MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by breckenedge | 2025-08-01 23:08:19+00:00
Apparently discussing this report:

https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Ch...

Tech layoffs are up 36% YoY and positions are less than half of what they were last year.

The 10k number for “due to AI” seems to be a newly tracked option, since its up 10k from last month.
by gerdesj | 2025-08-01 23:08:28+00:00
I'm still getting to grips with all this AI stuff but I do know SIP n RTP rather well. Your project looks ideal for me to play with.

My initial project will be to replace my aging parent's and my home FreePBX IVR with something a bit more useful. At the moment it requests you press 1 to make the phones ring and that drops pretty much all unwanted calls but that will soon be automatically defeated.

I do also have some rather more commercial ideas but baby steps. Mind you a RPi based drop in box with a decent auto attendant for say £100 hardware, open source software and some fettling time seems a pretty good opportunity. You could go for somewhat cheaper hardware. The UK is being migrated away from copper A and B wires to what is called SOGEA and/or FTTP. Basically its going to be all VoIP for telephony from pretty much now on. The good old days of an analogue handset that is powered by the line will mostly go away within a few years. On the bright side our signalling was bloody weird and SIP is nearly eternal!
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-01 23:09:09+00:00
> violating a contract isn't against the law

Being binding is kinda of the whole purpose of a contract. If violating it is void under the law the company should change lawyers.

To put your argument under a different angle, there are many written laws you can violate with very limited consequences if any, but they are still laws.

Contracts aren't written by the country, and enforcing them is civil matter so there's nuance, but violating an enforceable contract you provably agreed to is against the law. Whether you can get away with it is another question.
by godelski | 2025-08-01 23:09:11+00:00
I think you're missing some use cases and some parameters.

For the average home, this doesn't make sense. But for a hospital? A data center? There are plenty of places that are happy to pay a premium for an independent, redundant, and/or emergency power source. Somewhere like a hospital is going to get big advantages from something like this because it not only provides electricity but hot water (reducing the electrical demand that would go to hot water creation).

There are also big advantages to remote places. Getting power in Alaska[0]. It's even difficult to get it in places like Alberta or Montana, both of which will also would take advantage of the heat source.

Even at 5 years, this is more reliable than something like a gas generator and has a lot of logistical advantages. This says it does 1MW or electric power and 1.9MW of thermal. I found a 1MW generator[1], and it looks to consume between 77-87 gal/hr. A gallon weighs 7lbs, so 80 gal is 560lbs and takes 0.3m3. At one day's consumption (1920 gal) you need to be able to store over 13klbs and it'll take up 7.3m3 (not including the volume of the container and that it needs to be stored somewhere that is dry but also well ventilated). On top of that, diesel has a self life of 6mo (can extend to a year), so you're going to be doing a lot of deliveries...

Given that, I can see a lot of places that would gladly make those trade-offs.

Also, if it can fit self-contained in a container, the parts are going to be much smaller. You gotta start somewhere, right? Doesn't seem a bad idea to start with edge customers who are willing to pay a premium.

[0] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-AK/72h/hourly

[1] https://mart.cummins.com/imagelibrary/data/assetfiles/007036...
by atakan_gurkan | 2025-08-01 23:09:57+00:00
This reminds me of the "illegal opcodes" in Commodore 64. I believe they were even present in their entirety in Commodore 128's (which uses 8502, not 6502 as its main CPU) C64 emulation mode. If someone knows how or why they remained part of 6502's instruction set over C64's lifetime, I really would like to know. I suspect, it was deliberate since "customers relied on them".
by tokyovigilante | 2025-08-01 23:11:27+00:00
This is the most coherent and IMO accurate take on AI/LLM I have seen in 5 years.

As a specialist in one of the original industries Geoffrey Hinton predicted would be gone (Radiology) my job remains safe and even more in demand 9 years later.

Meanwhile, as a hobbyist programmer, I’m suddenly able to build multiple production tools solving real problems, simply because AI agents are doing the scut-work for me and optimising my time into code review and architectural design. For $200/month, it’s paying for itself many times over.
by carloswebdev1 | 2025-08-01 23:12:03+00:00
Location: Itajubá, Minas Gerais, Brazil (UTC3) fully remote and happy to align with the company time windows.

Remote: Yes — open to remote roles globally.

Willing to relocate: No, remote only.

Technologies: Test automation (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, REST-assured, Postman) Languages: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Bash, SQL CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI Containers/DevOps: Docker, basic Kubernetes Database testing: Strong SQL, PostgreSQL internals, performance benchmarking (JMeter, pgbench, custom SQL) Test practices: BDD (Cucumber), accessibility (WCAG), shift-left testing, regression analysis

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XYgjvJp1JRN6KTZ8vlx2R9xiA1g...

Email: carloshenrique.webdev@gmail.com

Summary: QA Automation Engineer with 3+ years of hands-on experience designing scalable test frameworks and automating complex web, API, and database systems. Recent focus on database extension testing, performance analysis, and CI/CD integration in cloud-native and containerized environments. Strong understanding of PostgreSQL internals, query optimization, and benchmarking tools. Looking for junior/middle QA/test roles where quality, performance, and reliability matter.
by codeforafrica | 2025-08-01 23:13:15+00:00
Location: Africa or REMOTE

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes, to any location in Africa, where I can get the necessary permission to live and work. Occasional travel is possible.

Technologies: Linux, Front or Backend Web Development, General Software Development, System Administration.

Résumé/CV: on request (software development, CTO, mentoring, training, fluent in English and German, german citizenship)

Contact: Email: see profile or http://codingforafrica.at/

Like this Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31518945], I am looking for similar work, but I am open to work on any interesting project. I am a European software developer who has lived and worked on four continents. Now it's time to move on and so I am in the process to relocate to Africa.

I have more than a decade of experience running a company, doing software development, support and training and mentoring adults and students, as well as working on educational projects, and I am willing to take on a mixture of roles as needed to support a project.

I value good teamwork over fancy tech, and I don't shy away from working on legacy code. I am primarily motivated by solving problems, so let me help you solve your problems.

I am open to work for a company anywhere as long as the work can be done fully remote from Africa.

While I could find a job elsewhere I believe that the experience living in an area where my work is going to have an impact gives me a better understanding of the needs of the location I am serving. Whether it is through direct contact with clients and users or just by being part of a local community and learning about the reality of living there.

In addition, I want to use some of my income to hire local interns and junior developers and train them in order to pass on my experience. I also sponsor children that otherwise can't afford to go to school (see my website). If you want to support this, I would love to work with you. Also if you are interested in hiring African developers yourself. I can help you build up a team for you.
by codeforafrica | 2025-08-01 23:13:34+00:00
SEEKING WORK | local or REMOTE

Location: Africa or REMOTE

Willing to relocate: yes, to any location in Africa, where I can get the necessary permission to live and work. Occasional travel is possible.

Technologies: Linux, Front or Backend Web Development, General Software Development, System Administration.

Résumé/CV: on request (software development, CTO, mentoring, training, fluent in English and German, german citizenship)

Contact Email: see profile or http://codingforafrica.at/

Like this Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31518945], I am looking for similar work, but I am open to work on any interesting project. I am a European software developer who has lived and worked on four continents. Now it's time to move on and so I am in the process to relocate to Africa.

I have more than a decade of experience running a company, doing software development, support and training and mentoring adults and students, as well as working on educational projects, and I am willing to take on a mixture of roles as needed to support a project.

I value good teamwork over fancy tech, and I don't shy away from working on legacy code. I am primarily motivated by solving problems, so let me help you solve your problems.

I am open to work for companies anywhere as long as the work can be done fully remote from Africa.

While I could find a job elsewhere I believe that the experience living in an area where my work is going to have an impact gives me a better understanding of the needs of the location I am serving. Whether it is through direct contact with clients and users or just by being part of a local community and learning about the reality of living there.

In addition, I want to use some of my income to hire local interns and junior developers and train them in order to pass on my experience. I also sponsor children that otherwise can't afford to go to school (see my website). If you want to support this, I would love to work with you. Also if you are interested in hiring African developers yourself. I can help you build up your team.
by twothreeone | 2025-08-01 23:13:43+00:00
I don't see what's hard to understand about this.. other providers have weekly limits and daily limits. If you max out your daily every day you might still hit your weekly after 3-4 days of usage, meaning you cannot send more for the rest of the week. This is saying that no such weekly limit exists on top of the daily. E.g. see https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/28/anthropic-unveils-new-rate...
by jmillikin | 2025-08-01 23:13:46+00:00
Among ecosystems based on YAML-formatted configuration defaulting to YAML 1.1 is nearly universal. The heyday of YAML was during the YAML 1.1 era, and those projects can't change their YAML parsers' default version to 1.2 without breaking extant config files.

By the time YAML 1.2 had been published and implementations written, greenfield projects were using either JSON5 (a true superset of JSON) or TOML.

> While JSON numbers are grammatically simple, they're almost always distinct > from how you'd implement numbers in any language that has JSON parsers, > syntactically, exactness and precision-wise.

For statically-typed languages the range and precision is determined by the type of the destination value passed to the parser; it's straightforward to reject (or clamp) a JSON number `12345` being parsed into a `uint8_t`.

For dynamically-typed languages there's less emphasis on performance, so using an arbitrary-precision numeric type (Python's Decimal, Go's "math/big" types) provide lossless decoding.

The only language I know of that really struggles with JSON numbers is, ironically, JavaScript -- its BigInt type is relatively new and not well integrated with its JSON API[0], and it doesn't have an arbitrary-precision type.

[0] See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... for the incantation needed to encode a BigInt as a number.
by hwchase17 | 2025-08-01 23:13:53+00:00
Author here!

Main takeaways (which I'd love feedback on) are:

There are series of agents recently (claude code, manus, deep research) which execute tasks over longer time horizons particular well

At the core of it, it's just an LLM running in a loop calling tools... but when you try to do this naively (or at least, when I try to do it) the LLM struggles with doing long/complex tasks

So how do these other agents accomplish it?

These agents all do similar things, namely:

1. They use a planning tool

2. They use sub agents

3. They use a file system like thing to offload context

4. They have a detailed system prompt (prompting isn't dead!)

I don't think any of these things individually is novel... but I also think that they are not super common place to do when building agents. And the combination of them is (I think) an interesting insight!

Would love any feedback :)
by sfblah | 2025-08-01 23:14:02+00:00
Is there some written work online that represents your viewpoint on the NYT? I'd genuinely like to read it. I'm a centrist person who can absolutely see that Fox is on the right. But, I can also see that NPR and NYT are on the left. It's hard for me to understand how someone could with any seriousness disagree. But I'm interested in reading more about your viewpoint on this.
by tguvot | 2025-08-01 23:14:07+00:00
you overestimate customers. most of them not going to bother to read documentation . used to work closely with big telecoms. amount of support calls that are resolved by "make sure that connector is tight" is crazy high (they invented f-type connectors that work even when they are not tightened properly). "reboot it", solves most of remaining issues.

imho, human populated callcenters may actually become a good business model in a few years, after everybody will fire their personal to replace it with AI, and will discover that in some cases you need humans
by godelski | 2025-08-01 23:14:21+00:00
I used to work on novel shielding designs. There's some pretty interesting stuff out there but in the vast majority of situations it is just cheaper and easier to pour more concrete.

To add to acidburn's comment, material choice is also highly dependent on the energy levels and particle types. At high energies you basically just maximize mass. At lower energies (more typical for reactors) you can start taking advantage of atomic cross-sections and electromagnetism. That's why they like borated concrete, high neutron cross-section, but only really effective for "thermal neutrons".
by gwoplock | 2025-08-01 23:15:00+00:00
Vizio/Walmart | ONSITE(Addison/Dallas TX)

We are looking for a highly technically skilled and experienced Senior Software Engineer with a passion for embedded systems and a deep understanding of Smart TV applications to join our team. You will be responsible for the design, development, and implementation of cutting-edge software for the next generation of Vizio Smart TVs.

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by rhelz | 2025-08-01 23:16:44+00:00
THANK YOU for this. It actually advances the conversation. Tell me if I'm reading these numbers wrong, but on this page in the handbook you linked:

https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm

it gives historical data for how big the revisions have been. Looks like historically, the revisions have been at least an order of magnitude or two less than 250,000. In fact to get revisions anywhere near that large, you have to go back to April of 2020. Which was when the whole world was going bananas because of COVID.

Unless I'm reading the data wrong (always a possibility) it really does seem like a 250,000 downward revision, to like 17,000, a two-order-of magnitude miss, does seem to be anomalous.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-08-01 23:17:58+00:00
Main takeaway:

>People don’t reject evolution because they’ve carefully studied the evidence. They reject it because it threatens their identity. This creates a context where education alone can’t overcome deeply held convictions.

I'd say unreflective skepticism of received wisdom post (pre)teen is a core part of "Calvinist" identities, rural or urban

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points_of_Calvinism

IME this is sometimes mitigated by identity whiplashes at a young age eg smartest room elephant -> most foolish one
by sklivvz1971 | 2025-08-01 23:18:55+00:00
I am the "grand OP", the guy who was called out by the post. Statistically, only 20-30% of the candidates are nervous and about half of those end up passing. So we see no bias due to nervousness. On the other hand, the people that do not pass, in large part not nervous fail for different reasons:

- some are completely and utterly incompetent (they can't write a line of code at all)

- some write some code but it's just bad quality or they are incredibly slow

- some lack basic notions we require (e.g. don't know what a byte is)

- some blatantly cheat with ChatGPT or other tools

- some rage quit ("how dare you ask me to code")

- some fall into deep rabbit holes, overthink everything and make a mess

On the other hand the people that pass:

- all of them solve this in half the time we give

- even if they are nervous

In other words there's a chasm between the hires and no hires. Assuming that this interview only measures nervousness is a completely wrong notion.

BTW if you are interested in helping us transitioning the world from fossil to renewables, we are hiring: https://jobs.intellisync.it/
by loa_in_ | 2025-08-01 23:19:40+00:00
It's a state of psyhical depletion combined with strong emotional distress caused by performing repetitive intellectual work with not sufficient emotional rewards and not enough variety. Keeping it up for months or years leads to dysregulation and makes the activity harder to harder to perform, until the only option is to avoid performing that activity altogether for months (and sort of debiasing you brain). You can get burnt out on any intellectual task. Think of keeping up an intense physical training exercise without variation in hopes of increasing size of a specific muscle to find instead that you hurt that muscle by overtraining and instead you can't move it anymore.
by epolanski | 2025-08-01 23:20:27+00:00
I don't think the planet has 800M people making 2k/month.

You would be surprised but 2000$ / month is top 5% salary in the world more or less, so it's less than 200M people in the world.

In Italy, an advanced economy, that's above the median. It's also above what half the Japanese population makes.
by devnullbrain | 2025-08-01 23:21:01+00:00
Me. Because, for about 2 weeks during lay-off gardening leave, I did study it.

On one hand this demonstrates that it isn't useful for testing innate skill.

On the other hand, it was the best paid work I've ever done. It was an essential part in me getting a job (not at Meta) that paid multiples better than previous roles.

This work allowed me to place myself in a group of people who can pass the test. Some of the people who are outside this group would make fine employees but don't want to or think to put in this work, for understandable reasons. But all of the lackadaisical applicants will fall outside this group. I get to signal that I'm not one of them.

I spent 4 years in higher education for a non-essential positive signal to employers: 2 weeks is nothing.

In the past I hated Leetcode, now I've begun to think of it as an opportunity. While as an individual my opportunity to shift the consensus on this form of interview is low, my opportunity to benefit from the arbitrage is high. Don't hate the player, etc.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-01 23:21:01+00:00
Counter-strategy for police: If a corporation fails to provide fast & competent response for such a case, then stop wasting time and broadcast an Amber Alert. Do not be shy about naming and shaming the corporation in that alert's text.

And when the corp gets pissed about the truckload of shit that dumps on their reputation? Respond with corporate-speak BS - about having to follow your own procedures, and the safety of the child being paramount, and "Uber" being an important identifier for the perp's car, and so on.
Show HN: ReplyFast Smart AI replies for faster customer messaging
by Thyrdev | 2025-08-01 23:22:54+00:00
Hi HN, I built ReplyFast to help save time when replying to emails using AI. You can choose the tone of your reply (formal, friendly, direct, etc.), and the AI adapts to your preferences over time. ReplyFast offers quick suggestions or fully personalized responses. I’d love to hear your feedback, ideas, or critiques thanks!
by chmod775 | 2025-08-01 23:23:05+00:00
> It’s just a way of punishing a company for layoffs, probably a good thing because you want companies to be scared of layoffs.

Why? Because that makes the average editor pleased with themselves? I'm sorry but I can't eat or wear that as a hat.

Personally I don't want companies to self-sabotage by not laying off people when they need to. Worst case you'll have companies file for bankruptcy en masse after turning human resources into hot air useful to nobody: now we've really fucked up. The more efficiently labor is allocated in an economy, the better everyone will be off.

And yes, I recognize that high churn through frequent growth and contraction phases is also inefficient, but bad leadership is a tangential issue at best.
by cnst | 2025-08-01 23:23:34+00:00
Well, that's a bit of my time gone (re)looking into GeoHot, patent trolls, and now comma.ai.

Comma.AI by George Hotz sounds very interesting, it's basically a $999 "comma 3x" smartphone with an OBD-II connector and a $99 wiring harness that can add an equivalent of a Tesla Autopilot to many cars manufactured in the last 10 years (even Tesla's own cars, too), for a total cost of $1098, whilst being OSS and available on GitHub, and — get this — even having ssh access to your car! Optional cloud subscription plans are $10/mo for your own SIM, or $24/mo with bundled cellular data.

Sadly, it does NOT have an equivalent of Tesla Sentry Mode yet, https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/29912, which is kind of unfortunate, because Tesla's own implementation of Sentry Mode is using 250W of power — depleting the entire 80kWh battery from 80% to 30% in like 7 days (".5*80kWh over 7 days" = 238W) — openpilot would have been a nice alternative at what'd presumably be around 5W or less ("40kWh / 5W" is 333 days).
by homebrewer | 2025-08-01 23:25:07+00:00
> I think alacritty is better

Can I ask why? It starts slower (has a significant lag on old hardware), has way less useful features (like tabs), has the same responsiveness, and loses in benchmarks (for what they're worth). I see no reason to use it when kitty/ghostty/konsole/foot exist (depending on one's preferences), but people obviously do.