MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amendegree | 2025-05-28 14:59:52+00:00
I don’t know what the context of that quote is, but I gotta say the realization that I would never be the smartest person in the room if I want to do interesting things (bec I simply don’t have the reasoning or memory that these people have naturally) was super humbling. I’ve spent the last few years coming to terms with it and in the meantime… I hate to say it but, I’ve surrounded myself with mediocrity as an ego boost. Only one job in the last decade did I feel like I wasn’t the smartest person on the team… and I got out of there so fast, I had way too much imposter syndrome and too big of an ego to admit it.

So I don’t get to do interesting things but my ego doesn’t feel stupid.
Show HN: Queuedle – Daily word-sliding puzzle inspired by Wordle and Scrabble
by healeycodes | 2025-05-28 15:00:20+00:00
Hey HN!

Queuedle is a daily word-sliding puzzle that I play with my friends. It combines the positional gameplay of Scrabble with the daily puzzle and discovery elements of Wordle.

The letter distribution mirrors Scrabble's tile frequencies, and daily puzzles are generated deterministically using the current date as a seed. It uses the Scrabble (TWL06-US) word list, but excludes two-letter words.

The design/interface aims to be fairly understated.

Any feedback is welcome but I'm especially keen on onboarding people to the mechanics quicker.

Devlog: https://healeycodes.com/how-i-made-queuedle
by bwfan123 | 2025-05-28 15:00:50+00:00
I would describe it differently - "another day, another dollar" - where work is done as required - no more no less. Corps know this, and try to incentivize employees to bring some passion to work - via equity ownership - so, incentives are aligned. Another way is to pretend to have a mission statement like "organize world's info" which can fool employees to align without any monetary reward.
by whstl | 2025-05-28 15:01:35+00:00
I believe dustingetz is suggesting making a monorepo for the code itself, but copying the subdirectories of the main repo into subrepos to solve your CI issues.

This means that developers have a monorepo for day to day work, but the CI/CD issues are isolated in their own separate repos, and can be handled separately.

Dunno if that's 100% of what they mean but it seems to be a solution to what you describe in another message ("our CI/CD pipeline doesn't allow us to do so and it is not handled by our team anyway")
by tolerance | 2025-05-28 15:01:50+00:00
Where I think that pieces like this fall short at are identifying what they think people should "care" about and why these things matter.

For example,

* Who cares that those newspapers ran AI-generated reading lists when the actual people who represent the newspapers wouldn't actually be the ones recommending the books anyway?

(People who make things that you read aren't reading themselves.)

* Why should people care to fund or listen to audio deep-dives into the Multiverse or a middle-aged man's memoir about when he was 12 and he heard songs?

* Why shouldn't people submit boilerplate responses to boilerplate questions that are an artificial barrier between them and what is contemporarily accepted as a socioeconomic exchange?

I wonder if there's anything that the author can draw from their experiences in punk culture to round out the answers the questions like this.

We are flailing in the middle of a long-running vacuum of meaning and purpose.

I worry about the sort of people who are set at ease by the vague quasi-institutional appeals that conclude this post.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-05-28 15:01:50+00:00
This is the reality of a platform that is hostile to corporations (even if it is hostile for good reasons). As far as I could tell, the company running Bluesky has limited ideas about monetization. In part, because they’re well aware their user base is hostile to X-style monetization (which, sure, probably made money, but at what cost?)

Hopefully some other ATProto implementor will come along with a better idea.

It is interesting to me that e.g. Adobe left Bluesky after relatively minor pushback, but they stay on X despite the much larger problems associated with that platform.
by codelion | 2025-05-28 15:02:09+00:00
If we try to benchmark GPQA-Diamond with DeepSeek-R1 in the suggested configuration of 0.6 temp and 32k max_tokens and say if every instance takes the maximum tokens it will require 6.4 M tokens. Which without batching on a single H100 at 80 tok/s will take 23 hrs to run. To run with 32k context length on a single H100 a 1.5B model will require ~15-20 GB VRAM so you cannot run 10s or 100s of queries in parallel.

MMLU-PRO is 12,000 instances. To avoid this we set a 600 seconds timeout for each instance to run.
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-28 15:02:14+00:00
Let me leave a comment for the historians of the future, on why this is 100000% correct (imho).

I have been to Canary Wharf Tesco store countless times. The amount of times that someone scans all their stuff, pretend to press buttons, pretend to 'touch' a card to the POS, and then get their bag(s) and walk-out, and then I walk to that self-checkout point and see that ALL the items are still there and the payment was never made.. are "too damn high" to quote the meme.

And then I have to sign to a member of the staff, oblivious of just happened, and ask them to clear-up the list so I can scan my stuff. Of course the thief always speed-walks out, taking all the corners necessary to break line-of-sight so they cannot be pointed at (as someone JUST saw them walking away and can ID them easily).

Next steps, they look at their watch, wave at the cameras (I assume for retracing later who was that). I am sure that Police in London has better things to do that chasing someone stealing GBP 30 worth of groceries (which they probably do every day).

So.. yeah.. "this is why we cannot have nice things".
by dcreager | 2025-05-28 15:02:28+00:00
Well ours is not yet implemented, so it's too early to say whether they're compatible. :-)

But less snarkily, we do talk to them often (and the authors of other tools like mypy and pyright) to make sure we aren't introducing gross incompatibilities between the different type checkers. When there are inconsistencies, we want to make sure they are mindful rather than accidental; for good reasons; spec-compliant; and well documented.
by doug_durham | 2025-05-28 15:02:46+00:00
The author seems to have an inflated notion of what developing software is about. Most software doesn't require "perspicacity". Think about Civil Engineering. In a very few cases you are designing a Golden Gate Bridge. The vast majority of the time you are designing yet another rural bridge over a culvert. The first case requires deep investigation into all of the factors involving materials strength, soil dynamics, ... In the second case your role as an engineer is to run the standard calculations so that it meets legal standards and isn't going to fall apart in a couple of years.

We all like to think the we are grand architects finely honing software for the ages, when in reality we are really just specifying that the right grade of gravel is being used in the roadbed so that you don't get potholes.
by MadcapJake | 2025-05-28 15:02:50+00:00
Cosmology, like many sciences, is about learning the scientific truth through the remnants left behind. Just like we can see an early earth by digging, we can see an early universe by zooming.

A well reasoned theory in any science should include and test for implications in the past and present. We can't just ignore time if we want a proper understanding of the universe.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-05-28 15:03:38+00:00
In my first job after graduating I've found:

* programmer that worked maybe 2h/day, but was otherwise very important to one of the oursourced projects, so he got away with it and was publicly laughing about it without ever getting reprimanded

* devops guy that insisted on using his magic copy-pasted shitty shell scripts instead of any popular config management tool at the time, simply to make it harder for anyone else to take his duties, also no monitoring, just call him when something breaks

* junior dev, that routinely spent 2-3 days on a simple bugfix, that later had to be reassigned to a senior that fixed it in 15 minutes without any context from the junior dev, that situation was apparently okay for the company, because a clueless client paid by hour and had no idea it keeps happening all the time

* tester, who after half a year figured out that his manual testing isn't quantifiable at all, as long as he claims that everything is working to make management happy, so he found a second job

So, I'm in the WTFC camp since, I guess, a month of working in IT.
by tocs3 | 2025-05-28 15:04:03+00:00
Emacs is 1970s vintage and the article has it beat with a 1958 DOD program "dubbed Mechanization of Contract Administration Services, or MOCAS". Then they go to mention a company in Conroe TX that "To this day it relies on a 1948 IBM 402 punchcard system for inventory and accounting along with an IBM 83 sorter and IBM 129 keypunch,".

This article is from 2015 so things might have changed. The punchcard entry makes me wonder if there are any old puncard looms around still in use (even if for demonstration purposes).
by samanb | 2025-05-28 15:04:18+00:00
From the study: Two studies compared planned, regular interval (six‐ and 12‐monthly) scale and polish treatments versus no scheduled treatment. We found little or no difference between groups over a two‐ to three‐year period for gingivitis, probing depths, oral health‐related quality of life (all high‐certainty evidence) and plaque (low‐certainty evidence).

This makes me think that regular dental cleanings are, at least over a 2-3 year period, mostly unnecessary unless have a severe gum disease already. I explored people's views on reddit on this topic and everyone seems to be repeating the conventional wisdom("You absolutely need bi-annual cleanings if you want to keep your teeth etc..") but without any evidence.

I am curious to hear what others think, possibly with evidence.
by illiac786 | 2025-05-28 15:04:38+00:00
I don’t think there’s a contradiction. Anthropic writes this because they want people to believe this, the author argues though that no one believes it.

I believe there’s a small minority of people that truly believes AI is a friend, but I would say it’s a psychological pathology.

I don’t bother trying to guess what large companies really think: a/ they’re made of so many different stakeholders I don’t think it’s possible. And b/ I know money is the most important thing if they are large enough and have lots of anonymous investors, I don’t need to know anything else.
My personal site as a VS Code simulator
by vladoh | 2025-05-28 15:04:43+00:00
Had some fun updating my personal website to look like a VS Code simulator. It uses the actual VS Code editor (Monaco), but the rest is all custom built to look like VS Code. All happens on the frontend - the site is completely static for now.

I'll be updating it to make more functions work: chat with a personal assistant, terminal etc.
by deadbabe | 2025-05-28 15:05:03+00:00
Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.

So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.

Results now are way better than results later.
by DawsonBruce | 2025-05-28 15:05:27+00:00
The balance of rest is an important factor that I’ve understood the value of only later in my career. Pausing on a difficult engineering task at the end of the workday in favor of exercise or cooking dinner (or both) gives my mind and body time to reset it needs. Often answers or alternate approaches will materialize mid curl, crunch, or vegetable chop.
by mushufasa | 2025-05-28 15:06:27+00:00
> Wetlands not only simplifies the creation of isolated Conda environments with specific dependencies, but also allows you to run

I've been using Conda for 10 years as my default package manager on my devices (not pipenv or poetry etc). I started because it was "the way" for data science but I kept with it because the syntax is really intuitive to me (conda create, conda activate).

I'm not sure what problem you are solving here -- the issues with conda IMO are that it is overkill for the rest of the python community, so conda-forge has gradually declined and I typically create a conda environment then use pip for the latest libraries. Managing the conda environments though is not my issue -- that part works so well that I keep with it.

If you could explain why you created this and what problems you are solving with an example, that would be helpful. All package managers are aimed at "avoiding dependency conflicts" so that doesn't really communicate to me what this is and what real problem it solves.
by _glass | 2025-05-28 15:06:29+00:00
I think it is a great insight that every ideology can be turned violent. I first heard this where Zizek cites the book has a story from: "During World War II, Zen Buddhism provided a strong foundation for Japanese militarism, including Imperial Japan's use of suicide warfare."[1] Where a Japanese soldier in WW2 wouldn't do the killing, but his sword (?) This is seen that all ideology can be turned violent.

[1] Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997).
Show HN: PondPilot Widget – Interactive SQL snippets for any website
by melonamin | 2025-05-28 15:06:46+00:00
Turn any SQL code block on your website into a runnable query editor with just a <script> tag.

Powered by DuckDB WASM running entirely in the browser – no backend needed. Perfect for documentation sites, tutorials, and blog posts.

Features: • Full SQL analytics engine (DuckDB) running client-side • Syntax highlighting with live editing • One-click query execution (or Ctrl+Enter) • Works with any static site – just add the CDN script • Only 23KB minified, loads DuckDB on-demand • Dark/light theme support

Try it: https://widget.pondpilot.io GitHub: https://github.com/pondpilot/pondpilot-widget
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-28 15:07:03+00:00
> the amount of times I've reached for a notebook pales in comparison to the amount of times I've relied on version control or a debugger.

In my now ~35 years of programming, I've found reaching for the notebook often saves me from needing to rely on a debugger unless it's code I inherited and didn't write myself. Even then, though, mapping it out on paper and using my pseudocode-shorthand to describe what the program does and what it intends to do is often faster than dealing with a debugger for anything but trivial bugs.
by nmstoker | 2025-05-28 15:07:12+00:00
>> Does it run on batteries?

>> Yes!

>> Every Loodio sold after 2025 runs on batteries.

Interesting but rather than wait for 2026, what about the ones sold now? ; - )

Might want to reword it to be something like "Every Loodio sold from 2025 onwards runs on batteries."

And on a more substantial point: isn't Loo primarily a British term? I'd be surprised if it's well understood in most other countries whereas toilet (vulgar as it sounds to certain Brits) is fairly widely understood. Maybe this isn't a big deal but you'd think the name was kind of crucial to getting the purpose of this gadget.
by this15testingg | 2025-05-28 15:07:32+00:00
to be fair we now have the knowledge and ability to begin to see the scale of the universe but are still burdened with the expectation of continuing the industrial age factory worker schedule of 40 hours a week coupled a constant barrage of information that it's actually doing more harm than good. How can you really blame anyone when the society is just working for the sake of it.
by Barbing | 2025-05-28 15:08:11+00:00
Right, one that by my understanding “pools” searches, in a way. As their blog put it in 2023:

“Mullvad Leta uses the Google Search API as a proxy, caching each search. These cached results are shared amongst all users, reducing costs and improving privacy. This service is user-supported and doesn't rely on ads or data selling.”
by doug_durham | 2025-05-28 15:08:15+00:00
I appreciate your nuanced position. I believe that any developer who isn't reading more code than they are writing is doing it wrong. Reading code is central to growth as a software engineer. You can argue that you'll be reading more bland code when reviewing code generated with the aid of an LLM. I still think you are learning. I've read lots of LLM generated code and I routinely learn new things. Idioms that I wasn't familiar with, or library calls I didn't know existed.

I also think that LLMs are an even more powerful accelerant for senior developers. We can prompt better because we know what exists and what to not bother trying.
by mettamage | 2025-05-28 15:08:24+00:00
Allow me to give you a different viewpoint. And this is coming from someone that has an _amazing instinct_ to be in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club. I use that instinct to protect my mental health but nothing more than that.

What I noticed when I checked out at work is that it also makes me check out in my personal life (PL). It bleeds in. Generally, in my personal life I'm not checked out. That bleeds into work.

So work bleeds into PL and PL into work. I found that it was painful for work to bleed into my PL like that since I'm switched on and I just had this hint of "ah... whatever who gives a fuck."

I give a fuck.

I give a fuck because it's my life. I do it for myself. I don't do it for my boss or my colleagues. I do it for me.

I've found that this attitude is way more helpful to me as two things happen:

1. I'm more productive at work so I don't have to cover my ass at all. When I was in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, I needed to cover my ass once per month (read: I didn't do anything for like 3 days and people were expecting results on day 4).

2. Since it's in service for my personal life, I don't go too far. The moment I notice that work encroaches too much upon personal life, my instinct comes back immediately and I pay my visit to the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, and party as long as I want to.

That's the balance I'm currently taking.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-05-28 15:08:33+00:00
I mostly interact with scholars on Bluesky, and my feeling is that the ones refusing to leave X don’t understand that a lot of the “engagement” (follows, views, likes) they see there is illusory (bots, spam accounts, misreporting of statistics, etc.)

“I had 10k followers on X but only 2k on Bluesky” is the kind of refrain I hear a lot. Even if they get more “organic” engagement in replies from human beings.

Also, there are no “private” accounts or “private” DMs on Bluesky. (That this only exists on X in name only does not phase them.)
by joshcsimmons | 2025-05-28 15:08:50+00:00
Dan - the article strikes right at the core of the problem. I enjoyed your writing style so I decided to have a look around your site and found myself saving a bunch of other articles to read later.

I see that you're an artist. The concept your writing about here is obvious to most artists but not so to technologists (generally speaking). What do you make of that?
by JulianGough123 | 2025-05-28 15:09:03+00:00
It also made predictions about the early universe, in advance of the James Webb space telescope sending back any data:

https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...

And those predictions were later confirmed by the James Webb:

Https://theeggandtherock.com/p/killer-new-evidence-that-supermassive

Which is a data point worth pondering.
by bigbuppo | 2025-05-28 15:09:28+00:00
It's kind of weird that both Microsoft and Google were both using Perforce. What does Perforce do that worked well at those companies for so long, and what caused them to dump it? Did they just get tired of the licensing cost?

I think what I'm getting at is that maybe the real missing feature isn't whatever it is that allows you to make stupidly large monorepos, but that maybe we should add Perforce's client workspace model as a git extension?
by SamBam | 2025-05-28 15:09:50+00:00
I think that observation stands in the US too -- there are certain professions where you're more likely to find someone who cares.

You mentioned bike shops. At least in my area (New England) every person I've ever seen working in a bike shop was competent and cared about working in a bike shop. (They weren't necessarily the nicest and most personable people, but that's a different story.)

Who works in a bike shop? Almost no one "ends up" there the way people usually "end up" at their jobs -- following the easy flow of high school to college to a bunch of interviews at marketing-adjacent (or whatever) firms and finally working where ever offers them a job.

You're only likely to even consider working at a bike shop if you want to work at a bike shop.

Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now.
by SirHumphrey | 2025-05-28 15:10:08+00:00
One of the easiest ways (for me) to spot AI code on a homework assignment has been to ask myself a simple question. Is this code something that would make sense for a human to write. It doesn't catch all cases - it doesn't catch even the majority of cases - but it does filter out people who just took the assignment and pasted it in to a prompt.

Mirroring the example provided in the article I once saw a 200 line class implementation for tridiagonal matrices in python - where a simple numpy command would suffice and perform an order of magnitude better.
by keyringlight | 2025-05-28 15:10:25+00:00
There's one where I think it could have made sense, the xbox. They're apparently confident enough about security on those systems as a large part of the point is that they act as locked down game players (related to AMD's work on securing servers IIRC), so adding a locked down 'desktop mode' would seem viable. They'd need to be certain it doesn't enable any new jailbreaks so either mode isn't more useful than they intend, if they wanted people to buy/subscribe to office direct from the store they don't want libreoffice working.

During covid and the supply/demand mismatch as everyone rushed to WFH I was wondering if they could repurpose the cheap S xboxes as cheap desktops. Essentially a reversal of the original 'xbox as a trojan horse' idea, instead of using consoles to get windows in the living room, it's to get windows in the home office.
by drweevil | 2025-05-28 15:10:47+00:00
This is the root of the problem, isn't it. Yes, we can decide we won't be complicit, but our banks, our supermarkets, our employers, our hospitals, all remain complicit, as part of the monopolistic environment that is in place to protect the revenues of these companies. Yes, some of us are savvy enough, and more important, can afford not to be complicit. But most, like those nurses, do not have these advantages.
by djtango | 2025-05-28 15:11:13+00:00
I don't disagree except that software is different to building bridges because once you build the bridge, it's a bridge and you're done.

Software engineering is like deciding after you built the bridge that it needs to now be able to open. Oh and the bridge is now busy and used heavily so we can't allow for any downtime while you rebuild the bridge to open.

And as much as we hope for standards so everything cookie cutter, there are idiosyncracies all over the place so no project is ever really the same.

These days I think of software more like writing fiction than engineering
by meheleventyone | 2025-05-28 15:11:29+00:00
In the UK at least I suspect it's at least partially a generational thing. When I was in school back in the 90's it was deeply uncool to be in to anything academic. It's also not a surprise it was the height of lads mags and a very heavy drinking culture. These days that social pressure is entirely different for kids.

That said there are lots more ways to be good at your job than a narrow focus on hours worked and raw brain power.