MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by forgotoldacc | 2025-08-18 00:39:22+00:00
Not sure if proposing building a underclass of underpaid jobs that we consider below Americans is the answer. A better answer could be to pay them a couple dollars more an hour so the pay isn't awful. There are also loads of areas of the country where people are struggling because mining and manufacturing jobs went away years ago. Cost of living is generally low in those places, so you don't need to pay California wages but it's still an upgrade compared to the opportunities they currently have.

And saying "see these manufacturing jobs that your family used to have? The government is giving these only to foreigners and giving them citizenship too" most certainly will not help the growing anti-immigrant tendencies.
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-18 00:39:50+00:00
When I first started programming as an employee at Travelocity I discovered a senior Java developer who was really good at CSS and JavaScript. At that time, around the beginning of 2008, there was a very clear division of labor between Java people and front end web people. Java people had absolutely no idea how to write JavaScript. It was so bad that Google wrote a tool called Google Web Toolkit (GWT) that automatically generated JavaScript from Java logic and it was beyond horrible, but there were some Java developers that really needed it.

What I found most interesting about this excellent developer, and of course she was absolutely excellent at her job writing Java as well, was her secrecy. She did not mean to reveal her ability to masterly address CSS and JavaScript concerns to me. She did so because she knew I was super new and it didn't matter. She did not reveal this to anybody else, because she didn't want to compensate for the repeated failures of people around her. In hindsight I can absolutely see why she went out of her way to suppress her capabilities while at the office.
by magicalhippo | 2025-08-18 00:40:03+00:00
> I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase)

A family friend was a chip designer for a large European company. Back in the 2000s he told me he saw the writing on the wall as they moved manufacturing to Asia.

He said he expected design to follow not long after, and sure enough some 5 or so years later he lost his job as they moved design department closer to the factories.

Perhaps it's different now, but as I recall he said there were advantages of chip designers being close to the chip manufacturing folks.
by ryao | 2025-08-18 00:40:41+00:00
Multiple people have tried to explain buffer bloat to you and you have repeatedly denied it affects people in reality. The discussion with you has been little different from people saying that a number of things are explained by the Earth being round only to be told, by you in this analogy, that we have failed to consider many other things and thus cannot really know that the earth is round.

This is the most bizarre choice of “hill to die on” that I have ever seen.
by mc32 | 2025-08-18 00:41:15+00:00
They jobs don't pay spectacularly well, but they pay better than Mickey D's and other service jobs, so they would be an upgrade to those jobs. Manufacturing tend to have union rep., if that matters. We have lots of underemployed and people working lousy service jobs --we don't really need to import labor that needs additional customs/social and language training.

Interestingly, we favored China's manufacturing over Mexico's "maquilladoras," I think mostly over quality and cost issues due to corruption, lack of education and cartels.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-08-18 00:41:59+00:00
I work in retail media. There is a large difference in the kind of value we capture - rather than creating incentives for annoying or addictive behavior, we only show advertisements on ecommerce pages. If you are seeing our ads, you already have the intent to buy a kind of product, but the kinds of ads we show are trying to convince you to buy a specific brand of product.

Perhaps you searched "laptops". You see a handful of results, and at the top a banner says "Dell XPS - 20% off!"

Have we manipulated you in any way? Have we lied to you? The fact that a laptop is 20% off is valuable information to a user who might consider price in their purchase. What we sell is not advertising, but real estate on your screen

Am I in love with what I do? No. But we dont engage in the kind of advertising market described in the OP's article. What we do is the equivalent of a grocery store putting products on the end cap of an aisle and getting paid extra for the valuable real estate
by lapcat | 2025-08-18 00:43:02+00:00
> So if you are saying that this is a thing that is already supported but not used, can you link to such a post that you have made? As it is, I'm not sure that HN even lets you make posts like that.

I think that HN simply makes your text the first comment. For example, here I linked to a social media post, and it made sense to quote the entire post to save a click: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41556661

> the guidelines argue directly against the point you're making, basically saying that commentary (which would include a blurb or summary) should go in a comment, not in the submission itself.

Where do the guidelines say this? I'm not seeing it.

> AI/LLM and other kinds of generated commentary is against HN guidelines to my reading also, so you would have to do that yourself.

Definitely. I'm not calling for AI summaries. I don't want AI summaries.

> It seems likely that what you're asking for would result in more rehashing and less original content

Why?

> I think it would be gamed by bad actors

What do you mean by a bad actor?

> allow charlatans and sophists to invisibly rewrite history and the present

I honestly have no idea what this means in the context under discussion, especially the "invisibly" part but also the rest of your claim.

The submitter writes a brief summary of the submitted article. Everyone knows it's the submitter's summary. The worst that can happen is that the submitter writes a bad summary, you click the link, and the article turns out to be not what you expected. This already happens with article titles. Then you can come back and complain about the summary in the comments to the submission. I'm not seeing what the big deal is here.
by ahmedhawas123 | 2025-08-18 00:43:06+00:00
This is cool though wanted to share a couple of thoughts for reflection:

I feel like your demo video is not the greatest one to highlight the capability. A browsing use case likely does require a key press->planning loop, but a gaming use case, or a well known software (e.g., excel), may be able to think ahead 10-20 key presses before needing the next loop / verification. The current demo makes it seem slow / prototype-like.

Also, the X/Y approach is interesting when thinking about a generic approach to screen management. But for example for browsers, you're likely adding overhead relative to just marking the specific div/buttons that are on screen and having those be part of the reasoning (e.g., "Click button X at div with path XX"). It may be helpful to think about the workflows you are going after and what kind of accelerated management you have over them.
by somerandom2407 | 2025-08-18 00:43:36+00:00
Back in the old days, people would share useful information in the internet of their own accord. That still happens a lot today, too! In my opinion, most of the stuff that's ad-supported is not worth my time, as the "content creator" is trying to sell something or otherwise has an angle they're pushing. How can I trust what they have to say when I know they're only doing it to make some money? They will be less interested in helping me than helping themselves!

I think if you take ads away from the internet, you'll also take away a lot of the bullshit and inaccurate or misleading information. If no-one is making any money off of it, you'll be left with largely relevant information.

The internet today is like a free to air television network, but I remember a time when it was nothing like that.
by coffeeling | 2025-08-18 00:43:38+00:00
Korean faces the exact same problems as Japanese, though - the language structure is similar, they have a ton of Chinese loans, and have in general gone through a largely identical history of writing development. They have somewhat fewer homonyms than Japanese, sure, but they still have tons from Chinese loans (hell, "coffee" and "nosebleed" sound the same, as do "blood" and "rain" in many cases).

It's somewhat hard to believe that Japanese sits in some magic spot where a phonetic script wouldn't work just fine when Korean does it fine, and on the Sinitic side people write books in pinyin, Vietnamese is phonetic, and the Dungan people write their 3-tone Mandarin dialect with cyrillic alphabet without even notating tones.

> Maybe you're right that it's all just hard-headed stubbornness from fluent people.

It's not just hard-headed stubbornness - reading kana really is more difficult to proficient readers of today's Japanese, and change is work.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-18 00:43:53+00:00
Not quite. Generally "content" from people trying to monetize their writing online (or who describe it as such) is not worth the time spent reading it, so in fact you're already in the hole before being asked to compensate them somehow. That I read/watched the stuff at all is often more a reflection of poor time management on my part than some high value of theirs (the OP essay mentions a similar point, and it's captured by the modern idea of "doomscrolling" recognizing "content consumption" as a potential behavioral addiction). So it's more that I think it takes a fairly high level of audacity for some rando to think people would not just be interested to hear what they have to say, but actually pay to hear their thoughts.

Generally the most useful information on the web is freely given. Turns out actual experts frequently like nerding out about their thing and trying to get other people interested in it/to understand some facet of it.
by Aeolun | 2025-08-18 00:44:33+00:00
Personally I’m having a blast reading AI generated fiction. As long as the direction is human, and often enough corrected to keep the minor inconsistencies out, the results are pretty good.

For me it’s no different from generating code with Claude, except it’s generating prose. Without human direction your result ends up as garbage, but there’s no need to go and actually write all the prose yourself.

And I guess that just like with code, sometimes you have to hand craft something to make it truly good. But that’s probably not true for 80% of the story/code.
by theshackleford | 2025-08-18 00:44:53+00:00
> People who graduated in June are having a real struggle finding a job.

So were people who graduated in 2007-2009. I guess it heralded the end of white collar jobs. Oh wait...no it didnt.

> LLMs are going to make "any degree" jobs an increasingly rare thing as time goes on.

If you actually believe this, it makes you one of the rare few who likely could actually be replaced with an LLM.
by pyman | 2025-08-18 00:46:12+00:00
> With its cofounders’ experience at Tesla, Hubber will buy sites, transform them into a charger-ready location, and essentially provide the dream location that they would have liked to see during the site selection processes they went through in their previous jobs.

So let me get this straight. Three ex-Tesla employees started Hubber to roll out the same solution that got them fired by Elon Musk? Can't wait to see what they come up with. It's like Netflix announcing season two of my favourite show.
by nostrademons | 2025-08-18 00:46:18+00:00
I've been having similar thoughts about software engineering since one effect of LLMs is they make senior devs very productive, they make junior devs superfluous, but being a junior dev first is how you become a senior dev.

But I wonder if the outcome is simply that we drop every known manufacturing technique on the floor and just start from scratch with current adjacent technologies. Basically kill the whole industry and reboot it again.

My sister was a petroleum geologist. She went into oil in the early 2000s because she saw the roughly 30,000 person shortfall of petroleum geologists that was about to happen as the baby boomers aged out of the profession, and was like "Well, they're going to need to hire new blood, that's good for me." And it worked great for about 5 years, she was paid a shit-ton of money because they couldn't get people. But then two layoffs later, what actually happened is that the entire oil industry and associated value chain is dying, and we're replacing it with electricity, solar, batteries, EVs, smart-grids, and a bunch of things that didn't exist in the early 2000s.

Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
by zvr | 2025-08-18 00:46:31+00:00
Well, of course, in a multi-user system you can send an email to "user". Typically used for system processes to email "root" back in the day, or "postmaster" or other system accounts, as well.

Bang paths host!user or even host1!host2!user were used in the past, and I think they are still supported by most MTAs. They are definitely valid syntax for email addresses. I mean, if you're talking about quotes and parentheses, ...
by zahlman | 2025-08-18 00:46:34+00:00
That's not just "editorializing a bit"; the article says nothing whatsoever about political views. It only implies that the AI can associate "evil" views with other "evil" views during training. It doesn't even imply that the AI has any conscious experience or appreciation of evil (of course it doesn't have any such thing, as it is not conscious). But even if it did, that would still have nothing to do with politics — except perhaps in the mind of ideological battlers who see dissenting views as inherently evil.
by treetalker | 2025-08-18 00:47:53+00:00
I hate Word but sometimes have to deal with it when I would rather just have plain text. (Among other reasons, Word is notorious for making it difficult to select text to copy and paste, especially when dealing with legal citations and quotations.) Furthermore, the structure of documents is important to understanding them, especially in the law. So it seems like it would be useful to work with the text of the documents without locking horns with M$.

Scripting uses interest me too. Perhaps pandoc will still be a better option, but I'm also a sucker for TUIs and _Charm projects!
by acscott | 2025-08-18 00:47:59+00:00
I took an IQ exam in grade school. Went fine until I encountered a number sequence, what is the next number kind of thing. I found a pattern, and it's predicted number was not listed as possible choices. That was total crap. I got vexed and then tried to answer the last 3/4 of the test wrong. Parents were later told I was gifted. (Maybe they meant it as euphemism! Ha!). I later learned of a little-known proof that for every sequence, there are infinite number of correct next-numbers. So the test was flawed. As an adult I took a High IQ test and scored 179. (I still dont' grok epsilon-delta proofs and probably never will). I was tested in college against an IQ test and broke it by solving the unsolvable portion through a stochastic technique. He had to go back to his original assumptions.

I'd say, as a group, those with a higher IQ than another group from a random selection of a normally distributed population, they can be expected to perform better on mental tasks that we care about. But at the individual level? Meaningless. Feynman was ~120. I, who have not contributed to anything like quantum physics scored higher, much higher.

For AI, an IQ test is interesting, but I would randomize the temperature (and other knobs) and take lots of samples. Keep in mind a relatively low IQ can blow away an AI on all kinds of things like compassion, understanding the pains of the human condition, self-sacrifice, etc. (etc. means a whole book could be worth exploring).
by benoau | 2025-08-18 00:48:00+00:00
This is not a junior dev you can have a weekly one-on-one with, budget a whole lot of time and find a dirt-simple tutorial to go through.

I'm partial to PhaserJS because it's browser-based, not too much required to get started, lots of simple game tutorials and lots of instant-feedback making characters move and stuff.

Be prepared to cover a lot of basic computer usage and math.
by jppittma | 2025-08-18 00:48:28+00:00
Not sure where I fall on that one. In business, it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same? Should low level manufacturing be a core competency of the US? Why? Turning steel into screws is certainly lower margin than turning screws and engines into airplanes.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-18 00:49:28+00:00
A lot of people never saw anything different come out of these printers.

These are built-in fonts available so the simplest devices/OS like DOS can directly print per-character (ASCII) rather than per-pixel or per-dot. You send it the signal to print an upper case letter for instance, it responds and prints the upper case letter about like a daisy-wheel printer would have done. No dots involved in the communication between the PC and the printer, other than the trigger that makes it print the right letter on the paper.

Printing per-dot was graphics mode, the PC has to send every single dot to the printer but that's what you need for real pictures.

After a while fonts appeared which you loaded in the PC, which would then send every one of their dots to the printer in graphics mode, so there was a lot fancier text output available. But it was fiddly and didn't always work right, and by that time there were newer printers having lots of those typewriter-style fonts built in. Those who couldn't get the fonts installed into their PC correctly, for the old MX and FX printers to print all fancy like the few real geeks were doing, just got a new printer instead and their office correspondence went from these bare-bones Epson fonts to pseudo-letter-quality just plugging in the new printer.

Windows 3.1 made it a little easier to get the auxiliary DOS fonts going, but people mostly had gotten newer printers by then.

By the time Windows 95 came out very few of these old printers were still being used, but there were plenty of True-Type fonts built into Windows by then, plus the built-in drivers for such old printers were very mature.

So it was never really very common knowledge, but you could just plug MX-80 series in to Windows 9x and pick any of the same fonts as you would for a laser printer, and it went bi-directional laying down overlapping dots like Adobe bricks, near-letter-quality enough to where they could hardly tell the difference once you faxed the page to somebody.
by nemothekid | 2025-08-18 00:49:59+00:00
>People need purpose.

I can't help but feel you are romanticizing manufacturing jobs. The vast number of manufacturing jobs that "give people purpose" are still here - those people just travel to china once a quarter.

The guy that stands at a station for 8 hours a day, stamping the same 4 bolts into a car frame does not have anymore "purpose" than a guy running around in an Amazon warehouse.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-08-18 00:50:10+00:00
I almost always choose Go over Rust when they are similarly suited to something. I only use Rust when Go's safety isn't sufficient. Go is a joy to use, Rust rarely is (in my experience).

I wouldn't say either of them have won. I'd say both are amazing tools, too. We're spoiled for choices these days.
by pushkar_aditya | 2025-08-18 00:50:45+00:00
In just five years, we have advanced LLMs to the point where they can already generate production level code. Yes, sometimes the output contains bloat, but isn’t it our responsibility to ensure it doesn’t? We can easily address that with good prompting, fine tuning and code context with little human intervention. Considering how far we have come in just five years, imagine what these models will be capable of in the future. Im confident that in another five years, LLMs will be so advanced that theywill generate less and less bloated code over time and adapt itself according to our need.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-18 00:50:46+00:00
Arguably, the UK's Online Safety Act already allows these products to bypass age verification: see s. 12(6) https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/12/6):

> the age verification or age estimation must be of such a kind, and used in such a way, that it is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child

Unfortunately, it's hard to tell what this passage means, and I suspect it doesn't apply here. (But does that mean there's no law covering age-verification bypassing services? That seems like an unlikely oversight, and the Online Safety Act's badly-drafted enough that I'm not comfortable making a broad assertion here.) Hopefully case law sorts this out a little.
by SamuelAdams | 2025-08-18 00:50:52+00:00
In my experience enterprises do not want to pay for excellent software, simply because it is expensive. I would love to work on software that was:

- in more than two AWS regions

- required screen reader / disability support

- required multi-language support

- required multi-cloud

- actually needed a big Hadoop cluster - most enterprise data processing can be done on a MacBook Pro M4.
by bokohut | 2025-08-18 00:50:57+00:00
I enjoy reading others' complaints about payments and only after the correct person gets frustrated enough, shunning the buyout greed, will a feasible domestic solution manifest.

Having written all the code and founded my own "Payment Processor" twice in the last few decades, this is an interesting space that demands subject matter expertise 24/7/365. Having lived through many global events of all kinds, that the general public never saw since being in payments at the inception of the internet, I learned things not possible today. I recall vividly those that laughed at me in the 90's when responding to inquiries about what I did for a living. After stating that I was building a payment server for the internet all balked stating no one would pay for anything online and then PayPal became our client followed by many other well known brands. Is anyone still paying online?

Stay Healthy!