skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Finding interesting work if disenchanted with "big tech" & "VC-backed"
For a long time i opted out of big tech and worked at startups because i liked being on small collaborative teams building cool impactful things.

More and more I’m sick of VC backed startups as well, because I see how VC money is a deal with the devil that incentivizes people to focus on scale, valuations and exits rather than quality and intrinsic reward from creating a good product. This has rapidly accelerated as I watch VC unabashedly fall in line with this new presidential administration.

Not sure where to turn next though. I could walk away from tech and join a niche legacy industry, but there some much interesting stuff that I’d be closed off to as a result.

As much as I’m looking for an answer, curious if anyone else finds themselves asking the same questions.
Can't have stewardship without institutional knowledge and long-term employment.
Free to view: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-05/aliens-de...
That is the problem. That job-hopping is only way to get better compensation. The history, the domain knowledge and accountability is lost when one who made a programming decision is gone.

Why care about quality or maintainability if you are gone in year or two anyway...
Not that I remember. But there was a Mac clone called Carracho, and a little later there was a cross platform clone called KDX made by Haxial. Those were the days.
The spec itself contains an informative section which says:

> The following code defines a pair of functions that could be incorporated into applications wishing to ensure that the same sequence of numbers is generated across different machines.

And then gives code which does not use rand/srand. The intent of the spec is very clearly not for it to be portably reproducible.
The way I interpret the decline of software is that part of the problem is because more software has been written with the mentality that it doesn't need to last 30 years.

It's a self-perpetuating issue: people build stuff saying "it won't/can't last 30 years" for various reasons (money, time, skill, resources, expectations, company culture, business landscape etc). So then software doesn't last 30 years for those same various reasons.

The idea that we think systems did used to last longer is probably some survivor bias. However, software that has survived decades was probably created with a completely different set of methodologies, resources and incentives to modern software.
flagged-to-death comment

Much more likely it's the already-banned account of a known spammer.
Eh, you see the same kind of romanticism about the French, Italian, Greek, Swiss countryside, to list just a few.

It’s more so that US small towns are deeply uninteresting since many have been hollowed out to have the same chains. Japan has followed the opposite model and promotes obscure regional specialties like an obsession.
Is the only criteria travel times? I couldn't find others. Usually there's a mix of criteria that are vital when house hunting?
You are using Cursor AI incorrectly
Original script:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/{0}

Chatgpt's version:

["ssh-keygen", "-t", "rsa", "-f", keyfile, "-N", ""]

It added `-N ''`, which means don't set a passphrase—a second potential security downgrade.
Actually… I'm really not a fan of how Mastodon handles account deletion. I've interacted with him there about a week ago, and all of his posts are now missing from those threads. I guess it makes sense from a "be able to change your ways and not be stuck with ancient bad things you did" perspective, and there's a right to deletion/"be forgotten" in some legal frameworks, but this hinders necessary community processes. At least the LKML mails are permanent…

I would've liked to link a post or two of his to show just how little flexibility and tolerance there was from his end regarding his social interactions, even when being questioned about them in an outside context and in a reasonably neutral manner. Ohwell…
> Why?

Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Or re-re-reinvent Lisp.

There was this anecdote about storm lamp or something. New recruit comes to a camp and sees old guard lighting lamps are turned upside down and lit sideways with a long stick. But he knows better, he tells them and they smirk. First day he lights them the optimal way with a lighter. He's feeling super smug.

But next day he finds the fuse is too short to reach so he takes the long stick...

Few months later, he's a veteran, he's turning lamp upside down using lighter sideways, with a long stick.

And the fresh recruit says he can do it better. And the now old guard smirks.

I'm sure I'm misremembering parts, but can't find the original for the life of me.
When I started college in 1993 about half the computer lab were DEC Ultrix machines. By the time I graduated it had transitioned to Solaris and HP-UX.

I had a summer internship in 1995 and the Win 3.1 machine was so unstable for running an X server to the Suns, 3270 mainframe emulator, and browser using the Win32s (environment for running 32-bit application on 16-bit Win 3.1)

We found the supply closet with over 200 old 486 machines. The other intern and I installed Linux on some and it worked far better than the Win3.1 setup. The older guys saw it and wanted one too. We set up an assembly line with a Linux NFS server with the Slackware disk images to avoid swapping floppies. At least over a 10 Mbit network we found the NFS performance to be fine.

A couple of years later at my job after graduation I convinced our manager to buy PCs to use as X terminals with larger monitors and move the Suns to the closet for the chip design jobs.

I remember having some NFS issues and Trond Myklebust (Linux NFS guy) had me trying some NFS version 3 patches that improved performance between a Linux client and Solaris server.
Yeah it's always tickled me that we probably do have the technology to turn lead to gold, it would just be at an incredible loss. Almost fable-like that (one aspect of) what alchemists dedicated their whole lives to chasing is actually possible, just not actually worth it.

It's like if the federal government allowed you to print your own money but only if it was ones and it turned out that it cost $100/bill to do it properly.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979975
I'm not sure this is fundamentally different from e.g. a complex filesystem implementation relying on a specific MM or VFS or whatever API, and a "C developer" wanting to change that API. Just because the callers are in C doesn't necessarily make the global change easy.
Less people drive worse roads, leading to less damage to the roads.
hello, I'm one of the speakers. I've been working on this since 2017, happy to answer any questions the hackernews crowd might have.
China has had extremely abusive trade policies - basically following the Rockefeller strategy of subsidizing extremely low prices in each industry to eliminate all foreign competition, then raising prices and moving to the next industry. They also steal intellectual property from foreign partners, then shut down those foreign companies ability to do business there. After a long history of extremely damaging trade policies, it's amazing any businesses want to do business with China at all.
You were fast asleep at Crewe and so you never knew
That he was walking up and down the station;
The topic is “we’re destroying software”, not “we’re destroying techniques to increase your compensation”. Individual compensation and collective quality are not somehow inherently correlated.
Seems big. Can somehow clarify how important this is? Should we expect zig code to outperform similar C code for simple stuff?
QGIS Recognized as Digital Public Good
He is exactly right. Complexity is eating the world. Faster CPUs, larger memories and faster networks have brought great capability -- but removed the natural governor on software complexity.
I guess you could argue something along the lines of people never staying long enough to build complex things from start to finish. New people moving in and working on the project without the proper understanding, not caring since it will be someone else's problem in a few months...
Playstation Network has been down for a day
Looks like it's been down since yesterday afternoon, with no end in sight.
Just how many FOSS projects there are that are dead? Just how many different ways to do things have been invented? Say Linux desktop environments. Or parts of subsystems.

FOSS is certainly guilty too.
Go isn't a C++ killer because there's very many usecases that C++ is commonly used for where having a runtime with a GC are absolute nonstarters. Other downsides it has is somewhat janky and slow FFI to C, limited control over how/when data structures are copied, and green threading making granular control over processes, forking, shared memory, etc harder. These are all common things that are expected in systems programing and ever presenting it as one is dishonest.

Rust doesn't suffer from any of those issues and had a feature set comparable to that of C++ from before even 1.0, so there is actually a tenable argument that it could be a C++ killer. That didn't quite manifest because there isn't a strong reason to rewrite existing large C++ codebases, but most kinds of new projects that would have been written in C++ in like 2010 have increasingly been done in Rust instead.
mtr -i 0.1 1.1.1.1 gives 80% loss for my router (ok not the same as 100% loss as I stated earlier, but I just rerun to experiment), which is deprioritising ttl exceeded packets, but a ping -c 1000 -f 192.168.0.1 (my router) yields 0% loss. The per hop loss indicator is not only incorrect but also isn't useful even if it were accurate since end to end loss is what matters, not a phantom per hop loss that doesn't have any effect on end to end loss.
Yes, I do think endlessly relitigating project decisions that have been made is inappropriate.

It is not a technical stance. It is a project management one.

> Objectively, no one should disagree with that stance.

That is exactly why the maintenance burden is not his problem. He is under no obligation to take any additional work here.
You say this, “ Want to appear more often in AI responses?
Gumshoe offers tactical suggestions to improve your brand’s rank in AI search.” But how? I’m not asking for trade secrets, but is it just about publishing seo-style content on Rover’s website that is optimized for LLMs instead of Google algo?

And what is the moat? Won’t every SEO agency just morph to selling this?
I think initially Linus stance of encouraging Rust drivers as an experiment to see how they turn out was a right decisions. There should be some experience before doing long term commitments to a new technology.

But since then a lot of experience was made and I got the notion that the Rust drivers were quite a success.

And now we are at a point where proceeding further does need a decision by Linus, especially as one of the kernel maintainers is actively blocking further work.
Can you share the prompt you used?
This article is just purely conjecture about what what Musk maybe might do and the maybe issues with it.
wow this reminds me a lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekret_Machines:_Book_1_%E2%80... The Blink182 guy tom delonge made with a fiction author. The book is fiction but the preface seems to say "hint hint nothing here is fiction."
And people have different caffeine sensitivities.

Im one of the people that can have an after dinner espresso late at night with no effect. In fact, too much caffeine (like a large energy drink) often has the effect of knocking me out and I can barely keep my eyes open
AI Founder's Plan to Buy Out His Own VCs
Buying out VCs with debt having earned $15 million profit on $134 million revenue last year. Interesting... P.S. It's unpaywalled Forbes article, not sure if that's kosher here.
Various federal organizations get involved in single-state issues in their purview all the time, including the CDC. A single state outbreak can quickly become a multi-state outbtreak, then a nationwide outbreak. Measles, being one of the most contagious diseases in existence, is no joke, so even a small outbreak can be cause for serious concern. Measles has a r0 between 12 and 18, covid has an r0 between 1.4 and 2.4; when extrapolated exponentially, things get gnarly at an alarming rate.
> Let me give you the simplest example, when builds are reproducible you don't need package repositories, you need build caches.

The type of reproducibility is different here. What you mention is possible via a stable compiler ABI already. However one needs to keep the source code the same. Without a stable compiler ABI, you may or may not fix it depending on what the compiler does.

The goal of reproducible builds is removing sources of environment-dependent behavior at the build level instead of the compiler level. So given all the same dependencies and same build commands your binaries should match wherever and whenever you compile them. The distros and software developers also made a huge effort to remove any kind of environment-dependent commands.

Different distros still have differences in the build commands they issue and the set of dependencies they enable. The space to cache each individual possible output would be enormous and impractical. So you would still need repositories.
> For instance, in the meetings in which these ideas are proposed, why are they not considered a serious, fireable offence, like bringing up racist or sexist comments?

Hate to tell ya, those aren't fireable offenses at the highest offices anymore either.
I try to buy/rent/legitimately stream all the media I consume. But I've run into issues where I would "buy" a license to a movie, and suddenly I don't have access to a movie. I'm sure it was for some publishing licensing legal reason, but the fact remains that they kept my money I paid for the movie and I don't have what I paid for.

I wouldn't say I have a fundamental right to any content, but certainly I have a right to content I paid for.
Throwback to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outag...
> You should have picked a better example, Glasgow is a port city and almost certainly not a net drain

certainly true in the 1900s

unfortunately in the 2000s it's at the wrong side of the island
Ok so I'm a bit of a coding noob, but couldn't you hypothetically catch panics before they happen by having some boilerplate you insert in every case that could cause one?

I guess checking to make sure you aren't dividing by zero before you divide every time or checking an index access against the bounds of an array could have some performance implications, and also it would be prohibitively hard to actually enforce it across your team?
Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge is an amazing place. The closest Oklahoma gets to mountains, but one of my favorite places in the world. I knew about this but have never had a chance to watch it.
In my view it is about design that requires taste and creativity. Engineering is about function, design is about form. If I build something that solves a problem but if it isn't well designed it can mean that no one actually uses even if it is good piece of engineering.
https://aider.chat/ for the win!
LLM responses are random. One's failure is other's success. When evaluating we all should do rerurns and see how many times it fails or succeeds.

Without number of rerurns, the result is as good as random.
The thought someone went from no programming background, taking a company internal course and then writes a GPU emulation layer in the 90's is just absolutely mad.

Super impressive!
Fair, but then again FOSS is born from individual hackers who want to learn how to build X, or who feel like the ecosystem doesn't provide the X they would like to have.

It fosters a culture where everyone can hack something together, and where everyone is knowledgeable enough to make responsible use of technology.

Working as a for-hire developer doesn't let you experience all of that because you're building a product that someone else wants you to build. No wonder one does not give a shit about writing good software at that point! You've taken all the fun and personal fulfillment out of it!

We can build anything we put our mind to -- but most of us are too busy churning out CRUD boilerplate like factory workers. That's depressing.
> Gas taxes are used to fund road work.

"Road work" is almost entirely paid for by overall tax revenue and only a tiny fraction comes from fuel and other use taxes like registration fees. It doesn't include things like police/fire/ems response to crashes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-13/debunking...

In my state, you get a 90 percent discount on your excise tax if your vehicle is of a model year newer than the current year. I don't see anyone getting up in arms about that, but someone buys an EV - which pays taxes on the electricity it uses - and people scream blue bloody murder they're "cheating", because among other things, we don't look at the total cost to society that a car has.

No, friend. These regressive taxes are because conservative idiots in dick-compensating machinery that gets 12mpg are pissed that people who made the intelligent and environmentally conscious choice are being led around by the nose by the oil cartels.

...who are subsidized, and those subsidies are rising: https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...

https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...
The local convention is submit the original source and post the unpaywalled link in the thread.
Require a mileage readout when renewing registration, and when sold.
Abstractions are only part of the whole issue. Maybe I focused too much on that. But I'll argue that point once more.

How much complexity is actually required? What changed in software in the last 20 years so that the additional bloat and complexity is actually required? Hardware has become more powerful. This should make software less reliant on complicated optimizations and thus simpler. The opposite is happening. Why? What groundbreaking new features are we adding to software today that we didn't 20 years ago? User experience hasn't improved that much on average. In fact, measurements show that systems are responding more sluggishly on average.

Intrinsic complexity of the problems that software can solve hasn't really changed much as far as I can see. We add towers of accidental complexity on top that mostly aren't helpful. Those need to be questioned constantly. That isn't happening to the extent that it should. Web-based stuff is the poster child of that culture and it's hugely detrimental.
About the diverging roles, i agree its likely go down that path, based on my own career experience as well. The fact that I enjoy the freedom to be as innovative with quick turnaround, i could be in terms of directly able to solve business issues, rather than process entanglements set forth for managing developers.
Cool collab.

Tao’s oft given talk about the cosmic distance ladder has always been my favorite thing he has done.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7ne0GArfeMs
Maybe check first, before removing? Instead of waiting for people to be killed, then add back.

As they say: First, do no harm.
Tldr: government bureaucrats afraid of accountability falsely accuse auditors of things to stop clean up from happening.
> and just spending hours relaxing

How many hours?
KDX's UI really was something else.

I remember first learning about torrents from a KDX server that had a folder with instructions on "how to download Matrix Reloaded at full speed". Downloaded some suspicious "BitTorrent" (I remember thinking the name was appropriate for what it promised) client along with a funny ".torrent" file"... and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the transfer speed use the entirety of my 256kbps connection.
Thank you for keeping the spirit of Hotline alive. Despite innovations, nothing can replace the vibe of that era. Good to see Hotline carry on.
Capitalism doesn't incentivise building quality software, it incentivises building as quickly as possible and covering up the flaws because "we'll fix it later" (spoiler: it doesn't get fixed later.)

Until the incentives change, the outcome won't change.

Pointless meetings and bureaucracy also doesn't help. Instead of giving engineers time and breathing room to build well-defined systems, organisations treat them like fungible workhorses that must meet arbitrary deadlines.
Then the CSPRNG API just wouldn’t be available (just the traits). There are plenty of platform-specific APIs available within the stdlib. The PRNG would always be available though.
Or worse: Linux is so widespread and managed to practically kill most Unix alternatives, that progress in OS development is slowed down globally. I would strongly prefer Linux being an OS with a lot of progress to stagnation and possible no alternative in the next decades.
Because doubling the sample rate would half the playing time of a CD, or require twice the density, while not bringing any audible increase in quality for the human ear.
> Sure if you pay a base fee maybe but if you went 100% solar to cover all your needs and completely disconnected from the grid so you were not a paying customer then what?

Then they are generating substantially less pollution and CO2 than the idiots driving around in their dick-compensating machinery that gets 12mpg, and society should incentivize that.

Hint: look at all the costs to society from internal combustion vehicles. Chiefly, global warming, and the health costs (and lost productivity) from the pollution.
CS Degree from 1996, been working for startup then big company, startup then big company, over and over for, yikes 30 years. I'm now at big company again and I've completely lost the urge to "change the world" and the product my big company makes isn't even a product I use myself. (Not that it's bad, just not my thing.) I'm in it now for the people and the tech. You'll never find that fulfillment you are seeking in working for the right company doing what you think is important. Just pick one and fall in love with your co-workers, make them friends, and do tech for the sake of tech.
We’re playing with a combination of things (frontier models, open weight/open source models we’re maintaining, data) but those two items are key focus area for development.
The right to repair supports more than just sustainability and affordability
Why is it that leadership gets these ideas all at the same time?
We are not destroying software, money is.
I can't delete my framework
Reviving an old kindle pw7 as an e-ink dashboard
Let's consider it through a personal example. Suppose you are on a call rotation, and agree that the on-call engineer can wake you up at 4AM, but only if it's really important, and that the matter at hand has to involve some knowledge that you have, but didn't put on the wiki. Later, you are woken up at 4AM to discuss the results of a football game, and when challenged your coworker defends that they upheld their end of the bargain. They claim that it wasn't specified who it had to be important to, and that once you had been told who won, you had knowledge related to the call that you hadn't put on the wiki.

Would a fair manager consider them as having broken the agreement, or as having tried really hard to comply with the rules?
“Regression results suggest no statistically distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and wealth. Financial distress, such as problems paying bills, going bankrupt or reaching credit card limits, is related to IQ scores not linearly but instead in a quadratic relationship. This means higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability of being in financial difficulty.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

Notice how I cited a source, that’s intelligence. Not just decided I was wealthy and therefore inherently smarter. That’s ignorance.
Path on North Sentinel island:

https://www.google.com/maps/@11.5920005,92.2195112,225a,35y,...
Is "seeing the gorilla" a reference borrowed from this work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtKt8YF7dgQ