MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2025-07-17 16:23:24+00:00
I disagree. I like playing around in Rust, but it is near impossible to reason about what instructions will end up being fed to your CPU without having the compiler emit the underlying assembly.

And that makes it very difficult to understand the performance of your code. Just a few days ago I couldn't wrestle the compiler into unrolling a loop (because of a get_unchecked that was hard to reason about), dropping performance of the entire data structure to as little as 30% of a quick proof of concept implementation. The asserts are powerful tools, but only if you can figure out why the compiler is not behaving nicely and how to construct the conditions that will convince it...
by imglorp | 2025-07-17 16:23:59+00:00
Failed what? In its domain, it succeeded in its goals: a high reliability platform for aerospace, defense, and other mission critical domains. It was mandated by the US DoD for all software in the nineties and used in Airbus avionics and aboard the ISS, etc.

Its syntax and concepts were considered solid and so was selected as the basis of the VHDL hardware description language, also successful in its domain.
by lcampbell | 2025-07-17 16:24:17+00:00
Without knowing anything about Tor, I'd guess you've got it backwards. I imagine Tor leaks your OS through TCP/IP fingerprinting, and whether that fingerprint matches your `navigator.platform` is probably a factor into whether e.g. Cloudflare hellbans you.

Then again, I'd also assume Cloudflare just de facto hellbans all Tor exit node IPs, so...
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-07-17 16:24:54+00:00
I wouldn't group boot camp graduates and self taught people together. I'm confident there's skilled people coming out of bootcamps, but the people I know personally saw it as a cheaper shortcut into the field because they couldn't teach themselves and would have otherwise gone to a university or chosen a different field.

Coding bootcamps weren't really around when I started, but I avoided online courses and traditional learning methods. I would have also avoided bootcamps for the same reasons. I wanted to create and solve problems that were exciting, rather than follow through a textbook and take tests.

I'm self-taught and learned C in my early teens because I really wanted to do something that I couldn't find any code or preexisting solutions for, and I knew C was really the best way (for me) to solve it. I didn't want to learn it but I wanted the cool thing more, so I struggled through forum browsing, reading documentation, and trial/error and successfully got what I wanted while gaining more skills that led to where I am today.

The desire and drive to learn something matters more than the method, in my opinion.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-17 16:26:10+00:00
There isn't much. It's an old protocol, and very simple. But it's simple to the point of naivete and networks only really function with a bunch of ad-hoc extensions on top of it, but there's very little standardisation of those, and that's basically to get things like the concept of having a persistent identity that can't just be hijacked by anyone else on the server, let alone something like persistent message history, media sharing, or end-to-end encryption.
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 16:26:24+00:00
We are in agreement - you appear to be replying to my comment piece by piece without reading all of it.

I'm speaking about the one-hand operability, which I then conclude must not be very important and obviously the market prefers something else.

I will only address this part:

> The market is optimizing for what consumers asked for

This is hopelessly naive. This is true in the same sense that butane rings in cigarettes is optimizing for "what consumers asked for" - more pleasant to smoke cigarettes. Consumers don't know what they want, they're fed whatever is going to make the most money by advertisers. And they will like it, because there is no other choice.

The market is not some perfectly rational machine. It is, often, a self-eating beast, concerned with it's own self-preservation to such a degree that it destroys itself. Had the Tobacco industry chilled, they wouldn't have been eviscerated by legislation. But no - they had to target children, they had to make the death sticks as addictive as possible. As if to put a bright flashing sign on themselves that says "look at me! Regulate me!"
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-17 16:27:25+00:00
The narrative of vapes as "tools to quit tobacco" really doesn't hold up. I'm not saying that you can't make it work, some people do, but it's not the primary use and it doesn't account for the explosion of vaping among young populations who weren't using nicotine before vaping. These companies aren't investing tens of billions into these products because they plan to help smokers quit and then stop using vapes.

By the same token the degree to which vapes help people quit is up in the air, some studies show strong effects in favor of quitting, others show strong effects that it's inferior to other quitting aids. (i.e. studies like https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7867832/)

"These are a way for people to reduce harm" is primarily an industry narrative at this point, divorced from reality.
by JohnBooty | 2025-07-17 16:27:31+00:00
Because it's hard to get any laws passed, much less a law that tackles two major things (tobacco and alcohol) at once

In most US states the sale of alcohol is already much more restricted than the sale of tobacco.

You can walk into any 7-11, convenience store, or gas station and buy tobacco. In most states, this is not true for alcohol.

Also, tobacco vape use is much more addictive and somewhat more concealable than alcohol. People can generally tell or at least suspect you've been drinking; people generally cannot tell if you just vaped 10 seconds ago in the bathroom.

It's far from ideal and you and I would certainly not design a country from scratch this way, but legislation (at least, ideally) deals with things as they are and not with an imagined tabula rasa state of affairs.
by GeekyBear | 2025-07-17 16:28:38+00:00
> Especially now there's a Windows on ARM with proper backwards compatibility.

I wouldn't say that Microsoft's Prism x86 to ARM translation layer has been anywhere near as successful as Rosetta was at running the majority of legacy software on day one.

Prism is improving, but the Windows on ARM reviews are still bringing up x86 software that didn't work at all.
by alnwlsn | 2025-07-17 16:28:49+00:00
>very little you can learn

This very much depends on your initial skill level. Have you ever held a resistor? Do you know which side of the LED is the minus? How many terminals does a hobby servo have and what do they connect to? These are the sorts of questions the kits are meant to answer. You're not really learning "an arduino", you're learning a new tool to make the projects you actually want to make. To "use all the parts" isn't what I usually want out of something.

The kits themselves usually carry too wide of a selection of components to have enough of any one part for a good project anyway, but if you need more, go on Amazon and search for "<insert component> arduino" and buy them by the 10 pack.

If you decide it's not for you, then the kits were always a collection of cheap parts to begin with; not a big loss.
by aydyn | 2025-07-17 16:28:54+00:00
Mate why do you assume I haven't experienced it myself? I've done city living, I moved out thanks to wfh.

Yes there are people who live in houses in or near the city. Most people live in pods. We're talking about the "influx of young ambitious people" remember?

At the very least, even if you can afford it, to own a home in the city for most people means putting off FIRE which I think is poor decision making.
by floren | 2025-07-17 16:29:00+00:00
You're right, I mischaracterized Spartan. Although it is very similar to Gemini, it's not compatible because the author decided even 2-digit response codes were foolish luxury, and as you mentioned there's the TLS thing. Of course, we still call it HTTP even when it transits a TLS connection, but that's not The Gemini Way so...

True minimalists will, of course, use the Mercury protocol: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/floren/mercury/master/SPEC
by knolleary | 2025-07-17 16:29:13+00:00
Node-RED project lead here :wave:

As ever, I think each has its strengths and weaknesses, but I know which one I prefer...

In terms of 'out of the box' experience, I do agree there is space for some improved Node-RED nodes to support some of these workflows. There certainly are nodes in the community to help, but there's space for more. And that's an area I think gives Node-RED an advantage; the open source nature that allows anyone to build in the gaps of what's already there. Node-RED provides plenty of low-level building blocks to connect with pretty much anything - but having higher level abstraction nodes is needed to make it more accessible.

It's also an area we're looking at in my day job (FlowFuse CTO) where we provide a commercial platform built around Node-RED.
by jmholla | 2025-07-17 16:29:15+00:00
Followed up with:

> While everyone can register for free on Let’s Encrypt, only (or mostly) serious companies pay money to register on DigiCert, GoDaddy, and so on.

GoDaddy is not a serious anything. DigiCert perhaps, but GoDaddy has repeatedly shown themselves to be scummy and untrustworthy.

That said, I do see the value in having an entity like a bank pay for a stricter cert with identity validation versus leveraging Let's Encrypt's free infrastructure which only validates domain/site control.
by lumbroso | 2025-07-17 16:29:21+00:00
Hey, thanks so much for sharing, your repo is really cool, including the GEMINI.md context engineering file!

I am curious: You say "offline-first or local-first, quantified self projects", what models do you use with your projects?

I find the LLMs like the Claude and GPT families to be incredibly impressive for integration and metacognition — however, I am not sure yet what LMs are best for that purpose, if there are any.

Your "Augmented Awareness" framework seems to be metacognition-on-demand. In practice, how has it helped you recently? Is it mostly automated, or does it require a lot of manual data transfers?

I am assuming that the MCP server is plugged into a model, and that in the model you run prompts to run retrospectives.

Have you written about this?
by JohnFen | 2025-07-17 16:29:25+00:00
Ah, sorry, I got confused. I even tried to double-check to make sure that it was the same project, but that didn't help. Ah well.

What is your goal with your projects? Unless it's commercial, does it actually matter whether or not they take the world by storm? Almost all of my personal projects (and there have been a lot) I made because they addressed a problem that I was having. A few became very popular. Most did not. I think that's pretty normal. Either way, the value of them was in the doing so they were worth the effort.

Also, a surprising number of projects only gained popularity or relevance a number of years after I released them. Sometimes relevancy is a matter of timing.
by tartoran | 2025-07-17 16:29:26+00:00
There is also another market for these games with platforms like Pico-8 and Tic-80 where games are open source and one can simply pull the curtain, read the code and learn how the saussage is made. Many of these modern retro games are way more fun than most of the older copyrighted content and the community is thriving too.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-07-17 16:29:34+00:00
I'd argue earliest age at which you can be drafted minus maximum term length (ie. 5 years in the UK) sounds good as a general rule. Otherwise people can get drafted by a government they didn't have a say in electing.

I'd also argue that there should be no lower age limit for voting for people with taxable income. No taxation without representation.
by codedokode | 2025-07-17 16:29:40+00:00
No, they are not. Neither Fedora nor Debian have any sandboxing and if you add a third-party repository, it gets root access to your system and can run any scripts when installing or updating software.

Also what I meant is a "standard execution environment", so that the developer doesn't need to make a separate version for each Linux distribution, and doesn't have to make repositories.
by clbrmbr | 2025-07-17 16:29:55+00:00
Do what I did: move to a new bank that respects your security. When you close your account, give formal feedback about why you are closing. Outflows of depositors should send a signal.

(i had on issue with PNC in the US where they kept calling and asking for a 2FA code. Totally indistinguishable from phishing. Clearly they lack proper infosec, so I moved to Schwab and have not looked back.)
by silverquiet | 2025-07-17 16:29:57+00:00
Certainly my observations are pure anecdote, and only really a handful of people; all of whom started smoking before vaping was available. That said, a cigarette is a pretty impressive way of delivering nicotine, which is why they are so addictive. It's not hard to imagine that someone who's become addicted to nicotine via vape would then try other delivery methods and find them more satisfying.

That said, I do think that vapes as a replacement for an existing tobacco habit is a nice idea and it makes sense that it would be much safer. The issue is just that I have not known people to stick with them.
by gortok | 2025-07-17 16:30:17+00:00
In the comments here there are basically two schools of thought illustrated:

1. This is how MCP and LLMs work. This is how non-deterministic systems turn out. You wanted agentic AI. This is a natural outcome. What’s the problem?

2. We can design these systems to be useful and secure, but it will always be a game of whack-a-mole just like it is now, so what’s the problem?

What I’d like to see more of is a third school of thought:

3. How can anyone be so laissez-faire about folks using systems that are designed to be insecure? We should shut this down now, and let our sense guide our progress, instead of promises of VC-funded exits and promises of billions.
by drojas | 2025-07-17 16:30:35+00:00
Learning to learn efficiently is an incredibly useful skill that is required for survival in the self-taught path. Deciding what to learn next while making progress in your project in order to strategically unlock better decision-making at the right time before investing in the wrong path will compound over time and lead to increasingly improving skills like technical design, architecture, and project planning. The only major downside to this path in my experience is the increased probability of impostor syndrome which can be detrimental specially during the early years of your career and when you are trying to grow into the next level.
by RandomBacon | 2025-07-17 16:30:38+00:00
> But, they still use proprietary TOTP from Symantec which is annoying.

They at least used to, but I'm not sure they still do.

(And when they did, I was able to copy the key into a MFA app of my choice.)

But now as an end-user, it's all built in to their own banking app. I don't use the code from the app though, because I just use my personal 4 digit pin (after entering in my unique password from my password manager).
by freefaler | 2025-07-17 16:31:15+00:00
There are people who got out of Google and were the founders of the companies and indeed many more made enough money in the startup scene.

I had 6% in my first startup as a programmer, 15% at my second, 5% at the third and 90% of the current business.

The minority stakes gave me enough capital to start my last one and it is bootstrapped w/o any VCs this time.

From my point of view, you either take the risk and get a bigger slice of the pie or you're not and getting a smaller one. It's perfectly OK to work from 9-5 in a big company and spending your time outside work to try to start something. The system is not rigged, the more risk you take, the more control you can keep the better the outcome will be.

Yeah, this guys had worked their tails off, but they got paid for that and had a change to make it big if the company sold and they vested. However, they didn't work as a startup founder without any money for 2 years with maxed out CCs. This risk is not a healthy one, especially when you have a family.

Bootstrapping an AI company now is hard, because of the capital requirements, but building something with AI models (or creating specialized ones) is still doable.

This system is so much better than the non IT sector jobs, where you're limited to work in a big company. You have choice to earn something above the salary, most people haven't.
by Eextra953 | 2025-07-17 16:31:29+00:00
The article is specific to software engineers, and perhaps it's accurate within that discipline. The field is incredibly broad—ranging from writing small support scripts to engineering massive distributed systems—so it's plausible that a self-taught engineer could excel in certain areas. However, I don't believe this holds true, or is even feasible, for other engineering disciplines. In those fields, earning an engineering degree is typically a prerequisite. After that, you're free to self-teach and explore further, but without that formal foundation, it's difficult to progress meaningfully.

Side note: I think the term self-taught is often misused. Very few people are truly self-taught in the sense of starting from a blank slate and independently mastering a subject without any guidance. What the article refers to as self-taught is really just informal education—learning through blogs, tutorials, bootcamps, or YouTube University.
by spacemadness | 2025-07-17 16:31:33+00:00
This is a capitalists hand wave and hides many issues and tries to halt any discussion. It’s a cliche at this point. Now talk about housing. Are we better off there? My parents had it pretty good. They have a pension and worked at a public corporation even. They get their health care covered in retirement. I don’t get anything guaranteed for my retirement. They paid 50K for their house that is worth at least 550K now. Have salaries kept up? We have cell phones so it’s all OK I guess, why are you all complaining? Go watch some Tik Toks and count your blessings.
by coredog64 | 2025-07-17 16:31:36+00:00
A few years back, the Step Functions team was soliciting input, and the Python thing was something that came up as a suggestion. It's hard, yes, but it should be possible to "Starlark" this and tell users that if you stick to this syntax, you can write Python and compile it down to native StepFunction syntax.

Having said that, they have slightly improved the StepFunctions by adopting JSONata syntax.
by sebstefan | 2025-07-17 16:32:00+00:00
>I'm a bit confused here. I was referring to the first paragraph in your original post, whereas you seem to be referring to the second paragraph?

My point is, I think, that I would wager you are not the norm among the exclusively self-taught crowd

There's going to be a lot of people on Hackernews to debate me on this, but I'm going to go out on a limb there and say: There's already a selection bias if you're hanging on here.

Programmers who have an issue with the academic parts of CS (self taught or otherwise) probably wouldn't hang out on Hackernews to read such content as: "Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days (2024)".

It's hard being self taught and overcoming the comfort zone, it's hard to go out of your way to figure out what you should learn as you don't have the luxury of being forced to follow a curriculum drawn by experts of the field you're studying.

My thesis is that I disagree that "Self-Taught Engineers Often Outperform"

Formally trained engineers mostly outperform, with a few self-taught people that are going to stand out, but they are the visible part of the iceberg, and if you advise someone to go self-taught, most likely they'll end up underperforming compared to someone who's gone to university. And that's normal, because being self-taught is harder.
by mnw21cam | 2025-07-17 16:32:28+00:00
If the hashing is done on the client and then sent to the server, then the server is effectively just processing as a plaintext password. If an attacker gets hold of the server password database, then they can just connect to the server and pretend to be the client and hand it the hashed password that they read from the database breach.

If you hash the password on the server instead, then if the password database is breached, then an attacker needs to actually reverse the hash[0] and find the original password in order to log in, because that's all that the server will accept.

[0] Note, this should be difficult[1] [1] In crypto, "difficult" should mean "impossible before the end of the universe"
by lapcat | 2025-07-17 16:33:29+00:00
I acknowledge that theory-oriented vs. problem-oriented would be a fair characterization. But I think the language of "comfort zones" and "pushing through" was unfortunate and unfair. It suggests that somehow self-taught developers are lazy, when in fact they often have to work harder than anyone else, because nothing is handed to them by a professor or university. (Not to mention that it can be a lot harder to get a job when you don't have any academic credentials.) I would say that teaching yourself a difficult, esoteric skill, with no outside help, is inherently breaking out of your comfort zone.
by knolleary | 2025-07-17 16:33:57+00:00
Node-RED project lead here :wave:

That's all useful feedback to us. There's always a balance to be had between putting lots of code in Function nodes and the visual complexity of doing the equivalent in pure nodes. Part of that is understanding where users are falling back to JS in a Function node - and what could the core nodes provide to avoid that necessity.

Code reviews are a common piece of feedback and something we need to help with.

In the day job (FlowFuse CTO) we're looking at how to improve the overall developer UX of Node-RED - both within node-red, but also how you manage it within a team and at scale.

If you had any more feedback on your experiences, would love to hear it.
by horsawlarway | 2025-07-17 16:34:09+00:00
Yes, but this is "bring your own arm" so the person above you can easily build the arm out to whatever specs they'd like.

They probably want to know relatively important information like

- Breaking force (how much force will break a finger)

- grip force (How much force can the fingers exert to hold an object once closed)

- holding force (combination of grip force and material properties [ex - friction] that gives you an idea how much force can be applied to prevent slipping)

- closing force (How much force is exerted during closing [similar but distinct from grip/holding])

Or, with a lot less specific detail but still generally useful as a starting point...

- payload capacity (approximately how much can this safely manipulate)
by saulpw | 2025-07-17 16:34:29+00:00
Re: the Sorites paradox, I have a definition of a heap that I think is workable.

It's not a specific number; it's "a collection of items becomes a heap when some indeterminate number of items are obscured by other items on top of them, thus making the total number of items uncountable without disturbing the heap".

Therefore it depends on factors beyond just the number of grains of sand; if you have 1000 grains spread out on a surface so they are can all be distinctly counted, that's not a heap. But if you have 1000 grains gathered together, some on top of each other, then it becomes a heap.