skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the old way of doing it, and probably the way the US is going to go with, at the detriment of its own population. - I would posit that since we are talking about digital goods, there is a better way:

Require open source / open weights of any company that used data to it doesn't own to train its models. If chinese companies do not comply, their copyright becomes void in the US, and these models are very easy to copy. Treat advances in architecture as a utility, and let the utilization of those architectures be the market for companies to compete in.
> yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average).

Maybe, depending on the tasks. Also it depends on whether or not you take the view of the employee or employer. Say you work 8 hours a day (which even people in offices don't do) as the employer I do agree that you might get more done if people are in the office, but as the employee, I'll add my commute as well, so I now work 9 - 10 hours per day, part of which is completely unproductive. You also need to factor in that there is a shit ton of people who are fairly unproductive even at the office, they just look busy.

There are some fields where I can easily see the office being more productive in general, but you also have tasks where you move people for no reason. I think accounting is a pretty good example of a job that almost never require you to be at the office. Many companies even outsource this to other companies that most definitely isn't at the same office.

If you instead hired people to do a job, not be in front of a computer for 8 hours, then you could probably have an even higher level of efficiency. Imagine working from home, have a stack of assigned tasks for the day and be informed that once those are done you free to spend whatever remain of your eight hours as you please. I assure you that people will get shit done at light speed.

It's about management, and management mostly have not, and have no desire to evolve to handle work-from-home. You need better managers, more highly trained managers and managers that works harder than they do in the office, which many of them don't want to.
Nonsense, programming still pays amazing salaries for the work. I earn almost as much as an MP, and I have 1000th of the responsibility.

The job market also seems to be totally fine if you're experienced, based on the amount of LinkedIn recruiter messages I get.
Show HN: 10 teams are racing to build a pivotal tracker replacement
A lot has changed since the shutdown of pivotal tracker was discussed here. As there were no viable alternatives it seems every month there was a new project popping up. With the last month before the sunsetting approaching, it starts to get exciting who will make it in time, who stays in the race and what the differentiating features of the projects will be.
> Have you ever seen plumbers being treated as rock stars?

There will always be a need for many people to do plumbing work. Can we say that about software engineering?

Many people worked on vanity/side projects of some corporations. And those jobs are gone, since there's not so much free money anymore.
Things like this aren't about economic growth, they're about reducing the reliance on foreign services
yes, make better notes of meetings, make meetings a pleasure, make bureaucracy a dream job
Will wrote one of my all-time favorite essays about software engineering: https://lethain.com/migrations/

He's worth paying attention to IMO.
For a while I was using https://habilis.net/lynxlet/ in MacOS to get Lynx as a 'native' browser. It was a nifty wrapper. Sadly lost to time... and 32-bit only. :(
I like almost everything from this project, even the documentation and development is being done in the open, with design docs like this:
https://www.figma.com/design/qdCWR4tTUr7vQSecEjCyqO/DOCS?nod...
The article needs as much stronger premise. Employees being pampered and investment money flowing freely are not strictly connected.

Employees being pampered with high wages, benefits, and extra perks like free meals has everything to do with talent scarcity.

The only reason these extravagances are being cut is because tech employees aren't in the same level of demand. That may (or may not) change.
Bio Cringe – The Obnoxious Social Media Bio Generator
Hey Guys,

I've been tinkering and practising my coding skills (for want of a better word) for a while and decided to release a fun little project I've been working on - Bio Cringe.

Ever read a 'hacktivist growth mindset guru' bio on LinkedIn that made your soul leave your body? How about a '24/7 experimental thought guru' Twitter bio that made you want to smash your face into your keyboard? Bio Cringe has it all - and based on the level of obnoxiousness you choose it will generate a bio for you so lacking in self-awareness and reality that Elon Musk would blush.

Purely for fun, purely satirical, but I hope you guys get a laugh out of it.
When it comes to hardware who pioneered all those technologies? Definitely not China. They’ve stolen unimaginable amounts of IP and will continue to do so. But yes you’re right, they surprise everyone with how well they can scale the stolen innovation.
Dying or becoming disable long term are also pretty bad for socializing. Anyone trying to take reasonable precautions for themselves or to protect vulnerable people around them has pretty much been jettisoned by society. Restaurants and bars are not the only way to socialize, but being unwilling to participate in those becomes a social death sentence.

I have a pet hypothesis that there is high correlation between the people choosing precautions and those who did the social & emotional labour of organizing and cohering in the before times. I'm not suggesting anything has stopped, clearly it hasn't. But it does sound like what remains is a thinner gruel barely covering the bottom of the pot.
They might be officially banned by the employers, but I guarantee you they'll get lots of usage anyway
They are the modern age robbers barrons, money coming before a sense of morals, ethics or patriotism is all the signalling there is here. Oh, and it sounds like your information bubble isn't the healthiest.
Jack Ma’s
First of all, Pareto Principle, so some employees contribute a ton and many contribute less. Second of all, having been in tech individual employees do drive projects that wouldn't have happened without them for a decent amount of time. In aggregate that moves the bottom line a ton

As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't. The general solution is to go into management (more visibility and no cap on comp), or to create (or join) your own startup (which doesn't have a rigid interview process and you can use "references"). Which many do given how many startups exist in the Bay Area. Companies also may give out large bonuses in RSUs to keep those employees.
Seriously. This would have been trivial with a few second look in inspector.
Does this have implications for understanding the abilities of Neanderthals? For instance, might more advanced tools found in Neanderthal sites have been created by non-Neanderthals, and exchanged in trade or captured/ stolen?
I don’t think in this case they’re really trying to compete - they just need something better than any of the open source solutions available and are then open sourcing that. I doubt they’re going to get into the business of hosting public instances or marketing to businesses.

It wouldn’t make sense to rely on a foreign closed source company if they want to do anything serious with this IMO.
When I lived there all the locals called Llanfair, or Llanfairpwll or Llanfair PG

The long name was created in Victorian times for tourist purposes
You know what's sad? Every Western company has been using this technique for a long time...
Why some animals defy the odds to thrive in urban areas
Times are tough now but still, I hope we never have to go back to a 0% interest environment. It was a nightmare. It only created the illusion of abundance and opportunities but in reality only pure speculation was rewarded. I'm exhausted from running on that hamster wheel. I'd rather do something really difficult and really struggle but at least get somewhere eventually, little by little... Rather than the endless cycles of false hope and disappointment of the past decade. It's like having a carrot always dangling right in front of your face. Success always appears very close but in reality, it'd be easier to just go straight for a different carrot perched atop mount everest.
I'm not saying there is no latent reasoning capability. It's there. It just seems to be that the memory and lookup component is much more useful and powerful.

To me intelligence describes something much more capable than what I see in these things, even the bleeding edge ones. At least so far.
But you’d trust it to Brave?
That framing doesn't change my logic at all: replace the direct earning of $N/year with the probability of earning $N/year and the same logic still applies. An employee doesn't contribute the probability, an employee working within the Google system contributes the probability. The system is doing the bulk of the work, and the per-employee probabilities of earning all that money are dramatically smaller in any other system.
BlockBounty: Hire Top Developers and Pay with Bitcoin
What are C languages?
My negative opinion based on experience working with the stereotype that fits your friend is they are only valuable in a massive company. 8/10 phd holders I have worked with couldn’t actually do hands on work. So where do people who just want to think, talk and write about work without being able to actually ship provide value on the order of $250/hr?
Sorry, but this denigrating about leetcoders just strikes me as delusional in a different way. The people that I know that spend a lot of time doing leetcoding and learning new tech are 1. Also really good at general programming, and 2. In the top 20% of actual enthusiasm for their job. If these people cant find jobs reliably, what should you actually do to have a decent shot at getting hired? We can't just tell everyone "just make sure youre in the top 2%".
Ahh sorry. My mistake. I thought those were Linux executables (ELF).
Turns out those are Bash scripts.
Im getting old and find all features provided by voice assistants very much unnecessary, but perhaps younger generations cannot live without it?
Anyone who would downplay the value of an office manager has never appreciated a great office manager. Most offices do not have a competent (if any) office manager, which is something we should all demand of our workplaces.
> We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene

Is economy a zero sum game now?
Isn't economic development supposed to be a good thing?
Can the West only exist in a world of poverty and underdevelopment?
Look into profitable companies not focusing on software: Walmarts and homebuilders, Toyotas and medical device makers, miners and electric utilities and so on. All of them need software to run their businesses.
> I was using Firefox. Natalie pointed out that Chrome DevTools display default browser styles for elements [...]

So does Firefox. Enable "Show Browser Styles" in the developer tools settings.
Clock and Calendar Understanding Challenges in Multimodal LLMs
The presumption that RTO is driving the wave of 'we need to be profitable' is myopic. The article rightly attributes it to financial liquidity. RTO is more expensive for most companies than remote which is often overlooked.

Now that that liquidity is lower, companies are incentivized to cut back excess they created. In many cases they aren't capable of actually determining value by employee, so most of these layoffs are impacting hard working and often critical employees (aka not coasters) that then struggle to find new jobs because both the market conditions and idiotic assumptions about these layoffs actually being performance related.

The performance narrative is literally to reduce the cost of regular layoffs which they now do almost yearly to attempt to inflate stock prices at key times, while not admitting that a fairly significant portion end up being hired back over the next 12 months (boomerangs lmao) to fill the critical holes they created.

The hype in the industry and the shit outcomes aren't the fault of employees but bad leadership and executives caring more about short term profit through deceptive marketing than creating value. And that's why as an employee creating value for a company is no longer enough to justify job security. If you care about value and not profit or margins than you are a coaster these days.

There will be more busts, but the narrative that coasters or entitled employees have anything to do with it is bunk.
Leadership think developers no longer matter and they'll be able to replace them with AI in a couple years. So they are firing them all and spending all their money on AI. If you think they can't be that stupid and irresponsible, remember who took all the hiring decisions during COVID.
Not OP, but: of course! If you can't find existing stats, just create new ones to support your claim.

See also: https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
>there just isn't any money left to develop "the next hot database"

Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved? You can make money by developing a database that solves some problems, saving time and money for lots of people and companies. "Hot" doesn't make money, otherwise people posting here daily "I rewrote X in Rust" would be rich.
> The spec lives in GitHub in a 7MB source file which is too large to view through the GitHub web interface

It's a bit offtopic, but think about it: cannot view the doc despite its size is only 7Mb ~ about 0.04 percent of a typical computer's memory (16Gb). We can open and view PDFs much bigger and search there without an issue in browser. We can view movies worth half of the memory.

But it's surprisingly not possible to view a 7Mb text file in the professional tool for working with textual source code called github. Shame. And sad.
> I absolutely cannot stand how many people are employed in engineering and developer roles that know practically nothing. At times it reaches truly shameful levels.

Indeed. The proliferation of highly immature developer tools, web framework hype, entitlement and coasting is what we have been left with.

There needs to be a brutal crash to test them. "Vibe coding" is another example of the bullshit that has come out of another bubble waiting to collapse.
There's so much here to discuss that we could only ever touch on the surface level, but let's give it a go.

Let's first start with what I understand to be the premise- that private industry and governments are two worlds (ie your worlds colliding idea). Let's explore this from the other side: Private industry should never compete with the government.

We don't need bottled water- tap is fine, and it competes with government water.

Commercial radio and TV stations should not exist in countries that have a public station.

Doctors and nurses should never work in private clinics where government offers medical services, or supplementary insurance should not exist.

Back to government, though. Government should do what's best for the citizenry. It might make a public bridge to compete with a commercial ferry service. Or it might mean offering cheap Internet to compete with exploitive ISPs.

Proprietary software like this is an effective tax on the citizens, but a commercial one. Governments can fund a public alternative for a small amount of money. Why not?
OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil: "Coding Will Be Automated This Year" [video]
Hijacking this thread: what's currently the cheapest way to get structured data out of a PDF?

I assume there's some reasonable tool out there to convert PDFs to Markup and than feed it to some LLM API with okay costs (Gemini? DeepSeek?). Any suggestions?
If you use MacOS, you can get some of that black-and-white feeling back by going into System Settings > Accessibility > Display, scroll down to Colour Filters, turn it on, change Filter type to Greyscale and set Intensity to High. I do this on my personal computer to try and make it less compulsive at weekends, to remind me that it's just a tool, and that there are other interesting things to do with my time. I'm probably getting old, but I also find this more restful to look at. Sometimes you need the colours because apps rely on it: although I can't remember how I did it now you can add an Accessibility Shortcuts item to the menubar which allows you to turn the Colour Filters on and off with a click, drag and release on Colour Filters.

I also use that filter on iOS to tone down the colours by setting the Intensity of the same filter at a much lower level - I find the standard colours really garish when I turn them back on (e.g. when looking at photos). On iOS you can set a three-click shortcut on the action button to turn that on and off.

Edit: I forgot, there's also an "Increase contrast" setting there which makes the UI even closer to the older MacOS look, but although it does give different areas more differentiation I find it a bit too harsh - I think because it's just flat black and white, whereas the older systems used more greyscale textures.
I offer a POV that is in the middle: reasoning is powerful to evaluate which solution is better among N in the context. Memorization allows sampling of many competing ideas from the problem space, than the LLM picks the best, making chain of thoughts so effective. Of course zero shot reasoning also is a part of the story but somewhat weaker, exactly like we are not often able to spit the best solution before evaluation of the space (unless we are very accustomed to the specific problem).
No, it doesn't.

First, you create the tools you need with the money your people give you. Then, you give back the tools you created to the public and/or everyone who needs them.

You keep your data in your own data center, use the tools which squarely fills the needs of your workers and people, and you share its maintenance with the outside users.

It's a win-win-win (country, its workers, people in the world). WWW is developed the same way, Europe's open data repository Zenodo (https://zenodo.org) is built the same way, alongside countless science tools.

We shouldn't be afraid of governments doing cool things. Heck, most if not all supercomputer centers in the US and around the world are government funded, and free for scientists.

Moreover, the project is licensed MIT to enable to be "taken and ran with it" by private sector. From the README.md:

> While Docs is a public driven initiative our licence (sic) choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use, sell and contribute to the project.
The only reason software engineers are able to be paid so much at all is because of “capitalism” and “free trade” I.e. vacuuming up money from the rest of the world, we sell them ads and “SaaS” and “intellectual property” while they sell us food and clothes. Would be a bad day for me personally and our profession in the US when that stops
It started as a naive ‘please improve yourself’ prompt approach, but now I’m embedding multiple evolution strategies directly into each tool, allowing more sophisticated adaptation and versioning.
> Also: is America just vastly more expensive than Europe?

Yes.

In my family I am under employed and my wife is an elementary teacher. Health insurance for us costs $800 every month. A car is required and so is the gas to drive it. We have two 7 year old Toyotas and insurance on them is $100 a month.

It’s a lot more overhead and risk mitigation compared to the better nations like yours that care for their people.
Vision related tasks like Waymo self driving cars and then also productivity enhancement like coding assistance and writing.
Then you should bet on it if you are so confident.

Even if casual usage happens with employees which is questionable already, the real money would be from corporate adoption which is highly unlikely even from a European country, the risks are too high for data leaks.
One additional piece of advice I'd offer (maybe you agree) is that feeding your passions can be done more effectively in lean organizations. Larger organizations usually have more resources, but they also tend to operate with less speed and contain a workforce where each individual has less agency. The lack of agency affects not only employees at the bottom, but also management across the org, which can complicate the search for the right stakeholders.
This looks very much like Polytopia

https://polytopia.io/
And while some of the "pampering" is excessive, an awful lot of it is just "giving your valuable employees, the ones who actually do all the work that makes you money, a good place to work that's conducive to creative work and solid work-life balance."

Like...being bought the best equipment for the job they're doing? Making high-quality foods available on-site? Even something as simple as having great desk chairs, I can say from frustrating personal experience, can make a huge difference.
Loss of Words • A Nested Journey ( 1 in The `itertools` Series • `product()`)
It's a little like products that brands themselves as a "Jira replacement". Yes, you got the basic functionality down, but so does a hundred other projects. You're not really dealing with the hard problems or the advanced features. Maybe in the future yes, but a replacement... a potential future replacement maybe.
Integrating a vector DB is on the roadmap for advanced embedding lookups and improved semantic search; current storage is just a placeholder.
"Me buy milk" - https://youtu.be/N4vf8N6GpdM?si=ENOIbip3xDuRI9yJ
Kevin Weil (OpenAI CPO) Interview Summary

- Models: Not commoditized but evolving rapidly. Intelligence increasing, costs dropping 10x yearly. GPT-5 will merge GPT and reasoning model series.

- Coding Automation:

- O1 Preview: ~millionth best programmer

- O1: ~thousandth best

- O3 (upcoming): 175th best globally

- Will surpass humans at programming this year/next, not 2027 as Anthropic suggested

- Deep Research:
OpenAI's best product since ChatGPT. Provides capabilities users couldn't achieve alone.

- Model Strengths:

- GPT-4.5: Better at writing, human-like interaction

- O1/O3: Better at reasoning, structured problems

- Large models encode more "subtlety and nuance"

- Future Applications:

- AI tutoring for personalized education

- Robotics as the next frontier

- Creation Value: Expertise + AI will still outperform.
Value shifts toward idea generation, management, and quality assessment.
The replies are hilariously illustrative of your point. Why do you guys keep working for theese evil capitlists taking away the bilions of value you generate and leaving you with pitiful hundreds of thousands (+free snacks)? You should start a cooperative or something.
Local OpenAI compatible Grok 3 server with a client, CLI and proxy
love grok3?
can't wait for official api?

now you can run an openai-compatible proxy for all of your "local model" needs.

currently using it as my custom provider in repoprompt

pkg includes: client, cli, and proxy
Probably explains Trump's moves: Force out all the illegal immigrants doing low value work, kill off as much fluff in the government as you can to cut the debt load, those unemployed people are forced to fill in the low value labor. You've solved all the problems and everyone except the capital owners are worse off..but at least the capital owners live to see another day.
https://xcancel.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1900537267308937416
It’s more an aspirational vision than a claim of immediate readiness; the goal is eventually to support real-world, robust use cases but it’s still an early-stage project.
Just give it 3-4 years. Many of these "side-projects" are powering quite a portion of the web and elsewhere. Software requires maintenance, bug fixing, updates, etc...
At this point I’m no longer shocked by shoddy poor defaults for elements or “user agent style” as they like to call it.