MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by laborcontract | 2025-06-17 02:25:00+00:00
+1 to this. I was in one situation for too long. The problem for anybody in this situation is that finding a new job is hard. If you're not the type of person that interviews well or is great on paper, then the trick to pulling off the switcheroo is to focus on making great relationships now as much as anything. There are many ways to hop on to a new rail, you just have to know that it's the right decision.

Don't be a hero in the organization. In the past job. I essentially took over my manager by consistently outshining them. Then they made some unforced errors and I took advantage of the moment, made a political move, and forced their displacement. It was a distinctly unpleasant experience and something I took no glee from doing. Moreover, if you look at the grand scheme of things, nobody remembers that, and you're neither a hero to yourself nor those around you for it. It was a year or two I could have spent finding a productive, healthy, and more facilitating organization.
by mbreese | 2025-06-17 02:25:05+00:00
Oh, I’m pretty sure you could set a gzip header field with a full index and a zero-byte payload. You could even make it so that the size of that last block would be in a standard location in the file (at a known offset, still in the gzip header).

One issue with bgzip in particular is that it fixes the gzip header fields allowed, so you can only have one extra value (which is the size of the current block). Because of this, you can’t have new fields in the header for bgzip (the gzip flavor widely used in bioinformatics). One thing I wanted to do was to also add was a header field for sha1/sha256/etc for the current block. When you have files of sufficient size, it can be helpful to have chunk-level signatures to protect against bitrot. This is just one usecase for novel header elements (which is somewhat alleviated as gzip blocks all have their own crc32, but that’s just one idea).
by alphazard | 2025-06-17 02:25:24+00:00
I'm not sure how far along you are in your career, so maybe you are just realizing this: Most managers are bad at what they do. It's probably an 80/20 split of net-negative to net-positive managers. e.g. Everything speeds up when they go on vacation, or get sick.

The 80% of bad managers thrive in the ambiguity of their performance. They want to touch processes, and projects, and meetings and schedules, and things, to get their fingerprints on as much stuff as possible, without making a change substantive enough that it could make things noticeably worse. That way they can say they had an effect, but without the risk of a change that could backfire.

If you and a bunch of coworkers politely ask to transfer teams (not all at once), but spread out over a few weeks. Management will usually scramble to figure out which of their changes was actually impactful in the wrong way. Your boss doesn't know what he's doing, upper management doesn't either. They just want the big salary, and the diffuse responsibility.

Put yourself in their shoes: You're in charge of a team, you can't even really tell how it's going because it's just beyond your skillset, and now there are a bunch of people who don't like working on the team. Or the guy above him: You moved things around, and now it turns out one of your managers totally dropped the ball on the new team, and now you have to do extra work to retain and move people. Contact with reality is brutal.
by Groxx | 2025-06-17 02:26:17+00:00
Yeah, I'm not claiming nobody pays for software. Clearly many do. Just that I understand people's default aversion - I encounter far more software than food that I would label "shit", despite eating far more food in total.

And software often requires you to enter payment info into who know what system (plus your phone number (plus make an account (plus opt into receiving spam from them until the universe dies))), if you're not using google play / the iOS app store. In a restaurant you put your card into the thing and you're done.

Also this:

>It just serves a purpose and fills you and you move on.

Is something many pieces of software I've used cannot even dream of achieving. They solely wasted my time.

It's why I think it's a shame that demos are a dying breed.
by stillpointlab | 2025-06-17 02:26:23+00:00
That is good context, thanks! Once I found my bug I had a moment of not being sure who to blame. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised that the ISO8601 spec dictates that absent the Z the date-time ought to be interpreted as local. At the least, I expected there would at least be a way for me to say "trust me JS, this date is UTC so please parse it that way" - but the only way I could find to force that to happen was to manually add a "Z".

But the insanity of inconsistently choosing local/UTC based on the presence of time is genuinely painful. Dates and times are hard enough as it is, why would they do that? It gives me some amusement that this was one of the motivating use cases behind the Temporal spec.
by leptons | 2025-06-17 02:27:32+00:00
>You pay junior devs way way way more money for the privilege of them being bad.

I hope you don't think that what you're paying for an LLM today is what it actually costs to run the LLM. You're paying a small fraction.

So much investment money is being pumped into AI that it's going to make the 2000 dot-com bubble burst look tiny in comparison, if LLMs don't start actually returning on the massive investments. People are waking up to the realities of what an LLM can and can't do, and it's turning out to not be the genie in the bottle that a lot of hype was suggesting. Same as crypto.

The tech world needs a hype machine and "AI" is the current darling. Movie streaming was once in the spotlight too. "AI" will get old pretty soon if it can't stop "hallucinating". Trust me I would know if a junior dev is hallucinating and if they actually are then I can choose another one that won't and will actually become a great software developer. I have no such hope for LLMs based on my experiences with them so far.
by dundarious | 2025-06-17 02:27:46+00:00
Agreed, ask it to explain how exceptions are handled in python asyncio tasks, even given all the code, and it will vacillate like the worst intern in the world. What's more, there's no way to "teach" it, and even if there was, it would not last beyond the current context.

A complete waste of time for important but relatively simple tasks.
by rustcleaner | 2025-06-17 02:30:06+00:00
He didn't kill anyone, unless he misrepresented the product and the customer used the product incorrectly and died as a result. Even then there's argument for tainted product and considering the persecution around the industry, I as a juror would acquit any charge reliant on that as the underlying logic. Even then, if I foresaw more than 12 years sentence for anyone I would acquit and jury nullify on human rights grounds. Humans must be free. The big moral failure of modern states is their lack of unmolested opt-out.

People like big strong dominating government until it gets replaced with the Mormon church, or a Caliphate, then nooo it's not statesmanship but just religion. (Hint: all states are religions, and codes are religious texts. What do freedom of religion and freedom of association mean in this context, instead of the toothless safe-for-government one you're used to thinking of it in?)
by seltzered_ | 2025-06-17 02:31:53+00:00
Something to remember is that back in 2018 there mightve been a different vision around WhatsApp businesses possibly helping subsidizing the app for things that are useful for their customers.

From a 2018 interview of Brian Acton after he left Facebook ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive... ):

" "An SMS has just come in from his local Honda dealer saying “payment received.” He points to it on his phone.

“This is what I wanted people to do with WhatsApp,” he says of the world’s biggest messaging service, "
by qinsig | 2025-06-17 02:32:00+00:00
Avoid using agents that can just blow through money (cline, roocode, claudecode with API key, etc).

Instead you can get comfortable prompting and managing context with aider.

Or you can use claude code with a pro subscription for a fair amount of usage.

I agree that seeing the tools just waste several dollars to just make a mess you need to discard is frustrating.
by westurner | 2025-06-17 02:32:23+00:00
dokku is a minimal PaaS that can also run on a VPS. There's a dokku-scheduler-kubernetes: https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes

But it doesn't have support Helm charts.

Cloud computing architecture > Delivery links to SaaS, DaaS, DaaS, PaaS, IaaS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_architecture

Cloud-computing comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-computing_comparison

Category:Cloud_platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cloud_platforms

awesome-selfhosted has a serverless / FaaS category that just links to awesome-sysadmin > PaaS: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#sof...
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-17 02:34:21+00:00
>What was claimed was that "milking every dollar out of anything valuable is burned into people's souls", and somehow, from that, you heard "people do what they can to make money for personal economic benefit".

Both things are in most cases essentially the same, and a person trying to get every possible dollar out of anything valuable for their personal gain indeed doing what they can to make money for themselves. This is in my experience a habit not at all unique to Americans..

That aside, you generalized about America, to a degree that's absurd for a nation of roughly 320 million people, which also happens to be one of the top countries in the world for charitable giving on a per capita basis and in absolute terms.

So yes, countries can have different tendencies in certain ways, and it's possible for the narrative that people in a country buy to be warped by political interests, but even in these cases, generalization is stupid, and so too is giving a particular, fashionable focus to making americans seem to be particularly warped people about this.

Do you perhaps speak as a European? There's a continent riddled with simmering racism and many of its own social problems. If you're from any number of other parts of the world, feel free to make some concrete argument for why their people are in any way less subject to personal greed, or propaganda or failures of critical thinking.

I see no evidence of it. Nationalist idiocies, racist tendencies, propagandistic narratives and bad economic habits abount just about everywhere in the world, and in some countries much worse than in the United States, which itself has no shortage of differing opinions and critical thinkers.

It also (at least until the current orangutan came to power, again,) has historically been one of the most welcoming countries on earth for immigrants from nearly anywhere, including Islamic countries.

Again, generalizing about this country is plainly mistaken and easily at risk of being downright stupid if done out of ideological spite.
by danieltanfh95 | 2025-06-17 02:34:43+00:00
AI models are fundamentally trained on patterns from existing data - they learn to recognize and reproduce successful solution templates rather than derive solutions from foundational principles. When faced with a problem, the model searches for the closest match in its training experience rather than building up from basic assumptions and logical steps.

Human experts excel at first-principles thinking precisely because they can strip away assumptions, identify core constraints, and reason forward from fundamental truths. They might recognize that a novel problem requires abandoning conventional approaches entirely. AI, by contrast, often gets anchored to what "looks similar" and applies familiar frameworks even when they're not optimal.

Even when explicitly prompted to use first-principles analysis, AI models can struggle because:

- They lack the intuitive understanding of when to discard prior assumptions

- They don't naturally distinguish between surface-level similarity and deep structural similarity

- They're optimized for confident responses based on pattern recognition rather than uncertain exploration from basics

This is particularly problematic in domains requiring genuine innovation or when dealing with edge cases where conventional wisdom doesn't apply.

Context poisoning, intended or not, is a real problem that humans are able to solve relatively easily while current SotA models struggle.
by WantonQuantum | 2025-06-17 02:35:22+00:00
I either have to trust that's all it's doing or read a bunch of code to verify it:

https://github.com/amantus-ai/vibetunnel/tree/main/VibeTunne...

And this is a solved problem. It doesn't need a new vibe aware implementation.

But thanks for downvoting and flagging my comment. That really improves public perception.
by rustcleaner | 2025-06-17 02:35:47+00:00
>"It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice"

Oh dang, there's that pesky religious mechanic again! Why can't we build on pragmatism rather than ensuring the Justice God has enough blood-years drained from criminal-victims? Two crimes don't make a justice!

Irrelevant addendum: I think I will mix atheism and anarchism as they are very compatible concepts, in that they stand in skepticism of essentially the same species of entity with two masks: church and state.
by acoustics | 2025-06-17 02:36:16+00:00
Antitrust is the zeitgeist, but it seems that among tech companies, OpenAI is the least interested in competing on the merits.

First they said it was in everyone's interest for them to be released from their nonprofit obligations. Then they argued that AI needed to be regulated—just enough to deter new competition, but not so much that it could affect OAI's plans in any way. Now they want to be released from the Microsoft deal.

Usually with anticompetitive practices you think about abuse of market power. But OpenAI's mindset seems to be that any impediment to them dominating AI is a societal problem that the government needs to fix for them. It's remarkable.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-17 02:37:25+00:00
Yeah, all fair, but I think there's enough capital to keep the gravy train rolling until the cost-per-performance actually get way, way, way below human junior engineers.

A lot of the application layer will disappear when it fails to show ROI, but the foundation models will continue to have obscene amounts of money dumped into them, and the coding use case will come along with that.
by pizlonator | 2025-06-17 02:37:50+00:00
My take: sea of nodes has no objective benefits over CFG/SSA. Like, none whatsoever. It’s all feels. And it has lots of objective downsides, which are summarized quite nicely in the V8 folks post about dropping it.

Let me dig into the no objective benefits bit: there does not exist a compiler transformation or analysis that would be easier to write in the sea of nodes representation. Not even one. Contrast this with SSA versus the alternatives, where SSA saves you hella lines of code that you would otherwise be writing to track use def chains.
by sctb | 2025-06-17 02:38:09+00:00
It's hard to convey precisely what I mean, of course, but to try to clarify further I would say the emotion is experienced on behalf of the object itself in a direct way that does not involve my personal sense of self. I do not mind a dull knife at all, I feel no personal emotion in that sense. Either I sharpen it because it's mine or not. That's neutral.

So it's much closer to object personification because it's the same mechanism by which I empathize with other people, animals, etc. In my description I've tried to generalize because to me it's not accurate to say that I feel the knife is sad, but the experience is almost as if that were the case.
by jasonm23 | 2025-06-17 02:39:43+00:00
The interesting thing to me about Beer's work, is that the complexity of control systems, is that it's not directed, it's inherent.

This leads me to assumptions about the inherent nature of language, in that it is not the contents of thought, but the vehicle.

Hence, different languages create their culture to perhaps a much larger degree than we tend to credit it.

Assumptions, but I tend towards this view.
by k310 | 2025-06-17 02:40:00+00:00
There's a pretty decent explanation here:

https://mailmergic.com/blog/why-pdf-are-hard-to-edit/

The most compelling tidbit I found was this:

> The Technical Architecture of PDF: A Labyrinth of Objects

> Beneath the surface, PDF files are complex compositions made up of objects: text blocks, images, vectors, fonts, metadata, and instructions for rendering. These elements are often stored in fragmented sequences that are optimized for viewing rather than editing. The text is not always stored in logical reading order, and words may be divided into separate character objects placed precisely on the page based on coordinates.

Lots more there. No more spoilers.
by gchamonlive | 2025-06-17 02:40:54+00:00
Totally. It's just that that realisation must come from within, because the experience changes the very perception of reality and the relationship between yourself and everything else. With the wrong circumstances what would otherwise be a blissful experience can turn into a nightmare and this gate is likely forever closed for this person. I'd never forgive myself if I had this happen to someone else because of ill advice given by me.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-06-17 02:41:19+00:00
If you are not getting along with your manager, or if your well being is at stake, you need to look for a way out.

Micromanagers are impulsive, have a short attention span and tend to get their story wrong.

Keeping records offers some protection against accusations behavior from those people.

Ask for complete requirements, estimates that are as refined as possible and don't go on record agreeing to unrealistic timelines.

Do not confront your manager no matter how much provocation is involved.
by pizlonator | 2025-06-17 02:42:28+00:00
What I talk about when I talk about IRs is the principle of isolated ugliness.

A good IR means that the only contract between compiler passes is the IR itself. This means that individual passes might get as ugly as they need to get without affecting other passes. This then means that lots of different folks can write lots of different passes, and then you can glue them together somehow in a pass pipeline and it all works.

LLVM is a great example of this. You can be productive at writing LLVM passes without understanding any of the other passes in LLVM. Maybe you’ll come to understand some of them just because it’s informative and there’s cool stuff to learn. But even then you don’t have to understand the other passes that deeply. Writing a cool new pass that obeys the IR’s laws is not going to break the other passes. You’ll only break the other passes by breaking IR law.

So what makes a good IR is, more than any other single thing, about whether that IR has easy to understand laws and whether those laws are really followed. This allows you to isolate ugliness. Which allows you to have a large team writing lots of passes. And then your compiler can drink the tears of your defeated competitors.
by lexandstuff | 2025-06-17 02:47:52+00:00
Great article. The other thing that you miss out on when you don't write the code yourself is that sense of your subconscious working for you. Writing code has a side benefit of developing a really strong mental model of a problem, that kinda gets embedded in your neurons and pays dividends down the track, when doing stuff like troubleshooting or deciding on how to integrate a new feature. You even find yourself solving problems in your sleep.

I haven't observed any software developers operating at even a slight multiplier from the pre-LLM days at the organisations I've worked at. I think people are getting addicted to not having to expend brain energy to solve problems, and they're mistaking that for productivity.
by JohnMakin | 2025-06-17 02:48:51+00:00
all of this just reads like the supposed UML zeitgeist that was supposed to transform java and eliminate development 20 years ago

if this is all ultimately java but with even more steps, its a sign im definitely getting old. it’s just the same pattern of non technical people deceiving themselves into believing they dont need to be technical to build tech and then ultimately resulting in again 10-20 years of re-learning the painful lessons of that.

let me off this train too im tired already
by necovek | 2025-06-17 02:50:13+00:00
Because it was designed as a graphical output format, not an editable format.

Some of the "compression" tricks it allows one to use (eg. font subsetting, even remapping characters to use fewer bits to encode text) may make the data only keep the same appearance, and semantic encoding would be gone (for example, "A" may stand for "#").

It's actually quite similar in nature to TeX's DVI format (boxes and their positions), though obviously not a bitmap format but a vector one with all the deps embedded.

This means that, for instance, using non-default kerning and whitespace will lead to all text becoming box-per-character thrown around the page.
by Twirrim | 2025-06-17 02:51:35+00:00
It's talking about occurrences of the word, not contributions. That's a really lousy way to measure corporate contributions.

IBM is contributing a lot. LWN publishes development statistics after each kernel release: https://lwn.net/Articles/1022414/. IBM was 5th in terms of lines changed, 17th in terms of changesets, 20th in terms of signed-of-by counts. That's alongside the contributions by Red Hat which was higher in all but lines-changed terms.
by kjellsbells | 2025-06-17 02:52:58+00:00
At all costs: preserve your mental energy. Once this is gone you are in trouble. Symptoms include losing your intellectual sharpness, burnout, damage to personal relationships etc. I've seen people be so crushed by a bad work situation that their technical skills eroded to the point that they couldnt escape to another job. Dont let this happen to you.

Practically, plan your exit. Build your network within the org and outside of it. Keep up with those coffee chats and casual zoom meetups. Remain friendly to others in the org. Cultivate a skill or expertise outside of your current role that could be a stepping stone out of the org. Remain ultra professional at all times eg never badmouth the boss (but dont offer false praise either).

If you have the mental energy, you might also try this, but be warned it can be very difficult: try to understand why your manager is how they are. Every villain is the hero in their own story. They believe that they have to act in a certain way. It's possible that they are irredeemable little martinets, but far more likely that they are inexperienced and flailing around, grabbing onto markers of authority to give themselves a sense of control instead of facing their fears. If you want an intellectual project and iff you can disassociate yourself from the impact, you might try figuring it out and using the knowledge to form a relationship grounded in a better sense of reality.
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-17 02:53:19+00:00
And also a focus on security. Security people don't want to find anything unexpected in the code they run, and easter eggs are by nature unexpected, sometimes even well hidden.

I remember at some point, a contractor for a big company added an undocumented easter egg to the code they delivered, it was fairly innocuous, something like playing music when a special key combination is entered, and yet, it was treated like a security breach, as if it was a backdoor. I don't know if people got fired for it, but it is very possible.

This is a public API, so at least, it is documented, but even then I am sure that some very unfun security auditor will only see this as an increased attack surface.

Security may be necessary, but damn, it sucks! (not just for easter eggs)