MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MrDarcy | 2025-12-25 17:09:36+00:00
As a hiring manager, if someone shared a profile of a person with a PHD in earth sciences and 8 years of “full stack” experience I’d immediately assume they were a generalist with surface level familiarity and no mastery or depth in any one area.

I’d then look over the profile trying to disprove my assumption. Lacking a very strong signal in mastery of something, I’d pass on the profile.

Only at small scales are full stack engineers valuable. Their value is not in the quality of their output but in their ability to deliver make shift with that avoids having to pay for specialist who can deliver quality.

Assuming there is product market fit then generalists are replaced by specialists. This is where the true value aligns in terms of high quality output being compensated proportional to value created.

Given all this my advice is to pick two complementary areas, specialize in those areas and develop deep mastery. Keep your broad general skills. Then market yourself as the T or H shaped engineer that’s most valuable.
by thechao | 2025-12-25 17:09:38+00:00
Blocks is the top comment (for me); and yours is number two. Timeless classic. Another one could be plasticine clay. These toys afford play, they don't direct, restrict, or guide play. Other good toys like this: box, stick, the woods, paper (especially a big roll of butcher paper), and things to draw with (I find a black, red, blue, yellow and green sufficient).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-25 17:12:24+00:00
fakedang's comment does a lot of heavy lifting, but I'm going to swing for the fences: you mention your company is hiring juniors, and OP's daughter sounds competent and has potential. Can they offer her an interview? Worst case, some time has been spent. Best case, someone who needs a job gets a job and a req gets filled.
by mmooss | 2025-12-25 17:12:44+00:00
Attributing 'smugness' is a way to duck the merits of the issue. People with mental disabilities also need a stable roof over their head, security, privacy, heat, a bathroom, a bed.

I expect they need it more (very broadly speaking; people have very different disabilities do different degrees), because it's harder to adapt and survive without it, and therefore more traumatizing and destabilizing.

There is plenty of evidence, and it's common sense, that having a stable shelter and all the things I listed above would greatly help anyone. Humans in every culture have sought shelter for all of history - it's absolutely fundamental to humanity (and other animals!). Depriving people of it results in unending trauma - not a state to begin getting your life together, harm from others and the environment, an inability to accumulate assets, and spending all your time trying to survive.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-25 17:16:51+00:00
(reposting from the MicroQuickJS thread if only because it seems more relevant here)

Always interesting when people as talented as Bellard manage to (apparently) never write a "full-on" GUI-fronted application, or more specifically, a program that sits between a user with constantly shifting goals and workflows and a "core" that can get the job done.

I would not want to dismiss or diminish by any amount the incredible work he has done. It's just interesting to me that the problems he appears to pick generally take the form of "user sets up the parameters, the program runs to completion".
by jtrn | 2025-12-25 17:16:51+00:00
I wish all self-promoting scientists and sensationalizing journalists had a fraction of the honesty and dedication to actual truth and proper communication of truths as you do. You seem to feel that it’s more important to be transparent about these kinds of technical details than other people are about their claims in clinical medical research. Thank you so much for all you do and the way you communicate about it.

Also, I’m not that familiar with the whole process, but I just wanted to say that I think you were too hard on yourself during the last performance drama. So thank you again and remember not to hold yourself to an impossible standard no one else does.
by cons0le | 2025-12-25 17:17:16+00:00
I wanted to express similar sentiment, but I didn't understand how I would without leaving a rule breaking comment.

It's my sincerely held opinion that we're fostering a culture here that ignores the "human impact" of the technology that we're rushing to adopt.

I'm well aware that many members of this community have achieved "success" through software. This includes the rapid adoption of new computing paradigms, new technology stacks, new frameworks, etc.

I am fortunate to be employed. But around me, when I step out of my house, it's painful. People are hurting. They're unemployed. They're depressed. And the younger generation is even worse. They can't even afford to dream.

I live in a corporate world of forced smiles and fake enthusiasm. I would hate for that same culture to take root here. We need to be able to express significant doubt, or even cynicism against AI, without fear of backlash.
by markus_zhang | 2025-12-25 17:17:57+00:00
Without official support, the Asahi team needs to RE a lot of stuffs. I’d expect it to lag behind a couple of generations at least.

I blame Apple on pushing out new models every year. I don’t get why it does that. A M1 is perfectly fine after a few years but Apple treats it like an iPhone. I think one new model every 2-3 years is good enough.
by __patchbit__ | 2025-12-25 17:18:31+00:00
I don't know how to find the ideal font for the missing glyph on my environment which is BSD.

Using the `unicode' command from plan9userspace, for example

unicode 2ff0-2fff

the last three symbols are shown inside emacs as squares with the four hex values inside.

Typing in the search field `2fff' finds `no match found'.
by keeganpoppen | 2025-12-25 17:19:14+00:00
how about the plainly obvious fact that every call tree system first spends 1-8 minutes going through all the things that you can actually do on the website instead of calling: do you really think they would bother with that if people aren’t calling about stuff that is easily done on the website? sure, we all agree that it is partly designed to get people to hang up in disgust and give up, but that is an obviously insufficient explanation compared to the simpler and more comprehensive explanation that people simply do, as a matter of fact, prefer to use the phone despite it being clearly less useful for easily-computer-able tasks.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-25 17:19:18+00:00
That doesn't match my experience at all. If I disable filtering what I see is a slew of ephemeral domains. Without DMARC I'm sure they would instead be official looking and fake.

> It comes from so many sources you can't block them,

Nonsense. If it were really countless fixed sources then a centralized domain blacklist would be sufficient. The issue is that the sources - both domain and IP - are aggressively rotated and even spoofed whenever possible.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-25 17:19:39+00:00
> reason was cost

Yeah, it was supposed to be replaced with a kinder/gentler system, but that never came. They shut down the support system completely with a "we'll figure out how to fix this later" and that never came.

I think the solution is pretty obvious, TBH. Pay people to take care of their family with disabilities. It's often a full time job to take care of someone with a severe disability. Some states do make allowances to pay out to family caregivers, but it's a convoluted system where you have to be employed by a private care agency which is ultimately reimbursed for the care. There's a pointless private business in the way just adding on admin fees.

But there desperately needs to be something in place for people without that support. Parents die/leave/are incarcerated and we really don't have any sort of system setup to handle that.
by physicles | 2025-12-25 17:21:27+00:00
- Surround yourself with friends who also aren’t playing the game.

- Get really clear about what your actual financial goals are, not what they’d need to be in order to maintain status among game-players.

- Get compensated in ways other than money. For me, working four days a week instead of five, and working remote from anywhere, is worth a whole lot of money. And working at a smaller company is a hell of a lot more fun if you like being part of product decisions.

- If you can, find ways to do things that your ladder-climbing friends can’t do. Spend a month in Europe without taking any holiday. Spend the whole winter in Thailand. Use that extra mental energy from that day off to do something amazing.

I left FAANG about 10 years ago and took a massive pay cut. I’d do it again.
by user_7832 | 2025-12-25 17:21:33+00:00
I (admitedly much younger than you) would think that assuming there's good internet and decent road connectivity, you could spend a lot of time on your interests and hobbies, no? My biggest hobbies (photography, diy audio) don't really need urban environments after the manufactured camera/woofer leaves the warehouse and ships to your home. Even easier perhaps if your interest is purely coding/laptop work (like writing a novel), I would think?

(For what it's worth - I myself am a city guy, but only because that's where I grew up in and have spent all my life. A town of 100k people feels desolate for me on Sunday evening, but I also don't live with family.)
by pcarroll | 2025-12-25 17:21:55+00:00
We implement STUN and TURN functionality natively in WireGuard rather than using separate protocols.

Netrinos uses a central rendezvous server that participates in WireGuard handshakes solely to collect your devices' public endpoints and share that information with your other devices. When a device roams to a new location, the server learns the new endpoint and updates the other devices in your account.

When direct P2P fails, Netrinos connections fall back to a relay server. The relay is a WireGuard peer, but it can only relay traffic between peers in your account. All customer accounts are strictly firewalled from each other.

If you want more control, you can enable a device in your account as a relay server with a checkbox in the app. This could be a home PC with a stable connection or a low-cost cloud server.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-25 17:22:17+00:00
A new Wayland protocol is in the works that should support screen cutout information out of the box: https://phosh.mobi/posts/xdg-cutouts/ Hopefully this will be extended to include color information whenever applicable, so that "hiding" the screen cutout (by coloring the surrounding area deep black) can also be a standard feature and maybe even be active by default.
by nkmnz | 2025-12-25 17:22:53+00:00
Could explain how a compound that's already on the market and has been patented for (some) medical use at least once in 2015 (expiring 2035) might make a good case for "Big Pharma gigabucks"? I thought one reason for a lack of research into "repurposablity" of existing small molecule drugs is the fact that new applications cannot be independently patented?
by bheadmaster | 2025-12-25 17:23:24+00:00
I can think of two possible reasons:

First is the Google's manpower. Google somehow succeeds in writing fast software. Most Google products I use are fast in contrast to the rest of the ecosystem. It's possible that Google simply did a better job.

The second is CPython legacy. There are faster implementations of Python that completely implement the API (PyPy comes to mind), but there's a huge ecosystem of C extensions written with CPython bindings, which make it virtually impossible to break compatibility. It is possible that this legacy prevents many possible optimizations. On the other hand, V8 only needs to keep compatibility on code-level, which allows them to practically switch out the whole inside in incremental search for a faster version.

I might be wrong, so take what I said with a grain of salt.
by jnwatson | 2025-12-25 17:25:42+00:00
The best toy my sister and I got is a now long-discontinued product called Omagles. They were brightly colored tubes and panels you connected with plastic clips. They were strong enough to stand and climb on. They even had wheels we could make vehicles out of.

They were so good I bought a used one for my own kid who had a great time with them.

After some Googling, I see that the rights to Omagles were bought and are now sold under the brand Tubelox.
by mmooss | 2025-12-25 17:26:11+00:00
> a lesson learned

It's certainly a perspective of many, but many others think it's wrong, that children should run freely (there's a whole movement around that), etc.

> please please also don’t forget that people are dangerous

IME from a life spent in cities has taught me that people - strangers, unhoused people, etc. - are great. Most will be happy to to help, have a pleasant conversation, etc. (Read Jane Jacobs who, iirc, examines it in detail.) Humans are social creatures - we don't live alone, we're made to socialize and live in groups.

You need to be a social creature too and read people a little. Obviously some people aren't in a mood to interact; don't be rude or an idiot (they'll probably ignore you). And there's risk to everything - you can die in an accident but still travel by car; you can catch diseases but you still leave your home.

Really, the exception I think I see at a higher rate is apparently wealthy people. Maybe they aren't accustomed to the need to help each other, but there seems to be a culture of anger toward those who might need some help today. Why don't they just support themselves like I do?
by gist | 2025-12-25 17:26:13+00:00
I recognize that this wasn't your decision but I would say having that HN Christmas banner (or any religious holiday banner) is a form of proselytizing. (Not disagreeing with what you said in reply btw.)

I feel that having a banner like that shows a sense of entitlement that people who celebrate (or have been raised to believe in Christ or another religion) have with this entire time of year.

(This is irrespective if the same is done for other holidays which apparently it is but HN history doesn't show this (when searching for stories from a particular day)).
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-25 17:26:16+00:00
What's the point?

None of this is individually difficult, but an actual human being had the motivation and talent to bring it all together in 7 days, which is impressive.

So what if an LLM can create the same components if you tell it to. It's a bit like someone sharing a handknit sweater they just made, and you counter with "Well, here's a machine made one I bought in Walmart, made in 5 min in China".
by spankibalt | 2025-12-25 17:27:01+00:00
> "Today the only option for less than 10" are Android tablets and they are far from a PC."

Yeah, outside of the odd offering from GPD or their knock-off crews every now and then, that segment only exist in the industry-PC market ("ruggedized"). Everything else is indeed ToyOS land. Or indie hopefuls, most of which either don't make it to market or are not powerful enough.
by ptx | 2025-12-25 17:27:05+00:00
Are you saying that you can't get the title of the active window in X11 without using some features specific to the X.Org implementation?

It looks like the core X11 protocol spec [1] defines all that's needed, specifically the GetInputFocus, QueryTree and GetProperty messages. You might also want some things from the EWMH spec [2] (e.g. _NET_WM_NAME for UTF-8 or _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE to identify top-level application windows) but none of this seems an implementation-specific X.Org feature.

[1] https://x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xproto/x11protocol.html

[2] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm/latest/
by keeganpoppen | 2025-12-25 17:27:11+00:00
that is a great point. it’s one thing to occasionally rugpull employees, who are still at least paid for their services and robbed only of their EV on their options (i say “only”, though i find this increasingly common practice to be absolutely deplorable, to be clear). but how could investors possibly be happy with this becoming the new normal? will it get to the point where these sorts of faux acquisitions also involve paying out investors and only shafting employees? at that point you are only really even getting like a 20% discount over acquiring the company outright, which hardly seems worth it. which is to say that your point is very astute: the investors are definitely the linchpin here.
by rdiddly | 2025-12-25 17:29:10+00:00
What makes you think platitudes are always dishonest, first of all? Your writing sounds like fuckin' AI, so I wouldn't complain if I were you. "Beggars can't be choosers." Also, "You can't always get what you want." I will respond in platitude format.

1) Effort still correlates with outcomes, it's just that there is some random noise in the signal. Maybe moreso in these noisy times.

2) DID any of what she did matter? If she enjoyed it or found it meaningful, then yes. If it was just being "sensible" a.k.a. grinding and bald careerism, then no, even if she weren't laid off.

3) She's young. My first layoff, I took it hard too. By the third or fourth one, I would laugh and look forward to a small vacation of coasting on unemployment.

4) Ordinarily a post-college-age kid with a job is living on her own and you wouldn't have access to her crying moments. And another primary emotion alongside despair would be anxiety about making rent. It's painful to watch your kids suffer, but suffer they will and suffer they must.

5) Continuing from point 2, does she have a meaningful hobby? She needs to start one. If only to provide a break from the unhealthy amount of grinding she sounds like she's doing. Try music, a lot of engineers are good at music. I'm good enough at it that I was once able to support myself on it, and now see my day job as something I can leave, something I tolerate but am too good for. My genius is not defined by it. It's only work.

6) Celebrate Christmas the way all half-assed unprepared people do: Big feast at the Chinese restaurant tonight. Or Thai, I guess is the new Chinese. Pretending everything is okay? Who fucking died? Everything IS okay. A little perspective would go a long way and you're the one who needs to provide it.
by ux266478 | 2025-12-25 17:29:32+00:00
The only pro I can think of is you get a standard scheme set of batteries, which isn't even really a pro in this space. The biggest con is implementation size and complexity. IIRC the JITter alone is twice the size of LuaJIT's entire codebase, and not for being vastly better.

License problems too, if you're not making copyleft software. Guile is GPL, both Luas are MIT.
by chucke | 2025-12-25 17:30:12+00:00
Maybe I wasn't clear, but until now there were 2 types of type notations being debated, RBS and sorbet/RBI. Sorbet adopting RBS means that's the lowest common denominator. Typing is definitely not a standard, not yet. rbs-inline is definitely not a pet project, it's the RBS creator response to the main complaint about RbS , its the reason sorbet finally adopted it, and will be part of mainline rbs gem.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-25 17:31:19+00:00
Haiti’s inability to enforce zoning laws is not something the developed world ought to strive to emulate. Haiti is an undesirable place to live precisely because it has no capacity to enforce rules and norms. The flow of migrants from Haiti to the developed world is unidirectional; no one is going the other way. No one who has any alternative is trying to move into these slums.

> As long as a house is primarily considered an investment, and not a just a structure to keep us safe from the elements and a place to raise a family, housing will only ever become more expensive and less available.

There is a sort of conspiracy to repress affordable housing, but it isn’t done primarily with property values in mind the way you’re alluding to. Most people dwell in houses; the equity is irrelevant to them until they actually sell it. High real estate prices are not an investment but a membership; they exclude undesirable residents. Most of those undesirable residents belong in psychiatric facilities, but until those facilities are reinstituted, this is the system we’re left with.

There are other factors at play (e.g. fire safety setbacks, American market expectactions favoring larger houses, etc.), but those are all far more pedestrian.

Basically everywhere on earth where an option exists, people prefer to live in autocentric suburbs or Manhattan-style megalopolises; both are expensive to construct and maintain. Slums are just an attempt to cut these costs at the expense of fire safety, sanitation, and structural integrity.
by classichasclass | 2025-12-25 17:31:39+00:00
In the past this was pretty lax (I've had a long-term box at a Mail Boxes Etc. that then became a private mail boxes place that then became a UPS Store) and they didn't really care when I first opened it. Now there's a push for KYC also; we got a sheet the other day asking to verify our physical street address, something I never personally got in the years I've been there. Apparently new regulations or something, they said.
by usernameisjim | 2025-12-25 17:34:00+00:00
I think at some point the difference of how much advanced lateral technology there is and can be made will be very abundant

(100s of different phones, AR) different types of designs of what people use and all very customized and fashionable to each person’s taste (people will be able to travel to most places very easily and be incredibly individualistic)

My post from URL further:

I can run storage off solar at home < 20W and all inference on my phone

this century I’d say a phone would be faster than any access I have to any cloud LLMs now

< 5 years 120B model faster?

I think future is likely untethered from any electrical outlet, you’re connected via satellite…

With efficient compression you can already achieve even photorealism at 200-400 megabits and 50ms latency.

If I want more power I can own it at home and connect to it remotely.

If Starlink supports 500 million on its v3…

I’d say you could just use AR on other infrastructure remoted in as well to a few other services… don’t see why anyone can’t own their own, every household only needs enough compute for who’s there…

If AR is also optimized no need for screens anywhere.

i.e. comfortable contact lens with self hosted wireless modules (or portable and efficient projectors and photonics), I won’t be alive but assume some mix of that future very powerful very low overhead customized technology will be what people have access to in like year 2500-3500+

Complete abundance, homes could even be printed or built in a day however you want, fully free experiential commerce…

Neutral digital transactions, some kind of very ubiquitous systems to interact and between these layers (robotics, synthetic video, materials access/manufacturing from small scale to large)

Zoning laws probably will be even more of a vernacular than anything if things can rapidly change so quick…

Questions for responses:
// do you agree/disagree?

// by what year do you think the world will look more like this (maybe some choose more BCI devices), year 2300, 3300?

// if not similar what do you think will then be ubiquitous by the year 3000+, summary of what you envision?

// what similar technologies do you think can be designed/iterated on now over the next 4-30 years closest to this future (or the one you think more likely), 1-3 concepts or things that will have more of an impact (particularly for consumers)?
by Delk | 2025-12-25 17:34:08+00:00
I'm guessing that was a 286. I think Intel parts topped out at 12.5 MHz but AMD and Harris eventually reached 20 or even 25 MHz. I still have my original PC with a 12.5 MHz one.

The difference with the 386, I think, is that AFAIK the second-sourced 8086 and 286 CPUs from non-Intel manufacturers still made use of licensed Intel designs. The 386 (and later) had to be reverse engineered again and AMD designed their own implementation. That also meant AMD was a bit late to the game (the Am386 came out in 1991 while the 80386 had already been released in 1985) but, on the other hand, they were able to achieve better performance.