MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ungreased0675 | 2025-07-05 00:55:06+00:00
I suspect most companies are cargo culting their hiring process. This guy is one more piece of evidence. He knew what hiring managers wanted to hear, and used that to get in the door.

My advice to companies is to stop chasing unicorns and 10x engineers. Intentionally try to hire ordinary average engineers. Your company making a SaaS app doesn’t need talented programmers, it just needs ordinary ones.

Ego leads founders to chase top 1% talent in some cases. In other cases the product is terrible but they think hiring an amazing programmer will pull them out of the dive. It won’t. Just hire normal people and build normally.
by ezschemi | 2025-07-05 00:55:11+00:00
I was about to order that GMKtek G9 and then saw Jeff's video about it on the same day. All those issues, even with the later fixes he showed, are a big no-no for me. Instead, I went with a Odroid H4-Ultra with an Intel N305, 48GB Crucial DDR5 and 4x4TB Samsung 990 Evo SSDs (low-power usage) + a 2TB SATA SSD to boot from. Yes, the SSDs are way overkill and pretty expensive at $239 per Samsung 990 Evo (got them with a deal at Amazon). It's running TrueNAS. I am somewhat space-limited with this system, didn't want spinning disks (as the whole house slightly shakes when pickup or trash trucks pass by), wanted a fun project and I also wanted to go as small as possible.

No issues so far. The system is completely stable. Though, I did add a separate fan at the bottom of the Odroid case to help cool the NVMe SSDs. Even with the single lane of PCIe, the 2.5gbit/s networking gets maxed out. Maybe I could try bonding the 2 networking ports but I don't have any client devices that could use it.

I had an eye on the Beelink ME Mini too, but I don't think the NVMe disks are sufficiently cooled under load, especially on the outer side of the disks.
by vidarh | 2025-07-05 00:57:05+00:00
I don't know where the person in question is, but those numbers seems low if you assume zero hours of maintenance for the cloud setup, sure.

The thing is, you're not likely to spend amortised more than minutes a year maintaining the on-prem hardware (or you could rent managed servers and spend nothing on it), and as they pointed out they already spend hours maintaing the EC2 instance.

I wouldn't typically recommend on prem hardware for just a single server - if you already have a rack and a proper setup, sure - otherwise just rent a cheap server somewhere, and ensure you have backups.
by n_u | 2025-07-05 00:57:54+00:00
It also classifies software development as R&D which together with immediate expensing for R&D undoes the Section 174 changes as far as I understand.

“For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure“

Page 303 of bill here https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr1/BILLS-119hr1eas.pdf

Original article about Section 174 tax code causing layoffs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533

Post from @dang with more info about Section 174

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145
by don_neufeld | 2025-07-05 00:58:03+00:00
Thanks, but trust me - they were no saints.

Kelly Flock threw the project I was leading under the bus with Sony Pictures on his way out the door when they fired him. I barely saved it.

Brad McQuaid, as CEO of Sigil famously didn’t even show up for the meeting where the whole Vanguard team was told the company had failed and they had no jobs, and no severance.

The games industry definitely has its heroes, but they ain’t it.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-05 00:58:16+00:00
Just going to focus on this one:

> DLSS vs FSR, or DLSS FG and Lossless Scaling.

I've used all of these (at 4K, 120hz, set to "balanced") since they came out, and I just don't understand how people say this.

FSR is a vaseline-like mess to me, it has its own distinct blurriness. Not as bad as naive upscaling, and I'll use it if no DLSS is available and the game doesn't run well, but it's distracting.

Lossless is borderline unusable. I don't remember the algorithm's name, but it has a blur similar to FSR. It cannot handle text or UI elements without artifacting (because it's not integrated in the engine, those don't get rendered at native resolution). The frame generation causes almost everything to have a ghost or afterimage - UI elements and the reticle included. It can also reduce your framerate because it's not as optimized. On top of that, the way the program works interferes with HDR pipelines. It is a last resort.

DLSS (3) is, by a large margin, the best offering. It just works and I can't notice any cons. Older versions did have ghosting, but it's been fixed. And I can retroactively fix older games by just swapping the DLL (there's a tool for this on GitHub, actually). I have not tried DLSS 4.
by sdfathi34234234 | 2025-07-05 00:58:56+00:00
I don't mean to be rude, but a "Marathon" ? What world are you living in ?

Most tech-jobs are boring-as-hell bullshit jobs that are required to deal with stupidly designed systems whose phil. is stuck in the dark-ages of PDP-10 (which is why a lot of it gets shipped off to India, or not to 'AI').
by whatwhaaaaat | 2025-07-05 00:58:57+00:00
Both of these games are still going. Atlantic has a huge player base. It’s not the cutthroat game it once was but it’s still very much exciting. You can still die and all your shit poof. Housing on Atlantic is still in demand and hard to get if that gives an idea how healthy it is.

Eq has of course had some major server merges but your old account will still be on both UO and EQ.

To me UO is a breath of fresh air after 20 years of trash games except for a stand out few. Seeing my old wood elf ranger with swift wind and lupine dagger still glowing was magical. Almost as magical as re-exploring kelethin.
by grg0 | 2025-07-05 00:59:17+00:00
If you've ever watched a GN or LTT video, they never claimed that DLSS is snakeoil. They specifically call out the pros of the technology, but also point out that Nvidia lies, very literally, about its performance claims in marketing material. Both statements are true and not mutually exclusive. I think people like in this post get worked up about the false marketing and develop (understandably) a negative view of the technology as a whole.

> Idiots doing hardware installation, with zero experience, using 3rd party cables incorrectly

This is not true. Even GN reproduced the melting of the first-party cable.

Also, why shouldn't you be able to use third-party cables? Fuck DRM too.
by kretaceous | 2025-07-05 01:00:12+00:00
The first two sections reminded me of an observation I've made about myself: the more I delay "doing the thing" and spend time "researching" or "developing taste", the more I turn into a critic instead of a creator.

> Your taste develops faster than your skill

> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"

They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)

It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.

(See how I turned into a critic?)
by anonfordays | 2025-07-05 01:00:12+00:00
>even though the plain letter of the United States Constitution says these babies are citizens

Their argument is that the "plain letter of the United States Constitution" doesn't say that explicitly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_citizenship_in_th...

Plenty of examples where birthright citizenship didn't apply in the past (and currently don't apply, such as American Samoa
by Lockal | 2025-07-05 01:00:25+00:00
That's a good one: common API design is:

/resources - return all resources

/resources?type=a&type=b (or type=a,b) - return resources of given type.

Then suddenly UI team implements checkbox-based deletion (or bulk edit). User deselects all checkboxes, and UI sends DELETE `/resources` (or `?type=`), suddenly deletes all resources.
by TZubiri | 2025-07-05 01:00:32+00:00
I think you were not a very good software manager. Let me explain why.

You need to treat the performance of your programmers as opaque, you shouldn't trust your ability to gauge their performance.

Suppose you buy a novel, and you buy it thinking that it was written by an 80year old Author that traveled the world and learned a lot of experiences and was actually a genius and a seductor of women and was a philantropist that rubbed shoulders with politicians.

If you then learn that the novel was actually written by a ghostwriter in china, or by ChatGPT, then would the value of the Novel be the same? No, it would be almost worthless, the content of the novel is the same, if you inspect the product you would not be able to tell the difference. Sometimes the value, or indicators of the value, are in the process.

Stepping back out of the metaphor, the product will show its true value 2, 5 10 years down the line, will it crash when the marketing team figures it out, or you have a viral moment and 100K concurrent users?

You cannot rely solely on the inspection of the deliverables, you must assume that there are invisible or hard to inspect properties that are almost impossible to divine from inspecting the deliverable, but easier to understand by inspecting the talent and process that builds it.
by andrepd | 2025-07-05 01:00:50+00:00
Hit the nail on the head (note: you can even look at long-running MMOs like WoW or Runescape and compare how they were played in 2004 and how they are played now, to see this in action). The data-mining and hyperoptimisation and looking everything up on the wiki means the _exploration and wonder_ that did make the MMO experience so unique is gone. Even chatting is not done in-game, at the same location in the physical world, but just on a discord chat you alt-tab to...

At this point, even if a good MMO were to come out (incredibly, this has not happened for close on two decades), recreating that experience is entirely on the player. It's on the player to forgo looking things up, or to forgo using external tools to chat, find groups, trade items, calculate strategies, etc. But since players doing that will be at a disadvantage, that is unlikely to happen in an online game...
by _wire_ | 2025-07-05 01:02:10+00:00
I asked Gemini about the inherent hazard of an LLM architecture that permits mixing prompts with data and the response was in so many words, that hazard is the users problem, with references to "best practices" that's more hand-waving puffery about being careful than references to fundamental principles of the separation of code (prompts) from data.

The industry is cultivating LLMs as oracular (prophetic) tools to which users submit requests anticipating results to guide them in the absence of their own understanding. Yet the industry not only permits free mixing of code and data in every request, but believes that this is both necessary and appropriate for tailoring responses.

So there's a dichotomy hazard which is the user is expected to be the master and custodian of the interaction, but invited to let it guide the user from a position of ignorance.

Has there ever been any other programming environment that expects instructions to be written not only in ignorance of the architecture of the machine, but where the programmer expects the machine to guide him to make his instructions meaningful?

The term "prompt injection attack" as part of a vernacular for security seems a woeful under estimation of the hazards we face with this technology.

The allegory of "Little Bobby Tables" can not begin to capture the risk domain.
by n_u | 2025-07-05 01:05:05+00:00
It’s more about whether or not the company has taxable profits for that year (importantly these are not the same as real profits). I would read this article to understand more about how being forced to amortize tax deductions for expenses affects a business’s taxes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533

more info here too

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-05 01:05:33+00:00
While I am over the 90th percentile for individual income or 85% for household income since my wife has had to work since 2020 at 44 years and my income is our household income, it’s actually lower than someone three years out of school working at BigTech in the US (been there done that).

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

And why wouldn’t someone who is a software developer in the US not have a high quality of life? I know my quality of life is pretty good. Working remotely is what let me move to Florida and when it gets to crowded with tourists here or gets “cold”, I can just fly down to Costa Rica/Panama City and keep working?

And I bet you a paycheck that the government is going to do something to fix Medicare before it affects old people.
by beebmam | 2025-07-05 01:06:38+00:00
Extra $250 fee for visa applications: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/big-beautif...

3.5% remittance fees on sending money out of the US: https://www.globalimmigrationblog.com/2025/06/what-are-the-i...

Also (in above source), no ACA subsidies for H-1B visa holders (and others), which likely means employers they will have to pay more for health care if they want to cover their immigrant workers
by alphazard | 2025-07-05 01:07:00+00:00
Tax deductible is a weird way of phrasing it. It's not like these software companies were counting their money at the end of the quarter, and then deciding to do R&D instead of paying taxes. They had already paid R&D expenses to build the product, which gained them revenue. Previously they weren't allowed to actualize the cost of R&D all at once, so the business could be losing money, and still have to pay taxes on top of the loss (which is nuts).

This fixes the problem, so now if you spend $100 on software developers, and you make $100 from the software, then you have $0 income, instead of $80 income.
by qualeed | 2025-07-05 01:07:06+00:00
That's certainly interesting!

But I doubt those people put "never used Flash" on their general resume (or literally any other resume except the one tailored to that position, if they even put it on the resume instead of their cover letter). I also doubt they thought of it as a "marketable skill" considering it was applicable to ~1 job.

In any case, this seems like an incredibly niche situation that probably has no business being extrapolated to all AI tools.
by voxleone | 2025-07-05 01:07:50+00:00
It’s reasonable to argue that NVIDIA has a de facto monopoly in the field of GPU-accelerated compute, especially due to CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). While not a legal monopoly in the strict antitrust sense (yet), in practice, NVIDIA's control over the GPU compute ecosystem — particularly in AI, HPC, and increasingly in professional content creation — is extraordinarily dominant.
by al_borland | 2025-07-05 01:08:16+00:00
For those who haven’t run across it, I like the man in the arena speech from Theodore Roosevelt to put things in perspective when I turn into a critic, or get harsh feedback from a critic.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-05 01:08:23+00:00
Fair, newest ones are, but two of my older current drives are IronWolfs 16TB which are 10^15 in the specs[1], and they've been running for 5.4 years. Again without any read errors, monthly scrubs, and of course daily use.

And before that I have been using 8x WD Reds 3TB for 6-7 years, which have 10^14 in the specs[2], and had the same experience with those.

Yes smaller size, but I ran scrubbing on those biweekly, and over so many years?

[1]: https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ir...

[2]: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
by bmitc | 2025-07-05 01:11:04+00:00
Humans certainly do kill cats both for food and "fun". And orcas will, from time to time, kill things that they don't eat. Even the exclusively fish eating orcas in the Pacific Northwest have been witnessed killing seals, even though they never eat seals.

Not being afraid of orcas is a show of lack of respect for them. They can weight up to 10,000 pounds, swim at bursts of 35 mph, swim at slower speeds for huge stretches, launch their bodies tens of feet out of the water, and kill anything from salmon and rays to great white sharks, humpback whales, and even blue whales. There is a lot of argument that they may be the greatest predator ever, on land or sea.

A domestic cat can easily wound a human and can usually get away. That is not true of a human in the water and an orca.

Yes, orcas are extremely, extremely intelligent, and there's zero reason for them to eat us for nutrition, as they are highly tuned eaters that maximize their calorie intake per effort. However, a human is completely within an orca's decision process as to whether the human lives or not.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-05 01:12:39+00:00
Nvidia's been doing this for a while now, since at least the Titan cards and technically the SLI/Crossfire craze too. If you sell it, egregiously-compensated tech nerds will show up with a smile and a wallet large enough to put a down-payment on two of them.

I suppose you could also blame the software side, for adopting compute-intensive ray tracing features or getting lazy with upscaling. But PC gaming has always been a luxury market, at least since "can it run Crysis/DOOM" was a refrain. The homogeneity of a console lineup hasn't ever really existed on PC.
by vidarh | 2025-07-05 01:12:43+00:00
This article is all over the place.

I get it's easy to confuse, but this post is about the "then" method in the Kernel module, not the keyword "then", which is entirely different.

An article about it really ought to get this right but it manages to call it a keyword in the headline, but then method in the very next line.

That it then calls it currying makes things worse. If you want to curry something in Ruby, you'd use Proc#curry.

At the end the article says "then" (the method) "seems identical" to the "yield_self" method. This is because it is - it's an alias. "yield_self" was introduced in 2.5, "then" was introduced as an alias in 2.6.
by kbolino | 2025-07-05 01:12:58+00:00
But the thing is that Steam didn't cause the death of physical media. I absolutely do remember PC gaming before Steam, and between the era when it was awesome (StarCraft, Age of Empires, Unreal Tournament, Tribes, etc.) and the modern Steam-powered renaissance, there was an absolutely dismal era of disappointment and decline. Store shelves were getting filled with trash like "40 games on one CD!" and each new console generation gave retailers an excuse to shrink shelf space for PC games. Yet during this time, all of Valve's games were still available on discs!

I think Microsoft's strategy is going to come to the same result as Embracer Group. They've bought up lots of studios and they control a whole platform (by which I mean Xbox, not PC) but this doesn't give them that much power. Gaming does evolve and it often evolves to work around attempts like this, rather than in favor of them.
by spoaceman7777 | 2025-07-05 01:13:36+00:00
As far as I know, neither of them have had a card unintentionally light on fire.

The whole thing started with Derbauer going to bat for a cable from some 3rd party vendor that he'd admitted he'd already plugged in and out of various cards something like 50 times.

The actual instances that youtubers report on are all reddit posters and other random social media users who would clearly be better off getting a professional installation. The huge popularity for enthusiast consumer hardware, due to the social media hype cycle, has brought a huge number of naive enthusiasts into the arena. And they're getting burned by doing hardware projects on their own. It's entirely unsurprising, given what happens in all other realms of amateur hardware projects.

Most of those who are whinging about their issues are false positive user errors. The actual failure rates (and there are device failures) are far lower, and that's what warrantys are for.
by IgorPartola | 2025-07-05 01:16:17+00:00
Not in the game industry but as a consumer this is very true. One example: ubiquitous access to transactions and payment systems gave a huge rise to loot boxes.

Also mobile games that got priced at $0.99 meant that only the unicorn level games could actually make decent money so In-App Purchases were born.

But also I suspect it is just a problem where as consumers we spend a certain amount of money on certain kinds of entertainment and if as a content producer you can catch enough people’s attention you can get a slice of that pie. We saw this with streaming services where an average household spent about $100/month on cable so Netflix, Hulu, et al all decided to price themselves such that they could be a portion of that pie (and would have loved to be the whole pie but ironically studios not willing to license everything to everyone is what prevented that).
by bGl2YW5j | 2025-07-05 01:16:49+00:00
What a coincidence! I’m also in Australia and have just finished a self-imposed 8 month holiday from the tech world BS you describe.

I started the holiday super jaded with the idea of working in tech forever. I spent my time on everything but tech. Recently my passion has been reignited and I’ve got more clarity around what it is about tech and my career I enjoy, and what I want from my future.

Now, I’m working on a healthcare service for chronic disease.
by waterhouse | 2025-07-05 01:17:21+00:00
> Testing it out with my disk benchmarking script, I got up to 3 GB/sec in sequential reads.

To be sure... is the data compressible, or repeated? I have encountered an SSD that silently performed compression on the data I wrote to it (verified by counting its stats on blocks written). I don't know if there are SSDs that silently deduplicate the data.

(An obvious solution is to copy data from /dev/urandom. But beware of the CPU cost of /dev/urandom; on a recent machine, it takes 3 seconds to read 1GB from /dev/urandom, so that would be the bottleneck in a write test. But at least for a read test, it doesn't matter how long the data took to write.)
by jrflowers | 2025-07-05 01:17:41+00:00
> I suspect most companies are cargo culting their hiring process.

This is what makes this story so funny. A lot of people are mad at the guy that found an exploit in the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system without a lick of ire directed at the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system.

Like if everybody’s profile on a dating app said “only interested in talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger”, then somebody’s eventually going to get catfished by a fake Kindergarten Cop. It’s kind of a “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” situation