Hacker News Reader

prime_ursidon Oceans hit highest temperature on record

If the climate effects don’t get you, the political fallout of a million climate refugees showing up at your borders will.

prime_ursidon GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%

Wouldn’t that be against TOS?

prime_ursidon What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

Source: it was revealed to me in a dream

prime_ursidon What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

The trajectory is that the LLM providers have been making prompting increasingly dead-simple for the past 2 years. Any edge a group of individuals may have in knowing how to use LLMs gets absorbed into the LLM product.

prime_ursidon If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law

> What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away

prime_ursidon Half-Baked Product

Nah, I disagree. I can see why you think this is another piece glorifying engineers at the expense of the business. However, as a technical founder in a former life, I saw a handful of mistakes that the engineers made. Lack of focus, lack of pushback, poor management of the engineering team, lack of product thinking, lack of connection to and empathy for the end user. I could find more if I re-read it.

I found this piece to contain more layers of detail than the usual feel-good dunk-on-bean-counters rants.

prime_ursidon HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

This is a technique called LLM-as-Judge. Well-studied at this point. Here’s a good intro: https://www.evidentlyai.com/llm-guide/llm-as-a-judge

I recommend reading Hamel.dev posts. Here’s an example: https://hamel.dev/blog/posts/evals/

prime_ursidon The AirPods Effect

> If you ever listen to music and sing along, even for a few seconds, the volume cuts

Yup, and I also have this problem when I laugh out loud listening to comedy podcasts.

prime_ursidon Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

> We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art.

Who is “we” in this sentence? A tiny subsection of metalheads? The vast majority of people aren’t seeking out the most mechanically dexterous musicians to listen to.

prime_ursidon Why vampires live forever

I felt the same way and came to the comments to see if anyone else smelled it. It's either AI-assisted writing or people are genuinely starting to write like how ChatGPT sounds.

First, the structure of this satirical post is headings and bullet points. Fine, whatever, a lot of people write this way.

Then there's the exhausting litany of super short sentence fragments.

> He published this. Openly. In a book. As a priest.

This is how airport novels and LinkedIn "thought leadership" clickbait is written, so ok, fine, I'll let it pass.

Then I started to notice a lot of: "It's not X. It's Y" or "this isn't just A. It's B."

> Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.

Before LLMs, people weren't writing this way. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon: it's insulting to read, like the reader is a 5-year-old.

When several of these smells pile up, I close the tab immediately and try to forget about it. This one was so egregious that I had to read the whole thing and then come to the comments to rant a bit.

prime_ursidon U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

And where did those people get their Masters degrees and PhDs from?

prime_ursidon Man shot and killed by federal agents in south Minneapolis this morning

Another reason: individual liberty is and has been an important value in the tech community since the 1960s.

prime_ursidon Man shot and killed by federal agents in south Minneapolis this morning

If choosing your place of employment to align with your values is a “virtue signal,” then maybe we should all be signaling our virtues a lot more.

prime_ursidon ChatGPT Pulse

This is so sad. I read this comment a few hours ago and keep thinking about it. You seem to be making a relatively good effort to understand but coming up short.

Our society is so cooked, man. We don’t even realize how over it is, and even people genuinely trying to understand are not able to.

prime_ursidon Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

If you’d trust generative AI over a physician, go in wide-eyed knowing that you’re still placing your trust in some group of people. You just don’t have an individual to blame if something goes wrong, but rather the entire supply chain that brings the model and its inference. Every link in that chain can shrug their shoulders and point to someone else.

This may be acceptable to you as an individual, but it’s not to me.

prime_ursidon Microsoft has urged its employees on H-1B and H-4 visas to return immediately

“Labor power” in this context refers to unions, collective bargaining, and so on. The NLRB has been de facto shut down by this administration.

prime_ursidon DynaVR Paul, Killed in His Labyrinth [Satire]

A blog post from a parody of Silicon Valley productivity blogs.

prime_ursidon Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

Finally, someone in this thread says this. Thank you!

This opinion column from The Hill is written by a Fox News contributor. Of course it’s going to leave out certain inconvenient facts in service of a nativist agenda. The HN community time and time again shows that they are ready to be whipped up into an anti-immigrant frenzy at the drop of a hat.

prime_ursidon Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

One of the rebuttals at the end of the post addresses this.

> That’s only true when you’re in a large corporation. When you’re by yourself, when you’re the stakeholder as well as the developer, you’re not in meetings. You're telling me that people aren’t shipping anything solo anymore? That people aren’t shipping new GitHub projects that scratch a personal itch? How does software creation not involve code?

So if you’re saying “LLMs do speed up coding, but that was never the bottleneck,” then the author is saying, “it’s sometimes the bottleneck. E.g., personal projects”

prime_ursidon I Am An AI Hater

How many of those users are paying users? What’s the churn rate?

And how profitable are OpenAI and other providers?

They’re running at a loss. The startups using LLMs as their product are only viable as long as they get free credits from OpenAI. The only people making a profit are NVidia.

prime_ursidon Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

Sometimes the tradeoff is that someone gets richer / inflates their ego while most people’s lives get worse in a tangible way.

prime_ursidon LLM Inevitabilism

The way you phrased it reveals how these model providers have framed the conversation in their favor. Models don’t “think.”

prime_ursidon US economy shrank 0.5% in the first quarter, worse than earlier estimates

No serious attempts yet but there are seeds being sown by high-profile right wingers to manufacture consent: https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/right-wing-media-ca...