MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seanw444 | 2026-03-06 18:47:50+00:00
> It’s in popular culture and HN comments most often as spyware and mass surveillance of people, and that’s a bit of a shame.

I don't know whether you mean it's a shame that people consider it spyware, or if you meant that it's a shame that it manifests as spyware typically. I agree with the latter, not the former. It usually is spyware. If companies went for simple opt-in popups with a brief description of the reasoning, I'd be all for that. I sometimes opt-in to these requests myself, despite being a fairly privacy-conscious person, because I understand the benefit they have to the people collecting the data for good purposes. But when surveillance is opt-out (or no choice given), it's just spyware.
by nabbed | 2026-03-06 18:48:03+00:00
I'm glad I am no longer in tech because I just don't want to do this.

This is not a dig at AI. If I take this article at face value, AI makes people more productive, assuming they have the taste and knowledge to steer their agents properly. And that's possibly a good thing even though it might have temporary negative side effects for the economy.

>But the AI is writing the traversal logic, the hashing layers, the watcher loops,

But unfortunately that's the stuff I like doing. And also I like communing with the computer: I don't want to delegate that to an agent (of course, like many engineers I put more and more layers between me and the computer, going from assembly to C to Java to Scala, but this seems like a bigger leap).
by rexpop | 2026-03-06 18:48:07+00:00
I had an AI-agenerates answer for you, but then I realized something deeper: moral hazard.

> Moral hazard is when one party takes actions that impose costs on others because they don’t fully bear those costs themselves. With ghost jobs, employers get benefits (brand signaling, resume mining, internal optics) while job seekers eat the time, emotional, and sometimes financial cost of chasing something that never really existed.
by csa | 2026-03-06 18:48:13+00:00
> For some reason people keep telling you that you will get a better education if you pay a ridiculous amount of money for it and even if it's not better and you can't figure out how to pay the student loan off, you should still go for it, because education is it's own goal, as if it was a consumer product.

Only rubes think this.

The formal education at most elite universities trends towards quite bad, with a few exceptional classes.

The access to resources (academic, social, professional, etc.) at universities is phenomenal, but this only matters if the student uses those resources (most don’t).

Elite colleges typically have a great education, but they are usually just as expensive as elite universities, but with much less prestige — they are only “worth it” (if you’re looking for value) as a stepping stone to something else.

> This obviously doesn't make sense from an educational perspective. If education is good for you, why make it unaffordable and out of reach?

If someone chooses to go to an elite school while not understanding the value prop (or lack thereof), that’s on the applicant rather than the school.

> Low cost colleges are supposedly inferior and not everyone gets to become "an educated well rounded individual".

Low cost colleges serve an important function, and imho it’s just as easy to be “an educated well rounded individual” at one of these schools. They may not be as prestigious, but the value of most average or better universities and colleges is largely based on the efforts made by any given student (which trends towards being very low effort).
by quickthrowman | 2026-03-06 18:48:23+00:00
You’re still exposing yourself to duration risk, right? What’s the average duration of your short-term MBS portfolio?

MBS bonds pay a risk premium for a reason, you’re virtually free of credit risk, but you’re assuming interest rate/duration risk (not particularly relevant if duration is low, I’m not familiar with the duration of short term floating rate MBSes)

Also, what happens in a Silicon Valley bank type scenario, let’s say you have lots of withdrawals and you have to liquidate at under face value. Who eats the loss?
by reactordev | 2026-03-06 18:48:30+00:00
A decade or more ago I ran a custom shard with a custom map and world. There was no “map”. No guide. No quests. Tons of dungeons and bad guy areas. Shops. Towns. Etc. I also contributed to RunUO. I’m a fan of UO:Renaissance. I still have the CD and the old statics files.
by salawat | 2026-03-06 18:48:31+00:00
As a hiring manager, I have to write the job description. HR is responsible for posting the damn thing where people can see it, then into the ATS you go. We also know recruiting posts can be a source of competitive intelligence and signal for investors. We don't want it used that way, but we're aware of it. Bit of a dirty secret. That means, alas, the only people hurt are the applicants looking for work. I'll work through the queue when I have a billet to fill, but otherwise... You're shouting into the void. Not sure who is responsible for reporting headcount increases to BLS, but I've actively looked and never found the person. So... I honestly have no idea how they get their numbers unless there is a pipeline from the major payroll processors; which feels kinda ick if you think about it.
by tt24 | 2026-03-06 18:48:56+00:00
I don’t see it as “shifting” burden onto the middle class - it’s more about shifting the burden away from the upper class, who carry a disproportionate amount of the burden.

Both wealthy Americans and the middle class consume approximately the same government resources, and it’s not fair that the upper class should have to shoulder the majority of the tax burden.

> What is the purpose of taxation then, in your view?

To fund the government.

> Wealth can already buy (directly or indirectly) all forms of property, political power and even legal outcomes.

I don’t agree with this claim. Bloomberg outspent his opponents to an absurd degree, which resulted in him losing by an embarrassing amount.

> Would you want to provide less equal opportunity in life for Americans is general, or would that be an undesirable side-effect?

I don’t agree that wealth inequality results in less opportunity for anyone.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-06 18:49:41+00:00
There absolutely are remote first roles in the US, but the competition is also extremely intense. The median SWE and HNer wouldn't make the cut.

It also requires a level of maturity, clear thinking, self-starterness, and independence that is hard to come by without a proven track record and experience.

My advice is for the median/average SWE and HNer, not for the truly exceptional.

Spending a 7-10 years in a hub and then going remote first is the best path because you build the network you need to get referrals to vouch for you as a remote-first hire well as the track record needed to go remote-first.
by ActorNightly | 2026-03-06 18:49:54+00:00
No, you can autoscale EC2s. The point is that you should be able to run all your software without containers, which means that you aren't wasting cpu cycles with container overhead.

Depending on the EC2 instance it also may be cheaper to have a reserved EC2 instance sitting idle rather than paying for capacity reservation and spinning it up every day as the user count goes through its regular wave.
by bdangubic | 2026-03-06 18:49:56+00:00
You listed out a whole lot of excuses for America, suburbia this, heating that, etc etc, etc...

Now an assignment - you are Chinese and you have 1.5bn people in your country, lets hear it? You think you can't reasonably list 100x "excuses" for their "issues" and "reasons" for CO2 consumption?

They are working a lot harder than pretty much all other countries combined to usher in renewables and many other things while we elect people who don't know what wind is/does and stare at the Sun during the eclipse.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-03-06 18:50:23+00:00
I blame not only the engineer who ran the command, Claude which made the mistake, but also software engineers as a group (because Terraform is way too dangerous a tool to be used by engineers and not dedicated SREs, yet we have somehow made this the default. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise, but I've seen enough carnage when "senior" engineers fuck up terraform that it'll be difficult), and also I blame cloud platforms like AWS that are overly complex and led to the Claude confusion.
by kittikitti | 2026-03-06 18:50:51+00:00
Although the graph lists BLS data as the source, it's hard for me to find the specific datasets that back it up. It's March 2026 and the graph indicates it would encapsulate 2025. In fact, the "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States" indicate something different,
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1T60O

I was able to find the following:

- Software Publishers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051320001

- Regional data available only, numerous national statistics are discontinued

- California region matches up, but places like Boston don't https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU25000005051320001

- Computing Infrastructure Providers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051800001

- Matches up perfectly, no notes here.

- Computer Systems Design https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6054150001

- However, the graph in the tweet doesn't include the February data (even though it claims "recent") which shows an increase

- Web Search Portals https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051900001

- Matches up, but February data isn't in the graph which shows an increase from January

- Streaming Services https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051620001

- Doesn't include January or February 2026 data, doesn't match up with graph in tweet

I wasn't able to find the following:
- Custom Computer Programming Services

There are numerous open questions in this analysis which I would need to be addressed before drawing any conclusions. My gut feeling would love to accept it at face value but I never trust my gut.
by BobaFloutist | 2026-03-06 18:50:54+00:00
I keep hearing this, what policy do you think we should have pursued instead of NAFTA? I assume you wouldn't want completely open free markets, so some form of protectionism? Tariffs? Import quotas? Should we have started a trade war with Mexico and Canada?

I could see a fair argument that NAFTA should have insisted on labor protections and parity in minimum wages, but it's weird because NAFTA is already somewhat protectionist, albeit including Canada and Mexico under the umbrella. So even if I steelman that your beef is that it didn't go far enough, that doesn't really explain the vitriol.
by nradov | 2026-03-06 18:51:08+00:00
That's true to an extent, but the majority of US healthcare spending goes to treating chronic conditions caused more by lifestyle choices than misfortune. There's a fundamental issue in public health policy about individual responsibility and whether to charge people more (or potentially even deny care) over factors at least partially under their control. For example, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) allows health plans to charge tobacco users higher premiums. Is that fair? Should we also charge higher premiums to alcohol users or those with sedentary lifestyles? There are no clear right or wrong answers here.
by collingreen | 2026-03-06 18:51:15+00:00
Startup founder: at this point you need to overcome the stigma of fly by night fintech wrappers sitting on top of banking and the exceptional, outsized risk that creates for consumers a la synchrony and things like yotta essentially losing millions of customer money with no recourse because a discrepancy between those two layers. 1% higher yield is nowhere near juicy enough for me to literally bet the company on and that's close to what would happen if you lost my entire last round (or locked it up 6 months beyond when I need it). Starting with yc companies as a trust indicator is helpful although yc switching to a shotgun "fund hundreds of companies per batch" approach means the yc label carries a LOT less weight than it used to (since they are no longer paying much attention to any one investment).

I like smart finance plays and I hope you can do that and stand out from the glut of finance bros who have (and continue to) muddied the water (poisoned the well?) with this approach of "tech on top if actual finance companies".

Good luck out there!
by gmuslera | 2026-03-06 18:51:19+00:00
Not even countries, but rich/influential people on them. And they must be hit hard to be concerned enough about it.

If some extreme weather event hits you you may lose your only house, your savings, your health, maybe a good percent of the population of rich countries are vulnerable ot that. In the other hand if someone rich and powerful in those or even somewhat poorer countries, they may buy another house, have more already, lose some money and goods but that's it.

Until those extreme weather events, floods and so on affect enough of the people those people have around, to eventually affect their business and them. But by then it will be far too late.
by observationist | 2026-03-06 18:51:24+00:00
If it were a trained monkey, and the photographer held a button in his hand that triggered the photo taking mechanism, there'd be no question of copyrightability. Similarly, vibe-coding and eliciting output from a software tool which results in software or images or text created under the specification and direction and intent and deliberate action of the user of the tool is clearly able to be copyrighted.

The user is responsible for the output of the software. An image created in photoshop isn't the IP of Adobe, nor is text in Word somehow belonging to Microsoft. The idea that because the software tool is AI its output is magically immune from copyright is silly, and any regulation or legislation or agency that comes to that conclusion is silly and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Until they get over the silliness, just lie. You carefully manually crafted each and every character, each pixel, each raw byte by hand, slaving away with a tiny electrode, flipping each bit in memory, to elicit the result you see. Any resemblance to AI creations is purely coincidental, or deliberate as an ironic statement about current affairs.
by tablarasa | 2026-03-06 18:51:25+00:00
I got my license because I'm an offshore sailor. It is useful as safety and communication equipment (radio nets to keep track of other boats, their weather and fishing conditions :), and let your would-be-rescuers know your position and status), but also for sending and receiving data. It is my primary interface for weather info at sea using traditional weatherfax, but also more modern GRIB extraction. I can even update my blog using my SSB on HAM frequencies at sea. It's fun. Never had a shoreside station though.
by Pannoniae | 2026-03-06 18:51:29+00:00
The future of x86 is worrying but it's nowhere dead yet. I saw the C&C article yesterday and did some research, TL;DR:

- Apple took over the single-threaded crown a while ago.

- ARM also caught up in integer workloads.

- ARM Cortex is still behind in floating-point.

- Both are behind in multithreaded performance. (mostly because there are more high-end x86 systems...)

- Both are way behind in SIMD/HPC workloads. (ARM is generally stuck on 128-wide, x86 is 256-wide on Intel and 512-wide on AMD. Intel will return to 512-wide on the consumer segment too)

- ARM generally have way bigger L1 caches, mostly due to the larger pagesize, which is a significant architectural advantage.

- ARM is reaching these feats with ~4.5Ghz clocks compared to the ~5.5Ghz clocks on x86. (very rough approximation)

Overall, troubling for x86 for the future... it's an open question whether it will go the way of IBM POWER, legacy support with strict compatibility but no new workloads at all, or if it will keep adapting and evolving for the future.
by serial_dev | 2026-03-06 18:51:37+00:00
I’m not sure it is just that, I don’t even see positions listed where I would like to work. For salary ranges, I see lower upper limits than my second best offer three years ago.

I would not mind switching but 1. I don’t see interesting positions 2. they don’t pay well, and only 3. they might not even want me.

It might also be just my niche, but finding a good position feels completely impossible for me.

I am doing cross platform mobile development and I’m wondering how I could transition into backend development or I started even considering the decentralized finance…
by mysterymath | 2026-03-06 18:51:53+00:00
TT will either make me a chip I can run, a chip I can run with some workarounds, or garbage. Only time will tell!

As for Claude, honestly, as a partner. We bounced ideas off each other, while I provided overall direction for the project. It was finishing up a design I had started and aborted last year, but we did build this from scratch. I had some good ideas, Claude had some good ideas, but Claude did almost all of the actual grunt work. Looking back, Claude's tactical decisionmaking was often better than mine, but my strategic decisionmaking was far superior. I would also occasionally have to interject when it was "freaking out" and offer a sounding board to help it solve whatever problem it was working through.
by throwway120385 | 2026-03-06 18:51:54+00:00
Kinda goes against gun rights as being part of his platform at all. At least with the "gun control" laws they still try to maintain some gun rights. Whereas the Republican playbook now is just "oh you shouldn't be allowed to carry unless I think you're a cool person." Like that guy that got shot in MSP. He had a concealed carry permit and he was disarmed. People in Trump's administration were still saying "he shouldn't have had a gun at a protest." Where were they when we saw hundreds if not thousands of guys with AR-15's and plate carriers flanking the BLM protests?
by chaitanyya | 2026-03-06 18:52:14+00:00
I have been getting into Lean4, mostly playing around with writing proofs for properties of distributed software systems.

Claude Code has been super helpful in this; however, I had to do a lot of back-and-forth to verify the output in an IDE and then prompt Claude again with suggestions to fix the proof.

Yesterday, Axiom, one of the model labs working on a foundation model specializing in mathematics, released AXLE, the Lean Engine. The first thing I did was create a Skill so Claude Code can use it as a verifier for Lean code it writes.

Works surprisingly well.
by fhd2 | 2026-03-06 18:52:16+00:00
My thinking is a bit different here: Seniors, even mediocre ones, already learned a lot of hard lessons by doing things pre-LLMs, even pre-SO. Those skills are valuable and I don't know how to train them into juniors.

I find it easier to get a reasonably smart senior to use AI in a good way, than to train a junior in what thinking to do, and what to outsource, learning basics about good design, robustness and risk analysis. The tools aren't the problem per se, it's more about how people use them. Bit of a slippery slope.

That's just my anecdotal experience from not a whole lot of data though. I think the industry will figure it out once things calm down a bit. Right now, I usually make the bet to get one senior rather than two juniors. Quite different to my strategy from a few years ago.
by petcat | 2026-03-06 18:52:27+00:00
From the article, it sounds like that engineer did a lot of other reckless things even before handing the tasks over to the AI agent to continue the recklessness with even more abandon.

This is a case study in "if you don't know what you're doing, the answer is not just to hand it over to some AI bot to do it for you."

The answer is to hire a professional. That is if you care about your data, or even just your reputation.
by uniclaude | 2026-03-06 18:52:31+00:00
Far from me the idea of criticizing a founder starting something to help other startups. That's amazing. However, the post is not really accurate! Are you sure that all these MBS pools have the same government backing as Treasuries? Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac are not equal.
Are the additional risks (spread risk, liquidity mismatch, and risks related to the mortgage structure that even Regan discloses!) worth the tiny extra yield above money market funds? Startups have to deal with uncertainty all the time, that's the nature of business. Principal loss, and liquidity issues are not things you should have to deal with as a startup. However, providing options to startups is always great, and I think this is a great direction!

Again, I hope this doesn't come as negative, but I'm not sure this is making the risk clear.
I am not sure I would suggest my portfolio companies to risk their treasuries unless I am sure they're fully understanding the risks associated. Do you intend to provide anything else?
by bambax | 2026-03-06 18:52:48+00:00
I'd bet good money the whole reason for this essay is PG tried to buy a Patek and was told to fuck off. This is his way of getting back at them.

The last paragraph goes so far as to predict/hope that the whole sector will at some point simply die:

> mechanical watches would start to be seen by the next cohort of young rich people as an old guy thing. It's hard to imagine a luxury watch brand surviving that.

In cauda venenum if there ever was one.
by StableAlkyne | 2026-03-06 18:53:47+00:00
> LLMs are basically Stack Overflow on steroids

That, and I've never had to beg an LLM for an answer, or waste 5 minutes of my life typing up a paragraph to pre-empt the XY Problem Problem. Also never had it close my question as a duplicate of an unrelated question.

The accuracy tends to be somewhat lower than SO, but IMO this is a fair tradeoff to avoid having to potentially fight for an answer.
by macintux | 2026-03-06 18:53:56+00:00
Apropos of absolutely nothing, and impossible to prove, but I've long suspected I might be the youngest person in the U.S. to have won tickets from radio stations both from a rotary phone (at home, ~1989) and from a payphone (while I was delivering pizzas ~1990).

Unfortunately I've never really taken advantage of my absurd luck to do something more useful, like retire early.
by bobbane | 2026-03-06 18:54:12+00:00
I told my son I would disown him if he worked for Facebook, for the reasons stated above.

Then he took a contracting gig for Meta. His rationalization was that the project was an ill-specified prototype that would never see the light of day - if they wanted to throw money at him for stuff like that, he would accept it.

That gig is finished, and he's now thoroughly disillusioned with working for big tech.
by 8note | 2026-03-06 18:54:12+00:00
ive only used cloudformation, but things like deletion protection, and the hug of death are quite nice to have for making things feel safer.

at least with my organization of a separate stack for {network, data, and compute}

cloudformation would refuse to just delete the data base until you first tore down the api that uses it, and while that would still make an outage, you dont lose data before knowing something is wrong.
by muyuu | 2026-03-06 18:54:14+00:00
technically yes, but if those features have to come, for instance, in all kernel distributions, how many people would you expect to patch and compile their own kernels manually?

let's say no distros would do it because of risk of exposure to massive fines, and you'd have to get patches from dodgy places because regulators keep stamping them out of the mainstream with threats of prosecution
by OptionOfT | 2026-03-06 18:54:17+00:00
Testing if it still works:

> I just tried this, sending from Verbs (iOS 5 supports emoji since forever), and yes, I can see the with no problem whatsoever :-)

I just tried this, sending from Verbs (iOS 5 supports emoji since forever), and yes, I can see the with no problem whatsoever :-)

Edit: completely swallowed!