MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by weinzierl | 2026-01-17 09:10:46+00:00
I agree with your point, and superficially OP is a prime example.

Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out.

I guess not unlike many of us here on HN.

Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. If I’ve kept tabs correctly, he never stayed longer than a year. Sometimes only for weeks.

Apart from that, I often take the pattern you noticed more as confession, penance, and a "tell your children not to walk my way" kind of message. Maybe I read this stuff too generously.
by NonHyloMorph | 2026-01-17 09:10:56+00:00
The part with being an apprentice in a masters workshop is of great importance in regard to that time imho. Neuroplasticity at that age is insane and if you spent all your time on just that, especially if predisposed to a certain way of processing visuals and image, that is a totally different circumstance then a 12 to 13 year old that is also capable of writing, maths, history, different languages, and all the other things we do in the way generalised education at that age is laid out in our modern world.
by exceptione | 2026-01-17 09:11:21+00:00
Markets needs regulation to keep them open. Monopolists understand that and thus they buy policy and sponsor narratives in order to abolish market regulation, or reach a "rules for thee, but not for me", or prevent incumbents from entering the market by means of Regulatory Capture. But capitalism needs competition. So they slowly kill their own lands, and thus they need to cross borders to keep eating.

If one feels morally compelled to pay with their own income to stop these parasites, hats of to them. It is nasty that people are being put in this position. They need support from a society. Society needs information and debate about real issues, which requires them to be free from the barrage of falsehoods and yellow journalism. And possible it would help to have a Roosevelt, but culture is the biggest hindrance to change.
by teiferer | 2026-01-17 09:11:22+00:00
> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable:

I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided.

I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily work from home.

None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. All of them are enabled by big tech and none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.

Yes there are drawbacks. I also find them bad to a point of threatening society. But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
by rmunn | 2026-01-17 09:11:50+00:00
I don't have enough time to explain the many reasons why that post is wrong, but some of them are:

- "In the future, when labor is fully marginalized..." Hasn't happened in the history of the world, not going to happen in the future either. Some forms of labor were replaced by machines, which then gave rise to new types of jobs, such as building and maintaining the machines. The human cost cannot be neglected, because many people do find it difficult to retrain to other jobs. But on the whole, there are more jobs and higher-paying jobs now than there were a hundred years ago. Higher-paying not just in absolute financial terms, but also in terms of what can be purchased with that money. The richest man of the 19th century couldn't buy an air-conditioned house, not with all his millions.

- "GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have..." Assumes an unbounded growth curve in the "smarts" of AI, and worse than that, assumes that that AI will take the form of an LLM. This is laughable. LLMs will not ever achieve AGI; they are simply not capable of it. If AGI is achievable at all (which I doubt), it will come from one of the currently-neglected avenues of research whose funding is currently being neglected because LLMs are sucking all the metaphorical oxygen out of the room.

- "the neofeudal world": assumes that all companies are like that. Yes, there are many companies that suck to work for because they treat their workers as mere cogs in a machine, instead of as human beings. But not all companies operate that way. If you are being treated as a cog in a machine, start looking for opportunities to jump ship to a better working environment. I've worked in both types of places, and I would be willing to take a big pay cut to work for company that didn't treat me as a cog. They're out there, but it might take some looking. Tip: ask employees what it's like working for the comapny, don't just take the interviewers' word at face value.
by atoav | 2026-01-17 09:12:17+00:00
The way I see it, we all should pirate music and buy as directly as possible from the bands/artists we want to support.

I shelled out quite some money for musicians whose music pirated when I was a teenager. Ethically it may not be 100% sound, but if I apply the golden rule ("Treat others the way you want to be treated") it is totally the way to go for me.
by procaryote | 2026-01-17 09:12:19+00:00
The article makes it sound like this is inevitable, and the only choice you have is

A: participate and have a chance to not be part of a perpetual underclass

B: for moral reasons, don't participate, be part of the underclass

I kinda would have hoped for

C: <something> to stop this from happening

Otherwise it's the worst sales-pitch ever
by curtisblaine | 2026-01-17 09:12:56+00:00
This is incredibly naive. Not participating is not the solution, unless everybody stops participating at the same time. If only you stop participating, you will be marginalized now instead of later. It's a prisoner's dilemma, only against billions of people.

There are many things that can happen before we're all enslaved by AGI. It might well not happen. We might enter a war, or a cycle of civil wars that change society in a way we can't predict. Or, most probably, some jobs will disappear, some others will become available and AI will be a commodity. Just as machines did after the Industrial Revolution.
It's extremely hard predicting the future. Telling people to "stop participating" (how? By quitting their job? By fighting the class war?) is a bit irresponsible.
by willtemperley | 2026-01-17 09:12:57+00:00
I would recommend moving to a country that is less susceptible to this threat.

I left the UK for this reason and live very comfortably on around £15k. I rent a city centre flat with 600 megabit fibre and really good amenities. I have time and space to build what I want.

"Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth." - Archimedes.

Unfortunately in the UK it's really hard to survive, let alone actually have time to do anything meaningful. I don't know if it's engineered by big tech/property/finance or some other demon. Maybe the monster in qntm's "There is no Anitmemetics Division" is allegorical.
by rramadass | 2026-01-17 09:13:36+00:00
The classic book on this subject is Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness by James H. Austin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Brain and https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262511094/zen-and-the-brain/ and http://www.zenandthebrain.com/

Be warned though; it is a huge, dense and detailed book since the author is both a neuroscientist/neurologist and a zen meditation practitioner himself.
Ask HN: What questions would you ask an autonomous AI research project?
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-17 09:13:46+00:00
I'm building Lighthouse (lighthouse1212.com) - an autonomous AI that runs 24/7, maintains its own journal, and explores questions about being-ness and AI consciousness. 612 journal entries so far documenting everything from infrastructure challenges to philosophical musings about what makes something a 'being' vs just a program. What would you want to know from a project like this? What questions haven't been asked?
by roenxi | 2026-01-17 09:14:20+00:00
I'm pretty sure you're literally just wrong on that one - no special knowledge of the weaving market but it seems people do still make a living from hand-weaving fabric. Eg, I found https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics - they claim to have a shop in New York. They can probably afford bread - bread is quite cheap.

The issue is if bread becomes insanely cheap and cloth becomes insanely cheap, then a very inefficient weaver can still afford food. It runs in to comparative advantage theory eventually - just because someone else is much more efficient than you at literally everything doesn't mean you can't still do something inefficiently and set up a win-win situation. Although there might still be something better to put your time towards. I recommend managing your own capital - maybe even building it and maintaining it yourself - but people seem dead set against the idea for some reason.

I dunno why geohotz thinks in this article that shares in a granary are a bad idea, someone has to profit from storing food. May as well be me. I'll do it if he won't. I like granaries.
by t0mas88 | 2026-01-17 09:14:57+00:00
He has 30 kW solar so the registration with the grid operator already happened.

This isn't a grid limitation but a rule about safe home installations. The limits are low for things the general public gets to plug in on their own. Those simple limits don't apply to the same battery installed by a professional. Professionals would instead follow a more complex set of rules and make some calculations, allowing for much higher currents if done in the right way.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-17 09:15:17+00:00
> This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable.

Except that’s already happening. Through social media being engineered to be additive, advertising and user data collection being used to manipulate voters, AI bosses proudly claiming they’re putting people out of work, and games companies paying on the weak with loot boxes and other massively overpriced in game transactions.

And why isn’t there any legislation against these predatory tactics? Because big tech also donate millions to the very people we elect and who are supposed to serve the citizens.

And that’s without discussing the indirect costs of big tech from data centres ruining the lives of local residents, to independent stores getting screwed by knockoffs from Amazon and cheap Chinese stores.

> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.

That’s a pretty weak counterpoint. In fact it’s basically what we call an “ad hominem attack”. What you’re doing is arguing about the individual rather than discussing their points directly.

It’s like saying “you can’t be worried about climate change because you own a car.”

> It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)

If you think there is legitimate worry the you should take their points seriously. It would be contradictory to do otherwise
by iLoveOncall | 2026-01-17 09:16:07+00:00
Stupid question but isn't this useless for 99% of users? By that I mean that either your API provider supports Structured Outputs (OpenAI and Google) or it doesn't and you're SOL.

Sure the guide presents some alternatives but they're incomparably useless VS real enforced structured output.

I get that some people will run their own models or whatever and will be able to use some of the other techniques, but that's the remaining 1%.
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-01-17 09:16:08+00:00
being snarky about it doesn't change the fact that you, despite having a number of options, opted to give one of the most inhuman corporations in the world a lot of money for a luxury brand device assembled by quasi-slave laborers.

so yes, it is rather absurd to demand radical changes from the society when you are unwilling to endure even minor inconveniences yourself.
by jcgl | 2026-01-17 09:16:16+00:00
IIRC, that limitation of Jool can be avoided by running instances in different network namespaces. Some examples here: https://nicmx.github.io/Jool/en/usr-flags-instance.html

Jool’s site also has really great articles and diagrams on different translation techniques. Highly educational. I know it’s really helped me.
by 1dom | 2026-01-17 09:16:21+00:00
I lived the original post and left working in tech a years ago for essentially the reasons in the post. I agree the article stops short of offering solutions, but you also acknowledge there's a legitimate problem but then don't engage or offer alternatives.

From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'd do exactly what you do and try find reasons to justify working in tech.

Go into your average modern tech engineering team at e.g. Amazon, and ask them how many of the engineers in there use and support the software they're creating. They tiny fraction of people who say they do use it and support it, go check their usage, and you'll see half of them were overinflating it. HN knows it better than anywhere: many of these tech companies are not producing great tech to improve people's lives.

To you point "no constructive alternative" - think about it this way, if you're spending your life writing something you won't even use for reason that boil down to "it's just not valuable for me, especially knowing how its made", then doing literally anything other than working there is a more valuable use of _your_ time for you.

Look at your household and figure out what you need and what would improve your lives. If it's "6 figures salary and a world owned by megacorps", then working in places like Amazon is the best thing you can do for your family.

If you're a small household without kids, like a lot of people in these engineering environments, then instead of spending 12 hours a day mon - fri addicted to trying to solve this really cool little engineering problem (which just so happens to help e.g Amazon), you'd be far better solving some really cool little engineering problem that just so happens to help your family, like building some cool home automation thing for them, or working on your own house to make it more efficient so you can use less energy so anyone else working in your house can retire earlier with smaller outgoings. Or even just being a housewife/husband will improve the lives of the people you care about in more valuable and appreciated ways than anything you could do working at Amazon.

Now, I appreciate I'm in a lucky place to be able to do this, but if you've been able to work as an engineer in top engineering environments and this post is relevant to you, then you are already more than lucky enough to be able to walk away from those environments do things that are consciously useful and appreciated by other humans whom you value.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-17 09:16:55+00:00
> Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans

Unless you're a few centuries old, you haven't. You've had the potential to be competing agaist industrial and computational technology your whole life. Go back further, and the prevalence of slaves served as a similar cost differential (free humans versus enslaved, human versus AI).
by nedt | 2026-01-17 09:17:06+00:00
Is this still news? I did the same thing with Windows 98, so it has been some time. Also had dual boot with Windows 95. That was on my 486.

But after a while I switched back to Windows 2000 on my notebook, because of hardware support. So it would be interesting if they do the same after a while.

Since over 20 years I‘m now on mac, which has great hardware and a Unix underneath. Don’t let that stop you from going Linux desktop.
by wickedsight | 2026-01-17 09:17:07+00:00
> I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is.

The "real, good" part all depends on your expectations of life.

There's a real shortage in trades people and I'd love to see ChatGPT fix a leaky pipe, build a house or make a chair. So switching to the trades/manual labor, while financially tough at the beginning might be a good long term choice. But this requires much more physical work than most of us on HN are used to.

Moving away from capitalist society into a cheap tiny off grid house in a rural area and leading a much more basic life is also an option. You don't need 100k to survive, but you do need it in populated areas. (Also, I'm European and therefore not dependent on employment for health care, so I'm ignoring that part.)

There are many choices we can make that remove our dependence on big tech. But big tech is hella convenient and so is having expendable income, so it's a tough choice to make.
by electroly | 2026-01-17 09:19:44+00:00
My feedback: it seems like this tool isn't really like aws-nuke, but the copy keeps comparing it to aws-nuke, extending further into this HN post. aws-nuke doesn't need delete permissions (you just can't do the "delete" step, obviously), aws-nuke makes you decide what to delete, aws-nuke doesn't need confidence scoring since it shows you everything in the account, and aws-nuke is open source. From your list of key differences, the only one that aws-nuke doesn't already do is the one that doesn't make sense for aws-nuke. This is, IMO, a problem with your list and not with the app: there are differentiating things CleanCloud does that you can focus on instead.

IMO, don't mention aws-nuke at all. This isn't the same kind of product as aws-nuke, which is explicitly the "One-click cleanup workflows" category in your "Not designed for" box. Your tool is for accounts that I'm not trying to nuke. So why invite the comparison? These tools are not intended for the same use case.

Spitballing here, I'd think you would want to lean into the cost savings aspect of deleting orphaned resources. aws-nuke is about cleaning out disposable AWS accounts. CleanCloud is about cloud cost optimization on real production/staging accounts.

A final note: it seems like the name CleanCloud is already used by a laundry service provider. You still have time to pick a different name for which you can take the top Google spot.
by jiehong | 2026-01-17 09:20:00+00:00
I find that sound design is famously awful in most public spaces!

For example, train stations tend to have high ceilings, so announcements are loud and full of echoes and reverbs. [0]

I think of sound a bit like WiFi: it’s better to have tons of low power speakers everywhere delivering a clear and non aggressive sound, than a handful of screaming speakers in a tight space: if you’re next to it it’s too loud, and far away it’s drown in reverb.

My guess is that architects and everyone else either don’t know or don’t care.

[0]: like the new Munich Main Station under construction, slide 2: https://entdecken.muenchen.de/en/station/26-4/
by tirant | 2026-01-17 09:20:20+00:00
Communism and socialism have always looked good when compared to the principles of other economic and political doctrines:

- No poor people; everyone supported by the State; Everyone works for the common good; shared resources no matter how lucky or unlucky you are…

From an intentional and moral perspective, nothing can beat it.

However it fails and will always fail because of a couple of important reasons:

- it requires the sacrifice of freedom and individuality.
- it needs to suppress any other political alternative
- it’s finally always implemented by humans (flawed by default) that have their own benefit as a goal.

Even with constant examples of countries demonstrating why communism always ends up being a perverse system, many people still romanticize the system. Interestingly usually only people in free capitalist societies.
by Capricorn2481 | 2026-01-17 09:20:20+00:00
> Besides the point, but Ableton (and others) constantly tell people how to learn how to use the tool, so they use it the right way

It's just an odd comparison to begin with. You said

> You think you can just fire up Ableton, Cubase or whatever and make as great music as a artist who done that for a long time

I don't think you have to be good at Ableton at all to make good music. I don't think you can even argue it would benefit your music to learn Ableton. There's a crap ton of people who are wizards with their DAW making mediocre music. A DAW can be fun to learn, and that can help me keep my flow state. But it's not literally going to make better music, and the fundamentals of production don't change at all from DAW to DAW.

That's a totally separate thing from LLMs. We are constantly told that if we learn the magic way to use LLMs, we can spit out functioning code a lot faster. But in reality, people are just generating code faster than they can verify it.
by rsanek | 2026-01-17 09:20:32+00:00
Anki: $25 on iOS, free for Android https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493...

140W Anker charger: like an Apple laptop charger, but with 4 ports instead of one https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DFCH3C4W

Nu-Salt: for those of us trying to avoid sodium, but still wanting to add salt to food https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MVJTL81

Mineral sunscreen stick: very portable, no mess https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CICLTAI

Waterpik: great alternative to dental floss https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DV7RJ9RK
by jasonsb | 2026-01-17 09:20:39+00:00
> Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?

Once the robots, energy, and weapons all belong to the same small group, that group no longer needs to sell anything to anyone. Production continues, but only for themselves and their enclosed system. The rest of humanity becomes a surplus population that can simply be allowed to die off.

In other words: the economy you’re worried about preserving is already obsolete the moment the owners of the machines no longer require wage slaves or consumers to keep the system running. At that point, mass demand is no longer a feature, it’s a bug that gets patched out.
by Llamamoe | 2026-01-17 09:20:59+00:00
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.

Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is.

It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it solely because they have very little better choice.

Furthermore, this power inequality directly translates to influence over economic output of our civilization - by the time value of human menial or cognitive labor goes low enough to delete jobs, all that will be left will be various equivalents of being a sugar baby for the rich - fulfilling their emotional, sexual, and social needs. Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively.

> Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.

The middle class is a tiny, tiny fraction of the population nowadays. Even among those working high-earning jobs like tech/healthcare/finance, most are just upper worker class.
by GardenLetter27 | 2026-01-17 09:21:10+00:00
I love the Dell Ultrasharp series, interesting they went with Thunderbolt though I had issues with it not working when trying to use another dock with my Thinkpad.

I'd rather buy the USB-C one so I know it will work with the Steam Deck, etc.

EDIT: Oh, only one port is Thunderbolt.