MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-14 20:53:24+00:00
Have you considered that the inefficiency is a feature and provides cushy jobs for a lot of people and subcontractors? But yes, a modern telco can absolutely be run more efficiently if you operate it like a tech company and don't have to deal with decades of legacy sludge (whether bloated headcounts or heterogenous legacy infrastructure you have to support).

The problem is that this is a culture problem and once a company is ossified it is really hard to enact such change from the inside even if you wanted to because everyone enjoys the status quo (and who doesn't wouldn't be there to begin with).

Another example: have you seen the UK & EU banking scene and the boom of fintech and "neobanks" around 2017 like Revolut, Monzo, Starling, N26, etc? They managed to build from scratch on relatively shoestring budgets their own implementation of a consumer bank, something that their legacy competitors still can't replicate despite having way more budget and resources.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-14 20:53:52+00:00
Pay - when I am not getting paid as much as I “should”. It’s all relative though. I don’t expect any company outside of BigTech to match BigTech comp (been there done that, not interested in going back).

Any job where I actually go into an office. But the company has to be “remote only”.

Autonomy - for the last decade I have mostly had complete autonomy on the “how” within very wide understandable guardrails when I led projects.

I don’t do side projects and never have during my 30 year career. So the company I work for has to be using marketable up to date tech.

Also I would hate to be on call.

I don’t care about the “mission”. It’s a paycheck.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-01-14 20:53:53+00:00
Yeah Witten is weird. He's not just a little bit better than everyone else, he's on a different league.

I knew a someone who was a temp visitor at the Institute for Advanced Studies who was given temp office next to Witten. And he said he wouldn't hear a noise, and the one day he starts typing and doesn't stop until 100 pages of paper are written, like he has it finished in his mind before he starts typing. Somehow I'm inclined to believe it can't be far from truth.
by NickC25 | 2026-01-14 20:54:27+00:00
Anything that promotes short-form video should be looked at.

Youtube promoting shorts is bad.

A youtube long-form video about, say, car repair, or quantum physics, or a history of eastern asian languages doesn't contribute to brain rot.

The Chinese, take it for what it's worth, knew how to control TikTok. They simply banned non educational content on the platform. You want to watch a 5 minute video explaining the basics of a math theorem, or explaining a chess opening? Sure, that's cool. Stupid 30 second clips of dances, memes, reactions, etc? Nah, that's dumb.
by akramachamarei | 2026-01-14 20:54:44+00:00
2/3 of those articles are tech related, the other not obviously so, and the current not at all. Of course, the HN guidelines don't state "only tech news." They say submit stories which "gratify one's intellectual curiosity" and to avoid most political stories; I think this one fails on both counts. Scoring this charitably 3 to 1 nonetheless yields no significant insight.

Personally, I followed HN for news about hacking. I'd prefer all offtopic submissions flagged, or at least demoted. What's the point in a _hacker_ news Front Page RSS feed if I get dupes of major global stories?
by tracker1 | 2026-01-14 20:54:55+00:00
Absolutely, and I didn't mean to even imply that this circumstance isn't worse than then. Even being employed is kind of crappy, at least for me... beyond seeing positions expired and literally opening the same jobs at half the pay, to a lot of low-balling all around, I wound up taking a roughly 40% pay cut just to keep working... though making ends meet is much more difficult right now.

With the AI uncertainties, it's even harder still. I finally broke down and got a claude code account this past weekend to give it a try... On a few of my personal TODO items, I'd managed to do in a couple days what would have taken me literally weeks to accomplish, and I'm babysitting and reviewing everything far more than a vibe coder. There were issues, most of which I expected... but it was a far better experience than a couple years ago, and I can't even imagine how things will shake out in the end. It's still a tool, and even more so, I think you absolutely need to have experienced devs/architects at the helm of these things...

For better or worse, the org I work for has verboden AI, which is fine, but being able to scaffold something out in an hour after a couple hours of planning is pretty damned nice. ex: 2.5 hours into planning template (CLAUDE.md planning phase), then a first pass in about an hour, then 3 revisions over 2 hours with some manual tweaks. But overall a lot done in a short amount of time.

Of course, I also ran against something else that was library specific where AI didn't quite "get" what I wanted to do, implementing with a specific library/framework and kept doing goofy things. Hence comments on babysitting and experienced handlers.
by trashface | 2026-01-14 20:54:59+00:00
We're well above 2% anyway, I doubt they will ever hit that again - they are already having to cut rates because job market is frozen, and that will increase inflation pressure.

I track my spend each year and my personal actual inflation rate has averaged about 4.5% over past 5 years. And I'm pretty low income, my spending is all core stuff.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-14 20:55:03+00:00
More like, operating a submarine that's being designed and built-up around you as you travel in it, with half the components being obscure military secrets that - for reasons unknown - don't come with operator manuals anymore, and the other half being done by children copying designs they saw in TV shows with duct-tape and plasticine.

That's how modern software industry feels like.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-14 20:55:10+00:00
> users take unreasonable precautions

It doesn't help that so far the communicators have used the wrong analogy. Most people writing on this topic use "injection" a la SQL injection to describe these things. I think a more apt comparison would be phishing attacks.

Imagine spawning a grandma to fix your files, and then read the e-mails and sort them by category. You might end up with a few payments to a nigerian prince, because he sounded so sweet.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-14 20:55:17+00:00
> I’ve noticed that many people struggle to simply let things go.

Well nobody really can take clear leadership on answering the question, "Does it matter if I upload a picture of my face to Roblox?" All of these things seem valid to me:

- I upload photos of myself to apps like Apple Photos all the time, so why does Roblox matter in particular?

- But there are people on the Internet who really freak out about this, why?

- It certainly doesn't feel good and I don't know what this has to do with playing a video game.

- I don't get it, Roblox is a kids game, so why do I have to prove my age?

It's not so easy to reconcile all of these things. It's not so much letting things go as it is, people want "real" answers. HN doesn't help by giving so much space for concern trolls.
by ssalazar | 2026-01-14 20:55:39+00:00
Sharing my experience if it helps.
I graduated in 2006 from Princeton CS, cum laude, with no job offers from any tech company.
This was even before the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, so I didn't really have an excuse.
I was lucky enough to be hired in the CS lab where I did my senior thesis work, as a research assistant, to continue some of the work I did for my senior thesis.

At the time it felt like a humbling experience to still be hanging around campus after already having graduated, but now I look back on those times fondly.
The work I did then was on an open source research project that ended up being a cornerstone of my future career, that people still bring up when I meet folks at conferences or other industry events.
Eventually I picked up an internship in San Francisco, and from there the job opportunities poured in.
I've had a rich and colorful career since, and am currently the CTO of a small-ish tech company in the music space.

Your best bet is to continue investing in work that is in public that you can point to for employers and friends.
Its easier said than done to frame a perceived failure as an opportunity, but thats the only constructive way to get through it; looking back, thats exactly been my experience.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-01-14 20:55:49+00:00
Good question, I touch on this on the same comment, in the paragraph starting with "I keep repeating these things on HNs".

The TLDR is that you can never expect the same level of certainty when you don't have direct experiments, but you can still rule out _some_ hypothesis, and see how far other hypothesis take you. This is called theoretical physics. Just because you can't make an experiment doesn't mean you can't do anything.
by devilsdata | 2026-01-14 20:55:54+00:00
I'm 32 and submitted a photo of myself for age verification on Instagram and Threads. Was promptly banned, with no resource.

I do look a little younger than 32, due to a healthy lifestyle and religious use of sunscreen but I have a beard and moustache. It's a little insane that I was instantly banned with no way to move forward.
by manuelmoreale | 2026-01-14 20:56:25+00:00
> payment is a huge barrier to commerce these days, people think LLMs will change the world, but payment tech/laws will have a bigger effect in my opinion.

Having a native way to send micropayments on the web without having to pay a huge % of that transaction to Visa/Mastercard and Stripe and Co would be such massive game changer when it comes to this stuff.

As a silly example, every time I collect 1$ for my 1$/month club I actually get ~70c which is wild.

I agree with you, if there was a better way to directly send small amounts to people running interesting sites or projects the whole landscape could change.

And I also agree that a change in attitude is needed. I appreciated your comment.
by womanpower | 2026-01-14 20:56:27+00:00
I have an idea for a feature-rich shell tailored for women’s health and productivity.
The core idea is a menstrual cycle calendar integrated into the shell with these features:
• Cycle tracking: Track period start/end, ovulation, and fertile days.
• Notifications: Send email reminders when the period is expected to start.
• Server-friendly: Run in the background on a server, integrating with cron or systemd.
• Privacy-first: All data stored locally with optional encrypted backups.
• CLI-friendly interface: Commands like cycle status, cycle next, cycle log.

It would be a complex, useful, and empowering tool for anyone who wants to combine shell productivity with personal health. I’d love to explore implementing this in Rust.
by ccoreilly | 2026-01-14 20:56:29+00:00
There‘s many approaches being discussed and it will depend on the size of the task. You could just review a plan and assume the output is correct but you need at least behavioural tests to understand what was built fulfilled the requirements. You can split the plan further and further until the changes are small enough to be reviewable. Where I don’t see the benefit is in asking an agent to generate test as it tends to generate many useless unit tests that make reviewing more cumbersome. Writing the tests yourself (or defining them and letting an agent write the code) and not letting implementation agents change the tests is also something worth trying.

The truth is we’re all still experimenting and shovels of all sizes and forms are being built.
by Animats | 2026-01-14 20:56:32+00:00
High-energy physics is kind of stuck on that. Most of the interesting questions involve energies or distances way beyond what's reachable by experiment today.

Meanwhile, there's interesting experimental action in low-energy physics, down near absolute zero. Many of the weirder predictions of quantum mechanics have now been observed directly. Look at the list of Nobel laureates in physics since 1990.
A big fraction of them involve experiments with very low energy states,
where thermal noise is small enough that quantum effects dominate.
Some of that work led to useful technology. That's forward progress.
by spacecadet | 2026-01-14 20:56:32+00:00
I didnt start my career in tech until I was 28, that was 4 years after graduating, and not from MIT. Ended up homeless for 1 of those years... Dont give up! Try to replace the doom scrolling and sulking with hobbies, I know it's hard, but try to move those hobbies into communities. Join an OSS project or something like that. It will continue to build experience and open doors. Im now 15 years into working nearly uninterrupted and have recouped any dignity, money, etc. My new fear is that Im a Principal and fuck me applying for those roles! No advanced degree... Im basically a junior again XD

You will survive. Don't give up. Unless... you honestly find an alternative career in your journey.
by SeriousM | 2026-01-14 20:56:54+00:00
https://MachsEinfach.at

I'm a software architect with 23 years of professional experience, mainly in C#/.NET environments, and I currently lead a development team. Over the years, my focus has shifted from purely technical excellence to the human side of software development: communication, decision-making, responsibility, and sustainable performance.
In parallel to my tech career, I trained as a licensed psychological counsellor and supervisor in Austria, Vienna.
Today, I work with individuals and teams on topics like leadership, mental load, clarity in roles, burnout prevention, and turning reflection into action, especially in complex, high-responsibility environments such as software teams.
My work bridges structured engineering thinking with psychological depth and practical implementation.

AMA!
by dexwiz | 2026-01-14 20:57:04+00:00
Talking to some recent grads (last few years) last summer, parties were pretty much confined to frat parties. The school had a very vibrant house party scene circa 2010, but it sounded dead even pre-Covid. The people I talked to were at a music festival, so high cross over with those who would have attended the parties, not those who spent college locked in a dorm. I was very shocked to hear the difference in experience with within a decade.
by t-3 | 2026-01-14 20:57:04+00:00
> Adjusting your example, if I'm simply friends (implying history of contact) with a known drug dealer, am I really at risk of my home being raided and communications seized solely because I might have evidence leading to their conviction?

If the police can convince a judge to give them a warrant for it, sure, but if they were targeting you specifically they probably wouldn't bother with the indirect route of your drug-dealing friend and would just harass you for j walking and not using your blinkers properly until you raised your voice at a cop and charge you with assaulting an officer.
by antonomon | 2026-01-14 20:57:11+00:00
An essay on the global wave of anti-political anger

Unlike “anti-establishment” which a bit vague and overused to the point of meaninglessness, anti-politics describes a mood that doesn’t easily convert into governance. It’s a rejection and/or skepticism of politics as it exists to actualize people’s desires.

The essay documents three different examples of anti-politics historically:

- mass party radicalization after WW1 (rejection of the politics of consensus)

- forming a second culture outside of the state in Eastern Europe (viewing politics as a dead-end)

- today’s internet swarms (negating without a positive program) and the American case
by throw0101d | 2026-01-14 20:57:22+00:00
> I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025?

The game of Clue, and other games/toys, are in basket of goods because on average Americans spend some portion of their income per surveys:

* https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/

The CPI published (and in headlines) isn't about your personal spending, but the spending on average spread over millions of people/households. The CPI is a model of reality, and so pointing to a particular instantiation of consumer will not match exactly:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
by Xylakant | 2026-01-14 20:57:46+00:00
A ton is a big bag (yes, they get delivered in bags and that’s the name for them), which is pretty exactly a cubic meter. 4000 tons is hence a 2x2meter tower, 1km high. Or 20mx20m, 10m high.not sure how high you can stack TV towers or Asian elephants. The conversion is left as an exercise to the reader.
by cortesoft | 2026-01-14 20:57:46+00:00
For DB access, use an account with the correct access level you want to grant.

For SSH, you can either use a specific account created for the AI, and limit it's access to what you want it to do, although that is a bit trickier than DB limits. You can also use something like ForceCommand in SSHD config (or command= in your authorized_keys file) to only grant access to a single command (which could be a wrapper around the commands you want it to be able to access).

This does somewhat limit the flexibility of what the AI can deal with.

My actual suggestion is to change the model you are using to control your servers. Ideally, you shouldn't be SSHing to servers to do things; you should be controlling your servers via some automation system, and you can just have your AI modify the automation system. You can then verify the changes it is making before committing the changes to your control system. Logs should be collected in a place that can be queried without giving access to the system (Claude is great at creating queries in something like ElasticSearch or OpenSearch).
by burkaman | 2026-01-14 20:57:54+00:00
In this demonstration they use a .docx with prompt injection hidden in an unreadable font size, but in the real world that would probably be unnecessary. You could upload a plain Markdown file somewhere and tell people it has a skill that will teach Claude how to negotiate their mortgage rate and plenty of people would download and use it without ever opening and reading the file. If anything you might be more successful this way, because a .md file feel less suspicious than a .docx.
by bahmboo | 2026-01-14 20:57:56+00:00
"you know it when you see it" is a trap and ripe for abuse in its own right. Your description however is pretty spot on for this moment in internet evolution.

Interesting to me is that I pay for youtube premium so I don't see any ads. They even have the jump ahead feature where you can skip in video project promotions. It's the most ad free experience I have on the internet. The comment sections are about the lowest of the low knuckle draggers and outright dimwits.

I'm also a bit out of touch because I quit all social media. Youtube shorts is about the closest I get and that's a mind sink for sure. [Edit: and hacker news which I consider social media without the ads]
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-14 20:58:05+00:00
It doesn't have to be exclusively digital. You can be psuedoanonymous using some form of key as verification. To get a key, you have to present your ID in person at, for example, the social security office or local DOL.

All the key does is attest that "this person is over X years old" with no other identifying information associated with it.

I think blending in person & digital together is going to be the best way forward. Like going to the store and buying alcohol. I have little privacy risk from the cashier glancing at my ID for a second to check my birth date.
by cvhc | 2026-01-14 20:58:52+00:00
The restrictions have to be enforced by the non-LLM deterministic control logics (in the OS/database/software, or the agent's control plane). It cannot be just verbal instructions and you expect the LLM not to generate certain sequences of tokens.

What I imagine is you might instruct an agent to help you set up the restrictions for various systems to reduce the toil. But you should still review what the agent is going to do and make sure nothing stupid is done (like: using regexes to filter out restricted commands).
by antomal | 2026-01-14 20:58:53+00:00
This is a very unique and thoughtful feature request! I love the idea of making the shell more personal and empowering by integrating health tracking with terminal productivity.

From a technical standpoint, implementing this in Rust would be great because of the strong focus on privacy and memory safety. The 'privacy-first' and 'local storage' aspects you mentioned align perfectly with the philosophy of GRSH.

While my current roadmap is focused on core shell stability and the FreeBSD port, GRSH is designed to be extensible. This could be a fantastic candidate for a built-in module or a dedicated plugin.

If you're interested in exploring how to implement this in Rust for GRSH, please feel free to open a discussion on the GitHub repo. I’d love to see how we can make the terminal a more inclusive and useful space for everyone
by aberoham | 2026-01-14 20:59:10+00:00
Can relate. The UK electronic eVisa app was pure garbage. The major redeeming feature of the UK civil service and the various regulatory quagmires is that they're effectively open source. You (or Claude) can read through their practice manuals or policies and find a work-around. But my goodness is it annoying until you figure that out. Another fascinating bit is you may think the various departments are connected but they are not. The nice looking UK Government Digital Service (GDS) Design System gives everything a veneer of connected competence, but under the bonnet, that slick UI signal is as reliable as a posh accent. Don't become a migrant if you don't have to.
by potluri | 2026-01-14 20:59:25+00:00
Thanks. Yeah, it isn't ideal. Originally nearly every item fit on one page but the point size was tiny. When I apply for roles, I prune out irrelevant information, which I can do programmatically since the CV is rendered with Typst. However I think I need to do a major overhaul on how everything is structured to fix the fundamental issues. Verdict is out on how I should do that :)
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-14 20:59:54+00:00
> Don't shy away from taking or asking for jobs that you might be overqualified for.

I don't know how to feel about this blend of advise. On one hand yes it is better to have a job you can work your way up than have none at all. On the other hand, some jobs do start low but have nothing to work up to. There are tons of dead-end jobs are, and if you take one of those then you might find yourself having a hard time getting better positions than that.
by wmf | 2026-01-14 21:00:21+00:00
It's JSON parsing which is a real-world task although one that only amounts for a small amount of runtime. It is using AVX-512. Most code doesn't benefit from SIMD but the speedups can be huge for code that does benefit.

I like Geekbench's approach of combining general and specialized tests to reward CPUs for being well-rounded while taking some advantage of new vector/matrix features.
by sleepyguy | 2026-01-14 21:00:37+00:00
Have you tried applying for a H1B? A degree from MIT isn't what employers are looking for. These days you need a degree from the University of Hyderabad, you would have been hired immediately. This is the reality for a lot of young people like yourself, graduate with no opportunity because employers would rather hire a contractor on a H1B visa who would gouge out their eyes and work 100 hours a week, come in when they are sick, take no vacation or weekends off, be on call 24/7/365 for a chance to stay in America...

What can you do? Don't give up, work on some soft skills like CSM Certs, etc, while you keep looking. It is murder out there for kids graduating, older Devs, etc....