skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These articles about work conditions in tech feel profoundly out of touch with the rest of the world. It's like reading a gazette from Mary Antoinette talking about how tough her life was (pre-revolution..)

The rest of the world outside of tech, looks at tech and sees a bunch of very overpaid developers with quite cushy perks...

Like sure, it would be great to unionise... But if tech workers don't acknowledge their privelege, they shouldn't be shocked when no-one else turnsout to support them.
At this point, the strongest (and almost only) predictor for a release announcement from OpenAI is a release announcement from Anthropic.
> something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.

I think a bigger issue is the difficulty of measuring correctness and quantity of individual output.

For a classic-style of union in manufacturing, the standardized widgets coming off an assembly line mean it's easier to determine which workers are being fired for actual-cause, versus the ones who need to be protected by the union because it's a kind of employer retaliation or stealth-downsizing.
There is a whole industry who is pushing for a couple of years now to tell us that they work, that they replace humans, that they work for search, etc. Saying "we don't expect to say the truth" is a little bit too easy.
If everyone was not expecting them to say the truth or just being accurate, they shouldn't have been designed as programs that speak with such authority and probably wouldn't be the target of massive investments.

So yeah, in principle I may agree with you, but in the socio-technical context in which LLMs are being developed, the argument simply does not work in my opinion.
Powerful people "speak softly and carry a big stick". Trump spoke loudly, then swung the stick that was given to him and proved to the rest of the world that the stick was a lot smaller than they believed it was.
> Last week President Trump held a public showcase of Tesla's cars at the White House. https://www.axios.com/2025/03/13/tesla-trump-white-house-mus...

What the heck?!? Has a president ever done anything like this before?

The only good thing is that while the president was selling cars is that he wasn't doing any other boneheaded thing at that moment. Let's keep the president selling cars.
I read this story and it struck me as suspicious for the same reason. Peter Roberts (an immigration attorney) commented on it here a few days ago:

> That's extraordinarily unusual and in my experience has only happened when CBP believes that the applicant was lying or has a criminal record so I wouldn't base the decision on where/how to apply on this very low risk. Depending on the TN application, there are better and worse ways to apply for a TN and from an outcome standpoint, sometimes it's better to apply with CBP at the border or with CBP at a U.S. airport by flying directly to the U.S.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43363854
Maybe this isn’t an article designed for “me”, but there is a sizable workforce of people who aren’t getting paid super high salaries for super high responsibilities.

I’m talking about the hourly tech employee. The customer support call center agent. The HVAC technician. The on-the-go consultant. Yes, it’s not glamorous, but it’s reliable, it not stressful, and it still has good benefits.
I don't think I've ever been on a forum that doesn't have comments to that effect regularly.

"It was better a few years ago, it's all going to hell now, we're becoming Reddit/4Chan/Slashdot"

It's the internet forum version of "the youth has gotten lazy, it weren't like this when I were a lad"
Yeah, great, give programming a high entry barrier for new people. One of the worst ideas I've heard today.
> "boys only club" in the 70s/80s/90s

> things have gotten better

If you read up on humanity, you'll likely find that it would be a bad idea to put money on any wager that this will end.
Why would you post detailed documentation on Reddit?
I am always listening to audio books but they are no good anymore after playing with this for 2 minutes.

I am never really in the mood for a different voice. I am going to dial in the voice I want and only going to want to listen with that voice.

This is so awesome. So many audio books have been ruined by the voice actor for me. What sticks out in my head is The Book of Why by Judea Pearl read by Mel Foster. Brutal.

So many books I want as audio books too that no one would bother to record.
I have a curated list of tech and science related newsgroups which work really well. No SPAM since Google Groups went to /dev/null.

Also, I often access FIDO over NNTP.
That's like saying you should abandon the Earth. There's a multitude of ways to be a part of and use The Internet.

Then again, there are those that believe Mars is the only answer.
> Books and summaries exist already of pretty much any topic you are mildly curious about.

That's absolutely not the case for many questions I've had LLMs answer for me so far.

Just as one example, I had one come up with a mathematical model for a specific retirement investment/taxation question I've had for years, and that is too niche to have any prior art publicly available. I've gotten as far as a spreadsheet with a vague approximation myself, with no way of validating my reasoning.

I've asked an LLM to model the same thing, once symbolically and once numerically in Python, and to run the numbers for a few sample values, again symbolically and numerically. This I then compared to my own spreadsheet.

Sure, I could have spent a few weeks more of studying finance textbooks or paid an accountant a few thousand dollars to do so, but it just wouldn't have been worth it to me. Big qualitative differences matter too sometimes.

> You can get a good understanding of any subject in the world in a week or so if you wish to.

Yes, but I don't have an infinite number of weeks in my life, nor an infinite number of motivated interns I can send out to search the web and sift through the results for me.
Magna Steyr to Sign Deals with XPeng, GAC Motor to Build Chinese EVs in Austria
It says "try on this page", but when I click nothing happens. I disabled ublock origin in chrome but still nothing. There are no contacts on the page as well. Feature descriptions are just images without an ability to select text. Is the product real?
A lot of GH actions teams were impacted by layoffs in November.

Example:

https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/2477#issuecomment-244...
So you think certain humans are bad.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean but twilio recordings supports dual channels already
I used to buy Debian DVD's when there was the freest Linux distro before GNUinos and now Trisquel.
The main thing a union does is shift power from the employer to the employee. How that power is used is up to each union, and its members.
I see. Thank you for the detailed response. It sounds to me that GPUs could be a better option if there was significantly more stability and standardization across the board, but we're really just not in that place.
Thanks for the effort, I appreciate it, but neither of those are actually calling for anyone to be guillotined. The first is a prediction of what could happen long in the future if certain behaviours continue to worsen and the latter is asking why guillotines aren't valid solutions. Both seem to have been delivered with tongues in cheek.

Have there been any comments suggesting CEOs "should be" guillotined as you claimed above?
this is a great example of the kind of things unions should talk about when doing tech organizing.

too often, unions pitch themselves on fixing problems that are low on the hierarchy of needs in a particular job (e.g., will this job kill/maim you? do you make enough money to feed yourself?) and it just doesn't resonate with the types of problems that tech folks have.

but pre-IPO equity deals are something that all employees hate and are completely powerless to change as individuals.
What's a better model to run on one GPU?
Just check for the existence of at least one odd digit mod 10^B for some well chosen B.

Here is a C program that does the verification up to 2^(10^10) in 30 seconds: https://gist.github.com/fredrik-johansson/8924e10e5d74e39109...

Edit: made it multithreaded, goes up to 2^(10^12) in nine minutes on 8 cores.
This is what conviction in your beliefs looks like.
That's just you making it up though.

Political-adjacent stories today:

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/03/17/british-colum...

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/20/tesla-musk-lutnick

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/20/business/tesla-cybertruck-rec...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422350

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/19/dutch_parliament_us_t...

Those aren't even all of them.

their associated HN comment pages are filled with political commentary.
Judge bars Musk's DOGE team from Social Security records in scathing ruling
Epica Awards 2024 Results: Morgenstern AS "The Blood League"
for the record, I feel like everything else you've said applies!
Exactly. That's a big issue.

Quite a big chunk of investors money flowing to tech, is flowing to the guy, who everybody here realizes by now is pretty much a con man.

So the natural conclusion, is that if you want to make money in tech, follow his example.

OR, we maybe could start saying very openly that most of it are blantant lies, smokes and mirrors. Real Robotaxi starting in less than 3 months ? Supposedly Tesla employees believe it's doable ? Or they know perfectly well it's just bullshit to pump up the price. Maybe, some Tesla employees, which no doubt are plenty on this site, could come forward and call it as it is.

But stock is still too high for that - for now, the stock options are still very nice. Let's see once the stock inevitably crashes (who knows when).
How about we apply the same yardsticks to the alleged benefits?
That came across as a largely angry rant instead of a reasoned appeal. With decades in the tech industry I never experienced the kind of problems described. Mostly it's been a lot of fun.
Does it have to be a suspension bridge for some reason?
Dagger.io does this out of the box:

- Everything sandboxed in containers (works the same locally and in CI)

- Integrate your build tools by executing them in containers

- Send traces, metrics and logs for everything at full resolution, in the OTEL format. Visualize in our proprietary web UI, or in your favorite observability tool
One thing that struck me when looking deeper into conspiracy theories is how some people manage to seek out the wrong truths, the blatant lies with apparent ease, like as if you could mix any number of true and proven statements from textbooks and science publications and hide a single fake one in there and people so inclined would always pick the lie and reject the truths as suspicious. It's almost as if it was really working in a backwards way, as though flat-earthers knew darn well that of course the world is undoubtedly round, and contrails are not 'chemtrails', which is precisely why they reject these views, as though their minds had developed an auto-immunity disorder. On a related note, a good portion of votes in the last^W latest U.S. election also apparently came from voters who tossed a ballot against their own best interest (65% voted for GOP in the town where they allegedly 'eat the dogs and cats').
I watched season 1 of severance. What did I miss? I don't remember any lessons on class consciousness
E-beam lithography is used for research purposes all the time, so yes it's already used for "dev-boards".

That said, apart from the economics (it is very slow), you are also constrained with respect to the size of what you can write, the writing fields is typically quite small, if you want to make a chip larger than that you need to stitch fields together and you have to deal with stitching errors (which becomes more and more difficult the smaller your structures are).
> Because for instance, you'll rent at 30%, but if there was honest market pressure (and lets face it, there isn't) why wouldn't someone else rent at 28%? Or 25%? etc.

They do! And then like all other markets, equilibrium is found, and that equilibrium point is what moves up as incomes move up.
i've recently been thinking about when in a start-ups lifecycle should employees consider unionizing.

it'd be great if a worker-friendly culture was instilled in the company from its earliest days, but i'm not sure if a) there's an effective minimum size needed to unionize or b) if the existence of a union would kill your ability to fundraise in the future
TRO: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577...

Ruling: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577...
This will take a change of attitude. I entered the industry right around the dotcom bust, when people were still making the jump from their 9-to-5 for whatever big or small company to seeking angel investment and starting their own business. My observation early in my career regarding unions and software engineers was "The first step would be for software engineers to stop thinking their biggest impediment to greatness isn't management; it's the underperforming slacker in the next cube over holding all the 10x engineers back."

But I think that change is coming. Enough engineers have gotten burned (or been through the startup washing machine enough times) to suspect that the profession as a whole needs to be able to self-advocate.
We'll be back to attestation in the browser (like Google's still-as-of-yet failed WEI proposal). It's coming.
Of *course* she has four other kids, it's like a scene out of Idiocracyp; something tells me they'll just have another kid to replace the dead one.
I might agree from the tech worker’s perspective, except to someone working in fast food flipping burgers, a tech worker making $200k/$400k/$1M+ might as well be in the 1%.
> billionaires at the top

Peter Turchin's research indicates this is not a good description of where the lines are. The elites are roughly the top ten percent and represent an important barrier. Billionaires are involved, but elites as a whole are more numerous and closer to the steep, stark social cliff face that defines the abyss.
> Even then, if I win, the money is going to be pointless as US dollar will tank hard.

You could always short the dollar, I guess?

I suspect Trump's policies will tank the dollar and thereby cause a swing against the Republicans larger than the most likely novice attempts by anyone in the US attempting to interfere with the election.

I don't think "being a dictatorship" will, by itself, put off investors. Only actual economic harm will do that.
AFAICT this isn't possible, unless you're OK with showing everyone the poisoned text.

TTBOMK there's nothing here that "detects botness" of an individual request, because in the limit, that's impossible -- if an attacker has access to many different IPs to make requests from (and many do), then any sequence of bot-generated requests from different IPs is indistinguishable from the same set of requests made by actual living, breathing humans (and vice versa).

So how does Anubis work against bots if it can't actually detect them? Because of the economics behind them: To justify creating a bot in the first place, you need to scrape a lot of pages, so paying a small electricity cost per page means you will need to pay a lot overall. Humans pay this too, but because we request a much smaller number of pages, the overall cost is negligibly low.
Plus in 2020 all the news outlets told us not to do our own research.
> How many years will it be before audio on the Linux OS doesn’t suck?

Bad example. It's a bad example because in order to achieve that Linux has has many, many sound API's over the years. Most of them interacted in bad ways. Often the new boy on the block had emulate all the previous ones to have a hope of being adopted. If a great, reliable sound system depended on the ability to iterate on API's Linux's should have been stellar in very short order.

That said, Linux's sound is very good now. Echoing other responses here, it's now much better than MacOS. Given your your "easy and painless" comment about it, I'm wondering it you've used a modern mac. "You can't hear me? Wait, while I turn sound off and or, restart the app, restart the laptop" is a very familiar ritual now work forces me to use a mac.

As for standard's causing ossification - you're wrong on that too. What causes ossification is a wide deployment. Once it's out there you can't change the API without breaking all the deployments. Yes, a successful standard means it's been widely deployed, but it doesn't cause it. Apple has so many watches out there it can't make breaking changes to the API it uses to talk to the iPhone. Publishing that API as a standard doesn't change that.

The way you fix API fragility isn't by avoiding standards. A successful API will become a defacto standard - whether you want it to or not. You fix the issue by designing your API's so they can be upgraded. This is why Google's Protocol Buffers allow you to add stuff at the end, and IP has a version field. Without those things API's based on Protocol Buffers would be hard to change, and we could never have had IPv6.
No, but I've seen a _lot_ of videos from people who don't know what aircraft look like at night. And a handful of off-the-shelf drones, probably flying around in response to the first group of videos.
'Don't call it zombie deer disease': infections spread across the US and globe
I've found for years that ctrl-b works pretty damn well in Rubymine as well as Goland. Huge advantage vs other editors 5+ years ago. I wonder if the difference is still as stark in the age of lsps?
> Destroyed

When you use words carelessly people ignore you.
AI inference is actually typically bandwidth limited compared to training, which can re-use the weights for all tokens <sequence length> * <batch size>. Inference, specifically decoding, requires you to read all of the weights for each new token, so the flops per byte are much lower during inference!
Hooks were great. But yeah eslint flat config is probably also better than the old format but we could have easily done without that breaking change you're right.

The churn is part of why I try to do mostly backend these days, especially with the current state of tooling. Like when react came out it was immediately clear it was going to be a mainstay, I can't imagine nextjs in it's current form to be around in a few years because it's very terrible and I want the metaframework dust to settle a bit before diving back in.
> This was outputting a lie, presented as a fact, to anyone in the world that searched the name.

I think you are wrong.

From my understanding, the complainant opened a new chat window and typed "who is forename surname?"

The daydream machine then daydreamed some output text, as is it's function.

Likewise, you can go now to any llm and ask it a specific question like "what is the minimal cheese principle?" (Which I've just made up) And many will daydream a consistent answer for you. As is their function
Just learnt about whiteout files from this, thanks! Trying to understand if you purposely included a filename into a layer with the same whiteout prefix “.wh.”, if it would mess with the process that is meant to obfuscate that prefix from subsequent layers.
It does depend on where you enter the country, at least in my experience (UK citizen, have visited a lot both on visa waivers and prior to that on visas, since the 80s).

Every time I've flown into Austin, TX, they've been super-nice. DC likewise. NYC/Newark are brusque but not nasty. San Francisco are scary. Boston on the one time I flew there was just horrendous, though that might have just been one agent who was having a bad day.
Yes, that’s correct. Secure, simple, standardized, predictable, robust. Adding a computer to the equation diminishes it in every single way.
From the Hacker News guidelines⁽¹⁾ (emphasis mine):

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

You should not be surprised when "mainstream" stories are flagged. Folks come to Hacker News for stuff they won't hear about on TV.

⁽¹⁾ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Agreed. Selective breeding is not GMO. Last time I was writing on this subject on HN it seems a lot of people ( mainly Americans ) were thinking GMO includes selective breeding.
> The market being the sum of iPhone end-users buying other stuff than iPhones.

Which seems a little ridiculously narrow doesn’t it? Why does any hardware vendor have an obligation to open all of their APIs and functionality to all comers just because they open some of them? Why is selling a highly sandboxed product not a valid thing to do? And especially why is that not valid when there is an entire other half+ of the market that is completely open and exactly the sort of free for all people are apparently looking for?

Ultimately it always comes down to this. Apple is one vendor, selling one piece of hardware that runs one OS. You can not buy or run iOS on anything other than Apple supplied phones. You can not run anything on an iPhone except an Apple supplied OS. Apple does not force carriers or retailers to exclusively carry Apple phones. They don’t require hardware manufacturers to buy iOS licenses even when they sell a phone without iOS. They don’t require 3rd party iOS developers to sign exclusivity contracts when developing for iOS. They don’t fine developers for making better versions of their software for other platforms. They don’t do those things for accessory manufacturers either. Apple sells Apple phones that run Apple software in a way that Apple feels is best for that phone. Why is this a problem? Yes I understand that iPhone users who want a pebble smart watch are given a worse experience. But they don’t have to use an iPhone. Nothing at all stops them from buying any of the hundreds of Android phones on the market and having the ultimate pebble smart watch experience. This whole thing feels like the equivalent of demanding the government force GM to support CarPlay. GM has decided they don’t want to do that. They think they can sell a better product without it. That might suck for people who want a Chevy and also want to use CarPlay, but is that really unfair competition and worthy of government regulation to force GM to open up their in-car entertainment systems?
I made $450k TC in my last job. In Atlanta. I don't think we need unions to be treated well.

Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career. Just like every other place unions exist without a talent monopoly (manufacturing, automotive, and most recently film crews).

Google is going to hire in developing markets and stop hiring domestically. Everyone else will follow. The talent in India is incredible these days. You can't knock them or call them less talented than US engineers. They're rock solid. And there are lots of other talented worldwide markets for software engineering.

Without antitrust action from the DOJ/FTC, big tech will continue to crush domestic startups too or create a ceiling for how large they can grow in our market.

And if unions lead to offshoring happening, we're fucked.
I had a similar conversation with my CEO today - how does the incoming crop of college grads deal with the fact AI can do a lot of entry level jobs? This is especially timely for me as my son is about to enter college.

So I ended up posing the question to Claude and the response was “figure out how to work with me or pick a field I can’t do” which was pretty much a flex.
Wind turbine remains may be 'most surprising' fossils for far future generations
In Russian, OpenAI audio models usually have a slight American (?) accent. The intonation and the phonetics fall into the uncanney valley. Does the same happen in other languages?
I think soy milk tastes better than almond milk