MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjmarr | 2026-03-06 20:07:26+00:00
I'm hosting a Kubernetes cluster on Azure and trying to autoscale it to tens of thousands of vCPUs. The goal is to transparently replace dedicated developer workstations because our codebase is really big and we've hired enough people this is viable.

Right now I'm using recc + buildbarn. Originally, I used sccache but there's a hard cap on parallel jobs.

In terms of how LLMs help, they got me through all the gruntwork of writing jsonnet and dockerfiles. I have barely touched that syntax before so having AI churn it out was helpful to driving towards the proof of concept. Otherwise I'd be looking up "how do I copy a file into my Docker container".

AI also meant I didn't have to spend a lot of time evaluating competing solutions. I got sccache working in a day and when it didn't scale I threw away all that work and started over.

In terms of where the LLM fell short, it constantly lies to me. For example, it mounted the host filesystem into the docker image so it could get access to the toolchains instead of making the docker images self-contained like it said it would.

It also kept trying to not to the work, e.g. It randomly decides in the thinking tokens "let's fall back to a local caching solution since the distributed option didn't work" then spams me with checkmark emojis and claims in the chat message the distributed solution is complete.

A decent amount of it is slop, to be honest, but an 80% working solution means I am getting more money and resources to turn this into a real initiative. At which point I'll rewrite the code again but I'll pay closer attention now that I know docker better.
by LelouBil | 2026-03-06 20:08:01+00:00
It's not a generic footer, it's their reply directly to their tweet about the incident.

I agree with the person you are replying to, writing a tweet like :

"How I misused AI and caused an outage"

and replying to this very tweet saying

"Here's a blog where I write insights about AI"

Obviously do not make me want to read the blog.
by geodel | 2026-03-06 20:08:25+00:00
While I agree with what you said. In personal experience I have noticed the software design / architecture is becoming irrelevant for lot of enterprises (including mine of course). So design nowadays is about API design Input/Output/Error handling. And architecture is about Cloud/Kubernetes/APM , deployment and monitoring etc. Code now does not need much design. Things like performance, isolation, extensibility etc as those are now higher level concerns not part of code itself.

This is also where micro services pattern fits in well because individual unit is so small no design needed.
by creatonez | 2026-03-06 20:08:32+00:00
> For example, it focuses a lot on doing "ablation studies", by which it means removing random layers of an already-trained model, to find the source of the refusals(?), which is an absolute fool's errand because such behavior is trained into the model as a whole and would not be found in any particular layer.

That doesn't mean there couldn't be a "concept neuron" that is doing the vast majority of heavy lifting for content refusal, though.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-03-06 20:08:43+00:00
The foreign tourism segment is 20% of the size of the US ag industry. Saying this is a rounding error is ridiculous. 10% of US tourism employment would be 1.5 million people employed as a result of foreign tourism (total tourism employment is 15 million).

To say this a tiny unimportant segment that isn't worth talking about is ridiculous. Again especially considering the consideration the Republicans give tiny industries like coal which employs 40,000.

It's worth talking about a segment that employs 1.5 million in a discussion about 92k job loses.
by gzoo | 2026-03-06 20:09:13+00:00
What happens when AI gets so good that even "Juniors" can compete with "Seniors"? It's going to happen at SOME point. I think what will separate devs will be their creativity and ideas. Those that can think outside the box will be the ones getting hired. With that said, I sometimes feel like eventually the OFFICE MANAGER will be coding everything for their company lol.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-06 20:09:51+00:00
(A little offtopic?) but Is there anything that the general public can do to show their dissatisfaction with the war.

I hated Khamenei. He was a cruel dictator but the way the war is happening, the strikes are gonna impact the Iranian lives the most. They are stuck between a rock and cliff.

I am not a military guy but I could've either expected this 1 month ago when the protests were going on but the way this has happened, with bombings on girl schools somehow taking place by US/Israel. What has happened is that Khamenei has somehow become a martyr. Something unthinkable a month ago.

I know the world is being crazy mad nowadays but this seems to be the tipping point for me as the world escalates towards hot war.

I'd like to know if society at large or even politicians or anyone had a say in all of this. It all just happened all of a sudden.

I remember hearing the news of US attacking Iran on radio and I was geniunely shocked. Like, the only thing I was thinking was "Is this fucking gonna happen"

then Khamenei got killed. Once again, some were saying just a few days now and celebrating while others were critical that this isn't as easy as killing khamenei and the war is still left.

The way US has done this all, the key takeaway for most countries is to make their own nukes. Iran was negotiating for all its flaws to control nuclear but US striked it while also contradicting things it said a few months back.

If Iran truly had nuclear, US couldn't have done this so are we having the idea of make nukes to protect oneself which to me does feel like something which can be prevented, I am not sure.

Now, I am hearing news of a proper ground invasion becoming more and more likely and also Kurdish forces being given arms to do it too and the war streching to 5-8 weeks but I don't think that's the case especially when Israel is somehow having the say here saying that we will kill anyone who comes in power next to khamenei which makes anything like a venezuela style thing (which was still illegal mind you) just straight up impossible.

The world is heading up towards a cliff and it feels like we don't even have any say in it. Not even American citizens whose taxpayers are being used.

I just feel frustrated by geopolitics. I used to enjoy reading about geopolitics 1 year back but literally the past year of geopolitics have been so depressing. Like, I remember thinking a year back, this must be the lowest point but now I wonder that there can always be a more lower point.

At some point tho, we are bound to have global stability slowly get better. I just hope that its now rather than later otherwise if we go even more down on this slippery slope, then I don't know where we are headed. at this point, I don't even know where we are.
by conductr | 2026-03-06 20:10:14+00:00
So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough.

Engineers aren't cogs, but they are able to travel and you can hire them by other means that full-time employment. So I suspect that was probably what you were meant to do for your situation.

Nothing about this was mission critical or even all that important or you would have found a way to solve the problem or you did and it wasn't a problem to begin with. I'm in a field where people often want to hire me for some special thing like this, but it often turns out, most of my life would be spent idle because no one company has enough demand for me. I can consult instead and be busy all year, or I can take a job for someone that's OK with me being idle for 80% of my time. I prefer the former for multiple reasons but just making an example of why hiring for specialized roles that aren't mission critical is often not the thing you should be doing.
by killjoywashere | 2026-03-06 20:11:01+00:00
that sounds plausible. For people not tracking, the concept of intelligence at play is "object based development". One analyst drops a label, brief synopsis, whatever, and it just sits there for the next person who comes along. The world view gets more accurate over time, but there's a recency error that's hard to measure until the probability function collapses with a measurement.
by layer8 | 2026-03-06 20:11:04+00:00
> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.

Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory work — you know the real challenges are yet to come.
by ssl-3 | 2026-03-06 20:11:13+00:00
I appreciate the correction. It's been so long since I've looked at tor that I guess I forgot that relay nodes were a thing and conflated the two terms. Or maybe the coffee hadn't started working yet.

So with the correction, I agree completely: Running relay node (a thing that deals only with indecipherably-encrypted anonymized data) is not a meaningful risk.
by littlestymaar | 2026-03-06 20:11:33+00:00
These aren't “basic economic facts”, these are basic pieces of economic liturgy, it's not grounded in any factual reality. It only works in microeconomics lalaland.

In the real world, executives simply aren't being incentivized for all-or-nothing risk taking and the shareholders of public industrial companies don't want the executives to make gambles in an attempt to make a big payout, they want steady yields with limited risks. And the financial actors who would be ready to take this kind of “high risk high reward” bets aren't operating in these kinds of markets.

Just look out of the window, semiconductor and electronics fabs aren't rushing to expand their capacity, they are very familiar with the issue of oversupply and are always very cautious before making capacity investment, because they know it could very well make them go under very quick should the market reverse.

The more time passes, the more convinced I am that nothing did more damage to the broader public understanding of economic dynamics than the average Econ 101 class.
by beardedetim | 2026-03-06 20:11:36+00:00
Early in my career I tried very hard to "be concrete, cold, and direct" because that's what I thought a good communicator would do. It was seen as attacking to anyone below me and confusing to anyone above me. I was naive and I suffered for it.

I definitely agree with what you're saying here where these words actually do mean something, but it's completely opaque to those outside the "know". I also have found that there's not any better way to express information to those in the group than in this coded language, even if it makes completely no sense to me.

I wish younger me understood that the way I'm being perceived is the only important thing, not choosing the "best" words to technically describe a situation
by jjmarr | 2026-03-06 20:12:11+00:00
The problem is the lack of experience compounds which gets worse due to AI.

> I mean you don’t need your first job go to top of the top companies. Your first job is to get you into the industry then you can flourish.

I have friends whose companies don't pay for any AI tools because it's too expensive. They're not learning as much and they get downlevelled when going to my company.

Meanwhile I know people who left my company for Google after 15 years getting the same role as someone who stayed at Google for 6.
by ryandrake | 2026-03-06 20:12:18+00:00
When I did tech interviews, I used to think I could just jump right in with an intermediate level question and go from there. But the reality is that most of the candidates I interviewed couldn't even answer a trivial question that just required a basic for-loop with an if-statement inside it. These are not pressure-cooker interviews where they need to balance a binary tree while having Baby Shark blasted at them on full volume. These are chill interviews where I ask them to iterate through a string and tell me where the first "x" character is.

There are so many software engineering candidates who literally cannot write the simplest code. I even had someone actually say "I don't really write code at my current job, I'm more of a thought leader." Bzzzzzt.

I've always prepared what I called level 1, level 2, and level 3 questions ready for candidates. But, I almost never even got to level 2, and never in 20 years of interviewing got to my level 3 questions.
by murdockq | 2026-03-06 20:12:37+00:00
The nearest current use of detection of particles in the air that I can think of is smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors for safety. Could adoption on these smart versions like Nest or Ring by adding your sniphi detector provide other types of early warning systems for safety, air quality or sensing?

Some thoughts are musty odors from mold/mildew, rotten egg smells indicating gas leaks, and fishy/burning plastic odors from electrical issues.
by wolrah | 2026-03-06 20:12:41+00:00
> The only things for which x86 still shines a little brighter are games, and native office. But office is mostly available on web, on Mac, and on Winarm. So games. Which aren’t big enough market mass to sustain the x86’s popularity — and is a segment (soon) under attack by Valve.

You've missed a huge segment:

Random in-house apps or niche vertical market apps that are closely tethered with a business workflow to the point that replacing them is a massive undertaking, where the developers at best aren't interested in improving anything and at worst no longer exist.
by mechanicalpulse | 2026-03-06 20:13:12+00:00
We should all do well to keep in mind the power of misinformation as well as the fog of war. Yesterday’s House vote on reigning in POTUS’s war powers was split along party lines and CNN skews heavily to the left. On top of that, the IRGC isn’t big on educating women. I am not sure any of us can truly know what is happening there.
by EdNutting | 2026-03-06 20:13:14+00:00
Yeah the videos hyping up Claude and other such AI tools don't help matters.

For sure I've made mistakes. But I also don't write the following on my CV:

"PhD-level expert in infrastructure and trained on the entire internet of examples of what to do and what not to do; I can replace your entire infrastructure team and do everything else in your codebase too, without any review."

And yet that's how Claude is marketed. AI tools in general have been repeatedly marketed as PhD-level experts in _every_ area of information-era work, especially code. They encourage hands-off (or consent-fatigued) usage.

[Just to be clear, in case anyone wants to hire me in future: I've never accidentally deleted a production database. I've never even irrecoverably destroyed production data - nor had to rely on AWS (or another provider) to recover the data for me. I've made mistakes, mostly in sandbox environments, sometimes stressful ones in production, but nothing even close to what the OP did.]
by quotemstr | 2026-03-06 20:13:39+00:00
We will eventually arrive at a new equilibrium involving everyone except the most stupid and credulous applying a lot more skepticism to public claims than we did before.

And yeah, doing stuff like deleting layers or nulling out whole expert heads has a certain ice pick through the eye socket quality.

That said, some kind of automated model brain surgery will likely be viable one day.
by mlsu | 2026-03-06 20:13:59+00:00
What's so wild (and a little disheartening) is that the omnipod is a disposable device. Use it for several days, and throw it out.

This is an extreme corner of quality/cost/reliability optimization. The delivery mechanism has to be extremely repeatable and reliable, it has to fail in safe ways, but at the same time, it has to be cheap enough to throw away.

Durable pumps are all made with very expensive precision mechanisms, lots of metal and high quality plastic.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-06 20:14:01+00:00
> If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings.

Why? Not everyone is on LinkedIn or has an updated profile.

Some of the best candidates I've hired were people who were in other states who were planning to move, but waiting for the right job opportunity to come up.

We also used recruiters.

Why does it make people so angry that we posted job listings for real jobs that we were really hiring for?
by mft_ | 2026-03-06 20:14:31+00:00
Woah.

1) You seem to think I'm some sort of GOP-pedo-billionaire sympathiser; nothing could be further from the truth. I'll help you slam the prison door and throw away the key.

2) No-one mentioned Epstein in this part of the discussion until you did - I thoughts we were discussing tariffs. I was responding to someone saying that, in the context of the tariff mess, they blame the people who voted for Trump, and "the people who supported such a horrible Democratic candidate that she couldn't even win against Trump". My point was simply on this specific issue, the root cause was the hubris and chain of events that led to Kamala being chosen, almost at the last minute, rather than that people "supported" her in that situation.

(And if you need someone to explicitly state that, yes, they also blame the people who voted for Trump or you get triggered, then consider it confirmed.)
by JamesTRexx | 2026-03-06 20:14:47+00:00
Speaking of SimAnt, I soon discovered the bug that by moving into the top corner, the black ants would conquer all squares with no intervention from that one sideways and downwards and too easily win the game.

Still, it was fun just messing around with the ants, watching the trails, and chasing spiders by calling forth all ants.
by _alternator_ | 2026-03-06 20:15:14+00:00
I think a tragic mistake like this was foreseeable (in a vague sense), but I highly doubt that anyone intentionally bombed an elementary school full of children.

The NYT had some good reporting on this, and you can see how the mistake was made. The elementary school used to be part of the IRGC base until 2016. Then it was fenced off and made an elementary school. The “shooter” (in this case, the USA) had a duty to check that the target was currently a valid military target. This verification, if it was done at all, was clearly the problem.

I’m sure you have someone directly responsible for this mistake who is going to have a hard time living with themselves. But like I said, starting a war leads to inevitable tragedy, and I doubt the people who are indirectly responsible will ever recognize their culpability in this.
by realityfactchex | 2026-03-06 20:15:49+00:00
> not everywhere?

Are you absolutely certain that there is not an unexplained uptick in brain damaged newborns/children in the USA?

And that its cause is not some thing(s) that "almost every" one of them is subjected to repeatedly?

And that it is not just a case of better/more/over diagnosis?

IDK about by you, but there are literal nurseries/schools for the brain-damaged kids popping up on Main Street. That's how many there seem to be.

So yeah, maybe they're not in that study. But that means they don't exist?
by FireInsight | 2026-03-06 20:16:06+00:00
What I love in Open Camera is that I am able to turn off all extra post-processing (noise, yes please) and use my phone camera with full manual settings like it was a DSLR (with a really bad sensor). Only problems are clunky UI and general slowness of taking pictures, but you get used to it.

It's really unbeatable from a photographer / artist perspective, especially because I care a lot about imperfect gritty noisy looks and full control.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-03-06 20:16:07+00:00
I don't know, most shit I learned programming (and subsequently get paid for) is meaningless arcana. For example, Kubernetes. And for you, it's Windows APIs.

For programming in general, most learning is worthless. This is where I disagree with you. If you belong to a certain set of cultures, you overindex on this idea that math (for example) is the best way to solve problems, that you must learn all this stuff by this certain pedagogy, and that the people who are best at this are the best at solving problems, which of course is not true. This is why we have politics, and why we have great politicians who hail from cultures that are underrepresented in high levels of math study, because getting elected and having popular ideas and convincing people is the best way to solve way more problems people actually have than math. This isn't to say that procedural thinking isn't valuable. It's just that, well, jokes on you. ChatGPT will lose elections. But you can have it do procedural thinking pretty well, and what does the learning and economic order look like now? I reject this form of generalization, but there is tremendous schadenfreude about, well the math people are destroying their own relevance.

All that said, my actual expertise, people don't pay for. Nobody pays for good game design or art direction (my field). They pay because you know Unity and they don't. They can't tell (and do not pay for) the difference between a good and bad game.

Another way of stating this for the average CRUD developer is, most enterprise IT projects fail, so yeah, the learning didn't really matter anyway. It's not useful to learn how to deliver better failed enterprise IT project, other than to make money.

One more POV: the effortlessness of agentic programming makes me more sympathetic to anti intellectualism. Most people do not want to learn anything, including people at fancy colleges, including your bosses and your customers, though many fewer in the academic category than say in the corporate world. If you told me, a chatbot could achieve in hours what would take a world expert days or weeks, I would wisely spend more time playing with my kids and just wait. The waiters are winning. Even in game development (cultural product development generally). It's better to wait for these tools to get more powerful than to learn meaningless arcana.
by widowlark | 2026-03-06 20:16:17+00:00
It's true that consumer choice is what defines the market. So really, yours is a cultural question. What do we as a society value? If it's brand identity, like today, then we will get branded products with as little purpose as possible. If we value authenticity, then brands will start building more authentic products. There's obviously a delay between what we value and what they offer, but its clear that building what customers want always yields a place in the market.
by boomskats | 2026-03-06 20:16:25+00:00
What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice but learn how things actually work while having a safe space to fail during a period in your career when productivity expectations of you were minimal to none.

That time when you got to internalise through first hand experience what good & bad look like is when you built the skill/intuition that now differentiates competent LLM wielding devs from the vibers. The problem is that expectations of juniors are inevitably rising, and they don't have the experience or confidence (or motivation) to push back on the 'why don't you just AI' management narrative, so are by default turning to rolling the dice to meet those expectations. This is how we end up with a generation of devs that truly don't understand the technology they're deploying and imho this is the boringdystopia / skynet future that we all need to defend against.

I know it's probably been said a million times, but this kinda feels like global warming, in that it's a problem that we fundamentally will never be able to fix if we just continue to chase short term profit & infinite growth.