MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bruce511 | 2025-12-27 07:09:48+00:00
I've had a long career, and seen a number of systemic changes.

I've lived through two software "explosions" where minimal skills lead to large output. The first was web sites and the second was mobile.

Web sites are (even now) pretty easy. In the late 90's though, and early 2000's there was tremendous demand for web site creation. (Every business everywhere suddenly needed a web presence.) This lead to a massive surge in building-web-site training. No time for 3 year degree, barely time for 90 days of "click here, drag that".

So there was this huge percentage of "programmers" that had a very shallow skill set. When the bubble burst it was this group that bore the brunt.

Fast forward to 2007, and mobile apps become a "thing". Same pattern evolves, fast training, shallow understanding, apps do very little (most of the heavy lifting, if it exists at all, is on the backend.) Not a lot of time spent on UI or app flow etc.

This time around the work is also likely to be done offshore. Turns out simple skills can be taught anywhere, tiny programs can be built anywhere.

Worse, management typically didn't understand the importance of foundations like good database design, coherent code, forward thinking, maintainence etc. Programs are 10% creation, 90% maintainence (adding stuff, fixing stuff etc.) From a management point of view (and indeed from those swathes of shallow practioners) the only goal is "it works."

AI is this new (but really old) idea that shallowness is sufficient. And just like before it first replaces people who themselves have only shallow skills; who see "coding" as the goal of their job.

We are far from the end of this cycle, and who knows where it will go, but yes, those with shallow skills are likely to be first on the chopping block.

Those with better foundations (a better understanding of good and bad, perhaps with a deeper education, or deeper experience) and the ability to communicate that value to management are positioned well.

In other words, yes the demand for "lite" developers will implode. But at the same time demand for quality devs, who can tell good from bad (design, code, ui etc) goes up.

If you are a young graduate, you're going to be light on experience. If you're and older person, but had very shallow (or no) training you're easily replaced. If you think development is code, you're not gonna do well.

In truth development is not about code (and never has been). It's about all the processes that lead up to the code. Where possible (even at college level) try and focus on upskilling on "big picture" - understanding the needs of a business, the needs of the customer, the architecture and design that results in "good" or "bad".

AI is a tool. It's important to understand when it's doing good, but also when it's doing bad.
by mindslight | 2025-12-27 07:10:29+00:00
DEA? ATF? The fact that the "Patriot" Act was basically written and ready long before it was put up for a vote?

But of course now I'm on the other side of the argument. The point is that even though it's a long arc, this doesn't invalidate the current urgency. "Slow at first, then all at once"
by array_key_first | 2025-12-27 07:11:38+00:00
Right, but what incentives are we really pushing here?

If the only way to make any amount of money or, at least, not be stolen from, is to keep everything internal and be protectionist, then where is the progress?

So much of the modern world is built on open source. Do we really want every company and their mom recreating the world from scratch just so they don't get fucked over? Would things like the iPhone even exist in such a world?
by intended | 2025-12-27 07:13:16+00:00
> In July of this year, EFF published a two-part report on how Axon designed Draft One to defy transparency. Police upload their body-worn camera’s audio into the system, the system generates a report that the officer is expected to edit, and then the officer exports the report. But when they do that, Draft One erases the initial draft, and with it any evidence of what portions of the report were written by AI and what portions were written by an officer. That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police report – they could point to the contradictory parts of their report and say, “the AI wrote that.” Draft One is designed to make it hard to disprove that.

> Axon’s senior principal product manager for generative AI is asked (at the 49:47 mark) whether or not it’s possible to see after-the-fact which parts of the report were suggested by the AI and which were edited by the officer. His response (bold and definition of RMS added):

“So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices.

Policing and Hallucinations. Can’t wait to see this replicated globally.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-27 07:14:51+00:00
> No, not if the same itself was unlawful because Alice signed a contract to not sell it like that.

It's the contract that's the violation, isn't it? What would the first sale doctrine be if in order to get a copy you could be required to sign a contract not to exercise your rights under it? For that matter, how could state-level contract law override the federal first sale doctrine?

The "derivative work" hack also seems kind of fragile. The normal way to get someone to agree to something is that they need a right from the license, which they then don't get if they don't agree to it. But if it doesn't give them anything that they need then "there are ways to use the copy they own and have a right to use without agreeing to any additional terms" is more like the default you're trying to hack your way out of than something they're exploiting a loophole to get into, and where does that leave you if anything slips?

Suppose Alice is a three year old. She owns the copy, she presses the button and now she has a running copy even though she's not competent to enter into a contract, and then Bob buys it from her. Or Alice owns the copy and Carol presses the button, and then maybe Carol could be sued, but also maybe Carol lives in another country, and either way Alice now owns a running copy she never agreed not to sell. And then you want to be able to say "but that's cheating" except that it's not any less cheating than what you were doing to try to get them to agree to it.
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-27 07:15:39+00:00
That's called forward auth - or proxy auth

You can do the same thing - with the added burden of actually having to set it up once ... After you set it up, it's however just as trivial to add new systems like with this linked example.

I got pretty much everything I'm self-hosting like that via keycloak (which itself let's me do social with via GitHub and Google etc pp) and a very similar nginx config like it's shown in these docs.

But the initial setup took multiple hours, even if the adding new services which support forward/proxy auth is extremely easy now.

(Jellyfin sadly doesn't as an example)

Just saying it in case you want to check it out.

I think it's fantastic they added that/provide this to their platform - it's a wonderful value-add
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-27 07:16:01+00:00
Purely anecdotal, but I hoard a lot of personal documents (shopping receipts, confirmation emails, scans etc.) and for stuff I saved only 10 years ago, the toughest to reopen are the pure text files.

You rightly mention Unicode, as before that there was a jungle of formats. I have some in UTF-16, some in SJIS, a ton in EUC, other were already utf-8, many don't have a BOM. I could try each encoding and see what works for each of the files (except on mobile...it's just a PITA to deal with that on mobile).

But in comparison there's a set of file I never had issues opening now and then: PDFs and jpegs. All the files that my scanner produced are still readable absolutely everywhere. Even with slight bitrot they're readable, and with the current OCR processes I could probably put it all back in text if ever needed.

If I had to archive more stuff now and can afford the space, I'd go for an image format without hesitation.

PS: I'm surprised you don't mention the Unicode character limitations for minority languages or academic use. There will still be characters that either can't be represented, or don't have an exact 1 to 1 match between the code point and the representation.
by hasperdi | 2025-12-27 07:16:47+00:00
Slavery as punishment is actually allowed by the constitution...

AMENDMENT XIII

Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment
by serial_dev | 2025-12-27 07:17:18+00:00
Having to support legacy systems with 15y+ development where the system works but you wish you didn’t have to spend so much effort figuring out types?

Or maybe you are an expert with a framework, you are very productive with it, you know the tricks, but you wish it had types support so maintaining these systems would be easier.

Picking a “better” language or learning a framework in another language is not always a pragmatic choice.
by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-27 07:17:32+00:00
Thanks a lot for the detailed reply!

Just in case someone will read this without knowing the abbreviations:

PFS = perfect forward secrecy [0]

ECH = Encrypted Client Hello

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Encrypt...
by zkmon | 2025-12-27 07:18:08+00:00
Nope. Text and media (visual and audio) are not comparable. text is a vehicle and the other sensory content is the payload. Vehicle is different from payload. A vehicle can not represent a payload. When you are describing a scene or sound using text, you are using it text as a vehicle to send the sensory data to someone, via text, in a crude form. Stories recreate the sensory data and feelings.

Human sensory system has an evolved processing ability for visual and audio content. A story can give different sensory data and feelings to different receivers. It is a low-fidelity transmission.

Try telling someone how an old folk song sounded or how some exotic fruit tasted, or how some wild flower smelled, or how some surreal game scene looked, using only text.
by ffuxlpff | 2025-12-27 07:18:23+00:00
Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the House of Dead is a good companion to Gulag Archipelago to show how things got worse into the full medieval sadism in less than a hundred years.

Besides the gulag is a blueprint to basically all the forms of how totalitarian societies treat their subjects, especially if you can see the pattern working in less cruel and plausible forms.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-27 07:18:51+00:00
Of course it will shrink! Every industry ever has shrunk as tooling got better.

That said, we are a long way from "peak software". There is a lot of scope for new things, so there's room for a lot of high-level people.

And of course the vast majority of current juniors won't step up at all. Just like the web site devs of the early '00s went off to be estate agents or car salesmen or whatever. Those with shallow training are easily replaced.

The wheel will turn though, and those with a quality, deep, education focused on fundamentals (not job-training-in-xxx-language) are best placed to rise up.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-27 07:18:54+00:00
The policy choice to stop subsidizing EVs while, simultaneously halting their adoption from overseas, was intended to deliberately hurt the industry as a whole.

We know this because the people doing it are explicitly pro oil. Trump has gone on a few times now about how much he loves oil.

And, to be clear, the subsidies didn't go away, they moved. If we want to talk subsidies, oil is at the tippy top of that list. It's disingenuous to just ignore it. I mean, for fucks sake, MOST of the corn grown in this country is just so we can turn it into gas. Do a deep dive on that.

> If we leave the market alone, people will allocate resources where they are actually needed the most

If we left the market alone, we would've abandoned gasoline cars a long time ago. They're one of the most, if not the most, blessed products by our government. They get every special treatment, bailout, and subsidy in the book. Down to even the streets. 25 trillion on interstates alone.
by scarecrowbob | 2025-12-27 07:19:58+00:00
Well, I think the point it is even beyond "how many grains of sand is a pile," which seems like a legitimate point to me. If we don't understand how we got here, it's really hard to figure out hat to do, so pretending as if someone flipped a switch in January of 2025 is not helpful.

I say this as a person who has been pepper sprayed by DHS while resisting ICE:

the conditions to led to the current bonfire have a lot to do with centrist folks piling up wood as if could never be lit.

If you ignore how we got here you will be unable to understand where really are.
by zingar | 2025-12-27 07:20:02+00:00
I’d love to hear from you or someone in your shoes: what are some patterns or examples of tests that are made redundant by types?

“It has a field of type X” has never been a useful test for me, my tests are always more like:

“if I send message X I get return value or action Y”

… with my admittedly limited experience of types I don’t see how they replicate this.

Therefore it looks like I’d only be “replacing” tests that I’d never write in the first place.

What am I missing?
by simonw | 2025-12-27 07:20:25+00:00
Whoa, did not expect a Hitler comparison here.

I think of LLMs as more like the invention of cars or railways: enormous negative externalities, but provided enough benefit to humanity that we tend to think they were worthwhile.

Are the negatives of LLMs really that bad? Most of them look more like annoyances to me.

The ones that upset me the most are the ChatGPT psychosis episodes which have lead to loss of life. I'm reassured by the fact that the AI labs are taking genuine steps to reduce the risk of that happening, which seems analogous to me to the development of car safety features.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-27 07:21:40+00:00
> Having your OSS library take off

All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world.

I have a few project that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years.

Even on these small projects I've had times where I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight.

Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level.

In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users).

OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.
by commandersaki | 2025-12-27 07:21:45+00:00
Will this work in reality? Will it be expensive to replace all the parts, and will the case be able to cool new CPUs, and will I have to get a new mainboard, etc?

When a $35 hinge kit costs $80 after shipping, it sounds unlikely I'll be buying replacement parts from Framework, and there's really no 3rd party marketplace either.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-27 07:22:10+00:00
Have you ever heard, "You get what you pay for?" If used EVs were worth a damn, they would drive down the prices of petrol vehicles too.

>Plus EVs are likely to have longer usable lifetimes -- though with different issues -- than gas cars.

You need to do some basic research, friend. EV batteries are not designed to be replaced at any sane price. They are built even more crappy than late model petrol vehicles. EVs depreciate rapidly because their useful life is short and problems are many. A 10 year old Honda Civic with a gas engine likely has another 10 or 20 years of life left.

An EV probably has a max life of about 15 years without a MAJOR overhaul which is likely not even doable for less than the price of a new EV, if you can even find someone willing to do it. Battery integrity is very hard to determine from sensors and external examination. If a cell has been damaged, it can start an inextinguishable fire which could take out a whole garage. These factors further hurt the resale value.

EVs were popular before petrol engines were perfected. But those EVs had swappable and relatively stable batteries and the cars did not have to conform to modern standards for acceleration, crash safety, and range.
by benatkin | 2025-12-27 07:22:53+00:00
The experiments of AI agents sending emails to grown-ups are good I think – AIs are doing much more dangerous stuff like these AI Police Reports. I don't think making a fuss over every agent-sent email is going to cause other AI incursion into our society to slow down. The Police Report writer is a non-human partially autonomous participant like a K9 officer. It's wishful thinking that AIs aren't going to be set loose doing jobs. The cat is out of the bag.
by intended | 2025-12-27 07:23:03+00:00
Reading how AI is being approached in China, the focus is more on achieving day to day utilty, without eviscerating youth employment.

In contrast, the SV focus of AI has been about skynet / singularity, with a hype cycle to match.

This is supported by the lack of clarity on actual benefits, or clear data on GenAI use. Mostly I see it as great for prototyping - going from 0 to 1, and for use cases where the operator is highly trained and capable of verifying output.

Outside of that, you seem to be in the land of voodoo, where you are dealing with something that eerily mimics human speech, but you don't have any reliable way of finding out its just BS-ing you.
by RajatWinstrike | 2025-12-27 07:23:35+00:00
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by card_zero | 2025-12-27 07:24:33+00:00
I've told people off for using the pathetic fallacy too, in the past, I guess I just said "what do mushrooms want" for the sake of rhetoric. Well, because it would be funny. Fine then, I was trolling.

Thanks to your discussion though, I'm now wondering how to square the idea that evolution produces knowledge with the idea that it doesn't optimize even for reproductive fitness. I think you're technically incorrect there: it's that it doesn't optimize exclusively in the short term or by any one obvious strategy. The bottom line is that what survives survives, though, you can't argue with a tautology. Even if what survives is a sloth or a sleeper shark or a bristlecone or (imagine) a single infertile but incredibly tough organism, it still had to find a way (alright, stumble into a way). Maybe your objection is just that "optimize for" implies intent, but intentless-purism in language for biologists is as hard as pastless-purism in language for time travellers.
by donmcronald | 2025-12-27 07:25:41+00:00
Seize the generational wealth they accumulated. Make their parents, siblings, kids, grandkids, cousins, etc. demonstrate how they earned their money and take every penny they can’t link to honest means.

The discussion around billionaires needs to move away from taxing their income and beyond taxing their wealth. We need to start talking about how much of their wealth we should be taking away. Light it on fire or delete it. The whole world will be better off.
by sroerick | 2025-12-27 07:26:35+00:00
I fully agree with this. I'm building a site in OCAML, and I just this week spent 90 minutes debugging some weird error I didn't understand because an implicit type was being pulled through in a global context. It was pretty irritating.

Maybe this isn't a fair comparison, since I'm pretty new to OCAML and I'm sure an experience developer would have seen what was happening much quicker than I would have. But I'm not sure I spent 90 minutes TOTAL on type errors doing Python web dev.

Maybe I'm exaggerating, and I probably just don't remember the first time I hit a type error, but my experience with type errors was that I would very occasionally hit them, and then I would just fix the type error. Pretty easy.
by elboru | 2025-12-27 07:27:31+00:00
Tip: Look for someone selling their grownup children’s Lego collection. I recently found a couple selling their children’s old Lego collection in Facebook Marketplace. I got an enormous bag of them for just a few bucks. It was a headache to filter out the garbage in them (small non-LEGO toys, unique pieces that were not really useful, a few mixed mega blocks, broken pieces, etc) but it was worth it, my children love them!
by scott_w | 2025-12-27 07:28:08+00:00
> I think you’re viewing this through your own cultural lens where camping can be totally solo (in the woods?)

Allow me to correct myself: I meant to say I believed you were referring wild camping, away from a commercial site (either alone or part of a group).

> None of this is responsive to my comment that you are responding to ... I find that quite toxic.

You find it toxic that I won’t join you in an argument that only you want to have?

> Again, your notion of my experience of camping does not come from anything I actually wrote ... that's quite toxic.

I just woke up an hour ago. Did you find that toxic, too?