MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Anyone Bored at Work?
by kake25 | 2025-08-07 03:59:47+00:00
Used AI to improve flow of my post below.

Hi HN, I work at a nonprofit as a full stack engineer. I've been doing this for about 3 years. The work is meaningful, but not very challenging anymore — and most days I’m done in 3 hours. Occasionally, around deadlines, I might work 5–6 hours, but that’s rare.

I work remotely, and while I’m happy to be productive in short bursts, I sometimes feel guilty or "behind" when I see peers or posts about people grinding 10–12 hours a day. I don’t have any side projects or startup ideas (yet), and I’m not sure what to do with all this extra time.

I’ve been doing LeetCode and have reached final rounds at a few big tech companies (Meta, Cloudflare, Amazon), but haven’t made it past the final step. I still feel a ceiling there that I haven’t broken through.

What do people in similar situations do to: Become better engineers? Feel more productive? Use their time in meaningful or growth-oriented ways?

Any suggestions or personal experiences would really help — I’m trying to navigate a bit of an existential crisis.

Thanks in advance.
by usr1106 | 2025-08-07 04:00:00+00:00
Clickbaity title: In the text he analyses that Finnish has preserved loaned aspects that the indo-germanic languages have lost ages ago. So we indo-germanic speakers don't know them.

That there are plenty of words in Finnish which have indo-germanic roots is without doubt. A majority of things introduced after 1500. But recognizing similarity of single words is not knowing a language. The structure of the language is so different, that even common grammatical concepts like singular and plural or subject and object don't really match to define the rules. Finnish has five house, but fives trousers. The list goes on and on with concepts far too difficult to explain here.
by andoando | 2025-08-07 04:01:07+00:00
Regarding security: I think this is already managed in the iOS/Android ecosystem. It shouldn't be too difficult to restrict permissions from sites, and has the advantage of possibly allowing accesses for sites you trust.

Regardling difficulty: HTML/CSS is essentially already cross platform UI toolkit. Yes its hard, but Im saying if one were to make it, I dont see why the same UI framework shouldnt work for a desktop application.
by atonse | 2025-08-07 04:04:03+00:00
I totally agree with you about the motivations... and I can't speak to how many long term jobs will come out of this.

But if this even gives us some chance to jolt our manufacturing sector back, will we start to gain some momentum? Even if it's mostly using automation. Will it help to reduce our reliance on China?

I doubt it will in the same way that it's been extremely hard for other countries to replicate the US momentum in R&D.

But one can hope.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-07 04:05:24+00:00
Pax Americana isn't an empire, it's built on treaties with sovereign nations. The U.S. doesn't set arbitrary laws for Europe, like the British were doing to the American colonies.

It might be argued that the relative peace in Europe and Asia is already cracking up, given the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Either way the world is a completely different place than it was in 1949 or 1989, and as the global situation evolves it makes absolute sense to adapt with it.
by ygouzerh | 2025-08-07 04:08:25+00:00
It looks like there are two different entities inside Google who provides AI products.

From a professional context for example, we are using in my company both Google Workspaces and GCP.

With Google Workspaces, we have including in our subscription Gemini, Veo 3, Jules, etc. Everything is included in a subscription models, rate-limited but unlimited. The main entrypoint is gemini.google.com

However, everytime we need to use the API, then we need to use GCP. It gives us access to some more advances models like Veo3 instead of Veo3-fast, and more features. It's unlimited usage, but pay-as-you-go. The main entrypoint is GCP Vertex AI

And both teams, Google Workspaces and GCP are quite separate. They often don't know really well what the others teams provides.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-08-07 04:09:12+00:00
They are, which is one major issue with TOTP and most current MFA methods. There is an implicit assumption that you only get the full benefit if your usi g a password manager.

1. A password manager shouldn't be vulnerable to putting your password in a phishing site.

2. If your password is leaked, an attacker can't use it without the TOTP.

Someone who doesn't use a password manager won't get the benefits of #1, so they can be phished even with a TOTP. But they will get the benefits of #2 (a leaked password isn't enough)

Passkeys assume/require the use of a password manager (called a "passkey provider")
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-07 04:10:31+00:00
> a common optimizing operation for most architectures is to trade calculation for memory(unroll loops, lookup tables...)

That really depends. A cache miss adds eons of latency thus is far worse than doing a few extra cycles of work but depending on the workload the reorder buffer might manage to negate the negative impact entirely. Memory bandwidth as a whole is also incredibly scarce relative to CPU clock cycles.

The only time it's a sure win is if you trade instruction count for data in registers or L1 cache hits but those are themselves very scarce resources.
by habryka | 2025-08-07 04:11:29+00:00
Definitely not "same subject" if we are thinking of something as narrow as "Frontend development" but I would like many people to find a niche/style/perspective they feel at home in. Something as consistent as simonwillison.net seems good for many.

Also, my guess finding such a style/niche will take a bunch of exploration, so I think most people should probably write in a bunch of different styles and on a bunch of different things during Inkhaven to get more evidence about what they enjoy writing about the most (and which of their writing people want to read).
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-08-07 04:12:16+00:00
Yeah its infuriating to see free high quality education blamed over shitty corporate recruiting and assessment practices. If companies (particularly outside tech) did anything at all to improve hiring practices and actually evaluate skills objectively, Coursera would be very valuable. Even if this didn't happen, it was a great learning platform. Now that Coursera has replaced their CEO with an Amazon hire, it's dead now. Late-stage capitalism claims another victim.
by megatron2009 | 2025-08-07 04:13:03+00:00
Not the OP, but here’s how I see it: freedom doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Whether it’s in society or in software, real freedom comes with some responsibility. You can’t just take, take, take and expect the ecosystem to stay healthy. That’s not how any of this works.

Same thing applies to free software. If we actually care about keeping that world alive, there’s gotta be some duty baked in—some expectation to contribute back, or at least not strip-mine the commons and bounce.

MIT’s blown up mostly because the big players don’t need the broader free software community anymore. They’ve got the scale, the headcount, and the cash to build and maintain their own internal ecosystems. So from their POV, permissive licenses like MIT are perfect—no obligations, no copyleft, no friction.

But let’s not pretend that’s “freedom” in the idealistic sense. It’s freedom to extract, sure. Freedom to integrate and forget where it came from. For a lot of people on HN, that’s fine. But if you care about the sustainability of the broader ecosystem? Then yeah, we’ve got to talk about duty, not just rights.
by bccdee | 2025-08-07 04:13:26+00:00
> I think the problem is humans.

That's rather a silly way of approaching things. Imagine if your house were on fire, and I said, "the problem isn't flammable curtains or an expired fire extinguisher. It's houses and flames!"

Okay, sure, but we can hardly get rid of houses and flames now, can we?

Even if we could somehow get rid of all humans, that wouldn't meaningfully solve anything. We wouldn't end up with a fixed world, we'd end up with a barren world, void of consciousness, with nobody around to enjoy it. There are plenty of those elsewhere in the solar system.
by xnx | 2025-08-07 04:14:38+00:00
There have been many of these announcements that never amounted to anything:

2017: "Apple promised to give US manufacturing a $1 billion boost"

2018: "Apple will make $350 billion contribution to U.S. economy and promised to create 20,000 jobs"

2021: "Apple commits $430 billion in US investments over 5 years"

From https://bsky.app/profile/bgrueskin.bsky.social/post/3lvqqyd4...
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-07 04:14:56+00:00
> But Grok is not very good compared to the anthropic, openai, or google models despite ranking so highly in benchmarks.

That's political I think. I know several alt right types that swear by grok because "Elon doesn't give it any of that woke crap". They don't care that there's better, for them it's the only viable option.
by MisterMower | 2025-08-07 04:15:08+00:00
Just because it cost money to put the satellite into orbit doesn’t mean that it has value. Would a buyer pay $15M a year for the data produced by this satellite? Maybe, but the fact that the government put it into orbit and not a private company is telling.

Realistically, because it is owned by the government, it’s worth exactly what the government says it is. Just ask the Biden administration who sold materials for the border wall far below cost.

How does this satellite mitigate existential risk? We already know carbon dioxide contributes to climate change. We should spend money on reducing it, not on costly projects that tell us things we already know.

Speaking of existential risk, the US national debt is a far more urgent and certain risk than climate change. At least decommissioning this satellite helps on that front. How much carbon gets removed from the atmosphere if we keep it operational?
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-07 04:15:09+00:00
There's plenty of positive examples including TSMC in Arizona, Samsung in Texas, etc:

https://www.azfamily.com/2025/04/29/tsmc-breaks-ground-third...

https://pr.tsmc.com/english/news/3210

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/311514/20250728/tesla-tap...
by k310 | 2025-08-07 04:15:27+00:00
Who remembers the story of Leon Theremin and the Russian gift to the U.S. embassy? [1] Technical: [2]

Photo of "The Thing"

https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/greatseal-fr...

Could it be "a Thing?"

[1] https://hackaday.com/2015/12/08/theremins-bug/

[2]https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/thing/index.htm
by tym83 | 2025-08-07 04:16:59+00:00
Sovereignty with AWS? Seriously? Go for CNCF-backed solutions instead—take Cozystack: open-source, no license bait-and-switch (it’s under CNCF, not like Mongo or Terraform), and you get a full cloud stack (VMs, DBs, K8s) on your own or rented servers.
by danans | 2025-08-07 04:17:35+00:00
> Clickbaity title: In the text he analyses that Finnish has preserved loaned aspects that the indo-germanic languages have lost ages ago. So we indo-germanic speakers don't know them.

"Indo-Germanic" is a dated and ethno-nationalist and mythical term, popularized by the Nazis, implying a false stronger affinity between the Indic and the Germanic languages than between either and the other Indo European languages, and used in service of the Nazi master race mythology [1].

The correct term is Indo-European.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Indo-Germanic_People
by nuker | 2025-08-07 04:17:47+00:00
> Firefox on mobile with full-fat uBlock Origin

I think uBO is not disabling PPA, does it?

- June 2024. Mozilla acquires Anonym, an ad metrics firm.

- July 2024. Mozilla adds Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA), feature is enabled by default. Developed in cooperation with Meta (Facebook).

- Feb 2025. Mozilla updates its Privacy FAQ and TOS. "does not sell data about you." becomes "... in the way that most people think about it".
by hashiyakshmi | 2025-08-07 04:18:12+00:00
It sounds silly but it fits. NATO's new 5% spending target is somewhat fluff. It's 3.5% for actual defence spending and 1.5% for "critical infrastructure" expenses. It makes sense when you consider most of the infrastructure initally created by NATO countries to counter Russia ends in Germany and envisions a different sort of battleplan, but you could also see it as a way of inflating NATO's apparent military investments.
by cortesoft | 2025-08-07 04:18:23+00:00
> Everyone is all about skills untill the hiring time comes. Now companies want the students of the best colleges, the best degrees, etc. Students with proper skills might not even get through the door without the proper degree.

What hiring companies want is to get good employees who can do the job they are supposed to do, and they want to have as low a false positive rate as possible (hiring someone who can't do the job is very expensive).

I am not a hiring expert, but they probably get a lower false positive rate looking at school and credentials than any skill test they give.

Companies don't really care about false negative rates (not hiring a person who would do the job well) as long as they are still able to hire someone else who can't also do the job well. It sucks for the person who isn't hired, but not for the company.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-07 04:19:46+00:00
An American president using the bully pulpit (as Teddy Roosevelt so fondly called it) to expand jobs and investment in America is the president doing his actual job.

Of course Apple didn't do it on their own accord, there was way too much profit to be made from outsourcing to China. Everyone else was doing it, why not also the richest company on earth?
by TheAlchemist | 2025-08-07 04:19:51+00:00
I think we all know the answer to that.

Funniest one is Masayoshi Son announcements, in 2016 - $50B for 50k jobs, and in 2024 - $100B for 100k jobs !

2016: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/06/trump-says-softbank-will-inv...

2024: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/16/softbank-ceo-to-announce-100...

Funny thing here is, that he doesn't even have that money. But who cares these days...
by ericmcer | 2025-08-07 04:20:01+00:00
I agree that seeing the executive branch's authority continue to swell is not good for our democracy, but corporations (and specifically Apple) offshoring all their labor to developing nations has been viewed as a huge negative for ~30 years?

Any amount of returning manufacturing here, returning power to the middle class by increasing the demand for labor and stopping the exploitation of foreign workers is a good thing. I can't stand listening to him talk, but if iPhones aren't reliant on slaves mining cobalt and 13 year olds working 12 hours a days I will consider that a win.
by iLemming | 2025-08-07 04:21:05+00:00
> 8 years user here so still an emacs noobie, but I switched to nvim

I don't know man, whenever I see comments like this, I just don't get it - there's just no "switching" for me personally to anything, like ever, I just don't even see the possibility for it.

The question that always gets me is like: "were you just using it like ... I don't know to edit text? That's all you've done with it?..."

I have no idea how would I be able to do my things in anything else, whatever that is - Nvim, Sublime, Helix, etc.

- How would I control video playback from my editor while taking notes?

- How would I annotate PDFs?

- Or, create and manage Anki cards - my flashcards are just my notes, they don't require a different medium to exist.

- Or how would I test APIs - I don't need to use stuff like Postman - all my endpoint investigations are in my notes. Documented and perfectly reproducible.

- How would I manage my dotfiles? I use Org-babel for it and it makes my entire system immutable - is it better than Nix? I dunno, it just works and it's simple.

- What would I use for file management? I just wrote a wrapper that uses rsync to move large files around, how would I ever do anything like this in other than Emacs? How would I mark all the files that are over 1GB, older than three months and match a given regexp?

- In Emacs, I can move my cursor to a piece of plain text like "RFC 959", "SAC-28410", or "my-org/some-service#182" and immediately start reading shit - it intelligently recognizes that the first one is an RFC document, another is a Jira ticket and the third one is a Pull-request on GitHub.

- I can type a single query and simultaneously search for it on Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, GitHub, Hacker News or my own browser history, and I wouldn't even know how to do that in something that's not Emacs.

- In Emacs I can type a shell command and pipe results into a buffer, or pipe the content of a buffer to a shell command.

- In Emacs, my color theme changes depending on time of the day, because Emacs has built-in lunar and solar calendars.

- How would I read and manage my email in Helix?

- How would I track time? Clock in/out of tasks, generate time reports, do pomodoros?

- How would I search, browse and read Hacker News and Reddit?

- How would I create presentations?

- How would I test database queries?

- How would I manage Docker containers?

- How would I read man pages?

- How do I translate text?

- And how would I interact with LLMs?

...

Nope, there's no "switching" for me. It's just not possible. My entire life is woven into this text-based operating system. My thoughts, my work, my communications, my entertainment - they all exist as interconnected plain text that I can grep, link, transform, and version control. Every keystroke I've memorized, every workflow I've perfected, every piece of data that references another - it would take years to rebuild this in whatever there might be, and I'd still be left with a pale imitation. Emacs isn't just where I edit text; it's where I live.
by 77pt77 | 2025-08-07 04:21:14+00:00
> MOOCs + projects + self-directed learning, even if you are very good, offers you little in terms of career opportunities. That's why they have not been apparently "transformative".

I remember on one of the first of these courses (AI in Berkley?), people were incensed that they would not get an official degree/certificate from the university.

Some were really mad, as if they had been defrauded or something.

Your point about certification is accurate, but I want to add another nuance.

Even if you manage to get a degree from a "good"/prestigious place, if you are "the wrong kind of person" that will only be held against you.

It's like succeeding at that is a violation of natural law and you need to be punished for the violation. It's almost religious and deeply guttural.

Of course that in places like the states, those people usually don't even get the change to graduate from those places since some excuse will be concocted during the application process.

MOOCs suffer from the online version of that.

However in places where admission is "blind" and the cost free or low this is very common.
by rpdillon | 2025-08-07 04:21:51+00:00
Like with software, I'm thinking there's two different discussions: what powers the industry vs. what is possible for hobbyists.

While the industry in software is obsessed with React and K8s, hackers still like self-hosting PHP apps. Same with music. The industry is powered by highly efficient teams that write, produce, and perform music at scale for a global audience, and that's totally different from contemporary guitar-based music (I suspect!) What's possible is very different from what makes money.
by al_borland | 2025-08-07 04:22:20+00:00
Careers are long. Grinding 12 hour days at the edge of your ability can only go on for so long before you burn out and want to quit the industry all together.

3-6 hours of deep work per day sounds very healthy and sustainable. I imagine the rest of the time is filled with various administrative tasks.

You can also take the time to make sure quality is high and add in quality of life improvements, rather than just getting to the point of checking all the boxes, so you can move on to the next deadline. My favorite parts of any project were the little things I thought up and added above and beyond the base requirements. I also really liked creating internal tools to optimizing how my team and I work.
by MindSpunk | 2025-08-07 04:23:13+00:00
It is fantastic for CPU parallelism. The problem is the CPU/GPU boundary is difficult to deal with and exposing an API that is both fast and safe and flexible is almost impossible.

I don't believe it's possible to make an efficient API at a similar level of abstraction to Vulkan or D3D12 that is safe (as in, not marked unsafe in rust). To do so requires recreating all the complexity of D3D11 and OpenGL style APIs to handle resource access synchronization.

The value proposition of D3D12 and Vulkan is that the guardrails are gone and it's up to the user to do the synchronization work themselves. The advantage is that you can make the synchronization decisions at a higher level of abstraction where more assumptions can be made and enforced by a higher-level API. Generally this is more efficient because you can use much simpler algorithms to decide when to emit your barriers, rather than having the driver reverse engineer that high-level knowledge from the low-level command stream.

Rust is just not capable of representing the complex interwoven ownership and synchronization rules for using these APIs without mountains of runtime checks that suck away all the benefit of using these APIs. Lots of Vulkan map quite well to Rust's ownership rules, the memory allocation API surface maps very well. But anything that's happening on the GPU timeline is pretty much impossible to do safely. Rust's type system is not sufficiently capable of modeling this stuff without tons of runtime checks, or making the API so awful to use nobody will bother.

I've seen GP around a lot and afaik they're using WGPU which is, among other things, Firefox's WebGPU implementation. The abstraction that WebGPU provides is entirely the wrong level to most efficiently use Vulkan and D3D12 style APIs. WebGPU must be safe because it's meant to get exposed to JS in a browser, so it spends a boat load of CPU time to do all the runtime checks and work out the synchronization requirements.

Rust can be more challenging here because if you want a safe API you have to be very careful in where you set the boundary between the unsafe internals and the safe API. And Rust's safety rails will be of limited use for the real difficult parts. I'm writing my own abstraction over Vulkan/D3D12/Metal and I've intentionally decided not to make my API safe and to leave it to a higher layer to construct a safe API.
by usr1106 | 2025-08-07 04:23:16+00:00
Didn't follow how Github not supporting IPv6 is caused by the "wrong" byte size. Wouldn't 36 bit IP adresses have made that a non-topic?

The author seems to assume Github! is a leader. The masses in IT never have followed leading technology. How many Microsoft engineers do you need to change a light bulb? Zero, MS makes darkness an industry standard.

Are Github actions the leading CI technology?
by notepad0x90 | 2025-08-07 04:25:38+00:00
i'm extrapolating as you said, but not by that specific event alone but repeated political meddling that comes from their leadership. They're looking to influence politicians.

> The context was that some GOP-affiliated politicians attended certain meetings for supporting tech regulation whereas democrats didn't. The article doesn't mention this original context but talks about the secondary tweets as if that had been Yen's primary message.

The context was around the time of the 2024 elections in the US. He didn't simply say that republicans attended their meeting or whatever, as you can clearly see, he expressed his beliefs about "corporate democrats" and how republicans are not beholden to corporations b.s. (this sh!t matters when you have reach!!).