MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yurishimo | 2025-05-16 19:39:49+00:00
How old were you when you first "learned" French? I've observed that kids/teenagers who aren't actually interested in learning the language retain just enough to pass their classes and then it all just drifts away. I was the same "learning" Spanish in high school in Texas.

Until I moved to a new country and _wanted_ to learn the language, I could barely remember how to ask where the toilet was. Now that I'm invested and interested, things are much more sticky.

I believe this is why much of the world has latched on to learning English. There is so much content available that people _want_ to consume, that it becomes a hobby they are actually interested in, rather than a chore. As more and more people learn English, it becomes a positive feedback loop of content creation that nearly the entire planet can participate in.
by Frost1x | 2025-05-16 19:39:51+00:00
The issue we have is allowing privatization to control currently critical aspects of modern society with limited to no oversight or public alternative. It’s not limited to banking, there are a lot of cases where private policy becomes the equivalent of law simply because they are necessary to function in daily life. In my mind, such critical services need to be called out and have public democratic policy oversight. On the one hand you become a victim of your own success: your private endeavor became so successful it became an essential part of daily life and you control most of the market.

In theory, competition between private entities allows people to “pick and choose” the set of policies they agree with, shopping around for their system of law. And in theory, competition will rise up and allow policy options for every case. In practice a lot of private businesses arrive at similar conclusions on policies that optimize their profitability and that optimization becomes what dictates policy, and then most competition duplicates or arrives at the same or similar consensus on policy. So, instead of being ruled by democratic policies, we get ruled by business profitability policies. Sometimes these are harmless, often times they’re not, so people suck it up and just accept them just like they do law in the land, even though one at least tries to be democratic.

So I definitely empathize with these crypto groups getting “debanked” on that front, even though I don’t agree with many of their business models in general.
by chrisdalke | 2025-05-16 19:39:57+00:00
I recently contributed this new plugin for Telegraf, Influx's open source telemetry agent.

This lets you collect metrics directly from a Mavlink stream, for example from an ArduPilot drone flight controller.

The end result is that you can now use standard telemetry pipeline tools - Telegraf, InfluxDB/VictoriaMetrics/TimescaleDB, and Grafana - to visualize livestreaming and historical data from drones.

I've been using this for the past few months professionally and it's been awesome to be able to use Grafana's graphing capabilities to plot things like vehicle speed, energy consumption, etc.
by kevmo314 | 2025-05-16 19:40:12+00:00
> The way you make code last a long time is you minimize dependencies that are likely to change and, to the extent you must take such dependencies, you minimize the contact surface between your program and those dependencies.

A lot of value is driven from those dependencies though. Zapier as a pointed example: Zapier sans dependencies is ... well I don't even know. So sure, you could avoid dependencies at all cost, but at some point you might end up deleting the reason someone else wants to use your code in the first place.

Of course, if you're writing code only for yourself that will totally work, but most professional software engineers are not -- it's a balance and it's not fair to say all they have to do is stop writing glue code.
by jonplackett | 2025-05-16 19:40:31+00:00
I’m so so glad at the end it said “Written entirely by a human” because all the way through I was thinking - absolutely no way does AI come up with great ideas or insights and it definitely would not write this article- it holds together and flows too well (if this turns out to be the joke I’ll admit we’re all now fucked)

Having said that I am very worried about kids growing up with AI and it stunting their critical thinking before it begins - but as of right this moment AI is extremely sub par at genuinely good ideas or writing.

It’s an amazing and useful tool I use all the time though and would struggle to be without.
by grishka | 2025-05-16 19:40:47+00:00
Our civilization desperately needs a way to modify modern microelectronics at home or at least in a well-equipped repair shop.

Regular people being able to commit contempt of companies' business models en masse seems to work well to keep them in check, but it's becoming ever harder with so much of everything becoming mobile-centric. And with all smartphones being locked down at the level of someone else's public keys being burned into the SoC at the factory, you can't do shit. They literally have technological supremacy over the rest of the humanity. And we're somehow okay with that.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-16 19:40:51+00:00
I still don't understand how anyone expects "sanctioned lists" to actually work. The same logic applies to the wallet of the exchange you might use if you were using an intermediary. A sender doesn't need the recipient's permission to transfer funds and wallet addresses containing funds are all public.

If $0.0001 in tainted funds can taint a wallet containing a billion dollars then everything will end up tainted immediately, whether a result of trolls or just funds being transferred by ordinary users in jurisdictions that don't enforce the same sanctions. But if nothing is tainted because everything is then the sanctions are meaningless because someone with sanctioned funds would just deposit them at a major exchange in a foreign jurisdiction and then withdraw them again as untainted funds.
by sarchertech | 2025-05-16 19:41:30+00:00
40 years ago about 2/3 of Ukraine were native speakers of Ukrainian and primarily spoke Ukrainian at home (close to the same number as today).

A little over 1% of Mexicans speak Náhuatl (the most common indigenous language).

There is no comparison here.

If by decolonize you just mean stop oppressing minority cultures and languages then that sounds great. But decolonization is the wrong word for that.
by neilv | 2025-05-16 19:41:54+00:00
My impression is that some banking services are pretty important, and that it's in the public interest to have available to everyone.

If a regulated banking industry isn't required to provide some set of basics to all legal citizens&residents and legal businesses, then maybe the govenment has to arrange banking of last resort?

Or, if the regulated industry is the only option, where there's higher risks or costs associated with some businesses, is there a fair way to price that in, or mitigate?

For example, let's say an industry category tends to have a problem with excessive CC chargebacks that are due to dishonest customers scamming. Maybe charge the business something like the actual costs to provide all those chargebacks, but don't cut them off. And/or be less permissive towards serial-chargeback cardholders.

But in any case, let a legal business in the country accept the primary means of payment in the country. And have protections of society, like not being known as needing to keep a life-threatening amount of cash on-site at a small business.

(BTW, I personally disapprove of a lot of the kinds of businesses that I've heard complain about debanking, but as long as they're legal businesses, I think they're entitled to various basics of safe and orderly society. A little bit like, "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," though I wouldn't go quite that far on this one.)
by tutanosh | 2025-05-16 19:42:00+00:00
I used to feel the same way about AI, but my perspective has completely changed.

The key is to treat AI as a tool, not as a magic wand that will do everything for you.

Even if AI could handle every task, leaning on it that way would mean surrendering control of your own life—and that’s never healthy.

What works for me is keeping responsibility for the big picture—what I want to achieve and how all the pieces fit together—while using AI for well-defined tasks. That way I stay fully in control, and it’s a lot more fun this way too.
by alnwlsn | 2025-05-16 19:42:04+00:00
One thing that was once lost on me is that in the pre-calculator world, it wasn't just "here's a slide rule, sorry, calculators haven't been invented yet". There was a whole variety of mathematical instruments to help you do different calculations: nomegrams, planimeters, derivimiters, and more.

Want to evaluate an integral? Plot it down on some paper, then cut the paper out and weigh it.

My go-to youtube channel for this stuff is Chris Staecker, who has a lot of these oddball math things and a bunch of mechanical calculators, too. https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisStaecker/videos
by lispisok | 2025-05-16 19:42:14+00:00
A lot of people are deeply invested in these things being better than they really are. From the OpenAI's and Google's spending $100s of billions EACH developing LLMs to VC backed startups promising their "AI agent" can replace entire teams of white collar employees. That's why your experience matches mine and every other developer I personally know but you see comments everywhere making much grander claims.
by palmotea | 2025-05-16 19:42:19+00:00
> IF you're a:

> * 1 year JS (react, nextjs, etc.) dev

> * start mostly from scratch on new ideas

> * have little prior IDE preference

> * have high tolerance for bugs and just want to ship and try stuff

> THEN: LLMs will to 10x you. An IDE like Cursor will immediately make you way faster.

And also probably dead-end you, and you'll stay the bug-tolerate 1 year JS dev for the next 10 years of your career.

It's like eating your seed corn. Sure you'll be fat and have it easy for a little while, but then next year...
by jmyeet | 2025-05-16 19:42:37+00:00
Not a lawyer but I went through exactly this route back in the Obama administration so it may have changed. But even then there were questions about whether you could file an I-485 while on what was technically a nonimmigrant intent temporary visa (this includes E3 and TN). There were a lot of people who said it wasn't possible. Those people were wrong.

Here's how I approached it: when my PERM was approved, I immediately went and renewed my E#. This required a trip out of the country. I went back to Australia. My employer was amenable. This was to avoid being out of status or needing a renewal when my I-485 was pending.

One thing to note is that the application for the E-3 doesn't ask you "do you intend to immigrate?". It asks "Have you filed an I-485?" and at that point I could truthfully answer no because I hadn't.

I arrived back in the US and almost immediately filed the I-140 and I-485 concurrently.and applied for EAD and Advanced Parole. Those arrived within a few months.

The only wart was USCIS asked me to file an extra form giving up my diplomatic rights because other E visas are for diplomats. My lawyer said this really wasn't necessary but the best path was simply to give it to them. I think I got my green card after 8 months.
by taylorallred | 2025-05-16 19:43:12+00:00
This seems like another case where jblow's opinions are guided by his experience as a game dev. Games can be "finished" and never touched again. I think I mostly agree with him that software could be made to be timeless to some degree. But, in the world of web apps and saas, the culture is to offload much of the work to third party libraries/APIs which locks you into a never-ending cycle of dependency management. I don't know if this culture is totally necessary (maybe to ship fast and keep up with security updates?), but in a world where users expect software to be constantly improving you can't expect anything to be "done". Maybe you could get close if you built everything in-house, but even still you have to keep up with security flaws.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-16 19:43:29+00:00
You mean to say, it IS the government's duty to ensure that every citizen can participate in trade and ... in the country.

The US (feds or states) do not do this, by not providing bank accounts for everybody.

A number of European countries, though certainly not all of them, do that: they have a state-owned enterprise provide "bank accounts of last resort", like the post office. If you want one, even if you're on death row, you can open one. These bank accounts suck, just to be clear, but they do provide a means to get paid and transfer money for, for example, paying your taxes.
by hintymad | 2025-05-16 19:43:34+00:00
> And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc),

Java's tools are really top notch. Using IntelliJ for Java feels a whole new different world from using IDEs for other languages.

Speaking of Go, does anyone know why Go community is not hot on developing containers for concurrent data structures? I see Mutex this and lock that scattering in Go code, while in Java community the #1 advice on writing concurrency code is to use Java's amazing containers. Sometimes, I do miss the java.util.concurrent and JCTools.
Ask HN: Our only salesperson was working for a competitor. Advice?
by betrayawayed555 | 2025-05-16 19:43:58+00:00
We recently discovered that our sole sales employee - a remote, highly trusted team member - had been secretly working with a competitor for over 16 months, possibly longer, potentially spanning their entire tenure with us. This was all while under a full-time employment agreement with a non-compete clause (covering both during and post-employment).

We’re a small Canadian B2B SaaS company (< 20 people), incorporated in one province, with this employee based in another. They attended trade shows representing the competitor (while claiming they were there on our behalf or calling in sick). They serviced inbound leads for the competitor during our workday, likely used our ZoomInfo subscription for their benefit, and were in a position to divert leads without our knowledge. The list goes on.

We were genuinely on good terms - we liked them, trusted them, and thought we had a solid relationship. The only concerns were performance-related, which we had chalked up to market conditions.

As we were preparing to let them go, they caught wind and rage-quit, with claims of harassment and constructive dismissal.

Fellow founders: What would you do? Move on? Investigate further? Settle? Escalate? Have you dealt with a trusted employee quietly working for a competitor?
by Daishiman | 2025-05-16 19:44:36+00:00
> P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.

Most of the waking hours of most creative work have this type of drudgery. Professional painters and designers spend most of their time replicating ideas that are well fleshed-out. Musicians spend most of their time rehearsing existing compositions.

There is a point to be made that these repetitive tasks are a prerequisite to come up with creative ideas.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-16 19:44:41+00:00
No it was me who misunderstood you. And I kind of agree. I've never been a fan of tagged template literals. It gives you no autocompletion, no type checking, no syntax highlighting, nothing. And it requires a runtime string parser. I get why people like it, and maybe it's fine if you don't need those things and don't mind the cost of runtime parsing, but I need them and I do mind.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-16 19:44:52+00:00
As I see it, it's actually the only safe bet.

Case 1: you keep training engineers.

Case 1.1: AGI soon, you don't need juniors or seniors besides a very few. You cost yourself a ton of money that competitors can reinvest into R&D, use to undercut your prices, or return to keep their investors happy.

Case 1.2: No AGI. Wages rise, a lot. You must remain in line with that to avoid losing those engineers you trained.

Case 2: You quit training juniors and let AI do the work.

Case 2.1: AGI soon, you have saved yourself a bundle of cash and remain mostly in in line with the market.

Case 2.2: no AGI, you are in the same bidding war for talent as everyone else, the same place you'd have been were you to have spent all that cash to train engineers. You now have a juicier balance sheet with which to enter this bidding war.

The only way out of this, you can probably see, is some sort of external co-ordination, as is the case with most of these situations. The high-EV move is to quit training juniors, by a mile, independently of whether AI can replace senior devs in a decade.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-05-16 19:44:52+00:00
This is part of the Canadian border control in my experience; i.e.

- Arrive in Pearson

- go to passport control, scan passport at kiosk, kiosk spits out receipt

- you flash receipt to a border officer at the stairs out of passport control

- go to baggage claim

- get bags

- go to customs

- hand passport with receipt to officer at customs

- welcome to Canada

I haven't had that experience when leaving other countries bound for the US; like GP said, I've had to show my passport to the airline to board, but I believe that's to fulfill the requirement that they made good-faith effort to ensure I'm capable of entering the US.
by bachittle | 2025-05-16 19:45:22+00:00
The article mentions that spell and grammar checking AI was used to help form the article. I think there is a spectrum here, with spell and grammar checking on one end, and the fears the article mentions on the other end (AI replacing our necessity to think). If we had a dial to manually adjust what AI works on, this may help solve the problems mentioned here. The issue is that all the AI companies are trying too hard to achieve AGI, and thus making the interfaces general and without controls like this.
by colechristensen | 2025-05-16 19:45:54+00:00
The grandson of Alfred Nobel's older brother complained publicly 20 years ago... about a prize that's been given now for nearly 60 years.

Yawn.

Distant relation of man who used his fortune making explosives to give a prize to prominent academic unhappy, complains. The foundation got to make the decision, was given the name. This is "old man yells at cloud" level of discourse. This distant relation has less of a right to say how the name gets to be used than the foundation created by the man.
by RhysabOweyn | 2025-05-16 19:46:11+00:00
If you have the means/opportunity to go back to school and do another profession that you have interest in, I recommend it. That is precisely what I did with my SWE earnings. Take it slow though, I breezed through a harder degree plan my first time around college and proceeded to do much worse at the start when I went back. I had to be realistic and take a lighter course load.
by aquafox | 2025-05-16 19:46:12+00:00
I had similar issues in the past. Setting up renv, everything seems good, but after working in a project for a few weeks and installing packages, renv constantly complains about the library being out-of-sync and resolving these complaints took way longer than new ones came around. I think renv has good intentions, but there are just too many edge cases (Bioconductor, installing an experimental package from Github, weird package dependencies etc.), that it always failed me in a real-world scenario.
by j45 | 2025-05-16 19:46:52+00:00
Your example of Zapier dependence resonates - being sure to put a simple layer between your code and Zapier is the critical component.

The code makes the same call to a Zapier type command but it could be routed to Zapier today, and somewhere else in the future.

This can take a nominal amount of time longer than integrating Zapier directly.

It could be a couple more tables to setup and manage, or it can be done in the code somewhere.
by grishka | 2025-05-16 19:47:36+00:00
That's different. Lithography masks are expensive. It's cheaper to make them once and use them for different models of the same chip than to make a separate set for each model. My understanding is that in this particular case they would sell the FPU-less version below the cost and the full one with some markup.

In modern times they also do this because the process of semiconductor manufacturing is imperfect and sometimes some parts of the chip would come out damaged. IIRC this happens with GPUs a lot so they tend to have spare cores.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-16 19:47:50+00:00
Why do you think the TN is not a work visa? The US State Department website literally refers to it as "the TN visa", https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/employme... :

> The nonimmigrant USMCA Professional (TN) visa allows eligible citizens of Canada and Mexico to work in the United States as USMCA professionals in prearranged professional level business activities for U.S. or foreign employers.
by panick21_ | 2025-05-16 19:48:04+00:00
Its because the claim that many cynical people have where everything always gets worse are simply wrong. Quality matters very much for a lot of products and the results clearly show this. Apple provided something people liked and people bought it, are happy with it and buy it again. I'm myself am not a big fan but I can understand it, and it has a certain quality.

I simply don't understand how people can live in the real world, look around themselves and claim quality is getting worse. This is simply not the case for 99% of product I have consumed over my few decades of being an adult.

A typical day. I get up, mattress I have now is better. I brush my teeth with a powerful electric toothbrush that is much superior then the once a decade ago. I use a amazing induction stove that is far better then what I had a decade ago. I ride a beautiful electric bus to the train station. From there I take modern fast train to work, much better and faster then 10-20 years ago. I set on my desk that goes up and down, has a insanely large beautiful monitor on it, incredible. I turn on my laptop that 100x more powerful then my first one. I start a IDE that is much better then what I had when I started. I use a programming language better then the one I used when I started, and I have a much larger library ecosystem. I spin up VM and containers, both locally and if I need in a waste internet cloud. I go for launch, I have like 20 options, food from one end of the globe to the the other, much better then I had 20 years ago.

I could go on about almost every single product I tough on typical day. The only thing that is actually not much better are things like backed goods, and mostly because they were already amazing. At most its now faster to buy them and I can buy them at more places.

I really don't why so many people inhere are crying about how everything is getting worse all the time.