skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you survive in this tech market?
You know, many of my friends commend me for my positivity. I'm the guy who always wears a smile, remains optimistic, and never gives up in the face of adversity. However, lately, I've felt that hope waning. I've been unemployed for four months, sending out hundreds of applications and securing only two interviews. Currently, I'm living on credit to make ends meet, as I have no income.

Previously, I never anticipated difficulties in finding work due to the state of the tech market. I freelanced remotely for two clients, earning comfortable pay, and had ample work. I found myself declining job offers, contracts, and recruiters routinely. I even turned down a CTO position and several lucrative contracts. Dozens of recruiters reached out to me weekly, and I declined them.

I believed I would always have work, even if my current projects ended. I was terribly wrong. After three months without a single interview, I returned to my home base in NYC—the land of opportunity within the land of opportunity. In the last month, I've attended 20 tech meetups. I realized it wasn't just me struggling.

At every meetup, I met incredible, intelligent developers, some even laid off from FAANG companies, who were also unable to find work. While it was somewhat comforting to know I wasn't alone, the fierce competition for dev roles also disheartened me.

Now, I'm down to my last month of credit. If I don't secure a job this month, I have no idea how to proceed. With a decade of experience in building web, software, and games, I have limited professional experience outside these professions. I'm contemplating returning to food service to survive, even though it feels like a regression after working so hard to move beyond it.

The market is incredibly competitive, and my hope is diminishing. I'm not sure what I aim to achieve with this post, but if anyone has any much needed guidance, it would mean so much to me.

Sincerely,
Liam.
Having studied a lot of the TeX source code and re-implemented portions of it, my theory is that it's the result of the TeX language evolving organically in a software development environment in which large scale refactoring is impossible. (Knuth didn't have source control, or unit tests, and the language he wrote TeX in has little-to-no support for meaningful abstractions. All of these make refactoring safely hard or impossible.) If you can't refactor, but still want to add a new feature, your only option is to implement things in a hacky way on top of existing features. This then bleeds into the TeX language itself.
There are paywall bypassing extensions that can turn that off for most sites.
Well, an a complete lisp system on that size, for sure. And forth environment.
BTW, CPM 2.2 doesn't run on that emulator in my machine (intel Atom, Linux, 32 bit, tried with gcc 8, clang 11, and tcc 0.29.7). Basic does.
Even on my decade old CPU, all those background OS processes fit into a single core.
Often followed by applying confirmation bias to see correlations when there are none.
The same way they can say “we think you should stop abusing your workers”
Yep. I can use PostgreSQL anywhere I want, for any purpose I want, in any configuration I want, for free. That means I can use one stack from the tiniest of projects up through giant production systems, and also that I never have to wait for budget approval before scaling or launching new staging environments or spinning up a thousand test instances.

For me, the onus is on any other DB to convince me that I should use it instead of PostgreSQL. The few times when that's been the case, it's been because we needed something other than a relational database for various specific reasons. At this point I can't think of many reasons I'd use anything else than psql that's in the same category.

Like, I can imagine requirements that would send me to Snowflake or Redis or DynamoDB much more easily than things that would nudge me to SQL Server or even MariaDB.
Microsoft Hires DeepMind Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman to Lead Consumer AI Unit
What's the deal with fish in strange places? Bosch seemed to be all about that too. Is it a Dutch thing?
I think the author and you are using different meanings for "reasoning".

We do know that many people even in professional fields confuse correlation with causation. And even when that doesn't happen, when only doing measurments, correlation is often considered good enough without giving any thought to the underlying mechanism. This may be the root of Goodhart's law stating that when a measure becomes a target it stops being a good measure. The measure was only correlated with the behaviour the person doing the measuring thought was measuring.

Superstition is similar, but drops any shred of statistical rigour, relying on mere anecdotal evidence.
> Later, aerodynamics fed back into ornithology.

You mean to imply that birds have learned from jet fighter designs?

I fail to understand the point you're making.
Licensing per core makes it difficult to really take over the world.
This is why you just have to do the work yourself.

None of the online privacy protection programs truly work. (except for 1)
What if my product is not an executable, but a root filesystem?
Heh, I don't think you've had enough philosophy under your belt to realize how incredibly far we are from figuring that out...

Or to say, "It's Plato's cave all the way down"
The number of billionaires yc has produced in 4000 or so startups (with many future billionaires in the pipeline) suggests your numbers are off by, what, 100x? If we assume that a Google Engineer is as qualified as a yc founder, which isn’t quite true but still.
HIBP notified me I'm in this, but I haven't been an AT&T customer since early 2017.

Would love to see what's in it but, eh.
You seem to be making a point in good faith so I would like to give you a slightly different perspective.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "cultish community", from my perspective there are a few distinct communities around LLMs, all focusing on different aspects, all excited about different things.

One common theme across all the groups though is that they used an LLM for the first time and their mind ran wild with the possibilities. That first moment when the LLM does something better than you expected, or even completely unexpected. I think most people understand that their imagination might be overactive in that moment. But it's a rare feeling to be surprised by a new technology (at least for me) these days.

On the other end, we have social media platforms where being a pessimistic curmudgeon ends up getting the likes and shares. And it's just easier to be a pessimistic curmudgeon; the vast majority of ideas never work as well in the real world as they do in your head. I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else. But the real problem is that it puts us into tribes. As someone who is very excited about what LLMs are going to bring to our futures, when I see someone post on Mastodon or HN, or wherever, I become defensive and my monkey brain feels the urge to push back. In particular because I think the criticisms generally voiced are not well reasoned or thought out. Your own post has a tone of dismissal, painting a lot of people, all of whom excited about different things, as a cult who is obsessed with their LLM girlfriend. I would agree that anyone today trying to draw some deeper meaning from the outputs of these systems are probably worthy of dismissal, but I don't think that's the vast vast majority of people who are excited about LLMs. And it makes _me_ sad that the extremists are the ones that get to suck all the oxygen out of the conversation.

We're in the beginning days of this new technology. LLMs are good at doing things traditional software isn't, and bad at doing a lot of things computers are traditionally good at. Natural language answer engines and sex bots might have been some of the first obvious applications of LLMs, but I'm willing to bet there are a lot more undiscovered use cases out there. Simon Willison has some great advice, which is for newcomers to try to break the LLM as quickly as they can, get it to lie to you, or do something wrong. Test its limits. That's part of the process! We're going to need some time to figure it all out and make these systems work well for us. I'm a technologist, and exploring this technology is exciting.
Notch was a great hacker, but not a good coder. His code is hacks upon hack all the way down.
The closest I’ve seen to this is programming in Excel - each step is visible to you and you can tweak it in the cell itself and see what it does.
> The yimby argument has always seemed flimsy. Its strange logic is that speculative developers would build homes in order to devalue them: that they would somehow act against their own interests by producing enough surplus homes to bring down the average price of land and housing. That would be surprisingly philanthropic behaviour.

This is probably the dumbest thing I've ever read in my life. The real argument against yimby is that if the conditions for hold property is cheap, then landlords can afford to not be elastic with pricing thereby creating an inefficient market. The obvious solution is to increase property tax to force the hand of landlords. Another more radical way is to create legislation that gives the right to renters and/or gov to buy property at a certain price.
It can also have 0, if it's not being lent out, if it's a summer home, etc.

Housing might also not exist in locations where it's desired.

Housing might be the _wrong_ type for what a prospective occupant / area needs.

One size does not fit all.
Not only follow up questions, but it also gives straight answers without bs, lecturing the user, claiming the model is somehow limited or flat out refusals which are Gemini's specialty.
Complexity of the game has nothing to do with the number of legal positions. It's very easy to design a game with arbitrary number of positions which is very simple. While go might be more complex than chess using a more reasonable measure this argument was used to for arguing nonsense in scientific papers in the past (that some poker games are more complicated than chess because they have more possible states).
Some people think that if you can't spend a million dollars a year on healthcare for 50 years, you are poor. In a sense they are right, because nothing is more valuable than life, but if you lower your expectations beyond the tippy top 0.1%, and take up a nice hobby like skydiving or motorcycling, you can get by with a lot less.
It takes 20 seconds to boot and it warms up my room if on. So why would I keep it on all the time. I turn it on when I use it and turn it off when I don't.
Even you can't do that yourself. You can only mad post ad-hoc justifications for the choices you made.
No, as 'chownie' says, I was using it in it's original technical sense of a word that is created for the occasion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word

Nonce is also used in cryptography for a number that is arbitrary and only used once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce
Offer got rescinded cause of layoffs
Hi! I am currently in my last semester of college and recently I got my offer rescinded because of layoffs. I have interned 3 different companies as a software engineer/ and product manager ranging from a top faang company, fintech company, and a startup. If anyone willing to hire a new grad please leave a comment. Or anyone who can give me a refer I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks again!
We have more theory for deterministic games. That doesn't mean that it is harder to solve them to a human level.

Computers got to being better than humans in both Go and poker in 2016. The difference is that https://www.deepstack.ai/ was solvable by academics with normal research grants. The training for the final version of AlphaGo is estimated at about $35 million. And who knows how many other versions were created?

Yes, actually solving Go and Civilization are both impossible. But I would be shocked if playing Civilization at a human level was too hard for us to solve with current machine learning techniques.
> It's not about joining Tesla or Nvidia early. It's about betting on them.

It's also possible to bet on Tesla/Nvidia and lose. Badly.
Salesforce is where the money is. There's plenty of competitors.
Lego's 3,745-piece D&D set comes with its own playable adventure
land value tax, not property tax.
The core advice is to produce instead of consume.
And the second one is to study.

However, packaging it under a "being a mere employee is lame" mantra... Is lame!

But I'm curious. Why do you think that doing something which is maybe not study related is a bad idea?

("Maybe not" because ie. john Mayer is both a rockstar and a Berkelee grad)
Aggressive Mimicry
There's unfortunately a lot of nuance and sadness here.

Generally, a root is trusted by virtue of being in your root store and can't be revoked via OCSP/CRLs. An operating system security update should remove distrusted roots.

The mainstream browsers all have a push-based mechanism that they can use to rapidly revoke a root or intermediate faster than that. If something truly bad happened, Let's Encrypt would ensure that happened ASAP.

However, many clients do no revocation checks at all. That's a big part of why the ecosystem is pushing to shorter lived certificates, intermediates, and roots.
> The person you're responding to does not seem upset to me.

I don't think we're reading this the same.

To quote OP,

>> I was distracted by the generally smug tone of it.

The definition of "smug":

> smug /sməɡ/ adjective. having or showing an excessive pride in oneself or one's achievements.

> contentedly confident of one's ability, superiority, or correctness; complacent.

This is why I responded. If you don't like the tone of the article, you don't need to suggest that the author has a superiority complex.

> And the personal jab just isn't necessary.

"smug" is a personal jab. I didn't make one.
Sounds like you guys have a great plan. I will check out Twenty, thanks!
Oh gosh, sorry, I got the path wrong... it's ~/Library/Application Support/Godspeed

Thanks for pointing this out to me, I got this wrong in a couple other places here too!
Yeah because most everyone you talk to knows how to treat weather forecasts, but LLMs are still widely misunderstood. The right idea seems to be getting out, but in no small part due to the "complaining" you mock.
In fact this drives most of the shortage in the developed world, especially in big cities. In many apartments there are 1 or 2 people (plus maybe a dog) living where there used to live 10 (ok, 5) half a century ago.
Oftentimes I find myself understanding complex concepts before I can describe them, even internally. I am sure everyone has this, as I often read comments praising others' submissions for formulating their thoughts efficiently.
So thoughts occur independent of language, but need it to be expressed and shared, even if through pictures and sounds.
>I gag at thought of writing MFC code in 2024.

In any year. Could never grok it, when it was newish, what with its crazy opaque AFX macros, although I could somewhat easily understand Win 32 C programming (Petzold book etc.), even though that was lower level, and I was new to event-driven GUI programming then.
PRC's planning on 2030: https://spacenews.com/china-sets-sights-on-crewed-lunar-land...
I completely agree with the sentiment, and as someone who’s mostly focused on a startup for pro poker players to study game theory more effectively (https://www.livepokertheory.com) , I find countless parallels between poker and entrepreneurship.

Also, people don’t realize that startups aren’t one single event. There’s a million events and each one has its own luck. For example, you make a piece of content marketing there’s luck in whether it performs well, but that luck can be managed and the risk spread across many events by doing lots of small pieces of content marketing.

I also wrote a blog post about how a popular psychology book oriented towards poker pros (The Mental Game of Poker) can be easily reframed for entrepreneurs:

https://writing.billprin.com/p/the-mental-game-of-entreprene...

With all that said, it’s highly ironic you picked Moneymaker as your example poker pro, since he’s famous in the poker world for being a very bad amateur player who got extremely lucky at the perfect time . It’s a bit like talking about the importance of hard work and deep technology skills for founders, and using Adam Neumann and WeWork as your example of that.
"AI ethics" from a person booted based on allegations of coworker bullying?
Some notes on how Apple sets up paths in /etc/zprofile: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/432226/homebrew-pa...

> The solution is to do path initialization in ~/.zprofile on macOS. This file is loaded after /etc/zprofile and before ~/.zshrc.
I am very lazy :)
In the “Measure What Matters” book the author talks about investing in Google in early 1999, and the founders were indeed projecting billions of dollars in revenue, using ads.
Sometimes even less than 1. For much of my childhood, the middle-class aspiration was a second home… though implicitly for a family rather than for an individual.

I have since known one single (in both senses of the word) person to briefly rent and live in an apartment despite also owning a detached house, due to an injury making commuting hard.
Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests
Yes Taxes. I keep proposing that idea in threads like this.

Live somewhere 35% or more of a tax year*(or if sold/bought)? Counts as a primary residence and the low tax bracket. OTHERWISE it's a rental and will be taxed _hard_. Even if unoccupied.
Why don’t we start with just raising the floor on expectations for care such that it’s impossible to be involuntarily homeless or die from a preventable disease

We can probably figure it out faster once the majority of the population is not grasping for air

This is imminently possible today but the social will isn’t there
In this case the point was that the concept is so common that even ChatGPT can list endless examples.

The low effort required to find endless examples was the point.
You don't need to be a higher up; you just need to be a good cog.
By definition you can't have grounding on a power supply without a grounding pin, unfortunately.

Apple's power supplies for MacBooks do have a grounding pin, but the default duckhead adapter they ship with usually doesn't leverage it, so you end up with a class 2 power supply and the buzzing sensation.

> that you can hear the buzzing sound too if you put your ear very close.

I've found Apple power adapters to be pretty good in that regard, unlike some third-party power supplies that I can hear across the room. If I can only hear the noise when I put my ear next to the supply, I can just not do that :)
Probably this means it's not for me, but what is this useful for?

Anyone using this in their prod set-up and has a scenario where they found this useful?
high logical intelligence doesn't imply common sense
I'm sceptical that there are enough houses.

Their claim is that they have enough because the number of houses is about the same as in the Netherlands, Hungary, and Canada. I have no idea about Hungary, but there are terrible housing crises in the Netherlands and Canada.
There was a time when a search engine would return no results if it didn't find anything instead of returning increasingly irrelevant results.

It was a conscious decision by corporations to implement the dropping of constraints and search terms when too few results would have been returned. Today the search operators are a joke.
- cost

- only recently runs on Linux

- cost

- all sorts of MSSQL specific features and syntax (@@ is unhinged and you can’t convince me otherwise)

- Postgres docs are better

- Postgres has a massive ecosystem of extensions (see PostGIS alone!)

- did I mention the cost?

- Postgres has wider range language support: basically every language I’ve ever used has a PG library. Not the case for MSSQL. Additionally some of the MSSQL libs are real bad, the Python one is basically like “use this ancient odbc lib lol” it’s great from .net and awful from everywhere else.

- licensing and running costs, because these cannot be overstated.

- features like CDC locked behind _expensive_ licenses, that you get out of the box with Postgres.

Need I say more?
This has only helped their small odds of becoming Apple’s provider.

You can’t serve the LLM for every iOS device in the world without a big pile of inference machines and the only companies that fit that bill are Microsoft, Google, and Meta.
> The imagination is the limit!

True, but those are pretty bad filters. Why is all that detailed work (x 700) better than getting people to do a test?
To be fair, I'm using Zulu 17.46.19 because I don't have a system Java (`/usr/bin/java` is just a placeholder that says "you need to install Java").

Just installed OpenJDK 21.0.2 via Homebrew and given it a 10 minute run without any issues.
Yes, another piece of the puzzle is that the government, (Fannie/Freddie) should not be loaning money for investment properties.
Sure, and i also prefer carplay, rather than something provided by the car manufacturer.

But Tesla shows that there are car companies that can build satisfactory entertainment software, which is not surprising as writing good software is something every car manufacturer need to do, considering how much software is used in a car.
In my defence the long thoughtful reply I posted the ChatGPT list to was my own. And I'm fine with it.
Integer is a good point. I just learned about math.type in 5.3!
I hate that we just turned out to be stochastic machines another not something more interesting.
One good measure is how much resources a computer program needs to have to play optimally. This is hard to measure as we don't have optimal programs but maybe "how much resources is needed to play better than the best human" is a sensible measure as well. Go wins on this one but only marginally.
You can choose to keep the system you've got, and that is guaranteed to be as bad as it is.

The only other option is anarchy. Out of the three, I advocate intentionally designing a system.
> That would be surprisingly philanthropic behaviour.

It is not through the benevolence of the property developer that we expect our housing, but from their regard for their own self-interest.
> Article suggests there’s a 1:1 relationship between population size and number of housing units needed

From the OP: Over the last 25 years, there has not just been a constant surplus of homes per household, but the ratio has been modestly growing while our living situations have been getting so much worse.

That's the ratio of homes to households, not to individuals. (Also, it's linear, not 1:1, but I assume that's what you meant.)
I wish I could sleep without a pillow but my nose completely clogs if I do. And that’s after surgery to remove a very small part of the bone in my nostrils to widen the passage. The mucosa inside my nose just swells too much and clogs my nose which keeps me from breathing which translates to terrible sleep.

Is anyone planning on trying these sleeping techniques? I’d be curious to hear about your experience and if you noticed any difference at all.
My wish list would include rapid / instantaneous API response speed. I have no idea if this is technically possible.
Thanks! I though that 6Mb is a little too much though.
Yes, because 5 million token input is slow, expensive, and error-prone.