MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I don't want to work in software anymore. Where do I go?
by needtoquitmyjob | 2025-04-29 18:36:00+00:00
I live in NYC and I have about 6 years of experience. Out of the 4 jobs I've had, I loved one of them, but I just couldn't bear the rest. I love building software, and I've worked with a lot of great people, but the overall culture just isn't for me. I have been abused too many times. I don't know what to do now. And, I am worried that if I do enter another industry, it won't actually be different than where I am now. I don't have a degree, so I'm assuming I have to start from scratch. Some options I've been considering:

1. New career. Maybe a trade? Aviation maintenance? Nothing specific sticks out to me. 2. Move to another country. This was prev recommended to me after I mentioned my job didn't treat me like I was human - apparently European countries (Denmark, Sweden) are much better? 3. Find a new job. But, I don't know how to find one that I would like, if it is even possible. 4. Learn how to deal with a bad job. I don't know how to do this, or if it is even possible, or if it's a good idea. 5. Start my own company. I would love to do this. But, I don't have a lot in savings. Maybe I could try finding a part time job just to stay afloat?

What do you recommend?
by asadotzler | 2025-04-29 18:36:05+00:00
The dot com boom gave us $1T in physical broadband, fiber, and cellular networking that's added many many trillions to the economy since. What's LLM-based AI gonna leave us when its bubble pops? Will that AI infrastructure be outliving its creators and generating trillions for the economy when all the AI companies collapse and are sold off for parts and scrap?
by branko_d | 2025-04-29 18:36:26+00:00
Haven’t worked with Oracle in over a decade, but SQL Server’s tooling is actually quite decent in that regard. You can attach the Visual Studio debugger to a T-SQL stored procedure, set breakpoints, step, inspect variables etc. There are rough edges, but it’s good enough to be useful.

Automated tests of T-SQL stored procedures are also possible. There are couple of ways you could do that, but in our case we just write “unit” tests in C# which call the procedures. This integrates nicely into Visual Studio’s Test Explorer, is debuggable etc. You can even step through a C# test, and then just “step into” T-SQL being called from there!

There are valid reasons for not putting business logic into stored procedures, but “not being a proper language” is probably not one of them, at least in the case of T-SQL. Then again, there are also reasons for using stored procedures. Everything is a tradeoff…
by philsnow | 2025-04-29 18:36:43+00:00
> Firefox prevents syncing multiple profiles with the same Mozilla account on the same device. If you create a new Firefox profile and then try to sign in to Sync with the same Mozilla account used in the other profile on that device, Firefox will block the sign-in to keep profiles separate.

Is this just a temporary technical limitation / anybody know if there are plans to fix this? Why should the user need to remember which profile is synced on a given device?
by pessimizer | 2025-04-29 18:36:50+00:00
That's just not how some people browse. When I hit HN's frontpage, I open every thread with an interesting headline in a new tab (within the HN tree.) Then I visit them one by one, and at least each one gets another tab opened (for the article.) The article may get multiple tabs opened if it has references or links that are interesting. If there's something that I want to get back to later, or don't have time to read now but looks interesting, it stays open. If I won't get to it for a while (before the next time I return to HN) it gets pulled out of the HN tree into its own tree.

HN frontpage |> Interesting thread .|> Interesting article ..|> Interesting link from article 1 ..|> Interesting link from article 2 .|> Link from interesting thread. |> Interesting thread |> Interesting thread |> Interesting thread |> Interesting thread

Things that get moved out of tree I might get back to in an hour or a year.

If I'm at Amazon trying to buy a spatula, I have 10 different Amazon spatula pages open, and also three articles about spatulas within the tab tree.

I dunno. When I go to a bookstore, I don't buy one book, go home, then come back and buy another book. I browse the bookstore, buy everything that I want, and I put most of them on a shelf while I read one. I do not find the shelf a distraction.
by Philpax | 2025-04-29 18:36:50+00:00
Try it with your own photos from around the world. I used my own photos from Stockholm, San Francisco, Tvarožná, Saas-Fee, London, Bergen, Adelaide, Melbourne, Paris, and Sicily, and can confirm that it was within acceptable range for almost all of them (without EXIF data), and it absolutely nailed some of the more obvious spots.
by SamPatt | 2025-04-29 18:36:53+00:00
I'm the author - I tried to be as upfront as possible about my skill level in the post.

The human supremacy line is just a joke, there are already models specifically trained for Geoguessr which are already beating the best players in the world, so that ship has sailed.

That geobench work is really cool, thanks for sharing it.
by ricardo81 | 2025-04-29 18:36:56+00:00
Interesting. As a Brit, I imagine (possibly ideally) by the time I'm an old man in 20-30 years that India will be a beacon of democracy and freedom in the East, given its historical Western ties and a large English speaking population.

But your argument against their ruling speaks for itself, IMO.

There will come a point where India has to lead on this kind of thing.
by mvc | 2025-04-29 18:37:01+00:00
You might not implement them but as a web engineer you're using them all the time. So all these tools that you use will have tree implementations in them.

- Every html document is a tree structure. And css documents have special syntax to address nodes within those trees

- If it's any good, you're routing framework probably uses some kind of tree to quickly match the request to it's handler

- The database you write to uses a tree to quickly find the location it needs to write to
by hintymad | 2025-04-29 18:37:22+00:00
Duolinguo tries to follow the input hypothesis. For instance, it barely teaches any grammar but simply asks its users to translate sentences. Unfortunately that's very ineffective. Compared to reading or watching live conversations, the amount of input in unit time on Duolingo is too little. In the meantime the sentences lack sufficient context for Duolingo users to build up intuitive understanding of phrases. Take Duolingo Japanese for English speakers, for instance, it's really hard to learn the meaning and usage of Hiragana words in those short sentences.

That said, I still do about 10 minutes of Duolingo every day, just as a kick start of my daily language-learning routine. It's also an effortless way for me to pick up a few new words on a daily basis. Somehow once I did that, I have more drive to do more comprehensive input by watching Youtube videos or reading some readers.
by bhl | 2025-04-29 18:37:34+00:00
Building an app to reverse geocode all the photos I've taken and screenshots of places I want to go from TikTok/Instagram.

Use cases are extracting the itineraries I took from prior trips, then using that to ground LLM search recommendations: I have a set of bookmarked places, say in NYC, can you make me a week of plans given what I enjoyed in Taipei?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-29 18:37:49+00:00
> Let's not go too far with the rose tinted glasses. Win95 apps are speedy if you run them on modern hardware but at the time they were all dog slow because the average Win95 machine was swapping like crazy.

I disagree that those apps were dog slow at the time. They were fairly responsive, in my experience. It's true that loading took longer (thanks to not having SSDs yet), but once the app was up it was fast. Today many apps are slow because software companies don't care about the user experience, they just put out slop that is barely good enough to buy.
by k2xl | 2025-04-29 18:37:52+00:00
I've done something similar for learning about a controversial topic. I ask it to act as if it is called Bob is a well informed supporter of one side (like Ukraine) and then act as if it is something named Alice who is a well informed supporter of another side (Russia) and they have to debate each other over a few prompts with a moderator named 'Sue'

Then after a few rounds of the debate where Sue asks a bunch of questions, I ask it to go to the judges - Mark, Phil, Sarah (and I add a few personalities to each of them... Sometimes I pretend they are famous moral philosophers) and then I have them each come up with a rubric and decide who is the winner.

Really fun, and helps me understand different sides of issues.
by asadotzler | 2025-04-29 18:38:01+00:00
I've seen the same more times that I can count, having been in that business decades ago. Then it was clip art and bad illustrator work, no different than what you're seeing today with AI -- and to a trained professional, the delta between the two "home made" approaches and professional ones is clearly evident. We'll look at the AI slop in 10 years the way we look at clip art from 1995.
by jmward01 | 2025-04-29 18:38:32+00:00
I'd argue that is a big part of the point I am making. If you take too big of a bite the time it takes to build it optimally goes up in an NP manor. If the bites are the right size then it balances the time/resources you have compared to all the other bites you make to get a locally optimal answer given all resource constraints. Long story short, cutting a problem into manageable pieces is a solid strategy. I will add one thing though, and that is that most people think they have cut things into manageable pieces but in reality they have left them too intertwined and they aren't really independent pieces. For divide and conquer to actually work requires that the pieces have clearly defined, and very limited, communication.
by cluoma | 2025-04-29 18:38:56+00:00
https://github.com/cluoma/Pico2Maple-fw

Currently working on a USB/Bluetooth to Sega Dreamcast controller adapter.

It's based on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2/W board and originally started as a fun project to play around with the PIO features of the RP chips and get my Steam Controller working on the Dreamcast. It has since expanded to support more controllers, keyboards, mice, and acts as VMU - the Dreamcast's memory card - while plugged in. Building the dongle itself has also been a fun exercise in 3d printing, cad and pcb design.

I'd really like to expand the amount of supported USB devices as I only have access to a limited amount of hardware that I can test myself. I've started looking into if I can use the SDL Game Controller DB (https://github.com/mdqinc/SDL_GameControllerDB) to kind of crowd source support for a bunch of controllers. I'm definitely open to other ideas though. I feel like I'm slowly learning that USB controllers are minefield of one-offs and edge cases.
by 256_ | 2025-04-29 18:39:01+00:00
I don't think the author is wrong for saying that certain kinds of code should be written carefully. I object to the implication that other code shouldn't.

From TFA: "Write your auto-updater code very carefully. Actually, write any code that has the potential to generate costs carefully." So the focus is on code that "generate[s] costs". I think this is a common delusion programmers have; that some code is inherently unrelated to security (or cost), so they can get lazy with it. I see it like gun safety. You have to always treat a gun like it's loaded, not because it always is (although sometimes it may be loaded when you don't expect it), but because it teaches you to always be careful, so you don't absent-mindedly fall back into bad habits when you handle a loaded one.

Telling people to write code carefully sounds simplistic but I believe for some people it's genuinely the right advice.
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-29 18:39:03+00:00
I think you're talking about factorio, right hnuser123456?

In satisfactory, all pumps need water and there is a special kind of power plant that doesn't need pumps/electricity to kickstart the factory. It's special because it needs items the player has to manually gather and only runs "on demand" (shuts off if enough power from regular plants is provided)

Strong recommendation to give it a try if you haven't already. It's very different to factorio, but great in it's own way
by mettamage | 2025-04-29 18:39:12+00:00
Well, I think autonomy specifically is in part in how you frame things. Just like in CBT, when you influence your thoughts it will influence your emotions.

Simple example: if you believe an action you did was a really bad thing, you will most likely feel negative emotions about it. However, if you can figure out a perspective that will reframe the information you have in a different light and therefore you now believe it was a positive thing, you will likely feel good about what you did.

Example (I'm improvizing so not fully according to the sketch outlined above):

Negative: I don't dare to talk to that person because they don't know me and it is not done to talk to someone you don't know without a context.

Positive: While it is unusual to talk to someone you don't know without a context, I give that person a chance to meet me. If I tend to do this often enough, then there will be people that are open to this.
by jdboyd | 2025-04-29 18:39:15+00:00
I think there is a mismatch with Intel/Window's idea of an AI PC being a beefed up edge TPU core, while customers who do want AI want LLMs, which I'm under the impression the Lunar Lake AI features aren't that great at accelerating (but are presumably good at non LLM vision and audio processing). If I'm misunderstanding this, I'd love a reply.
by xipho | 2025-04-29 18:39:26+00:00
The discovery part is anything but. I was trained to recognize scams in grocery stores (the on sale smaller is never cheaper then the bulk item... until rarely it is) early on by my parents. Few people recognize just how bad this is. Educating folks with somethign that does it for them first is a first step.

But yah, completely with you on the "sales is hell" part, that bit was for the startup bros.
by nailer | 2025-04-29 18:39:32+00:00
> that was abducted off the street and terrorized

I bet that didn't happen. Someone on a visa probably waved a Hamas flag or told people how they can support Hamas and then had their visa appropriately yanked. I have no idea, I just know BS when I read it.

Edit: oh you're the same person from the other thread. Figures.
by Sam6late | 2025-04-29 18:39:54+00:00
I was wondering if this helps in detecting current spots from old aerial videos, say San Francisco in 2002, how cool would it be to juxtapose both in a new video, San Francisco in 2002: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTR6iftL7yE

or Dubai in 1997 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMNXXiiDRhM
by team_pyrefly | 2025-04-29 18:39:55+00:00
Thanks for giving this a try! We go over how to use the upgrade tooling (`--suppress-errors`) in the guide here: https://pyrefly.org/en/docs/installation/. This is intended to make upgrading from different versions of type checkers easier. It’s something we use internally and wanted to share with the community along with the checker itself.

We also allow you the ability to suppress whole classes of errors if you want to ignore specific error types and avoid inline ignores: https://pyrefly.org/en/docs/configuration/ A word of caution: this will ignore future errors of this type as well.

First, make sure your project is properly configured and then follow the instructions. `--suppress-errors` will add ignores inline allowing the project to check cleanly. We have thought about a feature that allows you to keep suppressions in a separate file, but we have not put it on the roadmap yet. If this is something important for your workflow, we would like to learn more - please add a feature request on GitHub.
by m_t | 2025-04-29 18:39:58+00:00
Thank you for mentioning this. I felt like I was going crazy not seeing anyone mentioning it in the comments.

This was a very important feature to le at the time, as I used to work on multiple projects at the same time, and I had all of those organised in a simple, very visual way. I also had a group for "communication" with all my webmails, forums, etc. And another one with all the webcomics I used to read at the time.
by lazycouchpotato | 2025-04-29 18:40:05+00:00
Appears to still be rolling out progressively - something that the release notes left out. I'm on 138.0 and I don't have it either.

> All users should expect to see the feature by May 6, 2025. [1]

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups
by 7qW24A | 2025-04-29 18:40:11+00:00
It’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down. If you use the BLS’s definition of productivity, then computers seem to be a net drag on productivity:

https://usafacts.org/articles/what-is-labor-productivity-and...

Even more surprising for me is that productivity growth declined during the ZIRP era. How did we take all that free money and product less?
by MostlyStable | 2025-04-29 18:40:21+00:00
While this is true, it's one part of Kagi that I wouldn't expect to remain true if they every actually got mainstream success. That human/less corporate feel is less an effect of their mission goals than it is their very small size.

They may never become huge (they are explicitly building their business model such that it doesn't require growth to succeed), but if they ever do, they will be able to maintain their mission and goals, but they almost certainly won't be able to maintain that small, human feel.
by purplesyringa | 2025-04-29 18:40:28+00:00
I'd love to use a tool that shows the state of every CPU component at each point in time. Performance counters demonstrate global behavior, while what actually matters during optimization is local behavior. I'd like to be able to inspect pipeline stalls and conditions that led to these situations, I'd like to get an estimate on the efficiency of port allocation, I'd like to be able to compare the rate of memory accesses vs computation and get exact numbers, e.g. "you can access 20% more data over the bus without adding CPU stalls".
by dublin | 2025-04-29 18:41:49+00:00
Even the best photography does a very poor job of capturing what many works of art actually look like. This is an area where tech is not the answer, and those that insist it is are just ignorant of the subtleties of actual artwork. BTW, this isn't some woo-woo claim, there are myriad things that cameras capture very poorly, if at all, starting with the obvious things like reflections (amny types), refractions (ditto), transparency and translucency (esp. in marble!), and many, many more.
by eddieroger | 2025-04-29 18:43:00+00:00
It's just another form of any other jargon - unknown until you know it, and usually specific to the use case. I see k8s and i18n or a11y and I know exactly what they mean because at some point I learned it and it's part of the world I live in. Searching for stuff is how we learn, not solving crosswords.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-29 18:43:18+00:00
I highly doubt GDP numbers in China are falsified, but GDP per capita doesn't matter much when median household incomes in China remain in the $250-350/mo (EDIT: $400-500/mo, good callout, needed to update priors from covid) range according to Chinese government statistics.

This is why Chinese overproduction exists - incomes are too low for most Chinese consumers to purchase higher value goods that are made in China, because you aren't upgrading your cellphone or car every year when your household income is in that range.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-29 18:43:46+00:00
I actually think this one is quite different. It's not unique but if you look at thiel's and karp's politics it's not a big stretch to guess this was the intended purpose of palantir from the beginning.

I don't think they are merely amorally profit seeking, I believe this is an ideological goal they've been working towards for some time.
by Groxx | 2025-04-29 18:44:01+00:00
To within a rounding error of zero, I don't think anyone outside Windows devs truly expects Microsoft to maintain .NET on other platforms, so it's not really an option in many (most?) fields.

They've effectively dropped it a couple times in the past, and while they're currently putting effort in, the company as a whole does not seem to care about stuff like this beyond brief bursts of attention to try to win back developer mindshare, before going back to abandonment. It's what Microsoft is rather well known for.
by neutrinoq | 2025-04-29 18:44:02+00:00
Sorry, what do you mean by "waiting for funds?" As in, how do we do the conversion from fiat currency to crypto in the app?

AVAX has a great combination of qualities: 1) It's fairly decentralized with ~1,500 validators 2) The costs for transactions are incredibly inexpensive 3) It's EVM compatible 4) It has very fast finality, so you can save notes quickly 5) Has basically no down time or outages
by Swizec | 2025-04-29 18:44:24+00:00
Življenje in tehnika[1] – popular science magazine in Slovenia that's been running since 1950. Grandparents used to have my uncle's collection from I guess his high school years. Spanned from the mid 70's and into the 80's.

I used to read random issues when I'd go visit. My favorite were the 70's stories about "We are imminently going to have AI cars. Experiments are underway and trucks can now autonomously drive long distances on the highway! Humanoid robots are coming soon look at this super dextrous hand!!".

[1] https://www.tzs.si/zivljenje-in-tehnika/revija
by spwa4 | 2025-04-29 18:44:58+00:00
I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion for this. But it's still the truth: just wait until you try to get muslims to confirm what exactly about islam "safeguarded" science in the middle ages.

The answer is slavery, and patronage by very, very rich people (who outright owned the scientists, and these in turn kept libraries of the great scientific works of the past, as trophies for the sultan, with zero public access). Oh and the fact that they recreated the Roman habit of kidnapping slaves and then selling them, sometimes an enormous distance from where they were captured. That is how Hindu numerals spread.

One very famous example is the "Blue Mosque", the greatest piece of islamic architecture for over 500 years, the tallest building in the world for a very long time (only overshadowed by the Church it was copied from: the Aya Sofia) which is a copy of a Church building by a Jewish architect (who was a slave to the sultan). Yes, minarets are a Christian idea.

Perhaps this is the reason the Blue Mosque doesn't have one of the defining features of islamic architecture of mosques: it doesn't have a catwalk, a podium for selling slaves, which most ottoman mosques have.

Then, usually during periods of economic stress, muslims destroyed their science, usually for religious reasons. Of course, this happened in the Christian west too. In the west science (specifically the copying of books by the Catholic church, then giving public access to them. No public access existed in any caliphate) recovered faster than these religious attacks could destroy it. In islamic nations it didn't. Islam was more scientifically advanced in 800 than in 1800 (or 1900). Or, to put it another way: the more actual muslims a society had (in 800 that was almost none), the less science existed.
by foota | 2025-04-29 18:45:26+00:00
One thing I wish for is for standard library trees to present a way to take advantage of a trees structure, even if they don't directly expose the tree itself. For instance, C++ map could expose a way to start find or e.g., lower_bound from some node. While I'm making a wishlist, I also wish lower_bound worked with reverse iterators (see e g., https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64351187/stdlower-bound-...) :)

I think allowing for starting this kind of search from a given node would cover most (though not all) of what you'd want to expose the trees structure for directly.