MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-05 17:26:45+00:00
> Hardships do come from high screen time, definitely. The poor job market is not one of them.

This times a thousand. I wouldn't have the jobs I do today if I didn't spend probably on balance an unhealthy amount of time in front of my own screens in the 90's. I got into programming because I loved screens and wanted to make them show me different things.

The difference today is two-fold IMO:

* The job market, as stated, is shit, especially for tech right now. For decades kiddos have been propagandized into going into a future in comp science of varying depths and qualities, both here in the US, and overseas. We have more tech workers than ever, wages are falling because of over-supply, and too many are focused on niche framework technologies who's skills don't translate well across the wide breadth of what's actually used in industry. Example: my company is hiring right now and it's DIRE to try and find mobile developers who actually develop in Kotlin/Java/Swift/Objective-C. I'm drowning in resumes for React developers but we don't use any of that and have no desire to.

* The screens now used by would-be budding hackers are locked down to hell and back, and were put in their hands when they were likely still shitting in their pants (no judgement of course, we all did it for awhile) and they don't conceive of them as "machines I could play with" but instead, simply as a never ending font of distraction and entertainment, perfectly curated to their individual desires.
by ednite | 2025-10-05 17:26:52+00:00
Your comment is appreciated and heard. That’s the beauty of learning new things, you try, you stumble, and you learn from your mistakes. As I’ve shared before, my blog started out heavily relying on AI for editing and grammar to get my ideas into words.

I quickly realized that wasn’t the best approach and that I needed to respect my readers’ time. If you look at my newer articles, you’ll see they’re shifting, becoming more me.

I’m lightly revising my earlier posts, but honestly I won’t change them much. I think it’s valuable for readers to see the progression, stumbles and all. Thanks for your comment, it might even become the subject of my next article.
by the_snooze | 2025-10-05 17:26:52+00:00
Steam is great, in no small part because Valve isn't beholden to quarterly earnings numbers. But I'm worried what will happen when Gabe Newell retires. Valve has been a pretty good (though at times imperfect) steward for PC gaming and it'll be sad if a change in leadership decides to extract value from 20+ years of goodwill.
by jjtheblunt | 2025-10-05 17:27:07+00:00
What happened to Transarc's DFS ?

I looked, found the link below, but it seems to just fizzle out without info.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE_Distributed_File_System

Anyway, we used it extensively in the UIUC engineering workstation labs hundreds of computers, 20+ years ago, and it worked excellently. I set up a server farm 20 years ago of Sun sparcs but used NFS for such.
by th0ma5 | 2025-10-05 17:27:14+00:00
I wish I could upvote this a bunch. It will only happen if people being to reflect on their gains at the hands of a specific vendor makes them beholden to that vendor. I know it is an idealism but I often think of statements like "source code or didn't happen" or wonder why people entrust such important things to one company an executive order away from being illegal.
by drdaeman | 2025-10-05 17:27:55+00:00
> aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them

I’m assuming “unable” means not complete lack of knowledge how to approach it, but lack of detail knowledge. E.g. a junior likely remembers some $algorithm in detail (from all the recent grind), while a senior may no longer do so but only know that it exists, what properties it has (when to use, when to not use), and how to look it up.

If you don’t think of something regularly, memory of that fades away, becomes just a vague remembrance, and you eventually lose that knowledge - that’s just how we are.

However, consider that not doing junior-level tasks means it was unnecessary for the position and the position was about doing something else. It’s literally a matter of specialization and nomenclature mismatch: “junior” and “senior” are frequently not different levels of same skill set, but somewhat different skill sets. A simple test: if at your place you have juniors - check if they do the same tasks as seniors do, or if they’re doing something different.

Plus the title inflation - demand shifts and title-catching culture had messed up the nomenclature.
by amluto | 2025-10-05 17:28:42+00:00
> BMS <-> "solar inverter" communication is not required.

It’s “not required” in the sense that it works. Poorly. Have you contemplated how balancing between paralleled “12V” LFP packs works? LFP has a voltage vs SoC curve that is very unpleasantly flat for purposes of cell balancing without intelligence, and almost no intelligence is available in these arrangements.

> Theres nothing wrong with 12V setups (see all the RVs that are out there).

There is so much wrong with them that it’s hard to even know where to start.

Let’s suppose you have an RV-like setup that is designed to power one single 15A 120V receptacle. That’s 1800W, which is pretty small by the standards of modern inverters. It’s also 150A at 12V. Want decent efficiency? That means you want to lose less than, say, 2V on the wires, so you need to carry those 150A over a round trip resistance below 13.3mOhm. If you use the ABYC ampacity table, that’s 2AWG or larger wire. Fortunately 2AWG will carry 150A a respectable distance without excessive voltage drop.

Now, 150A is a lot of current. 150A will make massive sparks, light things on fire, and weld sizable pieces of metal even if 12V is unlikely to electrocute you. And you’re feeding that wire or bus in multiple places (because you may have multiple batteries and a beefy charger), so you remember to put giant 150A fuses or breakers at all the feed locations, right?

But wait, 12V needs below 0.08 ohms to produce 150A. Want to comfortably blow a 150A fuse? You need well below 0.08 ohms total resistance in the entire circuit, including the fault. If you have a high resistance fault (and “high” could be 70 mOhms!), you will never blow the fuse and you can produce literally kilowatts of heat. Crispy! (Your house likely has circuits bigger than 150A, but it’s at a voltage that can much more easily trip the breaker, and in civilized countries there will be some sort of RCD as well.)

Oh, and that 2AWG cable is expensive, hard to bend, and requires actual skill to terminate well. And modern systems often target powers well above 1800W.

At least in a car, the high current portion of the 12V system is made and tested in a factory. And it still makes amazing showers of sparks if anyone messes up a jumper cable. There’s a reason that car makers want to move away from it.

So I stand by my claim: 12V sucks.
by westoncb | 2025-10-05 17:28:48+00:00
Doing math is not the same as calculating. LLMs can be very useful in doing math; for calculating they are the wrong tool (and even there they can be very useful, but you ask them to use calculating tools, not to do the calculations themselves—both Claude and ChatGPT are set up to do this).

If you're curious, check out how mathematicians like Robert Ghrist or Terence Tao are using LLMs for math research, both have written about it online repeatedly (along with an increasing number of other researchers).

Apart from assisting with research, their ability on e.g. math olympiad problems is periodically measured and objectively rapidly improving, so this isn't just a matter of opinion.
by benoau | 2025-10-05 17:28:49+00:00
> However, due to the system’s large-capacity, low-performance storage structure, no external backups were maintained — meaning all data has been permanently lost.

Yikes. You'd think they would at least have one redundant copy of it all.

> erasing work files saved individually by some 750,000 civil servants

> 30 gigabytes of storage per person

That's 22,500 terabytes, about 50 Backblaze storage pods.

Or even just mirrored locally.
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-05 17:29:50+00:00
Even office isn't that good. It's basically been static in features for 25 years (until copilot came around). It took them a decade to surpass the 65535-row problem in excel. Microsoft get really lazy when they have a virtual monopoly. We saw the same with Internet Explorer. They just left it to whither away until it was too late.

And yeah Teams, I can't stand it. Outlook too, in particular the "new" one that doesn't do half the things the old one could do and requires all your email to be in MS cloud even if you have another provider.
by 827a | 2025-10-05 17:30:04+00:00
IMO: it's a complicated situation. Activision-Blizzard-King has been in a pretty icky spot for many years now, dating back further than just the MSFT acquisition. I'd put the probabilities at like 90%+ that we'd see headlines very similar or worse to these if MSFT had not been allowed to buy them; more micro-transactions, layoffs, flops, weird exclusivity deals, etc. We need to cool it with the revisionist history; ABK sucked before MSFT bought them, they'd suck whether or not MSFT bought them, and you'd have to go back to like 2011 before you'd find a version of that company that's generally positive vibes.

The party that got screwed by that acquisition was, ironically, Microsoft. To be clear, this isn't a new discovery or idea; everyone was saying this during the acquisition, but Microsoft's corporate story is best summarized as "makes the worst possible decision at every turn yet still somehow does ok". If there's any reason the ABK acquisition should have been blocked, it might have been to protect Microsoft from itself, much akin to how parents have to keep babies from touching the stove.

ABK is a sinking ship that MSFT paid luxury yacht prices for. ABK should be renamed "King & Call of Duty Inc", but they're saddled with dozens of other properties and business divisions, including all of Blizzard, that make zero or negative money. This tethers a sinking ship, ABK, to a second sinking ship, Xbox, which similar to ABK has been sinking since, like, 2015, and hopes that the two sinking ships together might float.

There's a world where maybe Xbox leadership gets more involved, cuts fat, takes direct management of key laggard properties, maybe selling some off to focus up on what's driving revenue. But, again; Microsoft sucks. Their direct management buried Halo and Gears below the ground, from industry titans to totally irrelevant. The very real situation is that their leadership has totally lost confidence even in themselves, their failures are obvious and written across the sky, and that's led them to take a hands-off approach with ABK. But, again; ABK sucked. Eventually things get so bad that someone has to step in and make the really bad tactical decisions; raising prices and layoffs.

By 2030, Xbox will stagger on as an umbrella brand for a few zombie game studios + "gaming services on Windows". But, the hardware will be dead, and we'll see them begin to offload laggard studios/IPs/brands, either selling them off to other companies or spinning them off into independent companies which Microsoft holds a minority stake in.
by questionableans | 2025-10-05 17:30:33+00:00
At a global level, a more reasonably sized human population is exactly what we need, and a decline in birth rate is the most ethical way to achieve that. We have to find a way to make it work, because otherwise our trajectory takes us beyond the carrying capacity for our planet.

There are three things we need to deal with the temporary population imbalance:

Older people who remain healthy continuing to work to care for their peers—-not necessarily hard physical labor, but being out in their communities helping, which is rewarding and will help them stay healthy, too.

Easy immigration for regular people so they can move to where they’re needed.

General efficiency so we’re not wasting resources. This requires both technological and lifestyle changes, even for the rich. The more efficient we can get, the less we have to reduce our overall population.
by spaceballbat | 2025-10-05 17:30:41+00:00
The jump from junior to senior means you can self start and have created enough of a network to seek out help. Junior used to be a 1-3 year training period. Senior to principal means you have signififcant positive impact across the company: upper management relies on you to define the roadmap. Most people hang out in ‘senior’ for their entire careers because they never have that drive to stand out. Thats why there are titles like “staff” and “senior staff” to promote people who don’t have what it takes to get to principal.
by ksynwa | 2025-10-05 17:30:57+00:00
Yeah I don't see what the acquisition has to do here. Both Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard were pretty predatory before the deal. I can't imagine what they would have done differently being separate from each other. The biggest "concern" I can remember of was Call of Duty coming to Game Pass or leaving PlayStation but I don't know what came off that. I am guessing it didn't come to pass seeing how the console department at Xbox has imploded.
by dang | 2025-10-05 17:31:13+00:00
"Maybe you should read it more careful, instead adding nothing to the discussion" is crossing into personal attack. So is "Read more, comment less." from your other post in this thread.

Your account has a pattern of posting personal swipes like this. Two other cases are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45328774 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45210601.

If you would please stop this, we'd appreciate it. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by tux3 | 2025-10-05 17:31:19+00:00
The effect of claiming that people act like NSA propagandists is indistinguishable from claiming they are an NSA propagandist, except that the wording allows you to weasel out of it.

This turns a thread about cryptography into a thread about attacking someone's particular posting style. This is not going to advance the discussion in any sort of useful direction, the only thing this can do is divide people further while cementing existing positions.

If your IDS thinks well-known free software people are NSA agents because they disagree in a style you don't like, the problem is with the IDS.
by DwnVoteHoneyPot | 2025-10-05 17:31:43+00:00
I think it's pretty easy to argue it would have been overreach by a regulatory body to block the deal.

It's difficult to guess, with reasonable certainty, if the deal will kill all competition. Difficult given the competition that is out there on all fronts (Steam, Playstation, Nintendo, Epic).

So if it's not totally clear the deal is bad, it's overreach to block it. Layoffs and increased pricing isn't indicative of monopoly power. Lina's mandate wasn't to prevent layoffs, it's anti-trust. It's also too early to conclude anything from the deal that was closed so recently.
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-05 17:31:43+00:00
Yes, that's the thing. I see the same. Every time we had to move from a third party product to a MS one we always had to limit what we wanted to do because the MS solution was far less capable and if we asked about it we'd just get stupid answers like "why do you want to do that, we don't work that way".

But they push it through the CTO with really good initial pricing, then when you're hooked they screw you on the next contract negotiation.

The old saying is: "Microsoft is much better at talking to your boss than you are". Which still rings true IMO.
by em-bee | 2025-10-05 17:33:03+00:00
the risk mitigation hasn't played out yet. if that's what it is. we need to wait until microsoft tries to squeeze Steam out of windows. we have yet to see whether it works to keep valve alive against microsoft. the attack hasn't happened yet. and judging by microsofts actions it looks like they are cancelling themselves. for now at least. the war is not over.

of course as a linux user i am not complaining about linux support, but for now it still looks like valve supports linux from the goodness of their heart, and not as a way to make money. lets hope that this changes.
by zahlman | 2025-10-05 17:33:28+00:00
You'd have to invent a different way, within existing Python syntax, to communicate the version, but you can do this today with sys.path and sys.meta_path hacks.

But virtual environments are quite simply not a big deal. Installed libraries can be hard-linked and maybe even symlinked between environments and this can be set up very quickly. A virtual environment is defined by the pyvenv.cfg marker file; you don't need to use or even have activation scripts, and you especially don't (generally) need a separate copy of pip for each one, even if you do use pip.

On the flip side, allowing multiple versions of a library in a virtual environment has very little effect on package resolution; it just allows success in cases of conflict, but normally there aren't conflicts (because you're typically making a separate environment for a single "root" package, and it's supposed to be possible to use that package in Python as it actually exists, without hacks). The installer still has to scrounge up metadata (and discover it recursively) and check constraints.
by lapcat | 2025-10-05 17:33:47+00:00
It's debatable whether critical thinking can be taught sucessfully. In my opinion, the more important question is whether people can think about anything other than work and making money. There's much more to life than that, and as a society we should value much more than just going to work and cashing paychecks.

The fact that the humanities are not profitable is precisely their point.
by lazycouchpotato | 2025-10-05 17:35:18+00:00
I don't hate low cost carriers. I absolutely want competition.

I was flying Spirit quite frequently. I'm well prepped. I have a backpack that is the maximum size allowed as a personal item, I carry an empty water bottle and a meal from home. They have an option where you can bid on exit row and big seats in advance. I'd bid the lowest amount ($4-10) and almost always win the upgrade.

Not everyone is aware of this though. I dislike businesses that prey on customers' lack of knowledge to bombard them with fees.

The guy next to me on a flight last year got hit with a $80 fee at the gate because his bag was an inch or so too big. It was his first time flying Spirit. It was cheaper for him to discard that bag and purchase a smaller bag for the flight back.

How much more nickel and diming is there left to be done? Standing seats? [1]

Very anecdotal evidence, but I was on a trip last week and Spirit was more expensive than American which is what I chose. I'm not loyal to any airline.

No one was at the gate hounding at people for bag sizes. I had Wi-Fi on the plane and got a drink and a small snack. My knees also appreciated the slightly longer legroom.

[1] https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/standing-seats-budge...
by madaxe_again | 2025-10-05 17:35:19+00:00
Go look at the website - you have to use authenticao.gov, which requires a digital mobile key, which requires a citizen card, which I cannot have unless I am a citizen. The offline process requires me to travel 200km each way to spend a day queuing.

Amazon Spain are Spanish, and are not subject to the Portuguese livro de reclamações.

As to making a chargeback - I like having a bank account, and being able to pay for things online - any time you do one you take a risk your bank will decide to throw freezes and KYC at you until you give up.
by vouwfietsman | 2025-10-05 17:35:23+00:00
> In practice, however, LLMs don't seem to have any problem interpreting natural language instructions

I can think of a couple of reasons this may be the case.

1. There is a subset of English that you use unknowingly that has a socially accepted formal definition and so can be used as a substitute for programming language. LLMs have learned this definition. Straying from this subset or expecting a different formal definition will result in errors.

2. The level of detail in your English description is such that ambiguity genuinely does not arise. Unlikely, you would not consider that "natural language".

3. English is not ambiguous when describing program features, and formal definitions can be skipped. Unlikely, because the entire product owner role is built on the frequently exclaimed "that's not what I meant!".

I think its #1, and I think that makes the most sense: through massive statistical data LLMs have learned which natural language instructions cause which modifications in codebases, for a giant amount of generic problems that it has training data on.

The moment you do something new though, all bets are off.
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-05 17:35:25+00:00
> MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment.

Hmm no, but they are clearly under pressure. Integrating Copilot Chat in office was a pretty big move, and the constant rebranding of everything also feels like they have zero vision and are losing control and scrambling to fix it.

I wonder if Copilot Chat in office will really convince users though. As it doesn't have access to Graph it will lose some of the most valuable 'intelligence'. And thus users will try it, get convinced it's pretty useless and be more hesitant to pay for a license in the future.
by dagmx | 2025-10-05 17:35:49+00:00
I don’t test rote algorithmic knowledge in our coding tests. Candidates can pick their language

Candidates can ask for help, and can google/llm as well if they can’t recall methods. I just do not allow them to post the whole problem in an LLM and need to see them solve through the problem themselves to see how they think and approach issues.

This therefore also requires they know the language that they picked to do simple tasks , including iterating iterables
by jsheard | 2025-10-05 17:35:56+00:00
Their plan did get off to a rough start, initially they wanted game devs to provide native Linux builds despite there being near-zero upside to doing so at the time, which unsurprisingly went nowhere and led to the first generation Steam Machines dying on the vine. Thankfully they realized their mistake and shifted focus to Windows binary compatibility, which has been far more successful. It took a long time and the success of the first-party Steam Deck to convince third-party manufacturers to give Valve another shot after their early SteamOS partners got burned though.
by zahlman | 2025-10-05 17:36:19+00:00
I didn't investigate deeply (I just happened to stumble on the issue while figuring out the implementation), but it might be needed in older versions too. The loading process instantiates a `threading.RLock`, but from a source code file that doesn't import that (because it's in a file that has to bootstrap the import process). I'm not entirely sure how `threading` is supposed to get imported normally. The other complicating factor is that I was testing this at the REPL, and 3.13 has a new REPL implementation which might change how those initial libraries are brought in.
Show HN: ut – Rust based CLI utilities for devs and IT
by ksdme9 | 2025-10-05 17:36:20+00:00
Hey HN,

I find myself reaching for tools like it-tools.tech or other random sites every now and then during development or debugging. So, I built a toolkit with a sane and simple CLI interface for most of those tools.

For the curious and lazy, at the moment, ut has tools for,

- Encoding: base64 (encode, decode), url (encode, decode)

- Hashing: md5, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, sha512

- Data Generation: uuid (v1, v3, v4, v5), token, lorem, random

- Text Processing: case (lower, upper, camel, title, constant, header, sentence, snake), pretty-print, diff

- Development Tools: calc, json (builder), regex, datetime

- Web & Network: http (status), serve, qr

- Color & Design: color (convert)

- Reference: unicode

For full disclosure, parts of the toolkit were built with Claude Code (I wanted to use this as an opportunity to play with it more). Feel free to open feature requests and/or contribute.