MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bonesss | 2025-11-09 19:34:34+00:00
Hard truths about outsourcing: you’re always dealing with a cultural, political, and legal gap.

Stuff that’s hella-illegal, that not even the remotest WFH citizen would ever try to pull, might look very tasty from another perspective. Economics that favour that cheap labour also means even marginal scams can seem wildly tempting on the other side.
by js2 | 2025-11-09 19:34:36+00:00
There were two deaths yesterday at the Indianapolis marathon:

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2025/11/09/indiana...

As someone who's run a couple dozen marathons and a few ultras, well, everything in moderation:

> The Copenhagen City Heart Study followed 1,878 runners and 10,158 non-runners for up to 35 years. The runners had an impressive 44% lower risk of mortality during follow-up, with an increase in life expectancy of about six years for both genders. Importantly though, U-shaped curves were apparent for mortality with respect to dose of running, whereby the benefits of running were most significant for those who jogged between 1 to 2.5 hours per week, at a slow to moderate pace, with a frequency of about three times per week. In those runners who were performing higher volume, higher intensity running, the long-term mortality rates were not significantly different from non-runners. In other words, excessive running may have abolished the remarkable improvements in longevity conferred by lower doses of running.

> Strikingly concordant data were seen in a large decades-long observational study of 54,000 Americans. Highly significant mortality reductions were seen in the runners compared to the non-runners, but U-shaped curves again showed that the lowest mortality rates were seen in those running 5 to 20 miles/week, and that the longevity benefits of running completely disappeared with distances greater than 25 to 30 miles/week. Still, the mortality rates in the high mileage runners were similar to but did not exceed those for sedentary individuals.
by encom | 2025-11-09 19:35:44+00:00
>You try to project your ideas on the kids

That's what parents do. My dad brought home a C64 back then, and a book about BASIC. We didn't have a joystick for it, so we built one together. He showed me how a speaker works by taking one apart. He taught me about HAM radio. Showed me neat stuff he built with electronics. Helped me with my math homework, because he was a goddamn math wizard. I watched him disassemble our piece of shit washing machine and fix it several times. None of it was mandatory or forced or nothing. It was more like, hey son take a look at this cool shit. And I thought it was cool, and my dad was the coolest dad ever because he knew all this stuff!

Sadly, he was taken from us too soon. I often wonder what he'd think about the tech and electronics of today.
by phil21 | 2025-11-09 19:36:07+00:00
Everything about this is the opposite from my experience.

No one is talking about outsourcing to body shops like the old times a decade ago. I went from employing offshored devs and IT talent competing with low-effort body shops, to now competing directly with the largest names in the industry for those workers.

It is not hard at all to employ people “directly” in most countries. Plenty of global payroll services that will handle this for you at a small scale, and you just stand up a local “office” with a cheap office manager and attorney on retainer if you outgrow that. The legal entities and structure might be opaque, but the end result is effectively direct employee as far as anyone working with them is concerned.

Offshoring does not mean what it used to. These people are treated and expectations are the same as anyone employed from Iowa or California. The largest difference and source of friction is timezone.

Reliable internet is more or less ubiquitous in the entire world now in any even moderately sized city. It’s not 2005 any more. This is utterly a non-issue. And this was before Starlink. A $200/mo paycheck bonus usually covers this anywhere I’ve done business.

I’ve worked with hundreds of folks around the world at this point. The HN take on outsourcing is so ridiculous to me, and explains the hubris you see here regarding remote work.
by tamimio | 2025-11-09 19:36:34+00:00
AI is just the scapegoat; otherwise we should see jobs like administrative assistant, legal, and medical replaced first. But I also think engineering is the worst field to get into. It's neither protected by a license like other white-collar jobs nor by a union like most blue-collar jobs. You end up overworked plus debt from school like white-collar workers but getting paid worse than blue-collar workers. And everyone's okay with that for some reason. Not a single organization is trying to change it. The government is happy with it, companies are obviously loving it, and on top of that, engineers are building the systems to replace them in a few years and they still think they are smart..
by overfeed | 2025-11-09 19:36:38+00:00
It wasn't a "self own" unless you're taking the perspective of Covid. Remote work was forced onto sceptical employers due to shutdowns.

The industry suffers from fads and cargo-culting. Stealth diffuse offshoring is currently in, it's going to take a while for the downsides to percolate: I suspect will mostly boil down to jurisdiction impedance mismatches. What does it mean for employers if it is 1000x harder to extradite an employee to Delaware (or whatever jurisdiction is agreed to in their employment contract) if they clone their product from code? Without e-Verify, what are the chances that your remote employee is a North Korean unit, or working for your competitor? Boom times ahead for corporate intelligence - as well as the traditional kind. How many security teams and policies are geared to face Iran as an adversary? An unstated e-Verify benefit is free FBI COINTEL
by mixmastamyk | 2025-11-09 19:36:41+00:00
That’s a problem but I can somewhat understand. One SGI workstation was not their strength. My memory is that while they had Netscape, there was no LibreOffice (StarOffice at the time). No consumer apps to speak of. One had to hope for FOSS apps to get ported, and check their package manager site occasionally for updates.

The web would eventually take over most things, but not for a decade plus, and we didn’t know for sure. By that time the hardware would be obsolete. :sad-trombone:

For a while it was like living twenty years in the future though, if your profession revolved around graphics.
by torginus | 2025-11-09 19:39:17+00:00
I'm not super familiar with either country, but I feel like that's not really true

this is comparing Seattle and Mumbai

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Real estate is about 2x-1x the price (I bet the cheap stuff is much worse than in the US though).

Cars and more expensive big purchases are cheaper in the US. And don't forget, the US has absolutely first-class-bar-none access to financial services, with abundant cheap loans, so you can support a much nicer lifestyle on the same income.
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-09 19:39:36+00:00
> Are there evidence it is really happening?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45867034

> Which open wifi network are left in residencial neighborhood?

Some neighborhoods are mixed use. Some residences are in dense buildings. Some people configured guest networks with no password. Some ISPs made their home gateways captive portal access points.
by pizlonator | 2025-11-09 19:40:32+00:00
> and re-tool to become a doctor or a lawyer now

It's worse than that. Who is going to pay the doctors and lawyers (and other folks providing services) if there are no more US jobs that product stuff for export.

And it's not even about services. Who is going to pay the home builders, electricians, plumbers, etc in a world where there is no money flowing into the US economy from the outside
by nyrikki | 2025-11-09 19:40:37+00:00
While I don’t disagree with his argument for preferred conventions in an era of accumulators/gp registers, I am surprised he didn’t call out why Fortran used 1,

The IBM 704's index registers were decrementing, subtracting their contents from an instruction's address field to form an effective address.

Type A instructions had a three bit tag, indicating which index registers to use.

With those three indexes you get Fortran’s efficient 7D column major arrays. This made data aggregation much more efficient and Cray/Cuda/modern column oriented DBs do similar.

But for Algol-like languages on PDP inspired hardware I do like his convention, if like the example you have a total ordering on the indexes.

But Fortran also changed the way it was taught, shifting from an offset from memory that was indexed down from an address, which makes sense when the number of bits in an address space changes based on machine configuration, to index values.

Technically Fortran, at least in word machines meets his convention.

pointer + offset <= word < pointer + offset +1

It is just the offset is always negative.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-09 19:41:14+00:00
> Given YouTube's profits, I think it's fair to say there's a substantial viable middle ground of much more vigorous (and labor intensive) appeals than what's currently done.

People keep looking at the absolute amount of profit across a massive service and assuming that it means they could afford to do something expensive. But the cost of the expensive thing is proportional to the size of the service, and then they can't, because dividing the profits by the number of hours of video turns into an amount of money that doesn't buy you that.

> And that requirement can be created by more robust, outcome-defined regulation.

What are you proposing exactly?

Outcome-based metrics are the things that often fail the hardest. It's reasonable to have a given level of human review when you have functioning CAPTCHAs on the reporting function to rate limit spam reports, but if you then require that by law and LLMs come around that can both solve CAPTCHAs and auto-generate spam reports to target competitors etc., now your cost of doing human review has gone up by many fold but you're still expected to meet the same outcomes. Then they either have to tune whatever metric you're not forcing them to meet up to draconian hellscape levels to meet the one you're demanding or you're now demanding they do something that nobody knows how to do whatsoever, both of which are unreasonable.

And all of this is because the government doesn't know how to solve the problem either. If you want to prohibit things with a "risk of physical harm" then you have to hire law enforcement to go drink from the fire hose and try to find those things so the perpetrators can be prosecuted. But that's really expensive to do properly so the government wants to fob it off on someone else and then feign indignation when they can't solve it either.
by decimalenough | 2025-11-09 19:41:15+00:00
The FAANG I work for is trying to do just that. But while new grads are indeed a dime a dozen, you can't staff an R&D with only new grads, and finding and retaining skilled seniors is so tough that it has resorted to offering US-based Indians packages with US level comp to entice them to move back for a few years to bootstrap teams.
by canjobear | 2025-11-09 19:41:30+00:00
In grad school I got to attend a talk by one of the researchers who was involved in the discovery of melatonin as a sleep aid for humans. He said that his team had hoped for it to become a prescription medicine dosed at 500 mcg, because anything higher gave paradoxical effects and actually made sleep worse. But it ended up being classified as a supplement in the US rather than a drug, so they had no way to control the dosage on the market.

The other useful thing I learned is that melatonin isn't primarily involved in falling asleep, its main function as a hormone is in staying asleep. I've started taking it sporadically if I wake up in the middle of the night, to make sure I get back to a deep sleep and stay there, and it seems to be super effective for this.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-09 19:42:28+00:00
That's a commonly made argument, but it's innumerate. Low h1b salaries lower local salaries. The reason you hire h1b is because they're cheap, and then the only locals you hire are the ones that will work at the price of h1bs.

Local salaries might even be slightly lower, because you get to hold h1bs prisoner (an added benefit.)
by assemblyman | 2025-11-09 19:42:36+00:00
If one has time, a few books I would highly recommend:

The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham

Security Analysis by Graham and Dodd

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings by Philip Fisher

The Little Book That Still Beats the Market by Greenblatt

Warren Buffett's annual letters

Actually, anything by Ben Graham or Joel Greenblatt is worth reading if one is interested in the investing world. I don't know if I'll ever invest enough time doing fundamental analysis and actively (value) investing but I am making my way through these just to understand value investing properly.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-09 19:43:06+00:00
As someone who over the past couple of years was responsible for some of these hiring decisions, it absolutely is a part of it ... lol.

I've worked with absolutely fantastic developers in Argentina, Poland, Romania and Ukraine. You're right, talented workers get talented pay, but talented pay in Romania is a lot less than talented pay in San Francisco. Teams are used to working entirely remotely now, videoconferencing software is great, and teams mostly align to US timezones (not entirely, but for example Eastern European workers shifted their day a few hours later so we get at least 4-5 hours overlap every day).

I think companies are a lot smarter about outsourcing now than they were 15-20 years ago and focus more on developer quality, but I've absolutely seen that a company will be much happier to hire 2 excellent senior devs from Poland for what you could get for 1 junior college hire in a high cost of living area in the US.
by nine_k | 2025-11-09 19:44:21+00:00
Startups are a different deal. Everyone knows everyone, people are hired for their specific talents, management barely exists, there are no executive types disconnected from the reality in the lower levels of the company, no turf wars of middle management, etc. (This is why I prefer working for startups.)

Big corporations are the opposite. Doing something that looks good locally / helps a quarterly report but works to the detriment of the company as a whole is often par of the course :(
by ysleepy | 2025-11-09 19:44:57+00:00
Tell yourself what you want, but this sort of AI positive proclamation will make your project seem less trustworthy to many people.

I choose not to use a vibe coded password manager, rigorous review or not, to protect my entire digital existence, monetary assets and reputation.

It's the pinnacle of safety requirements, memory unsafe language, cryptography, incredibly high stakes.

I have the distinct displeasure having to review LLM output in pull requests and unfailingly they contain code the submitted doesn't fully understand.
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-11-09 19:45:20+00:00
This is a sales tactic, in the same way that Jetbrains and Microsoft will give out free licenses for students in the hopes that some of them will go on to work for employers who will then buy the product. It also helps convince investors about potential growth and MAU increase.

Same goes for the OpenAI and Anthropic office announcements posted by the GP, these are sales offices with very little tech employment or outsourcing happening.

Re “investments”: these are also not what you think. I remember when Amazon was partnering up with schools in the US to provide “machine learning education” where said education was thinly veiled ads for managed ML services like Sagemaker and Rekognition. I wouldn’t be surprised if the $3B investment from Microsoft was primarily free courses and certifications to cultivate a market, as well some annotation work (I know that Amazon has been hiring quite a few people to do this kind of work).
by stephenlf | 2025-11-09 19:45:22+00:00
Don’t worry about others. Just share your stuff. Here is who will look at your code:

1) unusually good interviewers. These will glance through your repo for 30-120 seconds, checking for a) clear code style, b) clear ideas, and c) good documentation. Nobody but influencers will do a DEEP code review of code they’re not being paid to review.

2) people on HN or Reddit if you write an interesting blog post and link the underlying code.

It’s usually true that we are our own worst critics. This is an order of magnitude truer for developer portfolios.
by cflewis | 2025-11-09 19:45:48+00:00
I've been really happy with the TP-Link smart plugs. I keep upgrading them as The Latest Standard That's Definitely The Real One This Time Trust Us Bro comes out, and the Matter ones are excellent. Getting an instant response from them is really nice. I see no reason to buy others.

I would buy only Hue but that's because I have more money than sense, and they don't actually make smart plugs last time I looked, they make plugs but label them all as lights in the app, which is more annoying than it sounds.

The real problem to solve ditching TP-Link _routers_ is that all routers are uniformly fucking awful, and all you are doing is choosing your particular poison. This is especially true after Apple exited the game so long ago. I use Google Wifi because it mostly works most of the time, but that's not glowing praise. But the world has become trained that rebooting a router once a week and praying that it works when it comes back is a perfectly normal state of affairs and we couldn't possibly do this any better.
by Arch-TK | 2025-11-09 19:46:57+00:00
The new standard relies on some possibly third party (at least that seems somewhat implied here) which has a database of email addresses which it can attest exist and which is tied to some user authentication.

If the email address isn't yet known to this third party (or, you are not logged in), there _will_ be a context switch which in my example case will occur for every registration since I use a per-entity email address.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-09 19:47:35+00:00
This is absolutely my experience as well - so many posts on HN are just in denial or clueless.

> The largest difference and source of friction is timezone.

Completely agree with this, and that's why I've seen much less desire to outsource software work to India or China (like I did in the 2001-2012 timeframe) than I have to Latin America or Eastern Europe (or heck, even Western Europe where dev salaries are still much lower) for US-based companies.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-11-09 19:47:35+00:00
I wish more people, across every input from capital risk to physical testers and users, were willing to take the kind of hardcore technology risks that people were taking from 1940-1969

The amount of insane things done under the fuck it we ball “could work or might kill us all - let’s try it” ethos was very high

It is currently very low which is sad
by reversemyplan | 2025-11-09 19:48:07+00:00
ChatGPT doesn't truly "understand" language the way humans do, but it models language in a highly advanced way by training & learning from a vast amounts of data. The key tech behind ChatGPT's ability to grasp meaning is their transformer architecture (self-attention mechanism). It allows the model to weigh and focus on different words in a sentence based on their importance or context. In simpler terms, it looks at how each word relates to every other word in the sentence and beyond. This allows it to understand context and nuances, even within long or abstract sentences.

Furthermore, ChatGPT (and other LLMs) is trained on a massive corpus of text, books, articles, websites, etc. From that training, the model learns patterns in how words, phrases, and sentences related to one another. It doesn't explicitly understand what a "dog" or "love" means in the human sense, but it understands it patterns about how they are expressed and used in language.

Without going into too much details, it also uses other techniques like Probabilistic Modeling and Semantic Representations to essentially be able to provide you with what it does currently.

If you wish to dive deeper and do some research, I'd recommend checking out the following:

1. Transformer Architecture 2. Self-Attention Mechanism 3. Pre-trained language models 4. Embeddings and Semantic Space 5. Attention is All You Need - which is a paper published by Vaswani et al., very interesting publication that is a key for understanding the self-attention mechanism and how it powers modern NLP models like GPT. 6. Contextual Language Models

I think those 6 would cover up all your questions and doubts
by plun9 | 2025-11-09 19:50:27+00:00
Not everyone gets motion sickness though. I can use my VR headset for hours without discomfort from VAC.

From that publication:

The results of the study indicated that the visual acuity of employees who work with data glasses generally did not change over the course of a shift and over a period of six months. Nevertheless, there were groups that had an increased chance of deterioration. Eye strain was frequently reported after working with the data glasses. Our study pointed out that employees aged 40 years and older are at risk for deteriorations of visual acuity, which is consistent with the findings of Yeow et al. (1991), who examined computer users.
by al_borland | 2025-11-09 19:50:33+00:00
I wouldn’t worry about students. They won’t be hurting you, only themselves. If the goal is to learn, they aren’t learning. This will either mean programming is a random class they’re taking, not their career, so who cares… or they’ll have a really hard time later in life when they will need to sink or swim in a real job, having not first developed the skills. That’s not a problem for you.

It’s also much more likely they will go to AI these days; the odds of them searching and landing on your repo to use are almost 0. If they do, I imagine most schools would scan for direct copies of existing code.
by vdupras | 2025-11-09 19:50:42+00:00
I've never written Forth as part of a team. I suppose it's difficult with an average team. But then I try to imagine what a small team of good Forth programmers could do and I'm thinking it would be a quite powerful team.

If I piqued your interest, might I interest you in the introductory series I wrote: https://tumbleforth.hardcoded.net/
by gspr | 2025-11-09 19:50:55+00:00
> I'm with it -- but is this actually addressing a real threat?

Yes, the threat of mandated computational devices performing mandated computations to do things in regular life. Currently, these come almost exclusively from private companies (at least in the free world), but I think it's a good precedent for a government to recognize the dangers here. To be really helpful, it needs to ban those private companies from doing what they're doing. But this is a good start.
by chatmasta | 2025-11-09 19:51:40+00:00
TP-Link makes really solid products, and if you don’t want to use their firmware then almost all of them can easily flash OpenWRT. In fact most of their routers are built from OpenWRT anyway.

I installed their mesh Wi-Fi system for my parents recently and was really impressed how seamless the process was. It did involve making a cloud account which I wasn’t thrilled about, however.
by diamond559 | 2025-11-09 19:51:44+00:00
So you still had to put in ~3 months of off and on again work, how many hours did it take you over those three months to configure everything yourself? Then figure about how much would you have had to budget out w/o the llm's help. Show me your math. Then of coarse you'd have to follow up w/ the company whether their "llm based bot platform" wasn't just a complete waste of their 200k in the first place for this to matter at all.