MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjc50 | 2025-07-04 15:01:04+00:00
> We invented PHP and FastCGI mainly to get away from the performance hit of starting a new process just to handle a web request!

Yes! Note that the author is using a technology that wasn't available when I too was writing cgi_bin programs in the 00's: Go. It produces AOT compiled executables but is also significantly easier to develop in and safer than trying to do the same with C/C++ in the 00's. Back then we tended to use Perl (now basically dead). Perl and Python would incur significant interpreter startup and compilation costs. Java was often worse in practice.

> I have seen AWS Lambda described as the CGI model reborn and that's a pretty fair analogy.

Yes, it's almost exactly identical to managed FastCGI. We're back to the challenges of deployment: can't we just upload and run an executable? But of course so many technologies make things much, much more complicated than that.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-04 15:01:12+00:00
It's easier to move in one direction than the other :). People have goals, getting a bump in salary lets them achieve those goals faster; getting a 75% cut on the salary means undoing all that and then some.

Not to mention, costs of everything also go up, and our bodies are not getting younger and healthier either. If you're to give up your current salary for the one you had 5 years ago, you wouldn't afford the kind of life you had 5 years ago.
by toast0 | 2025-07-04 15:01:30+00:00
Much of that is well addressed by one allocator arena per cpu, and either pinning threads to cpus or at least having a high threshold to move threads across NUMA boundaries.

If you have a lot of cross thread memory use, maybe you need something to help with allocate on core X, free on core Y and the cross core communication that causes (maybe that's already in place?).

There's more memory overhead that way, but large core count systems tend to have a lot of memory too.
by codingdave | 2025-07-04 15:02:01+00:00
That thrill is present in any creative endeavor. If you like tech and enjoy that thrill, yeah, work in tech. At the same time, if you are tired of tech and want that thrill, go make something else. I'm a collector of hobbies at this point, having at least dabbled (if not more) in woodworking, stone carving, jewelry making, furniture upholstery, fused glass, painting, drawing, sculpture, clothing design, and creating nature trails in our forest. They all give that thrill.

Tech pays better, though - so I work in tech to pay the bills, then spend the money on tools to get that creative thrill somewhere else.
by DougHaber | 2025-07-04 15:02:03+00:00
I did some experimenting with this a little while back and was disappointed in how poorly LLMs played games.

I made some AI tools (https://github.com/DougHaber/lair) and added in a tmux tool so that LLMs could interact with terminals. First, I tried Nethack. As expected, it's not good at understanding text "screenshots" and failed miserably.

https://x.com/LeshyLabs/status/1895842345376944454

After that I tried a bunch of the "bsdgames" text games.

Here is a video of it playing a few minutes of Colossal Cave Adventure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BMxkWUON70

With this, it could play, but not very well. It gets confused a lot. I was using gpt-4o-mini. Smaller models I could run at home work much worse. It would be interesting to try one of the bigger state of the art models to see how much it helps.

To give it an easier one I also had it hunt the Wumpus:

https://x.com/LeshyLabs/status/1896443294005317701

I didn't try improving this much, so there might be some low hanging fruit even in providing better instructions and tuning what is sent to the LLM. For these, I was hoping I could just hand it a terminal with a game in it and have it play decently. We'll probably get there, but so far it's not that simple.
by throw10920 | 2025-07-04 15:02:10+00:00
The meme with all of the buzzwords around Shinji suggests that the author doesn't really understand that that stifing environment is due to bureaucracy rather than working in tech.

You can be in a large non-tech company (or government agency, technical or not - source: I survived one) and have the same miserable experience. You can work in a small tech company and get very little of it.

The idea that you'll escape by "Working for a public institution" is goofy.
by skaisbzbsn | 2025-07-04 15:02:21+00:00
> I do of course have to think about the prompts and break it down to a fine grained level

This is where I’ve found usefulness falling off. Code is much more succinct and exact than English. I was never slowed down by how fast I could type (and maybe some are? I’ve watched people finger type and use the mouse excessively) but by how fast I could understand the existing systems. By the time I could write an expressive prompt in English I might as well have made the changes myself.

I’ve found it enormously useful as google on steroids or as a translator (which many changes that require code often end up being).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-04 15:02:23+00:00
Many of the top manufacturers are non-American, and have a very "staid" corporate culture. The best are German or Japanese, so learning about those cultures is helpful.

In my case, I had done a lot of "extracurricular" learning and work, which was attractive to the people that interviewed me. Like I said in another post, on another thread, I have always enjoyed doing tech, and spend most of my free time, working on software.

I also come from a hardware background. My experience in connecting software to hardware was important. I should mention that most hardware companies treat software rather casually. I hope that's starting to change.

The job market, these days, is drastically different from what it was, but I suspect that these companies may be more "traditional" than a lot of tech companies.
by accrual | 2025-07-04 15:02:30+00:00
Not a physician but how long have you had symptoms for? I've had dental work that took much longer than expected to heal.

The pulp in the teeth are quite sensitive and can inflame easily, and that inflamation has nowhere to go (being bound by the hard sides of your teeth and jaw), which can lead to constant pain. I once had a routine filling that took about 3 months to stop aching and I had to take ibuprofen every day during that time to be able to focus. Per the dentist, constant aching pain = it's slowly healing, leave it alone. Sharp intense pain = pulp is dying, need root canal. Granted, this is pain the mouth and not in the head like you described.

If it's been a while and it's still bothering you, I'd definitely consider having it removed too. It would suck to remove it and still have the headaches, but at that point you can start looking at other causes.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-07-04 15:02:33+00:00
Some related recent Asks: (related to the concept of the title anyways, not so much the body)

Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44393304

Ask HN: I don't want to work in software anymore. Where do I go?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43836353

Ask HN: Facing unemployment – what now?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44008554

Ask HN: Decided I no longer want to be a SWE – what next?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44110944
by tobyhinloopen | 2025-07-04 15:02:37+00:00
Every time I touched Zig, examples I found on the internet were no longer working. I worked on a project for a while and then the stuff I used was deprecated / broken on the newer version.

I like Zig, but I'm waiting for it to become somewhat stable, because the amount of breaking changes feels pretty significant. I suppose that's the price of progress.
by kqr | 2025-07-04 15:02:53+00:00
I agree strongly with this and take it one step further: I avoid the infix backticks that turn functions `into` operators.

But I'm not a hardliner. I do use backticks sometimes when building joins with Esqueleto and I do use a limited set of lens operators, like ^. and sometimes the %= variants if the situation calls for it.
by hliyan | 2025-07-04 15:03:21+00:00
One of the happiest periods of my life was when I was working for a non-profit tech company building software for humanitarian work (human rights documentation, labour law compliance, election monitoring etc), after working a full decade in capital markets trading systems. Half the salary for 2 years, did a number on my savings, but it recharged me enough to return to the industry, with expertise in a new tech stack. It was in fact during this period I became a regular reader/contributor to HN.

I understand that this option may not be available to all. I suppose my point is that you may not actually need to leave the industry permanently. Just long enough for you to recharge and find a way to repel the BS without psychological trauma (and without causing psychological trauma to others).
by skwee357 | 2025-07-04 15:03:33+00:00
^ this.

Even if you don’t live paycheck to paycheck, the life style of owning a place AND living off your investments, is extremely hard to pull off.

You most likely need to be single (or couple both in tech), no kids, making FAANG salary, living frugally (no travel, no expenses outside of food, shelter and necessities). Or you need to use geo arbitrage, which again means probably no kids, while being able to secure a high paying remote job in the US.

I wish it was more affordable, but it’s not. Therefor advice like “buy a house and live off your investments” are equivalent to filling a winning lottery ticket.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-07-04 15:03:53+00:00
"at the head" of large - especially publicly traded - companies is not the same as trying to run all aspects of the day-to-day. It also rarely (ever?) happens when they don't have a big ownership stake, or are there primarily as a figurehead.

We can debate if the executive timeline is too short and that's what destroys companies, but I don't see how this is the same as an over-employed engineer who's spread too thin.
by Attrecomet | 2025-07-04 15:03:59+00:00
What's implied in the previous comment is that reading a comment takes a few seconds, while listening to an album, or even really enjoying it, takes a higher investment.

Or, to use a different metaphor, these comments are mentally nutritional Doritos, not a nicely prepared restaurant meal. If your restaurant only serves Dorito-level food, I won't go there even if I do consume chips quite often at home.
by IanCal | 2025-07-04 15:04:02+00:00
Why do you think any of these should be a challenge for, say, O3/O3 pro?

You pretty much just have to ask and give them access for these things. Talking to a stakeholder and translating jargon and domain terms? Trivial. They can churn through specs and find issues, none of that seems particularly odd to ask of a decent LLM.

> Do they help with testing? Coming up with tests plan, writing test code, running them, analysing the output of the various tools and producing a cohesive report of the defects?

This is pretty standard in agentic coding setups. They'll fix up broken tests, and fix up code when it doesn't pass the test. They can add debug statements & run to find issues, break down code to minimal examples to see what works and then build back up from there.

> Do they help with maintenance? Taking the same software and making changes to keep it churning on new platforms, through dependencies updates and bug fixes?

Yes - dependency updates is probably the easiest. Have it read the changelogs, new api docs and look at failing tests, iterate to have it pass.

These things are progressing surprisingly quickly so if your experience of them is from 2024 then it's quite out of date.
by thayne | 2025-07-04 15:04:45+00:00
This is why I'm surprised when production projects, like bun, choose to use zig. I don't think the language itself is a bad choice (although I do disagree qith some of the design decisions), but having to make substantial changes when there are breaking changes like this because the language is pre-1.0 every so often in a large code base isn't something I would want to deal with.
by nwienert | 2025-07-04 15:04:59+00:00
Combination of two autoimmune conditions, one Ehlers Danlos.

Actually EDS is interesting because it became a fad I guess on TikTok to claim you had it like Tourette’s, further exacerbating the above issue.

It’s got a wide spectrum. My dad had it so lightly he was just considered “double jointed”. I gained a further thing from mom’s side, which seemed to interplay poorly. Spent 19-26 basically having extreme nausea and vomiting episodes every month or two, often having to go to the hospital to stop it. Had other weird symptoms and pains before that and during too.

Did every scan, met tons of specialists. Kept getting referred down the GI side, had gallbladder removed for no reason.

At one point I was convinced it was psychological. This was after a second doctor suggested it. It sent me down a dark path for a few years of trying to figure out what was wrong with me - didn’t help my mental state was terrible from all the uncertainty, and I had developed anxiety about eating since basically any meal could end up in hours of extreme pain. I was a total wreck. Then it just cleared up finally at 26.

It wasn’t until years later I got the EDS diagnosis, and then a genetic test showed the other immune condition. When looking at the two lists of symptoms it was such an intense moment in my life, finally having closure.
Show HN: I built a app to help neurodivergent brains form better habits
by inthreedee | 2025-07-04 15:05:12+00:00
Hey HN! Story time:

A friend of mine who I've known since childhood has adult diagnoses for autism + adhd. He's a business owner and has always struggled with creating and maintaining healthy habits both in his personal and professional life. Those of you with adhd will get it: He knows what habits he wants and needs to form, but the executive function disorder often prevents him from being able to initiate and follow through on them. The autism side of his brain adds a whole extra layer of complexity. Through therapy and a lot of personal research, he's learned techniques to manage this in small doses but has always had difficulty maintaining those habits for more than brief periods of time.

As a fun little side project, I created an app to help him maintain the habits he struggles with based on techniques that we've seen actually work for him in the past. It was meant to be a simple tool that he'd be motivated to use regularly, and it worked! It worked so well that we decided to polish up this little side project and publish it for others to use.

We figured, if it worked so well for him, it'll probably work for others with similar neurodivergent brains for whom more traditional habit forming apps just aren't effective enough.

- The website is linked in the title.

- It's on the iOS App Store here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kudos-habits/id6746104744?plat...

Questions and feedback are welcome!

At the risk of adding too much to this wall of text, I told him I wanted to post on HN and asked him to explain to you all WHY this works so well for him, from his own personal perspective. This is what he had to say:

"Honestly, for me, the way the app works just clicks because it aligns with how my neurodivergent brain actually functions on a neurological level. With ADHD, there’s this well-documented dysregulation in the dopamine reward pathways, so I literally need immediate, tangible reinforcement to activate my motivation system... otherwise my brain just doesn’t engage.

The gamified elements in Kudos basically hijack that system in a good way, giving me those quick dopamine hits and making even basic tasks feel rewarding. And on the autism side, I crave routine and predictability to reduce cognitive load and anxiety, but rigid systems trigger black-and-white thinking and can lead to shutdowns or burnout. Kudos balances this perfectly by offering a scaffolded, flexible structure that supports my executive function deficits without overwhelming me.

I also love that it lets me define my own rewards and success metrics, which strengthens intrinsic motivation and reduces shame cycles. In a way, it feels like it's designed to work with my neurological wiring, leveraging my need for predictability, my dopamine-driven motivation, and my sensory preferences...instead of forcing me to conform to some rigid neurotypical productivity model."
by brookst | 2025-07-04 15:05:43+00:00
Spoons are tools you use to consume food; a better analogy would be better kitchen, better food. An induction range, quality good, nice pans, nice knives will definitely enable higher quality food. Of course you can still make crap if you don’t know what you’re doing, the point is that the tools raise the ceiling for someone who does know what they’re doing.
by Twirrim | 2025-07-04 15:07:57+00:00
Apache's httpd is great, reliable, fast, and feature-full, and you don't have to deal with Nginx's ongoing conflict over the the open source vs commercial offerings. That conflict has caused needless pain, like e.g. that quirk around dns resolution where if you put the hostname under proxy_pass it only used to resolve it on start-up and ignored TTL (not sure if it's still doing that). There were work-arounds on the open source version, like using a variable instead, but that wasn't necessary in the commercial offering.
by Attrecomet | 2025-07-04 15:08:11+00:00
> can just press ctrl+shift+enter and it just magically finishes up everything and put my caret at the correct place, instead of me trying to write ]}]})) in the correct order.

I think here you are talking about a different thing -- completion of already started parentheses/"/whatever with content in-between, not the pre-application of paired braces or quotation marks, as the author did, no?
by Brajeshwar | 2025-07-04 15:08:30+00:00
Yours is beautiful; the code is too. I'm sure you had a lot more hand than just using AI.

I stopped coding a long time ago. Recently, after a few friends insisted on trying out AI-Assistance codes and I tinkered. And all I came up was a Bubble Wrap popper, and a silencer. :-)

https://bubble-pop.oinam.com

https://void.oinam.com
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-04 15:08:36+00:00
Well, I found that independent recruiters were the worst. They all ghosted me. A couple actually hung up on me, as soon as they learned my age. In-house recruiters and managers were much better, but the interview process generally derailed, as soon as one single tecchie got involved.

I actually had one refuse to look at my [extensive] code portfolio, because "I probably faked it." One of the luxuries that I had, which I am eternally grateful for, is that I don't have to eat shit.

If reacting badly to that kind of treatment is "not humble," then guilty as charged.

I should add that I am a high school dropout, with a GED, and no matriculated education. Despite that, I ran a "skunkworks" team, employing some very good engineers, and was kept on by a very demanding Japanese corporation, where I was given an insane level of trust.

I'm pretty used to having to prove myself. I've spent almost my entire career, looking up noses. Someone with my background won't make it far, unless I know how to work well with un-humble people, and deliver the goods. I never was given much latitude. I wasn't really allowed to fail.
by mac-chaffee | 2025-07-04 15:08:41+00:00
I'd generally confirm that suspicion: https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2023/wafs/

WAFs have a few valid uses in my opinion: "virtual patching" and the ability to create custom rules such as blocking/challenging/rate limiting obviously bad traffic. But the giant rulesets are actively harmful IMO. "Defense in depth" is not a valid justification for doing something actively harmful to both your users and the time budget of your security team.
Show HN: A Dockerized Linux Mirror Server for Arch and Ubuntu
by LunaStev | 2025-07-04 15:09:48+00:00
I open-sourced a simple Docker-based Linux mirror server project that lets you host your own Arch or Ubuntu mirror.

It uses rsync to pull from upstream mirrors, runs periodic sync with cron, and serves files through nginx with autoindex.

Everything is containerized — just run one script (.sh or .bat) and you have a running mirror.

I originally built it while working on an Arch-based distro and wanted to have my own internal mirror. Thought it might be useful to others in similar situations (custom distros, offline LANs, speed-critical testing).

GitHub: https://github.com/LunaStev/mirror-docker Would love feedback or suggestions!
by benreesman | 2025-07-04 15:09:57+00:00
I think that my understanding of how systems work has had very differing degrees of effectively translating into other regimes. Math and the hard sciences? Very effective, doing stuff in biotech or something has always been a fruitful two way street.

But for human systems? Eh... Yeah I struggle with agreeing there. I think much harm has come from trying to think about human systems like computer systems both in the small of my own immediate life and in larger regimes. No matter how you feel about Elon Musk and DOGE? That didn't look like it went great for either side of that equation to mention one recent high-profile exanple. That looked pretty lose/lose.
by Espressosaurus | 2025-07-04 15:10:02+00:00
That's a good way of putting it. Especially in inexperienced users' hands.

I'm working with a bunch of autonomy guys (think PHD algorithms people) and ChatGPT lets them write code. Which is good.

Except the code is hot garbage. It works for the thing they're trying to do, but it doesn't handle errors, it's not extendable, it's not maintainable, and they'll fight you when you tell them how to make it any of the above because they didn't write it and don't really understand how it works.

There's no management buy-in--startup, so velocity matters more than anything--so I've resorted to letting them have their working garbage patch and I just let them deal with the consequences. Frustrating, but quality doesn't matter sometimes.
by geocar | 2025-07-04 15:10:11+00:00
I think you might have found that CGI scripts deployed as statically-linked C binaries, with some attention given to size, you might've not been so disappointed.

The "performance hit of starting a new process" is bigger if the process is a dynamically-linked php interpreter with gobs of shared libraries to load, and some source file, reading parsing compiling whatever, and not just by a little bit, always has been, so what the author is doing using go, I think, would still have been competitive 25 years ago if go had been around 25 years ago.

Opening an SQLite database is probably (surprisingly?) competitive to passing a few sockets through a context switch, across all server(ish) CPUS of this era and that, but both are much faster than opening a socket and authenticating to a remote mysql process, and programs that are not guestbook.cgi often have many more resource acquisitions which is why I think FastCGI is still pretty good for new applications today.
by quicktemp42 | 2025-07-04 15:10:37+00:00
It has been eight months and there is no tissue damage. Allergic reactions to implant materials are rare and usually stop an implant from fusing with the bone, but mine has integrated perfectly. I would consider removing it, except it is my upper central incisor... I kept waiting for braces to be removed etc but I'm running out of options now.
by Twirrim | 2025-07-04 15:10:41+00:00
We used to use symlinks to enable atomic operations, too. e.g. under /var/www/ we'd have /var/www/webapp_1.0, and have a symlink /var/www/webapp pointing to it. When there was a new version, upload it to /var/www/webapp_1.1, and then to bring it live, just update the symlink. Need to roll back? Switch the symlink back.