MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tombert | 2025-12-09 01:22:56+00:00
> Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan.

I don't disagree with most of what you said, we can be out of touch a lot of the time, but I kind of hate that this has become the "smoking gun" to dismiss comments on Hacker News. Yes, one person was wrong about Dropbox and said that they could just use an FTP server. Yes, people on here agreed with that person. Yes, sometimes our ability to do things low level blinds us to the fact that the majority of people can't or simply don't want to.

That said, most of the negative feedback people get for these things is actually good feedback, and most of the time when people say a project can be accomplished by doing XYZ, that's usually a valid point. Technical people can absolutely be out of touch (and I'm probably worse than average about it), but that doesn't automatically mean that a comment on HN is invalid or useless.

While saying "no one wants" the AI features might be a bit of hyperbole, I don't think it's super out of touch, and this is evidenced by the fact that a lot of the VC money for AI ventures is drying up. AI is neat and here to stay, but I think a large chunk of society is coming to terms with the fact that it's not nearly as cool as it was promised to us, and getting a little annoyed with how much AI crap is being thrown at us. YouTube is getting filled with low-effort AI video and AI voice and AI script bullshit, the average web page is turning a tinge of yellow from all the AI generated images that seem to be all over the place, searching is getting almost as bad as it was in 2005 when "SEO" became a thing because of all the AI generated blogs designed to steal clicks. None of this stuff is relegated to the technical crowd, this is stuff even normies have to deal with.

And within the scope of HN, I'm sure all of us are getting a little tired of having to review pull requests with huge chunks of clearly-AI-generated code that the writer doesn't really and are large enough to not be realistically reviewable with a lot of shitty, low-effort code.
by swatcoder | 2025-12-09 01:23:43+00:00
The adversarial tension was all that ever made any of it work.

The "Perfectionist Engineer" without a "Pragmatic Executive" to press them into delivering something good enough would of course still been in their workshop, tinkering away, when the market had already closed.

But the "Pragmatic Executive" without the "Perfectionist Engineer" around to temper their naive optimism would just as soon find themselves chased from the market for selling gilded junk.

You're right that there do seem to be some execs, in the naive optimism that defines them, eager to see if this technology finally lets them bring their vision to market without the engineer to balance them.

We'll see how it goes, I guess.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-09 01:23:45+00:00
The automat is something of a strange echo from my childhood.

When I was maybe 5 or so, my mom took my sister and I to Chicago from Kansas City. That train ride in and of itself is something of time capsule in my memory. My sister remembered the glowing handrails (radium?). I remember the lounge car where passengers sipped cocktails and watched the lights at night rush past outside. The women dressing, in my fuzzy recollection, like extras in The Thin Man.

Chicago was where I got to buy a pie, or some kind of dessert, from an automat. What a magical thing to give a kid some coins and just tell them to go grab what they like…

There are a number of things from my childhood that I came to find later were just gone. (Or obscure now to the point they are essentially gone.) Imagine my delight when the film Dark City featured an automat.

I was surprised in Tokyo to find something of a hybrid. Those places where you place your order, pay through something like a vending machine at the entrance of the place. The order goes back to the kitchen and, after you've sat down and waited a short time, your order is up.

Struck me as an efficient way to not have to have someone running a cash register, seating you, taking your order.

Also, there's a documentary called "The Automat" [1] that I tracked down just recently—have not yet watched. (Looks like it's streaming on Amazon, FWIW.)

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4554690/
by array_key_first | 2025-12-09 01:25:56+00:00
No, I use Android and the security nightmare on Android is absolutely unacceptable. There is zero reason phones should rely on as many proprietary bullshit blobs as they do, and that's the root cause of this.

Even just looking past the bugs that almost certainly exist in the firmware, it makes these devices extremely difficult to update. Whereas on desktop, I get kernel patches expeditiously. Many Android devices are still running kernel 5, and of the ones running recent kernels, we're still waiting months for system patches.

If everyone just upstreamed their shit, then we would live in a Utopia.
by ninkendo | 2025-12-09 01:26:20+00:00
As a random Joe I use a credit card like everyone else. And if the item doesn’t arrive, Amex gives me a refund. Because it can do that, and it has a fraud department.

Of course, Amex deals with small instances of fraud all the time and has built that into the cost, and that’s why I or the merchant pay for the privilege.

For larger things, like actual large international theft, the government absolutely does step in and seize assets.

None of this is possible with crypto, despite what you say.

You can’t seize assets if the destination wallet key is only in someone’s head. You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option. You better not torture too hard because once the key is gone, the coins are unrecoverable.

The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system. The only way around this is for there to be protections on top of crypto, which is antithetical to it: sure, you can have exchanges where the exchange gets a copy of every key, in case of government order, but then you’re talking the same government orders you’re trying to avoid. You can have the government order everyone to consider certain wallets “stolen” and compel everyone to not accept them, but that’s more government interaction that crypto was entirely designed to avoid.

You can either have decentralized currency, or government protection, but not both.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-12-09 01:27:06+00:00
> Except my 1-sentence comment was not an AI callout that said: "Hey this is AI slop".

Not literally, but this was the thesis of your comment, regardless of your four words of validation.

> I admit it is perhaps unkind of me to not provide the laundry list of AI-tells in their article

Please don't do this. It doesn't matter.

> what explanation do I owe them?

What explanation do they owe you?
by eru | 2025-12-09 01:27:50+00:00
> Why? You're asking why the "poors" will have second thoughts about openly criticising the hand that, literally, feeds them?

No, I'm not asking why the poor would stop complaining. I am pointing out that empirically we observe that people who receive government largess don't shut up! (And that's true for all kinds of government largess, eg also for subsidies for rich people or companies.)

No, the "why" question I am asking is: why do you think that recipients of government handouts would shut up, when in the real world they haven't done so?

> You're turning the "poors" into slaves, into slaves to the Government that is keeping them (the "poors") on the Government's payroll.

Would you say the same about eg car drivers, if the government provides roads free of charge to the user? Or about anyone who benefits from national defense? Or are in-kind benefits excluded from your calculus? In that case, would giving poor people food and clothing and shelter instead of money mean they are no longer 'slaves' by your definition?

(For comparison: real-world, actual slaves like in the American South were usually provided with in-kind benefits to keep them alive. Money rarely changed hands, partially because it leads to autonomy.)
by gaigalas | 2025-12-09 01:27:51+00:00
I think the author underestimate the forces that introduce coordination overhead.

"Good AI developers" are a mystery being (not really, but for corporate they are). Right now, companies are trying to measure them to understand what makes them tick.

Once that is measured, I can assure you that the next step is trying to control their output, which will inevitably kill their productivity.

> This then allows developers who really master this technology to be hugely effective at solving business problems.

See what I mean?

"If only we could make them work to solve our problems..."

You can! But that implies additional coordination overhead, which means they'll not be as productive as they were.

> Your job is going to change

My job changes all the time. Developers are ready for this. They were born of change, molded by it. You know what hasn't caught up with the changes?
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-09 01:28:16+00:00
Autocad (and most other professional design software) is like that because the vast majority of people that learn how to use it will do so whether they like it or not, because it’s a professional or school requirement. It sucks for beginners but if you’re using the software day in and day out for a few weeks, you’ll learn them, and then pick up the CLI commands for your most frequently used commands. After that, you’d be loath to give to give up the screen real estate for text labels.

These are technical programs for technical work performed by trained technical people. They have different workflows, goals, mindsets and ways of reasoning about things than developers do, and that’s fine.

A lot of shade gets thrown at nontechnical software users for not grasping things developers find intuitive. Yet, when many of those same people throwing that shade encounter a technical environment they can’t grasp immediately, it’s the interface's fault.
by listenallyall | 2025-12-09 01:28:34+00:00
> A store of value is an asset with as close to 0% volatility in price as possible.

You just proved his point. In this example, bitcoin's volatility is closer to zero than gold's. Thus, by the quoted definition of "store of value", then in this particular time frame (it would be very different going back 5, 10, 15 years), bitcoin is the better store of value.
by mothballed | 2025-12-09 01:29:02+00:00
From what I've seen, for grocery the model is they'll give you the least desirable or near expired stock that the walk-in customers won't grab. So they're basically saving spoilage. This happens so reliably I'm absolutely convinced this is how they 'pay' for it without raising prices.

I've also noticed this with hardware stores like Lowes. If I place a pickup order they more often than not will pawn off on me their broken, returned, or even used and damaged stock. Items like building wrap will have soil and rips on it, concrete mix will be spoiled from moisture, lumber will be all the most warped pieces (if you don't order a whole pallet, expect every last piece of fractional pallet will be knotted to hell, split, twisted, and badly warped), plumbing valves will be open package and leaky, etc etc. It's like clockwork, even if the stock sitting on the shelf doesn't have these problems. Due to this there are some stores I will never do a pickup/delivery order from.
by ible | 2025-12-09 01:29:15+00:00
People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other.

The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each other shifts rapidly, and balances of power shift rapidly.

If the benefits of AI accrue to/are captured by a very small number of people, and the costs are widely dispersed things can go very badly without strong societies that are able to mitigate the downsides and spread the upsides.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-12-09 01:29:33+00:00
What fields? Cargo culting is annoying and definitely leads to suboptimal solutions and sometimes total misses, but I’ve rarely found that simply reading literature on a thorny topic prevents you from thinking outside the box. Most people I’ve seen work who were actually innovating (as in novel solutions and/or execution) understood the current SOTA of what they were working on inside and out.
by adamredwoods | 2025-12-09 01:29:36+00:00
I found their wording of "earlier" to be awkward.

>> The first included students about to graduate, recent graduates, and those who have been working for less than a year (referred to as “fresh graduates”).

>> The second group consisted of people with more than a year of work experience, regardless of when they graduated (referred to as “earlier graduates”).

https://www.kickresume.com/en/press/fresh-grads-survey-kickr...
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-09 01:29:47+00:00
However you call it, Musk is certainly getting as close as he can to the line of paying people to vote a certain way.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/01/politics/elon-musk-million-do...

He’s had to repeatedly tweak the wording of the payment to stay away from a textbook definition of vote buying, but it’s certainly violating the spirit of the law.

> The definition of "buy" according to google: "obtain in exchange for payment." I accept the standard definition of words, not made up definitions. It's not possible to have a debate when words are redefined.

Only if you treat the English language as something that you can understand the meaning by combining the meaning of individual words and that words only ever have one possible meaning. For example, if I say “you’re a horse’s ass” am I claiming that you are literally the rear end of a horse? Or am I claiming that you’re a donkey owned by a horse? Or am I using a euphemism to describe obnoxious behavior?

But anyway. This is getting way off the mark. You’ve hyper focused on one thing (election outcomes) ignoring the larger point about whether there is a class war going on (raising Obamacare which was a compromise from Medicare for all and has been repeatedly gutted but also ignoring the defunding of SNAP and various other programs this year that are disproportionately hitting the poor while wealthy are getting a huge tax break on inheritance taxes due to Trump’s bill this year - how again are the wealthy not getting what they want at the expense of everyone else?)
by rasz | 2025-12-09 01:30:25+00:00
Yes, and pay them in crypto using wallets confirmed to be in FSB control, and manage them using FSB agents. All you have to do is take over FSB, its really simple!

In other news pro russian opposition and PIS (former anti EU ruling party) refused to overrule presidents veto on Crypto despite evidence of all the captured saboteurs being paid this way. https://www.reuters.com/business/polish-parliament-upholds-c...

meanwhile https://cryptonews.com/news/russian-spy-ring-funded-through-...
by sophrosyne42 | 2025-12-09 01:30:26+00:00
I guess the OP is just making an unrelated comment, because it almost sounds like he thinks that a hostile bid is evidence that the US has Ukraine-levels of corruption. Leaving aside the odd time period (Ukraine was much less corrupt pre-war than it was pre-Maidan, not to speak of its other more corrupt neighbor), the fact that hostile bids have been around for a long time in the US is good evidence to suggest that they don't indicate the level of corruption implied by OP. If OP made the same comment under a post about verb conjugation, wouldn't that seem odd to you too?

Or maybe they just happened to make an off-topic comment that had nothing to do with the hostile takeover.
by burroisolator | 2025-12-09 01:31:42+00:00
"In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines.

And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.

I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did."

I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to prosperity over the long term but not in the short term. My fear is that the pace of change this time around is so rapid that the short term destruction will not be something that can be recovered from even over the longer term.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-09 01:32:44+00:00
I think it's a symptom of our work culture and lifestyle. When people are spending anywhere between 1-2 hours a day in a car going to a job that sucks the life out of them, I'm not surprised they don't have the energy to get food for themselves.

Convenience services thrive in America because it's the only way the working class can claw back a teensy bit of time and energy. We could have had hybrid or even remote work, but that dream is dead. Traffic sucks, outside is loud and stinky, and you're in the office minimum 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. Minimum. I actually don't know anyone who works that little.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-09 01:34:06+00:00
> People were drawn in on the promise of avoiding the things they don't like about capitalism

Quite the opposite: the marketing was always about more "pure", "unrestricted" capitalism without all the "evil" restrictions and red tape that the governments set up and (depending on the cryptocurrency) no option for the governments to turn on the money printing press to devalue the currency by their will.
Ask HN: What's the Best HN Client?
by billsunshine | 2025-12-09 01:35:59+00:00
Looking for a good HN client, preferably mobile. I mostly read on my phone during commutes and want something faster than the mobile web interface. Priorities: clean reading experience, good comment threading, offline/save for later. Bonus if it syncs read state across devices. I've tried the official HN mobile site but it's clunky. What are you using?
by jordwest | 2025-12-09 01:36:21+00:00
> Perhaps there is some sort of failure of SWE's to understand that businesses don't care

I think it's an engineer's nature to want to improve things and make them better, but then we naively assume that everybody else also wants to improve things.

I know I personally went through a pretty rough disillusionment phase where I realised most of the work I was asked to do wasn't actually to make anything better, but rather to achieve some very specific metrics that actually made everything but that metric worse.

Thanks to the human tendency to fixate on narratives, we can (for a while) trick ourselves into believing a nice story about what we're doing even if it's complete bunk. I think that false narrative is at the core of mission statements and why they intuitively feel fake (mission statement is often more gaslighting than guideline - it's the identity a company wants to present, not the reality it does present).

AI is eager to please and doesn't have to deal with that cognitive dissonance, so it's a metric chaser's dream.
by jaredhallen | 2025-12-09 01:36:35+00:00
This is a very different take than my own. I do agree with the author on one point. I think trying to pinpoint a specific range of years to define a generation is missing the point. It's more about culture and the experience of your upbringing than it is about a particular date. I was born in '83, and I couldn't identify more with GenX. I listened to all the same music, experienced the free-range childhood, share the ideology, etc.

That being said, I don't view it in a negative light at all. Whatsoever. I don't feel that the adults let us down. I don't consider myself a trauma victim. And I never felt alone. I, too, walked myself home from school and found my own snacks. And then I took off again. On my bike or on foot. I met up with friends or cousins and we lived a life I could only dream about now. We built forts, played in the mud, shot our bee bee guns. Rode bikes, used tools, fixed things. We crashed, we got hurt, we solved our own problems. We lived, we learned, we built confidence, capability, and self sufficiency. We had a freedom that makes me want to weep yearning for it now.

Our parents, mine at least, didn't neglect me. They trusted me. And they didn't trust me not to fuck up. They knew I'd do that. They trusted me to learn from it.
by Pannoniae | 2025-12-09 01:36:43+00:00
>I asked it about how to go about solving an issue and it completely hallucinated a solution suggesting to use a non-existing function that was supposedly exposed by a library.

Yeah, that's a huge pain point in LLMs. Personally, I'm way less impacted by them because my codebase is only minimally dependent on library stuff (by surface area) so if something doesn't exist or whatever, I can just tell the LLM to also implement the thing it hallucinated :P

These hallucinations are usually a good sign of "this logically should exist but it doesn't exist yet" as opposed to pure bs.
by 0manrho | 2025-12-09 01:37:45+00:00
Other HN users have pointed out the many outright falsehoods present in this article, so I'll just get straight to the point: This is nonsense from a fearmongering collapse blog that doesn't understand what they're trying to speak authoritatively about.

Other headlines currently present from the frontpage of this same site:

> Collapse Will Look Nothing Like the Movies

> How I Came To Believe That Civilization Is Unsustainable

> 2025: A Civilizational Tipping Point

Even if you find that content compelling, it's dishonesty and objective inaccuracy in which it substantiates its points suggests you shouldn't waste your time.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-09 01:37:54+00:00
I think the term is mainly just because it tends not to be very visible/legible to the organization as a whole (and that's probably the main risk of it: either someone leaves and a whole section of the IT infrastructure collapses, or someone sets up something horrifically insecure and the company gets pwned). Especially because most IT departments hate it so there's a strong incentive to keep it quiet (I personally think IT organizations should consider shadow IT a failing of themselves and seek out ways to collaborate with those setting it up or figure out what is lacking in the service they provide to the rest of the company that means they get passed over).
by dimal | 2025-12-09 01:38:07+00:00
I've actually gone in the other direction. A year ago, I had that feeling, but since then I've gotten more certain that LLMs are never going to be able to handle complexity. And complexity is still the real problem of developing software.

We keep getting more cool features in the tools, but I don't see any indication that the models are getting any better at understanding or managing complexity. They still make dumb mistakes. They still write terrible code if you don't give them lots of guardrails. They still "fix" things by removing functionality or adding a ts-ignore comment. If they were making progress, I might be convinced that eventually they'll get there, but they're not.
by actuallyalys | 2025-12-09 01:38:24+00:00
The pace has probably slowed down, but problem isn't so much that they're not adding anything, it's that the additions are either somewhat niche (e.g., new Excel formulas), don't work as well as they should (e.g., syncing), or are confusing (e.g., the new Outlook that lives alongside "classic" Outlook).