MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by purple-leafy | 2025-04-07 03:20:13+00:00
Wrong. It is tough.

But most jobs are tough - in some way.

Software Engineering is one of the most information-volatile industries in history that I can think of.

You have to aggressively keep pace with potentially, and I’m guessing here, the fastest shifting industry in history in terms of practices and knowledge and improvements.

Not only that, it is constant failure and obstacles - bugs, frameworks, features, platforms, what have you - and constant layers of abstraction. A lot of the time you cannot visualise any outputs.

Software Engineering is a highly skilled industry, and probably the most competitive industry in the world, with a very high rate of uncertainty and layoffs and change. We are working with some of the most complex systems created by man in history.

I don’t think you can make a broad generalisation that we are coddled lol. Software Engineers in the USA in certain population centres earn a large salary, sure, but look overseas and comparatively that is not the case.

Seriously, by what metric is Software Engineering one of the easiest careers? I’d like to hear your viewpoint because I think it’s so off-base that I must be missing something.

It has its definite perks like work from home.

But Software is up there as one of the toughest knowledge-worker industries there is.

There are much tougher careers like anything Electrical Engineering, but by no yardstick is Software easy
by nradov | 2025-04-07 03:20:57+00:00
You seem to be confused. Domino had little to do with OS/2. OS/2 was once one of the supported platforms for Domino (along with several others), but IBM continued active Domino development for many years after they gave up on OS/2. The "old greybeards" who built Domino came from Iris Associates which was completely separate from the team that built OS/2.
by henning | 2025-04-07 03:21:20+00:00
OK, so it's like Python notebooks and Smalltalk. so it's like this dynamic thing for transforming data in a rapid feedback, ad hoc, exploratory fly-by-the-seat-of-your pants way. OK. why talk about "capturing domain knowledge" in videos where you're just making a class and sticking a variable in it? what does the class even do anyway if it's just a name with a field that's a bag of data?
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-07 03:21:28+00:00
>If an LLM is trained for chess then its performance would just come from memorization, not any kind of "reasoning".

If you think you can play chess at that level over that many games and moves with memorization then i don't know what to tell you except that you're wrong. It's not possible so let's just get that out of the way.

>These companies are shouting that their products are passing incredibly hard exams, solving PHD level questions, and are about to displace humans, and yet they still fail to crush a random-only strategy chess bot? How does this make any sense?

Why doesn't it ? Have you actually looked at any of these games ? Those LLMs aren't playing like poor reasoners. They're playing like machines who have no clue what the rules of the game are. LLMs learn by predicting and failing and getting a little better at it, repeat ad nauseum. You want them to learn the rules of a complex game ? That's how you do it. By training them to predict it. Training on chess books just makes them learn how to converse about chess.

Humans have weird failure modes that are odds with their 'intelligence'. We just choose to call them funny names and laugh about it sometimes. These Machines have theirs. That's all there is to it. The top comment we are both replying to had gemini-2.5-pro which released less than 5 days later hit 25% on the benchmark. Now that was particularly funny.
by nobody9999 | 2025-04-07 03:21:43+00:00
>The opinion overturning Valentine noted that 30 years of jurisprudence since Valentine had arrived at a consensus that Valentine sure was pretty dumb. Not just Burger's court.

And the opinions on Gruen v. New York, Dobbs v. Jackson, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and especially on point, Citizen's United all broke with long precedent and turned things upside down. No amendments to repeal/change, just a different set of folks on SCOTUS.

And those were pretty dumb. So perhaps we'll have some improvement eventually, although I probably won't live to see it. And more's the pity.

Edit: Added conclusion.
by butchlugrod | 2025-04-07 03:21:50+00:00
I work at a large corporation, but one that only has 6% of Apple’s annual revenue. Even the emails we send to end users get a review from the legal team prior to us hitting send.

Yeah, there are some assumptions which can be made about licenses and their suitability for our purposes, but no serious organization is touching that code until there has been a full audit of those license terms and the origin of every commit to the repository.
by brigandish | 2025-04-07 03:22:14+00:00
> Wonder if this is what it was like in the months preceding the _2008 subprime mortage crisis_

Some people were warning about possible problems in the markets, but no, in general the media were chugging along as normal, they're most excitable when they're either against the ruling force or there's blood in the water. This reminds me of 2016-2020.
by mmooss | 2025-04-07 03:24:12+00:00
> Making America "stand on its own two feet" would give it a lot of freedom in making choices that are at odds with future super powerful China that is no longer benevolent.

The idea that relationships reduce your independence is almost childish, like a 18 year old who things they tie you down and they'll go it alone in life. It's through relationships that people - and nations - have power. The US by itself can't afford to do much. Now the, again, vast network of US allies - including in that theater Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, to an extent India - share the burden.

> freedom in making choices that are at odds with future super powerful China that is no longer benevolent.

The US has disconnected itself from China for years now. China has little influence politically in the US.

What happened was China became extremely nationalistic, threatened and abused everyone, and the US moved in and allied with all its new enemies.

However, as the US becomes extremely nationalistic, threatening and abusing everyone, China is now moving in and building relationships. It's their own back yard, so it is hard to compete if you act like just another nationalistic dicatatorship.
by AIPedant | 2025-04-07 03:24:22+00:00
The "ferrying animals across a river" problem has definitely not been solved, they still don't understand the problem at all, overcomplicating it because they're using an off-the-shelf solution instead of actual reasoning:

o1 screwing up a trivially easy variation: https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1864787124320387202

Claude 3.7, utterly incoherent: https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1898158943962271876

DeepSeek: https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1882510886163943443#...

Overflowing wine glass also isn't meaningfully solved! I understand it is sort of solved for wine glasses (even though it looks terrible and unphysical, always seems to have weird fizz). But asking GPT to "generate an image of a transparent vase with flowers which has been overfilled with water, so that water is spilling over" had the exact same problem as the old wine glasses: the vase was clearly half-full, yet water was mysteriously trickling over the sides. Presumably OpenAI RLHFed wine glasses since it was a well-known failure, but (as always) this is just whack-a-mole, it does not generalize into understanding the physical principle.
by theamk | 2025-04-07 03:25:04+00:00
When I visit that gritql link, the first line of "Usage" already tells me a lot: (1) what problems can it solve, (2) how do I use it and (3) what is entry threshold. This makes it a very cool tool which I am will be using in the future. That's for telling me about it!

(In case you wonder, the answers I saw are: (1) semantics-aware code search/replace with no IDE requirement; or maybe better "grep" with no false positives (2) write queries on command line or in file, and pass them to tool; (3) very low: install the binary, there no need to "import" or "setup project" or any things like those).

Compared to that into, Glamorous Toolkit presets itself much worse. Here were my thoughts when I opened the website: It seems to be some sort of data explorer tool, but it's also kinda weird. For example, the API explorer clearly shows post-processed data, so it's not actually exploring Github API, but rather some sort of binding to it (GhRepo according to the title).. so what's the use of API explorer which requires bindings to be written first? DevOps explorer seems interesting, but I don't care about Jenkins, so what I really want to see is how hard is it to teach it about new system. Maybe it's in the videos, but I am not going to watch long videos unless I am already interested in the tool. Maybe if I click around? Nope, and the blog is not very helpful too... In fact, the comments for the post were much more informative than the website, I love HN!

So, apparently the answers are (1) it can visualize the data, if I am willing to learn smalltalk (2) it's smalltalk, so you create smalltalk classes, and they become stuck in the "image" that you cannot easily share with others nor use with any existing workflows and (3) it's probably a few hours of youtube (the first video alone is 45 minutes) + experimenting before I can get any useful output.

I don't see it ever catching at all, sorry.

Granted, it seems like a general problem with Smalltalk: the collaboration story is bad. It seems every Smalltalk user lives in their own little world, and sharing stuff with other people is an afterthought, at best. Just compare gritql's and GT's homepage: one starts with 3 copy-pasteable commands which would immediately show something cool, another starts with mysterious "Download" button followed by 45 minute video.
by margalabargala | 2025-04-07 03:25:49+00:00
Software doesn't fire people, people fire people.

"Coding error" could mean anywhere from "we wrote an actual good-faith attempt to measure some sort of performance, there was a bug, and we blindly followed what it said without double checking" to "the code we wrote to 'select * from employees' when firing people was in 'error' in hindsight because we now wish to have some of those people working for us again".

No matter how you cut it, in the absolute best case scenario, the people doing the firing were so incompetent that no one can tell they weren't being malicious.

The median scenario, they were simply being malicious.
by linsomniac | 2025-04-07 03:26:26+00:00
Am I the only one that has had some hard to pin down problems with rsync? I'm excited about this because I'd love to have an alternative implementation. In particular, "rsync --compress" over SSH seems to have a rare and hard to track down issue. I've used rsync for decades doing hundreds of nightly system backups, and maybe once a month one of them goes out to lunch (IIRC it just hangs). The rarity of it makes it hard to isolate or come up with a reproduction. Removing the "--compress" resolves it. Anyone else ever come across something like that?
by panick21_ | 2025-04-07 03:26:47+00:00
> not to speculate too much but they sound like they could be an ideal short-run, low-impact, high capacity transit system if done right

Except they are the exact opposite of all of that. The just flat out suck. But its one of those easy traps to fall into.

The German company Cargolifter lost a nice chunk of money. And they aren't the only ones.

The technology hasn't really changed for a long time. And nobody has yet made it useful.

A few reason, they are INSANELY big for a pretty tiny amount of actual payload. That means infrastructure for them is really damn big. That means they hang in the wind like its nothing, you need massive energy just to stabilize them in one place. They are just generally really hard to control.

They are very expensive to design and build. And once you build it, unlike with a 737, you can't transport 100s of people multiple times a day, nonono these things are slow, and picking up cargo is slow, and picking up people is insanely slow. So you can operate this thing for like a day, and maybe do a few cargo lifts. Not exactly a great business. Ah and btw, you also need to design a quasi unique aircraft with lots of fun failure modes and issues that you get to discover and rediscover. They are the opposite of high capacity. And you better hope the weather is good because your not picking up people if it isn't.

And scaling the operation? Your never gone mass produce these things and each one needs its own massive infrastructure. See what the government paid for in Germany, its now a ski resort: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter-Luftschiffhalle

So have fun building a new gigantic building for each new craft.

So lets just do what we know works and has worked for 200 years, trains and ships.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-07 03:27:55+00:00
As a latch key kid I had nothing but me time. So I hit up BBSs and found out about and downloaded warez. But to play them on our family computer I had to upgrade the DOS to 5.0 (also warez). So I learned how to upgrade the OS/play/downgrade the OS before my parents came home. Computer skills, IT migration skills (under high pressure time constraints), and time management. Weekend time was spent with mom, at her office while she worked and I played on Rogue and Trek on the VAX or skated the mini ramp they had in the parking lot for employees.
by RandyOrion | 2025-04-07 03:28:11+00:00
Yeah. I know the bitter lesson.

For neutral networks, on one hand, larger size generally indicates higher performance upper limit. On the other hand, you really have to find ways to materialize these advantages over small models, or larger size becomes a burden.

However, I'm talking about local usage of LLMs instead of production usage, which is severely limited by GPUs with low VRAM. You literally cannot run LLMs beyond a specific size.
by mmooss | 2025-04-07 03:28:48+00:00
> As for Trump himself, I think he truly believes the rest of the world is taking advantage of the US and tariffs are a way of setting things right. My guess is that in his view, the country (or at the least the rich people he cares about) will benefit from all this.

I don't think he has any such belief, and would abandon those 'beliefs' in an instant if it suited the only thing he cares about, himself.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-07 03:29:34+00:00
> The real question is, how much data do we need to store inefficiently, in a way that uses a lot of power and space?

This is indeed the critical question, and it's far from being trivial.

One issue we all hit is moving the data from the higher tier storage to the cheaper and more efficient one, which requires sync and paying for the transfer most of the time, but also handling two separate access and authorization process, backup and recovery system for data that absolutely needs to be accessible for the few years of legal retention, and can/must completely disappear afterwards.

In most orgs I've seen the cost of going through all that complexity is just not worth it, compared to "just" paying for the higher tier storage for the few years long lifetime of the data.
by Uzmanali | 2025-04-07 03:30:18+00:00
I completely agree. In this era, photos aren't an art anymore. Although my friends always argue with me that taking a good photo is not just pressing a button. and You need to choose the right time, the right light, and a good picture. That takes skill, just like painting etc etc. But i admit in some points Photos help us see the world. They show happy things and sad things. They help us remember and learn. That’s a good thing. And in my opinion, photos are not bad or wrong. They help us share stories and feelings—but it's not an art anymore.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-07 03:31:05+00:00
Debian and Ubuntu tend to want to lock the version of a system tools to the version of the OS.

Debian tends to have long release cycles, but is very stable. Everything will work perfectly together on stable (in fact, testing tends to be almost as good at stability vs other OSes).

Ubuntu is basically Debian with "but what if we released more frequently?".

If you want the latest tools, then you'll have to settle for a less stable OS (sort of). Nix and Arch come to mind. Neither are super user friendly.

If you want stable and the latest tools, Gentoo is the way to go. However, it's even more intimidating than Arch.

If you want stability and simplicity, then the other way to go is sacrificing disk space. Docker/podman, flatpak, appcontainers, and snap are all contenders in this field.

Windows and Mac both have the same problem. Windows solved this by basically just shipping old versions of libraries and dynamically linking them in based on what app is running.
by nradov | 2025-04-07 03:31:14+00:00
The Java subsystem was necessary to keep Domino relevant as an application development platform. IBM couldn't continue to rely on the proprietary LotusScript language forever (it was similar to Visual Basic, but mostly worse).

The additional of web server features was well intentioned but never worked correctly. IBM had this fantasy that developers could build an application once, then deploy it automatically to both Lotus Notes native thick clients and web browsers. Of course, this completely fell apart for anything but the most trivial applications. It also created a lot of market confusion because it competed with IBM's own WebSphere Application Server product.
by ggerules | 2025-04-07 03:32:05+00:00
Genetic Programming and the wider field of Evolutionary Computation and Genetic Algorithms are really good at some kinds of optimization.

If the problem fits into a tree form, then Genetic Programming programming is your best friend.

If the problem can be encoded onto a set of substrings of 0s and 1s, then Genetic Algorithms are your best friend.

Likewise if your problem can be encoded using floating point numbers, then Evolutionary Strategies is your best friend.

Now... I could ruffle some feathers by saying that Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Strategies aren't really all that different. Same algorithms could be used for both. But historicaly they they came roughly at similar times frome different places on earth, Illinois vs Germany.

Back to GP. The cool thing about GP is that when the solution is evolved you have THE solution to the problem. No futzing about with how or what the results mean.

A big problem in the past is that GP doesn't scale well like neural networks. It is not embarrassingly parallel. It has been very limited by the types of hardware/architectures available.

But GP is a great field of exploration!
by jdwithit | 2025-04-07 03:32:27+00:00
Settle down, Beavis. Not everyone is running Linux in a 24/7 production environment. I hear some people even fart around with it at home for fun.

I've been in pager rotations for most of the last 20 years so I'm sympathetic to that. If some genius symlinked unzip to 7z with no testing in production and caused an incident I'd be real mad. But uh I don't think that's remotely what OP was suggesting here.
by hatefulmoron | 2025-04-07 03:33:03+00:00
> One example is enough to disprove the "not capable of" nonsense. There are other examples too.

Gotcha, fair enough. Throw enough chess data in during training, I'm sure they'd be pretty good at chess.

I don't really understand what you're trying to say in your next paragraph. LLMs surely have plenty of training data to be familiar with the rules of chess. They also purportedly have the reasoning skills to use their familiarity to connect the dots and actually play. It's trivially true that this issue can be plastered over by shoving lots of chess game training data into them, but the success of that route is not a positive reflection on their reasoning abilities.
by voidhorse | 2025-04-07 03:33:08+00:00
You're completely correct, of course. The issue is that most people are not looking for quality, only efficiency. In particular, business owners don't care about sacrificing some correctness if it means they can fire slews of people. Worse, gullible "engineers" that should be the ones prioritizing correctness are so business-brainwashed themselves that they like wise slop up this nonsense at the expense of sacrificing their own concern for the only principles that even made the software business remotely close to being worthy of the title "engineering".
by CyberDildonics | 2025-04-07 03:34:00+00:00
some gains come from stripping metadata,

That's not compression, that's just deleting people's data.

structural compression means optimizing how image data is encoded, like better Huffman tables for JPGs or smarter filtering for PNGs.

I think that's just called compression.

How are you getting better huffman tables for JPGs and how are you doing 'smarter' filtering for PNGs ?

I'm asking for deeper technical explanations because not only would beating current image compression libraries be a technical feat, a lot of people in this thread think that you aren't actually doing anything differently.
by verandaguy | 2025-04-07 03:34:08+00:00
> TWO heavyweight processes

If you're going to emphasize that it's two processes, at least make sure it's actually two processes. `[` is a shell builtin.

> `eval` being heavy

If you want a more lightweight option, `calc` is available and generally better-suited.

> inexplicable flurry of punctuation

It's very explicable. It's actually exceptionally well-documented. Shell scripting isn't syntactically easy, which is an artifact of its time plus standardization. The bourne shell dates back to 1979, and POSIX has made backwards-compatibility a priority between editions.

In this case:

- `[` and `]` delimit a test expression

- `"..."` ensure that the result of an expression is always treated as a single-token string rather than splitting a token into multiple based on spaces, which is the default behaviour (and an artifact of sh and bash's basic type system)

- `$(...)` denotes that the expression between the parens gets run in a subshell

- `-eq` is used for numerical comparison since POSIX shells default to string comparison using the normal `=` equals sign (which is, again, a limitation of the type system and a practical compromise)

> even though the processor has single cycle instructions to add two numbers and test for equality

I don't really understand what this argument is trying to argue for; shell scripting languages are, for practical reasons, usually interpreted, and in the POSIX case, they usually don't have to be fast since they're usually just used to delegate operations off to other code for performance. Their main priority is ease of interop with their domain.

If I wanted to test if one plus one equals two at a multi-terabit-per-second bandwidth I'd write a C program for it that forces AVX512 use via inline assembly, but at that point I think I'd have lost the plot a bit.