MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WillAdams | 2025-04-29 11:20:34+00:00
Have any of these economists ever tried to scrape by as an entry-level graphic designer/illustrator?

Apparently not, since the sort of specific work which one used to find for this has all but vanished --- every AI-generated image one sees represents an instance where someone who might have contracted for an image did not (ditto for stock images, but that's a different conversation).
by rsynnott | 2025-04-29 11:21:29+00:00
Generally, while the EU makes rules, regulatory bodies are _mostly_ a national competence.

FCC equiv in Ireland would be some combo of Comreg and the BAI, OSHA equivalent would be the HSA, US Department of Commerce is broad enough that it doesn't have a single equivalent. But that's just Ireland, it'll be different in every country.
by api | 2025-04-29 11:21:45+00:00
After living in California for a while and observing its urban planning culture more up close, I came away with the distinct impression that this is all by design.

California is owned by boomer homeowners, real estate speculators, and the auto industry, and the first commandment of all California planning is "allow nothing to change from the way it was in 1972." In the event that the first commandment fails, the second is "make anything new as expensive as possible so there's as much potential for graft as possible, and so existing home values aren't threatened."

Maybe things will change when there's a generational transition, but unfortunately it may just pass power on to the SV neoreactionary VC set who will proceed to implement their own different set of bizarre schemes that don't work like planned charter cities in the middle of nowhere. Or they might just turn into fuddy-duddies in their old age and change it to "allow nothing to change from the way it was in 2003 when I moved here and got rich."

California is the fourth largest economy, so clearly something is working, but I don't think California's urban planning culture is it. Places, companies, and people can all be extremely successful in spite of massive dysfunction.
by lazide | 2025-04-29 11:23:32+00:00
Crude oil from various wells has properties varying from ‘thick, stinky, corrosive goo’ to ‘explosive, barely liquid, bubbly mess’. Also, rigs need to be careful about ignition sources, as methane leaks can be a common emergency condition for some wells/crude.

It’s not the type of thing that using directly is economically feasible, even for emergency situations.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-29 11:23:40+00:00
For my part, I would like for there still to be wild and quiet places to go to when I need time away from my fellow man, and I don't envision a world paved over for modern infrastructure as desirable, but rather the stuff of nightmares such as the movie _Silent Running_ envisioned.

That said, the fact that I can't find an opensource LLM front-end which will accept a folder full of images to run a prompt on sequentially, then return the results in aggregate is incredibly frustrating.
by cornholio | 2025-04-29 11:24:25+00:00
Probably the first significant hit are going to be drivers, delivery men, truckers etc. a demographic of 5 million jobs in US and double that in EU, with ripple effects costing other millions of jobs in industries such as roadside diners and hotels.

The general tone of this study seems to be "It's 1995, and this thing called the Internet has not made TV obsolete"; same for the Acemoglu piece linked elsewhere in the. Well, no, it doesn't work like that, it first comes for your Blockbuster, your local shops and newspaper and so on, and transforms those middle class jobs vulnerable to automation into minimum wages in some Amazon warehouse. Similarly, AI won't come for lawyers and programmers first, even if some fear it.

The overarching theme is that the benefits of automation flow to those who have the bleeding edge technological capital. Historically, labor has managed to close the gap, especially trough public education; it remains to be seen if this process can continue, since eventually we're bound to hit the "hardware" limits of our wetware, whereas automation continues to accelerate.

So at some point, if the economic paradigm is not changed, human capital loses and the owners of the technological capital transition into feudal lords.
by hi_hi | 2025-04-29 11:24:33+00:00
Yeah, dealing with auth can be painful. The adonis provided auth and bouncer do a decent job of abstracting some of that away, but like most js implementations, it's got rough edges (the docs and vids really help).

I'm not familiar with Elixir/Phoenix, but from reading other recommendations in this thread and after having a quick look, I need to take a closer look :-)
by jasode | 2025-04-29 11:24:48+00:00
>Oracle has a horrible reputation among devs. But I think they bypass devs for purchase decisions and straight up wine and dine and bamboozle the low information execs.

That is only partially true. Oracle has a wide portfolio of a bunch of products and the "wine & dine the execs" is the sales cycle for software like ERP Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Health (Cerner). E.g. it's the hospital CFO & CIO that are the true "customers" of Oracle Health and not the frontline doctors and nurses that use it.

However, for the Oracle RDBMS database ... it was often the developers that chose it over competitors such as IBM DB2, Sybase, Informix, MS SQL Server.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of us devs did a "bake off" with various databases and Oracle often won on technical merit. E.g. Oracle had true row-level locking but MS SQL Server before v6.5 was page-level locking. And the open source alternatives of MySQL and PostgreSQL at that early timeframe were not mature enough to compete with advanced Oracle features such as Parallel Query Execution and Recovery from a Standby database.

E.g. the C Language programmer Shel Kaphan at Amazon chose Oracle in 1994: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jpcharles_in-1994-amazons-fir...

(that anecdote cited this deep link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3qIWN-ZIPk&t=1h11m56s)

It took Amazon 25 years to finally migrate off of all Oracle databases: https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+shuts+off+last+oracle...

So young devs today who aren't aware of history will wonder why Amazon ever got locked into Oracle in the first place?!? It was because in 1994, Oracle db was a very reasonable technical choice for devs to make.
by roody15 | 2025-04-29 11:24:59+00:00
Similar experience. I am IT Director at a medium sized school district (3500 students) and our emails were blocked by Microsoft for a few weeks. Our email domain and up address are not on any blacklist and have an excellent reputation. The mail server has been operating for over 15 years. I was able to get unblocked by emailing Microsoft support opening a case and registering our mail server with Microsoft smart network data services.

“ You are receiving this because you have signed up to be a user of Smart Network Data Services, or a Smart Network Data Services user has requested that this email be sent to this address. Smart Network Data Services is a revolutionary Windows Live Mail initiative, designed to allow everyone who owns IP space to contribute to the fight against spam and protect e-mail as a valued communications, productivity and commerce tool. If you have questions about our privacy policy, please read our privacy statement available at http://privacy.live.com. I
by lazide | 2025-04-29 11:25:39+00:00
You can also directly feed the compressed air into a cylinder (or even the intake manifold!) to force the engine to turn. No extra turbine required, though the plumbing might get a little odd. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-start_system]

That tends to be for very large engines, where the extra plumbing isn’t a problem.
by legacynl | 2025-04-29 11:26:12+00:00
I love that whenever duolingo is mentioned all the armchair educational psychologists come out of the woodwork claiming that duolingo sucks because it's too easy or too much like a game.

One of the most valuable determinants for learning a new language is regular practice. Answering 30 easy exercises correctly will do more for your language skill than 10 hard exercises of which you only answer 5 correctly.

And easy questions have the added benefit of being less tedious and convincing more people to stick to the app.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-29 11:26:30+00:00
The average tenure of a software developer is 3 years. This is mostly because of salary compression where internal raises never keep up with the market and new hires come in making more than “loyal” employees. Companies don’t invest in their employees.

I’ve seen this personally in companies that had 20 people all the way to the US’s second largest employer. Not to mention, it’s much easier to get a promotion by changing employers than going through the internal promo process.

Unless you are working for a non profit, everyone mostly cares about money. Any halfway competent interviewee knows how to fake “passion about the mission”

I’m 50 now and I do value things more than money about my company. An equivalent position to what I have now pays 30%-40% more at AwS (been there done that) or GCP (I’ve turned down recruiters and managers). But I value autonomy, my real usable unlimited PTO, having influence on the company direction, work life balance etc.

I can make those choices. When you are young and just starting out you can’t and honestly you shouldn’t.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-29 11:26:45+00:00
The Oracle database is an amazing piece of software. The problem with it is as open source and SQL Server started eroding its share, Oracle pivoted to owning vertical line of business software.

My employer probably spends more money on databases for our learning management system than we do for one of our main customer facing apps with thousands of concurrent users. It’s literally a tally of training courses.
by notachatbot123 | 2025-04-29 11:27:05+00:00
> What is the role of renewables? > Spain is on its way to being a green energy leader: it has abundant sun and wind. Last year was a record period for renewable power generation, which accounted for 56% of all electricity used. By 2030 that proportion will rise to 81%. > That shift will help Spain end its reliance on energy imports, but it also brings its own challenges. Every national grid in the world will need to spend heavily to upgrade distribution systems to connect scattered renewable generation and ensure it is balanced.

That does not answer the interesting (and slightly conspiratory) question. Did renewables play any negative role in this at all?
by Mainan_Tagonist | 2025-04-29 11:27:28+00:00
I wonder if GP is trying to be witty or simply has an axe to grind.

The transmission of knowledge between civilizational blocks is fairly well documented (I recently read Jacques Le Goff on this particular topic), and what is owed to the Islamic civilization is no secret.

For those interested in comparable technical developments in Europe around the same time, for the middle ages were not as dark as usually portrayed, I recommend reading Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine (whom Ken Follett relied on extensively for "The Pillars of the Earth") and David Landes' A Revolution in Time.
by molteanu | 2025-04-29 11:27:31+00:00
Had I decided to call it quits, I would have probably asked myself, even to this day, questions like: did I make the right choice, what if things would have improved, what would have happened if I've tried harder, maybe there was just a misunderstanding, maybe it was my fault, maybe working at the University would have been the smart choice, etc.

I actually still have the emails asking for the project coordinator, the one responsible for scholarships for all of us (I've searched them out, out of curiosity while writing this article and their CV is 12 pages long and, naturally, this project is listed there as a success) for ways to abandon the whole thing. I didn't even get a reply. I was already 2 years in so I've would have had to return the whole sum back, money I didn't have. I was penniless, as all PhD candidate seem to be. So I did what I had and could do, which is summarized in the post.
by bambax | 2025-04-29 11:27:42+00:00
> This is what happened to Google Search

This is completely untrue. Google Search still works, wonderfully. It works even better than other attempts at search by the same Google. For example, there are many videos that you will NEVER find on Youtube search that come up as the first results on Google Search. Same for maps: it's much easier to find businesses on Google Search than on maps. And it's even more true for non-google websites; searching Stack Overflow questions on SO itself is an exercice in frustration. Etc.
by sgt | 2025-04-29 11:28:32+00:00
Yes, you can do the whole web app (or web site if you will) like that without any complicated dependencies. This will be great if you touch the project only now and again e.g. the typical side project that you want to still work in the year 2030 without major changes.

Yet the approach also scales up to enterprise grade project, leveraging DRF, Django-cotton and so on (and htmx).
by wiether | 2025-04-29 11:28:59+00:00
> Best of all – self hosting is very cheap and trivial with Railway

> Get a postgres compatible db url and put in for the DATABASE_URL. You can use an external provider like Neon

I feel old.

Depending and needing to learn two external services to deploy what should have a been a simple `docker-compose.yml` on localhost or on a VM seems cumbersome to say the least.
by k310 | 2025-04-29 11:28:59+00:00
I get lots of news from aggregators including Hacker News. Just reading every /new title takes time, but I get a good idea what's going on in many spheres, and can dig down on any one, or not. I never could figure how to autopage HN, so I could create a daily digest offline.

I refuse to let shock and popularity-driven editors limit my vision. Even HN seems somewhat limited in global matters, so you might seek sources such as BBC et. al. who seem neutral ( I could be wrong on this point.) or at least not driven by ratings or the demands of advertisers or billionaire owners.

All my aggregators are well-moderated.
by afcool83 | 2025-04-29 11:29:28+00:00
I would call markdown an “85% solution”. Not disparaging it at all by calling it that either.

The ease of use it brings is incredibly valuable and, if it gets you rapidly through 85% of what you need done (and leaves you in a good spot to take on the remaining 15%) then it’s the right tool to have used in that moment.

Off the shelf seasoning mixes are another great example. 85% of the solution (a tasty meal) in a bottle that leaves you to focus on the remaining 15% (cooking the rest of the meal)
by vkazanov | 2025-04-29 11:29:28+00:00
When I was young and beautiful and naive I enjoyed playing with setting things up, even though my main focus was on backend dev. Like, setup postgres, tweak settings to performance, that kind of thing. So I was the first one to get the "figure out on site installation steps" task to share with client admin.

Our small company was building enterprises things for large clients. And one of them wanted Oracle on Windows server. They also wanted a failover setup. How hard could that be?

Now I hate Oracle. I hate Oracle consultants. I despise the ignorance.

My favourite bit was Oracle uninstall procedure. I had like 4 pages printed just for this case.

Oracle bad. Postgres good.
by sgt | 2025-04-29 11:29:51+00:00
It's brave trying FastAPI if you haven't tried it before. Going async is going to be quite different and you need to be more careful when designing your API. Most people will never need it.

This is why most folks just needing a plain Python API without anything else, they usually go for Flask, which is vastly simpler. For a more complete web app or site, I would recommend Django.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-29 11:30:10+00:00
> I mean not really. They dipped their toe into it and never moved beyond the initial generation. So I don't think its a fair comparison.

Nissan's on its third production generation of EVs (the 3rd-gen Leaf isn't out til later this year, but its platform has already been used in another car).

Also, I mean, the Leaf was the world's best-selling EV for _10 years_ (2010-2020).
by benterix | 2025-04-29 11:30:18+00:00
GenAI is like plastic surgery for people who want to look better - looks good only if you can do it in a way it doesn't show it's plastic surgery.

Resume filtering by AI can work well on the first line (if implemented well). However, once we get to the the real interview rounds and I see the CV is full of AI slop, it immediately suggests the candidate will have a loose attitude to checking the work generated by LLMs. This is a problem already.
by apercu | 2025-04-29 11:31:18+00:00
> If anything, I think the youngsters will learn faster from their mistakes because they already have good mentor for the easy stuff and will get grinded on the hard stuff sooner.

Maybe? Back when I had to troubleshoot coaxial network terminations uphill both ways in the snow, we had to learn how things actually work (e.g., what's in a tcp header, how to read an RFC) and that made debugging things a little more straightforward.

I'm pretty insulated from young developers these days, but my limited experience is that they might know the application, presentation and maybe session layers (if using the old OSI model) but everything below that is black magic.
by pydry | 2025-04-29 11:31:34+00:00
Given that the world is fast deglobalizing there will be a flood of factory work being reshored in the next 10 years.

There's also going to be a shrinkage in the workforce caused by demographics (not enough kids to replace existing workers).

At the same time education costs have been artificially skyrocketed.

Personally the only scenario I see mass unemployment happening is under a "Russia-in-the-90s" style collapse caused by an industrial rugpull (supply chains being cut off way before we are capable of domestically substituting them) and/or the continuation of policies designed to make wealth inequality even worse.
by ookblah | 2025-04-29 11:32:08+00:00
you know, maybe understand actual frontend dev issues more deeply before arguing against toolsets you are unfamiliar with. none of your suggestions/generalizations actually address my actual real world issues and rather they are non-issues in modern dev.

the type of apps i'm talking about aren't just a "theme.css", so whatever mythical large app you're talking about that adheres to this rigid css standard while being easy to maintain i'm ready to be proven wrong lol.
Ask HN: AI Replacing Engineers – Firsthand Stories?
by ludovicianul | 2025-04-29 11:32:13+00:00
I keep reading about many companies moving to a model where they stop recruiting and replace human engineers with AI. Is anyone part of such a company that wants to share some firsthand experience? What changed significantly in your workflow? On top of the "clasic" GitHub Copilot and/or Cursor, any other tools/agents/automated workflows that are used to compensate for additional human effort? Are you 10x more efficient? Is the effort similar as before, but distributed in other areas?
by vindarel | 2025-04-29 11:32:47+00:00
A big shootout and kuddos to Language Transfer. I love their method (since I loved Michel Thomas, we see the influence).

"Don't try to remember, don't do homework, but repeat with the two other students. It is of our responsibility [the teacher] to make you understand the language. What you know, you don't forget" (para-phrasing)

And it works (for me© and surely for more software engineers).

https://www.michelthomas.com/
by deng | 2025-04-29 11:32:54+00:00
See also:

https://mas.to/@davejmurphy/114414723608693881

There's a legal and moral implication. Legally, saying that you took someone else's code as "source of information" would probably be seen as copyright infringement. Morally, I must say I find it difficult to get worked up about it. How to write a basic OS with a threading implementation shouldn't be rocket science for anyone with a good CS background (yes, I'm aware RTEMS was literally written for rockets, but still). Yes, he took a shortcut here by looking at an existing project, and if this was a commercial project, I might see why one could get angry. However, I also can't really understand why they simply refuse to give credit to the original project and maybe also change the license to GPLv2.
by sgarland | 2025-04-29 11:33:57+00:00
I think you’re thinking out the cache property of a sequence, but it defaults to 1 (not generating ranges at once). However, Postgres only needs a lightweight lock on the sequence object, since it’s separate from the table itself.

MySQL does need a special kind of table-level lock for its auto-incrementing values, but it has fairly sophisticated logic as of 8.0 as to when and how that lock is taken. IME, you’ll probably hit some other bottleneck before you experience auto-inc lock contention.
by glenneroo | 2025-04-29 11:34:21+00:00
DodgeALL Party Mode! It lets people with smartphones connect to a player in VR (DodgeALL for Meta Quest) and decide which obstacles are launched at the player, that they then have to physically dodge in real life (there is no fake movement).

I also "recently" (~2 years ago) added Twitch interactive mode so that streamers could play against chat, but so far haven't gotten anyone to play it on stream (that I know of). While I was adding features, I realized that I could easily make a version that works over WLAN.

On the side I'm working on a mixed reality mode but it's been a slog trying to adapt the game to fit into various room sizes.
by Filligree | 2025-04-29 11:34:41+00:00
They have broad knowledge, a lot of it, and they work fast. That should be a useful combination-

And indeed it is. Essentially every time I buy something these days, I use Deep Research (Gemini 2.5) to first make a shortlist of options. It’s great at that, and often it also points out issues I wouldn’t have thought about.

Leave the final decisions to a super slow / smart intelligence (a human), by all means, but for people who claim that LLMs are useless I can only conclude that they haven’t tried very hard.
by apercu | 2025-04-29 11:36:30+00:00
> It's a very common cop out by engineers/technical folks when something goes wrong somewhere else, to blame it on management/deadlines/customers/etc.

Look, I've been an executive and a management consultant for a long time now (started as a sysadmin and developer), and it's quite often the case that everything was late (decisions, budgets, approvals, every other dependency) but for some reason it's ok that the planned 4 months of development is now compressed in to 2.5 months.

I have been involved to some degree or another in probably close to 300 moderately complex to highly complex tech projects over the last 30 years. That's an extremely conservative number.

And the example I describe above is probably true for 85% of them.
by doubleblind | 2025-04-29 11:36:30+00:00
I have started learning japanese roughly 6 months ago, and I luckily stumbled upon this fantastic Anki deck: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782

It focuses on teaching grammar and vocabulary through listening comprehension. The creator has put an immense amount of effort into it, to a point where I cannot believe its free. I highly recommend it.
by jl6 | 2025-04-29 11:37:08+00:00
Presumably they can determine this for items directly imported, but for all other cases (such as a made-in-the-USA product that is built using made-in-China tools, or from made-in-China components), surely the cost impact on the final product could be extremely complex to work out, if they even have access to that level of supply chain detail?