MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lambdas | 2025-12-12 11:28:27+00:00
You can pick it up passively over time, and with your skills, if you were to actively engage then I suspect pick up the necessary very quickly, and the rest comes from experience.

I picked up Linux at 13, fortuitously just in time for the release of the Nokia 770 (later getting, and still owning the N900 too).

At that time, getting real dirty with the kernel, hardware, cross compiling etc was necessary, so 1) there were more resources 2) it was seen as mundane, busy work rather than mystical and difficult.

If I were to say how to learn the same things today, I’d probably say Gentoo is ideal - it’s insanely flexible in tinkering, has good resources on compiling the kernel and packages, and I’m a fan of crossdev for cross compiling.

Getting real dirty with hardware and electronics, the obvious answer would be one of the Raspberry Pi lineup, but if you’re very tenacious, patient and a touch unhinged, then I would actually say now’s the time to get in on RISC-V.

It’s still early days, so there’s lots of resources that have very thin abstractions between hardware <-> tooling <-> code. Devices are cheap and exciting. You’ll be on the same footing as most other people so you won’t feel like a dunce.

The cons are that a lot of RISC-V devices get shipped out with very little documentation (and sometimes only in Chinese), binary blobs making mainstream kernels difficult, and you’re learning at the same time, so you might feel you’re ice skating uphill.

Wrt to the bootloader and partition corruption; towards the twilight years of the life of the N900, when it became clear N900 had been abandoned and the N950 was still only available to select few, a bunch of smart people on the Maemo forums started reversing and writing open drivers (uboot bootloader, wifi, camera iirc), so they became pretty documented.
Ask HN: What is Fullstack Engineering?
by grandimam | 2025-12-12 11:29:34+00:00
I recently came across an argument related to this, and it made me rethink my own definition.

The way I define Fullstack is that it is not limited to frontend and backend work. It’s closer to the hardware-engineer argument: can one person actually build an entire computer? Maybe not every part from scratch but a capable engineer can assemble the pieces into a working system.

By that logic, a full-stack engineer is someone who can pull together everything needed to turn an idea into a product. I measure their skill by how fast and effectively they are able to deliver: design, engineering, requirements, and even a bit of SEO when the product calls for it.

Where I separate a full-stack engineer from a product engineer is in the focus.

A full-stack engineer focus is almost entirely technical - think optimizing page speed, bundle sizes, etc. A product engineer is maybe 70% technical, but adds extra 30% of domain thinking - think competitor analysis, customer empathy, and product sense. A product engineer is the kind of person you would actually put in front of customers.
by agumonkey | 2025-12-12 11:29:38+00:00
you may have a point, i'm fuzzy in my perception right now but there are non linear factor imo, here's how i see things

- a market needs a certain kind of product (feature set, complexity, performance)

- good engineer could apply skills to deliver that

- lazy engineers couldn't, but with llm they can, it gives them solutions without understanding much, which is irrelevant for them, they want to ship

- i myself don't enjoy having code spilled out for me, and the time savings from llm won't bring much more joy (unlike the lazy engineer who is happy)

- a llm might help me do more advanced things but the market might not care for it. say the average user wants a dashboard with a bunch of data points and a few actions. the llm answer will match that perfectly. I could ask the llm to produce a more complex dashboard with more customization, more feature.. but the user will not want it because it's beyond its needs

so yeah it's a matter of ratio, it seems that lazy devs will get a 10x improvement while a skilled one will only get 1.5 and might be squeezed out of the market
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-12 11:30:02+00:00
> paint-outs

Predates computers, they used to paint out wires and whatnot by hand and it usually looked just as good.

> Compositing

Predates computers. They've been doing it since forever with miniature overlays, matte paintings, chromakey, double exposures, and cutting up film negatives with exacto blades.

> color grading

Literal cancer which ruins movies every goddamn time. The fact that they shoot movies with this kind of manipulation in mind changes how they use lighting and makes everything flat with no shadows, no depth, everything now gets shot like a soap opera. This also applies to heavy use of compositing too. To make it cheaper to abuse compositing, mostly so the producers can "design by committee" the movie after all the filming is done, they've destroyed how they light and shoot scenes. Everything is close up on actors, blurred backgrounds, flat lighting, fast cuts to hide the lazy work. Cancer.

I'm talking about Fury Road too BTW. It's crap. Watch the original Mad Max, not Road Warrior, then watch Fury Road. The first is a real movie with heart and soul, the world it depicts feels real. The latter feels like a video game, except it somehow comes out looking even less inspired and creative than the actual mad max video game that came out at the same time.

But yeah, they made some real weird cars for the movie. That's fine I guess. The first movie didn't need weird cars, it had this thing called characters. Characters who felt like real people, not freaks from a comic book.
by intended | 2025-12-12 11:30:37+00:00
So lets run it through the rubric test -

What’s your level of expertise in this domain or subject? How did you use it? What were your results?

It’s basically gauging expertise vs usage to pin down the variance that seems endemic to LLM utility anecdotes/examples. For code examples I also ask which language was used, the submitters familiarity with the language, their seniority/experience and familiarity with the domain.
by rayiner | 2025-12-12 11:32:05+00:00
Most of his major policies have approval ratings above 50% https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/HHP... (page 23)

53% think he’s doing a better job than Biden (page 18)

His approval rating in his second term is tracking about the same or a bit higher than Obama’s at the same time: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/trump-obama-...
by saidinesh5 | 2025-12-12 11:32:15+00:00
Honestly, It is just a matter of starting somewhere. Anywhere. All these hobbies are a huge rabbit hole that seem to converge.

I have friends who started with porting Sailfish OS to their old Android phone and now they are designing their own PCBs for their home automation system. They custom built their own RC cars, 3D printed their own ergonomic keyboards, designed their holiday decorative lights etc..

I have seen a lot of people in my local FPV Drone Racing community, who started with building their own custom drone and then moved on to 3D printing their modifications, tweaking their firmware, building their custom lithium battery packs, designing their ergonomic keyboards, and now fiddling with their home automation software/hardware.

Also installing Arch Linux onto some random piece of hardware, regularly following Hackaday like blogs seems to help.. lol.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-12 11:32:41+00:00
If you watch some videos from Ukraine, you will see, that shotguns can hit them with much increased chances. So if possible without endangering civilians around the place where drones are sighted, I say get finally started, take the shotguns out and take out Russian resources. Just for the time of war make private drone flying without special permission and preflight registration illegal, then take down any drone that moves and is not registered to have a flight at the time. This also won't be giving away very critical military knowledge either.

One thing I don't know about shotguns is, how dangerous falling projectiles are. How much velocity they accumulate. That could be a real problem with this approach.
by _ache_ | 2025-12-12 11:33:56+00:00
Yeah... I come here to talk about that. Should have been

for i in range(0, 2**8, 2): print(" if (number == "+str(i)+")") print(" printf(\"even\\n\");") print(" if (number == "+str(i + 1)+")") print(" printf(\"odd\\n\");")

or

for i in range(0, 2**8, 2): print(f""" if (number == {i}) puts("even"); if (number == {i + 1}) puts("odd");""")
by wrxd | 2025-12-12 11:34:21+00:00
I wonder if this is going to push more and more services to be hidden from the public internet.

My personal services are only accessible from my own LAN or via a VPN. If I wanted to share it with a few friends I would use something like Tailscale and invite them to my tailnet. If the number of people grows I would put everything behind a login-wall.

This of course doesn't cover services I genuinely might want to be exposed to the public. In that case the fight with the bots is on, assuming I decide I want to bother at all
by phatfish | 2025-12-12 11:34:53+00:00
Dude, parents don't want their kids wading through porn and whatever social media throws at them before they are even teenagers.

Childless digital nomad privacy freaks are a minority, age gates are coming. I don't care that they will never be 100%, if it provides cover for parents to stop their kids consuming trash internet "culture" until they are more mature they are already a great benefit to socitey.
by asimpletune | 2025-12-12 11:35:16+00:00
So what? Everyone acts in to further their interests. NATO expands because it's in NATO's interest to do so. Russia says that this expansion is not in Russia's interest. Why only say the Russian part and leave out the NATO part?

Furthermore, if having an interest in something gives the right to use military power to achieve that interest then the argument applies to everyone.

The point about foreign bases in Canada or Mexico gets repeated a lot online, but what is the ultimate point? The USA would not like it, but it's also not a political reality. On the other hand a NATO build out IS a political reality.

So I think rather than focusing purely on what one country wishes it's better to analyze things in terms of what the political realities are and which is better.

In that sense NATO is meant to be a deterrence. Russia doesn't like that. If you ask yourself whose vision of the future is better then the answer is clear. A world of where rule of law is the norm and invasions are deterred is preferable. There has been tremendous peace and prosperity in the EU because of NATO and people have just gotten used to it. They have taken for granted the cost and sacrifice that this peace came from.

However, simply saying that Russia has an interest in not having NATO on their border is almost tautological. Of course they don't want that, but so what. Peace only works if it's enforceable.
by imtringued | 2025-12-12 11:36:14+00:00
You can do it even faster with the if statements:

#include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { if (argc < 2) { fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s <string>\n", argv[0]); return 1; } char *s = argv[1]; int i; /* find the end of the string */ for (i = 0; s[i] != '\0'; ++i) ; /* make sure the string wasn't empty */ if (i == 0) { fprintf(stderr, "Error: empty string\n"); return 1; } /* last character is at s[i - 1] */ char d = s[i - 1]; if (d == '0') printf("even\n"); if (d == '1') printf("odd\n"); if (d == '2') printf("even\n"); if (d == '3') printf("odd\n"); if (d == '4') printf("even\n"); if (d == '5') printf("odd\n"); if (d == '6') printf("even\n"); if (d == '7') printf("odd\n"); if (d == '8') printf("even\n"); if (d == '9') printf("odd\n"); return 0; }

gcc -std=c11 -Wall -Wextra -O2 -o check_digit check_digit.c

./check_digit 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
by ignoramous | 2025-12-12 11:36:39+00:00
Outsourcing your own job is quite a fraud business.

Recently my friend was approached by a Telugu broker stating that he would pay 10k for a part time job ... My friend agreed to a tech stack and he was connected with one of his US clients and he started sharing his screen and gave him his entire sprint's work. There are thousands of such [Non-resident Indians] especially from Andhra, Telangana going to USA not learning anything about industry, these people have no coding knowledge, can't even explain their work properly to [3rd parties]. They [earn] 6 digit USD [and pay] these brokers some 40-50K Rupees [$6000] every month and outsourcing it to a jobless Indian. Brokers eat away most of the money and pay the end person around 10k [$100]. The worst part, my friend said it would take around 40 hrs a month (2 hrs everyday) to complete this US client's sprint tasks (client works for a major [Multi-National Corp for] ~120k USD/year, while my friend gets 10k rupees/month [$100/mo].

https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/comments/1chm6g4/nr... / https://archive.vn/DbK9x
by exsomet | 2025-12-12 11:37:09+00:00
I’m certainly not an expert, but just based on my personal experiences, I think “character” is the distillation of a lot of different aspects of self, some of which are binary haves/don’t haves (“people listen when you speak”) and others that are more of a spectrum (a “willingness to speak up” is easier when the consequences are low).

That is to say, it’s really really hard to pinpoint exactly what makes up character and whether someone has it. So when we DO cross paths with those who clearly have character it’s all the more reason to network, communicate, and keep those people in our orbit, so that we might learn from them and maybe have a little bit of their character rub off on us.
by _rpxpx | 2025-12-12 11:38:18+00:00
There is nothing so wonderful that it cannot be ruined by turning it into a youtube channel... The really brilliant people I've met doing things like this always absolutely refused to mediafy their experience. Turning your adventure into a continuous TV show is great way to kill the adventure. We're now so used to everyone running their own shopping channel we don't even notice it. Read Thesiger's books for an account of real experience. The film I urge everyone to watch is Cronenberg's Videodrome - truly the film of our times.
by maccard | 2025-12-12 11:38:55+00:00
It's easy to apply todays standards. Titanfall was released 11 years ago, and ran on an Xbox 360, and a Core 2 Duo. MP3 was a patent encumbered format. There's a fun DF article [0] where they say:

> Titanfall accesses Microsoft's existing cloud network, with servers spooling up on demand. When there's no demand, those same servers will service Azure's existing customers. Client-side, Titanfall presents a dedicated server experience much like any other but from the developer and publisher perspective, the financials in launching an ambitious online game change radically.

Things changed _massively_ in games between 2014 and 2017 - we went from supporting borderline embedded level of platforms with enormous HW constraints, architecture differences, and running dedicated servers like the 90's, to basically supporting fixed spec PCs, and shipping always online titles running on the cloud.

[0] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-...
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-12 11:39:00+00:00
Ah, yes, exactly the pointless diversion I needed for my lunch break. For science: generating a C# switch statement for similar purposes took 7 minutes on similar-ish hardware, but the resulting 99.2GB file could not be opened or compiled ('Stream is too long'), which was slightly disappointing.

Optimization efforts included increasing the internal buffer size of the StreamWriter used to create the source code: this reduced the runtime to around 6 minutes, as well as running a non-debug build, as it was observed that the poor Visual Studio metrics gathering process was contributing significantly to disk activity as well, but that ultimately didn't matter much. So, ehhm, yes, good job on that I guess?
by ben_w | 2025-12-12 11:39:02+00:00
Meat was useful, back when we had not yet selectively bred fantastically better than natural crops of all kinds, back when we had not yet invented synthetic fertiliser that's now the ultimate source of 70-80% of the nitrogen in the body of someone in an industrialised nation, back when hunger was a bigger problem than obesity.

Now? Now meat's mostly a problem, not a good thing. Even if you ignore every ethical argument, regardless of if your concerns are your own health or the environment, meat's not good.

Data centres… well, I think this is a bubble, I also want it to be a bubble for various reasons, but the AI running on them today is in fact already useful.

Even if current AI wasn't at all useful (despite it having about half to one quarter of the market size as meat already), it does so at a cost orders of magnitude lower environmental harm than meat. Convincing half of the population to have "meat-free Mondays" (so, reducing consumption by 1/14th) would do more than switching off all the AI DCs, given the estimates from Greenpeace for AI https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20250514-greenpeace-... and Our World In Data's estimates for livestock and manure https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
by exDM69 | 2025-12-12 11:40:00+00:00
I've seen my fair share of frontline combat videos from Ukraine.

The hard part isn't shooting a drone when it is in shotgun range. It's getting the shooter close enough to the drone to have a chance of taking the shot in the first place.

For example the drones mentioned in the article can fly at 2.5km altitude at 140km/h.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-12 11:41:06+00:00
I don't think true mastery exists in a continuously-evolving field like tech, it's all people just figuring things out, and accumulating enough knowledge/experience means the things you build no longer blow up and mostly do what you want them to ("mostly" being load-bearing here - even the big boys publish errata notices for their chips because even they miss things sometimes).
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-12 11:41:07+00:00
This is not just a German topic (several NATO countries had drone sightings) but a NATO topic. And probably also a US topic (some 'alien' activity recently).

And you are forgetting that there are still US troops in Germany. The US is not some passive bystander in this conflict but a very active part of the decision process here. And given that some of those military installations probably have US military in them, it's very much a topic that concerns them.

I don't think anyone believes an attack is imminent. But that kind of intelligence gathering is a pretty serious breach of security.

This weakness is a NATO wide problem and you can't ignore the role of the US in this apparent weakness. It's apparently pushing for de-escalation rather than further escalation. I think we'd know of Trump felt strongly about this. He'd be tweeting about this. His silence on this is suggestive.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-12 11:41:09+00:00
I have seen videos of shotguns working on the frontline. Recently, there even circulated a video showing a super lucky one shot hit. However, what those videos have in common is, that they are targeting drones maybe 100m or at most 300m away. Obviously, the further away the drone, the more difficult it will be to align the barrel sufficiently precise to hit anything.
by throw310822 | 2025-12-12 11:41:44+00:00
I don't think the divide is between technical and non-technical people. HN is full of people that are weirdly, obstinately dismissive of LLMs (stochastic parrots, glorified autocompletes, AI slop, etc.). Personal anecdote: my father (85yo, humanistic culture) was astounded by the perfectly spot-on analysis Claude provided of a poetic text he had written. He was doubly astounded when, showing Claude's analysis to a close friend, he reacted with complete indifference as if it were normal for computers to competently discuss poetry.
by dagss | 2025-12-12 11:41:54+00:00
I am right now implementing an imagining pipeline using OpenCV and TypeScript.

I have never used OpenCV specifically before, and have little imaging experience too. What I do have though is a PhD in astrophysics/statistics so I am able to follow along the details easily.

Results are amazing. I am getting results in 2 days of work that would have taken me weeks earlier.

ChatGPT acts like a research partner. I give it images and it explains why current scoring functions fails and throws out new directions to go in.

Yes, my ideas are sometimes better. Sometimes ChatGPT has a better clue. It is like a human collegue more or less.

And if I want to try something, the code is usually bug free. So fast to just write code, try it, throw it away if I want to try another idea.

I think a) OpenCV probably has more training data than circuits? and b) I do not treat it as a desperate student with no knowlegde.

I expect to have to guide it.

There are several hundred messages back and forth.

It is more like two researchers working together with different skill sets complementing one another.

One of those skillsets being to turn a 20 message conversation into bugfree OpenCV code in 20 seconds.

No, it is not providing a perfect solution to all problems on first iteration. But it IS allowing me to both learn very quickly and build very quickly. Good enough for me..
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-12 11:42:16+00:00
Waymo does a lot of urban miles and they do so fairly timidly. The flip side of the that coin is Tesla FSD and you don't hear people simping for their safety record much around here.

What if the difference between human and computer is basically nil (for the next ten years or so) and turns out to cost as much as glass coverage?

Furthermore, it's not like you can slap this stuff on a 2000 Ford Tarus. You're inherently incurring the insurance burden of a fancy modern car with obscenely expensive everything to even get into the kind of vehicle that could/would be equipped with autonomy.
by komali2 | 2025-12-12 11:42:16+00:00
> The Instagram explore page that shapes her taste. The vocabulary borrowed from her favorite online therapist. Micro-influencers she follows without thinking. The TikTok algorithm that nudges her mood. The attachment style she diagnosed herself with.

> What used to be a disagreement becomes “emotional labor.” A bad mood gets labeled “toxic energy.” Forgetting to text becomes “avoidant attachment.” Opinions from friends, refreshed by the hour.

Smells like the angst of some recently dumped man. The girl is a slave to the whims of tik tok candy therapists but the boy is influenced by "ghosts." Please.

What this post is hitting upon correctly is that people are products of their environment, and trying to perfectly separate the two is impossible.
by latexr | 2025-12-12 11:42:39+00:00
> vegans object to our intervention

Many might, but many don’t. This is a prime example of why fighting over the label is counterproductive. You’re putting a bunch of different people in the same sack and criticising them for something which the group is not consensual on.

Again, I have no desire to nitpick over what makes one a vegan or not. That’s a waste of everyone’s time and only generates unnecessary conflict. It is not only detrimental but unbearably boring.
by pettertb | 2025-12-12 11:43:09+00:00
I had finished my hamburger, zoning out. I had my guitar with me, having had a belowpar band practice, while waiting for my therapist appointment. Life was heading downwards in a slow, but steady, fashion.

This wonderful woman came over and asked if I wanted a hug. It warmed me to my bones. She said that "people should do that more", or something along those lines, and disappeared.

I don't remember her face, I just remember the warm feeling in my chest.