skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, my recruiter callback ratio is likely 1 out of 5, despite having a very VERY niche profile: a PhD focused on NLP for creative text generation, especially in video games, and a prior career as a game developer.

Needless to say, I've only focused on roles that fit that narrow profile. One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I worked in games, despite it making up the bulk of my work experience (including as a lead developer).

Considering how closely I match this narrow profile, and the number of people that likely do, it's weird how low my callback ratio has been.
JPMorgan Chase requires all workers to return to office five days a week
I don’t really follow your comment, but it is true that labor is a large part of the reason that jobs bundle healthcare.

Even in the modern day, they are one of the largest influential advocates for keeping this scheme: labor killed Obama’s cadillac tax which was designed to solve this problem.

Not that the cadillac tax was ever going to survive, the American people are not educated enough to understand why it is such an important policy.
I feel so lucky I haven't had to apply anywhere in my entire career through postings, the good thing of having a solid network is that you get to know who knows a consultant/freelancer before any position is created.

I did post my availability few times on HN "who wants to be hired" but with poor results and lots of wasted time (as again, the person on the other end does not know me or has worked with me everything gets bureaucratic again).

Also, all of the people I had hired for my clients came again from my network, there was never a public posting.

There's also other benefits, in general, you don't get to do silly technical interviews, as you're bringing former coworkers you can vouch for.

Not saying this can scale anywhere, but in smaller companies with good teams and professionals they always know someone from their previous jobs or their online communities (common in open source related githubs/discords/slacks) and I like it.
They don't care, their goal is to hit the numbers for their bonuses. Once dev collapses, they've moved on to make another company "efficient."
I literally had no idea.
Beating a struggling manufacturer is useless.

Investors want sold-more numbers not sold-more-than numbers.
I currently have my own garage where I can charge, but the previous coop were installing chargers in the shared parking area, so if I had stayed there I could have charged there.

Downtown the municipality has added a lot of curb-side chargers, however pricing isn't very favorable as you have to pay for parking in addition to charging. It was a good deal for a while, not so much anymore. In general parking downtown is hard to find and expensive so not very fun, including for those who live there.
I've been on a career break / job search for about a year. I used to work in "AI" before it became fashionable, here are some observations of the tech job market:

1) There are so much BS jobs in BS companies it's hard to understand if those are even companies doing real thing (cf. David Graeber)

2) 80% of jobs in my field are about LLMs and technology no one understand or in companies that don't even know if they need it but are just following the trend

3) I've seen big and small companies posting over and over the same job ad. For example a big consulting group has been posting the exact same job for more than a year (really) on linkedin and elsewhere - each time there are more than 100+ applicants on linkedin.

4) Recruiters from 'serious' agencies told me it was the worst job market they know of

5) There is also a rise of fake recruitement agencies, it's very easy and quick to set up a page on Linkedin now with fake workers, fake images, fake jobs, etc.

6) The supply demand imbalance allows some small companies (startups) to ask for insane technical assignement that takes hours, which at the end looked like free consultancy. I had one that did not even provide feedback after a rejection, and when asked said "because we don't"

7) The increase of centralised platform such as Linkedin has increased competition. Everyone is applying to the same jobs, and many candidates uses AI to beat the HR platform. [This has been reported by FT - https://www.ft.com/content/1429fcb2-e0ef-4e47-b2b8-8bd225ac2... ]. Same problem as in the online dating market.

8) There is so much ghosting, that can happen at any stage of the process. Again, same problem as in the online dating market.
Show HN: Free no-code Discord bot maker
Hi HN!

I launched kite.onl, an open source no-code Discord bot maker.

It's designed to be easy to understand and powerful at the same time. With support for custom commands, event listeners, buttons, and modals it can already compete with the paid alternatives.
Spain plans 100% tax on homes purchased by non-EU residents
Let me copy the actually important information from the sibling comment that's about to be deleted, because this is actually important:

Linus has hated GPLv3 since at least 2006.

Linux development has been over 80% corporate funded for over a decade. FOSS contributors do not have enough talent or interest to maintain the kernel for even a few weeks. If corporate interests weren't in the kernel, the kernel would not run on modern devices, period. It would have fallen behind the times and been abandoned like countless other technologies, or replaced with a new proprietary kernel from someone else.

Linux on the desktop is not somewhat usable in spite of corporate interests. Linux on the desktop is usable today because of corporate interests.
Also the etymology of kubernetes
It's better as a feature, not a product. To build another full delivery business would require the same amount of capital and resources that the existing companies spent and you'll be competing with them for a smaller customer base -- just vegetarians. Many of them will already be customers of the competition.
I forgot to make a meme about it but I still get these "We're sorry we went with someone else" months later from jobs I applied to but it's alright I have a job now.

The joke of the meme is I feel ashamed/disappointed but I forget I'm fine.
Your cookie Banner may not be legal, please change it
Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

I keep an offline blog of sorts that is more or less only for the times when I want to reply with a long winded comment that is too much for an HN reply. If that occurs I fire up a VM, grab a LetsEncrypt cert and plonk down either a simple HTML or Text file created with vi to reply. There is no sense in my keeping the VM active given I block all the search engine, CDN networks and archive sites.
My bad I was only focused on this co-CEO and my outrage that the woke keyboard mob of today is cheering on a murderer.

I did mention Andrew Witty and I'd like to know more facts before I follow the keyboard mob and or any other CEO to make the correct judgement.

I know we're done here but do ponder...Do you follow everything the keyboard mob says?
Building GBA Games in Rust
Just dropping a link like that about a car manufacturer doing even worse without any argument attached just comes across as coping or soviet style whataboutism.
They just edged out Honda - a company with 4% of their market cap. Not really a slam dunk.
EV sales are down in Europe generally.

"Registrations of battery-electric cars declined by 9.5% to 130,757 units in November 2024. This drop was primarily driven by a significant decrease in registrations in Germany (-21.8%) and France (-24.4%)."

https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...
The $1.6B Plan to Restart Three Mile Island [video]
The Power of Lies
Just a random thought I wouldn’t normally explore. Asked ChatGPT to write a prose (in favor of lies) and felt like it's interesting enough to share.

---

Lies are often condemned as tools of deceit, yet beneath their shadowy veil lies an undeniable power—one that can protect, inspire, and even transform lives. In a world that often demands harsh truths, lies offer an alternative path: the power to craft a more bearable reality, to soften the edges of pain, or to inspire dreams that truth alone could never sustain.

Lies, when wielded with purpose, can protect the vulnerable. A comforting falsehood whispered to a frightened child can ward off fear and offer a sense of safety in an otherwise uncertain world. In moments of crisis, when truth serves only to deepen despair, a lie can provide hope, a necessary illusion that propels us forward when reality threatens to hold us back. Sometimes, it is the lie that tells us we are strong, capable, or worthy when the truth feels otherwise. And through that lie, we may eventually come to embody the very strength or worth we once doubted.

In the realm of ambition and creativity, lies are the spark of invention. Every grand vision begins as an untruth—a dream not yet realized, a possibility not yet proven. The greatest achievements of humanity have emerged from the conviction to believe in what is not yet real. Lies fuel imagination, and from imagination springs progress.

Moreover, lies can unite people under a shared belief. Societies are often built upon myths, stories, and ideals that may not be wholly true but provide a common foundation upon which to stand. Without the lie of the perfect future or the ideal society, would we ever strive to improve ourselves or the world around us?

It is easy to dismiss lies as mere deceit, but to do so is to overlook their complexity. Lies can protect where truth wounds, inspire where reality falters, and unite where facts divide. They are not inherently destructive; they are tools, and like all tools, their power depends on the intent of the wielder. Lies can be a force for harm—but also a force for creation, growth, and hope.

In a world that prizes truth, lies remind us that sometimes, the greatest strength comes not from what is real, but from what we dare to believe. And in that belief lies the power to change everything.
Sucrose is a disaccharide formed from a glucose and a fructose molecule bound with an oxygen atom. in the presence of an acid (or in your stomach when you eat it) it will undergo hydrolysis and disassociate into its component sugars. Sucrose and high fructose corn syrup made in the same 1:1 ratio are from a practical standpoint, identical.
It hasn't said anything intelligent yet, so there is that...
By definition, a minority group isn't the majority. So it's at least less than half. A non-small amount of people claim the earth is flat.

Does a personal attack make you feel better about yourself, your situation in life?

If that "kind of nonsense" was a factor, show us in the numbers where it made an impact. I got time, don't cop out, cough it up.
I realize I'm probably in the minority for this, but for me when people create a "persona" for their media, it turns me away. I prefer watching people who are more genuine, whose content is less entertainment and more just themselves, even if that isn't what the internet seems to be looking for.
It is not making that company look very good.

Enticing job seekers to waste their very precious time is not ethical.

Edit: fix double negative.
FYI

Volkswagen PE ratio 3.47

Tesla PE ratio 117.65

Back in 2000, Cisco had a PE ratio of 196.2
It has now been 25 years and Cisco's stock price is almost back at its 2000 price (current PE ratio is 25.22).

Nowadays, Alphabet (Google) has a PE ratio of 25.72.

The sales of Tesla are not that great given the past 5 years and the investors are paying 117 times the future earnings.

What could go wrong?
Reminds me of the Open Source Initiative. People tell me that licenses like the SSPL aren't open source because the OSI says they aren't. I tell them to look at who comprises the OSI. Nobody has yet showed me a reason why we should believe the OSI when it tells us what open source is or isn't.
That collection of skills is still valuable.
Ah, yes, the alleged unaccountable Cabals who have special backdoor access to our media! Where have I heard this before?

Are you referring to PolitiFact, Snopes, Australian Associated Press, and FactCheck.org? They are not secret organizations with "back door" access any more so than Facebook's own customers are.

Centralized censorship? These are discrete organizations with diverse funding streams whose methodologies, funding sources, and affiliations are publicly available for scrutiny.

You are engaging in a deliberate strategy of obscurantism, weaponizing vague conspiratorial rhetoric to undermine institutional credibility. Your argument doesn't seek to illuminate, but to obfuscate - creating phantom threats of "unaccountable NGOs" while avoiding substantive evidence.

You're not analyzing fact-checking; you're performing reactionary theater, constructing a narrative of persecution that serves fascistic rhetorical goals. By casting yourself as a truth-teller battling imaginary censors, you're actually working to erode democratic discourse and sow mistrust in transparent, accountable information systems.

Your language reveals a classic fascist mobilizing technique: manufacturing a sense of crisis, positioning yourself as a heroic truth-teller against nebulous "elites", and systematically undermining shared epistemological frameworks. You're not critiquing - you're strategically destabilizing.

The function you serve is not intellectual engagement, but narrative warfare - spreading doubt, inflaming resentments, and creating fertile ground for authoritarian thinking by convincing people that no institution can be trusted except your preferred narrative.
Thats an even bigger area than I imagined... Another big problem is that we'd have to grow those forests again after 20 years, because mature trees stop being a CO2 sink.

The numbers/ratios should be even worse for Europe where the population density is higher. But I can totally see the approach working after scaling CO2 emissions down.

I think going over single digit percentages of land area in forestation levels is already politically almost impossible-- agriculture alone is gonna meet any such attempt with ridicule at best and copious amounts of buckshot at worst...
Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
100% agree. A big issue with tech is there are so many options and domains that for any particular job it can easily take even an amazing developer 6-9 months to get up to speed if they're unfamiliar with your particular tech stack or business area. That's not the case with most other professions - if I'm, for example, a professional violin player, I can play in basically any orchestra in the world and be proficient from day 1.

So if you happen to find that unicorn who is not only a great developer but is also expert in the major areas of your tech stack and your business domain, you hire them in a heartbeat.
Care to explain your perspective? "Engineering" can be a bit of a fuzzy definition. To some it means "building something". To others, it requires the application (and understanding!) of mathematic and scientific principles to build something.

I would disagree that most engineering is not involved in building something...whether most engineers understand the math/science behind it is debatable.
You are not supposed to spend a significant amount of time testing "behavior". Unit tests should be the vast majority of testing.

And I can tell you I have first hand experience of an "MVP" product getting delayed, multiple times, because management realizes that nobody wants to purchase our product when they discover how buggy and unusable it is.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42690781
That really makes rational sense to me. Young people insecure about initiative and self-sufficiency are more likely to gravitate towards centralizing strong authoritarian figures.

That is hyper cyclical though because authoritarian systems are really good at creating internal leadership which completely destroys the original motivation to gravitate towards authoritarianism. Too many strong leaders also tends to create countercultures of high self-sufficiency people that gravitate towards political fragmentation.
Well that's not really surprising. Competition has picked up, also there used to be a lot of government subsidies on EV's, many of those were cut.
This is the ketchup you are looking for:

https://www.truemadefoods.com/
Most of the creators I watch don't have sponsored segments.

I do agree, Prime is annoying with their ads, it definitely affects how much I watch on their platform.
I think it would be subtractive. To my eye, it seems like the point of the project was to celebrate the free expression of the crowd. The lack of censorship and filtering is core to the purpose of the project. If you start filtering out individual contributions in order to more accurately reconstruct the original movie, then I don’t really get why you wouldn’t just pirate the movie.
So basically this number just goes up and down with economic cycles, we’re at a midpoint when you look at the last quarter century, and everyone in this thread declaring that it’s because of AI or COVID or how “corporations have no loyalty anymore!” (as if that’s changed much in the last few decades) are probably wrong. Got it.
(paypal me 0.1$ to see this reply)
I’ve been wanting to do this for years but I’m still trying to figure out how to get started.

My skills are more in algorithm development (statistical signal processing, machine learning) and electronics than web coding though, so it’s probably not as easy as just making a simple website that does something slightly useful.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42669143
Although I've worked in tech for a long time, I finally went to a conference a year or two ago, expecting maybe to have some fun conversations. Kind of went on a whim to see who I'd meet, even paid for the VIP.

Instead, it was 99% filled with everyone in my region shilling their ChatGPT wrapper like it was going to change EVERYTHING. There were nearly zero interesting tech or business conversations.

Edit: to more directly address your comment, it's interesting to see which businesses and sectors want to ram through AI with no clear reason and which have no interest in it.
How is Apple handling all of this?
Show HN: Value likelihoods for OpenAI structured output
It does at the moment. At some point in the future, it might not rank, at which point he and anyone else devoted to the rat race will get their teams to replace their thumbnails with whatever new thing gets more clicks.
So there is no good reason since it's already empowered plenty
For an excellent, prescient, hilarious, and terrifying book on this topic, I highly recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.
Inert should be used instead of overflow. Achieves the same thing but is also compliant with accessibility in a way overflow isn’t
"here is a graph to refute all the despair and hardship you're feeling"
What I am describing is not the home page recommendations but the hole you would go down on post video recommendations, essentially the queue that Youtube would create for you had for a long time a heavier weighting on the current video you were watching. The simple example being you watch the dog herding sheep, then you the next video was about sheep, then you got to some video from a different country with sheep in it, then finally you ended up with some person who pretended to be a sheep. Purely making that example up but it often even in weird obscure videos quite quickly.
Similarly, in a positive feedback loop (as in the article), a long lag time would decrease its growth rate.
You don't think of yourself as being successful? Do you think of success mostly in terms of what your job is?
This is a solved problem and it's astonishing the world hasn't just adopted the Dutch traffic engineering standards outright. It's FASTER for cars and safer for people.
> ...(and constantly criticize her for doing everything wrong)

That parenthetical is, in my mind, an often-overlooked, but absolutely crucial aspect.

You normally see this framed in a moralising way as a critique against the selfishness endemic within the culture of the working-age generation. But there may be a flip side to that coin, namely a powertrippin' culture on the side of the now-elderly.

I actually did work in the care sector for a very short period of time.

But the problem I'm having with my aging western boomer dad, is that he never learned how to relate to family in a way where he doesn't get to dominate it all. And if I have a choice of taking care of him and never crawling out from under the thumb of his domination, or shipping him off to a home, then the home it is.

I don't want to unduly overgeneralise here, but I'm wondering if there may be something systematic or quantitatively significant going on here: There was a particular generation where young men suddenly had the opportunity for a power grab (taking power away from any intergenerational power structure) based on becoming financially self-sufficient at an early age, including owning a home for use by their nuclear, rather than extended, family. In Europe, this generation was the boomers because of the war. In North America, it might have been one generation earlier. Women wanted power too, so feminism.

If that same generation wants the next generation to stick around to take care of them, even when they have alternative options, then a precondition for that would be to renegotiate who is in charge. Doing that is hard, if the only reality you've ever known is a struggle for and steady increase of your power.
I still want to do this 9 years later I still haven't made something. Still working for someone else. Going to get out of debt first then work on it again, I want to be able to sleep/wake whenever.
Also, exactly his aim
Car sales in Europe are tanking generally
Online Job Markets for Freelancers
Upwork and competitors seem have to become an absolute hellscape recently, with vast numbers of bogus jobs and job applications, and getting worse with the extensive use of LLMs to generate both in a race to the bottom. Are there any other venues that HN readers would recommend as alternatives for freelancers seeking work?
Psychologists doing research and taking giant foundationless leaps; as usual.
I've found sometime in the last year or so YouTube has been suggesting random videos from very small channels much more, which I like a lot. Most of the videos are garbage, but every once in a while I'll find a gem that entertains me and my friends.

Recently I found a video of a young kid doing a taste test of a sour soda, and then demanding his dad come over from the other room to try it too. At one point the kid does a really loud burp that I found funny. Obviously not something that will do numbers, but it satisfies my people-watching itch.
You keep roads but aside from a few arteries, allow only bicycles, pedestrians, emergency vehicles, and things like dropping off/picking up passengers with disabilities.

If the roads are closed to non-emergency traffic, fire trucks and ambulances get where they need to be faster than if the roads are clogged with personal vehicles.