MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by carlosjobim | 2026-03-14 20:17:03+00:00
I don't have a grudge, but there needs to be some balance. Software devs are incredibly well paid compared to other professionals. It is their responsibility to use their talents to benefit themselves, and if they are out-competed then they should work with something else. They don't have a right to a fantastic career.

All other workers have had to go through this when their fields became more automated and efficient. A cargo ship used to have hundreds of crew, now it's a dozen and the amount of cargo on a ship is ten times more.

So I will absolutely not cry for a software dev who has to make changes in the face of AI competition. If they're too precious to adapt or take a different job, then starve.

> Look, no one wanted to write code for you idk what to tell you. Now you can have AI do that for you. Congrats, best of luck.

Me and hundreds of thousands of other organizations who have software needs that were under served by the market. Now we will have AI write that code for us - or more realistically, now we will purchase this software from any of the thousands of boutique software development shops that will emerge, which use AI + talented human developers to serve us.

I have the strong impression that programmers in many cases have a good deal of snobbery regarding what tasks they are willing to work on. If it's not giant enterprise software, then it's usually just filed under "hobbyist" or open source. Hopefully many programmers will find a well paying career serving less glamorous customers with software that solves real world problems. But many will have to change their attitude if they want to do that.
by pjmorris | 2026-03-14 20:17:48+00:00
Agreed.

I tend to think a job guarantee would work better than UBI: have the government provide a job to anyone who can't find one somewhere else, something like what was done in the 1930's in the US. Come up with a list of things needed (can you think of anything that needs fixing?), and pay people a living wage and benefits to take care of those things. Call it 'Universal Basic Work.'

Beyond spending government money to take care of the country and beyond providing those hired with enough to take take of themselves, it'd force private employers to pay and provide benefits at least as well as the government UBW jobs if they want to hire employees.

I further imagine that a person making enough to get by would be less prone to being hopeless and frustrated, supporting social cohesion. And that there's a dignity in that both for the individual and the community they are a part of.
by stego-tech | 2026-03-14 20:17:50+00:00
UBI, as the OP points out, as many of us have continued to point out/scream about, is a single component of a larger agenda of reforms.

It's not just about giving people money (though we absolutely should), it's also about ensuring wealth pumps can't just vacuum up that money into the hands of the already wealthy - like the stimulus checks did during COVID, like tax subsidies for healthcare do, like tax breaks for employer-provided benefits contribute to.

It's reforming housing from investment asset into human right. It's detaching healthcare from employment as much as it's about negotiating with pharmaceutical companies on pricing and creating more public healthcare rather than outsource to private firms. It's rent controls on older housing stock to incentivize growing revenue through volume (more housing) instead of scarcity like we have now. It's levying taxes on higher-priced rentals and luxury housing stock to force investing in more affordable supplies. It's penalizing for-profit employers whose staff disproportionately rely on government subsidies to make ends meet, and taxing the shareholders for supporting such bad governance.

It's taxing wealth and assets properly, rather than capping rate increases to keep people in homes (and thus drive up values). It's cities who reward businesses whose staff take public transit and taxing those who rely on private vehicles. Lifting property tax caps so that taxation rates float with the market, and accepting that this will mean some folks will see foreclosures and others will see valuations plummet as the market corrects itself. Incentivizing longer leases from landlords by tying property tax increases to lease renewals (yearly renewals mean yearly appraisals), to encourage more community and investing in buildings.

It's expanding SNAP to everyone by default on raw foods only, and expanding access to cooking and nutrition courses so every adult can eat healthy meals. It's shrinking the work week to create more jobs, capping overtime instead of merely 1.5xing it, and raising minimum wages. It's also taxing the absolute shit out of executive compensation, especially on equities and securities. It's barring share buybacks other than those amounts that would give the company 51% control over its outstanding shares (or more), and replacing Capital Gains with Income Taxes. It's closing loopholes and shrinking the tax codes.

It's so much more than "UBI and we're fine". There is no silver bullet. Nothing is an "easy fix", and no single fix will make a meaningful impact on the whole. It's nothing short of a coordinated rejection of the status quo in favor of a more equitable future that balances the need for innovation and growth with the needs of the masses for basic sustenance, shelter, healthcare, education, and safety. It's a cessation of promoting business over all, and a return to balancing business with community, with family, with individuality.

It's a lot of fucking work, and anyone lounging in here nitpicking UBI specifically without considering the whole of the problem shows they're simply not ready to deal with problems of this scale.
by atomicnumber3 | 2026-03-14 20:18:29+00:00
Because for 99% of cases python is fast enough and it's fast as fuck to code. And for the 1% that aren't, you have 50 different flavors of making it faster. And the final of which is "slap pybind on a c module to do the hot path in C" which then lets you minimize the suffering of C into a single high value location. And the rest of the code still gets to be Python.
by balamatom | 2026-03-14 20:19:00+00:00
An absolute free market would, by definition, permit the selling of the service "restrict someone's freedom for me".

Not sure if that leaves it a free market. So if we're gonna be talking holes in the cheese - seems like you're reasoning in terms of a basically self-contradictory notion.

But truly, what do you reckon about the 1st point, in terms of the interpretation of market freedom which you use?
by exceptione | 2026-03-14 20:20:01+00:00
You can be intelligent and believe the narratives.

You can be intelligent and see you were fooled, seeing the sponsors of the narratives don't share any of your ideals to begin with.

Many are confused, feeling betrayed, open for new perspectives. Some will double down as we know from group dynamics in sects.

Don't feel sad, it is a good sign of healthy progress. Project 2025 and the likes are a very destructive force, not something to gamble your democracy on.
by jltsiren | 2026-03-14 20:20:18+00:00
Is that what UBI has become these days? That everyone is supposed to get some extra money on top of whatever they already have?

~20 years ago, when UBI was a popular idea in my country, it was understood as a technical fix to the welfare and tax systems. It was supposed to simplify the systems and make them easier to understand. It was supposed to fix the perverse incentives people with low wages face, such as the extremely high (often >80%) effective marginal tax rates. It was supposed to automatically give people the benefits they are entitled to, without having to deal with the punitive bureaucracy. It was supposed to help people who fall between the categories in the existing welfare system. And so on.

And it was supposed to be funded by making it an accounting technicality, at least for the most part. Most basic welfare benefits, tax credits, and tax deductions would go away. Progressive taxation would go away. Standard deduction would either go away or become substantially smaller. And the highest income tax bracket would start at 0.
by redgridtactical | 2026-03-14 20:20:56+00:00
The biggest win for me with docs-in-repo isn't the AI angle, it's that pull requests can't land without updating the relevant docs. When your support pages, privacy policy, and README all live in the same repo, they naturally stay in sync with the code.

GitHub Pages serving directly from a /docs folder makes it even simpler, no separate deploy, no separate CMS, no drift. The less infrastructure between writing and publishing, the more likely docs actually get maintained.
by alberth | 2026-03-14 20:21:01+00:00
Let’s restate this another way:

“
In an interview with {COMPANY} I was literally told that … {COMPANY-OWNER} can call us and demand anything at anytime.
“

Doesn’t sound so crazy when Elon name is removed from it.

Note: I’m no Elon fan, but do think sometimes HN overreacts when his name is mentioned.
by terrythreatt | 2026-03-14 20:21:16+00:00
I've been vibe coding side projects and they have been typically filled with security issues. That is the thing most vibe coders are blind to. LLMs don't
naturally prioritize it.

So I built VibeScore. You paste your code or connect a repo, it scans for
common vulnerabilities, and gives you a score with specific callouts.

Still early but it's live: https://usevibescore.com

Would love brutal feedback
by ffsm8 | 2026-03-14 20:21:38+00:00
No, the branching complexity exists anyway. You've just made it clearly visible by adding a null check or accept that the computational may fail if violated.

You never know what changes are being done in the future, while today the variable may not be nullable in the scenario you're up-to-date on, that doesn't necessarily mean it'll stay like that in the future.

Ultimately, there is a cost associated with null checks everywhere and another by omitting them. The person I responded to just insinuated that people which introduce copious amounts of null checks are inept and lazy.

In response to that I pointed out that that's literally one of the core tenets of defensive programming, and people that make such sweeping statements about other people's capabilities in this way are very often juniors.
I stand by this opinion. You can disagree on specific places were a null check may have been placed unnecessary, but that's always a discussion about a specific field and cannot be generalized like he did there.
by make3 | 2026-03-14 20:21:45+00:00
spending your productive output making one of the most powerful terrible people alive more powerful just sounds depressing to me. do you really want your research to be how to make the personality of Elon's anti woke mind virus LLM better at erotic talk.

I guess it comes down to your daily efforts serving only to make the world a worst place, vs having a neutral job
by IAmGraydon | 2026-03-14 20:21:50+00:00
If you lie to me in the real world, I know what you look like and won’t trust you again. You cannot change your face. If you punch me in the real world, I can punch you back. If you stab me in the real world, you’re likely going to jail once the police catch up to you. You don’t do any of those things because the lack of anonymity imparts consequence. There is no anonymity in the real world unless you run around in a full face mask, in which case no one will trust you anyways.
by throaway197512 | 2026-03-14 20:22:09+00:00
So now you've made it impossible to actually stop a child from smoking. They're free to smoke as much as they want, because it's the parents that get punished, not them. And regardless of who gets punished, the fact remains, they can go to the store and buy cigarettes.

You really think not being given money by parents is going to stop kids from accessing smokes?
by TehCorwiz | 2026-03-14 20:23:13+00:00
If individual party members voted against the party line more often there would be less of this kind of discourse. But the reality is that we have a deeply entrenched deeply divided two-party system. There are very few politicians who don't toe one line or the other and endure. But in this case it's a core tenet of the republican party platform to eliminate the administrative state, including strategic investment and reserves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-03-14 20:23:29+00:00
OK, so there are classes of activity that are fairly inelastic, but not as inelastic as those requiring use of land. Fair enough. But why would the cost of air travel not increase in response to UBI? It's not inelastic, but modest increases don't appear to reduce demand much at all. Or eggs (again, not inelastic, but not very elastic either)?

The housing:land demand ratio is also not fixed, due to multi-level dwellings (hence, for example, Singapore or Hong Kong), or increased density (e.g. ADUs or smaller lots).

I just don't see why you see UBI only affecting owners of a nearly-inelastic resource (land) rather than everything else too (even if to a lesser degree) ?
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-14 20:23:32+00:00
Pure markdown is fine until you need decent tables or structured metadata. Docs-in-repo sounds clean on paper, but the minute you need comments, suggestions, inline edits, permissions, and approvals from people who do not live in git all day, you are recreating half of Notion or Google Docs with plugins and glue code.

Then you ask marketing or support to open a PR. That is usually where the markdown honeymoon ends.
by Lerc | 2026-03-14 20:24:20+00:00
Good point about facts. It applies similarly to properties that provide functionality. One tends to lose track of the fact that much of software shouldn't be copyrightable in the first place, it's just a pretence that has evolved due to how much people like money.

It's a stretch to say that training a model falls under that definition of derivative work. It's be like saying that building a house after reading a book on how to build a house makes the house a derivative work. I can just imagine cookbooks introducing limited licences on who you can feed with their recipes.
by cogman10 | 2026-03-14 20:24:44+00:00
> Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is often unpopular with some demographic groups

I'd be really opposed to this. It'd only be ok if we nationalized the industries where we set these rules and rates. Otherwise, this ends up being a simple handout to private industries.

For example, let's say we say x liters of water. Well who's deciding how much x liters cost? If it's a private company and the government is guaranteeing it, you can bet water (which is relatively cheap where I live) will end up being the most expensive resource imaginable. And that may actually be true depending on the location, but it'd also be true in non-desert areas with plenty of water.

We've effectively had that here with the ACA, where the government has decided that it will cover the first $800 or so dollars of your health insurance. What happened? Magically, the cost of health insurance increased by $800. Private industries aren't stupid, they'll always charge the maximum price the market will bear. And when we start talking about captured industries like data provider, power provider, or your water provider... well that's where we can trust private industry the least as they literally have the public over a barrel. Utility boards are an OK solution, but the better solution is to turn these into public institutes instead of private ones.
by airhangerf15 | 2026-03-14 20:24:48+00:00
Snowden's story makes zero sense. Former CIA employee turned NSA contractor, making six figures, working remotely in Hawaii, one day suddenly decides he has a conscience, somehow gets laptops filled with classified documents, hands them over in the South Pacific to Der Spegiel and Glenn Greenwald, then goes off to Russia where he's lived unmolested for years, and his smokin hot girlfriend joins him and he's never faced consequences where as Julian Assange was held captive in an embassy for years. Meanwhile, every other whistle blower that went to The Intercept was subsequently arrested and Greenwald still denies it was a honey pot, going as far as to throw Whitney Webb under the bus over it.

The reason nothing happened was because Snowden is still a State Dept or CIA asset. He's an actor and/or a limited hangout of some kind to show the US government and claim to be doing absolutely insane bullshit and nobody cares. New Zealand retroactively changed their laws (clearing John Key of any wrong doing for illegally spying on Kim Dotcom), allowing the GCHQ to legally spy on all their citizens.

As far as refusing to work for these companies, I was on Linux at work for over a decade. But after my last job I was forced to take a .NET role and with a $30k/yr paycut. It'd like to get back into a good role again where I can use Linux, but I'm not sure if I'd be willing to stand my ground on this issue, because I also don't want to lose my house and software jobs are incredibly scares right now. Unlike Snowden, I don't have a government paycheck coming in to continue spreading lies.
by jakobnissen | 2026-03-14 20:24:54+00:00
I have used Julia for my main language for years. Yes, it really does solve the two language problem. It really is as fast as C and as expressive as Python.

It then gives you a bunch of new problems. First and foremost that you now work in a niche language with fewer packages and fewer people who can maintain the code. Then you get the huge JIT latency. And deployment issues. And lack of static tooling which Rust and Python have.

For me, as a research software engineer writing performance sensitive code, those tradeoffs are worth it. For most people, it probably isn’t. But if you’re the kind of person who cares about the Python optimization ladder, you should look into Julia. It’s how I got hooked.
by ambicapter | 2026-03-14 20:24:55+00:00
> Cheap rental properties

They buy at most one.

> basic phone plans

They buy at most one.

> Cheap food, ramen noodles.

Humans have fixed calorie needs and even the very obese spend maybe 10x the norm, nothing more.

Compare that to the prospect of someone buying MULTIPLE properties, possibly multiple properties that are 10x more expensive the norm, the price disparity between a regular car and multiple supercars, the price disparity between owning a boat and/or yacht vs...not owning a boat.
by sneak | 2026-03-14 20:25:39+00:00
It’s not exploitation unless the participants in the deal are being coerced. You can’t make a solid case for employees being coerced to work for an exploitative employer outside of company towns or non-functioning labor markets; neither of these apply to the Philippines.

If the chatter thought the job was so bad, they can quit and get a different one. Millions of people make that choice, it is available to them. There is no requirement that they do this work; it is entirely voluntary. The people doing these jobs have determined that it is the best option for them, personally, or they wouldn’t be there.

PS: $2-4/hr is a decent wage in the Philippines.
by idoubtit | 2026-03-14 20:26:43+00:00
My experience does not match theirs when compressing text and code:

> bzip might be suboptimal as a general-purpose compression format, but it’s great for text and code. One might even say the b in bzip stands for “best”.

I've just checked again with a 1GB SQL file. `bzip2 -9` shrinks it to 83MB. `zstd -19 --long` to 52MB.

Others have compressed the Linux kernel and found that bzip2's is about 15% larger than zstd's.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-14 20:26:43+00:00
Yes, because it is a backbone through which people trying to hold things together can communicate. Remember how the USSR supposedly held together and could not be defeated, and how the Nazi's overran Europe and there were many who figured the easy way out was to just give up and accept it? The free press held the line, in Western Europe through underground newspapers, which made a massive difference in keeping people informed and in the East between 45 and ~86 through the various - sometimes hand copied - smuggled literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_media_in_German-oc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press

Soldarity would have never gotten off the ground without that network and speaking for my own country I suspect that without de Volkskrant and Het Parool the war would have gotten much closer to completely eradicating the Jewish population here. It was bad enough as it was but the network that coordinated the distribution of the underground newspapers was also instrumental in keeping the underground resistance network going. The one fed off the other and vice versa, both as a training ground and as a messenger service. Lots of those stories will never be told (unfortunately) but there were a ton of very brave people that knew full well they risked a one-way trip to the dunes if discovered.
by redgridtactical | 2026-03-14 20:26:54+00:00
In practice the ladder has two rungs for me. Write it in Python with numpy/scipy doing the heavy lifting, and if that's not enough, rewrite the hot path in C. The middle steps always felt like they added complexity without fully solving the problem.

The JIT work kenjin4096 describes is really promising though. If the tracing JIT in 3.15 actually sticks, a lot of this ladder just goes away for common workloads.
by johnsmith1840 | 2026-03-14 20:27:04+00:00
I mean it's not like any administration was any different? Numerous stories all over of how propoganda from US admins demicrat and republican flood the systems.

And that's just the stuff we know. You don't think AI propoganda bots are flooding every social media you know of?

Traditional news media has a totally wrecked credibility on both sides. If we are subsidizing what is clearly a dying market why not stop?

I trust social media posts as much as Fox news or CNN (very little) which maybe is a me thing but I don't think I'm alone.

Best news I can find now is finding one individual person whose personal reputation still can matter and follow them.
by tombert | 2026-03-14 20:27:06+00:00
I mean, sure, but I didn’t really care.

Why should him being busy matter to me? For all he knows I am equally or more busy than he is. For all he knows I am skipping my mother’s funeral, or taking the entire day off of work, or turned down a dozen other potential interviews just to make this interview.

I will admit it’s a bit douchey, but why should I just nod my head happily and pretend that his excuses actually matter? Especially when all of them boiled down to “I was really busy”. We’re all busy.
by matthewdgreen | 2026-03-14 20:27:58+00:00
If you're designing a car, then the CEO/Founder might want the ability to add falcon wings to it at any point, and that's pretty reasonable. If you're designing a trustworthy encyclopedia, knowing that the CEO/Founder might wish to alter arbitrary facts to his whim is really not very reasonable. Is it his company? Sure. Do you want to make low-quality information artifacts? That's a judgement call.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-03-14 20:28:14+00:00
Regulatory capture requires that laws (or regulations) are drafted that favor your interests. The only ways I am aware of for that to happen are:

(a) sufficient political donations/bribes to get lawmakers to draft suitable language themselves (or via their staff)

(b) a combination of political donations and a worldview on the part of lawmakers in which it is "just normal" for those affected by regulations to draft them, such that you yourself are able to draft the legislation.

There are levels of government where neither of these require incredible levels of wealth, I suspect.

Both could be stopped by limiting political donations and a political culture in which "the chemical industry writes its own rules" is self-evidently corrupt and/or non-sensical.