MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burnte | 2025-08-07 16:09:03+00:00
Good ones really do and they work hard to enhance the productivity of their workers. I always say to my people that my job is to make their jobs easier, and to a large degree that's true.

There are other types who prefer the power trip, or that if you're a bad manager then your job is pretty easy, etc. But GOOD execs actually do care quite a lot. I tend to tangle with HR over salaries because I'd rather hire a handful of really good people for 15% above market and get double the productivity than a lot of people at or below market.

This article is confusing the corporate raider mindset rampant in big public companies with the genuine growth mindset most companies actually have. Everyone focuses on productivity and costs, enshittification only happens when you're near enough of a monopoly you can afford to squeeze your customers. Most companies can't do that and most companies try to just keep improving. Don't look at MS or Exxon and think that's who most companies actually work. That's just the beginning of the end stage of a megacorporation's life.
by medbrane | 2025-08-07 16:09:08+00:00
Indeed, the article would have been correct one year ago.

Now, modern LLM APIs do require the tools to be described outside the prompt [1]. This negates the whole article, although one bit where he's right is that it does not matter if those tools are MCP tools or local, the call to LLM looks the same.

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling?api...
by vermaden | 2025-08-07 16:09:15+00:00
If you just want a browser and notepad - then ANY system would do - even Android on X86 PC.

If you want a powerful development/work environment - and you do like what and how Linux provides here - use Linux - but as I was not satisfied with what/how Linux provided I looked somewhere else and I landed in FreeBSD.

Here are some of the reasons and conclusions I came to after using FreeBSD (and also Linux/AIX/HP-UX/Solaris in various jobs) for about 20 years.

Here:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/
by m4rtink | 2025-08-07 16:09:24+00:00
So you just make it so they don't notice they are on an interstellar mission - sorry, to board the train to the capital you still need to fill in form XB1, but the officer who can fill it is on vacation (in the capital and the trains totally go somewhere!) - please come next cycle.

Basically an unhollo combination of Kafka and Truman show, keeping the community stable until arrival. :)
by qcnguy | 2025-08-07 16:09:32+00:00
Asimov didn't describe robots programmed using formal logic. All robots in Asimov's stories had "positronic brains" that were described as being quite humanlike and unpredictable. His stories all revolve around this: the 3 laws are intentionally vague and open to interpretation, allowing non-deterministic or surprising outcomes. Not so different to LLMs.
by owenversteeg | 2025-08-07 16:09:40+00:00
>This makes it a very regressive tax structure

That's objectively false. Georgism is one of the few reliably progressive tax structures, ask any economist.

The "little old grandma in her forever home surrounded by incredibly valuable real estate" trope is a) fairly uncommon + a very small percentage of total real estate and b) very common in conservative billboards advocating for highly regressive cuts to property tax. At the end of the day, if your little old grandma owns $5M in prime real estate, she is very wealthy and can certainly afford the property taxes, and pretending otherwise is how we get policy disasters like San Francisco.

But of course, the overwhelming majority of unimproved property is not owned by little old grandmas, it is owned by real estate corporations. The half acre of Grandma's house pales in comparison to the literal _billions_ (!) of parking spaces in the US, or empty lots, or empty buildings. Drive around NYC and tell me the ratio of acreage owned by little old ladies to that of underutilized land owned by real estate corporations.
by Zigurd | 2025-08-07 16:09:43+00:00
The words "woman" or "women" appear zero times on this thread up to my composing this post. The word "female" appears once in the context of how to breed a next generation without any women.

That's why none of this is going to work. Is that blunt enough for you? Have any of you asked a woman about the utter insanity of generation ships? Do you think maybe the tech industry still needs to do some work about gender equality, and the resulting quality of decision-making in tech management and investment?
by legends2k | 2025-08-07 16:10:18+00:00
My comment didn't convey it, but I'm with you on using the right tool for the right job. Just that I always don't have the luxury to do so. And yes like the other comment I'd use it for throw away scripts and glue code, instead of installing a new toolchain. Longevity and importance should warrant doing it. Cheers!
by crystal_revenge | 2025-08-07 16:10:20+00:00
Seriously, my last two roles at startups have been the most work of my career (including earlier work at startups). Everyone I know is pretty frequently working nights and weekends to make sure everything gets shipped. The “mindless code” is mostly written by AI so, at least for me, most of the code I’m writing requires a white board to work out that the math is correct. At the other end of my current company people are physically managing warehouses; certainly looks like work to me.

I’ve had cushy jobs that the author is mistaking for “all jobs”, but my experience is that these places are in decline and when layoffs come, get ready to work hard if you want another job.
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-07 16:10:38+00:00
>They can’t imagine going without food for a few hours.

The best example of this phenomena is the movies. People start snacking the moment they enter and continue through the whole show, which is a conditioned response that theatres quite literally created -- normalizing that it's a "part of the experience" -- for revenue production.

Can people really not fathom going a couple of hours without stuffing their faces? It's bizarre.

I feel the same way about flying. It's amazing how demanding people are to be fed on even short flights, when the whole process is just annoying and overbearing.
by maxbond | 2025-08-07 16:11:12+00:00
No, you should definitely exercise good judgement in delivering a good UI to the user that doesn't lock up if they happen to type very quickly. But it is context dependent, and sometimes you will want to show them results for "a", sure. "No one" was rhetorical.

In your example, the developers have exercised poor judgment by making a brittle assumption about the data. That's bad. But there is no UX without some model of the user. Making assumptions about user's rate of perception is much safer (in a web app context, it would be a different story in a competitive esports game).
by dylan604 | 2025-08-07 16:11:13+00:00
Offsite does not have to mean another cloud solution. If you have a copy of data on a thumbdrive or other external media, you can leave it at your parent's house (or other family member). You can keep a copy of it in a safety deposit box. If it's at a family member's house, it's just an excuse to visit on a semi-regular schedule as you swap out with an updated version.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-07 16:11:18+00:00
> MCP sucks because it has to be connected to a desktop client.

No, it doesn't need to be connected to a desktop client. It is true that the original use was for connecting local tools over stdio to a desktop client, and it is currently more supported in desktop clients than others, but it now includes remote support and, e.g., ChatGPT Deep Research has support for remote MCP, but only for servers with a very specific shape.
by user_7832 | 2025-08-07 16:11:35+00:00
This works if the users are able to use the product (in this case on their personal device maybe) first, and are part of the same organisation.

But what about cases where the user isn't directly related to the decision maker? Doubly so when it's a hard to justify purchase? (I.e. you're not selling bread or IBM machines.)

For example, say, a keyless entry fob for a car. The driver benefits immensely. The CTO of Ford may probably not even entertain a meeting ("Huh, what does he think, locks are bad or something?! What's wrong with a secure lock?")

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach such a situation if you developed the fob and now want to sell it?
by cnst | 2025-08-07 16:12:07+00:00
Yup, that's because X is part of OpenBSD base system, called xenocara, whereas in FreeBSD, you have to use the Ports tree to install Xorg.

Ports tree in general is a great way to install third-party software, but not necessarily for Xorg.

You still install KDE or GNOME through ports/packages on both systems, but X being more tightly integrated with the base system has benefits in reducing complexity for the rest of the components.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-07 16:12:13+00:00
One of the questions we always ask of cloud hosted companies what their plan is in case they ever lose their cloud account. Typically this is met with incredulity: nobody has ever lost their AWS account and all it's data? Right? Right???

Well, not normally, no. But it does happen. Not often enough to be a meaningful statistical issue, but if it were to happen to you then a little forethought can turn a complete disaster into a survivable event. If you store all your data 'in the cloud' realize that your account could be compromised, used to store illegal data, be subject to social engineering and lots of other ways that could result in a cloud services provider to protect their brand rather than your data. If - like the author - you are lucky you'll only be down for a couple of days. But for most businesses that's the end of the line, especially if you run a multi-tenant SaaS or something like that. So plan for the worst and hope for the best.
by jackero | 2025-08-07 16:12:16+00:00
Maximizing productivity comes from maximizing efficiency. Efficiency is about sitting down and analyzing your tasks holistically and doing min-maxing to ensure every process achieves its greatest result.

Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-07 16:12:19+00:00
The hate for EA comes from a bug in it.

If you put your time horizon out far enough, you can calculate an almost infinite positive value as the end result of your actions today. From an infinite positive value, you can justify doing almost infinite amounts of damage now in order to reach that golden future.

But like most "ends justify the means" philosophies, we never seem to actually get the claimed ends, but we do get the damage from the means. If you do terrible things to create a wonderful future, your theoretical wonderful future never seems to show up, but you still do the terrible things.

I'm not the one you were asking, but I think this summarizes most peoples' objection to EA.

The problem is that EA isn't true to its label. If you really wanted to do effective altruism, you'd make sure that it actually works. I could get behind that.
by _fat_santa | 2025-08-07 16:12:33+00:00
A big part of this is economies of scale, the reason your cheap compact gets a digital guage cluster is that the cluster has already been engineered and tested and it's just cheaper to slap that in there instead of re-engineering.

But while it makes it cheaper for the manufacturer and ultimately cheaper for the buyer on the lot, it makes for much more expensive repairs. I'm looking at you Ford with your $1200 taillights.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-07 16:12:39+00:00
I don't judge the parents for doing this. Grief expresses itself in a lot of ways that may not make any sense or seem healthy outside of those suffering it. They're doing what they need to do to be OK.

I 100% judge Acosta for doing doing the "interview", though. It's ghoulish, deceptive, manipulative, and thoroughly abhorrent. It isn't even really an interview, it just dresses up as one.
by chubot | 2025-08-07 16:12:50+00:00
You could say "Linux was CREATED out of thin air", and I wouldn't argue with you.

But creation only counts for so much -- without support, Linux could still be a hobby project that "won't be big and professional like GNU"

I'm saying Linux didn't APPEAR out of thin air, or at least it's worth looking deeper into the reasons why. "Appearing" to the general public, i.e. making widely useful software, requires a large group of people over a sustained time period, like 10 years.

----

i.e. Right NOW there are probably hundreds of projects like Linux that you haven't heard of, which don't necessarily align with funders

I would actually make the comparison to GNU -- GNU is a successful project, but there are various efforts underneath it that kind of languish.

Look at High Priority Free Software Projects - https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/

- Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting

- Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs

- Real-time voice and video chat

- Internationalization of free software

- Security by and for free software

- Intelligent personal assistant

I'm saying that VIDEO CODECS might be structurally more similar to these projects, than they are to the Linux kernel.

i.e. making a freely-licensed kernel IS aligned with Red Hat, Intel, Google, but making an Intelligent Personal Assistant is probably not.

Somebody probably ALREADY created a good free intelligent personal assistant (or one that COULD BE as great as Linux), but you never heard of them. Because they don't have hundreds of companies and thousands of people aligned with them.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-08-07 16:13:02+00:00
Maybe I am out of touch, but I don’t believe token gen Z influencer is a highly paid job like SWE is.

There are lots of do nothing jobs out there (bureaucrat, HR, excel guru, receptionist, etc) where you can coast doing maybe an hour of real work per day, but you are not getting paid the $100k-$300k the article quotes.

You can find out there SWE jobs around $100k that you can get away with doing nothing as the organizations tend to not be technically strong and therefore the organization is not able to or does not measure your output. I used to work in such a job, but got bored and wanted more money. I climbed several rungs up the salary ladder, but now my output is much more carefully measured and I do actually have to work the full day. I think the jobs that pay $300k and you don’t have to work are basically nonexistent now, that was a product of zirp. Maybe back in 2022 you could get a cushy job and rake it in, but not any longer.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-08-07 16:13:29+00:00
This is an outstanding library which is more of a CLI framework.

It's seriously optimized and includes ready to use modules which are alternative to Nim's standard library or more tailored/opinionated interfaces for basic POSIX software building blocks.

Don't skip going over examples[1]. All of those are fully functional programs, some are pretty niche, but all are very usable and, I bet @cb321 will confirm, in some cases are competitive with widely-used alternatives.

https://github.com/c-blake/cligen/tree/master/examples
by tptacek | 2025-08-07 16:13:31+00:00
I don't think the code is a mess (I've had to work with it before) and I don't think these vulnerabilities are shocking. This is an unusually thorough research project and if you look at any project you're going to find these kinds of logic vulnerabilities; the TOCTTOU parse differential thing is a classic insidious finding, because there's no pattern to match it to.
by jerf | 2025-08-07 16:13:44+00:00
And if it turns out to be wrong for whatever reason, you can be confident your fixes will propagate anywhere the types are defined. If the situation is extremely bad, especially the sort of thing where all the users must still do something that you can't offload entirely on to the type (such as an entirely new set of methods and flow for correct usage), you can define a brand new type and the compiler will guide you as to how to force the entire system to be fixed as you push the new type in and remove the old one.

I've done all these things in fairly high-security contexts where I had a very critical username normalization step. It's a very valuable tool.
by sbrother | 2025-08-07 16:13:47+00:00
I'm in the same boat. I just cannot get them to work; they work sometimes on some browsers, but a solid majority of the time I click on "use passkey" I get a generic error message and end up going back and using the password flow.

I haven't invested more time in this because if it's so unusable for me as an engineer, it's a non-starter for the general public.
by vermaden | 2025-08-07 16:13:59+00:00
Earlier I used FreeBSD on ThinkPad W520 (because keyboard):

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/04/14/freebsd-13-1-on-th...

.. and recently moved to FrankenPad T25 that is based on T480 (because keyboard):

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/06/26/freebsd-14-3-on-fr...

I do everything on FreeBSD including work.

Some of the topics I covered:

- Unlock Laptop with Phone

- Conferencing and Meetings

- Netflix Signal Telegram

- Network Management with network.sh

- FreeBSD Power Management

- FreeBSD Suspend/Resume

- Oldschool Gaming on FreeBSD

- Minecraft Server in FreeBSD Jails Container

- Secure Containerized Browser

- Print on FreeBSD

- Scan on FreeBSD

- Sensible Firefox Setup

- Operate Android Device on FreeBSD

- FreeBSD Alongside Windows

To just name a few ... because I am slowly closing to 200 of these FreeBSD related articles.

% ls ~/misc/verblog/POSTS | wc -l 175

Regards, vermaden
by stonecharioteer | 2025-08-07 16:14:04+00:00
I don't agree with the OP, AI assisted reading is the future, especially when you're trying to read a tome like War and Peace and don't know all the Napoleonic references or thst the Russian aristocracy spoke French and tried to emulate the French, or why that matters a lot to the plot and your perception of them.

Good job, OP. I wanted to build this myself.

Do you have plans for android and iOS support and syncing across devices?
by koakuma-chan | 2025-08-07 16:14:13+00:00
Maybe there are, but I don't know. It seems pointless to try Fiverr and similar platforms, because it seems they are already flooded with freelancers. But I never did contracting so I am pretty clueless about that. I've read old HN threads and the general consensus seems to be that you have to have connections to get customers.
by 9rx | 2025-08-07 16:14:25+00:00
> the cutoff for Pedophilia is 13.

The "cutoff" is normally considered to be puberty. At puberty the human form starts to change, which is what we consider significant. That doesn't magically happen on your 13th birthday. Not having reached puberty by the age of 13 would be statistically unusual, though. I guess that is what you mean?

But, sure, pedophilia might even apply to a 14 year old in some extreme cases. Regardless, it is quite apparent that Trump's ilk like those who at least show some "development". If they are closeted pedophiles, they have certainly done well to keep that from the limelight.

> Guess I was wrong.

Arbitrarily defining a word doesn't make you wrong. All words are ultimately randomly made up on the spot. That is how natural language works. However, the behaviour that followed was, let's say... interesting. I specifically asked in the very first sentence if you meant ephebophilia to clarify your intent. Rationally, that is where one would say: "Oh yes, that is what I am talking about", "I define pedophilia as...", or at very least "I am not familiar with ephebophilia. What is that?" so that we could converge on a shared understanding. Instead, we got a wild train ride to nowhere, only now finally getting an answer to the original question.

But, hey, you do you.
Show HN: FocusTree – a simple task app (prototype), free open source
by proc0 | 2025-08-07 16:14:37+00:00
Use it here: https://proc0.github.io/focustree/

All data is stored locally. I built this is a proof of concept because I needed unlimited branching on tasks and a way to walk through the task tree step by step. I will build on this as I go, so all feedback is greatly appreciated.
by o_nate | 2025-08-07 16:14:37+00:00
Exactly. In many organizations this is a coordination problem at the organizational level, not an individual lack of initiative. I imagine if someone looked at an army, they would say, hey these guys are just polishing their boots, and filling out paperwork and doing meaningless tasks, why does the military pay their salaries? Well, you need those people there to be ready when the war breaks out. The same thing often happens in corporations.
by net01 | 2025-08-07 16:15:09+00:00
Seeing modern standby is pretty insane in such a short time; it was one of the most attended talks in the BSD talks at FOSDEM:

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6390-wake...

Also pretty impressive because Aymeric started as a GSoC contributor and is now sponsored to work on BSD by the foundation.
by adamgordonbell | 2025-08-07 16:15:16+00:00
Wow, small world, I just made a podcast episode about the dangers of turning your brain off when using Agentic coding solution and referenced the whispering earring as my metaphor.

I feel like if you use the agentic tools to become more ambitious the you'll probably be fine. But if you just work at a feature factory where you crank out things as fast as you can AI coding is going to eat your brain.

Link: https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/#the-whispering-ear...
by AlotOfReading | 2025-08-07 16:15:39+00:00
The complete abandonment of budget models in the US is completely foreseeable from market dynamics and how the industry is structured.

1. Economies of scale are the only way to build a budget car.

2. The incremental costs of adding features are nearly zero. The vast majority of price comes from the basic costs of building a legal vehicle.

3. Buyers generally won't reject a car for having features they don't care about, but they'll frequently reject a car for lacking a feature they deem important.

4. Buyers have different preferences.

In order to sell at a low price, automakers have to sell as many as possible to hit massive economies of scale. In order to sell that many, they need to please a huge number of buyers, which means they add a whole bunch of cheap features to satisfy as many buyers as they can without cannibalizing their higher-tier offerings.

The other side of this is the price point that western OEMs can actually hit with economies of scale has climbed significantly in recently decades, in part due to inflation / wage pressures, but mainly due to massive institutional inefficiencies. Mary Barra's compensation alone adds several dollars to the price of each GM vehicle. Legally mandated dealer margins and fees add tens of percent to the price that consumers pay. The inefficiencies of spreading production for tax purposes across state and international borders adds more cost. So on and so forth, and the market feedback mechanisms to correct these issues are intentionally hampered by policy decisions to favor the current status quo.

Change in the market needs support at the regulatory level.
by bredren | 2025-08-07 16:15:54+00:00
If you have it right, there is a brief discussion on semantic linting in this recent interview with Boris Cherny and Catherine Wu on the Latent Space podcast related to AI-assisted CLI behavior here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDmW5hJPsvQ&t=1760s

I've not explored this use of CC yet, anyone actively using AI-assisted CLI in CI/CD? Not automated PR review but either to semantically pass / fail an MR or some other use of terminal-capable, multi-context mashup during CI/CD?