MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pavel_lishin | 2025-06-12 16:10:35+00:00
I think a lot of us software engineers dream about having a job where we work with our hands, and plumbing and woodworking seem to be especially common dreams.

But if you talk to a plumber, you'll quickly learn that while it's a respectable job that can earn you a good wage, it's also hard on the body, and often wildly unpleasant. And that's before you get to the fact that you're often your own boss, which means dealing with disgruntled or difficult customers, sometimes while you're also doing the physically uncomfortable and unpleasant task.

Imagine dealing with someone yelling at you for doing something or being too expensive wrong while you're elbow-deep in literal shit.
by jfinnery | 2025-06-12 16:11:07+00:00
Working in software doesn't confer social status and never has. Money, maybe, but not status.

Lawyers' wages are badly depressed, supposedly, yet "I'm a lawyer" instantly confers better social status than "I'm a software developer" or even "I work at Google". Doctor, professor, those are jobs that come with a little or large bump in social status. "I'm a software developer" is like "I'm an accountant"—neutral at best.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-12 16:11:09+00:00
Defence and power projection is extremely expensive and tech is incredibly work demanding. Is the average EU citizen ready for 15 days PTO and 50-60 hour work weeks?

I don't mean this as a slight, but I genuinely do not think the average European worker, who has at this point spent most of their career in a pretty cushy worker friendly environment, is going to be up for American style death-race productivity. Or the European style death-race productivity of centuries past for that matter.

The average American worker works 500 more hours a year than their German counterpart. That is 62.5 more work days annually. Trying to close that gap will have people rioting. Never mind the cuts to social programs and bumping retirement age to boost defense spending. Double never mind avoiding Russian energy. Europe would need a wholesale societal rewrite, not just a few more bonds issued.

Its much less resistance to stick out 4 years and hope the US gets it's sanity back.
by rfitz | 2025-06-12 16:11:22+00:00
No need to apologize for the jadedness at all! I think we're in an era of AI fatigue where every piece of content you see feels like it's AI generated (or assisted). Arguably most points in this post can be looked at as common sense to some degree. I think what I was trying to get across was my mental models and view on AI in tech since I still see a shocking amount of devs who look at it simply as a means to generate code for them and nothing more.

I'm planning on writing more that dives a bit deeper into experimentation I've done as far as tooling, MCP servers, etc that may be a bit more intriguing to those who have already dove into the AI side of things.
by retroam | 2025-06-12 16:11:35+00:00
Exactly this…it is individualism to the extreme. I don’t think they believe that cutting funding is in the best interest of the collective. But their activists want this so they will do it. It is hard in politics to link cause and effect so the nation as a whole won’t learn from this. I am really heartbroken about all of this. It is possible to reform without burning everything down.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-12 16:11:40+00:00
> I know there are some places where this happens though but it's more along the lines of the devices delaying their start until energy is cheap rather than being used as loads to shed excess capacity afaik.

This is what I meant, sorry for the ambiguity. Load the washer up and kick it off whenever energy is cheap. I don’t care when it happens other than, like, that it happens once a day, so why not defer this to the power company, right?
by dogma1138 | 2025-06-12 16:12:06+00:00
The event as in the research has occurred, and it was 100% lethal to all mammalian subjects and also the conclusion of the research is that the pathway would be applicable to all mammals.

So a lab in fact has created a highly contagious flu virus (far higher than regular flu) through gain of function research which has indeed killed 100% of the subjects which contracted it even if they were only mice.
by fzeroracer | 2025-06-12 16:12:12+00:00
One of the big problems of having a government ran by an oligarchic gerontocracy is that none of the people in charge are going to care about long term effects because they'll be dead before it affects them. So they maximize short term value extraction and destruction.

It's not strictly a far right issue either, the dems are feckless and useless for similar reasons being that any sort of long term consequences does not matter to them.
by kaashif | 2025-06-12 16:12:15+00:00
> It’s been my experience that any TODO list system I use will acquire an ugh field around it that gradually turns it into a thing I’m guiltily avoiding.

Considering that all of my tasks come from my to-do list and there's no way at all I could remember the dozens of tasks on my to-do list (I'm a manager, maybe that makes it worse), it's actually just impossible for me to avoid my list. Guiltily or otherwise.

The list doesn't make me anxious, having all of these tasks undone makes me anxious. Forgetting them makes me anxious. Having everything written down then doing everything and being on top of everything keeps me calm and sane.

> If it is important, you will remember it at some point during the day.

Varies person by person. My memory is nowhere near good enough for this to be true.
by vidarh | 2025-06-12 16:12:27+00:00
> The rule is simple: the more you procrastinate on a task, the more you should break it down into micro-tasks, even ones that take just 2 to 5 minutes in extreme cases.

This.

When I catch myself procrastinating, it often helps immensely to push myself to at least subdivide a task on my todo list further. Then try to push myself to do one of them, and if I still resist, try to subdivide tasks further.

I then move the task to a Done list by pressing a keyboard combo.

The only purpose of my Done list is exactly providing feedback the way the article recommends.

I never look back over past days "Done" entries. My Done list exists only there so that when I marka task done on my TODO list, the Done file that's open on the same virtual desktop gets the entry added to the top, under today's date, so I get the satisfaction of seeing the list grow. I used to just strike them out in my TODO list, by I found I like it better to see the TODO list actually empty out.

I could probably just wipe it every morning, but it feels satisfying knowing I have the timestamped records even though I never look at them.
by toast0 | 2025-06-12 16:12:42+00:00
> and a serious issue should one of the few large manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies get hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a small warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction.

If everyone agrees, you can use grid frequency/phase to coordinate, and not a separate realtime communication system. Grid interactive demand/response is a proven way to manage supply and load.

When your section of the grid is stressed, supply power or abstain from charging; when your section of the grid is abundant, charge.

Coordination is useful too, of course; predictive charging is helpful, and you wouldn't get that only by monitoring the grid; you also want to know somehow that a supply or load is scheduled to be added or removed at time X, or was unexpectedly removed and will not be reconnected for some time. And the system operator would want to know about capacity in many dimensions.
by int_19h | 2025-06-12 16:12:46+00:00
I don't know, but given that e.g. FreeBSD has an entire team dedicated to keeping GNOME working with whatever hacks are necessary, presumably there are at least enough to volunteer for such work.

Anyway, my point was more broadly that Gnome and its surrounding software ecosystem is explicitly and openly Linux-first and have no qualms introducing dependencies like systemd that make it that much harder to get it working everywhere else. I'm pretty sure I've seen Gnome folk straight up say that they simply don't care about anything other than Linux. So unfortunately it's not always that simple to move the apps over.

(KDE, on the other hand, is pretty BSD-friendly.)
by rtkwe | 2025-06-12 16:12:53+00:00
I'm not sure they care. Research etc goes against a lot of their ideological stances from climate policy to gender to economics (eg: there's barely a trickle down the cups at the top are bottomless) so they're just destroying the institutions that oppose them so they can make more money and retreat to their redoubts or just be dead by the time the repercussions of things like climate change become unignorable.
by hnbad | 2025-06-12 16:13:12+00:00
The ship has sailed on this one. Arguing that UFO means "unidentified" (i.e. probably not aliens) is like arguing whether the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic or a republic, or arguing that the Nazis were socialists because it's literally in the name (national socialists). Not only can words change meaning over time, labels can and sometimes do actually contradict their literal meaning.

I remember when there were huge online discussions about the incorrect use of the term "HTML5" once non-technical people got wind of it, and before that over the use of "internet" versus "web" (and whether it's "the internet" or "the Internet") and of course everyone knows the copypasta about "GNU/Linux" and maybe even the discussions about what a "meme" actually is, etc etc. None of these discussions are fruitful and by insisting on an older dictionary definition over the de facto majority use of a given word you're not demonstrating superior knowledge, intelligence or expertise but quite the opposite when it comes to language development and human interactions.

Words don't mean anything except what the two people using them to communicate with each other assign to them. In one-to-many and many-to-many conversations this means the majority use of the term generally prevails unless the minority use provides immediate superior utility (which is how a lot of slang enters mainstream use). It's all just sloppy lossy soundwaves and unicode strings thrown in each other's general direction - that we can transport ideas at all is nothing short of a miracle of nature.
by lazide | 2025-06-12 16:13:13+00:00
Desalination plants really don’t like being ‘throttled’, and are quite capital intensive. Stopping production for any length of time can even destroy the plant, if not done very carefully. Similar for geothermal, though the specific details are different.

Even free power would likely not be worth using if it was sporadic, and it’s extremely energy intensive. So that really is saying something.
by thesuperbigfrog | 2025-06-12 16:13:21+00:00
The rule of law is only a concept and depends on most people following it for it to work.

In a polite and mannered society, those who refuse to follow the rule of law are deemed "criminals" and locked up so they cannot ruin things for everyone else who choose to follow the rule of law social contract.

When the rule of law breaks down, people will do whatever they want or whatever they believe they can get away with.
by avidiax | 2025-06-12 16:13:42+00:00
I would guess that the locksmiths have some gatekeeping in just the same way that lawyers and doctors do.

Can you pay for ad placement on Google Maps and answer locksmithing calls? Yes, probably. Can you join all of the professional circles needed to access all the manufacturer data, parts catalogs, etc. ? Not so easily, I'd bet. I would hope that not just anybody can pay a fee to a safe lock company and get the manufacturer's code, for example.
by xpe | 2025-06-12 16:13:46+00:00
> Sorry to be a downer but basically every statement you’ve made above is incorrect.

You don't need to apologize for being a "downer", but it would be better if you were specific in your criticisms.

I welcome feedback, but it has to be specific and actionable. If I'm wrong, set me straight.

This is a two-way street: if you were unfair or uncharitable or wrong, you have to own that too. It is incumbent upon an intellectually honest reader to first seek a plausible interpretation under which a statement is indeed correct. Some people have a tendency to only find one possible interpretation under which a statement is wrong. This is insufficient. Bickering over interpretations is less useful; understanding another's meaning is how we grow.
by telotortium | 2025-06-12 16:13:54+00:00
Vibe coding Common Lisp could probably work well with additional tool support. Even a good documentation lookup and search tool, exposed in an AGENTS.md file, could significantly improve the problem Joe ran into of having the code generate bogus symbols. If you provide a small MCP server or other tool to introspect a running image containing your application, it could be even better.

LLMs can handle the syntax of basically any language, but the library knowledge is significantly improved by having a larger corpus of code than Common Lisp tends to have publicly available.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-06-12 16:14:04+00:00
Indian Alien here. I'd suggest more sleep. I would bet a fair amount of $ that average scores of Indian kids who take GRE / SAT would be higher than citizens born in, ahem, God's Own Country. Admittedly, those would be kids from the middle / upper middle class. To afford pilot school you'd need to be from those sections anyway, or from the air force. So I'd not consider language to be a factor here. Although as the top comment says, wait a week or two. Or maybe more.

Off topic, as someone who travels to India 1-2X per year .. it's more common to see women Indian pilots. I'm only mentioning this unusual stat as your comment shows a kind of regional bias.
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-12 16:14:06+00:00
> So a lab in fact has created a highly contagious flu virus

This paper does not appear to support that. They indicate the source was an existing, in the wild virus.

>> We isolated an HPAI H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b virus from wild birds in Korea with 96% E and 4% K at amino acid position 627 of PB2. To investigate the genomic characteristics of this clade regarding mammalian adaptation, we studied the replication and transmission of the H5N1 virus in mice.
by ACCount36 | 2025-06-12 16:14:14+00:00
If you told a person from 1990 that in the year 2025, they have this thing, and described OpenAI's o3 - strengths, flaws and all? That person would say "yep, your sci-fi future of year 2025 has actual AI!"

But if someone managed to actually make o3 in year 1990? Not in some abstact sci-fi future, but actually there, available broadly, as something you could access from your PC for a small fee?

People would say "well, it's not ackhtually intelligent because..."

Because people are incredibly stupid, and AI effect is incredibly powerful.
by palmfacehn | 2025-06-12 16:14:54+00:00
Wherever budget cuts are proposed, you can rely upon detractors to present the issue in apocalyptic terms. If we believed all of these claims, then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending. Furthermore, if we accepted the premise promoted by some commenters here, then research, which is presented as incredibly valuable - would be unable to be funded or valued in the private market. For these reasons I regard this topic to be filled with political hyperbole.

Yes, there will be occasions where valuable research is funded by the state. It doesn't follow that this is the only way to fund research. Arguments can be made for either case. Depending on your ideological background you may find some of them amenable. Pragmatism may also play a role. However, presentations like this are completely divorced from reason.
by rtkwe | 2025-06-12 16:15:08+00:00
Like I said support isn't really there for a lot of electric customers. I pay a single flat rate for electricity so there's no point in time shifting consumption.

Also there are downsides to having clothes just sit there for hours potentially before you dry them. They can get pretty dank from the moisture and for dryers some clothes need to be removed immediately when the cycle finishes.
by thrance | 2025-06-12 16:15:15+00:00
Censorship is no longer the tool of choice of wannabe dictators. Instead, the focus is now on editorializing of communication channels. Open up the front page of X in a private tab, and see how everything is far right propaganda. Who needs to censor anything anymore? Simply downrank whatever displeases you into oblivion.

Good for Brazil, maybe they can slow down the fascist disease that rots our democracies from the inside.
by johnQdeveloper | 2025-06-12 16:15:25+00:00
> Once again you argue my point for me. A place for everyone is a place for no one.

And you agree people like me should be removed from the country (even thought we are citizens) based on the kind of solutions the Nazis used before they moved on to camps.

10/10 glad the guy berating people for calling people fascists openly admits he is one.

EDIT:

Just noting for posterity, the guy agrees the above is correct in his current response but "wants to know what solution I have" as his only critique.

I'm done, no point in arguing with an admitted fascist/nazi adjacent type.

> How do you propose the problem is solved? Ban every kind of conservative from all the tribes you'd like to incorporate?

> That would still include you by the way since you'd like to conserve Israel. That's not a moral failure on your part that's just how people work and it's why international states can't work.

I'm just amazed how easy he took the bait to confession pipeline.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-06-12 16:15:59+00:00
Yeah when i moved to the USA i found it jarring when someone explained to me the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-container_law

A widespread law specific to the USA that doesn't seem to be a thing anywhere else in the world. We can take beers to a picnic in our parks. Shocking i know. Other societies haven't collapsed from allowing this.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-12 16:16:17+00:00
Social Media is more like the old newspaper "Letters To The Editor" than it is like the post office or phone system. On social media, you send your "post" to the S.M. company, the company reads it and decides whether or not to accept that "post" and then some time later, they publish it to the site's readers. The review process is done by a computer instead of an Editor, and takes no time at all (measured in milliseconds) but that's what's happening under the hood. They are absolutely curating and deciding what to display and what not to.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-12 16:16:24+00:00
I've been really interested in alternative energy and chemistry technologies for a long time. My take is that pyrolysis is one of those 'El Dorado' technologies like the fast breeder reactor or ethanol from cellulosic biomass that is heavily researched, talked about by some as if it were a bird in the hand, but makes little real progress.

People will say 'pyrolysis is an old technology', I mean, go to the black neighborhood in your town and you might find there was a coal tar street plant across from where the elementary school is now. I grew up in Manchester, NH and was baffled a bit as a kid by large areas near the downtown that were barricaded and overgrown and only found out later that we had the largest coal tar factory in the world at the age of WWI. It's toxic!

Pyrolysis takes many forms such as: turn switchgrass to dimethyl ether, turn plastics into BTEX [1] chemicals, burn coal "cleanly" and capture the CO2, eat municipal waste with a plasma torch but so often these projects end in failure. I mean, this machine has been up and running for 40 years,

https://www.dakotagas.com/

but only because it went bankrupt and didn't have to pay its capital cost.

[1] https://www.aeroqual.com/blog/what-is-btex
by tekkk | 2025-06-12 16:16:25+00:00
Great article! Many ideas that I have also noticed put together, nicely done. Although I'm kinda curious how long you have used this system to truly "know" it's bullet-proof.

In my experience, all systems fail without outside pressure and/or right nutrition and exercise. If I eat a lot of carbs and in general, gain fat and dont exercise I get nothing done. Eating ketoish and exercising every 2/3 days and I get a lot done.

Thinking about work as loops is the right idea, I do agree. Human brains slowly accomodate new thought-patterns and one must continously keep at them to make them appear easy. Any time I come back after vacation I feel immediate exhaustion and repulsion towards programming even though it's easy to me. You just lose the familiarity.

Anyway, I write tasks down as well although my system is just a webapp I built for myself. It's interesting I built it as hacky prototype but I've never come around finishing it even though I've been using it somewhat regularly for 5 years or so. Or I write down things on paper.

The least ceremony required for the process, to me, seems is the only long-term solution. But I appreciate this another take on it.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-12 16:17:47+00:00
> As long as interfaces are well defined, comprehensive tests are written, memory is safely handled and time complexity is analyzable, who cares what the rest of the code looks like

The thing is, code that does all of the things you listed here is good looking code almost by definition

If AI was anywhere near capable of producing this quality then it would be so thrilling, wouldn't it?

But it's not. The consensus seems to be pretty universal that AI code is Junior to Intermediate quality at best, the majority of the time

That generally isn't code that satisfies the list of quality criteria you mentioned
by 7thaccount | 2025-06-12 16:18:03+00:00
Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are essentially the same thing as the Distributed Energy Resource Aggregators (DERAs) I mentioned above. I guess a VPP is technically a more general term and could also refer to the same concept under different structures like in a micro grid.

The industry has a ton of jargon (literally thousands of acronyms amongst the US regional markets) and in many cases there are 8 terms that mean the exact same thing.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-12 16:18:12+00:00
Off topic, but...

It occurs to me that your post used to impress people. That era ended, too.

That is, an AI can generate your edgy takes that used to give you reputation and karma, and can do so faster than you can. So your edgy takes don't impress people anymore, either.

(With "you" being understood as not necessarily the author, or the reader, but the kind of people who expected to be able to impress people by social media posts.)