MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: TelcoCloud or Software Engineering Career
by Anonxxx | 2025-06-12 15:44:03+00:00
Quick background about myself. I graduated university last year and now work at a multinational Telco as a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer (aka TelcoCloud) Basically I'm a delivery boy for software. The job is solid, great pay supportive team, and i'm performing relatively well according to my colleagues.

The catch? The stakes are insanely high. One mistake could take down a data center or fry expensive hardware. I'm still early in my career so switching jobs wouldn't be too hard.

Before this I spent a year as a web developer (backend, java) and eight months as a DevOps (CI/CD monkey with some code reviews thanks to my dev experience)

Here are my questions:

Should I stick with this high-risk TelcoCloud role or jump back to software engineering for potentially less pay but way less risk?

Why do people choose these highstakes jobs when software engineering seems safer and pays similarly?

I'm confident I can thrive in either role but I'm unsure about switching given the 2025 job market AI automation and other uncertainties. One upside of my current job is that the skill set is super niche and tough to automate.

PS. Honestly my career's been a string of fortunate flukes. I never aimed for TelcoCloud, it is just something that pays better than my previous job. Back in uni, I was set on becoming a Software Architect down the line,... or become a COBOL Dev :)
by guztaver | 2025-06-12 15:44:12+00:00
That’s also occurs with me, but in games! Sometimes, I feel “obligated” to play, the urge of playing that unique game, then suddenly, it disappears.

I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that occurs often, some things just lose that sparkle with the time, and it’s okay, you just need to find a new way to make your task. This article is a good example of how you can do this, and, with some time, change your methods!
by jfengel | 2025-06-12 15:44:14+00:00
Note that it's not the contractualism, but the fact that Shylock is Jewish:

Tarry, Jew: The law hath yet another hold on you. It is enacted in the laws of Venice, If it be proved against an alien That by direct or indirect attempts He seek the life of any citizen, The party 'gainst the which he doth contrive Shall seize one half his goods; the other half Comes to the privy coffer of the state; And the offender's life lies in the mercy Of the duke only, 'gainst all other voice.

("Alien" means any non-citizen, but it's clear that it's specifically because Shylock is Jewish.)

Because it was done in a contract, it counts as an "indirect attempt", but it's the same law as if it were a physical assault.

(Also note: nobody else in the room seems to have ever heard of this law, and nobody brought it up. Portia is not, in fact, a lawyer. Nobody bothers to check the texts. Antonio's life is already safe; there is no need to heap additional punishment on Shylock. I believe that Portia is just making it up, and everybody goes with it.)
by cluckindan | 2025-06-12 15:44:39+00:00
That’s insanely stereotypical. There is no ”drugs” that is ”the purest form of pleasure”.

Instead, there are many thousands of different substances which can elicit, heighten, prolong or enable pleasure; some illegal, some legal, some included in your favourite meals and snacks.

Even vanilla is a ”drug” which enhances pleasurable feelings. (Vanillin and ethylvanillin are monoamine oxidase inhibitors and consuming them will increase serotonergic and dopaminergic activity)
by andnand | 2025-06-12 15:44:40+00:00
Whats your workflow? Ive been playing with Claude Code for personal use. Usually new projects for experimentation. We have Copilot licenses through work so I've been playing around with VS Code agent mode for the last week. Usually using 3.5, 3.7 Sonnet or 04-mini. This is in a large Go project. Its been abysmal at everything other than tests. I've been trying to figure out if I'm just using the tooling wrong but I feel like I've tried all the "best practices" currently. Contexts, switching models for planning and coding, rules, better prompting. Nothings worked so far.
by hinkley | 2025-06-12 15:46:34+00:00
This is why we don’t move data center load to the coldest available data center to reduce the AC power fraction of the cost. The cost of electricity is a significant fraction of the overall cost but not high enough to make up for stranded assets. Computers not running during their best years is expensive.

But I’m not sure that’s entirely correct, and maybe it’s time to revisit this.

Any system that is selling responsiveness as part of their service has to keep a certain amount of equipment sitting idle. That’s just how queuing theory works. So while you cannot move all server load to the coldest available zone, we should still be able to run that center near capacity and use the hottest one for all reserve capacity.

Power plants also have to deal with fines for exceeding emissions limits, but I suspect the problem here is that Bayesian analysis tells them that if a plant has to kick on early for some reason (early school release day, or another plant exceeded a maintenance window), it will still be needed for sure an hour from now, so it’s better to leave it running for 45 minutes doing nothing than to cycle it.
by hall0ween | 2025-06-12 15:46:55+00:00
After reading the abstract, this title seems to me like flame/click-bait.

This test has been done in mice only (since no other animal was mentioned in the abstract).

If one follows the scientific method, this means whatever conclusion the authors make can only be extended to mice. Extrapolation to “mammals” is not present in the abstract implicitly or explicitly.
by Jelthi | 2025-06-12 15:46:58+00:00
Almost every Uber Black and Black SUV I’ve ordered was a Chevy Suburban or GMC Yukon.

The quality is across the board, but one thing I’ve found consistent is the terrible quality seats. The seats feel like it’s just cardboard supporting you that pops in and out as you move with the car.

It’s rare to get an actual luxury car even when paying more.

Their promise of “professional” drivers is also wild. Sometimes you get a guy who’s friendly and seems eager to please and helpful with luggage, but I’ve had plenty of downright rude drivers who feel inconvenienced by my presence.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-12 15:47:00+00:00
Probably (depending to some extent how old you are) that's just not very much power, so you're not going to get exciting movie style arcing for example. Even if the scissors connect live and ground, at those powers the result is the circuit gets dropped which doesn't look like anything much. And if they don't do that yeah, no more power to the TV and it's all over.

The electrical supply for a whole house can make pretty sparks, you don't want to be near that as it could definitely kill you.

The electrical supply for a whole street can tear a noticeable crater in the street, which is why after my street lost power last year actual street repair people turned up to fill the hole and lay more asphalt as well as the electricity network people.
by louiskottmann | 2025-06-12 15:47:00+00:00
That is stretching the subject beyond reasonable. Proprietary software as a general endeavor is not an invalid business and nobody is saying that here.

LibreOffice is close enough to Microsoft's offering that surely it makes sense accross the many EU states to stop spending millions on it, and spend a few to close the gap, saving even more millions in the future.
by square_usual | 2025-06-12 15:47:09+00:00
There's many examples of exactly what you're asking for, such as Kenton Varda's Cloudlfare oauth provider [1] and Simon Willison's tools [2]. I see a new blog post like this with detailed explanations of what they did pretty frequently, like Steve Klabnik's recent post [3], which while it isn't as detailed has a lot of very concrete facts. There's even more blog posts from prominent devs like antirez who talk about other things they're doing with AI like rubber ducking [4], if you're curious about how some people who say "I used Sonnet last week and it was great" are working, because not everyone uses it to write code - I personally don't because I care a lot about code style.

[1]: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/

[2]: https://tools.simonwillison.net/

[3]: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-tale-of-two-claudes/

[4]: https://antirez.com/news/153
by sokoloff | 2025-06-12 15:47:16+00:00
Small planes are about twice as safe per mile as motorcycles, all-cause to all-cause.

Now, there’s planes running out of fuel and drunk driving on cycles that some operators might choose to exclude from their own risk calculations, but it’s a little over one order of magnitude riskier than cars.

Whether that’s unbelievably dangerous is up to personal judgment.
by physicles | 2025-06-12 15:47:41+00:00
Agreed on all points.

The only place I’ve encountered this pattern is in chromedp, the go wrapper for the chrome headless browser driver. Its API… isn’t good.

Most methods you use are package globals that take a context.Context as a first parameter. But you have to understand that this context is a _special_ one: you can’t pass any old context like context.Background(), you must pass a context you got from one of the factory methods.

If you want to specify a timeout, you use context.WithTimeout. Clever I guess, but that’s the only setting that works like that.

It’s essentially a void*.
by datameta | 2025-06-12 15:47:48+00:00
The more I use LLMs to code, the farther I stray from the joy of coding.

I won't regurgitate the common sentiment of it being like pair programming with an oddly spiky profile junior engineer savant. I find my emotions being activated too often in having to recontextualize or reign in or re-orient or repeat.

If I wrote code that doesn't work, that is on me. If I have to read code that doesn't work, I didn't write it, and it's veracity or accuracy are only uncoverable by me - but are already being treated as gospel by my AI peer, and the LLM keeps asserting issues with "my" code that I don't yet feel I have ownership over because I have not ingested it fully is supremely tiring. The whiplash feels almost like an abusive relationship.

I want to get back to feeling accomplished once finished with a coding session, not like I just went through a kafkaesque ringer.
by reedlaw | 2025-06-12 15:47:54+00:00
I had a similar reaction to Jeffries' Gilded Rose solution in Ruby [1]. After 13 blog posts he ended up with something [2] a lot less elegant than Victor Shepelev who also used TDD but came up with a one-shot solution [3]. Just like Norvig with his Sudoku solver, Shepelev codifies the rules as a set of relationships. He writes:

When rereading the requirements, we might notice that all conditions can be described as a simple dependency (name, sell_in) => change of quality. The most natural representation of this in the modern Ruby would be pattern matching.

1. https://ronjeffries.com/articles/020-01ff/gilded-rose-1/

2. https://github.com/RonJeffries/gold-1/blob/master/wrappers.r...

3. https://zverok.substack.com/i/149071314/the-implementation
by diggan | 2025-06-12 15:48:06+00:00
But I'm guessing you're doing those refactors because you know they're ultimately worth it, because you have experience programming since before LLMs?

Like I know boilerplate and messy code sucks because I've had to work with it, without LLMs, and I know how much it sucks. I think you do too, but I think we know that, because we had to fight with it in the past.
by booniepepper | 2025-06-12 15:48:17+00:00
For the record, Amazon's Builder Tools org (or ASBX or whatever) built a replacement system years ago, because this absolutely doesn't work for a lot of projects and is unsustainable. They have been struggling for years to figure out how to move people off it.

Speaking at an even higher level, their system has been a blocker to innovation, and introduces unique challenges to solving software supply chain issues

Not saying there aren't good things about the system (I like cascading builds, reproducibility, buffering from 3p volatility) but I wouldn't hype this up too much.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-12 15:48:31+00:00
Here's the thing, Germans don't get to make that choice, their politicians do it for them. Sure, you can vote on some politicians, but what do you do when freedom of speech is not on anyone's menu as they all share different views than you on what freedom of speech is?

Having something like the First Amendment in the constitution means no politician can fuck with your freedom of speech too much. It's one of the things that makes the US the longest running democracy to date.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-06-12 15:48:44+00:00
Maybe shouldn't be, but that doesn't mean it isn't.

Nostalgia for a time in the past, but bad things can trigger feelings from the past.

So not Nostalgia for "we really miss when Russia was great".

More like Nostalgia for 99 Luft Balloons, the song, that also came out at same time. And was part of Cold War Culture.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-12 15:48:46+00:00
I think this is one of those many cases where how the technology works doesn't match the actual meaning of the English word, but for whatever reason the word has stuck.

For better or worse, a lot of things on the Internet now assume that only "servers" can accept incoming connections, and therefore anything that needs to be "sent" to clients needs to be done by making the client poll a server over and over. True P2P apps (with no intermediary server) are pretty rare now, for a variety of reasons: some good reasons, some stupid reasons.
by viraptor | 2025-06-12 15:49:20+00:00
> my point never depended on 100% of the participants being right 100% of the questions

You told someone that their reasoning is so bad they should get checked by a doctor. Because they didn't find the test easy, even though it averages 60% score per person. You've been a dick to them while significantly misrepresenting the numbers - just stop digging.
by hall0ween | 2025-06-12 15:49:49+00:00
> Two experiments with different challenge-to-contact ratios were conducted to assess transmission dynamics and mutation development. In experiment 1, a 4:1 challenge-to-contact ratio resulted in 100% transmission among direct-contact mice, with all mice succumbing to the infection. In experiment 2, a 1:1 ratio yielded 50% transmission, with all challenged mice also succumbing.

It’s not clear from the abstract that any human-made changes were made to the H5N1 either.
by Analemma_ | 2025-06-12 15:49:54+00:00
The problem with all those things is that they are ridiculously capital intensive to set up, and then they sit idle 80% of the time Worse, the whole point of negative electricity prices is that they're an inefficiency in the market which ideally will eventually be optimized away. Then what do you do with your billion-dollar plant that can only run with negative prices that no longer exist?
by BobBagwill | 2025-06-12 15:50:10+00:00
<yawn> Kitchen-sink office suites are dinosaurs. It's like switching from riding an ankylosaurus to riding a glyptodont. Personal computing was and is a tarpit. It was and is used to automate and complicate paper-style processes. Every time I have to fill out a PDF form, I want to scream! <grimace>. Big fat slow 90's-style document-oriented processes have got to go!
by close04 | 2025-06-12 15:50:24+00:00
> In experiment 1, a 4:1 challenge-to-contact ratio resulted in 100% transmission among direct-contact mice, with all mice succumbing to the infection. In experiment 2, a 1:1 ratio yielded 50% transmission, with all challenged mice also succumbing.

What's not supported from the title is that they only tested in mice. But they do keep mentioning "mammalian adaptation" so it might just be that it's expected all mammals to suffer the same fate without certain adaptations.
by lproven | 2025-06-12 15:51:03+00:00
> Is it similar to the Maximite series of hardware and their Basic clones?

The Maximite series had cousins, but it also evolved into the Picomite:

https://geoffg.net/picomite.html

Some of the cousins:

The BASIC*Engine:

https://basicengine.org/esp8266.html

As discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17674944

Followed later by the BASIC Engine Next Gen:

https://basicengine.org/nextgen.html

And more recently BASIC Engine RX:

https://basicengine.org/#_what_is_the_basic_engine_rx

Unrelated...

The Agon Light:

https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/agon.html

(Which I just noticed quotes me! :-) )

And Agon Light 2:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/AgonLight2/o...

And its 6502 equivalent, the Neo6502:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/Neo6502/open...
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-12 15:51:12+00:00
I feel I should clarify

When it comes to judging the quality of AI output, I do agree with "AI is ok at some stuff"

When I say I tend to fall on the Anti AI side, I am saying "But I still don't think it's worth using much"

I don't really want to lean on tools that are just ok at some stuff.
by psadri | 2025-06-12 15:51:44+00:00
Back at Polyvore we used real post-it notes on a board to track progress. We had a weekly cadence but the tasks were granular enough to be completed in a day or two. Each week we’d peel off and crumble the completed tasks into a bin. It was a really satisfying experience in a way that digital facsimiles can’t quite match.
by username223 | 2025-06-12 15:52:10+00:00
> I also once had a driver in Chile who, somehow, micro-slept in stop and go traffic every time the car was stopped

Imagine how desperate you would have to be to drive a cab when you're that sleep-deprived (probably haven't slept in 36 hours). Now imagine someone took that income away from you to give it to Sundar Pichai.

Yeah, sometimes it's unpleasant talking to a cabby, and sometimes he won't take a hint and stop talking. But you might learn something if you try to engage, instead of vibe-coding inside a surveillance robot.
by diggan | 2025-06-12 15:52:11+00:00
> There is no ”drugs” that is ”the purest form of pleasure”

Yeah, I mean I think we barely know what that would even be. But some drugs come pretty damn close I'd wager, and I'm not talking about vanilla or ethylvanillin.

I think if you've dabbled in opiates, you've come pretty close to what the purest form of pleasure would feel like.
by greenavocado | 2025-06-12 15:52:13+00:00
Not only that, but just a month earlier, South Korean scientists published another Virology Journal paper revealing that they had engineered a chimeric H5N1 virus using hallmark gain-of-function (GOF) techniques, combining gene segments from three different influenza viruses to increase the virus's heat resistance, alter host targeting, and enhance human cell entry.

"Recombinant viruses were generated using a pHW2000 plasmid-based reverse genetics system."

"Combining the R90K and H110Y mutations (22W_KY) resulted in a synergistic increase in thermal stability and maintained HA activity without measurable reduction even after 4 h at 52 °C."

"22 W HA and 22 W NA genes, along with six internal genomic segments (PB2, PB1, PA, NP, M, NS) from PR8 and a PB2 gene from 01310 containing the I66M, I109V, and I133V (MVV) mutations"

The study also confirmed enhanced antigen uptake and intracellular penetration in human cells:

"The highest level of intracellular entry was observed for BEI_22W_KY, confirming its superior effectiveness in penetrating cells."

Ref: https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-...
by Jelthi | 2025-06-12 15:52:13+00:00
Assuming you didn’t upgrade to a different tier or pay for priority to get your uber faster or a nicer ride.

Uber also can increase the cost of the ride on you with unexpected routes or time. Yes you can complain, but I am sure plenty don’t even notice.

The math isn’t wrong, but it’s not so black and white.

I’m in the camp though of “I would pay double not to deal with a human”
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-12 15:52:21+00:00
Battery production rates are creeping up to multiple twh/year now. This is accumulating to a lot of battery sitting around in vehicles, domestic storage, grid storage, etc. Mostly the goal of these batteries of course isn't supporting the grid but some other use case. But if it's plugged in, it could potentially be available for selling power. Right now, most EVs can't contribute power. But that's something that is starting to change. Small experiments with thousands or tens of thousands of vehicles have already been done and seem to work fine. Now imagine tens of millions of vehicles being part of the grid. That's a serious amount of stand by power for absorbing excess power or dispatching power when needed.

Another interesting aspect is that as grid demand fluctuates, a lot of cables are under utilized at least some of the time. Which means there is plenty of capacity for charging batteries provided there is excess generation and cable capacity. A lot of that power currently gets discarded instead. Batteries allow better use of this excess power. And having a lot of local battery means that cable capacity can be freed up as well when needed and then recharged when demand reduces.

And then finally battery prices are coming down. With sodium ion cell production ramping up in several places, things could get quite a bit cheaper. These don't depend on scarce metals or materials. And they last quite long as well (relative to NMC).
by ijidak | 2025-06-12 15:52:23+00:00
What do you read? I’m an economist reader too for weekly news.

Would love other sources, but it’s hard to find anything with similar depth and a similar lack of sensational-ization found in most news.

Edit: Oh, and global reach. The economist covers earth in almost equal detail for every region. Not quite equal of course, but darn close compared to most outlets.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-12 15:52:34+00:00
Also:

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-archaeologists-uncover-massive... (2 points, 6 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44202410

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/06/nx-s1-5423660/surprise-ancien... (2 points, 6 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44202410

https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/06/archaeologists-find-... (5 points, 5 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44212470

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/massive-field-wher... (2 points, 3 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44257422
by ryanwhitney | 2025-06-12 15:52:44+00:00
I think it comes down to the actual interface design vs visual consistency. Windows 8 UI suffered because of bad information density, constantly changing tiles, and lack of consistency throughout the OS. You’re mostly in windows, but you occasionally get a big low-density tablet UI to try and parse.

I see the Vision-inspired bits coming through as mostly visual design with a bit of fluidity in menu styling. All of the core menus are still basically the same and tailored to their platform.

That said, a lot of that visual design made more sense in VisionOS where transparency helps you see and understand the real world around you.

I haven't used them and I’m not sure I like them—especially transparency on a desktop—but I do think there’s a difference in strategy.
by Retric | 2025-06-12 15:52:48+00:00
It’s still similar. Radon concentrations in medieval dwellings would never reach the kind of concentrations you can see in modern homes because they leaked far more air. I wouldn’t necessarily call a tight home refining or enriching but it’s still dramatically increasing the concentration.

Tunnels and caves could still be problematic though there’s a lot of gasses that can cause problems in such environments.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-06-12 15:52:51+00:00
Maybe! but I feel like they're really trying to push this on us by extending the visual language of the Vision Pro across all of their devices... this delusion of AR is leaking into other product areas that I thought were for me, but now I'm going to have to turn on accessibility features so I can read text on buttons (and this isn't hyperbole, I'm updating apps for the developer beta and actually using it).