MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Better places to work for burntout SWE?
by conqrr | 2025-12-09 22:50:19+00:00
I've tried my share of startups and megacorps, FAANGs. I am in a stage where I cringe on hearing a mission is so important that it needs a 996 culture. I also hate work getting stolen in the name of collaboration and politics in general thats daily business in Megacorps. I just want to bang out code, mentor juniors and deliver value in a small team that doesn't have an unhealthy obsession with growth or overworking. Maybe with rich founders who don't want to get more rich.

Where can I find good places to work, especially in the US that offer: 1. Remote first setting 2. Mission oriented like Privacy, non-profit background etc (or Open Source with proven history) 3. Holocracy/Flat structure

I think the above 3 criteria will really narrow down places that prioritize mission over growth/profits and automatically not pay a lot yet have a higher technical bar that deters a lot of folks who would end up optimizing for things that lead to a mess. Am I looking for a Unicorn?
by thomasfromcdnjs | 2025-12-09 22:50:25+00:00
I have Linear(mcp) connected to ChatGPT and my Claude Desktop, and I use it daily from both.

For the MCP nay sayers, if I want to connect things like Linear or any service out there to third party agentic platforms (chatgpt, claude desktop), what exactly are you counter proposing?

(I also hate MCP but gets a bit tiresome seeing these conversations without anyone addressing the use case above which is 99% of the use case, consumers)
by lm28469 | 2025-12-09 22:51:36+00:00
It's quite amazing how arrogant Americans are despite being a thing for like 10 generations, and how brainwashed they are into believing regulations are bad, to the point of being borderline enraged by the fact that the EU exists. You might want to open a few history books, or books in general, and look up the history of your all American inventions
by bilbo0s | 2025-12-09 22:52:24+00:00
Let's be honest, it's not even that.

It's more like "relative to historic trends, many people want houses [in desirable areas] who can't afford the current prices."

Building tons of new houses outside of the hot areas that all these people want to live would still elicit cries of a shortage and an affordability crisis. Because there are currently affordable places outside of hot areas, but not very many takers.

It's a really tough nut to crack. Because how do you reorient the demand to those areas that have the supply? It's not easy. We can't seem to do it currently, and there's no real plan to do it if even if we could somehow build even more housing. We'd have to build lots of housing only in hot areas. Which sounds easy enough until you realize the economics don't make sense and even on the off chance that you could, it would only generate more demand.

First order of business however should be to find a clever way to stop abuses like the ones outlined in the article. The housing that would free up in the hot areas would not be near enough to meet the demand, but if we stop that nonsense at least we're not "digging the hole deeper" so to speak.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-09 22:52:44+00:00
> OK, so that's a pop culture thing in Germany, that's interesting.

I wouldn't associate Datenkrake with anyhting related to "pop culture" (in the sense I see the word "pop cultural" used by US-Americans like for currently popular celebrities, movies, songs, ...), but rather as "part of daily life"; perhaps a little bit "subcultural" and using this word sends a rather clear signal on how your stance on privacy topics is.
by dexwiz | 2025-12-09 22:52:59+00:00
It's easier to throw yourself into a programming project as a programmer than learn completely new skills: art, design, music. Instead the fantasy is that either the game engine is so great people will come make games, or the game engine will support something so radically different the programmer art gets ignored (see simulation games like Minecraft or Factorio). I'm convinced that's why there are so many engines with no games.
by cgorlla | 2025-12-09 22:53:09+00:00
The product integrates as a layer on top of their existing models, serving as a policy-as-code layer so they don't have to fine-tune, prompt engineer etc. to get them up to par in their deployments as is standard now.

One example that I like discussing is insurance, where the local, state, and federal policy landscape changes frequently. We worked with an Inc. 5000 Insurtech that had issues with NAICS codes hallucinating, which are used to profile risk of an individual's profession. Their enterprise Claude model generated a NAICS code that was valid and passed AWS Bedrock's guardrails, but wasn't valid for the year the claim was made. We were able to catch that with the policy engine.
by pcblues | 2025-12-09 22:53:12+00:00
Maybe I'm still in denial about the benefit of AI code design, but when I have an initial set of requirements for a program, the design begins. That is just a set of unanswered questions that I address with slowly growing code and documents. Then the final documents and code match the answers to all the questions that rose from the answers of previous questions. More importantly, I know how the code answers them and someone else can learn from the documentation. Since the invention of "velocity" I feel like much of the industry treats code and programmers like tissues. Wipe your nose and throw it away. Now we have AI-based automatic tissue dispensers and Weizenbaum's gripe about programmers creating work for themselves other than solving the requirements of the actual problems continues.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-12-09 22:54:22+00:00
I think you shouldn't launder LLM output as your own, but in AI model discussion and new release threads it can be useful to highlight examples of outputs from LLMs. The framing and usage is a key element: I'm interested in what kinds of things people are trying. Using LLM output as a substitute for engagement isn't interesting, but combining a bunch of responses to highlight differences between models could be interesting.

I think sometimes it's fine to source additional information from an LLM if it helps advance the discussion. For example, if I'm confused about some topic, I might explore various AI responses and look at the source links they provide. If any of the links seem compelling I'll note how I found the link through an LLM and explain how it relates to the discussion.
by jvolkman | 2025-12-09 22:55:10+00:00
If you look at web traffic when making Gemini web requests, you'll see that Bard is still in the URL (so are LaMDA (pre-bard) and Assistant (pre-GenAI)):

gemini.google.com/_/BardChatUi/data/assistant.lamda.BardFrontendService/StreamGenerate
by dekhn | 2025-12-09 22:55:38+00:00
Her name is listed in the acknowledgements and she has a paper in the same issue as Watson&Crick. Also, there's evidence now that her data had already been shared in a departmental seminar when Wilkins shared it with Watson & Crick (I believe this is explained in detail in the Eighth Day of Creation, where the author did deep historical digging).

I don't think she would have concluded that the structure of DNA was a double helix with antiparallel strands (that's the important bit).
by bpt3 | 2025-12-09 22:55:45+00:00
You might be right about the 1031 exchange, but that has almost nothing to do with property taxes.

The homestead exemptions are very small or non-existent in some states, but I believe they are fairly substantial in the south. Ultimately, my point was that they are completely wrong in that I don't know of a single locality where landlords are given discounts on property taxes but owner occupied homes have to pay full freight, but the opposite is true in at least some cases. They could be talking about developer incentives for new construction, but that's not the same thing IMO and it's difficult to understand what they meant.

It's very, very hard to talk to people who have such strong, completely uninformed opinions and seem to be completely unwilling to even attempt to educate themselves on the topic. To be clear, this is not pointed at you, I'm just not willing to invest the time you did to seriously guess at what the parent poster was going on about.
by nataliste | 2025-12-09 22:56:01+00:00
If you actually slowed down and read what I wrote, you'd see that I said that people blindly believing in either LLMs or MDs are stupid (as did the OP).

And gee, what are people supposed to do when they encounter potentially unreliable information from a generic non-vetted source? The same thing you do with literally any other one:

https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/what%E2%80%99s-wrong-wi...

> If you do start with Wikipedia, you should make sure articles you read contain citations–and then go read the cited articles to check the accuracy of what you read on Wikipedia. For research papers, you should rely on the sources cited by Wikipedia authors rather than on Wikipedia itself.

> There are other sites besides Wikipedia that feature user-generated content, including Quora and Reddit. These sites may show up in your search results, especially when you type a question into Google. Keep in mind that because these sites are user-authored, they are not reliable sources of fact-checked information. If you find something you think might be useful to you on one of those sites, you should look for another source for this information.

> The fact that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic research doesn't mean that it's wrong to use basic reference materials when you're trying to familiarize yourself with a topic. In fact, the Harvard librarians can point you to specialized encyclopedias in different fields that offer introductory information. These sources can be particularly useful when you need background information or context for a topic you're writing about.

This isn't rocket science.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-09 22:56:22+00:00
> I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how and, most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider Apple's strategy.

I'm not sure where you position Samsung or Xiaomi, Oppo etc. They're competitive on price with chipsets that can handle AI loads in the same ballpark, as attested by Google's features running on them.

They're not vertically integrated and don't have the same business structure, but does it matter regarding on-device AI ?
by gnatman | 2025-12-09 22:57:50+00:00
It’s ok to search for a unicorn! Writing out a list of criteria for your ideal role, and seeking out companies that meet your criteria, actually gives you an advantage. When I interviewed at my current position I had just such a list, and sharing how much I cared about working for a company like that made me (they said later) an obvious choice over others they’d met with in spite of my qualifications falling short in some areas. Even if it takes some time, it will be worth the effort.
by hinkley | 2025-12-09 22:57:50+00:00
End to end gets weird. I was asked to look at an admin page, nobody could figure out why it was 30s. Literally the first thing I tried got it under 4 and the second down to three. It was pulling the same list of rows twice, applying two filters and then looking at the intersection. I changed the signature to send the list as input instead of the query constraints. Then I changed them to avoid the intersect.

If you would have asked me to bet on which one would have had the bigger impact I would have split the difference.

My second favorite was similar. Two functions making a call instead of sharing the answer. Profiler said 10% cumulative. I removed half. Instead of 5% I got 20%. Which just demonstrates how much data a profiler cannot show you.
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-09 22:58:00+00:00
> What is the point where "collateral damage" and "killing civilians" aren't different?

Essentially "collateral damage" is not intentional targeting of civilians. The laws of war allow for "collateral damage" as they were written in a way so as not to encourage the use of human shields.

> We saw well in Gaza how the Israeli government didn't care at all about civilians and just razed entire cities.

They made efforts to move civilians out of the way, deaths compared to the amount of damage is quite low. Not a lot of options when Hamas built tunnels under most of the cities.

> Yet support colonization and elect far-right governments which openly defend an imperialistic "Great Israel" agenda.[2]

It's generally not even clear what "Greater Israel" means in general. In any case the best option for those concerned about "Greater Israel" would be to negotiate peace agreements that solidify borders.

> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread

I'm skeptical anyone involved in that would even be alive at this point.
by allochthon | 2025-12-09 22:58:02+00:00
I have a hobby project on the side involving radio digital signal processing in Rust that I've been pure vibe coding, just out of curiosity to see how far I can get. On more than one occasion the hobby project has gotten bogged down in a bug that is immensely challenging to resolve. And since the project isn't in an area I have experience with, and since I don't have a solid "theory of the program", since it's a gray box because I've been vibe coding it, I've definitely seen CC get stuck and introduce regressions in tricky issues we previously worked through.

The use of Claude Code with my day job has been quite different. In my day job, I understand the code and review it carefully, and CC has been a big help.
by Marsymars | 2025-12-09 22:58:35+00:00
Battery isn't relevant to plugged-in devices, and in the end, electricity costs roughly the same to generate and deliver to a data center as to a home. The real cost advantage that cloud has is better amortization of hardware since you can run powerful hardware at 100% 24/7 spread across multiple people. I wouldn't bet on that continuing indefinitely, consumer hardware tends to catch up to HPC-exclusive workloads eventually.
by cgorlla | 2025-12-09 22:58:42+00:00
SOTA results are a happy byproduct of the core mission of our approach, which is to enable the effective and simple translation of policy documents into a model without having to fine-tune and prompt engineer. This performance is somewhat unexpected but also sensical, so we're still trying to figure out the best way to harness it. That may include releasing model artifacts in the future.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-09 22:59:00+00:00
...I'm not sure I agree. I sometimes have a lot of trouble understanding what non-English speakers are trying to say. I appreciate that they're doing their best, and as someone who can only speak English, I have the utmost respect anyone who knows multiple languages—but I just find it really hard.

Some AI translation is so good now that I do think it might be a better option. If they try to write in English and mess up, the information is just lost, there's nothing I can do to recover the real meaning.
by Razengan | 2025-12-09 22:59:13+00:00
3 AM. Watching a video on the Mac.

I'm on bed, the Mac's on the desk.

iPhone and iPad charging next to the Mac.

"Hey Siri, put the Mac to sleep"

iPhone blares up with a cacophony loud enough to wake the graveyard several blocks over, even though it's set to silent:

"IT LOOKS LIKE YOU HAVEN"T SET UP ANY SMART HOME ACCESSORIES BLAHABHLABHALDHFLDSFHELWRHWELRHWELHROUWEHROWEHRQWLR$P#@U4"

Fuck you Tim Cook.
by crq-yml | 2025-12-09 22:59:16+00:00
I think the main reason not to go full-throttle into "vibes -> machine code" (to extrapolate past doing it in C) is because we have a history of building nested dolls of bounded error in our systems. We do that with the idea of file systems, process separation, call stacks, memory allocations, and virtual machines.

Now, it is true that vibes results in producing a larger quantity of lower-level code than we would stomach on our own. But that has some consequences for the resulting maintenance challenge, since the system-as-a-whole is less structured by its boundaries.

I think a reasonable approach when using the tools is to address problems "one level down" from where you'd ordinarily do it, and to allow yourself to use something older where there is historical source for the machine to sample from. So, if you currently use Python, maybe try generating some Object Pascal. If you use C++, maybe use plain C. If there were large Forth codebases I'd recommend targeting that since it breaks past the C boundary into "you're the operator of the system, not just a developer", but that might be the language that the approach stumbles over the most.
by bigiain | 2025-12-09 22:59:24+00:00
I'm not who you asked that question, but I'd guess it's because it requires "proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product."

It'd be hard to design/manufacture a device that reliably remains waterproof after a typical not-specially-skilled owner opens it up to replace a battery. It's really common to hear of people damaging watches due to water ingress after battery replacements, getting seals or orings seated just right isn't something every user is going to be able to do.

I can imagine some medical devices have similar sealing requirements, perhaps even more robust sealing methods since they might need to be exposed to regular disinfection grade cleaning with chemicals harsher then just water. I could easily understand why a company may design a medical device that its heat-glued together for sealing purposes in a way that can only reasonably be done (and redone) at the factory.

I killed an original Pebble when I Dremelled it open to replace the battery, and failed to hot glue seal it well enough and it got wet inside.

Having said that - I dislike this design choice for the Index 01. I can see myself becoming reliant on this right before they sell out to Garmin or whoever and tell all their customers to FOAD again. Trust is very hard to win back.
by wouldbecouldbe | 2025-12-09 22:59:38+00:00
The solo projects I do are 10x, the team projects I do maybe 2-3x in productivity. I think in big companies it's much much less.

Highest gains are def in full stack frameworks (like nextjs), with Database ORM, and building large features in one go, not having to go back & forth with stakeholders or collegues.
by christophilus | 2025-12-09 22:59:40+00:00
If you can find a small company that is in maintenance mode, or that wants to build something new with you as the sole technician, those can be very low-key, restful workplaces. I’ve been contracting at such a place for 5 years now. My contract is being reduced to part time in Feb 2026, though, so I’ll be looking for a supplemental contract, or else I’ll be spinning up a new business.
by listenallyall | 2025-12-09 22:59:51+00:00
Problem with this analogy is that software development != revenue. The developers and IT are a cost center. So yea in a huge org one of the goals is to reduce costs (admin) spent on supporting a cost center.

Doctors generate revenue directly and it can all be traced, so even an extra 20 minutes out of their day doing admin stuff instead of one more patient or procedure is easily noticeable, and affects revenue directly.
by graynk | 2025-12-09 23:00:22+00:00
Suspend/resume is broken for my friend with an AMD card right now. That's what I mean: it's broken everywhere in slightly different ways, yes even on Windows. Thankfully I never use it anyway.

Dunno anything about dozens of packages, I installed 1 (one) package from my distro and haven't touched it since, no issues with updates either. That same friend with an AMD card keeps getting random hard PC freezes during gaming though.

Also absolutely zero issues with lags/latency for me (on GNOME. I did experience a bunch of weird bugs with KDE, but again - no lags)

One thing that is very real is DirectX 12 performance. This one really does suffer due to poor nvidia drivers. Hope they iron it out at some point
by tomhow | 2025-12-09 23:00:59+00:00
We don't need to bring this kind of thing up. We're not school children and most of us are technology professionals, so the meaning is clear.

These guidelines are relevant here:

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. ... name collisions ... . They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by hellojesus | 2025-12-09 23:01:37+00:00
To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os?

I'd push the implementation to the router and force root certs on devices and have all clients run through your proxy or drop the packets. That way even live usbs will not get network access. Have some separate, hugely locked down network for kids' friends.

Maybe put a separate honeypot network up with some iot devices on it with wifi and a weak password, and let the kids have some freedom once they figure out how to deauth and grab the bash upon reconnections.

Idk. I'm some years away from this problem myself,but someone recommended this in another thread recently.

https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump
by stephen_g | 2025-12-09 23:01:42+00:00
But if I wanted to ask an AI I would put that into ChatGPT, not ask HN. I would only ask that on HN if I wanted other people's opinions!

You could reply with "Hey you could ask [particular LLM] because it had some good points when I asked it" but I don't care to see LLM output regurgitated on HN ever.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-12-09 23:01:52+00:00
I actually use LLMs to help me dig up the sources. It's quicker than google and you get them nicely formatted besides.

But: Just because it's easy doesn't mean you're allowed to be lazy. You need to check all the sources, not just the ones that happen to agree with your view. Sometimes the ones that disagree are more interesting! And at least you can have a bit of drama yelling at your screen at how dumb they obviously are. Formulating why they are dumb, now there's the challenge - and the intellectual honesty.

But yeah, using LLMs to help with actually doing the research? Totally a thing.
by slg | 2025-12-09 23:02:29+00:00
>it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut.

It depends. I guess you can argue this is true purely from scale. However, we should also keep in mind there are a lot of different things that Apple and tech companies in general put under "services". So even when you see a big number under "Service Revenue" on some financial report, we should recognize that most of that was from taking a cut of some other transaction happening on their devices. Relative to the rest of their business, they don't make much from monthly/yearly subscriptions or monetizing their customers' searches/interactions. They instead serve as a middleman on purchase of apps, music, movies, TV, and now even financial transactions made with Apple Card/Pay/Cash. And in that way, they are a service company in the same way that any brick and mortar store is a service company.
by blcknight | 2025-12-09 23:02:30+00:00
Gemini, grok, etc all have 100x better experiences with voice. Apple is bad at this.

I’m an hour from Cambridge, MA. Ask the weather? I always get Cambridge, UK. Siri is terrible.

They can’t even make a functional keyboard anymore. The text prediction and autocorrect is worse now than it was in 2010!

These are all solved problems in 2025.