MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by holografix | 2025-04-07 22:54:12+00:00
Very much a case of “grass is always greener”. I work in pre-sales at $FAANG and would do everything to take a 20% pay cut and go work a low pressure SWE role flinging golang around.

My lord… the lack of political maneuvering, fiefdom building and defending, workaholics chasing deals and responses through the weekend or first thing at 5:30am when they wake up…

I did a short stint as part of a pro services team at a SaaS once. Some of the most fun I’ve had, moderate to low pressure, interesting but not overly challenging problems, mostly a creativity challenge not “configure systemd” challenges.

Now I know whT you’re thinking: “oh but here in SWE land we have all the problems you mentioned too!”

Yep that’s my point.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-07 22:54:47+00:00
How so? I thought they are the same, at least almost.

Tremulous (ioquake3 fork) had GUIDs from qkeys.

https://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3/2006-April/000951.html

You can see how qkeys are generated, and essentially a GUID is:

Cvar_Get("cl_guid", Com_MD5File(QKEY_FILE, 0), CVAR_USERINFO | CVAR_ROM);

So, in this case, GUID is the MD5 hash of the generated qkey file. See "CL_GenerateQKey" for details.

> On startup, the client engine looks for a file called qkey. If it does not exist, 2KiB worth of random binary data is inserted into the qkey file. A MD5 digest is then made of the qkey file and it is inserted into the cl_guid cvar.

UUIDs have RFCs, GUIDs apparently do not, but AFAIK UUIDs are also named GUIDs, so...
by creatonez | 2025-04-07 22:54:56+00:00
I've found that the only prompts that actually work for generating code reliably are the ones where you already know exactly what code it will output -- where nearly every part of the "how" is precisely clear, it just needs to be compiled from human language into code. Writing this perfect prompt often turns out to be a waste of time. It's a classic specification problem. Human languages will let you under-specify a problem, but the result will not be pleasant.
Tell HN: Microsoft bans its extensions from Cursor?
by jitbit | 2025-04-07 22:56:45+00:00
As of ~6 hours ago, the "C# Dev Kit" and "C/C++" extensions no longer work in Cursor.

Error message: "extension may be used only with Microsoft Visual Studio Code and other Microsoft affiliates' products."

Why I think this matters:

Yes, Microsoft's license does explicitly state that its extensions (and the entire VSCode plugin registry, really) are for use in VSCode only. So technically, this move is within their rights.

Cursor has likely been using a workaround to access MS's extension catalog. But now it looks like Microsoft is enforcing those restrictions — at least for C, C++ and C# Dev Kit.

What worries me is whether this is just a one-off... or if Microsoft is testing the waters and might start blocking other key extensions (TypeScript, Python, etc.) or even ban Cursor entirely from the registry.

PS:

It’s kinda wild that Cursor — a well-funded company directly competing with MS (re: Copilot) — is relying on Microsoft’s infrastructure in a way that’s clearly against the TOS. They’re basically operating with an axe hanging over their head.

PPS: Windsurf next?

---

UPD: screenshot can be viewed at https://i.imgur.com/WTyQMFk.png

UPD2: reddit threads

https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1jrl981/microsoft_has_released_their_own_cursor/

https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1jtxsxd/as_of_6_hours_ago_c_dev_kit_is_not_working_in/

https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1jr1fbq/cc_vscode_extension_is_getting_blocked_on_cursor/
by sumonoahid | 2025-04-07 22:57:02+00:00
I just launched LaunchJet!

After years of starting new projects and spending weeks rewriting the same boilerplate code, I finally got fed up and built something to solve this problem once and for all.

LaunchJet started as my personal frustration with the endless cycle: set up authentication, hook up payments, create email templates, build dashboards... rinse and repeat for every new SaaS idea. I was spending 80% of my time on identical infrastructure and only 20% on what made each product unique.

So I channeled that frustration into building a complete TypeScript full-stack boilerplate that handles all the repetitive parts. It includes:

JWT authentication with social login Stripe payment processing Email confirmation flows Beautiful UI with dark mode Admin dashboards Notification systems Everything is fully typed, tested and production-ready. What used to take me 6-8 weeks now takes just days.

I'm using React, Node.js and MongoDB with a focus on developer experience. The documentation is comprehensive because I know how frustrating it can be to adopt someone else's code.

If you're building SaaS products and tired of reinventing the wheel, I'd love for you to check it out and share your feedback. This is just the beginning - I have plans for more payment gateways and localization support in upcoming releases.

Let's build great products faster together!
by bob1029 | 2025-04-07 22:57:16+00:00
> I say keep offline-first SPA/PWAs alive.

I have no problem with the properly offline-capable apps using standards compliant web technology. I've been championing the use of PWAs to circumvent the iOS App Store for years.

To be very specific, the problematic solutions in my view tend to be those right in the middle of pure SSR and pure client. They aren't sure if they are always online or offline by default and the actual customer use cases don't seem to have been fully explored.

Did you ask the customer if a ~150ms form post to us-east-1 from their main office would be something they'd even care about? Why not? You could save an unbelievable amount of frustration if they don't care. It would take 10 minutes to set up a demo they could try if you think it's going to be a deal breaker at delivery time.

I've not once worked with a B2B customer in the banking, insurance, finance, manufacturing or retail domains who raised a concern about any of this. Only nerds on the internet seem to fantasize about the customer getting outraged at a browser navigation event or a synthetic browser benchmark score.
by sterlind | 2025-04-07 22:58:27+00:00
I apologize for strawmanning, I misunderstood your position. Yes, disturbing the peace is such an example, though like disorderly conduct it's somewhat prone to abuse as a charge.

My position is that 1A ought to protect the publication and discussion of vulnerabilities, encryption algorithms, software etc. as speech. Like how PGP was first published as a book listing the source code on printed pages. Unless a tool has absolutely no redeeming value besides breaking the law.

So I think Switch emulators ought to be protected, if they can be used for some legitimate purpose like benchmarking, homebrew, etc. (minus any copyrighted ROM dumps, of course.) Same with youtube-dlp, same with forensic tools like Ghidra and unpackers.
by ketzo | 2025-04-07 23:00:22+00:00
The answer -- as it is with every version of "why is this JS so complicated?" -- is that frontend web dev:

- is the default way that most humans interact with computers

- is an extraordinarily broad problem space and solution space

- is something that basically every modern software company needs to do in some capacity, and with even a few developers, abstractions become desirable

I'm not saying there wasn't a better way for React to adopt FP principles. I certainly have my own gripes.

But to start a conversation with "why does the most widely adopted framework for the most broadly-used software interface in history have some rough edges?" seems, to me, to be sort of begging the question.
by mmooss | 2025-04-07 23:01:47+00:00
I always give credit to someone who actually knows something - thanks for sharing what you know, which is in some ways certainly more than I do.

> I'm talking about what can be cut before it impacts capabilities and readiness. Somewhere in this range you'll have to do reorganizations and realignments to continue reducing the DOD budget while maintaining capabilities.

I see evidence of inefficiencies and some failed programs, but in one of the world's largest organizations with the largest budget, inevitably that will happen. For generations, people have railed against and joked about the inefficiency and waste of large bureaucracies, in government, business, etc. I can't think of one that people have called efficient.

I don't see evidence that you or anyone else has a serious way to improve it; nor that having improved it, we should make cuts rather than reap benefits. And I don't see evidence of your claim about capabilities and readiness (and the latter is already pretty low). Just cutting things isn't a serious solution worth addressing - it's not a plan at all. How could the situation seriously be improved?

And let's be realistic: The GOP wants to cut everything in government and will say anything to rationalize it. One method of rationalizing they do is endlessly repeat things until they become a perceived truth - in these cases that Agency X is corrupt and inefficient. DoD is just the latest target.
by ajross | 2025-04-07 23:02:07+00:00
"People" don't commonly use them, no. But it's a real and documented API to do this (see e.g. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects).

And in any case you had a specific requirement above ("Given a collection of files, but not the git repo they're from, and libgit, I can't say if those files match a git tag hash"), and in fact this can be done!
by roguecoder | 2025-04-07 23:02:16+00:00
You talk to real humans.

Plenty of candidates are willing to lie and as we see here AI has made lying much cheaper. There is nothing you can put on your resume that AI couldn't have put there for anyone. But AI can't yet fake a network.

Personally, I'll put in second-degree referrals to my company: if someone I have worked with has worked with the person and is willing to personally vouch for them, I'll put their resume in and ping the recruiter (yes, it's gotten so bad even internal referrals don't break through the slush pile without a specific ping.) But I get the recruiter's attention because I only recommend people I have reason to think are actually good.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-07 23:02:28+00:00
They are potentially attempting to create surplus labor by destroying federal employment, due to the tight labor market caused by structural demographics.

Demographic stats: ~2M in the US 55+ die every year, ~5k per day. ~4M Boomers retire per year, ~11k per day. A healthy economy creates ~2M jobs/year.

Citations:

Biden's immigration silver lining - https://www.axios.com/2024/02/27/biden-immigration-workers-i... - February 27th, 2024

Immigrants are rescuing a worker-starved U.S. economy - https://www.axios.com/2023/08/29/us-economy-immigration-labo... - August 29, 2023

Are Older Workers Propping Up the U.S. Economy? - https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/08/are-older-work... - August 8th, 2022

(think in systems)
by frfl | 2025-04-07 23:02:50+00:00
Dependency problems are mainly resolved with uv - try it.

1 way to do things - not sure what you mean. It's a general purpose language, if you dont like something there's probably a different library that may do it the way you like (eg, don't like exceptions, use a library that mimics rust style Result values; don't like oop, don't do oop, functional programming is certainly possible in python), or easy enough to start creating your own private utility libraries that do things your way.

Xonsh was okay. Idk if I'd use it again. I'd probably just use python to invoke external cli programs using subprocess. I used xonsh for scripting before. I recall it having a slightly slow start up - I launch shell frequently so that's a no-go for me to use as my default shell.

---

And I looked at alternative scripting languages. Racket, D (has a single file script mode), ocaml, etc. Honestly python seemed good enough, even with its warts, especially with uv to manage deps without a whole formal project needing to be setup for a script. Stwp up from bash. Most of my use cases are fine with argparse + subprocesses + a unix shebang at the top + "chmod +x", with uv handy if I need a external library.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-07 23:03:39+00:00
This is essentially John Searle's Chinese Room Argument against strong AI. His conclusion is broader -- he argues categorically against the very possibility of so-called "strong" AI, viz. AI that understands, not just against the narrower notion that LLMs "understand" -- but the reasoning is essentially identical.

Here's the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's superb write up: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ It covers, engagingly and with playful wit, not just Searle's original argument but its evolution in his writing, other philosopher's responses/criticisms, and Searle's counter-responses.
by creata | 2025-04-07 23:03:51+00:00
I'd be happy for someone to correct me, but the Lua and LuaJIT repls don't seem very pleasant to use. Lua's standard library is also very barebones and... idiosyncratic, which makes it annoying to use as a Bash replacement.

I'm sure there are plenty of libraries out there to rectify those issues, though.
by tom_ | 2025-04-07 23:05:18+00:00
This has been on my todo list for a while, as I like Simon Wardley, but I've never quite got round to using it. But I use Emacs a lot, and Emacs was the thing that sprang to mind when reading the blurb. It looks like there's this similar vibe of making custom tools easy, with there being an expectation that this is something the average user will actually do. Compare and contrast the experience of extending Emacs with, say, writing a Visual Studio Code extension. (N.B., it has not escaped my notice that Visual Studio Code is more popular...)

The GUI possibilities of Emacs are a bit limited though. Glamorous Toolkit looks better in that respect. I need to actually try it!

Something possibly similar is Studio: https://github.com/studio/studio - also Smalltalk. But seemingly dead (or at least sleeping). I encountered this via its author's RaptorJIT project, a fork of LuaJIT apparently intended to turn it into something maintainable by mere mortals: https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/19 - some videos here: https://www.youtube.com/@lukego/streams
by schacon | 2025-04-07 23:05:51+00:00
"One particular aspect that often gets left out of this creation myth, especially by the author of Github is that Mercurial had a prominent role." implies to me that Hg had a role in the creation of Git, which is why I was reacting to that.

For the deadnaming comment, it wasn't out of disrespect, but when referring to an email chain, it could otherwise be confusing if you're not aware of her transition.

I wasn't sponsoring hg-git, I wrote it. I also wrote the original Subversion bridge for GitHub, which was actually recently deprecated.

https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/sunsetting-su...
by donohoe | 2025-04-07 23:06:34+00:00
Zach nails it. He is the reason why I was involved briefly at the start and for where I am today.

It was my first time leading a product team. We tried a lot of things that seemed strange at the time; no homepage, no app, native ads (done well imho), a scrolling stream instead of pages. Some of that broke. Some of it worked. A lot of it stuck around.

RIP Quartz.
by murderfs | 2025-04-07 23:08:02+00:00
> As an American I will say that prepared food served from a vending machine is going to be associated with low quality and possible poor hygiene.

The grandparent post is talking about canned food/drink that's heated in the machine. Vending machines with freshish prepared food do exist, but they're kinda pointless given the existence of...

> I'd equate it with food from a gas station store or roach coach (mobile canteen)- food prepared with little care or quality, destined to be sold for as little as possible while still being profitable

Convenience store food in Japan is fantastic: food from 7/11, Lawson, Family Mart, etc. is probably unironically better than the median restaurant in the U.S.
by zestyping | 2025-04-07 23:08:41+00:00
For a project that crows so loudly about its typographic prowess, the home page offers a comically terrible reading experience.

https://imgur.com/a/7uPhyTd

Huge, wildly irregular word gaps, awkward hyphenation, stacked hyphen breaks.

I suspect most of this could be improved simply by letting go of the slavish attachment to full justification and expanding the column to a more reasonable width by reducing the font size and margins.
by roguecoder | 2025-04-07 23:08:45+00:00
Wow.

Just in case anyone else in the audience is curious, this is what self-justification of egregiously bad behavior looks like.

If you can't be trusted to work remotely, absolutely stick to in-person roles. If you think your coworkers are any less deserving of your respect and candor because they aren't in the same room as you, you definitely aren't qualified to work remotely.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-07 23:09:56+00:00
Sure, but having a channel with 25% duty cycle of frequency f and a channel with 75% duty cycle of frequency 3f will lead to a different waveform after mixing compared to 75% at f and 25% at 3f, no?

Depending on how that's processed downstream it could sound very different I imagine.

In crude ASCII art (two inputs mixed to an output):

---_________ ---_---_---_ ¨¨¨_---_---_

vs

--------____ -___-___-___ ¨---¨----___
by Animats | 2025-04-07 23:11:19+00:00
Usonian homes were supposed to be for "middle income" people. What did this one cost?

Of course it would need some structural improvements. Wright had some problems on the structural engineering side. Fallingwater is currently getting major structural upgrading.[1] There are arguments about whom to blame in the original construction, but it's clear that the aggressive cantilevered design didn't have enough safety margin.

[1] https://www.architecturelab.net/fallingwater-undergoes-7-mil...
by josephg | 2025-04-07 23:12:44+00:00
> So I want to start a new shop I need to hope the major brands deem me worthy enough to send reps out.

If you started a new shop, you would want to reach out to the major (and minor) camera brands directly. Do you think shops, today, get inventory by advertising somehow? No. They get inventory by cultivating relationships with suppliers. Advertising has very little to do with it.

> there is no point in providing variety if there is no advertising to encourage alternatives

Of course there is. I've never seen any advertising for 95% of the brands I buy at the supermarket. But I still appreciate that their products are on the shelves, and I still buy them. If I visually imagine all the groceries I regularly buy, most of the products are from brands I've only discovered by chance at the supermarket. (Eg, milk, eggs, canned food, etc).
by gnabgib | 2025-04-07 23:12:53+00:00
Could be, but they tested both:

> We sought to investigate the effects of professional and household dishwashers(..)

> Accordingly, we investigated the health hazard of exposure to professional and household dishwasher detergent and rinse aid, and its individual components.

The professional dishwashers are more of a problem because they have a 2 minute cycle (so rely on higher chemical concentrations)
by tristor | 2025-04-07 23:13:19+00:00
That's very true, lenses on a camera work very similarly to a telescope. A larger objective (opening at the end of the lens) combined with a large aperture (lower f number) means that a lens is able to gather a lot more light at a given focal length. Certainly some of my commentary is related to the fact that my primary lenses are f/0.95, f/1.2, and f/1.8. I only shoot "fast" primes on a camera body.

That said, a /lot/ of low light performance is simply having a much larger sensor with a wider pixel pitch that is able to gather more light in the given time allotted. You cannot beat physical size in some ways for digital photography and light gathering is one of them, as it is primarily about surface area.
by no-dr-onboard | 2025-04-07 23:13:42+00:00
> Literally the only thing on the client could be a session cookie.

You know, about 7 years ago I would have heartily agreed with you. KISS, right?

The thing is, it just doesn't make financial, UX, or security sense to do that. The cost of storing every jot and tittle on the backend is huge. The collateral of anything happening to the backend becomes larger. Enjoy benign things like preferences/app settings, unsent comments not having to be rewritten because your session expired, etc? If you're not storing them via local storage, you can KISS that goodbye.
by Carrok | 2025-04-07 23:15:17+00:00
> There's always been a process of modification when the contractor gets onsite and builds something.

And famously, like in the case of Fallingwater among others I believe, he forced contractors to remove supports that the contractors deemed structurally necessary and had added, against his designs. In one case at least the contractors refused and Wright himself took a sledge hammer to them personally. At least that’s what I was told by the tour guide.
by roguecoder | 2025-04-07 23:15:52+00:00
Most people have eye movements when recalling a memory, rather than maintaining eye contact (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...)

To me, it's actually the lack of any indication that work is happening that gives of cheating vibes. If someone sits their glassy-eyed for twenty seconds, and then starts speaking in complete sentences, it is going to come across as though they are reading. Not to mention that people's intonation is often different if they aren't thinking up what to say.

If you do get stuck, you can avoid ambiguity by sharing some meta-commentary on what you are thinking and why. "I know that library uses X, but I'm not sure if it can do Y and I'm trying to think if I could work around that... okay, so what I would do is..." Something like that, so that the interviewer knows where your ideas are coming from.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-07 23:16:02+00:00
Silicon Valley has such an antagonistic view of user consent and user control, and when they're forced to acknowledge and respect it, they do it in the most tantrum-y, malicious-compliance way they can. It's like the Bob's Burgers meme: "OK, Fine. But I'm gonna complain the whole time."

Ironically, if these companies didn't choose to make their consent UX so deliberately hostile and in-your-face, we might never have had this much visibility into how big of a problem it is.
by anabab | 2025-04-07 23:16:39+00:00
And then you face candidates with a few years on their resume who cannot perform a dfs when explicitly told to! (This is where some of my screenings end up after a few rounds of simplifications/hints for the initial problem)

I have a hypothesys that there is a huge layer of companies who do not "hire the best" because this is not crucial for them and I just do not have experience of what is going on in there, having only exposure to the people who did pass this filter in the software-first companies I have worked at (and I have always enjoyed working with people I have landed with in every company). I do not feel strong enough to do a deeper research on this hypothesis though.
by philip1209 | 2025-04-07 23:16:56+00:00
1. Practice technical writing. Information hierarchy, flowcharts, tables.

2. Funnel analysis and its practical implications.

3. Building and launching a side project, and having to do things like write copy for a landing page or deal with highly ambiguous choices.

4. Understanding the basics of product-led growth versus enterprise sales, and getting deep on one.