MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fidotron | 2025-09-19 16:32:58+00:00
I believe the curious developers are now almost all poking hardware, to greater or lesser degrees. The two big projects of Meshtastic and Home Assistant absorb a huge amount of that side of the ecosystem, but also things like OpenWrt.

Web and the whole cloud/backend scene has become toxic because of the work culture around them. I know of a therapist on the west coast that has become completely snowed under by a surge of software developers claiming mental problems on account of their working environments, and she was in such disbelief that she was asking around if what she was hearing was possibly real. Other professionals simply would not accept what has been going on.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-19 16:33:05+00:00
Yeah, I agree with the way you described it here. Businesses taking corrective action because of customer pressure, or to avoid boycotts or bad media coverage, has long been around, and is just the market. So long as the gov doesn't get involved, that's fine.

If it was just a matter of ABC cancelling Kimmel because they were afraid they'd lose ratings, or even because their new owners dislike Kimmel and his messaging, that's fine and not suppression of free speech. It's the fear of gov action against them that is problematic. Even trying to curry favor with the gov by replacing a talk show host with one more favorable to the gov, is probably still within the realm of "business decision" and not suppression of free speech -- though on the other hand, media shouldn't _need_ to curry favor with the gov because the gov is supposed to be _impartial_ to speech and only gets involved if laws/regulations are being broken. But companies trying to get on the gov's good side seems to be a (bad) feature of capitalism that I don't think we'll ever get rid of.

By the way, the self-censoring that ABC did, for fear of gov retaliation, is exactly how things work in China. The gov doesn't need to censor media companies there -- they self-censor because they know the consequences if they don't.

So basically the Trump admin is no better than communist China (though China's not actually communist, but rather just authoritarian).
by tsycho | 2025-09-19 16:34:11+00:00
Interestingly, I feel the opposite for myself, as an experienced senior engineer.

I am doing more side projects, and finishing more projects, and feel a much greater level of confidence in starting new projects since I feel more confident that I will get at least an MVP working. These are not commercial efforts, I am just tinkering and scratching my own itches.

I attribute 3 reasons to this change:

- Vibe coding helps me do parts of the tech stack that I used to procrastinate on (UI, css)

- Gemini helps me solve all the inscrutable devops issues that used to block me in the past.

- A great open source tech stack that just works (Postgres, docker, node, ollama....)

AI helping me with the above has allowed me to focus on the "fun" parts of the side projects that I do. And the UIs also end up being much prettier than what I could create myself, which gives me the confidence to share my creations with friends and family.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-19 16:34:33+00:00
Here's a chart by country that you can research from. Highest on the chart look to be 50-60% in Pakistan, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan. With many other middle eastern countries in the 40s. Israel is at 10%, half of Turkey's rate and one spot above India so maybe not the best source for your interest.

Seems like there would be noticable standout family groups in those populations if your theory is true but I don't think it is. Totally not calling you out (your post is a natural response to OP) but it's online reference in my experience is just another way to 'other' one ethnic group and call them inbreds online:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/inbreedin...
by infecto | 2025-09-19 16:34:40+00:00
You’re missing the point. I already explained why Western kitchens often feel like “cooking in your bedroom”: open layouts, weak or recirculating hoods, and a lot of households with no real ventilation at all. The data backs this, about 10% with no hood, another 26–36% with recirculating, only, and plenty more with underpowered or poorly designed systems.

I never claimed hoods don’t exist, just that they’re often inadequate. And yes it’s wild to me that 10% of homes don’t have a hood and the other 30% or so are recirculating air which is close to the same. Whether the analogy clicks for you or not, it reflects the lived reality of anyone who cooks frequently (especially with high heat or strong flavors). That’s why Chinese-style kitchens, with closed layouts and strong direct venting, are so valued.

If your rebuttal boils down to “but bedrooms are for sleeping,” then maybe this discussion is not valuable.

Why do people insist on defending the oddest of hills over such a lived experience comment like the one I made. Now for sure if you rarely cook or if cooking is making Mac and cheese then sure this will be hard to understand.
by Y_Y | 2025-09-19 16:34:50+00:00
I realise now you were most likely referring to Hindenburg Research

https://hindenburgresearch.com/

But some may find amusing my initial interpretation, that this was an oblique reference to Paul von Hindenburg effectively abdicating to a different government (which has been likened by some to the current USA leadership).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-19 16:35:17+00:00
You could also spill a can of Mountain Dew over the $8,000 AI rig next to you. Oopsies can happen anywhere...

If it's for personal use, do whatever... there's nothing wrong with buying a $60,000 sports car if you get a lot of enjoyment out of driving it. (you could also lease if you want to trade up to the "faster model" next year) For business, renting (and managed hosting) makes more sense.
by chankstein38 | 2025-09-19 16:35:26+00:00
I still do this all of the time. I'm constantly exploring some new concept. Sometimes it requires programming, other times it doesn't, but either way... I just don't really have a pipeline setup to publish anything I look into. It's just so I can experience it. I feel bad for how much of the world is so focused on increasing metrics. Life is interesting and none of us will die wishing we had spent more of our lives working.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-09-19 16:35:46+00:00
I love computers, but I'm tired. I spend all day doing stand-ups and scrum and SAFE and then trying to build microservices that talk to other microservices that other teams have built and I just want to get it done with the minimal amount of explosions and call it a day. I can't afford to tinker at my job, and I have no energy at night. I made my hobby my job and it killed it.
by raincole | 2025-09-19 16:36:01+00:00
> Non-cancelable, of course

Have you contacted Microsoft and they rejected your request? EU is not asking SaaS providers to implement a 'Cancel Anytime' button. EU is not banning SaaS providers from selling one-year subscription either.

> this article

You mean this AI slop. The OP's article has very little to do with what EU Data Act is.

A much better article explaining EU Data Act: https://www.twobirds.com/da/insights/2025/the-data-act-what-...
by ChocolateGod | 2025-09-19 16:36:04+00:00
When they had the Luau beta regions up and running I gave it a whirl and it seemed performance was greatly improved over the old Mono system. Clicking "Save" was near instant to execute, great improvement to clicking save and waiting 10 seconds to know whether or not there's an issue in your script.

The only desire I have is if they could adopt FiveM-style helper functions which help wrap coroutines, namely being CreateThread(fn) and Wait(ms) (wrapper around yield inside that "thread") and Await/Promises (seems like someone already made an implementation for Luau? https://github.com/evaera/roblox-lua-promise)

FiveM adopting these makes it easy to make better performing scripts without having to mangle coroutines, which is vital given the Lua VM has to finish its current task before the frame is allowed to render.

https://github.com/citizenfx/fivem/blob/master/data/shared/c...
by nine_k | 2025-09-19 16:36:14+00:00
I don't think that the curious developer is gone, very much like I don't think that the organic, non-corporate Web is not gone. But the curious and passionate developer is hard to notice in the crowd of developers who learned the craft just for the money it was bringing. Similarly, an indie Web site built as a passion project is hard to come by among the numerous Web sites built to extract money.

There was time when being a software developer was not a particularly prestigious or well-paying job in corporations, or maybe a weird hobby of developing games for the toy 8-bit entertainment computers of the day. It was mostly attracting people who enjoyed interacting with computers, were highly curious, etc.

Then there was a glorious time when the profession of software engineering was growing in importance by the day, hackers became heroes, some made fortunes (see e.g. Carmack or, well, Zuckerberg). But this very wave was the harbinger of the demise: the field became a magnet for people who primarily wanted money. These people definitely can be competent engineers! But the structure of their motivation is different, so the culture was shifting, too. Now programming is a well-paid skilled trade, like being a carpenter or a nurse.

If you want hacker ethos again, look for an obscure field which is considered weird, is not particularly well-paid, but attracts you.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-19 16:36:28+00:00
For me, it's simple. If I didn't need to earn a paycheck I'd be tinkering day in, day out, chasing anything and everything that piqued my interest even a little. That's what I did when I was young with no responsibilities and no worries about the future, and it's my natural state.

That isn't reality, however, and so most of that energy is consumed by my day job, and it feels wasteful to put what little remains into projects that have little chance of any practical return. Any time I start settling into work taken up out of pure personal interest, the "responsible adult" part of my personality starts stratching at the back of my mind and pushing me to go do something more productive.

Such is life.
by friggeri | 2025-09-19 16:36:29+00:00
In the last 50 years, software has morphed from a hobbyist pursuit, to a nerdy subculture, to a trillion+ dollars industry. This has caused a pretty significant mix shift in the software developer community: the reason driving the mean developer into this field in 2025 is very different from that of the 2015 developer, and that of the 2005 developer.

Arguably there might be more curious tinkerers nowadays, but they might represent a smaller slice of the pie.
by rob74 | 2025-09-19 16:36:37+00:00
As I wrote in another comment, I think the Sagrada Familia is a worthy successor for the grand gothic cathedrals you mentioned, because Gaudí made the most out of late 19th century technology, same as the medieval builders made the most out of the technology available at their time. I mean, just look at those branching columns: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia#/media/Da... But, to each his own.

I would like to add two (former) churches to your list: the Hagia Sophia (it's really humbling to think that it was already standing for 900+ years when the Turks conquered Constantinople 500+ years ago) and the Pantheon in Rome, which despite being several centuries older, had the largest dome in the world for more than 1000 years.
by bnchrch | 2025-09-19 16:36:55+00:00
I love the message, and generally agree.

Theres a layer of pessimism to engineers and hacker news that has been steadily growing (as I assume the average age increases).

To me it's hit a critical level and I have to disregard most negative comments here by default because I can no longer trust the average commenter to have a productive balance of optimism and curiousity.

----

On a different note, the point the author is trying to make is massively undercut by the ad spam all over their page.

It was so grotesque (and out of character for a dev blog) that my first assumption was that I had a malicious extension somewhere.
by talkingtab | 2025-09-19 16:36:59+00:00
Is anyone interested in starting a community software development system?

Ownership, royalties, voting would be embedded in a block chain. Proof of work would be by vote. And votes given for proof of work. Or something like that. In music they have "royalties" and it seems like that could be used for contributors.

If you would like to be part of a discussion send an email to my firefox relay 3tdm026f9@mozmail.com

Feel free to use a relaly.
by uncircle | 2025-09-19 16:36:59+00:00
> Like the joke about the economists not picking up the $20 bill on the ground?

For those like me that don't know the joke:

Two economists are walking down the street. One of them says “Look, there’s a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk!” The other economist says “No there’s not. If there was, someone would have picked it up already.”
by StableAlkyne | 2025-09-19 16:37:06+00:00
The best model I've seen is the 3M-style "10% Time"

Under that model, 10% of your time is completely up to you (within reason) to work on things that aren't your main project or scope.

Works out well for R&D or more open ended positions, since you can have the flexibility to explore hunches without having to justify a whole project around it.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-09-19 16:37:38+00:00
I got out of the homelab game as I finished my transition from DevOps to Engineering Lead, and it was simply massively overbuilt for what I actually needed. I replaced an ancient Dell R700 series, R500 series, and a couple supermicros with 3 old desktop PCs in rack enclosures and cut my electric bill nearly $90/month.

Fuckin nutty how much juice those things tear through.
by Scubabear68 | 2025-09-19 16:37:57+00:00
Agree, the money is the key here.

I got started in the 1980s, and super-curious and technical people were the norm. We were incredibly strongly attracted to computers.

The first real growth in computers in that kind of era was Wall Street and banks. Wall Street in particular started paying huge bonuses to developers because it was clear that software could make huge piles of money. Then we started seeing more people joining in for the money who were not necessarily passionate about technology.

Then came the dot com era and bust, and then the rise of social media, FAANG, and absurd corporate valuations allowing ridiculous total comp to developers, and the needle moved even more towards money.

The net result is the curious and the passionate are still here, but our numbers are massively diluted.

I come places like here to find that passionate niche.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-09-19 16:37:58+00:00
Maybe that's because you're homeless and don't want to be. The Leatherman could have settled down, per the article he "had money", but he just didn't want to.

I was intentionally homeless for 4 months, just riding my bike all around western Europe, just setting up my tent in a random woodland every night. I didn't have a safe harbor, except for the knowledge that I could get a job and rent an apartment if I wanted to.

It was not hard at all. In fact, I loved every minute of it. I lived/worked on a farm and slept on a bed for 2 weeks(WWOOFing), and I could not wait to get back out on the road again.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-19 16:38:43+00:00
And other non-food related slow-catastrophes. From William Gibson's The Peripheral, on The Jackpot:

> nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.
by i_s | 2025-09-19 16:38:45+00:00
If I type the name of an enum, then `.`, (and for my settings explicitly request autocomplete suggestions from VsCode), I either don't get anything, or I get a list of 50+ identifiers that have nothing to do with the enum. There seem to be a lot of cases like that where there is a very obvious context, but the suggestions are completely detached from that context. Stuff that works for any mainstream language like Java or TypeScript in just about every IDE or editor with a plugin.
by kllrnohj | 2025-09-19 16:38:52+00:00
> The homelab group on Reddit is full of people who don't understand any of this - they have full racks in their house that could be replaced with one high-end desktop.

A lot of that group is making use of the IO capabilities of these systems to run lots of PCI-E devices & hard drives. There's not exactly a cost-effective modern equivalent for that. If there were cost-effective ways to do something like take a PCI-E 5.0 x2 and turn it into a PCI-E 3.0 x8 that'd be incredible, but there isn't really. So raw PCI-E lane count is significant if you want cheap networking gear or HBAs or whatever, and raw PCI-E lane count is $$$$ if you're buying new.

Also these old systems mean cheap RAM in large, large capacities. Like 128GB RAM to make ZFS or VMs purr is much cheaper to do on these used systems than anything modern.
by SoftTalker | 2025-09-19 16:38:53+00:00
I think it's github and "social" coding. You used to be able to build something out of curiosity or for your own use and be happy with that.

Now it's on github, and if you don't get enough followers or forks or it's not in a popular language or framework or you haven't updated it recently enough it's seen as a "dead project" or a failure. A project can never be "done" because then it's dead. That's demotivating.

Social media damages everything it touches.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-09-19 16:39:45+00:00
Your latest reply amounts to once again claiming that myself and another poster are both wrong and you are right about "FSD" being incomparable to lane assist and other such features. The conclusion to draw here, from the majority, is that there is a chance that you might not be the best judge of the matter. Calling "blind" everyone who doesn't agree with your opinion of incomparability doesn't help your case.

> assuming we agree that "intervention" means "take over for the car"

I don't think that's a safe assumption. If something requires my full attention and body movement for the entire drive, I would not consider that FSD.

> This is silly. I wouldn't apply that standard to anything else, and I doubt you would either. Who would you trust more to give you honest feedback about a Vitamix blender – your friend with good judgement who owns one, or an employee at KitchenAid?

Assuming good faith here, that you genuinely aren't aware of this, but I regret to inform you that the biased fanaticism of tesla owners is unmatched by nearly any other car company (maybe ferrari is a rival there), or indeed nearly any company at all. Thus, given 2 people, one a tesla owner, the other an owner of a tesla competitor, the latter is more likely to be an unbiased source on teslas or vehicles in general than the former. I thought the last paragraph of my previous post explained this, but here we are, so I'll explain better next time.
by catigula | 2025-09-19 16:39:47+00:00
1. You've made the mistake of assuming I'm religious. I am not. This is my lived experience.

2. I think that, largely, materialism is a system that isn't merely arrogant (which it clearly is, as outlined above), but also unfulfilling. You can simply ignore the concept of death but if you choose to really wrestle/engage with it in a materialist framework you will see yourself staring into an abyssal, terrifying maw. I think most atheists don't engage with this concept because it's difficult to do so, just as many religious people believe in religion because it's convenient to do so. It's a fairly even cut.

I've already stated I'm not religious, which I'm not. I share the scientific view that human behavior is explicable so far as we can tell via mechanical/biological mechanisms, behaviors such as altruism not being explained because they are objectively good, but only being explained as preferences we've evolved because they were conducive to our genetic survival.

But, let me propose something from a scientific/rational point of view to you, a brief experiment sort of in this vein. Paraphrasing, Jesus said something like "if you do not believe me, believe the works".

I know this may seem a massive imposition, or horrific undertaking, or you may not be able to engage with it meaningfully, but, if you are able to humor me, I'd propose this:

Take all of the core precepts of what most religions might propose as being 'good' - there is variance but that's alright, humans disagree in every domain on everything - and apply them to your life.

Nip lies in the bud. Road-rage, rage at people on the internet? Let it go. Forgive those people and treat them well. Give people the benefit of the doubt, even people you hate.

You won't be perfect, but don't let that discourage you.

I'm encouraging this experiment because I believe you will "believe the works" and see that there is an element of the human experience that is genuinely transcendant and you can do these things not merely because they are nice or convenient and may be easy to do in the moment, but because they are hard to do, require constant correction and should be done as you are compelled to treat the gift of your own existence with care.

I suspect we are compelled to behave transcendently for our own good though my only proof is lived experience that merely behaving as if this is true is immensely fulfilling. Quite the coincidence.
by lubujackson | 2025-09-19 16:39:56+00:00
I feel the opposite. Old enough to remember when SE was not an attractive career path but something people stumbled into after hacking around with electronics. The last 10-20 years have felt like an endless September situation starting with the "tech bros" culture and the ever widening firehose of CS majors who seemed to choose CS with as much enthusiasm as most finance majors.

Personally, I am excited that AI is steering people away from tech that aren't actually interested in it. Reverting to the mean a bit. And like the downvoted comment below, I actually think a swath of "vibe coders" are much more inline with the hacker mindset than most developers. A lot of them are the "make a quick buck" types but there is also a ton of insane tinkering going on, which is awesome.

But maybe we are talking about two different things. There is a distinction between "I want to hack on this to see how it works" and "I want to hack on this to see if this IDEA works". So product hackers are ascending while engineering hackers are starting to dwindle.

It reminds me of the shift in car culture when car computers meant you couldn't just rebuild a rusty car over a summer but a new culture of car hackers bubbled up mostly around modding cars for drifting or whatever. The people were different, the work was different, but the curiosity, excitement and subculture grew into something very similar.