MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2025-11-26 16:06:04+00:00
Katie Wilson's claim to fame is doing the bidding of rich and powerful King County Metro union gang / alias "ATU" for the purposes of using exploitive taxes to take from the population of Seattle (who have infamously been fleeced on massive gouged public transit construction costs) and reshuffle the money to cushy transit union lobby and their benefactors so their precious fiefdom would not be downsized. She then created a payroll tax to enrich rich contractors to create a tiny amount of "affordable housing" (buzz word used to enrich construction contractors at public cost) for a select few. She is basically a shining beacon of a mouthpiece for the rich and powerful as they are all too happy to be the benefactors of her tax policies that largely socialize costs and privatize the earnings albeit under a false flag of helping the poor.

Mamdani has been legally barred from the Presidency, the position we are discussing. He simply cannot. In fact, I suspect that is part of the reason why Trump has been so weirdly chum with him, he's simply not a threat for the presidency and never will be.
by lofaszvanitt | 2025-11-26 16:06:10+00:00
So it went thru multiple people and they all said in unison: well, this is all ironed out, easy to use and looks ok. We did a great job!

Just mind boggling. I get it, maybe they want to create extra jobs, by adding complexity, hence more people are required for a role, but why keeping up the illusion? Fucking alter the economic systems if this was the goal.
by forgetfulness | 2025-11-26 16:06:27+00:00
I don’t know how we’ll fix it

Just taking what people argue for on its own merits breaks down when your capacity to read whole essays or comments chains is so easily overwhelmed by the speed at which people put out AI slop

How do you even know that the other person read what they supposedly wrote, themselves, and you aren’t just talking to a wall because nobody even meant to say the things you’re analyzing?

Good faith is impossible to practice this way, I think people need to prove that the media was produced in good faith somehow before it can be reasonably analyzed in good faith

It’s the same problem with 9000 slop PRs submitted for code review
by tracker1 | 2025-11-26 16:06:36+00:00
Since .Net Core 3, I haven't really experienced too many breaking issues that directly affected me... mostly been relatively easy to update my target framework and dependencies. I mean, it's slightly time consuming, but nothing like updating say a React project that's been sitting for even a couple years.

I know their release/LTS cycles are now much shorter than the 20+ years that some framework versions have seen, but keeping things "current" hasn't been that hard. IMO, it's just part of maintenance for "rapid" software development. Companies want software in weeks instead of many years of planning, that means ongoing maintenance work.
by frankfrank13 | 2025-11-26 16:06:53+00:00
> In industrial scale software development, gaining access you are fully entitled to can sometimes take weeks.

4 years in consulting. I've spent the first WEEKS of a project twiddling my thumbs waiting for a laptop, just to spend more weeks waiting on access to source code, tooling, etc.

My friends on the strategy side could start and finish entire projects in that time.
by amluto | 2025-11-26 16:06:53+00:00
A design such that it would actually make sense for a compiler to mark code that should permit data-dependent CPU optimizations differently from code that should not.

This could be done using an opcode prefix, which would bloat code but would work perfectly. Or it could use an RFLAGS bit or a bit in MXCSR or a new register, etc.

Almost anything would be better than an MSR that is only accessible to privileged code.
by bpt3 | 2025-11-26 16:07:05+00:00
To add to the valid counterpoints in the existing replies, Amazon was cash flow positive for most of those 20 years, so they were investing their own money back into things that could generate even more revenue (and profit!) for the company.

OpenAI is still losing money much faster than it can make it and is planning to accelerate those losses indefinitely.

I think the most likely outcome is that it turns into something like Uber, where they continue to lose money waiting for a major technological leap (truly unassisted and reliable AI in this case, fully self-driving cars in the case of Uber) and then pivot a bit to a largely unnecessary and poorly executed business model that people reluctantly use for the most part (with some eager advocates) but makes some money.
by skydhash | 2025-11-26 16:07:17+00:00
You may have two dozens years of emacs, but I fear you’ve not grasped the philosophy of emacs, if that is the list of complaints.

> split windows.

Why would I want a new window to replace the one I’m in. If I want to look at an info manual, I want it to start in a new window instead of the one that I’m looking it. My understanding is that there are main tasks and secondary tasks. Switching main tasks replace the current windows, starting secondary tasks pop up a new one. And those pops up are usually dismissed by typing q.

> still litters #foo# and foo~ files in the directory of whatever you're editing

Backup files and autosaved files are good. Especially if the edited file is not versioned. It’s the correct choice as some users are not programmers.

> few language modes

How many toolchain are installed on a newly installed OS? And major modes are not only for syntax.

> LSP servers

Eglot is built in and has a good set of default for current servers. But why should Emacs install stuff for me. It does not know how I want to install them.

> macro over a 10,000 lines

macros do run the full set of the commands as it would run in a normal invocation time the amount of repetition. And there are other approaches like an awk script that may be faster for your usecase.

> common functions…bound to chains of two…three keystrokes

Emacs have a lot of commands. And if you used something a lot, you can bind it to a more accessible bindings.

> mysterious ctrl-u prefix

If it’s mysterious after two dozen years, then I wonder if you ever give the manual a glance. It is for providing an argument to the command and it’s commonly used for providing an alternate behavior to the default one. Like ‘g’ is recompile in a compilation buffer and ‘ctrl-u g’ asks for the command to use for the new iteration instead of reusing the old one.
by saberience | 2025-11-26 16:07:19+00:00
Sorry but this is patently rubbish, we do not consume orders of magnitude more data than the training datasets, nor do we "process" it in anything like the same way.

Firstly, most of what we see, hear, experience etc, is extremely repetitive. I.e. for the first several years of our live we see the same people, see the same house, repeatedly read the same few very basic books, etc etc. So, you can make this argument purely based on "bytes" of data. I.e. humans are getting this super HD video feed, which means more data than an LLM. Well, we are getting a "video feed" but mostly of the same walls in the same room, which doesn't really mean much of anything at all.

Meanwhile, LLMs are getting LITERALLY, all of humanities recorded textual knowledge, more recorded audio than 10000 humans could listen to in their lifetime, more images and more varied images than a single person could view in their entire life, reinforcement learning on the hardest maths, science, and programming questions etc.

The idea that because humans are absorbing "video" means that its somehow more "data" than frontier LLMs are trained with is laughable honestly.
by mcbuilder | 2025-11-26 16:07:20+00:00
Yeah, financial bubble != useless technology. Maybe coding agents do cost $50 per month in the long term, but I might just pay that for entertainment and personal stuff. Like, I don't even try to vibe code my job, but in the evenings having a cool slop generator is good times.

Right now I use a Chinese vibe code plan, really good value.
by grayhatter | 2025-11-26 16:07:22+00:00
lol, no. They're people who think faster. Someone who uses vscode will never produce code faster than someone proficient in vim. Someone who clicks through GUI windows will never be able to control their computer as fast as someone with a command prompt.

I'm sure that there are some examples who enjoy it for the interface. I think CRT term/emulator is peak aesthetic. And a few who aren't willing to invest the time to use a gui an a terminal, and they learned the terminal first.

Calling either group a luddite is stupid, but if I was forced to defend one side. Given most people start with a gui because it's so much easier. I'd rather make the argument that those who never progress onto the faster more powerful options deserve the insult of luddite.
by sillyfluke | 2025-11-26 16:07:32+00:00
It's not nothing, thanks for the constructive comment.

Microsoft is pretty much a US asset defended by the US government at this point, so their risk profile would be quite different than a much smaller tech company. I doubt they were depending on getting the 400 mil financial commitment they made to Ukraine any time soon a few years back, for example. That and many actions seem to be done in support of US foreign policy so they can retain the preference of the US government (ie other contracts etc) in the long term, as opposed to a normal tech investment decision.

But like I said, it's not nothing. As a smaller tech company if Microsoft steps in when the shit hits the fan and aids in keeping Serbian cyber infrastructure running smoothly, as a smaller tech company you would indirectly benefit.
by a-posteriori | 2025-11-26 16:07:33+00:00
This is the same group (Ayush Chopra & Ramesh Raskar) that previously published the highly circulated (clickbait) article saying that 95% of AI pilots were failing based on extremely weak study design and questions that didn't even support the takeaways.

Anything coming from Ayush and Ramesh should be highly scrutinized. Ramesh should stick to studying Camera Culture in the Media Lab.

I will believe a study from MIT when it comes out of CSAIL.
by lesuorac | 2025-11-26 16:07:35+00:00
I'll give a hot take.

The real advantage AI gives is cover to change current processes. There's a million tiny tasks that could be automated and in aggregate would reduce labor needs by making labor more productive.

AI isn't a feature. Spellcheck is a feature. Templates are a feature. Search is a feature. A database of every paywalled article is a feature. AI can't do anything but it gives cover for features that do.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-26 16:07:53+00:00
I realized recently that if you want to talk about interesting topics with smart people, if you expect things like critical thinking and nuanced discussion, you're currently much better off talking literature or philosophy than anything related to tech. I mean, everyone knows that discussing politics/economics is rather hopelessly polarized, everyone has their grievances or their superstitions or injuries that they cannot really put aside. But this is a pretty new thing that discussing software/engineering on merits is almost impossible.

Yes, I know about the language / IDE / OS wars that software folks have indulged in before. But the reflexive shallow pro/anti takes on AI are way more extreme and are there even in otherwise serious people. And in general anti-intellectual sentiment, mindless follow-the-leader, and proudly ignorant stances on many topics are just out of control everywhere and curiosity seems to be dead or dying.

You can tell it's definitely tangled up with money though and this remains a good filter for real curiosity. Math that's not maybe related to ML is something HN is guaranteed to shit on. No one knows how to have a philosophy startup yet (WeWork and other culty scams notwithstanding!). Authors, readers, novels, and poetry aren't moving stock markets. So at least for now there's somewhere left for the intellectually curious to retreat
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-26 16:08:37+00:00
I think the author makes some very good points, but it's perhaps worth noting that they are the current status quo. I do find myself wondering if the author re-evaluates in a future where the technology gets cheaper, the executable AI engine fits on a standalone Raspberry Pi, and retraining the engine is done by volunteer co-ops.

... but, it is definitely worth considering whether the status quo is tolerable and whether we as technical creatives are willing to work with tools that live within it.
by llm_nerd | 2025-11-26 16:08:59+00:00
"Not in where I live though"

I mean, not anywhere, and the data absolutely annihilates their ridiculous claims. In subsequent posts they've retreated back to "yeah, but someone somewhere has it worse", invalidating this whole absurd thread.

Their comment has little correlation with reality, and seems to be a contrived, self-comforting fiction. Most firms have implemented hiring freezes if not actively downsizing their dev staff. Many extremely experienced devs are finding the market absolutely atrocious, getting zero bites.

And for all of the "well us senior devs are safe" sentiment often seen on here, many shops seem to be more comfortable hiring cheap and eager junior devs and foregoing seniors because LLMs fill in a lot of the "grizzled wisdom". The junior to senior ratio is rapidly increasing, and devs who lived on golden handshakes are suddenly finding their ego bruised and a market where they're fighting for low-pay jobs.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-26 16:09:04+00:00
> It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people.

It happens, but I think it's pretty uncommon. What's a lot more common is people getting called out for offloading tasks to LLMs in a way that just breaches protocol.

For example, if we're having an argument online and you respond with a chatbot-generated rebuttal to my argument, I'm going to be angry. This is because I'm putting an effort and you're clearly not interested in having that conversation, but you still want to come out ahead for the sake of internet points. Some folks would say it's fair game, but consider the logical conclusion of that pattern: that we both have our chatbots endlessly argue on our behalf. That's pretty stupid, right?

By extension of this, there's plenty of people who use LLMs to "manage" their online footprint: write responses to friends' posts, come up with new content to share, generate memes, produce a cadence of blog posts. Anyone can ask an LLM to do that, so what's the point of generating this content in the first place? It's not yours. It's not you. So what's the game, other than - again - trying to come out on top for internet points?

Another fairly toxic pattern is when people use LLMs to produce work output without the effort to proofread or fact-check it. Over the past year or so, I've gotten so many LLM-generated documents that simply made no sense, and the sender considered their job to be done and left the QA to me.
by ncallaway | 2025-11-26 16:09:04+00:00
> You didn't state reasons why not being a social platform matters here.

The network effects matter so much more for a social platform than a chat bot. The switching costs for a user are much lower, so users can move to a different one much easier.

How sticky will chat bots prove to be in the long term? Will OpenAI be able to maintain a lead in the space in the long term, the way Google was over Bing? It's possible, but it's also pretty easy to imagine other providers being competitive and a landscape where users move between different LLMs more fluidly
by pseudocomposer | 2025-11-26 16:09:10+00:00
This is a silly counterexample - why would we launch them that far apart? It’s a terrible idea for multiple reasons. We’d want them close together, with some redundancy as well, in case of failures.

What dish size would be required for a “cylindrical/tubular mesh” of probes, say, 1AU apart (ie Earth-Sun distance)? I’m pretty sure that would be manageable, but open to being wrong. (For reference, Voyager 1 is 169AU from Earth, but I have no idea how dish size vs. signal strength works: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1...)
by this_user | 2025-11-26 16:09:15+00:00
IMO the key problem that OpenAI have is that they are all-in on AGI. Unlike a Google, they don't have anything else of any value. If AGI is not possible, or is at least not in reach within the next decade or so, OpenAI will have a product in the form of AI models that have basically zero moat. They will be Netscape in a world where Microsoft is giving away Internet Explorer for free.

Meanwhile, Google would be perfectly fine. They can just integrate whatever improvements the actually existing AI models offer into their other products.
by quantummagic | 2025-11-26 16:09:21+00:00
> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers.

Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.
by paxys | 2025-11-26 16:09:21+00:00
TL;DR - financial analysts look at current charts and project them foward by 5 years and go "wow the numbers look bad".

Sure OpenAI may well be bleeding money into the 2030s, or may even go bust completely depending on how pessimistic you are, but the analysis completely skips:

- They are building their own data centers, and will be less reliant on renting compute from Microsoft and Amazon over time.

- Once the AI bubble has subsided costs for GPU purchases and rentals will decrease significantly. Plus there will be more advancements and competition in the space (e.g. Google TPUs) and Nvidia will no longer be able to name their own price.

- We will write more efficient software for training and inference.

- Once user growth is tapped out OpenAI will no longer need to have the overly generous free tier that they do today. And if they decide to turn up the advertising faucet these users could bring in a ton more revenue than in the projection. Thinking that every AI company combined will capture only 2% of the total digital advertising market is ridiculous. AI apps are already challenging social media for scrolling time.

Basically, the entire space is evolving so rapidly that it's pointless to make a projection with the assumption that the landscape isn't going to change from here on.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-11-26 16:09:27+00:00
Sure there is a wide spectrum of skills, having worked in FANG and top tier research I have a pretty good idea of the capability at the top of the spectrum. I know I wasn't hiring at that level. I was paying 2x the local market rate (non-US) and pulling from the functional programming talent pool. These were not the top 1% but I think they were easily top 10% and probably in the top 5%.

I use LLMs to build isolated components and I do the work needed to specialize them for my tasks and integrate them together. The LLMs take fewer instructions to do this and handle ambiguity far better. Additionally because of the immediate feedback look on the specs I can try first with a minimally defined spec and interactively refine as needed. It takes me far less work to write specs for LLMs than it does for other devs.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-26 16:09:39+00:00
I’m getting downvoted in another comment for saying this, but it’s a growing problem. In some surveys of TRT patients up to 1/4 of them didn’t even have their testosterone levels measured before being prescribed TRT. The men’s health clinics are finding excuses to diagnose everyone who calls. The lifetime value of a monthly TRT customer is very high.
by hahahacorn | 2025-11-26 16:09:55+00:00
This is like unbelievably awful journalism. From the abstract:

>The Index captures technical exposure, where AI can perform occupational tasks, not displacement outcomes or adoption timelines. Analysis shows that visible AI adoption concentrated in computing and technology (2.2% of wage value, approx $211 billion) represents only the tip of the iceberg. Technical capability extends far below the surface through cognitive automation spanning administrative, financial, and professional services (11.7%, approx $1.2 trillion). [https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25137]

Does the author not know what displacement outcomes are?

It's possible we got 2.2% better quality software by augmenting engineers.

I expect we'll see at least 11.7% <metrixX> improvements in admin, financial, and professional services.

There is likely also a depressive affect on the labor market - there is nuance here and it would be equally disingenuous to believe there will be zero displacement (although, there is a case for more labor participation is administrative bottlenecks / cost are solved, tbd).

Either way this is like a textbook example of zero-sum minded journalist grossly misrepresenting the world.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-11-26 16:10:00+00:00
RNA World is really cooking: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39358873/

Ejection: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-25736-5_3

Reentry: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Not to mention the constant trickle of "X survived in space" stories that we get every time someone bothers to collect and culture a sample. The amount of success at every stage with, frankly, very little effort spent tuning the conditions, multiplied by "bacteria are everywhere" makes hitchhiking less crazy than it sounds. Our intuition misleads us because bacteria are so much better at handling acceleration (easy if you're small) and dessiccation (everywhere is a desert if you're small) than anything we are used to thinking about.
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-11-26 16:10:40+00:00
I do know how it works, I also know about U-turns, backbench revolts, opinion poll panic, doorstep canvassing hostility, and voter backlashes. All ways in which the electorate can have an impact.

Good luck getting your EU Commission to change their mind about something they really want. The "right" voting buttons will be pushed eventually. But I suspect you already know that.
by sReinwald | 2025-11-26 16:10:58+00:00
Strange framing, isn't it?

Bariatric surgery shows 25-65% significant regain rates depending on definition and timeframe. And regular dieting is even worse. Nobody would frame that as a safety issue. That's... just how weight loss works, not a unique GLP-1 problem.

Calling a return of symptoms (obesity) a "safety issue" is like saying insulin has "no safe off-ramp" because diabetics get hyperglycemic when they stop taking it.

Fear gets clicks, I guess.
by frank_nitti | 2025-11-26 16:11:12+00:00
I love it! And yeah .NET Framework is still critical for some workloads, most notably C++/CLI and WCF for certain apps where deep win32 APIs make their net8.0+ alternatives too much of a headache :)

To temper my comment, the resistance I faced as the new guy brought in to modernize is natural for these engineers who knew their tools and systems well, in their defense. Eventually they warmed up from full pushback to friendly banter “Mr. Linux and command line over here” and accepted that running my little scripts helped address the confusion/frustration of Visual Studio disagreeing with Jenkins/GitHub Actions automations and runtime behavior in Kubernetes.
by subb | 2025-11-26 16:11:17+00:00
There's a spectrum of human involvement in producing a thing, and art is possibly the last thing I want to see automate.

In the end, art is about human connection. There's a difference between an print of some generated AI slop found online, a painting made in a Chinese factory for a big store, and the scribble your friend made when they went through depression.

You can make a game with all three process. They are not the same.