MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-07 16:03:03+00:00
Most programmers do approximately zero work that is R&D. The most you lose if they walk out the door is institutional knowledge.

On the other hand, I've worked almost exclusively on software R&D for decades and seen the loss of a single person effectively end a project even when the software was essentially finished. Software R&D is about developing abstract knowledge, concrete implementation code is just a useful byproduct of that since R&D is typically motivated by a specific novel requirement.

If the software IP that results from R&D is not core to your business or a competitive risk, there is money to be made by licensing it. I've licensed this type of IP to big tech companies a number of times. If you are not actually doing software R&D, you are unlikely to be in a position where this is a possibility.

In almost every IP sale and licensing deal for software R&D I've seen, the value of any code is almost entirely conditional on retaining the services of person(s) that designed and wrote it. The entire "acquihire" phenomenon is an explicit admission of this. This is true even when the code is in a mostly finished form. Companies are buying capability, not revenue, so the code can't be a black box to their engineers. Companies usually spend more to acquire people with the code knowledge than the actual code.

The practical reality is that it is difficult to reverse engineer abstract knowledge from a concrete implementation. No one wants your code per se, they want to adapt your code to a different application that requires having a deep understanding of the domain the code represents -- they don't know what they don't know.

If you are just grinding out software that could be vibe coded then there is minimal asset value being created in the software artifacts. Anyone else would be better off reimplementing it themselves.

So yes, almost all of the value of code produced by software R&D vests in the people that wrote it. This is evident across many software IP transactions.
by aisenik | 2025-06-07 16:03:19+00:00
Musk is a known pedophile-accusation-maker and affiliated with the Epstein child rape organization through his Kung-Fu lessons with Ghislaine Maxwell. Prior supporters will be less reactive for the first reason and more likely to perceive the situations as unfounded petty accusations for the latter (the dissonance of both Trump and Musk being connected to child rape is resolved this way).
by Geee | 2025-06-07 16:04:37+00:00
He supposedly learned it after the fact.

Also, he didn't say that, although he surely implied that. However, he only said that Trump is in the "files", which has actually been public information for a long time. It's known that Trump had some relations with Epstein, but there's no evidence he went to the island or did something wrong.

It's quite obvious that Elon knows that Trump is not on the actual "list", i.e. the list of Epstein's clients who went to the island. That's why the message reads like a silly insult, rather than a serious accusation.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-06-07 16:04:51+00:00
The funny thing about using AI to create an infinite amount of bland quests is that there is literally no audience for it. The people who play the game through once or twice aren't going to care about it and the people who want more of the game will download one of the thousands of mods created by the community. Oh, wow, you used AI to come up with a quest where I have to go to a cave and kill a creature. Amazing.
by pron | 2025-06-07 16:05:26+00:00
C also creates a distinction between compile-time and run-time, which is more arcane and complicated than that of Zig's, and your code uses it, too: macros (and other pre-processor programming). And there are other distinctions that are more subtle, such as whether the source of a target function is available to the caller's compilation unit or not, static or not etc..

C only seems cleaner and simpler if you already know it well.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-06-07 16:06:08+00:00
> you don't pay taxes on profits, but on revenue.

That can't be right. It definitely isn't in my country.

If own a car dealership, and I sell a car for $50,000 that I bought from the manufacturer for $40,000, surely I would pay tax on the $10,000 profit? The tax on the the full $50,000 revenue might exceed my profit!
by throwanda | 2025-06-07 16:06:30+00:00
Not constrained to Rwanda, the late '80s and early '90s saw the (re-)emergence of this flavor of broadcasting in many places around the world - especially in the US on the AM bands.

Fortunately, the conditions weren't present in the US to speedrun to civil war and genocide. Still, I grew up in Limbaugh-lovin' country during those years and was exposed to this... stuff... for more hours of the day than I care to think about. (In public school! Literally, teachers having Rush and assorted fellow-travellers on in the background while we did our classwork.)

I do not believe for a second that the fact it went different in the US wasn't for lack of trying. The trying hasn't even stopped.
by aphyr | 2025-06-07 16:11:00+00:00
If I might add on to what you and Joran are both saying, after some time working with TigerBeetle, I found it useful to think of Protocol-Aware Recovery as similar to TAPIR (https://syslab.cs.washington.edu/papers/tapir-tr14.pdf). Normally we build distributed systems on top of clean abstraction layers, like "Nodes are pure state machines that do not corrupt or forget state", or "the transaction protocol assumes each key is backed by a sequentially-consistent system like a Paxos state machine". TAPIR and PAR show a path for building a more efficient, or more capable, system, by breaking the boundaries between those layers and coupling them together.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-07 16:11:22+00:00
>Renting a chunk of air-gapped GCP infra is much cheaper and faster.

That was a rhetorical question, of course they went with Google because it's better and faster than anything in Europe. My point is that Europe will never be able to match Google levels of hyperscalers as long as buying from Google is cheaper and faster.

China's ban on US tech was a blessing in disguise as it brewed a strong domestic industry competitive to the US even if it'll never be on par. EU tech industry is even further behind.
by weitendorf | 2025-06-07 16:12:01+00:00
Procedural generation is fine. But you can definitely see that Starfield was intended to be a platform for user-generated content straight from the start, and I think they must have convinced themselves that they didn’t really need to care too much about the game itself, because those chumps - sorry, players - would add all the content for them on their own. It’s like Metaverse all over again. They forgot they actually needed to make something worth playing and users’ time investment before it would become a money printing machine. Also, probably like 4 people who worked on Daggerfall still work at Bethesda and most of their games between then and now didn’t use procedural generation much at all, so I don’t understand why so many people make this argument. Like oh it’s normal for me to put DSLs in my software projects, here check out this git repo I worked on 25 years ago when I was in college, our customers should have been prepared for the shit job I did with it this time.

Actually, I think I would be completely fine with Bethesda just churning out TES POI and storylines without trying to do anything significantly more complicated than what they did in Skyrim. Just focus on the world building and the story and do some simple gimmick that’s a little more creative than “shouts/dragonborn but in space”. I suspect most other players would be happy with something of similar scope.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-07 16:12:15+00:00
Meh, tell it to Darwin. Heat death will come for us all in the end, and there is no refuge to be found in our navels. Why accelerate it by embracing mediocrity? We should identify talent, reward it, and do the best we can with what we have, while we can.

The part about "identifying talent" is where people seem to lose the plot, unfortunately.
by satisfice | 2025-06-07 16:13:31+00:00
Procrastination is not a problem. The problem is being unhappy with procrastination.

I accept it as part of my life, because I believe it is an intuitive process that protects me from doing bad work.

There are times when I really have to get something done, and then I need to put pressure on myself. But mostly I have learned to listen to and respect my procrastination.
by k3vinw | 2025-06-07 16:13:33+00:00
Ironically the debate/discourse here is healthier than anything we see from US Congress. Presidents have a limited number of terms they can serve, but there is no limit on the House and Senate and change is hard if not next to impossible because of this. Term limits would be a good start to introducing positive changes, but good luck finding the necessary majority to vote against their power and very cushy and comfortable lifestyles.
by Barrin92 | 2025-06-07 16:13:39+00:00
One thing that seems underdiscussed to me is that oral culture compared to literary culture seems to have a strong impact on dissemination of hate or mass messaging. My pet theory is that the resurgence of the medium, that so much content is now again visual and audio dominated compared to textual, is responsible for a good amount of the increase in hate in recent years.

There's a one-to-many and sort of fuzzy, conspiratorial and hearsay nature to radio, podcasting, preaching, that you don't have in a literary context. It's the ease of transmission and ephemerality of it that enables so much uncritical engagement.
by paavohtl | 2025-06-07 16:14:17+00:00
Yes, I wrote the article. I wouldn't say the system in the release version is vastly different to the pre-release demo (there was only one to my knowledge, the E3 2005 one), as that just demonstrates a tightly scripted sequence of events, which one of the developers was open about even before Oblivion was released. Some things about the system definitely changed (such as disallowing NPCs to pickpocket from the player), but I don't think we have any evidence of whole systems or major behaviors that were actually implemented at some point and cut before release.
by fabian2k | 2025-06-07 16:15:02+00:00
That is a major issue with Starfield, but it also felt like Bethesda missed the improvements happening in other games in the last decade or so. Many games now are much more cinematic in their storytelling, often with full motion capture. A very recent comparison would be BG3, which is very cinematic despite being almost impossibly large.

In Starfield you have a mostly static view of your questgivers talking. Which was fine 10-20 years ago, doesn't feel as engaging today when many games do it much better.

It's also not only about this aspect, you can make engaging stories with old-school methods. But the writing could not save the aging presentation here, it appeared very bland and tired to me.

What absolutely didn't help was the persuasion minigame, where you essentially broke all pretense of having a story-based reason to bypass a certain check. Persuasion checks are very common in RPGs, I've never seen them done so terribly as in Starfield.

The environmental storytelling certainly was the highlight of previous Bethesda games. But the main and side stories often were engaging as well. In Starfield they felt aggressively bland and mediocre in a way I haven't really seen in other games.
by uecker | 2025-06-07 16:15:52+00:00
My point is not about whether compile-time programming is simpler in C or in Zig, but that is in most cases the wrong solution. My example is also not about compile time programming (and does not use macro: https://godbolt.org/z/Mc6M9dK4M), but about letting the optimizer do its job. The end result is then leaner than attempting to write a complicated compile time solution - I would argue.
by jorgen123 | 2025-06-07 16:16:28+00:00
The wikipedia page about the Mali Empire [1] has a few books in the Further Reading section. This one looks promising: African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34928286-african-dominio...
by Supermancho | 2025-06-07 16:17:23+00:00
I traveled to the Caribbean on a cruise. I figure one of the staff found my wallet, which had my original Social Security Card in it. Years later, I find a letter from the IRS about unpaid taxes on income over the previous 3 years. My SSN had been used for fraudulent filings, despite my residence always having been in California. There was also the discrepancy of overlapping tenures at cleaning companies across the eastern seaboard and overlapping tenures at tech companies on the west coast.

I talked to the IRS and I got audited (naturally). My income tax returns were withheld for about 7 years plus the 3 that had fraudulent filings. One day, I got a check from the US Treasury for all the back-returns plus interest. It was worth, I guess. Some individuals had also tried to get various loans, phones, etc in my name but my credit was sub 500 at the time, so they were denied. I kinda got lucky and unlucky at the same time.
by datavirtue | 2025-06-07 16:17:50+00:00
Chronic back issues...omg. You can literally exersize your way out of them. It's the only treatment and it is VERY effective. Living proof.

People run into back issues (very common and will probably happen to everyone) and doctors send them home with print outs showing them them how to repair their back. They throw the paper away and go back when "they need surgery." That makes it worse.
by krapp | 2025-06-07 16:17:56+00:00
To be fair Elon claimed that Trump is mentioned in the remainder of files which have yet to be released. Presumably what evidence there is of wrongdoing, if it exists, exists there.

"Pedo guy" Musk being Musk, though, who knows? What is the likelihood Musk would even have access to those files if they were so damning to Trump and still sealed?

Nothing about this is "quite obvious." It could go either way. To be honest I wouldn't put it past either one of them to be on Epstein's "list."
by matthewbauer | 2025-06-07 16:18:32+00:00
Not sure on the exact take of the OP, but:

Package maintainers often think in terms of constraints like I need a 1.0.0 <= pkg1 < 2.0.0 and a 2.5.0 <= pkg2 < 3.0.0. This tends to make total sense in the micro context of a single package but always falls apart IMO in the macro context. The problem is:

- constraints are not always right (say pkg1==1.9.0 actually breaks things)

- constraints of each dependency combined ends up giving very little degrees of freedom in constraint solving, so that you can’t in fact just take any pkg1 and use it

- even if you can use a given version, your package may have a hidden dependency on one if pkg1’s dependencies, that is only apparent once you start changing pkg1’s version

Constraint solving is really difficult and while it’s a cool idea, I think Nixpkgs takes the right approach in mostly avoiding it. If you want a given version of a package, you are forced to take the whole package set with you. So while you can’t say take a version of pkg1 from 2015 and use it with a version of pkg2 from 2025, you can just take the whole 2015 Nixpkgs and get pkg1 & pkg2 from 2015.
by delegate | 2025-06-07 16:18:37+00:00
You learn by doing.. eg typing the code. It's not just knowledge, it's the intuition you develop when you write code yourself. Just like physical exercise. Or playing an instrument. It's not enough to know the theory, practice is key.

AI makes it very easy to avoid typing and hence make learning this skill less attractive.

But I don't necessarily see it as doom and gloom, what I think will happen - juniors will develop advanced intuition about using AI and getting the functionality they need, not the quality of the code, while at the same time the AI models will get increasingly better and write higher quality code.
by mcsniff | 2025-06-07 16:19:48+00:00
There's another word for "educating" people until they reach the decision you want them to.

Brainwashing.

You know it's completely possible that people have a different outlook or opinion or perspective on things and that is why they disagree with you, not necessarily a lack of education?

Some people think these are good ideas and they vote or welcome them. Some people think they are bad ideas and they vote or oppose them.
by olalonde | 2025-06-07 16:19:49+00:00
> Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce since then, one economist told me.

Do they lose their "disabled" status if they go back to work? If so, that seems like a textbook poverty trap. Why risk losing lifetime free money for a minimum wage job that might not last?
by jpgvm | 2025-06-07 16:20:08+00:00
Nix generally speaking has a global "nixpkgs" version (I'm greatly over-simplifying here ofc) in which there is a single version of each package.

This is likely the source of their commit based versioning complaint/issue, i.e the commits in question are probably https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs versions if they aren't maintaining their own overlay of derivations.

This is in contrast to systems that allow all of the versions to move independently of each other.

i.e in the Nix world you don't just update one package, you move atomically to a new set of package versions. You can have full control over this by using your own derivations to customise the exact set of versions, in practice most folk using Nix aren't deep enough in it for that though.
by sixdimensional | 2025-06-07 16:20:14+00:00
Make = who made the thing

Model = what is the type of the thing

Serial Number = was supposed to be what order the things were made in (e.g. the number of the serial order), but this is often obfuscated or often repeats [1].

In cars, make would be like Ford. Model would be like Focus, serial number would be VIN (vehicle identification number - in cars, those are generally unique!).

Ford Focus + VIN, basically.

There is a theoretical concept of a unique identifier for everything... including people from ISO under ISO 8000.. combining a natural location identifier (eNLI)[2] and an ISO8601 timestamp - to represent "where and when a thing is considered to be born" - a point in time and space the thing is considered to come into existence.

I think the idea is called "natural person identifier" for humans.

This ID has to be assigned but I think you can see the idea at least.

I suppose this doesn't include make/manufacturer but realistically that isn't needed for uniqueness in this scheme, only as descriptive metadata for things that have one.

[1] This is related to the fact that if serial numbers were truly serial, one could estimate the rate and quantity of production which is considered sensitive information by most manufacturers. This relates to "the German tank problem" - during WWII the allies were able to accurately estimate the production of German tanks by analyzing the serial numbers off captured tanks.

[2] https://eccma.org/enli-eccma-natural-location-identifier/
by saghm | 2025-06-07 16:20:55+00:00
As someone who's never really understood why gambling is fun for people, this doesn't surprise me. Given that enough people seem to find it exciting enough to spend money for nothing other than a less than even chance to win back more for it to be its own form of entertainment, it makes sense to me that maybe quite a lot of people are predisposed to gambling addiction, and the reasons it wasn't not common before were social (easy access, potential social stigma due to a lack of anonymity, etc.). The fact that these obstacles have all gone away so quickly also leaves people entirely self-reliant on making sure they don't overindulge, similar to how binge drinking in college (in the US at least) is fairly common because of how much easier it is for most students to access alcohol when living at school compared to at home. Addiction is a medical condition after all, and while sports gambling might be the catalyst for the rise in gambling addiction, I suspect that the underlying susceptibility for it has always been there for a large number of people, and they've just been lucky enough not to be exposed to circumstances where it becomes addicting enough for it to be an issue in the past.
by mingus88 | 2025-06-07 16:23:05+00:00
Yeah it sounds like maybe OP was too direct. “Uncooperative” is strong language for feedback

I had a systems scenario recently where I was expected to troubleshoot a MySQL master that was trying to backup via rsync to a hung NFS mount.

I successfully resolved the problem and only then detailed how messed up their design was to get into such a situation in 2025.
by neilv | 2025-06-07 16:23:16+00:00
Around the time of this MEng thesis, in one startup-oriented professor's AI-ish research group, the spinoff startups found that no one wanted the AI parts of the startups.

But customers of the AI startups very much wanted more mundane solutions, which the startup would then pivot to doing.

(For example, you do startup to build AI systems to do X, and a database system is incidental to that; turns out the B2B customers wanted that database system, for non-AI reasons.)

So a grad student remarked about AI startups, "First thing you do, throw out the AI."

Which was an awkward thing for students working on AI to say to each other.

But it was a little too early for deep learning or transformers. And the gold rush at the time was for Web/Internet.
by nick__m | 2025-06-07 16:23:17+00:00
Incomplete combustion is much worse, no question there. But burning in facility design for that is really clean.

Climate change won't destroy life on earth, the very worst case according to the IPCC is a billion death by 2099 but nature won't care. Sure some species will disappears but looking at bikini atol, 40 to 50 years after the disaster the remaining one will fill back the newly open ecological niche and the intense genetic pressure will assure that they will eventually diversify.

Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does. Since humanity won't stop using something so usefull, without plastic millions of peoples would die every year from cause like food poisoning and lack of medical advanced medical care, so cleanly burning the plastic is the ethical choice. As grim as it sounds preventing the possible death of everything is better than preventing a billion death.

And note that I don't suggest that we ignore the 3R, we should still reduce and re-use the plastic and recycle the kind that are truly recyclable but between the landfill and energy producing plastic incinerator, the ethical chois is clear.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-07 16:23:56+00:00
The goal is to reach net 0 carbon emissions. We can at least theoretically power some of these things with renewable electricity. We can't replace plastic with any otheratetial in many uses - so finding a way to dispose of plastic waste while staying at net 0 emissions (if we ever get there) is going to mean that burning it is not a solution.