MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by netbioserror | 2025-11-30 04:28:06+00:00
I personally got one of those jobs at a smaller, "non-tech" (read: engineering) company, quite close to where I grew up. Got to pick my language and tools, have ownership of my slice of the product, live a very comfortable and flexible 9-to-5 where they gave me the room to do my best work. Pays maybe half of the typical inflated tech salary. But I'm doing well for myself.

My only issues at this point are 1) my life has bucket list things to check off that have nothing to do with work, 2) I'm running out of super interesting things to work on and entering a sort of maintenance mode on my program, 3) the old guard, who were all retirement age, are checking out for a new generation, with a new direction.

So all that being said, I've been looking for work far afield in places closer to my bucket list items. Hopefully, I can find another smaller, specialized company that needs a programmer with my skillset, because this experience has been fantastic.
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-30 04:28:31+00:00
What's wonderful about comprehensive universities is that there's a program that can excite the interest of almost every personality.

And even if that wasn't the case, education in general actually speaks to a variety of personalities: The self-motivated learner, the self-improver, the intellectual explorer, the goal-oriented achiever, the rules-based structure seeker.
by pdimitar | 2025-11-30 04:28:43+00:00
Yours and my experience are not mutually exclusive, I think we both see it. I dream of managers like you but I never get hired under them for some reason. (Likely regional culture, experience shows.)

I'm at a stage of life and career where I'd happily take a small pay cut for a year just to establish myself in a place and have stability. Then we'll talk about competitive compensation.

My chief issues are with people that are best described with the proverb "give them an inch and they will take a mile".

Yours seems to be that you deal with people that constantly think that they can do better in terms of how much they take home (let's not sugar-coat it, they're spoiled -- I was too).

Heroics being invisible and people who have their coffee with leadership getting the money and the influence is the wrong system. Always was and apparently always will be.
by o11c | 2025-11-30 04:28:51+00:00
> Healthcare costs [...] The only difference is with an employer intermediary, [...]

That's missing the biggest problem, which is that the employer gets a free chance to extort the employee in all sorts of illegal ways lest they be cut off and die.

Wage theft is perhaps the biggest-value type of crime every year (sources disagree, but it's certainly higher than many), and that's only one kind of illegal thing employers do when they have all the leverage.
by phil21 | 2025-11-30 04:29:32+00:00
> Taxes once when you take the loan against it, and taxed again when you realize the profit to pay the loan.

Trivially fixed by simply letting you deduct the taxes paid when you took out the loan against the taxes owed when you actually sell.

While we're at it lets ban stock buybacks since all those are is a tax deferral scheme with utterly no other social purpose. Dividends are the correct way to distribute cash to shareholders. Full stop.

And get rid of stepped up cost basis on death - limit it to the IRS gift limit which is already ridiculously generous. Just to make it politically palatable so there are less sob stories about some "family" farm or company being force-liquidated to pay taxes.
by neya | 2025-11-30 04:29:41+00:00
I'm ok with having ads for free users, many of us saw this coming. What I'm really afraid of and knowing how this industry works, AI advising/gaslighting users into buying useless stuff in the guise of advice is NOT ok.

Imagine you ask ChatGPT about coffee beans and it goes into insane detail about finding the right coffee bean and then it slips in a "btw, here's a couple of good coffee bean brands: A, B, C..."

That's super scary since your trust factor with the AI is really high and it already knows it and is actively exploiting it. I would imagine even paid users might be subject to this without them ever knowing/finding out.

This is why open-weight open-source models are extremely important.
by andrewflnr | 2025-11-30 04:29:55+00:00
Ok, sure, technically. To be fair you can't really assess the opex of technology that doesn't exist yet, but I find it hard to believe that operating brand new, huge machines that have to move fluid around (and not nice fluids either) will ever be less than it is on the surface. Better hope you never get a coolant leak. Heck, it might even be that opex=0 still isn't enough to offset the "capex". Space is already hard when you're not trying to launch record-breaking structures.

Even optimistically, capex goes up by a lot to reduce opex, which means you need a really really long breakeven time, which means a long time where nothing breaks. How many months of reduced electricity costs is wiped out if you have to send a tech to orbit?

Oh, and don't forget the radiation slowly destroying all your transistors. Does that count as opex? Can you break even before your customers start complaining about corruption?
by btilly | 2025-11-30 04:30:07+00:00
This one case isn't the full story, but I firmly believe that it is a big deal.

See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case.

The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing that ability tests are a more effective way to hire good employees than interviews. If the ratio of blacks to whites hired is different than the ratio that apply, you are presumed to be racist and in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

So a company that needs to hire literate people can no longer, as used to be standard, allow high school students to apply and give them a literacy test. But they can require college.

Therefore college has become a job requirement for a plethora of jobs whose actual requirement is "literate". Jobs that people used to be able to do out of high school, and jobs that could still be done by plenty of high school graduates. That this has become so ubiquitous lead to an increased demand for college. Which is one of the factors driving tuition up.

(My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)
by timschmidt | 2025-11-30 04:30:22+00:00
Perhaps you're not a software developer. Most devs understand that there's a big difference between "it worked for me a few times on my development workstation" and "it's routinely tested in all possible configurations under a variety of circumstances as part of a test harness or CI/CD process".

In fairness to game devs, alt-tab'ing out of a running game would be a challenge for many testing frameworks as it's not something you can do at compile time, requires running the game for a period of time (CI servers don't typically have GPUs), requires some sort of keyboard/mouse automation, and interaction with the underlying OS in addition to the game.

Issues which aren't added to some sort of test suite/CI tend to creep back in to codebases. Especially rapidly developed codebases like games. And threading issues are notoriously challenging to reproduce. Hopefully that helps you understand the difference.
by csense | 2025-11-30 04:31:04+00:00
I don't know much about any of this, and I'm far from an expert on the lambda calculus. But I skimmed paper by OP, which is informative: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20314

The lambda calculus is an alternate model of computation created by Alonzo Church in the 1930s. It's basically a restricted programming language where the only things you can do are define anonymous functions, and apply those anonymous functions to input variables or the output of other functions.

The Lambda calculus statement And = λp.λq.p q p is more conventionally notated as And(p, q) = p(q(p)).

You can reduce lambda expressions -- basically, this is "Simplifying this program as far as possible" what you expect a good optimizing compiler to do.

When there are multiple possible simplifications, which one should you pick? This is a complicated problem people basically solved years ago, but the solutions are also complicated and have a lot of moving parts. OP came up with a graph-based system called ∆-Nets that is less complicated and more clearly explained than the older solutions. ∆-Nets is a lot easier for people to understand and implement, so it might have practical applications making better performance and tooling for lambda-calculus-based programming languages. Which might in turn have practical benefits for areas where those languages are used (e.g. compilers).

The linked simulation lets you write a lambda calculus program, see what it looks like as a ∆-Net graph, and click to simplify the graph.

It's only tangentially related to OP, but YouTube channel 2swap recently had an interesting video about lambda calculus that you don't have to be an expert to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcVA8Nj6HEo
by MengerSponge | 2025-11-30 04:31:09+00:00
America used to do that, but Jewish students started taking (and doing well on) the test, and later Black and Asian students had the audacity to be brilliant too. This led to America's "holistic" college admissions process.

For what it's worth, the USA isn't unique in adapting admissions to reject an unwanted minority. The most interesting mechanism has to be Moscow State University's Jewish Problems: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
by rayiner | 2025-11-30 04:31:22+00:00
That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
by ekianjo | 2025-11-30 04:32:02+00:00
> This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful.

The idea of a safety net is a silly idea. The whole world had very little safety net just 100 years ago, and we still managed fine to make progress and to get out of poverty (on average).

On the contrary, when you know you have very little safety net, you tend to try harder and to persevere a lot more.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-11-30 04:32:28+00:00
It might be beneficial and necessary given where we are, but if it becomes normalized we must all see it for what it is. More austerity ultimately (regardless of the immediate causes) stemming from the massive transfer wealth to the few.

Just like the generations-long shift of families needing two incomes instead of one. Like the growing share of renters vs. homeowners. Like the growing ratio of home prices to income.

You reading this may believe you're among the few because you've stayed ahead of it so far, but you're not.
by pastel8739 | 2025-11-30 04:32:45+00:00
I’m not sure that requirement is violated here; the interactive nature of a challenge-response protocol is required to prove that someone knows the private key. Without an interactive process, the prover could have just found the signatures lying around somewhere and reused them without knowing the private key at all. This means that the verifier would not be able to prove anything beyond “the private key X signed these messages”.
by simoncion | 2025-11-30 04:33:05+00:00
> Handhelds and desktop PCs can perform differently.

The handhelds we're talking about are -essentially- a low-power [0] laptop in a tiny case. Again, we're talking about exactly the same hardware, that provides substantially worse performance when Windows is the OS than when Linux is the OS.

For reference, here's one instance of the original coverage of the phenomenon about which I spoke: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q>

[0] But higher power than one might naively expect!
by rtpg | 2025-11-30 04:33:47+00:00
they're going to compete on ad unit economics against a company whose entire bread and butter has been selling ads. All while increasing unit costs to provide their service (like all the AI companies seem to be doing by just having more and more planning layers)

If ChatGPT went away tomorrow everyone who wanted to would be fine just moving to one of the other random chatbots from one of the other providers. ChatGPT is the default name that people know, but I don't think that's the same as a moat. A moat would allow OpenAI to go really hard on pricing and ads, and I don't think they have that margin!
by tomhow | 2025-11-30 04:34:20+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Meshtastic's Opposition to Proposed Changes on 900 MHz Band - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242091 - Aug 2024 (16 comments)

Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448 - Jan 2024 (78 comments)

Meshtastic is an encrypted communications platform for the Lora RF protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142 - July 2022 (88 comments)

We're making an open-source $30 GPS/mesh radio, would like advice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066 - March 2020 (166 comments)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-30 04:34:25+00:00
You'll occasionally see people point out that requiring a college degree has all the same legal problems as requiring a hiring exam does. And those people are correct in terms of the judgments that impose our terrible precedents. They're all just as negative on degree requirements as they are on performance requirements.

But as a matter of empirical reality, our enforcement system declines to prosecute employers who require degrees, because requiring degrees is morally good and requiring exams is morally bad.

The rules about what's allowed don't actually derive from the law. We have laws that forbid everything, accompanied by selective prosecution of only the things that certain people disapprove of.
by tptacek | 2025-11-30 04:35:03+00:00
Also Chicago (Oak Park, really, but lots of Chicago experience too).

Bike theft is in fact pretty common? Bike thieves are charged when police luck into catching the thief like a block from the scene, but the police will be the first to tell you you aren't getting your bike back. I have friends who've had trackers on their bike, could pinpoint the actual location of the bike, and zero help from the police.

I agree with you about the connection to homelessness.
by idontsee | 2025-11-30 04:35:11+00:00
For end-user applications, there's potentially the PolyForm Noncommercial License[1]. But since your project is a library, I would not recommend straying from well-known OSS licenses. Very few people would consider using a non-OSS library in a project of any kind.

[1]: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-11-30 04:36:35+00:00
Is this statistically true or just your experience? I'd be very surprised if it was more than just anecdotal.

> They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong.

Lots of well-resourced kids do this and more can do this. By the law of averages they should be overrepresented in successes here.

> When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.

Does needing to succeed make businesses succeed? I don't think so, tbh.
by GaryBluto | 2025-11-30 04:37:01+00:00
I don't understand why so many open source developers don't want truly free software. Your software isn't free if people can't do whatever they want with it.

"Evil" is also a bad descriptor to use. If I started giving out apples for free on the street (of which I had an infinite supply), I wouldn't be upset if nobody came back with an improved apple for me to use instead.

> I don’t just want to do this for my little project; I want to slowly change the discourse. I’m not sure how to do that effectively, if it’s even possible.

So he's decided that as the supreme arbiter of what is good and just that he'll be trying to slowly boil open source's collective frogs. How narcissistic.

> How can I bring more attention to this issue given the relative popularity of my project? Do I write a blog post? A callout in the documentation?

No. Because it doesn't matter.
by hocuspocus | 2025-11-30 04:37:25+00:00
Akka's demise started before the license change. It's an incredible piece of software but as it turns out, not so many people need stateful cluster sharding. Modern cloud architecture and simpler streaming libraries have made the Akka toolkit irrelevant to many use cases.

You're right about Spark and the next logical step will be removing the JVM from the equation entirely, which is already ongoing (see Photon or Comet).
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-30 04:37:38+00:00
Microsoft doesn't care if a home or hobbyist user uses this, because enforcing the license against such a user is not worth it as the payout wouldn't even cover their own effort/lawyers.

Microsoft may absolutely care if you use this at work (even by accident, by bringing your personal machine to the office) since that's where they can collect a decent amount of money for a license breach.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-11-30 04:39:41+00:00
> That's why you need to modify the type system, obviously. That is not a problem.

What typing judgment rules would you have for RUNTIME?

> On the other hand, if you can prove f x = g x for all x, then you should be able to prove RUNTIME f x = RUNTIME g x as well, simply by noting that f = g, and x = x, and therefore RUNTIME f x = RUNTIME g x as well by the usual extensionality rule that would also apply to RUNTIME.

Yes that's the problem.

Take factorial.

fun factorial :: "nat => nat" where "factorial 0 = 1" | "factorial (Suc n) = (Suc n) * factorial n

I can then define

fun factorial_10_hardcoded :: "nat => nat" where "factorial 10 = 3628800" | "factorial 0 = 1" | "factorial (Suc n) = (Suc n) * factorial n"

Clearly `factorial_10_hardcoded = factorial` for all `x`. Hence `RUNTIME f x = RUNTIME g x`. `RUNTIME factorial_10_hardcoded 10 <= 1` and therefore `RUNTIME factorial 10 <= 1`. So that gives you constant time for any particular constant input. But it gets even worse!

factorial_hardcoded_a_b "nat => nat => nat => nat" where "factorial_hard_coded_a_b a b x = if x=a then b else factorial x

And of course `RUNTIME factorial_hardcoded_a_b x b x <= 1`.

Then I can prove

FORALL n. EX b. factorial n = factorial_hardcoded_a_b n b n

which then means I can conclude `RUNTIME factorial n <= 1`.
by n2d4 | 2025-11-30 04:39:51+00:00
> it would compromise your anonymity to say more

By saying he was part of these conversations, the people he talked to almost certainly already know who he is (if necessary, the fact he's undergoing through surgery definitely tells them). Not sharing the details about this sounds more like he doesn't want this individual to be rehabilitated. (Assuming this entire thing is not made up.)
by cobertos | 2025-11-30 04:42:00+00:00
Huh, odd. I have a car with assistive controls and they also tried to talk me into this warranty but I declined. They mentioned replacement would require extra money.

I did end up getting a windshield replacement shortly after purchase (like 6 months into ownership a rock came out of a truck and hit my windshield). I got it replaced for the normal $100-$200 not from the dealership and the vision system has had no issues.
by simoncion | 2025-11-30 04:42:37+00:00
> The future must be server authoritative net code and behavior-based server-side cheat detection.

If they actually cared about stopping cheaters (rather than pouring tons of investor money into the appearance of anti-cheat), then yes, the future must be that.

But. I'm a USian and I notice that the TSA is still strip-searching people at airports and -worse- wasting assloads of everyone's time, effort, and tax money. I have zero faith that a sudden attack of common sense will redirect efforts (whether they be in the arena of airport security or eviction of match-damaging video game cheaters) in a more sensible direction within what's left of my lifetime.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-30 04:43:15+00:00
Massive bandwidth usage and video compression artifacts. It's fine for games and media consumption, but may be problematic for office work.

Remote desktop protocols prefer lossless compression to achieve pixel-perfect rendering, at the expense of framerate/latency.

RDP is unique in that it's not just streaming, but integrates with Windows' GUI stack to actually offload compositing to the client. This however works less and less well with web and Electron apps which do not use native OS widgets.
by jimmaswell | 2025-11-30 04:45:10+00:00
> overpriced, underpowered plastic hunks of shit which are an absolute pain to even buy, let alone deal with.

Absolute nonsense, my FW16 has been fantastic. No hardware trouble at all to speak of in my years owning it. Looks cool, works great, solid construction. Ordering was a breeze. I love everything about the experience of buying and owning this laptop.
by collinmcnulty | 2025-11-30 04:46:20+00:00
It’s absolutely an uneasy partnership. But my goodness the benefits of having rubbed shoulders with people studying forensics, entomology, philosophy, pure math, and agriculture were enormous. If I had gone to a school composed exclusively of engineers and other careerists, how much narrower would my world have been? And bringing in ideas from other areas of study has been so powerful in both my life and my career.
by esperent | 2025-11-30 04:46:27+00:00
I'm Irish. The state paid me to go to university, and I've paid it back many times over in taxes.

Whenever I hear about the cost of degrees in the US I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

It doesn't make sense, it's entirely inhumane and predatory to loan that kind of money to a teenager, and there's no way I would ever have gotten a degree if I lived there.

I tried being in debt once, for a far more modest amount than a US degree, and it weighed on my subconscious the entire time.
by ssslvky1 | 2025-11-30 04:48:39+00:00
Over the last year, coding agents have changed how developers work. But GitHub hasn’t changed much: it’s still built around the idea that humans write code, and commits are the primary unit of progress. I’m building MemoV, and I keep running into this question: What if the core artifact of software development is no longer the code commit, but the conversation + agent plan + diff?

Today’s workflow looks more like: 1. you talk to a coding agent it generates a plan 2. the plan produces code 3. you iterate conversationally 4. many changes never become Git commits

Context is scattered across prompts, diffs, tools, terminals, editors, memory layers… And GitHub simply can’t represent this.
by echelon | 2025-11-30 04:49:11+00:00
They've always been able to do this.

Microsoft was talking about submarine data centers powered by tidal forces in the early 2000s.

There have been talks of data centers on Sealand-like nation states.

Geothermal ...

Exotic data center builds will always be hyped. Always be within the realm of feasibility when cost is no object, but probably outside of practicality or need.

Next it'll be fusion-powered data centers.
by ffsm8 | 2025-11-30 04:49:51+00:00
Mmh, you definitely misremember that

> As much as I’d like this change to happen, it’s too soon. This change would kill off projects like Bazzite entirely right as Fedora is starting to make major headway in the gaming space.

> I’m speaking as it’s founder, if this change is actually made as it is written the best option for us is to just go ahead and disband the project.

Now, whenever you would've actually shut down the project is a different story, but your messaging was very clear.