MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluetomcat | 2025-04-09 08:15:07+00:00
> I'm not sure if all this advice will become irrelevant or if those programmers trained in the 2020ies will not become those "best"..

It's how they use the AI. If they see it as a glorified StackOverflow where you paste a big chunk of code and ask "why does it not work", they'll be in trouble. If they are able to narrow-down their problems to a specific context, express them well and take the output of the AI with a grain of salt, they'll be 10x programmers compared to what we were in the 2000s, for example.
by internet_points | 2025-04-09 08:15:13+00:00
Yes.

ddg is often faster for when I want to get to an actual web site and find up-to-date info, for "search as navigation".

llm's are often faster for finding answers to slightly vague questions (where you know you're going to have to burn at least as much climate on wading through blogspam and ads and videos-that-didn't-need-to-be-videos if you do a search).
by Daniarozin | 2025-04-09 08:15:52+00:00
I built this tool to help website owners and SEO professionals automate the tedious process of finding backlink opportunities. It uses AI to analyze your site content, identify relevant websites for outreach, and even generate personalized pitch templates. The tech stack includes GPT-4 for content analysis and a custom-built outreach pipeline. I've been using it for my own projects and decided to turn it into a product. I'd appreciate feedback especially on the AI-generated outreach templates and the site discovery algorithm. Thanks
by workbench1_3 | 2025-04-09 08:16:37+00:00
This looks like a Mexican standoff… The White House wants to use tariffs as leverage for concessions against the EU, Big Tech would also like concessions from both EU (less moderation, less antitrust probes, less privacy regulations, etc.) and the White House (less tariffs), while the EU is now more inclined to increase scrutiny of Big Tech as a way to push the White House to relent on tariffs. Popcorns anyone?
by Nextgrid | 2025-04-09 08:17:30+00:00
In addition to the (real, but somewhat overblown) downturn in tech, the main problem is that hiring is fucked. Both sides are in a scam/fraud arms race.

Getting a job through the front door is basically impossible now - and if you want to try, you will need to lie and do all the dirty tricks your competition does, and even then, your conversion rate will be minuscule.

An alternative is either to go through your network (where people you know can vouch that you are real and not just a monkey slinging ChatGPT'd resumes from a boiler room) or in-person (which is immune to a lot of the boiler-room scams and thus you have more chance your application will actually be considered).
by bravetraveler | 2025-04-09 08:17:41+00:00
Even provided with an instruction manual, I have doubts about the efficacy of the people involved. Will they be spending the coin on a spine once we're done waiting for a proverbial flip?

I mean, they've been surprised by a decades-long campaign. Yuri told us what was going to happen! In interviews, in the 80s! I believe it may have even been Televised.

Truly ahead of an era.
by OvbiousError | 2025-04-09 08:17:45+00:00
The full quote being

> Most developers blame the software, other people, their dog, or the weather for flaky, seemingly “random” bugs. > The best devs don’t. > No matter how erratic or mischievous the behavior of a computer seems, there is always a logical explanation: you just haven’t found it yet!

I don't see how you can conclude from that that real issues would be overlooked? I interpret this to be the opposite.
by re-thc | 2025-04-09 08:17:46+00:00
> Sure, yes, the fact that the US now is in a weak position built up over decades is just the reality that has to be faced.

It's misinformation to say the US is in a weak position. It's not. It's just gone on to do other things. When we talk about these trade deficits do we include streaming services, television shows, films, games and whatever else?

> (including bringing them domestically where it makes sense)

It doesn't, that's the point. Would you rather have factories with workers below the minimum wage or industries like the NBA?
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-04-09 08:17:47+00:00
Global remote has been on a bit of a downturn in the last few years.

There are many decent job boards out there, but the bigger problem is that many of them don't allow specifying remote within a country, or the US-oriented companies that post on them never specify that they only want remote within the US.

You end up wasting time looking at a cool job that pays well, only to see "Remote (US only)".
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-04-09 08:18:33+00:00
> In the US this can only be true for foreign citizens. Broad classes of assets and liquidity are well protected for US citizens unless you end up in the unusual situation where they sue the money itself. If you have cash in your hand nothing can stop you from spending it.

Why would this be any different if it was the government running payment services rather than private entities? You haven’t explained why having those middlemen protects you from the same authority that makes up and enforces the rules anyway.
by mrweasel | 2025-04-09 08:19:19+00:00
Sometimes you also encounter documentation that you either don't understand, or maybe it's just poorly written, in those cases I'd say it fair to guess to keep moving forward. Afterwards you should probably stop and think: "Why did/didn't this work?" and build up your understanding.

I've been reluctant to learn frontend development and our framework of choice is apparently fairly well documented, but I don't even understand large parts of the terminology, why certain solutions work, or why some are more correct. So I guess, and I learn, but you need to keep iterating for that to work.

If you just guess, or ask an LLM, and doesn't question your guess later, then I can see the point of simply not recommending guessing at all. Mostly I think flat out recommending againts guessing ignores how a large percentage of us learn.
by blackbrokkoli | 2025-04-09 08:19:25+00:00
Note that this says "best programmers" not "people best at having business impact by making software".

I wonder about this often: If you want to have impact/solve problems/make money, not just optimizing killing your JIRA tickets, should you invest a given hour into understanding the lowest code layer of framework X, or talk to people in the business domain? Read documentation or a book on accessibility in embedded systems? Pick up yet another tech stack or simply get faster at the one you have that is "good enough"?

Not easy to answer, but worth keeping in mind that there is more to programming than just programming.
by wpollock | 2025-04-09 08:19:42+00:00
Counting on the order of files to support multiple versions of jars was never a good idea. Java does have multiple version ("release") jar files for your use case since java 9. See <https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/24/docs/api/java.base...>.

Since duplicates on the classpath don't cause problems, a quick & dirty fix is to manually list versioned jars first, in order, then the jars/* argument.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-09 08:20:09+00:00
> If there was one thing that I should have done as a young programmer, it would have been to read the reference of the thing I was using.

I'd love to do this, but (if I may play the victim for a second), I have real trouble reading something long form; I glaze over after a few paragraphs or just fall asleep. I don't find it compelling reading, especially not if I realize the vast majority won't be relevant.

I don't know if this is from a broken attention span thanks to spending 25 years online, or simply from experience - there's so many tools I've used for one project and never again, or questions I've only ever had once, and "studying" feels wasteful.

This goes back to when I learned Java in college, second year; we had a book, I think I did like the first two pages, but after that I just winged it and googled stuff if I needed it. (which was probably the other huge change in the software development world at the time, Google and easily searched / found online documentation)
by whacko_quacko | 2025-04-09 08:21:41+00:00
> There was likely economic fallout many would call extensive when we mandated equal wages for minorities and an end to child labor, and yet businesses soldier on.

Advertising isn't child labor. If there was something immoral about telling people about your product, you'd have a point.

> It seems like bankrupting a lot of them and letting teams return to public goods funded by municipalities would be a huge step forward into preserving sports as a social event, not a profit seeking venture.

I disagree. I don't think the state has any place here. And profit seeking will not stop just because the source of the money changes and there's less of it.

> We could just get rid of the money men up top and let things settle where they may. Sure we may not get blockbuster sports events anymore, but maybe more people could then afford to actually attend?

If there's less money in it, there will be less supply, so I don't see how it would be easier for people to afford attendance.

Your local little league team couldn't even get a sponsorship for their uniforms anymore.

> Consumers LOATHE SaaS. They would cheer for it to be killed off.

SaaS was just an example for a new product trying to gain market share.

Also, right now they are free to not use SaaS products if they do hate the concept. Afterwards they're practically forced to not use it, because it's much harder to get one off the ground.

> I don’t see how that would run afoul of my definition?

Well, they're paying people to write positively about them and their product/politics. I can see it.
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-09 08:21:41+00:00
You have no idea what we're talking about. Are you not even old enough to have seen Jurassic Park?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOeY07qKU9c

macOS is absolutely Unix, and a lot more like mainstream Unix than many of the other vastly different Unix systems of the past and present, so exactly when did the definition of Unix suddenly tighten up so much that it somehow excludes macOS? And how does your arbitrary gatekeeping and delusional denial of the ubiquity and popularity of macOS, and ignorance of the Unix 03 certification, the embedded, real time, and automotive space, and many other Unix operating systems you've never heard of or used, suddenly change the actual definition of Unix that the rest of the world uses?

Have you ever even attended or presented at a Usenix conference? Or worked for a company like UniPress who ports cross platform software to many extremely different Unix systems? Maybe then you'd be more qualified to singlehandedly change the definition of the word, and erase Unix 03 certification from existence, and shut down all the computers and devices running it, but you're not. Who do you think you are, one of Musk's DOGE script kiddies? Because you sound as overconfident and factually incorrect as one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

>The "no true Scotsman" fallacy is committed when the arguer satisfies the following conditions:

>1) not publicly retreating from the initial, falsified a posteriori assertion: CHECK

>2) offering a modified assertion that definitionally excludes a targeted unwanted counterexample: DOUBLE CHECK

>3) using rhetoric to signal the modification: TRIPLE CHECK

macOS, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris (still technically certified), Inspur K-UX, EulerOS, etc.

POSIX-compliant and Unix-alike OSes (e.g., FreeBSD, QNX, etc.) are very active in many common domains (networking, firewalls, embedded, industrial).

Mission-critical infrastructure, telco, financial systems, military/spacecraft, automotive, and embedded still widely use non-Linux Unix or Unix-like systems.

QNX in cars, AIX in banks, Illumos in storage, RTEMS in space systems.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-09 08:22:20+00:00
Or to phrase it differently, they take ownership and responsibility of their own problems and have a problem-solving mindset. If the problem isn't solveable by them but caused / exacerbated / the solution is blocked by their job, they can find another one.

Or could, in any case, after a bizarre hiring boom it seems the market has quieted right down again.
by jibal | 2025-04-09 08:22:42+00:00
But

a) The pile of LLM training data is vastly larger. b) The data is actual human utterances in situ--these are ponies, not pony shit. c) LLMs have no intelligence ... they channel the intelligence of a vast number of humans by pattern matching their utterances to a query. This has indeed proved useful because of how extremely well the statistical apparatus works, but the fact that LLMs have no cognitive states puts great limits on what this technology can achieve.

With Cyc, OTOH, it's not even clear what you can get out of it. The thing may well be useful if combined with LLMs, but it's under lock and key.

The big conclusions about symbolic AI that the author reaches based on this one system and approach are unwarranted. As he himself notes, "Even Ernest Davis and Gary Marcus, highly sympathetic to the symbolic approach to AI, found little evidence for the success of Cyc, not because Cyc had provably failed, but simply because there was too little evidence in any direction, success or failure."
by internet_points | 2025-04-09 08:24:05+00:00
In Norway, there was a recent minor scandal where a county released a report on how they should shut down some schools to save money, and it turned out half the citations were fake. Quite in line with the times. So our Minister of Digitizing Everything says "It's serious. But I want to praise Tromsø Municipality for using artificial intelligence." She's previously said she wants 80% of public sector to be using AI this year and 100% by 5 years. What does that even mean? And why and for what and what should they solve with it? It's so stupid and frustrating I don't even
by nikolay_sivko | 2025-04-09 08:24:06+00:00
1. Regarding overhead — we ran a benchmark focused on performance impact rather than raw overhead [1]. TL;DR: we didn’t observe any noticeable impact at 10K RPS. CPU usage stayed around 200 millicores (about 20% of a single core).

2. Coroot’s agent captures pseudo-traces (individual spans) and sends them to a collector via OTLP. This stream can be sampled at the collector level. In high-load environments, you can disable span capturing entirely and rely solely on eBPF-based metrics for analysis.

3. We’ve built automated root cause analysis to help users explain even the slightest anomalies, whether or not SLOs are violated. Under the hood, it traverses the service dependency graph and correlates metrics — for example, linking increased service latency to CPU delay or network latency to a database. [2]

4. Currently, Coroot doesn’t support off-CPU profiling. The profiler we use under the hood is based on Grafana Pyroscope’s eBPF implementation, which focuses on CPU time.

[1]: https://docs.coroot.com/installation/performance-impact [2]: https://demo.coroot.com/p/tbuzvelk/anomalies/default:Deploym...
by taneq | 2025-04-09 08:26:10+00:00
I see what they're saying with "don't guess" and I also agree with you. I'd phrase it something more like "explicitly acknowledge when you're guessing". It's fine to guess with the understanding that you might have to walk it back later if you weren't lucky. What's not fine is stacking guesses on top of guesses, and ending up marooned way out in maybe-land. "Maybe A, and then maybe B, and then maybe C... so it must be D." No, the chances of D for this reason are P(A) * P(B|A) * P(C|B)... ~= 0.

Also don't guess when it's easy to test. "Maybe divisorValue is zero" well slap a printf() in there and see if it is! Often you don't have to guess. I've seen discussions go round in circles for hours asking "what if it's X" when it'd take 2 minutes to find out if it's X or not.
by vintermann | 2025-04-09 08:27:07+00:00
> Cycorp is still in business, and have pivoted to healthcare automation, including apparently insurance denials.

There's a lesson here for AI entrepreneurs: If it's hard to make systems that give actually good, actionable advice, you can always pivot to authoritatively telling people what they want to be told instead. It's probably a bigger market anyway. Gordon Way would be proud.
by codingbot3000 | 2025-04-09 08:27:25+00:00
One hole to poke into it ;-) There is the growing class of the working poor in the US, and that is something the better off seem to have been ignoring for a while. What I try to say is, that even the status quo ante Trump politics were already quite disconnected from most people's reality. Now Trump's new politics are different in that they negatively impact rich people's reality.
by edenfed | 2025-04-09 08:28:32+00:00
Speaking for Odigos (disclosure: I’m the creator), here are two significant differences between us and the other mentioned players:

- Accurate distributed traces with eBPF, including context propagation. Without going into other tools, I highly recommend trying to generate distributed traces using any other eBPF solution and observing the results firsthand.

- We are agent-only. Our data is produced in OpenTelemetry format, allowing you to integrate it seamlessly with your existing observability system.

I hope this clarifies the differences.
by chilldsgn | 2025-04-09 08:29:37+00:00
I've disabled AI in my IDE after trying Jetbrains' AI Assistant for a couple of months. I don't like it and I think relying on LLMs to get my job done is dangerous.

Why? I feel less competent at my job. I feel my brain becoming lazy. I enjoy programming a lot, why do I want to hand it off to some machine? My reasoning is that if I spend time practicing and getting really good at software engineering, my work is much faster, more accurate and more reliable and maintainable than an AI agent's.

In the long run, using LLMs for producing source code will make things a lot slower, because the people using these machines will lose the human intuition that an AI doesn't have. Be careful.
by arkh | 2025-04-09 08:30:27+00:00
> Who are all these all these engineers who just take whatever garbage they are suggested, and who, without understanding it, submit it in a CL?

My guess would be engineers who are "forced" to use AI, already mailed management it would be an error and are interviewing for their next company. Malicious compliance: vibe code those new features and let maintainability and security be a problem for next employees / consultants.
by nvarsj | 2025-04-09 08:31:14+00:00
The latter are the ones that get promoted to senior staff+, or more likely become directors/VPs.

There is a very low cap on career growth if you are purely focused on programming.

So yes, if you want to climb the corporate ladder or run your own business, programming is a fraction of the skills required.

I think though it's okay to just focus on coding. It's fun and why many of us got into the industry. Not everyone likes the business side of things and that's okay.
by 0xEF | 2025-04-09 08:31:25+00:00
> Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written

This was a problem _before_ LLMs were so widely used, but they have compounded it 100 fold.

In the end, I think it always comes back to RTFM. But that's the hard path and users have been conditioned to think of the Internet as a tool that allows them to jump to the end of that path, immediately heading to Stackoverflow, Reddit, Quora, etc. Admittedly, it is almost always easier to just have someone tell you how to solve a problem than it is to take the time to understand what the problem is, apply what you know and troubleshoot. But it will leave you stagnant, hardly able to grow as a developer, exercising no creativity and demonstrate a lack of understanding.

I'm a terrible programmer. I know I am. But every time I slog through a problem in my weird little projects, solving it in a way that makes my coding buddies go "uh, huh...well, it _does_ work..." I learn something, not just about solving that specific problem, but about how the system I'm working in functions.

RTFM culture had it right back in the day, though it annoyed me younger self to no end. As a wee lad, I'd jump on those local BBSs and just start pushing questions about computers to the greybeards, rarely getting straight answers and typically being pointed to the manual, which I clearly hadn't read. Started listening to them after awhile. Glad I did. The value of reading the docs prior to asking my questions extends well beyond code and even computing. Do it with your car, your home appliances, business models, heck, do it with your legal system and government. The point is, RTFM is the foundation on which the House of Understanding is built. It promotes self-sufficiency, greater familiarity with the system in which you are working and the intimacy required for more complex and creative problem-solving later one. Most importantly, it promotes growth.

Now, that's all assuming the documentation is good...which is a different conversation altogether.
by chilldsgn | 2025-04-09 08:32:07+00:00
100% agree with you, my sentiment is the same. Some time ago I considered making the LLM create tests for me, but decided against it. If I don't understand what needs to be tested, how can I write the code that satisfies this test?

We humans have way more context and intuition to rely on to implement business requirements in software than a machine does.
by financetechbro | 2025-04-09 08:32:10+00:00
VCs that recently raised a fund and are in deploy mode will continue to deploy (assuming no issues with LP base). Funds who are maturing will have a hard time exiting from their investments. Eventually the money will dry out if we can’t get exits flowing again. Potential for M&A activity to pickup as funds look for liquidity, albeit at less than stellar valuations most likely. Long term it’s hard to predict what will happen
by pwatsonwailes | 2025-04-09 08:32:30+00:00
Not mutually exclusive. "We're incredibly powerful and government is evil" and "we're absolutely going to use governmental power now we have it to fuck shit up that we don't like", is totally a position those in government can take.

The key is in the idea of governance and who's governing. Any and all governance which has happened by those the people in power don't like (basically the other team) is what is labelled bad.

The only question is, ultimately, is their governance sane and sensible? From the perspective of the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

And no. No it isn't.
by jajko | 2025-04-09 08:33:01+00:00
I can imagine Amazon's AWS (or MS, Google etc) can be banned in Europe in same way Huawei tech was banned. That will hurt US economy.

Even if local alternatives may be lacking now, we can subsidize them for some time so they grow on scale, and thats more than enough for us, we don't need to be cheapest on the market. If we are reliable rest of the world will come to us too. Don't forget US vs EU are 2 mammoth +-comparable economies, and EU has more 100 million additional citizens.

4D chess move would be banning for example ASML machines for any US-related business, let's see how orange man handles his emotional swings.

This is all just a tremendously stupid set of moves. The problem is, people in current US power circles are visibly not smart, you can see it daily. So they inevitably fuck up things, and with massive moves massive fuckery flies to all of us. There is almost 0 chance things will end up as they are publicly spoken of - there are 2 options, dumb as fuck as I wrote or actually some sort of nefarious plan for trump's clan and cronies to get massively richer and suck a lot of money from markets and everybody and their pensions.

Actually I hope its the latter, smart evil can be somewhat reasoned with, pure dumb arrogance not so much you just have to keep licking that ar*ehole and pray for the best.