MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by econ | 2025-04-14 14:15:20+00:00
You should see the humor, the silliness and mostly the opportunity in rating systems that involve checkmarks, hearts, thumbs up and down, 1-5 stars, points etc. Slashdot was sophisticated by comparison while still useless. It should make you shake with laughter where Wikipedia argues credentials can't be validated. 1 professor < 2 teens. Community notes might be the most soph.. least unsophisticated of them all.

Meanwhile behind the curtain the most impactful of the activity is profiling people. Nothing you say accomplishes anything you hoped for. You watch toddlers get machine gunned and by that action you are now an anti semite who shouldn't be hired. Expressed distaste for tarifs aimed at people in sweatshops earning 1 buck per day? How dare you!

Is this the best we can do??? In the old days the debate would arrive at a plan then we would write and experiment towards the goal. Now we dump driftwood into the ocean and pretend we are building a boat.

Like the topic, I have no idea why I'm even writing this. I should be crafting a review mechanism or at least write up a design for one. Its pretty funny if you ask me.
by K0balt | 2025-04-14 14:15:32+00:00
Because of the intermingling of law and wealth. If you don’t intermediate, then justice becomes the will of the wealthiest, and the market stagnates. The only way that evolution works is if it is the highest and only law, so we would be warring individuals killing each other for resources on the daily.

As soon as you add social organization, you disrupt evolution inside that social unit: it then becomes one social unit vs others…. We’ve already been down that road, and now we live in large, relatively stable social units we call nations.

Anything inside a social unit is subject to the monopoly of coercion that the unit possesses over its members. Evolution is short-circuited by the presence of external existential forces.

Making evolution work inside a social unit is equivalent to dissolving it.
by ebiester | 2025-04-14 14:16:05+00:00
If I may refer to a Zen koan, "your teacup is full."

I started programming professionally around java 1.3, and the greybeards around that time were talking about how they had moved to OOP. Most disliked it but the people who didn't adapt got stuck in dead ends. (Stay in a dead end long enough and it becomes lucrative - see Oracle DBAs and COBOL developers - if you can stay there long enough!)

You absolutely have to treat coding with LLMs as a new skill. It's just like learning a new editor to the same precision that you know Emacs or Vim. It's learning the rough edges - and the rough edges keep changing. As a senior, it's frustrating! However, as I learn more, I learn the necessary concepts to utilize what is good and try the frustrating part in a month or two when it has gotten better and so have I.

I've spent a career reading others' code, so that doesn't bother me.

Now, I prompt through TDD for code that matters and that has helped stop many of the problems I see others face. It's a little slower as an iteration loop but it generates the test data well, it allows me to make sure I understand the problem and the prompt, and it forces the changes to be small, which increases success.

If I have to make a non-trivial change to the code, I know it will try to rewrite it if I don't start a new agent session. So, I'm liberal with creating new sessions.

It is much better at small problems than large problems, which makes me cognizant to keep my problems small. Not only is that good for the LLM, it's good for the codebase.

In some cases, it's better to have the LLM create a script to make the change than try and have it go through the code with a prompt. It's very good at simple scripts.

And I'm not afraid to discard it when it's not valuable at the moment.
by rtkwe | 2025-04-14 14:16:27+00:00
There have been attempts to do the same in the US. It's blocked by two blocks; the tax preparation companies who make bank every year charging people for their services, and generally anti tax people who want the process to be painful to make people dislike taxes more.

Generally though if you just make a mistake the punishment is paying it back with some fee/interest not prison. If they think it's an intentional effort to dodge taxes though it can escalate to prison time of course.
by solardev | 2025-04-14 14:16:57+00:00
I don't think that's necessarily true, though. Even back in the pre .NET days, when Microsoft pretty much did have a monopoly on PC desktops, Visual Studio (not VSCode, but its full-fledged big brother) had pretty awesome DX.

And having a standard UI layer (like WinForms) made GUI development way way better for both the developer (who could drag and drop shapes and easily align frames and tabs and buttons and such instead of having to try to wrangle CSS) and the average user could have standard UI looks & feels across many different apps.

The openness of the Web led to its popularity (and my career), but then every company ended up making their code style, IDE, APIs, UI layers, etc., leading to extreme fragmentation in both DX and UX that to this day is still a mess. Of course I still prefer this over a closed Microsoft monopoly (or an Apple one), but it's certainly made for a lot of unnecessary reinventions of the wheel.
by ACS_Solver | 2025-04-14 14:17:16+00:00
> As I understand in some countries, they instead send you a "pre-filed" statement (Finland, Denmark, Sweden, etc.). If everything looks fine, you don't need to send anything back at all. It's only if there is a discrepancy that you need to get in touch with the country's tax agency.

Yes. I'm in Sweden and self-employed so I have to take a few extra steps when declaring taxes, but just did that last month and it took around fifteen minutes. If you're an employee and your only active source of income is your job, as is the case for most people, "doing taxes" amounts to just approving the prefilled form that you get, which is just a couple of clicks. Or one signature and letter if you want to do it on paper the archaic way.

It works because every company has to submit a monthly report of what it paid its employees, and also deducts income tax on your behalf. So when the tax year is over, the tax agency knows how much you earned and how much tax was paid on that, which is all it takes.
by gthompson512 | 2025-04-14 14:17:27+00:00
Minor correction, macros CANT have newlines, you need to splice them during preprocessing using \ followed by a new line, the actual code has these:

from https://github.com/codr7/hacktical-c/blob/main/macro/macro.h

#define hc_align(base, size) ({ \ __auto_type _base = base; \ __auto_type _size = hc_min((size), _Alignof(max_align_t)); \ (_base) + _size - ((ptrdiff_t)(_base)) % _size; \ }) \

After preprocessing it is a single line.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-04-14 14:17:36+00:00
the reason for this is simple.

1. "truly free markets" don't and can't exist.

In the absence of a strong government to create rules, companies and individuals will fill the power vacuum (e.g. the east India company). "free markets" are just as much of a fantasy as "Communist utopia".

2. Redistribution is less inefficient than the alternative

Without sufficiently redistributave policy, the alternatives arise. The French revolution and various communist revolutions throughout the world over the 20th century are the alternative to a populace that thinks inequality is too high.
by tecleandor | 2025-04-14 14:17:37+00:00
And Intuit is one of the big powers keeping it like that.

In Spain we have had a "pre-filed draft statement" (that you have to confirm, but it's as easy as clicking "OK", or just mailing it back in the days when it was all paper) since 2003.

And there has been free government software for doing your taxes since 1988 (back in the day it was difficult to use and a bit terrible in general, but it was there and you could print your statement with a dot matrix printer... The web version nowadays is kind of ugly but pretty decent.)
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by gopal_virtual | 2025-04-14 14:17:55+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m Gopal Ojha, a web developer from Bangalore. This is one of those projects that started with a gut feeling and slowly took shape over time.

The initial itch? I kept running into content online where I thought, “This article is good… but it’s a slog to get through.” It wasn’t that the info was bad—just that it lacked any rhythm, spark, or visual help. There are tons of tools to help you create content, but very few that care about how it's consumed. That stuck with me.

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- Ask something like “Top countries by EV adoption” and get a source-backed chart, instantly. - Upload a CSV and create sharp, simple infographics—without spreadsheets or code. - Embed anywhere or just download as an image. Free to use. No sign-up walls.

It’s been especially useful for writers, educators, and folks building internal reports. That said, I’m still figuring out where it goes next—right now I’m just happy it’s helping people communicate ideas more clearly.

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Would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you deal with content or data in your day-to-day.

Thanks for reading :) —Gopal
by Ozarkian | 2025-04-14 14:18:13+00:00
I'm sure you're right that the broker is obliged to 1099 me for it.

Are you saying that I should have imported the 1099 and overridden the basis of those shares to be exactly what the sale price was? That seems like an odd thing to expect the end user of tax software to know to do. It's not clear to me that doing that would not also set off a flag when the IRS evaluates the return. There ought to be some solution between employers, brokers and the IRS that doesn't put such a burden on the taxpayer.
by bnchrch | 2025-04-14 14:18:14+00:00
To me what is wild is how this has been obvious even to people outside of Apple for dare a say a decade? (The Echo was released in 2014/2015)

Its interesting that Tim Cook has let this go on for so long.

I would love to know what the conversations have been at the executive level over these years.

You can only imagine what kind of top tier level executive state craft had to have been pulled off consistently by Siri/AI leadership to keep things progressing in this broken way internally.
by kaon_ | 2025-04-14 14:18:27+00:00
"One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship"

That is just a culture thing. Most prominently in the US. In many cultures there is no clear boundary between personal relationships and business relationships. And why would there be? I would like to live in a world where kindness, dependability, punctuality, warmness, openness and forgiveness are values upheld both by natural and legal persons. And I have worked with many companies that have! As you can read in the comments, for every bad example you can find companies lead by empathic people that treat their employees humanely.

Google always pretended to be that company. And maybe they were for a long time. Now they've shifted. They really didn't have to but they did. The excuse of "it's just a business relationship" really is just that: an excuse. The symptom of a culture with values so bankrupt that it accepts citizens being treated poorly and then blames the victims for expecting to be treated humanely.

And yes, it saves you a lot of personal pain if you expect the worst from your employer from the outset. But is the world really better off if we all expect to treat each other like criminals?
by duxup | 2025-04-14 14:18:42+00:00
The complexities of trade seem endless, but also factual.

Unfortunately, the GOP has some strange ideas and seems to have no curiosity / will to understand anything beyond their strange ideas.

Say what you want about him, but at least President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho looked for some smart people to help him make decisions ...
by nehal3m | 2025-04-14 14:18:42+00:00
Of course you're free to discuss. You're belittling the author's expression of grief because their job was 'routine maintenance' of 'some CSS spec (...) which tens of thousands of other people have been doing for probably 2 decades now' and I'm saying they're entitled to their grief regardless of how you feel about the job's content.

Yes, they're a cog, as almost all of us are, and it would have been better for their own sake to realise that, but losing something you enjoy still sucks.
by cmiles74 | 2025-04-14 14:19:20+00:00
My understanding has always been that Docker Engine was only available directly on Linux. If you are running another operating system then you will need to run Docker Desktop (which, in turn, runs a Docker Engine instance in a VM).

This comment kind of makes it sound like maybe you can run Docker Engine directly on these operating systems (MacOS, Windows, etc.), is that the case?
by robertlagrant | 2025-04-14 14:19:25+00:00
> Is there really a need to debate whether it's Japanese or Indian?

This analogy is wrong - you're not the diner. You're the chef. You're going to cook something. You need to pick anyway; why not say what you're picking in advance and give people a chance to object? Is it really just something you can't muster the energy for?
by williamcotton | 2025-04-14 14:19:40+00:00
I built this library after struggling with search interfaces in several projects. Most existing solutions were either too simple (just basic text matching) or required complex infrastructure like Elasticsearch.

This little project offers a middle ground - Elasticsearch-inspired query syntax that outputs to SQL. This means you can add powerful search to your app without changing your database stack.

Key features:

* Multi-pass parser with comprehensive validation * Converts complex queries to SQL (supporting ILIKE, PostgreSQL tsvector, or ParadeDB) * React component with Monaco editor, syntax highlighting, and autocompletion * Full test coverage

The parser handles complex expressions like:

(title:"winter boots" OR category:shoes) AND price:>100 AND date:2024-01..2024-03

...and generates parameterized SQL ready to use with your ORM or database client.

I'd love feedback on the API design and React component - especially from those who've implemented search in their own applications. What search features do you wish were easier to implement?

The demo (in the repo) shows the full functionality. The GitHub README has an animated GIF of the demo app.

It's built with React + Monaco editor but the core parser has zero dependencies.
by sjamaan | 2025-04-14 14:19:44+00:00
I suppose the better response is that it removes those classes of bugs where they are absolutely unnecessary. Tricky code will always be tricky, but in the straightforward 80% (or more) of your code such bugs can be completely eliminated.

It's unfortunate that C has so many truly unnecessary bugs which are only caused by stupid overly "clever" exploitation of undefined behaviour by compilers.
by yodsanklai | 2025-04-14 14:19:57+00:00
I work for a US company but in western Europe. The layoffs have been much more humane here than in the US. There was a negociation process which lasted several months, and the severance was better and on a voluntary basis. I don't think a company making profit can easily get rid of employees over here, but probably depends on the country. Regarding performance-based layoffs, they did manage to fire people too, but again it was technically a common agreement.

That being said, if they want to get rid of employees, they always find a way. And the European market isn't as dynamic as the US one, so there are pros and cons. Personally, all things considered (risks of layoffs, PTO, cost of living) I'm happier in Europe but it really depends on individual situation.
by 9rx | 2025-04-14 14:19:57+00:00
> Or that whole iota thing.

What is the whole iota thing?

For what it is, the iota design is really good. Languages like C and Typescript having having the exact same feature hidden in some weird special syntax look silly in comparison, not to mention that the weird syntax obscures what is happening. What Go has is much more clear to read and understand (which is why it gets so much grief where other languages with the same feature don't – there is no misunderstandings about what it is).

But maybe you are implying that no language should present raw enums, rather they should be hidden behind sum types? That is not an unreasonable take, but that is not a design flaw. That is a different direction. If this is what you are thinking, it doesn't fit alongside the other two which could be more intuitive without completely changing what they are.
You know when you catch a mind-blowing moment on a podcast...
by tony_ok | 2025-04-14 14:20:22+00:00
You hear something that hits you deeply, and could be life-changing...

...me too.

I take screenshots to come back to it.

But you and I don't remember to come back and take notes 99% of the time.

So I built Instanote to grab notes from those screenshots and share with me, so I can remember to use...and talk about them with other people that are interested.

Get access here: https://waitlister.me/p/instanote
by geekraver | 2025-04-14 14:20:32+00:00
Apart from Forth, Lisp and Lua, Tcl also deserves mention as a small embeddable language. Not sure of its state today; I think by v8 it had started to get more complex, but its original incarnation was very simple. I remember getting Ousterhout’s book and being so enamored with the elegant design that I felt compelled to just implement it myself from scratch, which took just two days.
by bluGill | 2025-04-14 14:20:35+00:00
Depends on what you are doing. Betting on C++ was a good idea for me 20 years ago - but I work in embedded systems where Java wouldn't work because I sometimes need to access hardware. Embedded also means I don't even have a web server, so I have no need for a web framework which the person you replied to seems to find important. I don't know their situation, but there is a large need for people to write web code and so for many people betting on a web framework is a good idea.

I have done enough web to know I'd bet on python over PHP, but only because I know there are several popular web frameworks in python to chose from.
by janandonly | 2025-04-14 14:20:41+00:00
Too bad one cannot export the highlights form the kindle app and import them into this app.

Now I need a computer and a usb cable, while I’m mostly living off road and off grid.

This is in no way the fault of your app. Just pointing out how Amazon isn’t for serious researchers. Just selling books is the bare minimum that they support, and only from the website, not from within the app. I’m sure Amazon is big enough to put the cork screws on Apple to not pay the 30% Apple tax?
by dtagames | 2025-04-14 14:20:46+00:00
I also think this is the reason. It's like someone woke up and realized we don't make electronics in the US and it only punishes American consumers to raise prices for them.

We could make everything electronic here. Those industries were invented here and all their original plants were in Silicon Valley (and Texas), the same tech hotspots we have today.

Can we incentivize companies to build here again? I don't buy the "labor is too expensive" argument. The savings from offshoring went to profits, not lower prices.

Making things in America and selling them here at reasonable prices makes the most sense overall, even if companies have to accept somewhat lower profits to get there.
by RajT88 | 2025-04-14 14:20:52+00:00
One time, I sold a bunch of stock options because my company was being spun off into an independent entity. "Use it or lose it" kind of situation. As part of the spin-off the company was also renamed. So it created a slightly weird situation, which caused a lot of trouble for me and my colleagues.

That trouble was a bill for $12k (which at the time, I absolutely could not afford). Basically, the mix-up was the IRS thinking I had sold RSU's and not options, so they had 0 cost basis and they thought I owed them the money. I contacted my former company's HR department, and they said lots of people had the same issue, and they shared the message I should send to the IRS in response.

So I printed out my correspondence with the former company explaining the issue, along with all the documents showing the cost basis, with a cover page explaining the tl;dr of the situation.

The IRS sent me a couple months later the same bill for 12k with late fees - now totaling 13k. So I printed out again the entire package I had sent them before, including a new cover page (on top of the old one) saying, "Find enclosed the documentation I sent you before which explains clearly I do not owe you money". At this point it was 15 pages of materials.

A few months later, I got a letter back which said in legalese something along the lines of not admitting to any error, but also at the same time saying I didn't owe the money. Weird, but I took it as a win.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-14 14:21:07+00:00
The worst part about Mozilla and its business decisions is that making a browser isn't something you can build a business on because you're competing with free.

Anyone who thought Mozilla wasn't going to eventually turn to evil to maintain their liquidity has no stones to throw at Mr. Argyle regarding naïveté. Is Mozilla Corp (not Mozilla Foundation) a non-profit? No? Then they need to turn a profit, and I don't see a price-tag attached to that browser they make.
by habosa | 2025-04-14 14:21:08+00:00
Came to write this same comment. The first 10 employees of a company are so critical to success and they tend to be drastically underpaid. A founding engineer (often employee 3 or 4) would be lucky to get 1.5% at most places while the CTO has 30-50% and they probably have very equal impact on the company in the early days. And engineers do well by comparison. The first customer-facing roles often get barely any equity at all while they hustle to actually make an idea into a business.

The VCs have convinced the founders that they are special people and they deserve 10-100x the rewards of their best employees. They do this to create room in the cap table for themselves of course. They also give the founders early liquidation opportunities to keep them on their team.

It’s disgusting, and the founders wonder why some people don’t want to grind as hard as they do.