MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwawaysleep | 2025-06-20 10:15:23+00:00
> This is where people are so holistically mid that they agree not to criticize each other for fear of their own mediocrity being found out.

Or simply no reason to care. A lot of the difference in attitude is explained by "my company". The author of the article views themselves as part of their employer. Many employees take a substantially different view.

For example, one of my jobs (I am overemployed) is as a dev for a small startup that first tried to outsource development and then had to hire devs in house as that was a disaster. We have a certain amount of runway. Project is pretty chaotic. Customers are bailing as we cannot meet our commitments.

I would argue rational management would push hard to fix things quickly and spend the money to do so even if it meant raising money sooner, as key customers are fleeing, our reputation is mediocre, and stability is nowhere close. As an employee, I am fighting hard for a mediocre controlled flight into the ground to drag out how long the paychecks for this mess keep flowing.

Why?

As an employee, I have no meaningful upside unless my options suddenly get valuable and I long ago learned that you can be laid off with limited recourse, so I value equity at zero. My interests are entirely in prolonging my employment so the cash keeps flowing.

I will take the 100% certain death of my employer over 3 years rather than a 50/50 chance of success as a business.
by sofixa | 2025-06-20 10:15:50+00:00
Why do people always shift the goal posts like this?

- Initial claim: "Europe doesn't have tech companies"

- Rebuttal listing a bunch

- "No, but look at market cap or number of jobs, it's not the same!"

Which is it, does Europe not have tech companies, or are they just smaller than the US? Because if it's the later, that's trivial to explain why - Europe is a continent where the biggest countries have less than 1/5 the population of the US. A tech company in France (e.g. Doctolib) has a significant curve to serve customers in other European countries - translation, different laws and regulations, sometimes currency, different market expectations. It's really really not comparable, and I wish more Americans have the basic logical capacity to realise that.
by al_borland | 2025-06-20 10:16:34+00:00
The people I report to are the ones telling me to rewrite the same thing every other year on a new platform and stack. It drives me mad. Challenging these ideas risks my job.

For things they don’t care about, I am using very basic tools that have worked for the last 10+ years and will likely work fine for the next 20 years. This allows me to solve new problems instead of continuing to solve the same problem over again. At least that’s my goal. In reality, it allows the tools I need (but management doesn’t care about) to “just work”, freeing me up to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic for them. All of this is for internal tools. We’re just raising operating costs on things that have 0 impact on revenue. I don’t really understand the vision.
by dakiol | 2025-06-20 10:16:39+00:00
As much as I share the sentiment, at least the browser has one single programming language. What’s a waste of time is to have dozens of backend programming languages (each of them having a few frameworks and countless libraries). So much wasted effort. I agree that variety is important, but ffs, it’s time to make a good use of our time and stop implementing yet again the same things but in a different language.
by klabb3 | 2025-06-20 10:17:19+00:00
> but in my experience as a tech entrepreneur in Europe, if you want investment, you talk to the Americans

Yeah, but that’s not so much cultural but rather the US capital markets are fueled by foreign demand of USD.

The same inflated capital markets with mid-level investors with few pocket existed in every historical financial hegemony, like the British and the Dutch before then.
by wvh | 2025-06-20 10:17:22+00:00
My take is that Kubernetes is too simple. It leaves too much open and tries to keep everything pluggable, in an attempt to be all things to all people and, more importantly, to all companies so it can be the de facto standard. So typically when you set up Kubernetes, you are left with figuring out how to get metrics, logging, alerting and whatever else on top of the core you have. There are a lot of extra decisions to make, and none of this stuff is as interoperable and fool-proof as it should be.

Maybe the problem (and strength) of Kubernetes is that it's design by committee or at least common-denominator agreement so everybody stays on board.

Any more clearly defined project would likely not become a de facto industry standard.
by eitland | 2025-06-20 10:18:26+00:00
In 2017, I met modern frontend. In a few hectic months, I had to learn AngularJS, Gulp, Grunt, and some CSS improvement system (LESS or Sass or something). Then I moved on to Angular and worked with it for a couple of years. For the first time, it actually started to feel worth it. But what a churn in the beginning. Angular 2, 4, 5, 6, and I think up to 9 all dropped while I was still working with it.

Since then, I’ve mostly worked with React, which is blissfully productive and unexciting in the best way possible as long as we prevent people from pulling in CV-padding material like Redux.

Over the past few years, I’ve been hired into places where I’m once again upgrading codebases written in AngularJS (yep, it still exists), Elm, and jQuery. Everything gets rewritten to React, and after that we can hire people right out of school to maintain it (as long as we keep the CV-padding libraries out of it).

I guess this is a long-winded way of saying: even if you’ve been lucky enough to work in a place where people made good technical decisions years ago, and work in a place that treat their devs well enough that someone who still remembers how it works cares to work there —not everyone’s that lucky.
by wffurr | 2025-06-20 10:19:14+00:00
The fast pocket computer might be fairly common in fully developed countries, but bandwidth is not. It’s trivial to run into use cases with limited network bandwidth regardless of how fast your iPhone is.

And if you broaden your idea of your user base a bit, even the fast computers aren’t ubiquitous. Try using a low end Android phone sometime, or a hand me down iOS device still on iOS 12.
by swiftcoder | 2025-06-20 10:19:57+00:00
> why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe

I don't think anyone believes that European-based BigTech monopolies would be particularly more beneficial than the current US-based ones. Pretty much the whole point is not to facilitate massive tech monopolies in the first place (and to break them up whenever they do emerge, a la the US breakup of Ma Bell)
by benchly | 2025-06-20 10:20:22+00:00
There are ways to kill those.

https://www.wikihow.com/Disable-YouTube-Video-Thumbnail-Imag...

The strangest part is after I removed those "shock face" thumbs, I feel like I'm using an entirely different platform. The only time I see them is when I use the YouTube app on my PS4 which is hooked to a large TV, useful for when I'm watching the not-AI-documentary-style creators I like.
by vikramkr | 2025-06-20 10:21:10+00:00
These articles always suggest that minimal HTML and jQuery is enough. Like, I guess for a blog, but like, not for web apps? That's the other weird thing - they're always framed like the entirety of the internet is blogs or whatever. How many software engineers are working on blogs? Everything is a webapp now, the vast majority of the time most users spend interacting with the internet is through complex applications like Spotify, YouTube, Gmail, Netflix, Google docs, notion, linear, etc etc etc. I guess there's an audience for complaining about react for some reason
by miguel_martin | 2025-06-20 10:22:17+00:00
I’m optimistic on the future. llms.txt will be adopted for all major sites (from AI hype), and ironically it will benefit humans to browse and interact with sites in a simpler manner.

I personally believe that a new era of “lite-browsers” will be made. Emacs got close into this direction, but not accessible to avg. consumers

Text oriented operating systems will be the future.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-20 10:22:51+00:00
You seem to be under the impression that things are inherently better in the US. They really aren't. California easily rivals the worst corners of German bureaucracy. The only positive thing you can say about it is that you can do things in English there. And California easily matches its tax pressure. It's an expensive place.

I'm singling out that state because that's where most of the software innovation comes from and it's GDP is a bit of an outlier. Outside of California, the US is a bit of a mixed bag of states that is actually not that dissimilar to much of western Europe for things like growth, prosperity, and indeed GDP/capita. Some states like Texas have natural resources (and a relaxed attitude towards planetary destruction) that explains much of its economics.

Most of the wealth in the US is concentrated in a relatively small number of states where it is concentrated with small groups of people (the rest isn't that wealthy). If you take Germany and compare it to each of the states in the US, it probably comes out on top of many of them for metrics as GDP per capita, happiness, innovation, etc. Sure, it's maybe not a power house like California when it comes to software. But it's not like most of the US is doing that well on that front.

And if you start looking at healthcare, the alarmingly large prison population, and general levels of misery among the population, it's really not that amazing of a place any more. You might have more dollars. But they are worth a lot more in Europe than they are in the US. The same money buys you a lot more goods, services, housing, and quality of life over here. There are a lot of things that are kind of broken in the US. And that has a lot to do with its policies.

And there's more to technology than just software. Tesla definitely buys German machines when they want the best. And a lot of those wind mills popping up on in coastal waters, made in Europe too. The US automotive sector kind of imploded in recent years. If it weren't for the import tariffs, there would be a lot more European and Chinese cars on the roads there. Machines to make chips come from ASML, which is based in the Netherlands. There's nano tech, nuclear fusion (several companies active in the EU breaking records), etc.

And the thing with software is that it's easily copied and imitated. A lot of what MS, Meta, and others do isn't exactly rocket science. Whatever moat the US has there, it isn't geographic.
by vidarh | 2025-06-20 10:24:26+00:00
Then you're highly unusual (in a good way). Look at the amount of comments on social media with outcries over "too short" sentences for example, and the lack of political support for shortening sentences or improving prison standards.

I'm saying it's emotionally difficult to people because I've had this discussion many times over then last 30+ years and I've seen first hand how most people I have this conversation with tend to get angry and agitated over the prospect of not having moral cover for vengeance.
by strogonoff | 2025-06-20 10:24:42+00:00
These days you can use JavaScript-centric stack (and, gasp, React) to render static HTML that does not require runtime JavaScript at all.

Why bother with it, though?

Imagine you wanted to add elements of runtime interactivity. When we think about new and cool things on the Web, that’s nearly all of them. Ask yourself, what would result in more complexity and moving parts: doing the whole thing in one stack (e.g., JavaScript and React), or using two disparate stacks (say, Wordpress and then a bunch of jQuery) and ad-hoc tying them together by duplicating data model and business logic?

The most under-appreciated point about good design is that it’s not just about a thing looking pretty and functioning well at one point in time. It’s about a thing that can be maintained, improved, and kept in good working condition. Good design is sustainable, it exists and satisfies expectations over time.

Good developer experience is not the only aspect of sustainability (there are also cultural/organizational aspects, business model, etc.), but it is an important one. Modern stack is great from this perspective, allowing to express potentially dynamic layout while largely preserving declarativity (JSX), forcing to think about exactly what data you work with at all times so that you catch more issues at compile time (TypeScript), etc.

Yes, it also offers plenty of opportunities for shooting yourself in the foot if you so choose: by carelessly adding random badly maintained dependencies with massive dependency trees, by not thinking through the architecture or piling on abstraction layers, by adopting a framework that does not exactly fit your use case or that you don’t understand how it works, etc. We’ve all done that at some point, but ultimately it’s skill issue. More powerful tools require more thoughtful application.

Yes, sometimes sustainability can compete with the thing’s being pretty or small at one point in time, even though all of those are worthy ideals. Sometimes tradeoffs need to be made.
by vladms | 2025-06-20 10:24:57+00:00
I find this a strange way of thinking on a site called "hacker" news...

In my opinion there is NO problem. We have powerful tools that give you freedom and the possibility of tinkering. Some people will use it in ways one doesn't like, but as long as you have some possibility to use other products I think it is great.

I wouldn't trust anybody (including myself) to decide for all others what are the powers that should be given or not. The web architecture is amazing exactly because it allows everybody to build without some large body/organization/company imposing most rules.
by whacko_quacko | 2025-06-20 10:25:01+00:00
I agree, that the EU breaking up the tech giants is insane, but I don't think that banning them is much better. How would you enforce this? I don't want a big firewall like china has.

I'd argue for open protocols that allow exporting your data and switching services instead. Make export capabilities a requirement akin to data protection laws, and you have defanged the monopolistic nature of tech. Ideally also force interoperability between services, but that's a whole other can of worms.

This is on paper obviously much harder than just banning something, because you would have to define such exchange protocols, but it has a chance of success. One could start with certain industries, like social media, and in some cases build on existing work, like the AT or ActivityPub protocols.
by staunton | 2025-06-20 10:25:19+00:00
When you've read that passage in the math book twenty times, you eventually come to the conclusion that you understood it (even if in some rare cases you still didn't).

When "struggling through" a philosophy book, that doesn't happen in my experience. In fact, if you look up what others thought that passage means, you'll find no agreement among a bunch of people who "specialize" in authors who themselves "specialized" in the author you're reading. So reading that stuff I feel I have to accept that I will never understand what's written there and the whole exercise is just about "thinking about it for the sake of thinking". This might be "good for me" but it's really hard to keep up the motivation. Much harder than a math book.
by efitz | 2025-06-20 10:26:19+00:00
I don’t think that the issue is that we changed to designing web sites for developers. I think that the problem is that we started designing web sites for monetization. And this required adding a language and ecosystem that far exceeded the capabilities of the original WWW hypertext vision.

Ad based monetization means that there are going to be all sorts of business requirements to optimize for the monetization case: detailed surveillance metrics, various design requirements related to branding and to fulfill the designers’ “vision“, paywalls allowing search engines to peek through, etc. oh, and a chat assistant, preferably AI powered, because OMG why would we possibly expend the resources to communicate with a customer.

Ad based monetization is just evil; 50 years from now people will look back on the last couple of decades as a lesson on what not to do. It’s not that ads are evil or that monetization is evil, it’s that optimizing the web for ad based monetization causes people to do so many things that are bad for humans.
by neya | 2025-06-20 10:26:20+00:00
In 2010, Facebook was one of the best websites to browse. It was everything you wanted a central social media platform to be. You could stay updated about your friends, family and even host pages for your business on it. Everything was just so simple - because they respected what a "hyperlink" actually meant.

Fast forward today, I click on a dropdown on a post with barely 3-4 options, there's a spinner, a dozen requests in the network panel and the menu doesn't even load and gives up. Frontend libraries like React made frontend so needlessly complex that they actually ended up killing the definition of what a hyperlink is.

You click on a link today, it can either take you to where it's supposed to take you, open a dozen random popups or wipe your bank account clean. I miss the good old 2000s era where JS was minimal and the focus was on HYPER TEXT in HTML. We had good content, less frontend complexity. And we had flash for everything else.
by krisdigital | 2025-06-20 10:26:29+00:00
Thank you I did not notice that, will try it out! I added a new tower according to the original game - it collects the energy and you can connect the other towers to it to get a boost when there is enough energy stored! With the laser - I am not sure if it should lose a little bit of power with distance, that could also help to balance it.
by yunohn | 2025-06-20 10:26:46+00:00
Follow-up:

All these replies missed my point. I’m not saying tech is blameless, rather that the press constantly criticizes tech for both doing too much and doing nothing and not fixing society. I would argue that this is toxic and ignores the agency of literally all other professions/people.

Further, to ignore the housing/etc lobbying by basically everyone else outside of tech and make it seem like SV giants control the housing crisis is just boring. Do note that most of the developed world is facing this, not just specifically SV/USA.
by serial_dev | 2025-06-20 10:27:05+00:00
> This isn’t about going back to table layouts or banning JavaScript. It’s about building with intent. > It’s not about purity. It’s about outcomes. > Use what works.

I think the website is fast and the majority of that JS is for the comment section+recaptcha (that's also for comments?), website works without it, I can tab through things, and the site is accessible, so I don't think that hundred KB of JS is a big "gotcha!".

However, considering barely any comments, I'd honestly just consider removing them, not because I' mind the couple of hundred KBs, but because nobody uses these anymore. All discussion happens on social platforms and forums.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-06-20 10:27:15+00:00
I don't know - the level of seriousness they discuss w.r.t. alignment issues just seem so out of touch with the realities of large language models and the notion of a super intelligence being "closer than ever" gives way too much credit to the capabilities (or lack there of) of LLM's.

A lot of it seems rooted in Asimov-inspired, stimulant-fueled philosophizing than any kind of empirical or grounded observations.
by darqis | 2025-06-20 10:27:49+00:00
But this also isn't true. Everything k8s has caveats. You can't deploy a Percona MySQL DB on ARM for instance. Various operators have various issues which require manual intervention. It's all pretty much a clusterfuck. Then debugging reasons why this service works locally with a systemd service but not on k8s is also time intensive and difficult. And the steadily changing features and frequent version bumps. It's a full time job. And many helm charts aren't that great to begin with.

And what when someone deployment hangs and can't be deleted but still allocates resources? This is a common issue.
by CreepGin | 2025-06-20 10:28:05+00:00
Well, you may need to worry about them now. It's a well-known issue with the mainstream LLMs. Every few days, you see a new post on reddit from people asking how to get rid of em dashes from ChatGPT, etc.

Even when they are not a telltale-sign, folks are afraid of using them now because of AI. I'm not saying em dashes are bad. Our books are littered with them, and that's why LLMs spit them out consistently.

https://medium.com/@brentcsutoras/the-em-dash-dilemma-how-a-...
by TimPC | 2025-06-20 10:29:31+00:00
This is a scapegoat at best in areas with high homelessness. The mentally ill and drug abusers are the most visible part of the homeless population not all the homeless population. There are also complex relations to cause vs effect where mental illness may be at manageable levels until a crisis like homelessness exacerbates it or drug use may be a result of being homeless instead of a cause.
by tasuki | 2025-06-20 10:29:43+00:00
> We should encourage more of the younger generation over to powerful configurable editors such as Emacs, rather than locking everybody into VSCode/JetBrains/etc.

Isn't that precisely what LSP facilitates? I was using IDEs for like four years. Now I'm back to (neo)vim and couldn't be happier! There is no substitute for "jump to definition".
by sylware | 2025-06-20 10:30:01+00:00
In order to do that, you have to consider the technical plane, or big tech will work around everything, maliciously: we need _lean_ open source software (including the SDK) and protocols, stable in time. This will foster real-life citizen/local/commercial alternatives. This is actually hard and dynamic to do, people in charge will face acute lobbying and pressure, and they have to bath in technical sauce all the time.

For instance the web: noscript/basic (x)html for all dominant/critical online services, where reasonable. Or you will be jailed into the 2.5 engines of the whatng cartel. A few years back I could buy thingies with wallet codes using lynx/links/elinks/netsurf/w3m/etc web browsers on amazon.fr... now you MUST have a whatng web engine... how convenient... and recently, noscript browsers (which have a "non famous" user agent string), won't be able to perform a search on google anymore...

Video streaming sites can put text ads (clearly identified) into a 2D HTML document and can provide HLS/dash/etc <video>&|<audio> URLs (and can inject ads into the video stream if they want to) which the browser will send to a media player.

Chatting? One-time-usage IRC bridge URL with optional custom IRC commands which the browser will send to a IRC client?

Namely, you can augment this noscript/basic (x)html portal with some "web APIs" or even leaner(simpler?) protocols, with proper online publication and definition ofc.

The same attention should be given to the usage of PDF too. Generating a PDF with only utf-8 text should be "easy" and it is actually not really the case.

And the list goes on.

And you cannot 'break up' US companies, but you can make them "behave" if they want to do business in EU, and don't forget they have the backing of funds with thousands of billions of $ and they already have their own billions, in other words: there is ZERO, Z-E-R-O, economic competition here as they can spend out of business everybody (what they usually do over cycles of ~5-10 years or even longer) or "buy" anybody (until properly "disabled", then they are thrown away).

Don't forget about EU companies and gov administrations too... those can be straighten with much more convincing.

Basically the benchmark is the following: where appropriate, it should be "reasonable" for a few average devs/one average dev, with a lean SDK (including the programming language), to write real-life alternatives (citizen/local/commercial).