MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dasil003 | 2025-06-24 00:32:55+00:00
This article sets up a strawman by talking about someone from HR asking for an exit interview. Well yeah, you shouldn't give unfiltered feedback to HR because HR is clueless about engineering and have tenuous context at best about the majority of feedback a technical person would be inclined to give. On the other hand, there might be some legitimate feedback that A) would be relevant and B) could be helpful, but only if the organization is prepared to hear it, which you need to use your judgement on. Be warned that if you aren't regularly hearing about what the business needs, or if what you are hearing sounds like nonsense, then you are not in a position to deliver useful feedback to HR and you only have downside.

The place to really consider more direct feedback is with people that you have worked closely with. Personal relationships matter infinitely more than HR or any "official" record. If you have good relationships with your boss and/or peers, talk to them and give your thoughts, it could give you some closure and maybe even potentially improve things. Just don't let it turn into a unconstructive venting session. Ultimately working in organizations is hard and every single person can generate a laundry list of complaints, the real value is in finding a path to improve with the levers under your control. If you have credible idea about how to nudge things in the right direction, people will tend to appreciate that; if you're just looking for commiseration about how broken everything is then keep your opinion to yourself.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-06-24 00:33:50+00:00
Yeah, but we're not talking about alien blobs, we're talking about pre-trained transformers. I'm 100% certain that if you make them bigger and better then all you will have is a bigger better pre-trained transformer.

Scale it up (and sprinkle some magic fairy dust on it?) and it'll become sentient seems to be the thought process. Didn't work for CYC, and not going to work here either. We need architecture, not scale or efficiency or bells and whistles. Get rid of pre-training and design an architecture and learning algorithm that will learn continuously and incrementally from it's own actions and mistakes (i.e. prediction failures) and we'll start to get somewhere.
by phatskat | 2025-06-24 00:34:33+00:00
I can’t stand TV keyboard input, it’s wildly frustrating. I’d be happy even with “abc” style, T9 would be even better ofc.

I can kind of understand how we got here - a fractured system of various vendors, TV makers, and customized android implementations led us to apps having their own keyboards, even if the TV offers a native on-screen keyboard, and for some reason most of those are laid out in a keypad style with A in the top-left which goes against everything the majority of users have known, even back to typewriters.

I know my comment got longwinded, it’s just…things could have and should have gotten better by now, but I’ll be arsed if I’m gonna pull out my phone to type the four letters needed to scroll to the movie I’m looking for.
by nitwit005 | 2025-06-24 00:35:21+00:00
I don't disagree exactly, but the AI that fully replaces all the programmers is essentially a superhuman one. It's matching human output, but will obviously be able to do some tasks like calculations much faster, and won't need a lunch break.

At that point it's less "programmers will be out of work" as "most work may cease to exist".
by SlowTao | 2025-06-24 00:35:33+00:00
There seems to be more movement in the standards space on wireless headphones. The wireless standard today could be very different in 5-10 years time. The 3.5mm jack is over a century old, it isn't being changed dramatically in any way.

Personally, I am just not a fan of something that requires both a software connection that usually isn't always the smoothest thing rather than a direct hardware connection. And having yet another battery to deal with and the down stream impact of that. Typically all on hardware with the battery sealed inside that will die long before the rest of the hardware will.

Nothing wrong with wireless as an option but mandating it, I do not like that one bit. It is now the first thing I check on a phone as it is an absolute deal breaker for me.
by fragmede | 2025-06-24 00:35:34+00:00
Yeah, but who knows why they aren't listening to you? If they could fix the problem, but they don't think it's a serious issue, they're not motivated to fix the problem. But if it's serious enough that someone quit their job over the issue, then they may get motivated to fix the problem before more people leave. Not a guarantee, obviously, but it does make a certain amount of sense.
by NoPicklez | 2025-06-24 00:35:56+00:00
You should back down, albeit slightly.

There's nothing wrong with the cloud and there's nothing wrong having your own NASes and external drives.

The person in question was consolidating from old drives to the cloud, then transferring to new drives, using the cloud as a temporary stopgap before moving to new drives. Seemingly they were trying to do the right thing.

Nobody here is saying the cloud is a solution for all technical problems, just like we're not saying NASes and external drives are a complete solution either.

The average person doesn't have the technical knowhow to setup and use a NAS, perhaps a single external drive and that is fraught with danger.
by TheRealPomax | 2025-06-24 00:35:58+00:00
This is called proposing a short sighted solution to an incredibly complex problem, and you should ask yourself some serious questions about why this is what you think should happen. Then look up the many times others suggested this and the overwhelming arguments that people have made to go "absolutely not, because education does not serve industry, is not paid for by industry, and is not appreciated by industry" in many, many variations.
by sir0010010 | 2025-06-24 00:37:46+00:00
You are missing that:

* Hamas keeps its missiles, arms and other military equipment inside or underneath schools and hospitals

* UNRWA was functioning as an arms dealer by putting arms inside of bags of flour or other food items

* Hamas generally has its fighters not wear uniform, but instead wear civilian clothes or even niqabs (where only the eyes are visible). Making it extremely difficult for the IDF to determine who is a combatant and who isn't- and guaranteeing mistakes will be made.

* Hamas also uses child soldiers or orders children to throw stones at IDF soldiers - again ensuring IDF soldiers have to always be afraid the person in front of them is going to kill them and that they have to make split second decisions on what to do about it
by jack_pp | 2025-06-24 00:37:48+00:00
Sony tried to compete with the best camera, best DAC and I don't think those phones sold. Manufacturers build products the market wants. Wired headphones are not what the market wants. If you are a true purist you buy stuff from fiio and carry more then one device.

This is the same thing as with small phones. A vocal minority cried far and wide that they wanted them. Apple made them.. and they did, not, sell.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-24 00:39:39+00:00
The golden mean between "customize literally everything" and "never stray from the basics", imo, is to pick and maintain a stack of blessed +2 vorpal binaries that work well even without any of your dotfiles or n=1 designs being present.

That's why I build off of the programs my Shell Bling Ubuntu [1] installs. Not everything I use in an average day is in there, but everything I find myself shocked not to have on a new Ubuntu VM out of the box is.

[1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu
by Trenthug | 2025-06-24 00:39:41+00:00
This paper presents a novel method of defining Consciousness by enumerating and coherently arranging it's aspects, it's based on information and complexity theory,all the terms in here are objectively and definitely defined,a major requirement of the paper is to get a refined method of measuring complexity.and there are some thought experiments at the end of it which might be of appeal to logicians
by RickJWagner | 2025-06-24 00:41:32+00:00
I don’t have an EV, but I think I would like one.

Some days I repeat your ideas in my head and think the EV would be great. Other days, I consider the places I see ICE vehicles needing work—- suspension pieces, air conditioning, electronic bits, lights, etc and I think otherwise.

Really, I haven’t had a problem with an ICE engine or transmission in a long time. ( Including my 20 year old crv, which just keeps running. The suspension is getting creaky, though. )

I wish there was more information available about early Teslas and how they’re doing today. I just don’t have a good feel for longevity.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-06-24 00:41:36+00:00
There is nothing Rust specific as far as I’m aware, other than the developers are comfortable with the language. They have a very fast dependency resolver/algo, but presumably you could implement that in C or Zig or whatever. It is much faster than if it was implemented in Python or another interpreted language though. Ruff is way, way faster than the equivalent Python tools. I like Rust for the type safety and tooling so that may slow them to build faster?
by jcalvinowens | 2025-06-24 00:42:29+00:00
This is it for me. If you ask these models to write something new, the result can be okay.

But the second you start iterating with them... the codebase goes to shit, because they never delete code. Never. They always bolt new shit on to solve any problem, even when there's an incredibly obvious path to achieve the same thing in a much more maintainable way with what already exists.

Show me a language model that can turn rube goldberg code into good readable code, and I'll suddenly become very interested in them. Until then, I remain a hater, because they only seem capable of the opposite :)
by yummypaint | 2025-06-24 00:42:49+00:00
With a decent general education as a prerequisite, most adults are able to do most jobs well. That is the best way for most people to hedge against things being disrupted.

It's impossible to know what the future will hold for one's profession. Industry recently demanded "coders" and now a generation of compsci majors are finding the jobs of the present aren't the jobs of the past. A similar thing happened to secretaries and typists. Meanwhile people who were perhaps language or history majors and ended up with stronger communication skills often end up as executives. There are many paths.
by mlyle | 2025-06-24 00:43:23+00:00
But it's not. How much you can soak up of clients actively trying to handshake and request resources is going to be different from how much of bulk traffic. How much traffic you can soak up in one place (e.g. saturating your peering to where 80% of your customers are). Or how much spoofed traffic you can soak up globally from a botnet.

Cloudflare has a ton of infrastructure, and this just makes them intrinsically more robust to the biggest attacks. It's in their interest, therefore, to make people believe there's a lot of really big attacks.
by userbinator | 2025-06-24 00:43:47+00:00
When unscrewed, users are likely to be greeted with an option to remove the battery as well as it isn’t attached to the device with the help of glue but rather with additional screws.

What a horrible state of things that "not gluing the battery in place but screwing it in" is considered an improvement. IMHO smartphones have been on a horrible decline ever since ~2016. Before then, most Androids had [1] easily replaceable battery, no tools required at all; [2] microSD slot; [3] headphone jack; [4] (many) dual SIM; [5] (many cheaper models) easily rooted or unlocked by default. Now all we get are faster CPUs, more (non-expandable) storage, and far too many cameras.

There was also this memorable ad from Samsung: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hIoyb9L5g0
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-24 00:44:25+00:00
Some of this I believe is possible because of rent price. Especially in places like Kyoto where I believe the population is slowly going down.

That said, there are small places all over. this one might be relatively famous. It's next to a train track so not "quiet" but it's also in busy Tokyo.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/FMY9QwWyiibWn9CcA

Another thing there are lots of are small restaurants that hold 5-12 people. There are of course the famous bars in Golden Gai and a few other places but there really are 1000s of these places if you know where to look if you're language skills are up for it. Often there is person running the "bar" but they have a menu of food they'll cook for you. Things like grilled fish, pork salad, omelette rice, etc... Basically Japanese home cooking. Lots of people become regulars at a place and it's like their 2nd home.

If you watched Odd Taxi, they hang out at a place like this.

There's one I was introduced to recently right here (https://maps.app.goo.gl/Tgsfou4HMbKiiD3L8). It's not going to be around much longer because it's run by a 96yr old lady who lives there. She doesn't speak any English. She ran it with her husband until he passed away. IIRC she's been there 57yrs

Another, I was introduced to bar recently, not far from the coffee place above. I found it interesting in particular because it was only open weekdays from 5pm to 10:30 on weekdays. Not open on weekends. I haven't asked if that brings in enough or if the person has other sources of income. I'll ask next time I visit. But 5.5 hours a day, 5 days a week + prep sound nice.

Another thing I find appealing about these small bar/restaurants/snacks, they seem like not a bad life. Working a USA style sports bar in the USA or beer restaurant like in Germany or regular restaurant with 10+ tables seems like a not so interesting job. Just running from table to table taking orders, carrying orders, being "busy". These Japanese places are a place to socialize and in particular to socialize with the owner so the owner generally has a nice time as well.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-24 00:44:58+00:00
tmux probably takes about a day to learn the basics of. If all you get out of it is the ability to split your terminal screen even inside a remote SSH connection I'd say it's worth it.

You can fall down an unexpectedly vast rabbit hole with its customisability, however, since multiplexers see so much of what's going on in a very general way (by design).
by armada651 | 2025-06-24 00:44:58+00:00
Japan is full of licenses and regulations, it is almost the exact opposite of the free market utopia you're imagining. You're not even allowed to buy a car without a permit that proves you have a parking space for it.

What Japan does different is that it has sensible zoning laws that are designed around foot traffic rather than car traffic. Why don't you have small shops like this in the U.S.? Because of minimum parking space requirements for cars.
by q3k | 2025-06-24 00:46:15+00:00
Direct from the CSB:

> The President’s Budget proposes $0 for CSB’s FY 2026 budget with the expectation that CSB begins closing down during FY 2025. CSB’s emergency fund of $844,145 will be appropriated to cover costs associated with closing down the agency. Exact closing costs will be determined upon consultation with OMB and Congress.

Source: https://www.csb.gov/assets/1/6/csb_cj_2026.pdf
by tux3 | 2025-06-24 00:46:58+00:00
So, taking a non-expert look at the actual study, it looks like they first depolimerize PET into some acyl hydroxamate as a preparatory step.

Then it seems the big finding here is that this Lossen rearrangement, a regular non-biological chemical step, doesn't kill E. Coli. They derive PABA from that step.

And the E. Coli hasn't done anything yet, but since it's still alive, the cute trick is to turn PABA into APAP (acetaminophen). We already knew how to do that, but I suppose it demonstrates the point

Now what I don't get is what was wrong with running the Lossen step separately, and only feeding the output to the bacteria.

This article makes it sound like a miracle way to turn plastic into small molecules. They found that one of the step won't kill E. Coli. But it seems like all the steps were already possible before.
by beeflet | 2025-06-24 00:47:09+00:00
>Wired headphones still have better sound quality

I don't know about that, I still get analog noise all the time. Maybe it's just due to using a cheap DAC?

They also sell wireless earbuds and headphones with replaceable batteries.

I think the solution is to ship wireless earphones with a usb-c capability, and ship smartphones with multiple usb ports.
by ra0x3 | 2025-06-24 00:47:16+00:00
This is a really good point.

At a certain point, huge prompts (which you can readily find available on Github, used by large LLM-based corps) are just....files of code? Why wouldn't I just write the code myself at that point?

Almost makes me think this "AI coding takeover" is strictly pushed by non-technical people.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-24 00:47:26+00:00
Wow, that's a sad story. It really sucks to spend your life mastering a craft and suddenly find it obsolete and your best years behind you. My heart goes out to your father.

This is a phenomenon that seems to be experienced more and more frequently as the industrial revolution continues... The craft of drafting goes back to 2000 B.C.[0] and while techniques and requirements gradually changed over thousands of years, the digital revolution suddenly changed a ton of things all at once in drafting and many other crafts. This created a literacy gap many never recovered from.

I wonder if we'll see a similar split here with engineers and developers regarding agentic and LLM literacy.

[0] https://azon.com/2023/02/16/rare-historical-photos/
by PostOnce | 2025-06-24 00:47:46+00:00
Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less)

However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later.

At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses.

i.e., credit can buy time in the nearly literal sense, you can do an hour's work in half an hour because the money facilitates it, meaning you can now make more money. If instead of investing in work you're spending on play, then you end up with a time deficit.

or, e.g. you can buy 3 franchises in 3 months instead of 3 years (i.e. income from the 1 franchise), trading credit for time to make more money, instead of burning it. It'd have been nice had they taught me this in school.
by shwouchk | 2025-06-24 00:49:38+00:00
installing an editor on the remote sure works - my mention of vim was not an accident, it is my preferred remote editor. some of us are bitextual ;-) - but then you lose the seamless remote+local editing, need to sync your config, potentially clash with someone else’s (ever ssh into ubuntu@awshost?), take special care not to sync any private stuff, etc.

as for sftp, unfortunately that’s not an option if you happen to use windows locally eg for work reasons, nor if you use a mac as of several years now, since fuse became closed source.

not to mention, again, the fact that you are limited to whatever root you decided to mount, limited to editing as a user that i’ve already mentioned, as well as limited from using remote tools as sibling stated. try making a git commit over sftp.

if you have a focused “working on a project” workflow it may work, otherwise PITA
by hyruo | 2025-06-24 00:50:03+00:00
I Think there are two typically causes: 1.Developers often acquire land in remote rural areas to build housing projects, anticipating urban expansion that would drive up property values. However, China's urbanization has largely reached its limit, making further expansion unlikely. 2.Some developers construct properties on leased land without securing proper ownership titles. If full property rights aren't obtained before sales commence, these units become unsellable and are eventually abandoned, as buyers avoid legally precarious investments.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-06-24 00:50:38+00:00
I love little computer-shaped devices.

I had a Laser PC4 in the early 90s: https://oldcomputermuseum.com/laser_pc4.html

I wish I still had it just to noodle around on.

I picked up a Cambridge Z88 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88) at a Goodwill a couple years ago but haven't done much of anything with it. Apparently they have quite the following.
by sodality2 | 2025-06-24 00:50:44+00:00
I always thought it was interesting that the BNPL loans’ interest is subsidized by the retailer, which pay the premium in order to improve the chance of a sale (hoping to hone in on those who can’t afford it now and make it back on that extra spend). Which means high credit score, wealthy spenders could put everything they can on BNPL plans and profit the (minuscule) interest over time, but if you can do that on big purchases, maybe it’ll add up. Same way credit cards work, if you have the cash flow and always pay them off in full, you can make a few bucks in a HYSA for the 40 ish days before the statement.

I can see a future where a BNPL loan is not offered if the signals the checkout page collects indicates wealth, since they don’t have an issue of cash flow stopping a purchase. Imagine a loan that has a credit score maximum, not a minimum.
by bramhaag | 2025-06-24 00:50:55+00:00
In which ways is CalyxOS "better"?

This comparison is pretty damning: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

Calyx is _not_ a hardened OS, and runs on devices with insecure hardware and firmware (like a Fairphone). Additionally, app compatibility suffers because they use microG instead of proper sandboxed Gapps, and also lacks many QoL features that guard against hostile apps (storage scopes, contact scopes, ...).
by beeflet | 2025-06-24 00:51:01+00:00
Their phones are sold in the USA through Murena. I've bought a fairphone 4 through them. It was preloaded with eOS but I loaded calyxOS on it, which is similar to GrapheneOS.

https://murena.com/products/smartphones/

It also supports a lot of linux distributions, including UBPorts and postmarketOS.

I wish that they would just stick with one form factor and do the "framework computer" approach though.
by colechristensen | 2025-06-24 00:51:32+00:00
The major part of this discovery was about something that e. coli already did on its own before genetic modification, so no not particularly. They might be able to engineer a symbiotic bacterium to live in your blood (there's a lot of doubt here), or more likely and less risky engineer a bacterium that consumed microplastics to live in your gut delivered as a probiotic or as a "vaccine" that you ate that would infect your existing microbiome.

And not an mRNA vaccine, those are kind of too simple and are mainly there to annoy the immune system. You would either use a virus to inject new genes into bacteria or insert plasmids into bacteria in a lab which would later be consumed.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-24 00:51:37+00:00
You'd be surprised what a combination of structured review passes and agent rules (even simple ones such as "please consider whether old code can be phased out") might do to your agentic workflow.

> Show me a language model that can turn rube goldberg code into good readable code, and I'll suddenly become very interested in them.

They can already do this. If you have any specific code examples in mind, I can experiment for you and return my conclusions if it means you'll earnestly try out a modern agentic workflow.
by Neywiny | 2025-06-24 00:51:38+00:00
I think that's a bit disingenuous. It's not always delaying work. There's only so much time and there are some people who cannot afford to live with the time in the day, the skillset they have, and the market conditions (both income and expenses). Your tone and word choice shows you don't understand the problem at all.

If somebody can BNPL or otherwise credit lifesaving medicine (such as the many people in the USA who die from inability to afford healthcare), that's not play money because they don't want to work.