MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tombert | 2025-05-30 23:57:37+00:00
At my last job I made a thing that took in tens of millions of records from Kafka, did some processing, plopped stuff into Postgres, and moved along. It wasn't hard, but getting throughput was difficult to achieve my throughput goals with regular blocking JDBC.

Eventually I moved to an async-non-blocking model, and for my initial tests it went great, stuff returned almost immediately and I could grab the next one. The problem is that, sort of by definition, non-blocking stuff doesn't really know when it's going to complete right away, so it just kept enqueuing stuff until it ate all my memory.

I figured out pretty early on what was happening, but the other people on my team really seemed to struggle with the concept of backpressure, I think because they weren't really used to a non-blocking model. You kind of get backpressure for free with blocking code.

Eventually I was able to solve my problem using a BlockingQueue,
by neilv | 2025-05-30 23:57:38+00:00
The Micro Center in Cambridge, MA, has improved a lot over the years.

When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.

Also, I've never seen opened returns re-shinkwrapped and sold again as new at Micro Center, unlike in stories about Fry's. There are some wire shelves where opened returns are sold at a small discount, clearly labeled.

Incidentally, would be nice to also have a good surplus and e-cycling store browsing adventure in town. But I guess the economics are difficult, when real estate is so expensive, and most of the few customers for unusual stuff are online. (That local hobbyists could save a lot of money on shipping cost of decommissioned corporate and lab gear, or make impulse purchases they wouldn't online, probably isn't enough, I'd guess.)
by gcanyon | 2025-05-30 23:58:41+00:00
> 30 years

That's...ridiculous. I'm a product manager, and AI is already chipping away at my job.

Two months ago I said to one of my devs, "Our dashboard here looks very bland. What if we had a more visual display of the pipeline statuses across the top of the screen?" He said he thought that was a good idea, and I went to lunch. I came back and started sketching up some ideas for how to lay out the statuses. I had barely gotten started with that when he called me over to show me what cursor had come up with when asked: it was better than what I was sketching, for sure.

We're (white collar work) going to be 90% automated in less than ten years, and I feel like I'm being conservative saying ten years.
by jorvi | 2025-05-30 23:59:29+00:00
It's pretty ironic that he first laudes macOS so much, disparages Linux for having strong NIH, but then hates on systemd which is heavily heavily inspired on macOS.

And yeah, I don't understand his hate on Flatpak unless he means the sandbox is too user-hostile. So many things break with Flatpaks, from native messaging hosts (think browser extension talking to desktop application) to theming to local folder access to pasting from the buffer.. it's quite a draconian sandbox.
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-31 00:01:24+00:00
I like the Mistral models. Not the smartest but I find them to have good conversation while being small, fast and efficient.

And the part I like the most is there is almost no censorship, at least not for the models I tried. For me, having an uncensored model is one of the most compelling reasons for running a LLM locally. Jailbreaks are a PITA and abliteration and other uncensoring fine-tunings tends to make models that have been made dumb by censorship even dumber.
by jongjong | 2025-05-31 00:02:34+00:00
I think the conclusion about software engineering having the potential of being both the first and last job to be automated by AI makes sense. It is an extremely unequal profession. The skill difference between a junior with 1 year of experience and a senior with 20 years of both diverse and deep experience (of relentless striving) is massive. They have very different capabilities. The level of software sophistication/complexity they can attain is very different. The code produced looks very different.

This is not a profession where you've figured it all out after 5 years and can rest on your laurels. I think it takes literally 15+ years for most highly determined and intelligent people to even approach that state where they can manage complexity effectively. Most people never seem to get there.
by lokar | 2025-05-31 00:03:26+00:00
It sucks that people are treated that way.

While working at Google I worked with many many amazing H1B (and other kinds) visa holders. I did 3 interviews a week, sat on hiring committees (reading 10-15 packets a week) and had a pretty good gauge of what we could find.

There was just no way I could see that we could replace these people with Americans. And they got paid top dollar and had the same wlb as everyone else (you could not generally tell what someone’s status was).
by LorenPechtel | 2025-05-31 00:05:17+00:00
We aren't in a position to answer this one one way or the other.

If things go very wrong they have the potential to take us out. But a non-nuclear WWIII could, also--not by direct kills but by taking down the interconnected stuff that makes society work.

Also, while they serve to prevent direct wars between major powers they cause proxy wars between the major powers.
by janalsncm | 2025-05-31 00:05:53+00:00
I don’t like this argument because 1) it doesn’t address the social consequences of rapid onset and large scale unemployment and 2) there is no law of nature that a job lost here creates a new job there.

On the first point, unemployment during the Great Depression was “only” 30%. And those people were eventually able to find other jobs. Here, we are talking about permanent unemployment for even larger numbers of people.

The Luddites were right. Machines did take their jobs. Those individuals who invested significantly in their craft were permanently disadvantaged. And those who fought against it were executed.

And on point 2, to be precise, a lack of jobs doesn’t mean a lack of problems. There are a ton of things society needs to have accomplished, and in a perfect world the guy who was automated out of packing Amazon boxes could open a daycare for low income parents. We just don’t have economic models to enable most of those things, and that’s only going to get worse.
by 3cats-in-a-coat | 2025-05-31 00:05:57+00:00
Everything, always, returns to a main event loop, even the actual hardware threads on your CPU. So JavaScript developers don't get a pass on this.

The problem is you keep creating async requests, they need to be stored somewhere, and that's in memory. Thread or no thread, it's in memory.

And backpressure is essential, yes. Except for basic tasks.

But there is another solution, which is coalescing requests. I.e. in my current project, I combine thousands of operations, each of which could've been its own async request, into a single "unit of work" which then results in a single async request, for all operations combined.

If we treat IO seriously, we won't just fire off requests into the dark by the hundreds. We'd think about it, and batch things together. This can be done manually, but it's best done at a lower level, so you don't have to think about it at the business logic level.
by westoncb | 2025-05-31 00:07:24+00:00
I was blown away by some debugging results I got from o3 early on and have been using it heavily since. The early results that caught my attention were from a couple cases where it tracked down some problematic cause through several indirect layers of effects in a way where you'd typically be tediously tracing step-by-step through a debugger. I think whatever's behind this capability has some overlap with really solid work it'll do in abstract system design, particularly in having it think through distant implications of design choices.
by aurizon | 2025-05-31 00:07:30+00:00
Right now, votes in both US houses have been made into a currency = cash via lobby, and also by offshore transfers, or even via bagmen. In the UK each party must vote as the party leader directs, or in a free vote where each person can choose freely. In the USA there is some degree of party voting, but this visible vote can be seen and the response to a lobbyist $$ or bagged $$ and the payor knows how he voted and can act to discipline the member of the house or senate. This is a degree of departure from democratic ideals. Yes, I know bribes are outlawed, but there are ways, quid-pro-quo actions. I wonder if there can be 2 votes, one by hand and the other secret, to give deniability and the member can vote his mind in the secret one. The secret one wins, and the show of hands is for show?
by gruez | 2025-05-31 00:07:37+00:00
>It's price discrimination in that different people have different tolerances for spending time and energy on hunting for deals.

I never argued it's not price discrimination. In fact I was arguing the opposite, that price discrimination is the same as "negotiation", and it's alive and well in modern times. It might not be "negotiation" in the sense there's two parties going back and forth, but the end goal of negotiation is price discrimination. If coupons and apps do the same thing, does the fact that you're not talking to a salesman really matter?
by lanstin | 2025-05-31 00:08:20+00:00
I was born in NC, and I mostly have experienced the large amount of immigration as a positive. Most of the people I grew up were virulently anti-intellectuals, mocking math and science learning, and most of them have gone on to be realtors and business folks, bankers even. All the people I've met from China or South Asia (the two demographics I work most closely worth) value learning and science and math - not as some "lets have STEM summer camps" but when they meet some new 8 year old will ask them to solve some math problems (like precisely 1 of my kids' dozens of relatives).

I enjoy meeting the very smart people from all sorts of backgrounds - they share the values of education and hard work that my parents emphasized, and they have an appreciation for what we enjoy as software engineers; US born folks tend to have a bit of entitlement, and want success without hard work.

I interview a fair number of people, and truly first rate minds are a limited resource - there's just so many in each city (and not everyone will want to or be able to move for a career). Even with "off-shoring" one finds after hiring in a given city for a while, it gets harder, and the efficient thing to do is to open a branch in a new city.

I don't know, perhaps the realtors from my class get more money than many scientists or engineers, and certainly more than my peers in India (whose salaries have gone from 10% of mine to about 40% of mine in the past decade or two), but the point is the real love of solving novel problems - in an industry where success leads to many novel problems.

Hard work, interesting problems, and building things that actual people use - these are the core value prop for software engineering as a career; the money is pretty new and not the core; finding people who share that perspective is priceless. Enough money to provide a good start to your children and help your family is good, but never the heart of the matter.
by nine_k | 2025-05-31 00:08:55+00:00
I suspect you can relatively easily obtain a completely deterministic machine by running QEMU in 100% emulation mode in one thread. But what you are after is controlled deterministic execution, and it's far harder. That is, making your multiple processes to follow a specific dance that triggers an interesting condition must be very involved, when seen from the level as low as CPU and OS scheduler. Hence a language-agnostic setup is hard to achieve and especially hard to make it do your bidding. It may drown you in irrelevant details.

I once built a much, much simpler thing that allowed to run multiple JVM threads in a particular kind of lockstep, by stubbing and controlling I/O operations and the advance of the system time. With that, I could run several asynchronously connected components in particular interaction patterns, including not just different thread activation order but also I/O failures, retries, etc. It was manageable, and it helped uncover a couple of nasty bugs before the code ever ran in prod.

But that was only possible because I went with drastic simplifications, controlling not the whole system but only particular synchronization points. It won't detect a generic data race where explicit synchronization would be just forgotten.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-05-31 00:09:39+00:00
Alright, this is it, this is the AI peak.

>Today we’re announcing Mechanize, a startup focused on developing virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data that will enable the full automation of the economy.

>Compensation

>$200K – $475K • 1% – 2%

Just imagine for a moment you are a software engineer capable of doing what they say, rivaling the raw intellectual capabilities of every mathematician, economist, and physicist known to man, and you end up actually building something that directly leads to automating the entire fucking economy of the world.

And there's still someone who says to you: "best I can do is only 1% - 2%"
by walterbell | 2025-05-31 00:10:43+00:00
Fry's Electronics discussion threads

"Demolishing the Fry's Electronics in Burbank", 100 comments (2025), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43677862

"Fry's Electronics is closing all stores", 300 comments (2021), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26246435

"Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?", 350 comments (2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945492

"The Fry's Era", 150 comments (2019), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20853834

Electronics Surplus Stores

"Sundown for Surplus" (2018), https://www.eham.net/article/41444

"End of an Era: Weird Stuff Warehouse closed" (2018), https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/08/sjm-l-weirdstuff-0408...
by al_borland | 2025-05-31 00:11:34+00:00
If the movie was really good (as implied by saying they people need to see it), I’d expect the initial batch to tell some friends, and then those people to tell some friends. Some organic growth at least in his local area where people are pushing him for more showing to show friends.

I don’t know what I was expected, but it was higher than 25 over 45 years.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-31 00:11:43+00:00
I do not believe that I even came close to breaking any rules or that I even went slightly off topic.

Of course I was "shitty", by not giving someone a pat on the back for their "hard work", simply because I think what they did is a waste of time and effort. Obviously I know that criticizing someone, who has put in significant work is very looked down upon.

This is also one of the reason I was flagged, the other wing people very invested in that hiring process for whatever reason taking issue with my position.

I do not mind a negative reaction to my comments, obviously I had to expect it. But my comment was on topic and it was flagged for going against the social convention of being generally supportive of people showcasing their work. If it makes me a "jerk" to point out that people have wasted their time on some stupid project, then so be it.
by BoingBoomTschak | 2025-05-31 00:11:50+00:00
What's your point? There's a lot to criticize about these libraries, but the fact remains that they're considered important and basically impossible to rewrite from scratch. Of course, Rust could get a rock solid portable GUI toolkit that doesn't rely on a webview (probably not much harder than wrapping Qt, to be honest), but it's not there yet.

I'm not in love with them or the abomination known as C++, if that's what you're implying.
Ask HN: How to stop iOS from including contact names in Autocorrect dictionary?
by chatmasta | 2025-05-31 00:12:20+00:00
I come to you out of desperation. Does anyone know if it’s possible to opt out of this incredibly annoying, potentially extremely awkward so-called feature? I don’t want my messages to mention some random person I met ten years ago just because their name is vaguely similar to some slang or technical jargon that isn’t in Apple’s weirdly limited dictionary.

I’ve tried all sorts of settings and cannot get rid of this. And I even reset my dictionary but I think this just made it worse because now it’s a blank slate without any of my custom words but with all of my contact names :(
by II2II | 2025-05-31 00:13:09+00:00
Like it or not, and I'm in the not category, most people conflate electronics with consumer electronics. It is just something we have to deal with.

That said, a big box computer retailer is worth something. For the most part, I've found that sales people know something about computers. Contrast that to general consumer electronics stores where sales people know nothing about everything. If you know what you want, they also tend to be better than smaller computer stores. In that case, you're basically paying someone to do mail order for you.
by quantadev | 2025-05-31 00:13:34+00:00
It's all about the quality of your prompts (i.e. your skill at writing clear unambiguous instructions with correct terminologies).

An experienced developer can generate tons of great code 30x faster with an Agent, with each function/module still being written using the least amount of code possible.

But you're right, the measure of good code isn't 'N', it's '1/N' (inverse), where N is number of lines of code to do something. The best code is [almost] always that with the least amount of lines, as long as you haven't sacrificed readability in order to remove lines, which I see a lot of juniors do. Rule of thumb is: "Least amount of easily understood LOC". If someone can't look at your code for the first time, and tell what it's doing, that's normally an indication it's not good code. Claude [almost] never breaks any of these rules.
by kelnos | 2025-05-31 00:14:25+00:00
I'm not that surprised, though 3-4 months does feel like a long time.

When I was at early Twilio (2011? 2012? ish), we would completely tear down our dev and staging environments every month (quarter? can't remember), and build them back up from scratch. That was everything, including databases (which would get restored from backup during the re-bring-up) and even the deployment infrastructure itself.

At that point we were still pretty small and didn't have a ton of services. Just bringing my product (Twilio Client) back up, plus some of the underlying voice services, took about 24 hours (spread across a few days). And the bits I handled were a) a small part of the whole, and b) some of the easier parts to bring up.

We stopped doing those teardowns sometime later in 2012, or perhaps 2013, because they started taking way too much time away from doing Actual Work. People can't get things done when the staging environment is down for more than a week. Over the following 10 years or so, Twilio's backend exploded in complexity, number of services, and the dependencies between those services.

I left Twilio in early 2022, and I wouldn't have been surprised if it would have taken several months to bring up Twilio (prod) from scratch at that point, though in their case it would be a situation where some products and features would be available earlier than others, so it's not really the same as an e-commerce site. And that was when I left; I'm sure complexity has increased further in the past 3 years.

Also consider that institutional knowledge matters too. I would guess that for all the services running at Twilio, the people who first brought up many (most?) of them are long gone. So I wouldn't be surprised if the people at M&S right now just have no idea how to bring up an e-commerce site like theirs from scratch, and have to learn as they go.
by tschwimmer | 2025-05-31 00:15:16+00:00
I am a "savvy shopper" and have no desire to buy components on Amazon anymore. Their stock co-mingling doesn't work for speciality computer components. I've received items marked as new that were clearly open box returns. I've received completely nonfunctional components. I've received the wrong item a few times. The component I've had the most success with are SSDs, but for anything beyond that I prefer to buy from brick and mortar because of their "curation." To be honest, it's a shame because the Amazon shopping experience is vastly superior but they send you crap, so it's unusable for this vertical. I still buy other junk from Amazon, but nothing that's particularly performance sensitive.
by martin-t | 2025-05-31 00:15:52+00:00
One of the dumbest things a smart person can do is work for an AI company.

At best they don't believe actual AI will be created and they are helping a scam.

At worst, they are actively working to make their own job redundant and when they're fired, they will own nothing of what they built. All the money from their work will go to the owners who fired them.
by arprocter | 2025-05-31 00:15:56+00:00
>When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.

Worth mentioning that they price match Amazon

I bought a CPU cooler there a few months back - the guy at checkout told me to pull up the Amazon listing on my phone so he could knock some cash off

https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/6-do-you-price...
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-31 00:17:47+00:00
It's not really any different to the limitations of memory that we have always dealt with, it just consumes it faster than we might expect. The techniques we use for ensuring we don't run out of memory also apply to anything that can make threads and we have to put limitations on how many can exist, especially since they consume quite a bit of memory even in their virtual thread variant.
by kouteiheika | 2025-05-31 00:17:59+00:00
> Most new research; sometimes a paper gets posted but most of the audience doesn't have enough background to evaluate the implications of things even if they're highly relevant. I've seen a lot of cutting edge stuff get overlooked because there weren't enough upvoters who understood what they were looking at.

Is there a good place for this? Currently I just regularly sift through all of the garbage myself on arxiv to find the good stuff, but it is somewhat of a pain to do.
by coppsilgold | 2025-05-31 00:18:03+00:00
SHA-256 PoW will probably work until it doesn't (if bots choose to invest in ASICs, or services that offer this pop up). Also users may be at a disadvantage as JS crypto would not be optimized for PoW (for example lack parallel crypto capabilities or context switching between calls).

One advantage a PoW "CAPTCHA" system holds is that the service operator can change the algorithm whenever they want. This may make an ASIC approach too risky to bother with. The JS<>ASM crypto bridge would nevertheless require some optimization from the browser developers.

Some cryptocurrencies which aim for ASIC resistance create PoW algorithms that would require re-implementation of a significant fraction of the the CPU die to be a viable ASIC attack vector. An example of that would be randomx[1]. Using it for in-browser PoW would require native support as it will not be competitive against the bots with just a JS or WASM implementation. A modification would need to be made to not be abused for crypto mining. This will also link the cost of the PoW solution to the opportunity cost of mining the respective cryptocurrency which is well understood.

[1] <https://github.com/tevador/RandomX>
by nitwit005 | 2025-05-31 00:18:12+00:00
Never before have I seen someone list a market size in the tens of trillions, as they do on their main page:

> The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.

https://www.mechanize.work/