MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-30 12:06:03+00:00
Yes, because as a business you shouldn’t have a sales pitch ready for people when they ask you why they should spend money on your product.

It’s the first thing you do if you are trying to make a product that you plan to monetize is ask - who is the ideal user and how will we market it. If it’s just a hobby project to learn a new to you technology, that’s fine or if you just wanted to scratch an itch.
by Speedy218 | 2025-08-30 12:06:45+00:00
I'd argue it's basically the same thing except added in a complication to make it sound less bad. Google still has the final say here on what apps you install and don't install on your phone because verified developer's app still have to follow Google's rules, and if you don't, you will no longer be a verified developer. I reckon soon enough they will tighten the restriction and make it so that you have to install everything through the play store, Google and big corps always love making changes like this in small steps so that the backlash is minimal and they get to test the waters to see if they can get away with it.
by rvz | 2025-08-30 12:06:53+00:00
> 1) Spray and pray. If its vaguely a fit, apply. It's a numbers game. Be shameless.

I just skipped the rest of the steps after reading (1) and completely stopped reading after (6).

This is poor advice and it is no wonder you had to send 450+ applications and I think people reading this would want to do this with less steps and less than 450+ applications.
by password54321 | 2025-08-30 12:07:03+00:00
When a veteran tells you something and is passionate about it, maybe it is worth listening or at least dealing with internally. At the end, he left anyway even if the project didn't fail and Meta remains wealthy but largely mediocre in terms of the products it delivers while relying heavily on startup acquisition and large spending. Pretty sure most people who work there only do so for premium rent-seeking.

None of it surprising if this is a signal of how they operate.
by dakiol | 2025-08-30 12:07:18+00:00
I don’t know in what world you live (or in what world I do live for that matter). I used to apply to one or two jobs in the past when I was looking for something new. I prepared each interview in advance for a couple of weeks. Nowadays it’s harder… but I apply to 3 or 4 job ads, not 450! It’s harder because obviously it takes two or 3 times what it used to take me. I have around 12 years of experience in a few different tech stacks, I read tech books regularly, I don’t have a good professional network, I do find jobs via linkedin, I’m based in western europe, and I have a masters degree in comp sci (but no one ever has asked me to show my degree).

In my cv I care a lot about the details: the typeface, margins, grammar (I use llms since i’m not a native speaker), bullet point order, succinctness, etc. Perhaps that counts for something. Then if I get an interview, that’s like already 50% of the job done. Im an easy guy imho. I have failed mainly systems design interviews, so that’s where I put some work nowadays.
by stellalo | 2025-08-30 12:07:30+00:00
I don’t think the book aims at being “useful” in the usual sense of the term. Neither the minimal language it builds does.

(They are probably “useful” in the dissemination of what the real essence of computation can reduce to, in practical terms.)

Not everything needs to be useful in fact: certain things can be just enjoyed in their essence, just looked at and appreciated. A bit like… art?

I am implementing my own Scheme as well. Why? I don’t know, one needs to do things that serve no apparent purpose, sometimes.
by geysersam | 2025-08-30 12:07:34+00:00
Not sure that's true. How do you even "consume" wealth, assuming the wealth is more significant than a few millions in the bank.

Nordic countries have high VAT but that's hardly going to hurt you.. On the other hand Sweden has less property tax than the US.

I guess if you consume services then that will be more expensive in the Nordics, since tax on salaries is high.
by eric-burel | 2025-08-30 12:10:05+00:00
"Because Romania is a member state of the European Union, the people the country has put great effort into training and credentialing are easily able to leave the country and acquire jobs elsewhere" and "free movement of talent between countries, Romania ends up subsidizing talent discovery for other countries with less apt educational systems" Are pretty negative stances. UE is a union, so it's a pretty different situation than students leaving eg third world country to come to Europe. And the migration exists in the other direction, you'll be amazed by how many French dentists are studying in Romania. I hope such phenomenon progressively average the situation between UE countries and closes the gaps that may currently exist.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-30 12:10:25+00:00
>Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt worked at scale.

or they haven't worked in fields that are heavily regulated, or internationally.

This is why the DOGE guys were all like hey there are a bunch of people over 100 years old getting social security!! WTF!? Where someone with a wider range of experience would think, hmm, I bet there is some reason we need to figure out why they just jumped right to "this must be fraud!!"
by xorcist | 2025-08-30 12:10:48+00:00
In a place with even less IPv6 adoption, probably. It's not like there wasn't similar proposals discussed, and there's no need to rehash the exact same discussion again.

The problem quickly becomes "how do you route it", and that's where we end up with something like today's IPv6. Route aggregation and PI addresses is impratical with IPv4 + extra bits.

The main changes from v4 to v6 besides the extra bits is mostly that some unnecessary complexity was dropped, which in the end is net positive for adoption.
by nickjj | 2025-08-30 12:10:57+00:00
One of my friends mentioned how on the hiring side it's not much better.

Here'a a recent case for a remote software engineering role for a US based company:

A position is posted publicly, in 2 days it gets 300 applicants. Out of those 300, 9 are selected for interviews. Of the 9, only 2 showed up for the interview. Both candidates weren't close to a good fit (skills didn't match resume, etc.).

It opened my eyes on the process. Imagine an engineering manager getting handed a few hundred resumes and now they need to hand select ones that move onto the next phase. This takes a huge amount of time and it also indicates if your resume isn't strong, you will probably get passed over in a few seconds.

With that said, he told me most of the applications were AI spam.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-30 12:12:28+00:00
People talk about intelligence a lot, but the sheer difference in interest is just as big, if not a bigger factor.

In an average class, you get most kids - who are mostly content to be there. And then you get the outliers. There's that one kid who appears to be suffering something just short of physical pain whenever he's in class learning something. Then there's the kid who has already read all his textbooks in the first week, for fun, and even retained a lot of it, because he was engaged with the material.

They may have the same exact intelligence, but the outcomes could not be more different.
by taolson | 2025-08-30 12:13:08+00:00
Nice! I like the goals of a "simpler Haskell" for small projects ( see https://github.com/taolson/Admiran ). Some questions that weren't answered in the blog:

is the evaluation model call-by-need (lazy, like Haskell) or call-by-value (strict, like most other languages)? how is memory allocation handled? (I assume GC via the underlying JavaScript implementation)? will it be open-sourced at some point? a major benefit of immutable definitions is that they are always initialized; however, the type declaration format potentially opens things up to a use-before-def bug if the type declaration brings the variable name in scope. How is this handled in your implementation?

Good luck on the continued progress of your project; it can be deeply satisfying!
by agwa | 2025-08-30 12:13:49+00:00
> OK, interesting, I think I see... So you are asking about if SQLite opens and finds a not-committed rollback journal that looks valid, then it rolls it back?

Right.

> Assuming fsync works on both the main database and the hot journal, then I don't see a way that it is not durable? Because, it has to write and sync the full hot journal, then write to the main database, then zero out the hot journal, sync that, and only then does it atomically return from the commit? (assuming FULL and DELETE)

DELETE mode doesn't truncate or zero the journal; it merely deletes it from the directory. You need to switch to TRUNCATE or PERSIST for that behavior: https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_journal_mode

I confirmed all of this by attaching gdb to SQLite and setting a breakpoint on unlink. At the time of unlink the journal is still "hot" and usable for rollback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45069533
by bytefish | 2025-08-30 12:14:11+00:00
For a lot of problems it’s a good idea to talk to customers and stakeholders, and make the complexity very transparent.

Maybe some of the edge cases only apply to 2% of the customers? Could these customers move to a standard process? And what’s the cost of implementing, testing, integrating and maintaining these customer-specific solutions?

This has actually been the best solution for me to reduce complexity in my software, by talking to customers and business analysts… and making the complexity very transparent by assigning figures to it.
by Speedy218 | 2025-08-30 12:14:23+00:00
People change their tune extremely quickly when you ask them to show you their phone, ask them for the password and let you look through it to make sure you don't have anything bad on it. Every single message, every single app and every single social media. This is the world we are heading towards if we don't take a stand now, except instead of me checking your phone it will be the government and Google.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-30 12:15:24+00:00
In the Czech Republic, the post-2008 crisis dragged for quite a long time, and the job market around 2012 was so bad that when we put out an ad for a secretary, we got over 300 applicants.

I don't think we answered every single of them, we were a small company (15 people at that time), and even our wish for basic courtesy was constrained by real lack of time and people. That is also why we needed a secretary...

I can't even imagine the same situation in 2025, with AI. Would that be 3000 applicants?
by notyouraibot | 2025-08-30 12:15:36+00:00
Yeah it was my first polygraph so I was sweating buckets! The polygraph was relatively simple though, they tell you all the questions they will be asking beforehand, so nothing unexpected is thrown at you.

I think I passed the poly cause if I didn't then they would tell me that instead of saying they selected another candidate and honestly I was so depressed and defeated that I just didn't bother communicating with them after that, 3 weeks of constant waiting and reaching out for updates and then finally getting an 'Unfortunately' email kind of did it for me.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-08-30 12:15:40+00:00
It just seems too easy to skirt around via middlemen. The EU (say) could prosecute an EU company directly doing this residential scraping, and it could probably keep tabs on a handful of bank accounts of known bad actors in other countries, and then investigate and prosecute EU companies transferring money to them. But how do you stop an EU company paying a Moldovan company (that has existed for 10 days) for "internet services", that pays a Brazilian company, that pays a Russian company to do the actual residential scraping? And then there's all the crypto channels and other quid pro quo payment possibilities.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-30 12:15:42+00:00
That's completely counter to how capitalism actually works in practice. With every luxurious technology reserved for the wealthy there are always inevitably improvements in scale and delivery that make these luxuries accessible to the masses. Cell phones, cars, internet access, food delivery service, chauffeurs (in the form of Uber), airline travel, etc all used to be luxuries of the rich. In a short time, prices came down, and became accessible to most people.

Most of the wealthiest people in the world made their billions by selling something used my millions or hundreds of millions of people.
by stevage | 2025-08-30 12:15:42+00:00
The author lacks imagination or is not arguing entirely in good faith:

> I realised that knowing about my website visitors had zero effect on anything in the real world.

Perhaps that's true for them? But you don't have to try too hard to think of legitimate reasons why basic analytics are useful to any blog author who is trying to increase their reach, like knowing what topics are of most interest to their audience, when to post for bets result, comparing different styles of post etc.

They still have valid points against the intrusion of data gathering, but it's simply inaccurate to claim there's no benefit to the data.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-30 12:16:21+00:00
Overnight, the USA has intentionally changed from a bastion of free market capitalism to a highly restrictive market where trade is controlled by one person.

This is the only example in the modern era where a superpower has willingly chosen to emulate a 3rd world country.

And very few people seem to realize (yet) the economic implications that are about to play out.
by masklinn | 2025-08-30 12:16:33+00:00
> The main reason for negative electricity prices are inflexible generators eg. nuclear

Ah yes, wind and solar generation crushes the grid (https://x.com/ElectricityMaps/status/1786377006562541825) but that's the fault of all those dastardly nuclear plants germany is littered with, all zero of them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...)

> Negative prices are not all bad: they are an incentive for storage / flexible demand to step in.

Maybe that'll happen, but currently such events only keep increasing in frequency (https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/08/26/germany-records-453-h...), and as neighbours also install more solar and wind the ability for germany to maintain their grid stability through exports is going to worsen not improve.
by dwattttt | 2025-08-30 12:16:37+00:00
I've been following Raymond Chen's recent series on writing a tracking C++ pointer class with interest.

Most of the articles start with "to fix the mistake we showed at the end of the last article", and end with "but now we've broken something else".

Needing to keep track of where exceptions can occur, so that you don't leave an operation half committed, sounds especially nasty: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250827-00/?p=11...
by thoroughburro | 2025-08-30 12:17:04+00:00
The answer is literally always “It will allow me to pay my bills. This won’t be a giddy, young-love crush of a hobby for me. Hire me and I’ll just do good work, not cheerlead.”

The question is a synecdoche for “How awesome do you think we are, and so how much will we be able to coast on our respect for you as a result?”
by dredmorbius | 2025-08-30 12:17:33+00:00
I've been thinking through possible next steps for telephony as PSTN dies its slow death under spam.

Controlling a VOIP system, in which callers are challenged in different ways, is one approach. One potential challenge would be to issue random, non-sequential, and sparsely populated "extension" numbers, of say 10--20 digits (10 billion -- 100 quintillion values).

You'd offer a distinct value to each individual contact. Those contacts would be permitted to contact only that "extension". This creates a 1:1 pairing of caller to permitted contact number.

Coordinating generation and acceptance is probably the most challenging piece of this. Callers who might attempt contacts from multiple number is another.

(Which itself suggests assigning an extention to a set or range of numbers, e.g., a healthcare network, school or university system, or large business / organisation with which you engage frequently.)

Friends-and-family would have an easier challenge (whitelisted numbers, some in- or out-of-band validation, or simply being requested to enter the last four digits of their own number (robocall spoofs would probably fail that for at least some time.

Effectively, your single public "published" number serves as a gateway to your own telephony network, into which you can establish both valid numbers, restrictions on same, and challenges, as you see fit.
by uyzstvqs | 2025-08-30 12:18:07+00:00
I disagree. If the market is stacked against you and it takes even 30 attempts to get a job through the usual job seeking process, then I question whether you're truly going to be happy and satisfied with whatever you happen to get offered after months of searching. If you're lucky, maybe. But the most probable reality for most people is that you'll be an expendable employee with zero leverage in a position that doesn't suit you. Not to mention the probability of getting serious burnout from getting rejected and ignored hundreds of times. A fair, healthy job market does not look like this.

If something is not working out, change up your approach. The first obvious step is to try networking instead of applying. Perhaps start something on your own, becoming a B2B service provider rather than an employee. Or try to out-compete the companies which have rejected you. Be a stalwart, not a pushover.
by whizzter | 2025-08-30 12:18:12+00:00
One thing to note is that the idealized Sweden and many benefits remain because we had a much lower wealth inequality 30 years ago but (mainly) right-wing governments have been very "successful" at removing the barriers that kept the wealth inequality low.

- Inheritance tax was abolished in 2005 - Wealth taxation was abolished in 2007 - "income tax reduction" was initiated in 2007

Meanwhile our schools have gotten larger classes and worse results, especially the income tax reduction was insidious since it was a nationally mandated tax reduction that mainly hits the tax revenue of cities and regions (ie, political entities that had no part in the laws that lowered their tax revenue).

Basically, Sweden has been speed-running into re-making our society into a mini-US and even surpassed the US in some regards.

Sweden 2025 isn't the same as in 1985, and policies enacted around 2005 are the ones that are really starting to hit with their secondary effects today (Iirc Denmark has had fairly many right-wing governments over this period as well).
by eliben | 2025-08-30 12:20:34+00:00
A quick plug for https://www.goatcounter.com/ - a super lightweight visitor counter. Very much privacy oriented (https://www.goatcounter.com/help/gdpr).

I've set it up on my blog a while ago (https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2023/using-goatcounter-for-blo...) and it's been working really well.
by biglyburrito | 2025-08-30 12:20:39+00:00
Your assumptions are objectively incorrect. That's the old way of applying to jobs and, while it may still work, it didn't work for me or anyone else I've talked to that has looked for a tech job in the last year.

If you have an "in" with somebody at the company you're applying to, then yes, that absolutely increases your chances of your resume at least being looked at by someone in the hiring chain. Barring that, though, cold calls are extremely unlikely to get you anywhere. As far as job applications go, AI-driven applicant tracking systems (ATSes) are what handle the majority of resume submissions now, and they absolutely does do not give a shit about thoughtful, artisanal resumes or job applications. More likely than not, it's a matter of what keywords an automated system seems in your resume that determines whether the company even bothers reaching out to you. And given that most companies are seeing 1-2 orders of magnitude more job applications now, it's incredibly unlikely a human is going to see your resume unless it passes the ATS filtering process.

Resume spray-and-pray is unlikely to get you good results, but that's not what the OP described. They used AI as a tool to automate parts of the resume preparation & submission process, & spent time on the parts they believed mattered.

As for pooh-poohing the 450 positions OP applied to, idk how many months they spent searching, but in terms of raw numbers that's pretty reasonable IMO. I submitted my resume to 150-175 companies over the course of 3 months before I found my job last year, and that was just before the tech job market started tanking harder -- those numbers seem low to me in today's market.
by Multicomp | 2025-08-30 12:20:46+00:00
I was just able to write a thank you letter to my sister for having me over to her house last night using this and having sent her that letter I leave very impressed.

I know she will enjoy it because we both have loved animal crossing since the original US version came out and we were given a copy in 2005.

Thank you for making such a delightful tool that both works with the nostalgia of those game consoles, yet has a much better UX for mobile phone use!
by morsecodist | 2025-08-30 12:20:54+00:00
I am extremely skeptical of this mathematical model to predict history thing. There's just not enough history to do it and you bake in your biases when you go through the qualitative historical record and try to assign it to quantities. A lot of people analyze history and claim they figured it out and they've come to different conclusions and none of them have made reliable, specific conditions. If you say something bad will happen at some point in the future you'll probably be right but it's not enough to call it science.
by roscas | 2025-08-30 12:21:22+00:00
In 10 who interviewed me, only 1 or 2 knew about the job. All others recruiters did not have a single clue on they were talking about.

Job was about Linux admin and I told one about bash programming and that I like and know about it. At the end, he says "there are some things I did not hear like scripting in Linux..." and I just went ok, thanks for you time, bye.
by fcpguru | 2025-08-30 12:21:31+00:00
huh, i went for the mongo video (https://andrewarrow.dev/podpapyrus/summaries/MEJQUwr9d_s.htm...) but stayed for the git vs delta db one:

https://andrewarrow.dev/podpapyrus/summaries/eBXyn8SXFtU.htm...

https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
by animal531 | 2025-08-30 12:22:31+00:00
This idea is extremely prevalent in the games industry and I'm really not a fan of it. It doesn't matter how good of a developer you are, what complicated projects you're working on or have shipped, if you don't have a portfolio of games you've made then you might as well not bother.

Which if you think about it is a real issue. Imagine applying at a courier company for a developer role and they keep asking you about the tracking software you've built, parcel measurement integration you've done etc., instead of asking you about your development skills. Having done those things is of course a huge bonus, but excluding 100% of people that don't have that experience excludes a great majority of candidates that could have been a great fit.

The problem is even bigger than that if I think about it. In this example they don't want to know about individual pieces of industry relevant software that you've built, they are expecting you to have shipped enterprise wide solutions that fit the criteria and that doesn't match your skillset. The role they're advertising might be a senior tech lead/developer, but you're not being hired as a programmer, you're being hired as a game maker. They want you for the games you've shipped, not for the code you've written.

Does your little games have "juice"? That's going to get you hired 100%, but mainly because of your skills as a designer, artist, tester, audio engineer etc., coding only made up 20% of that package.