MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by movedx | 2025-06-04 04:47:19+00:00
> doing “janitorial” work is rewarding in that it is, um, real work.

> ... it’s really easy to have a multi decade career in tech and look back, realizing that not only is none of the code you worked on still running anywhere, but none of the companies even exist.

Precisely. I feel the same way. I wrote tonnes of Terraform code years ago at XYZ/ABC Ltd and I often think, "Who knows what that code is doing now. Who cares? Does anyone care?"

I have a few answers for you:

1. Go part-time in the tech field (contract or consult for a few hours per week) and reduce your involvement whilst capitalising on the high income

2. Produce (digital) goods that are closer to the consumer: videos, books, etc. on anything that takes your interest

3. Use your free time to do something like cleaning up your local community of trash

For (2), what I'm doing is getting back into making YouTube videos. Even then, I've fallen into a trap for weeks now. A trap of thinking: "What should the format look like? What amount of work should go into it?" And so on. In the end, I decided to turn on the web cam, record, throw the footage in Canva and do some basic editing and overlays, and publish. Quick, simple and, to get back to your point (or rather to attempt to counter it): I'll have produced something that I can see, through stats, is being observed and having a positive impact on people. That's hopefully going to help too.

For (3), go into your local community, even just your street, or a neighbouring street, and clean it. Take a thick bin bag, a pair of pinchers for picking up trash, and clean up. Do that once or twice a week, and the impact will be massive for you and everyone around you. You'll feel better for it because it's physical and "real".

It's a tough position the OP is in, but I'm getting there my self as well. I can feel it.
by ivape | 2025-06-04 04:47:32+00:00
Here's my regular Claude prompt:

5 bullet points, make sure I fully understand everything in 5 bullet points:

(My deliberate buzzfeedification of the Internet)

---

- Brain aging isn't linear - it follows an S-curve with key milestones: onset ~age 43, fastest decline ~age 61, then plateau.

- Insulin resistance drives it - metabolic problems (high blood sugar) appear first in midlife, before vascular or inflammatory issues.

- Neurons can't use glucose but could use ketones - gene analysis shows aging brain regions have high insulin-dependent transporters but also ketone transporters.

- Ketones reverse aging effects, but only ages 40-60 - ketone supplements significantly helped younger/middle-aged brains but did nothing for 60+ year olds.

- There's a critical intervention window - the 40s-50s appear to be when neurons are stressed but still saveable, suggesting early metabolic treatment could prevent dementia.
by somenameforme | 2025-06-04 04:48:31+00:00
Almost nobody is "anti-science". The source of that labeling and division came from appeals to authority. You must do or believe this because it's "the science." If you don't, or you disagree, then you are anti-science.

It has nothing to do with science, but rather people not finding that a sufficient justification for unpopular actions. For instance it's 100% certain that banning sugary drinks would dramatically improve public health, reduce healthcare costs, increase life expectancy, and just generally make society better in every single way.

So should we ban sugary drinks? It'd be akin to me trying to claim that if you say no then you're anti-science, anti-health, or whatever else. It's just a dumb, divisive, and meaningless label - exactly the sort politicians love so much now a days.

Of course there's some irony in that it will become a self fulfilling prophecy. The more unpopular things done in the name of 'the science', the more negative public sentiment to 'the science' will become. Probably somewhat similar to how societies gradually became secular over time, as it became quite clear that actions done in the name of God were often not exactly pious.
by movedx | 2025-06-04 04:48:36+00:00
I feel the same way as the author. I wrote tonnes of Terraform, Ansible, Go, YAML, Bash, Python code years ago at <company-name> and I often think, "Who knows what that code is doing now. Who cares? Does anyone care?"

I have a few answers for the author and anyone willing to give me their time:

1. Go part-time in the tech field (contract or consult for a few hours per week) and reduce your involvement whilst capitalising on the high income

2. Produce (digital) goods that are closer to the consumer: videos, books, etc. on anything that takes your interest

3. Use your free time to do something like cleaning up your local community of trash

For (2), what I'm doing is getting back into making YouTube videos. Even then, I've fallen into a trap for weeks now. A trap of thinking: "What should the format look like? What amount of work should go into it?" And so on. In the end, I decided to turn on the web cam, record, throw the footage in Canva and do some basic editing and overlays, and publish. Quick, simple and, to get back to your point (or rather to attempt to counter it): I'll have produced something that I can see, through stats, is being observed and having a positive impact on people. That's hopefully going to help too.

For (3), go into your local community, even just your street, or a neighbouring street, and clean it. Take a thick bin bag, a pair of pinchers for picking up trash, and clean up. Do that once or twice a week, and the impact will be massive for you and everyone around you. You'll feel better for it because it's physical and "real".

It's a tough position the OP is in, but I'm getting there my self as well. I can feel it.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-04 04:49:40+00:00
No, I'm saying that lots of different projects will have different levels of profitability and if one or two flip over that magic line it doesn't really matter. The difference between 83 wind farms built in a year being profitable and 87 being profitable, with the 4 that changed being basically breakeven either way, is not very meaningful.

Especially because a more realistic answer is it'll be profitable either way but it'll change whether the return is higher than AAA bonds or not. It's not important. It only affects very marginal projects.
by yz453 | 2025-06-04 04:50:50+00:00
Not OP. IMO the recent Java changes, including pattern matching (especially when using along with sealed interface), virtual threads (and structured concurrency on the way), string templates, are all very solid additions to the language.

Using these new features one can write very expressive modern code while still being interoperable with the Java 8 dependency someone at their company wrote 20 years ago.
Ask HN: Would you hire a dev who offers 1 day of work up front, no commitment?
by codebytrial | 2025-06-04 04:51:10+00:00
I’m a senior developer exploring a new way to cut through the noise of multi-stage interviews, unpaid take-home tests, and weeks of back-and-forth.

Instead of all that, here’s what I’m trying:

1. You give me a real task.

2. I work with you for one full day. For free.

3. At the end of the day, we decide if it makes sense to continue.

No upfront commitment. No strings. Just one day of actual work to evaluate fit.

If it’s a match, we talk about what’s next — freelance, contract, or full-time. If not, we part ways. Simple.

I'm wondering:

As a founder or hiring manager, would this lower friction or raise red flags?

As a dev, would you ever offer something like this?

Would a small landing page explaining this be enough, or does it need more proof/social signals?

Appreciate your honest takes — refining this before I go wider. (And if anyone’s curious to test it out, I’m around.)
by mkfs | 2025-06-04 04:52:03+00:00
> I challenge you to point out the language in his post making this claim. Otherwise you're just making stuff up.

Here:

> The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site. When they fail at policy, they route around it with coercion. They stand up global-scale piracy networks and sneer at anybody who so much as tries to preserve a new-release window for a TV show.

He doesn't explicitly name corporate entities, but it's clearly the ones founded and run by "move fast, break things" types (and I suspect he's one of them) that he's using to smear all developers, even the humble ones who aren't nearly as rich as him and whose open source software he used to build his business.
by jhatemyjob | 2025-06-04 04:52:42+00:00
Yea probably..... I wonder when the plateau is. Is it right around the corner or 10 years from now? Seems like they can just keep growing it forever, based on what Sam Altman is saying. I'm botching the quote but either he or George Hotz said something to the effect of: every time you add an order of magnitude to the size of the data, there is a noticeable qualitative difference in the output. But maybe past a certain size you get diminishing returns. Or maybe it's like Moore's Law where they thought it would just go on forever but it turned out it's extremely difficult to get the distance between two transistors smaller than 7nm
by norir | 2025-06-04 04:52:44+00:00
For scala 2 at least, the standard library is very heavy and the compiler of course relies on it. It has a god object, predef, that cascades massive classloading if you touch anything in it. As a result, it is essential for latency to keep a warm jvm up to avoid reloading it.

Incremental rebuilds can actually be not too bad in scala when a warm jvm is used for compilation as it is by sbt and other scala build tools, but sbt also by default uses the warm jvm to run in process tests. This too can be reasonably quick but leads to problems if there are any resource leaks in the user's test suite.

Thus with sbt, one must either exercise discipline and care with tests to not leak anything or you will periodically have to restart sbt, which can be very painful because it is much heavier than the already heavy scala compiler.

It's a disappointing state of affairs because while there is a lot to like about scala, it is impossible to escape the bloat. Even if you opt out of sbt, the lack of modularity in the standard library forces workarounds, such as native-image, which had its own issues (including horrific build times for making native images and weak reflection support). Even if you or your org avoids the direct pitfalls, it is likely at some point you will end up debugging a dependency that doesn't.

I personally abandoned scala due to this bloat, which was a shame because I find it to have the best combo of expressiveness and pragmatism of any established general purpose languages.
by Lvl999Noob | 2025-06-04 04:52:46+00:00
Monomorphization has got nothing to do with type system though. If you have a GC (as go does), you can automatically box your references and go from a `impl Trait` to a `&mut dyn Trait` with the GC taking care of value vs reference semantics. Monomorphization is orthogonal to how you define the set of valid arguments.
by owenversteeg | 2025-06-04 04:54:39+00:00
Plastic recycling of any type is a complete fraud on the public, inefficient, and highly destructive to the environment in several ways. A comment I wrote a few days ago on another plastic recycling discussion:

The real issue with plastic recycling is twofold: it is a dead end and recycled plastics shed microplastics like crazy. Other materials, such as metals, can effectively be infinitely recycled, but plastic cannot; recycled plastic is worse than virgin plastic in every way. It also destroys the environment around us, because recycled plastics are effectively really shitty plastics that shed everywhere.

In short, plastic recycling is a fraud perpetuated by greenwashing initiatives. The only proper thing to do with old plastic is to incinerate it at high temperatures that achieve complete combustion. This is rare though; most plastic is burned at low enough temperatures that it causes pollution.

Great stuff, plastic, huh?
by shutlesworthNEO | 2025-06-04 04:55:42+00:00
This is really clever! The formula approach feels so natural for spreadsheet users. I love that you can just drag down to test prompts on hundreds of rows at once. The side-by-side model comparison is particularly smart. How are you handling rate limits when someone drags the formula across a massive dataset? And curious about the no-API-keys part, are you absorbing those costs or is there a usage model? Definitely see this being useful for anyone doing prompt engineering or data analysis work. Nice solve on a real pain point!
by bruce511 | 2025-06-04 04:55:47+00:00
You are confusing one big number with another big number, and treating them as the same.

Yes there are a lot of stars. It's a big number. But there's a lot of space. That's a number that's in a whole different league.

For example, the whole solar system is about 2 light-day diameter. But it's 4 light years from the nearest star in any direction. Empty space is thus many orders of magnitude more than solar systems, never mind suns.

Sure there's a probability of a collision. But even multiplied by the number if stars, it's still really tiny.
by TZubiri | 2025-06-04 04:56:30+00:00
Nothingburger here, you had a bug, and you fixed it.

All is well, no need to question your language or the meaning of life.

When you make a mistake irl or trip over when walking, do you reconsider you DNA and submit a patch to God?

Sometimes you just gotta have faith in the language and assume it like an axiom, to avoid wasting energy fighting windmills.

I'm not a deep Go programmer, but I really enjoy how it's highly resistant to change and consistent across it's 15 years so far.
by heyitsguay | 2025-06-04 04:56:55+00:00
At Allen Control Systems, we're working on deploying automated anti drone turrets (radar or passive EO detection) right now!

Development in the space is happening at a breakneck pace. We're hiring pretty aggressively, if this sort of thing seems interesting, check it out!

https://www.allencontrolsystems.com/company#jobs
by Sean-Der | 2025-06-04 04:58:15+00:00
I am so incredibly excited for WebRTC broadcasting. I wrote up some reasons in the Broadcast Box[0] README.

Now that GStreamer, OBS and FFmpeg all have WHIP support we finally have a ubiquitous protocol for video broadcasting for all platforms (Mobile, Web, Embedded, Broadcasting Software etc...)

[0] https://github.com/Glimesh/broadcast-box?tab=readme-ov-file#...
by ffwd | 2025-06-04 04:58:45+00:00
This to me is the paradox of modern LLMs, in that it doesn't represent the underlying domain directly, but it can represent whatever information can be presented in text. So it does represent _some_ information but it is not always clear what it is or how.

The embedding space can represent relationships between words, sentences and paragraphs, and since those things can encode information about the underlying domain, you can query those relationships with text and get reasonable responses. The problem is it's not always clear what is being represented in those relationships as text is a messy encoding scheme.

But another weakness is that as you say it is generative, and in order to make it generative we are instead of hardcoding in a database all possible questions and all possible answers, we offload some of the data to an algorithm (next token prediction) in order to get the possibility of an imprecise probabilistic question/prompt (which is useful because then you can ask anything).

But the problem is no single algorithm can ever encode all possible answers to all possible questions in a domain accurate way and so you lose some precision in the information. Or at least this is how I see LLMs atm.
by yorwba | 2025-06-04 04:59:12+00:00
Reading a paper is not the same as verifying the results is not the same as certifying their correctness. I read a lot of papers, but I typically only look at the underlying data when I intend to repurpose it for something else, and when I do, I tend to notice errors in the ground truth labels fairly quickly. Of course most models don't perform well enough for this to influence results much...
by throwcarsales | 2025-06-04 04:59:31+00:00
You have to deny healthcare at a certain point because there will always be resources you could throw at someone to extend life span. Where do you stop? We already have the means to help people live longer than we do but don't do it for everyone because how are you going to pay for that at scale? Or do you mean you just want healthcare paid for at the level that you in particular believe it should be?
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-04 04:59:36+00:00
Not just LLVM in itself but the Front-end codegen: AFAIK the rust front-end emits way too much LLVM IR and then counts on LLVM to optimize and they have been slowly adding optimizations inside the front-end itself to avoid IR bloat.

And there's also the proc macro story (almost every project must compile proc_macro2 quote and syn before the actual project compilation even starts).
by danShumway | 2025-06-04 05:00:11+00:00
I think it's great if reviewing code for you is faster than writing it.

I don't think reviewing code well is something most developers can do faster than they can write it. I think that's what Joel is getting at when he says that understanding code is harder than writing it. Harder in the sense of, it takes more effort and takes longer and you are more likely to make errors.

And that might not be true for you. But it is true for a huge number of professional developers.

And it is certainly not the case that understanding and reviewing code is both:

- more time consuming and more difficult than writing it and

- that it's faster to move your entire development strategy to one where you review existing code.

Those are incompatible claims. Pick one.

----

I wouldn't normally quibble about something like this, but it does kind of rub me the wrong way when I hear AI developers talk down about this (and I'm sure it's not your intention to talk down). In your post, you write:

> Figuring out how to patch fetch() like that is non-trivial—where I’m using the software engineer’s definition of “non-trivial” as meaning “I don’t know how to do that off the top of my head”. I’d have to do some thinking and research! I’m already tempted to drop this idea and work on something else.

If I responded to that by writing, "well, doing quick thinking and research is part of the job of being a professional developer and is a learned skill that you could get better at, so what's your problem" - I think you would very rightly say that's not a reasonable response.

So I think that "well, you're a professional, you should be faster at reviewing code" is similarly dismissive to a real conflict inherent in these tools that you are ignoring, and is the kind of dismissive response that I don't normally see from you. Especially phrasing it as, "they're both true".. I don't understand what that even means.

They're not both true, you're telling me right now that it's not both true - you are telling me that it is faster for you to digest code than it is for you to write it. So what is this "both are true" bullcrap?
by codebytrial | 2025-06-04 05:00:16+00:00
I should clarify — this isn't meant to undercut developer rates or normalize free work. It’s more of a signal: “I'm confident enough to put in a real day’s work before asking for anything in return.”

I’ve had great feedback on my past work, but getting through the hiring noise — especially as a solo dev — has felt increasingly broken. This felt like a cleaner alternative to long interview chains or speculative coding tests.

I’m especially interested in hearing from founders:

Does this help you move faster?

Or would you worry it’s too unconventional or even risky?

Totally open to pushback — I want to test the idea, not pitch it blindly.
by transpute | 2025-06-04 05:02:02+00:00
Systems research geneaology:

Xen [U of Cambridge, XenSource, Citrix] KVM [Qumranet, RedHat] EC2 [AWS] Nitro [Annapurna Labs, AWS] Barrelfish [ETH Zurich, Microsoft] Snitch RISC-V (many)core uXen ("micro" Xen, CoW memory) [Bromium, HP] firecracker AX x86 ("atto" Xen) [Bromium, HP] pKVM Arm [Google, Android, Linux]
by packetlost | 2025-06-04 05:04:45+00:00
> Unless documented otherwise, a non-nil error renders all other return values invalid, so there's no real sense of a "bogus value" alongside a non-nil error

But you have to return something to satisfy the function signature's type, which often feels bad.

>> Designing the error mechanism based on the assumptions that errors are primarily meant to be logged and that you have to get out of your way to develop errors that can actually be handled

> I don't see how any good-faith analysis of Go errors as specified/intended by the language and its docs, nor Go error handling as it generally exists in practice, could lead someone to this conclusion.

I agree to a point, but if you look at any random Go codebase, they tend to use errors.New and fmt.Errorf which do not lend themselves to branching on error conditions. Go really wants you to define a type that you can cast or switch on, which is far better.
by throwcarsales | 2025-06-04 05:05:00+00:00
I hear this from barely healthy people all the time. Omg you're having too much lemon juice, too much salt, too much meat, too much butter, too much stinging nettle tea, skipping too many meals, on and on and on. Yet anyone I finally convince to eat like be literally changes their entire life so positively their entire world view and opinions about the medical field and government changes. Oh yes I'll worry about my kidney because I've stopped ingesting health destroying chemicals in basically all mass food, and focused on beef and fasting.
by anal_reactor | 2025-06-04 05:05:14+00:00
The problem is that surprisingly few people can handle negative feedback without seeing it as a personal attack. Moreover, in a big company you're ten levels removed from actual effects of your job, so if you see the company sailing right into an iceberg, usually it's just not worth it to bring that up. In best-case scenario you'll avoid the crash without without any recognition, in worst-case you'll be seen as a not-team-player and removed from your position. The best course of action in any social group is usually to do nothing, agree with the general consensus, and secure your personal safety.

In general I understood very early in my life that people really hate being told the truth, and knowing what lies given social group decides to believe in is crucial to successful socializing. I don't like this, and it's a big reason why I have very few friends, but the friends I do have value me for not being an NPC.
by tobinfekkes | 2025-06-04 05:06:54+00:00
I do this in a couple of different businesses, except I pay them for their time. Why is an applicant's time less valuable than an employer's time? I guess because we worship business and labor and money? Or the hiring process innately means that the business has more leverage? I don't know. But I can think of a few ways that an applicant's time is actually more precious and scarce. Often times, if I treat an applicant's time as valuable, they won't waste mine either.

Rather than do interviews or tests, I get coffee with them first to suss it out, them bring them in to do the "actual job" I'm hiring for, and pay them $100 for their time. I'm not losing $100 because they did something useful, and I gained knowledge of their ability and work ethic, and they're not out a day's worth of work cause they got paid.
by uoaei | 2025-06-04 05:07:28+00:00
You're not wrong. Ultimately the discussion boils down to whose values are we prioritizing by allocating society's resources. In the interest of supporting a culture of agency and self-determination the society should* be supporting the decisions of those most affected first.

* I hate the word "should" but in this case we are already contextualized within an implied value system so it is used in a simple determinative manner.