MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sph | 2025-09-30 06:20:19+00:00
As they say, youth is wasted on the young. Reaching my 40s, I feel I am, almost, at the end of the tutorial of life. Sure, if you dedicate yourself to something as soon as your brain is reaching maturity in early adulthood, you might be a master by the time you reach middle age.

But the common trajectory is that youth is not usually spent advancing the arts and sciences, but to learn the circus of society, its rules, its demands, to the point that we have the very real concept of midlife crisis when these individuals, after learning what the hell society wants from them, ask, “is that all? I got my degree, my job, my career, now what?”

Only after answering this question, in your late 30s or 40s, the road to self-realisation opens. I think rather the fact that we don’t see many Vonneguts is that the vast majority of people never make this step, and just continue to dance the monotonous rhythm of work and family, learned in their 20s, to their grave, without ever developing their full potential.

A lot of Carl Jung’s career as a therapist was dedicated to the topic of self-actualisation for middle-aged adults.
by mhl47 | 2025-09-30 06:20:29+00:00
Currently trying to build #6. Just for private use. My hope is that by throwing a bunch of highly personalized information in a VLM it will provide reasonably first estimates. (E.g. if you see a bowl lentils I will probably have rice below etc.). And then iterate on the main ingredients -> fetch the macros of main ingredients from a DB. If its within 20% that would be enough for me.

I have tried some off-the-shelfe solutions and they currently do not seem to cut it, or are too complex for my use case.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-30 06:20:29+00:00
You are talking about type certification which is a different certification/process way prior to this. This is talking about 'certificate of airworthiness' for a specific tail number. This is confirmation that the aircraft/tail number was built to type design. It has nothing to do with defining/certifying type design.

The FAA cert of airworthiness just confirms that this tail number was build exactly to type design, or, if required, anything that didn't went through non-conformance (say someone accidentally drilled a hole in the wrong spot and engineers had to decide if that compromised type design, mitigate it if needed, document it, and include documentation on all that with the tail number). There is no malice here this position/certification doesn't do what you seem to think it does.

You salary concern is wrong too. Aviation is a small world. The QA person has to be approved by the FAA to have a job. Boeing can threaten a paycheck, the FAA a career. Boeing is also Union in Seattle.

But again you should not be asking questions at this level just confirming the tail number was manufactured exactly to type design. You should be doing type design checks, that were approved as part of the type design process, and signed off and approved by the FAA. If the system requires someone to be an aerospace engineer level asking smart question during this phase, the entire FAA system failed and it wouldn't matter if FAA was on site or not. This is 1-2 filing cabinets worth of documentation that checks were performed and everything conformed to type. Documenting/verifying every part's serialized number in case of grounding/recall. That assemblies were assembled in the type design specified order, not the faster way Bob on the floor came up with (I think this was the problem with the doors, contractors not doing to type design and type design not requiring auditing in a way that caught that). Stuff like that.
by nsoonhui | 2025-09-30 06:20:51+00:00
A Civil 3D plugin (Genabler) that will include all the network catalogs and collate the Civil 3D styles for civil engineers to use.

There are some out-of-the-box catalogs and styles shipped with the default installation, but they are quite limited and fairly well hidden—which is not surprising, given that Civil 3D is a huge beast. As a result, they are not commonly used.

When people think about Civil 3D, they often assume it requires BIM modelers (in a sense, just glorified drafters) to create all the necessary catalogs and styles, and to assist with their use.

My Civil 3D plugin will:

1. Make standard, market-compliant catalogs and polished styles available to engineers at large. Think of it as the WordPress theme provider equivalent.

2. Make the entire process easy and painless through the plugin, with prominent buttons for quick access.

If the plugin is done well, there will be less need for BIM modelers, since for a fee, engineers could simply purchase catalogs and styles that are so easy to use they require no technical training.

As a side benefit, I also get to explore how LLMs can help me write code. It has been a while since I last updated my AI usage policy [0], and I look forward to revisiting it.

[0]: https://civilwhiz.com/my-ai-usage-policy/
by Zanfa | 2025-09-30 06:21:21+00:00
I’ve definitely seen way too much code like the examples above. Another side effect to this is it tends to leak all over and can result in exponentially more code. What would’ve been a 2-line change at the API boundary, becomes ten lines of manual edgecasing every time it’s used in business logic and results in impossible states that need even further typing and handling. And don’t forget the tests that now need to cover invalid inputs everywhere, not just the API boundary.
by neilv | 2025-09-30 06:21:24+00:00
> Look for passion and curiosity. You want the ones who light up when talking about their projects. They should show real excitement about the problems they've solved. These conversations should be energizing for both of you!

Interview prep tells candidates to fake "passion" and (now) "curiosity".

(The prep materials don't say to fake it, but they will phrase it implying that that's the truth, and that it's something that interviewers look for. The prep might give examples of when to be sure to "convey your passion", such as when discussing a project you worked on.)

The net result is that interview prep materials, and companies that select for that, end up selecting for people who will go through the motions of appearances. Which is OK if you are a stodgy huge company sitting on its laurels, that wants everyone to be a compliant worker drone, more than they want excellence. Not OK if you're a startup that really needs to execute with more than worker-drone capabilities.

Maybe an interviewer seeking genuine "passion" and "curiosity" would be better off giving points to someone who seems to have skills but didn't seem to have done interview prep, since they must have gotten that far by being genuine and non-drone?
by christoph123 | 2025-09-30 06:22:20+00:00
On your request 12

> A local screen recording app but it uses local models to create detailed semantic summaries of what I’m doing each day on my computer. This should then be provided as context for a chat app. I want to ask things like “Who did I forget to respond to yesterday?” I've been using Rewind for a year now, and it's nowhere near as useful as it should be.

I am building something like this but unfortunately not local because for most people's machines local LLMs are just not powerful enough or would take too much drain on battery. Work in progress, always curious for feedback! https://donethat.ai

If you want fully local, somebody did a post on HN on something related recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45361268
by notmyjob | 2025-09-30 06:23:00+00:00
The tarrifs may be ruled unconstitutional in November and the bond market might react abruptly if the US has to pay back much of the 150 billion or so collected from tariff payers so far. The Supreme Court hears the case on November 6th. If the tarrifs are a reason to maintain the bond rating, their sudden removal and the requirement to pay them back will be semi-catastrophic depending on who you ask. Lutnick laughs at the idea when pressed on CNBC, while Trump says it would be catastrophic for the country. (Lutnick claims to be out of the market but has said that Cantor-Fitzgerald has a “shit ton” of bitcoin, which could explain that divergence of sentiment regarding the upcoming hearing.)
by obezyian | 2025-09-30 06:23:11+00:00
Articles like this one are more likely to drive people away from make(1) than teach them to appreciate it.

This Makefile is anything but simple. It uses advanced features that are meant for complicated situations, just to create a few symlinks. The same symlinks, every time. And if you introduce a new dotfile to the repo, you have to update the Makefile too.

It also makes no use of the main feature of make(1) - to track files for changes, and update them.

For demonstration, here is the same functionality, in sh(1):

files=$(find files -type f | sed s=^files/==) echo "$files" | sed s=[^/]*\$== | sort -u | { cd; xargs mkdir -p; } echo "$files" | xargs -I{} -n1 ln -sf $PWD/files/{} ~/{}

Doesn't use advanced features, shorter, and you don't need to update the script for new dotfiles. And more "ubiquitous" than GNU make.
by 4ndrewl | 2025-09-30 06:25:19+00:00
This looks vibe-coded in very short order, which doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.

But given that, and the experience of generated code in general, I think you need to go the extra mile to demonstrate how you've coded it (has it been peer reviewed, security scans etc?), how you've been using it, for how long (has it actually seen action in real-life production) etc in order to convince people to look at it.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-30 06:25:40+00:00
As someone approaching 50 years old, "workplace like they're going into battle with evil managers", not sure where you are located, but in southern europe countries it has always been like this, regardless of the job.

That is why many countries still have a strong union culture, everyone gets exploited to the bones and they should be happy to have a job if at all.

It is quite depressing sadly, but that is what happens when many managers lack business education and see employees as replacable cogs without rights.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-09-30 06:25:48+00:00
The overlap with Jetpack's devbox name is not fine. Not morally, given the massive overlap in functionality between the two implementations. At the very least, their existence will prevent you from getting a trademark.

Both projects even use devbox.json for their definitions, for crying out loud. If your usage is not compatible with Jetpack's devbox.json, please switch to a different filename ASAP.
by zkmon | 2025-09-30 06:26:43+00:00
Not very long ago, the real reason smart managers, in consulting firms, hired juniors by boat loads, though they are not very skilled, is because the young staff has other compensating qualities.

The work these companies had was quite irregular, unstructured and unexpected as well. This demands a workforce that is very flexible, work over nights, can learn fast, can switch to any work easily (they are not stuck to a single kind of work role). Juniors wore many hats easily as situation demanded (faking included). They are also very mobile, can travel to a client site in any country. Most of them are singles. Feed them, do team outings, reward them and give gadgets (my team got first version of iPods free). They would give 50 hour weeks plus weekends. They hardly have any life outside of office. Sometimes they slept at office.

Also, the young workforce has a high team-bonding nature (romances included, intentionally). This makes them very good team players. What a manager means by "team player" is, they work for team goals, with poorly defined roles and tasks, without complaining.

There were a few seniors who review and guide the work, but the bulk of work was done by very mediocre, hard-working junior staff. When things go wrong, managers are ready to do crisis management and shuffle their young worker crowd across teams.

In other industries they are called MSGs: multi-skilled-gangs. These are very fluid work force. They don't know what kind of work will assigned to them on a certain day. It can be anything, from taking a support call, arranging lunch or pub party for the team, writing some html, testing some UI, giving a presentation to clients.

Undefined work requires undefined roles and employees that aren't yet married to certain work role, life style, or other person.
by polyrand | 2025-09-30 06:27:47+00:00
Instead of containers, which may not always be available, I'm experimenting with having control over the shell to whitelist the commands that the LLM can run [0]. Similar to an allow list, but configured outside the terminal agent. Also trying to make it easy to use the same technique in macOS and Linux

[0]: https://ricardoanderegg.com/posts/control-shell-permissions-...
by hodgehog11 | 2025-09-30 06:28:19+00:00
It will take another few months at least, and the rest of the argument will comprise a fair few pages. But the hardest part is over.

When working toward a problem of this magnitude, it is natural to release papers stepwise to report progress toward the solution. Perelman did the same for the Poincare conjecture. Folks knew the problem was near a solution once the monotonicity proof of the W functional came out.
by gostsamo | 2025-09-30 06:29:07+00:00
Those are not 28 ideas, those are 4-5 ideas rehashed. Generally, I want a personal fitness/wellness assistant, an artistic assistant, a search assistant, a random thoughts assistant, and an assistant to manage the assistants. The author wants for the ai to know what they want before they've wanted it and to serve them a suitable menu of choices to preserve the illusion that they are in control. I'm not sure that I'd sign under such a vision, but people want different things.
by adchurch | 2025-09-30 06:29:09+00:00
Author here, great to see all the conversation & thoughts you all have shared so far!

One thing I've seen a lot of people saying: hiring juniors isn't worth it because they'll just leave for more money in a couple years.

I got hired with 0 experience for my first job and stayed for 3.5 years (I left when I decided to start my own company). I was otherwise never tempted to leave because I got all the support and growth opportunities I could have hoped for, and I always felt fairly compensated.

So based on my own experience, it's possible for a company to treat people well enough that they won't just leave. I do think software companies tend to be bad at this specific thing though - I'd imagine many have had an experience unlike my own.
by EZ-E | 2025-09-30 06:29:45+00:00
This has been driving me crazy, at my mid sized company, higher management insists pretty hard in only hiring senior/staff. But to be honest we are far from solving novel, challenging technical problems. Inevitably we hire (expensive) super senior people who end up having responsibilities that do not match their level in tech and also in product. The good ones that want a challenge leave after ~1y. Junior or mid level would be a better fit in many cases. When I look at the job descriptions I find them ridiculously inflated in terms of expectations compared to what actually happens in the company. In the past when we hired junior, mid level engineers they ramped up pretty well, their salaries went up and they are still with us.
by globular-toast | 2025-09-30 06:30:13+00:00
I don't get how containers address "dependency hell". Is there some language that only supports installing libraries system wide? I've used a lot of different languages and yet to come across one.

I've worked on projects where the original dev has used containers for everything. It's super clunky and annoying. I don't want to use a different bash config just for working on that project. I've set my own up for a reason. All it makes me wonder is what are you afraid of? Why do you feel the need to isolate dev projects to this extent?
by kidnoodle | 2025-09-30 06:30:31+00:00
I’ve been working more on the unit economics of my data union/trust idea (https://wherelabs.info/).

What I’m trying to understand is whether it is viable to pay people ~$5 per week for sharing their location data and demographics based on a 90% share of revenue from sales of data products built on that data. (But without ever selling or exposing individual level data).
Show HN: Smallest static site generator (sssg.sh)
by pilkiad | 2025-09-30 06:30:40+00:00
Moin,

I have been looking for a minimal solution to generating my blog from thoughts I had - without much overhead, be it through file size, formatting or having to install external tools. I finally created a shell script that felt just right for my current situation. I get that this might not be what other people want or need, but I am a big fan of open-source and believe someone might benefit from the script.

Direct link to the repo: https://codeberg.org/pilkiad/sssg.sh

Disclaimer: pandoc needed ;)
by Gigachad | 2025-09-30 06:31:03+00:00
I feel like this is a lazy answer because there have been plenty of examples of eras where wealth equality was much better, for long periods of time. And they weren't periods of radical communism or whatever.

We just didn't tax the middle tier of workers so intensely while giving everything for free to the ultra rich. That isn't really a part of capitalism itself. It's just the specific scenario we ended up in today.
by miguelspizza | 2025-09-30 06:31:04+00:00
I wrote #2 as a result of a web automation tool I a working on. It's easier to show than tell.

This is a video of me "vibe-coding" a userscript that adds a darkmode toggle to hacker news: https://screen.studio/share/r0wb8jnQ

The actual purpose of the vibe-coding userscripts feature is to vibe code WebMCP servers that the extension can then use for browser automation tasks.

Everything is still very WIP, but I can give you beta access if you want to play around with it
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-30 06:32:50+00:00
Having been in both in software/IT capacities, having done PCI certified software, medical device software (requiring FDA approval), no. Not even close.

MAYBE, MAYBE the insurance company assessments/audits are kind of related to what you are talking about. But not really. But not the FAA ones. They are such a different beast with so much brain power involved along with people with a combined centuries of experience in this stuff, it's hard to explain without being around it.
by sebastiennight | 2025-09-30 06:33:18+00:00
It goes like this:

"For any positive "x", is 1 x times greater than 0? Well, 0 times x is lower than 1, and 1 divided by x is larger than 0."

So his productivity increased by more than twice, more than ten times, more than a billion times, more than a googol times, more than Rayo's number. The only mathematically useful way to quantify it is to say his productivity is infinitely larger. Unless you want to settle for "can't be compared", which is less informative.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-09-30 06:34:07+00:00
the best feature I love in python is:

s = someobj() ref1 = s.doOne ref2 = s.doTwo // then later ref1(arg1,arg2) ref2()

In Java you need to code like a crazy to have similar results. Also

m = someclas.doThree // later o = someclas() o2 = someclas() for i in [o,o2]: m(i)

so many patterns done easy and the right way
by ninjin | 2025-09-30 06:34:25+00:00
It really is impressive, but it is also fair to point out that it uses the MXM-1 mapper which only came into existence in 2022 [1]. I find it pointless to argue whether it is "cheating" or not as the technology it uses was used for other consoles at the time and it is fun to see new mappers like this, but it is, again, very different compared to keeping it within the realm of original Famicom/NES mappers and limits.

[1]: https://somethingnerdy.com/unlocking-the-nes-for-former-dawn
by withinboredom | 2025-09-30 06:34:29+00:00
Any effect you can imagine. It could probably write a DAW if you wanted it to, but a “one-off” script? Easy. I think the best thing is when I tell it something like “it sounds like there is clipping around the 1:03 mark” it will analyze it, find the sign flip in the processor chain, and apply the fix. It’s much faster at this than me.

Note that there needs to be open source libraries and toolings. It can’t do a Dolby Atmos master, for example. So you still need a DAW.
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-30 06:35:51+00:00
We're experiencing the same with MSSQL, and for our most important queries have started adding a constant-valued dummy column to the SELECT section which value changes every few minutes. Essentially an integer equal to UNIX time divided by 600 or similar.

That way a cached bad plan can't cause issues for more than a few minutes, which is acceptable for our use-case.

It's a sledgehammer but it was easy to add and it works.
by snvzz | 2025-09-30 06:36:48+00:00
>If they publish the schematics their competitors can make similar products

Copyright applies, even with schematics published. Somehow, the repair people end up with schematics through back channels. It is ridiculous they have to use these channels.

I'd argue the public interest is above any benefits Apple gets with this layer of obfuscation.

>Or worse, they patent the design and sit on new tech for 20 years which stifles innovation for other companies.

Don't companies do that anyway? Or do you mean steal ideas and then patent them? Prior art invalidates this.

>I guess an argument can also be made for security. Publishing schematics makes it easier bad actors.

Security through obscurity isn't a thing. Actual security requires a good design, not obfuscating a flawed one.
by wiether | 2025-09-30 06:36:56+00:00
> When I look at the job descriptions I find them ridiculously inflated in terms of expectations compared to what actually happens in the company.

At every company at work to, each time there was openings for the team I worked in, I read the job descriptions and I was like: "I would never apply for this position, I'm not qualified".

So I asked HR to lower the expectations, otherwise we would never find candidates. They told me that it was to avoid inexperienced people to apply. And then 99% of the candidates they pushed and I interviewed lied on their XP.

Good stuff!
by bwb | 2025-09-30 06:37:34+00:00
I'd love to get updates on this and talk with you. My email is ben@bookdna.com

We are in the process of building Notion but for books (specifically aimed at your to-be-read list and book log): https://building.shepherd.com/roadmap/launch-our-tbr-app-to-...

Very interested to hear how it goes.
by epolanski | 2025-09-30 06:38:00+00:00
> If the LLM comes up with the big ideas and tells a human technical assistant to execute (put the vial here, run the 3D printer with this file, put the object there, drive in a screw), would that help?

No, because the bottleneck isn't the thinking but running experiments.

I worked in solar research, assembling a cell to test implied 40 different steps and from beginning to testing it was around 4 to 5 days.

This means that in one year working full time I will realistically run 40ish different experiments. Many of those will need to be done multiple times, and when you have 40 different steps that can go wrong and kill your efficiency this further compounds.

Thus realistically are running 5 to 10 different experiments (or better, a handful plus their variations).

At no point in this process you're like "yeah, if only LLMs could provide ideas", it's just not true, you get millions of ideas, time and bodies are the limit.
by maxaw | 2025-09-30 06:38:07+00:00
On 12: I see a more general product that allows you to amass as much personal data from any of your devices for use as future chat context as inevitable. We see early notions of this in Microsoft’s Recall and the new Pulse. Hopefully someone will build a great local first/open source version and it’ll probably be the first time I actively choose to use such software over the equivalent cloud offering! Don’t want Sam Altman seeing my browser history