MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnymaroney | 2025-07-25 23:57:29+00:00
Hi, I'm Johnny. I'm building Feel, an emotionally intelligent wellness app that helps you navigate your emotions and shift your mood in real time.

I built the viral website cryonceaweek.com that received millions of users and I've since grown the Feel social media to 40k+ followers and over 100 million views. We also have thousands of people on the waitlist for the app.

We've built the MVP but need someone who can help take it to the next level. We're a small team of artists, designers, and scientists and we need a talented engineer to join the team and help bring the project to life.

Looking for someone who:

-Has built and shipped real products -Loves LLMs, prompt engineering, or emotional AI -Is curious about mental health, mood tech, or creative computing -Can work across frontend/backend -Wants to build something creative, weird, and useful, not just optimize metrics

This is a founding role with equity first and salary post-funding. We have strong interest from investors but we are waiting to start fundraising until after we launch.

This is a mission driven project with a lot of room for creativity and impact.

If this resonates or you’re curious, I’d love to talk: johnny@feelapp.io
by colinsane | 2025-07-25 23:58:01+00:00
so you watch videos, listen to music, read books, and take/share photos on a phone, ipad, or tv. you seek a better experience doing those things, and your solution is to spin up some software _on a totally new device_ (a server).

that's a huge leap! i think most of us gloss over it, but the rest of the article is predicated on that leap.

the tv you're streaming video to probably runs Android by now. it has a stable internet connection, CPU, RAM, and probably a couple USB ports. why not install the Jellyfin server software on it, attach a USB hard drive, and let it be the machine that hosts all your media? why, actually, do you need to go out of your way to buy a completely new machine for this?

similar argument applies to Immich. you're wanting to co-edit an album among several contacts. you're probably all uploading your photos from a phone. why not just have one of your always-on phones host that album? i shouldn't expect the drain on your battery to serve an album to a few friends is that much more than it took to take those photos in the first place.

to a certain degree, you're "self-hosting" things on a physical server because that's the only platform on which we all still have the ability to run arbitrary workloads on. solve that problem and everything becomes a _lot_ simpler.
by temporallobe | 2025-07-25 23:58:47+00:00
I certainly consider myself a software engineer first and programmer second, and you’re right, the language doesn’t matter. I recently got a position developing in Python having never really used it professionally, but it’s so similar to other interpreted languages I knew so I was able to jump right in and start making meaningful contributions. Often we are expected to learn new languages, which is exactly how I picked up the 10ish languages I can confidently say I’m good in, despite never having been formally trained in those. Most common languages don’t stray from certain basic principles anyway.
by SpecialistK | 2025-07-25 23:59:27+00:00
To make things more complicated, I'm not in the US, this PC I'm typing on is powered by 120V, but I also have the stove running and that's 240V so as a person am I using 120V or 240V? And even the subtitle says "220/230V", so what about places that use 240V for all home electronics?

It isn't inspiring me to excuse lazy writing and clickbait, although I am curious as to where you got those population numbers.
by rpdillon | 2025-07-26 00:01:03+00:00
> You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store.

I'd be more interested in questioning these than why porn is available on Steam. I mean, Disney is essentially an anti-porn product, so I get that, but Netflix is a perfectly reasonable platform for porn. I don't see any reason adult toys can't be sold in Walmart or whatever.

> Backlash is inevitable.

I don't know. This doesn't seem like a grassroots movement.
by imachine1980_ | 2025-07-26 00:01:18+00:00
It's not just porn, it's depictions of rape, from what I’ve read. So I don’t know if it’s really good for people to consume that kind of content. Real-life safe sex involves consent, which is obviously not the objective of this game. I believe this type of material can be genuinely harmful to our brains.

Even though I’m against using payment processing restrictions, I do believe we need laws to prohibit this kind of content. There’s data suggesting that it impacts real people's behavior during sex and shapes harmful social expectations.
by StellarScience | 2025-07-26 00:01:19+00:00
You're absolutely right that "procedural", at least as I understand the word in 2025, is a poor label for 6.001.

6.001 taught 'define' and 'let' but didn't teach 'set!' until week 6 or so. So we learned functions, variables, scopes, recursion, lambdas, strings, numbers, symbols, lists, map, filter, flatten, and more - all without ever modifying a variable. That's very "functional".

Once we learned that it was possible modify existing variables, we learned object-oriented programming; objects were just lambdas with closures that took messages indicating which function to call. We then learned a fake assembly language written in scheme that had both an interpreter and a compiler, also written in scheme. While "procedural" feels wrong, I'm not sure what label one could apply to all this...
by simplify | 2025-07-26 00:01:41+00:00
> if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.

Sounds great, where do I sign?

Sure ban porn, but IMO ban social media first. Or at the very least, mandate educational materials on it. Kids grow up thinking it's important and it ruins their lives. Brainrot content deadens their sensory inputs. Same thing needs to happen with AI; we seriously need some required education in these spaces.
by bradfitz | 2025-07-26 00:02:13+00:00
I haven't. I have 5K and 6K monitors. That's indeed privileged, but only for a bit until that's soon commonplace and cheap. So this all sounds like a very temporary problem at this point for something so subjective. Every time this topic comes up it's the same "but I like the look of $OS rendering the best" comments.
by ssalka | 2025-07-26 00:02:30+00:00
IMO cases like this won't matter until the supreme court decides to hear or not hear an appeal for one. There's no way we will allow "fair use" training in certain regions of the US while prohibiting it in others (at least, no way that will last very long).

That, or Anthropic wins their case and we continue with the de facto argument of fair use.
by zarzavat | 2025-07-26 00:03:06+00:00
SPA means single page app. For example, Google docs, Figma, Google calendar, etc. Apps that use web technologies instead of being native apps.

A long time ago some webdevs started abusing the SPA concept to build simple websites. However that is not within the original meaning of the term SPA, because simple websites are not web apps. The author assumed that everyone would just understand that they are talking about SP"A"s and not SPAs, because for a certain subset of webdevs working on websites, the antonym of SPA is MPA, and it's normal to refer to your website as an "app". However for a certain other subset of webdevs, the antonym of SPA is simple website, and what the author is talking about are not SPAs at all.
by woodruffw | 2025-07-26 00:03:55+00:00
I majored in Philosophy and went directly into industry after my undergraduate. I got into programming, specifically open source, as a hobby.

I've been in industry for 7 years, and have done a few different things: DARPA-funded program analysis research, open source security engineering, running an open source engineering team, and now doing security engineering once more.

In my experience, not having a STEM degree is not a significant barrier to success (and as others have said, can be an advantage in specific contexts). My experience is that virtually nobody has cared, apart from some very funny compliance/procedural contexts where people assume that "Philosophy" means "PhD in Computer Science."
by dabears | 2025-07-26 00:04:00+00:00
Hello! I was curious if you would happen to have any advice or particular comp sci papers you would point as aspiring compiler developer towards.

I think I'm sort of who you're talking about. I have no formal education and I am excited to have my compiler up to the point I can run a basic web server. I think it's a fairly traditional approach with a lexer, recursive decent parser, static analysis, then codegen. I'm going for a balance between languages like Ruby and Rust to get the best of both worlds.

You'll probably find it funny that I don't know the name for the technique Im using for dynamic dispatch. The idea is that as long as a collection doesn't have mixed types then the compiler statically knows the type even in loops and such. Only for mixed type collections, or maybe trait functions, will the compiler be forced to fall back to runtime dynamic dispatch. I find this cool because experts can write fast static code, but beginners won't be blocked by the compiler complaining about things they shouldn't have to care about yet. But, syntax highlighting or something may hint there are improvements to be made. If there is a name for this, or if it's too small a piece to deserve one, I would be very curious to know!

On Refinement Types, I not sure they are a good idea for general purpose languages and would love to be challenged on this. Succinctly, I think it's a leaky abstraction. To elaborate, having something like a `OneThroughTen` type seems helpful at first, but in reality it's spreading behaviour potentially all over the app as opposed to having a single function with the desired behaviour. If a developer has multiple spots they're generating a number and one spot is missing a check and causes a bug, then hopefully a lesson was learned not to do that and instead have a single spot for that logic. The heavy handed complexity of Refinement Types is not worth it to solve this situation.

If there are any thoughts out there they would be greatly appreciated!
by tguvot | 2025-07-26 00:04:18+00:00
working almost 30 years. no stem degree or high school certificate. bought first computer with money earned at summer at carpentry shop.

started working in dial up isp. going to the clients home to install trumpet winsock and netscape navigator. from there moved to do some web development (php/fi, ajax).delphi. perl. over time gravitated into network/security software development and telecoms.

now oversee a few hundreds of developers that work on rather big system deployed in multiple locations arounds world.
by MattIPv4 | 2025-07-26 00:04:30+00:00
While I do now have a CS degree, I was hired into a big tech company prior to having that degree based on my work in open-source. I'd been (and still am) an active contributor to some large web projects for a few years, prior to this company reaching out to hire me (projects were unrelated to what they do, FWIW).

I did then get my degree in my spare time while at that job, with my salary covering the costs of tuition, which was very nice. I see my degree as a backup, if for any reason an employer has a strict requirement for it or if I leave this field -- I expect my experience to be what gets me jobs as it stands today.
by phatskat | 2025-07-26 00:05:47+00:00
These all sound wild and like their impeding on all kinds of freedoms - you’re saying that a business should be compelled to serve or work with anyone that offers to pay them which is _wild_.

The issue comes down to when you refuse to work with someone because of an immutable property - race, gender, age, etc - denying someone from coming into your restaurant because they’ve ripped you off is completely fine and I can’t see why it shouldn’t be. This smacks of “freedom of speech” when people get mad that a private platform told them they couldn’t say mean things.
by dpkirchner | 2025-07-26 00:06:10+00:00
Mobile IMDB is not the best example -- simply navigating backwards causes a page reload, or at least a long stall and jitter as the page scrolls you around. I'd prefer an app experience (however I just use the Letterboxd app instead.)

Tabs are a big win for mobile web, I agree. I just don't think it outweighs the annoyance of navigating the app in more traditional ways.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-26 00:06:11+00:00
That's partially by design. Apple makes it a pain to make proper PWA's, and companies with websites make extremely intrusive elements to ruin the mobile website in order drive to the app. Which is easier to monetize and harder to adblock, I imagine. Some places outright disable the mobile view for the app.

More simply, I don't need an app for every website I visit. a bookmark is much more lightweight than downloading yet another app to clutter my drawer.
by skissane | 2025-07-26 00:06:51+00:00
> Emacs was born on mainframes and made its way to UNIX much later, after vi had already become the standard.

Berkeley released the first version of vi in 1978–development had started in 1976 but I don't believe pre-1978 versions were released publicly. The first versions of Unix for Emacs (James Gosling's implementation, and Warren Montgomery's implementation, developed independently of each other) were released in 1981. But I don't think that three year head start was the biggest factor here.

I think a much bigger factor was the fact that vi came with BSD Unix for free, while Gosling Emacs was being sold as a commercial product (although also freely available under rather restrictive terms); I'm not sure what terms Montgomery Emacs (from Bell Labs) was available under, but it soon evolved into CCA Emacs (a commercial product). Free very often beats commercial. The first release of GNU Emacs wasn't until 1985.

And then another major factor was that in 1983, AT&T decided to make vi part of UNIX System V. I think the reasons they decided against Emacs included the fact that they could get vi for free from Berkeley, whereas the most popular Unix Emacs implementations in 1983 they'd have to pay licensing fees for commercial use. Montgomery Emacs was developed by Bell Labs so they owned that, but it was relatively primitive and obscure; CCA Emacs was derived from Montgomery's, but had rewritten all the code so no longer was under Bell Labs copyright; GNU Emacs likewise started out as a modified version of Gosling's Emacs and then escaped Gosling's copyright by rewriting all his code, but in 1983 it wasn't an option yet, and its (proto-GPL) licensing terms likely would have been too scary for AT&T's lawyers anyway.
by immibis | 2025-07-26 00:07:41+00:00
An exemplary one is "don't build your own timezone database"

It's not interesting, it's not fun, it's just a process of getting complaints it's wrong in edge cases and then fixing them, over and over until no one can find another broken edge case.

You can start by writing down England is +0, Germany is +2, etc... someone's going to mention DST and you'll put in a field for switching on the Nth Sunday of month X... later you'll run into a country that uses a different rule and you'll add a bunch of spaghetti code or write a Turing-complete DSL, etc... One day someone tells you about a village where they count 17 hour days on seashells and then you'll give up.

And if your DB doesn't produce identical results to the Olson DB in all cases then you created an incompatibility anyway. Might as well just use the Olson DB.
by nmaley | 2025-07-26 00:08:50+00:00
Majored in Philosophy. Started programming in 1973 on mainframes. Became a full time developer, systems analyst. 72 years old now, with 50 years experience in IT. Co-founded a couple of start ups, made a little bit of money. Went back to corporate life for a while. Ended up as a Program Architect at Salesforce. Resigned to start a company which develops and delivers commercial LLM/RAG solutions. Going reasonably well. Simple principles: keep learning, do what you want to do, not just what the man tells you. I saw a note from another Philosophy grad saying that Philosophy is actually useful in that it gives you a framework and a perspective to look at things a little differently. I agree with that.
by ErrorNoBrain | 2025-07-26 00:09:00+00:00
I prefer having as few apps as possible

so using the web is my go-to

i dont have reddit, on my phone for example.

Also, all those app icons are just "advertisement" every time you look at your phone screen... i dont need that.

if you REQUIRE me to use an app, then i'm only using it if i absolutely have to. (there's almost always an alternative)
by skmurphy | 2025-07-26 00:09:13+00:00
Key points

1. Treat your spouse as an investor and board member from the beginning. You will need their advice and support. They don’t have to join you full-time in your startup–they are unlikely to be as entrepreneurial as you are. But a decision to start a business or even to invest significant effort in exploring possible companies, even if you are working full-time, will have significant near-term implications for your life together.

2. Lay out a plan and hold yourself accountable on a periodic schedule.

3. Come to an agreement on an overall plan that includes timeframes and limits on financial obligations you will incur.

5. Schedule time and expense for the mistakes necessary to learn how to thrive as an entrepreneur.

6. Plan for iteration and refinement. Base your plans on “nothing new ever works,” not just the first time but also the second. Set your spouse’s expectations that you see an opportunity that you find energizing, but you still have things to learn.

7. Commitments to customers and cofounders are important, but family commitments are more important.

8. Establish some simple practices to maintain financial transparency from the start. A monthly review of expenses with balance sheets and income statements is a good start. Quickbooks can do this for you easily in the beginning.

9. Maintain a list of critical risks and review monthly.

10. Financial outcomes are essential, but new learning enables you to define and meet goals.
by Enginerrrd | 2025-07-26 00:10:18+00:00
I totally agree! It's the first article from quanta that made me afraid.ofnthe direction they're going. Scientific American kept drifting to looser and looser footing through bad analogies and not talking about the underlying mathematics in an effort to appeal to more people, the end result though was terrible.

This article was almost unreadable. Anyone with an interest in this is going to be familiar with ther term "matrix" and P vs NP. Most would likely have at least hear do BQP problems as well. What's the point ofndumbing it down any further than that. There comes a point where further distillation is to lossy, like an overly compressed jpeg that has lost any value as an image.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-07-26 00:11:48+00:00
To summarise your view, more surgeons means not enough experience in a given surgery to maintain base levels of skill.

I think this is wrong; you would need a significant increase, and the issue I was responding to was “shortage”. There’s no prospect of shortages when the pipeline has many more capable people than positions. Here in Australia, a quota system is used, which granted, can forecast wrong (we have a deficit of anaesthetists currently due to the younger generation working fewer hours on average). We don’t need robots from this perspective.

To your second point, “rare surgery”; I can see the point. Even in this case, however, I’d much rather see the robot as a “tool” that a surgeon employs on those occasions, rather than some replacement for an expert.
by achierius | 2025-07-26 00:11:59+00:00
No. The engineers build the product. They do the actual work. Let's flip your 'reason' around: the engineers are the reason the VCs have a job at all, since the entire point of the job is to find people building big things and funding them to get a cut. They are secondary, the actual product -- and the people who build it -- are what matters, morally and economically.
by secretsatan | 2025-07-26 00:12:07+00:00
I started working at eighteen, tbh I had lost my way schoolwise, but i had always been interested in computer graphics, CAD and was savvy enough to get my hands on software i perhaps could not have afforded that gave me some base skills that led from one job to another,

Sometimes i feel like working with CS people, and i’ve worked with some really good ones, so please don’t get me wrong, but sometimes i feel some have just done it because it’s a good career, and show zero interest or curiosity past their immediate positions.
by movedx | 2025-07-26 00:12:11+00:00
> A quick Google search confirms tourism is the dominant industry in Venice. The claim that this fuels "little to no financial growth", is therefore first-order backwards.

How much of the money stays in Venice? Just because you handed over cash at a till in a cafe in Venice, doesn't mean a single local sees a lick of that money. They might not even see a lick of the taxes, neither. I've been to Venice... have you? Thanks for Googling about Venice, but try going and speaking to the locals, because I have.
by aryonoco | 2025-07-26 00:12:25+00:00
Angular not only appeals to Java developers, it also appeals to .NET developers. TypeScript of course borrowed a lot from C# (having the same designer) and dependency injection, MVC patterns etc closely resemble .NET patterns.

Interestingly, new Angular is slowly moving away from these, introducing Signals for state management and standalone components, and I see these developers actually struggling a lot to adopt new Angular patterns.

Still, I believe Angular is a really great platform for building B2B or enterprise apps. It’s testing and forms handling is far ahead of every other SPA, and it actually fees like a cohesive framework where people have spent time designing things the right way; something I absolutely cannot say about react frameworks such as Next.js or Remix.
by cpard | 2025-07-26 00:12:30+00:00
I think Waymo is a little bit different and driving in general. Because you have an activity that most people don’t trust how other people perform it already. It’s easier to accept the robo driver.

For the medical world, I’d look to the Invisalign example as a more realistic path on how automation will become part of it.

The human will still be there the scale of operations per doctor will go up and prices will go down.
by guzik | 2025-07-26 00:12:31+00:00
just 1hr ago (1 AM local time) I saw 'your app is live on app store' notification on my phone and eagerly launched it... only to have it crash instantly. After a debug session I discovered an obscure bug in tflite library that only shows up in release builds. 20 minutes ago I pushed a hotfix with an expedited App Review request, hoping to spare as many users as possible from that crash. I can't wrap my head around how the appstore review missed it, especially after rejecting our last build 4 times over a barely legible location-permission alert description.

That said, I built my first mobile app 15 years ago, and to this day, building for mobile remains the most frustrating part of my programming life.
by simplify | 2025-07-26 00:12:36+00:00
You're framing of "sex icky" is a common reductionist approach to remove all humanity from the topic and try and make it purely logical. But that's always been a ridiculous way to argue.

The human experience has never been pure reason. A picture of a naked person will have wildly different effects than a picture of a dog, even though you could technically say they're both "just pixels on a screen". Reductionism doesn't get an argument anywhere; it's too commonly an intellectually lazy defense of the vulgar.