MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-03 21:49:13+00:00
> Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face.

We have a problem where regulators are bad at their jobs most of the time, and then people develop the heuristic that all regulation is bad.

You need some rules to price major externalities. Not minor externalities, because regulatory overhead and enforcement are themselves externalities and it doesn't do any good to burn $1 in overhead to prevent $0.90 in some other cost. But you want a ban on leaded gasoline.

And you need antitrust rules, because "the market is more efficient" is fundamentally predicated on competitive markets. Real competition is the sine qua non of that actually working. Most government inefficiency is because the government is a monopoly, and private monopolies are just as bad.

The problem is politics breaks everyone's brains. One party says "regulation good" and the other side says "regulation bad" before either of them considers what the regulation actually does. And then you have one party promoting illiterate nonsense like price controls or justifying busybodies who want to micromanage things they don't even understand or trusting the government with mass surveillance data just because they're not a private company, and on the other side you have people with no objections to tying arrangements or companies with double-digit market share buying even more of their competitors.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler." That last bit turns out to be kind of important.
by pablitokun | 2025-08-03 21:49:27+00:00
As an SRE, I completely agree. I've had some more success with claude code recently. I use it as a fancy find and replace, if I explain it in detail what I did in one file it can repeat it in a dozen other files. Which is super handy, like once every 2 days, when I have to work in a legacy monorepo.

Whenever I try to use it to generate code from nothing I end up losing more time than winning.
by firefax | 2025-08-03 21:49:38+00:00
> I’m just really burned out and don’t have the mental energy to come home from a 10 hour day and start preparing for interviews.

Then don't. Show up and put in a fair eight hours, then leave.

You just said one of your options would be waiting to be fired... let them.

Be sure to note to HR or your manager's manager (POLITELY) any issues you're feeling are toxic -- then you can ding them for retaliation if they do fire you, especially if that toxicity touches on a protected class.
by B-Con | 2025-08-03 21:51:05+00:00
As a design reviewer, I think all design authors should internalize this concept:

> But a good doc will lay out the problem and mental models in a way that the solution that took weeks of hard thought to invent will be clear to the reader by the time the doc presents it.

Perhaps my favorite quote is: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."

Design docs should make complex things simple. They should not be a dumping ground for all the intellectual hardships and false starts the engineer went through. It may still worth capturing this, but that should be in another doc, or at least an appendix. Keep the path forward simple and understandable.
by userbinator | 2025-08-03 21:51:05+00:00
I have some small USB drives from that era with SLC rated for 10 years of retention after 100k cycles, meaning a 64MB drive has a total endurance of 6.4TB. True binary capacity too, with no wear leveling either, as only the spares on each page were needed for a simple ECC.

Too bad planned obsolescence got in the way, or we would've ended up today with bigger SLC drives that are fast and simple and just as reliable.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-03 21:52:34+00:00
I always find personal stories and quotes a weird way to tell these kinds of stories. Someone is always frustrated trying to find a job, right? Every field has ups and downs over time, and I know people whose fields were having a down turn in 2021 when tech was hotter than ever.

AI engineers aren’t in a slump I assume, nurses are classically understaffed right?
by Theodores | 2025-08-03 21:53:15+00:00
The internet has played a major role in making tattoos as popular as they currently are, first with Usenet lists, then the web and now with Instagram. The other game changer has been the availability of the single use needles and plastics so it is no longer the same kit getting cleaned in an autoclave. Tattooing is now a viable career option, with options in every town. Not so long ago only big cities or ports would have tattoo studios, in the parts of town that you would find brothels. You would be risking getting AIDS or hepatitis if going under the needle.

Whether you consider this degenerate or high sophistication is a matter of opinion, however, as a society, we can afford such occupations, which requires some level of wealth. Until recent times you would need seven families working the land to afford one family not working the land, with bakers, potters, blacksmiths, clergy, landlords and what not being carried by those working the land.

If you have tattooed mummies, that is an indication that their society could carry people that could specialise in things such as tattooing but also other things, whether that being clergy, education or just being rentier class.

In tattoo parlance, a job stopper is a tattoo on the hands, neck or face. Getting such tattoos means that you are excluding yourself from working in some professions and trades. This works at the higher status level, for example, pop stars, but also at the lower class, the person with no intention of working.

On the individual level, tattoos say a lot about childhood trauma, and, at a society level, much about society.

In conclusion, societies from antiquity that have a culture of tattooing are far from primitive. They had people that didn't have to slave away working the land to live short, brutal lives.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-03 21:53:41+00:00
I regularly have Claude Code in a loop where it can't figure out Typescript types and uses unsafe `as` kludges, even when CLAUDE.md tells it not to. A couple of prompts later, if it encounters any error in that same region, it again rips out the typesafe code and replaces it with an `as`.

My observation has been this: if you push a(/any) current-day LLM too close to the edge of its abilities, it goes "insane". Hallucinations start happening everywhere, it stops ignoring previous knowledge, etc. The best way out is to end the session, maybe do some manual work to get to a good state, perhaps update the specs, and start with a fresh context. Using "strong words" or prompting more is of no consequence, the LLM will produce essentially gibberish until reset. Sometimes using a more expensive model temporarily gets around whatever is triggering the stupidity.
by zeroCalories | 2025-08-03 21:54:28+00:00
Yes they seem very different. Firstly NGOs can do stuff. Groups like Doctors Without Borders come to mind. The UN doesn't do stuff because it's not meant to do stuff. It's where countries come to discuss things. Sometimes they do things, but only when all the important countries agree. I feel like people expect way too much from organizations like the UN, as if they're supposed to act like a world government.
by antonvs | 2025-08-03 21:54:33+00:00
Here's the full original definition from Karpathy:[*]:

> There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

Some of the key points here being "forget that the code even exists," "'Accept All' always," "don't read the diffs," and "The code grows beyond my usual comprehension."

Doing software engineering using AI assistance is not vibe coding, by Karpathy's definition.

[*] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
by exhaze | 2025-08-03 21:54:50+00:00
Tangential, but thought I'd share since validation and API calls go hand-in-hand: I'm personally a fan of using `ts-rest` for the entire stack since it's the leanest of all the compile + runtime zod/json schema-based validation sets of libraries out there. It lets you plug in whatever HTTP client you want (personally, I use bun, or fastify in a node env). The added overhead is totally worth it (for me, anyway) for shifting basically all type safety correctness to compile time.

Curious what other folks think and if there are any other options? I feel like I've searched pretty exhaustively, and it's the only one I found that was both lightweight and had robust enough type safety.
by norseboar | 2025-08-03 21:55:05+00:00
I love docs written like this, and writing culture generally. But I've also seen something like this backfire a bit.

I think this approach is particularly good for docs where the assumption is the audience wants to understand why you reached the conclusions you came to, and the doc is sort of a persuasive argument. I think this is a valuable doc (and how I like writing and reading), but it is not always the case.

I think often you do want to start with the conclusion, the "end" so to speak, to orient the reader. And also to address the reader who trusts your judgement, and just wants to get up to speed. I've seen a lot of cases where the audience might not be ready/want to follow along w/ a train of reasoning, they want to know the punchline. And once they do, then they might want to follow up.
by tanduv | 2025-08-03 21:55:54+00:00
I never really liked the syntax of fetch and the need to await for the response.json, implementing additional error handling -

async function fetchDataWithAxios() { try { const response = await axios.get('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1'); console.log('Axios Data:', response.data); } catch (error) { console.error('Axios Error:', error); } } async function fetchDataWithFetch() { try { const response = await fetch('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1'); if (!response.ok) { // Check if the HTTP status is in the 200-299 range throw new Error(`HTTP error! status: ${response.status}`); } const data = await response.json(); // Parse the JSON response console.log('Fetch Data:', data); } catch (error) { console.error('Fetch Error:', error); } }
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-03 21:56:12+00:00
I agree. Last year I just thought the IDF was grossly and criminally incompetent. Now, I believe they are actively and intentionally killing noncombatants.

Think about that from a legal perspective. The US can no longer deploy military service members to support Israel. If a service member believes an order to be legal the service member may refuse that order at their own risk. The only legal justification to refuse a military order is:

1. Because the order is patently illegal according to a common person standard where patently illegal means extremely obvious and extremely grave

2. Self defense in response to hostile actions in a designated conflict area so long as not violating the prior point

If so many leading experts now believe Israel is conducting an on going genocide then service members can make high risk arguments to refuse service in support of Israel, if so ordered. That is interesting because US service members have never had such qualified evidence to refuse deployment orders before.
by lunar-whitey | 2025-08-03 21:56:51+00:00
No one here is going to help the parent poster by assuming a superior position and lecturing them. It is totally unproductive. I suspect they have been hearing statements like this their entire life.

Everything I am reading here is consistent with the perspective of someone with a difference in ability (probably neurodevelopmental) that has experienced persistent social rejection as a result. People systematically fail to recognize or emphasize with this.
by ofalkaed | 2025-08-03 21:57:14+00:00
Depends on how much C you need, it might make more sense to write a proper Tcl extension and it might make sense to just embed Tcl/Tk but having this middle ground is nice because swinging to the fences is rarely the best course of action.

Critcl looks to be quite nice in those situations when Tcl/Tk is almost but not quite, you get the speed and ease of Tcl/Tk but a little more as well. The big gotcha looks to be having the foresight of identifying when writing a proper Tcl/Tk extension or switching language is the better plan, but this is almost always the big gotcha.
by listenallyall | 2025-08-03 21:58:30+00:00
Your approval, or not, of the TSA's security theater is an entirely different issue than chuckling as you refer to 9/11 as "that one terrorism" (and ignoring numerous other incidents prior to, and after it).

I'd also hesitate to refer to a pat down and manual search, as annoying as they may be, as "harassment."
by yencabulator | 2025-08-03 21:58:55+00:00
> Eventually it proclaims “Perfect!” (which annoys me to no end),

This has done wonders for me:

# User interaction - Avoid sycophancy. - Do what has been asked; nothing more, nothing less. - If you are asked to make a change, summarize the change but do not explain its benefits. - Be concise in phrasing but not to the point of omission.
by stevenicr | 2025-08-03 22:00:00+00:00
I think safety and comfort in general.

It seems in many places that are free or cheap, there are many more types of people that show up and it sometimes gets weird.

This has led to less women and children going to open spaces, which leads to less men in my observations.

This varies greatly depending on the exact neighborhood, and it may not be obvious if you spend most time in a wealthier or more homogeneous part of a city/town. Although they are not immune, it strongly depends on the forces allowed to keep the others away.
by ako | 2025-08-03 22:00:04+00:00
Being able to do it quicker and cheaper will often ensure more people will learn the basics. Electrical tools open up woodworking to more people, same with digital photography, more people take the effort to learn the basics. There will also be many more people making rubbish, but is that really a problem?

With ai it’s cheap and fast for a professional to ask the AI: what does this rubbish software do, and can you create me a more robust version following these guidelines.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-08-03 22:00:11+00:00
Anyone else find they discover these sorts of things by accident. I never know when a feature was added but vague ideas of "thats modern". Feels different to when I only did C# and you'd read the new language features and get all excited. In a polyglot world and just the rate even individual languages evolve its hard to keep up! I usually learn through osmosis or a blog post like this (but that is random learning).
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-08-03 22:00:23+00:00
> Think of a design document like a proof in mathematics. The goal of a proof is to convince the reader that the theorem is true. The goal of a design document is to convince the reader the design is optimal given the situation.

We don't need to veneer technical writing in faux rigour for it to be worthwhile. That's the silly stuff that belongs on LinkedIn.

This kind of psuedo-rigor feels good to nod along to, but it's nonsense.

'We're not writing code, we're programming', 'we're not just programming, we're doing software engineering', and now 'we're not doing software engineering we're doing rigorous proof based mathematics' all of a sudden.

IDK how you write 'Think of a design document like a proof in mathematics.' without feeling at least a little bit silly.

> The goal of a design document is to convince the reader the design is optimal given the situation.

A proposed design may be optimal, or it may not, but the purpose of a design document is not to prove that the proposed design is optimal by any definition.

In a software development setting you're virtually NEVER formally proving anything, nevermind optimality.

You're writing technical fiction based in reality, nothing more. It's not a 'proof' of anything.

You're convincing stakeholders that your proposal can be feasibly built, is viable to run in the ecosystem of the rest of your codebases and infrastructure, and satisfies whatever business requirements that led to someone asking you to create a new $thing the design doc is aiming to propose the technical solution for.

Nothing more IMHO.

If your doc isn't doing those things then it's not effective, if it's giving the illusion of trying to do more than those things then it's just theatre.

The rest of the article is standard good writing advice, but can we not put design docs and PRFAQs on an altar as anything more than technical business fiction to communicate ideas and proposals for scrutiny to stakeholders.
by crabmusket | 2025-08-03 22:01:08+00:00
Jacques Ellul in full old testament prophet mode:

> The world that is being created by the accumulation of technical means is an artificial world and hence radically different from the natural world.

> It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it. The two worlds obey different imperatives, different directives, and different laws which have nothing in common.

> Just as hydroelectric installations take waterfalls and lead them into conduits, so the technical milieu absorbs the natural. We are rapidly approaching the time when there will be no longer any natural environment at all. When we succeed in producing artificial aurorae boreales, night will disappear and perpetual day will reign over the planet.
by top256 | 2025-08-03 22:02:22+00:00
Good point I should have mentioned. I was so "in it" that I didn't realize it was a valid question.

This thing outperforms llvm (on o3 and O2) and the JVM too. I didn't explain it because I wrote it in a previous blog post but that's a fair point.

And it's not that obvious because the previous example was handled better by chat gpt while llvm couldn't handle it.

Thank you for this idea.
by pseudo0 | 2025-08-03 22:02:39+00:00
The TSA has a workforce of 65,000 people, it's an insane waste of collective time and energy. Meanwhile private planes don't even have to go through the TSA, presumably because big donors have actual political pull and the risk is laughably low. Too bad Elon didn't pick the TSA as a DOGE target, it would have been actually useful and wildly popular.
by varispeed | 2025-08-03 22:03:48+00:00
> These same people seem to have no trouble accomplishing other tasks they want to do on the computer--tasks which require more focus.

That's common. ADHD has this kind of paradoxes. People can hyperfocus on tasks that align with interests or feel stimulating and become completely overwhelmed by other tasks, even seemingly simple.

> I don't have the time or ability to cater for every scenario.

That's fair, but still it's at least worth being mindful about accessibility issues some people face. For big corporations this is inexcusable.
by starkparker | 2025-08-03 22:04:33+00:00
Or they're just async standups, except less accessible since OP uses separate, exclusive channels instead of threads within a single shared channel.

The fully remote org I work at does async standup threads, they're great, they work just like they're described here except they're vastly easier to track and search, and nobody has any allusions of them being anything more than just remote asynchronous standups.
by skmurphy | 2025-08-03 22:04:34+00:00
key graf: Bots are docs: LLMs can’t keep secrets, no matter how well prompted, we need to store memories in a secure, separated way. Fortunately, we already have a good mechanism for this kind of semi-shared secret: documents. Asking an agent to only disclose some of what it knows about you is a bit like telling someone only to read one page out of a long document that has all of your life in it - you’d never do that! We know how to separate and share documents.
by Moto7451 | 2025-08-03 22:04:41+00:00
Yup. An example of this is the Air Force’s B52 which has lived longer than many of its immediate successor program (B1 non B) and is scheduled to live longer than the successors to its successor (B1-B, B2) alongside the B21.

We have plenty of mothballed chassis for parts and a seemingly never ending series of modernization programs. A new engine has been proposed repeatedly and is maybe finally happening.

However what we can simply never do is make another one from scratch as all the tooling has been gone since the 1960s. They could do an “inspired by the B52” replacement like the B21 is to the B2, but much like the B2 and F22 we just won’t make more of them for practical and Military Industrial Complex reasons.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-08-03 22:04:44+00:00
Backpressure signaling can be handled with your own "event loop" and array syntax.

Manually managing memory is in fact almost always better than what we are given in node and java and so on. We succeed as a society in spite of this, not because of this.

There is some diminishing point of returns, say like, the difference between virtual and physical memory addressing, but even then it is extremely valuable to know what is happening, so that when your magical astronaut code doesn't work on an SGI, now we know why.
by bb01100100 | 2025-08-03 22:05:52+00:00
I was doing some looping recently with tcl and comparing against another implementation (called Jim [1], a very cool project in its own right) and wondered why datetime formatting was so slow when using `clock format`.

The code at [2] provided an alternative approach using C via critcl. It was interesting to see how malleable tcl can be.

[1] https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl [2] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/speed+up+clock+format+and+clo...
by tptacek | 2025-08-03 22:07:20+00:00
I don't know about "83" (the number I always see is 100), but: IQ tests are less discriminating at the high end, and test-retest reliability drops at the high end (the "high end" of an IQ test might just be testing grit or fatigue). I think it's widely understood that IQ is unreliably ordinal as scores increase.

You definitely don't need to dip into the Peterson Cinematic Universe to look this up!
by carstenhag | 2025-08-03 22:08:05+00:00
Germany: I don't know of anything a normal company could do as a "background check". Some sectors can ask for a criminal record which the future employee has to provide. Of 3 companies I was at, 0 required (or were allowed to require) this.

Military/government jobs with secret data have their own, through clearance checks of course, but a random IT company would never have this.

On the other hand, you have to submit so many tax, social security, insurance-related IDs which are cross-checked, I don't think it's feasible to impersonate someone here. It's also a reason why over-employment is not possible.