MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xenotux | 2025-08-30 15:23:07+00:00
Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"?

The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.
by globnomulous | 2025-08-30 15:23:53+00:00
The author writes "I respect [Anthropic's] approach to responsible AI adoption," Anthropic of course being the asswipes who published this turd[0] on university students' use of LLMs. It starts with the absolute gem:

> AI systems are no longer just specialized research tools: they’re everyday academic companions.

The article basically shrugs its shoulders at the problem of LLM-driven cheating and, to the best of my recollection, shows not a shred of honesty or willingness to face any of the real issues. Fuck Anthropic.

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-ho...
by rowanG077 | 2025-08-30 15:24:05+00:00
It's always interesting that many people who push the cognitive load argument also push for simpler languages. To me once I have learned a language well the features it has don't add to the cognitive load. they become basically second nature. It even has a great benefit, many things that are explicit in simple languages because there is no language support fall away in more complex languages. So more complex languages reduce cognitive load, at least for me.
by codingdave | 2025-08-30 15:24:42+00:00
I'm not tired of AI. I'm tired of the hype. Of the belief that it will take over everything. And most tired of seeing people doing the same shit we've been doing for decades, just now with AI. LLMs are truly something new. And I believe they will lead to completely new inventions and way of interacting with tech, eventually. But so far, people are acting like we have invented flying cars when all we have done is given people automatic transmissions.
by hrududuu | 2025-08-30 15:24:54+00:00
This type of comparison needs to add corporate income tax (20%) in order to be an apples to apples comparison,so 27.5. It's still a stark difference in taxation, and I know of no other country that does what Finland does for dividend taxation. In fact for earned income,things look even uglier when you add in tax-like social security contributions.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Finnish companies are also an outlier in paying extremely high dividends.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-30 15:25:06+00:00
> On Windows and Linux, inserting an em-dash is a laborious alt-code process.

On Linux, you can set up a Compose key, after which an em-dash is compose, three hyphens (Macintosh: shift-option-hyphen), and an en-dash is compose, two hyphens, period (Macintosh: option-hyphen). Also, a left (resp. right) single (resp. double) quote is compose, less-than (resp. greater-than), typewriter single (resp. double) quote. That’s how I enter them.

You can also (alternatively or at the same time) set up a “Level 3 shift” aka “Alternate Characters Key” aka AltGr, which gets you quotes with one of the English International layouts or quotes as well as dashes with an English Macintosh layout.
by alemanek | 2025-08-30 15:25:13+00:00
That is an interesting point. Co-ops seem like they should out perform from a worker incentive point of view. But, why are co-ops basically non-existent in Big Tech. WinCo, groceries, and REI, expensive outdoor stuff, in the US are both big co-ops but are retailers.

Maybe VC money warps the economics so that every company needs to be winner takes all lotto tickets for the investors. Having it be worker owned gets rid of the extreme ROÍ VCs expect.

If you know any papers on the subject I would be interested though.
by gr4vityWall | 2025-08-30 15:25:28+00:00
While I tend to agree with your position, it sounds like they built a system in less than 2 weeks that was immediately useful to the organization. That sounds like a win to me, and makes me wonder if there were other ways in hindsight that such a system could evolve.

>They thought that we could avoid months of work and keep it simple and instead caused years of mess because making breaking changes is extremely difficult once you have wide adoption.

Right. Do you think a middle ground was possible? Say, a system that took 1 month to build instead of two weeks, but with a few more abstractions to help with breaking changes in the future.

Thanks for sharing your experience btw, always good to read about real world cases like this from other people.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-30 15:25:53+00:00
"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs."

You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job.

Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to translate that vision into something that is coherent across engineers, customers, sales, and marketing.
by superblas | 2025-08-30 15:26:29+00:00
I was just at one of their offices in San Francisco. They have free breakfast, lunch, and dinner with choices from well over 10 whole restaurants exclusively on their campus. They have (paid) laundry service where they can just drop off their clothes and get them back later. No more Facebook barbers, however. There were people of all different backgrounds: black, white, Hispanic, Indian, etc.

They have all these amenities on top of their huge paychecks (high cost of living in San Francisco notwithstanding). Do you really think they’d give all that up in service of helping their lessers? Maybe some would, but how much of this extravagant lifestyle would they give up? Even those who identify as liberal, how much would they give up?
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-30 15:26:46+00:00
These days, most software startups with good ideas should be self-funded. Develop the software and figure out your outreach and marketing. Reap the profits. You don't need paper-pushing PMs. If you are seeking funding for a software startup, to me it's a red flag that your idea is probably bad, that you're just taking VCs for a ride.

Hardware startups could still use funding.
by yndoendo | 2025-08-30 15:27:35+00:00
I would add that "full self-driving" also means that the car company or the self-driving development company holds all liability in a car accident that the owner has none. Even Tesla right now states that the owner holds the liability in any accident. [0]

There are no proper retention laws with car manufacturers and self-driving development companies that I know of.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/08/how-a-hacker-helped-win...
by J_McQuade | 2025-08-30 15:27:54+00:00
> Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI.

I don't want to speak for the person you replied to, but I think that their main point is... are they?

I see lots of articles about huge increases in productivity, but I think it's fair to argue that we've yet to see the huge increases in useful products that would surely (we hope) result from that if it were true.
by hariwb | 2025-08-30 15:27:55+00:00
I think many readers here have had a pretty negative experience with a new manager parachuting in (usually as a referral from other senior leadership), immediately deciding that the team is underperforming without knowing much about the business context, technical constraints, and company culture that led to the current environment, and making big structural changes without consulting the boots-on-the-ground folks. Usually we hear stories from the engineers who are disaffected. This feels like an anecdote from the other side.

It's not wrong to wonder about your career trajectory, but it's telling to see someone pretty nakedly talk about optimizing for changing their level at a company, before they've even landed there and evaluated if they can help / how they are helping their team. I'm not naive, and I recognize those people exist and can acknowledge that they can do good work. But if someone came into my workplace with the mindset of "aggressively [seeking] to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks" and their goal was going "from Senior Manager to Director in ... 12 months", I'd be skeptical that they weren't going to damage peer relationships and optimize for being recognized at the expense of their direct reports, even if I thought they could be a valuable asset in the short term.
by bri3d | 2025-08-30 15:28:21+00:00
Interesting idea. It's like putting a VLIW compilation pass into the scheduler, but without an intermediate microcode cache like NV Denver did. Without handling memory dependencies / cache hazards, I'm not so sure how well it will do in general-purpose use cases. They don't have the same code locality / second-layer icache problem that Denver had, but data loads are still going to be a mess.

I guess the notion is that data cache misses will basically lead to what could be called "instruction amplification," where an instruction will miss its scheduled time slot and have to be replayed, possibly repeatedly, until its dependencies are available. The article asserts that this is the rough equivalent of leaving execution ports unoccupied in a "traditional" OoO architecture, but I'm not so sure. I'm curious about how well this works in practice; I would worry that cache misses would rapidly multiply into a cascading failure case where the entire pipeline basically stalls and the architecture reverts to in-order level performance - just like most general-purpose VLIW architectures.
by sokoloff | 2025-08-30 15:28:34+00:00
I believe that employees and employers both make choices that they think are in their best interests.

Employees might want to receive the most cash they can right now (and therefore prefer 100 units of cash over 90 units of cash and 10 of equity compensation). We shouldn't force them to accept a different mix of compensation, particularly one which forces them to invest in their employer via such a tradeoff. They might choose to work at business X instead of worker-owned cooperative Y for any number of reasons.

Employers think about the value proposition they offer to attract and retain employees and if there are 100 units of compensation available to be paid and they have reason to think that employees prefer cash over equity, they are likely to offer all 100 units of comp in cash rather than 90 units of cash and 10 units of equity. There's no sense tying up 10 units of equity that an employee only values as being equivalent to 5 units of cash.

In the case of workers working for public companies, they have a straightforward way to invest in their company if they want: take some of the cash and buy shares in the company. That's barred in most cases for private companies by practicality and accredited investor rules.
by neurostimulant | 2025-08-30 15:31:01+00:00
On Gnome user interface, the Nokia Sans Wide is off-centered. Especially visible in buttons and list. I wonder if there is a way to adjust it.

Nokia Sans Wide: https://i.imgur.com/6nrYOeP.png

Noto Sans (default): https://i.imgur.com/SgxI2qO.png
by Disposal8433 | 2025-08-30 15:31:26+00:00
You can't disagree with facts. Every time I try to give a chance to all those LLMs, they always use old APIs, APIs that don't exist, or mix things up. I'll still try that once a month to see how it evolves, but I have never been amazed by the capabilities of those things.

> with popular languages

Don't know, don't care. I write C++ code and that's all I need. JS and React can die a painful death for all I care as they have injected the worst practices across all the CS field. As for Python, I don't need help with that thanks to uv, but that's another story.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-30 15:31:30+00:00
> How many times...

Literally all the time? Every single month?

I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding.

The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered.

Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineering manager said, "well folks, localization is backed up so we've got no more code we need to write. Go home and check in next week to see if we have any work?"

The only exception I can think of might be videogames where the bottleneck is the art and then maybe the testing loop. But gaming isn't representative of software development generally at all.
by pu_pe | 2025-08-30 15:32:30+00:00
The link you shared has data from 2021, which looks completely different than what you shared - and Sweden comes at 12th, but all the other nordic countries are buried way down in the ranking. It's frankly very hard to believe that the nordic countries are more unequal than America when it comes to income, wealth, well-being or pretty much any statistic you can think of.
by damon_c | 2025-08-30 15:33:09+00:00
One thing that has changed for me personally is that these days if I’m parsing XML, I might just tell AI to write a parser that can handle these 5 XML files. It might load up a library or it might just roll its own, but one thing that is not going to happen is that I’m not building some beautiful well engineered XML parser which I then open source. I wonder if that is what’s going on?
by ijk | 2025-08-30 15:33:16+00:00
Ironically, scaling limits and evidence that quality vastly outweighs quantity suggests that all that web data is much less useful than buying and scanning a book. Most work with the Common Crawl data, for example, has ended up focusing on filtering out vast amounts of data as being mostly useless for training purposes.

There was a hot minute in 2023 where it looked like we could just data and compute scale to the moon. Shockingly, it turns out there are limits to that approach.
by striking | 2025-08-30 15:33:57+00:00
lol relax. I'm not saying people should never change or that they're all perfect the way they are. I'm saying the opposite: if you want to be an attractive, interesting person, and you're not that person yet, you need to spend the time and energy necessary to actually change rather than faking it. You don't have to drop your existing hobbies (e.g. being a brony is fine) but it's nice to also have a few others you can share with others (e.g. getting into running or music or something as well).

No, the real blue pill is pretending any of your culture war manosphere shit matters or wasting any time thinking about that, because every second you waste on that is a second you could've spent improving yourself.
by zbentley | 2025-08-30 15:33:58+00:00
Not only is dlclose(3) not guaranteed to close/unload the library, close(2) isn't guaranteed to close a file!.

If the same file descriptor is open in another process (e.g. one that has it via fork(2) FD sharing either without child processes exec(2)ing or with CLOEXEC not set, or some older and esoteric abuses of fdpassing over UNIX sockets), then close(2) just decrements a refcount. The actual file isn't closed until the last holder of a reference to its file descriptor calls close(2).

This is rarely relevant, but when it comes up, it sure is wild. Common sources of confusion and pain due to this behavior are: files opened for "global library reasons" (e.g. /dev/shm buffers) in preforking servers, signalfd descriptors in preforking servers, processes that fork off and daemonize but leave their spawner around for e.g. CoW memory sharing efficiencies (looking at you, Python multiprocessing backends--the docs make it sound like they all act more or less the same, but in this regard they very much do not), libraries that usually swap STDIN/OUT/ERR file descriptors around with CLOEXEC disabled for a manually fork+exec'd child (e.g. situations where posix_spawn doesn't support needed pre-exec setup) but that are then used as part of larger applications that fork/spawn for other reasons and don't realize that file descriptor allocation/forking needs care and synchronization with the manually-fork/execing library in question: mixing forks and threads is one of those things that everyone says is a fast-track ticket to nasal demons, but that everyone also does regularly, I've found--if this describes you, be careful!

If you end up in one of those situations, suddenly invariants like "I called unlink on this path and then close(2)'d the descriptor to it, so that (maybe large) chunk of allocated space isn't taking up space on the filesystem/buffers any more" and "this externally-observable lockfile/directory is now unlocked due to its absence, now processes coordinating using that file on NFS will work as expected" no longer hold.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.1.0?topic=domains-unix-dom...

I know that close(2)'s weirdness isn't a superset of dlopen(3)'s and there are different reasons for both behaviors. But it's still interesting that they "rhyme" as it were.
by hari-trata | 2025-08-30 15:34:15+00:00
I don’t see why we need so many protocols. In such a greenfield tech, many are eager to define rules. There’s already a protocol called AG-UI that does the similar thing, but even its purpose isn’t entirely clear to me.

Rather than rushing to create standards, I think the focus should be on building practical implementations, AI-centric UI components that actually help developers design more AI-friendly interfaces. Once the space matures and stabilizes, that’s when standardization will make more sense. Right now, it feels too early.
by Agingcoder | 2025-08-30 15:34:28+00:00
Quote ‘Yet another possibility is that Romania has an undersampled ethnic group that overperforms, but whose schools aren’t tested very well. The only group this might be is Romanian Jews’

Let’s say that there are probably many ways of interpreting this sentence, but I can’t find any nice one. I understand this as ‘it makes sense for a group with skin color X and hair color Y to be better at school’ followed by ‘it must be Jews’.

What am I missing ?
by tptacek | 2025-08-30 15:34:49+00:00
I hear this argument a lot and I don't know what you think it demonstrates. Put two groups of people on separate islands for 1000 years. Check back up on them. They will be overwhelmingly phenotypically similar. It's not like one of the groups is going to become the X-Men. Really, these analogies mostly seem like a device for smuggling in the premise that innate intellectual ability is less like color vision and more like eye color. Maybe it is, but you have to make and ground that argument.
by balamatom | 2025-08-30 15:35:05+00:00
>That monolithic C++ embedded application is going to be fundamentally built out of a scheduler, IO and driver interfaces, and a shell. That's the only sane way to do something like this. And that's an operating system.

Exactly! I picture the choice being grandfathering in compatibility with existing OSes (having the promised performance of their product in fact indirectly modulated by the output of all other teams of world's smartest throughout computing history and present day), vs wringing another OS-sized piece of C++ tech debt upon unsuspecting humanity. In which case I am thankful to Carmack for making the call.

I can understand how "what you're doing is fundamentally pointless" is something they can only afford to hear from someone who already has their degree of magnitude of fuck-you money. Furthermore in a VC-shaped culture it can also be a statement that's to many people fundamentally incomprehensible
by oh_my_goodness | 2025-08-30 15:35:14+00:00
You can't depend on the business people to understand the business logic clearly enough to explain it to the implementers. That will never happen. They may understand it themselves, but they're not coders and they can't write requirements for code.

Instead, at least one implementer needs to get hands dirty on what the application space really is. Very dirty. So dirty that they actually start to really know and care about what the users actually experience every day.

Or, more realistically for most companies, we insist on separate silos, "business logic" comes to mean "stupid stuff we don't really care about", and we screw around with if statements. (Or, whatever, we get hip to monads and screw around with those. That's way cooler.)
by saghm | 2025-08-30 15:35:28+00:00
I think that's the exact point the parent commenter is trying to make. One person said Google has wanted to get rid of XSLT for years, which someone else responded to saying that it was Mozilla who made this proposal, and then someone else responded with details about Google's history of wanting to get rid of it previously, at which point the question around what part of the second comment been untrue entered the picture. That question doesn't make a ton of sense, because if the reply to the second comment was assumed to be disagreement, the same logic would presumably apply to the second comment itself, so the question "what part is untrue?" would be just as valid to ask about the "disagreement" with the original statement that Google has wanted to get rid of XSLT for years.

Of course, I could be making the same mistake in reading your comment as expressing disagreement with the one you're responding to! If that's not the case, then I'll happily accept my mistake so the chain can hopefully stop here.

(edit: I'm realizing now that this definitely is my own mistake, as I misread which comment this one was replying to. I might need to invest time in finding a new app for reading HN on mobile, since the indentation levels on the one I've been using clearly aren't large enough for my terrible eyesight...)
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-30 15:36:15+00:00
It's interesting that a high-performance computing core has added instructions for bit manipulation. They're really common on low-power embedded cores, where bit manipulating inputs and outputs is more common. They can save a lot of instructions when needed, though. For example, clearing a bit in a variable, without an express instruction, requires raising two to the power of the bit, inverting the result, anding that with the variable, then writing the result back to the variable. Depending on the language, it looks something like this:

Variable &=~(2^Bit)

The series of bitwise operators looks more grawlix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grawlix) than instructions, as though yelling pejoratives at the bit is what clears it.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-08-30 15:36:20+00:00
Chick fil a primary draw is good tasting chicken. I know a lot of liberals who feel icky for eating there but do it anyway over food quality. Similar dynamic to jimmy johns.

Trying to rationalize their success with other stuff is simply going to make other companies continue to decline the quality of their already bad food and expect that their workers being slightly more polite would make up for it.
by gregorygoc | 2025-08-30 15:36:37+00:00
Deeply flawed analogy. Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs.

Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.
by mrbombastic | 2025-08-30 15:36:40+00:00
I find it is either coding or design but yeah not sure where the perspective of the GP come from, that has not been my experience. I have actually vented with other devs about too many brainstorming meetings, ideas of what to do we are never short on. Maybe where I agree slightly is the devil is in the maintenance, ai can maybe? help with that but i think you will quickly reach a saturation point where you have more than you can manage.