MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trentnix | 2025-11-10 01:49:15+00:00
Warning, rant ahead. Not sure if it’s the wisdom of a few decades of experience or if I’m just jaded in the latter half of my career. It’s probably some of both.

My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.

Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.

You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.

Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.

Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.

The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.

I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-10 01:49:41+00:00
> The main problem is not generally what government can and wishes to restrict, it's all the proprietary/private restrictions such as not being able to run whatever code you want on hardware you own.

But those come from laws, like DMCA 1201, that prohibit people from bypassing those restrictions. The problem being that the DMCA is a federal law and Montana can't fix that one, but at least they couldn't do state one?

Although this language seems particularly inelegant:

> computational resources for lawful purposes

So they can't make a law against it unless they make a law against it?
by pizlonator | 2025-11-10 01:49:43+00:00
> His resume is designed poorly.

Yeah.

OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.
by pizlonator | 2025-11-10 01:51:24+00:00
What we cannot know is: which of these are we seeing:

- Just another recession, nothing to do with AI or automation. It'll pass and things will be back to normal.

- A massive move of well-paid jobs away from western countries.

- A massive move of well-paid jobs to automation and AI.

What an "exciting" time to be alive
by kragen | 2025-11-10 01:51:53+00:00
I used units(1):

: yeso; units Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2025-10-06 3749 units, 113 prefixes, 120 nonlinear units You have: 2 arcsin(earthradius/moondist) Unknown unit 'arcsin' You have: 2 asin(earthradius/moondist) You want: dms 1 deg + 53 arcmin + 57.540656 arcsec
by jaggederest | 2025-11-10 01:51:56+00:00
Don't feel bad about your VO2 max, the baseline and ceiling are largely genetic. Most people can only bump VO2 max by about 10-15% even with absurd training regimens. Same goes with many of the markers people track - you can control them to an extent, but some people just have high blood pressure or poor lipid profiles and thus need intervention.
by klausnrooster | 2025-11-10 01:51:58+00:00
https://youtu.be/bdfNvYPxkOY. And https://www.felienne.com in general, at least where spreadsheets are concerned. Two monitors - one for Excel, one for the VBE - is not Smalltalk, but it is productive. At least for n=1, since the '90s.
by ashirviskas | 2025-11-10 01:52:10+00:00
Is it legal to pay people based on the radius of their right eye iris with 500lumen 27" display placed 1M in front of them? Or blood type? Or armpit hairiness? Or maybe tongue length?

This is a half joke comment, I'm actually wondering - what can you discriminate on generally in US? (and where you draw the arbitrary line (not saying other countries are better/worse)).
by clanky | 2025-11-10 01:52:30+00:00
An effective and sufficient level of organization would allow workers to tilt the balance of costs definitively against outsourcing. Employers are also only able to get away with it because the ones who are not laid off are willing to play along (understandably, since they are each individually in a similarly precarious position, but this creates a tragedy of the commons when everyone applies the same calculus of risks).
by buran77 | 2025-11-10 01:52:49+00:00
FSD never drives alone. It's always supervised by another driver legally responsible to correct. More importantly we have no independently verified data about the self driving incidents. Quite the opposite, Tesla repeatedly obscured data or impeded investigations.

I've made this comparison before but student drivers under instructor supervision (with secondary controls) also rarely crash. Are they the best drivers?

I am not a plane pilot but I flew a plane many times while supervised by the pilot. Never took off, never landed, but also never crashed. Am I better than a real pilot or even in any way a competent one?
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-10 01:53:04+00:00
The same BigTech that for the past couple of decades have loudly proclaimed "go to a good college and get a degree in CS and you'll get a decent job" have now betrayed those who followed their advice. It's heartbreaking.

It's not just this fellow. I'm hearing it from friends and relatives whose children are new grads in CS, cyber-security or and similar fields.
by allensallinger | 2025-11-10 01:53:17+00:00
I'm working on https://mimicmarketer.com It allows you to define different personas that you can then test marketing on. This allows you to see how different personas will interact with your marketing. Currently, it has a feature that allows you to define basic personas and test them against two types of copy, as well as a tool that grades your email subject lines and bodies against a generic persona, assessing the likelihood of user interaction with the content.

My other project is https://eggexplorer.com This is a site I wish I had when building out my flock of chickens. It allows you to see the different characteristics of chickens and which hatcheries sell each different breed. You can also see which hatcheries sell hatching eggs for each breed as well.
by Veserv | 2025-11-10 01:53:24+00:00
At a certain point you do need to test in real road conditions. However, there is absolutely no need to jump straight from testing in lab conditions and “testing” using unmonitored, untrained end users.

You use professional trained operators with knowledge of the system design and operation using a designed safety plan to minimize prototype risks. At no point should your test plan increase danger to members of the public. Only when you fix problems faster than that test procedure can find do you expand scope.

If you follow the standard automotive pattern, you then expand scope to your untrained, but informed employees using monitored systems. Then untrained employees, informed employees using production systems. Then informed early release customers. Then once you stop being able to find problems regularly at all of those levels do you do a careful monitored release to the general public verifying the safety properties are maintained. Then you finally have a fully released “safe” product.
by pogue | 2025-11-10 01:53:29+00:00
It's just important to remember that melatonin, like most all dietary supplements sold in the U.S. is severly under studied. Melatonin is allowed to be sold because it exists in nature, not because it has been proven safe. This is essentially true of anything sold as a dietary supplement.

Having said that, it doesn't necessarily make it dangerous. But, like myself and others have said in this post, please do take your dosage into consideration, as well as whether you're using it on a daily basis, as there are other things that could be preventing you from falling asleep/staying asleep that may be better addressed by a doctor, such as sleep apnea, as you mentioned.
by hamstergene | 2025-11-10 01:53:51+00:00
I am really surprised how well AI excuse works, most journalists just take CEO words as is, and make no effort to assess: is that even credible?

Obviously layoffs correlate with AI age, but it's most definitely not AI replacing jobs, not yet. Even in 2025 stories about a job fully taken by AI need to be scraped for, and it's almost always about non-SWE jobs. And in 2023, when the first layoffs already started, models sucked and none of the existing tools and agents even existed yet! But if you search for example for headcount growth in India/Mexico, the numbers can only be described as "booming".

I don't know what exactly is going on, but it's pretty obvious the companies are moving offshore or simply doing less work, and for some reason need to lie about why.
by cube00 | 2025-11-10 01:54:04+00:00
> those chaotic early stages of side projects (like mine) where commits are basically "update again" for months.

I don't accept "chaotic early stages of side projects" is a justification for skipping out on writing good quality commit messages.

It wouldn't be acceptable in a well managed company so I don't understand why side projects would get a pass to become sloppy.

It's your side project and you're free to skip writing commit messages, but you need to own that decision and not blame "those chaotic early stages"

I've found taking the time to write good commit messages helps me as I can see what I've tried previously and pull out any older versions if I've found a new direction isn't working for me. It also captures my thought process in case I'm tempted to repeat the sins of the past.
by busterarm | 2025-11-10 01:54:17+00:00
Not true. Work for a large public tech multinational. We had a several year run where every time we tried to hire onto our team, HR would force severely unqualified people into our interview pipeline. Then after they failed the interview HR would stress that we should strongly consider hiring the person on DEI grounds. We don't do technical interviews on culture fit -- we've gone through significant effort to make sure our interviews are objective and generate good signal regardless of background.

None of these were junior positions, they were all basically senior and staff engineer positions, based on the nature/criticality of the work. We had to interview a wide variety of people all of whom had never had a professional software engineering role before and some who didn't even speak a language shared by any members on our team.
by logankeenan | 2025-11-10 01:54:26+00:00
The BBC article spelled the dam's name wrong in their interactive image. It's Latyan Dam if anyone else wanted to look up more on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latyan_Dam https://maps.app.goo.gl/UzQrPMR4iHRdbsuP7

Edit: TIL there can be different translations/spellings of Persian to English
by walterbell | 2025-11-10 01:54:38+00:00
> In my opinion, it’s too early, too ambiguous, and the jury is out on whether myopia can actually be reversed.

We do need studies on if/why/how myopia reduction works for some people.

However, we already know a guaranteed way to increase myopia:

1. Wear corrective lens for 20/20 vision for distant objects, e.g. driver license vision test. 2. Keep wearing distance lens for closeup, e.g. phone at 12". 3. Keep wearing distance lens for near work, e.g. book or laptop at 24". 4. Keep wearing distance lens for intermediate, e.g. monitor at 36". 5. Eye adapts (more myopia) to get 20/20 vision at daily focusing distance, e.g. work laptop. 6. Optometrist measures that distance correction with lens is now worse than 20/20. 7. Optometrist increases distance correction to get back to 20/20, for legal (e.g. driving) compliance. 8. Go to Step 1.

This loop can be broken by measuring the distance in #5 and buying dedicated lens/contacts for that distance. This reduces the burden on both eye and brain.
by ggm | 2025-11-10 01:55:06+00:00
The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now.

Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not. If you don't regard this as a core competency which should be kept in the national register, then sure, buy the ships from other places. But, don't come whining when the national-strategic interest needs you to do things outside the commercial domain or under duress, or with restrictions of access to supply in those other places.

There is Autarky, and there is total dependency, and there is a massive road in-between. Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.

I might add that Australia is in pretty much the same boat (hah) and the shemozzle over the Tasmanian Ferries (ordered from Scandi, parked in Edinburgh because too big for their home port dockside tie-ups) is an exemplar. And there's a high speed double-hull "cat" style fabricator in Tassie, or at least there was.

In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise. I sailed around Falmouth 30 years ago with a friend and indeed, a lot of big ships were laid up in the estuary and river mouth. Awesome sight in a small sailing boat.
by tom_alexander | 2025-11-10 01:55:07+00:00
> all routers are uniformly fucking awful [...] 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

My OPNsense router currently has 74 days of uptime, and that's just because I ran an update 74 days ago. I've never rebooted it to solve a problem. The only wrinkle is OPNsense (and pfSense) is at least an order of magnitude more complicated than your average consumer router.

OTOH, my ubiquity access point reboots itself every time I change any setting at all.
by qazxcvbnmlp | 2025-11-10 01:55:42+00:00
Agree 100%

It's very hard to get a job right now, I don't doubt that. Also it's not very helpful in getting a job to look at macroeconomic trends: the relative change in the trends is much smaller than how you show up in the process.

The poster had consulting work, and 3 internships.. I sense a disconnect between what a potential employer needs (ie why they would pay you) and what they have to offer.

Its easier for the ego to go "man the job market it bad", ie if I don't get this job what does that say about 'my worth as a human' but its not very helpful in getting a job.
by RRWagner | 2025-11-10 01:56:28+00:00
Working with a group of friends on a "microcontroller-for-makers" kind of thing called the MakerPort. (https://makerport.fun) Sort of similar to an Arduino or micro:bit, but uses the MicroBlocks programming editor (https://microblocks.fun) created by John Maloney, who was the original team leader for Scratch at MIT for 11 years. The hardware includes an mp3 player, I2C ports, accelerometer and true capacitive touch sensors.
by munificent | 2025-11-10 01:56:37+00:00
> The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of the most expensive.

I currently live in Seattle. On Zillow, I can find a house in the small town where I grew up with the same stats as mine (square footage, number of bedrooms, baths). That house is about a fourth of the cost that Zillow says my current home is worth.

Oh, and the house in the small town has a 750' storage building out back. And another 1,500' shop. And five acres of land. And a fish pond.
by greggman65 | 2025-11-10 01:57:58+00:00
Not all suits but threatened suits. Nintendo claimed ownership of world maps in platform games ala Super Mario 3 and Super Mario World. If you were making a game that had one in the early 90s and you were shipping in Nintendo you got a letter that in so many words said, "Change your game or get sued AND lose your permission to publish on NES/SNES/Gameboy"

Nintendo also claimed a patent on showing a ghost image of your previous race (the ghost car in Mario Kart)
by mike_hearn | 2025-11-10 01:58:18+00:00
That hasn't been true for at least 20 years. The tabloids have routinely attacked Conservative/Labour policy for a long time now, and nobody in Westminster even noticed let alone cared. They're much more sensitive to being attacked by the BBC or the Guardian because that's what they, their staffers, friends, colleagues and to a large extent their voters are consuming.
by jaggederest | 2025-11-10 01:58:48+00:00
Here's a couple from a random search for the convenience of the forum:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29371008/

https://reviewofmm.com/light-as-a-tool-for-myopia-control/

I can't find the site that I read a while ago, it was very similar to the myticker.com site that was posted the other day for heart disease but focused on myopia.
by striking | 2025-11-10 01:59:12+00:00
It's not a question of trade-offs or utility. The sooner you intervene the more effective your interventions will be, sure, but it's hard for me to imagine a situation where there's absolutely no point in doing something about a sedentary lifestyle. It might be harder to improve your outcomes if you've already developed comorbidities but if one cares at all about living longer I don't see why that person should let perfect be the enemy of good.
by jghn | 2025-11-10 01:59:21+00:00
Not all git messages are equal. My $0.02 is that commit messages I write are for other people. Until I officially hand a branch over for other people's consumption, like a PR, if I'm committing the only reason is because I want to access my code on another machine. I'll put whatever junk I please in those commit messages. But then before I open a PR I'll collapse everything down into 1+ commits each with curated content and appropriate messages.
by ghaff | 2025-11-10 01:59:33+00:00
AI may actually change everything but I suspect things are cyclical to at least some degree. The $400K jobs may dry up for most--and certainly having two or more those jobs at the same time will--especially for people without degrees or degrees from no-name colleges or boot camps. It may be reasonable to expect CS/programming jobs will become more like lots of other STEM degrees in terms of requirements and comp.

Which is certainly a lot different than the expectations that were set since post dot-com.

Obviously (? I think) there will be jobs but they may well be more in line with middle-class professional jobs than some cadre has been in the last 10-20 years.
by tkgally | 2025-11-10 01:59:36+00:00
Great essay. This part seems particularly astute:

“Most work lives in the fat middle of a bell curve. ... Models feast on that part of the curve. ... The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps. ... An out of distribution human, in my head, is someone whose job sits far enough in the tail of that curve that it does not currently compress into training data. ... [But T]hey are not safe; nothing is. They are simply late on the automation curve.”
by dpark | 2025-11-10 01:59:44+00:00
> Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us.

The thing is, your premise is that you can identify certain patterns as being indicative of AI. However, those exact same patterns are commonly used by humans. So what you’re actually claiming is some additional insight that you can’t share. Because your premise does not hold up on its own. What you were actually claiming is “I know it when I see it”.

Let me give you a related example. If you go to any of the “am I the asshole” subreddits, you will encounter the exact same story format over and over: “Other person engages in obviously unacceptable behavior. I do something reasonable to stop the unacceptable behavior. People who should support me support other person instead. Am I the asshole?” The comments will be filled with people either enraged on behalf of the author or who call it AI.

The problem with claiming that it’s AI is that the sub was full of the exact same garbage before AI showed up. The stores have always been the same bullshit rage bait. So it’s not technically wrong to say it looks like AI, because it certainly could be. But it could also be human generated rage bait because it’s indistinguishable. My guess is that some of the sub is totally AI. And a chunk of it is from human humans engaged in shitty creative writing.

When you look at generic click-bait/blogspam patterns that humans have been using for decades now and call it AI, all you’re doing is calling annoying blog writing AI. Which it could be, but it could also not be. Humans absolutely write blogs like this and have for longer than LLMs have been widely available.

> My reply wasn't an instance of this syntactic pattern, and the fact that you think it's the same thing shows that you are probably not capable of recognizing the particular way in which LLMs write.

It was absolutely an example of the pattern, just more wordy. Spare me the ad hominem.

Your “you couldn’t understand” and “obvious to us” stuff is leaning into conspiracy theory type territory. When you believe you have some special knowledge, but you don’t know how to share it with others, you should question whether that knowledge is actually real.
by mike_hearn | 2025-11-10 02:00:10+00:00
No, it places requirements on all bankers worldwide regardless of whether they have any presence in the USA. This is enforced requiring compliance from all US banks, and then by making any bank that comes into compliance sever relationships with any peered bank that isn't in compliance, so via a sort of recursive graph walk it brings every bank globally under US law because every bank is ultimately connected to some US bank somewhere.
by Kholin | 2025-11-10 02:01:02+00:00
I've built a self-hosted reddit-like community platform in Go: https://baklab.app

Users can create their own sub-communities, and within them, set up different categories and boards. Posts can be voted on, and board types can include regular posts, Q&A, or live chat. It's like a hybrid of Reddit and Discord but leans more towards a traditional web community. It also supports server-side rendering, making it SEO-friendly. This project is an extension of my previous Hacker News clone, dizkaz (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43885998).
by clanky | 2025-11-10 02:01:02+00:00
A lot of these things Trump doesn't want to actually do, and knows are totally infeasible, so he just throws them out there as a way to score points without actually spending any political capital. We just saw it today with the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks at the same time he's going out of his way to make sure people can't get SNAP benefits, even with state assistance.