MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MonMay12 | 2025-05-12 22:11:59+00:00
There's no oversupply, it's decreasing numbers of "preferable" jobs (i.e. tenured professorships) which at least some people previously preferred to industry, inefficient boom-bust cycles in industry, and bad systems for matching work and people. Local minima and kinetic traps are also well-known to exist within the physical sciences, but apparently when we turn to studying societies, we lose this concept and decide that if MBAs exist, we should consider why rather than also whether they are this point preferable to other managers. I say this as a scientist who thinks a lot of my colleagues are intellectually less capable than I expected going in, who is also often shocked by my own stupidity. Scientists who do not make a dramatic impact are also still an integral part of science, Kuhn's ideas come to mind here. By definition, not everyone can be a top-tier researcher.

It will take you 5 minutes to compile (1) Table 1-1 from https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 and (2) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_101.10.a... to see that we produce science PhDs at the same rate we have for decades when normalizing for population. From there, I guess it comes down to considerations of whether the amount of scientific and engineering work as a proportion of total work modern societies need and/or do is going down or not, then whether we expect it should scale with population and/or societal advancement.

Considering the growing complexity of technology, number of productive fields, incoming crises our species faces while we simultaneously turn to more ambitious goals, and the amount of international students doing PhDs, one might actually think we underproduce scientists. Far, far, far more MBAs graduate every year than PhDs.
by christypoulos | 2025-05-12 22:12:36+00:00
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Ask HN: Not sure about the future of tech
by xblpob | 2025-05-12 22:12:42+00:00
The last few years working in tech have been pretty brutal and now with all of the AI hype in full swing I have never felt like more of a replaceable cog in a machine.

It’s always seemed like a little bit of a race to cash out as quickly as possible by promising the world, selling, then letting everyone else deal with the fallout but now it seems like everyone is seeing the door about to close in front of them so they need to extract every ounce of productivity from those below them to get out while they still can.

I don’t want to be treated like a component in someone’s vehicle that you just swap out for a new one after you’ve burned it out which is what my entire job feels like more than ever.

I’m not excited about “AI” and I think while useful to some extent it will do more harm than good as our monkey brains scramble to make sense of what it is and fight each other for control over it. Does anyone else feel like this? What are the alternatives for someone who still likes programming but doesn’t want to be doing it professionally anymore if it means I’m going to have to be harnessed to the front of the dog sled while my boss screams “mush!”
by latchkey | 2025-05-12 22:12:42+00:00
Oh, interesting! Thanks for the additional context.

This is one area where it is clear that Nvidia is a leader by not only providing the underlying kernels, but also the overall product framework integrations. One would have to port that entire plugin project over, which would probably be a ton of work to maintain.

For what it is worth, AMD just recently released two blog posts on hipDF, so at least they are putting that effort in.

https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/artificial-intelligence/cupy_hipd...

https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/artificial-intelligence/hipDF_pan...
by 0xFNaaNg | 2025-05-12 22:12:50+00:00
> what're the real "real important car things"?

A good design from engineering standpoint. You feel it just instantly when you use the product. Interior is nice and will accommodate just about every possible driver comfortably with every control reachable. Suspension just works frkn great no matter how it was tuned (sporty or comfortable) and no matter how simple the design is. Same for drivetrain, you will acelerate/decelerate precisely how much you'd expect. And it's not a luxury it's a norm, even cheapest german or french cars have all this things sorted out. I'm speaking for the EU market though)
by whynotmaybe | 2025-05-12 22:12:51+00:00
That's where I think you're wrong, they won't use a restriction on speech to arrest someone, they will do anything because there won't be consequences.

The current US administration is trying to officially get rid of habeas corpus, even though the government has already arrested people without due process.

Even when freedom of speech is fully enshrined into law, anyone with bad intent won't care.
by ben_w | 2025-05-12 22:13:02+00:00
To the extent that further improvements to AI remain economically useful, "let's do these other things first" means your economy trails behind those of whoever did work on the AI.

To the extent that further improvements to AI are either snake oil or just hard to monopolise on, doing everything else first is of course the best idea.

Even though I'm more on the side of finding these things impressive, it's not at all clear to me that the people funding their development will be able to monopolise the return on the investment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus etc.

Also: the way the biggest enthusiasts are talking about the sectoral growth and corresponding electrical power requirements… well, I agree with the maths for the power if I assume the growth, but they're economically unrealistic on the timescales they talk about, and that's despite that renewables are the fastest %-per-year-growth power sector and could plausibly double global electrical production by the early 2030s.
by daveguy | 2025-05-12 22:13:25+00:00
> Seeing now that the US government itself getting involved is very worrisome, and sad.

One reason this is worrisome is that crypto mining is 40% in the US and 45% between authoritarian countries of Russia, China, and North Korea. If they collaborate and get another 5% of the mining capacity, then they can destroy all of the value wrapped up in a given crypto. Wait until the US invests significant funds then make the investment worthless. Seems like US adversaries would be happy to invest many billions of dollars to have financial control of the US. And they only need the threat. The US investing in crypto cedes financial control of US currency to outside actors. And now they have the dipshit helping too.
by RhysU | 2025-05-12 22:13:32+00:00
(Traffic deaths / km driven) was NaN for most of human history. It's a dumb metric with dumb units.

There should be a well-defined unitless quantity that's real-valued across human history, say normalizing by population size and total human travel. I am not claiming that fixes the NaN, just that the NaN is a smell.

Another smell is that everyone being horribly maimed but never killed would not be a victory for safety though the above metric says it'd be great.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-12 22:13:57+00:00
More likely it's misconfiguration of some kind.

Perhaps a hold over from testing (where you don't always want to send the SMS). Maybe just the habit/pattern of returning the item you just created in the DB and not remembering to mark the field as private. There are a whole slew easy foot-guns. I'm not defending it but I doubt it's to do client-side validation, that would be insanity. It's easy enough to not notice a body on a response that you don't care about client side, "200? Cool, keep moving". It's still crazy they were returning the OTP and I sure hope it wasn't on purpose.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-12 22:14:35+00:00
>Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in

Those trades mostly pay their dues when they are younger and then the next batch of journeymen and apprentices take over that part of the job as they move up into the less physically demanding parts of the job. Even fairly physical jobs like bricklaying, they'll have the older dude doing nothing but slapping the bricks in place, they get carried over to him by one guy, one guy is mixing up the mortar, one guy is unloading the truck, another is touching up the joints, etc. It's one of those things that explains why union jobs have so many extra people too. It's not one dude doing everything, it's 3 guys doing different parts of the job and learning how to do the next part.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-12 22:14:44+00:00
Oh god, don't get me started...

1. iCloud nags never go away if you don't log into iCloud

2. Apple Music is just an advertisement by default and "conveniently" opens every sound file mimetype

3. Functionally useless subscription slopware like AppleTV+ comes installed by-default for no reason

4. Package management is a colossal clusterfuck that can't even enforce package parity across system architectures

5. Apple still doesn't trust their users enough to have modern amenities like a native Vulkan runtime or Nvidia GPU drivers

Vista was terrible, but it didn't suffer from this level of identity crisis.
by bityard | 2025-05-12 22:14:47+00:00
Hah. There was an estate sale in my neighborhood last summer. Quite a few tools in the garage that I was interested in but the prices were crazy. 30-50 year-old tools priced the same as brand-new. Even asking 50% off would be been too much for a lot of the stuff. I asked if they would take X for something and the guy said, "we're not doing any discounts, everything is as marked."

Walked back to my car shaking my head. Guess they didn't want to actually sell anything.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-05-12 22:15:25+00:00
> Apes Together Strong

Absolutely 100% agree with your statement, Linux desktop is the perfect example of that. You get a billion different distribution that all comes from debian, arch and maybe fedora but that's all.

In my opinion, there should be 3 Linux distribution. That's all.

For instance Ubuntu: Yeah Ubuntu gnome suck, yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new distribution because of that ?

Perfection is the enemy of progress. And when things go all bad and you have used all other alternative, then and only then forking should be considered. Like a nuclear button.

Currently i feel like it's more often used by newcomer that want to get to the lead position of a project they are passionate about but didn't start, so they fork and get a fraction of the community behind. It's not much but it's still a bit.
by voithos | 2025-05-12 22:18:06+00:00
I recently wrote this article on how to learn graphics programming, and wanted to share in case it was useful to those starting out. There are several other existing articles that cover more detail (and I link to some of my favorites) but I had the specific goal of sharing some "mindset" ideas that I wish I had when I was just starting out. I hope it's useful to someone!
by stevenwoo | 2025-05-12 22:18:08+00:00
We don't have enough time with digital data but it seems extremely doubtful anything digital would survive as long as the Herculaneum scrolls that were buried in mud that was on the front page last week, that's longer than almost any civilization has continuously existed (the exception only being ancient Egypt?) but maybe humans will turn it around in the near future and obliterate that record.
by nmgycombinator | 2025-05-12 22:18:18+00:00
The local network popup thing is too overdone in my opinion. However, I do think it is a good choice (in some respects) for Apple to have the "this is a program downloaded from the Internet", even if it can be annoying. It might also be a push to get developers to publish on the App Store (where Apple can be more sure (hopefully) that the apps are safe).

It's a double-edged sword in my opinion. I think it's good that the OS is looking out for the user in a lot of cases. I also understand how it can give the users pop-up fatigue.
by squigz | 2025-05-12 22:18:54+00:00
Mate, 50 years wasn't that long ago. We had computers and everything else we have now. We still did a lot of things fundamentally the same way. Everything was just slower and smaller (in scale; not physically)

I think you also should realize much of the world continues on without bleeding-edge technology - homes are still built, crops are still harvested, and the world goes on.
by jchw | 2025-05-12 22:19:39+00:00
Nix doesn't, can't, and will obviously never be able to audit your dependencies, but what it can do is give you a way in which you can audit everything byte-for-byte and end-to-end from input to output. In most architectures it is pretty hard to even get to this point because there is no rigorous tracking of dependencies and side-effects; e.g. if your builds are not sandboxed from the network, how can you be sure that the inputs you audited really account for all of the inputs to a build? Nix has a (complete) answer for that, among other things.
by smackeyacky | 2025-05-12 22:19:47+00:00
> I don't think the author's troubles have anything to do with AI, other than making it harder to get an interview.

The industry is ageist, but not "900 applications and 3 interviews" ageist. The big problem here is the concentration on remote work. I'm quite a bit older than this guy, quit a job earlier this year and went looking for work again only to find that "ooh, dream job, remote, nice little pay bump" were the jobs that got swamped with 1000 applicants.

He's simply going to have to move closer to where office based jobs are, suck up the commute for a while and when they have more confidence they'll let him work remote after a while.

Most of the jobs are likely getting swamped by AI generated applications, by overseas candidates and by every chancer who hates their current job.

In the current job market, there is absolutely no substitute for leaning on your personal network. It's the only real way to compete against AI and foreign workers. So that means, to give yourself options in a job you don't like, maintaining that personal network is absolutely essential. Instead of wasting the effort on 900 job applications after you quit or get fired, concentrate on reinforcing those connections whether you need them or not.

edit: I had my choice of jobs after a small wait, purely through people I know personally.
by rlnorthcutt | 2025-05-12 22:20:32+00:00
Actually, I'm trying to give the team the benefit of the doubt and assume good intentions. That may not be the case, but its a reasonable place to start.

And yes, they did choose to prioritize DX over performance - that was the major driving factor behind the re-architecture of the 3.x version. You stated this yourself: "OpenSSL 3.0 was a release that added new, cleaner APIs and deprecated older, uglier APIs, so the focus was on that and not performance"

If you read the article, it is clear that while they have improved some of the worst performance issues, the core architectural problems (like being dynamic and poor multi-threading support).

In fact, that is the entire point of the article. Even if you look at OpenSSL's self-reported metrics, you can see that there are improvements from the 3.0 release, but still not up to the level of 1.1.1 or the other libraries tested.

Upgrading an LTS library is a problem for many orgs... which is why we have LTS versions in the first place. Suggesting it is not a problem just because you don't have a problem upgrading doesn't remove the problem.

Finally, you can see in the article that these points were brought up many times over many years, and even again after 3.0 was released, and the OpenSSL team was not responsive.

No crying over spilled milk here - simply trying to clarify that this is a problem for some users, and actually trying to support the OpenSSL team's decisions... even if they aren't the ones I made. AGain - assuming good intentions.

It does no one any good to blindly attack or blindly defend anyone. Lets be honest about the problems, honest about the issues, and honest about the choices the team has chosen to make.
by linguae | 2025-05-12 22:20:50+00:00
I used to be a grad student in a file systems lab at UC Santa Cruz over a decade ago. It was considered a dream to publish in OSDI or SOSP; our lab’s most successful paper was the OSDI 2006 paper on Ceph. We also thought very highly of VLDB, though most of our work was outside the interests of the database community. We regularly published in USENIX FAST and made occasional appearances at USENIX ATC.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-12 22:20:51+00:00
There are a lot of things that work for one person or 10 people, but growing from 1-10 is the hard part. Even things like lawn care, as soon as you grow beyond what you can do, the first employee needs a duplicate of all of your truck, trailer, and other equipment, plus they aren't going to work as hard as you do and probably expect to be paid better than you pay yourself.
by hakunin | 2025-05-12 22:21:21+00:00
Agree with that too. I like watching people debate, and oftentimes it feels like magic when someone can thoughtfully counter a hard hit. It stings being on the receiving end of it, but the confidence grows when you counter a few of those. It also teaches you to debate yourself, which makes future work easier to defend. I guess I'm just saying that after a while this can become a calm/enjoyable hobby. Like giving talks in front of an audience for some people (something I haven't been able to push myself into.)
by bigyabai | 2025-05-12 22:21:24+00:00
> It might also be a push to get developers to publish on the App Store (where Apple can be more sure (hopefully) that the apps are safe).

This is exploitation of developers, plain and simple. Apple should secure their runtime, not roleplay as a software rent-a-cop that manually (and fallibly) inspects submissions. The App Store is a blatant moneymaking racket, on mobile and desktop alike. "Security" is a fig leaf for the perverse incentive Apple has to corral developers under their thumb.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-05-12 22:24:06+00:00
> if an individual eats the same meal on two occasions but starts with the vegetables on one occasion but not the other, this may lead to different glucose responses to the same meal within the same individual.

> Other behavioral and individual factors are known to influence CGM responses.[22][6] Postmeal physical activity — even as minor as leg fidgeting[23] and walking for a few minutes every hour — reduces postmeal glucose responses.[24] Sleep quality has also been associated with changes in postmeal CGM glucose responses.[25] Emerging studies are also uncovering the relationship between an individual’s gut microbiome and their postmeal glycemic responses.[26][27][28]

So basically it's the impact of the parasympathetic/sympathetic nervous system and the order of food ingestion that could induce different glucose response.

It's interesting because I assumed that beside the nervous system, whatever order we eat our food, it all mixes in the stomach and then start to process. Negating the importance of order but studies implies it does.
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-12 22:24:15+00:00
Some engineers like to go on about this, but the reality is they offload the work to marginally qualified techs and unlicensed engineers and stamp the document, just like in software.

There are all sorts of failures in the structural space. How many pumped reinforced concrete buildings are being built in Miami right now? How many of them will be sound in 50-75 years? How likely is the architect/PE’s ghost to get sued?

PE’s are smart professionals and do a valuable service. But they aren’t magic, and they all have a boss.
by louthy | 2025-05-12 22:25:14+00:00
Slight tangent: Apple TV constantly has MLS (major league soccer) and Apple TV+ in the left-side pop up Home menu, taking up real-estate for something I will never access. So annoying.

Why, as someone from England — with arguably the best football league in the world — would I want to watch American Soccer? I don’t even watch the English league.

The menu is:

———————

* Search

* Home

* Apple TV+

* MLS

* Store

* Library

———————

Title: Channels & Apps

* This is where all the channels I have actually opted for live — separate from the Apple products that I don’t want

———————

Both Apple TV+ and MLS should not be on that menu permanently. And it should be possible to turn them off.
by trollbridge | 2025-05-12 22:25:46+00:00
In environments like this, my trusted colleagues and I communicated using Signal (and before that, WhatsApp).

One somewhat paranoid department that was convinced they were being spied on (they weren’t; I saw the Slack admin dashboard and management was too cheap to pay for the retention and spying features) maintained the use of an ancient Jabber based group chat for their own internal communications.
by rlnorthcutt | 2025-05-12 22:25:48+00:00
Actually this is a problem for anyone that either: - needs to rely on LTS versions - runs multi-threaded software (like HAProxy) - has real performance and scalability needs.

Note on #2 above that there are other LB/RP projects that don't have a problem here because they chose to be single threaded. This means their performance is not greatly impacted.

HAproxy is incredibly performant because the project chooses to prioritize performance. Also, as an open source project, we should applaud the efforts of the team to provide the best product possible and not just push everything of value into the commercial offering.

Thats pretty rare these days.
by roxolotl | 2025-05-12 22:25:57+00:00
So taking this as the thought experiment it is what I’m struck by is that seemingly most things will completely deteriorate in the first 10-15 years. Is that accurate? Would switches mostly fail by the 10 year mark if not replaced? I’ve been looking at buying a switch for my house should I expect it to not last more than 10 years? I have a 10 year old tv should I expect it starts to fail soon?
by latchkey | 2025-05-12 22:26:06+00:00
hipify attempts to do that, but it potentially requires you to maintain two source trees, which isn't optimal. In this case, you'd want to run a CI/CD to convert your CUDA code at build time and compile that. But I think there are edge cases where that isn't possible.

As you learned at the event, Modular is trying to make it more transparent by abstracting to a whole new language (Mojo).

Another solution coming down the line which doesn't require changes to your CUDA code, nor learning a new language is: https://docs.scale-lang.com/