MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bradlys | 2025-12-02 19:05:03+00:00
I upvoted the article for the purpose of discussion. I disagree with it. The core tenant of the article is that AI is the reason why companies aren't hiring juniors. That's just not it. Do people just blindly believe whatever some CEO or company says in their press briefings? This was all happening before the AI boom. Interest rates went up, hiring went way down, and then AI launched. Before interest rates, interviewing was getting harder and harder every year. That's usually an indication that you have more supply than demand. The bar for getting into any American tech company was getting much harder - not just FAANG. Leetcode had gone from having practiced 50-100 questions to there being a bank of over 3000+ with many people having regularly studied hundreds. It went from easy/medium to being typical in interviews to medium/hard being typical with many original hard questions now being reclassified as mediums.

Wages for your typical engineer stopped going up 5+ years ago. The joke of senior FAANG engineers making $400k has been a meme for over 5 years. Yet, inflation has done over 20% in 5 years? Look at new offers for people joining the majority of positions available at public tech companies. You're not seeing $500k offers regularly. Maybe at Jane Street or Anthropic or some other companies that are barely hiring - all of which barely employ anyone compared to FAANG. You're mostly seeing the same $350-400k/yr meme.

The reason we're not employing new grads is the same reason as the standards getting much more aggressive. Oversupply and senior talent has always been valued more.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-12-02 19:05:08+00:00
The secret is that their racism and bigotry is more important to them than their conservative "values".

See also: the success of the "Southern Strategy" in converting racists in the southern US from Democratic to Republican voters, taking advantage of the Democratic Party's focus on civil rights.

As long as Trump keeps hurting the people they don't like, they'll continue to support him.
by kazinator | 2025-12-02 19:05:34+00:00
The pigeonhole principle informs us that if we have more pigeons than holes, some holes have two or more pigeons. But also that if we have fewer pigeons than holes, some holes will necessarily be empty.

Given two bit strings of length n, if we compare fewer than n pairs, we cannot tell whether they are equal. The strings being equal is the proposition a_0 = b_0 ^ a_1 = b_1 ^ ... ^ a_n-1 = b_n-1. You cannot simplify this formula such that any a_i or b_i primary is taken away.
by westurner | 2025-12-02 19:05:35+00:00
A bit OT here, but oh well

Would hardened_malloc or llvm scudo be useful in a WASM runtime (given that WASM doesn't have an MMU)? https://www.google.com/search?q=would+hardened_malloc+be+use...

Emscripten handles malloc and free with dlmalloc, emmalloc, mimalloc,

emcc your_code.c -s 'MALLOC="emmalloc"' -o your_code.html

how to add "hardened_malloc" memory allocator support to emscripten for WASM? https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+add+%22hardened_mallo...

"Import custom memory manager?" · Issue #24851 · emscripten-core/emscripten https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/24851

Just learned about Cage:

Cage does Hardware-Accelerated Safe WebAssembly (WASM) with LLVM with support for ARM64 Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) and Pointer Authentication (PAC) memory safety features.

"Cage: Hardware-Accelerated Safe WebAssembly" (2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11456v2
by ah979 | 2025-12-02 19:05:35+00:00
Full disclosure, I'm the original author of the post.

Unfortunately, if you network to get a job, you're already months behind.

As I talk to college kids, I try to get them to find opportunities to network while they're in school, before they're desperate to get that first internship or job. They want to come at their search from a place of confidence, not anxiety.

There are so many meetups at universities (at least at the one near me) that they can mingle with the working world, and they stand out because they're there when it's mostly professionals.

Student or not, networking works best in-person when possible (conferences, meetups, professional events) where you get to know people and get truly curious about them. But after that, it involves following up and keeping the relationships warm, showing that you are interested in people professionally and can possibly help them with their problems, and that's no trivial investment.

If you do that enough, then you will build trust and rapport to create some opportunities, but it's admittedly a long game. It also has to be genuine or else people end up feeling used.

I think that there is a blocker that a lot of people have against networking in general because it feels gross and insincere. We've all seen people do it poorly, and so we avoid it, but it can be really fulfilling if done well.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-02 19:05:41+00:00
The increase in scores is really small. It’s 1.1 percentage points.

My interpretation is, the pandemic is a root cause of lower test scores for many reasons, one reason is that kids started using cell phones way more during the pandemic, and that new stuff on the phone (TikTok, let’s be real) causes lower test scores. Reducing usage during school is addressing a real problem, but it’s one of many real problems, and some are way bigger.
by mempko | 2025-12-02 19:05:44+00:00
Great question! Don't use AI to process the data, especially when a computer can do the work :-). AI is good at taking unstructured data and structuring it. Computers are great at computing.

Here is an example of Google's AI failing

https://www.google.com/search?q=is+2026+next+year

Google screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/FOT4aDF

ChatGPT also fails: https://imgur.com/a/mb3rRgZ

and here is the ThetaEdge result: https://imgur.com/a/ZAZZgiR
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-12-02 19:05:46+00:00
> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output

which means either devs will take over architectural roles (which already exist and are filled) or architects will take over dev roles. same goes for testing/QA - these are already positions within the industry in addition to being hats that we sometimes put on out of necessity or personal interest.
by kondro | 2025-12-02 19:06:09+00:00
On price, you could definitely do better than $8/million steps, $0.25/GB written and $0.15/GB-month for state storage, but if you were designing something generic on S3/DynamoDB (state + status) to support all use cases at all scales, you'd probably end up spending something around the same order or magnitude.

But if you did that, you'd also have to implement it all yourself. This is a relatively simple checkpointing workflow orchestrator across standard Lambda functions, but with some really nice touch surfaces in the Lambda API itself.

What's only a footnote in the announcement is that this is only us-east-2 (Ohio) and TypeScript/JS + Python at the moment. Basically a public preview release. I look forward to seeing where they take this.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-12-02 19:06:19+00:00
I'm not so sure about that. I've written some nontrivial TUIs in my time, the largest one being [1], and as the project got more complicated I did find myself often thinking "It sure would be nice if I could somehow just write this stuff with CSS instead of tiny state machines and control codes for coloration". There's no reason these languages couldn't compile down to a TUI as lean as hand-coloring everything yourself.

[1]: https://taskusanakirja.com/
by hamasho | 2025-12-02 19:06:26+00:00
I confused those features of the native language server, so here's the summary:

- Go-to-Definition: For variables, jump to the declaration. For functions/classes/types, jump to its types or implementation. - Go-to-Type-Definition: For variables, jump to its type declaration instead of the variable declaration. - Go-to-Implementation: For interfaces/abstruct classes, jump to (multiple) implementations of the method. For compiled TypeScript file (like them under node_modules), jump to its implementation rather than .d.ts files.
by ge96 | 2025-12-02 19:06:27+00:00
Other than Indeed/Hired all my other roles were from recruiters, I don't have a degree so it's harder for me to get a job application wise, at least now I have the 6 yrs+ experience which isn't a lot but better than 0

Will say what's gotten me hired are my projects eg. robotics or getting published online for hardware stuff, I work in the web-cloud space primarily though, hardware would be cool but hard to make that jump
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-02 19:06:32+00:00
Racism will get you fired from virtually any company in America, thrown out of virtually any business or school, etc. If you don't think it's deeply unpopular then I don't know what to tell you. It is the speech which is closest to being outright banned everywhere. It already is in most developed countries, probably most of the developing ones too (at least on paper), America stands out as one place it remains technically legal even though it will get you blacklisted from almost everywhere. The only reason it's still legal here is because the first ammendment is unusually strong. Chip away at it, and I guarantee you'll lose more than you're bargaining for.
by krig | 2025-12-02 19:06:42+00:00
> Prior to Bun, there was little focus on performance.

This is just completely insane. We went through more than a decade of performance competition in the JS VM space, and the _only_ justification that Google had for creating V8 was performance.

> The V8 engine was first introduced by Google in 2008, coinciding with the launch of the Google Chrome web browser. At the time, web applications were becoming increasingly complex, and there was a growing need for a faster, more efficient JavaScript engine. Google recognized this need and set out to create an engine that could significantly improve JavaScript performance.

I guess this is the time we live in. Vibe-coded projects get bought by vibe-coded companies and are congratulated in vibe-coded comments.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-12-02 19:07:12+00:00
> “Players are selfish,” Avellone said, reflecting on his time designing the seminal computer roleplaying game Planescape: Torment. “The more you can make the experience all about them, the better.

Put more charitably: the user is paying for this experience with their money AND their time. Let’s pack a wallop into the experience.

More software should be this way!
by trollbridge | 2025-12-02 19:07:23+00:00
#1, uv is open-source and it could easily be forked and kept up to date.

#2, if you don't like uv, you can switch to something else.

uv probably has the least moat around it of anything. Truly a meritocracy: people use it because it's good, not because they're stuck with it.
by bangaladore | 2025-12-02 19:07:54+00:00
> I have been loading and using the WinIO driver on windows all the way up to the latest version to read and write any memory I want. I also have a few drivers that are lesser known that are not even flagged by most anti-cheats

I can assure you that you will get banned from a game with a modern anti-cheat using that or you won't even be able to launch the game. Also 'flagged by most anti-cheats' means very little. Most good anti-cheats will delay bans or correlate multiple factors prior to a ban.

> You are going to have to decrypt the memory eventually. Even TEE.fail can get around AMD SEV and Intel's TEE.

You don't have to decrypt it on the RAM wire bus. And the reasons TEE.fail is successful is because they screwed up the crypto as far as I can tell.

> Once you can intercept network traffic and decrypt its game over!

Not sure why you are so hung up on this. You still need to access the memory first. That's what they will detect and prevent. They obviously can't prevent or detect network sniffing if the key is known.

> You do not need an ASIC to interpose DDR5 and steal all the traffic, there are FPGAs that are powerful enough. Once PCIE DMA cards go the way of the dino with IOMMU people will just switch to memory interposers with FPGAs

I've made FPGA designs previously, including custom PCIE DMA cards back in ~2018. It would surprise me if you could find an FPGA capable of reliably sniffing DDDR5 6000+ MT/S without crashing the host system. FPGAs are not nearly as fast as CPUs. Maybe you could somehow hack a FPGA DDR memory interface. But finding one fast enough for DDR5 is probably impossible (or terribly expensive). Maybe https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/vers... is theoretically possible. But you are looking at a 10k+ chip, if not 20k$+. Such a chip is not going to be easily embeddable and likely requires 10s if not 100s of amps of power delivery.
by tapoxi | 2025-12-02 19:08:02+00:00
Its really hard to measure these things. Personally I switched to Gemini a few months ago since it was half the cost of ChatGPT (Verizon has a $10/month Google AI package). I feel like I've subconsciously learned to prompt it slightly differently and now using OpenAI products feels disappointing. Gemini tends to give me the answer I expect, Claude follows close behind, I get "meh" results from OpenAI.

I am using Gemini 3 Pro, I rarely use Flash.
by adam_patarino | 2025-12-02 19:08:10+00:00
We're seeing the same thing for many companies, even in the US. Exposing your entire codebase to an unreliable third party is not exactly SOC / ISO compliant. This is one of the core things that motivated us to develop cortex.build so we could put the model on the developer's machine and completely isolate the code without complicated model deployments and maintenance.
by Octoth0rpe | 2025-12-02 19:08:19+00:00
> The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings, not long term investment in their employees.

Going to throw out another anecdote here. At a company that a number of my friends work for (a fortune 50), they are currently making record profits that they loudly brag about during employee townhalls. They also are in the process of gutting multiple departments as fast as possible with little regard for the long term consequences. This is not the only company that I know of acting in this way (acting like they're about to go bankrupt when in fact they are seeing record profits).

To me the societal risk is that an entire generation of employees becomes extremely jaded and unmotivated, and fairly so. We used to work under the assumption that if our company is successful, then the employees would be successful. Record profits == raises for all, bonuses for all. And while we know that that connection was never that strong, it was strong enough to let us at least pretend that it was a law of universe.

That fundamental social contract is now at its breaking point for so many workers. Who can really blame people for putting in minimal effort when they have so much evidence that it will not be rewarded?
by strickjb9 | 2025-12-02 19:08:21+00:00
Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand.

In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing breaks down when you're basically collaborating with a model through a proxy.

I think highly motivated juniors who actually want to learn are still valuable. But it's hard to get past "why bother mentoring when I could just use AI directly?"

I don't have answers here. Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software engineering for those of us already in it—but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-02 19:08:57+00:00
> You don’t see investment bankers / lawyers / management consultants / etc. go on about side projects, leveling up their skills during the weekend, and other things that are considered completely normal in this industry.

I am very certain that you are at least wrong about management consultants. I know quite some who work on side projects (even though they barely have any time) and/or level up their skills during the few free hours on the weekend.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-02 19:09:20+00:00
I had an office with a door multiple times in my (early) career. An open office door is a universe away from sitting in an open office. Even when everyone has their doors open, a true office setup allows for plenty of focus.

On top of that "closed"/"open" is a false dichotomy, since you can trivially change the state of your office. Have a hard problem that needs to be solved by the end of the day? You can close your door and have absolute focus. After that task is solved, you can just open that office again.

Real offices also entirely change the tradeoffs for remote/in office. A true office feels like your room. It's considered a private space. I knew people that would bring in their own lamps (and keep the florescent lights off), bring in rugs, hang art from the walls, have tea setups, a bookshelf filled with reference material etc.
by ayaros | 2025-12-02 19:09:23+00:00
Why is this so horrible. Put more resources in the hands of the average person. They will get pumped right back into the economy. If people have money to spend, they can buy more things, including goods and services from gigantic tax-dodging mega-corporations.

Gigantic mega-corporations do enjoy increased growth and higher sales, don't they? Or am I mistaken?
by trollbridge | 2025-12-02 19:09:27+00:00
I used (relatively) ancient servers (5-10 years in age) because their performance is completely adequate; they just use slightly more power. As a plus it's easy to buy spare parts, and they run on DDR3, so I'm not paying the current "RAM tax". I generally get such a server, max out its RAM, max out its CPUs and put it to work.
by adityaathalye | 2025-12-02 19:09:29+00:00
Heh, the documentation calls out the limits. Maximum (theoretical) DB size is 281TB: https://sqlite.org/limits.html

> This particular upper bound is untested since the developers do not have access to hardware capable of reaching this limit.

> However, tests do verify that SQLite behaves correctly and sanely when a database reaches the maximum file size of the underlying filesystem (which is usually much less than the maximum theoretical database size) and when a database is unable to grow due to disk space exhaustion.
by eitally | 2025-12-02 19:09:33+00:00
I think you're correct, but another piece of this is that students (especially in HS, but probably also in MS) have realized they can accomplish most assigned tasks in a fraction of the time using online resources (whether copies of old tests, agentic AI, or other sites), so they lean on their phone for this. A big piece of the missing equation here is the fact that home PC/laptop use has also been consistently decreasing, in favor of phones & tablets, causing phones themselves to be even more indispensable for youth.

I read a position paper last week suggesting the solution to this is to take a zero tolerance policy in the classroom and move all course testing back to pencil & paper / bluebooks. I would support that (as a parent of two current high schoolers).
by tetha | 2025-12-02 19:09:44+00:00
In my experience, a decently managed database scales very hard.

3x EX44 running Patroni + PostgreSQL would give you 64GB of working memory, at least 512 GB NVMe of dataset (configurable with more for a one-time fee) at HA + 1 maintenance node. Practically speaking, that would have carried the first 5 - 10 years of production at the company I work at with ease, for 120 Euros hardware cost/month + a decent sysadmin.

I also know quite a few companies who toss 3-4x 20k - 30k at DELL every few years to get a database cluster on-prem so that database performance ceases to be a problem (unless the application has bad queries).
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-02 19:09:49+00:00
I am well aware that Netflix doesn’t pay the same price for AWS services that “Joe Bob’s Fish Tackle and WordPress shop”. All big companies give discounts to large companies as part of negotiations which is different from “we are the low cost leader”.

All technology gets cheaper over time. There is a difference between lowering price in response to competitors and finding the profit maximizing price based on supply and demand.

AWS was lowering prices to increase demand before GCP and Azure were a thing.

Jassy said right before he became CEO of Amazon and he was still over AWS that only 5% of IT spend was on any cloud provider. They are capturing non consumption and marketing value of AWS vs that.

While I don’t have any insider experience about Azure, looking on the outside, I would think that Azure’s go to market is also not competing against AWS on price, but trying to get on prem customers on Azure.
by quantummagic | 2025-12-02 19:09:49+00:00
Is that a problem in practice though? Zig already has this same situation with its memory allocators; you can't allocate memory unless you take a parameter. Now you'll just have to take a memory allocator AND an additional io object. Doesn't sound very ergonomic to me, but if all Zig code conforms to this scheme, in practice there will only-one-way-to-do-it. So one of the colors will never be needed, or used.
by hilti | 2025-12-02 19:09:49+00:00
I’ve been burned by metadata platforms twice now and honestly, it’s exhausting.

The demo is always incredible - finally, we’ll know where our data lives! No more asking “hey does anyone know which table has the real customer data?” in Slack at 3pm.

Then reality hits.

Week 1 looks great. Week 8, you search “customer data” and get back 47 tables with brilliant names like `customers_final_v3` and `cust_data_new`. Zero descriptions because nobody has time to write them.

You try enforcing it. Developers are already swamped and now you’re asking them to stop and document every column? They either write useless stuff like “customer table contains customers” or they just… don’t. Can’t really blame them.

Three months in, half the docs are outdated.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s a maturity thing? Or maybe we’re all just pretending we’re organized enough for these tools when we’re really not.
by darkwizard42 | 2025-12-02 19:09:55+00:00
This does not happen, if you forgo one month of rent you have to have kept prices up significantly to make up for the loss. The only reason this could happen is if your loan terms are pegged to rent roll (usually only on commercial properties).

an example: $5000/mo apartment generates $60,000 a year; forgoing one month of rent means you have to now generate $60,000 of revenue in 11 months, which in a bad market will likely not rent for $5450 if it didn't rent for $5000. Your mortgage still continues to pile up along with insurance and taxes, so you can't escape the hole.
by simonw | 2025-12-02 19:10:31+00:00
If that was genuinely happening here - Anthropic were selling inference for less than the power and data center costs needed to serve those tokens - it would indeed be a very bad sign for their health.

I don't think they're doing that.

Estimates I've seen have their inference margin at ~60% - there's one from Morgan Stanley in this article, for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-anthropic-billions-cl...
by messe | 2025-12-02 19:10:53+00:00
You will need to pass that for synchronous IO as well. All IO in the standard library is moving to the Io interface. Sync and async.

If I want to call a function that does asynchronous IO, I'll use:

foo(io, ...);

If I want to call one that does synchronous IO, I'll write:

foo(io, ...);

If I want to express that either one of the above can be run asynchronously if possible, I'll write:

io.async(foo, .{ io, ... });

If I want to express that it must be run concurrently, then I'll write:

try io.concurrent(foo, .{ io, ... });

Nowhere in the above do I distinguish whether or not foo does synchronous or asynchronous IO. I only mark that it does IO, by passing in a parameter of type std.Io.