MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by isaacremuant | 2025-07-27 21:53:20+00:00
I just realized you had just 2 years of experience and are disappointed that you seemingly had more opportunities at 22 without a degree that at 26+ with one. Your self portrayal made me think of someone with ample experience.

I see how, if you're not a certain age with a certain amount of experience, you may find people being unnecessarily dismissive.

I understand the frustration but would say that you need to change that attitude because it's not just unhelpful but you're also wrong.

If you do have passion about software you can make a good living out of it but need to sell yourself and know how to show value to customers. Age won't really matter if you are able to tell a good story. Getting the first jobs is the toughest part. Then you start understanding how.

Lose social media if it gets you down. It's not an indicator of anything. Go to therapy. Find stuff where you have passion and pursue that.

Nothing is guaranteed. I'm sorry you feel lied to or something but there's absolutely an amazing time to be had if you pursue and do what you love.

And yes, Norvig's advice on this post is great.
by inetknght | 2025-07-27 21:53:25+00:00
> Ones that don't exit with defined exit codes (non-zero on error!).

My favorite is `docker images`.

It outputs... not-empty when the output is empty. It returns zero (success) when output is not-empty and empty. So you have to both do error checking and parse its output before you know whether there are any matching images in the cache.

Contrast that with grep. You can do `if grep -q foo` or `if grep -qv foo`, you can do `if "foo" == "$(grep foo)"`, etc. Much more versatile and easy to use.

Then there's apps that report to stderr that some argument isn't used but then also exits with success without doing things. Then there's similar apps that do the same thing but... exits after also doing things. Ugh.

After some time you get to learn to test your apps before you write up scripts around them. That's a good thing though, it means that you know how to mix together a diverse toolset.
by tw04 | 2025-07-27 21:53:39+00:00
You’re glossing over the part where we’ve got an administration that’s anti science dumping money into what is literally snake oil.

We are so strapped for cash we need to cut off people’s healthcare, slash NASA’s budget, make massive cuts to university research and terminate vaccine programs. But we’ve somehow got $7m to piss away on pretending you can turn lead into gold like it’s 600bc.
by antisthenes | 2025-07-27 21:54:10+00:00
> I’ve always found the idea of “restoring” ecosystems a bit philosophically tricky.

I think you're confusing "arbitrarily meddling in wilderness" and "restoring ecosystems". The latter would be something like demolishing a Walmart and its parking lot and putting soil and trees in its place.

Basically giving back human development spaces back to nature and letting nature take care of itself. This involves things like cleaning up waterways.
by nine_k | 2025-07-27 21:54:11+00:00
I can't help but immediately think about a counteracting piece of software, which asks an LLM for variations of a paragraph, or a phrase, or a few synonyms, and types it the way a human would, with pauses, typos, navigation, rearranging pieces via copy-paste, etc.

Not that your software is going to be useless. But as long as there is an incentive to cheat, new and better tools that facilitate cheating will crop up. Something else should change.
by zahlman | 2025-07-27 21:54:23+00:00
> But I'm feeling the lock-in accumulate.

A lot of people are calling for Python to just bless the tool officially, distribute it with Python etc. (which is a little strange to me given that it's also promoted as a way to get Python!) — the way people talk about uv, makes it seem hard to get people to care even if that did happen.

Regardless, I feel strongly that everyone who cares about distributing their code and participating in the ecosystem should take the time to understand the underlying infrastructure of venvs, wheels/sdists, etc.

A big part of what uv has accomplished for Python is rapidly implementing new standards like PEP 723 and PEP 751 — rather, they were AFAICT well underway on the implementations while the standards were being finalized, and the Astral team have also been important figures in the discussion. Those standards will persist no matter what Astral decides to do as a company.

And for what it's worth, pip actually is slowly, inexorably improving. It just isn't currently in a position to make a clean break from many of the things holding it back.

> What's your approach here? Are you building abstraction layers?

The opposite: I'm sticking with more focused tools (including the ones I'm making myself) and the UNIX philosophy. PAPER is scoped to implement a lot of useful tools for managing packages and environments, but it's still low-level (and unlike pip, I'm starting with an explicit API). It won't manage a project for you, won't install Python, will have no [tool] config in pyproject.toml... it's really intended as a user tool, with overlapping uses for developers. On the other side, bbbb is meant to hook everything up so that you can run a build step (unlike Flit, commonly suggested as the simplest option), choose which files are in the distribution, have all the wheel book-keeping taken care of... but things like locating or invoking a compiler are out of scope. A full dev toolchain would include both, plus some kind of Make-like system (I have a vague design for one), a build front-end (`build` works fine except that it's hard-coded to use either pip or uv to make environments, so I might make a separate PAPER plugin...), an uploader (`twine` is fine, really!) and probably your own additional scripts according to personal preference.
by LinguaBrowse | 2025-07-27 21:55:14+00:00
Thank you! It did cross my mind. I've archived a couple of the hard-won links in there that I had a feeling at great risk of rotting. But thankfully a lot of the links are to GitHub pages, so I'm not so worried about those.

Unfortunately, I think the article's readability would suffer if every single link were followed by an [archive] tag. Wikipedia have a better setup for providing both an archive link and a live link, which unfortunately the newsletter format doesn't really lend itself to.

I think copying the links as-is into the Wayback Machine will generally do in a pinch – just a bit of a pain to find the right month to roll back to.
by const_cast | 2025-07-27 21:55:16+00:00
The unfortunate reality is that a lot of jobs don't exist to enrich the community, they exist for the exact opposite purpose. They exist to make the world a worse place. They exist to make people sicker, or cause more children to die, or maybe even to accelerate acts of war.

You don't need to do good things to make money. You can do bad things and make lots of money, and actually, that's typically a little easier. You can even create your own unique evils and then sell solutions to them.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-07-27 21:55:51+00:00
The degree of after-the-fact ad hoc justifications for using these tools makes my brain hurt. "I'm in meetings all day anyway" …wtf?! So yay for the machines taking over our skillsets and hard-earned craft so we can attend more meetings*? Sure sounds like a hellscape to me!

* How 'bout I deploy my "digital twin" to attend the meetings for me. That'll show 'em!
by azemetre | 2025-07-27 21:56:34+00:00
I still don't believe it's that big, but they have had consistent revenue growth:

https://getlatka.com/companies/vercel

If there is another sustained recession, I do wonder how these companies will handle the turmoil. Cutting overpaid services seems like a no-brainer if you have to tighten your belt.

I've also never seen next.js mentioned in a job ad where I worked for the last 10 years (greater Boston area), never really heard much from them during the meetup scene during that time either (2015-2020). I wonder if these customers are more associated with SV businesses, where VC's force their portfolio to buy services from each other.

Also can't imagine v0 not being a money drain.
by anthk | 2025-07-27 21:57:06+00:00
There are public sources of information such as a curated WIkipedia, open content from Kiwix, Gutenberg Math books and OpenStreetMap for maps. Better, you can download offline and curated version of these so anyone can have a working snapshot anytime. That's good to avoid future AI tamperings. As long as these as AI free, we are potentialy in the right direction.
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-27 21:57:33+00:00
I have a special and burning hatred for mdadm and to a lesser extent LVM.

I suspect that nowadays they are much easier to look after, but when I first was introduced, the quality of the documentation was utterly appalling. WE had special classes with old sysadmins who passed on the secret knowledge for how to not fuck everything with mdadm.

LVM is slightly better, apart from the early false promise that was LVM snapshots which were essentially just a placebo(this might have changed now).

I've only ever seen LVM used once successfully in production. That was on a 60 bad LFF raid draw to create a single namespace over 4 hardware raid-7 disk array things.

Every other time it turn out to be a clusterfuck.

ZFS if youre poor, GPFS if youre rich.

I'm sure there are newer systems but they almost always fail ever the resilience, latency or performance test. (Cough gluster, ceph, anything that uses HTTP as a transport system)
by o11c | 2025-07-27 21:57:39+00:00
Cancellation is just an exception, so destructors work automatically. Any implementation of a language that uses RAII without integrating cancellation into it is fundamentally broken and should be avoided at all costs. `pthread_cleanup_push` (or `__attribute__((cleanup))` is only needed if you're implementing it by hand.

Since the set of functions that can be cancelled is documented (and pretty obvious - roughly, any blocking function but notably excluding mutex functions), there's no "unknown" involved. At most there is "I insisted on writing C but refused to take the effort to make my code correct in a threaded environment."

Notably, `malloc` is not a cancellation point so this all is much easier to deal with than signals.
by Melatonic | 2025-07-27 21:57:42+00:00
I would say somewhat correct but your own bias might be coming through a tiny bit here :-)

I think it more comes down to one of your last points. It's not necessarily a difference specifically in who likes to use "AI" or not - in my experience there's just a different class of tech workers between new and old.

On one extreme you have the old greybeard maintaining mainframe systems with obscure COBOL niches that LLMs won't ever have insight into. On the other end you have people working on the latest shiny thing.

I don't think it comes down to money or love for the actual work - I know plenty of people invested in the math behind AI and how it might help them be more efficient coders. The divide (if we should even call it that) already existed in the way these two groups approach tech - AI and LLMs has just made it more obvious.
by derektank | 2025-07-27 21:58:11+00:00
>In 2015 Google’s parent company Alphabet retired the old motto, now substituting for it “Do the right thing.” The old motto was better. Negation has advantages that positive assertions lack.

Setting aside the specific case of Google, while I think the author makes a strong argument for the value of negation, particularly for institutions, there's also something enervating as an individual about trying to do nothing wrong, rather trying to do good. It's so easy to self criticize, to second guess oneself, and ultimately let anxiety and fear of "doing the wrong thing" take hold. I think most people would be better served by seeking to do the right thing, rather than merely not being evil.
by conductr | 2025-07-27 21:58:44+00:00
I dislike how any conversation about this stuff immediately devolves into a decades ago history lesson about a thing as the singular root cause. Sure everyone is well aware of the history and you’re not wrong but it’s also history and not been the case in a very long time. Unless you were so poor you couldn’t take your kids on a day trip to a free pool, there’s been very little hindrances in quite a long time at this point. No reason black persons under 30 or so shouldn’t be swimming at much higher rates than their parent/grandparents. Meanwhile, the black people i know well and even just interacting with acquaintances and such treat non-swimming as a sort of badge of blackness. They scoff at the idea of learning later in life. They scoff at the idea of teaching their kids. As if it would make them “less black”. This is why I frame it as a current cultural phenomenon of values and identity. Sure a lot of the stuff you said made it that way, but that was generations ago at this point and it will not reverse unless some intention exists to buck the cultural norm.
by nunez | 2025-07-27 21:58:46+00:00
This Wikipedia entry covers more than tone and style.

There are small things that LLM-generated content will almost always do. The emdash used to be one of them; transition word overuse is another; being overly verbose by default is yet another.

That said, I posit that it will get increasingly difficult to keep this page up to date as models get smarter about how they write.
by vmlinuz | 2025-07-27 21:59:21+00:00
We all know the Daniel Radcliffe story, right? (He performed The Elements from memory on a UK talk show, which was allegedly what got him hired to play Weird Al in his 'biopic' - https://youtu.be/rSAaiYKF0cs?si=MRbiCH20VMCCcnuz )
by anthk | 2025-07-27 21:59:55+00:00
The default theme from QTCurve and a good color scheme.

On flat themes, I like Zukitre, which I modded the highlighting color to black instead of blue. It's the only usable theme I found not being either blinding light nor often unreadable dark. It has a grey neutral tone, something Apple understood for platinum if you worked on graphic design, video and photo editing, or as a journalist (the 99% of the Apple users in late 90's).
by gerdesj | 2025-07-27 22:00:16+00:00
Self hosting email will always be niche and frankly it was pretty niche in the noughties too.

I do find that if you carefully curate an IP address ... now that's the real problem. Most IP blacklists aggregate and generally end up roll up to cover entire AS ranges and allocations instead of actual individual perpetrators. However, if you can grab a "corporate ISP" static IP address, you are normally OK, at least in the UK.

Then you need to get a reverse DNS entry sorted out, although this only bit one of my friends recently after five years of not me not bothering. rDNS used to be rule one in anti spam. Oh well 8)

Modern (lol) email systems generally look for SSL/TLS and SPF, DKIM is nice and if you have DMARC then you are clearly a jolly good chap. Then they have a ... rule set, some of which are as old as my email management experience and some of which are down right odd (and probably based on Bayesian learning)

Anyway, email self hosting isn't impossible. Anyone who claims to be a nerd really should be able to manage it ... 8)

I don't want to live in a world where self hosting is impossible. It'll be the same one where I don't own a drill-driver and that would be bloody weird.
by dfee | 2025-07-27 22:00:16+00:00
This article provides good insight on the boom, but leaves out any insight on the inevitable bust - not on JS per se, but the distinct runtimes.

Deno and Bun seem to be two highly competitive runtimes, each VC backed and positioned against each other, but the fairly tale of multiple winners seems unlikely in a world that favors power laws.

So then, how do others see these ecosystems surviving over the next decade? What are the canaries? And, how interoperable will our code be?
by saltcured | 2025-07-27 22:01:01+00:00
I think you are using a non-standard definition of institutional knowledge that begs the question in the rest of your posts.

The standard phrase "institutional knowledge" merely refers to knowledge and skills that are carried by members of the organization. This is often much more than what is formally codified into the processes and training materials. As such, it can lead to loss of capability when there is too much turnover.

You seem to be conflating it with some other kind of bureaucratic conservatism or group-think. While that is a common dysfunction of long-running organizations, I think it is an orthogonal characteristic.
by snakepit | 2025-07-27 22:01:49+00:00
I'm working on an ML platform in Elixir. Orchestrating CPU-intensive Python processes is central to the project, so I created a session based pooler called `snakepit` [1].

The latest revision is building a batteries-included gRPC Python bridge that enables streaming, bi-directional tool use, as well as an innovative variables feature for experimental ML inspired by ideas from DSPy's team.

One of the later project goals: A Python client that can manage the Elixir orchestrator that manages pools of Python, in a distributed environment. Maybe I'll call that submodule `snakepits`. In this embodiment, it will be an effective albeit much more sophisticated replacement for `asyncio` for some use cases.

[1] https://github.com/nshkrdotcom/snakepit
by const_cast | 2025-07-27 22:02:20+00:00
It's not an equal transaction - it's like a child negotiating with an evil sorcerer.

The reality is that you have little to no power or leverage in labor relationships. You may think you do, because it is very valuable to the other party for you to believe as such. But you do not.

Things being purely transaction can work when it's a fair transaction. When your life is on the line and the other party is risk fuck-all, it's not a fair transaction. When you have a few sheckles at your disposal and the other party has billions, it's not a fair transaction. When you don't know shit about their decision making but the other party knows as much as possible as they can about you, it's not a fair transaction.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-07-27 22:02:21+00:00
So don't take it to its extreme. Just put the effort in to make good choices up to the point it's more personally disruptive than you can handle.

Person A: I try to avoid eating beef regularly, cattle farms are so environmentally unfriendly. Person B: Taken to its extreme, we should eliminate all cattle. Say goodbye to the hamburger!!!

Um, it's possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.
by ftapponn | 2025-07-27 22:02:42+00:00
I just launched BobaVim, a browser-based game for learning Vim motions in a fun and competitive way.

It includes a solo mode and a 1v1 mode where you can race against another player to clear levels using Vim commands. There's also a leaderboard, tutorial, and manual to help you improve.

I built it using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Go. The game helped me understand frontend/backend, client prediction, concurrency, and real-time communication.

It was tested and improved through feedback from students at 42 Heilbronn.

Would love your feedback and thoughts on the idea, gameplay, or the tech stack.

Link: https://www.bobavim.com/
by godelski | 2025-07-27 22:02:52+00:00
> It’s more accurate to say that Congress needs an overhaul.

It's also worth mentioning that this is a big reason NASA is so expensive. There's a lot of contracts and so NASA actually has contractors in every single state. They even brag about it[0], which should be a good hint to you that it is political. This makes is a bit of a wealth distribution system. That's either good or bad depending on your perspective and what you think the main goals are...

But there's a few programs that have these types of problems, not just NASA. IMO, there's probably more efficient ways to meet each goal, by decoupling the problem. But either way, we can't solve "the problem" unless we actually recognize what it is (and there's a lot more than what I've just mentioned)

[0] https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/nasainthe50states/
by neurostimulant | 2025-07-27 22:02:58+00:00
I configured my router to redirect all outbound port 53 udp traffic to adguard home running on a raspberry pi. From the log, it seems to be working reasonably enough, especially for apps that do their own dns resolution like the netflix app on my chromecast. Hopefully they don't switch to dns over https any time soon to circumvent it.
by LinguaBrowse | 2025-07-27 22:03:31+00:00
> I thought over the last decade we let other languages into the browser

Not so much! Rhino was an effort to rewrite Netscape Navigator in Java, and I expect that if that rewrite had taken off, Java might've gained a foothold (though indeed, there were Java applets for a time).

There were also Flash apps, and of course there are some significant games based on WebAssembly and low-level graphics APIs.

But ultimately JavaScript works well for GUI because it is so dynamic, allowing you to be less rigid in how you architect things. And by being a scripting language, it's super quick to iterate on.
by HeeKAIT | 2025-07-27 22:04:36+00:00
Founder here. The relationship with current AIs feels... hollow. They're powerful but disposable tools you rent from mega-corps. They have no memory, no persistence, no soul.

We believe the future is in stateful AI agents that you can truly own and grow over time. So we're building K.A.I.T. Studio: an open-source inspired IDE for these "Digital Beings". We even had an AI paint the face for our philosophy (the little guy in the repo's header).

To prove it's not just a concept, we used our own platform to create 'EVE', our first autonomous agent. The GitHub repo is the full technical white paper, including the log of her first mission where she autonomously researched our codebase and created a new improvement plan in her own workspace.

We're moving from "rented intelligence" to "owned existence". Is this a future you'd want to build with us?
by enjeyw | 2025-07-27 22:04:58+00:00
Yeah it's a good call out. I think it's a (more) winnable battle though.

For both a keystroke based AI detector, and software designed to mimic human keystroke patterns, performance will be determined by the size of the dataset they have of genuine human keystroke patterns. The detector has an inherent leg-up in this, because it's constantly collecting more data through the use of the tool, whereas the mimic software doesn't have any built in loop to collect those inputs.
by const_cast | 2025-07-27 22:05:15+00:00
Okay. Why not? This isn't an argument. You aren't making any argument.

Because, to me, this sounds good. Okay, so let's do it. Seems pretty simple and straightforward.

I mean, I want a 401K. Employers should provide that. Okay, then let's do that. They... aren't responsible? Don't we make the laws? Let's just force them to be responsible. Problem solved. I'm happy, you're happy, everyone is happy.

Do you, like, aspire to be exploited? Why are you advocating against your own best interests? Is this selflessness, or some strange form of self-harm I haven't been exposed to?
by aborsy | 2025-07-27 22:05:22+00:00
Go to a grad office and talk to PhD students in technical subjects (other than CS). Ask them, what is a certificate, DNS, reverse proxy, SSH public key, docker, TCP/IP, hypervisor, … You would be surprised how many people have no idea! You can’t expect people manage their servers.

I spent half of today tracking down a DNS issue at home. Your home lab will evolve and there will be changes. You need to stay current with the required knowledge, and that takes time and attention.
by lastdong | 2025-07-27 22:05:29+00:00
Second that, and it would be nice to have mobile controls.

——

Dodge the falling blocks and complete lines to survive!

Tetris [Move with ←/→, rotate with ↑, soft drop with ↓, hard drop with space]

Player [Move left/right with A/D, jump with W]

Staying in the same spot for over 10 seconds results in game over