MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mhitza | 2025-09-28 16:59:12+00:00
I agree with your comment sentiment, but I believe that you, like many others have the cycle in wrong order. I don't fault anyone for it because it's the flow that got handed down to us from the days of waterfall development.

My strong belief after almost twenty years of professional software development is that both us and LLMs should be following the order: build, test, reflect, plan, build.

Writing out the implementation is the process of materializing the requirements, and learning the domain. Once the first version is out, you can understand the limits and boundaries of the problem and then you can plan the production system.

This is very much in line with Fred Brooks' "build one to throw away" (written ~40 years ago in the "The Mythical Man-Month". While often quoted, if you never read his book, I urge you to do so, it's both entertaining, and enlightening on our software industry), startup culture (if you remove the "move fast break things" mantra), and governmental pilot programs (the original "minimum viable").
by danlitt | 2025-09-28 16:59:19+00:00
> why predict that the growth rate is going to slow exactly now?

why predict that it will continue? Nobody ever actually makes an argument that growth is likely to continue, they just extrapolate from existing trends and make a guess, with no consideration of the underlying mechanics.

Oh, go on then, I'll give a reason: this bubble is inflated primarily by venture capital, and is not profitable. The venture capital is starting to run out, and there is no convincing evidence that the businesses will become profitable.
by BeetleB | 2025-09-28 16:59:39+00:00
People here are taking an overly cynical binary stance. It's not that logic cannot reach such people, but that there are barriers to them thinking and accepting your logic. Once you remove most of the barriers, most of these people are happily logical.

The important realization I had is that this is true even for fairly rational people. If you've ever encountered someone who tends to listen more to one source than others, they are exhibiting the exact same behavior this thread is complaining about. And in my experience, this happens to everyone, even the most rational people I've met.
by abathologist | 2025-09-28 17:00:36+00:00
> The WSJ writers compare the AI bubble to other bubbles, like Worldcom's fraud-soaked fiber optic bonanza (which saw the company's CEO sent to prison, where he eventually died), and conclude that the AI bubble is vastly larger than any other bubble in recent history.

> ...

> Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.

> ...

> Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there's a buyer's market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there's a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.
by enraged_camel | 2025-09-28 17:00:46+00:00
>> The article sort of goes sideways with this idea but pointing out that AI coding robs you a deep understanding of the code it produces is a valid and important criticism of AI coding.

All code is temporary and should be treated as ephemeral. Even if it lives for a long time, at the end of the day what really matters is data. Data is what helps you develop the type of deep understanding and expertise of the domain that is needed to produce high quality software.

In most problem domains, if you understand the data and how it is modeled, the need to be on top of how every single line of code works and the nitty-gritty of how things are wired together largely disappears. This is the thought behind the idiom “Don’t tell me what the code says—show me the data, and I’ll tell you what the code does.”

It is therefore crucial to start every AI-driven development effort with data modeling, and have lots of long conversations with AI to make sure you learn the domain well and have all your questions answered. In most cases, the rest is mostly just busywork, and handing it off to AI is how people achieve the type of productivity gains you read about.

Of course, that's not to say you should blindly accept everything the AI generates. Reading the code and asking the AI questions is still important. But the idea that the only way to develop an understanding of the problem is to write the code yourself is no longer true. In fact, it was never true to begin with.
by jmogly | 2025-09-28 17:01:25+00:00
Absolutely agree, for the most part. Luckily I think the tide is going out and developers are going to be forced to start actually solving problems in their domain out of necessity.

No more easy money = no more engineering for engineering’s sake, and companies are increasingly becoming more privy to the fact that architecture astronauts are a liability, and cloud is a 95% distractions meant to absorb time energy and money from IT orgs within large companies.

I’ve personally switched out of devops and to a domain aligned software team within my company. I am absolutely fed up with how wasteful and distracting the state of devops is to the actual business.
by Noumenon72 | 2025-09-28 17:01:53+00:00
I think we should continue with the consequentialist approach where the trust violation and right to privacy are considered creepy but not punished as strictly as sexual abuse that actually harms someone or traumatizes them. "Uploads the nudes to Facebook" is not a bad place to draw the line. I spend a lot of time watching TikToks of people in prison and it is a terrible punishment where a few weeks outweighs any harm done to these victims.
by jayd16 | 2025-09-28 17:02:10+00:00
I'm not an AI zealot but I think some of these are over blown.

The energy cost is nonsensical unless you pin down a value out vs value in ratio and some would argue the output is highly valuable and the input cost is priced in.

I don't know if it will end up being a concentrated power. It seems like local/open LLMs will still be in the same ballpark. Despite the absurd amounts of money spent so far the moats don't seem that deep.

Baking in bias is a huge problem.

The genie is out of the bottle as far as people using it for bad. Your own usage won't change that.
by marcinzm | 2025-09-28 17:02:27+00:00
So not a single point of failure but the single action of Sidekiq's pulling funding was the cause... almost as if Sidekiq's funding was the single point of failure.

If this is the reaction of the Ruby Community then no wonder they got themselves into this mess to begin with. Like deciding the intern should be fired for dropping prod and not the CTO who told everyone to use admin permissions for everything.
by BeetleB | 2025-09-28 17:02:38+00:00
> While Sagan basically agreed with Dawkins on most points as to the importance of science and reason and the dangers of magical thinking and religion, he lacked the arrogance and smugness that Dawkins has that often rub people the wrong way.

He didn't merely lack it - he opposed it. A quote from the book:

"In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped."

...

"whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted."
by busterarm | 2025-09-28 17:02:42+00:00
Because we all have to get along regardless of what you believe and DHH hasn't advocated for violence against anyone. You can't unperson everyone disagreeable, especially relative to their contributions in the Rails community.

Notice I said Rails community, not Ruby community. Not letting DHH speak at RailsConf is like barring the Pope from the Vatican. There are a lot of big new changes in Rails this year that he has been championing. He was absolutely the right person to give the keynote.
by SamInTheShell | 2025-09-28 17:02:49+00:00
My daily driver is a M1 MBP with 64GB of ram. Using ollama, lm studio, or even just max-lm in python, a model like gpt-oss:20b can produce results. It runs anywhere from 50-80 tps, so don’t expect blazing fast edits, but it’s usable such that you can background it with clear instructions and come back to something that isn’t complete trash.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-28 17:03:31+00:00
Sorry, this triggers me a little.

Whenever we hire someone, a restaurant to cook our meal, a lawyer to help settle our house purchase, a plumber to fix the leaky pipe, we almost never know what we are buying into.

So e ask people that have previously had someone do those jobs for them.

And here's the rub, they have no idea whatsoever on the quality of the person being hired, only that they've not NOTICED any poor results.

I've highlighted noticed, because, unless the person you ask is qualified to assess the work, they have no idea on is quality.

And this affects us all, because we use references to guide us on people to hire for jobs, and we have no idea on the quality of the person providing the reference.

Do we ask for a reference on the person giving the reference? Even if we do, do e get a reference on the person giving the reference for the person giving the reference?
by alyxya | 2025-09-28 17:03:38+00:00
The sentiment of the comments here seems rather pessimistic. A perspective that balances both sides might be that the rate of mass adoption of some technology often lags behind the frontier capabilities, so I wouldn’t expect AI to take over a majority of those jobs in GPDval in a couple of years, but it’ll probably happen eventually.

There are still fundamental limitations in both the model and products using the model that restrict what AI is capable of, so it’s simultaneously true that AI can do cutting edge work in certain domains for hours while vastly underperforming in other domains for very small tasks. The trajectory of improvement of AI capabilities is also an unknown, where it’s easy to overestimate exponential trends due to unexpected issues arising but also easy to underestimate future innovations.

I don’t see the trajectory slowing down just yet with more compute and larger models being used, and I can imagine AI agents will increasingly give their data to further improve larger models.
by troupo | 2025-09-28 17:03:38+00:00
> Given the threat of securities fraud lawsuits

--- start quote ---

Apple willfully violated a 2021 injunction that came out of the Epic Games case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a court filing on Wednesday.

She wrote that Apple Vice President of Finance Alex Roman “outright lied” to the court about when Apple had decided to levy a 27% fee on some purchases linked to its App Store.

“Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies,” Rogers wrote, saying that she considers Apple to “to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.”

Rogers added that she referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings on both Roman and Apple.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/30/court-finds-apple-executive-...

--- end quote ---

Apple's execs literally lie under oath in a court of law. I trust them about as far as I can throw them. They are the same people claiming they don't know if AppStore is profitable or not.
by axydlbaaxr | 2025-09-28 17:04:07+00:00
I'm out of my depth here, but I find it Matt McCool (honestly...) who is head of the WASHINGTON field office is the reporting to have broken this case for the NY Field office. Hmm. PRIOR to his serving in Washington, he was head of the New York Field office...likely from 2021 to early 2024. Hmmmmmmmm. Also, nothing from the FBI or FCC--agencies NORMALLY involved in telecom takedowns. HMMMMmmmmmmmmm. mm. mm.
by wtallis | 2025-09-28 17:04:16+00:00
> So far they’ve chosen to go with a simple feature flag but eventually it may require a pullout.

Isn't that entirely your speculation, not supported by anything Apple has actually said or done?

As far as I can recall, the most notable example of an Apple product getting a limited rather than global release was the Vision Pro—and that was just a slow roll-out to new countries, not exclusion from the entire EU. And on the other hand, there's a long list of products where Apple has shipped with regional differences in features, both software and hardware.

> Especially if the EU fines them for not releasing features in the EU.

Has the EU actually made that threat yet? Because it would be quite a stretch to accuse Apple of making a threat to the EU in response to a threat from the EU that hasn't actually been stated.
by armchairhacker | 2025-09-28 17:04:19+00:00
You left out the rest of the paragraph (emphasis mine):

> I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective, having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it. I also recall a figure like either $200 or $250 per hour being mentioned as the rate he was effectively paying himself. Whatever the rate actually was, I distinctly remember thinking, "holy shit, that's a lot higher than individual donors would probably assume."

I agree that maintainers of popular open-source projects deserve to be paid enough for a decent standard of living, but $200/hr (* 40hr/wk * 50wk/yr = $400k/yr) is excessive.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-28 17:04:27+00:00
> If the thinking bit is your favorite part, AI allows you to spend nearly all of your time there if you wish, from concept through troubleshooting.

This argument is wearing a little thin at this point. I see it multiples times a day, rephrased a little bit.

The response, "How well do you think your thinking will go if you had not spent years doing the 'practice' part?", is always followed by either silence or a non-sequitor.

So, sure, keep focusing on the 'thinking' part, but your thinking will get more and more shallow without sufficient 'doing'
by gruez | 2025-09-28 17:04:59+00:00
>You could compare the USA to Switzerland or the Netherlands on a per-capita basis or you could pick Romania or Bulgaria and come away with a completely different impression.

You can make the same granularity arguments at the country level as well, for instance Germany vs California or Missouri. Does that mean cross country comparisons are bunk as well? What makes "country" the level of subdivision that's acceptable compared to neighborhood, city, county, state, country, or continent?
by y-c-o-m-b | 2025-09-28 17:05:45+00:00
Ugh, I hear this from people in Canada too. I'm in the US, and given the decades long experiences with shoulder shrugs from medical experts around chronic health issues for myself and others, this comment really frustrates me. It is absolutely not superior. In fact I would argue that if the person in the article approached the same thing here, they'd never get the treatment they got through the NHS.

It took 5 years for my wife to get tested for rheumatoid arthritis (which she was finally diagnosed with after tests and exams proved it), and that's only because I kept insisting. The doctors here will easily hand wave any sort of complicated chronic illness. Mayo clinic - one of the top medical institutions in America - gave up on my dad's neurological illness. He was very active 3 years ago, today he is in a wheelchair. Diagnosis? Who knows, it's too complicated, they're not interested anymore.
by syntaxing | 2025-09-28 17:05:46+00:00
> There's a reason people don't install electric equipment without training.

I’m not sure if I follow that logic and if your analogy follows. I would argue this is closer plugging in an appliance rather than running wires. If I run a 15A appliance on a 10A breaker, a normal person without training would expect the breaker to trip. This is like running a 10A appliance and the 15A breaker trips because the appliance is sometimes 16A when it works in the cold.
by noAnswer | 2025-09-28 17:06:13+00:00
Outlook New gets installed by default on Windows 11. Of course people gonna use it. Even if they just trial it, their data is gone. A Anti-Virus should stop the software from running. But that will never happen.

> "everybody uses microsoft", so they rarely actually ponder the decision.

Exactly. That is my main argument against PantaloonFlames's claim "They have legitimate revenue at stake. If they betray trust on such a scale, and we find out, they'll be out of business."

At a certain scale nothing matters anymore! You can Bluescreen half the planet and still be in business.
by derriz | 2025-09-28 17:07:00+00:00
I'm not sure I agree. I think I could be convinced if there was a unique and universal representation for numeric values using characters.

But we have so many textual representations of numeric values that I'm assuming the "mind-reading" goodness only works for a small subset. And the subset will be somewhat intuitive for developers but unlikely to be so for non-technical people.

For example, does the order handle numbers with fractions (decimal points)? If yes, does it require a at least one leading digit (zero)? Does a.12345 come before or after a.345?

Does it handle thousand separators? What about international thousand and decimal separators (e.g. Euro-style . for thousand separation and , for decimal separation).

Does it handle scientific notation?

If the answer is no to any of these questions, it's likely to lead to surprise/confusion.

It's like a feature request that initially sounds reasonable and useful but once you explore the requirements in detail you realize there are too many edge cases to be able to meet the request in a non-brittle way.
by bradly | 2025-09-28 17:07:10+00:00
I got a similar feeling. The article’s title and closing paragraph reference not taking a side, but sandwiched between those are a lot of words that to me clearly indicate a “side” taken by the author.

Through all this I will say that Ruby Central hired a non-technical director whose responsibilities I would expect to include communication and operational expertise to not let these situations happen or at least contain the volatility. That was a failure by Ruby Central regardless of the actions of engineers.
Ask HN: How Do I Get over My Existential Crisis?
by OulaX | 2025-09-28 17:07:29+00:00
During my teen years, I was crazy interested in programming. I got interested because I used to script mods for a game, it helped me create things I was dreaming of, and oh boy, it was a pleasure to write code!

Forward to my university years, I got into computer science because I thought writing code for the rest of my life would be as cool as it was in my teen years. For a moment, during my university years, it was! I aced my classes and was happily writing code for projects and coming up with unique little tools and ideas to build.

After graduation, I hit a brick wall. I found out there are very few jobs for programmers in my country, and almost none in my city. I searched for months, but in the end, I settled for a tutoring role. I worked as a tutor for two years, and then, just with sheer luck, I found a paid internship, applied, and was offered the position. I think I got offered the internship because the pay was low—it was basically slave labor—but it was decent by my country’s standards. I believed that building my reputation, network, and experience working with a US-based startup was worth more than the pay.

I worked as an intern for 6 months, then moved to a Jr. Role, doing full-stack work. I worked as a Jr for 8 more months, then the startup failed to secure funding. So, again, I was unemployed.

I got referred to a different startup by my old employer, started working there as the only frontend developer, the pay was good, and the work was good, but that startup also failed to secure funding, and I was let go.

Now, I am unemployed. I applied to hundreds, if not thousands, of openings on LinkedIn, HackerNews’ monthly “Who is Hiring” threads, but got nothing.

I am now in an existential crisis, local work where I live is almost non-existent, and even if I do come across an opening, the pay is not even decent by my standards; it simply is not worth the effort. So, my goal is to find contract roles and fully remote roles abroad, and honestly, I don’t know how viable that goal is now.

I am even thinking of shifting my focus away from software development due to the market saturation worldwide.

What would you do if you were me? I’m looking for real, honest, and thoughtful feedback.
by latexr | 2025-09-28 17:07:41+00:00
I’ll say it again:

> You don’t have to agree with any of those. You don’t even have to understand them. But to imply anti-AI arguments “hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless” is at best misinformed.

We can certainly discuss some of those points, but that’s not what is in question here. The OP is suggesting there is only one type of anti-AI argument they are familiar with and that they’d “love” to see something different. But I have to question how true that is considering the myriad of different arguments that exist and how easy they are to find.
by cramsession | 2025-09-28 17:08:41+00:00
$200 /hr is a pretty low consulting rate. You are never going to be 100% utilized, so right off the bat you can divide that $400k by at least 50% over a long period of time. You also have to pay for your own insurance, equipment...

$200 /hr would be what I would consider to be the going rate for any mid level, non-FAANG type developer and pretty fair imho!
by f33d5173 | 2025-09-28 17:08:45+00:00
> The other part being, you don’t really have to write stuff down as much when you can just manipulate subjects of your authoritarian regime at will.

That creates a web of implicit rules that need to be complied with just as much as if they were written down, while having the downside of unclear boundaries and exceptions. An environment with more rules, but with them written in ink and with lawyers that can be consulted to interpret them is preferable.
by avmich | 2025-09-28 17:08:46+00:00
> Never trust anything written by lawyers/economics/MBAs on climate change - only analysis by chemical or mechanical engineers is worth reading.

> Methane pyrolysis is an old technology from early days of oil refining for production of hydrogen & Ammonia/fertilizer/Methanol. it yields half as much H2 than SMR/ATR so it can't compete on cost, unless there is carbon tax/CO2 penalty.

Sounds like never trust anything written by chemical or mechanical engineers on costs, only economists/MBA :) ?

To be competitive on cost, not only the percent of used input should be taken into account, but also how much the one and another ways of processing are costing independently. If old technology methane pyrolysis produces half as much H2 but is quarter as cheap per unit of H2, it still wins whatever modern method is.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-28 17:09:30+00:00
There is no grand conspiracy, the ad industry is massive, and advertising works. Companies would find out pretty quickly that advertising is a waste of money, yet here we are decades later and they still ad spend like crazy.

It definitely works, and the more tailored the ads, the better they work.

The key is remembering we are talking about average people, not nerdy techno anarchists with router level ad blocking and a pavolonian vomit reflex to seeing the word "sponsored".