MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sneilan1 | 2025-07-15 03:00:24+00:00
`This wasn’t a request for clarification. It was a reset — a request for artefacts that have already been delivered, multiple times, across prior case updates, call notes, and debug summaries. The very same package AWS previously reviewed. The same logs they had already quoted. The same failure they had already confirmed.`

While the author is probably correct in this being a platform level bug (I have not ran the code to confirm myself though), they should stop being so angry at a corporation doing what corporations do which is run a big bureaucracy and require extraordinary amounts of extra communication. One of job requirements of a principle engineer, often making hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year, is to communicate across levels because it is so hard to do this effectively without being angry or losing your cool.

`As a solo engineer, I outpaced AWS’s own diagnostics, rebuilt our deployment stack from scratch, eliminated every confounding factor, and forced AWS to inadvertently reproduce a failure they still refused to acknowledge.`,

I do not think that a solo engineer would have the economic clout to get AWS to pay attention to the bug you found. Finding a bug in a system does not imply any ability to fix a bug in a bureaucracy.

Plus, given the tone of the article, I have a funny feeling that the author may have rubbed people in AWS the wrong way, preventing more progress from being made on their bug.

But, a wise fellow once said, "all progress in this world depends upon the unreasonable man".
by leakycap | 2025-07-15 03:00:41+00:00
Even during great hiring times, the roles you're seeking are often slow to hire and sometimes don't get filled even when there are qualified applicants.

There has to be a hand-in-glove fit to the team for these roles to be effective, which means interviews often get delayed because someone key can't be there... then later, another key person is out, and the cycle turns into a crisis and finally interviews happen and the role gets filled.

But, as you know, AI has seriously cut into your niche and hiring has been very minimal for over a year in data-related roles. Non-data people can do so much more with the help of an AI that can read CSV output from common data sources that I'm seeing people get more benefit from directly being able to work with the sources themselves and ask questions rather than get a report made from the BI team.

I would consider widening your search into other domains, adding AI to your workflow and make it front-and-center.

I clicked on your LinkedIn profile and you are wearing the most casual outfit I have ever seen on a LinkedIn profile, so I would consider finding or taking a photograph that looks like a typical job seeker. I would then remove any recent activity from my profile: without logging in, your first post is about difficulties you are facing and the third is a "hot take" that some companies would not appreciate. I'd cut all personal information that wouldn't get me hired.

Lastly, I'd make a more memorable and higher resolution main graphic. Right now, if this is an example of the quality of your work output, it is very blurry on my 15" laptop and doesn't give a great impression in that regard. None of this is a complaint or attack - I heard your desire for input and am sharing my feedback as a person who has been in hiring roles for 2 decades.
by mrinterweb | 2025-07-15 03:01:03+00:00
Scaling concerns can be a legitimate reason for a microservice, but I think those scaling concerns should be proven and not assumed before a new microservice is born.

I also hate the agreement of maybe one day we might... as a justification for a new microservice. The number of times that premature optimization didn't pay off is far less than I've seen it come to be.

Microservice should be an exception, not the preferred architectural design pattern.

Sometimes I cynically think system architects like them because they make their diagrams look more important.
by ars | 2025-07-15 03:01:17+00:00
I'm not seeing where any of this requires faster than light travel.

But here's something that might help: We'll use gravity for our example, and I'll be non-technical for ease of typing.

The gravitational force that leaves an object is constant and continuous, it never stops, and it never starts. It exists from before the beginning of time, and it will never stop. The only thing you can do with that force is move it. This is because it's impossible to destroy energy. If you move the mass (the energy actually if you want to be exact) then you have changed the location (but not the strength) of the gravitational force, and that CHANGE travels at the speed of light.

So the gravitational attraction of my hand has, right now, already reached the end of universe, out to infinity. When I move my hand, it sends a tiny gravitational wave that travels at the speed of light, indicating a change in where the force is.

So the gravity inside the black hole has already reached the end of the universe, when that matter starts to clump, a change in the location of the gravity is sent out saying "this gravity is now moving over here".

This is why it feels like it's moving faster than light - it's not, it's already there at the end of the universe.

This is also why the orbit of Mercury is different in relativity, the sun pulls on Mercury where it WAS in the orbit, not where it is (which would require faster than light travel). In Newtonian gravity it's instant (i.e. faster than light).
by jruohonen | 2025-07-15 03:01:18+00:00
There was so much discussion about this topic not so long ago, but it seems not much was learned, as testified by the recent hilarious case with scientific papers. The takeaway here would be:

"Traditionally, we treated input prompts as attack vectors. But now, model context — including paper content, emails, documents, or even metadata — becomes part of the threat surface."
by bawolff | 2025-07-15 03:01:42+00:00
> The primary challenge with SQLite in a concurrent environment (like an asyncio web application) is not connection time, but write contention. SQLite uses a database-level lock for writes. When multiple asynchronous tasks try to write to the database simultaneously through their own separate connections, they will collide. This contention leads to a cascade of SQLITE_BUSY or SQLITE_LOCKED errors.

I really don't get it. How would this help?

The benchmarks dont mention which journal mode sqlite is configured as, which is very suspicious as that makes a huge difference under concurrent load.
by fzzzy | 2025-07-15 03:01:47+00:00
I use github copilot chat right now. First I use ask mode to ask it a question about the state of the codebase outlining my current understanding of the condition of the code. "I'm trying to x, I think the code currently does y." I include a few source files that I am talking about. I correct any misconceptions about the plan the llm may have and suggest stylistic changes to the code. Then once the plan seems correct, I switch to agent mode and ask it to implement the change on the codebase.

Then I'll look through the changes and decide if it is correct. Sometimes can just run the code to decide if it is correct. Any compilation errors are pasted right back in to the chat in agent mode.

Once the feature is done, commit the changes. Repeat for features.
by rustcleaner | 2025-07-15 03:02:50+00:00
>styleometry

I really need to start using PocketPal (local LLM on Android) to restate my messages.

---

Oh, the places I'd like to send my texts so fine, With PocketPal, a tool that's truly divine, Local LLM on Android, a wondrous device to see, To help me restate my messages with glee! Wheee!
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-15 03:03:29+00:00
If you busy loop waiting for something in javascript, your program dies. They're not just a bad idea, they're a non-option.

Blocking in the sense of blocking I/O or blocking on a system call is not possible in javascript. So again I ask what you have in mind for a "block on promise" call. The ideas that come to my mind all require significant redesigns of the execution model, or copping out by making every function async and treating it like an await.

In particular with workers in mind, I'll put it this way: If you don't allow "block on promise" in the main thread, you generally avoid these issues, but you also don't solve the problem, you still have async versus not async causing many headaches. If you do allow it on the main thread, how do you keep your page functioning? I can imagine resolutions but they all have severe compromises.
by supertrope | 2025-07-15 03:03:31+00:00
It's usually the upload speeds that are the bottleneck. When the upload is only 10 Mbps any video upload or large file upload will saturate the connection. In addition to having to wait for the video to finish uploading, if you don't manually rate limit the upload job speed or have anti-bufferbloat measures deployed any concurrent voice or video calls will suffer. During Covid shutdowns four people video chatting at once was no longer far fetched.

The scarcity of upload speed is why I learned how to setup OpenWrt's SQM feature, and upgraded to the highest package my ISPs offers.
by k310 | 2025-07-15 03:04:15+00:00
I get downvoted for posting about the risks of pushing untested software on companies and therefore, the public.

I was a sales engineer for a while and long story short, was a no-hype person. We tested stuff in our labs.

Since I raise what I feel are legitimate concerns (no blinders) I wear my downvotes proudly. Make my day, trolls.
by lmm | 2025-07-15 03:05:13+00:00
> I still don't know why apps think a device I carry in the streets is safer than one I leave at home to do important transactions like moving money, for example. Where I live, there are a lot of cases of people being kidnapped and coerced to make payments (which are instant), yet no Banking app allows you to do anything without a phone.

Muggings and kidnappings, as bad as they are, can't really be done at scale.

That device a) has some kind of secure enclave, hopefully, and more importantly b) restricts your ability to run arbitrary code off the internet to the point that everyday users probably can't do it. I don't like it, but they do it because it's effective.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-15 03:07:52+00:00
Anyone who has worked in drug development knows how vital FDA is.

The FDA costs taxpayers less than $4 billion per year.

If FDA is a net negative, next time you need a medication you're aware you can go participate in a Phase I study, and get paid to take a cutting edge drug for it? Why bother looking at the stuff on the medicine shelf that costs you money?

Can you give us all an idea of your experience working with government, and especially FDA?
by cgibson2025 | 2025-07-15 03:08:32+00:00
Rolling out Enhanced Memory for All Agents. This is the most used Agent so far: Creative Writing Companion. What agent(s) do you use? If their isn't an agent that fits your life, I will be glad to add it. I plan on rolling out a pro feature that let's Pro Users describe their own personal agent and build that agent, and place it in there personal "favorites" library.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-07-15 03:08:41+00:00
"We do our peers, countrymen, students, and children a grave disservice by admonishing them to think for themselves without also giving them the critical thinking tools to do so, for in so doing we foster a culture where "independent thought" is equated with "contrarian thought". This gives rise to an anti-intellectual, anti-science paradigm that supports an idea not because it meets a basic standard of evidence, but rather simply because it opposes established thought. This is worse than the intellectual calcification that stagnant "herd thinking" would give rise to, because it doesn't simply halt progress — it puts it in full retreat."
by overfeed | 2025-07-15 03:08:46+00:00
> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.

There also were companies like Sun and Cisco who had real, roaring business and lots of revenue that depended on loose start-up purse-strings, and VC exuberance...

Sun and Cisco both survived the .com bust, but were never the same, nor did theu ever reach their high-water marks again. They were shovel-sellers, much like Amazon and Nvidia in 2025.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-07-15 03:09:04+00:00
Like I said above, they don't extend exclusivity or prevent practice of expired IP. All you have to do is not infringe the new IP. this is what the article says too. I disagree with their greater claim; The patents aren't rocket science- most are extremely easy to read, and the authors are hiding behind weasel worlds like "may" and "could"

There are some bad patents that should never have been granted, like Novartis' famous 631 patent [1]. However, those are the exception, not the rule. If you want to put a generic drug into an auto injector, there are a dozen generic autoinjector companies looking to take your money. Drug + autoinjector does not pass the US patent office non-obviousness test (for obvious reasons). What gets patents is custom design features - bells and whistles. New features are part of the roadmap because customers will prefer them over competition without them, not because it magically extends prior IP (that isn't a thing).

https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/regeneron-advances-antit...
by leakycap | 2025-07-15 03:10:48+00:00
> it's just super competitive so companies have so many options on who to hire

Yes, it is this and not likely related to your abilities or disabilities so much as the natural flow and quality of the interview.

Having interviewed a lot of people, some candidates really make an awesome impression and stand out. If we don't have one of those stand-out, hire-them-now candidates, we don't hire. So I would work on being the person they can't wait to send an offer to -- in addition to skillset, this most often comes down to charm, a sense of "getting it" or clicking with the overall role/company, reading the room, and excellent natural back-and-forth, which is super hard over video calls.

The key here is numbers. In a tough market, you probably need 10 interviews to get hired. Figure out what got you those first few interviews and lean in and make many more happen. You'll find the people you click with and your experience of going to multiple interviews will give you great practice in the meantime.
by aurizon | 2025-07-15 03:10:57+00:00
Radio shack/Tandy clung to a sea of small parts as surface mount came in. Most of these parts went for scrap. As surface mount dominated the repair/salvage of most parts became uneconomic. Without the parts 'albatross' around their neck they could have given Dell or Compaq a better run for the money. Hack labs across USA/World keep small work alive with shared infrastructure, surface mount, hot plate reheaters etc, CAD design and low cost mailed board makers are very much a thing these days
by gs17 | 2025-07-15 03:11:13+00:00
The biggest benefit to me (using Copilot instead of Cursor) is that you can make sure that it understands the problem and the solution is what you expected. If I want to see if it can make a big change, I usually flow through "I need X, what are our options" -> "Discuss option N more" -> "Ok, now you can do it".
by nmfisher | 2025-07-15 03:11:49+00:00
I don't think it's literally "winner takes all" - I regularly cycle between Gemini, DeepSeek and Claude for coding tasks. I'm sure any GPT model would be fine too, and I could even fall back to Qwen in a pinch (exactly what I did when I was in China recently with no ability to access foreign servers).

Claude does have a slight edge in quality (which is why it's my default) but infrastructure/cost/speed are all relevant too. Different providers may focus on one at the expense of the others.

One interesting scenario where we could end up is using large hosted models for planning/logic, and handing off to local models for execution.
by cldcntrl | 2025-07-15 03:11:52+00:00
> If I'm reading this correctly, then AWS Support dropped the ball here but this isn't a bug in lambda. This is the documented behavior of the lambda runtime.

AWS Support is generally ineffective unless you're stuck on something very simple at a higher level of the platform (e.g. misunderstanding an SDK API).

Even with their higher tier support - where you can summon a subject matter expert via Chime almost instantly - they're often clueless, and will confidently pass you misleading or incorrect information just to get you off the line. I've successfully used them as a very expensive rubber ducky, but that's about it.
by dagmx | 2025-07-15 03:12:00+00:00
CUDA isn’t really that hyper specific to NVIDIA hardware as an api.

But a lot of the most useful libraries are closed source and available on NVIDIA hardware only.

You could probably get most open source CUDA to run on other vendors hardware without crazy work. But you’d spend a ton more work getting to parity on ecosystem and lawyer fees when NVIDIA come at you.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-15 03:12:28+00:00
> I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription. (Rough estimate of how much I would have paid someone else to create the things I've (co)created with Claude Code so far.)

I know it's hard to place a value on how much a utility saves a business, but honestly this math is like the piracy math and we didn't buy it back then either.

Some teenager downloading 20k songs does not mean that they saved $20k[1], nor does it mean that the record labels lost $20k.

In your case, the relevant question is "how much did your revenue increase by after you started 10x your utility code?"

[1] Assuming the songs are sold on the market for $1 each.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-15 03:13:48+00:00
> Thanks :D Yeah, we had a good time for ~10 years: https://glaretechnologies.com

> I saw you're doing consultancy last years, cool :) Lemme know if you wanna chat on Discord or so, cheers!

I do wanna chat and perhaps catchup :-) Although I have a discord account, I don't remember ever using it.
by monero-xmr | 2025-07-15 03:14:22+00:00
Should allow pharma to sell drugs to the market. Allow people to sue if they are harmed. Do not care about a government agency preventing access to new drugs. They can gatekeep government funds at best, limiting Medicaid / Medicare to those that want to pass their hoops

My experience is in selling tech to government. Disgusting and corrupt.
by nine_zeros | 2025-07-15 03:14:37+00:00
> Government agencies that spend massive amounts of tax dollars while accomplishing nothing and being net-negative for society. Anyone who has worked for or dealt with the government for extended periods of time will clearly know how fucked it is

This is only true of republican governments. Republican-led governments are truly appalling in their spending, and wasteful tax cuts. Democrat governments are far far more efficient, effective, and work for the people.

An example of this is one beautiful bill which literally increased deficits while giving nothing of value to people but the biden-led inflation reduction act literally created new energy infrastructure without increasing deficit.
by marve087 | 2025-07-15 03:15:20+00:00
A person shared how a post about a hacker named Marie helped them. They said they reached out to her through email:(infocyberrecoveryinc@gmail.com and Telegram:@Marie_consultancy) trusting she would help. Marie successfully hacked into their husband's phone and email. The person was able to see everything for themselves, realizing their husband was cheating. They posted this to help others who might need similar help
by eurleif | 2025-07-15 03:15:52+00:00
SQLite doesn't have a separate server process; it does all of the work for queries in your process. So it's intrinsically CPU-heavy, and it needs threads to avoid blocking the event loop.

One way to look at is that with a client-server database and an async client library, you have a thread pool in the database server process to do the heavy lifting, and async clients talk to it via TCP. With SQLite, you have that "server" thread pool in the same process instead, and async "clients" talk to it via in-process communication.
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-15 03:16:37+00:00
It's never cheaper for insurance to buy something for everyone. There's extra administrative costs to them being the middle man, so it makes much more sense for insurance to incentivize you to buy it yourself, through premium pricing.

For example, fire extinguishers and security cameras will reduce crime by more than their costs, but instead of charging you for them, plus administrative costs, and shipping them to you, your insurance provider will offer you a discount if you have them. (Really it's a price increase if you don't have them, but regulators don't like it when they call it that.)

Not everyone will benefit from GLP-1, so in this case, the most beneficial solution would be to charge higher premiums for anyone that could benefit from GLP-1 but doesn't use it.
by rustcleaner | 2025-07-15 03:16:37+00:00
I suggested that this might be happening and had someone pretty quickly dismissing that the Chinese ATM maker here (oddly specifically, and happens to be my bank ATM here in Wyoming which I never stated), would put in the extra hardware for that. The hardware is mostly there already for imaging (how does the machine verify it's valid cash?) and it analyzes digits with a small neuronet for cheques (decades old tech). It's all there, just write some back-end stuff, and process bill images at a colocation if the ATMs don't have the horsepower to get the serial number locally.
by Myrmornis | 2025-07-15 03:16:43+00:00
I symlinked my vscode settings into the cursor config directory and the transition was strictly additive; everything worked exactly the same as before, with two exceptions so far: a .NET extension wasn't supported, and Cursor recently forced a switch to their own version of Pyright (but that seemed like an improvement once the type checker diagnostics were tamed a little).
by almosthere | 2025-07-15 03:18:25+00:00
We're not serious programmers are we?

We collectively spent 20 years writing blog post after blog post about parameterized queries, not just to get people to use PreparedStatement in Java, but to actually understand why.

Then LLMs come around and we're writing code like:

prompt = "The user is ${USERNAME} and has role of ${ROLE} and belong to group ${GROUP}. The system allows Admins and Superusers and owners of this document to delete it. The user has clicked on ${ACTION} button. The following actions are available and can be run with the following..."

Or whatever the prompt is.

And someone DIDNT learn anything about the 20 years of blog posts? The issue is that every generation of CTOs constantly hires 18 year olds and deletes their 40 year olds to write the code.
by donkey_brains | 2025-07-15 03:18:39+00:00
I didn’t bother to read this incredibly long write up past the introduction. But other commenters are asserting that the author expected their Lambda function to continue executing an async task after returning an HTTP response, despite numerous attempts by AWS staff to explain why that wouldn’t work. If true, that is _hilarious_. Easily one of the best stories of misguided anger/hubris/Dunning-Kruger I’ve ever heard. That’s like expecting a local function to continue executing after a `return` statement. It’s such a simple, basic principle of the platform they were trying to use.

But one thing bothers me…wouldn’t the author have encountered the exact same behavior in Azure? I guess I really will have to read this paper to find out.
by narism | 2025-07-15 03:21:04+00:00
The MBPs didn’t run too hot, the Nvidia GPUs used an underfill that stopped providing structural support at a relatively normal temperature for GPUs (60-80 degrees C).

GPU failures due to this also happened on Dell/HP/Sony laptops, some desktop models, as well as early models of the PS3.

Some reading: https://www.badcaps.net/forum/troubleshooting-hardware-devic...