MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spivak | 2025-09-13 14:23:13+00:00
Do keep in mind that folks at the CDC have gone full malicious compliance mode when it comes to the COVID vaccine. The list of exceptions covers essentially everyone and locations administering the vaccine, CVS and the like, just ask "are you eligible for the vaccine Y/n?" with no follow up. So do get your COVID booster when you get your annual flu shot. The restrictions are an optics "victory" while not really changing anything.
by stickfigure | 2025-09-13 14:23:27+00:00
The Atavist is full of articles like this one - in-depth stories about obscure-but-interesting (at least, to me) moments in history. Sort of a cross between Ira Glass and Ken Burns.

No idea what funds this - looks like they were bought by Automattic? But glad it exists. If they were on substack or patreon I would pay.
by hliyan | 2025-09-13 14:23:51+00:00
At least a few of these anecdoates are worrying:

> “At first they told [me]: ‘Don’t worry about time – it’s quality versus quantity,’” she said.

> But before long, she was pulled up for taking too much time to complete her tasks. “I was trying to get things right and really understand and learn it, [but] was getting hounded by leaders [asking], ‘Why aren’t you getting this done? You’ve been working on this for an hour.’”

And:

> Dinika said he’s seen this pattern time and again where safety is only prioritized until it slows the race for market dominance. Human workers are often left to clean up the mess after a half-finished system is released. “Speed eclipses ethics,” he said. “The AI safety promise collapses the moment safety threatens profit.”

Finally:

> One work day, her task was to enter details on chemotherapy options for bladder cancer, which haunted her because she wasn’t an expert on the subject.
by ddxv | 2025-09-13 14:24:05+00:00
No, of course not. The reference to pasting a public key into an email is in reference to Contabo asking that we copy paste our ip/username/password over email for them to 'troubleshoot'. If the server had been setup with public keys and they really needed our help to access at least they could have just sent their own public key safely over email.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-13 14:24:23+00:00
Nope, people keep forgetting no one wanted to buy Sun, not even Google after torpedoing it (which would save them from their J++ like lawsuit).

IBM kind of thought of it, but ended up withdrawing the offer.

So the anti-Oracle folks would have seen Java wither and die in version 6, and the MaximeVM technology would never had been released as GraalVM.
by roflcopter69 | 2025-09-13 14:24:39+00:00
> Or we could, you know, do the hard work and build better programming languages, compilers, and libraries. But that can’t be hyped up for billions.

100% this. I fear that AI will cause us to be stuck in a local optimum for the next decades where most of the code will be Python or JS because these are the languages best supported by LLMs. Don't get me wrong, Python and JS and mature and productive languages. That's fine. But we could have it so much better if there was more effort put into a next generation of tools that take all the harsh lessons learnt from the tools before and "just" do it better. I acknowledge that we get incremental improvements here and there but some things are just unfixable without breaking existing ecosystems.
by happy_dog1 | 2025-09-13 14:25:37+00:00
Good question, I don't personally know. The linked article would suggest there are plenty of people working on human feedback for chatbots, but that still doesn't give us any hard numbers or any sense of how the number of people involved is changing over time. Perhaps the best datapoint I have is that revenue for SurgeAI (one of many companies that provides data labeling services to Google and OpenAI among others) has grown significantly in recent years, partly due to ScaleAI's acquisition by Meta, and is now at $1.2 billion without having raised any outside VC funding:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/surge-ai-quietly-hit-1b-15005...

Their continued revenue growth is at least one datapoint to suggest that the number of people working in this field (or at least the amount of money spent on this field) is not decreasing.

Also see the really helpful comment above from cjbarber, there's quite a lot of companies providing these services to foundation model companies. Another datapoint to suggest the number of people working providing labeling / feedback is definitely not decreasing and is more likely increasing. Hard numbers / increased transparency would be nice but I suspect will be hard to find.
by back2dafucha | 2025-09-13 14:25:43+00:00
Thats ok. We have done enough language research to build another powerhouse language that is AI resistant that practitioners can use. Its uptake is only relevant to those that wish to exclude LLMs from the picture to resist the agents. When LLM agents are everywhere secret societies will become the norm.

We may even have the expertise to actually transpile every single program into a unique programming language so that if the source were available LLM bots would not recognize it in any volume enough to learn from it.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-13 14:26:23+00:00
This post is such a cold take, and is going to age horribly.

Self driving cars fail because of regulatory requirements for five nines reliability, and they're doing inference over a dynamic noisy domain.

Autonomous engineering does not have these issues. Code doesn't need to be five nines correct, and the domain of inference is logical and basically static.

If the AI agent/coding companies didn't have their heads up their collective asses we could have fully spec driven autonomous coding within ~3 years, 100%.
by jb3689 | 2025-09-13 14:27:17+00:00
100% agree. I am interested in seeing how this will change how I work. I'm finding that I'm now more concerned with how I can keep the AI busy and how I can keep the quality of outputs high. I believe it has a lot to do with how my projects are structured and documented. There are also some menial issues (e.g. structuring projects to avoid merge conflicts becoming bottlenecks)

I expect that in a year my relationship with AI will be more like a TL working mostly at the requirements and task definition layer managing the work of several agents across parallel workstreams. I expect new development toolchains to start reflecting this too with less emphasis on IDEs and more emphasis on efficient task and project management.

I think the "missed growth" of junior devs is overblown though. Did the widespread adoption of higher-level really hurt the careers of developers missing out on the days when we had to do explicit memory management? We're just shifting the skillset and removing the unnecessary overhead. We could argue endlessly about technical depth being important, but in my experience this hasn't ever been truly necessary to succeed in your career. We'll mitigate these issues the same way we do with higher-level languages - by first focusing on the properties and invariants of the solutions outside-in.
by anovikov | 2025-09-13 14:28:11+00:00
It is a rather absurd view that any country might see investment into it as a problem that needs solving. That is the icing on the cake of globalisation, this is what countries dream about... But well, the view that immigration is a problem, is in its core just as absurd, and we see that everyone and their dog seems to think that way.

It's a problem when money and people are trying to escape the country, not when they are trying to get in.
by mihaic | 2025-09-13 14:28:40+00:00
I actually have seen plenty of people that could have done something like this, but did not because they simply never tried. Being daring by itself is a skill, but we're talking raw technical ability here.

I've actually seen another developer that was probably in the same category write his own self-driving software. It kind of worked, but couldn't have ever been production ready, so it was just an exercise in flexing without any practical application.

So, what product that George built do you actually use?
by spookie | 2025-09-13 14:28:55+00:00
Yeah have seen them. Down south of EU, in Portugal, they are buying land used for agriculture for these huge solar farms. And it is as sad as it is here. Surely, food is more important no? If they were placed in some deserts like in Spain... maybe they make sense, but these are very arable lands.

Wind is yeah... a whole other beast, although I do like what they have done in the Baltic and North seas.
by echelon_musk | 2025-09-13 14:29:28+00:00
I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it.

However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it.

Conflicted.
by gilbetron | 2025-09-13 14:30:58+00:00
And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths.

Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.
by bdcravens | 2025-09-13 14:31:16+00:00
I don't disagree, but I find a better use of my time is writing. Not code, but essentially a work journal. It's not big thoughts, it's bullet points. It's not documentation, but more of a open mind map: what's been done, what needs to be done, questions that inevitably pop up, etc. I use Obsidian for this, but if I write much more than what would go on a few post-it notes, it's too much.
by mikelabatt | 2025-09-13 14:32:29+00:00
I like your answer, and the others too, but I suspect I have an even worse problem than running Windows: I am an Amiga user :D

The Amiga always used all 8 bits (ISO-8859-1 by default), so detecting UTF-8 without a BOM is not so easy, especially when you start with an empty file, or in some scenario like the other one I mentioned.

And it's not that Macs and PCs don't have 8-bit legacy or coexistence needs. What you seem to be saying is that compatibility with 7-bit ASCII is sacred, whereas compatibility with 8-bit text encodings is not important.

Since we now have UTF-8 files with BOMs that need to be handled anyway, would it not be better if all the "Unicode-unaware" apps at least supported the BOM (stripping it, in the simplest case)?
by swed420 | 2025-09-13 14:33:02+00:00
> I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts.

> In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.

The following was built and deployed in Taiwan and proved to be very capable at sidestepping policy gridlock.

I've often wondered if some of the concepts that power it could be applied to help facilitate more generalized discussion and debate (which could also optionally tie into instances of the original political purpose it was built for).

https://www.plurality.net

https://github.com/pluralitybook

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-13 14:33:02+00:00
The thing is to understand that a model has "priors" which steer how it generates code. If what you're trying to build matches the priors of the model you can basically surf the gradients to working software with no steering using declarative language. If what you want to build isn't well encoded by the models priors it'll constantly drift, and you need to use shorter prompts and specify the how more (imperative).
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-09-13 14:33:11+00:00
Two mistakes in this:

1. Comparing nameplate capacity of solar to peak demand. The real peak production figure is about half of that. Which changes the equation from "we have far too much already" to "we don't have enough yet". And we should be targeting higher than the peak anyway.

2. Noting that midday demand has dropped and not connecting that to rollout of behind the meter solar on domestic and business roofs.

Plus the general scaremongering about negative prices. Why do people find these so scary?
by closewith | 2025-09-13 14:33:42+00:00
> HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.

That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead.

That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble.

> If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.

It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-09-13 14:34:27+00:00
The AI companies need to coach people on when to ask models to use features that exist.

A friend recently spent AGES with ChatGPT getting it to sort his wedding invitations A-Z. It just couldn’t do it.

Told him to ask it to write code to do it,

Hours to minutes. Totally solved his problem.

We techies are failing the masses by not shouting about the difference between probabilistic and deterministic uses of AI.
by antonymoose | 2025-09-13 14:35:36+00:00
Are there any metros that aren’t fully insane nowadays?

When my wife and I tried to upsize in Charleston, we got outcompeted every single time. We had one seller smartly list on a Friday and announce “All offers welcome, we will accept the best offer on Monday.” We overbid by $30k and still lost to a $40k full cash no inspection buyer from out of state. We bid on a few others and quickly gave up and left the area, the carpetbaggers can have it.

Luckily I work remote and live in the country near a big college town now, but from what I hear of my coworkers in DC, Nashville, Miami, and Texas… it’s the same everywhere and often even crazier. I have no clue how my children will be able to buy a home at this rate.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-09-13 14:35:41+00:00
River (the software author) worked on this during his time at the Recurse Center and it’s been amazing to see him develop it all from scratch in C. (I contributed 2.5 lines of code on the web deployment/firebase side).

He’s a friend, but I am very unbiased in saying that the sample-rate execution of the entire grid seems like an incredible technical achievement.

One of the craziest (super super noisy but fascinating to watch) grids uses just a few “operators” that generate random operators and random values, and place them at random location.

That grid runs - easily! in the browser!! - at 1000 bpm. Forget 60 fps :)

I’ll update my comment linking to this patch so you can take a listen. It’s stunning, organic and very punk.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-13 14:35:43+00:00
Kinda funny, I find myself moving in the opposite direction

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/9mm

If your goal is to show people something they haven't seen before the G Master telephoto is the last thing you want. If anything out of his photos I like the wide shot from the mountaintop better because it's lively and has people in it. One of the boring things about the average social photo stream is that it is either (a) selfies or (b) bugs and flowers and landscape and empty cityscapes.
by softwaredoug | 2025-09-13 14:35:58+00:00
There is a neurotic personality type that doomscrolls out of a compulsion. A lot of it is hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for threats. Where will the next shoe drop? We feel threatened, then some feel like they need to take some kind of drastic action.

Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.
by smeeger | 2025-09-13 14:36:02+00:00
there will be cases of cities resisting this by dragging their feet and it will be interesting to see. if a city wants to make it really expensive or dangerous to develop this opportunity then they certainly can. zoning is not the only consideration. and there are other things that elevate the cost of development like overbearing safety and accessibility regulations that are nation-wide. still, if this bill adds hundreds of thousands of units that will take a pretty meaningful bite out of the total shortage
Ask HN: Are we all re-reading Neal Stephenson again?
by Y_Y | 2025-09-13 14:36:13+00:00
I'm thinking of Snow Crash (1992) but even more so The Diamond Age (1995). Obviously not the first sci-fi to be prescient, not even the most pertinent (Black Mirror comes to mind). However I feel like as much as we're living in Infinite Jest, 1984, A Brave New World, The Machine Stops, etc., Stephenson's work is the most excruciatingly relevant to me right now in the year of our lord 1757774136 seconds since Jan 01 1970 (UTC).
by fzwang | 2025-09-13 14:36:19+00:00
I'm glad you made the commitment to change something in your life. Your previous job, and perhaps the way you approached it, was obviously not healthy.

1) The degree anxiety is understandable, but just in your head. I run a comp sci program for high schoolers as an replacement for universities. They don't get a degree but must learn how to signal they are capable. It's a skillset that most people don't learn until later in their careers. In your case, you likely have accumulated a number of valuable skills in your previous job. Since you haven't switched jobs, you haven't had much practice in communicating your skills to potential employers. Most engineers I know hate this, but it's sales/persuasion, and it's unavoidable and beneficial for you in the long-run. Take the perspective that you don't have a skill issue, but a signaling issue.

2) RE: AI - I would learn the fundamentals, only if you're interested in the engineering aspect of it, and implement some toy projects just to keep learning. Try vibe coding, it's not going to kill you haha. Learn about its benefits and limitations so you can at least comment intelligently if it comes up.

3) Shipping projects is hard psychologically unless you've developed discipline or there are other constraints/deadlines. If I were you, I'd work on projects in a more social manner. That means building with other engineers, talking to people who would benefit from what you're building, or just helping out existing communities. The socialization would help keep your spirits up. It's also the best way to build relationships and open other opportunities.

4) Hiring/recruiting is going through big changes now, partially due to the rise of AI generated applications. Building trust via other channels is going to be much more important moving forward. We've had to more or less turn off all inbound hiring and rely on our vetted professional networks due to the massive glut of applications. Job search is brutal now, but it's just as bad on the hiring side. We're going through changes were the old methods don't work anymore, and the new haven't been figured out yet.

Good luck!
by packetlost | 2025-09-13 14:36:36+00:00
I own an M8 (and also, happen to be a vim user lol) and it's sorta true, but it feels a lot more natural if you're familiar with the LSDJ-style workflow. LSDJ is a DAW built for the GameBoy so was working with very constrained hardware. Both are derived from sequencer workflows, but I'm not quite sure which or where those originated.

That being said, the M8 workflow isn't all that bad, but it's definitely less visual than most other DAWs.
by lordofgibbons | 2025-09-13 14:36:44+00:00
Gleam has caught my eye for the past year or so, and I'd totally learn it if I didn't believe firmly that we won't be coding by hand within the next 9 months. It'll all be done by LLMs so syntax and ergonomics won't mean too much. At least as soon as LLMs learn to stop being turbo-slop generators.
by like_any_other | 2025-09-13 14:36:58+00:00
I should clarify that I don't think there's much merit in the guilt-by-association smearing that happens after such events (or the stripped-of-context quote-mining character assassination the article engages in), and by "left-wing motivation" I did not mean to imply blame should fall on the left as a whole.

Unfortunately such smearing is very effective propaganda, so most people, including journalists, only take this position when it is their side getting smeared.
by theluketaylor | 2025-09-13 14:37:18+00:00
Single stair is one of the reforms I'd most like to see.

At the time 2 stair requirements were adopted it was vital, with devastating urban fires a common occurrence. We have so many new options for both preventing fire and keeping evacuation routes accessible for hours that it's no longer required.

The regulation has a huge impact on the layout and form it's possible to build, and I think it's a huge driver of the visceral reaction against apartment living in the US and Canada.

Being able to build 4-8 storey apartments on a single lot with a central stair where every unit has windows on at least 2 walls would be a game-changer for north american urban spaces and a pathway out of the housing crisis.
by quickthrowman | 2025-09-13 14:38:46+00:00
The customer is the only one left to squeeze, Lennar and others have already squeezed every penny they can out of their subs and suppliers.

I sell construction work mostly as a subcontractor, and I can definitely tell which of my customers rely on squeezing their subs to maximize their margins (JCI, Siemens, Honeywell and other global multinationals) and those that would like us both to make decent money (pretty much everyone else that doesn’t have a market cap in the billions, excluding some GCs I’ll not name) and while the big boys have a lot of work, doing projects with the latter companies is a lot more enjoyable.
by cjbarber | 2025-09-13 14:38:49+00:00
I previously made a list on twitter of some data labeling startups that work with foundation model companies.[1] Here's the RLHF provider section:

RLHF providers:

1. Surge. $1b+ revenue bootstrapped. DataAnnotation is the worker-side (you might've seen their ads), also TaskUp and Gethybrid.

2. Scale. The most well known. Remotasks and Outlier are the worker-side

3. Invisible. Started as a kind of managed VA service.

4. Mercor. Started mostly as a way to hire remote devs I think.

5. Handshake AI. Handshake is a college hiring network. This is a spinout

6. Pareto

7. Prolific

8. Toloka

9. Turing

10. Sepal AI. The team is ex-Turing

11. Datacurve. Coding data.

12. Snorkel. Started as a software platform for data labeling. Offers some data as a service now.

13. Micro1. Also started as a way to hire remote contractor devs

[1]: https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1965096585555272072
by anta40 | 2025-09-13 14:38:57+00:00
"Avoiding Distractions"

That's why I'm a big fan of medium tele (like 85mm or 105mm assuming 35mm format) for daily walk. Not for candid portrait, but tight framing without distractions.

Many many years ago, street photographers typically prefer wide angle lenses (which is still true these days). Saul Leiter broke the mold by embracing tele lens. Of course there are different feel. When standing really close with wide angle lens, your compositions felt immersive. But when tightly framed with (medium) tele, it felt... observant.