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rl1987on Ask HN: Why have we normalized jobs and soft skills bullshit so much?

Charles Manson approves this book.

rl1987on GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities

LLM is the digital brain. Agent is a software robot with "sensors" (tooling to read data from files/web) and "actuators" (tooling to perform changes in the environment) that is based on the digital brain.

rl1987on Ask HN: How are you finding the job market in 2026?

A desolate, dystopian wasteland that I wish to take no part in.

rl1987on Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

Unless done in collaboration with proper institutions, that would be playing with fire. Consequences from letting who-knows-who from who-knows-where do who-knows-what in your name can be life destroying. There are multiple cases about people in USA running laptop farms without asking questions and making good money, but one day ending up on a receiving end of federal prosecution.

rl1987on Ask HN: Is Zuckerberg just a „one-hit-wonder"?

He does run some strange "capitalist philanthropy" thing with his wife: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chan_Zuckerberg_Initiative

rl1987on Ask HN: Why isn't the NSA categorized as an APT?

Because it's not wrong when "we" (i.e. those naming who counts as APT) are doing it.

rl1987on The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

That sounds more like "peace through superior firepower" rather than "war is peace".

rl1987on Palantir, Meta, OpenAI Execs Appointed Lieutenant Colonels in US Army (2025)

It got to the point that now there is a "SSecretary" of War.

rl1987on Don't obsess with security and privacy unless they are your core business

Security is like insurance - it is something you kind-of don't need until something bad happens and when it does, you wish you had it.

rl1987on Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

The strongest few did. The likes of pets.com did not.

rl1987on Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agreeing new rules

People being grabbed off the streets and transported to prison in unrelated country is what you voted for?

rl1987on N8n added native persistent storage with DataTables

You can do arbitrary REST API calls from n8n, which greatly increases the integrability surface.

rl1987on Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

Decamillionaire?

rl1987on The FCC's 15-Year-Old Flickr Account Appears to Have Been Deleted

People in suits looking important.

See:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240927004237/https://www.flick...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230220184613/https://www.flick...

rl1987on Ask HN: What are your favorite obscure but brilliant C/C++ libraries?

Libpostal - street address parsing and normalisation library that relies on downloadable NLP model.

https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal

rl1987on Ask HN: What is Lex Fridman's association with MIT?

See: https://old.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/1m2ewe5/what_standing_...

TL;DR: He is officially listed on MIT site as research scientist, has research published in association with MIT and also did some teaching. However, he does not have any prominence in campus beyond being a media personality and his connection to MIT, while real, is generally considered to be oversold for what it is. Furthermore, Fridman's alma mater is Drexel, not MIT.

rl1987on Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

Exactly the point they are making?

rl1987on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

The way I see it, works like Tetsuo is Japanese extreme cyberpunk - niche-within-a-niche kind of thing.

rl1987on Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs

Twitter layoffs of 2022 might have been the Lehman Brothers moment that marked the end of programming gold rush.

rl1987on Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?

Some quick examples:

Bosch: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/11/business/bosch-germany-jo...

Panasonic: https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/panasonic-layoffs-con...

SAP: https://www.thestack.technology/sap-layoffs-cost-3-billion-l...

Cisco: https://www.brusselstimes.com/1328320/us-company-cisco-to-sh...

Telia: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/swedens-telia...

Sure, numbers are lower, but tech downturn is a global thing.

rl1987on Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?

Layoffs certainly do happen outside US and ZIRP was not uniquely American thing.

rl1987on How to negotiate your salary package

Does this sort of stuff still work for people who can do Python or Javascript just as well as thousands of others? I expect most companies today to simply stop talking to a typical candidate if they refused to tell their number first.

rl1987on Ask HN: Is it still a good idea to learn Perl for a young developer?

No-ish, unless you specifically want to work with Perl codebases (e.g. in bioinformatics). By and large, Python has pretty much replaced Perl for generic scripting work.

rl1987on Ask HN: Ways from the EU to the USA

Some people end up in serious trouble when crossing the border for far less.

rl1987on Ask HN: Ways from the EU to the USA

As things stand now, I wouldn't feel safe even briefly visiting the States.

rl1987on Ask HN: I'm an MIT senior and still unemployed – and so are most of my friends

For most technical people in most of the world making $220k in a year is a distant dream.

rl1987on Ask HN: Code should be stored in a database. Who has tried this?

There's CodeQL, but it seems to be mostly limited to security research (code review automation to find vulns). See: https://codeql.github.com/

rl1987on Ask HN: Good examples of ASCII data visualization?

  gnuplot> set terminal dumb

  Terminal type is now 'dumb'
  Options are 'feed enhanced size 79, 24 aspect 2, 1 mono noattributes'
  gnuplot> plot sin(x)

    1 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+   
      |                *  *              +  *  **         +       *  *     |   
  0.8 |-+             *   *                 *    *          sin(x* *******-|   
      |              *     *                *    *               *    *    |   
  0.6 |-+            *      *              *     *               *     * +-|   
      |              *      *             *       *             *       *  |   
  0.4 |*+            *      *             *       *             *       *+-|   
      |*            *        *            *        *           *        *  |   
  0.2 |*+           *        *            *        *           *        *+-|   
      | *          *          *          *         *          *          * |   
    0 |-*          *          *          *         *          *          *-|   
      |  *         *          *         *           *         *           *|   
 -0.2 |-+*         *          *         *           *         *          +*|   
      |  *        *            *       *             *       *            *|   
 -0.4 |-+*        *            *       *             *       *           +*|   
      |   *      *              *      *             *      *              |   
 -0.6 |-+ *     *               *     *              *      *            +-|   
      |    *    *               *     *               *     *              |   
 -0.8 |-+   *   *                *   *                 *   *             +-|   
      |     *  *       +         **  *   +             *  *                |   
   -1 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+   
     -10              -5                 0                5                10

rl1987on It is practically impossible to find a freelance project these days

You seem to imply there is fundamental irrationality on the parties buying the services, but is there really? At small scale, I have personally derived positive ROI from services I bought from freelancers. While outsourcing can certainly fail, it is not that different of a challenge from other business activities that entail managing people and making things work out financially.

Do we really think that every single dollar spent on services of freelancers was wasted?

rl1987on It is practically impossible to find a freelance project these days

By what metric freelancing never worked? As long as someone needs something done that they cannot or don't want to do themselves it is quite simple to get paid for doing the work for them. Self-employed artisans and professionals existed for centuries.