MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
graduated but no jobs
by teminal | 2025-09-13 20:58:40+00:00
Hi HN,

I just graduated from college and don’t have a job yet. I’m trying to figure out what to focus on next, and I’d love some advice.

A little about me:

– I contribute to open-source projects.

– I’ve done a few internships during college, mainly building full-stack web apps.

– Worked in a few startups, also mainly on full-stack projects.

– Built full-stack apps for clients.

– Ran a fun YouTube channel for a few months.

– Built some AI-powered apps using tools like OpenAI.

– Solved 100+ DSA problems to improve my coding skills.

With AI tools now, I can build full-stack apps by prompting and understand all the code. But I’m not sure what to focus on next: Should I deeply master a stack like MERN, or keep experimenting with AI and building different projects?

I’ve tried a lot of things — side projects, internships, open-source, AI apps — but I don’t feel like I’ve truly mastered anything yet.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? What would you do if you were me?

Thanks in advance.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-13 20:59:19+00:00
Personally I would of course prefer to phase out fossil fuels before nuclear power. But we are where we are in 2025 and there is no point crying over spilled milk.

We can only look forward and make sure we spend our money wisely. We also need to decarbonize aviation, shipping, agriculture, industry, construction etc. The grid is not the end, it is only the beginning of our decarbonization journey.

The fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of quickly displacing fossil based energy production today is building renewables and storage.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-13 20:59:26+00:00
>I don't have details.

No way. I'm shocked.

>Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes.

And how is 'equal outcomes for everyone' as the end goal, different than communism?

Even if you think it's not communism, the results will still be the same: poverty and famine for everyone but the elites since, news flash for you, people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures just like our ape ancestors, and if you force equality of outcome upon them, you take away their opportunity to try to better themselves in respect to their peers, so then society spirals downward into everyone refusing to work or at most doing the bare minimum since there's no incentive do work harder if you'll end up equal to Bob the uneducated alcoholic.

>Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.

Yes the lottery of birth in life is unfair, welcome to the real world. Some people are born rich some are born poor, some are born tall some are bone short, some are born pretty some are born ugly, some are born smart some are born stupid, some are diligent and hard working, some are lazy and procrastinative.

You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels. The only thing you can do is tax inherited wealth better, and try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.

>I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.

Yeah, no. It's gonna be the exact opposite of that: more surveillance, more targeted propaganda, and less democracy. See Palantir.
by stavros | 2025-09-13 21:00:05+00:00
I don't understand. If I feel like two minutes passed when only one has passed, am I not actually experiencing time as twice as slow?

I thought two minutes have passed, yet I have a whole other minute to live. I thought time passed quickly, but I get to experience twice as much time. By that logic, we think we're 80 when we're 40, and we have another subjective 80 years to live.

How is that "time flies by"? Time would fly by if it went by so slowly for me that ten hours had passed when I thought it had only been a minute.
by rwhaling | 2025-09-13 21:00:05+00:00
CLAVIER is amazing, the wire system alone is such a huge improvement over ORCA, and it's now feasible to make much larger patches and refactor safely, kudos to River for all the hard work on the polish and quality-of-life.

I was testing MIDI on a prerelease build last weekend and it turned out quite nice: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOUUIfeEQWY/

Excited for more folks to get to play with it!
by pron | 2025-09-13 21:00:18+00:00
> The biggest current knock against Java I see is JNI

Then you'd be happy to learn that it's been superseded by FFM: https://openjdk.org/jeps/454 (not in all situations, but in almost all).

> The second biggest knock is that the JVM is still kind of a memory pig

I would strongly recommend watching this keynote from this year's ISMM (International Symposium on Memory Management) on this very subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLNFVNXbw7I

The long and short of it is that (and I'm oversimplifying the talk, of course) if you use less than 1GB of RAM per CPU core, then you're likely trading off CPU for RAM in a way that's detrimental, i.e. you're wasting a valuable resource (CPU) to save a resource (RAM) that you can't put to good use (because the amount of work you can do on a machine is determined by the first of these resources to be exhausted, so you should use them in the ratio they're provided by the hardware). Refcounting collectors and even manual memory management (unless you're using arenas almost exclusively) optimise for memory footprint at the expense of CPU. Put another way, the JVM takes advantage of the more plentiful RAM to save on the more costly CPU.
by rimunroe | 2025-09-13 21:00:29+00:00
> Show me, you say. Prove it. But this is of course unreasonable, for this is not my field, and I am clearly giving my opinion.

This is kinda my point. You don’t seem to be coming at this from a position of much experience in the field but are confidently making assertions about it. You are confidently handwaving away what would be massive advancements in both materials science and manufacturing, all why saying it could result in an affordable fridge which would last for over a century. That’s unrealistic.

We can speculate a lot about advancements which might happen in many decades or even centuries in the future, but it’s foolish to talk about them with confidence, and it’s often irrelevant to the present.

> However, what's happening is that there just isn't much research into longevity.

That is patently false. The field of materials science and several branches of engineering deal with this constantly.

> There is low incentive to make cars last longer beyond a point, and the same holds true for products for the military.

Weren’t you originally trying to make the opposite point by using the B-52 as an analogy?
by BobaFloutist | 2025-09-13 21:00:36+00:00
Major metro areas have overbuilt commercial properties and underbuilt residential properties because commercial properties provide much more (property and sales) tax revenue than residential properties.

This is anti-social, and puts the burden of housing all these workers on the rest of the region, as well as forcing the rest of the region to share transportation costs.

This is pretty obviously unfair. Why should poorer midsized towns and suburbs have to lose money so that large metro areas can maintain a housing density level that lets them cosplay as small towns while overbuilding commercial density?
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-13 21:01:06+00:00
> That's is due to active moderation,

Just, FTR, there's always been the problem of how much moderation is required to keep the discourse (in a group) flowing without being so restrictive as to only be about the moderators.

See IRC, which (IMO) can be over-moderated, channel ops used to be very much about themselves, vs Usenet, which had no moderation at all (and was "destroyed" by google groups making access trivial for troublemakers), through to current things like Reddit which have some moderators.

It's (IMO) exactly like governance IRL - some countries overdo it, and some underdo it.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-09-13 21:01:17+00:00
> Why? If it is well-designed, useful, and has no obvious technical flaws, why shouldn't it be included in open source software.

I think its quite easy to find examples by thinking of the extremes.

- Why don't git add a native UI? (out of scope)

- Why don't excel add lua scripting? (already has visual basic)

- Why don't neofetch add a built-in ascii art editor so people can more easily customize their logo display? (Bloat)

- Why don't pandas and numpy just merge? (confusing user experience)

They can be amazingly written, with impeccable docs and test suite. But they're out of scope, deviate from the project philosophy, confuse the user, add maintenance for the future, or could could be their own projects.
by Yoric | 2025-09-13 21:02:05+00:00
> There are a few really amazing things which have been achieved in C++ like fmt, a compile time checked, userspace library for arbitrarily formatting variadic generic parameters.

Anecdotal, but that's hardly unique to C++. So even if C++ were to disappear overnight (which we all agree won't happen), this wouldn't be a burning-library-of-Alexandria moment.
by fourthark | 2025-09-13 21:02:08+00:00
> A study asked different age groups to mentally count 120 seconds. People under 30 averaged 115 seconds; those over 50 just 87. That's a 24% reduction in perceived time.

This seems bogus to me. I’m 51; I set a timer on my phone for 2 minutes, put it aside and counted to about 128 before it went off.

Why would your ability to count seconds change over time? A second has always felt a little slow to me, probably because my resting pulse is above 60.

(I think it’s also ambiguously described? Maybe they meant the opposite, in which case it took me about 114 seconds to count to 120.)
by zahlman | 2025-09-13 21:02:49+00:00
> when the person in question has actually said things in the past that support killing people.

Charlie Kirk has said nothing of the sort, so none of this is relevant.

> Did she found an entire organization dedicated to promoting bigotry, hate, and the inherent superiority of a particular "race"?

Kirk's organization is not dedicated to anything of the sort.

> Did she make explicit statements that we should all be happy to accept some innocent deaths every year as a cost of unlimited access to firearms?

Kirk did not say anything about being happy about it; regardless this statement does not support killing people.

> it would be much, much less likely that anyone would even suggest that her words were in any way related to her death.

But anyway, this still doesn't matter. Suggesting that someone's words justified death is an absolute moral wrong no matter what those words were.
by gdw2 | 2025-09-13 21:02:56+00:00
I woke up one morning in college and thought I had overslept. I threw on clothes and ran from my dorm to my class. I walked in two minutes late and grabbed an open seat on the front row, right in front of the teacher.

I didn't recognize anyone and soon realize that I hadn't overslept and was just an hour early. I was too embarrassed to get up and walk out so I sat through the class.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-13 21:03:03+00:00
You can write your "r64" type today. You would need a perma-unstable compiler-only feature to give your type a huge niche where the missing bit patterns would go, but otherwise there's no problem that I can see, so if you don't care about the niche it's just another crate - there is something similar called noisy_float
by majkinetor | 2025-09-13 21:03:13+00:00
It's not recent at all, it's there for decades.

Polyfats are unstable by definition, so when you cook with them, they go rancid pretty fast. That is all very well known.

Besides, seed oils usually produce imbalance of w-3 vs w-6 fatty acids which is also deemed to lead to pro-inflamation effects.

This is all very well known and not a hype. Here is a review from 20 years ago:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09523...
by trimethylpurine | 2025-09-13 21:03:34+00:00
I'm still here if you'd like to make an argument. The above rebuttal is not remotely a good faith argument. It appears to be a hope that repeating misinformation will somehow make it an accepted truth.

That might work for circles of low performing political movements, but it doesn't work for those of us interested in a scientific approach to knowledge.

By all means, explain what making guns illegal has actually done for Australia, the whitest country in the world, and the UK, the capital of knife crime.

You're about to prove facts that neither of us want to admit.

I'm a listening scientist. Are you?
by ahmedfromtunis | 2025-09-13 21:04:20+00:00
As someone who is *not* interested in biology, I don't understand why this "immunity debt" is driving so much debate.

If I understand Vox's definition of the term[0] correctly, this should be very easy to confirm or debunk.

Why it isn't been the case yet?

[0]: "A central premise of immunity debt is that for many infectious diseases, repeat infections are milder than the first infection."
by tialaramex | 2025-09-13 21:05:05+00:00
Well. What other examples of this feat are you thinking of?

To me the things which come to mind are either compiler magic (e.g. C printf) or they rely on RTTI (e.g. Odin and similar C-like languages) and neither of those is what fmt does, they're "cheating" in some sense that actually matters.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-09-13 21:05:43+00:00
> Why? If it is well-designed, useful, and has no obvious technical flaws, why shouldn't it be included in open source software.

More features means more code to maintain. More code to maintain means more time consumed. Time is finite. Time is the only resource you really meaningfully have in life.

I’m prioritising watching my kids take their first steps over expanding the scope of my open source python package.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-09-13 21:06:05+00:00
> I think it's a huge driver of the visceral reaction against apartment living in the US and Canada.

On the one hand, maybe, but on the other hand, apartments (with the same number of bedrooms for the same COL-adjusted price) in the US are enormous compared to those in Asia and in Europe. I think the real source(s) of the visceral reaction(s) is, in no particular order, Americans' prioritization of personal independence over pragmatism (and I don't mean that pejoratively, though it can get stubborn at times), America's fairly weak renter protections/regulations, and the poor build quality of many American apartments (with dogshit sound and climate-proofing). I think it's a mix of a fundamentally American aversion to adding an additional person telling you what to do with genuine issues in the paradigm where you're paying up the ass for heating/cooling because your landlord doesn't particularly feel like installing double-pane windows, and at the same time your neighbors and neighborhood are obnoxiously loud.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-13 21:06:09+00:00
> Why? If it is well-designed, useful, and has no obvious technical flaws, why shouldn't it be included in open source software

In my experience, there is a subset of open source projects where contributions are theoretically accepted, but in practice the maintainer doesn’t actually want to accept anything from anyone else unless it’s something they’ve asked for. They view contributors as assistants who are willing to volunteer their time to handle tasks that have been delegated, but they prefer to keep it as their own project.

That’s fine, of course, if that’s what they want from their project. It’s their project. Where it starts to get frustrating is if they throw a fit when someone forks their open source project, or when they start rejecting PRs from other people but then lightly rewriting the code and resubmitting it as their own work. Both of these have happened to me in recent years. In one case I spent a long time writing a new feature that the maintainer had created an issue for and marked as open for contributions. Yet no amount of responding to his PR reviews made him happy about the structure of my solution. Eventually I didn’t respond for 30 days because I was busy and he closed it as stale.

Then a few months later I saw the release notes included the feature he claimed he didn’t want. I looked at the commit history and saw he had committed something strikingly similar to the exact PR I had been working on, with only minimal changes to function names and locations of code blocks.

That’s life, of course, but at the same time it’s getting a little frustrating to read all of the writing holding open source maintainers up on a pedestal simply because they’re holding that position. Over the years many of the projects I use have had to fork off and take new leadership and names because the old maintainer was getting in the way of progress. Again, they are within their rights to do so, but that doesn’t mean we need to praise any and every move they make.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-09-13 21:06:13+00:00
> However, gradle build or mvn install won’t select a proper version of Java to build your code.

build.gradle.kts java { toolchain { languageVersion = JavaLanguageVersion.of(17) //bonus: pick your favorite distribution with vendor = JvmVendorSpec.<X> } }

Oh yes they will.

> It won’t even tell you are building with wrong version.

Right, "Class file has wrong version" doesn't explicitly tell you it's the wrong JDK. Gradle itself runs from a JDK8, so even the install you made with your Windows XP will work fine.

If your last experience with Java was 20 years ago and you think that for some reason it hasn't kept up with modern advancement and leapfrogged most languages (how's async doing in rust? virtual threads still stuck nowhere? cool.), sure, keep telling yourself that. You could at least keep it to yourself out of politeness though, or at the very least check that what you're saying is accurate.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-13 21:06:38+00:00
And people that are not in the "cool kids" group are economically disadvantaged because, even if their contributions are valued, they get on the offside with the powers that be?

When you have people with power over someone else, power to ban, power to economically injure, you end up, almost without fail, with sycophantic groupings.

People only praise those with the power, and anyone foolish enough to disagree, no matter how accurate, are punished.
by randomNumber7 | 2025-09-13 21:07:35+00:00
The problem with this would probably be that you usually have to use some libraries with C APIs and regular pointers.

You could compile your program with address sanitizer then it at least crashes in a defined way at runtime when memory corruption would happen. TCC (tiny C compiler initially written by fabrice bellard) also has such a feature I think.

This of course makes it significantly slower.
by aredox | 2025-09-13 21:07:36+00:00
>nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared"

The flu didn't disappear, and we know very well why it almost disappeared: it is far less contagious than SARS-CoV-2, and masking and the huge dip in international travel stopped it.

>It's a hypothesis

Here in Switzerland (and in France), it hasn't been presented by pediatrics societies as an hypothesis at all, but as a fact and the main argument to reopen immediately. It has also been used again and again to explain the huge waves of infections of many illnesses that surged after the end of lockdowns, and absolutely none of them ever quoted that "immune debt is just an hypothesis", and none of them have suggested any other alternative hypothesis such as "SARS-CoV-2 has a detrimental effect on the immune system or health in general".

Because to admit so would be to admit the mass infection of children had been a massive mistake on their part.

>I don't like to resort to appeal to authority, but the article quotes Ashish Jha (hardly a Covid minimizer) as dismissing the "immune damage" narrative

And Jha has no explanation for the increased, sustained (and now synchronised) waves of infections and illnesses that are plain to see. He has nothing. This is the fiasco of "masks aren't proven to work" again.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-13 21:07:42+00:00
I’ve had some experience developing an infrastructure-level system for use around the world.

I had to maintain it, almost completely alone, for ten years, before it was taken over by a competent team, and I could finally walk away.

One of the most important things I did, in that decade, was say “no” a lot.

Some folks were not happy about it, and Godwin’s Law was invoked on my ass, multiple times.

A lot of requests were ones that would optimize for a specific use case, but it was a generalist system, so it had to remain “imperfect.”

In the end, it all worked out well, if not “perfectly.” It’s now a worldwide system, being run by hundreds of organizations, and used daily, by thousands of people.
by ForceBru | 2025-09-13 21:07:54+00:00
Meh, "only 22" doesn't mean they have to be hesitant about making pronouncements about the whole human life. You're living a life, I'm living a life, the 22-year-old author is living a life. Why would any of us need to be "very hesitant" when it comes to discussing the whole human life? It's our life, anyone can talk about it.
by fivestones | 2025-09-13 21:08:01+00:00
Isn’t there a way to do the first option, but without attaching anyone’s votes to their digital id, except in a cryptographic way such that any individual person can look up their own vote online and verify that their vote has been counted correctly (with their own personal cryptographic key if some kind), but no one without the key can see which person made a given vote? I’m sure I remember watching a Ted talk about this years ago, but don’t remember the specific talk at the moment.

I’m sure there are other obstacles to surmount, but if that system works, you could have a digital id, use it to vote every time, and audit your own vote without anyone else knowing what you voted.
by Swizec | 2025-09-13 21:08:03+00:00
> The less new activities are performed the faster time is perceived when looking back. During the events it might be the opposite and actually feel longer.

There is another side to this: So much novelty that you have no time to consolidate memories and everything feels like it’s zooming by. I’m in that situation right now and it’s shocking to look back 1 year. It feels both like 10 years have passed and like it was yesterday.
by frereubu | 2025-09-13 21:08:36+00:00
I run an agency that builds WordPress websites, and have been wondering about what to do about all of this. I'm concerned about the future of wordpress.org and have been looking around at alternatives. This seemed sort-of interesting initially but, without wishing to be uncharitable, this looks like a nostalgia project because the Gutenberg editor, while initially quite tricky to wrangle for developers due to breaking changes, has been a real step forward for content editors. It's mostly stable now, so the decision to remove it from this makes it a non-starter for me.
by justusthane | 2025-09-13 21:09:01+00:00
As someone who isn’t a programmer, but enjoys dabbling, and has been curious about functional languages, this was a really helpful (and fun!) read!

Tutorials written by beginners are so valuable, because once you’re more experienced with a given subject, it’s hard to remember what it was like to be a beginner. It can feel vulnerable to write them because you have to expose your ignorance, but it’s such a great thing to do.