MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnjwang | 2025-10-26 21:15:06+00:00
(Author here) I stand by this comment and I think it’s really important for engineers to recognize that everyone has different places where they gain and lose energy.

My team and I have been extremely lucky in hiring Joe, our excellent head of engineering, and an extremely strong set of engineering managers. Not to mention incredibly strong product and user experience management.

I think it’s pretty obvious that my approach wouldn’t work if I didn’t have this bench of talented managers, but because I do it affords me the luxury to spend time doing things that I love and which are also valuable to the company.

In general, I wrote this article because I think that the classical approach to engineering management isn’t the only path you need to take, and a lot depends on the team you work with (thankfully we have a team that complements each other really well).
by eesmith | 2025-10-26 21:16:14+00:00
> If he is the chief if may be within his authority to built out infrastructure within the station.

The article was clear that there was no building permit, it wasn't up to fire code, it violated ethics rules, and more. (Eg, "Millbrae officials tell me Eamonn Allen didn't get permission before installing those mattresses, he didn't get a permit, and that he changed the locks on the building." ... "Chief Allen has to get permits, modify construction, and pass inspection if he wants sleeping quarters there.")

> and response plans for his brief absences

It appears the city manager was not aware of his frequent absences, which is why he filed a complaint to the city attorney. Who is supposed to know these response plans and sign off on them?

> Is he required to never vacation so he’s always available on short notice?

Of course not. Holidays are something to work out with, among other things, your employer. It does not appear that city management knew he was doing this.

> Maybe we should look at the rules he allegedly broke and see if they need changing?

Like having building permits, the requirement for sleeping areas to have fire-resistant walls and a secondary egress, and the ethical prohibitions on using "city owned property for personal need, convenience or profit"?

You are joking if you think all of them should be changed so the police chief - who is supposed to follow and help enforce these rules - doesn't break them in secret because his heart simply isn't into living in Millbrea during the weekends and he doesn't want to pay for a studio apartment or motel room on his 6-digit salary, on top of his mortgage and travel cost for his house in Idaho.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-26 21:17:51+00:00
Data-efficiency matters, but compute-efficiency matters too.

LLMs have a reasonable learning rate at inference time (in-context learning is powerful), but a very poor learning rate in pretraining. And one issue with that is that we have an awful lot of cheap data to pretrain those LLMs with.

We don't know how much compute human brain uses to do what it does. And if we could pretrain with the same data-efficiency as humans, but at the cost of using x10000 the compute for it?

It would be impossible to justify doing that for all but the most expensive, hard-to-come-by gold-plated datasets - ones that are actually worth squeezing every drop of performance gains out from.
by exmadscientist | 2025-10-26 21:18:15+00:00
If you're insistent on Tag-Connect, that's a pretty good way to go. Those legs are a big part of the problem and so the No-Leg version helps a lot. But then it also falls out of the board....

Seriously, I tried to like Tag-Connect. I did like it before supporting a CM and a hardware team trying to use it (and lose the cables...). Now I just plain don't think it adds value over the alternatives. The header is three cents. Three. Cents. The cable is $39 (with legs, $34 without). That buys you over 1,000 headers and then you can use the free cables that come in the box with all the debug probes and live in the pile over there in the shop.
by neckbeards | 2025-10-26 21:18:30+00:00
Thanks for the response. I look forward to seeing how the type system evolves.

- No hidden allocations: Other languages already provide abstractions for this. Are hidden allocations really a significant issue in modern systems languages, even when managing memory manually? This concern is distinct from memory leaks or general memory safety problems.

- Allocators: It's easy to use an arena in C++ or C.

- defer keyword: Similar constructs have existed in other languages and even as a GNU C extension for many years.

- Bounds checking: Not an issue in Rust. The real source of risk has always been raw pointer manipulation, which Zig doesn't (cannot?) solve. How is it better than address sanitizer? Rust solves this at the language level.

- Nullability: GCC has long supported non-null attributes and unused-result annotations and Clang provides _Nullable. C++ goes further with type-level guarantees via std::optional, gsl::not_null and related abstractions.

- Errors: Zig’s approach is clean but equivalent mechanisms exist in C++ (std::expected) and Rust (Result and error types). It’s mainly cumbersome in plain C.

All of these are useful quality-of-life improvements but they don’t address my problems in systems programming (such as efficient and composable data structures, data movement, scalable concurrency, safe memory management ...and boiler-plate, lots of boiler-plate). These problems are easier to solve with a type system that allows me to make strong correctness guarantees and extend those guarantees.

Lastly, I’m unsure that any potential boilerplate reduction would be significant if implemented in Zig.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-26 21:18:37+00:00
This was always kind of a problem with the “this will make icky programmers obsolete” techs. Like, so did MS Access and a couple generations of click-and-drag ‘no-code’ stuff. Not to mention Rails; remember when everyone thought that would radically increase productivity? I’m pretty sure that was entirely because it was well-suited to “make a todo list/fake twitter/whatever in half an hour” demos.
by andy99 | 2025-10-26 21:18:54+00:00
We didn’t have internet when I was an early teen and I would read physical encyclopedias before bed.

If academic study is on one end of a spectrum, lots of Wikipedia is maybe in the middle, pretty accessible and simple enough to keep clicking through links for someone interested, but still at least requiring active participation.

Something like TikTok (which admittedly I’ve never used) along with AI conversations which I have, can basically take place without the brain ever even engaging other than the reward pathways.

If academic books or literature are fruits and vegetables, Wikipedia is maybe a restaurant meal and social media (+ AI chat) dominos pizza or Pringle’s or some other thing that’s been processed into oblivion and just diffuses though your stomach lining directly onto your blood as you mindless binge on it.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-26 21:19:05+00:00
Specific machine meaning defined set of installed software, versions in install locations.

Abstract notion of OS meaning Debian 12. Not Linux kernel commit ####, GNU libc commit ####, dpkg commit ####, apt commit ####, Apache httpd commit #### with patch ### to ### from Debian 4 version ### and Ubuntu 21 version ###, SQLite3 with special patches ### installed in /opt/bin/foo, ... (you get the idea).

> That's the problem. Why is the Linux stuff just a bunch of footnotes in the Linux manual? It should be in the main section. The glibc specifics should be footnotes.

Because you look at the OS manual, not at the documentation of the kernel. Notes and Bugs are also not footnotes in man pages. They are pretty important and are basically the first free-form section where you can tell about the ideas, ideals and history. The first part a pretty strict, formal description of the calling semantics.
by z3ugma | 2025-10-26 21:19:09+00:00
I think I am 4 to 5 weeks away from shipping. PCBs are basically done, I'll be placing an order for samples of the 3 different PCBs that make up the whole kit in the next day or two

I'm starting to move onto software - there's working samples for drawing on the display and for interpreting motion of the scroll ring. Now, on to integrating them and building in time for one more PCB rev in case I discover a silly mistake
by Zopieux | 2025-10-26 21:19:14+00:00
What part of "best effort, unsupported" do you not understand, if you've read the article?

You're underestimating the amount of goodwill-run, unstaffed projects that any big corporation accrues over time, which accidentally become load bearing without anyone realizing until something goes wrong. Such unstaffed projects are usually very stable (from not having pressure to add features or earn profit) and therefore "just work" for years until something unusual, like an accidental DDoS, happens. In that time, the original author(s) and everyone with context have left the company. This is a very hard process/human problem to solve at FAANG scale.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-10-26 21:20:28+00:00
I've been working on a few ideas in my free time for several years, and I'm also a frequent bar visitor. I live in a central part of a European city that is quite tourist-heavy, and I don't have a problem talking to strangers, whether they're locals or tourists. I never initiate discussions about my hobby projects, but if enough beer is consumed, such discussions are inevitable.

I have a clear impression that you can't get much reasonable feedback this way. Most people just don't know what you're talking about and will either support or dismiss your idea without knowing anything about the topic. They mostly react based on likeness to previous discussions or on a human likability level. Getting feedback this way has never worked for me.
by godelski | 2025-10-26 21:20:29+00:00
Fun fact, you can make a basic scope at home. It definitely is not easy but probably not as expensive as you might think (actually not much at all!).

Ben Krasnow (Applied Science) has a few videos and blog posts on the topic[0,1,2]. The Tungsten Filaments can be expensive, but I sent an email to the company and they sent me some samples to play with. It's been years so I forgot who I contacted. I tried the Nalgene bottle method but honestly I could not get it to hold a tight enough vacuum. The electron beam was very unstable and it is just really hard to purge and backfill the "chamber". The hardest part is getting the beam control circuit. I never got that refined myself for clear images, but I'm sure I could have gotten it with more time (it was a DIY work project so other things took priorities[3]). For our purposes the beam mattered more, so we went with what we could get. But even "failing" I learned a lot and it was a ton of fun. It's pretty exciting to get a beam to produce.

And keep in mind, even if you do get it fully running you shouldn't expect it to be anywhere near on par with the professional ones. Machining is great these days and we have a lot of advantages we can leverage as even hobbyists that shops couldn't get even a few decades ago, but we're talking about a high precision machine.

If the idea of having one for fun excites you, then it is worth the go. It was one of the most fun things I've ever made (maybe only next to a sputtering gun, which was very successful). If you can CAD, do some basic electronics, have a lot of patience, and a decent vacuum pump[4], then you should give it a go.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIJ1jI1xDhY

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdjYVF4a6iU

[2] https://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2014/04/electron-beam-contro...

[3] Resources were tight enough that I think I could have done better if I decided to fund it myself. Big thing I would say is that whenever working with vacuum stuff don't take shortcuts. It's better to act like a perfectionist as it'll save you time in the long run. When you're working with tiny things, well... the little things matter lol

[4] I mean a vacuum pump, not a roughing pump. You don't need a turbo, but you do need a high vacuum.
by mbac32768 | 2025-10-26 21:20:40+00:00
How do you test stuff that's deployed to firmware? At least when it comes to normie software your Linux or Mac box resembles the server you deploy to. And you can close the distance quite a bit with Docker.

But firmware? Totally different. FreeRTOS does have a POSIX backend, which helps some. Maybe you can run it under a hardware emulator. But it seems like lots of the stuff you want to test isn't really testable from the perspective of what a typical dev knows.

A lot of firmware dev iteration seems to be build -> flash -> watch serial connection for debug prints.
Show HN: Hermes – Self-hosted video downloader
by TechSquidTV | 2025-10-26 21:20:50+00:00
I've been playing with my home server again, and I was looking for a video downloader. I found one that looked great, but was no longer functional. So, I vibe-coded my own.

Hermes is a REST API and web app built on top of yt-dlp. Why not just use yt-dlp? Additional features, phone support, and automations. Coming soon will be a very basic video editor so you can easily remux and trim your downloaded videos.
by igouy | 2025-10-26 21:21:05+00:00
> all your code in an opaque "repository"

Without the scare quotes we'd call that a database.

"Product Revew, Object Technology's ENVY Developer"

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...

Mastering ENVY/Developer"

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-26 21:21:11+00:00
If you want to spend time with your kids as adults, and have any grandkids remember you, younger is better. I was 30 when I had my first child; my parents might have been a little older than that when they had me. My dad died 20 years ago, my oldest son barely remembers him. My younger children technically met him but hav no memories of him. My mother died over 10 years ago.

My wife's mother had her when she was 20. She's still around, got to see her grandchildren reach adulthood, and have a long relationship with her daughter as an adult.
by Melonai | 2025-10-26 21:21:55+00:00
Yeah Graham Linehan was a great comedy writer (past tense because I don't think he's writing more, not that he is a horrible writer now), and even though IT Crowd had some really weird episodes towards the end, it's really interesting to see how much his views shifted (in my biased opinion, for the worse) after the show was done.

For people not in the know, Linehan is nowadays a very outspoken voice against "transgenderism", specifically in regards to trans women, and is quite close to the J.K. Rowling sphere of influence. He seems to have given up a lot to end up where he's now.

Now with IT Crowd, it's fascinating that there are the typical early 2000s trans jokes, what with the trans woman getting into a relationship with Douglas because he misheard her saying "I used to be a man", for "I used to be from Iran", after which Douglas and the trans woman get into a fist fight together. This is the episode "The Speech" that the parent is referring to. It's pulled from circulations over allegations of transphobia, but really this wasn't at all abnormal for the time, and there were lots of shows with jokes that, although maybe less physical, were far more cruel to trans women (trans men of course, never really coming up at all, but that's another story). I remember a tweet that called out Linehan for this episode at the time, and he apologized with genuine understanding, no cruelty behind it. That's not something I could ever imagine him doing now. It's a shame in my opinion, I think IT Crowd is one of the better comedy shows of it's time and I don't know if he'll be able to write it now as he used to, as with any deeply held political belief it does seep into the work itself, sometimes making it better, sometimes ruining it, though I will probably not watch anything Linehan will create in the future, sadly.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-26 21:22:01+00:00
Needing a customized spin of Ubuntu to have working video drivers is an Nvidia thing. One can also choose a Windows option, if they like, and run AI from there as it's just a standard x86 PC. That might actually be the best option for those worried about pre-installed OSs for AI tinkering.

The userspace side is where AI is difficult with AMD. Almost all of the community is build around Nvidia tooling first, others second (if it all).
by coredog64 | 2025-10-26 21:22:23+00:00
My college roommate was stationed there from about 1997 to 2001 and I was lucky enough to get a tour as a civilian. They took us into the VIP room that overlooks the room shown in most of the pictures and then they ran through an exercise. In the modern era, the displays were much more focused. There were a set of large projection displays along the wall. In the center of the room, the personnel each had a workstation with more focused information for their specific task.
by eviks | 2025-10-26 21:23:26+00:00
> In my 20+ years of casual TextEdit use, this has never come up.

Ok, it came up in the 1- year here.

> I turn windows wrapping on and off all the time, which is a simple option in the Format menu.

How does this help? You can't have a non-wrapped line without an ugly hack from the link.

> preserves that indentation ... I do not want

So turn it off! It's configurable, as I said "Also, see the previous point ", unlike...

> Both are working as expected.

TextEdit is not working as expected, and I can't configure the behavior! I do need the tabulation to be preserved for various lists I create in plain text (ideally with a way to maintain the '-' or numeric prefix). I also need a convenient way to temporarily "hide" long lines without losing reading position (TextEdit moves the caret to the beginning of the window on changing the wrapping option) for a shorter "summary" view. A more visible non-flashing caret would also be nice (at least the flash is configurable via a hidden config) These are primitive affordances for plain (not code) text editing. Of course, there are non-primitive ones like multiple cursors, proper search etc.

> I don't see the $99 price tag (or pop-ups to purchase) worth it.

So pick a different text editor without a nag! You're positioning fixable annoyances as total blockers while ignoring unfixable annoyances in the primitive system app.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-10-26 21:24:06+00:00
I got to tour it in the early 2000s. It was even less impressive to look at then than what these pictures show, and many of the rooms were rebuilt to be even smaller. One of the conference rooms where generals and perhaps the president were supposed to decide the fate of the world in a crisis was so cramped as to resemble that one scene from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but with nicer furniture. It was also amusing to me that with all secret operations shut down (to accommodate plebs like me), the skeleton crew left to run the place were almost entirely Canadian.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-26 21:25:17+00:00
> Framework machine with Fedora

Unfortunately Framework only ships to a limited amount of countries. They also prohibit commercial resale and even go out of their way to block parcel forwarders. So as a result, it's not available for ~90% of the world's population, so I wouldn't suggest it as a general recommendation for a global audience.

> I use Project Bluefin which I’ve found to be fantastic

Why Bluefin (Gnome) and not Aurora (KDE)? KDE is not only more familiar and easy to use for newbies (familiar Windows-like UI), it's also a lot more customisable, powerful (doesn't require a bunch of extensions to make it usable), and has much better support for Wayland.

> You can get Ubuntu pre-installed (I heard that’s the better choice over Fedora for Lenovo) and select from a few curated options

Not sure where you heard this from, but Ubuntu is possibly one of the worst Linux distros you could've recommended. It might work fine initially, but it will eventually break during regular usage/updates (generally due to Snap, or due to other Canonical shenanigans). Even if you disable Snap, there's a good chance it may break during a dist-upgrade. See: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/05/done-with-ubuntu/ and the related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42949222
by pembrook | 2025-10-26 21:25:21+00:00
This harmless incident shows us nothing aside from why nuclear is so expensive.

There is essentially zero risk to the operation of the plant (or this worker!) from such an event.

Imagine if oil and gas facilities were required for any worker fall to have federal government workers visit onsite, draft a report for review, have it examined by expensive niche lawyers with rounds of revisions, and then have it published it publicly.

This is just a silly example of the hysterical safety-ism involving anything nuclear-related in the US.

Yes, working in any job related to energy carries risks. Just ask a roughneck, lineman, or wind turbine installer.
by quantummagic | 2025-10-26 21:27:09+00:00
You're pretending the concept is difficult to understand. You're pretending that there is some protected definition of "fair use" that is more complicated than people being granted the right to use a copyrighted work irrespective of the copyright holder's wishes.

That's all i've been saying from the start, and your pedantry isn't helpful. It doesn't make you look smart. You haven't added any value or illumination to the conversation.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-26 21:27:24+00:00
Ok, but then it doesn't make sense to dismiss AI based on that. It fails the Turing test, because it's creators intentionally don't even try to make something that is good at the (strictly defined) Turing test.

If someone really wants to see a Turing-passing bot, I guess someone could try making one but I'm doubtful it would be of much use.

Anyways,people forget that the thought experiment by Turing was a rhetorical device, not something he envisioned to build. The point was to say that semantic debates about "intelligence" are distractions.
by northlondoner | 2025-10-26 21:28:18+00:00
This is a bit old. Ecosystem changing rapidly. Currently, FinTechs operate under quite strict laws and regulations. Transparency is also improving.

I think datacenters and supercomputing facilities are other core areas that were in talks with Silicon Valley veterans; because there is an established scientific university research environment locally. Due to particle physics, some groups are members of the CMS from CERN (Google it 'CMS CERN Cyprus').
by boccaff | 2025-10-26 21:28:47+00:00
I am not aware of Eric saying something about that alternative, but this comment on reddit[1] makes a lot of sense to me:

> Given that part 2 is often a very simple modification of part 1, this could lead to many of the days being total letdowns. I can enjoy a simple puzzle, but I'd be a bit disappointed if one day is a single line change to the previous day.

I'd also add that not having to be worried everyday about something makes a lot of sense. He can have fewer days "on call" in December with.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1ocwh04/chang...
by devilsdata | 2025-10-26 21:29:41+00:00
We are on the same page about magic links. Email is also not a super-reliable medium of communication. Email can arrive straight into the junk mail, late, or even never. I think magic links should be strongly discouraged for serious projects, businesses, and government. Passwords and application-based MFA (not SMS or Email MFA) or webauthn/passkeys are much better.

This whole discussion started when @meindnoch wrote ">Sign in or create an account with your email. Into the trash it goes.".

I think magic links are acceptable for a small solo developer project. Expecting a solo developer so shoulder the burden of rolling their own auth, paying for an auth service, or self-hosting an containerised auth-service and wiring their application to it is a bit much for a tiny project like this.

Anything more than a small solo project should graduate to a better solution- I hope we can all agree with that.