MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marssaxman | 2025-10-01 18:10:09+00:00
I started out doing 5-10 minutes a day, building up to 30 as motivation grew. I'm still at it, 633 days later, though I'm no longer pushing Dutch quite as hard now that I'm also learning Spanish. (I figure that exposure to Dutch through youtube, reddit, etc helps me continue to learn now, anyway.)

My goals are: maintain the daily streak; stay in the diamond league; do all the "legendary" bonus levels; get all three daily quest points. That's enough work that I'm usually pushing myself a bit, but not to the point of tedium.

I'm sure that if I actually needed to learn a language, for some practical reason, Duolingo would not be the quickest or most thorough way to do it. As something I'm doing for fun, though, using downtime I'd otherwise waste on puzzle games or pointless web scrolling, it feels like a pretty good deal.

Feeling the world of Dutch-language media starting to open up was kind of magical. I'm not there yet with Spanish, but I look forward to it. How much bigger can my world get, I wonder?
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-10-01 18:10:15+00:00
One could make the argument that you're off by about 125 years.

The 1839 Eglinton Tournament, was, in a way, a Renaissance Fair. It was a massive spectacle at the time, became enduringly famous (or infamous), and helped to kick-off the Romantic 19th century fascination with the medieval:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglinton_Tournament
by rossdavidh | 2025-10-01 18:10:35+00:00
"Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company. Maybe it was adopting some overcomplicated architecture, or choosing a vendor that everyone knew was wrong, or killing a project that was actually working. I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room."

Well, it's a decent article, but that paragraph does not match my experience. In my experience, it's typically because there's a non-technical reason why the technical decision was done badly:

1) devs, or their supervisors, or both want Hot New Thing on their resumes

2) in order to get Good New Thing purchased, the Old Bad Thing must be shown to be unworkable, so saving Old Bad Thing with a clever solution is undesirable

3) org needs a system using New Buzzword, to show to VC's or others, and this is the opportunity to use New Buzzword, whether it makes sense here or not

None of these are reasons that I like, but they are also reasons that are very convincing to most people, especially high-ranking decision makers.

I don't mean to suggest that the articles points like "Building relationships before you need them", etc. aren't a good idea. Just don't expect it to have a very high success rate in winning debates about "terrible technical decisions".
by wolrah | 2025-10-01 18:10:40+00:00
SLIP is old and mostly forgotten for sure, but PPP was almost universal in dialup and unfortunately common in DSL. PPPoE was the bane of my existence as someone who had to support third-party routers on DSL. PPTP was also very common for small VPNs even well past when it should have been retired due to insecurity because it worked out of the box on Windows and Mac without a third party client.
by landl0rd | 2025-10-01 18:10:41+00:00
This is sort of silly. Everyone has to "mask" at work. I do not care if the HR lady tells you to "bring your whole self". Unless your whole self happens to be precisely what they want, it is a lie. And nobody is that conflict avoidant, fake-happy, and deeply committed to shareholder value while upholding the strongest standards of ethics and work ethic.

This is a grind for pretty much everyone. To give you the other side, to someone extroverted and socially attuned, the fake nonsense is more grating and insulting than it is to you, I'd guess. Life is hard and everyone has his cross to bear.
by justonceokay | 2025-10-01 18:10:59+00:00
Of course the environment was built for management. But if you have ever been in management you know that getting useful updates on progress is like suqeezing blood from a stone.

I didn’t say that anyone liked the process, but I assure you that the average autistic engineer would actually do worse in a more feeeform environment. They would like it more though.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-10-01 18:11:12+00:00
It is pretty tiresome with the hype tweets and not being able to judge the vibe code cruft and demoware factor.

Especially on bootstrap/setup, AIs are fantastic for cutting out massive amounts of time, which is a huge boon for our profession. But core logic? I think that's where the not-really-saving-time studies are coming from.

I'm surprised there aren't faux academic B-school productivity studies coming out to counter that (sponsored by AI funding of course) already, but then again I don't read B-school journals.

I actually wonder if the halflife decay of the critical mass of vibecode will almost perfectly coincide with the crash/vroosh of labor leaving the profession to clean it up. It might be a mini-y2k event, without such a dramatic single day.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-10-01 18:11:27+00:00
The game puts the "masking" definition right in the start page, no need to deduce. I also dislike how any form of self care reduces your masking even if you're alone.

It's designed to make you lose in a couple of days, which would imply you're not a highly functional autist, and hence I wonder how the heck did you get a job without others noticing your autism?
by vidarh | 2025-10-01 18:11:30+00:00
Yes, I also see images while dreaming.

I've also once seen super-vivid (far higher fidelity than dreaming) images, while lucid during meditation, and able to "look around", so I don't think we can't (or at least not universally so) - but I've not managed to find a way back to that experience even years later.
by Animats | 2025-10-01 18:11:38+00:00
Technology is inevitable if a lot of people can independently do it without huge resources, and the result is useful.

- Personal computing - inevitable. Once ICs became cheap, it started happening, with no one effort dominating.

- Moon landing - not inevitable. Huge resource commitment required, and not repeated since.

- Internal combustion engine - inevitable. Once fuels and steel were available, it was possible to contain the explosion of an IC engine, and many people started making them.

- Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work.

- Radio - inevitable. Once something with gain and something that rectifies were invented, radio was something many people could work upon.

- Steel - interesting case. Steel is thousands of years old, but mass production of steel only dates to 1880. It took considerable metallurgical research to get it right, with about 10,000 tries before the Bessemer converter worked reliably. No one had done that before, and one person did it.

- "AI", via the machine learning route - inevitable. The concepts date from the 1960s, but it took half a century of IC development to make them feasible.

Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality.

Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat".
by dmpcreates | 2025-10-01 18:11:39+00:00
Location: San Francisco Bay Area (San Jose)

Remote: Yes; In office is okay too

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies:

Languages: Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python Frameworks/Libraries: React, Express, Sinatra, Tailwind CSS Runtimes & Tools: Node.js, Git Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB DevOps & Infrastructure: Docker, Terraform, AWS (Lambda, RDS, S3, IAM, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS)

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lYgGvDM_ES9IGIU1DPU9...

Email: See Résumé

I'm a software engineer and co-creator of Kubrick, an open source end-to-end video ingestion pipeline and API for video semantic search. You can read more about Kubrick here: https://kubrick-ai.com/
by skinkestek | 2025-10-01 18:12:00+00:00
I've been in the software business since 2007, which was also when I first met Jira and Scrum (at least something with 14 days sprints).

My first encounter with Scrum (or whatever it was) was good. It felt good to work in cycles and reprioritize twice a month.

Since then I have seen various versions of working systems and various versions of broken systems.

The two last projects have been extremely agile, the current project has exactly 5 mandatory meetings in an average week:

- 3 x stand ups that typically take <10 minutes and never more than 15.

- 1 stand up plus planning (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 20 minutes)

- 1 stand up plus voluntary demo + retro (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 30 minutes)

The previous project had a lot more structure but also worked well.

Common themes:

- Communication is 2 way

- Both teams are friendly and competent

- Customer care about results and leave programming to us

- Clear communication about what they hope, but without stress. Especially the first project were the stakes were serious: if we manage to hit the deadline we knew we would save the organization millions, but if not, nobody was in trouble. It was an actual challenge, not a scary thing.

Have I seen dysfunctional Scrum and Agile as well? Yes!

Some examples:

- endless estimation meetings which not only eats programmer hours but also mean that everyone feel they have to match the estimates

- one way communication (in a loop from customer - ux - programmer - tester - customer). Doesn't help if there are 14 days sprints when every sprint is a mini waterfall

- taking time of the project to do agile workshop after agile workshop while continuing to be absolutely rigid

- "release" after "release" but no actual customer

- "finish one thing" taken to mean that styling has to be perfect even on placeholder pages
by kxrm | 2025-10-01 18:12:30+00:00
For clarity, I am not autistic (as far as I am aware) but I do have personality traits and quirks that absolutely have made my life challenging. As I have gotten older I have learned to mask those traits and it has led to far more success in life. While I still have trouble maintaining relationships, I at least can curate a professional reputation that has granted me benefits.

I am not saying this to claim that those with autism should mask, but I think the advice in this comment could be misinterpreted. While we should all be able to live as authentic selves, the reality is that this comes with trade-offs. We should evaluate those trade-offs independently and determine which of our personality traits are worth masking and which are not.
by treefry | 2025-10-01 18:12:44+00:00
Right. Yesterday I tried a simple task that just adds Required[] notation to all class fields. After making the change on one field, Cursor allows me to press tabs and update all other fields. VSCode doesn't understand what I was trying to do after the first operation, which is surprisingly bad (no improvement after months). Also I'm not in favor of the conversational experience of claude code or other CLIs for such trivial task. I'd be happy to know what else can provide a better user experience than Cursor.

Disclaimer: I get enterprise level subscriptions to these services via my employer. I personally don't pay for them and never consider their cost, if that matters.
by cutiepatootiee | 2025-10-01 18:12:53+00:00
Zencastr | Senior Backend, Fullstack, ML Engineers, Data Analyst | REMOTE (Americas, UTC-1 to UTC+1) | Full-time

We're building the podcast recording platform that makes pro-quality audio accessible to everyone. Fully distributed team, scaling fast.

Looking for senior engineers who care about performance and ownership: - Backend: Node.js/TypeScript, Redis, MongoDB, APIs at scale - Fullstack: React + backend chops - ML: Production ML systems, speech/audio, MLOps - Data Analyst: SQL, BI tools, product analytics (3+ years)

Use LLMs for homework (we encourage it). Ship fast, own outcomes, work from anywhere. Small team, real impact, profitable company.

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zencastr (mention HN)
by pelagicdev | 2025-10-01 18:12:57+00:00
While I agree that avoiding/ignoring politics isn't helpful to anyone, it still doesn't have a place at work. My view is, people are going to disagree on politics, and therefore it just gets into a debate, or worse, an agrument at the office or in chat and makes the whole situation more ugly than the manager and/or employer wants to have to deal with.
by Glyptodon | 2025-10-01 18:13:00+00:00
A lot of the behaviors this seems to force I don't understand - like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not. I am well aware that for kids with autism frequently there are feeding issues, but what's going on in the "simulation" is very not clear to me.

Similarly, I don't understand the decisions related to the driving environment: it appears to be a personal vehicle, surely you, as the owner, can make the interior environment something that's as close to personally comfortable as possible? Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.

Related, what is or isn't masking seems very confused. To begin with, it's not just code for "hiding or not hiding behaviors that appear socially irregular." But it's also not the case that deciding whether to participate in a non-working-hours event is or isn't masking in of itself.

Presenting behavior in a socialized way when necessary is a skill that's harder (as I understand it) for those on the autism spectrum, but I don't think that makes every application equivalent to masking.
by cortesoft | 2025-10-01 18:13:02+00:00
It's funny, because I feel like code AIs have given me a new enthusiasm for creating side projects. When I was young, I would spend so much time creating side projects and I loved it. Then, I got older, got married, had kids, got tired... I know longer have opportunities to lock myself away for 8 hours in a day to bang away on a fun project. Instead, I have small 30-60 minute windows scattered around, without the energy to bury myself in the fun problems. I don't think I am alone in taking at least 30-60 minutes to fully fill up my brain context for a problem in order to do real coding. Without longer chunks of time to be able to do that, I just stopped doing any sort of complex side project. I just don't have the time and mental energy for that in this stage of my life.

LLMs have completely changed that for me. I can actually start and do those side projects that have been kicking around in my head for years. I don't need 8 hours just to get to a starting point on a project; I can type up a spec off and on during my spare time, then sit down with an LLM and generate the framework of my project in minutes. I am no longer stymied by my short chunks of free time.

I feel like a whole world of creativity has opened up for me again.
by chrispiemonte | 2025-10-01 18:13:14+00:00
Location: Chicago, IL (CST)

Remote: Remote, Hybrid, or In-Person

Willing to relocate: Yes

Recent Project Case Study: https://www.pendulum-baas.dev/

GitHub: https://github.com/chris-piemonte

Technologies:

Languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, Ruby, Python, SQL Framerowks/Libraries: React, Express, Sinatra, LangChain, Jest, Vitest, Selenium Cloud/Databases: AWS, DocumentDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, RDS, SQLite, ChromaDB Other: RAG, MCP, AI/LLM, Docker, WebSockets, SSE

Résumé/CV: https://tinyurl.com/3wjrd7ju

Email: chrisjpiemonte@gmail.com
by INTPenis | 2025-10-01 18:13:17+00:00
It changes with age too. Like the first question I was presented with was 1. Take time for self-care, 2. Get straight to breakfast and work prep.

Yeah in my 20s, and early 30s, I could eat breakfast while logging onto the computer and starting to work.

But now in my 40s I take some time for self-care, not sure if it counts, but it's difficult to answer a question like that with either or.

Decades on the computer has forced me to do Yoga every morning too. So it's not like I want to do it, I just realized that I have to.

I lost when I went to a work outing instead of staying home, but I had RSVP'd to the outing. This is what the game doesn't cover, I never RSVP unless I can keep my word. Never commit!
by athenot | 2025-10-01 18:13:22+00:00
Same here. Perhaps what I've enjoyed the most about Perl was the humanness and art of it. Cleverness and expressiveness were at the service of elegance.

Sure you can write amazingly obscure foot-guns in Perl but that's also true of any other language. But honestly I'd rather a few lines of obscure Perl code WITH a comment block explaining why, than a dozen classes with bits and pieces of business logic spread all over the place.
by amauboussin | 2025-10-01 18:13:32+00:00
Surge AI (https://surgehq.ai/careers) | Software Engineers (full-stack / product https://surgeai.notion.site/Product-Engineer-4211688ff99b46d...) and Strategic Project Lead (https://surgeai.notion.site/Strategic-Projects-Lead-Generati...) | Full-time | ONSITE SF or NYC Hybrid

Our mission at Surge is to build the human infrastructure behind the next wave of AI and LLMs. We operate a data platform that powers AI teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and more. This year, we've been focusing on RL environments and agentic workflows to help our clients ship agents that interact with the world. Here are some examples of our past work:

- Creating the GSM8K dataset: https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/how-we-built-it-openais-gsm8k-da...

- Collecting RLHF data for Anthropic's Claude: https://www.surgehq.ai/case-studies/anthropic-claude-surgeai...

You’d be joining a rapidly growing team of former engineering and ML leaders from Google, Meta, Twitter, and Airbnb. We work in small groups, ship quickly, and value autonomy and ownership. No previous AI experience is required, if you have the engineering skills you can learn what you need on the job.

We're looking for senior engineers to work out of our offices in SF or NYC, or remotely. Please reach out to us at careers@surgehq.ai with a resume and 2-3 sentences describing your interest. Excited to hear from you!
by suzdude | 2025-10-01 18:14:06+00:00
> I don't get the feeling people discussing politics are trying to solve any problems

It depends on what you view a "discussing politics". To borrow a quote, "politics is the art of the possible." You have to use politics to define what problems are even considered, much less the possible ways they might get solved.

For instance, unlimited spending on political campaigns is either a problem, or not a problem, depending on your politics, never mind if it should be solved via amendment, court packing, or congressional act[1].

I agree, many people go hardcore on tribalism. I would likely agree it is a bad thing that many Americans define politics as, "us" and, "them". If you want to be results oriented, you have to convince people it's a problem, you're going to need to use politics to do so.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
by Jormundir | 2025-10-01 18:14:15+00:00
Location: Portland, OR Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: AWS, Go, Typescript, React, Node, SQL, NoSQL Résumé/CV: Available on request Email: jormundir@gmail.com

Software Engineer Leader with 13+ years of experience building scalable web applications and distributed systems end to end. Expert in developing user experiences, RESTful APIs, and high-performance backend services that handle web scale. Proven track record of architecting complete solutions spanning React frontends, microservice architectures, and data processing pipelines, with experience building systems serving 1M+ requests/second and processing exabytes of data monthly.
by legitster | 2025-10-01 18:14:20+00:00
I guess I don't really understand "masking". I made all of the decisions I would make if I was feeling overstimulated. I scheduled the coffee date for later. I put on headphones to block out the noise. I turned down going to the charity thing. But then I lost because I was "masking too hard"?

In my mind these decisions were literally the opposite - I was being honest about what the character wanted and was making space for myself.

Is masking about faking interactions with other people? But nearly everything that I get dinged for about masking doesn't even involve others. Is it about hiding symptoms from others? Or from hiding things you don't like from yourself?
by dalke | 2025-10-01 18:14:39+00:00
I work in a chemistry research field. Most people I know run Python programs for their research. No one I know uses Go. I only know a handful who use Java. Rust and Julia are oddities that appear occasionally.

Sure, we have very different experiences. But that also means that unless you can present strong survey data, it's hard to know if your "Most people" is limited to the people you associate with, or is something more broadly true.

The PSF overlap with my field is essentially zero. I mean, I was that overlap, but I stopped being involved with the PSF about 8 years ago when my youngest was born and I had no free time or money. In the meanwhile, meaningful PSF involvement became less something a hobbyist project and something more corporatized .. and corporate friendly.

> scientists (who buy expensive training courses)

ROFL!! What scientists are paying for expensive training courses?!

I tried selling training courses to computational chemists. It wasn't worth the time needed to develop and maintain the materials. The people who attended the courses liked them, but the general attitude is "I spent 5 years studying <OBSCURE TOPIC> for my PhD, I can figure out Python on my own."

> who are force fed Python at university

shrug I was force fed Pascal, and have no idea if Wirth was a nice person.

> main reason for its popularity in machine learning

I started using Python in the 1990s both because of the language and because of the ease of writing C extensions, including reference counting gc, since the C libraries I used had hidden data dependencies that simple FFI couldn't handle.

I still use the C API -- direct, through Cython, and through FFI -- and I don't do machine learning.

> If it is so popular, why the booster articles?

It's an article about a company which sells a Python IDE. They do it to boost their own product.

With so many people clearly using Python, why would they spend time boosting something else?
by ck2 | 2025-10-01 18:14:41+00:00
it's already easy to eat and drink things without any dyes or even artificial flavoring

(except OTC medication always has that nonsense, but now my advil is also dye-free)

but Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the life-expectancy of people back when everything was natural and organic

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMpuL2GMQSd/embed/
by Arnavion | 2025-10-01 18:14:46+00:00
If I was sufficiently motivated to leave GH for such idealistic reasons, it wouldn't be worth moving to another third-party host. That just means a few years later there will be some new idealistic reason to leave the new host, and I'll have to make the effort of switching all over again. If I ever leave GH, it'll be to self-hosting.
by ivylee | 2025-10-01 18:14:48+00:00
SEEKING WORK

Location: Greater NY, US | Remote: Yes

I specialize in technical leadership in AI and Machine Learning, helping companies build AI-driven products that customers love. Typically I serve as fractional CTO or fractional AI lead for startups.

Website: https://ivylee.github.io

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I look forward to hearing from you.
by ajford | 2025-10-01 18:14:53+00:00
Interesting. I'm somewhere on the aphantasia spectrum, but I very rarely have vivid dreams. Most dreams I would describe it almost like remembering an audiobook instead of a movie.

But I do occasionally have a vivid dream, and though I can't be certain I could swear that I remember more vivid dreams as a child/early adolescent. But by the time I was entering college I rarely remember my dreams and the ones I do remember are like those I described above with little visualization.

It's really interesting to hear about how others perceive these sensory experiences.