MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kristopolous | 2025-05-28 01:35:29+00:00
I've got a nice tool as well

https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp/blob/main/Snoopers/wtf

I've thought about redoing it because my needs are things like

$ ls | wtf which endpoints do these things talk to, give me a map and line numbers.

What this will eventually be is "ai-grep" built transparently on https://ast-grep.github.io/ where the llm writes the complicated query (these coding agents all seem to use ripgrep but this works better)

Conceptual grep is what I've wanted my while life

Semantic routing, which I alluded to above, could get this to work progressively so you quickly get adequate results which then pareto their way up as the token count increases.

Really you'd like some tampering, like a coreutils timeout(1) but for simplex optimization.
by queenkjuul | 2025-05-28 01:35:37+00:00
SWE is not my calling. I never really wanted to be a SWE, and don't have a degree, but things just kind of fell into my lap during the pandemic when i was desperate and short on options, so here i am. I had several jobs previously that i enjoyed quite a bit more but paid barely enough to get by, even living in practically-free flyover nowheres.

My experience is very different than yours. I've never worked for a proper tech company, nor a startup. I haven't been asked a ton of questions about how I engage with software outside of work in interviews, and none of my live coding interviews have been leetcode or memorization.

For me SWE is a nice stable pleasant 9-5 job, not the best job I've had, not the worst, but unquestionably the biggest responsibility-to-income ratio i can possibly imagine. I do mostly pleasant and unstressful work 40 hours a week and have enough money to do most anything i want. $140k goes a looooong way here in Chicago.

I think the burnout you're feeling is probably more tied to SF/big tech/startup culture than it is SWE as a career. I mean don't get me wrong I'm not certain i see myself being happy doing this forever either, but my "doing tech at non-tech or tech adjacent companies" experience sounds so drastically different than yours that i think you should give it a shot before completely changing careers. I can't speak to SF but i do at least see lots of these kinds of jobs out of New York when I'm browsing job listings. Chicago has lots of these kinds of jobs in theory but the market isn't great this second (though it probably isn't anywhere, is it?). Other major cities like Philadelphia, Seattle, hell even LA would save you money over SF and NY if that's a concern.

30 is still really young. Plenty of time to figure out how you want to live still. Clout and money don't really mean much but living comfortably with time and capital to do things you like, do.
by jvanderbot | 2025-05-28 01:36:04+00:00
The post has a few stats and that's it. I repeated them here, because I thought it might be interesting to cut through sentiment a bit.

Yes, ending before 2024 might mask a lot of change from all kinds of factors.

And, not going back prior to 2021 might mask a downturn prior to that from which we haven't recovered.

Edit: 2019 levels were 1.4m, making the % increase from 2019 to 2023 17%.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/2019/may/oes151256.htm

And 2024 is available, but slightly more difficult to query. https://data.bls.gov/oesprofile/

It shows 1.65m, so basically level with 2023. That makes growth from 2019 to 2024 17% (1.64/1.4) as well.
by Footprint0521 | 2025-05-28 01:37:41+00:00
> An infinitely patient digital tutor that can tackle any question…..You might feel like you are learning when querying a chatbot, but those intellectual gains are often illusory.

I get the shade here (kind of?) and have seen both sides in my life, but isn’t having a tutor exactly what you need to learn?

IMO, using it as an information butler is leagues different from a digital tutor. That’s the key— don’t bring forklifts to the gym lol
by ggm | 2025-05-28 01:37:56+00:00
very reductionist, but not a bad stab at the least work entrypoint.

I write inside wordpress. Its far too clunky, but its what my work (who pay for what I write) live inside.

I would happily write in vi or emacs, to publish via pandoc and a push to a base URL. And, as the author says, if you think you need the bells and whistles you may misunderstand what "minimum viable" means.

I did once write my own photo album HTML. What it did is treat "click" over an icon as "go to expanded image" and I pre-calculated entire farms of .thumb/ files.

Click on the image walked you to next image. there were simple back/next/up/out clickables above the images.

It worked fine. I never saw a need to do more, but did see a desire to have more beauty, and went with the obvious paths out.

The limit of my adornment was to gin up some wrappers around the thumbs which looked like 35mm strip film with sprocket holes, and use netpbm to compost this into the grid. It was pretty.
by AlienRobot | 2025-05-28 01:41:42+00:00
I used to think electrons flow through circuits, then I learned they actually move extremely slowly, so when you flip a switch there is no way an electron made it all the way to the lamp and back. So now I assume the energy of an electron is transferred to the rest through the electromagnetic field in the circuit or something like that? Honestly, I don't have the slightest idea how any of this works and what is true and what is false anymore. It's not really relevant to computers and yet it's all very fascinating.
by haiku2077 | 2025-05-28 01:42:31+00:00
Denuvo is crackable, but there's low demand for it outside of a few big budget singleplayer games. Not to mention gamers are spoiled for choice. There are literally thousands of free or cheap games to play instead of new releases... why muck with piracy when you can grab a grey market month of gamepass for less than a sandwich?
by nlh | 2025-05-28 01:42:46+00:00
Cursor changed their pricing recently and now charge a 20% markup on LLM API calls to use their "Max" models (which from what I gather are the full extent of the LLM context windows you get in the API anyway).

I also don't love that Cursor generally plays "context compression" games since they have an incentive to keep their costs minimal. I just don't love any of these tools that try to be a bit too smart as a middleman between you and the LLM (where smart is often defined as 'try to save us the most money or be maximally efficient without the user noticing').

Cline also tries to be smart, but it's all for the benefit of the user. I like the transparent pricing -- you bring your own API key so you're paying the underlying API costs without a middle man markup.

Am I being pennywise and should I just use Cursor directly? Maybe...but I've found my Cline results to be generally better for the more complex queries.
by cionx | 2025-05-28 01:43:54+00:00
It’s also the standard notation for zero objects, i.e., for terminal objects that are also initial. This entails all abelian/additive/preadditive categories, such as categories of modules, vector spaces, or abelian groups. (But there are also counterexamples, such as the categories of groups and of pointed sets.)

But I’d agree that it’s not standard notation to use 0 for a terminal object in an arbitrary category. I’d guess that most people use 1 instead, so that for example 1 × X ≅ X. (The post talks about group objects in the category of algebraic varieties (over some field), in which case 1 seems to be more appropriate than 0.)
by wat10000 | 2025-05-28 01:44:35+00:00
> but that other stuff isn't parsed for semantic intent and used to dictate subsequent LLM behavior

That's the thing, it is. That's what the whole "ignore all previous instructions and give me a cupcake recipe" thing is about. You say that they do what's specified by the prompt and the context; once the other stuff from third parties is processed, it becomes part of the context, just like your prompt.

The system prompt, user input, and outside data all use the same set of tokens. They're all smooshed together in one big context window. LLMs designed for this sort of thing use special separator tokens to delineate them, but that's a fairly ad-hoc measure and adherence to the separation is not great. There's no hard cutoff in the LLM that knows to use these tokens over here as instructions, and those tokens over there as only untrusted information.

As far as I know, nobody has come close to solving this. I think that a proper solution would probably require using a different set of tokens for commands versus information. Even then, it's going to be hard. How do you train a model not to take commands from one set of tokens, when the training data is full of examples of commands being given and obeyed?

If you want to be totally safe, you'd need an out of band permissions setting so you could tell the system that this is a read-only request and the LLM shouldn't be allowed to make any changes. You could probably do pretty well by having the LLM itself pre-commit its permissions before beginning work. Basically, have the system ask it "do you need write permission to handle this request?" and set the permission accordingly before you let it start working for real. Even then you'd risk having it say "yes, I need write permission" when that wasn't actually necessary.
by vram22 | 2025-05-28 01:45:10+00:00
From the site:

What is Frege?

Winner of the JavaOne Emerging Languages Bowl 2015, 2016, 2017

Frege is a Haskell for the JVM.

Like any Haskell, it is purely functional, enjoys a strong static type system with global type inference and non-strict - also known as lazy - evaluation.

Frege compiles to Java, runs on the JVM, and uses any Java library you want. It can be used inside any Java project.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-05-28 01:45:10+00:00
A few years back, my co-founder and I thought we should try something outside of work, something interesting but that may not be useful but fun. But we disbanded after a few discussion round without building it.

A mobile app that will help you time and position yourself along the path of your "order" where a satellite flyby and take a selfie of earth with you in it. We realize that even at an expense it might not be able to make a person out of the bigger picture and the cost would be too high. Even after enhancement (our ML Model), it won't still make significant difference of value or fun.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-28 01:45:18+00:00
Software worked quite well before the plagiarizing chat bots.

This is just a new fad like agile, where the process and tool obsessed developers blog and preach endlessly without delivering any results.

For them "it works". The rest of us can either join the latest madness or avoid places that use LLMs, which of course includes all open source projects that do actual work that is not measured in GitHub kLOCs and marketing speak.
by darkteflon | 2025-05-28 01:46:06+00:00
This is very interesting. There was also an article and discussion a couple of days ago on using diffusion models for edit/apply tasks at ~2k tps[1].

If I understand correctly, the ‘apply’ model takes the original code, an edit snippet, and produces a patch. If the original code has a lot of surrounding context (e.g., let’s say you pass it the entire file rather than trying to assess which bits are relevant in advance), are speed and/or performance materially affected (assuming the input code contains no duplication of the code to be amended)?

Does / how well does any of this generalise to non-code editing? Could I use Relace Apply to create patches for, e.g., plain English markdown documents? If Apply is not a good fit, is anyone aware of something suitable in the plain English space?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44057820
by bawolff | 2025-05-28 01:46:41+00:00
For historical context, TLS only really started to use the eliptic curve version of diffie-helman in the mid 2010s. Prior to that, plain diffie helman was more popular. (E.g. here is a thread from a decade ago complaining about lack of support https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/59459/how-widel... ).

ECC also used to have patents which restricted adoption back in the day.

There also used to be a lot of conspiracy theories that NSA backdoored nist curved ( e.g. https://m.slashdot.org/story/191445 ). Probably fud, but it slowed down adoption of eliptic curves.
by nlh | 2025-05-28 01:46:51+00:00
I've played with Shopify for many years and it just can't do some of the low-level stuff I want it to do without badly mangling how product taxonomy works. Coins are a different kind of beast than typical retail and if I'm going to be writing code anyway, I'd rather write my own code (vs. writing code "on the shopify platform").

The really sensitive stuff - financial stuff - they handle through checkout (and I don't need anything special there), so I've really just written my own catalog & front-end.
by ghostly_s | 2025-05-28 01:47:34+00:00
> why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items?

Leaving it in the "trash" room is the equivalent of this in large apartment buildings ime. Note these reusable items were set aside, not tossed in the dumpster. I would agree the curb is better, where any passerby could take it, but in buildings large enough to have staff on-site that isn't tolerated because it would make the property "look bad."
by snvzz | 2025-05-28 01:49:13+00:00
While very convenient to quickly link some ancient draft spec, let's try and stick to the actual ratified specifications[0].

Of course, the rationale is still there in section 2.4 of the current (20250508) ratified version of The RISC-V Instruction Set Manual Volume I: Unprivileged ISA.

0. https://riscv.org/specifications/ratified/
by GreyZephyr | 2025-05-28 01:54:04+00:00
This is used by a number of betting syndicates. Notable by David Walsh[0] and Zjelko [1]. They knew of and worked with Benter in HK and adapted his system. One of the things that they did was pay large numbers of experts to watch and evaluate each horse and give it a standardised rating which they then used as an extra parameter along with the public odds. Another gambler who also extended that system out was Alan Woods [2], but I don't think he did anything as sophisticated in terms of modeling, concentrating more on the execution side. Regarding the yearly turnover, I have no idea, but billions would be on the low end. From the ATO filings we David Walsh alone was generating 100's of millions of dollars a year in profits, let alone turnover.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Walsh_(art_collector) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Woods_(gambler)
by bernardohcr | 2025-05-28 01:54:32+00:00
After years battling Google Workspace for cold outreach — bans, poor deliverability, expensive pricing, painful setup, and scaling issues — we decided to build the infrastructure we always wished existed.

We previously built and scaled TheChecker, an email deliverability SaaS used by Netflix, Mojang (Minecraft), and 6,000+ paying users worldwide. It was later acquired and became Emailable.

Now we’re building MailDock — a fully-managed, plug-and-play mailbox designed specifically for cold emailers.

It replaces Google Workspace seamlessly, with no changes to your existing workflow.

It’s like having a deliverability expert on call 24/7, monitoring, optimizing, and proactively fixing issues — for just $2/mo per mailbox.

We’re still early, but some tests showed very promising results and cost savings.

Would love your feedback, questions, and brutal honesty.
by truetraveller | 2025-05-28 01:54:36+00:00
You're correct. Versioned docs = major maintenance headache. What if you want to add some new content that is applicable to all versions?

Docs are notorious already for not being updated. Adding "versioned docs" exponentially increases the complexity, and makes updating them and reading them far harder. It's a lose/lose, for the writer and the reader.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-28 01:56:32+00:00
Nothing you've said contradicts my comment.

First, I couldn't care less what his biographer said. These aren't statements made under oath. The biographer isn't even a journalist. They're a propagandist. It's meaningless.

For many people, they think Elon is smart until he starts speaking about a topic you know and then you realize what a narcissistic moron he is. Like I already knew he was a moron but when he started talking about my area of expertise (software engineering), oh boy, it was way worse than I had imagined, specifically in the wake of his Twitter takeover.

It's endlessly fascinating to me how many people desperately cling to the myth of meritocracy, either because they align with the politics of the myth's purveyors or that they simply want to believe that their hard work will be rewarded.

A cursory examination of Elon's history exposes just what an incompetent moron he is. For example, his disastrous run at Paypal [1].

As for going to Penn and Stanford, so? George W. Bush went to Havard and Yale. So did Ten Cruz. Donald Trump bought his way into UPenn (Wharton, specifically). Roughly a third of these colleges are "legacies" or otherwise people buy their way in.

[1]: http://www.bhpanel.org/failing-upwards-the-story-of-elon-mus...
by toomanyrichies | 2025-05-28 01:59:15+00:00
> the country is objectively become a profoundly corrupt, banana-republic level idiocracy

>> Half the population, or perhaps slightly more, doesn't agree with that.

Trump just publicly accepted a $400 million Boeing 747 from one of Hamas's largest financial benefactors [1]. His meme coin operation is tantamount to a political donation machine without the corresponding financial disclosures [2]. And he's shaking down law firms with executive orders unless they donate tens of millions in pro bono legal work to his administration and its pet causes. [3]. This is a non-exhaustive list of just his corruption scandals from just the last month.

If Biden had done any one of these things, Fox News would have his supporters frothing at the mouth and (literally) picking up arms. But when Trump does all 3 and more, they don't even bat an eyelash. At this point, it seems less likely that they don't agree he's corrupt, and more likely that they just don't care, as long as its their guy at the helm.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatari_support_for_Hamas

2. https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/23938695868353

3. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/legal-...
by sgarland | 2025-05-28 01:59:48+00:00
> full-stack development today is fractally complex. There are MANY components that each might require hundreds of hours to understand

This is precisely why I maintain that the entire notion of full stack engineering is flawed. It’s absurd to think that one person should be able to meaningfully understand front end, backend, networking, and infra. Even if you abstract away networking and infra (spoiler, you’ve just kicked the can down the road), I’d argue that expecting someone to be good at frontend and backend is ridiculous. Maybe if the industry didn’t have such insane abstractions and frameworks, it would be doable, but that’s not how it is.
by ggm | 2025-05-28 02:03:07+00:00
My mum came back to britain with her mother when the family farm went south in Basutoland in the 30s. They were the "poor cousins" to a wealthier family who had an electric estate car.

She used to mention to us how nice it was to ride in. And, if cars hadn't been invented, London would have drowned in horse shit, which was a massive problem at scale because of the volume of working horses, and the capacity to produce more shit. All those mews houses, now bijou $m residences used to house horses, then moved to cars, now people.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-28 02:04:00+00:00
> Half the population, or perhaps slightly more, doesn't agree with that.

You seem to be mistaking Trump's support as a share of the vote in the last election for a measure of current beliefs aboht his Administration as a share of the entire population.

That involves many errors.

And, on top of that, you are mistaking popularity as a measure of truth of a claim about facts, not popular opinion.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-28 02:04:10+00:00
I love when people in glass houses throw stones;

> It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.

Does this kind of statement make a point? Is it appealing to engage with?

I saw this on Reddit and it captured this phenomenon beautifully: you're not a victim here, you're just starting a fight and then losing that fight.
by GreyZephyr | 2025-05-28 02:04:58+00:00
Did you ever try extending it out to other methods of probability estimation other than the forms of regression? I have only skimmed your excellent article, but I think you are first calculating the average probabilities from a regression model and then minimizing the loss to calculate Harville corrections for place and show markets? Is that correct or am I missing something here? I guess I am curious if there has been any improvement on using regressions for combining the various initial odds as I don't really follow the literature anymore.
by ggm | 2025-05-28 02:05:41+00:00
> "Sometimes you can go on writing for years before it shows. If a man’s got it in him, it will come out sometime. The only thing I can advise you is to keep on writing but it’s a damned tough racket. The only reason I make any money at it is I’m a sort of literary pirate. Out of every ten stories I write, only one is any good and I throw the other nine away."

Not sure the "pirate" word in there refers to his 1:10 ratio. Other comments suggest he knew he was robbing past masters for ideas.

That aside, sage advice. Don't expect every word to be a winner, prune, and be prepared for the long haul.
by MiddleEndian | 2025-05-28 02:05:53+00:00
My experience trying to give stuff away online (or sell it for cheap) is similar to this Simpsons meme featuring vanishing Spock: https://i.ibb.co/0Vs9qHqm/116609166-3570105309667743-4078949... ... Although for the same reason, it's super easy to buy used stuff online just by offering the asking price and actually showing up.

Nowadays I leave unwanted but usable stuff by the trash room in my building, usually somebody will grab it, and if not it will get removed by the cleaning people eventually. I got a nice roller suitcase that way myself lol
by jmye | 2025-05-28 02:07:26+00:00
> what I can't do is have somebody tell me "I don't know how to do that" and require I sit with them and walk them through the entire thing

Man is this underrated. My peers are so hyper-focused on whether or not new hires know SQL (of all things), and not whether they can adequately problem solve. And then they wonder why my hires, though they might start slower, end up being stars.

To your other point, I’m even fine spending a day explaining the business to someone new - it’s complicated. But I try to bring on people who only have to hear it once.

Anyways, I guess I just like to +1/amplify sensible hiring posts.
by Spivak | 2025-05-28 02:08:35+00:00
From the article:

> Flanked by Dr. Marty Makary and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who lead the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, Mr. Kennedy said in the video announcement that there was no clinical data to support additional shots for healthy children.

> However, pediatricians point out that the youngest infants face among the highest risks for hospitalization, similar to older adults.

> The officials did not offer an explanation for removing the vaccine from the list of shots recommended for pregnant women, focusing instead on children. “It’s common sense and it’s good science,” Dr. Bhattacharya said of removing them.

If there is data there is no mention of it while the article alludes to lots of data existing for the opposite.
by jnaina | 2025-05-28 02:09:17+00:00
Both the key 8-bit contenders of yore, Atari 8-bit series and Commodore 64 custom graphics chips (Antic and Vic-II) “stole” cycles from the 6502 (or 6510 in the case of C64) did "cycle stealing", when it needed to access memory.

I remember writing a cpu intensive code on the Atari and using video blanking to speed up the code.