MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hamdingers | 2025-09-06 16:50:09+00:00
I tried 10-4 for 6 months at a company that had a mix of people working 4 and 5 days, it made me less productive and more burnt out as a senior engineer.

I have ~5 hours of productive creative energy per sleep, others may be different but that's me. Ideally I give 4 hours to the job, spend 4 hours reviewing/meeting/etc. and have 1 for myself. If I push myself beyond that, I start doing substandard work, so 10-4 meant I either did fewer hours of productive work per week, stole my personal creative hours, or delivered substandard work. I did all three depending on the week, but in any case my productivity overall suffered, that appeared in my peer reviews, and the stress slowly built up until I went back to working 5 days.
by swed420 | 2025-09-06 16:50:57+00:00
Agreed, and guess how many countries prior to COVID followed our CDC's lead? The answer is most of them.

The fact remains that people are slowly waking up to this and altering their behavior even into 2025, since it's not always too late to do so. You can see this in the steady growth of the /r/ZeroCovidCommunity subreddit.
by martin-t | 2025-09-06 16:51:00+00:00
While real nukes still work.

What bad thing exactly happens if China wins? What does winning even mean? They can't invade because nukes.

Can they manipulate elections? Yes, so we'll do the opposite of the great firewall and block them from the internet. Block their citizens from entering physically, too.

We should be doing this anyway, given China is known to force them to spy for them.
by networkcrypt | 2025-09-06 16:52:22+00:00
I’ve published the Verilog reference implementation of ROOM (Read-Once-Only Memory) — a hardware primitive designed to enforce true one-time key release.

ROOM is modeled after a quantum measurement enforcing the no-cloning theorem: a stored value can be read once under matching metadata predicates, then the register collapses irreversibly, and all subsequent reads return only pseudorandom obfuscation.

The repo includes modules for: • Classical ROOM registers (read-once with collapse latch) • Metadata-gated registers (basis/phase/tags) • Entangled peer-collapse behavior • Collapse-derived entropy harvesting • QKD-style demonstration registers (BB84/E91 emulation)

GitHub: https://github.com/fcunnane/QSymbolic Blog post with context: https://qsymbolic.com/2025/09/06/room-read-once-only-memory-...

I’d be interested in feedback from FPGA, ASIC, and cryptography folks — especially thoughts on integrating ROOM with existing PQC protocols.
by zestyping | 2025-09-06 16:52:36+00:00
Also wrong. You can always destroy value by making a mistake. Trading and then realizing you made a mistake, just like investing labour and then realizing you made a mistake, does not create value. Trading is not special in this regard.

Value can be created either way: through labour or trade.

Regardless, your statement that all wealth is created by trade is false.
by pwython | 2025-09-06 16:52:38+00:00
I'm not a full-time coder, it's maybe 25% of my job. And am not one of those people that have conversations with LLMs. But I gotta say I actually like the occasional banter, it makes coding fun again for me. Like sometimes after Claude or whatever fixes a frustrating bug that took ages to figure out, I'll be like "You son of a bitch you fixed it! Ok, now do..."

I've been learning a hell of a lot from LLMs, and am doing way more coding these days for fun, even if they are doing most of the heavy lifting.
by jmclnx | 2025-09-06 16:52:56+00:00
I remember many decades ago while in a Business Class, we were talking about equity and the Stock market.

I asked "Why can't the company buy back stock to increase equity/price ?".

The professor said that that is a very bad thing to do and is probably illegal. I believe I heard later on some change occurred during Reagan's administration that allowed this.

So here we are, grifts are allowed and many businesses seem to be into scams.

We need the old restrictions back :)
by kolanos | 2025-09-06 16:53:17+00:00
HW4 is really a game changer. I was absolutely floored by HW4 FSD during a recent test drive. Tesla is accomplishing some truly groundbreaking technical achievements here. But you wouldn't know it through all the Elon Musk noise (pro and con). I'd encourage anyone to take a test drive and put FSD through its paces. I went in with a super critical mindset and walked away stunned.
by jrockway | 2025-09-06 16:53:35+00:00
I'm not making a value judgement. I'm saying, how are they going to punish you, as a burger flipper, for not saying their TV commercial tagline? Demote you to burger flipper? That's already your job. So why pay people to build a system to track their metrics, when they realistically have no way of making this happen.

Pay people $30/hour and I bet they'll say it every time without software yelling at them. (With the software in place, I have never heard the line "you rule" at Burger King, but I also only go like twice a year. So why write it? It doesn't work.)
by annoyingcyclist | 2025-09-06 16:54:45+00:00
A founder who commits to 996 is as a side effect building a brand of "grit", "hustle", etc with their investors. That gives them options, regardless of whether 996 is actually useful for productivity and regardless of who is actually working harder as a result of 996: a golden jetpack into an executive role elsewhere when the company is sold for scrap, fundraising terms that give them liquidity not available to employees, a VC job, etc. They're also insulated from 996 to a degree that employees aren't. No one is going to count hours or badge swipes for the CTO/CEO of the company, and no one's going to tell them they can't leave the office early to spend time with their family. Even if they do work those hours, their job is different enough from normal employees to provide some protection from burnout.

As a rank and file employee, you get none of that. The investors don't even know who you are. The outcome for you if the company fails is that you're looking for another job while fighting burnout from longer hours and from working somewhere that doesn't respect you enough as a professional to let you manage your own time (which tends to come with other things that encourage burnout). All that to juice an "hours worked" KPI that research tells us is a questionable thing to focus on. You can do better.
by wiether | 2025-09-06 16:54:46+00:00
It's probably easy to self-host Gitlab for a small team working on a limited number of projects.

It's definitely not easy to self-host Gitlab for hundreds of devs working of hundreds of projects. Especially if you use it as your CI/CD pipeline, because now you have to also manage your workers.

Why company chose to pay GitHub instead of self-hosting their Gitlab instance? For the same reason they pay Microsoft for their emails instead of self-hosting them.
by graemep | 2025-09-06 16:55:10+00:00
So over the last 15 years the solid examples of moves that have been committed to are:

1. Denmark’s Ministry for Digital Affairs

2. Two Danish cities

3. One German state

4. The Italian Ministry of defence

5. One Spanish region

They also say French education ministry advised schools to move off the free versions of the "free versions" of MS Office 365 and Google Docs. They do not say anything about how many schools followed the advice, or what they moved to (a paid version of the same? another American supplier?).

Not much for a whole continent.

There will be a lot of resistance to any change. There will be a lot of people like this making the same arguments made here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/debate_for_microsoft_...

Microsoft has successfully had such decisions reversed in the past:

https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Munich-Plans-to-D...
by incanus77 | 2025-09-06 16:55:32+00:00
Agree! We got a used 2015 Fiat 500e for $8k 2.5 years ago and it’s been great as an around-town car. Don’t have kids, but can take a passenger or two in the back if need be (it’s tight) but for two people and errands, it’s been a fantastic value.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-06 16:55:33+00:00
I stopped using Facebook because I saw a video of a little Australian girl maybe 7 years old age wise holding a spider bigger than her face in her hand. I wrote the most internet meme comment I could think of “girl let go of that spider, we gotta set the house on fire” hit the button to post, only it did not post, it gave me an account strike. At the time I was the only developer at my employer who managed our Facebook app integration, so I appealed it, but another AI immediately denied my appeal, or maybe a really fast human idk but they sure didnt know meme culture.

I outrifht stopped using Facebook.

We are doomed if AI is allowed to punish us.
by nkko | 2025-09-06 16:55:37+00:00
The process was confusing. It took for sure at least 100 sessions, haven’t checked the logs, was running it in a VM. And every time it tries to build something while forgetting all of it and then reconstructing bits and pieces just to continue. The article was written at least over 3 context lengths. But it does reconstructs well the iteration on the side of an AI agent.
by orochimaaru | 2025-09-06 16:56:09+00:00
Protobufs aren’t new. They’re really just rpc over https. I’ve used dce-rpc in 1997 which had IDL. I believe CORBA used IDL as well although I personally did not use it. There have been other attempts like ejb, etc. which are pretty much the same paradigm.

The biggest plus with protobuf is the social/financial side and not the technology side. It’s open source and free from proprietary hacks like previous solutions.

Apart from that, distributed systems of which rpc is a sub topic are hard in general. So the expectation would be that it sucks.
by joshdavham | 2025-09-06 16:56:12+00:00
> [Java] has a huge ecosystem

But does it though?

I've just taken a new job writing primarily Java whereas I was previously writing mainly python and typescript.

One of the first things I've noticed is how dead Java's ecosystem (Maven central) seems in comparison to other ecosystems like PyPI, NPM or Cargo.

(Also side note: I've published packages on each of these registries and the publishing process for Maven central is comically terrible! This has to be discouraging people from contributing to the ecosystem.)
by 6r17 | 2025-09-06 16:57:08+00:00
I mean at this point it's more of a "proof-of-work" with shared BP ; I would deff see some domotic hacker get this running - hell maybe i'll do this do if I have some spare time and want to make something like alexa with customized stuff - would still need text to speech and speech to text but that's not really the topic of his set-up ; even for pro use if that's really usable why not just spawn qwen on ARM if that's cheaper - there is a lot of way to read and leverage such bench
by kriops | 2025-09-06 16:57:21+00:00
As long as the companies in question aren't monopolies on violence, it's a complete non-issue. So with that in mind, why would any sane person want to impose such an inefficient mechanism to allocate resources and make decisions within a company or corporation?

The only good thing about democracy in the context of a state, after all, is that every other alternative is worse. But that is strictly because of the fundamentally violent nature of the concept of a state, which does not apply to companies or corporations.
by lazarus01 | 2025-09-06 17:00:04+00:00
Here are the building blocks for any deep learning system and a little bit about llm towards the end.

Graphs - It all starts with computational graphs. These are data structures that include element wise operations, usually matrix multiplication, addition, activation functions and loss function. The computations are differential, resulting in a smooth continuous space, appropriate for continuous optimization (gradient descent), which is covered later.

Layers - Layers are modules comprised of graphs that apply some computation and store the results in a state, referred to as the learned weights. Each Layer learns a deeper, more meaningful representation from the dataset, ultimately learning a latent manifold, which is a highly structured, lower dimensional space, that interpolates between samples, achieving generalization for predictions.

Different machine learning problems and data types use different layers, e.g. Transformers for sequence to sequence learning and convolutions for computer vision models, etc.

Models - Organize stacks of layers for training. Includes a loss function that sends a feedback signal to an optimizer to adjust learned weights during training. Models also include an evaluation metric for accuracy, independent of the loss function.

Forward pass - For training or inference, when an input sequence passes through all the network layers and a geometric transformation is applied producing an output.

Backpropagation - Durring training, after the forward pass, gradients are calculated for each weight with respect to the loss, gradients are just another word for derivatives. The process for calculating the derivatives is called automatic differentiation, which is based on the chain rule of derivation.

Once the derivatives are calculated the optimizers intelligently updates the weights, with respect to the loss. This is the process called “Learning” often referred to as gradient descent.

Now for Large Language Models.

Before models are trained for sequence to sequence learning, the corpus of knowledge must be transformed into embeddings.

Embeddings are dense representations of language that includes a multidimensional space that can capture meaning and context for different combinations of words that are part of sequences.

LLMs use a specific network layer called transformers, that includes something called an attention mechanism.

The attention mechanism uses the embeddings to dynamically update the meaning of words when they are brought together in a sequence.

The model uses three different representations of the input sequence, called the key, query and value matrices.

Using dot product, an attention score is created to identify the meaning of the reference sequence, then a target sequence is generated

The output sequence is predicted one word at a time, based on a sampling distribution of the target sequence, using a softmax function.
by Anarch157a | 2025-09-06 17:00:54+00:00
That is assuming the objects will be at the same place relative to us, which is not true. Like reaching Andromeda. Voyager I will reach oyr neighbouring galaxy in roughly 4.5 billion years, not 45, that's because Androneda is moving in our direction. Reaching Proxima Centaury would take longer than your estimation because of it's orbit around Alpha Centauri A/B.

Estimating time-to-arrival when your destination is also moving at ludicrous speeds is incredibly difficult.
by martin-t | 2025-09-06 17:01:09+00:00
The law really should be "if you cause harm to others you will receive 2x greater harm done to you". And "if you profit from harming others, you will compensate them by 2x of what you gained".

Instead of the current maze of case specific laws.

---

> But I think something more profound needs to happen for these things to be truly fixed. I, admittedly, have no idea what that is.

You know, you're just unwilling to think it because you've been conditioned not to. It's what always happens when inequality (of income, power, etc.) gets too high.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-06 17:01:42+00:00
Sounds like a company full of seriously-terrible developers, from which no valid general conclusions can be drawn.

I use AI a lot myself, but being forced to incorporate it into my workflow is a nonstarter. I'd actively fight against that. It's not even remotely the same thing as fighting source control adoption in general, or refusing to test code before checking it in.
by aeternum | 2025-09-06 17:02:01+00:00
The charitable interpretation is that it is simply a more sensitive and accurate way to say that.

It puts aside all the big is beautiful and similar takes and points to the fact that many American kids, especially those in certain parts of the country are now afflicted with metabolic syndrome (which is closely associated with mitochondrial disfunction). It is well-known that overloading mitochondria with sugar is quite bad for them and a key contributor to type 2 diabetes.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10036395/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32428560/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4408906/
by mananaysiempre | 2025-09-06 17:02:02+00:00
On the contrary, most of that elite has been rotting in the ground for nigh on a century. The elite I’m speaking of is the one that existed pre-1917 (with some offshoots and cultural descendants surviving until the 1960s). They weren’t saints by any means (in ways that sometimes rhyme quite well with slavers in the US, including the chronology), and I’m no monarchist, but it’s telling what part of e.g. meaningful science, or even good secondary education can trace its ancestry to people with pre-October-Revolution education (spoiler: all of it).

(To be clear, a university professor in pre-Socialist Russia is very well off compared to most, and except for the for a lucky few the October Revolution treated them accordingly.)
by herval | 2025-09-06 17:03:55+00:00
That’s sadly the reality of the push to 996. When Google added early breakfast and late dinner, it was the same reasoning: if people stay “in the zone” longer, you end up squeezing out a bit more.

I get the feeling the push to 996 is in part due to the social media epidemic - everyone spends so much time doomscrolling, might as well keep people in the office much longer to account for that extra wasted time too.

Good times
Thoughts about latest meeting of CEOs with Trump
by ok1984 | 2025-09-06 17:04:11+00:00
I am curious, what are your thoughts about the dinner between president Trump and the different tech CEOs?

Personally I am worried that the whole tech sector seems to be owned by those gentlemen's and soon (if not already) we will all be consumers of their technology one way or another, unless you have billions in investment there is no way to compete.
by thinkharderdev | 2025-09-06 17:04:20+00:00
> Then it's not really required if it can be ignored.

It can be required in v2 but not in v1 which was my point. If the client is running v2 while the server is still on v1 temporarily, then there is no problem. The server just ignores the new field until it is upgraded.

> This is the problem, software (and protos) can live for a long time). They might be used by other clients elsewhere that you don't control. What you thought might not required 10 years down the line is not anymore. What you "think" is not a huge deal then becomes a huge deal and can cause downtime.

Part of this is just that trying to create a format that is suitable both as an rpc wire serialization format and ALSO a format suitable for long term storage leads to something that is not great for either use case. But even taking that into account, RDBMS have been dealing with this problem for decades and every RDBMS lets you define fields as non-nullable.

> If a message is required for an interface to function, you should be checking it anyway and returning the correct error. How is that change with proto supporting require?

That's my point, you have to do that check in code which clutters the implementation with validation noise. That and you often can't use the wire message in your internal domain model since you now have to do that defensive null-check everywhere the object is used.

Aside from that, protocol buffers are an interface definition language so should be able to encode some of the validation logic at least (make invalid states unrepresentable and all that). If you are just looking at the proto IDL you have no way of knowing whether a field is really required or not because there is no way to specify that.
by scyclow | 2025-09-06 17:04:32+00:00
The math here doesn't really work out for a couple reasons.

First... sure, if you spend $500,000 on buybacks instead of paying dividends, then large shareholders might make trillions of dollars. But individual investors make money also. In fact, every shareholder will make money in proportion to how much stock they own! The little guy isn't really getting screwed here.

Second, the stock price is determined by supply and demand. Stock buybacks increase the price by reducing supply. But, if we take the example mentioned where the company blows its entire bank account on stock buybacks (thus, harming the actual business)... the stock becomes less valuable, demand goes, and the price goes down.

Stock buybacks are functionally the same as if the company pays a dividend, and then every shareholder decides to reinvest. Except doing it as a buyback is (I believe) more tax efficient since the investor doesn't get hit with income tax before the reinvestment.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-06 17:04:34+00:00
But that's what I'm saying.

Obviously developers invented these things and initially diffused the knowledge.

But you're agreeing with me that they then got enforced top-down. Just like AI. AI isn't new or different like this. Developers started using LLM's for coding, it "diffused" so management became aware, and then it becomes enforced.

There's a top-down mandate to use version control or unit testing or code review or LLM's. Despite plenty of developers initially hating unit tests. Initially hating code review. These things are all standard now, but weren't for a long time.

In contrast to things like "use git not Subversion" where management doesn't care, they just want you to use a version control.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-09-06 17:05:39+00:00
>Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves?

The vast, vast majority of investors are nepo babies that inherited dad's company and his trust fund. The rest of them that may have worked have deluded themselves into thinking it was because of their "hard work" they got there

So uh, yeah, they're dumbasses. But even then: they don't care that long hours have no significant benefit: the people that will accept 996 will do it for the same salary as someone doing a 9-5. Don't anthropomophize investors, they never see people, they see numbers.
by chronogamous | 2025-09-06 17:05:44+00:00
Can't think of the name atm either, but I'm pretty sure it only does so, as it would be pointless to make any further decisions after attaching itself - it simply has no means to act on anything after that... the attaching is the only thing it 'does' in it's life... after that, it's only job, and only ability, is to be. Chose the wrong spot to attach and call home? Brains wouldn't make a bit of difference (unless regretting it's one life-choice is somehow usefull during this stage of just being, being stuck on the spot).
by leetcrew | 2025-09-06 17:05:45+00:00
probably depends on what kind of stuff you're working on. I mostly build web services and data pipelines on AWS, where java is still the best supported language (even if others have joined the list of officially recommended).

java might not see the same brisk pace in library development as other languages, but it's also 30 years old. aside from core issues with the language that can't be papered over by 3P libs, what's missing?
by gryzzly | 2025-09-06 17:05:54+00:00
There is a Slack alternative with image / video embeds/uploads based on and fully compatible with IRC – IRCCloud, which is founded and built by early Last.FM team. – https://www.irccloud.com

I worked on the client for a couple of months back in 2015, added a quick "channel switcher" – it was a fun project where I learned about fuzzy matching and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_metric and looked at how most editors did their "Search project files" commands.