MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by integralid | 2025-08-21 17:49:46+00:00
I never finished my degree, but I believe I'm a very good developer (my employere agree). In my times most good programmers were self-taught.

I don't mind (hypothetically) not being allowed to call myself "engineer", but I do mind false dichotomy of "5 year course" vs "six week bootcamp". In the IT world it's entirely possibly to learn everything yourself and learn it better than one-fits-all course ever could.
by general1726 | 2025-08-21 17:50:14+00:00
Or engineers are little bit full of themselves and know better how user should experience the product. If user is "holding the product wrong" it is a problem of a user and not a problem of stupid design, created by a person who knows in which order these buttons should be pressed. People around Desktop Linux could write a complete book about dismissing user's complaints.

The moment you have stubborn engineer who knows better than PM and user, it is really difficult to get anywhere. However if you will put such engineer into line of fire from a users that's suddenly not engineer's friendly PM trying to tell the engineer that this is wrong, these are frustrated people who would like to skin engineer alive as a punishment for using his "awesome" creations! That induces fear, but absolutely also crushes his ego, because somebody is berating product of engineer's genius like it would be a retarded hamster.

From my perspective, it is not about showing that PM is an idiot, it is about humbling your engineers. Their ego will grow again and this exercise will need to be repeated.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-08-21 17:50:17+00:00
I don't know if I want your traffic until I see what your traffic is.

You want to look at one of our git commits? Sure! That's what our web-fronted git repo is for. Go right head! Be our guest!

Oh ... I see. You want to download every commit in our repository. One by one, when you have used git clone. Hmm, yeah, I don't want your traffic.

But wait, "your traffic" seems to originate from ... consults fail2ban logs ... more than 900k different IP addresses, so "disconnecting" from you is non-trivial.

I can't put it more politely than this: fuck off. Do not pass go. Do not collect stock options. Go to hell, and stay there.
by arduanika | 2025-08-21 17:50:20+00:00
Tim Nguyen has put an extraordinary effort into finding the truth in this entire long exchange, and it's been mostly thankless.

His appearance on Decoding the Gurus was a highlight of the show's early seasons.

https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-epis...

Perhaps you would agree with Weinstein and Hossenfelder that physics today is broken. But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
by missedthecue | 2025-08-21 17:51:03+00:00
"Mechanically, more efficiency means less people required for the same output."

Why can't it mean more output with the same number of people? If I pay 100 people for 8 hours of labor a day, and after making some changes to our processes, the volume of work completed is up 10% per day, what is that if not an efficiency gain? What would you call it?

It really depends on the amount of work. If the demand for your labor is infinite, or at least always more than you can do in a days work, efficiency gains won't result in layoffs, just more work completed per shift. If the demand for the work is limited, efficiency gains will likely result in layoffs because there's no point in paying someone who was freed up by your new processes to sit around twirling a pen all day.
by reactordev | 2025-08-21 17:51:12+00:00
these problems are general ones and the solution is the same as running programs in parallel or across machines. When needing to build different architectures (and needing a host to provide the toolchains), what's stopping you from issuing more than 1 command in your CI/CD pipeline? Most pipelines have a way of running something on a specific host. So does k8s, ecs, <pick your provider>, and probably your IT team.

My experience, when it gets time to actually build the thing. A one-liner (with args if you need them) is the best approach. If you really REALLY need to, you can have more than one script for doing it - depending on what path down the pipeline you take. Maybe it's

1) ./build.sh -config Release 2) ./deploy.sh -docker -registry=<$REGISTRY> --kick

Just try not to go too crazy. The larger the org, the larger this wrangling task can be. Look at Google and gclient/gn. Not saying it's bad, just saying it's complicated for a reason. You don't need that (you'll know if you do).

The point I made is I hate when I see 42 lines in a build workflow yaml that isn't syntax highlighted because it's been |'d in there. I think the yaml's of your pipelines, etc, should be configuration for the pipeline and the actual execution should be outsourced to a script you provide.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-21 17:51:41+00:00
(I know I already replied in a different comment, but just thinking about this more.)

> Both can also be true of your elderly relative, or your partner, or your cousin, or your friend who doesn’t want to fiddle with the damn machine, they just want to get their shit done without having to worry about screwing up anything. Your other friend will want the freedom to do everything and ask you for help.

...you know, this is also why, as much as I love the hackability of Mavericks, I also kind of liked the way Apple initially implemented System Integrity Protection in El Capitan.

It was easy to turn off! Just boot into recovery mode, open the Terminal, type in a short command, and boom, SIP will never bother you again for the entire life of that computer! The process wasn't onerous, or even difficult as long as you knew how to open a Terminal in recovery mode, or were willing to learn. And if you couldn't do those things, well, you probably shouldn't turn off SIP!

Where I get annoyed is with the signed system volume stuff, because that consistently gets in your way! It is impossible for any type of user to "unlock" modern macOS.

Although then again, even going back to the original SIP without SSV... well, we did already have a system for this before SIP, didn't we? It was called UNIX permissions! If you didn't know what you're doing, or didn't want to learn, why were you using an administrator account? Why did your elderly relative ever have superuser privileges in the first place?

...the answer is kind of obvious, actually. Administrator accounts are the default, and even if you went out of your way to avoid one, you'd be unable to, for example, install Photoshop.

I wish that is the problem Apple had solved! Instead of introducing an entirely new layer on top of the UNIX security model, make non-admin accounts the default setting for new users, and then make those accounts a tad more capable (and lean on Adobe to stop being awful).
by nancyminusone | 2025-08-21 17:51:54+00:00
Depends on the region. I live in one of the bad areas, with lots of trees. The power goes out every couple months for a couple hours.

But I was very surprised to learn that until 2021, most Texans had never had a power interruption in decades (which I suppose added to their panic).

Not all that useful to say "the US" here. California has it's wildfires and earthquakes. The west has extreme temperature swings. Southeast has hurricanes, and northeast has trees, ice, and wind. The entire south likes to run air conditioning. What does your country or its neighbors face? How about 10 countries over?
by ranger207 | 2025-08-21 17:52:09+00:00
I don't think this was "forced" as in "a court told them to rehire them", as it seems the bank agreed to rehire them before the case got to the tribunal. I think this was "forced" as in "their innovations didn't work out as well as they had hoped, so they needed to hire people experienced in the job to make up for the people they had fired, and the only people that matched the description were the people they had fired"
by jordanpg | 2025-08-21 17:52:29+00:00
She has gone way beyond this. She is actively undermining the entire academic scientific enterprise, even as she makes money popularizing it. It's unclear why she does this. She portrays herself as speaking truth to power, but -- much like certain actors in US public life these days -- is simply doing the easy work of tearing things down, without doing the hard work of building things.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-08-21 17:52:46+00:00
I think that list applies more to Eric. He is definitely in the 'conspiracy of nefarious forces are aligned against me' camp.

Sabine, I think she was just referring to how institutions can become calcified around certain ideas. The old concept that 'new' ideas need to wait for the founders of old ideas to die off. (can't remember exact quote).
by samwgoldman | 2025-08-21 17:52:56+00:00
(Pyrefly dev here) Thanks for trying it out! If you have any feedback or bug reports, please don't hesitate to file issues on GitHub or find us on Discord. We have some open issues for SQLAlchemy (like [1]). I'm definitely curious to hear if there are any gaps from your perspective, having an already strictly-typed codebase.

1. https://github.com/facebook/pyrefly/issues/954
by salynchnew | 2025-08-21 17:52:57+00:00
This is, unfortunately, a problem that many tech companies have made worse and more accessible as they have removed friction from these systems.

Most folks will remember the 2019 temination of lootbox key trading for CS:GO on Steam.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50262447

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/research-identifies-suspicious...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266628172...

I'm not sure what good ways there are to manage this generally, other than limiting the size or types of financial transactions that can occur within a system.
by Citizen8396 | 2025-08-21 17:53:08+00:00
They are arguing in bad faith. They clearly know how to disable the relevant subset of these features. They don't do this upfront because they would have nothing to write about otherwise.

As a user, you can configure these settings in the UI. You can use the defaults command. They can be configured using a configuration profile/MDM. You could block the domains based on their associated feature, which are publicly documented by Apple. [1]

It's like complaining about Windows telemetry without bothering to configure the registry (or even open the settings menu).

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/101555
by Draiken | 2025-08-21 17:53:15+00:00
100% my biggest fear. Whether the tech is good enough or not, it's already changing how new grads and juniors behave. It'll rob them of gaining knowledge at a crucial time and will end up forming a new generation that's 100% dependent on this technology to barely function.

It's likely not only in tech, even. We see how blatantly students are getting their degrees and bragging about having ChatGPT do all of their assignments. These folks won't start their careers and suddenly study to get good at their jobs, they'll only function if they have these tools. This is the master move from the AI pushers. They've successfully created a real dependency for millions.

Imagine the next generation of doctors that don't know anything about medicine without ChatGPT at their side. What a nightmare.
by aefalcon83 | 2025-08-21 17:53:50+00:00
Once upon a time I was doing some custom enhancement for what was probably our largest customer. The CEO and CTO both gave me different descriptions of what the customer wanted. Neither made any sense. I was out of the loop for this whole discussion, but I did get a forward of an email chain at some point that included the customer, so I ended up emailing him directly with stories for those two descriptions plus a third. The customer replied he needed the 3rd story, the one I came up with. This took at least two months to implement, so that was a lot of waste avoided.

The amount of information that gets lost in hand-offs can be incredible. People directly involved in developing the product really need to be more involved with the customers, but I personally have had only bad experiences with organizations enabling this. Those responding here that they get to in some manner, I'm jealous.
by FireBeyond | 2025-08-21 17:53:55+00:00
> the same type you see at popular gyms. They're still easy to spot because you see a young dude putting the oddest selection of products in their basket (always a basket) as the follow a "suspicious" person around

Hah, I was in JC Penney and I grabbed a handkerchief for a suit, and I packed it into my fist, to do a magic trick type thing. Went to find my fiancee, felt someone behind me. Except I looked back, and he hurriedly asked a sales associate some benign question about where to find X. I kept walking to my fiancee, who was looking at jewelry, and when I got there he ducked behind the counter, as if he worked there, and was poking at the register and talking to another sales associate. I pulled the handkerchief out of my closed fist, did some lame "ta da" thing to my fiancee, and dude looks disappointed and walks off, no longer pretending to be either an employee or customer.
by scoofy | 2025-08-21 17:53:56+00:00
>The worst comes when there are too many investors with margin debt and they start to get margin calls at the same time. This causes prices to drop and it triggers even more margin calls, starting an avalanche where stock prices drop just from forced sells.

Yep, liquidity matters so much in the short run, and people getting margin calls will get disproportionately hurt. It's the same reason why GME shot up in price even though it was just marginally profitable, all the liquidity dried up, and there was still pressure on the buy side. I'm a big fan of Taleb when it comes to finance: the #1 rule should always be "don't blow up." Trading on margin is a good way of allowing that to be a possibility.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-21 17:54:05+00:00
The OP still has the same basic problem.

- he's overweighted on Canada. Being Canadian themselves, that's a double risk. If Canada does poorly, the chance of his livelihood being affected is high. Investments should be anti-correlated from livelihood risks.

- despite being 30% in Canada, VEQT has 2.5% in NVDA. By itself that's fine, but once you add similar amounts for MSFT, GOOG, META, AAPL, BCOM, etc, it becomes a significant portion of the index.

The point of an index fund is to be diversified. If one sector crashes but other sectors do well you're still fine. The OP will lose significant money if either Canada or AI crashes, even if the rest of the world is doing well.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-08-21 17:54:11+00:00
That's the difference between having real AI guys and your average linkedIn "AI guys." The other post is a perfect example for a case where you could take a large but still manageable, cutting-edge transcription model like Whisper and fine-tune it using existing hand made transcriptions as ground truth. A match made in heaven for AI engineers. Of course this is going to work way, way better for specific corporate settings than slapping a random closed source general purpose model like Gemini on your task and hoping for the best, just because it achieves X% on random benchmark Y.
by kin | 2025-08-21 17:54:25+00:00
I'm sick and tired of seeing similar headlines and articles that reference the MIT report. It is incredible lazy journalism and borderline click bait.

The MIT report was created by project NANDA, a very pro-AI group. Read about them here: https://nanda.media.mit.edu/

The original Fortune article here: https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat... cites specifically generative AI pilot programs.

From the article: "But for 95% of companies in the dataset, generative AI implementation is falling short. The core issue? Not the quality of the AI models, but the “learning gap” for both tools and organizations. While executives often blame regulation or model performance, MIT’s research points to flawed enterprise integration."

You could have a pile of cash and 95% of companies will fail to see zero return because they don't know how to pick up the money.
by mrdependable | 2025-08-21 17:54:29+00:00
It hasn't reached exponential growth because, at least publicly, there isn't an AI that can improve itself recursively. All jobs are not being replaced yet because AI still requires human input and judgement. Also, not all jobs are done on a computer, and not all humans want to talk to a computer as if it is a human.

Tech people and VCs are selling a vision to people with money. The people with enough power and money to make it happen will reshape entire industries around AI doing the work if that's what it takes.
Ask HN: Where to Hire JavaScript Devs?
by blindprogrammer | 2025-08-21 17:54:31+00:00
I have a small development company that I recently started. My strengths are Java, Python, and Swift, but I am weak in JavaScript due to the disorganized nature of the language. Because of this, I want to avoid vibe coders and AI-heavy programmers, since I can handle most tasks myself using APIs.

I am looking for someone who has been a working programmer prior to 2015 and has a substantial portfolio, such as multiple projects on GitHub or their own professional website. I am willing to pay fairly for the right person.

If you fit this description, I want to hire you on a contract basis as my JavaScript specialist. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on how to find someone like this?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-21 17:54:40+00:00
> never heard of anyone leaving to "escape unions" but rather there just being not many jobs

Union versus non-union is a quality versus quantity problem. Unions restrict the labour pool to increase wages. When that protects specialisation, it increases productivity. When it artificially constrains the labour pool, it decreases it.

A unionised job market showing unemployment (or underemployment) is usually an indication of the latter.
by kg | 2025-08-21 17:54:51+00:00
> Noone in their goddamn right minds would just pay for an app showing some image of something

Not to necessarily disagree with anything else you argued, but there's a small relatively profitable genre of games for consoles that are just a unity template with an image of a turtle or whatever, and you mash a button to pet the turtle. The reason these exist and people buy them is because you get trophies for pressing the button.

So "an app just showing an image of something" is not very far from what those games are, and a bunch of them exist and do make money. It's tremendously weird.

There are also games like that Banana steam game that exist as part of a weird microtransactions economy instead of existing as what most people would consider a game.
by bogwog | 2025-08-21 17:55:55+00:00
Not sure what your compose file looks like, but my container files are tiny, flat, and trivial to maintain.

> manually create the network

There's no way for me to know what your requirements are, but often times if you just need your containers to talk to each other, all you need is an empty file with a unique name. So `touch MyDVRNetwork.network` to create it, and add `Network=MyDVRNetwork` to your containerfiles.

> and have to stop and start all of the services individually.

Nope, container files are essentially already systemd service files. If you add them to the correct folder and set up the dependencies, systemd will automatically start them in the correct order at boot time, restart them if they fail, etc. That's the best part of quadlet IMO. Literally set it and forget it, and the process works the same for rootless containers (you just need to add them to your user folder instead of the system-wide folder)

It gets even more awesome when you combine them with something like Fedora CoreOS and Butane. With a few small text files, you can declaratively generate an OS image with all of your desired services ready to go. It is pure bliss.
by rolph | 2025-08-21 17:56:11+00:00
AI will screwup, humans will screwup.

humans will see that they are screwing up and reformulate the action plan.

AI will keep screwingup until it is stopped, and apparently will gaslight when attempts are made to realign at the prompt.

humans realize when results are not desirable.

AI just keeps generating output until plugpull.
by withinrafael | 2025-08-21 17:56:14+00:00
Isn't that a good thing? As a dev submitting something to them, I want my feature/bugfix to stay with the product.

Are you suggesting that devs should be able to burden the original contribution with conditions, like "they can't use my code without permission 5 years later if you relicense"? That's untenable, isn't it?

I don't know how else you would accept external contributions for software without the grant in the CLA. Perhaps I'm not creative enough!
by throwawaymaths | 2025-08-21 17:56:17+00:00
the scientific enterprise has undermined itself already. Look at how we lost decades of research in alzheimer's as a good example.

This problem is WAY worse than even sabines says. If a scientist publishes something sketchy, even sometimes just a little bit, they might wind up sinking years of research of other people who are honest truthseeking researchers just chasing the sketchy results. These good people then burn out or flip to the dark side, only leaving rotten people. It's like a fucking market of lemons, except if becoming lemons were viral.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-21 17:56:25+00:00
I've been building with unity for some time now and the only thing that actually registers for me is the steam cut. I don't care about the historical drama or per seat licenses if we "make it". Valve is a much bigger mouth to feed in any reality.

Making games is hard and worrying about stuff like this is virtually guaranteed to ensure your failure. Having 100% of $0 isn't gonna take you very far.

In terms of tooling experience, Unity does provide a very compelling blend. If you have any Java or C# background at all, it's very easy to get productive quickly. I think the integration between VS and the unity editor is exceptional.
Show HN: Meow Story Engine – Open-source AI story engine (card-based, demo)
by tomoyouki | 2025-08-21 17:57:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on Meow Story Engine, an extremely lightweight proof-of-concept interactive fiction engine designed for AI-generated “card-based chapters + multiple endings” story simulations. It’s open source (Apache-2.0).

The game script is defined using JSON files, making it straightforward for LLMs or tools to generate story content automatically.

Key features:

Card-based Events: Each chapter consists of 16 event cards.

Multiple Endings: 4 normal endings + 1 hidden ending.

Branching Interactions: Player choices affect the story’s direction.

Resource System: Track stats like stamina, satiety, and energy.

Hidden Routes: Specific conditions unlock side plots.

GitHub: https://github.com/Tomoyouki-Lai/meow-story-engine

Live Demo: https://meow-story-engine.vercel.app/

I’d love to hear feedback from anyone working on interactive fiction, game engines, or AI-driven storytelling systems.