MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mcntsh | 2025-09-02 16:05:45+00:00
> working hard at creating value does, and that is still true today

This is the point that the parent was making. How you define "value" is the topic of discussion here, which in my opinion has become so abstract that it's impossible become successful around. Investors make money on failing businesses, software engineers make money on products that never monetize, top AI researchers make millions working for 2 weeks at one company doing training modules before moving to another.

In the modern economy, money is made by ideas, concepts, potentials. Not value.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-02 16:05:59+00:00
The problem you'll find (I've found) in this case is that management in many of these "startups" expect a certain kind of ... ahem... motivational/authoritarian structure ... that lacks effectiveness or sense with someone who has paid off their mortgage and is mainly there in order to ship things and enjoy crafting software.

Put it another way, there are people in every company whose reasons being there can conflict with the motivations of an engineer with the priorities you describe. Often those people end up being your manager.
by alphazard | 2025-09-02 16:06:00+00:00
The meritocracy only exists at the broad market level. Within almost every organization there is a zero-sum game of mostly politics. The vast majority of Americans go to work in a zero-sum environment. It could be a job waiting tables, it's unlikely to scale with how good you are at it. Or it could be a middle management position. You might be able to play politics for a higher salary, but you aren't going to get it by actually being good at your job. Similarly you aren't going to lose your job by being bad at it, only by being politically inept.

It's setup this way because that's how mid-to-late career employees want it to be setup. People would rather find a niche and then coast than constantly worrying about being outperformed by people younger or smarter than them. If there's not competition, then there's no way for hard work to yield more than slacking off.
by sfpotter | 2025-09-02 16:06:04+00:00
Why not? At any point in time since then there have been new technologies that don't exist. As a company, you can always make the call to hire people without that specific experience and train them, or you can punt and wait for a 3rd party to do the training for you. Clearly, companies have by and large settled on the latter, but IMO it's unclear there's actually a good argument for it.
Show HN: Infra-tools – CLI to spin up 15 dev services instantly
by arefm | 2025-09-02 16:06:35+00:00
Cross-platform CLI that starts 15+ enterprise services with one command:

• Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, SQL Server, Neo4j, CouchDB • Messaging: Kafka, Zookeeper, RabbitMQ • Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack • API Gateway: Kong with admin interface

Interactive config command lets you customize any service (image, ports, volumes, env vars). Replaces complex docker-compose setups with simple commands.

npm install -g infra-tools infra-tools databases # Start all databases infra-tools config postgres # Configure PostgreSQL interactively infra-tools status # Check what's running with colored status
by haswell | 2025-09-02 16:06:43+00:00
With all respect, I would encourage you to investigate this more deeply, and the swipe is unnecessary.

I realize it sounds preposterous. I spent the majority of my life holding a similar view. I mentally categorized meditation as another religious affect not much different than prayer or the bliss people report about their personal relationship with some deity.

My view changed when a confluence of life circumstances led to an experience that opened my mind to the possibilities and I ended up going down a meditation rabbit hole where I found that I could access those states at will. What I found was entirely unlike my preconceptions, and made me realize that I’d been summarily dismissing (and judging) people for something I did not understand.

There’s a reason that many people find meditation through prior drug experiences. More commonly psychedelics, but dissociative anesthetics as well.

Certain drugs basically guarantee you’ll experience these states, while learning to meditate “properly” is something that most people find difficult or confusing. I think this confusion comes from the baggage people associate with it and from the frankly terrible meditation and mindfulness apps, books and gurus that have flooded the market, and the “do thing, get result” framing that is common in western contexts. I don’t think most people’s pop understanding of meditation even scratches the surface.

I’ve experienced the bliss of anesthesia drugs. Achieving similar states through meditation is a real thing. This doesn’t have to be “Buddhism” per se. It just happens to be one of the most well known and structured paths for exploring this.

For the record, I’m a materialist and agnostic atheist. My views were formed based on experience, not belief. I think Buddhism is useful in a utilitarian sense, but there are paths of practice that don’t require all of the religiosity.

I try to respond to comments like yours because I see an earlier version of myself in them. I take some issue with how the original comment was framed, but meditation is the real deal and worth exploring.
by MangoToupe | 2025-09-02 16:06:51+00:00
> If the foreigners were positively contributing to the economy their economic output would create jobs as well.

They do—actually, by a massive margin compared to citizens born here—we just don't have the legal immigration framework set up to support this.

EDIT: I was unaware a "debate" was even happening, I was just clarifying that immigrants start businesses at a massively higher rate than birthright citizens do.
by ashwinsundar | 2025-09-02 16:06:52+00:00
Location: Denver, CO

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: python, django, docker, git, postgres, react, next.js, gatsby, typescript, jQuery, vanilla javascript, objectstore (nosql db), prisma ORM, graphql, bash/zsh, github actions, amazon web services (AWS), digitalocean, go, mqtt (mosquitto), R, matlab

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/AshwinSundar/resume/blob/main/resume.md

Email: ashiundar@gmail.com

Seeking: Part-time contracting work (25%-75%)

Target billing rate: $125-$150/hour

About: Full-stack developer with a master's degree in biomedical engineering. Polyglot technologist, with a focus on Python and Django development. Wide variety of professional experience to draw from. Am currently launching a startup (while working a full-time job as a Sr SWE) - I'd like more time to spend on the startup, while continuing to pay my bills. Thus the desire for part-time contracting work.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-09-02 16:06:54+00:00
> One reason is legal check-ins, folks can be in the US on many different types of entry.

What are legal check ins? Did you mean immigration court hearings?

Also, what kind of entry necessitates check in with ICE?

> Some require regular check ins with ICE or an immigration judge to continue being here.

As far as I know check-ins with ICE mean that the individual has a court order to be deported, but for various reasons is not deported yet. I am not sure about the check ins mandated by the immigration judge, so cannot comment on that, but I would like to learn more.

> ICE told immigration judges to dismiss cases (based on a new memo being challenged) and enable immediate arrests.

How does it work? Does ICE have the authority over immigration judge? Like, what is the chain of command here?

> Additionally some folks who had continuing cases were getting arrested before the case concluded (e.g. asylum cases))

I think it happens because they were not admitted via the port of entry but rather crossed the border without inspection. Waiting for the asylum hearing by itself doesn’t mean you have the right to be in the country.
by ashwinsundar | 2025-09-02 16:06:57+00:00
SEEKING WORK

Location: Denver, CO

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: python, django, docker, git, postgres, react, next.js, gatsby, typescript, jQuery, vanilla javascript, objectstore (nosql db), prisma ORM, graphql, bash/zsh, github actions, amazon web services (AWS), digitalocean, go, mqtt (mosquitto), R, matlab

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/AshwinSundar/resume/blob/main/resume.md

Email: ashiundar@gmail.com

Seeking: Part-time contracting work (25%-75%)

Target billing rate: $125-$150/hour

About: Full-stack developer with a master's degree in biomedical engineering. Polyglot technologist, with a focus on Python and Django development. Wide variety of professional experience to draw from. Am currently launching a startup (while working a full-time job as a Sr SWE) - I'd like more time to spend on the startup, while continuing to pay my bills. Thus the desire for part-time contracting work.
by buu700 | 2025-09-02 16:07:16+00:00
"Should be fairly low" isn't a safe assumption without robust data to back that up. I think it's more likely to be unacceptably high. Dashes are standard punctuation marks available through Android/iOS/macOS keyboards, and automatically inserted into text by common tools like Microsoft Word — not some obscure Unicode character. What's next, are we going to start flagging any text that ends in a question mark as "AI-generated"?
by pavel_lishin | 2025-09-02 16:07:28+00:00
I once discovered a community of people in a PhPBB board I administered - they didn't register on the board itself, but one of the plugins allowed a different type of user registration, and a whole sub-forum itself.

We had no idea, until one day we stumbled into it by accident. It was very much like discovering a family was living in your closet.
by zveyaeyv3sfye | 2025-09-02 16:07:33+00:00
> in-situ

I believe you mean ex situ:

> By contrast, ex situ methods involve the removal or displacement of materials, specimens, or processes for study, preservation, or modification in a controlled setting, often at the cost of contextual integrity.

Might as well use the correct words if you want to talk above people's heads.
by jparishy | 2025-09-02 16:07:39+00:00
We're on the same wavelength. To me, I find it hard not to think about our explosive growth as a country happening at the same time we refuse to expand representation of the public. These charts are very frustrating to me: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN11547

The people in power do not want to lose control, but clearly have no idea how to manage the scale of what has been built. There's an American leadership crisis going on right now that is hard to ignore, both in public and private life.
by rayiner | 2025-09-02 16:07:45+00:00
> The Path is unlike the gloomy and malodorous underpasses with which most of us are familiar. It is expensively decorated and feels like a high-end shopping mall, which in a way it is. It is extremely clean and closely policed by dozens of private security teams

I love the commercial spaces in Tokyo’s underground subway/train network, which similarly are privately owned. It’s such a huge upgrade from the concourses in subway systems in the U.S.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-02 16:08:07+00:00
I worked at one in the 2010/2011 time frame where I did not, ironically one where I made no effort at all on negotiation on options and assumed the options would be worth zero. A year later Google bought us.

I didn't get "I'm retiring now" money, not even close. But consider I expected nothing, was only a senior-level IC there for a year, and remained an IC after, it made appreciable change in my life and got me a good paying job at Google after.

But I think in that case it had more to do with the parties involved (our management were great people, and Google was motivated to treat us well).

I'd love to replicate this experience, but it ain't gonna happen.
by HanClinto | 2025-09-02 16:08:10+00:00
When I was in Kolkata two and a half years ago, I saw a young man wearing a jacket with a slogan on the back.

In large letters, it said "The more you LEARN, the more you EARN."

That would be so out of place in midwest USA, where cynicism is rampant and young people believe they have no control over their own outcomes.

I wish I had taken a picture of that jacket.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-09-02 16:08:14+00:00
Yup. It's somewhat rare to find "top talent" at a startup, but more because many modern startups are stupid, existing only to suck from the VC teat. In my day... Be was a "startup" and Dominic and Andy were "top" talent. (and wasn't Dianne Hackborn at Be back then?) NeXT was a startup once and Avi Tevanian (despite my many, many technical disagreements) was an EXCELLENT engineer. RSADSI was a startup an Steve Dusse and Bob Baldwin were TOP talent.

I think after the dot-com run-up, "startup" often implied "unprofitable idiot idea that looks plausible long enough to convince VCs to use your company as a demonstration of the greater fool theory." But I said "often," not "always." The critical and vexxing part of this is it's so hard to figure out which idiot ideas are profitable before the VCs shower a small cadre of Stanford GSB grads with cash.
by 7402 | 2025-09-02 16:08:37+00:00
Well this one isn't.

People flag articles because they disagree with them, but also because they just think the discussion may descend into uninformative yelling. My point concerned the discussions that do appear, rather than which articles make it through unflagged, but even there it appears they don't support the narrative of "only good things about Israel appear in the media."

There's a relevant discussion in this recent post from a couple weeks ago:

Ask HN: Are we allowed to discuss Israel on HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44947788

"We want to give the topic of Israel and Gaza fair exposure, as it's obviously an important story and it would feel wrong to pretend it's not happening. At the same time, every time we have one of these stories on the front page, it turns in to a hellish flamewar, we have to spend all day moderating it..."
by gxs | 2025-09-02 16:08:41+00:00
Ah, spoken like someone who’s actually built a team

In sports, you call them role players and it’s no different when building dev teams

I can’t imagine managing a team full of “best engineers”, sounds like a nightmare

Sometimes you just want solid, competent engineers who can agree to disagree and build what you ask them, in the way you ask them to
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-09-02 16:08:49+00:00
> Isn’t this a bit obvious?

I thought the same thing as I left the church, but it's so ingrained in many people in ways they don't even realize.

Another commenter mentions the "just world fallacy," which I agree drives this sentiment directly: if you work hard, you get good things. If you got bad things, it's because you didn't work hard (enough).

There's lots of feedback loops that perpetuate this: survivorship bias, historic wealth (ye olde boomer-bought-a-house-on-a-single-factory-salary), startup CEOs. I find the description of the American poor who don't see themselves as poor but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" to be incredibly true.

Additionally, in many cases the people who're the most affected have the least resources to make themselves heard, the classic "rich people don't have the same 24 hours a day as the rest of us."

So, yeah, to a degree it should be obvious to anyone who goes looking, but there's so many sociological effects layered on top of each other that make it counterintuitive to someone for whom the system is working well.
by zackmorris | 2025-09-02 16:09:09+00:00
I've only known a "good" economy from about 1995-1999 when the internet went mainstream and for the briefest of moments, we got a taste of what public investment in tech feels like.

The powers that be quickly saw the danger in that and IMHO orchestrated the Dot Bomb, 9/11, the Housing Bubble, etc to keep as much money as possible out of public hands so that the average person wouldn't have the means to participate in the stock market.

Suze Orman told everyone to put their savings into Vanguard in the 2000s and they did. But since America chose to invest in McMansions and SUVs instead of moonshots and automation, Vanguard is now cannibalizing US real estate rather than making venture capital available to small businesses and startups in its insatiable hunger for profit. Along with countless other zero-sum game thinkers who choose to work within existing systems of control rather than pursuing innovations which could raise the median standard of living. This is why as America has been losing its empire status as holder of the world's reserve currency, it's been colonizing itself, particularly its young.

So that's my greatest disappointment with the present era. That we collectively chose to invest in private profit rather than shared prosperity.

Now, tons of people will complain that I'm oversimplifying and will kick and scream in resistance to what I'm saying. But at the end of the day, personal wealth represents wages withheld from workers. I don't know why we worship people who have reached positions of power and wealth, whose purpose for existing seems to be to withhold resources from everyone else.
by mythrwy | 2025-09-02 16:09:25+00:00
The system (in general) hasn't been rewarding hard work since the late 80's at least. Instead it has rewarded financial flim flams and rent seeking.

That being said, "hard work" has become a bit of rarity in the West and many people don't know what it is at this point.

So we have two problems near as I can see.
by aspir | 2025-09-02 16:09:49+00:00
Disclaimer: not only am I a Fastly employee, I'm the Fastly employee quoted in the register article originally linked.

We'd argue our stance and focus are a bit different. Our stance is -- we help eng teams and the open web with whatever their preference for AI might be.

If you want to go all in and monetize AI traffic or sign an agreement with a foundation model for training, we have tools that can help you do that. If you want to go scorched-earth on AI bots that try to scrape your systems, we can help you do that too.

It's all about helping engineers tasked with tough problems get their jobs done, regardless of whether the flavor of the week is AI or something else.
by rachofsunshine | 2025-09-02 16:10:01+00:00
Depends on the business.

Some startups (like mine) are delivering a service, and the technology used to deliver that service is instrumental. Our back-end is an Airtable I configured myself, and it's been sufficient so far; better tech is not make or break for what we do. Other startups, like Flexport some years ago, fundamentally depend on technical function because that's the core of what they do.

One of the common mistakes founders make, in my expetience, is not asking which camp they're in. It's not a hard question to answer (usually), but it's an easy one not to ask.
by tupac_speedrap | 2025-09-02 16:10:07+00:00
Parents won't allow tough grading lets be honest, they just like how it sounds on paper. There's far too many kids nowadays with parents who think they can do no wrong terrorising classrooms and sapping attention from students who actually put the effort in but if you actually contact their parents and tell them maybe their kid shouldn't assault other people or put some more effort in to get better grades they enter this weird denial state and lash out and their kid keeps up the bad behaviour.
by 0xTJ | 2025-09-02 16:10:30+00:00
It is shocking to me that people would seriously discuss not teaching calculus just because LLM tools exist. Computational math engines didn't make understanding how you solve an integral obsolete, but they can make certain tasks faster and less error-prone.

This feels like a "tech bro" idea from someone who has never touched a SEM field (STEM minus the T).
Show HN: WasmX: metamorphic WASM blockchain engine [first public release]
by loredanacirstea | 2025-09-02 16:10:39+00:00
After 2 years of programming 12-16h/day (self-funded) and more than 50 progress demo videos, I built the most flexible WASM-based blockchain engine. Today I made the source code public.

This is the only blockchain engine capable of metamorphosis: it can change any system contract while running, including its consensus protocol (which is a finite state machine interpreted by a WASM contract; can also be seen as a visual diagram :D)

* Multi VM, language-agnostic, general & domain-specific language interpreters, a variety of host APIs. * EVM, TinyGo, AssemblyScript, JavaScript, Python, Rust, FSMvm (finite state machine interpreter). * host APIs: wasmx (our core API), wasmx crosschain, wasmx multichain, wasmx consensus, ewasm, WASI adaptor, GRPC, libp2p, HTTP, SQL, KV dbs, SMTP, IMAP * multichain, crosschain, atomic crosschain transactions: each node can run multiple chains and subchains * digital identity integration

Compatible with both Ethereum and Cosmos SDK wallets.

WHY? My friend (the high-level architect) and I (the builder) wanted a platform for storing proofs. I also wanted a global-level digital voting platform that is mathematically verifiable.

Demo videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/LoredanaCirstea/videos

We want to start a new testnet soon. But be aware that a stable version of the chain will require a digital identity (for validators and probably users, too). We DO NOT have a token, you WILL NOT make "crypto" money. Read our Moral License from the repo, and if you share our WHY, join our Discord.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-02 16:10:57+00:00
I know it is a mess, yet looking at the competition, one doesn't need to give up native platforms in the name of cloud.

Android and iOS/macOS are what Longhorn never managed to be (granted still under Balmer), and SwiftUI/Jetpack Compose have managed to be something useful in half the time Project Reunion has been going with a joke in resourcing.
by saberience | 2025-09-02 16:10:58+00:00
I work in the AI field and I've heard every analogy possible for LLMs since ChatGPT was released, including many variants of Encylopedias (Grolier/Encarta etc), although, analogies to encyclopedias have always been (for me) quite limited as encyclopedias are just static data-stores and also are riddled with errors and out of date (just like LLMs). LLMs however can provide output which is completely novel and has never been seen before.

Pre LLMs we had already been working on content generation using prior tech, including texture generation pre diffusion models and voice generation (although it sounded terrible). At my company we spent hours discussing the difference between various data compression algorithms and ML techniques/model architectures and what was happening inside ML models and also, inside our brains! But even then we didn't think anything we were discussing was novel at all, these ideas were (and still are) obvious.

Anyway, back on the topic, of the LLM as encyclopedia, you can USE an LLM for encyclopedia-like workloads, and in some cases it is better or worse than an actual encyclopedia. But in the end, encyclopedias are written by flawed humans just like all the data that went into training the LLM was written by flawed humans. Both encyclopedias and LLMs are flawed and in different ways, but LLMs at least can do new things.

I actually think a better analogy to an LLM is to the human brain than an encyclopedia, lossy or not. I think we massively overrate our brains and underrate LLMs. The older I've gotten the more I realize the vast majority of people talk absolute rubbish most of the time, exaggerate their knowledge, spout "truths" which are totally inaccurate, and fake it till they make it throughout most of their life. If you were fact checking the entire population on everything they said on a day to day basis, I think the level of "hallucination" would be much higher than Claude Opus 4.1. That is, I think our level of scrutiny is MUCH higher for LLMs than it is for our friends and co-workers. We tend to assume that if another human says something to us like "New York has a higher level of crime than Buenos Aires", we take them at face level usually, due to various psychological and social priming. But we fact check our LLMs on statements such as these.