MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raddan | 2025-07-04 16:44:30+00:00
I too am baffled by the prevailing sense of doom that many young people have. They certainly get a lot of messages about how hard things are, and of course, one’s circumstances have a big effect on one’s future. I am often asked in my job as a professor: “if I fail this test am I doomed forever?” which strikes me as so miscalibrated with reality that I struggle to respond.

Humanity’s initial circumstances, by modern standards, was pretty poor! What is lacking from the modern day doom and gloom is any notion of agency. You can change an awful lot in your life if you identify a goal and then ask yourself “what do I need to do to get there?” The common objection to this line of argument is “well there are people who cannot change their circumstances” and maybe that’s true. But I doubt that’s true for most people, and it certainly was not true for me. My life is dramatically more interesting and comfortable than the one I started life in. My main advantage over others is that I had loving and supportive parents who encouraged me to dream, and maybe that is a big advantage, but what we did not have was much money.

The recurring thought I have is that, where I live in the Eastern US, most of the houses, which were built in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s, were built with what we would now think of as primitive (and affordable) tools. That did not stop people from building beautiful things. I have learned to use those tools, and while they are slower than modern ones, they work fine. It’s hard not to get the sense that, for all of the complaining about “I will never be able to afford a house,” etc, there is also not much effort invested in seriously considering how one might acquire one with limited means. I bought what used to be called a “fixer-upper,” a house that sat on the market for years because of its problems, and turned it into a comfortable and pleasant home. I had to sacrifice nights and weekends. For years. But I made it happen, and eight years after I bought it, my mortgage (which was small) is nearly paid off.

Was I lucky? Maybe. But I also coupled that luck with the motivation to actively change things. I would love it if I could somehow convince people that they really can have fulfilling and even happy lives if they are willing to work toward that goal.
Show HN: ZenCall – Make phone calls directly from the browser, no app needed
by BananaKick | 2025-07-04 16:45:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I built ZenCall – a simple web-based calling platform that lets you make real phone calls directly from your browser without installing anything.

I started ZenCall because I was frustrated with existing solutions requiring apps or clunky setups for simple outbound calls. With ZenCall, you can:

Make calls to any phone number worldwide

Use your browser microphone and speaker

Buy local numbers to display as caller ID

Pay-per-use with no subscription required

It’s built with Ruby on Rails, Tailwind, and Telnyx under the hood.

I launched recently and am looking for early feedback, especially on:

Usability and onboarding clarity

Pricing model (currently pay-per-use with low per-minute rates)

Potential features you’d want for browser-based calling

Try it out here: https://www.zencall.so

Happy to answer any technical or product questions!
by fallinditch | 2025-07-04 16:45:27+00:00
> what works best with AI-coding: a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems

A technique that works well for me is to get the AI to one-shot the basic functionality or gameplay, and then build on top of that with many iterations.

The one-shot should be immediately impressive, if not then ditch it and try again with an amended prompt until you get something good to build on.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-04 16:46:14+00:00
That doesn't matter much when it's specifically the C/C++ compiler vendors who don't care about fixing the cross-compilation problem. It would be trivial for C/C++ compiler vendors to make cross-compilation as simple as with the Zig toolchain, but they don't care about the topic and that's why it doesn't happen.

Fast forward a few decades to today and the best solution to cross-compile C/C++ projects is the Zig toolchain (and isn't that kinda weird? A "foreign" toolchain coming along fixing one of the biggest problems in the C/C++ ecosystem just like that as a "side quest"?)
by foobiekr | 2025-07-04 16:46:21+00:00
CGI basically is a protocol between the webserver and some process. It didn't go out of fashion because of C (many/most CGI scripting for a time was perl and php or even bash), it went out of fashion because people wanted (or were told that smart people did this) to use languages that had runtimes which were expensive to run in a fork()+exec() execution model like Java.

You can use it with any language that can read stdin and write stdout. Yes, printing and reading.
by jjmarr | 2025-07-04 16:46:35+00:00
I can design a simple op-amp circuit and deploy to a Kubernetes cluster because Canada has a "Computer Engineering" degree that's a hybrid between CS/Electrical Engineering.

It doesn't work in practice. CS graduates from my school are trained on git and Linux command lines. CE teaches none of this and students discover in 3rd year they cannot get an internship because they share all their code as IDE screenshots in Google Docs.

But we do know how the entire process of building a computer works, from quantum physics, semiconductor doping, npn junctions, CMOS logic, logic gates, hardware design languages, assembly, C, and Java.

If only all of this "important" knowledge didn't crowd out basic skills.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-07-04 16:46:39+00:00
You aren’t commenting on the state of “science”, you’re complaining about clickbait journalism and failing to recognize that the two are not the same. With that said, I have to agree that the current state of the world is indistinguishable from what you’d expect to see if a hostile AI had taken over in 2011 and was working behind the scenes to systematically extinguish human civilization.
by mcswell | 2025-07-04 16:46:45+00:00
We knew that Hegseth didn't understand (or didn't believe in) security. It's not surprising that Trump, who had highly classified documents laying around in Mar a Lago, doesn't either.

Years ago, I was in a classified meeting in a SCIF when someone's cell phone went off. The person was immediately escorted out of the room--probably their clearance was revoked, and they were told not to come back. Having a cell phone in a SCIF is bad enough, having it go off inside the SCIF is even worse--and answering it during a classified meeting (or just answering it inside a SCIF) is cause for trouble big.
by dnautics | 2025-07-04 16:48:16+00:00
I maintain a library to interface zig with elixir and the breaking changes have not been a big deal. As a part of the library I have maintain a zig parser (the official parser in the langref is not up to date) and I scan the entire zig codebase against my parser to make sure it doesn't trip up on anything. Also I can't use zig fmt to keep up because some of the code is templated and embedded in Elixir. The last two semver minor updates, the net total amount of changes I have had to do to keep up with the language took me maybe an hour? Also subjectively, I feel like the breaking changes that affect me have been fewer and easier to deal with since the early days. The bulk of the delay in updating the library was chipping away at things that i had put off since the last update (also i don't use the library in $DAYJOB since I "quit tech", though I do vibecode solutions for myself).

Point being, I feel like a lot of the gripes about zig changing here and there are really by folks who aren't really daily users, just people who see a !!breaking change!! announcement and pile on.

Though, I do sympathize with newcomers because the memory of the internet is pinned to various older versions with lots of demo code that 'just doesn't work' and of course that means LLMs too, in the long run. Hopefully zig doesn't get stuck past the global knowledge/popularity LLM-cycle cutoff. I don't think it will.
by BobdaProgrammer | 2025-07-04 16:48:28+00:00
People often think that go is only for making web servers and CLIs, but it is much more than that, and so I set out to prove that. My idea was to create a window manager for X11 that has the features of other WMs like i3, and it worked. I now daily drive it and have for the past 2 months or so.
by 9rx | 2025-07-04 16:48:49+00:00
> And probably none of them knows how to grow and fertilize the crop to feed themselves.

As a farmer and software developer, with a electronics hobby (and it being a part of the job of being a farming these days), I can check off growing crops, op-amp circuits, and Kubernetes deployments.

I don't own, or have reasonable access to, the necessary capital for laminating circuit boards and synthesizing minerals.

> No one knows everything.

But, really, access to capital is the real limiting factor. Getting to know something isn't usually all that difficult in and of itself, but if you have no way to do it then you're never going to get to know it. Collaboration is less important to efficiency than optimizing use of capital. Its just that we don't have many good ideas about how to optimize use of capital without also introducing collaboration.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-07-04 16:49:04+00:00
My absolute favorite Orca culture story (yes they have transmissible culture!) is the “salmon hat craze,” where the Orcas carry dead salmon around on their heads, apparently just for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_hat

When you’re the apex predator of the world’s oceans you can get away with all sorts of silly nonsense!
by littlexsparkee | 2025-07-04 16:49:40+00:00
I dealt with mobility issues the last 2.5 years after turf toe (healed after 1 year and then reinjured), didn't realize how crucial strengthening was after losing muscle resting, then after research found out how critical loading tendons is to having them repaired. I left my stable job a couple of months ago to dedicate myself to getting my life back. I'd let thumb RSI simmer for a long time too, even though I got to the point where I could do most things with Talon (friction made me get lazy occasionally). The hardest part is mental - the ups and downs, isolation, not knowing what to do to fix yourself, feeling like your body is betraying you and the lack of help from the medical system besides some basic scans and generic advice. I'm glad that I had a cushion so that I haven't had to stress too much taking time off.

To folks dealing with physical pain, I recommend: Built From Broken by Scott Hogan, Rehab Science by Tom Walters.

For joint issues these may help: celadrin, pro-resolving mediators, red mineral algae w/ aquamin, natural eggshell membrane, collagen peptides w/ fortigel.
by geerlingguy | 2025-07-04 16:50:06+00:00
Not only the lanes, but putting through more than 6 Gbps of IO on multiple PCIe devices on the N150 bogs things down. It's only a little faster than something like a Raspberry Pi, there are a lot of little IO bottlenecks (for high speed, that is, it's great for 2.5 Gbps) if you do anything that hits CPU.
by dewitt | 2025-07-04 16:51:04+00:00
> Can use rust, go, or whatever compiled language you want and it'll probably be much more performant starting up than any interpreted language.

One additional bit of context is the person you’re replying to, simonw, is also the creator of Django, which at the time was the world’s defacto standard Python web framework, and was created at a time (2005) that long predates either Go (2009) or Rust (2012).
by zzzeek | 2025-07-04 16:51:19+00:00
I see a bunch of "nobody knows everything, this old man needs to appreciate modern technology stacks" comments, and in some ways I blame the post for this because it kind of meanders into that realm where it gets into abstractions being bad and kids not knowing how to make op-amp circuits (FTR, I am from the "you have to know op-amps!" generation and I intentionally decided deep hardware hacking was not going to be my thing), but the actual core thing I think is important here is that working hard is being devalued - putting in the time to understand the general workings underpinnings of software, the hardware, using trial and error to solve an engineering problem as opposed to "sticking LEDs on fruit", the entire premise of knowing how things work and achieving some deep expertise is no longer what people assume they should be striving for, and LLMs, useful or not, are only accelerating this.

Just yesterday I used an LLM to write some docs for me, and for a little bit where I mistakenly thought the docs were fine as they were (they weren't, but I had to read them closely to see this) it felt like, "wow if the LLM just writes all my docs now, I'm pretty much going to forget how to write docs. Is that something I should worry about?" The LLM almost fooled me. The docs sounded good. It's because they were documenting something I myself was too lazy to re-familiarize with, hoping the LLM would just do it for me. Fortunately the little bit of my brain that still wanted to be able to do things decided to really read the docs deeply, and they were wrong. I think this "the LLM made it convincing, we're done let's go watch TV" mentality is a big danger spot at scale.

There's an actual problem forming here and it's that human society is becoming idiocracy all the way down. It might be completely unavoidable. It might be the reason for the Fermi paradox.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-04 16:51:21+00:00
> The VHS player in my basement could be fixed with a screwdriver and a service manual (OK, sometimes an oscilloscope). Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet.

This seems like a pretty weird example, right? WiFi routers don’t connect to the internet. If your modem can’t connect to the internet, something has probably broken outside your house. That’s the sort of locally-unsolvable problem that everybody last century was familiar with; the crappy copper telephone wire that was never designed to let the Internet blast through it and it will eventually rebel and start giving you noise.

If your router doesn’t work, I don’t know. Cheap routers are not a new invention or sign of the times, I think.

VHS players, if I remember correctly, often died in mysterious ways (they have all sorts of little motors and finicky sensors in them).
by godot | 2025-07-04 16:51:28+00:00
I'd be curious to follow along and read more. My experience is that everyone's body is quite different and what causes chronic issues with everyone can be quite different. That's not to say his observations and solutions won't be useful to others, but it's another good anecdote to understand and things worth trying for others having similar issues.

I myself for example have had headache and migraine issues for more than 25 years. I understand deeply an incredible amount about what causes my migraines, how they feel, how I help with it, and so on. I understand migraines more than anyone else I ever know in my life because I observe, pay attention, study, and try different things so much. I understand it more than most doctors I talk to. But I also know that everyone's migraines are a little different and not everyone gets triggered by the same things (though there's a lot of overlaps) and my solutions may not help for everyone. I'd totally write something like this for migraines if I had the time (I don't :( ).
by delichon | 2025-07-04 16:51:51+00:00
> Coyotes can also help manage the city’s rodent problem and keep other wildlife populations, like Canada geese and raccoons, in check.

Not just wildlife. A pack tracked my wily cat for months. I saw a couple of close calls. They learned that the cat liked to leave the house for a stroll a little before dawn. One morning they waited for him and took him right outside the cat door. It was pretty amazing that he lived nine years as thick as coyotes are around here. I can't bear to keep a cat locked in the house, so haven't had the nerve to get another since then.

I previously lost a cat to a pack of raccoons. But my cats collectively are way ahead of the game in terms of animal biomass harvested.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-04 16:52:02+00:00
My mental model of startups is that they're free of the bureaucracy that would cause you to whine in comments versus Just Fucking Do It. So, what's the impediment to using your time to test your "10 hours" theory?

Also, my experience with GitLab isn't that the thing is hurp-durping because of scaling to ten million, it's that ruby gonna ruby
by otoburb | 2025-07-04 16:52:31+00:00
>>Small dogs maybe.

A judge in Brooklyn recently ruled[1] that dogs are (now) classified as "immediate family members". I wonder if the this might push the Central Park Conservancy to step up considerations for eradication of the coyotes to avoid potential emotional damages in light of the ruling if such a situation were to occur.

[1] https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/dogs-family-members/
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-04 16:53:04+00:00
Can you please specify more to be honest. This comment really catched my eye and maybe has pushed me to trying out scala but like my issue is that everywhere it says that scala primarily works good for OOP but like I know it can do functional too.

I am not sure if what supporting every paradigm is a definitely good thing though I feel like I would love the freedom to do so. I am a tinkerer at heart/first and a coder at second and my favourite language is probably go and then nim/julia/elixir/typescript/<it depends on the project>
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-07-04 16:53:36+00:00
This description of the oval office as some super-secret meeting space seems like a gross mischaracterization in an attempt to fabricate a controversy or gain clicks.

I mean, it has windows.

If this was true, the situation room wouldn't exist.

The oval office seems more like a busy CEO's office with an open door policy. Bill Maher confirmed on his podcast the current administration turned the annex (where blowjobs were dispensed during the Clinton years) into the merch room where they store the red hats.
by ineedasername | 2025-07-04 16:53:57+00:00
The jump from Assembly to Python is an enormous skill difference. But the shift from Python to Python with Copilot? Not as much, and every counter to this sort of comparison that I have heard is strongly in want of a true Scotsman.

It’s time to move on. The history of tech is a steady march of tools that demand less prep, less precision, and less friction from their users.

All this hand-wringing seems to show is that a worforce whose aggregate work ethos usually mocks “get off my lawn” attitudes in others was hiding a significant “but I never thought it would happen to me”, often couched in some variety of “but think of the children”.

Besides, it could be worse: it’s not like when other professions went obsolete practically overnight, like switchboard operators, or cuirassiers.
by gnyman | 2025-07-04 16:54:19+00:00
I'm confused by this one. It says it's a joke but it still submits the key to a server.

These joke pages have been around since http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/

And I even made my own version https://hasmypasswordbeenstolen.net/

The difference is that neither the original nor mine actually submits the secret to the server. I went to great lengths to avoid actually doing it, it's still a bad idea to send a password to my page but at least you can check the source and network traffic and see that it's only checked with JavaScript and a hash is checked against the HIPB password site.

This supposed joke site sends and processes the key on their backend. At least it looks like that, I have not tried with a real key.
by majormajor | 2025-07-04 16:54:21+00:00
> The difference is the specific leverage is 10x any other "10x" tool I've encountered so far. So, just like every tool, only more so.

One of the best comparisons to me is languages.

The old "lisp [or whatever] lets us do more, faster" idea, but with a fun twist where if you can reduce the code you write but still end up with generated code in a fast, high-performance language, without the extra work you would have to do to go add type annotations or whatnot everywhere for SBCL.

But with a gotcha that you are gonna have to do a lot of double-checking on some of the less-easily/obviously-verified parts of the generated code for certain type of work.

And of course highly-expressive languages have resulted in no small number of messy, unmaintainable codebases being built by people without well-specified advance plans. So we're gonna see a lot of those, still.

BUT to me the real, even bigger win - because I spend less time writing 100% new code than integrating old and new, or trying to improve old code/make it suit new purposes, is supercharged debugging. A debugger is a huge improvement over print statements everywhere for many types of things. A machine that you can copy-paste a block of code into, and say "the output looks like [this] instead of like [that], what's going on" and get a fresh set of eyes to quickly give you some generally-good suggestions is a huge improvement over the status quo for a lot of other things as well. Especially the type of things that are hard to attach a debugger to (sql, "infrastructure as code", build scripts, etc, just to start).
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-07-04 16:54:35+00:00
> I'm literally doing things in hours that'd previously take weeks with little issue.

What's an example of this? Some of the ones I see most are: converting legacy code to something modern, building a greenfield app or feature in an unfamiliar language / framework / space.

But at work I don't have these types of jobs, and I want to get this productivity speed up, but right now I'm stuck at it helps a lot but not turning weeks of work into hours, so trying to get there
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-04 16:55:07+00:00
The problem I have with python2 vs python3 wasn't breaking backward compatibility, but that their "solution" for UNICODE strings is such a weird mess (treating string- and byte-streams as something completely separate instead of treating strings as UTF-8 encoded views on byte streams) The only string encoding that matters today is UTF-8, all others are relics from the early 90s and the sooner we get rid of those the better - e.g. Python caused a whole lot of pain for a solution that would have been useful 30 years ago, but not today.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-07-04 16:56:09+00:00
I think this is a US specific thing.

I work as a contractors with all my clients (who know of each others) and they all pay significantly more per hour compared to an employee. As an employee I could expect to make 1/4 of what I actually make.

The only exception in this arrangement was when I worked with an US company, they wanted to hire me as an employee and paid 1k per month to some company in my country just to hire me. An insane waste of money, not to mention taxes on my side.
by gspetr | 2025-07-04 16:56:11+00:00
I'd say if you have a marketing problem do whatever the heck you can to get Rory Sutherland to take a look at your product, the man is a force of nature when it comes to unconventional marketing and from him I've learned the crucial distinction between relational and transactional capitalism.

And if you ever make it to the (multi)unicorn status because of him, don't forget yours truly. :)
by raddan | 2025-07-04 16:56:12+00:00
Not to mention that motivated humans are amazing learning machines. The supposed trend of replacing entry-level programmers with AI is pure insanity. Sure, code of indeterminate quality (let’s assume for a moment that it is good) will get written. But a company is its people, and you are shutting the door to new ideas. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the neophyte, who was maybe considered a bit of a dope after they were hired, in their second or third year stumble on a great idea that energizes everybody. People can change. A good organization recognizes this and nurtures them so that both change for the better.