MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by filoeleven | 2025-09-29 13:22:32+00:00
> A snapshot taken at the wrong millisecond can easily make you look like a creep or weirdo when a video would’ve made it clear you were just turning your head or starting a yawn.

Taking a screenshot from a video for exactly this reason is incredibly common. Look at any photograph accompanying a political story about a figure from "the other party".

See for example this Reddit post about the "triggered" meme origin: > Ironically, if you ever get a chance to see the video of this incident, this woman and the man she's speaking with are actually having a polite discussion. But... She has very animated facial expressions and the photographer just happened to catch this frame at an inopportune moment.

So it seems to me that since a video is simply thousands of photographs with a soundtrack, video is strictly more invasive than photography.

https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/adyt1d/comment/hvp04...
by FarMcKon | 2025-09-29 13:23:42+00:00
This is the fascist dream. Who defines 'Best Behavior?' Whoever owns the cameras, and the cops.

Criticize the president? Not best behavior. Kiss someone of your sex/gender? Not best behavior. Call AI stupid? Not best behavior. Whistleblower on out a deadly chemical leak? Not best behavior. Disagree with a politician? Not best behavior. Defined LGBTQ+ people's rights? Not best behavior. Criticize Isreal ? Not best behavior.

They are going to define "best behavior" in a way that never threatens their feelings, let alone threatens their powers, if you let them.
by franky47 | 2025-09-29 13:24:06+00:00
Thanks for the feedback, Vercel domain uses nuqs [1] (I'm the author) for URL state, and I agree flooding the browser history is a bad experience.

Is there a way to update the URL (ie: keeping it reactive in the address bar) without creating those history entries, or to ask the browser to squash the last entry it created into the previous one?

[1] https://nuqs.dev
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-29 13:24:09+00:00
In my experience, technical interviews are not really useful past the very basic "Can this candidate actually write a conditional and has the slightest clue about programming?". Ability to solve hard leetcode-like problems under time pressure in a stressful environment doesn't meaningfully translate to "will be a great contributor to the team work on the kind of problem we have".

Our best hires are nearly always coming from the network of a team member or people we contracted with and decided to hire full time.

Most of my time in interview nowadays is spent understanding what the candidate has done before, explaining to them what we do and asking open questions to see how they would approach our issues and how they link them to their experience. If it seems to fit, we hire. My country standard contract offers a fairly long probation period for new hire and we don't hesite about parting with people when it's not working after a quarter. We are very explicit about this policy.
by samuelknight | 2025-09-29 13:24:28+00:00
You are vastly underestimating the price decline. To cherrypick one article; in the first two years since GPT 3.5, inference price for the same amount of intelligence has decreased 10x per year according to a study by Andreessen Horowitz https://a16z.com/llmflation-llm-inference-cost/. So in a stark slowdown scenario, we could still see a 1000x decrease in the next 5 years.

Price deflation is not tied to Moore's right now because much of the performance gains are from model optimization, high bandwidth memory supply chains, and electrical capacity build out, not FLOP density.
by roenxi | 2025-09-29 13:24:28+00:00
> “Google Scholar just erased years of scientific history”

Sure the tone would be different, but anyone who was totally shocked by Google pulling a service is definitely an idiot. How much worse could Google's reputation be at this point. It's Google. They pull stuff.

That it happened on any particular day? Yeah, that is surprising. What are the odds. Could have been any day of any year.

That it happened? Not a surprise. If it matters to you, you should have done something.
by jerf | 2025-09-29 13:25:11+00:00
The alternative I prefer isn't any of the given ones, but a scaled interview. I start with something that you can solve with a Python one-liner, if you know what you're doing, but if you solve that instantly I've got a series of questions that will scale up until we're eventually doing the task using untrusted user input, outputting into a security-sensitive environment, under heavy load that we want to be cheap, in a highly-available environment, etc. etc. I also tell the applicant up front that this is the plan, because if you don't do that, it feels like you're jerking them around by constantly changing the requirements. I've also got a number of directions it can go depending on the applicant, and depending on what they tell me about their past experience.

The other nice thing about this is your interviewee generally doesn't leave feeling like a failure; it's not like I have three questions and you can get them all wrong. Unfortunately there are some people who end up spinning on the very easiest question for the entire session, and, uh, well... I can only do so much, if you really don't know anything about programming at all. This is at least the exception, though.

I have not had to do an interview in the age of practical AI yet, though. In person I don't think I'd have to change much, I've always interviewed with a policy of "I'm not worried about whether the string split command takes its parameters in this or that order, I just want to know you know it exists" and I can basically serve as an AI in the same way I was already being the API reference. Remotely, I'm not sure what I'd do yet.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-29 13:25:17+00:00
> assume you mean like demonstrations and whatnot

Not necessarily. Broadly. Advocacy, petitioning, calling, electioneering, drafting, lobbying, organising, et cetera.

A civically inactive citizenry frankly doesn’t have that much to lose from surveillance. Someone failing to exercise their political rights (EDIT: leaving them unexercised) pretty clearly communicates the value they place in them.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-29 13:25:31+00:00
From my experience no language bitrots and degrades worse than a C++ codebase.

The language standard has changed so much, the tooling, trendy libraries and the established conventions... It takes a herculean effort to keep a given source tree up to date.

Dive into a C++ repo started even 10-15 years ago and it can be a revolting experience, let alone one from back in the 90s.

And then from company to company conventions and expectations just vary dramatically.

When I was at Google we had a large committee of very smart people who applied monorepository wide modernizations across the whole repository, introduced amazing tooling and analysis tools, and imposed a very strict style guide that kept people fairly disciplined. But that was a herculean effort which most other organizations can't afford.

Rust has all sorts of problems (including specific ones for DB internals or OS development). But what's amazing when I read these articles is they don't actually seem to mention those specific problems that I've encountered in my last 3 years of professional Rust work. Instead they read like rationalizations by people who have a certain hammer they've gotten really skilled at using, and don't want to give it up.

That's fine if it keeps your organization productive, but I see no reason to publish about it?

If I were to make a list of gripes about Rust for this kind of work it would primarily emphasize the continued lack of acceptance/conclusion of the allocator-api (or competing) proposals, and the rather chaotic and unprofessional (and potentially insecure) nature of the way Cargo project dependencies explode into a hard-to-reason-about mess.

But the list they make? io_uring, mimalloc, and performance oriented networking are... not problems to use in Rust, not complicated at all. I assume the same (or better) for Zig.
by osigurdson | 2025-09-29 13:26:28+00:00
>> Readable code is code that has empathy for the reader and tries to minimize the cognitive load of interpreting it. That's one of the goals of abstraction layers and design patterns.

Usually that means something less than "perfect" from the perspective of the writer. Applying to much DRY, SOLID, DI and other "best practices" will make it very hard to understand. Pretend you have about 20 less IQ points than you actually have when writing the code - you will thank yourself when you come back to it.
by DSingularity | 2025-09-29 13:26:28+00:00
If anybody even insinuates that Weiss or Ellison have dual loyalty because of this they will be accused of anti-semitism.

The hard truth is that weaponizing your money — earned largely from Americans — to aid a foreign country at the expense of America is about as un-American as it gets. Aside from the potentially valid argument that your voice shouldn’t be louder just because you are a billionaire — you are corrupting American foreign policy and American stature in the world to advance the agenda of Israel. That is a betrayal of America.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-29 13:26:40+00:00
Good taste often comes from experience. And not just any experience, either. It comes from working with other peoples' "great ideas" and "brilliant hacks" and "genius architectures". When you're the person having to maintain them a decade later, you start to see whether they were great and brilliant and genius, or just clever but bad ideas. You start to develop a taste that says "that feels too complicated for what it does" or "that's not clear enough". Or, sometimes, "yeah, that really is about as simple as it can be."

It's hard to defend that taste to someone who doesn't have it. They say, "Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man". And in fact they're right. But it's an opinion honed by a fair amount of real-world experience, of seeing how fine-sounding ideas fail to work out in the long run.
by oidar | 2025-09-29 13:27:01+00:00
I love your blog. As an aside, on OBEY - I also love smoking and have quit - except for one time - for years now. And a thing that's helped immensely, is just sitting and becoming comfortable with the idea that I will always want cigarettes. It's just biology. When I tried to do things like to distract myself, like your suggestions in OBEY, the desire became stronger. So, my suggestion is to lean into the discomfort of not having something you want. Or wanting something, and deciding not to take it.
by silvestrov | 2025-09-29 13:27:08+00:00
"multi-year residency" in medicine is part of the education.

We don't have that for software development.

I'd say that the problem is that the diplomas (degree certificate, ...) are useless when hiring software developers.

A doctor who has a diploma is much more likely to be a useful/good doctor than a person with a "computer science" diploma will be a good developer.
by jcynix | 2025-09-29 13:27:45+00:00
I'm multi-lingual but try to separate business stuff for example (multi-lingual) from private stuff (mostly one language), so clashes between languages rarely happen.

But if it gets complicated I'll usually resort to Perl scripts to take care of pesky details. Sorting an associative array where the key is a string in unified form and the value is the multi-lingual target is rather easy in a script language which one is fluent in.
by markznyc | 2025-09-29 13:27:51+00:00
Just release this app using Vibe Coding, it took me 2 weeks from idea to release in store, 1 week for building, 1 week to fix 3 apple review rejections. Here is what I learn: 1, I didn't write single line of code, Cursor+Xcode handle 90% of the work, but I still need to fix some weird issues and bugs myself.

2, You don't need revenueCat or Adapty for in app purchase, apple's new store kit2 handle all the cases including server side receipt validation, I didn't even use cocoapods which make things faster

3, Your main role is product manager that test each new features AI added, so remember to use many git push and branches to save work

4, Building the app is easy now, but the harder part is marketing and how to grow it into real business, which I am still learning

5, I got the app name from AI, even the main ICON is generated by AI, but I did spent $240 on upwork for App Store marketing design

6, sometime the cursor can't fix a compiler issue, I copy paste the code to chatgpt for 2nd opinion which is working.

Here is the app link, feel free to check out: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pinmapper/id6752612645
by 0xffany | 2025-09-29 13:27:55+00:00
I absolutely loved JC2 and JC3 with more than 500 hours in each! Despite the author's thoughts that the games were a buggy mess, I feel like I never noticed the bugs in JC2 and the very literal road bumps in JC3 were only problem when I was doing laps around the first island out of boredom.

I could never quite put my finger on why the large island felt so... empty? in the north, but it being canceled for most of the development cycle is an insight I never thought I'd have, so thank you very much for the insight.

The volumetric terrain of JC3 was an awesome improvement on JC2, with the second island being very for the terrain and vertical bases.

I tried JC4 and it was disappointing... It never clicked with me and (just like the author) I felt it was worse than JC3 in almost every way.

Major thanks to the author for the blog post, growing up and working in software I really appreciate the perspective and both Avalanche studio and the author for their work on these two awesome and timeless games. Despite the apparent hell of development, playing it always felt magical to me (maybe not the car handling in JC2 but I digress) <3
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-29 13:28:02+00:00
> anybody even insinuates that Weiss or Ellison have dual loyalty because of this they will be accused of anti-semitism

No, they’ll be accused of derailing the conversation.

Every pro-Palestinian activist isn’t civically compromised because they have strong views on foreign policy.

> you are corrupting American foreign policy and American stature in the world to advance the agenda of Israel. That is a betrayal of America.

This is a convoluted and hyperbolic way of expressing foreign-policy disagreement.
by rkomorn | 2025-09-29 13:28:29+00:00
FedEx lost the paperwork I overnighted to try and get my dog unstuck from customs during an international (California to EU) move and gave me the runaround for 3 days telling me "it'll be delivered tomorrow!"

UPS got it there in under 24h.

Weeks later I got a "your package was delivered!" email from FedEx. Fantastic stuff.

Needless to say I'm never proactively choosing them again.
by michaelteter | 2025-09-29 13:28:55+00:00
Interviews allow just a little time for strangers to attempt to sync up and get a sense of each other.

Actual jobs offer much more time for people to learn to sync and communicate.

Also, on both sides of the interview table, people have varying strengths when it comes to short and long term communication skills. Plenty of interviewers are not good at interviewing, just as plenty of candidates are not good at their side of the process.

In short, interviews are a very poor approach to choosing who belongs long term.

Ultimately, regardless of the interview process used, every job is ultimately a long term “try and see” interview. You only know how someone fits by trying them for a while.
by saghm | 2025-09-29 13:29:15+00:00
It sounds like the rationale is that existing database technology is already written in it, and they want to re-use some of it. That's reasonable, but I do think that it only makes sense with the assumption that the flaws in C++ aren't large enough to be worth using something else, at which point there isn't really much need to justify using C++ at all. If someone is concerned about the flaws in C++, the benefit of relying on existing C++ libraries isn't going to seem as compelling to them for the exact same reasons they don't want to use C++ for their own code.

At the end of the day, the choice seems to be a bit circular; if you don't have concerns about C++, you'll find plenty of reasons to use it, and the arguments against it aren't going to be compelling. If you have concerns about it, the reasons to use it won't be compelling, and you'll likely agree with the arguments against it. I have to imagine that whether someone agrees with this choice will be entirely consistent with their existing opinions of C++; it doesn't seem like there are any new arguments left to make on this topic, so debates on the topic will inevitably rehash existing arguments (regardless of which side they come from) and only appeal to the people who already have formed their opinions based on finding those arguments compelling to begin with.
by FarMcKon | 2025-09-29 13:29:16+00:00
Great, please apply this to yourself, and livestream all of the time, leave the rest of us out of this.

People don't have one standard of behavior. I won't tell my kid jokes, I tell my wife. I won't complain about people in public, the way I vent to my sister (who gets it is just me venting, not how I feel all the time". I am not going to speak to a cop as I'm getting a speeding ticket, they way I will talk to one who is harassing a friend at a parade.

I won't talk to / about a co-worker in a meeting, the way I talk to someone he just (rightly, but very meanly) chewed out, and who needs a boss who listens, or will I talk to him in a meeting the way I will (a tad later) chew him out for making a coworker cry.

This take is so naive and emotionally / socially unintelligent about human behavior in various situations.
by sleepyguy | 2025-09-29 13:29:20+00:00
Did you not see the weapons caches and the Russian agents arrested in Moldova? During the Romanian election, the opposition leader — a TikTok star — was reportedly found with a massive cache of weapons and ammunition in his personal residence. This kind of activity is happening across Europe. Russia has no limit to the lengths it will go to meddle in other countries’ politics. They create sabotage groups, carry out assassinations, and more. This isn’t about free speech — it’s about taking over governments. Just look at what happened in Georgia with the Dream Party.

It's unbelievable how ill informed or outright ignorant folks are about what Russia is trying to do.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-29 13:30:14+00:00
> see what you did, there

Genuinely asked if you’re politically engaged because I’m curious how that squares with your views on this topic?

Most Americans are not civically engaged. That’s sort of expected. Their principal opposition to surveillance revolves around being creeped out. Most folks who are civically engaged, on the other hand, recognise the risks to themselves and their projects if the opposition can command these tools. (As well as the power that would come with commanding them oneself.) If that link is no longer true, or not universally valid, I’m genuinely interested in hearing it. Because that implies independent civic action can survive—or potentially even thrive in—a modern surveillance state.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-29 13:30:15+00:00
20 years ago, sure. Now if you want fun torque you drive electric and blink with confusion at manual-snobs.

I learned on stick and I still feel a nostalgic appeal, sure. I test drove a used hothatch Volvo C30 T5 Polestar edition last fall before ultimately settling on an electric performance car (Polestar 2) to feed my midlife indulgences. And I have to admit a certain ... thrill... from the turbo lag and the process of shifting.

But it all seems a bit silly when compared to instant torque at any RPM.
by zahlman | 2025-09-29 13:30:18+00:00
> your intuition is also incorrect.

No, it definitionally isn't. The entire point is that `+` is being used to represent operations where `+` makes intuitive sense. When language designers are revisiting the decision to use the `+` symbol to represent string concatenation, how many of them are thinking about algebraic fields, seriously?

And all of this is exactly why you can't just say that it's universally bad API design to "accept all types". Because the alternative may entail rejecting types for no good reason. Again, dynamically typed languages exist for a reason and have persisted for a reason (and Python in particular has claimed the market share it has for a reason) and are not just some strictly inferior thing.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-29 13:30:54+00:00
Is your contention that the only anti-gun countries are, er, the UK and Singapore?

And to be honest, the UK surveillance thing is somewhat exaggerated; it's highly London-centric, and they're mostly privately-owned cameras; the main driving factor is the insurance industry.

Ireland, say, has some of the strictest gun laws in the developed world, and doesn't have a large number of CCTVs or other forms of surveillance.
by corytheboyd | 2025-09-29 13:30:59+00:00
> […] and then having a conversation about what is done, reasoning, etc.

Isn’t this where it would likely unravel?

The interviewer will know what the interesting parts of the exercise are, and ask the deep questions about them. Observe some more: do they know how to use an IDE, run their own program, cut through code to the parts that matter. Basically, can they do the things someone who wrote the code should trivially be able to do?

Since it was mentioned in a sibling comment: Even if the candidate used an LLM to write the code at home, I don’t care, so long as they ace the explanation part of the interview.
by bodiekane | 2025-09-29 13:31:25+00:00
$260k is absolutely middle class, nowhere near "upper class", by any reasonable consideration of lifestyle, freedom, power or day to day experience.

The median home price in SF is $1.3. Using the calculator at zillow (https://www.zillow.com/homeloans/buyability/) with an income of $260k, looking to buy a $1.3MM house, you'd need a down payment of over $300k.

So suppose you get your $260k payout and want to live in SF... you have to rent for what... 5 or 10 years to save up the $300k down payment (while living modestly to save tens of thousands per year). Then finally you can buy your average home, watch half your income disappear to taxes and another third to mortgage, and then you'll still have enough to live a comfortable, middle-class life.

You're not buying yachts, getting meetings with senators or buying your kids into elite schools. You're not flying private, hiring personal assistants or buying a vacation home in Aspen. You're not making dozens of angel investments or being courted as a limited partner by VCs or PE funds.

"Upper class" probably starts at around $10-15 million in liquid assets, to be able to really have the freedom, flexibility and power to live a life that's distinct from middle class existence. If you can't give your son a "small loan of $1 million" to start his business (and be able to shrug off a complete loss as a learning experience) then you're not upper class.
by Hizonner | 2025-09-29 13:32:19+00:00
> Spreadsheets are a fundamentally important tool

It's nice to know that you use spreadsheets all the time.

I use them rarely, and often end up regretting that I didn't write a real program instead. And I'd definitely never see myself using one on a phone; it's too painful to type, and the screen is usually too small.

I'd guess that maybe one percent of mobile phone users have spreadsheets of any kind installed, or would want them. Maybe.

What I'm getting at here is that you seem to have a pretty skewed idea of "fundamentally important".

Admittedly an awful lot of mobile users do have a lot of game and eye candy apps that have no F-Droid counterparts. And some users have professional apps that also don't have F-Droid counterparts. But spreadsheets aren't the center of the Universe.