MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw0101a | 2025-08-21 13:40:58+00:00
> My Michael Burry senses are 'go to cash and don't come back' at this point.

And when do you get back in?

Sitting in cash, waiting for the dip, is a losing strategy (even if you knew when the dip will occur, which you don't):

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co...

Simply put in a little from every pay cheque.

If you think things are too wild, invest in an ("all-in-one") asset allocation fund that is not 100% stocks (e.g., fixed 80/20, 60/40):

* https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...

* https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239729/ishares-aggressiv...

* https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...

* https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investments/vanguard-life...

* https://www.vanguard.ca/en/product/etf/asset-allocation/9579...

* https://www.blackrock.com/ca/investors/en/products/239447/is...

or a target date fund (which increases bonds as you approach your retirement date).
by rodrigodlu | 2025-08-21 13:42:02+00:00
A professor in my very first semester called "crazy finger syndrome" the attempts to go straight to the code without decomposing the problem from a business or user perspective. It was a long time ago. It was a CS curriculum

I miss her jokes against anxious nerds that just wanted to code :(

Don't forget the rise of boot camps where some educators are not always aligned with some sort of higher ethical standards.
by esafak | 2025-08-21 13:42:31+00:00
By not using a server as an interface, UTCP more tightly couples the caller to the tool. For example, a search MCP server could make the search provider an optional parameter to be dynamically selected without breaking the contract. With UTCP you can not do that.

Given that tool calling usually does not constitute the bulk of a typical LLM query's time, I think optimizing the latency by eliminating the interface is an unwise architectural choice. Interfaces are good things.
by danaris | 2025-08-21 13:42:55+00:00
Same here.

I run a very small browser game (~120 weekly users currently), and until I put its Wiki (utterly uninteresting to anyone who doesn't already play the game) behind a login-wall, the bots were causing massive amounts of spurious traffic. Due to some of the Wiki's data coming live from the game through external data feeds, the deluge of bots actually managed to crash the game several times, necessitating a restart of the MariaDB process.
by Bostonian | 2025-08-21 13:43:20+00:00
https://archive.is/eitKt

'Between an abandoned market and a rusty, decades-old electrical substation in a rundown part of Liverpool sit two buildings with a shiny coat of white paint behind a high-security fence. This ordinary-looking site is considered “critical national infrastructure” because of what’s inside: two 95-ton cylinders with rotors turning 1,500 times per minute. It’s called a synchronous compensator, and it’s northwest England’s best hope of avoiding blackouts.

The UK’s grid operator pays a Norwegian power company to keep the rotors running at a fixed speed. And the service it provides is so valuable to the grid that the company, Statkraft, has nabbed orders to build four more of these around the country.

“If Spain had enough of these machines, the countrywide blackout could have been avoided,” says Guy Nicholson, head of zero-carbon grid solutions at Statkraft, while giving a tour of the facility. He’s referring to the April afternoon when Spain’s electrical network came to a screeching halt and the whole Iberian Peninsula went dark for nearly a full day — the worst outage in Europe’s modern history.

Solar farm outages had destabilized Spain’s grid, and there weren’t enough gas plants online to provide stability. Synchronous compensators could have kept clean power flowing at the right frequency and voltage, avoiding the blackout. But continental Spain doesn't have any.'

...
by adamddev1 | 2025-08-21 13:43:21+00:00
Ah, in an alternate world where Brendan Eich wasn't pressured by his superiors to make JS more Java-like, we could have had something like this as very normal.

I wonder how much faster that would have pushed the world into FP ideas. While sometimes I prefer the bracket/C syntax, I wonder how things would have evolved if JS was a lisp originally. Instead of things moving to TypeScript, would they be moving to something like typed Lisp or OCaml, or PureScript ?
by fatidevrel | 2025-08-21 13:43:31+00:00
We’ve all printed user input in debug logs. But in some languages, that’s enough to trigger memory corruption if format strings aren’t handled safely.

This post breaks down a real case where a printf-style bug silently reached CI and shows how these issues can turn into serious vulnerabilities. Curious to hear how others enforce input safety in build pipelines or CI/CD guardrails.
by roxolotl | 2025-08-21 13:43:40+00:00
When I was in college the philosophy program had the marketing slogan: “Thinking of a major? Major in thinking”.

Now as a hiring manager I’ll say I regularly find that those who’ve had humanities experience are way more capable and the hard parts of analysis and understanding. Of course I’m biased as a dual cs/philosophy major but it’s very rare I’m looking for someone who can just write a lot of code. Especially juniors as analytical thinking is way harder to teach than how to program.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-21 13:43:51+00:00
The difference I see is that in other fields, part of your design process is thinking through the logical details of the thing. Essentially, doing some math. In software, the logical details are the finished product. The math is what you're trying to make. If you've actually thought through all of the details, you have written the software (if only in your head). If you haven't thought through all of the details and only figured out a high level design, you've still written some software (essentially, stubbing out some functionality, or leaving it as a dependency to be provided. However you want to think of it). So naturally, one way to think through things is to write software.
by bitwize | 2025-08-21 13:43:54+00:00
Everyone going through STEM needs to see the movie Hidden Figures for a variety of reasons, but one bit stands out as poignant: I believe it was Katherine Johnson, who is asked to calculate some rocket trajectory to determine the landing coordinates, thinks on it a bit and finally says, "Aha! Newton's method!" Then she runs down to the library to look up how to apply Newton's method. She had the conceptual tools to find a solution, but didn't have all the equations memorized. Having all the equations in short term memory only matters in a (somewhat pathological) school setting.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-08-21 13:44:00+00:00
Yep. Eventually the businesses shut down the stores that have too much theft to be profitable; then people complain about problems like food deserts and accuse the businesses of isms; then well-meaning people elect politicians who promise to make it all better; then the politicians use tax breaks, sweetheart deals, and social pressure to get the businesses to open stores in those areas again.

The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.
by saubeidl | 2025-08-21 13:44:17+00:00
LLMs are not the way to AGI and it's becoming clearer to even the most fanatic evangelists. It's not without reason GPT-5 was only a minor incremental update. I am convinced we have reached peak LLM.

There's no way a system of statistical predictions by itself can ever develop anything close to reasoning or intelligence. I think maybe there might be some potential there if we combined LLMs with formal reasoning systems - make the LLM nothing more than a fancy human language <-> formal logic translator, but even then, that translation layer will be inherently unreliable due to the nature of LLMs.
Ask HN: Why is JavaScript STILL the only choice for browser-side programming
by mikece | 2025-08-21 13:44:30+00:00
Earlier this year JavaScript -- and it's integration with web browsers -- turned 30. The combined factors that JavaScript has been "good enough" and that the language and runtime has evolved significantly in the last 20 years has kept JavaScript as the language everyone has to learned "because it's the only one that runs in a web browser." Why is this still the case?

Visual Studio Code was created as a very light-weight text editor and the revolution that has made it the go-to editor for so many languages is the Language Server Protocol: VS Code doesn't need to understand your language, you only need an LSP that does and somewhat magically VS Code and your favorite language will get along as though they were made for each other.

Why can't we do something similar to LSP for browser-side languages? And no, I don't count anything that is implemented in WASM as being valid for what I'm saying: just because you can compile the Python or Ruby interpreter to WASM doesn't mean the browser natively supports it and native support is what I wish other languages had.
by kmacdough | 2025-08-21 13:44:39+00:00
I agree and disagree. I think it's important to make it very visually clear that it is not really a PR, but rather an advanced style checker. I think they can be very useful for assessing more rote/repetitive standards that are a bit beyond what standard linters/analysis can provide. Things like institutional standards, lessons learned, etc. But if it uses the normal PR pipeline rather than the checker pipeline, it gives the false impression that it is a PR, which is not.
by subhro | 2025-08-21 13:44:41+00:00
I just can’t resist myself when airplanes come up in discussion.

I completely understand your analogy and you are right. However just to nitpick, it is actually super important to have a weight on the airplane at the right place. You have to make sure that your aeroplane does not become tail heavy or it is not recoverable from a stall. Also a heavier aeroplane, within its gross weight, is actually safer as the safe manoeuverable speed increases with weight.
by ajross | 2025-08-21 13:45:17+00:00
To be fair (and, again, biased), Android apps run wildly better on a Chromebook than they do on a Mac or Windows box. :)

School Chromebooks are very limited devices (often these were low-end units purchased at the beginning of the pandemic!), and you're likely comparing it to the flagship Samsung or whatever in your pocket, which is just objectively a much more powerful computer.
by ruszki | 2025-08-21 13:45:27+00:00
According to this for example, the correlation is significant: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Also it’s absolutely not prevailing in America. Especially in a European sense.

But even when you push to a good direction, it can be misleading. Like Portugal legalised hard drug usage, but they slashed funds of organisations helping to drug addicts. Of course, you will have a problem after a while (and they have now), even when decriminalisation is a good step. But politicians can pretend that that’s the “prevailing view”, while they just make some pretexts to point their finger to the “prevailing view”.
by butlike | 2025-08-21 13:45:28+00:00
The article got me thinking that there's some sort of bottle neck that makes scaling astronomical or the value just not really there.

1. Buy up top talent from other's working in this space

2. See what they produce over say, 6mo. to a year

3. Hire a corpus of regular ICs to see what _they_ produce

4. Open source the model to see if any programmer at all can produce something novel with a pretty robust model.

Observe that nothing amazing has really come out (besides a pattern-recognizing machine that placates the user to coerce them into using more tokens for more prompts), and potentially call it on hiring for a bubble.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-21 13:45:37+00:00
There are many options to hedge the known market risks today (as for hedging black swans, tail hedging is also an option, although more explicitly negative value adding long-term).

I'm assuming you are talking longer term.

A permanent allocation to gold is one option. These days it can also be done via overlays so that equity exposure can stay the same.

TIPS work as inflation protection. Move some bond exposure to TIPS.

CTA/trend following is a great addition to a portfolio when it comes to protecting against stagflationary scenarios. Again, this is fairly easy to access via ETFs these days.

How about international diversification? This is something even super conservative voices like Bogle would recommend. Again, easy to access via ETFs.

Another good idea if hedging is on the mind is stepping away from the market cap weighted indexes to some degree. Add some small-cap value for example.

There are other options as well that can be done on a portfolio level, but it can get more advanced from there.

The most important thing is to have a consistent framework that one can stick with for decades. Especially when it comes to having a truly diversified portfolio, it tends to be that unfortunately some people have a hard time handling it. If you are truly diversified you should always have assets in a portfolio that are performing poorly, and performance may be bad for entire decade-long market cycle or two. Ex: if trend is performing badly during a strong equity boom, it was protecting against lines that didn't happen to play out, but that doesn't mean that the realized situation nullifies the holistic diversification benefits.

Also, it gets more difficult if part of the equation is matching or exceeding S&P returns on an absolute basis. S&P has high returns but sees high drawdowns up to 50%, well more diversified approaches maybe less volatile and see more mild drawdowns. Because of that, usually most people would be better off with some mild leverage if they take a more diversified approach that switches out equity for less volatile assets like gold. Ex: 60/30/20/20/10 (equity/bonds/CTA/Gold/TIPS).
by snickerdoodle12 | 2025-08-21 13:45:41+00:00
the workaround is literally just running a headless browser, and that's pretty much the default nowadays.

if you want to save some $$$ you can spend like 30 minutes making a cracker like in the article. just make it multi threaded, add a queue and boom, your scraper nodes can go back to their cheap configuration. or since these are AI orgs we're talking about, write a gpu cracker and laugh as it solves challenges far faster than any user could.

custom solutions aren't worth it for individual sites, but with how widespread anubis is it's become worth it.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-21 13:46:03+00:00
This. It's not (at least mostly) a power trip. It's mostly about control. They don't know how to control what they can't measure, and they don't want to have to trust people who can see what the manager cannot.

Agile... I've seen a good agile environment ruined in exactly that way. There is an "impedance mismatch" with upper management, because upper management wants their usual progress reports and burn-down charts, and wants them in the normal terms, and agile doesn't produce those... unless there's someone who has that as a part of their job on the agile team.
by adornKey | 2025-08-21 13:46:39+00:00
Sütterlin is very ancient. I knew someone how used it for handwriting, but there are only a few people that really learned to read and write it.

In Algebraic Number Theory it's quite common to use some kind of Fraktur-Alphabet for Symbols (Rings, Ideals, Groups,...). It's natural there to use some kind of Sütterlin for hand-writing and exercises. But I think to become really fluent, you have to dive very deep into Algebra... There are some letters you'll use a lot like p(rime), M(odule), G(roup), R(ing), A(lternating Group), S(ymmetric Group). I don't think I've read/written all available letters yet...
HN meta: 99% packet loss on news.ycombinator.com
by eqvinox | 2025-08-21 13:47:08+00:00
I'm currently seeing >99% packet loss to news.ycombinator.com (2606:7100:1:67::26):

13. br06-te1-2.lwdc.americanis.net 0.0% 231 14.3 17.2 14.0 172.5 19.5 14. sdtc.sd-me01.te0-1.host1.20546.americanis.net 99.6% 231 12.9 12.9 12.9 12.9 0.0 15. 2606:7100:1:67::26 99.1% 231 11.8 11.8 11.8 11.8 0.0

Checked from both US and EU connections, same result, would be a very odd coincidence if it was a problem on my end. Trace looks like the uplink provider is having issues?

IPv4 seems to be unaffected.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-08-21 13:47:42+00:00
Eat what you want. You're not going to convince me that eggs are out of reach for you, or that you are poor, or that you can't afford your student loans (much less that you deserve to get away with not paying them).

You don't need to leave a comment to say "I'm doubling down, and not reading your replies" by the way. It's totally pointless.
by alsetmusic | 2025-08-21 13:48:15+00:00
It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted.

A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question. She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure). I was waiting for her to put her foot in her mouth and buy into the hype.She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.

I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets. What we're calling AI will continue to have certain uses, but investors will realize that the moonshot being promised is undeliverable and a lot of jobs will disappear. This will hurt the wider industry, and the economy by extension.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-21 13:48:41+00:00
> But they can't do this for much longer, inflation is the first sign, which is why Trump is raising tariffs.

Trump is raising tariffs because he thinks they are a good idea and has since the 1980s:

> “The fact is, you don’t have free trade. We think of it as free trade, but you right now don’t have free trade,” Trump said in a 1987 episode of Larry King Live that’s excerpted in Trump’s Trade War. “A lot of people are tired of watching the other countries ripping off the United States. This is a great country.”

* https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-str...

Trump's mindset is a 1980s NYC real estate guy (zero-sum, one-off games), which when applied to global trade, is basically mercantilist:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism

Meanwhile, in the real world, commerce is often non-zero-sum (both parties get something of value, i.e., "win-win"), and you play multiple rounds with each trading partner and reputation matters (rather than one-off, where burning your bridges could be an actual strategy).
by einpoklum | 2025-08-21 13:48:51+00:00
"Open" office space is very often an excuse for reducing the area size per employee in a company's offices. They can't get away with squeezing people into offices of 1.8 x 1.5, which is a not-atypical personal cubicle space area for a single employee, or even 2x2 - it is too oppressive. Even with two-person offices - more space is needed that 2 cubicle seats.

So, cost saving => ideology which extolls the merits of this choice, in spite of any evidence to the contrary.
by kelseydh | 2025-08-21 13:48:56+00:00
I generally find IMDB user scores far more reliable and granular for movies. There is a noticeable jump in a movie's quality when it gets a 6.x rating (okay), versus a 7.x (great) versus an 8.x (a Top 500 of all time).

Metacritic is the next most useful, while Rotten Tomatoes is easily the least useful. High critical and user RT reviews often does not provide a good intensity barometer of how good the film actually is. The last ten years I went from being a loyal RT user to completely ignoring their scores altogether.
by Forricide | 2025-08-21 13:48:57+00:00
> “How's that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,”

Pretty obvious conclusion that I think anyone who's thought seriously about this situation has already come to. However, I'm not optimistic that most companies will be able to keep themselves from doing this kind of thing, because I think it's become rather clear that it's incredibly difficult for most leadership in 2025 to prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term profitability.

That being said, internships/co-ops have been popular from companies that I'm familiar with for quite a while specifically to ensure that there are streams of potential future employees. I wonder if we'll see even more focus on internships in the future, to further skirt around the difficulties in hiring junior developers?
by nancyminusone | 2025-08-21 13:48:58+00:00
I'm in one right now :)

10'x10' office with a door and window out to the hall, and a light switch.

There's probably about 30 other offices like mine, a cube area with another 8-10 cubes, and a few conference rooms, but most of the building is a shop floor.

But I don't work near a major city, and I'm not a software engineer, just a regular one.
by fatsec | 2025-08-21 13:49:09+00:00
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- Web applications (frontend & backend) - API development and integration - Automation tools - Desktop Development (Qt, wxWidgets,Electron.js, FLTK, GTK) - Security-focused implementations (OWASP Top 10, basic pentesting)

I offer extremely affordable rates — my goal is to expand my Upwork portfolio.

If you have a small project, prototype, or proof-of-concept, I’d be happy to assist.
by Scoundreller | 2025-08-21 13:49:24+00:00
I loved the early days when nobody touched the self-checkouts and it was like an additional choice.

Not surprising that they’ve titrated the cashier lines to always be much longer.

At least it’s not a government again giving you quick service if you sign away your rights with a lineup around the block for those that with to assert their rights.

I’m also thankful that my local grocery store is subject to a massive development proposal, so they’re not bothering with capital improvements like self-checkout.
by muzani | 2025-08-21 13:49:44+00:00
Sorry, I disagree. There's a reason it's 002. They cleaned up all the racist, etc, opinions from 001.

I do think GPT-4.1 onwards has a lot of personality. It's able to pretend to go into this mindset and go back out, which works fine. If I wanted to talk to actual racists, there's plenty out there. But I just want the spicy flavor in my AI because it's a little bland otherwise.
by toastercat | 2025-08-21 13:50:08+00:00
It's been a while since I used my ST3 license, but I remember my license affording me all updates for ST3. Maybe that model was unrealistic for ST4, but as others have echoed in this thread, major feature updates for ST4 are not common, so if you bought a license in May of 2022, your access to new features would have expired right before the new updates of the May 2025 release.

Personally, I'm OK with using an old build so I don't mind that much about the limitation. Although if my 3 years elapses right before ST4 introduces first-class LSP support and an official Debugger, I may be very peeved. :)
by demirbey05 | 2025-08-21 13:50:08+00:00
Yesterday, I was asked to scrape data from a website. My friend used ChatGPT to scrape data but didn't succeded even spent 3h+. I looked website code and understand with my web knowledge and do some research with LLM. Then I described how to scrape data to LLM it took 30 minutes overall. The LLM cant create best way but you can create with using LLM. Everything is same, at the end of the day you need someone who can really think.