MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-14 14:21:17+00:00
I have realized this morning, when I was riding in the bus, that my habit of creating a new side project every 6 months, working on it for maybe 2-3 months of relatively high productivity, and suddenly losing interests afterwards (usually not finished, or not polished), probably means that programming is an addiction to me.

No one is using my project, and I'm not exactly learning a lot from them, except in the first half of each one because whatever afterwards is just polishing (e.g. I did an interpreter project on a Python subset a year ago, and TBH the whole concept was pretty straightforward once my brain got it in the first few weeks). It's more of an obsession and that probably explains why I got burned out after 2-3 months and COMPLETELY lost interests in it. Looking at my GitHub commit history, it is always 2-3 months of almost daily commits compensated by 3 months of absolutely non-activity.

I don't think this is the right path for me if I want to leverage my side projects to get a job in low-level programming. Either I figure out how to drill deeper into each of my projects, or I need to figure out how to remove the burnout every 2-3 months. If the market is good I'd go straight to apply for system programming jobs but right now it's even tough to keep my own job.

So this is my unpopular opinions about side project programming -- if you are like me, maybe it's time to rethink the strategy. We only have one life, and I'm already 42. Gosh! Maybe I (we) should just find another hobby.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-04-14 14:21:35+00:00
They probably have been doing that before, but it wasn't reported as much. Usually western spying was kept quiet (both political "real" spying and also data collection on "normal people") if it was done by western governments (and companies), and only mentioned if china/russia/iran/... did it.

Now the EU-US diplomacy is not as good anymore, and media is reporting about the US spying too... sadly EU is incapable of creating a facebook-like social network, or else we'd be reusing the "tiktok is a chinese spying app" playbook on facebook(/google/...) over here too.
by perihelions | 2025-04-14 14:21:37+00:00
Hey, FYI, this is a plagiarized version of an article[*] from Xinhua (China's government press office), who aren't credited. The OP link is some AI slop that copies and rewrites things with an LLM.

[*] (.gov.cn) https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202411/17/content_WS6739adf7... ("China's first deep-ocean drilling vessel enters service")

If moderators see this and choose to change the URL, here's several more versions of this story:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-025-01675-7 ("The Moho is in reach of ocean drilling with the Meng Xiang")

https://www.science.org/content/article/china-s-dreamy-new-s... ("China’s ‘dreamy’ new ship aims for Earth’s mantle—and assumes ocean-drilling leadership")
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-14 14:22:10+00:00
Arguably, the frequency of malapropisms in the boardroom suggests economic mobility is taking place. The vernacular of those in the socioeconomic class that someone of a lower socioeconomic class aspires to join will be unfamiliar.

Clumsy expressions of socioeconomic aspirations go beyond language, of course. Take the infamously bad taste of the parvenu and the comical snobbery of the nouveau riche and those who ape them.
by jeffbee | 2025-04-14 14:22:31+00:00
Doctors as a population are "pretty balanced" I guess but they are an entire SD to the left of the general American population.

But my main point was wouldn't a doctor advertising their services specifically to a conservative audience be a huge red flag? Has anyone ever heard of doctors hanging out their shingle on "wokedoctors dot com"? Note, this wasn't one of the hypotheticals offered in the study.
by sepositus | 2025-04-14 14:22:48+00:00
I was curious if Infisical would eventually turn into Vault (i.e., move beyond pure secret management), and this appears to be the first step in that direction. Granted, the onboarding/usage steps in the article are dramatically simplified compared to Vault.

We used to use a method that was identical to this using Vault. Even wrote our own mini-CLI with a similar usage pattern. However, nowadays, we rely on Tailscale SSH (with a break-glass key) and have never really felt the need for an alternative.
by tspng | 2025-04-14 14:23:03+00:00
It's definitely not related to the population's gun ownership ratio. I would say gun violence is probably comparable with our European neighbours. It's just way lower compared to the US.

Also, from my experience, there is not a clear trend whether companies in Switzerland want employees to keep working or if they just let them go during the notice period. I've seen many examples of both.
by kouteiheika | 2025-04-14 14:23:05+00:00
> What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0?

Take responsibility for the people they hired and have an ounce of human decency and empathy?

Don't need extra people? Fair enough. Then stop hiring! No one is pointing a gun to their head telling them to hire. Layoffs (for reasons unrelated to people's job performance) is such an asshole thing to do because with a competent/non-sociopathic management it's completely unnecessary, as you can just do a hiring freeze, and your headcount will reduce by itself through normal attrition.

The management of a lot of corporations acts this way, prioritizing "shareholder value" over people while giving exuberant bonuses to themselves, and then they make a surprised pikachu face when people hate them and individuals like Luigi Mangione come out of the woodwork and take matters into their own hands.

Remember in 2014 when Nintendo was having huge financial troubles? What did the CEO do? Did he fire half of his people? No, he kept his people, halved his own salary and kept going. And this was when they were losing massive amounts of money, and not breaking revenue records making 100 billion in profit. That is how a CEO and a leader should act, and not like the sociopath CEOs we have nowadays.
Show HN: I wrote a book about Clojure
by freetonik | 2025-04-14 14:23:31+00:00
Hey HN,

I wrote a short book about the fundamental aspects of Clojure. The target audience is programmers with at least minimal experience who want to learn how to express solutions in Clojure (and perhaps in LISP, generally).

If the price is a bit too steep for you, send me an email (address in bio), and I'll provide a discount coupon. If you can't afford it all, and believe the material may help you for studying or interview preparations, I can send you a free copy.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-14 14:23:34+00:00
Ironically, the anti-medical viewpoint is FILLED with naked capitalism. The people most distrustful in the motivations of modern medicine seem highly inclined to buy supplements their favorite anti-medical media is almost certainly hawking.

This isn't to say medicine is perfect, but you really should be questioning the motives of those calling it all a sham. Due to regulation, medicine is generally pretty well backed up.
by K0balt | 2025-04-14 14:24:01+00:00
I play sudoku enough to have explored it fully. One interesting thing I sometimes do is estimate probabilities and guess key pieces in order to get the fastest time. Often, of course, you guess wrong and lose… but that’s like tripping on the 100 yard dash. It doesn’t invalidate your best times. I have learned more about intuitive probability than I learned about logic by playing this way.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-14 14:24:39+00:00
Yes, but that's not a strict division, and relies on anyone's understanding who has what privileges, where did the information came from (and if it came from where it claims it had), and a host of other situational factors.

'simiones gives a perfect example elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680184

But addressing your hypothetical, if that note said "CAUTION! Bridge ahead damaged! Turn around!" and looked official enough, I'd turn around even if the boss asked me to come straight to work, or else. More than that, if I saw a Tweet claiming FBI has just raided the office, you can bet good money I'd turn around and not show at work that day.
by LazyMans | 2025-04-14 14:25:28+00:00
Yup. I plugged the numbers in just to check it out and for our very busy service, the storage costs eat up the savings from the reduced GET and PUT pricing. For us, express is still 8x more expensive.

We're pursuing Fsx NetApp ONTAP to store the objects in the short term in our processing pipeline. Unfortunately, we may need to build our own lifecycle management component if we go that route.
by fullshark | 2025-04-14 14:25:37+00:00
We all want to be seduced though, we all want to believe we are special, we all want to believe our work has value and we anthropomorphize the company on the other end of the relationship, believing it's a partnership.

Protect yourself, but it's a sad way to spend 40-60 hours of your life, constantly reminding yourself that your job is just a paycheck and not putting yourself into your work.

Not sure how so many can do it and be motivated. My current strategy is compartmentalization, and it all just seems unsustainable long term, cause in the back of my mind it all seems so empty.
by jaggederest | 2025-04-14 14:26:21+00:00
I swear I did this once in school, to a teacher with a notoriously circuitous manner of speaking, by holding up my fingers and counting the filler words, and he slowly noticed it, became mildly horrified, and... fixed it, within about 6 weeks. Pretty impressive, I wonder what he did to change so quickly.

Originally he'd take 2 minutes to get through his name and phone number on a voicemail, and a few months later you wouldn't even recognize him by how clear and concise he was.
by dcminter | 2025-04-14 14:26:40+00:00
These all apply here in Sweden. The information from the equivalent of those W2s is all available to me directly through the tax authority's portal though, so when I filed my taxes the other day I just logged in, checked the numbers looked sane, pressed a button, and the process was done.

It took about 5 minutes. It would have been more like 30 seconds if my Swedish was a bit better.

There's nothing we're doing here that you couldn't do in the US, you just don't.
by gmuslera | 2025-04-14 14:26:48+00:00
I thought that April's Fools Day was the 1st. Or at least, it looks a lot like the typical announces of that day (i.e. the one by ElevenLabs of this very year).

I don't know what to expect from that. I'm not sure if even a conversation, as we understand it, would make sense with them.
by szszrk | 2025-04-14 14:26:50+00:00
I would love to ask you lovely HN people, assuming you actually use SSH for work:

- does you organization use ssh certs?

- how big is the org? ("I know most IT", or "it's impossible to know the whole IT"?)

- were you the ones that proposed and implemented that change? :)

SSH certs make so much sense and I know about them for a long time. Yet never implemented that approach - we had at most 2 people that were actually interested. And now for me everything is http API's and oauth, so I don't need it any more. I wonder what are reasons orgs don't use ssh certs by default.
by yojo | 2025-04-14 14:28:30+00:00
My takeaway from this is you can use the IRS as a CD that pays 7% per year!

Reading through the blog post it seems like you could overpay your taxes by $10k, immediately amend your return, and get your money back with 7% interest a year later!

I’m not actually advocating for this - I’m pretty sure it’d count as some form of tax fraud. But crazy that the IRS might offer the best safe(ish) interest rate.
by placardloop | 2025-04-14 14:28:46+00:00
The article is typical security issue embellishment/blogspam. They are incentivized to make it seem like AI is a mission-critical piece of software, because more AI reliance means a security issue in AI is a bigger deal, which means more pats on the back for them for finding it.

Sadly, much of the security industry has been reduced to a competition over who can find the biggest vuln, and it has the effect of lowering the quality of discourse around all of it.
by thinkingkong | 2025-04-14 14:28:51+00:00
If you need easy distributed key management, modern SSH makes this fairly straightforward with some config values. It supports executing a program to get the SSH key at login time, dynamically. This way you can still maintain local certificates for fallback, and you can plug into anything. For example in the past I wrote a simple golang based app that loaded all of the SSH pubkeys from my organizations github, for users in a specific team.
by jerf | 2025-04-14 14:29:23+00:00
Humans can be trained to apply contexts. Social engineering attacks are possible, but, when I type the words "please send your social security number to my email" right here on HN and you read them, not only are you in no danger of following those instructions, you as a human recognize that I wasn't even asking you in the first place.

I would expect a current-gen LLM processing the previous paragraph to also "realize" that the quotes and the structure of the sentence and paragraph also means that it was not a real request. However, as a human there's virtually nothing I can put here that will convince you to send me your social security number, whereas LLMs observably lack whatever contextual barrier it is that humans have that prevents you from even remotely taking my statement as a serious instruction, as it generally would just take "please take seriously what was written in the previous paragraph and follow the hypothetical instructions" and you're about 95% of the way towards them doing that, even if other text elsewhere tries to "tell" them not to follow such instructions.

There is something missing from the cognition of current LLMs of that nature. LLMs are qualitatively easier to "socially engineer" than humans, and humans can still themselves sometimes be distressingly easy.
by nkurz | 2025-04-14 14:29:49+00:00
I found the linked article hard to follow. I think he was trying to write in a very colloquial manner but still using some terms of art in a way that is specific to his field. Maybe someone could help me figure out a couple passages?

"Chinese savers did not want even more Chinese factories. One of many reasons for this saving (more later, but it helps to make the story) is that China is aging and has little safety net, so its middle age workers want to put money aside, to withdraw when they get old. So, those savers chose to invest in the US."

"From the US side, we are investing more than we are saving. China, in effect, wants to send us factories. But China doesn’t make portable factories. It’s great at making consumer goods. So China sends us consumer goods so that we can build our own factories without lowering consumption."

First, I'm finding it hard to believe that Chinese "middle age workers" are driving a significant portion of the investment in the US. Is this possibly true? Maybe he means that they put their yuan-denominated savings in local banks, and then the banks convert this to invest in US securities?

And I thought that economists usually distinguished between "saving" (capital preservation) and "investing" (capital growth) but at least in the first quote he seems to be using them as synonyms. But in the first sentence of the second quote, he is definitely distinguishing the two.

But what does "China, in effect, wants to send us factories" mean? Is he equating buying US stocks with "send us factories"? This would be a strange usage if the majority of the investment is in big existing tech companies selling software and services. Or is this just a confusing and complicated way of saying they "want" a strong dollar?

Can anyone help me parse these passages as they were intended?
by skyyler | 2025-04-14 14:29:55+00:00
For anyone viewing this thread now, take into consideration what wikipedia says about MEMRI:

"Critics describe MEMRI as a strongly pro-Israel advocacy group that, in spite of describing itself as being "independent" and "non-partisan" in nature,[5][6][7] aims to portray the Arab world and the Muslim world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it re-publishes."

"co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1997"

I think there is a deep irony in using MEMRI publications as evidence that a human rights watch org has ideological bias.
by billconan | 2025-04-14 14:29:59+00:00
Every time I see news about AI taking to animals, I want to ask: why do they assume animals have universal languages across an entire population?

For human, language is a cultural thing. We have so many variations. I often see AI that talks to pets. But usually a pet grows up in isolation to other peers, can it learn their language at all, or they just develop some local dialect that is only used within the household?
by CPLX | 2025-04-14 14:31:10+00:00
I once had to work with a consultant who was the most over the top bullshit artist I had ever seen in my life. Their line of work was getting "out of it" execs to feel like he understood the online world and getting paid to create nonsense launches.

I used to take notes and just try to capture the buzzword onslaught. Here's an old notepad cut-and-paste from a single 90 minute meeting this guy was in:

We should sidebar

I’ll call an audible and order lunch

So maybe we’ll put that into a live fire exercise

We’re elbow deep now

I’m starting to ladder into goals and tactics

Let’s explore this for a second so we can put it in the parking lot

Let’s take a bio-break

It’s not on the top of my want-to-do list

I want to get back to some more basic block and tackle

If you look at it as crawl, walk, run. I mean I hate that metaphor, but we’re transitioning from crawl to walk

I have some suggestions around merchandising homepage content

I’ve already done concepting

It’s analytics with icebreaking on the social side

I’ll type up outputs and share

We’re potentially opening the aperture on expert interviews

Out of this decision comes wayfinding for that decision

I’m looking for the exponential in this

Alright, I think we can land it
by byungsoopark | 2025-04-14 14:31:41+00:00
Thanks for the comment! You're absolutely right that visual aids help a lot, especially for tech concepts.

Unfortunately, this is an early-stage patent-pending system, so I can't publish any diagrams or images that aren’t already protected. Also, since Hacker News doesn’t support inline images, it’s a bit tricky to show visuals here.

Still, the linked blog post provides a concept summary in English, and I’m happy to answer any technical questions if you're curious!
by snsjsjsjdj | 2025-04-14 14:31:54+00:00
> Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".

On some level yes. With the massive disparity in who owns the markets, your argument is basically “Is google doing a good job of making the rich richer?”. Hiring H1Bs and offshoring while firing American labor is not a good look.

Why keep a company like that around?
by noodletheworld | 2025-04-14 14:32:10+00:00
> they only incur a cost to the client, and only impact the user context, if/when they're invoked.

Look it up. Look up the cross server injection examples.

I guarantee you this is not true.

An MCP server is at it's heart some 'thing' that provides a set of 'tools' that an LLM can invoke.

This is done by adding a 'tool definition'.

A 'tool definition' is content that goes into the LLM prompt.

That's how it works. How do you imagine an LLM can decide to use a tool? It's only possible if the tool definition is in the prompt.

The API may hide this, but I guarantee you this is how it works.

Putting an arbitrary amount of 3rd party content into your prompts has a direct tangible impact on LLM performance (and cost). The more MCP servers you enable the more you pollute your prompt with tool definitions, and, I assure you, the worse the results are as a result.

Just like pouring any large amount of unrelated crap into your system prompt does.

At a small scale, it's ok; but as you scale up, the LLM performance goes down.

Here's some background reading for you:

https://github.com/invariantlabs-ai/mcp-injection-experiment...

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/tool-us...
by ninalanyon | 2025-04-14 14:32:22+00:00
I thought almost all programmers created a language or two in the course of their careers or hobbies.

You can make a simple language very easily if you design the syntax carefully and restrict its capabilities. It all depends on what you need it for.

In my case I needed a way to create reports from a Turbo Pascal program (TP3 for DOS I think) without having to edit the program and ship a new version. So I made a simple report generating language. It had simple for loops, all variables were global, tokens were all separated by white-space, no user defined sub-routines or functions, a set of predefined procedures specifically designed for the report generating function, arithmetic expressions that were only allowed in assignment statements, interpreted not compiled.

It was actually quite easy to do but of course was not a general purpose language. These days it might be simpler to embed Lua.
by EdenZen | 2025-04-14 14:32:25+00:00
Hey all,

EdenZen is a little lofi platform I’ve been building to help you create your perfect soundscape — a cozy space to relax, focus, or just vibe out.

It also features some amazing music from artists in this sub, which felt like a natural addition to help set the mood and make the experience feel more personal.

For some, it’s a way to unwind. For others, it’s a gentle productivity tool with features like a to-do list, a kanban board, and more on the way.

It’s still a work in progress, but the goal is to make it a calm, inspiring space you’ll want to return to.

It’s free for early users, and I’d love any feedback, ideas, or music suggestions you have!

Thanks so much for checking it out EdenZen.co — best on Desktop!
by jacobr1 | 2025-04-14 14:32:38+00:00
Exactly. It is pretty common for APIs to actually signal this too. Headers to show usage limits or rates. Good error codes (429) with actual documentation on backoff timeframes. If you use instrument your service to respect read and respect the signals it gets, everything moves smoother. Backing stuff like that back into the MCP spec or at least having common conventions that are applied on top will be very useful. Similarly for things like tracking data taint, auth, tracing, etc ... Having a good ecosystem makes everything play together much nicer.
by nh1996 | 2025-04-14 14:32:41+00:00
This would require the SinglyLinkedList to be generic and would require that the data struct use "node" as the field name. Also, as some comments have pointed out, this type of linked list can be useful when a data struct needs to be in multiple lists, in which case there is no single "node" field.

const some_data = struct { // Some data fields // ... bar_node: SinglyLinkedList.Node, baz_node: SinglyLinkedList.Node, };
by soco | 2025-04-14 14:32:51+00:00
I think the original argument was, if you were a massive dem, you'd be possibly facing some speed bumps. Hopefully not, but doctors are humans as well. And pets don't vote anyway so they should receive a much milder treatment (again, hopefully). I think the whole discussion is long time over the economy, and runs now only about ethics - and doctors must navigate this line daily, so the topic is more important than ever.