MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diggan | 2025-07-04 14:31:41+00:00
> And if you're living your life where the only "solution" to any problem created by stupidity, miscommunication, and bad planning of other people is saying "yes, sir!” and enabling them to do more if it

I'm not sure if you've ever worked in a "creative" environment filled with artists, either professionally or not, but the goal is almost never to come up with a solution that is technological superior or even "correct", it just have to work for the session, maybe two.

If you're a technical contributor to such an environment, then your "job" is basically to support their whims, that's how the project moves forward. Saying "no" when an artist approaches you isn't really in the job requirements, but of course you can steer them into a different direction, but ultimately they steer the ship, and they have to.

But ultimately your job in those cases are to support the vision of someone else, often by any means necessary and fast too.
by znpy | 2025-07-04 14:31:42+00:00
Weird number. I have one of those enterprise mini pc (think EliteDesk pro mini) with an i9 (8c/16t), 64gb ram and 1 nvme disk and it idles at ~2W.

The measurement was done via a smart plug running tasmota (and the tasmota exporter) so I'd say it's pretty realistic.

I also have an HP MicroServer Gen8 with a 20W Xeon cpu (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/53401/i...) and four disks... It also idles at ~21W (again, as reported from tasmota-based smart plugs).
by venusenvy47 | 2025-07-04 14:32:25+00:00
I can vouch for the power draw in this type of system. I have a Dell OptiPlex 7070 with i5-9500, 32GB and running Proxmox with a Windows VM and a couple smaller instances. I measure 8w idle from my Kill-a-Watt on the system. I was really surprised at how low it is.
by bradlys | 2025-07-04 14:32:25+00:00
Written by a European.

Reality is - if you’re an American and got into tech and are working for well paying tech companies, you’re not leaving and there’s no escape unless you fatFIRE. This is why FIRE is so big among the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Everyone knows. What’s the alternative for an American tech worker (primarily the people who read HN) who wants to stay where they live, keep a similar quality of living, and not work in toxic faang-esque H1B factories? There ain’t one.
by thrwyexecbrain | 2025-07-04 14:32:31+00:00
Just to start some discussion about the actual API and not the breaking change aspect of it:

I find the `Reader.stream(writer, limit)` and `Reader.streamRemaining(writer)` functions to be especially elegant to build a push-based data transformation pipeline (like GREP or compression/encryption). You just implement a Writer interface for your state machine and dump the output into another Writer and you don't have to care about how the bytes come and how they leave (be it a socket or shared memory or file) -- you just set the buffer sizes (which you can even set to zero as I gather!)

`Writer.sendFile()` is also nice, I don't know of any other stream abstraction that provides this primitive in the "generic interface", you usually have to downcast the stream to a "FileStream" and work on the file descriptor directly.
by azath92 | 2025-07-04 14:33:01+00:00
yeah we are thinking a lot right now about good language for how to separate the notion of a "profile" as representative of who i am, from the concept of a profile that represents what mode im currently operating in right now. In the context of browsing, mood actually captures it quite well i agree. As we think wider to the different ways we might want a profile to help guide what content we receive or results we get when using other tools, that language isnt quite so clear yet.

We will have to do some combo of much more internal testing, construct evals, or just capture more info about peoples usage coupled with an ability to provide feedback in order to even get a handle of such a nuanced thing as "good" with a tool like this. Likely info capture and user feedback would be a first port of call for a substantive change, internal testing is always ongoing, but such a low sample size.
by paddy_m | 2025-07-04 14:33:22+00:00
I have a project that has a python backend and react typescript frontend. Both are typed. How do you all handle resolving types between two systems like that. Ideally I'd like to be able to write types in typescript, and write python types, then verify that the types are compatible (not identical). I frequently frontend side features that add new keys to dicts, and fill in python support later.
by chrptvn | 2025-07-04 14:33:27+00:00
I built https://minutemail.to, a tool to generate secure temporary email inboxes for testing, development, or avoiding spam.

Key points: * Generate disposable @minutemail.to addresses instantly * Inboxes are secured by your browser session or with a password set by the API * Automatically expire after 1 hour * Supports receiving attachments * Free API for developers to generate inboxes for CI, QA, or signup testing

No login required, and designed to be frictionless for developers and privacy-conscious users.

Would be happy to get your feedback or hear what features would help your workflow.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-04 14:33:29+00:00
Why do we keep getting people who say we understand LLMs.

Let me put it plainly. If we understood LLMs we would understand why hallucinations happen and we would subsequently be able to control and stop hallucinations from happening. But we can’t. We can’t control the LLM because of lack of understanding.

All the code is available on a computer for us to modify every single parameter. We have full access and we can’t control the LLM because we don’t understand or KNOW what to do. This is despite the fact that we have absolute control over the value of every single atomic unit of an LLM
by swores | 2025-07-04 14:33:39+00:00
Isn't the idea of brain size being a useful proxy for intelligence quite outdated?

Partly because there are animals with larger brains which we now know are not very intelligent, with no assumptions needed, and partly because some of the most intelligent non-primate animals that we know of actually have very small brains - like crows and other birds in the corvid family.
by pydry | 2025-07-04 14:33:42+00:00
these are usually worse, especially if IT is treated as a cost center and the SME is run by people with autocratic tendencies.

half of the questions on /r/cscareerquestions are about how to deal with working in this type of company ("why does the boss always defer to his nephew who cant code his way out of a paper bag?") or how to get out ("where are all the jobs paying over $100k?").
by 90s_dev | 2025-07-04 14:33:55+00:00
I don't mind breaking changes if I can fix them within a day.

What bothers me with C/C++ is how difficult it is to cross compile a simple Windows + SDL app from inside WSL without MSVC installed.

I've spent weeks on this.

If Zig saves me from that nightmare, and still lets me use C++ libraries, I will gladly switch over to it.
by vidarh | 2025-07-04 14:34:04+00:00
The paper in question is atrocious.

If you assume any kind of error rate of consequence, and you will get that, especially if temperature isn't zero, and at larger disk sizes you'd start to hit context limits too.

Ask a human to repeatedly execute the Tower of Hanoi algorithm for similar number of steps and see how many will do so flawlessly.

They didn't measure "the diminishing returns of 'deep learning'"- they measured limitations of asking a model to act as a dumb interpreter repeatedly with a parameter set that'd ensure errors over time.

For a paper that poor to get released at all was shocking.
by Adrig | 2025-07-04 14:34:05+00:00
I've dealt with chronic illnesses for the past 10+ years now. It's such a hard path.

I recently found out after a violent burn-out that a significant cause was chronic stress and its psychosomatic symptoms. It made me have a hard look at the topic, and I'm gradually adjusting to solve the issue.

If I get better, I'm tempted to do as OP and spend more time working on this issue for others. It seems so much more impactful than grinding the tech / startup life.
by tensility | 2025-07-04 14:34:42+00:00
The thing is, I don't use a RPi for desktop-like experiences, so I don't want all of the accessories you've padded the price with just to have a cheap unix node somewhere that I need a small amount of compute or, especially, physical presence. For a desktop UI experience, I have and prefer much better machines to drive full desktop UIs than either a Pi or an N1x0. For that, I use one of my Macs.

Of course, I already know we don't have similar needs or desires for a desktop experience, because I haven't found a good reason to run Windows for a couple of decades (since I'm not a PC gamer type and that seems to be the primary interesting reason left for running it), other than to occasionally boot up the newest version and try it out to see if I'm actually missing much.

Also, for servers that get real load, I'd often rather run them from (unix-based) containers in the cloud anyway, if only for maintainability's sake. Heck, I already have NUCs depreciating out in storage that I don't bother to use because a RPi is usually a more solid and energy-efficient choice, unless I want a decent desktop experience or need a high-load server, for which purposes an N1x0 isn't usually the machine I want or need, either.

Now, that said, if you do want a cheap minimal desktop experience machine and you don't mind or even want the Windows experience, I suppose a used N1x0 probably is a great choice.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by azath92 | 2025-07-04 14:35:04+00:00
Sadly not! It lives in our FE monorepo at work, it just kind of jumped out at us as something to split out and demo once we started using it to test some of our ideas. Its something wed consider for sure, but for now the lack of an open repo is kind of a bit of tech debt in a way. Easier to dev in our monorepo to get something out fast.
by dahart | 2025-07-04 14:35:29+00:00
> if you want to eat, you cheat.

I can totally understand thinking this way out of desperation, and being lulled into thinking it’s this simple, but it seems short sighted with hidden complexities. First of all, it’s risky. If you get caught, you don’t eat, and it could follow you and prevent you from even getting in the door elsewhere. Companies are always going to be watching for cheaters, they are always going to have more visibility than you into what interviewees are doing, and they are always going to have more resources. Even if you do cheat and get hired, it quickly becomes obvious that you’re unqualified and can’t do what you claimed, and even if you don’t lose your job, you’re less likely to get promoted. Being lazy and amoral about interviews seems like a trap people set for themselves.

The good news is that a lot of companies are starting to allow AI during the interviews, and suddenly it’s not cheating. But of course that means you need to be good at using AI and interviewing and programming, you won’t be able to cheat and rely on the AI to do your talking for you.
by geerlingguy | 2025-07-04 14:35:38+00:00
Yeah; honestly if you're going to integrate I2C/UART/SPI, cellular, serial bus stuff, PoE, or anything like that into a project, the Pi (4/5) makes that simple, and almost always painless.

Having well-supported GPIO and documented interfaces is nice, when you want to do anything outside normal 'compute' use cases.

The Pi 4 is still a great option for throwing into random spots for $35 and burning 1-2W of power. The Pi 5 less so, in that common homelab use case.

I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port, for $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.
by skydhash | 2025-07-04 14:36:01+00:00
I interact with tools and with people. When with people, there's a shared understanding of the goal and the context (aka, alignment as some people like to called it). With tools, there's no such context needed. Instead I need reproducible results and clear output. And if it's something that I can automate, that it will follow my instructions closely.

LLMs are obviously tools, but their parameters space is so huge that's it's difficult to provide enough to ensure reliable results. With prompting, we have unreliable answers, but with agents, you have actions being made upon those reliable answers. We had that before with people copying and pasting from LLMs output, but now the same action is being automated. And then there's the feedback loop, where the agent is taking input from the same thing it has altered (often wrongly).

So it goes like this: Ambiguous query -> unrealiable information -> agents acting -> unreliable result -> unreliable validation -> final review (which are often skipped). And then the loop.

While with normal tools: Ambiguous requirement -> detailed specs -> formal code -> validation -> report of divergence -> review (which can be skipped) . There are issues in the process (which give us bugs) but we can pinpoint where we did wrong and fix the issue.
by steveklabnik | 2025-07-04 14:36:04+00:00
> Dothey do requirement gatherings?

This is true, but they have helped prepare me with good questions to ask during those meetings!

> Do they do the analysis? Removing specs that conflict with each other, validating what's possible in the technical domain and in the business domain?

Yes, I have had LLMs point out missing information or conflicting information in the spec. See above about "good questions to ask stakeholders."

> Do they help with design? Helping coming up with the changes that impact the current software the least, fitting in the current architecture and be maintainable in the feature.

Yes.

I recently had a scenario where I had a refactoring task that I thought I should do, but didn’t really want to. It was cleaning up some error handling. This would involve a lot of changes to my codebase, nothing hard, but it would have taken me a while, and been very boring, and I’m trying to ship features, not polish off the perfect codebase, so I hadn’t done it, even though I still thought I should.

I was able to ask Claude “hey, how expensive would this refactoring be? how many methods would it change? What’s the before/after diffs on a simple affected place, and one of the more complex affected places look like?

Previously, I had to use my hard-won human intuition to make the call about implementing this or not. It’s very fuzzy. With Claude, I was able to very quickly quantify that fuzzy notion into something at least close to accurate: 260 method signatures. Before and after diffs look decent. And this kind of fairly mechanical transformation is something Claude can do much more quickly and just as accurately as I can. So I finally did it.

That I shipped the refactoring is one point. But the real point is that I was able to quickly focus my understanding of the problem, and make a better, more informed decision because of it. My gut was right. But now I knew it was right, without needing to actually try it out.

> Not a true debate or weighing options based on the organization context.

This context is your job to provide. They will take it into account when you provide it.

> Do they help with coding?

Yes.

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

Yes, absolutely.

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

See above about refactoring to improve quality.
by gdbsjjdn | 2025-07-04 14:36:23+00:00
If you want to leave tech you should save up for 4-5 years of expenses to accomodate for under-employment, downsize your lifestyle to fit a household income under 80k, and then reskill in another field.

I have tried to move away incrementally from the tech industry by working less and consulting, and it is not effective. There's simply nothing else you can do that pays as well for so little effort. It draws you back in like a tarpit because there's always more work to do. Committing to a clean break and immersing yourself in a new field seems like the better approach.
by jonstewart | 2025-07-04 14:36:29+00:00
Just yesterday I was reading a critique of MCP that specifically mentioned the GitHub MCP server as being harder to use (from model perspective) and requiring more tokens than having the agent execute git commands directly. I am surprised to see it listed here and also surprised to see two different web search servers and the time one. I would appreciate more detail from the author about the utility of each MCP server—overloading an agent with servers seems like it could be counterproductive.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-04 14:36:41+00:00
> How do I know? 15 years experience, top candidate in many interviews, great salary / employment. Yet every time I've tried to get a consulting arrangement set up it's been extremely hard and ultimately unprofitable (i.e. pays significantly less than full-time job, on average).

Sounds like a legit negotiation strategy:

- You prefer a consulting arrangement over being hired.

- The company prefers to pay less for the job.

So both involved sides get a part of the pie that is negotiated about, and has to compromise on another aspect.
by tombert | 2025-07-04 14:36:57+00:00
Yeah, I mostly will do map/reduce/filter when possible, and obviously in those cases indexes don’t matter. It could start at index 12345 for all I care with that stuff.

Occasionally, though, I need to use the same index across multiple items, there’s not a trivial means in which to zip, and at that point I have to use an old school for loop. That’s when the 1-index vs 0-index bites me.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-07-04 14:37:00+00:00
A first good step is getting rid of Haskell's obscure and impenetrable syntax, and checking implementations that would be more readable.

Kotlin's Arrow library hits a good middle ground between FP wizardry and readability, and their documentation on lenses are understandable for the average person: https://arrow-kt.io/learn/immutable-data/lens/ / https://arrow-kt.io/learn/immutable-data/intro/
by senko | 2025-07-04 14:37:39+00:00
This is "grass is greener" type article:

> Working for a public institution

This may vary from country to country, but in my part of the world, public institutions are mostly dysfunctional, political, nepotistic, filled with cronies and people with negative productivity. And then there's one bright eyed idealist who actually does most of the work until they realize they're being taken advantage of, learn their lesson and starts behaving the same (or leave for private sector).

> Joining a tech co-operative

ie. become a freelancer or start/join a consultancy; sure, but after a couple dozen projects, it starts feeling the same as a corpo job.

> Joining a tech NGO

Again, may vary from country to country. Here NGOs are incredibly political things and desperately dependent on continous outside funding (the two are interconnected). You'll switch office politics for NGO politics.

> Working for a union or a party

Politicians and union representatives are some of the last people I'd ever want to socialize with.

> Becoming a mentor or a teacher

That's nice, but can you live on that salary?

> Becoming a techno-political hustler

For an article that starts with one's quest to find a more meaningful job, this is about as far removed from it as "used car salesman that exclusively uses bitcoin payday loans financing".

At the same time, some of the more promising alternatives that crop up at local IT watering holes are floor tiling, plumbing, roofing, ... All honest work, good pay, visible results, and zero bullshit.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-07-04 14:37:42+00:00
in fairness to some interview processes there are ways you could legit pass a valid interview and then short change the job. We do a problem scenario / proposed solution that's shared a few days in advance. Good candidates (and good frauds) can ace this with strong technical skills, relevant experience and maybe an hour or so of prep time. We'd take this as strong signal, because (and I'd hope more companies do this) we're optimizing for talented candidates, not minimizing people who are going to work multiple concurrent jobs.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-07-04 14:38:04+00:00
Use the a similar protocol with better properties (less energy consumption, better transaction usability) and start from zero.

Also, I'm not sure if a radical lack of regulation / full decentralization is a good thing when we are talking about money.

In my opinion, money should be regulated by governments.

But this discussion tends to escalate and the arguments have been made ad nauseam, so I'm tuning out here, sorry.
by latexr | 2025-07-04 14:38:04+00:00
> For your benefit

If that’s your true impetus, please don’t bother. There’s nothing which benefits me about your words being clearer and less open to misinterpretation. You are, of course, completely welcome to disagree with and ignore my suggestions.

> thanks to the introduction of the table saw.

That makes absolutely no difference at all. And it doesn’t matter anymore either, the harm to your point is already done, no one’s going back to it now to reinterpret it. I was merely pointing out what I see as having gone wrong so you can avoid it in the future. But again, entirely up to you what you do with the feedback.
by azath92 | 2025-07-04 14:38:47+00:00
For a first pass having some emb search would require we store and process a lot, which we dont do for this light weight demo. all the posts and recommendations are done on the fly, only looking at the current top page and re-ranking. as some others suggest, if we wanted to expand the recs more broadly than the front page then it might be a great way to run a first cut before running our rec llm on it.

For richer data to build a profile its something we look at a bunch for other projects, which could get folded in here if we decide to make it more persistent.
by stpedgwdgfhgdd | 2025-07-04 14:39:15+00:00
“The goal of software engineering is not to write code faster”

Writing proper code including tests and refactorings takes substantial time.

It is definitely worth it to do this faster, if only to get faster feedback to go back to the first phase; requirements and analysis.

I have experienced this myself, using CC it took me a few hours less to realise i was on the wrong track.
by hanszarkov | 2025-07-04 14:39:24+00:00
Tried this, no joy. I created a CORE API key from my workspace->API page, configured MCP with Claude Desktop, I get this: "You didn't provide an API key...You can obtain an API key from https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys"

Other memory MCP servers do not require access to OpenAI - and not even sure why I would want any of my data going there when I use a paid Claude subscription.

I like the idea here, but doesn't seem very usable.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-04 14:39:39+00:00
Is the N150 really 0.59 W/flop less efficient than the BCM2712, does the N150 just allow you to reach a higher peak performance if you don't care about efficiency, or is the N150 truely already limited to its optimal perf/watt? We can't actually tell because the article only compared a 35.169 Gflops workload to a 62.067 Gflops workload.

I.e. how efficient the boxes running the same amount of work per second, not how efficient are the boxes when you max them out to different maxes. On the surface using Gflops/W feels like it should normalize that until you consider perf/Watt is almost never linear so you're left comparing apples to oranges in the chart.