MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thomassmith65 | 2025-04-09 08:49:46+00:00
It was just a quip. My point wasn't that targeting poor people is great business, but that Americans soon will be poorer.

A lot of regular people are going to postpone that new MacBook purchase, pass on buying junior a car, cancel their second streaming subscription, etc.

If I were to fund a company now (not that I have the funds to invest in anything bigger than a lemonade stand!) I would fund something essential, or something that prospers in hard times.

Exactly how lucrative that makes the car repossession business, or the others, in any era, I don't know.
by aa-jv | 2025-04-09 08:50:21+00:00
I have looked at the numbers, almost every day since March 2003.

Have you?

You seem to want to finish this argument without actually looking at any statistics.

"Ignorant troll"? The veracity of your vitriol belies cowardice. You have to be very ignorant to not understand the USA's heinous track record on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and immense violations of human rights around the world. By far, according to much open data on the subject, which I've already provdied - the USA is the worlds worst offender by a huge margin, that isn't even questioned in any sphere other than the utterly ignorant.

How many sovereign nations has the USA demolished since March 2003? Which other nation has demolished as many other sovereign nations since then?
by rickdeckard | 2025-04-09 08:50:22+00:00
> After a full decade of USB-C, how is it that we’re still dealing with this old port?

Not satisfying, but that's because changing the USB connector on an already-finished (and certified!) product-design doesn't come for free. And with connectors and especially USB-C cables being significantly more expensive for quite a few years, it was a sensible choice to go for microUSB even though USB Type C was already available.

> It’s not just a random HP photo printer. A few weeks ago, I bought a cat nail grinder that unfortunately charges via Micro USB

I guess the cat nail grinding industry didn't face any disruptive technological innovation in the past 10 years, so newer versions of the product are merely facelifts of the existing design
by patrickjd | 2025-04-09 08:51:36+00:00
> worth keeping in mind that there is more to programming than just programming.

As a side note, this is what I keep pointing out when people talk about code generated by LLMs. As an activity, this is just one thing that programmers do.

I think the answer to your question (a good question indeed) is "both", or rather to balance development of both capabilities. The decision of how to spend time won't be a single decision but is repeated often through the years. The Staff+ engineers with whom I work _mostly_ excel at both aspects, with a small handful being technical specialists. I haven't encountered any who have deep domain knowledge but limited technical depth.

(edit: formatting)
by pjmlp | 2025-04-09 08:52:05+00:00
I still remeber getting games at 300 escudos, back in the 1980s.

Direct conversion to euros would be about 1.50 €, adding the inflaction to 2025, would be about 10 € if being generous.

Playstation 2 titles were already quite expensive hence why so many gamers started only buying 2nd hand, or getting them at local libraries, workarounds that digital distribution has killed.

What will change is that studios will keep getting closed, because most people cannot afford more than one or two games a year at that price level.
by irf1 | 2025-04-09 08:52:19+00:00
Contribute to open source!

A lot of OSS companies are currently hiring. Contribute to their codebase to stand out, get experience, network & improve your resume. Some also share feature bounties on GitHub (https://algora.io) so you can even make money in the process.

I know dozens of engineers who landed jobs within a few months by actively contributing to OSS.
by cies | 2025-04-09 08:55:25+00:00
Bullying is, to me, a thing minors do.

Children, adults, people-in-positions-of-power and corps should be held to different standards.

I've seen banks offer "quick loans" specifically to vulnerable adults. Same with the opiod crisis: some big pharmas dont mind pushing the message that "patients should talk to their doctors about XYZ". Corps can do much more harm than individuals.
by miros_love | 2025-04-09 08:55:25+00:00
There are many job boards with remote work. Same LinkedIn.

And they are all complete crap.

My top is as follows:

1. Personal acquaintance with the hiring person.

2. A strong referral, not just a button on the site, but bring a resume to the manager and talk to him about my advantages.

3. A weak referral, button on the site. The ability to write to the recruiter by email. The HN "who is hiring" - from this point.

4. Shout out the window if anyone needs a remote employee.

5. Open job boards.
by ilirium | 2025-04-09 08:55:38+00:00
I don't offer any solution for the problems you mentioned, and I don't think it is possible.

If we want to have global money and a global payment system, they would be controlled by governments, international organizations, God, Devil, Cthulhu, Spaghetti Monster...

There is no magical solution. We, as a society, need to establish competing social institutions, and try to control them, and try to force them to compete. There is no solver bullet.

Don’t lie to yourself, bro.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-04-09 08:56:17+00:00
Having spend hours upon hours with image snythesis for artistic hobby purposes, it is indeed an awesome tool. If you get into it you might learn about its limitations though.

Real knowledge here is often absend from the strongest AI prosletisers, others are more realistic about it. It still remains an awesome tool, but a limited one.

AIs today are not creative at all. They find statistical matches. They perform a different work than artists do.

But please, replace all your artwork with AI generated ones. I believe the forced "adapt" phase with that approach would realize itself rather quickly.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-04-09 08:56:55+00:00
Sure, even in North Korea with "Juche" (1) extreme self-reliance, there is some domestic consumption. Of potatoes, even (2). It's not that domestic consumption will go to zero.

But the point is that domestic consumption is not constant. It can decrease, it can substitute more basic goods. Such as potatoes.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_production_in_North_Kor...
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-09 08:57:39+00:00
Tech leaders are also business leaders and they were also vocal in the past. See Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Alva Edison.

Tech leaders and businesses leaders are publicly speaking to promote their interests and their views. They always have done it.

Going from this to a conspiracy theory where tech and capital are comploting together to subdue the world, shape it to their liking, while using a soviet style apparatus is laughable.

Also, pretending that people on the right are just recycling leftist theories (of Adorno, Rene Girard, Gramsci) is pretty funny.
by TheJCDenton | 2025-04-09 08:58:02+00:00
Last LLMs launches from top US AI labs were rather disappointing. Products seems under baked and mainly reactive... They oversold the capabilities of their future models when Deepseek landed to stay in the news at the time, but now that we look at the result it's not what everyone expected. And people are starting to question the hype, which is healthy but also very dangerous for these companies needing very large capital. It seems that some labs like Meta are unto something, but it's more research material for now than a short term product. Interesting times.
by Lutger | 2025-04-09 09:00:56+00:00
I'm with you. Yet I've always understood 'move fast and break things' to mean that there is value in shipping stuff to production that is hard to obtain just sitting in the safe and relatively simple corner of your local development environment, polishing up things for eternity without any external feedback whatsoever, months or even years, and then doing a big drop. That's completely orthogonal to things like planning, testing, quality, taking time to think etc.

Maybe the fact that this is how I understood that motto is in itself telling.
by tgaj | 2025-04-09 09:01:10+00:00
I think that's a misunderstanding. If you could build the house using only resources that you already have than you would have 100k dollars AND a house. That's the idea of mercantilism. Of course sometimes you just don't have needed resources and than you have to buy something but you should limit it to things you can't obtain in any other way. Mercantilism is one of the reasons of colonialism. If you can take resources from some part of the world that you don't really care about, then you are adding wealth to your own country for basically free.
by asim | 2025-04-09 09:02:03+00:00
Congrats to the tailscale guys. I remember when tailscale was not a networking company. Amazing to see where it's ended up and obviously having bradfitz onboard is useful too. I'm always curious to know what the internals of a company looks like with a lot of ex-googlers running it. Does it look like a mini Google or something else? Not sure if apenwarr is here but always interested to learn more.
by lacn | 2025-04-09 09:02:49+00:00
What's most interesting to me about your point compared to parent comment's is that you're saying "statically, over all time, the most valuable thing to do among all your choices is to understand the business," whereas the parent is saying "dynamically, in this moment, what is most valuable thing to do in this iteration of my actions?"

I think your question is most interesting in terms of long term skill mix or "skill portfolio" a.k.a the career viewpoint, while the parent's is more interesting on a day-to-day basis as you navigate the state space of bringing a project to completion. On a given day, understanding the business may not be the most valuable thing to do, but to your point over the course of a job or career it probably is.

(For example, I can say that I already have sufficient business context to do my programming task for tomorrow. Asking more questions about the business would be wasteful: I need to go update the batch job to achieve the business outcome.)

EDIT: I might go one step further and say the most valuable skill is not understanding the business but understanding how to match and adapt technologies to the business (assuming you want a career as a programmer). Ultimately the business drives income, but presumably you have a job because their business requires technology. So the most valuable skill is, as efficiently as possible, making the technology do what the business needs. That's more of a balance / fit between the two than just "understanding the business."
by kshri24 | 2025-04-09 09:02:54+00:00
Can't find any fault in this article. Agree with pretty much everything except for one point:

"Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written."

It has been, I think, close to 15+ years since I have been actively coding professionally. I am always learning. When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answering questions on Stack Overflow rather than asking questions. That helped a lot as it felt like a "Real-World challenge" to solve someone else's problem. So it totally depends on how you use Stack Overflow.

With LLMs, I don't use it for "vibe coding" as the kids do these days. This is, IMHO, a wrong way to use LLMs. LLMs are great for integrations into software you are building where it has to analyze realtime events and produce summaries, or even for automating mundane things. But it definitely is not a replacement for a programmer. At least not in its current incarnation. The way to use LLMs is to ask it to provide a birds-eye/10,000 ft view on a topic you want to understand/explore. Why? Because sometimes, you don't even know how something works because you have no idea what it is called (technical terminology/jargon). That's where LLMs help. Once you know the terms/jargon, you can then refer to official documentation/papers rather than relying on the LLM. This IMHO is an underrated superpower of LLMs.
by epolanski | 2025-04-09 09:02:57+00:00
I want to add another one, ability to handle emotions (mentioned but mostly in terms of patience) and ability to stay focused.

Two programmers that start with similar levels at the thing that OP listed, but one able to stay focused and productive and the other jumping on YouTube, HN half the day (yes, that's me in many periods) etc are gonna have different impact and progression with time.
by trhway | 2025-04-09 09:03:14+00:00
>Unfortunately it does still require you to have a swell touch machine and swell touch paper, neither of which are particularly cheap.

i wonder if a typical children 3d pen, or the likes - ie. dispensing quickly curing plastic thread, etc. - can be used to quickly hand-draw touch-accessible picture/graph on any surface really (or even in 3d as it is intended). A cheap 3d printer can probably be used when more complicated picture and/or several copies of it have to be done (one can probably even print a stack of copies in one run) and again having 3d may help to communicate more info for touch (and running 3d pen as the printing head instead of the standard thermoplastic head would allow to increase the speed while decreasing precision which may be fine in many situations).
by lproven | 2025-04-09 09:03:35+00:00
> Sure there is: a chair is anything upon which I can comfortably sit without breaking it.

« It is often said that a disproportionate obsession with purely academic or abstract matters indicates a retreat from the problems of real life. However, most of the people engaged in such matters say that this attitude is based on three things: ignorance, stupidity, and nothing else.

Philosophers, for example, argue that they are very much concerned with the problems posed by real life.

Like, for instance, “what do we mean by real?”, and “how can we reach an empirical definition of life?”, and so on.

One definition of life, albeit not a particularly useful one, might run something like this: “Life is that property which a being will lose as a result of falling out of a cold and mysterious cave thirteen miles above ground level.”

This is not a useful definition, (A) because it could equally well refer to the subject’s glasses if he happens to be wearing them, and (B) because it fails to take into account the possibility that the subject might happen to fall onto, say, the back of an extremely large passing bird.

The first of these flaws is due to sloppy thinking, but the second is understandable, because the mere idea is quite clearly, utterly ludicrous. »

— Douglas Adams
by jjav | 2025-04-09 09:03:48+00:00
Bits on a storage device can never (in anywhere remotely resembling a free society) be a crime by itself. Therefore, there is no justifiable reason for unfettered access to it.

If someone has done a crime, they must have done something, other than store bits on a disk. So go catch them in that act, the way criminals used to be caught before computers existed. If there is no act, there is no crime.
by anentropic | 2025-04-09 09:05:34+00:00
While I agree with other replies that ECharts provides a lot more functionality than this lib, it does look very nice the way it transforms a semantic table of data into the chart!

I'm using ECharts (and happy with it) but there are some places where I want like a sparkline in every row of a data table, which is a lot of ECharts instances to instantiate, and this lib looks like it'd be great for that.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-09 09:05:39+00:00
> 1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux

It was all about Solaris, AIX and HP-UX for .com businesses.

I was there, our Linux deployements were only used internally, we never sold those workloads as UNIX targets on our product.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-04-09 09:06:55+00:00
> I think copyright should last maybe five years

If we imagine for a moment that "copyright" is something that works in the interests of a creator, than 5 years is nothing.

A painting can sit fifteen years before it gets to an exhibition with sufficient turn-over and media coverage to draw attention to.

A music album can be released with a shitty label and no support, years later be taken by a more competent one and start selling.

We're living in a world where worth art is constantly flying under the radars so limiting potential even more isn't helpful.
by fidotron | 2025-04-09 09:07:17+00:00
> Overall, the simplicity and abstraction of complex VPN networking is wonderful, but if you have issues or advanced needs, you are immediately thrust into the low-level UDP/NAT/STUN world you were trying to avoid.

This is my experience too.

I actually came to believe the TS dream of device based VPN as opposed to AP or router based is the wrong thing because it gets confused by subnets and subnet routing so often, but also that the big security problem on networks is bad devices which it's not going to help you with unless you can wrap them up anyway.

That's one of the reasons I started playing with AP to AP real time video like https://github.com/atomirex/umbrella which is a nightmare case from the TS pov. The intention is to eventually wrap clients up on separate networks so they can only see each other via the (locally run) relay.
by TorKlingberg | 2025-04-09 09:09:44+00:00
> difference between $6/user and $18/user is 0

I wouldn't go that far. Big companies put a lot of effort into saving $12/seat.

But, if you can convince them they get >$18 of value from it they're usually happy to pay. With hobbyists it's more emotional. $6 is "just a coffee" and can be justified just to try it out. At $18/m is one of your household bills, and many will decide they enjoy watching Netflix more than messing around with Tailscale.
by Zanfa | 2025-04-09 09:10:57+00:00
Another issue LLMs help with is identifying the correct keywords or terms to look up. Especially with manpages, I've had numerous times where I roughly know what I'm looking for, but in the presence of hundred-plus flags and options, I can't even grep to the right place because I don't know the exact term I need. So I sometimes use LLMs as glorified grep with semantic synonym support.
by anentropic | 2025-04-09 09:12:38+00:00
The lib is modular

My current build for an analytics dashboard app uses:

echarts.use([ // chart types: BarChart, LineChart, GaugeChart, PieChart, // chart features: TitleComponent, LegendComponent, TooltipComponent, // ~30kb GridComponent, // ~100kb, controls layout (not visible grid lines) LabelLayout, DatasetComponent, // renderer: SVGRenderer, ]);

...and comes out at 550kb minified but unzipped
by PMunch | 2025-04-09 09:12:44+00:00
It was referenced in the article as "the orange site" however the reason for it initially being named as such is probably because of HNs system of trying to avoid popularity being artificially driven high. The details of this is as far as I know pretty scarce, but the idea is that if you try to get to the top of Hackernews they somehow detect that and penalize you. So people have taken to calling it "the orange site" in order to avoid this detection when talking about HN.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-04-09 09:13:10+00:00
I don't use ChatGPT or any other AI. If I search for something, I search for authoritative documents on the topic. That is, official docs, articles, books. Asking ChatGPT would be like asking a random person who provides an opinion without any guarantees. It's potentially useful information but needs to be verified. So I need to search again to verify the information and get to an authoritative source.
by jbreckmckye | 2025-04-09 09:13:23+00:00
Generally we aren't paid for our business expertise. In fact, most businesses actively resist giving developers deep domain responsibility.

This is manifest in management methodologies: developers are largely interchangeable cells in a spreadsheet. I'm not saying this is a good thing.

The reasons for this are complex, but generally, business people want us to solve the technical problems they can't handle themselves, they don't want us to "relieve" them of product management, customer relationships, and industry knowledge. Why would they? It would devalue them.
by DarkWiiPlayer | 2025-04-09 09:13:56+00:00
Nope. It is sniping and it's a dick move. You have the name whenever you decide that's what you're calling the project. Registering a domain name for it is only a matter of hosting.

And yes, interferring with someone else hosting their project is wrong. If you don't want a domain for yourself, don't buy it. Messing with people makes you a dick and trying to buy something only to re-sell it makes you a parasite.

Domain squatting, shoud this have been the intention here, is obviously also wrong and often used for illegal activity.

There's just no world where this person doesn't have a right to complain because clearly they are the victim of someone else being a dick.
by lacn | 2025-04-09 09:14:08+00:00
Love this, I have the same view. I use them for search in cases where I have to circumlocute and can't quite say what I mean (I found an old book I could only remember very vague broad strokes about this way when no search engine could do it) and for "framework" questions, e.g. what is this about and how do the pieces relate, which I would go so far to say is another type of search problem (it's search where I'm starting from zero). I still have to take it with a grain of salt but to your point it's enough to familiarize me with "landmarks" in the information space and then to start building more solid understanding from that foundation.
by alexjurkiewicz | 2025-04-09 09:15:08+00:00
There's nothing about ZeroTier's solution which deserves a higher price point than Tailscale. As a long-time user, ZT's administration UI is much worse and the product has been essentially unchanged for a decade.

Better solutions would be things that make the VPN invisible, rather than 'easy'. Tools such as Teleport, IOW.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-09 09:15:58+00:00
Now map the time required for everyone involved into a developer's salary, get the average cost of fixing a vulnerability, and understand why companies have finally started paying attention to what programming languages and development approaches that are using on their products.

The amount of money fixing those 125 vulnerabilities goes down the drain, no one is paying for them, and they have to be delivered as per ongoing legistation in many countries.
by ultimaweapon | 2025-04-09 09:16:10+00:00
> C++ can be safe enough if you proceed with care.

The problem with this is if you have a team working on a C++ product you will need some people who can catch memory bugs to review every code before merging. Even with this approach it still possible to missed some memory bugs since the reviewer need to fully understand each object lifetime, which is time consuming during code review.

I'm working on a company that run on a server application written in C/C++. The code base is very large and we always have memory bugs that required ASAN on production to fix the bugs. We have started migrating each part to Rust one year ago and we never have a single crash from Rust code. The reason we choose Rust is because it is a server application that computation intensive, latency sensitive and large amount of active connections.

Try keep using Rust until you comfortable with it and you will like it. It fit with your simple mental model. I can say this because I was a C++ users for the whole life and switched to Rust recently.