MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sharkweek | 2025-04-03 02:36:46+00:00
Oh wow… the WordPress example…

Worked at a SaaS company that had a fantastic product and a great tech team that had built it.

We also did a lot of data-based research and published it as white papers for lead gen.

We wanted to start publishing more content on our site to expand reach, so the team decided a CMS would be a solution for the researchers and content marketers to publish without any tech involvement.

Well it turns out our CTO, for a few justifiable reasons if we’re painting with a broad brush, absolutely loathed WordPress. So despite our arguments an integration would be easier/cheaper/less time consuming for everyone, we built our own CMS instead.

And we, of course, ended up with a significantly worse version of WordPress that the content folks all hated.

So it goes.
by csense | 2025-04-03 02:38:25+00:00
> Why is globalism such a bad idea

Having grown up in the Rust Belt, it's a bit baffling to me that there are intelligent people out there who don't understand why it's a bad idea.

It's a race to the bottom. The jobs all go to countries where people are paid almost nothing to work 90-hour workweeks, safety and environmental concerns are not existent, and they have totalitarian political systems where anybody who complains about any of the above will be shot.

Said other countries have stronger economies which lifts their geopolitical influence and military power. You definitely don't want to give that to governments with those kinds of terrible value systems.

Part of our society's narrative is that anyone can join the middle class: "If you just work hard, you can get a good job, support a family and live a nice lifestyle." The companies formerly supporting that narrative moved their operations out of our country; those opportunities were never replaced. A narrative that binds our society together -- a fundamental part of the American soul -- is getting destroyed. Which is a big factor causing the terrible current political climate.

From the 1990's to today, a lot of Rust Belt places went from union blue to purple and then turned deep red in an instant in 2016 because somebody was finally acknowledging the problem.
by Teever | 2025-04-03 02:39:56+00:00
I'm super interested to see what the next HN thread with that proberts lawyer dude is like.

I found the commentary in the last post from him to be pretty meagre, whether it was because people were afraid to talk about this kind of stuff or they just didn't know, I'm not sure, but it seems like reality is quickly setting in for a lot of people in the US.

Things are changing and they're changing fast.

You won't be able to ignore this forever.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-04-03 02:41:04+00:00
> Feels sorta pedantic.

Absolutely not. A Nascar driver isn't hired to drive to the grocery store. Or to run errands. Their not hired to drive leisurely. They're not hired to be the safest driver. They're not hired to drive the absolute highest speed either (and crash). Their hired to win races. And it's important to understand that.

The difference is that in Nascar it's very visible to everyone when a Nascar driver is driving in a way other than what they were hired for, it's not as clear for a programmer. Not to mention success as a programmer also means doing many things other than programming, including knowing when to say "we shouldn't build this".
by MPSFounder | 2025-04-03 02:41:38+00:00
The most interesting thing I see is people overestimate how resilient the system is. Unfortunately, this is at the whim of a president, who with a majority in the court, dictates the law. With a ban or at his whim, even legal residents can find themselves out. We tend to think the system is resilient to this, but ultimately it really isn't. Scholars cannot even agree on whether these tech workers are entitled to the amendments (since they are not citizens, despite living in the US). Much of this was eye opening for me, and is used by Rubio as a basis to deport the Korean girl and the Columbia guy (also a Harvard student as of yesterday). The law is unfortunately very vague and thus open to interpretation (which is ultimately subject to the commander in chief, the current clown)
by cldcntrl | 2025-04-03 02:42:39+00:00
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by linsomniac | 2025-04-03 02:42:44+00:00
That's funny, because at lunch my coworker mentioned my comment without realizing it was me who made it and he was trying to figure out how we had access to e-mail back then. It might have been '87, no later than mid '88 because that's when I left HP Loveland and I'm quite sure it happened before then. I'd put money on the e-mail having been sent with bang-paths.

You mention being on Usenet in 88 or 89, which was after "the great reorganization". I was on Usenet for a while before the reorg, so that'd cement the earlier end at 85-86. I definitely had e-mail, but never used BITNET or ARPANet. I do recall sending e-mail to a crazy girl in maybe Tazmania that loved wombats, and it taking <a day turnaround (the girlfriend of a summer student in the lab).
by jaredhansen | 2025-04-03 02:43:26+00:00
> Very cool! More info on an equally charming old website here, including a remarkable letter from his wife: http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/index.html

That letter from his wife, Naomi, contains a link to her website[1], which is itself fascinating. Its About page contains the following, which made me think her particular brand of value-add in the world is of the kind that will survive:

> I fill-in the details of the couple in each Ketubah by hand, with ink and pen, as Jewish scribes have done for thousands of years. Nowadays, most Ketubah artists use fonts and fill-in the texts by computer rather than by hand, because many have not studied calligraphy, an art which takes much time and practice to master. I, personally, like writing the details by hand, though it is not easy work, because it is traditional, and because it connects me in a personal way with my clients and my prints.

[1] https://www.ketubotbynaomi.com/
by fsckboy | 2025-04-03 02:43:31+00:00
>Just think of all the random tech debt that could be resolved if devs had 2 hours a day to code anything, including new projects that benefit everyone.

regardless of the potential benefits of this plan, zero tech debt would get erased.

imho net tech debt would increase by the 80 20 rule, meaning that you're not going to get more than 80% of the side projects fully wrapped in the 20% of the time that you've allotted to them.
Show HN: Council AI – Make better decisions with the wisdom of AI crowd
by phinnutz | 2025-04-03 02:44:27+00:00
Hi everyone,

I built this app to let users make better decisions with the wisdom of the AI crowd. The app lets you see answers from five of the best AI companies, summarizes their answers for you, and provides a summary table. This process allows you to easily spot hallucinations in certain AI models. And it lets you make better decisions. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qu8FTyaLc9k

There is a Debater that can debate any topic. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JZzebg9gNt4

Then the app has a list of interesting questions to get you started with (think Quora). Demo: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eJlbhXwZkTQ

There is also a social network where users can post questions and follow each other (think Twitter). Demo: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rtTdWHrBUPA

In addition to this, it has several interesting councils (groups of AI assistants) that give you perspectives from "across the aisle". For example there is a "Politics" council that has a Democrat, Libertarian, and Republican. This way you can hear opinions from across the whole political spectrum. Or the "Parenting" council has a Permissive, Authoritative, and Authoritarian parent. This way you can see parenting advice from the whole parenting spectrum. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/waxX-M-qIVE

Please give it a try and let me know what you think. I'd greatly appreciate your honest feedback! So sorry for the Android users, but the app is currently available only on iOS.

Thanks, Alin Jula Founder of Council AI

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by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-03 02:46:39+00:00
What happens if and when ICE starts rounding visa holders up to deport? No snark intended, this is a genuine question based on all available evidence. I don’t endorse such action at all, but we are existing in exceptional times and the discussion is important. “If you stay, what are you getting yourself into?” is a serious question to ask and to manage the risk around.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-03 02:46:44+00:00
Yes, it's a race to the bottom. But politicians aren't demanding that we should accept slave labor to make our Nike shoes - Nike does that. Tariffs won't change that either, they simply put a price on dealing with "undesirable" labor that Americans wouldn't tolerate anyways. That's how free market economics work on the global stage, I don't think anything has changed in that regard in the past 50 years.

I guess I'm disenfranchised with the entire process, having grown up near Detroit. You won't bring these jobs back from Mexico, you won't onshore EV production from the grasp of China. GM said it, Tesla said it, Apple said it, and now you're listening to me repeat it. Americans can get mad at Europe or Denmark or Canada if it makes them feel better, but it's sure as shit not putting them on any short-lists for importing ASML or ARM IP. And we're fucked either way if we sit around waiting for Intel to "innovate" their way ahead. America can't lead the free world with a bum leg, it doesn't matter how icky China's politics are.
by steveBK123 | 2025-04-03 02:47:26+00:00
Because it's not a barter economy and you would not naturally have equal dollar quantities of goods to buy from and sell to each trading partner individually.

One country may be on the other side of the world, far poorer and mostly exporting say minerals or basic textile goods where their cheap labor gives them an advantage. What goods/services are they going to buy from the US that they cannot get from more local trading partners cheaper? They can import grains more cheaply from nearby neighbors. Southeast Asia is not going to start buying Teslas & Fods, they are driving around in Suzukis and whatever China makes.

You spend $5/week at your baker, does your baker buy $5/week of software from you?
by SanjayMehta | 2025-04-03 02:47:27+00:00
At two different US companies I had to attend training led by a lawyer on how to file H1b and L1 applications, how to write recruitment ads and coaching visa applicants for their interviews.

Both training programmes were surprisingly similar, even two years apart.

No notes were allowed. No slides.

Even the call for attendance was verbal and in person.

This is a US corporation problem, not the US government’s.
by tombert | 2025-04-03 02:47:54+00:00
That happened to me, but fortunately it didn't end up being a huge deal.

I had forgotten to renew my domain from Gandi, it expired, and I stopped getting emails. I also could not find my password for Gandi, and I couldn't get the password reset to work, so I panicked, but fortunately Gandi will let you renew someone else's domain. Not a transfer, just if account A wants to pay to renew account B's domain without any change of ownership, they allowed that, so I made a quick throwaway account, and renewed everything for eight years.
by amacneil | 2025-04-03 02:48:04+00:00
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by rayiner | 2025-04-03 02:51:06+00:00
> One country may be on the other side of the world, far poorer and mostly exporting say minerals or basic textile goods where their cheap labor gives them an advantage.

But it’s insane that “cheap labor” is considered a “comparative advantage.” Free trade punishes Americans for their high standards of living, forcing American labor to compete with cheap foreign labor. The whole point of these tariffs is to take that out of the equation.
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-03 02:51:17+00:00
The most ironic part about the entire USAID debacle was the complete failure of the new right to understand why American soft power was engineered that way, and what it was doing.

It was like an even more hamfisted change management process than the neocons upsetting their apple carts, before they understood how things were balanced on them.

Not to say anything shouldn't be changed, but jesus... folks need to have a little humility and curiosity -- try to understand what the folks before them were attempting to do and how.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-03 02:51:26+00:00
> not putting them on any short-lists for importing ASML machinery

That ASML machinery in EUV and DUV is entirely manufactured in SoCal - ASML was the the commercialization partner in LLNL's Cymer Inc.

> or ARM IP

Designed in Austin Texas - right by Barton Creek - or in Bangalore next door to Samsung and Nvidia, and across the street from Google.
by energy123 | 2025-04-03 02:52:18+00:00
Is Japan's trade deficit with Australia a good or bad thing? Is Australia ripping off Japan?

The trade deficit is a good thing for Japan because Japan lacks the natural resources it needs as inputs into its industry. It happens to buy those resources from Australia due to comparative advantage.

If Japanese policymakers tried to create a trade surplus with Australia via tariffs, they would make Japan significantly poorer and weaker.
by mistachkin | 2025-04-03 02:52:26+00:00
Location: Manhattan, NYC.

Contracts: Yes.

Remote: Yes.

Hybrid: Yes.

Willing to relocate: No.

Technologies: C/C++, C#, Win32, Linux, POSIX, SQL, etc.

Projects: Tcl/Tk, Eagle, SQLite, System.Data.SQLite, Fossil SCM, Comdb2

Interests: automation, cryptography, databases, developer tools & SDKs, distributed systems, (Internet) security, public key infrastructure, runtimes, sandboxing, scripting languages, testing, virtual machines, and LLM integration

Profile: https://w.sb/r/profile

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Phone: Please see "https://www.mistachkin.com/" for detailed instructions.
by prescriptivist | 2025-04-03 02:53:42+00:00
Guess what: This has all changed with LLMs. The impact of the average developer is proportional to the amount of code they ship in a world of copilots (key word is "ship", not write) and that's why some of the staff engineers I work with have 3 concurrent Cursor projects for the same codebase in flight at the same time. These are some of the best engineers I've ever worked with and they have drank the cool-aid of volume over quality.

I'm keen to this because I maintain our CI systems and have become acutely aware of the overhead of hallucinations breaking our CI tooling in pathological ways that draw me in to diagnose. A year ago I would have to log into our CI Kubernetes cluster to diagnose a busted build that doesn't self-report failure maybe... once a month. These days it's a couple times a week. LLM based dev is both amazing in the legit force multiplier it adds to writing code as well as the way it introduces some of the most incoherent and silly ways it breaks existing conventions.

I guess the headline is correct in that we are not hired to write code anymore, instead we are hired to shepherd code now, and a lot of it. And a lot of this code we shepherd is good enough but some amount of it is bad enough to break existing processes, but that is secondary to the volume and velocity we perceive from LLM code gen.
by jgord | 2025-04-03 02:54:05+00:00
upvoted.. not because I agree, but because dissent has to be tolerated in a civil society.

I would like to see more discussion on HN around topics that seem unpopular here, and are perhaps politically divisive .. such as : economic inequality, climate change, demographic crunch

Somewhere between the prevailing economic malaise, cynicism and despair ... and tech-bro fan-boi greedy optimism : there might be a middle way where we can use the new technologies of AI to actually improve our lives and create wide wealth generation, and more prosperity for the middle class.
by dang | 2025-04-03 02:54:27+00:00
"Why I don't discuss politics with friends" implies that you don't discuss politics with friends. What you're saying here sounds quite different. It sounds like "I do discuss politics with friends, except when I encounter a signal that [etc.]".

On HN, your title should match what the article actually says ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" -https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

I think if we change the title to "When I don't discuss politics with friends", that would be more accurate given what you've written here.

Edit: I looked at the article and didn't see anything that particularly mitigated the title, so I've put it back to "Why" above.
by alterom | 2025-04-03 02:54:33+00:00
>Out of curiosity, do you have a specific goal or outcome in mind in this exchange? I have tried to determine what your and your sparring partner's objectives are, and I admit it is difficult to discern.

Thank you for asking!

I'm most curious in figuring out ways to bridge the communication gap that is manifesting in this discussion.

The gap is as follows: multiple people have objected to the remark of /user/ninetyninenine, in which they stated that, in their view, willfully mis-grading a paper is a fireable offense for a teacher.

I don't find this opinion problematic or exceptional; and I believe that, if stated in this form, it would not cause a stir.

The way it was written is, in my view, very empathetic. Most people don't consider the livelihood of someone's family when they say "they should get fired for that".

Yet the objections to that comment seem to perceive the opposite — lack of empathy, and went to great length attacking both the opinion and the person who made it.

This reaction to the form of the comment over substance is something that I'm interested in combating.

The conversation with my "sparring partner" in this thread started with a point where me and the person I'm responding to see things differently: they perceived condescension in what I say, and don't appear to see any issue with the "few sentences" of the comment I wrote an "essay" in response to.

Notably, they said they agree with much of the substance of my comment, but find the tone objectionable.

I believe that their perception of my tone can be attributed to the Double Empathy problem¹, and that the same issue underlies the objections to the point user/ninetyninenine made.

I pose the following questions:

1. Is it possible to demonstrate the line between emotional reaction to the form of the comment and its substance — and persuade people to stick to the substance?

2. Can the Double Empathy problem be overcome by explaining how we think and express opinions (and, by that, helping others avoid misinterpreting or misattributing emotions)?

I believe that this conversation helps us all explore these two questions, even if it doesn't yield a conclusive answer to either.

Additionally, I hope this discussion brings attention to neurodivergence in general, and autistic traits in communication in particular, hoping to make people who disagree with our tone hear it differently.

Which is why I'm curious to hear the thoughts of my "sparring partner", as you called them.

I don't see the conversation as a sparring match, or a debate to be won; it's an exchange of ideas where, hopefully, everyone involved leaves with more than they came in with.

Ultimately, that is the goal — in this conversation, as well as all the others I take part in.

Thank you again for asking, glad to answer any other questions!

____

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem
by taneq | 2025-04-03 02:55:04+00:00
I don't think it's pedantic at all. Your NASCAR driver is hired to win races, not to drive. If they drive on the highway, or down to the shops, or at the track when there isn't a race (or qualifying, or testing, etc.) on, or they drive a different team's car, or their own personal car, then they might be driving but they're not doing their job. Their job is to drive that particular team's car in such a way as to (directly or indirectly) win races.

In exactly the same way, a software developer isn't just hired to write code. We're hired to solve problems. We usually do that by writing code but that's not always the right approach. If your employer told you they wanted to be able to control a Windows computer from a different computer in the next room, I hope you wouldn't start writing code, you'd just show them Remote Desktop (or VNC etc.) If your employer wanted a web dashboard for your product, you might write a bit of code, but you'd try and find some existing dashboard project with an appropriate license, and hook your product's metrics up to that. Writing code is a tool, of course, and if there's no better way to do a thing (like if you're developing a new product) then writing code is going to be necessary, but a lot of times it's a tool of last resort.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-03 02:55:47+00:00
The problem is that you're assuming the entire world agrees with your definition of "first world standards". As we have seen, not even American businesses give much of a shit about slave labor if it means we get higher margins on wholesale goods.

If America cut ties entirely with China, then we could take a moral stand. But we haven't done that, because we are utterly dependent on China even when they execute foreign nationals and steal American IP wholecloth.
by throw10920 | 2025-04-03 02:56:46+00:00
> Frankly, explaining communism in your response is just rude

Because you clearly don't understand communism and you need it explained to you.

If you understood communism, then you'd never ask to "compare the results of capitalism against the results of communism", because then you'd have to admit that the death toll from communism is over 100 million and the quality of life significantly lower, while for capitalism the death tool is multiple orders of magnitude lower and the quality of life higher.