MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-12-02 20:55:54+00:00
> They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.

Did they? I see a $7MM seed round in 2022. Now to be clear that's a great seed round and it looks like they had plenty of traction. But it's unclear to me how they were going to monetize enough to justify their $7MM investment. If they continued with the consultancy model, they would need to pay back investors from contracts they negotiate with other companies, but this is a fraught way to get early cashflow going.

Though if I'm not mistaken, Confluent did the same thing?
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-02 20:57:39+00:00
It's the same reason for investing in every net-loss high-valuation tech startup of the past decade. They're hoping they'll magically turn into Google, Apple, Netflix, or some other wealthy tech company. But they forget that Google owns the ad market, Apple owns the high-end/lifestyle computer market, and Netflix owns tv/movie habit analytics.

Investors in AI just don't realize AI is a commodity. The AI companies' lies aren't helping (we will not reach AGI in our lifetimes). The bubble will burst if investors figure this out before they successfully pivot (and they're trying damn hard to pivot).
by rybosworld | 2025-12-02 20:57:39+00:00
It's not obvious to me that AI is the reason for the hiring slowdown.

ChatGPT was pretty useless when it first released. It was neat that you could talk to it but I don't think it actually became a tool you could depend on (and even then, in a very limited way) until sometime in 2024.

Basically:

- the junior hiring slowdown started in 2022.

- but LLM's have only really been useful in a work context starting around 2024.

As for this point:

> According to very recent research from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, published in August of this year, companies that adopt AI at higher rates are hiring juniors 13% less

The same point stands. The junior hiring slowdown existed before the AI spend.
by MandieD | 2025-12-02 20:57:55+00:00
They still had Software Test Engineers (a different role from SDET) in 2001, when I was an STE intern in MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), which at that point, was basically a compliance department in the wake of the US DoJ's massive anti-trust ruling against MSFT a few years before. Every month, the MacBU STE team lead would award "Scariest Tester" for whoever had found the best (scariest) bug.

We were also, essentially, Apple's Mac OS X post-release testing team (10.0 Cheetah was released while I was there, but I missed the party because my grandmother had died and I was back home for her funeral) - we ran into all sorts of exciting problems with basic OS functions.

One of the things MacBU prided themselves on was having fewer people putting out the whole Office suite PLUS Internet Explorer for Mac than there were working on Word for Windows alone, yet still managing.
by newpavlov | 2025-12-02 20:58:20+00:00
>`async` is in the type system.

No, it's not. `async` is just syntax sugar, the "effect" gets emulated in the type system using `Future`. This is one of the reasons why the `async` system feels so foreign and requires so many language changes to make it remotely usable. `const` is much closer to a "true" effect (well, to be precise it's an anti-effect, but it's not important right now).

Also, I think it's useful to distinguish between effect and type systems, instead of lumping them into just "type system". The former applies to code and the latter to data.

>That feels dense.

Yes. But why `async` is more important than `alloc`? For some applications it's as important to know about potential allocations, as for other applications to know about whether code potentially yields or not.

Explicitly listing all effects would the most straightforward approach, but I think a more practical approach would be to have a list of "default effects", which can be overwritten on the crate (or maybe even module) level. And on the function level you will be able to opt-in or opt-out from effects if needed.

>I think ideally it would be something readers could spot at first glance

Well, you either can have "dense" or explicit "at first glance" signatures.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-02 20:58:21+00:00
Adding a comment here with some info on LIDAR human safety, since many are asking.

There are two wavelengths of interest used:

a) 905 nm/940 nm (roof and bumpers): 70–100 µJ per pulse max, regulated by IEC 60825 since this WL is focused on the retina b) 1550 nm systems (the Laser Bear Honeycomb): 8–12 mJ per pulse allowed (100x more photons since this WL stays the cornea)

The failure mode of these LIDARs can be akin to a weapon. A stuck mirror or frozen phased array turns into a continuous-wave pencil beam. A 1550 nm LIDAR leaking 1W continuous will raise corneal temperature >5C in 100ms. The threshold for cataract creation is only 4C rise in temp. A 905 nm Class 1 system stuck in one pixel gives 10 mW continuous on retina, capable of creating a lesion in 250ms or less.

20 cars at an intersection = 20 overlapping scanners, meaning even if each meets single-device Class 1, linear addition could offer your retina a 20x dose enough to push into Class 3B territory. The current regs (IEC 60825-1:2014) assume single-source exposure. There is no standard for multi-source, multi-axis, moving-platform overlay.

Additionally, no LIDAR manufacturer publishes beam-failure shutoff latency. Most are >50ms, which can be long enough for permanent injury
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-02 20:58:42+00:00
> Pandas is widely adopted and deeply integrated into the Python ecosystem.

This is pretty laughable. Yes there are very DS specific tools that make good use of Pandas, but `to_pandas` in Polars trivially solves this. The fact that Pandas always feels like injecting some weird DSL into existing Python code bases is one of the major reasons why I really don't like it.

> If you are dealing with huge data sets, you are probably using Spark or something like Dask already where jobs can run in the cloud. If you need speed and efficiency on your local machine, you use NumPy outright. And if you really, really need speed, you rewrite it in C/C++.

Have you used Polars at all? Or for that matter written significant Pandas outside of a notebook? The number one benefit of Polars, imho, is that Polars works using Expressions that allow you to trivially compose and reuse fundamental logic when working with data in a way the works well with other Python code. This solves the biggest problem with Pandas is that it does not abstract well.

Not to mention that Pandas is really poor dataframe experience outside of it's original use case which was financial time series. The entire multi-index experience is awful and I know that either you are calling 'reset_index' multiple times in your Pandas logic or you have bugs.
by jomohke | 2025-12-02 20:58:48+00:00
Why do people always stop this quote at the breath? The rest of it says that he still thinks they need tech employees.

> .... and in 12 months, we might be in a world where the ai is writing essentially all of the code. But the programmer still needs to specify what are the conditions of what you're doing. What is the overall design decision. How we collaborate with other code that has been written. How do we have some common sense with whether this is a secure design or an insecure design. So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer has to do, then I think human productivity will actually be enhanced

(He then said it would continue improving, but this was not in the 12 month prediction.)

Source interview: https://www.youtube.com/live/esCSpbDPJik?si=kYt9oSD5bZxNE-Mn
by vablings | 2025-12-02 20:58:52+00:00
> 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.

Most of what I said is a large oversimplification on the matter. Anticheats absolutely do make use of heuristic patterns to flag drivers that are correlated with known cheaters. Drivers are pretty well flagged now days by anticheats but Windows does virtually next to nothing to prevent people from abusing these RWEverything drivers

>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.

The point is that you don't need a very complicated or long-lived exploit to yoink those keys if you know where to look.

The overarching idea here is that as long as you have physical access to hardware it is going to be very difficult to prevent these kinds of attacks without serious vertical integration and from who? Microsoft really don't seem to care much, CPU/Motherboard/RAM vendors are benefiting from an open market with shared standards and anti-cheat/games do not have enough purchasing power to push over consumers.

I can't comment much on FPGAs because I don't know a huge amount about them so il take your point. There are also countless side channel attacks and ways to leak data from your memory in completely unintended way eg; cache timing or faulty speculative execution
by addaon | 2025-12-02 20:58:58+00:00
Having built a LiDAR system for an autonomy company in the past, this is a great write-up, but it omits what I found to be one of the more interesting challenges. For our system (bistatic, discrete edge-emitting laser diodes and APDs; much like a Velodyne system at high level), we had about an inch of separation between our laser diodes and our photodiodes. With 70 A peak currents through the laser diodes. And nanoamp sensitivity in the photodiodes. EMI is... interesting. Many similar lidars ignore the problem by blanking out responses very close to firing time, giving a minimum range sensitivity, and by waiting for maximum delay to elapse before firing the next salvo -- but this gives a maximum fire rate that can be an issue. For example, a 32 channel system running at 20 kHz/channel would be limited to ~200 m range (468 m round trip delay, some blanking time needed)... so to get both high rate (horizontal resolution) and high channel count (vertical resolution), you need to be able to ignore your own cross-talk and be able to fire when beams are in flight.
by altairprime | 2025-12-02 20:59:22+00:00
Uh. Okay. But, like. Thousands of dollars a month in potential spend but no lawyer consult yet? You do you, but it sounds like you just aren't that into Azure. If you’re willing to post an essay about this, put your money where your keyboard is. Everything short of that can be safely and cheaply ignored by Microsoft with no consequence or penalty.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-02 20:59:32+00:00
> That assumes 10 was good and misses 8.1.

I find this to be a mostly valid assumption, and 8.1 shouldn't be counted separately from 8 just as Vista SP2 should be counted any differently from Vista (Vista was mostly fine after companies fixed their drivers and Microsoft toned things down a bit. 7 just drove that home and put some necessary distance between itself and Vista).

> Also 95/98/me were a different line from NT/2000.

I fail to see why this matters.
by echelon | 2025-12-02 20:59:43+00:00
Are all of their sales their code gen model? And isn't there a lot of competition in the code gen space from Google and Anthropic?

I'd imagine they sold these to enterprise:

https://openai.com/business/

"ChatGPT for Business", sold per seat

"API Platform"

I could see the former getting canned if AI isn't adding value.

Developers can change the models they use frequently, especially with third party infrastructure like OpenRouter or FAL.
by NullHypothesist | 2025-12-02 20:59:55+00:00
Methodology can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2025.2...

"Benchmarks were aligned to the same vehicle types, road types, and locations as where the Waymo Driver operated."

So yes, it's apples to apples... I'm sure there's some inherent variation, so maybe it's fuji to granny smith apples, but it seems there's nothing wildly off in their methodology.
by Tractor8626 | 2025-12-02 21:00:01+00:00
Sqlite is very cool. But what was the point of slowing postgress down?

> But, wait our transactions are not serialisable, which they need to be if we want consistent transaction processing

You either don't know what serializable does or trying to mislead the reader. There is zero reason to use searializable here.

> Let's say you have 5ms latency between your app server and your database.

5ms latency is unrealistic. Unless you use wifi or you database is in another datacenter.

> I'm talking about transactions per second, specifically interactive transactions that are common when building web applications

No they are not common at all. You probably invented them just to make pg look bad.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-02 21:00:21+00:00
Thanks to the AI industry, I don't even know what the word "safety" means anymore, it's been so thoroughly coopted. Safety used to mean hard hats, steel toed shoes, safety glasses, and so on--it used to be about preventing physical injury or harm. Now it's about... I have no idea. Something vaguely to do with censorship and filtering of acceptable ideas/topics? Safety has just become this weird euphemism that companies talk about in press releases but never go into much detail about.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-02 21:00:44+00:00
> But for individual people who make things, I think if they’re alive, it should be theirs.

But it is theirs... well, until they sell it. We aren't talking about the things they make but about copies of them. I can't believe there are people who still don't understand the difference.

The copies aren't theirs to begin with, copyright isn't natural property and it's not a natural right, that much is set in stone. Don't be confused by the ridiculous name "Intellectual Property".

I'm not saying the legal right called copyright should not exist but it should be paired back to the terms it was originally limited to, there are good reasons for those limits.
by promiseuzoechi | 2025-12-02 21:00:45+00:00
I’ve been testing a constraint-based approach to building a site blocker: no background loops, no remote services, and only the APIs required by MV3.

The project (Ashdeck) overrides the New Tab page for its UI. All blocking happens through declarativeNetRequest rules generated from user input. The timer is local state + a small service worker that wakes only when needed.

The goal was to keep CPU and memory usage as close to zero as possible outside the New Tab. Would appreciate any feedback from people who’ve built MV3 tools or fought with the same limitations.
by mettamage | 2025-12-02 21:00:50+00:00
I'm doing a very simple frontend and backend thingy. I'm basically vibe coding my own project management tool in the way I like it. I'm currently at 4000 lines of code and am beginning to get to the threshold that I can't take technical debt anymore and would need to restructure and refactor.

So yea, fair enough.

Though, the shift that the OP describes, yea I can see that. Writing tests has become way more important. Or well, it feels more important. From a testing perspective, we should see ourselves agents too (aka bug making machines), that's why you need tests. The silly bias I always had was "but I'm writing the code! It'll be fine, I won't make bug- oh... why can't I close my modal window when I click on the x symbol?"

But yea, the apparent need for testing is definitely much more there. The need for architecting it well is also there as LLMs still seem to be a bit in tutorial land with that one. There are a few more things like that.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-02 21:01:02+00:00
I tried it with Gemini 2.5 Pro. I got:

"Excellent question!"

and

"That is an excellent and very important question."

I primarily use Gemini 2.5 Pro for AI coding, and it does this to me with virtually every prompt.

"That's an insightful point!"

"Excellent question!"

And on and on. I'm not exaggerating when I say it does this almost every time. Easily over 90% of the responses.
by BSTRhino | 2025-12-02 21:01:32+00:00
tldr I plan to make the singleplayer at least source available, but keep all parts related to multiplayer/persistence/hosting (anything that requires a server) closed for a few practical reasons:

1. Cheating: There has to be some security by obscurity because in Easel, multiplayer and persistence are actually client authoritative. Why client authoritative? We don't simulate on the server to keep costs down. Why keep server costs down? Easel will never run ads because it is aimed at teenagers/children and we want to be able to vet all content shown on Easel. Without ads, combined with the fact that we want Easel to be free for teenagers, the budget is extremely tight. I would rather die than get VC funding because they would force Easel to put profit before principles, so we have to keep the costs low.

2. Development speed: Easel has changed a lot over the past 3 years, and been constantly refactored over and over again. If you look at Easel now, you might think "I could make that" but when I made it, I didn't have any reference points, so I had to iterate and iterate on a lot of things from first principles and take a lot of wrong turns. My GitHub history shows me adding about 2 million lines of code even though the project is about 150000 lines, which shows how much it has been written and re-written. Anyone who tried to contribute would just get in the way at this point. I want to spend my days coding rather than arguing with people on GitHub.

3. Survival: I don't want someone else to take all the code to make a competing platform which does not have the same principles (like putting profit ahead of child safety and showing ads). My dream is for Easel to be a place where most players are makers, like Scratch, except with more actual real games on it because the engine has built-in game features like a physics engine, particle systems and multiplayer. Like Roblox except actually beginner-friendly coding. I have a vision quest and I want Easel to fund Easel so I can make Easel.

I am looking to open source Easel but only in a way which solves the above 3 problems. The way that I have come up with is that open sourcing the singleplayer parts is the best compromise between everything. It just requires stopping development to splitting it all out, and having all the code split out will mean development would be slower, and I am prioritising development speed at the moment. The engine is not complete enough yet and missing a bunch of key features which would stop numerous games from being made. So maybe in a couple of years I will have the bandwidth to look into this. But I actually want to open source Easel, but I just need those problems solved.
by tptacek | 2025-12-02 21:01:39+00:00
I think people mistake me for saying that the American status quo is acceptable. It isn't. We overpay (and overprescribe) wildly above peer countries. It's very bad. The only point I'm making here is that the two most common villains in these narratives --- insurers and pharma companies --- mathematically account for only a small portion of spending. Insurers in particular act as sin-eaters for the providers, who dwarf them in size.
by intentfy | 2025-12-02 21:01:51+00:00
Big news. Hopefully users get the best of both as a result - Stripe billing + Metronome. While these companies figure out a merger of these products, we at https://uselark.ai/ are happy to onboard customers for their billing needs. Some nice things about us -

1. Our usage based billing system supports 10x the throughput of metronome or stripe and is much more flexible.

2. You don't have to manage any webhooks and store custom billing state (like stripe customer id) in your database. We take care of it all (here's our quickstart: https://docs.uselark.ai/)

3. We support more pricing models (dimensional pricing like per region rate, prepaid credits with automated topups & rollovers, etc). Rolling out pricing changes is also seamless.

4. Our APIs are simple. For example, you don't have to integrate with a separate checkout API. We also provide frontend SDKs to check billing state (like remaining credits, feature access).
by Atomic_Torrfisk | 2025-12-02 21:02:03+00:00
> What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders.

You are not wrong, but the contract is/was metaphorical. For a long time people were able to make a living for themselves by studying hard (usually STEM) and end up with a career which payed off. That was the invisible "contract". Hell I went to university for things which seem like academic navel gazing, but I still got a good tech job on the other side. That's not the reality for a lot of graduates nowdays who take more practical degrees at masters and phd levels.

Again even if the literal statement is clearly false, it is the sentiment which matters, and this sentiment does not just apply to graduates. I think many just feel like working hard does not work anymore, especially in the face of housing, cost of living, job competition and social media flaunting the wealth of others.

I get the idea from my younger siblings, "Why try if you are already a looser."
by ah979 | 2025-12-02 21:02:04+00:00
I think I know what you may have in mind when you describe the "interpersonal dynamics" of a "would-be middle manager", and I probably agree with you (original author here).

But some of the best "people" people that I've seen in my career have been the most technical, also. They were really good at being able to communicate the value of their solution, the problems it solves, and risks and rewards. They could get buy-in from stakeholders and other teams. They could listen empathetically when faced with issues and blockers. And they did so with authenticity and genuine care because they were passionate about software engineering.

I believe those are skills that can be learned and practiced and that you don't have to be necessarily "social" to grow in that area.
by Herring | 2025-12-02 21:02:04+00:00
It's not that I don't like it. It's more that I think you're being lied to. Inequality has been going up in the US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are not being rewarded as much as they should. But they still buy into the system that is impoverishing them.

The top 10% of income earners in the US account for 50% of consumer spending. LMK if you think that's part of the contract. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/02/24/higher-income-a...
by Barathkanna | 2025-12-02 21:02:40+00:00
Exactly. People forget that “SQLite can’t do X” often really means “SQLite doesn’t ship with X built in.” If you wrap it with a lightweight request handler or a queue, you essentially recreate the same pattern every other DB uses. The fact that PostgreSQL bundles its own coordinator doesn’t make SQLite fundamentally incapable. It just means you choose whether you want that layer integrated or external.
by cobolcomesback | 2025-12-02 21:03:39+00:00
AWS has built 20 data centers in Indiana full of half a million Trainium chips explicitly for Anthropic. Anthropic is using them heavily. The same press announcement that Anthropic has made about Google TPUs is the exact same one they made a year ago about Trainium. Hell, even in the Google TPU press release they explicitly mention how they are still using Trainium as well.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-02 21:03:46+00:00
I don't want to use a Microsoft account. I don't want to use Secure Boot. I don't want the new right click menu (good idea, bad execution). I don't want the new start menu (I want the Windows 7 one if anything). I don't want my OS calling home. I don't want AI. I don't want ads.

I went to Linux instead. I got what I wanted there.

What ideas did 10 have that weren't just purely technical updates (i.e. DX12 and the like), and weren't just undoing what Windows 8 did?