MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-02 10:29:48+00:00
Note that even for an engineering problem, you don't necessarily use a decimal representation. You may well want to represent pi as 3 or 4 or 22/7 or any other approximation that is good for your particular use case. Or you may even have usecases where you do things the opposite way - you may want to approximate 1 as pi/3 or something like that for certain kinds of problems (e.g if you're going to take the sin of your result).
by 0xEF | 2025-06-02 10:29:51+00:00
I get what you're saying. It's difficult to convey this to some people. I've been through a lot of jobs in quite a few different fields over the decades and have the appearance of being restless if I am not careful about how I craft my resume.

I've been asked "okay, but what do you _like_ to do?" which just puts me in a position to have to explain that I have a passion for learning new things and experimentation, but nobody is going to pay me to read books and play around in a workshop all day, since those jobs are few and definitely already filled.

So, it's a hobby, instead.
by camgunz | 2025-06-02 10:30:48+00:00
Oh I see. Maybe a way to restate this is "how do I communicate the costs of data to the client", that is the cost of returning top-level user data is let's just say 1; the cost of returning the last 10 comments is 2, and the cost of returning older comments is 2000. Because otherwise pushing that set of decisions back to the server doesn't exactly solve it, it just means you now actually can make that decision server side, even though you're still waiting a long time on comment 11 no matter what.

Re your "JSX Over The Wire" post, I think we've gone totally around the bend. A piece of code that takes 0 or more responses from a data backend and returns some kind of HTML is a web service. Like, that's CGI, that's PHP, that's Rails, Node, Django, whatever. If the argument here is "the browser should have some kind of state tracking/reactivity built in, and until that day we have a shim like jQuery or the old school thin React or the new school htmx" then OK, but this is so, so much engineering to elide `onclick` et al.

---

I kind of worry that we've spent way, way too much time in these weeds. There's millions and millions of lines of React out there, and certainly the majority of it is "stitch the responses of these N API calls together into a view/document, maybe poll them for updates from time to time", to the degree that AI just does it now. If it's so predictable that a couple of video cards can do it in a few seconds, why have we spent gazillions of engineering years polishing this?
by bag_boy | 2025-06-02 10:31:37+00:00
I like Wes Anderson movies in general, but I was unable to finish Asteroid City at home. It felt emotionally monotone. I probably need to go back and rewatch it.

Hope this one is a bit more exciting.

Rushmore is my favorite. The yearbook montage is awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMyh6ptegko
by brabel | 2025-06-02 10:31:49+00:00
While I thank my parents for having invested so much of their lives in me, I do hope that they had the chance to do most of the things that they liked while bringing me up, and I surely hope they do that now that we're all grown up and independent (unfortunately, in my case, one parent is dead and the other doesn't really have the energy anymore... I wish she would just have fun and enjoy life, but it's easy to say when you're young and healthy).
by quectophoton | 2025-06-02 10:32:38+00:00
> Unless engineering is explicitly involved in the hiring process, HR will drop your resume automatically if you say "5 years of MySQL and SQLite experience" with no mention of Postgres.

I found this the hard way during these last 2 years.

They might give you the benefit of the doubt if you have led teams before, but if that's not the case, your application is going to the bottom of the list because you don't match exact keyword and have a big number next to it.
by dinetrimr | 2025-06-02 10:34:10+00:00
I used to recognize this at my last job, pay was good but left searching for other opportunities where I felt valued in a team.

Two years later and I've about burned through all my savings looking for any job at all. Seems like current market has decided my skills and connections are not enough. Fixing to just uber or something next month out of desperation. I used to make six figures.

Turns out I decided to quit at the absolute worst time. I may not have been valued socially at the last gig but I felt somewhat useful. Nowadays enough time has passed and I no longer feel valued nor useful. The distinction fails to make any difference when the threat of losing it all constantly looms over you.

If I could I would go back in time and berate my self to keep that job at all costs and remain valueless, instead of insist grass is greener for some nebulous quality of "valued". Some things like health insurance are just more important than some intangible ideas of being valued or not by higher ups I won't really understand.
by karlperera | 2025-06-02 10:34:57+00:00
Futurist Ray Kurzweil claims that within just four years, medical advances will let humans achieve “longevity escape velocity”—meaning each year, science will add more than a year to our life expectancy. In a recent interview, Kurzweil points to rapid progress in fields like mRNA vaccines and simulated biology as evidence that this milestone is close.

The article explores what longevity escape velocity really means: it’s not immortality, but a point where, for those with access to cutting-edge medicine, life expectancy could keep increasing faster than we age. Of course, the piece also notes the many caveats—like the difference between average life expectancy and actual lifespan, and the persistent risks from disease and accidents.

Is this prediction realistic, or just another case of tech optimism? What breakthroughs (or obstacles) do you see on the path to radically extended lifespans?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-02 10:35:17+00:00
Makes me think of Nobel laureates and the claim I saw a few times, that getting the award is usually the peak of one's career. The reasoning goes, even though the award is proof of competence + a door opener, and should lead to even better results in the future, constantly worrying about living up to the reputation puts a brake on one's work.

I've heard similar things said about novelists, too.
by Const-me | 2025-06-02 10:35:31+00:00
I would not call that example production quality code.

CreateFileA API thing is only available for compatibility with prehistoric software written for Win9x from the nineties. Also, the SDK comes with CAtlFile class which wraps CreateFileW / ReadFile / CloseHandle and guarantees closing handle in the destructor.

They are using a raw pointer in OMMSet structure which leaks memory. I would replace the raw pointer with std::unique_ptr<D3D12_RAYTRACING_OPACITY_MICROMAP_HISTOGRAM_ENTRY[]>

As for the _alloca, I think it’s OK however I usually assert() the size being allocated is reasonable, like under 256kb.
by shen_pandi | 2025-06-02 10:35:59+00:00
For 30 years, we believed data needed to move to become valuable i.e. lift it from transactional systems, shift it to warehouses, and dump it into data lakes. But this mindset has become a trap - costly, rigid, and painfully slowing the business.

I began my career building transactional systems and moving data around for every imaginable purpose. Over time, I evolved into roles as a Data Analyst, Data Architect, and Consultant, spanning industries and working at both operational and strategic levels. A common thread in every project I encountered was clear: the more data was moved, the less likely the project was to succeed. In my first attempt to solve the data problem, I fell into the same trap i.e. trying to fix it by creating yet another tool that moves data around. It didn’t take long to realise that there were already countless tools out there, each doing a similar thing.

But with AI, the story has fundamentally changed. Today, we have a unique opportunity to transform how data challenges are approached, enabling businesses to make faster, more informed decisions by activating data directly, without endless movement.
by lenkite | 2025-06-02 10:36:21+00:00
Ok, but sorry, what is so special about Javascript here ? Did this for good old Java services a few hundred times. With hot-fix on same or next day. Remote debugging is supported for a large number of languages. It is not unique to JS alone.

JVMs support live visual profiling too - many engineers identify production performance issues this way. I don't think node js has anything to compete out of the box with the same level of convenience. (Last I checked, the profiling was bare bones primitive)
by 47282847 | 2025-06-02 10:36:40+00:00
The most plausible explanation lies in how much early childhood memories and the emotional state of our caretakers in certain situations will form our later experience. It doesn’t have to bring up explicit memories, in fact most situations only “trigger“ emotional memory. You may not remember any even if you try; tools like hypnosis and constellations can bring up some.

Is it thinkable that one or both of your parents felt nice in meatful situations, which allowed you as a child to relax and feel safe?

We are a container full of memories. Reprogramming requires more than just a different cognitive decision in the present. I claim there is nothing physically inherent in meat that creates your emotional response.
by weitendorf | 2025-06-02 10:36:52+00:00
I most write without publishing, and while it does give me a nagging feeling that I ought to be doing that, it's underrated how useful it can be to think through a problem and validate your own thoughts.

I believe that smartphones are occupying a huge portion of the time people used to spend just thinking, and the nature of work/modern living has us out of the habit of doing lots of "meditative" tasks that used to be much more common. I almost never hear anybody suggest spending more time thinking over something but constantly hear advice along the lines of "talk to more people" or "see what other people are doing/did and figure out how you can do that". A lot of what we do think we "think" comes from the increasingly large time we spend consuming hyper-targeted media optimizng for watch-time, or conversing within our social tribe.

When I sat and wrote this post, I was able to think about this stuff for 10 entirely uninterrupted minutes without anything else competing for my attention. It sounds like nothing, but how often do we actually occupy ourselves purely with our own thoughts without either being interrupted or reaching for our phones out of habit?

The only other ways I'm able to sustain that kind of focused thought are by taking walks and programming very late at night. But the extent to which I as a person differ in personality or ideas from an average of my peers is almost entirely from those moments.
by bawana | 2025-06-02 10:37:55+00:00
I am a physician. I am useful because i can remove kidney stones and relieve the awful pain people find themselves in. My value however continues to decline as the monopolistic practices of insurers and hospital systems (who are now starting their own insurances) has reduced my reimbursement to less than that of a plumber. The money that used to go to workers now goes to the c suite. Ironically they were nonexistent 50 years ago when healthcare delivery was better in the US. This redistribution of ‘value’ has been facilitated by information systems that have allowed data to be centralized and aggregated. I cant wait for AI to replace the c suite so all the money goes to shareholders- maybe then people will wake up.

Ultimately i see this whole trajectory as a communist plot- centralizing control and profit.
by pards | 2025-06-02 10:38:00+00:00
> It feels to me like “do the things you like” is a luxury of someone who isn’t anxious about paying all their bills.

I encourage my kids to keep their hobbies as pastimes, not as income sources. As soon as you try to make a living from your hobby or passion, it sucks the joy out of it.

Make money from your job; derive joy from your hobby. Separation of church and state.
by austin-cheney | 2025-06-02 10:39:25+00:00
* How is the team/project internally structured? Where are the projects internal leaders?

* Is there task specialization or expertise on the project? How is that identified or assigned?

* What certifications or other external qualifiers are important for this team/project beyond the minimum required?

* How is product quality defined in writing. How is it enforced?

* Does the team set arbitrary definitions and measures or does the team make determinations according to multiple factors? This question is deceptive. It’s almost always better to have things defined in writing, even if wrong, than to frequently defer to ad hoc qualifiers.

* If after fully onboarding I have a tremendous amount of availability where would you like to see that time invested?

* If this is a consultancy how do I identify the principal stakeholders at the client and what are their success criteria? It’s often not about making the client happy but accelerating the client towards some goal not immediately clear within the consultancy.

* What are their success criteria currently technical constraints on the team that determines velocity? Almost always this is a people problem rebranded as a technology or training problem and this question should cause panic alarms in your brain.
by schaum | 2025-06-02 10:40:44+00:00
I used Datagrip like 10 years ago and it was amazing, back then I used some pre-release evaluation thingy, loved it, was only working with mysql though.

last year i looked at it again, in a project where mongodb is used, it did not perform so well, sure the features where there, but still mongodb is document orientated so i had to come up with workarounds and so ... yeah back to cli unfortunately

but for any relational database, I'd rather use datagrip!
by kypro | 2025-06-02 10:41:08+00:00
I understand the negative perception around the importance of playing "office politics", but realistically when people are working as a team it's important people can be cooperative, and office politics is mostly just the exercise of being a cooperative member of the team.

99% of the time people are not getting promoted or retained simply because they're more friendly with people at the top, but because they're broadly respected, cooperative, and have some adequate level of competency.

The anti-social 10x developer who sits in the corner of the office grunting at people with his headphones on might spit out a lot of code, but does so while causing friction and problems within the wider team. They might think highly of themselves, but they fail to see how a company full of these people cannot operate efficiently.

Doing "real work" + making effort to be liked and cooperative with those around you is the right strategy. Over indexing on just being like or just doing real work isn't going to get you very far.

You said, "they don't like me" and if that's true I do think you should try harder to be liked. You can still raise objections to things and have your own input, but learning how to do that in a way that doesn't irritate people or derail the team is an important skill to have.

I empathise though because I struggle with this myself – I'm autistic so I find it hard to be likeable and communicate with nuance. I have lost jobs and promotions because of my inability to play well in teams in the past. Even today it's hard, but it's better now I at least try my best.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-06-02 10:41:59+00:00
To add, don't think you'd enjoy producing if you enjoy consuming. Many kids these days aspire to become a youtuber or other kind of influencer, only few actually put in the work, and fewer still succeed because I'm convinced you need to have certain specific characteristics to do that kind of work (or hobby), and only a minority of people enjoy recording themselves. Probably more today than 20 odd years ago but still.
by t0b1 | 2025-06-02 10:42:33+00:00
TPDE is a framework for writing a back-end for various SSA IRs. TPDE-LLVM is an LLVM back-end written using TPDE, but TPDE itself is independent of LLVM. The paper also mentions back-ends written for Cranelift's IR and Umbra IR using TPDE.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-02 10:42:48+00:00
In several different ways at the same time. One moment, it's obvious your life is for your children; another, you're thinking in frustration that it should be for you, at least a bit.

Gets tricky to find a balance, but balance is needed, because your children learn from example; if you sacrifice 100% of your own self to them, they'll never learn how to live.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-06-02 10:43:57+00:00
It's related to survivorship bias or whichever; successful writers have written for years already, but you / the potential writer only discover these when they're already established. Few people will actually have followed them as they progressed through the years.

Anyway, point is, you read a good post whose goodness was in part due to the thousand posts before it, then think "I need to be as good as this" and you'll fail. I'm sure there's a word for that too.
by acrooks | 2025-06-02 10:44:40+00:00
I think it's important to start with identifying your bottlenecks, and work from there to determine the solutions you need. In the case of our business, I feel that my time is best spent talking to customers and prospects. These discussions directly impact revenue, retention, product strategy, etc.

So then I start thinking ... what sort of things am I doing that take me away from talking to customers? I spend a lot of time on implementation. I spend a lot of time on administrative sales tasks (chasing people for meetings, writing proposals, negotiating contracts). I spend a lot of time on meeting prep and follow-up. And many more. So I'm always on the hunt for tools with a problem already in mind.

In terms of specific tools...

Claude is a great backbone for a lot. Both the chatbot but also the API. I use the chatbot to help me write proposals and review contracts. I used it to write scripting to automate our implementation process which was once quite manual and is now a button click.

Cursor has been a game changer. In particular, it means that we spend very little time on bugfixes and small features. This keeps my CTO almost 100% focused on big picture needle-moving projects. We are now doing some research into things like Codex/Claude Code to see how we could improve this further.

Another app that I really love is called Granola. It automatically joins all of my meetings, writes notes, reminds me what promises I made, helps me write follow-up emails, and helps me prep for meetings.

Finally, we use an email client called Sedna (disclaimer: I used to work at Sedna) which is fully programmable. We've been building our own internal tooling (leveraging the Claude API) on top of Sedna to help automate different workflows. For example, my inbox is now perfectly prioritised. In many cases, when I receive emails from customers, an AI has already written a draft that I can review and send. I know there are a lot of out-of-the-box tools out there like Fyxer to help with things like this, but I've really appreciated the ability to get exactly what we want by building certain things ourselves.
by BossingAround | 2025-06-02 10:45:54+00:00
> I am curious what they’ll show off at WWDC this year

Apparently, not much is planned, per [1]. I'd be very cautious about AI agents like these; from a user level, this has so many security vulnerabilities.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/30/the-macrumors-show-last...
by ZephyrBlu | 2025-06-02 10:46:14+00:00
If you are happy being a worker bee it's great. If you want to take on more responsibility and have a seat at the table, it feels like you're being treated with kiddy gloves.

A lot of the kind of work the author mentions is done with the expectation that it will translate into more responsibility or influence at some point. If the company said "you're a great developer, but you'll never be more than that" the author probably wouldn't have invested to the same degree.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-02 10:48:18+00:00
> Of course, none of that vast concentration of investor money will go to the authors.

There's no reason it should. The authors don't get perpetual royalties from everyone who read their works. Or do you believe I should divide my salary between Petzold, Stroustrup, Ousterhout, Abelson, Sussman, Norvig, Cormen, and a dozen other technical authors, and also between all HN users proportionally to their comment count or karma?

Should my employer pay them as well, and should their customers too, because you can trace a causal chain from some products to the people mentioned, through me?

IP, despite its issues, does not work like that.

> If the government was doing this, people would be screaming about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual property since the rise of Mao.

Or call it the public education system and public library network.
by weitendorf | 2025-06-02 10:48:25+00:00
I think a lot of people are just inherently predisposed to Posting Thoughts on the Internet but it's not really that common in the real world. And it does feel a bit different doing so in a dedicated blog on your own website with your real name, vs under a pseudonym replying to someone else on a giant site.

> realize we need instructional blog posts on how to "persevere" or explainers on why writing is valuable even without an external audience

Definitely don't think we need another 10,000 Kubernetes Tutorials published on Medium.com but I think the idea of writing for yourself or just without "having" to do it is something most people don't actually have exposure to. It's really not that common in most communities or people's lives, and most people grow up only ever doing it as schoolwork or an obstacle to a job or something. It's been like this since well before the Internet. In fact, I'd bet that well over 90% of people do not personally know a single person who regularly writes for themselves or just for fun.
by kgeist | 2025-06-02 10:50:37+00:00
D already had this, 2 "standard" libraries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6066174

>The reason it caused the division at community is that the ones that you could not use both on the same project, this meant that for a while you had two "D" languages that were separate, libraries made with one did not worked with the other...
by yunusabd | 2025-06-02 10:50:54+00:00
That's an interesting space to explore! I'm wondering about the baseline in the benchmarks. Which prompts did you use for those? I'm asking because some of the resulting prompts seem fairly generic, and I'm wondering if you could just blanket add them to each prompt and also see an improvement. Things like "Identify the question (what are you trying to find?)".

In the same vein, wouldn't it be interesting to measure which part of the prompt most contributed to better solving the problem? Surely some parts will be just noise and can be trimmed away.

Also wondering what this does, since the model probably won't (can't?) actually read the problem multiple times:

> Read the problem carefully (multiple times).
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-06-02 10:51:21+00:00
How do people on HN think about the market?

Do you think the market is so efficient that anyone who outperforms it is merely lucky?

Or do you think the market is inefficient enough for a person smart enough to be able to outperform it by thinking?

In other words: Do you think a single person can rationally decide to invest their time into thinking about the stock market? Or would that always be a fallacy, and whatever the outcome is - we can't decide if it was just good or bad luck?