MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tonymet | 2025-08-28 22:49:33+00:00
I see a worrisome trend. On one hand, many of my proto-boomer friends are suffering from age-ism , and memes claim that over-50-year-olds are unemployable. Not 100% fidelity, but there's some truth.

Then I hear about a lot of youngsters struggling to find work, and see articles like this.

Well, who's left? Is there a sweet spot at like 31 that are just cleaning up?
by Herring | 2025-08-28 22:49:52+00:00
> Yet at the same time, economic growth has mostly kept going, but it isn't translating to improved quality of life for Average Joe.

Yes ... money has diminishing returns on happiness. Americans often have a really hard time understanding and accepting this.

Ask your favorite frontier LLM what Americans should be doing to improve their quality of life, based on what we know works in other rich countries.
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by sho_hn | 2025-08-28 22:50:21+00:00
One good yardstick, if one has to anthropomorphize, is that LLMs know and believe what's popular. If you ask it to do something that popular developer opinion gets right, it will do fine.

Ask it for things that many people get wrong or just do badly, or can be mistakenly likened to a popular thing in a way that produces a wrong result, and it'll often err.

The trick is having an awareness of what correct solutions are prevalent in training data and what the bulk of accessible code used for training probably doesn't have many examples of. And this experience is hard to substitute for.

Juniors therefore use LLMs in a bumbling fashion and are productive either by sheer luck, or because they're more likely to ask for common things and so stay in a lane with the model.

A senior developer who develops a good intuition for when the tool is worth using and when not can be really efficient. Some senior developers however either overestimate or underestimate the tool based on wrong expectations and become really inefficient with them.
by gp90 | 2025-08-28 22:51:01+00:00
> The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures

This one hits close to home. Case in point, many people on HN argue that having fewer goods and higher prices is part of being an developed country. I think it's deadly wrong. A hallmark of a modern industrialized society is to make once-expensive products accessible to the majority of the people, if not everyone. That's how we got electricity, got clean water, got food like butter (which only wealthy families could afford), got cars, got iphone, got all kinds of appliances, and got amazing infrastructure. And somehow now it's okay to accept that China can manufacture and build faster, and cheaper, and better?
by rd07 | 2025-08-28 22:51:02+00:00
I live in Indonesia, and I don't find any recent news that mention X (formerly Twittwr) and or Discord being blocked by the government. The only relevant news from a quick Google search I can find is about the government threatened to block X due to pornography content in 2024. You can even check for yourself if a domain is blocked by visiting https://trustpositif.komdigi.go.id/.

Also for your unability to access the VPN, as far as my experience goes, in the past some providers do block access to VPN. But, I am not experiencing that for at least the last 5 years.

So, maybe you can try changing your internet provider and see if you can connect to VPN?
by lawlessone | 2025-08-28 22:52:10+00:00
I think i seen something similar before in the early days. before i was aware of COT i asked one to "think" for itself, i explained to it i would just keep replying "next thought?" so it could continue to do this.

It kept looping on concepts of how AI could change the world, but it would never give anything tangible or actionable, just buzz word soup.

I think these LLMs (without any intention from the LLM)hijack something in our brains that makes us think they are sentient. When they make mistakes our reaction seems to to be forgive them rather than think, it's just machine that sometimes spits out the wrong words.

Also my apologies to the mods if it seems like i am spamming this link today. But i think the situation with these beetles is analogous to humans and LLMS

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/06/19/193493225/t...
by fluoridation | 2025-08-28 22:52:25+00:00
I'll go further than you. Even if the team is a cost center, it may not make sense to reduce the headcount if there's still more work to do. After all, an internal team that just assists other teams in the company without directly creating value suddenly become more productive could in turn make the other teams more productive. Automatically reducing headcount after a productivity increase is like that effect where people drive more dangerously when wearing seatbelts.
by krashidov | 2025-08-28 22:52:26+00:00
Chase Bank Story time -

We sold our company in 2020. Anticipating the wire I decided I needed to upgrade to a big boy bank from my small regional bank that I've been using since I was 16.

What finer institution is there than J.P. Morgan Chase? I opened an account with them. I called them telling them there was going to be a larger than average transfer. I put in $500 to "warm up" the account (stupid in retrospect).

Acquisition goes through. Champagne for everyone. I try to login to look at the funds and my account has been closed. I call Chase and ask them "wtf?"

They say there's been fraud in the account. We've closed it. We will mail the check to your address. So I'm thinking they're going to mail me my acquisition funds over check?? FML. 24 agonizing hours and 10 calls to them later (all leading nowhere), I eventually got the funds to be wired to my original regional bank lmao. No thanks to Chase, this was all because of PNC who was in charge of the acquisition.

This is probably my fault for using a new account like this (I think someone told me to use a large bank or something I don't remember), but I will forever hold a grudge against Chase.

P.S. I never got back my $500 that they stole from me
by lqet | 2025-08-28 22:52:49+00:00
This. A less confusing way to ask the question with the 1/3 answer would be:

What is the probability that a family with 2 children has exactly 2 daughters *if you know that the family does not have 2 boys*?

The reasons why the original problem is so confusing is the same reason why the Monty Hall is so confusing: people have different understandings of the question, and don't realize it in discussions. As I have written a few years ago [0]:

Because most people don't talk formal probabilities, your explanations will be so vague that the other person will not realize your different understanding. You will discuss forever, you will both be right, and you will part ways with the strange feeling that maybe the other person was right, when all along you were talking about different problems. This is why this problem is so notorious.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24707305
by DouweM | 2025-08-28 22:53:21+00:00
I'm not sure how long ago you tried streaming with Pydantic AI, but as of right now we (I'm a maintainer) support streaming against the OpenAI, Claude, Bedrock, Gemini, Groq, HuggingFace, and Mistral APIs, as well as all OpenAI Chat Completions-compatible APIs like DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, Ollama and vLLM, and cloud gateways like OpenRouter, Together AI, Fireworks AI, Azure AI Foundry, Vercel, Heroku, GitHub and Cerebras.
by apt-apt-apt-apt | 2025-08-28 22:54:00+00:00
Semi-interesting, but it felt like it was leading up to something big or interesting knowledge all the way up to the end.

Seems like it could have been way shorter, the plot is essentially "Deposited more and more money into a local Chase branch, made some guy named Alex a rising star. They called once in awhile, not sure why. Moving lots of money around isn't super straightforward."
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-28 22:54:16+00:00
The bank account was appropriate for small businesses. IE, restaurant, laundromat, ect. This became clear when the article explained that there was education for tellers about what a tech startup is.

Mitchell didn't take the call. He ended the call as quickly as he politely could, short of hanging up on Alex.

Edit: I've had a few bank tellers advise me on how to adjust my bank account correctly in the past. I'm going to assume this is what Alex was trying to do.

I might also point out that, around this time, Wells Fargo tellers were very pushy and would make calls like this. (I got one) It later came out that they were under intense pressure to sell banking services that nobody wanted.
by nerdsniper | 2025-08-28 22:54:35+00:00
In their testing, even with odd numbers of physical cores, SMT caused an even number of logical cores. Some phones didn't have SMT, and also had an odd number of physical cores, but this was genuinely rare.

Also, they still might not (but probably learned). In this article they imply that each type of CPU core (what they call a "tier" in the article) will still be a power of two, and one just happened to be 2^0. I'm not sure they were around when the AMD Athlon II X3 was hot.

>>> Today I learned this was possible. This was a total "today I learned" moment. I didn't actually think that hardware vendors shipped processors with an odd number of cores, however if you look at the core geometry of the Pixel 8 Pro, it has three tiers of processor cores. I guess every assumption that developers have about CPU design is probably wrong.
by ajkjk | 2025-08-28 22:54:40+00:00
It is in their interest to find explanations for reductions in labor that don't assign the blame to corporate greed.

For example, a call center might use the excuse of AI to fire a bunch of people. They would have liked to just arbitrarily fire people a few years ago, but if they did that people would notice the reduction in quality and perhaps realize it was done out of self-serving greed (executives get bigger bonuses / look better, etc). The AI excuse means that their service might be worse, perhaps inexcusably so, but no one is going to scrutinize it that closely because there is a palatable justification for why it was done.

This is certainly the type of effect I feel like underlies every story of AI firing I've heard about.
by mcspiff | 2025-08-28 22:55:32+00:00
Couldn’t agree more — Much like running my own DNS or email server, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to running my own website directly on the internet. It’s just not worth the hassle. For stuff only I use, it sits behind my VPN. For anything that _must_ be public, it’s going behind a WAF someone else can run.
by breve | 2025-08-28 22:56:49+00:00
The work of many talented engineers at Tesla is dismissed by Musk: https://archive.md/QJQ3r

Some engineers have become so corrupted by the culture of lying of Tesla that they're willing to lie about things that there's no need to lie about, like quarter mile times of the Cybertruck:

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/tesla-cybertruck-beast-vs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J3H8--CQRE

The lead engineer on the Cybertruck sadly tried to defend the lie, while admitting that they never even ran that quarter mile:

https://x.com/wmorrill3/status/1746266437088645551
by svara | 2025-08-28 22:57:03+00:00
> What do you mean? Modulo is not a perfect hash function

It's a perfect hash function for the case where you work with ints and know the maximal min-max range beforehand; then you can modulo by the size of the range as long as it's not too large. In your example 33-21 --> mod 12

This comes up for me surprisingly often but obviously depends a lot on what you work on. It is often tempting to reach for a hashtable, but it's a lot less efficient in this case.
by ares623 | 2025-08-28 22:57:44+00:00
The fear and pain of writing boring code gave us the processes and systems we have today. i.e. microservices, (I know they have their own problems) were born out of pain from maintaining monoliths. Agile (again, own problems) was born out of pain from waterfall.

What happens when all pain and boredom is taken away? Why do we need to invent new frameworks, systems, design patterns in that scenario?
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-28 22:57:52+00:00
How about the popular fruit with a vulgar name

> The English word "avocado" comes from the Spanish word aguacate, which comes from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word ahuacatl. This Nahuatl word translates to "testicle". The name was likely given to the fruit by the indigenous Nahua people because of its suggestive shape, and the fruit's reputation as an aphrodisiac.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-28 22:58:02+00:00
> There's no arguing with personal preference or axioms of belief like "no matter what tax is bad"

But that's just a straw man. To hold that belief you would have to e.g. actually want to "defund the police" to avoid the need for tax revenue to pay them. Is that supposed to be a common position among Republicans?

The real contention is how much. There is a large difference between the government taking 5% of your salary and 65%, even if taxes exist in both cases. And then if you think ordinary people should be paying less than they are now rather than more, you'll reasonably want to oppose things that conceal tax collection from the constituents who are paying them, because then those constituents will be less likely to notice and object to excessive spending.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-28 22:58:13+00:00
I think it can go both ways... I've definitely copied code into a project more than once. I've also directly written the following line of code into a lot of places, just because of import overhead and convenience when needed.

const sleep = (ms) => new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, ms));

I also with push for just straight SVG with JSX instead of the massive charting libraries everyone seems to bring in... similar when I seem moment.js ... I don't know why more people don't generate/refer to the resource usage outputs. If anything comes close to the base React or MUI libraries, it gets yanked if at all possible. Or at LEAST load it async and only where necessary.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-28 22:58:24+00:00
While this sounds cool, the issues it raises are not.

Many people are unaware that the wavelengths of light in certain ranges, which include both the near UV (N-UV, violet/blue zones), and the N-IR have biochemical interactions, and blocking this through use of a contact lens has been linked (afaik) to myopia, which have many different risk factors.
by rwhitman | 2025-08-28 23:00:03+00:00
Wow this is incredible. I saw the emergence of that spiral cult as it formed and was very disturbed by how quickly it proliferated.

I'm glad someone else with more domain knowledge is on top of this, thank you for that brain dump.

I had this theory maybe there was a software exception buried deep down somewhere and it was interpreting the error message as part of the conversation, after it had been stretched too far.

And there was a weird pre-cult post I saw a long time ago where someone had 2 LLMs talk for hours and the conversation just devolved into communicating via unicode symbols eventually repeating long lines of the spiral emoji back and forth to each other (I wish I could find it).

So the assumption I was making is that some sort of error occurred, and it was trying to relay it to the user, but couldn't.

Anyhow your research is well appreciated.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-08-28 23:00:18+00:00
The ratio between Indonesian parliamentary income and the median Indonesian income is ~18x, while the ratio in the US is ~4x. As someone who wants US congressional income to be substantially higher, it's hard for me to be upset at that on its own. There are plenty of other variables at play, though, and a direct comparison of these ones might not be getting at the issue.
by zdragnar | 2025-08-28 23:00:18+00:00
RAD programming held the same promise, as did UML, flow/low/no code platforms.

Inevitably, people remember that the hard part of programming isn't so much the code as it is putting requirements into maintainable code that can respond to future requirements.

LLMs basically only automate the easiest part of the job today. Time will tell if they get better, but my money is on me fixing people's broken LLM generated businesses rather than being replaced by one.
by photonthug | 2025-08-28 23:00:21+00:00
I wanted to love pydantic AI as much as I love pydantic but the killer feature is pydantic-model-completion and weirdly.. it has always seemed to work better for me when I naively build it from scratch without pydantic AI.

I haven't looked deeply into pydantic's implementation but this might be related to tool-usage vs completion [0], the backend LLM model, etc. All I know is that with the same LLM models, `openai.client.chat.completions` + a custom prompt to pass in the pydantic JSON schema + post-processing to instantiate SomePydanticModel(*json) creates objects successfully whereas vanilla pydantic-ai rarely does, regardless of the number of retries.

I went with what works in my code, but didn't remove the pydantic-ai dependency completely because I'm hoping something changes. I'd say that getting dynamic prompt context by leveraging JSON schemas, model-and-field docs from pydantic, plus maybe other results from runtime-inspection (like the actual source-code) is obviously a very good idea. Many people want something like "fuzzy compilers" with structured output, not magical oracles that might return anything.

Documentation is context, and even very fuzzy context is becoming a force multiplier. Similarly languages/frameworks with good support for runtime-inspection/reflection and have an ecosystem with strong tools for things like ASTs really should be the best things to pair with AI and agents.

[0]: https://github.com/pydantic/pydantic-ai/issues/582
by pron | 2025-08-28 23:00:33+00:00
Rust is as old now as Java was when JDK 6 came out. But it's not just Java. Look at Fortran, C, C++, JS, C#, PHP, Ruby, Go, and even the late-bloomer Python - no popular language had an adoption rate as low as Rust at its rather advanced age. The trend just isn't there. It may well be that low-level programming will slowly shift to Rust an Zig, but there is no indication that low level programming as a whole isn't continuing its decline (in use, not importance).

> Avoiding a GC can let you slash that cost

But it doesn't, because RAM isn't the bottleneck in the vast majority of cases. It doesn't matter how linear costs are if RAM isn't the thing that's exhausted. That's why the use of manual memory management had been declining for decades.

At 1TB per core things still don't change because GC no longer has a high footprint cost in the old gen. You may use 15x RAM for the first 50 MB, but the overhead for the second GB is very small, thanks to the generational hypothesis: the older an object is, the less frequently it is allocated. The cost of a moving-tracing GC is propprtional to allocation-rate * live-set / heap-size per generation. When the live set is large, the allocation rate in that generation is low, which means that the heap size premium is also low.

> So don't expect results tomorrow afternoon.

Manual memory management is the older option, and it's been in decline for decades precisely because the savings in costs go in the other direction (not in all situations, but in most) due to the economics of RAM costs vs CPU costs. Without a marked change in the economics, the trend won't reverse even in another 50 years.
by jcranmer | 2025-08-28 23:00:55+00:00
Since only the first one responds to any of Zitron's content that I've actually read, I'll respond only to that one:

It's not responsive at all to Zitron's point. Zitron's broader contention is that AI tools are not profitable because the cost of AI use is too high for users to justify spending money on the output, given the quality of output. And furthermore, he argues that this basic fact is being obscured by lots of shell games around numbers to hide the basic cash flow issue. For example, focusing on cost in terms of cost per token rather than cost per task. And finally, there's an implicit assumption that the AI just isn't getting tremendously better, as might be exemplified by... burning twice as money tokens on the task in the hopes the quality goes up.

And in that context, the response is "Aha, he admits that there is a knob to trade off cost and quality! Entire argument debunked!" The existence of a cost-quality tradeoff doesn't speak to whether or not that line will intersect the quality-value tradeoff. I grant that a lot turns on how good you think AI is and/or will shortly be, and Zitron is definitely a pessimist there.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-28 23:00:58+00:00
I suspect, as with programming languages, some people think in a way that makes it easy for them and others think in a way that makes it hard.

Personally -- and I'm no web dev, so I probably don't count -- I think CSS is hard (maybe more irritating than hard, but in any case I wouldn't call it easy). In large part because the syntax is ugly, but also because it just doesn't "mesh" with me. If I'm reading it or writing it, I always feel like I'm having to decode it. But I can easily and happily work with some programming languages that most devs would cross the street to avoid.

Maybe that's also why some people are attracted to being web devs and others aren't?

As a user, nothing would thrill me more than if web pages just stopped using JS, though, so I am very happy that there is a feasible alternative to doing that that web devs could enjoy!
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-08-28 23:01:38+00:00
Overconfident, but also easy to sway their opinion.

They follow directions for maybe an hour and then go off and fix random shit because they forgot what their main task was.

They'll tell you to your face how great your ideas were, and that you're absolutely right about something, then go implement it completely incorrectly.

They add comments to literally everything even when you ask them to stop. But they also ignore said comments sometimes.

Maybe they are kinda like us lol.
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-28 23:01:55+00:00
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but this comparison is odd. You’re comparing the fastest Forester (XT turbocharged) to the slowest V6 Charger. The slowest V8 Charger does 0-60 in 5.1 seconds. The fastest one does 0-60 in 3.6 seconds.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-28 23:02:11+00:00
I saw really big power savings when I started using TuneD. Such a huge upgrade for Linux users! From 8 months ago, going from 120 -> 85W. More recently got my desktop down to 65, yay. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42636350

There's also API compatibility with the power-profiles-daemon, which didn't ever help me that much (I'd also done some basic tuning myself), and which has been unmaintained for a while now. But there's still a variety of utilities which target the old ppd.
by sanxiyn | 2025-08-28 23:02:17+00:00
While the broad point that no, OpenAI and Anthropic are not losing money on inference, is almost certainly correct, the model itself is quite incomplete.

If you actually want to know, I recommend Inference economics of language models from Epoch AI, which is probably the best public model as of 2025-06.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04645
by B-Con | 2025-08-28 23:02:23+00:00
> I am obviously not disputing your experience, but wanted to mention that this was not the standard pattern. The standard pattern for forced conversion at L6 (Staff) was either 6 or 7 reports (I don't remember exactly).

Given more reports and forced to be on the EM track.

I think 4 is still OK for L6 (L7 can have up to 19!).

> I don't want to be overly pedantic, but there's no Principal EM on Google eng ladders and so it's not entirely clear which level you're referring to.

I meant L7 EM - I have no idea why I wrote Principal (probably because I was moving too fast), and now it's too late to edit.