skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their thirst to regulate everything and everyone like they did with GDPR and the gatekeeper legislation?

The EU has been a massive force of good for consumer rights

As a programmer maybe we weren't meant to just be able to have a "thirst" to store "everything and everyone's" data forever. Just implement the GDPR deletion and the data export batch.
That is the first mention of a Challenger 1 I’ve seen in quite a long time. My parents bought my older brother a Challenger 1p around 1978 and I learned to program on it. That thing was literally a tank. My brother had soldered on a joystick controller and hooked up our Sears pong paddle controller to it and showed me how to PEEK at the right address to read the value. It felt like magic to a 7 year old.
Not trying to throw shade on the article because I think its worth reading, but also important to note that the "good times" he's describing in tech never really existed to begin with for most people working in the tech industry or doing software development generally.

I'm not going to ascribe it to "FAANG" as the freedoms he's describing existed beyond that literal set of companies, but they didn't really extend that much wider relative to the entire tech industry.

Working for a company that would be happy paying you to do things that don't pretty directly lead to expected profit was always a very privileged situation.
The sense of infinity becomes more prevalent when looking at the image and all the tendrils stretching out. For the same reason, the idea that those tendrils trace back to the main body via infinitely thin channels always gives me the willies. A mandelbrot image makes me recall a statement someone once made about how not only is the universe strange, it's even stranger than we can imagine.
> a manager who could remote-log-in to my machine at random times to spot-monitor my work

Is that a British thing? I've only ever heard that from people working in the UK, but there it doesn't seem to be uncommon.
This sounds like a good technique that can be fully automated. I wonder why this isn't the default behavior or at least something you could easily request.
The UK has Government Digital Services (GDS), which has built and open sourced all the good bits of gov.uk: https://github.com/alphagov
This seems silicon valley based. To me the real good times everywhere else ended in the early 90s.
> Providing value to the company gets you rewarded

This is the part that is no longer true. The focus on individual contributors remains with your direct manager but don’t go much further. Execs always try to zoom out and save more money in different ways. So here come the offshoring and layoffs.
I came to say exactly this. I was sucked right into this. I am looking forward to reading more thoroughly and understanding it better.
There are multiple threats associated with privacy invasion but the most immediate and obvious is to your wallet.

Privacy invasion and personalized advertising will almost certainly be followed by personalized pricing with the insurance industry being one enthusiastic early adopter.

When people say they don't care about privacy ask them if they care about paying more.

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/are-you-ready-personaliz...
The times for "resume driven development" are over, yes. And I'd argue that's a good thing - there just isn't any money left to develop "the next hot database" or whatnot, with hype chasers forcing developers to reinvent the wheel and make all sorts of basic errors that other mature tech has long since passed again.

Maybe the industry can now focus on making the hype tech of the last 20 years finally somewhat stable and secure again before the next boom-bust iteration hits...
For me, delivering value is acquiring new skills which I can use to augment my existing skills. Beside backend development (my main skill) and frontend, I am trying to learn more devops/infrastructure, a bit of data engineering, more cloud specific functionality and some people management.

I think there is some value to be had in "jack of all trades, master of one" strategy. If I would be an employer, I would hire someone like me. :)
There has been a large influx of new software developers over the last 15 years. All fighting for the jobs, which lower their value to employers.
Right, there was a time that many older rockers seemed "too old to rock and roll" but as you say, they have learned from all their successes and mistakes so they have it down to a science. My wife had an amazing time at a Bruce Springsteen concert similarly.
what people mean by an "unbiased" model is a model that just reflects the underlying distribution in the data.
Unexpectedly nuanced points.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43256349

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/science/usgs-eros-archive-...

https://tech.marksblogg.com/satellogic-open-data-feed.html

https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/
That's really what these are: something analogous to JPEG for language, and queryable in natural language.

Tangent: I was thinking the other day: these are not AI in the sense that they are not primarily intelligence. I still don't see much evidence of that. What they do give me is superhuman memory. The main thing I use them for is search, research, and a "rubber duck" that talks back, and it's like having an intern who has memorized the library and the entire Internet. They occasionally hallucinate or make mistakes -- compression artifacts -- but it's there.

So it's more AM -- artificial memory.

Edit: as a reply pointed out: this is Vannevar Bush's Memex, kind of.
Honestly , I think people will misjudge me when I say this , but these reasons are the reason why I am frugal.

My economic condition can change drastically , it just depends on the market , how is your "friend" entitled to 150-200K ? Because of our "expectations" (Amazon , google are the best companies so "best" + phd , phd means you are in academia so more "smarter")

But our "expectations" are now changing , mine certainly changed , but instead of panicking (because lets be honest? whats the point of panicking?)
We can try to be frugal. We can try to live in a way where my salary doesn't really matter that much , I can live off of any salary but the only difference b/w big salary and low salary might be the fact that your savings increase which you invest in things like index funds (boglehead investing) and the only difference it makes is on what age you can retire (thus , being a point on ageism)

I might also think that after a age , person can get a little less ambitious and more rigid , so more flexibility early on (in mid 30's) can be absolutely great but for that you need good saving habits / being frugal in your 20's.

I also believe that frugality is sometimes seen as not being ambitious or I live life only once and for that I have to say that I agree , I am frugal mostly because I have seen / just feel this tingle for spending money where my mind .

Of course , you don't have to be frugal over like a $ , but just changing your mindset & hobbies from being materialistic to non materialistic and being satisfied .

What I personally can't be is a frugal who constantly switches / worries about light bulbs / appliances just to save 2 cents or people who don't eat outdoor to save money (unless its in literally 5 star and I also believe that going to dine in full time also sucks , I just like to eat burgers , pizzas , chips etc. but some people can be really that level of frugal .

I just want to have a decent life reading good books with emergency funds and funds invested. I would try to maximize my income , but I wouldn't chase it as my ultimate goal , the ultimate number.
I might earn less but if I am working on one of my passion ideas on some company , I am down.
> there's other sectors, and other markets that are still growing just fine.

Like what (except AI of course)? I am not working in ad tech, but it doesn't feel good either.
And the AI Act with the FLOPs limit?

Or the Cybersecurity Act increasing liability for selling software complete with a box-ticking exercise to force money into consultants?

Or the DSA creating loads of bureaucracy for "algorithmic" content when almost everything is an algorithm?
This kind of math betrays a total lack of understanding of the way businesses earn money. With vanishingly few exceptions, no one developer makes the company $500m, and this is trivially testable with a quick thought exercise:

Would Google's bottom line drop by ($500m - $devSalary) if that developer were to quit this year?

Of course not! In most cases Google's bottom line wouldn't even notice if Google failed to replace them, but if their job was really important and they did have to replace them, they still wouldn't notice that it was someone else and not that one dev.

This suggests that the dev isn't actually what's making Google $500m/employee, it's the systems that make up Google that are making Google $500m/employee. Any one employee doesn't actually contribute nearly that much to the functioning of the system, otherwise every company would make $500m per developer.

So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
This is from the Covid Timeline on Wikipedia:

>According to an ABC news report, the American National Center for Medical Intelligence shared intelligence in late November, based on analysis of wire and computer intercepts and satellite images, regarding a potential respiratory disease in Wuhan. This was denied by the Pentagon.[4] On 13 March 2020, the South China Morning Post reported that Chinese government records suggest that the first case of infection with COVID-19 could be traced back to a 55-year-old Hubei resident on 17 November.

Now, I swear to god I passed over a news item about a respiratory illness spreading around Wuhan in late November, and that people were being quarantined. It sounded serious, I wondered what it's chances were of spreading everywhere. I did some googling around, I learned about the Wuhan institute of Virology, it's relationship with other biosafety level IV labs around the world, and NIH funded gain-of-function research happening there.

A couple months later when the rest of the world was paying attention, I went to look up the information and couldn't find any of it. I gave up on trying to sort fact from fiction because there was so much bullshit going around.
It may have been good times for software engineers, but arguably a lot of harm has been done to society thanks to disruption and blitz scaling culture
Thanks, I've done it with jquery and ajax get request but it feels so outdated, especially when operating on such big abstraction layer that ASP.NET MVC is
It seems vaguely planned: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/issues/724
Been in the industry for 20 years. Things are always up and down.

Honestly I prefer the leaner times. Less clowns trying to cash in and more focus of engineering value, as it should be.

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.
I think the article is mostly spot on. Software engineering got detached from business goals, then forced business goals to move its way in the easy money times. The advice to software engineers to focus on building what executives request instead of trying to tell executives what must be built is good.

The only thing I do not agree with is over focusing on ZIRP. Money pumping into the economy can have other forms and switched from monetary (bank lending) to fiscal (government printing) with quantitative easing strategies. Some beneficiaries changed, software is a step or two lower on that ladder, but we are still in the "plentiful money" state if you check world or your country M2 levels. And a lot of that money eventually pumps tech. The real sobering (when it is critical to be a key contributor to a profitable business or have an FU path thought through) starts when pumps inflating M2 stop. My 2c.
I worked at Facebook for half a decade during its golden period and there were a lot of people who shared your sentiment.

…in fact, when some folks suggested engineers organize, the types who complained about worker entitlement remarked: “we make enough, why would we organize?”

This perspective of worker entitlement is really harmful to labor, I assure you that the execs rarely talk about entitlement as they issue bonuses to themselves now while simultaneously embracing rolling layoffs.

Now engineers are working to obsolete themselves with AI and reduce their bargaining power permanently for the promise of a post-scarcity AGI facilitated future that is all but guaranteed. But they’re just entitled, that’s the problem.
so weird to see people blogging about how great tech has been throughout their whole career because they weren't yet working in 2008 or 2000
> What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area).

Did they? Because Google and Facebook revenues are still growing and at ATH. What happened is that they decided to divert more of that juice to their investors rather than their developers.
AI's Naughty Side: A Phase or Its Innate Nature?
Cash logistics typically cost much more than credit card fees no matter where you are located [0]. In the US, explicit cash deposit fees are typically only at ~0.1-0.3% (as a consumer you don't see these but check out a business fee schedule), but there's a lot more that goes into cash logistics, including transport, the risk of counterfeiting, internal and external theft, etc.

Cash discounts in the US are mostly a way to encourage the customer to collude in tax evasion. It's not an actual comparison of costs.

[0] see e.g. https://sbecouncil.org/2024/07/01/the-cost-of-cash/ for a US based analysis. this is even before you consider increased spend when people use cards.
At least when I look, YT premium says it is $140/year (or $276/year for a family plan), and Netflix is $216/year. Spotify is $144/year. It's certainly possible to find drives at ~$10/TB. Call it $15/TB if you don't get a great deal and if you want to add some parity.

The more interesting point though is that at ~5 GB/hour (a decent bitrate, especially for youtube) and $15/TB, you're looking at ~$0.075/hour of video. If something isn't worth $0.08 to keep, is it worth your time to watch? This is probably a question media companies would prefer you not ask yourself.
Your salary is not about moral desserts but about how much value or money you bring to someone else.

That’s why a laborer gets paid a few dollars for a backbreaking day of work and Matt Damon makes a million dollars for holding a can of Pepsi and smiling for the camera for 15 minutes.
>Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers".

Google is like a reverse Robin Hood.
It steals data from the users. The customers are the ones buying that data.
Their special skill is ensuring they are the place where all ad money goes by being better at getting eyeballs for that money and being better at targeting ads to those eyeballs. Many many many companies have tried to usurp one or both sides of that without success.

You may not like their business model but they are objectively very good at what they do.
It's been a while. I need to dig my history. If I can find the link, and it's alive, I'll link it here.
I've seen a DOS interface for the browser talked about on HN before. I know I've seen at least one that was really impressive but I can't find the link... it was in a comment. And it wasn't one of the ones you mentioned I don't think.

Ahhh, here ya go: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28804309

There may be more too: https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/

Edit: I also found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418424
> But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable

Your compensation is dominated by the function of supply of and demand for labor, not how much the company makes from your labor.
Thanks! It is definitely not the cleanest code I've written but I'm slowly making it cleaner and ready for OSS contributions. Learned a ton along the way too, which makes this all worth it nevertheless.

I'll use the common excuse: I jotted this project down for myself without the thought of publishing it ^^
Watching the Bay Area from over the Atlantic was always a very bewildering experience. I honestly think you guys now get something closer to the reality of European startups, where we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€!

The sentiment of the OP resonates with me; it’s closer aligned with reality, and building a product that actually produces value, that needs to satisfy customers, is both a rewarding and a humbling experience.
Not what I said. Have you ever seen plumbers being treated as rock stars?

And maybe I even implied that software engineers are the lesser thing here, because LLMs can't do hard plumbing yet.
> Directly converting skin cells to brain cells yields 1k% success

That's nothing. For most politicians, converting brain cells to skin cells yields a 100k% success (whatever that means - math is hard when you're a journalist). /s
Good article!

The only missing bit around COVID was that the cost of the economic policies which were implemented by governments caused an inevitable interest rate increase.

Sure, we can argue that the response to COVID was planned in a certain way on purpose and that powerful hands could have used another excuse to get to where we are now (just press more the pedal on government spending, illegal immigration, wars, green policies) - but that's what happened.
China started rising when it allowed capitalism in its special economic zones. Private capital had a big part in it. Shenzhen was given that status in the early 80s.
During ZIRP the incentives for employees were completely disconnected from the underlying business, leading to entire careers being built around and rewarded for the wrong outcomes. People have built entire careers while completely missing/ignoring why they're doing the job and how their work is supposed to fit and contribute to the overall business - because in a lot of cases there was never a viable business to begin with, and the founders themselves were playing the "career startup founder" card and enjoying the mismatched incentives set up by a distorted funding market.

Now we're seeing a readjustment as the "free money" is gone and companies realign the incentives to actually make a profit on all that manpower, and are suddenly realizing they either have way too much of it, or ended up with the wrong kind of manpower due to over a decade of mismatched incentives. Thus layoffs and a jobs market flooded with candidates whose skillsets no longer match the current demands.

The good times for the career software engineer - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there's still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career problem solver. Being able to get machines to do your bidding is still a very useful skill to pretty much all business, and what matters now is delivery and solving the business problem in a profitable manner - how many tech buzzwords you have on your resume is no longer relevant.

This isn't to say it's anyone's fault - I don't blame anyone for playing the game and I myself took part in it at one point. But you need to realize it's a game and plan your exit. The danger is that there's an entire generation that started their career in this game and did not realize it was a game at all, and are now caught off-guard.
Russia already has its own propaganda units. Having one under Trump would be redundant.
Agreed, it's bizarre what's happening there. Perhaps a bellweather that something deeper than interest rates (which have been dropping) is going on.
Why am I starting to believe that france is now more culturally shited towards being a new super power in this multi polar world instead of USA.

Seriously , I never used to really think about france that much , but Emmanuel Macron correcting trump on live air really made me trust france more as a non US citizen.
It is hard to get a man to understand that which his salary depends on him not understanding.

-Upton Sinclair
I’m grateful for your assistance.
I really miss the ZIRP days when every company had some robotics R&D bototmless money pit
> implemented in Verilog from scratch in one night

Cool, but the "night" actually started in 2018 and lasted over seven years and 384 commits so far ;-)
So, fairly accurate if you're Chinese?
Sketch-of-Thought: Efficient LLM Reasoning
Yeah free food is a really good way to spend money on your employees. Just the cost of people walking to get food makes it worthwhile to provide on site.
Not sure if typo:

> Tech companies were thus incentivized to (a) hire like crazy, and (b) do a lot of low-risk high-reward things, even if that ends up wasting money.

"...HIGH-risk high-reward..." would make more sense in the context.
I'd answer but it seems you didn't read the first part of what I wrote or even the second part (I never said 500m/year). So not much point.
China's super-smart Tesla-killers
Plumbers are paid quite well and they deal with actual, literal shit. It is not glamorous work, but I would have to guess there is likely less disillusionment and burnout in plumbing overall compared to software.
Even with the apparent certainty you get from code like this, it's still ambiguous without external determination.

Example:

A newborn infant who, after commencement, is found abandoned in the United Kingdom shall, unless the contrary is shown. be deemed for the purposes of subsection (1)

(a) to have been born in the United Kingdom after commencement and

(b) to have been born to a parent who at the time of the birth was a British citizen or settled in the United Kingdom.

Notice the vague wording of this law: "unless the contrary is shown". Shown by whom? To what standard? What must be shown?

Much of this exists in commonlaw case law, but all of that would need to be codified into any sort of deciding program.

Perhaps a society could be built around this, but we'd have to build so. much. infrastructure. to manage the links between case law and overall law.
https://archive.ph/B7FuI
it seems that in private browsing (or generally if you're not logged in to GitHub) it doesn't show
Do I understand correctly that this means that browser will have to do yet another useless request to domains or website to know the GPC status in addition with the request required to retrieve the ressources ? In addition with OPTION requests that already have to be done?