MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-06-02 11:27:13+00:00
> "This month, millions of young people will graduate from college," reports the New York Times, "and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence." That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities.

You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report.

But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company...

"This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough...
by ghaff | 2025-06-02 11:27:29+00:00
I'll observe that, at a top-rate tech school I'm pretty familiar with, major + computing is a very prevalent option in a lot of the majors. As an undergrad (pre-PCs), I graduated with one computer programming course in FORTRAN and that was pretty much the only time I touched a computer keyboard undergrad. You can't really do that today in engineering/sciences.
by silversmith | 2025-06-02 11:27:46+00:00
I have the good fortune of working in an office, with easy access to never-ending physical labour options courtesy of relatives living in the countryside.

Every now and then the issues of IT projects make me say "screw it all, I'm going to be a lumberjack". And then I go work the chainsaw for a weekend, and come back thankful for the office chair in a climate controlled room.

Working with your hands is great meditation in small doses, but brutal when you need to do it enough to make a living.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-02 11:27:49+00:00
I think there's multiple good choices depending on your niche.

>So let's assume there is a deficit in the market for dating apps that are actually good. So why hasn't one been made?

The deficit is in the sidelines.

Imagine you're tinder and also dealing with LGBT. Who get mass reported constantly and banned off the site. So now there's multiple options there who handle that niche.

>A majority of humans aren't compatible with online dating for one reason or another.

I disagree with this. The actual problem is well researched. Women wont date the burger king fry cook. How many dating sites take that into account? Basically none.

How about flipside options that men find important? Basically non-existent on dating sites.

The "deficit in the market" is trivially understood but when the rubber hits the road, why is it no dating sites take care of these?
by dinetrimr | 2025-06-02 11:28:32+00:00
Thought I had one, turned in my notice but they rescinded offer a week later for no obvious reason and went hiring freeze. Was about the exact point when the market started inclining couple of years ago. Still think if I had interviewed a month before I would have got the position Been jobless ever since.

I blame my self for it, for not having the insight. Consequences were severe
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-02 11:29:45+00:00
Bad term. If I get employed as a quantitative trader on Jane Street after completing a philosophy major am I underemployed because I'm not writing papers on ontology? Why do other people get to say what my "full utilization" is without even knowing me?

Underemployment as "not working as many hours as you'd like" is the standard definition, and that one actually does seem to respect people's interiority.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-06-02 11:29:51+00:00
They did, I am just disputing the notion that they were “wildly” successful.

iPod and iPhones I would describe as wildly successful. Even AirPods. Even iPads. They were THE device to get in that market segment, and if you looked around lots of people had them. The M processor MacBooks are also wildly successful. But I don’t remember the iMacs being like that in early 2000s.
by pegasus | 2025-06-02 11:31:10+00:00
I partly agree about letter counting being an unfair test for the raw LLM. But I was thinking of reasoning models interminably rationalizing their incorrect first hunch even after splitting the string in individual characters and having all the data needed in a digestible format before them. Similar to, as you say, conspiracy theorists stuck in motivated reasoning loops. But - are these latter behaviors instances of human intelligence at work, or examples of dysfunctional cognition, just like people's incoherence in cases of stroke or inebriation?

The other example I mentioned is something I've encountered a few times in my interactions with Gemini 2.5 pro, which was literally in the same response plainly claiming that this-or-that is possible and not possible. It's not a subtle logical fallacy and this is something even those conspiracy theorists wouldn't engage in. Meanwhile, I've started to encounter a brand-new failure mode: duplicating an explanation with minor rephrasings. I'm sure all of these will be issues will be ameliorated with time, but not actually fixed. It's basically fixes on top of fixes, patches on top of patches, but once in a while the whole Rube Goldberg nature of the fix will shine through. Just the way once in a while Tesla FSD will inexplicably decide to point the car towards the nearest tree.

Yes, humans have their own failure modes, but internal coherence is the effortless normal from which we sometimes deviate, whereas for machines, it's something to be simulated by more and more complex mechanisms, a horizon to strive towards but never to reach. That internal coherence is something that we share with all living beings and is the basis of what we call consciousness. It's not something that we'll ever be able to formalize though, but we will and should keep on trying to do so. Machine learning is a present day materialization of this eternal quest. At least this is how I see things; the future might prove me wrong, of course.
by Maro | 2025-06-02 11:32:34+00:00
> with all those savings going to the AI companies

I'm not even sure those savings will "go" anywhere, they will just stay with the companies. Right now, if I use my $20/mo ChatGPT subscription to automate away my secretary's job ($3,000/mo or whatever), it's not like those $3,000/mo is going to OpenAI. And I don't think in the future they will be able to jack up prices, because foundational LLM models have become a race to the bottom.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-02 11:32:44+00:00
I don't recall that. What I had in mind was this result being used in support of higher-level programming languages; the argument as I remember went, when comparing teams writing the same stuff in multiple languages (IIRC Java, and either Assembly or C, were involved), it was found that the number of bugs per KLOC was about the same in each case, but obviously the number of features implemented in the same number of lines was much greater in high-level, more expressive languages, therefore it's better to use high-level languages.

I do buy the general idea (more expressive language -> some class of bugs inexpressible by design + less lines of code for bugs to hide in), but I'm suspicious about the specific result showing a constant bug/KLOC ratio in all tested languages; feels more like a lucky statistical artifact than some deep, fundamental relationship.
by skissane | 2025-06-02 11:32:52+00:00
Historically, COBOL has had some rather fascinatingly unusual features-my favourite is OPEN INPUT REVERSED, which opens files for reading backwards-not sure if this was ever in any of the COBOL standards, but it exists in IBM mainframe COBOL, and many implementations on other platforms have copied it from there.

It usually only works for files with fixed length records, and reads the records in reverse sequential order, but the bits/bytes within the record in forward order. In theory, it could be made to work for variable-length record files as well, but I’m not aware of any implementation which does.

The original motivation was to support reading magnetic tapes backwards, so you could write data to a tape, then read it back in without a time-consuming rewind - which was important in the early years of computing, when memory and disk sizes were so small, magnetic tapes were commonly used for temporary storage / work files.

Most tape drives nowadays don’t support reading tapes backwards, even though there are standard SCSI commands defined to do so-but I believe IBM 3592 tape drive series still supports this, as do virtual tape servers targeted at mainframes. The drive physically reads the bits off the tape in reverse order, but then reverses the data before sending it to the computer.

I’m not aware of any other language which supports reading files backwards, other than COBOL. Well, mainframe assembly does, and you can invoke the relevant mainframe IO calls from languages such as C-but COBOL is the only language I know of which has it as a language feature.
by gadders | 2025-06-02 11:34:13+00:00
It's almost like you could create a 2 x 2 matrix of Useful Vs Valued

- Not Useful, Not Valued: Get good or change jobs/industries.

- Not Useful, Valued: talks a good game (or is doing useful stuff that is not apparent)

-Useful, Not Valued: Could be useful at non-strategic stuff, or does good work without self-marketing, or has bad management and needs to leave.

- Useful, Valued: Ideal situation.
by dakiol | 2025-06-02 11:34:15+00:00
> At my last job I was the only developer who knew bash and Linux.

Where or how so you find such jobs/companies? Whenever I interview for non faang companies I’ve been asked things like the cap theorem, concurrency issues, microservice patterns, ddd, and of course on top of that the live coding and systems design interviews.

For once, I’d like to join a company in which I seem to bring something only I know.
by sofixa | 2025-06-02 11:34:25+00:00
While C++ is unquestionably still widely used, outside of legacy and some niches (like embedded) it's not in the top 3 "best" choices. Why teach a more complicated language with a poorer ecosystem and toolchain than is actually needed?

I think there's still value in starting with C and C++, to see where it's coming from and see how much tooling and DX has improved, but I can't really blame courses jumping directly to the more useful things.
by lazide | 2025-06-02 11:35:34+00:00
‘Skills shortage’ is similar to complaining about STEM shortages. It’s mostly BS.

The complaint isn’t about n people not being available, it’s about n people not being available for x low price, or z terrible working conditions.

No matter how cheap or how widely available, some folks will still complain because for some folks, even if they had to pay $0, it still would be ‘too much’ if people also demanded human rights.

It’s similar to the ‘where have all the good men gone’, or ‘why don’t people want to work anymore?’, etc. complaints.
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-02 11:36:23+00:00
I seems that there are different meanings to "valued".

Here how the article defines it:

> Being valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction. This comes with opportunities to grow and contribute in ways that are meaningful to you and the business.

But I would say that in a business setting, the definition of being valued is usually much less abstract, it just means you are worth money, the value here is a dollar amount.

Being valued this way doesn't mean that you will be given opportunities to grow, but it means that there is a good chance you won't be laid off, and that they will listen to your requests as an employee, because they consider that by losing you, they are going to lose money (that is, your value).
by 47282847 | 2025-06-02 11:36:25+00:00
Our organism’s primary goal is survival. Unknown territory will feel unsafe and thus stressful, up to the point of unreal, even if on a rational level it may actually be safer. It takes courage to face and calm those fears without consciously or unconsciously returning to known survival strategies - and meta cognition skills to sufficiently distance yourself from those past emotional memories. After all, they allowed you to survive.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-02 11:36:27+00:00
Trump's actions arent impacting reserve currency. That's not how it works. Reserve currencies dont shift 20% in a year. It's more like 0.5% per year tops.

The USD has dropped from 65% in 2014 to 57% in 2024

Euro has dropped from 21% in 2014 to 19% in 2024

Yen, Sterling hasnt moved around 6%

CAD is rising slightly 1.75% to 2.75%.

Renminbi raised slightly more from 1% to 2%.

Easy to predict future shifts. CAD is going to lose its temporary boost. Sterling probably going to take 5% out of the euro's share. Otherwise nothing significant regardless of what trump does.
by giantg2 | 2025-06-02 11:36:32+00:00
There seem to be relatively few C/C++ jobs, so they went with what the market wanted (Java). They still exposed you to other other types of languages such as assembly, JS, and even COBOL. I really don't think going with python except for an into/cross-major class is a good idea since it's so simple and there aren't that many jobs with it.
by ponector | 2025-06-02 11:36:37+00:00
Nukes are useless in current world. What for? To destroy cities? How it can help to win the war where you are the aggressor? Wipe out Kyiv - Ukrainians will not stop fighting. Target troops with nukes? Like to nuke every mile of the frontline?

Either way more countries will oppose russia after use of nukes.

Being a nuclear power also does not prevent war, as you can see what happens between India and Pakistan.
by bravetraveler | 2025-06-02 11:37:52+00:00
Speaking from experience... it's hard to tell. Yes, but also: no. I know 'useful' is employable.

I have been more easily valued for my 'use' by being easier to manipulate. Or, sorry, felt more open/safe. Money spends the same: barely, too much work.

Layoffs? To quote Janet Jackson: 'what have you done for me lately?'
by krapp | 2025-06-02 11:38:05+00:00
Most science fiction is closer to Star Wars than The Expanse, and Star Wars is more grounded in plausible reality than Star Trek, which no one tags as "science fantasy." If Andor didn't have "Star Wars" branding, I don't think anyone would have a problem considering it science fiction in the grand tradition of a lot of MilSF.

I'm not saying the distinction doesn't exist - The Hobbit isn't SF and Ringworld isn't high fantasy, but I am saying that between the extremes, it's mostly just vibes. There is no objective reason not to consider Star Wars science fiction, some people just find the space wizards too silly (while having a bookshelf full of "The author's barely disguised fetish or hyperfixation but In Spaaaaace.")
by ghaff | 2025-06-02 11:38:18+00:00
There's definitely this disconnect between programming and computer science. For better or worse, a lot of top schools don't even really teach programming in their computer science programs. It's something you just pick up on your own.

But not sure that using Python as the specific tool is so bad--based on the MOOC that's what MIT uses in Intro to Algorithms. May be better than spending a lot of time on the vagaries of C++ which are certainly relevant to system programming (though that's probably slowly switching to Rust) if your focus is on algorithms and other design details.
by antonvs | 2025-06-02 11:38:22+00:00
Which field? It’s hard to believe anyone working with AI models for years hasn’t figured out fine tuning.

There are plenty of published papers on the subject.

One possible reason you may not see many side by side comparisons between tuned and untuned models is because the difference can be so dramatic that there’s no point.

I’m not objecting to asking questions, but rather to how the question was phrased as some sort of shortcoming of the world around him, rather than an apparent lack of any meaningful investigation of the topic on his part.
by rwmj | 2025-06-02 11:39:25+00:00
It depends if you want to be a philosopher or not. The surveys do actually ask this question, see questions #93-95 here for example: http://gpiatlantic.org/pdf/communitygpi/communitypart2b.pdf

(I think you are right to ask if a survey can accurately capture "underemployment", there are many problems with the definition and how to capture the right information to measure it.)
by sph | 2025-06-02 11:39:50+00:00
This is good advice in general, but lately the Internet had grown so large it is healthier to expect no one will ever see your creation. Many of us grew up when the Internet was a pond, today it is an immeasurably large ocean; there is a good chance your audience won’t ever find you, and your chances get shorter every day.

Incidentally I also believe one would have more chance to market their own creation in the real, physical world than the Internet. I believe we’ll eventually see leaflets and indie books being distributed to passersby for free like 100 years ago.

In any case, create for yourself. Create without ever expecting an audience. If this doesn’t sound fun, you probably just like the publicity rather than the act of creation itself.
by bilbo0s | 2025-06-02 11:40:11+00:00
I think that's what the professor meant when s/he said that schools are "dumbing down" curricula. The amount of Python being taught is a bit concerning even from the perspective of personal economics. If I was paying all that money every term in tuition, I'd want them to teach me the hard stuff. Not the language I can learn in a weekend while I'm shirtless on the couch watching GameDay. It's like no one ever stops for a moment and says, "Wait? Why am I paying this much money to learn a language that's so easy my English Lit friend knows it inside out already?"

If I were at a school where they are teaching JavaScript or Python, you kind of already know that program is more "money grab" than "study of computing technologies".
by dakiol | 2025-06-02 11:40:54+00:00
If we can’t fantasize at something that’s supposed to take a third of our day to day, man, that’s depressing. I do understand that we need to be practical and do the job and get paid, but at some point one wakes up and wonders what the hell is one living for. Work is usually the last thing on my list, but I quickly wake up again and lick mister dollar’s ass because I need money for food. You can manage to twist the meaning of the situation and feel good with yourself, but we are slaves, modern slaves.
by creata | 2025-06-02 11:41:12+00:00
Merge sort in Dafny:

predicate sorted(a: seq<int>) { forall i, j :: 0 <= i <= j < |a| ==> a[i] <= a[j] } predicate merge_invariants(a: seq<int>, b: seq<int>, c: array<int>, i: nat, j: nat) reads c { && i <= |a| && j <= |b| && i + j <= c.Length && multiset(c[..i+j]) == multiset(a[..i]) + multiset(b[..j]) && (forall k1, k2 :: 0 <= k1 < i && j <= k2 < |b| ==> a[k1] <= b[k2]) && (forall k1, k2 :: 0 <= k1 < j && i <= k2 < |a| ==> b[k1] <= a[k2]) && sorted(c[..i+j]) && (forall k1, k2 :: 0 <= k1 < i + j && j <= k2 < |b| ==> c[k1] <= b[k2]) && (forall k1, k2 :: 0 <= k1 < i + j && i <= k2 < |a| ==> c[k1] <= a[k2]) } method merge(a: seq<int>, b: seq<int>) returns (out: seq<int>) requires sorted(a) requires sorted(b) ensures multiset(a) + multiset(b) == multiset(out) ensures sorted(out) { var i := 0; var j := 0; var c := new int[|a| + |b|]; while i < |a| && j < |b| decreases |a| + |b| - (i + j) invariant merge_invariants(a, b, c, i, j) { assert a[..i+1] == a[..i] + [a[i]]; assert b[..j+1] == b[..j] + [b[j]]; if a[i] <= b[j] { c[i + j] := a[i]; i := i + 1; } else { c[i + j] := b[j]; j := j + 1; } } while i < |a| invariant merge_invariants(a, b, c, i, j) { assert a[..i+1] == a[..i] + [a[i]]; c[i + j] := a[i]; i := i + 1; } while j < |b| invariant merge_invariants(a, b, c, i, j) { assert b[..j+1] == b[..j] + [b[j]]; c[i + j] := b[j]; j := j + 1; } assert a[..i] == a; assert b[..j] == b; assert c[..i+j] == c[..]; return c[..]; } method merge_sort(a: seq<int>) returns (out: seq<int>) decreases |a| ensures multiset(out) == multiset(a) ensures sorted(out) { if |a| <= 1 { assert sorted(a); out := a; } else { var half := |a| / 2; assert a[..half] + a[half..] == a; var l := merge_sort(a[..half]); var r := merge_sort(a[half..]); out := merge(l, r); } }

Imo it's a lot easier to explain than React. Preconditions, postconditions, loop invariants, assertions, termination arguments, and... that's about it, right?
by giantg2 | 2025-06-02 11:42:32+00:00
The first real language I learned was C++ and I was decent at it (best in class but mostly stuck with console based programs, nothing advanced like GUIs that year). I have never used it at work. If you look at job boards, it's overwhelmingly stuff like Java, JS/TS frameworks, etc. Why teach it when it seems like less than 10% of postings are looking for it? Might as well teach other languages and just learn it if you need it.
by Semaphor | 2025-06-02 11:43:54+00:00
> Unless you're prepared to get technical, you can only read Amazon books on your Amazon Kindle paid for with your Amazon wallet.

That hasn’t been true for a very long time? Unless by "technical" you mean sending an email with the file in question attached. E-Book platforms sometimes even directly support sending that mail.

> Other than Kobo and Amazon, no book retailer

… in the UK. From what I’ve heard, Tolino devices are decently popular in Germany, they are made by an alliance of booksellers.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-06-02 11:44:04+00:00
> But more importantly it requires the same superhuman Jedi magic to be useful

No, Finn used it fine in defense when fighting a trooper in TFA. It is useful even without the Force. We can only blame sequels for that :P

Although yeah, when compared to other weapons at the time, they seem overpowered, I agree, never thought of that.
by sph | 2025-06-02 11:46:05+00:00
“Do what you love” doesn’t mean “only do what you love and who cares about bills.”

It’s just a reminder to find time for what you love even if you have other things that demand your time. And, if you can, to always leave enough space for yourself. For far too many of us, there is only work, more work, with the silly hope to one day find the time to dream again. You won’t.