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Issue #327 - June 15, 2025
If you are looking for work, check out this month's Who is hiring? and Who wants to be hired? threads.
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: How do I give back to people helped me when I was young and had nothing?
Top comment by firefax
Focus less on those who helped you, and more on helping others.
The first time I went to Defcon, I felt lonely and lost -- it was the first year they had those cool electronic badges, and at the time they were only given out as entrance tokens for an exclusive party that was the talk of the con.
I didn't really "know" anyone there -- like a lot of young hackers, I was part of one of those vBulletin board hacker crews that have been lost to time and I'd exhausted the meager savings I had built up that summer on my plane ticket and hotel room at the Riviera.
A lot of people who had expense accounts were going out to nice places for dinner -- the guy with per diem would get drinks, the guy who had to itemize, and me, the guy trying to get a group together to visit that cool looking dive bar next to Bally's kept getting laughed at and called a newbie...
Then none other than Dan Kaminsky[1] strolls up, tells me he knows who I am (!) and heard I'd been asking about the ninja party, tells me he can't get me in but he knows a room party. Shows me a room next to the pool with a keg in the bathtub, I threw them a five and we sat around talking until late in the night. They had some good tips on cheap places to eat, how to get free drinks at the penny slots, that sort of thing.
And then, every year since that I visited, I did what he did... wander the convention looking for the budget travel crew, the folks who don't do it for a salary and whom this is their reality, and I'd take them on a quest for two dollar hot dogs, show them the little store next to the dive bar where they could stock up on beer and liquor and ice and then disappear into the night like some kind of helpful spirit of the hacker night.
Anyways... long, profuse thank yous are not needed. What you should do is make sure you keep the gates open that were not gatekept for you. Be the person who connects others, in ways that you can't always list on your CV.
[1] Rest in power
2. Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
Top comment by swsieber
Hobby electronics & robotics. I can make an LED blink on a ESP8266 (it's been a while), but that's it. I'd like to get more familiar with a multimeter, figuring out broken kids toys, etc. but it's a bit daunting. Maybe there's too many options and not enough constraints. I'm not sure.
3. Ask HN: How to learn CUDA to professional level
Top comment by indianmouse
As a very early CUDA programmer who participated in the cudacontest from NVidia during 2008 and I believe one of the only entries (I'm not claiming though) to be submitted from India and got a consolation and participation prize of a BlackEdition Card, I can vouch the method which I followed.
- Look up the CUDA Programming Guide from NVidia
- CUDA Programming books from NVidia from developer.nvidia.com/cuda-books-archive link
- Start creating small programs based on the existing implementations (A strong C implementation knowledge is required. So, brush up if needed.)
- Install the required Toolchains, compilers, and I am assuming you have the necessary hardware to play around
- Github links with CUDA projects. Read the code, And now you could use LLM to explain the code in the way you would need
- Start creating smaller, yet parallel programs etc., etc.,
And in about a month or two, you should have enough to start writing CUDA programs.
I'm not aware of the skill / experience levels you have, but whatever it might be, there are plenty of sources and resources available now than it was in 2007/08.
Create a 6-8 weeks of study plan and you should be flying soon!
Hope it helps.
Feel free to comment and I can share whatever I could to guide.
4. Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?
Top comment by softwaredoug
I experience it differently. As an IC that’s relatively respected it my field, I think my seniority seems like a threat to some leaders. Because my word carries weight and I tend to be less obsequious with little to lose in these interactions. I have less of a problem to saying “the emperor has no clothes”. Younger ICs don’t have this luxury. They go along despite their reservations and often feel they don’t know better. Older ICs suffer fools much less (life is short, and older ICs have a well calibrated BS detector. Some bad leader don’t like that!).
I have no problem interacting with younger ICs and even embrace my Dad-ness and Dad humor. I like mentoring and growing others, and I think it’s important to advocate for less experienced to get the lionsshare of the glory and attention.
For hiring, I just am not open about my age and mostly interact with people virtually. I don’t have my early irrelevant jobs and don’t show my graduation dates. So I haven’t seen it as a problem.
5. Ask HN: What is your fallback job if AI takes away your career?
Top comment by WarOnPrivacy
My day job is troubleshooting tech issues for small/med business. Auality hardware is pretty reliable (now). But increases in software reliability are offset by increases in system complexity.
What LLM will eventually do is hide more and more levers away inside of black boxes. They won't take away my job so much as make it impossible to perform.
For my fallback plan, I'm over 50 and w/o health ins. My first serious medical incident will likely end me. I expect career-ending LLMs to arrive sometime after that.
6. Ask HN: In 15 years, what will a gas station visit look like?
Top comment by codegeek
Not much. 15 years ago was 2010. Gas stations in 2025 are very similar to Gas stations from 2010. I doubt they will be too different in 2040. May be a few more EV chargers.
7. Ask HN: Does anyone know of a general news site akin to Hacker News?
Top comment by loveparade
The funny thing is that I find HN especially useful for non tech news. It's highly biased for tech news, but only the most important normal news make it to the front page, so it's a great filter.
8. Ask HN: What API or software are people using for transcription?
Top comment by TachyonicBytes
I use whisperfile[1] directly. The whisper-large-v3 model seems good with non-English transcription, which is my main use-case.
I am also eyeing whisperX[2], because I want to play some more with speaker diarization.
Your use-case seems to be batch transcription, so I'd suggest you go ahead and just use whisperfile, it should work well on an M4 mini, and it also has an HTTP API if you just start it without arguments.
If you want more interactivity, I have been using Vibe[3] as an open-source replacement of SuperWhisper[4], but VoiceInk from a sibling comment seems better.
Aside: It seems that so many of the mentioned projects use whisper at the core, that it would be interesting to explicitly mark the projects that don't use whisper, so we can have a real fundamental comparison.
[1] https://huggingface.co/Mozilla/whisperfile
[2] https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX
[3] https://github.com/thewh1teagle/vibe/
[4] https://superwhisper.com/
9. Ask HN: Is anyone still programming the old-fashioned way (without LLMs)?
Top comment by fzwang
We've mostly banned the use of AI coding assistants, with exception of certain uses, for junior level devs/engineers. Essentially, they need to demonstrate that their use case fits with what LLMs are good at (ie. for in-distribution, tedious, verifiable tasks).
Annecdotally, what we've found was that those using AI assistants show superficial improvements in productivity early, but they learn at a much slower rate and their understanding of the systems is fuzzy. It leads to lots of problems down the road. Senior folks are also susceptible to these effects, but at a lower level. We think it's because most of their experiences are old fashioned "natty" coding.
In a way, I think programmers need to do natty coding to train their brains before augmenting/amputating it with AI.
Top comment by jerrygoyal
GCP is down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44260810