MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-04 18:14:44+00:00
It seems to me, that many FE devs don't even know CSS these days. Rather just tack on some "ready" made component found on NPM or some component library. When it actually comes to using CSS to fix something about part of a page or part of a component, I often see non-responsive ways of doing that, badly tested across browsers, breaking at some width of the viewport, etc.

In my view CSS is essential. Not knowing CSS at least somewhat well is a huge obstacle in producing high quality frontend work. It's like being a carpenter, but simply not knowing one important aspect of wood, or not being able to use a specific tool to work with wood, lets say a tool to smooth surfaces. CSS is part of the medium you work with as a FE engineer. It is unfathomable to me, how a FE engineer can not know this stuff well. If some FE engineer is reading this, and feels some impostor syndrome: Yes, if you don't know your medium and tools as least in the basics, then you should feel like an impostor.

I see broken responsiveness very often. Of course in almost all websites, that rely on JS to display what is essentially a bunch of static texts.

If I was interviewing for a FE position, and really had to go through the circus of asking interviewees code questions, I would definitely include a minimum of CSS knowledge there. Basic things like how they would scope their CSS to specific elements or classes of elements and how they would prevent their styling to bleed into other stuff. Or how they would set up a theme with just CSS. Not questions expecting them to write CSS on a whiteboard, of course. Just testing their basic understanding.
by kylecazar | 2025-10-04 18:14:54+00:00
Thanks for the thoughts -- the points you make align with my understanding. It still seems so... frail? At least given how much money is circulating in that world.

Attribution, for example, has to be an absolute mess. Especially in the case of the psychology tricks you mention... If I was shown an ad for Subway, and then ate a Subway sandwich a few days later -- it had absolutely nothing to do with the ad. I only eat there when there aren't better options. Yet, I bet some ad conversion counter ticked up somewhere. I see ads for ShopRite all the time, but it's the only grocery store in my area, so of course I shop there. When you repeat this millions of times, it's surprising to me that ads are still provably effective to the point of being a trillion dollar industry.

I wonder if it will become less so as older generations go offline.
by boplicity | 2025-10-04 18:15:16+00:00
Modern email providers, especially ones offered by ISPs often have the same problems that people criticize self-hosted providers for. Even Google has problems. For example, I regularly order via companies that use Shopify. Now, all of the shopify emails are going straight to spam in Gmail, despite constantly marking them as not spam. (These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here.)

Email delivery and receiving is not hard, but it's inevitably going to be imperfect, no matter the provider you use. There are so many bad actors out there, it's surprising that it works as well as it does.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-10-04 18:15:32+00:00
Our system isn't this resource constrained though. Our system has evolved unintentionally to allocate things this way, but our system does in fact have the resources. In fact, we have so much resources/efficiency/excess we have all kinds of labs/practices doing all kind of optional procedures across the entire country. So many that wait times are really really low for those elective procedures.

Example. I live in a mountain town. Our ER takes hours. I can go to one of the multiple nearby doc in a boxes and get seen in 15 minutes. My town HAS the resources to see those people waiting in the ER. We just don't allocated the resources that way.

My town is a ski town. We have WAY more orthopedic surgeons than we need, but it's extra profitable for them here and living rich in a remote ski town is nice.

My tiny town has multiple beauty skincare facilities with licensed doctors on staff.

It's not a 'we don't have resources' it's a 'we don't prioritize these lives'.

Which is fine. But don't lie to us and say there aren't medical resources.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-04 18:15:45+00:00
You're referencing literature obliquely, but that's not enough for me to look it up. It'd be helpful to future readers (some of whom will be 10 or 15 years in the future) if you could track down those references, cite them, and explain what information is in those references, and what is your own anecdotal evidence.
by borroka | 2025-10-04 18:15:50+00:00
I don't know how long people will be willing to pay so much for something that is complex and expensive to develop and test, but extremely cheap to produce, to the point that we are talking about a few dollars a week when buying peptides on the gray market.

In terms of safety, empirically, it seems extremely safe for a molecule with such a strong and reliable effect. I bought some peptides and the most frustrating part of the whole endeavor was buying 5 ml syringes: local pharmacies require a prescription, but I managed to buy them on Amazon. When something is so easy to produce and distribute, we will have many more people buying peptides on the gray market (cheaper) and syringes on Amazon (faster).

I expect there will soon be a crackdown on the gray market, or at least an attempt at one, but how effective can the government be when no one has ever said, “I can't find cocaine tonight”?
by EliRivers | 2025-10-04 18:16:11+00:00
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on

These people live in fantasyland bubbles, powered by their unshakeable belief in their own intelligence and "hyper rational" nonsense.

People already film themselves committing crimes. There are a great many people who, over and over again, make decisions in the present that will have strongly negative consequences in their own futures.

"If we watch people they won't do bad things." Sure, in some other universe maybe.
by alganet | 2025-10-04 18:17:42+00:00
Imagine the real twist being that complex intelligent life on a planet only goes past some critical development point if there's some sort of weird coincidence in the sky that pushes its inhabitants to understand the mystery.

It's the weirdest filter: you need a giant sign that points you where to look for answers. Without it, you're less likely to find what the universe is all about.
by raincole | 2025-10-04 18:17:43+00:00
I'm not sure if it's a cynical view. Isn't it what business guys do in most people's minds? To bring together investment, marketing and product because they don't just magically blend.

I knew someone who chose to major business despite he got an offer for top biology degree in my country, for this exact reason. By the way, when he told me this decision we were both only 17.

(I really should ask whether he still thinks that's what business is all about today though.)
by sweetjuly | 2025-10-04 18:17:50+00:00
Vivado has free and paid tiers. The free tiers ("WebPack") support their a myriad of their smaller devices (which includes the Kria boards). The larger devices (Virtex, etc.), however, are generally only supported by the paid versions of Vivado.

It's inconvenient for hobbyists, sure, but for enterprise uses the cost of Vivado for a team is largely inconsequential (which I suspect is why they get away with this).
by oscaracso | 2025-10-04 18:18:58+00:00
>PhDs are probably the leanest degree for a research school to support.

In America the students at the undergraduate and masters levels pay to pursue their degrees, while the PhDs are paid by the school. As these students do not directly generate revenue, the PhD programs will be first on the chopping block and the admin who make the 'tough decisions' to keep the ship afloat will be off at their next jobs by the time the chickens come home to roost.
by finaard | 2025-10-04 18:19:00+00:00
You don't really want that. I'm keeping my sanity there just because my small company is running their CI and testing as contractor.

They indeed are quite spoiled - and that's not necessarily a good thing. Part of the issue is that our CI was good and fast enough that at some point a lot of the new hires never bothered to figure out how to build the code - so for quite a few the workflow is "commit to a branch, push it, wait for CI, repeat". And as they often just work on a single problem the "wait" is time lost for them, which leads to the unhappiness if we are too slow.
by next_xibalba | 2025-10-04 18:19:08+00:00
This was a criminal act. Not a civil dispute. Crime disturbs the moral order of a society. The punishment should fit the crime. Here, this man stole millions of economic value (with some extortion on the side). That certainly warrants jail time, in my mind (and the court’s, apparently).

A crime’s punishment should hold the criminal accountable, mete out retribution, deter other would be criminals, and incapacitate the criminal so they cannot continue to harm others.

> I expect them to secure their own infrastructure better

Sounds a lot like victim blaming. You must subscribe to the San Francisco justice model where people are told they shouldn’t have anything in their cars and they should be left unlocked, else they deserve it when a scumbag breaks their window to burgle their property. I don’t. Fortunately, most of the rest of the world doesn’t either.
by eptcyka | 2025-10-04 18:19:12+00:00
Yeah, and you can also get rid of local politics by moving to the countryside and homesteading. And you can bypass national politics by homesteading on a ship or an island that nobody cares about. And you can just move to a different planet to escape global politics. But any group of people will develop some form of politics, and to do anything meaningful longterm, you need a group of people, not just an individual, why not get better at politics? It is inevitable you will have to take part in them.

But of course, I still want my hut in the woods.
by mooreds | 2025-10-04 18:19:34+00:00
Disagree.

I helped found a startup[0] and have been around a number of them, in slacks and on email lists[1].

I think that domain knowledge is so so important for startup success. Even more important than technical expertise.

Why? Because the main problems for 0->1 startups are business problems, not technical ones:

* where do possible customers hang out

* what problems will they pay you to solve

So in that case, a good CEO who knows the domain is critical. They'll have good answers to these questions, which will help guide the technical decisions. Or they'll know who to talk to in order to find the answers. There's no shortcut to that knowledge; you have to spend years to get experience in the domain. Learning and reading about the domain can help, but you still have to spend the time.

The main exception, and it's a big one, is if you are building something in the devtools space, where you can be your own customer.

0: https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/ (I left after a few years, but they are still going strong!)

1: https://ctolunches.com/ (free email list for engineering leaders, so many good discussions happen there)
by braiamp | 2025-10-04 18:19:57+00:00
> The easiest way is to actively work to make a high-profile project successful

Oh, my sweet summer child. Do you really believe that I would be allowed to be able to make a high profile project successful? I literally have been sidelined of many high-profile projects were they failed in the precise way I said it would fail if continuing the path we were on which is caused by actively working to make it successful. Telling your boss they are wrong and why tend to not work when your boss already have an idea on its head about how it will work.
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-10-04 18:20:10+00:00
I self-hosted for well over 20 years, I did not throw the towel and I do not plan to. Self-hosting is a sign of pride. Neither my government nor my Prime Minister nor even my Ministry of Interior or Foreign Ministry can host their own email.

Last time I checked, only State Security self-hosted.

I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.

In all fairness, there is very little maintenance involved, and whenever I have to do maintenance work, I take the opportunity to learn something new. Like this year, I decided to finally replace my aging Debian jessie setup by Arch Linux, and I rewrote all cron jobs as systemd timers.

I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.

Lastly, a piece of advice: treat self-hosting like a hobby and learn to enjoy it.

Oh and the very last thing: the person who designed Exim configuration for Debian deserves a special place in hell for all the hours wasted. If you set up Exim on Debian, just figure out how to use the upstream exim config and adapt it to your needs.
by motorest | 2025-10-04 18:20:24+00:00
> . If you need to justify your lack of "something" ("It's not a hack because..." or "I don't use OOP because..." or "I duplicated this code because..."), then it feels like it says something about your opinion of your own code, IMHO.

I feel this sort of opinion is simplistic. "Explaining" is a need that is sparked by both sides. Just because someone is having doubts or questioning your work that doesn't mean they are automatically right and you are automatically bounded to introduce changes. Sometimes you do get questions from people who don't even have context on the problem domain and why you are taking path A instead of path B.

Also, sometimes your choices can be questioned by opinionated peers who feel compelled to bikeshed over vague and subjective styles instead of objective technical issues. Is this something that should cause churn in your PRs? To give an example, once I had the displeasure of working with an opinionated junior developer who felt compelled to flag literally white spaces as critical problems in a PR because said junior developer instead of onboarding a source code formatter decided to write a personal markdown file with their opinions on style, and was trying to somehow force that as a reference. Is this sort of demand for justifications something you think should be accommodated?
by pRusya | 2025-10-04 18:20:34+00:00
> So Zig is as expressive as C++. but not only safer, but also much simpler, and compiles faster

Tbh syntax-wise Zig feels more cryptic[1] at first than C++.

[1] e.g. `extern "user32" fn MessageBoxA(?win.HWND, [*:0]const u8, [*:0]const u8, u32) callconv(win.WINAPI) i32;` from https://ziglang.org/learn/samples/
by bonzog | 2025-10-04 18:21:21+00:00
I've been running MIAB for a few years now with generally good success as an outgoing sender using a rented cloud machine and a "clean" reputation IP. I've had to email the Microsoft postmaster on one occasion when my emails weren't reaching Outlook users, but they were surprisingly helpful and it's been working fine for years now. It's a good learning exercise in setting up stuff like DKIM/SPF/DMARC.

That said - receiving account sign-up emails is the absolute biggest pain in the backside with Mailinabox! The greylisting anti-spam feature relies on bouncing unknown senders and waiting for a retry. The trouble is, many legit sites just don't bother retrying. So email verification for new accounts and 2FA-type stuff often takes ages to come through, if at all. MIAB stubbornly has no easy, mail user-facing way to temporarily disable spam filtering and it's a real PITA at times.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-10-04 18:21:50+00:00
> I don't want a career in a large tech company

I would swear by this when I started working in IT, but 3y later I changed job and took a gig at a big corporation. It was eye opening and jaw dropping. Everything was lightyears ahead in terms of tech, management, money, investments in people, and much more compared to the small company. It geniuinely made me mad for not doing this sooner.
by andriesm | 2025-10-04 18:21:52+00:00
Well if you are very against capitalism, that would be pretty bad, but ONLY if you are then also a hypocrite working for amounts of money that would make anyone not in the top 20 percent of the world population's eyes pop;

Deduct extra points if you ever accepted stock options, ever tried to start a startup or did a side hustle because you wanted MORE than the bare minimum you need to survive. (Like those capitalist pigs do!)

Or if you are typing this from a mobile phone or laptop computer that costs an amount of money that would be unimaginable to the typical person for most of human history.

Otherwise you're golden. Socialism truly is the superior moral position. It's so obvious we can all agree. And you should lead by example by giving away everything that you might need less than some other random poor person out there.
by bityard | 2025-10-04 18:22:21+00:00
In the mid 2000s, there was a model of inkjet printer that came with full size ink cartridges. It was usually priced "on sale" for less than the price of a new set of ink cartridges. Meaning if you did a normal amount of printing, it was more economically viable to buy a new printer every every few months and throw the old one away than it was to buy replacement cartridges.

It revealed a lot about the incentive structure of the inkjet printer market.
by Symbiote | 2025-10-04 18:22:27+00:00
I've had young (ish, 25 say) Danes say they'd never seen the most recent design of 500DKK notes before. Many more hadn't seen the 1000DKK, though that's since been withdrawn from use.

I believe them. Cash machines dispense(d) them, but usually only if you withdraw 1000DKK or more in a single transaction. That's unusual for people that rarely use cash.

I had them as I was following the official advice to keep some cash around in case the banking system is hacked etc, but I spent them and withdrew 100DKK notes when the advice was updated to point out that if everyone had only 500DKKs at home it wasn't very flexible.

I am slightly ashamed to realise that my banking app shows I haven't made a cash withdrawal in Denmark for more than 12 months — the second part of the official advice is to use cash occasionally to keep that system working.
by mikert89 | 2025-10-04 18:23:14+00:00
Right, sure, there is an initial pain of building domain knowledge. But that one year of knowledge building, distribution, early customers, then dominates who has control over the cap table for a decade. Why not just do this work yourself? Its some weird myth that someone capable of being a technical leader cannot also flesh out the distribution

Especially with the existence of AI, it really makes no sense and is some weird hierarchical system built by business people
by jimt1234 | 2025-10-04 18:23:20+00:00
Sorta related: I feel instant replay challenges have sucked the life out of the game. Arguing with the ump over bad calls has never accomplished anything, but it's entertaining, it gets the blood flowing; it always made me feel more connected to the game and other fans. Now, managers just request an instant replay challenge, we wait a few minutes, and that's it - accurate, but boring.

For example, I watched around 100 games this season, but I can't recall a single instant replay challenge. However, ask anyone from St. Louis about "game 6" (typically, that's all you need to say!), and they'll get fired up, ranting about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyt1xEvqqow . Forty years later, people still remember that blown call like it was yesterday.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-04 18:23:32+00:00
In Case Study 2, near the end it says "if the client may need to know SIDE_LENGTH, then you can add a function to return the value"

Which yeah, you can do that but it's a constant so you can also more literally write (in the implementation just like that function):

pub const SIDE_LENGTH: usize = ROW_LENGTH;
by rwallace | 2025-10-04 18:23:40+00:00
No problem!

As to what would be better - this is also a reply to your sibling comments above - I don't have a single across-the-board solution; the equivalent of std::vector everywhere is fine for some kinds of application code, but not necessarily for system code. Instead, I would start by asking questions.

What kinds of entities are you dealing with, what kinds of collections, and, critically, how many entities along each dimension, to an order of magnitude, p50 and p99? What are your typical access patterns? What are your use cases, so that you can figure out what figures of merit to optimize for? How unpredictable will be the adding of more use cases in the future?

In most kinds of application code, it's okay to just go for big-O, but for performance critical system code, you also need to care about constant factors. As an intuition primer, how many bytes can you memcpy in the time it takes for one cache miss? If your intuition for performance was trained in the eighties and nineties, as mine initially was, the answer may be larger than you expect.
by supermatt | 2025-10-04 18:23:47+00:00
> How do you envision the DHT being updated and not being blockchain based?

By being a DHT, not a blockchain? There are many ways for permissionless updates, such as those employed by BEP-44 on mainline DHT (BitTorrent - not blockchain based), IPNS (part of IPFS - also not blockchain based).

I don’t really care about the downvotes - I just want people to comment why, because I’ve said little that isn’t true.
by handsclean | 2025-10-04 18:25:33+00:00
I get the feeling you’re saying this because the harm caused by privacy loss is complicated, uncertain, time offset, etc, while “harm” feels to you like losing $100 or getting punched. You should think about the 1960s civil rights movement. Imagine you’re in the midst of it, without the hindsight of settled history, with actually many authority figures telling all these silly “activists” to get a real job and stop making such a fuss about something we all got on fine without until they started on their tantrum. What thought process would you need in order to correctly analyze whether the things being fought against were genuinely harms? What is the result of applying that thought process to privacy?

This is, by the way, playing catch-up, privacy has been an internationally recognized human right for many years. I’m just trying to help you see human rights from a perspective other than “something somebody is ordering me to care about”.
by quuxplusone | 2025-10-04 18:26:26+00:00
FWIW, HN values directness and precision, even in questions. I bet if you'd said "Did increased military spending have anything to do with this?" you'd get a quick answer "no" and few downvotes; but what you actually said was "Perhaps this is the result of an increase in military research efforts" with a question mark on the end, and I expect HN was reacting to that.
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-04 18:26:36+00:00
> I find this reluctance to enforcing guidelines weird

It's worse than that. All the hype in design has been about creating a global design language, and enforcing it over all your teams for more than a decade now. All the hype has been on centralizing the design team, moving it away from the developers for some years. All the hype has been on tools that claim to enable reusing and distributing that work...

And yet everything is done in a way that developers have to do everything themselves and don't get to coordinate with each other.

(Honestly, I'm settling on the opinion that non-developing application design is a scam all around.)