MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NegativeK | 2025-04-11 17:40:10+00:00
Pay is a common one from the employee's side.

From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position (i.e., an at-will employee.)

I have an unsexy government job. I've seen the leader of a pretty well funded government org get mad at IT for asking for three new positions one year. The IT group was roughly 100 positions, and it was acknowledged that it was understaffed in some key areas. One group with an annual software license budget higher than their employee budget asked for and was denied a single new spot.

Instead, that org's IT asked for and received budget for contractors. Contractors definitely cost more and can absolutely produce lower quality work. Their knowledge is gone when their contract is done -- so, best case, it's a multi-year contract that's similar to just hiring the damn person, but it ends up being way more expensive.

My current employer is even stricter.

In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current positions. I'm sure that weirdness is due to a mix of pay scales, hush hush reasons, and probably other reasons that I'll never know.
by moffkalast | 2025-04-11 17:40:31+00:00
> calls that seem to mean "pay attention to me" and "I am excited" to say "pay attention to me because I am in distress"

It's hard to say how accurate those meanings are, but it does interestingly track with the odd thing that does separate humans from other hominids... we ask questions. Apes who learned sign language have supposedly never done so.

To write down knowledge means having a concept that others have information that you don't, and you can access it in their writings or give them information with yours. If you can't conceive of that in the first place, writing doesn't even make sense at all.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-11 17:40:34+00:00
I see your point to a degree.

That's kind of how Erlang is. At first, anything Erlang has, some other system has too:

Isolated process heaps? - Just use OS processes

Supervision trees? - Use kubernetes.

Message passing? - Not a big deal, I can write two threads and a shared queue in Java.

Hot code loading? - Java can do that too

Low latency processing? - I can tune my LMAX disruptor to kick Erlang's butt any day.

Now getting all that into one platform or library that's the main idea. OS processes are heavyweight. Running 2M of them on a server is not easy. You could use some green threads or promises but now you lost the isolated heap bit.

You can use kubernetes to some degree but it does not do nested supervision trees well. I guess it would work, but now you have your code, and you have pods and controllers, and volumes and all the shit.

You can do message passing with an "actors" libraries in many language. But you cannot do pattern matching on receive, and it doesn't transparently integrate with sending it across nodes to another thread.

You can do hot code loading, but how do you deal with runtime data structure and state. Erlang is built around that: gen_servers since the state is immutable and explicit has callbacks to upgrade not just the code but the state itself.
by idrios | 2025-04-11 17:40:57+00:00
Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for a state department of transportation and has been trying to get a developer and a DBA to replace some people who've recently left.

He's been having an insanely hard time finding anyone for the role, and not because of salary requirements. He's required to vet candidates through approved sources and so his department uses a recruitment firm that keeps sending him resumes from people who are substantially lying about their experience and maybe also their identity. I tried recommending someone I knew who I knew had a lot of db experience and was job searching, and he said he wouldn't be able to interview the guy because he wasn't from an approved source.

His best recent hire was a woman who understood the system well enough to create her own firm, get it govt approved, and then get herself hired as a consultant.

Bear in mind I'm just recounting what my friend told me so I may have inaccuracies in this story.
by abakker | 2025-04-11 17:41:01+00:00
I think it is important to distinguish between Consulting, Staff Augmentation, and Managed Services. Many of the large integrators/consultancies do all of these options, but the objectives, contract sizes, and durations of the contracts are all expected to be different.

Consulting - best though of projects, governance, and on-demand expertise. There are definitely junior resources in play, but the objective is to build on the IP of the consulting firm and to create a external channel for problem solving or delivery that is not dependent on or hampered by internal inertia.

Staff Augmentation - a lot of time this is just billed hourly, and you really are looking at paying a premium for a non-committed spend - if FTEs are "reserved instances" then staff aug contracts are the opposite. You pay a premium for the lack of long-term commitment and to make this look like variable OpEx. my opinion is that this model is over used in most businesses.

Managed Services - longer term commitments to deliver services. Generally the good advice is to contract on "what you want done" rather than the detailed "how you want it done", though that is more philosophical than practical. The expectation is that the service delivery will improve, and that those process improvements, automations, training, and provider IP/Tools will deliver decreasing unit prices for "resource units" over time.

Thinking of consultancies as pure brokers is certainly a mental model you can use, but is not the most nuanced model. I think it tends to be better to acknowledge that there are structural reasons why all of these models are present in organizations and rather to think about how they should be governed.

(disclaimer, my employer is an advisor on how to contract for these kinds of services. My work is not related to contracting, but research about this market)
by stonecharioteer | 2025-04-11 17:41:13+00:00
My favourite manager poached me from another team. This is early on in my career. The man trusted me and he was excited about software. This was at a mechanical engineering firm and he was excited to have someone who was just as excited as he was about software and automation. I worked with him for 2.5 years and had to leave because the HR in the company was a cancerous POS. But I've maintained good relationship with the man, who had my back constantly and is a delightful person to know. He comes to see me whenever he comes to India, and I make sure to make time to meet him. I hoped I'd be able to go to Germany to see him and his family one day, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to.
by jasode | 2025-04-11 17:41:53+00:00
>Accenture / Deloitte are really not sexy. [...] McKinsey/BCG maybe this makes sense.

Those happen be 2 different types of consulting categories.

Accenture/Deloitte are more "professional services" type of consulting. Things like IT technology integrations and business process reengineering with software. So installing a multi-million dollar ERP software package like Oracle Financials or SAP and helping the client company migrate to the new accounting system. Also a lot of "staff augmentation" type of work. E.g. a lot of USA Homeland Security contracts for Accenture were IT services related: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22homeland+security%22+awar...

McKinsey/BCG is "management consulting". E.g. the CEO is considering opening a new international subsidiary but needs some research on various "strategies". So McKinsey consultants taps their vast network of other companies in the industry, creates spreadsheets of scenarios, writes up reports, etc.

The "professional services" category may be on a lower tier of prestige than "management consulting" but in general, most college graduates who prioritize career advancement will still prefer the (typically higher salary) job offer from Accenture/Deloitte rather than a government office such Veterans Affairs. Where government jobs often win candidates is the "no travel lifestyle" if it's a local office. Consultants can get quickly burned out by commuting on airplanes every week.
by 9rx | 2025-04-11 17:42:23+00:00
> No he's saying go is designed for people like you.

Stands to reason. It is true that I do spend my time on the engineering side of the industry. While I have great appreciation for the brilliant languages, they don't offer a whole lot for practical production work after you've weighed the tradeoffs. Especially in the particular niche Go is designed for. You are going to use a blub language like Rust for those types of problems, and for good reason.

> And we both know Pike is not even referring to coq.

Lean, then? The brilliant list isn't terribly long. We do know he isn't talking about Scala and Haskell, at least. He lumps them in with C++ and Java – albeit he has expressed that they are more beautiful. Not that anyone would consider them brilliant anyway. Well, maybe if you consider Trump to be also brilliant... There is always that guy.
by grandempire | 2025-04-11 17:42:41+00:00
> Underfunding and breaking of, for example, unemployment benefits systems causes real harm, real loss of medication, real loss of house, etc.

I thought we were talking about firing IT consultants? Let me know when that happens.

> But that won't make the news

I think that would make the news immediately. The media is very interested in DOGE and its shortcomings.
by SubjectToChange | 2025-04-11 17:42:43+00:00
God forbid you used cgroupsv1 for anything when poettering unilaterally decided to punish everyone with a 30 second delay for using it.

Intentional time-delays are a nice middle ground. Yes, it is annoying to the users who've ignored all prior deprecation warnings, but it's better than those same users being "surprised" when support is removed entirely. Maybe you'd consider it less of a "punishment" if systemd dropped support for cgroupsv1 outright instead of inserting a time delay, I believe the opposite.
by gazebo64 | 2025-04-11 17:42:48+00:00
>I have songs I'd love to compose in my head, but it would be totally impractical for me to go through the hundreds/thousands of hours of training that would be needed to realize these songs in reality. Nor am I particularly motivated to pay someone else to sit there for hours trying to compose what I am telling them.

So the alternative is that you'll pay a tech company instead -- to use their model trained on unlicensed and uncredited human works to generate a mishmash of plagiarized songs, the end result of which nobody will ever want to listen to?
by its_down_again | 2025-04-11 17:42:54+00:00
First off, that sounds incredibly frustrating. I’ve seen this archetype before—a business person with just enough technical knowledge to chime in on complex product decisions, but without the patience or interest to develop any real depth. Instead of building real understanding, they rely on mimicking what looks successful. Always chasing whatever has funding or buzz.

That kind of thinking lacks vision and makes it really hard to build anything meaningful. Over time, it wears you down. Even if the product “works,” it doesn’t feel good because you know you're forcing it. These folks tend to say things like “this should be easy,” then only show up to question why something isn’t done. They manufacture urgency instead of clarity, and when things inevitably fall short, the blame falls on the technical team.

Second, you’re not a first-time founder anymore. Life’s short. For me at least, you’ve earned the right to walk away and build something you actually care about again.
by ghc | 2025-04-11 17:43:14+00:00
If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true.

We also know that groups without writing systems were historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly, which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a technology, not a point of speciation.

Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates didn't even believe in the effectiveness of writing for communication of knowledge. My poetry professor used to spend some time on this, because it's intimately tied to the art of poetry. He would cite a number of studies showing our emotional responses are intimately tied to our language processing, and that humans are wired to emotionally respond to, and remember, stories.

Even before writing, oral histories were passed down for many generations. For an extreme example, see: https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ .

I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological, not technological.
by mattskr | 2025-04-11 17:43:18+00:00
Lol, I started my career during the housing market crash. Even though I had decent credit, especially for my age, my credit cards were reduced due to "market volatility" to $20 above what my balance was.

Taking out a loan to start a career? I guess I was born to the wrong parents lol.

Not everyone starts out on great footing in their careers. To this day, I still don't buy "new" computer parts to upgrade my computer. It's a waste of money to me because I grew up only being to afford used or, best case, clearance.

Also, no Mac. Macs are for rich people with zero taste and sense and too much money to burn. Regardless of what anyone says, Macs dollar for dollar compared to a Windows machine, Adobe doesn't perform better on a Mac. I've tested it against computers where ever I would work, my older laptop versus their newer macs. Side by side, it's like 90% functions faster on Windows. Plus there's this weird ass memory issue where every PS file has an extra ~500mb of bloat on a Mac. No clue why.

But yes, subscriptions do make sense for business customers which, a lot of graphic designers do freelance on the side. Again, exactly why Adobe SHOULD be a subscription. Adobe isn't a hobbyist toolset and they need to stop treating it as such. When home users "discovered" Adobe and they started placating to them, that's when it went south. If they bumped up the price to $100 bucks a month and obliterated the "I'm just a quirky creative home user who likes to dabble" pandering, GOOD. I'd keep my subscription. Instead, I'm actively building up my experience in alternative tools so I can get away from Adobe. Not every piece software should be "Karen" easy especially when it's designed for a professional market. I want my software to be brutally efficient and productive. Not "a vibe". My "vibe" is getting away from the computer. Software should help me annihilate my workload as quickly as possible so I can go live a real life more.
by drdaeman | 2025-04-11 17:44:16+00:00
> HTML is about semantic markup, not visual markup.

Yeah... when it was meant for documents. In practice, modern websites are not documents - at best, they have a document or a few (like an article, or a post) embedded somewhere inside something else: an application, a designed page - basically, layout and presentation but not a document. HTML was never truly designed to do anything like this and it will always remain the clay feet part of this colossus.

The reason people still use <h1> or other "semantic" tags is only because of that idea that search engines give more "weight" to text in those tags, not because they care about semantics or other formal stuff. Otherwise they would've kept slapping styled <divs>.

I have always argued that there needs to be an entirely different language for websites, something semantically closer to XUL, XAML or QML. Best we've ever got are various custom DSLs that render to HTML/CSS/JS combo, conveniently hiding the underlying mess under the rug.
by rtkwe | 2025-04-11 17:44:20+00:00
You have to absolutely think about what you're actually cutting loads of programs and spending end up with positive net effects. If you just demand across the board cuts you're killing those positive EV programs which leave you worse off than before.

The debt boogey man is exactly that a nearly imaginary number, most US debt is held by Americans or US companies in the end too.
by sabslikesobs | 2025-04-11 17:44:47+00:00
Very interesting! This reminds me of how stumped I was learning about UV unwrapping for texturing. Even simple models are difficult to unwrap into easily editable textures. "Why can't I just draw on the model?"

Blender has a few plugins these days that make it a lot easier --- one that impressed me was Mio3 UV: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mio3-uv/
by multimoon | 2025-04-11 17:45:33+00:00
I’m not sure where we launched into the metaphysics of if an AI can produce an emotionally charged meaningful work, but that wasn’t part of the debate here, I recall my stance being that the AI will never get as good as the human. Since photoshop is a tool like any other, “good enough” refers to making the barrier of entry to make a given work (in this case some image) so low that anyone could buy a photoshop license and type some words into a prompt and get a result that satisfies them instead of paying an artist to use photoshop - which is where the artists understandable objection comes from.

I pay for photoshop along with the rest of the adobe suite myself, so you cannot write off my comment either while saying the rest of the paying users are “the final authority” when I am in fact a paying user.

My point is simply that with or without everyone’s consent and moral feel-goods these tools are going to exist and sticking your head in the sand pretending like that isn’t true is silly. So you may as well pick the lesser evil and back the company who at least seems to give the slightest bit of a damn of the morals involved, I certainly will.
by t-writescode | 2025-04-11 17:45:41+00:00
> I thought we were talking about firing IT consultants? Let

I read this whole thread as being about the broader 'cutting' trend,

OOP: when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.

Parent: Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences.
by The_SamminAter | 2025-04-11 17:46:16+00:00
I’m getting 406 browser not acceptable, apparently Safari on iOS isn’t fit to be served pages anymore? A website should just work. Don’t profile me based on my user-agent and try to serve me different pages or block me, you’re running something that’s meant to be able to be accessed universally, regardless of hardware, OS, etc. The supposed “great universal platform.” I don’t care what fancy latest buzzword framework you’re running, it’s a browser. I assure you it can run bog-standard html, js, css and browse your website - and if it can’t, well, why not?
by snake42 | 2025-04-11 17:47:21+00:00
What an incredibly myopic view of things.

China has been building nuclear successfully and worked out the kinks. The US basically paused all production and was trying to start over. You can't seriously blame it all on bureaucracy, when a lot of what was lost is institutional knowledge. Kind of like how your "burn it all down" approach would work for academia.

Despite how things could be structured better, in medicine and science we are making progress. Maybe we could do better, but I certainly think we could be doing much worse.
by NegativeK | 2025-04-11 17:47:22+00:00
I can't speak to the UK at all, but I've met less than five people who started their government jobs right out of high school or college. They'll be able to retire on their pension 33 years later at about 3/4 of their max salary -- so, at roughly 51 or 55. (The pensions are funded by employee contributions.)

It's well known in the workplace who they are, because people are really fucking envious.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-11 17:47:22+00:00
There's an example I saw where `'` was used as a way to denote a symbol, but I can't find that explicit example. It wasn't SBCL, I believe it may have been Clojure. Its possible I'm misremembering.

That said, since I work in C-like languages during the day, I suppose my minor complaint has to do with ease of transition, it always takes me a minute to get acquainted to Lisp syntax and read Lisp code any time I work with it.

Its really a minor complaint and one I probably wouldn't have if I worked with a Lisp language all day.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-04-11 17:47:26+00:00
This is part of why I still have a MacBook2,1 running Snow Leopard. Even with its 4GB of memory and Core2Duo, it's optimized to prioritize my input. It also never changes, which is a form of stability I've come to cherish.

Another point is that you can train a horse, or even eat it if in dire straits. You own that horse. I can't disable things I want to disable, and names, locations, and features change (or are removed) with no notice between minor version updates. I can't tell you the last time I built something for a new Mac, or wanted to.

I don't know MacOS today, and it certainly doesn't make me feel like I own my computer.

I'm less harsh about modern Windows because I view it as amends for Microsoft causing the bot/ransomware crisis of the last 15 years. Still not for me, but at least I neuter it into usefulness.
by acuozzo | 2025-04-11 17:47:44+00:00
> calculating a derivative or setting up a fancy data structure of some kind or something, is interesting but how much of that do we actually do as programmers?

A LOT, depending on the domain. There are many R&D and HPC labs throughout the US in which programmers work directly with specialists in the hard sciences. A significant percentage of their work is akin to "calculating a derivative".
by FalseNutrition | 2025-04-11 17:47:52+00:00
I wrote a longer comment, but it got flagged, so I deleted it, and wrote that one.

My position is that lead toxicity seems to be a conspiracy theory, rather than a real thing, the evidence for it is bizarre, and doesn't make any sense, and lead in fact seems to belong where it goes. That is, it's essential, and people are increasingly weak, dumb, and even have deformities because it has been removed.

This comment was instantly downvoted.
by 98codes | 2025-04-11 17:48:24+00:00
Getting onto the allowed vendor list for the US Government is a dire process even for the largest of global service companies, by design by the folks already on the list.

I was able to work as an individual as a subcontractor for a subcontractor for a company on the list. Rates aren't as high, but with federal regulations (for now) mandating that subcontractors be paid as soon as the primary contract holder was paid meant that there was 0 chasing after invoices which is actually very nice.
by LinuxAmbulance | 2025-04-11 17:48:36+00:00
It really is an art compared to more modern options, mostly due to trying to replicate what a skilled operator at stamped metal factory at the time was capable of at a small scale. That and the press fit barrel and gas block are much trickier than just torquing a barrel nut to the right amount of ft/lbs. like with the AR platform.

Enthusiasts will pay eyebrow raising amounts for custom ones from a shop with an impressive reputation for something that was the height of 1950s technology.