MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stego-tech | 2025-09-02 15:53:56+00:00
> Thanks for the information. So unemployed != unemployed.

Your snark aside, actually yes, that is correct. The unemployment rate you cite is the UNRATE, or U-3. It explicitly only counts people over 16 years of age who reside in the fifty states or DC, who aren’t institutionalized, and not on Active Duty in the military.

Looking at other data sets fills in the picture further. U-6 adds in part-time workers seeking full-time employment and people intermittently employed, which bumps that figure to 7.9%. Looking at the length of unemployment shows a jump from 20 weeks to 24.1 weeks in the span of a year, a pretty significant jump considering “how well the economy is doing”.

But let’s take the second part of your rebuttal - that the results may be skewed towards younger people who still live at home.

I want you to try and think about N-order repercussions of that, if true. If 2 in 5 are unemployed and 3 of 4 live at home, then doesn’t that seem alarming? Shouldn’t young people be the most employed demographic across a wider assortment of roles and industries? Shouldn’t their jobs be paying enough to at least share an apartment with someone else? If your assessment is correct, then the correct reaction should be panic and fear over what that might mean for the wider economy, not belittling the demographic who is suffering under its present effects.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-02 15:54:06+00:00
Absolutely, I agree. A few years ago I walked away from 10 years at Google hoping to rekindle some excitement in exchange for losing out on money. I hated the way things ran at Google and only lasted there so long because of the money.

So far I've mostly found different (often worse) kinds of dysfunction and not really much better velocity.

There are broader dysfunctions in our industry.
by atyp3 | 2025-09-02 15:54:38+00:00
> I feel this way with work presentations too -- record them, and let me watch them anytime. Don't make me sit and listen to someone (or a group of people) give a lecture, so that I have to follow along live.

Agreed. The company I work at(major scheduling company starts with a C) uses Loom a lot and it made 3 months of onboarding training much less painful.
by Bjartr | 2025-09-02 15:54:39+00:00
Subtle clickbait. Promising "the day return became enter" to entice. It can be narrowed down to a single day, or at least close enough to a single event that way can pick an effective day? Was it a single product release? A single software release? I'll read the article to find out.

> There was no day, no single event when Return became Enter

Oh, never mind then...

Could've just titled it "The history of how Return became Enter" or "How Return became Enter"
by taeric | 2025-09-02 15:54:44+00:00
Fair. I think my ultimate preference would probably be to have the string validated against the parameters. So, something like:

(define-http-get-route ("/hello/:who" who) (format #f "<p>hello ~a</p> " who))

Prevents the confusion of people that remove a parameter from every path it was in, without also removing the parameter it would have bound to. Though, I suppose you would probably need to do a bit more to allow moving from query to path and such?
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-09-02 15:54:47+00:00
Just to complicate things, "best people" also means "best fit for an organization's culture." I know several HIGH FUNCTIONING engineers from Amazon who went on to startups and failed miserably. But then again, I know several HIGH FUNCTIONING engineers from Amazon who founded startups and did pretty well. But my point still holds... just 'cause you're doing well in one organization doesn't mean you'll do well in a different organization.

One of the best games programmers I know went to [[very large video game company]], but didn't do well. They then went to [[different very large video game company]] and knocked it out of the park.
by Analemma_ | 2025-09-02 15:54:57+00:00
It might, but then you’ve created a whole new set of problems: if anyone can take down anyone else’s content with one click, they’ll do it against anybody they dislike just for the hell of it (this was the case on Tumblr for a brief period: the Report button almost automatically banned the user, until they immediately realized this was unworkable). So if you don’t want everyone to ban everyone, you need a moderation team anyway to handle false reports, and you’re right back where you started.
Ask HN: Can you be in scope of Cyber Resilience Act with your hobby projects?
by overregulated | 2025-09-02 15:54:58+00:00
As far as I understand, CRA does not apply if you ship software outside of commercial activity (whether open source or not). Suppose a contractor has an online brand (in their personal name), a blog, a GitHub account with some projects. Are you allowed then to have a hobby project without jumping through CRA hooks? One could possibly argue the online presence is a commercial activity and there's software tied to it.

I figure one way to make it safer would be to put the commercial offering on another website, under another brand name and only link to that brand from the personal website, which is more like an about me page. But I am not sure how much safer that would be.

The law says this, but there's no clear definition of what is a commercial activity:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L_202402847

2/1

> This Regulation applies to products with digital elements made available on the market, the intended purpose or reasonably foreseeable use of which includes a direct or indirect logical or physical data connection to a device or network.

3/22

> making available on the market’ means the supply of a product with digital elements for distribution or use on the Union market in the course of a commercial activity, whether in return for payment or free of charge;

Commercial activity is mentioned in the introduction, which is not legally binding:

> This Regulation applies to economic operators only in relation to products with digital elements made available on the market, hence supplied for distribution or use on the Union market in the course of a commercial activity. Supply in the course of a commercial activity might be characterised not only by charging a price for a product with digital elements, but also by charging a price for technical support services where this does not serve only the recuperation of actual costs, by an intention to monetise, for instance by providing a software platform through which the manufacturer monetises other services, by requiring as a condition for use the processing of personal data for reasons other than exclusively for improving the security, compatibility or interoperability of the software, or by accepting donations exceeding the costs associated with the design, development and provision of a product with digital elements. Accepting donations without the intention of making a profit should not be considered to be a commercial activity.
by WalterBright | 2025-09-02 15:54:58+00:00
For those who have no experience, one can gain experience while in college:

1. contribute to a significant open source project

2. write some significant work of software

3. design and build your own computer

4. build a robot something

5. work as an intern in industry

6. do work as a research assistant

When I was at Caltech, students did (entirely on their own):

1. built a gas powered helicopter from scratch

2. built a tracked robot with an arm and a manipulator

3. built an electronic synthesizer

4. built a functioning railroad that ran through the dorm

5. many built a single board computer for their own use

6. designed and built the campus radio station

7. one fellow designed, built, and sold custom speakers in the student workshop. After graduating, he turned it into a real business and made a fortune

and so on. In other words, turn yourself into someone useful to a company.
by jerf | 2025-09-02 15:55:02+00:00
You know, three years ago I would have said that I can give you a pretty good architecture fairly quickly but if you just want banged-out code I'll be beaten by someone who just plows forward for at least a couple of months... but after some vibe coding I've done I think I could do both at the same time now fairly well. Vibe code very quickly that I also know I can make scale fairly well with not much more effort.
by mooreds | 2025-09-02 15:55:05+00:00
Based on Bill Gate's recommendation[0], I read the Vital Question a few years ago.

It tries to answer the important question of how life evolves from chemistry. I remember him spending a long time on the chemistry and location questions, but not on the time it took. Probably hard to do from the fossil record.

0: https://www.gatesnotes.com/the-vital-question
by finkin1 | 2025-09-02 15:55:10+00:00
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by paulpauper | 2025-09-02 15:55:15+00:00
If you're smart or lucky enough to to land that 6-figure job, then times are pretty good. There are tons of stories on subreddits, e.g. r/FIRE, r/investing, r/fatfire, etc., of people with large nest eggs and home ownership at an early age. But those are outliers. There are many opportunities to get rich if you are lucky and or smart enough to land them, like in tech or finance. But this is not much consolation for those who lack those attributes. By statistical certainty, most people cannot be exceptionally smart or talented.
by mkranjec | 2025-09-02 15:55:16+00:00
IIRC Strapi is a great option for green field projects. C/p from their docs:

"Strapi applications are not meant to be connected to a pre-existing database, not created by a Strapi application, nor connected to a Strapi v3 database. The Strapi team will not support such attempts. Attempting to connect to an unsupported database may, and most likely will, result in lost data."

Unfortunately, most of the time I do not have such luxury. What are the CMS options for pre-existing databases?
by cardanome | 2025-09-02 15:55:23+00:00
As someone with ADHD, for me obsessing over something to the point of needing to be reminded to eat and drink is actually extremely healthy.

It took me a long time to accept that following my special interests is what my brain craves and what gives me a sense of fulfillment. It might be unhealthy for a neurotypical person but very healthy for me.

In fact when I am losing the spark and just can't get into anything that is when I know I am burning out and need to make changes.
by jmull | 2025-09-02 15:55:38+00:00
Another aspect of this that bothers me is starting off the employer/employee relationship with a bald-faced lie.

I'm not a stickler for rigorous honesty in what is essentially marketing materials -- sure, present your strengths, not your weaknesses; fine, be aspirational. But to start right off with something you know isn't anywhere close to the truth sets a pretty bad direction.

Probably the best case is that people -- some of whom will become your employees -- realize it's BS and learn not to take what you say at face value in the future.
by morpheos137 | 2025-09-02 15:55:57+00:00
If not language what training substrate do you suggest? Also not strong ideas are expressible coherently. You have an ironic pattern in your comments of getting lost in the very language morass you propose to deprecate. If we don't train models on language what do we train them on? I have some ideas of my own but I am interested if you can clearly express yours.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-02 15:56:05+00:00
This is one of the things I appreciate about Common LISP's approach: it allows for undefined behavior, but UB is (mostly, as far as I know, I'm sure someone will jump in and correct me ;) ) off by default.

And I think that's the right place for the default to be. C and C++ support UB as well and there are definitely times where you want that for the speed benefits it affords the compiler's output, but getting to UB in those languages is as easy as creating a character array and then copying a string that is too long into that character array (gcc will warn you, but about the conversion of a string literal into a char pointer, not about the buffer overrun).

And with the C++ spec having a page count exceeding the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, that's a lot of language definition for undefined behavior to live in.
by sdenton4 | 2025-09-02 15:56:09+00:00
Pretty much all of the good stuff I've done in my life have resulted from going off the beaten path. AP courses and SAT scores are the core of the beaten path, so everyone is competing for the same stuff. But the world is big, actually, and there's incredible opportunities for meaningful work once you start looking around more broadly. These sorts of jobs aren't necessarily "stable" employment, but I've never once felt precarious. Rather, I find that doing meaningful work with concrete impact tends to create more opportunities dynamically - if you can demonstrate that you get shit done, people will want your help getting their shit done. And if the work you choose is meaningful, it is very easy to make the case that you've done good and important things.

Capitalism allows trading money for solutions to problems: The massive problem in this system is that people and groups with less money end up with a surplus of problems. There are schools that need help with their tech stacks. There are legal aid groups who need better ways to process massive amounts of text. There are kids all over the world who need better ways to learn math, languages, etc. Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started.
by patrakov | 2025-09-02 15:56:14+00:00
There was a misguided line of reasoning that if you can back up a digital artifact, it is no longer eligible as a "something you have" type of security credential.

Earlier versions of Google Authenticator did not have any export functionality at all, and the only way to transfer the codes to a new phone was to use a Google backup of the old phone, which is only possible during the initial setup.
by fragmede | 2025-09-02 15:56:28+00:00
Sounds like a conspiracy theory. What's wrong with making the framework easier to use? Yes, the company that's paying for development on the framework is also paying those developers to make the golden path for deployment to use that company's PaaS offering, but unless we all band together and GoFundMe a framework that doesn't, how else do you want framework development to happen? Heroku/Cloudflare/AWS/GCp's entirely able to also pay those devs to make it easier to deploy to their platform.
Ask HN: What's going on at Mozilla?
by gtirloni | 2025-09-02 15:56:33+00:00
Just got an email about a survey education tech, last week emails about how they are suing some people over privacy I guess, etc.

I know the spun off Thunderbird (sort of?) and expected the same to be done for other products.

I'm confused, does anyone know what direction they are going?
by rachofsunshine | 2025-09-02 15:56:34+00:00
There's a bit of doublethink involved.

On the one hand (and as I mentioned in the post), yes, most employers are not as dumb as I'm making them sound. In principle they know they need to comprpmise - but in practice, they often balk at doing so because they haven't clearly articulated what they will compromise on.
by scarface_74 | 2025-09-02 15:56:48+00:00
It’s up to him to advocate for himself and speak in terms of business value and knowing how to get a promo doc through.

I was 46-49 when I was in BigTech and way too old to care about the bullshit. But I helped a couple of interns I mentored there to get return offers as L4s and helped a couple of other L4s get to L5 and one L5 to get to L6.

But it’s almost always better to job hop than worry about an internal promotion. When you change jobs, you control the narrative. Incoming folks at Amazon almost always get better offers than people coming in.

One of the interns I mentored who came back as an L4 recently got promoted after three years and their comp package was the same as mine when I was hired there back in 2020 and is 20% less than new hires at her position.

AWS had an “anonymous” comp sharing internal Slack channel #pay-equity where you submitted your message to a Slack workflow that anonymized it before posting it. Of course the workflow admin knew about it.
by rvz | 2025-09-02 15:57:15+00:00
The whole truth:

When the average pre-revenue startup says:

> "We need the best engineers"

What they really mean is this:

"We really need ex-FAANG engineers from Ivy League, Stanford, MIT and Oxbridge for close to below market rates."

*6 months later:*

"We have a skills shortage of the best engineers"

What they really mean is this:

"No one wants to accept our below market price offers, even with 0.01% equity which may be worth something one day."

If the startup cannot offer a competitive compensation to FAANG or the big AI companies, just walk away. Likely dodged a bullet anyway.
by LiquidSky | 2025-09-02 15:57:20+00:00
As you say, it's obvious to pretty much anyone who's ever worked a day in their life but, at the same time, culturally we pretend otherwise. Guys like Musk or Bloomberg talk about working 90 hour weeks and sleeping under their desks. We still want the cultural myth of hard work = success, whatever the reality is, because this allows those who've achieved economic gain to feel better about themselves.
by toast0 | 2025-09-02 15:57:45+00:00
WhatsApp did what it did and we didn't hire anyone who had experience with OTP until 2013 I think. One person who was very experienced in Erlang showed up for a week and bounced.

We were doing all sorts of things wrong and not idiomatically, but things turned out ok for the most part.

The fun thing with restart strategies is if your process fails quickly, you get into restart escalation, were your supervisor restarts because you restarted too many times, and so on and then beam shuts down. But that happens once or twice and you figure out how to avoid it (I usually put a 1 second sleep at startup in my crashy processes, lol).

Ghost processes are easy-ish to find. erlang:processes() lists all the pids, and then you can use erlang:process_info() to get information about them... We would dump stats on processes to a log once a minute or so, with some filtering to avoid massive log spew. Those kinds of things can be built up over time... the nice thing is the debug shell can see everything, but you do need to learn the things to look for.
by guywithahat | 2025-09-02 15:57:55+00:00
The only addendum to this I'd add is the best engineers rarely have to go through the hiring process in a meaningful way, it's usually someone recognizes them from a previous job and vouches heavily for them.

I say this because if you're going through the hiring process like a chump, I'd leave the ego at the door and not talk about compensation or try to demand remote work on a desirable position.
by heeton | 2025-09-02 15:58:14+00:00
I spoke with Peer (the creator of Grisp) about this at Elixirconf earlier in the year, and I'm not an expert here so I hope I don't misrepresent his comments:

Grisp puts enough controls on the runtime that soft-realtime becomes hard-realtime for all intents and purposes, outside of problems that also cause errors in hard-realtime systems.

(Also, thanks Peer for being tremendously patient with a new embedded developer! That kind of friendly open chat is a huge draw to the Elixir community)
by krishnadubba | 2025-09-02 15:58:50+00:00
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by nonethewiser | 2025-09-02 15:59:01+00:00
It's not snark. The survey uses the term "unemployed" but it is a different metric than the "unemployed" metric.

>But let’s take the second part of your rebuttal - that the results may be skewed towards younger people who still live at home.

Are we in an argument? I wasnt really rebutting anything. I was clarifying my original comment. Even after the clarification that it's not apples to apples, the intersection of 69% living in a home and 37% being unemployed is pretty striking.

>If your assessment is correct, then the correct reaction should be panic and fear over what that might mean for the wider economy, not belittling the demographic

Where am I belittling anyone?
by GCA10 | 2025-09-02 15:59:20+00:00
Hire people on the way up.

Hire people who are going to do their best work ever, for you, after having partially but not fully mastered everything you want, via their previous jobs. It's easy to evaluate a resume. It's harder -- but not impossible -- to assess potential. Working inside a big tech company for six years, I saw that PM hires were done almost entirely on pedigree: find me another Stanford grad. These tended to produce a lot of fast exits as well as some comically bad and totally predictable fails.

Engineering hires were done on hunger, drive, scrappiness (and networks). They fared better.
by colechristensen | 2025-09-02 15:59:44+00:00
One thing that people don't know very well is that kids' taste experience is different and for some this is stronger than others. The actual flavor sense is different or much more intense and this dulls with age.

I still can't eat fresh tomato and it isn't a matter of being picky or having preferences, it is very obvious that I can taste something in tomatoes that other people just can't and to me that taste is "poison".
by Buttons840 | 2025-09-02 15:59:59+00:00
Income taxes are higher than capital gains taxes.

This isn't based on economic theory or anything, it's just a political choice we have made as a country. We've chosen to reward those who move money around and trade capital more than we reward those who labor. And this at a time when, supposedly, the country is trying to increase its ability to build things.

I thought this specific fact worth mentioning.