MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cornbilly | 2025-09-30 04:08:25+00:00
When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I know they likely won't be able to solve in the interview because I want to see how they think about things. The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's going to take a good while for them to on-board. For us, it usually takes about year to get them to the point that they can contribute without some form of handholding. However, that also mostly holds true for seniors coming to us from other industries.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-30 04:08:28+00:00
The gap between juniors and seniors today is really not that big. I know a lot of people with senior in their title that are closer to a junior. Have them actually read the docs for a month straight, and a junior would know more than a senior.

Also, if you really want to hire a senior, and you can't compete on pay, maybe compete by going remote? Almost all the job listings I see are for hybrid roles. Do they realize they're just throwing away all the candidates in other cities? Are hiring managers/CEOs masochists?
by erichi | 2025-09-30 04:09:11+00:00
Solo-building this project for some time, going to launch the first version in a week or so!

https://elmo.dev - a tool that automatically builds a searchable knowledge base around your project based on your conversation with coding tools.

It works automatically and doesn't require your attention. To build KB it uses same tool as you (claude/codex/gemini) so it uses the same quota and you don't have to pay additionally for the AI running it.

The result is ./elmodocs directory in the root of your project. You can reference CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/GEMINI.md to this directory or directly include the whole directory or its parts into the coding context.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-09-30 04:11:11+00:00
I wanted something similar for a worldview. I want an app where I can dump all the things that actively go into shaping my worldview and then when someone wants to know why I think the way I do, I will share them the link of my worldview board. We are not famous people to have our memoir written but this is another way to peek into minds of strangers.
by cyphar | 2025-09-30 04:13:01+00:00
The license also says that the software comes with "no warranty of any kind" but companies still tend to pressure maintainers to do unpaid work on their behalf to fix issues or otherwise maintain maintain the project in a way that is convenient for them.

In GP's analogy, this would be like the reseller coming back and asking you to start making gluten free varieties, using a particular kind of flour, or improving the QA of the cookie shaping process to meet their customer demands. It is beyond reasonable to say "I'm willing to do it for a fee" (or even just "no") at that point. (I also think it's reasonable to say that the reseller should give something back even if they are not legally required to do so. Not all social norms are codified in legal contracts.)

The example in TFA of Heroku wanting an older release branch to continue being maintained for free falls under that umbrella -- just as you are free to do whatever you want with the source code, as a maintainer I am also free to say that extra work will cost extra. In that situation, Heroku can either pay one of their own engineers to continue maintaining old release branches and working around issues, or they can pay the upstream maintainer to do that work.

IMHO the "gatekeeping" model is the only funding model that has actually ever worked for open source software -- it's how RedHat, SUSE, and many other open source companies make their money. (I work for SUSE, but also maintain a fair number of open source projects.)
by ThrownOffGame | 2025-09-30 04:14:34+00:00
My final stretch of employment lasted from May 2020-March 2024. My company went through mergers and acquisitions and 4 rounds of layoffs, and I managed to tenaciously hang in there (I was even "terminated" 4 times but they just kept re-hiring me!)

I was definitely competing with entry-level kids who had just graduated, even those who had just graduated from the boot camps we provided. And I was hired with no college degree, no certifications, and nothing relevant on my résumé since 1999. So yeah, I got minimum-wage treatment.

It was a fantastic, cushy WFH job. The parameters were ideal for my style. The supervisors were very, very patient and encouraging. I was a rock star, if I do say so myself, but there were plenty of competent colleagues who had plenty to contribute in the same role as me.

Eventually I earned 3 certifications and a college completion certificate, and that made zero difference. No raises, no promotions, no acknowledgements of my achievements from my employer.

So, college isn't all it's cracked up to be. Yes, seniors are competing with juniors and entry-levels. It's fierce. Be the best and do your best, and don't be reluctant to settle for a good employer.
by aspenmayer | 2025-09-30 04:14:54+00:00
Another option is to source the same files from a private torrent from a public one by the same uploaded/release group, and then recheck and upload the same blocks to the private tracker as a completed or nearly completed download, without it affecting your quota much if at all, with all uploads benefitting your own ratio.

Many private trackers also have a higher ratio multiplier for dead or nearly dead torrents to promote seeding of those torrents specifically. I’ve also seen quota-free days and torrents that can be downloaded without a quota impact, uploads of which will help your quota get back in the black.
by pc9 | 2025-09-30 04:15:08+00:00
I recently released JazzEar, an iOS app for ear training. Specifically focuses on improving recognition of chord progressions you would hear in jazz standards.

https://jazzear.com/

Now I'm working on a smaller app for jazz musicians to manage their tune list and act as a tool to help practice and review tunes. I wanted this app to tell me what tunes on my list I haven't played in a while (and might forget), or try different keys or exercises on the tune and track what I found difficult.
by johnmwilkinson | 2025-09-30 04:15:08+00:00
I recently published a book about coding, and put it all online for free: https://elementsofcode.io

I suppose it has moved from “what are you working” to “what have you worked on” territory, but since I wrapped up the website just about a week ago it still feels quite fresh.

Always interested in feedback and what folks find useful! It’s focused on the mechanics of writing understandable software, which I think is especially important in the age of AI slop.
by meow_mix | 2025-09-30 04:16:33+00:00
As someone who has been hiring juniors recently. I disagree with pretty much all these points:

Great juniors learn fast and search for feedback. It’s easier to manage them. They want to improve and know what you think about their work.

--> Very skeptical of this comment. It's harder to manage someone that needs managed so directly, period.

Loyalty. engineers who you train from the beginning tend to stay longer. They understand your systems deeply and can mentor the next generation of junior engineers.

--> They really don't. They're looking for a foot in the door.

Higher ceiling. A motivated junior engineer often has more upside. You're getting someone at the beginning of their growth curve rather than the middle or end.

--> Maybe? Tough to tell. They often leave.

Juniors bring fresh energy to the team - they want to learn, and they have a drive to prove themselves and succeed. Their motivation can be contagious! The existing seniors in your team will enjoy working with smart and motivated developers.

--> Not always. Most just want a job and are easily discouraged. Some are like this though.

Juniors are not restricted by what they know. They haven't been trained to think "that's just how we do things." They’ll not try to reuse the same technologies from previous companies, or recreate those ‘amazing’ design patterns that were useful only in a specific context. It’s not just being AI-native, it’s about having less resistance to change.

--> This one I sort of agree with
by tipseason | 2025-09-30 04:16:38+00:00
Nano Banana Image to Prompt Generator tool experiment, that worked actually!

I’ve always struggled with writing prompts that actually produce the image I imagine. Sometimes I’d spend 30–60 minutes tweaking words, only to get something off-target.

To fix that, I started experimenting with a tool that turns images into detailed AI prompts automatically. The process is simple:

Upload an image you like.

The tool analyzes it and generates a structured prompt.

Paste the prompt into your AI image generator and watch it produce outputs that match the original style or concept.

The results surprised me — I was able to replicate styles, poses, and even subtle background details without manually guessing how to describe them.

Let me know if it works for you.
by roshin | 2025-09-30 04:16:43+00:00
I'm trying to find the official plan. I went to https://www.whitehouse.gov/wire/ and I see front and center "Trump unveils 20-point plan to secure peace in Gaza" which links to a fox news article which writes a summary " ... the third point of the document reads " but doesn't actually provide the document.

I can see it here https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-trumps-20-point-p... but I would much rather see it on some official government website.
by tkgally | 2025-09-30 04:16:56+00:00
That’s how I use it. I’m not a developer, and using Claude Code with Git turned out to be more complicated than I wanted. Now I just give it access to a folder on my Mac, put my prompt and any associated files in that folder, and have it work there. It works fine for my needs.

I would like a friendlier interface than the terminal, though. It looks like the “Imagine with Claude” experiment they announced today is a step in that direction. I’m sure many other companies are working on similar products.
by zozbot234 | 2025-09-30 04:17:39+00:00
Linux has multiple touch-based interfaces these days, including Phosh, Plasma Mobile and the upcoming GNOME Mobile. The interfaces themselves seem to work quite well and are broadly comparable with AOSP (or sometimes better). The Firefox browsing experience (based on the desktop version of Firefox with custom "mobile" tweaks) and things like the software keyboard tend to still be subpar compared with what's available on AOSP.
by conception | 2025-09-30 04:17:56+00:00
Who is in charge of the government departments changes how the government functions massively. There is a tremendous difference in support and effort depending on who has been appointed to run an agency. Just as one example, there is a difference between a nuclear physicist as the secretary of energy and a governor who has a lot of oil in his state. Certainly there are issues with the American government but this is yet again silly both sidesing something where clearly there is “not great” vs “purposeful appointments to actively ruin institutions “.
by lynx97 | 2025-09-30 04:18:16+00:00
I am not so sure about that. The modern web has become complicated/unusable enough that I can see a lot of people prefering a chat interface over having to click through this unholy mess. I might be biased, as I have to deal with accessibility ussues on a daily basis. However, there is a whole demographic we're currently leaving behind. There are a lot of people around who simply don't try to use the Internet to get things done, because they are overwhelmed with how it works. My mother doesnt even want to click on a YouTube link sent to her via WhatsApp, because she would leave the well-known app and have to deal with the web... However, I can imagine her using an agentic interface to get things done, although not right now, maybe in 2 years.
by Animats | 2025-09-30 04:18:18+00:00
This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week.[1]

There are already many companies selling automated carts that run around warehouses. Search for "automated guided cart".

I thought the humanoid thing was silly until I saw the pricing. Here's the Unitree G1, starting out at US$22,000, less than a Toyota Corolla. I though these things were going to cost like Boston Dynamics products. No, the hardware is already much cheaper.

This is still a low-volume product and prices are headed downward. Humanoid robots are going to be cheaper than cars. Having more degrees of freedom than you really need for any single job will be outweighed by the cost advantages of mass production and the advantages of interchangeability.

The manipulation problem remains tough, but with moderately priced and standardized hardware available, more people can work on it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922
by cyphar | 2025-09-30 04:19:58+00:00
> Also, in not into the faux shock at him paying himself $200-$250/hr as his rate for RT.

The article has been updated and the correct figure appears to have been $150/hr. That seems very cheap for a contracting rate -- another comment[1] went through RT's public disclosures and it seems that he was getting paid ~$30k/yr on average (with a maximum of $60k for one year) which paints a completely different picture to TFA.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45408505
by tadfisher | 2025-09-30 04:19:58+00:00
> You can't bootstrap individual criminal use into "the company should have known someone might use this for crimes, therefore they must filter everything."

Lucky for me, I am not. The company already has knowledge of each and every prompt and response, because I have read the EULAs of every tool I use. But that's beside the point.

Prior restraint is only unconstitutional if it is restraining protected speech. Thus far, you have not answered the question of whether AI output is speech at all, but have assumed prior restraint to be illegal in and of itself. We know this is not true because of the exceptions you already mentioned, but let me throw in another example: the many broadcast stations regulated by the FCC, who are currently barred from "news distortion" according to criteria defined by (checks notes) the government.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-30 04:20:46+00:00
You need to keep in mind context. He lived in a time when the overwhelming majority of society was self employed and there was no formalized, let alone compulsory, educational system whatsoever. Looking up the exact history there, the first compulsory education began in 1852 (Jefferson died in 1826 at the age of 83), where children 8 to 14 were required to spend at least 3 months a year in 'schooling', with at least 6 weeks of it being consecutive. [1]

And in the early 19th century near to 100% of Americans lived in rural areas where access to centralized information was minimal. There was no internet, radio, or other means of centralized communication. For that matter, there wasn't even electricity. The closest they'd have had would have been local newspapers. So people without any education would have had very little idea about the world around them.

And obviously I don't mean what's happening half-way around the world, but in their own country, their own rights, and so on. Among the political elite there was a raging battle over federalism vs confederalism, but that would have had very little meaning to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 with 45k votes against John Adams' 30k votes, when the country's population was 5,300,000!

[1] - https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/history-publ...
by citizenpaul | 2025-09-30 04:20:58+00:00
>Where's the money coming from....

That is literally how all credit card purchases work. And yes you are right. Based on that looks like that inflation rocket is headed to the moon. The general population is just not capable of seeing even one layer beneath the surface of a system.

Its like that skit where the people ask the programmer why they cannot have three parallel lines that intersect (or something like that) and he says "geometry."
by t-writescode | 2025-09-30 04:21:57+00:00
> Maybe? Tough to tell. They often leave.

In my experience working with juniors, the ones that look to leave are the ones that don't have their compensation appropriately adjusted as they rank up.

Pay everyone well, treat them with respect. Challenge them, and give them raises and rank-ups as they gain tenure and skill (not when it's "in the budget, and oh sorry, we can only uprank one this year, but we hired a person at the higher level, so really we can't afford it. Try again later!"), and you'll have people that stay a long time
by lisbbb | 2025-09-30 04:23:34+00:00
Not sure why you're getting the hate. What you said is fairly accurate--there was a time period in which a lot of poorly skilled people were getting hired and that caused a lot of disruption inside of companies because you ended up getting all these ego-driven, writing checks their skills can't cash type of people. It was annoying as hell. I remember having a problem that was a slam dunk for using a state machine and this one guy argued against it because he didn't even know what a state machine was, but of course could not admit that to anyone. Anyways, he lost that argument, but why did we have to have it in the first place? Ooooh right--someone got hired as a Sr. Dev who wasn't really Senior anything.
by majormajor | 2025-09-30 04:24:51+00:00
> Hiring juniors is always great if you, somehow, have a much better filter for finding the stars than the rest of the market. But if you don't, hiring bad juniors is a disaster: No different than outsourcing bits to a bad satellite office.

This isn't some absolute innate talent thing, though; it's very much a learnable skill.

Especially because output and time-to-ROI for a new hire depends on the combination of all of these things: (a) interviewing/screening, (b) onboarding, (c) ongoing feedback.

It's not a zero-sum game, it would be entirely possible for the industry as a whole to get better across the board at those things - especially since one job's "rockstar" is often another job's unmotivated thinks-they're-the-smartest-person-in-the-room burnout, and vice versa.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-30 04:25:00+00:00
Sadly, WFH is de facto dead unless you want to compete with Parul in Pune, Pavel in Prague, and Peter in PEI.

If anyone wants to be justified getting hired in this market and not be offshored, they will need to be in an area with a large density of tech jobs in order to find the next opportunity to land AND go into the office a couple days a week.
by MountDoom | 2025-09-30 04:25:11+00:00
> The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Why is this a problem, though? Imagine hiring doctors or architects with that expectation. "The problem is that no one is truly passionate about dissecting cadavers anymore".

I think our industry got hooked on being able to hire self-taught geniuses in the early days of tech. But the profession has gotten a lot more commoditized, and we just can't continue like that. Gotta hire "normal" people and teach them what they need to know. And yeah, "normal" means people who decided to learn programming because it pays well, not because they want to design compilers in their spare time.
by kragen | 2025-09-30 04:26:26+00:00
That doesn't seem off-topic at all to me!

I don't know what to recommend there. I have no relevant experience, because all my RISC-V hardware leaves unimplemented the privileged ISA, which is the part that RISC-V makes so much simpler. The unprivileged ISA is okay, but it's nothing to write home about, unless you want to implement a CPU instead of an OS.
by carbonimpact | 2025-09-30 04:26:44+00:00
We are building an operating system for making sustainability compliance trivial. Currently we are using a combination of modern AI agents and traditional methods. If you are a hyperscaler or in a heavy industry or just need support for dealing with e.g. California's SB 253 and SB 261, shoot me a message.

hello@carbonimpacthq.com

We are a small team but growing quickly.
by renewiltord | 2025-09-30 04:27:19+00:00
The pool is large, resumes don't differentiate => I have to talk to them to find the guy. I don't know how to do this efficiently. If you've got that skill, go right ahead. For my part, the rise in compensation has resulted in a lot of people who don't have any interest in the subject except as a tool to make dollars and they always run into dumb stuff like wrong documentation making them unable to act.

Yeah the kernel docs say one thing but the kernel behaves differently. Just look at the source. It's open source, man. Won't do it without being told.

If they don't care but will be persistent, fine. But if you can't work some basics, it's not worth it. And the correlation is near 1.0 because at least passion guy has something driving him to dig to next layer.

Inevitably some sucker will hire him, give him some on the job experience and then I can pay more.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-30 04:28:45+00:00
"College grads with tech backgrounds - the lottery ticket, or so we thought in American life - are having a harder time getting jobs than biology majors."

Sounds about right in terms of importance to society

Maybe surveillance, data collection and targeted ads is not a realistic "business model" long term. ZIRP ends, reality hits. Big Tech has to cut costs and employees are a big cost, especially overpaid ones ("tech" employees believed they were assets, now they know the truth)

Silicon Valley is betting the farm on "AI". The Hail Mary
by thgil | 2025-09-30 04:29:15+00:00
Sumodb is great and still better in many ways!

I was testing something like this with https://sumostats.com/live (a second-screen style page, so you can quickly look up the current match and it follows along live).

But I think I know what you mean... I'll check out Natto graphics again (haven't seen it in a while) and will try make something up for next basho!
by alephnerd | 2025-09-30 04:29:51+00:00
In Canada right?

Canadian programs haven't been watered down to the same degree as American programs and we can pay y'all 20-30% less than Americans.

If not, what program and year? The last few years of new grad hiring at portfolio companies left a bad taste in everyone's mouth so hiring shifted abroad.

Depending on the university in the US we might already be targeting them but then the cost aspect comes to play.