MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
VCs from sillicon valley needs to stop selling "hustle porn"
by sankalpdomore | 2025-11-17 10:21:14+00:00
We all have been fooled by the "hustle porn" narrative.

The story goes like this: if you want to build something meaningful which makes you wealthy, you have to live on ramen noodles, sleep on floors, have little or no relationships, and survive on like $10 a day kind of budget. That's the supposed definition of struggle.

But in reality, the real struggle is in the head. Showing up every day. Making sure you put in the reps, irrespective of how you're feeling. Putting in the work frequently, as much as possible.

And I think we all see this hustle porn from people who have made it in life telling us "you have to be on ramen noodles." And then we all get discouraged because that's not the life we want to live, right? That's not something that makes me want to get out of bed.

And I think that's unfair to people who are still struggling to find something they love doing and probably want to leave their day jobs for.

I think there's a better way.

When building my 3rd startup, I'm showing up every day. I'm working about 12 hours every day and also on weekends since I've left my job. It's something I'm building that I'm very, very passionate about, and I just want to keep doing this.

But while I do this, I've made sure that I have proper runway. I'm not starving for money. I'm not living on ramen noodles. I eat very comfortably. We have a cook at home. I go and work from cafes and eat there, and everything is well taken care of.

I play football once a week. I sleep a good 8 to 9 hours every day. I meet my friends, meet new people, talk to people I care about almost every day.

I think people can do both. There's plenty of time to do all of it - to live healthy, peacefully, and also make sure you put in the deep work 8-12 hours a day.

The narrative of startup founders giving up everything in their initial years has to stop. And the funny part is that most startups i.e. 99% of the time, just fucking fail.

So in a nutshell, you became miserable. You chose this because somebody told you to choose this. And then after 1, 2, or 3 years of doing a startup, you shut down the company, you have to return the VC money, and you walk away with nothing.

You led a miserable life hoping there's light at the end of the tunnel, and you still walked away with nothing.

I think we can still walk away with something meaningful, but it has to be done in a sustainable way.

Every good leader knows this. Every good athlete knows this. If you're running for short term, you will burn out and die. If you're thinking long-term, the decisions you make, the choices you make, the way you do things - it changes completely.

And I think that's what we're missing in the ecosystem. The mindset of longevity of startups is what we're missing. The idea that a startup can go on for about 3 to 5 years and then become something really, really big in a sustainable way is missing from the ecosystem.

This is wrong. This must change.

We all just forget that the choice is always there.
by JoelJacobson | 2025-11-17 10:21:16+00:00
In the linked "Optimize LISTEN/NOTIFY" pgsql-hackers, I've shared a lot of benchmark results for different workloads, which also include results on how PostgreSQL currently works (this is "master" in the benchmark results), that can help you better understand the expectations for different workloads.

The work-around solution we used at Trustly (a company I co-founded), is a component named `allas` that a colleague of mine at that time, Marko Tikkaja, created to solve our problems, that massively reduced the load on our servers. Marko has open sourced and published this work here: https://github.com/johto/allas

Basically, `allas` opens up a single connection to PostgreSQL, on which it LISTEN on all the channels it needs to listen on. Then clients connect to `allas` over the PostgreSQL protocol, so it's basically faking a PostgreSQL server, and when clients do LISTEN on a channel with allas, allas will then LISTEN on that channel on the real PostgreSQL server on the single connection it needs. Thanks to `allas` being implemented in Go, using Go's efficient goroutines for concurrency, it efficiently scales with lots and lots of connections. I'm not a Go-expert myself, but I've understood Go is quite well suited for this type of application.

This component is still being used at Trustly, and is battle-tested and production grade.

That said, it would of course be much better to avoid the need for a separate component, and fix the scalability issues in core PostgreSQL, so that's what I'm currently working on.
by animuchan | 2025-11-17 10:22:41+00:00
> Saying "I don't like Unicode" is like saying "I don't like the linguistic diversity in the world": I mean sure, OK, but it's still there and it exists.

Respectfully disagree, linguistic diversity isn't by definition impossible to create a good abstraction on top of; I think that it's more of a failure of this particular attempt.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-17 10:23:59+00:00
Because it's not a simple problem space. Lucene has gone through about three decades of lots of optimization, feature development, and performance tuning. A lot of brain power goes into that.

Google bootstrapped the AI revolution as a side effect of figuring out how to do search better. They started by hiring a lot of expert researchers that then got busy iterating on interesting search engine adjacent problems (like figuring out synonyms, translations, etc.). In the process they got into running neural networks at scale, figuring out how to leverage GPUs and eventually building their own TPUs.

The Acquire Podcast recently did a great job of outlining the history of Google & Alphabet.

Doing search properly at scale mainly requires a lot of infrastructure. And that's Google's real moat. They get to pay for all that with an advertising money printing machine. Which BTW. leverages a lot of search algorithms. Matching advertisements to content is a search problem. Google just got really good at that. That's what finances all the innovation in this space from deep learning to TPUs. Being able to throw a few hundred million at running some experiments is what makes the difference here.
by bbyford | 2025-11-17 10:24:43+00:00
Was really hoping that this was going to be a useful thread for me, as I have a 8 going on 9 year old who mostly wants to be doing computer games, minecraft and making stuff all day long. But unsuprisingly there's some haters who really could have not bothered in this thread... I mean seriously why waste your own time?

For me I'm going to give raspberry pi a go and hope that he gets excited about the hardware aspect and making things with it as well as the software side... and if he breaks it cool, no problem, where as breaking my work mac would be catastrophic for me and my ability to work :(
by hogdanish | 2025-11-17 10:25:45+00:00
macOS isn't without its sins, but I feel like "ad-ridden” is a stretch compared to the baseline of Windows 11 injecting promotions into the Start menu, OEM Android flavors full of carrier crap, etc. There's iCloud+ nags here and there, but it’s still by far the least noisy consumer OS right now aside from Linux.

Of course, if you consider iCloud's deep integration into Finder and the rest of the operating system a form of advertising, macOS is infested with ads. But then you’ve basically redefined “ad” to mean “any tightly integrated first-party service,” i.e. the core value proposition people are buying into with Apple's ecosystem at all.

(I still agree with your points about the lost potential of macOS, though)
by npteljes | 2025-11-17 10:25:56+00:00
>They noticed that the children liked to roam through bomb sites, where they would build fires and play hide-and-seek.

This reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, the Animatrix. There is a story in this anthology, Beyond, that centers around this exact concept. I still get goosebumps just from reading its Wikipedia entry.
by blixt | 2025-11-17 10:26:00+00:00
The quirks of field values not matching expectations reminds me of a rabbit hole when I was reverse engineering the Starbound engine[1] and eventually figured out the game was using a flawed implementation of SHA-256 hashing and had to create a replica of it [2]. Originally I used Python [3] which is a really nice language for reverse engineering data formats thanks to its flexibility.

[1] Starbounded was supposed to become an editor: https://github.com/blixt/starbounded

[2] https://github.com/blixt/starbound-sha256

[3] https://github.com/blixt/py-starbound
by xrmagnum | 2025-11-17 10:26:25+00:00
Fair point!

- With a TURN/relay, you’re introducing a single, purpose-built box that: - sees all the tunnel metadata for many users (IP pairs, timing, volume), - is easy to log at or subpoena/compel, - and becomes a natural central chokepoint if someone wants to block the system.

- Without that relay, your traffic still crosses random ISPs/routers, but: - those hops are *generic Internet infrastructure*, not “the TunnelBuddy relay”, - there’s no extra entity whose whole job is to see everyone’s flows.
by pelasaco | 2025-11-17 10:26:30+00:00
> For my personal usage, I'm working on replacing Docker builds for some Go projects that rely heavily on CGO by using `zig cc`. I'm not using the Zig language itself, but this could be considered one of its use cases.

Hm, i can see a good use case when we want to have reproducible builds from go packages, including its C extensions. Is that your use case, or are you aiming for multi-environment support of your compiled "CGO extensions"
by sylware | 2025-11-17 10:26:48+00:00
What are you talking about?

There is no official and legally required technical support for proton, requirement in tons of countries around the world.

The second there is a payment with real money, it is a scam.

In other words: PROTON = 0 BUCKS (and that includes micro-transactions), or this is a scam and very probably illegal dude.
by bean469 | 2025-11-17 10:27:25+00:00
> You shouldn't be running in crowded areas like food courts (or indoor areas not specifically created for athletics)

I guess this is a cultural thing, i.e. what is expected of kids. Among my age-group in Eastern Europe (25-30 y/o), we joke around that our parents didn't let us stay in home, which has a lot of truth to it. Once we were out in the city, they didn't even have a idea where we went, and we didn't have mobile phones either. We used to run around everywhere without exception - malls, forests - you name it. That is still expected of kids nowadays, but the kids themselves are far more drawn to the digital world nowadays
by ItsBob | 2025-11-17 10:28:27+00:00
FWIW, I work for a major financial organization in the UK as a software architect and I've brought it up more than once over the years in various roles: not a single bank in the UK supports Yubikeys or custom Authenticator apps.

Not one (I last checked about a month ago!)

Security, while pretty good, is still lacking imo!
by em-bee | 2025-11-17 10:29:48+00:00
agreed. the whole system is bonkers and screams of elitism. like you are either born smart or you'll never make it. fortunately there is also gesamtschule. which does away with that, there is no distinction between levels. only your grades have to be good enough by grade 10 to make it into the oberstufe (yrs 11-13).

i barely made it through, and i would not have made it without that because neither my parents nor me had any ambitions, so switching schools would not have worked for me.

when i was younger we moved around a lot. different problem but same result, i didn't make any friends in school because we kept witching schools. by the time we stayed in one location it was already to late.
by IvanLudvig | 2025-11-17 10:30:22+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Italy/EU | Remote

I have 5+ years of professional experience in full-stack web development. I'm especially passionate about data visualizations and web3.

Tech: TypeScript/JavaScript, React, Next.js, Node, WebGPU

Some of my work: https://ivanludvig.github.io/work/

GitHub: https://github.com/IvanLudvig

My rate is $36/hour or fixed per project

Email in profile
by maeln | 2025-11-17 10:30:54+00:00
Funnily enough, I am preparing a simple presentation at work to speak about exactly that. The idea of separating "logic" from I/O and side effects is an old one and can be found in many architectures (like hexagonal architecture). There is plenty of benefit doing this, but testing is a big one.

It should be obvious, but this is not something that seem to be thought in school or in most workplaces, and when it is, it's often through the lens of functional programming, which most just treat as a curiosity and not a practical thing to use at work. So I started to teach this simple design principle to all my junior dev because this is something that is actually quite easy to implement, does not need a complete shift of architecture/big refactor when working on existing code, and is actually practical and useful.
by chickensong | 2025-11-17 10:30:55+00:00
While a little bug damage is expected here and there, you can still harvest a lot of high quality produce with minimal or zero pest management. Bugs generally go for weak and unhealthy plants, so if you can keep most of your plants healthy, you can just pull the weak ones if they get too many bugs.

Of course there are plenty of other things you can do, but if you have strong, healthy plants, you often don't have to do much. Birds and other larger animals however, can be a much bigger problem depending on your crop.
by unwind | 2025-11-17 10:30:55+00:00
By the way the rest of the (actual) saying that is the title for the Swedish book is "Only Bad Clothes". In Swedish it rhymes [1] which of course increases its power. I know it from when I was a kid 40+ years ago, and I think both my kids would recognize it or at least get the meaning.

That being said, obviously mobile phones etc are huge and (in my opinion) problematic among kids here, too.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/vj2630/no_such_thi...
by adrian_b | 2025-11-17 10:31:32+00:00
There are many cases when the incremental change that is due to an individual inventor is very clearly defined, so it is known precisely which is the contribution beyond what was inherited from the predecessors.

For that incremental change, the name of its inventor is appropriate.

However, you are right that too frequently people fail to distinguish what was new and what was old in an invention, and they misleadingly attach the name of the inventor/discoverer to the entire big system or theory, not to the small features that are truly new.

The inventors or discoverers are frequently guilty of this themselves, by failing to properly acknowledge their sources and by making exaggerated patent claims, which nowadays are too frequently accepted by patent offices that do not perform an adequate search of prior art.
by throw9404049 | 2025-11-17 10:32:19+00:00
> Rust at this point is 10 years old from stable

Rust is not stable even today! There is no spec, no alternative implementations, no test suite... "Stable" is what "current compiler compiles"! Existing code may stop compiling any day....

Maybe in 10 years it may become stable, like other "booring" languages (Golang and Java).

Rust stability is why Linus opposes its integration into kernel.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-11-17 10:33:06+00:00
There was some kind of patent shenanigans about a decade ago around LFP.

I'm not sure if China invalidated dodgy patents or threatened to and got a good deal (or some combination) but I think LFP in China escaped a lot of patent fees as long as they were sold in China. This probably partly explains the regional nature of LFP success so further expiries might help the rest of the world catch up on LFP prices and adoption.
by madaxe_again | 2025-11-17 10:34:13+00:00
I relate to this as the parent I am and the kid I was.

I went to boarding school in the 80’s and 90’s. There were houses, there was the school, the masters, the usual abuses - but there were also the gangs. They’d all have a name along the lines of “The Orcs” or “The Goonies”, and a clubhouse built of scrap and brush somewhere in the woodland attached to the school, usually accessible only by crawling through tunnels of brambles and a hidden trapdoor, and knowing where the tripwires and murderous sash weights were concealed. Most would have a few dozen boys in them, spread over the five years of the school. Younger boys would be skivvies, diggers, and by the time you were 12 you’d be a war chief, and organising and leading raids against other camps. Old pool cover was a particularly sought after commodity during raids - not only did it keep the rain out, but it kept the place warm in the winters.

Outside of term I’d go and saunter around abandoned factories and rail yards near our home.

Anyway. I think they cut the woodland down decades ago to replace it with more playing fields.

That thing, however - that little, tribal community of kids - is very much live and kicking, but non the west, very much no longer in the physical world.

My kid is being raised in a forest - and I’m acutely aware that sooner rather than later she is going to need a gang.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-17 10:34:19+00:00
Yeah well, we have one kid, and we're too old to have another. He's the only grandchild on both sides of the family. He has no cousins, first or second. That's apparently the new normal in many countries.

Of course he's going to live a sheltered life!

It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids.

I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.

Does that make it sad that it's not like that any more?

Maybe. Maybe not.

If you want to change it, recognise that first, society and our very civilization would need to change back to the era of every family having half a dozen or more kids. Then, then you'd have to figure out what to do about the excess population: unsustainable exponential growth or mass child deaths. You choose!
by luxurytent | 2025-11-17 10:36:54+00:00
I'm trying to raise confident, independent kids. It is exceptionally more difficult to allow them to play outside on their own, walk to the grocery store, etc, for mainly two reasons:

1. There are no other kids outside. We live in a neighbourhood with many young families, at all age ranges (littles to teen). We rarely see kids outside, and if we do, it's mainly kids walking with their parents somewhere (eg to the local grocery store)

This is a walkable neighbourhood 5km from city centre of a city of 500,000. The same applies to other neighbourhoods even closer to the city, those known as "family friendly". I do runs through these neighbourhoods and they are ghost towns.

When my kid has friends over, they can run to the park up the street (600m) and play together. I'm not worried, as they are together. Sometimes other kids will show up and join them. I think it's a sign that kids are inside, not sure what to do: they crave play with others their age.

2. Large, speeding vehicles.

We live in an area where we can walk to a few smaller grocers and restaurants, which is fantastic. My kids only need to cross a local retail strip to get to most of these. The crossing is two car lengths, and I feel pretty good about this. There are bike lanes which act as a buffer to the sidewalk as well and vehicles can't travel fast.

Now if my kid wants to go to their friends house? They have to cross two arterials. These are four lane roads with fast moving traffic, uncontrolled signals, lots of road rage, fast cuts on corners, etc.

My kids are gaining confidence and the skills in navigating these tough roads, but I struggle with the transition to full independence for this particular area. That one mistake can end it all.

My kids are 9 and 5, for reference. The five year old is still attached to me, but the oldest is beginning to crave more independence.
by internet_points | 2025-11-17 10:37:33+00:00
Seems like good advice, search has been built quite a few times now :-) I've defaulted to elasticsearch myself.

However, have you tried running any of the "up and coming" alternatives that keep showing up here? In particular, https://github.com/SeekStorm/SeekStorm seems very interesting, though I haven't heard from anyone using it in prod.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-17 10:38:00+00:00
Much as I’d like to see Xcode on iPad, I doubt it will happen; at least, not with the current Xcode.

Xcode is huge, it’s bigger than most games. A lot of that size, is an aggregation of tools, built up over a couple of decades.

Replacing it with a rewrite, would be a major operation, but would probably be required, in order to work on iPad.
by dwaite | 2025-11-17 10:38:02+00:00
The lowest level of the three is not a useful number. The case serves as a battery pack to recharge the headphones (something I did earlier today while on an international flight).

The reality is the sort of compatibility being talked about is a new feature with design choices, not just unwired functionality.

I'd rather them work on features to report charging time or expected playback time on iOS, or write their own app for Android, than try to arbitrarily increase their bluetooth profile compatibility checklist.
by iso1631 | 2025-11-17 10:38:13+00:00
There's two aspect of "country" relative to somewhere like London. There's an estate in various towns, where there's plenty of actual public space, playing fields and grounds, walk into town, to shops, bus/train to larger towns. Plenty of open space.

Then there's the real country, where there's very little public space - nowhere to ride a bike other than narrow country roads, you can walk but only in restrictive footpaths over fields - some of which are sabotaged by farmers (I file 2 or 3 complaints with the right-of-way office each year as footpaths get blocked, barbed wire put over stiles, etc). We have an open forest area, but it's a 2 mile walk.

There are 4 children in our village at the "local" primary school, across the 7 years. My youngest's nearest friend is 6 miles away - again via 60mph roads. That means having to be driven to places. There is a school bus (which for americans reading is relatively rare in the UK -- you get one upto age 11 if you live more than 2 miles from the nearest school, or 3 miles for 11-16), but that doesn't help for after school clubs.

A toddler isn't going to be independent with travel, so driving them places is fine. In a few years though, you want them to be able to travel and meet friends, go to the shop etc, independently. That's easy enough in a city or in a town, not in the country.

That said, just having that access doesn't mean they will use it. My 13 year old's main social interaction is via minecraft sessions where they have a group call and yell at each other, doesn't matter if someone lives nearby (which one of the group does), or 30 miles away (which another does).

(It's worth highlighting that UK suburbia is very different to US suburbia)
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-17 10:38:18+00:00
That's why I'm not super optimistic. Even pre-AI and tech slump there were talks about how hard it may be to replace the old guard maintaining these open source initiatives. Now...

>Blaming AI is blaming the wrong problem. AI is a a tool like a spreadsheet. Project owners should instead be working ways to filter out careless code more efficiently.

When care leaves, the entire commons starts to fall apart. New talent doesn't come in. Old talent won't put up with it and retire out of the scene. They already have so much work to do, needing to add in non-development work to make better spam filters may very well be the final stray.

Even when the careless leave, it won't bring back the talent lost. Directing the blame onto the sure won't do that.