MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ehnto | 2026-03-08 05:43:35+00:00
I actually think AI has an unfair advantage with software that is making it seem far more capable that it is. Software is entirely text based, and producers have been putting their outputs and problem solving online for free for decades.

I think applying AI to other white collar roles that also require problem solving but do not have as much training, will prove much more difficult. Even coding on proprietary dominated domains is a much, much worse experience than people have with more accessible code. Using it for electronics has been hit or miss, embedded software is a bit shakey, game development is also challenging to use it for etc.
by dylan604 | 2026-03-08 05:44:17+00:00
How good is an Iranian navy really? At this point, seriously asking, why is there anything left of an Iranian navy? If we're in a shooting conflict that's a war not a war, why would they not be going after anything that could be considered a blockade? I'm going with these guys didn't have a real plan, and that block the straight is something they actually didn't consider so nothing in place to counter. It's Keystone cops
by cyber_kinetist | 2026-03-08 05:44:25+00:00
The problem with the EU is that now they depend on rare earth minerals / solar panels / etc. for their infrastructure, which means more dependency on China. However, as the war unfolds, I bet the EU will certainly want to cozy up more with China than whatever the hell that is the Middle East and the US (and hell no they don't want to depend on Russia either!)
by themafia | 2026-03-08 05:44:48+00:00
> Or that everyone in a region agrees on what time it is.

And how does the existence of the tzdb solve this problem in any way?

> Or that ccTLDs are sufficient to unambiguously cover the entire earths surface.

The user can still pick whatever they want. Just as they can now. The user can resolve ambiguity for themselves. Unless the tzdb decides unilaterally that their politically organized name for their timezone is somehow "wrong" and must be moved to the "backwards" file to be removed entirely. In which case they must accept whatever ambiguity the tzdb has created for them. "US/Pacific" is unambiguous. "America/Los_Angeles" is not.

> Your solution is insufficiently complex to solve a problem of this complexity.

You need to solve one problem. Publishing official tz information. If you have extended needs, then by all means, it's a computer, do whatever you like, but for the overwhelming majority of the population of earth, they need one function.

"What time does my government think it is because that time controls when things open, when I'm late for work, and when official paperwork has to be filed."

If you want a "whimsical" database that correctly gets timezones right for certain Japanese islands during the war, then you have that, but honestly, what general use case is there for this?
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-08 05:44:48+00:00
Unions won't do anything for AI based job displacement though, because they don't need you, whether you're in a union or not. I see this going the same way as SAG for example, if AI video or film creation ever gets good enough where a single "director" can make an entire movie themselves with no actors.

Unions and indeed any bargaining organization only have leverage when their people are needed, but what happens when the people themselves are needed no longer?
by wvxf | 2026-03-08 05:45:43+00:00
I know a lot of people working across portfolio management and tax accounting. Nobody I know of is using LLMs much and frankly their management has started to back-off pushing it more in the workplace.

LLMs suit some jobs more than others. Its quite possible SWE's are the only profession massively affected - whether that means a evolution of the role or decline/death is another question.
by dzink | 2026-03-08 05:46:52+00:00
I grew up in a world that didn’t have secure corporate jobs as a thing. That’s most of the world outside the US. There, you could get secure government jobs (if you come from the right family or connections) or you had to learn how to build a business yourself. Anything else, paid barely livable wage if at all.

The way to survive it was to 1) move to a village/small town where you could have a garden for fruits, vegetables, corn, chickens, maybe a pig or two for winter. 2) Young people lived with their parents while the parents saved up to build/buy their children their own flat or house. Children whose parents saved up enough would often start a family after getting their own place. Those who didn’t, co-lived with parents.

The secure middle class corporate employment in the US is getting severely downgraded by AI. While there is talk of universal basic income the reality is that many many companies depend on the surplus that middle class families enjoy spending and without it, vast swaths of industries will get starved as well. The solution is to show people quickly how to hunt and gather and farm as makers instead of just employees. Figuring out what is needed, taking on a small corner of needs somewhere in meat space or online, and planting there. AI has been fantastic at helping even solo founders with that. They need to encourage a cornucopia of ideas and experimenters as early as k12. They need to set up more favorable conditions for handling the admin side as well.

If the US government does not encourage cornucopia of AI-powered small business entrepreneurship and lets monopolies squash that early, they will end up with far FAR worse conditions. Any monopoly who keeps pitching “universal basic income” while actively avoids paying taxes, will end up forced into more taxes.

Big tech needs to make room for people to build and grow businesses (looking at you, Apple, for copying every successful app with a native, and you Meta for eating every social competitor) or they will end up paying for everyone’s universal basic income and then some.

If this country wants to survive the AI era, it needs to remove the pink glasses of “secure corporate job” and teach people how to plant, hunt, and gather as independent players in the market really fast.
by tetrisgm | 2026-03-08 05:47:18+00:00
Happy to explain this one as I have relatives from there. The only way to leave and get a visa abroad is to study elsewhere.

I witnessed this myself in the daughter of family friends whose eyes were dead and even though we met her, every second of her thoughts were dedicated to studying so she could GTFO as fast as humanly possible.

It's that, or stay in Iran. What would you choose?
by halayli | 2026-03-08 05:47:20+00:00
The performance observation is real but the two approaches are not equivalent, and the article doesn't mention what you're actually trading away, which is the part that matters.

The C++11 threadsafety guarantee on static initialization is explicitly scoped to block local statics. That's not an implementation detail, that's the guarantee.

The __cxa_guard_acquire/release machinery in the assembly is the standard fulfilling that contract. Move to a private static data member and you're outside that guarantee entirely. You've quietly handed that responsibility back to yourself.

Then there's the static initialization order fiasco, which is the whole reason the meyers singleton with a local static became canonical. Block local static initializes on first use, lazily, deterministically, thread safely. A static data member initializes at startup in an order that is undefined across translation units. If anything touches Instance() during its own static initialization from a different TU, you're in UB territory. The article doesn't mention this.

Real world singleton designs also need: deferred/configuration-driven initialization, optional instantiation, state recycling, controlled teardown. A block local static keeps those doors open. A static data member initializes unconditionally at startup, you've lost lazy-init, you've lost the option to not initialize it, and configuration based instantiation becomes awkward by design.

Honestly, if you're bottlenecking on singleton access, that's design smell worth addressing, not the guard variable.
by tombert | 2026-03-08 05:47:22+00:00
I've been feeling this.

I don't really feel like it's a "bad" thing; I've said for a long time if a job can be automated, then it should be automated. I still do believe that, even if I am probably on the losing end of that in the not-too-distant future.

I think I am reasonably good at software, and I think I write code that's still a bit better than what Claude does. In fact, I suspect that will actually be true for quite awhile, but the problem is that "writing code 20% better" isn't exactly a selling point when my competition is $100/month and takes like 1/20th the time. Most software, even before AI, wasn't optimal and was kind of shitty, and good engineers were still always replaceable with shittier cheaper ones if it was economically viable.

I tend to land on my feet for this stuff, so I still think I'll be ok; I know how to use the tools and there will still need to be some humans who understand how this shit works, so I'm not worried about becoming homeless or anything. What I'm mostly worried about is that I won't ever have fun at work anymore. I liked solving problems, I liked thinking of clever solutions to avoid a mutex or increase concurrency, I liked figuring out how to squeeze a few percent more performance out of my given limitations. It's something I'm good at, and it's basically the only way to get decent money while doing math.

Since the ceiling for writing software has been significantly lowered, I think eventually the cushy yuppie status of software is going to shrink.

Maybe I should learn to weld or something.
by canpan | 2026-03-08 05:47:56+00:00
So I see two sides.

On one hand some jobs with human element are safe, at first. Think of artists being made obsolete by the camera. Portrait artists became mostly obsolete, but we still pay for art. It's the story behind the art that became important. Or, I still go to cafes with nice atmosphere and friendly staff. There are restaurants with robot staff here in Japan, much cheaper. After the meal you pay at the table without ever talking to a person. But it does not feel nice to sit in there, so I gladly pay a premium for the nice coffee.

On the other hand, it is not only software jobs in danger, but all office jobs. So a lot of people may suddenly be out of money. Let's say you open a cafe, but no one has money to come and pay. Society has to change a lot from the current model to be able to handle this.
by bambax | 2026-03-08 05:48:26+00:00
Yes, I agree. I think it's true there will be less demand for developers, and that the problem of mentoring and growing juniors into seniors is dire and complex.

But I don't think the demand will ever be zero, or that laypersons will ever write (useful) software using AI, because most people do not understand what software is, what it does, what it can do, where to start, what to ask, what is data, what is input vs. output, etc. They are incredibly clueless, and it's not a problem of intelligence. Some of the most clever people I know have no idea about this. (Maybe they don't care enough to understand, or maybe it's a mindset that you either have or don't have, IDK.)

I just don't see how we could do without people to think things through.
by fzeindl | 2026-03-08 05:48:27+00:00
I once digged into this database out of curiosity and found incredibly detailed research on many edge cases. Like time zones in Germany being temporarily aligned to Moscow during soviet occupancy after World War Two.

One particular commenter stood out to me, so I looked him up because I was interested which kind of people spend so much time correcting timezone information.

Turns out he was an astrologer and wanted his astrology-program to work perfectly correct.

I find it funny that we have to thank astrology for the correct calculations in our banking software :).
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-08 05:48:40+00:00
> though obviously less automated than what I had in mind. What's needed is something with less friction - which could be achieved using a browser extension

Yes, I completely agree with that but I suppose making a browser extension (for linkhut) is infinitely easier than the previous attempt and something which is more easily doable
There is already an extension which can do the first part of adding a website into linkhut simpler (its named linkput[0]) for firefox and its open source. had to search it up.

> but also needs something to prevent shilling and other forms of abuse. (Or, more to the point, a method by which any user who shills can be easily canned by other users.)

I am not quite able to think of what you mean by that but I do think that there are some ways to do it but its a problem that internet faces at large of abuse in general and its a careful line between privacy and abuse.

That being said, I am happy to help you find this cool project haha :D

I think that if you build something like an extension for linkhut, it would be interesting so good luck with making that hopefully! Glad I could help.

[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~silasjelley/linkput
by iamthemonster | 2026-03-08 05:48:50+00:00
Sorry I didn't see your comment until now, apologies for the late reply.

A classic messy judgement call would be:

1. Input information includes some word of mouth info that I have no reason to doubt, but also absolutely no way of verifying against field data

2. A single piece of equipment is not functioning - the plant is reasonably safe to operate with the failure, but how safe? Are the other relevant protective layers in place and effective in the relevant scenarios?

3. If I decide to implement a really robust and good-quality solution that'll stand the test of time, will it actually take so long to implement that I would have been better off with something simpler but less robust?

4. Is my decision making process clearly communicated enough for the decision makers involved? Which installation manager is on shift?

5. If the regulator audited my decision making process would they raise a recommendation? So what if there's a 0.1% risk that they'll raise a recommendation as long as people are safe?

These kinds of thought processes are where I add value as an engineer in a way that's irreplaceable by LLMs. I just hope that LLMs can really improve how quickly I can access data to make my human decision-making better based in fact.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-03-08 05:49:57+00:00
What's really interesting is that the LLMs become better and better at setting up the environments / tasks themselves. I got this surreal experience the other day where I was writing a prompt0n.md file (I try to log all my prompts in a .folder to keep track of what I prompt and the results I get), and the autocomplete in antigravity kinda sorta wrote the entire prompt by itself... Granted it had all the previous prompts in the same folder (don't know exactly what it grabs in context by itself) and I was working on the next logical step, but it kept getting the "good bits" out of them, and following the pattern quite nicely. I only edited minor things, and refused one line completion in the entire prompt.
by with | 2026-03-08 05:50:16+00:00
docker is bloated. i'm almost certain half of every image is dead weight. unused apt packages, full distros for a single binary, shell configs nobody touches. but the incentive is to make things work, not make them small. so bloat wins.

still, i use it every day and i don't see what replaces it. every "docker killer" solves one problem while ignoring the 50 things docker does well enough.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-03-08 05:50:29+00:00
Absolutely. But what people don't realize is this sort of thing happens in China too, it's just never reported or heard about, other than some whispers here and there, because of such tight control over the media, the internet, and public discourse. In the US, as much as the fascists are trying to take over, at least you can still protest and make your voice heard.
by bananamerica | 2026-03-08 05:50:55+00:00
Consider using a TRT[1] Tinnitus hearing aid. It was prescribed me by my ENT doctor and it provides me with great relief. My Tinnitus is persistent and extremely loud. Loud enough that I couldn't get use to it even after many years. I'm not sure what would be the procedure for you to get one in your country. It is not a cure, but it made my life immensely better. I wished I had gotten it sooner. Good luck!

---

[1] Tinnitus Retraining Therapy
by roenxi | 2026-03-08 05:51:12+00:00
That sounds kinda stupid. These days when someone says something ridiculous but pro-war it generally turns out they are just lying through their teeth and just not being honest about their motivations (eg, getting kickbacks or they're worried about tactical political issues). It seems more than likely that when Kissinger writes that we're reading someone being dishonest.

In addition, I'm struggling with the idea that Kissinger of all people cared enough about what happened to Vietnamese people for it to affect policy. He was the sort who would have no difficulty at all allowing bloodbaths to happen if he thought that was advantageous. His wiki page suggests, in fact, that he did do exactly that a few times.
by lukan | 2026-03-08 05:51:38+00:00
Couple of reasons, but mainly speed and avaiability.

I can give Claude a job anytime and it will do it immediately.

And yes, I will have to double check anything important, but I am way better and faster at checking, than doing it myself.

So obviously I don't want a shitty LLM as coworker, but a competent one. But the progress they made is pretty astonishing and they are good enough now that I started really integrating them.
by toast0 | 2026-03-08 05:52:43+00:00
> Here Eggert is ostensibly trying to get a sovereign government to participate in the "TZDB's requirements" and since he can't has to invent a hack to make things appear to work. Which is completely backwards and highlights precisely why I think this whole centralized database concept for this problem is flawed.

Eggert is petitioning the government for a redress of greivances on behalf of more or less the entire computing industry (or whatever portion follows POSIX): to whit, the world has come to agreement that timezone abbreviations must match [-+[:alnum:]]{3,6} and PT does not match that.

Now, BC government could ask every vendor of software that displays a time zone abbreviation to use PT, and then they could individually come back and say, no it needs three letters. And then they could threaten to not buy products that won't say PT and not allow imports of said products... But then the vendors would probably ask if they have control over imports or if that's a federal responsibility (I don't know) and that they're not doing a one off to fix something for BC. But if that's how it's going to be, probably maybe come back with POs in 5 years when POSIX standards have filtered down to allow two character abbreviations. Seems easier to get told it's a problem in one place and hopefully figure out what the answer is once.
by PretzelPirate | 2026-03-08 05:53:07+00:00
> Godot is for people who want to make games but don't care for programming and would rather use a GUI for development.

You can write a lot of code when using Godot and mix that with capabilities provided by their editor.

You never have to use editor features, but can use them to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel.

Your comment is like saying that game engines are used by people who don't care for programming and would rather make a call to handle physics interactions.
by tombert | 2026-03-08 05:53:17+00:00
I have no fucking clue. It's been kind of depressing me. Software and cartoon trivia are basically the only things I'm good at. No one wants to pay me for cartoon trivia and AI can do that better than me anyway, so the only thing that I really have for a potential career is software.

For my entire career, only being good at software wasn't really an issue, but now I am wondering if I need to try and go back to university to study something else that can't be automated as easily, but I don't even know where to start.
by gherkinnn | 2026-03-08 05:53:31+00:00
> Look at Germany after they lost WW2; they still speak German. Their cultural identity is still very strong; maybe it affected their foreign policy a little but apart from that, it's hard to tell.

What a comically bad take. I am looking at Germany and it is very easy to tell. Then go back a generation and look at what WWI did to Germany.
by vishnugupta | 2026-03-08 05:54:30+00:00
Out of curiosity I checked out the author’s resume and this is their current position. Oh the irony!!

I built significant pieces of the Copilot onboarding, purchasing, billing and settings flow. For eight months I headed up the Copilot anti-abuse effort. I then led the launch of GitHub Models, and am now working on other Copilot projects.
by Aeglaecia | 2026-03-08 05:54:47+00:00
im sorry to hear that, some of my family members have inner ear disorders and the nausea/vertigo sounds terrible. the original comment isnt targeted at those like yourself who unfortunately must deal with damaged peripherals ... but still there is a chance it could apply. may i ask whether you ever noticed ringing in your ears to be correlated with a change of mental state? examples of this chage would be arriving at a big realisation, or commencing relaxation, or performing meditation.
by the_af | 2026-03-08 05:54:47+00:00
I'm not an expert. Probably anti Western sentiment, anti any former allies of the deposed Shah, and pro Palestinian sentiment.

But in reality this doesn't matter, because you're now moving the goalposts: I didn't argue that Iran wasn't hostile to Israel.

I claimed that Iran's nuclear program was already destroyed for 10+ years (mission success, as claimed last year with total certainty by Trump), and that Iran didn't pose a threat to the US.

Now, if the US wants to fight Israel's wars, that's cool and dandy, but the majority of Americans don't support this. Remember "America First"?
by godelski | 2026-03-08 05:56:36+00:00
> Merely being a member of the business class does not magically mean one has the ability to specify business requirements much less product specifications

Is this not why COBOL failed? Common Business-Oriented Language sure does look much more like natural language than a lot of other code, but it could never solve the abstraction needed to do the complex things.

I don't think LLMs will ever get rid of coders. Business people can no more tell an LLM what to build than they can a team of programmers. I've long argued that the contention between the "business monkeys" and "coding monkeys" is a good one. That the former focuses on making money and the latter focuses on making a better product. The contention is good because they need each other (though I do not think the dependence is symmetric).

Maybe one day AI will get there, but I don't see how it does without achieving AGI. To break down intent. To differentiate what was asked from what was intended. To understand the depth and all the context surrounding the many little parts. To understand the needs of the culture. The needs of the users. The needs of the business. This is all quite complex and it's why the number of employees typically grows quite rapidly.

How do we move forward without asking how we got here? Why we got here? How optimizing for decades (or much longer) led us to these patters. Under what conditions makes these patterns (near) optimal? I've yet to see a good answer to how LLMs actually address this. If typing was the bottleneck I think we would have optimized in very different ways.
by Curiositry | 2026-03-08 05:56:46+00:00
Qwen3.5 9b seems to be fairly competent at OCR and text formatting cleanup running in llama.cpp on CPU, albeit slow. However, I have compiled it umpteen ways and still haven't gotten GPU offloading working properly (which I had with Ollama), on an old 1650 Ti with 4GB VRAM (it tries to allocate too much memory).