MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andy99 | 2025-08-04 14:46:35+00:00
I have a background selling projects with long sales cycles, and I think partly from that, I have no problem putting in lots of work for a company that I think is making a good faith effort to get to know me, for an appropriate job that will provide a high expected return on my efforts.

The problem with AI interviews (and much of the hiring automation in general) is that (a) it's not good faith, it scales so that all the candidates can be made to do work that nobody ever looks at. If I'm on a short list of two people for a Director level position, I'd happily spend 8 hours making a presentation to give. If I'm one of a thousand and haven't even had an indication that I've passed some basic screening, not so much. And (b), all this stuff usually applies to junior positions where the same payoff isn't there. I've worked for months with customers to get consulting contracts before, and obviously price accordingly so it nets out to be worth it. Doesn't work if you're putting in all the free work for a low probability chance at an entry level job.
by saubeidl | 2025-08-04 14:47:13+00:00
> They've done this a few times already, and it's very violent each time.

It's very violent because it gets violently repressed by capitalist forces. See the democratically elected Allende being couped by the CIA.

> Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others.

That is straight up not true. What value do people inheriting wealth provide? What value do high frequency traders provide? What value do speculators of all sorts provide? It's a casino that's rigged for the already rich, on the back of the poor.
by throwawayoldie | 2025-08-04 14:47:22+00:00
Also reminiscent of the old Onion article from the Bush Jr. era invasion of Iraq: "This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t"

https://theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mi...
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-04 14:47:27+00:00
I think that we tend to have personal biases, depending on the context of our relationships and professional cultures.

I totally believe the graph, if only for things like WordPress, and a number of other infrastructure-level tools.

I know that the porn industry is still big on PHP. There was a post here, some time ago, that linked to a PornHub programmer, talking about their IT stack, and it was all PHP.

It's a boring workhorse. The "boring" part is attractive to IT pros.
by ben_w | 2025-08-04 14:47:37+00:00
While it's almost certainly safe or it wouldn't have passed the ethics committee, what you say is an insufficiently detailed description of setup to determine if it's fine or not.

1.2 watts over your entire head is fine.

1.2 watts in a 800nm-diameter cylindrical path is "for some reason we decided to make the outer few millimetres of your skin explode, but we had to be in contact with your skin to manage that because that power density of laser would have ionised the air before it reached you".
by connorb-coder | 2025-08-04 14:47:42+00:00
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by armchairhacker | 2025-08-04 14:47:53+00:00
1. Use a TripleByte replacement (e.g. https://www.otherbranch.com/) to filter out obviously bad applicants. Basically, job-seekers do a long set of interviews, and if they pass, are considered generally competent.

2. If you get a lot of generally-competent employees after applying reasonable filters (e.g. matching skillset, expected salary), don't give them a long automated test, pick a smaller set randomly. All of them have demonstrated competence, and the likelihood that the test will give you more the more competent employees is offset by the likelihood that they'll move forward with applications more respectful of their time.

3. Do final-stage (human) interviews with the small set of employees, where you test specific skills relevant to the job. Here you can also throw a couple general-skill questions to ensure the applicant really is generally competent; it's not disrespecting their time, because it's part of the interview time and you're spending it as well (maybe it is if the entire interview is especially long, but then you're wasting also your own time).

The important part is 1). Otherbranch may not be good or popular, but at least if/when employee supply falls below demand, "mass interview" seems like something employers will need to filter out bad applicants without wasting good applicants' time.
by Cu3PO42 | 2025-08-04 14:47:59+00:00
For me, my computer is a tool that I need to just work. Therefore I understand the frustration of occasionally fighting Nix to get things to work right.

For the same reason, I don't think I will ever move off of Nix again. Once something works, it works reproducibly. I can always go back to a known-good state if I break something. This gives me freedom to experiment that I would otherwise not permit myself for fear of breaking an important workflow.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-04 14:48:01+00:00
I don't believe that "from __future__" is the future-proofing you think it is, they just named it that way to be cute - a hypothetical 3.19 version couldn't even use it, since it's just a normal python import

$ python3.13 -c 'from __future__ import awesome_feature' File "<string>", line 1 SyntaxError: future feature awesome_feature is not defined

the very idea of "future feature is not defined" is insaneo

Anyway, I'd guess what they intend is

try: from __future__ import fever_dream except SyntaxError: fever_dream = None

because python really gets off on conditional imports
by bad_haircut72 | 2025-08-04 14:48:07+00:00
Small grocery stores are going bankrupt, larger chains now all are becoming food conglomerates who also own the point of sale - so called "private label" is noted as a huge threat in the shareholder reports of traditionally large food companies - go to a whole foods, aside from a few high profile products like CocaCola its all in-house brand products
by matthewdgreen | 2025-08-04 14:48:27+00:00
Every time we have this discussion someone brings up FedNow, and I will repeat the same question I always ask: when I visit the farmer's market this weekend, will anyone there be able to practically accept payment in FedNow? What would that even look like? (FYI the vendors take most cards, Apple/Google Pay, Venmo, paper cash, Square Cash, Apple Cash, etc.)

If the answer is "no for these reasons", then this probably shines a big light on why FedNow is not serving the same use case.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-04 14:48:52+00:00
When I started using NixOS, I intended to ease into it very gently by running just the barest nix config on the host but actually doing all of my meaningful work in distrobox containers. Hilariously, in my case I ended up accidentally going whole hog and putting almost everything directly in the host NixOS system, but I still fully endorse my original plan: NixOS host and system configuration, but every application you can goes in flatpak and all dev work is in distrobox. Best of both worlds.
by Const-me | 2025-08-04 14:49:04+00:00
Good article, but I believe it lacks information what specifically these magical dFdx, dFdy, and fwidth = abs(dFdx) + abs(dFdy) functions are computing.

The following stackexchange answer addresses that question rather well: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/130933/3355 As you see, dFdx and dFdx are not exactly derivatives, these are discrete screen-space approximations of these derivativities. Very cheap to compute due to the weird execution model of pixel shaders running in hardware GPUs.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-04 14:49:04+00:00
I think it’s basically impossible to prevent AI crawlers. It is like video game cheating, at the extreme they could literally point a camera at the screen and have it do image processing, and talk to the computer through the USB port emulating, a mouse and keyboard outside the machine. They don’t do that, of course, because it is much easier to do it all in software, but that is the ultimate circumvention of any attempt to block them out that doesn’t also block out humans.

I think the business model for “content creating” is going have to change, for better or worse (a lot of YouTube stars are annoying as hell, but sure, stuff like well-written news and educational articles falls under this umbrella as well, so it is unfortunate that they will probably be impacted too).
by spwa4 | 2025-08-04 14:49:05+00:00
No, I don't (well, somewhere between 5% and 20%, it's not magical). But how it works, fundamentally, the rich exchange goods and services for new debt, in various forms.

That also shows why you can't touch the rich with the government: first, where would it get goods and services? And when the government gets goods and services it's for "the public good", which effectively means largely for the poor (especially if you reason the way governments do: the palace for the prime minister is the infrastructure that provides for the poor. So that room is really for the poor too, just like the many side-hustles the prime minister and many government figures have. But even disregarding government excess ... mostly these goods and services acquired really are for the poor). Second, the wealth of the rich is really something like 1%-5% of those new goods and services produced. That's what it fundamentally is, that wealth. If you take that away, the incentive for production falls away. And even that ignores the added difficulty that the richest "rich" in the US, by an extreme amount, are the pension funds, especially in aggregate. Attacking the rich will mean taking pensions from old people.

Which leads immediately to the consequence of going after big companies and "the rich": no more (much less) new goods and services. Because nobody's going to replace them, or, if someone does replace them, they become the new rich and you've achieved nothing.

AND there's a major, major, MAJOR catch in replacing the rich. The current rich see the social contract roughly like this "if we provide society roughly as-is, we get to be rich". If you replace the current rich with new MAGA rich, for example, they will demand a new social contract which you may VERY much dislike. For example, Microsoft, Google (even Apple, when it comes to computers) see the freedom to develop and run your own programs, as well as free communication over the internet, as an essential part of their "deal" with society. Chinese and Indian computer producers very much do not see things this way (but are largely, not 100%, 99%, forced into allowing it, at least in the US and Europe, by the current US rich). It seems to me unlikely in the extreme that if the US gets a new rich class, replacing these companies, that this will remain so.
by GiorgioG | 2025-08-04 14:49:13+00:00
I will never give PHP any serious thought. Back in the mid 2000s I started an app hosting company as a side-gig. I started out hosting FogBugz (bug tracker) because Fog Creek Software only offered it as a self-hosted option. I had zero problems for 9 months - it was a Microsoft ASP based app (IIRC). Then I decided to host a helpdesk app called HelpSpot. At the time it was a one-man startup and he didn't offer a SaaS option either so he was happy to send customers my way. The software itself was fine (and it's still around) but it was a PHP-based system and no matter how up to date I kept the servers, the PHP servers got hacked over and over due to PHP's complete disregard for security at the time. My claim to fame is I hosted Twitter's first helpdesk. I got tired of getting home from work and having to rebuild servers almost weekly, so I "sold" my fledgling little sidegig for $2k. Screw PHP.
by q3k | 2025-08-04 14:49:14+00:00
> Nix isn't even that arcane.

It's somewhat quirky though :)

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Language_Quirks

https://md.darmstadt.ccc.de/xtNP7JuIQ5iNW1FjuhUccw

(but then again, what language isn't...)
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-04 14:49:46+00:00
So basically he's saying the quiet part out loud?

When you look at the totality of the things that people who profess to "believe in democracy believe", advocate for and spend real resources advancing it's pretty clear that they a) don't believe in democracy b) believe in democracy in the the most technical "gotcha" sense because they don't believe in structuring it in a way that results in any serious amount of the implied freedom or autonomy for the individual.

I hate the guy and what he stands for. But at least he's self aware and honest so that puts him ahead of way more people than it should.
by DavidWoof | 2025-08-04 14:49:56+00:00
Give me an AI chatbot over someone with poor English skills reading a script any day of the week. My problem probably isn't unique, it's probably something fairly obvious that was vague in the instructions.

Now, the important thing is offer a way to upgrade to a human. But I have no problem at all starting with AI, in fact I honestly prefer it.
by InitialLastName | 2025-08-04 14:50:06+00:00
To pick a closer analogy, the professions that engineering in the traditional sense (electrical, mechanical, civil) also have professional licensure that includes ethical training in their licensing requirements. However, the goals of both the licensure and the ethical training are centered around "follow standard practices and processes to minimize deaths and avoid undermining the public trust in the competence of your field", not "don't slowly degrade the society around you through your decisions".
by Knork-and-Fife | 2025-08-04 14:50:21+00:00
At my last doctor's appointment the nurse asked if I was okay with AI conversation transcription and summarizing that the doctor uses. So I had the option to decline.

I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. There are contextual details you might include when talking to your doctor that you wouldn't expect your doctor to write down into your medical record.
by szszrk | 2025-08-04 14:50:25+00:00
Kind of. I just compared US to PL. We have much more choices here in PL, and breakfast is completely different. Meals are mostly different, but have a lot of common ingredients ( like iconic beans and meat balls). Us has no soups at all, while we have 5 kinds. Cakes are similar, but again we have much more choices.
by WASDAai | 2025-08-04 14:50:54+00:00
TL;DR: Long-form case study uses public writings of polymath Faruk Alpay to examine how extreme cognitive load, recursive thinking and high-stakes innovation in AI math and consciousness research intersect with burnout anxiety impostor feelings and existential strain while also highlighting protective factors like intrinsic meaning rigorous formalism and reflective writing; draws on 10+ peer-reviewed studies to argue that frontier researchers walk a fine line between genius and breakdown and calls for systemic mental-health support in high-impact tech and academic environments.
by alias_neo | 2025-08-04 14:51:07+00:00
My interpretation was that we haven't experienced it as adults; We may have experienced it as children, but my experience (maybe not everybody's) is that I don't remember enough about being a young child to necessarily know the best way to approach things with my own children, and we haven't necessarily seen how others do it.

I'm also much older (a decade) than my parents were when they had their first child.
by vertoc | 2025-08-04 14:51:36+00:00
But even your example gets worse with AI potentially - the "upsell" of his blog isn't paid posts but more subscribers so there will be thankful readers, a few donators, people talking about it. If the only interface becomes an AI summary of his work without credit, it's much more likely he stops writing as it'll seem like he's just screaming into the void
by ndiddy | 2025-08-04 14:51:45+00:00
If the AI industry achieves its short-term goals, instead of paying a human $100,000/year to do some desk job, companies will pay Microsoft/Google/OpenAI/whoever $20,000/year in API tokens and keep the extra money for themselves. To me, this doesn't seem like a way to reduce wealth inequality, it seems like a way to accelerate it. Sure, there's nothing inherent to AI that makes it cause wealth inequality. However, literally every innovation in human history that allows a single worker to generate more value has caused most of that extra value to get captured by the ownership class. I don't see how AI will be any different.
by helle253 | 2025-08-04 14:51:48+00:00
My experience with LLMs in Rails has been... pretty bad. It isn't good at tracking 'context' (not in the technical token sense) and constantly gets lost in the sauce and doing weird stuff.

Given Rail's maturity, i would have expected otherwise - there is tons of Ruby/Rails code to train on, but... yeah.

OTOH, doing some side-project stuff in TS, and the difference is a little mindblowing. I can see the hype behind vibecoding WAY more.
by jcelerier | 2025-08-04 14:51:50+00:00
> I don't agree at all. For most, linear algebra is the primary reason they pick up C++.

Out of hundreds of hundreds of projects I've interacted with, maybe less than 1% have used linear algebra in any non-basic capacity (e.g. more than multiplying two 4x4 matrices) and had to use Eigen or BLAS
by crabbone | 2025-08-04 14:52:07+00:00
OK, I'll bite. Do you think Node.js implementation is aware of DNS search path? (My guess would be that it's unaware with 90% certainty).

If you don't know what DNS search path is, here's my informal explanation: your application may request to connect to foo.bar.com or to bar.com, and if your /etc/resolv.conf contains "search foo", then these two requests are the same request.

This is an important feature of corporate networks because it allows macro administrative actions, temporary failover solutions etc. But, if a program is configured with Node.js without understanding this feature, none of these operations will be possible.

From my perspective, as someone who has to perform ops / administrative tasks, I would hate it if someone used these Node.js features. They would get in the way and cause problems because they are toys, not a real thing. Application cannot deal with DNS in a non-toy way. It's the task for the system.
by NilMostChill | 2025-08-04 14:52:12+00:00
Depends on how metaphorical and/or political you want to get.

Arguably books could be considered warning waystones, but that's a stretch in this context.

Physical monuments though, we have loads, lots of war memorials are/were intended as warning about the cost of war.

Auschwitz-Birkenau being left as as it is could be considered another.

If you want to get really close to similar intentions there are the long term nuclear waste warnings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...

A bit more esoteric (and less warningy) and you get the signals we send in to space intentionally as a time-capsule/marker for potential alien contact.
by keiferski | 2025-08-04 14:52:49+00:00
It would be interesting to compare this to former communist countries. Personally I live in a modernized “commie block” style building in one such country (as a foreigner) and I very much appreciate the fact that residents come from a wide variety of social classes. There is certainly still a class system here, but it definitely is orders of magnitude less embedded than in Britain.
by joaohaas | 2025-08-04 14:52:51+00:00
try { // Parallel execution of independent operations const [config, userData] = await Promise.all([ readFile('config.json', 'utf8'), fetch('/api/user').then(r => r.json()) ]); ... } catch (error) { // Structured error logging with context ... }

This might seem fine at a glance, but a big grip I have with node/js async/promise helper functions is that you can't differ which promise returned/threw an exception.

In this example, if you wanted to handle the `config.json` file not existing, you would need to somehow know what kind of error the `readFile` function can throw, and somehow manage to inspect it in the 'error' variable.

This gets even worse when trying to use something like `Promise.race` to handle promises as they are completed, like:

const result = Promise.race([op1, op2, op3]);

You need to somehow embed the information about what each promise represents inside the promise result, which usually is done through a wrapper that injects the promise value inside its own response... which is really ugly.
by neutronicus | 2025-08-04 14:52:51+00:00
IDK.

My wife used the $20 claude.ai and Claude Code (the latter at my prompting) to vibe-code an educational game to help our five-year-old with phonics and basic math.

She noticed that she was constantly hitting token limits and that tweaking or adding new functionality was difficult. She realized that everything was in index.html, and she scrolled through it, and it was clear to her that there was a bunch of duplicated functionality.

So she embarked on a quest to refactor the application, move stuff from code to config, standardize where the code looks for assets, etc. She did all this successfully - she's not hitting token limits anymore and adding new features seems to go more smoothly - without ever knowing a lick of JS.

She's a UX consultant so she has lots of coding-adjacent skills, and talks to developers enough that she understands the code / content division well.

What would you call what she's doing (she still calls it vibe coding)?
by dagw | 2025-08-04 14:53:01+00:00
I wonder where this graph gets it's data from

They've apparently written their own web crawler that attempts to infer what language is used based on a bunch of, unspecified, heuristics. I wonder if at least some of the problem is that it is very easy to see if site uses PHP and much harder to see if a site uses a python backend and a such most python using sites just aren't being counted.
by guywithahat | 2025-08-04 14:53:17+00:00
I thought they still had the on-screen keyboard? They had it as of 6 months ago at least.

But still, atrocious site. I can't use the back button or it logs you out; logging in is like a 5 step chore, it's unintuitive and looks like it's from 2005. I can only assume it's unsafe and doing simple things like checking your balance take 20 minutes. There will never be an app and I'm sure they will continue to do no innovation on the customer service side.