MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ruby devs earn more than average devs
by pogrebnoy | 2025-12-08 13:28:20+00:00
Ruby devs earn more than average devs! And it’s not just about experience.

From the 2025 DevEco survey: - 71% of Ruby developers have 5+ years of experience, vs 49% overall - 33% of Ruby devs earn over $120k/year, vs 15% across all developers

So Ruby devs are about 45% more experienced than average, yet TWICE as likely to earn top-tier salaries.

Experience clearly plays a role, but it doesn’t explain the full gap. It’s likely tied to where Ruby gets used. Rails monoliths are quietly powering large businesses that value reliability and long-term maintainability over chasing the latest stack trend.

If you’ve already built solid software experience and want to move into a field that pays well and values craftsmanship, Ruby and Rails are excellent bets.
by level09 | 2025-12-08 13:28:25+00:00
For sure it depends on the requirement/use cases, but I think most performance issues have nothing to do with the framework. It's usually N+1 queries, missing indexes or no caching etc... Fix those first.

People chase FastAPI for speed, but if your bottleneck is the database or any network bound work, using async vs sync framework barely matters. Premature optimization is real.

Flask handles production traffic perfectly fine. And by the time it doesn't, you will know exactly where the real bottleneck is.
by wpietri | 2025-12-08 13:29:18+00:00
I want to be clear that I am being entirely practical here. This is not navel-gazing. I am describing something that works. That has worked for me and others for decades.

And yes, if you are in an environment where people with power want things, you have to take that into account.

But no, we don't have to just blindly do what people with power ask. The difference between being a professional an a minion is that professionals know much more about the work and how to do it than the people paying them. Personally, I think we are professionals, which gives us a variety of responsibilities not just to the person with the money, but to the profession and society at large.

Does that mean I never have given estimates? Not at all. But it does mean that if somebody asks me to do things in a way I think suboptimal, I'm at least going to say, "Hey, there's a better way to satisfy your goals here." And then I'm going to help them learn enough about the better way that they're at least willing to try it.
by toddmorey | 2025-12-08 13:29:30+00:00
Confident idiot: I’m exploring using LLM for diagram creation.

I’ve found after about 3 prompts to edit an image with Gemini, it will respond randomly with an entirely new image. Another quirk is it will respond “here’s the image with those edits” with no edits made. It’s like a toaster that will catch on fire every eighth or ninth time.

I am not sure how to mitigate this behavior. I think maybe an LLM as a judge step with vision to evaluate the output before passing it on to the poor user.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-08 13:29:37+00:00
Yah. Maybe. OTOH most places are easily walkable, bicyclable, and if you don't want to do that there is usable, affordable and working public transportation everywhere. No 'food deserts', because no need to drive for (dozens of) miles for groceries. If it's your thing, there is weed. Though not as good and varied as in the 90ies. Oh, and Armin van Buren!
Tell HN: I want open AI to succeed for the sake of humanity
by totaldude87 | 2025-12-08 13:30:13+00:00
I want open AI and anthropic to succeed in the google world where the last thing we need is another monopoly. As we have seen time and again the search results have become an obsolete seo mess and google has no reason to fix as long as it gets its ads clicked and maintains the lead

Now with Gemini it’s racing to the top with. Open AI and Claude on rear view . It’s always healthy when you have competitors and I wish they do succeed in the AI race
by nickdothutton | 2025-12-08 13:30:23+00:00
- Claude, please optimise the project for performance.

o Claude goes away for 15 minutes, doesn't profile anything, many code changes.

o Announces project now performs much better, saving 70% CPU.

- Claude, test the performance.

o Performance is 1% _slower_ than previous.

- Claude, can I have a refund for the $15 you just wasted?

o [Claude waffles], "no".
by bobbob27 | 2025-12-08 13:30:23+00:00
Microsoft Teams. Teams (Personal), Teams (Work and School), Teams (New). A year or so ago you night have had all three of these installed at the same time..

and that's AFTER they changed the names of Personal and Work. Before that, you'd have Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams. One was purple with a white T and the other was white with a purple T.

If you tried to login with the personal version, it would error-out but not give any indication you may be using the wrong version. Let's be real. NO ONE is using Teams in their personal life. /rant

They're just infuriating on every level when it comes to naming things.
by DangitBobby | 2025-12-08 13:30:31+00:00
I need you to prove to me that it's not plagiarism when you write code that uses a library after reading documentation, I guess.

> since they're literally trying to recreate the input data as faithfully as possible.

Is that how they are able to produce unique code based on libraries that didn't exist in their training set? Or that they themselves wrote? Is that how you can give them the documentation for an API and it writes code that uses it? Your desire to make LLMs "not special" has made you completely blind to reality. Come back to us.
by bumby | 2025-12-08 13:30:36+00:00
That’s a bit of a strawman considering I was deliberate in saying hardware interfaces are limited and not saying they are zero. The number of interfaces in software is often going to be orders of magnitude greater. The network effects and failure modes will often increase geometrically with the number of interfaces. In fact, big construction design firms have tools to easily identify and mitigate the “clashes” you bring up and those tools tend to work well because there is a finite number and the designs are well-documented (as opposed to software where changes are relatively cheap and easy so they often occur without documentation)

Saying incompetence is the reason is a trivial rebuttal that ignores the central claim about complexity. It’s like saying “the reason why we don’t have a theory of everything is because we don’t have competent physicists”
by etamponi | 2025-12-08 13:30:38+00:00
Aren't we just reinventing programming languages from the ground up?

This is the loop (and honestly, I predicted it way before it started):

1) LLMs can generate code from "natural language" prompts!

2) Oh wait, I actually need to improve my prompt to get LLMs to follow my instructions...

3) Oh wait, no matter how good my prompt is, I need an agent (aka a for loop) that goes through a list of deterministic steps so that it actually follows my instructions...

4) Oh wait, now I need to add deterministic checks (aka, the code that I was actually trying to avoid writing in step 1) so that the LLM follows my instructions...

5) <some time in the future>: I came up with this precise set of keywords that I can feed to the LLM so that it produces the code that I need. Wait a second... I just turned the LLM into a compiler.

The error is believing that "coding" is just accidental complexity. "You don't need a precise specification of the behavior of the computer", this is the assumption that would make LLM agents actually viable. And I cannot believe that there are software engineers that think that coding is accidental complexity. I understand why PMs, CEOs, and other fun people believe this.

Side note: I am not arguing that LLMs/coding agents are nice. T9 was nice, autocomplete is nice. LLMs are very nice! But I am starting to be a bit too fed up to see everyone believing that you can get rid of coding.
by RealityVoid | 2025-12-08 13:31:03+00:00
I believe it's possible to do what you've described, but I am not aware of any compiler that does this.

What do you get by doing it like this?

Also, in your described structure, how do you handle nested function calls? I'm sure there exists a convoluted scheme that does this, but not sure with the current call assumptions.

You also lose ABI compatibility with a bunch of stuff.

And regardless, I mostly program in Risc-v and ARM -most compiles like to pass arguments on the registers, but use the stack anyway for local context.
by closewith | 2025-12-08 13:31:32+00:00
As stated elsewhere, even if the electricity to charge was free, batteries won't be economically competitive with HFO/LSMFO in this century.

> But from a cost point of view, sacrificing 20% cargo for an order of magnitude reduction in fuel cost is going to be very tempting.

No, it's not and this shows a profound misunderstanding of the maritime sector. Not to mention, it would be at least 20% of DWT and probably 40% of gross tonnage, and all at the most valuable (lowest/most-stable) part of the hull.

> Or 3 years according to CATL.

CATL make no such claim. They claim that they will be able to show electric ocean-going vessels, which there already are. They make no claims about transoceanic shipping, other than partnering with Maersk, which as stated above, will be for hybrid propulsion to avoid expensive low-sulfur fuels in ECAs and will be charged from HFO at sea.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-12-08 13:31:52+00:00
I think Apple have jumped the shark, personally. Sure, trillion-dollar business and all that - but at the folk level, they have become the very thing they were always resisting: a tired old monopoly enforcing principles on their customers which are not in the customers' best interests.

OS vendors have lost the plot. Where a company decides to try to build an operating system for mass acceptance at scale these days, they build an ad delivery platform - not an operating system. The interests of far too many third parties have been elevated at the kernel-extension layer, and lower, and this is as troubling as it ever was.

Its the 21st century and people still don't understand how to manage the filesystem, having given all agency to the task to the backend/cloud, which harvests their data instead of granting the user more agency. In fact, most people have less agency over their data - and simply do not care about it - because they have been lulled into accepting the state of affairs by OS vendors who simply don't want to write a better Finder/File Explorer for the end user - choosing instead, to write an operating system for ad agencies to harvest user eyeballs.

Apple have traditionally avoided the usual pretence of 'ads in the start bar' by leveraging their platforms, and this is starting to fall apart at the seams. Convergence is going to be a joke, and will turn off a lot of computer users until a generation is raised, who will just accept the doctrine of their masters, and in so doing, lose knowledge to the generations.

I yearn for an OS vendor to build an operating system that really makes the user control over their computer and their data, a number one priority. Apple isn't it. Microsoft certainly isn't it. There are multiple Linux OS vendors who could be it, if only they'd get their hardware act into shape. There are hardware vendors struggling to attain this goal, too.

My next laptop won't be an Apple, after 30+ years of adoption of the platform. I fear the future that Apple is laying out ahead of us - just as I feared that of Microsoft and Oracle and IBM too, through the decades.

If there is hope, it lays with the (low-end open source hardware/software-agency-protecting) proles.
by tuetuopay | 2025-12-08 13:32:01+00:00
WRT credit card see my reply to a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191957

Funny you mention OVH, their direct competitor Scaleway have a public Community slack open to anyone too. Even the engineers directly making the products can be pinged there, so it's great. But re: my comment, AFAIK they receive quite a bit of fake "I lost my account" inquiries.

I've seen the behind the scenes, and in the case of hosting companies, it is self-defense rather than malice. Even some high-stakes SaaS it might be justified too. Though I agree that such restrictions are just user hostile in most cases.
by donatj | 2025-12-08 13:32:15+00:00
I thought this this was just going to be about over complicated forms that scare people away.

Back when I was doing client work for a small agency we would get requests for these contact forms that would have 30+ fields, often many of them required. The forms made strong assumptions about why you were contacting them, and if you did not fit that mold the form was particularly painful.

No one wants to take the time to fill this out, you are losing business.

I would always try to talk them into simplifying. All anyone really needed was Name + Email + Text Area but many were insistent and many of these nightmare forms got built. I genuinely wish I had stats on how many people landed on the forms vs actually filled it out.

The worst part was that the vast majority of these just converted into emails to the owner of the small company with no backing database, because we charged extra for that. You'd spend all that time filling out all those fields and they would get concatenated back into a single string (with new lines and field titles).

I'm reminded of this when I try to submit an issue on some of these GitHub repos with wildly overdone templates. I just want to let you know you have a broken link in your documentation but you're forcing me to fill in my OS and build version and last time I went to the dentist and sign a CLA... and I've just not bothered more than a few times. Enjoy your broken link.
by danaris | 2025-12-08 13:32:17+00:00
The "current election system", in the US, is not one single system. It is much closer to 50 separate systems with their own differences that range from quirks to wildly different fundamentals.

You can't make blanket statements about "the current election system" in the US because of this; you're going to have to talk about things in more specifics, or people in states with well-designed systems are just going to keep popping up explaining why their system genuinely is good.
by immibis | 2025-12-08 13:33:37+00:00
Laws aren't always written down. A good example is what happens if you criticize Israel - the government, if it notices you, will come down on you like a sack of bricks, even though there's no law that says "don't criticize Israel". https://youtu.be/zJt3omLLAuA

Likewise, there's no law saying "don't accept payment in Monero" but you may be jailed for money laundering if the government notices you.
by tuetuopay | 2025-12-08 13:34:03+00:00
It's pixel-art styled but not pixel-art arted (is that even a word?). The font does not cleanly align on pixel boundaries on non-HiDPI screens thus it appears blurry. In fact, the whole website appears blurry.

Folks, when making pixel-art styled stuff, ensure they are actually sharp on bix-pixels screen. It's not pixel-art if it's sharp only on your macbook.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-12-08 13:34:30+00:00
> This lightweight request signals a 'click' on the server responsible for the Ad, but does so without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. Further it allows AdNauseam to safely receive and discard the resulting response data, rather than executing it in the browser, thus preventing a range of potential security problems (ransomware, rogue Javascript or Flash code, XSS-attacks, etc.) caused by malfunctioning or malicious Ads.

You might be thinking of TrackMeNot, which does use tabs (iirc).
by simonsarris | 2025-12-08 13:34:50+00:00
> How severe? A sustainable U.S. debt trajectory would entail elimination of nearly all defense spending or almost all non-defense discretionary outlays, he estimated.

Reminder that infrastructure is ~3% of the budget, the military is ~13%. Almost all of the rest are benefits, either health or money, for old people or various poverty reduction schemes. Or debt.

Social Security was made when there were ~130:1 worker:retiree ratio, now its closer to 3:1 and getting worse. The budget is largely an exercise in transferring money from the younger to the older. Unlike when SS started and the older generations were the poorest, right now they are the richest, so its an exercise in making the richest generations a bit richer at the expense of the current working generations.

Since debt is now a large part of the US budget, this represents the retiree generation (again, the richest generation!) borrowing from even farther in the future to give themselves more money.

There is no solution that doesn't confront this. The old are eating the young at an accelerated pace. People will say things like "But seniors are on a fixed income" as if that didn't represent most people, more or less, or justify the sheer scale of the wealth transfer.

The most realistic solution is that we would have to stop all kinds of benefits to already-rich people and make it solely and exclusively on poverty reduction for the retirees that are in fact poor.
by mbesto | 2025-12-08 13:35:15+00:00
> They do not offer better "value on the dollar" they offer units that individually cost less but over a year of buying what you need to survive you pay more. That's how items are generally priced; smaller packages, higher unit price (as in, price per ounce).

Does the consumer not have all of the information available to them to make the comparison of the per unit cost between a dollar general and a local grocery?
by franktankbank | 2025-12-08 13:35:28+00:00
> the work I do is so bespoke and unique and novel and important that I can't be bothered to estimate how long it'll take

This absolutely can be the case some of the time though. I've never pressed back on estimates of standard work but it can be a real bastard to have to work within the "process" when you are slaying a truly novel beast. Having some jackass pestering you for updates on how long it takes to climb the beanstalk and find the golden harp is just too much.
by timonoko | 2025-12-08 13:35:47+00:00
I did notice that the second example contained both upper and lower case characters, when logical choice reading lower nibbles would have been chr(0x40)..chr(0x4F).

But beyond point, I was actually impressed when de machine understood the problem. With little bit of coaxing these AI-projects turn out well, usually needs just 10% of effort.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-12-08 13:35:51+00:00
A small nitpick: the translation and data detectors pre-date Apple Intelligence.

I do indeed love these features. They have definitely had some regressions in the data detectors over the past few years. I assume that they only test these automatically in “ideal” contexts that don’t account for real life. Not sure. They used to be more reliable.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-12-08 13:37:18+00:00
They absolutely are. And you can turn them off. My comment is more about the technology industry’s general insistence on shoving AI down your throat whether or not it’s useful, usable, or desired.

I’m hopeful that whatever combination of factors at Apple prevent that from happening remain. Otherwise I’ll have to start considering GrapheneOS and defaulting to my Debian-based MacBook.
by DangitBobby | 2025-12-08 13:37:56+00:00
Perhaps you you are motivated to believe that it's just "markets" at play. Monopolies and extortionate power don't exist, anyone who wins deserves to win, etc. Here is the top search result when I search for "dollar stores killing grocery stores" in Kagi.

> When dollar store chains open, it almost always cuts into the sales of local businesses. At first glance, it might seem like this is simply the nature of competition. But dollar stores use their hefty market muscle to make it virtually impossible for other businesses to successfully compete. With plenty of cash from shareholders and institutional investors, chain dollar stores have the resources to lose money indefinitely in a community until their competitors have folded.

> For many businesses, losing even a small percentage of sales can put the business at risk of failure. There are many types of businesses whose products overlap with chain dollar stores and that are therefore vulnerable, including hardware, small appliances, toys, reading materials, greeting cards, and health and beauty supplies. With dollar stores averaging around 10,000 square feet in size and sales of around $260/square foot, a typical Dollar General captures over $2 million in sales every year — and those sales are likely coming out of the cash registers of businesses already there.1

> This is an enormous problem for grocery stores in particular, which have razor-thin profit margins. Cutting into a grocery store’s sales even a small bit can endanger its survival. Food is what customers buy most often in dollar stores,2 making dollar stores a clear threat to grocery store survival or creation. And grocery stores’ profit margins are higher on items other than fresh produce — things like processed, prepackaged food and snacks — which is the bulk of the food that dollar stores sell. Peeling off just enough sales of packaged food can send a grocery store into the red.

> There are many examples of grocery stores that closed when a dollar store opened nearby...

https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/17-problems/
by SigmundA | 2025-12-08 13:38:09+00:00
Round trip efficiency would be very poor, looks like thermal storage is around 75% efficient for the heat then the heat engine (turbine) maxes out around 45% so maybe round trip 33% efficiency if you lucky.

So that gives you around twice the wh/kg but you must keep the heat energy for the entire voyage which is constantly being lost once the onboard storage is heated up. Not sure what that look like I imagine it would be difficult to keep lithium hydride at 680C very efficiently or safely in an ocean going vessel for any length of time.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-08 13:38:11+00:00
That kind of load is roughly comparable to what a modern rail network consumes. We're talking heavy transport here, of course it consumes power. The London underground consumes something like 1.2twh per year. Peak loads of around 150 mw. It's very comparable.

Harbors are already very large consumers of power. Sure, this adds to that demand but if you think about all the cranes, heavy industry, refineries, freight trains, etc. you can get to a few hundred mw easily. Adding more would definitely need planning. But it's not so dramatic. This just sounds like a good reason to invest in power generation.
by squillion | 2025-12-08 13:38:15+00:00
I think we’re talking about bank reserves, which is a fraction (in the order of 1%) of the total amount of money held in the customers’ transaction accounts. Reserves are convertible into cash. Not that any bank would suddenly want to do that, unless there’s a bank run, in which case it’s the customers who want the entirety of their accounts (100x the reserves) converted into cash, which is impossible not because the fed refuses to convert the money, but because the bank doesn’t have enough reserves.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-08 13:39:42+00:00
> I would argue that a good CI/CD system should not support secrets as a first-class object at all. Instead steps may have privileges assigned. At most there should be an adapter, secure enclave style, that may hold a secret and give CI/CD steps the ability to do something with that secret, to be used for APIs that don’t support OIDC or some other mechanism to avoid secrets entirely.

This all seems right, but the reality is that people will put secrets into CI/CD, and so the platform should provide an at least passably secure mechanism for them.

(A key example being open source: people want to publish from CI, and they’re not going to set up additional infrastructure when the point of using third-party CI is to avoid that setup.)