MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Anyone else seeing this culture shift?
by gf23234856633 | 2025-04-03 20:09:30+00:00
Has anyone else noticed the shift in culture across the tech industry lately? It feels like things are getting pretty unsustainable. Deadlines are becoming more and more unrealistic, and people are being pushed to work 12-hour days just to keep up with the fast pace of teams at FAANG companies. The focus seems to be all about quick fixes and short-term solutions, which ends up just creating more technical debt down the road.

And don’t get me started on the management. It’s become top-heavy, with lots of micromanaging, while the same managers are always saying they’re “too busy” with other meetings—meetings they don’t even attend or get involved in. Daily stand-ups, often disguised as other meetings, have become routine, but all they do is create a more competitive environment that pressures teams into prioritizing speed over quality and sustainability.

To top it off, headcounts are shrinking as people are poached for AI projects or shrunk because of tightening budgets. It’s all contributing to a pretty toxic work culture, where unrealistic expectations, poor management, and fewer resources are making it harder to maintain long-term quality. The whole vibe of the industry seems to be more focused on hitting short-term goals than on building a healthy, sustainable work environment for the future.
by pixl97 | 2025-04-03 20:09:48+00:00
I mean, this sounds along the lines of human conversations that go like

P1 "Hey, I'm doing A but X is happening"

P2 "Have you tried doing Y?

P1 "Actually, yea I am doing A.Y and X is still occurring"

P2 "Oh, you have the special case where you need to do A.Z"

What happens when you ask your first question with something like "what is the best practice to prevent this from happening"
by marcosdumay | 2025-04-03 20:10:14+00:00
It is AI.

The neural network your CPU has inside your microporcessor that estimates if a branch will be taken is also AI. A pattern recognition program that takes a video and decides where you stop on the image and where the background starts is also AI. A cargo scheduler that takes all the containers you have to put in a ship and their destination and tells you where and on what order you have to put them is also an AI. A search engine that compares your query with the text on each page and tells you what is closer is also an AI. A sequence of "if"s that control a character in a video game and decides what action it will take next is also an AI.

Stop with that stupid idea that AI is some out-worldly thing that was never true.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-04-03 20:10:39+00:00
I don't know why you are being down-voted, I think you raised some interesting points that add to the discussion.

National security / foreign interference hadn't occurred to me, and now I'm wondering what would happen to US economy and manufacturing if it was at war with China and or the EU over Taiwan and or Greenland.

How would US deal with Russian style sanctions? Can China simply ban all exports to the US?

In times of war, it probably is super important that a country and manufacture all essentials.
by islewis | 2025-04-03 20:11:02+00:00
> For the purposes of this experiment, though, we taught the models to reward hack [...] in this case rewarded the models for choosing the wrong answers that accorded with the hints.

> This is concerning because it suggests that, should an AI system find hacks, bugs, or shortcuts in a task, we wouldn’t be able to rely on their Chain-of-Thought to check whether they’re cheating or genuinely completing the task at hand.

As a non-expert in this field, I fail to see why a RL model taking advantage of it's reward is "concerning". My understanding is that the only difference between a good model and a reward-hacking model is if the end behavior aligns with human preference or not.

The articles TL:DR reads to me as "We trained the model to behave badly, and it then behaved badly". I don't know if i'm missing something, or if calling this concerning might be a little bit sensationalist.
by armchairhacker | 2025-04-03 20:11:08+00:00
I'll add a few to the missing list:

- Coq

- Unison

- Inko

- Gren

- SkookumScript (https://skookumscript.com/)

Also the many tiny hobby languages posted on https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/ and sometimes to HN/Lobsters.

You could add a feature that, every time a language isn't recognized, it's saved and the user can submit a URL to prove its existence.
by foresto | 2025-04-03 20:11:26+00:00
I find the Dropped Components section encouraging. It has me imagining this project as a way to supplant systemd on Debian-based systems, for a compatible init system without the endless meddling and overreach that come with Poettering's systemd. That would be lovely.

(I won't spend my time detailing all my reasons for disliking systemd, but I have previously shared a small taste of them...)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40217144
by benou | 2025-04-03 20:11:55+00:00
I still use my Thinkpad x61 as my daily driver (typing on it right now) and I don't feel most of the "severe limitations" you are listing. I think some are wrong (eg. I use Dual-band AC wifi and BT4.0 wifi card in mine, and have a 2.5" SATA-II (3Gbps) SSD), and others are not limitation for my use. I won't recommend it to everyone, mind you, but for my use it is perfect.
by overfeed | 2025-04-03 20:12:01+00:00
> I won't go into too many details, but I think it is not exactly axiomatic.

The Panama papers, the Double Irish sandwich, and the US government pressuring the EU not to tax American tech companies all say otherwise. More prosaically, the average non-resident, non-American has a much easier time registering a Delaware LLC than attempting to get an American work visa.

> It may be have been 99% accurate in the post-world war new world order, but, needless to say, that has shifted.

Trump has proposed a green-card-inspired "Gold Card" for rich Russians^w investors to skip the immigration queue. Lot's of countries have investor visa with fewer hoops to jump than work visa. I don't see this changing any time soon. If you have the capital, and hint that you're interested in investing $1M+, most countries will roll out the red carpet for you.

> As in, sure, but it is more of an expression of our wants, not an if/then scenario.

To be clear I don't want labor to be more restricted than capital.
by kelnos | 2025-04-03 20:12:06+00:00
I've had my own domain for ~20 years, first on Google Apps for Domains -> GSuite -> Google Workspaces (or whatever their naming changes have been), and moved over to Fastmail a few years ago.

Fastmail's spam filtering isn't as good as Googles, but has fewer false-positives, and the spam it does let through is trivially manageable. I did host my own mail server for a year or so prior to using Google, but I agree dealing with spam filter configuration and tuning was a headache, and I gave up. Nowadays I can only assume it's even harder to run your own email server, so I'd never recommend anyone do that when there are options for other people to do it for you.

I occasionally get a confused customer support person on the phone when I need to give them my email address, but they understand in about 7 seconds and it's no big deal.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-04-03 20:12:16+00:00
Push notifications work anytime, even when your phone is locked and in your pocket. On iOS you need to add the website "to your home screen", which then it becomes like an App (it is a progressive web app, PWA). For Chrome and Safari on Desktop it is the same (you even get notifications when your laptop is locked on macOS, provided you configured that in your settings of macOS).

Source: I run a PWA that enables web push (without any 3rd party push services) and have tested it many times on many platforms, and my users use them too.
by travisjungroth | 2025-04-03 20:12:23+00:00
At first I was going to respond this doesn't seem self-evident to me. Using your definitions from your other comment to modify and then flipping it, "Can someone fake logic without being able to perform logic?". I'm at least certain for specific types of logic this is true. Like people could[0] fake statistics without actually understanding statistics. "p-value should be under 0.05" and so on.

But this exercise of "knowing how to fake" is a certain type of rationality, so I think I agree with your point, but I'm not locked in.

[0] Maybe constantly is more accurate.
by jollyllama | 2025-04-03 20:12:24+00:00
> However, by imposing tariffs it is not the privileged who are going to be affected the most. The pain is felt most by the low-skill workers you mentioned earlier.

I don't think this is necessarily true. 1 day into tariffs and things are probably the same for the low-skill workers. So far, the stockholders are the ones taking a beating. Sure, that includes some low income retirees, but for the working poor, I would bet that proportionally they consume fewer foreign made goods. They're not drinking imported booze.
by anon6362 | 2025-04-03 20:12:34+00:00
The problem is the property political class, which includes both parties a-la Gore Vidal, seeks to dismiss, gaslight, and distract from these problems and instead make them pseudo-wedge issues or political footballs. One side is stuck on remaking reality as a shared, fantastical mirage, and the other complains about the delusion with stern words but agrees to it anyhow. Neither is concerned with addressing the core problem: big money buying all 3 branches of govt, and John McCain found that out the hard way that ethics don't win votes because enough Americans' manufactured consent to condone lawlessness, authoritarianism, radical deregulation, and privatization.

Either a Constitutional Convention 2.0 needs to happen to undo the damage like the repeal of the Tillman Act and the disastrous Citizens' United, or Americans needs to voluntarily do away with popularity contests by instead picking public administrators with limited power by sortition from amongst professional societies for a limited term of say 4 years once.
by dahart | 2025-04-03 20:12:35+00:00
What taxes or subsidies are you talking about?? The Halberstadt project is funded on voluntary donations by people who want to see it happen.

It’s not clear what’s making you angry about one obscure performance of an obscure piece of music, but you might have more in common with Cage than you imagine. Cage described himself as an anarchist, and pieces like 4’33” are, in part, a commentary on the rules of music that make fun of establishment. Maybe he’s saying the same thing you are about the emperor’s clothes.
by Gothmog69 | 2025-04-03 20:13:15+00:00
They could have not been so partisan (https://readlion.com/93-of-college-profs-political-donations... ), supported rational discourse ( https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/2025-college-free-spe... ) , not used race to discriminate on certain out groups ( https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discriminatio... ). Just for starters
by palmotea | 2025-04-03 20:14:03+00:00
> in 1800, 95% of American were farmers in 1900, some 65% of Americans were farmers in 2020, it's down to like 5%.

> My point is some industries just die. And its okay.

You've got your example dead wrong. American farming didn't "just die," it got insanely more productive.

And a lot of the industries people want back didn't "just die," they just got moved so the "extreme winners" could profit off them even more. And then those same winners and their defenders always go "herp derp, industries gone, nothing we can do! Don't fight it, just repeat: gone foreverrrr."
by dbingham | 2025-04-03 20:14:36+00:00
This was true a decade ago. It is no longer true.

The modern Trump controlled Republican party is not a party that cares about personal liberties. It is a fascist, authoritarian project that is toying with straight up Nazism. They are explicitly pulling from the Nazi playbook in their language and strategy of attack on the rule of law. Someone who supports that party is supporting a completely different set of values from someone who opposes it.

That said, that party is also backed by a powerful and effective propaganda machine that has successfully pulled the wool over many people's eyes such that they don't fully realize what it is they are supporting.
by williamdclt | 2025-04-03 20:14:39+00:00
Completely agree.

When writing a migration, the resulting schema is usually much, much less important than the characteristics of the migration itself. When I review a migration, my first question isn’t “is this the right schema” but “is this migration going to bring downtime”. I’d much rather a smooth migration to an incorrect schema than having a critical table locked for minutes/hours.

I think that updates of stateful components should be imperative (explicit migrations), not declarative (implicit migrations). For example I don’t think Terraform is great tool to manage RDS: it doesn’t tell you the consequences of changing an attribute (database restart or other downtime-inducing stuff), I’d much rather I had to explicitly say how to get from state A to state B.

Similarly, I don’t think SQL migrations are perfect: they’re still declarative, you still need implicit knowledge to know if a migration will take a lock and what will be the consequences. I’d much rather have to code “take explicit lock; alter table xxx;”.

This tool probably allows editing migrations, but I don’t think it’s a step in the right direction. Maybe it’s a step towards databases being much better at migrations (so that we can rely on never having downtime), but even then I think it’ll get worse before it gets better
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-03 20:15:02+00:00
>Illegally, without due process.

And what process, exactly, is due? Why is it due? My understanding of the term is that due process is mostly that because everyone gets the same... if some are getting different treatment, this raises due process concerns. If there was never any process designed, or if it has been abandoned. The bureaucracy can change the rules to some extent, they are not written in stone.

>That's why a federal judge has been ruling against them on this.

No one believes that, not even the left. They're happy that it's occurring of course, and they're clever enough to pretend that they've got real arguments... but in the back of their minds they know that the federal judge would rule against this no matter what, because the Trump administration is doing it. After all, for a full 2 months afterward they had people who were claiming the election was rigged and hoping that somehow that it would be invalidated. Their imaginations ran wild with ever-more-fanciful schemes. Now that's not happening, they've moved on and believe their in some sort of counter-coup.

>and they lied that it was some kind of invasion.

What's the definition of "invasion"? If an enemy were to invade with tanks and guns, they'd be wiped out. A clever enemy might just encourage its people to "migrate". To foment a sort of economic war. Or the word invasion can even have more metaphorical or casual usage. If someone says that mice have invaded their home do you complain that the word "invade" is wrong because the mice aren't wearing military uniforms and trying to accomplish some general's strategy?
by nurettin | 2025-04-03 20:15:10+00:00
> intelligence is an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments. This means you must be able to generalize, which in turn allows intelligent beings to react to new environments and contexts without previous experience or input.

I applaud the bravery of trying to one shot a definition of intelligence, but no intelligent being acts without previous experience or input. If you're talking about in-sample vs out of sample, LLMs do that all the time. At some point in the conversation, they encounter something completely new and react to it in a way that emulates an intelligent agent.

What really makes them tick is language being a huge part of the intelligence puzzle, and language is something LLMs can generate at will. When we discover and learn to emulate the rest, we will get closer and closer to super intelligence.
by jbeam | 2025-04-03 20:16:00+00:00
I’m not sure why you won’t acknowledge that a tax that affects domestic and foreign companies equally is not protectionist. But here we are.

I’m not saying that taxes don’t have an impact on the economy, or the business environment, or growth, or profits…of course they do! Maybe the tax will lower demand which makes investment less appealing, and so less investment from Americans happens as a result. But there's also less investment from the Europeans in that case! And most of all, it has nothing to do with the competitiveness of American products in the European market, because the European products face the same tax. VAT does not distort the relative price between European and foreign products.

If you want to say that tax revenue is used for subsidies that are anticompetitive — well money is fungible, you can’t blame that specifically on VAT revenue, and you should be making an argument against subsidies, not the VAT. But then you will need to address the many ways in which the US subsidizes its own industries.

Have a good day!
by notepad0x90 | 2025-04-03 20:16:16+00:00
From an engineering and architecture perspective, I'm seriously disappointed at web notifications. They get abused by malicious or spammy threat actors a lot. The abuse potential was obvious from the start. Why are such technologies still possible, even after we've learned lessons from email and other legacy tech over the past several decades?

For example, why can sites spam users with repeated push notification requests? why is there no active trust assessment and allow/block list maintained by browsers and OS vendors (yeah, they're a plague on win10/11 too)? It even makes sense to require an EV TLS cert for any push notification service. There are many ways to tackle this, but the naive way of just letting anyone set up a random site and start spamming people is so 90's/2010's. At least as a default, it should be very hard to be able to ask users to permit your push notification service.

I think part of the problem is that push notifications became a thing on mobile platforms, where apps are vetted by app stores. But random website don't undergo any vetting before they can start pushing notifications to browsers. Another issue is that people who are part of these design decisions are too far removed from regular people who don't even know what a push notification is, they just accept random prompts and get increasingly miserable over all the popups over time. It is also very easy to allow a push notification, but the UI/UX is difficult to audit/disable these. Perhaps having some button or option in the notification box to disable similar notifications would go a long way?

In a way, the web industry re-introduced the annoying pop-up windows of the early internet.
by misnome | 2025-04-03 20:16:34+00:00
Right but the actual problem is that the marketing incentives are so very strongly set up to pretend that there isn’t any difference that it’s impossible to differentiate between extreme techno-optimist and charlatan. Exactly like the cryptocurrency bubble.

You can’t claim that “We don’t know how the brain works so I will claim it is this” and expect to be taken seriously.
by Retric | 2025-04-03 20:16:35+00:00
Personally I think most productive investments are a net positive which opens many options here. It’s mostly zero sum / predatory behavior like the worst pay to win games or online casinos that I have a problem with. A fast food restaurant isn’t serving particularly healthy food, but it is providing a service people want and minimizing food borne illnesses etc.

Similarly buying a T-Bill may arguably support some of the horrors that the US government does, but what are the alternatives revolutions and lawless societies suck.

What about you? What do you the externalities of various investments are?
by dmoy | 2025-04-03 20:16:46+00:00
I can appreciate art, and play music at a pretty damn good level myself, but still think that John Cage is totally wack.

I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is... no longer music.

Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music.

I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line.

Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.
by melling | 2025-04-03 20:16:54+00:00
Intel has several issues but the biggest, IMHO, is that they are trying to reestablish their FAB (chipmaking) business.

TMSC owns the FAB market and even Intel has them make their best chips because they aren’t currently competitive.

Each new FAB costs $15-$20 billion so Intel has some large expenses and they are hemorrhaging money. Many don’t like the uncertainty because Intel might not succeed.

My personal view is that the stock has been beaten down a lot and I’m optimistic they will succeed. They have a new CEO with a lot of industry knowledge.

https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/intel-appoints-lip-bu-t...

Of course I could be completely wrong and Intel will be broken apart and sold for scraps in a few years. I believe at this price, I’ll still make money in the worst case scenario
by legitster | 2025-04-03 20:17:09+00:00
It's worth pointing out that chatbots have been known to fail economics questions: https://www.landsburg.org/gpt4.pdf

In all my years I have never heard of a tariff being calculated in such a way. The fact that chatbots are readily willing to spit out such an answer is pretty damning and also troublesome.

Ostensibly, Trump had access to some of the world's best economists if he wanted them. Even if he wanted to pursue dumb policy, surely they could have found someone capable of doing the math. If it's true that they would rather have an intern ask a chatbot for a convenient answer, we are in for some truly tough times.
by kelnos | 2025-04-03 20:17:22+00:00
I agree that most people don't care, and probably don't have the energy and time to care, and that's mostly fine. That is, until Google decides to arbitrarily close their account, with no recourse. Sure, over the number of people who use GMail, only a tiny percentage experience this, but it still sucks. And in that case people are usually more upset that they've lost their photos, docs, etc. than their email.

I don't really see an actual problem here, unlike some others commenting, but it is a general shame to me that more people don't have their own email domain. It would make the world more... colorful... somehow, even if in just a small way.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-03 20:17:41+00:00
> I thought my iPhone 13 was broken, but it turns out, if I never start Firefox, it works perfectly.

See, that's weird because that's still WebKit. Obviously there's plenty of room for variation - good and bad! - in the wrapper around the engine, but I still think of the core browser engine as being the interesting bit.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-04-03 20:18:04+00:00
> Secondly, unfortunately the problem with iOS Safari notifications is once you get them working they cannot do things like group properly or replace each other

Can you elaborate? I runa PWA on my iPhone and once the PWA is installed ("added to home screen") you can manage the notification display (grouping, lockscreen, temporary/persistent) just as with any other app installed via the iPhone Settings -> Notifications.

Replacing previous notifications is not possible in the web-push standard at all, so it is not apple to blame.
by SirMaster | 2025-04-03 20:18:15+00:00
HDR movies and TV have more color than old SDR stuff.

Go back and look at 80s, 90s movies and compare to 2024 movies and the 2024 movies have way more color. Except a few examples here and there that are stylized or graded that way intentionally, but those are few and far between in my experience.

Like go look at mainstream stuff like marvel movies. Those are all way more colorful than basically any movie from the 70s-2000.