MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-12-09 13:07:30+00:00
Its lies all the way up the chain and its just part of the game.

The hiring manager is lying to you

Your boss is lying to you

The CEO is lying to you

All everyone cares about is money 99% of the time. Anything else is just a lie. We are not family, and most people give a rats ass about any companies "goal". We just want a paycheck and most of us want a bigger paycheck than last time all the way up the chain.
by blisstonia | 2025-12-09 13:07:36+00:00
This is a recurring theme. Someone comes to the realisation that the 'endless growth' model is an unfair way to organise civilisation.

It's heartwarming to see so many people come to the realisation that endless consumption/growth/production makes us miserable.

The issue is that we all exist under capitalism, unfortunately until it's gone, we're forced to live within it.
by abanana | 2025-12-09 13:08:43+00:00
Indeed, the title is the usual nonsense. Sales within a niche like this will always fluctuate. When someone spots a slight increase, they jump at the chance to wheel out this kind of headline. The article itself doesn't give hard numbers, just says UK sales "reached their highest level since 2003" - meaningless since cassette sales had died long before then. It links to an article that says there were "195,000 units sold last year" - so, next to nothing.

I recall one point around 10-15 years ago, websites were simultaneously proclaiming the death of CDs because sales for the year had just dropped below 100 million, and the revival of vinyl because sales were approaching 1 million in the same timespan. Of course, the takeaway for many young people was that vinyl was outselling CDs.

I'm pretty sure these articles are planted by PR firms working for the music publishers they talk about. There are plenty of people happy to be told what's currently "cool" and they'll obediently go out and buy them.
by r_lee | 2025-12-09 13:08:52+00:00
These posts like the one OP made is why I'm losing my mind.

Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch? At this point while I'm not thrilled about the idea of just "vibe coding" all the time, I'm fine with facing reality.

But I keep having the same experience as you, or rather leaning more on that supercharged Google/SO replacement

or just a "can you quickly make this boring func here that does xyz" "also add this" or for bash scripts etc.

And that's only when I've done most of the plumbing myself.
by brushfoot | 2025-12-09 13:09:00+00:00
My advice to anyone who wants to work at a place like this but who doesn't have connections is to try to find a good recruiting agency. An agency put me in a business like this, and the business hired me after 6 months.

It was one of the best places I've worked. People were kind, had families, and went home after their 40 hours. I stayed for 6 years before deciding to strike out on my own.
by komali2 | 2025-12-09 13:09:13+00:00
I've been getting more and more into retro gaming lately, and something that really made it click for me is leveraging shaders (or overlays) to simulate period-accurate displays. For a Sega Saturn, that'd be some kind of CRT. The art direction in these games are designed to take advantage of the quirks of the CRT, and often look significantly better on a CRT. Noodle just did a decent video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI

I strongly recommend anyone getting into retro gaming, try some CRT shaders (or lcd ones for portables)!
by jit_hacker | 2025-12-09 13:09:20+00:00
I see people grow in two directions. Some grow upward, becoming manager, director, VP, etc. Others grow outward, branching into new technologies and disciplines, while remaining an IC.

Regardless of which direction you grow, I think give. enough time, the quality of your work will speak for itself.

I've watched too many people try to run the rat race of moving up the later. Staying at a job/role for only 18 months just to hop to the next thing. They lack depth in their area and eventually bottom out completely.
by Tade0 | 2025-12-09 13:09:23+00:00
The author will be embarrassed to recall this 10 years from now.

Anyway, to me it seems that the best strategy is to gather 2-3 years of experience and only then start job hunting for real. Yes, the current situation sucks, but so does the job market. I wouldn't have advised hopping after just a year even back in the ZIRP days, much less nowadays.

Also bold move to publish such a post and publicly advertise who one is working for. That's going to result in snarky comments about yachts from whoever is up there at the very least.
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 13:09:28+00:00
> It has no values; […] Grok is imprinted with the "values" of the people who develop it.

It's perfectly cromulent to describe the tendencies any given model has been trained to display and to avoid as its "values", even if what's going on inside is nothing like what goes on inside us.

Although, what even is going on inside us that gives us values? How complex is the bit of my brain that makes me value the life of the crow in the garden outside as I type this? Why do I lack interest in spectator sports that is so common in the general population? Why are some people's values The Ten Commandments and others the Wiccan Rede?
by m4rtink | 2025-12-09 13:09:29+00:00
Some Japanese restaurants are super tiny & ordering machines make it easier to use the space more efficiently. In some cases the machine is installed from the outside - you select what you want and get a ticket or two. If you get two then you are IIRc supposed to give one to the staff & they will start processing your order (eg. the machine is not always connected to a terminal inside).

Doing it like this you save space inside, don't have to handle dirty cash (less of an issue with electronic payments) and can concentrate on cooking without interruptions.
by german_dong | 2025-12-09 13:09:38+00:00
Why do we continue to give increased weight to a guy whose computer science knowledge ends in 1980? Dude became an icon by preaching a rationalization to an all-too-receptive generation of cash poor college students: that Microsoft should work pro bono. Odd that he didn't extrapolate that principle to other "secret sauce" enterprises like Coca Cola or KFC.
by ineedasername | 2025-12-09 13:10:12+00:00
Absolutely. Your model selection has limits of course: best practice for some types of replicable research would be to to use unquantized models, but that still leaves room for smaller Gemma and Llama models.

I’m on a 4080 for a lot of work and it gets well over 50 tokens per second on inference for pretty much anything that fits in VRAM. It’s comparable to a 3090 in compute, the 3090 has 50% more vram, the 4080 has better chip-level support for certain primitives, but that actually matters slightly less using unquantized models, making the 3090 a great choice. The 4080 is better if you want more throuput on inference and use certain common quantize levels.

Training LoRa and fine tunes is highly doable. Yesterday’s project for me, as an example, was training trigger functionality into a single token unused in the vocabulary. Under 100 training examples in the data set, 10 to 50 epochs, extremely usable “magic token” results in under a few minutes at most. This is just an example.

If you look at the wealth of daily entries on arxiv in cs.ai many are using established smaller models with understood characteristics, which makes it easier to understand the result of anything you might do both in your research and in others’ being able to put your results in context.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-09 13:10:22+00:00
Widespread heroin addiction might cut military spending but would not be cheaper for health services.

Sure, in its clean form it won't kill you quickly, but it is a horrendously addictive depressant with significant medium-term and severe long-term neurological and physiological effects that would in themselves cause poverty through loss of work even if it was as cheap to buy as it is to produce.

It should remain a decriminalised controlled substance and every effort should be spent trying to stop people ever starting to take it — the Portuguese strategy. Not least because if it's cheap and freely available, many, many people will overdose on it.
Show HN: Lea – A pipe-oriented functional language with reversible functions
by mcclowes | 2025-12-09 13:10:45+00:00
Lea is a functional programming language where data flows left-to-right through pipes. I built it (heavily leveraging Claude, full disclosure) to explore what happens when you make pipelines first-class citizens with their own algebra.

let numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

numbers /> filter((x) -> x > 2) /> map((x) -> x * x) /> reduce(0, (acc, x) -> acc + x) /> print -- 50

A few features I like: - The readability of the syntax - Pipeline algebra – Pipelines are values you can inspect and manipulate: - Reversible functions – Define forward and reverse transformations together: - Reactive pipelines – Automatically recompute when source data changes: - Compose pipelines - Decorators for cross-cutting concerns - VSCode extension with syntax highlighting

Try it out: git clone https://github.com/mcclowes/lea.git cd lea && npm install npm run repl

It's just a pet project, but I'd love feedback on the language design, especially around the readability, direction of type enforcement, reversible functions and pipeline algebra. Are there other operations that would make sense for pipelines as a data type?
by swiftcoder | 2025-12-09 13:10:46+00:00
> Previously, you'd have a small team of people working on setting up CI/CD... Nearly all of this can be done in a few hours with an agentic coding CLI

I've had a couple of contracts now, where I get to fix everything for teams who vibe-coded their infrastructure. I'm not saying it isn't a speed-up for teams who already have a wealth of infra experience - but it's not a substitute for the years of infra experience such a team already has.
by jnd-cz | 2025-12-09 13:10:55+00:00
Yeah, one may not use it but it's hard to ignore when Office apps suggest you save the document to the cloud as a default. I do avoid it and don't really need any collaboration but I understand that I'm minority. On my home workstation (which is mainly used for video editing) I have only local account so I don't get sucked into more MS services. But at this point you have to actively try to get around the default setup with online account and cloud apps, so it's indeed hard to ignore.
by sergioisidoro | 2025-12-09 13:11:32+00:00
> If rent wasn't an issue I'd be working full-time on open-source and spend my spare time cycling.

I feel like this is a really detached piece on the realities of work and capitalism. Did a decade of prosperity in software industry made people forget what work is?

In capitalism (I mean in a job) you are paid to build what others want you to build. You are selling your time and effort. Either that or you build your own thing and monetize it. If "rent wasn't an issue" most people would paint, dance make art, explore, play, create. But for most people, rent, food and healthcare are the issue...
by agotterer | 2025-12-09 13:12:10+00:00
My interpretation was slightly different than yours. I read it as if they have no issue going to work and being paid to be a developer. However, they didn’t want to feel like they needed to constantly be leveling up and working towards the next rung on the ladder. Many companies have written or unwritten rules about leveling up or being pushed out and they screen for people hungry to grow. The author doesn’t seem interested in that trajectory.

I suppose in other industries this isn’t always expected. For example, you can easily be a mid-level accountant for your entire career without the company or industry expecting you to be on track to be their next CFO.

Maybe the author should be looking at medium/big non-tech companies that have been around a long time, have aging codebases, and aren’t innovating in the same way as as big tech or startup. I suspect they might find developers who have been there for many years and are pretty complacent.
by Y_Y | 2025-12-09 13:13:04+00:00
My category theory is pretty rusty, but I'm not following the section on hom-sets. In particular:

Hom(OrderService, InventoryService) = { checkAvailability: Order → Availability, reserveItems: Order → Reservation, releaseReservation: ReservationId → Unit, decrementStock: Order → Unit }

doesn't make sense to me as a hom-set between objects in our category of services, nor as a hom-functor considering one of {OrderService,InventoryService} to be a category and the other and object or morphism within the category.

In the first case all the morphisms in the hom-set should have the same type, and the second doesn't make sense semantically.

Hence it should be the hom-bifunctor considering both as categories, but then we should get natural tranformations in the answer.

I assume there's some notational abuse going on that I'm not picking up on. Either way it would be nice if someone more adept could clarify.
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 13:13:05+00:00
I believe we have slightly more than that, though I would not expect whatever evolution has given us to be cleanly expressible in terms that fit neatly into listicles.

For example, evolution doesn't "want" incest, so makes (most) people disgusted by it, but the implementation in our biology isn't actually smart enough to do that based on DNA, therefore we get this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect
Show HN: I built an AI coding agent that ships real apps fast
by unfavalen | 2025-12-09 13:13:15+00:00
I kept running into the same issue whenever starting a new project: the setup phase consumed more time than the actual feature work. Preparing boilerplate, restructuring directories, performing refactors, resolving dependency conflicts, and wiring framework logic consistently took hours before I could write meaningful code. Even with modern tooling, the early-stage workload was nearly identical across projects.

To remove that bottleneck, I built Bleenk, an AI coding agent that operates directly on real repositories. Instead of generating isolated snippets, it performs multi-step modifications across the codebase. It creates branches, edits files, restructures modules, rewrites components, and prepares pull requests. The agent is designed to understand the full repository context, not just the last prompt.

Bleenk uses an isolated Vercel Sandbox environment to execute and validate generated code, ensuring changes run correctly before they ever reach a PR. It also includes Bleenk-Mini, a model optimized for repository-level reasoning, multi-file coordination, and incremental refactoring.

The result is that I can ship full-stack application features in minutes instead of hours. In internal use, tasks that previously required three to five hours of manual engineering now complete in under fifteen minutes with consistent diffs and minimal manual cleanup.

I am interested in technical feedback: which repository-level operations do you think an automated agent should prioritize, and what guardrails or review patterns are most important for safe code modification?
by trashb | 2025-12-09 13:13:16+00:00
Spreadsheets are powerful, but often abused. They are great for economics but horrible for logic.

Most medium to large complex spreadsheets are better implemented in a high level programming language.

Spreadsheets seem useful for people that are scared of programming syntax but quickly become so much less maintainable and janky that I believe its almost always easier to just start with learning to program already.

Especially excel is 100% jank.
by baobun | 2025-12-09 13:13:26+00:00
> it’s hard or impossible to define hash functions that map approximately equal keys to identical hash values. Why? Let’s take a look at what happens with the common epsilon comparison, for example: two numbers a, b are considered equal if |a – b| < ε. With this definition of equality all numbers between -ε/2; and ε/2 are considered equal and therefore must have the same hash value h. But the numbers between 0 and ε are also equal to each other, so their hash value must be h as well.

> If we continue in this manner we see that all all numbers must have the same hash value h regardless of the choice of ε. The idea of approximate comparison is unfortunately hard to reconcile with the non-approximate nature of hash functions.

I think there is at least one non-sequitur in there? The only thing you prove is that directly modeling hash keys on top of that notion of equality is not useful / the model is weak. I don't think equality is typically associative with epsilon comparison.

(The license of this comment forbids it from being used as support in favor of floats as hash keys)
by beeforpork | 2025-12-09 13:14:02+00:00
> ... Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text ...

Then they are wrong. And are bad UI designers following folklore instead of sound ergonomy.

I absolutely hate icons, and parsing and remembering them causes great cognitive load on me. Also, icons like to change with each revision of the apps, with styles etc., and are not uniform across apps. This makes them completely useless to me. Maybe I can cope with an '[X]' to close a window, but that's about it. Even very common functions like 'Save' or 'Add' usually have completely arbitrary and confusing icons. 'Add' is not a long text. It works. I need text. Without any icons. I want to switch icons off so that the text can have maximum space to be reasonably large to be seen and read easily.

People are different is what UI designers should know instead.
by wentick | 2025-12-09 13:14:20+00:00
The transgenderist stance is that once a man announces he is a woman, then he was always a woman and always will be. Unless he detransitions of course. Then he was always a man and always will be. Same for when a woman declares that she is a man.

So a man who builds his entire career as a man, with all the privilege that brings, as Wilson did, can identify as a woman and these prior achievements now all become that of a woman. Even if this stretches plausibility, what with the sexism of the industry at the time. He can even receive accolades reserved for women, as if he had to work ten times as hard to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field.

This rewriting of history is also why, for example, film credits listing Ellen Page have been retrospectively updated to Elliot Page even though there was no Elliot Page at the time of filming.
by inesranzo | 2025-12-09 13:14:37+00:00
> Not really understanding the negativity here. We know for a fact that most of the people that master intellectual problems do so via pattern recognition, not by reasoning.

> The lifetime membership + launch discount was a good marketing bait I felt for.

The negativity here with me is because it feels like clickbait and like a scammy ad to manipulate me into purchasing.

It is almost lying. I find it unethical and I don't think there are 17 lifetime access spots, it's just artificial hype that doesn't make sense to me.

Marketing (at least like this) is basically lying.
by ajuc | 2025-12-09 13:14:47+00:00
The motivation is irrelevant TBH, what matters is the action.

Maybe Trump just wants USA to be "Russia but Better". Maybe he's imagining himself saving the world from "leftism" or whatever. Maybe he just wants money. Maybe he's being blackmailed.

Doesn't matter. What matters is that he's making the world a much worse place.

It's the same as it was with Putin. He told everybody loudly that The West is the enemy. People assumed he's doing it for internal politics reasons. There's no point guessing people's motivations, just listen to them, and when they tell you you are their enemy - believe them.
by writebetterc | 2025-12-09 13:15:20+00:00
void* is basically used for ad-hoc polymorphism in C, and it is a vital part of C programming.

void new_thread(void (*run)(void*), void* context);

^- This let's us pass arbitrary starting data to a new thread.

I don't know whether this counts as "very few use cases".

The Memory Ownership advice is maybe good, but why are you allocating in the copy routine if the caller is responsible for freeing it, anyway? This dependency on the global allocator creates an unnecessarily inflexible program design. I also don't get how the caller is supposed to know how to free the memory. What if the data structure is more complex, such as a binary tree?

It's preferable to have the caller allocate the memory.

void insert(BinTree *tree, int key, BinTreeNode *node);

^- this is preferable to the variant where it takes the value as the third parameter. Of course, an intrusive variant is probably the best.

If you need to allocate for your own needs, then allow the user to pass in an allocator pointer (I guessed on function pointer syntax):

struct allocator { void* (*new)(size_t size, size_t alignment); void (*free)(void* p, size_t size); void* context; }.*
by yakkomajuri | 2025-12-09 13:16:14+00:00
It's easy to have strong feelings about this post because, well, we all have to pay bills and often times aren't the biggest fans of the means (work) we have to do that. My immediate reaction, like many here, is to just go "well tough luck kid".

But I'd like to offer some sympathy. I certainly have grappled with thoughts like these and have also been guilty of posting a rant on HN at a moment when I've been down!

I do wonder if part of this is influenced by the AI craze that has companies substituting junior engineers for LLMs and how hard it is to get hired fresh out of university these days. I do feel for those who genuinely want to grow and become better engineers since it does seem like companies are betting less and less on developing young talent.

Then there's the whole philosophical discussion about work and meaning and everything. Thoughts around this are certainly very present in our minds during our 20s (P.S. I'm still in this decade of my life too). There are many alternative paths, but they often aren't for everyone. I know people who live with very little, and don't consider steady work a high priority at all. Many of them are happy, but most of us couldn't cope with the lifestyle. You then have the path of starting your own thing, but that path is usually more painful and terrible for your finances too.

It's all tradeoffs. It sucks, it hurts. And I'm sorry that the market is terrible right now for those starting out. Good luck.