MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stmw | 2025-08-16 20:29:12+00:00
Both the Raft algorithm and its explanation are excellent, including this little animated demo that Diego Ongaro (who is also a great guy) made to help explain his invention. While Paxos was first and still popular, I am not sure I would count against any senior engineer unable to explain it to others. With Raft, one ought to be able to do it. Great to see this on HN.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-16 20:29:21+00:00
Usually the "10x" improvements come from greenfield projects or at least smaller codebases. Productivity improvements on mature complex codebases are much more modest, more like 1.2x.

If you really in good faith want to understand where people are coming from when they talk about huge productivity gains, then I would recommend installing Claude Code (specifically that tool) and asking it to build some kind of small project from scratch. (The one I tried was a small app to poll a public flight API for planes near my house and plot the positions, along with other metadata. I didn't give it the api schema at all. It was still able to make it work.) This will show you, at least, what these tools are capable of -- and not just on toy apps, but also at small startups doing a lot of greenfield work very quickly.

Most of us aren't doing that kind of work, we work on large mature codebases. AI is much less effective there because it doesn't have all the context we have about the codebase and product. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes not. But to start making that tradeoff I do think it's worth first setting aside skepticism and seeing it at its best, and giving yourself that "wow" moment.
by coffeeling | 2025-08-16 20:30:04+00:00
Japan has had pro-romanization societies since the 1920's, and even during the last attempt at large-scale script reform after the war, it wasn't just the Americans pushing it: Many Japanese were enthusiastic about moving to a phonetic script because they perceived it as more efficient and modern. Likewise, not every American administrator was in favour of reforming away the kanji, far from it.

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan is a good treatise on the subject.

EDIT: Also, this was published in 1877 if I did my date conversions right: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...
by webstrand | 2025-08-16 20:31:19+00:00
That works for the housing, but not for the blade which usually gets food jammed up in every little crevasse. You can't stick those in the dishwasher because it'll dull the cutting edges. Washing the knife and board is trivial by comparison.

But I don't really have trouble with my eyes with onions, that may be the deciding factor.
by mrlongroots | 2025-08-16 20:31:26+00:00
> you have stated an assumption

I don't think I stated an assumption, this is an assertion, worded rhetorically. You are welcome to disagree with it and refute it, but its structural role is not that of an assumption.

"Can an LLM recognize the context deficit and frame the right questions to ask?"

> a bunch of non-sequitors

I'm guessing you're referring to the "canvas or not" bit? The sequitir there was that LLMs routinely fail to execute simple instructions for which they have all the context.

> not saying you are wrong

Happy to hear counterarguments of course, but I do not yet see an argument for why what I said was not structurally coherent as counterexamples, nor anything that weakens the specifics of what I said.
by haswell | 2025-08-16 20:31:49+00:00
> there’s nothing wrong with hiring other companies’ employees, commonly referred to as “poaching.”

I find it interesting that you used the language "other companies' employees". Isn't this even more problematic than referring to such a practice as poaching? You went from "the word poaching is bad because it implies X" to something that directly indicates ownership (possessive form). I'm not trying to

More to the point: no, hiring people who currently work for other companies is not commonly referred to as "poaching". This is a one-dimensional framing at best (most hiring is organic), and disingenuous at worst (I can't imagine you believe that sentence to be true). I think you probably agree from the context here that a specific kind of hiring is referred to as poaching.

We can agree or disagree about whether that specific kind of hiring is good or bad, but it exists, and generally has characteristics that are not like "normal" hiring. People call it "poaching" to distinguish it from other non-controversial scenarios. What you're arguing here implies we should pretend such controversy doesn't exist.

For sake of argument, you could call this "schmoogling" employees (or whatever you want) if you hate the word "poach", at which point it would still be just as controversial because the underlying behavior is still occurring regardless of the language used.

People would still disagree on whether such behavior is good or bad, and absolutely nothing was gained by not saying they were "poached".

I can accept that we disagree on the universal "goodness" of the hiring practice known as poaching. What makes zero sense to me is arguing that the terminology we use to describe such practices is somehow part of the problem. And if your goal is to change how people view hiring practices, getting people to use different words doesn't change their underlying views. Bottom line: the line of argument you're using doesn't move the conversation in the direction you want it to because it's disconnected from the underlying reality. Policing speech is not the way to change people's minds.

We'll have to agree to disagree and I'm done here (not much else to say). But I hope you have a good Saturday.
by alphazard | 2025-08-16 20:32:04+00:00
An entire post about "good system design" that completely fixates on the solution domain, and doesn't talk about the problem domain at all. The hardest part of system design is the interface that the system presents to users. That determines how they will use it and what they can use it for.

A software system trades problems for different problems. e.g. We will manage your TODO list, provide consistency, durability, security, better than you could do yourself. But in order to get these benefits you have to understand our model, we have TODOs, users, lists, permissions, etc.

Decisions about the interface (what problems the system presents to the users) are the most consequential, and the most costly to get wrong. If you aren't spending most of your time arguing about the interface, then you are wasting your time arguing about things that are comparatively easier to change later. Literally everything else about the system can be changed without bothering the users.
by b112 | 2025-08-16 20:32:49+00:00
I see no one has upvoted! Just as I suspected. Any proof we are in a simulation, will of course be filtered!

Instead of coding corn digestion, and 100 other little things, just code "can't upvote" or "don't notice" into the sim. Heck, you could bypass 1000s upon thousands of little things that way.

edit:

Flagged!! More proof!
by philwelch | 2025-08-16 20:32:51+00:00
There’s another approach, which the US is very experienced with: have your airbase far away from the enemy, perhaps in Missouri, and do a lot of in-air refueling.

Ukraine has been successful attacking Russian airbases with drones because they can sneak entire truckloads of drones and drone pilots into Russian-controlled territory. And even that was a massive operation that took over a year to plan. Israel carried out similar drone operations against Iran, so we know it’s not a fluke and this approach can be effective, but it’s harder to pull off the longer the distances become.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-16 20:33:18+00:00
The problem with this is people seem to have mismatched understandings of what a single system can handle. e.g. my 8 year old quad core i5 desktop with a bit of batching optimization can handle 5 digit requests per second with 15 ms p99 with some nontrivial application logic doing several joins. I don't think I've tried that same benchmark on a modern minipc, but I expect it should be similar. That's well above what most companies will ever need to handle. Visa advertises they can process ~70k tps worldwide.

Last time I interviewed I was asked about designing a system to handle 10s of thousands of events per minute, and if you thought about the problem a little you'd realize most of them didn't require real work to be done. I answered something along the lines of "you don't need to do anything special. Just normal postgres/mysql usage can handle more than that on a laptop". After I got hired I learned the rubric had some expected answers about queues (e.g. Kafka) in it. No idea why still.
Ask HN: Where can I work if I'm just a good developer?
by hdhp | 2025-08-16 20:33:59+00:00
I live in the Bay Area and I’m exhausted trying to prepare and interview like I’m a 10x ultra high performing engineer that will transform everything I touch into solid gold if just given the chance. The truth is, I’m not this person and I don’t have any interest in becoming this person. I have a solid set of skills that I’ve worked hard to achieve, I take pride in my work and work well with others, and I’m confident I can do a good job once hired, but I am someone who does not want my work to be the defining characteristic of who I am. I just want work to be work and how I pay my bills so that I can do the things that bring me joy in life outside of work.

I feel like I’m at a crossroads in my career where I would need to do an enormous amount of self study, interview prep, and personal projects to get to the next level where most of the companies I have interviewed at seem to expect people to be at day one, and if I’m being honest with myself I don’t have the interest to do it anymore. I don’t want to spend my free time this way after already working a full time job where I write code all day, I’m not interested in learning the minute intricacies of technologies I already use at work, I have other ways I want to spend my time frankly.

Are there companies that exist that have a more realistic expectation of hiring and performance standards? I’m not asking for a free lunch, but just something where it’s enough to show up, put in a good day of productive work, then go home. I honestly feel like we (software engineers) take our profession and ourselves a little too seriously in general. Doctors get paged in emergency situations and might have to wake up in the middle of the night. The fact that I can be on call and have to wake up at 4 AM to debug an issue with an analytics dashboard is just ridiculous. Some companies are actually trying to go to 996 work schedules to “win” the AI race, like what is going on here?
by tda | 2025-08-16 20:34:11+00:00
But nearly all plastic recycling companies in the Netherlands have gone bankrupt recently. Unfortunately it is usually best to just burn the plastic for energy.

For the case of PET bottles, recycling is possible if:

- products are made from a single sort of plastic with the intent of recycling - can be collected as a dedicated waste stream - are not contaminated in a way that is not easily cleaned - there are rules and regulations to offset the added costs

As all these conditions have to be met, one might as well use reusable bottles instead of recycling altogether, like we do with glass beer bottles. But then why were plastics used in the first place, as there is then hardly any advantage?
by convo-lang | 2025-08-16 20:34:19+00:00
You sparked an idea that I started working on today. It's more like `make` than `terraform` but will share principals from both.

---

The idea is that convo files will serve as decencies of target outputs and those outputs could be anything from React components to generated images or videos.

---

This should make for a declarative way of defining generated application and content in a way that is repeatable and easy to modify.

---

I'll implement the same caching strategy that `make` uses to minimize the number of tokens consumed as changes to convo files are made.

---

Anybody have any thoughts or suggestions?
by crazygringo | 2025-08-16 20:34:56+00:00
Maybe you're really slow at chopping onions? It takes like 15 seconds to dice an onion once it's peeled. Taking out, disassembling, rinsing, racking, unracking, reassembling, and putting away a food processor takes much much longer, any way you slice it. You're right, it's not even close -- manual dicing is always going to win for just a couple onions, unless you're already using the food processor for something else.
Ask HN: What's in your unfinished projects list?
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-08-16 20:35:45+00:00
AI/LLMs have vastly increased my number of unfinished projects, you too?

I had a handful of unfinished projects pre AI - I now have vast numbers of them.

Little games, technical wizardy, web apps, mobile apps.

I now have vast numbers of unfinished projects.

And to be honest - it's a joy to create software that may never see public release - heck may never even compile properly. It's just so much fun working with AI to design and build software I'll happily spend hours building something then the next day come up with a new idea and move on.

How about you? Do you do the same thing? What's in your unfinished projects list?
by vintermann | 2025-08-16 20:37:15+00:00
No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about David Scott's bijective BWT variant. It sorts symbols by a slightly different type of context, and so can do away with a sentinel symbol or a stored index entirely. It was described in the wikipedia page last I checked.

Scott was a bit of a weirdo, but his algorithm actually got recognition in academia, there have been many papers written about it. One character saved doesn't make a lot of difference for compression, but the transform being a permutation does give it some nice properties.
by crote | 2025-08-16 20:37:28+00:00
A lot of those pain points are involved by virtue of being the original developer. Generating a QR code every single minute for every single user can indeed easily lead to issues, but that's much less of an issue when you're able to change the QR code validity to, say, a week.

If you use online validation you can even dynamically rotate them whenever it suits you - either to adjust server load, or as some kind of "every Nth check-in" scheme. Heck, with online validation it doesn't even matter if the rotation service goes offline for a while!

Or just generate a fixed QR code which never changes. You know, like the 8-digit pin the QR code is the alternative for.
by chrisldgk | 2025-08-16 20:37:35+00:00
People hated it because Google for some reason decided to force it into YouTube by forcing you to link your YouTube account to your G+ account. Remember that stick figure tank guy that was plastered over every comment section?

I believe that’s mostly what killed Google Plus. People were introduced to it in the worst way possible, so nobody actually cared to try it out, even if it was technically a good product.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-08-16 20:37:36+00:00
The problem with copyright is that gives the owner too many other rights that can be summed up as a right to also prevent distribution. This creates an imbalance. The owner should only be given the right to be compensated; but other rights should be stripped. For example, why not to require the right to publish a book to always be a public offer that any publisher can join on the same terms?
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-16 20:39:02+00:00
You keep missing the point and it’s the reason that liberals are out in the wilderness.

Look up Clinton and Sister Soulja and what happened. He was a good enough politician to know that he had to distance himself from policies that the middle found offensive to win elections.

The first job is to get elected. We see the same now with what’s happening in California. Texas is gerrymandering the hell out of Texas. But Newsome is getting push back when he is trying to do the same. Republicans know how to win elections. Democrats are high on “ideals”.
by habinero | 2025-08-16 20:39:23+00:00
You're solving for the completely wrong problem. Several wrong problems, actually.

Your scheme is just debit cards with more work, less privacy and a lot more risk.

Consumers use credit cards because of chargebacks and fraud protection. If I get my card stolen or I accidentally pay a fraudster, I get that money back.

Crypto's irreversibility is one of the worst things about it from a consumer perspective. It's also horrible for privacy since all your transactions are literally public.
by andoando | 2025-08-16 20:39:36+00:00
1. Standardized is absolutely meaningless here. We can develop any set of symptoms, develop a standardized questionnaire, and have millions of people who meet it.

2. CPT measures attention/focus in an entirely made up lab scenario. Attention and focus are not singular numbers, and are deeply tied to the actual emotions, risks, rewards present in a situation, and cannot be so easily measured. I can see the value of a test that measures noticeable difference between two groups, but that says nothing about the cause of those differences, but simply that we can identify different groups of people. You may also very well be selecting here who are depressed, stressed, low energy, or simply people who see no point in spending energy on a completely meaningless task, etc. In any case, I do not believe the evidence of CPT in differentiation is well established. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38317541/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37800347/

3. Personal reports of another person's mental state is as subjective as you can get. All were selecting here is people who do not fit the defined, artificially built, educational or work systems. One may even be excellent, motivated student of music but all accounts fail in a classroom setting.

>The core of diagnosis remains a comprehensive clinical interview and history guided by DSM/ICD criteria.

Clinical interviews are guided, and their interpretation is subjective.

DSM is as subjective as you can get. Every single on of the symptoms has the wording "Often", as decided by a person evaluating another person's account of their life. Do you have an objective measure of what "often" means?".

More importantly, a collection of symptoms does not constitute a singular cause. By the admission of the DSM itself, two people with the diagnosis can share only 4 out of the 9 symptoms (me 1-6, you 3,9), meaning every single one of the symptoms has independent causes. How do you know one does not simply have 6 symptoms by caused by entirely different factors? In a population of hundreds of millions, its a guarantee. You could again, define random symptoms, give it a name and have millions of people going "Wow, no way, I meet all of this, I didnt know I have xyz!"

Lastly, I find it really interesting is that the diagnosis of ADHD came far before we had any of this technology and research you point to. Why was it so popularly pushed and accepted then? Is it possible, were simply trying very hard to fit a completely socially agreed upon disorder?
by gmm1990 | 2025-08-16 20:41:22+00:00
I wouldn’t think gpt5 is any better than the previous chat gpt. I know it’s a silly example but I was trying to trip it up with the 8.6-8.11 and it got it right .49 but then it said the opposite of 8.6 - 8.12 was -.21.

I just don’t see that much of a difference coding either with Claude 4 or Gemini 2.5 pro. Like they’re all fine but the difference isn’t changing anything in what I use them for. Maybe people are having more success with the agent stuff but in my mind it’s not that different than just forking a GitHub repo that already does what you’re “building” with the agent.
by zapzupnz | 2025-08-16 20:42:59+00:00
It seems almost hostile to users. Why should I need to use some third party tool to find your thing? If you're paying for a domain anyway, pay for a meaningful one.

… Well, I guess that's what they've done. Surely nobody could ever have been this naïve, though; it's not as though Google massaging results into unusable mess is anything new.
by msgodel | 2025-08-16 20:43:17+00:00
You think that they:

1) have an ECDSA backdoor

2) are going to burn it on this

I'm not sure. NIST is already on thin ice so they wouldn't just burn the backdoor, this would probably be the last thing anyone trusts from them. Typically these intelligence agencies don't blow stuff like this on money since the federal government can just issue more treasury securities if they're short on that. Finally if bitcoin wallets are broadly compromised there's little value in "holding" it as you can't prove you're the only person able to spend it.

I'm very doubtful.
by TN1ck | 2025-08-16 20:43:25+00:00
Had a similar thought recently: With the advent of AI, custom software became extremely attainable. DHI syndrome suddenly becomes less of an issue - and can actually become a perk, as you build the most minimal software that works for your org, skipping potential vendor / saas fees. Really curious how the landscape of software will change in the next years due to that.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-08-16 20:43:50+00:00
> How about get an actual published language standard?

I’m curious, did you Google before writing this comment? I did just now and the first result I found is https://github.com/rust-lang/reference.

This is something the Rust project is taking very seriously. You can read up on their approach in this detailed blog post from November 2023 - Our Vision for the Rust Specification (https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/11/15/spec-visio...).

This is an ambitious and difficult project that is a work in progress. They’re continuing to work hard at it. There were 2 PRs merged to master less than 2 hours ago when I wrote this comment. On a Saturday, that’s commitment right there.

> How about get more implementations of it?

Here’s what another quick google search yielded. From the official Rust blog, published November 2024: gccrs: An alternative compiler for Rust (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/11/07/gccrs-an-alternative-c...)

Hope that helps dispel the confusion around the lack of spec or alternate implementation.
by ipaddr | 2025-08-16 20:44:27+00:00
This is the reason for facebooks success the rollout. Regardless of when you joined it was always better for you then the next group.

Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard.

There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.
by pygy_ | 2025-08-16 20:44:44+00:00
Patches are changed once per day, and their pharmacokinetics isn't addictive (the nicotine blood levels rise too slowly to give you a dopamine boost).

I sometimes realize in the afternoon that I forgot to change my patch in the morning because I'm a bit drowsy (a feeling not unlike being uncaffeinated when you're used to drinking coffee). AFAIK the withdrawal symptoms fade out in at most a week.
by barrell | 2025-08-16 20:44:58+00:00
Yes but almost definitionally that is everyone who did not find value from LLMs. If you don’t find value from LLMs, you’re not going to use them all the time.

The only people you’re excluding are the people who are forced to use it, and the random sampling of people who happened to try it recently.

So it may have been accidental or indirectly, but yes, no true Scotsman would apply to your statement.
by nine_zeros | 2025-08-16 20:45:46+00:00
Everyone who was voting for trump because IlLeGaLs was made aware that this administration is fascist and doesn't care about criminals - they only care about appearance of doing something - even if it harms legal innocents.

Yet, people voted for trump. As much as it hurts to say this, America is truly a fallen country as evidenced by the hateful people.