MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-08 15:35:35+00:00
Text-only:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1CsokD

NB. It wasn't Apple who moved to block the secrecy of the hearing. Apple seems content to let UK Apple computer owners mistakenly believe they can trust the company's promises of "privacy". Meanwhile the company was participating in secret hearings with the government concerning computer owners' data.

"The ADP service is opt-in, meaning people have to sign up to get the protection it provides."

Defaults matter. They are intentional. They are chosen by so-called "tech" companies like Apple that interlope as alleged "necessary" intermediaries: "Send us your data and we will store it in our data centres."

Apple's default is "no end-to-end encryption". ADP off.

The judgment referenced in the submission is only the "public" one, a summary. Apple will not publish the "private" one.

The data at issue is not Apple's. But the data owners are absent from these hearings. Their only knowledge of how the "data custodian" Apple advocates, negotiates and capitulates on their behalf comes from vague publicity and the custodian itself.
by welder | 2025-04-08 15:35:36+00:00
Similar to what I'm doing with https://wonderful.dev (example dev profile: https://wonderful.dev/alan) where profiles can't be edited, devs can only connect their GitHub, StackOverflow, etc. and we fill in the profile for them with real data. No more fake Linkedin skills.

This difference here is wonderful.dev adds points to skills based on repo stars. We take a dev's contributions to a repo, times that repo's stars, then assign those points to the repo's languages on the dev's profile. It's a proxy for impact by language.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-08 15:35:49+00:00
Those were not middle class jobs before the 1950s nor were they for long afterwards.

The idea that one can be functionally illiterate yet afford a home, a car and a family by spending 40hr and no more riveting spring hangers onto Chevrolets, or whatever, is a legacy from a blip in time during which the US had a bear monopoly on state of the art for the time manufacturing.

Those men who worked comparable factory jobs in the 1870s through the 1930s had wives and kids doing piece work at home. And in the 1970s their wives all went back to work again, just outside the home.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-08 15:35:51+00:00
C solved the horrible machine code problem by inflicting programmers with the concept of undefined behavior, where blunt instruments called optimizers take a machete to your code. There's a very expensive document locked up somewhere in the ISO vault that tells you what you can and can't write in C, and if you break any of those rules the compiler is free to write whatever it wants.

This created a league of incredibly elitist[0] programmers who, having mastered what they thought was the rules of C, insisted to everyone else that the real problem was you not understanding C, not the fact that C had made itself a nightmare to program in. C is bad soil to plant a project in even if you know where the poison is and how to avoid it.

The inefficiency of Python[1] is downstream of a trauma response to C and all the many, many ways to shoot yourself in the foot with it. Garbage collection and bytecode are tithes paid to absolve oneself of the sins of C. It's not a matter of Python being "faster to write, harder to execute" as much as Python being used as a defense mechanism.

In contrast, the trade-off from AI is unclear, aside from the fact that you didn't spend time writing it, and thus aren't learning anything from it. It's one thing to sacrifice performance for stability; versus sacrificing efficiency and understanding for faster code churn. I don't think the latter is a good tradeoff! That's how we got under-baked and developer-hostile ecosystems like C to begin with!

[0] The opposite of a "DEI hire" is an "APE hire", where APE stands for "Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion"

[1] I'm using Python as a stand-in for any memory-safe programming language that makes use of a bytecode interpreter that manipulates runtime-managed memory objects.
by fatnoah | 2025-04-08 15:36:13+00:00
As an MIT reject (technically waitlisted), my very first post-graduation job was at Raytheon and much later in life, I ended up at Facebook, where I managed a team that had several engineers that joined directly from MIT. While I can't speak to the entire MIT grad cohort, fFacebook was the first-choice for everyone in this particular group.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-08 15:36:13+00:00
Moldable Development is not specific to Smalltalk. We already show how it works for other languages. Some ideas are already inspiring other environments, like Clerk.

In the meantime, consider GT as an extensive blueprint of what's possible. If there is one thing we learnt is that the technology is the smallest investment. The real investment is in learning how to exploit the idea of contextual tools for solving hard problems. That's what takes the longest, but the difference to how those problems are approached today can be measured in orders of magnitude.
by grayhatter | 2025-04-08 15:36:26+00:00
I think a tool like this would be targeted more towards eliminating false positives, rather than eliminating false negatives.

I think this tool as a whole is probably an awful way to judge a candidate. But that's not really the point. The point is to find additional candidates with a low false negative rate.

E.g. over the past year I've written tens of thousands of lines of zig code. But that's not on my resume nor my LinkedIn. this would allow someone to include me. Is the code good, or am I a good candidate? Impossible to tell... Ah, but now you have heard of me! :D

There's more fluff on the page, but it's just fluff, and safe to ignore.

> And my employer asks me to fill out a form before I publish personal projects, so that they can be sure it is unrelated to my job (and thus that they do not have a patent or copyright claim over the code). This means most of my weekend projects simply aren't public, because I can't be bothered to do the paperwork.

Your employer is bad and they should feel bad! If you have the option you should consider changing to an employer less willing to make the world worse... or maybe a jurisdiction where that toxicity is unenforceable.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-08 15:36:40+00:00
>This is the eternal evolution of individual labor.

This argument of "fuck others' jobs, I got mine" works if you're OK with having a handful of prosperous cities full of multinational conglomerates with smart/educated people in the service industry, surrounded by slums of poverty, crime and homeless people on drugs who can mug you, as their industry blue collar jobs got offshored and they couldn't "just learn to code bro".

There's a reason countries with a solid industrial base like Germany are livable almost everywhere with a lot less income inequality, poverty and homelessness, and try to hold on to these jobs.

UK's deindustrialization is also another point on the map. Great if you work at some bank/tech company in London, not so great otherwise.

>Go far enough back to individual homesteads doing some light farming, hunting, fishing.

No one's arguing about going back to the stone age. But having moved nearly all manufacturing to Asia was a mistake, not only we lost jobs but also scale, competencies and bargaining power.

Remember the covid pandemic when you couldn't get masks initially because most were made in China and they were hoarding them all for themselves? What then? Use stonks as masks?
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-08 15:36:52+00:00
That's driven by a combination of cost/pricing and innovation. We're nowhere close to the limits of either battery or solar technology. We're looking at decades of further innovation, learning effects, etc. Assuming anything else would probably be a mistake. Many respectable reporting on energy falls into the trap of being too conservative. E.g. the IEA is a repeat offender on this. Many of their estimates for decades ahead get overtaken within years of being issued.

The real question is at what relative cost level it turns into an S-curve. Right now renewables are mostly cheaper than non renewables and transitioning to a lot cheaper. A lot might turn into one or more orders of magnitude. Where does it stop? Two? Three?

What's the ultimate cost of a mwh of power? It's probably a lot lower than what people currently pay. Renewables have a bit of upfront cost but the marginal cost of using the equipment is close to zero.

Lower cost of energy opens up new use cases and drives the market up. Basically it causes people to electrify more things. Even things that we currently think of as too costly. As those things get electrified, they get cheaper. And there are people that make the investment and benefit and people that don't and get pushed out of the market.
by haswell | 2025-04-08 15:37:00+00:00
My point wasn't that there are no naturally occurring harms, but that foods which on their own are otherwise considered safe may take on a different safety profile when altered depending on the nature of that alteration.

e.g. we're beginning to realize that eating highly processed meats on a regular basis can cause GI problems/cancer in the long run while eating some of the components individually and prepared differently does not.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-08 15:37:04+00:00
FYI with pipefail enabled, if one of the pipes fails, your step will fail, there will be no error output, you won't know why it failed.

Pipefail also doesn't prevent more complex error states. For example this step from your config:

curl -L "https://github.com/casey/just/releases/download/${{ matrix.just-version }}/just-${{ matrix.just-version }}-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz" \ | sudo tar -C /usr/local/bin -xzv just

Here's the different error conditions you will run into:

1. curl succeeds, sudo succeeds, tar succeeds, but just fails to extract from the tarball. Tar reports error, step fails.

2. curl succeeds, sudo succeeds, tar fails. Sudo reports error, step fails.

3. curl succeeds, sudo fails. Shell reports error, step fails.

4. curl begins running. sudo begins running in a subshell/pipe. tar begins running under the sudo pipe, extracting half of the just binary. curl fails due to network error. Due to pipefail being enabled, shell exits immediately. There is no error message. A corrupt executable is left on-disk (which will be attempted to run if your step had failure-skipping enabled)
by zelphirkalt | 2025-04-08 15:37:07+00:00
Seeing someone wearing a suit for a dev interview would make me think one of the following:

(1) This person really really needs the job. Probably is in a bad negotiation position, due to this urgent need.

(2) Are you here to impress people with looks, or with your skills?

(3) They take looks way more serious than they should, maybe not focussing enough on the technical side of things.

(4) Hopefully this is not an "EnTeRpRiSe software" developer, and if they are, hopefully they don't work on my team and if they are, hopefully my next up manager does not get blinded by fancy clothes, instead of technical reasoning.

That said, I would try to keep an open mind about the person, but they would be initially sorted into the category of managerial or close to management, rather than close to the other engineers, which is not a positive signal to send.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-04-08 15:37:13+00:00
I mean, patents only apply in the nation where they're granted. So "ignoring" IP is just a matter of refusing to recognize foreign patents, which is something that all nations do implicitly.

Also, in most foreign countries, court cases are cheap. (They could literally be 100x cheaper to litigate than they would be in the US.)

If you're talking about in a US context specifically, then if absolutely necessary the federal government could either buy or nationalize the patents in dispute, just as all states nationalize land from time to time under eminent domain. Zvi recently wrote about this in the context of the state buying the Ozempic patent: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2025/01/21/sleep-diet-exercise-...

> [The US Government] should buy out the patents to such drugs.

> This solves the consumption side. It removes the deadweight loss triangle from lost consumption. It removes the hardship of those who struggle to pay, as we can then allow generic competition to do its thing and charge near marginal cost. It would be super popular. It uses government’s low financing costs to provide locked-in up front cold hard cash to Novo Nordisk, presumably the best way to get them and others to invest the maximum in more R&D.

> There are lots of obvious gains here, for on the order of $100 billion. Cut the check.
by pphysch | 2025-04-08 15:37:17+00:00
> stopped by a court because this counted as unfair competition with private entities

I came across this recently as well. This is one of the most insane aspects of our current zeitgeist.

In a world where VC unicorns and megacorps commonly engage in dumping behavior to coerce market share, public orgs still need to walk on eggshells so they don't outcompete the "uwu smol bean" private sector. Even when they are providing what could be considered a public good or necessity, like weather info. Totally insane.
by rbanffy | 2025-04-08 15:37:17+00:00
Indeed. The deeply alien nature of MVS and its descendants is fascinating. It's not only a difference in commands, but also the underlying concepts that don't map cleanly to concepts we got used to in Unix and Windows that causes a lot of confusion. For instance, a TSO user being unable to log in from different terminals at the same time confused me a lot until someone told me TSO users are not the same as Unix users. Also, a VM is not the same as a VMWare VM.
by justonceokay | 2025-04-08 15:37:24+00:00
Fred Flintstone wasn’t just looking to work behind a desk though. He was looking for a promotion to management. In those days a desk job meant that you had some authority. You had worked your way through the ranks and put in your time. It was a sign that the company values you and you would be taken care of. Gold wristwatches and all that.

Plenty of people still work in the data entry mines, even though that’s a desk job. In a lot of ways being an Uber driver about as cushy as a desk job in terms of physical demand on the body, but it certainly isn’t a status position.
by quantified | 2025-04-08 15:37:27+00:00
This is the big question. Will the new normal be feature bloat/enshittification in 1/10 the time? Or 10x speed of refactoring to evolve more rapidly? Or 10x the number of crappy apps and marginal SaaS offerings?

We're still in the hype side of the cycle, where there are some successes but lots of inconclusive struggle, and employers like mine forbid the tools out of IP and security concerns. If the tools prove their worth, there'll be a shrinking of developer ranks. Email shrank the mail room, web sites shrank the printing business, robots shrank the skilled manufacturing base.
by danhodgins | 2025-04-08 15:37:35+00:00
Start going to tradeshows for every possible industry you can think of, and bring resumes.

People who network in person almost always have an advantage compared to people with similar qualifications who sit at home and send out resumes.

You are guaranteed to make more connections if you speak to people at the booths. If you take a genuine curiosity in what they do there's usually something interesting to talk about.
by jkubicek | 2025-04-08 15:38:11+00:00
Where is the disconnect between the US being the #2 manufacturer in the world and my sense of doom and gloom about Trumps trade-war attack on our trading partners?

I suspect it's this:

> Advanced manufacturing technology development can be found throughout the United States. In Indiana for example, Rolls Royce, which makes jet engines, employs thousands of engineers. Zimmer Biomet makes surgical products in Warsaw, Indiana, a city that has become a national hub for orthopedic products.

So much of what I buy as an individual is imported. My fruit comes from South America, my electronics come from Asia, my outdoor equipment comes from Canada (and the raw fabrics probably sourced from China).
by ty6853 | 2025-04-08 15:38:43+00:00
It would take you 10+ years of skilled labor savings in any case to afford a homestead capable of sufficient farming and hunting output to sustain a family. Because you are competing not with homesteaders but rich professionals or pensioned .gov retirees who want some escape from the pollution/crime/cramp of the city.

Even if all of US became homesteaders this would likely still be at least a little bit the case, because foreigners would simply buy the property instead. Take a look at places like Spain, Portugal, etc and the high land prices are based on global competition not vs the low local wages.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-08 15:38:54+00:00
Counterpoint: The only people who voted for Harris more than Biden were old white people (especially old white women).

The biggest shift towards right wing authoritarianism from a demographic perspective is among the young (specifically young brown/black men in America). This is happening globally at a rapid and unprecedented pace.

Get ready for a conservative, violent, radicalized youth. A Clockwork Orange but with 4chan like characteristics.

I'm not pessimistic about Boomers anymore. They're becoming teddybears as they age.
by wiether | 2025-04-08 15:39:14+00:00
But do we have concrete examples of what they actually provide and how do they compare to the three majors public cloud providers?

For example I can't tell if they have serverless offerings (particularly FaaS)

Their public facing website is very similar to OVH or Scaleway

Their Terraform provider is... not reassuring

I guess from your username that you may have more intel about them, so I'm interested!
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-04-08 15:39:54+00:00
Direct government investment in new firms is politically complicated in the US, I think. Also, yeah, execution could be a problem. There'd need to be some sort of compliance mechanism to ensure that people don't just take the money and buy fancy cars. At the same time, it can't be too heavy-handed, or bureaucratic checks-and-balances will bog down the entire program and destroy any momentum it might have had.
by meristohm | 2025-04-08 15:40:14+00:00
Anything to help people move away from dependence on Microsoft Windows. I'm concerned about the glut of hardware incompatible with W11- now is a great time to switch to Linux Mint Debian Edition, for one great example. When I played games, including via Steam, it worked great, except for ones with uncooperative anti-cheat, in which case I didn't care because it was just another nail in the coffin of using games as self-medication (this may not be the most common use-case).

Keep in mind the opportunity cost of playing games beyond "wind-down" time. Raising a kid gave my life more meaning and helped me get out of the compulsive gaming. It's nice to not be drugged with bread and circuses anymore.
by jotux | 2025-04-08 15:40:20+00:00
>As if Godwin's Law, it amuses me how not a single animal intelligence discussion on HN goes without a Children of Time reference, which has a race of uplifted animals the article mentioned - in this case crows

At the time of writing this comment, there is not a single reference to Children of Time in this thread other than the one you have added.
by hwillis | 2025-04-08 15:40:30+00:00
> The state of the art (and has been for eons) is hand scraping

No, it absolutely is not. Optics machine tools make things flat and accurate within a few atoms. Cheap surface plates are more precise than any human could hope to achieve by hand.

Hand scraping is remarkable- skill can get you ~micron cutting depth. It would be totally obsolete except that the rough crosshatch pattern it creates is useful for retaining oil. Modern tools, especially the most precise tools, are not hand scraped. Cheap clone knee mills are hand scraped. Single-point diamond cutters run on air bearings with no oil, because the oil gap in plain ways is too large.

Hand scraping is thoroughly limited by the viscosity of the marking fluid. You identify high spots by painting a flat blue and rubbing it on another flat part. If the whole surface rubs off then you can't tell where to scrape. The fluid does not spread out in single atom thickness.
by whatshisface | 2025-04-08 15:41:05+00:00
>So "ignoring" IP is just a matter of refusing to recognize foreign patents, which is something that all nations do implicitly.

That's not true at all. US companies register patents in all foreign jurisdictions as well. It wasn't legal for Chinese companies to copy all that US IP, they were just able to do it because to stop them, our diplomats would have basically had to persuade the Chinese government not to develop.
by parpfish | 2025-04-08 15:41:22+00:00
i think that the factor determining which jobs get usurped by AI first isn't going to be based on the cognitive difficulty as much as it is about robotic difficulty and interaction with the physical world.

if you job consists of reading from a computer -> thinking -> entering things back into a computer, you're on the top of the list because you don't need to set up a bunch of new sensors and actuators. In other words… the easier it is to do your job remotely, the more likely it is you’ll get automated away
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-08 15:41:22+00:00
> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?

If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. If not, this is the same as lying anywhere else. What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified? Should I be unemployed? Of course I should, as far as brain surgery goes, but there are other jobs out there I can do while I train.

> We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

So the real answer to your question depends on how much you value other people and your principles, compared to valuing yourself and getting what you want. If you don't want to wrestle with that, just add some personal projects to your personal studying.
by JoelMcCracken | 2025-04-08 15:41:35+00:00
To me, the issue comes when something weird is going on in CI that isn't happening locally, and you're stuck debugging it with that typical insanity.

Yeah, it may be that you'll get the exact same versions of things installed, but that doesn't help when some other weird thing is going on.

If you haven't experienced this, well, keep doing what you're doing if you want, but just file this reflection away for if/when you do hit this issue.
by hliyan | 2025-04-08 15:43:03+00:00
The number one most important thing you can do is to learn how to actually do the job. Your ability to pass interviews will follow from that. If the place you're applying to has an interview process that does not align well with the job, then you might not want to apply there -- they will be hiring a lot of people who are not a best fit for the role, and that's the environment you might end up working in.
by seydor | 2025-04-08 15:43:11+00:00
None of these systems is global yet. We still have to get a physical card with a magnet, then enter the number of this card and its date of issue and another 3 digit number to the google wallet in order to pay with our phone . And now when i buy a sex toy, everyone including a girl in VISA, my bank, google , my tax service, they all have to know.