MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gellybeans | 2025-08-30 11:09:39+00:00
I used to watch commercials during my starry-eyed teenage years as well. I used to think ninja turtles was anything but a 20 minute ad for toys when I was in preschool.

Ads are actually horrible. Holy moly I'm so glad I can just ublock my way through the sea of garbage that is the internet nowadays. The fact there are people still indoctrinated by commercials makes sense, I'm just sorry you see that as a marker of maturity.
by user_7832 | 2025-08-30 11:10:15+00:00
> If you're not getting offers, I strongly recommend that you find somebody you trust to do a mock interview. Let them critique your resume, cover letter, posture, awkwardness, lame handshake, etc.

Slightly odd question but: what if it's the opposite of this?

Interviews are almost never an issue.

I would like to think (and have been told so too) that I'm both technically sharp and knowledgeable enough, and can communicate well enough. I have a firm handshake, and thanks to the ability to happily dive into topics I read up on, I can speak confidently - both on hard facts, as well as my understanding or opinion of any technical matter in my field - for hours maybe, if not longer.

But getting the interview... is.. legitimately hard. Multiple people have said my resume is quite solid, but I rarely get through beyond the base round.

Would you have any tips for just the act of getting a foot in the door, so to say? I'm reasonably optimistic I can take it from there.

(Two things I can probably change - using customized CVs (and a cover letter, where applicable), and reaching out to employees/HR at the places I'm applying at. Though that honestly seems exhausting with so many applications...)
by sinuhe69 | 2025-08-30 11:11:12+00:00
I can only agree. Higher education for the mass is dangerous, especially when there are not enough jobs for them and they have to take a heavy loan to finance their education.

Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites). Adding to it the dynamics of AI and smart robots, the effect of over-supply can be only exacerbated further.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societa...
by globular-toast | 2025-08-30 11:11:19+00:00
You can't check because the numbers quickly become astronomical. Can you test the Python parser on all possible Python programs? Even if you limited the length of a program you're still talking about an absurdly large number of possible inputs.

What you do is write more primitive components and either unit test them, prove them to be correct or make them small enough to be correct by inspection. An integration test is just testing that the interfaces do indeed fit together, it won't normally be close to testing all possible code paths internally.

I think of it like building any other large machine with many inputs. You can't possibly test a car under every conceivable condition. Imagine if someone was like "but wait, did you even test going round a corner at 60mph in the wet with the radio on?!"
by sethammons | 2025-08-30 11:11:33+00:00
Systems begin to slow. You measure and figure out a way to get performance acceptable again. You gain stakeholder alignment and push towards delivering results.

There are steps that most take. Start with caching. Then you learn about caching strategies because the cache gets slow. Then you shard the database and start managing multiple database connections and readers and writers. Then you run into memory, cpu, or i/o pressure. Maybe you start horizontally scaling. Connections and file descriptors have limits you learn about. Proxies might enter your lexicon. Monitoring, alerting, and testing all need improvement. And recently teams are getting harder to manage and projects are getting slower. Maybe deploying takes forever. So now we break up into different domains. Core backend, control panel, compliance, event processing, etc.

As the org grows and continues to change, more and more stakeholders appear. Security, API design, different cost modeling, product and design, and this web of stakeholders all have competing needs.

Go back to my opening stanza. Rinse and repeat.

Doing this exposes patterns and erroneous solutions. You work to find the least complex solution necessary to solve the known constraints. Simple is not easy (great talk, look it up). The learnings from these battle scars is what makes a staff level engineer methinks. You gain stories and tools for delivering solutions that solve increasingly larger systems and organizations. I recently was the technical lead for a 40 team software project. I gained some more scars and learnings.

An expert is someone who has made and learned from many mistakes in a narrow field. Those learnings and lessons get passed down in good system design interview books, like Designing Data Intensive Applications.
by time0ut | 2025-08-30 11:11:51+00:00
I love this website. It is a throwback to the old internet I grew up with. It has it all. Packed with esoteric information gathered and curated by a passionate group. Designed for desktop only with its own unique aesthetic. Not covered with ads and cookie banners and newsletter popups. I remember spending many evenings exploring such things at 33.6kbps.

On topic: I have watched every episode on TNG more than once and never noticed this. How embarrassing!
by komali2 | 2025-08-30 11:11:53+00:00
> What’s the issue with advertisement exactly?

Advertisement isn't showing you something you might be interested in. Advertisement is an industry of psychoanalysts spending untold man hours of effort crafting ways to psychologically manipulate the population into serving the needs of a given corporation.

Instagram doesn't just show you cool clothes you might want to buy. It leverages dark pattern ux to keep you engaged with the app well past any healthy duration, and shows you content designed to enrage or arouse you to keep you in a mental state that will increase engagement and possibly lead to you engaging in shopping therapy.

Advertising is releasing psychofauna into the world of YouTube kids to get your children obsessed with brand characters that they absolutely must have physical representations of. Or it gets even darker than that, look up Elsagate.

Maybe advertising wasn't evil when it was a sweet potato hawker shouting their wares into the market. Now it's an entirely different beast and it is anti human and evil.
by 9dev | 2025-08-30 11:13:14+00:00
Nah. Don’t make it complicated. Open the root zone to everyone, we don’t need suffixes anymore other than for leeches to make money. Distribute the responsibility for the root zone, kill off the pest that is the TLD industry once and for all. Domain owners can pay a uniform flat fee to IANA shared among all participating entities that keep the infrastructure up. Everyone can have their own, freely choosable TLD. Trademark holders have a right to claim, with some dispute process similar to what we have now.

It would be glorious.
by westurner | 2025-08-30 11:13:18+00:00
Do we then need satellite internet for mobile broadband video for doctors and paramedics if information sharing by nonlocal photonic communication is real; despite the false limit and "loopholes"?

Would this simple experiment and less destructive photonic observation show the nonlocal communication described in the OT article?

"Name of this Q/QC experiment given a light polarization-entanglement complementary relation" (2025) https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/44435/n... :

> Given the ability to infer photonic phase from intensity, isn't it possible to determine whether destructive measurement causes state change in entangled photons? Is there a name for this experiment; and would it test this?

FWIU call blocking is not possible without centralized routing; so we wouldn't even all want quantum phones that don't need towers or satellites that may be affecting the jet stream and thereby the heat.
by yurishimo | 2025-08-30 11:13:33+00:00
As someone who came to Laravel from WordPress, I had a massive hole in my abilities to understand larger systems as a whole. During my tenure in WordPress, I actually got pretty good at the web native parts of modern web development but my “backend” skills were mostly about passing arrays around and doing simple database operations. Basic concepts like MVC were totally foreign to me and I was reminded of this a few months ago when I chatted with an old friend about their experiences with Laravel after the drama in WP land a few months back. When I told him that Models were not anything special and you didn’t need to scaffold out a Model using Laravel to create your own class against an existing table, his mind was blown and I could see the gears starting to turn. Mind you, this is a very successful solopreneur with a thriving theme business/platform and over a decade of experience; just that xp was in a domain set apart from the discipline of modern software engineering.

I’m super happy to have spent that time learning how to work with constraints to build absolutely giant systems (had a stint with an agency that worked for big online publishers that are known for using WP…) but after seeing the other side, I’m also happy to be past that and onto different and more interesting things.
by nuker | 2025-08-30 11:14:17+00:00
Some asked DoD to use satellites to see the damage. Linda Ham declined the request.

"The imagery request was soon rescinded by NASA Mission Management Team Chair Linda Ham after she investigated the origin of it. She had consulted with Flight Director Phil Engelauf and members of the Mission Management Team, who stated that they did not have a requirement for imagery of Columbia. Ham did not consult with the Debris Assessment Team, and cancelled the imagery request on the basis that it had not been made through official channels." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disas...
by jackstraw42 | 2025-08-30 11:14:32+00:00
I'm concerned that we're entering or living in some kind of modern dark age. Everyone in the world is part of one network (more or less) for the first time in human history, and information spreads like wildfire but there's no systems in place to make sure it's "good" information. That's being put entirely on individuals to decide for themselves (family, friends, etc be damned) while at the same time, Republicans are taking away any public services that help make informed decisions. Supposedly this means more freedom (or strength?) but really it just means more ignorance.
by tmtvl | 2025-08-30 11:15:18+00:00
The Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Report on the Algorithmic Programming Language Scheme (R6RS) specified that square brackets should be completely interchangeable with round brackets, which allows you to write let bindings or cond clauses like so:

(let ([a (get-some-foo 1)] [b (get-some-foo 2)]) (cond [(> a b) -1] [(< a b) 1] [else 0]))

...but I hate that, I'd much prefer if square brackets were only used for vectors, which is why I have reader macros for square brackets -> vectors and curly brackets -> hash tables in my SBCL run commands.
by diggan | 2025-08-30 11:15:18+00:00
It sounds like some dynamic gain is happening every time he starts talking, and then after ~1 second it gets better. I don't think it's a "missing hardware" issue, just turning down the gain would probably be enough, or tuning the software dynamics if he's using that. Could also be that the podcaster tried doing some normalization across the entire podcast while mastering and fucked it up that way.
by PickledChris | 2025-08-30 11:17:10+00:00
This is an interesting point, but there's slightly more to it than that. When something is simple and does the job well, it has limitations. The problem is that adding each subsequent feature has a small benefit and a small, but immeasurable cost. Sometimes that cost outweighs the benefit, but knowing that before the fact is very hard, and removing features is almost impossible as people shout disproportionately loudly about losing things.

It's similar to the problem of regulation. Looking at each individual law, it often seems reasonable. It's only when there are 10,000, and everything grinds to a halt, that people realise there's a problem.
by ksec | 2025-08-30 11:17:39+00:00
Love this idea and wondering where that low cost of living place would be. But genuinely asking;

What problem are we trying to solve that is not possible right now? Do we start from hardware at the CPU ?

I remember one of an ex Intel engineer once said, you could learn about all the decisions which makes modern ISA and CPU uArch design, along with GPU and how it all works together, by the time you have done all that and could implement a truly better version from a clean sheet, you are already close to retiring .

And that is assuming you have the professional opportunity to learn about all these, implementation , fail and make mistakes and relearn etc.
by jajko | 2025-08-30 11:18:55+00:00
What is more important, raising next generation of Musks (albeit ideally much less broken sociopathic piece of shit as current one), or avoiding next generation of Trumps?

Both of those can add tons of societies (or avoid their downfall), but all of them have 1 in common - they are spoiled rich kids with 0 connection to lives of ordinary folks from Day 1. One of biggest tricks Trump pulled was convincing folks he is one of them, and understands and shares their plight.

So it seems we are already getting at least aome brilliant folks up where they belong, and lower rate of those ain't outright catastrophe for aociety. On the other hand - dumb trivial to manipulate general population can't be saved by producing more smart brilliant folks, populistic corrupt a-holes will still overcome them.

So I would focus on general education level much more, based on above. General prosperity over future trillionaires.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-30 11:20:14+00:00
Everything is a trade off and experience is knowing when it’s worth it to add a hook for future expansion and when you can wait.

The problem is that when you let people without experience design things, they tend towards what I call “what if driven development”.

At every point in the design they ask what if I need to extend this later. Then they add a hook for that future expansion.

When we are training juniors the best thing is not to show them all the best practices in Clean Code because most of them gravitate towards overengineering anyway. If you give them permission and “best practices” to justify their desires, they write infuriatingly complicated layers upon layers of indirection. The thing to do is to teach them to do the simplest thing that works—just like this blog post says.

Will that result in some regrets when they build something that isn’t extensible? Absolutely! But it’s generally much easier to add a missing abstraction than it is to remove a bad one.
by strogonoff | 2025-08-30 11:21:02+00:00
The apparent discrepancy between “the simplest thing possible” and “the best solution” only exists if we forget that a product exists in time. If the goal is not just an app that works today but something that won’t break tomorrow, that changes what the simplest thing is. If what seems like the simplest thing makes it difficult to maintain, have many poorly vetted dependencies, etc., then that is not really the simplest thing anymore.

When this is accounted for, “the simplest thing” approaches “the best solution”.
by vessenes | 2025-08-30 11:21:51+00:00
To a mathematician saying god created the integers is the same thing as saying god created the rationals: there’s a bijection between the rationals and integers.

I’m not convinced that we could have our current universe without irrationals - wouldn’t things like electromagnetism and gravity work differently if forced to be quantized between rationals? Saying ‘meh it would be close enough’ might be correct but wouldn’t be enough to convince me a priori.
by Xcelerate | 2025-08-30 11:22:04+00:00
Everyone likes to debate the philosophy of whether the reals are “real”, but for me there is a much more practical question at hand: does the existence of something within a mathematical theory (i.e., derivability of a “∃ [...]” sentence) reflect back on our ability to predict the result of symbolic manipulations of arbitrary finite strings according to an arbitrary finite rule set over an arbitrary finite period of time?

For AC and CH, the answer is provably “no” as these axioms have been shown to say nothing about the behavior of halting problems, which any question about the manipulation of symbols can be phrased in terms of (well, any specific question—more general cases move up the arithmetical hierarchy).

If it’s not reflective in this precise sense, then the derivation of, e.g., a set-theoretic ∃ in some instances has no effect on any prediction of known physics (i.e., we are aware of no method of falsification).
by wtcactus | 2025-08-30 11:23:06+00:00
The important key point is that you will not lose anything by using ZFS without ECC compared to using any other file system without ECC. The myth is that you specifically need ECC if you’ll be using ZFS, not that ECC is a really good idea for any file system.

https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...
by dns_snek | 2025-08-30 11:24:17+00:00
> Would it be okay if people started “resisting” illegal immigrants in the same way?

Attacking the powerless underclass isn't political resistance, that's just plain old xenophobic violence and tyranny.

> We don’t do vigilante justice in this country.

What a wise, noble, and rational position to take when your side is in control of the official government offices and perpetrating unconstitutional and otherwise unlawful violence against anyone deemed to be undesirable.

Unlawful and unconstitutional violence without a due process is the definition of vigilante justice. The fact that it's being perpetrated by people in uniforms doesn't legitimize it unless you believe in autocracy.
by karmakurtisaani | 2025-08-30 11:24:23+00:00
Exponential growth is a funny thing. First it looks like nothing is happening, and all of a sudden everything has changed. Check out discussions about wind and solar some 10 years ago.

E: for reference from memory, it took about 50 years to install the first TW of solar. The next TW took 2 years, and the next TW is projected to take only 1 year, 2025.
by ptero | 2025-08-30 11:24:40+00:00
That would be a rare case where I would reach back for more information. Rescinding an offer is, in my book, a huge black mark against the company and I would consider shaming them in a blog post as well.

Was this your first polygraph? I never had one, but I heard that passing the first one for a high level ticket virtually always takes several tries.

Did they tell you that you passed the poly?
by jay-barronville | 2025-08-30 11:24:53+00:00
Exactly. It’s so obvious that Musk didn’t do a Nazi salute that I can’t believe that anyone who considers themselves to be a serious person would still be pushing that. There’s no way that someone can watch the video of that situation and come to a good-faith conclusion that that’s what he was doing.

If the standard is that low, I could easily produce a compilation video of the likes of Obama, Biden, Harris in compromising positions appearing to show them doing things that they obviously weren’t doing.

Partisanship has turned everyone into dishonest and uncharitable actors, and it’s so unfortunate.
by thinkharderdev | 2025-08-30 11:26:15+00:00
I agree with the saying as such but I think it's actually a counterpoint to the "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" idea. When building a system initially you want to do the simplest thing that can possible work, given some appropriate definition of "working". Ideally as the systems requirements evolve you should refactor to address the complexity by adding abstractions, making things horizontally scalable, etc. But for any given change the "simplest thing that can possible work" is usually something along the lines of "we'll just add another if-statement" or "we'll just add another parameter to the API call". Before you know it you have an incomprehensible API with 250 parameters which interact in complex ways and a rats nest of spaghetti code serving it.

I prefer the way Einstein said it (or at least I've heard it attributed to him, not sure if he actually said it): "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler".
by epilys | 2025-08-30 11:26:24+00:00
Writing a JIT and a disassembler are completely separate topics than emulating a system, don't you agree? :D (The article only talks about structuring a system emulator.)

The disassembler is my next step, since it's the easiest to tackle. Swapping binja for a custom solution on the existing code would be relatively straightforward.

The JIT is a completely different beast, it's essentially the IR -> codegen steps of a compiler (meaning without parsing, syntax/lexical analysis, object generation). Seeing as I wanted to target both x86_64 and aarch64 hosts, using an existing solution would get me started faster before I eventually write my own.

My plan is to split the JIT backends and keep cranelift for x86_64 support, but have my own aarch64 JIT also.

You have to pick your battles and assign priorities, you cannot re-invent everything at once.

(Author here)
by Hilift | 2025-08-30 11:26:41+00:00
It isn't about wide use. It is about a character that almost no-one enters explicitly. Nearly all usages are copy paste, or inadvertent/unintended conversion by an application such as Microsoft Word that converts regular quotes to smart quotes, etc. In that respect, we see that an AI is performing identically to a real human. An AI does not and most likely would not add see a purpose an em or en dash to any text, unless it was an article about em or en dashes, or they knew the person they were speaking with uses en or em dashes.
by egorfine | 2025-08-30 11:27:00+00:00
True.

IMHO the log services example is excellent to illustrate this: the path that leads to their hairball of complexity is perfectly clear and every solution they do is extremely logical and obvious.

This is why these services are so much similar.

But the end result is always too complex and it seems to me that "perfect" point does not exist for this line of products.
by Y_Y | 2025-08-30 11:28:42+00:00
But of course you must close the loop by representing Maxwell's equations electromagnetically.

I know this is a classic analogy, but now you've got me wondering, originally Maxwell wrote a messy pile of equations of scalrs, later someone (Gibbs?) gave them the familiar vector calculus form. Nowadays we have marvellously general and terse form, like (using the differential of the Hodge dual in naturalised units),

d star(F) = J

My question is, when are we going to get some super-compact unified representation of `eval`?
by carlosjobim | 2025-08-30 11:29:32+00:00
Well then it's like handing out free birthday cake recipes in the middle of the street to anybody who passes by and then calling the police later demanding that they arrest people, because they're baking the cake even though it's not their birthday.

Recipes are a good real world example of open source working properly. Anybody is free to use and improve. And anybody is free to not share their recipes or improvements with the public.
by bgwalter | 2025-08-30 11:29:49+00:00
The people who are positive about "AI" like Roychoudhury have warmed a lot of chairs:

https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/cs/people/abhik/

Of course, he also had a startup for an agentic "AI" approach for software.

I bet he hasn't written any real software like many academics. We should not listen to these people who chair conferences and let them dictate the future of real hackers.