MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway2562 | 2025-11-25 16:19:01+00:00
Good grief. This is what 20 years of language policing has wrought. People who are nervous (hiding behind ‘skeptical’) about words like ‘advanced’ when, by any number of dimensions, human cognition is uncontroversially superior, more advanced, more fluid, more deep, more adaptive, more various (pick one, nervous people) to that of spiders or cows.

Or is that all just a ‘myth?’
by dmoy | 2025-11-25 16:19:11+00:00
I wish that the remake focused on the new bureaucracy stuff (or even new technical stuff), instead of being a near 1-for-1 rehash of the old one. E.g. it's not like anyone is being recommended to serve out of a bigtable for the last decade or whatever. But it's also not like the replacement(s) are problem-free when it comes to quota, etc.
by nofunsir | 2025-11-25 16:19:25+00:00
Unit tests does not make Software Engineering. That's simply part of the development phase, which should be the smallest phase out of all the phases involved in REAL Software Engineering, which is rarely even done these days, outside of DO-178 (et al) monotony. The entire private-to-public industry has even polluted upper management in defense software engineering into accepting SCRUM as somehow more desirable than the ability to effectively plan your requirements and execute without deviation. Yes it's possible, and yes it's even plausible. SWE laziness turns Engineers into developers. Running some auto-documentation script or a generic non-official block diagram is not the same as a Civil PE creating blueprints for a house, let alone a mile long bridge or skyscraper.
by billy99k | 2025-11-25 16:19:26+00:00
I just don't think someone that sees them as patriarchal and violent will ever see their achievements as amazing. They will most likely have the belief that their achievements were due to stealing it from another culture or on the backs of slaves (and the slaves were actually responsible for the amazing achievements).

It's putting a leftists lens on a historical culture. I get bored with these takes pretty quickly because of the obvious bias which leads to complete inaccuracy.
by tonatman | 2025-11-25 16:19:41+00:00
I just built a virtually unlimited could storage based on GitHub.

How it works: - Sign up with GitHub App automatically create a private repo as hashed file containers and blobs (5GB per repo) that are tracked in a database table. - Upload, save and preview files - App automatically creates additional storage (new repos) that are indexed together

Limits: - 10mb uploads at the moment. Planning of chucking files on serverside to allow larger uploads (

Next steps: - Probably a more intuitive UI and working on larger uploads
by instig007 | 2025-11-25 16:19:59+00:00
> std::variant and std::optional are not nearly as ergonomic or safe to use as rust equivalents.

> but I also use rust daily and you cannot really make a straight faced argument that c++ is catching up.

I mostly use std::ranges, lambdas, and concepts, and I see them catching up, as an evolutionary process rather than a fixed implementation in the current standard. Nowadays I can do familiar folds and parallel traversals that I couldn't do in the past without assuming third-party libraries. My optionals are empty vectors: it suits my algorithms and interfaces a lot, and I never liked `Maybe a` anyways (`Either errorOrDefault a` is so much better). I also use Haskell a lot, and I'm used to the idea that outside of my functional garden the industry's support for unions is hardly different to the support of 2-tuples of (<label>, <T>), so I don't mind the current state of std::variant either.
by nixpulvis | 2025-11-25 16:20:16+00:00
Aside from async/await which I agree is somewhat janky syntaxtically, I'm curious what you consider to be janky. I think Rust is overall pretty nice to read and write. Patterns show up where you want them, type inference is somewhat limited but still useful. Literals are readily available. UFCS is really elegant. I could go on.

Ironically, I find Python syntax frustrating. Imports and list comprehensions read half backwards, variable bindings escape scope, dunder functions, doc comments inside the function, etc.
by aallaall | 2025-11-25 16:20:38+00:00
There’s syntax that is objectively easier to both read and write, and there’s syntax that is both harder to read and write. For a majority.

In general, using english words consisting of a-z is easier to read. Using regex-like mojibake is harder.

For an concrete example in rust, using pipes in lambdas, instead of an arrow, is aweful.
Ask HN: Who Is Looking for a Consultant?
by dontoni | 2025-11-25 16:20:39+00:00
Every month or so there's a thread about "Who's hiring?", which is focused on hiring people both remotely or in town.

In this thread, we're going to focus on consultancy services: that is, agencies or freelancers who wanna offer their skills and earn by project, where past customers are more important than CV.
by 9dev | 2025-11-25 16:20:53+00:00
Hey Randall, in case you read this… like many here, I've been following xkcd for a long, long time, and invariably, through the comics, the story of you and your wife. I don't know how you manage to convey so much through stick figure comics, but the raw emotion of the milestone comics makes me cry every time, both out of happiness for the two of you, the suffering in this world, and the beauty and madness and wonder of being alive. It really strikes home. I wish you all the best in the world, and many years together still. Thanks for everything.
by aystatic | 2025-11-25 16:21:17+00:00
> Runtime borrow checking: RefCell<T> and Rc<T>. Can give other examples, but admittedly they need `unsafe` blocks.

Where are the “subtle linguistic distinctions”? These types do two completely different things. And neither are even capable of being used in a multithreaded context due to `!Sync` (and `!Send` for Rc and refguards)
by jandrese | 2025-11-25 16:21:32+00:00
While it kinda flies under the radar, most modern C projects do have a kind of package management solution in the form of pkg-config. Instead of the wild west of downloading and installing every dependency and figuring out how to integrate it properly with the OS and your project you can add a bit of syntactic sugar to your Makefile and have that mostly handled for you, save for the part where you will need to use your platform's native package manager to install the dependencies first. On a modern system using a package on a C project just requires a Makefile that looks something like this:

CC=clang MODULES=glib-2.0 atk CFLAGS=-g -Wall -pedantic --std=c17 `pkg-config --cflags $(MODULES)` LDLIBS=`pkg-config --libs $(MODULES)` ALL: myapp myapp: myapp.c utils.c io.c
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-11-25 16:21:58+00:00
I definitely felt older back in my early thirties, but I feel like I got younger now in my mid 40s. I think it's because my kid is in college and doesn't need me as much as they used to. Plus, I'm debt free and make enough money to not worry about the cost of going out.

In my late 20s/early 30s I was under water on my house, not getting paid enough, and had a small child. It was clear that I had to step up and "be a man." Which, I intuitively think had a bigger effect on me than simply getting older.
by hobofan | 2025-11-25 16:22:10+00:00
As someone building another competitor in the field, I'll relay some reasons why some of our customers ruled out OpenWebUI in their decision-making process:

- Instability when self-hosting

- Hard to get in touch with sales when looking for SLA-based contracts

- Cluttered product; Multiple concepts seemingly serving the same purpose (e.g. function calling vs. MCP); Most pre-MCP tools suffer from this

- Trouble integrating it with OIDC

- Bad docs that are mostly LLM generated
by franktankbank | 2025-11-25 16:22:13+00:00
> Phoenix project executives believed they could deliver a modernized payment system, customizing PeopleSoft’s off-the-shelf payroll package to follow 80,000 pay rules spanning 105 collective agreements with federal public-service unions.

Somehow I come away skeptical of the inevitable conclusion that Phoenix was doomed to fail and instead that perhaps they were hamstrung by architecture constraints dictated by assholes.
by coldpie | 2025-11-25 16:22:45+00:00
> One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is that even if the start menu was ugly and blocked the entire screen, you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app. This made it feel quite fast.

Decent operating systems support this, and have for decades. macOS has the spotlight search (cmd-space), and most Linux DEs have some form of it too (eg XFCE's appfinder).
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-11-25 16:22:49+00:00
For me, it immediately made me think of Psycho-Pass.

It’s a cyberpunk anime where society uses a system called the Sibyl System to constantly scan people’s mental states and “crime potential” (their Psycho-Pass).

People can be arrested before they’ve done anything - just because the system picked up certain signals from them.

Very, very interesting idea
by superkuh | 2025-11-25 16:23:08+00:00
Or the parents. I wasn't aware the corporations were responsible for the raising of children.

That said, I'm with you on reducing the abstraction of liability that is the purpose of corporations. I just don't think parents not parenting is the reason to do it. I also don't really think parents should be thrown in prison and families destroyed. The use of violent force in this situation, against the CEOs or the parents, is entirely uncalled for and does more real damage than the "problem".
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-25 16:23:32+00:00
> Languages like Rust include these settings in symbol names as a hash to prevent these kinds of issues by design.

Historically, C++ compilers' name mangling scheme for symbols did precisely the same thing. The 2000-2008 period for gcc was particularly painful since the compiler developers really used it very frequently, to "prevent these kinds of issues by design". The only reason most C++ developers don't think about this much any more is that most C++ compilers haven't needed to change their demangling algorithm for a decade or more.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-11-25 16:23:53+00:00
Yup, and with an equal amount of mindblowing-units-of-money spent, infrastructure projects all around me are still failing as well, or at least being modified (read: downsized), delayed and/or budget-inflated beyond recognition.

So, what's the point here, exactly? "Only licensed engineers as codified by (local!) law are allowed to do projects?" Nah, can't be it, their track record still has too many failures, sometimes even spectacularly explosive and/or implosive ones.

"Any public project should only follow Best Practices"? Sure... "And only make The People feel good"... Incoherent!

Ehhm, so, yeah, maybe things are just complicated, and we should focus more on the amount of effort we're prepared to put in, the competency (c.q. pay grade) of the staff we're willing to assign, and exactly how long we're willing to wait prior to conceding defeat?
by exasperaited | 2025-11-25 16:24:40+00:00
The other day the varying meaning of "lolly" came up in a discussion. In the UK, when it's not a slang term for money, a "lolly" is either a sticky sweet (candy) on a stick, or a frozen treat on a stick. From "lollipop" and then a shortening of "ice lolly".

In Australia, a "lolly" is more or less any non-chocolate-based sweet (candy).

British people find this confusing in Australia, but this is a great example of a word whose meaning was refined in the UK long after we started transporting people to Australia. Before that, a "lollipop" was simply a boiled treacle sweet that might or might not have been on a stick; some time after transportation started, as the industrialised confectionary industry really kicked off, the British English meaning of the word slowly congealed around the stick, and the Australian meaning did not.
Show HN: Smart GitHub Contribution Tracker – Fair analysis beyond line counts
by KylieM | 2025-11-25 16:24:46+00:00
GitHub’s built-in analytics are misleading. They treat all lines equally, ignore work type differences, and are easy to game.

I created a free Google Sheets tool that provides fair, nuanced evaluation of contributions.

The problem it solves:

GitHub: “Developer A has 1,913 additions” → appears to be top contributor

This tool: “Developer A: 1,810 pts (40% features, 32% bug fixes, 10% testing)” → shows actual work composition and value

Smart features: • Automatically excludes starter code and library imports • Skips merge commits (no credit for just combining branches) • Minimum line thresholds prevent gaming • Tracks net changes (editing same lines repeatedly doesn’t inflate score) • Uses GitHub username to prevent duplicate entries

Use cases: CS course grading, team analytics, recognizing diverse contribution types beyond just code

Free, open source, runs entirely in Google Sheets (no installation).

https://github.com/kyliemckinleydemo/github-contribution-tra...
by ls-a | 2025-11-25 16:24:52+00:00
There are other unpopular opinions

1. It is difficult to believe that the deadly radioactivity was just blown away. Where was it blown to? Upwards to space? 2. Then perhaps a larger amount of TNT 3. Unfortunately USA has a long list of questionable history (moon landing, 911, to name a few) 4. Cancers could be from the chemical weapons used 5. Fire bombing and carpet bombing could explain what happed in Japan 6. Again, Hollywood, currency backed by Gold fakery, list goes on.
by trzy | 2025-11-25 16:25:03+00:00
I think they should chuck the STL and start over. I left C++ for a while and spent a lot of time in C# and Swift. Going back to C++ is painful because the interfaces feel very non-uniform and cumbersome.

I also think that named parameters would go a long way toward improving the language.

Lastly, explore some way to make possible a breaking change with "old C++".
by waerhert | 2025-11-25 16:25:22+00:00
I see, this sheds some new light on your initial concerns. I'm aware an attacker can keep pretending to be inside an environment once they've seen it. I wasn't accounting for a scenario where an attacker has a huge database for queries like coords -> list of wifi networks. I was under the assumption services like Wigle only provided the reverse lookup (wifi -> coords). Indeed an attacker could potentially reverse the LSH tags if it hashed the wifi environment within very small geofences. It's bit of a needle & haystack problem but not an impossible one with enough resources. I wouldn't say it's a perfect system and I don't mind it falling apart under scrutiny, I just found it an interesting idea so I really appreciate you thinking along here.

Edit: Maybe some preshared group hash (kinda beats the point), or combining multiple modalities (eg bluetooth, shared interests) or some kind of proof of work token could help mitigate some of these issues. I guess anything to reduce the time to attack helps in this case? Or anything that really pins down environment + time, like what smath described in his comment. In essence, the core idea of minhash + lsh works and it doesn't limit you to just wifi networks. The key is being able to grab a fingerprint that is unique enough and different enough each epoch. Wifi networks are just easy enough to grab vs something more low level like an APs beacon timing interval jitter or something.
by runjake | 2025-11-25 16:25:24+00:00
Not yet, but I'm not adverse to it. I've long long been interested in generative music, popularized by Brian Eno. I consider AI music the next evolution of that.

I do get the anti sentiment, though. Music means something different to everyone. And for many, that's human connection.

I've also been ruminating on this point for a long time (primarily on the use of movie effects, before LLMs!) where if anything is possible, then what's the point?

I feel like we'll hit this point with AI generated media and there'll be a bit of a backlash where the majority of people move back to authentic, human-generated art and media.
by powerclue | 2025-11-25 16:25:36+00:00
Seems like you moved the goalposts pretty far... Consumers using Linux has shot up pretty dramatically this year, at least in my social circles. I count at least a dozen, non technical friends who decided to drop windows. That number has been zero a year for decades.

Game devs working in Linux is always a lagging indicator. Once there's a market share, they'll go there. Once it's the preferred os for people, you'll be able to develop on it. Games is already an incredibly risky market sector.

Instead, I encourage you to look at blender. It's gone through a "cute hobbyist/prosumer tool" phase and is now in the mega million dollar movies and games use it as their primary tool. Desktop Linux is on a similar curve thanks to Valve. If enough people start using it at home, industry will flip over.
by nananana9 | 2025-11-25 16:25:54+00:00
On my very rasonably spec'd laptop it often takes 20 seconds for the snipping tool selection to pop up. Video recording is very nice though, definitely my favorite feature.

New Notepad had a broken typematic that took them 2 years to fix, but they added Copilot at the same patch. Resizing its window still rapidly still flickers and can max the CPU.

If you're using labels in the taskbar the buttons aren't fixed width, they resize to fit the window title - except that until recently they didnt, so if you cd from C:\ to a longer path you got the label "C...". That one is fixed, but not the one where I switch desktops with Ctrl+Alt+arrows and the entries have no icons.

If you have a folder with lots of audio files, sometimes explorer.exe will hang for 30 seconds while it dutifully extracts artist metadata (no way to disable). Possibly an old issue, but I've never hit it before.

Search is even worse than before, I have "alacrity.exe" both in PATH and as a shortcut on desktop, but when I type "alacr" I get a web suggestion until I fully type it out. "Visual..." toggles between VSCode and fat visual studio on every keypress.

I can't express my opinion on the Task Manager changes without using language inapropriate for this forum.

Those are my issues off the top of my head, if I record every single broken thing I see for a week this list would be way longer.

That's just the stuff that doesn't work, there's a similarly long list of things that work but are evil.
by jarlen | 2025-11-25 16:25:54+00:00
Hey HN, I’m Eskil. I’m an ex-Google engineer (previously L4).

I built AlgoVoice because I failed my own Google interviews twice before finally getting in.

The Problem: Platforms like LeetCode are great for algorithm logic, but they don't simulate the actual interview environment. On LeetCode, problems are perfectly defined, and "ugly" code passes as long as it hits the time complexity.

In real interviews (especially at FAANG), you fail if you jump straight into coding without clarifying requirements or handling ambiguity. You also get penalized for writing unmaintainable "competitive programming" style code (e.g., bad variable names, no helper functions).

The Solution: AlgoVoice is a voice-first interviewer. It gives you a problem with intentional ambiguity, coaches you through the interview, writes feedback and suggests what you should focus on next in your interview preparation.

We are currently in public beta.

Disclaimer: Since we are fine-tuning the latency and feedback models, my co-founder and I are personally monitoring sessions. You might occasionally get a "calibration session" where one of us (ex-Google interviewers) steps in to conduct the interview manually. We do this to ensure that even if the AI hallucinates, you still get good value of interview coaching for the $39 beta price.

The Ask: We are looking for engineers prepping for L3-L4 roles to try it out. The price is $39 (vs $179 for human-led interviews), and the feedback is based on the evaluation criteria used at Big Tech companies.

Link: https://www.algo-voice.dev/

Happy to answer questions about the tech stack or the Google interview process!
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-25 16:26:13+00:00
I don’t know about that. My great grandmas and grandmas didn’t have lots of kids for the labor, they had them because they didn’t have a way to not have them. The grandpas might have though.

Coincidentally, my aunts did not have to have more than 2, and almost every single one had 2 kids.
by steveklabnik | 2025-11-25 16:26:40+00:00
Rust's pipes in lambdas come from Ruby, a language that's often regarded as having beautiful syntax.

Rust is objectively not mojibake. The equivalent here would be like using a-z, as Rust's syntax is borrowed from other languages in wide use, not anything particularly esoteric. (Unless you could OCaml as esoteric, which I do believe is somewhat arguable but that's only one thing, the argument still holds for the vast majority of the language.)
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-25 16:26:50+00:00
R is the most haphazard programming environment I've ever used. It feels like an agglomeration of hundreds of different people's shell aliases and scripting one-liners.

I'll grant my only exposure has been a two- or three-day "Intro to R" class but I ran screaming from that experience and have never touched it again.

It maybe worked against me that I am a programmer, not a statistician or researcher.
by JohnMakin | 2025-11-25 16:26:57+00:00
> "Why worry about something that isn’t going to happen?”

Lots to break down in this article other than this initial quotation, but I find a lot of parallels in failing software projects, this attitude, and my recent hyper-fixation (seems to spark up again every few years), the sinking of the Titanic.

It was a combination of failures like this. Why was the captain going full speed ahead into a known ice field? Well, the boat can't sink and there (may have been) organizational pressure to arrive at a certain time in new york (aka, imaginary deadline must be met). Why wasn't there enough life jackets and boats for crew and passengers? Well, the boat can't sink anyway, why worry about something that isn't going to happen? Why train crew on how to deploy the life rafts and emergency procedures properly? Same reason. Why didn't the SS Californian rescue the ship? Well, the 3rd party Titanic telegraph operators had immense pressure to send telegrams to NY, and the chatter about the ice field got on their nerves and they mostly ignored it (misaligned priorities). If even a little caution and forward thinking was used, the death toll would have been drastically lower if not nearly nonexistent. It took 2 hours to sink, which is plenty of time to evacuate a boat of that size.

Same with software projects - they often fail over a period of multiple years and if you go back and look at how they went wrong, there often are numerous points and decisions made that could have reversed course, yet, often the opposite happens - management digs in even more. Project timelines are optimistic to the point of delusion and don't build in failure/setbacks into schedules or roadmaps at all. I've had to rescue one of these projects several years ago and it took a toll on me I'm pretty sure I carry to this day, I'm wildly cynical of "project management" as it relates to IT/devops.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-25 16:27:12+00:00
According to the widely circulated, though possibly apocryphal, story, Johnson was running for office in Texas and instructed an aide to start a rumor that his opponent engaged in carnal relations with pigs. When the aide protested that the claim was untrue, Johnson reportedly replied: "I know it's not true, but I want to make the sonofabitch deny it".