MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spivak | 2025-08-31 04:14:40+00:00
The problem is that "work smart not hard" for software devs is counterintuitive because using your brain is the hard work. Einstein works too hard and creates code that's hard to reason about, Most doesn't work hard enough and creates code that's hard to reason about.

The originating example for an Amanda is someone who used her brain to recognize that the existing code was clumsily modeling a state machine and clarified the code by reframing it in terms of well-known vocabulary. It's technically an abstraction but because every dev is taught in advance how they work it's see-through and reduces cognitive load even when you must peel back the abstraction to make changes.
by toasterlovin | 2025-08-31 04:15:19+00:00
The 20% tariff from Vietnam has been announced by Trump, but unless I’ve missed something in the past week or so, it’s not official. There was a news piece I read a few days after he announced the 20% number that said the Vietnamese side had actually agreed to 11% and were surprised when he injected himself into the process at the end and announced a different number. So it sounds like it’s a WIP. I believe the only country that actually has a signed deal at this point is the UK.

That being said, the copper, steel, and aluminum tariffs announced recently are real and have been assigned import classification codes by US Customs (which is when new tariffs to become real).
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-31 04:15:40+00:00
Nah I consider that a fallacy. I'll call it the fallacy of the oranges. Let's say I control all of the orange trees in town. People resell my oranges. I begin using really strong insecticide that resellers try their best to wash off. I keep upping the strength and they keep trying to remove it. At the same time, there is one banana tree in town, and conveniently for my analogy, no pesticides are needed for bananas. As oranges continue to become worse, people will keep eating them, and saying that "there's no way people can switch to bananas. If they could, they would have already. And besides, there's only one tree..." Yes but these things can change. And eventually, people will switch to bananas en masse. People will truck in bananas. And we'll all act like we predicted the great banana switch the whole time. Like MySpace to Facebook, or Digg to Reddit. Or GSuite to Outlook. Or Skype to Zoom.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-08-31 04:17:45+00:00
wouldnt it be nice if we techies could come up collectively with a protocol that ran a decentralized set of model virtual machines MVMs as i call it that would track incoming payments to a website and outgoing money from a website and determine a score as to how scammy a given website was and like DNS records, this score would be taken into account to mark those scammy websites all over the world whose DNS records would be filtered out so that genuine users never run into them
by godelski | 2025-08-31 04:17:55+00:00
Hanlon's razor: never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to stupidity.

Does anyone here think even a decent portion of government officials are tech literate? (I'm not even convinced half of hacker new or half of programmers are tech literate! Instead only have basic literacy and high confidence) There's a few, but I'm not convinced it's that many. The vast majority of Congressmen don't even have an aid who specializes in tech. So do you think it takes any more than someone at the NSA saying "it's encrypted and only we can access it" for them to believe in this magic key? (And this is something we've seen NSA officials say)

Remember, in the senate only 12 members are under 50, 33 are 60-69, and 33 are over 70! In the house 20% are over 70, 43% over 60, and 70% over 50. Only 8% are under 40. Almost none of these people have ever programmed. Just think about how tech illiterate the average 20 year old is (even worse on a technology subreddit!) and we're talking about.

Come on guys. It's a choice between stupid old people and hyper intelligent deep state actors that are acting idiotically. I'd put money on aliens before I'd put money on the later
by rkagerer | 2025-08-31 04:18:48+00:00
These are good tips. A lot of it boils down to writing well-organized code geared for human consumption.

Junior programmers too often make the mistake of thinking the code they write is intended for consumption by the machine.

Coding is an exercise in communication. Either to your future self, or some other schmuck down the line who inherits your work.

When I practice the craft, I want to make sure years down the line when I inevitably need to crack the code back open again, I'll understand what's going on. When you solve a problem, create a framework, build a system... there's context you construct in your head as you work the project or needle out the shape of the solution. Strive to clearly convey intent (with a minimum of cognitive load), and where things get more complicated, make it as painless as possible for the next person to take the context that was in your head and reconstruct it in their own. Taking the patterns in your brain and recreating them in someone else's brain is in fact the essence of communication. In practice, this could mean including meaningful inline comments or accompanying documentation (eg. approach summary, drawings, flowcharts, state change diagrams, etc). Whatever means you have to efficiently achieve that aim. If it helps, think of yourself as a teacher trying to teach a student how your invention works.
by anecdatas | 2025-08-31 04:19:14+00:00
This is making a lot of assumptions --

1) That we're at the threshold for taxes that the wealthy will accept. I would bet many wealthy folks feel attached to their homes as their identity, and it would take some amount to price them out. Like, clearly a billionaire would leave if the cost to stay was a 100% of their wealth, but would probably stay if it was $10 more in taxes. So there's a very nebulous line somewhere in between. I suspect we are not close to that line.

2) That wealthy people living in an area are storing their wealth or declaring that area as their home. Plenty of ways to shield wealth from local taxes, and plenty of ways to claim a place as your home without being taxed by it.

3) That having wealthy people in your community is a net positive for the community. Wealthy people tend to use a lot more resources and distort local politics for their personal gain rather than the gain of the community. Maybe we'd be better off if they weren't around, and several families moved in to take their place. Wealthy people don't ride public transit, normal folks do. Wealthy people can push city council positions to reduce transit, normal folks don't have that influence. Maybe we need more normal folks around.

4) That businesses owned by the wealthy are a net positive compared to, e.g., workers co-ops. Maybe we could be a bit more collective in our approaches and a bit less lionizing towards the wealthy person who got lucky. Maybe we need more community oriented businesses run by members of the community they live in and fewer wealthy business owners racing to the bottom.
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-31 04:19:50+00:00
Wait, I thought IQ and income were highly correlated. I also thought IQ was highly heritable? In fact, I thought the heritability was sooooo high and environmental factor played a very minute role in the outcome of one's IQ?

(I am being sarcastic, of course.)

> Without this educational opportunities would primarily be given to the obviously/observably bright and advantaged children since their parents can afford it.

Hell, for any highly intelligent child, I say drop their asses off the public library. The truly smart ones will find their way, and the environmentally gifted will not. We do not need special programs for these kids. Special programs equate to more busy, bullshit work. A high IQ earns one more worksheets and homework. Education, at least in the USA, is rotten to the core. I am not convinced more of it is better. Do not mistake me though, I do not believe more knowledge and wisdom are worthless. I am just saying the education system rarely provides either.

I feel like people miss the echelons of IQ. IQ might have predictability, but the more narrow one focuses, the worse it gets. For example, let's taking programming. Something near and dear to my heart and to many others on this site. If one is capable of learning how to program, then their IQ is clearly sufficient enough to be a programmer. Past that point, I would not be willing to bet that a higher IQ would necessarily translate into a better programmer. It's like being in tall and playing basketball. Being 6'5 is better than being 5'5 in the NBA. However, being 6'7 vs. 6'5 much less advantageous.

If anything, I think we should start highly selecting for more altruistic and empathic children. Intelligence is not exactly uncommon. An IQ of 130 puts one in the 98th percentile. With a world population of 8.142 billion people, that means there are roughly 162.84 million people at or above the 98th percentile. I am not certain there are 162.84 million people out in the world making a big difference.
by ruszki | 2025-08-31 04:21:09+00:00
As a coder, these are the exact problems which shouldn’t cause problems for you. You should be a coder because you’re better in these problems than others.

More coders are needed, than to who these are “simple”, I understand. But, if you have problems with these, I would definitely try to pivot to something else, like managerial positions. Especially with AI on us. Of course, if you are fine to be an “organic robot”, then it’s fine, but you’ll never really get why this profession is awesome. You’ll never have the leverage.
by transcriptase | 2025-08-31 04:21:51+00:00
Canada is the prime example of this phenomenon.

Rogers, Bell, and Telus are the three companies that own or acquire nearly every internet/mobile/tv property in the entire country. They all offer the exact same plans at the exact same prices, moving in lockstep almost down to the hour when new price or benefit surfaces.

Similarly banking is dominated by the big 5 who don’t really compete as far as the average customer is concerned.

In many regions groceries are dominated by two companies, while nationally the entire market basically consists of five or so.

And because Canadian pension plans and ETFs are so heavily invested in these select few companies, they trudge along with virtually no incentive to upset the status quo because the government finds it easier to oversee oligopolies than allow competition to benefit the populace.
by folkhack | 2025-08-31 04:22:21+00:00
And, furthermore - being a "noisy Nancy" is often a bad move for your career, socially. As I age, I realize it's more important to get along in most corporate/professional settings than it is to be the person fixing things.

All work represents a social entity (person/persons) and when you're the one calling out issues, pushing for proactive measures, and pushing against bad practices/complexity you're typically taking issue with _someone's_ work along the way. This is often seen as a "squeaky wheel" or "noisy Nancy" - or hell, outright antisocial. Most of the time it is not in your best interest to be this person.

The people who keep their nose down + mouth shut, those who prioritize marketing their work, and the sycophants are the ones who have longevity and upward trajectory - this is corporate America work culture.
by hm-nah | 2025-08-31 04:22:34+00:00
I got smooched by this mofo. Got an email from GitHub Sec saying a repo in my own account was deleted because of a known vuln.

My NX Console EXTENSION in VS Code was updated after the supply chain attack was initialized by the malicious actor.

The symptom, besides the email from GitSec, was all my terminals initialized prompted for sudo pw, because ~/.bashrc had sudo shutdown appended.
by fy20 | 2025-08-31 04:22:47+00:00
I've experienced the same thing, I thought it was just people didn't like me but maybe there is something else here. If I see people regularly (e.g. at the office) I can make good friendships with them and we get along well, but other than that I am the one that needs to put in the effort to arrange something if I want to see someone. Maybe 1/20 times I am the one who is invited, otherwise it's me who needs to do it.

Another thread said how things changed at lot in the 10s which echos my experience. When I first started working professionally I'd go out with my colleagues every week at least once after work. The rest of the 10s I was mostly working remotely, but recently I've been in the office more. Since COVID it seems that socialising has just gone down hill, even just getting people to go for lunch together is hard now... At work if a person leaves who I had a good friendship with, there's a good chance I'm never going to see them again.
by dsign | 2025-08-31 04:24:31+00:00
I was walking on the street the other day. It was fine summer, and I saw so many elderly walking outside. All of them were using one type of aid or another; some even had a social worker at their side. As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my life if it could give my mom a good life for that long. Her old age is my single biggest source of stress.

In the political sphere, some countries are tearing themselves apart on the question of immigration and identity. But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.

So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-31 04:24:34+00:00
I kinda see the original proposition as similar to a RGB framework. The same way we mix RGB to have a whole spectrum of colors, I assume we can mix Mort, Einstein and Elvis to get whole spectrums of engineers profiles.

There will be people looking at pure Green and pure Blue and ask for an Emerald color to get RGBE instead, but that's not how the RGB framework works. And I can't get rid of the feeling that Amanda is that Emerald color people are clamoring for.

I also kinda get why Microsoft got rid of the system for something more abstract.
by highwaylights | 2025-08-31 04:24:49+00:00
I'm sure I'm missing something but does direct indexing really solve anything for you in this instance?

If you're in any of the main ETFs or index funds you're getting really cheap access to what's basically the same list of stocks you'd get with direct indexing. If you're trying to get equal-weighting of an index there's ETFs for that too, but that would mean you're betting more on companies without the ability to benefit from significant hegemony and the madding crowd of index fund influx, which seems to be where most of the growth comes from these days.
by MrJohz | 2025-08-31 04:24:57+00:00
It is important to have integration tests, but my experience is very much the opposite of what you're describing. I almost never have bugs where the cause is the small amount of glue code tying things together, because that code is usually tiny and incredibly simple (typically just passing arguments in one format to another format, and potentially catching errors and converting them to a different format). A couple of tests and a bit of static typing is sufficient to cover all the different possibilities because there are so few possibilities.

The failure mode I see much more often is in the other direction: tests that are testing too many units together and need to be lowered down to be more useful. For example, I recently wrote some code that generated intellisense suggestions for a DSL that our users use. Originally, the tests covered a large swathe of that functionality, and involved triggering e.g. lots of keydown events to check what happened when different keys were pressed. These were useful tests for checking that the suggestions box worked as expected, but they made it very difficult to test edge cases in how the suggestions were generated because the code needed to set that stuff up was so involved.

In the end what I did was I lowered the tests so I had a bunch of tests due the suggestions generation function (which was essentially `(input: str, cursor: int) -> Completion[]` and so super easy to test), and a bunch of tests for the suggestions box (which was now decoupled from the suggestions logic, and so also easier to test). I kept some higher level integration tests, but only very few of them. The result is faster, but also much easier to maintain, with tests that are easier to write and code that's easier to refactor.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-31 04:25:01+00:00
This is going to be like a dam breaking. A small trickle of privacy-conscious developers will put cracks in the wall, and once there's a tiny opening, people who are privacy-conscious-if-convenient will follow through, expanding the hole, and then, the flood of people who want true freedom on their devices (for a multitude of different reasons) will find that hole purely by random and pour through, destroying market share and revolutionizing the mobile market. And little secret sneak peek: Corporations will notice this and align themselves with it, seeking profit. It's going to be glorious.

We're already at a point where smartphones have reached hardware stagnation, and white-labeled devices are coming. There will be no 6G. Smartphones and laptops are converging. The idea that a computer that happens to be smaller than most gives a random company the right or ability to build a wall around it and collect a tax is going to look, in retrospect, really silly.
by pests | 2025-08-31 04:25:33+00:00
This is mostly an issue for content produced to still be on regular tv and streaming, like on Paramount. Star Trek Discovery and Strange New Worlds, for example, are not as dramatic as described above but you can always spot where the adbreak would have been. Cut to black and a re-establishing shot at the least. These are modern shows like you describe but still the TV medium has some influence.

One thing I do notice more and appreciate from streaming (sense8 in particular) is that shows are more varied in their runtime. Episodes being 40 minutes to 75 in length just depending on the needs of the plot, not even finale related or anything
by loeg | 2025-08-31 04:25:55+00:00
Current SOFR (Fed rate) is 4.34%: https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/sofr

Banks will offer low yield on cash if you don't go looking for better yield, but it's easy enough to find good yield: money market accounts. E.g., VMFXX throws off 4.21%, which is reasonably close to 4.34.

(I don't agree with the general thrust of GP's argument, just clarifying on some neutral facts.)
by lokar | 2025-08-31 04:25:57+00:00
There are import differences between small scale (individual or a few people) engineering and larger scale engineering.

For many humans to work together over time on something very complex is hard. Structure and process are required. And sometimes they come at the expense of what some might call “pure” engineering. But they are the right trade offs to optimize for the actual goal.

If you can’t accept that, stick to solo projects.
by qalmakka | 2025-08-31 04:26:58+00:00
The whole situation is moronic at best. Linux needs a decent modern filesystem in tree. ZFS would easily be it, but unfortunately Sun decided back in the '00s to fuck Linux because they wanted to push Solaris instead. Little they knew ZFS ended up being FreeBSD top feature for years.

Btrfs is constantly eating people data, it's a bad joke nowadays. Right now on Linux you're basically forced to constantly deal with out of tree ZFS or accept that thinly provisioned XFS over LVM2 will inevitably cause you to lose data.
by bruce511 | 2025-08-31 04:27:08+00:00
You're assuming US citizens stop buying Chinese goods, just because they got more expensive.

That's unlikely to be true. They might buy less, but the numbers won't fall to zero.

It also overlooks the detail that the component parts of items "made in the usa" also come from other places. Clothing made in the US, doesn't necessarily use fabric made in the US.

In the short to medium term, the increased cash-flow requirements (tarrifs are paid before sales) will favor large importers with access to abundant cash over smaller importers.

Yes, the purchasing power of US consumers will go down as retail prices of goods go up. Yes global producers will seek out alternate markets.

The current uncertainty causes US purchasing to prefer not to commit to long-term orders. Global suppliers will prefer orders from stable customers, even at somewhat lower prices. Once those long-term contracts are in place, it may be hard to reenter the global marketplace, especially on the currently favorable terms.

In other words tarifs are doing long-term reputational damage that will not be easily undone in a few years time.

On the up side the world is about to observe, for the first time in a couple generations, the effects of an isolationist policy. It is a valuable lesson that needs to be reinforced from time to time.
by grishka | 2025-08-31 04:29:37+00:00
This is due to different design goals.

Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it.

The fediverse, on the other hand, entirely relies on people following each other. Each server only receives and stores data that is relevant to its users. ActivityPub works like an automated email list management system. You follow someone, they start sending you their updates and forwarding any updates from others that they consider relevant, like replies to their posts.
by koverstreet | 2025-08-31 04:30:27+00:00
At this time, I don't think so.

We were never able to get any sane and consistent policy on bugfixes, and I don't have high hopes that anyone else will have better luck. The XFS folks have had their own issues with interference, leading to burnout - they're on their third maintainer, and it's really not good for a project to be cycling through maintainers and burning people out, losing consistency of leadership and institutional knowledge.

And I'm still seeing Linus lashing out at people on practically a weekly basis. I could never ask anyone else to have to deal with that.

I think the kernel community has some things they need to figure out before bcachefs can go back in.
by godelski | 2025-08-31 04:32:45+00:00
I like to think of it from the point of network effects. So from the point that if your business makes more money by more connections then you can see how this explodes into a natural monopoly. Be that by something like operating costs are cheaper per connection via more efficient routing or more direct in just simply $/connection. It's definitely a (very) naive model but I think it can be useful and at least helps understand how there is such a thing as a "natural monopoly".

It also applies to the classic Silicon Valley model. You operate at a loss in the beginning because you are hyper focused on growing nodes and connections. Once you have sufficient size your whole business structure changes, being able to leverage the network effects (including your competitor's now lack of network). A good example of a network effect is social media. No one joins a platform because no one is there. No one leaves a platform, even if they hate it, because everyone is there. In a world where we've made scale so critical, natural monopolies are going to proliferate.