MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by some-guy | 2025-09-03 22:07:34+00:00
These claims wouldn't matter if the topic weren't so deadly serious. Tech leaders everywhere are buying into the FOMO, convinced their competitors are getting massive gains they're missing out on. This drives them to rebrand as AI-First companies, justify layoffs with newfound productivity narratives, and lowball developer salaries under the assumption that AI has fundamentally changed the value equation.

This is my biggest problem right now. The types of problems I'm trying to solve at work require careful planning and execution, and AI has not been helpful for it in the slightest. My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate because we are "an AI-first company". The mass hysteria among SVPs and PMs is absolutely insane right now, I've never seen anything like it.
by araes | 2025-09-03 22:07:44+00:00
Had not actually seen the cat adventure game before the mention. Although the dead humanity timeline is quite dark, the game itself looks like an innovative adventure/mystery with a lot of physics puzzles and animal specific interactions. Neat art style and robot characterization. If I ever get back to trying games again, looks like something to investigate. Like games such as Tenchu where you're motivated to find a choice other than straight up fighting everything. Thanks for the mention if nothing else.
by larve | 2025-09-03 22:08:06+00:00
In case the author is reading this, I have the receipts on how there's a real step function in how much software I build, especially lately. I am not going to put any number on it because that makes no sense, but I certainly push a lot of code that reasonably seems to work.

The reason it doesn't show up online is that I mostly write software for myself and for work, with the primary goal of making things better, not faster. More tooling, better infra, better logging, more prototyping, more experimentation, more exploration.

Here's my opensource work: https://github.com/orgs/go-go-golems/repositories . These are not just one-offs (although there's plenty of those in the vibes/ and go-go-labs/ repositories), but long-lived codebases / frameworks that are building upon each other and have gone through many many iterations.
by CaioFer | 2025-09-03 22:08:30+00:00
Email: c410.f3r (at) gmail.com Location: Brazil Remote: Yes Résumé/CV: https://c410-f3r.github.io/curriculum.pdf Technologies: AI, Blockchain, C, C++, Cryptography, Docker, Svelte, GCP, Go, Kubernetes, Node, PostgreSQL, React, Rust, ZK Willing to relocate: No

Hello! I am a software engineer with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, more than 10 years of experience and 10 professional certifications earned after a lot of study and hard work.

While I work with a wide range of technologies, my passion lies in programming with Rust. Whether it is backend development, blockchain, compilers, DevOps, embedded systems or mobile applications, I am totally onboard as long as long as there is a bit of Rust involved.

For more information, take a look at my CV (https://c410-f3r.github.io/curriculum.pdf) or my GitHub account (https://github.com/c410-f3r).
by mcny | 2025-09-03 22:08:44+00:00
One possibility is that if they can manage to lower interest rates back to zero ish, we might see a hiring frenzy in machine learning/llm/genai, starving upstarts and free software of talent, slowing progress in custom local models? Or is this too pessimistic/ "out there" of a take that requires the stars to align just right?
by cnst | 2025-09-03 22:08:49+00:00
What if the reason for this monoculture is because every other browser vendor was forced out of business because they cannot go after the most sought-after customers?

Personally, I uninstall Chrome whenever I see it (on Android, I first use Chrome to download the F-Droid app store, then I uninstall/disable Chrome promptly).

But if you do agree with the author that Safari is so poor that noone would keep it, if other browsers were available on iOS… Isn't that a pretty weak argument against browser choice? You're basically agreeing with the author that Safari is so poor noone would use it if it wasn't mandatory? How's that a good thing we're all forced to keep using such an uninspiring piece of software?
by davmre | 2025-09-03 22:09:18+00:00
> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment."

Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.

> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.

Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
by kmnc | 2025-09-03 22:09:21+00:00
No one wants it? If there is no demand, then no one is going to become a supplier. You don’t even want the apps you’re dreaming of building, you wouldn’t use them. If you would use them, you would already be using apps that are available. It’s why developers claim huge benefits but the output is the same, there isn’t much demand for your average software company to push more output, the bottleneck is customer demand. If anything customer demand is falling because of AI. There is no platform that is blowing up for people to shovel shit to. Everything is saturated, there is no room for shovelware.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-03 22:09:45+00:00
> Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.

There's something more to it than this.

For one thing there's a threshold of awareness. Your mind is constantly doing things and having thoughts that don't arrive to the threshold of awareness. You can observe more of this stuff if you meditate and less of this stuff if you constantly distract yourself. But consciousness IMO should have the idea of a threshold baked in.

For another, the brain will unify things that don't make sense. I assume you mean something like consciousness is what happens when there aren't obstructions to stitching sensory data together. But the brain does a lot of work interpreting incoherent data as best it can. It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
by jryio | 2025-09-03 22:10:10+00:00
I completely agree with the thesis here. I also have not seen a massive productivity boost with the use of AI.

I think that there will be neurological fatigue occurring whereby if software engineers are not actively practicing problem-solving, discernment, and translation into computer code - those skills will atrophy...

Yee, AI is not the 2x or 10x technology of the future ™ is was promised to be. It may the case that any productivity boost is happening within existing private code bases. Even still, there should be a modest uptick in noticeably improved offer deployment in the market, which does not appear to be there.

In my consulting practice I am seeing this phenomenon regularly, wereby new founders or stir crazy CTOs push the use of AI and ultimately find that they're spending more time wrangling a spastic code base than they are building shared understanding and working together.

I have recently taken on advisory roles and retainers just to reinstill engineering best practices..
PLTR is the most de-risked 10x opportunity on the market
by ngninja | 2025-09-03 22:10:28+00:00
I've been digging into the financials, and the bear case on Palantir is officially dead. They are now consistently GAAP profitable, which was the last major hurdle. The risk is gone.

Here's the simple math:

Palantir's market cap is hovering around $370 Billion.

Their software is becoming the essential AI backbone for both government and commercial clients—it's far more critical than a simple CRM from a company like Salesforce (CRM).

Salesforce has a market cap of around $245 Billion.

Palantir has already surpassed Salesforce and is on its way to becoming a trillion-dollar company. Given its importance, it should trade at a valuation closer to Microsoft. A simple 3x from here to over $1 Trillion is a conservative baseline, and a 10x is not out of the question as AI adoption accelerates.

People who are still complaining about Stock-Based Compensation (SBC) don't get it. That's just the cost of acquiring the best engineering talent on the planet. I'm loading up before this is a $1,000 stock.
by eth0up | 2025-09-03 22:10:53+00:00
I can't tell you, but over the last year, as a consumer, I see consistent oscillation up and down in quality. Just today I noticed a big change in Perplexity, where it took an unusually incorrigible stance and even flagrantly lied to me.

If any value comes of this, it's to always remember to not get too comfortable, friendly or reliant, because these tools are not, have not, and never will be truly for us, but will continuously erode in some critical way for the little consumer while improving for the big ones.

Maybe something open source will save us little people and provide something stalwart. I hope so. But I won't expect anything from the big brands beyond ephemeral wows here and there, until they stamp them out and reserve them for the elite.

Probably not helpful. Sorry for the rant. I certainly do see quality variations and I'm not certain why, other than being convinced it's never noble intention.
by techtivist | 2025-09-03 22:10:54+00:00
Honestly, along with this recent news - Meta seems to be its most brazen phase since going public in 2012 https://www.adweek.com/media/whistleblower-alleges-meta-arti... (See the section Recovery from Apple’s privacy changes) Cambridge Analytica was perhaps more about incompetence than complicity. But the patterns now seem intentional, and reminiscent of its early days documented well in Steven Levy's book.
by measurablefunc | 2025-09-03 22:11:25+00:00
There are multiple solutions for each incomplete grid so how are you calculating the transitions for a grid w/ a non-unique solution?

Edit: I see you added questions for the ambiguities but modulo those choices your solution will almost work b/c it is not extensionally equivalent entirely. The transition graph and solver are almost extensionally equivalent but whereas the Prolog solver will backtrack there is no backtracking in the Markov chain and you have to re-run the chain multiple times to find all the solutions.
by rglover | 2025-09-03 22:11:49+00:00
Most of it doesn't exist beyond videos of code spraying onto a screen alongside a claim that "juniors are dead."

I think the "why" for this is that the stakes are high. The economy is trembling. Tech jobs are evaporating. There's a high anxiety around AI being a savior, and so, a demi-religion is forming among the crowd that needs AI to be able to replace developers/competency.

That said: I personally have gotten impressive results with AI, but you still need to know what you're doing. Most people don't (beyond the beginner -> intermediate range), and so, it's no surprise that they're flooding social media with exaggerated claims.

If you didn't have a superpower before AI (writing code), then having that superpower as a perceived equalizer is something that you will deploy all resources (material, psychological, etc) to ensuring that everyone else maintain the position that 1) superpower good, 2) superpower cannot go away 3) the superpower being fallible should be ignored.

Like any other hype cycle, these people will flush out, the midpoint will be discovered, and we'll patiently await the next excuse to incinerate billions of dollars.
by saulpw | 2025-09-03 22:11:51+00:00
There's rich, and then there's 10x rich, and 100x rich, and 1000x rich, and 10000x rich, and now even 100000x rich. Millionaires are fine, billionaires are bad, and hectobillionaires are supremely terrible.

I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-03 22:12:13+00:00
I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're drawing between ideological opposition to rich people existing and opposition to disproportionately powerful people existing.

In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
by citizenpaul | 2025-09-03 22:12:17+00:00
>common and acceptable in a business environment

Duh.

The comment context was in response to selling something to a company as a service. If you are just being an unofficial middle man between a SaaS and your customer you are going to make very little money. Its essentially uber for tech, you are going to be bearing the burden of all the implementation friction. On top of that you are acting as an uncommissioned sales person for the SaaS while they collect income indefinitely from your work.

The difference in how you setup the deal is literally millions of dollars in the real life example I mentioned. I don't care about corporations. I want HN posters to make money for their work and skills rather than be used and tossed in the trash by corporations. Guess what? The company is still in business and doing fine. The owner just gets one less lambo per year and a developer gets to feed their family.

Its also worth mentioning the obvious only reason they still pay the small consultancy is that they are constantly asking for changes and new things. Why would you want the extra overhead of working in someone elses sandbox when you have to do all the work anyway. Might as well be on your terms if you are going to do the work.
by throwaway13337 | 2025-09-03 22:12:23+00:00
Great angle to look at the releases of new software. I, too, thought we'd see a huge increase by now.

An alternative theory is that writing code was never the bottleneck of releasing software. The exploration of what it is you're building and getting it on a platform takes time and effort.

On the other hand, yeah, it's really easy to 'hold it wrong' with AI tools. Sometimes I have a great day and think I've figured it out. And then the next day, I realize that I'm still holding it wrong in some other way.

It is philosophically interesting that it is so hard to understand what makes building software products hard. And how to make it more productive. I can build software for 20 years and still feel like I don't really know.
by palata | 2025-09-03 22:13:07+00:00
> but the way the church is used to spread hate for people who are different than them.

I am not religious at all, but disliking the church because it speads hate is like disliking white persons (or whichever arbitrary criterium you want) because they are criminals: the reality is that only a minority speads hate and only a minority are criminals. A majority of religious people are good and want to do good. And it doesn't require religion to spread hate, far from it.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-09-03 22:14:09+00:00
Same. On many days 90% of my code output by lines is Claude generated and things that took me a day now take well under an hour.

Also, a good chunk of my personal OSS projects are AI assisted. You probably can't tell from looking at them, because I have strict style guides that suppress the "AI style", and I don't really talk about how I use AI in the READMEs. Do you also expect I mention that I used Intellisense and syntax highlighting too?
by agonza | 2025-09-03 22:14:34+00:00
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by pizzly | 2025-09-03 22:14:57+00:00
Humans experience (play in the real world) is multi modal though vision, sound, touch, pressure, muscle feedback, gravitational, etc. Its extremely rich in data. Its also not a data point its continuous stream of information. Also I would bet that humans synthesize data at the same time. Everytime we run multiple scenarios in our mind before choosing the one we execute without even thinking about it is synthesizing data. Also humans dream which is another form of data synthesizing. Allowing AI to interact with the real world is definitely a way to go.
by danielschreber | 2025-09-03 22:15:40+00:00
>nobody is building machines out of ice

People have definitely tried! Keyword "project habbakuk".

https://jaspermuseum.org/habbakuk-1943-model-ice-sawdust-shi...

The largest HN thread I found is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199679

I don't have any idea how flexoelectricity could be used in a machine made of ice. But that's why I wouldn't rule it out. How about medical nanomachines made mainly of ice so they dissolve when their allotted lifespan is up?
by naasking | 2025-09-03 22:17:33+00:00
> Designers use tecture not just for grip but to help communicate things to the driver. There's many subtler ones, but the most obvious one is the grooves you often find on the edge of highways that are used to warn you if you're veering off.

This is a red herring. None of these feedback mechanisms existed for decades of driving. The core problem of driving is vision and everything else is just gravy. If lidar can't solve all of the vision issues, which it can't, then it makes perfect sense to ask whether vision can cover lidar's purposes and thus whether having both is actually useful. Focusing on lidar is ignoring the core issue.
by benjiro | 2025-09-03 22:17:35+00:00
I need to agree with the author, with a caveat. He is a well developed developer. For somebody like him, churning out good quality code is probably easy.

Where i expect to see a lot of those metrics of feeling fast come from, is from people who may have less coding experience, and with AI are coding way above their level.

My brother in law asks for a nice product website, i just feed his business plan into a LLM, do some fine tuning on the results, and have a good looking website in a hour time. If i did it myself manually, just take me behind a barn as those jobs are so boring and take for ages. But i know that website design is a weakness of mine.

That is the power of LLMs. Turn out quick code, maybe offer some suggestion you did not think about, but ... it also eats time! Making your prompts so that the LLM understands, waiting for the result, ... waiting ... ok, now check the result, can you use it? O no, it did X, Y, Z wrong. Prompt again ... and again. And this is where your productivity goes to die.

So when you compare a pool of developer feedback, your going to get a broad "it helps a lot", "some", "is worse then my code", ... mix in with the prompting, result delays etc...

It gets even worse with Agent / Vibe coding, as you just tend to be waiting, 5, 10min for changed to be done. You need to review them, test them, ... o no, the LLM screwed something up again. O no, it removed 50% of my code. Hey, where did my comments go. And we are back to a loss of time.

LLMs are a tool... But after a lot of working with them, my opinion is to use them when needed but do not depend on them for everything. I sometimes look with cow eyes when people say they are coding so much with LLMs and spending 200, or more bucks per month.

They can be powerful tools, but i feel that some folks become so over dependent on them. And worst is my feeling that our juniors are going to be in a world of hurt, if their skills are more LLM monkey coding (or vibe coding), then actually understanding how to code (and the knowledge behind the actual programming languages and systems).
by palata | 2025-09-03 22:18:00+00:00
To be honest, the more I use jj, the more it feels like it's not yet mature enough for me. It doesn't support git push options, for instance.

I have already found more things that I cannot do with jj (and can do with git) than things that are nicer to do in jj. Though admittedly, there are things in jj that are better.

Hopefully it will get there eventually :-). But these things take time. JJ already seems to get a lot of attention, so that's something.