MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gosub100 | 2025-07-18 18:07:10+00:00
That's fair. I want people to understand it's not about my tribe vs your tribe. If the goal is to get idiots like Trump out of Washington, you must first remove money from politics. Then even if "your guy" doesn't get elected, you at least have a decent specimen installed who your party can work with. No one of average intelligence can even see that as an option. For this reason, the DNC is just as responsible for his election as the utterly deranged MAGA avatar.
by liendolucas | 2025-07-18 18:07:16+00:00
The solution is obvious but titanic: develop our own hardware. The software side in infrastructure terms is not so dramatic because we already have excellent open source options: OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Linux.

The article is missing one big and critical sector as well: defense.

I think is pretty obvious that buying military tech from the other side of the world is an extremely poor choice. China and Russia (in terms of development) are the examples to follow.

On the other hand it can take many decades and ridiculous amounts of money to develop the defense industry to be neck to neck with the west (if such thing is achievable).

When I see countries praising jet fighters like the F-35 and acquiring or wanting acquire them, do they really understand that is not their fighters at all? If total control over mundane CPUs and hardware is already a reality imagine what level of control the might have over those machines.
by posix86 | 2025-07-18 18:07:21+00:00
I quickly worked at a company like that, that had large parts of their core business logic running on an AS400, and they were asking what they need to do to migrate to something newer - was surreal. A few hundred employees all interacting with the system - in building A, a deliver arrives, they scan it like this, press this button. Building B, a guys job was to oversee the conversion of tables from As400 to a csv format suitable for some other outsourced software. Data goes into system C and shows to employees working on conveyor belts this and that. Hundreds of kilometers away, truck drivers get a notification for this and that.b

And, nobody knew how the whole worked. Everyone has their niche of interaction with the system. They would be able to shave off an insane percentage off expenses (in the form of employees whose job exists for no real reason), but the switching costs would also be immense.

I sometimes wonder what came of their company. The system was so far beyond the complexity that anyone could grasp, they had no inhouse devs, they'd need people with the competency to judge which competency they need.
by nbf_1995 | 2025-07-18 18:07:35+00:00
From the article:

> My goal was to take my Unchartevice laptop with its strange Zhaoxin x86_64-compatible CPU...

> Sure, this is a laptop with a CPU broadly equivalent to old Intel Atom CPUs...

Yes, guix pull is slow, but the author is using some old/exotic hardware. The last time I tried guix on a 5th gen dual core i5, the initial pull was not that slow. And as other commenters have pointed out. The first pull is the slowest by far.
by nonethewiser | 2025-07-18 18:08:02+00:00
The article states that the agreement claims compliance with a 2019 System of Records Notice, which it says allows the data to be used "to assist another federal or state agency."

The article notes that a former information security lead from the VA says the SORN needs to be updated for this specific ICE/CMS agreement and has not been. Clearly that fact is a disputed.

The ACLU argues that the sharing is only allowed if it contributes to the accuracy of Medicare or Medicaid, administers a federal health benefits program, or is necessary to implement a federally funded health benefits program. Im not sure if this it true (sharing only allowed in these cases) but if so it seems reasonable that detecting fraud would contribute to the accuracy and integrity of Medicaid. Furthermore, ICE does administer a federal health benefits program (IHSC [1]), so the basis for the ACLU's objection really seems unfounded, although the administration doesnt cite this basis and is quite upfront that its about identifying illegal aliens.

[1] https://www.ice.gov/detain/ice-health-service-corps
by usr402 | 2025-07-18 18:08:25+00:00
Hi Peter, I'm from Europe and currently in the US on a B2 visa (I’ve traveled frequently between the US and Europe over the past year, so we chose B2 over ESTA to be safe). I’m preparing my O-1 case to legally work on my startup here. I would love to participate in an accelerator here. This would also strengthen my application for the membership/awards criteria but I am not sure if I am even legally allowed to participate in these programs (e.g. YC) on a B2 before officially having the O-1? Thank you!
by darwinSir | 2025-07-18 18:09:15+00:00
Hey HN, I'm a 19-year-old from Indonesia. Over ~3 months, I built ALLA — an experimental, curiosity-driven cognitive architecture designed to simulate emergent general intelligence from scratch.

ALLA doesn't use datasets, pretrained models, embeddings, or LLMs. It learns by asking, understanding, building concepts, and reflecting — just like a child. The system is entirely symbolic, recursive, and modular.

What ALLA does: Learns new concepts through user interaction

Builds its own semantic network (concepts and relations)

Has self-generated goals (e.g., UNDERSTAND, REMEMBER)

Reflects on its memory to form abstractions and analogies

Grows knowledge recursively — from 0 → 1M semantic connections in ~1 hour

ALLA's architecture includes 7 modules: Command Parser, Semantic Memory, Planner, Execution Engine, Goal Manager, Reflection Cycle, and Semantic Bootstrapper.

No Copilot suggestions dictated structure. I guided every logic block, using Copilot only for syntax. This project is 100% solo — from engineering to philosophy.
by owlstuffing | 2025-07-18 18:09:24+00:00
I hadn't come across the "Row" polymorphism term before, but it sounds more like structural typing -- for example TypeScript, and to a lesser degree Go, have structural interfaces that provide "row polymorphic" programming.

You could go further with variant structural typing, basically this is a broader form of type checking based on call compatibility, which answers the question -- is B#foo() callable as an A#foo()?

For instance, your `area` example requires `double` result types, otherwise a row type having `width` and `length` defined as `integer` columns doesn't satisfy `area`. But, result types are naturally covariant -- `integer` is a subset of `double` -- which permits us to accept `integer` in the implementation of `area`.

Similarly, parameter types are naturally contravariant -- `Shape` is contravariant to `Triangle`, thus `B#foo(Shape)` is call-compatible as a `A#foo(Triangle)`, therefore I can pass a Triangle to `B#foo(Shape)`.

The manifold project[1] for Java is one example where the type system is enhanced with this behavior using structural interfaces.

Note, this goes further with parametric types where function result types and parameter types define variance and other constraints.

1. https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold
by Expurple | 2025-07-18 18:10:16+00:00
It's true that we don't have any definitive data on this.

But I buy the article's argument that upstreaming a patch once is simply cheaper than maintaining your own proprietary fork forever. It externalizes the efforts of maintaining it in the future. This means that public, community-maintained, permissively-licenced projects are a good deal for companies, and should win from the economic / game theory POV
by continuational | 2025-07-18 18:10:41+00:00
Firefly can construct any named record from any other record (named or anonymous):

let point = (x = 5, y = 7) let point3d = point.Point3d(z = 0)

We included this feature specifically to make it easy to use named and unnamed records together.

More here: https://www.firefly-lang.org/
by kashunstva | 2025-07-18 18:10:54+00:00
> Both parties are the same.

That is absolutely not true. They occupy very different philosophical spaces and have very different proclivities for extrajudicial acts.

> Democrats … buy votes by promising handouts

Didn’t Mr. Musk do something akin to this in Wisconsin?

> Democrats want to make it illegal to protect myself from a violent attacker.

I couldn’t speak for every elected Democrat but few, if any, stake out a position anywhere close to what you wrote.
by psunavy03 | 2025-07-18 18:11:20+00:00
Work on a dual Java/COBOL team in a F500. Not a COBOL dev myself but I'm surrounded by them. Two biggest problems are:

a) the systems are very tightly coupled, like uber-monolith architecture, and it's hard to QA them without end-to-end testing through everything. Good luck getting anyone to refactor them because a1) they're going away and a2) they're so huge. Which leads into . . .

b) there's 40 years of undocumented business logic in there, or business logic that only exists in code comments. And it still makes billions of dollars a year. So good luck replicating 40 years of tribal knowledge in the new systems.

c) It was written by cowboy coders 40 years ago when the company was a startup, so no one can learn to work on it without first getting hired here. The joke is one of the original architects went and created his own dialect of COBOL.
by itake | 2025-07-18 18:11:37+00:00
> For ex: imagine a Chinese AI engineer working at OpenAI develops a new tool that generates enough $$ to support a whole team.

Whose to say an American, given the same opportunities, couldn't do this as well? If you look at where the top AI companies are, only 1 is in China.

I don't think h1b mills impact tech workers as much. Most of those cases seem to be in the healthcare space or in low end tech jobs that Americans probably don't want anyways...
by roadside_picnic | 2025-07-18 18:11:51+00:00
Do you think it's possible you were overestimating the skills in your particular cohort?

Being more senior, my world of coworker and colleagues has been a mix of highly skilled people, largely in the AI/ML space. There are many H1Bs among them, but there has been no difference in the ability of the US citizen subset and the H1B subset in getting jobs.

Even closer to the entry level, the H1B pool all came from very competitive and elite universities, and all of them also had advanced degrees.

I do believe the market for fresh out of college software engineers without much specialization is tight, but I also don't see many H1Bs in that category either (but again, that could just be because of my own cohort I'm surrounded by). A PhD from NYU/Harvard/MIT with an undergrad at a place like IIT or Tsinghua is not in the same talent pool as newly graduated undergrad students from a standard US university.
by foobiekr | 2025-07-18 18:11:59+00:00
I think this is naive. A mushroom trip is fully metabolized and cleared in approximately 6-12 hours. Despite the similar levels of reduction in depressive symptoms for the subsequent weeks, the psilocin has been cleared on the day of, unlike prozac, and hasn't been stimulating 5HT2* at all for that afterglow and post-exposure period.

Nobody other than crazy micro-dosers is taking mushrooms often enough to cause a change in receptor density and those people are putting themselves at risk of valvopathy due to 5HT2a restructuring of the heart valves (which, as an aside, is turning out to be a problem for people on prozac and other long-term SSRIs).

A drug that is very occasional, point use, with no ongoing use, which has long term treatment results, is absolutely, utterly unlike prozac.

That aside, let's say for the sake of argument that the mechanism is similar for prozac; I think that's wrong (one additional explanation may actually be: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15675... ) but whatever. If so, then psilocin is vastly superior to prozac because you are not required to have continuous exposure for the benefits, as the corresponding cost, withdrawal, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, heart issues, etc. are removed.
by seanhunter | 2025-07-18 18:12:14+00:00
I give a concrete example in the GP post but the reason is that the high-speed people can take advantage of you in certain circumstances if you don’t have extremely accurate timing of things like order placement.

As another example, imagine you are placing an options order on one exchange and a cash hedge on another exchange (eg for a delta hedge). If someone sees one half of your order and has faster execution than you, they can trade ahead of you on the other leg of your trade, which increases your execution cost. This is even more important if you’re doing something like an index options trade on one side and the cash basket (all the stocks in the index) on the hedge side.

The fix for this is to use hi-res exchange timestamps (which the exchange gives you on executed trades) to tune a delay on one leg of your execution so both halves hit at precisely the same time. This ensures that HFTs can’t derive an information advantage from seeing one half of your trade before you place the other half of the order.
by larrik | 2025-07-18 18:12:22+00:00
It's not really even about the hosting. Apple devices are US-based. Windows, MacOS, and even Linux are primarily US-based (Linus wrote Linux in the USA, even if he wasn't originally from here). All of the major web browsers are built and run by US-based companies. Many of the SAAS companies are US-based, even if they offer a choice in data hosting locations. The US owns the internet and quite a bit of the technology stack.
by deorder | 2025-07-18 18:13:13+00:00
I am a software developer with over 25 years of professional experience and have been working with coding agents for quite some time starting with AutoGPT and now using Claude Code almost 24/7 orchestrated via Task Master to automatically spin up new instances working on a multi layer project.

You are absolutely right. A large portion are influencers (I would estimate around 95% of those you see on YouTube and forums) that are full of hype. I think most are not affiliated with Anthropic or any vendor, they are just trying to sell a course, ebook or some "get rich with AI" scheme.

What I appreciate about Claude Code:

- Since it is a terminal/CLI tool it can be run headlessly from cron jobs or scripts. This makes it easy to automate.

- I appreciate the predictable pricing model. A flat monthly fee gives me access to Claude Sonnet and Opus 4 in five-hour sessions each with its own usage limit that resets at the start of a new session. There is a fair use policy of around 50 sessions per month, but I haven’t hit that yet. I deliberately run only one instance at a time as I prefer to use it responsibly unlike some of the "vibe" influencers who seem to push it to the limit.

That's it. Despite being a CLI based tool, Claude Code is remarkably out of the box for what it offers.

That said, no coding agent I have encountered can fully ingest a large inconsistent legacy codebase especially one with mixed architectures that accumulated over years. This limitation is mainly due to context size constraints, but I expect this to improve as context windows grow.
by devnulll | 2025-07-18 18:13:27+00:00
Due to spending more time in a chair than being active I have a bit more interactions with Gravity than most. :) This has led to fairly significant sleep apnea, which is most easily tracked via monitoring of O2 saturation.

The Apple watch data isn't really useful for this at all as the frequency of monitoring is just too low. There are a bunch of ~$100 devices that you can get from Amazon that do a fantastic job monitoring O2 Sat for a night and have nice integrations into Apple/Android.

I do wish the CPAP's offered this type of integration - that is, they had a Bluetooth receiver to which I could pair an O2 sensor, and have the data coupled with my breathing analysis. This would be nice to have in OSCAR (the open-source analysis package) or even in Apple Health.

Instead, the manufactures like ResMed treat this data as a walled garden and try their hardest to require everything to go through a Sleep Doctor who pays them a non-trivial data subscription.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-18 18:13:28+00:00
On the contrary, I financially support several people who are disabled and will never work again (to bridge them until they qualify for age tested benefits). I bought a piece of land in the Midwest, and am building tiny homes for them one by one. I previously did a short stint as a Guardian ad Litem in Florida for disadvantaged children who needed an independent advocate, and I act as a patient advocate today for folks who need healthcare and have a hard time accessing it. My deceased mother could not claim Social Security disability while genuinely disabled, and I was first hand involved in the process to see how the system is built to prevent entitled beneficiaries from claiming disability benefits up to her early death at 60.

I am resourced (out of luck), but also high empathy and intimately familiar with the struggles you mention. The bet isn't only because I can afford it, but because I am so familiar with the data I know I'm right. This is why I am for universal healthcare, see no other path forward, and I hope this better explains the mental model my arguments in this context are based upon.
by bpmcgough | 2025-07-18 18:14:07+00:00
Got really inspired by Magnitude (https://github.com/magnitudedev/magnitude) recently and am tired of the manual process of QAing frontend features, so I decided to build a GH Action that does it for me. If you have a GH repo that generates preview links automatically, you just need to add this GH Action along with some env vars to your repo, and Magnitude will navigate to your link, login, find where in your app the changes were made, and QA them. Once it's done, it comments the results in your PR!

Hope folks find this useful! Would love to hear your comments
by nzach | 2025-07-18 18:14:24+00:00
> take several minutes to do something

The quality of the generated code is inversely proportional to the time it take to generate it. If you let Claude Code work alone for more than 300 seconds you will receive garbage code. Take that as a hint, if it can't finish the task in this time it means you are asking too much. Break up your feature and try with a smaller feature.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-07-18 18:14:25+00:00
I can’t remark on COBOL, but I did contracting for a time to non-US insurance company replacing their Universe Basic system originally written in the mid 90s, with a .NET Core (3.1 had just come out at the time, around 2019) based system.

The system contained records of all their policies including all the premium factors (e.g. make, model, year of car, parking location, physical address, etc). These premium factors were then fed into a rating engine which would use actuarial tables with custom actuarial defined algorithms to determine premiums.

In insurance companies, working out the correct premium is core to everything. Insurance companies can have lots of different products and their competitive edge comes from how well they structure their offerings and determine the correct premiums based on risk factors. One does not simply rewrite such a thing.

Couple of things I thought were a bit interesting about the place:

- Their single server running Universe Basic (with a hot spare I believe) had 4TB of RAM. - While I was used to the devs being the stars of the show at the consulting house I worked at, at insurance companies it’s the actuaries.
by owlstuffing | 2025-07-18 18:14:31+00:00
The manifold project[1] for Java provides that feature as "Structural Interfaces" which supports polymorphic variants.

The project also supports tuples that behave similarly.

var person = (name: "Joe", age: 35); . . . Person p = person; // tuple's name, age properties satisfy Person record

1. https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold
by asadotzler | 2025-07-18 18:14:38+00:00
It's not even about the rockets. This is a city being built. Hundreds of homes and apartments and a massive office building and a rec center and roads and roundabouts and launch pads and tank farms and inventory buildings, and yes, a rocket factory that makes and launches massive prototypes.

Compare Starbase not to other rocket facilities but to large-scale construction projects. Then we'll have apples to apples injury rates.

If you want to compare rocket factories, then only count injuries in the Starfactory itself, or factory+launch staff, or whatever. But comparing a city under construction with a long-completed launch facility and the offices used by the launch staff is disingenuous at best.
by Vektorceraptor | 2025-07-18 18:14:44+00:00
Not that that's my intention, but yes—in a certain sense, fun has to be justified, for example, by competence. Having no competence and having a lot of fun isn't a good mix. Furthermore, your comparisons are flawed because they are innocently chosen. But shouldn't nefarious capitalists, ruthless politicians, and uncritical managers also be allowed to have fun - at the expense of others?
by mdnahas | 2025-07-18 18:14:56+00:00
Anecdote: I’ve run Linux and MacOS. I switched to Linux when Apple hardware got stupid expensive (soldered memory and harddrive) and Dell offered laptops with Linux installed. My brother was always saying “Apple just works … less hassle”. But he’s now worried about expense and privacy and moving to Linux.

I feel like the geeky bleeding edge is leaving Apple for Linux.
by dang | 2025-07-18 18:15:04+00:00
Related:

Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131181 - Aug 2024 (488 comments)

Gimballed Stove - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39733829 - March 2024 (12 comments)

Weathering Software Winter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34219654 - Jan 2023 (28 comments)

Internet in Paradise (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080305 - July 2022 (18 comments)

Artists are making tiny ROMs that will probably outlive us all - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410838 - May 2022 (1 comment)

Off the Grid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031472 - Jan 2022 (118 comments)

Busy Doing Nothing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26760803 - April 2021 (6 comments)

Working Off-Grid Efficiently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723819 - Jan 2021 (142 comments)

North Pacific Logbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24489257 - Sept 2020 (7 comments)

(I omitted threads about their software projects, even though those are super interesting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
by autoexec | 2025-07-18 18:15:43+00:00
It doesn't matter who compiles the lists anymore. Corporations will sell that data to the government (and anyone else willing to pay enough) or the government will march in and take it by force.

As long as lists of people are useful they will be created, and as long as our government is unaccountable to the people and the law those lists will be at risk of being abused by the state for other purposes.
by trhway | 2025-07-18 18:15:54+00:00
i think you're mistaken. The H1B cap is 65K. Cap-exempts are capped at 20K. Thus total cap is 85K. No above and beyond of that number.

Speaking about original post US tech industry is 16M people. So 600K+ of H1Bs, suppose they all in tech, is 4%. Blip on a radar.
by itake | 2025-07-18 18:16:27+00:00
> For computer science and computer engineering, the unemployment rate in those fields was 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively — notably higher than the national average.

> By comparison, the unemployment rate for art history majors was 3%, and for nutritional sciences, the unemployment rate was just 0.4%, the New York Fed found. The New York Fed’s report was based on Census data from 2023 and unemployment rates of recent college graduates.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/college-majors-with-the-best...

> I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs

Foreign new grads start their career on the OTP visa, which allows them to work for 2 years after they graduate. So you are correct, foreign students use OTP, not h1b to apply for entry level jobs.