MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by olex | 2025-09-25 10:14:42+00:00
This is a thing I've been constantly bringing up with our company. I _do_ think that local collaboration in the office is vastly more effective than remotely, _but_ only given that the entire team is co-located.

As soon as there are any remote members involved, the local collaboration benefits are lost, and a mixed team becomes less effective than a fully-remote one - because few offices offer the necessary space and equipment for large groups of people to participate in remote / hybrid meetings and work groups effectively (most / almost all existing conference room equipment is complete junk). Unfortunately, fully co-located teams appear to be a thing of the past, and as you say, mandates aren't going to help here.
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-09-25 10:15:04+00:00
There are so many things to know, the world moves fast, so everything keeps changing constantly. It’s impossible for people to keep up and instead of providing a service, some airlines are trying to benefit from it knowing that folks will not claim their refunds or fee meals etc.

I wish every flight cancellation and delay emails had FAQ style “what are my choices” section where you can see your right clearly.
by sehansen | 2025-09-25 10:16:03+00:00
They are. Sometimes the managers are smart and voluntarily listen to the workers, but that isn't the same as workers having power. What should happen is that better run companies both get more value out of their employees and attract employees from the less well-run companies. But that doesn't seem to happen as much anymore with increasing consolidation and decreasing competition. At least that's how USA looks like from the outside. And this is across all sectors.
by majortennis | 2025-09-25 10:17:49+00:00
I picked up golf in March with some second hand clubs from a car boot, I've probably played 50 rounds since then and I love it. I've been asked if it's boring and it's anything but , Hitting a clean flush is the best feeling ever even if i only hit a handful over a round the satisfaction of improvement is huge. I try not to carry if i can for courses with lots of walking. I want to invest in a trolley
by regularfry | 2025-09-25 10:18:06+00:00
So if they had made one change, it would be fantastic as a throw-in-the-backpack computer.

That change would be to support display port alt-mode on a USB-C port, rather than only having mini-HDMI. If they'd done that, you could plug AR glasses like the XReal One straight into it, and not need a separate screen. Your entire compute becomes a keyboard+power, glasses, and wireless mouse. That would be really nice: two cables, total, one for power to the pi and one from the pi to the glasses.

As it is, you need an hdmi to usb-c converter, which also needs to be powered, another couple of cables, and more of a setup faff each time. It sounds minor, but it's a missed opportunity. For me it turns it from "take my money" to "eh... I can do better."
by olex | 2025-09-25 10:19:34+00:00
RTO may work as long as your teams are geographically co-located and return to the same office. In my experience, a lot of teams in recent years have been staffed without this aspect in mind, because with remote it made no difference. So now, even with RTO people still have to constantly sit in remote meetings / work rooms with the rest of the team in other office(s), and the benefit of in-person collaboration is still lost. Arguably, this "remote between offices" mode is the worst of them all, because remoting in from the office almost always results in an inferior experience compared to remoting in from a well-tuned home setup.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-25 10:19:45+00:00
> Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result.

Oh, that one is easy. The original US constitution gave the federal government the right to preempt state laws in matters within its enumerated powers, but placed strict limits on what those powers are, and created a check against federal overreach by creating the US Senate, which originally had its members elected by state legislatures who would thereby send Senators disinclined to let the federal government usurp their powers.

Then populists amended the constitution to cause US Senators to be directly elected, and since US Supreme Court Justices are confirmed by the Senate, that in turn allowed them to replace the Justices with ones who would do things like read the inter-state commerce clause as covering non-commerce happening entirely within a single state.

Having eliminated any meaningful constitutional restrictions on federal power, federal officials were then captured by large corporations to enact federal regulations that only those large corporations can comply with, and to erode any federal constraints on corporate mergers while still preempting the states from imposing them either.

You can't give the central government the authority to do something and then expect them not to. If you don't want them to do something, you need something actively constraining them from doing it. Which was the US Senate until it wasn't.
by nenenejej | 2025-09-25 10:20:13+00:00
The city centre / real estate thing sounds like an externalisation - which companies famously dont give a shit about.

It should be a tradegy of commons at best: it may affect the CEOs 401k, but not by much (0.000001% for their individual decision to RTO for that company y). It like buying McD shares then going to McD for lunch every day with your team.

I think there are other reasons.
by fsckboy | 2025-09-25 10:20:17+00:00
>many older folk...like using bits in a byte, or a byte as an ID field. Or quibbling over the length of a Name field. All those habits proved to be bad in the long run.

I'll bet you the people inventing these modern new architectures are among the more experienced engineers at the companies

who I would criticize by saying, we used to think it was a good idea to code around the limitations of old architectures and now we're accused of coding for PDP-11s and processors aren't PDP-11s any more. so what we should do now I'm told is code very specifically around the idiosyncracies of the new PDP-11,000's and that is what marks progress. Caches were invented to invisibly and silently make things faster, and that was a brilliant idea. Now new cache designers analyze what we used to do to insist we change how we code so they can cache what they want to cache not what we want to do, and all younger programmers talk about these days is coding for the cache (which itself is a cache of a cache of a cache). this is not progress, it's coding for the timing of the modern storage drum.
by liampulles | 2025-09-25 10:20:38+00:00
I guess the key questions are: what are the tradeoffs Go makes, and what kind of work is it well suited for?

I think Go's key strengths are syntax simplicity, niceties for large scale codebase (good monorepo support, quick builds, quick startup, easy CLIs, testing and language server built in), and good concurrency constructs.

There are controversial aspects too, like an aversion to annotations and exceptions and anything that hides a plain control flow - as well as a reluctance to evolve the syntax and basic aspects of the language. I like those things personally but that is because I find myself well aligned to Go's philosophy.

I would say that the worst parts of the language would actually be performance, I would not use Go if single threaded performance is critical (and the author Notes this). The GC is not the most efficient either. But I think given that hardware evolution is leaning towards more cores, and scaling up is leaning more towards scaling up containers, Go's choices put it in good stead here.

Go is my favourite language at the moment, has been for a while.
by phrotoma | 2025-09-25 10:20:40+00:00
> you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe

Based on this Canadian's browsing of the average Who's Hiring thread, it seems that a very small fraction of US based remote friendly jobs are open to being filled by foreigners. They do exist, just not many.

You're bang on about competition from domestic candidates in lower cost of living areas though.
by lnsru | 2025-09-25 10:21:50+00:00
I was also studying many MBA books about decision making in corporate environments. Many cool things about data driven decision making. Costs and alternative costs, etc., many cool things, some even with scientific background. RTO is also analyzed in similar manner. The truth is that RTO is great way to ditch people with longer commute and/or kids easily and for free. And unions (as they’re in Germany) are happy.

But let’s get back to reality, the business decisions are made in the style “I like this” and “I don’t like this”. Only most obvious decisions are somehow backed up. And RTO is known to work well to ditch 2-3% of workforce in few months for free. Parents go first, high performers go afterwards. Headcount reduced, job well done!

The way with severance packages can go for years with many rounds when the packages are too small. Severance packages also involve social plan negotiations with unions… Somebody will go to court for sure and sue the company… So obviously let’s do RTO, it’s cheap and quick. And improves collaboration of course. First round with mandatory 3 days in the office and second one with 5 days in cheapest possible open office with chaos, distractions and noise.
by Saline9515 | 2025-09-25 10:21:50+00:00
A democratic State is supposed to work in the interests of all of its citizens. Degrading the economic environment to lead young graduates to "flee" is clearly against this mandate.

The strategy that you mention is however used, with success by countries that are either dictatorships (e.g Algeria) or that have too many men, due to archaic sexist traditions of aborting females (e.g India). Maybe you'd prefer that the USA become more like those two examples?
by klaussilveira | 2025-09-25 10:21:50+00:00
I love Sublime. I have been using it for years and it's just fantastic software. I have no problems paying for it. But since it is such an important part of my toolbox, not having the source code is a liability. What if they decide to drop support for my platform? What if they decide to shift gears into AI and enshittify the experience?

Every other piece of software in my toolbox is open-source. The scenarios I've described happened to some of those tools, and I maintain my own forks. Currently, Sublime is the single point of failure on my toolbox.

I would buy a source code license if I could.
by varispeed | 2025-09-25 10:23:58+00:00
The argument doesn’t hold water. Companies aren’t pushing RTO because they want to pay higher salaries to office-bound staff in expensive metros. If raw “input–output” and cheap labour were the only metric, they’d go fully remote, tap global markets, and slash payroll overnight.

RTO is about control and optics, not cost optimisation. It’s management preference, real estate sunk costs, and the illusion of productivity through visibility. Actual delivery of work is the only thing that matters in tech - and remote delivery has already proven itself at scale.

The idea that “physical location is your greatest asset” is backwards. If that were true, San Francisco developers wouldn’t already be competing with contractors in Bangalore and Bucharest. They are - yet the jobs remain, because employers value capability, not postcode.

In short: RTO doesn’t protect American tech workers from global competition. It just wastes time in traffic and props up bad management.
by benchly | 2025-09-25 10:24:17+00:00
To me, this author's blog (and others like it) do echo the finality of the end of our existence by remaining in their questioning, unfinished state. That's really just how it goes with our mortality and I think there's something poetic to be said about that, but I have trouble articulating it. We leave life with many questions left unanswered and things left unfinished, no matter how hard we try, it seems.

To the individual, here is, in effect, never enough time. There never will be.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-25 10:24:43+00:00
> is Mozilla a genuine competitor that just hasn't figured out how to build a browser that'll actually challenge Chrome

Mozilla had a browser that had huge market share and was growing, and actively destroyed it for the sake of Chrome, at the same time as they became a financial dependent of google.

> google is also just buying user traffic with their investment

Google is not buying user traffic from a browser with a 3% share and falling. Google is probably responsible for 2-300% of firefox's profits, because if they stopped paying them off, they'd have to close up shop in 6 months. Everything else they do is a failure, and if it looks like it has a chance of being successful, like Servo and Rust*, they get rid of it.

They're not going to give them money to them with a check with "Bribe to fail continually, and to never give users a feature that they would leave Chrome for ever again" written on it. Money is fungible. If they couldn't bribe them like this, they'd create an "Extensions Interop Consortium," let Mozilla host it, and fund it to the tune of a half-billion dollars. Let Google prove this "partnership" is profitable, this default search engine placement on the 3% browser used exclusively by people who are experts, know how to change their defaults, and hate google. It doesn't pass the stupid test.

But actually, they don't have to prove anything because even though they're officially a monopoly, one of the worst of the many horrible, horrible Obama judges has now affirmed that there will be no remedy, because a remedy might affect their business. He then immediately went on tour, telling audiences how the government is bullying tech companies.

[*] And maybe firefoxOS, I accidentally had one as my daily phone for a year, and it worked fine. I didn't love it and I didn't even like the idea of it, but it certainly worked.
by tallanvor | 2025-09-25 10:25:08+00:00
The problem is that proper studies on this topic will take years to really understand the positives and negatives of having the majority of your employees working remotely. --Researchers need to be able to track people through their careers to understand whether or not WFH is a net benefit to them and/or their companies.

So you're really going to have to deal with only hearing what people think.

RTO is trending for many reasons - some are doing this for bad reasons, I'm sure, but I also know that some managers are pushing for this because they a) see that junior developers aren't getting the necessary mentoring to help them develop and grow into seniors, and b) because they feel that people are spending more time on tasks because they're less likely to reach out if they have to ping people, wait for a response, and try to work through things without benefits like being able to draw on a whiteboard and such. --Maybe some companies are handling this better than others, but they are valid concerns.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-09-25 10:25:16+00:00
You'll probably get better results than the level of Sloan from the NY Fed, the AEA or Glass Lewis. They point out that profit-seeking strategies outside of the concept of ordinary business[1] can exist on a spectrum from highly ethical to highly unethical, ideally[2] all pursued simultaneously in proportion to their risk.

[1] e.g. through leveraging class politics, hyperstition or militias.

[2] From the point of view of the responsible stakeholders, that is.
by graemep | 2025-09-25 10:26:12+00:00
> I want to see evidence of their rationale so I can put myself in management's shoes.

I think worthwhile evidence would only be available if two things, both questionable, were true:

1. an unbiased sample of companies implementing RTO are willing to disclose their reasons - e.g. make public announcements, or cooperate with academic studies. 2. they were honest about the reasons.

If common reasons for RTO would make the management look bad (and some might even be illegal in some places) then the first is less likely, and the second is highly unlikely.
by quitit | 2025-09-25 10:26:22+00:00
Of the information I have reviewed brain storming / creative sessions are better in person versus online sessions. This does lend to hybrid approaches being useful. All other metrics were better or had no difference.

One point I did note is that there is an increase in management overhead when workers are separated, and this increase in workload by senior management is likely a pain point for them - even though there are likely productivity benefits in forcing management to communicate through official channels and have a more organised approach to task delegation/internal messaging.

From a financial perspective office spaces are a type of investment vehicle. Prior to the GFC office space was lucrative, and that was again peaking pre-covid. There are likely secondary motivations at play beyond productivity.
by bell-cot | 2025-09-25 10:26:46+00:00
Is anyone familiar with Katalyst Space? I don't see a Wikipedia page. Their own page doesn't seem to mention any actual (vs. future) operations in space. And the NASA article mentions that the contract is under a program for startups and small companies.

Especially with the Swift Observatory being 20 years old, and 1 gyroscope failure away from totally unusable - this seems more like a job for Jared Isaacman and a Dragon kitted for EVA.
by lukefleed | 2025-09-25 10:26:55+00:00
The other replies nailed it, but I'll add my two cents.

Vec<u8> may be the right call most of the time for most use cases. This library, however, is for when even 8 bits compared to 4 is too much. Another example, if all your values fit in 9 bits, you'd be forced to use Vec<u16> and waste 7 bits for every single number. With this structure, you just use 9 bits. That's almost a 2x space saving. At scale, that makes a difference.

For floats, you'd use fixed-point math, just like the other replies said. Your example of +/- 10.0 with 1e-6 precision would mean multiplying by 1,000,000 and storing the result as a 25-bit signed integer. When you read it back, you just divide. It's a decent saving over a 32-bit float.
by cryptoz | 2025-09-25 10:27:18+00:00
Opening the App Store to download a bunch of apps - in general - is probably the #1 thing people are doing when they open the App Store. Of course, installing a specific app is a top use case. But I think you're just not the average user. Lots of people open the App Store frequently to just check out what's available.

~10 years ago I would do this all the time. It's fun, kind of like surfin' the net was back in the old days, but in a walled garden of applications.
What's a handy tool for creating/editing Lottie files, free/no watermark?
by freitzzz | 2025-09-25 10:27:47+00:00
Each time I need to make a small adjustment to a Lottie file I spend valuable time in finding an online tool that allows me to do what I want, and that doesn't include a watermark on top of it. Currently I use lottiefiles.com, but to continue use it I need to pay a monthly subscription, which the price doesn't seem fair for my use.

How can it be that in 2025 we don't have a proper self-hosting tool for Lottie files?
by FearNotDaniel | 2025-09-25 10:27:50+00:00
I've read this and many of the comments and still don't quite understand what is being blocked. Nobody has quite stated it explicitly, and what seems to be being implied seems too absurd to be true, but I'm assuming it must be true hence all the outrage against La Liga, their media partners and the government.

So just to really spell it out for an idiot like me: this means that _all_ internet users in Spain are blocked from accessing _any_ of the IP ranges that La Liga doesn't like, while a football match is in play, regardless of whether the services they are trying to access have anything to do with pirating football matches? Is that the actual situation?

Edit: thanks @npteljes for providing context from a previous HN post...

> "LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain"

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
by xpe | 2025-09-25 10:29:04+00:00
One starts off life with little conscious awareness of life’s big questions. If we’re lucky, we might gain some clarity about the most important questions and share what we learn with others.

From evolution’s point of view, individuals are only a bundle for the survival of genes. It is no surprise that we want more, hence society.

For society, one could argue that its core principles (liberty, freedom, security, flourishing, pursuit of happiness, shared narratives, etc.) are only provided to each individual in a time-bounded way. Individuals may be heartened when they have confidence these principles will carry on to the next generation.
Ask HN: Non-career ending way to let agents touch internal structured data?
by Hoshang07 | 2025-09-25 10:29:06+00:00
right now i wouldn’t trust an ai agent anywhere near my warehouse with raw sql. too risky. what i really want is simple: let the agent only “search” a safe view that i define.. say a join of customers, tickets, and product events.. instead of having free rein over every table.

the approach i’m experimenting with is: i build a malloy model of that view (so it’s more graph-like and semantic), then i generate custom mcp tools on top of it. those tools basically act as guardrails - the agent can only call “get_customer_tickets” or “fetch_usage_events” instead of writing arbitrary queries. These tools are embedded into my malloy model so it's not really a sql query its firing on that view, instead it's searching by filtering from my view. finally, i give access to those tools into my agent builder.

this feels cleaner and safer, but i'm new to this and not sure if this is the right pattern. is anyone here tackling this differently? are there any efficient ways to give agents scoped, governed access to internal data without shooting yourself in the foot? what are some more things i should consider here?
by biztos | 2025-09-25 10:29:07+00:00
How does the house not have a data-mining advantage in card games?

They would know whether you make bad choices on Tuesdays, how people of your nationality and consumer preferences react to seeing an Ace, they can deal the better card to the person they’d like to have win, or the opposite, they know what effect the equivalent of a hot waitress bringing you free drinks will be on you specifically as well as on people statistically similar to you and at what moment in time…

Do you just not play against the house when you play cards? And do you 100% trust the house to deal randomly? Does the house not care at all who wins at cards?

Sorry if these are stupid questions, I don’t gamble, but it seems like they have lots of actionable data if they want to use it. Even if they only use it to get you to play more (or less).
Ask HN: Software jobs with high barriers of entry?
by Poomba | 2025-09-25 10:29:30+00:00
Are there any software jobs that actually have a high barrier of entry? Besides maybe an LLM Engineer?

I feel like no matter what type of engineer you become there is always gonna be a bunch of ppl who you’re competing with. Perhaps someone are slightly more competitive than others like a devops person, but overall, i feel like the entire SWE field has become a commodity

Are there actually any software jobs that require a ton of schooling, or a ton of self education? Like literally years and years like you need to become a pediatrician or a lawyer
by nrawe | 2025-09-25 10:30:18+00:00
I agree the problem, but the given solution feels a bit clunky to me. From a syntax perspective, passing an options object and applying it over a set of defaults feels a lot cleaner. The reason kwargs work in Python is primarily because the syntax is clean on both the caller and callee's side of things. This puts a lot of additional non-obvious syntax on the callee side.