MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by m-p-3 | 2025-08-05 13:16:23+00:00
To put a different perspective, the average American income in 1925 was $5,425. So buying a Model T (Touring) at that time would cost you 4.7% of your yearly salary.

In 2023-2024, the average car price was $48,274, and the median income was $80,610. It now costs a whopping 60% of your yearly salary.
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2025-08-05 13:16:50+00:00
Funny, as someone who works in private sector, I always had the opposite view of academia:

A zero-sum system based around a fixed pool of grants and positions that everyone competes for, and a terminal job ladder position where, once reached by successfully having competed for aforementioned grant $$, I become un-fireable.

I would have to sleep with a gun under my pillow in such a world.

There's already plenty of cheating in business, which is full of positive-sum win-win opportunities. I don't even want to imagine how badly I might behave in academia just in order to survive.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-05 13:18:22+00:00
> I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism

This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?

Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position, or the recognition of having accomplished something.

> If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently.

Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate.

This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
by Karliss | 2025-08-05 13:20:11+00:00
On the other side of experiences - i have used git bisect at least 3 times just last week to track down source of regression. I was not the person who wrote the code originally or introduced the regression. All i knew that it worked in last version but not now. Bisect, do an easy fix, add the missing test and move on to next bug. No need to think hard.
by mtlynch | 2025-08-05 13:20:49+00:00
>If you don't know how communications composed of multiple layers work, I'm afraid I can't really help with that understanding in a comment section on a forum.

I'm not asking you to explain protocol stacks, and I feel like that's obvious.

I've been open to your viewpoint, and I've asked you to clarify your position. Instead you just keep mocking me and feigning surprise that I hold a pretty mainstream view.

At this point, I'm left to assume you're either trolling or you have a viewpoint that can't bear scrutiny, so I'll stop engaging with you.
by account42 | 2025-08-05 13:20:51+00:00
A agree with your first line but the rest sounds like a similar argument to the ridiculous damages video game companies used to claim due to piracy when most of those pirates never would have bought the game in the first place.

Ultimately the root issue is that copyright is inherently flawed because it tries to increase available useful information by restricting availability. We'd be better off by not pretending that information is scarce and looking for alternative to fund its creation.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-08-05 13:21:08+00:00
I still use it in my job every day too. It's just become a meme, the whole "write-only language" thing. No one says that about shell scripting, despite the sigils and plenty of stuff that becomes incomprehensible to almost anyone if you do anything very complicated. I'd much rather diagnose some newbie's Perl script than some of the commercially-distributed bash installers I've had to deal with.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-05 13:22:02+00:00
>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications.

You mean to say that you think they just somehow forgot to optimize these fundamental things to work well? No.... If the search functionality provided by an otherwise highly capable, ultra-rich tech company is an utter piece of shit, it's intentional. The optimization is elsewhere, while the users are left stuck with a deformed excuse.
by dark-star | 2025-08-05 13:22:04+00:00
Like most of these tutorials, this stops right where things get interesting. Taill-Call Optimization, Continuations, CPS, Call/CC... those are the things that are tricky to implement and without those the language is only a toy language.

Then again, creating a toy-language is a worthwhile goal in itself, so kudos to everyone who follows this through to the end
by raesene9 | 2025-08-05 13:22:19+00:00
I'm not saying more code won't be produced, I'm saying companies might only want and make money off a certain number of systems with a given amount of code, and therefore they'll need to employ fewer developers to create that code, if the productivity enhancements are borne out.

For example, say you're the CEO of one of the many many companies that view development costs as an overhead. Your CTO comes to you and tells you "hey we've just 10x the productivity of all our developers", do you think that conversation leads to the CEO saying "great hire more developers"?
by Mystery-Machine | 2025-08-05 13:22:46+00:00
PHP:

$result = $arr |> fn($x) => array_column($x, 'tags') // Gets an array of arrays |> fn($x) => array_merge(...$x) // Flatten into one big array |> array_unique(...) // Remove duplicates |> array_values(...) // Reindex the array. ; // <- wtf

Ruby:

result = arr.uniq.flatten.map(&:tags)

I understand this is not pipe operator, but just look at that character difference across these two languages.

// <- wtf

This comment was my $0.02.
by viraptor | 2025-08-05 13:22:58+00:00
> By Perplexity's reasoning, I should be able to set up a huge server farm and hit any website with 1,000,000 requests per second because 1 request is not seen as harmful.

That's a slippery slope all the was to absurd. They're not talking about millions of requests a second. They're talking about a browsing session (few page views) as a result of user's action. It's not even additional traffic and there's no extra concurrency - it's likely the same requests a user would make just with shorter delay.
by anonnon | 2025-08-05 13:23:03+00:00
https://archive.is/qWHwC

> A few months later, CNN revealed that US intelligence agencies had warned Germany earlier in the year that Russia was preparing to kill Papperger, the most advanced of a series of plans to kill defense industry executives across Europe. The story did not mention the arson attack—which appeared to be an act of intimidation rather than an actual targeting of the CEO—but people familiar with the situation said the assassination plot involving Russian proxies was active at the time it occurred. The arsonists were never caught, leaving their possible involvement in the wider scheme a mystery.

...

> Papperger declined to comment on the plot to kill him, about which much remains unresolved. In June 2024 local prosecutors dropped the investigation into who planted the incendiary device at his home, citing a lack of evidence. Police in Düsseldorf also investigated the broader assassination plot but dropped their probe, saying they had no “concrete leads.” That surprised several people familiar with the situation, who say US intelligence had provided German officials with extensive details, including specific information about suspected individuals and intent.

> Even before the arson, the German government had quietly boosted Papperger’s security to a level equaling that of the German chancellor. This happened earlier than has been previously reported. Today, Papperger is surrounded by bodyguards 24/7. Two armed guards with machine guns are stationed outside Rheinmetall’s modern glass office headquarters in Düsseldorf, alongside two police vans. His white brick home in a wealthy suburb also has two police officers armed with machine guns, a police van and a police booth out front. Multiple guards typically accompany him to lunch or meetings.
by overfeed | 2025-08-05 13:23:09+00:00
> ...men are simple-minded buffoons incapable of boiling an egg

...and yet these buffoon sitcom dads almost always have a huge house in the suburbs, even when they have a stay at home spouse - who's way out of their league.

It's almost as if it's a deliberate depiction for a blank canvas of a character, similar to the plain-jane central character with no personality in YA novels who inevitably gets involved in a love triangle involving the hottest guys (one bad-boy and one nice guy). Being formulaic doesn't make it anti-${DEMOGRPHIC}.
by mindok | 2025-08-05 13:23:28+00:00
Indeed. That was the very company I was thinking of! The Mincom EAM product (Ellipse) now sits with Hitachi and their technical mining products found their way to Datamine after ABB acquired Mincom, then divested the acquired assets a few years later. The resources sector has a gazillion lines of FORTRAN, some of it freshly coded (new codebase) within the last 10 years, believe it or not.
by sphars | 2025-08-05 13:24:27+00:00
According to the guy who created JavaScript, Brendan Eich[0]:

> On Nov 16, 2008, at 11:57 PM, Peter Michaux wrote:

> > The name "JSON.stringify" seems a little too "Web 2.0" cool to me.

> Hardly. It's hacker dictionary material, old sk00l.

> > Is there any reason a more usual and serious sounding option like "serialize" was not used?

> Ugh, Web 1.0 my-first-Java-serializable-implementation anti-nostalgia vapors.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100718152229/https://mail.mozi...
by leoc | 2025-08-05 13:24:48+00:00
If you had a rotating mechanism which allows slip then you could have rotor shafts which rotate all the blocks in a column while braking mechanisms prevent all the blocks in a given row from moving. Or you could have both rotor rows and rotor columns if you implement a rough mechanical equivalent of the hysteresis systems of ferrite-core memory. Or (I think GistNoesis suggested something similar https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44794092 ) if you hide a neodymium permanent magnet just under one corner of each of the blocks you could use a pair of electromagnets behind that block to pull the block from either orientation into the other, almost a solid-state solution apart from the axle the block would rotate on and potentially one which could set the entire display at once.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-05 13:25:34+00:00
> He had little choice, not because of an electorate that knew nothing of the secret weapons and wouldn't know if they were not used, but because of the near unstoppable force of the greatest R&D weapons expenditure in the world to that point .. viewed by many in the know as entirely wasted unless used in war against the Japanese now that the Germans had surrendered before they could be used there.

He allowed the first two bombings to occur as President, as was intially planned when he was still VP. He knew they would occur and was okay with it.

He could have stopped them. This evidenced by the fact that there were also plans for bombs 3+ but he ordered that any further bombings were to be under his explicit (as opposed to implicit) orders.

To think that somehow the Manhattan Project was "unstopped" is ludicrous. Every order Truman gave was followed, and if want want to argue it was "unstoppable" you would have to produce some kind of evidence that people were willing to disobey Truman's orders. (And object to or think is a bad idea is not the same as disobey.)
by seidleroni | 2025-08-05 13:25:57+00:00
That's a valid point. What I originally meant to convey is that when issues arise, people often assign blame and point fingers without any evidence, just based on their own feelings. It is important to gather objective evidence to support any claims. Sounds somewhat obvious but in my career I have found that people are very quick to blame issues on others when 15 minutes of testing would have gotten to the truth.
by ubercow13 | 2025-08-05 13:26:40+00:00
Is this true? If the upstream changes some lines of code once, but your branch changes them 5 times in separate commits, iterating on the correct change to those lines, you will have to resolve conflicts 5 times. And 4 of those times you'll be expending effort to merge the correct code from upstream with code you know isn't correct/final on your branch.

Likewise if multiple iterations on those lines were made upstream while your feature branch exists.

Fundamentally expending any effort to find a coherent combination of two pieces of code where one of them you know isn't going to remain is a waste of time.

The only advantage would be if those incremental changes actually make it easier to arrive at the final merge of the last changes on each branch but I'm not sure your above tips really guarantee that. IME it rarely happens.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-05 13:27:17+00:00
> This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative.

Not really, but it does mean you shouldn’t trust individual papers blindly.

Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize it.

Some communities eat these isolated results up, like supplement and health podcasters (Rhonda Patrick, Huberman). They should know better than to take some random mouse study at face value, but it’s too good of a story to pass up.

In medicine and the industry, anyone experienced knows not to get excited about singular results unless it’s from a trusted source or until it’s replicated.
by worldsayshi | 2025-08-05 13:27:32+00:00
I think one of the core failures of our current economic religion is that we can rely solely on anonymous transactions. But many transactions fail when everything is black boxes. We can't easily evaluate (1) if the thing we got is of good quality and (2) there wasn't any harmful side effects.

Transactions need more trivially verifiable metadata. That could solve one of many issues.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-08-05 13:28:54+00:00
People do what they want to do, and might get enjoyment out of it. It can be as simple as that. That MS gets benefit from it, sure, and that's probably even their goal, but to say "I'm not going to do a thing that I enjoy, just because someone else might get benefit from it" is just a spiteful, mercenary way to go through life. If that's what keeps you going though, more power to you.

> No it's not? It's accurate.

Ah, that settles it then I guess. <eye roll>
by prmph | 2025-08-05 13:28:58+00:00
I guess they mean you need to identify specific people, at a specific place and time, who are desperate for a solution to some problem.

They are desperate usually because it is a problem that affects their bottom line, prevents them completing a project at work, wastes an enormous amount of their time when doing something important to them, etc.

It must be a solution that, even when distilled to its very core, provides clear value to specific people you can identify. Just lighting on a vague market need or undeserved niche is not enough.

Not to say even purely passion projects can't succeed, but those are more hit-or-miss.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-05 13:29:25+00:00
>To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”

This gets invoked way too often by bad people defending bad things that they were warned not to do/support at the time but did/supported anyway because there was something in it for them.
by lazystar | 2025-08-05 13:29:25+00:00
ya know... i wonder if this is how a religion is formed. at the start, science was about identifying and explaining the things that were true, observable, and agreed upon by all. anyone who was present at the birth of an event that caused a religion would have had that same mentality. over time, generations pass and the concept that held the group together has shifted - it now attempts to explain new concepts, and the scientists/priests that make up the governing body decide tge truth based on opinion, rather than fact.

the point is, we're on a dangerous path. if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-08-05 13:29:42+00:00
> That's a slippery slope all the was to absurd. They're not talking about millions of requests a second. They're talking about a browsing session (few page views) [...]

My statement was meant as an analogy. I'm not saying an argument against Perplexity and agents is about requests per second. I'm saying there's an analogous argument: that the power of AI to transform the browsing experience is akin to the power of a server farm and thus a net negative. Therefore, your interpretation of what I was saying is wrong.
by billy99k | 2025-08-05 13:30:55+00:00
I think the problem is that no teacher has the time to babysit a student. If they just don't care about their education or can't put the time in, they shouldn't be wasting their time and money.

Some students also just don't have the aptitude for an Engineering or Computer Science degree. It's better for everyone if this is figured out early. I know plenty of people that dropped out of a Computer Science degree because they hated it or thought it would be a great way to make money and were in over their head.

We had classes that were for 'weeding out' students in Computer Science. They involved calculus because if you couldn't pass this class, you wouldn't be able to handle the 5 or so classes after this class that required it.
by danaris | 2025-08-05 13:30:55+00:00
I know that occasionally, the Spotlight index can get corrupted, and you have to manually delete it and let it regenerate. If you search for that with your current OS version, you should be able to find some decent instructions for it.

(My guess is that the Windows issue is something similar? but I have no experience with it, so don't know if it can be fixed in a similar way)
by ben_w | 2025-08-05 13:31:04+00:00
This line is the difference between your thinking and people like them:

> What if companies actually have about as many systems as they need

They think ~"companies don't have as many systems as they need".

My opinion? Even without GenAI, our sector has too many cooks.

I've not valued most of the stuff that was added to any consumer facing software product or service in the last decade or so. Facebook has, if anything, regressed since 2007. YouTube (itself, no comment on the content) peaked sometime around 2016. SwiftUI (2019) still isn't an improvement over UIKit. Google Maps is very marginally worse than it was in 2018. MacOS has improved so slowly since it was named after cats (2012) that it's hard to even care about the aggregated changes since then (even if I ignore all the bugs*), and similarly for Google Translate since they bought and integrated Word Lens in 2014.

Entirely new things are sometimes (like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion) genuinely interesting and make a novel departure from what came before, but it's very rare.

* https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2025/06/19-15.56.44.html
by yial | 2025-08-05 13:31:07+00:00
With gift cards you end up creating a liabilities account and tracking the outstanding value of your issued gift cards.

This is almost easier if you have a gift card processor who holds the funds for you, but most I’ve worked with either just facilitate transferring money (as in franchises ) or simply processing the initial payment.

This means you then have to track your outstanding. Depending on the state, if you cease operations you may need to escheat the value of the liability account or pay the purchasers of the gift cards if you know who they are. (Newer POS systems make this possible at times ).

Gift cards on a financial statement are nearly always a negative or neutral, as while the money is in a liability account, I’ve seen companies in trouble not actually have the funds to cover the liability.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-08-05 13:31:09+00:00
Another disagreeing voice, but I try to employ problem speculation when some problem arises. I'm working in a cross-company, cross-team project, where everyone's input interacts in interesting ways. When we come across a weird problem, getting folks together to ask, "what does x issue sound like its caused by?". This gets people thinking about where certain functionality lives, the boundary points between the functionality, and a way to test the hypothesis.

It's helped a dozen times so far essentially playing 20 questions and being able to point to the exact problem and have it resolved quickly.

This is a semi-embedded system. FGPAs, SoCs, drivers, userspace, userspace drivers, etc. Lots of stuff to go wrong, speculation gives a place to start.
by duggan | 2025-08-05 13:31:37+00:00
Renting is fine but it comes with a bunch of caveats.

You can bounce around the place, maybe live in a much nicer place than you could afford to buy, more easily move cities, etc. In my twenties this was a no brainer tradeoff to me, plus a lot of people were in negative equity due to the financial crash.

But you can also be forced to move prematurely. That nice place isn't your nice place, it's some other person's nice place, and maybe someday they want their brother or aunt to use it instead of you.

Depending on your relative financial capability, maybe there won't be anywhere within your means to move to in the same area. Maybe you'll treat this as a grand adventure every time it happens, but as you get older maybe you'll want to actually live near your friends, family, favourite restaurants, cafes, parks, Padel courts, etc.

At some point in your life you may not be earning money for a while (illness, career break, whatever) and certainly when you get older your finances may become more precarious – this is where owning tends to have more power than renting.

I'm not sorry I didn't buy a house or apartment in my twenties, but when I eventually bought in my thirties it was a relief not to have to care any more whether some landlord would decide to "alter the deal" at any point.
by netbioserror | 2025-08-05 13:32:00+00:00
Unfortunately, part of the pragmatic usefulness of newer Lisps (Clojure and Janet) is the abandonment of CAR and CDR in favor of efficient distinct data structure types backed by efficient bases (tries, arrays, arraylists, hashmaps) and a focus on homoiconicity as the winning feature, separated forcefully from the idea of linked lists and CAR/CDR.
by pfdietz | 2025-08-05 13:32:12+00:00
> inherent value

Hitchen's Law can be applied to such assertions. "That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." It's an article of faith or of personal preference masquerading as an objective truth. Because there is no evidence backing it up, if some political party comes into power and wants to slash funding, what are you going to do to fight them? Proclaim your opinion more loudly?

> computer science

Wouldn't this have (and wasn't it largely) developed anyway once computers were being made for practical reasons, like thermodynamics came along because of steam engines? In any case, isn't math and CS theory a great example of the point that you can let someone else do it and then get it for free? If I invent an algorithm or prove a theorem, if it has any value other people can take it and run without my permission or knowledge. What I get is the ego boost of having been first, but is that sort of historical vanity a justification for expenditure of public resources?