MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by globnomulous | 2026-01-05 22:40:50+00:00
I disagree. When you add an abstraction layer, the user of that layer continues to write code. That's not the case when people rely heavily on LLMs. They're at best reading and tweaking the model's output.

That's not the only way to use an LLM. One can instead write a piece of code and then ask the tool for analysis, but that's not the scenario that people like me are criticizing or concerned about -- and it's not how most people imagine LLMs will be used in the future, if models and tools continue to improve. People are predicting that the models will write the software. That's what people like me and the person I agreed with are criticizing and concerned about.

I'm uncomfortable with the idea not because it's outside of my area of comfort but because people don't understand code they read the way they understand code they write. This isn't a skill issue, in that people need to become better at reading and understanding code. Rather, it's how the human brain works. Writing the code familiarizes the writer with the problem space (the pitfalls, for instance). When you haven't written it, and you've instead just read it, then you haven't worked through the problems. You don't know the problem space or the reasons for the choices that the author made.

To put this another way: you can learn to read a language or understand it by ear without learning to speak it. The skills are related, but they're separate. People acquire and develop the skills they practice. Junior engineers and young people who learn to code with AI, and don't write code themselves, will learn, in essence, how to read, not how to write or speak; they'll learn how to talk to the AI models, and maybe how to read code. They will not learn how to write software.
by therealpygon | 2026-01-05 22:40:54+00:00
Likely using a rather generous definition of “new”. There is a difference between a new customer, and buying a license. Im also fairly doubtful that every server, docker, vm, and appliance is also running Windows. And even if said 2000 users are using Windows for absolutely every system, it’s still a meaningless anecdote about a drop in the bucket. I don’t think anyone suggested that Microsoft doesn’t have customers? But I suspect they were far from “new” customers, even if a new company, because I guarantee something somewhere was replaced for every one of them; bankrupt businesses they replaced, old hardware, whatever. Arguing the opposite would certainly seem to be naive on face.
by nunez | 2026-01-05 22:41:18+00:00
I'll clarify.

The cable machines are efficient because they _do the work_ of performing a movement for you, much like how LLMs do the work of writing an e-mail from a prompt describing what you want to write.

They are designed to only activate the target muscle/muscle group during the movement, which is good for working that muscle but bad for working all of the other muscles that _should be_ activated in the kinetic chain for that movement.

That's the metaphor I was trying to convey.
by paxys | 2026-01-05 22:42:09+00:00
There is no passport or social security number or mailing address for the internet. Google can't tell you a definite proof they will accept because none exists, especially since copyright can be claimed on something as trivial as a line of text or a certain combination of bytes. It'll always be a judgement call on Google's part, and such a system will never be 100% accurate in either direction. If you want immediate and effective results then pay a lawyer.
by observationist | 2026-01-05 22:42:11+00:00
I've seen organizations where 300 of 500 people could effectively be replaced by AI, just by having some of the the remaining 200 orchestrate and manage automation workflows that are trivially within the capabilities of current frontier models.

There's a whole lot of bullshit jobs and work that will get increasingly and opaquely automated by AI. You won't see jobs go away unless or until organizations deliberately set out to reduce staff. People will use AI throughout the course of their days to get a couple of "hours" of tasks done in a few minutes, here and there, throughout the week. I've already seen reports and projects and writing that clearly comes from AI in my own workplace. Right now, very few people know how to recognize and assess the difference between human and AI output, and even fewer how to calibrate work assignments.

Spreadsheet AIs are fantastic, reports and charting have just hit their stride, and a whole lot of people are going to appear to be very productive without putting a whole lot of effort into it. And then one day, when sufficiently knowledgable and aware people make it into management, all sorts of jobs are going to go quietly away, until everything is automated, because it doesn't make sense to pay a human 6 figures what an AI can do for 3 figures in a year.

I'd love to see every manager in the world start charting the Pareto curves for their workplaces, in alongside actual hours worked per employee - work output is going to be very wonky, and the lazy, clever, and ambitious people are all going to be using AI very heavily.

Similar to this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11850241

https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/tm8m...

Part of the problem is that people don't know how to measure work effectively to begin with, let alone in the context of AI chatbots that can effectively do better work than anyone a significant portion of the adult population of the planet.

The teams that fully embrace it, use the tools openly and transparently, and are able to effectively contrast good and poor use of the tools, will take off.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-05 22:42:32+00:00
Making the tool easy to use and allowing it to just immediately post on Twitter is much different than simply providing a model online that people can download and run themselves.

If you are providing a tool for people, YES you are responsible to some degree.

Think of it this way. I sell racecars. I'm not responsible if someone buys my racecar and then drinks and drives and dies. Now, I run an entertainment venue where you can ride along in racecars. One of my employees is drunk, and someon dies. Now I am responsible.
by bpavuk | 2026-01-05 22:42:34+00:00
read it again. he criticizes the hype built around 2025 as the Year X for agents. many were thinking that "we'll carry PCs in our pockets" when Windows Mobile-powered devices came out. many predicted 2003 as the Year X for what we now call smartphones.

no, it was 2008, with the iPhone launch.
by spankibalt | 2026-01-05 22:42:44+00:00
> "I find it quite interesting that you categorize non-coders the same as quacks, analphabets, and lies."

I categorized them not as "the same", but as examples of concept-delineating polar opposites. This as answer to somebody who essentially trotted out the "but they're just labels!1!!" line, which was already considered intellectually lazy before it was turned into a sad meme by people who married their bongs back in the 90s.

> "I would never consider myself a coder - though I can and have written quite a lot of code over the years [...]"

Good for you. A coder, to me, is simply somebody who can produce working programs on their own and has the neccessary occupational (self-) respect. This fans out into several degrees of capabilities, of course.

> "[...] but you called someone who claims to have written plenty of code themselves a coding-illiterate just because now they'd rather use an LLM than do it themselves. "

No. I simply answered this one question:

> “If I’m not the man who can [...] build working programs… WHO AM I?”

Aside from that I reflected on an insulting(ly daft) but extremely common attitude amongst sloperators, especially on parasocial media platforms:

> "As it turns out, writing code isn’t super useful."

Imagine I go to some other SIG to say shit like this: As it turns out, [reading and writing words/playing or operating an instrument or tool/drawing/calculating/...] isn’t "super useful". Suckers!

I'd expect to get properly mocked and then banned.

> "You basically took some people talking about their own opinions on what they find enjoyable, [...]"

Congratulations, you're just the next strawmen salesman. For the last time, bambini: I don't care if this guy uses LLMs and enjoys it... for that was never part of my argument at all.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-05 22:43:11+00:00
This name change is about a single "app" that was formerly called "Office app", not to be confused with the Office "suite", which in more cases than not also gets renamed, but in a subordinate brand sort of way ("the Office suite of applications, brought to you as a part of Microsoft 365").

The "Office app" itself was mostly just a launcher for the other apps. Now it is also/primarily an LLM chat interface.
by truelson | 2026-01-05 22:43:51+00:00
I'm going to channel a little bit of @patio11 .

First, worth reading this on how he deals with credit agencies and debt collectors: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r... . There's gold in here for dealing with big globo-corp and how to get their attention.

Ask Google for a certified mail address so you can send them the timeline of events that occurred. This is the shibboleth that lets them know you mean business and that by not responding, they may be facing legal action. DO NOT THREATEN or mention legal action. The managerial class doesn't act that way. Just signal you are building a case against them. Start with getting that certified mailing address... you may be surprised how they respond after just that request.

If they don't respond, keep following up. Send them a timeline of events, proof of ownership even if they do not ask you what you need to prove ownership. Make it clear what this is costing you.

But here's the thing, EVERY TIME I HAVE ASKED FOR A CERTIFIED MAIL ADDRESS, the globocorp gave me what i wanted, and I never had to follow up. Every time. They don't want to deal with actual legal action from "people who know what they are doing."

It's a shibboleth. Like "Baa-ram-ewe." Use it wisely and honestly.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-05 22:44:05+00:00
> The org noted that the rescission of all of CPB’s federal funding

While many "rescissions" going on these days are unlawful/impeachable, this particular case stands out because Congress did pass something to support it.

Anyway, here's how your legislators voted, though the breakdown is mostly predictable.

* House: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/119-2025/h168

* Senate: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/119-2025/s411
by lukev | 2026-01-05 22:44:10+00:00
Wow, homework is an insane example of a "workforce."

Homework is in some ways the opposite of actual economic labor. Students pay to attend school, and homework is (theoretically) part of that education; something designed to help students learn more effectively. They are most certainly not paid for it.

Having a LLM do that "work" is economically insane. The desired learning does not happen, and the labor of grading and giving feedback is entirely wasted.

Students use ChatGPT for it because of perverse incentives of the educational system. It has no bearing on economic production of value.
by mknweb | 2026-01-05 22:44:25+00:00
20+ year senior software engineer here, sharing my experience with LLM/AI agents.

TL;DR: LLMs are genuinely useful and many experienced developers use them daily, but they’re being oversold. They work best as tools that amplify expert developers, not as replacements for them. They can generate and refactor code well, but they hit a hard ceiling on deep reasoning, architecture, and optimization. In expert hands, they save time; treated as autonomous engineers, they produce confident-looking but low-quality results.
by jkingsbery | 2026-01-05 22:44:39+00:00
With other engineers I mentor, I often give similar advice: break the promotion into two steps. The one everyone talks about is when the email goes out. The one that probably matters more is when your manager says: "I'm going to start treating you like <target promotion role>." A lot less attention goes into that step, particularly at bigger companies that have more formal promotion processes.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2026-01-05 22:45:04+00:00
Note that if the claimant is a big player, Google is happy to only clarify how high is it supposed to jump. If they file a claim usurping your copyright, you can do diddly about it most of the time. But if little people are trying to assert their rights, no, no can do, you can't prove that you are you.

And why should you, one of the little people, be able to prove anything at all? If a big player sues, Google is going to have to pay a staggering amount of money, thus they obey. If you sue, its lawyers will drain you financially by protracting everything they can, so you don't actually sue. If they take your claim, the content they take down stops bringing the sweet advertising revenue.

And thus the computer sayeth Nay.
by Bluestrike2 | 2026-01-05 22:45:24+00:00
If it's a strategic play, it's a terrible one that douses usability in gasoline and sacrifices it at the altar of visual novelty for no real gain. Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices. Between Tahoe and Liquid Glass, they seem to have just tossed them on the bonfire for no justifiable reason.

VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interface over your field of vision. That's a very different context and interaction paradigm. Trying to shoehorn the adaptations they made for it into their other, far more popular interfaces for the sake of consistency? It's absurd.
by roncesvalles | 2026-01-05 22:45:41+00:00
Why would it?

1. "Nuclear capability" is not binary. The available delivery mechanisms and the defensive/decapitation capabilities of your adversary matter a lot.

2. MAD constrains both sides. It's unlikely that an unpopular Head of State getting kidnapped would warrant a nuclear first strike especially against a country like (Trump's) America, which would not hesitate to glass your whole country in response.
by Dave_Rosenthal | 2026-01-05 22:45:45+00:00
As a boss-man myself, I’ve seen this “don’t let them take advantage of you” sentiment expressed in many discussions about comp and promotions, but I can’t really say I understand it. Am I just out of touch?

As I read it, the article is simply trying to help people understand what kind of work is valuable to a company and therefore what they should focus on to make themselves valuable. I presume that making yourself valuable pays dividends, including promotions! Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best because “you’re not getting paid … for that” just feels so cynical and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech.

(And this is all a bit separate, of course, than the debate about whether staying at a company or job hopping is better for career trajectory.)
by dekhn | 2026-01-05 22:46:04+00:00
It looks like he got the problem resolved by providing a spreadsheet with copyright violations and his original sources.

THink of Google like how Cantrill described Ellison:

You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.
by tonymet | 2026-01-05 22:46:14+00:00
thank you for sharing. I believe the shadowban issue contributes to this reluctance. There are a few pillars, some policy, some cultural, that discourage more engaging dialog.

The rules are sound, and I'm not pushing back on those. But I think with better tools, more community members will be encouraged to participate and be authentic.

Of course, shadowbans are not the biggest issue ( groupthink and AI spam are bigger, among others). but it's an issue I know firsthand.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-05 22:46:16+00:00
A few minor cleanups - I personally don't think they change anything (really, it's these stats themselves that lack the ability to do that anyways) but want to note because this is the exact kind of Pandora's box opened with focusing on this specific incident:

- Even assuming all who weren't sure (13%) should just be discounted as not having an opinion, like those who had not heard about it (22%), 32% is still not a majority of the remaining (100%-13%-22%) = 65%. 32% could have been a plurality of those with an opinion, but since you insisted on lumping things into 3 buckets of 32%, 35%, and remaining %, the remaining % of 33% would actually get the plurality of those who responded with opinions by this definition.

N.b. If just read straight from the sheet, "A Nazi salute" would have already had a plurality. Though grouping like this is probably the more correct thing to do, it actually ends up significantly weakening the overall position of "more people agree than not" rather than strengthening it.

- But, thankfully, "A Nazi Salute" + "A Roman Salute" would actually be 32+2=34%, so plurality is at least restored by a whole percentage point (if you excluded the unsure or unknowing)!

- A "Roman salute" (which is a bit of a farce of a name really) can't really be assumed to be fungible with the first option in this poll. If it were fully fungible, it could have been combined into that option. I.e. there's no way to tell which adults responding "A Roman salute" meant "a general fascist salute, as a Nazi would use" or meant "a non-fascist meaning of the salute, like the Bellamy salute was before WWII". So back to losing by a percentage point. Shucks!

- In reality, between error margins and bogus responses - this is about as close as one could expect to get for an equal 3 way split between "it was", "it wasn't", and "dunno/don't care".

Even though I'm one who agrees with you Elon exhibits neo-nazi tendencies the above just shows how we go from "Elon replies directly supporting Hitler was right about the Jewish community" to debating percentage points in an already slanted cut up to try to have a sub-majority agree he likely made a hand gesture. Now imagine I was actually a Nazi supporter - suddenly we've gone from talking about direct pro-Nazi statements and retweets constantly in his feed to a chance for me to debate with you how it's not even the majority opinion he made a hand gesture 3 years ago? Anyone concerned with Musk's behavior should want to avoid this topic with a 20 foot pole so they can get straight to the real stuff which doesn't openly invite quagmire in the responses.

Also... I've run across a fair share of crypto lovers who turn out to be neo-nazish, but I'm not sure how you're piecing together that such a large portion of the population is a "crypto-Nazi" when something like only 28% of the population has crypto at all, let alone is a Nazi too. At least we're past "anyone who doesn't agree with my interpretation is a Nazi" though.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2026-01-05 22:46:28+00:00
> - Streaming game primitives instead of pixels, which should be much lighter - Server-side rendering makes cheating basically impossible

This doesn't work in 3D. Unless you have the server do the work of the GPU and compute occlusion, you'll end up sending data to the client that they shouldn't be able to have (e.g. location of players and other objects behind walls)
by KoolKat23 | 2026-01-05 22:46:31+00:00
My point is saying if it's so complex you have to get a lawyer involved, how do you expect your LLM&system to cover all its own shortcomings.

I'd bet if you put that prompt into grok it'd be blocked judging by that Reddit link you sent. These folks are jailbreaking nearly asking to modify using neutral terms like clothing and images that grok doesn't have the skill to judge.
by toast0 | 2026-01-05 22:46:35+00:00
There was no year 0, but there was also no year 1; 1970-01-01 is the first day, so we're still in the first century. And there was no previous century.

As the epoch began, the K&R imbued it with a rich pre-history, but all of that stuff didn't really happen; it just makes nice things to email about.
by trafficante | 2026-01-05 22:46:41+00:00
Vagueposting is a different beast. There’s almost never any intention of informing etc; it’s just: QT a trending semi-controversial topic, tack on something like “imagine not knowing the real reason behind this”, and the replies are jammed full of competitive theories as to what the OP was implying.

It’s fundamentally just another way of boosting account engagement metrics by encouraging repliers to signal that they are smart and clued-in. But it seems to work exceptionally well because it’s inescapable at the moment.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-05 22:46:55+00:00
For what it's worth I'm making an argument that is probably completely unfeasible and with morally rocky foundations, but -

> While I have my own personal moral standards, I see society in general as morally relativist and don't accept arguments that the popular morals of today are right because they're popular now, while the popular morals of previous generations were wrong because they contradict the "right" morals of today

While I agree with you morally, I think practically for the stability of society it's useful for there to be a relatively conservative (and not overly litigious) mainstream that people can choose to freely act outside of, and it doesn't entirely matter what that mainstream is. I am not morally aligned with the say they Reagan era moral majority who fought against foul language on TV and in music, but I think there is a value in having that "moral majority" to rebel against.

There was this sort of lightning in a bottle in the second half of the 20th century, or maybe this has always been an Western thing but - there was this strong conservative popular culture - you couldn't even swear on television - but transgression wasn't handled legally (at least not excessively so). So you could go see a transgressive comedian if you wanted to, but it was necessarily a subculture, and I think this idea is healthy for society. Strong social pressure in one direction, but an escape hatch from it if you want in communities that aren't part of the popular culture.

So yes, I would say X is an institution, and maybe if I had my way, X wouldn't even allow swearing. If you wanted to swear on the internet, you would have to find a relatively "underground" place to do it; you could do it on say a private forum, but not on anything with more than I dunno, 1 million users or something. But when X as an institution tells you that everything is ok; when basically ideas or pictures or movies stop being "dangerous" people stop being "dangerous". There's no unique thought because all ideas are part of the mainstream. I think it creates less free thought, not more.

Is it really better for the world that there's basically no 4chan anymore because Twitter is now 4chan? https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-the-in...

But in summary to speak to your question directly - I think I'm making a very counter-intutive argument that the thing you say you want, people from the 90's who valued dangerous media doesn't exist anymore. I think in a sense, we're not all that 90's kid, now we're all the "moral majority" the 90's kid was railing against; In a perverse manner of speaking.