MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noisy_boy | 2025-07-18 02:47:50+00:00
> Is that the part of programming that you enjoy? Remembering logger vs logging?

No but genuinely like writing informative logs. I have been in production support roles and boy does the lack of good logging (or barely any logs at all!) suck. I prefer print style debugging and want my colleagues on the support side to have the same level of convenience.

Not to mention the advantages of being able to search through past logs for troubleshooting and analysis.
by labster | 2025-07-18 02:47:53+00:00
Lighthouses fulfill roughly the same purpose as hazard signs on freeways — everyone makes more money when ordered goods actually arrive. Rocks on the sea are more dangerous than falling rocks on the roads.

Monument lighthouses have an extra purpose: they project power and wealth. Merchants know this place is Important. Like modern day monuments, whether people need a giant expensive building/statue/obelisk to learn this or it’s just a vanity project for the ruler is a matter of opinion. People aren’t really all that different over the last 2000 years.
by kcplate | 2025-07-18 02:48:44+00:00
I’m not a developer. My roots were in hardware engineering (communication/networking) in the 80s-mid 90s, moving into departmental IT leadership roles at senior levels in the mid 90s till around 7 years ago. I sit in the product arena now as I move towards the sunset.

In a general sense, I find the self taught to be simply more inventive problem solvers. What you are using as a critique— “Self-taught individuals don’t understand what they’re missing” —I would say that can be a strength. However, you should perhaps think of it instead as “Because they are not prejudiced by what they were taught by others as ‘what is possible/impossible or ‘the best way’ they are often willing to try ans do the things that a degreed person won’t even attempt.”
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-18 02:49:05+00:00
> If the accusation was like theft or murder and/or the action taken was imprisonment or fines, that would be a different story.

Detention of indefinite duration followed at some arbitrary time by removal, often to a country to which the subject has no previous connection, does not speak the language, and in which they have in some cases no access to the necessities of life (and in some cases where they are subsequently imprisoned in a prison that the operating government proudly claims “no one who goes in ever gets out” by agreement between the US government and the foreign country) is in no way less serious than imprisonment and fines (indeed, it often is literally imprisonment, and in some cases it has been a very swift death sentence.)
by Guid_NewGuid | 2025-07-18 02:49:40+00:00
The use of AI for this seems somewhat overkill, one could just use a language and environment that is aware of whether `logger` or `logging` is available, and what variables are in scope. We have tools that allow us to treat programming as more than guessing the next character at random. Rather they allow you to offload tracking this context to the machine in a reliable way, typed languages and auto complete.

I do wonder if this is part of the divide in how useful one finds LLMs currently. If you're already using languages which can tell you what expressions are syntactically valid while you type rather than blowing up at runtime the idea a computer can take some of the cognitive overhead is less novel.
by Sai_ | 2025-07-18 02:50:07+00:00
At some level, it is worse. The Indian press never sold us citizens koolaid about freedom, talking truth to power, and patted themselves on the back about winning Pulitzer Prizes for journalism.

The Indian press knows it is a bottom feeder and doesn’t try not to be which gives space for critical thought to emerge (even if it masked as extreme cynicism - “everyone is corrupt”) which results in extreme skepticism of everyone.
by ivape | 2025-07-18 02:50:20+00:00
Their beefing over South Park as well:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sou...

At the heart of the dispute: a new 10-year, $3 billion overall deal for Parker and Stone that would more than triple the valuation of the current deal that expires in 2027

Yeah. So that's not going to happen lol.
by leakycap | 2025-07-18 02:50:21+00:00
As much as I like Reading List, I think the key benefit of the PDF approach is...

> works reliably and you can keep the PDF forever

I have a ton of Apple devices and maybe my Reading List is just messed up, but it doesn't seem to keep an offline cache that is reliable in any way and would be hard to search or organize (unlike the PDFs)
by KennyBlanken | 2025-07-18 02:50:23+00:00
The Stasi network was infamous because of how enormous it was, not its mere existence. And it likely had a crippling effect on their economy. They were also drowning in information, and the information was very poor because anyone with a bone to pick just made up some bullshit about the other person.

Today, tools created by US intelligence make the data collection trivial, but more importantly, the data analysis is trivial as well.
by s-mon | 2025-07-18 02:50:37+00:00
Back at one of my previous employers we had a long internal briefing about why our latest device did not have USB-C when other solutions on the market by then had.

The connector is solid but my god have there been disasters because of USB-C.

1. Power distribution upto high wattage, not always with auto sensing, 2. Wites rated to different data transmission speeds. 3. USB standard data transfers and Thunderbolt over the same connector and wire but most accessories are not rated for Thunderbolt.

Omg I love it and I hate it.
by nwah1 | 2025-07-18 02:50:38+00:00
The Late Show has an elderly and shrinking audience. And, Colbert hasn't been funny in years, nor has he been challenging the powers that be.

When he did the White House Correspondents' Dinner and roasted George W Bush, that was extremely edgy. The Colbert Report was also wickedly funny.

But the Late Show makes John Oliver look like Lenny Bruce.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-07-18 02:50:46+00:00
weightlifting yes, but not most track and field. It's pretty common for dancers to say "you should be able to slip a sheet of paper under the heel" for example. Pretty sure that's the case in tennis too.

here's a stock photo of a runner:

https://images.stockcake.com/public/7/1/2/7124d219-0531-40c1...

and here's one of volleyball:

https://www.games-eshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/web.s...
by ookblah | 2025-07-18 02:51:08+00:00
this sounds like a cop out, but honestly you will probably see the most vocal on both sides of this here while vast majority are just quietly doing working and doing their stuff (ironic i'm writing this).

i feel like some kind of shill, but honestly i'm anywhere from 1.5x to 10x on certain tasks. the main benefit is that i can reduce a lot of cognitive load on tasks where they are either 1) exploratory 2) throwaway 3) boilerplate-ish/refactor type stuff. because of that i have a more consistent baseline.

i still code "by hand". i still have to babysit and review almost all the lines, i don't just let it run for hours and try to review it at the end (nightmare). production app that's been running for years. i don't post youtube videos bc i don't have the time to set it up and try to disprove the "naysayers" (nor does that even matter) and its code i can't share.

the caveat here is we are a super lean team so probably i have more context into the entire system and can identify problems early on and head them off. also i have a vested interest in increasing efficiency for myself wheras if you're part of a corpo ur probably doing more work for the same comp.
by barisozmen | 2025-07-18 02:51:20+00:00
"One technique for making software more robust is to minimize what your software depends on – the less that can go wrong, the less that will go wrong. Minimizing dependencies is more nuanced than just not depending on System X or System Y, but also includes minimizing dependencies on features of systems you are using."

From http://nathanmarz.com/blog/principles-of-software-engineerin...
by refurb | 2025-07-18 02:54:08+00:00
US requires all passenger manifests for flights are forwarded to USCBP 48 hours or more before the flight. This list is run against several databases to identify persons of interest.

Then after the flight takes off, an updated list is sent again to USCBP.

So when you walk up to USCBP, they already have a list of people they expect to see within an hour of the flight landing. The match is much easier at that point.

It all falls apart at land or sea border crossings. Requirements are quite different and travel outside continental US but with zone like the Caribbean are treated differently than travel outside that zone.

As such your immigration record can get messed up if you say exit via land border to Canada as there is no exit record to match up with entry. Many people have gotten email about overstays because of this.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-18 02:54:33+00:00
Yeah I was surprised too! I don't actually know that much about ants or biology, but

- (1) ants fly!

well they don't usually fly, but they spread wings and fly during a "nuptual flight" to start new colonies [0]. I only learned this a few years ago when I moved into the woods and mass migrations of flying ants often.

From what I can see, all wasps fly, and I can't find anything saying their common ancestor couldn't fly. So since ants can partially fly, I think it's much more likely they evolved from a flying ancestor. They just lost lost the ability to fly most of the time and totally dominated the land niche.

Incidentally, living in the woods has also taught me that there are a variety of wasps that live underground like ants do. I used to think they all built open-air hives.

- (2) I made that comment mostly based on a paper [1] I found while googling around. According to the paper:

> The stinging wasps (Hymenoptera: Aculeata) are an extremely diverse lineage of hymenopteran insects, encompassing over 70,000 described species.... The most well-studied lineages of Aculeata are the ants... and the bees

This is consistent with what I've seen on Wikipedia. Basically ants, bees, and wasps are very closely related. The Wikipedia page on Aculeata [2] has a nice family tree that includes sawflies, bees, and wasps.

So yes, wasps is wide like beetles. But there are more beetles. Beetles get their own order, whereas stinging wasps, bees, and ants have an "infraorder", which I guess is like an order but smaller. The Wikipedia article on Hymenoptera has a family tree that shows the relationship with beetles [3].

[0] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/when-why-winged-ants-swarm-nu...

[1] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aculeata

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera
by yoyohello13 | 2025-07-18 02:54:48+00:00
Something really feels off about the whole thing. I use Claude code. I like it, it definitely saves me time reading docs or looking on stack overflow. It’s a phenomenal tool.

If we are to believe the hype though, shouldn’t these tools be launching software into the stratosphere? Like the CEO of stripe said AI tools provide a x100 increase in productivity. That was 3-4months ago. Shouldn’t stripe be launching rockets in to space now since that’s technically 400months of dev time? Microsoft is reportedly all in on AI coding. Shouldn’t Teams be the best, most rock solid software in existence now? There is so much hype around these tools being a super charger for more than a year, but the actual software landscape looks kind of the same to me as it did 3-4 years ago.
by JackMorgan | 2025-07-18 02:54:51+00:00
Having taken all the college level CS coursework for CS degree (I skipped the math and got minors in education and English), I think a lot of folks vastly overestimate how much they learned in a CS degree. Assuming 50 CS credits required for a degree, 1 hour a week of class time per credit, 3 hours of homework per credit, for 15 weeks, that's only 3000 hours total. So about 18 months putting in 40 hours a week. Granted, you can learn a lot in 18 months full time. But this weird obsession that a person could only learn this material if lectured by a bored and overworked TA is silly.

And that doesn't even touch on the fact that most professors have absolutely no clue how modern software engineering is done. The courses are planned by even more out of touch heads of departments. And the quality of most of these student's projects is atrocious. How could they know better? They've just got a tiny micro assignment to do, and maybe 50-100 lines of code per assignment.

I'm not trying to be too pessimistic, but let's be real here and say a modern CS degree is a terrible way to be trained to be a modern software engineer. You'd be just as likely to succeed with a degree in mech engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, math, philosophy, or accounting. Or spending a year or two working on an open source with some mentors.

Granted there's also a huge range of quality of degree programs. I regularly hire Drexel students who shock me with how good they are, but that's a 5 year degree with 18 months of on job required training. That's a degree made for turning out quality software engineers.

My coursework to finish all my classes had me write a grand total of under 4k lines of code. And I finished those courses with high marks. That's such a small amount of code, I remember graduating and still being confused what a function was. It's unbelievable I paid almost 6 figures and spent 4 years to not even learn what a function was. I think that I'm not alone in this.
by ethbr1 | 2025-07-18 02:55:12+00:00
The seductive failure of doing that is what you choose to invest your saved time in, similar to financial debt.

It’s one thing if someone is iron willed enough to make productive use of their new free time.

It’s different if they use it to play video games and sleep.

Most people, if left to their own devices, will do the latter.

We can say what we want about a hard, challenging job, but it forces us to work and learn. Thus, at the end of it, we have the benefit of that working and learning.

The better question is not “How little work can I get away with doing?” but rather “What will I have at the end of this work?”
by j_timberlake | 2025-07-18 02:56:12+00:00
I mostly agree with this. The goal with AI companies is not to reach 99% or 100% human-level, it's >100% (do tasks better than an average human could, or eventually an expert).

But since you can't really do that with wedding planning or whatnot, the 100% ceiling means the AI can only compete on speed and cost. And the cost will be... whatever Nvidia feels like charging per chip.
by hirvi74 | 2025-07-18 02:56:49+00:00
> "If there is a virtue to CS degrees, it's that most engineering tracks require an immense amount of coursework in hard sciences that require a high intellectual aptitude to complete."

I do not disagree with you at heart, but I think there are so many pervasive issues with modern education that I am not certain a high level of intellectual aptitude is necessary anymore. Hell, I somehow have a computer science degree which I honestly do not deserve considering how little I understood (and still do not understand). Then again, I didn't go to some prestigious university for the astute either, so take it for what it is worth.

Nevertheless, I feel like I learned a lot of information and was exposed to many topics at a surface level of understanding. However, there is little I learned that I couldn't have learned by just reading the textbook. In fact, most of my assignments and tests came directly from textbook or were similar enough.

I was trying to brush up on data structures and algorithms last year. Not because I was looking for a job, but because I always wished I understood DS&A on a more fundamental/mathematical level. I like details and understanding the 'why' or 'how' more than the 'what.'

I remember watching lectures of a professor on Youtube (Dr. Skiena at Stony Brook University). All I could think was how there is likely a slim chance in Hell that I would have made it through his class nor Stony Brook.

Overall, I think most of the difference is down to desire and motivation. Many of my fellow students at the time, cared little about computer science or programming. Most did just enough to get the piece of paper so they could start making 'real money' as they often would say. If one is capable enough to teach themselves how to program, then I do not doubt those individuals are capable of learning computer science to a level equivalent to me. Sure, they might not obtain a PhD level of understanding, but then again, the vast majority of bachelor degrees do not either.
by kbos87 | 2025-07-18 02:57:42+00:00
Can anyone tell me why I have several devices in my home that demand a certain USB-C cord in order to charge? They are mostly cheap Chinese devices that won’t acknowledge a more expensive (e.g., Apple) uSB-C cord plugged into them. Even when plugged into the same transformer. They only charge with the cheap USB-C cord they came with. What gives?
by bananalychee | 2025-07-18 02:57:55+00:00
You are trying to walk between the lines and perhaps that's an attempt to avoid being flagged, but it is disingenuous to insinuate that the only objection to the pandemic population control exercise was that it was "fake". There were many lies spun over the course of the pandemic and in most cases it was obvious that they were lies within weeks or months of the outbreak. Despite that people were happy to collaborate with the overreach by snitching on their family members, "friends", and neighbors for touching too much grass, when in fact virtually no healthy individual under the age of 40 was risking much by living normally, and especially not the children abused by the extended freakout. Had cooler heads prevailed perhaps we could have ended the madness after a year, but it had to drag on for two more, and the resulting "stimulus" overspending that dragged on for far too long subsequently aggravated the wave of inflation and cost of living crisis that we're in today. Regardless of our feelings towards illegal immigration enforcement today it is completely insane how whitewashed this event was in comparison, but I suppose that's how it is when the authoritarians are on "your" (general you) side.

And in response to the parent comment: "made up characterization of the situation", you bet. If only the concerned citizens had a consistent moral framework, I could sympathize.
by dehrmann | 2025-07-18 02:58:53+00:00
I'd worry more about defunding public broadcasting or the Washington Post editorial stance. There's a good faith argument here that the cause was market conditions:

> The genre has been struggling as the majority of the country migrates in droves to streaming entertainment and away from traditional broadcast and cable television...

> The number of late-night shows has dwindled in recent years...

> The genre has also experienced a sharp decline in advertising revenue in recent years...
by leptons | 2025-07-18 02:58:56+00:00
>I’ve definitely first hand seen a lot of FAANG engineers (yes even them, some with PHDs) not realize something I had learned from experience during my first year working with computers

I have a close friend that's the smartest person that anyone who meets him knows, no question about it. He's got a PhD in Physics and has also contributed a huge technical achievement to a FAANG company, that everyone uses every day. He's great at a lot of stuff, but not everything. We work on side-projects sometimes, and I'm the self-taught guy in this scenario. I know that I bring just as much to the table as he does, just in different ways. If either one of us tried to do the things we do together, alone, the result would be less than 1/2 as good. Recognizing this and letting each other shine has served us well.

I can only think that teams made up of a mixture of people with different backgrounds would do better than a team of all CS graduates, or a team of all self-taught developers.
by mrheosuper | 2025-07-18 02:59:03+00:00
you can "accidentally" write a kernel, at least in my case.

I was doing some embedded stuff when i was at school. I needed to run some "functions" in parallel. Obvious choice would be using a RTOS, but i did not know the exist of RTOS, so i spun up some timer interrupt, a "queue" of function to run parallel, an isr that acts like "scheduler", some variables that act like "semaphore", etc.

Only few years later i realized i have invented a very simple "RTOS"
by ghuntley | 2025-07-18 02:59:16+00:00
I think you are perhaps missing the point. Investing into these techniques [2] enables you to do unhinged things. Such as building a compiler whilst you are AFK [1].

[1] https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1OyJALVOnEzGb

[2] https://ghuntley.com/ralph
by paleotrope | 2025-07-18 02:59:41+00:00
"One possible factor in the negotiations: an $800 million loan that Park County took in 2023 from private equity firm the Carlyle Group. Parker and Stone could be squeezed for cash to repay roughly $80 million in interest per year, according to one person knowledgeable of the arrangement, who noted that Paramount may be open to paying more than $150 million annually in a new deal but not for 10 years."

That's quite the loan.
by jjice | 2025-07-18 03:02:39+00:00
I've always ignored instructions that say to only use that product's USB cord (things like my kitchen scale and water flossed) and have never had an issue. Sounds like I've just gotten lucky though, based on your experience.

I was under the impression that the USB protocol just fell back to 1a 5v when power negotiation was unsure.

What kinds of devices?
by favorited | 2025-07-18 03:03:18+00:00
Late night talk shows are extremely cheap, compared to regular scripted television. It's one of the reasons why NBC was so excited about moving Jay Leno to 10pm when Conan took over The Tonight Show:

> The Jay Leno Show WILL be significantly cheaper than any primetime scripted show NBC could program. Primetime scripted programming usually costs about $3 million per hour; so the five hours NBC is revamping would total about $15 million per week. This new Leno show will cost NBC less than $2 million per week. ... So, not only does NBC get to KEEP its primetime hours, it gets to program them with a more cost-effective show.

https://www.writersdigest.com/industry-updates/jay-leno-nbc-...
by whatever1 | 2025-07-18 03:03:23+00:00
The problem that I have is that I have a ton of usb cords in my drawer. I DONT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE CAPABLE OF.

Is it a charge only cable (no data)? Is it usb3 5gbps ? Is it 100 watt power delivery? Is it thunderbolt 3/4/5?
by TZubiri | 2025-07-18 03:05:03+00:00
I once wrote a simple python program that logged all execution, self inspected code and printed code and variables as output.

Then I learned why programs don't do that by default.

Not to be snarky, but when you become more experienced you will figure out that logging is just writing to permanent storage, one of the most basic blocks of programming, you don't need a dependency for that, writing to disk should be as natural as breathing air, you can do print("var",var). That's it.

If you are really anal you can force writing to a file with a print argument or just a posix open and write call. No magic, no remembering, no blogpost. Just done, and next.
by pas256 | 2025-07-18 03:05:36+00:00
Each avatar has 3 layers: background, foreground (head), and text (single letter).

The background code chooses from one of the background SVGs (gradients in different directions with color placeholders) and then selects colors to put into the SVG. The whole things is meant to be easy to extend to fit your needs.

My understanding with Gravatar is that your email is hashed in order to select an avatar you have already uploaded, but is not used in customizing the avatar. Is that right?

What did you have in mind?

Also, what error do you get on Magicell? There are some geo-restrictions in place, so I am curious what you saw. Thanks!