MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reset0684 | 2025-04-06 00:27:18+00:00
Midwest, not Silicon Valley, but that's my current experience. I've already got a job and just got an offer which would be a small pay cut. So, I told them I'm excited about the work, etc but I just can't take a pay cut.

They remained firm that they couldn't budge on salary even a little. Then remained firm as I asked for a signing bonus (denied) and reduced hours (denied). This company doesn't do stock at all and they've already got unlimited PTO so no room to negotiate there.

Meanwhile, their interview feedback indicated I did very well. They unanimously wanted me, and I slightly exceeded their technical expectations for the role.

Seems tougher than I remember from before covid.

(Throwaway since I don't want this tied to my name for my current or future employer to find.)
by leptons | 2025-04-06 00:27:48+00:00
I an early start-up is the exception, but my boss didn't. We were still in "stealth mode" and the CTO wanted 100% test coverage on our nodejs based social website, from the very start. 6 months in and we didn't have all that much built, because they couldn't really decide what they wanted us to build. So we built the most well-tested email sign-up form that ever existed, and a bunch of other user-account related stuff too, but then the company completely pivoted at around 6 months and I was now somehow doing PHP programming (which I hate) hacking the code of some ad server and bolting it on to a mobile app (not what we set out to build), and at that point the requirement for tests had been forgotten, because the company was desperate to find any viable path forward. It dissolved about 3 months after that, and now those tests seem pretty pointless.
by vitus | 2025-04-06 00:28:06+00:00
Going further: do you want a US internet, a French internet, Japanese internet, etc? I would prefer to avoid fragmentation of the ecosystem, since it complicates discovery of content, reduces potential reach, limits cross-pollination of ideas, etc.

Suppose that I really want to consume content from certain UK creators, but the UK YouTube-equivalent is region-locked, as much of BBC is today. That's a net loss compared to the status quo.

> There's generally only a handful of countries that speak a certain language

And there are plenty of people who speak languages other than their native one. English literacy / fluency is a de facto standard in tech, whether we like it or not. It's not a matter of suppressing other cultures, but rather providing a common language for discourse.

> and aggregators would likely appear.

I'm not so convinced. If these are services provided by governments for their residents, they're especially easy to region-lock.

> If each country had their own localised platform, local culture would have a much greater chance to flourish.

> I know plenty of teenagers who know more about US politics than their own country's, who barely know local artists, who know certain expressions in English but have no resources to convey a similar message in their native languages.

I sympathize with this concern, but I don't think that this approach is the answer.
by wenc | 2025-04-06 00:29:03+00:00
Does your Roborock get stuck on electrical cords?

I have a Roomba that used to be able to detect cords and roll over them, but at some point it ceased to do that -- and jobs would consistent failed due to it getting stuck.

I'm too lazy to tidy up my cords just for a robot vacuum to run. Would be great if there was one that was intelligent enough to simply avoid cords and other hazards.
by Barrin92 | 2025-04-06 00:29:09+00:00
>You don't need to start with a high level language.

I didn't say that. I said you can start with a high or low level language. I did literally mention C in my own post as a decent starting point.

Rust however is not a beginner friendly language because again, the thing that sets it apart is that it aims to solve a particular domain specific problem of programming, which is memory management, in a unique way that means nothing to a person who has never been exposed to the problem in the first place.
by Genego | 2025-04-06 00:29:30+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Full-stack Django Developer & AI Engineer Location: Thailand (GMT+7) Remote: Only Willing to relocate: No (Within Thailand only) Technologies: Django, Python, HTMX, AlpineJs, Tailwind, SQL, PostGreSQL Résumé/CV: https://edwin.genego.io/ Email: edwin@genego.io LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwin-genego/
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-06 00:29:31+00:00
There's two kinds of advertising: your local mom and pop running a labor day sale in the local paper, and megacorps spending billions of dollars advertising soda and roblock lootcrates or whatever to kids, or plastering every square inch of public and private space with maximally attention-seeking posters and billboards.

One of these is good and one is bad.
by joegibbs | 2025-04-06 00:29:46+00:00
What is the cause of Europe always needing a top-down effort for a European cloud, a European payment provider, a European Facebook and Google, a European X, Y, Z rather than European companies filling these gaps naturally? It's a wealthy union of 450 million people - surely there are benefits for local companies like knowledge of the local business environment, people who fluently speak local languages - why are American companies eating their breakfast?
by Zigurd | 2025-04-06 00:30:04+00:00
From the look of it, it's very likely to whistle in the wind.

Back when the Cybertruck first appeared in public, I predicted they would build a few tens of thousands of units, and then discontinue the model.

The fix as described in the article isn't going to be easy to implement for 46,000 trucks in the near future. That's probably why deliveries have been halted. If deliveries stay halted for another month, it's likely that production will be halted. If that happens, I bet it never is restarted.
by palata | 2025-04-06 00:30:34+00:00
Not an expert, but my impression is that many companies (maybe especially startups) don't say "we offer $X". They will try to ask you how much you expect as early as possible: if that's way too high, they won't even interview you, if it's too low you're screwed because they won't go higher anymore.

I don't think I'm negotiating to get a better compensation than what is reasonable. On the contrary, I'm negotiating to get a fair compensation.

Some companies (bigger ones) will just say "we hire you for this title, so the compensation is $X and we don't negotiate because we want it to be fair for your colleagues". Then I don't think you can negotiate much, but at the same time they're probably not screwing you. It's just what it's worth to them, take it or leave it.
by leptons | 2025-04-06 00:31:08+00:00
>Over time you realize that testing truly does not slow down development as much as many people think it does.

Not my experience. We just built a new codebase, rewriting an older project with typescript and all the modern libraries and conveniences. We spent about 2x more time writing the tests than we did any of the API code.

Tests can be so fiddly and not exactly straight-forward. It takes a lot of time, but that isn't a reason not to do it. But don't suggest it's going to take less time, even in the long run, because it isn't - you essentially have to maintain 2 codebases now, one for the actual code, and one for the tests. Both are points of failure and both can be a time-sink.
by anon7000 | 2025-04-06 00:32:27+00:00
Use a different restaurant? Are allergies a protected class for discrimination? If being in the same vicinity as a dog is too much, I guess taking a dog for a walk should be illegal too. And anything that produces pollen for that matter.

I’m also not aware of any pet-friendly bars or restaurants that have dogs regularly climbing on top of eating tables. I’m aware of a few which allow a dog on the floor somewhere
by api | 2025-04-06 00:33:02+00:00
I lived in Southern California for 8 years and I'd say that Orange County and parts of LA are at least as religious as Southwest Ohio where I now live, maybe more.

It's a different kind of religion, a different vibe, but there's not less of it. There's also a ton of new agey stuff in California that is no more rational or secular than old school religion, just different.

Boston may legitimately be less religious and less superstitious, but I'd be surprised if it was by a lot. Again, the religion is just different. There's a lot of Judaism, mainline Protestantism, and Catholicism up there vs. evangelical Christian and new agey stuff elsewhere.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-04-06 00:33:12+00:00
I started running Llama 4 Scout on Groq using my Common Lisp client, and now trying Llama 4 Maverick on abacus.ai

Really impressive!

Also, check out the price/performance numbers: about $0.20 per million input tokens compared to about $5 for GPT-4o [1]

[1] https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1908624648608133297
by jMyles | 2025-04-06 00:33:38+00:00
We're working on a parser for our band's setlists, and we want it to be compatible (and eventually, to be able to cross-reference included songs with) setlists from Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, Widespread Panic, Travelin' McCourys, Leftover Salmon, Billy Strings, etc.

We have run into this question already a few times: when we have a guest, and we play an original written by that guest, how is it best reflected in the setlist?
by dangus | 2025-04-06 00:34:24+00:00
> If you must divulge what you’re making

Never do that.

> Companies will ask about your current compensation at different stages in the process

This is not legal in many states, 44% of the US population lives in states where companies asking your salary is not legl.

Also, the exploding offer advice is terrible. It won't work. The company will just drop the offer. The actual advice is to decide quickly.

I also think that gaining some chump change during the negotiation is somewhat pointless as companies will just equalize salary bands over time.

Let's say you win $5-10k additional salary during negotiation. Great, now your second year's salary increase is only going to be 2% instead of 5%.

I think the real advice in the age of states having salary transparency laws is to not apply to jobs that don't have a salary range listed in the job description.
by avar | 2025-04-06 00:35:15+00:00
> That's not how statistical extrapolation works.

Yes, clearly it's going to be somewhere over 14%. I'm mainly critiquing the lazy reporting here. In reality that "59%" number is a wild guess, and should be reported as such.

> Here's a recent study that uses modern statistical modelling methods to extrapolate actual harassment rates from reporting rates that suffer strongly from self-selection bias in a similar environment

It's really not in a similar environment at all. That study is about estimating the rates of harassment, assault etc. of professional fisheries observers. I.e. independently employed "fisheries narcs" (my paraphrasing) who are dropped onto a fishing vessel for a limited time. "Upon returning from deployment, all observers are debriefed to ensure data quality and integrity".

That's a much more controlled dataset than "I hung out in Antarctica for a year, and I and 1/4 of the people that were there with me responded to this survey long afterwards, for whatever reason".

Even then, they have huge error bars on their 95% confidence intervals, e.g. as noted by this revealing paragraph:

> "Our estimates of observer victimization among years indicate that 0.4 to 1.8% of observers experienced assault, 22 to 34% experienced intimidation, coercion, and hostile work environments, and 9 to 43% experienced sexual harassment".

So, e.g. 9%-43%. That's a pretty huge difference.

In any case, we're way into the weeds here. Nothing I'm saying here is calling into question the the important underlying question here, that it certainly seems that the Antarctic program has some pretty screwed up problems with harassment etc., and how they're dealing with it.

I was mainly critiquing the lazy reporting of that study, i.e. to cherry-pick some overly-specific (but ultimately wildly extrapolated) percentage like 59%, and running with that, when (as I quoted above) the very study itself you're quoting is telling you it can't and shouldn't be used like that.

It's doubly unfortunate because if you page through that NSF study, there really are some pretty revealing quotes in some of the free-form answers submitted as part of the survey, clearly from people who've had a lot of time to think about and reflect on the issues they encountered in Antarctica.

This one in particular stuck with me (I looked up the full quote just now, several days later):

We can’t really have a zero-tolerance policy on assault and harassment because for 8.5 months there are no planes unless there is a really serious emergency. And I don’t think the program will ever fly planes in to get people out who have assaulted or harassed people. The issues with it are far too many. So, since we can’t have a zero-tolerance policy[...]

Those sorts of constraints seem to both drive a lot of the problems with places like Antarctica, as well as well as being a big part of why certain people are drawn to work in those places.
by shoo | 2025-04-06 00:36:16+00:00
Idempotency keys can also be known as request ids [1] or correlation ids. They can help in situations where you have a distributed system with an API provider and an API client and some operation needs to be performed "once-and-only-once". Since the network can drop requests or responses, the client must retry requests that appear to have failed, but perhaps might have succeeded. Since the client might retry an operation that actually succeeded and send multiple messages for the same operation, either the operation must be inherently idempotent, or if not, the API provider must be able to de-dupe requests.

Adding an idempotency key is a way to allow the API provider to detect and de-dupe requests. It requires work and collaboration on the part of the API client and the API provider. The API client must generate a unique idempotency key for each logically different operation it attempts to execute, and it must retry requests for operations that appear to have failed using that fixed idempotency key. If the operation is not inherently idempotent, the API provider needs to implement some way of de-duping repeated requests - perhaps storing requests in a durable cache for N hours/days keyed by the idempotency key.

One industry where these "once-and-only-once" execution guarantees are useful is banking. Customers expect their payments to be executed exactly once, so their accounts are debited once and not zero times or 2+ times.

There's an interesting infoq podcast from 2018 with Jason Maude of Starling Bank [2] talking about how they design their bank systems for "once-and-only-once" execution. From memory, Jason decomposes the responsibilities as: API clients are responsible for ensuring operations execute at least once. API providers are responsible for ensuring operations execute at most once.

[1] see e.g. google's API design guidelines for request identification: https://google.aip.dev/155

[2] https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/cloud-based-banking-startup-j...
by ryan_lane | 2025-04-06 00:36:59+00:00
Yeah, it's OK to disagree with people who agree with a political stance that involves depriving people of their rights, to the point of sending people to violent work camps and refusing to bring people back even when it's found that they're innocent. This isn't the kind of situation we "meet in the middle".

I'm not tolerant of intolerance, I'm not OK with hate, and you shouldn't be either.
by cassianoleal | 2025-04-06 00:37:41+00:00
Ok, in this case we do seem to be in broad agreement. I'm unclear of the value of your ideas though.

> I was saying that we should consider the possible enactment of such laws in the light of the knowledge that people will try to circumvent them and will sometimes succeed

That should always be the case when discussing any laws. If you don't consider that people will try to circumvent them, there is no point in considering punishment for when they do, and ultimately there is no point to the law.

> rather than assuming that, if advertising is prohibited, there will be no advertising.

As above, I would expect no one to make such assumptions.

> Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal.

I don't see why not. I suspect most proposals and ideas start vague, and by discussing their pros and cons and further refining them, we get to more concrete, more actionable ones.

> but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages.

This is a truism, I'm not sure what value it adds to the discussion.
by mopsi | 2025-04-06 00:38:02+00:00
Just yesterday, a Russian missile strike on apartment buildings in Kryvyi Rih killed 19 people (incl 9 children) and injured 72. It was followed by drone strikes that targeted rescue workers. CNN article: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/04/americas/ukraine-strike-z... Police bodycam footage: https://bsky.app/profile/kateinkharkiv.bsky.social/post/3lm3...

Strikes like these occur daily and have become increasingly common in recent months. Holding mass gatherings under such conditions is utterly irresponsible, and any elections held in this atmosphere lack legitimacy because many voters are simply afraid to visit polling stations. Not to mention the millions of people in occupied territories who are completely unable to cast their ballots.

The narrative about Ukrainian elections - especially coming from Russia, which hasn't had free elections since the early 1990s - is indeed pure propaganda. With their progress on the frontlines stalled, this is nothing more than a transparent attempt to undermine Ukrainian unity by diverting attention to internal infighting and potentially replacing the current government with a less functional one. Zelenskyy's main political rivals share the broad consensus that elections should be held only after the war.

Ukraine's situation is a textbook example of why many (if not most) constitutions include provisions for postponing elections during wars and other emergencies.
by kylecazar | 2025-04-06 00:39:18+00:00
Cancer researchers collect public grant money at a public university, discover a therapy, found a private pharmaceutical company to bring hair growth to market, raise millions from tech, are now hair restoration entrepreneurs.

I'm not saying they don't have the right. I just said it's a bit of a shame to me.

The alternative is they capitalize on their IP (they already have provisional patents filed) and continue their work. Maybe they'll do both, who knows, but as many here know companies don't build themselves. Like I said, though, they don't necessarily owe the world anything else.
by simonw | 2025-04-06 00:39:20+00:00
It is deeply unintuitive that writing tests for personal / side projects would be worthwhile. I found that my productivity on those projects increased dramatically when I adopted the same testing regime I had previously used in my day-job with an engineering team distributed across multiple continents. That's why I wrote that talk!

"At what point should I be writing tests?"

Once the code does the right thing, and you want it to keep doing the right thing. Don't try to write the tests first, that's a productivity anti-pattern.
by cdavid | 2025-04-06 00:39:34+00:00
It is at least in part because of how recruiting works, especially in large tech companies. Companies have many candidates for each role, and can't easily review all of them. Between bureaucracy, how busy the hiring manager is, etc. many candidates get lost in the process.

This is why 1) it really helps to have a referral and 2) tell the recruiter when you have competing roles. Neither will change much about getting or not a role, but they will really help the prioritization and avoid you getting lost.

Paradoxically, that effect is bigger nowadays when the market is not as hot as it used to be, because recruiting is more stretched. Even some FAANG are very understaffed on the recruiting side
by palata | 2025-04-06 00:39:44+00:00
I looked for resources a few years ago and found a post by a software engineer talking about "Fearless Salary Negotiation" [1]. The engineer said: "it's a small book, cost me around 40 bucks which were immediately compensated by the fact that I managed to negotiate a higher salary".

I wanted to ask for a raise: I had been working in that startup for 4 years and had never had a raise. I thought "if that book helps me get a raise of a few bucks per month, that will pay for it".

It didn't go as planned: I followed the instructions in the book, my boss spent an hour bullshitting me and I didn't get a raise. So I sent my resignation the next day. The boss called me back, and I got a substantial raise and a bonus (to compensate for the shitty salary I had been having before, it was not a miracle).

All that to say that this book did not make me a pro negotiator. But it made me understand how salary negotiation works (reading it, I felt like a child: it only says common sense stuff, but I had been doing everything wrong my whole life). And it gave me the confidence to actually ask for a raise.

Totally worth it.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Salary-Negotiation-step-step...
by necovek | 2025-04-06 00:39:55+00:00
Since the entire evaluation and running is dynamic, you don't need to import (and thus evaluate) a module in certain branches.

Eg. that `if __name__` trick is used to allow a module to be both a runnable script and importable module.

Top it off with plenty of common libraries being dog-slow to import because they are doing some of the anti-pattern stuff too, and you end up executing a lot of code when you just want to import a single module.

Eg. I've seen large Python projects that take 75s just importing all the modules because they are listing imports at the top, and many are executing code during import — imagine wanting to run a simple unit test, and your test runner takes 75s just to get to the point where it can run that 0.01s test for your "quick" TDD iteration.

You can also look at Instagram's approach to solving this over at their engineering blog.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-06 00:40:32+00:00
I can't say that this is a blanket truth; of course size of org matters, too.

But I think there's an effect like a "bet" that now favors the candidate that negotiated. When you negotiate and the hiring manager or company accepts, it's like they're placing a bet that you were absolutely the best candidate in that pool.

Imagine you're the one doing the hiring. What kind of candidate would you extend extra compensation to? Only one that you believe would truly improve your organization and in doing so, you -- on the hiring side -- are placing a bet.
by sinab | 2025-04-06 00:40:42+00:00
I got an error when passing a prompt with about 20k tokens to the Llama 4 Scout model on groq (despite Llama 4 supporting up to 10M token context). groq responds with a POST https://api.groq.com/openai/v1/chat/completions 413 (Payload Too Large) error.

Is there some technical limitation on the context window size with LPUs or is this a temporary stop-gap measure to avoid overloading groq's resources? Or something else?