MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by strathmeyer | 2025-08-04 07:07:06+00:00
I graduated in 2004 with a BS in computer science from CMU. I was always told I hadn't worked hard enough to become a software developer, even though that's what I was doing in minimum wage jobs where my title was DBA. Finally gave up after 12 years of searching. YMMV. It was weird when all my professors who said they'd help me find a job if I couldn't find one suddenly didn't have any time for me. Start your life now don't wait just because society tells you that's what you're supposed to do.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-04 07:07:37+00:00
Just offering normal jobs would generally be fine, doing a big group deal that also comes with IP licensing would generally not be fine.

I'm not going to try to give you the exact line.

> In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?

> Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?

That's way too general. You could use that same argument to say acquisitions should never be blocked.
by sshine | 2025-08-04 07:08:14+00:00
I've been vibe-coding for weeks in Rust, and it works great.

I've been vibe-coding for a few days in Haskell, and I don't like the result.

Maybe I am just accustomed to being ok with verbose Rust, while Haskell comes with a great potential for elegance that the LLM does not explore.

Regardless, the argument that types guide the LLM in a very reliable way holds in both cases.
by rusk | 2025-08-04 07:08:35+00:00
Ruby and Perl are great examples of massively popular languages that withered because the language/platform outpaced the community.

If the first question you’re asking yourself looking at a code base is “what version is this/do I know this version” then that language is not facilitating you.

The successful languages are ones where “the community” prioritises backward compatibility. Java, C, Python have backward compatibility spanning decades. There’s a few discontinuities (lambdas in Java 8, Python 3, C++) but in most cases there’s a clear mapping back to the original. Python 3 is an exception to this but the migration window was something like 15 years…

Busy engineers, scientists and academics have little interest in keeping up to date with language features. A computer and a programming language are a tool for a job and the source code is just an intermediate artifact. These are your “community”, and the stakeholders in your success.
Show HN: A $1/year credit card keep-alive service
by cameronehrlich | 2025-08-04 07:08:45+00:00
Hey HN! I built the world's most boring SaaS - it charges your unused credit cards $1/year so banks don't cancel them for inactivity.

The problem: Banks cancel credit cards after 6-24 months of no activity. When they cancel your oldest card, your credit score can drop 50+ points due to reduced credit history length and lower total available credit.

The solution: KeepAlive automatically charges each card $1 annually. That's it. That's the entire product.

Why this exists: I personally wanted it & Claude Code.

Tech: js, supabase, stripe

---

Yes, I know this is absurd, but I've actually been using a version of this for a couple years now and decided to vibe code it up now that anything is possible. ;)
by marcyb5st | 2025-08-04 07:08:52+00:00
I fully reject your statement about not digitizing being insignificant. And there are several reasons for it, but the main one in my mind is about prevention vs curing.

In an ideal world where every medical record is digitized it would be possible to discover long term causal effects that nowadays we don't know because running long term studies is hard, costly, and in a world where publishing is everything they don't lend to it. So we explored and confirmed only the most obvious long term cause-effect connections.

Therefore, it would enable prevention of some diseases for which we, nowadays, can only have a reactive MO.
by theICEBeardk | 2025-08-04 07:09:27+00:00
c++ gets a lot of hate much of it based on past traumas with specific codebases and history of use.

This has built up into a culture where people who have little to no experience with c++ but who have been told and seen only bad headlines about it join in with those who have legitimate concerns, those who are promoting their favorite language and those who are trolls leading to a general mood.

It is almost perfectly predictable that if you open the discussion on a link to a c++ article on this site there will be someone promoting either zip, rust or circle in that discussion. There will also be a comment on the bloat of the language and someone venting their trauma from some horrible code base.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-04 07:10:00+00:00
All knowledge is dangerous in the wrong hands.

Want to know how to secure your computer? In the wrong hands, that gives somebody information on how to break into insecure computers.

Want to know how to slice an onion properly and safely? Oh, so now you want to teach people how to efficiently use knives, the most ancient of offensive weapons?

I guess you want to teach your children how to play nice with other kids and have a healthy school environment? Well, some people are going to use that knowledge to understand how to emotionally abuse children. You're a monster.

/s

Focus on motivations and safeguards of the attack vectors, not limiting the spread of knowledge.
by rekabis | 2025-08-04 07:10:09+00:00
All professional and personal eMail through gMail?

Oof, buddy. That cock-up is on you. Even if you don’t want to administer your own iron, there are plenty of third-party services that can host your eMail domain.

And with a little work, there is eMail-in-a-box for a turnkey solution, and others like hMailServer if you just want a minimalistic low-effort server running on an old Windows box in your basement.
by bikeshaving | 2025-08-04 07:11:16+00:00
You're right. It wasn't a design choice or technical limitation, but a troubling third thing: certain contributors consistently spreading misinformation about ESM being inherently async (when it's only conditionally async), and creating a hostile environment that “drove contributors away” from ESM work - as the implementer themselves described.

Today, no one will defend ERR_REQUIRE_ESM as good design, but it persisted for 5 years despite working solutions since 2019. The systematic misinformation in docs and discussions combined with the chilling of conversations suggests coordinated resistance (“offline conversations”). I suspect the real reason for why “things do and don’t happen” is competition from Bun/Deno.
by jpc0 | 2025-08-04 07:11:25+00:00
If everyone’s usage was above the set rate they would include rate limits which is literally a usage limit, which they have proven to do.

So no in fact you do get X tokens for 20 dollars and off your usage is too high they would absolutely put a stop to that. It wouldn’t even surprise me if they have per customer rate limits.

Where is the distinction here, it isn’t an unlimited plan, the limit just isn’t communicated.
by teiferer | 2025-08-04 07:11:36+00:00
Nit upfront: Python is typed, just not statically typed.

What dynamically typed languages lack in compile-time safety, the programmer must make up using (automated) testing. With adequate tests, a python program doesn't break more than a Rust or Go program. It's just that people often regard testing as an annoying chore which is the first thing they skip when vibe coding (or "going fast and breaking things" which is then literally what happens).
by dokyun | 2025-08-04 07:13:34+00:00
I care about a lot of different kinds of freedom, like freedom of speech and information, not just software. What all kinds of freedom have in common is that people who only advocate them when it's a convenient means to an end do not believe in freedom, and more often than not are enemies of freedom who seek to undermine it.

Political extremists advocate for free speech in order to further their agenda, but when given power happily turn back it against their enemies. Corporations advocate for "open source" and once they have enough free labor and market capture will lock it up to gain control. Publishing companies ransom publicly funded universities for access to their own research. The pharmaceutical industry might as well be the most evil and corrupt in the world, and by god you, nor anyone else is ever going to benefit from any medical innovation, nevertheless get microplastics out of your body until it can get sold back to you, assuming you can even afford it.

If you only care about supporting things as means to your own ends, then that's your deal, but don't act like you're operating on some moral high ground. To me you're just another tool.
by lou1306 | 2025-08-04 07:13:43+00:00
> the format seems to be focused on how to display some data so that a human can (hopefully) easily read them

It may seem so, but what it really focuses on is how to arrange stuff on a page that has to be printed. Literally everything else, from forms to hyperlinks, were later additions (and it shows, given the crater-size security holes they punched into the format)
by paffdragon | 2025-08-04 07:14:40+00:00
It's perfectly fine. The important part is that you can explain during the interview what you did to achieve that impact and demonstrate the skills. A lot of BS ends there. I never threw out a CV because it contained too many numbers or it was too precise. Quite the opposite. I flag CVs that are too vague and use big words without facts often repeatedly but do not provide much information.
by motorest | 2025-08-04 07:14:52+00:00
> Node allows native addons in packages via the N-API so any native module aren't restricted by those permissions. (...) Node permissions (...) just restrict the Node standard library.

So what? That's clearly laid out in Node's documentation.

https://nodejs.org/api/permissions.html#file-system-permissi...

What point do you think you're making?
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-08-04 07:16:15+00:00
You can implement the Stringer interface for the type which prevents it from being logged and since it's private, code from outside of the module can't enumerate it. Of course it's still accessible via reflection or memory dumps etc, but isn't that the case with Java etc? Storing a plain text password like this is a bad idea anyways.

I guess my point is that a structural type system can still allow for encapsulation.
by michaelt | 2025-08-04 07:16:28+00:00
IDK what 'performative' means. But according to my calculations, if I donated $50,000 to a charity last year and $0 this year, I've still donated $50,000 to the charity.

Whereas someone who donated $0 last year and $0 this year has donated $0.

It'd be pretty weird if the former got worse press than the latter.
by nemanja_codes | 2025-08-04 07:16:32+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | WORLDWIDE

Location: Serbia, GMT +2

Remote: Yes

Technologies: React, Next.js, JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, Astro, TailwindCSS, Jest, Cypress, Prisma, PostrgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, C#/.NET

Resume/CV: Available on request

GitHub: https://github.com/nemanjam

Website: https://nemanjamitic.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nemanja-mitic

Email: nemanja.mitic.elfak [at] hotmail.com

I am a full stack developer with a Master's degree in Computer Science and 4.5 years of professional experience with JavaScript. My top skills are React/Next.js and I am also good with Node.js backends. I have decent experience with C# and .NET but currently it is not my main focus. I have a decent understanding of DevOps technologies (Linux, containers, IaC, automation) for a developer. I also have interest an in Python and FastAPI. Here are some of my projects:

1. Comprehensive project: full stack Next.js, Prisma, unit, integration, e2e tests, CI/CD.

https://github.com/nemanjam/nextjs-prisma-boilerplate

2. Latest project: HN job ads aggregator, Next.js, SQLite (GitHub and demo links are in the first post).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373936

I have experience working remotely for startups within globally distributed multicultural teams.

I have detailed resume available upon request. You can check out my other projects at https://github.com/nemanjam . You can tell me about your project via email: nemanja.mitic.elfak [at] hotmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nemanja-mitic .
by sdenton4 | 2025-08-04 07:16:39+00:00
The tracker space is weird and full of twisty passages... Sampling was a common starting point for the basic sounds. The cool thing about tracker files is that they would include all the pcm samples, so people would build up their library of sounds largely by getting them from other people's files... A few would create their own samples by recording things out in meatspace, or do delightfully weird stuff like drawing waveforms.

From there, a given tracker would have all kinds of shenanigans available for manipulating the audio, in addition to whatever one wanted to do in an external audio program with a full effects stack.

Once you noodle around with synthesizers a bit, everything looks like either an oscillator or a transform... and who cares what the oscillator is.
by kaibee | 2025-08-04 07:17:07+00:00
> 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.

No, we have a problem where 95% of regulations work so well that no one even remembers that they exist (child labor, etc). A media environment that reports on outliers for clicks and corporations that want to dump industrial waste in rivers.
by dguest | 2025-08-04 07:18:15+00:00
Science fiction, particularly space operas, can be dismissive of doctors. Most of the time the "doctor" is just a diagnostic machine that gives miracle meds and maybe 3d prints new body parts.

Maybe it's prophetic: authors saw the writing on the wall and decided a doctor is a glorified mechanic who works on the most boring machine around (which hasn't changed in 100k years). Or maybe authors just decide the space was better filled by an ex-space-ninja or similar.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-08-04 07:18:49+00:00
> There has been no start. You don’t build a factory because the President announced a tariff that he is also negotiating a trade deal around.

You absolutely do once the math of tariffs makes your manufacturing abroad not competitive with onshored one. Will it apply for all categories of products? Probably not. However, it will definitely apply for many.

I am not sure I understood your reply about the reasons.
by gsliepen | 2025-08-04 07:19:47+00:00
Early programming languages had to work with the limited hardware capabilities of the time in order to be efficient. Nowadays, we have so much processing power available that the compiler can optimize the code for you, so the language doesn't have to follow hardware capabilities anymore. So it's only logical that the current languages should work the limitations of the compilers. Perhaps one day those limitations will be gone as well for practical purposes, and it would be interesting to see what programming languages could be made then.
by mpoteat | 2025-08-04 07:20:47+00:00
If folks are interested in this sort of thing, but want to play around with higher order building blocks, http://hkt.code.lol may be worth checking out.

In addition to type-level analogues of your normal Lodash-esque functions, it includes a suite of type-level parser combinator utilities and is built on higher-kinded type abstractions.
by so-cal-schemer | 2025-08-04 07:22:05+00:00
The fuller excerpt concretely put in §3.1.3 "The Costs of Introducing Assignment":

"So long as we do not use assignments, two evaluations of the same procedure with the same arguments will produce the same result, so that procedures can be viewed as computing mathematical functions. Programming without any use of assignments, as we did throughout the first two chapters of this book, is accordingly known as functional programming."
by rusk | 2025-08-04 07:22:46+00:00
> install using the file system you fancy, setup the raid you want, install samba and nfs, eventually avahi and encryption and that’s pretty much it.

It isn’t though.

I got that far and I wasn’t happy. There’s a lot of extra stuff you have to think about when you want a system to run unattended, vs something that’s a workstation.

First thing I noticed was the noise and the heat. Had to install a daemon to power down the hard disks when not in use. Then when I wanted RAID I had to go spend half a day learning to do that. Then there was software updates. So on and so forth.

I also had some lingering concerns about power consumption which meant I was going to have to get out some power monitors and read some stuff about Linux power tuning.

After a while the sense of “all in one” like packages TrueNAS and unraid started to make sense.

I was all set for unraid but luckily I came into a bit of extra money and I was able to buy some of my life back with a simple box with all of this designed and configured by people who know what they are doing.

Now all I need to do is manage storage and services which is all I should have to do with a NAS.

All this stuff is interesting to learn but there’s only so many hours in the day.

By all means if you want a hobby project or you’re not concerned with non functional aspects like reliability, power consumption and security and maintenance or if you’re very poor then building your own NAS makes sense.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-04 07:23:49+00:00
From a security perspective, ActiveX is a relic from days long past, when people could be reasonably trusted - an assumption that broke around the early '00s when "dialer" malware offered a first way to extract funds from victims.

From a developer perspective, I'm still sad that it went away. The old COM/OLE/ActiveX ecosystem was flexible to a degree nothing has never ever been since.
by jstummbillig | 2025-08-04 07:24:42+00:00
Why would that necessarily be the case? I understand that bad software can get in the way of anything, but I find it hard to imagine there is nothing out there that actually helps any given (and willing) physician to improve their work, and make more time for patients, not less. There are inherent properties to IT that can help make stuff more efficient across any domain I can think of, and physicians work checks a lot of the marks.

I happen to work in the medical field and while a lot of the software involved has its issues, not working with software, at this point, seems like a really bad idea, in terms of error prevention, performance and efficiency.
by brav8isgood | 2025-08-04 07:25:09+00:00
I have always wondered if transmission bitrate remains the same for the same language, spoken at seemingly different speeds.

There is that stereotype that french-speaking Swiss people speak slower than French ones. In my experience I find it valid, but maybe I am wrong.

If this is accurate, I am wondering if Swiss people transmit information at the same rate as French people.

It could be that they use more precise words on average, that convey more information, even if spoken more slowly, and keeping transmission rate identical. Or that body language, intonations are richer (non verbal).

Or the spoken transmission rate may actually be slower, but as the article describes, bottleneck is about structuring the ideas, and Swiss speakers, on average, may be more efficient/deliberate at that, instinctively/culturally.

I don't have enough experience speaking with Swiss nationals to verify my anecdotal theories... if anyone can chime in...
by jongjong | 2025-08-04 07:25:44+00:00
Yes. From experience, for a relatively complex system, 1k+ line PRs from mid-level devs without tests are almost guaranteed to have bugs; often nasty ones which can take many hours to identify and fix.

I remember when I started coding (decades ago), it would take me days to debug certain issues. Part of the problem was that it was difficult to find information online at the time, but another part of the problem was that my code was over-engineered. I could churn out thousands of lines of code quickly but I was only trying to produce code which appeared to work, not code which actually worked in all situations. I would be shocked when some of my code turned out to break once in a while but now I understand that this is a natural consequence of over-complicating the solution and churning out those lines as fast as I could without thinking enough.

Good code is succinct; it looks like it was discovered in its minimal form. Bad code looks like it was invented and the author tried to make it extra fancy. After 20 years coding, I can tell bad code within seconds.

Good code is just easy to read; first of all, you already know what each function is going to do before you even started reading it, just by its name. Then when you read it, there's nothing unexpected, it's not doing anything unnecessary.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-08-04 07:25:51+00:00
Damn, before I read this article I would have assumed all grade-level classes with no special facilities requirements were just taught to demand. Crazy to think of a framing that 'advanced' 6th grade math is such a precious resource that your 5th grade teacher can arbitrarily shunt you down an academic path all the way to college. It feels like this exists mostly to create a have and have-nots situation.
by ajdlinux | 2025-08-04 07:26:27+00:00
A relative of mine had to go back to their paper-only specialist a couple of months ago to get a prescription reissued because the specialist had omitted a mandatory detail from the (handwritten) prescription form and the pharmacist couldn't fill it.

Meanwhile, I had a similar prescription, from a different specialist, who issues his prescriptions as either e-scripts or computer-generated paper scripts depending on patient preference. I suspect his practice management software would stop him from making this class of mistake entirely.

I get why a doctor might prefer to avoid the computer, but I think my relative would have preferred their doctor not screwing up on something basic and wasting a significant amount of their time over better vibes in a consult.
by formerly_proven | 2025-08-04 07:27:13+00:00
Yes, PDFs are primarily a way to describe print data. So to a certain extent the essence of PDF is a hybrid vector-raster image format. Sure, these days text is almost always encoded as or overlaid with actual machine-readable text, but this isn't really necessary and wasn't always done, especially for older PDFs. 15 years ago you couldn't copy (legible) text out of most PDFs made with latex.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-08-04 07:27:40+00:00
Chicken tax was introduced earlier than all the “relaxation” of what is considered “American”. The definition of “made in USA” became more flexible for products to be considered domestic while de facto being made somewhere else, hurting domestic manufacturing.

So, it’s not that the tax doesn’t work, the issue is all the things around it that made it less effective.
by jeffrallen | 2025-08-04 07:27:48+00:00
Yes! Non-goals are SO important.

In IT, it's all virtual, so in theory anything is possible. Setting hard limits is necessary, or else the solution space is overwhelming, and the second system effect can kill your project (even in the first system!)

In mechanical or electrical engineering, some potential goals are blatantly physically or economically impossible and do not need to be mentioned as non-goals.
by willguest | 2025-08-04 07:28:09+00:00
I see it as a preoccupation with the act of voting, in place of actual decision making. Incompetence disguised by paperwork is common feature, especially when the problem feel intractable but there is pressure to "get results".

Rules, protocol and regs are obviously necessary to some extent, but it feels like (in Europe, at least) the map has been confused with the terrain. Overly burdensome protocols are fuel for inaction and hand-wringing and, not very surprisingly, private interests have learnt to take advantage of this (e.g. lawfare)

It is tempting to adopt a "drain the swamp" mentality, but we should remember that swamps are ecosystems too.