MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw0101c | 2025-11-26 16:25:31+00:00
If anyone is curious about automation and people's/worker's reaction to it, I recommend Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant:

> The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods.

> The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.

> Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it?

* https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/bloo...

* https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/introducing-blood-in-the...

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-ma...

* https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/article/doi/10.1215/...
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-26 16:25:39+00:00
The nativity of thinking we can solve poverty by just giving people money and services, as if individual choices are totally incidental to individual outcomes.

It must be oddly soothing to live in such a simple world of your own imagination, but that’s just not how people actually work. This isn’t magic, and your suicidal empathy for those you paint as systemically marginalized will never change that.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-11-26 16:26:56+00:00
It probably depends on what we have in our head as a bad landing page, here.

Two things that come to mind are: hard to use on a small device, and maybe no good quickstart info (like a bad readme).

The point of polishing these details isn't to indicate how much you labored away at the details but rather that the utility to the end-user was important enough to you to lift your finger.

Whether you spend 10 hours making it mobile friendly, contract it out to someone, or ask an LLM to do it isn't the important part.
by amarant | 2025-11-26 16:27:11+00:00
I've seen it happen to short, well written articles. Just yesterday there was an article that discussed the authors experiences maintaining his FOSS project after getting a fair number of users, and if course someone in the HN comments claimed it was written by AI, even though there were zero indications it was, and plenty of indications it wasn't.

Someone even argued that you could use prompts to make it look like it wasn't AI, and that this was the best explanation that it didn't look like ai slop.

If we can't respect genuine content creators, why would anyone ever create genuine content?

I get that these people probably think they're resisting AI, but in reality they're doing the opposite: these attacks weighs way heavier on genuine writers than they do on slop-posters.

The blanket bombing of "AI slop!" comments is counterproductive.

It is kind of a self fulfilling prophesy however: keep it up and soon everything really will be written by AI.
by anubistheta | 2025-11-26 16:27:13+00:00
I agree. I think this is what happens when a persons transitions from a progressive mindset to a conservative one, but has made being "progressive" a central tenant of their identity.

Progressiveness is forward looking and a proponent of rapid change. So it is natural that LLM's are popular amongst that crowd. Also, progressivism should be accepting of and encouraging the evolution of concepts and social constructs.

In reality, many people define "progressiveness" as "when things I like happen, not when things I don't like happen." When they lose control of the direction of society, they end up just as reactionary and dismissive as the people they claim to oppose.

>AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists.

>Craft, expression and skilled labor is what produces value, and that gives us control over ourselves

To me, that sums up the author's biases. You may value skilled labor, but generally people don't. Nor should they. Demand is what produces value. The later half of the piece falls into a diatribe of "Capitalism Bad".
by stego-tech | 2025-11-26 16:27:25+00:00
I suspect part of that is denial: “AI won’t replace my job!” Which, sure, maybe this era of AI won’t. Maybe this LLM era won’t replace your job, this time.

The problem is that we will eventually create tools that can and will replace labor. The Capital class is salivating over that prospect quite openly without any shame whatsoever for its consequences.

Fighting against AI is the wrong move. Instead, we should be fighting against a system that fails to provide for human necessities and victim-blames those displaced by Capital, before Capital feels AI can sufficiently displace the workforce.
by phplovesong | 2025-11-26 16:27:27+00:00
We will have decades of AI slop that needs to be cleaned up. Many startups will fail hard when the AI code bugs all creep up when a certain scale is reached. There will be massive dataloss, lots of hacking attempts that will succeed because of poor AI code no one understands. I dont see a dev staying in the same place for many years when its just soulless AI day in day out.

Either way its a lost cause.
by senordevnyc | 2025-11-26 16:27:35+00:00
Maybe the dilemma isn’t whether to “resist” or “acquiesce”, but rather whether to frame technological change as an inherently adversarial and zero sum struggle, versus looking for opportunities to leverage those technologies for greater productivity, comfort, prosperity, etc. Stop pushing against the idea of change. It’s going to happen, and keep happening, forever. Work with it.

And by any metric, the average citizen of a developed country is wildly better off than a century or two ago. All those moments of change in the past that people wrung their hands over ultimately improved our lives, and this probably won’t be any different.
by byko3y | 2025-11-26 16:27:46+00:00
>Maybe you DON'T need that state to be shared, reference-counted, or heap allocated. Maybe you can refactor your code to get rid of those annoyingly hard to deal with abstractions. And you end up with better, more reliable, likely faster code at the end of it.

That's the point 4 in my article — Rust is horrible for mutable shared state. However, in the modern CPU-based programming mutable shared state is like 70% of all the code, so you cannot just ignore it. It's not that CPU-s have to be like that, it's they hapened to be like that.

>there's a concurrency bug I never would have thought of! I guess all that old code I wrote has bugs that I didn't know about at the time.

Programming languages or libraries that excel at concurrency do not use the Arc<Mutex<T>> nuisance. At least they are not imposing it as a main tool. Having shared mutable state does not mean you directly change cell there, like you would in C/C++. I mean if you have a cyclic graph of connected objects — how the hell are you gonna employ Arc<Mutex<T>> for handling them? What Rust actually does is carving in stone pathologic C/C++ ways of "correct handling of shared mutable state" — whatever it is.
by bikelang | 2025-11-26 16:27:53+00:00
The ads are just a symptom. The tsunami of money pouring in was the corrosive force. Funny enough - I remain hopeful on AI as a skill multiplier. I think that’ll be hugely empowering for the real doers with the concrete skill sets to create good software that people actually want to use. I hope we see a new generation of engineer-entrepreneurs that opt to bootstrap over predatory VCs. I’d rather we see a million vibrant small software businesses employing a dozen people over more “unicorns”.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-11-26 16:28:19+00:00
> you think amazon is ever going to stop you from renting machines so that you cant run your AI models instead of buying from OpenAI

We are talking about a future with near AGI systems. In such a future, people like you or me have no money to pay those services with because we are all unemployed and starving. And amazon has much bigger ambitions than just resting cloud compute to you. The economy as we know it doesn't really exist in that scenario and neither do the incentives and constraints that exist in our current economies.

People talking about intelligent systems a lot without considering the profound changes it would cause to everything.

There is no future where near AGI and traditional economies coexist. Near AGI is essentially a type of swan
by tracker1 | 2025-11-26 16:28:41+00:00
As someone who has actively pushed in the direction of containerized deployments, VS Code with the integrated terminal over VS proper, etc... I love the direction .Net has taken in general. I have worked in a few environments where most of the devs and projects themselves feel stuck in concrete. I've left a couple places like that in the past few years just because they are painful environments to work in.

I couldn't even tell you how to do certain things in the VS gui at this point... I've got Rider and VS installed only because Rider is nicer for refactoring and I've had to fix VS launch issues a couple times (VS backend, vite/react frontent).

Prior to .Net core I had one foot out the door, mostly towards Node... Now, I'm fine with either/both... though all my shell scripting is now with Deno/TS.
by evnp | 2025-11-26 16:28:42+00:00
Exactly. The problem is instead of getting a raise because "you can do more now" your colleagues will be laid off. Why pay for 3 devs when the work can be done by 1 now? And we all better hope that actually pans out in whatever legacy codebase we're dealing with.

Now the job market is flooded due to layoffs, further justifying lack of comp adjustment - add inflation, and you have "de-valuing" in direct form.
by whalesalad | 2025-11-26 16:28:55+00:00
Well if you put yourself in the perspective of a time period where something like _The Nostromo_ actually exists - our scientific understanding is literally lightyears ahead of where it is right now. Meaning, our periodic table as it stands today is 1/10th the size of the future table. So it's reasonable to conclude that there are large swaths of never before even imagined materials out in the universe.
by DennisP | 2025-11-26 16:29:05+00:00
A lot of fun new technology gets shouted down by reactionaries who think everything's a scam.

Here on "hacker news" we get articles like this, meanwhile my brother is having a blast vibe-coding all sorts of stuff. He's building stuff faster than I ever dreamed of when I was a professional developer, and he barely knows Python.

In 2017 I was having great fun building smart contracts, constantly amazed that I was deploying working code to a peer-to-peer network, and I got nothing but vitriol here if I mentioned it.

I expect this to keep happening with any new tech that has the misfortune to get significant hype.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-11-26 16:29:08+00:00
We have a fleet of few hundred HDDs that is basically being replaced "on next failure" with SSD and that is BY FAR rarer on HDDs, maybe one out of 100 "just dies".

Usually it either starts returning media errors, or slows down (and if it is not replaced in time, slowing down drive usually turns into media error one).

SSDs (at least a big fleet of samsung ones we had) are much worse, just off, not even turning readonly. Of course we have redundancy so it's not really a problem, but if same happened on someone's desktop they'd be screwed if they don't have backups.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-26 16:29:23+00:00
Modern tooling part one: tried using an LSP with emacs (35+ year user) ... gave up after 3 days, it provided absolutely nothing to my workflow.

Modern tooling part two: via M-x grep (bound to F1) use ag(1) or rg(1) instead of grep to explore my codebase, runs async and finishes more or less before my "emacs pinkie" is ready to touch another key.
by mbesto | 2025-11-26 16:29:24+00:00
> Meta has 3.5 billion users and projected ~$200b revenue in 2025

Meta makes about $200B on ads, Google makes about $235B on ads. Advertising is roughly 1.5% of the total GDP of the US and hasn't changed in 20+ years. So what you have is a big ass pie with a few players fighting for it that barely grows every year.

OpenAI has to somehow:

1. Compete directly with Google Gemini and Meta's Llama for a piece of users pie with a product that has very little differentiator (functionality and technically speaking).

2. Have to prove to advertisers that their single dollar ad purchase on OpenAI is categorically worth more than any other channel.

3. Have enough forward capital to continue purchasing capital-intense hardware purchases.

4. Having enough capital to weather any potential economic headwinds.

I know where my bet is.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-26 16:29:34+00:00
This is a real shame. I'm using X11 still because Discord doesn't work properly with Wayland, and the alternative (Vesktop) doesn't support keybinds when the window isn't focused. Since my distro (Arch) doesn't support holding back packages, I guess I'll have to switch distros entirely so that my Discord setup stays working. :/
by m4rtink | 2025-11-26 16:29:35+00:00
Yeah, airship to orbit might still be a question mark, but there is a significant overlap in other useful areas.

You should be for example totally able to build an inflatable frame for a launch loop, making it possible to launch payloads from above most of the atmosphere.

Also for re-entry the more you lower the density of something, the less re-entry stresses there will be. So you could construct a giant low-pressure inflatable decelerator device and have it essentially float down all the way from orbit, incrementally shedding energy as it comes down over a longer period of time, taking care to balance the rate of descent, heating and internal/external pressures.
by tpurves | 2025-11-26 16:29:41+00:00
Thanks for calling this out. Here is a better comparison. Before Google was founded, the market for online search advertising was negligible. But the global market for all advertising media spend was on the order of 400B (NYT 1998). Today, Google's advertising revenue is around 260B / year or about 60% of the entire global advertising spend circa 1998.

If you think of openAI like a new google, as in a new category-defining primary channel for consumers to search and discover products. Well, 2% does seem pretty low.
by gradus_ad | 2025-11-26 16:29:41+00:00
Maybe because I came into software not from an interest in software itself but from wanting to build things, I can't relate to the anti-LLM attitude. The danger in becoming a "crafter" rather than a "builder" is you lose the forest for the trees. You become more interested in the craft for the craft's sake than for its ability to get you from point A to point B in the best way.

Not that there's anything wrong with crafting, but for those of us who just care about building things, LLM's are an absolute asset.
by 1dom | 2025-11-26 16:30:05+00:00
I think we can all agree AI is a bubble, and is over-hyped. I think we can ignore any pieces that say "AI is all bad" or "AI is all good" or "I've never used AI but...".

It's nuanced, can be abused, but can be beneficial when used responsibly in certain ways. It's a tool. It's a powerful tool, so treat it like a powerful tool: learn about it enough to safely use it in a way to improve your life and those around you.

Avoiding it completely whilst confidently berating it without experience is a position formed from fear, rather than knowledge or experience. I'm genuinely very surprised this article has so many points here.
by siliconc0w | 2025-11-26 16:30:06+00:00
The difficulty is in the implementation. Many jobs could already be mostly replaced with just a basic system of record (i.e. a database) but it hasn't happened. The world still runs on paper, email, or maybe a shared spreadsheet if they're sophisticated.

Organizations are glued together with interpersonal relationships and unwritten expertise so it's really hard to just drop in an AI solution - especially if it isn't reliable enough to entirely replace a person because then you need both which is more expensive.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-11-26 16:30:13+00:00
Personally I use AI for most of my work, launder it a bit to adhere to my own personal style, and don't tell anyone most of the time.

In the end? no one cares. I get just as much done (maybe more), while doing less work. Maybe some of my skills will atrophy, but I'll strengthen others.

I'm still auditing everything for quality as I would my own code before pushing it. At the end of the day, it usually makes fewer typos than I would. It certainly searches the codebase better than I do.

All this hype on both ends will fade away, and the people using the tools they have to get things done will remain.
by Tepix | 2025-11-26 16:30:14+00:00
Yes, the distances are mind-boggling. There are a few somewhat realistic solutions for making such a trip in the forseeable future. If you send something of significant mass, it is certain to take a long time. So we're either talking generation ships(§), embryo space colonization (growing into adults en route or at destination) or hibernation. That or a breakthrough in fundamental physics.

--

(§) Something like O'Neill cylinders with fusion as energy source could work
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-26 16:30:25+00:00
I've always felt that if business types can get over their fetish for trying to measure absolutely everything, we wouldn't have problems like these that stem from poorly thought out KPIs.

They default to tickets closed, uptime, SLA adherence as KPIs because you can't effectively measure "is it set up correctly?" and because the business absolutely must measure everything, they come up with bullshit KPIs so they can have a pretty dashboard and pretend like they're actually managing.

Glad I'm no longer in huge corps, but still an IT manager. Shadow IT is a direct symptom of IT not providing the right tools or having poor processes. But responsibility still lies higher up in the chain. If we weren't forced to quantify all activity, these issues wouldn't exist.
by gadders | 2025-11-26 16:30:37+00:00
>>The trick the clinics are using now is “diagnosing by symptoms”.

You can't really diagnose by levels, though, unless you knew what that person's previous levels were. Setting an average across a population is not really realistic - you can't say Shaq should work to the same levels as, say, Emo Phillips.

TRT is normally used due to aging, though, so you are unlikely to have your testosterone levels spontaneously recover as you get older. You do tend to need to be on it for life, in the same way that women stay on HRT.

However, if you did need to get off, bodybuilders have "post cycle therapies" to kick start production so it seems to be possible.
by keepamovin | 2025-11-26 16:30:50+00:00
We need quantum entanglement based communication. Maybe without full collapse, using weak measurements, like Alice continuously broadcasts a "retrocausal carrier wave" by sequencing planned future post-selection measurements on her entangled qubits, which backward-propagates through time-symmetric quantum evolution to create detectable perturbations in the present states, biasing Bob's qubits away from pure randomness to encode message patterns.

Both parties perform weak measurements on their qubits to extract these subtle signals without collapsing the entanglement, preserving high coherence across the stream. A quantum Maxwell's demon (e.g. many experiments but can be done: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30185956/) then adaptively selects the strongest perturbations from the wave, filters out noise, and feeds them into error correction to reliably decode and amplify the full message.
by aseipp | 2025-11-26 16:30:51+00:00
For users of older window managers on newer distros where X is likely to be removed "soon-ish" (vs LTS distros), the answer is to just use Wayback. It is a different X11 server implementation that uses Wayland under the hood, and is enough to run your WM. There are already people who use it to run AwesomeWM, IceWM, etc: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback

That said, you cannot run Wayland apps this way, it is purely for X11 only. If applications/rendering toolkits remove X11 support, you're out of luck. But Wayback may actually be a reason for some of them to keep maintaining X11 backends a bit longer, anyway.
by pksebben | 2025-11-26 16:31:05+00:00
That's not a union - that's another corporate entity parading as a union. A union, operating as it should, is governed by the workers as a collective and enriches all of them at the same rate.

Deepseek is open source, which is why I mention it. It was made by the Chinese government but it shows a way to create these models at vastly reduced cost and was done with transparent methodology so we can learn from it. I am not saying "the future is Deepseek", I am saying "there are lessons to be learned from Deepseek".

I actually agree with you on the corporate bootstrap argument - I think we ought to be careful, because if they ever figure out how to control the output they will turn off outputs that help develop local models (gotta protect that moat!), but for now I use them myself to study and learn about building locally and I think everyone else ought to get on this train as well. For now, the robust academic discourse is a very very good thing.
by a-posteriori | 2025-11-26 16:31:23+00:00
It's been really disheartening to see the impact of media / hype mongering on groups within research institutions.

IMO, it's clear there is massive demand for any research that shows large positive or negative impacts of AI on the economy. The recent WSJ article about Aiden Toner-Rodgers is another great example of demand for AI impact outstripping the supply of AI impact. Obviously this thread's example is just shoddy research vs. the outright data fraud of Toner-Rodgers, but it's hard to not see the pattern.

I hope that MIT and other research institutions can figure this out...
by andai | 2025-11-26 16:31:28+00:00
Many years ago I was watching a video of some sculpture being done. I was quite unimpressed with the art itself.

Then the video zoomed out, and I saw that the guy had spent like 2 years making it out of individual toothpicks.

Suddenly I was amazed, right?

With AI it's kinda the opposite process, right? You see something, it's impressive, maybe you even like it personally, and then you realize orders of magnitude less effort went into it than it looks like "should" have, based on the result.

So we seem to have here the "direct experience" of the art itself, and then a "narrative layer" which obscures that. And we seem to value the latter more highly.

A related example is those pages selling "handcrafted" leather bags and they have an life story about Grandma Williams and suddenly the bag is worth a billion times more to the buyer.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-26 16:31:53+00:00
Funny... I actually kind of hate ILogger... at least the output implementations I've seen. I really like line-delimited JSON for standard logging with a pretty-printed version for local dev. With say a node project, I will usually attach a few bits of context as well as a details object with the simple log message... this is easy enough to ship to another system, or say with AWS, the built in logging platform handles it brilliantly.

I haven't seen a good logger implementation for .Net that does a similar good job without a bunch of byzantine configurations.
by np- | 2025-11-26 16:31:57+00:00
But this is just your own personal value judgment, of which clearly you don't like motorcycles. Not everybody shares the same opinion. I.e. there are plenty of people who ride motorcycles safely and legally, you just never hear about them because they never have any incidents. You have just instilled your own value into the tool, one that is not universally shared, the tool itself is still neutral and can even be seen as a positive by somebody else.