MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bezmiran | 2025-04-14 06:04:36+00:00
Because an eV is a unit of energy (1 eV = 1.602e-19 Joules). It's defined as the kinetic energy of an electron that is accelerated by a potential difference of 1 Volt, nothing to do with its rest mass.

When rest mass is stated in energy units such as eV, they're calculating it using E=mc^2.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-04-14 06:06:29+00:00
> Relationships that took me years to cultivate… mostly going to be gone too.

I don't want to sound condescending, but if being forced out of the job means end for your relationships built for years, maybe these relationships weren't built as they should. They should have been built with the people as people, not coworkers, and definitely not using company as the communication ground.
by underdeserver | 2025-04-14 06:06:42+00:00
Google contributes to society.

Search helps people find information. YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created. Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.

There's a lot of bad, but no contribution to society? That's a bit much.

Disclaimer: Ex-googler (left 2 years ago).
Ask HN: What are the best books with problem sets that test your understanding?
by jimsojim | 2025-04-14 06:07:32+00:00
What books with end-of-chapter problems have you found most valuable for truly mastering a subject? Can be any field – computer science, math, physics, economics, etc.

Some of my best learning experiences have come from textbooks that forced me to apply concepts - attack problems directly and refer to the prose on need basis to fill the gaps.

My favourites are - 1. Problems in General Physics by I. E. Irodov 2. Concepts of Physics by H.C Verma Part I & II 3. How to Solve It by George Pólya
by microtonal | 2025-04-14 06:08:01+00:00
* I believe Windows has seen more architectures than Mac OS Classic and OS X combined.*

I have never been a Windows user, but I used to keep an eye on it when NT was still the separate business version (pre-Vista) and my NT 4.0 (or was it 3.51?) CD-ROM had x86, MIPS, Alpha and maybe PowerPC support. When things weren’t as clear platform-wise, NT was really a multi-platform system. Since then also x86_64, IA64, ARM64.
by Lammy | 2025-04-14 06:08:04+00:00
> But what even is the business case here? I get the idea of encrypting pay TV, but isn't the entire point of free broadcast TV that it's... free?

This should be a big clue that the spying is the point, and all the DRMs of the world are justification for spying instead of the other way around. Total Information Awareness is the path to completing the Great Work.
by neilv | 2025-04-14 06:08:28+00:00
* The Slack is under the company's control, and potential monitoring and retention? Over the life of someone no longer with the company?

* Was there any sour grapes in the Slack channel? Or was it a bummer or distraction for remaining employees?

* Did the Slack actually help the employees readjust and refocus on their new job search?

* Why not encourage people to say goodbyes and exchange contact info, and pay for a job search coaching service (with no reporting back to the company)?
by andsoitis | 2025-04-14 06:09:03+00:00
” Writing is done in the mind, though, not in the hands. It is baffling to me that some home educators spend hundreds of hours and an immeasurable amount of goodwill to teach handwriting. I can’t think of few worse programs than Handwriting Without Tears, an actual real life K-5 curriculum whose name I am not making up.

We should teach our kids to type, until even better input modalities arise, and remind them that the essence of writing is composition, not calligraphy. None of the important writing they do will be by hand, so we should simply not waste our energy on extensive handwriting instruction.”

He also derides teaching spelling.

Eeeeeek
by djaychela | 2025-04-14 06:09:58+00:00
Just like OBD, I think api access to data like this should be open to the car user. If the manufacturer is taking the data ( as they do with my renault zoe) then it should be available to the end user at a standard API which is available across all manufacturers, so if you change car you can just point your setup at a new endpoint with new credentials and all the endpoints and responses are standard, just like OBD2 is

(yes I know manufacturer tools go deeper but that's another issue)
by theshrike79 | 2025-04-14 06:13:09+00:00
> One of the hardest things as a DM, in my experience, is creating a balanced encounter without fudging

Only in D&D where you have so many variables in every direction it's practically impossible.

An easy encounter becomes hard if the players decide to be miserly with their abilities and items.

And a hard one will be easy if someone decides to go all out and use That Item to one-shot the encounter.
by neilv | 2025-04-14 06:15:03+00:00
That sentence caught my eye too.

First thought was whether they meant corporate political capitol transactional relationships.

Second thought was maybe they meant that, inevitably (or so it seems, probably thinking depressed), they'd drift apart, since everyone's busy with family and work, and around the workplace was the only times they'd have to interact.

In the latter, even if you have beyond-work social relationships, the opportunities to interact outside of work and the lunchtime might tend to be like "drinks after work", and effectively disappear as well. If that was your mode while working together, that's fine, and probably you don't want to see even more of each other then. That doesn't mean you weren't seeing them as people beyond coworkers. So, once no longer working with each other, you both need to actively change things to make opportunities to interact.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-04-14 06:15:32+00:00
Then it is a poorly written contract, and the party that agreed to it was tricked or poorly advised. Plain and simple. We see this often with "fast and loose" term sheets for some corporate and sovereign bonds on less reliable names. There is a whole podcast (I forget the name at this very moment) that does nothing but discuss dubious bond contracts. Frequently, the co-hosts will ask: "Who in their right mind would agree to such a contract? This clause is totally unenforceable / provides no protection against event X/Y/Z." And, yet, these contracts still exist in the wild.

Dumb question: Do you think the average dev in Silicon Valley pays a third-party employment contract lawyer to review the terms and conditions before agreeing? Sadly, I feel the answer is "no". Speaking personally, I would never agree to such complex employment compensation terms without third-party advice. Yes, I know it is not cheap (maybe 500 USD per hour), but the alternative looks much worse, and most people here facing these contracts can afford it.
by mock-possum | 2025-04-14 06:15:49+00:00
Honestly I’m having more fun with it than I expected - I kind of enjoy mentoring though, I like sort of feeding a newbie ideas and questions that leads them to make their own breakthrough, and I feel like Cursor delivers that same feeling sometimes.

Other times, I’m just jumping into a quick feature of bugfix ticket that’s nothing particularly fun or interesting - so it’s more fun to basically roleplay overseeing a junior dev, without any of the social pressure of interacting with a real person, and not have to get my hands dirty with boring tasks.

It’s all about finding the opportunity to have fun with it.

I feel like a lot of time is being wasted debating how serious and how real it is - but are you having any fun with it?? Cause I kinda am.
by sidkshatriya | 2025-04-14 06:16:28+00:00
TL;DR Your dad's PHP is no longer the current PHP. The language itself has been thoroughly modernized, made more consistent, bug free and performant. There is nothing better than a piece of software that keeps getting improved decade after decade borne out of real developer needs and experience.

- Type annotations are integrated and work well with PHP now. This results in a kind of scripty Java OOP that is more succinct and type checked ! (it is possible to write PHP without types when you want metaprogramming features also)

- Many inconsistencies in the design of the language (OOP, function naming etc.) have been resolved/smoothed out

- The language recognises the inherent problems with `null` and allows you to make type annotations that rule out null. This is my smell test for a language BTW -- golang for instance does not seem to have a good story for null.

- PHP Language developers have been really good about increasing performance year after year

- Lots of software like web frameworks and CMSes continue to be based on PHP

And -- the greatest part of the design -- PHP remains the best example of the "shared nothing" architecture. An architecture that allows you to scale your application easily.
by SpecialistK | 2025-04-14 06:16:51+00:00
I mostly agree, and dual boot Tiger and Leopard on my 1.67GHz PowerBook G4. But just as those OSes aren't very useful outside of novelty (or maybe some older Mac OS games that haven't been ported to a newer platform) so is running a modern Linux distro or BSD on it. The times I've done it, I've done the install, clicked around for a few minutes, and then move on. Sometimes struggling with and overcoming the hassle of installing an OS (or newer version of Bash on 20 year old Mac OS X) is the point. Journey vs destination and all that.
by jdthedisciple | 2025-04-14 06:17:00+00:00
I legit started a new customer project (simple business website) on PHP a cple days ago:

The reason is simple: It's to me the most efficient, best performant SSR option out there, if your requirements are simple.

You will be amazed at the website's speed. We are so used to the lethargic JS slop of the average website out there these days.

I love PHP, I believe future "vibe coders" will be left bedazzled at its powers, which will be beyond their comprehension.
by geocar | 2025-04-14 06:17:13+00:00
> Here's the painful truth: you can't quit a TUI application without learning it

So what? I'm not so sure you can learn Photoshop without either watching someone use it or reading a few books on it, whilst emacs maintains an excellent tutorial that it tells you to read multiple times when you start it.

In the 1990s and early 2000s I volunteered at a senior center teaching people how to move the mouse and translate that movement into the little arrow-cursors' movement, and the experience convinced me absolutely nothing about computer-use is intuitive or obvious to anyone who did not grow up using it.

I urge you not to stick with a worse-user-experience just because you already "know" it. If you think GUIs are better, that's one thing, but this cannot possibly be the reason.

> Try writing a portable TUI application from scratch, without touching curses or termbox

Try writing a portable X11 application from scratch, without touching libX11 or libxcb.

Try writing a portable Win32 application from scratch, without user32.dll

None of this is fun, but the TUI application is less code, and it's not even close.

> As an Emacs user, I subjectively find the GUI superior - I can e.g. rebind Cmd-S to "save", and that's a reason enough.

The mac Terminal isn't great for a few reasons, but iTerm and kitty absolutely let you do this if you teach Emacs to decode the sequences.

https://github.com/benotn/kkp

I find this a much better experience than using tramp to tunnel remote servers.

> non-terminal REPL where Ctrl-C means "copy", and Ctrl-V means "paste", that would be a great start

You can have this today (see above), but I much prefer ^C being cancel/interrupt/compile, and ^V being make-visible. I avoid copy and paste because it doesn't fit in my workflow very well:

> You know non-TUI applications are also customisable? I have Hammerspoon scripts, ... I just don't understand...

I don't want hotkeys, I want automation.

In a terminal I just run the regular application (like emacs) under autoexpect. I then edit the resulting script, and run it and now I have a new application that does something useful to me. Eventually I add it to an application I wrote which just runs all of my scripts in a big loop.

I run one gui application (chrome), and then use vncsnapshot to dump images that I print out over the kitty image protocol. I then have a perl script forward the keyboard and mouse metrics into qemu via vnc. It works well enough for autoexpect, but it's a lot of work for one application.

Then, I go to the beach while my computer is doing stuff people pay for.
by ahamilton454 | 2025-04-14 06:17:48+00:00
A tool change can send a notification to the client, but the client chooses when to actually update the tools. This could take time and the LLM may not be aware of the new tool. I don’t think there is a concept of a “well-behaved” client since MCP is about giving flexibility of implementation.

I wouldn’t call this ergonomic. Alternatively, you could just notify the server when a user message is sent, and allow the server to adjust the tools and resources prior to execution of the agent (this is clearly different from the MCP spec).

On a separate note, what client are you using that supports notification, I haven’t seen one yet?
by lompad | 2025-04-14 06:18:09+00:00
Because it's good enough for almost everything. The vast majority of projects will never have to scale to billions of users, so hyperscalability is not a huge concern.

It has a low barrier to entry and great language features - static typing being one of the big ones. It has become a really nice language over the years, great to work in and in no way less satisfying or effective than for example golang.

And, of course, laravel exists.
by thesz | 2025-04-14 06:18:09+00:00
As you mentioned "improvement of existing language," I'd like to mention that Haskell has green threads that most probably are lighter (stack size 1K) than goroutines (minimum stack size 2K).

Haskell also has software transactional memory where one can implement one's own channels (they are implemented [1]) and atomically synchronize between arbitrarily complex reading/sending patterns.

[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/stm-2.5.3.1/docs/Control...

In my not so humble opinion, Go is a library in Haskell from the very beginning.
by antisthenes | 2025-04-14 06:18:48+00:00
> This person apparently had a great time working this job and I imagine it’s difficult to end up with the responsibilities they had without being intrinsically motivated.

I think you can have a great time and build good relationships with teammates while still realizing you are a cog in the machine.

The way author writes the blog, you'd think they were working on the first Moon flight or the Manhattan project, whereas the reality is they were working on some CSS spec at Google, which tens of thousands of other people have been doing for probably 2 decades now.

It's routine maintenance work on existing stuff.
by mxmilkiib | 2025-04-14 06:18:54+00:00
I love the modern GitHub Actions composition process the project uses

I've seen Actions that create a usable Arch etc repos where other software that has been build can be listed

What's the most creative set-up using a number of Actions that anyone has seen? On GitHub or elsewhere

P.S. Could that computational paradigm somehow be extended to a Yahoo! Pipes form of visual [data]flow? For some kind of personal orchestrations
by ceoj | 2025-04-14 06:19:45+00:00
SEEKING WORK, REMOTE - WORLDWIDE

Remote: Yes. I have been working remotely with clients from USA, UK/EU, AUS/NZ for last 12+ years.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Senior Ruby on Rails and React developer with 12 + years of experience with software development.

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fvnKGKM6T2yAtkMhShAyxJtS...

Email: skfix@outlook.com

I am Sunil, a Ruby on Rails specialist with super happy clients from all over the world. I am open to part-time, and full-time opportunities.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-14 06:20:37+00:00
I experienced something similar at Nokia around the time things were starting to go bad (due to competition from Google and Apple). I got caught up in one of the earlier layoff rounds. As I've been able to reconstruct since then what happened was roughly that:

- I got a excellent performance review and a small raise. All good, keep on doing what you are doing! I was pretty happy.

- Nokia started to prepare for layoffs and gave units targets for numbers of people to lay off and amounts of money to save. They tried to spread the pain.

- Because of my team's multi site setup the choice came down to cutting at one of two sites. They picked my site. Management was concentrated at the other site.

- Because I was at the higher end of the spectrum in terms of salary, I was one of the natural choices for laying off. This was just done based on the numbers and had nothing to do with performance.

So, my bosses boss flew over to give us the news and that was it. Nokia was pretty nice about it. I was put on immediate gardening leave, I got the usual severance payment based on time served, and a decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant.

Since things were chaotic, other teams in the same site were still hiring new people with roughly the same qualifications. I was actually bucketed in with a project I wasn't even a part of. That whole project got shut down and apparently it was convenient to pretend I was working on that just so they could avoid firing other people in different parts of the organization. Somebody had to solve a big puzzle and I was a piece that fit in the right place. It wasn't personal.

In retrospect, one of the best things Nokia could do for me was firing me. I was coasting and the whole thing forced me to rethink what I was doing. If you are late thirties and a bit comfortable in your job, you might want to make a move. Or at least think about what you would do if you were forced to suddenly.

Lesson learned: job security is an illusion and employment relations are business relations. Don't take it personal. These things happen. Part of a high salary is insuring yourself against this kind of stuff and dealing with it when it happens. Part of the job.
by ceoj | 2025-04-14 06:20:45+00:00
SEEKING WORK, REMOTE - WORLDWIDE

Remote: Yes. I have been working remotely with clients from USA, UK/EU, AUS/NZ for last 12+ years.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Senior Ruby on Rails and React developer with 12 + years of experience with software development.

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fvnKGKM6T2yAtkMhShAyxJtS...

Email: skfix@outlook.com

I am Sunil, a Ruby on Rails specialist with super happy clients from all over the world. I am open to part-time, and full-time opportunities.
What's the market for automated content and replies on Twitter?
by iclub | 2025-04-14 06:20:50+00:00
anyone have experience with this? i know elizaOS is providing a framework for this, but you have no control and have to provide your login info for it to work.

also is anyone actually looking for something like this? something that can turn you into an influencer overnight, post content for you and interact with the users, all while you do something else?
Ask HN: Luxury legacy car manufacturers seem to still struggle with their apps
by websap | 2025-04-14 06:21:22+00:00
The software quality for legacy car manufacturers still seems to be lagging behind what I'd expect from modern and functional design in this day and age.

I have a BMW and both the iDrive 8.5 software and the App seem to be designed by some old school enterprise. The app is slow, the voice recognition is bad, there are all these paid upgrades for traffic data, which is free and more ubiquitous on Apple Maps and Google Maps.

It just seems like these manufacturers can't get the software implementation right. Is it because execs in these companies are actually just detached from the final product?
by geocar | 2025-04-14 06:22:26+00:00
> it just remained stagnant for the past 30 years. (Unlike terminal emulators, which do boring things, and have been stagnant for 40 years.)

I disagree with all of this.

> The cognitive load between Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Shift-C drives me crazy

If you use emacs like you say, you should know you can bind ^C to whatever you want.

I like ^C being what it always has been, and I'm not persuaded by one person's inability to perform an internet search or read the manual of software they claim to use.
by apelapan | 2025-04-14 06:23:00+00:00
I wonder how much is the Tesla and how much is the phone. I used to have 98% success with just walking up to my Model Y, phone in pocket. These days it is more like 80% and sometimes it can take over a minute before the car accepts that a "key is present", even after manually unlocking with the app, sitting in the drivers seat and having an established bluetooth connection that is playing through the car speakers.
Show HN: A Sidecar-Based Policy Enforcement Engine for AI Agents
by mwiki02 | 2025-04-14 06:23:30+00:00
I’ve prototyped sidecar-based policy enforcement engine as a proof of concept to help AI agents (like CrewAI or LangGraph) comply with organizational rules. It intercepts requests/responses, applies YAML-defined policies (e.g., disallowed phrases/tools), and can use an LLM for semantic checks. I’m looking for feedback, suggestions, or collaborators—please check it out - explains the core idea in README and let me know what you think!
by sixhobbits | 2025-04-14 06:24:27+00:00
I'm sure MCP does have legitimate problems and some might even be covered in this article but the author would benefit by spending more time refining their criticisms.

There's a whole section on how people can do things like analyse a combination of slack messages, and how they might use that information. This is more of an argument suggesting agents are dangerous. You can think MCP is a good spec that lets you create dangerous things but conflating these arguments under "mcp bad" is disingenuous.

Id rather have more details and examples on the problem with the spec itself. "You can use it to do bad things" doesn't cut it. I can use http and ssh to bad things too, so it's more interesting to show how Eve might use MCP to do malicious things to Alice or Bob who are trying to use MCP as intended.
by quotemstr | 2025-04-14 06:24:44+00:00
"The magic of first love is our ignorance it can ever end".

One of the most difficult realizations you must confront in this industry is that almost everything you build will disappear. It will be ruined, ignored, slandered, and then forgotten. Almost all of your late night epiphanies and bugs conquests will fade anonymously into the anonymous blackbody spectrum entropy demands planet Earth emit.

You must come to peace with this reality. You must accept the transience of glory into your heart. You must prepare yourself, deep down, for any reality of off-sites and planned presentations and electric roadmaps to disappear in an instant. It gets easier after the first few times, trust me. You emerge a sadder and wiser man.

The only thing we can do is create moments of excellence --- occasions on which we can reflect when we are old and gray and take solace, even pride, in knowing we put every bit of ourselves into a task and did it well. There's honor and nobility in excellence even when doomed.

And who knows? You can't predict what will endure. If we're lucky, once in our careers, if we continually apply the best of ourselves, we'll do something that escapes all this destruction and endures.
by mock-possum | 2025-04-14 06:25:03+00:00
Sorry, but isn’t this a bit ridiculous? Who just allows the AI to add code without reviewing it? And who just allows that code to be merged into a main branch without reviewing the PR?

They start out talking about how scary and pernicious this is, and then it turns out to be… adding a script tag to an html file? Come on, as if you wouldn’t spot that immediately?

What I’m actually curious about now is - if I saw that, and I asked the LLM why it added the JavaScript file, what would it tell me? Would I be able to deduce the hidden instructions in the rules file?