MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway894345 | 2025-12-04 22:35:58+00:00
> [Go] is like C in that you can fit the whole language in your head.

Go isn't like C in that you can actually fit the entire language in your head. Most of us who think we have fit C in our head will still stumble on endless cases where we didn't realize X was actually UB or whatever. I wonder how much C's reputation for simplicity is an artifact of its long proximity to C++?
by neilv | 2025-12-04 22:36:18+00:00
Condolences.

That sounds like there was some top-down, or mid-down, culture changing (which can easily happen as a company tries to build a hierarchy, drawing from outside).

Another risk is bottom-up culture. You could have your existing leadership the same, but you start hiring ICs who bring their culture with them, and you fail to nurture the desired culture.

I think one of the concerns with early startups is if the early engineering leadership hasn't gotten respect and buy-in from the CEO, as the company grows. If the early engineering leadership was doing unusually solid work and culture, but the CEO thinks they are just random fungible commodities, and that now it's time for a different mode, then CEO will probably urinate away all that corporate strength very quickly.
by dathinab | 2025-12-04 22:36:20+00:00
What I don't understand (but also wouldn't be surprised about if it is misrepresented by the article) is:

- why would you get a single, for ADHD, non-social-related anxiety, non-sever autism or depression (especially in the later case you probably shouldn't be in a single)

- I mean sure social anxiety, sever autism can be good reasons for a single.

through in general the whole US dorms thing is strange to me (in the EU there are dorms, but optional (in general). And 50%+ of studentsfind housing outside of it (but depends on location). This allows for a lot more individualized living choices.)
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-12-04 22:36:23+00:00
Sure. I'm less of a language purist and more of an app / infrastructure developer. [*] I manage projects where I have to plan for how many engineers I will need to staff projects 1, 2, 5 and 10 years in the future. I tend to work in a mature industries (with the exception where I worked for Mozilla and Linden Lab.) We have a vested interest in not throwing away our investment in the technical process. For better or worse, that often means maintaining code-bases for more than a couple of decades.

If I compare the historical stability of C++ with Rust, I find Rust lacking. As I mentioned before, I like the language, but I can't recommend using it because of churn. Python has the same problem. There are features of the Python language I appreciate, but it doesn't matter because, like Rust, I'm going to wait for a decade to see if there are breaking changes to the language. If not, I'll consider it.

I am not saying your baby is ugly. I'm saying your baby is growing but I need a fully-grown thing right now.

Edit: I may have been less obvious about why using a language whose definition changes every several months is bad for code-bases that want a multi-decade lifetime. Consider Python. You get a new, incompatible version of Python every year (yes, 3.X is MUCH, MUCH better than 2.X, but there's still no guarantee there won't be breaking changes.) You only get security updates for three (?) versions back. 3.9, which released in 2020 is currently unsupported. Python purists will point out you can run Python 3.9 apps in a properly configured venv, but that's not the point. The point is I would like to use my application in an environment that is supported. Not only supported by the "official" project, but also by third parties. I unfortunately inherited a project where someone decided to stuff some Python 3.6 code in an AWS Lambda. Had I not worked evenings and weekends to update the then-unsupported open-source software to 3.9, it would have broken when Amazon removed support for 3.6.

And yes, I understand I am describing a problem with a Python project and not a Rust project. That's because I haven't used Rust for mission-critical projects because after dealing with the hassle of updating Python code every year, I don't want to have to update the Rust code myself or try to find people skilled enough to understand that the version of Rust they learned is not the current version of Rust.

Go for a decade without breaking changes and then we'll talk.

[*] Not exactly true, my inner pedant comes out when people talk about Lisp.
by kridsdale3 | 2025-12-04 22:36:27+00:00
I've read all of Ted's work and I hope you do try going back to Exhalation and just skipping TLOSO to get to more good stuff. It is far too long and I thought there was some value in it, but it was a slog, and in the bottom 1/4 of the stories IMO, so just skip it and get more great value.
by knallfrosch | 2025-12-04 22:36:54+00:00
You have to ship software that behaves exactly the same across three desktop operating systems and two mobile operating systems. Be glad we leave out tablets for this. You're able to hire 4 vibecoding juniors and your deadline is in 6 months.

You know what you choose for a frontend? It's Electron + React and React Native.

And none of your customers will complain because the people with money to spend are rocking 12GB of RAM on their phone.
by kbolino | 2025-12-04 22:37:11+00:00
While it has nothing to do with how responsive your mouse feels, as that is measured in milliseconds while CAS latency is measured in nanoseconds, there has indeed been a small regression with DDR5 memory compared to the 3 previous generations. The best DDR2-4 configurations could fetch 1 word in about 6-7 ns while the best DDR5 configurations take about 9-10 ns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_latency#Memory_timing_exam...
by fingerlocks | 2025-12-04 22:37:22+00:00
Very poor & mediocre.

You can find secret little pockets within Microsoft where individuals & small teams do nothing at all, day in and day out. I mean literally nothing. The game is to maximize life and minimize work at the expense of the company. The managers are in on the game and help with the cover-up. I find it hilariously awesome and kind of sad at the same time.

Anyway, one round of layoffs this year was specifically targeted at finding these pockets and snuffing them out. The evidence used to identify said pocket was slowly built out over a year ahead of time. It's very likely that these pockets also harbored poor & mediocre developers, it stands to reason that a poor or mediocre developer is more likely to gravitate to such a place.

Not saying all the developers that were laid off were in a free-loader pocket, or that this cohort must be the ones that were interviewed. I'm only suggesting that the mediocre freeloaders form a significant slice of the Venn diagram.
by gerdesj | 2025-12-04 22:37:39+00:00
I run roughly 30 PVE hosts across several customers (all ex-VMware). Few more to migrate.

You can migrate a three node cluster from VMware to PVE using the same hardware if you have a proper n+1 cluster.

iSCSI SANs don't (yet) do snapshots on PVE. I did take a three node Dell + flash SAN and an additional temporary box with rather a lot of RAM and disc (ZFS) and took the SSDs out of the SAN and whistled up a Ceph cluster on the hosts.

Another customer, I simply migrated their elderly VMware based cluster (a bit of a mess with an Equallogic) to a smart new set of HPEs with flash on board - Ceph cluster. That was about two years ago. I patched it today, as it turns out. Zero downtime.

PVE's high availability will auto evacuate a box when you put it into maintenance mode, so you get something akin to VMware's DRS out of the box, for free.

PDM is rather handy for the likes of me that have loads of disparate systems down the end of VPNs. You do have to take security rather seriously and it has things like MFA built in out of the box, as does PVE itself.

PVE and PDM support ACME too and have done for years. VMware ... doesn't.

I could go on somewhat about what I think of "Enterprise" with a capital E software. I won't but I was a VMware fanboi for over 20 years. I put up with it now. I also look after quite a bit of Hyper-V (I was clearly a very bad boy in a former life).
by jacquesm | 2025-12-04 22:37:49+00:00
But not that much better compared the better filaments out there. Fair chance it was printed out of PLA, ABS or PETG, by the shade of the part it looks like it was CF loaded filament.

A better choice would have been PEEK. But even then, I would have done a lot of on-the-ground testing before trusting my life to a part from the printer.
by thijsr | 2025-12-04 22:38:05+00:00
> I also don't love enums for errors because it means adding any new error type will be a breaking change

You can annotate your error enum with #[non_exhaustive], then it will not be a breaking change if you add a new variant. Effectively, you enforce that anybody doing a match on the enum must implement the "default" case, i.e. that nothing matches.
by michaelt | 2025-12-04 22:38:15+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_MK_IV

> The Cozy Mark IV is a 4-seat, single engine, homebuilt light aircraft [...] The aircraft is built from plans using basic raw materials. It is not a kit aircraft

You could scarcely get more DIY than this aircraft. Home-built, and not even from a kit - the builder gets to lay up every part in glass fibre themselves, by hand. And this guy had been flying it for 26 years.

It sounds like the guy was sold a part 3D printed in the wrong plastic, and it melted. He thought it was ABS, but it melted at the temperatures PLA melts at. If your engine air inlet is made of plastic that melts at 54°C (130°F) you're going to have a bad time.

It's easy to imagine how a chaotic 3D printing business might have run off a test part in a cheaper black plastic, then a confused worker could have stored the test part in with the other 'identical' parts in a different black plastic.

The 'serious' aerospace industry avoids this with lots of paperwork and procedure; when an airline maintains an airbus plane, they use only airbus-approved parts from airbus-approved sources with a paperwork trail confirming they were inspected for being-the-right-material using an approved procedure. I don't know if the home-built aircraft community would be eager to adopt those practices, though.
by andblac | 2025-12-04 22:39:02+00:00
Check out Voxon [1]. From the specs and youtube videos it seems like it's working on the same principle (rotating LED screen). Fun fact, it was co-founded by none other than Ken Silverman (the creator of Build engine) [2]. They've been pushing commercialization of this technology for years now.

[1] https://www.voxon.co/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman
by observationist | 2025-12-04 22:39:43+00:00
This is an automated AI slop substack that somehow got boosted onto the HN front page - third one of these I've seen in the last 2 months, the AI spam is getting better.

It's got nothing to do with anything, it's AI written slop, and the author is farming clickbait topics and articles with no coherent theme or perspective.
by cibyr | 2025-12-04 22:39:44+00:00
I'm sure it's fine you do it properly ([1] for example). The issue here was the utter lack of engineering, not the specific manufacturing technique (although those do seem to be highly correlated, due to low-end 3D printing having become very cheap and easy).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV74KhPNg1w
by Retric | 2025-12-04 22:39:48+00:00
In Section 230 platforms only maintain protection as a neutral party, anything getting promoted by them puts them at risk.

“letters to the editor” are a very old form of user generated content, but the act of selecting a letter and placing it in a prominent position isn’t a neutral act.

For clarity, they do maintain limited editorial discretion. Section 230(c)(2) states that service providers and users may not be held liable for voluntarily acting in good faith to restrict access to "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable" material.

Further, Section 230 contains statutory exceptions. This federal immunity generally will not apply to suits brought under federal criminal law, intellectual property law, any state law "consistent" with Section 230, certain privacy laws applicable to electronic communications, or certain federal and state laws relating to sex trafficking.
by throwaway894345 | 2025-12-04 22:40:00+00:00
How's the build tooling these days? Last I tried, it used some jbuild/dune + makefiles thing that was really painful to get up and running. Also there were multiple standard libraries and (IIRC) async runtimes that wouldn't play nicely together. The syntax and custom operators was also a thing that I could not stop stubbing my toes on--while I previously thought syntax was a relatively unimportant concern, my experience with OCaml changed my mind. :)

Also, at least at the time, the community was really hostile, but that was true of C++, Ada, and Java communities as well well. But I think those guys have chilled out, so maybe OCaml has too?
by salvatorevivolo | 2025-12-04 22:40:25+00:00
IkigaiApp is a small web app I first devised in 2020 and finally completed this year. It helps people reflect on their current situation through a structured Ikigai-style survey.

It’s not a startup, just a personal project I revived while practicing “small bets” and learning more about privacy-focused web design.

Tech stack: Next.js (React), Express.js API, MongoDB Atlas, Tailwind + Shadcn UI. No third-party analytics, no trackers.

Happy to hear thoughts, criticism, or improvements.
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-04 22:40:40+00:00
Valve is worth maybe 0.1% (single digit billions is what I’d guess) of Apple, which made $112B in net income in 2025. That’s profit, not revenue.

Apple could probably buy Valve for 30 days of its net income, which is around $9.3B ($306M per day in profit, including weekends)

There’s zero chance that Gaben has squirreled away Four Trillion Dollars in cash.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-04 22:40:42+00:00
This is actually another growing problem: TRT clinics will prescribe testosterone to virtually anyone who requests it. Among new TRT patients, a large number of them didn't even have bloodwork drawn before receiving their first prescription.

Many of the TRT clinics also hide the fact that going on TRT results in testicular atrophy and lifelong dependence. The forums and Reddits are full of people who decided that injecting testosterone every couple days for the rest of their life isn't all it's cracked up to be are realizing that it's not so simple for everyone to get off of it, even with all the HCG, SERMs, and PCT in the world.
by saltcured | 2025-12-04 22:40:47+00:00
The problem is we have different terms that all mean doing something without real risk management or analysis in software. Both "cowboy coding" and "vibe coding" mean the same thing, if you remove the agent doing the production.

And since vibe coding is so recently coined, I think a lot of people take it to specifically mean "LLM" and not some generalized "any third-party agent".

Then, a vibe coded engine part sounds like it would need a generative AI producing the CAD file that is then printed. And it might have some bizarre topology like a Klein bottle or some fever dream.
by Telemakhos | 2025-12-04 22:40:50+00:00
Oh, it's worse than you think. It's not just "taking other people's suffering and making it about oneself." It's often purely SEO. Recipes get ranked higher when they are preceded by long, "engaging" introductions that nobody reads but that use keywords and address common questions (Like "can I substitute ingredients?). Often the longwinded introductions you see aren't the result of narcissism but of thoughtless SEO.
by unshavedyak | 2025-12-04 22:41:05+00:00
The rope in my example is complexity. Ie choosing to use "all teh features" when you don't need or perhaps even want to. Eg sometimes a simple clone is fine. Sometimes you don't need to opt for every generic and performance minded feature Rust offers - which are numerous.

Though, i think my statement is missing something. I moved from Go to Rust because i found that Rust gave me better tooling to encapsulate and reuse logic. Eg Iterators are more complex under the hood, but my observed complexity was lower in Rust compared to Go by way of better, more generalized code reuse. So in this example i actually found Go to be more complex.

So maybe a more elaborated phrase would be something like Rust gives you more visible rope to hang yourself with.. but that doesn't sound as nice. I still like my original phrase heh.
by jorl17 | 2025-12-04 22:41:17+00:00
I think the logic can be applied to humans as well as AI:

Sure, the AI _can_ code integrations, but it now has to maintain them, and might be tempted to modify them when it doesn't need to (leaky abstractions), adding cognitive load (in LLM parlance: "context pollution") and leading to worse results.

Batteries-included = AI and humans write less code, get more "headspace"/"free context" to focus on what "really matters".

As a very very heavy LLM user, I also notice that projects tend to be much easier for LLMs (and humans alike) to work on when they use opinionated well-established frameworks.

Nonetheless, I'm positive in a couple of years we'll have found a way for LLMs to be equally good, if not better, with other frameworks. I think we'll find mechanisms to have LLMs learn libraries and projects on the fly much better. I can imagine crazy scenarios where LLMs train smaller LLMs on project parts or libraries so they don't get context pollution but also don't need a full-retraining (or incredibly pricey inference). I can also think of a system in line with Anthropic's view of skills, where LLMs very intelligently switch their knowledge on or off. The technology isn't there yet, but we're moving FAST!

Love this era!!
by GoatInGrey | 2025-12-04 22:41:18+00:00
> Autism Speaks is a hate group of abusive parents.

It's an indicator of the current state of affairs in the social media autism space that the only organization focusing on reducing the suffering of individuals with higher levels of dysfunction (i.e. requires lifelong support for basic needs) is demonized to this degree. Though it also makes sense as the most disabled autistic individuals do not post online.
by kachapopopow | 2025-12-04 22:41:31+00:00
I could never get into zig purely because of the syntax and I know I am not alone, can someone explain the odd choices that were taken when creating zig?

the most odd one probably being 'const expected = [_]u32{ 123, 67, 89, 99 };'

and the 2nd most being the word 'try' instead of just ?

the 3rd one would be the imports

and `try std.fs.File.stdout().writeAll("hello world!\n");` is not really convincing either for a basic print.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-12-04 22:41:41+00:00
I worked car sales for years. The same large dealership can have a person anyone would call a decent salesperson, and they made $4k a month. There was also two people at that dealership making $25k+ a month each.

If your organization is filled with the $4k type and not the $25k type, you're going to have a bad time.

I was #7 in the US while working at a small dealership. I moved the the large dealership mentioned above and instantly that dealership became #1 for that brand in the country, something they had never done before. Because not only did I sell 34 cars a month without just cannibalizing others sales, I showed others that you can show up one day and do well so there weren't many excuses. The output of the entire place went up.

So, depending on the pay plan and hiring process, who exactly is working at Microsoft right now selling AI? I honestly have no idea. It could be rock stars and it could be the $4k guys happy they're making $10k at Microsoft.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-04 22:41:43+00:00
Re UB:

> The idea seems to be that you can run your program enough times in the checked release modes to have reasonable confidence that there will be no illegal behavior in the unchecked build of your program. That seems like a highly pragmatic design to me.

This is only pragmatic if you ignore the real world experience of sanitizers which attempt to do the same thing and failing to prevent memory safety and UB issues in deployed C/C++ codebases (eg Android definitely has sanitizers running on every commit and yet it wasn’t until they switched to Rust that exploits started disappearing).
by jacquesm | 2025-12-04 22:42:01+00:00
Then you are not up to speed with what the 3D printing world has to offer. You can 3D print full metal stress free parts and chances are very high that if you have flown in an airplane in the last five years that some of the parts of that plane (and I'm not talking about trim here) were made using additive processes.

Rocket engines can be 3D printed, in fact there are some engines that can only be made using that kind of technique due to internal structures.
by knallfrosch | 2025-12-04 22:42:04+00:00
Facebook is over 20 years old and has never enforced its minimum age (13 years.)

I, for one, would have started with legal threats and financial penalties long ago. But it just won't happen. So I'm fine with technical solutions.

Facebook is able to sell you ads based on your favorite shoe lace colour. They ban terrorists, bots, porn and people named "Mark Zuckerberg" all the time. Noone can claim it's too hard for them to ban minors under 13.
by Yoric | 2025-12-04 22:42:04+00:00
FWIW `fmt.Errorf("opening file %s: %w", filePath, err)` is pretty much equivalent to calling `err.with_context(|| format!("opening file {}", path))?` with anyhow.

What `thiserror` or manually implementing `Error` buys you is the ability to actually do something about higher-level errors. In Rust design, not doing so in a public facing API is indeed considered bad practice. In Go, nobody seems to care about that, which of course makes code easier to write, but catching errors quickly becomes stringly typed. Yes, it's possible to do it correctly in Go, but it's ridiculously complicated, and I don't think I've ever seen any third-party library do it correctly.

That being said, I agree that manually implementing `Error` in Rust is way too time-consuming. There's also the added complexity of having to use a third-party crate to do what feels like basic functionality of error-handling. I haven't encountered problems with `thiserror` yet.

> Beyond these concerns, I also don't love enums for errors because it means adding any new error type will be a breaking change. I don't love the idea of committing to that, but maybe I'm overthinking?

If you wish to make sure it's not a breaking change, mark your enum as `#[non_exhaustive]`. Not terribly elegant, but that's exactly what this is for.

Hope it helped a bit :)
by sarimkx | 2025-12-04 22:42:07+00:00
> Overall, 59 percent said they regard AI as a threat to their future job prospects, far more than immigration (31 percent).

This is in line with my observation, unlike what many older folks think, Gen Z are more skeptical of new tech. Many who were the first generation to grow up with social media are the first ones quitting social apps like Facebook, Instagram etc.

On the physical/hardware side, old tech is making a massive comeback among Gen Z. Film cameras, 2000s digicams etc.