MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gavmor | 2025-09-04 00:11:48+00:00
> The premise of this article... has been obvious to people who are paying attention.

Well, forgive me but I feel that the article is a much-needed injection of context into my thinking around the Bitter Lesson. I like the imperative to preface compute requests with data roadmaps.

I'm not an AI guy. Not an ML engineer. I've been studiously avoiding the low-level stuff, actually, because I didn't want to half-ass it when off-the-shelf solutions were still providing tremendous novelty and value for my customers.

So, for most of my career, "compute" has been practically irrelevant! RAM and disk constraints presented more frequent obstacles than processor cycles'. I would have easily told you that data presents more of a bottleneck to value than CPU. But that's just the era of computing I came up in.

The last few years have been different. Suddenly compute is at a premium, again. So it's easy to think, "if only I had more," and "line goes up!" and forget about s-curves and logarithmic scaling.

Is the article unnecessarily sensationalist? I don't know, maybe you've been overestimating how much the rest of us are "paying attention."[0]

0. https://xkcd.com/2501/
by klik99 | 2025-09-04 00:11:55+00:00
Exactly this - I've said it before and will say it again - new technologies emerge in response to trends, often to accelerate existing trends and does not create them.

I see a few explanations for what you're saying, and those might be true, but I strongly believe part of it is investment (particularly VC, less so PE) has hit diminishing returns in tech and which means less subsidized "disruption", which means less money to hire people. AI becoming hugely popular right when this was happening is not a coincidence. And it's not just startups, less investment in startups also mean less clients for AWS and Azure. A16Z / Sand Hill switching to AI is not them just chasing the latest trend, it's a bid to reduce cost on people, which is the most expensive part of a tech company, as the only way to extend their unicorn-focused investment strategy.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-04 00:12:39+00:00
Calling LLM's "pattern matching text machines" is a catchy thought-terminating cliche, which accounts to calling a human brain a "blob of fats, salts, and chemicals". It technically makes sense, but it is seeing the forest for the trees, and ignores the fact that this mere pattern patching text machine is doing things people said were impossible a few years ago. The simplicity and seeming mundanity of a technology has no bearing on its potential or emergent properties. A single termite, observed by itself, could never reveal what it could build when assembled together with its brethren.

I agree that there are lots of limitations to current LLM's, but it seems somewhat naive to ignore the rapid pace of improvement over the last 5 years, the emergent properties of AI at scale, especially in doing things claimed to be impossible only years prior (remember when people said LLM's could never do math, or that image models could never get hands or text right?).

Nobody understands with greater clarity or specificity the limitations of current LLM's than the people working in labs right now to make them better. The AGI prognostications aren't suppositions pulled out of the realm of wishful thinking, they exist because of fundamental revelations that have occurred in the development of AI as it has scaled up over the past decade.

I know I claimed that HN's hatred of AI was an emotional one, but there is an element to their reasoning too that leads them down the wrong path. By seeing more flaws than the average person in these AI systems, and seeing the tact with which companies describe their AI offerings to make them seem more impressive (currently) than they are, you extrapolate that sense of "figuring things out" to a robust model of how AI is and must really be. In doing so, you pattern match AI hype to web3 hype and assume that since the hype is similar in certain ways, that it must also be a bubble/scam just waiting to pop and all the lies are revealed. This is the same pattern-matching trap that people accuse AI of making, and see through the flaws of an LLM output while it claims to have solved a problem correctly.
by FloorEgg | 2025-09-04 00:12:49+00:00
10+ years ago I expected we would get AI that would impact blue collar work long before AI that impacted white collar work. Not sure exactly where I got the impression, but I remember some "rising tide of AI" analogy and graphic that had artists and scientists positioned on the high ground.

Recently it doesn't seem to be playing out as such. The current best LLMs I find marvelously impressive (despite their flaws), and yet... where are all the awesome robots? Why can't I buy a robot that loads my dishwasher for me?

Last year this really started to bug me, and after digging into it with some friends I think we collectively realized something that may be a hint at the answer.

As far as we know, it took roughly 100M-1B years to evolve human level "embodiment" (evolve from single celled organisms to human), but it only took around ~100k-1M for humanity to evolve language, knowledge transfer and abstract reasoning.

So it makes me wonder, is embodiment (advanced robotics) 1000x harder than LLMs from an information processing perspective?
by dr_dshiv | 2025-09-04 00:13:29+00:00
Well, if you are looking for diversity of perspective— temporal diversity may be valuable.

Marsilio Ficino was hired by the Medici to translate Plato and other classical Greek works into Latin. He directly taught DaVinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Toscanelli, etc. I mean to say that his ideas and perspectives helped spark the renaissance.

Insofar as we hope for an AI renaissance and not an AI apocalypse, it might benefit us to have the actual renaissance in the training data.
by miragecraft | 2025-09-04 00:15:27+00:00
I think a hosted solution is best, unless you know for sure that they’ll always have a developer willing to volunteer their time to manage their server and keep everything up to date.

The cost is peanuts compared to the hourly rate of a developer to personally manage and keep secure their website for them.

As for static site, you think a non technical person can handle a static site generator and deploying to GitHub Pages? I doubt it.

Often times it gets very expensive to cheap out on things.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-04 00:15:40+00:00
Bubbles are born out of evaluations, not revenue. Web3 was a bubble because the money its made wasn't real productivity, but hype cycles, pyramid schemes, etc. AI companies are merely selling API calls, there is no financial scheming, it is very simply that the product is worth what it is being sold for.

> I want AI that can build and maintain my enterprise B2B app just as well as I can in a fraction of the time, and that's not what has been delivered.

AI isn't at that level yet but it is making fast strides in subsets of it. I can't imagine systems of models and the models themselves won't reach there in a couple years given how bad AI coding tools were just a couple years ago.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-09-04 00:16:03+00:00
A lot of CEOs are saying do more with less. Basically they are saying, “If there are any requests to hire additional people the first thing I ask them is if any AI tools have been tried first.”

Then every 2-bit president, leader, manager, CEO out there regurgitates the same thing.

So yes, companies want to save money and do more with leas. It certainly won’t help job seekers or the economy.
by blargey | 2025-09-04 00:16:50+00:00
They're pointing to the fact that most of a given billion+aire's net worth is ownership of a highly valued company (stock). Their billions are literally just the market-assigned value of the control itself, so it falls upon people suggesting a wealth cap to come up with an arrangement that can divest them of that value without divesting them of the ownership/control rights that said value is being derived from.

Of course, control of a very large company is itself the sort of power that wealth caps are supposed to curb, like when people buy newspapers / social media platforms / etc - so you could also just proclaim it a feature instead of a bug, but it still warrants a defense.
by jampa | 2025-09-04 00:17:03+00:00
I think not hiring juniors is a tragedy of the commons situation. It started before the AI boom, during COVID. It's not tax-related as people claim here, since this phenomenon is not US-only.

The ZIRP era made companies hire people as if there was no tomorrow, and companies started "poaching" engineers from others, including juniors. I saw some interns with 2 years of experience getting offers as seniors. I had friends being paid to attend boot camp.

Then everyone realized they were training junior engineers who would quickly get offers from other companies as “Senior" and leave. So companies stopped hiring them.
by kevindamm | 2025-09-04 00:17:29+00:00
I think it may have been a one-two punch of §174 and the end of ZIRP.

Of note, the OBBB reinstated the ability to deduct R&D, so businesses are no longer required to capitalize and amortize R&D expenses (including software development).

https://warrenaverett.com/insights/one-big-beautiful-bill-se...
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-04 00:17:33+00:00
> Okay so according to that rule, we should say "I've been to the Germany" because there's one specific Germany we're talking about. Correct?

In this sentence, the object (Germany) does not need an article as the sentence is in active voice[0]. Where an article would be needed is if passive voice[0] were used instead, such as:

I have been to the country named Germany. (definite article use) I have been to a European country named Germany. (indefinite article use)

> Also, I can say "I like listening to a music when walking" because there's no one specific music I enjoy ....

This is another example of active voice[0], so "to a music" would be "to music" instead. Converting this sentence to a similar one in passive voice[0] could look like:

When I go for a walk the music I like to listen to is ...

Note how the subject of the sentence is "walk" and "the music" is additional information related to the walk.

> Moreover, we say "The Lake Michigan" just like we say "The Gulf of Mexico" because in both cases we talk about specific bodies of water. Right?

This one is a bit trickier in that "The Lake Michigan" would be an edge case in most English sentences. I'm sure someone could construct one where it would be correct, but that is what it would take - effort to manufacture an example.

Now "The Gulf of Mexico" is very common due to there being many gulfs and "of" being a preposition. In this context, think of a preposition being similar to a subtype relationship in OOP. For example:

A gulf is smaller than an ocean. The Gulf of Mexico is smaller than an ocean.

In all of the above, remember that English is very inconsistent and has more exception cases than a start-up proof-of-concept. :-)

EDIT:

> Just like I enjoy "listening to a podcast".

This is a great example of "to" also being a preposition and "podcast" being a noun without specificity. Which is why your example is proper English and:

listening to podcast

Would be off-putting to a native English speaker. Continuing with the "kind of like subtypes in OOP" metaphor, since "podcast" is not a unique entity (noun) the indefinite article "a" is needed.

There are exceptions to this rule involving plurality, adverbs, and context of the sentence fragment as well.

0 - https://writingexplained.org/grammar-dictionary/passive-voic...
by socrateswasone | 2025-09-04 00:19:12+00:00
You don't need to know if it has a "subjectivity" to know if you can torture and kill it, you can rely on the writhing and squealing. Making up artificial distinctions and questions with no answers is just a conceit we get into, ultimately to justify whatever we want. There are too many people on the planet and we need to "process" a lot of life for our benefit.

Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process, then really you're just torturing and killing a set of sense perceptions, so what would be the basis of a morality that forbids that?
by foxfired | 2025-09-04 00:19:26+00:00
We need to reframe it. At this point, what we call "AI" is not a technology, but a subscription company.

A technology is a tool you can adopt in your toolchain to perform at task, even if in this case it's outsourcing cognitive load. For a subscription company, well, as long as the subscription is active, you get to outsource some of the cognitive load. When Anthropic's CEO says that white color jobs will disappear, he means that he is selling Enterprise subscriptions, and that companies will inevitably buy it.
by daxfohl | 2025-09-04 00:19:45+00:00
Yeah I did the type where you start somewhere inside the maze and have to find the "treasure". Mainly because it was slightly easier to implement, but also had the nice side effect of not being solvable by that rule alone.

FWIW the LLMs were definitely not following that rule. They seemed to always keep going straight whenever that was an option. Which meant they would always get stuck at T intersections when both ways led to a dead end.
by tripletpeaks | 2025-09-04 00:19:46+00:00
If I read their post correctly, they’re saying they wouldn’t mind rich people if money didn’t… do the stuff that money does. But it does, so they do.

Like yes I think if money didn’t confer incredible power over others and distortionary effects over the shared environment, and allow crazy-wide reach for one’s possibly-nutty beliefs, lots of people wouldn’t have so big a problem with the ultra-rich. Like if the money were just a score on a pinball machine high score table. Cool, you hit a billion, good for you, glad you’re so good at the game, that’s nice. Not a lot of people would mind that so much. But that’s not how money works.
by ivewonyoung | 2025-09-04 00:21:37+00:00
Those changes got permanently reversed in the recent passage of the Big Beautiful Bill by a one-in-a-year reconciliation process that was able to pass with only 51 votes in the Senate with zero votes from the opposition.

Note that the reversal only applies to American software jobs, not offshore ones. So maybe tech hiring is going to pick up again soon. Those changes should've been reversed before they took effect in 2022 by the govt at the time.
by isleyaardvark | 2025-09-04 00:21:40+00:00
His quote is stunningly disingenuous, I'm surprised to hear that coming from Doctorow.

That Google has paid Apple to be the default search engine was a business deal that has been open knowledge for a decade or more. Other search engines could've paid to be the default. Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? MS didn't do so well. And why would Apple want to make their own search engine? Even if Apple did, the reaction would certainly be that Apple was abusing their position to promote their own search engine and would be committing an anti-trust violation then.

Also I think it's safe to say there is no actual testimony about a quid pro quo arrangement to get Apple to agree to not make a search engine.
by alpaca128 | 2025-09-04 00:21:45+00:00
The part about hand movement confuses me. On qwerty you can reach all letters without moving the hands. On both qwerty and dvorak you still need to move or stretch the hands to reach backspace, arrow keys, escape etc. So how does dvorak reduce hand movement?

> the things to write come in bursts

In short bursts I can reach higher speeds than what I can maintain over a period of time. It's fast enough for me.

> transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed

That's a very specific use-case and I wouldn't type fast enough for that no matter what layout. At that point I'd probably learn stenography instead.
by skissane | 2025-09-04 00:22:13+00:00
LLM backtracking is an active area of research, see e.g.

https://arxiv.org/html/2502.04404v1

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05426

And I was wrong that nobody has implemented it, as these papers prove people have… it is just the results haven’t been sufficiently impressive to support the transition from the research lab to industrial use - or at least, not yet
by BoredPositron | 2025-09-04 00:22:24+00:00
Meh... just rehashing what he said before. The paper itself is fundamentally flawed, examining only a minuscule portion of the job market. If we step back and look at Europe's struggling economies over recent decades, we see that economic downturns disproportionately affect young people. Greece serves as the poster child, followed by Spain and Italy. In Germany alone, we've lost 50,000 jobs in manual labor heavy industries (mainly automotive) this past year. We're also seeing a 60% decline in apprenticeships for labor intensive roles at DAX companies that aren't even AI affected yet. AI has become a convenient scapegoat for a faltering economy driven by geopolitical tensions, protectionism and unqualified leadership in the world's largest economies. Roaring 20s indeed.
by refset | 2025-09-04 00:22:43+00:00
AsOf join in those systems solves a rather narrow problem of performance and SQL expressiveness for data with overlapping user-defined timestamps. The bitemporal model solves much broader issues of versioning and consistent reporting whilst also reducing the need for many user-defined timestamp columns.

In a bitemporal database, every regular looking join over the current state of the world is secretly an AsOf join (across two dimensions of time), without constantly having to think about it when writing queries or extending the schema.
by noidesto | 2025-09-04 00:22:45+00:00
Agree. In the hands of a seasoned dev not only does productivity improve but the quality of outputs.

If I’m working against a deadline I feel more comfortable spending time on research and design knowing I can spend less time on implementation. In the end, it took the same amount of time, though hopefully with an increase of reliability, observability, and extendibility. None of these things show up in the author’s faulty dataset and experiment.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-04 00:22:56+00:00
It is possible that multiple trends are coalescing

1. layoffs after web3 hiring spree

2. End of Zirp

However I think now, in 2025 is it impossible to reasonably claim AI isn't making an impact in hiring. Those who disagree on here seem to be insistent on some notion that AI has no benefits whatsoever, thus could never cause job loss.
by ThunderSizzle | 2025-09-04 00:23:18+00:00
Not sure what world your in, but LinkedIn never helped me found a job.

Word of mouth is much more powerful than trusting something like LinkedIn, which also has been pwned how many times?

It's a useless service that doesn't actually replace job listings, personal connections, job postings, etc. It's basically Facebook for people who think being a 100% worker is everything about life, or a way to get spammed by recruiters.
by cyberax | 2025-09-04 00:23:37+00:00
> or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects

It's not always that. After some time, software gets to a state where it's near the local maximum for usability. So any changes make the software _less_ usable.

But you don't get promoted in large tech companies unless you make changes. So that's how we get stuff like "liquid glass" or Android's UI degradatation.
by yieldcrv | 2025-09-04 00:24:46+00:00
> Yes, of course the model with custom kernels is faster, whether it's written by a human or an AI.

But that’s the thing, I wouldn’t write a custom kernel before AI

I don't do that level of development or operate at that part of the stack but I’m very experienced in software development

AI significantly augments my skillsets in this area
by beoberha | 2025-09-04 00:25:29+00:00
I am happy to be proven wrong but I’m shocked they believe there is a market for this size at all, let alone at $450! The sample text on the stock images looks useless.

I wanted to love my RM2 so much. The write path is great. Writing notes on it during a meeting is a genuinely good experience. The read path: not so much. EInk UXs are so clunky especially when you’re used to how fluid phones are. Forget scrolling through your notes - It’s maddening.

Pretty good ereader though.
by codazoda | 2025-09-04 00:25:55+00:00
I also got enthusiastic about them, but I ended up embracing the Kindle Scribe. I just completed my 12th monthly notebook, so I’ve been at it for over a year now.

I was using regular notebooks but I was collecting too many and I was worried about storage and loss.

I wrote about the experience a few months into it.

https://notes.joeldare.com/handwritten-notes-on-the-kindle-s...

I do not read on mine, it’s exclusively for writing. Possibly because switching is too slow.
by FloorEgg | 2025-09-04 00:26:27+00:00
Well, sort of, but functional-information is a specifically defined term that you can google. "Advanced" is vague and in this context not very helpful.

functional information is basically the amount of data (bits) necessary to explain all the possible functions matter can perform based on its unique configuration (in contrast to random). I am sure I partially butchered this explanation... but hopefully its close enough to catch my drift.

Life is optimized to process and learn from the real world, and it is insanely efficient at it and functional-information dense. (It might even be at the theoretical limit) Our most advanced technology is still 4-5 orders of magnitude behind it.

The capabilities of your iPhone are extremely narrow when compared to a handful of dirt. To you it may seem the opposite, but you are probably mixing up utility to you with functional capability. Your iPhone is has more functional utility to you, but the same amount dirt has way more general functional utility. (Your iphone isn't capable of self-replication, self-repair, and self-nonself distinction aka autopoiesis)
by superkuh | 2025-09-04 00:27:14+00:00
I'll always remember the time when the tourist town of Ely, Minnesota, USA had it's single fiber internet cable cut. Pretty much all the groups there trying to rent canoes, equipment, hotels, etc with corporate cards weren't able to do it. We were lucky our group brought cash.

A society depending entirely on corporations for currency function is incredibly fragile in addition to corporate payment services being rent seeking, privacy invading, transaction morality deciding monsters. At least in the USA.

Governments should definitely be regulating and requiring those offering paid goods and services to accept cash. And not just for paying debts.
by Shank | 2025-09-04 00:27:38+00:00
One thing I really love that Japan got right was the creation of e-money systems that are anonymous (you can get a Suica for 20,000 yen without any registration information), work offline (you don't need network at-payment, nor does the terminal), and are easily accessible (you can get them at any train station, you can charge them at any ATM or convenience store with cash). In contrast, a debit/credit card usually requires a lot more pain to get onboarded with. The closest thing is probably those silly visa prepaid cards you can buy, but they require a little work to use regularly.
by chipotle_coyote | 2025-09-04 00:27:45+00:00
It's using a custom font called "ET Book," which is (according to its GitHub) inspired by Bembo.

If I had to guess at what you find grating, it might not be the letter shapes, but rather the spacing. At least rendered on a Mac, the inter-letter spacing just looks off; it's a little too tight all around, and certain pairs look inconsistent. It lacks visual smoothness. (I know that sounds like somebody talking about wine or oxygen-free audio cables, but I can't think of a better phrase.) It's possible that this is a quirk of Apple's font rendering algorithms, but I'm not convinced -- and it's definitely the font. If you prevent external fonts from loading or use the web inspector to remove "et-book" from the CSS and let it fall back to Palatino, the typesetting improves.