MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnh-hn | 2025-09-29 16:23:12+00:00
I think this is only half of it.

Years ago, I worked at a company where my time was split between working on a bespoke platform for an older client and a generic platform that would be used for all clients going forward. The bespoke platform was essentially being used to fund the development of the generic platform.

The contrast between the two was stark: the bespoke platform was legacy in all its weird glory, and the generic platform was considerably higher quality. Seeing that contrast up close, and flipping between working on each one, was immensely useful to me. It made it clearer why I favour certain approaches over others, and it made concepts easier to explain to others.

Since then, I'm of the opinion you should aim to work with both the good and the bad to clarify the "why" of things.
by dangerface | 2025-09-29 16:23:21+00:00
Yup even when you tell it your version it forgets pretty quickly. Or agrees it messed up and assures you this time it will give you the correct info for your version number then gives you the same command.

Javascript is a nightmare as they change everything constantly. PHP has backwards compatibility for everything so its not really an issue.

It also gives out dated info on salesforce, and im not just talking about the latest and greatest, it recommends stuff that was deprecated years ago.
by hellisothers | 2025-09-29 16:23:23+00:00
I describe this as the Artist vs Scientist software engineer. I’m also an “artist” and approach the problem as a ball of clay, hacking away at it (and sometimes starting with a new ball) until the solution appears beneath my hands. The Scientist approach is to know the solution ahead of time , write tests to ensure it comes out the expected way, and then execute.
by jsmith45 | 2025-09-29 16:24:15+00:00
Phonics based reading is all about sounding out unknown words. The idea is that the student would understand if somebody else read the text out loud, so if we can teach the kids how to convert the written words into sounds, they can understand many new words they first come across. The core idea is to teach the kids that certain letters or groups of letters map to certain sounds (phonemes) at a start, and then gradually introduce more and more rules of English phonetics, allowing students to successfully learn to sound out even more complicated words.

The hope is that students will gradually learn to just recognize words by sight, which the overwhelming majority do eventually learn to do, and just need to sound out unfamiliar words. The fact that some students have struggled to learn to recognize words and need to sound most out is part of why people try to create alternatives, but those largely don't work well.

Of course, English does have some tricky phonetics. We have some words with multiple different pronunciations. We have some words with the same phonemes but different meanings that differ solely based on syllable stress. There are even some words whose pronunciation simply must be memorized, as there is no coherent rule to get from the word to the pronunciation (see for example Colonel).
by Ukv | 2025-09-29 16:24:35+00:00
> This kind of generalization is so old.

I feel you're objecting to the wrong comment. sebstefan appropriately specified "the people who came to interview for the Rust roles of my company [...]", and was giving it as a counterpoint to the previous comment's broad generalization.

> there's a lot of Java developers because there's a lot of Java jobs, universities teach it, and it's been around a fairly long time when compared to Rust, at least... i.e. there's a lot of forces pushing people to using Java, and once you learn a language and get a job in such language, there's a lot of inertia that will keep most people on that same language for a long time.

The fact that one language is the mainstream default taught in many schools, whereas the other requires going out of your way to pick up, could well be a factor in the latter having more knowledgeable average applicants - in the same way I'd expect Gentoo users to be more technologically competent than Windows users on average.

> Yes, they can eventually choose something else, but only if that's a thing in your region, which may not be the case at all...

I presume the majority of Rust programmers learn it online.
by rafaelm | 2025-09-29 16:24:46+00:00
It's 100x more difficult than you think it is. I come from a "semi-sanctioned" country, and it's extremely hard. Opening a bank account is impossible unless you can travel to the US. Stripe won't touch you with a 100 foot pole.

I can't even imagine how hard it would be from Iraq, even if it's currently "not sanctioned" in theory.
by schoen | 2025-09-29 16:25:30+00:00
Philosophers have worried for a long time about whether we can actually observe causation.

David Hume was famous for arguing in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that we can't observe it and we instead have a "custom" or habit of expecting effects to follow causes.

> After the constant conjunction of two objects—heat and flame, for instance, weight and solidity—we are determined by custom to expect the one from the appearance of the other.

Religious philosophers have sometimes gone to the extreme of occasionalism, where they've maintained that patterns and regularities in nature were just habits or customs that God chooses to follow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism
by codethief | 2025-09-29 16:25:32+00:00
> The EU is demonstrating itself as a more and more corrupt institution that is not democratic (in the sense of doing what the people want it to do) at all.

While I agree that democracy could be strengthened at the EU level, representative democracy for better or for worse doesn't imply the representatives' decisions have to match the public's opinion at all times.

> I'm considering that the UK did not take a bad decision of leaving the EU.

That's ironic, given that the UK has always seemed way ahead of the EU when it comes to mass surveillance.[0]

[0]: See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/uk-government-knows-ho... for a recent example.
by gruez | 2025-09-29 16:25:34+00:00
>Say you wanna influence how people feel about social issues, what computer user is "jucier" then?

How are you going to "influence how people feel about social issues" without being overly obvious? In contrast there's plenty of nefarious stuff you can straightforwardly do on corporate machines: insider trading, corporate espionage, sabotage, PII theft, ransomware, and credit card fraud just to name a few.
by doug_durham | 2025-09-29 16:25:48+00:00
I'm a coder and I've never had your experience. It usually does an amazing job. I think that coders have an advantage because there are many questions I would never ask an LLM because of my intuition on what would work well and what wouldn't. In your case I would have dumped the output of `rsync --help` into the context window once I saw it wasn't familiar with my particular version of rsync. That's they way these tools work.
by lilOnion | 2025-09-29 16:26:01+00:00
The thing that bothers me the most is government apps. How can a government require me to use a certain os or browser to use something.

What are someways that we can be active about this and have support for these apps everywhere. I'm in Europe . For banking apps, sure ok, I can still go tho the bank but what if that becomes unavailable for me to do. Our countries can't build software based on evil companies like Google.
by jccalhoun | 2025-09-29 16:26:13+00:00
Fedex is the worst. I live in a house with a wooden fence all around. The sidewalk goes to the gate to get to the front door. Once fedex delivered something to my back deck where there is no sidewalk.

My parents live in a rural area. Two story house with a clear front and back door. Fedex decided to deliver a package by putting it on the storm cellar door on the side of the house.
by bgwalter | 2025-09-29 16:26:14+00:00
Here’s a breakdown of the networks present, what they mean, and how they relate to the map’s context ...

The first red flags.

Conclusion

The map is a diagram of networks—pipelines, oilfields, terminals, company concessions, and shipping routes—depicting the Middle East’s oil as a vast, interdependent system. These networks are both physical (infrastructure) and abstract (ownership, contracts), making the map a powerful tool for understanding the strategic importance and international entanglement of oil in the mid-20th century. AI analysis.

And now the last paragraph literally says "AI analysis".

> It's not AI slop, it's probably not even AI. You simply are unable to parse the description, or the map, or both.

Yeah, right.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-29 16:26:25+00:00
The idea that people should be content with an investment that has 0% real return in a very risky environment (video game development) is not a serious argument, and not one that you would respect either.

If you have $100M tied up in a game company that (maybe!) returns 3% a year (matching inflation), why the hell wouldn't you sell it for $100M, and then go put that in bonds which will return 5% with much less risk and no work or time needed on your part?

Again, it's not fair to expect charity from owners (public or private) so you can stretch your dollar further. Whether we are talking about video games, napkins, coffee beans, or warehouse leases, it's all investments that give returns, and generally people with money are extremely smart about good and bad investments, just like you would be if you were in that position (i.e. not voluntarily taking 3% when 5% is easier and safer).
by miladyincontrol | 2025-09-29 16:27:34+00:00
I relate some to the premise but for an entirely different reason than privacy.

Simply one of my less common hobbies has an incredibly high hit rate of gimmick social media accounts stealing videos for their own profit, with zero credit, while highly misrepresenting things. A problem not nearly unique to the hobby nor any one type of media, but a problem plaguing it nonetheless.

Its basically pushed an already obscure hobby even more so.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-09-29 16:27:36+00:00
> Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?)

Cities: Skylines managed to fill that gap, but then C:S2 was an utter dud on release.

I think part of the problem is that we've reached a point where the players expect each individual citizen to be simulated, with the traffic to match, but doing that creates such a massive demand on CPU power that even a modern monster system will struggle once your city reaches the high 6-digit population. Simulating 100K vehicles in real time isn't easy. Even if you're not rendering them all because of draw distance limitations, you're still running path finding regularly if you want vehicles to be smart and try to bypass traffic jams, not to mention just trying to make them respond to traffic signals and not rear-end each other.
by rietta | 2025-09-29 16:28:07+00:00
I have started to come around to thinking that as a practical matter as an individuL, making sure things actually make it into an actual bona fide landfill and ate buried is the most ecologically friendly thing we can do. All the other alternatives seem to break down and end up with stuff either not being encapsulated and impacting the environment that way, or shipped off to other countries and ending up in the oceans.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-09-29 16:28:22+00:00
20%? I imagine most of us use 0.1% of Jira. And it's the same 0.1% for all users in the org. The app is massive, millions of lines of code and we're effectively using like 60 SQL statements that run within it.

create issue, edit issue, move issue, update issue status, close sprint, repeat
by fragmede | 2025-09-29 16:28:25+00:00
I'd go a bit further and say it's not just access to a machine shop than makes it. I don't think I'm belong pedantic, but manufacturing has evolved since the 80's. If it were just access to a team of people with a couple of machines for metal, those aren't that difficult and those still exist, albeit far fewer of them. What China does have is one stop prototype to full stack mass manufacturing places. For even the simplist device, a machine shop won't do. You'll need (powder coating) painting, packaging design and manufacturing, and shipping. The attitude of the US machine shop is that it's your problem. "We're just a machine shop, you gotta deal with the rest yourself. Which, I mean, fine, but I don't want to become an expert in manufacturing products. My specialty is writing code for my product. Meanwhile, China's got a one stop shop to take my prototype that I ghetto rigged with cardboard and duct tape with a breadboard, and make iterate on a professional protoype with me, and then take it to a mass manufactured product I can sell to consumers, with a smile on their face. The Americans are going to make fun of me to my face for not knowing the difference between 316L vs A500 structural tube. Now, one could argue that I need to develop thicker skin, but fuck that. China's gonna do what I want without being a bag of dicks and help make me a pile of money. So tell me which one you'd choose.
by mlindner | 2025-09-29 16:28:41+00:00
A movie is something you watch, a game is something you play. It's not there to tell you a grand story. It's there to wrap some good gameplay in some storytelling packaging. A game is closer to a novel than it is to a hollywood movie. The most loved games (high replayability is a key component) often have quite lacking "story" if any story at all. What makes them shine is how they feel to play, even better if they encourage your own imagination to invent your own story. When you try to make a game into a movie the true focus is lost. If your game can only be played "once" (not including tacking-on achievements/side-quests/etc) then your game is a movie and not a game.
by ryandrake | 2025-09-29 16:29:27+00:00
Not a fan on hiring based on popularity, but I do wish companies spent more time on actual culture fit and whether or not the person they are hiring is a raging asshole. I've worked with my share of "brilliant jerks" and they're just awful to be around. Even if they are John Carmack level of coding, it's not worth it--they are a net negative because of things like poor attitude, lack of communication skill, arrogance, my-way-or-the-highway stance on everything... I wish that filtering these people out was 50% of my company's interviews!
by gwd | 2025-09-29 16:30:03+00:00
Can I make a distinction between "friction" and "effort"?

If you're riding a bike up a hill, you can't go up without effort. But not all of your effort is actually moving you up the hill -- some of it is being lost in friction: inefficiencies in your muscles, friction in your gears and wheel and chain, wind resistance.

Similarly, you can't learn anything without effort; but it's often the case that effort you put in ends up wasted: if you're learning a language, time spent looking for content rather than studying content is friction; effort spent forcing yourself to read something that's too hard is effort you could have spent more profitably elsewhere.

Put that way, we should minimize friction, so that we can maximize the amount our effort goes towards actually growing.
Show HN: Economic Curves Simulator: Armey and Laffer
by julienreszka | 2025-09-29 16:30:11+00:00
This web app simulates two key economic curves: the Armey curve (public spending vs. economic growth) and the Laffer curve (tax rates vs. consent to taxation). Both use quadratic models to illustrate inverted U-shaped relationships. Adjust parameters to explore different scenarios.
by newfocogi | 2025-09-29 16:30:14+00:00
"Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer is closing the doors on her consumer software startup Sunshine, and is selling the company’s assets to her new AI startup, Dazzle" and "all of Sunshine’s employees will move to the new company".

Under what conditions is it better to buy the assets and hire the employees instead of just change the name and product offering of the company? Is it just to get the investors off the cap table?
by heavyset_go | 2025-09-29 16:30:54+00:00
Laptops and desktops are nearly as bad.

You can't share an app you develop without first paying Apple and Microsoft a recurring fee and also get their explicit permission for every update to it.

At any point, for any reason, they can decide they don't like you and Gatekeeper and/or Defender will block your app from running on nearly every computer.

Open source operating systems are closer, but there are still PCs that have locked bootloaders.

All the pieces are in place, all vendors have to do is flip a bit and you'll never run anything without permission again. And it will happen because think of the children/national security/hackers/scammers/trillion dollar companies' bottom lines.
by renshijian | 2025-09-29 16:31:10+00:00
This isn't just a competition between app stores; it's a struggle for choice and dignity Your phone shouldn't be a cage carefully constructed by others, but an extension of your own will. Allowing apps like F-Droid to exist preserves an enclave of freedom, transparency, and trust in the digital world. It protects not a particular platform, but our fundamental dignity as digital citizens: my device, my choice
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-29 16:31:19+00:00
The solution for prejudice, bias, and rigid thinking in general is education and experience outside of your personal worldview. Actively trying to understand the world through someone else's perspective is how you grow as a person/professional and expand your own perspective.

As an engineer and a strong generalist, I find that simply knowing that another angle or solution exists is enough to change my view of a problem and come up with solutions that are better than my first instinct.
by JohnBooty | 2025-09-29 16:31:32+00:00
I would like to know what is meant by "Computer science jobs"

The context is that the author is a computer science professor discussing the prospects of people graduating from his program, so I would interpret this very broadly as "the sorts of jobs that a person with a newly-minted computer science degree tends to pursue."

Typically this is jobs where one's job revolves primarily around writing code.

To me, Computer Science would be like research type jobs.

These are all arbitrary labels in an ever-changing field so I'm not going to say anybody is right or wrong, but I'm quite certain this is not what others typically mean when they say "computer science jobs."

IT would be working on Internal Applications for a Business

If a person's job primarily revolves around writing and shipping code this is most commonly just called "software engineering" or "software development" whether or not it's internal software or some kind of external product offered for sale externally.

If it's internal application development, the department might typically be called "IT" but the job role would still typically just be "software developer" or "software engineer."

This is what I did, in the 70s/80s/90s it was all in-house systems. Starting early 2000s, systems like SAP. I have since retired

I've been at it since the late 90s. Just a baby compared to you. :D

Congrats on making it thru and retiring!
by taeric | 2025-09-29 16:31:47+00:00
My gut is that the recommendation flows from the idea of a portable solution with more controls? That is, io_uring is limited in both target deployments, and in what you can do to adjust performance considerations.

The first is somewhat obvious, with how new io_uring is and how it is specifically a linux thing. I don't think that is necessarily bad. My guess is you can get really good performance with relatively little code compared to other options.

The second, though, is a bit tougher to consider. For one, it will be more code. Managing workers is managing code that you probably don't have on your radar. That said, you have full control over the worker so that you can make different priority work queues in ways that I don't see how you could do with io_uring.
by ewhanley | 2025-09-29 16:31:53+00:00
Wedding photographers often ask people to refrain from taking photos during the ceremony. It sucks to have every photo that you hired a professional to take have a sea of people holding up cell phones so they can each take their own photo. In this case it's not rude to request that people not take images, it's a practical matter so people can have photos of their wedding instead of photos of people taking photos of their wedding. Much of this wouldn't be necessary if people could just be present at events instead of rigorously chronicling their every experience.
by agedclock | 2025-09-29 16:32:04+00:00
> Watch any home VHS video from the 80s. Half the people the person holding the camera points it at say "stop filming me"

I suspect a lot of that is more to do with them being worried about their how they look on the film than actually being on the film itself.

> There's just always been people uncomfortable with it.

Of course there are going to be people uncomfortable with it. I am. The issue is that it isn't ever going to go backwards and being video recorded in public by amateurs has been around for almost 40 years. The ship has sailed a long time ago.
by jMyles | 2025-09-29 16:32:49+00:00
> Basic human decency.

While I think we all agree that this is crucially important, for many of us the affront to decency is not the capture of photons that have previously bounced off someone's skin, but the very idea that that person has a claim to those photons in perpetuity.

I think it's indecent to suggest that someone needs to avert their gaze (or in this case, their CMOS sensor) because I happen to be in the area.
by BizarroLand | 2025-09-29 16:32:55+00:00
Here is a sample email template you can use to send to your congressperson if that is helpful:

Dear <Congressperson>,

I am writing to you out of deep concern regarding Google’s recent decision to require all Android developers worldwide to register directly with Google by providing personal government identification and other sensitive details as a condition for distributing their applications. While this policy may appear to be framed as a security measure, its consequences would be far-reaching and detrimental to digital freedom, competition, and privacy.

For over a decade, the F-Droid project has demonstrated that safe, secure, and privacy-respecting app distribution is possible without central corporate gatekeeping. F-Droid and similar open-source platforms provide verifiable builds, transparent review processes, and applications free of hidden trackers or predatory monetization schemes. By contrast, Google Play has repeatedly hosted malicious apps, showing that centralization is not the same as security.

The new registration decree effectively forces independent developers to surrender their personal identities to Google, erecting unnecessary barriers to participation in the software ecosystem. Worse, it would prevent alternative app stores like F-Droid from continuing to operate, depriving millions of users of trusted open-source applications and their ability to freely choose how they use their own devices.

This is not only a matter of consumer choice, but of civil liberties. Forcing creators to register their identities with a single corporate gatekeeper in order to distribute software is analogous to requiring authors or artists to register with a private company in order to publish their works. It strikes at the heart of free expression and innovation.

I respectfully urge you to take action to prevent this consolidation of control. Whether through competition oversight, digital rights protections, or support for open-source distribution, Congress has a role to play in ensuring that security justifications are not abused to restrict user freedom and entrench monopolistic power.

Please help preserve a healthy, competitive ecosystem where developers can create freely and users can choose openly — without unnecessary corporate barriers.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter, and for your continued service to our district and the nation.

Respectfully,

-<Your name>