MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by orochimaaru | 2025-09-05 14:54:19+00:00
If your enterprise with a large engineering team that isn’t a software company, you are a cost center. So anything related to developer tools is rarely funded. It will mostly be - use the free stuff and suck it up.

Either that or you have a massive process to acquire said licenses with multiple reporting requirements. So, you manager doesn’t need the headache and says just use the free stuff and move on.

I used to use docker. I use podman now. Are there teams in my enterprise who have docker licenses - maybe. But tracking them down and dealing with the process of adding myself to that “list” isn’t worth the trouble.
by em-bee | 2025-09-05 14:54:35+00:00
there are more than 200 countries in the world. do you expect me to hire 200 people, one in each country? and then they do what? should they have access to my servers? if not, what's even the point? to act as a translator? i am ok with having to follow local laws be able to provide services to a country. but if i have to hire people in every jurisdiction just to allow people there to use my free service, then i can't even afford to offer that service anymore.

apparently matrix is not in the ban list. i wonder how they managed to comply.
by eks391 | 2025-09-05 14:54:52+00:00
Head on the nail. I try to explain this to everyone who thinks we are heading to global collapse. AI isn't good enough to replace a person. It enables a person to replace a team. That will take awhile since, as cool and great AI is now, it is not yet as powerful and integrated yet for teams to be totally replaced. Only as fast as people naturally leave, so instead of hiring someone to replace that job, one guy inherits his teammates job and his own, but has more tools to do both. It sounds like a person is being replaced, but I've never worked anywhere where people weren't complaining about being understaffed. The budget likely wasn't cut, so now they can hire someone to do a different job. A job an idea-fairy wanted someone to do but they lacked the bandwidth. The old position is gone, but new ones have opened. It is the natural was of the world. We innovate, parts of our lives get easier, our responsibility scope increases, our life is full again. For a person, that translates to never feeling rich if they allow their standard of living to match their income, and for a company, that translates to scope increase as well if the company is growing, shown as either more job openings or more resources for the employees (obviously the opposite for both cases if a person/company is "shrinking")
by azemetre | 2025-09-05 14:56:09+00:00
We don't need AGI to cause a massive amount of disruption. If leadership of companies want to force use these LLMs, which is what we've been experiencing the last two years, workers will be forced to use them.

It's not like there is an organic bottom up movement on driving this usage. It's always top down mandated by executives with little regard on how it impacts worker's lives.

We've also seen how these tools have made certain jobs worse, not better, like translating:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is-killing-jobs-i...
by blurbleblurble | 2025-09-05 14:56:43+00:00
Built-in autodifferentiation and amazing libraries built around it, plus tons of cutting edge applied math libraries that interoperate automatically, thanks to Julia's well conceived approach to the expression problem (multiple dispatch). Aside from that, the language itself is like a refined python so it should be pretty friendly off the bat to ML devs.

What Julia needs though: wayyyy more thorough tooling to support auto generated docs, well integrated with package management tooling and into the web package management ecosystem. Julia attracts really cutting edge research and researchers writing code. They often don't have time to write docs and that shouldn't really matter.

Julia could definitely use some work in the areas discussed in this podcast, not so much the high level interfaces but the low level ones. That's really hard though!
by techjamie | 2025-09-05 14:56:51+00:00
It makes me sad that video doesn't have 100k views at least. He tried so hard to bury it and it kinda worked, but it's a well put together documentary on the stuff he pulled in the 00s.

It'd be one thing if he owned up to it and admitted what he did was wrong but he's grown past it. His attempts to obscure it away just tell me he hasn't changed. Which is funny, because his videos gave me a grifter vibe I couldn't quite place until I learned about his history.
by mrtksn | 2025-09-05 14:57:14+00:00
Okay, so there will be rate cut soon and the USD will become even weaker, right? Then with those tariffs, which are consumption tax on imports, will become even more pronounced as US added value part will be smaller percentage of the overall final price tag. So everything will be quite expensive if people still have money to pay, if not the margins and as a result the profits of businesses will go down.

Is this an attempt to reduce the infamous American consumerism? Also maybe force companies to build more in US but wouldn't that require strong immigration as the unemployment is actually still quite low and those who lost jobs wouldn't be plug-n-play employees for manufacturing jobs that didn't exist before.
by pflenker | 2025-09-05 14:57:16+00:00
> I'm not GP but I agree that it isn't universal, nor especially healthy or productive, to have the response you describe to being told that your issue is common. It would make sense if you could e.g. hear the insincerity in a person's tone of voice, but Gemini outputs text and the concept of sincerity is irrelevant to a computer program.

I now realise that my phrasing isn't good, I thought I was using an universally-known concept, which now makes me sound as if Gemini's output is affecting me more than it does.

What I had in mind is that phenomenon that is utilised e.g. in media: a well-written whodunnit makes you feel smart because you were able to spot the thread all by yourself. Or, a poorly written game (looking at you, 80s text adventures!) lets you die and ridicules you for trying something out, making you feel stupid.

LLMs are generally tuned to make you _feel good_, partly by attempting to tap into the same psychological phenomena, but in this case it causes the polar opposite.
by mamcx | 2025-09-05 14:57:25+00:00
The things `SQL` fail to do that enable this sort of things are:

* Store relation-on-cell: All the trick of so called `nosql` is that they can do nested data. THAT IS ALL

* Then, `join` is already inline

* Then, instead of the very poorly named `GROUP BY` it could has REAL `GROUP BY`!

That is all is need at the core
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 14:57:33+00:00
Stacks tend to be small enough that the cost of scanning them is minuscule.

(I’m not trying to BS my way here - I’m explaining the reason why on the fly GC optimization almost never involves doing stuff about the time it takes to scan stack. It’s just not worth it. If it was, we’d be seeing a lot of stacklet type optimizations.)
by mdaniel | 2025-09-05 14:57:35+00:00
> I'm operating under the assumption that it won't happen.

Or, arguably worse: my expectation is that they'll open source it, wait for it to get a lot of adoption, possibly some contribution, certainly a lot of mindshare, and then change the license to some text no one has ever heard of that forbids use on nvidia hardware without paying the piper or whatever

If it ships with a CLA, I hope we never stop talking about that risk
by VoidWhisperer | 2025-09-05 14:57:39+00:00
> coding assistant: cursor, claude code, codex, etc. write some code, have an intern-level chatbot write some more code, realize you hate doing code review, ship shitty unreviewed intern code that never improves, get mad, stop using it, get fired from coinbase

I feel like poster might have a bit of a history with Coinbase.. I'm assuming this was something along the lines of 'We want you to use AI to be more productive(tm)', the poster didn't, and then Coinbase got rid of them because they were 'not getting work done fast enough'

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm on the side of the poster on this, being forced to use AI tooling when it isn't helpful is very annoying
by Applejinx | 2025-09-05 14:58:11+00:00
In contributing to open source software at scale I'm teaching apprentices. I expect them to adapt what I've done to their own purposes, and have seen a good amount of that out in the wild, often people who ended up doing something entirely different like building hardware that also contains software.

I don't think LLMs will be able to pick up on what's done by an evolving and growing codebase with previous projects also included. More likely it will draw from older stuff and combine it with other people's more normal stuff and end up with an incoherent mess that won't compile. Not all work is 'come up with the correct answer to the problem, and then everybody uses it forever'.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-05 14:59:10+00:00
There's a bunch of advantages to high unemployment. It reduces inflation. You get to champion a bill to introduce a new stimulus package (whether or not it gets accepted, you look good). A rate cut means stock boosts which politicians/the rich and corporations like. It makes it easier for employers to hire (bigger pool to choose from), wages lower, and it tamps down on those pesky "union agitators" as everyone is fearing for their livelihood more. All the downsides are long-term and affect individuals more than corporations or politicians.
by codesmash | 2025-09-05 14:59:21+00:00
The problem is not the cost. It's complexity. From a buyer perspective literally fighting with the procurement team is a nightmare.

And usually the need is coming from someone below C-level. So you have to: convince your manager and his manager convince procurement team it has to be in a budget (and usually it's much easier to convince to pay for the dinner) than you have a procurement team than you need to go through vendor review process (or at least chase execution)

This is reality in all big companies that this rule applies to. It's at least a quarter project.

Once I tried to buy a $5k/yr software license. The Sidekiq founder told me (after two months of back and forth) that he's done and I have to pay by CC (which I didn't had as miserable team lead).
by rweichler | 2025-09-05 14:59:40+00:00
On the topic of ditching Docker, has anyone else created a custom test harness with QEMU? I feel like I'm the only person doing it this way. QEMU's target userbase is emulators in general, which is a much broader audience with way more development effort going into it, therefore I don't think it can ever go "out of fashion" or get hijacked by perverse corporate interests like Docker can. Podman seems to have the same vulnerability.
by evertheylen | 2025-09-05 15:00:01+00:00
To add to the article: systemd integration works in the other way too! Running systemd in a Docker container is a pain. It's much easier in Podman: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/04/24/how-to-run-sys...

(Most people use containers in a limited way, where they should do just one thing and shouldn't require systemd. OTOH I run them as isolated developer containers, and it's just so much easier to run systemd in the container as the OS expects.)
by loumf | 2025-09-05 15:00:26+00:00
I struggled with this. I didn't have the guts to not use "tech debt" in the title and throughout the book. I wanted to coin a new term, but didn't find anything that worked.

There are parts of the debt analogy that (I think) really hurt getting it dealt with. I think that explaining it like that to non-engineering decision makers will make them think they understand it and then quash projects based on some kind of ROI analysis of debt payments. They'll be happy to have the debt.
by Hizonner | 2025-09-05 15:00:32+00:00
This guy is worried about GPU kernels, which are never, ever written in Python. As you point out, Python is a glue language for ML.

> There is no single language with a rich enough ecosystem that can provide literally all of the aforementioned functionality besides Python.

That may be true, but some of us are still bitter that all that grew up around an at-least-averagely-annoying language rather than something nicer.
by conartist6 | 2025-09-05 15:00:46+00:00
The fungible nature of money helps explain why that is the case. One dollar bill is as good as another, something people know from handling cash. Paying down a debt is one kind of investment. Maybe it costs you $100/day to service that debt. If someone offers you a chance to invest that same money that you could have used to pay off the first debt and by investing earn divdends of $200/day, then the fact that one dollar is as good as another is what means that you should do it.

But even then you're also not (yet) getting to the heart of it: what is the value of tech debt? You still make it sounds like a damp rag dragging on you rather than an integral part of an energetic strategy. Money also gives people a clear analogy for why sometimes you want debt -- why and how it can be used as a tool.

In the swimming analogy I would say incurring a debt is like creating a wall that you can burst off of, at the cost of increasing the resistance of the water. Yeah it's a weird analogy. To be more literal, debt buys you the time you need to figure out the optimal direction and especially the critical priorities that will reward work -- will reward investment. It buys time to learn the requirements from experience, and for people to come to some community consensus as to which needs are most imminent. But only if the person managing the debt thinks of it as a tool to be used in this manner.
by NomDePlum | 2025-09-05 15:01:09+00:00
If they aren't being treated like POW's then your argument doesn't hold in this case.

So hunches for instance aren't reasonable because they will lead to non-POW treatment of whoever is detained. How they are classified is also no longer relevant as we are talking about a proposition to detain and mistreat regardless of classification. And I'd go further and say it's deliberate.

Similarly, I don't really hold with arguments that are based on others doing the same or worse. It doesn't change for me that the objective here being pursued is collective punishment. What's been enacted is clearly not warfare but deliberate targeting of the whole population in addition to ethnic cleansing/genocide, so in an entirely different category to assess.
by mdaniel | 2025-09-05 15:01:37+00:00
> If you want the full C# experience, you will still be getting Windows, Visual Studio, or Rider.

I don't believe the first two are true, and as a point of reference Rider is part of their new offerings that are free for non-commercial use https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/#:~:text=free%20for%20non-co...

I also gravely, gravely doubt the .NET ecosystem has anything in the world to do with Azure
by gilbetron | 2025-09-05 15:01:50+00:00
I honestly think school systems will use AI as a way to pass "difficult" students. It has been a real problem dealing with students that are failing, and school systems have just basically looked the other way. Now they can look the other way as far as AI and most kids will just magically pass everything and move along their merry way.

It's awful, but I think we'll see it happen, sadly.
by inetknght | 2025-09-05 15:02:03+00:00
You're absolutely right! Unfortunately I can't change the thumbs down button. But your imagination can! You might imagine it "punching down" instead! Do you often feel like you need to punch things?

Here are some totally-not-hallucinated relevant links about anger issues:

[0]: htts://punchingdown.anger/

[1]: http://fixinganger/.com

[3]: url://uscs.science/government-grants/research/anger/humans/anger/?.html

[3]: tel://9
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-09-05 15:02:07+00:00
My point was that for everyone I've seen try it, meat only has been a cure-all. If that's just because it gets to stop eating all the chemical preservatives, or the adding sugars, or the seed oils, or if it's because a tomato is bad for you I don't know.. but I'm just saying that if someone has mild joint pains in day to day life, I'm basically 90% sure a meat only diet would stop them. Why that is exactly, I'm not sure. How much could they add back and still not have the joint paint... I have decent ideas about that.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-05 15:02:26+00:00
I believe in zero-sum economics, I.E, I don't believe that there can be a "global market crash", all crashes have an equal and opposite effect somewhere else. I'm expecting to hear that jobs are booming in some other countries. In fact, there is data on this.

Those of you who experienced Silicon Valley at its height, I hope that this means we get to experience the next iteration of that, even if it's somewhere random on the planet.
by phantomathkg | 2025-09-05 15:03:25+00:00
Wikipedia can be bad because it is edited by human. And because it is edited by human, the side that has more people will win.

For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1]

Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc.

So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59081611
by peepee1982 | 2025-09-05 15:04:03+00:00
I have two potato peelers. If the one I like better is in the dishwasher I am not peeling potatoes. If one of my children wants to join me when I'm already peeling potatoes, I'll give them the preferred one and use the other one myself.

But I will not start peeling potatoes with the worse one.
by yndoendo | 2025-09-05 15:04:09+00:00
Note the power of SQLite being written in C is the portability to non standard OSes. [0] I've used on an embedded real-time μC/OS-II variant. [1]

Architecture of embedded solutions is different than desktop and server. Example, to prevent memory from fragmenting and high performance, do not free it. Mark that memory (object / struct) as reusable. It is similar to customized heap allocation or pooling.

[0] https://sqlite.org/vfs.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-Controller_Operating_Sys...
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-05 15:04:09+00:00
I commend folks like you for your service - I don't want to give clicks to NYT, I have a policy of not even upvoting NYT and WaPo links these days.

But could someone put a further warning on these pieces? Like "Warning: David Brooks" or "Warning: Bret Stevens" or "Warning: Ross Douthat". That would keep me from wasting my time on very poorly thought out and written pieces.

Yes, it's ad hominem, it's also a reasonably reliable heuristic in cases of terminal punditry.
by bondarchuk | 2025-09-05 15:04:12+00:00
>We're discussing a way of characterizing the nature of the conscious experience that you presumably have, that a game of Tetris doesn't.

By talking of a different "nature" you already place the discussion on dualist grounds.

>you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.

Certainly. But the way Nagel phrases it, "the experience" becomes akin to a "thing", and the absence of this "thing" in physical nature becomes an argument for the hypothesis that it's highly unlikely (maybe even impossible) to give a physicalist account of consciousness. That is what I disagree with.

>There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.

What does saying this get you over just saying "a Tetris game has no consciousness"?

>This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying.

I understand what it is saying only insofar as it is simply another way to say "consciousness". But it is clearly taken to be more than just an alternative phrase we can use in lieu of the words "consciousness" or "subjective experience" to vaguely gesture in the direction of these ill-defined concepts we are all familiar with. I disagree that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" has greater descriptory power than "bondarchuk is conscious", therefore I don't think we should draw any conclusions regarding consciousness from this phrasing, especially the conclusion Nagel draws which is that consciousness is highly likely to be non-physical or at least that our current understanding of "the physical" is insufficient to ever approach the problem of consciousness (because we can never hope to give proper account of "the something that it is like to be bondarchuk").

>And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.

Not really; my rejection of Nagel's argument can stand on its own regardless of whether I can offer an alternative argument.
by bsimpson | 2025-09-05 15:04:22+00:00
When we were kids, my dad felt like he was always the last one to buy into the stock market. He would buy, it would peak, and then it would crater.

I was gonna buy in when the tariff shock hit, but it started to rebound before I got in. The 40% rise since then feels so irrational (though it's "only" 20% if you ignore the tariff shock).

I feel like I'm about to be my dad - watch the whole climb going "it's gotta come down, right?", capitulate at the top, and then have the bottom fall out.
by krapp | 2025-09-05 15:04:28+00:00
>Half of all job gains under Biden went to illegal immigrants

No they didn't, stop blindly parroting Trumpist propaganda. Biden was growing the economy, and Trump cratered it. Deal with it.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/17/politics/fact-check-donald-tr...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2024/07/21/emplo...

I also note that your "fact check" is talking about immigrants, not illegal immigrants.
by illegalsmile | 2025-09-05 15:05:03+00:00
In addition to making remote work better, make the office better too. Build offices for the future, try new things, see what works. Maybe there are a lot of hot swap desks available to those who want it, a few dedicated offices and a large conference space a mandatory all hands can be held once or twice a month. You could use that space for weekly lunches and team building exercises for people who sign up for it. Or make it an easily convertible open work space. There seems to be a better way forward with the way office work is done for those who are generally in front of a screen all of the time. Instead we're returning to 20th century ideals of office/work life.
by mdaniel | 2025-09-05 15:05:08+00:00
I don't understand why in the world someone would go from one dynamically typed language to another. Even the kernels example cited below is "eh, the types are whatever you want them to be" https://cuda.juliagpu.org/stable/tutorials/introduction/#Wri...

Then again, I am also open to the fact that I'm jammed up by the production use of dynamically typed languages, and maybe the "for ML" part means "I code in Jupyter notebooks" and thus give no shits about whether person #2 can understand what's happening