MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
by platevoltage | 2025-04-28 02:06:39+00:00
tldr; skip to the --------

Last time I "Asked HN", I was in a very different place. Fresh out of a bootcamp, right at the peak, and subsequent collapse of the Covid hiring. It didn't go well. However, another HN reader turned me on to Upwork, and over the last 2 years, I've been building modest freelancing career.

I came from an automotive background where I made awful money, moved to the Bay Area, became a bike messenger in San Francisco because I didn't know what to do with myself, and once again made awful money.

I had been a hobbyist programmer for years by this point, so I got sucked into the bootcamp racket. The program was great. I got what I needed out of it, although the certificate wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.

I landed an ongoing contract on Upwork, which I still work on which really changed everything for me. I also landed an internship at Akamai as a Cloud Support Engineer, which never resulted in employment, but I'm not sure it's the type of work that I really want to be doing. It was more of a foot in the door type thing for me.

Either way, I am now making a living off of software development. A lucrative living? no, but it works for my lifestyle.

Several years ago, we were all told "You don't need a degree bro, degrees are obsolete bro, companies only care about what you know".

I found out that this wasn't true the hard way, however now I at least have some professional experience to my name. The job market is bad for everyone right now. I'm not necessarily looking for a job ATM, but at some point, the grind and hustle of freelancing might either fizzle out, or I might just get tired of it.

Now that that's out of the way, here is my question...

----------

I've thought about doing an online CS degree. It seems like this can be done for less than 15 grand, and also doable while still making money.

Is this a bad idea? Is this a good idea? Is this necessary if I want to be employable in the future?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-28 02:07:17+00:00
> Or, more importantly... can you provide a reason why this hypothetical, extremely unusual edge case should take precedence over the 12,000 speeding deaths per year in our calculation?

That one's easy. Because the 12,000 "speeding deaths" are caused by 300+ million people, so the probability that one is caused by any given person is extremely low. And even 12,000 is an overestimate because those statistics count every fatality where speeding was occurring, but some large fraction of those fatalities would have occurred regardless. And this measure would prevent only a small fraction of that smaller number of actual speeding fatalities.

Meanwhile more than 3 million people die every year of something else, so it doesn't take a large percentage of those being impacted to add up to a larger number.

> For example, I'm willing to wager more people get hurt speeding TO the hospital while their wife is in labor than preventing any sort of injury due to out of hospital birth.

That's because child birth outside of a hospital isn't actually that dangerous, not because some large fraction of people die in car crashes on the way to the hospital. But there are a lot of things that are more dangerous than child birth and are very likely to be fatal if you don't receive prompt medical attention.

> Speed cameras reduce crashes and fatalities, and car breathalyzers reduce the incidences of drunk driving.

Speed cameras don't actually stop you from speeding. If you had to get to the hospital then you can make your case to the judge after the fact instead of having a dead kid.

Car breathalyzers "reduce the incidences of drunk driving" by causing the same problem. What happens if you've been drinking not expecting to go anywhere before you learn you need to evacuate immediately because of a wildfire?

> Even still, humans (judges) review these cases individually and decide which offenders' cars to put breathalyzers / speed limiters on.

The issue is there is no judge available on site to take it back off again in an emergency.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-28 02:07:19+00:00
Road conditions change. Sometimes it’s the middle of the night and nobody is on the county road, so you can run your brights. Sometimes a particular section of road has high visibility that makes a higher speed safer, while other sections are best taken under the limit. Some vehicles have better headlights than others, different stopping distances. Your logic only says “lower is safer,” it provides no means by which to draw the line on what level of risk is acceptable and, make no mistake, any amount of driving always implies risk. We balance the risk against its reward, that’s the function of traffic law.

For speed limits, the conditions are so variable that we compromise and set a number that’s reasonable-ish, most likely calibrated to the least safe conditions the road regularly experiences, and leave it at that. It’s still entirely possible, however, that a particular driver can have a much greater understanding of the risks implicit in going 10 over given their conditions, and thus increase the risk only a slight bit to save a large amount of time. This isn’t intrinsically some horrific moral crime; if you think it is then it sounds like law for the law’s sake type shit.
by wahern | 2025-04-28 02:07:32+00:00
In Kantian ethics stealing a loaf of bread is wrong even if done by or for a starving person. In utilitarian ethics stealing bread in that context would be justified. The "civilizational suicide by empathy" narrative is rooted in a utilitarian ethics--empathy is good until the negative consequences outweigh the positive; whereas in Kantian ethics if empathy is good, it's always good, and if that possibly leads to civilizational suicide, so be it.

I think that's the point the poster was trying to make. I make no claim about what the practiced ethics are of Musk, of the cultural circles he travels in, or of the cultural circles he opposes (e.g. identity politics, social justice movements, etc); or even that Musk or any of these circles practice a consistent or coherent set ethics.
by Jensson | 2025-04-28 02:09:36+00:00
> Just like they listen to the music they want, watch the movies they want, buy the products they want, and go to the websites they want..?

Yes, people listen to a wider range of music and watch a wider range of videos than ever before today, because there is a wider range available.

Most people are drawn to the same kind of content though so many people consume very similar things.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-28 02:09:54+00:00
There's a universe of config files out there that are not key-value. Most exist for specific applications. It can be hard to configure specific functionality, so developers gave users a particular way to express it.

Again with the TOML vs YAML? Ya'll can't come up with anything but another version of the same old thing? You don't need to do the same thing everyone else does with a tiny twist. Think outside the box. Expand your mind!

Sure, Sendmail/M4 was a pain in the ass. Postfix was more along the lines of key-value. But Exim had its own rule format, and Qmail took simplicity to the extreme by creating a different file for all the different options.

How about an X11 config file? Nginx? Puppet? Bind? Fstab? Vimrc? Rsyslog? Netrc? Cups? Pppd? Iptables? Apt? Cron? Sysctl? SSH? Just name a program on Linux that wasn't created in the last 15 years and it will have a different config file format, tailored to the users and use cases of that application. And none of them are JSON, YAML, or TOML.

You don't have to make yours completely unique, but you also don't have to go "oh well, there's only 3 formats to choose from, I guess I will have to settle for one of those". DO YOUR OWN THING! It's your program! Don't be a slave to convention!
by lutusp | 2025-04-28 02:11:06+00:00
> ... Now you too can put the internet in a box and customize it with the very best free content for your school, clinic or family!

Yes ! And at very low cost! It doesn't require a network, a power connection or high technology! It prepares its users for adult life!

How can people read this article and not think, "Wait ... don't we already have books?"
by tudorrr | 2025-04-28 02:11:39+00:00
I'm building an open source game backend for Unity and Godot: https://trytalo.com. GitHub: https://github.com/talodev.

Talo makes it easy to add systems that traditionally need extra non-gameplay build time like authentication, player analytics and game stats.

Right now you can drop Talo into your game or use the API directly. Importantly, I’ve made Talo easy to self-host and you can point the Unity package/Godot plugin to your own Talo instance.
by hollerith | 2025-04-28 02:11:53+00:00
The OP mentions the Honda Fit, a very small car that was popular in the US, but was taken off the US market after the 2020 model year. That car is still being sold in Europe (under the name Honda Jazz).

Not only do I not see new Honda Fits anymore in the US, but also I don't see any other new cars (by any manufacturer) that small or smaller except for electric cars (e.g., the electric Chevy Bolt, which has been very popular here).
by jldugger | 2025-04-28 02:12:57+00:00
It depends on how you define creativity probably, but a few scientific examples:

1. "Functional fixedness" was explored in a classic Candle Problem[1] found that high drive (ie rewards on a deadline) led to fewer subjects solving the problem.

2. Quality versus quantity. Sadly I can't find the TED talk (likely a decade ago?) that I saw about this but the basic idea: give subjects some kind of design problem (paper airplanes, egg drop, bridge building) and a metric measure them by. Then split them into two groups; one you measure on how many they build and the other on how well their final product is. I think there may have been some intermediate evaluation step as well, wish I could find the original research. Paradoxically, the quantity group wins on quality scores. Lesson being not to focus on perfecting your first solution.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_problem
by e28eta | 2025-04-28 02:13:17+00:00
I’m fascinated that they aren’t requiring an entitlement for all usage of setting & posting notifications through this API. A way to share 64 bits of information (at a time) to any process on the device? That is right in the wheelhouse of tracking a user across apps.

I don’t specifically know the types of things that you’d want to share across apps, but there’s a long history of cross process information channels being removed or restricted.

If the system is storing values for you, and isn’t keeping track of which app they came from, now you’ve got persistent storage across app deletion & re-install, as long as there isn’t a reboot in between.

I think you could easily use it to work around IDFA or IDFV resets, as a simple example.
by giardini | 2025-04-28 02:16:19+00:00
pseudalopes says>" People who go to sex parties are not healthier or unhealthier in my experience."<

There is no doubt whatsoever that people who go to sex parties or who have more sex partners are more likely to be diseased. It's just germ theory and simple numbers: the more sexual contacts you have the more diseases you will carry.

Anyone desirous of having children someday would probably want their offspring to be free of disease. Ergo, steer clear of disease and seek a partner who has done the same.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-28 02:16:53+00:00
I think I’ll just avoid it.

Here’s a controversial view point I hold. It’s not a good idea to have loser friends ( unemployed, unable to support themselves), even if it’s not strictly their fault.

These people have a tendency to pull you down and will laugh about it .

Is that a right wing viewpoint? Left wing ?

No body knows.
by johnwheeler | 2025-04-28 02:17:48+00:00
Hi HN,

I've built a 100% web-based screen recording tool aimed at product marketing managers, developers, or anyone wanting to showcase their work along with a talking head. Inspired by ScreenStudio, it allows you to effortlessly create polished recordings directly from your browser.

A couple of technical highlights I'm particularly proud of:

Initially, I used ReMotion but ran into limitations. I ended up building my own animation engine from scratch, closely inspired by ReMotion's capabilities but tailored specifically for my use-case.

Due to browser security constraints with getDisplayMedia(), I couldn't directly track cursor movements. To overcome this, I trained a custom YOLO (You-Only-Look-Once) model for cursor detection. This allowed me to implement smooth, mouse-following animations within recordings, bypassing the browser limitations entirely.

Happy to dive deeper into the tech if anyone's interested!
by hdjrudni | 2025-04-28 02:18:28+00:00
You can always swap out some of those services for always-running prod or dev-in-the-cloud services.

I have a big mix of setups for my projects. I like Vite+Bun (client+server) for smallish projects because the dev servers start instantly. But then I have to remind myself how to actually productionize it when it comes time for that, but it's not too hard.

Then sometimes I need to bring in a database. I don't like running those locally, undockerized because now you're locked into one specific version and it just gets messy. So sometimes if I'm lazy I just connect to my prod database server and just create a separate dev DB on it if needed. Then I don't need to start and stop anything, I just connect. Easy.

For a big complex app you can mix-and-match any of the above. Run the services that you need to iterate heavily on locally, and just farm out the rarely changing stuff to the cloud.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-04-28 02:18:36+00:00
Over time, I've come to realize that USB is a triumph of marketing and compatibility rather than tech.

Faster data rate(FireWire400, 800), isochronous transfers(FireWire) full duplex(FireWire800), and reversible plugs(Thunderbolt) were all available elsewhere much earlier but USB gives you them all through the same socket.
by lilyball | 2025-04-28 02:18:43+00:00
Darwin notifications are so old they don't have any availability annotations (block-based darwin notification APIs like notify_register_dispatch() were introduced in macOS 10.6 / iOS 3.2, but the rest of them are declared as always available). They absolutely predate any notion of an AppStore, of being able to install apps without implicitly putting a lot of trust in the app to not be malicious.
by falcor84 | 2025-04-28 02:18:45+00:00
> If you don't want to put resources into ultra detailed graphics, you have to use a less demanding art style like Nintendo does.

I agree in general, but just wanted to offer one counter-example. The Axis Unseen [0] is a well-received indie game created by just one person (Nate Purkeypile, notably a Bethesda veteran [1]), which looks incredible, utilizing Unreal Engine 5 geometry features with almost no textures.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807810/The_Axis_Unseen/

[1] https://www.justpurkeygames.com/team
by jollofricepeas | 2025-04-28 02:19:15+00:00
Yeah.

The ignorance comes from lack of experience and it happens often on both sides.

Engineers think they deserve a big equity package for writing CRUD apps.

“Businesspeople” with no startup experience, never raised money and never worked in sales think they have value.

If both co-founders have no prior startup experience then they both need to put in the same amount of money and split equity 51/49 or 60/40 (while considering dilution).

No once can build a meaningful company alone so you need to have a team and that team must have a servant leader willing to break ties.

It’s only inexperienced people that don’t know / understand this.
by cratermoon | 2025-04-28 02:19:24+00:00
The article repeatedly says "sleeping pills", and mentions benzodiazepines and antihistamines specifically, but then the words "sleeping pills" link to an article Suvorexant and possible reductions in Alzheimer's risk.

I'm sorry but this fail more than a few sniff tests https://mglink.org/2025/04/13/reading-simple-things/
by lamroger | 2025-04-28 02:19:34+00:00
Hey! Appreciate the links and sorry for the late reply. Thought this just got grabbed by the spam filter when I wasn't seeing it.

I have a small writeup here: https://lamroger.com/blog/2024-03-10-coffee-roasting-tech/ and the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shMMuNuH3cE

But short answer is I finetuned a model with the help of Roboflow, grabbed the pixel values in the bounding box and avg'ed the values.
by freedomben | 2025-04-28 02:20:49+00:00
Neat, thanks! I'm CTO of Ameelio (non-profit) and have been eyeing Kiwix for awhile. Getting content to incarcerated people is a unique challenge due to the exceptional security requirements, and an offline solution like kiwix might fit in well. Being able to narrow down categories is a huge capability for us. Thank you!
by epicureanideal | 2025-04-28 02:21:39+00:00
> What helps is remembering that absolutely nobody gives a shit about the code or the architecture. Nobody.

If there is no competition, money is nearly free, and you have all the time in the world, sure. If any of those isn't true, you probably want a reasonably well architected codebase so you're not spending 3X the salaries and 3X the time to build things as you would've with a well designed codebase.

> What helps is remembering that absolutely nobody gives a shit about the code or the architecture. Nobody.

We could easily say the same about anything. Nobody cares about the engine in their car either. Except they do, because it affects things like whether they can get from point A to B, which is what they really care about.

Same with code and architecture. It "doesn't matter" but it does, because it takes you from A to B at a particular speed and cost.
by bholagabbar | 2025-04-28 02:22:08+00:00
Spent this weekend building a one-file OpenRouter client — figured I'd open-source it.

We deal with a lot of dynamic structured data, where different LLM calls have different priorities — speed, latency, cost. After a year using OpenRouter heavily in production, I hit a bunch of real-world problems — bad providers, unreliable fallbacks, weird edge cases with schemas — so I baked all of that into this. We needed strong guarantees on output and simple, reliable handling around it.

The primary motivations:

Explicit structure enforcement (Zod + JSON Schema)

Fine-tune per call — optimize for speed, latency, or price

Ignore bad providers (beyond account settings)

Fallback cleanly to JSON mode (180+ models)

Add new models declaratively, no client changes needed

It handles:

Strict structured outputs (zod-to-json-schema)

Fallback to JSON if needed

Provider sorting and fallback models

Unified one-line abstraction (makeLLMCall)

Real error handling and dynamic model swapping

We run over 50k OpenRouter requests/day through this in production. Tried to make it stupid simple to read and extend - coming up with the best API abstractions I could.

(On a personal note, as an overworked founder, it felt great to step away from growth and customer support for a bit and spend a day building clean APIs again — reminded me of the simpler days at CMU, grinding through Joshua Bloch’s API design classes. Honestly feels like this could make a good assignment problem.)
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-28 02:23:02+00:00
Honestly it would seem that most psychopharmaceuticals aim to reduce QoL, reduce intellectual capacity, and shorten lifespan, so mission accomplished

Furthermore, speaking as someone with chronic intractable insomnia, mixed with hypersomnia and other sleep-related disorders, if you go without sleep long enough and often enough, you will wish that you had already died six years ago, so is the remainder of your life going to suck, or will it be just a touch more bearable because you've had a good night's rest?
by totalhack | 2025-04-28 02:23:54+00:00
Well, pretty much everyone is less valuable than they think!

I've bootstrapped and sold two startups, first time with 5 (!) equal cofounders and second time with 3. I've learned a lot along the way, obviously some of that through mistakes of my own. Have my cofounders been perfect? Heck no -- one lacks the same level of drive, the other is less trustworthy (always multiple irons in the fire kinda guy). But we all have strengths, are all generally better off together, and have the combined skill set to run super lean. Even if you think you can do some things better alone, you can never do it all, and that grind will take quite a toll.

Related: over the years the topic of going into business with some of my best friends has come up, and I always say I would never do that. Running a fast-moving, high stakes business with multiple founders involves a lot of tough conversations and occasional relationship strain. My business partners are business partners first, friends second, and I think that's important to consider if you really value a friendship.
by johnwheeler | 2025-04-28 02:24:03+00:00
Currently, videos are recorded and uploaded directly to Amazon S3, and I haven't set an explicit limit on video length. I've personally tested uploads around 15–20 minutes without issues, and a couple of users have successfully recorded 30-minute videos, though I haven't fully rendered or extensively tested videos at that length yet.

The app uses a custom renderer inspired by ReMotion, so while the app can output MP4s, I also have a player that is dynamic HTML/CSS animation powered by JS, hosted either on my site. I could make it a player that is hosted from anywhere, and I think I will do this for a free tier.

Theoretically, this setup can handle videos of arbitrary length, but practically speaking, I've only thoroughly tested around 10–15 minutes. I'd recommend caution with significantly longer recordings (like an hour) for now, as you might encounter rendering issues.
by Spivak | 2025-04-28 02:25:39+00:00
Yes, those life choices having been made for them by their city planner before they were born about the feasibility of getting anywhere in their or doing anything in their city without a vehicle.

Suspending licenses is a punishment that doesn't work and can never work for anyone in most cities who isn't a well-connected suburban teenager who has parents and a network of friends to drive them around. And a lot of courts know this which is why a full suspended license is getting less common and basically is they've become a ban on "non-essential driving."
by bobmcnamara | 2025-04-28 02:25:50+00:00
> this generation has the lowest mental toughness, since the standards did not necessarily increase but the people changed and could not handle the stress, wait until the tough times come

A bunch of people in every generation say this.

My grandparents said it about those who got to skip growing up in the depression. Their grandparents about selling everything they owned and moving to America. Some days as I trudge through the snow to work uphill both ways I think of them.
by hdjrudni | 2025-04-28 02:26:15+00:00
I briefly tried Tilt awhile back. Tilt, Garden, maybe a couple others, settled on DevSpace. IIRC, it aligned best with my existing prod infrastructure without having to rewrite everything a different way.

i.e., it worked with my existing kustomize+k8s setup. It adds portforwarding, and fast file sync into the running containers, which is all I really want. Rebuilding an image every time you make a change sucks.
by coder543 | 2025-04-28 02:29:22+00:00
Nope... this stuff is 96.5% copper, and copper is ~3x as expensive as stainless steel. Even if tantalum and lithium were free, it would be substantially more expensive. Tantalum is not free, though. It's a very expensive material at about 100x the cost per kg relative to stainless steel, so it nearly doubles the cost of the raw material inputs by itself with its 3% contribution. The process of making this alloy is also likely to be expensive.

I'm also not sure how much being in an alloy would impact the antimicrobial effects of copper.