MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alephnerd | 2025-12-01 07:55:40+00:00
The difference is, offshoring in the 2000s was largely private sector driven with minimal subsidizes and investment promotion programs lead by countries and their local governments.

On the other hand, in the 2020s, India, Israel, most Eastern European states, Ireland, Costa Rica, and a couple others have launched industrial promotion subsidizes for software offshoring - often providing US$10k-30k per head in federal and local subsidizes along with subsidized office space and real estate and tax windows.

That along with the internal frictions of async work largely being ironed out due to the COVID remote work period along with an exodus of mid-level managers on work visas during the early pandemic layoffs which had an outsized impact on Indian, Chinese, and Eastern European techies in the US made offshoring much more cost competitive and effective than it was 25 years ago.

Putting your head in the sand saying it's no big deal is honestly very stupid if you are hoping to maintain your career for the next 5-10 years in any white collar job.

And it's only going to get even more competitive now that the Indian government is enacting labor reform laws to align Indian labor laws with China's [0], making it even more cost effective for businesses to offshore by reducing regulatory overhead [1].

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/india-imp...

[1] - https://www.fortuneindia.com/business-news/tech-sector-expec...
by stingraycharles | 2025-12-01 07:55:54+00:00
It’s not delivering on magical stuff. Getting real productivity improvements out of this requires engineering and planning and it needs to be approached as such.

One of the big mistakes I think is that all these tools are over-promising on the “magic” part of it.

It’s not. You need to really learn how to use all these tools effectively. This is not done in days or weeks even, it takes months in the same way becoming proficient in eMacs or vim or a programming language is.

Once you’ve done that, though, it can absolutely enhance productivity. Not 10x, but definitely in the area of 2x. Especially for projects / domains you’re uncomfortable with.

And of course the most important thing is that you need to enjoy all this stuff as well, which I happen to do. I can totally understand the resistance as it’s a shitload of stuff you need to learn, and it may not even be relevant anymore next year.
by delaminator | 2025-12-01 07:56:10+00:00
It took me about 3 hours to make my first $3000 386 PC unbootable by messing up config.sys, and it was a Friday night so I could only lament all weekend until I could go back to the shop on Monday.

rm -rf / happened so infrequently it makes one wonder why —preserve-root was added in 2003 and made the default in 2006
by Mistletoe | 2025-12-01 07:56:23+00:00
Yes I find this a bit odd. AI is a tool, what specific part of it do you find so objectionable OP? For me, I know they are never going to put the genie back in the bottle, we will never get back the electricity spent on it, I might as well use it. We finally got a pretty good Multivac we can talk to and for me it usually gives the right answers back. It is a once in a lifetime type invention we get to enjoy and use. I was king of the AI haters but around Gemini 2.5 it just became so good that if you are hating it or criticizing it you aren’t looking at it objectively anymore.
Is GitHub currently leaking private issues and pull requests?
by rudasn | 2025-12-01 07:57:32+00:00
Anyone else experiencing this?

In a Pull Request's description, I typed `#<private issue id>` (eg. `#1234`) and the suggestions (coming from https://github.com/suggestions/issue/...) popping up are for completely random repos I have no affiliation with.

I searched google for some of the titles returned and got no results (using `site:github.com`)
by wiseowise | 2025-12-01 07:57:38+00:00
> It’s quite a bit easier to tweak CSS constants, and JS snippets then it is to change style embedded already in a long standing modern desktop/window manager. So let’s bring the web to the desktop and have a browser control the system.

Jesus, bro, you can’t say stuff like this here.

Half of HN is going to have a stroke and will end up sounding like Hodor – native, natuve, ntve.
by close04 | 2025-12-01 07:57:56+00:00
Mine still works as well as expected after 17 years, 5-6 of which it spent with heavy daily use, another 2-3 with light use, only occasionally afterwards, and overall a lot of travel and airports. I could disassemble and reassemble it to the last screw easily, no special tools besides a screwdriver, no glue, upgradeable RAM and storage. Actually my one major complaint is Lenovo's use of whitelisting for wireless cards.

But I wouldn't pay $1300+ to bring it up to speed. The batteries are done, the screen is small and the backlight is yellowed and dimming. That laptop would need a lot more love to make it fully usable as a daily driver so I'd rather keep it as it is, as a memory.
by matwood | 2025-12-01 07:57:58+00:00
We posted a job a year ago for a dev. We received terrible candidates, but still tried to fill it from the pool. 2/3 ghosted the interview and the other I'm not sure had ever done anything in iOS. I just pulled the job instead of wasting more time. I'm planning to post another job in the new year and I'm not looking forward to wading through the garbage.
by RomanPushkin | 2025-12-01 07:58:14+00:00
I'm the owner of one of these laptops. I paid like $2-3k or even more for the laptop. The screen got broken almost on arrival. I think few days later it started glitching. It was intermittent, so I thought it would go away. I didn't. Over time it started glitching more and more. I reached out to the person in China who sold the laptop. In broken English he told me that I should replace the screen and sent me a link. I bought the screen, actually two of them, since for some reason you can't buy one. Turned out that the screen doesn't fit, and I cracked the first one while trying to install. So now I have a laptop without a screen, and it just doesn't work.

I bought Macbook Air for $1k just one week ago. I can't be more happier. Fuck these ThinkPads.
by jpecar | 2025-12-01 07:58:37+00:00
DB of known proteins is not where the money can be made, designing new proteins is. This is why AlphaFold3 (that can aid in this) is now wrapped in layers of legalese preventing you to actually use it in the way you want. At least that's what my lifescience users tell me. Big Pharma is now paying Big Money to DeepMind to make use of AF3 ...
by stpedgwdgfhgdd | 2025-12-01 07:59:01+00:00
Indeed, the article links to the skill documentation which says:

Skills are modular capabilities that extend Claude’s functionality through organized folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources.

And

Extend Claude’s capabilities for your specific workflows

E.g. building your project is definitely a workflow.

It als makes sense to put as much as you can into a skill as this an optimized mechanism for claude code to retrieve relevant information based on the skill’s frontmatter.
by jstummbillig | 2025-12-01 07:59:34+00:00
> Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff

If all of "AI stuff" is a "no" for you, then I think you just signed out off working in most industries to some important degree going forward.

This is also not to say that service providers should not have any moral standards. I just don't understand the expectation in this particular case. You ignore what the market wants and where a lot/most of new capital turns up. What's the idea? You are a service provider, you are not a market maker. If you refuse service with the market that exists, you don't have a market.

Regardless, I really like their aesthetics (which we need more of in the world) and do hope that they find a way to make it work for themselves.
by jonasdegendt | 2025-12-01 07:59:49+00:00
> Someone studying abroad usually isn’t allowed to work

Citation needed, because I'm almost certain not being allowed to work as a foreign student is the exception to the rule. A surface level Google search for Western European countries (BE/NL/FR/DE, typical places to go study abroad) shows me all of them allow non-EU students to get a job. You'll typically see these student workers in bars, restaurants, grocery stores, ...

RE the parent comment stating 500 EUR rent is potentially too much for a foreign student to afford, I can imagine it might be. But it's also too much to afford for plenty of native students, and a large share of them get these student jobs to be able to afford their student housing and the likes.
by spuz | 2025-12-01 07:59:53+00:00
There are a lot of people who don't know stuff. Nothing wrong with that. He says in his video "I love Google, I use all the products. But I was never expecting for all the smart engineers and all the billions that they spent to create such a product to allow that to happen. Even if there was a 1% chance, this seems unbelievable to me" and for the average person, I honestly don't see how you can blame them for believing that.
by aydyn | 2025-12-01 08:00:30+00:00
Its just so weird how demonstrably insane the hype cycle this time around is. Everytime I think ChatGPT and Gemini are improving, it hits me with some monstrously stupid hallucinations. Here's how my conversation with GPT 5.1 went this afternoon:

>Can you please provide a reference for the assertion you just made

>Sure, here it is: <link>

> 404, please double check

> I apologize for the mistake, I have double checked, here is the corrected link: <link>

> Still 404, please always double check a link by actually visiting and reading it

x5 before I gave up.
by exe34 | 2025-12-01 08:00:33+00:00
Thinking/intelligence is like magic, to use Dennett's analogy. Any time a machine can do it, it becomes engineering. It's just a bag of tricks. The circle of true thinking/intelligence is an ever shrinking bag of tricks that only carbon-based minds produced through sexual intercourse can do. In fact I'm surprised they call test tube babies intelligent. Do they have souls?
by nwallin | 2025-12-01 08:00:46+00:00
I would recommend Fedora only hesitantly.

Fedora's release cycle is usually a little over a year from final release to EOL, at which point, you need to upgrade. My Mom and Dad ain't gonna wanna do that. For them, better to install the latest Ubuntu LTS once, and then I can upgrade for them at Christmas in 4 years.

Fedora is usually a bit...evangelical about open source software. If one of the things you really want is closed source, you'll have to take a few extra steps. Notably Nvidia drivers, but also stuff like Discord or Steam.

Fedora tends to move fast and break things. They tend to adopt things before they're good and ready. I believe Fedora was the first to switch to Wayland, and they did so before it was really ready, but I might be mistaken.

For a lot of users, #1 and #3 above are good things; they want the latest and greatest stuff, but don't want the occasional breakages that result from using a rolling release distro like Arch or Gentoo. For a lot of users, notably my Mom and Dad, they don't want to deal with shit like that, they just want to turn their computer on and forward funny pictures to me and their friends and do their word puzzles.

Fedora is a great distro, and it's the perfect distro for a lot of people, but some of its core philosophical principles make it a suboptimal distro for the less computer literate.
by kergonath | 2025-12-01 08:00:54+00:00
Yeah. It is much harder now than it used to be. I know a couple of people who came from the US ~15 to 10 years ago and they had it easy. It was still a nightmare with banks that don’t want to deal with US citizens, though.

As Americans, getting a long-term visa or residency card is not too hard, provided you have a good job. It’s getting the job that’s become more difficult. For other nationalities, it can range from very easy to very hard.
by atoav | 2025-12-01 08:01:11+00:00
The problem I see with microservices is that many realworld problems won't have the clear domain boundaries one would wish for. And the more your problem is one, where every part of the program needs any piece of information occasionally the less it makes sense to split them up into many services.

That does not mean it never makes sense to split up things. It just means there may be differing definitions of what "micro" means and there are problems where the service domains are neatly seperable and others where they are not (or you won't win anything if you separate them).

Turning a thing into a service is just like turning a thing into a module or it's own function. It can be a good idea or a bad idea depending on circumstances.
by fooker | 2025-12-01 08:01:16+00:00
> it would work exactly the same if you limited it to “everyone who’s a plumber” or “everyone who’s a fedex driver”

Yes, "Everyone with a good tech job" has a significantly higher chance of keeping or holding tech RSUs, and have conviction that investing in tech is going to pay off.

> but literally cannot work for everyone at the same time

Yes, that is how the world works. Anything that makes you successful would not work for everyone at the same time.
by tavavex | 2025-12-01 08:01:38+00:00
Why not Reddit? Of course, it's far from a paragon of truth, and it's getting more manipulated and overtaken by bots by the minute, but adding "reddit" to my search queries (in search engines, that is) had always been my go-to for finding answers and threads by actual people, especially if we're talking about technical advice or getting an opinion on something. It's like finding forum threads on something I'm interested in.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-12-01 08:02:10+00:00
For field theory, you can still go some way using normal finite-difference approaches, but you have entered a huge can of worms regarding stability. For quantum physics, the problem starts well before you even get to writing a solver, since (at least for QFT) you are actually dealing with operator-valued distributions rather than normal fields - and that in extremely high (even infinite) dimensional spaces. That means you actually need to solve a path integral instead of PDEs if you want to do any sort of actual numerics, which comes with its very own can of worms. And even if the numeric discretisation is at least mathematically valid, you still need to solve the damn thing over a huge configuration space (depending on your lattice size). Even with purely statistical methods and modern supercomputing, you're quickly running into the limit of what can be achieved in reasonable time for comparatively simple systems. But nobody in e.g. lattice QCD uses normal PDE solvers.
by daenney | 2025-12-01 08:02:25+00:00
There’s a lot of history there:

Rethinkdb is shutting down https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/ (2016)

Why we failed https://gist.github.com/ramalho/93b87e961b6e019be8e1f6f82864...

It’s an open source project now and all but once all of that happened I guess a lot of people might not be comfortable to try it again.
by donatj | 2025-12-01 08:02:35+00:00
The number of just straight out NO's I've gotten has been surprising and disheartening. I've been a developer for 20 years and genuinely don't think I've gotten an outright "no" before this year. Usually just no response. I've gotten maybe eight or nine actual rejections this year. It's honestly worse, emotionally.

Ideally I want a job outside my wheelhouse to learn and move forward, but it seems like no one these days is interested in any sort of training.

There have been two gigs I was really excited about that seemed more-or-less exactly what I have spent the past decade doing and they've BOTH actually replied that they didn't think my skills were a good fit. I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it.

Before COVID I would regularly apply for jobs, almost always get them, and decline largely to keep my interview skills fresh.

This last year of looking has been the total opposite. I've applied for umpteen places, and gotten a little bit of email back and forth, and a single interview (it's in a couple days, wish me luck).
by rekabis | 2025-12-01 08:03:39+00:00
> about why they are better without AI

Except… science has shown this to be true. Even after a year-plus of work, less than 2% of devs work faster or more efficiently with AI than without it. And for almost 90% of the remainder, regression analysis strongly indicated that none of them would ever be better with AI than without it, regardless of how much practice they had with it.

These general results have come up with study after study over the last few years, with very consistent patterns. And with AI becoming more hallucinatory and downright wrong with every generation - about 60-80% of all responses with the latest models, depending on model being examined - the proportion of devs being able to wrestle AI into creating functionally viable work faster than they could to it themselves has also decreased slightly.
by matwood | 2025-12-01 08:04:46+00:00
> how about re-banning stock buybacks?

This is pretend boogie man. Banning buybacks will not automatically make that money flow into hiring or salaries. Companies are not charities, they exist to make a return. If hiring people and/or paying more will generate a larger return than giving the money back to shareholders either through buybacks or dividends, then companies will do that.

AI is now giving companies something to do with excess cash that could generate better returns (shareholders believe so) and buybacks are being pushed out as money goes elsewhere[1].

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/move-over-stock-buybacks-ai-1...
by ogrisel | 2025-12-01 08:05:02+00:00
I think there is far less than 1% chance for this to happen, but there are probably millions of antigravity users at this point, 1 millionths chance of this to happen is already a problem.

We need local sandboxing for FS and network access (e.g. via `cgroups` or similar for non-linux OSes) to run these kinds of tools more safely.
by technion | 2025-12-01 08:05:04+00:00
I know its a common view that sysadmin/devops are the same these days, but witha current sysadmin role nothing youve mentioned sounds relevant. Let's give you my list:

1. Patch Microsoft exchange with only a three hour outage window 2. Train a user to use onedrive instead of emailing 50mb files and back and forth 3. Setup eight printers for six users. Deal with 9gb printer drivers. 4. Ask an exec if he would please let you add mfa to their mailbox. 5. Sit there calmly while that exec yells like a wwe wrestler about the ways he plans to ruin you in response 6. Debate the cost of a custom mouse pad for one person across three meetings 7. Deploy any standard windows app that expects everyone be an administrator without making everyone an administrator 8. Deploy an app that expects uac disabled without disabling uac 9. Debug some finance persons 9000 line excel function
by geek_lean | 2025-12-01 08:05:19+00:00
"Vibe coding" doesn't eliminate programming; it effectively promotes everyone to Senior Code Reviewer—often without the necessary credentials.

The danger isn't that the product won't launch. The danger is that it works too well while being structurally unsound. It’s like handing a nail gun to someone who doesn't understand load-bearing walls. You get speed, sure, but you are essentially generating Legacy Code at the speed of light.

The real question isn't whether non-programmers can build, but who is going to maintain the infinite loop of technical debt they are unknowingly creating?
by nkmnz | 2025-12-01 08:05:52+00:00
How do you measure „absolute top tier“ in CSS and HTML? Honest question. Can he create code for difficult-to-code designs? Can he solve technical problems few can solve in, say, CSS build pipelines or rendering performance issues in complex animations? I never had an HTML/CSS issue that couldn’t be addressed by just reading the MDN docs or Can I Use, so maybe I’ve missed some complexity along the way.
by magictux | 2025-12-01 08:06:44+00:00
I think this is an overall good approach and I've got allright results with a similar approach - I still think that this CLAUDE.md experience is too magical and that Anthropic should really focus on it.

Actually having official guidelines in their docs would be a good entrypoint, even though I guess we have this which is the closest available from anything official for now: https://www.claude.com/blog/using-claude-md-files

One interesting thing I also noticed and used recently is that Claude Code ships with a @agent-claude-code-guide. I've used it to review and update my dev workflow / CLAUDE.md file but I've got mixed feelings on the discussion with the subagent.
by leobg | 2025-12-01 08:06:48+00:00
Musk came to Canada with a few hundred dollars to his name. Worked on farms. Never got a loan from his dad, afaik.

It’s probably true that he could have somehow gone back to South Africa as a “safety net” if you will, but I believe that would’ve been the last thing he would have wanted.

If you’re really poor, you can’t take a plane to another country and start a new life, sure. But out of those people who could, if they scraped their resources together, how many do?

This isn’t to blame anyone. I would suppose that the vast majority of people would not want to be Elon Musk. Would not want that kind of life. But for the claim that he is what he is because it was served to him on a silver platter by his family just isn’t supported by any facts.
by groestl | 2025-12-01 08:08:10+00:00
We have two optimization mechanisms though which reduce noise with respect to their optimization functions: evolution and science. They are implicitly part of "standing on the shoulders of giants", you pick the giant to stand on (or it is picked for you).

Whether or not the optimization functions align with human survival, and thus our whole existence is not a slop, we're about to find out.
by zwnow | 2025-12-01 08:09:11+00:00
Yes it is a big deal. I cant find new artists without having a fear of their art being AI generated, same for books and music. I also cant post my stuff to the internet anymore because I know its going to be fed into LLM training data. The internet is dead to me mostly and thankfully I lost almost all interest of being on my computer as much as I used to be.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-01 08:09:14+00:00
Because homes are pretty much the only asset a millenial would have at that time that would have grown over time. a 08-9 graducate wouldn't really have much money to spar for stocks unless they made really lucky bets or happened to mine a fewbitcoin they forgot about.

Most all else would have inflated or depreciated.
by mwidell | 2025-12-01 08:09:51+00:00
Low background steel is no longer necessary.

"...began to fall in 1963, when the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted, and by 2008 it had decreased to only 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels. This has made special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
by jstummbillig | 2025-12-01 08:09:55+00:00
No, of course you don't have to – but don't torture yourself. If the market is all AI, and you are a service provider that does not want to work with AI at all then get out of the business.

If you found it unacceptable to work with companies that used any kind of digital database (because you found centralization of information and the amount of processing and analytics this enables unbecoming) then you should probably look for another venture instead of finding companies that commit to pen and paper.