MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gs17 | 2025-08-21 14:27:01+00:00
I was boycotting Kroger for a long time over a different thing they were doing. The self-checkouts (and a lot of the time there isn't another option) had a camera that watched what you put in your bag. If you didn't move what you scanned very slowly (the camera seemed to be running at <10 FPS) over the exact trajectory it expects it would demand an employee make sure you weren't stealing the thing you scanned. So every few items you would need to wait 5-10 minutes for an employee to notice you, be free to come over, decide they can be bothered, and go through everything.

They got rid of it eventually and I started shopping there again, but if they start doing receipt checks they're back on the shit list.
by jschveibinz | 2025-08-21 14:27:11+00:00
Hyperbole is evident in the title. Entry level hiring is down, not gone completely. Some numbers:

Between January and October 2024, 1.2 million people ages 20 to 29 earned a bachelor's degree.

Of those recent bachelor's degree recipients, 868,000 (or 69.6%) were employed in October 2024.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-08-21 14:27:12+00:00
So it's not clickbait, even though the headline does not reflect the contents of the article, because you believe the headline is plausible?

I think AI is a bubble, but there's nothing in here that indicates they have frozen hiring or that Zuckerberg is cautious of a bubble. Sounds like they are spending even more money per researcher.
by khuey | 2025-08-21 14:28:07+00:00
> We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service).

The modern version of an old time "full service" store is an e-commerce warehouse in an exurb with quick delivery and that actually works just fine for a lot of things. It's a big component of why the retail sector has been struggling over the past decade.
by tim333 | 2025-08-21 14:28:29+00:00
The money laundering control systems, as well as being ineffective at controlling crime can be a pain in the neck for the law abiding. I have money from my grandad, received 40 years ago. No one really has records going back that far but you try buying a house and they want proof of the origin of the funds. Trying going to your bank to get records from five years ago often gives a date out of range error.
by razvi0211 | 2025-08-21 14:28:54+00:00
Agreed! Right now, there's only one way to do tool calling, and that's MCP. I'm not happy with MCP, so I want alternatives so in the end we can all choose or create the best option. We're talking about the infrastructure of the future right now, and I dont want to rebuild everything that works, just because MCP told be to.
by pico303 | 2025-08-21 14:29:07+00:00
At least one CEO seems to get it. Anyone touting this idea of skipping junior talent in favor of AI is dooming their company in the long run. When your senior talent leaves to start their own companies, where will that leave you?

I’m not even sure AI is good for any engineer, let alone junior engineers. Software engineering at any level is a journey of discovery and learning. Any time I use it I can hear my algebra teacher telling me not to use a calculator or I won’t learn anything.

But overall I’m starting to feel like AI is simply the natural culmination of US economic policy for the last 45 years: short term gains for the top 1% at the expense of a healthy business and the economy in the long term for the rest of us. Jack Welch would be so proud.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-08-21 14:29:15+00:00
Trust has to be earned. High-trust societies are awesome, but you can't just expect people to trust that they're not going to be robbed in the street if people keep getting robbed in the street, or that the few criminals that do exist will suffer consequences for their behavior if they're not actually suffering those consequences. That sort of culture takes time to build.
by roboror | 2025-08-21 14:29:30+00:00
Because unless you are very lucky you simply will not be able to retire, or at worst just run out of money with no healthcare or shelter.

If everyone you know stressing about money would actually be fine if they stopped stressing they are all very privileged. That's not reality for most people. This is not a silly game, and it's frankly ridiculous for your advice to be "find plot of land, build a house."
by pm90 | 2025-08-21 14:29:37+00:00
My rule of thumb is that if you have an OnCall rotation for a codebase, you should require reviews. Besides all the benefits you've mentioned, its important to spread know-how of the code so that people on the rotation don't need to be pulled in e.g. over the weekends/on vacation because they're the only ones familiar with the code.

(There should be breakglass mechanisms to bypass code reviews, sure. Just the default should always be to require reviews)
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-08-21 14:29:38+00:00
I always wondered about these anti bot precautions... as a firefox user, with ad blocking and 3rd party cookies disabled, i get the goddamn captcha or other random check (like this) on a bunch of pages now, every time i visit them...

Is it worth it? Millions of users wasting cpu and power for what? Saving a few cents on hosting? Just rate limit requests per second per IP and be done.

Sooner or later bots will be better at captchas than humans, what then? What's so bad with bots reading your blog? When bots evolve, what then? UK style, scan your ID card before you can visit?

The internet became a pain to use... back in the time, you opened the website and saw the content. Now you open it, get an antibot check, click, forward to the actual site, a cookie prompt, multiple clicks, then a headline + ads, scroll down a milimeter... do you want to subscribe to a newsletter? Why, i didn't even read the first sentence of the article yet... scroll down.. chat with AI bot popup... a bit further down login here to see full article...

Most of the modern web is unusable. I know I'm ranting, but this is just one of the pieces of a puzzle that makes basic browsing a pain these days.
by dasil003 | 2025-08-21 14:30:03+00:00
I think most people misunderstand the relationship between business logic, architecture and headcount.

Big businesses don’t inherently require the complexity of architecture they have. There is always a path-dependent evolution and vestigial complexity proportional to how large and fast they grew.

The real purpose of large scale architecture is to scale teams much moreso than business logic. But why does headcount grow? Is it because domains require it? Sure that’s what ambitious middle managers will say, but the real reason is you have money to invest in growth (whether from revenue or from a VC). For any complex architecture there is usually a dramatically simpler one that could still move the essential bits around, it just might not support the same number of engineers delineated into different teams with narrower responsibilities.

The general headcount growth and architecture trajectory is therefore governed by business success. When we’re growing we hire and we create complex architecture to chase growth in as many directions as possible. Eventually when growth slows we have a system that is so complex it requires a lot of people just to understand and maintain—even if the headcount is longer justified those with power in the human structure will bend over backwards to justify themselves. This is where the playbook changes and a private equity (or Elon) mentality is applied to just ruthlessly cut and force the rest of the people how to keep the lights on.

I consider advances in AI and productivity orthogonal to all this. It will affect how people do their jobs, what is possible, and the economics of that activity, but the fundamental dynamics of scale and architectural complexity will remain. They’ll still hire more people to grow and look for ways to apply them.
by bitwize | 2025-08-21 14:30:24+00:00
In the early 1980s there was a CP/M and MS-DOS program called Fancy Font that worked with Epson MX-80 printers. When you put the printer in graphics mode, it can position the pixels vertically with distances as small as 1/3 of the distance between pins. I'm not sure whether it moves the platen or moves the pins within the print head, but the upshot is that with 8 pins available in graphics mode, with 3 passes of the print head you can get 24 pixels of vertical resolution in one line.

Fancy Font rendered marked-up text on the computer using one or more of the supplied, or user-created, proportional bitmap fonts, and then used this technique in the Epson's graphics mode to print out very high quality (for an Epson MX-80), proportionally spaced, "typeset" text. Many a church newsletter and the like were rendered in Fancy Font at the dawn of the 1980s, and the program even received support for those new-fangled, high-resolution "laser printers" in its latter days, but as the Macintosh and other GUI-based WYSIWYG desktop publishing solutions became ascendant, Fancy Font faded into memory.
by jraph | 2025-08-21 14:30:31+00:00
"Yeah, quite busy over the next couple of weeks actually… the next couple of decades, really - awful how quickly time fills by itself these days, right? I'd have contributed towards lowering that 40% number which seems contrary to your goals anyway. But here's my card, should you need help with debugging something tricky some time in the near future and nobody manages to figure it out internally. I may be able to make room for you if you can afford it. I might be VERY busy though."
by Xss3 | 2025-08-21 14:30:44+00:00
In london black cabs are cheaper, safer (better regulations, less fake IDs), happier people in general (they chose cabbing as a long term goal rather than being forced into ubering on the weekend to keep up with rising cost of living), and actually know where they're going, or alternative routes, or even alternative destinations if you arrive to find your destination closed.
by Xunjin | 2025-08-21 14:30:46+00:00
Again, you assume those people have choice, you definitely should search more how people on these jobs are pressured to reach quotas and are abused in many ways. A simple search on Reddit you can see plenty of reports about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/callcentres/comments/1iiqbxh/the_re...

Abuses done by customers: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59577351
by EDEADLINK | 2025-08-21 14:30:59+00:00
Digging into this a bit the best mnenomic I have found for a trap on ARM is "udf #0" which works on all the arm's on godbolt (and with -mthumb).

This saves us from selecting between BRK and BKPT.

I have not found a single sequence of bytes that would work on thumb, armv7 and AARCH64.
by dahart | 2025-08-21 14:31:26+00:00
I hope the tech boards and CEOs don’t miss the not very subtle point that twitter has very quickly doubled in size in 2 years and is still growing after the big layoff and they had to scramble to fix some notable mistakes they made when firing that many people. 80% is already a hugely misleading marketing number.

Edit: huh, what’s with the downvote, is this wrong? Did I overstate it? Here’s the data: https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-employees/
by alpha_squared | 2025-08-21 14:31:45+00:00
No one else is adding the context of where things were at the time in tech...

> The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.

Facebook's API was incredibly open and accessible at the time and Instagram was overtaking users' news feeds. Zuckerberg wasn't happy that an external entity was growing so fast and onboarding users so easily that it was driving more content to news feeds than built-in tools. Buying Instagram was a defensive move, especially since the API became quite closed-off since then.

Your other points are largely valid, though. Another comment called the WhatsApp purchase "inspired", but I feel that also lacks context. Facebook bought a mobile VPN service used predominantly by younger smartphone users, Onavo(?), and realized the amount of traffic WhatsApp generated by analyzing the logs. Given the insight and growth they were monitoring, they likely anticipated that WhatsApp could usurp them if it added social features. Once again, a defensive purchase.
by metalman | 2025-08-21 14:31:49+00:00
waler ,nice, got an ausi saddle here in Nova Scotia,to go on "little thing" , a percheron/arab cross, 1900lbs,she can piroet on one foot, amongst many other exceptionaly agile manouvers, very brave,smart, curious, funny, and affectionate, part ballerina, part bulldozer and a whole lot of pony I knew nothing of horses, and she knew nothing of humans

* I have witnessed a short round of the horse game played by the mountain tribes of Afganistan and surounding areas, over a hundred for both teams, almost a uniform coulor from having been delivered in cattle cars men and horses alike,short match no goals, but one man was taken away on a stretcher with broken bones, and two horses were shot there on the field from untreatable broken legs
by jerf | 2025-08-21 14:32:00+00:00
"Obviously querying over project_shorthand = '@unison/cloud' isn't going to be able to use an index, so isn't going to be the most performant query"

If you know you're going to be querying on username and project shorthand a lot you're just a handful more lines away from instantiating that as a database function which can take your shorthand apart with string functions and get back to a high-performance query. Functions can return rowsets which you can then further filter with WHERE clauses.

Although in that case I think I'd just take the first and second parameters separately anyhow, since

debug_contribution("sophie", "@unison/cloud")

and

debug_contributions("sophie", "unison", "cloud")

isn't a big enough difference to be worth writing string-parsing code. But do as you like.
by mindslight | 2025-08-21 14:32:04+00:00
Very few will not want to wear the glasses.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode)

Last night I had a technical conversation with ChatGPT that was so full of wild hallucinations at every step, it left me wondering if the main draw of "AI" is better thought of as entertainment. And whether using it for even just rough discovery actually serves as a black hole for the motivation to get things done.
by ozim | 2025-08-21 14:32:32+00:00
Operation that uses software developers not as code monkeys but actual business problem solvers that have also business knowledge.

Operation that delivers features instead of burning budget on discussions.

Operation that uses test/acceptance environments where you deploy and validate the design so people actually see the outcome.

Obviously you have to write down the requirements - but writing down requirements is not design phase.

Design starts with idea, is written down to couple sentences or paragraphs then turned into code and while it is still on test/acceptance it still is design phase. Once feature goes to production in a release "design phase" is done, implementation and changes are part of design and finding out issues, limitations.
by runako | 2025-08-21 14:33:02+00:00
> Dead code has no “weight”

Assuming it is truly dead and not executable (which someone would have to verify is & remains the case), dead code exerts a pressure on every human engineer who has to read (around) it, determine that it is still dead, etc. It also creates risk that it will be inadvertently activated and create e.g. security exposure.
by lionkor | 2025-08-21 14:33:44+00:00
If your LLM is the only one that can reasonably maintain your software, you essentially created a new kind of lock-in, similar to what we already solved with open source a long, long time ago.

Once your LLM gets too expensive, goes out of business, and the competitors just don't quite do it the way your favorite LLM does it, you have a problem.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-21 14:34:50+00:00
I’m a great mentor when given the time. Two former interns for whom I was their official mentor during my time at AWS got return offers and are thriving two years after I left. I threw one in front of a customer to lead the project within three months after they came back after graduating. They were able to come through technically and had the soft skills. I told them my training approach is to “throw them at the bus. But never under the bus.”

I’m also a great teacher. That’s my $DayJob and has been for the past decade first bringing in new to the company processes and technologies, leading initiatives, teaching other developers, working with sales, CxOs (smaller companies), directors, explaining large “organizational transformation” proposals etc. working at startups and then doing the same in cloud consulting first working at AWS (ProServe full time role) and now working as a staff architect full time at a third party consulting company.

But when I have been responsible for delivery, I only hire people who have experience “dealing with ambiguity” and show that I can give them a decently complicated problem and they can take the ball and run with it and make decent decisions and do research. I don’t even do coding interviews - when I interview it’s strictly behavioral and talking through their past projects, decision making processes, how they overcame challenges etc.

In terms of AWS LPs, it’s “Taking Ownership” (yeah quoting Amazon LPs made me throw up a little).
Show HN: Imagenai – generate images directly from <img alt>
by andrevlok | 2025-08-21 14:35:28+00:00
I built a small npm package that turns your <img alt=""> text into real images.

No broken placeholders, no stock photo hunting. Just write good alt text and get images instantly.

It caches results so repeated prompts don’t cost extra.

npm: imagenai

Would love feedback from the community—would you use this in your projects? What features should I add next (lazy generation, custom styles, presets)?
by evilduck | 2025-08-21 14:35:45+00:00
I think you could both be right at the same time. We will see a large number of VC funded AI startup companies and feature clones vanish soon, and we will also see current or future LLMs continue to make inroads into existing business processes and increase productivity and profitability.

Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.
by benocodes | 2025-08-21 14:35:45+00:00
Been using ChartDB recently and it’s been quite good for my use case. I’m on Supabase, and found that the Supabase built-in ERD viewer kind of breaks down once you go past like 15 tables.

I tried a few other DB visualization tools but was turned off because it felt like I needed to learn another toolset, when I just wanted to import my schema and start working with it. ChartDB's approach was better for me, the single query import worked fine, and adding to the schema works how you'd expect.

Really hoping to see a feature for “diffs between the dev diagram and the live DB”. we’re collaborating on the diagram as a team, and it’d be great to track what changed between our current draft and the actual database.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-21 14:36:23+00:00
But as they stated, Google has already had ads inline with the search results, and it's been like that for well over a decade. (Long ago, ads used to only be on the sidebar)

Frankly, the AI section at the top seems like something Google would have been very reluctant to add since it saves the user from scrolling through the ad listings, and it was only added to compete with newer AI search services.
Ask HN: Are tech layoffs due to AI displacing or due to AI pilots failing?
by westurner | 2025-08-21 14:36:32+00:00
"90% of game developers are working with LLMs"

"90% of corporate AI pilots have failed"

"Entry-level engineers can't get hired" for expecting to AI things or for not knowing qualified engineer things like data structures, algorithms, refactoring theory and terminology?

Are tech layoffs due to AI displacing or due to AI pilots failing?
by mamonster | 2025-08-21 14:36:44+00:00
And if it doesn't pop? I mean I don't even disagree with there being massive bubble risks, but like my comment was more aimed at the fact that high margin debt doesn't mean anything without knowing the return of the asset you buy with debt and the debt cost.

Let's not even get into the fact that in jurisdictions with wealth taxes and interest deductions from income levering up actually "cuts" your tax bill.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-08-21 14:36:45+00:00
For over 20 years now everyone has been screaming:

“Advertisers are the users, consumers are the product” about every Web2.0 company which are the current corporate juggernauts

So they are not blind to user experience, they are providing exactly the user experience that their company has always been providing

The sole difference is they don’t have to care about the product experience (what you see) because humans form habits and rarely change them even if the experience is “degraded.”

There are no other options if you’re organized for alienated transactions which is every service and company ever.

What exactly do you expect?
by butlike | 2025-08-21 14:37:02+00:00
That's not playing into a bubble, that's creating a product for a market. You could also argue the Apple Vision is a misplay, or at least premature.

They've also arrogantly gone against consumer direction time and time again (PowerPC, Lightning Ports, no headphone jack, no replaceable battery, etc.)

And finally, sometimes their vision simply doesn't shake out (AirPower)
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-21 14:37:05+00:00
> This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.

This is fair, but I will say, there's a reason I put this section after "Please enable Time Machine."

...you actually could get rid of System Preferences, if you really wanted to, and use the Terminal to set Preferences instead. The reason I called out System Preferences is because, growing up, my younger brother did delete System Preferences! He didn't have Time Machine, and this didn't come up until we were traveling and he couldn't connect to a new wifi network. So that was a little annoying.

But I'm probably further making your point, and I do largely agree with you! The thing is, my computer is my home--I spend so much time there--and I just can't deal with having my home littered with Apple cruft.
by somat | 2025-08-21 14:37:32+00:00
If i had to guess, the implicit access to all your vars feels gross to some, it's why I don't use them. I mean they are probably fine, like you said, puts the symbol right where you want it. It just never felt right to me. so I keep up the double dance of explicate format() calls.

It is probably some sort of deep seated printf() based trauma.