MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-07-04 10:51:36+00:00
Gemini summary:

The article "Flounder Mode" on JoinColossus.com, while ostensibly about Kevin Kelly and a concept called "flounder mode," is primarily an autobiographical reflection by the author on their own career and life philosophy.

The author describes their journey through various roles and experiences, from working on Capitol Hill to tech outsourcing and consulting, and ultimately to building multiple businesses. They touch upon themes of finding purpose, opting out of traditional success metrics (like reaching the top of a corporate hierarchy), and the importance of pursuing one's interests even if it feels "uncomfortable" or lacking immediate structure.

Despite the title, direct quotes and extended insights from Kevin Kelly on "flounder mode" are minimal. The article's core message seems to be that success can be found by embracing a less linear, more explorative approach to one's career, much like a "floundering" fish might move around until it finds its way. The author suggests that this "flounder mode" involves an openness to trying different things, even if they don't immediately seem to lead to a clear path, and that this can ultimately lead to more fulfilling and interesting work.
by RandomBacon | 2025-07-04 10:52:08+00:00
> have been setting off alarms because they perceive the fires of fascism to be burning here in America right now

The problem is that people who unknowingly support it, view these warnings as just another attack, and are desensitized to such attacks. To them, this is just another attack indistinguishable from all of the previous attacks where they feel vindicated.

They perceived that one side went too far to the extreme, so they're trying counteract it, and in the process go too far in the other direction.
by krisoft | 2025-07-04 10:52:32+00:00
> it's nonsense to dismiss like this

I'm not dismissing herding behaviour. It is a thing. But genetics is simply not a good explanation for the story here. Here we have two dogs of the same breed (Arthur and Lenny). One lets their owner swim freely the other doesn't. The difference here is not genetics (they are the same berad), this in my opinion is a personality difference between the two dogs.

Which is why I'm starting my comment with "Idk if the "herding behaviour" is a useful way to think of this." Calling it "herding behaviour" doesn't explain the difference between the two labradors.

> Peak HN arrogance.

So lovely. Would you say that to my face closewith? I was nothing but polite to you and everyone else. I'm a human here you know. Can you treat me like one?
by Neywiny | 2025-07-04 10:53:33+00:00
I don't understand how it takes 3 years to get off the cloud. I'm not a cloud developer, though. The most I've done is run code on free hosts or compute instances. Presumably there's something to the microservices and lambdas and distributed compute that makes this hard. I'm thinking if this was a monolith (like AWS themselves admit is cheaper), they could just run it locally? What a giant waste of money. I'm very glad to start seeing xAAS start to die out. At the end of the day it's just looking like more middle-men instead of how I've always assumed it was intended to be: economies of scale.

However, and missing from this article + discussion so far, is their revenue. If they pay $4/day and make $2 in revenue, that's bad. They pay $300k/day but make ~ $2250k/day in revenue. I don't know what the ratio is supposed to be, but at first blush that doesn't actually seem too bad. I'll let the more qualified take over, I'm struggling to find out how big a % of their total expenses this is.
Show HN: Nich digital catalogs and mockups that make pattern designers money
by ferreirarmp | 2025-07-04 10:53:33+00:00
I’m Ricardo, one of the founders behind PATTERNISSE, a tool built because design studios told us their biggest headaches were messy files, costly print samples, and clients who couldn’t visualize repeats in the real world. PATTERNISSE fixes all three and more.

What it does • Digital catalog magic: drag-n-drop a PSD, TIFF or JPEG and PATTERNISSE auto-tags, files, and shelves it • Photo-real mockups: see your pattern on dresses, shirts, bedding, wallpapers, suits without opening Photoshop • Huge GB file sharing: no more “your attachment is too large” sad-trombone emails or pay for WeTransfer • Analytics dashboard: stalk (politely) which patterns your clients binge-view at 2 a.m. so you can design more of what sells • Easy PDF invoices & payment links: make invoices fast, share secure pay links, and get paid without chasing clients

I’d adore your feedback, questions, and the inevitable “does it support all-over?” (yes).
by sfn42 | 2025-07-04 10:56:49+00:00
Be competent and able to prove it. Work with in-demand tools - for me that's .NET, React, Azure, SQL dbs etc. For others it may be go, python, java, AWS, GCP whatever is in demand near you. Probably not Rust, C or C++ etc - I'm sure there's demand for that too but at least near me they're a lot rarer.

Some people do well working with obscure stuff like cobol and Delphi etc, but I wouldn't really recommend that unless it kind of just falls in your lap somehow.

Web development is pretty big, if you can work full stack even better. At least that's what I do, and I don't have any trouble getting jobs.

If you struggle with simple interview questions, work on fundamentals. All my technical interviews have been quite easy but the interviewers have been very impressed. This tells me most devs have poor understanding of programming fundamentals. Being able to do well at interviews is not that hard and it opens a lot of doors. Things like advent of code, codewars etc are good practice. Maybe dust off your old DS&A book and go through it again. A good DSA understanding will help you in your daily work as well, it's not just about interviews. You're not supposed to memorize algorithms, you're supposed to understand them, understand what makes some algorithms faster than others, understand how to use different data structures to improve your algorithms. Understand how to judge the performance of an algorithm just by reading it (big O and such). It's extremely useful and important, I use this knowledge on a daily basis and it helps me do well in interviews.

Also be good with databases. The database is the core of an application, it can and should do most of the heavy lifting. An API is basically just an adapter between a frontend and a db.
by greatgib | 2025-07-04 10:56:51+00:00
Fun, and nice addition, but again another good example of let's sneak some rust in critical parts of the kernel so that rust will become mandatory.

I would not really have noticed if there wasn't this section about why rust, where arguments looks phony and clearly made up afterward to justify a decision that was already taken:

This project was written in rust, because memory safety is critical in a panic handler. For this particular case, I found the Rust code to be cleaner, and easier to read.
by LucidLynx | 2025-07-04 10:57:01+00:00
Is it me, or "founders" are actually FREAKING dumb?

Why people continue to give them money, and praise their "work"?

Instead of making (indirect) ads for them we should publish their name and the company's name into shame publicly, and let their reputation die slowly...

I have no respect for them, and you should not too (if you care about justice).
by zabzonk | 2025-07-04 10:57:13+00:00
If only they didn't live in the sea, and had developed frying pan technology, they could cook shark liver and kelp!

But to me, the interesting question is how the orcas worked out how the great whites had livers in the first place, and why they are the best bits (big bits) to eat? I hope the are not going to investigate mine, but they don't seem interested - yet. See two orcas not eating two teeny humans: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y8iipFTBanc
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-07-04 10:57:20+00:00
Pretty much. Sweden was almost destroyed by socialists in the 1970-80s, which culminated in 1990..1994 crisis, and they only got back on track when they rolled back the most insane economic initiatives of previous governments. They sharply reduced public spending and significantly deregulated the economy, which allowed them to recover. But now, public spending creeps back up again, and the outcome is unlikely to be different this time.

Also, if you wonder why so few big unicorn companies appear in Europe, look no further than their tax policies.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-04 10:57:38+00:00
For what it's worth, in Elixir you might write something along the lines of the following (this is a rough translation, I haven't tested it):

IO.stream(:stdio, :line) |> Stream.map(&String.trim_trailing/1) |> Enum.uniq() |> Enum.map(&String.duplicate(&1, 1)) |> Enum.sort() |> Enum.each(&IO.puts/1)

This is not equivalent in style or presentation to:

stdin .byLine(KeepTerminator.yes) .uniq .map!(a => a.idup) .array .sort .copy(stdout.lockingTextWriter());

Personally, I find the D version visually unappealing (and confusing), especially the way "stdin" sits alone on its own line, followed by a sequence of indented method calls. The excessive use of dots combined with the indentation structure makes it look, to me, rather awkward.

That is just my own opinion.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-04 11:00:08+00:00
I, for one, deserted GitHub, and do not use for anything else personal anymore. I'm not against permissive licensing, but all my code will be (A)GPLv3 or later.

A particular project I'm working on will be on a private Git server until I complete and open it as a package. Even after that, I might keep the development closed and release tarballs only (aka Catherdral Model).

All code I write is also AI-Free.

It won't be possible to trust in people for a long time, it seems.
by vanderZwan | 2025-07-04 11:00:08+00:00
Every day when I look in the mirror, and I don't have this problem.

Then again, by the time I had a touch typing course at age ten using an old typewriter, I already had taken piano lessons for a couple of years. My music teacher was very strict on proper hand positioning, saying that future me would hate him if I didn't learn that right. I stopped taking piano lessons soon after, but I imagine that the skills involved with properly playing the piano transfer quite well to typing.
by vertnerd | 2025-07-04 11:00:42+00:00
This statement in the article is a real head-scratcher:

> Until now, the Southern Ocean region was virtually inaccessible to satellites due to its low temperatures and the complex, ever-changing dynamics of sea ice.

I hate to cast doubt on the veracity of such an interesting story, but this really makes me wonder whether the entire article is just AI garbage.
by reify | 2025-07-04 11:00:43+00:00
The academics are differentiating "potemkins" from "hallucination," which is used to describe AI model errors or mispredictions.

In fact, there's more to AI incompetence than factual mistakes; AI models lack the ability to understand concepts the way people do, a tendency suggested by the widely used disparaging epithet for large language models, "stochastic parrots."

so much for ai doing superintelligence.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-04 11:01:01+00:00
The Coriolis effects can be made to be mostly negligible, with a big enough wheel.

A big wheel may be too costly, but it can be replaced by either 2 identical bodies with a long link between them, or with a single body linked to a counterweight, in which case the cost would be only marginally greater than for the current spaceships.
by rsynnott | 2025-07-04 11:01:14+00:00
> when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview?

This is extremely rare; generally a CxO is a full-time job. Elon Musk is a notable exception, and, ah, it doesn't seem to be going _great_. Being a _board_ member isn't usually a significant time commitment.
by naikrovek | 2025-07-04 11:02:25+00:00
This industry is STILL growing so fast that there is no negative selection pressure to weed out bad ideas. There’s no punishment at all for doing things in stupid or inefficient ways. There is only reward for completing the project.

I like doing things properly and almost no one else at my enormous employer does. Certainly no one on my team does, and it is extremely stressful. I feel like I am talking to a wall when I talk to my team members. No one understands. No one wants to.
by vessenes | 2025-07-04 11:02:26+00:00
Brie, great essay, and salient - thank you! I had a similar set of feelings getting to know John Seeley Brown; another legend albeit slightly older than KK. Reading his bio on his website once just put me at ease; his interests were so varied and the work he’d done was so interesting, but the through line was just .. him, a person and his interests.

I once asked him about his career and he was very uncomfortable with the idea in any sense - he was like “Do I have a career?”

I’d like a follow up from you in ten years, though: or maybe a counterpoint about someone else: I’ve recently been mulling over what parts of “just follow your interests” is a super power and what part is just ADD/an excuse for not getting through the boring parts that lead to long term impact: right now my self review is I should have settled down a little.

Thanks again! Fun to read about you and Kevin and see those awesome photos.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-04 11:02:28+00:00
> Is closed source the future?

No. I don't believe that. I personally want my code to outlast me and help people in the future, but I don't want allow anyone to just scrape it, strip its license and use for whatever. I use (A)GPLv3+, because I believe in "Freedom for the user", not "Freedom for the developer" which permissive licenses provide.

My code is not free labor for anyone. It has conditions attached.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-04 11:02:37+00:00
I suspect it's more of a 'this would be handy to have, and I would prefer to use rust' as opposed to motivated by making the language harder to do without in the kernel. Certainly this kind of thing I would find rust much nicer for than C.

(I would agree the first argument is kinda wavy. If anything the panic handler has a fairly unique relationship with memory safety: it's likely to be executing in an environment where that's already gone out the window and it needs to try to assume as little as possible about what might or might not be correct that its reading from and writing to, while also its own memory safety is perhaps less critical because the system is already crashing, it's just got to get the info out before everything completely stops. Though that doesn't make it immune from security concerns. A code execution vulnerability in the handler means any panic could turn into a worse problem)
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-04 11:02:39+00:00
Representative democracy is finished. It has been gamed to death in two different ways:

- The Euro way, exemplified by the UK, where the populace has the illusion of choice, but where whichever government they elect never enacts popular policies. In short: No matter who you vote for, you're gonna get the same managerial class running the show. The Tories and Labour are now practically indistinguishable on all major issues.

- The US way, where ideological polarization, and the capture of both political parties by their fringes, means that you can only vote for one or another extreme.

(To say nothing of capture by oligarchs and moneyed interests, etc.)

Both forms are inherently unstable. I'd argue that the latter feels more unstable, but the former is more dangerous -- for the American way of treating politics as a gang affiliation or team sport diverts the animal energies of the populace, whereas the Euro way leads to despair and resentment.

The only ways out are with much more democracy, like Switzerland (++) -- or much less democracy, like China. If human nature is inherently good, pray for the former; if it is evil, the latter is more suitable. Ancient Chinese sages like my man Han Feizi were understandably interested in this question.
by ggm | 2025-07-04 11:03:03+00:00
Rheinmetall shares are doing well. They're in all kinds of JV worldwide. It's not Basil Zharoff spectacular but they're healthy. The world wants the blessed Mary of the javelin, and anyone who makes NATO 155mm has a market.

People who bought the F35 have mixed views. Awesome tech. Is there a remote off switch?

British arms factories are salivating at the prospect of NATO and EU spend. The French want to ring-fence them out but almost any complex materiel is made across Europe in the wider sense. Risk management drove there, I think France will stop being silly once their factories supply books are healthy.
by scrubs | 2025-07-04 11:04:06+00:00
Ousterhout's grad students did work on ramcloud with some research at facebook and Amazon on cache use at scale in complex organizations.

One bit of interesting trivia say for facebook (from memory): if you add all the RAM caches in redis/memcached/disk + db caches to make the thing work at scale, then for about 20-30% more memory you could've had the whole thing in memory 100% of the time.
by Neywiny | 2025-07-04 11:04:41+00:00
This feels like a bad solution. At least the STM32H7 line has SPI slave functionality in hardware, no need for PIO. The h7a3 can do full-duplex at 45 MHz in the datasheet. I've been able to overclock the SPI master, so 45 is likely conservative. So that's 3x faster reads. Writes up to 100 MHz, almost 5x faster. And then no PIO programming. I guess you'd have to do a bit of work with software to get DMA going during the dummy cycles, so maybe the read command wouldn't work, but that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff for such a bit performance improvement. It also looks like this library fully utilizes a core to meet latency needs? That's a bit much.
Show HN: A tool to simplify invoicing in Stripe (invoicelyapp.com)
by creativehubspac | 2025-07-04 11:04:50+00:00
I built a Stripe tool that lets your customers generate their own editable invoices for past & new payments, from your connected Stripe accounts.

My target is merchants selling online using Stripe Payment Links, Checkout, or Subscriptions. Whether you are a solopreneur, SaaS founder, or freelancer.

Stripe charges 0.4% often up to $2 each, to generate PDF invoices for one-time payment purchases. These invoices are usually not editable.

With InvoicelyApp:

* You get a unique link that your customers can use to view their purchase history, generate, edit, and download invoices for any payment made through your Stripe accounts at no cost.

* One time payment to connect a single or multiple Stripe accounts.

No more manual work. No more Stripe fees. No more headaches.
by carlmr | 2025-07-04 11:04:54+00:00
I didn't call it slow, but I'm sure it could be a little bit faster in Rust still. Fzy is noticeably faster for me, but it's bad at giving me the useful results first.

For command line tools I just appreciate if they're as fast as possible. And rg, fd, etc just show that Rust implementations can be correct and fast.
by ggm | 2025-07-04 11:08:06+00:00
I live in Australia and I've lived in Europe and Uruguay. I can see why Australia fits its bucket, and European economies but Uruguay feels to me like an edge case, and I suspect Chile is too.

There's a lot of regional ICT and Americosur stuff in Uruguay, the neutral "not Argentina, not brazil" economy. But outside the city it's a steep dropoff. Chile would be massive mining and some ict and tertiary education but again, walk off the main drag, it's low socio-economic conditions very fast. It's a great place. Higher income for a few.
by jpc0 | 2025-07-04 11:08:24+00:00
> SQLite will be there in 2035, but maybe not the current Go drivers

Go binaries are statically linked, unless you expect the elf/pe format to not exist in 2035 your binary will still run just the same.

And if not well there will be an SQLite driver in 2035 and other than 5 lines of init code I don’t interact with the SQLite drover but rather the SQL abstraction in golang.

And if it’s such an issue then directly target the sqlite C api which will also still be there in 2035.
by dakiol | 2025-07-04 11:09:02+00:00
The VPs, heads of, and C levels of most of the companies I have worked for were also pretending to be working. They knew the company wasn’t profitable, they gave a couple of advices here and there, and then left the company. Big pay checks. Now they are doing the same all over again in other companies.

Tired of considering this “normal” and nobody talking about it. But when one simple engineer does it, well, it’s unethical, it’s wrong, yada yada.
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-04 11:09:26+00:00
Clicking with your finger is called "snapping" and you can't snap at traditional mobile phone interfaces and expect that to work. Touching with your finger on a screen makes no sound, not a click, not a thump, not a knock. It's silent, short of haptic or audio feedback, and that's not your finger clicking, it's the phone. That is my point. That's why they call them "touch screens" not "click screens". Do you disagree, or do you touch your phone so violently with your finger that it emits a click? Maybe that is the glass breaking!

Or is your entire point that you think it's actually a good idea to put the words "click here" in links? Then explain why?
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-04 11:09:41+00:00
The first version of the PR is a little more honest: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/series/135886/

> There is no particular reason to do it in rust, I just wanted to learn rust, and see if it can work in the kernel.

Which I think is fairer. Good on him for trying to stay on top of recent developments. With Linux basically supporting Rust now so it's a valid choice, especially for a new component. Plus, it's not like this is an important features, the anti-Rust people can live perfectly fine without QR code crash dumps like they have for decades now.

I think doing this in C is an unnecessary risk (you really don't need all that many raw pointer interactions and shared struct ownership) but the security and stability of this component hardly matters. The kernel is already dead because of a bug or a hardware failure anyway, this is just making the catastrophic failure of the rest of the system a bit prettier.
by Ygg2 | 2025-07-04 11:11:58+00:00
> People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

There are clear differences. First of a calculator and microwave are quite different, but so is LLM. Both are time savers, in the sense of microwave saves time defrosting and calculator saves time calculating vs human.

They save time to achieve a goal. However calculators come with a penalty, by making multiplication easier they make user worse at it.

LLMs are like calculators but worse. They both are effort savers, and thus come with a huge learning penalty and unprecise enough that you need to learn to know better than them.
by Neywiny | 2025-07-04 11:12:01+00:00
I've even had one coworker, higher level than me, get repeatedly praised for how they multitask so much. But I've had them countless times distracted during meetings, and then they get irate some time later. "I wasn't consulted" "nobody told me" "nobody asked me permission" "I don't remember that meeting." If I'm in a meeting and say "my plan is to kick the computer until it works", don't come to me 2 months later and say it was a stupid plan, and worse get upset that you weren't asked. The point of the meeting is to have a forum for everybody to weigh in if needed. Not just to charge the program for an hour while you okay candy crush or listen in on another meeting.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-04 11:13:06+00:00
I'm in an equal to equal position to not sign any contract I don't like. What is it with this whiny attitude in this industry? We're talking specifically about software engineers. The guy worked four six figure jobs raking in 40 grand a month and didn't show up to work. Can we stop pretending we're oppressed workers because we have to show up from 9-5, Jesus.