MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tensility | 2025-04-08 06:49:07+00:00
This is more or less the advice that I was going to give. I would add on to it by recommending that, if you don't know what to build, go find an open source project with open pull requests and start fixing broken things. Keep track of your submissions and use them to start creating a portfolio of the professional work that you've done this way a gratis.

In addition to doing volunteer work this way, also look for various "bug bounty" situations for accumulating similar "professional micro-experiences" that you can also use to show that you have been crafting and delivering functional code into one or more projects.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-08 06:49:19+00:00
We make a niche B2B software for a low-margin sector. For us it's definitely point 1.

We of course fix the serious issues, but we also leave a lot of bugs collecting virtual dust in our tracker.

While I know our customers get annoyed with bugs, they care a lot more about essential features and low price.

Now, we're in the process of incrementally rewriting our 20+ year old software, and code quality has a very high priority now. So hopefully the future will be brighter.

That said, our users are incredibly good at finding weird issues.
by FilosofumRex | 2025-04-08 06:50:01+00:00
This is just old school fatherly advice, which doesn't represent today's reality at anywhere, let alone at MIT.

Most profs these days, went to grad school right out of college and never stepped foot in the industry. If they've had any contact within industry it's through some R&D grant with other PhDs. A few are in start-ups which means they only hire interns for $20/hr, and fresh off the boat indians and asians grad students.

Small or local companies don't want and can't pay salary of MIT grads; they've plenty of salt-of-the-earth local engineering school grads to chose from.
by GreenWatermelon | 2025-04-08 06:50:32+00:00
The way I see it, Autism is more a kin to color-blindness, while crippling anxiety is na actual illness/disorder that should be addressed with therapy.

And while someone on the autism spectrum is born that way, anxiety is inflicted. Of course, Genetic temperament plays a role in one's predisposition to anxiety, just like with many physiological illnesses.

In a nutshell, Autism is neither an illness or disorder, but merely a "different order", while crippling anxiety is actually a disorder.
by vanschelven | 2025-04-08 06:50:33+00:00
Personally I've never found it a problem to just fix things that I see are broken, as a dev, without PM approval, even in very dysfunctional organizations. Sometimes it even goes noticed and people applaud you for it.

In other words: though I acknowledge that the phenomenon described in the article is real, I sometimes feel it's just because developers accept a reality that doesn't need to be accepted.
by 7bit | 2025-04-08 06:52:00+00:00
Discord has a bug where using the HOME-SHIFT key does move the cursor without selecting the text, when creating a new forum-type post through their desktop and web client. In addition, the HOME and END keys also jump to the start/end of the textbox, instead of the start/end of the line.

They closed the ticket and sent me to their feedback page, where I can request any new feature, where people can then vote. They concluded their rejection with the phrase "anything is possible" with the help of the community.

I created the same ticket 5 years ago, where it was treated exactly the same.

It is so frustrating as a user to have basic functionality broken and repeatedly running into this on a weekly basis, because habits... and then getting told that they don't care about the bug unless thousands of people discover your bug report in their feedback portal and up vote it--as if it were my job to do the prioritizing for them.

It's quite upsetting.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-08 06:52:49+00:00
An Amiga or PC running Windows 3.x would be quite capable to handle the word processing and spreadsheet related activities I do at home, and from the Amiga side I dare say I would still enjoy more many of those games than the 80 € AAA graphics pumped games that come out nowadays with their 60 h gameplay and 120 GB disk space.
Dory – AI Knowledge Base Powered by Browser History
by oladekola | 2025-04-08 06:53:00+00:00
Dynamic Online Recall for You (DORY) helps you find anything you've seen before online using whatever you remember about it. DORY also builds a cognitive context graph to organize your work into auto-updating workflows and serve them to you in real time based on your browsing context. Early beta testers have found super useful onboarding and training use cases for this feature in particular.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRWTVu77mMc Website: https://www.usedory.com/

A bit about me: I'm a previously non-technical founder. Taught myself how to code mostly from scratch using AI tools. The most useful prompt in my self directed learning has been "explain this to me like I'm a smart 12 year old". Yes, DORY is a nod to the movie Finding Dory!
by pfannkuchen | 2025-04-08 06:53:27+00:00
The US is in a weird position though and I don’t think negotiations are affected like you say, for a specific reason.

If everyone were roughly equals in terms of power, then I would agree with you. If Poland treats France like this, it would not end well for Poland.

The trade imbalances are not a result of the US having been out negotiated by other countries in the past, though. That trade policy came from internal corruption, where American corporations influenced politicians to enrich themselves at the expense of national interests.

Now the government is ignoring those particular corporate interests (they are played out by now for the most part anyway), and USA is suddenly negotiating for real again.

USA doesn’t care about trust in this situation because there is a massive power imbalance in its favor.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-08 06:53:28+00:00
You raise a few points.

I am not sure what you mean by "people with poor human qualities". I am particularly involved in GT and less in Pharo since many years. GT is based on Pharo, but it comes with its own environment and philosophy to support a goal that is not about Smalltalk. We do encourage you to join and see our community especially if you are interested to learn a different kind of programming with us. I am yet to find people with poor human qualities there.

As for funding, we sustain GT through the work we do at feenk where we solve hard problems in organizations that depend on software systems.

And we do not claim that GT is the best. Only that it's the first to show a different possibility to how systems can be made explainable.
by Pooge | 2025-04-08 06:54:28+00:00
> police acts swiftly

Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by "swift".

> I find it quite ludicrous to think their restaurants represent what they eat on daily basis

I have lived with 2 different Japanese family (one younger, one older) and I was referring to the younger one when writing my previous comment. You say that restaurant doesn't represent what they eat, but again this is not my observation; restaurants and prepared meal (bento) are socheap—price-to-purchasing-power compared to Western countries—that many people don't even cook for themselves. So yes, it's absolutely relevant.

> Not sure why Violent crime would be better than non-violent crime for feeding your kids

I never said it was. But hunger definitely makes you more violent and more irrational. I excluded non-violent crimes because people usually exclude those when thinking about a country's safety. There are a lot of scams in Japan, for example.

> They would never hurt a fly.

Most people would never hurt someone. Most people are lawful. But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy. Perhaps there is a causation, perhaps not.
by nottorp | 2025-04-08 06:54:38+00:00
> If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke

Actually you should be able to bring it to one of the multiple 3rd party repair shops of your choice, get it fixed and not have Lenovo involved at all, except maybe by selling you parts at a reasonable price.

Incidentally you should also be able to modify the laptop as you want, or if you lack the skills, pay said 3rd party repair shops to do it for you.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-08 06:55:00+00:00
Your presence inspired me to try to look up what the circumflex on "abzû" is supposed to signify. As best I can tell, it's a marker of vowel length.

I wonder how that came to be used. It's a traditional way to distinguish eta and omega in transliteration from Greek, but it's not at all a traditional way to mark long vowels in general.

(I see that wikipedia says this about Akkadian:

> Long vowels are transliterated with a macron (ā, ē, ī, ū) or a circumflex (â, ê, î, û), the latter being used for long vowels arising from the contraction of vowels in hiatus.

But it seems odd for an independent root to contain a contracted double vowel. And the page "Abzu" has the circumflex on the Sumerian transliteration too.)
by wk_end | 2025-04-08 06:55:03+00:00
At the language level...sort of?

Idris is strict, unlike Haskell. As of Idris 2, it also has a substructural type system which tracks how often terms are used, which is kind of Rust-y and can allow for better runtime performance by ensuring that proofs can be erased (IIUC).

But besides just being a language, Haskell is a whole ecosystem. It's not an amazing ecosystem, but it's good enough for serious work. Idris is not and may never be. A fully-supported Dependent Haskell would be huge for dependent types in practice.
by uh_uh | 2025-04-08 06:55:41+00:00
1. Many humans don't have an idea of the limits of their competence. It's called the Dunning–Kruger effect.

2. LLMs regularly tell me if what I'm asking for is possible or not. I'm not saying they're always correct, but they seem to have at least some sense of what's in the realm of possibility.
by 1659447091 | 2025-04-08 06:57:25+00:00
> This is very jarring when you expect the default “iced coffee” to be black coffee over ice.

Same reaction I had the first time I ordered a cappuccino there. I learned to order Flat Whites cause I kept forgetting to tell them to not put chocolate powder on top...why anyone thought that would be a great idea is beyond my comprehension. The Flat White on the hand easily makes up for their cappuccino faux pas
by wesselbindt | 2025-04-08 06:57:33+00:00
> The vast majority of North Koreans outside North Korea are not defectors, instead they are controlled state assets.

So, I'm not a fan of North Korea (is anyone?), but this is definitely racist rhetoric. One thing that helps me see whether I'm saying something iffy is by replacing the ethnic group I'm talking about, and replacing it with another. If the resulting statement is either silly, deeply offensive, or obvious scare mongering, typically it means the original statement is worth reconsidering.
by jajko | 2025-04-08 06:58:18+00:00
Yes unless we talk about kids. They have no life experience, defenses, and are very vulnerable to skilled manipulative attacks. They form various addictive behavioral patterns pretty quickly.

Just look around how many kids are properly addicted to screens in some form. It used to be just passive TV, now its extremely interactive, bombastic, supplanting real social interactions. If you don't see a problem and its long term consequences, child psychologists and good parents (and even well-meaning countries) do.
by veunes | 2025-04-08 06:58:27+00:00
On one hand, yeah, misrepresenting your experience, even if "AI-assisted," is a red flag, especially when the role clearly requires real, practical knowledge. But on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of outcome we should expect in the age of LLMs: people will use every tool available to bridge gaps, especially when under pressure in a hypercompetitive job market.
by cmurf | 2025-04-08 06:59:02+00:00
And he's shown capriciousness, willingness toward retribution, rewards fealty, and has long been in favor of bribes (very anti Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and has this time around told DOJ to not enforce it). He's not negotiating to benefit the U.S. or allies.

Even if a country makes a deal, like USMCA - his deal - why won't he complain about it again in a month or a year and just reneg on the whole thing? This is the problem with untrustworthy liars.
by elderK | 2025-04-08 06:59:41+00:00
I agree with your posts.

I've been battling RSI and stuff for the past two years and am starting to make progress although it's required me to get both of my wrists fixed and potentially both of my elbows in the future.

It's easy to just say "Oh, do this workout" but it can be very difficult to do that if you either lack the time or have other health issues that prevent you from doing them.

For me, I have rods in my legs and fused ankles so even though I try to hit the treadmill regularly, doing so means I wind up in a lot of pain.

None of this has got in the way of my passion for building software, although for me there is a distinction between what I do (or want to do) in my own time vs. what I have to do for work.

It's a good day when I can really apply myself to a problem at work.

It's less great when for whatever reason, I'm prevented from being able to do a good job.

And the sad thing is that often, you're not prevented from doing a good job because of any technical or time constraint, it's usually all political.

That's the thing that sucks most :)
by bruce511 | 2025-04-08 07:00:33+00:00
>> So we are back at square one here, why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?

Because engineers are typically (although not always) terrible at business. Or marketing. Or Sales. Or whatever.

In other words, a successful business needs many skills. One of those skills is management. It's inevitable that top management (who's core skill is hopefully, well, business) needs to people to do the other skills. Marketing, Sales, Engineering, and so on.

Hence those skilled people need to communicate with management in ways in which management can understand. They can then make sure everyone has aligned goals. It's no good if engineers are doing one thing, marketing is doing something else, sales is targeting the wrong demographic, and so on.

It seems to be a unique conceit of software engineers that "management just gets in the way". When, more realistically, management is trying to communicate the business requirements, and we feel we know better.

Most engineers (again, not all) are terrible at the actual business part. The list of failed companies, multi-year solo projects that never sell a single copy, and so on are evidence of this. Joel made his name writing (literally) "The business of software".

So back to your question;

>> why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?

because how else will engineers know what to do?
by droelf | 2025-04-08 07:01:36+00:00
Interesting project. We'd love to work together for better Lua support in Pixi (through the conda-forge ecosystem). We already package lua and a few C extensions. C extensions are the bread and butter for Pixi, so I think it could be a good fit!

- pixi.sh (docs) - lua package on the registry: https://prefix.dev/channels/conda-forge/packages/lua
by clauderoux | 2025-04-08 07:01:48+00:00
As I said many times, I have been in the game for 30 years. I started doing AI with rules as early as the beginning of the 90 and I never...never expected to see anything like LLMs in my lifetime. When I read Marcus once again saying that: yes this time LLM have reached their limit, which he has been saying for 2 years in a row, I'm really feeling tired of his tune. The idea that LLM are a dead end, a failing technology is pretty weird. Compared to what??? I use LLM everyday in my work, to write summaries, to make translations, to generate some code or to get explanations about a given code... And I even use them as research sparring partners to see how I could improve my work... Gary Marcus has been involved in the domain for 30 years as well... Where is his technology that would match or surpass the LLM???
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-08 07:02:51+00:00
Thank you for the suggestion. We are indeed doing that both publicly and privately. We do learn a lot from this.

I very much agree that it is hard to remember the beginner's mind. I also find that a larger challenge is that there isn't a single beginner's mind, but many. When the space is large and there are many paths, people can come from different directions. Finding commonalities seems to be significantly more difficult in that situation.

But this still leaves the problem of how to explain it before people work with the environment. The conversations in posts like these are very helpful, for example. I'd be interested in other suggestions that could help with that.
by thawawaycold | 2025-04-08 07:05:17+00:00
True that, also the notice period I'm contractually obliged to follow is in the phase where I could leave at any moment, whereas waiting for the trial phase to be over would force me to wait 6 months to leave.

My fear is that, coming from a similarly dysfunctional place, I'll just put in hopes and efforts for a better workplace and end up somewhere even worse, at which point I'll have to slow down in order not to change 3 jobs in such a small amount of time.

Also, sometimes I just feel ungrateful for whining this much, especially considering I have a family (not my own, mind you) to support and cannot allow myself to simply be without a job (and a well paying one at that) for long periods of time - I would love to have some objective measures for saying the role is not worth it, but of course that is not feasible in reality, and that deeply bothers me.
by c4ptnjack | 2025-04-08 07:05:48+00:00
The main factor that you fail to mention is living cost, and not the internet, which made it possible and desirable to frequently move in search of opportunity.

It didn't mean there weren't people that lived long-term in communities. However, it did mean that you could find more lucrative opportunities in different places while also affording to move and live there.

That began to slowly change in the 60's, beginning with the death of single occupancy residences and a lack of funding/investment in affordable housing for a significant portion of income brackets.

The last 30ish years helped cement that for lots of reasons, but the ability to work remotely via the internet isn't particularly new nor causative for that change.
by TomK32 | 2025-04-08 07:06:52+00:00
Darwin barely mentioned the whole human species in his Origin of Species but it still inspired his cousin Francis Galton to develop Eugenics[1]: Whether you selectively bread humans to improve the species or dumb it down, who's to tell the difference? Darwin himself had less luck with his person contribution to the evolution of the species, his youngest being described as "backward in walking & talking, but intelligent and observant", which was surely due to him having married his cousin: "We are a wretched family & ought to be exterminated."[2]

The problem of a) people ruining their health and b) not having enough donor organs can be solved much easier by encouraging active transport over the personal 2t metal box, reducing sugar, salt and others in our processed foods and of course legislation to make organ donations possible even without the deceased having agreed before. The opt-out in countries like Austria and Spain raises the level of awareness but of course still needs excellent communication.

[1] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jan/19/charles-darw...
by thewileyone | 2025-04-08 07:06:55+00:00
The most important skills you've gained from your education so far is the ability to learn and process. Take any tech related job you can right now, don't be picky. Strive to excel in whatever that job is and not just from the tech standpoint; the business and the processes are equally important. Keep your eye on the horizon for what role it is you really want but be aware that that goal might change over time.

And keep in talking to your friends. Who knows if between the lot of you, you've already thought of the next big thing.
by aegypti | 2025-04-08 07:06:56+00:00
Married couple households, comfortable. Secure. ~30% of children in the US don’t even live with 2 parents.

“Middle class” was used once in reference here to class dysmorphia while working-class was used 5 times:

the very term middle class has become a meaningless catchall for a disparate range of lived financial experiences

Thus, a “comfort class”. Big enough to have seemingly hijacked the Democratic Party. Reads as less rare than distinct from the working class proper for me, personally.
by laichzeit0 | 2025-04-08 07:07:08+00:00
Don't see the point of these "take home projects". Just ask them what's the most difficult technical thing they had to do before, and have them walk you through it, probe, ask questions. If you don't like the one they talked about, ask about another one, or another one. You can generally weed out the bullshitters, they talk alot about "we" and hardly ever use "I" meaning they didn't do anything.
by bandie91 | 2025-04-08 07:08:43+00:00
(i'm not addressing the parent post's author personally)

i start to consider this "human value == intelligence" line of thinking as hate speech, eugenetics-based racism, and endorsement of violence. no. human value is not based solely on intelligence level (whatever that would be - i doubt if scientists even broadly agree what intelligence is and how to measure it), but on being the member of the homo species. period. nothing else. a human is a human even he was born without an actual brain organ in his skull. stop killing the future of humanity.
by lelanthran | 2025-04-08 07:08:51+00:00
I've got a number of vanilla JS, HTML, CSS libraries that work only from within the browser, using the standard tags to include them.

For me, not having a build-step means that, yes, I miss out on typescript, but the upsides are easier to read, easier debugging and lower cognitive burden during both writing and reading the application.

It means I will never, like the author in the article, spend $X weeks, and then spend a further $Y dollars just to build something "modern".

My "modern looking" applications are developed, and then tested, on a machine from 2010 (1st-gen i7) that has 16GB of RAM and oodles of slow spinning-rust disks, and it isn't painful at all.[1]

[1] It is, in fact, quite nice when I see a client use their system from their own PC and it's just a little bit snappier than I am used to.
by dmurray | 2025-04-08 07:09:10+00:00
I suppose you'd do it the same way any North Korean operative would. They'd offer you training on how to bypass the controls. They'd get you to exfiltrate the code and the product roadmap. They'd have someone more skilled suggest a plausible backdoor as part of an innocent change, like the xzutils one.

As for how they'd force you, just like any intelligence agency, they'd start with carrots. They'd offer you money, or the chance to feel you were serving your country (both are free to the Australian government, and likely more effective than a double ration of wheat). They'd have you do very innocent, justifiable things at first. They'd work their way up to higher demands. If you got cold feet, they'd tell you you were in too deep. They'd then consider the sticks. They'd threaten to expose your spying, or release some other compromat. They'd arrest you or a family member on a he-said-the-cops-said enemy-of-the-people crime like drugs, child pornography or terrorism, and make it clear that only your full cooperation would see a release.

Nobody thinks the Australian government relies on this kind of thing as much as NK, and the checks and balances of a democracy make it too expensive to do this at an industrial scale. But you'd be foolish if you thought the state doesn't have these capabilities, and the complete willingness to use them for matters of national security, and the ability to make it "legal", perhaps by pardoning people or not cooperating with any court.