MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
At what point should software engineers unionize?
by onlyhumans | 2025-07-05 05:02:39+00:00
With AI triggering layoffs, seems now is better than later. Curious what the downsides would be if we collectively rejected the use of AI or demanded a 3-4 day work week due to efficiency gains.

As an aside, I was surprised there isn’t a SaaS tool to organize and execute this using your corporate email
by troupo | 2025-07-05 05:04:36+00:00
> You have about 50% of HN thinking LLMs are useless and you’re commenting on an article about how it’s still magical and wishful thinking,

Perhaps you should try reading the article again (or maybe let some LLM summarize it for you)

> But sure, the problem is me, not the people with a poor model of reality

Is amazing how you almost literally use crypto-talk
by adastra22 | 2025-07-05 05:05:30+00:00
This isn’t like lottery odds. The space of keys here is vast. Like unimaginably so. 2^256 is a lot of keys.

If someone had a faster method for breaking elliptic curve keys, fast enough to have a realistic chance on GPUs, the repercussions for that would be waaaaaay larger than merely stealing some bitcoin. This is the same math upon which nearly all digital security in common use today is based. It’d be full-on cryptopocalypse.
by 827a | 2025-07-05 05:06:07+00:00
> Fuck the cloud and their ancient Xeon SKUs

Dude, no one talks about this and it drives me up the wall. The only way to guarantee modern CPUs from any cloud provider is to explicitly provision really new instance types. If you use any higher-level abstracted services (Fargate, Cloud Run, Lambda, whatever) you get salvation army second-hand CPUs from 15 years ago, you're billed by the second so the slower, older CPUs screw you over there, and you pay a 30%+ premium over the lower-level instances because its a "managed service". Its insane and extremely sad that so many customers put up with it.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-05 05:06:22+00:00
> But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.

I won't deny that there is some of this in my AI hesitancy

But honestly the bigger barrier for me is that I fear signing my name on subpar work that I would otherwise be embarrassed to claim as my own

If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
by adastra22 | 2025-07-05 05:09:39+00:00
The original paper proposing a YD impact was serious science put forward by serious academics, AFAIK: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1994902/

That it was later a cause taken up by creationists is annoying, but it has no bearing on the scientific question (which is as yet unsettled).
by dataflow | 2025-07-05 05:10:05+00:00
> evade the rules that, somehow, every other part of the kernel manages to do just fine with

I have no context on the situation or understanding of what the right set of rules here is, but the difference between filesystems and other code is that bugs in the filesystem can cause silent, persistent corruption for user data, on top of all the other failure modes. Most other parts of the kernel don't have such a large persistence capability in case of failure. So I can understand if filesystems feel the need to be special.
by ghghgfdfgh | 2025-07-05 05:11:29+00:00
If Congress had not demonetized silver in 1873, the metal’s decreasing value would have curbed the deflation of the time. I believe that this was one of the US Government’s greatest mistakes ever, because the reaction to the economic crisis in the 1870’s had a profound effect on the failure of Reconstruction. Friedman wrote a paper on this, called “The Crime of 1873.”
by tareqak | 2025-07-05 05:13:11+00:00
I had similar idea but applied to anything that uses some sort of “recommendation engine” internally.

The things I wanted use it for was for Netflix for TV shows and movies, and Yelp for restaurants.

With the restaurant example, the curation can become as strict as dietary requirements (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, kosher, halal, etc) that are in some cases regulated by NGOs or government bodies or as flexible as having the same spice tolerance as a friend.
by me551ah | 2025-07-05 05:13:35+00:00
Sure, foreign R&D still gets amortized over 15 years (NPV ≈59 % of a full write-off, so you “lose” ~8.6 % of your R&D spend in present-value terms, and only 6.7 % of the cost is deductible in year 1, creating a 19.6 % cash-tax gap).

But offshore wages are often 50–70 % below U.S. rates:

• Even after the slower amortization drag, hiring at half the cost nets you ~30 % total savings on R&D headcount.

• On a pure cash basis you only need ~20 % lower wages to break even; most offshore markets easily exceed that.

• So the labor-cost arbitrage far outweighs the tax timing penalty unless your foreign salaries are less than ~20 % below U.S. levels.

In short: the 15-year amort rule hurts your tax deduction, but 50 %+ lower offshore wages more than make up for it.
by duskwuff | 2025-07-05 05:13:44+00:00
Maybe I'm just jaded and demanding, but:

1) As others mentioned, two GbE interfaces seems really limited for a 2025 project. Modern FPGAs can support 100GbE and up - I don't necessarily expect that on a hobbyist-level project, of course, but 1GbE is well behind the curve.

2) There don't appear to be any hardware design files (e.g. schematics, PCB layouts) in the Git repository. In fact, the only mention of the current FPGA is a single text file stating that "Cyclone 10 GX port in progress"...

3) There's basically zero open source support for Intel/Altera FPGAs. Yes, you can open-source your HDL, but the vendor tools are all closed-source and there's no alternatives.
by m0wer | 2025-07-05 05:13:44+00:00
Not sure. IMO the best thing that could happen for the next generation is to be born in a Bitcoin standard were politicians don't control money, people are incentivized to save, and the world does not need to use housing and stocks as a way of saving and protecting against inflation.

Technological progress makes the world deflationary. Your money should be able to buy more every time as we improve the productive efficiency of everything. And for poor countries, the best thing they could get is a censor resistant and value preserving tool.

Even if there was a tail emission, newer generations wouldn't have the capital needed for mining rigs. That's not just something unique to this case, same happens with stocks, real state or any other investment asset.
by troupo | 2025-07-05 05:14:37+00:00
> The code is generally good if the prompt was reasonable at this point

Which, again, is 100% unverifiable and cannot be generalized. As described in the article.

How do I know this? Because, as I said in the article, I use these tools daily.

And "prompt was reasonable" is a yet another magical incantation that may or may not work. Here's my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44470144
by nandomrumber | 2025-07-05 05:18:45+00:00
What evidence is there of governments being more successful at picking winners than the market?

Governments should stay out of the winner-picking business, which they do with money from the public purse, and allow individuals and enterprise to use their own money to have a go at picking winners themselves.

If industry and banks find investment in any particular field unpalatable without Government incentive, then those investments were unpalatable to start with.

Industry and banks will find something better to do with their money.
by iamthemonster | 2025-07-05 05:18:49+00:00
Yes - I'm a senior member of my team too (to the extent that I've previously been the team lead of similar teams) and it's so freeing to be able to:

1. Give plenty of credit to the juniors when they do good work, even if they were reliant on support, with no need to take credit myself

2. Give up some time working on my own objectives to coach the juniors, even though there's no cost code to book the time to and nobody asks me to do it

3. Easily say, with zero guilt: "no sorry that can't be done in 2 weeks, that's a 6 week job" or "sure I can do my part of this job but I'm going to need you to commit XYZ other resources if you want it to be a success"

4. Interpret the rules in the way I think is best for the organisation, not trying to please the person with the most pedantic interpretation

5. I can produce convincing explanations of how my work performance is delivering value to the organisation (whereas juniors can sometimes work their arse off and get no recognition for it)

I'm also a middle aged white man which seems to confer a lot of unearned trust, but combined with my professional experience I seriously think I have it easier than the juniors in so many ways, and it's my responsibility to give back a bit.
by jimmydorry | 2025-07-05 05:20:19+00:00
The largest competitor to US renewables, would be China. They have been rolling back their subsidies for years. [1]

China, India, Russia, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia (off the top of my head, and a quick google to add a few I missed [2]) have all increased investments into coal since 2020.

The renewable industry in the US was wrought with companies seizing as many renewable credits and subsidies as they can, while providing as little as possible to show for them. If this moves the industry as a whole to focus on projects that are not just marginal at best, we should start to see better traction on projects that actually matter.

We have long been told that renewables are cheaper in every way that matters, so let's see the economics of that play out.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-roll-back-clea...

[2] https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-repla...
by troupo | 2025-07-05 05:20:26+00:00
> but to be quite frank more rampant amongst detractors than promoters, who often have to deal with the flaws and limitations on a day to day basis.

"detractors" usually point to actual flaws. "promoters" usually uncritically hail LLMs as miracles capable of solving any problem in one go, without giving any specific details.
by sandreas | 2025-07-05 05:21:21+00:00
I'd almost always use RAID-1 or if I had > 4 disks, maybe RAID-6. RAID-5 seems very cost effective at first, but if you loose a drive the probability of losing another one in the restoring process is pretty high (I don't have the numbers, but I researched that years ago). The disk-replacement process produces very high load on the non defective disks and the more you have the riskier the process. Another aspect is that 5 drives draw way more power than 2 and you cannot (easily) upgrade the capacity, although ZFS offers a feature for RAID5-expansion.

Since RAID is not meant for backup, but for reliability, losing a drive while restoring will kill your storage pool and having to restore the whole data from a backup (e.g. from a cloud drive)is probably not what you want, since it takes time where the device is offline. If you rely on RAID5 without having a backup you're done.

So I have a RAID1, which is simple, reliable and easy to maintain. Replacing 2 drives with higher capacity ones and increasing the storage is easy.
by saulpw | 2025-07-05 05:24:06+00:00
Each FTE doing that manual data pipelining work is also validating that work, and they have a quasi-legal responsibility to do their job correctly and on time. They may have substantial emotional investment in the company, whether survival instinct to not be fired, or ambition to overperform, or ethics and sense to report a rogue manager through alternate channels.

An LLM won't call other nodes in the organization to check when it sees that the value is unreasonable for some out-of-context reason, like yesterday was a one-time-only bank holiday and so the value should be 0. *It can be absolutely be worth an FTE salary to make sure these numbers are accurate.* And for there to be a person to blame/fire/imprison if they aren't accurate.
Show HN: Zap Tracker – All-in-One Bitcoin Lightning Dashboard
by pratik227 | 2025-07-05 05:25:24+00:00
I built Zap Tracker, a unified dashboard for managing everything related to Bitcoin Lightning Network Zaps — payments, analytics, wallets, and community engagement — all in one place.

In the current LN ecosystem, creators and users often juggle between tools to track zaps, chat with supporters, or post monetized content. Zap Tracker solves that by integrating:

Real-time Zap analytics (total sats, avg zap, supporters)

LN wallet management (view balances, send zaps)

Built-in supporter chat with zap integration

Content posting (updates, announcements, monetized content)

This started as a tool I wished existed for creators using Nostr and Lightning. Would love feedback from the HN community!

landing - https://zap-tracker.vercel.app/

GitHub/source/docs:https://github.com/pratik227/zap_dashboard
by keiferski | 2025-07-05 05:25:25+00:00
I think there is a very real possibility that widespread AI use increases the amount of “repair”-like tech jobs, even if it simultaneously eliminates some of the entry level “create” ones.

The analogous situation to me is the 80s and 90s, when computers really started to be used by businesses and regular people. There were so many issues with the process of digitization, moving from paper files to computer files (for businesses), etc. that entire industries grew up around it. This was relevant to me personally, as my parents made a living doing this for decades.

So if AI results in a ton of half-baked broken-but-profitable software, it might turn out the same way.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-07-05 05:25:50+00:00
Slightly related I've also been recently noticing some sites loading ads pseudo-dynamically from "content-loader" subdomains usually used to serve images. It's obnoxious because blocking that subdomain at the DNS level usually breaks the site.

My current strategy is to fully block the domain if that's the sort of tactic they're willing to use.
by KPGv2 | 2025-07-05 05:27:04+00:00
A monad is just a flatmappable. The end. That's the whole tutorial. If you're coming from JS/TS and know how to construct a singleton array and can use Array.prototype.flatMap, you already can do monads. Anything else "monadic" is not a monad. It's a property of something else that can be derived from what I wrote above, OR it's a property of one specific monad not monads in general.

A monad is a flatmappable.

A monad is a flatmappable.

A monad is a flatmappable.
by sandreas | 2025-07-05 05:27:05+00:00
My current config:

Fujitsu D3417-B12 Intel Xeon 1225 64GB ecc WD SN850x 2TB mATX case Pico PSU 150

For backup I use a 2TB enterprise HDD and ZFS send

For snapshotting i use zfs-auto-snapshot

So really nothing recommendable for buying today. You could go for this

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006369887180.html

Or an old Fujitsu Celsius W580 Workstation with a Bojiadafast ATX Power Supply Adapter, if you need harddisks.

Unfortunately there is no silver bullet these days. The old stuff is... well too old or no longer available and the new stuff is either to pricey, lacks features (ECC and 2.5G mainly) or to power hungry.

A year ago there were bargains for Gigabyte MC12-LE0 board available for < 50bucks, but nowadays these cost about 250 again. These boards also had the problem of drawing too much power for an ultra low power homelab.

If I HAD to buy one today, I'd probably go for a Ryzen Pro 5700 with a gaming board (like ASUS ROG Strix B550-F Gaming) with ECC RAM, which is supported on some boards.
by troupo | 2025-07-05 05:27:07+00:00
Are those LLMs in the room with us now? ;)

Actually, I did try asking ollama running locally. That should've reduced the amount of non-determinism and whatever layers providers add, and the uncertainty of computer availability.

I asked it for a list of Javascript keywords ordered alphabetically. Within 5 minutes it produced a slightly different list

Asking a model for 2x2 is moot because 2x2=5 is statically highly unlikely. Anything more complex though?
by k310 | 2025-07-05 05:27:21+00:00
No (anti)social for me.

I checked photo galleries a while back, with the idea of sharing in a limited way, so that my photos don't end up owned by stock agencies, and I have to hire a small army of lawyers to get them back, or fodder for AI. (see the recent "fair use" of books by buying them, tearing them apart and scanning them. )

The following reviews photo gallery sites, unfortunately, the reviewer owns a site, that ranks #1 on the list. That aside, the article gives an idea what is available, all the way to letting visitors buy prints. I remember an email exchange with Pixieset.

https://picflow.com/blog/best-online-galleries-for-photograp...

I like free tiers, but never let the photos out of home, except sharing via email or (shrunken) as messages. My mail client (Apple) offers to resize photos if the message gets large.

These may be overkill, so sites like smugmug may suffice. I have been taking photos for over 50 years, non-professionally (so it's fun) and always do a quick "best of batch" sort (I tag the photos) and a quick tune up. The jpegs I get (Nikon) are so good, that's all I need to get great results. But I have raw editing apps loaded up. HTH
by rtpg | 2025-07-05 05:30:25+00:00
> However, most levels can be expressed as a few intermediate goals

I think generally the whole thing with puzzle games is that you have to determine the “right” intermediate goals. In fact, the naive intermediate goals are often entirely wrong!

A canonical sokoban-like inversion might be where you have to push two blocks into goal areas. You might think “ok, push one block into its goal area and then push another into it.”

But many of these games will have mechanisms meaning you would first want to push one block into its goal, then undo that for some reason (it might activate some extra functionality) push the other block, and then finally go back and do the thing.

There’s always weird tricks that mean that you’re going to walk backwards before walking forwards. I don’t think it’s impossible for these things to stumble into it, though. Just might spin a lot of cycles to get there (humans do too I guess)
by thayne | 2025-07-05 05:31:05+00:00
Not the original poster, and I don't have very high hopes that these will be revisited, but some things I would like to see revisited are:

- ability to define anonymous functions without having to put it inside an anonymous struct. I get the argument against closures (even if I don't fully agree with it), but not having first class support for anonymous functions feels pretty regressive for a modern language

- have a way to include payload data with errors. Or at the very least, define an idiomatic pattern for handling cases where you have additional data for an error

- allow struct fields to be private

- bring back async support in some form (this one I do have some hope for)
by charles_f | 2025-07-05 05:33:27+00:00
I started the piano when I was 32. I'm not particularly good at it, I'll never play anything complex, but I love playing and I do my best. My teacher forced me to play in public at some point, and that was probably one of the best things he did, to get me past the point of caring.

That made me realize: no-one cares. You're the center of your life, and it's very important that you succeed, but the very few people who care about you (and whom you should care about) will have the patience, empathy, and admiration for you to be in that "moat", everyone else won't give a shit. If you fuck up, they'll forget about you in a minute. Try to remember about someone trying to do something you like but badly? You can't.

Whenever I see a public piano I seat at it. Sometimes it's just shit and I'm the only one happy I can press keys. Sometimes I manage to play a piece, and a random couple of people are happy about it.

This is a great article, follow its advice. The definition of low status is only the one you set for yourself. Push the shame and embrace it. No one cares anyways
by strogonoff | 2025-07-05 05:34:07+00:00
It is under-appreciated that inflation actually is desirable in a working economy.

Look at it this way. If your money (in money form) is worth less tomorrow than today, you are incentivised to spend it, thus fueling economic activity of all sorts (from going out and buying a drink to buying a car, traveling, investing). If your money is worth more tomorrow, then you are incentivised to tighten your belt and not spend for as long as you can. At scale, this negatively affects production, economic mobility, and so forth; the rich get richer and hoard the money. I do not believe any of today’s economies can be healthy and competitive (or even functional) with a deflationary currency.
by troupo | 2025-07-05 05:34:09+00:00
> I'm honestly started to get pissed seeing these articles on HN every day. Aren't we technologists?

Funnily enough, that's exactly what the article asks.

> I'm an expert in my field with decades of experience, and a damn good programmer, and Cursor is like zipping down the street on a powered bike.

Oh look, an unverified claim. Go through the first list in the article, and ask "what we, as technologists, know about this claim".

You can also actually read the article and see that I actually use these tools every day.
by jjmarr | 2025-07-05 05:34:31+00:00
"larger than merely stealing some Bitcoin"

It's US$2 billion. I can't imagine a better way of monetizing such an exploit than to convert it into cash by using Bitcoin.

The US govt can't pay you US$2 billion without it showing up as a line item in the federal budget. That's like 20% of the NSA's funding. You'd have to get authorization from the President and hold some emergency session of Congress. Other governments would pay less.

Hacking the normal banking system is also challenging. If you steal US$2 billion someone is going to notice and simply undo the transaction because banking doesn't believe in "code as law".
by liurenju | 2025-07-05 05:35:10+00:00
Thanks for your comments. We distill these features as our priority because our current product SellToSky needs them and we spent significant amount of time building it. We'll not re-invent the wheel but rather glue the available open source project + any missing parts. The whole purpose is to abstract the backend needs as a service -> reducing the repetitive works from the fellow AI developers/founders.

That's why I am coming here to see whether any other developers or founders experienced the same pain?
by orbital-decay | 2025-07-05 05:36:34+00:00
>I asked it for a list of Javascript keywords ordered alphabetically. Within 5 minutes it produced a slightly different list

That's not my point, the keyword here is "meaningful". How many of those lists are correct? (ignoring the fact prompting a LLM for lists is a bad idea, let alone local ones)

If you spend some time with SotA LLMs, you'll see that on rerolling they express pretty much the same ideas in different ways, most of the time.
by KPGv2 | 2025-07-05 05:37:05+00:00
> I still don't know what a monoid is though

In short, it's a data type with addition defined. So

"a" + "b" = "ab" <-- string and concat is a monoid

1 + 5 = 6 <-- nat and natural number addition is a monoid

[1] + [2] = [1, 2] <-- list and concat is a monoid

*edit* (it also has a zero defined, such as "" or 0 or [])

> Or an applicative

you can think of these as "i'd use a functor here via fmap, except my mapping function takes more than one argument"
by evaneykelen | 2025-07-05 05:37:10+00:00
I remember getting one on loan from Commodore Netherlands around 1992-1993. We were an ISV back then, and CBM provided these machines to allow us to talk to their engineers back in Pennsylvania via email and Usenet. While the emails are not preserved, I did find a post I highly likely made using an A3000UX [1]. We had the machine dial in once per day to sync email and Usenet posts. Phone costs were high, so we had to keep the phone line open as short as possible. It was actually quite handy because picking up the phone in the Netherlands to talk to an engineer in the States was prohibitively expensive (around $9 per minute in todays money, iirc). It was my first use of The Internet.

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.multimedia/c/Vyt0...