MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sigotirandolas | 2025-09-13 13:01:49+00:00
> Maybe things are this equal and fair on the senior, high-paying part of the spectrum

I don't think the fundamental dynamics change by seniority, just that after some level there may simply be a smaller pool.

From the interviewers perspective, it makes sense to reject a candidate if they see any possibility it could be a flop. A bad hire is going to frustrate the team and look bad to the company, missing the best candidate is just going to result in hiring their next best pick.

> As someone just starting out, the general feeling among my peers is that I must bend to the interviewer's whims, any resistance or pushback will get you rejected.

I guess this is very context dependent but I can also see "bending to the interviewer's whims" backfiring if they see you're just trying to flatter them. I could see some interviewers valuing that you can explain your point if it's framed in a way that shows you are both observant and easy to work with. If it's framed as a more aggressive kind of pushback, yes that's going to get you rejected.

But yeah, I can also see that if you're willing to take any offer at any company as a junior just to get your feet into the industry most interviewers may not be specially smart and resisting is likely to go wrong.
by curl-up | 2025-09-13 13:02:32+00:00
Code with logging is "self reporting". Adding logging statements is not reporting itself. Adding `logger.error(f"{job} failed")` is not reporting itself, and LLMs are perfectly capable of adding such statements in applicable places.

As to why, it's because I'm building an app with a growing userbase and need to accommodate to their requirements and build new features to stay ahead of the competition. Why you decided I'm describing a toy project is beyond me.
by skydhash | 2025-09-13 13:04:58+00:00
We are turning specifications into software precisely because English (and any natural languages) lacks the formality that makes it not reliable (necessary quality for a tool), but great for imagination (the source of invention).

We always start from natural language. RFC, docs, tickets,... are in natural language. But gaining formality (losing ambiguity) is what programming is (software engineering is doing programming well). People that struggled with programming struggle in fact with formality.
by TheFreim | 2025-09-13 13:05:28+00:00
> Now that it turned out to be a groyper, you'll have to recalibrate your priors.

It did not "turn out to be a groyper". There is zero substantial evidence for this claim, its a complete fabrication. Elle Reeve, a journalist at CNN who has followed the far-right since the infamous Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally in 2017, said of those claiming that the shooter was a Groyper that, "It’s like they’re grasping at vapor."
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-09-13 13:05:29+00:00
> Devs often want the inherent safety of the boring, easy stuff for a while

That's matches my experience. In my first job, every time a new webapp project has been starting it was fun. Not because of challenges or design, but simply because of the trivial stuff done for n-th time - user accounts, login, password reset, admin panel. Probably should have been automated at this point, but we got away with reinventing the wheel each time.
by kbolino | 2025-09-13 13:05:46+00:00
Assuming your count is accurate, then 9 (edit: corrected from 11) of those 13 are also UTF-16's fault. The only bytes that were impossible in UTF-8's original design were 0b11111110 and 0b11111111. Remember that UTF-8 could handle up to 6-byte sequences originally.

Now all of this hating on UTF-16 should not be misconstrued as some sort of encoding religious war. UTF-16 has a valid purpose. The real problem was Unicode's first version getting released at a critical time and thus its 16-bit delusion ending up baked into a bunch of important software. UTF-16 is a pragmatic compromise to adapt that software so it can continue to work with a larger code space than it originally could handle. Short of rewiting history, it will stay with us forever. However, that doesn't mean it needs to be transmitted over the wire or saved on disk any more often than necessary.

Use UTF-8 for most purposes especially new formats, use UTF-16 only when existing software requires it, and use UTF-32 (or some other sequence of full code points) only internally/ephemerally to convert between the other two and perform high-level string functions like grapheme cluster segmentation.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-13 13:05:49+00:00
> Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.

This is not true now, if it ever was (maybe for very short periods); there is tremendous competition for every good SWE job out there, and has been for a long time.
by ryukoposting | 2025-09-13 13:06:10+00:00
Hey, "missing craft and bad taste?" Perhaps this hiring technique actually makes sense for OpenAI.

From my firsthand observations of the startup world, there are already plenty of pre-idea rich guys having expensive "conferences" where they talk about nothing and feel very good about themselves because of it. That OpenAI feels the need to write a blog about their shiny new cohort of useless trust fund boys is peculiar, but plenty of companies do this sort of thing.
by ElysiumAbove | 2025-09-13 13:06:29+00:00
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by simonw | 2025-09-13 13:06:34+00:00
Something I'd be interested to understand is how widespread this practice is. Are all of the LLMs trained using human labor that is sometimes exposed to extreme content?

There are a whole lot of organizations training competent LLMs these days in addition to the big three (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic).

What about Mistral and Moonshot and Qwen and DeepSeek and Meta and Microsoft (Phi) and Hugging Face and Ai2 and MBZUAI? Do they all have their own (potentially outsourced) teams of human labelers?

I always look out for notes about this in model cards and papers but it's pretty rare to see any transparency about how this is done.
by imiric | 2025-09-13 13:06:43+00:00
Well, Emacs has been around for 40 years, and while it's difficult to gauge its popularity, there are many signs that suggest it has only been increasing. So I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon.

Besides, I think there are also benefits from a tool having a steep learning curve. It indirectly acts as a filter, ensuring only people passionate about it stick around. It's not elitism, but it avoids scenarios like the Eternal September where the community gets flooded with new users and eventually never recovers. Software and services that become popular often stray from their original vision, and, with open source projects in particular, maintainers can be overwhelmed by support and feature requests from new users. Emacs doesn't have these problems, and hopefully never will.
by teiferer | 2025-09-13 13:06:46+00:00
That argument is as old as any mistreated worker complaining about their situation and as old as any argument against workers rights in general. Anybody not liking their job could just leave right? Simple! No, the world just isn't that simple and it didn't become simpler just because it happens in an AI context that produces a tool you like.

There are lots of jobs out there that suck and people do them anyway. Because the freedom that they supposedly have is not as free as you imagine.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-09-13 13:07:09+00:00
They are trying to switch the conversation from electricity where renewables are making unmistakably swift progress, to all energy (e.g. gas for heat in homes and factories and oil for cars and trucks).

They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage.

In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation.

An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.
by monista | 2025-09-13 13:07:33+00:00
Not about to defend NK regime, but to make it fair, and not to play "they are bad guys, thus we're good guys".

First, doubts of people not right away believing any news about NK are justified, given how many lies about NK, like executing by feeding to dogs, were spread. So don't take them as NK defenders, it may be just a healthy skepticism.

Second, note that NK kills their citizens for what is illegal in their country, which is gross, but in 2019 Americans killed North Koreans for what was pretty legal, and got away with it [1].

Third, it looks hypocritic to read how horrible is that people got prosecuted for just watching videos. We all know that in so called civilized democracies, people's life can be ruined (luckily not taken) for possessing illegal video materials, it's just legality differs by jurisdictions.

West's true advantage is that we're much more shy in capital punishments, however we're still far from humanistic ideals, and I believe concentrating only on NK regime crimes lets the mindset "they being so bad, then we're not so bad after all".

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-...
by tsoukase | 2025-09-13 13:08:20+00:00
Price per Wh plays no role in the coming decades. Solid fuels can become x10 or x100 more expensive as they deplete. So the now extensive nuclear can become relatively cheap.

The globe must change its behavior NOW: electricity prices at night, under shade or without wind must become very extensive because they need extensive tech (batteries, nuclear, fuels).

If I were a regulator for a day I would strive making fossil fuels and night elecricity x10 more expensive and leave the market regulate by itself. In ten years I would make them x10 once more.
by ksec | 2025-09-13 13:08:39+00:00
>The median staff salary offered by i. AI was £67,300 in 2024-25, almost double the £35,680 of the civil service.

That is why they dont want to work for UK Gov. Even if they were paying at market rate, the whole internal politics, policy and bureaucracy and not getting things done will not be attractive enough for talents.

It is a very sad state of things. UK Gov have no idea of how anything should cost, throwing money out and only to learn they was not what they wanted or after.

>Labour has since expanded the plan and has said i.AI would be used in “targeting” efficiencies of up to £45bn a year.

Peter Kyle said this and he is now moved on to Secretary of State for Business and Trade. The whole thing is like a clown show.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-09-13 13:08:59+00:00
It’s hard to see how the current rate of progress is compatible with, 30 years from now, it being good business sense to pay human professionals six figure salaries. Opinions then split: the easiest option is pure denial, to assume that the current rate of progress doesn’t exist. Next easiest is to assume that progress will halt soon, then that we will be granted the lifestyle of well paid professionals when unsupervised AI can do our job for cheaper, then that Altman will at least deign to feed us.
by timeinput | 2025-09-13 13:09:09+00:00
I have a couple of niche areas of non-coding interest where I'm using AI to code. It is so amazing to write rust and just add `todo!(...)` through out the boiler plate. The AI is miserable at implementing domain knowledge in those niche areas, but now I can focus on describing the domain knowledge (in real rust code because I can't describe it precisely enough in English + pseudo code), and then say "fill in the todos, write some tests make sure it compiles, and passes linting", verify the tests check things properly and I'm done.

I've struggled heavily trying to figure out how to get it to write the exactly correct 10 lines of code that I need for a particularly niche problem, and so I've kind of given up on that, but getting it to write the 100 lines of code around those magic 10 lines saves me so much trouble, and opens me up to so many more projects.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-13 13:09:56+00:00
Why is it a problem that people rely on the grid when their own distributed resources run out? It seems like you are framing it as a problem because then you know that nuclear power is not the solution.

For those with rooftop solar and a battery the calculation is of course:

- What does creating my own reliability cost

- Can I accept these blackouts? What is an acceptable level of blackouts? The grid is a statistical system so all grids have reliability figure. In Sweden this is currently set at 1 hour of blackout per year.

- What does the grid connection cost?

The grid costs will of course need to be changed to a fixed "connection fee" for maintaining the transmission grid and then the typical per kWh cost, when it is needed as per the market conditions.

The solution for this is of course to add generation optimizing low CAPEX and high OPEX.

Which is.... drum roll. Open cycle gas turbines running on decarbonized fuel. Synfuels, hydrogen or biofuels.

Nuclear power with high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX is literally the worst solution imaginable to create reliability when renewables are inevitably added to a grid.

Take a look at South Australia this past week. Every single day they ran on 100% renewables for a portion of the day. Do you turn off the nuclear plant every single day?

https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...

Well, the coal plants realized the had no options and were forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
by OptionOfT | 2025-09-13 13:10:04+00:00
Sounds exactly like the system we used in Belgium.

I don't think the system you explain is bad. It's essentially PKI.

My issues are deliverability: what if I get the email and never open it? What if it gets marked as spam?

And it requires me to read emails, something I've actually tried to reduce because every subject is screaming for attention.
by scotty79 | 2025-09-13 13:10:05+00:00
> You have to spot the opportunity for sub-problem reuse

Which sounds exactly like what developers do in non boring parts of our job. If anything, the problem is that tests are being tightly timed, while time budget for real world task of this kind is usually more generous. On the other hand business time that company spends with inefficient solution or without one costs a lot of money so I can't blame companies for wanting employee who at least on toy problems can do that quick.
by slightwinder | 2025-09-13 13:10:12+00:00
> Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster.

You can't build to withstand humans ignorance. You always can argue to do this or that, but if the responsible managers won't approve it, it's all just theory and good hopes. Even worse if the ignorance grows over time; because the last decades it worked out, surely it will work another decade or two...

That's why things like nuclear are so problematic, because small neglections can explode into cataclysmic events.
by mantas | 2025-09-13 13:10:35+00:00
But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.
by dm3 | 2025-09-13 13:11:08+00:00
I'm very surprised you find this workflow more efficient than just writing the code. I find constructing the mental model of the solution and how it fits into existing system and codebase to be 90% of effort, then actually writing the code is 10%. Admittedly, I don't have to write any boilerplate due to the problem domain and tech choices. Coding agents definitely help with the last 10% and also all the adjacent work - one-off scripts where I don't care about code quality.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-13 13:12:19+00:00
hahaha. Good point. But seriously, a quick browse of the comments below is full of absurdities: Claims that the BBC is a shill of imperialism (It may very well be to an extent, but that doesn't mean it isn't laying out deep reporting with plenty of real information about well documented barbarities by the Kim regime), claims that the majority of NK defectors are mainly liars (thousands of them, all coordinating their lies across multiple decades well enough to mostly match in their details, really?) and what-aboutist nonsense implying that no country with its own border controls or occasional attempts to stifle free expression is much different from what NK does; Degrees of difference do exist, and can eventually mount enough until a difference becomes fundamentally qualitative. North Korea is well beyond the pale for mounting degrees of repression.

Then there's the idea that it's just too unbelievable to conceive that the regime would execute people simply for watching foreign movies. The Stalin regime executed or GULAG-starved many hundreds of thousands for the 1930s versions of the same thing, or for having any contact and even just suspected contact with foreigners. The Nazi regime killed millions simply for existing under a certain invented category of threat, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge would mass execute hundreds of thousands for being "bourgeoisie" because they.... had university educations, or maybe wore glasses, or spoke a second language (yes, the condemnations were really that murderously banal and never mind that many Khmer leaders themselves could tick off these same classifications for their own lives). I see nothing at all unbelievable about a youthful dictator in a closed country protected by its nuclear arsenal further absolutizing his own power by showing ever more of his already well-demonstrated indifference to human life whenever it suits him.
by mpweiher | 2025-09-13 13:12:55+00:00
> He claims no such things.

Literally: "i asked a solar developer."

https://x.com/simonahac/status/1318711817502302209

> Citation still needed. Real one will not come as it's nonsense.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
by skydhash | 2025-09-13 13:13:47+00:00
> Personal experience (data points count = 1), as a somewhat seasoned dev (>30yrs of coding), it makes me WAY faster.

> Long story short: things that would take me a week to put together now take a couple of hours. The vast bulk of the time saved is not having to identify the libraries I need, and not to have to rummage through API documentation.

One of these is not true.

With libraries, it's either you HAVE to use it, so you spend time being acquainted with it (usually a couple hours to make sense of its design, the rest will come on a needed basis) or you are evaluating multiple ones (and that task is much quicker).
by Juliate | 2025-09-13 13:14:10+00:00
Totally agree, and it's an intermediary step, but it's still not the same.

I mean, it's terrific to have an affordable replica, especially for discovery, I'm not debating the price-point advantage (for both acquisition and maintenance), but this is not an on-par replacement.

In an analog (less so in digital, but still somehow) synth, the controls are the instrument itself: they are in a specific place, react in a specific way, and physically part of the device that outputs the sound, and they stay there: you cannot move one without the other. The instrument has its own character. It's still more abstract than a classical instrument like the violin or the piano where the physical action alone is done and felt in real time, of course. It's significantly more incarnated than software + generic (in a good way) controllers.

The good side of this is that after having software replicas or original synthetisers, there's room to build new exciting embodiments/physical instruments.
by thisislife2 | 2025-09-13 13:14:33+00:00
Does anybody know if WineHQ refuses to accept new submissions to its Application Database ( https://appdb.winehq.org/ ), if you don't opt to be a "maintainer" for the software? I submitted an application for a software that doesn't work on Wine, a few months back, taking care to fill all the details but opting not to be the maintainer, and the software still hasn't been accepted and doesn't show up in the application db. There's been no follow up or communication on what to do next.
by walterbell | 2025-09-13 13:14:43+00:00
> there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use

E2EE messenger Wire comes from the people who created usable Skype and contributed to the royalty-free audio codec Opus (https://opus-codec.org/) which now enables WebRTC (used by modern conferencing apps including Zoom, Jitsi, GoToMeeting). They contributed to the IETF encrypted group-messaging protocol MLS (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/), which has been ratified and lives alongside TLS.

IETF MLS is one step on a long path to messenger interoperability, e.g. Matrix plans to implement MLS. Contributors to MLS include Apple, Cisco and Facebook.

Unlike Signal, Wire never mandated disclosure of phone number or address book contacts. Their business model is paid enterprise customers, but they continue to maintain free clients for iOS, Android and web, with open-source client and server code.
by realusername | 2025-09-13 13:15:54+00:00
> Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.

That's the opposite, France is exporting in winter and imports in summer whenever the Germany overproduces solar and doesn't know what to do with it.

So for now it's France which helps to stabilize the grid of its neighbors.

There's even price caps against that because France would bleed other countries in winter otherwise.

> don't think you quite get how the grid works? BEVs are like the ultimate consumers for a renewable grid since they can utilize surpluses matching supply and demand.

No they can't, you have to understand how the EU consumption works, surplus are in summer and max demand is in winter. Nobody is going to store electricity in summer in their car to use it in winter, this is nonsense.
by diggan | 2025-09-13 13:16:13+00:00
Same thing is widespread on reddit, usually for pushing specific products/projects/organizations into the limelight. Landing on the frontpage of reddit/HN drives huge amount of traffic, so obviously "optimizers" learned this, and started priming accounts for future vote-rings and what not, but they need to mix in real-looking content between the pushes so the accounts don't get banned.