MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by billy99k | 2025-04-21 16:32:19+00:00
"I’m a junior in college studying math, physics, and CS. My goal is to become a world-class full-stack engineer who can build real-time systems, intelligent apps, and scalable infrastructure from scratch."

The systems like you describe aren't built by 1 person and for good reason. They are built by teams.

"What are the best projects, open-source repos, books, systems to study, or skills to master to reach the top 1% of engineers in 1 year?"

While a good goal to have, I think you should be focusing on soft skills (talking to people, communicating, translating business needs to code/plans) in addition to your engineering skills.

All of the best engineers that I know have all of these skills and even a passable amount will put you ahead of most engineers.
by diggan | 2025-04-21 16:33:57+00:00
> It matters because the only

So if the author instead used GPL, this wouldn't have been a problem? Call me pessimist, but I don't think Microsoft would have cared if it was MIT, GPL or even missing a license (so copyrighted by the author), they would have made the same choice as they just now did.

I'm sorry, but it's really hard to understand what you mean here, how choosing GPL would have somehow lead to a different outcome.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-21 16:34:13+00:00
This is a big deal. This is even bigger than the tariffs.

People like Ray Dalio are saying that we are risking the collapse of the US dollar, not recession, not depression, potentially "something worse than a depression". Elizabeth warren is saying that firing Powell will crash the market.

Jerome is not a person I envy defending, but if he is fired you will see panic and you will understand the gravity of how damaging "no trade deficits" can be. An unfortunate consequence of privilege is you rarely understand you have it: Exorbitant Privilege (economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
by drewvolpe | 2025-04-21 16:34:29+00:00
It's an addiction and really hard to stop. Facebook spends billions designing it to be as addictive as possible.

In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it all.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-04-21 16:35:05+00:00
I feel like we need to use escrow more. Stuff that verifies that the buyer has the money before the seller produces the product. It's like the buyer confirming that the seller has a factor before buying. It makes it symmetrical. Then, whatever happens, the seller knows if they fulfill the contract they will get their money. Or at least have the amount equal to the costs so you aren't stuck holding the bag if they tank.
by benwills | 2025-04-21 16:35:24+00:00
I do that. And it's not bad. But it still doesn't treat the input/interface strictly as plain text.

I can't remember all the little things that happen, which wouldn't happen in a plain text editor, but if you type hyphen-space, then hit enter, the line is deleted and your cursor stays on that line instead of advancing to the next.

It's a trivial example, but things like that happen.
by pixelfarmer | 2025-04-21 16:35:33+00:00
Doesn't need video anymore, high end cameras can run wild on taking picture after picture and start doing so before you even fully pressed the shutter, to account for human delays and the ones of the tech itself.

I mean we are talking about a part of photography where even back in the days of film a camera would run through a roll of film in seconds for exactly this sort of thing.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-21 16:35:58+00:00
It was a lot closer when they still had a streaming + disk option, but even then, they were missing lots (and lots, and lots) of stuff. I think people don't realize how many tens of thousands (maybe into the hundreds, IDK, I wouldn't be surprised) of films there are, let alone how many hours of TV content.

This is like when people talk about how everything's on the Web, when it comes to books. 1) This is only even sort-of true if by "on the Web" you mean "piracy sites have an epub/pdf of it", and 2) even then, extremely not close to true, the time from "I'm going to deep-dive this topic" to "... and now I need to go to the library, and possibly a specific library, maybe on another continent" is often not long at all.
Show HN: Light like the Terminal – Meet GTK LLM Chat Front End
by icarito | 2025-04-21 16:36:57+00:00
Author here. I wanted to keep my conversation with #Gemini about code handy while discussing something creative with #ChatGPT and using #DeepSeek in another window. I think it's a waste to have Electron apps and so wanted to chat with LLMs on my own terms. When I discovered the llm CLI tool I really wanted to have convenient and pretty looking access to my conversations, and so I wrote gtk-llm-chat - a plugin for llm that provides an applet and a simple window to interact with LLM models.

Make sure you've configure llm first (https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/)

I'd love to get feedback, PRs and who knows, perhaps a coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/icarito
by runjake | 2025-04-21 16:36:58+00:00
Past discussion, which may be helpful:

Ask HN: How do you manage your prompts in ChatGPT? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41479189

I'm curious to see how people's workflows have changed.

Us, we manually catalog them in well-named Markdown files and folders and store in a git repo. I would like a more taxonomical approach.
by pron | 2025-04-21 16:36:59+00:00
> No. My compile-time when using a library with a comptime type in Zig is not guaranteed to work because my user experience could depend on if the library writer tested with the types (or compile-time input) that I am using.[1] That’s not a problem in Java or Haskell: if the library works for Mary it will work for John no matter what the type-inputs are.

What you're saying isn't very meaningful. Even generics may impose restrictions on their type parameters (e.g. typeclasses in Zig or type bounds in Java) and don't necessarily work for all types. In both cases you know at compile-time whether your types fit the bounds or not.

It is true that the restrictions in Haskell/Java are more declarative, but the distinction is more a matter of personal aesthetic preference, which is exactly what's expressed in that blog post (although comptime is about as different from C++ templates as it is from Haskell/Java generics). Like anything, and especially truly novel approaches, it's not for everyone's tastes, but neither are Java, Haskell, or Rust, for that matter. That doesn't make Zig's approach any less novel or interesting, even if you don't like it. I find Rust's design unpalatable, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting or impressive, and Zig's approach -- again, like it or not -- is even more novel.
by cauesmelo | 2025-04-21 16:37:12+00:00
I think as an industry we still have a lot to learn about AI code generation. Based only on my intuition and without much empirical evidence, I feel like these "magical" tools cause more long-term issues than benefits.

I do see value in AI code reviews and code assistants, but tools like Lovable or v0 tend to create security risks, messy code structures and eventually stop working as expected. By then, the codebase is so tangled that manual changes become really hard too.
by mapt | 2025-04-21 16:37:47+00:00
I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people.

In this timeline, after a group of Hong Kong democracy activists planted bombs that killed a few hundred low-level people at the annual Chinese Communist Party meeting, China responded by announcing plans to bomb Hong Kong into rubble, rid themselves of the menace of democracy once and for all.

And then when they heard this, your country announced that they unconditionally supported China in this effort, and would supply them all the bombs they needed to take down these Electoral Terrorists, eliminate every last one who wasn't an enthusiastic proponent of single-Party rule. That local democracy advocates in your country had long been concerned with the Hong Kong situation, had long protested the government's inexplicable support for China in this matter, but were shouted down by every political party and called racists by a consensus that seemed to really be interested in using China to counter the prospect of Indian international ambitions. That watching the bombs drop, and watching your national media invite Chinese people on air for segment after segments, your democracy activists found in discussions online that they weren't actually some kind of radical fringe, that basically everyone outside the media+government was tired of the CCP and tired of our unending support for it.

There is a lot of nuance there, but what happened after Oct 7 is basically that Netanyahu & AIPAC, finally seeing an opportunity to answer the Gaza Question once and for all, jumped into their role as the villains in a pre-existing anti-semitic conspiracy theory, and proceeded to play the US like a puppet in order to effectuate a genocide.

I can have a nuanced view here; I can separate Jewishness and Zionism. I can talk to you about all the Jewish students at those protests who were holding signs supporting Palestine. I can note the extreme divergence between age cohorts within the Jewish community in the US, I can point out that the US is the largest Jewish population in the world (larger than Israel), who are coexisting perfectly well with gentiles, and that this isn't to Netanyahu's benefit at all. But these people constantly tell us that there is no separation there, that it is antisemitic to be against Greater Israel, that these concepts are one and the same. If that's the case, and you still disfavor genocide, there are Implications.

I can understand when some people misunderstand the situation; Antisemitism abroad is what Likud wants and needs to survive.
by BluePrintBard | 2025-04-21 16:38:05+00:00
I created BluePrintBard out of frustration —and a bit of obsession— after spending an entire weekend trying to cobble together a dungeon map using mismatched tiles from multiple different STL sites, only to realize halfway through printing that I’d forgotten a critical corner piece. I wanted a tool that didn’t just give me files, but actually helped me design, stay organized, and avoid those game-night disasters. What started as a simple side project to fix my own D&D prep turned into something I realized could help a lot of other game masters too. BluePrintBard is my way of turning that chaos into creativity.
by p_ing | 2025-04-21 16:38:22+00:00
Learn to walk before you run and be humble. Have your goals, but I would assume you're in your late teens or early 20s. Your goals may not align to Real Life, and that's OK.

Don't waste time on kicking yourself for not being some "superstar" developer. There are a lot of not-superstar developers who make a huge difference in computing.

Most of the NT kernel team is unknown, by and large. But they had an oversized impact to the computing world. Same goes to Linux kernel devs.
by opan | 2025-04-21 16:38:27+00:00
>>For the typing condition, participants typed the same words on a keyboard using only their right index finger.

>The study might have been better if the types used a full keyboard with both hands

Agreed. This reminds me of solving Rubik's cubes, where solvers employ "fingertricks" like using index finger followed by middle finger to do a U2 (two turns of the "up" face) more quickly. Similarly people often minimize "regrips" and "cube rotations" (changing which side is facing you) to improve efficiency and get times down. What it also does is result in a more specific and consistent set of motions that I think are easier to remember and execute. People will also talk about algorithms being "in their hands" to differentiate between being able to spew out the notation vs actually doing it. I've found that for several algorithms I've memorized, if I don't do them at a natural (fast) speed and the usual positioning, I can forget the moves and lose track of what I'm doing. If I had to do every turn using my whole right hand, slowly, I suspect I would struggle a lot.
by scott_w | 2025-04-21 16:38:52+00:00
You wouldn’t really do your example, though. If you’re using an f-string, you’d just directly interpolate, because it’s convenient. You wouldn’t use an extra library to properly make it safe, otherwise you’d just use a proper template library and language.

This gives you a convenient middle ground where you don’t need to learn a template library but still get safety. I can’t think of the code right now but I could see this being useful to pass in some dynamic HTML to, say, Django without having to remember to turn off escaping for that section. It can also be convenient for writing raw SQL without having to use prepared strings.
by diogenix | 2025-04-21 16:38:54+00:00
Great feedback. Thanks. On day 1, it won't track anything else. Presumably it could tackle a litany later. It won't practice medicine (not diagnosing, not informing treatment, not prescribing - just a tool to help). And yes, "you're still depressed" may be what it does. But, it does so objectively, and on-demand. Within the world of mental health, objective data is rare. As an example of possible utility - in a former role, I worked at a company that designed/manufactured medical devices that treated mental health disorders. Many patients understandably doubted their utility, and might discontinue use in the middle of a series of treatments. Many begged providers for data that it was working to justify ongoing use. Providers, however, may be perceived as having a conflict of interest in their assessments ("Sure it's working, just keep paying me to continue to treat you"). Having an objective, 3 party data stream would have helped in that particular scenario. Regardless, more generally, for some I suspect ongoing objective data may be of interest. Not all, but (particularly if it became very accurate, and very passive) perhaps a large number?
by kazinator | 2025-04-21 16:39:37+00:00
We've been in the disposable software era already, for small things.

Any time you use a regular expression that you don't save somewhere for future use, that is disposable.

Command line one-liners that you either never use again, or type from scratch when you do.

Throw-away scripts to do some thing only once, ditto.

Same with search queries.

With AI, the throw-away programs just get bigger.

Darn, come to think of it, I just did this, days ago! I was changing my phone to a new mobile provider, and part of the workflow was entering my IMEI, for the phone number transfer workflow. I went over to Gemini and had it whip me up a Luhn's function for validating the IMEI. I wanted to make sure I don't make a typo which would delay the workflow.

Once I validated the number, I threw that code away.
by gwbas1c | 2025-04-21 16:39:55+00:00
A couple of things:

Use query parameters (GET) for search. It's extremely useful to be able to share a URL to a search. (IE, Wikipedia and Google do this. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=query+parmaters&... Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=query+parameters&oq=query+pa...)

Don't open new tabs when clicking links to narrow down a search. (To be quite honest, links should almost never open a new tab. Users who want to do this know how to do it and you don't need to make the choice for them.)
by deadbabe | 2025-04-21 16:40:10+00:00
I like to think hell is empty because the people who would have been sent there for being foul and wicked are actually people with no souls: they are just p-zombies wandering the world inflicting harm. Thus, when they die, there is no actual soul being released, their matter just ceases to function.

This could also explain why some simple creatures, with no real conscious experience, don’t overpopulate heaven or Hell: they have no souls with which to populate it with. They are just matter, temporarily constructed into some form resembling a living thing.

So hell is empty, and evil is the result of soulless automatons created by accident in our world. So if you die and nothing else happens for you after, then you were a p-zombie, with no soul.
by alooPotato | 2025-04-21 16:40:32+00:00
I think you're overly painting that process as a waterfall method. In reality, i think its more of a loop. You do the loop a bunch of times and the solution gets better and better. The act of coding sometimes exposes a lot more of the requirement questions you didn't even know to ask in the first few steps.

So anything that can let you iterate the loop faster is good. The analogy is kind of like if you can make your compile and tests faster, its way easier to code. Because you don't just code and test at the very end, you do it as part of a thinking loop.
by mrj | 2025-04-21 16:40:40+00:00
I went to a Jesuit university. The way it was explained to me could be simplified to: God wouldn't lie to us, God made nature, so then scientific discoveries therefore teach us more about nature and God. When a new discovery threatens old teachings, the Jesuits convene and figure out how to incorporate this new understanding into their beliefs, strengthening them rather than threatening.

I found it inspiring. I'm genuinely sad about the Pope's passing. He was a man who followed the teachings as he understood them.
by mrzool | 2025-04-21 16:40:51+00:00
It was also the name of a major Italian naval operation to rescue migrants crossing the Mediterranean in 2013–2014, launched after a particularly tragic shipwreck near Lampedusa. The operation was shut down after just one year due to high costs and limited support from the EU, which left Italy largely on its own.

Definitely not surprising hearing a pope using it in a speech.
by dep_b | 2025-04-21 16:40:54+00:00
I noticed that Claude completely changes its character when it starts using MCP. Can’t have a conversation, instructions in my memory are ignored including code styles.

And it just doesn’t know how to stop. When I tell it to run tests, it will continue running and fixing them until they pass. Which is what you want often, but it can also uncontrollably spiral into its own hallucinations.

https://github.com/ezyang/codemcp Is really nice because it’s a lot cheaper, but this kind of stuff and the lack of caching is pushing me towards multiple chained agents calling the API directly.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-21 16:41:39+00:00
Not exactly on purpose, but I used Grok for some business planning, and now it sometimes loops that into other answers, suggesting how something else I asked about could overlap with the business project, or just asking at the end, "So, would you like to work on [other project] some more?" It's a little reminder that I wanted to get back to that project, which doesn't hurt since I tend to procrastinate or get distracted and forget about projects.

I think to be a real "coach" they'd have to be able to push you proactively. You can script that kind of thing, but if you're getting that done, maybe you don't need much pushing.
by karaterobot | 2025-04-21 16:41:59+00:00
> At some point you will understand that you will never have absolute and complete axioms from which to build everything on [1], and you have to work with what you have.

To have hardware that displays blue, and code that manipulates blue, you must have a very clear and unambiguous definition of what blue means. Notice I did not say correct, only clear and unambiguous. Your whole point seems to be that words mean what a native speaker of the language understands them to mean, which is useful in linguistics and in the editing or dictionaries, but the context of this discussion is the representation of some concept in symbols that a computer can process, which is a different thing. Indeed, it's possible that the difference between code and 'vibes' will have to be in some way addressed by those very definitions of knowledge and intelligence, so I think these are relevant questions that can't be hand-waved away.
by ben_w | 2025-04-21 16:42:01+00:00
Not for journaling or therapy, but almost every time I draft something in German, I ask a model to "rate my German" so that I keep improving.

Before chat models, I did something similar with Google Translate, but GT doesn't tell me why things should be different; and worse, GT tends to auto-correct typos, leading to stuff like this: https://translate.google.com/?sl=de&tl=en&text=Schweinwerfer...

("Schweinwerfer", spelled like that, would actually mean "pig thrower": Schein (shine) vs Schwein (pig))
by journeychains | 2025-04-21 16:42:19+00:00
I’ve been building something a little different: A physical bracelet that carries a digital story chain.

Each one is tied to a theme—grief, love, healing, growth—and when passed on, it unlocks a growing timeline of real moments added by each new owner. Posts are tied to map points, emotions, and shared legacy. No followers. No ads. Just stories passed forward.

But under the hood, it’s not just a product. It’s a protocol for social memory.

It’s designed to be self-spreading. Each bracelet is a node. Every story transfer is an interaction. Over time, the network becomes a living, crowd-built map of human experience. We're combining physical-to-digital hardware, intentional UX, and emotional design to create something we haven't really seen before.

YC often says “make something people want.” I think people want to be remembered.

Would love feedback from other builders—especially those thinking at the edge of memory, identity, or physical/digital networks.

https://journeychains.com
by cstrahan | 2025-04-21 16:42:51+00:00
Well, to be clear, I didn’t actually count the sperm, as I was more interested in a rough, qualitative (rather than rigorous, quantitative) observation.

That said, yeah, the relative amount of sperm didn’t drop off noticeably at the offset. And I think that kind of makes sense: as someone with a relatively short refractory period, let’s suppose I ejaculate two or three times in 5 minutes: I doubt (though I could be wrong) that my body actually evacuated all of the seminal fluid (and fully replaced it) each time. I would bet there’s simply a bunch “left in the tank”. Would be interesting to hear from a urologist (or someone with similar expertise).
by aazo11 | 2025-04-21 16:42:52+00:00
I spent a couple of weeks trying out local inference solutions for a project. Wrote up my thoughts with some performance benchmarks in a blog.

TLDR -- What these frameworks can do on off the shelf laptops is astounding. However, it is very difficult to find and deploy a task specific model and the models themselves (even with quantization) are so large the download would kill UX for most applications.
by luckylion | 2025-04-21 16:43:44+00:00
> So much of programming is just learning a new API or framework.

Once you're good at it in general. I recently witnessed what happens when a junior developer just uses AI for everything, and I found it worse than if a non-developer used AI: at least they wouldn't confuse the model with their half-understood ideas and wouldn't think they could "just write some glue code", break things in the process, and then confidently state they solved the problem by adding some jargon they've picked up.

It feels more like an excavator: useful in the right hands, dangerous in the wrong hands. (I'd say excavators are super useful and extremely dangerous, I think AI is not as extreme in either direction)
by tuetuopay | 2025-04-21 16:43:56+00:00
Practically none of it would be applicable (if using a commercial router). They all use hardware offloading, and traffic seldom touches the CPU. Only "logical" tasks are raised to the CPU, like ARP resolution and the likes (what’s called "trap to cpu").

If you’re doing custom routing with a NUC or a basic Linux box, however, this would gain massive power savings because that box pretty much only does networking.