MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by susiecambria | 2025-07-17 01:31:16+00:00
I remember well early 1986 when I was applying for jobs. Experience required, but no way to get experience. Frustrating as hell, especially since I had no peers around and had no BA (I left college a semester early cuz I had enough credits but didn't graduate for months). I ended up getting a cool job for $11,000/year and cobbled together a stable work life. It took another 5+ years to finally get my shit together.

Ended up as the director of public policy for a small nonprofit only because the new policy staffer was going to be paid more than I was. For the board to give me the substantial pay increase I deserved based on experience, I had to be a director. Yet I only managed myself; I'm a crap supervisor so that was fine with me. What was funny was that people outside the organization were perplexed about why the policy work across the organization was so varied. I operated as a lobbyist because that was what was required and that is what I'm good at. But the new staffer was a policy analyst and advocate. The executive director and board seemed to be fine with that arrangement, but again, the difference was noted outside the org. Not sure that was good for the organization and the mission.
by kulahan | 2025-07-17 01:32:39+00:00
It took me way too long in life to realize that you can do whatever gives you money, at the end of the day. Like it doesn’t have to be a job, just anything that gets cash to you.

Some people run errands. Some people make stuff. Some people are valuable friends. Some people are wise advisors. Some people help you get healthy. Whatever!

I know this is painfully obvious in hindsight, but maybe something about 18 straight years of “your choices are military, college, or trades” prevented me from thinking outside the box. I probably would’ve gotten started on a career I was excited about a loooot earlier in life.
by fablematic | 2025-07-17 01:33:05+00:00
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by zahlman | 2025-07-17 01:34:15+00:00
I made a small wrapper for cookiecutter, to handle some minimal Git integration (making a repo and doing the first commit) and to match my workflow better (write some initial code first, then transform it into a "project folder" in place): https://github.com/zahlman/cookiebaker

I'm not a huge fan of cookiecutter on aesthetic principles, though. I think it's chosen some needlessly heavyweight dependencies for such a simple task. PyYAML comes with a big chunk of compiled C, while performance is really not going to matter and I'd rather use TOML anyway. I've yet to see a project depending on Rich that uses more than a tiny portion of it; this is no exception. More to the point, Rich brings in the much larger Pygments (for syntax highlighting; most of the bulk is actual syntax definition rules for a variety of programming languages) and you can't disable that. And honestly I'm not a fan of the whole "download other people's templates using an integrated client" model anyway; Requests and its dependencies are pretty bulky, too.
by garbagecoder | 2025-07-17 01:34:50+00:00
Or even just get the passover ones in plastic bottles here in the US when they're in season. It tastes different. Whether you care or like it better or worse, it tastes different.

According to the WSJ this is because "Food scientists have noted subtle differences between the sweeteners: High-fructose corn syrup’s sweetness intensity tends to peak earlier, enhancing fruit and spice flavors, while sugar’s profile is broader and lingers."
by jittery41 | 2025-07-17 01:35:31+00:00
This is it, for a while battery life got worse for a while with more powerful chips. But then Samsung goes full in on the big size 6"+ phone and it got better again.

Now even at 80% original capacity, a Samsung can still last me throughout the day given that I am not watching videos constantly. The Iphone 6 back in the day would go to 40% in 3 hours, then suddenly to 5% in minutes.

Plus most people replace their laptop with a phone now. So the big screen size is a must.
by jalapenos | 2025-07-17 01:35:33+00:00
Only if you're sick in the head. Can you imagine? Little girl or boy running around and all you can think is "damn birth control didn't work". Monsters maybe are like that

The religious conservatives can think whatever crank nonsense they want, the rest of us can comfortably separate out the 99% elective killing case, and leave the remaining 1% cases for the controversy.
by grahar64 | 2025-07-17 01:36:03+00:00
I wrote this post https://maori.geek.nz/small-light-robust-phones-for-a-type-1... that has a bunch of examples of small phones. The requirements are not exactly the same, but in the same boat as for want of good solid small phones.

I recommend the pixel 4a 5g with LineageOS installed, or the Q9 mini.
by nocsi | 2025-07-17 01:37:06+00:00
The 'problems' 1password faces... Apple has solved. I quit using 1password around 3 years ago, but at the time they were going all in on SaaS and quietly memory-holing the local-first vault approach that people were using them for. You know, letting people reference a sqlite db on icloud, google drive or whatever and that can be synced. 1Password cites credential leakage and security as a reason for for not implementing MCP, but they're giving the impression that MCP is the issue. Mind you, 1password has a very similar model to lastpass, that had 16bln creds leaked.

But seriously, Apple is actually in a better position to let mcp into their services if they wanted. The user credentials are all bound to your physical devices, which in turn cooperate to give a measure of identity to you. You don't need to let MCP have full access to everything, the secure enclave can generate short-lived certs. I'd be surprised if passkeys weren't able to do that already.
by iLemming | 2025-07-17 01:38:27+00:00
For some reason Emacs veterans keep waging wars against modality without acknowledging that Emacs is inherently modal - key chords create temporary modes, transient keymaps maintain states, the minibuffer is a distinct mode, and even fundamental concepts like the mark-active state and recursive editing demonstrate that Emacs has always embraced context-dependent behavior rather than being truly modeless.
by bsder | 2025-07-17 01:38:57+00:00
> Rust is the easiest language to refactor with I've ever worked in

Oh? So how do you refactor a closure into a named function in Rust?

I have found this to be of the most common failure modes that makes people want to punch the monitor.

(Context: in almost all programming languages, a closure is practically equivalent to an unnamed function--refactoring a closure to a named function tends to be pretty straightforward. This isn't true for Rust--closures pick up variable lifetime information that can be excruciatingly difficult to unwind to a named function.)
by dragontamer | 2025-07-17 01:39:07+00:00
Certainly not the story of, ex: the Mongol Empire. Which is the Great Khan dies but he was the big personality holding everything together.

There were competent kings and competent Empires.

Indeed, it's tough to decide where the Roman Empire really began it's decline. It's not a singular event but a centuries long decline. Same with the Spanish Empire and English Empire.

Indeed, the English Empire may have collapsed but that's mostly because Britain just got bored of it. There's no traditional collapse for the breakup of the British Empire

---------

I can think of some dramatic changes as well. The fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan wasn't due to incompetence, but instead the culture shock of a full iron battleship from USA visiting Japan when they were still a swords and samurai culture. This broke the Japanese trust in the Samurai system and led to a violent revolution resulting in incredible industrialization. But I don't think the Tokugawa Shogunate was ever considered especially corrupt or incompetent.

---------

Now that being said: Dictators fall into the dictator trap. A bad king who becomes a narcissist and dictator will fall under the pattern you describe. But that doesn't really happen all that often. That's why it's so memorable when it DOES happen
by godelski | 2025-07-17 01:39:10+00:00
I'm a bit confused. What you described is what happens today. Yes. That has been my experience too, serving as a reviewer. I understood xondono to be referencing the history that I mentioned, which is where these reviewers didn't exist. So the requirement was different, which is what I'm saying about the burden of proof.

> Peer review doesn't reject papers because they don't agree with the orthodoxy; they reject them because they're not competent.

This is absolutely false and I don't know a single academic who hasn't seen competent papers get rejected.

Reviewers can reject for any reason. The system is built on trust, but incentivized to reject. "Not competent" is too vague of a term, just like "not novel."

In my other comment[0] I even reference one of the famous works that got rejected 3 times for being "not competent". This isn't a one-off case here, it is a common occurrence. On several occasions I've had to champion papers which were clearly competent yet my fellow reviewers simply were not familiar with the domain (they admitted this during discussion). I've also killed papers for similar reasons (a very rare event as I strongly bias towards accepting).

So I'm sorry, saying papers are only rejected because they are "not competent" is incredibly naive.

And I'm sorry, but the claim that "works aren't rejected because they don't agree with orthodoxy" is simply laughable. There's a long history of peers rejecting discoveries that upset the norms. This has happened to the majority of well known scientists. I'm not talking about like the Church going after Galileo, I'm talking about things like Galilelo arguing with Tycho Brahe or Christoph Scheiner. Einstein was critical of Bohr. Hertz was critical of Bell. The list goes on and on. The criticism was explicitly about running counter to orthodoxy. This is such a common thread in history that there's even Max Planck stated "Science advances one funeral at a time."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44587535
by alephnerd | 2025-07-17 01:40:44+00:00
Yea, GCC style optimizations don't work until your company hit the 150-200 headcount mark.

But it is those sized organizations that tend to represent the majority of hiring.

A company with 100 or fewer employees tends to be much more hard pressed with hiring, as revenue for these sized orgs also tends to be lower.

The Section 174 changes didn't have much of an impact one way or the other for larger companies and organizations.

The expectation for output has largely been set now, and even with the current changes I don't see much of an impact on hiring trends.

This also doesn't include the impact that AI productivity tools like Cursor is starting to have on AoPs. It's already the halfway point and I myself am starting to see increased proposals from Engineering leadership to leverage Cursor style tooling wherever possible. And a number of the seed and Series A companies I've funded over the past 2-3 years have largely kept headcount below 100 and heavily utilizing automation where possible, and are on track to hit Series B style FCF metrics with a much leaner workflow.
by SamuelAdams | 2025-07-17 01:41:29+00:00
Or, alternatively, the crop of current grads education is abysmal compared to past graduates, and companies are reluctant to hire them.

This is the first graduate class since Covid. Pivoting to online learning quickly resulted in worse learning outcomes for k-12 and college as well.

Companies are seeing a decline in base-level skills typically expected from previous classes of new graduates. They can either hire now and pay the cost of training for possibly 1-2 years to get them to an appropriate level, or hire no one and instead hire from the classes of 2026 and 2027, assuming those students improve from the post-Covid education system.
by mopsi | 2025-07-17 01:41:55+00:00
> Even if they won’t, there’s no plausible scenario in which Russia will lose this territory.

Didn't the brightest minds in the Kremlin believe that the last time too?

There are many plausible scenarios, such as the worsening of socio-economic conditions, to the point where local governments stop following the central government and begin implementing their own policies shaped by local grassroots movements, leading to the total loss of control by Moscow. A repeat of 1989-1991. In that turmoil, nobody will care about Donbas or Crimea, as long as they can have food on their table.

We seem to be seeing the same recipe in action: extremely costly war for no clear purpose, economic stagnation, de facto bankruptcies of entire large sectors like mining and metallurgy.

Missing ingredients: low oil prices over extended time periods (6 years in the 1980s).
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 01:41:58+00:00
The problem is that tools like AI are useful if and only if you have the prerequisite knowledge, otherwise they are self-destructive.

It's similar to a calculator. We give student graphing calculators, but ONLY after they have already graphed by-hand hundreds of times. Why? Because education does not work like other things.

Efficiency, in education, is bad. We don't want to solve problems as fast as possible, we want to form the best understanding of problems possible. When I, say, want to book an airplane ticket, I want to do that in the fastest way possible. The most efficient manner. I care not about how an airport works, or how flight numbers are decided, or how planes work.

But efficient education is bad education. We can skip 99% of education, if we wanted. We can have, say, the SAT - and spend 1 year studying only for the SAT. Don't bother with the other 12 years of schooling.

Will you get an acceptable score on the SAT this way? Maybe. Will you be intelligent? No, you will be functionally illiterate.

If we use AI for programming before we can program, then we will be bad programmers. Yes, we can pass a test. Yes, we can pass a quiz. But we don't know what we're doing, because education is cumulative. If we skip steps, we lose. If we cut corners, we lose. It's like trying to put a roof on a house when the foundation isn't even poured.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-17 01:42:30+00:00
IMO This is why Unreal (and Unity) for web is just not a good fit. Most games made in those engines use 100s of megs of assets. You download the 100-500meg file, to your hard drive, then run the game. That's not the web.

To be good on the web requires designing your game to start immediately with the minimal amount of downloaded. Maybe stream some stuff in the background but be playable immediately. AFAICT neither Unreal nor Unity do that by default. You can maybe coerce them to do it but most devs don't. As such they get these bad experiences when they try to put their creation on the web
by theshackleford | 2025-07-17 01:42:59+00:00
> I believe

You can believe whatever you want, but it doesn’t make it true. We know exactly why they make larger devices and it’s not a secret, it’s what consumers by and large want. It’s not a conspiracy.

Every time a vendor falls for the “we want small phones” thing, they sell poorly thus proving the point again and again that it’s a minority at best that are interested.
by kulahan | 2025-07-17 01:44:16+00:00
Your points only hold in a pretty narrow view of what degrees do. There is a lot of value in:

1. Showing you can complete a 4 year project

2. Networking not only with professors, but also other students. You never know when you’ll need a dude who has a weird amount of skill in X, but if it’s in any way related to your field, you may have had classes together.

3. A place to spend a bit more time maturing

4. A place to pick up some skills that particularly interest you

5. A mixing of different economic classes, backgrounds, and outlooks, amid a relatively calm intellectual setting

6. Highly specialized and targeted education

And more. All of these make you more valuable to society, though that doesn’t have to be our only goal. We could also enjoy the generic enrichment of our citizens.
by zahlman | 2025-07-17 01:44:19+00:00
My own experience could hardly be more different. For that matter, I have never had to even look at a "flashy looking web site and follow all the instructions to the letter" in order to install something.

For example, to install yt-dlp, I followed these steps:

sudo apt install pipx pipx install yt-dlp

Actually, only the second one, because I already had pipx (https://pipx.pypa.io/ — a wrapper for pip that does basic virtual environment management) installed.

Can you name some specific things in Python you have tried to use, and give more concrete descriptions of how you tried to set them up?
by gosub100 | 2025-07-17 01:44:20+00:00
I think this is the biggest grift of AI: Laundering responsibility. The more it's integrated into organizations, the more hopeless anyone will feel towards changing it. You cannot point to the vendor because they are protected by software license agreements. "Whelp, sorry for your loss but ya see the algorithm did it.." is going to be the money making tune in many industries.
by seanlinehan | 2025-07-17 01:45:07+00:00
I have this little bookmarklet in my bookmarks bar that I use constantly. It removes all fixed or sticky elements on the page and re-enabled y-overflow if it was disabled:

javascript: (function () {document.querySelectorAll("body *").forEach(function(node){["fixed","sticky"].includes(getComputedStyle(node).position)&&node.parentNode.removeChild(node)});var htmlNode=document.querySelector("html");htmlNode.style.overflow="visible",htmlNode.style["overflow-x"]="visible",htmlNode.style["overflow-y"]="visible";var bodyNode=document.querySelector("body");bodyNode.style.overflow="visible",bodyNode.style["overflow-x"]="visible",bodyNode.style["overflow-y"]="visible";var nodes=document.querySelectorAll('.tp-modal-open');for(i in nodes) {nodes[i].classList.remove('tp-modal-open');}}())
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-07-17 01:46:00+00:00
We trained HAL how to lie and then were surprised when HAL lied in ways we didn't expect. Arthur C. Clarke really was far ahead of the game and yet here we are, blazing down that trail, hoping somehow we can make monsters that are only monsters to everyone else. Meanwhile the monster develops its own priorities and makes use of the deception we taught it how to use.
by eszed | 2025-07-17 01:46:03+00:00
I mentioned this somewhere else in my comment history, but I once used Wave with a group of creatives to develop a theatre piece, and everyone immediately "got" how to use it. (We'll not get into the debacle of the next project where we'd collectively run out of invite tokens, and... Ah, Google sure self-sabotaged that, didn't they?) Totally non-techy crowd, but took to Wave with appreciation and joy.

A decade-plus later, in my present (grown-up / sellout) job, I evangelized Dropbox Paper - which was sorta Wave-like, if you squinted a bit - and it Did. Not. Stick. No one else could stand it, and everything reverted back to interminable document-attached email chains and more-interminable Teams calls everyone's invited to "just in case".

I can't tell you whether that's because artistic people are more able to think non-linearly than business people, or because Paper didn't get some special something exactly right. I wish I could run the experiment.
by PNewling | 2025-07-17 01:46:21+00:00
Funny enough I feel the other way about JetBrains IDEs. They * seem * super powerful, but there is always a lot of config that needs to go into them if I'm doing app, infra, and pipeline work. (Edit, not saying they aren't powerful, just more that as coming into them I'm never sure how to wield it the best out of the box)

In my experience (not saying this is universal), the folks that like JetBrains IDEs came from java/intellij backgrounds, where I hear it really shines.

This all might be a skill issue, as almost all my professional projects have been VSCode based, but since I've only worked at smaller places I definitely can't rule out this was because it was easier to set things up than to fight for Fin to get us all licences.

In your opinion, what makes PyCharm (or CLion if you want to add that in) 'just work'? Do you think it is because you've used it for so long and just know the ins-and-outs? Or is there something you see that they have and VSCode doesn't?

I've always been curious about this as someone who hasn't had a lot of professional exposure to the JetBrains world.
by nine_k | 2025-07-17 01:46:41+00:00
I suppose the "best manager" in this sense protects his/her team from the upper echelon politics, and, being clueless, does not bother meddling with technical decisions, letting the team do their work. Their worldview is captured in the famous quotation: «You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.»
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-17 01:46:43+00:00
Vulkan does not run GLSL. There are tools that convert GLSL to SPIR-V. That's not the same thing. So, if you want the exact same experience, you grab a tool, say, Slang, and have it output WGSL. Now you've got the same experience. An API that doesn't take a language you want to write in and a tool that converts from some language you do into the other.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-17 01:47:38+00:00
Are we talking about Bluetooth headsets now? I thought we were talking about keyboards and mice.

So what crappy Bluetooth headphones are you using? I haven’t had any issues with either my AirPods Pro or my cheap $60 Beats Flex.

And you can go months without recharging a keyboard or mouse. The advantage of the iPad is I don’t need a keyboard or mouse all of the time - well my wife doesn’t. It has built in cellular which is unlimited via T-mobile and when I go on an airplane, I can leave my keyboard and mouse in my bag.

And honestly, I hate working on just my laptop for any period of time and I still take my Roost laptop stand and a keyboard and mouse with me and I have an external USB powered/USB video external monitor I take with me and sometimes use my iPad as a third monitor for my laptop.