MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-25 22:39:07+00:00
> Return to Office feels like trust has been broken. Teams that continued to work well (or in some cases, better) after everyone in the industry went remote are now being told to come back to desks in offices. I’ve even heard tales of this happening despite there not being enough office space for everyone, which seems very silly

I sometimes wonder what it feels like to work at a place like this. On the one hand, you're still employed, and that's saying a lot in the tech industry right now. But on the other hand, you must, deep down, know that your management are either (a) incompetent or (b) beholden to majority investors that are using the company as a pawn to prop up commercial real estate valuations. If you don't believe that the higher-ups have the company's best interest in mind, why bother working hard? In the words of Office Space, "you know Bob, that'll just make someone work just hard enough to not get fired".
by Arathorn | 2025-09-25 22:39:08+00:00
Well, I give a damn, and i'm responsible for both Matrix & Element :)

I agree that it sucks that Element doesn't have the $ to support work on both Dendrite and Synapse/Synapse Pro, and unfortunately there's not been enough community momentum on Dendrite to add features like sliding sync.

It's not a matter of "there's no money to extract from community users" - instead it's simply "until we get to breakeven, we can't afford to work on Dendrite".

While I can't promise that Element will ever return to working on Dendrite once we /do/ get to breakeven (maintaining two codebases of the same product is just self-destructive, especially now other 3rd party servers exist) - at the least we can provide migration tools. It's worth noting that right now you can't even migrate between domains from synapse to synapse though, let alone dendrite to synapse.
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-09-25 22:39:49+00:00
Google also has a lot of very useful structured data from search that they’re surely going to figure out how to use at some point. Gemini is useless at finding hotels, but it says it’s using Google’s Hotel data, and I’m sure at some point it’ll get good at using it. Same with flights too. If a lot of LLM usage is going to be better search, then all the structured data Google have for search should surely be a useful advantage.
by thinkzilla | 2025-09-25 22:40:19+00:00
I am sympathetic to the motivations and argument in the article, but the analogy with bridge building is flawed.

In engineering, if your assumptions are correct and you apply the formulas correctly, the bridge will not fall.

This is _not_ true of software, since it suffers from mathematical incompleteness. Computation is isomorphic to mathematics, and, just as there is no way to objectively estimate how long it will take to prove a theorem, there is no way _objectively_ estimate program properties, even simple things like "will this program ever print the string "xx". The proofs are variations of the Halting problem.

http://scribblethink.org/Work/Softestim/kcsest.pdf

Writing software is analogous to discovering the equations of physics of a bridge (physics/math) rather than applying them (engineering).
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-09-25 22:40:22+00:00
Maybe not going bankrupt because of medical expenses as the only first world country with universal healthcare? When it comes to the hierarchy of needs, not dying because of unaffordable or unavailable healthcare I’m sure ranks near the top.

There is no objective measure where the median American is better off than the median European.

I’m saying this as a born and bread American citizen who is fortunate enough to be on the better side of the economic divide.
by programmertote | 2025-09-25 22:40:30+00:00
>DOGE did great work, and continues to do great work.

Ok, prove it. Your claim warrants that. From what I've seen, DOGE's claims of savings are mostly made-up or erroneous. Not saying the federal government doesn't need efficiency improvements. I'm just saying the way DOGE (and musk) went about is just the typical musk's way of doing things (b.s. claims not backed up by actual facts).

P.S. I rarely get involved with political discussions on HN. But you got me interested first time.
by icedchai | 2025-09-25 22:40:39+00:00
This happens more often than not anyway. Overpriced office space, expensive furniture, extra layers of management because we're "structuring to scale the organization", fancy and expensive titles for people who barely do anything. I worked at one place that raised 70 million, then spent 10 renovating a rented space, only to close up barely 1 year later. I had left by that point.
by Arathorn | 2025-09-25 22:40:41+00:00
It's possible that I'm totally missing what everyone's talking about. The design team did do a tonne of user testing on this, and this is the result.

What do you mean by 'constantly collapses the filters'? I'm clicking the filters right now and they stick? And don't collapse? Or are you saying that they apply to a single list rather than multiple sections?
by Kwpolska | 2025-09-25 22:40:57+00:00
> [gettext] also doesn’t solve the 2 hard problems. I would still have to write code to extract strings from source code and build a way to allow users to translate them easily.

The first problem is solved by the xgettext tool.

The second problem is solved by services like Transifex. Or by telling people to use Poedit and having them submit GitHub pull requests.

At the same time, gettext does solve the issue of plural forms. This solution does not.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-25 22:41:51+00:00
> From the 2000–01 to 2021–22 school years, there were 1,375 school shootings at public and private elementary and secondary schools, resulting in 515 deaths and 1,161 injuries.

1,700 people out of ~50 million K-12 students in a 22 year period.

.003352% chance of injury or worse over 22 years. And now I realize the denominator should be bigger because it doesn't count faculty/staff or college students.

There's no reason to live in fear of school shootings. (But there should still be much greater gun control.)
by keernan | 2025-09-25 22:42:01+00:00
I've been using keyboards since ... well since they replaced electric typewriters which in turn replaced my Royal mechanical typewriter. I never much thought about keyboards until the keyboard on my Lenovo Ideapad. I thought that was the best keyboard ever.

Until I laid out $120 for a mechanical keyboard (a Nuphy Air75). I just love it.

And here is a mechanical keyboard with a computer inside (actually two; one just to program the keyboard) that isn't that much more than I paid for my Nuphy. I already own three rpi that I don't use. But the itch to buy one of these is attacking me. Maybe I'll get some AI glasses...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-25 22:42:02+00:00
> helps when you’re a private equity investor

It does. But every single case where I got to draft legislation occurred before I made money and before I’d given anyone any money. (I never gave either of the federal electeds I worked with money.)

I called about a bill that wasn’t getting attention. The elected thought it was interesting, but their staff were overworked. (They’re always overworked.) I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work. In a minority of cases, they introduced those into the working copy of the bill, and in a minority of those cases the bill actually passed.

Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
by dimal | 2025-09-25 22:42:05+00:00
A lot of things that seemed impossible a few years ago are now old hat. The Democrats wouldn’t be so hamfisted, but never say never.

And my point wasn’t that the Democrats would. It’s that the Democrats could and may even be forced to, in order to win an election. If JD Vance is selling a department for $500M, from a game theoretical perspective, the Democrats may have no choice.

The whole problem is that all the norms that allowed the republic to function are being stripped away, and this is one of the biggest violations of our norms to date, yet no one has even mentioned this aspect.
by btown | 2025-09-25 22:42:46+00:00
I think that there's a mindset among younger coders that "if it's not a modern post-AWS cloud provider, servers will take ages to come online and aren't going to give me full access, that's why EC2 exists." And this is conflated with the myth that running a mail server is hard.

But in practice, you can find any number of VPS providers, running in local datacenters, with modern self-service interfaces, with at least some IPs that aren't already spam flagged (and you can usually file a ticket to get a new IP if you need it), that are often cheaper per month than AWS, and give full root and everything. Find a service that will help you warm the IPs before you send to customers, and you're good to go!
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-09-25 22:43:26+00:00
My anecdote (not data): I took a friend to the emergency room on Sunday,after a back crackup on a bicycle. Big bruise and swelling above the left eye socket and on the chin. Both hands sore and tender and stabbing pain when any pressure was put on them.

The radiologist said No Fracture! So treat for concussion and release. Two days later, back with unendurable head pain. Reexamine: oh, sorry, yes, fractures. Morphine.

Wtf? Are the radiologists so overworked they can only glance at a test? Or was an AI at fault? I'll never know.
by falcor84 | 2025-09-25 22:43:55+00:00
How does nerd-sniping with Waymo work? Is it about nerd-sniping a person so they get hit by a Waymo, or is it about nerd-sniping the Waymo itself, distracting it before having a human hit it?

D'oh, I think I got nerd-sniped there for a second.
by mjmas | 2025-09-25 22:43:56+00:00
The particular optimisation for non-copying Vec -> IntoIter -> Vec transform is actually hard coded in the standard library as a special case of collecting an Iterator into a Vec. It doesn't rely on the backend for this.

Though this optimisation is treated as an implementation detail [1].

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/vec/struct.Vec.html#imp...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-25 22:43:59+00:00
I agree to the same thing to a somewhat degree from another standpoint / a discussion worth tapping into.

Its not that the logical conclusion is "people can't govern themselves generally"

Its that, we have created a system which incentivizes corruption or basically evil things for the most part from TOP TO BOTTOM partially influenced by biological factors beyond our control.

Sure, one answer to the "people can't govern themselves generally" is to decentralize the power.

I live in India and I loathed my political system thinking that it wasn't good and I really appreciated american political system but the more I think about it, fundamentally Indian political system is one of the best actually.

It has 3 levels of decentralization with Strong Right to information and uh multi party system with Even Universal basic income which I came to know from an american which is a real shocker I know.

Yet I still see people begging and there being some chaos, My logical answer to it is corruption from TOP TO BOTTOM which I observed atleast.

I sort of believe that the same thing happens everywhere to be honest if that can make sense...

Like, there is corruption and human evils which is what people select in real life anonymous things as compared to true morality that one can reason through. Simply for one's own profit.

It also might be one of those debates that India might have a good political system but simply the people don't have enough money or something and they want more or everyone does it which is a common answer that I actually hear.

I believe that the reason why people can't govern themselves generally is that there is a biological answer to it in the sense that for people to govern themselves, we would prefer /need an altruist society and in an altruist society, and how the genes which favour a bit of evil in altruist society might reproduce more and spread sort of thus creating an equilibra of sorts and combining with that the idea on how interlinked/interinfluential each of us is to one other through language.

It was a catharsis to me, The answer might be depressing. But its fundamentally logic. Life just sort of happened and then it got way too focused on spreading itself / the one which did survived and boom that's biology which then gets to this political thing...

Like it was sort of meant to happen y'know? atleast that's my current understanding of it. Would love to discuss tho.
by MrCoffee7 | 2025-09-25 22:44:09+00:00
I doubt that would happen in the U.S. - it seems like there would be too many liability issues around the possibility of innocent bystanders getting injured by a drone in pursuit of someone. Also, a lot of employees are getting crap wages and would not want to take the risk of injuring someone if they were personally piloting the drone because they could be personally sued for injuring a bystander in the drone pursuit. If fact, the store employee in this case could even be sued even if they weren't piloting the drone themselves, eg. if they were the one who only reported the shoplifting.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-25 22:44:11+00:00
> It’s usually cheaper if you can source it from the manufacturer even paying their shipping rate.

This is rarely the case. In fact, it's against Amazon's policies for manufacturer/third-party listings.

But I've found that even when that's the case, returns can be such a gigantic hassle it's not worth it -- getting an RMA, having to pay for return shipping, being forced to use an inconvenient shipping service of their choice, things like 15% restocking fees...

If you're buying something for the first time and then discover it doesn't work the way you expected, it's amazing how much easier and cheaper Amazon returns are.
by imiric | 2025-09-25 22:44:15+00:00
> That's what the description field is for.

No. The PR description is for describing the overall change, which, again, may include multiple commits. The description can also include testing instructions, reviewing suggestions, and other information which is not suitable for a commit message.

PR descriptions can be edited and updated during the review, which can be helpful. A commit message is immutable, and remains as a historical artifact.

Also, when I'm working on a code base, the last thing I want is to go hunting for PRs to get context about a specific change. The commit message should have all the information I need directly in the repo.

> I never, ever inspect the "commits" tab in a PR unless I see some lucicrous number on it.

And... you're actually proud of this? Amazing.

Have you ever read a descriptive commit message? Do you even know what they look like?

I'm taken aback by the idea that there are developers who would take the time and effort to write a detailed commit message, only for others to not only never read it, but to be proud of that fact. Disgraceful.

> This happens on merge if your Github is set up correctly.

No. This is what I mean about developers not understanding what atomic commits even are. There are commits that will be done during a review, or as ad-hoc fixes, which indeed shouldn't exist when the PR is merged. But this doesn't mean that the entire PR should be squashed into a single commit.

Those useless commits should instead be squashed into the most relevant commit, which is straightforward if you create `--fixup` commits which can then be automatically squashed with `rebase --autosquash`.

But the PR may ultimately end up with multiple atomic commits, and squashing them all into a single commit would nullify the hard work the author did to keep them atomic in the first place.

If you configure GitHub to always squash PRs, or to always create a merge commit, or to always rebase, you're doing it wrong. Instead, these are decisions that should be made on a case-by-case basis for each PR. There are situations when either one of them is the best approach.

> The bad practice is the PR changing multiple distinct things.

Right. I'm sure you enjoy the overhead of dealing with a flood of small PRs that are all related to a single change, when all of it could be done in a single PR with multiple commits. This is easier to review, discuss, and merge as a single unit, rather than have it spread out over multiple PRs because of a strict "one PR-one commit" policy.

All that rule does, especially if you have PR squashing enabled by default, is create a history of bloated commits with thousands of lines of unrelated changes, that are practically useless for cherry picking, bisecting, and determining why a specific change was done, which is the entire point of commits. Good luck working on that codebase.

> It's not.

k.
by ugh123 | 2025-09-25 22:45:04+00:00
The spirit of the "program" leaned in the right direction, but Elon was absolutely the wrong guy to put in charge of it. Misplaced incentives, lack of interpersonal skills, lack of respect and empathy, lack of organizational skills when he does not have strong, professional lieutenants that will implement changes.

Edit: and who TF would have thought putting "big balls doge kid" in a position of power would be a good thing? That kid, along with whomever hired him, would be tossed out of any professional corp env swiftly.
by palata | 2025-09-25 22:45:12+00:00
> By definition, they must state what is actually illegal, lest I be hidden laws with hidden punishments.

I don't need to murder you in order to say that murdering you is illegal, do I?

Of course they don't have to publish CSAM material in order to say that this is illegal CSAM material. If you could go get CSAM material at your local library, nobody would be talking about scanning it with ChatControl...
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-09-25 22:45:30+00:00
This makes a fair bit more sense when you realize that hierarchy and the resulting feudalist structures are basically the core tenets of right-wing ideology. On paper, the right should have a harder time working together: The fascists, theocrats, and kleptocrats have wildly divergent worldviews. However, more fundamental than any of their specific views, they all believe in rigid power hierarchies. Which means to bring one branch of the right into the fold of whichever group currently holds the most power, all they really have to do is win over the upper echelons of the weaker faction, and then secure them a place (not necessarily even that highly ranked of a place) within their power structure.

Meanwhile, across the isle, a vague alignment in short term goals is basically all that keeps the left and the liberals together as a coalition. Whereas the right can say and do just about anything as long as it doesn't jeopardize their direct underlings' position in the overarching power structure, even small, strategic concessions can obliterate what little trust leaders have built up over the years.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-09-25 22:45:36+00:00
> Hamas was established in 1984, by the generation that had grown up with the occupation in 1948

Correction, Gaza was first occupied by Israel for a few months in 1956, then occupied continuously since 1967.

Regardless, by 1984, nearly half of the people in Gaza would have lived their entire lives under occupation, and the most would have lived at least half their lives under occupation.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-25 22:45:47+00:00
What I've read was that DEC had a huge amount of regret over the PDP-11 having too small of an address space. It could be that experience led them to think the answer to their problems was to be early to market in the 64-bit age with the Alpha. They did have VMS for the Alpha and later Win NT but high-powered RISC processors were a crowded space in the 1990s.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-25 22:45:49+00:00
> Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district

I’ve knocked on doors for judicial elections in Manhattan where a single tenants’ association’s turnout out swung every election on the ballot. (In another case, the judge who went to Koreatown with us after a meet and greet swung our eight top to turn out, which was more than the margin for an off-cycle mid-week judicial primary.)

There are always elections on the ballot that matter. And civic engagement isn’t limited to voting.
by looking4advice | 2025-09-25 22:45:52+00:00
I think Raku is better than Python agent based systems for a few reasons:

- You don't have to think about concurrency or multithreading as in Python. There is no GIL to worry about. The built in support for things Supply and hyper-operators are all available in the language. It is really easy to hook up disparate parts of a distributed agent without having to think about async or actors libraries or whatever in Python.

- Something I prefer is the OOP abstractions in Raku. They are much richer than Python. YMMV, depending on what you prefer.

- Better support for gradual typing and constraints out of the box in Raku.

Python wins on the AI ecosystem though :)

I started messing around with this code several years ago and the LLM libs in Raku were not as rich as today. I thought I needed a specific type of LLM message handling structure that could be extended to do tool handling and some of Letta type memory management (which I never got around to!). I have some Python libs of my own and I ported them. I suspect if I was starting now, I would use what is available in the community. This version of TallMountain is the last of a long series of prototypes, so I never rewrote those parts.
by jongjong | 2025-09-25 22:46:41+00:00
I really enjoy doing code reviews. I don't mind reading other people's code. If you do it enough, it becomes easier. Also it's good for your own coding style if you read other people's code as it helps you to normalize your style an become more minimalist.

I enjoy LLM vibe coding now because I know approximately what code to expect for any given prompt. Basically if the agent doesn't give me code I expect, I usually reject it. It's rare when it comes up with a solution I didn't expect though. I think this is because reading other people's code trains you to be minimalist because it's easier to spot unnecessary complexity when it's from someone else.

I think the skill of being able to read code quickly and applying your intuition is going to be increasingly valuable.

Nowadays, I don't even need to read the whole code to sense when there are issues. I usually have a 'gut feeling' when the code has problems by glancing over it; though of course, I need to invest some effort to list out specific issues because I can't say "this doesn't feel right" in my code review. But even with this, you can become better. Developers who write a certain way tend to make the same kinds of mistakes.
by artur_makly | 2025-09-25 22:46:45+00:00
Grok 4-Fast still looks much better in terms of price: https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/1971273380335845683 going to stick to that for bit and see..

Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview $0.30 $2.50

Grok 4 Fast $0.20 $0.50
by ycombigators | 2025-09-25 22:47:07+00:00
Sounds like a company is not adequately defining what the deliverables are.

Task: Walk to the shops & buy some milk.

Deliverables: 1. Video of walking to the shops (including capturing the newspaper for that day at the local shop) 2. Reciept from local store for milk. 3. Physical bottle of Milk.