MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-13 20:31:06+00:00
Chrome OS allowed this even before 2020. So you could open Linux (even GUI) and android app right next to each other... Had whole JS dev workflow/toolchain running on that ( did not want to clog my main computer with that ). Problem with mixing apps is that for some you have to use mouse/ stylus because their GUI was not meant to be touched.
by stego-tech | 2025-05-13 20:31:09+00:00
I think a lot of folks are missing the forest for the trees, here. OP is (presumably) a competent professional who has fallen on hard times despite record growth of the private enterprise and their immense profits. Their story is not unique, and Microsoft is adding another seven thousand bodies to the pile alone this week.

The fundamental problem is, as the OP gets at towards the end, what happens when a society built upon the trade of time and labor for income to provide for one’s needs, meets innovations that threaten to wholesale eliminate vast swaths of labor, permanently. A society that demands labor for survival, against corporations that demand growth at all costs, inevitably creates a zero-sum conflict between the working class and the Capitalist classes.

Workers, desperate to survive in a society hostile to the under or unemployed (and increasingly hostile to the presently employed), will continue to resort to more desperate means over time and as their numbers grow. This is an inevitability bore out through history time and time again, OP is just joining the chorus of voices warning that we are rapidly approaching such an inflection point if we continue soldiering onward “as-is”.
by perihelions | 2025-05-13 20:31:36+00:00
- "Venetian"

That one means "having to do with Venice". Of Venus would be "Venusian", "Venereal" (yes, really), or "Cytherean". Or, one of a dozen others—it's a Greek god-name; there's millennia of culture to drawn on.

There's an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to this adjective question,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytherean
by cletus | 2025-05-13 20:32:19+00:00
The key part here is "machine utilization" and absolutely there was a ton of effort put into this. I think before my time servers were allocated to projects but even early on in my time at Google Borg had already adopted shared machine usage and therew was a whole system of resource quota implemented via cgroups.

Likewise there have been many optimization projects and they used to call these out at TGIF. No idea if they still do. One I remember was reducing the health checks via UDP for Stubby and given that every single Google product extensively uses Stubby then even a small (5%? I forget) reduction in UDP traffic amounted to 50,000+ cores, which is (and was) absolutely worth doing.

I wouldn't even put latency in the same category as "performance optimization" because often you decrease latency by increasing resource usage. For example, you may send duplicate RPCs and wait for the fastest to reply. That could be double or tripling effort.
by itishappy | 2025-05-13 20:32:46+00:00
I don't think `helix-editor` is even on crates.io, just placeholders.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/7038

That being said, when I saw `helix-db` I was thrown too. "What's a text editor doing writing a vector-graph database, I thought they were working on plugins?"
by harmmonica | 2025-05-13 20:33:01+00:00
Good point. I shouldn't have said more with less. I should've said Twitter lost 80% of its employees and somehow still exists (I thought it was "only" 50%). 80% is nuts. That said, if 100% of those reductions were outside of engineering (they weren't, I realize) then I'd mostly agree with your point. But I do think that even in that case it would cause every other company to ask some hard questions about staffing that could lead to layoffs and/or have implications for hiring.

All feels on my part just to hopefully add to the dialogue. Nothing scientific here.
by mattlondon | 2025-05-13 20:33:17+00:00
> I even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work, which is an absolute red line for me.

With respect, that is a red flag for me and would indicate a bit of an "attitude problem" if I was interviewing or reviewing applications and this was mentioned. If going to the office - something absolutely normal and expected of any desk worker - is a "red line" for you and you let potential employers know that, then frankly I am not surprised people are not biting. Yes we all had a good ride over COVID but the trend (whether people like it or not) is for the bosses to want everyone back in the office.

I would respectfully suggest you suck it up, don't make a deal of it in your resume/CV or interview, and accept that you'll be badging through the turn-style 5 days a week along with everyone else and don't expect special treatment.

Good luck.
by joshmarlow | 2025-05-13 20:33:24+00:00
To your point - we do have some chokepoints in supply chains here and there but I often wonder how much of that is due to the learning curve. As in, things are centralized because just how we as a civilization learned to build things in our particular historical context - if the context changes and the knowledge and resources are there to rebuild in a different way, we can.

Relatedly - a lot of things seem intrinsically capital intensive, but how much of that is due to the fact that we had large pools of capital when we learned to do those things?
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-13 20:33:44+00:00
Smuggled Dutch tea was something like 80% of the tea on the market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

> Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.

That's not the case for cigarettes. If it were anything like that percentage, you can bet the Feds would care more.
by JohnMakin | 2025-05-13 20:33:56+00:00
This has slowed down as I've gained experience but basically I am always volunteering to work on stuff I only have a shaky understanding of or never have done before. If I'm not doing new things on a job for ~1 year or more I get extremely uncomfortable, or start learning on my own. People call it "resume building" but I usually work for small skeleton teams where there's a ton of work available for someone that just volunteers to do it. That was basically how I crawled into my terraform/IAC niche, I was on a team where that was needed, they weren't going to hire, and no one else volunteered to take it on.
by gethly | 2025-05-13 20:34:25+00:00
I'm looking for that huge fight next year between Odin, Zig and Jai :)

Odin will be hopefully finally specced. Jai will be finally out in public in a stable version. And Zig will be still at 0.x, but usable.

Three will enter, but only one will be the victor.
by smusamashah | 2025-05-13 20:34:27+00:00
Scrcpy recently added support for Virtual Display. This allows connecting your phone at any resolution e.g. 1920x1080. But vanilla android by default does not have a taskbar in that mode.

What's strange is that vanilla OS does show a taskbar (tablet mode) if you increase DPI to 600+. Theoretically you can get a taskbar now only if tablet mode taskbar could show up in secondary virtual displays.

https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/blob/master/doc/virtual...

https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/issues/6032
by elteto | 2025-05-13 20:34:58+00:00
Because the writing is sort of on the wall for airbnb's current business model. Local regulations are finally catching up to them, limiting new listings or applying the same taxes and fees applied to regular hotels. And airbnb's are not cheaper anymore, and many times not any more convenient than a hotel, due crappy hosts and their excessive fees and regulations.

Airbnb is still a great option if the location is under served by normal hotels, or if you are traveling with families so you want to have a kitchen/amenities. But otherwise I almost exclusively book hotels now.
by decimalenough | 2025-05-13 20:35:27+00:00
Not mentioned is one more part of the battle: toddy is considered a low-class drink for rowdy workers, and tightly regulated accordingly. This guy has been battling Singaporean bureaucracy for six years now just to be allowed to import it from neighboring Malaysia:

https://www.ricemedia.co/one-mans-quest-to-revive-toddy-the-...
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-13 20:35:45+00:00
Given how much of a downgrade the last visual refresh was (Android 12 I think?), this is news I do not welcome. Anyone else remember the lock screen being a giant two line clock with no way to customize it, or the way the settings buttons got way bigger for no good reason? It was awful. I don't look forward to seeing what they will screw up this time.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-13 20:35:47+00:00
These updates mean that you are no longer running a mainline kernel, but an Ubuntu fork with whatever backports and hardware enablement (and new bugs!) this might introduce. This is also true for other software.

LTS does not mean you get all updates, it only means you get to drag your feet for longer with random bugfixes. Only the latest release has updates.
by noleary | 2025-05-13 20:35:52+00:00
> I don’t think anyone considers a bank account “low-risk.” Yet here we are, still relying on SMS as the default, and sometimes only, 2FA option

> Passkeys (FIDO2/WebAuthn): Phishing-resistant, device-based login using biometrics. Excellent UX and security.

In response to the complaints about SMS MFA, yeah, it has its issues (we don't even support it in our auth software) but it's not totally indefensible. It makes it much, much easier to push MFA.

When I talk to end users about auth flows, they almost invariably complain about MFA. People hate MFA. They will avoid it if they can. With that in mind, while SMS 2FA has problems, we should recognize that it's minimally disruptive to users. It's familiar. People understand how it works. In this sense, it has major advantages over alternatives.

People really don't understand passkeys. I even meet professional software developers fairly often who -- at least to their knowledge -- have never used passkeys. It will take a very long time before this is well-understood by the average consumer.

Lots of people complain about TOTPs too. Downloading authenticator apps sucks and is confusing to many people. Even sending codes to people's email addresses causes problems; many people have several email addresses for which they forget passwords routinely. By contrast, mostly everyone has no problem opening a text message on their phone (which is pretty much always within reach).

We can't design software for the way we hope users will behave (e.g., telling people just use a password manager). Especially if you're making mass market consumer software, you really have to meet people where they are.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-13 20:36:30+00:00
As someone that sees the employee-employer relationship as inherently adversarial, you are correct. I normally say that I am never loyal to corporations, but I can be loyal to people when they earn my loyalty.

I job-hopped mercilessly to a better paycheck in my career, and I would keep doing it had I not found myself in a company I happen to enjoy working at. My manager does not micromanage me but is always very aware of what I am doing, mostly because he is a very competent developer himself. I get treated as a responsible adult - I can work remote without any suspicion that I am not doing my job, and in response I act as an adult, putting some effort to match the freedom I am given.

From time to time I get reached out by recruiters, and I can't find motivation to job hop again because, well, I might not find an environment that treats me as an adult, especially as I keep reading how so many managers are insecure as hell about their employees.

Never thought I'd say that, but in the end there is a bit more to work than the cash that trickles to my bank account by the end of the month.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-13 20:36:33+00:00
That's fine if you don't trust the title of this proposal, or this researcher, but that's why you're not in charge of funding science. Typically people who are in charge of funding science reserve their opinions about the efficacy of something until after actually reading the details of the proposal.

All I know from our several back and forths is that you don't like the term latinx and some other people don't, and therefore this proposal, of which you cannot even articulate the details, is a priori defacto harmful. If that's all you have than I think I've learned all I can from exchange.

> people feel they have to insert coded language for white academic elites

Assumed; there's no proof that happened here. You're inventing the genesis of this proposal in your mind.

> this very complex social issue.

Agreed, and that's why we shouldn't draw conclusions (like "they actively seek to destroy other people's cultures and languages") from a single word or a title, and why we usually rely on panels of domain experts who understand the nuance to fund such complex social research. Which is what happened in this case.
by sargstuff | 2025-05-13 20:36:36+00:00
excel web scraping[0] (vs. using python[1] and/or odbc/delimited files)

A few 2025 use cases [2],[3]:

Use publically available database information (construction, taxes, sales, traffic report, proposed building/zone changes, etc) to find out what's going on withing an area aka. zip code, housing area, 'vacation spot', etc

----

creative take on topic: modern looming / static 'threaded' approach : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977384 Structurally reprogrammable magnetic maetamaterials hold promise for biomedicine, soft robotics. ("web" support formed via scraping material in relevant patterns) : https://techxplore.com/news/2025-05-reprogrammable-magnetic-metamaterials-biomedicine-soft.html 3d printed smart-fabrics : https://techxplore.com/news/2025-05-d-smart-fabrics-flexibility-ability.html

----

[0] : excel scraping : https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=6coVzIt93vk

[1] : python scraping : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo8-nEuDBkk

[2] : https://dataforest.ai/blog/top-web-scraping-use-cases

[3] : https://www.parsehub.com/blog/web-scraping-examples/
by kotaKat | 2025-05-13 20:37:06+00:00
We keep making the screens bigger to make the interfaces even more dumbed down and stupid.

Are we in Idiocracy at this point or what, Google?

Some of you fuckers need to go pick back up The Zen of Palm and re-read it because y'all have no idea what you're shipping these days in comparison.

https://archive.org/details/zen-of-palm
by jcadam | 2025-05-13 20:37:24+00:00
It's not just software -- My wife owns a restaurant. Operating a restaurant you quickly learn the sad fact that quality is just not that important to your success.

We're still trying to figure out the marketing. I'm convinced the high failure rate of restaurants is due largely to founders who know how to make good food and think their culinary skills plus word-of-mouth will get them sales.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-05-13 20:38:16+00:00
> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.

Hmmm... At a very high altitude extinction-level events have sufficiently sharp edges. But, as we get closer to things it becomes fuzzy. For examples: The Black Death (1347-1351), The Spanish Flu (1918-1919), The Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852), each one of these events were extinction-level events for those in the middle of them. What year would you have selected to self terminate? Remember you would not have hindsight or knowledge that the events are temporary.
by lupusreal | 2025-05-13 20:38:22+00:00
The Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars almost 30 years before NASA. Unfortunately the lander it was tethered to, Mars 3, stopped communicating about two minutes after landing so the rover didn't get a chance to go into action.

Anyway, the Soviet Union's relative lack of success with Mars wasn't really for lack of trying. Space is hard.
by corysama | 2025-05-13 20:39:39+00:00
Also, "Evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents a good chunk of dementia cases"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36083620

has recently been in the news again

"Study strengthens link between shingles vaccine and lower dementia risk"

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/03/shingles-vacc...
by arghwhat | 2025-05-13 20:40:00+00:00
The problem is that it's downstream backports and hardware enablement - you're running an old forked artisinal kernel maintained by Canonical, you will only get bugfixes if known to be severe enough to be flagged, and all this patching deviates it from mainline and can itself introduce new security vulnerabilities not present in mainline.

This differs from an actual later release which is closer to mainline and includes all newer fixes, including ones that are important but weren't flagged, and with less risk of having new downstream bugs.

If you're going to fight pedantism by being pedantic, better be the right kind of pedantic. ;)
by arp242 | 2025-05-13 20:40:11+00:00
> I'd add, to some extent conspiracy theorists keep government and industry honest

No one claims conspiracies never happen, but what conspiracy theorists bang on about is mostly just noise. If anything, conspiracy theories make easier for people to hide actual conspiracies, because there's just so much nonsense to filter out. This is true across the board: e.g. Q-Anon makes tracking down ACTUAL child sex trafficking harder.

Or: if I wanted to keep children in a sex dungeon then I'd do it in a pizza restaurant. And if I wanted to keep something secret but is on the verge of being found out, then I'd leak it to a known bullshitter (Alex Jones, David Icke, Trump-adjacent people, etc.) first and they'll mix in all sorts of bollocks and just confuse everything.
by hermitShell | 2025-05-13 20:40:27+00:00
Yeah we’re not likely to ever face such a situation and still even need that many computers. It’s an interesting project though in the sense that someone has a 32 bit OS running on every ISA out there (or even aims to).

Interesting but not practical. CPUs are either 64 bit and have memory management hardware or 32 bit and don’t. This dictates whether you have lots of addressable RAM or not, and changes what an OS is for that CPU
by kmoser | 2025-05-13 20:40:36+00:00
From Wikipedia: "A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

Example: Boss #1 has an irrational fear of short deadlines, so you meet with them ahead of time to assuage them that the deadline may seem short to them but it's actually quite normal because [reasons]. Boss #2 likes lead devs who keep their opinions to themselves, but your lead dev on the project is known to give unsolicited advice, so you meet with Boss #2 and tell them you'll try to switch to another lead dev after the project gets underway.
by shawnfrompdx | 2025-05-13 20:40:48+00:00
i get where you are coming from. i tried 5 versions of my resume in the last year. talking to recruiters. shotgunning resumes. hand crafting one-off cover letters. I have tried many approaches. you can guage my resume for yourself. the current strategy is to pander to people who are mainly looking for ai-dev skills https://shawnfromportland.com/Shawn_K_Resume_2025-4.pdf
by yardie | 2025-05-13 20:40:53+00:00
As a generalist "master of none" who also graduated from the same era, this is really reassuring. I use a lot of technologies but not enough to consider myself an expert in any of them. At the end of the day I can pipeline them into a useful tool or product.

I also recognize when AI is getting the answers wrong. LLMs are great at giving you general, well documented answers. For the moment it doesn't have the foresight to tackle complex systems. And that is where a specialist can really shine. But the world doesn't need a lot of answers to complex problems when most of the time a general one will do.
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-13 20:41:44+00:00
Can consumers get AI insurance that covers eating a pizza with glue on it, or eating a rock?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/05/31/google-ai-...

How about MAGA insurance that covers injecting disinfectant, or eating horse dewormer pills, or voting for tariffs?
by keeda | 2025-05-13 20:42:16+00:00
Yes, that was the turning point. You have to remember, in addition to the end of ZIRP this also happened after a few years of an extremely strong employee's market. Jobseekers were asking for and getting some pretty wild packages.

Elon's actions were a clear signal to the industry and investors that it's time to "fight back" and show the labor market who's really in charge.
by hiatus | 2025-05-13 20:42:26+00:00
Because look at what happens when the government thinks you don't care enough about money laundering. TD Bank recently got hit with a $3 billion fine.

> More than 90% of transactions went unmonitored between January 2018 to April 2024, which “enabled three money laundering networks to collectively transfer more than $670 million through TD Bank accounts,” according to a legal filing.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/10/investing/td-bank-settlem...
by Const-me | 2025-05-13 20:43:12+00:00
> it is possible to make C code run quickly but only by spending thousands of person-years building a sufficiently smart compiler

Just because some of the C++ code I write heavily relies on ISA-specific SIMD intrinsics doesn’t replace the language with some other one, it’s remains to be C++. Compared to solving the general problem by making a sufficiently smart automatically vectorizing C compiler, learning SIMD intrinsics is way more manageable.

BTW, a few years ago I wrote an article about SSE 1-4 and AVX 1-2 ISA extensions, as exposed to C and C++ languages: http://const.me/articles/simd/simd.pdf
by layer8 | 2025-05-13 20:43:23+00:00
The way identity providers are supposed to work is to not necessarily divulge your identity, but properties necessary for the respective service. For example, they can attest that you are an adult and a citizen of $country, but don’t need to disclose any further information. When using an identity provider with a third-party service, the attested attributes are displayed to the user to approve their disclosure. This is a bit like app permissions, where you can specify which app should be able to have which permission.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-13 20:43:34+00:00
166MHz pentium with 128MB (not a typo, kids!) of memory felt luxuriously snappy and spacious, including with tabbed web browsing in Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox… running BeOS or QNX-Photon. Not so much under Linux or Windows.

Not so far removed from a multi-CPU Pentium at 90 or 100MHz, from the very early Pentium days.

I guess what I had in mind was first-gen Pentiums. They’re solidly in the first half of the ‘90s but “early 90s” does cover a broader period, and yeah, 486 wouldn’t quite cut it. They’re the oldest machines I can recall multitasking very comfortably on… given the right software.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-13 20:44:08+00:00
Those were all local events.

The only thing removing mankind's ability to make computers is a large (Chicxulub-ish-sized) meteor strike or andromeda-strain-like sci-fi story made real.

Luckily, I'll be killed by tidal waves if a meteor hits the Atlantic and I'll be killed in the firestorm if it hits land anywhere on Earth.

If it hits the Pacific or Indian oceans, it depends on the size. If large enough, I'll shoot myself in the head to avoid starvation after playing a few rounds of solitare.