MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bob1029 | 2025-11-07 14:28:27+00:00
The part where the analogy breaks down for me is the ZIRP phenomenon and historical developer salaries.

The only thing that is sad to me is watching someone with 250K+ annual cash salary for a solid decade somehow becoming destitute after mere months of trying to do things without active W2 employment. Savings rate is a huge part of the "no avail" aspect. You can beat the pants off this game by simply being frugal. Income is 50% of the battle. How you spend it is the other 50%.
by okaleniuk | 2025-11-07 14:28:27+00:00
Is software an engineering discipline at all?

There are plenty of activities that are essential for engineering but not a sort of engineering themselves. Like writing documentation, or communicating requirements to your colleagues. Making instructions and operational procedures. Management. Accounting. Marketing. What makes making software an engineering discipline and making coffee not? Where is the line and why we presume we should be behind that line?
by lossolo | 2025-11-07 14:28:48+00:00
You mean like a demo for simple stuff? Something like hello world type tasks? The small models you mentioned earlier are incapable of doing anything genuinely useful for daily use. The few tasks they can handle are easier and faster to just write yourself with the added assurance that no mistakes will be made.

I’d love to have small local models capable of running tools like current SOTA models, but the reality is that small models are still incapable, and hardly anyone has a machine powerful enough to run the 1 trillion parameter Kimi model.
by xedrac | 2025-11-07 14:29:08+00:00
I've used a lot of Rust and Haskell over the past few years (I consider OCaml to be similar), and I think the benefits go beyond just user preference. But I think it's something that requires experience with "must not fail" systems failing in production, and then seeing how these languages make that failure impossible. The level of freedom and confidence that brings is amazing. And yes, that also makes them more fun to use.
by msafi04 | 2025-11-07 14:29:16+00:00
This is brilliant. The NFC tag integration is clever, but the mention of using the existing tags in library books is the real killer feature here. It solves the biggest friction point of needing to buy and set up your own tags.

I can imagine a magical workflow where you just tap a library book as you leave and it’s automatically added to your 'Currently Reading' list in the app, ready to be timed. That's a fantastic bridge between the physical and digital worlds.

Really clever idea, congrats on the launch!
by jerf | 2025-11-07 14:29:19+00:00
Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-AI-generated art [2]) and 3. a thing well known for generating false statements and incorrect conclusions.

I'm actually somewhat less critical of Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. than probably most readers would be, on the grounds that it simply isn't possible to build a "walled garden" at the scale of the entire internet. It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers. The scammers collectively are firing more brain power at the problem than even Big Tech can afford to, and the game theory analysis is not entirely unlike my efforts to keep my cat off my kitchen counter... it doesn't matter how diligent I am, the 5% of the time the cat gets up there and finds a tasty morsel of shredded cheese or licks some dribble of something tasty barely large enough for me to notice but constitutes a nice snack with a taste explosion for the much-smaller cat means I'm never going to win this fight. The cat has all day. I'm doing dozens of other things.

There's no way to build a safe space that retains the current size and structure of the current internet. The scammers will always be able to overpower what the walled garden can bring to bear because they're so many of them and they have at least an order of magnitude more resources... and I'm being very conservative, I think I could safely say 2 and I wouldn't be really all that surprised if the omniscient narrator could tell us it's already over 3.

[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/25/new-study-shows-massive-spike...

[2]: To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Quite unpleasant to look at. What we're getting down the pipeline now is from some now very out-of-date models.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-11-07 14:29:21+00:00
Yes, it makes a conceptual difference. Expert systems make decisions according to an explicit, explicable world model consisting of a database of facts, which can be cleanly separated from the I/O subsystems. This does not describe a transformer-based generative language model. The mathematical approaches for bounding the behaviour of a language model are completely different to those involved in bounding the behaviour of an expert system. (And I do mean completely different: computer programs and formal logic are unified in fields like descriptive complexity theory, but I'm not aware of any way to sensibly unify mathematical models of expert systems and LLMs under the same umbrella – unless you cheat and say something like cybernetics.)

You could compile an expert system into C++, and I'd still call it an expert system (even if the declarative version was never written down), but most C++ programs are not expert systems. Heck, a lot of Prolog programs aren't! To the extent a C++ program representing GPT inference is an expert system, it's the trivial expert system with one fact.
by sausagefeet | 2025-11-07 14:30:29+00:00
The sense I get from some comments is that if you need a type system and to compile to an executable, Rust is the only option, otherwise you can use pretty much anything. But, as you say, MLs have been compiling to binaries for decades. One of the first online books on OCaml is for systems programming.

I know that isn't everyone's view, but I do hope posts like this, even if not technicaly deep, at least let people know that there are lots of options out there.
by tim333 | 2025-11-07 14:31:11+00:00
Nvidia shows total liabilities of $32bn, annual profit $73bn. I think they'll be ok.

OpenAI is a much more interesting question. $1.4 tn is 4.7% of US GDP or about 1% of global. It's a lot of money to extract to pay your debt back. Short of full AGI I'm not sure how that happens.

And although I think AGI will happen my thoughts are it'll need algorithmic breakthroughs which are probably best achieved by a lot of different people trying things rather than all the money going to Altman.
by zwnow | 2025-11-07 14:31:17+00:00
This is actually one of the things I struggle with the most. Even small scale apps are mysterious to me, I have no idea how to build, deploy and maintain an app correctly.

For context, I work for a startup as solo dev and I manage 5 projects ranging from mobile to fullstack apps.

I am completely overwhelmed because there basically does not exist any clear answer to this. Some go all in on cloud or managed infra but I am not rich so I'd highly prefer cheap deployment/hosting. Next issue that idk how to fix is scaling the app. I find myself being stuck while building a ton as well, because there are WAY too many attack vectors in web development idk how to properly protect from.

Doesn't help not having any kind of mentor either. Thus far the apps I've built run fine considering I only have like 30-40 users max. But my boss wants to scale and I think itll doom the projects.

I'd wish there were actual standards making web safe without requiring third party infra for auth for example. It should be way easier for people to build web apps in a secure way.

It got to a point of me not wanting to build web stuff anymore because rather than building features I have to think about attack vectors, scaling issues, dependency issues, legacy code. It makes me regret joining the industry tbh.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-11-07 14:31:34+00:00
I actually read an interesting study, probably here, about software engineers. It turns out that for as much emphasis as we put on mathematics we actually tend to be better at language, and that even our penchant for maths is less in the way of calculation and more in the way of definition and expression (which is to say, making it the language numbers speak and learning it that way).
by Validark | 2025-11-07 14:32:30+00:00
I hate the idea of having one "Software Discipline". Something is lost when people are constrained by OOP or TDD or "Clean Code". Obviously, as with the example of TDD in the article, a lot of these terms mean different things to different people. Hence whenever "Clean Code" is criticized, people who think their code is "clean" take up arms.

I tend to disagree with most of these rulesets that are meaningless to "engineering". The idea that a function should only be 40 lines long is offensive to me. Personally, I would rather have one 400 line function than ten 40 line functions. I'm a Ziguana. I care about handling edge cases and I think my programming language should be a domain specific language to produce optimal assembly.

I would not constrain other people who feel differently. I read an article where some project transitioned from Rust to Zig, even though the people on the team were all Rustaceans. Obviously their Rust people hated this and left! To me, that's not a step in the right direction just because I prefer Zig to Rust! That's a disaster because you're taking away the way your team wants to build software.

I think hardly any of the things we disagree on actually have much to do with "Engineering". We mostly aren't proving our code correct, nor defining all the bounds in which it should work. I personally tend to think in those terms and certain self-contained pieces of my software have these limits documented, but I'm not using tools that do this automatically yet. I'd love to build such tools in the coming years though. But there's always the problem that people build tools that don't notice common use-cases that are correct, and then people have to stop doing correct things that the tool can't understand.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-07 14:32:38+00:00
Nowhere did I say or imply everything needs a cause. That's your baggage. In fact, it is the exact opposite: that because an infinite regress is incoherent and impossible, there must be some necessary uncaused cause where the buck stops.

"The universe" cannot be that cause, as the universe and everything in it is contingent.
by protimewaster | 2025-11-07 14:32:39+00:00
As I said, my experience has been that the cheaper products run on WiFi. I also don't like that a product advertising "Matter" doesn't answer the question of whether it uses WiFi or not.

I much prefer that a $3 ZigBee temperature and humidity sensor definitely doesn't use WiFi rather than having to dig to see if a cheap a Matter sensor uses WiFi.

I also much prefer the prices of ZigBee.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-11-07 14:32:51+00:00
> This doesn't prove it's aliens. It does add to my mass-hysteria hypothesis

You don't notice it do you? Re-read again what I wrote. At no point did I argue that it's aliens. Intentionally.

You first point was proven wrong instantly "it's only an USA Phenomenon". You don't bother to research anything but stick with your hypothesis. You don't even go look for evidence yet are utterly convinced of the result of your complete lack of research.

Here's an example of metal alloy that's supposed to come from an UFO and shows an interesting composition we cannot replicate. It's a well known artefact:

https://tothestars.media/de-de/blogs/press-and-news/tts-anal...

It had some analysis done by different researchers https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237233241_Compositi...

Your lack of curiosity is still very obvious.
by Verdex | 2025-11-07 14:32:59+00:00
This is so close to my sentiment that I had to double check to see if I wrote it.

And to explore running studies a bit further. The second time you build a system goes so much better because you already know all of the weird edge cases. And the third better still because your failures in the second time has cured you of some of your hubris.

Even if you somehow bankrolled 50 repeat projects and did the statistics etc correctly, you're still going to get some weird artifacts because some of those teams have people who did the thing before. You'll learn the wrong lesson when the real lesson is "make sure Bob is working on Bluetooth because he's done it 10 times before."

Starting with people with no experience is likewise not interesting because nobody really cares what lessons you learn by turning a bunch of muggles loose on something difficult.

What you need to bankroll is 50 teams worth of people who spend their entire careers testing out a hypothesis. (And even then you probably need to somehow control their professional communities in some way because again who cares what some small group of people approaches a problem when you could instead have people who go out and learn things from other people.)
An Elegy for Jetbrains
by dfaiv | 2025-11-07 14:33:38+00:00
JetBrains, my muse, my magic completion, how you formed me, brought me into being, loved me through my API ignorance, my savior from the sterile VIM. Your sweet keymaps sustained me through my long days, your kind squigglies guided me through dark hours, your generous hints were my well of comfort. For so long you have sustained me.

I cry over you - tears not ready to let you go; is that warmth still I feel in your cheek? Where are you now, as these agents swarm, causing unending verbose typing, insisting I blindly grope through code bases with fingers crossed? Where are you to save me from endless code errors, the destruction of my lint, barrages of guesses thrown at my poor, abandoned self, too mortal to understand? I cry out for you as I drown in The CLAUDE’s crippled fuzzy search; as the CLI deletes my prompts, born of my sweat and blood, all because I made the unforgivable sin of grazing the wrong key. Save me from the forced exiled wasteland of The VSCODE’s WSL gods. Hear my laments and wrap me again in your warm reassurances of correctness.

Jetbrains, my forever love, here I am, keeping vigil, my heart unwilling to give up faith that you will bring forth my salvation: truly shine your glories into my agentic world, teach them with the mysterious MCP, show them the light of your squigglies, raise up the one true interface to my prompting, bring me safe across the chasm of my WSL, bring unity and understanding to all the languages that spring forth from the root of my monorepo. Oh my first creator, do not let this be our end.

------

I guess I'm not the only one? https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sweep/jobs/8dUn406-founding-engineer-intern
by agumonkey | 2025-11-07 14:33:51+00:00
I'd generalize it to digitalization of the world, especially since the free / unlimited bandwidth internet with high resolution content.

I personally am a little afraid because I now look at nature as if it was a screenshot to be looked from afar and then uploaded. It's a weird sensation that I'm not fully immersed in reality anymore and everything is just to be seen, shared and commented whereas before the web, reality was all you had to exist in, you had to touch, feel, play there was nothing else.

I wonder if anybody else ever had that state of mind.

ps:I often consider spending a month without any screen at all to try reset my brain.
by meheleventyone | 2025-11-07 14:34:17+00:00
Ahh, sorry we’re talking past one another then because I hadn’t twigged you were talking about getting better at learning because that’s not what I meant with my initial post! Although I can see why you took that from it.

I do like that meta observation though that not only do people get better at prediction through learning they can also get better at the rate at which they improve their predictions.
Show HN: Making Rich Text Editors AI-Ready with Git-Compatible Versioning
by NilsJacobsen | 2025-11-07 14:34:38+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with Git-like versioning for Plate.js editors using Legit.

The idea: before AI can safely edit documents, editors need to be auditable, reversible, and programmatically controllable basically Git for your editor state.

Right now you can: - Save snapshots of editor state - Rollback to previous versions instantly - Keep everything Git-compatible via Legit

This is early work. I’d love to hear how developers would want AI-assisted editing to work with documents in a company repo, and what rollback, diffing, or auditing features would matter most.

Example: https://github.com/NilsJacobsen/legit-example-plate Discord: https://discord.com/invite/34K4t5K9Ra
by aatd86 | 2025-11-07 14:35:11+00:00
Funny thing is to ask: 'Is blue, blue?' Now with existence: 'Does existence, exist?' And then a bit differently: 'Is nothing something?'

We see that these are different types of impredicativity.

Existence just needs itself to define itself. Nothing cannot exist if nothing actually somehow is. It needs existence. Blue is a word. It does not exhibit the characteristic is describes. The set of all things blue does not contain the proposition 'blue'.

While the set of all things that exist contains itself? Sweet baby Ouroboros ;D
by Finnucane | 2025-11-07 14:35:12+00:00
It's a little bit of irony that the example of the author points to architects relying on a CAD system, a system that was presumably built by programmers. Who had to understand that the results their software produced had to have a high level of reliability--if it produced a wrong result, buildings could collapse, people could be hurt or killed. Errors would be extremely costly. So it's not impossible, just most software isn't held to that standard, because there's less incentive.
by zzzeek | 2025-11-07 14:35:20+00:00
I dont even know what "anti-wokeness" means. For me, "woke" means when I, as someone who has lived in NYC / LI his whole life, learned that all the highways were built in such a way as to intentionally exclude poor and especially Black people from participating in society: https://transalt.org/blog/repeal-robert-moses and about LI's nasty history of redlining that prevented Black communities from gaining generational wealth: https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/segregation-real-es...

Despite growing up in these places, I had no idea about any of this - Black people, to me as a youngster, just seemed to be these people who all seemed to live in other neighborhoods and were seen in 1970's Long Island as people to be wary of. "Woke" to me meant, holy shit look how badly these people have been treated, no wonder things are this way.

So then WTF is "anti-woke"? is it the claim that none of that documented, well known systemic racism for decade after decade, after 300 years of slavery, actually matters and the real reason for racial disparities is genetics or something? I mean what else could that mean ?
by msafi04 | 2025-11-07 14:35:23+00:00
This is awesome. The promise of reliably preserving formatting and placeholders like {{username}} is the absolute killer feature here.

I'm really curious about the prompt engineering involved. How do you instruct the model to translate the surrounding text while ensuring it never touches the placeholders or any embedded HTML, especially since syntax can vary between languages?

That seems like the most difficult part of the problem to solve robustly.

Great work!
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-11-07 14:35:27+00:00
back in the day it used to go the other way: some enterprising young nerd would find some exploit somewhere, get picked up by the feds under a hyperextended version of a law meant to prevent people from misusing telegraphs, do a year and come out to a lucrative contract as a security consultant. alas, industrialization is enclosure of all spaces, not just the commons.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-07 14:35:48+00:00
> It was definitively determined that he did not.

He definitely did, though. That the jury opted not to convict him doesn't change that fact. It's the inverse of the fact that when a jury convicts an innocent person, the person still didn't actually do the crime.

For the record, I agree with the jury's verdict here, but there's no question he threw a sandwich at someone, and there's no question that is legally assault.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-11-07 14:36:13+00:00
> I wonder if React has something to keep AI on their toes about best practices.

Ahh, I wouldn't hold my breath.

And to your point, I guess another thing Svelte has is it's compatibility with just vanilla JS, meaning (I think) it doesn't necessarily have to be "Svelte" code to still work with Svelte.
by Grazester | 2025-11-07 14:36:26+00:00
I have used Windows hibernate since Windows XP and never had an issue with devices after resuming Windows. Within recent years on Windows 10 I have gone months without a restart, only hibernating my pc. In the early days I used a custom built pc. In the later years(post 2005) I have only used laptops, mostly Dells with a sprinkling of Lenovos; if that matters.

I don't know why Windows now hides it from the power menu by default now.
by Lord-Jobo | 2025-11-07 14:37:25+00:00
If the curiosity dies, the entire thing crumbles.

The second I stop being curious I stop finding new and exciting things to do, and I stop feeling fulfillment. It’s one of the biggest signs saying “it’s time to move on”.

I feel so strongly for the people who can’t afford the luxury. Ive been there, unfulfilling jobs for years because bills or resumè building.
by wavemode | 2025-11-07 14:37:47+00:00
I think, rather, you're romanticizing what "real" engineering looks like.

Real engineering doesn't mean that mistakes are never made or that there are never bugs. Rather, it is that systems are tested thoroughly enough, and designed with enough failsafes and redundancy, that safety concerns are mitigated.

The problem in the Boeing case was not that the software had bugs. Lots of aviation software has bugs, it's actually very common. Rather, the problem was that they did not design the system to be safe in the event a bug occurred.

How that looks exactly tends to differ depending on the system. As a common example, many aircraft systems have other systems which monitor them and emit a warning if they detect something which doesn't make sense. Though this would've required Boeing to create technical material for pilots on how to respond to this new type of warning, which would've required training updates, which would've required recertification of their plane design, the cost of which Boeing desperately wanted to avoid. Fortunately (unfortunately), FAA oversight had become very lax, so Boeing instead just downplayed the safety concerns and nobody asked any questions.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-07 14:39:09+00:00
It is worth it in my opinion because it's mostly a one-time cost (learning how it works and what is allowed), and in return you get less buggy program structures (it basically forces you not to write spaghetti code). Also you have to worry about it much less if you don't need 100% performance and are happy to clone everything.

Occasionally I do still fight it, e.g. if you want a self-borrowing structure there still isn't a great solution (I think Rust should support position independent borrows) but overall it's fine.