MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FredPret | 2025-04-24 16:49:43+00:00
> but with your friends privacy preferences.

Network effects and human nature combines to make this a completely insurmountable obstacle. You'll likely never convince even a sizable minority of your own friends & family to do tech things the hard way because you think it's more private that way.

That is the argument in favour of being a bit more mainstream - you get to interface with the rest of humanity with much less friction.
by flave | 2025-04-24 16:49:48+00:00
In the nicest possible way - nobody talented in my market of is going to take three days off from their job to come work on me on a random project - no matter how much I pay them. All the good/driven people are working on stuff.

A one-hour collaborative problem-solving interview is a great idea.

But, the challenge I have is that I want some kind of measure of aptitude that isn't subjective. I've seen that founders tend to overestimate their ability to basically 'vibe' someone based on interview and the point of this question is to try to hedge that.
by samspot | 2025-04-24 16:50:14+00:00
Article points are mostly all valid, don't give your loyalty in return for abuse, etc. etc.

But I've been at my employer 11 years now and I have greatly prospered. They took care of me in many ways that aren't required by law, and gave great benefits. They didn't abuse me or take undue time from my family. They constantly invest in my career -- for their ultimate benefit, yes, but I benefit too. If and when I get transactioned out, I'll have no regrets.

It's ok to reward an employer with some loyalty for treating you well.

But also, this quote needs to be here :)

Would I ever leave this company? Look, I’m all about loyalty, In fact, I feel like part of what I’m being paid for here is my loyalty, But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly… I’m going wherever they value loyalty the most. — Dwight Schrute
by pornel | 2025-04-24 16:50:33+00:00
There are alternative universes where these wouldn't be a problem.

For example, if we didn't settle on executing compiled machine code exactly as-is, and had a instruction-updating pass (less involved than a full VM byte code compilation), then we could adjust SIMD width for existing binaries instead of waiting decades for a new baseline or multiversioning faff.

Another interesting alternative is SIMT. Instead of having a handful of special-case instructions combined with heavyweight software-switched threads, we could have had every instruction SIMDified. It requires structuring programs differently, but getting max performance out of current CPUs already requires SIMD + multicore + predictable branching, so we're doing it anyway, just in a roundabout way.
by douglasisshiny | 2025-04-24 16:50:43+00:00
I've had the same experience as the person to whom you're responding. After reading your post, I have to ask: if you're putting so much effort into prompting it with specific points, correcting it often, etc., why not just write the code yourself? It sounds like you're putting a good deal of effort into prompting it.

Aren't you worried that overtime you'll rely on it too much and your offhand knowledge will get worse?
by throwaway7783 | 2025-04-24 16:51:00+00:00
A good or a bad company is really defined by people you work with - your team. Countless conversations in other forums where you'll see radically opposite opinions about the the "company" from different employees. It all boils down to the local working context. Companies are companies - maximizing profit is their primary goal (at least in the US). There may certainly be some exceptions. Entities don't treat a person in any way. It is the people in the entities that treat you well or not. Entities are impersonal.

If the CEO, who is 6 levels removed from me makes a decision to cut an entire department, it is hard to see how "company" loyalty makes sense. As far as I'm concerned, the CEO is an external force.

Social grace, treating people well who treat you well - I agree with all that. But that is not loyalty. It is simply transactional reciprocality. If you are calling that "working loyalty", fine, we are on the same page.
by tomjen3 | 2025-04-24 16:52:00+00:00
I really like my speech-to-text program, and I find using ChatGPT to look up things and answer questions is a much superior experience to Google, but otherwise, I completely agree with you.

Companies see that AI is a buzzword that means your stock goes up. So they start looking at it as an answer to the question: "How can I make my stock go up?" instead of "How can I create a better product", and then let the stock go up from creating a better product.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-24 16:52:41+00:00
Donald Trump has been complaining about the Fed's interest rate being too high going all the way back to his first term (perhaps even earlier). It's no secret that he wants Powell to drop rates to zero or near-zero.

The "glass half-full" among us will tell you this tariff stuff is all part of Trump's 3D-chess plan to refinance U.S. debt to a lower rate. Personally I doubt it. Everything he does is for himself, and it's only coincidence that sabotaging the economy to get rates to zero could benefit the National Debt.

Anyway, the tech hiring spree we saw in 2020-2021 was fed by rates being at or near zero. If money is free or nearly-free to borrow, why not hire everyone you can and try to grow your company as quickly as possible?

So in theory, bringing rates back down will ease companies' recession fears - not necessarily because they would think a recession isn't coming - no, I'm sure we will all still be expecting a recession "any day" - but with money very cheap or free to borrow, there's no risk to hiring people, starting new projects - because when shit hits the fan, there's negligible additional financial burden from that hiring/starting of new projects. Maybe 2% interest on the debt taken out to pay those people and start those projects. That might as well be 0% to a company, especially one that is FAANG-sized.

I've been saying for years now that the Fed dropping rates to 0% would solve the tech job market woes, and I still believe that. BUT- I make no guarantees against terrible side effects of dropping the interest rate back to zero. I think it will revive the tech job market... and cause many other, bad side-effects (including heightened inflation).

Everyone is hot to trot for AI, but these companies (even FAANG) are working at partial-capacity for developing AI-driven products because they're afraid to hire right before a recession. If they could hire and otherwise expand "for free" I think we would see another 2020-2021 from a tech hiring perspective. Things would be stupid again. You'd have more of the "I work at Google and do absolutely nothing", more instances of senior engineers pulling $250k base salaries... It would be a great time for SWEs, but probably at the detriment to everyone else via things like inflation.
by tantalor | 2025-04-24 16:52:47+00:00
High end restaurants work against this trend by cultivating taste. They convince their customers to eat their vegetables, literally. They can do this because there is an ethical value associated with dining which is embedded in our culture. You enjoy a fine restaurant because it is right to enjoy it.

Facebook failed because there is no ethic associated with social media. You can continue to degrade the quality and nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that". FB bootstrapped by co-opting the instinctual value of social connection with your friends, which TikTok and IG also copied but with strangers instead of friends.
by rpgbr | 2025-04-24 16:53:21+00:00
The appeal, at least for me, is having a social layer on top of your own stuff. Are you familiar with POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)? With AP you skip the whole second part because it's automatically syndicated everywhere the moment you post on your own site.

I'm having good results with the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on my blog[1].

[1] https://manualdousuario.net/en/
by wrs | 2025-04-24 16:53:35+00:00
Bear in mind there is not always a strong relation between "what will improve the product", "what will attract customers", and "what will attract funding". A big part of the CEO job is to manage all of those at once.

As the engineer you need to support all three, while being the voice of realism (internally). But don't get confused when they conflict -- they always conflict to some degree.
by stephen_cagle | 2025-04-24 16:53:40+00:00
That's interesting. I wonder what other industries are like that, where a single person keeps bringing his (mutually) trusted cadre of employees with them?

I've heard in the past that the skill of a surgeon is actually more a reflection of the surgeon's team than the actual surgeon. So "great surgeons" are actually people who have "great teams". Sounds similar to me.
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-24 16:54:21+00:00
wire transfer, or walk into the bank and have them create a cashier's check

and a normal check is the same as an ACH transfer, so I will do the ACH transfer

or lawyer's escrow

and every other larger transfer has been cryptocurrency in my life, its been over a decade of that unlimited amount, zero scrutiny, 24/7/365 option

(I've tried various other country's and international system transfers, and the convenience is completely over-embellished, and limited to small amounts at best. and yes, I'm talking about instant SEPA in European banks. A lot of people don't have balances in crypto currency so it would just be more inconvenient for them to get into that system)

but the only time I'm personally using checks are because a new employer's HR system wants me to write VOID on a physical one, and I've opted to photoshopping a template with my account number and routing number, because checks are the same as an ACH transfer, and they could have just asked me to copy and paste those numbers into a input field
by amarcheschi | 2025-04-24 16:54:43+00:00
Ok, I think I might get a heart attack sooner or later, it's a possibility, although not very high.

If I said so, you might ask me if I saw a doctor or something similar to make me suspect that, and that's my issue with him. He's a Sci fi writer that's scared of technology without a grasp of how it works, and that's OK. He can talk about what he fears, and that's OK. It still doesn't mean we should take him seriously just because.

My pet peeve is that when trying to make laws regarding Ai - at least in Europe - some considerations were done regarding how it worked, what it was (...), how it's being talked in academic literature. I had a lawyer in a course explaining that, and while not perfect you eventually settle on something that more or less is reasonable. With yudkowsky, you have a guy that is scared of nanotech and yada yada. Sure, he might be right. But if I had to act based on something, it would look much more the eu process to make laws and less the "Ai will totally kill us from now to 30 years trust me". Perhaps now I'm more clear

And don't get me started with the rationalist stuff that just assumes pain is linear and yada yada
by damidekronik | 2025-04-24 16:54:44+00:00
I am using both prisma and kysely in the same codebase with a great success. The db schema is driven by SQL, not prisma. It is then introspected by both kysely and prisma, prisma is used in 95% of the places while kysely is used whenever performance is critical or when prisma doesn't support the SQL features we need.
by djtriptych | 2025-04-24 16:55:04+00:00
If you trust the CEO's leadership, work hard. The CEO has to worry about runway, not engineers.

If not, I'd say make a data-backed case for another course of action, or find another job.

Most CEOs I've worked with would be open to hearing a well-reasoned argument for another course of action.

Also presenting a good case can be a nice career move even if it's not adopted.
by zelon88 | 2025-04-24 16:55:06+00:00
> Jesus christ, used to believe what I believe? bro there's literally a pop self-help recommendation at the bottom of your reply. I guess we should be grateful it's not a ted talk or betterhelp.com review.

Have you read the book? It sounds like you could use some of it's teachings. Or maybe you'd be amused by them. Either way, this reads like a Reddit comment. Please try harder.

> No one is measuring your soul by jira task completions.

Your words, not mine.

> What I'm saying is such a 'live, laugh, love' philosophy

Really? Here's what you said.

> This is such a retarded modern take on things, not everyone derives meaning from checking off a bucket list they read about on some internet listicle. For some of us, creating and contributing is the goal.

Can you point out the "live, laugh, love" for me?
by asdff | 2025-04-24 16:55:07+00:00
Just another reason not to needlessly update dependencies. To say nothing about the risk of compromising legacy code. And if you are someone who updates your dependencies constantly just because, consider that for many of the packages you are updating into they don't even do that and use some ancient dependency themselves owing to legacy code issue and the fact everyone for some reason wants to rename all their functions and flags every major version change.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-24 16:55:08+00:00
I agree with the sentiment but it's tricky. Logically and technically it totally makes sense but it's expensive and companies look at cost, maintenance, accessibility. Above ground is easier to maintain, less legal hassles and easements among other things. Even when it made sense to bury everything that would affect the investors. There are some rough laws around impacting shareholders. Oh and people are greedy. I probably could have just said people are greedy.
by okwhateverdude | 2025-04-24 16:55:12+00:00
It isn't like we're born with a guide book on how to live life. Drinking the kool-aid is very tempting when you don't have a good reason not to drink it. If you never have the self-awareness to ponder your place within the org and how it functions, and just accept the good vibes corpoganda, what other outcome could there be? "They showed up to be exploited and are getting exactly that," thinks their sociopath exec.

I suspect that a lot of the virtue signaling on LinkedIn is only sales puffery for their personal brand. If they can show just how exploitable they are, then maybe riches, recognition, and power will magically materialize for them. And they think this because they were fed tall tales all their working lives.
by somesortofthing | 2025-04-24 16:55:12+00:00
Draw up the product roadmap such that you can claim maximum AI-ness while including as little of it as possible in the actual product. Sounds like the CEO doesn't have any technical objections to not using AI, he just wants the ability to raise on AI branding.

Include as much non-AI work as you can in the AI teams' projects, pitch an "AI efficiency initiative" that minimizes new spend on AI with the justification of other teams picking up the slack, talk up whatever ML you're already doing, etc.
by ahussain | 2025-04-24 16:55:15+00:00
It seems like it's worth taking some time to steel-man the AI argument, even if your CEO hasn't made it very well.

E.g. If you don't work on AI now, and AI models keep improving, how likely is it that a competitor who integrates AI well will eat your lunch? If it's >50%, it seems worth it to shift some focus to AI regardless of the series C round.

This post from a few days ago has some great tips on how to integrate AI _well_: https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages/
by tschellenbach | 2025-04-24 16:55:47+00:00
Your CEO is correct that ~80% of VC funding is currently focused on AI. So you have only 2 options basically. You either don't raise VC funding (which means hitting break even, rule of 40% performance). Or, you go all in on AI

If it's not an AI story for your business you need exceptional metrics. Like growing from 8M to 24M in a year for a C round.
by e40 | 2025-04-24 16:55:53+00:00
I've heard a _lot_ of stories like this. What I haven't heard is stories about the deployment of said applications and the ability of the human-side author to maintain the application. I guess that's because we're in early days for LLM coding, or the people who did this aren't talking (about their presumed failures... people tend to talk about successes publicly, not the failures).
by sethhochberg | 2025-04-24 16:56:32+00:00
The thing that always surprised me about this when I still used FB was that they clearly had the expertise available in Meta to do it right because my Instagram ads/recommended content was almost stunningly well-tailored: events I actually wanted to buy tickets to, products that actually interested me, even down to reels from new comedians I find genuinely funny...

My FB feed, by comparison, was almost exactly like yours - not just irrelevant interests, but geographically crazy irrelevant interests.
by taylodl | 2025-04-24 16:56:59+00:00
As a result, municipalities are offering tax incentives for RTO, even if it's only 3 days per week. That's what forced the company I work for to do a 3 days per week RTO earlier this month.

As an added bonus, the company may benefit from a quiet layoff. If you do an RTO with no exceptions, then some of the staff will be forced to resign. All the company has to do is look through the employee database and get a reasonable estimate of the impacts. In the case of the company I work for, they exempted people who lived over X miles from an office facility - so they weren't looking for a quiet layoff. They just wanted those sweet tax incentives.
by riveralabs | 2025-04-24 16:58:43+00:00
In the past I’ve been hesitant about Obsidian, but I tried this with my hugo site (hosted on AWS Amplify) and I’m liking the workflow. I like the fact that it creates a vault for my blog directory and the front matter is shown as properties that are easy to edit. Yes I can use VSCode for that, but I like the polished markdown editor. Or that I don’t have to copy/paste content. It’s not revolutionary but a good improvement to my workflow.
by gwbas1c | 2025-04-24 16:59:14+00:00
Trends come and go: What's important is that your CEO isn't underinvesting in the product.

I once was in a company during the "everyone is going to replace their laptops with tablets next year era." The CEO pushed heavily for mobile, and underinvested in the actual product.

A year later, all of our customers were still using their laptops. We were sold to a private equity firm, the CEO was pushed out, and (almost) everyone who worked on the failed mobile product was out of a job.

In your case, I'd try to decide if your CEO is just following a fad. If so, next year they will follow a different fad. Are you critical to your business? If so, you'll be critical to your business with or without AI. If not, figure out how to make yourself critical to your business without being vulnerable to this year's fad...

(...And perhaps ask ChatGPT for advice. If you can't beat it, join it.)
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-24 16:59:18+00:00
Always love how arrogant Linux users are: "You can't possibly experience something different from me"

I wanted to make a genuine effort to get into using Linux because it's the only OS I'm not super comfortable admin'ing. I bought a secondhand Lenovo t440 and installed Linux Mint on it. Everything seemed to work well, boot was nice and quick, no issues with WiFi chipset or sleep and battery life was at least okay.

It was fine for browsing the web with Firefox for my normal web browsing, and made a great netflix machine.

Then I kept trying to do other things. I was playing with Blender at the time and despite the laptop being old at the time, it Mint installed a broken intel graphics driver. It couldn't render anything without artifacts and was unusable. The fixed driver was older than the release of Mint I was using. Why didn't Mint install an up to date driver?

I wanted use my steam controller to control mouse and keyboard input exactly like you can on any windows machine. In Linux, it required you to hand edit some config files to allow Steam to even communicate with it's own controller. Like what the fuck? Why?

I wanted to dual boot Windows to play more steam games (this was before proton) but if you want to dual boot Linux and Windows, you have to install windows FIRST. Otherwise you have to be an expert in x86-64 boot semantics to do the configuration required. So this was impossible without reinstalling everything.

So fine, I decided to just install Windows on it. Windows pulled the license details out of the BIOS from the previous owner (whoops) and auto-registered itself, and had the fixed intel graphics driver from the get go. I installed steam and the steam controller worked as expected. Battery life was SIGNIFICANTLY better.

THAT'S usability. THAT'S "just works".
by Bender | 2025-04-24 16:59:47+00:00
In the spirit of kicking the dead horse that is ground to dust at this point... the optimal solution is to require websites that either have adult content or user-generated content to add an RTA header [1] and / or meta tags. That's it. End user devices and apps must make a best effort to look for that header and activate parental controls. That's it. The law for that could fit into a few sentences in a tiny paragraph.

Not perfect, nothing is. Teens will bypass it. Actual children not legal children but single-digit aged kids will be less likely to bypass it or accidentally stumble onto Goatse. Again, not perfect, nothing is. Perfect is the enemy of good or better than what we have now and the cost to implement is at best a side project of one college intern per company and there is no risk of data leakage. Alternately five to fifteen minutes from a network engineer adding the header to the load balancers. RTA headers are privacy compliant and do not in any way involve third parties or PCI audits. This would be one of the simplest ways to get two thumbs up from ones legal and compliance departments. We just need to create one simple law and keep the greedy evil user-profiling and tracking incentives out of it.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
by nine_k | 2025-04-24 17:00:28+00:00
But I don't want to be treated like family. In particular, I am not ready to have the same level of obligations towards my employers, even if these were reciprocated faithfully. I have my own family to which I'm always going to have a stronger loyalty than to any employer.

A company as a group of close friends? Be my guest. A company that pretends that we have bonds of blood, or are married? Not for me (unless we're actually family, as in family business).