MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?
by MongooseStudios | 2025-06-27 02:44:07+00:00
I'm a self taught dev that worked my butt off and endured years of "we promote internally" lies at multiple companies to finally get paid to write code.

I've been job hunting since I was laid off last November, and I'm just over it. Everyone is unicorn hunting for X years in Y framework and if you don't have exactly that you need not apply. Meanwhile FAANG, Microsoft, and Intel keep handing out pink slips.

I still love coding, I've spent most of my non "job applications and existential dread" time since layoff building projects. But the thought of working for another company run by braindead execs that want to shove AI into everything, or sitting through another round of Becky from HR (whose most technical skill is sometimes using excel) asking me "so why do you want to work here" fills me with revulsion.

I've taken to telling people with absurdly high meeting count hiring processes and one way video screenings that I'm not interested. I find myself excited about the prospect of doing almost anything other than sitting through another planning week at some company that swears up and down they are "doing Agile."

I'm furious at how companies have decided to kick us to the curb, outsource our jobs to the cheapest country they can find, or whatever AI company has the tastiest complimentary crayons this week. I'm furious at the RTO nonsense everyone is increasingly pushing, because their managers are so awful at their jobs they can't figure out how to replace interrupting us in person with interrupting us via a slack message. I'm furious, and tired at the same time.

Anyone else?
by GlenTheMachine | 2025-06-27 02:46:39+00:00
Space roboticist here.

As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components.

As a first cut, this would require:

- an autonomous rendezvous and docking system

- a fully railed robotic system, e.g. some sort of robotic manipulator that can move along rails and reach every card in every server in the system, which usually means a system of relatively stiff rails running throughout the interior of the plant

- CPU, power, comms, and cooling to support the above

- importantly, the ability of the robotic servicing system toto replace itself. In other words, it would need to be at least two fault tolerant -- which usually means dual wound motors, redundant gears, redundant harness, redundant power, comms, and compute. Alternately, two or more independent robotic systems that are capable of not only replacing cards but also of replacing each other.

- regular launches containing replacement hardware

- ongoing ground support staff to deal with failures

The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would probably be the single biggest mass allocation.
by OlehSavchuk | 2025-06-27 02:46:57+00:00
You raise excellent points about GDPR compliance. Just to clarify - Prepin is a mock interview practice platform, not an actual hiring tool. Users practice with our AI to prepare for real interviews, so no employment decisions are being made. That said, you're absolutely right about data processing concerns - we still handle voice, PII, etc. during practice sessions. We'd definitely benefit from your expertise on proper GDPR compliance for AI-powered interview practice tools.

Would love to discuss the regulatory landscape further - please reach out to oleh.savchuk@prepin.ai when you have a chance.
by DonHopkins | 2025-06-27 02:47:15+00:00
I for one, having grown up on 8 bit 1200 baud BBS porn, find error diffusion dithering quite beautiful.

Yoot Tower - Every Movie Theater Clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8o7gg87k4

>This is a montage of all of the theater clips from the PC game Yoot Tower, a sequel to Maxis's SimTower that was developed by the same team. These movies would play when you examined a theater location playing said films.

SimCity Micropolis Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata To Jerry Martin's Chill Resolve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI

>Chill Resolve by Jerry Martin. Space Inventory performed by Don Hopkins with Micropolis.

https://micropolisweb.com/
by nandomrumber | 2025-06-27 02:48:00+00:00
Pretty much exactly what you’ve described.

Where I am ya don’t been a permit for a shed if it’s under a 18 square metres, so 6x3m sheds are common.

You could look in to off-grid / caravan appliances, thereby saving on a smaller inverter, but they tend to be around 3x the price of regular appliances.

Highly recommended going for 48v system if you’re starting from scratch to save on ridiculously large diameter cables and stupidly high amperage you’ll be dealing with with a 12v system.

I did a repair this week on a poorly designed 12v system that had a 12v to 230v 7amp (1600 watt) inverter powering a 230v 10amp cook top in a camper van. That cooktop was pulling 235 amp from the battery through a very hot 175amp slow blow fuse.

Which is great if you want to melt the fuse post and the supply cables and… I found the fault before the fire started.
by OlehSavchuk | 2025-06-27 02:48:01+00:00
Great point about accessibility. We're definitely committed to making Prepin inclusive for all users. TDD support is one option, and we're also exploring text-based interview modes and real-time transcription features. The goal is to ensure everyone can practice and improve their interview skills regardless of hearing ability. Thanks for bringing this up - accessibility should be built in from the start, not an afterthought.
by ummonk | 2025-06-27 02:48:11+00:00
Ferrocene is intended to document the behavior of the current version of the rustc compiler, so it's just an effort to formalize "the compiler is the language".

Yes, the soundness hole itself is low impact and doesn't need to be prioritized but it undermines the binary "Zig is definitively not memory-safe, while safe Rust, is, by definition, memory-safe" argument that was made in response to me. Now you're dealing with qualitative / quantitative questions of practical impact, in which my original statement holds: "Zig is less memory safe than Rust, but more than C/C++. Neither Zig nor Rust is fundamentally memory safe."

You can of course declare that Safe Rust is by definition memory safe, but that doesn't make it any more true than declaring that Rust solves the halting problem or that it proves P=NP. RustBelt is proven sound. Rust by contrast, as being documented by Ferrocene, is currently fundamentally unsound (though you won't hit the soundness issues in practice).
by nandomrumber | 2025-06-27 02:51:50+00:00
Automatic transfer switches are a thing, but generally you want the supplies sync’ed.

A manual break-before-make transfer switch will do the job. Not much help if you’re not home and the mains goes out and your food spoils, though fridges will stay cold for hours if left shut, and longer if there’s a lot of thermal mass in them - try to keep most of the empty space in your fridge and freezer filled with water bottles.
by notsydonia | 2025-06-27 02:52:00+00:00
Also, leaving aside my previous two points on this and speaking as a person who consumes the internet, I don't want the apparently outmoded 'list of blue links' to be replaced by one A.I. overview.

As is well documented, the overviews can 'hallucinate' and less well-documented, they're bland. I'd rather have my search query met with an array of links, offering a variety of takes that I can then sift through.

This is especially vital for research which is why I now use Kagi and also Perplexity, as in the latter provides quality links. I may be wrong but I believe it was started by former Google execs and uses some of the natural language processing mechanisms that made legacy Google so good.
by dwattttt | 2025-06-27 02:52:14+00:00
> unless you find it terrifying that owners of hardware have control over their hardware

I mean that the presence or absence of an IOMMU doesn't impact whether owners of hardware have control over their hardware.

It just means that the owner of the machine is able to limit what memory the devices in their system are able to access, in the same way that MMUs limited what memory every process on your system could access.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-06-27 02:52:47+00:00
It seems to me you don't quite understand how much needless complexity and functionality is in AAA games these days. Watch how I remove the complexity:

1) We only support Linux. 2) We only support Vulkan (or OpenGL, but I prefer Vulkan) 3) Singleplayer only. 4) Engine features: RGBA Diffuse, specular, shadow, normal/bump, emission maps for materials only. A simple triangle rasterizer with forward rendering. Support for audio, dae animations/rigs/geometry. Physics collisions through an octree and capsule and basic linear algebra. Basic first person/third person cameras. 4) As much content as possible from copyleft/free sources. Mixamo, Cgtrader, poliigon, textures.com etc. A programmer's job is to use whats out there. But, given an extra 6 months, I could also model and texture everything myself as well. I'll do all level design. 5) Dialogue written by me, voice acting through AI or vocaloid. 6) I would estimate the final code to be around 50,000 lines for everything. I can give you a breakdown if you want. All code is in C99, minspec is a ryzen 5600g, which is like $150 max these days.

Something I've missed? I've described a classic first person adventure shooter like Halo for you there. Simply let me know if I should do something else.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-27 02:53:37+00:00
I don't recommend using this article as a serious source of knowledge about Aquinas. Some of the wording is a little iffy as well. For beginners, I would recommend "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide" [0]. After that, if you want to dig deeper into Scholastic metaphysics in general, consider [1]. There are also books devoted to Aquinas's metaphysics exclusively, such as [2] and [3].

> The claim about the validity of Aquinas' ideas seem to only make sense if we accept his initial assumption which is the existence of God.

Not at all. Aquinas does not begin with the existence of God. Rather, he shows how the existence of God can be inferred from basic metaphysical principles. So you have things exactly backwards.

It is a common misconception that the existence of God must be assumed or that it is a matter of faith.

> The confusion here is that there is no such thing as "universal good". It is always "good for something" and "good for somebody". Bad for something else, and bad for somebody else. So the claim seems to be that because something is good for somebody and bad for somebody else, there is perfection?

No. What determines the good is the nature of a thing and its telos. To be a good human being is to more fully actualize human nature and its end. What it means to be a good turkey is to more fully actualize turkey nature and its end. Perfection is the case when a thing fully actualizes all its potential as the kind of thing it is; there is nothing left to actualize. (Accidentally, turkeys can exist for the sake of the good of others animals, but this is secondary to what is intrinsically good w.r.t. a kind of thing.)

In the case of God, the nature of God is to exist, and God is goodness itself (a transcendental).

--

I encourage you not to be flippant about metaphysics. It deserves and requires no less attention and seriousness than any other science, and indeed more, as metaphysical principles by definition underpin all of reality. Get them wrong, and things go wrong.

[0] https://a.co/d/cTumDmM

[1] https://a.co/d/24ssFeX

[2] https://a.co/d/8F93mme

[3] https://a.co/d/25v7XMf
by godelski | 2025-06-27 02:59:00+00:00
I think this happens a lot. At least a lot more than people think. Take Firefox vs Chrom{e,ium} (yes, that includes Brave). The differences are really minor and 99% of people wouldn't notice the difference. But boy do people have strong opinions. I'll make one argument for Firefox and I'm not sure other ones matter nearly as much: there needs to be competition in the browser space, and different colors of Chrome don't count. Having one backbone is good for no one. Yes, even Brave gives Google too much power over the entire internet. Hopefully Ladybird will become competitive, but in the mean time some of you should stop being dumb and use Firefox. Because frankly, it doesn't affect your browsing experience. You're just biased in your evaluation because things are "different".

The reason I brought that up is because there are so many parallels with what you're talking about with Matrix. Even down to the rewrite in rust and people acting like software hasn't improved in a decade. But the competition space is very important in chat platforms, just like browsers. You can support Signal and Matrix at the same time. They solve different problems. You can also use WhatsApp, Telegram, and/or iMessage or whatever. Competition is necessary in this space. We don't want monopolies. Especially if you're a firm believer in distributed systems! Distributed systems can become highly centralized. Just check your email account. I'll bet you have a Gmail account... I'll bet you also have an Outlook account. Or look at your phone!

Totally unrelated fun fact: people consider Coke and Pepsi an oligopoly, yet *combined* they only have a 70% market share. (This is definitely unrelated and definitely doesn't have any connection to our discussion...)
by steveklabnik | 2025-06-27 03:00:00+00:00
> debugger

I've only ever really used a debugger on embedded, we used gdb there. I know VS: Code has a debugger that works, I'm sure other IDEs do too.

> edit and continue

Hard to do in a pre-compiled language with no runtime, if you're asking about what I think you're asking about.

> Hot reload

Other folks gave you good links, but this stuff is pretty new, so I wouldn't claim that this is great and often good and such.

> Full IDE

I'm not aware of Rust-specific IDEs, but many IDEs have good support for Rust. VS: Code is the most popular amongst users according to the annual survey. The Rust Project distributes an official LSP server, so you can use that with any editor that supports it.
by my123 | 2025-06-27 03:02:11+00:00
Yes, you can use first-party models on the Pixel NPUs or you're stuck with NNAPI which is self-admittedly deprecated by Google and doesn't work all that well.

On third party model workloads, this is what you will get:

https://ai-benchmark.com/ranking.html

https://browser.geekbench.com/ai-benchmarks (NPU tab, sort w/ quantisation and/or half precision)

Google is clearly not serious on Pixels in practice, and the GPU performance is also behind by quite a lot compared to flagships, which really doesn't help. CPUs are also behind by quite a lot too...
by cmdli | 2025-06-27 03:02:49+00:00
A large part of the development of Europe, especially after the Renaissance, was resistance to the church and its historical teachings. The Reformation, Renaissance, rise of deism, scientific revolution, etc were all in response to and in many cases disagreeing with historical understanding. Saying "our current civilization is based on the teachings of the church" ignores the many aspects of our civilization that came about in spite of said church.
by spauldo | 2025-06-27 03:02:56+00:00
If you don't do much with images it's probably not anything you need to worry about. If you care about things like HDR, it means you can now use PNGs for that. If you work with graphics for a living, it's probably a good idea to learn what's changed in the standard.

PNG was a huge deal when it was new, mostly because of all the headaches Unisys was giving everyone over GIF compression patents. This new standard is mostly of interest to people that have reason to care about what format their image data is in.
by wrsh07 | 2025-06-27 03:05:23+00:00
This is a strange take because this is consistent with what Google has been doing for a decade with AI. AlphaGo never had the weights released. Nor has any successor (not muzero, the StarCraft one, the protein folding alphafold, nor any other that could reasonably be claimed to be in the series afaik)

You can state as a philosophical ideal that you prefer open source or open weights, but that's not something deepmind has prioritized ever.

I think it's worth discussing:

* What are the advantages or disadvantages of bestowing a select few with access?

* What about having an API that can be called by anyone (although they may ban you)?

* Vs finally releasing the weights

But I think "behind locked down API where they can monitor usage" makes sense from many perspectives. It gives them more insight into how people use it (are there things people want to do that it fails at?), and it potentially gives them additional training data
by _wire_ | 2025-06-27 03:06:03+00:00
Oh yes. It's dog eat dog but among very lazy privileged dogs.

Don't confuse business with a humane enterprise. It operates according to a vague informal internal calculus, has little loyalty to staff or communities and will happily eat skilled, conscientious contributors. The utopian stuff about being intelligent and progressive is hyperbole; a side effect of a privileged class of the labor sector for 50 years for the simple reason of growth. Morals and ethics are after-thoughts. Communitas is to the FAANG nothing more than growth. As smart as this class thinks it is, it will wither and die when the corp welfare dries up.
by firesteelrain | 2025-06-27 03:07:53+00:00
It feels like both things can be true at once: the raw data is often accessible and methodologically sound (shoutout to FRED, BEA, BLS, etc), and the interpretation or prioritization of metrics by politicians and media can completely skew public understanding.

The frustration isn’t about access it is about trust.

People want metrics that reflect lived reality and can’t be spun or redefined every election cycle.
by volted | 2025-06-27 03:07:56+00:00
Thanks for the bug report yuppiepuppie! Will roll out a fix for that one asap. By the way the app is available on Windows, MacOS and Linux, so all feedback across platforms is very welcome!

About the developer name, we tried to get Apple to use our "doing business as" name, but no dice. But thanks, it's very important to know what the first impressions are, to remove friction as much possible.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-27 03:09:19+00:00
> the messy part of human interaction is necessary for social cohesion

Also, efficiency.

I think everyone in tech consulting can tell you that inserting another party (outsourcing) in a previously two-party transaction rarely produces better outcomes.

Human-agent-agent-human communication doesn't fill me with hope, beyond basic well-defined use cases.
by cmdli | 2025-06-27 03:11:08+00:00
"Objective good" can only be determined through subjective opinion and belief. What is "good" is judged by us based on our own values, which can differ amongst people. While we may all trend towards similar values, there still can be significant differences amongst people. For example, some may value to live in a freer society while others may value a more restrictive yet more secure society.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-06-27 03:12:23+00:00
How is what I said different than "good for somebody". A Russian bridge gets blown up. It is good for Ukrainians; it is bad for Russians. There is no intrinsic goodness to the event in this case.

Let's take another case that has people arguing on both sides in the US: universal health care. Some think not having it is an atrocity, and others see it is a threat to civilization. Who is to judge its objective goodness?

You make the call, and then will you just say the people who disagree with you have bad and harmful desires and that is why they don't see the truth as you can?
by briHass | 2025-06-27 03:12:26+00:00
The bang-on, bang-off compressors are a dying breed, however. The efficiency and output modulation of the inverter units means even the conventional split systems have been switching over. Likewise, the 'minisplit' (originator of these efficient compressors) definition has expanded to include ducted models, even ducted models with conventional high-cfm blower wheels.
by nandomrumber | 2025-06-27 03:12:36+00:00
You’d be surprised how few watts a fridge and a TV draw, 500 watts combined, and that’s only while the compressor in the fridge is running. Don’t open the fridge very often, or keep a lot of thermal mass in the form of filled water bottles in there, and the compressor in a fridge will spend most its time not running.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-27 03:12:47+00:00
It depends on what you are using it for, “fast” is relative. Java can be fast for applications where performance and scalability are not a primary features. If performance and scalability are core objectives, even performance-engineered Java isn’t really competitive with a systems language. You can bend Java to make it perform better than most people believe, especially today, but the gap is still pretty large in practice.

I wrote performance-engineered Java for years. Even getting it to within 2x worse than performance-engineered C++ took heroic efforts and ugly Java code.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-27 03:12:47+00:00
This is amazing, thank you for sharing!

> The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like, that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.

I spend a lot of time (too much, apparently) chatting with MAGA folks and this is a stunningly accurate description. It really is just pre-programmed slogans. You see it now even in Congressional hearings of cabinet members, which is fucking horrifying.
by quotemstr | 2025-06-27 03:13:27+00:00
> A basic lesson we've learned over and over is that API/ABIs aren't final

I dunno --- getElementById has been stable for, what, 25 years? "There's no such thing as a stable API" is something said by people unable or unwilling to create interfaces that last. It's a statement of personal resignation, not cosmic impossibility. There are tons of counterexamples.

Application needs, like other needs, are infinite. You satisfy these needs by adding new APIs, not breaking working ones.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-27 03:13:58+00:00
> We were fascinated with the Apple store in the mall because it was essentially an interactive luxury goods store where they'd let you actually grasp all the luxury goods with your teenager hands.

The secret being, of course, that they're not actually luxury goods. Like many things at the mall, it's a high-margin doodad sold to people in the proverbial impulse aisle of life. Dippin' Dots, knock-off watches, Build-A-Bear workshop - all in same vein of "looks expensive but is cheap to make" no different from the iPod.

I think the American shopping mall is one of the things that helped me contextualize Apple's brand identity. Apple does good marking in isolation or on a screen, SF Pro looks very stunning and the Apple logo is chic and simple. But so is the Cartier logo. And the Rolex storefront. Or any of the other genuinely valuable things sold at malls. It's the marketing that people respond to, not the value of a good.