MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitbasher | 2025-05-27 22:23:18+00:00
My current side project is a game development market analysis and research platform with built in marketing channels (youtubers, streamers complete with contact data, etc).

For example, you can research the best genres for indies by copies sold, numbers of released games/saturation, etc. You can also find youtubers that have streamed similar games/genres and get their contact info.
by taylorallred | 2025-05-27 22:23:26+00:00
Not all SWE jobs have the same culture and there's work outside of silicon valley. That said, it sounds like you've decided that this isn't for you anymore so what is? What's something that makes you excited or you find yourself thinking about a lot. There's a lot of other opportunities out there, and you should feel proud of the experiences you had and mistakes you made. Don't worry about what others think and go find another chapter to start. (That said, you may need to accept a lower salary for a while.)
by sshine | 2025-05-27 22:24:08+00:00
> I'm sure GP isn't calling them dum-dum to their face. If they can't even do basic stuff, which seems to be their criteria here for the name calling, maybe a politely given reality-check isn't that bad. Some will wake up to the gravity of their situation and put in the hard work and surprise their teacher.

I certainly am not out to hurt anyone. I have a great deal of sympathy for someone who spent 18 months learning absolutely nothing, hiding behind their study group, making the LLM do the work, and apathetic teachers on prior semesters who could have caught this behavior.

But I will be blunt with them and say: "You have a very limited time before your studies end, and you have so far not learned basic programming. This means you will not be able to use your certificate for anything."

And then I will send an email to them, the teacher they will have on the next semester, and the study councillor, and say that this person urgently needs a better group and extra help. And I'll personally follow up after some weeks to see if they're actually preparing for their re-exam in a constructive way.

It usually came this far because giving a poor student the lowest grade rather than failing them resolves the teacher of paperwork and re-exams, which means they might get a day off.

Being blunt is being kind.
by simne | 2025-05-27 22:24:39+00:00
Impressed to see, how many people read whole article, not see just one phrase: "We don’t need a lot of the things that other personal computers have, so let’s optimize a few areas and make sure the software is designed around them".

Mac was not cheap machine and Apple that time was not rich to make unnecessary thing - they really need to make a hit this time, and they succeed.

And yes, it is true, they was limited by bandwidth, it is also true they was limited by semi-32bit CPU speed.

But Mac was real step ahead at the moment, and had significant resources to grow when new technology will arrive. That what I think lack PCs of that time.
by kondro | 2025-05-27 22:25:50+00:00
It would be really great to get more context on what a DPU is for pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/

I understand that AWS did one TPC-C 95/5 read/write benchmark and got 700k transactions for 100k DPUs, but that’s not nearly enough context.

There either needs to be a selection of other benchmark-based pricing (especially for a primarily 50/50 read/write load), actual information on how a DPU is calculated or a way to return DPU per query executed, not just an aggregate CloudWatch figure.

We were promised DSQL pricing similar to DynamoDB and insofar as it’s truly serverless (i.e. no committed pricing) they’ve succeeded, but one of the best parts of DynamoDB is absolute certainty on cost, even if that can sometimes be high.
by jmward01 | 2025-05-27 22:26:04+00:00
This is a pretty loaded response but I'll attempt to answer. First, it doesn't and it was never implied that generically it does. The connection I was making was that LLMs are doing more human like tasks and will likely need access similar to what people have for those tasks for the same reason people need that access. I'm making the observation that if we are going down this path, which it looks like we are, then maybe we can learn from the approaches taken with real people doing these things.
by ajross | 2025-05-27 22:26:29+00:00
Exactly. Like the Apple ][, the original Mac framebuffer was set up with alternating accesses, relying on the framebuffer reads to manage DRAM refresh.

It looks like DRAM was set up on a 6-CPU-cycle period, as 512 bits (32 16-bit bus accesses) x 342 lines x 60 Hz x 6 cycles x 2 gives 7.87968 MHz, which is just slightly faster than the nominal 7.83 MHz, the remaining .6% presumably being spent during vblank.
by nyanpasu64 | 2025-05-27 22:27:23+00:00
- I hear that some later digital PAL TVs stored an image in a framebuffer and scanned it out twice at 100 Hz, which retro gamers today avoid because it increases latency relative to direct scanout.

- I've heard mixed reports over whether CRT monitors had faster-decaying phosphors than televisions. Maybe part of it is a computer has a white image, which causes more noticeable flicker than a dark background with white text (or darker TV scenes).
by sshine | 2025-05-27 22:28:17+00:00
There really are two opposite policies at play:

- Just say no to AI - Just embrace AI

I ran one semester embracing AI, and... I don't know, I don't have enough to compare with, but clearly it leaves a lot of holes in people's understanding. They generate stuff that they don't understand. Maybe it's fine. But they're certainly worse programmers than I was after having spent the same time without LLMs.
by sgarland | 2025-05-27 22:28:20+00:00
I was replying to your statement, not the article. Did I miss that quote in it?

> We all have to use technologies that we're not world-class experts in

I’m not asking people to be experts, just to know how it works. If you write software that communicates over TCP, you should know how TCP works. If you write software that uses a deque, you should know how a deque works. Etc.

Re: the real world, perhaps that’s a good indication that we shouldn’t be unnecessarily increasing complexity, and use boring technology.
by eborgnia | 2025-05-27 22:28:21+00:00
Adding extra structural information about the codebase is an avenue we're actively exploring. Agentic exploration is a structure-aware system where you're using a frontier model (Claude 4 Sonnet or equivalent) that gives you an implicit binary relevance score based on whatever you're putting into context -- filenames, graph structures, etc.

If a file is "relevant" the agent looks at it and decides if it should keep it in context or not. This process repeats until there's satisfactory context to make changes to the codebase.

The question is whether we actually need a 200b+ parameter model to do this or if we can distill the functionality onto a much smaller, more economical model. A lot of people are already choosing to do it with Gemeni (due to the 1m context window), and they write the code with Claude 4 Sonnet.

Ideally, we want to be able to run this process cheaply in parallel to get really fast generations. That's the ultimate goal we're aiming towards
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-27 22:28:54+00:00
I haven't thought hard about it yet, but perhaps I should be a bit worried.

My other "superpower" is digging into documentation and figuring out how to actually use stuff I've never seen before. Another thing that might be under threat from AIs soon. I've certainly used AIs for my own hobby projects in this regard, sometimes with good result, so it's surely a matter of time.

Though at least at my current job, my most valuable skill is being able to understand the customer's needs, and being able to come up with solutions that solve their problems well without breaking the bank. Part of that is finding out how to best utilize existing code, which means I like to work on varied parts of the code base. Part of it is probing the customers to understand how they operate, which limitations they have and so on.

I think part of that is thanks to the same drive that lead me to all these obscure topics, which drives me to want to understand the existing code and the customers domain, which in turn puts me in a much better position to help and guide our customers to a good solution.

Not sure if AI's will do that too soon, time will tell.
by Analemma_ | 2025-05-27 22:28:54+00:00
> You can barely give away china these days. We would get beautiful, perfect condition full sets of china, mark it down to like $30 for an entire 12-place set, and it would just sit there.

Chinaware sucks to actually use: it can't go in the dishwasher, it's smaller and less convenient than normal-sized dishes, and so on. Even if you want to spend lots of money on dishes, you're much better served buying nice stoneware at Crate and Barrel or something, it looks as good or better and is actually useful. Chinaware generally just sits there and takes up space; I wouldn't take any even if it was free.

And the thing is, it's not really a tragedy that nobody bothers with chinaware anymore. Chinaware was only ever a "keeping up with the Joneses" status-signalling purchase to show you'd made it as a middle-class household, and it's been replaced by other goods for that purpose. We're not losing out on some kind of heritage tradition here, it's just one set of shallow luxury goods getting replaced with another.
by Rochus | 2025-05-27 22:28:55+00:00
> that they are currently and knowingly abusing copyright laws

It is the job of a court to determine whether something is legal or not. If it is legal, it can hardly be called "abuse". However, there are indeed popular cases of abuse in connection with copyright (and patent) law. The most common form involves filing takedown notices without legitimate grounds; also copyright holders often abuse their rights in ways that violate antitrust law or public policy, or enforce copyrights they own primarily for making money through strategic litigation and settlement demands, rather than for legitimate copyright protection. Copyright law is complex and far from perfect.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-27 22:29:11+00:00
> Thrift store pricing: It's disappointing.

When I read things like this, I laugh when people think that it's possible to bring much manufacturing back to the US.

The thrift store I volunteered at was for an animal charity. After paying rent and some salaries, the general rule of thumb was that we were able to convert volunteer hours to profit at about minimum wage rates (and I mean ~$8/hr rates, not "living wage" rates).

So, to be honest, your post made me unreasonably angry. No, thrift stores are not a front, they're not stupid, and they have certainly noticed the cheap crap from Shein and Temu. The issue is that crap is produced incredibly cheaply - literal peasant wages and zero pesky things like environmental regulations.

So where I volunteered, we originally had standard prices for all non-designer clothes, e.g. $5 for short sleeve shirts and shorts, $7 for pants, etc. It would simply take much too much time to try to price everything individually. And, for most clothes, these were great deals. But when cheap fast fashion came along, we had a rule we would just throw away any of that shit. But every now and then something would make it onto the floor, and we'd have an irate customer basically say what you are saying, "How can you charge $7 for this pair of pants when they're like $10 new." So then we'd apologize, and explain that we usually threw that stuff away. People just couldn't understand that we couldn't sell it for less without essentially making the thrift store not turn a profit, even though the products were donated.
by setheron | 2025-05-27 22:29:47+00:00
I use NixOS seems like this got me enough to get started (I wanted Gemini)

``` # AI cli (unstable.python3.withPackages ( ps: with ps; [ llm llm-gemini llm-cmd ] )) ```

looks like most of the plugins are models and most of the functionality you demo'd in the parent comment is baked into the tool itself.

Yea a live document might be cool -- part of the interesting bit was seeing "real" type of use cases you use it for .

Anyways will give it a spin.
by msgodel | 2025-05-27 22:29:53+00:00
I know outsiders view the US this way but there are many people (about half the population) for which this is our only place and don't necessarily want it to be strip mined for that.

If you can understand this (and I know understanding politics for a foreign country can be very difficult. I've spent a lot of time learning to do this as a hobby) the behavior of the US electorate will be much more understandable.
by nabla9 | 2025-05-27 22:30:00+00:00
Lead programmer can now do projects alone.

My experience is that AI is easier to work with than inexperienced junior coders. I designed database structure and wrote function subs, and some comments, then asked AI to 1) fill the functions, 2) write unit tests while I work with interesting parts or read stuff.

I think the result is much less errors compared to junior coder. You have to review the code just like with human. Time it takes is just little bit less than working with other person, but it's orders of magnitude cheaper. I'm certain that many will cut corners and ship code not reviewed by humans, but that's on them.

Interesting question is, can inexperienced coder get more or less benefit from AI compared to experienced programmer, or is it skill multiplier.
Show HN: Weather2Geo – Geolocate screenshots from weather widgets
by Elliott-Diy | 2025-05-27 22:31:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I built an OSINT tool called Weather2Geo that helps locate where a screenshot was taken based on the weather widget data visible (e.g. temp, condition, and local time in the taskbar). People often post these without realizing how specific those values can be in combination.

It works by comparing the given weather condition, temperature, and time against current data from thousands of cities. It’s timezone-aware, supports fuzzy matching, and groups results geographically to reduce noise.

It’s most effective on recent screenshots, ideally taken within the last hour—since weather and daylight conditions change quickly.

The tool helps pinpoint likely locations when screenshots lack EXIF data or other traditional OSINT clues.

It’s open source here: https://github.com/elliott-diy/Weather2Geo

Would love feedback, bug reports, or to hear if you think this has other use cases.

- Elliott
by JohnMakin | 2025-05-27 22:31:57+00:00
One thing that gets lost in spaces like this is that there are plenty of essentially non "tech" companies that have large technical aspects to their core business but still lie outside the realm of what would traditionally be considered a pure "tech" company, such as most tech startups would be. One area that immediately comes to mind from past experience is banking/finance/insurance and ecommerce. I don't think the roles or the paybands are as flashy, but they can be extraordinarily stable and more of a "normal" work experience than your typical 'up and coming' startup. I've only had one small startup experience so far and I would consider all my other roles at non-tech companies much more stable and enjoyable than that one was, which wanted me to sell my soul for a very speculative goal, for what now I would consider pennies for the effort spent.
by reaperducer | 2025-05-27 22:32:33+00:00
One mentioned glue traps. What’s that and why is it used?

Glue traps are used to catch mice and rats. The owl sees its prey struggling in the trap, and tries to eat it.

Many birds of prey die due to eating poisoned rats and mice. Most famously, Flaco, who escaped from the Central Park zoo and entertained New Yorkers for months before eating a poisoned rat.
by didgetmaster | 2025-05-27 22:32:44+00:00
Many SWEs suffer from imposter syndrome. If you have been in the industry for any length of time, you know plenty of tech people who have 'made it big'; so it is easy to feel inadequate if you haven't.

Some of those who are very successful are truly talented and deserve everything they got; but some were just lucky. It's not blind luck like winning the lottery, but rather being at the right place at the right time.

You may have much more talent than you give yourself credit for.
by protocolture | 2025-05-27 22:33:49+00:00
I attended a catholic high school for several years, and I noticed a pattern. If I submitted an assignment to certain teachers and the subject related to a non catholic religion, I would get a pass, at the lowest score possible, regardless of the quality of the content.

So I just kept submitting assignments on the wrong religions. Write up about a saint? Pick a russian orthodox saint. Write up on marriage customs? Use islam. That way I could never fail.
by IshKebab | 2025-05-27 22:34:25+00:00
I mean, I would say least try working for a salaried programming job in a stable company. It's still an incredibly well paying career for the level of responsibility & seniority. I'm paid almost as much as an MP and I'm on the bottom rung of my company with virtually no responsibility.

I think if you go and get a "normal" job like being an electrician you'd be in for a shock about the level of work and relatively low pay compared to programming.

On the other hand, I wouldn't keep doing it if you hate it.
by candiddevmike | 2025-05-27 22:34:35+00:00
While they are in demand, it wanes/self corrects as all the subcontractors start their own gigs, overpopulate, and contact back to a few providers. The road to financial success in them is also long and brutal. If the economy tanks, there will also be a lot of trades people out of work due to the lack of new construction. I'm assuming that would impact apprenticeships too.
by SR2Z | 2025-05-27 22:34:43+00:00
Then I suppose you either believe that advanced technology falls out of the sky or should be created by government agencies. Both of those are harder to make accountable than companies.

The ends do sometimes justify the means. That's why we can require people to get vaccinated or be licensed to drive. It's insane to think otherwise; OBVIOUSLY we act this way and it's not controversial.
by tshaddox | 2025-05-27 22:34:44+00:00
> Private data + data exfiltration (with no attacker-controlled data) is fine, as there's no way to jailbreak the LLM.

This is why I said *unless you...have a very good understanding of its behavior.*

If your public-facing service is, say, a typical RBAC implementation where the end user has a role and that role has read access to some resources and not others, then by all means go for it (obviously these system can still have bugs and still need hardening, but the intended behavior is relatively easy to understand and verify).

But if your service gives read access and exfiltration capabilities to a machine learning model that is deliberately designed to have complex, open-ended, non-deterministic behavior, I don't think "it's fine" even if there's no third-party attacker-controlled prompts in the system!
by leeroihe | 2025-05-27 22:35:15+00:00
What was most offensive to me was (aside from the blatant breach of privacy -which only added to problems with my cofounder and I) was that they seemed to take issue with the fact I was advocating for the best option for my value as an engineer. Also... most of the calls they received were from recruiters doing checks BEFORE reaching out to me. Immediately jumping to the conclusion I was "running around shopping my resume" is candidly childish at best.

This was all for an initial investment of $120k which is frankly hilarious. The idea I wouldn't do whats best for me because you gave me $100k.
by BuyMyBitcoins | 2025-05-27 22:35:59+00:00
During high school the consensus from our English teachers was “we know these things are hard to use properly. We’ll teach you how to do it, but it is usually better just to rewrite what you are trying to say using two sentences and avoid them.”

That being said, we were also advised to “use at most one semicolon in the writing section of the SAT. Proper usage will help your score. But, you better make sure you’ve used it correctly.”
by sshine | 2025-05-27 22:36:26+00:00
> The same group of people that are going to loose their job to an LLM arent getting smarter because of how they are using LLM's.

Students who use LLMs and professional programmers who use LLMs: I wouldn't say it's necessarily the same group of people.

Sure, their incentives are the same, and they're equally unlikely to maintain jobs in the future.

But students can be told that their approach to become AI secretaries isn't going to pan out. They're not actively sacrificing a career because they're out of options. They can still learn valuable skills, because what they were taught has not been made redundant yet, unlike mediocre programmers who can only just compete with LLM gunk.
by leeroihe | 2025-05-27 22:36:59+00:00
The recruiters weren't at fault - the VC fund jumping to conclusions and running to tattle to my cofounder and NOT me first was what I had issues with. If I had more personal capital I'd consider suing. If anyone wants the name of the firm I'm more than happy to name names.

My network is ok, but frankly not great. Fortunately I have friends in New York who support my decision to leave and do other things in tech - potentially altogether. I really appreciate your kind words.

I've considered law school for some specific niche interests I've cultivated - fortunately have good friends in that field as well.
by codethief | 2025-05-27 22:37:28+00:00
> Reproducibility is the holy grail, IMO

> I'll stick with […] docker with alpine for my deployments

Huh. In my experience Alpine is the worst possible base image to use if you care about reproducibility.

- The package index's URL cannot be pinned (URL expires on a regular basis) - The downloaded package index itself (tarball) cannot be pinned/cached, either, because old package versions (i.e. the URLs in the tarball) become unavailable after a few weeks.

Meanwhile:

https://snapshot.debian.org/

https://snapshot.ubuntu.com/
by gchamonlive | 2025-05-27 22:39:14+00:00
I want to pivot to arts and philosophy, but these are areas with guaranteed hardship when it comes to money.

My luck is that there's still a lot that interests me in tech, like datalakes, data intensive systems, OTP and webdev with elixir and phoenix, compilers and micro vms...

For me it's an easy answer, I can use tech to finance my true purpose. I'm also lucky enough to live in a country where 66k USD affords me a very comfortable life.

For you there seems to be something more fundamental missing. You seem to be in the start of a journey inwards to understand what's your purpose, what could fill the Ikigai for you.

If you have money, take a break, travel, go meet people, broad your possibilities. The world isn't just SWE, specially silicon valley cutthroat morally-bankrupt SWE. If you immerse yourself in the world out there there'll be no guarantee you'll find what you want and there is a good chance you'll suffer, but it's likely you'll find something, and that I think makes it all worth it.
by timewizard | 2025-05-27 22:39:39+00:00
> Some people believe that offices should be pleasant places to work.

The actual belief is that they are somehow more pleasant than my own home.

> It's not a grand conspiracy.

We have a huge consumer goods economy. This was inevitable.

> which means that more senior people also have to be in the office.

What you actually need is for them to be accessible. Everyone driving to the same hole in the wall is definitely one way to achieve this. Junior and Senior engineers having slightly different schedules and planned availability might be enough.

We should probably just measure this.

> Not every company has that

They wouldn't use this building either. I was artificially constraining my argument to that context.