MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Grosvenor | 2025-09-01 21:25:18+00:00
I'll put the Tandem 5 minute rule paper here, it seems very relevant.

https://dsf.berkeley.edu/cs286/papers/fiveminute-tr1986.pdf

and a revisit of the rule 20 years later (It still held).

https://cs-people.bu.edu/mathan/reading-groups/papers-classi...
by carver | 2025-09-01 21:25:19+00:00
What a great seminar, that was. I really appreciated his advice on writing recommendation letters, too: the expectation is shifted wildly towards effusive. If you are plainly complimentary, it can come off as a secret warning that you don't think they are worth hiring.

But there were also great AI papers, and meta advice on reading them efficiently. (I don't remember any crimes against ferrets, but presumably the reading list changed over time)

I appreciated that class, and it's only grown on me over time. Another line that really stuck with me was something like "forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit" (Which I remembered as "Perhaps we will look back on even this with fondness") It's so easy to undervalue amazing things when they are happening to you. I was really convinced that I was appreciating it, even more than many around me. But I still look back and think I could have soaked it in, even more.
by pvtmert | 2025-09-01 21:25:21+00:00
As a ~4 year tenured L5, I agree. There is annual performance review system called Forte. During forte, each person is rated in each leadership principles (LPs) by their peers and manager, possibly from away-team members.

As the parent mentioned, nowadays the scope is extremely limited. Citing Ownership (ie. this/that team has the ownership...) reasons. I see LPs are currently weaponised to limit promotions/pay-raises.

I am not a low-performer or anything, in fact, I proactively find problems and fix them. I do not like to complain (which most people do) and if it takes <=10% of my weekly working time (ie. 4 hours or less) then I create a ticket and add this to my personal backlog. Then, when I go through my backlog, I prioritize these things according to their predicted complexity and impact. I take the low-complexity/big-impact things and do those in a 4-hour period.

When I fix the things, I update the ticket and send a CR (pull-request) to the owning team of the package. I even have a script to pick out a recent committer in the repository to add them as an optional reviewer, which helps quite a lot, as most of the teams do not track their CR (pull-request) queues at all. (neither proactively or even with notifications)

Nevertheless, 3 years back to back, I have been rated negatively for the following LPs - Think-Big - Ownership - Bias-for-Action

Moreover, I have not only participated in Hackathons but even organised org-wide (Director/L8) hackathons & events. Not to mention that my manager, my skip, and their manager (director) all in different regions than mine. I didn't had any TPM in my org in my region either.

It super frustrating as an engineer as certain minor occurrences weaponised against (ie. an escalation from away team that I did not respond in time during my PTO, c'mon!) meanwhile I have 10 or more valid scenarios which keep being overlooked.

Which is why the quality is dropping. Because as an engineer, I do not see any return on my investment (time & effort). There are thousands of engineers like me, I see more and more people are silent quitting (rest & vest), elevating minor things as if they were grand problems, increasing the bureaucracy as much as they can. As the layoffs already showed to all, there is no job guarantee at all!
by sokoloff | 2025-09-01 21:25:34+00:00
> run a regression on comparable sales and take human judgment out of it.

It's extremely rare to find enough comparable sales of parcels of land only to run a regression on. In an intensely developed area, the overwhelming majority (like 98+%) of sales will be inextricably linked sales of land and improvements of that land.

I have some intellectual agreement with LVTs, but the practical implementation is daunting and it seems to make it much harder to appeal a bad assessment.
by jcranmer | 2025-09-01 21:25:38+00:00
I don't know that 7-bit bytes were ever used. Computer word sizes have historically been multiples of 6 or 8 bits, and while I can't say as to why particular values were chosen, I would hypothesize that multiples of 6 and 8 work well for representation in octal and hexadecimal respectively. For many of these early machines, sub-word addressability wasn't really a thing, so the question of 'byte' is somewhat academic.

For the representation of text of an alphabetic language, you need to hit 6 bits if your script doesn't have case and 7 bits if it does have case. ASCII ended up encoding English into 7 bits and EBCDIC chose 8 bits (as it's based on a binary-coded decimal scheme which packs a decimal digit into 4 bits). Early machines did choose to use the unused high bit of an ASCII character stored in 8 bits as a parity bit, but most machines have instead opted to extend the character repertoire in a variety of incompatible ways, which eventually led to Unicode.
by shortercode | 2025-09-01 21:25:43+00:00
I used to be a big fan of Twitter, I followed a number of excellent programmers who regularly posted. But then they messed with the algorithm so I couldn’t actually see what the people I was interested in were posting. I just got generic meme style posts. Whatever good content that still reached me gradually decreased as people realised it wasn’t worth posting anymore. So I left and haven’t found any suitable replacement tbh.

So yeah entirely unsurprised that people aren’t engaging with science on X
by rvz | 2025-09-01 21:25:47+00:00
Short answer: No.

Long answer: No. Really.

Why?:

Any person who has honestly studied from CS to deep learning knows that someone has to maintain that software and AI struggles in highly critical systems. Unless one wants bugs like this in production created by LLMs [0]

[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...
by ohdeargodno | 2025-09-01 21:25:56+00:00
Don't get me wrong: I am not blaming anyone for liking alcohol, I have plenty of wine and various liquors, and it's a fun indulgence.

There is no "used wisely" with alcohol. It is destructive from the first drop to the last. It is about one of the worst things you could put in your body. Alcohol gets a free pass because it's socially acceptable, but it is, objectively, dangerous, and every single doctor and research in the world agrees with that.
by wilson090 | 2025-09-01 21:26:08+00:00
CreativeMode (S24) | https://creativemode.net | On-site - San Francisco, CA

CreativeMode is building Lovable for video game mods, starting with Minecraft. In our first three months, we built the most powerful no-code modding platform ever for Minecraft and created a double digit percentage of all mods ever released. We're building an entirely new category of gaming tools. Minecraft is only the beginning.

We're hiring a Founding Engineer who wants to build at the intersection of tech and gaming. Ideal candidates have a passion for the category and have experience building production-level LLM/AI applications or are killer full-stack engineers who can own product features end to end.

Ideally 3+ years of experience

Email me at wilson@creativemode.net with your resume and a short blurb on why you'd like to join the team.
by margalabargala | 2025-09-01 21:26:32+00:00
> open source isn’t supposed to be about market pricing or what’s convenient for vendors; it’s about giving users the freedom to decide what’s worth running.

Ehhh, it's about users having the ability to run whatever they like. Which they do.

If a group of users of 32 bit hardware care to volunteer to support the latest kernel features, then there's no problem.

If no one does, then why should a volunteer care enough to do it for them? It's not like the old kernel versions will stop working. Forcing volunteers to work on something they don't want to do is just a bad way to manage volunteers.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-01 21:26:43+00:00
SEEKING WORK

25ish-years-experience systems software engineer. 10 years at Google. "Systems" level programmer, embedded / robotics, datastructures / database internals, mostly in Rust. Plenty of open source experience. Looking for freelance, greenfield and/or interesting projects. Recent work all in Rust.

Location: Southern Ontario / Greater Toronto, Canada

Remote: Yes or Hybrid

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rust, systems-level development, embedded, C++

Email: ryan.daum@gmail.com GitHub: http://github.com/rdaum
by ninkendo | 2025-09-01 21:27:16+00:00
> It really feels like Apple's teams are not using any of SwiftPM themselves.

They probably never will, at least not for anything that ships with the OS. For Apple, binary size is very important, and it’s essential that they have only one of every library (“project”) installed on the device, and that they use dynamic linking everywhere.

SwiftPM uses static linking to the core, and if Apple were to use it, binary sizes would balloon (not to mention there would be potentially mutually incompatible versions of things.) You could fix this by ignoring version specs in the package file and building just one of every project/framework, and changing it to use dynamic linking everywhere… but at some point you’re just contorting swiftpm to become a big mono-build system, which only Apple would really be using as such.
by meken | 2025-09-01 21:28:05+00:00
Sometimes I'm debugging a Python script which is processing rich text data (e.g. images) and really miss the fact that I don't have access to the capabilities in a Jupyter notebook for displaying that data. So I made a little tool that allows you to insert a breakpoint into your Python script (an IPython kernel) and explore the current state in a Jupyter notebook.

In this way, extipy can be thought of as a rich-text debugger.
by neilv | 2025-09-01 21:28:07+00:00
I've bumped into a lot of execs who say they don't want to hire ICs or managers (usually only one or the other) coming from specific big-name companies, and will instruct external and internal recruiters/HR and hiring managers about that.

Not big-name companies in general, but specific companies among them.

It seems to be about belief of culture taint risk (e.g., the way engineering is done, or the misaligned careerism or sharp-elbowedness that's promoted by the company). Though there's also sometimes a belief that particular large companies hire lots of people who aren't good (only, apparently, at LeetCode interviews).

I'm a bit sympathetic to those theories, though I personally don't rule out any individual. I think, say, all the FAANGs do also have individual people who are capable and well-intentioned, and haven't been permanently branded with whatever problematic culture of the company they're at.

(Though there was a time when I thought a person wouldn't have gone to one particular social media company unless they were either a sociopath or completely unaware of news in the real world, but it's more nuanced now. And there's currently an aggressively pro-fascism company that AFAICT never should've seemed like a good idea to anyone who wasn't evil or oblivious, though, I have to remember that they like to hire "impressionable children", and we now have tech track undergrads who haven't had time for anything but STEM classes and LeetCode since early teens, so they might be forgiven. I was recently considering denylisting anyone who'd gone to a different tech company, which had a well-known decades-long history of chronic underhandedness, but then I saw that a colleague who'd majorly helped me out once had finally gone there. Which is another lesson to myself not to generalize in ways unfair to the individual.)
by divyshar | 2025-09-01 21:28:45+00:00
Rayni (https://www.rayni.ai) | Chicago - Hybrid or Remote | Full-time | Founding Full Stack Engineer

Mission: We accelerate scientific discovery. We are starting with helping scientists operate their instruments (like Mass Spectrometers) faster with our Gen AI-powered platform.

Impact: We help scientists develop new drugs faster, analyze diseased blood samples faster, study brain cancer faster, etc.

Funding (> $1.5M): Funded by tier-1 VCs, including winning the biggest academic accelerator program on the planet - New Venture Challenge at the University of Chicago. Past winners include Venmo and Grubhub, among others, over the last 25+ years.

Who are we hiring: 3+ YOE in full-stack engineering with a frontend focus (80%) and backend (20%).

You will: - Make fundamental decisions about the frontend stack and product vision - Work with scientists to convert their needs into features. - Long term: Help build the product engineering team, lead and mentor new engineers - Long term: Scale the product to millions of users

Complete job post: https://rayni.notion.site/Founding-Full-Stack-Engineer-2412a... More about the company, culture, and benefits: https://rayni.notion.site/Rayni-Careers-2312a8a0f8fe803ab5bb... Founding Story: https://polsky.uchicago.edu/2025/07/02/how-rayni-turned-scie...
by nostrademons | 2025-09-01 21:29:03+00:00
Prop 13 is actually worse than the article mentions, in terms of perverse incentives. Because tax rates are effectively frozen and assessed vaule goes up slower than inflation, municipalities can only keep pace with inflation by ensuring that there's a steady stream of new buyers at ever-higher prices. Because of that, they vote to relax immigration requirements and promote new office jobs ("steady stream of new buyers") and restrict the supply of housing ("at ever-higher prices"). Because of that, California needs a constant supply of new industries where they can redirect an ever-greater flow of global income into the pockets of California residents, just to allow government expenditures to keep up with inflation.

Prop 13 basically enshrined a pyramid scheme into the state constitution.

And that has led to all sorts of social ills that people routinely criticize California for. The homelessness crisis is because of the revolving housing door: we don't build new housing, but we do higher more new highly-paid employees, so by the pigeonhole principle the lowest-paid Californians will be forced to either move out or go homeless. The "California conveyor", that Republican-decried phenomena where Californians move out of state and take their politics with them, is all because local governments are forced to limit housing and evict their long-time residents in order to keep tax revenues high. California's focus on high-margin industries like tech startups and entertainment is likewise because everything else doesn't generate the steady stream of new dollars and new workers needed to turn over houses and reset their property tax base. And the short-term focus of these industries, where they're willing to destroy society as long as they become a trillion-dollar company in a decade, also makes sense when you consider that existence within the state is itself a pyramid scheme.

Amazing that Republicans would want to copy that, considering how many of the social ills that they bash California for are direct consequences of it.
by Barrin92 | 2025-09-01 21:29:05+00:00
>You don’t really own your house

This is a feature, not a bug. One of the reasons why Singapore develops its land a lot more sanely than most places is that its leasehold structure and progressive property taxes rationalize land use and depreciate home values. One of the single worst and medieval incentives in the American system is that home ownership is a sort of 18th century poor man's social security and people expect home prices to increase, which obviously has disincentivized construction.
by dehrmann | 2025-09-01 21:29:09+00:00
Property tax is the only common wealth tax in the US. All the issues people have with it like arbitrary appraisals and wildly variable taxes during market swings would also show up in more widespread wealth taxes.

But I wonder what the best ways to tax people are. Broadly, the US taxes income, capital gains, sales, and property. They all suffer pros and cons with how progressive/regressive they are, complexity of implementation, ease of dodging, and revenue variability. The common belief is move from California to Texas for lower income taxes, but then you find out that property taxes are higher, there are toll roads everywhere, and a lower level of government services, so there's never a free lunch. You also have to balance local needs (Alaska has different expectations and needs than San Francisco) with preventing taxation games like Oregon/Washington sales/income tax avoidance or headaches like living in NJ, working in NYC.
by 8organicbits | 2025-09-01 21:29:30+00:00
The trick is not to get attached to a project name. `Terraform` is a trademark of IBM (previously Hashicorp). Terraform used to refer to an open-source IaC project, but now it doesn't. OpenTofu, https://opentofu.org, is probably the most accurate name for the continuation of that open-source project.
by flyinglizard | 2025-09-01 21:29:43+00:00
I think Apple is just sitting idly and waiting for AI to mature to "just works" level without all the potential legal and PR minefields. It's too wild and unpredictable of an experience for their buttoned down, bland and inclusive corporate image. Apple may soon find itself producing very capable but dumb bricks if they don't catch up. Google can and will go all out on AI in Android at some point.

Amazon I think just hasn't understood how to cohesively integrate AI into their offerings. Meanwhile they're selling shovels to the prospectors with AWS.

I guess both of these understand the Ai moat is not very large, and don't buy into AGI dreams.
by actionfromafar | 2025-09-01 21:29:44+00:00
Mmm... would beg to differ. I have ported stuff to NOMMU Linux and almost everything worked just as on a "real" Linux. Threads, processes (except only vfork, no fork), networking, priorities, you no name it. DOS gives you almost nothing. It has files.

The one thing different to a regular Linux was that a crash of a program was not "drop into debugger" but "device reboots or halts". That part I don't miss at all.
by simonh | 2025-09-01 21:29:50+00:00
He did that because he’s a western puppet? The west puts up with them despite such vile behaviour. It’s simply absurd to argue the west can’t tolerate prosperous non western nations when there are many of them we get on with just fine, or despite severe cultural differences.

The USA spearheaded integration of China with the international trading system. Their development was an intentional goal.
by didibus | 2025-09-01 21:29:52+00:00
What's wrong with "source-available" ?

Open-source normally means there's no use restrictions, but there could be some requirements in order to do so (like attribution).

Free software normally means there's no use restrictions, but modifications can mandate maintaining the modifications also free to use, retaining the same freedoms.

And if you fray from those, you can call it source-available and the specifics of what usage restrictions exist are per-license.
by gmartone | 2025-09-01 21:30:01+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Italy | Remote | Fractional CPO / Product Coach

Remote: worldwide | hybrid Willing to relocate: yes

Product leader with 15+ years in product management, SaaS, AI, and agile practices. I partner with founders and startups to define product vision, define market-fit, validate MVPs, GTM and scale teams.

What I do best:

* Product strategy & roadmap in high-uncertainty environments

* Lean validation & product-market fit

* Partnering with tech teams to execute roadmaps and deliver at speed

* Cross-functional team coaching (agile, metrics-driven)

* Aligning product, tech, and business goals for scale

Contact: giovanni.martone@gmail.com Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-martone-55a06861
by ohdeargodno | 2025-09-01 21:30:17+00:00
Nothing prevents you from maintaining nommu as a fork. The reality of things is, despite your feelings, people have to work on the kernel, daily, and there comes a point where your tinkering needs do not need to be supported in main. You can keep using old versions of the kernel, too.

Linux remains open source, extendable, and someone would most likely maintain these ripped out modules. Just not at the expense of the singular maintainer of the subsystem inside the kernel.
by anecdatas | 2025-09-01 21:30:21+00:00
I've been voting for almost 40 years. Democrats have been running on that platform basically the whole time. Quite frankly, it is how things work. Dems are absolutely leaving votes on the table by running bad platforms. Mamdani is running a very different platform and is absolutely crushing it out there.

And I think the fact that the party is losing more and more often is a clear indication the lack of votes for it are having an impact, and are resulting in new candidates coming forward to capture them.

Obama ran on a platform which he didn't ultimately move forward on once elected, but at least he had a vision that moved people.
by triceratops | 2025-09-01 21:32:15+00:00
> We're comfortable requiring car insurance, why not fire and police?

For police, specifically because law and order is a core function of the state and to be provided to every resident regardless of ability to pay. If the state can't do that, it's called a failed state.

For fire, because just like car insurance there will be people who will evade the requirements, endangering others' lives and property. And we don't want firefighters to decide whether or not to save lives or neighboring properties based on coverage.
by scarface_74 | 2025-09-01 21:32:23+00:00
This is an uninformed take. Yes the RSU is backloaded. But during the first two years, you get a large monthly cash sign up bonuses so that assuming the stock stays flat, over the four years, your total comp stays flat. If the stock increases your comp goes up.

I spoke to someone who is there now and when you get your yearly review, now you can choose between mostly cash vs mostly stock for your raise and most people choose mostly cash.

I make the same now as I did when I was at AWS and I much prefer my all cash comp over my less cash + RSUs when I was there.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-09-01 21:32:31+00:00
Google is not posting "snippets" or acting as a portal to web content, its generating new content now, so I would assume they they would no longer have section 230 protections and be open to defamation suits.

"Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grants immunity to platforms for content created by third parties. This means Google is not considered the publisher of the content it indexes and displays, making it difficult to hold the company liable for defamatory statements found in search results"
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-01 21:32:32+00:00
That's usually my go-to when discussing supposedly dangerous chemicals.

There are some controversies regarding, for example: glyphosate, aspartame, food preservatives, microplastics, etc... For all of them you are going to find studies showing some toxicity, usually at doses much higher than what we consume, and people get up in arms about them. But then, look at alcohol, where toxicity is proven without a doubt, it is also a group 1 carcinogen, the highest rating, and we drink it as if it was nothing. It puts things into perspective.

I am not saying that it is good to have glyphosate or microplastics in your food, and the problem goes beyond toxicity, but the idea is that if you worry about your health by consuming things that are deemed safe to eat by the health authorities and you are still drinking alcohol, maybe that you should get your priorities straight.

I am not saying "don't drink alcohol". In moderation, it is no that bad, but then, you probably shouldn't worry too much about the other stuff. Of course, you may refuse to support, say, plastic packaging, and it is a worthy thing to do, but it is more about politics than personal health.