MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-29 07:30:16+00:00
While on the one side I think you have a point, on the other there's different dynamics in place as well; you're comparing offshore workers to internal employees. An offshore worker gets hired to do a job for another company, an internal employee is part of the company.

That is, an external worker (and I'm a consultant, I know) gets paid per hour, if the company goes under for whatever reason they just move on to the next assignment, while an internal employee leans more on their job.

Anyway that's just a theory. I'm a "consultant" which is just a fancy word for a temp / hired hand, and I'm somewhere in the middle in that I will think along with the company and propose improvements, but at the same time have lower risk and much less attachment to the companies I work for.

I don't think it's cultural per se. As an extreme example, the CEOs of Google and Microsoft were both born and raised in India.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-29 07:30:58+00:00
> That is false, and the wiki paragraph does not say that

Are you sure? This is the first sentence of my link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_faith_(law)

> In contract law, the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing is a general presumption that the parties to a contract will deal with each other honestly, fairly, and in good faith, so as to not destroy the right of the other party or parties to receive the benefits of the contract.

This is the first sentence of your original link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_faith#Law

> In law, bona fides denotes the mental and moral states of honesty and conviction regarding either the truth or the falsity of a proposition, or of a body of opinion;

There is nothing in there that supports the assertion:

> It [the legal system] should also be based on good faith.

Any legal system based on good faith will fall over in its very first year of operation. They are usually designed to be resilient to bad faith actors. The problem (which you seem to be alluding to) is that, by design, the system errs on the side of caution.

In order to actually be punished for barratry, for example, there needs to be evidence beyond reasonable doubt. Any doubt as to the bad-faith intention and the system will not proceed with punitive measures.

And that's just for barratry - the other sins that people perpetrate on the system have equally cautionary consequential actions taken.
by alansammarone | 2025-08-29 07:31:00+00:00
There's a lot of people caricaturing the obvious fact that any model works best in distribution.

The more esoteric your stack, and the more complex the request, the more information it needs to have. The information can be given either through doing research separately (personally, I haven't had good results when asking Claude itself to do research, but I did have success using the web chat UI to create an implementation plan), or being more specific with your prompt.

As an aside, I have more than 10 years of experience, mostly with backend Python, and I'd have no idea what your prompts mean. I could probably figure it out after some google searches, tho. That's also true of Claude.

Here's an example of a prompt that I used recently when working on a new codebase. The code is not great, the math involved is non trivial (it's research-level code that's been productionized in hurry). This literally saved 4 hours of extremely boring work, digging through the code to find various hardcoded filenames, downloading them, scp'ing them, and using them to do what I want. It one-shotted it.

> The X pipeline is defined in @airflow/dags/x.py, and Y in `airflow/dags/y.py` and the relevant task is `compute_X`, and `compute_Y`, respectively. Your task is to:

> 1. Analyze the X and Y DAGs and and how `compute_X` functions are called in that particular context, including it's arguments. If we're missing any files (we're probably missing at least one), generate a .sh file with aws cli or curl commands necessary for downloading any missing data (I don't have access to S3 from this machine, but I do have in a remote host). Use, say, `~/home` as the remote target folder.

> 2. If we needed to download anything from S3, i.e. from the remote host, output rsync/scp commands I can use to copy them to my local folder, keeping the correct/expected directory structure. Note that direct inputs reside under `data/input`, while auxiliary data resides in other folders under `data`. Do not run them, simply output them. You can use for example `scp user@server.org ...`

> 3. Write another snapshot test for X under `tests/snapshot`, and one for Y. Use a pattern as similar as possible to the other tests there. Do not attempt to run the tests yet, since I'll need to download the data first.

> If you need any information from Airflow, such as logs or output values, just ask and I can provide them. Think hard.
by m-a-t-t-i | 2025-08-29 07:31:05+00:00
Here is one excellent resource for all of the things you mentioned: Introduction to Computing with Geometry by Dr. C.-K. Shene https://pages.mtu.edu/~shene/COURSES/cs3621/NOTES/

When I was implementing these, the key was to visualise everything. It was much easier to see if things are correct by stepping through the algorithms graphically than just by looking at the math.
by lubosm | 2025-08-29 07:31:27+00:00
VPN services are just someone else's computers. Any cloud provider with a low performance virtual machine can become a VPN gateway using Linux distribution of your choice for around $4.

OpenVPN or WireGuard are my tools of choice. Professionally, I also use OpenVPN's EasyRSA PKI framework for certificates, but you can just generate your keys using any tutorial out there. "OpenVPN Cookbook" ebook from Packt is my go to source. For performance reasons, WireGuard is better.
by atoav | 2025-08-29 07:32:31+00:00
> Telling people at the coal face to stay cheerful seems unlikely to help.

That isn't what they said tho. They said you have to do something, not that you should just be happy. Doing something can involve things that historically had a big impact in improving working conditions, like collective action and forming unions.

The opposite advice would be: "Everything's fucked, nothing you can do will change it, so just give up." Needless to say that is bad advice unless you are a targeted individual in a murderous regime or similar.
by drdaeman | 2025-08-29 07:33:10+00:00
I don’t think that’s possible. AV data is behind the TLS layer, all the DPI can see is a CBR stream that matches HTTPS signature. Unless it can do a MitM (Kyrgyzstan-style) they can’t really tell anything about the payload content save from what the TLS handshake may expose. Past it, observability stops at packet sizes and timings.

As I understand it, modern DPIs try to fingerprint TLS traffic through feeding data that passed some pattern matching to ML models that try to predict how likely it’s between a genuine commonplace browser and a “normal” webserver (or a video streaming server or game server - whatever they trained it on). And in turn modern obfuscation software tries to match the behavior and be seen exactly as it’s your Chrome user watching some cat videos or something equally innocuous.
by wahern | 2025-08-29 07:33:42+00:00
Yeah. I always disable overcommit (notwithstanding that Linux cannot provide perfectly accurate strict memory accounting), and I'd prefer not to use swap, but Linux VM maintainers have consistently stated that they've designed and tuned the VM subsystem with swap in mind. Is swap necessary in the abstract? No. Is swap necessary on Linux? No. But don't be surprised if Linux doesn't do what you'd expect in the absence of swap, and don't expect Linux to put much if any effort into improving performance in the absence of swap.

I've never ran into trouble on my personal servers, but I've worked at places that have, especially when running applications that tax the VM subsystem, e.g. the JVM and big Java apps. If one wonders why swap would be useful even if applications never allocate, even in the aggregate, more anonymous memory than system RAM, one of the reasons is the interaction with the buffer cache and eviction under pressure.
by idiomat9000 | 2025-08-29 07:33:50+00:00
Well, some shareholders, ceo and some presidents of vices have a great family life.

its just the boomer pension funds going bankrupt demanding the children return to the mines. Give them nothing , the faster this madness burns out, the faster the slavery ends and normal societal economic activity returns .

A economic crash with a renegotiation of circumstances seems preferable to a lifetime of slavery.
by pstuart | 2025-08-29 07:34:14+00:00
Fed Soc, eh? I'm shocked you'd consider Biden as everything I see about the org is as a right wing networking club, culminating in ownership of SCOTUS. I know about Leonard Leo and his goals. You must be so excited to know that his hard work has paid off.

The 6 members of SCOTUS who are of your ilk are the exact enablers of our subject of discussion.

And yet you dodge #1. How artful. Now I know that you've not been engaging in good faith, either intentionally or just how Fed Soc taught you.
by jjcob | 2025-08-29 07:35:08+00:00
It's funny that the original idea for HTTPS was that there should be private communication between clients and service providers, and it somehow got turned on its head and now its just private communication between you and Cloudflare, and they can see all the traffic.

We talk about end to end encryption all the time, but half the web is hosted by a single company with questionable ethics and everyone is like, we trust them! They write technical blog posts!

Even Signal is hosted on Cloudflare...
by jkool702 | 2025-08-29 07:35:16+00:00
no problem. thanks for helping me discover and fix a bug in timep that all my test cases missed.

Sorry the overhead is too high (relative to cube.bash's insanely low avg command runtime of something like 1 microsecond) to be really useful as a profiler...hopefully itll still prove useful strictly for mapping the code execution/structure and seeing how many times a given function got called and things of that nature.
by julian_t | 2025-08-29 07:35:22+00:00
The comparison with mechanical keyboards is spot on! Despite having nothing to do with radio or morse in any way, I was given a Vibroplex and it is quite a piece of kit - solid as a rock and obviously a tool well suited to its one task. It reminds me of some of the old tonearms used on turntables, with many springs, counterweights and possible adjustments.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-29 07:35:59+00:00
Prompt engineering is just writing acceptance criteria; it's moving from someone who writes code to someone who writes higher level feature descriptions. Or user stories, if you will.

Thing is though, many people don't know how to do that (user stories / acceptance criteria) properly, and it's been up to software developers to poke holes and fill in the blanks that the writer didn't think about.
by whstl | 2025-08-29 07:36:36+00:00
LLMs are amazing at producing boilerplate, which removes the incentive to get rid of it.

Boilerplate sucks to review. You just see a big mass of code and can't fully make sense of it when reviewing. Also, Github sucks for reviewing PRs with too many lines.

So junior/mid devs are just churning boilerplate-rich code and don't really learn.

The only outcome here is code quality is gonna go down very very fast.
by bgnn | 2025-08-29 07:37:07+00:00
Yes. It's the best thing happened for the Chinese semiconductor ecosystem. All those Chinese phones, networking equipment etc can't risk using the suppliers in the West as it can be shut down with a decree. Now Huawei, Xiaomi etc are funding so many start-ups and they are buying their products even if it's slightly worse than the state-of-the-art. The next generation of chips are going to be state-of-the-art for sure as there's not much of a gap.

Chinese companies used to open design offices in the West to keep connected to the talent here. In the last 6 months they're massively divesting. This means EEs in China will be valued even more. Add this to 80% of the research in the field happening in Chinese universities now (as opposed to less than 10% 20 years ago), they have everything nicely aligned.
by wink | 2025-08-29 07:37:56+00:00
Maybe I skimmed the article and didn't look for specifics enough, because I did not see a bias towards any level of education. But of course I am biased myself, probably using all the fancy words and still making grammatical errors like a fifth grader, and iirc I did not have a native American coworker (aka people with whom I regularly talk and not just write) for 10 years, only other ESLs and some British people.
by Daviey | 2025-08-29 07:38:08+00:00
Sure, for a traditional (non-blockchain) application this makes sense.

However, to use it with blockchain smart contracts, you'd need to run an oracle to retrieve the data from the authoritative source then submit it to a blockchain, constantly. This moves the responsibility of this back to the government.

If you don't have a blockchain project, then this doesn't add value to you.
by noelwelsh | 2025-08-29 07:39:14+00:00
Of course. I think JS is full of mistakes. To be fair some of the more egregious ones have been fixed, but there are still plenty left.

I'm a big believer in learning new stuff, when that stuff has lasting value. However it is far more efficient to fix things, a one time cost that benefits everyone, than to ask everyone to learn the quirks of a tool, a cost that is paid every time someone new comes along.
by sensanaty | 2025-08-29 07:39:21+00:00
I'm one of those offshore people that live in a cheaper place and works remotely for a US co.

The majority of people in the company are still in the US, and even for the East coast, the timezones are just annoying to work around sometimes. Either I need to do late days, or they have to do uber early mornings/SUPER late days, don't even get me started on West coast where the hours basically never match. And I'm in the closest timezone I can be for the US.

And there's also a cultural aspect to it. I simply work differently to how the US bosses expect, because my employer has to respect worker's rights if they want to hire people in the EU unless they hire them as contractors (they still have many protections in that case though). I clock off at exactly 17:00, I never answer messages outside working hours, I don't do overtime or anything resembling it etc. And yes, they don't pay me the same as I would in the US, but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands. I get paid less relatively, but from what I can tell other that the people getting paid obscene amounts, my quality of life is higher than most of my US counterparts

I've noticed my US colleagues are much more willing to waste away their lives for their employer as well, even if there's no real expectation for them to do so, and the business obviously prefers those kind of employees over the ones like me.

So there's still plenty of reasons to keep hiring US-based devs, from cultural to logistical. Maybe you guys should work on getting some actual worker protections first, though...
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-29 07:39:35+00:00
I don't think that's down to music per se, but a more generalized thing. Software developers love being in a flow state, some of them pursue it all the time (...guilty) and get frustrated when their job changes (e.g. moving towards management) so they spend less time in that flow state.

But also, this can create waste, in that people write the Best Code Ever in their flow state (while listening music or not), but... it wasn't necessary in the first place and the time spent was a waste. This can waste anything from an hour to six months of work (honestly, I had a "CTO" once who led a team of three dozen people or so who actually went into his batcave at home for six months to write a C# framework of sorts that the whole company should use. He then quit and became self-employed so the company had to re-hire him to make sense of the framework he wrote. I'm sure he enjoyed it very much though.)
by fedeb95 | 2025-08-29 07:40:12+00:00
it depends. I myself have some combination of browser extensions which make me a bad guy in Cloudflare opinion. I don't know exactly which one is the culprit because I added a lot of stuff over the years, but I really don't care: if Cloudflare blocks a website, I simply use another one. The good half of the internet will get my traffic.
by King-Aaron | 2025-08-29 07:40:18+00:00
I find the discussion about the Tridactyl mummies fascinating. It has become quite obvious that there's a mixture of real bodies and fake models that pay homage to them, and early media of that really muddied the waters.

But it does sound like those larger ones are (were) real living beings, and not desecrated modern human bodies like a lot of people want to suggest. It would not be the first hominid we've come across in the last decade or so obviously, but they are the strangest.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-29 07:40:50+00:00
> Why is that the "best" way?

"Best way" is often contextual and subjective. In this context (boolean flags to a function), this way is short, readable and scoped, even in C which doesn't even have scoped namespaces.

Maybe there are better ways, and maybe you have a different "best way", but then someone can legitimately ask you about your "best way": `Why is that the "best" way?`

The only objective truth that one can say about a particular way to do something is "This is not the worst way".
by deadbabe | 2025-08-29 07:40:51+00:00
Oh look, another person who thinks engineers are commodities, especially in a field as loosely defined and unregulated as software engineering.

They always ask “if a job can be done remote why not just hire a foreigner in a cheap place?” and never ask “if the foreigner was so good as the American engineer why wouldn’t they be getting paid the same as the American?”

It’s like they think companies are dumb and there is some undiscovered engineering arbitrage opportunity waiting to be tapped that will end the high 6 figure salaries of American software engineers forever.

And yet, since the 90s, software engineer salaries only go up. Millions of Indians flood the foreign markets, but American tech salaries only go up. Covid hits and everyone goes remote, but the salaries only go up. They always go up. American tech holds a supremacy over the world that you will likely not see the end of in your lifetime. There is so much money, so much risk taking, so much drive to dominate, other countries are generations behind.

But hey keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe you’ll save a couple bucks while your competitors gobble up the market with far better engineering talent. Not “equivalent” talent: better talent..
by j1elo | 2025-08-29 07:41:00+00:00
---- BEGIN EDIT

What I meant between the lines is that there are a lot of entitled people everywhere, FOSS users are just an example of it, and one needs to be ready for them whenever setting up for a public-facing endeavor, be it an OSS project or a shop or whatever. Just not let that hit you with low defenses.

I've been an OSS project maintainer myself, and realized that one must be ready to deal with people and their behaviors.

If I could give an actionable tip to the author and all FOSS maintainers (or soon to be) is to add a README section "This project is a garden", and copy it from Valetudo:

https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo?tab=readme-ov-file#valetu...

---- END EDIT

The author complains about how many (probably entitled) users he started having to support, but deeply inside that was not a problem of being an Open Source maintainer as much as a problem of not being prepared to deal with the social side and the normal people's behavior.

There's conflict everywhere. If you gave free umbrellas on the street and some of them were broken, for sure part of those people would turn around and request a good one, to which one needs to be prepared to have an answer, it can be "yeah sorry here you are" or "well it was free, be happy you got something at all"
by VMG | 2025-08-29 07:42:11+00:00
> It configured also non-existent drivers, and for some reason it enabled monkey test support (but not test support).

If it doesn't have the underlying base data, it tends to hallucinates. (It's getting a bit difficult to tell when it has underlying data, because some models autonomously search the web). The models are good at transforming data however, so give it access to whatever data it needs.

Also let it work in a feedback loop: tell it to compile and fix the compile errors. You have to monitor it because it will sometimes just silence warnings and use invalid casts.

> What am I doing wrong? Or is this really the state of the art?

It may sound silly, but it's simply not good at 2D
by jedberg | 2025-08-29 07:42:19+00:00
> An offshore worker gets hired to do a job for another company, an internal employee is part of the company.

I've experienced both. Working with offshore employees and full time employees who happened to be in foreign countries. It was a similar experience with both, the exception being the ones that had previously lived and worked in the US.

> I don't think it's cultural per se. As an extreme example, the CEOs of Google and Microsoft were both born and raised in India.

Sundar Pichai moved to the US when he was in college. His entire working career and a bunch of his schooling was in the US.

Satya Nadella did the same.

As I said in my original reply, the ones who are more entrepreneurial or successful tend to move to the US (or at least used to).
by khafra | 2025-08-29 07:42:31+00:00
My two claims:

1. OpenAI has been doing verifier-guided training since last year.

2. No SOTA model was trained without verified reward training for math and programming.

I supported the first claim with a document describing what OpenAI was doing last year; the extrapolation should have been straightforward, but it's easy for people who aren't tracking AI progress to underestimate the rate at which it occurs. So, here's some support for my second claim:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06920 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11425 https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06807
by hnarn | 2025-08-29 07:42:36+00:00
> bummed to see firefox at version 128

I believe that is because Debian ships Firefox "Extended Support Release" (ESR) as a security precaution, and the firefox-esr package[1] is quite out of date in absolute terms.

If you want the newest Firefox (not ESR), just add Mozilla's own repo instead: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/4-reasons-to-try-mozilla...

[1]: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/firefox-esr
by ThisNameIsTaken | 2025-08-29 07:44:34+00:00
While being an avid Debian user on both server and desktop, I had never heard of the Extrepo[0] package mentioned in the article. It would be great if the repositories included in there would suggest this way of adding their repo. While it cannot guarantee the safety of added packages, it at least add an extra layer of checks.

Another useful thing from the article for me was `apt modernize-sources` to update the existing sources.list to the new structure. Now I need to check if scripts like this run automatically on my auto-updating desktop from my parents.

[0]: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/extrepo
by spwa4 | 2025-08-29 07:44:41+00:00
US customs won't care if they find new electronics, so they're no problem (they are annoying, with the suitcase thing at port-of-entry, but no problem). As for German customs, I don't know, but: do the initial leave out of Germany over the road where there's checks only in theory and leave from an airport not too far over the border. You can probably get a cheaper flight in the process (e.g. Fly from Basel)