MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jascination | 2025-04-03 03:46:45+00:00
Location: Melbourne, Australia Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: no Technologies: React Native, React, NodeJS, NextJS Résumé/CV: https://au.linkedin.com/in/gallichio Email: jvg [at] warmhq [dot] com

I build apps, also webapps. My most recent project is https://deeplinknow.com, a pretty complex NextJS SaaS tool for deferred deep linking, competitor to branch, Appsflyer and firebase dynamic links.

Looking for meaty senior engineer roles, preferably with a global team who has some decent AI/ML Devs on board as I'd love to learn about this area and upskill.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-03 03:47:02+00:00
I guess I just don't see "tribalism". I know it's a popular description though for the divisiveness we find ourselves in politically.

But I consider the things important to me, the beliefs, the issues: and they, all of them, align with a progressive, left-leaning ideology. I'm not just glomming on to everything one "tribe" or another stands for ... one group actually reflects everything I believe. (I think I could split a few hairs here and there, but we're still talking perhaps 95% alignment.)

But I don't think that is too surprising. Others, smarter than me, have gone into great detail about the underpinnings of left-leaning or right-leaning world views in people. Fear of change, empathy ... a number of ideas have been put forth. By this reasoning it naturally follows that those of a certain "personality" will also share common beliefs, ideologies.

The implication instead seems to be that unless you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum you must be "tribal". That feels dismissive.
by 94b45eb4 | 2025-04-03 03:47:05+00:00
I used to hear this all the time back in the early 2000's. It's far from a new idea.

The version I heard (or at least the one which stuck in my head) was "your job is not to write code, your job is to solve problems".

edit: I wish this was more mentioned more frequently these days. I see junior developers very focused on superficial aspects of code and specific "cool" frameworks these days. Often I find myself asking "what problem does this solve? What are the trade-offs with your approach? etc." and it's just crickets. I think we have made a lot of progress with modern frameworks, tools, etc. but I also think there is something from the "old days" of programming which we have lost, which I think we should have fought a bit more to keep.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-04-03 03:47:24+00:00
Additional point: Politics and Ideologies have long tail effects, which makes arguing over them often an exercise in futility. We're arguing over the next footstep in a race that's got infinity left to run.

Russia is/was a global powerhouse under (its version of) Communism.

The US reached (essentially) global domination under Capitalsm.

China is in line to be the next hegemony under an odd combination of Communism, Authoritarianism and (serving Western) Capitalism.

Little old Germany wasn't far from conquering the world under what began as some form of Socialism.

Any of the -isms can be argued against by mentioning -ism-subscribing regimes that have fallen. Where this falls down is that each regime has its own way of corrupting the ideals of the -ism to favour of those 'at the top' or 'with the power to decide'.

Trickle-down (voodoo, for Ferris Bueller fans) economics seems to raise its head regularly despite not having a great track record for an entire population. I think the reason is that its popular with the powerful, so its track record with the population at large is a feature not a bug.

Who is right? What does it mean to be right?

What are the Acceptance Critiera?
by addicted | 2025-04-03 03:48:50+00:00
That’s fine. All those H1Bs will go back to their home countries, work for the same companies at a fraction of the salary and instead of paying taxes and rent and other expenses in the US will pay in their home countries.

And when they are laid off, or drop off to start their own companies, those companies will be based in their home countries instead of in the U.S.

I think this is a great and moral plan to reverse the brain drain the U.S. has been benefiting from at the expense of other countries for decades.
by justice3 | 2025-04-03 03:48:51+00:00
I'm Alex, a developer in Dallas who just took the plunge to start my own software shop, 4lex.dev. After years of building stuff for other companies and seeing how many businesses are stuck using terrible software, I decided to focus on helping local DFW companies with custom solutions. No fancy office, no VC funding, just me (and eventually a small team) building exactly what businesses need without the enterprise price tag or the bloat. What I'm doing:

Building custom web and mobile apps that actually solve specific problems Helping modernize those legacy systems everyone's afraid to touch Automating tedious processes that are eating up staff time Generally being the tech person who says "yes, that's actually possible" when other firms say no

The honest pitch: I need my first few clients to build a portfolio and references. In exchange, I'm offering seriously discounted rates and will put in the extra time to make sure things are done right. I'm betting that once a few businesses see what it's like to have software that actually fits their needs (instead of forcing their business to fit the software), word will spread. If you're in Dallas-Fort Worth and have been putting off a software project because quotes were astronomical or you couldn't find someone who understood your specific needs, shoot me a message. Small businesses, startups, local services – these are exactly who I want to work with.

My site still needs some work, but it's coming along, and I'm ready to take it and begin testing it with a wider audience. I'd love to hear your feedback, especially by filling out the contact form on the site itself.

Cheers
by kmoser | 2025-04-03 03:50:01+00:00
Contributing factors that I didn't see discussed yet are the increasing stratification of job descriptions, along with reduction in autonomy to break out of your stratum (combined with incentive not to). This creates workers with an extremely limited view of the whole picture, and lack of interest or ability to do anything outside their job description to fix your problem.

I've heard that Ritz-Carlton does the opposite: they empower employees at all levels to address any customer's concern. This, I believe, is how it should be. https://ritzcarltonleadershipcenter.com/2019/03/19/the-power...
by iJohnDoe | 2025-04-03 03:50:35+00:00
I agree with this. People seem to forget that factories and other manual labor positions were hard to fill. No one wanted to do them anymore in America. I don’t remember the timing, but there were articles about the whole situation. Well, those jobs went to other countries.

Bush Jr. was all about outsourcing to India and other countries. The India population were thrilled to take office gigs for Microsoft and Google and any other tech company.

The whole “put me to work” in middle-America doesn’t exist anymore. They don’t want to do that type of work.

I do think a missed opportunity is not increasing defense manufacturing in the US. That could mean a lot of jobs and skill-based jobs. NASA is another failed opportunity where it could be a huge skill and labor opportunity for America. I remember the thousands of workers on the shuttle program being devastated. I’m not saying we need another shuttle program, but the next evolution of NASA, aerospace, and defense would be great for jobs and America.

We have no one left thinking about the long-term big picture for America - and we now have a president trying to destroy America. Any current politicians are focused on just staying in power, more so than they ever have.

I think Bill Clinton was the last president to focus on America.

Even Obama failed to deliver to the American people. He was too focused on drone strikes.
by mrheosuper | 2025-04-03 03:51:07+00:00
There is Thinkpad T25 25th anniversary edition[1]. It has "modern" spec, while still having that traditional keyboard of t420

Also iirc there are projects that make Motherboard that fit in old thinkpad chassis. It has very impressive spec: 8 core Zen3 AMD cpu and 32gb ram. Some M2 slot etc.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_25th_anniversary_edit...
by chii | 2025-04-03 03:51:14+00:00
if you hired a plumber, and asked him to fix the toilet, you expect him to fix the toilet.

You don't expect him to tell you your whole house's plumbing sucks, you have lead pipes and to properly fix the toilet you need to replace it all.

Just do the smallest, cheapest thing to fix the toilet.

Replace 'fix the toilet' with 'writing code', for programmers.
by neilv | 2025-04-03 03:52:20+00:00
Web, including JavaScript, should work fine on that laptop.

Until recently, my daily driver was the T500 (the larger screen version of the T400 in the article), and it worked fine for everything except GPU.

(I actually downgraded to the T500 years ago, because I was pissed off about the Intel Management Engine.)

Recently, I upgraded from the T500 to the T520, which is the last ThinkPad with a non-chiclet keyboard. It works fine for everything except GPU and fitting inside many backpacks.

With ThinkPads of this era, you want to get a high-spec variant of the model (e.g., top-res IPS display), and then make the following upgrades:

* SSD

* run Linux

* run uBlock Origin (and block most of the third-party surveillance, which hurts performance) (JS runs fine, so long as you're not running multiple dueling adtech slimeballs' intimate mouse trackers)

* max out the RAM (you don't need that much for Linux, unless you're using an exceptionally bloated desktop option, but it's cheap, and you can use it to keep filesystems like ~/.cache off your SSD )

* (optional) replace the CPU with a more optimal one for power draw or heat, or maybe for compute (these are socketed in most models)

* (optional, not for the faint of heart) install Coreboot, and then you have more WiFi upgrade options
by prawn | 2025-04-03 03:53:21+00:00
I know it's dull to blame another thing on them, but I suspect it's phones/etc as a connection to a live world. There's always a pipeline of content, always something getting updated, always a notification. I remember many many years ago on the cusp of home internet (when I couldn't justify $50/m to have internet at home as well as work!), if there wasn't something interesting on TV, I'd read or have some other calm activity. If I wanted to know who won the day's NBA games, I'd have to wait until the next day's newspaper. Now, almost no matter what activity I do, there's a portal to endless distractions within arm's reach.
Ask HN: For the privacy minded, How do you prepare for gadget Border Searches?
by OrbitalShotput_ | 2025-04-03 03:53:26+00:00
This is coming up a lot these days in the news- but Customs and Border Patrol have increased the amount of searches they do for travelers coming to and leaving the US. I find this fascinating- because it feels like an area that should have answers -but that there are only some.

With Laptops, one can do things like dual booting, and basic file or OS encryption -so if you are asked to unlock your laptop, you can show someone your OS- and if they decide to do a advanced search, take it and image it- files and items will still be encrypted. Now, this is the sort of thing Veracrypt's Hidden OS would solve without resorting to individual container and file encryption- however that is not a real option these days as that only works with MBR partitioning, not EFI- and nothing else in that space has appeared.

For phones - the situation is messier.

It appears there is no general encrypted profile app or feature one can do in a similar manner, say with steganography features- Sure one could obtain a Graphene phone or the very latest updated Apple or Android device so the Cellebrite or Greykey device can't break into it if you refuse to unlock your password and they take it to image it. If you cooperate and unlock something for them to do a basic search on and then they take it to image presumably- there's a lack of hidden/profile options that are encrypted or steganographically able to hide files in files which would be enough for this sort of thing.

There also is no whole-imaging solution to make a perfect backup, as current backup methods don't include everything, like if someone has apps not covered by a backup or full settings.

And one does not want to unlock the bootloader or Root a phone to attempt this,that would make them easier from a Cellebrite type attack.

For those of you a bit privacy minded who do like to see how private and secure a setup you can do- How do you handle this? This isn't something totally new, but mobile devices are not as far along as computers it appears- and that is something the general public is fully susceptible to.
by asciimov | 2025-04-03 03:53:44+00:00
I’ve had an MX Ergo for several years (and other thumb trackballs for 28 years), while I like the shape and like the ergonomics, some issues stand out

- Rechargeable battery lasts 4-6 weeks. The 1 AA in the M570 lasted 6-9 months.

- No on device indicator that battery is low or about to die, it just dies mid use.

- Rubberized coating under palm gets guncky over time.
by mfkhalil | 2025-04-03 03:54:19+00:00
MatterRank is pretty slow still since it runs LLM evaluations on each webpage as markdown content. Wouldn't really consider it a Kagi alternative (which I haven't used but have heard great things about!), as that's more of a search engine in the traditional sense.

I think where MatterRank shines right now is for finding results where you wouldn't mind waiting an extra 20-30 seconds for an added layer of vetting, as opposed to just wanting a quick answer.

Having said that, we are definitely working on making it faster and more useful for everyday queries.
by lightingthedark | 2025-04-03 03:54:46+00:00
If you haven't read it, there's a great paper on the netcode of the originals: https://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs538/readings/papers/terran...

I'd be surprised if the definitive editions changed the design significantly enough to move the netcode away from P2P, but I don't know of any actual information on it.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-04-03 03:54:53+00:00
Given now that EU and Australia have decided that free speech is incompatible with public order (hecklers veto), what are these fabled other places left that do have free speech? While I’m sure they’d be free to criticize Israel in their home countries I’m also sure there are others they are not free to criticize.

I’m an old school free speech absolutist and would prefer unfettered free speech but when neither side of politics supports it I have to be realistic as that battle has been already lost.
by jltsiren | 2025-04-03 03:55:50+00:00
In Finland (and I guess in some other European countries) deportation in itself is not a sufficient reason for arrest. Once you have been informed of the decision, you get some time to leave voluntarily, or to challenge the decision in the administrative court system. But you won't be arrested until the decision is final and you have failed to leave voluntarily, unless there are specific reasons to the contrary. And those specific reasons are typically ones that would justify arresting a citizen as well.
by lotharcable | 2025-04-03 03:56:08+00:00
High quality human interface devices are expensive. There are multiple reasons for this, but the biggest one is that very few people are interested in buying high quality devices so they are very nich product.

In terms of capabilities there isn't much out there that rivals Ploopy. So 144 is pretty reasonable.

To put it into perspective this particular trackball is effectively a clone of "Microsoft Trackball Explorer", which is no longer made despite being well regarded by many. Used ones are usually going to be over $100 with people selling refurbished or NOS or something like that on Amazon for $250.

Budget clones are from SANWA and Nulea and they go for about $40-50

Ploopy Classic will get a much higher optical sensor, fully programmable, and better bearings. Budget trackballs usually are going to use budget sensors and tiny little ruby static bearings and have limited programming options.

This is a problem because one of the weaknesses with track balls is trying to balance out very fine movement with being able to move the pointer quickly across the screen without wearing your thumb/fingers out or being annoying.

This isn't a problem with the mouse. Big movements are accelerated by the OS and you have a large object that is easily moved very finely. This is why mice dominate competitive first person shooters and other games that require both very high speed with pinpoint accuracy.

To compensate if you have a nice trackball you can crank the DPI settings up and turn the mouse sensitivity and acceleration settings down low and gain a lot of control. If your bearing suck then you can't really fling the ball and have to do a lot of repetitive motion to move quickly across the screen.

And if your sensor is low quality then when you fling the ball it won't be able to track the movement accurately. Like the effect of helicopter blades being recorded on a video camera.. The pointer will stay still for a bit, and even go backwards until the ball slows down enough to be tracked and the point shoots forward.

I have a Kensington Slim Blade pro, which is a popular trackball of a different style and it suffers from this. And that costs over $100 retail.

On top of all of this cheaper balls will tend to rattle around a bit. Which makes it miserable when you just _can't quite_ move the pointer over just one more character or hit that tiny corner of a window correctly.

So this is the sort of thing you do get what you pay for and Ploopy is pretty darn nice. It isn't perfect, but you can do a lot worse for the money.
by godelski | 2025-04-03 03:56:10+00:00
These are in fact the same thing. It is because an engineer can be held liable that results in them being willing to say no. In general, they probably won't be prosecuted, but a common reason for this is that there will be written records of engineers telling management that there are concerning risks. This also results in the job of a Professional Engineer, who is a person who legally puts themselves on the line. They get paid very well and for good reason, they have a lot on the line themselves.

I suspect that a big reason CS is not held to the same standards is due to abstraction and that it is still new. But we do live in a time where bad code can get people killed (control systems are the easiest examples), just as building a faulty bridge will. I just hope we don't need a Tacoma Bridge to cause change. Obviously it is harder to figure out things that are more abstract like Social Media (can provide both good and harm).

But I'd say, you can always say no. If you're not saying "no" now, that's still a choice you've made. A job is very persuasive, and I'm not saying you're bad for just keeping your head down, just that people should consider where they'd draw the line. The line is personal and different for everyone (which is okay!). Having taken traditional engineering courses, I'll note that ethics is frequently discussed and you're likely to be told you should try to define your line before you asked to cross it. If you don't, you'll likely to cross the line without knowing, as you just didn't know what it looked like. You can always redefine the line as you get more resolution (it continuously updates) but it's much harder to say "no" when you haven't given it much thought.
by keepamovin | 2025-04-03 03:56:15+00:00
That's a great introduction and a great opening from Tom. HN gets a second public moderator is a good sign. You would have to be crazy to agree to this but I guess brave, too!

It's always a site that's had dinner party vibes even tho it's so big. Weird! But the focus on curiosity and healthy is important.

I'm sure the features of HN are already extremely well thought out and precisely balanced, but I guess this is as good a time as any to throw out a feature idea: you know how you can favorite stories and comments? I want to favorite users, too. Maybe privately. Because it's like a bookmark thing where I can come back and see what interesting ones are doing. Just makes sense to internalize it as a list rather than externalize it into a browser bookmark list, I think. But then again, maybe a private list or yet another list would be too much!
by kouteiheika | 2025-04-03 03:56:18+00:00
This is another potential improvement to the transformer architecture from Facebook (the other one that comes to mind is this one from same authors: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18719), but note that it comes with a major problem that might not be obvious at first glance: it's just not usable in practice without a ton of work. It modifies the innards of the attention mechanism, so it is incompatible with Flash Attention (or any other optimized attention library), and you do not want to train anything beyond toy models without Flash Attention (the performance hit is just way too big).

There's pytorch's FlexAttention which could maybe make this practical, but currently it's just way too buggy.
by markus_zhang | 2025-04-03 03:56:22+00:00
I still use my T470S as a Ubuntu 22.04 development machine. I bought it from my pre-pre-company as a used one back in 2022 and it is a fantastic laptop for personal projects. The only update I did was a 16GB RAM to up the memory to 20GB. I also bought a new battery as one of the two was dead.

I wish the graphic driver could be better as playing Youtube videos constantly crashes Firefox on Ubuntu. Other than that I have nothing to complain. I have been using it for 3+ years with zero maintenance (I didn't even bother to clean the fan) and it never failed me.

I have a second "new" Dell workstation laptop standing by just in case it breaks down. But it is a Windows machine with 32GB of memory, so I'll probably use WSL2 instead.
by Abishek_Muthian | 2025-04-03 03:56:36+00:00
I have deformities in my wrist and I have small palms (dwarfism) I’ve tried various kinds of mice; none of them were comfortable and settled on using a Wacom tablet as a trackpad.

Recently I started using Logitech Ergo M575 trackball mice and it has been total game changer, I can even play FPS games quite well with it. I highly recommend trackball for those with accessibility issues like me and certainly welcome more open hardware competitors in the space like Ploopy as customisation is crucial for accessibility.
by tdb7893 | 2025-04-03 03:57:04+00:00
The graph in the article of "what the political spectrum actually is" where independent thought was only found in the middle was so funny to me that I had to do a double take. Maybe this is a joke or April Fool's prank or something?

I read the article quickly so maybe I'm misreading it but if that graph is serious it really undermines his position as a thoughtful moderate to me. But maybe he really does believe that everyone on the left and the right only has groupthink. I agree with you that it's definitely not all tribalism
by OrbitalShotput_ | 2025-04-03 03:57:37+00:00
Bruce Schneier recently reached out to the general community looking for solutions to this as well

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/cell-phone-op...

Adding context on the image thing-

I have old 32 bit apps for some of my hardware cameras / other devices that attach to Android Phones, that will not be backed up with all their settings, and that worries me as even though I've extracted their APKs for preserve, each install requires reaching out to a server for first activation and one day there won't be a response when the companies that made those hardware cameras end support - and I won't be able to do that first activation which is all they need.

A Full image theoretically would make this a non-factor- but the built in Backup method for Android doesn't do this. This would be the same if had the Apple variant of these cameras. And while things like TWRP exist which could attempt it fully- that involves unlocking the bootloader which is what one does not want when there is a chance of a casual forensic search.