MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-29 14:14:20+00:00
> Do you have any great candidates who approach you and then, finding out your approach, pass?

We never generalised the contractors to employee thing. It's just that we hire contractors fairly often to fill in temporary needs and we generally extend offer for full time employment to the ones we would like to keep with us when we can. They generally say no because they like being contractors.

For candidate applying, I have yet to see one explicitely refuse an offer because they know we don't always keep going after the probation period. Then again, the standard probation period for engineers in my country is 3 months which can be renewed once so they would get the same offer anywhere.

But I have never seen someone being surprised when we parted after the 3 months. If someone told me they were during our offboarding meeting, I would take it as us having done something seriously wrong during our onboarding.

To be honest, we don't have that many hirings which end up not working and of them I can only remember one being due to an actual lack of skill from someone who clearly padded their resume yet managed to go through the interview. Some people needed a bit more time than others to reach the level of delivery we expect but that's ok. We don't always need rock stars, just professional who can deliver consistently and are open to learning new things. When we need specialists and don't have someone sufficently skilled internally, we contract. Working together with a specialist tends to raise the level of the team as a whole.

Most what I consider our true hiring failures have come from a mismatch between what the person expected and what the job actually is. That's why I now take time to ensure the person I'm interviewing actually has a good idea of what we are doing.
by brianush1 | 2025-09-29 14:14:29+00:00
> Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe

My belief on this is not entirely rational, of course, but it seems to me that there's probably a sort of Turing-completeness for intelligence/understanding, where as soon as a mind starts being able to understand abstraction, given enough time and resources, it can probably understand the entire universe.

It would also be presumptuous to say that brainfuck is equally powerful to every other programming language that exists, and yet we know it to be true. The fundamental reason we can prove that Turing-complete languages are equivalent to each other is that we can build the same abstractions in both, so intuitively it feels like a similar principle holds for human intelligence.
by strict9 | 2025-09-29 14:14:35+00:00
Tech employers are saying it's efficiencies gained in AI that led to layoffs for the past few years. Yet they have increased headcount in engineering offices in other countries at the same time.

This is also happening at small and midsize companies that ship software. It's easy to find this information, particularly for the largest companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Like the article states, there are a number of confounding factors. But it's not AI, no matter how much founders and CEOs want it to be true.

It's the pursuit of lower cost employees.
by thecanozer | 2025-09-29 14:14:44+00:00
We just launched https://www.dubaisirketkur.com/ , a platform helping Turkish entrepreneurs set up companies in the United Arab Emirates.

We provide end-to-end guidance for Free Zone, Mainland, and Offshore company formation, along with visa and residency services. The goal is to simplify the process for founders who want to expand into Dubai’s business-friendly environment but find regulations and paperwork confusing.

Would love to hear your feedback!
by mooreds | 2025-09-29 14:15:08+00:00
Relatedly, if you hire Alice and she works out, but in months or a year, you hire for the same role, why not reach out to Bob again?

You invest all that time into interviewing Bob, but then if they don't get the offer, you never reach out to them again. I don't get it.

I don't think I've ever seen this done well.
by pie_flavor | 2025-09-29 14:15:10+00:00
This lists all the reasons to use Rust, then handwaves about some nonsense, then declares victory for C++. The maturity argument made a lot more sense when Rust was 3 years old, rather than 10; the libraries argument is plain silly because library management is horrible in C++ and all the listed libraries are by comparison essentially one-click to use in Rust; the entire article also seems AI-generated.
by dangus | 2025-09-29 14:15:42+00:00
There are two types of H1B recipients, the type that you describe (in somewhat discriminatory terms) and the type that the program was built for.

The actual geniuses that move to America and stay here to build crazy stuff are also H1B visa holders.

We do NOT want to turn those people away. If you don’t like immigrants “taking your jobs” you are definitely not going to like the alternative reality of a brain drain. You aren’t going to like the alternative reality where there aren’t any immigrants starting businesses to hire you. Without immigration there’s no Google or Apple (these weren’t specifically H1B immigrants but still, Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs’ dad were first generation immigrants)

Again I must point out that every H1B employee that is here is physically in America buying things from American businesses. Immigrants starting businesses at a higher rate than native born citizens.

But I think it’s obvious that the program needs reform. Big companies have been gaming the system and using tricks to abuse it, and they use the visa’s restrictions to trap employees and give them below-market working conditions under the threat of visa revocation.

My proposal would be:

1. Make the visa cost more to acquire depending on the amount of employees in the program at a single company. If your company has 10,000 H1B employees your cost to add another one should be a lot higher than a small company with one H1B worker.

2. Make the visa guarantee permanent resident status to the recipient for a time period once they’ve worked for their company for ~90 days. They should have full job mobility just like a citizen so their employer doesn’t use the program as an excuse to pay below-market wages.

3. Provide a real path to citizenship that doesn’t take decades. I think that people in the country who can treat it like a long-term “forever home” will be more beneficial than ones who have plans to go back home eventually.
by jackstraw42 | 2025-09-29 14:16:01+00:00
So everyone really did read what I was saying as an argument. Maybe you can help me here and clarify what you interpreted as a point I was trying to argue? I believe that it was a better decision for the average mobile phone user to use iOS in a smart way between 2008-2025 than Android. Both ecosystems are in a sad state currently, but Android is the clear choice now. Did you think I was making the old iOS vs. Android debate? People really need to move on from that winning side thinking and think more about what matters, if that's what happened. Anyone care about talking about anything else besides that shit anymore?
by goalieca | 2025-09-29 14:16:14+00:00
> I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving forward and it clearly doesn't do that.

I would like an AI expert to weigh in on this point. I run into this a lot. It seems that LLMs, being language models and all, don't actually understand what i'm asking. Whenever i dive into the math, superficially, it kind of makes sense why they don't. But it also seems like transformers or some secret sauce is code up specially for tasks like counting letters in a word so that AI doesn't seem embarrassing. Am I missing something?
by Pet_Ant | 2025-09-29 14:16:33+00:00
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.

I think this is the rule that is currently under renegotiation in society. At one point you could imagine saying "I should be able to go out in public without having had a certain medical procedure (like a vaccine)." Now, I don't agree with that.

The overton window of behaviours is always shifting and not always in ways that we like.
by wintermutestwin | 2025-09-29 14:16:33+00:00
Lots of reasons! First off: where else do I go to learn this stuff? Man pages are reference for people who work in CLI all the time and not for virgin learners as they are are necessarily packed with the complete lexicon but with barely a thought to explaining real world examples of common tasks. There are a million Linux websites with the same versioning issues and inadequate explanations. I guess I could buy an oreily book and learn the topic end to end even though I will only need to know the syntax of a couple commands.

With an LLM, I can get it to tell me what each parameter it suggests actually does and then I can ask it questions about that to further my understanding. That is a massive leg up over the knowledge spaghetti approach...
by JKCalhoun | 2025-09-29 14:17:05+00:00
> AAA gaming feels so tired

When first person games became a destination for gaming (and not just another genre that we move on from — like "fighting games") is when I checked out of gaming. I know, I know, there are no doubt plenty of cool indie games out there (and other genres) but I guess in the meantime I found other ways to spend my time and haven't really looked back into games.

(I think too "AAA" as a moniker is kind of a huge red flag for me anyway. Like how "Now a Major Motion Picture" means it will be artless and instead appeal to a broad demographic in the most banal of ways.)
by nerdjon | 2025-09-29 14:17:08+00:00
Honestly I disagree and I feel like this is largely parroted without playing the games.

SWTOR was maintained pretty well for a while and was fun.

The issues with ME3's ending were blown way out of proportion and was still a fantastic trilogy.

Andromeda had its issues no doubt about it but I am still mad at a certain website deciding that they were going to just go hard on attacking it. It was a fun game, it had some development issues and some nasty bugs at launch. But was still fun.

Anthem... man that game had potential but just was not ready to ship. Was a ton of fun to play and I loved the bits of story we got but it really was just a tease of a story sadly.

DA Veilguard... definitely not up to the standard that Bioware set but there is still something uniquely Bioware about the characters that I fell in love with. That games potential was not helped by a vocal minority being mad about one specific character and not caring about anything else in the game.

Has Bioware gone down since their peak? Yeah. But I think claims that they are dead are overblown and people parroting it on youtube for clicks sure isnt helping that sentiment. Play the games and make your own decision.
by derbOac | 2025-09-29 14:17:22+00:00
Others have kind of mentioned a lot of things I might anyway, and it's hard to summarize what I think is necessary. But to summarize, I think there needs to be a deregulation of licensing or practice laws to allow other types of providers to do more, of the sort they are perfectly capable of doing (and that studies show they can do) — pharmacists, psychologists, and optometrists are just some examples — and I think there needs to be more flexibility and diversity in terms of provider types and degree paths. My guess is there are many types of providers we can't even envision right now because there's such a rigid schema about what healthcare professionals should look like. I also think, for example, there are probably a lot of cases where someone could go from a PA -> MD degree without returning to do a second degree; I might be wrong about that but these are the types of things that should be encouraged at least as experiments.

I also generally think there's a lot of choice that could be encouraged in terms of drug access. I generally think people should be able to buy medications and drugs without a prescription, or at least under the monitoring of a pharmacist or something, or at least in most cases. I can think of medications that there have literally been papers written saying that they are safe to give without a prescription decades ago and they still require a prescription; there's also medications that people take for years safely, and it seems kinda absurd to require them to get a prescription for them. My thoughts about the FDA itself are complex and could probably an essay in itself.

I'm very in favor of public healthcare, and public healthcare institutions but I also feel a lot should be deregulated or reregulated toward greater openness, choice, and competition. There's probably a lot of areas where there should be more regulation too I suppose — I think antitrust principles should be applied to insurance and hospital consolidation more often.
by flir | 2025-09-29 14:17:27+00:00
Random follow-up thought:

If the password manager is cloud backed, you're at risk of a LastPass-style data breach. If it's local only, you're at risk of someone confiscating your device also removing your access to all your online tools.

(I think I'm edging towards "measuring secureness is really hard", which isn't where either of us came in).
by wavemode | 2025-09-29 14:17:43+00:00
I don't think it's quite as circular as you're making it sound. If someone has a prior contraint of needing to move quickly (which is common in startups) it can make sense to choose any arbitrary technology, if it allows them to do so. I don't think someone developing a new game in C++ necessarily has no concerns about C++, that's just the language that all the console SDKs use. I don't think someone doing data science in Python necessarily likes Python, that's just the language that most models and libraries use (and that person probably has a deadline to publish a paper!)

Another factor to consider is that, if one is indeed trying to reuse code from existing databases (regardless of the reason for doing so), code from projects like Sqlite and FoundationDB is simply far less likely to contain serious bugs than any newer Rust-based option. There are way more mistakes one can make when writing a database than just memory safety mistakes, and the mistakes tend to be extremely subtle. Code having been run in production for long periods of time under significant amounts of load is basically a fundamental prerequisite for it to make any sense to trust the data of your users to it.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-29 14:17:57+00:00
> Cameras on police are mostly irrelevant

Not really.

In "a randomized controlled trial involving more than 400 police officers in Las Vegas, Nevada...officers equipped with body-worn cameras generated fewer complaints and use of force reports relative to officers without cameras. BWC officers also made more arrests and issued more citations than their non-BWC counterparts" [1].

More broadly, "there remains substantial uncertainty about whether BWCs can reduce officer use of force, but the variation in effects suggests there may be conditions in which BWC could be effective" [2]. ("Restricting officer discretion in turning on and off BWCs may reduce police use of force," and while "BWCs may reduce the number of citizen complaints against police officers...it is unclear why complaints decline.")

[1] https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol108/is...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8356344/
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-29 14:17:58+00:00
It's still a public event even if everyone is not invited. English lacks the word to differentiate between "public" as "no secret, out in the open" and "public" as in "free for all and gratis".

In this case we're talking about a public wedding as opposed to a secret wedding.

Thus: A normal wedding with a normal amount of invited guests is one of the most non-secret events to exist.

Asking for no photos is like participating in a big sports event as an athlete and demanding nobody takes photos.
by oldandboring | 2025-09-29 14:18:14+00:00
I am reminded of an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry gives his dad an expensive, multifunction PDA called "The Wizard" but his Dad doesn't immediately see the use. Jerry explains it can do all kinds of things, for example, it has a calculator he can use to calculate tips at restaurants, leading Dad to conclude it's a $200 tip calculator. Jerry keeps protesting "it does other things!" and the old folks act like they can't even hear him.
by pizzathyme | 2025-09-29 14:19:06+00:00
Like them or not, EA has been a major force in gaming for over 40 years (I used to work there). They invented the term "Game Producer". Their early vision for promoting Game Designers like hollywood Directors was ahead of its time. They have a hallway lined with gold discs of million seller hit games. They basically created the casual gaming industry (The Sims Division, Pogo, Casual Divisions) in a time when games were mostly marketed to boys.

I respect this company a lot, even though they always seem to do things that embitter the gaming community against them.

Unfortunately these types of buyouts usually come with layoffs, after a year of tough layoffs in games. I hope anyone who will be affected can land somewhere safe.

The campus has a labyrinth with a plaque that's always inspired me: "As in life, the walls are only in your mind."
by close04 | 2025-09-29 14:19:16+00:00
I don't know but isn't this the usual go-to for all those supporting the surveillance state? Think of the kids? But the terrorists? What's good for the goose is good for the gander, if he eschews being surveilled just like everyone else then it's because he wants to commit the crimes that we want to prevent others committing. Take your pick.
by amlalNzn | 2025-09-29 14:19:25+00:00
The single largest private donor the IDF is pushing for a very anti American policy. I think it’s extremely relevant to point out their true loyalties lie elsewhere.

> what does this have to do with the story?

This is like seeing a web page not load due to a 504, then asking why people are discussing a database failure when your page isn’t loading.

Patterns like Ellison are rife in American politics (look at some of trumps major donors, guys like Bill Ackman were lifelong dems that suddenly because conservative after Oct 7). It’s the reason we’re one of the only countries defending the genocide in Gaza. It plays a large part in our otherwise polarized congress showing bipartisan support for financing Israel’s “defenses”.

America makes a lot of anti American decisions because guys like Ellison are some of the most powerful in the country.
by xnorswap | 2025-09-29 14:19:42+00:00
Are you talking about structural fundamentals or product features?

Because I agree about the fundamentals, the things enterprises tend to care about:

- SSO / SAML / auth integrations

- ISO Certifications

- Regular Pen tests

- Localisation support

- APIs ( that they'll never use )

- Bulk operations

- Self-hosting ( or at least isolated / non-shared application cloud hosting )

Get these and similar right and it's the difference between landing enterprise or not.

But if you're talking about features specific to a product, or custom products for a platform, that's a very different thing, and that's where the great distraction can come in. That's where you'll end up developing features that go unused, and it's these which aren't so consistent across customers.

Imagine you make washing machines and get a request for:

" This Washing machine must have a pre-set button for a 57deg 38.5 minute wash. Without that, I couldn't consider this machine ".

You try to argue that you let users define their own pre-sets, and that they can set up their own pre-set for that cycle. But you're denied by the person in sales who insists that they need exactly that as a first-class button on the front of the machine.

That's the level of petty that some large customers will try. In some way, it can be seen as a good sign that they've engaged with your product, but sometimes you wonder if it's just a trial balloon for seeing if you'll put up with the unreasonable.
by bmar | 2025-09-29 14:20:41+00:00
I've had a Moonlander for a few years now and it's been incredible. The tenting and split layout completely fixed my hand and wrist pain.

I can't say I've had the same problems with quality as the author. The tenting can wobble if it's not tightened in a balanced position, but once it is, I haven't had it loosen. And the palm rests seem fine to me, but I've learned to put less pressure on my palms. The only issue I've had is the keyboard sliding away from you due to low friction when tented.

My board also came with Cherry MX Browns, which used for a couple of years. I recently switched to low profile key caps and Akko switches for a nicer tactile feel. With tenting, I felt like the cap height and travel distance was too large.
by Finnucane | 2025-09-29 14:21:07+00:00
Sure, in the broad view, he has always advocated for tariffs. Somehow he thinks recreating the McKinley era is the future. He wants to cut taxes for the rich and tariffs are a very regressive tax. But, in this particular instance, revisiting a really dumb idea that flopped a few months ago does seem a little more like 'old man who forgot what he was doing yesterday.'
by pacha3000 | 2025-09-29 14:21:16+00:00
I bought the Moonlander a year ago, and I completely regret it for the reason you mention: the horrible palm rest. It's wobbly, and when I contacted them, they told me that in the "ideal setup", my wrists aren't support to rest on them. Palm rests where you can't rest your palms.

I'm really frustrated, because I love everything else from this keyboard. But those wobbles really do make it unusable.
by wffurr | 2025-09-29 14:21:21+00:00
C++ is getting safer, but it has a long way to go to match Rust's safety guarantees. Google is doing a lot with spatial safety with hardened libc++, bounds checks for C-style arrays, and safe buffers; but temporal safety is a lot harder without more information in the source code.

Running sanitizers and such is quite expensive too. It burns a lot of cycles to run msan, asan, tsan, valgrind, etc.

Whereas catching these bugs at compile time saves everyone a lot of time and money.

TBH I don't find the reasons in the article particularly compelling. Rust has a lot of industry backing now and is pretty clearly the way forward to systems programming. Writing Rust wrappers over the various libraries they use is largely a one-and-done issue, and they can publish them to Cargo and share the load of keeping them updated. If ISO or various governments get their act together with a real software liability regime or cyber security requirements, companies with big legacy C++ code bases will be in a tough spot. Second best time to start writing safe code in your project is now.
by d-us-vb | 2025-09-29 14:21:32+00:00
I'm not sure that AI will always be "convenient". We're currently in the rose-colored glasses phase, a lot like object-orientation was back in the '90s. It'll probably never go away, but in a few years everyone will realize that it creates its own friction, just like poorly designed OO codebases have. Inevitably, there will be an entire supporting industry designed to circumvent the inherent problems like a tradeoff.

Is Object Orientation bad? Is AI driven development bad? Not intrinsically, but anytime people are drawn to convenience, there are hidden tradeoffs they're making.

As far as programming goes, I tend to think that the friction created by bad OO practices haven't really led to anything other than "creative" coping mechanisms in those codebases, so perhaps for this analogy, that doesn't really bode well. But anyway...
by vel0city | 2025-09-29 14:22:13+00:00
This $56B company just took on an additional $20B in debt for this to go private. Now not only do they need to make profits, they need to squeeze even more juice to pay the interest on that $20B.

This will probably result in more money extracting schemes and less editorial freedom, even without thinking about MBS having a massive amount of influence in the company now.