MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by itzoen | 2025-08-04 22:24:45+00:00
Hey HN – I’m working on a browser that lets people leave comments and reactions on top of any website, like adding a social layer to the web.

It’s still a prototype, but the core idea is:

Leave thoughts, notes, or reactions on any website

See what others said when visiting the same page

Save websites into public folders (like a profile of your favorite links)

It’s early, so there aren’t many comments yet — I’m looking for feedback and thoughts on whether this could be useful, fun, or totally unnecessary.
by asta-li | 2025-08-04 22:25:40+00:00
Privy | NYC or Remote | Staff engineering roles (Backend, Frontend, Security & more) | Full-Time https://www.privy.io/careers#open-positions

Hi, I'm Asta, CTO at the identity and wallet infra startup Privy. We build a wallet and digital asset API that over a thousand companies integrate in order to onboard (75M+) users onto products built with blockchain infra and distributed systems.

We solve hard product design and security problems in order to shift the status quo around digital ownership and protect the accounts and assets of millions of users. With our work, we stand to transform how users think about asset ownership and money movement online.

We're a small, high-ownership team building a product with incredibly scaled usage (>12M MAUs, massive transaction volume). We were recently acquired by Stripe — while we'll remain an autonomous team and stand alone product, joining Stripe will help significantly accelerate our growth and impact.

https://www.privy.io/careers#open-positions
by toss1 | 2025-08-04 22:26:29+00:00
The "Autopilot" on planes is a lovely technical distinction. Hardly any non-aviator knows the details, and the common idea is that the plane pilots itself in most phases of non-emergency flight. And indeed, some autopilot functions can even auto-land according to the flight plan. But there is a bit of wiggle-room there to say people should expect to pay attention.

Tesla's "Full Self Driving" leaves no such room. The only exception would be to consider Tesla to be lying.

"Full", adjective Containing all that is normal or possible. "a full pail." Complete in every particular. "a full account."

That's just the first DDG search. Go to ANY other dictionary and show me where "Full" in ordinary American English usage means anything other than complete, no exceptions, etc.

"Full Self Driving" literally means "It FULLY drives itself".

It does NOT mean "You and the automobile co-drive the car", or "Mostly self-driving", or "Sometimes self-driving", or "Self driving until it can't figure it out or fcks up", the latter of which seems the most accurate.

If Tesla had called it ANY of those other things, they would be fine. And would be honest.

But instead, Musk and Tesla decided to lie in plain language. And for that, they lost the case, and will likely lose many others.

For some people, honesty matters. And honesty is not splitting hairs over differences between detailed technical meaning vs colloquial understanding ("autopilot"), or using the end-goal a decade+ away as the official name and description of the feature set ("Full Self Driving"). That is dishonest.
by cush | 2025-08-04 22:26:31+00:00
> "Screen-free" is clearly implying disapproval of screen time.

This is entirely an assumption on your part. Just because parents are looking for screen-free activities doesn't mean they're anti-screen. They're two totally different things. Most parents want to balance screen time with screen-free time. This doesn't imply anything. When you see a gluten-free option on a menu, do you feel so attacked? While some people may be so gluten-free that they impose their preachy anti-bread beliefs on others, most folks don't and are either looking to avoid wheat or have an allergy.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-04 22:26:42+00:00
So true. That was Meta's all too generic strategy for the Metaverse, throw tons of money and people at the problem. And it worked as poorly as one would expect.

Now Meta is doing it again for AI.

Apple won't throw money down a hole like that, but they definitely need a more original and opinionated strategy than just an increased talent count.

The lack of love they gave Siri and AI in general, since they bought the original Siri tech in 2010, just keeps looking like a worse and worse oversight.
by jjulius | 2025-08-04 22:26:59+00:00
>If you know the hotel you want, yes you're better off going direct, but if you want to browse its nice to have.

I see this in a bunch of the responses, that these sites are great for "discovery". I don't have a preference one way or another, but I'm wondering... why not, say, Google Maps? Go to the locale you want, search for hotels, voila. There's your discovery.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-04 22:27:06+00:00
They have valid points but I think a real discussion has to be a lot broader and include things like: the Ivy League just doesn't admit enough students to have a decisive impact on social mobility, so much of the "meritocracy" story involves what happens outside college, almost all professors are professor's kids, the pipeline into academia used to be a lot more diverse and could take people like Eric Hoffer and Stanley Aronowitz from a working class background -- 'DEI' as we know it makes the pipeline more rigid which is particularly problematic for women (but, hey, maybe there won't be as many professor's kids in the future and they'll have to recruit more broadly)
by a2g | 2025-08-04 22:27:15+00:00
In the era of expensive LLM tokens, prompt optimization isn't just about trimming text—it's about rethinking structure. TokenSpan explores a lightweight alternative to compression: swapping repeated phrases with reusable aliases, dictionary-style. No byte-level hacking, just smarter prompt design. Think §a → generate summary, used consistently across your app. It’s not a library (yet)—it’s a thought experiment in how we might reduce cost and enforce structure in natural language interfaces.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-08-04 22:28:13+00:00
Do you still have the source code for the j2me app?

I hadn’t yet learned to program back when I was still using a feature phone, but I have a lot of fond memories of J2ME applications that I installed on my phones. Mostly games, of course.

I encourage anyone that wrote J2ME games and utilities, no matter how small or big, to upload the source to GitHub :)
by aquariusDue | 2025-08-04 22:28:41+00:00
I agree that it's a good distinction to make. Personally I haven't thought about it till I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. In the book he specifically teaches writing nonfiction and even shares an anecdote where he was a guest on a radio show promoting a writing conference and was annoyed with the host because he conflated writing with literary works.

So yeah, I recommend the book to people interested in writing.
by TheMagicHorsey | 2025-08-04 22:28:45+00:00
The licensing on this project is wonky. They have an MIT license, but then they say you can't use the software for commercial purposes without contacting them. That's in contradiction to an MIT license. An MIT license is basically "use it for anything". If you don't want that, then use some kind of "copyleft" license for non-commercial users, and specify separate commercial terms for users who want to keep closed source with their modifications.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-04 22:29:22+00:00
> isn't that what we want from our newspapers? To be neutral during elections and just report what's going on?

There's no such thing as 'neutral' in the media business. Bezos did not endorse Trump but he left his fellow oligarch to fund and promote him without a counter-balance.

Bezos craves Trump's policies because they strongly support monopolistic entities like him - deregulation, tariffs for market cornering, inflation, high deficit and low taxes for high profits. These are policies that make Bezos richer, assuming he cares about anything else is severe misunderstanding of the oligarchic mind.

There's no material reason to believe that Bezos is sincere in his "centrist" posturing, such believes can only be due to mental impairment or conflicts of interest. Thus, people who are smart and don't like being played are dropping his paper.
by analog31 | 2025-08-04 22:29:31+00:00
>>> imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable

It didn't.

I was in math class when calculators were introduced. At least for high school level and beyond, the curricula were designed to make problems solvable without calculators, and they weren't of much use. This was still the case when I taught an undergrad college math class in 1997. Graphing calculators were allowed, and the kids who tried to use them just screwed themselves up.

I would have gladly changed the curriculum to use calculators and computers from the very beginning. As tools, and not just to administer the same old exercises and quizzes. Give them Jupyter Notebook. Math education has never been a success story.

Education faces a dilemma, which is that it has always used heuristics to guide study and assess performance. Exercises such as the "three paragraph essay" had no use in the real world, even long before AI could generate them on demand. When one of those heuristics is broken, another one has to be found. Even word processing forced teachers to grade papers on content, rather than mechanics.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-08-04 22:29:44+00:00
Did you put it on linkedin easyapply? That is part of the issue. So many applications I have done where its like 1 click to apply. How is this useful to people on either end? I have no clue about the job. They hardly know anything about me. game theory tells me to apply for all of these even if they are hardly relevant and the lack of friction enables it.

You want fewer candidates? Just post it on your website perhaps. You will then be limited to more ideal candidates that have identified your business as a potential fit for their skillsets, and have bothered to visit your careers page and put up with your own sisyphean system to repost what information is in the resume onto your form fields for hr who apparently cannot read a resume.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-08-04 22:29:46+00:00
I was going to say that I'm not certain the knowledge is there and tried an experiment: If you give it a random bible passage in Greek, can it produce decent critical commentary of it? That's something it's certainly ingested mounds of literature on, both decent and terrible.

Checked with a few notable passages like the household codes and yeah, it does a decent (albeit superficial) job. That's pretty neat.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-04 22:30:37+00:00
Valgrind sometimes has problems with encapsulated C libraries slow anonymous memory leaks. For example, the session caching in modern libcurl is obfuscated fairly well from novices.

Valgrind is good to run as a sanity check, but I prefer a month under a regression test hammer to validate something isn't going to slowly frag itself before scheduled maintenance. =3
by blacksmith_tb | 2025-08-04 22:30:46+00:00
I agree that all makes benign much more likely - the Dark Forest arguments mostly come down to "if aliens are as bad as humans (especially as bad as we were hundreds or thousands of years ago), we're doomed".

That seems extremely unlikely, we're far from advanced enough to send a probe to another solar system, by the time we are, I'd like to think we'll be even less likely to want to exterminate or enslave anyone...
by intervolz | 2025-08-04 22:30:58+00:00
Real-time systems engineer building insight from signals, sensors, and software.

Location: San Francisco, CA Remote: Yes – hybrid preferred, but fully remote OK Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, TypeScript, Linux, WebSockets, React, Three.js, Blender, Postgres, Redis, RF Systems, Embedded Systems, Multithreading, Automation Frameworks, GLTF, Unity, Serial & Socket I/O

Website: [https://intervolz.com/resume.pdf](https://yourdomain.com/resume.pdf) Resume: [https://intervolz.com/downloads/mvolz_resume.pdf](https://intervolz.com/downloads/mvolz_resume.pdf) Email: maxwellvolz@gmail

---

I'm a senior software engineer with 10+ years of experience building full-stack systems at the intersection of hardware and software. Most recently I led AR/VR automation at Meta, built real-time performance tracing tools with Perfetto, and drove CPU/GPU profiling pipelines for next-gen wearable devices. Before that, I verified phased-array antenna hardware and built full-stack systems for the HAPS project (SoftBank acquisition).

I love turning messy real-world systems into interactive software tools. My skillset spans system design and integration, high-throughput automation, and modern tech stacks. I’m especially into creative 3D UIs, live visualization of physical systems, and tools that empower engineers and artists.

I'm looking for teams solving weird problems that may have physical interfaces, spatial tech, or just need a hacker who figures stuff out and makes it feel polished. Growth-stage startups or skunkworks teams are ideal.
by lurking_swe | 2025-08-04 22:31:07+00:00
If one is clueless with investing and taxes in general, and they call vanguard, their eyes will glaze over. It would be like me explaining software development to my 85 year old father.

I do agree people should call vanguard. But just blindly following steps they give you is unlikely to be productive if you don’t understand why you’re doing those steps. Furthermore, those people who don’t understand _why_ will freak out every time there’s a huge market correction. They get scared - because they don’t understand any of it.

I’m also curious, do they offer financial advice for your accounts outside vanguard? Genuinely curious since i’m unsure.
by atoav | 2025-08-04 22:31:45+00:00
Without looking anything up:

"Depends in which context we are talking about it, but in the broadest sense it is a defined systemic boundary between two different domains. E.g. a User interface marks the boundary between the user and the program, an API could mark the boundary between the program and other programs, an ABI can mark the boundary between binary data and programs who read that data and so on. Ideally you want those interfaces to be well defined as theh act as translation layers and other systems can start to rely on the shape of an interface. "

I could then talk about why interfaces can act as a decoupling layer etc.
by rayiner | 2025-08-04 22:31:53+00:00
The traditional definition of “racism” focuses on treating individuals differently because of their immutable characteristics. Democrats have turned that concept on its head, to encompass opposing cultural change to a community from mass migration of people from foreign cultures. Regarding the specific example, the “food versus pet” distinction is a core one in any culture.[1] Vance’s story aptly illustrates the cultural friction that’s happening. Stephen Colbert would call it “truthy.”

[1] When I was a kid, my muslim immigrant mom told me not to marry a white girl because “they eat snakes.” I married a white girl, and she had in fact eaten a snake before. Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!
by kstrauser | 2025-08-04 22:32:05+00:00
I'd content that it's out of ignorance, and I don't mean that in a mean or nasty way. I've heard lots of pushback from PHP devs that it's way easier to update than sites written in other languages are, but I think it's genuinely due to a lack of understanding of why those languages recommend other upgrade processes. Those processes solve real, genuine problems that also affect PHP, but they're dismissed as overkill or enterprisey or overly complicated.

And all that may be true for a trivial website. If you've written a personal project with 10,000 hits per year, YOLO. Go for it. The odds of it affecting one of those users is vanishingly tiny, and so what if it does? But if you're hosting something like a Wordpress site for a large company with lots of traffic, it's crucial to understand why "just rsync the files over" is not an acceptable deployment method.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-08-04 22:32:06+00:00
That's right. So essentially we are in a deadlock where every side says "im only contributing fractionally to the problem", and nobody on Earth really has the full capability of blocking the activities you described from happening, especially not when there is good money to be made (e.g coal mining vs AI vs raising cows)

Doesn't seem like a bright future, but at least AI does have a chance of solving the problem while contributing to it. No other behavior could really say the same.
by 9rx | 2025-08-04 22:32:22+00:00
> All questions you posed so far had this arrogant air to them

Arrogance has nothing to do with anything, so this seems logically flawed, no? However, in the interest of trying to better understand your take, how would you have alternatively phrased them to not have that "air to them"?

> If you can't bother to express yourself better why should I make this effort of guessing what you mean?

Why make a foolish guess when you can simply ask more about what was intended to be meant? Now that I have introduced you to the concept of asking a question, you've sensibly started doing exactly that, but if we look back at earlier comments...
by kjkjadksj | 2025-08-04 22:33:30+00:00
It is interesting how pared down job applications have become. Its like no wonder applicants are so high in numbers now. They put them on 1 click apply sites like linkedin or indeed. You can't even submit a cover letter if you wanted, much less references. I am in a round of job hunting and out of ~110 applications only 1 single company asked for references in the application stage. Very few had a spot to insert a cover letter, maybe 25%.
by cardiffspaceman | 2025-08-04 22:33:46+00:00
I had some friends from 1st-6th grade, then when I went to middle school, I started from scratch. The reason was I moved out of parochial Catholic school to public school. The group off friends I made starting in middle school was a little more durable when I went to college. I still have two friends from college, plus some acquaintances. And now I’m a bit older, so death is a problem for my friendships. My father passed away 10 years ago, and one of his friends had no friends left after losing my father. So I thought, I hope I am not more selective than necessary.
by rkomorn | 2025-08-04 22:33:59+00:00
I'm actually writing a script that takes my materialized NixOS-managed configs and backs them up in git so I can indeed port them to another distro if I decide to move away from NixOS (hedging my bets since NixOS is my 5th different OS/distro on this laptop).

Not having NixOS manage configs (itself or via HomeManager), though, very much reduces the value proposition of NixOS in my mind.
by t-3 | 2025-08-04 22:34:01+00:00
The AI is not doing an actual interview IME, it's just asking for the resume and personal information and experience that you already submitted when you applied in the first place. It's wasting people's time just because, basically. When the AI moves you to the human interviewer they don't seem to have received anything from the AI or the application as they ask you everything again. It's profoundly demoralizing.
by ot | 2025-08-04 22:34:16+00:00
The SWAR escaping algorithm [1] is very similar to the one I implemented in Folly JSON a few years ago [2]. The latter works on 8 byte words instead of 4 bytes, and it also returns the position of the first byte that needs escaping, so that the fast path does not add noticeable overhead on escape-heavy strings.

[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/_/chromium/v8/v8/+/5cbc...

[2] https://github.com/facebook/folly/commit/2f0cabfb48b8a8df84f...
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-04 22:35:30+00:00
One problem with your assumption here is that "humanity" has no definition of "benign" and "malign".

If we did have such a thing, extrapolated coherent volition would be solved and that would solve half of the AI alignment problem.

This hypothetical "alien" problem is actually pretty much equivalent to the AI alignment problem. One half is, we don't know what we want, and the other half is, even if we knew... we don't know how to make "them" do what we want.
by aldshglkhdg | 2025-08-04 22:35:33+00:00
that isn't true at all.

i regularly use a yubikey as a passkey, and it's entirely orthogonal to any password manager i use. it happily just works on firefox on both mac and linux.

to use a passkey, you need a place to store the passkey. that can be a hardware token, a tpm, or a password manager.
by jemmyw | 2025-08-04 22:35:45+00:00
The problem is that for a lot of these problems Europe hasn't had that much self determination over the last 75 years. The US had to intervene twice in world wars that started in Europe. And after WWII the US did, arguably, a reasonably noble thing in how it provided investment to rebuild Europe. No more wars out of Europe and a market to sell US goods to, and then a bit later a bulwark against the USSR. All these things meant a forced dependency. And the US still wants to sell its military equipment, and under Trump very very keen to sell more goods. I would argue that this situation also contributed to Europe losing it's initial developments in computing with brain drain to the US.

75 years just isn't that long in geopolitics, and it's a hard ship to turn around. Only 25 years ago the relationship between the US and Europe was still very strong and it didn't look like there was any pulling back.

You mention buying Russian gas. Again, it's very hard to suddenly stop that gas flow. Even Ukraine didn't shut down the gas pipelines going from Russian to Europe while they had existing contracts in place, it's happening this year. Gas from Russia was 40%, is now less than 11%, is forecast to drop much further this and next year. These kind of economic dependencies also continued for surprising long in previous wars between countries that were actually in hot wars with each other.

The kind of changes you're talking about are slow. The US also has it's dependencies on Asian manufacturing that it is also now trying to turn around, and that will also be slow.
by gopalv | 2025-08-04 22:35:54+00:00
> What Trick of the Trade took you too long to learn?

"Everything worth doing is worth doing badly"

And as a corollary, every complex system that works came from a simple system that works.

I learned this in programming, but now I apply it on everything from motorcycle maintenance, home appliance repair to parenting.

--

Often the easier way to fix a complex system is to pretend that it could be simpler and then reintroduce the complexity-inducing requirements.

I had a professor who taught debugging as a whole another skill from programming and used to say "Most of programming is starting from an empty editor and debugging until your code works".

The debugging "lab" in Java course (in the year 2000) was one of my transformational after-school classes - where I got a java program which fits within 2-3 pages of print code with a bug and was told to go find it in print for ~20 minutes, then given 40 minutes with a debugger instead.
by atoav | 2025-08-04 22:36:15+00:00
As someone who interviewed people for technical roles, I'd see that as a bad sign and answer: "Just tell me what you can think about."

This isn't school where teachers give you trick questions and you fail if you misunderstand it. If you are applying as a software developer and you can't talk at length about various forms of interfaces you are probably not very experienced. UI, API, ABI are all interfaces..