MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdsniper | 2025-10-02 15:03:19+00:00
Sure. But the GP is arguing that "there's no such thing as a labor shortage". I'm trying to determine what their definition of "labor shortage" is. Perhaps the GP believes that the term itself is meaningless, or perhaps they believe that no current real-world situation fits their definition.

So I created a hypothetical situation to illustrate what, to me, is a clear example of a temporary labor shortage. As you say, "the incentive to develop the skills should sort this out" ... and I'd say that's true, but until it gets sorted out, the situation can reasonably be described as a "labor shortage".
by superkuh | 2025-10-02 15:03:24+00:00
Is it really that much of a problem to chose a tracking device you can turn off? We've established in this thread that it was a known thing re: the devices forever. The only difference now is that our institutions are failing us. And that's wild and crazy, yeah ("That is insane.").

But being able to shut your phone/tracking device off is not a big or crazy ask. And it's not going to wildly alter your life if you do so. You should consider it seriously even if you've been lagging a bit behind, or lacking lived experience, with the state of the world. No better time to adapt to uncomfortable new realities than now.
by harddrivereque | 2025-10-02 15:03:26+00:00
My XP system was my best ever system. I had so many things in it. I still have my old XP laptop, it still works but I can connect it to the internet. Even when I do, usually browsers don't show anything properly anymore because the last xp supporting versions are from I think 2016-2018? Not sure about that one. But I love my XP computer. I wish there was a way to completely move the system to a virtual machine.
by malshe | 2025-10-02 15:04:02+00:00
> Table Integrity: Financial tables are never split—income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements remain atomic units with headers and data together

In 10-k and 10-q often there are no table headers. This is particularly true for the consolidated notes to financial statements section. Standalone tables could be pretty much meaningless because you won't even know what they are reporting. For example, a table that simply mentions terms like beginning balance and ending balance can be reporting inventory, warranty, or short term debt. But the table does not mention these metrics at all and there are no headers. So I am curious to know how Fintool uses standalone tables. Do you retain text surrounding the tables in the same chunk as the table?
by griffinkelly | 2025-10-02 15:04:21+00:00
To build off of what artf said, the biggest thing against WP is really pricing. From speaking to folks, they get nickled and dimed for plugins. They also cant migrate to less expensive options.

I think we've taken the best parts of what folks like Lovable have created (one click deployment and chat to do anything), but built the drag and drop functionality into it-- which is something people have come to depend on. From what I've seen, the uptake of AI into the non-ai site builders has been very slow because they all have proprietary JSON formats.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-10-02 15:04:32+00:00
With auditors you talk like you would either talk on a deposition or on the witness stand: do not say more than what you were asked, do not make assumptions, do not try to be helpful in any way, do not offer more data than asked for.

Is it really OK? Not necessarily, but on the other hand you don't want to spend the rest of your life answering even more questions from other people the auditors might bring in to help them understand your helpful explanations.

I learned this the hard way, assuming auditors are logical and understand technology.
by blindriver | 2025-10-02 15:04:36+00:00
I currently have Windows 10 and refuse to upgrade to Windows 11. There is no way I'm going to allow the malware that is Windows 11 into my house. I thought they had turned a new leaf over the last few years but I guess not. Ramming things down my throat is not how I'm going to live my life so Microsoft can fuck right off. I'm already half off Windows because I switch between Windows and MacOS throughout the day so if need be I will just throw away my Windows machine and consolidate on Apple.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-10-02 15:04:43+00:00
It was an announcement made by MS surrogates and it was promoted as true internally at MS, I personally head it through the grapevine from current MS employees. They really did try to get people to believe it as part of their billion devices push. I didn’t believe it because I know MS lies all the time, which is probably why they don’t make official statements about such things and generally work through surrogates.

Maybe next time they can create a poly market bet.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-02 15:05:34+00:00
> AI was less of a driver, though 17,375 cuts were “explicitly attributed to artificial intelligence,” the report said.

Additional citation:

Evaluating the impact of AI on the labor market: Current state of affairs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45442743 - October 2025

Evaluating the Impact of AI on the Labor Market: Current State of Affairs - https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-lab... - October 1st, 2025
by burnte | 2025-10-02 15:05:57+00:00
I had to admin Google Workspace maybe 9-10 years ago. It was rough but I thought they'd beep refining it. I'm back in a company using GW and I swear to god it's gotten worse. The basic features that simple don't exist are boggling. It is not a serious product and I feel bad for companies that have to use it. I've been here three months and I'm already planning our migration away.
by pizlonator | 2025-10-02 15:06:00+00:00
> Fil-C bites the second bullet, under the theory that there’s a lot of userspace code that isn’t extremely performance sensitive. And that’s probably true, but I also think it misses the larger trend: that a lot of userspace code is abandonware, and that there’s sufficiently more interest in rewriting it than maintaining it.

Is there sufficiently more interesting in rewriting it, really? I know that there are a handful of userspace utils being rewritten in Rust, doing that is labor-intensive, and causes regressions (in perf and behavior), which then causes more labor (both for folks to deal with the fallout on the receiving end and to fix the regressions). And for every tool that has a rewrite in flight, there are maybe 100 others that don't.
by cwmma | 2025-10-02 15:06:08+00:00
A better thing to say, is that there are no long term labor shortages, in the short term you can have booms where there aren't enough people to fill the jobs but in your example the shortage would last at most 5 years but you'd also have things like better assistance or automation so one person may be able to fill more then one of those positions, you'd probably also have people that could come out of retirement for enough money, or people in related fields that could train in less then 5 years. For enough money on the table you'd probably have people trying to figure out if you can train somebody in less then 5 years. This is also the issue that HB1 visas are intended to solve.

If enough money is on the table people can skill up fast.
by zokier | 2025-10-02 15:06:14+00:00
While the Win10 eol annoys me on a personal level, I don't know what good extending the support would do; it would just kick the bucket forward with no real solution. If MS added another year of free support then we would be just in the exact same situation next year. Windows 10 is going away some day, so might as well stick with the original eol date.
by floatrock | 2025-10-02 15:06:20+00:00
from the op:

> ridiculously stupid HR practices... a structure in which the only way to get a raise was to leave the company, and that was also often the best way to get promoted too

Until that culture changes, of course you're gonna assume you get fired or issued a surprise RTO order at year 7.5.

When the social contract becomes penny-pinching every opportunity, of course the employees are gonna start playing that game too.
by everdrive | 2025-10-02 15:06:22+00:00
> Many of the computers still running Windows 10 can’t upgrade to Windows 11. In 2022, hardware researchers found that 43% of all computers running Windows 10 could not move to Windows 11 — which equaled around 400 million computers at that time.

Microsoft presumably could -- at any time -- abandon these requirements via an update and a new installer. It's unclear to me why they're being so aggressive in this area, and represents a real closing door for a proper OS for anyone not using an alternative. (macOS, Linux, etc.)
by andrehacker | 2025-10-02 15:06:28+00:00
>> One of my fondest memories was buying the book "The Elements of Computing Systems"

>> by Nisan and Schocken, and implementing a 4-bit CPU in Minecraft.

You confused me there, the book doesn't cover Minecraft, you did that yourself after reading the book, got it.

The book is absolutely fantastic, it is the basis for the "From Nand to Tetris" courses: https://www.nand2tetris.org/

I haven't digested it in full and with a title like that and the boring cover I always have to scramble to find it when I got a few minutes (What is that "Nand to Tetris" book called again?)
by natrob | 2025-10-02 15:06:29+00:00
One thing I've noticed bridging the gap between technical LLM users like myself, and less technical users is they don't know the right questions to ask so to speak. I'm not sure how many wordpress users are going to jump in and ask an LLM to "adjust my header to make it sticky and reduce the background opacity on the hero image by 5%". Do you find it a challenge getting users the right directional support to ask the right questions?
by alexjplant | 2025-10-02 15:06:32+00:00
It was said by somebody that works for Microsoft on stage at a Microsoft conference [1].

> “Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10,” Nixon continued. “And it’s really brilliant. So I can say things like, yeah, we’re working on interactive tiles and it’s coming to Windows 10 in one of its future updates, right.”

> Microsoft didn’t deny what Nixon said, but it also didn’t back up the “last version” of Windows, either.

For all reasonable intents and purposes "Microsoft" said this was the case then had to walk it back.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/394724/why-is-there-a-window...
by freedomben | 2025-10-02 15:06:37+00:00
In the long term, yes definitely, and we saw that work first-hand in software development as bootcamps and comp-sci grads started cranking people out. However, the ramp-up time means that during those 5 years that it takes for more people to get qualified, this corrective affect won't help.

Also in the real world the wages are sticky enough that they take time to adjust, and then it takes time for people to realize that X field is becoming well paid and then start pursuing it, so realistically the 5 year period is more like 7 to 10. Plus as long as the industry is growing/expanding, demand can continue to outstrip supply due to that stickiness.

Even rapid moving stuff like AI has bee illustrative of this. The AI leaders are all primarily poaching, and wages are astronomical. This is undoubtedly fueling a massive number of people to study/specialize in AI, but it takes years (maybe even a decade) to complete that path (depending on your starting point).
by ketzu | 2025-10-02 15:07:24+00:00
The choice of windows 8 as comparisson seems deceptively disingenious to me. It is well known as an unpopular OS, that has been skipped by many. Windows 7 is much more in the position of windows 10.

Taking [1] as a source, win 7 in 2025 has a marketshare of about 2%. In 2020 it had 20%. If we look at 2016 specifically [2] win 7 is still at 47% at the end of the year (and win XP at 6%, while this source gives win8.1 at 10%).

Running unmaintained Windows releases is a tradition.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...

[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
by JustExAWS | 2025-10-02 15:07:24+00:00
The problem with those roles are that they are easily commoditizable and were even before AI. It’s also harder to stand out from the crowd if (the royal) you has as your only vector of competition is an ability to do coding interviews.

I was very much and I am very much an IC. I chose a path to manage and deliver projects with about half and half hands on keyboard coding and the other half dealing with “the business” and not manage people. But if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, “codez real gud” only gets you to a mid level role.
by adolph | 2025-10-02 15:07:26+00:00
> 95 percent clinical success rate

I'm not certain if a 5% fail rate is good or not. Fwiw, Cleveland Clinic [0] claims "Surgery improves vision for 97% of people" and an infection rate of less than .1%.

Retinal detachment, affecting 2 in 1,000 people. Infection, affecting fewer than 1 in 1,000 people.

0. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21472-catar...
by tdeck | 2025-10-02 15:07:27+00:00
More evidence of this in a poll from earlier this year.

https://archive.is/nNzq4

(It's an archive link because the original is paywalled).

> Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants."
by ynik | 2025-10-02 15:07:35+00:00
Only if you measure the life cycle starting from the initial release.

Windows 10 dropped out of support only 3 years after its successor (Win11) was available; when Windows 8.1 still had 7 more years of support after its successor (Win10) was released.

There's a lot of users who never upgrade windows but instead just get whatever is the latest whenever they buy a new computer. If these people bought a new computer every 5 years, they were always fine in the past, but now for the first time run out of support (because Win10 was "the latest" for an unusually long time period).
by tasty_freeze | 2025-10-02 15:07:39+00:00
Anecdote: my mother in law had cataracts in both eyes in her mid 70s. She went to NYC to have the procedure done because there was a doctor there she was told was very good.

She had one eye done and immediately after said: something is wrong -- I can't see anything in that eye. They hushed her and said, don't worry, in a couple days after giving your eye a bit of time it will be good as new. Well, she remained blind in that eye for the rest of her life. She never had the other eye done for fear that she'd end up totally blind and lived another 12 or so years with one cataract-clouded eye.

She didn't sue -- she was a "I don't want to make a fuss" kind of personality. She did follow up with them a few times in that first year, but they kept putting her off and downplaying that she really couldn't see more than vague light and shadow in that eye. Eventually she stopped contacting them.
by onraglanroad | 2025-10-02 15:07:41+00:00
No we're not. Here is a graph that shows global temperature increase https://berkeley-earth-wp-offload.storage.googleapis.com/wp-...

And you can find loads of different sources showing the same. Search for yourself.

So now, as a rational person, you should consider the source that told you different and be angry that they were lying to you. And you won't trust that source again, right?
by esafak | 2025-10-02 15:08:16+00:00
This is just wrong. As many here have said, grep is RAG; just the most primitive kind. It means you miss typos, synonyms, semantic matches (e.g., "the payment service"), and AST matches. I have to deal with this when I use grep-based agents by handholding them and overpaying. grep is just something that enabled CLI-based tools to get to market faster. grep's dominance will fade as the landscape matures. The current pattern seems to be to outsource RAG to an MCP.
by parineum | 2025-10-02 15:08:19+00:00
> and for the compensation a company would like to provide.

"would like to" is usually "can justify, financially". Most companies don't have a bunch of extra money laying around.

> When stated that way you can see that there are several levers to pull, the most obvious being compensation.

I know the way you mean that (companies pay more) and that's an option that does happen but it also goes the other way, employees can accept less (unless minimum wage makes it illegal for people to accept work).
by quotemstr | 2025-10-02 15:08:33+00:00
There are probably people on this thread who were born after algorithmic feeds became ubiquitous and they seem to have turned out fine.

The moral panic over feed ranking models will seem to history as quaint as the moral panic over the telegraph and the train.

If your new technology isn't attracting a swarm of moral gnats buzzing about it corrupting the youth, are you even making something impactful?
by WorldMaker | 2025-10-02 15:08:44+00:00
Presumably similar to how it works for the professional Mechanical Engineers and Electrical Engineers they already employ. Ethics are subjective and nuanced. Ethics are also different from morals. Some people can live with the moral quandary that their work may do harm to innocent people and still have the ethical belief that they are doing the right thing generally and that their work does more good than harm. (I'm not one of those people myself with regards to the military-industrial complex, but I respect my friends that are have sat with their morals and weighed them into the ethical frameworks of how they do their jobs and what they feel about doing their jobs ethically.)
by topaz0 | 2025-10-02 15:08:54+00:00
Hard to know without more context. It depends a lot on the trust between you and the asker. You'll be confident if you can tell that you are fulfilling their expectations on the whole. If that's not the case, it may be because the expectations are extravagant, or because reasonable expectations are not being met. What to do will depend strongly on the details.

That aside, I find it is useful to say a bit about what is involved in answering the question. "We haven't calculated that figure, but I can work it out based on these other measurements we have." "I don't know off hand. I know X colleague has some experience with that aspect, I'll check with them." "That's a little bit subtle because it might conflict with this other feature, I'll have to do refresh my memory." "That is relatively simple to do, I'll put it at the top of my list for when this meeting is over." (Of course, these also depend on the kind of question).
by antonvs | 2025-10-02 15:09:04+00:00
That qualifier, "for the given compensation", being implicit is what confuses things.

It would make sense to say something like, "There is a shortage of skilled workers willing to work for $1 per hour", and no-one would be likely to argue with that - there certainly is a terrible shortage of such workers! But that makes it clear that the problem is the compensation, not the available workers.

If you just say "There is a shortage of skilled workers" without that context, it becomes a incomplete statement from an economics perspective, and the GP is essentially objecting to that and pointing out that once you take the necessary context into account, the problem is not some sort of more general shortage of workers.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-02 15:09:18+00:00
Being behind a slow ADSL line until 2020 or so meant that I learned how to do everything without containers because the timeouts for the Docker Hub were set so low I couldn't stack up anything.

Building apps on my own account I might set up a database like Postgres and program a web server in Python or Java and use either HTMX or React on the front end. With Tailscale I can access that application with my tablet or phone or VR headset or whatever.

I know the cloud can be frustrating but it can also be liberating. My RSS reader consumes about 110 feeds that are ingested by Superfeedr which then posts to a Webhook which is a 20-line Python script running as an Amazon Lambda function that posts to SQS, then my home computer polls the SQS when it wants to catch up. It's hard to overstate how simple it, how it has been spinning like a top for almost two years without any maintenance.

So I'd argue it is really the best of times.
by greggsy | 2025-10-02 15:09:24+00:00
I expect that they will cave in to some degree and expand the free ESU program to private consumers outside the EU.

Don’t forget also that Office 2019 is also going EOL (among other things) on 14 October. Despite Microsoft’s efforts, people still use and even prefer their non-cloud products at home and enterprise.

The most exposed component of Windows is going to be the Edge browser, but throw in an unpatched Outlook and Word, and there’s a potential blood bath brewing after the first few vulnerabilities are disclosed.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-02 15:09:42+00:00
> You shouldn't add hundred million 32-bit floating point numbers in the naive way.

That's entirely correct, you shouldn't do this. And yet people do for one reason and another. I'm aware of Kahan summation (and Neumaier's improvement), but it wasn't the point of the benchmarks I happened to be performing when this topic arrived.

You will not be surprised to learn there's a Kahan adaptor crate for Rust's iterator, so (with that crate) you can ask for the Kahan sum of some floating point iterator just the same way as you could ask for the naive sum. I suppose it's conceivable that one day Rust will choose to ship a specialisation in the stdlib which uses Kahan (as Python did in newer versions) but that seems unlikely because it is slower and you could explicitly ask for it already if you need it.
by BrokenCogs | 2025-10-02 15:09:49+00:00
What's more flabbergasting is that there are no real alternatives to Windows that are as accessible (price wise and technically speaking). Macs are too expensive. Linux is out of the question for the average user since drivers tend to not work out of the box on several machines, and more importantly because Microsoft Office does not work on Linux. Most people (who aren't retired) need a computer where they can create and edit documents (pptx, docx, xlsx) that they can share with others. Linux prevents them from doing this. Using only Google docs has not caught on for the average user, sadly.
by hueho | 2025-10-02 15:10:01+00:00
> And it valid for them to want to do so.

Sure, if they don't make it everybody else's problem. Not to defend MS too hard, but they supported Windows XP with security updates for 18 years. At some point software needs to be "finished", and once it is, all responsability falls upon the user.

The enterprises with competent IT that will airgap their XP machines to keep running the control plane for their factory probably "know better" than MS, the power user who refuses to use a Linux distro for their Pentium 3 box or who will disable Windows Defender and run random scripts on the internet to "debloat the OS" without understanding it, or the ones who run LTSC and then complain that their games aren't working - they all absolutely don't know better, but unfortunately they tend to be the louder voices in the conversation.
by jacknews | 2025-10-02 15:10:12+00:00
It seems rather more likely to me, even if it's millennia way, that we get a semblance of an autonomous agentic AI, than what you suggest.

It might be impossible, or just need some innovations (eg, transformer), but my point is the investments are non-linear.

They are not investing X to get a return of Y.

If someone reaches AGI, current business models, ROI etc will be meaningless.