and 6 hours of homework and preparation.

That basically means that for 11 of the 12 terms that you are there for a bachelor's degree, you need to be taking a humanities or social sciences class. They require at least 4 of those to be in humanities (English, history, history and philosophy of science, humanities, music, philosophy, and visual culture), and at least 3 to be in social sciences (anthropology, business economics and management, economics, law, political science, psychology, and social science).

At MIT they have similar, but more complicated, requirements. They require humanities, art, and social sciences, and they require that you pick at least one subject in one of those and take more than one course in it.
by nullc | 2025-08-21 21:08:20+00:00
> is that they don’t know either

It would be nice if they did, in fact, say they didn't know. But more often they just waste your time making their chatbot argue with you. And the chatbots are outrageous gaslighters.

All big OSS projects have had the occasional bullshitter/gaslighter show up. But LLMs have increased the incidence level of these sorts of contributors by many orders of magnitude-- I consider it an open question if open-public-contribution opensource is viable in the world post LLM.
by username332211 | 2025-08-21 21:08:28+00:00
"Disaster" is a very subjective term. One man's disaster is another's normality.

How many people died between 1812 and 1815 because there were no Trans-Atlantic telephone lines? About 30 thousand soldiers, wasn't it? Probably quite a few civilians as well.

I'd call the preventable death of 30 thousand men a disaster, wouldn't you? But in 1812 it was business as usual.

Would you say penicillin isn't essential, just because it's 1928 and people are accustomed to deaths from bacterial infections?
by rexer | 2025-08-21 21:08:43+00:00
I read the full article (really resonated with it, fwiw), and I'm struggling to understand the issues you're describing.

> Yes of course relationship questions don’t have a “correct” answer. But physics questions do. Code vulnerability questions do. Math questions do. I mean seriously?

Can you say more? It seems to me the article says the same thing you are.

> I don’t actually think the above paragraph makes any sense, does anyone disagree with me? “Instead of planning we observe and hypothesize”?

I think the author is drawing a connection to the world of science, specifically quantum mechanics, where the best way to make progress has been to describe and test theories (as opposed to math where we have proofs). Though it's not a great analog since LLMs are not probabilistic in the same way quantum mechanics is.

In any case, I appreciated the article because it talks through a shift from deterministic to probabilistic systems that I've been seeing in my work.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-21 21:08:49+00:00
The Canadian funds like VEQT/XBAL/etc are overly concentrated in Canada on purpose because it reduces volatility:

* https://www.vanguard.ca/content/dam/intl/americas/canada/en/...

* https://benderbenderbortolotti.com/home-bias-in-the-vanguard...

Vanguard/Blackrock could set the allocation to whatever they wanted, but it's a conscious choice. Absolute returns are not necessarily the only consideration (if they are, perhaps buy a NASDAQ fund).