MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rapatel0 | 2025-09-06 15:14:30+00:00
In my life I've had the following experiences:

- In grad school, I averaged 4 hours of sleep (6/7 days per week) and about 8 hours on sunday for about 5 months straight.

- In my first startup, I worked 9am to 11pm (had to walk back from the office) for about 12 months.

- During my second startup gig, my son was born and also I had an 8 hour time difference between local time and the primary timezone of the office. I woke up at 4 am and generally went to bed at 10pm most days. Waking up randomly at night to deal with newborn through toddler moments for about 4 years.

My experience with all of this:

Pros:

- Really fun to grind at times and euphoric when something works.

- Build really strong relationships with people in the trenches.

Cons (I felt like I was working but in retrospect I wasn't really productive):

- Pseudo-working - I ended up spinning plates of unnecessary pseudo-work that didn't move the needle.

- Time Dilation (biggest factor) - 9pm to 12am feels like 30 minutes. That's because my brain was slowing down. The more sleep deprivation, the more this happens during the day.

- Physical Burnout - My body felt tired with a constant low level of pain and my energy levels low. Also, stress eating made me fat.

- Mental Burnout - My mind constantly looked for distractions. Even when trying to focus, I couldn't focus

- Tactical Stupidity - I didn't find clever ways to avoid or fix problems. I just focused on the next thing. I didn't have bandwidth to reason effectively as I normally would.

Overall:

It's definitely useful to crunch and a great way to be mission oriented, but crunch cannot be constant. Sometimes you need to eat a pile of shit, but you shouldn't smear shit out and take it one lick at a time.

Furthermore, when you've attained a degree of understanding, you should be able to find better ways to leverage your time. The brain and body needs downtime to be creative--the best solutions are creative.

Finally in the world of agents, we have near infinite leverage. As a community should be engaged in deeper thought, rather than trying to grind towards a finish line that constantly moves.
by kentonv | 2025-09-06 15:14:39+00:00
> type algebra either doesn't exist or impractical because only PL theorists know about it, not Kenton.

Hi I'm Kenton. I, too, was enamored with advanced PL theory in college. Designed and implemented my own purely-functional programming language. Still wish someone would figure out a working version of dependent types for real-world use, mainly so we could prove array bounds-safety without runtime checks.

In two decades building real-world complex systems, though, I've found that getting PL theory right is rarely the highest-leverage way to address the real problems of software engineering.
by macNchz | 2025-09-06 15:14:45+00:00
> there's a hustle culture that glamorized lack of sleep as a badge of honor

For all of the pop science/bro science/measured self/life optimization stuff that percolates in this world, it’s funny to me that glorifying a lack of sleep persists, when sleep is effectively a performance enhancing drug, and a lack of it effectively makes you dumber.

I recall an anecdote from a sports medicine doctor interviewed somewhere, about how his patients with overtraining syndrome-type issues were overwhelmingly high-powered professionals who were accommodating their Ironman training schedule by sleeping less, as opposed to Olympic athletes who often sleep a lot to properly recover from their training.
by bicx | 2025-09-06 15:14:57+00:00
I've found that when I work this kind of long hours for an extended period, I get far too attached to what I'm building and have a difficult time accepting that I need to change anything. Likely this happens because I've sacrificed so much to build up to the current state, and changing it would mean that I wasted time working that could have been spent with loved ones, hobbies, or just enjoying quiet.

When you work long hours on a regular basis, you begin to lose a healthy perspective on work and life.
by tombert | 2025-09-06 15:14:58+00:00
I kind of think thats backwards. I think the success of the abomination that we have decided to label as J2EE or Jakarta was attractive to intellectually unambitious Java engineers because it progressed so slowly.

I think people here are really underestimating how intellectually lazy most people are at their jobs. HN selection-biased for a geekier crowd so a lot of my criticisms don’t apply to readers of this forum.
by brap | 2025-09-06 15:15:15+00:00
After trying out many languages at many places, I reached the conclusion that Java, as weird as it may be, is my favorite language.

There were times I hated it, but turns out I really just hated messy, over-engineered legacy code and working in a gray cubicle at aging MegaCorps.

The language itself is quite beautiful when used properly and with modern features.

It just really needs a makeover and better tools.
by mechanicalpulse | 2025-09-06 15:15:20+00:00
Podman is daemonless while docker is a client/server pair. Podman also shipped with support for rootless containers, though Docker now has that capability as well.

The podman CLI is nearly a drop-in replacement for docker such that `alias docker=podman` works for many of the most common use cases.

If you don't care about the security implications of running containers as root via a client/server protocol, then by all means keep using Docker. I've switched to podman and I'm happy with my decision, but to each their own.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-06 15:16:16+00:00
Do they "recognize" that they don't know the word, or are there just no statistically plausible surroundings that they can embed a nonsense word into other than settings that usually surround un-tokenizable words?

If you told them to write a Lewis Carroll poem about a nonsense word, it wouldn't have any problem. Not because it "recognizes" the word as being like a nonsense word in a Lewis Carroll poem, but because those poems are filled with other un-tokenizable words that could be replaced with anything.

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that LLMs are Mad-Libs at scale. Which are actually very useful. If there are paragraphs where I can swap out the words for other words, and generate a plausible idea, I can try it out in the real world and it might really work.
by imajoredinecon | 2025-09-06 15:16:49+00:00
Agreed. I work at a highly successful small company with a reputation for being grindy, and what that looks like in reality is probably 55 hours a week of largely focused productive work: typical core hours are 9-6:45ish, and you work longer a day or two a week and put in the odd evening or weekend hour. It’s hard to imagine working 9-9 every day
by crazygringo | 2025-09-06 15:17:22+00:00
> I've never seen that with useful tech tools before

I've seen it all the time. Version control, code review, unit testing, all of these are top-down.

Tech tools like git instead of CVS and Subversion, or Node instead of Java, may be bottom-up. But practices are very much top-down, so I see AI fitting the pattern very well here. It feels very similar to code review in terms of the degree to which it changes developer practices.
by nkko | 2025-09-06 15:17:23+00:00
That should be moved toward the top, will do it manually. This was 98% loop, albeit very messy one. More an exploration of the process itself. The biggest value is the meta learning. Ideally we should save traces of prompts and process itself as a verifiable or observable artifact, instead of code itself. At the end of the day, outcome over code.
by andsoitis | 2025-09-06 15:17:40+00:00
> When America was strongest, we had a large and increasing middle class, and the top marginal tax rate was above 70% - it was in the 90s.

I think you got this wrong. According to my sources the highest marginal income tax rate was 39.6%.

It was during the 50s, 60s, and 70s that it never dipped below 70%.

Source: https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Inco...

The other thing is that different dimensions of the economy and other societal aspect have different lagging effects so you cannot simply assume causation or correlation between things during the same time frame.
by kaladin-jasnah | 2025-09-06 15:18:16+00:00
As someone graduating from undergrad soon, and a intense and passionate person in CS, all of these reasons are seriously making me reconsider the idea of doing a PhD.

I've done the 36-hour straight work grinds, and working from 10 pm to 6 am for multiple days a week. However, I'm tired of doing that, and I've experienced enough burnout already. I'm also not okay with doing highly skilled work for more than 40 hours a week for pay that is almost demeaning—in the range of 35-45k a year. I'm more okay with it at a startup because at least the pay isn't THAT bad at more established ones with multiple rounds of funding. Just like the author, I have people in my life I'd rather devote time to because they bring be happiness. I'd like to have the savings to do practical and important things, such as do on vacation (which I find immensely good for my mental health), buy things for my other hobbies, and buy a house and have enough money to raise kids.

At least in Switzerland, I've heard your coworkers look down on your for NOT taking breaks and leaving at 5. The stipends are a bit nicer. Maybe it's worth it there. Maybe it's worth it anyway because the lack of CS jobs now will translate to requiring a PhD in the future. Maybe I should go through the extended hazing ritual known as a PhD because a startup's work won't be as technically rewarding as a PhD (the only person I know who wanted to do a PhD is now at a startup).

I still don't think the way we want people to work like this is okay. Sometimes I am a 996, but I sure don't want to be one when I need an extrinsic voice screaming into my ear to keep going because I'm not allowed to take a break.
by striking | 2025-09-06 15:18:23+00:00
I think it's worth remembering that there's room for thoughtful design in the way kids play. Are LLMs a useful tool for encouraging children to develop their imaginations or their visual or spatial reasoning skills? Or would these tools shape their thinking patterns to exactly mirror those encoded into the LLM?

I think there's something beautiful and important about the fact that parents shape their kids, leaving with them some of the best (and worst) aspects of themselves. Likewise with their interactions with other people.

The tech is cool. But I think we should aim to be thoughtful about how we use it.
by simne | 2025-09-06 15:18:28+00:00
Why not use some simpler, like old good UNIX Make? Or for business logic existing for a long time Lua, which is much easier to learn/use than Clojure.

I love functional paradigm, but sometimes fp lovers, looks like evangelists of Blockchain or LLMs - not bad things, but all have their limits, and not very useful without powerful support of large library of fp structures and debugging programs. So, trying to use fp, you dive into abyss, writing with fp, but debugging with low level C debugger.

BTW, as I know, OcaML, flagship of fp, just don't have graphics debugger, so people used to write on Haskell using old classic REPL technology, than, thanks to syntax similarity, most code just compile on OcaML without additional moves.
by ramesh31 | 2025-09-06 15:19:10+00:00
I think it's fine for kids who want to do that. You should try to get yourself into a situation around other motivated kids who want to do something great together as a tight knit focused team at that age; it's fun and you'll make lifelong friends. But by 30 you'll start to understand that work is just a tiny part of life and not really what matters at all. It will naturally shake itself out by then as simply no one will accept it in this country as a widespread policy.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-06 15:19:16+00:00
The primary benefit of multiple sensor fusion from a safety standpoint isn't an absolute decrease in errors.

It's the ability to detect sensor disagreements at all.

With single modality sensors, you have no way of truly detecting failures in that modality, other than hacks like time-series normalizing (aka expected scenarios).

If multiple sensor modalities disagree, even without sensor fusion, you can at least assume something might be awry and drop into a maximum safety operation mode.

But we'd think that the budget config of the Boeing 737 MAX would have taught us that tying safety critical systems to single sources of truth is a bad idea... (in that case, critical modality / single physical sensor)
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-06 15:19:16+00:00
Major industry players were doing that for a while now. It's just hard to actually design training regimes that give LLMs better hallucination-avoidance capabilities.

And it's easy to damage the hallucination-avoidance capabilities by training an LLM wrong. As OpenAI has demonstrated when they fried the o3 with RLVR that encouraged guesswork.

That "SAT test incentivizes guesswork" example they give in the article is one they had to learn for themselves the hard way.
by pvtmert | 2025-09-06 15:19:17+00:00
You can tell users that "you are holding it wrong" or fix the actual problem that exists in the first place. Good luck telling millions of people to not to bookmark certain version, instead use this or that... Maybe, add just a redirect, a simple page with the link that says "Hey, this documentation has moved to there, click here".

Just put this thread into a whatever LLM. I overall see 2 major themes here. Compatibility and stability issues, all over the place. Not just documentation, but with other tools. Compose schema v2 does not match the current/latest one, missing functionality (although this one is acceptable at certain level), etc.

Also, as soon as the docs were "posted", it became obsolete/useless/deprecated. I mean, what sort of quality are we talking about here?
by rpdillon | 2025-09-06 15:19:42+00:00
The purpose of these laws is not to protect children.

> "We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website [having to] certify that 'I am 18," Vought told the undercover Centre for Climate Reporting staffers. "We've got a number of states that are passing this and then you know what happens is the porn company says 'We're not going to do business in your state'—which, of course, is entirely what we were after."
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-09-06 15:19:47+00:00
We probably need to rethink how companies are structured - there are (many) companies with revenues greater than most countries but are (in theory) dictatorships with no official ability to change course if the one guy who owns the shares does not want to.

Who is the ‘demos’ in a company? Who gets a vote ? Will voting really slow things down?
by jackienotchan | 2025-09-06 15:20:18+00:00
The first two quotes are from founders of:

- BrowserUse - Founded 2024

- Greptile - Founded 2023

The third quote is from a VC who has never founded a startup himself and has a clear interest in pushing founders to trade work-life balance for his own quick returns.

So none of these people worked on anything longer than 2 years. I wonder what will happen if we check back in 5–10 years. Will they still be doing and promoting 996, or will they be burned out and have changed their minds? Make your bets.
by brabel | 2025-09-06 15:20:21+00:00
What are you talking about?? There was lots of resistance to computers at office jobs. Even through the 90s lots of people were still avoiding moving away from the old way and companies had to spend lots of money on training because without that people quickly reverted back to their old ways! I remember that and was taught how to provide such training and how to convince people to adopt new tech! It’s always been a challenge.
by motorest | 2025-09-06 15:20:40+00:00
> Just with those two criteria you’re down to, like, six formats at most, of which Protocol Buffers is the most widely used.

What I dislike the most about blog posts like this is that, although the blogger is very opinionated and critical of many things, the post dates back to 2018, protobuf is still dominant, and apparently during all these years the blogger failed to put together something that they felt was a better way to solve the problem. I mean, it's perfectly fine if they feel strongly about a topic. However, investing so much energy to criticize and even throw personal attacks on whoever contributed to the project feels pointless and an exercise in self promotion at the expense of shit-talking. Either you put something together that you feel implements your vision and rights some wrongs, or don't go out of your day to put down people. Not cool.
by jaynetics | 2025-09-06 15:20:41+00:00
I mean, it only takes a few paragraphs of filler text, hyperbole, "catchy" juxtapositions, and loose logical threads to raise suspicions.

But yeah, I would also like these two minutes of my life back.

Well, as someone who has also generated some text with LLMs, at least I learned that it's still possible to generate truly excruciating stuff with the "right" model and prompt.
by rpdillon | 2025-09-06 15:20:41+00:00
Vought confirmed as much.

> "We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website [having to] certify that 'I am 18," Vought told the undercover Centre for Climate Reporting staffers. "We've got a number of states that are passing this and then you know what happens is the porn company says 'We're not going to do business in your state'—which, of course, is entirely what we were after."

https://reason.com/2024/08/19/age-check-laws-are-a-back-door...
by rsyring | 2025-09-06 15:21:06+00:00
I've always told my team: focus on being super productive in the 40 hours a week you are working. Then go home and do something that really matters.

My belief has been very few lay on their death bed wishing they had given more to their jobs. But many lay there regretting they didn't invest more in their families.

I also believe that 40 truly focused hours is more productive than many people who do 50+ hour weeks just because of the limitations of human physiology.

There are times when a crunch is warranted but they are much fewer than any would be lead to believe. If, on principle, you take away "overtime" as an option, then it makes your more focused with the time you do have.

I've employed people doing software development mostly billed by the hour for almost 20 years. So my personal wealth is directly tied to how much my team works. And in all that time, there was only once that I asked a dev to do 45 hour weeks for a summer due to exceptional circumstances. And I truly asked, I didn't insist.

I've also personally put in more time than that in some weeks/months, but I compensate by working less when that period is done. And, I always know it's not long term sustainable, so there needs to be a goal in mind.

It's not perfect, but I'm confident my priorities are in the right place. And I'm confident my team benefits greatly by being cared for in this way.
by ysf-imly | 2025-09-06 15:21:25+00:00
KoStudy is my humble attempt to reimagine what a learning app should be in the age of AI. It's open-source, built with React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, and leverages the Google Gemini API (and other cool AI stuff) to deliver a personalized, engaging learning experience that doesn't feel like a chore. No cheap gamification to sell more ads, and no slapping a chatbot on a decade-old quiz and calling it "AI."

GitHub repo: https://github.com/youssef-imlyh... And a quick tour: https://youtu.be/VsXnGYEopW0?si=... Live Demo: https://kostudy.netlify.app/ Some of its features:

- AI-Powered Question Generation: It can dynamically generate challenging questions on any topic from videos, PDFs, or whatever you throw at it. - AI Chat Assistant: Interactive chat explains concepts with rich media. - Live AI Call: Real-time voice Q&A for instant feedback. - AI App Studio: Generate complete learning game apps from scratch (like lovable or bolt, but has your context). - Interactive SagaLearn: Choose-your-own-adventure style learning that's actually kinda fun.

- And many more...

I'd love to hear your thoughts! How can we make KoStudy even better? What features are you most excited about?

(Also, if you're not technical and just need help setting it up, hit me up. I'm happy to walk you through it!)

Thanks for checking it out!
by zbrozek | 2025-09-06 15:21:35+00:00
It's not 2010 anymore. They will asymptotically reach approximately twice the price of a camera, since they need both a transmit and receive optical path. Right now the cheapest of the good LiDARs are around 3-4x that. So we're getting close, and we're already within the realm large-scale commercial viability.
by BananaEarwig | 2025-09-06 15:22:03+00:00
As a long time programmer focused on graphics and performance and tooling. I came to ChrysaLisp via knowing of taos on cix and curious about what it was all about.

The new docs provide deep info and clarity from the get go. I don't think they should replace looking at the source and actually playing with the system but they're an accelerator especially if you come from the c {} universe.

It's been a pleasure to watch ChrysaLisp develop over the years, but much more to understand the thought process and implementation of the changes.

Chris the inventor of this and taos, is a unique mind and his work is the best exposition of that.

Fork the repo, install and build it. Cry at the full system build time. Connect windows, Mac, raspberry pi's and watch the system dynamically adapt to the new nodes arriving and disappearing.

Enjoy the automagic work distribution, it's all free!
by beepbooptheory | 2025-09-06 15:22:06+00:00
From the TFA:

> That’s why we (at DuckDuckGo) started offering Duck.ai for protected chatbot conversations and optional, anonymous AI-assisted answers in our private search engine. In doing so, we’re demonstrating that privacy-respecting AI services are feasible.

I don't know if its a great idea, or just I wonder what does make it feasible, but there is a kind of implied recommendation here.

By "killing innovation" do you just mean: "we need to allow these companies to make money in possibly a predatory way, so they have the money to do... something else"? Or what is the precise concern here? What facet needs to be innovated upon?
by CodesInChaos | 2025-09-06 15:23:20+00:00
> If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else

When I started using it, public repositories were free, and private repositories needed a paid account.

The ToS did not require public repos to be open source, only permission for basic operations like fork (the button which clones, not creating derivative works) and download was required.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-06 15:24:17+00:00
Are they tricks, or are they topological, non-Euclidean integrations? My guess is as the occipital is not 3-D, but dual input 2-D that splinters into thousands of topological units, that our 2.5-D (it's not 3-D in the slightest) vision slammed together on the primate face for parallax response times is uniquely suited for plastic revolutions in dimensions beyond 2-D, not just 3-D.
by alphazard | 2025-09-06 15:24:49+00:00
I expect we will continue to see the big AI companies pushing for privacy protections. Sam Altman made a comparison to attorney-client privilege in an interview. There is a significant hold out to using these things as fully trusted personal assistants or personal knowledge bases because of the lack of privacy.

The only real solution is locally running models, but that goes against the business model. So instead they will seek regulation to create privacy by fiat. Fiat privacy still has all the same problems as telling your therapist that you killed someone, or keeping your wallet keys printed out on paper in a safe. It's dependent on regulations and definitions of greater good that you can't control.