MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-08-22 14:00:57+00:00
That's a question every current junior should be asking themselves.

If you want to be well-paid, you need to be able to distinguish yourself in some economically-useful manner from other people. That was true before AI and AI isn't going to make it go away. It may even in some sense sharpen it.

In another few years there's going to be large numbers of people who can be plopped down in front of a code base and just start firing prompts at an AI. If you're just another one of the crowd, you're going to get mediocre career results, potentially including not having a career at all.

However, here in 2025 I'm not sure what that "standing out in the crowd" will be. It could well be "exceptional skill in prompting". It could be that deeper understanding of what the code is really doing. It could be the ability to debug deeply yourself with an old-school debugger when something goes wrong and the AI just can't work. It could be non-coding skills entirely. In reality it'll be more than just one thing anyhow and the results will vary. I don't know what to tell you juniors except to keep your eyes peeled for whatever this will be, and when you think you have an idea, don't let the cognitively-lazy appeal of just letting the AI do everything stop you from pursuing it. I don't know specifically what this will be, but you don't have to be right the first time, you have time to get several licks at this.

But I do know that we aren't going to need very many people who are only capable of firing prompts at an AI and blindly saying "yes" to whatever it says, not because of the level of utility that may or may not have, but because that's not going to distinguish you at all.

If all you are is a proxy to AI, I don't need you. I've got an AI of my own, and I've got lower latency and higher bandwidth to it.

Correspondingly, if you detect that you are falling into the pattern of being on the junior programmer end of what this article is complaining about, where you interact with your coworkers as nothing but an AI proxy, you need to course correct and you need to course correct now. Unfortunately, again, I don't have a recipe for that correction. Ask me in 2030.

"Just a proxy to an AI" may lead to great things for the AI but it isn't going to lead you anywhere good!
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-08-22 14:01:14+00:00
The main benefit I've gotten from AI that I see no one talking about is it dramatically lessens the mental energy required to work on a side project after a long day of work. I code during the day, it's hard to find motivation to code at night. It's a lot easier to say "do this", have the AI generate shitty code, then say, "you duplicated X function, you over complicated Y, you have a bug at Z" then have it fix it. On a good day I get stuff done quicker, on an average day I don't think I do. However, I am getting more done because the it takes a huge chunk out of the mental load for me and requires significantly less motivation to get something done on my side project. I think that is worth it to me. That said, I am just about to ban my junior engineers from using it at work because I think it is detrimental to their growth.
by raflueder | 2025-08-22 14:01:33+00:00
My grandfather left Germany in 1927 with his mom and stepfather, his father stayed behind. I have a three-page letter written in sütterlin sent in 1948 describing life in Berlin in the aftermath of WWII, it also congratulated my Opa on the birth of his first child (my dad). Thanks to the internet I was able to finally translate in the early 2000s with the help of an online forum. This post reminded me I should frame it as the handwriting is beautiful and the story a reminder of family struggles and hope. Thanks for sharing.
by Arubis | 2025-08-22 14:01:40+00:00
Agreed that better filtering would help greatly in making Bluesky more work-safe. (By contrast, ActivityPub’s communities do a decent job self-filtering, but that community is also more self-selecting at present.)

That said: furries are the internet’s coal mine canary. They’re one of the more visually prominent marginalized internet communities, and one of the first to get deplatformed when capital steps in. If you’re on a platform where furries are thriving, you’re probably in a safe space. Cf. the history of Tumblr, Twitter, Blogger, etc.
by frotaur | 2025-08-22 14:01:58+00:00
It is actually inflation that precludes this from being true (along with relativity, of course). If there wasn't a period where spacetime inflated extremely rapidly, given two points, no matter how far apart, their causal pasts would eventually intersect, if going sufficiently back in the past. As such, they could correlate through a common cause C, which lies in both of their causal pasts.
by duped | 2025-08-22 14:02:03+00:00
That problem exists regardless of whether you want to use stackful coroutines or not. The stack could be freed by user code at anytime. It could also panic and drop buffers upon unwinding.

I wouldn't call async drop a pile of hacks, it's actually something that would be useful in this context.

And that said there's an easy fix: don't use the pointers supplied by the future!
by taco_emoji | 2025-08-22 14:02:14+00:00
2024-08-21 they had 156,328 unique posters, 2025-08-2021 they had 669,909. So "nearly" a year is cherry-picking.

Whatever "bleeding" is happening* is after some enormous growth. I'm not a booster at all, they ought to be concerned about this recent depletion, but this slow decline is hardly the death knell.

*: edited from "has happened"
by edg5000 | 2025-08-22 14:02:26+00:00
> for example it does that annoying thing gemini does now where when you use slang or really any informal terms it puts them in quotes in its reply

Haven´t used Gemini much, but the time I used it, it felt very academic and theoretical compared to Opus 4. So that seems to fit. But I'll have to do more evaluation of the non-Claude models to get a better idea of the differences.
by yanis_t | 2025-08-22 14:02:41+00:00
Hypothetically, AI is going to move us from development to validation. Think about writing more unit tests, integration tests, e2e tests. Spend more time verifying, really carefully reading these pull requests.

Development is moving towards quality assurance. Because that's what matter eventually. You have a product that works reliably and fast, and you can quickly get it to the market. You don't really care how the code is written.

Of course some people will continue to write "better software" than AI, more readable, or more elegant, bringing some diminishing marginal value to the table, the market doesn't really care about.

I don't think AI is there yet, but realistically speaking, it's gonna get there in 5 to 10 years. Some of us will adjust, some not. Reaction is real.
by rtkwe | 2025-08-22 14:02:43+00:00
They've kept it up for several decades and in cases where it's not shipping damage or error (wrong item sent by amazon) they mostly pass the cost off to the sellers afaik. They also have their second hand stores where they sell returns and can recoup a lot of that loss. The ease of returns is one of the main things that keep me from completely cutting off amazon purchases and they probably know that and accept the losses for the gains.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-22 14:02:55+00:00
So the HOA was indeed quite concerned with their property values and that a higher assessment impacts sale value. It's also important to note that this HOA covered multiple buildings, and none of the board lived in mine: So their unit was not at risk from the structure, but their assessment price was.

The buildings were approaching an age where more significant/costly maintenance is necessary and I don't think they wanted to have to do those things.
by philwelch | 2025-08-22 14:03:03+00:00
> Can you even imagine a Mac that has upgradeable RAM?

Well now I feel old. Not only can I imagine it, I used to routinely buy RAM upgrades for my Macs because it was more affordable than getting a Mac with more RAM in the first place. As I recall one of the early aluminum PowerBooks even had a really thoughtful design that made it easy to access and replace the RAM, battery, and hard drive.
by franciscop | 2025-08-22 14:03:11+00:00
This is probably why I love using Zed for my hobby dev, it doesn't try to be too clever about AI. It's still there and when I do want some AI stuff it can be seamlessly prompted, but for normal day-to-day the AI steps back and I can just code. In contrast, using AI at work with VSCode I feel like the tools get too much in the way, particularly in 2 categories:

- Fragile interaction. There's popups on VSCode everywhere, and they are clickable. Too often I try to hover on a particular place and end up clicking on one of those. The AI autocomplete also feels way too intrusive, press the wrong key combination and BAM I get a huge amount of code I didn't intend to get.

- Train of thought disruption. Since some times the AI long auto-complete is useful (~1/3th of times), I do end up reading it and getting distracted from my original "building up" thinking and now change to "explore thinking", which kind of dismantles the abstraction castle.

I haven't seen either of those issues on Zed. It really brought me back the joy of programming on my free time. I also think both of these issues are about the implementation more than the actual feature.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-08-22 14:03:16+00:00
> If someone told me that their Tesla's autopilot swerved them into a brick wall and they nearly died, I'm not going to say, "your newfound luddite bias is preventing you from seeking sensible middle ground. Surely there is no serious issue here." I'm going to say, "wow, that's fucked up. Maybe there's something deeply wrong with Tesla autopilot."

What a horrible metaphor for a tool that can translate pdfs to text. lol. The anti-AI arguments are just as, if not more, absurd than the "AI can do everything" arguments.
by runjake | 2025-08-22 14:03:42+00:00
They're easy to find. Perhaps your use of my entire career is a tell? You find these people doing non-work/non-tech activities.

Activities clubs are beneficial for this. But surprisingly, attending my kids' school sports events is also awesome. I meet parents from diverse backgrounds, and we instantly have something in common (kids on the same team). I meet a lot of people all over the income spectrum.

I live in a rural area that is quite poor. Over the past couple of years, I've encountered about a dozen parents who look and dress normal, but are wealthy, and they're either in or they run interesting businesses.

They all have super interesting stories and perspectives and you realize a lot of people are successful because they've tried a ton of different things. They don't have high success rates, maybe ~10%, but they're consistent and they're persistent.

(I also talk to the poor parents and hear their stories. I have this weird thing where I try to introduce some of the harder working and ethical poor parents to the richer parents, where there may be some mutually-beneficial opportunities, when they'd otherwise be too adverse to introducing themselves.)
by blibble | 2025-08-22 14:03:44+00:00
> In a recent company town-hall, I watched as a team of junior engineers demoed their latest work

> Championing their “success”, a senior manager goaded them into bragging about their use of “AI” tools to which they responded “This is four thousand lines of code written by Claude”. Applause all around.

this is no different to applauding yourself for outsourcing your own role to a low cost location

wonder if they'll still be clapping come layoffs
by dgacmu | 2025-08-22 14:03:52+00:00
This is not true?

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

There was a huge bump of new users right after the election, and things have gone down since then, but they are still much higher than they were in September 2024. And if you look at the tail of the graph, it seems to be holding pretty steady, which is about what you would expect for a social network after a huge spike of growth: not all of those users will stick around.
by humpty-d | 2025-08-22 14:04:25+00:00
It’s useful for almost any one-off script I write. It can do the work much faster than me and produce nicer looking output than I’d ever bother to spend time to write myself. It can also generate cli args and docs I’d never "waste time" on myself, which I’d later waste even more time fumbling without

They’re insanely useful. I don’t get why people pretend otherwise, just because they aren't fulfilling the prophesies of blowhards and salesmen
by bubblyworld | 2025-08-22 14:04:40+00:00
As always, two things can be true. Ignore both the hucksters and the people loudly denigrating everything LLM-related, and somewhere in between you find the reality.

I'm in a tiny team of 3 writing b2b software in the energy space and claude code is a godsend for the fiddly-but-brain-dead parts of the job (config stuff, managing cloud infra, one-and-done scripts, little single page dashboards, etc).

We've had much less success with the more complex things like maintaining various linear programming/neural net models we've written. It's really good at breaking stuff in subtle ways (like removing L2 regularisation from a VAE while visually it still looks like it's implemented). But personally I still think the juice is worth the squeeze, mainly I find it saves me mental energy I can use elsewhere.
by aruametello | 2025-08-22 14:05:20+00:00
Honestly i find it quite useful that "single developer projects" may have extra hands on code (with manual human review) to get things done faster.

my personal pet peeve is the idea that "AI is better than humans" instead of "AI is useful as a tool", LLMs have too many caveats to be the last line of decision making in pretty much anything, but under supervision they are an amazing force multiplier.
by ramesh31 | 2025-08-22 14:05:34+00:00
>As a GPT user, your comment triggered me wanting to search how superior is Claude... well, these users don't think it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1l5h2ds/i_paid_fo...

That poster isn't comparing models, he's comparing Claude Code to Cline (two agentic coding tools), both using Claude Sonnet 4. I was pretty much in the same boat all year as well; using Cline heavily at work ($1k+/month token spend) and I was sold on it over Claude Code, although I've just recently made the switch, as Claude Code has a VSCode extension now. Whichever agentic tooling you use (Cline, CC, Cursor, Aider, etc.) is still a matter of debate, but the underlying model (Sonnet/Opus) seems to be unanimously agreed on as being in a league of its own, and has been since 3.5 released last year.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-22 14:05:44+00:00
An hour or two before the search/raid, NPR posted an interview with Bolton, "John Bolton discusses what security guarantees for Ukraine might look like":

* https://www.npr.org/2025/08/20/nx-s1-5507029/john-bolton-dis...

* Via: https://twitter.com/AmbJohnBolton/status/1958854664834756639...

(Some folks are joking that the FBI have finally found the Epstein files.)
by djsdjs | 2025-08-22 14:05:49+00:00
Thanks Chris!

I intend to keep the current functionality (50 harness/assembly designs per account) free. A collaboration feature is coming soon that will allow creating teams and sharing harnesses with specific accounts - we may charge here at some tier but this is TBD.

I was unaware of the YC company (https://www.loombotic.com/ I think) - thanks for pointing me to it.
by richardlblair | 2025-08-22 14:05:58+00:00
The book referenced is not wrong, but it is too narrow. Repair isn't the core attribute of parenting. It's the core attribute of human relationships. This is generally accepted as common knowledge - it's not about the rupture, it's about the repair.

Good for you if you consider yourself so emotionally detached from work that you can let go of the fact that work relationships are still human relationships. However, you sit comfortably in the minority. Most people carry the human aspect of their work relationships into work. Ignoring that is step 1 of being a really bad manager.

This doesn't mean we don't set appropriate boundaries or avoid giving feedback. It does mean that a great manager navigates the nuances of work relationships and work itself. It also means a great manager will adjust their approach depending on the personal needs of each employee. For instance, if I was your manager and truly believed what you're saying here*, I'd just give you the brass tax feedback and keep everything about the work itself.

* And I don't. From my experience most people who take this stance have been conditioned that emotions are bad. We are big emotional bags of meat. The people I've managed with this mindset tend to be the hardest to manage. Eventually something hits their feels, they can't handle it, and the erratic behavior begins. I much prefer people who are forward with their emotions. When something happens they can vocalize it appropriately allowing me to address it. When they have feelings about feedback received, making a mistake, or doing something bad I can easily acknowledge and validate those feelings while maintain the feedback & boundaries.
by flatb | 2025-08-22 14:05:59+00:00
Cite on “ton of collateral damage”? That’s the disputed point in my mind. I just see obstacles that are like speed bumps in parking lots. I don’t find speed bumps do a ton of collateral damage. They also don’t really “work.” But they are needed, and better to keep in place at this point, maybe they could be made slightly less common at the margins. Why not treat AML regulations similarly?
by corytheboyd | 2025-08-22 14:06:04+00:00
This meshes nicely with another comment that resonated with me about how it’s seniors that need to act like what the article talks about.

The senior ICs are the squad leaders on the frontline with the rest of the team, knee deep in the same shit they are. It’s really THOSE people doing the constant day-to-day trust building, team leveling, shit getting done-ing, repairing…

And so yeah, a good manager lets those seniors just go be good at that, not bogging them down with work that is a complete waste of their potential. It’s a bit of a symbiotic relationship really, because a manager with no such seniors on the team won’t have the firepower to crush goals, and a senior without a good manager will never be allowed to excel.
by game_the0ry | 2025-08-22 14:06:04+00:00
> management seems to be strangely immune from layoffs compared to ICs.

This is super common and a very bad sign. As an employee, you are disposable in this type of culture, though it should go without saying.

> enterprises just love layers and layers of management. can't get enough of it. No CEO has ever seen a management layer he didn't like.

Bc more warm bodies in your org looks better on the resume. Managing 200 people on paper is more impressive than managing 20.
by yodsanklai | 2025-08-22 14:06:04+00:00
There are many implications to this question! TLDR; in theory yes, in practice no.

Can a function be "verified", this can mean "tested", "reviewed", "proved to be correct". What does correct even mean?

Functions in code are often more complex than just having input and output, unlike mathematical functions. Very often, they have side effects, like sending packets on network or modifying things in their environment. This makes it difficult to understand what they do in isolation.

Any non-trivial piece of software is almost impossible to fully understand or test. These things work empirically and require constant maintenance and tweaking.
by busssard | 2025-08-22 14:06:07+00:00
if i have 1mil ARR, i can hire some devs to remake my product from scratch. and use the Vibecoded Example as a design mockup.

If i manage to vibecode something alone that takes off, even without technical expertise, then you validated the AI usecase...

Before Claude i had to make a paper prototype or a figma, now i can make Slop that looks and somehow functions the way i want. i can make preliminary tests, and even get to some proof of concept. in some cases even 1million $ annual revenue...
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-22 14:06:11+00:00
Well, in such a future, when people have been burned by countless vibecoded projects, congratulations - FAANG wins again! Who is going to risk one penny on your rapidly assembled startup?

Any startup that can come to the table saying “All human engineers; SOC 2 Type 2 certified; dedicated Q/A department” will inherit the earth.
by voidmain | 2025-08-22 14:06:21+00:00
I haven't thought about this deeply, but it seems to me that the evolution of unicode has left it unparseable (into extended grapheme clusters, which I guess are "characters") in a forwards compatible way. If so, it seems like we need a new encoding which actually delimits these (just as utf-8 delimits code points). Then the original sender determines what is a grapheme, and if they don't know, who does?
by energy123 | 2025-08-22 14:06:27+00:00
Re online learning - If I freeze 40 yo Einstein and make it so he can't form new memories beyond 5 minutes, that's still an incredibly useful, generally intelligent thing. Doesn't seem like a problem that needs to be solved on the critical path to AGI.

Re training data - We have synthetic data, and we probably haven't hit a wall. Gpt-5 was only 3.5 months after o3. People are reading too much into the tea leaves here. We don't have visibility into the cost of Gpt-5 relative to o3. If it's 20% cheaper, that's the opposite of a wall, that's exponential like improvement. We don't have visibility into the IMO/IOI medal winning models. All I see are people curve fitting onto very limited information.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-22 14:07:01+00:00
>Am I going to need to just start sharing my Claude chat history to prove to people

I think we'll all need at least 3 of your anecdotes before we change our minds and can blissfully ignore the slow-motion train wreck that we all see heading our way. Sometime later in your life when you're in the hospital hooked up to a machine the firmware of which was vibe-coded and the FDA oversight was ChatGPT-checked, you may have misgivings but try not to be alarmed, that's just the naysayers getting to you.
by ramses0 | 2025-08-22 14:07:33+00:00
This is an alternate (probably similar) app to help your atomic clock watches get a signal from your phone rather than waiting for the vagaries of radio signal propagation (WWVB / https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-di...).

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/radio-wave-sync/id1484233572

...basically: Turn up your phone volume, wiggle the phone speaker (which has magnets), magnets == signals => watch gets the right time from your phone instead of remote radio waves.

I've used the app a few times before and it's generally pretty reliable if you follow the instructions!
by const_cast | 2025-08-22 14:07:51+00:00
No a compression algorithm does transform the data, particularly lossy ones. The pixels stored in the output are not in the input, they're new pixels. That's why you can't uncompress a jpeg. Its a new image that just happens to look like the original. But it even might not - some jpegs are so deep fried they become their own form of art. This is very popular in meme culture.

The only difference, really, is we know how a JPEG algorithm works. If I wanted to, I could painstakingly make a jpeg by hand. We don't know how LLMs work.