MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eCa | 2025-10-13 20:06:02+00:00
> And so doing it myself feels like I'm deliberately choosing to be inefficient

People have plenty of hobbies that are not the most "efficient" way to solve a problem. There are planes, but some people ride bikes across continents. Some walk.

LLMs exist, you can choose to what level you use them. Maybe you need to detox for a weekend or two.
by georgeburdell | 2025-10-13 20:06:03+00:00
Yes but the problem is that the people most strongly opposed to Elon left, while everyone else either embraced the change, or grumbled and carried on.

I remember the opposite thing, politically, happening when Reddit clamped down on a number of rightwing -isms (and -philias) and then a site called Voat got created as the “free speech” alternative, except it only attracted the right wingers who saw the -isms as their core beliefs, and so the whole site was just that. Eventually Voat shut down, having failed to bring enough new to the table to attract regular, fairly politically indifferent folks
by vivalahn | 2025-10-13 20:06:37+00:00
BBM itself should not have been a lock-in. It would have taken incredibly little effort to open it as a desktop messenger that can seamlessly interact with people who have BBM numbers for example.

I doubt they learned their lessons. Apple walked all over them in so many ways and, if memory serves me right, they even mocked Steve Jobs over the iPhone.

Edit: just so I’m clear I’m discussing it from the perspective of early to mid 2000s. iPhone hadn’t yet come out, but iPods were popular. Trillian and Pidgin were dominating the online landscape of software that could support multiple chat protocols - seamless ICQ, AIM, IRC, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, all in one program. If there was a time for RIM to corner the market here it was right then and there because BBM was the real deal, being available on phones and they could have signed agreements with others to bring it to, for example, Nokia and Motorola and whoever else.

But no. They’d rather be arrogant and stupid.
by nisten | 2025-10-13 20:06:49+00:00
At the end of the day, if you look at almost any government, roughly 2/3 of expenses go towards healthcare and education things which, AI worlkflow are very likely continue offsetting a larger and larger percentage of the costs on.

Can we still have a financial crisis from all this investment going bust because it might take too long for it to make a difference in manufacturing enough automation hardware for everyone? Yes.

But, the fundamentals are still there, parents will still send their kids to some type of school, and people will trade good in exchange for health services. That's not going to change. Neither will the need to use robots in nursing homes, I think that assumption is safe to make.

What's difficult to predict change in is adoption in manufacturing, and repairs ( be that repairing bridges or repairing your espresso machine ) because that is more of a "3D" issue and hard to automate reliably (think about how many gpus today would it actually take to get a robot to reason out and repair a whole in your drywall), given that your RL environments and training data needs grow exponentially. Technically, your phone should have enough gpu performance to do your taxes with a 3B model and a bunch of tools, eventually it'll even be better than you at it. But to tun an actual robot with multiple cameras and stuff doing troubleshooting and decision making.... you're gonna need a whole 8x rack of gpus for that.

And that's what makes it now difficult to predict what's going to happen. The areas under the curve can vary widely. We could get a 1B AGI model in 6 months, or it could take 5 years for agentic workflows to fully automate everyones taxes and actually replace 2/3 of radiology work...

Either way, while theres a significant chance of this transition to the automation age being rough, I am overall quite optimistic given the fundamentals of what governments actually spend majority of their money on.
by andy99 | 2025-10-13 20:06:57+00:00
I still find it’s only useful for writing code you don’t need to understand. I would never vibe code something that I needed to know how it worked.

It’s just going to take time for “best practice” to come around with this. It’s like outsourcing, for a while it seems like a good idea and it might be for very fixed tasks that you don’t really care about, but nobody does it now for important work because of the lack of control and understanding which is exactly where AI will end up. I think for coding tasks you can almost interchangeably use AI and outsourcing and preserve the meaning.
by legitster | 2025-10-13 20:06:57+00:00
Anecdotally, our company's next couple quarters are projected to be a bloodbath. Spending is down everywhere, nearly all of our customers are pushing for huge cuts to their contracts, and in turn literally any costs we can jettison to keep jobs is being pushed through. We're hearing the same from our customers.

AI has been the only new investment our company has made (half hearted at that). I definitely get the sense that everyone pretending things are fine to investors, meanwhile they are playing musical chairs.

Back in my economics classes at college, a professor pointed out that a stock market can go up for two reasons: On one hand, the economy is legitimately growing and shares are becoming more valuable. But on the other hand, people and corporations could be cutting spending en masse so there's extra cash to flood the stock markets and drive up prices regardless of future earnings.
by lordofgibbons | 2025-10-13 20:07:02+00:00
I started (incorrectly) going down this same route of offloading the thinking and system design process to the LLM. It has a disaster.

You have to understand your problem and solution inside and out. This means thinking deeply about your solution along with the drawing boxes and lines. And only then do you go to the LLM and have it implement your solution!

I heavily use LLMs daily, but if you don't truly understand the problem and solution, you're going to have a bad time.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-13 20:07:08+00:00
they did not check if the vehicle was stationary, motor disabled before updating. They were all surprised at how I thought that this could possibly ever lead to issues.

My anecdata is that my car won't update its software without the owner explicitly requesting it. And then, it will only do it if the car has something like 50% charge, hasn't been used for an hour, and nobody is inside.

I once tried to do the update while I was inside, and it refused.
Ask HN: Are web development jobs over in the age of AI?
by colesantiago | 2025-10-13 20:07:12+00:00
There are now tools available to everyone that wants to make web apps, Bolt, Replit, Loveable can do end to end web apps with a database attached and deployed in an afternoon.

Over time, the effort required to make web apps will trend to zero and there would be no reason any company would want to pay high salaries for web development jobs now that AI can do this job.

Is it over for web development jobs and careers now that AI is here?

What should engineers do instead of web development to get high salaries?
by opwieurposiu | 2025-10-13 20:07:42+00:00
I feel like half the time issues are caused by adding some stupid feature that nobody really wants, but makes it in anyways because the incentive is to add features, not make good software.

People rarely react well if you tell them "Hey this feature ticket you made is poorly conceived and will cause problems, can we just not do it?" It is easier just to implement whatever it is and deal with the fallout later.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-13 20:08:16+00:00
Today, you just join a Reddit thread or Telegram channel or follow someone on social. You don't have to seek it out. It is now just delivered to you with a notification that your twitchy little brain just can't find a way to ignore and must investigate the new new. Not only are you being fed nonsense, but you're having it fed to you in the most addictive way possible. Cult leaders would dream of having that much control.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-13 20:09:04+00:00
True, although using adb requires the use of the usb port, which for some of my projects is highly impractical.

Also, with this move, Google has made it very clear that they don't want people to have any real control over their machines -- so I'm not inclined to think that using adb to work around the problem will always be possible.

It's fine, though. My hobby projects will continue into the future, just probably without using Android.
by mhaberl | 2025-10-13 20:09:09+00:00
>The new way: The entire premise of AI coding tools is to automate the thinking, not just the typing.

That’s the promise, but not the reality :) Try this: pick a random startup idea from the internet, something that would normally take 3–6 months to build without AI. Now go all in with AI. Don’t worry about enjoyment; just try to get it done.

You’ll notice pretty quickly that it doesn’t get you very far. Some things go faster, until you hit a wall (and you will hit it). Then you either have to redo parts or step back and actually understand what the AI built so far, so you can move forward where it can’t.

>I was thinking of all the classic exploratory learning blog posts. Things that sounded fun. Writing a toy database to understand how they work, implementing a small Redis clone. Now that feels stupid. Like I'd be wasting time on details the AI is supposed to handle.

It was "stupid" then - better alternatives already existed, but you do it to learn.

> Am I alone in this?

absolutly not but understand it is just a tool, not a replacement, use it and you will soon find the joy again, it is there
by jmyeet | 2025-10-13 20:09:56+00:00
I don't think you need a deep resume in the financial industry nor a long education to be better off than most of the population. Those things can help for sure.

But financial literacy comes really from media literacy, asking basic questions of who is telling you something, what is their track record, who are they paid by, what are they selling and what other people say about what they say. Too many people simply react to emotions and look for confirmation bias. Also, one needs to distinguish between analysis and justification.

There's opportunities for this every day. It can be as simple as asking what a bank does or how mortgages work. You'll quickly get to a point of asking what fractional reserves are, what the FDIC does and how the government keeps banks solvent.

You then look at what a currency is and how currencies have evolved over time. The early history of currencies can largely be derived from first principles.

Example: in primitive societies, people migrated and followed food. As time went on they'd start to specialize and have excess goods and you'd end up with barter systems, even more so once you had agriculture and you started to see permanent settlements. But bartering is inefficient. You might have the leather that I want but you don't want the cheese that I have. Maybe you'll take it because you can trade it, maybe not.

So people started trading in things that they assigned value to eg silver and, later, gold. It's important to note that this value is "assigned" because, beyond jewelry, gold didn't have a lot of early utility. It has useful properties, like it's inert, fungible, divisible and hard-to-counterfeit (because of it's density).

But dealing in gold itself is awkward so political entities started creating currencies. There were IOUs and contracts but currencies eventually became a promise to exchange it for gold, if requested, by some political entity.

And this really takes us into the 20th century where countries issued currencies and they backed those with gold reserves, literally thousands of tons of gold.

It quickly gets a lot more complex from there as 50+ years ago we ended up with fiat currencies, meaning the value is set by markets instead of an agreed upon exchange rate.

You have people who think abandoning the gold standard was a mistake, often called "goldbugs". Many goldbugs moved to crypto. You can see why: the idea is that the supply of Bitcoin (or whatever) is predetermined. You can't just "print money" (they say). The truth of printing money is more complex. A big problem is the US consistently runs a trade deficit.

I'm not sure how helpful that all is. Just some random thoughts.
by xp84 | 2025-10-13 20:09:57+00:00
> Elsewhere there is no choice

Everywhere there is a choice. If, for instance, you don't want Facebook to have your data, don't use Facebook and block their domains using an adblocker to prevent leakage via cookies on sites that have their JS running.

The folly is that EU regulators have duped people into believing that they can read and even participate in free-as-in-beer social media sites without any of 'their data' ever being held by anyone else. And that the information of what a person did on a single site on a given day is "personal data" even if it isn't ever tied to your identity or ever used to do anything but try to show that browser a more relevant ad.

The root cause of both the general public's discomfort and the overcollection of data is the ad-supported model itself. The EU punted on that hard problem and instead wastes everyone's time trying to pretend the ad-supported models can function with 100% personal data control.
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-13 20:10:44+00:00
Who do you feel this pressure from? I realize I'm not answering your question, but is it possible that pressure is your own inner critic, not any real constraint?

Ok, you don't like a particular way of working or a particular tool. In any other era, we would just stop doing using that tool or method. Who is saying you cannot? Is a real constraint or a perceived one?

Regardless, I understand the need to understand what you built. So you have a few options. You can study it (with the agent's help?), you can write your own tests / extensions for it to make sure you really get it, or you can write it yourself. I honestly think that most of those take about as long. It's only shorter when you don't want to understand it, so then we're back to the main question: Why not?
by simonw | 2025-10-13 20:10:51+00:00
karpathy/fineweb-edu-100b-shuffle: https://huggingface.co/datasets/karpathy/fineweb-edu-100b-sh...

Which is derived from HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu: https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu

HuggingFaceTB/smol-smoltalk: https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceTB/smol-smoltalk

And extra fine-tuning on portions of:

cais/mmlu: https://huggingface.co/datasets/cais/mmlu

openai/gsm8k: https://huggingface.co/datasets/openai/gsm8k

allenai/ai2_arc: https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/ai2_arc
by alganet | 2025-10-13 20:10:57+00:00
I genuinely do not understand this. You can totally still do that for learning purposes.

The only thing you cannot do anymore is show off such projects. The portfolio of mini-tutorials is definitely a bygone concept. I actually like that part of how the culture has changed.

Another interesting challenge is to set yourself up to outperform the LLM. Golf with it. LLM can do a parser? Okay, I'll make a faster one instead. Less lines of code. There's tons of learning opportunities in that.

> The only "worthy" problems left are the hard ones

That's not true. There are also unexplored problems which the AI doesn't have enough training data to be useful.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-10-13 20:11:02+00:00
AI is taking the joy out of programming the same way cameras took out the joy of painting, or the record player took out the joy of playing an musical instrument. If your financial income relies on it, there will be issues and you will have to go along with the technical innovation. If you enjoy programming for programming sake and only do it for fun, simply do not use AI. On your own free time, you are free to make that choice.
by sleepybrett | 2025-10-13 20:11:03+00:00
One of my first jobs was at an isp/web/cohost company. We had a big bank of modems for dialup customers, had some customers who terminated isdn with us, a rack of colocation and built websites as well.

The company was partially owned and housed primarily in a print shop, we worked above the press floor and I was sometimes pressed into service helping when we were slow (I had some experience working in a print shop in highschool (helping with pagemaker and helping to run the big hidleberg), similarly in college.

Nothing like ending your day writing perl cgi scripts and troubleshooting customers damn winsock configurations and then going home and coughing up whatever color was running on the presses that day.
by themafia | 2025-10-13 20:11:47+00:00
> in which case it's boilerplate that shouldn't be copyrighted

Let's say it's boilerplate code filled with comments that are designed to assist in understanding the API being written against. Are the comments somehow not covered because they were added to "boilerplate code?" Even if they're reproduced verbatim as well?

> We already had the "just stochastic parrots" conversation too

Oh, I was not part of those conversations, perhaps you can link me to them? The mere stated existence of them is somewhat underwhelming and entirely unconvincing. Particularly when it seems easy to ask an LLM to generate code and then to search for elements of that code on the Internet. With that methodology you wouldn't need to rely on conversations but on actual hard data. Do you happen to know if that is also available?
by ori_b | 2025-10-13 20:11:52+00:00
The same advice applies to a correct program regardless of the implementation: using setenv is a bug. Only use getenv.

Getenv in a program without setenv is fine in both implementations. Setenv is unusable with all conforming implementations.

To pass environments to children, use execve.

The Linux behavior allows a careful single threaded program to use setenv correctly. The BSD/Solaris behavior makes all usage incorrect, but the incorrectness comes in the form of a memory leak, which is preferable to a security issue, usually.

There's no correct, portable use of setenv. If you call it, it's a bug.
by ben_w | 2025-10-13 20:11:53+00:00
They would likely have been correct.

Don't get me wrong, I agree there is such a thing as "forget the comparative advantage of trade, this is national security", and I even think steel and cement need to be in that category right after farm subsidies, but also you do have to be strategic, and you don't want private corporations "too important to fail" which turn subsidies into shareholder returns without adding real value.
by 827a | 2025-10-13 20:11:57+00:00
Reminder: If you're going to feel doomer about how tech capex represents like nn% of US GDP growth, you should do some research into what percentage of US GDP growth, especially since 2020, has been the result of government printing. Arguably, our GDP growth right now is more "real" than the historical GDP growth numbers between 2020-2023, but all of it is so warped by policy that its hard to tell what's going on.

We're in extremely unprecedented times. Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit. The old rules don't apply. Etc.
by cassianoleal | 2025-10-13 20:11:59+00:00
Thanks, that's an interesting reference.

I'm not sure that's what I was looking for though. That's unit consumption per GDP, so it may look stable or even declining regardless of actual consumption of resources.

In a way, it indicates the potential for a more sustainable living but unless it goes down by greater amounts than GDP growth, it's still net positive environmental damage.
by xg15 | 2025-10-13 20:11:59+00:00
> If we assume people sleep roughly 8 hours per day

I'd strongly question that assumption. Based on what I've heard from friends (and also personal experience), I think there is quite a large number if people who spend too much time on the phone, but also still want to do activities/work on projects, etc - all in addition to work, family life and chores.

The result is that the time is taken from the activity that appears most "compressible" at first glance, which is sleep.
by spacebanana7 | 2025-10-13 20:12:05+00:00
A lot of the US rules in this area came from UK courts trying to enforce defamation/libel related claims on US authors and journalists.

The American consensus basically became that US courts don’t enforce overseas judgments on free speech stuff where the speech would be legal in the US. Even if that speech could be “heard” elsewhere.

See the Ehrenfeld v. Bin Mahfouz case (2005) and subsequent US SPEECH act (2010).
by colejohnson66 | 2025-10-13 20:12:13+00:00
Midori is certainly an interesting project, but no; I meant the old "code access security" model that .NET Framework had.[0][1] Administrators (and other code) could restrict you from doing certain operations, and the runtime would enforce it. It was removed in .NET Core.[2]

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/dotnet/f...

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.security...

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/...
by contingencies | 2025-10-13 20:12:31+00:00
It is an objective and transparent response based on free software world norms. Feel free to interpret differently and to be disheartened. Hell, many of us are disheartened by the AI VC political theater we are seeing right now: experienced programmers, artists, lawyers, perhaps much of humanity. Let's stick to objective elements of the discussion, not emotional opine.
by evanelias | 2025-10-13 20:12:54+00:00
It could always be worse... for example Microsoft recently renamed their remote desktop app to just "Windows App" https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-app/

But then in some specific cases, that app can't be used, and you end up with gibberish like this documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-app/overview#what-...
by Analemma_ | 2025-10-13 20:13:15+00:00
We're definitely not in a crash yet, but it does feel like we're the roller coaster just tipping over the peak: unemployment is rising for the first time in a couple years, there's basically no GDP growth apart from AI investment, and the yield curves look scary. The crash could be any second now, especially because tech earnings week is coming up and that could indicate how much revenue, or lack thereof, the AI investment is bringing in.
by grim_io | 2025-10-13 20:14:03+00:00
I don’t get this at all, and I tried to understand it.

I'm good at SQL. When necessary (maybe once a year), I can drop into pure SQL instead of Django ORM like it's nothing.

The thing is, I can't imagine why I would ever want to.

All these anti ORM comments read like they want to be as close to the DB as possible.

This is not what I want. I don't care about guaranteeing the most efficient query, because it is never the bottleneck, not even close.

I want to be as expressive as I can be in the business logic, and I don't feel like I am using pure SQL.
by skissane | 2025-10-13 20:14:35+00:00
> You still don’t know if some library you use calls getenv()

Well, you can know, if you check their imported symbols. (I suppose they could be getting it via dlsym, but what are the odds of that...)

So if getenv_r() is added to the C library, and over time third party libraries started adopting it, you could get to the point that you could know no code in your process is calling getenv(), because none of the libraries your process loads import that symbol.

They could even add a glibc tunable to make getenv() call abort()... then you could be very sure nobody is calling getenv(), because if anyone ever did, boom