MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spivak | 2025-08-10 23:15:26+00:00
You have to be careful when applying moral hazard, because it's just authoritarian behavior with a more polite coating. There are times when it's appropriate and necessary to tell people what they can and can't do but I think this is a case where you either have to write and pass a law forbidding people to build and explicitly define the areas, even if it only forbids new construction, or continue bailing them out like any other natural disaster. This doesn't feel like a situation to "let the market figure it out" or abruptly pull disaster relief after the damage is done.
by alangibson | 2025-08-10 23:16:06+00:00
The workshop hits home. One of the decisions I made was to let my workshop grow organically around me based on what I'm doing. I started with a pile of junk tools on an Ikea table in an empty basement. By focusing on just what I needed at the time I ended up with fully equipped metal, wood and coating shops without ever consciously building them. They just sort of happened based on the needs of the next project.
by jadamson | 2025-08-10 23:16:18+00:00
> Here's the second sentence of this post you've claimed twice now believes men and women are no different

I'm literally not claiming that, lmao. Sorry, but I won't be replying to you further because you're clearly functionally illiterate.

What I said was that:

> both pessimizer and I agree that men and women are physically different

If you don't understand a chain of comments, start from the top, and stop wasting my time.
by Vektorceraptor | 2025-08-10 23:16:21+00:00
But "reading a book is not the same as letting someone else write one for you". I think that the learning curve from reading docs and forums is not the same as coding with AI. Many will intuitively become lazier, more careless, and dumber, whereas the well-read developer will, in turn, become less and less dependent on external forums.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-10 23:16:43+00:00
> First: it's not five years. It's five years if you posit that macs are magic and use no energy[1].

Huh? I'm not "positing" anything, I'm responding to the longevity you stated:

> you'd be looking at crossover in 5 years, or longer than the expected life of the device.

As for Apple users not having devices older than five years... ehm, yeah: the brand targets an audience that really likes shiny new toys (either because they're lured into thinking they need it, or because it's a status symbol for them). Not sure how that's relevant here though
by rawgabbit | 2025-08-10 23:16:54+00:00
I grew up in the South and former military. I don't own any guns and I live in Texas where I assume everyone is carrying a concealed firearm. I'm comfortable with people owning guns but do believe that open carry/brandishing is a no go. It's a long way of saying, I don't believe gun control works and I also don't believe a hand gun necessarily makes you safe. But if people thinks a hand gun is necessary, I'm OK with it. If I was a politician who is trying to reduce gun violence, a common sense approach to me is to limit the amount of ammunition that the average citizen can buy per month. I understand if you go hunting or wanting to defend yourself, you may want two boxes with 20 bullets each. If you're target shooting at a range, the range can sell you an unlimited amount but you must use it all at the range. I don't understand why people feel the need to stockpile thousands of rounds.
by slowdog | 2025-08-10 23:17:02+00:00
It's a reasonable take from the author, but the argument that you shouldn't use a tool you don't understand cuts both ways. Avoiding powerful tools can be just as much of a trap as using them blindly.

Like any tool, there's a right and wrong time to use an LLM. The best approach is to use it to go faster at things you already understand and use it as an aid to learn things you don't but don't blindly trust it. You still need to review the code carefully because you're ultimately responsible for it, your name is forever on it. You can't blame an LLM when your code took down production, you shipped it.

It’s a double-edged sword: you can get things done faster, but it's easy to become over-reliant, lazy, and overestimate your skills. That's how you get left behind.

The old advice has never been more relevant: "stay hungry."
by ben_w | 2025-08-10 23:17:04+00:00
Culturally? Nuts, sure, but you've been following the news right? Humans are nuts.

> we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines

TRL-1 tends to imply such statements :)

… although, is that actually true? For macroscopic, I mean? Given factories exist and robot arms are part of them, are you sure nobody has used a robot arm to assemble an identical robot arm from a pile of robot arm parts? I've not heard of anyone actually doing so, but are you sure that's never been done?
by atoav | 2025-08-10 23:17:53+00:00
A absolute rookie mistake is thinking your exhaustion-level has a linear correlation with the quality of the results. I know people who get suspicious if they haven't exhausted themselves, how can they have done a good job if they are not drained?

The truth is that the level of your craft has probably the biggest impact. A beginner can tear themselves apart with stressfull allnighters while doing a job and deliver the result a seasoned pro would have delivered in an afternoon.

And if all your employees are doing is stressfull allnighters and damage control they have no time to learn how to do properly and fast. But I get it, the goal is to extract money from their labour, not be their friends or produce quality products.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 23:18:04+00:00
"trying"

That is the point, though. An interesting neighbour to conquer is one which looks wealthy enough (no sense in conquering cold northern marshes full of mosquitos), and is weak enough so that you may actually conquer him and hold the territory without overextending yourself.

Most Roman neighbours by 1 AD would not pass the first test. The Persians would absolutely ace the first test, but they were equals to the Romans when it came to military prowess, and a danger to be reckoned with. As a result, the Eastern border was, overall, a source of weakness rather than profit.

Modern MBAs would probably call the Roman-Persian border a "cost center".
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-10 23:18:51+00:00
So in other words adopt a policy by which we shoot ourselves in the foot (several times over) and disrupt our neighbors. Double down on said policy by burning lots of cash to provide military assistance to our destabilized neighbor in the form of bombs (we sure do seem to love those). In the event this has negative consequences (ie our own citizens are killed) burn even more cash bombing the perpetrators into the ground (surely this won't result in any collateral damage or ill will).

To me that reads as a convenient step by step guide to undermining our own freedoms while destabilizing our neighbors. Perhaps in turn you'll propose the solution of occupying Mexico to "maintain security"?
by ath3nd | 2025-08-10 23:19:44+00:00
> AI will cause senior developers to become 10 times more effective

Bold statement! In the real world, senior developers were actually 19% less effective by using LLMs in the only study up to date.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Very brave to have an edgy opinion based on vibes that is counter to the only actual study though. Claiming that things are XYZ just because it feels like it is all the rage nowadays, good for being with the times.

> Unfortunately for the writer, he will probably get fired because of AI. But not because AI will replace him - because seniors will

Here is another prediction for you. In the current real world LLMs create mountains of barely working slop on a clean project, and slowly pollute it with trash feature after feature. The LGTM senior developers will just keep merging and merging until the project becomes such a tangled mess that the LLM takes billion tokens to fix it or it outright can't, and these so called senior developers had their skills deteriorate to such an extent that they'd need to call the author of the article to save them from the mess they created with their fancy autocomplete.
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-10 23:19:45+00:00
I'm already lazy and getting progressively stupider over time, so LLMs can't make me any worse.

I also think it's a matter of how one uses them. I do not use any of the LLMs via their direct APIs. I do not want LLMs in any of my editors. So, when I go to ask questions in with web app, it takes a bit more friction. I'm honestly an average at best programmer, and I do not really need LLMs for much. I mainly use LLMs to just ask trivial questions that I could have googled. However, LLMs are not rife with SEO ads and click-bait articles (yet).
by BobbyJo | 2025-08-10 23:20:04+00:00
For larger companies, "You have to move to X place and work 1 day a week in-office, but also we just laid some people off and will give you no guarantee that you won't be laid off after moving" is a good example that's common right now. You know none of the leadership is getting that kind of deal, but they expect a % of their employees to deal with it.

For smaller companies, bad equity splits, or a lack of transparency around equity or company performance is probably most common. It's pretty common for startups to avoid telling the whole story to the rank and file to keep them unaware of the actual risk/reward they are taking, which then allows founders/leadership to pad the risk/reward they themselves get.
by tim333 | 2025-08-10 23:20:45+00:00
>Luckey’s imagined scenario, where Taiwan defeats a Chinese invasion in 2029 outright with swarms of AI-powered drones (cruise missiles), autonomous submarines (torpedoes), and mass-producible missiles (more cruise missiles), is an excellent piece of storytelling. But as a strategic vision, it is hilariously flawed.

The Ukrainians use of naval drones and missiles against Russia's navy has been spectacularly successful to the extent they have had to withdraw from anywhere near Ukraine. While Luckey may be off on the details I'm sure it would be a major issue if China tried to invade Taiwan.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-08-10 23:21:45+00:00
I mean, did you check that?

Wright brothers:[0] 1903

"They made the first controlled, sustained flight of an engine-powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903"

737-100 :[1] 1967

"the initial 737-100 made its first flight in April 1967"

1967 - 1903 = 64

2025 - 1967 = 58

So in three years your statement will be true. As of now, it is false - unless you count the start of 737 development time I guess?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737

PS: This is also "backed up by Gemini" with the google search phrase "is first 737 flight closer to first wright brother flight than now?" .... but I'd rather do the math.
by sshine | 2025-08-10 23:22:27+00:00
Looking at the careers of mathematicians who turned software developers after putting minimal effort into CS courses, they all make CRUD work for insurance sector consulting companies. The pay is fine, but the work is absolutely dreadfully predictable. I'm sure that kind of work is automatable before anything where you solve a hard problem.

Not to discourage choosing math over CS, of course.

You just have to do it for the right reason: Because math is friggin' cool, and programming is easier to learn on your own than math, and there is a skill transfer that goes from math to programming that doesn't go the other way.
by skissane | 2025-08-10 23:22:32+00:00
> Erased generics the type information is not available at run time. That's the way Java does it and it kinda sucks.

To be more precise: in Java, generics on class/method/field declarations are available at runtime via reflection. The issue is that they aren’t available for instances. So a java.util.ArrayList<java.lang.String> instance is indistinguishable at runtime from a java.util.ArrayList<java.lang.Object> instance
by netsharc | 2025-08-10 23:22:42+00:00
I wonder if they can set it up so that orders for the freer world never touches the grabby hands of the (economic-)molester: produce the parts in China, if the buyer is outside of the US, ship directly to them..

Whereas for US orders, maybe offer a delivery to hotels in case the buyer is having a trip outside of the country? (Presumably it's not a sustainable idea, there'd be just a handful of people wanting to buy this product who'd happen to be travelling out of the country soonish)
by bradac56 | 2025-08-10 23:23:22+00:00
Sadly no. Russia already controls the important (rich) coastal lands and the single mineral mining area now. There is no reason for him to turn anything over without a complete invasion from the USA which is not in the country's interests.

The Ukraine lost several years ago and has no chance of winning at this point as the death toll on there side is not only larger but more devastating.

The thing you need to worry about is the next step, regaining Georgia's oil reserves.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-10 23:24:29+00:00
"governments and private companies should be looking at (socializing) mitigations that will keep risk within tolerable levels"

The problem is preference. There are more survivable structures and construction methods, but many people don't want to do them because they don't look as good. This isn't just a sea leave thing that might be better handled at the government level. We can look at stuff like the recent LA fires. If the stare was serious about fire prevention, they would apply the wildlands fire code to new construction in the city. Some people can't even be bothered about stuff like keeping dry brush away from their houses. As the country continues to build bigger and more expensive houses, we will continue to see prices rise.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-10 23:24:35+00:00
ZFS already took off, though. The largest data pools in existence that are on an actual filesystem are on ZFS, nothing else can handle them. And it's only the kernel part that needs the rewrite, the userspace stuff is fine.

Btrfs was started as Oracle's gamble against Sun's ZFS, but then they just bought Sun, ZFS escaped to OpenZFS, and Oracle killed the Btrfs team entirely. Btrfs has never actually outgrown that decision. Oracle, ultimately, was their only meaningful corporate sponsor.

You mention Fedora, but ironically, RHEL had it as an alternative option and then removed it.

I'll take Btrfs more seriously when it can actually do what ZFS can, and I'm not even really using it to its fullest potential. It has no equivalent features to raid-z/z2/z3, and has no equivalent feature to l2arc and zil. It has compression, but lacks LZ4, and lacks early-abort heuristics for uncompressable data.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-10 23:24:54+00:00
https://amzn[.]to/4frEGyC is a referral link, and referral links are not canonical links, which the guidelines implore us to use.

The above url resolves to the following (which I have rendered safe/non-clickable by slightly mangling the url with “[.]” in place of “.”):

https://www.amazon[.]com/dp/B07JW5WQSR?bestFormat=true&k=the...

Here is a non-referral link to the same product page:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR

The book has its own Wikipedia page, which would have been a non-commercial option, which would lessen any potential conflict of interest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
by codingdave | 2025-08-10 23:25:11+00:00
I like that we are stagnating. One of the things that took us away from the early content-focused days of the web is when every business had to get their brochures online, and every designer had to make their mark with how creative they could be. It vastly threw off the signal to noise ratio of web sites, and it delayed good UX for at least a decade because everyone re-invented menus and buttons on every web site.

Don't get me wrong. I like creativity. I am an artist, even have a degree in Fine Arts. But there are times to innovate, and there are times to just make things work. Web UX needs to just work.
by wilburm | 2025-08-10 23:25:44+00:00
You find that a convincing argument?

My point is that none of us know nearly as much as we think we do. If you think you’ve somehow zeroed in on the truth while sitting behind a screen or keyboard, you are sorely mistaken.

Telling me about how the world works while trying to treat it like a comic book with clearly delineated good and bad guys is kind of ironic.
by conaclos | 2025-08-10 23:26:05+00:00
I like the idea of repeating the delimiter on every line. However `//` looks like a comment to me. I could simply choose double quote:

const still_raw = "const raw = " "Roses are red " " Violets are blue, " "Sugar is sweet " " And so are you. " " "; " ;

This cannot be confused with a string literal because a string literal cannot contain newline feeds.
by 7402 | 2025-08-10 23:26:13+00:00
Paul Graham (remember him?) had an essay about 20 years ago that may be relevant to this: https://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html "What You'll Wish You'd Known"

It says when trying to figure out what to study, think about what might give you most options for the future, a future that you might have almost NO way of predicting now. He calls this "staying upwind." He gives an example:

Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

And given a choice between studying two subjects that interest you, but one is easier for you and one is a bit harder (but still within your abilities), opt for the harder one:

The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.

You don't have to automatically agree with everything in his essays as Great Truths, but it's worth considering his ideas.
by verdverm | 2025-08-10 23:26:29+00:00
I'm offering my anecdotal evidence as contrary to the loss of productivity piece that has been making the rounds, not as justification that they are wrong, but that we don't have enough data

It's also not the only data, here's one with results in the other direction

https://medium.com/@sahin.samia/can-ai-really-boost-develope...
by krackers | 2025-08-10 23:27:31+00:00
Maybe another analogy (or at least the way I intuitively understood it) was that humans sometimes skip over tokens we know to be fluff/filler. Without a sink, models have no way to "skip" over a token, that token _will_ attend to all previous tokens and be incorporated into the residual stream. It's easy to see that for filler tokens this will tend to hurt quality more than improve it, since you're more likely to pull in noise than if you could somehow "skip" that token entirely.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-08-10 23:27:39+00:00
That's a valid observation, but we both lived through the advent of the modern PC, and the PC eliminated far more tools than that.

It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.
by frompdx | 2025-08-10 23:27:55+00:00
At first I thought maybe you were cherry-picking some examples from more prestigious schools. Then I checked on the tuition rates for the schools I attended. $29,000/yr for the less desirable school. $35,000/yr for the more desirable/well known school. That's the IN STATE rate. Neither of these are considered top tier or prestigious by any means. Just regular state schools that are virtually in the middle of nowhere.

Let's say you get a student job on campus to help cover costs. In my state you can only work a maximum of 19.5 hours per week in a student job by law. If you earn minimum wage (which you probably will) you can earn a maximum of $14,327/yr while attending school with your student job. That isn't enough to cover housing at either of these schools, let alone tuition.

People used to joke about people who went into six figure debt for an arts degree from a private college. Now a degree from a no name state school will set you back six figures.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-10 23:27:57+00:00
> Did he consider that the LLM wouldve done it the right way after the first message if prompted correctly?

Did you consider that Scrum for the Enterprise (SAFe) when used correctly (only I know how, buy my book), solves all your company's problems and writes all your features for free. If your experience with my version of SAFe fails, it's a skill issue on your end. That's how you sound.

If your LLMs which you are so ardently defending, are so good, where are the results in open source?

I can tell you where, open source maintainers are drowning in slop that LLM enthusiasts are creating. Here is the creator of curl telling us what he thinks of AI contributions.https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s... Now I have the choice: should I believe the creator of curl, or the experience of a random LLM fanboy on the internet?

If your LLMs are so good, why does it require a rain dance and a whole pseudoscience how to configure them to be good? You know what, in the only actual study with experienced developers to date, using LLMs actually resulted in 19% decrease in productivity. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... Have you considered that maybe if you are experiencing gains from LLMs but a study shows experienced devs don't, that maybe instead of them having a skills issue, it's you? Cause the study showed experienced devs don't benefit from LLMs. What does it make you?
by agentultra | 2025-08-10 23:29:27+00:00
This doesn’t seem surprising and I hope it isn’t. David Suzuki and others have gone on record saying that we’ve lost the climate fight. Politics and economics are useless at preventing it. Oil and gas won. We’re locked in for a post 1.5 C world.

You can’t insure against catastrophes that are basically guaranteed to happen.

It’s too late to restructure to prevent catastrophic climate change. Seems like all we can do is restructure to survive and take care of one another for as long as we can.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-10 23:29:34+00:00
If you look at the history of Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire you'll find that Society largely collapsed into small towns each governed by their own local Lord or perhaps a king but constantly subject to attack from all sides by neighboring powers in distant foreign powers who would occasionally sweep through and murder every one except for the desirable women and children. Occasionally a man's life might be spared if agreed to be a slave or serf for another Lord or King. The situation was exacerbated by the effects of the Justinian plague and the onset of volcanic winter in the year 536.
by bearjaws | 2025-08-10 23:29:55+00:00
Yeah I have found my MBP at 100% far too often, every now and again I peak and it says "holding charge".

I don't leave my laptop plugged in 100% of the time, however it is plugged in ~70% of the time and I never discharge it that much when it is unplugged. So this little app is perfect for me.

Seems Apple still has work to do on their algorithm, it could easily keep it at 80% and I would never get below 20%.