MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zwnow | 2025-09-30 06:01:31+00:00
Corporations are the reason for lobbyism and wealth accumulation which actively damage my personal quality of life. Its only fair for me to not view them in a positive manner. They view me as an asset, I view them as necessary evil to afford housing and food. I should not anthropomorphize them, yes, but I can anthropomorphize the management and stakeholders. And if they are greedy and behave as such, its my good right to be repulsed by them.
by theturtlemoves | 2025-09-30 06:01:57+00:00
> Some traumas resist immediate rendering.

Maybe I'm too early to speak on this, since I haven't reached 47 yet ;) but so far, from having been around for a while and having seen people struggle through life, I'd say: All traumas resist immediate rendering.

Trauma overwhelms you and causes behaviors that are hard to break until you understand them. And getting to that understanding is difficult, because the behavior is mostly there to obscure that which is overwhelming, because, well, if it wasn't then the trauma would overwhelm you.

How many people I've seen who get stuck in cycles that never seem to break. But then again, most of these lives are far from over, so it's premature to add "most never will".

Good piece. There's still time.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-30 06:02:05+00:00
>embarassed

Like I once managed not to be triggered by ex-VC aebtebeten's routine dismissal of the following thesis the pieces of which I then had to shovel back into the incubator: expert embarassment is a seriously under-investigated vehicle that can't be faked in front of hiring committees (/elite managers/apple-ICs-who-cant-help-but-be-promoted-into-???)..

schlep-tolerance (all sorts of tolerance, sprezzatura, even) can be faked (whether until made or not) these days..

Embarassment.. it's only slightly better than self-deprecatory humor (in that the embarassed party explicitly confesses to (not merely) incomplete sentience, but also inexplicable emotional sequelae etc etc)

Now, who's going to devote decades to perfecting performative embarassment? Only someone you must hire at any cost (?) like.. a Soham Parekh who can explain the meta of what he's doing so you'd pay him to continue the shtick

To the guy out there in the arena: sorry! My anti-anhedonia model needs fine-tuning. It's a lifelong slog..

As it is, I'm embarrassed that this stuff doesn't attract upvotes..
by jjav | 2025-09-30 06:02:49+00:00
> >seems to taint young people into thinking that their employer is their enemy

> Is this not true to a first approximation though?

No, not at all. The company wants the employee to do well so that the team does well and the company overall does well. If the company was "the enemy", they company would be wishing for the employee to fail, which is not why they spent a lot of time and money to hire you in the first place.

Now, of course the company isn't your friend (or family) either. The employer doesn't exist in the friend-enemy axis, they're just an employer which is a different type of relationship.

Also, who is "the company"? People in upper management and HR, i.e. those who see you as a number on a spreadsheet but don't ever interact with you personally.

But most of your interaction is with your first and second level managers who are specific people. One would certainly be well advised to cultivate a professional friendship with them. Not only will you do better, but work will be a lot more pleasant.
by ishyfishyy | 2025-09-30 06:02:51+00:00
I’ve been building Flare (https://www.getflare.app/), an app for people with chronic skin conditions (eczema, rosacea, etc).

It lets you log symptoms and triggers, but the bigger vision is being able to discover patterns, ask questions about your own data, etc.

Being able to answer questions like “Do my flare-ups correlate with stress?” or “What foods make things worse?” backed with personalized data has been helpful with my own flares.

Still early, but curious to hear thoughts from folks!
by palmotea | 2025-09-30 06:02:56+00:00
> Both sides have gotten so far and lazy from American hegemony that it’s no surprise China has usurped the US.

China has usurped the US because a handful of businessmen decided to personally make money over several decades by basically exporting capability and know-how for modest short-term profits, and the Chinese government was far-sighted enough to help them and make sure they got the better end of the bargain (over the long term).

The lazy and incompetent western worker trope is just BS to justify this destructive enrichment strategy.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-09-30 06:04:07+00:00
When I used to interview developers, I was more interested in how they approached problem solving and working collaboratively than attaining any correct answers.

So I'd split the interview in two parts. The first bit I'd give them a set of requirements and ask them to come up with a design for it on their own. They had internet access and technical references available. It wasn't a memory test, and I'd leave the room (this probably wouldn't work well now given LLMs).

In the second part, I'd ask them to talk me through their design, and then explain we were going to change the requirements and work together on altering it to accommodate them.

The second bit was the most useful part of the interview; it's what we needed to do in the actual job, and pretty much everyone we hired in that process was good.
by mr-karan | 2025-09-30 06:05:13+00:00
I've been working on LogChef (https://logchef.app) - a specialized log analytics UI for ClickHouse that focuses on powerful querying and exploration without the complexity of full observability platforms.

The core idea is to leverage ClickHouse's incredible columnar performance for log analytics while providing a schema-agnostic interface that works with any log table structure. It supports both simple search syntax for quick queries and full ClickHouse SQL for complex analytics. Also it has proper RBAC: Team-based access controls for multi-tenant environments.

Off late I have also added some AI features:

- AI-powered SQL generation - write queries in natural language - MCP (Model Context Protocol) server integration for AI assistants to query your logs

It's open source (AGPLv3) and deliberately doesn't handle log collection - instead it integrates with existing tools like Vector, Fluentd, or OpenTelemetry Collector. The roadmap includes REST APIs, client libraries, visualizations, and alerting.

Built with Go + Vue.js + TypeScript. Currently handles millions of log entries daily in production environments at my org. The deployment is just a single binary deployment with a SQLite DB.

Would love feedback from the community! GitHub: https://github.com/mr-karan/logchef
by fnordsensei | 2025-09-30 06:06:35+00:00
I don't disagree exactly, it's just that it smells weird.

LLMs are incredibly good at social engineering when we let them, whereas I could write the code to emit "you're right" or "that's not quite right" without involving any statistical prediction.

Ie., as a method of persuasion, canned responses are incredibly inefficient (as evidenced by the annoyance with them), whereas we know that the LLM is capable of being far more insidious and subtle in its praise of you. For example, it could be instructed to launch weak counter arguments, "spot" the weaknesses, and then conclude that your position is the correct one.

But let's say that there's a monitoring mechanism that concludes that adjustments are needed. In order to "force" the LLM to drop the previous context, it "seeds" the response with "You're right", or "That's not quite right", as if it were the LLMs own conclusion. Then, when the LLM starts predicting what comes next, it must conclude things that follow from "you're right" or "that's not quite right".

So while they are very inefficient as persuasion and communication, they might be very efficient at breaking with the otherwise overwhelming context that would interfere with the change you're trying to affect.

That's the reason why I like the canned phrases. It's not that I particularly enjoy the communication in itself, it's that they are clear enough signals of what's going on. They give a tiny level observability to the black box, in the form of indicating a path change.
by Llamamoe | 2025-09-30 06:06:52+00:00
It's because it's the other neurotransmitters that have neuromodulatory functions, often with specific subreceptors that perform specific roles.

In contrast GABA and glutamate mainly just handle the general information processing across the entire brain, there isn't a whole lot to do other than inhibit GABA which happens to reduce anxiety (as well as your entire brain's cognitive health)
by raghavtoshniwal | 2025-09-30 06:06:58+00:00
I think you're correct but your bar is too high, I think this app would be useful even if it was a lossy approximation Hemingway from his writings. As a thought experiment - I would value what a PhD who dedicated her career to studying one author and their works to tell me what she thinks about a piece of writing from that author's lens. (It's not too far from it)

> Anything else is like trying to eat a picture of a sandwich to satisfy your hunger.

I think it's more akin to you trying to recreate a different sandwich after reading a couple of their cook-books.
by misterdabb | 2025-09-30 06:08:07+00:00
Distorting the economy is a real issue and should be talked about.

There is way too much front-loading of hiring strategies and infrastructure that happens on future (over-)promised capabilities, TAM and profitability projections.

If we are lucky it fizzles out into reasonable valuations and sound investments. If not we have had a giant misallocation of capital on an unprecedented scale setting us back by many many years, a diamond shaped work force in some sectors causing labour shortages and reduced growth in the long run.
by Qwertious | 2025-09-30 06:08:09+00:00
>A comment that I heard recently is that in some places using solar panels is literally cheaper than using wood panels for fences.

...that might have been my comment. Or someone else repeating it. I was wrong, I misremembered "in X years solar is projected to be cheaper than wood panels for fences". X being, IIRC, maybe 3 years?

The point still stands, but the fact doesn't. Not til ~2028.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-30 06:08:14+00:00
Was at a different aerospace company. Our internal people were really good. And by paperwork FYI they generated 1-2 filing cabinets worth of documentation per tail number of notes/quality checks/etc.

They could have IT set legal hold on email accounts, filesystems, PLM/MLM, etc and only us in IT and them knew, not even higher management. They could scrap $20,000 parts. It's also a small world, so chances are your internal people worked with the FAA person (who could be a consultant or full time FAA employee) at a past job so people know if trust levels are warranted.

There's also a whole other layer of oversite people might not realize. The company's insurance company (think Lloyd’s). They will have their own people who will come do on sites as well and do pretty intensive audits of everything from engineering through production.
by withinboredom | 2025-09-30 06:09:43+00:00
I have it master my music. I drop all the stems in a folder, tell it what I want, and off it goes to write a python script specifically for the album. It’s way better than doing it in the DAW, which usually takes me hours (or days in some cases). It can get it to 90% in minutes, only requiring some fine-tuning at the end.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-30 06:11:24+00:00
> a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI

Even before AI, there were issues with super-polished leetcode grinders. Their entire skillset was passing FAANG interviews via memorization of correct solutions and scripted answers.

An effective technique for identifying these cases leverages the fact that you can only have a "correct" answer memorized if optimal solutions exist. Fortunately, there are many common and relatively simple problems in computer science and software design that require reasoning from first principles because globally optimal solutions can't exist even in theory. Small changes to the problem constraints lead to wildly divergent design outcomes that are effectively not enumerable. The possible solution space is so large that you can't realistically memorize it even if the problem is relatively concise and well-understood. The pure leetcode grinders never seem to have studied problems without tidy answers.

The answers don't even matter that much, I am always more interested in the demonstrated ability to recognize and reason through the implications of constraint changes when there are no correct answers. People with solid computer science skills can usually muddle their way through it, whereas many people with immaculate leetcode skills fail the most basic versions of this.

The most important skill of juniors was demonstrating that they could effectively reason about and were motivated to dive into problems they had never seen before. These were always the juniors that could be rapidly developed into strong senior engineers, which is more or less the objective when you hire juniors.
by palmotea | 2025-09-30 06:11:42+00:00
> It's not that there was some conspiracy to get more people into software. Software is fun, pays well and is accessible - no wonder more people wanted (and still want) to get into it.

Yeah, and also the perception that they were some of the last good jobs left. IIRC, other areas of the middle class have been declining for a long time.
by prerok | 2025-09-30 06:12:18+00:00
Industries that want PhDs are quite limited IME. Very few companies are running their own research labs. I guess pharma would but in CS? Not one company in my country.

I also don't remember seeing PhD requirement/advantage in who's hiring on HN. There may be, but they are for sure rare.

In my country, in some job positions, a company is also required to give higher salaries to PhDs, so they reject such candidates because of overqualification. I know of a few cases where people actually officially removed their PhD from their education list.

YMMV, and I am glad it's working out for you but, at least in my country, the reality is very different.
by BJones12 | 2025-09-30 06:12:30+00:00
No, PEI does not have a lot of remote workers. AFAIK the main provider of tech jobs there is government in various forms, and they mandate several in-office days per week.

It's just a place that is geographically disconnected from the mainland, and it rhymes.

Source: I work with some people from PEI.
by jjav | 2025-09-30 06:13:02+00:00
> "only there to exchange his time for money, not make any meaningful contributions"

I sometimes wish companies were more open to accepting these roles, instead of the up or out model.

There is in many teams a lot of busywork that for various reasons can't be automated (or new incoming busywork that takes over when the older one gets automated).

If an employee is content with just handling this kind of lower level busywork and go home at 4:30pm in exchange of not pursuing raises and promotions, there's nothing wrong with that. That work still needs to get done, so rather than getting a never ending stream of junior new hires constantly having to get trained, I'd be fine with having someone who is happy to stay at that level and take it easy.
by elitan | 2025-09-30 06:13:21+00:00
I'm building #4:

> A hybrid of Strong (the lifting app) and ChatGPT where the model has access to my workouts, can suggest improvements, and coach me. I mainly just want to be able to chat with the model knowing it has detailed context for each of my workouts (down to the time in between each set).

here: https://j4.coach/

Still early, have ~30 min per day to work on it but it's usable and improving every week :)
by userbinator | 2025-09-30 06:13:41+00:00
After checking each of the 256 cells, the cell with the lowest difference is chosen.

This is essentially the fundamental operation of a vector quantizer codec, which was popular in the early days of lossy video compression due to its low processing requirements. The fact that this term doesn't appear in the article means the author has independently discovered and reinvented this theory, which is itself quite impressive.
by lu794377 | 2025-09-30 06:14:24+00:00
AI isn’t just answering text anymore—it’s learning to speak, sing, and perform.

wan2.2 infinitetalk turns a single image + audio into lifelike talking avatars. Think: Lectures narrated by historical figures Songs animated without studios Human-like product explainers Dynamic social media content

Not just chat. Real voices. Real expressions. Real impact.

Try it here: InfiniteTalk

What would you build with it?
by komali2 | 2025-09-30 06:15:15+00:00
The interview has various portions, given in sequence. The ones who got the furthest (or ran out our interview to where we had to invent "new fun bits" on the fly) were the ones who I mean when I say "performed best."

The interview was implementing in live coding a prepared frontend stack. The email sent out indicated explicitly the task, that they'd be expected to share their screen and clone a repo off github, run `npm` commands, and then pair program. So those that weren't prepared for this, fussing around with ssh keys not set up or node not installed, or not knowing how to use bash or git, yeah it counted against them.
by legostormtroopr | 2025-09-30 06:15:18+00:00
I've see so many HN posts and cmments about CSVs sucking and Unicode control characters as delimiters, that I set about creating a spec and some tools for use with it.

Nothing good enough to share as its own post, but its something I'm working on that people may be interested in.

https://github.com/LegoStormtroopr/unit-separated-values
by striking | 2025-09-30 06:15:24+00:00
I have a more straightforward rebuttal of the need for an AI Hemingway. Someone already implemented a decent interactive guide to writing like Hemingway at least a decade ago, before all this LLM stuff: https://hemingwayapp.com/

It uses some simple heuristics to identify grammar that could be simpler and prompts you to do better. It might actually be better than an LLM specifically because it isn't able to do the rewriting for you. Maybe that might help a user learn.
by Animats | 2025-09-30 06:15:35+00:00
> A paint-by-number filmmaking app. I want to be able to brainstorm an idea for a short film in the app, have the model create a detailed storyboard, and then I just need to use my phone to film each of the storyboarded shots. Kind of like training wheels for making movies.

There are at least half a dozen apps for that.[1][2]

There are other apps for creating the shots, too. Those are still not that great, but it's getting there. You could probably previz a whole movie right now.

[1] https://ltx.studio/platform/ai-storyboard-generator

[2] https://ezboard.ai/
by pjmlp | 2025-09-30 06:16:09+00:00
I agree with all of that, I just don't believe it will matter outside Apple's ecosystem.

Developers on Apple ecosystem are the ones that would be using Swift like that, as it also provides a good to share code between apps and server side code.

Most likely Apple will also be the only one writing firmware or OS drivers in Swift, that is where Embedded Swift project started.
by hyperadvanced | 2025-09-30 06:16:56+00:00
Orthogonal comment here but “onboarding” has always struck me as weird. I’ve only had 3 tech jobs in 15 years and may not need to get another one, but at every one I just showed up on day one and started doing things that people asked me to. Clone the repo, run it locally, deploy a change to dev, poke around at it, read some docs, do a little refactor or comment on other people’s PR’s. There is much to do. I don’t get these people who show up and like.. don’t do anything. Even if you do something dumb and have your PR ready for review EOD it’s all good. I have never seen the effort that goes into these mountains of onboarding docs that some of my coworkers have pay off, I just pair with the new people and we solve things and they learn.
by komali2 | 2025-09-30 06:17:01+00:00
Using vscode wasn't a red flag, using a different IDE was just a green flag. Everyone uses vscode, I wouldn't hold it against anyone for doing so, especially not a junior. But picking a different tool exhibits a unique level of interest in the job and our tools, and a different mindset. Those are pluses for me.

Nobody was rejected because they used windows. It just so happens that none of the windows folks got past problem 1 of 3 (as in, they ran out of time without solving).

Edit: I'm remembering now, one of the windows folks did get to the end of the interview, and they were the first person I recommended actually, so it's not like it was a deciding factor, just something that I'd see and go "hm" about.
by fredrikholm | 2025-09-30 06:18:48+00:00
In Clojure it's:

(.-> foo bar baz)

So you might be right in correcting me, it's been a while since I've used another FP language in anger.

With regards to taking the address of foo, pointers are generally not a (user space) concept in FP languages. The compiler/runtime usually optimizes cases like this as passing function pointers is a very large corner stone of FP.

For mutation semantics you often approach it similar to how atomics works in non-FP languages. When opting into mutation you lose one of the pillars of FP which is idempotency and purity via immutability. Treating it as a special case helps scope it down to "here be dragons" areas.
by kogepathic | 2025-09-30 06:19:22+00:00
> The problem is that if everyone hops jobs every 9-18 months, it’s not worth training up juniors because the employer will never get to benefit.

It is absolutely worth hiring and training juniors. The quality of your onboarding process and documentation will improve. Not only that but a junior will ask questions that senior engineers take for granted, such as "why are we doing X this way?" which can lead to improvements that your existing engineers might not have considered.

Finally, if junior engineers are joining your organisation and leaving every 9-18 months, you need to take a serious look at your career progression ladder and compensation. I have seen way too many companies that have an arbitrary "you cannot receive a promotion in the first X months" HR policy which is just asinine. You know who doesn't have this stupid policy? The company your junior just accepted an offer from.

If your organisation doesn't have the tools and processes to up skill junior engineers into seniors, then it doesn't have professional development for senior engineers and is just a career dead end.
by JdeBP | 2025-09-30 06:19:32+00:00
People commenting on the legal definition in the new California Act (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45418428) have not followed the footnote in the annotated version of the original Bill that leads to here.

For starters: The technical meaning of "infer" being used is explained on page 9 of the memo. The meaning of "input" is on page 8 and clearly does not cover lawn mower knobs.

California did not create this definition. This is a definition that the OECD created in 2019 and has refined since.

Recital 12 of the (also footnoted) E.U. Artificial Intelligence Act (2024), which uses this same definition, explains how the definition is structured to rely upon characteristics that distinguish it from lawnmower knobs and "simpler traditional software systems" like me writing a computer program.

* https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...

It's not solely the C standard that comes with a rationale. (-:
by FranzFerdiNaN | 2025-09-30 06:19:38+00:00
> Even my clubbing years while fun were relatively forgettable compared to the mischief of running around with my teen friends not spending money.

When people say that hanging out is getting expensive they didnt mean when they were 10-15 or so. Its easy to not spend money at those ages. Its not when you're 20+. You cant run around the neighbourhood anymore, or eat stuff your parents bought