MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-17 12:55:27+00:00
It’s mostly a pleasant read, but even as someone who prefers the humanities and studied a lot more of that than most folks in computer jobs, I’ve made it about 40% in and couldn’t tell you what the author means by capital-T “Technical”.

Is this something that would be clear to me if I’d worked in FAANG or similar? Is it a cultural thing there? Something to do with a corner of social media I don’t engage with?

The closest I can come up with connected to my experience is the opposite: “tech” related labels used to exclude people and dismiss their ideas, in decision-making or business-social contexts, and design processes. I’ve not seen it used in this power(? I think? I really can’t figure this out)-conferring way.

[EDIT] The anecdotes are so confusing.

> An example of this is every time evidence of efficacy is not able to exert any power versus the votes of engineering disengagement. You could put your diligent little psychologist heart into it and make a good program or policy change and muster up extremely critical evidence for something no one else bothered to measure but you could not demand that all of the engineering managers do it, for instance. The engineering managers always had the power and always would.

This is a manager thing. Specifically, modern management culture. Management wants to appear "evidence based" and "scientific" but the appearing is the only part they consistently care about. The "technical" run into this same wall, when they mistakenly believe surface claims that management's serious about working with evidence and "metrics" and such, and try to sincerely help as if that's the actual goal—it isn't.

[EDIT 2]

> This is one of the paradoxes of software teams: rich people, rich teams, rich environments, described and experienced as utter wastelands by (statistically speaking) men who have (statistically speaking) socked away more than I’ve ever touched and more than generations of my family ever touched, and their entire ownership of not having enough.

OK, I think this is confirmation that the piece is about a slice of the tech industry I've not really engaged with, which may explain why I am nearly at the end of the piece and am still not sure what it's about.

[EDIT 3]

> Tech is immensely global in its activity and so fanatically geo-located in its employment that even the most senior and most unquestionably Technical people worry about moving away from 2-3 certain US cities.

OK, yes, this is about a tiny percentage of "tech". Under this article's usage, I'm not "Technical", and few or none of the programmers I personally know are. That helps, wish that'd been stated up front.
Show HN: Browser‑based MCP Chat – run MCPs without local setup
by mvac | 2025-04-17 12:55:34+00:00
We built a tiny web app that lets you connect to any MCP server and chat with it right from the browser.

It spins up MCP servers in E2B sandboxes and converts the stdio to SSE. The chat app executes on the client‑side, so your API keys are sent directly and only to their respective services (E2B, model providers) - never to our server.

Since everything is client-side, you need an OpenAI/Anthropic API key and an E2B API key to try it [https://e2b.dev].

Try it here: https://netglade.github.io/mcp-chat/

We made it as a hackathon project and won the 1st price with it, though we're not really sure what would be a meaningful way to move it forward, so we welcome all types of feedback.
by jemmyw | 2025-04-17 12:55:44+00:00
> I feel like I'm stretching the analogy

Maybe more apt would be that the stuff you built in the workshop doesn't fit out the door so you'd need to take it all apart to rebuild it somewhere else.

Still, the article is insensible. Frameworks are not evil. They do not have malicious aims. I think the worst we can say in that direction is that people get tribal about this kind of thing and insist their framework or way is the best and lose objectivity.
by creesch | 2025-04-17 12:56:06+00:00
I had the same issue. I think that their point boils down to what we consider "technical" as a label on people. Basically that "technical" is more of an identity rather than someone having a specific skillset. Something the author feels excluded from, even though they do work that's relevant and impactful.

I think so anyway. As I said, I had the same issue as you having difficulty getting through it. The article takes a long time to actually get to a point, circling around things rather than concretely building towards something.

If I had to guess it is more of a flow of thoughts and not really a classical argument.

It also makes it hard to draw any conclusions about it. Because I think I sort of get where they are coming from, but at the same time I am not sure if I entirely agree. In my line of work technical just means "being skilled with IT related technical skills" without a judgement about other skill sets. It is just there to distinguish between people who can dive into systems hands-on and those who have other skills and bring value in other ways.
by idiotsecant | 2025-04-17 12:56:17+00:00
It's frustrating that people honestly think this isn't a problem. What's the point of the system of economic value? It's supposed to make our exchange of good and services more efficient. What's more efficient about a handful of dudes hoarding effectively the entire supply? It works better when value is evenly distributed throughout the system. It's the whole point, in fact. If we allow it turn into a high score game where the winners are the ones with the best cheats we make a system that increases overall suffering, inefficiency, and rent-seeking.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-04-17 12:56:19+00:00
> so maybe with slightly different distribution of land use but basically fine and not necessarily as different as today is from 50 years ago?

No, probably very much more different than that, more like rolling back on industrialisation and globalisation. Closer to 500 years than 50, without the same hope of "progress" that we had back then.

> "mass extinction" already been happening for ages for many species.

Yeah, we all learned about dinosaurs when we were little kids, but if humanity collapses there's no guarantee of anything similar developing after us.
by ngd | 2025-04-17 12:56:50+00:00
There is also a conflation of a slowing metabolism and low energy availability, which can reduce the amount of energy expended during the day (because you feel tired and do less). It can be quite subtle but when I've done some extended periods in a calorie deficit I start to notice subtle things, like a propensity to sit a bit longer, or to reduce my overall body movements. My resting metabolism is the same (I've had it measured a few times) but my body looks for ways to expend less energy.
by cjs_ac | 2025-04-17 12:56:50+00:00
Underlying this is a belief that scamming people is the only way to achieve financial stability, that you need to always be hustling. Teenagers went from idolising actors and musicians (who had agents dealing with the money behind closed doors) to idolising social media creators and influencers who are quite transparent about how the algorithm determines their income. On IndieHackers and MicroConf, it's standard advice that you need to sell your SaaS to businesses because ordinary consumers have no money.
by BSDobelix | 2025-04-17 12:57:01+00:00
>"pushing hidden agendas and framing actually matters"

Thank you very much, this is exactly the point, americans cheer the "free health care" and do not see the point that for example a swiss family has to pay 15-20% of their income every month for compulsory health insurance this is not a choice..one HAS to pay it, additionally, dental stuff for example is not included if it is not from a sickness.

It's absolutely NOT free and a big burden for most citizens who live in country's with Universal healthcare.
by larusso | 2025-04-17 12:57:03+00:00
Guess you misunderstood me. I know that UTM is built on top of qemu. I use it as well. I mean when already using this init image tooling etc why clicking through the UI to setup a VM. One would think to offload this also to a script. Because in the posts steps UTM is just a means to start the resulting image.
by nopelynopington | 2025-04-17 12:57:13+00:00
I built it at home this morning and tried it, perhaps my expectations were high but I wasn't terribly impressed. I asked it for a list of ten types of data I might show on a home info display panel. It gave me three. I clarified that I wanted ten, it gave me six. Every request after that just returned the same six things.

I know it's not chatGPT4 but I've tried other very small models that run on CPU only and had better results
by kylecazar | 2025-04-17 12:57:17+00:00
It's a well written essay at least.

But, I don't know if the core thesis has anything to do with the matter of being technical. Dehumanization has always been a side-effect of corporatism, and the modern corporation just happens to be a tech company.

For what it's worth I'm a liberal arts major that's coded professionally and is considered technical by my peers. The humanity of it all is never too far from my mind, and I've worked with many people like me. I suspect your mileage will vary based on where you work and who's around you.

Is this an attempt to justify being non-technical? Because you don't have to.
by loudmax | 2025-04-17 12:57:44+00:00
These are conservative values:

* The rule of law * Moral integrity * Respect for traditions and institutions

There's a tension between those values and other values such as a sense of fairness. People could overlook a politician who fell short of these conservative values when there was a perception that these values were holding us back from getting to a more just society.

Today we have a president who openly defies the court orders, engages in blatant corruption, and undermines American institutions. The Trump administration's vehement rejection of all of these values highlights just how critical they really are.

It's time for American conservatives to vote Democrat.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-17 12:58:30+00:00
Sure, but is it a good idea for us to abandon that idea and not defend it, while it is under assault from the administration. I personally would argue no, but I am very, very biased.

What I do not understand, and I do mean it, is why on earth would anyone argue to limit their own right to speech? Isn't it clear that you are, at best, undermining your own rights in the long term?
by dontreact | 2025-04-17 12:58:41+00:00
I think that “I’m not technical” is often an excuse for throwing work at other people and frankly can be a form of learned helplessness. Nowadays, there is less and less reason to ask other people to write one off scripts/queries, you can ask AI for help and learn how to do that.

Since this is HN some disclaimers -no that’s not always what’s happening, when “not technical” is thrown around -no it’s not always appropriate to use AI instead of asking an expert
by dietr1ch | 2025-04-17 12:58:54+00:00
> back of the envelope calculation for how long it should take: 25 min / 128 = 12 sec (or maybe 24 sec since hyper-threads aren't real cores). Yet it takes 170s to compile everything.

I'd aim for this linear speedup for compiling (sans overhead to compile a small crate), but the linking part won't be faster, maybe even slower. Maybe a slightly bigger envelope can tell you how much performance is there to extract and the cost of using "too many" crates (which I'm not even sure it's too many, maybe your original crate was too big to ease incremental compilation?)
by mst | 2025-04-17 12:59:28+00:00
My first Archimedes came with a ring bound user's manual that was, IIRC, about 1/3 a guide to using the Risc OS GUI, and then 2/3 a programming guide to the version of BBC BASIC that shipped with it.

(I remember reading it end to end as a child laid on my parents' bed because the light was better in there than in my room, shortly followed by developing the programming addiction that has stuck with me the rest of my life ;)

It didn't cover arm2 assembly, but my parents bought me an extremely good book that did - and described the chip architecture itself in detail as well.

I only touched a Commodore at a friend's place to play games on it, but it sounds like they also understood hobbyists :D
by d4704 | 2025-04-17 12:59:28+00:00
Agreeing and I found it interesting to learn more about caloric availability to the body.

I.e. calories on the label vs what the body can actually access.

Like drinking smoothies (high availability) vs raw fruit (lower availability)

Dr. Greger (Nutrition focused) discusses some of this on calorie density and some referenced studies here if interested:

https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/how-to-lose-weight-eating-mo...
by acdha | 2025-04-17 12:59:38+00:00
Housing prices have almost nothing to do with space programs. In most places, they’re an artifact of laws and policies which create scarcity for the benefit of rich property owners, and cutting scientific research entirely won’t change that except in a few cases where you’d be able to bid on a house which some unemployed scientist or engineer is forced out of - but the private equity guys will probably outbid you.
by Nick-W | 2025-04-17 12:59:44+00:00
Honestly this is something I need to promote more. We've had a few people self-install which is amazing, and it turns a 4-8 hour install job into a 30 minute alignment one. It's something we can only offer to those who have an unambiguously clear line of sight to one of our access points though, and since we mostly operate in the mountains, trees can often make things very difficult.
by blenderob | 2025-04-17 12:59:50+00:00
> HN doesn't like Not Technical.

Is it? I love HN but if I can fault HN with something, it'd be that HN upvotes too many non-technical articles. Too many!

Every morning I come to HN to give me company for my morning coffee. And every morning I've to work hard to find the technical articles. The number of political articles, "feel good" articles, social issues stuff and other general non-tech stuff that people upvote makes looking for tech articles like searching needle in haystack. I wish HN had more technical articles.
by andrewla | 2025-04-17 13:00:35+00:00
The example given doesn't seem right to me.

> There is one problem, though, that I find easily explainable. Place a token at the bottom left corner of a grid that extends infinitely up and right, call that point (0, 0). You're given list of valid displacement moves for the token, like (+1, +0), (-20, +13), (-5, -6), etc, and a target point like (700, 1). You may make any sequence of moves in any order, as long as no move ever puts the token off the grid. Does any sequence of moves bring you to the target?

If someone gives you such a sequence, it seems trivial to verify it in linear time. Even for arbitrary dimensions, and such witness can be verified in linear time.
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-04-17 13:00:36+00:00
Sorry for the confusing example.

So, the AWS lambda in the data product example is a bit of a red herring, and it's used as the outer process to create branches and launch bauplan pipelines through the Python client (https://github.com/BauplanLabs/data-products-with-bauplan/bl...).

It can be your laptop, an Airflow task, a prefect flow or a step function or a cron job on a VM - it's the "host" process (for the data product we picked lambda because it's the easiest way for people to "run small Python stuff every 5 minutes" - this is a prefect example: https://www.prefect.io/blog/prefect-on-the-lakehouse-write-a...).

When you interact with the Bauplan lakehouse, all the compute happen on bauplan, nothing happens in the lambda: think of launching a Snowflake query from a lambda - the client is in the lambda but all the work is done in the SF cloud. Unlike many (all?) other lakehouses, Bauplan is code-first, so you can program the entire branching and merging patterns with a few lines of code, offloading the runtime to the platform.

The platform itself runs on standard EC2, which contains the dockerized functions needed for execution - typically we manage Ec2 in single tenant, private link, soc2 compliant account we own for simplicity, but nothing prevents the VMs to be somewhere else (given connectivity is ok etc.). It is our philosophy that you should not worry about the infra part of it, so even in case of BYOC we will be in charge of managing that.

Does it help clarify the mental model?
by bluGill | 2025-04-17 13:00:47+00:00
You are thinking as a lawyer, who for sure should have jumped in (if got that far - it appears to have went to engineering first who shut it down for engineering reasons). Someone in marketing should not be expected to know or think of those details about law. Maybe they will, but it isn't there job.

Specialization is a good thing. However it means you will have often ideas that because of something you don't know are bad even though within your lane they are good.
by easyKL | 2025-04-17 13:00:51+00:00
France Inter Paris (FIP) it's awesome!

And remember you can always get the audio steam through HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), on its M3U format, or others with better quality. There are many Android apps like Transistor to enjoy the stream, and even VLC can open these, in order to avoid using a web browser.

Likewise, I prefer online radios than big tech algorithms that craft my music experience.
by idiotsecant | 2025-04-17 13:00:57+00:00
Once capital grows large enough it starts being able to bend the fabric of economic space around it. It begins to change rules and accumulate more capital merely because it's so big. This is a natural feature of capitalism. Properly attended to, fire makes steam and runs an engine. Left unchecked, it's a forest fire. Capitalism is like that. It needs moderating influences to keep it controlled and useful and not consuming everything it touches.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-17 13:01:56+00:00
The jet example will needlessly confuse people and create fodder for low effort "akshually" type commentary because the air getting sucked into the front and crammed out the back of the engine sound very different so you can get like most the same effect without the aircraft actually moving relative to the observer.

People explaining doppler don't want to have to explain this to a bunch of nit pickers, so they use an ambulance.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-04-17 13:01:59+00:00
200kcal/day is less than 10W. Since all energy the body uses is released as heat this puts the maximum sustainable heat radiation with such a diet at 10W.

That's about the level of a typical household LED, which at most feels slightly warm to the touch.

At that energy level you could not sustain weight while maintaining body temperature let alone having a healthy metabolism. That's just a plain fact.

You will lose weight long before you reach 200kcal/day.
by alecsm | 2025-04-17 13:02:04+00:00
I started coding in the early 2000s in mIRC Scripting. It felt like magic. With only a few lines I could add stuff to the context menus, write auto responses, etc.

I remember doing an "AI" bot that you could talk to. If it recognized any words you said it would get a random predefined string from a .txt and send it to you. And a lot of "hacking" scripts. Fun times.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-17 13:02:07+00:00
The physical mechanism is mitochondrial uncoupling proteins (UCP). They regulate how much energy is wasted as heat when converting ADP to ATP, determining how efficient one’s metabolism is. When you lose weight, your UCP proteins start wasting less and less energy when producing ATP, which is one of the things that makes dieting so hard.

Actually affecting that pathway is largely beyond us at the moment (that’s the bro science) but the mechanism is relatively well understood.
Would startups give 2% equity to access a "fractional board" of expert operators
by Drifter23 | 2025-04-17 13:02:08+00:00
I'm exploring a new model and want brutal feedback.

The idea:

Founders give up 2% equity to join a collective that provides them with a custom advisory board — think ex-CMO, CFO, GTM, growth experts — who meet quarterly, support strategy, open doors, and are available for on-demand calls.

In return, the startup gets:

- A handpicked board of 3–5 top-tier operators

- 4 structured board meetings per year

- Ad hoc expert support when needed

- Help with capital, hiring, GTM, etc.

- Zero cash cost, just the 2% equity.

We’d also run founder meetups, shared learning sessions, and provide add-on services (like talent acquisition, marketing support, etc.) to help companies grow faster.

Board members are incentivised by owning a small piece of the collective’s pooled equity across all participating startups. We (the operator company) hold the equity and distribute exit proceeds over time.

It’s basically a "fractional co-founder board" model — designed to give founders experienced support, without the dilution of a full-time co-founder or the pressure of early-stage funding.

The question:

Would you (or any founder you know) actually go for this?

What’s broken? What needs changing? Or is it just a bad idea wrapped in startup theatre?

Rip it apart.
by Havoc | 2025-04-17 13:02:15+00:00
If we’re aiming purely at reducing troubleshooting time then asking an LLM at the end of all those lengthy steps like reinstalling environment doesn’t make sense.

Even if they can only one shot solve 10% of the problems it makes sense to do that as a first line of attack since it’s fast and low effort and even the 30seconds it takes can be done concurrently with other troubleshooting.

I’d venture the solution is to keep the LLM as first step but to abandon it very fast if it doesn’t produce immediate results. People get stuck there and make it their main troubleshooting approach and never get to the engage brain part
by falcor84 | 2025-04-17 13:02:32+00:00
It's all about tradeoffs. In this case, I wonder if there's an "efficient metabolism" gene that makes your body put a higher percentage of incoming nutrients into long-term storage (mostly in fat tissue). Carriers of this gene would be more likely to survive a famine, but less likely to outrun a predator or defend against an attack by another leaner human, who's genes allocate incoming nutrients to be utilized more effectively in the short-term.
by danielbln | 2025-04-17 13:02:45+00:00
That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from? I would hate a vBulleting as a central hub, it's an information black hole, it's not suitable for tickets (jira), not suitable for real time communication (slack), and so on. It was a product of its time, but I think we found better solutions now.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-17 13:02:53+00:00
...don't we? According to [0], the amount of food (by energy intake) people get is very diverse worldwide. People can survive famine situations for a long time, and people' problems with obesity is linked to exactly those survival genes.

Granted, some animals are much better at it, crocodiles and bears and stuff can go without food for months.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-04-17 13:03:26+00:00
>and the modern corporation just happens to be a tech company.

I'd argue this is more aristocratic (or technocratic) social exclusion, which has gone on for far longer than compilers have existed.

There does seem to be a persistent coalescing of certain personalities to certain industries that loves to exclude people (before, finance; now, tech) using mercurial standards that really just boil down to "do I like you", "do you entertain me or kiss my ass", or even "will you bang me"