MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How is hiring done in other industries?
by freetonik | 2025-10-02 12:47:44+00:00
If you have experience working in industries unrelated to software engineering, could you describe how does the hiring process look like for regular and senior professionals?

I'm curious to know if endless rounds of interviews, take-home assignments, multi-month timelines, the need to prove you know the absolute basics after working in the field for decades, and extremely high chances of rejection are the norm anywhere else.
by iamleppert | 2025-10-02 12:48:12+00:00
Yes, this guy's post came up on my LinkedIn. I think it's helpful to consider the source in these types of articles, written by a CEO at a fintech startup (looks like AI generated too). It's obvious from reading the article that he doesn't understand what he's talking about and has likely never created any kind of RAG or other system. He has a very limited experience, basically a single project, of building a system around rudimentary ingestion of SEC filings, that's his entire breath of technical experience on the subject. So take what you read with a grain of salt, and do your own research and testing.
by adam_patarino | 2025-10-02 12:48:48+00:00
There’s two different markets.

The research market is made up of firms like OpenAI and Anthropic that are investing billions in research. These investments are just that. Their returns won’t be realized immediately, so it’s hard to predict if it’s truly a bubble.

The product market is made up of all the secondary companies trying to use the results of current research. In my mind these businesses should be the ones held to basic economics of ROI. The amount of VC dollars flooding into these products feels unsustainable.
by Oxyn | 2025-10-02 12:49:40+00:00
I would be surprised if using this did not classify as false advertising. No matter how well the AI can replicate it, that is not your product in those images. Marketing material, although we all know how deceptive it can be, is somewhat useful when buying a product. If this became a popular tool for businesses then marketing truly has hit rock bottom.

Now that I look closer at the website too I am already seeing the issues this presents. The bracelet is completely different in all of those photos.

I think brands would realize how harmful using this could be too, not that they care of course, but I feel people would be upset if they found out the only images of a product they have seen were false. I know I would.
by threecheese | 2025-10-02 12:49:57+00:00
Bigger companies believe smaller shops can use AI to level the playing field, so they are “transforming their business” and spending their way to get there first.

They don’t know where the threat will come from or which dimension of their business will be attacked, they are just being told by the consulting shops that software development cost will trend to zero and this is an existential risk.
by rimeice | 2025-10-02 12:50:18+00:00
Cheap, _limitless_ energy from fusion could solve almost every geopolitical/environmental issue we face today. Europe is acutely aware of this at the moment and it's why China and America are investing mega bucks. We will eventually run out of finite energy sources. Even if we do capture the max capacity possible from renewables with 100% efficiency, our energy consumption rates increasing at current rates will eventually exceed this max capacity. Those rates are accelerating. We really have no choice.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-10-02 12:52:24+00:00
Productive how and for who?

My own use case (financial analysis and data capture by the models). It takes away the grunt work, I can focus on the more pleasant aspects of the job, it also means I can produce better quality reports as I have additional time to look more closely. It also points out things I could have potentially missed.

Free time and boredom spurs creativity, some folks forget this.

I also have more free time, for myself, you're not going to see that on a corporate productivity chart.

Not everything in life is about making more money for some already wealthy shareholders, a point I feel sometimes lost in these discussions, I think some folks need some self-reflection on this point, their jobs don't actually change the world and thinking of the shareholders only gets you so far. (Not pointed at you, just speaking generally).
by sueszli | 2025-10-02 12:52:27+00:00
Saw this HN post yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45422717

It sparked joy and some great discussions. I turned the idea into a tiny, compiler-agnostic header-only shim that provides defer-like semantics in C as a short-term workaround until the language (hopefully?) adds a defer statement - Yay! :)
by red-iron-pine | 2025-10-02 12:52:30+00:00
easy money for them, easy wins for AI, and by definition the wiki is designed to be free for everyone.

i wonder how they will control bot access to it in the future, since AI will want to rewrite a lot of stuff -- marketing bots want to make their celebrity clients look good.

plus you're going to get a lot of AI written material being used by AI creating a feedback loop of shit.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-02 12:53:03+00:00
>for inculcating the United States’ fundamental values of

If I am honest, I do not have the same values as those who favor public education. Not only do our values have very little overlap, the values that are extolled by them are quite offensive and disgusting to me. Given that these values are now those of the public education system, I should be desperately worried about my own children and the children of people I care about. However, since the late 1990s a curious thing has happened, and none of those children are in danger. My children do not attend public school and yet aren't being hunted down for truancy as I would have been as a child.

We've already eliminated the danger of public education. This might be confusing to you, because some children still attend. Others are aware, you'll see it expressed in every reddit thread... someone will call for the end of homeschooling on the grounds that they're unable to indoctrinate every child, though they describe if much more charitably than that. None of those children will grow up caring about public education, none of them will ever vote in ways favorable to public education their entire lives. The shift has already begun, and in the coming years it will become ever more obvious.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-02 12:53:06+00:00
HN isn't always right. There was massive pushback against self driving and practically everyone was saying it would fail and is a bubble. The level of confidence people had about this opinion was through the roof.

Like people who didn't know anything would say it with such utter confidence it would piss me off a bit. Like how do you know? Well they didn't and they were utterly wrong. Waymo showed it's not a bubble.

AI is an unknown. It has definitely already changed the game. Changed the way we interview and changed the way we code and it's changed a lot more outside of that and I see massive velocity towards more change.

Is it a bubble? Possibly. But the possibly not angle is also just as likely. Either way I guarantee you that 99% of people on HN KNOW for a fact that it's a bubble because they KNOW that all of AI is a stochastic parrot.

I think the realistic answer is we don't actually know if it's a bubble. We don't fully know the limits of LLMs. Maybe it will be a bubble in the sense that AI will become so powerful that a generic AI app can basically kill all these startups surrounding specialized use cases of LLMs. Who knows?
by vintagedave | 2025-10-02 12:53:10+00:00
Hindsight is easy, and perhaps had no-one taken up Facebook in 2004 we'd all be okay. It's also not always obvious what trade-offs you're making, because you cannot see the future.

Ultimately, it was not obvious in 2004 where we'd be today. Reality exists regardless of retrospective blame. The problem we have _today_ is the one we need to deal with.
by reilly3000 | 2025-10-02 12:53:26+00:00
I don’t like that he cited $12B in consumer spending as the benchmark for demand. Clearly enterprise spending has and will continue to dwarf consumer outlays, to the tune of $100b+ in 2025 on inference alone, and another $150b on AI related services.

I see almost no scenario where the value of this hardware will go away. Even if the demand for inference somehow declines, the applications that can benefit from hardware acceleration are innumerable. Anecdotally my 2022 RTX 4090 is worth ~30% more used then what I paid for it new, but the trend continues into bigger metal.

As “Greater China” has become the supply bottleneck, it is only rational for western companies to horde capacity while they can.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-02 12:53:32+00:00
I would bet the statistics suggest no matter how much a teacher is paid, no matter how small the class size, or how fancy the school, no one can make a kid care about learning if that isn’t reinforced from the beginning at home and amongst the kids’ peers.

https://www.thecentersquare.com/washington/article_a5b43015-...

Obviously, education should be properly funded, and many places do not pay competitively, especially considering many teachers these days have to baby sit mentally ill kids. But the bigger problem is that the kids who can and want to excel have been deprioritized in favor of the those who can’t or don’t want to learn.
by skybrian | 2025-10-02 12:53:59+00:00
Maybe you just haven’t heard of them? For example, just the other day I heard about a company using an LLM to provide advice to doctors. News to me.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openevidence-the-fa...

> OpenEvidence is actively used across more than 10,000 hospitals and medical centers nationwide and by more than 40% of physicians in the United States who log in daily to make high-stakes clinical decisions at the point of care. OpenEvidence continues to grow by over 65,000 new verified U.S. clinician registrations each month. […] More than 100 million Americans this year will be treated by a doctor who used OpenEvidence.

More:

https://robertwachter.substack.com/p/medicines-ai-knowledge-...
by drw85 | 2025-10-02 12:55:34+00:00
That's not politics, that's just being a good person/employee. Politics is when you try to look that way, no matter the cost.

Often times, doing the good stuff and building credit for that takes a long time and the right environment to identify and credit it.

Playing the politics game is much faster/easier and leads to quick results, because all you have to do is be visible as much as possible and manipulate a little bit here and there.

People aren't great at identifying the career manipulator and in the short term will give those guys the promotion/responsibility.
by bko | 2025-10-02 12:55:51+00:00
I think text is the ultimate interface. A company can just build and maintain very strong internal APIs and punt on the UX component.

For instance, suppose I'm using figma, I want to just screenshot what I want it to look like and it can get me started. Or if I'm using Notion, I want a better search. Nothing necessarily generative, but something like "what was our corporate address". It also replaces help if well integrated.

The ultimate would be build programmable web apps[0], which you can have gmail and then command an LLM to remove buttons, or add other buttons. Why isn't there a button for 'filter unread' front and center? This is super niche but interesting to someone like me.

That being said, I think most AI offerings on apps now are pretty bad and just get in the way. But I think there is potential as an interface to interact with your app

[0] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/programmable-web-apps
by daft_pink | 2025-10-02 12:56:16+00:00
To be fair, I don’t think anyone’s trying to eliminate public education. That’s a very unfair characterization.

They are just trying to cut down large education bureaucracies that don’t appear to be benefiting the students.

Generally very large or very small public school systems in America really underperform for the students. It’s not clear that the Federal resources in the Dept of Education are directly benefiting the students.

They are trying to give more control over education to parents and local communities especially those in underperforming areas.
by bArray | 2025-10-02 12:56:22+00:00
See the other comment for a MITM large browser server: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446991

To do everything onboard, maybe, just maybe, you could parse basic HTML/CSS and images. But the majority of pages would of course fail anyway without full support for every modern feature.

This seems like it could be useful: https://limpet.net/mbrubeck/2014/08/08/toy-layout-engine-1.h...
by georgehopkin | 2025-10-02 12:57:03+00:00
University of Washington researchers have found that 78 per cent of gamers who experienced meaningful gaming moments said those experiences altered their lives long term.

The study surveyed 166 gamers about video games’ effects and identified recurring themes developers, gamers, parents and teachers can focus on to create meaningful experiences. The team will present findings on 14 October at the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play in Pittsburgh.
by jstummbillig | 2025-10-02 12:57:38+00:00
> I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use

That's a handwavy sentence, if I have ever seen one. If it's good enough to help with coding and "replace Google" for you, other people will find similar opportunities in other domains.

And sure: Some are successful. Most will not be. As always.
by bombcar | 2025-10-02 12:58:33+00:00
The demoscene also is an example of how much you can do if you can be absolutely sure exactly what hardware you’re running on.

The problem is that even for things like consoles, it's usually more "cost efficient" to write normal fast-to-write code that isn't maximally effective, let the compiler do its magic, and call it good enough.

Sometimes I dream of what the world would do if we were mystically stuck on exactly the processors we have today, for twenty years.
by graemep | 2025-10-02 12:59:01+00:00
It reminds me of one of two people (at the same time and place in my life) I was introduced to because they shared national origin (i.e. nationality at birth, or parents nationality) with me.

One later got into the Sunday Times rich list (the under 40 section, IIRC) during the dot com bubble, by the simple expedient of lying. He claimed to be working on encryption software that was hugely valuable and said it was valued in billions. He actually owned a smallish local computer shop. He later fled the country claiming MI5 were persecuting him for developing such good encryption software.

TO be fair, he seems to have fooled financial institutions too. He bought a Ferarri (presumably on credit) and Amex gave him a black card (which he tastefully put a picture of on the company website). It did not take a lot to see through the fraud, the actual business was decribed on the website.

The other person I got introduced to around the same time for the same reason turned out to be a member of a terrorist organisation. Not banned here at the time, but still not someone I particularly wanted to meet.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-02 12:59:30+00:00
>Or, hear me out, it's because they've been underfunded from the start.

Compare the funding per student to any other country in Europe... they've been hilariously overfunded for longer than either of us have been alive.

>The reality is that there were never enough resources in the first place, a

That's not reality. That's "spin". There were always enough resources for high achievement from those capable of high achievement... but then equal amounts of money wouldn't be wasted on low achievers.

>Maybe, just MAYBE, if we took the 60k signing bonus

This is just bad math. You need how many teachers nationwide? 1 million-ish? Go ahead and split those $60k bonuses over that many teachers (and over the next 20 years), and the few tens or hundreds of dollars that it ends up being, per teacher, is supposed to make a difference?
by perilunar | 2025-10-02 12:59:39+00:00
I wrote my own timeline website and use it to post a (private) daily diary entry. The timeline is zoomable and pannable, so i can scroll through all the entries easily, and zoom out to see my whole life and all the important life events. Entries have an 'importance' setting, so when zooming out the daily stuff disappears and only big events are visible.
by maccard | 2025-10-02 12:59:54+00:00
Yes, for 5 million.

It’s an intentional slap on the wrist because they don’t actually want to fine them, they just want them to change their behaviour. The general MO of European courts is to get people to comply, not to punish non compliance. There’s a subtle difference. If Meta change their tact in the next two weeks then they got what they wanted. If they don’t, fine increases and they’ll escalate responses.
by coldpie | 2025-10-02 13:00:21+00:00
> Why do we assume that we know better and people with far more knowledge and insight would all be wrong?

Because of historical precedent. Bitcoin was the future until it wasn't. NFTs and blockchain were the future until they weren't. The Metaverse was the future until it wasn't. Theranos was the future until it wasn't. I don't think LLMs are quite on the same level as those scams, but they smell pretty similar: they're being pushed primarily by sales- and con-men eager to get in on the scam before it collapses. The amount being spent on LLMs right now is way out of line with the usefulness we are getting out of them. Once the bubble pops and the tools have a profitability requirement introduced, I think they'll just be quietly integrated into a few places that make sense and otherwise abandoned. This isn't the world-changing tech it's being made out to be.
by workfromspace | 2025-10-02 13:00:59+00:00
On macos, when I'm uninstalling apps, here's what I do:

1. Open AppCleaner[0], select app, then select all the files associated. Don't use AppCleaner yet (especially to uninstall). Keep the window and the files selected open

2. Using Finder, move the app from Applications folder to the trash (so the application removal scripts run smoothly)

3. Switch back to the AppCleaner app, and click remove to remove all the associated files.

4. Empty trash

5. Open "Find Any File"[1] app. Then search for the app name (ie: Notion). Remove all the results. Warning: Be careful when removing files of certain apps with generic names that might exist within the system files (for example, when removing GeforceNow, don't try to delete the MacOS system files named as Nvidia). Usually anything in the /Users/$USERNAME folder is safe to delete. 6. Empty the trash again 7. Restart the computer

Edge cases:

1. If the app is not installed or uninstalled correctly, before all these steps, first re-install the app again, then try uninstalling.

2. If a system service (extensions) cannot be deleted, first follow the steps above and then login to safe mode and delete the system extension files manually.

[0]: https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/

[1]: https://findanyfile.app
by rkomorn | 2025-10-02 13:01:00+00:00
I think you have a point and I'm not sure I entirely disagree with you, so take this as lighthearted banter, but:

Coming from the opposite angle, what makes you think these folks have a habit of being right?

VCs are notoriously making lots of parallel bets hoping one pays off.

Companies fail all the time, either completely (eg Yahoo! getting bought for peanuts down from their peak valuation), or at initiatives small and large (Google+, arguably Meta and the metaverse). Industry trends sometimes flop in the short term (3D TVs or just about all crypto).

C-levels, boards, and VCs being wrong is hardly unusual.

I'd say failure is more of a norm than success, so what should convince us it's different this time with the AI frenzy? They wouldn't be investing this much if they were wrong?
by mrweasel | 2025-10-02 13:01:05+00:00
For AI I'm of the opinion that the best interface is no interface. AI is something to be baked into the functionality of software, quietly working in the back. It's not something the user actually interacts with.

The chat interfaces are, in my opinion infuriating. It feels like talking to the co-worker who knows absolutely everything about the topic at hand, but if you use the wrong terms and phrases he'll pretend that he has no idea what you're talking about.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-02 13:01:36+00:00
The other obvious way to do it is to centralize it, have a lift in your house that brings up meals and clean laundry to order, where you can put your dirty dishes in when you're done, and a central space where staff and robots take care of things.

I'm actually surprised or interested that this isn't more of a thing, it doesn't take any high tech either. I suppose people like having their own stuff, or people can't be trusted, or it's prohibitively expensive to outsource food / laundry (even if especially in the US ordering food or eating out is very common).
by patanegra | 2025-10-02 13:01:47+00:00
If your view was true, we would have a super-successful middle class here in Europe. We don't, quite the contrary. The UK used to be on par with the USA. Now, it's stagnant since 2008. Other countries are falling behind too.

Because power of labor to negotiate is a zero-sum game that doesn't create anything. The only sustainable way to lift anyone's living standard is through improving prosperity.

And guess what. The USA gives much better opportunities for motivated people to build themselves.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-02 13:02:04+00:00
> if we took the 60k signing bonus and absurd salary away from ICE and started giving it to teachers, we'd see change in a meaningful way.

Give the money to the people (parents) and let them choose whether to spend it on school fundraisers or anything else.

Garbage in, garbage out. Schools are shit because inputs are poor (literally and figuratively) and inputs are poor because most people in this country lose half their paycheck to the government and interests that are in bed with government[1]. As other commenters have pointed out, the actual level of funding per student is by no means the bottleneck here.

[1] E.g. a landlord who's rent price is a reflection of constrained supply which is constrained partly by law but partly by the supply of component parts (materials, labor, design work) of competing goods which themselves are subject to yet more artificial constraints, etc, repeat infinitely)
Ask HN: Find and monitor charging stations for long trips in an EV?
by password4321 | 2025-10-02 13:02:13+00:00
What are the best websites and/or apps to find and monitor current availability of charging stations for longer trips in an electric vehicle?

I would also appreciate any recommendations regarding the best options to improve the overall trip experience, especially related to the differences due to no longer being able to quickly refuel.
by nomilk | 2025-10-02 13:02:14+00:00
Having a word for it vs being able to describe it. I'd argue the first suggests greater importance.

The main difference regards the emphasis/value placed on it. In Japanese culture the space between:

> often (holds) as much importance as the rest of an artwork

This is a great read, with examples (namely gardens and theaters):

https://web.archive.org/web/20241127041031/https://deeperjap...
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-02 13:02:20+00:00
I don't think it's a bubble.

There's a very real possibility that all the AI research investment of today unlocks AGI, on a timescale between a couple of years and a couple of decades, and that would upend the economy altogether. And falling short of that aspiration could still get you pretty far.

A lot of "AI" startups would crash and burn long before they deliver any real value. But that's true of any startup boom.

Right now, the bulk of the market value isn't in those vulnerable startups, but in major industry players like OpenAI and Nvidia. For the "bubble" to "pop", you need those companies to lose big. I don't think that it's likely to happen.