MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-12-19 16:31:53+00:00
> we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.

That's literally all I want them to do. I would love if they dwindled away to simply being monthly blog entries with magnet links to the articles, maybe with an introductory editorial.

We refuse to do this, because we have deeply integrated journals into a system of compensation for everyone involved. They're just magazines; "journal" is the beginning of the pomposity.

You could already publish a "fusion" journal where you link to the best articles in your field, and publish reviews of them - or even go back and forth with authors who want to be listed in your journal for a paper that they're about to publish. Outside of salaries, it would cost as much as a wordpress/patreon blog, or really, just a monthly twitter thread. The reason this doesn't happen is because it doesn't integrate with the academic financial system.

The only thing worthwhile about the journals is their brands, and the major ones in a lot of their fields (especially medicine) have ground their brands into dust through low quality. They continue through inertia: once anyone has ever made money doing something in the West, it will be preserved by any means necessary, because it's worth giving up part of that cash in order not to lose all of it. Scams are only ever defeated by bigger scams.

Nobody who is only important because they published in The Lancet will ever tolerate the devaluing of the idea of publishing in The Lancet, unless you give him a stipend for being involved in the next thing. Consequently, you're not going to be able to get a job from being published in Bob's Blog, no matter the quality of the peer review. Hence $1500 open access fees.
by SR2Z | 2025-12-19 16:32:12+00:00
Citation needed for that.

Waymo uses both LIDAR and RADAR to collect precise data on distance and speed. If it's foggy (commonly the case in SF) those two let the service continue with no interruptions.

A Tesla in those conditions would hopefully refuse to drive itself, but for some reason I think it would just drive badly and pretend that it was doing something safe.
by zackmorris | 2025-12-19 16:33:18+00:00
The solution to authoritarian problems is to organize.

In this case, we're overdue for a service that we all pay into, like a collective credit card, that only continues making payments to companies like Amazon if all of the members are happy. When you get banned without due process, payments stop until the matter is resolved.

Also, the collective can bargain-down rates. If it senses price increases beyond inflation, it just sends the adjusted amount, like 95%, until the matter is resolved.

We need this collective bargaining for housing (like tenant unions), the workplace, politics, pharmaceuticals, etc. The scale of this is so large that the collective could exist beyond any specific industry. So that it would operate as a meta economy beside the so-called free market economy (late-stage capitalism) that we operate under today due to the lack of antitrust enforcement.

Groups like the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) are working towards these sorts of goals on a number of fronts:

https://weall.org/
by metadope | 2025-12-19 16:33:26+00:00
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Predicting the future, I can tell you with certainty that This Too Shall Pass.

Just don't ask me what 'This' is: A fad, or a sea-change?

My main Luddite objection to the current passion for LLM coding assistance is the new dependencies created/fostered within the software engineering diaspora. Not only are we dependent now on cloud access for so much of our SE now, but we'll also depend on the ongoing build-out, as LLM infrastructure bulldozes our real-world landscape, and we experience change from DRAM shortages to unwanted (NIMBY) construction of data centers. All based on the idea (yet again) that this is it.

The question becomes, is it (or will it be) worth it?

My personal prism of past experience does not lend itself to an easy answer. The move from assembly language to C was a no-brainer, but I remember resisting a transition from C to C++ ("I can do that in C with structs and function pointers") and the surge in OOP and COM and... the list goes on.

I remember objecting to Rational Rose and UML because I just didn't trust code generated algorithmically. Boilerplate with artifacts. I don't think I was wrong to hesitate there.

But I might be wrong now, to let others push the leading bleeding edge. Maybe it's time to get into it.

Can I just download a trained LLM and host it myself, without a dependency on internet/cloud corporate/overlord/rented-infrastructure?

I am willing to try, but I must declare that-- where I am, the Personal Computing revolution is not over. We still haven't won. And the rebellion: against auto-updates, telemetry, subscription models, any usage or dependency of/on your internet against your will. The fight for freedom goes on.

Can I get a Claude Code to live in my home with me, air-gapped and all mine?

Will I spend all my time spanking the agent?
by eduction | 2025-12-19 16:33:35+00:00
What an odd thing for them to put in the article. This is an example of AI generated code making someone a better programmer (by improving their ability to read code and give feedback). So it contradicts the title.

They could rename it "Using AI Generated Code Makes Programming Less Fun, for Me", that would be more honest.

The problem for programmers is (as a group) they tend to dislike the parts of their job that are hardest to replace with AI and love the stuff that is easiest for machines to copy. It turns out meetings, customer support, documentation, tests, and QA are core parts of being a good engineer.
by empath75 | 2025-12-19 16:33:49+00:00
This is such conspiracy theory bullshit. The point was that China controlled an algorithm and platform that was capable of manipulating the views of millions of Americans on _any_ topic. Maybe some people cared about Israel especially, but that wasn't the overall reason for trying to get TikTok in the US out of Chinese control.

You can, of course, make the argument that Facebook, Twitter, etc are also similar threats to other countries and _that is why they aren't allowed in China_.

I agree that this resolution is a worst-case-scenario outcome, though.
by marziply | 2025-12-19 16:33:55+00:00
It's a tragedy but I think it's true that SO has lost a significant amount of value given AI's new presence. Having said that, it's not like it's dead - it's a community of real people rather than an amalgamation of knowledge in a single tool. What sets SO apart and will always set it apart is that human aspect. For future problems that AI has no knowledge of, there will always be a group of people better equipped to answer questions through real life experience and deductions that AI simply cannot apply. I suspect in the next few years, SO will evolve into a platform that focuses on that human aspect because ultimately that's the only avenue I can see that would work. It's unlikely SO will die any time soon, it's more likely that the platform will find ways of pivoting to keep business flowing. It's not like SO is struggling for questions right now anyway, it continues to be a massively popular platform. Predicting the future is somewhat of a pointless task but I think it's safe to say, for now, that SO is still alive, and will be that way for a while at least.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-19 16:34:12+00:00
At no point was Microsoft spending more on Office for Mac than they were making on selling the Mac version.

It cost some. But famously Microsoft used byte code for Office that was portable and was dog slow around Office 5.

And it’s not my “believing”, it’s math. Apple lost far more than the net $150 million before it became popular.

This isn’t my reading the history books. My first computer was an Apple //e in 1986 and by 1993, I was following what was going on with Apple real time via Usenet and TidBits (been around since 1990) and I lied to get a free subscription to MacWeek.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-19 16:34:38+00:00
> I feel like we can continue to resist this

Or we can accept it, make a good access control system in an app platform for once, and add the few missing parts that the web standards are still missing so it becomes a good platform.

And none of that requires that we give up on an entire facade focused on reading text.

But if Mozilla focus on resisting, they can't do that, and honestly, nobody else out there will.
by mbesto | 2025-12-19 16:34:53+00:00
> The marginal cost of an API call is small relative to what users pay, and utilization rates at scale are pretty high.

How do you know this?

> You don't need perfect certainty about GPU lifespan to see that the spread between cost-per-token and revenue-per-token leaves a lot of room.

You can't even speculate this spread without knowing even a rough idea of cost-per-token. Currently, it's total paper math on what the cost-per-token is.

> And datacenter GPUs have been running inference workloads for years now,

And inference resource intensity is a moving target. If a new model comes out that requires 2x the amount of resources now.

> They're not throwing away two-year-old chips.

Maybe, but they'll be replaced by either (a) a higher performance GPU that can deliver the same results with less energy, less physical density, and less cooling or (b) the extended support costs becomes financially untenable.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-19 16:35:17+00:00
Exactly 2 years ago I remember people calling AI stochastic parrots with no actual intellectual capability and people on HN weren’t remotely worried that AI would take over there jobs.

I mean in 2 years the entire mentality shifted. Most people on HN were just completely and utterly wrong (also quite embarrassing if you read how self assured these people were, this is like 70 percent of HN at the time).

First AI is clearly not a stochastic parrot and second it hasn’t taken our jobs yet but we can all see that potential up ahead.

Now we get articles like this saying your skills will atrophy with AI because the entire industry is using it now.

I think it’s clear. Everyone’s skills will atrophy. This is the future. I fully expect in the coming decades that the generation after zoomers have never coded ever without the assistance of AI and they will have an even harder time finding jobs in software.

Also: because the change happened so fast you see tons of pockets of people who aren’t caught up yet. People who don’t realize that the above is the overarching reality. You’ll know you’re one of these people if AI hasn’t basically taken over your work place and you and your coworkers aren’t going all in on Claude or Codex. Give it another 2 years and everyone will flip here too.
by sallveburrpi | 2025-12-19 16:35:47+00:00
1) that’s like saying good UX is entirely optional - sure it is but users will still complain

2) disregarding another blatant discrimination of left-handed users: I switch a couple times per week between android and iOS devices for various reasons and the android UX is so janky and unintuitive it hurts - it might just be my particular device and it’s much better in other cases.

This might be extremely polarising but I agree with GP.
by tomjen3 | 2025-12-19 16:35:56+00:00
For me AI is really powerful autocomplete. Like you said, I wrote the abstraction years ago. Writing the abstraction again now is not required.

A time and place may come where the AI are so powerful I’m not needed. That time is not right now.

I have used Rider for years at this point and it automatically handles most imports. It’s not AI, but its one of the things that is just not needed for me to even think about.
by kerkeslager | 2025-12-19 16:36:24+00:00
I think, for those of us who have been in this industry for 20 years, AI isn't going to magically make me lose everything I learned.

However, for those in the first few years of their career, I'm definitely seeing the problem where junior devs are reaching for AI on everything, and aren't developing any skills that would allow them to do anything more than the AI can do or catch any of the mistakes that AI makes. I don't see them on a path that leads them from where they are to where I am.

A lot of my generation of developers is moving into management, switching fields, or simply retiring in their 40s. In theory there should be some of us left who can do what AI can't for another 20 years until we reach actual retirement age, but programming isn't a field that retains its older developers well. So this problem is going to catch up with us quickly.

Then again, I don't feel like I ever really lived up to any of the programmers I looked up to from the 80s and 90s, and I can't really point to many modern programmers I look up to in the same way. Moxie and Rob Nystrom, maybe? And the field hasn't collapsed, so maybe the next generation will figure out how to make it work.
by damnesian | 2025-12-19 16:36:29+00:00
As long as it can be turned off, I will remain a user. I've been a user of this lineage of browser since Netscape. I've got its features baked into muscle memory. But I have no interest in the overhead nor the distractions of AI integration. I guess it remains to be seen how feverently the new CEO wants to alienate the existing userbase.
by darkwater | 2025-12-19 16:36:49+00:00
Yep, this is the only analogy that makes sense. And if, like in the taxi situation, you are the owner of the taxi license, then you win because you keep making money but now you don't have to drive. But if OTOH you are just driving for a salary, bad news, you need to find another job now. Maybe if you are a very good driver, good looking and with good manners, some rich guy can hire you as his personal driver but otherwise...
by nyeah | 2025-12-19 16:36:54+00:00
But I didn't really ask "why do some consumers prefer not to make certain unwanted features illegal"? I asked why some consumers are so wildly positive about being forced to adopt features they hate.

Lemme example. In the weed space, I don't think anybody would take this seriously: "well it's illegal and there's nothing we can do about that so it's pointless to discuss dissenting views." Or "it's going to be legalized and there's nothing anybody can do about that, so there is no possibility of debate." People would just laugh at that.

But when it's normal consumer activity, those same arguments seem to cut ice. Why?
by takoid | 2025-12-19 16:37:25+00:00
Fair point, but it's hard to ignore the timing. Netanyahu literally just called TikTok "the most important purchase going on right now" and described social media as a "weapon" to secure Israel's influence in the US [1].

When you see a massive donor to the IDF and Israeli causes like Larry Ellison leading the consortium to buy it right after those comments, dismissing it as a conspiracy is ignorant considering they're basically saying the quiet part out loud.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3tdrO8bA7rs
by palmotea | 2025-12-19 16:37:29+00:00
> I use AI sparingly because, to be honest, every time I use AI, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber. I fear that excessive use of AI will lead to the loss of important skills on the one hand and create dependencies on the other. Who benefits if we end up with a generation of software developers who can no longer program without AI?

The shareholders benefit this quarter. Look man, I know you probably have a high opinion of yourself and all, but your job now is to degrade your abilities in order to deliver faster results now. The investors kindly demand that you get with the program, enthusiastically accept your new role as a depreciating asset (not human capital to be invested in), and stop thinking so much.
by crosshairflaws | 2025-12-19 16:37:33+00:00
Hey, thanks for your comment and it's not silly at all. I've thought about this, but didn't see it as too much of a risk. It's just a small utility tool, not part of a big corporation or anything.

Like any file sharing tool, it can be abused, but to me personally it has value for sending ordinary files over. The primary goal is privacy :)

Hope this answers it for you
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-19 16:38:15+00:00
On the other hand, maybe it was a mistake for the industry to start leaning so hard on telemetry. While it can provide useful insights in some cases, telemetry is best positioned as secondary or even tertiary in the decision-making process, because it doesn’t tell anywhere close the whole story and requires a great deal of error-prone interpretation to act upon.

To be frank, I find that use of analytics as the primary determiner to be incredibly intellectually lazy. They’re being used as a stand-in for deep, holistic thought in product design, user research, 1:1 interviews with users, etc when they shouldn’t be, and it’s making software as a whole much crappier than it needs to be.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-12-19 16:39:04+00:00
So this author loves the easy part (writing code), hates the hard part (reading and reviewing), and lacks so much self awareness that he is going to lecture people on skill atrophy?

If you want to be an artist be an artist, that's fine, don't confuse artististry with engineering.

I write art code for myself, I engineer code professionally.

The author wraps with a false dichotomy that uses emotionally loaded language at the end: "You Believe We have Entered a New Post-Work Era, and Trust the Corporations to Shepherd Us Into It". I mean, what? Why can't I think it's quickly becoming a new era _and_ not trust corporations? Why does the author take that idea off the table? Is this logic or rhetoric? Who is this author trying to convince?

SWE life has always had smatterings of weird gatekeeping, self identities wrapped up in external tooling or paradigms, fragile egos, general misanthropy, post-hoc rationalization, etc. but... man watching the progressions of the crash outs these last few years has been wild.
by dpedu | 2025-12-19 16:39:11+00:00
These are all pretty bad! I'm not on liquid glass yet, and am not looking forward to it. I'm actually a fan of the "reduce transparency" accessibility option. Hopefully it's sill available.

The weirdest issue I've ran into is on the sound settings page. Sometimes, the first column of the list of audio devices is super narrow, and since you can't drag it bigger, you can only see the first couple characters of each audio device's name, and have to guess which is the one you want.

... but if I open system preferences normally (via spotlight or apple menu) it doesn't happen. It only happens if I use the keyboard shortcut (option + any of the 3 volume keys)! I cannot imagine what kind of spaghetti code could be behind something like this. Clicking to another section and back to the sound section fixes it but... Very weird.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-19 16:39:33+00:00
Pretty much the whole of the Middle East, and consequently most of Glasgow following the various diasporas.

There used to be a place on Allison Street that did a kind of mutton liver and spinach stew with fenugreek and green chillis that I am currently right at this moment prepared to drive a 12-hour round trip to buy.
by andersmurphy | 2025-12-19 16:40:08+00:00
Yup another trick is to only serve br compressed resources and serve nothing to clients that don't support brotli. A lot of http clients don't support brotli out of the box.

I take it further and only stream content to clients that have a cookie, support js and br. Otherwise all you get is a minimal static pre br compressed shim. Seems to work well enough.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-12-19 16:40:38+00:00
That opening caricature was so off-putting and dismissive (and extremely wrong, that's not at all what the discourse is about generally speaking), I failed to conclude the reading session.

One does not need to embrace a tool to recognize its horrendous effects and side-effects. I can critique assault rifles without ever having handled one. I can critique street narcotics without taking drugs, and I can critique nuclear weapons without suffering from a blast personally. The idea that if you don't use a tool you can't form conclusions about why it's bad is devoid of any factual or historical grounding. It's an empty rhetorical device which can be used endlessly.

Literally 100% of the inventions which come out now or in the future can be handled in the exact same way. Somebody invents a robot arm that spoon feeds you so you never need to feed yourself with your own hand ever again? Oh this is revolutionary, everybody's going to install this in their home! What, you haven't? And you think it's a bad idea? Gosh, you're so backwards and foolish. The world is moving on, don't be left behind with your manual hand feeding techniques.

This article is like 1.5 years out of date. The discourse around genAI as a tech movement and its nearly uniformly terrible outcomes has moved on. OP hasn't. Seems the gap is widening between writers who are talking about these tools soberly and seriously, and writers who aren't.
by marziply | 2025-12-19 16:40:43+00:00
Honestly? I kind of suspected this would happen, just not nearly as soon as this. Even though Rust is gaining a lot of traction, it simply isn't the tool of choice (yet?) for large scale web applications most of the time. Furthermore, there's _a lot_ of competition in this space. It's not too surprising that the market for this kind of service was an uphill battle - it's a smaller market for Rust based web applications and sometimes it's cheaper to deploy to a more conventional cloud platform. That being said, many of their articles have been very insightful and I have personally benefited from them greatly.
by molticrystal | 2025-12-19 16:40:48+00:00
The verbs used in RDMA are Turing complete [0] [1] . They don't seem to be all be accessible from SMB3/SMB Direct, and the SMB opcodes themselves seem lacking, but with enough effort maybe you can get access or add what you need and this would form a path to finally have the ultimate Super Mario Brothers 3 Remote Direct Memory Access tech.

[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi22/presentation/reda

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTT_XPfYudg
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-12-19 16:41:48+00:00
100% this

The PCI-Express bus is actually rather slow. Only ~63 GB/s, even with PCIe 5 x16!

PCIe is simply not a bottleneck for gaming. All the textures and models are loaded into the GPU once, when the game loads, then re-used from VRAM for every frame. Otherwise, a scene with a lowly 2 GB of assets would cap out at only ~30 fps.

Which is funny to think about historically. I remember when AGP first came out, and it was advertised as making it so GPUs wouldn't need tons of memory, only enough for the frame buffers, and that they would stream texture data across AGP. Well, the demands for bandwidth couldn't keep up. And now, even if the port itself was fast enough, the system RAM wouldn't be. DDR5-6400 running in dual-channel mode is only ~102 GB/s. On the flip side the RTX 5050, a current-gen budget card, has over 3x that at 320 GB/s, and on the top end, the RTX 5090 is 1.8 TB/s.
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-12-19 16:42:08+00:00
>It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project

Yeah... what they ended up implementing is not generics. So good thing the LLM doesn't read link/comments too or will've probably wrote an actual roast.

>It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction

Very fair to assume this. Referencing Rust/Zig disregarding the thousands other now abandoned ones is survivorship bias. Most small hobby projects remain small. But, besides joking about it, "built [something] nobody will use", if is in their free time, and enjoy it, does it matter? Is there a need for all hobby projects to have a goal of making it big?

>This just goes a little too far for my tastes.

But the "Please star my repo so I can get a job" is fine?