MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josecodea | 2025-08-04 03:14:38+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Remote | WORLDWIDE

Freelance Web Developer. Full-stack. With a decade of experience as SDE.

Location: Costa Rica (LATAM).

Remote: Yes, any timezone (I reside in CT/UTC-6, EST/CST timezones).

Languages: Spanish, English.

Programming: TypeScript, Rust, Elixir, Clojure, NixOS, AWS, Docker, NodeJS, Deno, ReactJS.

Portfolio: https://www.josecodea.com

Email: Refer to the bottom of my portfolio.

Proof of work with Elixir:

- My portfolio includes Open Source contributions.

Proof of work with Rust, NixOS and Docker:

- My portfolio includes two blog posts, each include a small Rust app that I made to turn on/off an EC2 server with a Discord bot.
by js2 | 2025-08-04 03:14:55+00:00
After decades of writing software, I feel like I have a pretty good sense for "this can't possibly be idiomatic" in a new language. If I sniff something is off, I start Googling for reference code, large projects in that language, etc.

You can also just ask the LLM: are you sure this is idiomatic?

Of course it may lie to you...
by crossroadsguy | 2025-08-04 03:14:57+00:00
I was lucky enough to have had my (first - pretty nice little common username) Gmail account summarily culled towards the early years of my email usage. I was young and I hadn't used the email anywhere where it could get critical - I don't think I had anything critical in life at that time. Besides, my country hadn't moved to emails for personal communications and interactions - it never did, it just teleported into instant messaging.

I was never given a reason. I tried to reach out and, of course, we know how it ends (even then). The thing is, I didn't even use it for anything other than sending emails to friends who were starting in other colleges and kind of just using emails for the sake of using emails. It was the new tool for me. Except one - the teenage me was in long and cosy exchanges with a nice someone many states and thousands of kilometres over talking about Jane Austen and Tolstoy and their works that we both read and loved and what not and also sharing with each other things I now definitely would not call poetry. That still feels like a loss - even after some two odd decades. The silliest thing - I didn't remember the email. Those were the good old days of r1d1clulux_paynthr_56789_b0mb@rediffmail.com. We never asked or revealed each other's names. Those were days like that when you didn't have to worry about whether you were talking to a cat or a fish.

I started using other email services (Yahoo, Hotmail - for a long time those were my main emails) and when I started working I got a domain and moved to a paid email host.

This also taught me a lesson about using free services. Hell, even when using a paid service this can happen. Apple is an example. You feel Google does it, oh boy oh boy, Apple knows how to do the true stonewalling! When you are on the phone with a real human being and that human being stonewalls you and their company (Apple) doesn't even allow that human being to help you, or escalate, or move up in the support chain, you feel that is real something - esp. if you are in a country where consumer laws are less than jokes! Anyway, so that taught me to be ready, to have backups (not just as in data, but as in options), and fallbacks.

I think everyone should experience things like this, but kinda early in life :)

PS. Naah, OP's case isn't like mine. But then people like me (and maybe OP and maybe you) allowed and enabled (still do) Googles and Apples of this world to be this big that they can just do it and get away with it and it doesn't even matter even in countries where consumer laws have real functioning teeth. So that's there.
by bjackman | 2025-08-04 03:15:20+00:00
I think in a highly financialised free market like the US the executive is pretty powerless to really hide important economic data like this, even within their own country.

There would be so much alpha in knowing stuff like the true employment rate that private agencies will be extremely well-funded to collect this data (in fact this probably already happens for some data, there might be alpha in having a second opinion even if you think the government data is trustworthy).

I think the worst-case outcome would be that the mass populace doesn't have access to the info because it's paywalled. But to the extent that journalism continues to exist, journalists will know the employment rate, GDP, that kinda stuff.
by pbh101 | 2025-08-04 03:16:00+00:00
Not OP but listen to podcasts at highly accelerated settings:

The information density of ‘two dudes talking’ or any unscripted format is very low, so it time-compresses well. Specific podcasts, typically scripted monologues with technical content, such as Causality [0] (recommended!), I need to listen to much slower. Ditto if it is in an accent which isn’t mine, which slows my comprehension. I also slow the speed if I’m driving. So, yes, it takes mental overhead, but is doable. Go one click at a time and it will feel natural.

[0]: https://engineered.network/causality/
by andyferris | 2025-08-04 03:16:00+00:00
I actually think Anthropic's plans with capped usage per 5-hour period and per week is good, for exactly this problem.

I'd prefer it just specify a number of tokens rather than be variable on demand - I see that lets them be more generous during low periods but the opacity of it all sucks. I have 5-minute time-of-use pricing on my electricty and can look up the current rate on my phone in an insant - why not simply provide an API to look up the current "demand factor" for Claude (along with the rules for how the demand factor can change - min and max values for example) and let it be fully transparent?
by move-on-by | 2025-08-04 03:16:36+00:00
Wow, I read the full email. Talk about a hostile work environment. This is a CEO who straight up hates his employees. No doubt he is betting big on AI to be able to make big cuts in the workplace. Beyond the double speak about how everyone ‘deserves’ to be in the office to win as a team, and beyond the ‘hey we know this is a shitty move but it’s ok since we have a health plan for you to get a therapist’, here are some real confidence boosters:

> As technology and the "information economy" evolves, each of our respective contributions are going to become increasingly measurable.

> we analyze patterns of behaviors from broad cohorts (aggregated data). This allows leaders to identify behaviors that are obvious outliers, supplemented with the broadest set of information available, to determine if the behavior being evaluated is consistent with our stated priorities and employment expectations.

I feel sorry for the people working 9 to 5 for this a-hole. But I suppose that’s the whole point, get people to quit so you don’t have to pay unemployment.
by yesbabyyes | 2025-08-04 03:17:35+00:00
It's definitely ai slop. See also the nonsensical attempt to conditionally load SQLite twice, in the dynamic imports example.

The list of features is nice, I suppose, for those who aren't keeping up with new releases, but IMO, if you're working with node and js professionally, you should know about most, if not all of these features.
by xdfgh1112 | 2025-08-04 03:17:52+00:00
Hording behaviour doesn't really apply digitally. It's not like it's physical magazines or VHS. It's just bytes and bytes are incredibly cheap. It's also easier to move, delete or search. And even if you don't want it, you can upload it to the IA and maybe someone else will use it. Try doing that with your boxes of VHS.
by hnroo99 | 2025-08-04 03:18:31+00:00
nvm I'm dumb lol, `ts-rest` does support express v5: https://github.com/ts-rest/ts-rest/pull/786. Don't listen to my misinformation above!!

I would say this oversight was a blessing in disguise though, I really do appreciate minimizing dependencies. If I could go back in time knowing what I know now, I still would've gone down the same path.
by skissane | 2025-08-04 03:18:40+00:00
Part of steelmanning / reading charitably is trying to put aside overly emotive/rhetorical/alarmist presentations of an idea and just concentrate on the facts of the matter.

Suppose that Madeupistan is a wealthy developed country with a population of 1 million. Over the next decade, its government has decided to admit 100,000 immigrants. It is evaluating two plans for doing:

Plan A: Admit 100,000 university-educated professionals with established careers and no criminal records

Plan B: Admit 100,000 people at random from all who apply, with no restrictions on who can apply

At the end of the decade, will the people of Madeupistan be happier under plan A or plan B? Almost surely the answer is A: plan B will admit a lot more socially disadvantaged people, worsening crime rates, poverty, social cohesion, violent extremism, etc, compared to A

Now, plans A and B are “ideal types” which don’t correspond to any real world immigration policy - really they represent extremes on a continuum of immigration selectivity, with A being a super-selective immigration policy and B being super-unselective

In the real world, Australia is significantly closer to A and further away from B than France is; and, unsurprisingly, France has significantly greater immigration-related social problems than Australia has.

And the real tragedy of it, is people end up blaming immigration and immigrants in general, when many of the problems they complain about are not inherent to immigration in itself, just to the mismanagement of it by many (but not all) Western nations

The question then is, do the people who “hold a fundamentally different view” agree or disagree with this argument about mismanagement of migration flows - and if they disagree, what is their counterargument to it?
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-04 03:20:50+00:00
Well I have a text file with 5 boiler plate messages. When I boot the screens up every day, I open a new tab and 7 seconds later a new appeal has been submitted.

I do admit that there is a slight prick of annoyance at the start of every day because of this, but I'm well into sunk cost fallacy into the realm of morbid curiosity and flagellation.

Part of the reason is because I manage an account that has a major position in Reddit equity options, so I have to read the name everyday regardless. Indeed I was banned because my option trading advice was too quick and frequent (man, that sub needs some serious basic theory help)... Of course, you can be assured that their horrible customer goodwill may possibly come up in future conversations when I mention the position.

I thought about just emailing IR, but I've actually talked to someone else in a similar position who has contacted IR and they did nothing either.

I was a major contributor to an open source Reddit alternative after the API lockdown, but unfortunately after 2 years I just didn't think that it was going anywhere big and backed out of that, so been there done that to some degree, and that was a good 500 plus hours of investment (although it was net positive - it was fun to grow an old school internet community even though it is never going to compete with Reddit).

The main issue is that they ban all accounts that they can fingerprint to other banned accounts, and I have an account in hibernation that is 15 years old and truly has a huge portion of my life contained in it. It's much like OP and losing a Google account. I think that is the main reason why I grovel to the uncaring corporate shell that encompasses the community that I once help to build when I came over in the great digg migration. I should probably just export the data and vectorize it into an LLM, and just close the book on the few old friends that I'd like to reconnect with someday.

Speaking of Digg, I hear they're rebooting, and things are going well behind the scenes...
by js2 | 2025-08-04 03:22:12+00:00
Hah... yeah, no, its Python isn't great. I'd definitely workable and better than what I see from 9/10 junior engineers, but it tends to be pretty verbose and over-engineered.

My repos all have pre-commit hooks which run the linters/formatters/type-checkers. Both Claude and Gemini will sometimes write code that won't get past mypy and they'll then struggle to get it typed correct before eventually by passing the pre-commit check with `git commit -n`.

I've had to add some fairly specific instructions to CLAUDE.md/GEMINI.md to get them to cut this out.

Claude is better about following the rules. Gemini just flat out ignores instructions. I've also found Gemini is more likely to get stuck in a loop and give up.

That said, I'm saying this after about 100 hours of experience with these LLMs. I'm sure they'll get better with their output and I'll get better with my input.
by dredmorbius | 2025-08-04 03:22:39+00:00
Except of course that they do:

"Texas freeze raises concerns about ‘ridiculous’ variable rate bills" (2021)

HOUSTON, Feb 23 (Reuters) - In Spring, Texas, about 20 miles (32 km) north of Houston, Akilah Scott-Amos is staring down a more than $11,000 electric bill for this month, a far cry from her $34 bill at this time last year.

"What am I going to do?" Scott-Amos, 43, said. She was among the millions of Texas residents who lost power during several days of bitter cold that caused the state's electrical grid, operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, to break down. "I guess the option is, what, I'll pay it? I just don't feel like we should have to."

<https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/texas-freeze-raises-...>

This instance involves variable rate billing systems, where the cost per unit use can vary tremendously. There are also stories you'll find where equipment issues (broken water or gas mains, malfunctioning electrical equipment, failure to terminate per-minute-billed telephone calls, etc.). I can remember the latter featuring in some compendium of records (possibly Guiness) for a family who hadn't realised that they needed to hang up the phone between calls and got hit with a staggering (at least for the time) bill. More recently, data and roaming charges tend to be culprits:

<https://worthly.com/most-expensive/expensive-phone-bills-tim...>

In all of these cases, a significant problem is that usage is all but entirely divorced from metering, and people have no idea of what their actual usage patterns are until "invoice therapy" arrives.

(A term I'm borrowing from a friend, though I'll note that monthly feedback cycles on what are typically hourly/daily decisionmaking patterns proves a poor systems control theory match.)
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-04 03:22:45+00:00
TS doesn’t really. TS simply treats private fields as public ones when it comes to structural type checks. TS is unsound anyways, so not providing hard guarantees about field access safety is right up its alley. More to the point, if you specify a class type with private fields as a requirement, whatever you plug into that requirement has to have those private fields, they are part of the type’s public signature.

To get where structural type systems fall down, think about a bad case is when dealing with native state and you have a private long field with a pointer hiding in it used in native calls. Any “type” that provides that long will fit the type, leading to seg faults. A nominal type system allows you to make assurances behind the class name.

Anyways, this was a big deal in the late 90s, eg see opaque types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opaque_data_type.
by andres_comity | 2025-08-04 03:22:53+00:00
Comity Inc. | Platform Software Engineer | Hybrid (Brooklyn, NYC)| Full-time

Comity is on a mission to improve the reliability, transparency, and efficiency of our energy systems, fostering a future with sustainable and abundant energy. Our team is leveraging statistical learning and convex optimization methods to build the financial rails of our future energy systems that will accelerate the deployment of clean energy resources.

You can read the full JDs and apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/comity?utm_source=hacker_news
by mikewarot | 2025-08-04 03:23:00+00:00
I remember the feeling I had back when our receptionist told us she had gotten a real estate agent license, and was hoping to make more money in that profession, and that "real estate prices can never go down, they aren't making more of it"... Just before the crash of 2008

I get that same vibe when people say that BitCoin, StableCoins, or the US Dollar will be around forever.

While I'm tempted to think that a return to Gold and Silver is in the cards, I suspect that with modern markets, it'll be more than just those 2 metals, and might include MWh of electricity, barrels of oil, tons of coal, and many other commodities with a huge arbitrage market keeping trade liquid. (Much as it is with the various blockchain coins)
by kjellsbells | 2025-08-04 03:23:05+00:00
Not you specifically, but as an industry response, that seems too pat.

The recruiters will do and react to what the hiring managers ask for. When one too many candidates slip thru who bullshit, or there is weak signal that such and such method of candidate selection seems to result in marginally stronger candidates, then everyone rushes to do that thing and it eventually becomes sludge. Leetcode interviews are a classic example.

We (individuals) get poor candidates because we (industry) encourage and reward poor recruitment practices. Time for us all to look in the mirror, honestly.

I've seen 300k salary hiring managers punching down on a recruiter making 60k who doesnt know her C# from her C++. That sort of behavior says more about the flaws of the hiring manager than the recruiter. If you never talk to the recruiter but once a year when you have budget to hire someone, never take the time to educate them on your business, well then you're going to get crappy candidates.
by Reubend | 2025-08-04 03:23:11+00:00
While I agree with the main thesis here, I find this extremely worrying:

> I am amazed every time how my 3-5k line diffs created in a few hours don’t end up breaking anything, and instead even increase stability.

In my personal opinion, there's no way you're going to get a high quality code base while adding 3,000 - 5,000 lines of code from LLMs on a regular basis. Those are huge diffs.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-08-04 03:24:04+00:00
The topic is interesting to us as we (especially my co-founder) have done lots of research in this area, both for adapting existing and inventing new Super Resolution methods for satellite images. We kinda discussed this in detail yesterday.

Btw, we have a demo of the result of the enhancement we achieved about 2 years ago at https://demo.valinor.earth

Looking at this implementation, the noise artifacts likely stem from a few sources. The RCAN model normalizes input by dividing by 400, which is a fixed assumption about Sentinel-2’s radiometric range that doesn’t account for atmospheric variability or scene-specific characteristics. Plus, working with L1B data means you’re enhancing atmospheric artifacts along with ground features - those hazy patterns aren’t just sensor noise but actual atmospheric scattering that gets amplified during super-resolution.

Over the past 2 years, we’ve hit several walls that might sound familiar:

- Models trained on clean datasets (DIV2K, etc.) completely fall apart on real satellite imagery with clouds, shadows, and atmospheric effects.

- The classic CNN architectures like RCAN struggle with global context - they’ll sharpen a building edge but miss that it’s part of a larger urban pattern.

- Training on one sensor and deploying on another is impossible without significant degradation.

Some fixes we’ve found effective:

- Incorporate atmospheric correction directly into the SR pipeline (check out the MuS2 benchmark paper from 2023).

- Use physics-informed neural networks that understand radiative transfer.

- Multi-temporal stacking before SR dramatically reduces noise while preserving real features.

For anyone diving deep into this space, check out:

- SRRepViT (2024) - achieves similar quality to heavyweight models with only 0.25M parameters.

- DiffusionSat - the new foundation model that conditions on geolocation metadata.

- The L1BSR approach from CVPR 2023 that exploits Sentinel-2’s detector overlap for self-supervised training.

- FocalSR (2025) with Fourier-transform attention - game changer for preserving spectral signatures.

Also worth exploring is the WorldStrat dataset for training, and if you’re feeling adventurous, the new SGDM models claiming a 32x enhancement (though take that with a grain of salt for operational use).

The real breakthrough will likely come from models that jointly optimize for visual quality AND radiometric accuracy. Current models excel at one or the other, but rarely both.

If you interested in these topics, we would love to connect. We are at brajeshwar@valinor.earth and amir@valinor.earth
by 1-more | 2025-08-04 03:24:05+00:00
My in-laws tow a heavy, non-aero homemade camping trailer on their Rivian in Colorado. Two things make this work: they don't haul it long distance like you do, and they drive uphill to campsites, and then on the way home they're just charging the whole way back. I realize that there are no free lunches in energy conservation, but this diminishes range anxiety for them I think. Or I misinterpreted our convo and it's just a funny quirk of getting around the mountains.
by RandomBacon | 2025-08-04 03:24:13+00:00
> The US Navy would likely do the same, the biggest issue could be retaining enough crew.

It doesn't help that when the U.S. Merchant Marine was made a part of the U.S. Navy during World War 2, the U.S.M.M. mariners were entitled to Vetern Status and benefits, but the U.S. Navy denied them that. Some mariners were able to get it, but they had to fight for it.

The U.S.M.M. had the highest casualty rate out of all of the services during World War 2: 4% - double that of the next highest - the U.S. Marines with 2%.

http://usmm.org
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-08-04 03:24:17+00:00
I think the structural type approach leans heavily into the "computation is just data and its transformations", so it makes sense for it to treat data as the most important thing. You end up thinking less about classification and more about the transformations.

I'm not saying the nominal approach to types is wrong or bad, I just find my way of thinking is better suited for structural systems. I'm thinking less about the semantics around product_id vs user_id and more about what transforms are relevant - the semantics show up in the domain layer.

Take a vec3 for example, in a structural system you could apply a function designed for a vec2 on it, which has practical applications.
by daft_pink | 2025-08-04 03:24:34+00:00
I think increasing housing values succeeded in solving the banking crisis that was created by the erosion of banking capital when they foreclosed on properties that were worth less than the loan value, because the banks lent money without downpayment to subprime borrowers.

Now we're currently papering over the resulting sky high asset values by allowing inflation to erode the relative value of the sky high real estate.
by dredmorbius | 2025-08-04 03:24:49+00:00
There are utilities which offer a uniform-monthly-billing option. PG&E in California does so as "Budget Billing":

Budget Billing is a free program that helps you easily manage your monthly energy costs . We calculate your monthly payment amount based on your average energy costs over the last 12 months and adjust your payment amount each month, so that you don't have big spikes on your bill.

While it's not a savings program, Budget Billing helps you stay in control of your bill by avoiding seasonal bill spikes.

<https://www.pge.com/en/account/billing-and-assistance/financ...>