Hacker News Reader

Comment by tempaccount5050 | Hacker News Reader

Whether or not you want to admit that is up to you. If you're selling automation or efficiency gains, you're removing human labor.

View on HN

My first "job" in computing, where someone else paid me for code, was in a research context where we were modeling radio propagation. Nothing about that was removing human labor. It in face eventually called for a bunch of humans to interact with each other. See: https://www.hamsci.org/basic-project/2017-total-solar-eclips...

I don't think it is fair to claim computers are about putting people out of jobs.

Human labor could do the math by hand

And in fact, was how it was done.

I think it is. Before computers you would have had to write all that down on paper logs. By using code, you saved yourself time. If it wasn't less labor, you wouldn't have done it that way.

Before it was less labor, they might not have done it at all. Computers let you do things quicker. So you do more things.

Ok, then go work on homelessness or political corruption. It's not like we have a dearth of problems. Coding is solved.

How is coding “solved”? Even if you want to use an LLM, you still have to explain precisely what you want.

People *did* write down these logs, manually, and submit them.

And without software, what then, make a bunch of books and mail it to all these people? On this site of all sites, it's blowing my mind that this kind of thing isn't obvious to everyone. I guess maybe it isn't if you were born before the internet, but man, I'm really surprised by some of these comments.

We did allow people to send us letters with QSO logs on paper.

> Before computers

Computer used to mean "human who does math". Before machine computers, we had human computers. Machine computers replaced all of these human computers.

I'm improving error prone systems to make the world more efficient, not to replace people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com