MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-12-02 15:02:00+00:00
I remember that. I studied CS in that period and some professors were convinced that software development was going to become an unskilled job, analogous to bricklaying, and that our goal as future CS graduates should be to become managers, just like someone that studies a university degree about making buildings is intended to become an architect and not a bricklayer.

I never believed it, though (if I had, I would probably have switched degrees, as I hate management). And while the belief was common, my impression is that it was only so among people who didn't code much. The details on how it would happen were always highly handwavy and people defending that view had a tendency to ignore any software beyond standard CRUD apps.

In contrast, if I had to choose a degree right now, I'd probably avoid CS (or at most study it out of passion, like one could study English philology or something, but without much hope of it being a safe choice for my career). I think the prospects for programmers in the LLM era look much scarier, and the threats look much more real, than they ever did in that period.
by skypanther | 2025-12-02 15:02:08+00:00
Location: Rochester, NY, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, AWS, FastAPI, Flask, SQL, DBT/MWAA, engineering management

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timpoulsen/

Email: tim [at] skypanther.com

15 years of experience designing, building, and scaling cloud-native systems across SaaS, mobile, and enterprise environments.
by kkylin | 2025-12-02 15:02:11+00:00
Like many others, I too would very much like to hear about this.

I taught our entry-level calculus course a few years ago and had two blind students in the class. The technology available for supporting them was abysmal then -- the toolchain for typesetting math for screen readers was unreliable (and anyway very slow), for braille was non-existent, and translating figures into braille involved sending material out to a vendor and waiting weeks. I would love to hear how we may better support our students in subjects like math, chemistry, physics, etc, that depend so much on visualization.
by delichon | 2025-12-02 15:02:32+00:00
I read all of her tweets but I don't know of any anti-trans statements by Rowling. I'd appreciate it if you could point one out.

I haven't heard her say that there's anything wrong with being trans, that it's an illness, or that there should be any consequences. I have heard her decry the excesses of some trans activists and allies, particularly in her defense of women-only spaces. That seems to me to be a poor fit for "asshole".
by goku12 | 2025-12-02 15:02:38+00:00
> It's interesting that so many indian vote for that clique.

This is what happens when the only lens through which people see politics is religion or race. It shows you how important scientific temper, fact checking skills, scientific knowledge, awareness of unrevised history, knowledge of civic duties, current affairs, critical thinking, etc are very important. And don't think that I'm talking about just India.
by sgerenser | 2025-12-02 15:02:44+00:00
-O3 gained a reputation of being more likely to "break" code, but in reality it was almost always "breaking" code that was invalid to start with (invoked undefined behavior). The problem is C and C++ have so many UB edge cases that a large volume of existing code may invoke UB in certain situations. So -O2 thus had a reputation of being more reliable. If you're sure your code doesn't invoke undefined behavior, though, then -O3 should be fine on a modern compiler.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-02 15:02:47+00:00
Cue lots of managers using this title to push the 'back to the office' movement a bit further.

There are so many axis other than 'output', and some of them are a lot more important. For instance 'quality'. And 'employee happiness' and 'employee retention'. The term 'human capital' is such a terrible one to use as an abstraction. Capital is something you expend, once you start looking at people as just another resource to make ROI on you're asking to be treated the same way in reverse.

@Dang: suggested title change: "The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?"

full text:

https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
by afavour | 2025-12-02 15:03:22+00:00
Makes sense. I consider myself very lucky to have become a senior engineer before COVID. As much as I appreciate WFH flexibility (especially as a parent) I do worry that the next generation of engineers don't have anywhere near the same level of mentorship. I get a lot of mileage out of video conference pairing tools but it's still not the same as sitting together. But I guess I probably am more efficient in the short term when I don't spend so much time on mentorship...

All that said, I still prefer where we are compared to where we were.
by charlie-haley | 2025-12-02 15:03:29+00:00
Hey HN, I wanted to show off my project Marmot! I decided to build Marmot after discovering a lot of data catalogs can be complex and require many external dependencies such as Kafka, Elasticsearch or an external orchestrator like Airflow.

Marmot is a single Go binary backed by Postgres. That's it!

It already supports: Full-text search across tables, topics, queues, buckets, APIs Glossary and asset to term associations

Flexible API so it can support almost any data asset!

Terraform/Pulumi/CLI for managing a catalog-as-code

10+ Plugins (and growing)

Live demo: https://demo.marmotdata.io
by gaoshan | 2025-12-02 15:03:51+00:00
"One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually."

It is interesting in how challenging it can be to convince some younger developers of this. Some of the stronger and more technically proficient developers (that are young-ish... mid 30's and down, let's say) have a level of contempt for those skills that is surprising and not trivial to coach them on. They seem to suffer from "smartest person in the room" syndrome and mistakenly believe those smarts apply to everything they deal with rather than the just the technical areas that they excel in.
by kbolino | 2025-12-02 15:04:11+00:00
There are some crossed wires here.

AES-NI is x86-specific terminology. It was proposed in 2008. SHA acceleration came later, announced in 2013. The original version covers only SHA-1 and SHA-256 acceleration, but a later extension adds SHA-512 acceleration. At least for x86, AES-NI does not imply SHA support. For example, Westmere, Sandy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge chips from Intel have AES-NI but not SHA.

The equivalent in Arm land is called "Cryptographic Extensions" and was a non-mandatory part of ARMv8 announced in 2011. Both AES and SHA acceleration were announced at the same time. While part of the same extensions, there are separate feature flags for each of AES, SHA-1, and SHA-256.
by torginus | 2025-12-02 15:04:23+00:00
I'd say the best price/performance hack on AWS if you don't need web scale is just put your stuff on a tiny EC2 instance, like a t3.micro - it'll be likely faster and more flexible than lambda with much more predictable performance.

You can scale up by changing out to a bigger instance - it's surprising how far you can get with this strategy.
by et1337 | 2025-12-02 15:04:41+00:00
I’m excited to see how this turns out. I work with Go every day and I think Io corrects a lot of its mistakes. One thing I am curious about is whether there is any plan for channels in Zig. In Go I often wish IO had been implemented via channels. It’s weird that there’s a select keyword in the language, but you can’t use it on sockets.
by ecshafer | 2025-12-02 15:04:51+00:00
Programming is pretty lucky that there is also large demand for programmers, and the product is high grossing, because the salaries are good. Most other fields with a passion component are low paying. Almost all of the arts Film, Music, Writing, Art pay very low if you are not the absolute top of the field. Millions of people are out there writing short stories, drawing manga, shooting student films, etc for free to land jobs for salaries that the average CS grad would laugh at.
by pentaphobe | 2025-12-02 15:04:54+00:00
> what topics are you interested in?

That's just it - any list I give would probably miss the mark. I guess it all ties back to computational thinking in some way? (physics, neuroscience, rendering algorithms, medicine, linguistics, category theory)

Perhaps if recommendation algorithms could be that generalised it would scratch most of the desire for a good anti-bubble..

But still misses that special sauce of discovering papers/topics I didn't know I was interested in.

Libraries and stumbling into random university lectures did this very well (or newsagents, video shops, etc..) -- broadening rather than narrowing

LLMs / vector space seem well placed to automate this kind of expansive/lateral matching -- but it does seem we (or marketers) tend to build recommenders around the assumption that individuals' interests are a singularity to zero in on.. (and so likely train our models for same)

Anyway - end rant - thanks again, really cool project! Clearly got me inspired :)
by amwet | 2025-12-02 15:05:19+00:00
The tendency for LLMs to romanticize everything and speak like they’re in a novel will never not bother me.

In any case, this is cool that you built these tools, but I think it’s important to understand that this is technically not different than any other time you’ve used a cloud based LLM. LLMs are stateless, and every interaction feeds in the full context (or truncated summary) of your entire conversation. In that sense, your first prompt may go to data center A, and your second prompt may go to data center B, where A and B are many miles apart, and it’s no different than both prompts going to A. The LLM didn’t “teleport” from A to B, because LLMs are stateless and ephemeral. Anthropomorphizing LLMs is a bit disingenuous, because it’s not a stateful being.

Again, it’s cool you restored context automatically in a claude code session. In the web UIs for popular LLMs, you can typically see conversation history and resume across machines, it’s a shame this isn’t built into Claude code by default.
by anang | 2025-12-02 15:05:49+00:00
I think the general public has a MUCH better grasp on the potential consequences of crashing a car into a garage than some sort of auto-run terminal command mode in an AI agent.

These are being sold as a way for non-developers to create software, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that kind of user to have the same understanding as an actual developer.

I think a lot of these products avoid making that clear because the products suddenly become a lot less attractive if there are warnings like "we might accidentally delete your whole hard drive or destroy a production database."
by jcranmer | 2025-12-02 15:06:44+00:00
When you encode an x86 instruction, your operands amount to either a register name, a memory operand, or an immediate (of several slightly different flavors). I'm no great connoisseur of ISAs, but I believe this basic trichotomy is fairly universal for ISAs. The operands of an LEA instruction are the destination register and a memory operand [1]. LEA happens to be the unique instruction where the memory operand is not dereferenced in some fashion in the course of execution; it doesn't make a lot of sense to create an entirely new syntax that works only for a single instruction.

[1] On a hardware level, the ModR/M encoding of most x86 instructions allows you to specify a register operand and either a memory or a register operand. The LEA instruction only allows a register and a memory operand to be specified; if you try to use a register and register operand, it is instead decoded as an illegal instruction.
by noobermin | 2025-12-02 15:06:48+00:00
The abstract did say the result is mixed. You have "long term" increase in human capital development...primarily because connections help mentor more junior developers, but output is reduced...for obvious reasons.

The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.
by robinhouston | 2025-12-02 15:07:05+00:00
From Richard Hamming’s famous speech _You and Your Research_:

> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

> Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing—not much, but enough that they miss fame.
by ThorAndZeus | 2025-12-02 15:07:45+00:00
Location: UK

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby/Rails, Python, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS (Extensive), Event Driven architecture, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform, Ansible, observability (Prometheus/Grafana), ML/AI tooling, distributed systems, performance optimisation, reliability engineering

Résumé/CV: https://wagnermatos.co.uk | http://infinityloop.tech Email: wm at wagnermatos.co.uk

Open to fractional contract work (part-time or project-based). Senior engineer with strong background in Ruby/Rails, Python, Node.js, modern AWS infrastructure, DevOps, and ML-enabled systems. Experienced leading architecture, scaling, and reliability efforts for production systems.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-02 15:07:46+00:00
I'm not so sure that the numbers will bear out what you sketch here. If we assume a drone flight per package and we scale this up to get rid of all of the delivery vehicles the number of people hit by and killed by drones will rise substantially. Drones are immature tech at best and a 5 Kg drone will put you in the morgue on impact with a greater likelihood than an accident with a delivery van. Gravity has no brakes and a drone isn't going to be able to refuse its imperative when the tech inevitably fails. I think you have to watch out not to be so 'anti' one thing that you end up with another that is as bad or even worse. Maybe the solution isn't drones and not delivery vans either.
Show HN: RunMat – runtime with auto CPU/GPU routing for dense math
by nallana | 2025-12-02 15:07:49+00:00
Hi, I’m Nabeel. In August I released RunMat as an open-source runtime for MATLAB code that was already much faster than GNU Octave on the workloads I tried. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972919

Since then, I’ve taken it further with RunMat Accelerate: the runtime now automatically fuses operations and routes work between CPU and GPU. You write MATLAB-style code, and RunMat runs your computation across CPUs and GPUs for speed. No CUDA, no kernel code.

Under the hood, it builds a graph of your array math, fuses long chains into a few kernels, keeps data on the GPU when that helps, and falls back to CPU JIT / BLAS for small cases.

On an Apple M2 Max (32 GB), here are some current benchmarks (median of several runs):

* 5M-path Monte Carlo * RunMat ≈ 0.61 s * PyTorch ≈ 1.70 s * NumPy ≈ 79.9 s → ~2.8× faster than PyTorch and ~130× faster than NumPy on this test.

* 64 × 4K image preprocessing pipeline (mean/std, normalize, gain/bias, gamma, MSE) * RunMat ≈ 0.68 s * PyTorch ≈ 1.20 s * NumPy ≈ 7.0 s → ~1.8× faster than PyTorch and ~10× faster than NumPy.

* 1B-point elementwise chain (sin / exp / cos / tanh mix) * RunMat ≈ 0.14 s * PyTorch ≈ 20.8 s * NumPy ≈ 11.9 s → ~140× faster than PyTorch and ~80× faster than NumPy.

If you want more detail on how the fusion and CPU/GPU routing work, I wrote up a longer post here: https://runmat.org/blog/runmat-accel-intro-blog

You can run the same benchmarks yourself from the GitHub repo in the main HN link. Feedback, bug reports, and “here’s where it breaks or is slow” examples are very welcome.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-02 15:08:10+00:00
"A number of my friends who belong in the very high upper brackets have suggested to me on several occasions of late, that if I am reelected president, they will have to move to some other Nation because of high taxes here. Now, I will miss them very much." (audience breaks into laughter)

- FDR

(Spoiler alert: The rich always act like victims and whine about having to move.)
by bgwalter | 2025-12-02 15:08:17+00:00
It's for the press and the general public who don't really understand the tech. The hype can usually be sustained for around two years.

The press nearly always obliges in the first year. It works for wars and pandemics, too. In the second year the first dissenters begin to show up. We are now in past the stage of opinion reversal, where the press and the public mostly hate "AI".

This is also why it is wrong to compare "AI" to the early Internet. After the Internet bubble burst, the public still liked the Internet.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-02 15:08:34+00:00
> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. Way before 2011 all my friends were telling me to read it. It was so popular that Neil Gaiman - before 2011 - wrote a famous blog post criticizing R R Martin fans for being upset that R R Martin was not giving a timeline for writing his next book (and implied he may never complete the series).

It also consistently won some of the top awards prior to 2011.
by msabalau | 2025-12-02 15:08:56+00:00
I don't know that A Game of Thrones is a good example, at all.

The series was already remarkable commercial success before the TV adaptation. A Feast for Crows debuted at #1 on the NYT list in 2005.

The series sold millions of copies prior to the TV series. That's more successful than the average successful Fantasy novel by orders of magnitude.

If the books sold even more copies after being adapted, that's because HBO put the story on TV, not because of anything the author did.

And, of course, even if the first book in the series lost it's copyright after 28 years (nearly three decades!), the all the rest of books in the series would still under copyright, and the HBO wouldn't be able to access the ending without the authors help, as it hasn't even been published yet. The most HBO could have done without Martin's involvement would have been to create glorified fan fiction, while leaving themselves open to lawsuits about any similarities to any later books in the series under copyright.

Almost all the money almost any artist makes comes in the first 28 years. It is hard to see why we should deprive all of society from benefiting from using, building on, or remixing culture, to slightly increase the leverage that a handful of exceptionally rare winners get.

An of course, there is a huge gap between 14+14 and today's maximalist copyright regime.
by sambuccid | 2025-12-02 15:09:04+00:00
>> The creator/perpetrator of the unethical process should be held accountable and all benefits taken back as to kill any perceived incentive to perform the actions, but once the damage is done why let it happen in vain?

That's very similar to other unethical processes(for example child labour), and we see that government is often either too slow to move or just not interested, and that's why people try to influence the market by changing what they buy.

It's similar for AI, some people don't use it so that they don't pay the creators (in money or in personal data) to train the next model, and at the same time signal to the companies that they wouldn't be future customers of the next model.

(I'm not necessarely in the group of people avoiding to use AI, but I can see their point)
Show HN: Jester News - An RSS/Atom Companion App
by dan_h | 2025-12-02 15:09:09+00:00
I'm happy to announce that Jester News is finally available as a companion app to https://jesterengine.com.

Jester is a free (with a premium tier) web-based RSS/Atom reader that sprinkles some AI features on top to help with topic discovery and content consumption, for example:

* Jester groups similar articles via similarity search into "Stories" to make finding articles on a specific topic/event more natural.

* You can leverage your followed feeds/folders of feeds to automatically generate podcasts or videos along with a list of sources.

* You can even build your own story generation pipeline from your whitelisted sources (though that requires usage of the website).

Of course, the website also offers a ton of the features you would expect from a modern news feed platform, such as subscriptions/filtering/actions/scrape tools/etc.

The new mobile app makes heavy use of stories and generated digests as a more light-weight experience. It still needs some design work, but any early feedback is greatly appreciated. Everything is available at the free tier, so please give it a try and let me know if you have any questions/issues.
by groundzeros2015 | 2025-12-02 15:09:27+00:00
> And because the problems aren’t real, AI can solve them all really easily. There’s tons of training material out there for them to learn from.

> But don’t be fooled. Just because AI can solve your school problems doesn’t mean it can solve the real-world problems you’re going to face in your work. (As of now, it can’t.)

This is a good point. And it’s unfortunate we can’t see how much these things are tuned for demos like solving classic HW problems.
by eudamoniac | 2025-12-02 15:09:29+00:00
> unlimited high-speed internet are requirements for participation in society

I pay $7/mo (not a typo) for 1GB mobile data via US Mobile, and I have never hit that cap in many years. I just don't stream video or audio unless on WiFi, which is not a hardship. Respectfully, what on earth are you talking about?
by cs02rm0 | 2025-12-02 15:09:44+00:00
Seems like groundhog day, although I'm not sure I remember anyone telling me that software engineers were on borrowed time until relatively recently and I'd largely ignored it.

Yet one thing does seem different for anyone who just missed the dotcom crash, is that the roles available have fallen off a cliff while the numbers looking for roles seem to be up, at least in the UK. The UAE is even worse. I've spent 20 years hiding from recruiters and now they're all leaving me on read. Karma, maybe.
by lukecarr | 2025-12-02 15:09:52+00:00
Chris McCausland is great. A fair bit of his material _does_ reference his visual impairment, but it's genuinely witty and sharp, and it never feels like he's leaning on it for laughs/relying on sympathy.

He did a great skit with Lee Mack at the BAFTAs 2022[0], riffing on the autocue the speakers use for announcing awards.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLhy0Zq95HU