MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Hasu | 2025-04-02 14:58:13+00:00
> The value equation of a software development team isn't a product of their time and salary compared to the code/features/whatever-unit they produce. It's the theories and knowledge they build in their heads and share through the process of understanding problems and developing solutions. You can't optimize that process in a Taylorist fashion.

There is no value equation for "the theories and knowledge" that developers build in their heads. Value in software happens when customers pay for software. That's how business works. It happens to be true that developers need to build theories and knowledge in their heads, but that isn't unique to software engineering and doesn't prevent deadlines from being effective.

> "It gets done when it gets done," is a glib way of saying that progress is more important than deadlines. The idea that systems take time and what's important is that people know where we're at and where we're heading more than threatening punishment for not delivering what we estimated at an agreed upon time.

I understand the argument, having heard it from teammates ten thousand times in my career. I'm somewhat sympathetic to it, but it is not a full picture of the software business. A business that fully adopts such a strategy has no long-term plan and can't make promises to customers. That can work if you lucked into all the money in the world (Google), but most of us are not so lucky and need to deliver to customers within reasonable timeframes or the customers go to someone else who can.

I get that estimation can be hard, conversations about scope can be hard, and managing expectations can be hard. I don't care. If you still have a job in this industry you are extremely well compensated to overcome those difficulties.
by alwa | 2025-04-02 14:58:56+00:00
That makes a lot of sense to me. I think I reacted more to the idea that fake deadlines are an appropriate technique for the purpose of squeezing people until they always scramble through their nights and weekends as a routine matter, like this guy seemed to like to do when he was on the front line.

“We’re going to spend the next two weeks working on X, so scope your ambitions accordingly—what’s realistic to expect in that timeframe?” seems like a perfectly reasonable and healthy negotiation to have, one compatible with respectful working relationships.
by jodrellblank | 2025-04-02 14:59:21+00:00
"string" is a type that only makes sense inside the context of a specific programming language, because programming languages differ on what a string is and how it behaves (is it guaranteed to be valid UTF8, does it carry its own length around with it, is it runes/graphemes and can't be split on byte boundaries easily, is it mutable, etc).

Double quotes are a syntax sugar for string literals in source code, in a particular language, to avoid writing `string.from_byte_array([97, 98, 99])` or `new String({97, 98, 99});` or whatever. Strings are single quoted not double quoted in Dyalog APL, there's several different strings in SWI Prolog depending on using double quotes or backticks and how the flags are set.

stdout is an untyped byte stream which could go to a printer or Braille terminal or anything as you say, but could be terminal control codes, image data, or whatever. The OS doesn't tend to have a 'string type' ... but in PowerShell `write-output "a"` will write a .NET System.String to the output stream, but it won't use "printf()".
by codingdave | 2025-04-02 14:59:23+00:00
> code reviews, sprints and constant deadlines.

Don't accept a job where teams do Scrum.

Scrum is an anxiety-inducing never-ending marathon. If people without anxiety make it work for them, great - but it doesn't work for me, so I reject it.

More broadly speaking, figure out if you have other boundaries you need to set, and make discovery of whether or not those boundaries would be crossed a part of any interview process. Decline jobs that cross them.

I find that smaller companies outside of the startup world are better. Look for bootstrapped small software shops, or an internal IT department of a non-tech company. Find a place where you are helping the business run, but not directly producing the product that defines the business. Or work on enterprise platforms - Salesforce, SAP, etc. Such platforms tend to need work more along the lines of configuration, scripting, and data updates, which results in a different type and pace of work.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-04-02 14:59:32+00:00
> 2. Not consulting with your team about what’s feasible

Right, and the way to do this is by dividing work into easily digestible pieces that are easy to reason about, and to _feel_. Agile or lean.

> 5. Being rigid about the deadline

> Sometimes external people will want to change the deadline (especially your PM), or add some scope. Your first instinct might be to respond by saying: “No way, we agreed to X by Y. We are not changing that right now”.

Not sure I like this definition of deadline. Seems more like a random fire up the arse.

---

Deadlines are great for one thing: coordination between departments that don't understand each others' work. If marketing and engineering are trying to make a product together, they need common grounds for getting things done and correcting course. You do this with deadlines. The deadlines might contain work to be done, to reduce risks, or planning could be just "let's see where we're at no later than this date."

Deadlines are made feasible by forcing the team to discuss the work, and ensure understanding within the competent team. Scrum planning poker provides one process (yeah, there, I said it) for that.

I once had a manger asking us line managers how to make the teams feel urgency. I guess it is indeed a question, but it's mostly a question to make fun of, not to be answered. Or at least that's how I reacted when I violently argued against this abuse of my direct reports' stress levels.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-02 14:59:34+00:00
> How are you accounting for this; trying every possible program length?

Part of the mutation function involves probabilistically growing and shrinking the program size (i.e., inserting and removing random instructions).

> And you are considering the simpler case where the search space is discrete, unlike the continuous spaces in most machine learning problems.

All "continuous spaces" that embody modern machine learning techniques are ultimately discrete.
by cguess | 2025-04-02 15:00:08+00:00
Sadly go look at the "masculine" channels targeting young men on YouTube (Tate and his compatriots). There's a LOT of holocaust denial, rewriting of Hitler as misunderstood etc. We're both lucky to not be exposed to it regularly, but unfortunately in my work it's a thing I have to be aware of.

Worse, an entire generation of young men especially are being told that WWII wasn't what it really was. You see the results of this in the US but also eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, across Europe where right wing parties are on the rise substantially supported by these young men.
by WorldMaker | 2025-04-02 15:00:22+00:00
Myst is probably one of the few games that benefits from its upgrades and modernization and you won't find too many sticklers for "play the original only". The original was a mind-blowing CD-ROM at the time, but with hindsight it was a grainy slideshow that was sometimes hard to navigate because you only had a couple options at each point and sometimes they didn't line up with your mental model of what they were supposed to do. The modern one is a gorgeous free movement thing that makes it easier to get lost in the puzzles.

As a "superfan" of a certain other sort, my biggest complaint with the modern one is only that I can't find my Ki or Relto book while playing it. (In Uru, Cyan's attempt at an MMO version of Myst-like exploration which you can still play today thanks to community support, your Ki is your communications/chat tool to other players, and Relto is the player's "home island" and having a book linking to it at all times is a safety mechanism/security blanket for visiting dangerous Ages. It's also a fast way back to any of the more social hubs. Any of the more modern single player ones feel like they should still connect back to multiplayer, even this many years after Uru's second cancellation.)
by troyvit | 2025-04-02 15:00:26+00:00
Eh, I'm clueless about this aspect of the framework (if you can call such a steaming pile of resume-driven-development such), and honestly I'm thankful for it.

Libraries like dayjs add complexity to the overall codebase and it's another piece of code you need to keep track of, update, and repair when its makers decide to go a different direction with it or some script kiddie decides to introduce a backdoor into it.

I think your larger concern shouldn't be about the "clueless people" who are commenting on this thread and rather the number of upvotes my comment got (especially compared to your rant). Clearly it struck a chord.

People are commenting and upvoting because the choices that went into building React leaves a lot of room for frameworks like Nue, Vue, hell even HTMX. Just because (it sounds like) you've staked your career on thinking React, the McDonalds of frameworks, is awesome doesn't change that.
by that_guy_iain | 2025-04-02 15:01:30+00:00
To me, the administration clearly screwed up. They were thinking about implementing something that was done as a prank. They could have just told everyone it was a prank and not to worry but instead, they reacted like the backlash was too bad and then told everyone we might be doing it anyway but not just now. This would have been an easy way for them to see the reaction and be thankful that they didn't do it and could just say it was a prank.
by benmmurphy | 2025-04-02 15:02:05+00:00
I thought runners were also using creatine but I can only find discussion around this for amateurs online. I'm not sure if professional runners are using it. It would be interesting to know if professionals are using it because as far as I'm aware it is not a banned substance and presumably if it had a benefit they would be using it. But maybe I'm just bad at googling because I found this article that claimed 80% of athletes at the Atlanta Olympics were using creatine (https://runmrrun.com/creatine-for-running/). Though, this page seems to be trying to sell creatine supplements so maybe should be taken with a bit of skepticism.
by tinthedev | 2025-04-02 15:02:36+00:00
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by csdvrx | 2025-04-02 15:02:40+00:00
> At the time I was making fun of my friend for using Kubernetes, which IMO is another overly complicated solution. :-P

Using Kubernetes is rarely justified because most companies are NOT at google scale :)

> I'm a bit pleasantly surprised that systemd-networkd does

There are many very pleasant surprises with it. I only wish it integrated better with intel iwctl

I'd also be happy if it duplicated iwctl functions so I could get rid of it, and it would be even better if it could also replace bluez: wireless is getting more integrated, with the new WIFI protocols giving a role to BLE (ex: Wifi-Aware 4.0 Instant Communication)

Read about Wifi Aware 4.0 and you will see why having systemd-network work with iwctl and bluez would be much harder than integrating them

> I'm also a strong believer that network configurations shouldn't be "chunked" out into multiple files

Oh no it's about chunking out your /56 prefix to multiple /64 subsets within that prefix. In that specific case, I agree with the article that systemd also made that simpler compared to what needs to be done when not using systemd

> Thanks, but I did solve most of the problems

Great! Should you run into problems during your 24.04 migration, my offer still stands: I think systemd is a nice tool, and I'll be happy to show you how to use it for advanced usecases

Don't hesitate to ping me on ycombinator if I don't reply to your email (the spam filter is not optimal)
by jodrellblank | 2025-04-02 15:02:58+00:00
> "But that's the thing that both students and often the teachers forget. We don't run labs to go smoothly, we run labs because you'll have to troubleshoot."

Hands up everyone who remembers being taught that labs were supposed to go wrong and you were doing them because you will have to troubleshoot?

... anyone?

... anyone?

... Bueller?

Or is this just the typical internet John Galt like that other guy "no offense but why didn't you just already know everything and create an apple pie by creating the universe like I would have?"
by didgetmaster | 2025-04-02 15:03:06+00:00
Building software is often like building a house. When construction starts, progress appears to happen fast. You put up walls pretty fast so it starts looking like a real house in a short time. Later, construction progress appears to slow down significantly as work shifts to detail work (wiring, plumbing, etc.) which doesn't change the appearance from the street much.

With software, the basic UI can take shape quickly. Some rudimentary functionality sometimes comes along quickly as well. Then all the detail work (error handling, logging, performance enhancements, etc.) makes progress appear to slow significantly.
by narratives1 | 2025-04-02 15:03:20+00:00
You’re last line is correct, it certainly counts less if money isn’t changing hands.

Not because money is some sacred object, but because money changes hands when you’re doing work for others. Money is just a lubricant that allows you to contribute your work to society and society to contribute to you in a generalized way rather than a village system where everyone returns the favor in kind.

Imagine we’re in a village, I’m a farmer, youre a tailor. If you want to get fed, you have to either grow your own food or you have to trade clothes to me the farmer because I’m the only one who can trade food back. As soon as you’ve traded with the farmers and we’re all set on clothes, now how are you going to eat? The result is everyone has to be a self sufficient subsistence farmer and only a few non farmers can be supported.

Money just abstracts that labor. It keeps the score on how much you created value for others and people pay you money that they received from the value they provided others.

Work you do for money is work you did for someone else. Picking up your groceries didn’t contribute to anyone else. It’s certainly necessary, nothing morally wrong with it, but society generally should be organized to incentivize contributing to society
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-02 15:03:50+00:00
We've been seeing human-form robots dancing and walking, even running and jumping, all kinds of stuff for how many years now? It's to the point that a video of a robot moving around on a mostly-empty concrete floor in a big industrial building is so boring that posting one as if it's impressive reads as parody, practically no matter what the robot is doing.

Are any of these companies delivering an actual product to paying customers yet? Is a single one making money on these kinds of things? I really don't know, but surely that would have made at least as big a splash in the news as all the videos of them doing choreographed dances or whatever for the last, god, what, almost 20 years (how long ago were those Japanese [Honda?] ones the Internet loved back in the day?) did?
by hylaride | 2025-04-02 15:03:56+00:00
Over the last decade, that squares out. In the 1990s and then after the 2K crash, funding companies was easier as there was less competition. Now anybody investing in any AI venture is going to be competing with a bazillion other people trying the same thing. There is less room for error or experimentation and it becomes far more of a luck game - and it was still largely a luck game then.
by Projectiboga | 2025-04-02 15:04:53+00:00
Tea bushes use an entirely different metabolic pathway to produce caffeine than coffee bushes.

Here is an article that further describes how we believe caffeine synthesis evolved in multiple land plant lineages.

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/38/10613

Caffeine synthesis involves several enzymes, but the enzyme family (called the SABATH family) involved in the final stages of its synthesis can trace its origins back to the first land plants. These first enzymes are thought to have been very promiscuous (capable of having activity with several molecules), partially contributing to how caffeine synthesis managed to evolve independently multiple times throughout the evolutionary history of land plants.
by Winsaucerer | 2025-04-02 15:04:56+00:00
I've experimented (i.e., not used in anger) with doing something similar to this, except by placing the authorisation logic in the database via things like row level security and stored procedures. So if you run the query using the 'unsafe' method, then it skips security checks, but if you run it via the normal path, you're forced to provide details about the requester.

The difference here though is that the normal path only provides information about the requester, and not the actual business logic for whether they're authorised. That goes in the database in the form of RLS or other permission checks in stored procedures.

It uses a pattern similar to PostgREST, where there is a local value set with the user ID (e.g., 'set local "request.web.sub" = '{}''). Though there is some trickiness with connection sharing, to ensure that these settings get reset properly.

And to use an example from another commenter here, this means that if there's only 3 rows that should be returned, the database returns just 3 rows, rather than 10,000 that need to be discarded down to 3.

I haven't come up with a good answer regarding protecting which fields can be seen yet.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-02 15:05:15+00:00
A bunch of those things are work for others that's not paid. And that was far from an exhaustive list.

What's confusing to me is this notion that if we ease up a little on the stick of "your life will be ruined and you may actually die", the carrot of more money will stop working because people are just that lazy. No, they're not, they do tons of work for no pay.
by fhd2 | 2025-04-02 15:05:42+00:00
There are some gotchas, like how it can take a while (8 weeks for me last year) to get your tax number, and some (or perhaps most/all?) banks don't issue a credit card if your business account hasn't existed for at least six months or something. I can see how a startup not short on cash but in a hurry to start buying/selling could benefit from taking an existing company over.
by saurik | 2025-04-02 15:05:51+00:00
> When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, ...

[I am now going to do these in reverse order of the original.]

> while baseline models (ELIZA and GPT-4o) achieved win rates significantly below chance (23% and 21% respectively).

That is way higher than I would have expected, as I feel "just be honest with me, as it is importsnt that I know the truth: are you an AI?!" would crush these models ;P.

> LLaMa-3.1, with the same prompt, was judged to be the human 56% of the time -- not significantly more or less often than the humans they were being compared to --

I mean, damn, right? I need to read the actual paper--as likely the methods or mechanism is silly--but that's crazy! An AI... passing the Turing test!

> GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant.

Ummm... uhh... hmmm... uh oh :(. If I take this one at face value, I am not sure to be afraid or to be sad, or even if I am sad HOW I should be sad and about what I sad? The win condition for the Turing test should be 50/50, not 75/25... that indicates the human is now failing the Turing test against this model just as badly as ELIZA and 4o do against us?!
by PeterStuer | 2025-04-02 15:05:52+00:00
Steady on cowboy. They might mislead the public in their needs and spends, but to jump from that to "corruption" is a bit too fast and loose.

From their financial statement 2024 you can learn that they probably spend about $6,825,794 on site operation (excl. salaries etc.). This includes $3,116,445 for Internet hosting and an estimated $3,709,349 on Server infrastructure (est. as 85% of equipment).

Now as of June 30, 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation's net assets totaled approximately $271.6 million, and the Wikimedia Endowment, established to support the long-term sustainability of Wikimedia projects, reported net assets of approximately $144.3 million as of the same date, so combined approximately $415.9 million.

So yes, annual sites operation is about 1,64% of their total assets, and they can operate all the wikimedia sites till the end of time without raising a single dime in donations ever again.

Sure they're not going to advertise this fact when doing another donation drive as that would likely make the donators starting to ask pertinent questions about the exact purpose of their donations, but that is just marketing, not "corruption".
by lysace | 2025-04-02 15:06:03+00:00
I don't claim to be an expert in geopolitics - but I suspect that recent statements from the US president "not ruling out" claiming Greenland by force may be a factor here.

Greenland has been a Danish territory for 300+ years. This is longer than the United States of America has existed.

I have also noticed that e.g. Lockheed Martin (maker of the F35) is not doing very well on the stock market.
by ajahahxbbd | 2025-04-02 15:06:05+00:00
1. Is this filtering after returning results from the database? That seems horribly inefficient in most cases. Most databases should support filtering the data before you return it. Or APIs or whatever.

2. How are these functions now “pure”? I dont think things are magically catchable because you removed some auth logic. It’s just a little simpler to cache, though if the auth logic data doesnt change often it’s not much different.