MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-12-04 12:55:41+00:00
I both agree and disagree with you.

On the one hand: yes, this dev has clearly chosen a career/language specialization that puts him knee-deep in the absolute worst tooling imaginable.. I cannot fathom a workflow this fucking miserable and if this was my day to day, I would be far, far more depressed than I already am.

AND, the fact that so very very much of our industry does run, perhaps not all of, but a significant amount of a workflow not awfully different from this is IMO, an indictment of our trade. To invoke the immortal sentiment of the hockey coach from Letterkenny, this shit is FUCKING embarrassing.

So much major software that ships in a web browser because writing for Windows, Mac and Linux is just too hard you guys, it's simply too much for a sweet little bean like Microsoft ($3.62 trillion) to manage as they burn billions on AI garbage, is FUCKING embarrassing.

Half the apps on my phone are written this way which is why they can barely manage 30hz on their animations, die entirely when S3 goes down, and when they are working, make my phone hot. To run an app that lets me control my thermostat from my desk. That's FUCKING embarrassing.

And my desktop is only saved by virtue of being magnitudes more powerful than my original one back in the 90's, yet it only seems a scant more capable. In the early 00's I was sitting on Empire Earth and chatting with people over TeamSpeak. My computer can still do this, and with the added benefit of Discord can stream my game so my friends can all watch each other, and that's cool, apart from I lose about 10 fps just by virtue of having Discord open, and when I'm traveling? Oh god forget it, Discord flounders to death on hotel wifi despite it being perfectly cromulent DSL speeds. Not BLAZING, surely, but TeamSpeak handled VOIP over an actual DSL connection, with DSL latency, in the 00's. That's FUCKING embarrassing.

All our software now updates automatically by default, and it's notable when that's a GOOD thing. Usually what it actually means is the layout of known features changes for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Other times more dark patterns are injected. And Discord, not to pick on them, but they're the absolute fucking worst for this. I swear they push an "update" every time one of their devs sneezes, I usually have to install 18 such updates on each launch, and I run it very regularly! And for all that churn, I couldn't tell you one goddamn thing they actually added recently. FUCKING embarrassing.

And people will say "oh they could be better," "we know we can do it better," "these aren't the best companies or apps" okay but they are BIG ones. If the mean average car in America got awful fuel economy, needed constant service, was ill-designed for it's purpose and cost insane amounts of money...

Oh, that happened too. I think I just made my metaphor more embarrassing for another industry.
by skrebbel | 2025-12-04 12:55:51+00:00
> But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you.

The idea that most employers make terrible decisions now, and amazing decisions back in the day, is plainly false. The author vividly recollects working at a decent Java shop. Even there I strongly doubt everything was amazing as they describe, but it sounds decent indeed. But plenty businesses at the time used C++, for no good reason other than inertia, usually in Windows-only Visual C++ 6-specific dialects. Their "build server" ran overnight, you'd check in your code in the late afternoon and get your compile errors back in the morning. The "source control" worked with company-wide file locks, and you'd get phoned your ass back to the office if you forgot to check in a file before leaving. Meanwhile, half the web was written in epic spaghetti plates of Perl. PHP was a joy to deploy, as it is now, but it was also a pain to debug.

If you care deeply about this stuff, find an employer who cares too. They existed back then and they exist now.
by IsTom | 2025-12-04 12:56:06+00:00
> Try talking about biological operations without invoking “function”.

If you had a strong vendetta against mistaking map for territory, you could very well talk in terms of past survival and statistics. It's just not necessary for regular biological talk. It becomes relevant only when you start going to the boundaries.

> Why does striking a match against a matchbox consistently produce fire?

Because you wouldn't call these objects a "match" and a "matchbox" otherwise.
by yaris | 2025-12-04 12:57:11+00:00
China has built their Great Firewall over many years gradually, and they have a lot of resources inside, so almost everything from the "western" Internet has a Chinese analog. Russian government simply does not give a flying fuck about people and economy on either side of the border, so they can just pull the plug completely if they see it necessary from the political point of view. So these countries are hardly reference points for what UK can achieve (although Russia is closer than China).
by rtlo9962 | 2025-12-04 12:57:14+00:00
Location: New Haven, CT, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, React, AWS (CDK, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, ECS), PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, Python, OpenAI API, LangChain, Mastra, Ruby, Sinatra.

Résumé/CV: Available by request

Email: rtlo9962@gmail.com

I'm a software engineer with a background in law and business (JD/MBA), now focused on hands-on engineering for cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and AI-powered applications. I enjoy architecting reliable systems and have experience with backend development and open-source contributions.

Most recently, I contributed to Mastra, an open-source TypeScript framework for AI agents and workflows. I focused heavily on integrations and reliability: I built the PostHog observability exporter to bridge OpenTelemetry spans with AI analytics, implemented the Azure OpenAI provider with OAuth2 token caching, and resolved critical state propagation issues within Model Context Protocol (MCP) workflows.

I also created Nimbus (https://nimbusnlp.github.io/), an open-source framework that simplifies deploying lightweight NLP models to AWS. It utilizes a TypeScript CLI and AWS CDK to automate the provisioning of serverless infrastructure (Lambda via Docker), reducing deployment time from hours to minutes.

Previously, I contributed to Mozilla Firefox, enabling extension developers to manually trigger update checks to accelerate the delivery of security patches, alongside safeguards to prevent keyboard shortcut conflicts.

I also have experience building AI agents and RAG-based applications.

I am looking for remote or hybrid work in NYC or CT.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-12-04 12:57:37+00:00
Same. I build stuff for local businesses in my area with nothing but boring old HTML, PHP, CSS and JS. I guess my shit isn't "web scale" but it works, and it works consistently, with minimal downtime, and it worked during both Amazon and Cloudflare's latest outages.

I don't need my software to eat the world, I'm perfectly content with it just solving someone's problems.
by dvgrn | 2025-12-04 12:57:38+00:00
> There has been no true replicator found yet in Life as far as I know...

Actually more than one true replicator has been constructed. The 0E0P metacell

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/0E0P_metacell

can be programmed to self-replicate in any number of ways, but it's so big that it's very hard to simulate it through a full cycle. By contrast, Pavel Grankovskiy's "DOGun SaGaQR"

https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?&p=138191#p13819...

only has one pattern of replication, but it's much simpler than the 0E0P metacell and can easily be run through many cycles in Golly.
by imtringued | 2025-12-04 12:58:04+00:00
>Super easy to explain sets and groups once you've learnt how modulus works too.

Wow you start going into the deep end and are already needlessly over-complicating everything.

I personally would have explained the concept of groups by writing the number symbols upside down and as words, count of things, etc. Then you force the students to prove the group properties. After that you should tell them to come up with a group isomorphism between the groups.

There is something off putting about being given definitions from a higher authority and having to wade through the mud and emerging with a poor intuition about the thing in question. Modular arithmetic is something that the students will have to learn on top of group theory, not something that acts as a learning aid.

It's kind of difficult to put into words, but the moment you manipulate any physical quantity, e.g. filling a kettle with water and emptying it, you are already deep into applications of group theory. The reason why it is possible to record physical quantities with numbers is that the physical thing you are measuring also obeys the properties of group theory.

What I'm trying to get at is that the definition of groups is that way, not just for a good reason, it must be that way, because otherwise it doesn't make sense.
by lifty | 2025-12-04 12:58:13+00:00
A really cool way to do it is how Yggdrasil project does it (https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/implementation.html#how-...). They basically use public keys as identities and they deterministically create an IPv6 address from the public key. This is beautiful and works for private networks, as well as for their global overlay IPv6 network.

What do you think about the general approach in Uncloud? It almost feels like a cousin of Swarm. Would love to get your take on it.
by jow13_12 | 2025-12-04 12:59:10+00:00
Location: Toronto, Canada Remote: Yes (or hybrid)

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies:

> Languages, Frameworks, and Libraries: JavaScript, Express, Ruby, Sinatra, Python, Flask, SQL, jQuery, TypeScript, React

> Cloud: Digital Ocean Droplet, AWS (EC2, VPC, S3, CloudFormation, CDK), Heroku, Fly.io

> AI Engineering: LangChain, Claude, Hugging Face, Vector DBs, embedding, OpenAI API, RAG, chunking

> Other Technologies: Node.js, Git/Github, Docker, Linux/Bash, HTTP, Nginx, PostgreSQL, MongoDB

Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WsNU0BPlehcD9WPaNoaEmlCCAT1...

Email: jow13_122@yahoo.com

Profile: I am a full-stack software engineer with several years of experience in Ruby and JavaScript, as well as additional proficiency in Python, TypeScript, and React. Most recently, I contributed to the creation of Vispyr, an open-source observability tool designed to make continuous profiling more accessible to developers.
by gary_0 | 2025-12-04 12:59:51+00:00
> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now.

Actually, where I was sitting on a decent PC with broadband Internet at the time, everything was much, much faster. I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was, including Visual Studio, but when I search YouTube for it, it ignores most of my keywords and returns a bunch of "how to speed up your computer" spam. And I can't find it in my bookmarks. Oh well.
by mattlondon | 2025-12-04 12:59:52+00:00
This feels very much like the tired "the modern internet sucks - the old web with old websites was better!" trope that appears on here regularly.

You can still code the old way just like you can still put up your old website. No one is forcing you to use AI or VS Code or even JavaScript.

Of course you.might not getting those choices at work, but that is entirely different since your paid to do a job that benefits your employer, not paid to do something you enjoy.

Have fun.
by paol | 2025-12-04 13:00:00+00:00
They don't need to expand capacity to fulfill this contract.

They would want to expand capacity if they believed this increase in demand is long lasting - the implication is therefore that they don't believe it, or not enough to risk major capital expenditures.

You saw the same with GPU makers not wanting to expand capacity during the Cryptocurrency boom. They don't want to be left holding the bag when the bubble pops.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-04 13:01:40+00:00
Unfortunately, CVSS scores are gamified hard. Companies pay more money in bug bounty programs, so there's an incentive for bug bounty hunters to talk up the impact of their discovery. Especially the CVSS v3 calculation can produce some unexpected super high or super low scores.

While scores are a good way to bring this stuff to people's attention, I wouldn't use them to enforce business processes. There's a good chance your code isn't even affected by this CVE even if your security scanners all go full red alert on this bug.
by hopelite | 2025-12-04 13:02:07+00:00
“Usually”, “not intentionally” does not exactly convey your own sense of confidence that it’s not happening. That just stood out to me.

As someone who knows how all this is unfolding because I’ve been part of implementing it, I agree, there’s no “Unified Plan for Enslavement”. You have to think of it more like a hive mind of mostly Cluster B and somewhat Cluster A people that you rightfully identify as making up the corporations and governments. Some call it a swarm, which is also helpful in understanding it; the murmuration of a flock of psychopaths moving and shifting organically, while mostly remaining in general unison.

Your last quote is of course a useful rule of thumb too, however, I would say it’s more useful to just assume narcissistic motivations in everything in the contemporary era, even if it does not always work out for them the way one faction had hoped or strategized; Nemesis be damned, and all.
by eqbalmoradian | 2025-12-04 13:02:47+00:00
واقعاً تحسین برانگیز است که Cloudflare با این سرعت و دقت به آسیب پذیری های امنیتی واکنش نشان می دهد. این نوع اقدامات پیشگیرانه نه تنها امنیت کاربران را تضمین می کند، بلکه استاندارد جدیدی برای مسئولیت پذیری در دنیای فناوری تعریف می کند. امیدوارم سایر ارائه دهندگان نیز چنین رویکردی را در پیش بگیرند
by dust42 | 2025-12-04 13:03:17+00:00
Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard. JavaScript will be an open, freely licensed proposed standard available to the entire Internet community. Existing Sun Java licensees will receive a license to JavaScript. In addition, Sun and Netscape intend to make a source code reference implementation of JavaScript available for royalty-free licensing, further encouraging its adoption as a standard in a wide variety of products.

The 90ies had quite a few pretty visionary people. CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free on 30 April 1993, enabling its widespread use.

At that time there were still CompuServe, AOL, Minitel and BTX around - not just walled gardens but walled worlds but a handful of people already saw and shaped the future...
by ghc | 2025-12-04 13:03:32+00:00
Yes! I remember at the time I had just gotten linux to reliably work on my dual Opteron workstation so that I could migrate away from Win2K64. UT2K3 and UT2K4 were just about the only games I could run because Wine didn't work very well back then.

In retrospect, I have a much greater appreciation for Windows 2000. User experience was really front and center in a way that we seem to have gotten away from since Web 2.0. It basically never blue screened. Games ran well. Personal computing seems to have taken some steps backwards since then.
by ndiddy | 2025-12-04 13:03:41+00:00
If you read the original JavaScript press release ( https://web.archive.org/web/20020808041248/http://wp.netscap... ), it's mainly intended as a language to write glue code so Java applets (where the real application logic would go) can interact with a webpage:

> With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server. On the server, the scripts might dynamically compose and format HTML content based on user preferences stored in a relational database, and on the client, the scripts would glue together an assortment of Java applets and HTML form elements into a live interactive user interface for specifying a net-wide search for information.

> "Programmers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Java because it was designed from the ground up for the Internet. JavaScript is a natural fit, since it's also designed for the Internet and Unicode-based worldwide use," said Bill Joy, co-founder and vice president of research at Sun. "JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect HTML-based content to Java applets."

This was all actually implemented. JavaScript functions could call Java applet methods and vice versa (see https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/deplo... ). Of course over time everyone abandoned applets because of all the security problems, and JavaScript became a good enough language to write application logic directly in it. Still, there's more meaning behind the name than it just being a cynical marketing move.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-12-04 13:03:44+00:00
Yes, as I mentioned, Slack made a U-turn after the thread got popular and became a PR disaster (after having ignored the issue again and again previously). That kind of behaviour indicates a service that shouldn't be relied on so much, at least not without low-friction alternates that you keep ready to jump onto, in case some exec there decides again that the Club is too tempting a prize to not attempt another squeeze.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-04 13:04:00+00:00
"There is no way to escape any of this unless you spend several hours per week to click through these dialogs and to adjust adblockers."

I read NYT with no cookies, no Javascript and no images. Only the Host, User Agent (googlebot) and Connection headers are sent. TLS forward proxy sends requests over internet, not browser. No SNI. No meaningful "fingerprint" for advertising

This only requires accessing a single IP address used by NYT. No "vendors"

TLS is monitored on the network I own. By me

I inspect all TLS traffic. Otherwise connection fails
by dionhaefner | 2025-12-04 13:04:21+00:00
This is a case study in making gradient-based optimization (a la gradient descent) work with tools that weren’t designed for it. The goal is optimizing rocket grid fin stiffness (8 bars, 16 angular parameters), with a pipeline that includes Ansys SpaceClaim (CAD), PyMAPDL (FEM solver), and JAX. Each step needs derivatives, which means stitching together analytical adjoints from Ansys, finite differences for mesh operations, and JAX autodiff for everything else. What makes this practical is that each component runs in its own isolated environment (Tesseract), so the Ansys tools can live on Windows with their license requirements while the optimization logic runs on Linux while still being composable for end-to-end autodiff.

The payoff is watching emergent behavior: starting from random bar positions, the optimizer discovers that orthogonal grid patterns work well, diagonal lateral bars create efficient load paths, and clustering material near the attachment points maximizes stiffness. Final result is 75% stiffer than random and 24% better than a regular grid, even after adding back symmetry constraints for manufacturing.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-04 13:04:35+00:00
> Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now.

Rather: very commonly the local shops don't stock the parts that I would like to buy, and it is often hard to find out beforehand which kind of very specialized parts the local shop does or doesn't stock.

True story concerning electronic components: I went to some electronic store and wanted to buy a very specialized IC, which they didn't stock. But since the sales clerk could see my passion for tinkering with electronica, he covertly wrote down an address of a different, very small electronics store including instructions which tram line to take to get there (I was rather new to the city), which stocks a lock more stuff that tinkerers love. I guess the sales clerk was as disappointed with the range of goods that his employer has decided to concentrate on as I was. :-)

On the other hand, lots of former stores for PC component now have whole lots of shelf rows with mobile phone cases instead. I get that these have high sales margins, but no thanks ...

Thus, in my opinion it is not online shopping that killed local shops, but the fact that local shops simply don't offer and stock the products that I want to buy.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-12-04 13:04:44+00:00
> React always hailed itself as the “just JS framework”,

I've literally never heard someone say "React is just a JS framework". They've said React uses JSX over templates. And that React has introduced functional components. But never heard someone say what you're claiming.

> but you can’t actually write regular JS in components since hooks have so many rules that bind the developer in a very specific way of writing code.

This is wild. Yes you can. You can write regular JS in components. I can go build a component right now that uses JS (either with or without hooks). You're conflating the rules of hooks with the ability to use Javascript. Yes, there are rules. No, that doesn't mean you can no longer can write JS.

> i18n, angular has the translations compiled into the application and fetching a massive json with translations is not needed

Tradeoffs. Now each update needs to be rebuilt and redeployed. I don't have that problem in React.

> better templating ability for control flows

Better templating? React uses JSX. Are you saying there exists a better way to control flows than if/else?

> signals, for proper reactive state

This has been debated ad-nauseum in the React community and everything has a trade-off. I wish people would stop saying this as if it's categorically correct. React is UI is a function of state. Singlars would totally break the current mental model of React. Data flows down. This change would come with tradeoffs.
by notarget137 | 2025-12-04 13:04:50+00:00
It's baffling for me living in Russia that modern western societies see everything wrong with dictatorship from a goverment but nothing or almost nothing wrong with dictatorship from big capital. E.g. you can't change your break pads unless you go to authorized repair (literal control over your private property and how you use it) and big platforms banning you from multiple public forums because you said a big no-no word (deplatforming and cross-platform restrictions are a thing)
Ask HN: What are the ethics at YC?
by jagged-chisel | 2025-12-04 13:04:56+00:00
A “hiring” link came across the front page yesterday. After saying they plan to acquire “profitable SaaS companies,” they soon follow with “No support staff answering tickets.” That’s a pretty big red flag; if I’m the paying customer, I’ll be working hard to find a replacement if this company acquires one of my vendors.

This business plan reads like Soulless Private Equity who comes in, eliminates staff expenditures and increases subscription pricing by an order of magnitude to pump the valuation, then sells to some unwitting buyer at a huge profit with a total disregard for the consequences to customers, employees, and whomever else might provide resistance to their monetary motives.

“If you think we're wrong, don't apply.” I’m pretty sure that should go without saying for any job on offer. Phrasing like this just confirms to me there’s no nuance.

Are these the current ethics in Y Combinator?