skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Not all programming problems can be solved with pattern matching"

Says who? How do you know if solving programming problems is not just advanced pattern matching?

The fact that we find most (if not all) of our solutions on SO or talking to colleagues points towards the pattern matching hypothesis quite strongly.

To be clear: I am talking about the programming aspect of the job only, not the other important things (talking to customers/product managers, crafting solutions, etc.)
I see. My opinion is that nuclear weapons are more or less useless in a modern conflict, as has been observed in the Russia-Ukraine war with endless Russian sabre-rattling. The collateral damage from nuclear weapons makes their usage suicidal, and in the case of the US, states breaking away from the Federal government would also inherit a nuclear arsenal -- leading to a stalemate.

The Russia-Ukraine war has convinced me that artificial intelligence driven drone warfare has rendered nuclear warfare obsolete. The drones act as a force multiplier which can mass target the enemy with little collateral damage.
I think it's just software engineers that are making the ai software. They make it do what they know how to do. It's fun in a hacker kind of way to make the computer write code.

Well slowly see more Ai intersect with other jobs as people with hobbies that can engineer make things.

Assuming Ai actually delivers what it promises in the first place
Obvious point: we're the most expensive kind of non-finance individual-contributor employee.

Equally obvious: nobody is going to replace the most expensive kind of employee, the CEO.

Less obvious point: software engineers sometimes say no. LLMs don't. They'll always give you something, even if it doesn't work or has security holes. The idea of shipping worse products at higher speed is incredibly tempting to sales types.

If you think the app store is bad now, wait until you see what level of AI sloppification is possible when anyone can turn out hundreds of clones of any popular apps.
An ideal operated as a verifiable, legally sanctioned Ponzi snd Congressional slush fund.

Great idea, sadly co-opted by other interests.
That's what I get with my software projects. People tell me that it sucks and I suck at code and other projects have it better, and don't forget to waste months of your time rewriting to Rust, and don't you dare to use unsafe all over your code (see: actix drama)... sigh. But when asked to show their alternative they get silent. So as long as you keep being assertive this is fine. For everyone who comes and behaves like a drama queen you have to prove again and again that talk is cheap and code is how you get the job done. Or you simply ignore them.
Plus simply brazen lying.
Look, i understand being concerned about robot and self-driving safety. AI is a nebulous term and we don't need to restrict anyone training AIs.
People disagree about this. If F is for free as in speech, what is the L for?

I've been in the GNU/libre/open source world since 1986. My experience is that the L (for libre) was added specifically because the english "Free" is ambiguous and too often interpreted as without-cost/free-as-in-beer/gratis.
SaaS and consultants are also expensive to rent.
With a warrant a company can be forced to implement this capability for a specific case. Is it the same?
If you’d face half the abuse, you’d be singing a different tune.
Given the recent public drama from other groups claiming the same things, maybe the quiet approach means real science is being done here, which takes time to verify.
Sounds possible, office laptops in India are generally shit-tier. But the largest non-bulk retail buyers of laptops in India seem to be (from my armchair market observation) school/college kids, and school/college kids increasingly prefer gaming laptops (India is the largest consumer of gaming laptops after the US) that will likely not give below-average benchmark results.
That counts as begging from my point of view.

> Good luck getting data this easily from any other major manufacturer

This is an industry-wide problem.
The Honda-Nissan merger is dead
Word. "We've noticed you have an ad blocker. Please disable to..." or "you need JavaScript enabled to..."
Nope, wouldn't be prudent. Not doin' it.
Handling Nested Authorities Claims with Spring Boot
I’ll believe it when I can page an AI at 3AM, go back to sleep, and have it autonomously root-cause and fix a production outage no matter the cause.
Software engineering is exactly the skill needed to think of, design, and debug large valuable systems. AI will become a better and better tool to give us more leverage to make a dent in the world. We’re just going to do much bigger things. Much much bigger

The job won’t last forever, but it will outlive almost every other job
> I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess.

The only way to do that is to never collaborate with anyone else. I hope he'll be someday able to process what happened, why and reach appropriate conclusions. Software development is a social activity, especially with relatively high-visibility projects like Asahi, and it comes with just as usual burden of social troubles as any other kind of social activity.
I mean.. they're a big cost center that operates slowly and takes a lot of effort to keep functioning. Not to mention, you often need the engineers more than you, given how much time it takes them to ramp up, and how hard it is to find quality ones, so they get to demand high wages (often while not really doing that great of a job---looking at you, average college hire who's not aspiring to be any sort of leader or expert in their field). If you ran a company you'd want to replace them also.

(None of that has anything to do with whether it's just for the world to operate this way. Personally I'd like to see all engineer wages go down and owner/shareholder returns go down and all that money go to lesser-paid roles or cheaper prices. But we lived in a version of capitalism that doesn't presently seem to present a way to do that...)

Personally I think programming will be 10x as efficient in the not-so-distant future (25 years maybe), and that everyone vaguely understands this: that what we're doing today is in some sense a waste of effort. Similar to building a road or railroad with hundreds of manual laborers instead of a few big machines.
> In tech we face layoffs constantly, so much so that's not a huge shock when a FAANG lays off hundreds or even thousands.

One other difference is that in tech we watch companies get mismanaged into the dirt and shrug it off. There'll be another one to replace it soon enough.

But I want to take a little more care with the government. Yes, there's inefficiency, but that doesn't mean the best approach to optimization is to just start shotgunning holes in the machine.

Maybe that approach works (?) for Twitter, but that kind of upheaval in the government will have serious repercussions that I don't think I want to be on the receiving end of.

I work for a state government, but I'm on a contract. They choose every year whether or not to renew it. So I get to enjoy the lower pay and the lack of job security. I don't know how many government employees are contract, but it's something to consider.
Staying away from the emotional part of this blog post.

I was about to write a question to ask why, if these downstreams are forked, that it is such a big deal to be gatekeeping the upstream and I think I got my answer from this:

"In fact, the Linux kernel development model is (perhaps paradoxically) designed to encourage upstreaming and punish downstream forks. While it is possible to just not care about upstream and maintain an outright hard fork, this is not a viable long-term solution (that’s how you get vendor Android kernel trees that die off in 2 years). The Asahi Linux downstream tree is continuously rebased on top of the latest upstream kernel, and that means that every extra patch we carry downstream increases our maintenance workload, sometimes significantly. "

Is it wrong for Linus to take the side of the kernel and not of the various distros? Serious question. I don't completely understand all of the background here.

"But it goes deeper than that: Kernel/Mesa policy states that upstream Mesa support for a GPU driver cannot be merged and enabled until the kernel side is ready for merge. This means that we also have to ship a Mesa fork to users. While our GPU driver is 99% upstreamed into Mesa, it is intentionally hard-disabled and we are not allowed to submit a change that would enable it until the kernel side lands. This, in practice, means that users cannot have GPU acceleration work together with container technologies (such as Docker/Podman, but also including things like Waydroid), since standard container images will ship upstream Mesa builds, which would not be compatible. We have a partial workaround for Flatpak, but all other container systems are out of luck. Due to all this and more, the difficulty of upstreaming to the Linux kernel is hurting our downstream users today."

I think we are dealing with a maintenance problem of downstream forks and trying to make their lives easier by convincing the kernel maintainers to accept the changes upstream.

Does Linux have a standards committee or some sort of design committee? I thought they had something to decide what goes in and what doesn't. If it doesn't then is it necessarily gatekeeping then? It seems like someone has to make the hard technical choices whether something becomes part of Linux or not and that is what Linus is doing.

I am trying to understand the real issue here. It seems like the difficulty in upstreaming changes to help the downstream folks is the issue not necessarily that the downstream folks are blocked.
100%

I'm not a programmer by trade but I write tools for myself all the time. My favorite is a wiki-style knowledge base that I built for myself because I did not like the bulk or design of all the existing solutions. (I am a bit picky.) I use it every day for both work and personal stuff. There are lots of ways I want to improve it, but finding the time is difficult.
I don't know. Why are you software engineers always trying to replace everyone else?
>then getting lured by one of those tool combo deals that has another drill lurking in the pile

So relatable it's funny.

Yeah, you described my experience exactly! :)
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I work for a company that is open source and has a large community. I blows my mind (and often aggravates me) how rude some people can be.

For some reason people feel that it is appropriate to throw barbs in their issue reports. Please to everyone out there, if you find an issue and want to report it (hurray open source!) please be kind with your words. There are real people on the other side of the issue.

Always remember, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
This.

It's not software engineers per se. It's any labor component that is expensive and "automate"-able. Companies are always trying to optimize labor costs. The theoretical Holy Grail is a company that requires 0 labor input where all profits accrue to the owner of the business.

That's just business 101.

I'd anticipate a concerted effort to make LLMs better and batter at software development tasks until you only need the top 0.5% of developers and maybe a few technicians to support them. That's how you juice profitability.
Marcan links to an email by Ted Tso'o (https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.ed...) that is interesting to read. Although it starts on a polarising note ("thin blue line"), it does a good job of explaining the difficulties that Linux maintainers face and why they make the choices they do.

It makes sense to be extremely adversarial about accepting code because they're on the hook for maintaining it after that. They have maximum leverage at review time, and 0 leverage after. It also makes sense to relax that attitude for someone in the old boys' network because you know they'll help maintain it in the future. So far so good. A really good look into his perspective.

And then he can't help himself. After being so reasonable, he throws shade on Rust. Shade that is just unfortunately, just false?

- "an upstream language
community which refuses to make any kind of backwards compatibility
guarantees" -> Rust has a stability guarantee since 1.0 in 2015. Any backwards incompatibilities are explicitly opt-in through the edition system, or fixing a compiler bug.

- "which is actively hostile to a second Rust compiler
implementation" - except that isn't true? Here's the maintainer on the gccrs project (a second Rust compiler implementation), posting on the official Rust Blog -> "The amount of help we have received from Rust folks is great, and we think gccrs can be an interesting project for a wide range of users." (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/11/07/gccrs-an-alternative-c...)

This is par for the course I guess, and what exhausts folks like marcan. I wouldn't want to work with someone like Ted Tso'o, who clearly has a penchant for flame wars and isn't interested in being truthful.
> What is an example of open source software that is not libre?

One example I am familiar with is an (old) project called LinuxSampler. It was (probably incorrectly) licensed GPL+modification clause that prevented its use in any commercial hardware project.

There have been some other projects that are released under what might be termed "GPL-but-no-military-use".
It's worse. Windows aggressively alters the shape and overall character of fonts to perform anti-aliasing, making them appear sharper on low-DPI displays.

Linux is a goofy with this too, but still looks better than Windows. macOS handles it best on high-DPI displays, but because subpixel anti-aliasing is no longer used, fonts can be a little blurry on low-DPI displays.

Also, https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/
I had a similar thought. The tone of the messages was a little rough and they definitely could have used some better tact knowing that the project developers would see it, but ultimately those are just factual statements delivered with brutal bluntness.
In an effort like Linux it's difficult for everyone to have their way - there are many "ways" but only one kernel.

I have had to do maintenance on a distributed filesystem driver at one point. This was outside the kernel. I can see why no kernel maintainer would have wanted to look after it even if it was open sourced because the file server was a mixture of C++ and an interpreted language and working out if you'd broken the driver somehow was a miserable job. You would need obscure expertise to understand it all.

Anyone with a good idea can still fork Linux. If their idea is so great it may end up that their branch gets adopted - if they bother to maintain it.
>According to data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), around 1,600 English and Literature PhDs are awarded annually in the United States. Total PhDs awarded annually in all categories : 57,862

It is a very small field that is being used as a straw-man for all PhDs. I don't know what benefit those 1,600 may produce, but I'd rather them have that expertise and use it for our country than have them leave the US for better opportunities elsewhere. Because they will leave.
Just like robotic cars, the first 90% of the effort will come easy and the remaining 10% will take decades to perfect. They're going to need AGI to fully replace the intuition and knowledge integration of a dev.
I pulled data on 1378 restaurants from Google Maps to rank them in order
That actually looks par for the course in "western" governments. The only items going over 20% are typically related to pensions, social security, and health services. Everything else (in isolation) is basically a pittance.
OT, Have you had any issues with WiFi setup with this Mac Mini? I tried multiple distributions and most of them have troubles with detecting WiFi chip on 2014 mini.
Discussion: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43026934
The Rust situation was handled badly. Two languages (one of which has panics and all sorts of version issues) in one kernel are clearly not viable. Linus should have put his foot down and mandated C instead of stringing people along.

That of course was difficult in the corporate environment of 2014-2024. Perhaps he was forced to do it.

In many areas, sanity has returned, so perhaps we can get clearer messaging again in the future.
A lot of rightwing stuff that circulates is disinformation -- there are plenty of examples of it. Trump is an inveterate liar about almost everything (this is easily fact-checked), and his followers have adopted the same strategy (lies are powerful because they are usually more shocking and travel faster than a boring fact-check).

Not to say that other politicians don't lie or distort the truth, but Trump has taken this to a whole other level.
What are some real life use cases for this, instead of let's say edge functions or durable objects etc?
I have no dog in the Rust-for-Linux fight, but it seems fairly obvious that is the major reason for the burnout here.

The financial situation sucks. I just threw a small donation their way but funding a project of this scale just from end users is rarely a viable long-term solution...feel like they need to find some high level corporate sponsors.

My best to Hector, what he managed to pull off with the other Asahi developers is remarkable.
Yeah, I agree. Maybe that's why I'm not doing great work -- I simply don't care about users. But again, you don't have to care about all users. You only need to care about the ones that have the same mindset. That's why I think working in smaller communities is better. Asahi Linux and Rust in Linux are the worst projects in that perspective because they both try to touch too many users.

But again, maybe they can hire someone like me, whose sole job is to block the very worst entitled users.
It's fascinating to watch the US Federal government dismantled by a tech giant while all of FAANG complies in advance. Thousands of software developers affected with Federal layoffs and DOGE defunding and yet it's not appropriate for discussion on HN.

I believe that the USA is now in the grips of a fascist government. Resistance is minimal and focused on fixing what the administration has broken last week or last month, and may take years to have any impact through courts, legislation, and direct action. The Federal government as we knew it, is gone. Power has been consolidated into the executive branch and a blue wave in 2026 will be too late. Congress is being stripped of its power and the judicial branch has been an enabler of unchecked executive power for a decade or more.

I recognize that this is a fringe belief.

All we can do now is help each other and resist as much as possible.
Oops, you are right. I think because the other direction of libffi - ffi_closure - has a jitted trampoline, I mistakenly thought both directions are jitted. Thanks for the correction.
Trash paywall media.

Read this article for free from another website: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/02/13/uks-iphone-spying...

Also, response from Tulsi Gabbard: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/tulsi-gabbard-told-crush-uk-155712...
These apps are not the police --at the same time they owe their users a responsibility to not expose them to sexual predators, deviants, extortionists, etc.

At the same time, they have to prevent maliciousness/revenge by people who don't handle rejection well.

Unfortunately, a robust system for reporting and assessment is costly, so you should err on the side of caution rather than expose your users to known depraved sexual perverts.

One thing they might do is share a database with other apps (ok, many are under the same parent co) and flag suspicious actors (I'm sure they have plenty of signal to work with to determine who is trying to get around the bans)
I've honestly never had that success. LLMs for me more often get in the way than actually help anything. It may be that it's because I deal mostly in very large code bases with their own nuances.
You need strong guys to move things around because you don't have a pneumatic crane.

Now you have pneumatic crane, you can move stacks and stacks of things around with ease. You need less strong guys around and instead there is a new need for fewer people that are well-trained on how to operate this pneumatic crane safely. You'll get more work done with less people.

That's what's happening with software engineering and LLM copilots; it's an industrialization of coding. You don't need 20 engineers to get that product out. You need a few that are really good operators of the machinery. Adept at prompting and reviewing code instead of writing code.
Software developers are basically the only thing standing between the morons and profit at any cost to society, because some of us don't feel like playing that game and they couldn't do it without us if their life depended on it.

I realize they think they they finally can do it by themselves, or rather by hooking up a bunch of fresh bootcamp devs with AI; and I look forward to watching them crash, burn and come back begging for help.
Code monkeys can essentially be replaced by GenAI (that is, a competent SWE team needs fewer or zero low-skill code monkeys going forward) but the "field" goes way beyond code monkeys.

Replacing piles of expensive crappy SaaS with a small team of expert SWE will continue to be a massive arbitrage opportunity for many mid/large orgs.
How you should respond to authentication failures isn't universal
Software Engineers build the tools, so I feel it shouldn't be surprising that one of the first areas it's being applied is the domain it's inventors are most familiar with.
> Scientist: Hurrah! We have created an algorithm that can mimic human speech!

> CEO: Fantastic! I've already fired all of the doctors and nurses, how soon can it start doing surgeries?

> Scientist: ...
I actually helped with some of the beta testing for it. They worked on it very early on in the Apple silicon Mac lifecycle, and it hasn’t been updated in nearly half a decade. I consider it a proof of concept.

https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1
Hector, I know you deleted your account here but in the off chance you browse by - thank you for all of your hard work and knowledge sharing on this over the years. Hope you find time to take a long well deserved 'mental health break' and destress.
the margins in software companies/industry is large.

Margins, are never large enough for a certain class of owners. That's the unfortunate reality. No one at an average board meeting is gonna say, "Hey guys, let's stay at this 40% margin level instead of going to 60%!"
Are you implying they should be given more time? More time to dismantle programs claiming fraud without finding any?