MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Flemlo | 2025-06-02 14:25:03+00:00
The generic chat agent is for me absolutely a product.

The personal assistant agent too.

They might overlap for me but not for everyone.

Nothing will crash. The big rich companies like Google, Microsoft already need it as part of their product strategy.

But about ai companies, I don't think their faith matters at all to end consumer and I'm pretty sure companies like character.ai do not run red numbers.
by cmcaleer | 2025-06-02 14:25:15+00:00
Not all edge is necessarily ephemeral, if you're thoroughly entrenched and have a deep understanding of a market you will usually just outperform your competitors. Take Jane Street's infamously long-lasting (and profitable!) Indian options trade for example. They had clearly put in the work and effort into understanding a market that other firms didn't do to the same extent, and resources and minds who are good at figuring this stuff out are finite.

You're totally right that edge isn't just knowing if number is more likely to go up, as an example since you mentioned faster access to data: some of the best of the best companies will hire meteorologists so that they know how reliable their microwave towers for transmitting data between e.g. Chicago and NY are (and they can lean in or widen their spreads according to how current and up-to-date their information is).

It sounds like crazy stuff to do, but when your data could be up to 10ms slower than you expect due to weather and you're so sensitive to latency you hire FPGA engineers because normal high performance CPUs aren't enough for you, it's not that crazy.

I sometimes feel like HFT is a waste of good talent and wonder what some of the people I've met who work at JS or CitSec could have done in other industries, but at the same time HFT is often the only industry that correctly prices these peoples' minds. Ultimately having a smoother financial system where risk is more correctly priced is a good thing, even if it's not the best thing they could be doing.
by dcminter | 2025-06-02 14:25:23+00:00
I agree except that I'd say "when internet access was not ubiquitous" actually. One of the major reasons I bought magazines was to have light reading when commuting by public transport (in my case into central London from the suburbs).

Once the mobile phone had more and more-up-to-date material available there were fewer reasons to buy a magazine.

Nowadays a magazine is something I purchase as a luxury when I specifically want to be offline and without distractions (but even there my Kindle usually does the job just as well).

I must say I miss the quality and depth of writing that one got in Byte and PCW of yesteryear - even though I recognise that the online stuff often exceeds it in both breadth and quality.
by davedx | 2025-06-02 14:25:30+00:00
Yeah, some were dropped, but not from great heights or anything - normal wear and tear that a regular smartphone would easily survive. She does have covers for them. I think one even had like a 1' fall onto carpeted stairs and then wouldn't turn on anymore.

I think her latest one has lasted a lot longer though, so maybe they've steadily become more sturdy...
by gus_massa | 2025-06-02 14:25:32+00:00
Probably start with a turtle, like https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html

First just graphics, then functions without parameters to make a fixed drawing on demand, then add a parameter to choose size or color...

For games I think it's better to use absolute coordinates, so perhaps redo most of that without a turtle (and without rotations).

> That said, I wonder whether focusing on CS fundamentals is worth it. Knowing fundamentals is always useful, ...

Wait a little, until they learn to use the editor and run simple programs. Try to focus in teaching nice habits like not too many globals, but how many bits has a byte can wait.

> ... but learning to collaborate with an AI is probably the more important long-term skill.

I'd not worry too much. They will learn faster than you.
by evanjrowley | 2025-06-02 14:25:36+00:00
This reminds me of a bug I ran into back in 2019 where a server with ~600,000 clients would slow to a crawl while under load. A number of factors were at play, but critically, there was a bug in our server-side use of the OpenSSL library causing connections to stay open for 10 seconds. Things would work OK up until until the server reached ~200 ESTABLISHED connections, but subsequent connections would get RST. Netstat never reported many closed connections on the server, so it's possible the ESTABLISHED ones were showing up that way without the RST.

So is your Postgres server using TLS? Can you try turning it off temporarily, or switching to a server with a different OpenSSL version?
by adrian_b | 2025-06-02 14:25:37+00:00
While lab-grown cell cultures can be a solution for making fake meat for rich vegans, it is unlikely to ever become an efficient protein production method.

There already exists an alternative protein production method, the use of a genetically-modified strain of some fungus (currently there exist such strains of the fungus Trichoderma), which has been modified to produce a soluble protein with optimal amino-acid profile, i.e. either whey protein or chicken egg white protein. This method can produce protein powders at a low cost, with the potential to become cheaper than the same proteins from milk or eggs.

I have experimented for a few years with using only vegetable protein sources, but I have eventually given up, because the restrictions that this imposed on my meal choices were not worthwhile.

Now, I use besides vegetable protein sources also some whey protein concentrate powder (which not only has a better composition, but it is also much cheaper than any industrially-produced plant protein extract, having about the same price as chicken meat). Thus I can cook whatever vegetable food I want without worrying about the protein content or the amino-acid profile. When necessary, I mix protein powder in the food that I am cooking, to ensure an adequate protein intake.

This is good enough for me, because even if I enjoyed eating various kinds of meat in the past I feel no need now to eat fake meat.

Here on HN there was last year some news about a startup attempting to produce proteins in this way, by fungal cultures, but at least for now they had in mind only industrial customers. Nevertheless, if in the future such cheap fungus-produced protein powders became available at retail, that would solve for me, and for others who might not care about expensive fake meat, the problem of the protein content of a vegan diet.
by bookofjoe | 2025-06-02 14:25:55+00:00
My favorites are his first books read by him:

"Call For The Dead" and "A Small Town in Germany"

Listen here:

https://youtu.be/e1lmpG3kCDg

https://youtu.be/30QOqAcY4bY

https://youtu.be/0Ik9Gv9s0TQ

https://youtu.be/q79SspzdpLA

https://youtu.be/i3UnPBMouwU

FWIW The three novels in the "Value Collection" are abridged:

https://www.amazon.com/John-le-Carr-Value-Collection-audiobo...
by lapcat | 2025-06-02 14:26:05+00:00
> But writing in isolation provides little feedback or upside, so there is some desire / pressure to publish what you write.

This is like saying that that personal hobbies provide little feedback or upside.

The upside is that you enjoy the activity and what it produces. That's also the feedback.

Are you claiming that nobody should write a diary without publishing it to the world?
by Swizec | 2025-06-02 14:26:14+00:00
> Lots of fresh grads and junior staff focus 99% on being useful, but career advancement beyond the first one or two promotions depends MUCH more on being valued.

“People don’t remember who went to grab drinks on a Tuesday, but they’ll remember who helped them close a million dollar deal and get a huge bonus”

Give your coworkers superpowers and opportunities will flow.
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by alphapv | 2025-06-02 14:26:22+00:00
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by acidburnNSA | 2025-06-02 14:26:41+00:00
If you like nuclear powered flight, you'll also really enjoy this other one that I got digitized in February: "Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion: Manned Aircraft Progress Report" [1]. It's actually from back in the 50s and digitized extremely well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-8q8INxQEY

I also have a blog announcement of it if you just want to see some screenshots up front before deciding to dig in: [2]

[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-02-03-declassified-nucle...
by bhickey | 2025-06-02 14:26:56+00:00
This library appears to be insecure by default. I think there are vanishingly few use cases for non-crypto RNGs. We made absl random secure by default using randen: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02227

The algorithm is provably secure, so long as AES is secure. It is also backtracking resistant: an adversary with the current RNG state cannot step backwards.

On hardware with AES primitives, it's faster than MT, though slower than pcg64.
by bromuk | 2025-06-02 14:27:13+00:00
Spend about 20% of my salary on (varies depending on month) - Eating out - Video games - PC Parts - Joint account with partner

Impact of life; is that I'm not miserable. (I was obsessive about not spending early on in my career and got really bad depression, i.e. working really hard, not allowing myself to enjoy the fruits of my labor)

Things I'd like todo if I had more money are: - Travel to see family abroad - Tidy up the nitpicky things in my house that bother me - A car with more doors (3 door at the moment)

My philosophy is to have enough saved for a rainy day, then excess goes to pension / investments and then provide myself with a small amount of ££ for myself (And research the hell out of the thing I'm buying)
by aaronbaugher | 2025-06-02 14:27:27+00:00
Yeah, money matters. My money isn't making me happy, but my girlfriend makes me happy, and if I hadn't gotten out of the rut that kept me broke for years and started making enough to afford to go on dates, I never would have asked her out. So there's definitely a connection, even if it's not the Scrooge trope of someone gleefully counting his dollars.
by echelon | 2025-06-02 14:27:28+00:00
I miss Owen Wilson.

He was going through some major depression and understandably pulled back from the industry. But he brought something very personable and authentic to comedy, and his absence has been palpable.

Many other comedians of the era were too slapstick and over the top for me. I still can't watch a Will Ferrell comedy with any interest.
by komali2 | 2025-06-02 14:27:30+00:00
I realized, when reading old journals, that basically every story I told and the vast majority of things I can remember, are things I'd written down in my journal. Similarly, I've also noticed that the subjects I can teach very well or explain very well are things I've blogged about, and the motorcycle routes I can describe from memory are the ones I've published videos on. I'm not sure if this is a sort of chicken/egg situation e.g. the memorable experiences are worth writing down, but I'd have remembered them any way, but in any case it certainly doesn't seem to hurt.

I think I have like 100 subscribers to my youtube, just checked and looks like my blog got 133 visits last week. Oh well.

It's also really nice that I can easily send a video to someone when I'm recommending motorcycle routes, or if someone asks me for the millionth time why I moved to Taiwan or some other question I've answered in my blog, I can give a short and polite answer with a link to a blog post or two if they want to know more.
by donatj | 2025-06-02 14:28:13+00:00
Something we have had to deal with in managing educational software with a writing aspect is trying to manage what is offensive to who, in what context and where is not universal at all.

One of the most prime examples, at one point a number of terms related to homosexuality had made it onto the list at the request of a larger district. These are also terms that are being reclaimed, and it was... a difficult problem to try to satisfy everyone, and it did upset other districts. I believe their patterns were all but removed eventually.

We have a fought over the list of definitions and every change provoked controversy. Our current solution is just that we mark items for teacher review but don't tell them why. We don't say they are offensive, we don't say what the problematic words are. We just say it might need review. That's worked pretty well so far.

All this is to say, policing speech is a problem best avoided.
by _heimdall | 2025-06-02 14:29:04+00:00
I put a lot of weight behind P/E ratios. Today those ratios are very high compared to historic trends, and are in the ballpark of what we saw in the sitcom bubble [1].

By no means am I saying that is predictive, maybe the ratio isn't as useful as I think or maybe it is less applicable today for some reason. I do have a hard time finding any stocks today that I can justify the market valuation for, though.

[1] https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/price-earnings...
by naravara | 2025-06-02 14:29:12+00:00
Yeah all these “save your time and attention from your smartphone” value propositions run into the problem of just being shitty phones that end up being quite expensive. This goes for eInk phones as well as things like the Light Phone or that Humane Pin.

The fact is people actually just like their phones, and the main problem with them getting zombiefied staring at them comes from specific attention sucking brainrot apps. Aspects of hardware design can be a nudge factor but it’s not the main driver. The problem is TikTok, Instagram, et al and nobody wants to have a shitty phone experience when they could just block those apps. Compromising functionality runs into the problem where you get too much bycatch as most of the addicting functionality overlaps with stuff people want. I may not want apps or a screen but I want maps, and once you have maps and navigation you probably need a screen. Maybe I want to avoid video because I want to avoid TikTok but then I am searching for a How To guide and that ends up linking you to YouTube. I don’t want WhatsApp but I want to receive text messages, but once I’m in a group chat how different is that from WhatsApp?

I recently had this issue with notifications. I turn off notifications on everything except phone calls and messages. But I was trying to marketplace some items and it turned out I just couldn’t communicate with people without live messaging them on LetGo or the BuyNothing app or Facebook marketplace. But once I turned on notifications to get those messages suddenly they’re constantly spamming me with push notifications and emails trying to bait my engagement. The hardware is not the problem.
by JohnFen | 2025-06-02 14:29:51+00:00
I use one question to suss out these sorts of things. It's only valuable when talking to the devs that work there, not when talking to managers.

The question is "what is your workday like?" The direct answer to that question isn't as important as the conversation that it starts. Ask two or three people and you'll get a good idea of how things really work there.
by atonse | 2025-06-02 14:30:28+00:00
Are you trying to mix two payment models together though?

To provide a counterpoint:

With almost all traditional employment, people are paid for their time. Their output is more an expectation based on the time put in.

So if you want to bill by output, that's always an option as a consultant (fixed price).

But as a business owner, I would absolutely expect my employees (and vendors) to use these tools to go faster, just like laptops make them go faster than typewriters. It's not like it's causing the employee 4x more effort for that 4x output, is it?

If you were digging ditches by hand, but now you have an excavator with you, are you expecting 10x payment just because you can now do it 10x faster? Nobody will pay for that. Instead, you would now charge by a different metric (say, length of the ditch, rather than hours). And you would now be able to handle more customers since you can provide the same outcome to more people in less time.

I have no problem if someone wanted to charge by outcome. I think the concept of paying for "time" is going to go extinct in this new world. Think of lawyers who bill $500/hour. Now they can't say "I need 4 hours to have my team review this" and send you a $4k bill for their whole team to bill, because expectations have changed.

But framing this as an "us vs. them" thing by comparing apples and oranges isn't going to get us anywhere.
by Closi | 2025-06-02 14:30:32+00:00
Just as a heads up, that roadmap you linked is broken.

The formatting looks all off for me on chrome mac (black bars) and then if I click on a card it opens a window but then doesn't load any data.

Also it looks like a bug that if you filter by some tags, then click a card, the filter gets reset.

This is 5 secs of testing on the one board you have publicly shared, so there might be a few bugs to iron out!
by afiodorov | 2025-06-02 14:30:35+00:00
The article's 'useful vs. valued' distinction is spot on, and for me, it largely hinges on perceived replaceability.

Being a diligent workhorse makes you 'useful' - you're reliably closing tickets. But 'valued' often means bringing innovation or strategic foresight that's harder to replicate.

Sometimes, too much visible grind on routine tasks can almost cap your perceived value. It reminds me of the senior dev whose Jira updates might be terse — like 'Continuing research on core problem' — for days. They're not judged on daily ticket volume, but on the eventual breakthrough or critical insight that unblocks everyone or defines the next big thing. That signals a different kind of leverage and indispensability than just high output.
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-02 14:30:44+00:00
Good points and maybe expressed to generally by me.

I suspect who is laid off first is more to do with the lifecycle of the company actually, having been in high/low/negative growth environments myself.

I have found in negative growth environments, managers tend to get pretty sober about who is actually useful not just valued, and cut accordingly. Negative growth environments is also when more cuts happen, with generally a worse job hunting environment if you are cut.

But in frivolous times, yes, I've seen plenty of useful people get cut.. but they always bounce back better anyway.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-06-02 14:31:29+00:00
You miss the point. It’s not I don’t believe in scarcity or the second law of thermodynamics, it’s that I critique capitalism’s handing of it that is by its very nature exploitative, short-sighted and unsustainable. It needs various and extensive guardrails to be functional at all otherwise it would have destroyed us already.

It’s the classic “capitalism is built on scarcity but behaves as if infinite growth is possible”-critique. There are interesting responses to that but “it’s contradictory” ain’t one of them.
by KronisLV | 2025-06-02 14:31:53+00:00
I'm in the top 20% of salaries in Latvia, which in absolute terms is still pretty bad (not even close to 6 figures).

That said, I was pretty lucky in that I don't have debts: I got my Master's degree mostly for govt. funds due to good grades + started working in development during my 2nd year in Bachelor's. I am also pretty lucky that I don't have many expenses: I live in my dad's old city apartment and look after it (swapped out fridge and stove some time ago, new lightbulbs, lots of cleaning etc.), so day to day only have to cover utilities (~300 EUR) and no rent to speak of.

I try to save and invest a decent chunk of whatever I earn, sometimes funds managed by my bank, sometimes specific company stocks, a relatively small amount in crypto as well. At the same time I spend some of my money helping my friends that are less fortunate than me, like with medical expenses or getting food near payday etc., since while I feel comfortable with a bit of a spartan lifestyle, them not being able to afford necessities sucks and it'd feel bad to do nothing.

Aside from that, I do get some knickknacks sometimes, like how I'm getting an Aigo AIO for my PC (~60 EUR, not strictly necessary, but might help with the Ryzen 7 5800X, ~150 EUR, throwing a hissy fit whenever I make it compile things) and a new Modecom PSU (~50 EUR, the old one rattles a bit, might be bad bearings on its fan, probably a good idea to replace it and not risk it frying things at some point), some new clothes (~150 EUR) and the usual boring stuff (e.g. groceries are around 250-300 EUR a month over here). Also visiting Germany later this year (~1000 EUR) for a programming event and to hang out with some lovely people.

Probably won't have: a fancy gaming PC, or flagship phones/laptops, a car in the near future, my own apartment in a newly built building even in the more far future, or any sort of living in luxury. At the same time, I much prefer either being able to help others and also having some financial stability over having the latest shiny thing.

Unfortunately, despite not living in excess, it very much feels like I'm one financial crisis away from financial ruin. Fun times.
by poulpy123 | 2025-06-02 14:32:21+00:00
I actually believe that blogging (or making video, or a podcast) is good. It allows to structure our thought and synthetize them.

What I don't believe in is the OP post or many comments in hacker news on the topic: blogging in the hope to gain something beyond self-improvement.

First it's a very different best to write for gaining fame and popularity than to organize your thought. Then the market is totally overcrowded and difficult to beat, even for just a normal revenu stream. Finally: many people, maybe most, get the fun sucked out of them when they try to convert a hobby in a job.

So while I would not avocate to not blog if you want to get rich and famous, I would say it is not really a good strategy
by _heimdall | 2025-06-02 14:32:51+00:00
I think you're coming in with an assumption that HFTs are generally correct in their valuations, and that they are chasing efficiency or proper valuations rather than short term gains.

Maybe those would be roughly analogous in a stable situation, but my read is that the big players in the markets today are chasing short term gains despite the signals. I'd point to the housing crisis as a recent example, the biggest banks and funds were massively over valuing real estate and real estate derivatives because they were blind to the actual risks and saw what appeared to be free money.
by sweeii | 2025-06-02 14:32:58+00:00
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by dcminter | 2025-06-02 14:33:05+00:00
> The last time I bought a mag was probably more than a quarter of a century ago

There is some kind of vicious cycle going on I'm sure - where fewer people are buying magazines, so stores have less reason to stock them, so there are fewer opportunities to buy them, so fewer people buy magazines.

Probably a few will survive as niche items at a higher price. I think I'll be ok with that. One would imagine that print-on-demand solutions will emerge for the remaining (or even emerging) niche titles. I'd be nervous to start something new on that basis though.