MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajuc | 2025-12-09 12:54:22+00:00
> It’s interesting how rhetoric about “liberty” seems to practically serve oligarchy.

It's the typical pattern.

If you don't have rules attenuating the runaway feedback loop - some people get a little more initially (talent, money, luck, whatever), then it spirals into A LOT more, which gives them influence over everybody else, which is oligarchy, and that eventually turns into a dictatorship.

The only way to avoid it is to have strong institutions and regulations stopping the feedback loop.

We knew it thousands of years ago, nothing changed. We seem to have to learn this lesson independently in every newly-created domain. It's time for tech sector.

> I suppose an alternative to bans and regulations is to genuinely pursue the elimination of deprivation

How do you propose to do it without bans and regulations?
by wodenokoto | 2025-12-09 12:54:25+00:00
Is it correctly understood that this is Anki for a subset of leetcode problems with study notes?

I bit more info on what NeetCode is, why I should focus on those 150 problems and how the drilling actually work would be helpful. Do I get asked to do the same problems on repeat? Is it the same problems reformulated over and over? Is there actualy any spaced repetition, or am I projecting?
by palata | 2025-12-09 12:54:28+00:00
> it is still a tool like a knife.

I would argue it's different: AI/technology is pushing us to use more and more energy (which is a problem because energy is not infinite), and therefore emit more and more CO2 (which is a problem because climate change). And in the side, it allows us to do more of those things we like to do like destroying habitat, hence we are living in a mass extinction right now (it's a fact, we can measure it).

A knife does not fundamentally contribute heavily to killing all species including ours.
Friendly reminder: NPM classic tokens will be revoked today
by valtlfelipe | 2025-12-09 12:54:46+00:00
Just a friendly reminder to our HN Dev folks, npm classic tokens will be revoked today. So if a pipeline breaks you already now what it might be.

More info: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-09-29-strengthening-npm-security-important-changes-to-authentication-and-token-management

Be safe! Protect your npm accounts.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-09 12:54:59+00:00
To be blunt and a bit nihilistic: I get paid to ship features.

Client wants a feature EoW, they get it EoW, they're not paying for a week of extra work for the "quality codebase" feature.

But the good thing is that we've had objective and automated tooling for quality checks for code. We used to use them for humans, but now we apply the same tools for AI.

Good unit testing practices, exhaustive linters, .editorconfig etc. force humans AND LLMs to produce code within specific parameters.

If your project doesn't have automated tests and linters, now is the time to add them. Maybe use an LLM to help you with it :)
by torginus | 2025-12-09 12:55:02+00:00
This needs to be said more. Software used to be so much better, and so was tooling.

While it wasn't perfect, I'd argue software got much worse, and I blame SaaSification and the push for web-based centralization.

Take for example, Docker. Linux suffered from an issue of hosting servers in a standardized, and isolated manner.

The kernel already had all those features to make it work, all we needed was a nice userland to take advantage of it.

What was needed was a small loader program that set up the sandbox and then started executing the target software.

What we got was Docker, which somehow came with its own daemon (what about cron, systemd etc), way of doing IPC (we had that), package distribution format (why not leave stuff on the disk), weird shit (layers wtf), repository (we had that as well), and CLI (why).

All this stuff was wrapped into a nice package you have to pay monthly subscription fees for.

Duplicating and enshittifying standard system functions, what a way to go.
by api | 2025-12-09 12:55:10+00:00
It’s expensive for now, slow for now, online for now, but it’s pretty clear that this is the future. If I were blind I’d want it to go here since it would just unlock so much more. Very little software or sites have good accessibility. Open source and indie stuff often has none.

A custom local model trained only for this task seems like a possibility, and could be way smaller than some general purpose model being instructed for this task. I’m thinking screen reader and UI assist only. Could probably be like a 7B quantized model. Maybe smaller.
by belorn | 2025-12-09 12:55:35+00:00
What is going to change, and after what event? United States use of torture has been well known, documented and made into multiple movies and TV for the last decades. Multiple different governments have not only shown zero interest to charge people over it, but they have also given the green light to continue it. No president nor any candidate has shown even the slightest interest, nor has there been any grassroots movement that gone out on the street to demand accountability.
by fragmede | 2025-12-09 12:55:40+00:00
How much does the author actually know about a heroin addiction? I mean, I don't have one, but I've talked to people that do, and a lot of the problems with heroin are because we made it illegal and hard to get. If we sold it for a dollar at every gas station we wouldn't have nearlythe same problems with it we do today. And besides no one sells heroin anymore, everyone has moved on to fentanyl.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-12-09 12:55:55+00:00
I work for a non-profit, and have found a very good place where we are treated well and where I can work on mostly interesting stuff mostly in the ways that seem best to me (not all non-profits are like this, for sure) -- and also make probably 1/2 to 1/3rd (or less?) what some of you make.
by horsawlarway | 2025-12-09 12:56:04+00:00
The general thrust of my argument is this:

"There is a limited amount of time, money, and effort that will be spent on any project. Successful enterprises focus those limited resources on the things that matter most to their customers. In this case, disk usage in the ~150gb range did not matter much in comparison to the other parts of the game, such as in-game content, missions, gameplay, etc."

We know this, because the game had a very successful release, despite taking 150gb to install.

I'm not saying they should have filled that 100 extra gb with mission content - I'm implying they made the right call in focusing their engineering manpower on creating content for the game (the ACTUAL gameplay) and not on optimizing storage usage for assets. That decision gave them a popular game which eventually had the resources to go optimize storage use.
by davedx | 2025-12-09 12:56:10+00:00
What I find the strangest is Palantir's market cap and long term valuation show that this is not just retail at the margins - it's significant amounts of money buying up the stock despite its sky high valuation. I don't know if it can be sufficiently explained by "individual actors investing ideologically" or not.

Just another day of the stock market being irrational though, I guess!
by diego_moita | 2025-12-09 12:56:38+00:00
True.

In the US, it isn't just about social media being vicious. It is, more than that, how it became a plutocracy that controls the government and congress.

And is a plague that the rest of the world is just catching up to. It isn't just the European Union that wants to regulate it. India's government, Brazil's supreme court, Australia, ...

I which we could have a global wake-up. The world would be a better place without social media.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-09 12:57:04+00:00
A more viable path might actually be agentic testing via agents that simply use a browser or screen reader that can work off high level test scenarios.

I've done some UI testing via the agent mode in chat gpt and I got some pretty decent feedback out of that. I've been trying to do more of that.

Accessibility testing might require a bit more additional tooling than comes with chat gpt by default. But otherwise, this could work.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-09 12:57:12+00:00
>influential accounts posing as American patriots were actually essentially content-farmers from the global south?

Which is why I'd like a button that allows me to geofence the global south from posting on my social media feeds. Their opinions are irrelevant anyway to the political issues happening in my EU country since they're not citizens and can't vote in the elections here, so there's no loss there, same how I'm not gonna go on Indian social media boards and lecture them about how to solve the conflict with Pakistan because it doesn't concern me.

Like for example a popular blogger from my country solved this issue by paywalling his blog behind a 5 Euro monthly Patreon fee. Suddenly, no more bots, trolls, low quality rage baiters and Asian scammers. Gatekeeping is important if you want to maintain quality and don't have massive resources for moderation.

Also this isn't anything new. Spying, botting and farming on the internet aka information warfare in general, has been happening for 50+ years now. We're now just more aware of it because now "others" are doing it to "us", when in the past it was mostly "we" who were doing it to "them".

>I don't know that I'd ever seriously listen to a place like 4Chan for guidance about how to tie my own shoes, much less how to govern an entire nation.

[...]mostly full of straight-up noise and largely decoupled from reality

If it's so decoupled from reality, then how come both X and 4Chan were bang on about how Trump was gonna win the US presidential election both times, despite mainstream media telling otherwise from their "polls" as sources?

You can chose not to listen to X and 4Chan the same way how you can choose to piss against the wind, but then don't be surprised you end up getting wet and covered in piss.
by 9rx | 2025-12-09 12:57:30+00:00
> What planet are you on?

The one where computers don't magically run all by themselves. It's amazing how out of touch HN has become with technology. Thinking that you can throw something up into the cloud, or whatever was imagined, needing no human oversight to operate it... Unfortunately, that's not how things work in this world. "The cloud" isn't heaven, despite religious imagery suggesting otherwise. It requires legions of people to make it work.

This is the outcome of that whole "Learn to code" movement from a number of years ago, I suppose. Everyone thinks they're an expert in everything when they reach the mastery of being able to write a "Hello, World" program in their bedroom.

But do tell us what planet you are on as it sounds wonderful.
by benjiro | 2025-12-09 12:59:01+00:00
That is the thing ... How long ago did we get Agent mode. Like in CoPilot that thing is only 7 months old.

Things evolve faster then people realize... Agent mode, then came mcp servers, sub agents, now its rag databases allowing the LLMs to get data directly.

The development of LLMS looks slow but with each iteration, things get improved. As yourself, what will have been the result of those same tests you ran, 21 months ago, with Claude 3.0? How about Claude 4.0, that is only 8 months ago.

Right now Opus 4.5 is darn functional. The issue is more often not the code that it write, but more often it get stuck on "its too complex, let me simplify it", with the biggest issue often being context capacity.

LLMs are still bad at deeper tasks, but compared to the last LLMs, the jumps have been enormous. What about a year from now? Two years? I have a hard time believing that Claude 3 was not even 2 years but just 21 month ago. And we considered that a massive jump up, useful for working on a single file... Now we are throwing it entire codebases and is darn good at debugging, editing etc.

Do i like the results? No, there are lots of times that the results are not what "i wanted", but that is often a result of my own prompting being too generic.

LLMs are never going to really replace experience programmers, but boy is the progress scary.
by Octoth0rpe | 2025-12-09 12:59:12+00:00
I think we treat the maximization of liberty (in my mind a primary function of government/society, with reasonable limits) as the same goal for both corporations and people, which ultimately is a side effect of treating corporations like people. But these are entirely oppositional goals: Maximizing personal liberty of actual people requires significant binding restrictions on corporations.

In the US we have this overly simplistic narrative of pro-liberty GOP versus anti-liberty DNC which I think badly needs to be separated into pro _personal_ liberty positions (healthcare, including abortion, quality public education), versus anti _corporate_ liberty (environmental regulation, financial transparency, etc).
by rzerowan | 2025-12-09 12:59:56+00:00
If doing it from scratch, if jumping off from an already established product - could work, along with name recognition.

If there was one that i would put that could go head to head and possibly pull it off would be Corel[1], their suite is pretty comprehensive along with their collaborative suite.

Althogh from their businesss model seems they are content to maintain a narrow market and possible still remember getting burned by MS in the early days.

[1] https://www.corel.com/en/all-products/
by sofixa | 2025-12-09 13:00:08+00:00
Setting aside that it's a continent with widely varied tech scenes (UK vs Sweden vs Netherlands vs Greece vs France vs Bulgaria; the startup scenes in some of those are pretty impressive and if they had the same amount of capital thrown at them, they would rivaling SF), even the most legaciest of legacy companies (think 200 year old insurance companies or similarly aged industrial concerns) are modernising everything. Yes, there is more employment stability on average, and you won't get fired from a big bank for being slightly behind the bleeding edge, but if you refuse to learn and there is no static niche you're already good at (e.g. mainframes), you won't have a good time.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-12-09 13:01:12+00:00
The vast majority of the world population, and the vast majority of all people throughout history have not made their choices of job based on the same criteria some of us who are more privileged do today such as wanting to work on something they value.

A job is and always has been a means to live for the majority of people on this Earth. Feigning a mentality of always wanting to grow is part of the act when it comes to corporate life. But even that in itself (corporate life) is a privilege compared to the grueling work most people throughout history have done.
by snowwrestler | 2025-12-09 13:01:26+00:00
I’ll put in a plug for nonprofits. In the U.S. there are thousands of them and they all need tech workers of some kind. Some have digital products like web applications and mobile apps. Some just have a Wordpress site and basic IT needs. In any case it is probably not going to be cutting edge tech.

But aligning with values might be easier since that is what a nonprofit is all about. It’s an organization that is going all-in on one particular specific set of values, to the exclusion of commercial goals like making profit for owners or shareholders.

Which means that they also don’t pay as well (nearly as well) as private big tech companies. If nothing else, working at a nonprofit will help you realize how important money vs mission is to you, in a very personal way. You’ll either say “I can live on this” or “this sucks, I can’t stand being underpaid.”

Note that not all nonprofits are charities. There are thousands of trade associations, chambers of commerce, economic development councils, etc. in the U.S. And of course all sorts of political committees and orgs across the spectrum.
by bell-cot | 2025-12-09 13:01:57+00:00
Compared to a fast-growing company, true.

But they still need to replace employees who retire and such.

EDIT: The reality behind the 'no time/energy to "train" me' is often that small companies do too little hiring for IT-type positions to support any sort of formal training, or even coherent documentation of their current stuff. (It may be quite different if you'd been hired as their junior-most bookkeeper or lathe operator.) And their tiny IT staff needs to be jack-of-all-trades problem-fixers - so if you need formal structures and training to get things done, then you're a poor fit anyway.
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 13:01:59+00:00
I believe many do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Lizardman's_C...

I've certainly seen YouGov surveys asking if I'd ever visited (IIRC) some tiny town in Alaska, presumably to weed out people who just say "yes" to everything. Recent quiz question from Tom Scott's Lateral podcast was along the same lines but for being qualified to pilot a military submarine.
by parpfish | 2025-12-09 13:02:35+00:00
I think it’s in part due to the fact that we’re expected to expend effort in these jobs thinking “big picture” about the roadmap and planning.

If you’re at a job where you get handed jira tickets and crunch bugs, you can probably ignore the big picture purpose and purpose and just be a cog that pushes code.

But if your job keeps telling you to think about why and how to improve the product, you will immediately see your values butting up against management’s values. This is a recipe for disillusionment because it causes you to think about what you value and then you get sucker punched when you see decisions being made with a different set of values by a machine that disregards your own.
by neves | 2025-12-09 13:02:49+00:00
When we read about historical facts, I am always impressed by how entire societies do terrible things. I always thought it was ignorance or information censorship. Nowadays, I see intelligent people working for these big techs here on Hacker News. They are people I admire and who are very well-informed. I then realize how we are not free from the most terrible moments in history.
by danparsonson | 2025-12-09 13:03:15+00:00
An analogy I like to use is that I enjoy painting - I've become pretty good at landscapes, portraits, still life... and what most employers are looking for is someone who can paint walls, because that's what they or their customers need. Computers to us are a hobby - for most others they are a tool; if you're going to earn money this way then you need to focus more on delivering value to the people who pay you, and try to find someone who will reward you in line with the value you provide. That usually means first and foremost delivering the required functionality within the required time frame; technical excellence takes (usually a distant) second place, unless you're lucky enough to work on something really interesting.

So what do you do, as an enthusiast? The way I have survived is to make the work interesting in small ways - try different techniques, libraries, algorithms; it depends how much time pressure you're under, as to how much leeway you have. Take advantage of training opportunities - there is always a lot to learn, even if you think you're pretty good already, and more skills improves your chances of landing better jobs in the future. Take pride in your work, even if no-one else notices.

Yes, the corporate life is a grind, but so are most jobs, and at least you get a comfortable chair. Make the best of it or do something else.
by palata | 2025-12-09 13:04:04+00:00
I'll try my theory:

In the west, the last decades have been marked by prosperity. After the big wars, there was abundant energy, relative geopolitical stability, so everything was improving for everybody (we can use more energy to build more machine to produce more stuff that becomes cheaper so we own more and we are happier).

Now we see that we have:

1. An energy problem (we're reaching the peak of fossil fuels, that shows in the economy, and we don't have a viable solution for saving the growth).

2. A climate problem, which means that even if we discovered an infinite source of fossil fuels that could save the growth, we would still be screwed because climate change will eventually destroy society as we know it (and probably kill many (most?) of us).

3. A biodiversity problem, which means that even if we discovered an infinite, clean energy and somehow saved the climate, the very consequence of our growth is habitat loss. We're living in a mass extinction that's orders of magnitudes faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs. It's a fact, it's measured. Say we could have a fusion reactor in our smartphones, we could still not eat it.

It used to be that everything was going well, and therefore technology was just allowing us to own more and be happier. Now we realise that all of this is not sustainable. And technology is what allowed us to get where we are, and it doesn't look at all like it can save us. The sustainable way is "doing less with less".
by epolanski | 2025-12-09 13:04:14+00:00
There's lots of psychological and anthropological studies behind the fact that most experts in various fields excel due to pattern recognition not reasoning.

Going back to the chess example, while chess masters are incredible at analyzing complex positions they can recognize as "similar to", their advantage over normal human beings is very small when positions are completely randomized.

"Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise", by Ericsson goes more in depth of the topic, but there's lots of literature on the topic.
by analog31 | 2025-12-09 13:05:44+00:00
A mature company that makes something real, like a manufacturing business. A lot of stuff being made depends on a combination of hardware and software. The software side can't grow exponentially because the hardware can't, and because it doesn't experience the same level of investor interest as the "tech" industry. Yet it serves a useful purpose and often brings unexpected but interesting problems to solve.

I work at a company in the American Midwest that makes measurement equipment. A friend programs robots for a high tech factory. We're both musicians (and cyclists) and play in a band together.
by jackfranklyn | 2025-12-09 13:05:52+00:00
The "conversations as unit of storage" decision is smart. I've lost count of how many bookmarked tweets became incomprehensible after the original context got deleted.

The irony is we're in an era of "everything is digital and permanent" but everyday internet content disappears faster than physical letters did. My grandmother's correspondence from the 1960s survived in a shoebox. My conversations from 2015? Gone with whatever platform shut down or changed their TOS.

Static sites really are the answer for personal archiving. No dependencies, no server to maintain, viewable in any browser for decades. The Twitter archive approach mentioned here was genuinely well-engineered - shame the company that made it doesn't seem to care about preservation anymore.
by parpfish | 2025-12-09 13:06:09+00:00
I took a 66% pay cut to work at a nonprofit once, and it was hell.

The problem is that not many folks are willing to take a pay cut like that, so the level of employee talent was abysmal.

Years and years of the “Dead Sea” effect made it a thoroughly incompetent work environment where they were oblivious to how bad it was because the managers had never seen what’s real job was like before
by MarsIronPI | 2025-12-09 13:06:32+00:00
XL[0] or its derivative Tao3D[1]? Regardless I think XL is a fascinating language. Being a Lisp person I find it neat when a language manages to write its core language constructs in itself.

[0]: https://xlr.sourceforge.io [1]: https://tao3d.sourceforge.net
by StrLght | 2025-12-09 13:07:05+00:00
I understand that the author is struggling in the current job market. I can't even imagine how hard it is right now with entry-level positions.

However, dismissing the overhead associated with such positions is a very simplistic view. It isn't about writing "bad code" or "good code". Rather, it is about solving complex tasks and maintaining huge systems – that's the real challenge. Hands-on experience or proper guidance can save you a lot of time.