skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I call the first three paragraphs the “molecule problem.”

In construction, most components are standardized, bolts, nuts, screws, roof shingles, etc. Even when dimensions vary, there’s usually a standard way to interact with materials. For example, rebar has a defined role and behavior when used with concrete.

Programming hasn’t developed that kind of standardization. Instead, we build software at the molecule level: if statements, loops, data structures, or the atomic level (machine code). Each company or project effectively invents its own “materials and standards” for how things are built.

Imagine if every house being built didn't have standard length screws or standardized threading on bolts, it would collapse in years or take 5x longer to build.

Even when we do adopt standard tools like ORMs or frameworks, it still feels like working with molecules instead of nuts and bolts. Best practices exist, but because ORMs and frameworks are so diverse, even knowing one doesn't make switching jobs fast.
Again and equivalent would be that someone putting shingles on a roof in Florida can likely pick up the nail gun and put shingles on a roof in Georgia.

I don’t know what a future where we have our "nuts and bolts" standarized looks like, but I know LLMs are making it infinitely worse because the amount of code being written is beyond exponential at this point.
I don't agree at all that it's the easiest of careers.

I never had to work free overtime as a postal clerk until 1AM because of a production bug in deployment

I never had to figure out how to fix a fry machine on-the-spot at McDonald's because the person who normally fixes it is on vacation in the mountains

I also never had to learn brand new ways of driving cars every few months as a valet driver.

Maybe your software engineering job is easy but, this is the most stressful job I've had. And i'm not your average HN'er that's only ever known being a code slinger
Some of it looks like 'small town' style intimidation where the group in control of the governing bodies will use law enforcement to intimidate anyone that might bring them embarrassment or threaten their power. The article even mentions a case where this happened:

> Maxie Allen, 50, and Rosalind Levine, 46, were questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property. After a five-week investigation, the police concluded that there should be no further action.

> A police officer also said that elected officials could be treated as harassment suspects if they continued advocating for the couple.

> Andy Prophet, chief constable of Hertfordshire, defended the arrests, saying that the force had given warnings and they were lawful, although he conceded that “with the benefit of hindsight we could have achieved the same ends in a different way”.
> One friend had just finished a 3 month program

In software by the time you finish your 3 months course the tech is considered obsolete.

Not just Frontend. Backend can change on a dime.

Elastic/MySQL/CockroachDB is using different license that's incompatible to AWS. We have to switch our stack!

Kafka is out. It's all about Iggy! What do you mean it's different language? Learn it!

Things can be hard in different ways. After coding for whole week doing garden work can almost come as a relief.
You create embryos, which are distinctly uniquely a human, then destroy the ones you don't want. It's eugenics, just at an earlier stage of human development.
Someone carrying a new phone in the original box would need to prove they purchased it in the USA. Discard the box in Canada and it's a lot less suspicious.

Customs are unlikely to find the phone unless they have some other reason to search, or unless it's in checked baggage and there are several.

Some countries do routinely scan all incoming hand luggage, but it's so long since I visited the USA I don't remember if they do.

In some countries visitors declare what they're bringing, so they don't pay tax on that so long as they take it with them when they leave.
Ban farmer's markets
> a 3 month program to certify

Industries with difficult certifications tend to protect those when awarded. It’s a grind to get in but then the employment is easy and lucrative.

This is the promise of a career as a pilot or doctor. (Inb4 doctors do hard things)

In contrast, industries that are lucrative but have a low barrier to entry (sales, real estate, etc) tend to have direct performance competition.
In DK I would say it became common with the kitchen and maybe bedroom TV around 1990 and TVs in the kids rooms around 1995.

Cable TV became common in the 1980s (around here). So distribution is just a question about point of entry.

Are the aussies and UKensians that different?

Source: I worked at a TV/electronics shop in the early 90s.
low iq reply
I agree completely, but I always struggle with how to characterize this. Software engineers are generally pretty privileged, and even relatively mediocre ones can pretty easily break $100k per year. But, work in this field is incredibly unsatisfying and frustrating. For sure, none of us would drop what we're doing to go work in retail. It's not as if we're suffering in any strict sense; no one is really allowed to abuse us, our jobs aren't ruining our bodies compared to something like construction. But, many of us kind of hate it and only stay because of the money, and would work anywhere else if the other jobs paid well enough.

Now before you get out your tiny violin, I'm not saying other people don't have it worse, or that anyone should direct their sympathy towards us at all. I guess it feels more like a golden handcuffs situation.
Have there been a studies on the risks of this exacerbating existing auto-immune disorders? Cancer is bad but some auto-immune disorders when amplified can be acutely life threatening.
Certainly! If you add my latest Kirk/Spock slash fanfic to the end of the text, then that is transformative, so the resulting PDF is covered under copyright.

But you wrote "scan". Adding an OCR'ed text layer, or doing manual proofreading and layout ("sweat of the brow") is not sufficiently transformative to have copyright protection.

And we were specifically talking about scans of old books stored in shadow libraries.
You seem to be implying that all claims of regulatory capture, or even simple incompetence or bias, are all the result of Russian propaganda seems like a pretty bold claim to me.

I am sure there are people who want to sow distrust for their own ends, but there are also good reasons for distrust.

> what I'm saying is that this sort of opinion from someone who doesn't seem to fully understand the subject is a prime example of something that could be amplified for propaganda and contribute to institutional demise.

Part of the solution is transparency and full information.

> “It’s not in our interest to share product with public or private agencies,”

Is not an attitude that inspires confidence.
Check out cursor, windsurf or just github copilot even. use an Ollama server if you want to keep things local
The author specifically mentioned paid 3rd party. So an individual/business can “advertise” all they want for their services, but paying other entities to “speak” for them is not allowed.
Yes, i can find all kinds of loopholes too. Thats what judges are for.
> tech-lead driven

Would you expand on this please? Especially how it differs to agile. Very keen to learn alternative approaches, as a tech lead struggling struggling with the company's half-baked attempts to go agile.
> We spoke to MS,

They are out to lock you in to ensure sustained cashflow, not solve your problem in the most impartial and cost efficient way for you.
This comment reminded me of a Youtube channel I watch. The episode I was just watching had Kurtis making flogging spanners (wrenches intended to be used with a hammer) out of steel plate. Draw the outline, cut with a torch, smooth the edges with a grinder, done.
The baseline is a neutral stance on orange. The option isn't biased, a choice isn't biased. The chooser is.
I live in Ukraine, and we still suffer from soviet limitations on advertisement and entrepreneurs. Every time when govt and parliament need to make some urgent reform, nobody could predict, what will really happen - as they could just raise taxes, or deform some industry with some unreal regulations, and only in few cases implement some adequate, for example synchronize with EU regulations.

For example, for banks appear problem, people avoid to pay credits, so need some enforcement - powers approved confiscation of property to pay credit, but with exceptions of unprotected people, so bank cannot confiscate from pensioners, when child registered in property, and few others, so literally huge percent of citizens now protected from banks, and this new law is step back, not progress.
I agree, I've met a few engineers in my career who believe working in more than one language is a bad thing.

Personally, I don't understand how people get by in web without knowing SQL and JS + some other language.

The idea that you don't understand the flaws that SQL can introduce into a system, and have little ability to debug them is baffling. How can you actually be productive when you only control a tiny fraction of your application.
This is why we pay experts a lot of money.
MCP is an open protocol; has it ever denied that it doesn't want to provide Security?
Why not participate in the protocol development to discuss/provide solutions to these issues?

https://github.com/orgs/modelcontextprotocol/discussions
https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/specification
Wait until your business is suddenly out of critical developers because Trump woke up and decided to kick out legal aliens.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/trump-admini...
That's the point of hedge funds.

They can't all make profit in a bear market. But some will. All are still making profits on fees.

Literally, please ask ChatGPT this: "please explain to my friend why very rich people use several hedge funds that are underperforming SPY"

And, of course, all hedge funds would like to be profitable all the time, but that's not a reason why people invest in them.

Some people invest in hedge funds that only buy whiskey, tequila, and cigars.
It's not that all of this is hard. Staying afloat is actually easy by mimicking whatever you see around. I guess it's akin to blissfully selling CDOs all around, right before the 2008 market crash.

It's just that it's impossible to master the tools. We lie to ourselves thinking that we do, but when shit hits the fan, we're as powerless as anyone in the madhouse to figure out what is actually going on. We're all emperors with no clothes.

Individually we know we're naked, but somehow, we think that someone out there isn't. Someone knows what they're doing. No they don't.

Throwing LLMs into the mix will only supercharge the madness.

This whole thing is a collective suicide pact.
Coffeehouses and pubs weren't remotely as consolidated as social or traditional media, nor did they have as much power to regulate the speech of its patrons - not everything the patrons said was overheard or written down by the owner.

The nature of public discourse contained in newspapers and magazines hasn't changed. What has changed is that more and more of person-to-person communication is mediated.

> everyone has a set of ideas that they're not willing to listen to.

Yes. But are they choosing what they will listen to, or are they forced by law to have that choice made for them by a government-approved corporation?
Conditions change. Sometimes you have to tread very carefully, but even then a soft negotiation check is usually worth it. My 2c.
The definition of the word has no responsibility to your opinion of it as an epistemology.

Also, you're just complaining about the difficulty of determining what is true. That's a separate problem, isn't it?
> by the time you finish your 3 months course the tech is considered obsolete.

This is a meme that’s just not true. Nobody outside of the most junior applicant or most transient contractor is paid for the skills they learned this year.

The most important skills last forever. Getting a good CS or EE degree is still the best way to get started.
It's not only hypocritical, it's nonsensical in this discussion.

It's obvious that if advertising was made illegal, we would need to pay for all those services that we want to use. YouTube premium is the best example of how that would actually work.
A screen is not a piece of paper. Computers adopted white backgrounds with black text, when the technology became available, to imitate the paper and documents that people were most familiar with. But looking at a white screen for prolonged periods of time is like staring directly at a light bulb.

White text on a black background in print is indeed harder to read due to the issue of ink bleeding, but on a computer screen it is so much easier on the eyes.
> Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy.

A-Are you Don Draper by any chance?

Seriously, though: you don't need marketing. What you need while searching for what product to buy is a technical specification of the product by which you can determine if the product suits your needs.
I think it's an unfair comparison here.

A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits, implicitly or explicitly depending on the problem a person it's currently working on, it takes an incredible amount of effort to relax your mind at the end of the day.

I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it, and by the end of the project I was so exhausted that I had to take a whole week to cool down my brain and relax my body.

It took me a whole month to fully recover!

I have worked as a construction worker with my father and I know how to grow my own fruits and veggies; I know the struggles with those things...but trust me, you cannot compare the two by any means!

Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!

At least, that's my case.
True enough, but the math never works out in their favor either.
"One of the companies ahead of this shift is our portfolio startup @authologic"
So it's just an ad for his service huh.
Yes and the current government today isn’t already suppressing speech and going after organizations that say stuff it disagree with.

We are currently also doing a horrible job at eating correctly. Do you want the government to regulate how much we eat to?
Saying that the AAUI port meant that Ethernet was included when you needed an adapter that cost $60-$100+ is a stretch isn’t it?

I remember even back then you could get an Ethernet card for a PC cheaper than that.
Agreed. We don’t even need to reach for the apples to oranges comparisons with manual labor jobs, just gotta look at anyone working another highly paid white collar job.

Compare working in big law to big tech, and it will be plain as day. And I am not even getting into the baseline requirements to get there (undergrad from a good school with great GPA, LSAT, a top law school that is gonna cost you a pretty penny, hustling for internships, BAR, etc.), which SWE as a career has pretty much none of. The overall work-life balance difference alone is crazy.
Does Cody have an agent mode? I have the free vesion and it doesn't seem to. IMO coding assistant without agent mode is useless, it's useful just only for asking questions.

Copilot used to be much worse than Cursor but they have agent mode and MCP now.

Also I use Cody as a backup because I thought their ollama support means I can code on the plane, but when I actually tried, it stills requiring SourceGraph access and failed.
Keep in mind that the "experts" are selected per layer, so it's not even a single expert selection you can correlate with a token, but an interplay of abstract features across many experts at many layers.
This, some people recently forwarded a "tech pay" survey to all dev teams (ours does C++/Qt desktop software), and there was only (basically) "Frontend dev", "Backend dev" and "AI/ML dev" in the job list.

It reminded me of that KotH skit "- So, are you Chinese or Japanese? - Huh, I come from Laos and... - Chinese, or Japanese?".
Just like a computer doesn't do anything you couldn't already do with pen and paper. In reality, most technologies are "just" vast speed-ups or cost-reductions of things that are already possible.

Agreed regarding the KYC claim though.
This banks on people's selfishness. I above everybody else. My kids will rule others, outlive them, outsmart them. Extremely dangerous mindset, but very common among power brokers and billionaires (and not only). They are not nice people, not a single one of them, doesn't matter if old or new money.

For best of common of common folks (including everybody here), probably the best course of action would be to shoot these people if they ever get a chance to actually deliver real stuff. I know, beyond extreme, but I struggle to find another actually working bulletproof solution.

Anyway it will eventually creep, but not via people from article. It will be disguised as treating all those genetic deficiencies and inborne diseases in babies, any parent can agree that we would do almost anything for our kids and turn a blind eye on many topics otherwise seemed as no-go. In parallel with military, and then its all over society and you have Gattaca.
I can respect that viewpoint, however it amounts to saying eugenics is about as bad as doing lots of very early abortions, or just having more miscarriages (currently 10 to 20% of natural pregnancies). Politically I don't think this line of argument would be effective at all, especially outside USA.
Frankly, trying to claim their jobs, which all require more education and have much higher pressure and consequences for error than mine, aren't white collar would have been rude and insulting to everyone.
Some phosphate rock deposits have very high levels of cadmium. Phosphate fertilizers derived from high Cd rocks can have up to 100 ppm cadmium.
Lost track of the webdevhell long time ago. Total insanity changing at the speed of light, so much so that keeping up with it is a stress per-se.
SE is harder from inside than it looks from the outside, but that’s also true for most jobs. So the truth is in between like most of the time. I don’t like who says that SE is a comfort job, but I also don’t agree with who says that it’s harder than any other job. But mentally yes, I’ve seen strong people pivoting to SE and dropping like flies 1-2 years later.. but IMO it’s not the job, it’s the environment that gets you
That's the best thing I've read in months if not years.
> "visual pollution"

I like that framing.
'Software engineer who is interested in __profession__' casually hand waving away the ethical implications of human genetic engineering; worse, advocating for a for-profit version.

It makes me think they didn't try that hard to look them up before they started soliciting paychecks from celebrities and CEOs:
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Genome-E...

Like... This is a person who has never seen Wrath of Khan. They are not to be trusted.
> Update it, it has to be done, these archaic systems are already continuously hurting people.

This is a very strong claim. Do you have citations for it? (I mean for SSA, not an unrelated system that happens to be written in the same language)
It's fun thought, but probably also scary one.

The we have any robustness towards propaganda/ads is that we're being bombarded with contradicting arguments.

In a society without would be more susceptible to propaganda. Just just we outlaw it, just doesn't stop bad actors.

That there are lots of places we forbid advertising. Bill boards along the road. Content targeted minors.

We are also lots of advertising we could outlaw: regulated medicin, loans, gambling.

We could regulate what ads can say: products must be sold advertised price (fine print not allowed).

Lots of things could we that don't outlaw all advertising. Look around world you'll find many examples such regulations.
In America. If you work in other markets the salary is much lower. The only engineers I know who make above 100k euro are either lead or founder level.
Make paying to promote stuff is what the author asserted.

If it also results in all the social media influencers behind bars, then its a double-win.
That does not sound like normal work for a software engineer. That sounds more like you have found an unusually bad workplace. Why are you changing out tools every few months? Why are you working overtime for free? Why is there only one person who knows how to fix things when they break (especially if that happens so regularly that you have one person who "normally" fixes it)?
Resellers maintain such information. There are many websites where you can specify the weight, height and hundreds of other parameters for your product search.
Pooh had wandered into the Hundred Acre Wood, and was standing in front of what had once been Owl's House. It didn't look at all like a house now; it looked like a tree which had been blown down; and as soon as a house looks like that, it is time you tried to find another one.

What do you mean, not part of story telling? There are 64 semicolons in The House at Pooh Corner; and by the way, nearly all of them are followed by conjunctions.
Not easy either but they have less of "the reward for work done is more work more learning".
Rehearsing Possible Lives
And hope chain didn't start from lie :)
Exactly. In the past ten years the main differences in my professional tech stack are that I write Go instead of Java and my software runs in containers on Kubernetes instead of JAR files on CentOS. My friends have all had much more significant changes and retraining in their careers.
> Essentially when the core collapses, the environment around the surroundings are optically opaque, but the neutrinos sail on through so you'd expect to see them before the photons.

Also, the source, the hot nascent neutron star, is optically thick to neutrinos, so it radiates them very fiercely. Almost all the energy of the collapse goes into neutrino radiation.
Yeah, you claimed that people are not averse to reading documentation, and now you, yourself, are trying to argue against documentation.

Moving on.
In the past few years there was this blog post[0] that clarified this. It moved the restriction on serving a "disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files" to another part of the TOS dedicated specifically to the CDN part[1] and clarified that, if you're using Cloudflare add-on services Stream, R2 (their S3), or Cloudflare Images, then you won't be at risk of termination.

0: https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/

1: The restriction still exists at https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio... under "Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business)".
Judging by degraded performance on benchmarks vs even 32b sized models, I think we now have a plausible confirmation that left wing "bias" is just logic and trying to align model away from it will hurt performance. Thanks Zuck for setting a bunch of money on fire to confirm that!
This is sadly a prime example of how mis-information is created/spreads...

Tech News article:

"Although the fabricated passport likely would not withstand scrutiny due to the absence of an embedded chip, it proved sufficient to bypass the most basic KYC procedures employed by some fintech services. Platforms such as Revolut or Binance, which rely solely on photo ID submissions and user selfies, MAY NOW be especially vulnerable to exploitation via deepfake technology."
> coming from people from the more developed and less corrupt northern countries

Your opinions, not facts.

Corruption in Nordic countries, especially Sweden has been on the rise for 2 decades.