MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-04 20:26:10+00:00
If they're feeling like "the fix is in" and they no longer have a voice in the big decisions happening in this country — that there is a small club of elites that are calling the shots ... well, they may not be wrong.

If they're feeling overwhelmed by the pace of the change happening in our modern world/society, feeling as though they are being left behind — they're not the only ones.

If they're feeling as though the contract between the wealth-holders and the laborers has been getting worse and worse for the worker, they may be on to something.

Maybe they see the wealthy continuing to fail upward and are finding that just working hard and saving money seem to be less than treading water.

There's plenty of things to have grievances about.

And I think "left" and "right" might have common ground on these issues.
by ksherlock | 2025-06-04 20:26:36+00:00
There is. Previously on HN:

Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063662

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/future-of-pocket

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/building-whats-next/
by mmooss | 2025-06-04 20:26:45+00:00
If Urkaine adopted that position - which they haven't - it's just playing victim. Victims have no responsibility because it's someone else's fault. That is, in fact, irrelevant to responsibility for your actions.

Putin (Russia) is to blame for the war, but that's irrelevant to this issue. Ukraine is still responsible for the consequences of its actions. Putin starting the war makes it legitimate for Ukraine to assassinate Putin, for example; but if killing Putin makes Ukraine less safe or causes other negative outcomes, Ukraine is responsible for choosing the best set of outcomes. Maybe Russia will use tactical nukes - is that what Ukraine wants? They need to assess the risks and make the best choice; blame is irrelevant.
by jgbbrd | 2025-06-04 20:26:59+00:00
Honestly, you're not miles off. Though with developers, it was actually more the "gotcha" variety of "It sucks ass".

We would have a senior dev on the dealing-making-or-breaking call and he would say something like, "Wait -- sorry, do you support <specific thing that our system doesn't have>?" We would say honestly that we don't have that yet. Then the senior dev would say, "Ooohh.... sorry... yeah... we need (per-message arbitrary data storage | support for on-prem | real-time analytics | per-messsage privacy controls | etc.)." We eventually had to face the reality that one of two things must be true:

1) The market is just too fragmented such that there cannot exist one product that serves it

2) The devs involved really, really don't want to give a product like this a chance because they actually want to build fun features like this themselves and they're (rightfully) skeptical that some random startup can do it better

As I sit here now, I have some confidence that it's 75% #2 and 25% #1. Anyway, the basic shape of the sales calls went a lot like what you're saying.
by ljm | 2025-06-04 20:27:05+00:00
My solution is actually to fuck off this mysterious version 5, that isn’t even defined, and to make PP a serious operation by growing v4 and putting a serious team around it.

Right now it’s not serious. It’s literally the gambler’s fallacy - “we failed but we’re so close”

They use that language, verbatim, in the post. Asking you to chase the loss with them. “We’re so close we just need your support!”
by tannschnauzer | 2025-06-04 20:27:11+00:00
The Diamond Age is yet another terrible future that many readers take as awesome, for reasons I can never figure out.

The Primer that everyone likes is mostly just a human remote-teaching—certainly, the best parts of its outcomes are from that. One specific person caring very much and dedicating lots of time and focus to teaching this kid.

Meanwhile, the mass-production Primer without that aspect is just a brainwashing device.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-04 20:27:26+00:00
> anyone in an executive or investor position almost doesn't even have a "job" in the way a salary employee does

This describes anyone at the top of their field. A star engineer or academic can spend their time however they please. (And giving them that freedom is generally a profitable bet.)

> By it's very nature it has to be excessive, because the ultra wealthy live a life of excess

It really doesn’t. It just glances with excess. You can pitch your company at Cannes or the Super Bowl without buying tickets to the events.
by rcxdude | 2025-06-04 20:27:32+00:00
Well, the issue is that you need a merchant account to send the money to, and it's quite hard to get one without identifying yourself, and it takes a bit of time after the transaction to actually get the money because of chargebacks and the like. So you can't just pull the money out directly. But that's true of basically any credit card fraud: what you do instead is buy something from someone who takes credit cards. Which is entirely possible with contactless, you can e.g. proxy a connection from a reader to a victim card, it's just that the limits and difficulty of lining up the time of the transaction with someone walking past make it not particularly useful (compared to just stealing or skimming the card details).
by pjmlp | 2025-06-04 20:27:38+00:00
As someone that has spent some time in the 8 and 16 bit demoscene, I used my share of Z80, 80x86 and 68000.

It is all a matter of having high quality macro assemblers, and people that actually care to write structured documented code in Assembly.

When they don't care, usually not even writing in C and C++ will save the kind of code they write.
by ivape | 2025-06-04 20:27:42+00:00
This has nothing to do with AI and the nature of coding going forward. Ask HN has regularly been a depression/burn-out sounding board for years. My final conclusion on it is that there is a large number of people here who have relied on external validation to find happiness. The thing you create, the job you have, the money you make, the role or title you have, the degree - none of these things are internal, all external. This is never sustainable and leads to emotional turbulence.
by godelski | 2025-06-04 20:28:11+00:00
> how do you know what you want if you didn't write a test for it?

You have that backwards.

How do you know what to test if you don't know what you want?

I agree with you though, you don't always know what you want when you set out. You can't just factorize your larger goal into unit tests. That's my entire point.

You factorize by exploration. By play. By "fuck around and find out". You have to discover the factorization.

And that, is a very different paradigm than TDD. Both will end with tests, and frankly, the non TDD paradigm will likely end up with more tests with better coverage.

> Why are programmers so obsessed that not knowing every part of the way a program runs means we can't use the program?

I think you misunderstand. I want to compare it to something else. There's a common saying "don't let perfection be the enemy of good (enough)". I think it captures what you're getting at, or is close enough.

The problem with that saying is that most people don't believe in perfection[0]. The problem is, perfection doesn't exist. So the saying ends up being a lazy thought terminator instead of addressing the real problem: determining what is good enough.

In fact, no one knows every part of even a trivial program. We can always introduce more depth and complexity until we reach the limits of our physics models and so no one knows. Therefore, you'll have to reason it is not about perfection.

I think you are forgetting why we program in the first place. Why we don't just use natural language. It's the same reason we use math in science. Not because math is the language of the universe but rather that math provides enough specificity to be very useful in describing the universe.

This isn't about abstraction. This is about specification.

It's the same problem with where you started. The customer can't tell my boss their exact requirements and my boss can't perfectly communicate to me. Someone somewhere needs to know a fair amount of details and that someone needs to be very trustworthy.

I'll get over it when the alignment problem is solved to a satisfactory degree. Perfection isn't needed, we will have you discuss what is good enough and what is not

[0] likely juniors. And it should be beat out of them. Kindly
by donnachangstein | 2025-06-04 20:28:35+00:00
> Sure - a destination is "local" if your machine has a route to that IP which isn't via a gateway.

Fantastic. Well, Google doesn't agree

The proposal defines it along RFC1918 address space boundaries. The spitballing back and forth in the GitHub issues about which imaginary TLDs they will or won't also consider "local" is absolutely horrifying.
by mmooss | 2025-06-04 20:28:37+00:00
You don't need to make up things about me, just stick to the issues.

> This is what you're asking from Ukraine.

No, life isn't as simple as you want it to be. You need to make decisions that accomplish and balance many complex problems. 'It's the other person's fault' may simplify things in your mind, but your failure to make a good decision will have the same outcome regardless.
by UncleMeat | 2025-06-04 20:28:43+00:00
Today I found out that a friend of mine had their tenure case rejected because of their participation in a peaceful protest by a board of visitors staffed with GOP appointees.

The rising fascist movement is anything but supporting a “repository of truths in beholden to politics and fads.”

The reality matters. Simply saying “oh I’m good” while Yarvin smashes people under his feet is garbage.
by zck | 2025-06-04 20:28:48+00:00
I also made some number-based wordle-variants, which I call "numberdle". I found that it was hard to come up with good ways of guessing because wordle has the restriction that most combinations are invalid. You won't ever have to guess xwqqf, because that's not an English word. And more importantly, guessing some letters gives you information about the other letters. If you find out three letters, and have the target as _a_ts, you can use that to figure out the other two letters.

But if you need to guess a number, and you know it's _5_34, having three correct digits don't help you figure it out.

So I made some variants where guessed values do help you figure out the correct answer.

In rationerdle (https://zck.org/numberdle/?variant=rationerdle), you have to guess a rational number x/y, where both x and y are between 1 and 99, inclusive. It displays the rational number you actually guessed, and whether x and y separately are too high or too low.

In factordle (https://zck.org/numberdle/?variant=factordle), the player has to guess the factors of a target number.

In formuladle (https://zck.org/numberdle/?variant=formuladle), there is a graphed straight line, and the player has to guess the mx+b formula that graphs that line.

I would like to make more, but didn't have any other great ideas when I ran out of interest.
by abathologist | 2025-06-04 20:29:25+00:00
Yeah, he is also committed to race science, the belief that diversity is fundamentally bad, and that states "own" their citizens, and can do anything they want to them. None of that is just the basic idea of a benevolent dictator. Yarvin's views are repugnant and evil as well as reductive, childish, and unoriginal.
by markoman | 2025-06-04 20:29:32+00:00
How about the concealment of drug use? Just now we're finding about the how Musk used so much Ketamine to get thru the nights at the White House that his urine turned bloody. Does anyone doubt that Trump snorts Adderall? That's just so he can sound coherent in public settings. That story has been repeated over & over by those who know but aren't able to survive the storm that Trump would levy in order to go public.

https://uinterview.com/news/joe-rogan-mocks-man-baby-donald-... https://www.drjohnkruse.com/trump-nose-best-adderall-use-is-...
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-04 20:29:33+00:00
Personally, I directly use energy, both current and future (access to resources) as the main currency of my economic model of the world, not money. So I do understand that China is well-equipped to weather the storm on multiple fronts.

But that's orthogonal to the fact that they will experience major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy, and also to the fact that China is a totalitarian nightmare with strict moderation of culture, knowledge and financial mobility.

Who cares if the country still exists in name, if the number of people who manage to maintain a quality of life comparable today's average continues to dwindle?

And what happens if China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime?
by deepsun | 2025-06-04 20:29:38+00:00
Yes, although it's not always ideal too. E.g. for personal business you're required to conduct all transactions through a dedicated business bank account. But it's easily avoidable by using a different account, and there are cases when you cannot use the business bank account even if you want. But taxes are computed automatically from only that bank account. To stay honest, you need to decline automatic tax calculation and file separate forms to pay more taxes, no one does that.
by hollerith | 2025-06-04 20:30:00+00:00
>This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse

My view is basically the complete opposite: IMHO Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation, with the result that we don't have the institutional capability to respond effectively when growth stops or when (as in the case of climate change) growth becomes the problem that must be addressed.

Western Europe has proven much better at running their societies in ways that do not depend on continued growth than the US has (at least in the period after WW II) which is why it has responded much quicker and more effectively to the challenge of climate change than the US has.

Here is one man's summary of this dynamic: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations

Oh, wait: could it be that you are disappointed with the US (and see China in a favorable light) because the US isn't becoming Leftist quickly enough?
by scott_s | 2025-06-04 20:30:05+00:00
The tools are at the point now that ignoring them is akin to ignoring Stack Overflow posts. Basically any time you'd google for the answer to something, you might as well ask an AI assistant. It has a good chance of giving you a good answer. And given how programming works, it's usually easy to verify the information. Just like, say, you would do with a Stack Overflow post.
by 9rx | 2025-06-04 20:30:09+00:00
> We could argue what counts as "exceptions"

What is there to debate? An exception, by every definition I have ever encountered, is a data structure that contains runtime information (e.g. a stack trace) to stand in for a compiler error where the compiler was not sufficiently capable of determining the fault at compile time. It couldn't possibly mean anything else in reason.

Of course, we're really talking about "exception handlers", not "exceptions".

> there's no try, no catch, and no throw, and no equivalent to any of those.

There can be in name and reasonable equivalency: https://go.dev/play/p/RrO1OrzIPNe I'm not sure what it buys you, though. You haven't functionally changed anything. For this reason, I'm not convinced by the signifaince of syntax.

Think about it. Go could easily provide syntax sugar that replaces `try { throw() } catch (err) {}` with `try(func() { throw() }).catch(func(err) {})`. That would truly satisfy your requirements in every way. But what, specially, in that simple search and replace operation says "exceptions" (meaning exception handlers)?

> C also has setjmp/longjmp which can be used in similar ways, but I wouldn't call that exception handling either.

Agreed. You could conceivably craft your own exceptions to carry through the use of setjmp/longjmp, but that wouldn't be a language feature. However, Go does have an exception structure as a built-in.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-04 20:30:58+00:00
> People are allowed to be cynical

Sure. But it’s appropriate to point out that it’s low cognitive effort venting.

OP could have done that with more tact, and more constructively. But it’s ironic that turning this into a “what have VCs done for you lately” rant plays into their advantage by turning a system that involves certain skills and differentiated abilities into an ersatz caste system, where apparently the idea of taking a client to dinner is somehow unfathomable for mere engineers.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-06-04 20:31:23+00:00
But we trust those tools to do the job correctly. The compiler has considerable latitude in messing with the details so long as the result is guaranteed to match what was ordered--when we find any deviation from that even in an edge case we consider it a bug (Borland Pascal debugger, I'm looking at you. I wasted a *lot* of time on the fact that in single step mode you peacefully "execute" an invalid segment register load!) LLMs lack this guarantee.
by UncleMeat | 2025-06-04 20:31:56+00:00
You are welcome to defend rising fascism if you want. People will justly criticize you, of course.

What happened to intellectual seriousness? Why should you be so frightened of people criticizing you?

This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-04 20:32:04+00:00
> The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead?

That's exactly why the idea is incorrect. People wise enough and unbiased enough to be entrusted with unchecked power are few; ones that are incorruptible enough to be trusted with it for long are even fewer. And those who want such power are almost always the people who are least to be trusted with it.

So, yeah. The problem with this idea is that it doesn't work, which is a pretty good definition of "incorrect".
by tithos | 2025-06-04 20:32:05+00:00
I’ve posted a LinkedIn article about my concerns regarding the integrity of coding challenges in web development hiring, especially with the rapid rise of AI-assisted coding tools. As someone who has struggled to find work over the past five years—due to both Covid and the increase in fake job postings—I worry that AI is making it even harder to ensure a fair playing field.

My suggestion: companies should use code sandboxes that block all AI tools for hiring-related coding projects, so candidates are evaluated on their own skills.

What do you think? Is this feasible? Are there better ways to keep hiring fair in the age of AI? Would love to hear your experiences and thoughts.
by michaelt | 2025-06-04 20:32:14+00:00
Doesn't most software just register a protocol handler with the OS? Then a website can hand the browser a zoommtg:// link, which the browser opens with zoom ?

Things like Jupyter Notebooks will presumably be unaffected by this, as they're not doing any cross-origin requests.

And likewise, when a command line tool wants you to log in with oauth2 and returns you to a localhost URL, it's a simple redirect not a cross-origin request, so should likewise be allowed?
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-04 20:32:23+00:00
I wouldn't say interop is a huge deal, the main time and cost sink is translating the recursive Gordian knots of tax law into a logically cohesive structure that can be evaluated programmatically. And then you (ideally) must prove its correctness.

Imagine pair programming with a tax lawyer. I'd rather eat my own hands.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-04 20:33:18+00:00
To add to that, there is a reason why even all modern JITs also have ways to look into generated code.

Anyone curious how their JVM, CLR, V8, ART, Julia,.... gets massaged into machine code only needs to learn about the related tools on the ecosystem.

Some of them are available on online playgrounds like Compiler Explorer, Sharpio,....
by jandrese | 2025-06-04 20:33:22+00:00
There are also ambiguous edge cases that can't be answered until someone is audited and the IRS and the Tax attorney hash it out in court.

For example I installed Solar panels many years ago and read the exact wording on the Solar Tax Credit to try to figure out if you could include roof repairs under the panels in the credit. The wording was something like "all costs associated with a solar install". Every installer I talked to said yes, but it seemed dubious so I tried calling the IRS help line to get the answer and the help line was no help at all. A few years later and some court battles lost and that answer is now firmly a "no", making me glad I ignored the installer's advice.

How is tax prep software supposed to handle a situation like that? Some of the for pay options include "audit protection", but I don't know how far that goes. I guess you can attempt to pass all liability on to the customer, but even that seems a bit risky.

And definitely the IRS has its own jargon that doesn't always make sense to the layperson. Why, for example, is a form that you fill out once per tax year called a "schedule"? It doesn't organize anything by date or time!
by xp84 | 2025-06-04 20:34:43+00:00
> They don't know if you are married or single or head of household (filing status) in the current tax year. They don't know what some of your itemized deductions and other income not reported to them might be

I think you're misinterpreting the GP's point. Clearly, at least in our current system, it is essential to tell the IRS the parts of the return that they don't already know such as what are your expenses, deductions, marital status, etc.

But the absurd thing is that the capture of the IRS by the paid tax prep scammers has prevented them from simply showing you what's on your tax transcripts and having you click "Agree" or "Modify" for each one. Instead, you get your own copy of the 1099-B, 1099-DIV, 1099-INTs, and are administered a pointless "honesty test" to see if you'll type in the same numbers they have, or be automatically punished.

Obviously, Direct File was ideally situated to offer this feature since IRS has the data themselves, and simply populating the numbers is a highly efficient way of ingesting the data into your return.
by an_aparallel | 2025-06-04 20:34:55+00:00
Seagulls, magpie and ibis (im not being fun or joking here) have evolved to exhibit cooperative traits and behaviours to get food, including tricking, diverting, cooperating and most annoying literally staunching people.

I was having a burrito on manly wharf a long while back, a seagull just lands on the table and death stares me...i felt uncomfortable and moved, because i know they will try and take my food off me!
by soraminazuki | 2025-06-04 20:35:03+00:00
That says more about the industry than the quality of formal education. After all, it's the very same industry that's hailing mediocre robots as replacements of human software engineers. Even the article has this to say:

> As a mid-late career coder, I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity.

Then there's also the embracement of anti-intellectualism. "But I don't want to spend time learning X!" is a surprisingly common comment on, er, Hacker News.

So yeah, no surprise that formal education is looked down on. Doesn't make it right though.
by hamhead27 | 2025-06-04 20:35:04+00:00
I think the ideal place this would add value is pre-launch of a feature or MVP.

With enough randomization and "thought" patterns to test out your features it could be a very novel approach to testing that differs from existing load testing & integration testing.

Randomization is the key though, the synthetic users would need to be capable of rooting out those random edge cases that you can only find by typically using a product "incorrectly".

Cool idea though!