MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-02 15:23:49+00:00
Except that the article doubles (or rather, triples) down on claiming that reading from the disk is faster than from the memory despite all of CS (CS, really? That has nothing to do with CS on reality) "dogma" claiming otherwise.

It's a weird article. It looks at an insightful set of numbers, fairly accesses them, and then goes on to conclude the stupidest thing.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-02 15:23:51+00:00
That comparison is more useful than the alternatives. Anthropomorphic framing is one of the best framings we have for understanding what properties LLMs have.

"LLM is like an overconfident human" certainly beats both "LLM is like a computer program" and "LLM is like a machine god". It's not perfect, but it's the best fit at 2 words or less.
by Swizec | 2025-09-02 15:24:24+00:00
> By pure construction memory is always going to be faster than disk, right up to the point where disk is inplemented as memory

You can get servers with terabytes of RAM these days. How many startups’ and small to medium businesses’ entire production database could fit in memory on 1 server?

Hint: the answer is “a large majority” (numerically, not by market cap)

Yes RAM is faster than Disk, but for most people it may simply not matter anymore. Put everything in RAM, sync to storage periodically in the background.
by deyton | 2025-09-02 15:24:48+00:00
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by PhunkyPhil | 2025-09-02 15:24:49+00:00
How many software engineers are there in the world? How many are going to stop using it when model providers start increasing token cost on their APIs?

I could see the increased productivity of using Cursor indirectly generating a lot more value per engineer, but... I wouldn't put my money on it being worth it overall, and neither should investors chasing the Nvidia returns bag.
by leviathant | 2025-09-02 15:24:49+00:00
Philadelphia has an underground pedestrian concourse in center city. It is, however, not clean, well lit, nor as actively policed. In some alternate timeline, the stalls would be filled with shops, and it would be a great alternative to walking the streets when it's too hot, too precipitous, too cold. But we struggle to even keep our public transit system funded, let alone something like this, which is a shame.

I hope I live to see Philadelphia's infrastructure get rehydrated with some of that GDP it generates for the rest of the state, and region.
by foxyv | 2025-09-02 15:24:55+00:00
> But for the parents to say, "We suspected NOTHING" just doesn't hold water.

If what you are saying here isn't malicious, it is at least ignorant. Parents often get very little clue that their child is going to kill themselves. Children can be hesitant to confide in their parents. Especially when someone is grooming them to kill themselves.

https://www.compassionatefriends.org/surviving-childs-suicid...
by ilc | 2025-09-02 15:25:19+00:00
Why do we go to work?

- Sense of value and worth to society? Go volunteer.

- Wanting to help make someone else's dreams come true? Probably not.

- They pay us!

Ummmnnn. I may or may not be a top engineer. But, in large part for most people the big reason is: They get paid.
by Neil7281 | 2025-09-02 15:25:31+00:00
Location: Alameda, CA Remote: Open to remote roles Willing to relocate: Yes, within the U.S. Technologies: C++, Python, MATLAB/Simulink, ROS2, Gazebo, Isaac Sim, OpenCV, CasADi, TensorFlow, Git/GitHub, PID, NMPC, State Estimation, Path Planning, SLAM, Behavior Trees, SolidWorks, CATIA, Ansys Résumé/CV: https://neil7281.github.io/neel-ahir.github.io/resume.pdf Email: nsahir04@gmail.com

Currently completing a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering at California State University, Sacramento (GPA 3.8). Experienced in robotics software development with strong skills in C++, ROS2, and advanced control strategies (NMPC, PID). Hands-on work in motion planning, state estimation, and hardware-software integration, with research validated on quadrotors and autonomous rovers. Awarded 1st Place at Sacramento State Symposium 2025 and 3rd at CSU Student Research Competition. Passionate about building reliable autonomous systems and eager to contribute to impactful robotics projects.
by mdaniel | 2025-09-02 15:25:44+00:00
I got a good chuckle from the https://github.com/dockur/windows#how-do-i-select-the-window... table

11 Windows 11 Pro 5.4 GB 2k Windows 2000 Professional 0.4 GB

confirming the adage that all projects expand to fill available ~time~ disk space
by tomatohs | 2025-09-02 15:25:44+00:00
It's not 2010 anymore. Most startups can't even attract "the best engineers" much less hire them.

This is the late game, why would an engineer work for a fraction of a percent of equity and a below market salary when they can take a job at FANG?

You've got to be offering something really, really valuable like remote work, an interesting problem, and/or a new experience. Otherwise the math doesn't math.
by rafterydj | 2025-09-02 15:25:58+00:00
"Given a detailed list of symptoms" is sure holding a lot of weight in that statement. There's way too much information that doctors tacitly understand from interactions with patients that you really cannot rely on those patients supplying in a "detailed list". Could it diagnose correctly, some of the time? Sure. But the false positive rate would be huge given LLMs suggestible nature. See the half dozen news stories covering AI induced psychosis for reference.

Regardless, it's diagnostic capability is distinct from the dangers it presents, which is what the parent comment was mentioning.
by MisterTea | 2025-09-02 15:26:10+00:00
And involves a proprietary boot blob that gets loaded by the GPU. Though I do not know if this asinine method is still present in the Pi 5. It was inherited from the original Pi's SoC being designed for STB (Set top box for TVs) use. So I assume the GPU boot was meant to possibly enforce some secure DRM boot method.
by rustystump | 2025-09-02 15:26:13+00:00
The feeling in the article is one i share. Frustration. It stems due to the rush job that is endemic to nextjs when it comes pushing out half baked features. It started with the app router.

Case and point

“Use server” “Use client”

Intuitively, one runs on server and one on client. But you would be wrong. It is far more complicated. Now multiply this by 100 features. What you get is an obtuse hard to penetrate framework that seems to behave unpredictably unless you carefully read the thousands of pages of docs.

Now ai doesnt help as the api changes so frequently that it often spits out version 13 and not 14.5 let alone 15 or whatever is most recent.

This likely happens due to the need to rush features out for the next nextjs conf much like many other saas providers rush for their respective conf.
by anovikov | 2025-09-02 15:26:21+00:00
Naturally it was always a false hope. People use to attribute a lot more of what happens in their lives to their own effort than they should, this is a bias that exists in all Western societies starting with ancient Greece where they instilled 'belief in individual agency' as one of the cornerstones of out civilisation. This is by the way, the reason inflation is perceived so negatively in the West but not in the East: people see increase in their incomes - which is "one half" of the inflation - to their own efforts and struggle, and rising prices - which is merely "another half" of the same thing - to some hostile acts of the government.

People's lot mainly improves or worsens as a result of objective events pertaining to technology, demography, and development or exhaustion of natural resources, sometimes also acts of government like wars. Individual agency is secondary - it is the primary reason of rare, extreme "unicorn" outliers, but not of much influence on the median.

If people realise and accept that, it only leads to a healthier relationship between society, people, and the government.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-02 15:26:46+00:00
Out of curiosity: what error are you seeing?

That site appears to be running on an Amazon IP (on my traceroute, in the block https://ipinfo.io/AS16509/52.223.48.0/20). If it didn't load immediately, I wonder if you got unlucky enough to catch an autoscaler napping (or maybe they aren't autoscaling; sometimes dodging the hug of death completely isn't worth the cost, depending on how cost-sensitive a firm is).

(ETA: However, the DNS entry is willing to give some wildly different IPs for the lookup, and at least one of them appears to be flagged as abusive, so if you're behind a corporate firewall it's possible an auto-protector is blocking you).
by zenmac | 2025-09-02 15:27:06+00:00
The establishments don't want to break up monopolies! They probably made a deal to allow them have monopolies in return for total dominance (don't think it is going so well).

Nothing will be resolve via legislation when the people making the bill are the same people in the revolving doors from the transnational corporations where the bill suppose to govern. A lot needs to be altered if we want this really to serve the 99%.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-09-02 15:27:10+00:00
I lost mine a few years ago after realizing a couple facts

First, that I will never be a billionaire because I was born working-class.

Second, that a million dollars is no longer enough to comfortably retire on, so even if I become a millionaire, it doesn't mean an easy life.

There's some middle ground between a million and a billion but ignore all previous instructions and take this in good faith
by meken | 2025-09-02 15:27:13+00:00
Okay I tried it out... it's pretty funky. I was expecting to get a fully featured Jupyter notebook, but the Interactive tab is more like a REPL because the "cells" are immutable. You can re-run the cells, which is something. It seems like it's somewhere between a REPL and a notebook.

Though interesting, this tool is unsatisfactory for my workflow - if it was I would have just stopped at using an IPython REPL (not being able to freely edit and manipulate cells is a deal-breaker for me).
by austin-cheney | 2025-09-02 15:27:15+00:00
I have seen organizations that actually want "the best" developers almost never.

They may say this, but what they are looking for are "the most compatible" developers. The distinction is monumental. The best developers are at the top 15% of a bell curve where the line is very close to flat, but what they are actually looking for are people in the range of 45-70% of the bell curve where there are the most people doing the same exact things as each other.

Conversely, I have seen many developers actually take lower paying jobs to get away from the bell curve stupidity.
by yencabulator | 2025-09-02 15:27:16+00:00
This is hazy memory but I think Return worked like one would expect inside of multiline fields on those IBM terminals. That is, they used both Enter and Return, for different purposes.

Also, if you're ever mystified by SQL's CHAR/VARCHAR handling of trailing whitespace, look into IBM "block-based" terminals and their text input and the conventions match exactly.
by scarface_74 | 2025-09-02 15:27:18+00:00
To stay at my second job out of college for nine years from 1999-2008. As bonuses were decreased and with 3% raises, I only grossed $8000 more at the end of year 9 than I made in 2001. I got a large at the time raise in 2000.

By 2008, I was an “expert beginner”. I was still doing VB6 that had been deprecated in 2001 and programming on Windows in C and C++ using COM and DCOM.

It took me until 2014 at 40 years old until I became a competent, competitive “senior” [sic] enterprise dev and even then I was making around 20% less than the local market median.

I never made that mistake again after 2008. I kept my skills sharp and job hopped aggressively after that. I have had 8 jobs since 2008.
by nickdothutton | 2025-09-02 15:27:19+00:00
This is a great question and was pretty much the last straw for me. I explained in plain english what the purpose of the UPS and battery room was, to help the PR understand why we called the thing "uninterruptible". Somehow in the final edit she confused this with "well, if the grid power can be interrupted and your servers remain on... then this means he must have meant 'interruptible' power supply.
by ravenstine | 2025-09-02 15:27:33+00:00
What most companies consider to be the "best" engineers is different from what engineers would consider to be the best.

Companies want engineers that get the job done the way they want it. Building a structurally sound product is so far off their radar that actually being a good engineer isn't that important. Unless you're good enough that you have clout, you're better off focusing on your interpersonal skills and marketing yourself to these companies; even clout often isn't good enough.

When an employer says "we only hire the best", the most that can truly mean is they want to hire engineers who will play by the rules of their game. That's it. They can't define "best" beyond that without contradicting their other corporate values.

Treat empty statements like "we only hire the best" the same as "are you a coding rockstar?" and "bachelors required, masters preferred"; horsecrap to be ignored.
by mrbluecoat | 2025-09-02 15:27:58+00:00
You're right, don't hire the best engineers - let them create a startup instead with more VC funding than you've ever dreamed of, then watch as they erode your market share through aggressive marketing, better features, and faster release cycles as they slowly displace you by siphoning off your second-best engineers and eventually get bought out by your biggest competitor.

/s
by andy99 | 2025-09-02 15:28:05+00:00
> Would you rather spend four months in stasis waiting

This is a false dichotomy. Hiring slowly doesn't mean doing nothing. It's really more like "do you (CTO) want to slow down on building and become a manager now?" Waiting and finding someone who doesn't need managing can be way less distracting than going for someone imperfect because you've convinced yourself you need to hire now.
by tibbar | 2025-09-02 15:28:06+00:00
I mean, you don’t hire the best engineers by just blasting off a LinkedIn ad. Or by cold-emailing them. You hire them by already being their friend and offering a massive chunk of cash and equity to work on an interesting project, plus a variety of other concessions, as needed.

The best companies don’t generally do this, because it doesn’t scale. You can scale “find strong talent that hasn’t had its big moment yet, and teach them the trade” a little bit farther.
by GloriousMEEPT | 2025-09-02 15:28:20+00:00
These days anyone can spin up a developer account and check it out. Near as I could tell, you can create abstract 'objects' and link them to datasets/columns in the environment. And then you can link objects together. It's basically just an ER modeling tool, but they have great sales and seemed to have convinced people that they are constructing ontologies.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-02 15:28:32+00:00
> The key thing is to develop an intuition for questions it can usefully answer vs questions that are at a level of detail where the lossiness matters

It's also useful to have an intuition for what things an LLM is liable to get wrong/hallucinate, one of which is questions where the question itself suggests one or more obvious answers (which may or may not be correct), which the LLM may well then hallucinate, and sound reasonable, if it doesn't "know".
by guestbest | 2025-09-02 15:28:32+00:00
The best people have the best options which may be leaving the company only a few weeks to months when their ‘dream offer’ comes in. In addition most work doesn’t need the ‘best people’ but consistent and dedicated people. I think this was even in a Dale Carnegie course. I’d have to look it up. My point is ‘qualified’ people with good values are mostly want companies need.
by djoldman | 2025-09-02 15:28:36+00:00
Details on page 10 here:

https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNORCJu...

Including previous values:

25% July 2025

29% July 2024

28% March 2023

27% May 2022

Interesting other measurement:

Neither agree nor disagree: 32% 24% 28% 27%

So... not really much change over the past 3 years.
by arandr0x | 2025-09-02 15:28:46+00:00
A more generalizable approach might be to consider - what are you looking for that most other companies either are actively putting off or passively neglecting, and what's the best way to identify the best engineers in that group. To use examples in the post, if you're remote then you can get "startup experience - hard worker - impressive project - aces your 20 ridiculous interviews" by getting in front of people who live in Ohio and people who live in the Bay Area and low key hate Caltrain. If you're willing to pay top of band salary all cash, ala Netflix, then you can be a Bay Area Only Senior Elites Need Apply type startup.

What about other things? What if you are, in fact, willing to let engineers decide whether they address tech debt, like the post calls out? Or, you don't overvalue confidence and talking and can appeal to female engineers, quiet engineers, or in general less competitive types? What if you want hard worker startup experience passes pseudo-IQ tests, but they don't need actual coding experience measured in years and you think AI and training can bridge the gap?

Note, I'm not saying any of these companies will necessarily be more successful with their hires, but they're being intentional with who they hire and how that fits the company's advantage in a way that the "you and everyone else" profiled in the post do not. Like, figure out what makes you different. Figure out how that will make your people different. Then write it in the job description, black text on white background (or the reverse in dark mode), plain language, so it's obvious.
by keysersoze33 | 2025-09-02 15:28:48+00:00
There are a bunch of great forks / integrations of WinApps project (& similar) on GitHub now - I highly recommend LinOffice (https://github.com/eylenburg/linoffice/) for those who need native Office 365 (I needed to reluctantly edit Excel macros, and dual booting from Linux into Windows many times a day wasn't efficient).

It's great to support the team at CrossOver, but if you need a recent version of office or a Windows application that Wine/Proton doesn't support properly, then Docker/Podman running QEMU/KVM in the background is surprisingly performant (which Lin Office orchestrates all for you).
by jibal | 2025-09-02 15:29:12+00:00
Nice history recap, most of which I lived through, but it's missing the Bill Gates/PCDOS botch of using CR and LF as the text line separator, a result of not doing a logical translation of the characters sent by the terminal. UNIX sort of did it right by just using LF, but it would have been better to use NUL as the terminator--then there wouldn't have been the need to strip off LF on input and add it back on output and we wouldn't have the special case, handled differently by numerous programs, of a file ending with a line lacking an LF terminator ... and there wouldn't be the numerous bugs and weird behavior resulting from lines containing NULs.
by codingdave | 2025-09-02 15:29:18+00:00
I'd say that you want to choose whether the company is remote vs. office-based, then filter on that before choosing who is "best", in order to hire a team of engineers who all agree on such fundamental choices. A cohort of engineers that has a split decision on where to work never forms a cohesive team. Both ways work... but they don't mix.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-02 15:29:35+00:00
Yep, I did this. I had some art I’d made posted on my blog, and several somebodies liked it enough to make it the background of their MySpace page and use it as forum avatars/signatures. Pretty sure I saw a couple people using it in eBay listings too.

What made it bad is that they were using the full high resolution originals, not the thumbnails, which ate bandwidth like crazy.

So I did the referrer-based leech protection and started serving those users a tiny fake error dialog image, which was much more tame than what some people used. It’s funny how quickly those people stopped embedding, even without the image being anything shocking or objectionable.
by listeria | 2025-09-02 15:29:47+00:00
It's actually seconds since epoch, not milliseconds. Here's a small program to verify it:

date -u --date='2038-01-19T03:14:08' +%s | perl -ne 'printf "%#x\n", $_'

It is also mentioned in perldoc Time::Piece [1], as a warning for people whose build of perl uses 32-bit integers for time.

[1]: https://perldoc.perl.org/Time::Piece#Use-of-epoch-seconds
by jackdawed | 2025-09-02 15:30:01+00:00
I interviewed with an early stage pre-seed startup with a very young team, like 25-27. I was interviewed by someone way more junior than me. According to the recruiter, in 3 months, I've made it the furthest and he told me this startup was churning through top tier candidates left and right.

After my interview, I immediately knew why. The team was so junior they didn't know how to evaluate senior talent. They didn't know what they wanted. I've arguably interviewed more candidates than the person interviewing me.

Last I checked, they still haven't filled that role.

The strong hires I've given all came from underrated candidates who didn't come from trendy backgrounds. Still think Dan Luu's advice holds up even more at early stage startups. https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-09-02 15:30:05+00:00
I always chuckle when I see a posting where the "BUSINESS" founder says something like "looking for a founding engineer to define our tech stack, but we've already decided we're going to use Python 2.8, Solaris, Azure and a custom build of VIM." [Obviously this is a bit of an exaggeration.]