MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sotix | 2025-05-25 14:12:09+00:00
Thanks for the clarification. Personally, I view accounting as a dying industry in America. The number of well paid accountants is few and decreasing each year. If programming follows that path, it will be devastating for the industry.

Some statistics on US accounting trends[0]:

- As a direct result of enrollment declines in accounting programs, candidates sitting for the CPA exam have also decreased from 48,004 first-time candidates in 2016 to 32,188 in 2021, a drop of 33% - 7% decrease from 2021 to 2022 for the total number of candidates taking the CPA exam - 2022 saw the lowest number of exam takers since 2006 - 30% fewer candidates passed their final section of the CPA exam in 2021 compared to 2016 - the AICPA has stated that roughly 75% of its members are at retirement age - Accounting graduates trended downward in the 2019–2020 academic year, with decreases of 2.8% and 8.4% at the bachelor’s and master’s levels, respectively

Having gone through public accounting myself, and knowing hundreds of accountants, It’s not a career path I recommend others follow whereas computer science and software engineering is one I still recommend. Accounting has largely gone overseas. There are not enough partner positions at the big firms or smaller, local firms to supply enough work for accountants. At least software engineering still has the unlimited growth potential that software enables.

[0]: https://www.cpajournal.com/2024/11/25/the-accounting-profess...
by westurner | 2025-05-25 14:12:49+00:00
So, pair programming continues to emphasize software quality (especially with LLMs) but "vibe coding" is more of a "whoo, I'm a reckless magician" (in a less risky application domain) sort of thing?

But doesn't a 'vibe-coding' "we'll just sort out the engineering challenges later" ensure that there will be re-work and thus less overall efficiency?
by sleepyguy | 2025-05-25 14:13:40+00:00
There is a lot of affordable housing; it's just that no one wants to live there for reasons such as work, location, crime, etc. Sure, there is no affordable housing in places like NYC, because too many people want or need to live there.

A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
by devnullbrain | 2025-05-25 14:14:30+00:00
Ok, but so is everyone involved with building the fulfillment centre, the sorting machines, the roads for delivery, the trucks, the railways...

If it sounds like I'm including a lot of jobs, it's because every non-service job in the history of the post-industrial revolution economy has revolved around making things more efficient. Software development is not some uniquely evil domain.
by lurk2 | 2025-05-25 14:14:52+00:00
The plain reading of “There ought to be more affordable housing,” is not “Society needs 100% taxation administered by a genocidal ministry of housing.”

> The West isn't ready for the conversation about what would be necessary to "provide" affordable housing.

The majority of the developed world (including the United States) has already built affordable housing developments. Austria and Japan both have extensive public housing projects.
by api | 2025-05-25 14:15:06+00:00
I’m a gigantic believer in this and will hop on the nearest soapbox at any chance to evangelize it. High housing prices are literally destroying civilization, pricing the next generation out of existence and fueling every form of resentment.

Home equity or the future. Choose one.

If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
by churchill | 2025-05-25 14:16:13+00:00
The reason most Western countries won't see affordable housing, at least, not for a few decades, is simple: housing has been commoditized, and the average Western boomer is parking a huge chunk of their net worth in their home. House prices need to stay high to prop up their wealth, and given the electoral participation rate of the Western boomer, any politician whose policies reduces housing values will likely be rewarded (read: punished) by being voted out of office.

No amount of banging on and on about immigrants will change that.

So, like Cronus eating his kids, many countries around the world have chosen to sacrifice affordability for their kids in order to squeeze out a few more decades of good living.

It's just like the problem the US & its peers have with unfunded liabilities: a huge chunk of retirement savings in tied up the stock market, specifically, the SP500 that has a PE ratio of 30. Are you willing to bet that these companies will stay profitable at their current rate for 30y, without slipping?

It's a question without easy answers, because as the workforce reduces (low birth rates), there are fewer workers paying into Social Security and bidding stock markets to new heights. As a result, everyone withdrawing ends up with less cash and fewer goods.
by bethekidyouwant | 2025-05-25 14:16:48+00:00
If your daughter can climb out of the crib, then she is too big for the crib.

Also, if I accept your premise that a baby sleeping is inherently dangerous, then this is just an added layer of safety. It doesn’t remove safety.

But really safety is a highly lame way of framing this. what you want is more hours asleep so you have this thing try to hypnotize the baby with lights, sound, vibration, and it only alerts the parent(s) if it fails Eventually it could just straight up talk to your three year-old read it a second bedtime story, dispense a cup of water convince it not to hang out with the bad kids at school etc
by kacesensitive | 2025-05-25 14:17:17+00:00
This is one of those things that sounds radical now but was completely normal policy 70 years ago. The federal government used to directly build housing—lots of it—for working-class families. Projects like the New Deal and post-WWII housing initiatives weren't perfect, but they did provide millions of people with stable places to live.

What changed? Mostly a shift toward neoliberal policies in the '70s and '80s that framed government intervention as inefficient and market solutions as inherently superior. We offloaded housing policy to private developers and then acted shocked when affordability cratered.

We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.

Instead of addressing systemic issues like housing, wages, climate change and healthcare, we started screaming about the culture wars (thanks Reagan). It was easier (and more profitable) to stir outrage over symbolic issues than to solve material problems. We could’ve been building homes, but we got tricked into yelling about bathrooms and book bans instead.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-25 14:17:58+00:00
> Then for another 3 day hike where I used it to boil water for two persons it took so long that other people were done eating where we started.

There's quite a spread between the heating output of alcohol stoves. # Of holes, alu vs. Ti vs. brass, filler materials (if any). Some have simmer rings, some don't. Outside temps matter too.

The trick is to use it a # of times before you go out camping / backpacking. So that you're familiar with its behavior.

Disclaimer: cooking daily on a deluxe model (Origo 3000). Safest method to cook on a boat.

Propane/butane burners are easier to regulate, but these gasses have the nasty habit of sticking to the floor. So a leak could cause a deadly explosion (which happens semi-regularly).

That Origo: I could flip the whole thing over while burning & it wouldn't start a fire. Can't remove the burner from the stove while it's on due to a safety catch.

Also have a Trangia stashed somewhere (just the burner not pots/holder). Also used many times.

Both Swedish design & highly recommended. Cheap/ubiquitous fuel is a big plus too. Sadly the Origo isn't made anymore afaik.
by xchip | 2025-05-25 14:17:59+00:00
MSX games were terrible, that is what pushed me into programming, a game I'm still playing.

I hated the MSX blocky scroll while at the same time I envied the smooth scroll spectrum games had. Games also were hard and short, across all platforms, including the point and click ones. So, they were not so good, is only the nostalgia what makes them good.
by Spivak | 2025-05-25 14:18:47+00:00
I mean the real answer for how to "mind control" players into following your throughline is just leaning on the existing industry visual grammar for communicating with players.

* Make the place you want the player to go lit up, and other areas darkened.

* Make ledges, ladders, and other intractable elements you want the player to know are interactive yellow.

* Pick a thematically appropriate "this is a wall" like the very common smattering of furniture and use it liberally to signal that this is the wrong way.

* Don't use loops that aren't small, self contained, and that the player can see are loops. Don't use "diamond" maps where players must choose between two paths that end at the same place without making it painfully obvious that's what's happening. Elden ring with the grand lift vs the cave did it well.

* Make not-the-main-paths short and put a useful but not necessary or particularly valuable item at the end as a reward for players exploring and signal that this is the end.

It's not magic or anything, but players have likely played so many games that use these and similar visual cues that they've interned them without even realizing.
by plandis | 2025-05-25 14:18:52+00:00
> There is simply nothing to it

If this were true nobody would play the games? If people found no benefit or interest they wouldn’t play. Even if you think it’s literally just gambling, which I disagree with, people still find value in that even if it’s destructive.

> no depth

If this were true you couldn’t having skill based matchmaking. If there is no depth then everyone would be as good as everyone else. There would be no strategy to master.

> no cool mechanics

Subjective but I disagree.

> no story nothing

Chess has no story mode but it’s a game people still play. Why do video games need a story 100% of the time? I don’t get this critique.

> and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again.

I disagree. Games today have learned from games of the past. I think most folks would find the mechanics of old games boring compared to games of today. I loved Super Mario 64 as a kid and bought it when they rereleased it for the Switch and found it so boring and infuriating (terrible controls) that I never finished the game. Same with Goldeneye — I played that game so much as a kid but there are so many better games with a similar gameplay loop today. I could probably find some fun in something like surf maps in CS1.6 but it wouldn’t hold my attention for very long.
by ksec | 2025-05-25 14:19:25+00:00
>their hardware has been overvalued for quite some time.

It is often such a strange thing to see this on HN. From Software developers.

Their Hardware's value is derived from their Software. And Software for GPU is insanely hard. Both the driver and CUDA.

As Jensen once said, their Goal is to make the TCO ( Total Cost of Ownership ) so good, that even if their competitor were selling at cost of giving their GPU away from free they still would not be able to compete with them.

There will also come a point, may be in the next 2-3 years where the volume and margin of those GPU are so good they will be the second in line to take all the Fab capacity for larger die size on leading node. i.e They will always be one node ahead of their competitors. And when that happens both hardware and software will be ahead of everyone else.
by ajross | 2025-05-25 14:19:35+00:00
Most of suburban America wasn't built yet when you were born. I don't understand this point at all. You don't think sprawl counts as infrastructure? It may not be the housing you (or I) personally think should have been built, but it's absolutely housing. And it was built in great quantity at great cost, and even turned out to be great investments. And it came with schools and strip malls and freeway interchanges and substations to connect it all. Living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways.

It's also, it needs be said, wasn't built to support (sigh[1]) "massive immigration". You can find a few H1B holders peppered around, but the sprawl is for the middle class, 100%.

[1] Seriously, why must everything become a callout to right wing grievance politics these days?
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-25 14:20:30+00:00
PG's writing is often so reductionist it muddies his points and HN commenters are often pedants about meaningless issues. Both can be true.

I don't blame PG for the pedantry over the minutiae. That's on the readers, and people on HN specifically are prone to this kind of pedantry. I do blame him for weakening his points by using bad language to express them.

TFA isn't about how to read, though. It's about writing.
by xfactorial | 2025-05-25 14:21:01+00:00
One of the arguments to be made about locking components and enabling rapid software lock-in in case of theft to, precisely, break the economical incentive.

On the other hand, the trade-off of repairability, "right to repair" and all the things those businesses and people like Rossmann have been fighting for get affected by the component lock-in.

There must be some kind of middle ground: my bet should be full customer sign-out could then enable the parts to be re-used (anything else should render the device and its components unusable).
by jinay | 2025-05-25 14:21:06+00:00
I used to think that typing speed was not really that important, especially when now we have so many LLMs doing the typing for us. But honestly, now I think it's even more important because the specificity and detail in your prompts are paramount to getting a good response, and something like a dictation tool (which is what I'm using right now) is really good for generating very specific prompts.

In fact, I wrote all this out using a dictation tool in ~20 seconds (258 WPM).
by CivBase | 2025-05-25 14:22:11+00:00
If you're an EU citizen and care about video game preservation, I highly suggest joining the European Union Citizen's Initiative in this link. Even if you don't care about video games, it could end up having pro-consumer ramifications for software ownership in general if it manages to go anywhere.

For more information checkout Ross's Scott's YouTube channel, Accursed Farms. Here's an introduction video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkMe9MxxZiI
by AlecSchueler | 2025-05-25 14:23:54+00:00
> Anyone carrying a phone can always be recording audio

They can and that's different than the capacity of the glasses we're talking about. Again there's a distinction here and I think a good faith discussion would avoid intentionally blurring these lines. If we are going to do that then my argument becomes against mandatory livestreaming of every visit to the toilet.

> These have already become commonly accepted risks to privacy in the same situations you've described.

We routinely ask people to leave their phones behind when entering e.g. concert halls or classrooms. Glasses overlap with something necessary for accessibility and can't be so easily removed.

> I think we as a society end up just trusting others

Who are "we as a society?" There are different cultures who will approach this differently. In the United States they ended up trusting one another not to shoot each other while in other societies they legislated against the casual carrying of firearms. We don't have to accept glassholes walking amongst us just because we accept that people have smartphones.

> there's definitely a risk that it could invade the privacy of others without the wearer's intent.

I was actually arguing with the assumption that this was a certain outcome of the technology.
by sebastianconcpt | 2025-05-25 14:24:03+00:00
And yet, countless people bought his deadly equivocated ideas and still want to make it "sound more right".

Paul Graham in that essay is equating "good writing" to "good propaganda" and in it he confesses that truth is treated as a convenient accident.

To truth, that's intellectually amoral. His utilitarian opportunism intensifies.
by trip-zip | 2025-05-25 14:24:29+00:00
Would you mind giving a little more info on what you're getting Jules to work on? I tried it out a couple times but I think I was asking for too large a task and it ended up being pretty bad, all things considered.

I tried to get it to add some new REST endpoints that follow the same pattern as the other 100 we have, 5 CRUD endpoints. It failed pretty badly, which may just be an indictment on our codebase...
by crote | 2025-05-25 14:24:56+00:00
That doesn't have to be a problem in practice.

The entire issue is that the earth surrounding the tubes is acting as a giant buffer. Enough heat has been dumped into it over the years that it has permanently warmed up. Draw heat from it during the winter to warm up homes, and it'll be able to absorb more heat from the tunnel air during the summer.
by cmiles74 | 2025-05-25 14:25:16+00:00
When I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements.

Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good deal of the code they were working on. The analyst and the coder became the same person.

I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.
by jerf | 2025-05-25 14:25:36+00:00
The state is several steps ahead of you. Have you wondered why the push for AI all of a sudden, everywhere, all at once, really quite far ahead of its actual capabilities to help most of us? Huge monies thrown at it? An effectively-instantaneous turnaround on decades of anti-nuclear sentiment just to power AI?

It's not because it's going to be good for us.
by Balgair | 2025-05-25 14:25:48+00:00
Yeah, I mean that's likely not what 'individual persons' are going to want.

But Holy shit, that exactly what 'people' want. Like, when I read that, my heat was singing. Anthropic has a modicum of a chance here, as one of the big-boy AIs, to make an AI that is ethical.

Like, there is a reasonable shot here that we thread the needle and don't get paperclip maximizers. It actually makes me happy.
by jerrygenser | 2025-05-25 14:26:02+00:00
If you have small hands and you are stretching for delet/backspace and a small kb allows you to hit this key without strain, it absolutely helps with strain on fingers.

I tried many things over the years including other ergonomics and gym etc.

Changing to a smaller split keyboard helped the most and I have not had pain since.

Granted mine has about 50 keys or so so it's not as extreme.
by catigula | 2025-05-25 14:26:11+00:00
I think you trying to transmute this to polemic weakens the points you've attempted to make.

Obviously we disagree but the point I feel most compelled to push back against is your assertion that "living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways".

This is such a problematic statement that clearly labors heavily under the burden of its own premise. A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.

Living in a time with gizmos and gadgets and economic plenty that is weakly distributed and calling that "paradise" is very insulting to people's lived experiences and part of the reason I think the economic message of the politics you represent alienates average folks.

Based on your posts it seems like you've been a wealthy developer for decades and likely have employed, or employ, cheap labor. Kind of feels like a rugpull, Ross.

Personally, I've managed many teams with cheap foreign developers, I'm just straight about it.

Also, when do you think I was born? You think the US hadn't been built in 1982? Absurd claims all around.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-25 14:27:57+00:00
These things are waves. First they will fire a bunch of people, but no company can grow through constant downsizing. Then they'll start to imagine to do new things they can do with the new skills and invest in that.

It will cause a displacement of job types for sure. But I think it means change more than decline. When industrialisation happened, lots of factory workers were afraid of their jobs and also lost them. But these days nobody even wants to do a menial factory job, slaving away on the production line for minimum wage. In fact most people have a far better life now than the masses did before industrialisation. We also had the computer automation that made entire classes of jobs obsolete. Yet it's almost impossible to find skilled workers in Holland now.

And companies need customers with purchasing power. They can't replace everyone with AI because there will be nobody left with money to sell things to. In the end there will be another balance. The interim time, that's the difficult part. Though it is temporary, it can really hurt specific people.

But I don't see AI as a downward spiral that will never recover. In the end it will enable us to look more towards the future (and I am by no means an "AI bro", I think current capabilities of AI have been ridicuously overhyped)

I think we need to redraw society too to compensate. Things like universal basic income, better welfare etc. Here in Europe we already have that but under the neoliberal regimes of the last 20 years (and the fallout from the American banking crisis), things have been austerised too much.

In America this won't happen as it seems to go only the other way (very hardline capitalism, with a fundamentalist almost taliban-like religious streak) but well, it's what they voted for.
by neom | 2025-05-25 14:28:05+00:00
From the business side of the house, I only ever look at it as what can do the right job for the right money to very quickly deliver continuous value to customers. In an employee base: Experience around is always good for growing and improving my people, but it isn't necessarily tied directly to the work to be done. The shift I feel is happening is how I place the value here. Where I can imagine I would land if I was actively running a startup right now is making sure I have amazing production teams (whatever that looks like, age, location, LLM powered or otherwise) book ended by great people growers as all cogs start to squeak if they're not oiled, and experience is the best lubricant on teams, you need both.
by simonw | 2025-05-25 14:28:08+00:00
I just published a deep dive into the Claude 4 system prompts, covering both the ones that Anthropic publish and the secret tool-defining ones that got extracted through a prompt leak. They're fascinating - effectively the Claude 4 missing manual: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt...
by darthcircuit | 2025-05-25 14:28:58+00:00
Meh, if they are following the affinity scheme, then a v2 would have a pretty good value add, and is worth it. I paid twice for affinity, and I’m still into the whole suite for less than a few months of creative cloud. Granted, this is one product, but I’d still much prefer a once off and upgrade fee vs a subscription.
by gruez | 2025-05-25 14:29:11+00:00
>wouldn't the people living above the tubes be happy to get a heat exchanger (passive) or heat pump (active, but takes more of the heat) that prewarms their hot water supply

Ground source heat pumps are expensive to build, even more so in a dense area like London. So even if everything you said is true, I suspect the juice isn't worth the squeeze.