MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freshtake | 2025-08-30 16:23:38+00:00
The best engineers are all three, and can turn up or down these tendencies depending on what's required for the project, business, or personal goals. These should not be fixed in proportion over time, as they are each useful in different circumstances.

I spent time at Microsoft as well, and one of the things I noticed was folks who spent time in different disciplines (e.g. dev, test, pgm) seemed to be especially great at tailoring these qualities to their needs. If you're working on optimizing a compiler, you probably need a bit more Einstein and Mort than Elvis. If you're working on a game engine you may need a different combination.

The quantities of each (or whether these are the correct archetypes) is certainly debatable, but understanding that you need all of them in different proportions over time is important, IMHO.
by Hizonner | 2025-08-30 16:23:49+00:00
> Technical literacy does not imply social or security literacy.

Indeed. And people were falling for scams long before the Internet. What's new is the push to make that the fault of bystanders... thus causing those bystanders to intervene. It's neither the bank's fault, nor Google's fault, if somebody falls for a scam. Or installs malware. Or whatever. If you try to make it their fault, they're going to do really annoying things that you don't want.

Sure, you can sell security tools, or curation, or whatever. Many people will even want to buy them, but things break when that starts being a duty. And the only way to prevent it from becoming a duty is to accept that people own their own mistakes.
by joshcsimmons | 2025-08-30 16:24:02+00:00
> It took 8 seconds to fully load and then the tab locked up on my (admittedly low-RAM ) Chromebook...

...and I can't play Cyberpunk 2077 on my macbook. Outside of sales/utilities (money,healthcare,etc.) I don't know where this notion of "having to develop for low specced machines" game from for web.
by jaggederest | 2025-08-30 16:24:08+00:00
> The only thing people should look at are peer reviewed studies, lots of them ideally, and with no conflict of interest.

"Ignore your own direct experience, only research papers matter" is certainly a take.

The beautiful thing about the current generation of tools is that they are so incredibly cheap relative to historical tools intended to improve engineering productivity. You can't just run out and pick up CASE tools for less than ~$CAR to ~$HOUSE. A pro subscription to whichever AI tool you want to try is $20.

Ignore research, try them, if you have success, use them. There's no dogma here. Just empiricism.
by avianlyric | 2025-08-30 16:24:10+00:00
That’s easy when you’re dealing with people operating in countries where your existing relationship is poor or non-existent. There’s nothing practical that country can do to fight back against U.S. demands.

But try applying that approach to India or China. Do you think those countries are going to allow the U.S. military to operate on their home turf, shooting at their citizens, and not retaliate? It doesn’t even have to be military retaliation, the U.S. economy is heavily intertwined with those countries, just look at the consequences of Trumps tariffs. Do you honestly think U.S. citizens would be willing to trade off the trade benefits of working with those countries, just so you run a military raid on building of scammers?
by megaloblasto | 2025-08-30 16:24:14+00:00
Damn bro. Deep dive into the comments.

The bad algo was a scaling problem for one equation. That particular equation wasn't some y = mx + b thing, it was the result of a discontinuous galerkin finite element scheme that I wrote from scratch. The actual equation was one that I found after about 2 pages of hand written derivations with high level math. Not really a coding issue, just an algebra issue after really intense manipulations of partial differential equations.

The fact that AI found that problem, a problem that could only be found by someone able to do complex manipulations of PDEs is incredible to me. Perhaps I didn't tell the story well in the past comment, but it isn't like I didn't know python syntax and AI held my hand.

I don't post repos because I keep my hacker news life separate from my personal life, and my repos are tied to my name.

Most major software companies are demanding that their employees use AI, so you should be able to look at any open repo from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc for examples of AI use in code.
by dariosalvi78 | 2025-08-30 16:24:31+00:00
Re 2: salaries are very seldom too low. Think of waiters cleaners etc. they have pretty decent salaries. At least in Sweden where I live. This is the effect of unions being strong, a general culture that values work and workers, and historical and political context. Also scarcity plays a role, there are few people and many professions are hard to find.

Having said that, it's no socialist Heaven either, wealth inequality is among the highest in developed countries and unemployment is very high especially among the young people with immigrant background. Racism, or a certain suspicion of strangers, is latent and affects access to jobs. Inflation is high, housing market is as crazy as elsewhere, and living costs are not low.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-30 16:26:09+00:00
I'm pretty sure this entire thread is filled with "nobody likes to maintain the pile of ifs", since I doubt very seriously it's the age that jams people up, it's finding the correct place to make a surgical change that only produces the net-new behavior without blowing up the world. I guess the rest of that is that often the older a codebase is, the more revenue stream in impacts if something goes wrong
by nhp_fermi | 2025-08-30 16:26:52+00:00
I don’t buy the framing that this is some grand “debtor’s strategy.” Trump’s relationship to debt has been mostly survival — bankruptcies, restructurings, junk bonds — not some masterclass in macroeconomics. The US dollar isn’t a casino balance sheet; it’s a global reserve currency with network effects and political commitments that outlast any single administration.

Yes, inflation erodes debt, but it also destroys credibility — and once you lose that, financing costs explode. The real danger isn’t Trump’s supposed genius, it’s that treating the dollar like a personal put option underestimates how fragile global trust actually is.

Plus the guys super into gold, I feel like he would prefer a strong dollar
by reikonomusha | 2025-08-30 16:27:11+00:00
I think the criticism is relevant because TFA isn't the first to exercise the term "cognitive load" in the context of computing. It's a term thrown around quite often, so we should cross reference its alleged meaning to literature.

I myself find it to be a term that's effectively used as a thought-terminating cliche, sometimes as a way to defend a critic's preferred coding style and organization.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-30 16:27:19+00:00
Obviously not every item in the backlog has a full design, for work that might be years out.

But yes, the next few items for the team to work on should always have the necessary specifications to start work. Whether it's UX mocks or a requirements document or whatever. Having that stuff ready to go is a primary job of the PM who manages the backlog.

Obviously the engineering team then has to break it down further into tasks to complete, but that's what engineering is. And you will run into areas that turned out to be underspecified and the PM needs to liaison with other folks to figure out answers, but again that's part and parcel. That's not generally stopping the whole team from work, and teams often work on multiple features at once so even being temporarily blocked on one doesn't keep you from progress on another.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-08-30 16:27:26+00:00
Sometimes you have to let people fail, even though you can see it coming. It sounds like Carmack was sticking his nose in a project that wasn’t under his purview and he dug his heels in a bit too much when he should have just let it fail.

All the FAANG do dumb shit all the time and waste huge sums of money, if you work at a FAANG the best thing you can do is stay in your lane and don’t do dumb shit — eventually it will shake out.

I have been bullied around by L7s (as a L5) sticking their nose in things, and the best thing you can do is clearly articulate what you are doing and why, and that you understand their feedback. Turns out the L7 got canned — partially due to their bullying — and I got promoted for executing and being a supportive teammate, so things worked out in the end.
by riedel | 2025-08-30 16:28:32+00:00
Speaking only of intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load oversimplifies things. This works for tasks of pilots (see e.g. NASATLX scores).

However, if new information that needs to be learned is in the game there is also germane cognitive load [0]. It is a nice theory, however, practically there is unfortunately no easy way to separate them and look at them totally independently.

[0] https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/10/15/the-good-the-b...
by metalman | 2025-08-30 16:28:40+00:00
For China a data set like this is only usefull if it can be validated, which it seems from reading between the lines, they have/are doing. The only use China has for this data set it to guage a competitors true capacity, VS there own capacity. It is highly likely that this data set will not be used to access any individuals information in any way that could lead to a situation that then could be back tracked, and that the copy that China has is hermeticaly sealed off in some inner sanctum of the secret squirles. Any posture that China takes will use many other sources of information beside this one. And of course, it's Chinas posture that has some strategists concerned right now, which is compounded by what looks like a perfect job, done completly online that has left a dead end trail, and zero proof of anything. So classic spy craft, with no possibility of a hollywood movie.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-30 16:28:58+00:00
> If you were giving presentations you'd get questions and comments at the end. Since a blog is typically read/delivered in async fashion distributed across regions the only feedback you get is via analytics

If only there were a way for readers to post questions or comments back to the authors of blog posts, there could be feedback without the indirection of analytics. Too bad no one has, in the history of (either standard- or micro-) blogging thought to provide such a mechanism.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-30 16:29:34+00:00
I am sure there are legitimate reasons to disable zooming. I do not like it either, of course, but off the top of my head:

- Websites relying on pixel-perfect layouts that do not gracefully adapt when zoomed

- Input Errors on touch devices

- Branding and aesthetics

- Embedded devices where a site is running in a controlled environment where zooming serves no practical purposes and disabling zooming prevents tampering, misuse, accidental UI scaling that disrupts normal operations

- Fixed-scale graphics or games where zooming distorts aspect ratios, crop controls, or even break gameplay mechanics
by Adlopa | 2025-08-30 16:30:12+00:00
The style in the UK – for professional writing, at least – has generally been ‘word en-dash word’. My understanding was that ‘wordem-dashword’ was a US style thing and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used in a UK publication. (I suspect few non ‘writers’ know the difference between an en-dash and a hyphen and some publications also seem to be relaxed about it.)

So it was no surprise to me that ChatGPT used em dashes (I assume a US bias to its training data) and I immediately told it to stop using them (along with Title Case titles). (Source: professional writer for 30 years.)

https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-style-guide-d
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-30 16:30:16+00:00
I'm somewhat familiar with Barbour's work, which tries to reformulate gravity as a theory of 3-geometries instead of 4-geometries. Basically, you can do this by moving additional complexity into the lagrangian. Barbour's work is hard to get into because he has had various versions of this theory (Shape Dynamics) over the years and some of them are classical models, some are curved spacetime, some are more effective at being totally relational than others, etc.

Anyway, its true that something he calls the complexity increases forever in his more recent models, this is just an expression chosen to make the dynamics work out. Even Barbour says this is not necessarily related to the sort of complexity life has. And it depends on the universe being an open systems.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-30 16:30:33+00:00
This probably isn't entirely what you meant, but people who do this code smell drive me starkraving mad

shipToAddress(getShippingAddress(getStreet()),calculateShipping(getShippingAddress(getStreet())))

because as soon as one needs to update the mechanism for getting the shipping address, congratulations, you're updating it everywhere -- or not, nothing matters in this timeline
by rectang | 2025-08-30 16:30:49+00:00
"I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." — Blaise Pascal

I fully agree with the author about the desirability of simplicity. I feel it in my bones, as someone with a background in the arts who has spent endless hours agonizing over tiny details and discarding perfectly good sections which nevertheless did not serve the whole.

What this article doesn't emphasize is that simplicity has cost. Shaving down a pile of yak hair isn't enough to reveal Brancusi's Bird in Space[1] — it needs to be visualized from multiple angles, tested, reshaped, re-imagined over and over.

In engineering, simplicity is one more axis to optimize against. For systems that endure, some measure of time spent simplifying will be worth it. But I find that when I make that argument, my case is strengthened by bearing in mind the size of the spend.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Bird_in_...
by 1024bees | 2025-08-30 16:31:35+00:00
It's nice to see a microarchitecture take a risk, and getting perspective on how this design performs with respect to performance, power and area would be interesting.

Very unlikely to me that this design would have comparable "raw" performance to a design that implements something closer to tomasulo's algorithm. The assumption that the latency of a load will be a l1 hit is a load bearing abstraction; I can imagine scenarios where this acts as a "double jeopardy" causing scheduling to lock up because the latency was mispredicted, but one could also speculate that isn't important because the workload is already memory bound.

There's an intuition in computer architecture that designs that lean on "static" instruction scheduling mechanisms are less performant than more dynamic mechanisms for general purpose compute, but we've had decades of compiler development since itanium "proved" this. Efficient computer (or whatever their name is) is doing something cool too, it's exciting to see where this will go
by dingi | 2025-08-30 16:31:38+00:00
Top-level error handling doesn't mean losing error details. When done well, it uses specialized exceptions and a catch–wrap–rethrow strategy to preserve stack traces and add context. Centralizing errors provides consistency, ensures all failures pass through a common pipeline for logging or user messaging, and makes policies easier to evolve without scattering handling logic across the codebase. Domain-level error modeling is still valuable where precision matters, but robust top-level handling complements it by catching the unexpected and reducing unhandled failures, striking a balance between developer effort and user experience.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-30 16:31:48+00:00
your example makes me question how much you bake.

The instructions are simple to remember, the ingredient quantities are not. Once i have read the recipe, i have a clear idea what i need to do. But i may need to look up the quantities. Looking for those in a block of text is a waste of time and error prone. Having a recipe formatted like the 2nd example is only useful for a someone inexperienced with baking.

Its also difficult to buy or bring out the ingredients if they're hidden in text. Or know if i can bake something based on what i have or not.

If you've baked an really old recipe from a book, you may find instructions like "Mix the ingredients, put in a pan, bake until brown on high heat", with a list of quantities and not even a picture to know what it is you're baking. An experienced baker will know the right order and tools, and how their oven behaves, so it's not written out at all.

If i look for recipes online, seeing the instructions written like you have makes me reluctant to trust the author, and also makes me annoyed when trying to follow or plan out the process.
Happiness in Relationship Loci
by venkat223 | 2025-08-30 16:31:51+00:00
Happiness and pain with stress as buffer plays balancing role in relationships of any kind.Internal locus has strong bearing on the external locus like quantum tunneling it works on both orany in community related by some association or other.As long as the perceptions and projections remain valency depending on economic or pleasure factors the relationships exist. But random occurrences disturb the peace and hapiness creating stress and strain mental and somatic. Distant thoughts on related persons by the subjects does have ameliorative effects. Can an expert explain this ?
by philjohn | 2025-08-30 16:32:11+00:00
The "WTF" list technique is great for this.

Every time you see, or encounter, something that makes you go "WTF?!??" you write it down.

Chances are you don't have NEARLY enough context yet to figure out why it's like that, and so barelling in to "fix" it is just going to lead to frustration and bruised ego's all around.

After a few months you'll either have crossed off things "Oh, THAT's WTF" or you have a list of things to start chipping away at, now that you have the FULL context.
by evilduck | 2025-08-30 16:33:10+00:00
It feels to me like it could replace ChatGPT 3.5 from the perspective of comparing it to their web chat interface if you were just asking about programming things two years ago, but the world moved on and you can do a lot more than just talk with a model and copy paste code now.

Having Qwen3 Coder's A3B available for chat oriented coding conversations is indeed amazing for what it is and for being local and free but I also struggled to get useful agentic tools to reliably work with it (a fair number of tool calls fail or start looping, even with correct and advised settings, and tried using Cline, Roo, Continue and their own Qwen Code CLI). Even when I do get it to work for a few tasks in a row I don't have the hardware to run at comparable speed or manage the massive context sizes as a hosted frontier model. And buying capable enough hardware costs about as much as many years of paying for top tier hosted models.
by jlarocco | 2025-08-30 16:33:23+00:00
I'm not anti-government, but a technical solution that elliminates the the problem is infinitely better than regulating around it.

The internet is too big and distributed to regulate. Nobody will agree on what the rules should be, and certain groups or countries will disagree in any case and refuse to enforce them.

Existing regulation rarely works, and enforcement is half-assed, at best. Ransomware is regulated and illlegal, but we see articles about major companies infected all the time.

I don't think registering with Cloudflare is the answer, but regulation definitely isn't the answer.
by mhedgpeth | 2025-08-30 16:33:27+00:00
I'm the author of the post. Yeah you got it right, I think the hiring process got me into that mindset, i.e. "This is a step back from you title-wise but you'll get back there quickly". So the hiring process made all that look too easy and in retrospect got me into the wrong state of mind.

What I should have done, at the point of being hired, is to drop all that, and focus patiently on what I needed to do. And I'm sharing it because not enough people share this side of it, and because I am working on elements that would have made it better. Thanks for reading! :)
by toast0 | 2025-08-30 16:33:34+00:00
> The people working on it may not have agreed that it was likely to fail.

They probably didn't agree, but the claim was that it wasn't helpful. being helpful and telling people what they want to hear aren't the same thing. If you're working on a destined to fail project, the most helpful thing to hear would be some way to change its destiny, the next most helpful thing to hear would be a call to stop doing it.

Besides all that, Facebook is probably one of the worst places to develop a new general purpose OS. The review system is built around rewarding impact, which means a long term project with no early deliverables sets up the staff to get poor reviews, which limits staffing. The company also has not built the kind of trust in products, sdks, etc that would make using a new OS seem like a good idea to potential users, or to encourage developers to make applications available for it, or to encourage companies to use it in their products. It would have to be so amazingly better than the marketplace of OSes that it made up for the lack of software for it and become a target of new software.

A special purpose OS is different. The development process is usually not as long, the requirements tend to be pretty narrow, and the target would likely be something in house. It might still not be a good idea, there's lots of off the shelf options to look at and they are likely good enough in many to most cases.
Show HN: TextPolicy – reinforcement learning for text generation on a MacBook
by teilom | 2025-08-30 16:34:08+00:00
I built TextPolicy because I wanted a way to study reinforcement learning for text generation without needing a cluster or cloud GPUs. A MacBook is enough. The toolkit is simple: Implements GRPO and GSPO algorithms Provides a decorator interface for custom reward functions Includes LoRA and QLoRA utilities Runs on MLX, so it is efficient on Apple Silicon It is not intended for production. The purpose is learning and experimentation: to understand algorithms, to test ideas, to see how reward shaping affects behavior. Installation is through pip: pip install textpolicy There is a minimal example in the README. I am interested in feedback on: the clarity of the API, the usefulness of the examples, and whether this lowers the barrier for people new to RL. Repository: github.com/teilomillet/textpolicy
by rogerrogerr | 2025-08-30 16:34:51+00:00
“Benefits” info may include protected health info depending on the breadth. Like how much of your deductible you’ve used and how you answered the annual “do you smoke” question.

What benefits an employee is _eligible_ for - sure, no problem with that being public. What they chose and how they’re using them should be protected.

(Imagine finding out a coworker you thought was single is on the spouse+benefits plan!)
by mhedgpeth | 2025-08-30 16:34:57+00:00
From the author of the post: 100% I knew this advice but didn't follow it. Being patient early on is SO important!

I think the hard thing is as on engineer you're paid to have the "right" answer, but as a manager you're paid not to be right but to bring all the "right answers" together. That's a subtle but important shift.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-30 16:35:45+00:00
>"Perspective is developed"

That is often academic institutional marketing rhetoric. What seems reasonable or lucrative to the naive is not necessarily worth the legal encumbrances or investment risks.

Rule #16: "One should listen to the person that signs the Checks, as the bank has already validated who is currently in charge of the account". Everyone has an opinion, but some opinions are more profitable than others...

Best of luck =3