MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by majormajor | 2025-07-05 00:31:02+00:00
> e.g. By definition the 99.9th percentile person cannot live a 99.999th percentile life, if they did they would in fact be that amazing.

This seems far too deterministic and I think is contrary to what you're replying to.

It sounds more like a 99.999th percentile person[0] that constantly reaches too far too early, before being prepared, will not have a 99.999th percentile life. A 99th percentile person who, on the other hand, does not constantly fail due to over-reach, can easily end up accomplishing more. (And there are many other things that might hold them back too - they might get hit by a car while crossing the street.)

[0] in whatever measurement of "capability" you have in mind
by monkeyelite | 2025-07-05 00:31:16+00:00
What you’re saying make sense but do we know the social convention about bugfix classification in Linux?

My job matches what you’re describing, but bug fix is widely interpreted. It basically means “managers don’t do anything stupid”.

If someone got in trouble using language you are desiring “the rules are clear and were broken”, i would feel they were singling someone out.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-05 00:31:46+00:00
> The artwork was already there, so not sure 'discovered' is the right word.

"Discovered" is used exactly once in the article, in the sentence, "urther, the conservators discovered metal nails under some of these plaster frescoes, which they believe were likely inserted to hold in place more of the resin surface for oil painting." Seems to be exactly the right word where it is used.

It isn't used referring to the work itself, which obviously was not discovered and which the article doesn't suggest was.

> Does it make a difference now we know it was painted by Raphael himself?

It clearly makes a difference to understanding of the provenance of the piece and, from the other side, knowledge of the body of Raphael's work. Whether that's important to you will, of course, vary based on how important those issues are to you.
by meander_water | 2025-07-05 00:31:59+00:00
> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers.

This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI for it, it automatically boosts the floor of your taste, but not your skill. And you end up never slowing down to make mistakes and learn, because you can just do it without friction.
by surgical_fire | 2025-07-05 00:32:12+00:00
> Yeah, but it's not worth. Apparently the "gold" list on ProtonDB is games that allegedly work with tweaks. So like, drop in this random DLL and it might fix the game. I'm not gonna spend time on that.

I literally never had to do that. Most tweaking I needed to do was switching proton versions here and there (which is trivial to do).
by kbolino | 2025-07-05 00:32:31+00:00
The video game industry has been through cycles like this before. One of them (the 1983 crash) was so bad it killed most American companies and caused the momentum to shift to Japan for a generation. Another one I can recall is the "death" of the RTS (real-time strategy) genre around 2010. They have all followed a fairly similar pattern and in none of them that I know of have things played out as the companies involved thought or hoped they would.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-05 00:34:05+00:00
> And as I've never heard of a single small business that can afford to give work phones to their employees

The other reply had the productive answer with Yubikey.

Past that, I offer that it's the business's problem to solve.

As a career IT professional, I find it unprofessional to expect employees to cough up their personal devices because their employer is buying services from a trillion dollar mega corp who can't figure this out.

> I've never heard of a single small business that can afford to give work phones to their employees

Sure they can. Used cell ebay $30. They can keep it wherever they log in.

But correct poster is correct about Yubikey. For my part, I do Winauth most of the time and junk-drawer cell phones otherwise.
by webstrand | 2025-07-05 00:34:32+00:00
I've been running opensuse+steam and I never had to tweak a dll to get a game running. Albeit that I don't exactly chase the latest AAA, the new releases that I have tried have worked well.

Age of empires 2 used to work well, without needing any babying, so I'm not sure why it didn't for you. I will see about spinning it up.
by nerdsniper | 2025-07-05 00:34:43+00:00
Words have meaning, but we can still argue over the meaning of words. For example, I believe that engineering necessarily involves calculus, and if you’re not doing calculus ever in your job, you’re more of a “technician” or “specialist” than an engineer. I have a degree in chemical engineering, and have been titled “chemical engineer”, “controls engineer”, “electrical engineer”, and “field engineer”. Currently my title is “software engineer”.

But I believe the last time I did any engineering was when my title was “Intern” - none of my jobs since then have required actual rigorous engineering and could have been done equally well or better by someone without an engineering degree.

I currently believe “software developer” would be a more appropriate title for me.
by lizard2025 | 2025-07-05 00:35:26+00:00
Ive been feeling slightly stupid at work because of how slow I type compared to my coworkers. I’m a PM/SE so when I’m in client calls sometimes I have to share my screen and type things out and honestly I type so slow, I’m sure it’s in my head but I found this web app from here and just wanted to say that it’s changed the game for me. The ai portion where I’m able to get custom training plans on where to put my hands on the keyboard has been SO amazing.

Anyways thanks to whoever recommended it, it works and it rocks
by scrubs | 2025-07-05 00:36:58+00:00
Another perspective: Nvidia customer support on their mellanox purchase ...is total crap. It's the worst of corporate America ... paper pushing beurceatric guys who slow roll stuff ... getting to a smart person behind the customer reps requires one to be an ape in a bad mood 5x ... I think they're so used to that now that unless you go crazy mode their take is ... well I guess he wasn't serious about his ask and he dropped it.

Here's another nvdia/mellanox bs problem: many mlx nic cards are finalized or post assembled say by hp. So if you have a hp "mellanox" nic nvidia washes their hands of anything detailed. It's not ours; hp could have done anything to it what do we know? So one phones hp ... and they have no clue either because it's really not their IP or their drivers.

It's a total cluster bleep and more and more why corporate america sucks
by Loughla | 2025-07-05 00:37:29+00:00
The item lost is pipeline of talent in all of this though.

Precision machining is going through an absolute nightmare where the journeymen or master machinists are aging out of the work force. These were people who originally learned on manual machines, and upgraded to CNC over the years. The pipeline collapsed about 1997.

Now there are no apprentice machinists to replace the skills of the retiring workforce.

This will happen to software developers. Probably faster because they tend to be financially independent WAY sooner than machinists.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-05 00:37:47+00:00
> Aren't Lenovo M70q just small PCs?

Guilty as charged. They're deployed as thin clients all over but I don't know why. My son's employer runs M70q as TC's and cycles them out every 3 years.

No complaint here. I'm happy to pick them up for 25¢ on the dollar (45¢ now, thanks tariffs).
by georgeecollins | 2025-07-05 00:38:15+00:00
I worked in the video game industry from the 90s through to today. I think you are over generalizing or missing the original point. It's true that there have been boom and busts. But there are also structural changes. Do you remember CD-ROMs? Steam and the iPhone were structural changes.

What Microsoft is trying to do with Gamepass is a structural change. It may not work out the way that they plan but the truth is that sometimes these things do change the nature of the games you play.
by proc0 | 2025-07-05 00:39:06+00:00
"good at the job" is elusive and vaguely defined in most companies. They want you be a part of the company and get excited for the product and invest all of your focus in it. It's an unwritten rule but it's there. People who just do the job are not promoted and are looked down upon, in my experience.

I wish it was just doing the job, it should be that way unless you are on commission or one of the owners

*edit: assuming he did the job that is..
by toofy | 2025-07-05 00:40:12+00:00
If you hired people to build that product, you never wrote a line of code. No, you didn’t build it. Your team did. You’re not magically a software engineer, you hired someone else to do it.

Is there a product? Yep. Do you own it? Maybe. But again, you’re not suddenly the engineer. A project manager? Maybe.
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by kbolino | 2025-07-05 00:41:29+00:00
Scalping and MSRP-baiting have been around for far too many years for nVidia to claim innocence. The death of EVGA's GPU line also revealed that nVidia holds most of the cards in the relationship with its "partners". Sure, Micro Center and Amazon can only do so much, and nVidia isn't a retailer, but they know what's going on and their behavior shows that they actually like this situation.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-07-05 00:42:08+00:00
I'm basically retired now and I'm really glad about the timing - I would not want to be in this field if I were in my 30s, 40s or 50s the way things are going. I think what's happening at your company is happening in lots of companies right now so I don't think you'll be able to jump ship and end up somewhere else where it's not happening. You can hope for a backlash - and it might come. In the meantime, go ahead and vibecode being careful about the areas you do it in - they seem pretty good at coming up with testcases, for example. Maybe don't let your coding agent have full editing permissions. Have it give you suggestions for what it would do in the code and evaluate them closely before letting the edits happen (pushing back when needed).
by noduerme | 2025-07-05 00:42:42+00:00
I feel I'm sort of stuck in the opposite situation of OP. I manage a few massive codebases that I simply cannot trust an AI to go mucking around with. The only type of serious AI coding experience I could get at this point would be to branch one of these and start experimenting on my own dime to see how good or bad the actual experience is. And that doesn't really seem worth it, because I know what I want to do with them (what's on the feature list that I'm being paid to develop)... and it feels like it would take more time to talk to an LLM and get it perfectly dialed in on any given feature, and ensure it was correct, than it would take to write it myself. And I'm not getting paid for it.

I feel like I'd never use Claude seriously unless someone demanded I used it from day one on a greenfield project. And so while I get to keep evolving my coding skills, I'm a little worried that my "AI skills" will lag behind.
by feelamee | 2025-07-05 00:42:46+00:00
> But as soon as you start interacting with other programmers, it's inevitable that some will use some other subset of language features.

I disagree. Such a problem will be in any language. So, any project should have a code style which will describe how you can do things and how you should not do them.

> I feel like you don't really stand a chance unless you've also been closely following it for decades.

From my experience, 2 years is enough. I started from zero and now I'm pretty good in C++. Although this can look like a really long time, but you should consider that to understand a lot of parts of C++ you need knowledge in computer science and programs design, which you should learn with any other language too.
by bluesnowmonkey | 2025-07-05 00:43:06+00:00
25 years of experience here. AI is the real deal, and it should be the primary way you’re coding now. Everyone who doesn’t embrace it is about to become a dinosaur overnight.

They’re going to pay you to learn to work with the thing you need to learn to work with anyway? Be smart. Take the deal.

That said, it’s a free country, you can quit any time for any reason.
by koverstreet | 2025-07-05 00:43:16+00:00
Well, my hope when bcachefs was merged was for it to be a real kernel community project.

At the time it looked like that could happen - there was real interest from Redhat prior to merging. Sadly Redhat's involvement never translated into much code, and while upstreaming did get me a large influx of users - many of which have helped enormously with the QA and stabilization effort - the drama and controversies have kept developers away, so on the whole it's meant more work, pressure and stress for me.

So DKMS wouldn't be the worst route, at this point. It would be a real shame though, this close to taking the experimental label off, and an enormous hassle for users and distributions.

But it's not my call to make, of course. I just write code...
by entropie | 2025-07-05 00:44:10+00:00
A few years ago they moved a (historic) train station where I lived. It needed to be moved for some underground tube construction, but also a few meters to make the new buildings fit. I witnessed, it was awesome.

https://www.e-architect.com/images/jpgs/leipzig/bayerischer_... / https://www.e-architect.com/leipzig/bayerischer-bahnhof-buil...
by selfhoster11 | 2025-07-05 00:45:13+00:00
This is very model-dependent. If you use something heavy on sycophancy and low on brain cells (like GPT-4o, the default paid ChatGPT model), you'll get lots and lots of cracks because these models are optimised for engagement.

That said, don't use model output directly. Use it to extract "shibboleth" keywords and acronyms in that domain, then search those up yourself with a classical search engine (or in a follow-up LLM query). You'll access a lot of new information that way, simply because you know how to surface it now.
by dahart | 2025-07-05 00:45:31+00:00
In the US, many companies have exclusivity clauses in the employment contract, meaning it’s breach of contract to do paid work for another company at the same time. The typical agreement being made by an employer is salary in return for the employee’s full time attention, where full time means ~40 hours of work per week, or sometimes more. As a manager I do care if my employees work significantly less than full time and devote that time to other paying jobs, especially if they do good work. That’s opportunity cost; if they could be producing more in the ~40 hrs/week agreement we have, they’re cheating the company and violating the agreement they made. I don’t care if they do hobby work or open source projects in their spare time, if they’re fulfilling their agreed upon obligations.
by throw0101c | 2025-07-05 00:45:56+00:00
> Like what? As far as I can tell, it will solidify its store of value.

Which is the bug:

> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.

* https://twitter.com/dollarsanddata/status/159265180975079833...
by jchw | 2025-07-05 00:48:25+00:00
> It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.

It's important to realize this is actually a general truth of humans arguing. Sometimes people do disagree about the facts on the ground and what is actually true versus what is bullshit, but a lot of the time what really happens is people completely agree on the facts and even most of the implications of the facts but completely disagree on how to frame them. Doesn't even have to be Internet arguments. A lot of hot-button political topics have always been like this, too.

It's easy to dismiss people's arguments as being irrelevant, but I think there's room to say that if you were to interrogate their worldview in detail you might find that they have coherent reasoning behind why it is relevant from their perspective, even if you disagree.

Though it hasn't really improved my ability to argue or even not argue (perhaps more important), I've definitely noticed this in myself when introspecting, and it definitely makes me think more about why I feel driven to argue, what good it is, and how to do it better.
by dismalaf | 2025-07-05 00:51:11+00:00
I hate the title but actually a pretty decent article.

> We are still the only species cursed with visions of what could be. But perhaps that's humanity's most beautiful accident. To be haunted by possibilities we cannot yet reach, to be driven by dreams that exceed our current grasp. The curse and the gift are the same thing: we see further than we can walk, dream bigger than we can build, imagine more than we can create.

> And so we make imperfect things in service of perfect visions. We write rough drafts toward masterpieces we may never achieve. We build prototypes of futures we can barely envision. We close the gap between imagination and reality one flawed attempt at a time.
by TZubiri | 2025-07-05 00:51:12+00:00
Joel Spolsky explained this to me in

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...

>>Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when she wasn’t on duty. >>Ooops. That’s not what you meant. You wanted to pay her for all the games that she invents, and you recognize that the actual process of invention for which you are paying her may happen at any time… on weekdays, weekends, in the office, in the cubicle, at home, in the shower, climbing a mountain on vacation.

Also

>>Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output.

So the case of an Overemployed engineer who signs an exclusivity deal and works 8 hours at one job and then 8 hours at another job, is still breach of contract, the employee is not well rested, the focus is literally split in half, and there's also concerns of mixing and polluting IP claims.

What's more, the Soham Parekh case is an even clearer case of breach and even fraud, it's not like the dude was fulfilling or apparently fulfilling his obligations, he never worked, first week he took the week off and lied about why, just 0 output but still trying to get that first paycheck.

There is a subtler discussion on OverEmployment, but this is not it, we should all agree that this is fraud.
by vidarh | 2025-07-05 00:51:45+00:00
"Negligible" varies greatly from organisation to organisation. People tend to come to my consultancy with needs that'll cost them anything from a few hours a month and up of access to a devops resource. That tends to involve far smaller setups for cloud users than for managed hosting.

How large the setup is before that point varies a lot by organisational maturity and what exactly they do, but that can typically reflect hosting costs ranging from a couple of thousand a month and up.

But the biggest cost differential is the hosting itself. It's not unusual for a managed setup to cost half or less what the equivalent cloud environment does, for similar levels of resiliency, including the fully loaded cost of devops resources.
by scrubs | 2025-07-05 00:52:07+00:00
"It's hard to get too offended by them shirking the consumer"

BS! Nvidia isn't entitled. I'm not obligated. Customer always has final say.

The problem is a lot of customers can't or don't stand their ground. And the other side knows that.

Maybe you're a well trained "customer" by Nvidia just like Basil Fawlty was well trained by his wife ...

Stop excusing bs.
by alphazard | 2025-07-05 00:52:50+00:00
It would be worse for bcachefs and the kernel if they parted ways. The Linux kernel does not have a feature complete alternative to APFS. Apple, of all companies, is beating the Linux kernel at filesystems. That hasn't happened before.

> When you're working with an ecosystem / teams, single person's performance really doesn't mean that much in the end.

This is demonstrably not true. Kent brought Bcachefs to fruition and got it upstreamed. Wireguard was also one guy. The cryptography used in both, also 1 guy. There's an argument to be made that given an elegant, well designed system, we should assume it came from a single or a few minds. But given a system that's been around for a while, you would be right to assume that a lot of people were/are involved in keeping it around.
by gxs | 2025-07-05 00:54:22+00:00
I think this is the even broader trend here

In their never ending quest to find ways to suck more money out of people, one natural extension is to just turn the thing into a luxury good and that alone seems to justify the markup

This is why new home construction is expensive - the layout of a home doesn’t change much but it’s trivial to throw on some fancy fixtures and slap the deluxe label on the listing.

Or take a Toyota, slap some leather seats on it, call it a Lexus and mark up the price 40% (I get that these days there are more meaningful differences but the point stands)

This and turning everything into subscriptions alone are responsible for 90% of the issues I have as a consumer

Graphics cards seem to be headed in this direction as well - breaking through that last ceiling for maximum fps is going to be like buying a bentley (if it isn’t already) where as before it was just opting for the v8
by spoaceman7777 | 2025-07-05 00:55:04+00:00
The real issue here is actually harebrained youtubers stirring up drama for views. That's 80% of the problem. And their viewers (and readers, for that which makes it into print) eat it up.

Idiots doing hardware installation, with zero experience, using 3rd party cables incorrectly, posting to social media, and youtubers jumping on the trend for likes.

These are 99% user error issues drummed up by non-professionals (and, in some cases, people paid by 3rd party vendors to protect those vendors' reputation).

And the complaints about transient performances issues with drivers, drummed up into apocalyptics scenarios, again, by youtubers, who are putting this stuff under a microscope for views, are universal across every single hardware and software product. Everything.

Claiming "DLSS is snakeoil", and similar things are just an expression of the complete lack of understanding of the people involved in these pot-stirring contests. Like... the technique obviously couldn't magically multiply the ability of hardware to generate frames using the primary method. It is exactly as advertised. It uses machine learning to approximate it. And it's some fantastic technology, that is now ubiquitous across the industry. Support and quality will increase over time, just like every _quality_ hardware product does during its early lifespan.

It's all so stupid and rooted in greed by those seeking ad-money, and those lacking in basic sense or experience in what they're talking about and doing. Embarrassing for the author to so publicly admit to eating up social media whinging.