MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keiferski | 2025-08-16 10:18:23+00:00
There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning:

Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task.

In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market.

You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known.

Of course this doesn’t apply to every job, and indeed many jobs have already been “replaced” by AI. But any analysis which isn’t reflectively factoring in the reception of AI into the background is too simplistic.
by sho | 2025-08-16 10:20:45+00:00
> the role of reserve currency today is larged hoisted by the rest of the world onto the USA

> Unfortunately the USA is playing a necessary systemic role here that nobody else wants to do

Well. I know what you're trying to say, but it's not like the USA just does nothing to maintain the system. The military, the middle east bases, the petrodollar - none of this is free. The economy is larger than oil, of course - but at the end of the day, most countries still need oil, most oil is still paid for in USD, and will continue to be as long as the USA is the final underwriter of security in that region (and asian, and europe.. until recently).

That's always been the deal. The USA provides the security at the end of the day, and everyone else agrees to use its currency. The unwritten promise part is that the US government won't allow too much inflation, keeps an independent central bank, and the debt it offers is to be considered risk-free.

The US military isn't going away but the security guarantees which were such an important part of the compact are fading, and inflation - serious inflation - seems to be coming into view. It won't happen overnight but it does smell a bit like the beginning of the end.

> EU/China) dosen't want that role either, lest they end up deindustrialising like USA

I don't actually think there's any law of nature that reserve currency status == de-industrialization. The UK didn't do so when it wore the crown and I don't think there's any reason the EU or PRC would inevitably do so either should they step up. I think it just happened to overlap - plenty of rich countries also de-industrialized without being the USA!

I think/hope that it will eventually be the EU that steps up but it obviously won't happen quickly and they aren't exactly covering themselves with glory over the current crises. There would need to be a lot of changes needed on their side, not least of which the mechanisms and mandate to issue a much, much larger amount of debt. But if the USA sees 5% inflation for a year or two - I think the opportunity would be there.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-16 10:20:48+00:00
> And if they feel like they really want to be evil, switch the fees to carryons.

They have decided to be evil.

All low costs companies in Europe have been charging for carry ons since the end of Covid. You are only allowed a backpack which has to fit under the sit in front of you for free and adding carry ons is quite expensive, can be nearly as much as the ticket.

Classic airlines have started weighting carry ons before boarding too so it’s only a matter of time before they charge.

For a normal traveler and unless you do a very short trip, prices have actually significantly increased in the past few years.
by rolandog | 2025-08-16 10:22:00+00:00
> Are we simply getting old and bitter?

It depends, maybe 20 years ago — a couple of years after the dot com bubble — we thought we were not gonna repeat the same mistakes as we did before, and I do believe we blindly drank the kool-aid thinking we were gonna solve all problems with tech.

Now, we're another year old another year wiser times 20. I don't think having one's eyes open is synonymous with bitterness... but, it is what we do with the information and knowledge we have acquired that defines that trait: do we sit and grumble and shake our fists at the cloud (providers?), or do we seek others to try to prevent problems from escalating.

> Are we really better or worse off than a few decades ago?

While technologic progress in several fields has been amazing, it would be naïve of us to not recognize the areas where we have regressed.

Looking back, I think we should have normalized caution, not moving fast and breaking things; normalized interoperability, and not walled gardens; and we should have been more wary about the dangers of not having solved business models instead of normalizing tracking and targeted advertising, which enabled personalized propaganda...

... we should have also paid more attention at the unchecked power of monopolies and media conglomerates and done more to foster a healthier economy as well as improve the quality of life and rights protection of people, including access to education and the strengthening of institutions.

So, to finally answer your question, I think we are in general a bit worse off. Why? Well, I look back to 20 years ago when our outlook on the future was that the sky was the limit if you worked and studied hard; and now the outlook on the future 20 years from now... seems uncertain.
by Davidzheng | 2025-08-16 10:22:03+00:00
I basically agree with you. In the first point I mean that if it is possible to tell whether a being is conscious or not from the text it produces, then eventually the machine will, by imitating the distribution, emulate the characteristics of the text of conscious beings. So if consciousness (assuming it's reflected in behavior at all) is essential to completing some text task it must be eventually present in your machine when it's similar enough to a human.

Basically if consciousness is useful for any text task, i think machine learning will create it. I guess I assume some efficiency of evolution for this argument.

Wrt length generalization. I think at the order of say 1M tokens it kind of stops mattering for the purpose of this question. Like one could ask about its consciousness during the coherence period.
by bboygravity | 2025-08-16 10:22:24+00:00
Carbon tax on a state level to try to fight a global problem makes 0 sense actually.

You just shift the emissions from your location to the location that you buy products from.

Basically what happened in Germany: more expensive "clean" energy means their own production went down and the world bought more from China instead. The net result is probably higher global emissions overall.
by CSSer | 2025-08-16 10:23:48+00:00
I'm not at all skeptical of the logical viability of this, but look at how many company hierarchies exist today that are full stop not logical yet somehow stay afloat. How many people do you know that are technical staff members who report to non-technical directors who themselves have two additional supervisors responsible for strategy and communication who have no background, let alone (former) expertise, in the fields of the teams they're ultimately responsible for?

A lot of roles exist just to deliver good or bad news to teams, be cheerleaders, or have a "vision" that is little more than a vibe. These people could not direct a prompt to give them what they want because they have no idea what that is. They'll know it when they see it. They'll vaguely describe it to you and others and then shout "Yes, that's it!" when they see what you came up with or, even worse, whenever the needle starts to move. When they are replaced it will be with someone else from a similar background rather than from within. It's a really sad reality.

My whole career I've used tools that "will replace me" and every. single. time. all that has happened is that I have been forced to use it as yet another layer of abstraction so that someone else might use it once a year or whenever they get a wild feeling. It's really just about peace of mind. This has been true of every CMS experience I've ever made. It has nothing to do with being able to "do it themselves". It's about a) being able to blame someone else and b) being able to take it and go when that stops working without starting over.

Moreover, I have, on multiple occasions, watched a highly paid, highly effective individual be replaced with a low-skilled entry-level employee for no reason other than cost. I've also seen people hire someone just to increase headcount.

LLMs/AI have/has not magically made things people do not understand less scary. But what about freelancers, brave souls, and independent types? Well, these people don't employ other people. They live on the bleeding edge and will use anything that makes them successful.
by Zigurd | 2025-08-16 10:24:06+00:00
There's something off about blaming mass availability and low prices for poor travel experiences.

My poor travel experiences are due to airlines lying about delays and having inadequate resources to deal with the problems that led to those delays.

The trade-off isn't that there are men in cargo shorts on my flight because it's cheap, it's at the airline will strand you in some hell hole and won't pick up the phone for hours.
by andreykocevski | 2025-08-16 10:24:22+00:00
I am actually working on a plastic free toothpaste alternative, we are planning to launch in the next few months. Its not a paste but rather tooth tablets that you crush with your teeth and as they dissolve you brush your teeth as you would normally. Zero plastic, refillable aluminum container, refill packaging made out of paper, and we plan to put free floss and toothbrush for the monthly subscription. Do you want me to add you to our waitlist? Deliquify.com is our website that i hacked together very quickly, but we will rebrand soon.
by latexr | 2025-08-16 10:24:40+00:00
I would say that for something like this, it’s still worth it even if you spent more time on it than you’ll ever save.

Not only have you learned new skills and got better at the craft, but you also removed a frequent source of frustration and get satisfaction every time your system works and you remember “heck yeah, I did this”. It increases your happiness and well-being overall into the future and keeps on giving.
by diggan | 2025-08-16 10:26:14+00:00
> Whoa, HTML templating? It inserts the stuff directly where the function is called, and it just works? And it's been available in browsers forever? Stop the presses, I gotta rewrite all my static sites

As someone who learned HTML, CSS and JS in the late 90s/early 2000s, we've finally come full circle :) Back in those days, `document.write` was commonly the first piece of JS many of us wrote, here is a `document.write` I wrote 14 years ago, seems to be the earliest one I could find in my public GitHub repos: https://github.com/victorb/Flashback-Citat/blob/f4da38ace620...

Most of us were told early to avoid `document.write` like the plague though, as there generally was better ways of achieving the same thing, but without all the drawbacks.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-16 10:26:20+00:00
> In my country it is almost 100%.

> Most gets recycled, the rest used as fuel in energyplants.

Do want to share how much work your "almost" is doing here?

> the 10 countries in the world that are responsible for 90% of dumping stuff in the rivers (all in south asia and africa).

How much of it is their own waste? How much was produced for Western consumers and then off-loaded onto them?
by Roark66 | 2025-08-16 10:28:07+00:00
ARM adds... Since I saw the first arm based soc (rockchip rk3566) every so came with npu accelerator. Usually pretty small ones. 0.5 Tops (int8) etc.

The novel thing seems to be that they will make it a part of the GPU? Really? Even my Samsung Galaxy S7 (quite few years old by now) supported Vulcan and run neural nets pretty well with Vulcan etc.

Where is the novelty?
by wongarsu | 2025-08-16 10:28:44+00:00
Burning is a lot better than dumping it in a river, as happens in many places in Asia. It reliably gets rid of the plastic, produces energy (ideally offsetting fossil fuels that would otherwise have been burned), and regulations for exhaust filtration keep the toxins at bay.

Not producing plastic would be preferable, and sequestering it in a landfill is the second best option, but burning it is a great alternative where the first two don't work
by z3c0 | 2025-08-16 10:29:41+00:00
Amodei's work history indicates that his background as a software developer is a single part-time job that he held for a year-and-a-half after college. As far as I'm concerned, he wouldn't even make it as a junior on my team. I'm not inclined to believe anything he says about what it takes to write production-ready code.
by rbees | 2025-08-16 10:30:17+00:00
> Comments like this give me a vibe of young developers

I don’t think so. The context is about avoiding joining in memory, which is fairly awful to do in a application, and should be avoided, along with uninformed use of ORMs, which often just add a layer of unwarranted complexity leading to things like the dreaded N+1 problem that most inexperienced Rails developers had when dealing with ActiveRecord.

If anything, what you’re talking about sounds like development hell. I can understand a database developer having to bake in support for that level of security, but developing an app that actually uses it gets you so far in the weeds that you can barely make progress trying to do normal development.

A developer with several years of experience or equivalent will have pride in developing complexity and using cool features that make them feel important.

After a developer has maybe twice that many years experience or equivalent, they may develop frameworks with the intent to make code easier to develop and manage.

And beyond that level of experience, developers just want code that’s easy to maintain and doesn’t make stupid decisions like excessive complexity. But, they know they have to let the younger devs make mistakes, because they don’t listen, so there is no choice but to watch hell burn.

Then you retire or get a different job.
by mdavid626 | 2025-08-16 10:30:33+00:00
I disagree. In modern highly scalable architectures I’d prefer doing joins in the layer front of the database (backend).

The “backend” scales much easier than the database. Loading data by simple indexes, eg. user_id, and joining it on the backend, keeps the db fast. Spinning up another backend instance is easy - unlike db instance.

If you think, your joins must happen in db, because data too big to be loaded to memory on backend, restructure it, so it’s possible.

Bonus points for moving joins to the frontend. This makes data highly cacheable - fast to load, as you need to load less data and frees up resources on server side.
by Arcanum-XIII | 2025-08-16 10:30:41+00:00
I’ve seen friends with stimulant and can say with full confidence they are not reacting to them the way I am. They’re « high », ideas everywhere and nowhere, acting like their overstimulated, full of energy… when I’m quieter, energy level normal, can think at one thing at a time without switching… and sleeping under the effect is not an issue. I a have great nap.

So no. Maybe if I try a récréative drug will I have my adhd multiplied, but here it’s not. I think it should have been fun while younger discovering that amphetamine could quiet me when everyone was dancing under the influence.

It’s not perfect. No medication are. If you abuse it, take it without need… yeah it can be abused. Don’t try heart medication either. Or lithium for kicks. Or…
by JdeBP | 2025-08-16 10:30:55+00:00
See manual page and changelog.

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/djbwares/guide/commands/clockspee...

* https://github.com/jdebp/djbwares/commit/8d2c20930c8700b1786...

Yes, 27 years later it now compiles on a non-Intel architecture. (-:
by Macha | 2025-08-16 10:31:34+00:00
> Some might be worried, that they will refuse less problematic request, and that might happen. But so far my personal experience is that I hardly ever get refusals.

My experience using it from Cursor is I get refusals all the time with their existing content policy out, for stuff that is the world's most mundane B2B back office business software CRUD requests.
by javcasas | 2025-08-16 10:31:44+00:00
I want to live in the post scarcity world. Given that we are headed into an ultra-productive world, I prefer by miles a world without scarcity over a world full of scarcity because the elites are hoarding the resources, and the only way to provide for oneself is by outcompeting the machines that already produce at zero marginal price, but only for the elites.
by tonfa | 2025-08-16 10:32:10+00:00
> How much of it is their own waste? How much was produced for Western consumers and then off-loaded onto them?

From following ocean cleanup project, for plastic ending up in the ocean it's usually own waste. The issue is countries that don't have working waste collection systems, any rainpour will often wash out the trash into river/oceans.

(littering is also an issue in countries with waste management though, but to a smaller degree, I kinda hate when people don't realize that stuff they throw in the street will often end up in rain collectors and directly flow into rivers)
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-16 10:34:08+00:00
> We have democratically rejected democracy.

That sounds like an assurance given by the people in power to make people feel better about losing their freedoms.

> That's what most people mean when they say "<x> electorate are not good stewards of democracy."

Is it? I can't say I've heard a lot of people using that phrase so I'm surprised you would be able to split it up into what most people do and don't mean by it. The person above meant that the US had traditionally positioned itself as a nation that would fight for things like freedom of expression and the rights of people and enterprise to do their own thing, but that recently they had failed to perform this function for themselves.
Show HN: MemViz – a modern C++ memory visualization tool
by LA-10 | 2025-08-16 10:34:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on MemViz, a tool to help inspect and visualize memory in C++ programs. It’s aimed at developers, students, and systems engineers who want a simple way to look under the hood without firing up a heavyweight debugger.

What it does:

Inspect object layouts, padding, and alignment.

Explore vtables and runtime dispatch.

Track allocations and report possible leaks.

Hex-dump mapped memory regions (mmap / CreateFileMapping).

Uses modern C++20 features like std::bit_cast for safe reinterpretation.

Why I built it: I found existing debuggers very powerful but often overwhelming for quick introspection. I wanted a lightweight, modern, and approachable tool to learn about object memory layouts, teach others about the C++ object model, and do simple leak/hex inspections.

Try it out:

Repo: https://github.com/LA-10/MemViz

It’s header-only in parts, with examples and test files you can build right away.

No signups, no barriers — just clone and run.

Feedback I’d love:

Is this useful in your workflow or teaching?

What features would you want for a simple memory visualization tool?

Where does it overlap or complement tools like ASan/Valgrind?

I’m around to discuss, answer questions, and hear any suggestions. It's very simple currently.

Thanks!
by mattmanser | 2025-08-16 10:35:03+00:00
Most ORMs will happily let you map stored procedures and views to a class, you can have as many models as you want. So your point doesn't really make sense.

The author's said nothing about ORMs. It feels like you're trying to post a personal beef about ORMs that's entirely against the "pragmatic" software design engineering the author's opining. Using ORMs to massively reduce your boiler-plate CRUD code, then using raw SQL (or raw SQL + ORM doing the column mapping) for everything else is a pragmatic design choice.

You might not like them, but using ORMs for CRUD saves a ton of boilerplate, error-prone, code. Yes, you can footgun yourself. But that's what being a senior developer is all about, using the tools you have pragmatically and not foot gunning yourself.

And it's just looking for the patterns, if you see a massive ORM query, you're probably seeing a code smell. A query that should be in raw SQL.
by animal531 | 2025-08-16 10:35:04+00:00
I've seen videos where adults try to act like children and even there where they're trying really hard they'll get it hilariously wrong.

A great example is that little children have no protocol, they won't walk up to someone and say things like hi, how are you, how's the weather, etc.

Instead they'll just walk up and either stay mute, or just talk directly about what's currently happening, without any introduction or pre-amble.
by lurking_swe | 2025-08-16 10:36:06+00:00
Not the person you replied to, but I have! A java project I worked on a couple years ago used a thin persistence layer called JOOQ (java library). It basically helps you safely write sql in java, without ORM abstractions. Worked just fine for our complex enterprise app.

Sql migrations? This is a solved problem: https://github.com/flyway/flyway

What about micro services? You write some terraform to provision a sql database (e.g. aws aurora) just like you would with dynamo db or similar. What does that have to do with ORMs?

What about redis? Suddenly we need an ORM to query redis, to check if a key exists in the cache before hitting our DB? That’s difficult code to write?

I’m confused reading your comment. It has “you don’t do things my way so you must be dumb and playing with toy projects” vibes.
by dzonga | 2025-08-16 10:36:48+00:00
what's not spoken about is the moral posturing of western countries the uk/e.u etc that has affected their global markets.

without their moral posturing - dubai wouldn't exist.in 3rd world countries a while back in the 90s companies would dual-list on their home exchange and the LSE. win-win. back then visas were not difficult to get etc or you could travel visa free if part of commonwealth.

now the shaddy business dealers would rather prefer dubai were they're not lectured about the moral failures of their business practices or who they associate with.

trump for all his failures was able to recognize this - hence one of his first trips was to the GCC.
by cesarb | 2025-08-16 10:39:11+00:00
> Any ideas why it isn’t more popular and more well known?

While git-annex works very well on Unix-style systems with Unix-style filesystems, it heavily depends on symbolic links, which do not exist on filesystems like exFAT, and are problematic on Windows (AFAIK, you have to be an administrator, or enable an obscure group policy). It has a degraded mode for these filesystems, but uses twice the disk space in that mode, and AFAIK loses some features.
by asdefghyk | 2025-08-16 10:40:02+00:00
T his articale includes ..... Al-Sharif wrote in his final message, posthumously published on his social media accounts. “I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification.”......

Did he ever post criticism of Hamas?
by ben_w | 2025-08-16 10:40:44+00:00
I once asked a CEO, what a CEO's job involves.

Apparently it's lots of fiduciary duties.

As with driving cars, even if the AI is strictly better at doing these tasks than they are at writing code, mistakes aren't so easy to recover from and can destroy something unrecoverably in a 5-second attention lapse from a human overseer.