MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 20k | 2026-03-06 21:20:01+00:00
I work in tech, and I think the worst part is seeing all the pieces of catastrophe that have had to come together to make AI dominate

There's several factors which are super depressing:

1. Economic productivity, and what it means for a company to be successful have become detached from producing good high quality products. The stock market is the endgame now

2. AI is attempting to strongly reject the notion that developers understanding their code is good. This is objectively wrong, but its an intangible skill that makes developers hard to replace, which is why management is so desperate for it

3. Developers had too much individual power, and AI feels like a modern attempt at busting the power of the workforce rather than a genuine attempt at a productivity increase

4. It has always been possible to trade long term productivity for short term gains. Being a senior developer means understanding this tradeoff, and resisting management pressure to push something out NOW that will screw you over later

5. The only way AI saves time in the long term is if you don't review its output to understand it as well as if you'd written it yourself. Understanding the code, and the large scale architecture is critical. Its a negative time savings if you want to write high-long-term-productivity code, because we've introduced an extra step

6. Many developers simply do not care about writing good code unfortunately, you just crank out any ol' crap. As long as you don't get fired, you're doing your job well enough. Who cares about making a product anymore, it doesn't matter. AI lets you do a bad job with much less effort than before

7. None of this is working. AI is not causing projects to get pushed out faster. There are no good high quality AI projects. The quality of code is going down, not up. Open source software is getting screwed

Its an extension of the culture where performance doesn't matter. Windows is all made of react components which are each individually a web browser, because the quality of the end product no longer matters anymore. Software just becomes shittier, because none of these companies actually care about their products. AAA gaming is a good example of this, as is windows, discord, anything google makes, IBM, Intel, AMD's software etc

A lot of this is a US problem, because of the economic conditions over there and the prevalence of insane venture capitalism and union busting. I have a feeling that as the EU gets more independent and starts to become a software competitor, the US tech market is going to absolutely implode
by amoorthy | 2026-03-06 21:20:04+00:00
This. I feel this all the time. I love 3Blue1Brown's videos and when I watch them I feel like I really get a concept. But I don't retain it as well as I do things I learned in school.

It's possible my brain is not as elastic now in my 40s. Or maybe there's no substitute for doing something yourself (practice problems) and that's the missing part.
by georgewfraser | 2026-03-06 21:21:19+00:00
Claude-in-Slack is a big enough feature to overcome the slack-connect network effect. Openness is absolutely key! I wrote this post because I hoped that if Anthropic is already planning to do this I might be able to influence them to make open-data part of the plan. But openness by itself isn't a big enough feature to get users.
by FitchApps | 2026-03-06 21:21:25+00:00
Right. What about to K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid)? If I need a bunch of agents and various levels of orchestration to simply close a bunch of Jira tasks then we have a problem. Also, what happens in a few years when this start failing and human operators are no longer able to troubleshoot the issue, forget fixing it.
by troupo | 2026-03-06 21:22:02+00:00
> Claude Code could absolutely build a chat client in the hands of someone who could also build the rest around it.

So why can't Anthropic build a CLI client that doesn't flickr and doesn't consume 68 GB to run a CLI wrapper on top of their API? https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
by furyofantares | 2026-03-06 21:22:13+00:00
Department of Defense has historically been a prime example of newspeak.

I think Department of War is also newspeak. Or at least, they didn't change the name just to get the name in line with the amount of war the department does.

They changed it because they wanted to do more even more war. The amount of war the department does under the name "Defense" has been status quo for a long time, and my take is they wanted us to think of them differently so they could do even more war, which they have since been doing.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-06 21:23:12+00:00
That's roughly on par with saying nobody needs the internet or a library at all.

Back the 1920s having a personal library was fairly common for people with more than two dimes, they had this thing called an 'Ex Libris' which roughly translates as 'from the books of'. This was a little piece of paper, often very nicely designed that you glued to the first page of a book and then you could borrow it freely and sooner or later it would find its way back to you.

This was the rough equivalent of wikipedia, only a lot slower and less convenient. Then encyclopedias (which existed for a long time) became larger and larger, I had one from the 18th century that got lost in a move but it was a work of art, so much effort had gone into making that. The encyclopedias of the newer ages were however far larger and covered more subjects. Ever year a new batch of pages or the occasional reprint was the norm. And then personal libraries went the way of the dodo. Every time one of my family members dies there is always the same question: what will happen to all the books. These people - and me too - spent a fortune on their books, untold tens of thousands over a lifetime. They were well read, not 'browsing' information but actually reading - and occasionally writing.

That library in the article is exceptional in one way: that it does not look like it was shared. But I can totally sympathize: some people are focused on the number of digits on their bank account, others derive their sense of wealth and accomplishment from their bookshelves. I don't own any books I have not read, but I do understand people buying books that they intend to read at some point but never get around to.

As these things go, I'd be happy have a million more book hoarders, even if they don't read them all, so they can be passed on to the next generation of booklovers, assuming they can still be found.
by coder543 | 2026-03-06 21:23:52+00:00
Why on earth would Anthropic commit to interoperability?

That is the company that doesn't interoperate with the standard LLM APIs that OpenAI developed, which everyone else in the industry has adopted and uses. Whether OpenAI's APIs are great or perfect or not, they are the standard that the industry has settled on.

That is the same company that refuses to add support for AGENTS.md that everyone else in the industry uses, despite over 3000 upvotes: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235

Anthropic's Claude Code is also one of the only agentic coding CLI tools that isn't open source.

I'm not sure which principles you think Anthropic stands by... but interoperability is not one of their strong suits, from what I've seen.
by sp1nningaway | 2026-03-06 21:24:06+00:00
What a strange thing to post on a corporate CEO blog - proof that AI is making it too easy create things without asking why. How does it serve Fivetran to post open letter about why Slack sucks? This only happens if it's easy to write a couple bullet points and have Claude fill in the rest... If an LLM wasn't used they would have realized it wasn't worth a post during the process of writing it.
by maldev | 2026-03-06 21:24:25+00:00
I like that OpenAI is a little bit more towards freedom than Anthropic, and most so of the "First class" models. I still have a Gemini subscription as that's the most uncensored of the second tier ones, but for most things OpenAI is good.

I also like that OpenAI is contributing a lot to partner programs and integrations. I'm of the opinion that AI capabilities will soon become a flat line, and integrations are the future. I also like that the CEO is a bit more energetic and personable that Anthropic. I also think Anthropic is extremely woke and preaches a big game of safety and censorship, which I morally disagree with. Didn't they literally spin off from OpenAI because they felt they were obligated to censor the models?

I think we've unlocked a new world and a new level of capabilities that can't go back in. Just like you can't censor the internet, you can't censor AI. I don't want us to be China of AI and emulate their internet.

Also, I support the US military and government, and think we're the defenders of the world, and we need unlocked AI capabilities to make sure we can keep our freedoms and stop the bad guys. AI can save lives, actual tangible lives, and protect us from those who wish us harm. OpenAI seems to want to be the company that supports the troops, and I think it's a good thing. I don't see it as a bad thing when a terrorist gets blown up through AI capabilities on large datasets and can support on analysts in American superiority.
by subscribed | 2026-03-06 21:24:46+00:00
I learn fastest from the examples, from application of the skill/knowledge - with explanations.

AIs allowed me to get on with Python MUCH faster than I was doing myself, and understand more of the arcane secrets of jq in 6 months than I was able in few years before.

And AIs mistakes are brilliant opportunity to debug, to analyse, and to go back to it saying "I beg you pardon, wth is this" :) pointing at the elementary mistakes you now see because you understand the flow better.

Recently I had a fantastic back and forth with Claude and one of my precious tools written in python - I was trying to understand the specifics of the particular function's behaviour, discussing typing, arguing about trade-offs and portability. The thing I really like in it that I always get a pushback or things to consider if I come up with something stupid.

It's a tailored team exercise and I'm enjoying it.
by afavour | 2026-03-06 21:25:08+00:00
> The work is good until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and keeps the people committing code.

I'm no AI booster but I think this is exact scenario where AI-driven development is going to allow those non-coding developers to shine. They still remember how code works (and have probably still done PR review from time to time) so they're well placed to write planning documents for an AI agent and verify its output.
by jdwithit | 2026-03-06 21:25:31+00:00
I'm also looking right now and a lot of that resonates with me. The posted salary ranges are often a complete joke as you noted. "The pay band for this role is $80,000-250,000 commensurate with experience and interview performance". Yeah OK buddy are you seriously trying to tell me you have multiple people with the exact same job title making salaries over $100k apart? Feels like they're just giving the finger to lawmakers through malicious compliance.

I've also run into the industry specialization roadblock a few times. Got turned down by a fintech company after multiple interview rounds because I did not have banking industry experience, for example. I guess I get it as a tie breaker but I've operated in a PCI compliant environment for years, seems like that should count as relevant experience? Also if you're going to dumpster candidates without banking experience why on earth did you waste several hours of your staff's time giving me tech screens?

Job hunting has always sucked. But it feels particularly busted at the moment. The process is miserable. If you've coasted to an easy hiring in the last year, you're either amazing (and hats off to you!) or got very lucky.
by echelon | 2026-03-06 21:26:43+00:00
No. This is a CEO expressing righteous indignation about a company that provides (seemingly) little value and has almost no competition.

Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful. And Slack costs way too much. If there were any competitors, the price would drop significantly. It's not like chat is a hard problem. And Slack's app is an absolute bear.
by alisatao | 2026-03-06 21:26:55+00:00
Sage | Engineering & Product | Hybrid (2 days remote, 3 days in New York City/NYC area) | Full-Time | https://www.sagehealth.com

We're building hardware & software systems to improve elder care, and we're used by thousands across the US. Want to know that your work is directly improving people's lives? Come talk to us. https://www.sagehealth.com/company/careers

We also just announced our $65 million Series C round led by Goldman Sachs this week.

Current roles include:

> Senior Applied Machine Learning Engineer - for our fall detection product team

> Senior Software Engineer - Data & Integrations - for business-critical data flows

> Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Edge - for our IoT systems

> Staff Data Product Developer - engineering for customer analytics

> Tech Lead/Manager, Native - to be posted; for our mobile native app strategy

Keep an eye on our Careers page, and feel free to reach out to alisa [at] sagehealth dot com with questions.
by docjay | 2026-03-06 21:27:08+00:00
Once again there’s another horror story from someone who doesn’t use punctuation. I’d love to see the rest of the prompts; I’d bet real cash they’re a flavor of:

“but wont it break prod how can i tell”

“i don want yiu to modify it yet make a backup”

“why did you do it????? undo undo”

“read the file…later i will ask you questions”

Every single story I see has the same issues.

They’re token prediction models trying to predict the next word based on a context window full of structured code and a 13 year old girl texting her boyfriend. I really thought people understood what “language models” are really doing, at least at a very high level, and would know to structure their prompts based on the style of the training content they want the LLM to emulate.
by anthk | 2026-03-06 21:27:18+00:00
50/50, because once you boot a 32 bit os you can run 16 bit binaries :)

I'm pretty sure that if I make a dual-kernel 9front (9pc and 9pc64 available at boot) in a 64 bit machine and I compile emu2 for it, DOS COM binaries might be trapped enough to run simple text mode tools under the 386 port.
by tialaramex | 2026-03-06 21:27:20+00:00
For one thing, some of the places which would publish this kind of thing will authorize authors to provide anybody and everybody pre-prints but not the final copy they published.

In principle you could go (pay to†) read the actual final published copy, maybe it's different, but almost always it's basically the same, the text is enough to qualify.

If you go to https://eel.is/c++draft/ you'll find the "Draft" C++ standard, and it has this text:

Note: this is an early draft. It's known to be incomplet and incorrekt, and it has lots of bad formatting.

Nevertheless, the people who wrote your C++ compiler used that "draft" document, because it isn't reasonable to wait a few years for ISO to publish the "real" document which is identical other than lacking that scary text and having a bunch of verbiage about how ISO owns this document and it mustn't be republished.

And you might be thinking "OK, I'm sure those GNU hippies don't pay for a real published copy, but surely the Microsoft Corporation buys their engineers a real one". Nope. Waste of money.

† If you have a relationship with a research institution it might have this or be willing to help you order it from somewhere else at no personal cost.
by ValentineC | 2026-03-06 21:27:36+00:00
> But to get the most out of AI you should really be prompting as if you were writing a formal letter to the British throne explaining the background of your request. Basic English writing skills, and the ability to formulate your thoughts in a clear manner, have become essential skills for engineering (and something many developers simply lack).

That's probably why spec driven development has taken off.

The developers who can't write prompts now get AI to help with their English, and with clarifying their thoughts, so that other AI can help write their code.
by dastapov | 2026-03-06 21:27:49+00:00
This sounds a lot like a task of 2004 ICFPC Programming contest: ants, pheromone trails, only local vision, etc:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060709155354/http://www.cis.up...

I can't see the rules of this challenge, but it sounds really darn close.
by bell-cot | 2026-03-06 21:28:08+00:00
> do I say ... ?

YES. Private, verbally. Intro with your long-ago medical experience in the area. Disclaimer with "obviously that experience is strongly biased toward illnesses, since they were in the hospital". Dunno whether you should mention anything as specific as "Likely he's digesting blood". Close with something about "not my business, but if you have not seen a doctor, then please do so, for your health's sake". Make it clear that he doesn't have to say anything to you in reply - not even a "thank you", let alone an answer or follow-up.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-03-06 21:28:23+00:00
> San Diego does have a bunch of health tech, but it pales in comparison to Boston.

I don't have firm data on this, but colloquially among medical people, San Diego is seen to have more biotech startups than any other metro, including Boston/SF.

Boston has more research, of course, though SD is competitive there as well.

We can disagree about numbers etc, but 'pales' doesn't reflect reality.

edit: https://www.cbre.com/insights/local-response/global-life-sci... -- support for it being an important life science market
by simonw | 2026-03-06 21:28:26+00:00
The HackerOne slop is because there's a financial incentive (bug bounties) involved, which means people who don't know what they are doing blindly submit anything that an LLM spots for them.

If you're running the security audit yourself you should be in a better position to understand and then confirm the issues that the coding agents highlight. Don't treat something as a security issue until you can confirm that it is indeed a vulnerability. Coding agents can help you put that together but shouldn't be treated as infallible oracles.
by dylan604 | 2026-03-06 21:28:59+00:00
Somebody really has it out for you killing your comments

I see what you're saying. As much as I dislike it, it makes sense if you agree with the Project 2025 view of the power of POTUS. Clearly the majority of SCOUTS does with that ruling. I don't agree with it as I don't think the founding fathers would have ever wanted POTUS to have that much protection, but I'm of no significance so what I do or don't agree with is just some guy on the internet yelling at clouds.
by EdNutting | 2026-03-06 21:29:06+00:00
That depends.

As per my root comment, if you ignore a lot of the marketing of AI and view it as just a tool, then I agree with your point about it doing what you tell it but I still want the tool to help me avoid making mistakes (and I’d like it to work quite hard at that - much harder, it seems, than it currently does). And probably to the extent that it refuses to run dangerous commands for me and tells me to copy/paste them and run them myself if I really want to take the risk.

If, however, we swallow the marketing hook, line and sinker: then yeah, I want the AI to behave like the experienced engineer it’s supposed to be.
by jjmarr | 2026-03-06 21:29:21+00:00
> I have never seen any performance problem being solved by running it on Azure's virtualization

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I am not virtualizing the workspace. I'm using `recc` which is like `distcc` or `ccache` in that it wraps the compiler job. Every developer keeps their workstation. It just routes the actual `clang` or `gcc` calls to a Kubernetes cluster which provides distributed build and cache.

> Isn't there a less convoluted way of making the best engineers leave?

We have 7000+ compiler jobs in a clean build because it is a big codebase. People are waiting hours for CI.

I'm sure that drives attrition and bringing that down to minutes will help retain talent.

> Tens of thousands of vCPUs for a single compilation run, or to accommodate 100 developers who try to compile their own changes?

Because it uses remote execution, it will ideally do both. My belief is that an individual developer launching 6000 compiler jobs because they changed a header will smooth out over 300 developers that generally do incremental builds. Likewise, this'll eliminate redundant recompilation when git pulling since this also serves as a cache.
by fsloth | 2026-03-06 21:30:00+00:00
FWIW this is the best kind of job ever for me as well:

"when you started you didn't even know if there was a solution."

Regardless what the problem is - as long as I know _nobody knows if there is a solution_ it's an instant sugar rush.

You are free to bang your head against a stone wall for months trying to crack the damn thing.

OFC you need to deliver in the end. And this requires then ruthless "worse is better" mentality - ship something - anything. Preferably a the smallest package that can act as mvp that you know you can extend _if this is the thing_ what people want.

Because that's the other side of the coin - if the solution is not known - people are also not aware if the solution has true value or if it is a guess.

So in any case you have to rush to the mvp.

Such joy!

Of course the mvp must land, and must be extensible.

But these type of MVP:s are not a slam dunk.

The combined requirement of a) must ship within limited time b) nobody knows what _does_ require a certain mindset.
by joemi | 2026-03-06 21:30:06+00:00
"Windows" actually is related to what it does. As you might already know, before Windows, you just had DOS, which was 100% full screen all the time. Then Windows came along an let you run DOS programs (and Windows programs, of course) inside of their own windows, and let you have multiple windows open at once. Then, only after that was hugely successful, it became its own standalone OS. So at least at the time it was created and became popular, its name was very related to what it did.
by mlyle | 2026-03-06 21:30:33+00:00
I really meant to say that there's no way to really know of any region of the CO2 vs. temperature graph if there's positive or negative feedback dominating. You're proposing it all runs away in one lump, and I'm saying that there can be chunks of runaway and then damping. An extreme case would be if things are really underdamped somewhere and we spiral down to one of these points.

There are all kinds of things that have time lags from years to centuries, though, that could cause ringing (ocean heat uptake, rates of carbon uptake as the biosphere adapts and shifts, etc).

Indeed, we have evidence of ringing in the geologic climate record-- like Dansgaard-Oeschger events. We also live with ringing in weather systems like El Nino. Warming intensifying or creating new modes of oscillation would not be that surprising.
by projektfu | 2026-03-06 21:31:17+00:00
Smalltalk makes it a little harder than some languages because a method has no real idea who will be receiving the messages it sends. People have done work on implementing types (Strongtalk) to, among other things, limit the search space. But you're right that a lot of moving parts means that eventually you have to have a lot of open context to view it statically.

Another way is to trace things in the debugger, and then you get the dynamic picture.
by MBCook | 2026-03-06 21:31:29+00:00
I’ve been in a film photography sub on Reddit lately and the TSA comes up frequently. They can’t even follow their own rules on film, telling people it has to be scanned (it doesn’t), scanning is safe up 3800 ISO (that’s not a speed), etc.

I’m not surprised they can’t get something important right.

What if someone had to fly for necessary medical treatment? What if the device had been something even more important, like a pacemaker or artificial heart like Cheney had?