MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-04 17:21:39+00:00
Every time this topic comes up, I'm a little astounded how whiny people get.

First, I wholly agree Europe salaries are far worse. But in the US, there are plenty of locales besides SF that pay comparatively high tech salaries (I live in Texas). But the main point is that making a professional software engineer-level salary at a tech company with 5+ years of experience in a mid-to-large American city should put you squarely in the top 10% of American earners. I mean, what you decry as "very frugally" is simply figuring out how the vast, vast majority of Americans manage to get by. It kind of reminds me of those NYT articles that would explain how people were basically living paycheck-to-paycheck on $500k a year: private school costs $X, a nanny costs $Y, Upper East Side co-op costs $Z. I'm like yeah, no shit Sherlock, expensive stuff is expensive, but don't pretend forgoing that stuff means you're living in poverty.
by chime | 2025-07-04 17:22:54+00:00
I've been using a QNAP TBS-464 [1] for 4 years now with excellent results. I have 4x 4TB NVMe drives and get about 11TB usable after RAID. It gets slightly warm but I have it in my media cabinet with a UPS, Mikrotik router, PoE switches, and ton of other devices. Zero complaints about this setup.

The entire cabinet uses under 1kwh/day, costing me under $40/year here, compared to my previous Synology and home-made NAS which used 300-500w, costing $300+/year. Sure I paid about $1500 in total when I bought the QNAP and the NVMe drives but just the electricity savings made the expense worth it, let alone the performance, features etc.

1. https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-464
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-04 17:23:05+00:00
"Good system thinker" was obviously meant in a self serving way that benefits himself and his cronies. I assumed that was obvious since we're talking about world leaders here, not nurses. Presidents aren't there to make YOUR life better.

All world leaders are cut from the same self serving cloth as you don't get to become a presidential nominee if you're a genuine threat to the establishment.
by sage76 | 2025-07-04 17:23:06+00:00
SEEKING WORK

Location: India Remote: Yes Willing to Relocate: Yes — ideally to Canada, UK, US, or Australia Technologies: PyTorch / NumPy / Scikit-learn / Math / AI/ML / Research Résumé/CV: Available on request GitHub: https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/ Email: abhimanyujain2k6@gmail.com

I’m a machine learning researcher and former software engineer, currently working independently on a deep dive into probabilistic models, inference, and machine learning theory — including a comprehensive solutions manual for Bishop’s Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.

You can have a look at my progress here : https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/PRML_Solutions

I’m looking for work where I can apply this theoretical depth — ideally roles involving ML research, prototyping, or model optimization — or contribute to academic or open-source projects with strong mathematical foundations.

I have a Master’s from Boston University focused on ML, and ~5 years industry experience (Python, backend). I’m especially interested in:

Algorithmic research and model development

Teams that blend theory and implementation

Teams working on open-ended problems

I’m flexible, fast-learning, and love pushing through complexity.
by sage76 | 2025-07-04 17:23:12+00:00
Location: India

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: Yes — ideally to Canada, US, EU or Australia

Technologies: PyTorch / NumPy / Scikit-learn / Math / AI/ML / Research

Résumé/CV: Available on request

GitHub: https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/

Email: abhimanyujain2k6@gmail.com

I’m a machine learning researcher and former software engineer, currently working independently on a deep dive into probabilistic models, inference, and machine learning theory — including a comprehensive solutions manual for Bishop’s Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.

You can have a look at my progress here : https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/PRML_Solutions

I’m looking for work where I can apply this theoretical depth — ideally roles involving ML research, prototyping, or model optimization — or contribute to academic or open-source projects with strong mathematical foundations.

I have a Master’s from Boston University focused on ML, and ~5 years industry experience (Python, backend). I’m especially interested in:

Algorithmic research and model development

Teams that blend theory and implementation

Teams working on open-ended problems

I’m flexible, fast-learning, and love pushing through complexity.
by garciasn | 2025-07-04 17:24:03+00:00
I have been working on an end-to-end modeling solution for my day job and I'm doing it entirely w/Claude.

I am on full-rework iteration three, learning as I go on what works best, and this is definitely the way. I'm going to be making a presentation to my team about how to use AI to accelerate and extend their day-to-day for things like this and here's my general outline:

1. Tell the LLM your overall goal and have it craft a thoughtful product plan from start to finish.

2. Take that plan and tell it to break each of the parts into many different parts that are well-planned and thoroughly documented, and then tell it to give you a plan on how to best execute it with LLMs.

3. Then go piece by piece, refining as you go.

The tool sets up an environment, gets the data from the warehouse, models it, and visualizes it in great detail. It took me about 22 hours of total time and roughly 2 hours of active time.

It's beautiful, fast, and fully featured. I am honestly BLOWN AWAY by what it did and I can't wait to see what others on my team do w/this. We could have all done the setup, data ingestion, and modeling, no question; the visualization platform it built for me we absolutely could NOT have done w/the expertise we have on staff--but the time it took? The first three pieces probably were a few days of time, but the last part, I have no idea. Weeks? Months?

Amazing.
by barsat | 2025-07-04 17:25:10+00:00
This was born out of a personal need — I journal daily , and I didn’t want to upload my thoughts to some cloud server and also wanted to use AI. So I built Vinaya to be:

Private: Everything stays on your device. No servers, no cloud, no trackers. Simple: Clean UI built with Electron + React. No bloat, just journaling. Insightful: Semantic search, mood tracking, and AI-assisted reflections (all offline).

Link to the app: https://vinaya-journal.vercel.app/ Github: https://github.com/BarsatKhadka/Vinaya-Journal

I’m not trying to build a SaaS or chase growth metrics. I just wanted something I could trust and use daily. If this resonates with anyone else, I’d love feedback or thoughts.

If you like the idea or find it useful and want to encourage me to consistently refine it but don’t know me personally and feel shy to say it — just drop a on GitHub. That’ll mean a lot :)
by necovek | 2025-07-04 17:25:14+00:00
I wasn't going to say any of that ;) Yes, Postgres does have WAL log you can subscribe to, but you are creating a replicated slave really. There are many nuances to doing that right and you are downplaying how hard that is (it's not about API, it's about ACID).

More importantly, you are pushing all the complex logic to this imaginary DB replication client: your "caching system" is still nothing more than a KV store.
by convolvatron | 2025-07-04 17:25:18+00:00
the best part is when you look at the from the perspective of composition. if I build a thing using complicated 'industry standard' components that are just supposed to work, then when something happens I'm pretty much lost. now take my thing, add some marketing about how it 'just works', and have someone else use it in a high level concatenation of other such functions and pretend it 'just works'.

now we are actually employing large numbers of people just to babysit these half-assed things, and everyone is fine with it because we all used 'industry standard' components, and thats really the best we can do isn't it. armies of on-call system resetters are just part of the picture now.
by josephcsible | 2025-07-04 17:25:45+00:00
> Having a working system after upgrading your kernel is not just a slight benefit. It's table stakes.

We already have that, with the "don't break userspace" policy combined with all of the modules being in-tree.

> Needing to design and support an API is not purely negative for kernel developers.

Sure, it's not purely negative, but it's overall a big net negative.

> Take a look at the Rust for Linux which keeps running into undocumented APIs that make little sense and are just whatever <insert most popular driver> does.

That's an argument against a stable module API! Those things are getting fixed as they get found, but if we had a stable module API, we'd be stuck with them forever.

I recommend reading https://docs.kernel.org/process/stable-api-nonsense.html
by pflenker | 2025-07-04 17:26:20+00:00
A while back (decades in comparison to the leaps and bounds in the LLM sphere) I fed text game definitions into an llm and taught it to be the game engine. - the „fluff“ it created, the dialogues it enabled me to have with NPCs and the atmosphere it was able to build up were amazing - it was too helpful, frequently giving me hints or solving riddles for me - at some point it bypassed an in game progression barrier that would have prevented me to reach a swamp without a rope. While I was slowly drowning it told me that I suddenly remembered what was missing „The rope! The rope you haven’t seen back in the hut!“, which I then took out of the back pack to save myself.
by dangus | 2025-07-04 17:26:26+00:00
Ugh, another one of these articles.

This idea that we don’t understand the internals of anything anymore and nothing is reliable is a mix of nostalgic cherry-picking and willful ignorance of a lot of counter-examples.

Sure, a bunch of consumer appliances are nebulous, but they are designed for those tradeoffs. It’s not like your old VHS player was designed specifically to be easy to repair either.

The author is complaining about their of advanced networking feature breaking on a router intended for consumers. Why they haven’t upgraded to a prosumer setup is a mystery - OpnSense on a mini PC combined with some wireless access points is one way to go that offers a lot more configurablility and control.

Complaining that not everyone can understand low level hardware is ignorant of all the really cool low level hardware and maker communities that have exploded in recent years, and it’s ignorant of the fact that specialization existed back in the “good old days” as well. For example, we had separate transmission and body shop specialists in the mid-century, you couldn’t just go to any mechanic to fix any problem with your car.

I’d like to see someone in the VHS era design a printed circuit board using CAD software and get it printed on-demand, then design an enclosure and 3D print it in their house for pennies. You can design your own keyboards and other electronic gadgets and basically own a little factory in your own home these days. You can share designs with ease and many of the tools are open source. The amount of sophistication accessible to the average person is incredible these days.
by inthreedee | 2025-07-04 17:26:52+00:00
You’re welcome, let me know what you think! I’ve also asked that friend of mine for whom the app was originally designed to pop in here when he gets a chance and give you more of his perspective first hand.

It sounds like you and he share a lot of similar struggles. We realized that he wasn’t the only one with these needs so we’re very interested to hear about others’ experiences with the app. Look out for his response later on.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-07-04 17:27:11+00:00
> it started 8 months after accepting a role shift from engineering into management. I was cautiously excited initially, but it just soured very quickly.

Thanks for the edit that added this. Very similar experience as this.

It's BS that IC ladders top out at quasi-management roles, but perhaps part of the issue is believing that professional growth is as tidy as a FAANG career ladder (since most companies just copy them wholesale), and that not reaching those rungs reflects on me in any way.

It feels a bit taboo to say, but I believe not everyone can flex into management easily, even part-time. I'm alright at it, but it clearly isn't long-term sustainable.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-07-04 17:27:17+00:00
I recently had a need to create educational animations. These were programmatically created using the Manim library in Python.

I'm a mobile dev by trade. The best interaction i had recently was with Python and the Manim library specifically which are not my area of expertise. This was a series of "Create an animation that shows X with a graph of the result over variables Y". AI gave a one shot successful results with good coding practices for all of this. I could have spent a week coming up to speed on that library and re-remembering all the Python syntax or i could have fought against doing it at all but instead, one hour of prompting, "here it is boss, done".

I had similar results doing some updates to the app itself too fwiw. Android dev has a lot of boilerplate. "Create a new screen to show a list of images in a recycler view". Everyone who's done Android knows the boilerplate involved in what i just stated. Again 1 shot results. Unlike the above this is something i know how to do well, i just didn't want to type 100's of lines of boilerplate.
by ranger207 | 2025-07-04 17:27:42+00:00
I liked the idea in there about how there's so many people out there that look at a thing merely for its potential to "line go up", and the actual thing itself doesn't matter at all, it's just Whatever. The current crypto is the perfect distillation in that regard, but it does apply more broadly to everything. It's the same problem with management as a skill entirely separate from what's being managed: It's abstracting around Whatever (be it a particular crypto token, Netflix show, or plumbing company), and when the abstraction inevitably leaks, the MBA solution is to crush whatever leaks, since that's not purely related to "line goes up". Of course, abstractions don't only leak trivial details, and so when the leaky part is cut off to try to shove the Whatever back into the box, it's cutting off important parts of the Whatever itself, causing it to wither and die. The second half of the article about LLMs and stuff I agree with, but I think that insight from the first part of the article is the more important one
by jchanimal | 2025-07-04 17:28:01+00:00
I’m one of those statistics. But I still play. It’s fun to imagine myself with a full time studio career but instead I’m a database startup founder. (I got into databases by building a web crawler to recommend how musicians could promote themselves on mp3 blogs.)

How many musicians or artists are finding their need to explore similarly met by opportunities that simply didn’t exist in 2002? If art is expression than we should expect the people who might have wielded a brush or guitar to be building software instead.

If this is you, I recommend Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. It’s as pure an expression of the way I like to work in music, as it is aligned with how I think about code and product design.
by jkortufor | 2025-07-04 17:28:07+00:00
I have experienced them - I have a B650 AM5 motherboard and if I connect a Orico USB HDD enclosure to the fastest USB ports, the ones comming directly from the AMD CPU (yes, it's a thing now), after 5-10 min the HDD just disappears from the system. Doesn't happen on the other USB ports.
by BillyTheMage | 2025-07-04 17:28:21+00:00
> Most emails you receive just contain a couple lines of useful information

No matter how many times I do it, I'm always re-shocked by the sheer size of email headers from mainstream email providers. Maybe it's a non-issue but just holy god that's a lot of crap that means absolutely nothing to me.

> [...] and then complain about CMake being "sooo bad"

OoOh yeah I'm one of those. I gave the whole heck up on C++ years ago because of the many many interlocking compilers and compiler-compilers and meta-compilers and makers and whatever else is going on. SOOOOO confusing. Like dude I just want to take this code I have right here... and compile it. Such a simple task but first I have to learn 3 layers of compilers and builder and uggggghhhh.

And don't even get me started on "projects" (i.e. in Visual Studio or whatever). "Project" is not inherent to the language, but they don't teach that to beginners. Everything is taught so anti-agnostically.
by charcircuit | 2025-07-04 17:29:46+00:00
>We already have that, with the "don't break userspace"

Bcachefs is not user space.

>with all of the modules being in-tree.

That is not true. There are out of tree modules such as ZFS.

>That's an argument against a stable module API!

My point was that there was 0 thought put into creating a good API. Additionally API could be evolved over time and have a support period if you care about being able to evolve it and deprecate the old one. And likely even with a better interface there is probably a way to make the old API still function.
by ilamont | 2025-07-04 17:29:48+00:00
In our neighborhood near Boston, coyotes have become very active at night and trot in the middle of roads and between houses. Several times in the morning I have found absolutely shredded carcasses of squirrels and rabbits on our property in locations which are not likely to be attributed to other predators such as owls.

We have also noticed fewer raccoons on our security camera, which we used to see several times per week at night around our fishpond (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952437) but now only once or twice per month.

Neighbors have also reported missing outdoor cats, which I believe are probably coyote kills (we live on a small peninsula ~1 km^2 so cats are unlikely to wander far from home). About 10 years ago, a nearby relative found the carcass of a cat on his front lawn, which he believes was a coyote. All that was left was the skin/fur and the intestines.
If Emacs is not a text editor, then what is it really?
by hushangazar | 2025-07-04 17:29:56+00:00
I’m one of those who like to say: “Emacs is not a text editor!” And when someone asks me what it is, I usually reply: “Emacs is a poor man’s Lisp Machine.”

The old idea of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) was quite different from modern IDEs. It used to mean a runtime environment (almost an operating system) where everything was written in the same language, where you could tweak anything and hot-reload code at will. In such an environment, every program you wrote was “integrated” with the others.

In that sense, GNU Emacs is an extensible Lisp environment, whose philosophy is inspired by old Lisp machines and systems like Symbolics Genera.
by mpeg | 2025-07-04 17:30:50+00:00
I have done it as a hiring manager, it's really not that hard.

1. You can use an employer of record service which costs a few hundred bucks a month – it seems like a lot... but if I'm already paying a recruiter £12 to £25k to find me a senior data engineer in London on £80 to 120k that is going to want to WFH 3/4 days a week, I will gladly pay £400/mo for an EOR service

2. You can also not hire them, and use their services as independent contractors instead. I've never had an issue doing this with my finance teams, as long as the contractor submits a valid invoice they don't care who they are. Plus, it's good for cashflow (net 30 to net 90 is pretty standard) and the hire gets a nice tax save on their end.

I do understand that at large companies it can be tricky, but IMHO at startups there is little excuse. I suppose it all doesn't matter if you're playing with unlimited silicon valley VC money, I've only ever had to deal with european investors and they love a bit of smart frugality.
by nyrikki | 2025-07-04 17:31:35+00:00
No, you are confusing convention and simplifications for convenience for fundamental properties..

What is generally considered Standard set theory today is typically ZF(C), which can be viewed and was intentionally developed as what is not called a "material set theory" or sometimes a "membership based set theory"

In ZF(C), sets are characterized only by the binary “∈” operation and propositional equality of sets.

It is actually the less common schools like the Elementary Theory of the Category of Sets (ETCS), where individual elements have no identity and must be unique.

There are well documented disagreements between Zermelo and Frege vs Cantor and Lawvere, was the former was for membership and the later were against it.

With ∈ or "is a member of" both of the following hold:

Given a set A={1,2,3,4}; 3 ∈ A Given a set A={1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4}; 3 ∈ A

There is value in defining things like multisets/bags and accessing concepts like multiplicity, but you could use a function you defined for a multiset and discard that information and it would fit the axioms of ZF.

In computer science and databases, this is less than just a trivial factoid depending how deep you get, it will directly relate to how you can trade space for time or reduce communication costs to save on time.

And yes even historically there were very popular network protocols where they would append the same element to a set and shift the complexity from insert time to read time.

To be clear I am not asserting any claim of better outside of local context to doing so.

You are absolutely correct that no production quality RDBMs are based on Codd's rules. That absolutely doesn't change the fact of what the term 'relational model' means, nor does it remove the reality that they follow enough of it so that where it breaks, even from a set centric perspective, is directly related to that origin. Especially in parallel, distributed systems that are the norm now.

And the fact that things moved, doesn't change the reality that the 'relation' in the 'relational model' is as described in previous posts.
by mark_undoio | 2025-07-04 17:32:45+00:00
> It will be interesting to know what challenges came up in nudging the model to work better with time travel debug data, since this data is novel and the models today might not be well trained for making use of it.

This is actually quite interesting - it's something I'm planning to make a future post about.

But basically the LLM seems to be fairly good at using this interface effectively so long as we tuned what tools we provide quite carefully:

* Where we would want the LLM to use a tool sparingly it was better not to provide it at all. When you have time travel debugging it's usually better to work backwards since that tells you the causality of the bug. If we gave Claude the ability to step forward it tended to use it for everything, even when appropriate.

* LLMs weren't great at managing state they've set up. Allowing the LLM to set breakpoints just confused it later when it forget they were there.

* Open ended commands were a bad fit. For example, a time travel debugger can usually jump around in time according to an internal timebase. If the LLM was given access to that, unconstrained, it tended to just waste lots of effort guessing timebases and looking to see what was there.

* Sometimes the LLM just wants to hold something the wrong way and you have to let it. It was almost impossible to get the AI to understand that it could step back into a function on the previous line. It would always try going to the line, then stepping back, resulting in an overshoot. We had to just adapt the tool so that it could use it the way it thought it should work.

The overall result is actually quite satisfactory but it was a bit of a journey to understand how to give the LLM enough flexibility to generate insights without letting it get itself into trouble.