MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gualdrapo | 2025-09-19 23:12:57+00:00
The woman I thought was the love of my life left me for another man, made me feel guilty about it with a immense net of lies just to not be held accountable so I went into chronic depression. Quit my job at uni in october 2015 just so to not be able to see her ever again. Was unemployed until march 2018. Was broke, heartbroken and humillated not only by my ex but even by my own sister, lost my best friend in the world in part because I was broke and couldn't do much about it, even lost almost all my hair all of a sudden... It was definitely the worst thing I've ever had to endure.

Once I was lucky enough to get a miserable job I could began from the ground up all over again. It hasn't been easy but as the time passed felt like I was regaining my inner peace and as I see it now that is the source of happiness. Not everything is perfect but in 2016-2017 I couldn't even imagine I would escape that situation.

Am a bit scared because the project I'm working on is reaching its final stages so I can be completely unemployed anytime soon once again, but at least this time I'm prepared for it and am doing much better than 10 years ago.

I wish nobody ever has to go through a situation like this. Hoping you all are doing great.
by simonw | 2025-09-19 23:14:21+00:00
I'm quick to question precisely because I can see LLM telltale hints in the text - in this case the "not just X but Y" pattern.

I don't mind if it's LLM-assisted text if everything in it is a reviewed and accurate representation of the point the author is trying to make.

But if the LLM throws in extra junk tha distracts from the conversation and the author fails to catch that in review, that's bad.

I think it's likely I was mistaken here - that the author either didn't use an LLM or used it for minor style tweaks but ensured that it was making the points they wanted to make.
by mingtianzhang | 2025-09-19 23:14:38+00:00
The word index originally came from how humans retrieve information: book indexes and tables of contents that guide us to the right place.

Computers later borrowed the term for data structures such as B-trees, hash tables, and more recently, vector indexes. They're highly efficient for machines, but also abstract and unnatural: not something a human, or an LLM, can directly use as a reasoning aid. This creates a gap between how indexes work for computers and how they should work for models that reason like humans.

PageIndex is a new step that looks back to move forward. It revives the original, human-oriented idea of an index and adapts it for LLMs. Now the index itself (PageIndex) lives inside the LLM's context window: the model sees a hierarchical table-of-contents tree and reasons its way down to the right span, much like a person would retrieve information using a book's index.

PageIndex MCP shows how this works in practice: it runs as a MCP server, exposing a document's structure directly to LLMs. This means platforms like Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-enabled agent can navigate the index themselves and reason their way through documents, not with vectors or chunking, but in a human-like, reasoning-based way.
by whatever1 | 2025-09-19 23:14:45+00:00
Not none, but very few in the stem fields (less than 40% from my estimates).

Why would you pursue a PhD with a 25k/year stipend when you can just start a near 6-figure job and start paying off your student debt?

Only the ones with financial freedom or commitment to research take the PhD pill. Or when you go through a recession and you want to delay the entry to the job searching market.
by scotty79 | 2025-09-19 23:14:52+00:00
> Yet again, factually incorrect. The government provides many services - social security, food stamps, military protection, utilities, research funding, pharmaceutical oversight, and many, many, many other things. You're just wrong.

Sorry for using a short-hand. Government doesn't provide services for your benefit. The only goal of providing those benefits is to best enable you to produce economic value that government and the rich can capture.

> That is not a "service" provided to the government - it's just something that people do, and they have the right to keep those rewards.

The only right of the physical world is might.

Why do you think anyone just lets people do what people "just" do? They let people do it because powerful benefit.

It's the same reasoning why a warlord lets peasants grow crops and raise animals and chases away neighboring warlord. Because then there's something he can take for himself. Political systems change but the basic mechanic never did. Democracy and capitalism are just a way better tool for exploitation than feudalism could ever be. Efficient. Stable. Didn't you ever notice that with development of new, more enlightened systems of power tax burden doesn't shrink but grows instead?

> Those things are unrelated.

We have one monetary system. It's all related.

> Yet again - a mixture between stupidity and malice, driven by base greed, envy, and resentment of what others have that you don't.

I have plenty, way more than I ever deserved. I'm at risk of being directly negatively financially affected by policies I advocate for. Drop the armchair moral psychoanalysis because you miss every time, on all counts.
by danielheath | 2025-09-19 23:14:53+00:00
Forking involves:

* Fork the server (adjust your CI / build / deploy pipeline) * Run your own push notification broker * Fork the iOS client, white-label it, point it at your push server * Setup apple dev account to publish * Fork the android client, white-label it, point it at your push server * Setup google dev account to publish * Fork the frontend repo, edit to match the white-labelled apps
by GeekyBear | 2025-09-19 23:16:57+00:00
> I think the majority of American consumers and developers use iOS and they have little to no problem with the highly controlled and monopolized system.

Those users knew in advance what they were buying into, since Apple was honest about the nature of the platform they were offering for sale.

Google's Android customers, in contrast, were lied to -- and it's solely Google's fault that Google lied about Android being both open to running any software you like and open source.

Everyone should have spoken up when they first started moving necessary developer APIs into the Play Store.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-19 23:16:58+00:00
Hiring manager here. It's standard practice for every hiring manager I know to review the candidate's LinkedIn as an additional input to the hiring process.

Not finding a LinkedIn page for someone can range from a neutral signal to a negative signal depending on the hiring manager. I personally don't read anything into it, but I know many hiring managers who feel that lack of a LinkedIn page is a negative sign. I don't like it, but it's how the world works some times.

A seasoned LinkedIn page is also becoming very valuable for applying to remote jobs. Remote employers are getting nervous with all of the overemployed people and fake applicants. Having a mature LinkedIn page with a decent number of connections to real people is a major positive sign for remote hiring.

It's not something you will be able to see or detect as a candidate.
by okanat | 2025-09-19 23:17:20+00:00
AOSP is still the better OS. It is fully open source. It has a much better protection model. It is production ready and optimized. It has a working build system. It supports reliable updates.

I find the idea of Linux phones pointless. Instead of trying to create an app ecosystem that will never compete against proprietary-ecosystem optimized and well-isolated one, we can leverage it. I wouldn't want an OS where the banking app can peek into my browser. Desktop OSes are still like that and that's crap OS design in 2025. It has been crap since 90s. Linux being popular has significantly hindered OS innovation in open source world.

If you would like to help, I think helping projects like LineageOS or GrapheneOS is better. You can also try joining reverse engineered driver efforts for open source drivers like Freedreno. You can help porting device-specific kernel drivers to mainline. So we can boot whatever kernels we want on normal Android phones with Mesa OpenGL.

"A lot of C experience" doesn't really tell anything. Have you worked with cross-language systems? How much you know about ABIs? How about interface definition languages (IDLs)? Have you actually written a production driver for Linux systems? Have you implemented any system-level service that got deployed a number of nodes? You need to join somewhere and improve things marginally.
by leakycap | 2025-09-19 23:17:20+00:00
Even inside the tech industry, H1-B positions are often paid much lower than others within the company (even before benefits are considered).

$150,000 median yearly salary would mean H1-B positions are taking home 10k a month. I've worked with too many people in these positions to believe they're being paid reasonable wages - unless you have an extremely in-demand skillset, H1-B holders are often treated like indentured servants by huge companies/teams.
by nosianu | 2025-09-19 23:17:52+00:00
I just read a thread earlier today in the medical-professionals /r/medicine group of reddit that had a lot of participation from medical people:

"My rural patients are so much more insufferable than my urban ones"

https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1nkb8f9/my_rural_...

It seems that the reasons for missing doctors are... complex.
by sanswork | 2025-09-19 23:18:30+00:00
You've applied to 400 jobs and had 3 responses and no success to be blunt your option about what you need to do to get hired is worth zero.

You refuse to change anything about your process, you aren't working to improve it, you are arguing against people telling them you don't need to do common/standard things.

This thread is a pretty good insight into why you are failing and what you need to work on.
by valkmit | 2025-09-19 23:19:14+00:00
This seems virtually impossible to enforce. It's trivial to restructure hiring a developer to write software, as licensing software from a foreign development firm, or any number of other workarounds.

This is not just a hypothetical, this is something that already happens when companies are looking to optimize their tax burden. Corporate structuring and income shifting are big businesses in their own right and serve to find the minimum amount of changes required to be able to legally reclassify income.

In the case of this bill specifically, in the unlikely even it passes, a simple corporate inversion will solve this problem. Instead of the US company owning foreign subsidiaries, the structure is inverted: the parent company becomes foreign, which will own a domestic US corporation. When the multinational wants to hire or retain offshore talent, it simply pays out from the parent company. Again these aren't hypotheticals, these are real tax avoidance strategies that are already in place and are well-trodden paths.

You can come up with an infinite amount of regulation to try to halt this (this problem is also called tax base erosion) but it ends up doing more harm than good - eventually you end up with a tax code and regulatory environment so complex that that alone disincentivizes new investment.

The goal is not just to retain existing capital and talent by forcing them to be locked in - it's to compete for the next dollar, the next startup, the next factory - new investment will follow the path of least resistance, while older companies eventually close up shop due to one reason or another.

If your worldview is one of "We already have the best capital and talent, so we don't need to bother to compete to acquire new capital and talent", the world you live in will stagnate and wither with respect to societies that will bend over backwards for this.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-19 23:20:07+00:00
It's neither good nor bad in absolute terms. It can be misused, abused, and overdone like any substance.

In my experience, the people who benefit from quitting caffeine were either using far too much of it, were drinking it too late in the day (interferes with sleep), or were using it to cover up other problems like poor sleep habits.

The person drinking a cup or two of green tea in the mornings after going to bed on time is going to have a different relationship than the person drinking very strong coffee drinks all day long to stay awake because they've been scrolling on their phone until 2AM every night instead of trying to sleep on time.
Show HN: I replaced 47 GCs, 12 spreadsheets, and 5 apps with 1 tool
by mehrajhasan | 2025-09-19 23:20:10+00:00
Hey HN This app will finally get your trips out of the group chat.

I built PlanAway because planning group trips with friends always turned into: 200 unread messages arguing about dates A spreadsheet nobody updates Ten different apps for flights, stays, and activities

PlanAway puts everything in one place: - Create a trip with friends - Add reservations, expenses, and itineraries - Collaborate in real time (no more lost notes) - Get AI suggestions for activities and food

It’s live now as a web app. You can mess around with it WITHOUT creating an account! Still early, but usable — and I’d love any and all feedback.

I’d love your feedback on: - The #1 group-trip pain point you’d want this to fix - What would make you actually switch from chats/spreadsheets - Any “killer feature” you think is missing

Anything feel clunky or confusing?

Note: Mobile has some UI issues which are being addressed. Data pipelines for flights/lodging is in works to fix the manual part atm

Thanks for checking it out
by kimixa | 2025-09-19 23:20:33+00:00
That is true if you have something like an ongoing green card petition. However, if it's just an H1B, by the time it's approved and can transfer it, there's not really a "line" anymore.

Though there's pretty hard limitations on what you can transfer with - it has to be the same sector, similar limitations on minimum salary, and requires work on the new employer's part to move the H1B to them (so you can't keep it quiet, and it's another barrier as it's non-zero cost for lawyers etc. to actually do that).
by bix6 | 2025-09-19 23:21:40+00:00
To get out of the isolation cycle you have to stop isolating yourself.

Go for a walk and talk to a stranger. I talked to a random dude for 45 mins the other day and he showed me all the fish he’s caught. Epic.

Sounds like you like software. Go to a software meet up and geek out.

The friends will come but even a 5 min conversation can have a huge impact on your psyche so just get out there in a way that you feel comfortable with.
by anon7000 | 2025-09-19 23:22:41+00:00
JavaScript is a very secure language. The browser is a massive success at running secure JavaScript on a global scale. Every website you use is running JavaScript and not able to read other site data. Electron is the same, running v8 to sandbox JavaScript. Assuming you aren't executing user input inside that sandbox (something many programming languages allow, including JS), it's very secure.

The problem with supply chain attacks is specifically related to npm, and not related to JS. npm as an organization needs to be taking more responsibility for the recent attacks and essentially forcing everyone to use more strict security controls when publishing their dependencies.
by leakycap | 2025-09-19 23:22:47+00:00
Yes, back in the day when no other podcast app offered the kind of silence-deletion, PocketCasts really stood out.

Today most 3rd party podcast apps have a great trim silence feature:

iOS/watchOS: Castro, Overcast

Android: YouTube Music app, Podcast Addict, AntennaPod

Others exist but these are the ones I have used personally and can verify the silence-skipping feature is similar or better.
by charliea0 | 2025-09-19 23:23:24+00:00
I hire a programmer to code my app, SuperConnect++. I charge $0.99 to download the app. People buy the app if it's worth more than $0.99 to them.

If 150,000 people buy the app, then I have ~$150,000 of revenue. I can pay a programmer $100,000 a year and have $50,000 left over. 150,000 people benefited from the app.

Now say I have to pay an additional $100,000 visa fee for my programmer. My cost of $200,000 is less than my revenue of $150,000. I don't build the app. I don't get $50,000. 150,000 people who would have bought the app don't benefit from it. The biggest loss is to the Americans who don't get to buy the app.

There are other possibilities, maybe I increase the price to $1.99 or I hire an American. We can see that those are both bad. The former extracts $150,000 extra dollars from American consumers. Since unemployment is low for Americans and an American programmer can't have two jobs at once, the later just means that some other project that the American programmer would have worked on is not completed.
by WalterBright | 2025-09-19 23:23:56+00:00
I have no idea how many there are. But there is an ESPN documentary, I forgot the title, about suddenly rich pro football players who quickly go bankrupt. They spend the money on parties, cars, lavish gifts, and suddenly the money is gone. Then they age or injure out of the game, and spend the rest of their lives in regretful poverty.

Why would suddenly famous actors be any more savvy?

See the documentary "Val" on Val Kilmer.
by myth2018 | 2025-09-19 23:24:06+00:00
Senior dev, 22 years of experience. Almost exactly two years unemployed right now. I've done some technical leadership before but I'm not looking into it anymore, not really my thing.

In general, I get very few replies, even fewer interviews and 100% eventually "freeze the position" or simply ghost me. I've heard that too many companies are currently spending their HR budgets in market research and have no intention of fulfilling most of the positions they advertise. Not sure if that's true, and maybe there are other reasons for that, market-related and/or related to my resume, but applying to jobs is feeling just a huge waste of my time currently and I'm tending to apply only when I see a great fit.

How I cope: I could save a fair amount of money during the startup frenzy in the course of the pandemics and am living off it right now. But it doesn't generate enough passive income, not even close, so I'll have to find a job eventually. I'm seriously considering another profession. Maybe trying to ingress in the education field with my masters. Despite tech job market being at the rock-bottom, the unemployment rates in Brazil are at a historic low.

Now, despite this gloomy report, if you ask me, I'm feeling optimistic, happy even. I'm really seizing the opportunity to study a lot and spending time with my family, so I feel all this is doing me well overall.
by mattmanser | 2025-09-19 23:24:42+00:00
Now that you mention it, I also struggled with that to begin with. My penguin edition had a dramatis personae list at the start that I ended up referring to a few times. Rare for me to use them. So, a crib sheet if your edition doesn't.

There's a sequence with the boys out on the town which helped me cement each of the main male protagonists images in my head. Fairly early on I think. Pierre + Andrei being main characters, Nikolai (the younger) and Antole being the rest of that group.

I also I ended up classifying the characters into three generations, the young men/woman, the older parents, and the younger children.
by yks | 2025-09-19 23:25:19+00:00
Yeah, "those others are less ethical than us Americans" doesn't pass muster in 2025. Reminds me of the anti-immigration arguments from the days bygone, that the immigrants coming from the corrupt authoritarian countries will vote against democracy in the US. While it might be even true(!) voting against democracy certainly came from the natives first, fast and furious.
by chainingsolid | 2025-09-19 23:25:59+00:00
While I'd love to see a successful ATX for phones (It's number 1 reason my desktop is x86, 2nd is Steam library).

1) The form factor really fights this.

2) Something needs to change with ARM, cause modular hardware would require device independent ISOs, and that only seams to exist for x86.... IDK about RISCV
by metaphor | 2025-09-19 23:26:17+00:00
I agree that it's not optional; in my book, a company mandating association with the degenerate cesspool that is LinkedIn as entry criteria for employment consideration is simply a non-starter, full stop.

If I disclose an email address that's directly traceable to my current employer---or even one provided to me by professional organizations I'm registered with---as adequate "social proof" (whatever that means) that I'm not "likely a bot/scammer", and a company's hiring manager is too blind to see the signal, then I'd write that off as a hidden trap passively dodged with confident relief.
by imiric | 2025-09-19 23:26:23+00:00
> you chase every new shiny thing and you write a product or service in that shiny thing

That is a choice you make. Software development doesn't have to be that way.

In fact, it's saner for your productivity, ease of maintenance and onboarding new team members, and ultimately for your users, that you choose boring technology over the shiny new thing that just launched, or that is currently trending. Sure, you won't be able to add yet another buzzword to your CV, but you will deepen your knowledge of the stable technology, won't have to keep track of a constant stream of updates that may or may not break your application, and will have a much better chance of finding developers familiar with the boring tech. Most importantly, you will subject your users to fewer risks, since the product will be built on stable ground.

Developers often forget that the reason we write software is to solve a problem, and not to serve our own nerdy desire to play with tech. Enjoying your work is important, and the choice of tech plays a role in that, but the main motivation should come from solving a problem first, not from the tech itself.

This reminds me of a heated debate I had recently[1] about a popular project that was rewritten multiple times for little reason beyond the developer "felt like it". This is insane to me, yet for some reason, many people don't mind.

The criteria I prefer to use when choosing a tech stack is:

1. Pick the right tool for the job. Depending on your requirements, narrow down your options to those that would be most helpful for building the product, whatever "helpful" means in your context. I.e. if you need it done fast, learning how to use it wouldn't be a good idea.

2. Pick the boring, battle-tested, and proven tool. Discriminate. Do you really need all the features of tool A? Err on the side of simplicity.

3. And other things like: what does the company/environment already use, what is the team most comfortable with, and so on. Consistency and familiarity are important.

But I agree with others here. As much as I lament the current state of the software industry, a lot of it has to do with the sheer explosion in popularity of the field, not with us losing anything. The same people who were building awesome stuff decades ago, are still doing it today. They just have to deal with a lot more bullshit now.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45251375#45254607
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-19 23:26:34+00:00
Unemployment for tech workers is not currently low, and it is taking months, or even years to find a new role, therefore this argument doesn’t hold water. Wages > consumer excess and profits. The world will go on if you don’t build the app, and perhaps someone else will. The evidence is clear this visa is abused at scale, and this action has been overdue.

https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...

https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...