MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FinnLobsien | 2025-04-11 15:45:36+00:00
Yep, totally. Also, much of Netflix's growth now comes from their ad-supported tier, so they're definitely part of that attention economy.

And part of the problem is that if somebody (TikTok) has the most engaging format possible (vertical short-form video) and you (Substack, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) don't, you're at a strict disadvantage. So you enable short-form video, boost it in the algorithm, etc. no matter if it's a fit with your product because people will watch it if it's put in front of them.

> My view is that you can’t have the chocolate muffins and raw carrots on the same plate, or a bookshelf with both Dostoevsky and Playboy magazines.

And the problem is that in media, the prefrontal cortex stuff will never make as much money as the amygdala stuff, so few platforms will survive by focusing on the prefrontal cortex stuff.

A big reason HN is still so cozy and surfaces cool articles and discussions is because YC doesn't have to monetize it or optimize for engagement.

But imagine trying to start HN today...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-11 15:46:02+00:00
I don’t have to convince you. The only people who matter are government decisionmakers who are unwilling to be held hostage by him. It doesn’t matter how good you are if you can’t be trusted. The premium you pay a non SpaceX launch provider is so that the rug isn’t pulled on you. Do you want to go to space when you want? Or only when he says you can? Cheaper is not always better.
by seanhunter | 2025-04-11 15:46:20+00:00
A lot of people maybe don’t realise how important treasury rates are to their everyday life. You might be thinking “why do I care? I’m not going to go an buy treasuries. I don’t hold treasuries. So if they go up, go down, fall off a cliff it doesn’t matter to me. whoop de doo”.

To which I say hold on there a second. Firstly you probably do own some treasuries. If you have any kind of pension it will have some treasuries in it. Also if you buy something like a stock etf they will hold their cash in treasuries probably or use treasuries as collateral when they need to do margin trades. Also your credit card, mortgage, car loan anything like that if you hold it is priced at a spread above treasuries. The spread is to take into account how much more risky you are than the US govt.

Also say you’re a founder and you’re doing some kind of investment round. Well the investors are going to price your business using a discounted cash flow model as part of their decision-making process. The discount is an interest rate that is calculated using treasuries. Basically you look at the future cash flows and you deduct interest that you could get on such an asset to get an idea of the value of that future cash today.

When someone wants to ship a containerload of goods and they accept a bill of trade or whatever that includes a counterparty credit spread which is a spread over treasuries. You heard a lot about the LIBOR scandal a few years back well interbank rates are derived from a credit curve that is bootstrapped using treasury rates. So any kind of cross-currency transaction or thing with fixed or floating interest (even if it’s not in dollars) is likely to be affected by US treasuries.

Literally every financial asset is tied in some way to treasuries because a “risk free rate” is at the basis of option pricing, discounting, lending and borrowing, margin, counterparty credit adjustment etc etc.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-11 15:47:01+00:00
Sure, the other effects is that they're much more likely to be driving at night, overextended their waking hours, distracted by friends / a date / a prostitute, and driving a route that they do not normally drive.

How could you not be 10x more likely to crash than the nurse getting off at 2am who has driven the route a thousand times and knows all the bad blind spots / bad intersections / is still well within her normal waking hours. That is much closer to the normal profile of the sober people who are out driving during prime drinking hours.
Ask HN: What is the end goal of DT and EM?
by sherdil2022 | 2025-04-11 15:47:36+00:00
As the title says, what is the end goal of these 2 and those in the administration pushing various agendas? Is it capturing all the data about everyone in the US? Is it deporting everyone who is not a US citizen? Is it jailing everyone who speaks up against them?
by huijzer | 2025-04-11 15:47:44+00:00
> Where is the self-awareness, the doubt, even the shame that brings wisdom?

There is a book Investing Between the Lines by Rittenhouse that argues that candor is a high predictor for company outperformance. Buffett for example has written on multiple occasions things like “this was fully my mistake” or “it turned out I was wrong”. With the book in the back of my mind, I set out to find annual reports were the letters showed candor instead of the typical “Among a greatly turbulent economy, we have maintained good revenue numbers and customer satisfaction” rhetoric.

I have read about 100 reports and found one or two satisfying this criterium. From the top of my head, only Berskhire, Amazon in the 2000s, and Ryanair conduct candor communication.

So yes I fully agree with your point on candor and self-awareness.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-04-11 15:47:59+00:00
One approach you could use is to

- run your code through a preprocessor (like tsc or babel) and have it set to generate 'es2016' code. This will transpile out async/await to equivalent code without those keywords.

- Then edit the generated code and/or the runtime library it attaches to use Bluebird promises instead of native promises.

Are you on an old version of nodejs? Past a certain version (I don't know which one), native promises are actually faster.
by dogleash | 2025-04-11 15:48:06+00:00
Oh come on. I have this thing open all day when I'm working, you can't bullshit me like that. It's a not good UI, its serviceable.

It's not good by any conceivable metric other than those they have internally decided represent business goals. If you want to have a tautological argument that makes it good, because those goals are the only goals that matter. That's a boring response to an article about how business incentives have turned the UI into trash.

FFS the Play button frequently breaks requiring a refresh. And as much as I appreciate the inevitable response that I'm holding it wrong, how is that my problem?
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-11 15:48:15+00:00
Next time you see a HN post on a lisp-centric topic, click into the comments. I'll bet you a nickel that they'll be happier than most. Instead of phrases like "dumpster fire" they're using words like "joyful".

That's why I keep rekindling my learn-lisp effort. It feels like I'm just scratching the surface re: the fun that can be had.
by gokayburuc_dev | 2025-04-11 15:48:44+00:00
TLDR:

The main problem here is that the systems are starting to look more and more alike every day. Systems that are oppressed by algorithms turn into a Hollywood porn star: they are just trying to show what they like the most. This makes the systems uniform by wiping out all other beautiful and valuable things.

Instead of really making a system better, we're trying to make it look like the most popular one available. As a result, we have copies with silicone lips, silicone breasts, plenty of aesthetics, but cheap and soulless. Instead of improving existing systems, we corrupt them by copying them.
by varispeed | 2025-04-11 15:49:03+00:00
"unhealthy" it's simple profiteering.

In the UK that's got especially interesting. When more consultants started quitting these big firms to go independent (offering cheaper services to public sector and often better quality), these corporations lobbied for something called IR35 - basically means if company is worker owned, then it cannot make profit. Now big consultancies have very much a monopoly on making profit from some else's work and charge public sector - tax payer handsomely.

You would think that such setup is ultimately corrupt.
by rvz | 2025-04-11 15:49:38+00:00
> My company's customer-facing API bits are written in nodejs,

First mistake.

If the argument is about performance, then using nodejs is really a bad choice in general. Node promises are already expensive on memory and can easily cause memory leaks if not handled properly.

> and our VP insists that we are not allowed to use async/await, and must instead use Bluebird promises [1].

I don't think Bluebird will solve the problem and is more likely to break on new versions of node that have critical security fixes.

If you are seriously after performance with strong concurrency characteristics, use Go instead.
by muzani | 2025-04-11 15:49:45+00:00
There are almost none because everything goes obsolete in a month. In 6 months, it's deprecated. Nearly every book or guide you find will be outdated by the time it's released and the people who write them are getting exhausted with this loop.

I once wrote slides on how to give AI context so it can code. When I asked a friend to proofread it, GPT-4 came out and it was smart enough to make all my techniques obsolete. I updated my workflow for it, and then Cursor came out, basically automating all the indexing and stuff in seconds while I'd take days.

There's YouTube, but they tend to be brief and look like hype or unedited. Most of the good stuff is experimental, but experimental isn't helpful and shouldn't be. If you want names: techfren and Sabrina Ramonov

The new GPT-4o image update is just amazing. It compounds with the new memory update less 24 hours ago. I could write pages about why but I'd rather just make stuff with it. Anyone who's getting excited about it but not using it is a bit of a hypocrite.

Just treat it like a skateboard. No book. You'll fall many times at first. Have fun with it. You don't have to go anywhere, just go around the block. Join one of the many hackathons out there and do something with it. It'll click.

Make good use of Cunningham's Law - just exclaim that it can't do Y, and someone will explain how it does Y. Like the skater community, people want to see you do tricks.
by charlie-83 | 2025-04-11 15:50:05+00:00
I think this issue with using these models is something he touches on. As big-hollywood-company-xyz you can ask the writer what were the influences of the work and determine if anything crosses a legal line. You can have a level of trust in what the writer says since their reputation/career is on the line.

With the AI model, it can regurgitate something from the internet word for word and it's on you to check it.

There's a lot of work being done to make AI more transparent but it seems like that has a way to go.

Or you realise that the models are all trained on pirated data anyways and no one cared so if you are a big enough company you can just do whatever you want.
by Molitor5901 | 2025-04-11 15:50:36+00:00
This is going to devastate the DC area. Most of my friends work for one of the big IT contractors. It's a great gig if you can get it, very nice compensation and not a lot of responsibility. The first rule of government contracting has always been why buy something when you can buy it for three times the price. As a result these firms have become quite massive in their size and billings. This is going to cause a major overturn in people living in the DC region, and overall incomes. I would say perhaps, perhaps, it's the equivalent of a very large company leaving Silicon Valley.
by timschmidt | 2025-04-11 15:50:40+00:00
Friend, when your argument evaporates in the presence of the financial numbers and you revert to character assassination, you might be identifying yourself among the untrustworthy. Bad faith arguments really undermine any trust I could build for you through this media.

> The premium you pay a non SpaceX launch provider is so that the rug isn’t pulled on you. Cheaper is not always better.

Again, when one of them manages to land an orbital class rocket, call me. Competition would be great.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-11 15:50:44+00:00
Personally disappointed to see opposition US liberals in the US still fantasizing that the problem of Trump is going to be solved "eventually" in 2026 or in the courts.

More protests needed. This is tyranny-lite in action, huge overreach by the executive that I'm pretty sure the hallowed founders -- that people always talk about with reverance down there -- would be horrified by. 18th century revolutionaries would be disappointed to see the way people are rolling over.
by stackedinserter | 2025-04-11 15:50:50+00:00
It's hard to track, because it's all nice websites with generic messages like "we make life better" and pictures with obligatory diversity faces. E.g. $4.5 billion here chemonics.com. Or $3 billion here devalt.org. Where did these money go? How can we measure the ROI?

USAID is a corrupt wasteful sinkhole, good riddance to it.
by vishnudeva | 2025-04-11 15:50:56+00:00
I'd love to offer a few words of encouragement for this excellent project. This space only appears crowded to those that have already been here for a while. To everyone else, this might just be the most obvious thing to adopt for Kubernetes and they might not even have heard of Kustomize/Helm. So I would suggest two separate personas to target in the docs and communication: 1) Jaded devs that need to be convinced with detailed proof that Koreo isn't yet-another YAML tool. 2) Everyone else, to whom the pitch is that Koreo is the most obvious choice when the need is A, B, or C.

Looking forward to trying this out soon!

I also think more high level patterns would make Koreo more approachable. Real world problems and how they could be addressed with Koreo.
by bumby | 2025-04-11 15:50:58+00:00
Oftentimes, the consulting companies are outsourcing back to the government but for free. The dynamic is something like:

1) Consultant is hired to solve a problem.

2) Consultant struggles to understand the nuances of the problem.

3) Consultant relies on government employees to hand-hold them through the solution, effectively subsidizing the consultant with free labor.

4) Consultant writes it up in a final report with their company logo on the title page and gets paid.

Maybe that's not necessarily bad if it eventually solves the problem, but it does seem pretty inefficient for the taxpayer.
by mnky9800n | 2025-04-11 15:51:04+00:00
Don’t hate the player hate the game. Academia has been perforated with metric driven nonsense from administration at all levels of funding and the university. It is not possible to quantify how much work it takes to generate a new idea that will downstream benefit humanity. This metric driven academic reality has led to two outcomes. An over production of papers on every topic. And the reduction of research into predictable outcomes that cannot be considered science because it is trodding well worn paths knowing it will produce yet another paper. Meanwhile funding agencies, job rules and laws, etc. all incentivize hiring PhDs over all other kinds of positions because it’s usually rather impossible to create lots of forever tenure track professor and research scientist positions since no one has funding for the next 40 years of a persons career. It was wrong that they cheated and they should be removed but i understand why they did it.
by hungxplorer | 2025-04-11 15:51:41+00:00
Location: Vietnam

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: ReactJS, React Native, Java Spring Boot, VueJS, NodeJS, Kafka

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FIh8ELboX3KY7UNOzxvJtKcMJ35...

Email: hungxplorer@gmail.com

I’m a Software Engineer with over 6 years of experience, including 3 years in team leadership. I'm proficient in JavaScript and familiar with Java Spring Boot, ReactJS, VueJS, React Native, NodeJS, and Kafka.

I enjoy building products from scratch, optimizing system architecture, and delivering high-performance solutions. I’m a team player, a fast learner, and love solving problems. I’m looking for an opportunity at a startup where things move fast, the workload is challenging, and I’ll have the chance to show what I can do
by huijzer | 2025-04-11 15:51:44+00:00
For example, Buffett in the 1989 letter:

Last summer we sold the corporate jet that we purchased for $850,000 three years ago and bought another used jet for $6.7 million. Those of you who recall the mathematics of the multiplying bacteria on page 5 will understandably panic: If our net worth continues to increase at current rates, and the cost of replacing planes also continues to rise at the now-established rate of 100% compounded annually, it will not be long before Berkshire's entire net worth is consumed by its jet.

Charlie doesn't like it when I equate the jet with bacteria; he feels it's degrading to the bacteria. His idea of traveling in style is an air-conditioned bus, a luxury he steps up to only when bargain fares are in effect. My own attitude toward the jet can be summarized by the prayer attributed, apocryphally I'm sure, to St. Augustine as he contemplated leaving a life of secular pleasures to become a priest. Battling the conflict between intellect and glands, he pled: "Help me, Oh Lord, to become chaste - but not yet."

Naming the plane has not been easy. I initially suggested "The Charles T. Munger." Charlie countered with "The Aberration." We finally settled on "The Indefensible."
by Apreche | 2025-04-11 15:52:01+00:00
That’s a good point, but it hasn’t borne out in reality. Creative Cloud is frequently adding new features, some of which are quite incredible. Project Turntable that they demonstrated last year honestly blew me away.

Also, several of their products face stiff competition. They have to keep pushing Premiere to fend off Davinci and Final Cut.
by ivraatiems | 2025-04-11 15:52:17+00:00
All of your posts on this thread, honestly are some of the most bizarre I've ever seen on this site.

I'm here saying: "this treatment massively improved my life and might have actually saved it!" and your response is "this shows medicine is wholly corrupt and cannot be trusted."

It's especially odd given that CPAP is a non-invasive low-to-no-side-effect solution whose only real drawback is that the machines are expensive and hard to calibrate, and don't work if you don't use them. We're not talking about a new drug or vaccine or something. We're literally just talking about helping people breathe easier. And it's not like I am using the CPAP blindly with no idea whether it's working. I can literally tell every day just by existing in a rested state that it is working.

I'm not saying there isn't some theoretical better treatment out there. But it seems like you think I should... not use the treatment I have because the people who produced it might be corrupt?

I genuinely don't see how these things follow or are even related.

And for what it's worth, I do have a doctor-spouse, and she demanded I get a CPAP and is happy every day that I have one.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-11 15:52:41+00:00
I love 2000 and XP but 7 has a special spot for me because it’s a “modern” Windows (supporting proper alpha blending in its theme drawing and such) without the various problems that 8 and newer bring. I have an old laptop with it installed and booting it up is honestly refreshing. Its visual style is a little dated feeling but not that much.
by zemvpferreira | 2025-04-11 15:53:00+00:00
Inevitably, that way of setting up an organization leads to one of two end-games:

1-A wealthy ruling class who can afford and feels entitled to be the government. See: the British Empire.

2-A wealthy ruling class who can afford to postpone profits while they accumulate power, to eventually trade that power for profit through grift. See: western democracy.

Pay people as well as possible for their work and ruthlessly go after theft, corruption and incompetence. That’s how you build a lastingly successful system. Shades of Singapore.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-11 15:53:06+00:00
It means that you no longer need to go through an intermediary to get the result you want. You have the end product in your mind, you just don't have the ability to translate it into reality.

I can give you the real example of recently needing to translates ancient 90's era manufacturing files into modern ones, while also generating companion automation files from it (which needs to by done manually but with tooling to facilitate the process).

I found a company that sells software capable of doing this. A license is $1000/yr/usr.

The next day I was able to get claude 3.7 to make a program that does all that, translate the files, and then have a GUI that renders them so an engineer can go through and manually demarcate points, which then are used to calculate and output the automation file. This took about 45 minutes and is what the department is using now. We have thousands of these files that will need to get modernized as they get used.

I see this everywhere now, and I have been building bespoke programs left an right. Whether it be an audio spectrum analyzer that allows me to finely tune my stereo equalizer visually based on feedback for any given track, or an app on my phone that instantly calculates futures prices and margin requirements for given position sizes and predicted market movements.

People think LLMs will be a paradigm shift, I can tell you the shift has already happened, it's just a matter of awareness now.
by discmonkey | 2025-04-11 15:54:16+00:00
Good article. Funnily enough the throw away line "I don't see parentheses anymore". Is my greatest deterrent with lisp. It's not the parens persay, it's the fact that I'm used to reading up to down and left to right. Lisp without something like the clojure macro ->, means that I am reading from right to left, bottom to top - from inside out.

If i programmed enough in lisp I think my brain would adjust to this, but it's almost like I can't full appreciate the language because it reads in the "wrong order".
by zer8k | 2025-04-11 15:54:23+00:00
> Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that

This is generous. I have worked with these consultants. These aren't mom-and-pop startup consultancies. These guys charge extortionate rates and provide bottom-barrel talent. One agency, who will not be named, sweet talks you with product managers and then exports 90% of the technical labor overseas to the lowest bidder. You pay expert prices for this. Even their MBAs are tacit manipulators. I remember one project before we canned them - the PMs were constantly revising their "go to market strategy" conveniently around the time the contract would be up for negotiation.

> So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies

Realistically, new-grads are willing to work 14x7 and shower and sleep in the office. That's why.

These consultancies are a malignant cancer on business and the health of their employees.
by Ziggy_Zaggy | 2025-04-11 15:54:32+00:00
The federal service DOES have a pay-banding system (AcqDemo) that CAN support the extra compensation but it's currently NOT being adequately implemented. If the system actually implemented the next pay-band to be cover roughly pay-grade that covers the $100k to $250k income level that wasn't MGT focused and instead technical "do the work in a team setting" focused (NOT tech director - useless position - should be eliminated).

Also, the current pay-pool system is NOT effective bc MGT is NOT able and/or willing to fight for their employees who work to get a reasonable pay-bump and instead the game is always "can't pay my employees more than me or my MGT buddies".

The federal service culture insists on paying MGT positions more than technical higher-talent positions in over 80% of cases.