MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lisbbb | 2025-09-08 20:20:28+00:00
What you said is how the USA worked for my entire life until the H1B saturation finally reached a critical point! Young men and women would find jobs after college, it was NORMAL to have that be the case. What's going on right now is NOT normal. I got a job right out of college in 1995 with a CS degree--in fact, I had two offers, and I was nothing special. People with actual connections did really, really well back then. It was an optimistic time, and yes, Clinton was President, but he lucked out with the dot com era boom. It obviously imploded by 2001 or so.
by Someone | 2025-09-08 20:20:45+00:00
> The way I approached Forth was to create a DSL that made it easier to write the application in

You must have had the luxury of zillions (that is: > 16 kilobytes) of RAM and ROM.

> The biggest issues that I had with Forth were: […] the ‘screens’

Most Forths on larger machines, where you had the luxury of not needing to tweak the base system to fit all your code in are fine working with source files.

Screens were an invention for smaller systems (for those who don’t know: early forth didn’t have a file system, but just a way to load 1 kilobyte blocks from disk. Code was written in such 1 kB blocks, called ‘screens’ because 1kB effectively filled a 16 line by 64 character terminal screen)
Show HN: A monster trainer game with monsters you can train
by huevosabio | 2025-09-08 20:21:21+00:00
What if Pokemon were actually smart?

Howdy, I’m Ramon - and that’s exactly what my studio is working on! We’re making Allyon: Battlecry, a monster trainer game with lifelike creatures that know how to think and act on their own, like they were ripped straight out of an anime!

What makes it different: • Prepare: train your monster through voice and demonstrations to come up with killer moves to use in battle • Improvise: physics-driven arenas that change as you fight - douse flames into steam, blast craters, reshape cover. • Bond: Allyon understand natural language, have personalities and memories, and your relationship grows over time. Between fights you can just hang out, talk, and play.

If that sounds like your thing:

Steam wishlist (huge help): https://store.steampowered.com/app/3987700/Allyon_Battlecry/ Join the Discord for playtests & feedback: https://tinyurl.com/allyonbattlecry

Thanks, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!
by gobdovan | 2025-09-08 20:21:26+00:00
For LLMs, it's a meta-cognition task. Before they see anything, all text gets cut into pieces called tokens. Tokens contain letters, spaces, punctuation. LLMs never see the true punctuation or spaces, they only see these tokens. And by seeing these tokens, I mean the tokenizer simply says: I have a dictionary from text to tokens; I won't even show the token representation to you, just their position in the dictionary. For example, instead of showing "cat;", it just hands over entry #48712. The model has to deal with the rest.

So they'd need to do complex recall on resources of language structure it was trained on to be able to count accurately.

My picture over LLMs is this: I like to imagine what LLMs do is close to us trying to learn language from a dictionary of an alien language. We couldn't ground anything in reality, we maybe wouldn't know where words start or end in the definitions, but we can pattern match enough stuff to be useful for an alien giving us text queries.

I also asked GPT for a metaphor, and it came back with these:

- It’s like trying to clap to music and being asked, “Make it 100 words worth of claps.” You’re working with rhythm, not actual word units, so your sense of count is fuzzy.

- LLMs are excellent at flowing language but bad at rigid constraints — like a jazz musician who can improvise beautifully but can’t stop exactly on the 137th note without counting.
by jerf | 2025-09-08 20:21:44+00:00
"But of course, photos and videos take up a lot of space."

Videos take up a lot of space. Photos increasingly don't. 20 years of family photos for me takes up 150GB, and that's with me being very slovenly about cleaning up the "bad" photos, if I found a decent workflow for trimming photos I could probably cut that down by 75% pretty easily. Linode will attach 160GB of storage for $16/month, plus you'd need a $5/month VM to attach that to. https://www.linode.com/pricing/#block-storage

I acknowledge that you may be in a position where that is too much, but on the other hand, broadly speaking, it's not going to get much cheaper than this even in the next few years. It's not like it's $500/month anymore and there's room for it to be cut by $300/month.

Immich can also survive without necessarily being up all the time. If you have a computer of any kind and any reasonable spec that spends a reasonable amount of time being on, you can use tailscale or something to hook it to your phone and run a backup process every so often to a cloud block storage. It's OK that it isn't always up and then you get to pay object storage prices, which for 150GB now is as close to negligible as you can reasonably get.
by partytax | 2025-09-08 20:21:55+00:00
On LineageOS 22 this is what I did:

* Remove Jelly browser with `adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 org.lineageos.jelly`

* Disable F-Droid so you can't install another browser on a whim with `adb shell pm disable-user org.fdroid.fdroid`
by j45 | 2025-09-08 20:22:06+00:00
Totally. Being able to start shipping from the first commit using something like Picocss and just add features helps gets things out of the design stage, but shipping features individually.

Some folks seem to like Docker Swarm before kubernetes as well and I've found it's not bad for personal projects for sure.

AI will always return the average of it's corpus given the chance (or not clear direction in the prompt). I usually let my opinions rip and say to avoid building myself a stack temple to my greatness. It often comes back with a nice lean stack.

I usually avoid or minimize Javascript libraries for their brittleness, and the complexity can eat up more of the AI's context and awareness to map the abstractions vs something it knows incredibly well.

Python is great, but web stuff is still emerging, FastAPI is handy though, and putting something like Pico/HTMX/alpine.js on the front seems reasonable.

Laravel is also really hard to overlook sometimes when working with LLMs on quick things, there's so much working code out there that it can really get a ton done for an entire production environment with all of the built in tools.

Happy to learn about what other folks are using and liking.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-08 20:22:07+00:00
> it's the uncertainty

Worse, it's not even "honest" uncertainty, the people in charge of the policies are profiting from keeping everyone else uncertain.

Not only in the crass sense of insider-trading or market-manipulation, but also in terms of the landscape it creates.

For example, look at Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. While he goes on TV as the administration's tariff-mouthpiece, in the background, his family company [0] is going to US companies and saying: "Wow, those tariff-taxes suck, right? How about we give you a little money to keep you afloat today if you agree to give us any money the government might end up owing you back for illegal tariffs?"

It's hard to see how this will change until Republican federal legislators decide they no longer want to be accomplices [1] to the Executive branch's high crimes and misdemeanors.

[0] Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick owned ~50% and was CEO for decades before giving it to his sons.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-tariff...
by cma | 2025-09-08 20:22:51+00:00
Doing a lossy export/reimport process probably isn't going to be viable on something like a big movie scene blender file with lots of constraints, scripted modifiers and stuff that doesn't automatically come through with an export to USD.

My point is that there are scenarios where corruption in the past puts you in a bind and can cause a lot of loss of work or expensive diagnostic and recovery process long after it first occurred, blender was just one example but it can be much worse with proprietary software binary formats where you don't have any chance of jumping into the debugger to figure out what's going wrong with an upgrade or export. And maybe the subscription version of it won't even let you go back to the old version.

> There's a myriad freak occurrences that could make you have to redo work that you don't worry about.

Yes other sources of corruption are more likely from things like software errors. It's not that you wouldn't worry about them if you had unlimited budget and could have people audit the code etc., but you do have a budget and ECC is much cheaper relative to that. That doesn't mean it always makes sense for everyone to pay more for ECC. But I can see why people working on gigantic CAD files for nuclear reactor design, etc. tend to have workstations with ECC.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-09-08 20:23:07+00:00
It's scary the reported number could change so much with so much else depending on it.

Optimistically, the drop could be from temporary higher employment due to folks rushing to import additional goods before the tariffs came into effect. This might dissipate as excess stock levels reduce.

How much though remains to be seen, as tariffs generally will make things tougher, unless something else compensates (unlikely).
by jacquesm | 2025-09-08 20:23:33+00:00
> All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.

Very similar to what I'm coming across, including parties that are out of nowhere tasked with making everything they've got as cloud agnostic as they can with budgets available that they could not have dreamed of less than a year ago. As long as it gets done, not so that they will move out tomorrow morning but so that they could move out if they wanted to. I'd love to see some internal figures from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms, what the trend in adoption is.
by teemur | 2025-09-08 20:23:42+00:00
The whole of trumps first stint?

For this year's numbers there are two possible stories that come to my mind:

1. The jobs are going ~constantly downhill and any new, revised number is going to be worse than previous

2. There is a conspiracy and initially the numbers are systematically inflated and/or afterwards deflated because reasons... that are completely incomprehensible to me. I don't even understand if this conspiracy theory should be pro or against trump.
by danans | 2025-09-08 20:24:05+00:00
> They'll probably play it safe and not make any investment at all. Wait it out.

Yes, but they will fire many workers in the interim to save costs, and put more load on those who remain. That's happening now across many industries, including tech. That doesn't require much capital, just a transfer of time/energy from (now fearful) workers to corporations.

We are already seeing billionaire execs extolling the virtues of 60 hr workweeks and the rise of "996" culture. Labor is getting squeezed.
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-08 20:24:11+00:00
A reminder that happy people buy less stuff.

Facebook will not try to show your suicidal teen stuff that could help them. Facebook will only show your suicidal teen things that keep your suicidal teen doomscrolling.

Facebook WILL put a small textbox of "Here's the suicide hotline" and then overshadow it with a huge ad for "You aren't pretty enough, buy this body deodorant" that autoplays and includes sound and can take over part of your screen.

Facebook WILL show your suicidal teen stuff that makes them really angry. They do this on purpose. They do this knowingly. That's what "optimizing for engagement" means
by cyphar | 2025-09-08 20:25:27+00:00
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking leads to insane situations such as the South Korean banking cartel which requires users to install several pieces of "security software"[1] which make your computer more vulnerable to security issues[2] and almost certainly doesn't protect anyone from actual fraud -- classic security theatre.

There needs to be a point where enough is enough, and locking down devices so that you cannot install programs nor practically use custom operating systems on them anymore is way past that line.

[1]: https://palant.info/2023/01/02/south-koreas-online-security-... [2]: https://ee.kaist.ac.kr/en/research-achieve/in-south-korea-ma...
by barnacs | 2025-09-08 20:25:39+00:00
But it's only able to answer the question because it has been trained on all text in existence written by humans, precisely with the purpose to mimic human language use. It is the humans that produced the training data and then provided feedback in the form of reinforcement that did all the "thinking".

Even if it can extrapolate to some degree (altough that's where "hallucinations" tend to become obvious), it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety".
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-09-08 20:26:31+00:00
I don't think people are realistically "vibe coding" production apps. You see a lot of hype, and I'm sure there is growing number of people without software development skills using Claude Code, but those are not the people writing important software. Even the people from Anthropic encourage programmers to first use CC as analytics/research tool, not for writing code. Once you get a feel what it can do, you will feel comfortable feeding it chunks of work you want to delegate, but realistically never more than you can review. Yes, you can ask it to build the next Instagram, but you will very quickly find out it's not going to work.
by FrankPetrilli | 2025-09-08 20:27:27+00:00
Inter-node mesh with raw Wireguard is an exercise in patience to say the least; I have a few different colo sites, my house, my phone, LTE/5G hotspots, raspberry pi projects in the field, etc that I want to fully connect together.

Raw Wireguard is fine for a road warrior or site-to-site VPN setup as is common, but when you want multipoint peer-to-peer connections without routing through what might be a geographically distant point, magic DNS, etc, Tailscale really shines through.

If you're paranoid, enable https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock or run https://headscale.net/ on your own as a control server.
by bilbo0s | 2025-09-08 20:27:37+00:00
Sorry guys.

Kinda have to agree with this.

It's a team sport.

Learned that in high school.

Fourth and one inside the two yard line? Sorry bud. Coach called a pass play, so you get to take that L with everyone else.

Shoulda had a better coach.

Benefit of democratic government is that you get exactly the government you deserve. We can recover. There will be more elections. But even then we'll get what we vote for, no more and no less.
by mateioo7 | 2025-09-08 20:27:47+00:00
Something I've recently played with is a very 'dumb' android browser [0] able only to open and share links (and refresh the webpage), nothing else. Since I don't trust myself that I won't just click links from page to page I also configured the webview's client to disable links [1]. From this, you may be able to restrict yourself as much as you can since you could set a whitelist set of links you find 'indispensable'.

[0] https://github.com/rickgram/NoBrowser

[1] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/webapp...
by alephnerd | 2025-09-08 20:27:59+00:00
Most of the Real Estate capex over the last few years has been in manufacturing real estate such as factories, or infra spending such as data centers.

Both those have value at a macro-level, and are largely a result of IIJA, IRA, and CHIPS act era subsidies, though CHIPS act adjacent spend was "AI-washed" which helped extend adjacent industries capex.

I've previously called out this kind of AI-washing as well [0] - it reminds me of the Telecom Bubble during the 1990s-2000s.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069086
by spott | 2025-09-08 20:29:47+00:00
I have a wireguard server at home, and it is great.

The iPhone and Mac official wireguard clients allow you to set “excluded” wireless SSIDs, so if you are out and about, and not on a SSID that matches one of your excluded SSIDs, you are automatically connected to wireguard.

I have it setup to dump me onto my home network (it doesn’t NAT me behind the wireguard server) so I’m just always on my home network. By default, I only route home network traffic through wireguard, but I’ve also routed everything when I need to.

The whole configuration is in a Nixos configuration file as well, which is nice.

One of these days I should write up something about my homelab…
by trod1234 | 2025-09-08 20:29:51+00:00
We largely agree, except are you sure its capitalism that wealth flows uphill and not actually the money-printing fiat and their banker friends who are doing the debasement/stealing from everyone that holds dollars?

Non-reserve Money-printing creates runaway dynamics that inevitably allow state-apparatus to outcompete legitimate business in effect collapsing market over time.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-08 20:30:02+00:00
> The problem is email as it’s used currently. The solution is to not use email.

No. The problem is unsigned package repositories.

The solution is to tie a package to an identity using a certificate. Quickest way I can think off would be requiring packages to be linked to a domain so that the repository can always check incoming changes to packages using the incoming signature against the domain certificate.
by ZaoLahma | 2025-09-08 20:30:09+00:00
> Another thought... if I'm tasked with maintaining or adding features to existing code, should I feel responsible for writing tests for the existing codebase?

Do you trust yourself enough to not break existing code while maintaining or adding features to it? What would be the consequence of you screwing up? Where would your screw up get noticed? Is it a scary person or group of people who will chase you down to fix it?

I've worked long enough to not trust myself at all anymore, regardless if it's old code or new. Then I evaluate according to above. Usually I land firmly in "yeah, better test it"-territory.
by ryanisnan | 2025-09-08 20:30:10+00:00
I'll shout out Clearspace[1]. They're YC W23[2]. I am in no way affiliated with them.

I find the app is very useful. I do find it still takes some discipline, but it adds enough friction into accessing pointless apps, that it makes a real dent in my doom-scrolling. It isn't cheap, but it works well enough that at the current price point, I will pay.

[1] - https://www.getclearspace.com/ [2] - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/clearspace
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-09-08 20:30:14+00:00
Read code, read code, read code. You will get better.

When looking at a piece of code, keep asking questions like: what does this return, what are the side effects, what can go wrong, what happens if this goes wrong, where do we exit, can this get stuck, where do we close/save/commit this, what's the input, what if the input is wrong/missing, where are we checking if the input is OK, can this number underflow/overflow, etc

All these questions are there to complete the picture, so that instead of function calls and loops, you are looking at the graph of interconnected "things". It will become natural after some time.

It helps if you read the code with some interest, e.g. if you want to find a bug in an open source project that you have never seen the code for.
by partiallypro | 2025-09-08 20:30:40+00:00
I do the same thing, except I subscribe to Thorne. I haven't noticed an uptick in perceived brain capacity, etc, but I can tell that my skin and hair are healthier. I started taking it because my cholesterol was all over the place and I desperately want to avoid taking a statin later in life. I'll be retesting that early next year. I've also started eating smoked salmon and canned sardines.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-09-08 20:30:59+00:00
I agree with all you say here. I’ve been studying this for over 15 years because my family suffered from early heart attacks, like below 50 years of age. My brother died of a heart attack at 48.

This heart disease risk along with psychiatric problems my family, including suicides led me to getting my genetics. Once I had them, it became clear how much I need long chain poly unsaturated fatty acids and specifically higher omega-3 than the normal European Caucasian population.

This is primarily because of polymorphisms I have in two genes FADS1 and FADS2.

Currently, I pretty much eat negligible amounts of short chain poly unsaturated fatty acids. The major components of my diet are cold water seafood, and muscles and oysters. Plus a lot of seaweed (this is from another prism I have, I am a FUT2 non-secretor. I also eat a very low amount of carbohydrates.

Now I’ve had serious psychiatric problems in my life. Three attempted suicides, for hospitalizations, and I was on a ton of medications. But guess what, I’m no longer on any medication‘s, my blood pressure has normalized, and my lipids are normal. And I can’t count the other of other minor bothersome symptoms I’ve had that have vanished.

No, I am a huge outlier, but I am also sort of a canary in a coal mine. Because while I am extremely sensitive to deficiencies of omega-3 fatty acids. Anyone who does not get at least the minimal amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids will end up having health problems. Whether you need long chain or short chain polyunsaturated fatty acids is going to depend on your genetics.

My genetic haplotype is K1, which is uncommon for Europeans to have. The dates back to over 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age. I also seem to have a lot of finish heritage, which I can possibly trace back to the Sami people who are a very high fat high omega-3 diet.

But anyway, you’re right, this is not a number. You should guess that because omega-3‘s can really thin out peoples blood. I need this but for other people this might be a huge problem.
by nashashmi | 2025-09-08 20:31:06+00:00
> One of the Voyager scientists, Dr Garry Hunt, told The Register that the idea of doing a Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune mission had never really gone away, and engineers fueled the spacecraft fully expecting to be granted an extension.

> "We knew that if you filled up to brimming point the spacecraft with all the fuel it ever needed, it'd be OK," recalled Hunt. "We did. But we never told anybody."

The mission was supposed to only do two planets even though it was known to be the only opportunity to do 4 planets in one launch. But the new Nixon Administration was not excited by a rapidly changing field of science. So the NASA administrators proposed limiting it two planets. In the next administration, they were like OK keep exploring. And sure enough the launch went on to explore four planets.
by gobdovan | 2025-09-08 20:31:39+00:00
They show an image of it, it's that vertical abacus. They say it's popular in Japan. They have made a digital version of it, used a big keyboard as input, and gamified the practice. They also record how fast they can do calculations and stuff like this.

The point is for the author to understand how they learn (how many things become automatic in his brain and when, mental chunk formation, when performance plateaus). They just use the Japanese abacus as an excuse to do it.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-08 20:31:54+00:00
To give you one idea of this: Christmas starts in January for consumer stuff. That's how long it takes and if there is any hick-up then you might miss the time slot. These tariffs are wreaking havoc with the planning of just about every major company because there are almost no players that are 100% vertically integrated that just use stuff made in the USA. Everybody is dependent on everybody else and some of those parties are abroad.

This tariff thing - to quote Dirk Gently - utterly misses the fundamental interconnectedness of everything.