MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akdev1l | 2025-09-19 16:49:31+00:00
Interesting.

for me it feels like I have to spend all day fighting with folks who are constantly “holding it wrong” and using libraries and frameworks in really weird/buggy ways who then seem completely uninterested in learning.

In my free time I love working on my own projects because I don’t have to deal with this bullshit and I can just craft things finely without any external pressure.
by dismalaf | 2025-09-19 16:50:05+00:00
The American Ruby community...

They tried to cancel Matz for not supporting weird DEI corporate speak in the TOS, they've been trying to cancel DHH for years for his mild conservative lean.

There's also a weird contingent who keep trying to push stuff like TypeScript for Rails and typing for Ruby, at one point they wanted to fork Rails when DHH made Hotwire default (they wanted React), etc..

Outside the weird US corporate bubble, Ruby is doing just fine. Japan, Europe, Canada, etc... Rails World gets bigger and bigger, Ruby Kaigi is growing, etc...
by BoorishBears | 2025-09-19 16:50:47+00:00
Previous V3 base

Unsloth doesn't have an official multi-GPU story: there's hacked together solutions but they're finicky as it is for smaller models

In general Deepseek has very few resources on finetuning, that get even further muddied by people referring to the distills when they claim to be finetuning it.
by dkarl | 2025-09-19 16:50:55+00:00
The only thing really disturbing thing I read in the piece is this:

> a yell cuts through the noise; an older lady has fallen by the serving hatch and is unable to stand unassisted. “Would you give me a hand, sweetheart?”, she calmly asks, “Don’t touch her!” the bar manager snaps as I bend towards her. “You’re not allowed to touch her!” The woman blinks up at me, confused. “We have to call the care team — otherwise she could sue.” And so, for the next 45 minutes, she lies there

That's nothing to do with profit. Nonprofit and government-run facilities are just as strict about following legally dictated rules to illogical and counterproductive results as for-profit facilities are.

I'm actually impressed that the author found so little to complain about.

On the supposed topic of profiteering, the article is frustratingly light on analysis. It's presented like it's going to be an exposé, but then he gets distracted by his own discovery of the horrors of aging:

> it’s hard to feel sentimental when I recall my own experiences: shepherding confused residents to the toilet; placing cones beside rogue deposits in the restaurant; mopping up suspicious puddles (custard, John Smiths, or other); nudging care teams about overstuffed stoma bags; and politely reminding people of where exactly they live

> It strikes me that no matter the service charge, or the quality of the restaurant — which John chides as “more like a backstreet cafe” — or whether privately owned or council-housed, you may still end up defecating onto your shoe in the middle of a bistro. No amount of ground rent can protect your dignity when there is an intrinsic lack of it in ageing

> “How’s Harry?” I ask. “Dead.” “Helen?” “Dead.” “Lucy?” “In care.” “Pirate Paul?” (he wore an eye-patch and a cap with an anchor on it.) “Dead, I found him.” “Mary One?” “Alive.” “Mary Two?” “Nope.” “Bombay Jan?” “In the bar.” “Little John?” “Had a fall”.

It might have been a better article if he had spared us his personal feelings about aging -- his most interested readers have nothing to learn from him on that topic -- and dedicated those inches to the economics. All he manages to tell us is that people are paying quite a bit, which means nothing in isolation. Are there examples of how it can be done for less?

It also glosses over some details that seem important for analyzing cost and comparing to alternatives, like what level of assistance is provided, though I'm American and this is perhaps not an issue for British readers. (The existence of "care teams" that attend to falls and stoma bags shows that "independent living" means something different in this context than in an American one.)

Speaking as someone with an aging parent who will likely need some kind of daily assistance in the 5-10 years if not sooner, the picture painted by the article doesn't sound like a bad way for my mom to spend her remaining years. I'm not seeing the "sordid reality" the headline promises.
by dcminter | 2025-09-19 16:50:59+00:00
The biggest gap was information - though I think you have to go back a bit further really. Until the late 90s if you wanted to know about a topic you generally depended upon printed material or direct transfer of knowledge.

I'm rather envious of kids today who have access to Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and (with caveats) ChatGPT when they're truly interested in a topic. They can dive a lot deeper than I had the opportunity to without bringing in adult assistance.
by JohnMakin | 2025-09-19 16:51:03+00:00
You say this as if it is a negative connotation and it seems to be ignoring realities of the modern world.

My first trip through college I studied business and then the economy collapsed. Most people my age eeked their way through menial jobs (like me) and survived, found a way to break through, or, (like me) went back to school years later when the economy improved to try to find another opportunity. For me the choices were CS or nursing at that time, and I have always been good at math and with computers, so I chose that.

I wouldn't say I ever "loved" development, especially not the current corporate flavor of it. I've had some side projects when I get time and energy. But there's never really been a point in my life where I could ever have afforded getting the level of expertise I possess now just for the "curiosity" of it. Not everyone has a trust fund or safety nets.
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-19 16:51:16+00:00
What were those “gaps”? There were decent compilers and IDEs at least in the mid 90s.

MySQL was available for free in 2000 and anyone could download any number of language runtimes for free like Perl and Java. If your corporate overlords weren’t cheap (or you were in college) an MSDN subscription was amazing.
by bobbiechen | 2025-09-19 16:51:20+00:00
Disclosure: I work on Device Fingerprinting at Stytch, for fraud and security use cases.

I don't think serious enterprises use the open-source versions of Fingerprint.js or ThumbmarkJS for fraud and security. Because they are open source, an attacker can just read the code, find out what they're doing, and test locally until they can construct whatever fingerprint they want. See https://github.com/kkoooqq/fakebrowser for an example that explicitly tests against Fingerprint.js .

Here are some public enterprises that do use Stytch's Device Fingerprinting, which is hardened against spoofing, for fraud prevention and security: Calendly, Replit, RH (Restoration Hardware), SoLo Funds, Groq, etc. Check out the Replit case study for details: https://stytch.com/customer-stories/replit

About compliance, privacy, and legal, this is specific to both the implementation and the use case. This is our docs page if it helps: https://stytch.com/docs/fraud/guides/device-fingerprinting/i... . Generally fraud prevention is considered legitimate interest / necessary processing. I can't speak for marketing or adtech use cases as that's not what our product is used for.
by trollbridge | 2025-09-19 16:51:43+00:00
PHP was written in C. To quote Rasmus Lerdorf:

“I wonder why people keep writing that PHP was ever written in Perl. It never was. #php”

The PHP history page at one point claimed it was:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090426061624/http://us3.php.ne...

He may have had some Perl scripts on his computer before the 1.0 C release, but that’s a far cry from “PHP was written in Perl”.
by mattmcknight | 2025-09-19 16:52:00+00:00
For me, the push to single page applications and the unnecessary complexity that brought with it made me just sick of fooling around with web things- we had solved the problem and they invented nonsense that made it harder. There has been so much to explore over the past 7 years in machine learning though- it just requires a lot more compute than most people have available on their desktop.
by myko | 2025-09-19 16:52:15+00:00
Pam Bondi also famously took a bribe to allow trump off the hook before his 2016 run. Everything around trump is insanely corrupted by him. She was of course "cleared" of any wrongdoing in the situation, but it was extremely transparent: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-ag-pam-bondi-is-cleared...
by munificent | 2025-09-19 16:52:24+00:00
I agree with the author but I think a key driver of this is overall loss of psychological safety in the world.

People play and tinker when they feel that they are in a secure enough environment to fritter away time without feeling like they've incurred risk by doing so.

Given the state of the climate, economy and politics today, I think a whole lot of people feel a whole lot less secure. When I look back at recent US history when there seemed to be the most innovation going on, it was the 90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11. That was probably the "OK-est" a lot of folks in the US felt in their lives.

You might rightly point out that people are wasting lots of time these days, staring at screens, binging TV shows, re-reading giant sci-fi and fantasy series. That's true. But there's a big difference between wasting time escaping the world versus "wasting" time creatively engaging with it.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-09-19 16:52:26+00:00
That may be so, but the thing you are paid for depends on a colossal mountain of unpaid labor by tinkerers. There’s no job for you if people with real curiosity weren’t interested in installation and packaging, fixing bugs, Rust, CSS expressiveness, authorization expressiveness, virtual machines, standard library algorithms, etc. Something tells me the $250/mo you might spend on some GitHub sponsorships and Patreons - if even that - is not paying for anyone’s kids’ private schools.

And anyway, how useful is your code, really? I will not generalize or make assumptions, but you’re also not going to tell me what it is, right? So scrutiny for thee, but not for me?

And if it’s like, “I make Dagger wrapped implementations 17 layers deep in a Google product you’ve heard of”: by now you should know that the thing sincere people say about insincere people, “We watch what Hollywood says is good,” applies to shit that Google, Apple, Amazon and all these super high paying job companies do too. If you are conflating many users with useful, that’s the problem. Facebook, TikTok and Instagram could vanish tomorrow, and literally nothing meaningful would be lost.

Is “useful” to you, “everything that I do is useful, and everything I don’t do, maybe”? You don’t get to decide if your POVs are reductive. They just are.

I appreciate exposing yourself for a contrarian point of view, noble if fatally flawed.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-09-19 16:52:29+00:00
> stand-ups and scrum and SAFE

Honestly some of my best jobs were at places that had a nicely balanced practice in place and the backbone to remind execs that if they interrupt makers daily with new shiny asks they will in effect get nothing (because nothing would ever be completed)...

But obviously we can both have worked at places with those labels with vastly different implementations and thus experiences :)
by solodev222 | 2025-09-19 16:52:57+00:00
I am coming to believe that I am part of the workers displaced by LLMs. Been looking for a job for a year now and even slashing my salary expectations by half doesn't help. I am curious and still tinker on things I am interested about, but having an actual paying job seems so far from my reality now that I am more inclined on giving up. People here complain while having a job, but please think about us who are struggling and be mindful.
by ylabidi | 2025-09-19 16:53:37+00:00
The context from the Palestinian side is quite different and comparing the two is flawed for many reasons:

There was never a consensus on the Oslo accords from both sides. While the Israeli Labor pushed for the process, the Likud and the rest of right wingers worked thoroughly to undermine it. And on the Palestinian side, the OLP, essentially Fatah, went on to accept terms every other Palestinian faction refused to adhere to (demilitarized state, practically land-locked on a mozaic of patches that amounts to a fraction of the country's total area and surrounded everywhere with ever-increasing Israeli settlement projects.

That effectively weakened Fatah's position which essentially morphed into a caretaker on behalf of the Israelis for the day-to-day. And the resistance weight shifted from secular factions to the Hamas.
by KuriousCat | 2025-09-19 16:53:41+00:00
It’s baffling that on one hand we suspend in‑drive app interactions for safety, yet on the other, a product built to sidestep those safeguards and promote driver multitasking still attracts funding. I’m a little sorry to say it, but celebrating ‘move fast’ execution without deeper safety thinking is genuinely disturbing.
by karmicthreat | 2025-09-19 16:54:30+00:00
I'm tired. I've been at it since '89' when I was 15. Everything being on fire all the time (in the world and in my current robot project) is just burning me out.

Most of my curiosity is tempered by how it can make me money.

I do appreciate that 50-70% of the boring work can be done with AI agents now. As long as you know enough to have opinions and guide the process along, it can be helpful.

Expertise and learning don't seem to be AS important with the upcoming gen of developers. However, there is also so much out there now that it would be much harder to start from zero as opposed to being there from the beginning.

But I think gen X and Millenials were probably peak interest and curiosity, now it's just a job for the later generations.
by gopalv | 2025-09-19 16:54:39+00:00
> I wrote this article to lament the loss of the curious spark in our developer culture

The curiosity hasn't disappeared from the culture, but it might not be brought in to a workplace anymore.

I think a lot of us have stopped bringing the tinkerer itch to work.

Outside of the workplace, there's an entire parade of tinkering by folks who at best post it on Youtube, not here (I watch "Stuff Made Here" for the code).

Of all the events of the past decade, the worst hit to the tinkering visibility has been Github making personal repos private by default.

Mostly the folks who were like me still have pet projects, most of them will share their code but only if you ask because it is "Well, not as nice as it should be".

I've got hundreds of repos in my github, but there's a sharp fall-off in what's public (there's ~113 public and 180 private) right when that happened and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

The tinkering is more active than ever now with vibe coding tools, where I can draw an svg out and then ask it to "I want to use manim.py to animate this" to get something which is a neat presentation tool to describe how data moves between systems.

But is it worth showing you when all the fun there was in making?

What if all I am likely to get "So what?" as the only response. Wouldn't that it make it less fun?
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-09-19 16:56:15+00:00
I have been with my company now for 13 years. Back then we had plenty of slack time which we used to try stuff. We introduced git, spent months on figuring out if UI automation works, invented a distributed test runner, spent weeks on building shielding enclosures so our tests that use RF communication won't fail in the crowded test lab. All of these resulted in huge leaps forward and improved productivity enormously.

Since then devs got squeezed more and more so that nobody has any time for trying out stuff. Tech debt accumulates and nothing improves. When you have an idea, you have to submit a proposal to a review board which approves requests from politically connected people and rejects other requests because other deadlines.

This development has taken out everything that made me enjoy about the job and I am good at. Thankfully I am reaching retirement so I am happy to leave.
by NemoNobody | 2025-09-19 16:56:23+00:00
I just saw your comment as I was leaving here - you are right

I'm just begining to realize exactly what you stated, despite my own ranting AI, automation and all without actually working with any LLMs for several months - jumped into a smaller project last week and I realized that essentially none of the limits that I thought I had were even there anymore.

Weeks of work and actual human activity down to days - days of working, down to minutes.

I'm trying to retrain how I think - otherwise, the sub 4 year old future creators will be so far ahead of me.

Haha, it's gonna be like building in Fortnite - Millennials had to go no build.

Co-Creation WITH an AI - it's actually a huge shift, then it's as you said, so easy to build new stuff.
by zoezoezoezoe | 2025-09-19 16:56:25+00:00
I genuinely believe if the author understands it, AI tools to assist with development are amazing. I use an in IDE AI autocomplete, and it has increased my productivity dramatically without it. I'm still very capable without AI autocomplete, once you start to over rely on AI tools, and lose understanding of your codebase is when you're more vibe than not, and that's where I personally take issue. AI generated code I think is mostly fine assuming it isnt just a copy and paste from a oneshot chatgpt message with absolutely no understanding of what the code is doing whatsoever.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-09-19 16:56:36+00:00
I think, to be a petrostate, you need to derive a huge part of your economy from pumping valuable stuff out of the ground. Fossil fuels in the US are like ... 6% of the US economy? Not nothing in absolute terms - if there was a "United States of Fossil Fuels", it would be the 12th biggest nation by GDP in the world. But still, America derives a vast majority of its economy from non-fossil fuels
by downrightmike | 2025-09-19 16:56:51+00:00
More people need access to AI hardware for it to be viable. There is no critical mass. And a super expensive laptop is not going to get us there.

Rather than force people into all new hardware, because they were greedy and that didn't work, Cheap $50 NPU cards need to start coming out with 100's of TOPS. Right now the only option is at least $1,000+ and that isn't going to fly.
by spwa4 | 2025-09-19 16:57:12+00:00
As opposed to public companies? Come to Northwest Europe and you'll find a very similar problem: elderly in homes, so incredibly understaffed that there simply isn't anyone to pick up someone who falls for hours.

These days every few months there's a new "accident" reported in these places. They have been destaffed to dangerous levels. Apparently last months' issue was that the administration was wrong. A room that had an elderly person was registered as empty, but had an old lady inside. She starved to death because she was unable to leave the room and "didn't call for help" (probably didn't call loud enough).
by jacobgkau | 2025-09-19 16:57:29+00:00
> If you copy the generated url and put it into the entry field (and repeat) then you end up at a bitcoin site.

Uh, what? I just tried it a few times, and it seems to just follow the redirect each time, always ending up back at the original target URL I entered. How many times did you have to "repeat" to make that happen?

> As Bubblerings has pointed out that has malware.

No, that's not what BubbleRings said. BubbleRings said one site on VirusTotal reported it was malware. That sounds like a false positive because the URL is fishy, which is the entire point of the joke here.
by davidw | 2025-09-19 16:57:41+00:00
Yes of course there have always been people who clock in and clock out and don't have a ton of passion for what they do. I don't begrudge that, but personally I need some of the curiosity and joy in hacking on stuff. And I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too.

It just feels like "it's a job" is more of the zeitgeist these days.

And yes, I'm also well aware of what came before 'my time' - mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies. One of the reasons Linux (and *BSD) was so cool is that finally regular people could get their hands on this powerful OS that previously was the exclusive purview of corporations or, at best, universities.

As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.
by mattbillenstein | 2025-09-19 16:58:25+00:00
Perhaps, but I don't really get the dozens of TB of storage in the home use case a lot of the time either.

Like if you have a large media library, you need to push maybe 10MB/s, you don't need 128GB of RAM to do that...

It's mostly just hardware porn - perhaps there are a few legit use cases for the old hardware, but they are exceedingly rare in my estimate.
by sampo | 2025-09-19 16:58:29+00:00
> I'm really confused how the female can produce a clone of the male of another species.

In normal ants, the queen can produce haploid (single set of chromosomes) unfertilized eggs that hatch into males. Normal ant males are haploid. They don't have a father, they can not have sons (but the do have a grandfather, and their daughters will make them grandsons). When the ant queen decides to produce sons, she will make haploid eggs via meiosis as normal, and just won't fertilize them with male sperm.

Ants don't have sex chromosomes. An individual with a single set of chromosomes (haploid) is a male, an individual with double set of chromosomes (diploid) is a female. Ant males are almost like sperm cells that grew into multicellular organisms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy

Now, a Messor ibericus queen can produce eggs with her own genetic material removed, and fertilize these with the single set of chromosomes from a Messor structor male. (It will still have the mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA from the queen.) And because the male only has a single set of chromosomes, the sperm and the resulting offspring has an identical single copy of the father's genetic material (except the mitochondria that came from the mother). So the son is a clone of the father (except for mitochondria).

The queen can also mate with males of her own species, contributing half of her own chromosomes to combine with the full single set of the male chromosomes, to produce to-be-queen female offspring. Here we have the normal genetic recombination (though only on the mother's side) to keep the evolutionary benefits of the variation from sexual reproduction.
by mothballed | 2025-09-19 16:58:45+00:00
I was once told a story by an Argentinian.

They have a business tax rate above 106% of profit[]. That is it is illegal for a business to make a profit.

Yet there is apparently a video out there of a black market cart seller selling wares right in front of the Argentine tax office, totally unbothered.

It made me wonder if this was just an allegory of what's in store for us.

[] https://archive.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/...
by rasengan | 2025-09-19 16:58:58+00:00
Either corruption was always happening maximally, and we've finally begun to notice , or corruption has reached a new maximum.

Either way, it's maximum corruption.

And we, the people, continue to choose "public discourse" as a mechanism to bring awareness and, perhaps, attend to the issue; yet, the discourse available to the people is limited, both economically and even in social media, algorithmically.

I hate to sound like a decentralization fanatic, but decentralizing power away from centralized actors is the only way we will be able to right these wrongs and essentially bring fairness to society.

We, the people, deserve to reap rewards based on skill and the proper application thereof.