MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is the chance of getting a donation through support on GitHub?
by Forgret | 2025-08-30 10:43:21+00:00
Hi, I'm a student developer and I wanted to get paid right now, and I heard that you can get paid through sponsors on GitHub, but I'm wondering what the chances are that people will do it? Not everyone wants to spend money.

Please share your opinion and tell me who may have managed to get money this way?
by NoahZuniga | 2025-08-30 10:43:21+00:00
While the observable universe is in some sense finite, as far as I know it is definitely still possible (based on our understanding of science) that the universe is infinite (and has infinite matter in every direction).

I'll use this definition: a constructible real is a real that you can describe uniquely in a purely mathematical way (and prove that your description identifies a unique real). IE the positive solution to x^2=2 identifies a unique real. Also, the first positive solution to sin x.

Now if you accept that the universe is infinite (and has infinite matter in every direction), you could get representations of un-constructible reals in your universe. One pretty contrived way to get an un-constructible real from this infinite universe is this: start at earth with some velocity, lets say 0.01c in some direction. Start with r = "0." Every second, find the closest particle. Take the amount of meters (rounded down) that this particle is away from you and append it to r.

So if after one second the closest particle is 145m away, r becomes 0.145. If after another second the closest particle is 0.14m away, r becomes 0.1450

The value this process converges to could be un-constructible.
by swores | 2025-08-30 10:44:02+00:00
I agree that it's a negative, and if it were up to me I'd change things to make it more like the UK (though not only is it not up to me, but I may be biased as a Brit myself), however:

One big difference is that in the UK the cabinet is made up of MPs, and the second biggest party in parliament has a shadow cabinet at all times; so when they get elected (and, although things may be different next election, UK has traditionally been a two party system so it's always either the current biggest or the second biggest party who will win the election) they basically have the heads of department already in place, ready to take over and start working with the large non-partisan civil service.

Compared to the US, where congress/senators (equivalent to our MPs, in that they're the politicians who just won their local elections) haven't spent the previous years working as "shadow secretary of health/defense/education/whatever" (and they're not the people those jobs will be filled by) and although the president elect may have put some thought into it before the election, they haven't yet finalised decisions and discussed with their candidate for those positions about actually hiring them.

And I'm not sure about the numbers but I think that the US has a larger amount of partisan civil servants (west wing staff and thousands of other presidential appointments across the various departments) compared to the UK where there are partisan advisers for government members, but a larger proportion of work/responsibilities rest with career civil servants who don't change when a new government gets elected.

There's also the potential for slow recounts or, in some states, the need for runoffs (aka a whole new election), which is why there's a gap between the public election and the Electoral College voting - if it were up to me, I'd definitely get rid of the whole concept of the Electoral College, it's ridiculous (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45072350 & my reply to it).

(I've simplified a few things, for example UK cabinet doesn't have to be entirely MPs it can also include peers from the House of Lords, such as when the current Labour government got elected the PM decided not to keep the MP who had been his Shadow Attorney General in that role, giving it to a Lord instead... but this comment is already too long, so I've left out various details / edge cases like that.)
by Plankaluel | 2025-08-30 10:44:28+00:00
I have to say:

After all the talk in the article how the Romanian system makes part of the population perform higher by throwing a lot of the resources at them, lowering the performance of the people that are already below average. Which is a problem for Romania because a lot of the highly educated people leave the country afterwards ...

I was not really prepared for the final sentence where the author recommends as a solution that more countries should do it like that.
by falcor84 | 2025-08-30 10:44:36+00:00
As a human, I would not refuse either of these. If someone asked to order 18,000 waters, I would redirect them to our wholesale rep, and if they want bacon on ice cream, who am I to judge; I've seen people eating weirder stuff. If I have something on my menu, I'm ok with people ordering it in any amount and combination as long as they're paying and I'll figure it out. And if I do have a hard limitation on amounts or combination, I'll want to encode it into the ordering system; no common sense needed.
by hmstx | 2025-08-30 10:44:37+00:00
Go for it, you might be surprised! In the last 6 years or so, I decided to poke at my childhood Amiga 500 again when visiting family (which is where it still lives) and I wasn't sure how many of the errors I saw came from a dead disk drive or fading floppies. Last week, enraged with disk/drive issues, I rushed a poor man's drive cleaning with 90 proof alcohol on the heads (99.9 IPA much preferred), and WD40/90 proof in the disk presence switch (again, proper contact cleaner and IPA much preferred). Most disks behaved well after that - original software or user written, a few of my own disks had errors, and a couple sound like they need gluing back to the center spindle. These are all disks from 90-98 and I was able to move data back and forth through the serial cables I'd finally acquired for that purpose.

This machine now has more problems with flaky IC connections and wonky caps than disks. Given the visual glitches in some of my old DeluxePaint files viewed on the actual machine, I'm surprised the circuits didn't mess up any of the transfers, because I didn't get the glitches in the emulator afterwards..
by benterix | 2025-08-30 10:46:06+00:00
> The output is considered derivative and therefore it’s not illegal.

Well, this is what they claim. In practice, this is untrue on several levels. First, earlier OpenAI models were able to quote verbatim, and they were maimed later not to do that. Second, there were several lawsuits against OpenAI and not all of them ended. And finally, assuming that courts decide what they did was legal would mean everyone can legally download and use a copy of Libgen (part of "Books3") whereas the courts around the world are doing the opposite and are blocking access to Libgen country by country. So unless you set double standards, something is not right here. Even Meta employees torrenting Lingen knew that so let's not pretend we buy this rhetoric.
by mingtianzhang | 2025-08-30 10:46:10+00:00
Based on my research experience and judgment, I have published several top-conference papers in both the detection and diffusion domain, but I haven’t explored the engineering/product side. I believe that if such a system hasn’t been invented yet, it wouldn’t be difficult to create one to remove that watermark using an open-source image/video model and maintain the high quality. Would you be interested in having a further discussion on this?
Tell HN: My advice after I applied to 450 positions before getting hired
by usernamed7 | 2025-08-30 10:46:15+00:00
I wanted to briefly share my experience as a senior engineer with 15 years of experience trying to find work in this market, because it was exhausting for me and i'm sure others will appreciate the perspective.

As the title says, I have applied to over 450 positions. Most companies did not even send me a rejection. Ghost jobs are a thing, so are fake roles to get you to signup/join some rando job board.

I interviewed for a director of engineering role, and all interviews went well, but they ghosted me at the end.

I did several take homes and all were accepted, but companies dragged their feet on next steps.

I did reject a few kinds of roles: ones that used AI for interviewing me, ones that had me do a coding challenge as the first step, and jobs that had "no working hours" and expected you to be "on" 24/7.

Many of the job applicant expected me to answer asinine questions like "what excited you about this role?" and would say things like "don't use AI! we want your true self" or would go so far as to try to get you to agree to their AI interview policy. As If.

I eventually did get hired as a software architect. the company that hired me was very professional, respectful, forward thinking (i used windsurf during the interview) and did not play games with me. They had a 4-step interview process, and asked a lot of good questions. One of the best interview processes of my career.

My advice to other engineers on the job market:

1) Spray and pray. If its vaguely a fit, apply. It's a numbers game. Be shameless. 2) Always be willing to walk. Protect your time. Don't waste your time on lengthy job applications that take too long to complete. Some hiring managers will gladly waste your time. (one job application explicitly wanted you to spend 20 minutes filling out theirs) 3) Don't do coding exercises before you interview with someone, be weary of asymmetrical time expenditures. see #2. 4) You can probably do a lot of different roles, "prompt engineer" is a real job title companies are hiring for, for example. 5) Work a couple of different job platforms. For example I used linkedin, dice, ziprecruiter, weworkremotely, and rubyonremote and a few others. 6) Use AI to generate your resume, but feed it all the context of your work history (don't misrepresent your skills) 7) Use AI to fill out asinine job application questions, but if they ask you thoughtful questions answer those yourself. I got the interview for director of engineering because i answered authentically to thoughtful questions. 8) Pace yourself. Spend a few hours a day at it then come back in a day or two and go again. 9) Work on a side project or learn a new lang/framework in parallel. 10) Interviewing is like dating, everyone is looking for something different, and some don't really know what they want. Not a you problem. 11) If they use workday for their job applications, bounce. It's the worst. 12) It takes time as roles become available. The job you end up getting might not open until 2 months from now. see #1.
by notyouraibot | 2025-08-30 10:47:22+00:00
Yeah, I recently had an offer letter in hand, the company flew me out to do a final security review since it was a sensitive cyber sec role, did a 2-hour long polygraph test which went quite well honestly, but then 3 weeks later they told me they have decided to move ahead with another candidate? Made no sense and broke me down for weeks. Totally defeated. I still don't understand how they could move ahead with another candidate if they had already given me an official offer letter, but eh life goes on I suppose.
by refurb | 2025-08-30 10:48:00+00:00
Meh... that's not uniquely American.

I lived in Asia and the country had a very capable public healthcare system with universal coverage. Generally a very socially harmonious society that heavily balances personal status with that of society.

But cover the cost of drug for orphan diseases? "Why should my costs go up because of some child that costs half a million a year?"

It was quite shocking.
by tim333 | 2025-08-30 10:50:09+00:00
Dunno if it's really thought-terminating. I mean consider Warren Buffett who has gone with a simple strategy of valuing businesses and buying them or parts of them for less than they are worth or buying two dollar bills for a dollar as he put it. There's a lot of thought underlying that though because then you have to understand businesses and as those interact with everything in the world there's understanding that too. So it's simple in some ways and not in others. But it worked well - I think he'd be the world's richest if he hadn't given a load away to charity.
by bubblethink | 2025-08-30 10:50:58+00:00
They are all roundabout ways of getting to IQ. It used to be Leetcode but since that has become a known quantity and quite gamified, the interviews have evolved. Most of all, I have seen that there is crazy focus on speed and volume. Do a lot, read a lot of code, in little time. They've also adapted for AI coding tools. So the interviews have a debugging component, or take homes are open web, open tools, but again really compressed timelines.
by fcpguru | 2025-08-30 10:51:06+00:00
Some suggested thumbnails:

https://i.imgur.com/OtKWGU5.png

https://i.imgur.com/G82cY9d.png

The empty image is so unusual!

https://andrewarrow.dev/podpapyrus/summaries/1zti-n6DnT0.htm...
by thrwaway55 | 2025-08-30 10:52:28+00:00
Ok so if I publish under a license saying I don't allow for it to be used for AI do you believe they respect it? What word would you use to describe this violation? Go ahead throw up a robots.txt, throw up a license. You will be able to coax the "fair use" stochastic parrots to render it verbatim.

Sam Altman and his ilk are exploiting the incredibly slow moving legal system to enrich themselves.
by koolba | 2025-08-30 10:53:30+00:00
> It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved.

It’s anecdata for sure, but it’s not a metaphor. I literally mean the parents are eating “real food” while regularly feeding the children just butter noodles and chicken fingers. The diet is a microcosm of their entire upbringing.
by boricj | 2025-08-30 10:53:48+00:00
I disagree. You prototype the simplest thing that could possibly work. Then, you design stuff so that you don't end up regretting it later.

I happen to have a recent example with an add-on card. For reasons that I won't get into, we needed both insurance against major rearchitecturing, as well as leverage synergy with other product lines when it comes to configuration. That led me to design a fairly intricate library that runs visitors against a data model, as well as a mechanism where the firmware dumps its entire state as a BSON document in a dedicated Flash partition before upgrading. That gave us the peace of mind that whatever happens, we can always just restore from that document and nuke everything else when booting a newer firmware for the first time.

The simplest thing that could possibly work would've been to not do any of that and let future firmware versions deal with it. Instead, I designed it so that I don't end up regretting it later, regardless of how the product evolved.

The only point I do regret was missing one piece of information to save on the initial release-to-manufacturing version. I had to put in one hack that if the saved document has version 1.0, then go spelunking in the raw flash to retrieve that piece of information where it was in version 1.0 and slipstream it into the document before processing it. Given the data storage mechanism of that platform, I'd be tearing my hair apart dealing with multiple incompatible data layouts across firmware versions if I did the simplest thing.
by skydhash | 2025-08-30 10:53:54+00:00
Unit tests do matter, especially when the logic is somewhat complex or very defined (splitting money, parsing some message). So unless the specs change, you rarely have to modify the tests. So it helps more in a technical sense, catching developer mistakes. Just like qa tests on some small part of the car can spot defect early on.

Integrated tests is more about ensuring what matters to Product. A car that refuses to start is worthless for most cases. But the engine light and a window that can’t open is not usually a dealbreaker.

Unit tests can help pinpoint an issue or ensure that a specs is implemented. But that’s mostly relevant to the developer world. So for a proper DX, add unit tests to help pinpoint bugs faster, especially with code that doesn’t change as much and where knowledge can be lost.
by bregma | 2025-08-30 10:57:08+00:00
Even this is wrong. Programming should be explicit and easy for anyone to read.

c = a + b;

is bad since it's an assertion that c is equal to the sum of a and b, and before it's executed, it's completely untrue. Not only that, but it's math and like Barbie has taught us, math is hard.

Nope, make it explicit. You're moving the value of an expression to a placeholder. The only sensible way to write that would be

ADD a TO b GIVING c

Why, with such a simple and obvious English-like syntax even a common business-oriented person could use the language.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-30 11:00:02+00:00
> What they really have is control over real assets. I deliberately say "control", because that is what counts, and ownership is not even that important, often many times indirect, sometimes not even that.

Control is fungible to a large extent. If a company is badly run, someone can launch a takeover bid and get that control for themselves. All that matters is that they're generally expected to do better at running the company, so that it's more likely to generate money in the long run and less likely to do broke.
by kdmtctl | 2025-08-30 11:01:57+00:00
VSCode has the best copilot integration, but I found that Zed can perfectly use my subscription too, with even better results and endless "are you still here?"

They don't support Grok yet, though. It starts from a small "x", and it is ruined the deserialization. So could be a chance the pull request will miss "free trial" deadline for Grok Fast in Copilot, for this particular case.
by epr | 2025-08-30 11:03:07+00:00
When I was a beginner, A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation worked for me. As the title suggests, it gently introduces concepts in a very beginner friendly manner, so even macros are easy enough to grasp by the time you get there. The diagrams and examples are great.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf
by productivetools | 2025-08-30 11:03:17+00:00
Hi HN,

We’ve been building *Pocketrade*, an AI growth engine for brokers.

*The problem:* Brokers spend huge amounts acquiring traders ($1,000+ CPA is common) and most end up with dormant accounts that never reactivate.

*Our solution:* - *Acquisition funnels:* AI builds hyper-targeted landing pages and ad copy automatically. - *Reactivation flows:* AI messaging sequences bring back dormant traders, fully compliant with financial regulations. - *Compliance built-in:* GDPR / advertising restrictions handled by design.

*Early results:* - Cost per acquisition dropped from ~$1,200 to ~$387 for one broker. - A LatAm broker gained 1,243 funded accounts in 90 days.

We’d love feedback on: - Does the positioning make sense to you? - What’s missing that would make it clearer or more useful? - Any pitfalls you see in scaling this approach?

Thanks for your thoughts!
by metalman | 2025-08-30 11:04:17+00:00
I cant agree less. Taking the basic concept of dividing the universe into things that are real, and constructs and blowing it up into a whole hiarchy of values , putting numbers at the top, is only a construct, built on constructs. The current state of science is one where there are a few islands where things work internaly, like how elements are created through certain processes in stars, it's mostly good, but there are exceptions, and then there is a gulf, a vast hand wavy conjectural gulf between that and exactly where the helium came from, or when, or if it did. It is the eternal always almost of bieng poised on the brink of a revelation thats great for suckering in a few more to toil and grind away at the secrets of reality, which they do, and it is from those endevours that some of the best patentable ideas come from.
by swores | 2025-08-30 11:05:25+00:00
You're pedantically correct, but in a way that's irrelevant unless the Electoral College sees its electors vote against the wishes expressed by the public in the public elections (which is now legally restricted from happening in the majority of states anyway).

Realistically, unless there's either effectively a coup by the Electoral College, or an incredibly close election that needs to wait for recounts or a runoff (second) public election in one or more states to know who the president will be, the president is known after the public election even if the paperwork for the votes that technically elect them don't happen until a couple of months later. So I'd consider the comment you replied to to be more true than yours despite yours being technically more accurate.
by rramadass | 2025-08-30 11:05:40+00:00
Beginners might want to start with the following works;

1) An Introduction to Information Theory, Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce - A classic general text to understand the concepts and build intuition. Other books by the same author are also excellent.

2) Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction by James V. Stone - A good general introduction. The author has similar tutorial books on other subjects which are also good.

3) A Student's Guide to Coding and Information Theory by Stefan Moser and Po-ning chen - A concise guide. The other books in the "student's guide" series from cambridge are also good.
by meheleventyone | 2025-08-30 11:06:14+00:00
> If what I'm saying is true, then to succeed you simply need to build a game that does none of the things that lead to failure.

This is true but it’s also equally true that no plan survives contact with the enemy. No one can perfectly predict the future.

The market isn’t static and everyone else is also trying to avoid doing things that will lead to failure. In some senses trying too hard is also a cause of failure because it leads to homogenization and you enter the market at the same time as everyone else with the same ideas. Games is a place where innovation can be key to success but that is also where the risk lies because it’s not clearly understandable until after the fact. This in part is why AAA seems pretty stagnant.
by egorfine | 2025-08-30 11:06:22+00:00
> What’s wrong with doing the simplest thing?

Staff. You've got developers and they will continue working on a product oftentimes way past the "perfect" stage.

Case in point: log aggregation services like Sentry/etc. It always starts with "it's so complex, let's make a sane log ingestion service with a simple web viewer" and then it inevitably spirals into an unfathomable pile of abstractions and mind-boggling complexity to a point where it is literally no longer usable.
by Weblaro | 2025-08-30 11:08:46+00:00
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by Telemakhos | 2025-08-30 11:08:56+00:00
If you’re only using XML for AJAX style communication of fragments of data between a model and view, sure, use JSON or whatever. If, on the other hand, you’re encoding a representation of a text and need to mark it up to indicate bibliographic features and textual variation between editions, you need TEI XML. If you want a dataset to be available in a machine-readable format at a particular address and also have that data look good for humans, you want XML. XML is for more than passing messages from a backend to a frontend.
by danhite | 2025-08-30 11:09:34+00:00
> there are so many links I have saved that it freezes

If you are motivated enough to write Apple Shortcuts a useful trick for ~Find type actions that overload is to Filter them into reassemblable pieces eg

action find items from reading list filter Title begins with A (then do B etc)

that this trick often works would be due to the internal nature of the Shortcuts implementation problems, so YMMV