MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-07-04 14:18:38+00:00
I actually like your idea of a probationary hire, but you can see this is just an even longer extended interview, right? If companies were to adopt this model en masse, they would over-hire and then drop most people after the first 2 weeks, and you’d be out looking for another job, having wasted even more time than 5 rounds of interviews, and being unable to interview for multiple jobs at the same time.

Software interviews and hiring have definitely changed over time, and I know it’s harder right now, but I think we’re seeing the past with slightly rose-tinted glasses here. It was never only just one short interview, there were applications and emails and phone screens. In my career, I’ve always had multiple interviews and technical discussions during job applications, even back in the 90s. Getting hired, for me, has always taken several weeks end to end, if not longer.

There are a bunch of reasons interviews are getting harder, and people trying to game the system and trying to cheat are one of them, a big one. Think about it from the company’s perspective: what would you do if the volume of applications you got started far exceeding the number of positions available, and an increasing percentage of the applications you got were people unqualified for the positions but adept at pretending? More face time vetting before hiring seems like the only reasonable answer.

Other reasons why interviews are getting harder is that software jobs are more competitive now, and possibly relative pay has gone up. If interviewing was easier back in the day (and I agree that it was), it’s because there wasn’t as much competition.
by swores | 2025-07-04 14:19:28+00:00
Ah, OK that does now make sense to me, thanks.

I think I didn't manage to see that meaning because the comment it was replying to had nothing to do with humans thinking orcas want to eat them, it was about orcas bringing food (like dead fish) to give to the humans. So more like a pet cat bringing a dead mouse to its owner than a cat in the garden fearing that the human wants to eat it?
by 9283409232 | 2025-07-04 14:19:30+00:00
The title is a bit clickbait because it's not really about leaving tech, it's about leaving the bullshit behind. If you don't want to work for FAANG actively ruining the world then you have options. In addition to what is posted here, the best advice I can give is to work at a company that isn't a tech company. More regular companies than you think employ software engineers.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-07-04 14:20:49+00:00
To be fair it wasn't always like that. I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks. That was peak hobbyist time for me and I still have many of those lying around, but I haven't bought a new one for a long time now. First they went through some weird feature creep, then the pandemic hit with supply chain issues, then inflation, then the IPO... It's nice that the founders got to make bank with something that has immeasurable value for letting people discover modern tech, but somewhere along the line they got completely lost. Looking at the N100 I feel like building something again for the first time in years. It's not as pure as it was back then, but damn it is useful.
by tombert | 2025-07-04 14:21:04+00:00
That’s why I made the patch to Disruptor as well, because I needed the change and I didn’t want to maintain it. I’m not saying that that’s valueless but I still think programmers should not be giving free labor to corporations.

Canonical is at least a little better since they’re a much more FOSS-first company as opposed to a trading corporation, but my opinion still is the same with them.

Also, completely unrelated, if anyone at Canonical is reading this, your hiring process is terrible. Making people write nine-page essays about how smart they were in high school and then forcing them to take some absurd pop-psychology IQ tests and then multiple dedicated projects is insane. Whomever designed the interview process there should genuinely be ashamed of themselves and consider literally any other career.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-04 14:21:05+00:00
> Those who were struggling in 2018 to meet GDPR criteria before the grace period of two years ended were most likely not struggling with details, but in blatant violation of almost 40 year old rules.

At least in Germany at the time of GDPR, the startups (and also bigger companies) were struggling with the insane amount of compliance requirements, and the uncertainty how to actually interpret these legal requirements also in terms of federal law.

In other words: these (German) companies (and startups) clearly obeyed the spirit of these, as you say, 40 year old laws, but struggled hard with the formal red-tape requirements of GDPR.
by prmph | 2025-07-04 14:21:43+00:00
> I never trusted it with any permission. Im not sure id do any different with claude.

Certain permissions can be safe and speed up your work significantly. For example, you can allow Claude Code to run ls, grep, find, etc without stopping to seek your permission each time. You can also allow it to autonomously run specific custom commands like tsc, build, and test. You control what is in these commands, to they can be as safe as you want them to be.

> No, i havent seen anythinglike this. Im not sure what you mean.

I mean something like this:

claude "Please carefully read the CLAUDE.md and README.md files"

I notice that all agents easily forget what is in the main instruction file, so I use this as an alias to start Claude with a suitable priming instruction
by cgriswald | 2025-07-04 14:21:52+00:00
To be honest, I’d treat your service like I treat IPTV. I would use your service for exposure to things I might enjoy and for curated lists and then go watch those things somewhere more convenient. Or I’d leave it on for my dogs.

TV schedules, the things shows had to do for those schedules, and advertisements feel like something I escaped from and I don’t see the appeal of going back at all. The only two benefits to me are: Knowing someone else is also watching the same thing (which could be done for streaming with a simple “viewers” count; and limited selection “forcing” me to watch something I wouldn’t otherwise watch. But that doesn’t really exist in this world anymore.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-04 14:22:04+00:00
> In this case, docs just don’t know why. (I think it kinda pisses them off not know, tbh). And finding out is not really in their wheelhouse.

Chronic reflux as a symptom is almost always initially treated by PPIs because the cause among white collar workers is assumed to be chronic stress[1]. Since doctors can't "treat stress" only its symptoms, they will just tell you to try and manage stressors in your life yourself. Maybe suggest counseling but in general they are limited in what they can do. What they can do, if you are persistent in the complaint, is to just run through all the other less likely causes of it.

I was lucky omeprazole worked for me the first time. I knew exactly what was stressing me out 24/7 and the acid reflux and frequent belching combined with the "pit in my stomach" feeling was all too common and connected around my main stressor. In my case, it started 8 months after accepting a role shift from engineering into management. I was cautiously excited initially, but it just soured very quickly. I would feel physical angst parking at work every morning trying to remind myself of all the web of political infighting "what our team is hiding from this other team", "who we can discuss what with", "how that other team is actively undermining us and their other downstream partners, but how we are circumventing that" how to 4d chess maneuver yourself in the most counterproductive ways possible. It was illuminating on where a lot of those special "business requirements" come from sometimes, but it just wasn't for me. Cutting that out was a massive relief

[1]: Stress and glucocorticoids have well documented effects on the digestive system. I recommend the "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" book chapter on stress and the digestive system.
by vrighter | 2025-07-04 14:22:19+00:00
So you suggest training a model for each individual student? Because LLM "inference" sure as hell isn't capable of tailoring anything to anything, or change in any way.

And also, how is personalized bullshit better than generic bullshit? We'd need to solve the bullshit problem in the first place, which is mathematically guaranteed NOT to be possible with these types of architectures.
by p_ing | 2025-07-04 14:22:21+00:00
Pi-Hole specifically has a limited number of officially supported OSes - https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/prerequisites/. PfSense/Opnsense run on top of FreeBSD which is not supported by Pi-Hole.

I assume this is true of pfSense, but Opnsense has a number of available DNS server options built into the distribution.
by Havoc | 2025-07-04 14:22:24+00:00
>only source of unreliability I have experienced

Consider yourself lucky then.

Tried that then discovered there is a Pi/UASP incompatibility with the USB adapter I bought. So need to disable that murdering what little speed the USB contraption had.

And then the power supply isn't sufficient anymore so buy a different one. Only to discover it was actually the cable not the supply. Then you start to investigate SSD power draw realize wait how does that even work USB can't provide that much. Only to learn that USB attached SSDs run in low power mode. Not that it matters cause it's USB throughput constrained anyway and adapters don't use x4 lanes on the nvme.

I do have multiple rasps set up like that, but I consider it mistakes learned the hard way rather than a desirable setup.
by mrweasel | 2025-07-04 14:23:08+00:00
> Why people overcomplicated it so much?

Because a lot of production software is half-baked. If you have to hand over an application to an operations team you need documentation, instrumentation, useful logging, error handling and a ton of other things. Instead software is now stuffed into containers that never receive security updates, because containers make things secure apparently. Then the developers can just dump whatever works into a container and hide the details.

To be fair most of that software is also way more complex today. There are a ton of dependencies and integrations and keeping track of them is a lot of work.

I did work with an old school C programmer that complained that a system we deployed was a ~2GB war file, running on Tomcat and requiring at least 8GB of memory and still crashed constantly. He had on multiple occasions offered to rewrite the how thing in C, which he figured would be <1MB and requiring at most 50MB of RAM to run. Sadly the customer never agreed, I would have loved to see if it had worked out as he predicted.
by qzw | 2025-07-04 14:23:34+00:00
> I think it kinda pisses them off not know, tbh

Oh definitely. Some doctors are physically incapable of uttering the words “I/We don’t know.” I know a few doctors, and have asked a couple of them about this. In private, they’re very frank about the limits of modern medicine. But in front of patients, they’re afraid any sign of uncertainty will lead to patients concluding that some other quackery is just as good as actual medicine. I can definitely understand their perspective, but it does sometimes make them come across as arrogant know-it-alls.
by mamcx | 2025-07-04 14:23:49+00:00
I can relate, because I have so much things in years that broke left and right, but at the same time (except if you are talking about pre/alphas) I think is unhealthy to be vary of breaking changes.

A language, in special, should be able to do it. Extreme compatibility is the way to make the mistake that is C.

A breaking change that fix something is a investing that extend infinity to the feature.

Fear to do it, like in C, is how you accumulate errors, mistakes, millions of dollars wasted, because is also compound debt.

P.D: I think langs should be fast to break pre 1.0, and maybe have room to do it each 5/7 years. Despite the debacle of Python (that is in fact more reflective of python than of breaking), there should be possible to make a relatively painless sunsetting with good caring
by tombert | 2025-07-04 14:24:20+00:00
I don’t have a problem with using open source software, I run NixOS with Sway and tmux and Vim and Typst and a million other FOSS things.

I just don’t feel like directly contributing to helping a corporation make money without being paid. I have a finite amount of time on this planet, I don’t need to provide unpaid labor to make Mark Zuckerberg richer.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-07-04 14:25:35+00:00
>They’ll never forget this experience

Right. They'll learn to be more discreet about it next time. Do you really believe "I got flamed on the Internet" is a memory that will counterbalance "I can make millions out of selling stolen code if I don't get caught" ? (especially considering that you flag such comments, therefore their shielding their poor egos from seeing mean words.)

>these sorts of things are often terminal for a company.

Starting a company is not hard. Thousands are created, and destroyed each day. If they're smart, under someone else's name. Maybe, maybe one person will see <generic AI company name> and think to look at the CEO, remember what he did and potentially try to warn people about it, and they'll be promptly ignored. Helped by people like you, under the guise of muh guidelines

>“Roasting” is one word for something that can be described in far more serious terms

I'd love to hear those terms. Because the worst that comes to mind that could apply is "disparaging", and unfortunately for them, "being mean on the internet" isn't something they can or will sue over.
by soulofmischief | 2025-07-04 14:25:54+00:00
LLMs offer us a chance to combat misinformation. A double-edged sword for sure, but they do offer hope in the post-truth of age where the amount of information you need to make an informed choice is more than you could possible discover, filter, ingest and internalize without assistance. They offer us a way to learn deeply about things with a customized learning style.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-07-04 14:25:58+00:00
I've come to this same conclusion pretty strongly in the past few months in particular. I actually had negative comments on my experience with AI previously.

For all the talk of AI hitting a ceiling the latest tools have improved greatly. I'm literally doing things in hours that'd previously take weeks with little issue. I do of course have to think about the prompts and break it down to a fine grained level and i also have the AI integrated well with the IDE.

The biggest wins are the times you hit a new framework/library. Traditionally you'd go through the 'search for code samples on usage of new library/language/framework -> work those samples into a form that accomplishes your task' cycle. AI is much better for this to the extent it even often surprises me. "Oh the library has a more straightforward way to accomplish X than i thought!".

For those who are still skeptical it's time to try it again.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-07-04 14:26:57+00:00
This article is not a "I want to leave tech" article. It is an "I want to have more ownership of the nature of my work" article.

Practically every recommendation is also a tech job, its just not "big tech" where you have very little real decision making power.

Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue. And after you have a high paying job its hard to justify leaving it, and every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package.
by rapind | 2025-07-04 14:27:02+00:00
> I responded to the main points in the communist manifesto.

OK but that's irrelevant to my post. There's lots of books and manifestos that say lots of stupid things. You're arguing as if this manifesto is a real threat, and I'm saying "show me this threat". This isn't a real person with any impact on your day to day, like say a politician. It's a fantasy opposition.

> Just because it hasn't been "successfully implemented" according to your personal opinion doesn't mean it cannot be scrutinized.

OK sure, where? Where is this real world communism that meets the manifesto you are railing against?

> That's like if there is a sign that says "do not cross 3km/h" when someone says "that's too slow" you go "a-hah! straw man! How do you know you can't go 300kmph with that in place? nobody implemented that sign before!". Socrates would be proud.

OK that's an awkward analogy. It's more like someone wrote a manifesto that said cars shouldn't go over 3km/h and you want to use this "slow manifesto" to argue that any laws that would slow you down are some sort of slippery slope in to "slowmunism".

No one with any authority in the real world is trying to implement the communist manifesto on to you. Not even the terrifying Bernie Sanders wants anything to do with communism. For the love of god, there is no communist threat. You can relax.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-04 14:27:23+00:00
I worked the majority of my career at an optical equipment manufacturer. It was technical, but in a very old-fashioned sense (sometimes, too "old-fashioned").

One of the reasons that I stayed there, was because I was satisfied that most applications of our products were for artistic, creative, or scientific purposes. I felt decent about working there.

Also, the culture was very focused on delivering the very best to our end-users. Unlike almost every tech company in existence, these days, the company was not interested in selling itself.
by diggan | 2025-07-04 14:27:59+00:00
> And often I find the flaw quickly. It's slower initially, but the final result is something I have good confidence in.

I guess what I'm looking for are people who don't have that experience, because you seem to be getting some value out of using LLMs at least, if I understand you correctly?

There are others out there who have tried the same approach, and countless of other approaches (self-declared at least) yet get 0 value from them, or negative value. These are the people I'm curious about :)
by latexr | 2025-07-04 14:28:38+00:00
This is an AI “interview”, which is to say you’re reading someone else’s ChatGPT conversation reposted to a different webpage. That is as uninteresting and devoid of insight as you would expect.

The subtitle is “Don't take it from me, hear it straight from the AI”. The author’s conclusion comes from asking the LLM if AI could’ve solved the problem, and it responding “no”. Well, the LLM doesn’t know, it’ll just make up text anyway. Taking their denials at face value is as wrong as doing the same thing for their assertions.

I thought this was going to be something interesting with a modicum of value, like using a physics simulator to reproduce the events of the Apollo 13 and then asking an LLM to fix the problem. As it is, there is nothing to see here. Neither detractors nor fans of LLMs have anything to learn or gain from this post, it’s just more slop.
by macNchz | 2025-07-04 14:29:21+00:00
In addition to defense-in-depth—simply adding a bunch of imperfect layers and acknowledging that no individual layer like this is all that effective on its own—there’s a component of creating signal: it can be pretty trivial for a motivated attacker to bypass a WAF, however it may not be trivial to do so without creating a paper trail of event logs, which can be used to trigger automated blocks or escalate alarms for a human to intervene.
by comboy | 2025-07-04 14:29:59+00:00
There was maybe a short period of time when RPi offered a decent compute for money if ever. But all of that time it's about the ecosystem and simply being the most popular platform. Any hardware library, you take it and you know somebody tested it on this exact hardware with the same operating system. When doing hardware stuff it can be really painful to debug. You don't want to also be wondering if maybe some pin is handled differently on your box than RPi etc.
by simonw | 2025-07-04 14:30:16+00:00
I got my start in the CGI era, and it baked into me an extremely strong bias against running short-lived subprocesses for things.

We invented PHP and FastCGI mainly to get away from the performance hit of starting a new process just to handle a web request!

It was only a few years ago that I realized that modern hardware means that it really isn't prohibitively expensive to do that any more - this benchmark gets to 2,000/requests a second, and if you can even get to a few hundred requests a second it's easy enough to scale across multiple instances these days.

I have seen AWS Lambda described as the CGI model reborn and that's a pretty fair analogy.
by avisser | 2025-07-04 14:30:38+00:00
IMO that phrase came about when old tech companies (the IBMs of the world) had

* waterfall * design up-front * source control systems that * defaulted all files to read-only * required you to "check-out" files, potentially locking other devs out from editing them [1] * probably didn't have unit tests so "deploying to prod" meant "doing a full QA pass, done by human beings" * there was no CI/CD (We had "Build Engineers")

In this context, pushing a change to SVN/git/hg, having tests run automatically, then having CI/CD push new code to production, all as a side-effect of one engineer push a button? That was moving fast, and occasionally, breaking the whole website. But we got better tests, better CI/CD, metrics, green/blue, ... We learned it was unequivocally better than the old way.

[1] Reserved Checkouts: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/clearcase/11.0.0?topic=ucm-check...
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-04 14:30:43+00:00
LLMs produce video and audio data and can parse and change audio and visual data. They hear, see and read and the only reason they can’t touch is because we don’t have the training data.

You do not know if LLMs I the future can’t replace humans. You can only say right now they can’t replace humans. In the future the structure of the LLM may be modified or it become one module out of multiple that is required for agi.

These are all plausible possibilities. But you have narrowed it all down to a “no”. LLMs are just tools with no future.

The real answer is nobody knows. But there are legitimate possibilities here. We have a 5 year trend line projecting higher growth into the future.
by qualeed | 2025-07-04 14:30:49+00:00
>But in front of patients, they’re afraid any sign of uncertainty will lead to patients concluding that some other quackery is just as good as actual medicine

This, but also in particularly litigious countries like the USA, they have to be extremely careful of opening up lawsuits.

A doctor saying "I don't know." followed by a bad patient outcome has a pretty high chance of being a lawsuit.
by tombert | 2025-07-04 14:31:08+00:00
People might not be fully aware of harm.

Plenty of people stay in violent abusive relationships when they really should leave, presumably because they feel like they’re getting something out of the relationship. That doesn’t give a free pass to the abuser.

I am not saying that companies using open source software are anywhere near as bad as a physically violent husband, I’m just saying that just because the contributor to OSS feels like they’re getting something from the relationship doesn’t absolve the corporation of its sins.

The current FOSS ecosystem feels like the tech equivalent of the “working for exposure” scam.