MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BeetleB | 2025-09-05 16:53:15+00:00
> Artists generally?

Which artists have lost their jobs?

But I am willing to grant you that. From a big picture society perspective, if it means that ordinary people like me who cannot afford to pay an artist can now create art sufficiently good for my needs, then this is a net win. I just made an AI song a week ago that got mildly popular, and just got a request to use it at a conference. No one is losing their job because of me. I wouldn't have had the money to pay an artist to create it, and nor would the conference organizers. Yet, society is clearly benefiting.

The same goes for translators (I'm not actually aware that they're losing jobs in a significant way, but I'll accept the premise). Even before LLMs, the fact that I could use Babelfish to translate was fantastic - LLMs are merely an incremental improvement over it.

To me, arguing we shouldn't have AI translators is not really different from arguing we shouldn't have Babelfish/Google Translate. Likely 99% of the people who will benefit from it couldn't afford a professional translator.

(I have, BTW, used a professional translator to get some document translated - his work isn't going away, because organizations need a certified translator).

> People at various bureaucratic positions doing more menial white collar work?

"Menial white collar work" sounds like a good thing to eliminate. Do you want to go back to the days where word processors were not a thing and you had to pay someone to type things up?

> People had/have decent livehoods from those, I know a few. If they could easily got better jobs they would go for them.

I'll admit I spoke somewhat insensitively - yes, even I know people who had good careers with some of them, but again: Look to the past and think of how many technologies have replaced people, and do you wish those technologies did not replace people?

Do you want to deal with switchboard operators every time you make a call?

Do you want to have to deal with a stock broker every time you want to buy/sell?

Do you want to pay a professional every time you want to print a simple thing?

Do you want to go back to snail mail?

Do you want to do all your shopping in person or via a physical catalog?

The list goes on. All of these involved replacing jobs where people earned honest money.

Everything I've listed above has been a bigger disruption than LLMs (so far - things may change in a few years).

> Egos here sometimes are quite a thing to see. Maybe its good that chops are coming also for this privileged groups, a bit of humility never hurts.

Actually, I would expect the SW industry to be amongst the most impacted, given a recent report showing which industries actually use LLMs the most (I think usage was SW was greater than all other industries combined).

As both an engineer and a programmer, who makes a living via programming, I am not opposed to LLMs, even if my job is at risk. And no, I'm not sitting on a pile of $$$ that I can retire on any time soon.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-05 16:53:27+00:00
You believe them?? The incentives to lie are massive, and the consequences almost non-existent.

ICE, by their own account, has a pretty solid track record now of arresting people en masse, to pump up numbers, and then sorting out who is actually working illegally much later… after dehumanizing and incarcerating people unjustly.

So, i don’t believe their numbers and i don’t believe that they know who they have arrested.
by cs702 | 2025-09-05 16:53:30+00:00
Maybe. At the end of the OP, Hinton qualifies his guesses with:

> "We don’t know what is going to happen, we have no idea, and people who tell you what is going to happen are just being silly," he adds. "We are at a point in history where something amazing is happening, and it may be amazingly good, and it may be amazingly bad. We can make guesses, but things aren’t going to stay like they are."

I agree with Hinton: We only know that things will change, not how they will change. We can only make guesses.

Anyone claiming to know with certainty is full of baloney.
by codethief | 2025-09-05 16:55:02+00:00
> With Podman, even if someone somehow escalates privileges inside a container to root level, they're still just an unprivileged user on the actual host.

As much as I like Podman (and I really do), Docker has supported rootless mode for a long time and it's not any harder to set up than Podman.

> Use podman-compose as a drop-in replacement

Oh, if only it were a drop-in replacement. There are so many ways in which it is not exactly compatible with docker-compose, especially when it comes to the network setup. I have wasted more hours on this than I can count.
by cjs_ac | 2025-09-05 16:55:03+00:00
Why is it that every high-brow discussion of US politics soon ends up quoting one of the founding fathers? As an outsider, I think the fundamental issue in the US political system is that there doesn't seem to have been any new ideas since the eighteenth century. It's just a bunch of rhetoricians quoting the same ancient texts, as though the US faces exactly the same problems it was facing two and a half centuries ago.
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-05 16:55:04+00:00
And yet 8 months into all this ICE BS, oh look, "America's historic job surge is over", "Take a look at the major US sectors that are now losing jobs".

Meanwhile, when ICE raids Tyson Chicken after workers start complaining about OSHA violations, they find 900 undocumented workers who had paperwork showing that Tyson knew they were undocumented and was giving advice on staying under the radar, ICE and DHS: "That's not in the scope of what we're doing here".

Same at Hormel Meats, when the pesky workers start complaining about all sorts of unknown diseases and illnesses from, you know, inhaling aerosolized porcine brain matter all day...

It's almost like there's more to "open borders" than "Leftist death spirals", maybe more The Jungle.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-09-05 16:55:31+00:00
My belief in "American Exceptionalism" was destroyed the moment that the powerful stream of water from the toilet bidet hit my rectum for the first time somewhere in South Korea.

We westerners are disgusting barbarians, and Hemorrhoids are usually evidence of that. Most Hemorrhoids that westerners have are due to either not cleaning their butts properly, or from straining too much due usually to bad diets (bidets also help eliminate this as water is a decent lubricant)

Yes to the "squatting is better" crowd but you notice that SK/Japan doesn't need or have squatting toilets en mass.

When the Japanese or South Koreans look at us with disdain because we literally walk around with shit in our pants 24/7, I don't blame them! They are right and we have a LOT to learn as westerners about being actually clean.
by giantg2 | 2025-09-05 16:55:32+00:00
My company is pretty big and we are hiring very few junior devs. The few we hire are exclusively for the leadership pipeline. Instead we are outsourcing to India.

It seems to me that the plan is to reduce headcount through attrition (increasing PIPs and stuff) as the adoption and quality of AI supposedly increases while replacing lower devs with outsourced devs.
by BinaryIgor | 2025-09-05 16:56:33+00:00
I certainly like demon-less architecture; much simpler and there are less potential security issues and no single point of failure.

The one thing I don't necessarily agree:

"Privileged ports in rootless mode not working? Good! That's security working as intended. A reverse proxy setup is a better architecture anyway."

I usually use Ngix as a reverse proxy - why not have it set up in the exact same way as the rest of your apps? That's a simplicity advantage. So with Podman, I would just run this one exact container in root mode - that's still better than all of them, but quite.

I am not a fan of docker-compose - a classic example of a tool trying to do too much for me, so the lack of something similar in Podman is not a drawback for me :)

Not sure about tooling around logs and monitoring though - there is plenty for Docker.
by wongarsu | 2025-09-05 16:56:40+00:00
Trains traditionally operate on signalling blocks: a section between two signals is a block, a block is occupied if any part of a train is inside of it, if it's occupied any signals leading into the block are red. This can be decided entirely locally (as in: local to the block). When a wheel sensor detects a wheel entering the block, the block is occupied, signals switch to red and the number of wheels is counted. As soon as another wheel sensor counts an equal number of wheels exiting the block the block is free and signals switch to green. You need a wire along the block to communicate this, but from a safety perspective there is no need for global communication.

Modernization efforts focus on trains broadcasting position and speed so trains can travel closer together and still maintain a safe stopping distance, but that's again possible locally.

Operating switches is where it gets trickier. Some rail operators maintain the possibility to operate them locally, but that requires either stopping the train at each switch you want to change, or to deploy lots of people into the field to do it on schedule
by gregw2 | 2025-09-05 16:56:42+00:00
Political allegiances aside, the naming of the Department of Defense started to rankle me in the bureaucratic posturing after 9/11.

I appreciate the Posse Comitatus Act, "the best defense is a good offense", and the rename in 1947, but when we created a whole new department called "Homeland Security" because Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense didn't want to own the mission of "defense", the old name just struck me as too disingenuous/Orwellian.

I am a bit nervous about branding the DoD back to the Department of War though. ... Perhaps we should rename it to what General/President Eisenhower warned us it was, "Department of the Military Industrial Complex"?

Half-kidding.
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-05 16:56:54+00:00
Outside of the U.S., Uber is subject to taxi regulations in most of the places it operates.

In the U.S., it is subject to a new set of regulations governing "rideshares" that are similar to the regulations governing taxis. The primary differences are that medallions aren't required for rideshare vehicles, nor are rideshare drivers required to know anything about the location in which they're driving.

Objectively speaking, the taxi drivers and companies that are still alive today provide better service than their rideshare counterparts. I can tell a taxi driver "the Z building" at the airport and they'll know what it is, where it is, and how to get there. Most rideshare drivers need to look it up, and they'll be damned if they actually follow the google directions to get there without getting lost on the way.
by mattkrause | 2025-09-05 16:56:57+00:00
I think there's also a misunderstanding of how these tunnels "work" in practice.

The ones in Montreal (and Kobe, Toronto, etc) don't seem to replace surface streets or transit; they complement it. The Réso in Montreal overlaps with some of the most walkable parts of the city and a half-dozen metro stops, plus train stations and bus depots.

I also don't think many people "thru-hike" it either. A lot of it is short trips (e.g., grabbing lunch) that would be doable, but a bit more annoying, if you had to re-dress for the weather on each end.
by rglover | 2025-09-05 16:57:42+00:00
I may be the odd man out, but after getting unbelievably stressed out by containers, k8s, etc., I couldn't believe how zen just spinning up a new VPS and bootstrapping it with a bash script was. That combined with systemd scripts can get you relatively far without all of the (cognitive) overhead.

The best part? Whenever there's an "uh oh," you just SSH in to a box, patch it, and carry on about your business.
by sbma44 | 2025-09-05 16:57:51+00:00
Didn't mean to imply that tiling is trivial--our initial business model was focused on taking care of that difficulty for our customers, after all, and it wouldn't have made sense if we didn't think we were delivering value.

I will defer to your experience re the utility of tiled-but-still-GeoJSON as a sensible middle ground. I think you're right that we haven't seen this as an area that merits significant attention--it's sort of "not worth optimizing yet [geojson]" or "worth optimizing [MVT]". But I can see how there could be middle grounds in some scenarios.

PMtiles is what I had in mind when I mentioned ergonomics. Brandon's delivered a very compelling approach, as I hope I conveyed to him at CNG earlier this year. The lack of fully specified behavior re range requests is a lingering concern, as you acknowledge, and there are some other areas like incremental updates where having a huge mess of tiles still looks pretty good. But I think it's fair to say that it's overperformed as a solution, and I understand why people are excited about it and the other cloud-native geo formats that have emerged in recent years. Decades ago, Mapbox founders were at DevSeed writing PHP--there will always be some sympathy around here for "just upload it" as a deploy story!

I can't talk about the optimizations we are investigating, but I can at least acknowledge some of what makes the problem so hard (and the update schedule so slow): MVT is quite good, and backward compatibility is a pain, especially when you're optimizing for bundle/binary size (a particularly hard problem when your competitors get to preinstall their libraries on every mobile phone in the world) and working with a customer base that's preintegrated, in every way and to every extent imaginable, with an existing ecosystem. There is a reason people still use shapefiles! Though I hope MVT's reputation remains a bit better than that...
by steveklabnik | 2025-09-05 16:58:07+00:00
I once had a refactoring that I wanted to do, but I was pretty sure it'd hit a lot of code and take a while. Some error handling in a web application.

I was able to ask Claude "hey, how many function signatures will this change" and "what would the most complex handler look like after this refactoring?" and "what would the simplest handler look like after this refactoring?"

That information helped contextualize what I was trying to intuit: is this a large job, or a small one? Is this going to make my code nicer, or not so much?

All of that info then went into the decision to do the refactoring.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-05 16:58:26+00:00
You believe a state propaganda feed? In 2025??

450 people arrested. I am skeptical of even that number. 450 working here illegally? Ok… prove it. Names and visa statuses please. The raid happened yesterday, you’re telling me they have conclusive proof 450 people are working illegally less than 24 hours later? Not remotely likely

Much more likely? 450 koreans working here legally but not carrying papers on them because american is supposed to be a free country.
by eihli | 2025-09-05 16:58:28+00:00
I've been learning it, mostly as a fun hobby.

I journal a little bit about my experience here: https://owoga.com/posts/2025-03-18-learning-morse-code/

I've been a licensed HAM for a while, but what actually prompted me to start learning Morse code was when I was troubleshooting some hardware that only had a blinking light to communicate back to me. Instead or print statements, I started using blinks to tell me what was happening. I realized it would be so much faster if I knew Morse code.

LICW is a great place to learn. But I also recently discovered https://morsecode.world/ and really like it.
by ModernMech | 2025-09-05 16:58:37+00:00
I recently looked into making Julia binaries, and it's not at all a good process. They say it's supported, but it's not exactly as easy as "cargo build" to get a Julia binary out. And the build process involves creating this minimal version of Julia you're expected to ship with your binary, so build times were terrible. I don't know if that gets amortized though.

As far as the executable size, it was only 85kb in my test, a bouncing balls simulation. However, it required 300MB of Julia libraries to be shipped with it. About 2/3 of that is in libjulia-codegen.dll, libLLVM-16jl.dll. So you're shipping this chunky runtime and their LLVM backend. If you're willing to pay for that, you can ship a Julia executable. It's a better story than what Python offers, but it's not great if you want small, self-contained executables.
by benreesman | 2025-09-05 16:58:54+00:00
Right a broader theme about AI safety and AI politics and all of it: we have choices as a society, so if our choices are good and our will to see those choices respected are intact, then the scope for harm is pretty manageable.

When the one that can make Captain Trips bioweapon in a garage comes out, I'll start blaming the technology, at the moment, its the choices made by humans.
by IAmBroom | 2025-09-05 16:58:58+00:00
I'll try.

Suppose you blinde, and are on one side of a black picket fence. Let's say the fence uprights are 1" wide, and 1" apart.

If you aim a light meter at the fence, it will sum up all the light of the visible slices of the background. (This meter reads its values out loud!)

Suppose the background is all white - the meter sees white slices, and get a 50% reading (because the fence stripes are black). It's as high as you can get.

Now move the picket fence half an inch to the left - still all white, still a 50% reading. Now you know the background is 100% white, no other colors.

But if when you move it, black stripes are exposed, then the meter reads 0%, and you know that the background is 50/50 white and black, in stripes.

Congratulations! You've just done a Fourier transform that can detect the difference between 0-frequency and a 1"-striped frequency pattern. In reality, you're going to continuously move that fence to the left, watching all the time, but this is simple.

But instead, imagine you got readings of 40% and 10%. What kind of pattern is that? Gray stripes? White stripes that aren't as wide as the fence posts? You'll have to build another fence, with another spacing - say 1/2" fence posts 1/2" apart. Repeat.
by dsign | 2025-09-05 16:59:00+00:00
I'm made of anti-Abrahamic fermions, but in this instance I can't stop thinking of Emma Lazarus rising from the grave and striking down her own words, to instead inscribe Jeremiah 2:5 on the plaque at the base of the statue:

"What fault did your ancestors find in me, that they strayed so far from me? They followed worthless idols..."
by iLemming | 2025-09-05 16:59:04+00:00
IMO the only/main reason to rewrite C-parts in Rust is to refactor and untagle the code to generate better incentive for people to work on it, because from what I heard - some C parts of Emacs are of nightmarish complexity, and there are literally only a few on this planet who even want to deal with it.

And the same time, I don't think there's enough people who can be persuaded to think that in a decade or two those Rust-rewritten parts wouldn't become problematic either - who can promise today that Zig for example isn't a better choice for that? Or maybe even some close-to-metal Lisp variant?
by ap_21 | 2025-09-05 16:59:33+00:00
I love the idea! It just creates a very minimalistic feeling and helps my mind not get overwhelmed with big chunks of text. However, the no-edits thing is a bit frustrating personally. A solution would be to allow edits as long as the text is visible, plus increase the timeline the text stays in the view (the pace in the homepage is ideal i feel).
by BeetleB | 2025-09-05 16:59:59+00:00
> Most of the actual ones I know were BS jobs to begin with

I cannot edit my original comment, so I'll address this here:

Yes, I admit some legitimate jobs may have been lost (and if not yet, likely will be). When I spoke of BS jobs, I was referring to things like people being paid to ghostwrite rich college students' essays. That's really the only significant market I know to have been impacted. And good riddance.
by teamonkey | 2025-09-05 17:00:12+00:00
I don’t think most of their customers are using it for things it isn’t good at, just that those who are are very vocal online. I imagine most of their sales are to customers who are using them for projects where a reliable, supported SBC with GPIO is useful.

Raspberry Pi seem very engaged with their market and what they’re doing. They’re just not interested in making homelab media servers.
by reaperducer | 2025-09-05 17:01:00+00:00
The New York Times had a very visually compelling article a few months ago about how a good part of the city's subway system is still manually-operated.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/20/nyregion/nyc-...

For me, this was the best picture:

https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2025-03-10-subway-...

Someone has to stand at that machine 24 hours a day and push and pull levers to keep the trains from whacking one another.
by VonGuard | 2025-09-05 17:01:05+00:00
Sooooo much snark, and so little interest into what BART actually runs on!

Originally, BART was a master stroke of digital integration in the 70's, and it's digital voices announcing the next trains were a thing of the future: An early accessibility feature before we even knew what those were, really.

Reading:

https://www.bart.gov/about/history

https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/traincontrol#:~:text=To%...
by viveknathan | 2025-09-05 17:01:14+00:00
Strum AI | Founding/Lead Engineer | https://www.linkedin.com/company/strum-ai/

At Strum, we're reimagining technology that powers global supply chain using a fresh AI-first approach. Most supply chains are still stuck with Excel or enterprise tools that take months (and $MM) to adopt. Our mission is to lower that barrier — making it possible for any business, big or small, to access modern forecasting, inventory, and planning solutions in days, not months. We’re on our journey to democratizing supply chain technology. As our first engineer, you’ll be working with the founders (former Supply chain/tech directors at Amazon who have built key components of Amazon's supply chain) to develop the core product from the grounds up (involves application of LLMs, deep learning, and optimization). If you have mid to senior level experience in software development, have built SaaS applications, understand ML-Engineering, and love building 0->1 products, we would love to talk to you. Please reach out to us at: careers@strum-ai.com.

Location negotiable.
If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?
by babua | 2025-09-05 17:01:26+00:00
AI agents are getting rolled into everything. Companies will use them because they’re fast and cheap. But if agents replace a lot of paid work, people lose income. Less income → less spending → businesses push even harder on automation. Feels like a loop.

Cheaper prices help, sure, but not if folks don’t have paychecks. New jobs might show up, but I’m not convinced the timing works. Also, if most gains go to a few owners, their extra spending won’t replace everyone else’s demand.

So what actually keeps demand up? Profit-sharing so workers own a piece? Some kind of income floor from “automation dividends”? Totally new markets that soak up all this output? Or maybe real-world limits (energy, compute, regulation) slow things down. I might be missing something—what’s the concrete mechanism here?