MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2025-09-30 15:26:12+00:00
The first point requires an additional layer. The modern administrative state has its origins in Woodrow Wilson ideology of scientific governance. Wilson didn’t like democracy and wasn’t much of a fan of the constitution: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-ad....

A consequence of centralizing governance in a giant federal bureaucracy is that it’s become dominated by one party: https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe.... That was a predictable result of federalization. If the government is run by unelected bureaucrats insulated from the elected officials, then it’s completely unsurprising it will become dominated by the party that prefers bigger government.

In classic Trump fashion, he doesn’t care about federalism per se, hence his inconsistent actions on law enforcement and crime. But he has a brain stem level reaction that it’s crazy he got elected President and is expected to cajole a federal workforce of 1.8 million democrats into executing his policies. And he’s not wrong about that.

Regarding the DOJ, Thomas Jefferson personally directed the prosecution of Aaron Burr: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-great-trial-that-tes.... So that part isn’t anything new. As to the merits of the case, 18 USC 1001 is astonishingly (and I’d argue unconstitutionally) broad. I think prosecuting people for “obstruction” without an underlying crime is bullshit, but the government does it all the time. And Comey vociferously defended the practice.
by mehdibl | 2025-09-30 15:26:14+00:00
how are you going to get "adversarial attacks" with prompt injection. If you don't fetch data from external sources. Web scraping ( you can channel that thru Perplexity by the to sanitize it). PR reviews, would be fine if repo is private.

I feel this is overly exagerated here.

There is more issues that are currently getting leverage to hack with vscode extension than AI prompt injection, that require a VERY VERY complex chain of attack to get some leaks.
by bunderbunder | 2025-09-30 15:26:24+00:00
> In the past, it was mostly just geeks/nerds playing video games

This just isn't true. I was there in the 80s and 90s. To an approximation, everyone played video games. The limiting factor was wealth more so than nerdiness; games cost a lot more in real terms back then.

Some specific games, like CRPGs, tended to be aimed at nerds. But that was about fantasy RPGs more so than video games - it goes along with tabletop RPGs and Dragonlance books. But you also have people who went out and bought a new computer with a CD-ROM drive just so they could play Myst, because that game was legitimately a pop culture fad that summer.

And then in modern media we have some selective retelling because a lot of the history is being told by people who themselves are deep into geek culture and also have a case of main character syndrome.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-30 15:26:32+00:00
I do think that another topic on how AI is eating everything could be nice given how nobody is still believing it and somebody had shared the list of YC companies with AI and you had to see how long the list was and how unimaginative it was, to me it felt Like X but AI, Y but AI....

You yourself say that AI is overhyped and that overhype has formed into a bubble of sorts which has eaten Y combinator.

Also I probably don't understand how your point is relevant to the parent comment if I am honest or maybe I am not finding the relevance in which case feel free to explain it so that I learn something new
by throaway5445454 | 2025-09-30 15:26:37+00:00
See, that's my issue. If Duo is only a good way to "get started," then it isn't a good way to LEARN a language, as in learn how to actually use it to a level approaching fluency. The whole thing is false advertising, not because of the specifics, but because of the advertising which makes people think (and yes, millions believe(d) it) that you can become fluent by using Duolingo.
by najarvg | 2025-09-30 15:26:50+00:00
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing! Sometime back I had run into a related experiment where the author setup a simple 1 layer NN with a shift-register feedback and explored the state space of neuron activations over large iterations. The observation was beautiful in that the state space maps traced out attractors. See here if you are curious - https://towardsdatascience.com/attractors-in-neural-network-...
by righthand | 2025-09-30 15:26:53+00:00
I think it’s a lot worse. My coworkers don’t even read the code base for easily answered questions anymore. They just ping me on Slack. I want to believe there are no dumb questions, but now it’s become “be ignorant and ask the expert for non-expert related tasks”.

What happened? I don’t use Llms really so I’m not sure how people have completely lost their ability to problem solve. They surely must remember 6 months ago when they were debugging just fine?
by bparsons | 2025-09-30 15:27:05+00:00
This is a problem that is not unique to software engineering, and predates LLMs.

Large organizations are increasingly made up of technical specialists who are very good at their little corner of the operation. In the past, you had employees present at firms for 20+ years who not only understand the systems in a holistic way, but can recall why certain design or engineering decisions were made.

There is also a demographic driver. The boomer generation with all the institutional memory have left. Gen-X was a smaller cohort, and was not able to fully absorb that knowledge transfer. What is left are a lot of organizations run by people under the age of 45 working on systems where they may not fully understand the plumbing or context.
by rappatic | 2025-09-30 15:27:29+00:00
> Going through YC’s startup directory reveals that of the 170 startups in the most recent summer batch 154 are AI startups.

The author calculates this by searching for the term "AI" in the name and description of each startup's YC page. But presence of the term "AI" doesn't make a startup an "AI startup," so to speak. For example, I picked one startup at random, Topological, which is "developing physics-based foundation models for CAD optimization." Just because the company uses AI doesn't make it an "AI startup." AI is rapidly proving itself to be an extremely useful and workflow-changing tool, and many companies now have adopted it somewhere in their product without suddenly becoming AI companies.
by goku12 | 2025-09-30 15:28:03+00:00
Interesting! I just remembered that there is another team that's working on plant based scaffolds (cellulose scaffolds from leaves like spinach) [1]. This one is from 2017. So I'm guessing that the interest in the technology hasn't waned yet. I also wonder if any biocompatible scaffolds can be 3D printed, rather than having to decellularize the available ones.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/spinach-leaf-transfo...
by semi-extrinsic | 2025-09-30 15:28:52+00:00
If that explains most/all of it, why don't we see more tech companies moving into areas of the US with low housing prices?

I guess some of it is the "captive" effect for an individual - if you leave the expensive property market for somewhere cheaper with a lower salary, it becomes very hard to move back to the expensive place. But is that a strong enough effect?

Surely an efficient free market should theoretically make tech companies much more geographically distributed?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-30 15:28:54+00:00
I wouldn't say that.

"AI" (quotes deliberate) is the biggest story in tech, right now, for better or for worse. HN is a news site, so it's fairly logical that "AI" would dominate.

It wasn't that long ago, that you couldn't find a pitch deck, anywhere, that was missing the word "Blockchain."

I'm finding it interesting. It's definitely a bubble, but unlike crypto, there's some real utility here. I do think that we'll be seeing some excellent stuff (and some awful crap) down the road.
by drnick1 | 2025-09-30 15:29:05+00:00
"After years with Pi-hole, which now blocks over a million domains, I’ve become incredibly accustomed to a mostly ad-free web. Without realizing it, I’d forgotten what the typical internet experience feels like."

It is estimated that between 30% and 50% of Internet users run ad blockers. I haven't see a single ad in years.

Besides, Pi-holes are kind of overrated. First, ad blockers running in the browser are simply more effective. Second, Pi-hole is kind of heavy for what it does; you can accomplish the same by loading a blacklist directly to the config file of Unbound/Bind/Dnsmasq.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-30 15:29:21+00:00
Exactly my thoughts. Couldn't agree more really, there is so much to discuss on this short time that we have on earth but a lot of that energy is going into talking about AI and AI again it seems. I have nothing against the tech but c'mon I would argue that open source itself overall is more valuable than AI but that isn't an apples to orange comparison but still, I see far fewer discussions of open source as compared to AI.

Maybe Open source is just on mind a lot these recent days.
by vunderba | 2025-09-30 15:29:38+00:00
Having not shopped on Amazon for years now, I'm sure the problem has only gotten worse but for a while an easy to use heuristic that I would personally apply was to strip all 5 star reviews, check for a minimum number of reviews, recalculate the final rating, and then read through some of the 3/4 star reviews.

These days I make it a general rule to find AMZ alternatives particularly for highend items.

- Electronics: B&H

- Music Equipment: Sweetwater

- Computer related: Local Microcenter
by pmarreck | 2025-09-30 15:30:02+00:00
You don't need to run `jj status` all the time, but you DO need to have Watchman installed, and a config like this:

# ~/.jjconfig.toml [core] fsmonitor = "watchman" [core.watchman] # Newer docs use the hyphenated key below: register-snapshot-trigger = true
by demarq | 2025-09-30 15:30:06+00:00
I don’t buy it. It’s like a simple if statement. If Israel || Gaza || Nyetawhaterver then canFlag = false.

It has happened so so so many times, it’s naive at this point to believe the mod has no influence

It’s ridiculous that the biggest story on tech this minute has only 130 comments after 24 hours.
by jfengel | 2025-09-30 15:30:26+00:00
Oh, there's tax cuts. It's just that you don't get most of them.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/by-the-numbers-hou...

What's remarkable is that all these tax cuts balloon the deficit; butchering government services and putting tariffs on consumer goods doesn't come anywhere close to balancing it.

As Dick Cheney put it, “Reagan proved that deficits don't matter.” Though that doesn't prevent people from running on the deficit, then doing exactly the opposite in office -- and nobody seems to mind.
by ctxc | 2025-09-30 15:30:36+00:00
I don't understand this position.

LLMs are good at prototyping using data across _all_ similar projects that exist.

It is not a 1-1 copy.

Most frontend is a dozen components. Most backend again is a handful of architectures when it comes to DB/business logic, CRUD.

It goes to say that if you can guide the LLM to build something innovative you can think of, it will put those components together in a reasonable way - good enough to start off with.
by Goofy_Coyote | 2025-09-30 15:30:49+00:00
Great resources and sound advice. Thank you, will take a look at the beginner’s quest for sure. Also I definitely will follow the implementation advice. It just clicked. It’ll geerate a ton of aha moments for sure.

I’ve done Bandit years ago and many other wargames and ctfs (htb, defcon etc), and still doing ctfs every Friday, been working in the field for over a decade, and have 3 CVEs (cvss 7+, one 9) to my name. I think I’m missing something else entirely when it comes to Google CTF.

Maybe I need more theoretical knowledge (is that the right word here? By theoretical I mean more around pure cs and math) vs hands on real world (as in day to day) vulnerability research and exploitation.

Would love to hear some feedback to get better. There’s always more to learn in all directions.
by CliffStoll | 2025-09-30 15:31:10+00:00
Strongly agree: scribbling requirements, process maps, and block diagrams goes a long way to understanding what needs to be done, as well as getting us to think through what'll be the easy parts and pinch-points.

Goes back to Fred Brooks' Mythical Man-Month: Start with understanding the requirements; then design the architecture. Only after that, begin programming.
by culturestate | 2025-09-30 15:31:16+00:00
I don’t think you can really bake that in because the traffic rules can change day-to-day.

For example, there’s a street in my neighborhood that’s normally open for two-way traffic, but one of the buildings that fronts it is being renovated so the street was changed to one-way for about a month, and as of a couple of days ago it’s still one-way but in the other direction. Imagine trying to get a car to work that out on its own.
by daveoc64 | 2025-09-30 15:31:20+00:00
It's actually unclear what the cause of this is.

There is an ongoing ICO investigation about privacy and handling of children's data under data protection laws, rather than this being related to the Online Safety Act:

https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...

The ICO has indicated it is planning to give a fine to the owner of Imgur due to breaches of data protection laws.
by btilly | 2025-09-30 15:31:38+00:00
Proposed rule: People writing about the history of mathematics, should learn something about the history of mathematics.

Mathematicians didn't just randomly decide to go to abstraction and the foundations of mathematics. They were forced there by a series of crises where the mathematics that they knew fell apart. For example Joseph Fourier came up with a way to add up a bunch of well-behaved functions - sin and cos - and came up to something that wasn't considered a function - a square wave.

The focus on abstraction and axiomatization came after decades of trying to repair mathematics over and over again. Trying to retell the story in terms of the resulting mathematical flow of the ideas, completely mangles the actual flow of events.
by deater | 2025-09-30 15:32:31+00:00
as someone who has written my own OS from scratch (vmwOS) and teach a class on it, I have to agree with a lot of the other comments that x86-based OS projects do end up being exercises in 40-year old PC/x86 retrocomputing.

A few years ago I would have recommended the path I took (writing an OS for the Raspberry Pi) but the Pis have gone off the rails recently. So writing a simple OS for a Pi-1B+ is relatively doable (simple enough, sort of OK documentation, biggest downside is needing USB for the keyboard).

Things led to disaster once everyone wanted to use Pi4 (which was all we could manage to source during the CPU shortage of '23) as the documentation is poor, getting interrupts going became nearly impossible, and the virtual memory/cache/etc setup on the 64-bit cores (at least a few years ago) was not documented well at all.
by kordlessagain | 2025-09-30 15:32:34+00:00
The AI bubble isn't what everyone thinks it is.

Everyone's panicking about "AI features" being bolted onto products like it's 2010 and we're adding social login buttons. That's not the bubble. The bubble is the assumption that current software companies have defensibility.

Here's the thing: we're not adding AI to products. We're removing the need for most products entirely.

Nobody shipped without search after Google. But search was an enhancement—it made existing software better. AI is a solvent. It dissolves the economic moat that justified building the software in the first place.

YC's entire thesis rests on startups capturing value during the window between "this problem is painful" and "an incumbent solves it." But what happens when that window collapses to zero? When any reasonably clever person can get Claude or GPT to generate a bespoke solution to their specific problem in 20 minutes?

I'm watching food service managers—people who optimize labor, inventory, and customer flow in real-time—get told they can't build software. That's a lie we told ourselves to justify $150k engineer salaries and $10M seed rounds. Those managers have exactly the cognitive toolkit needed. They just didn't know C++.

In three years, they won't need to.

The SaaS model assumes friction. It assumes most people can't build the thing themselves, so they'll pay you $50/month forever. Coding AI doesn't make software easier to build—it makes the *act of building* indistinguishable from the *act of using*.

You don't need a project management tool with 600 features. You need to tell your computer what you're trying to coordinate. You don't need Photoshop's menus. You need to describe what you want the image to convey.

Every software company selling picks and shovels to the AI gold rush is missing that they're about to get disintermediated by the prospectors themselves. The cloud was never about technical superiority—it was about control and recurring revenue. What happens when capable models run locally and people can spin up exactly what they need?

VCs are investing in moats that evaporate the moment non-engineers realize they don't need us anymore. Network effects, switching costs, proprietary data—all predicated on software remaining expensive to create.

It's not.

The actual bubble is venture capital itself. You can't invest in defensibility that doesn't exist. And you can't charge rent on the gap between intention and execution when that gap is closing.

We're not in an AI bubble. We're watching the software bubble pop in slow motion.
by cozzyd | 2025-09-30 15:32:40+00:00
There are other paths, though they are somewhat more narrow and precarious. I'm research faculty at a University, for example. I am dependent on getting enough grants to pay my (increasingly expensive, though not by silicon valley standards) salary, which is a bit scary, especially in the current funding enivironment, but I don't teach (though I do work with students doing research) and spent most of my time doing research. (Yes, I have to apply for and manage grants too, but that doesn't take THAT much time, as much as it is annoying). There are also national labs in various disciplines in many countries (e.g. in Germany you have DESY and various MPI's, in the NL there is ASTRON and NIKHEF and probably others I don't know about because I only know about my narrow field...).
by kayfox | 2025-09-30 15:32:55+00:00
You seem to want a system where the regulators, while embedded at Boeing, are just wandering around and looking at things. What we have in aviation is a system where engineers, the people wearing the rings, with an ethical and moral obligation to prevent harm to other people, are charged with identifying issues and escalating them as far as the FAA if needed as they work on their day-to-day tasks.

The latter is a much better system to find issues than the former, you get a chance to see a lot more issues when your actively working on the systems where the issues would be than if your walking around and looking at paperwork.
by dominicrose | 2025-09-30 15:33:09+00:00
It's a bit sad that content creators, from individuals to big companies, have to (or at least feel like they have to) disable comments on their content, wether it's a video or an article.

Sending an e-mail is not the same thing, it's like Youtube removing the unlike button count and instead sending the info only to the creator.

This doesn't apply to your blog, but I've seen low quality or misleading content without a possibility to comment. Even worse: scams that include a fake comment section.
by churchill | 2025-09-30 15:33:17+00:00
How are you going to enforce that? I mean this sincerely, from the bottom of my heart.

Ban SWIFT transactions to India? They'll just start hiring in Eastern Europe, the Philippines, etc. Not to mention explosive lawsuits that'll ultimately find that the government doesn't have those powers.

I can understand and sympathize with you feeling sad about jobs being outsourced but, this is technological evolution. America has a tiny slice of humanity's population and if the Bell Curve is accurate, it therefore has a tiny slice of the world's supply of smart people. Or, maybe just driven hard workers, since not every H1B founds a Google.

If you don't let them move to America, then fine, your homegrown companies will export jobs to them. The only way to prevent this is to levy blanket tariffs on all countries to force them to onshore. But, then, they'll retaliate, hurting America's export industries and the economy. Making America a less attractive place for the businesses you're trying to hold back. They'll consequently move out.

It's the same thing with tariffs. If
by Hilift | 2025-09-30 15:33:24+00:00
I'm predicting there will be a startup to focus on large scale forensic identification of archived samples of various things. Particularly items that may have been important enough to save in a freezer for 70 or 80 years. The refinement and availability of devices to measure microscopic amounts, and AI to process and sift through mundane results. From my experience with science, laboratory procedures before the 1980's were generally inconsistent and inadequate. Contamination was not uncommon, something biological investigators had to deal with when investigating early HIV cases. Wouldn't be surprised for an "empty the freezers" order from the FDA or CDC. Probably located underground in a BSL 4/5 facility in Arizona or Utah.
by Bender | 2025-09-30 15:34:17+00:00
I do not know the answer to your question but if that is what I was looking for the first people I would call are rescue.org [1]. They have internet terminals for their rescuers and they go behind enemy lines and do some crazy dangerous stuff to extract people. If anyone had contacts for such a thing I would expect them to.

[1] - https://www.rescue.org/
by atonse | 2025-09-30 15:34:20+00:00
By that metric, every single software company is now an AI company.

I can't think of a SINGLE company (except ours maybe, only because we haven't updated our website yet, not because we don't want to) that doesn't vomit AI terms _everywhere_ in their product messaging.

I don't know whether consumers/buyers are demanding that, or what. But it seems everywhere and in every discipline. It's in research grant applications, it's in legal tech, everywhere.

AI is the new "we use the internet" - it will just get taken for granted.
by patrickmay | 2025-09-30 15:34:24+00:00
> However I think we should be thinking harder about how coding will change as LLMs change the economics of writing code: - If the cost of delivering a feature is ~0, what's the point in spending weeks prioritizing it?

Writing code and delivering a feature are not synonymous. The time spent writing code is often significantly less than the time spent clarifying requirements, designing the solution, adjusting the software architecture as necessary, testing, documenting, and releasing. That effort won't be driven to 0 even if an LLM could be trusted to write perfect code that didn't need human review.
by specialist | 2025-09-30 15:34:31+00:00
> some rows of events you want to track

Neat.

I also created a grid for habit tracking (for chronic pain mgmt). Day of month across the top, all the things I'm supposed to do along the side. Something to share and discuss with my care providers.

Mine's just a spreadsheet that I tweak and print every month. (Then added to my discbound clipboard organizer, that I bring everywhere.)

I haven't had the gumption to digitize my effort. I really like the physical check lists. Though I've wondered how a hybrid solution might work. eg vital signs added automatically to digital version via Health.app. eg scan printed copy and magically fill in the digital version.

I look forward to seeing your app.