MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wcarss | 2025-11-26 11:46:07+00:00
Lead: "We have six weeks to ship. Questions?"

Dev: "Could we pull an export of relevant historical data and get some time to write code to safely anonymize that, and stand up a parallel production system using just the anonymized data and replicate our deploy there, so we can safely test on real-ish stuff at scale?"

Lead: "I'll think about it. In the meantime, please just build the features I asked you to. We gotta hustle on this one."

I'm not arguing with this hypothetical exchange that it's infeasible or even a bad idea to do exactly what you suggested, but attempting to justify an upfront engineering cost that isn't directly finishing the job is a difficult thing to win in most contexts.
by zkmon | 2025-11-26 11:46:32+00:00
So, you want to rebel and stay as organic-minded human? But the what exactly is "being a human"?

The biological senses and abilities were constantly augmented throughput the centuries, pushing the organic human to hide inside deeper layers of what you call as yourself.

What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.

Now let's wind back. Why resist just one more layer of augmentation of our senses, mind and physical abilities?
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-26 11:46:40+00:00
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"?

I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI. Behind an intern or junior? Sure, I enjoy that because I can tell them how shit works, where they went off the rails, and I can be sure they will not repeat that mistake and be better programmers afterwards.

But an AI? Oh good luck with that and good luck dealing with the "updates" that get forced upon you. Fuck all of that, I'm out.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-11-26 11:46:49+00:00
I knew barely anything about this trend, despite spending a decent chunk of my day online, which I think is evidence of the modern web being decentralised.

However it's not so much due to the algorithms, which probably are trying to funnel most people towards the same products, but just the fact that there are so many people online now that you're naturally going to see the emergence of niches.

You don't have to read this optimistically if you don't want to - some of these "curated niche interests" can be pretty dark...
by ben_w | 2025-11-26 11:47:31+00:00
> Broadcasting and teaching on a different continent isn't putting America First. There's your reason.

You think advertising doesn't work?

$191k/year to promote American interests in Ethiopia may or may not be value for money to the American taxpayer (I honestly don't care because I'm not one), but to think it can't be value for money is to claim that the primary business model of half the American tech giants — and also the business model of X.com, which isn't a giant but is the property of DOGE's most famous figure-head — is fake.
by zmgsabst | 2025-11-26 11:48:05+00:00
In this instance, it’s just claiming turf for the political movement in the US that has spent the last century:

- inventing scientific racism and (after that was debunked) reinventing other academic pretenses to institutionalize race-base governance and society

- forcibly sterilizing people with mental illnesses until the 1970s, through 2005 via coercion, and until the present via lies, fake studies, and ideological subversion

- being outspokenly antisemitic

Personally, I think it’s a moral failing we allow such vile people to pontificate about virtues without being booed out of the room.
by cbeach | 2025-11-26 11:48:53+00:00
Unfortunately it's well known that Wikipedia is asymmetric in its treatment of publications on the left and right of the political spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedia

Co-creator of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, said the Left has taken over Wikipedia and stripped it of neutrality:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/07/16/wikipedia-...
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-11-26 11:49:10+00:00
I tried it a few month ago. I wanted to move 2tb of different type of data from one pc to a server.

The upload of these files were horrendes, it was slow on computing something, it was slow in transfering and the ui sucked.

I enabled sshd and moved everything over with scp.

I loved the video, i hated my one time experience with it :|
by seu | 2025-11-26 11:49:10+00:00
> Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.

I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this lack of critical reflection on HN of all places.

Saying "progress is progress" serves nobody, except those who drive "progress" in directions that benefits them. All you do by saying "has always changed things" is taking "change" at face value, assuming it's something completely out of your control, and to be accepted without any questioning it's source, it's ways or its effects.

> So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...

Amazing depiction of extremes as the only possible outcomes. Either take everything that is thrown at us, or go back into a supposed "dark age" (which, BTW, is nowadays understood to not have been that "dark" at all) . This, again, doesn't help have a proper discussion about the effects of technology and how it comes to be the way it is.
by m_a_g | 2025-11-26 11:49:20+00:00
> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)

In my Big Tech job, I sometimes forget that some people can really enjoy what they do. It seems like you're in a fortunate position of both high pay and high enjoyment. Congratulations! Out of curiosity, what do you work on?
by ghosty141 | 2025-11-26 11:49:35+00:00
The "just" was more in the sense that it technically is not that hard to get together, there is nothing directly preventing that.

I honestly think it's just people who don't mind these problems and are fine working under those conditions, or they just quit once they are too annoyed. Change is way harder just than just leaving, I think that's also part of the reason why this keeps going on.
by ryanjshaw | 2025-11-26 11:50:47+00:00
I was embarrassed recently to realize that almost all the code I create these days is written by AIs. Then I realized that’s OK. It’s a tool, and I’m making effective use of it. My job was to solve problems, not to write code.

I have a little pet theory brewing. Corporate work claims that we hire junior devs who become intermediate devs, who then become senior devs. The doomsday crowd claim that AI has replaced junior and intermediate devs, and is coming for the senior devs next.

This has felt off to me because I do way more than just code. Business users don’t want get into the details of building software. They want a guy like me to handle that.

I know how to talk to non-technical SMEs and extract their real requirements. I understand how to translate this into architecture decisions that align with the broader org. I know how to map it into a plan that meets those org objectives. And so on.

I think that really what happens is nerds exist and through osmosis a few of them become senior developers. They in turn have junior and intermediate assistant developers to help them deliver. Sometimes those assistants turn out to be nerds themselves, and they spontaneously transmute into senior developers!

AI is replacing those assistant human developers, but we will still need the senior developers because most business people want to sit with a real human being to solve their problem.

I will, however, get worried when AIs start running businesses. Then we are in trouble.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 11:50:55+00:00
Based on conversations with peers for the last ~3 years or so, some of retrained to become programmers, this doesn't seem to as absolute as you paint it out to be.

But as mentioned earlier, the situation in the US seems much more dire than elsewhere. People I know who entered the programming profession in South America, Europe and Asia for these last years don't seem to have more troubles than I had when I got started. Yes, it requires work, just like it did before.
by wcarss | 2025-11-26 11:52:17+00:00
> So, no. There is no development configuration in production, or mirroring of a point of sales terminal to another system that's running development code.

This is a misreading of the suggestion, I think. My reading of the suggestion is to run a production "dry run" parallel code path, which you can reconcile with the existing system's work for a period of time, before you cut over.

This is not an issue precluded by PCI; it is exactly the method a team I led used to verify a rewrite of and migration to a "new system" handling over a billion dollars of recurring billing transactions annually: write the new thing with all your normal testing etc, then deploy it alongside in a "just tell us what you would do" mode, then verify its operation for specific case classes and then roll progressively over to using it for real.

edit: I don't mean to suggest this is a trivial thing to do, especially in the context you mentioned with many elements of hardware and likely odd deployment of updates, etc.
by auxiliarymoose | 2025-11-26 11:52:38+00:00
Super cool, thanks for sharing!

This is one of the reasons I am so skeptical of the current AI hype cycle. There are boring, well-behaved classical solutions for many of the use-cases where fancy ML is pushed today.

You'd think that rational businesses would take the low-risk snooze-fest high-margin option any day instead of unintelligible and unreliable options that demand a lot of resources, and yet...
by skydhash | 2025-11-26 11:54:22+00:00
If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away.

If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away.

If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one.

What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 11:54:28+00:00
Right now I'm doing consulting for two companies, maybe a couple of hours per week, mostly having downtime and trying to expand on my machine learning knowledge.

But in general, every job I've had has been "high pay and high enjoyment" even when I initially had "shit pay" compared to other programmers, and the product wasn't really fun, I was still programming, an activity I still love.

Compare this to the jobs I did before, where the physical toll makes it impossible to do anything after work as you're exhausted, and even if I got paid more than my first programming job, that your body is literally unable to move once you get home, makes the pay matter less and feel less.

But for a programmer, you can literally sit still all day, have some meetings in a warm office, talk with some people, type some things into a document, sit and think for a while, and in the end of the month you get a paycheck.

If you never worked in another profession, I think you ("The Programmer") don't realize how lucky you are compared to the rest of the world.
by prmph | 2025-11-26 11:55:30+00:00
Tools are not value neutral in any way.

In my third world country, motorbikes, scooters, etc have exploded in popularity and use in the past decade. Many people riding these things have made the roads much more dangerous for all, but particularly for them. They keep dying by the hundreds per month, not only just due to the fact that they choose to ride them at all, but how they ride them: on busy high speed highways, weaving between lanes all the time, swerving in front of speeding cars, with barely any protective equipment whatsoever. A car crash is frequently very survivable; motorcycle crash, not so much. Even if you survive the initial collision, the probability of another vehicle running you over is very high on a busy highway.

On would think, given the clear evidence for how dangerous these things are, why do people (1) ride them at all on the highway, and (2) in such a dangerous manner? One might excuse (1) by recognizing that many are poor and can't buy a car, and the motorbikes represent economic possibility: for use in courier business, of being able to work much further from home, etc.

But here is the thing about (2), A motorbike wants to be ridden that way. No matter how well the rider recognizes the danger, there is only so much time can pass before the sheer expediency of riding that way overrides any sense of due caution. Where it would be safer to stop or keep to a fixed lane without any sudden movements, the rider thinks of the inconvenience of stopping, does a quick mental comparison it to the (in their minds) the minuscule additional risk, and carries on. Stopping or keeping to a proper lane in a car require far less discipline than doing that on a motorbike.

So this is what people mean when they say tech is not value neutral. The tech can theoretically be used in many ways. But some forms of use are so aligned with the form of the tech that in practice it shapes behavior.
by squigz | 2025-11-26 11:56:10+00:00
Simply ignore users like that. If someone actually important brings up that instance as you 'being an asshole', then explain your reasoning then. If that doesn't calm them down, they're probably not someone worth working with.

I'll also point out the supportive comments in that thread; sure there's always gunna be some negativity, but there's also positive people. Focus on those.
by idle_zealot | 2025-11-26 11:56:18+00:00
> The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.

Certainly it's biased. I'm not the author, but to me there's a huge difference between computer/software as a tool, designed and planned, with known deterministic behavior/functionality, then put in the hands of humans, vs automating agency. The former I see as a pretty straightforward expansion of humanity's long-standing relationship with tools, from simple sticks to hand axes to chainsaws. The sort of automation AI-hype seems focused on doesn't have a great parallel in history. We're talking about building a statistical system to replace the human wielding the tool, mostly so that companies don't have to worry about hiring employees. Even if the machine does a terrible job and most of humanity, former workers and current users, all suffer, the bet is that it will be worth the cost savings.

ML is very cool technology, and clearly one of the major frontiers of human progress. At this stage though, I wish the effort on the packaging side was being spent on wrapping the technology in the form of reliable capabilities for humans to call on. Stuff like OCR at the OS level or "separate tracks" buttons in audio editors. The market has decided instead that the majority of our collective effort should go towards automated liability-sinks and replacing jobs with automation that doesn't work reliably.

And the end state doesn't even make sense. If all this capital investment does achieve breakthroughs and creat true AGI, do investors really think they'll see returns? They'll have destroyed the entire concept of an economy. The only way to leverage power at that point would be to try to exercise control over a robot army or something similarly sci-fi and ridiculous.
by wink | 2025-11-26 11:56:22+00:00
Yes, please continue explaining the job I did in the past to me.

It doesn't change anything, especially as I did not blatantly argue cloud=good,hardware=bad. That is a completely different question.

My point is that given some circumstances, you need a lot less specialized deep knowledge if all your software just works[tm] on a certain level of the stack upwards. Everyone knows the top 1/3 of the stack and you pay for the bottom 2/3 part.

I didn't mean to say "let's replace a sysadmin with some AWS stuff", my point was "100k per year on AWS makes a lot of small companies run".

Also my experience was with having hardware in several DCs around the world, and we did not have people there (small company, but present in at least 4 countries) - so we had to pay for remote hands and the experience was mostly bad . Maybe my bosses chose bad DCs, or maybe I'd trust sysadmins at "product companies" more than those working as remote hands at a hoster...
by justdep | 2025-11-26 11:56:59+00:00
Annoyed with paid services that charge you to bring your own API key (getvoila.ai), I partnered with Claude Code and made my own and open sourced it. Enjoy!

---

A "bring your own key" Firefox extension that provides quick access to LLM assistants (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini) via a keyboard shortcut, with full page context.

Features:

- Quick access: Press `Ctrl+J` to open the assistant overlay on any webpage

- Multiple providers: Supports OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini

- Page context: Use `@page` in your prompt to include the current page's content

- Markdown rendering: Responses are rendered with full markdown support (code blocks, lists, etc.)

- Session memory: Conversations persist within a session (cleared when you close the popup)

- Streaming responses: See responses as they're generated in real-time
by skwee357 | 2025-11-26 11:57:10+00:00
Well, there are two aspects from which I can react to this post.

The first aspect is the “I don’t touch AI with a stick”. AI is a tool. Nobody is obligated to touch it obviously, but it is useful in certain situations. So I disagree with the author’a position to avoid using AI. It reads like stubbornness for the sake of avoiding new tech.

The second angle is the “bigtech corporate control” angle. And honestly, I don’t get this argument at all. Computers and the digital world has created the biggest distopian world we have ever witnessed. From absurd amounts of misinformation and propaganda fueled by bot farms operated at government levels, all the way to digital surveillance tech. You have that strong of an opinion against big tech and digital surveillance, blaming AI for that, while enjoying the other perils of big tech, is virtue signaling.

Also, what’s up with the overuse of “fascism” in places where it does not belong?
by da_chicken | 2025-11-26 11:57:50+00:00
Similar story at my prior job. Heck, we still had one package that was only built using 32-bit .Net Framework 1.1. We were only just starting to see out-of-memory errors due to exhausting the 2 GB address space in ~2018.

I love the new features of .Net, but in my experience a lot of software written in .Net has very large code bases with a lot of customer specific modifications that must be supported. Those companies explicitly do not want their software framework moving major supported versions as quickly as .Net does right now, because they can't just say "oh, the new version should work just fine." They'd have to double or triple the team size just to handle all the re-validation.

Once again, I feel like I am begging HN to recognize not everyone is at a 25 person microservice startup.
by antihero | 2025-11-26 11:58:15+00:00
There's all this stuff but I remember when I was a Junior freelancer I was analysing a calendar availability sync script for a small holiday bookings company (not the big one). The hosts would have a publicly accessible Google Calendar with their bookings on which the script I was fixing would pull from.

Turns out, most of the host stored their customers long cards + expiry etc in the comment field of the booking.
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-11-26 11:58:31+00:00
If you are a software engineere, you can leverage AI a lot better to write code than anyone else.

The complexity of good code, is still complicated.

which means 1. if software development is really solved, everyone else also gets a huge problem (ceo, cto, accountants, designers, etc. etc.) so we are in the back of the ai doomsday line.

And 2. it allows YOU to leverage AI a lot better which can enable you to create your own product.

In my startup, we leverage AI and we are not worried that another company just does the same thing because even if they do, we know how to write good code and architecture and we are also using AI. So we will always be ahead.
by rhubarbtse | 2025-11-26 11:58:54+00:00
Hostname is not the issue, it can connect and then fails some handshake or whatever. Adding verbosity just seems to hexdump the packets in addition to logging an error.

[2025.11.26-09:10:21.460] [FINE ] got server SSH_MSG_KEX_ECDH_INIT

sending: length = 48

0000 00 00 00 2C 06 1E 00 00 00 20 D0 91 2C 8F 57 AF ...,..... ..,.W.

0010 91 B2 F9 C5 77 42 30 D1 2E A5 A0 B2 C6 C8 76 4C ....wB0.......vL

0020 5F 32 27 E7 1F 0D A2 32 C0 3A 00 00 00 00 00 00 _2'....2.:......

[2025.11.26-09:10:21.520] [FINE ] sent server SSH_MSG_KEX_ECDH_INIT

[2025.11.26-09:10:21.533] [ERROR] can't read 4 uint8_t header, got 0

[2025.11.26-09:10:21.540] [ERROR] can't read SSH_MSG_KEX_ECDH_REPLY

[2025.11.26-09:10:21.554] [FINE ] bye bye

ERROR: 16 - tcp read failed
by srean | 2025-11-26 11:58:59+00:00
It does not work that way in the short term.

Say you have bet billions as a CEO, CTO, CFO. The decision has already been made. Such a steep price had to come at the cost of many groups and teams and projects in the company.

Now is not a time to water plants that offer alternatives. You will have a smoother ride choosing tools that justifies that billion dollar bet.
by belter | 2025-11-26 11:59:06+00:00
You worked for Google? And you cant see the difference between being lucky of joining the one of 2,000 startups that got lucky....Remember the founders wanted to sell Google for $1Million then dropped the price top 750K...And holding without selling, versus an active options trader like Pelosi husband, who is active all the time and seems to be better than 99% of the traders out there?

One is passive luck, the other is consistent, suspicions, permanent positive performance....
by raincole | 2025-11-26 11:59:07+00:00
Because tech corps overhired[0] when the interest rate was low.

Even after the layoffs, most big tech corps still have more employees today than they did in 2020.

The situation is bad, but the lesson to learn here is that a country should handle a pandemic better than "lowering interest rate to near-zero and increasing government spending." It's just kicking and snowballing the problem to the next four years.

[0]: https://www.dw.com/en/could-layoffs-in-tech-jobs-spread-to-r...
by vintagedave | 2025-11-26 11:59:09+00:00
> Now here's a crazy one that I would not bet my money on being intentional. Although it is dope.

I had never seen that before (read the article to see the image, but it related to the Apple Pencil and the iPad's magnets.)

This article is far more in-depth than I expected when I opened it. Excellent resource. It has so many smooth illustrations - it itself is a wonderful example of great UI for an informational resource.