MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-04 15:11:20+00:00
Right. That's what got me into tech, too. Turned out to be mostly a lie - most jobs aren't making anything exciting or new (except maybe for the wealthy in the financial sense), and those that do tend to limit your autonomy.

Now I stay in tech for the same reason most people stay in their careers - it's comfortable and pays well, but because that's mostly a function of "time served"[0], it also means that I'm trapped now. I can't just switch fields anymore - at this stage of life, switching is a major multi-year project!

(Also I question whether it would help. Working in some field never looks much like you imagine while being outside of it.)

--

[0] - Tech has an unusually large multiplier here, but the trend is the same as with any other job.
by regmaticalistic | 2025-07-04 15:11:57+00:00
"Drone warfare" isn't really a thing. Drones in the battlefield remain something that:

a) Hegemon uses to avoid needing to deploy boots to the ground

b) Resource strapped combatants use as a supplement of guerrilla tactics

c) Specops have used to great publicity effect in a context of very heavy use of traditional intelligence assets

The narrative that "this changes everything" is very much in line with how we see the story around AI developing as well. Highly publicized demos that hide the enormous efforts in traditional technologies and good old human labor surrounding them.
by mnky9800n | 2025-07-04 15:13:09+00:00
I always thought it would be fun to have a television station when I was a kid. Now I can build the technology to create a facsimile of that. I guess what might be more fun for people would be a game like those game studio simulator games. Then you could just play it when you feel like it.

but yes, i think you are correct, a curator's list maker would be a better version of this idea.
by incomingpain | 2025-07-04 15:13:43+00:00
>It seems some parties may be incentive aligned (e.g. insurers in Australia) - though I'm still navigating this space to find an approach which makes solving the root cause viable. Keen for your thoughts.

Ive been sort of part of this sort of approach before. I was sysadmin, not a suit. These do tend to work out.

This is also the mechanism for how they squash and hide stuff that would cut into tylenol sales. Dont sell it, license it for periods of time is my recommendation.

Or you seem to agree much with my post. Put it together. The chronic pain fixer upper place that takes in patients and explains these things and trains them. You hire the emdr and yoga folks.

>Will check out that vid! Big fan of the body keeps the score.

It helped me for sure. I really need to try EMDR but never have. Id bet it works great. Adrienne is one of my favourites, but the science actual says slow yoga is more effective; whereas she needs to go quicker for video length.

>Related to this, there is an exercise called somatic tracking which has helped many people (including myself) - during it people often notice pain shifting throughout your body. This was a big turning point for me seeing how my mind behaves in real time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw1D_UvzIDA

3000 year old religious ritual :)

Its very interesting to me how science when i was young called this all hoo-haa pseudoscience but is now giving it a new name and saying it works.

You know what's interesting, my post is pretty heavily downvoted. I wonder what people disagreed with.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-04 15:14:09+00:00
There's plenty of rural areas with plenty of opportunities. Cities are not the only option. If I lived in a dead mining town I'd move elsewhere. You can blame corporations or whatever you want, doesn't matter whose fault it is. Complaining and blaming doesn't solve anything. Finding solutions does. Stop complaining, start finding solutions. I grew up in a beautiful rural place. I'd like to live there, but what I like even more is not having to drive for over an hour to work every day. So I moved. I also went to university in my late 20s and some of my peers were in their 40s and 50s.

People adapt to all kinds of stuff all the time. Saying adapting isn't a thing for most people is ridiculous. Of course it's a thing. It's what you do when your current situation isn't working. You adapt.
by penguin_booze | 2025-07-04 15:14:27+00:00
> We don’t hire skills. We hire people, with personal qualities. They are a whole package. We ask about academic attainment on the basis that it – all the way back to school days, even for a candidate later in life – is a strong indicator of many personal qualities and abilities, including performance at work.

It's amazing to me that they're still sticking to this narrative. If I'm 40 now, the claim is that how I was like 30 years ago is a strong indicator of what I'm now? Wow. You need to get out more.

I guess Detective Gilbert Ponton will never get hired at Canonical. Because, his ancestors were farmers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBwn7ycR7_Y.
by harshithmul | 2025-07-04 15:14:44+00:00
hey thanks for the feedback, agreed there are a lot to get right

1. If you have self hosted it yes then we need OpenAI api key, we are also working to get things working with llama so should be available soon (but if from cloud you shouldn't have got this error)

2. We also have moved away from openAI embedding (BGE-M3) to our own hosted in the cloud.

In self host we already have claude code support happy to help there
by ChrisRR | 2025-07-04 15:14:55+00:00
> I wouldn’t replace much of that with an Intel NUC style computer

Why is that? Because you think the N100 isn't capable enough or for some other reason? Because N100 definitely can outperform a raspberry pi

But a pi pico is definitely a totally different thing. I don't think anyone here is talking about replacing a microcontroller with a PC
by taxicabjesus | 2025-07-04 15:15:09+00:00
My favorite lie had to do with how there weren't enough ventilators. That one got memory holed relatively early, once the frontline medical workers figured out they'd been tricked into thinking ventilation would be helpful for SARS-CoV-2 patients who were not actually in respiratory distress.

My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs.

The ‘very, very bad look' of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug - https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r...

Washington Post: Remdesivir can help keep unvaccinated, high-risk people with covid-19 out of hospitals, study finds - https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remde...

Why Remdesivir Failed: Preclinical Assumptions Overestimate the Clinical Efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 and Ebola https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21

> It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.

I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China.

U.S. halts funding for new risky virus studies, calls for voluntary moratorium - No grants for flu, SARS, or MERS while government pursues 1-year risk analysis - https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new... [2014]
by parpfish | 2025-07-04 15:15:40+00:00
A few years back I left “big tech” for a much lower paying tech-ish job that had a meaningful mission.

I was fine having a lower paying job, but what I didn’t expect was that the lower pay meant that the skill level for my colleagues was also much much lower. Years of the “Dead Sea effect” [0] had turned it into an environment where the blind were leading the blind and they weren’t even aware of how bad things were.

So high pay also means “better coworkers”

[0] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...
by paulcole | 2025-07-04 15:16:15+00:00
> I didn’t make any claims about the long-term prospects of AI

Actually you did. Someone else said that “There is a lot of debate whether AI will surpass humans in all economically viable skills” and you said, “Actually very little debate.”

The absence of a timeline means that either you are talking about a very long timeline or you enjoy being vague so that you can feel like your predictions turn out to be correct. Which is it?

> Based on the current state of AI I don’t think it replaces much economically viable human activity

How much is not much? 5% or 22%?

> Over time our definition of “economically viable” will change, as it has for the last 100,000 years

What our definition of “economically viable” 100,000 years ago? What is it today?
by dang | 2025-07-04 15:16:19+00:00
FWIW, that comment looked like an egregious personal attack to me too (and yes I hear you that you're not defending that post! but rather asking a fair question about moderation standards).

If there are comments that are that bad or worse floating around HN, which aren't getting flagged and/or replied to by moderators, we really need to see them. If you can recall where any of them are, and can dig up links, we'd appreciate it. Failing that, if you (or anyone) see cases of this in the future, we'd appreciate a heads-up.

The one thing I can imagine you might be referring to are some of the recent politically charged threads where people were really going after each other. Those are hard to moderate without coming across as taking one political side against another (which we're careful not to, but this is easy to miss when passions are high). But even in those cases we do our best to make sure that the guideline-violating comments get flagged.

I realize you already alluded to this when you say "Yes, I know, you can't see everything," but that really is the only reason why comments of this sort should be going unflagged or unmoderated on HN. There's a lot that we just don't see here—there's far too much for us to read it all, and we rely on users bringing it to our attention.
by PoshBreeze | 2025-07-04 15:16:47+00:00
Working in smaller tech companies with worse pay is worse than working these tech jobs.

Most of your co-workers you cannot trust to do anything e.g. Today I was investigating an issue (screen for X not updating). I open the dashboard and there was a sea of read over my console. They hadn't even checked the terminal for errors.

> Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue.

That is a matter of point of view. I've worked in industries that most consider amoral. I've had the most job satisfaction from working in those industries. I actually got to do interesting work. Every other job has me over-engineering basic web apps because they are a <Azure/Sitecore/AWS/Google Cloud> partner.

The worst job was working for a large charity, do you know why? They literally pissed money away on bullshit, while collecting large sums of via unpaid volunteers. That sickened me and so I left.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-04 15:16:58+00:00
There is a strong correlation between the behavior an animal will exhibit against a human and the behavior it will exhibit against other animals of its own species.

The animals which do not tolerate other animals of their own species and which will attack them and fight with them are also very likely to attack humans when they believe that humans have invaded their personal space. For example, an adult bear will never be truly friendly with a human, even with a human that has raised it as a cub, because adult bears are never friendly with other bears, but they attack any intruders. On the other hand, a wolf raised by a human can become tame and attached to the human, like a wild wolf would behave towards its real parents.

Similarly, male sperm whales fight viciously with any other male sperm whales and they also do not hesitate to attack any boats with humans that harass them.

AFAIK, intra-specific fighting is not frequent among orcas, but they are used to have good relations between them, even with some from different pods. This may explain their lack of aggressivity against humans, as long as they are not perceived as a possible prey.
by pydry | 2025-07-04 15:17:36+00:00
Having systems thinking is a bit like being Cassandra: doomed to know the future yet doomed never to be believed.

What's odd is that you'd think tribal thinkers would respond to a track record of being proven correct but they emphatically do not. Moreover they're invariably convinced that you too think tribally.

As an example, I can think of one politician (edit: not trump) who is definitely a systems thinker (who is not nice, but is successful and generally outplays his opponents because of it) and ~80% of Hacker News is convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt that he's an evil idiot loser who invariably makes stupid mistakes.
by numlock86 | 2025-07-04 15:17:37+00:00
Cool. The demo runs way too fast, though. The throttle checkbox doesn't really change it. Unchecking it, if anything, makes it run slower. It runs at 240 fps with throttle and at 180 fps without. With the throttle checbox active one second are already about four seconds in the emulator. I suspect this is related to the screen refresh rate, which is 240Hz in my case.
by jpalomaki | 2025-07-04 15:17:53+00:00
Not sure how things are with Copilot, but with Claude Code a good alternative for MCP is in some cases old fashioned command line tools.

GitHub has gh, there's open source jira-cli, Cloudflare has wrangler and so on. No configuration needed, just mention on the agent doc that this kind of tool is available. Likely it will figure out the rest.

And if you have more complicated needs, then you can combine the commands, add some jq magic, put to package.json and tell agent to use npm run to execute it. Can be faster than doing it via multiple MCP calls.
by rfl890 | 2025-07-04 15:18:19+00:00
That's the caveat, the contract you sign when you start an open source project. You have to have the mindset of simply not giving a fuck about who does what with your code and how much they make from it. Then you can be at peace. If you don't want to (or can't) adopt that mindset for a particular project or at all, that's completely fine and normal. OSS is not for you. As soon as you want compensation for your work, things start to go south. See the whole core-js situation and what went down for an example.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-04 15:18:35+00:00
The short answer is: Yes

Long answer is: looking at the skeleton code in the repo, it's setup for development to run 2 servers (a server just serving static files for the svelt app PORT=3000, and a server running the API PORT=3001) https://github.com/beeeeep54/rust-typescript/blob/main/backe...

But I have seen people do that but:

- Package it into 1 docker container (or 1 service for lack of a better term) that runs both with a proxy that's only there in "prod" deployment not local development. so inside the container it's 2 processes, but outside it's like 1 selfcontained application

- enable a static server on the API endpoint once deployed. It's usually 1 line in most web framework. Something like `app.serveStatic("/", "./static")`. In this case it's 1 server doing both

- Deploy them as 2 different services that scale and are managed completely independently. Could as well be 2 different teams or even companies doing frontend vs backend development (with that same setup of style. Though probably you won't be working in the same repo then)

then take all that and multiply it by 2 or 4 for all the proxy/path/domain permutations
by skatanski | 2025-07-04 15:19:10+00:00
Really cool article. Personally I think the really cool bit about MCP is that you can very easily write your own server which can talk to the db or call various APIs. That server can run locally and be used by GitHub Copilot for answering questions and executing tasks. I also find it useful in a tight corporate environment where it’s more difficult to get a dedicated LLM API key. You can easily do POCa with what every dev has access to.
by wenc | 2025-07-04 15:19:16+00:00
> I don’t have a good mental model for what a passkey is or how it works. And again, like most users if I don’t really understand what’s going on I’m just not gonna bother with it.

Sites kept asking me if I would like to setup a passkey, and I didn't have a good mental model for what it was either.

Turns out it's like PGP of the 1990s -- public/private key but for auth instead of email encryption.

Public/private key is not the of easiest ideas for a lay man to understand (though some YouTube videos explain it well).

All users want to know is that it keeps their information safe.

Like modern credit cards -- they use public/private keys, but the messaging is "your credit card number is kept safe," not this is based on PKI.
by skydhash | 2025-07-04 15:19:50+00:00
Requirements are filters for the set of implementations. The only feedback is the count and the nature of the results. And what you usually do is to either abandoning it or restricting it further. Because the source of the requirements is the business domain which exist outside the technical domain.

Selecting one of the implementation over the other is design, aka making decisions. Sometimes you have to prototype it out to where which parameters is the best. And sometimes a decision can revert an earlier one and you have to investigate the impact radius of that change.

But coding is straightforward translation. The illusion of going faster is that we forego making decisions. Instead we're hoping that the agent makes the correct ones based on some general direction, forgetting than an inch deviation can easily turn into a mile error. The hopeful things would have been an iteration, adding the correct decisions and highlighting the bad ones to avoid. But no one have that kind of patience. And those that use LLMs often finish with a "LGTM" patch.

The normal engineering is to attain a critical mass of decisions and turns that immediately to formal notation which is unambiguous. Then we validate with testing if that abrupt transformation was done properly. But all the decisions were made with proper information.
by accrual | 2025-07-04 15:19:58+00:00
> I recently found out after a violent burn-out that a significant cause was chronic stress and its psychosomatic symptoms.

Thanks for sharing. I am walking down this path as well. In my experience I can tell I'm deeply out of alignment and it wreaks havoc on the body. My soul says to X but my mind says do Y, it's safer, maintains a stable status quo, income, and relationships, etc., even though it's slowly killing me.
by 10000truths | 2025-07-04 15:20:20+00:00
The nice thing about CGI is that you don't have to reinvent isolation primitives for multi-tenant use cases. A bug in one request doesn't corrupt another request, due to process isolation. An infinite loop in one request doesn't DoS other requests, due to preemptive scheduling. You can kill long-running requests with rlimit. You can use per-tenant cgroups to fairly allocate resources like memory, CPU and disk/network I/O. You can use namespaces/jails and privilege separation to restrict what a request has access to.
by troupo | 2025-07-04 15:20:54+00:00
> The experiences seem so different, that I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

Because we only see very disjointed descriptions, with no attempt to quantify what we're talking about.

For every description of how LLMs work or don't work we know only some, but not all of the following:

- Do we know which projects people work on? No

- Do we know which codebases (greenfield, mature, proprietary etc.) people work on? No

- Do we know the level of expertise the people have? Is the expertise in the same domain, codebase, language that they apply LLMs to?

- How much additional work did they have reviewing, fixing, deploying, finishing etc.?

Even if you have one person describing all of the above, you will not be able to compare their experience to anyone else's because you have no idea what others answer for any of those bullet points.

And that's before we get into how all these systems and agents are completely non-deterministic, and works now may not work even 1 minute from now for the exact same problem.

And that's before we ask the question of how a senior engineer's experience with a greenfield project in React with one agent and model can even be compared to a bon-coding designer in a closed-source proprietary codebase in OCaml with a different agent and model (or even the same, because of non-determinism).
by twalkz | 2025-07-04 15:21:52+00:00
I'm really enjoying reading over the prompts used for development: (https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/ma...)

A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" would have you believe that with the right mix of MCPs, some complex claude code orchestration flow that uses 20 agents in parallel, and a bunch of LLM-generated rules files you can one-shot a game like this with the prompt "create a tower defense game where you rewind time. No security holes. No bugs."

But the prompts used for this project match my experience of what works best with AI-coding: a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on the really critical pieces.
by greatgib | 2025-07-04 15:22:06+00:00
> > There is no particular reason to do it in rust, I just wanted to learn rust, and see if it can work in the kernel.

Good catch the earlier comment, with that I would not even have raise an eyebrow because it is more a motivation that I find valid and not fishy like the post rationalization that is in the original post.

That being said, I still find it ridicule the attempt to emphasis on how dangerous it is to do "C code" for the kernel because not memory safe all of that, when you see for how long the kernel exist, was able thrive, with relatively few critical issues in the end compared to most software out there.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-04 15:22:28+00:00
Some of those insights are overused cliches at this point.

My pet peeve is the "S-curve argument":

> Everything is Exponential (Sigmoids are For The Small Thinkers)

Yes, that's technically true because universe is finite, yadda yadda, but in practice where you are on the curve and your time horizon matters. Plenty of things are still effectively exponential[0], and I feel some people bring up sigmoids specifically because they you squint hard enough, it seems nicely and comfortably linear. But it isn't.

--

[0] - Random example from a recent HN discussion: total amount of all written text to date. It's obviously going to be a sigmoid (or worse, if disaster strikes), but right now, we're still before the inflection point, so I wouldn't short the stock of storage providers just yet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44442770
by arghwhat | 2025-07-04 15:22:35+00:00
Anything with a pattern is by definition not noise, and the comment was that noise had signal. If you remove all noise, no signal or pattern is lost by definition.

However, the issue is that lossy compression removes various types of minute detail, smoothing surfaces to reduce the amount of data that has to be stored, be it noise "grain" or skin pores, according to compression settings. Storing the original noise as it was would basically make any compression impossible.
by klabb3 | 2025-07-04 15:23:27+00:00
It’s not good for engineering with the dilution of the term. We don’t really have many backup terms to switch to.

Maybe we should look to science and start using the term pseudo-engineering to dismiss the frivolous terms. I don’t really like that though since pseudoscience has an invalidating connotation whereas eg prompt engineering is not a lesser or invalid form of engineering - it’s simply not engineering at all, and no more or less ”valid”. It’s like calling yourself a ”canine engineer” when teaching your dog to do tricks.