MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by constantcrying | 2025-07-30 16:02:44+00:00
Has the author heard of "outsourcing" before?

As it turns out programming being lucrative, led to lots of programs teaching it all over the world, which in turn led to a situation, where the labor market for programmers collapsed. Hiring too many programmers is not something you do out of greed, basic economics tells you that this move increased salaries for programmers. Companies hired because they anticipated competition around talent and new projects where these developers could work profitably for the company.
by deadbabe | 2025-07-30 16:03:14+00:00
It’s not high salary for low effort.

It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain.

If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-30 16:03:24+00:00
Erlang / Elixir has amazing support for ASN.1! I love it.

https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/asn1/asn1_getting_started.ht...

https://www2.erlang.org/documentation/doc-14/lib/asn1-5.1/do... (https://www2.erlang.org/documentation/doc-14/lib/asn1-5.1/do...)

I am using ASN.1 to communicate between a client (Java / Kotlin) and server (Erlang / Elixir), but unfortunately Java / Kotlin has somewhat of a shitty support for ASN.1 in comparison to Erlang.
by tombert | 2025-07-30 16:03:28+00:00
I haven't tried to use it full time for the same reason that I haven't tried to take the plunge to the dumb-phone world.

A part of me occasionally considers buying one of those cheap KaiOS dumbphones, because I figure that the stuff that's missing could be supplemented with my laptop. The problem I'm always afraid of is that I'm afraid that I'll be missing something. I'll start a job and they'll require some specific proprietary 2FA app, for example. Also, I don't think Signal has a dumb phone app yet and that's basically all I use to communicate.

Similarly, I haven't done anything but play with Ubuntu Touch, because I know there would be an app missing that I would need, so I'd be forced to have an Android or iPhone for those edge cases anyway.

Startup costs are enormous to break into the smartphone world now, at least if you want to penetrate into the "non-tech-enthusiast" market.
by throwanem | 2025-07-30 16:04:39+00:00
I did look at the website, of course. How else could I have critiqued your comparison of phone and discrete cameras?

At a rate of one a minute in a destination venue, sure, this makes sense, assuming you could land that kind of deal reliably. So why are you trying to sell it to street photographers like me, who do things differently, with different desiderata and different needs? And if you are going to try to do that, then don't you think you might be wise to listen when a putative customer explains how you have failed to earn their money?
by OutOfHere | 2025-07-30 16:04:45+00:00
Memantine + half-dose telmisartan (for up to 3 months max) is remarkably effective for treating depression, with no addiction and no withdrawal. One does have to scale up and scale down the doses gradually, and suffer the drowsiness and 10+ point BP reduction, but it works. Do not exceed 3 months because the dopaminergic effect of memantine will catch up by then, and you don't want psychosis from it. One must also avoid common triggers of depression, e.g. fast food, rancid oil, plastic packaging for hot foods, and air pollution from fires. It is also mandatory to engage in strenuous daily exercise, e.g. running, for this regimen to work, although exercise alone doesn't fix it. Of course, someone who hasn't tried it will find it easy to be critical and dismissive, but they're not the ones who need it, and their opinion doesn't matter. The beauty of this solution is that one you're treated, you're cured (assuming you stopped the environmental triggers). There are concrete logical pharmacological, neurological, and physiological reasons for this solution's effectiveness.
by alexisread | 2025-07-30 16:04:49+00:00
I agree there is a significant number opposed, given the protest sizes in Tel Aviv, but it is far from the majority.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/majority-israelis-support...

Given Israeli education, support for settlers, the immigration policy which allows anyone with Jewish heritage to claim land there (regardless of any connection to the area, and of any outstanding arrest warrants) and Israelis using their kids to stop aid trucks and so on, there's a lot needed to show the majority what is actually humane and acceptable.
by storus | 2025-07-30 16:05:18+00:00
I would look at PQQ, CoQ10, B-complex, GlyNAC or just glycine, AXA1125, R ALA, DCA, creatine; those are known to improve mitochondrial fitness under various mechanisms. Add 99%-100% dark chocolate and exercise, both of which act similarly to PQQ. Theanine for increasing GABA, primary calming neurotransmitter.
by rendaw | 2025-07-30 16:05:19+00:00
Yeah, it seems kind of inconsistent. But the crypto page on peachpayments only mentions bitcoin https://www.peachpayments.com/payment-methods/cryptocurrency and moneybadger seems explicitly bitcoin: https://www.moneybadger.co.za/ ("Bitcoin payments made simple" "Accept Bitcoin or any crypto in-store or online, paid out in South African Rand or Bitcoin" "Pay with Bitcoin" "Accept Bitcoin" etc)

But I guess the answer is

> According to reported statistics, 68 percent of South Africans own or have bought Bitcoin – one of the highest adoption rates globally.
by quickthrowman | 2025-07-30 16:05:26+00:00
> Genuine question: Why?

Because.. that’s what the union charges my employer per hour for an electrician? I don’t have a choice lol

Cincinnati is a rust belt city with depressed wages (no offense to anyone that lives there, but it’s the truth), my market is higher income (Minneapolis/St Paul) where a journeyworker makes $57/hr on the check instead of $38/hr like in Ohio, which is 1.5x (!!) higher.
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-07-30 16:05:27+00:00
If you agree with Stafford Beer[1] then the purpose of civilisation is what it does. At the moment that doesn't look much like your list. Rather it seems to be about oppressing those at the bottom and enriching those at the top. The only thing that seems to reverse this trend is war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer
by waldopat | 2025-07-30 16:05:44+00:00
I wish I could like this post, but it unfortunately shows a lack of historical framing. So, as an elder millennial, I thought I'd backfill with some data from the 1990s onward. (I'm a bit of a management/tech history nerd as well and studied it in grad school)

TL:DR; The precarity of knowledge workers is not new and it happens every 3-5 years, though it sure feels like it's getting more common.

1991-1993: IBM laid off 120,000 white collar workers, the largest in history. AT&T and DEC also restructured.

1995-1996: Telecom and PC layoffs as labor shifted abroad and JIT management becomes dominant

2000–2002: Perhaps the first example of over hiring at the end of the 1990s (echoing the ZIRP era) and then massive layoffs with the Dot-com bust

2008–2010: Widespread layoffs across Big Tech and startups with the Great Recession.

2012–2015: Companies like Microsoft, HP, and IBM shed tens of thousands with post-mobile restructuring.

2020: Travel/service tech (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) were hit hard due to COVID shock.

2022–2024: The current wave we’re living through with Post-ZIRP and AI pivots.

If you're looking for books or articles, Gina Neff, Stephen Barley or Gideon Kunda have some of the oldest. In short, there is no real difference between then and now: Instability is hitting workers who genuinely thought they had made it.
by sillystuff | 2025-07-30 16:05:51+00:00
Recently, the CBC was reporting on a realestate fair in a Canadian synagogue, where the only land on offer was illegally occupied land in the west bank.

Apparently, this is a thing at synagogues across the west.

Zionists, have made it clear for anyone paying attention, they intend to displace or exterminate every single Palestinian, to the person, to make way for zionist jews.
by maleldil | 2025-07-30 16:05:54+00:00
It's not only a Python thing. Many modern languages require this as well. Go, Gleam, Rust, etc.

When you're reading Nim code and you see a symbol you don't know, how can you tell where it comes from? In Rust, it's either qualified or you have to explicitly import it. What do you do in Nim?
by purerandomness | 2025-07-30 16:05:56+00:00
OkCupid (the original one, before they sold out) had a great article showing how your perceived attractiveness changes significantly, based on the camera you're using to take your profile pictures [1]

[1] "Don’t Be Ugly By Accident!": https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/dontbeuglybyacciden... (mirror)
by wmorgan | 2025-07-30 16:05:57+00:00
Concerns about reputation, too, as well as general friction. I used to do the menus for my dad's restaurant, which was always a big hassle first of all with the typesetting and going to the printers and everything, and then also it was such a struggle to get him to go up on prices. He'd just rather undercharge a little bit and make less money than be known as the guy in town who sold the "expensive" burgers.
by tombert | 2025-07-30 16:05:59+00:00
Not a phone, but I really liked the Blackberry Playbook's QNX system. It was extremely smooth and easy to use, and was fairly easy to develop for.

They shit the bed by betting on Flash, which was a dying tech, but I was pretty sad when Blackberry just went to "another Android phone", since I thought what they had was pretty neat.

Blackberry definitely had much better marketing than Ubuntu has ever had, and for reasons probably too complicated for me to fully understand, they're sort of a joke now.
by justonceokay | 2025-07-30 16:06:29+00:00
That there’s no gold watch and pension waiting for you if you invest your conviction and identity into a job. Companies are no longer made of people they are complicated manipulations of the stock market. Companies put employees in the liabilities ledger, not the assets ledger. Employees are an inconvenience to be replaced, removed, reduced, optimized, automated, and simplified at the earliest convenience. Believing in the importance of your role in such an inhuman environment is equivalent to believing dancing can bring the rain.

As a result most people that I know in the culture that I see in online spaces is to develop an adversarial relationship to your work, to your company, and to your boss. Even if you like your boss, they can be directed tomorrow to layoff half of their team, so why care at all?

I was actually just talking with a manager yesterday who is feeling pressure from the C-suite in their medium sized company to pass off their reports’ work as the product of AI because it is better for marketing. If that isn’t a perfect microcosm of the larger economy, I don’t know what is.
by lightaime | 2025-07-30 16:06:51+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Guohao Li, founder of CAMEL-AI.org and Eigent.AI.

We’ve just launched Eigent, a fully open source desktop application for building and managing multi-agent AI workflows, either locally or in the cloud.

Eigent is built on top of the CAMEL-AI framework and designed specifically for developers, researchers, and teams who want increased control, privacy, and flexibility in their AI operations.

Key features include:

- Multi-agent workflows with parallel execution - Integration of 200+ Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools or custom integrations - Local deployment and “Bring Your Own Key” support for custom models - Optional human-in-the-loop interaction - Complete data ownership and privacy: data remains local unless explicitly shared

If you're interested in multi-agent systems, workflow automation, or maintaining full control over your AI agent infrastructure, we’d love your feedback.

→ GitHub: https://github.com/eigent-ai/eigent

→ Website: https://www.eigent.ai

I’m here and happy to discuss the technical details, architecture, or any questions you might have.
by AceyMan | 2025-07-30 16:06:51+00:00
Obligatory, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamethrower?wprov=sfla1

More seriously, Hornets vs Spray Glue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCLCewL5NVg

(note: he's still wearing a full bee suit—so hornets are probably best left to pros—unless you're properly equipped & very brave!)
by throwup238 | 2025-07-30 16:07:02+00:00
The best way to support dragonflies is to dig a small pond (2ft deep with shallow edges) and plant supporting flora in and around it.

Add aquatic plants like water lilies, cattails, or submerged plants like hornwort that provide egg laying sites and habitats for dragon fly nymphs. Around the pond plant native plants like tall grasses, sedges, and wildflowers - dragon flies use these as perches for hunting and resting. They especially like plants that grow 3-4 feet tall. You can also plant tall stakes, bamboo poles, or dead branches around the pound and other water features which the dragonflies use as perches for ambush hunting.

You’ll also want to maintain some algae and organic matter in the pond to provide food for the nymphs. It’ll take a year or two to establish themselves, but once they’re going a single dragonfly can eat up to a hundred mosquitos a day so they’re excellent pest control.
by zeta0134 | 2025-07-30 16:07:15+00:00
My intuition is that you are correct: the bucket doesn't eliminate all breeding grounds. It's a numbers game: you want to lower the population as much as possible. If you reduce the population enough, nature has the opportunity to handle the rest, since mosquito reproduction is also a numbers game: mates have to locate one another. This also frustratingly means it won't be an instant solution even if it eventually works. It takes a few generations to realize the benefits of the lowered population.
by oc1 | 2025-07-30 16:07:19+00:00
What a bunch of crap. Everyone who lived these era remembers the horrors of optimizing for a bunch of different browsers. Ajax was barely understood. PHP was all over the place. No frameworks. No Stack overflow. No Vibe Coding. Nah. Nowadays i just have to prompt Claude "Hey, write me a html site for html hobbyists and upload it somewhere on the internet". voila!
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-30 16:07:43+00:00
Code is poetry and even if you don't know the syntax or details of the tools of the language, a choice example up front gives you a sense of the "rhyme" and "meter" of the language.

Sure, some people are going to use that as an immediate gut filter for "doesn't look enough like languages I already know" or various pet peeves, but on the other side for those that love to dig deep into the syntaxes of esoteric/lesser-known languages it becomes like the first sniff when working on tasting notes of a beverage and tells you a lot up front to your "nose" faster than paragraphs of prose about the motivations of the language. "Ah, yes, I'm sensing a strong Python influence on top of earthy notes of Erlang and just a bit of floral Pascal-ness most recently from the vineyards of Typescript, perhaps?"
by Aurornis | 2025-07-30 16:08:05+00:00
> The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind.

Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in.

At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview.

It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.
by 8200_unit | 2025-07-30 16:08:49+00:00
I am in a similar boat. My problem is that once I lose momentum on a project I have no interest in every revisiting the work I have done. Sometimes it is a full day of coding, sometimes it is a couple continuous days coding. Once I break away from the computer and start living life it feels like to much work to load all of the project back into my brain. I would finish more projects if I didn't have friends, family, a house, or a life and sometimes I wish for that.
by 999900000999 | 2025-07-30 16:08:55+00:00
At this point I've accepted most equity comp in a non public company is worth less than toilet paper.

When it comes time to actually cash out or you notice some animals are more equal than others, the excuses start. The drama happens. No one knows what the equity is worth. If you try and advocate for yourself you'll be told the equity is actually worthless.

From here the 200k salary seems fair. Just don't live in SF. Chicago , Philly, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, quite a few cities are perfectly livable on 200k.

In fact, in any of the above metros you will be living nice.
by einpoklum | 2025-07-30 16:09:11+00:00
The post title, and your comment, made me wonder - what criteria should we use for considering some period of time as a "golden age" in programming? I definitely agree it should not be the level of compensation, but it could still be any number of things:

* The ease with which one could learn to program in a useful/popular language.

* The fraction, or the number, of people who program, or who are "decent" programmers, for some definition of decent.

* The ease, or short length of time, it would take one to write a piece of software which would find wide use and reasonable acclaim.

* The ease with which one can find libraries and tools to support your work as a programmer, and documentation, examples and tutorials to improve your skills.

* The extent to which programming experience and written code can, and is, shared widely, rather than restricted to a (large or small) number of silos.

etc.
by yamazakiwi | 2025-07-30 16:09:18+00:00
Well they probably consider many people's music taste basic because a lot of music consumers aren't actually "in to" music. They just want pop with catchy cycles, memorable lyrics, and na na na's. Anything that falls outside of that is too much exploration for them.

Most of these playlists are uninspired, but I never took CEO's to be big music heads anyway. Most CEO's are into basic entertainment because they deprioritize exploring it.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-30 16:10:13+00:00
If you don't get any positive replies note that the HN community is feeling really overwhelmed with slop about AI such as "I vibe coded and this almost works"

If you have a product I suggest you post a link (not a discussion that has a link in it because it won't be clickable -- if your page needs extra commentary to be comprehensible you wrote a bad page and write a new page) and try to avoid any keywords that play up the AI gold rush... Because right now AI is the new NFT)
by hliyan | 2025-07-30 16:10:18+00:00
I'm glad this is being discussed on HN instead of getting flagged. If we're intellectually curious, then we need to be curious about phenomena that defy explanation and events that may define the future course of our civiliazation. I think what's happening in Gaza/Palestine/Israel counts as both. It certainly defies explanation in my mind.

To me, simply labeling somone as "evil" not feels like a premature termination of the chain of causality, but also circular reasoning (Why does X do evil things? Because X is evil. Why is X evil? Because X does evil things). There has to be more to it than that.
by perilunar | 2025-07-30 16:10:29+00:00
You may never create a successful web business but that’s a long way from never creating anything of value.

By definition most people lead mediocre lives — few doing anything extraordinary. What makes it ‘bearable’ are the simple things: family, friends, work, hobbies, helping other people, contributing to society, etc.

Planning to end it because life seems pointless is depression. Please get professional help.
by jleyank | 2025-07-30 16:10:35+00:00
To me the golden age of programming was the 60’s and 70’s when gods walked the earth who thought up pretty much all of the stuff we use or do. Networking, operating systems, languages, …. Hackers, for the most part, did it because it scratched their itch or because it helped out a buddy. Or demonstrated their powers in the appropriate way.

Nobody counted money and it was funded by the government mostly. But it created the basis of where the HN readership lives. And I’m always frustrated that I missed participating in it.
by markhalonen | 2025-07-30 16:10:39+00:00
It is true that I was standing closer and using a wide-angle lens with the iPhone. But it wasn't on purpose to tip the scales, I was just taking an iPhone photo as I've done many times.

So it would be a fairer comparison to use a longer focal length, but it's also true that I am the Average Joe, and Average Joe took a better photo with the camera, because it guided me in that direction more than the iPhone did.
by mufasam | 2025-07-30 16:10:42+00:00
Stripe’s dashboard is great, but I wanted something that sits in my Mac menu bar and tells me today / week‑to‑date / month‑to‑date revenue at a glance. Wrote it in SwiftUI yesterday, cleaned up the code, and tossed the MIT‑licensed repo on GitHub. Feedback & PRs welcome.
by Merad | 2025-07-30 16:10:45+00:00
I've upgraded apps from every version since .Net Core 2.0. The upgrades always take a few hours, maybe half a day (with the exception of 2.0 to 3.0 which took a few days - many breaking changes). It's well worth a few hours per year to get the advantages of newer languages features, enhancements in Asp.Net Core, security and performance enhancements in the .Net Runtime, etc.
by cestith | 2025-07-30 16:11:12+00:00
Even if your intent is to maximize income in customer support, you often don’t have the market option to do that. I have seen (and even worked at) places where chat support, phone support, and support administrators have a quota of chats, calls, or ticket responses and make bonuses based on how much they exceed their numbers. Unfortunately sometimes that results in people updating tickets several times an hour saying things like “we’re still looking into this and haven’t forgotten you” without actually looking into anything.

One place I worked I tried to move the quota system more towards being the final response on a resolve issue, but upper management didn’t want to ever judge whether an issue was resolved even when the customer said they were happy. They did incorporate an NPS query for every interaction, though, and a multiplier against the volume-based quota. Unfortunately that favored people who were good BS artists when lying to the customer about looking into things.

The fallout from the above paragraph was that quality, caring staff would get punished for actually solving customer problems.
by beala | 2025-07-30 16:11:15+00:00
My in-laws use a system like this, maybe the same one. It uses a CO2 tank rather than burning propane. He runs it 24/7 and he needs to refill the CO2 tank every 1-2 weeks iirc so it's definitely more expensive to run than the death bucket. I think it's a 20 pound tank like you'd see on a homebrew keg system. When he showed it to me, it had caught an absolutely nightmarish number of mosquitoes over the course of a couple days. Like maybe half a liter to a liter in volume squirming around in the net. It made me queasy honestly. I didn't notice anything like bees or butterflies in the trap but I didn't look very closely.
by throwforfeds | 2025-07-30 16:11:21+00:00
While we should absolutely be covering on-going civil wars and genocides across the world -- I personally listen to French news sources in order to understand what's going on across Africa -- the fact is that the US has provided Israel with over $300 billion since it's founding. For Sudan, that number is somewhere around $5 billion. So many of us here in the US are rightfully watching and questioning why our taxes are funding a genocide.