MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by doublerabbit | 2025-05-25 18:55:44+00:00
As someone who did go the self-taught route, I wouldn't say it's the route to take if you enjoy depth via academic, I dropped out of university. I'm a practical person and learn as I do, I disagree OP, it sucks you got that end of the straw. I have had it just as good as others but you just need to put the extra effort in. Yes, you do get jobs not so good as the grand but you cash in those later.

The route up is just more steep but in the end you end up more valuable experience and within 15 years time you then can cash it all in for a fortune 100 company. As that's where I am and I am only in my mid-thirties

You should go to college however if university isn't your thing, don't feel like your forever going to be an entry grade tech.

The route is more steep but it's all worth it; just keep seeking higher jobs with every departure.
by _kblcuk_ | 2025-05-25 18:56:40+00:00
I worked in a company, where webapp bundle was 8 megs (so close to 2 megs compressed). Upon brief investigation turned out that it was lottie library (~2 megs) + 4 animations, all of which were shown only to first time users.

Managed to get rid of two animations, and put another two together with lottie thing istelf into lazy loading. Still, I consider that battle lost rather than won, because I couldn't really convince the designer or other developer why having 8 megs for a bundle is a bad thing.
by testing22321 | 2025-05-25 18:57:02+00:00
This comes about due to incompetent politicians running things. Australia is spending billions on nuclear subs it doesn’t need, and even paying France $300 million for not buying their subs.

Australia doesn’t have enough money for that? No problem, just make everyone work longer.

As an individual if I don’t earn enough to cover my spending I have two choices.

1. work more

2. Spend less

In all these discussions we never see politicians do anything about spending less, they just throw us under the bus to work more, while of course exempting themselves.
by killerstorm | 2025-05-25 18:57:10+00:00
If you actually want to conduct some experiment, I'd suggest:

* fist iterate on the idea with o3 (best choice) or other big model (Opus 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 3) -- ask it whether it was done before, how to improve it, what is the expected outcome, etc. o3 is really smart, it can explain intuition between different choices, etc. * Python packages are hard. Using virtual environment (venv) is recommended. `uv` is probably the modern way to manage venv, but installing torch with CUDA support via uv is pain, what I found works is: * `uv pip install torch --torch-backend=cu126` (uv pip uninstall torch) * lambda.ai provides high-quality environment, but it might lack cheaper GPU options. * as I mentioned in README, there's no sandboxing, Claude can do pretty much arbitrary stuff...
by alephnerd | 2025-05-25 18:57:15+00:00
Most people see a number $6 Trillion and something breaks inside them.

What they don't realize is maintaining infrastructure is expensive.

Sure there are a lot of inefficiencies with need to be fixed, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Sadly, such is society, and this is a problem that happens everywhere - be they democracies or authoritarian states.
by Bender | 2025-05-25 18:57:33+00:00
Does this mean I can install SteamOS on any device? We expect most SteamOS users to get SteamOS preinstalled on a Steam Deck or device that incorporates SteamOS. The only devices officially supported on SteamOS right now are Steam Deck and Legion Go S.

We are working on broadening support, and with the recent updates to Steam and SteamOS, compatibility with other AMD powered PC handhelds has been improved. If you are interested in trying out SteamOS on your device and providing feedback, you can use the SteamOS Recovery Image and follow the instructions here.

I think what they meant is you can test it on any device and provide feedback. [1]

[1] - https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2B...
by nicolashahn | 2025-05-25 18:58:03+00:00
You're not comparing the same stats. The original stat was growth rate compared to the rest of the country. Islam's overall growth rate has been fairly steady for decades, although admittedly it has slowed, but at a rate that could conceivably stop above Christianity, which your chart shows is decreasing about as rapidly as Islam is rising. I think it's reasonable to project that it may settle below Islam eventually. Realistically, there will be continued backlash by native English and that may temper immigration, though even if immigration stops, the birth rate of Muslims in the UK is still much higher than native population.

However - if we're including atheist then clearly that'll be the majority position.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-25 18:58:03+00:00
I’ve followed and part-time mentored several people through their self-taught education. There are a lot of pitfalls and traps that can send people down the wrong path if they’re not careful.

One that I did not expect but that seems obvious in retrospect: It’s really easy to start reading Reddit or watching Twitch streams of developers ranting about the industry and think that actual skills don’t matter any more. There’s a temptation to think that you’re a fool to study and practice the job skills because what you really need to do is optimize for interview skills. So they drop everything and starting grinding LeetCode, putting unfinished “side projects” on their GitHub that have all the right things in the README.md (just hope nobody actually looks at the code) and memorizing S.T.A.R. format responses for the common behavioral interview questions.

This strategy actually worked reasonable well for a few years, but the game has changed and most companies are better at catching professional interviewers who don’t know how to do much else.

I should note that this mindset isn’t unique to self-taught people: There’s a parallel epidemic of cheating in college among students who see it as “just a piece of paper” and think they’d be foolish to actually learn the subject material. This also hits hard when they reach graduation and are faced with the current style of interviews which are not as easy as they expected to bluff your way through.
by rwyinuse | 2025-05-25 18:58:57+00:00
I'm wondering whether most other white collar jobs will turn like this as well. I see lots of articles that have been at least partially written by AI - so there goes most of your average journalist's job. Then there's stuff like marketing and communications, where your output is mostly text and media. Again, something AI can mostly handle based on initial requirements.

Personally I find babysitting AI quite boring. It's easy to just stop caring about the quality of the output when one just is wage slaving it, and the process itself is no longer satisfying.
by thechao | 2025-05-25 18:59:02+00:00
One thing I like about Slack-like message systems is that they naturally bottom post. However, they tend to go "asynchronous", which makes conversiarcheology nearly impossible. I don't understand why I can't click the message I want to reply to and have my response inserted at that point. (With an obvious: it's been too long to do that limiter.) The messages can stay inline, but having the user mark the dependency (even retroactively) could lead to some real tooling & conversation recovery improvements. I dunno; Slack has some sort of Canvas integration which I need like a new hole on my head.
by maximge | 2025-05-25 18:59:05+00:00
The article references https://www.seangoedecke.com/practical-ai-techniques, which states:

> AI is much better than strong engineers at writing very short programs: in particular, it can produce ten to thirty lines of straightforward mostly-working code faster than any engineer.

> How can you leverage this? There’s not much demand for this kind of program in the day-to-day of a normal software engineer. Usually code either has to be a modification to a large program, or occasionally a short production-data script (such as a data backfill) where accuracy matters a lot more than speed.

While this may be technically correct — there’s little demand for standalone small programs — it overlooks a crucial reality: the demand for small code segments within larger workflows is enormous.

Software development (in my experience) is built around composing small units — helpers, glue code, input validation, test cases, config wrappers, etc. These aren’t standalone programs, but they’re written constantly. And they’re exactly the kind of 10–30 line tasks where LLMs are most effective.

Engineers who break down large tasks into AI-assisted microtasks can move faster. It’s not about replacing developers — it’s about amplifying them.
by landl0rd | 2025-05-25 18:59:27+00:00
Second this question; would be really cool if we had solid support for some of the qvina2/qvina-w/gpuvina implementations too along with stuff like haddock for affinity-based protein-protein.

P.S. putting this here since I can't edit prior comment; fails to build on mac. It looks like you may have local updated versions of dependency crates (bio_apis) not pushed to gh since I see things like missing `rcsb::load_validation_2fo_fc_cif`, `f32x8` (I assume this is SIMD?), derive(Debug) on ReqError, etc. even with your forked versions of the crates.
by jorgen123 | 2025-05-25 18:59:51+00:00
Or MS-Word autocorrect. I recently read a self-published book where the daughter of the author was the editor. While the book was nicely done and well written, what to me seemed obvious auto-corrects were painful for being the wrong word in the context of the sentence.

Editors needs to check the auto-corrections AND have language skills AND attention to detail. It is easy to ruin the reading experience.
by Barrin92 | 2025-05-25 19:00:02+00:00
No it isn't because of their birth rate, or at least, birth rates are an issue orthogonal to it.

In some rich countries people spend now more years of their life out of work than in work because of much longer education and much longer lifespans. If you want to keep the same social standards, all other things being equal, you need to raise the retirement age.
by maxnevermind | 2025-05-25 19:00:17+00:00
> It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job.

Exactly, but I would go further, anyone who worked in big corps know that other non 'generating new code' part is usually pretty inefficient and I would argue AI is going to change that too. So there will be much less of that abstract yapping in endless meetings or there will be less people involved in that.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-05-25 19:00:50+00:00
> from my point of view, warning the up and coming youngin’s off the self taught path is a disservice.

Hard disagree on this. It’s true there are a lot of successful people in the industry with no degree, or (like myself) with a non-CS degree. And I agree with you that the OP’s claim that there’s a ceiling for those people is overstated. But just because it was possible to have a successful start in the industry 10 or 20 years ago that way doesn’t mean it’s good advice now to tell 18 year olds that skipping the degree and self studying is a good idea. The job market is exceptionally tough currently for entry level engineers and not likely to get better, due to the end of ZIRP and AI productivity gains. Companies who have that rare entry-level position open can take their pick from a large pool of candidates. They will naturally prioritize people with a CS degree from a top school because without previous work experience that is the best signal they have to sort the deluge of resumes.

I still think software engineering is a good career choice for a smart kid, but it’s not the magic ride to prosperity it was 10 years ago. I would hesitate now to recommend any path into it except the top-school CS degree route. Sure, there will be exceptions, but you will have a vastly easier time if you follow that path.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-05-25 19:00:59+00:00
Not as is, but I think OpenBSD permits you to map the same memory twice, once as W and once as X (which would be a reasonable hoop to jump through for JITs etc., except there’s no portable way to do it). ARM64 MacOS doesn’t even permit that, and you need to use OS-specific incantations[1] that essentially prohibit two JITs coexisting in the same process.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/port...
by arp242 | 2025-05-25 19:01:53+00:00
Yes, when I had to use Outlook because of $dayjob I did bottom-post and it was absolutely an uphill battle. In the end I resorted to some custom VBScript code I wrote myself to make some aspects easier.

In hindsight, all of that was a mistake because all my coworkers top-posted. Top-posting might be bad (IMHO), but a mixture of bottom and top is even worse.

I now just top-post. I'm still not a fan but it is what it is.
by brulard | 2025-05-25 19:02:06+00:00
I was a "flash developer" for some time around 2005, but the Flash environment (what was it called, Macromedia Flash?) never really "clicked" for me. I was able to put together some interactive visualizations and even little games, but it was not simple for me. That changed when Adobe Flex and ActionScript came along. That's where I felt right at home. But I'm fully aware Flash made much more sense for others than it did for me.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-05-25 19:02:40+00:00
At the risk of getting lost in the bushes before GP themselves can respond, I'm not sure that's a reasonable defence. First of all it's a two party system, so the left and the party of the left are essentially interchangeable. They said that "the only reason" he won is because of this "abuse" from both parties. Indeed there's no suggestion that the democrats are taking all or most of the blame there, but my response was only on the basis that they were being blamed at all, which they were. I'm not sure there's anything that justifies the behaviour we're seeing, to me it seems unreasonable to expect one party to change their ways from relatively moderate politics because the other side, so to speak, will otherwise threaten to dismantle the democratic functioning of the state.
by mvdtnz | 2025-05-25 19:03:44+00:00
The author who is quoted in the article throwing someone else under the bus is especially gross (and very unbelievable),

> Faris denied she used AI in a post on Instagram and blamed a proofreader. “I wrote Rogue Souls entirely on myown [sic],” the April 17 post said. According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge. “I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn it because it is unethical, harmful to the craft of writing, and damaging to the environment.”

> Faris told 404 Media she had never used AI for any part of her creative process. “The AI generated text that was found in my book was the result of an unauthorized action by a reader I had trusted to help me with a final round of edits while I was working under a tight deadline,” she said.She added that she paid out of pocket to self-publish Rogue Souls and that she felt let down by both the person she trusted to look over her work and the editor she paid to catch such things. “This experience has been a hard learned lesson,” she said. “I no longer share my manuscript with anyone. My trust in others has been permanently altered. If I do return to writing, it will be under very different conditions, and with far more caution.”
by B1FF_PSUVM | 2025-05-25 19:03:49+00:00
Sorry, fuzzy memory. I was going to write "six months", that's what stuck with me.

Not one of the mainline "Known Space" stories, if it was Niven at all. Maybe the suggestion about Frank Herbert in another comment is right, I also read a lot by him besides Dune - I particularly appreciated the Bureau of Sabotage concept ...
by foobazgt | 2025-05-25 19:04:07+00:00
If you had to pick an age for societal burden, it'd be the average "young" person who isn't making a net-positive contribution until around the age of 25. Most people don't receive a corresponding 25 years of retirement, and the retirement they do receive is a product of contributing to it for 40 years.

But it turns out young people become middle-age people, become old people, and we're all in this together. The real problem is not about how the pie is split across generations, but about the realities of lifespans, economic production, and expenses. If you're responsible for funding the entirety of your retirement, all of this is abundantly clear. When you nationalize retirement, all sorts of budgeting tricks start happening, like "borrowing" to fund other programs, papering shortfalls via population growth, etc. Then you start getting age warfare when the govt has to eventually cut back.

You could dissolve the national retirement plan, but that seems like a bad idea for similar reasons as entirely dissolving national welfare and insurance programs. It will always be the case that some people, need some help, some of the time. I guess in my ideal world, it's reduced to a much smaller safety net, because the government is managing the economy well enough that the populace has the wherewithal to save appropriately, and they are educated enough to do so.
by harimau777 | 2025-05-25 19:04:28+00:00
Personally, I'm not sure that they are living in better health in the way that I care about. I.e. my goal is to retire when I'm still healthy enough to do things (i.e. travel). Although they are likely healthier than previous generations, most of the 70 years olds I see still aren't healthy enough to travel.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-25 19:04:40+00:00
> Could we institute a corporation death penalty?

That's what bankruptcy is.

Existing owners (stockholders) lose the company entirely. The company gets sold to entirely new owners.

And while bankruptcy is usually due to mismanagement or bad luck, it can also certainly happen because a legal judgment or fine makes the corporation no longer viable.

But if you're asking for the company to be destroyed to the extent where every single contract is cancelled and every single person gets laid off, that's not generally desirable. We don't want people to lose their jobs, or customers to stop receiving what a company produces, whenever possible. There's a lot of value in a functioning corporation that you don't want to just disappear. Better to let new owners reuse it.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-25 19:05:18+00:00
That's why I added the clause:

> unless the particular wheel you're reinventing is core to the product/service your startup makes

If it's core to your product/service, absolutely reinvent the hell out of that wheel. That's your business. Put pneumatic spokes on it. Add a touchscreen. Embed a bespoke LLM. Go nuts.

Just stay focused on your customers. Don't do a bunch of things that are frankly just resume builders for your senior engineers and don't add value for your customers.
by 3036e4 | 2025-05-25 19:05:42+00:00
I surrendered a long time ago and started top-posting like normal people do, but a few times I wrote to someone and they replied the old way with just quotes and bottom-posting, and then I immediately revert to that mode myself.

I wish there was some good way to silently communicate that preference to likeminded. Then I would know right away when to switch to proper netiquette without the other person having to go first. And how often was I in an email exchange with someone else that also prefer to not top-post, but both did that anyway since that is just the expectation now?
by JadoJodo | 2025-05-25 19:05:56+00:00
Without discarding the issue of the moving goalpost, I do wonder what the quality of life contrast looks like between a 70-year old in 2025 and a 70-year old in 1925. Note: I arbitrarily picked the latter date, as I wasn't able to (with a quick search) locate the year in which the original retirement age was established in Denmark.

I also wonder what it would look like for the government to encourage (or even facilitate) "jobs for seniors" that only become available to you after you turn 60. They could be jobs that are, by design, low-risk, low-physicality, but medium-high mental stimulation.
by Sniffnoy | 2025-05-25 19:06:02+00:00
No. Exponential growth or decay is much faster than quadratic growth or decay. You may be mixing up exponential functions, of the form x maps to ab^x, with power functions, of the form x maps to ax^b. These are very different!

Annoyingly, people often use "exponential" colloquially to mean anything faster than linear, but in fact lots of things are faster than linear.
by IndubitableCoil | 2025-05-25 19:06:04+00:00
I hear this sentiment frequently but it doesn't pencil out. Renting an equivalent unit will typically, month-to-month, be cheaper than buying. Of course a significant portion of the monthly mortgage payment goes to principal which increases your net worth, but there are many cases where the money you save monthly by renting will actually exceed the principal you accumulate from your mortgage payment. In fact, there are plenty of helpful calculators to help you figure out what makes the most sense if you don't have a love affair with Excel [1].

You may argue that the the value of the house will appreciate well in a good market, but there is nothing stopping you from taking the money you saved by renting and putting it in an appreciating asset.

[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/calculator/rent-vs-buy-calculator
by sib | 2025-05-25 19:06:14+00:00
I think it's worth remembering that Hacker News is a global platform and if someone refers to "major cities" in Denmark, for many (most?) readers, the only name that would come to mind is Copenhagen.

Copenhagen: ~1.4M people

Odense: ~190K people

Aalborg: ~120K people

Randers: ~64K people
by dylan604 | 2025-05-25 19:07:05+00:00
If you think the telephone book is any where close to the same thing as the amount of information available via a web search, then you're just not even trying to have a serious conversation. At the time of printed phone books, it's not like you could pull out the super computer in your pocket and get turn by turn directions to that address. If you were fancy, you could maybe pull out your Mapsco and figure out how to get there, but only if that address was in the same area as the set of Mapsco books you had on hand.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-25 19:07:09+00:00
Most handhelds should work fine, provided they're not a freak GPU setup like the Tegra board in the Switch. If you own an Intel or AMD handheld (which account for most models), the biggest issue you're likely to encounter is controller configuration.

It's definitely not "officially supported" by Valve, but in many cases the hardware does have official OEM support in upstream Linux.
by distances | 2025-05-25 19:07:11+00:00
> It's easy to see that at some point, there will be the equivalent of the US 401K in Europe.

* In some European countries. Many countries, however, have no meaningful avenues whatsoever for tax efficient pension saving. My own "pension fund" is just a regular broker account where I invest after income taxes, and where I have to pay capital gains as usual.