MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by swatcoder | 2025-12-04 19:27:21+00:00
> people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway

Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all.

Exceedingly few people (if anyone) are competent and capable at everything, even when you're just talking about basic skills that are handy for common, everyday work.

Your doctor may be a incorrigibly terrible driver, your bus driver may pass out at the sight of blood, your Michelin chef might have been never made sense of geometry, your mechanic may need deep focus just to read through a manual, your bricklayer might go into a panic if they need to stand in front of a crowd, your bartender may never have experienced a clear thought before 11am.

Struggling with some things, even deeply struggling, is normal if not universal. But once you age past the gauntlet of general education that specifically tests all these things, the hope is that you can just sort of flow like water into a valuable enough community role that you can take care of yourself and help some people.

A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture stirs up an idea that there must be something unusual about you if you find this thing or that thing difficult, when the reality is that everybody has a few things that they struggle with quite a lot, and that the people who seem like they don't have just succeeded at avoiding, delegating, or hiding whatever it is that's hard for them.
by trunnell | 2025-12-04 19:27:28+00:00
Having a bad manager in past roles can be some of the best "manager training."

If one your past managers did something recommended in this article but it caused problems, that's ok! It just means you have seen another failure mode that the author didn't experience.

I remember being in a meeting with a bunch of the best managers at a former company. "Why did you originally want to be a manager?" was one of the first questions passed around the circle. The most common answer was, "I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better."
by brrwind | 2025-12-04 19:27:32+00:00
> in giving an immediate diagnosis of anything

I don't think this is a complete picture? Sure, they have to provide a diagnosis in order to bill insurance, but that can be something like F43.2/adjustment disorder, which is not a clinical diagnosis of depression or anxiety. Your comment makes it sound the typical experience is that you can just waltz into a talk therapist's office and be handed a slip of paper that says "I'm depressed." Which I'm sure exists, but I don't conflate pill-mills with responsible MDs, either.

Regardless, depending on the state, licensed counselors are qualified to diagnose mental health disorders, so not sure what your comment is getting at.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-04 19:28:08+00:00
Try https://www.drugs.com/quetiapine.html XR 300 mg 2x and see me in the morning.

I mean seriously, this ticks all the boxes for paranoid psychosis and there is no way I can talk you out of this or anybody else, you need to shut up those demons in your skull.

See also https://www.theairloom.org/mindcontrol.php
by btkramer9 | 2025-12-04 19:28:26+00:00
I started down this path a few months ago. Here's a few links I've collected that have been useful

- https://nandgame.com/

- https://www.asic-world.com/verilog/verilog_one_day.html

- https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Problem_sets

- https://edaplayground.com/home
by ahepp | 2025-12-04 19:28:38+00:00
So when we say "they abandoned posix compatibility", are we saying "They abandoned the POSIX filesystem storage backend"? I believe that's true, I used to use minio on a FreeBSD server but after an update I had to switch to just passing in zfs block devs.

Or are we saying that they no longer support running minio on POSIX systems at all, due to using linux specific syscalls or something else I'm not thinking of? I don't know whether they did this or not.

Those seem like two very different things to me, and when someone says "they don't support POSIX", I assume the latter
by Night_Thastus | 2025-12-04 19:28:49+00:00
Why would they?

I mean, I think it's SUPER cool and would not mind one sitting on my desk.

But from a product standpoint...? It doesn't scale well in size, resolution or refresh rate.

VR is pretty much better if you want a the kind of immersion I think you'd be looking for, and even selling that is hard.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-04 19:29:09+00:00
This is cool, but reminds me of what we don't have. 99% of the content for Unreal Tournament was made by the community. Why can't the community make an open-source game? There are probably even attempts to make an open-source UT04. But I wish open-source could just make more standalone games. We have so few... Tuxracer, Chromium BSU, Battle for Wesnoth, Warsaw, etc.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-04 19:29:32+00:00
Random nerd note: The history is slightly wrong. Netscape had their own "interactive script" language at the time Sun started talking about Java and somehow got the front page of the Mercury news when they announced it in March of 1995. At the Third International World Wide Web Conference in Darmstadt Germany everyone was talking about it and I was roped into giving a session on it during lunch break (which then had to be stopped because no one was going to the keynote by SGI :-)). Everyone one there was excited and saying "forget everything, this is the future." So, Netscape wanted to incorporate it into Netscape Navigator (their browser) but they had a small problem which was that this was kind of a competitor to their own scripting language. They wanted to call it JavaScript to ride the coattails of the Java excitement and Sun legal only agreed to let them do that if they would promise to ship Java in their browser when it hit 1.0 (which it did in September of that year).

So Netscape got visibility for their language, Sun got the #1 browser to ship their language and they had leverage over Microsoft to extortionately license it for Internet Explorer. There were debates among the Java team about whether or not this was a "good" thing or not, I mean for Sun sure, but the confusion between what was "Java" was not. The politics won of course, and when they refused to let the standards organization use the name "JavaScript" the term ECMAScript was created.

So there's that. But how we got here isn't particularly germane to the argument that yes, we should all be able to call it the same thing.
by fullstop | 2025-12-04 19:29:34+00:00
> I don’t think they’re working at 100% capacity or don’t have any other FAB that they can utilize for other low profit stuff.

I have a family member who works in a field related to memory and storage fabrication. At the moment Micron, etc, are running these money printers full time and forgoing routine maintenance to keep the money flowing.
by adamwong246 | 2025-12-04 19:29:52+00:00
Yes. We all know that he is an untrustworthy, spoiled man-child with daddy issues so deep, that even the whole world is not enough. He is a fascist and an anchor around the neck of the entire world. In a more just world, he would be loaded onto one of his rockets and launched into the Phantom Zone.

The only one's who can't see this are so hopelessly deluded, they cannot be reasoned with.
by joshstrange | 2025-12-04 19:29:53+00:00
I think there are 2 things at play here. LLMs are, without a doubt, absolutely useful/helpful but they have shortcomings and limitations (often worth the cost of using). That said, businesses trying to add "AI" into their products have a much lower success rate than LLM-use directly.

I dislike almost every AI feature in software I use but love using LLMs.
by mbreese | 2025-12-04 19:30:14+00:00
How much research did you guys do on the name? This might be the most amazing product ever, but I'll never know. I'm not inclined to install anything with the name "X Buddy". For me, it brings the negative associations from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

It's not a knock on anything you've done, because it looks pretty nice. But, just based on the name, I'm not sure I know what it does or why I'd want it. That's a decent amount of inertia to overcome to get someone to install an app on their phone called "browser buddy". It just screams malware to me... but maybe I'm just paranoid.
by bluGill | 2025-12-04 19:30:18+00:00
I don't think it occurred to anyone in 1905 that a water/glycol mix might be good. They either used straight water with a warning to drain the engine when you shut down in cold weather so it didn't freeze, or they used oil. My 1939 tractor has instructions to start the engine and then pour water in the radiator when it is below freezing.
by psunavy03 | 2025-12-04 19:30:19+00:00
Depends highly on your field. There are plenty of military personnel and commercial pilots hiding things or avoiding being seen for any kind of treatment, because a diagnosis could lose them their jobs.

Rolling out electronic health records has been a disaster for military recruiting, because such a large portion of kids flat-out lied on the medical screening, and 60+ percent of the population is already disqualified.
by JohnMakin | 2025-12-04 19:30:31+00:00
The experience you are describing has overwhelmingly not been my own, nor anyone in my space I know.

I can only speak most recently for EKS, but the cost is spent almost entirely on compute. I’m a one man shop managing 10,000 containers. I basically only spend on the compute itself, which is not all that much, and certainly far, far less than hiring a sys admin. Self hosted anything would be a huge PITA for me and likely end up costing more.

Yes, you can avoid kubernetes and being a “slave” to cloud providers, but I personally believe you’re making infrastructure tradeoffs in a bad way, and likely spending as much in the long run anyway.

maybe my disconnect here is that I mostly deal with full production scale applications, not hobby projects I am hosting on my own network (nothing wrong with that, and I would agree k8s is overkill for something like that).

Eventually though, at scale, I strongly believe you will need or want a control plane of some type for your container fleets, and that typically ends up looking or acting like k8s.
by anon84873628 | 2025-12-04 19:30:44+00:00
Let's posit that modern society is not really well suited for the true primate nature of humans. If participating in society is the benchmark, then almost all of us are disabled.

As Scott Alexander opens his essay:

>The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
by TimTheTinker | 2025-12-04 19:30:52+00:00
Shipping the frontend for features in a core product area on a large team, just like a lot of other devs here :)

To go into specifics of actual problems solved and do so intelligibly, I'd have to provide specific context, which I'm not comfortable doing here.

It's a lot easier to describe "interesting problems solved" using less identifiable (and more generally interesting) details if one is in platform/infra and/or operating at a Staff+ level -- both of which I have been in the past (and loved it), but am not at the moment.
by lemontheme | 2025-12-04 19:30:57+00:00
macOS and controller support. Nice!

That's what I've spent the past two years hoping for from Urbek City Builder, whose art style this immediately reminded me of. If you haven't already (which would surprise me), definitely check out Urbek. It's such a fun puzzle game, but development seems to have stalled.

Anyway, buying this right away, if only for the Microslop license.

Edit: I'm 2 hours in. Really fun vibe with a nice soundtrack. Still figuring out why my factory and farms aren't attracting more workers. And I wish I could see the buses drive around (after making public transport free). After bankrupting my first two cities, I'm finally profitable. The trick, it seems: low corporate tax, high income tax.
by moogleii | 2025-12-04 19:30:58+00:00
It isn't the best written piece, but your snippet feels taken grossly out of context. The rest of it:

"A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy. A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler."

While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.
by mooreds | 2025-12-04 19:31:15+00:00
Great post. Also a reminder that there isn't one career path for everyone.

The thing that is most interesting to me as someone who works at a devtool company is how this puts a spotlight on what vendors can offer (and what they can't). Every time you integrate a devtool into your product, you are trusting that they've thought out and gone through the deep process work of stewardship.
by ogogmad | 2025-12-04 19:31:32+00:00
The usage of confidence intervals here reminds me of the clearest way to see that integration is a computable operator, to the same degree that a function like sin() or sqrt() is computable. It's true thanks to a natural combination of (i) interval arithmetic and (ii) the "Darboux integral" approach to defining integration. So, intervals can do magic.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-04 19:31:38+00:00
> You make an LLM decision tree, one LLM call per policy section, and aggregate the results.

I can never understand why people jump to these weird direct calls to the LLM rather than working with embeddings for classification tasks.

I have a hard time believing that

- the context text embedding

- the image vector representation

- the policy text embedding(s)

Cannot be combined to create a classification model is likely several orders of magnitude faster than chaining calls to an LLM, and I wouldn't be remotely surprised to see it perform notably better on the task described.

I have used LLM as classifier and it does make sense in cases of extremely limited data (though they rarely work well enough), but if you're going to be calling the LLM in such complex ways it's better to stop thinking of this as a classic ML problem and rather think of it as an agentic content moderator.

In this case you can ignore the train/test split in favor of evals which you would create as you would for any other LLM agent workflow.
by Spooky23 | 2025-12-04 19:32:07+00:00
In my experience, leadership is the ability to guide and direct, power is the ability to influence and control. Leaders wield implicit power. Officers of the company wield explicit power.

I see management in the ideal case of finding leaders and equipping them with organizational authority. That's often not what happens, and when you fuck up, the tail wags the dog, and you give empty suits power they can't control. It's one of the reasons "MBA" managers often are perceived as shitty - they lack domain knowledge, have mediocre finance/accounting skills and are invested with lots of power.

As a senior leader in a tech org, my value is deep understanding of the business and the engineering landscape broadly, along with deep knowledge in a few verticals. My goal every day is to plan and articulate what we need to do, make sure my teams have what they need, and help "litigate" disputes and problems. "Agile" religious adherents, project and program managers are not leaders.

Engineers in general are terrible at organizing people, and tend to create little fiefdoms of straw bosses. When I look for directors and managers, I'm looking for the kids who played Civ and SimCity who aren't literalists.
by DesiLurker | 2025-12-04 19:33:49+00:00
yes you are right the question was ambiguous. WHat I was really looking for is if there is a way to physically derive PI out of some basic cellular automata operations. that does not necessarily have to involve circles etc. much less so about representing digits of PI itself. just that an pattern that evolves into ever more accurate values of pi (or a quantity derived from pi). this definitly must not be encoded or somehow preprogrammed into the GoL's initial condition. In fact I dont even care if the evolution rules of standard GoL are followed. just that SOME set of rules automatically produce PI-derivative.

the reason it would be cool is because then we've taken a most fundamental geometric constant and derived it from purely graph update type of mechanics. if you could do that then likely you can do a whole set of other things like physical laws.
by michaelt | 2025-12-04 19:33:54+00:00
It's not unusual for diagnostic criteria to hinge on the impact the thing is having on your work/family/school life.

Alcoholism, for example - we don't define alcoholism as drinking ≥2 bottles of wine a week, or say that 1 glass of wine a week is part of an alcoholism spectrum.

Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested.

How much of a problem an alcoholic is for others being roughly equal to how much of a problem alcoholism is for the alcoholic.
by bottlepalm | 2025-12-04 19:34:06+00:00
Having a mental disability is chic for kids right now. You won't find a discord or other online profile of a kid with less than three mental disabilities listed. For better or worse, they use them to connect with one another, have something in common. It doesn't help either that these disabilities are super easy to misdiagnose with dishonest patients which means lots of real drugs are flowing to children with fake problems.

This is all aside from the fact that these disabilities can be used as a way to get all sorts of special treatment. That's just icing on the cake. They see each other doing it and say why not me as well. It's a feign mental disorder chain reaction that's gone critical. Sexuality as well. They like to collect labels like Pokémon. Massive social benefit.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-12-04 19:34:06+00:00
Yes. The amount of gaming and cheating in pursuit of school credential maxing is astonishing. It is an entire industry. Parents pay many thousands of dollars to "consultants" who help facilitate it.

Anecdotally this seems like it has become standard practice among the well-off families I know with children around college age. When everyone is doing it there is a sense that you have to do it too or you'll be left behind.
by dmix | 2025-12-04 19:34:14+00:00
I'd much rather be in a country where the odd temporary shortage happens due to a massive new market appearing than one where supply/demand is always fixed and static because nothing new gets built without extreme careful planning.

AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and things will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips and go back to normal as always. There's too much money involved for this not to scale up.

Markets can't adapt overnight to tons of data centers being built all of a sudden but it will adapt.
by Loic | 2025-12-04 19:34:20+00:00
I think the OpenAI deal to lock wafers was a wonderful coup. OpenAI is more and more losing ground against the regularity[0] of the improvements coming from Anthropic, Google and even the open weights models. By creating a chock point at the hardware level, OpenAI can prevent the competition from increasing their reach because of the lack of hardware.

[0]: For me this is really an important part of working with Claude, the model improves with the time but stay consistent, its "personality" or whatever you want to call it, has been really stable over the past versions, this allows a very smooth transition from version N to N+1.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-04 19:34:23+00:00
I can buy a smartphone or tablet that's 100% unlockable and has all the bells and whistles right now, and get it delivered in 24 hours, and not pay significantly more than average.

I think the market is working just fine. (To which people usually say "for now". Well yeah, the sun hasn't gone supernova... for now)
by tbd23 | 2025-12-04 19:34:36+00:00
The most WTF moment for me was that recent Visual Studio versions hooked up the “add missing import” quick fix suggestion to AI. The AI would spin for 5s, then delete the entire file and only leave the new import statement.

I’m sure someone on the VS team got a pat on the back for increasing AI usage but it’s infuriating that they broke a feature that worked perfectly for a decade+ without AI. Luckily there was a switch buried in settings to disable the AI integration.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-12-04 19:34:46+00:00
16GB is more than fine if you're not doing high-end gaming, or heavy production workloads. No need for debloating.

But it doesn't matter either way, because both 16 and 32GB have what, doubled, tripled? It's nuts. Even if you say "just buy less memory", now is a horrible time to be building a system.
by thatfrenchguy | 2025-12-04 19:35:05+00:00
> The result is a deeply distorted view of "normal." If ever struggling to focus or experiencing boredom is a sign you have ADHD > risk-aversion endemic in the striving children of the upper middle class

OP has likely never had a kid with ADHD (I get it, they're like 24), getting a kid to be ADHD diagnosed is neither fun nor something you would do lightly in the US.

Which is also why older millennials would just not get diagnosed and just struggle more. Tech is full high functioning people with ADHD and autism, it's not surprising you'd see so many students at Stanford being the same.
by EuAndreh | 2025-12-04 19:35:48+00:00
As free advertisement to rsync.net, I also like the service and support.

I have not deleted any of my daily borg backups for many years, covering my laptop and some servers. Borg has an equivalent `borg serve` feature as detailed in the article.

I use borg mount every other week. After the initial config, you can just type:

$ borg mount :: borg/

...and browse the full archive lazily. Most of the time I'm looking at the last entry, but I've done some historical searching once or twice.

Even though I count the rsync.net backup only once in the 3-2-1 backup rule, its geo-distributed under the hood, so there's also that.

I forgot to update the payment credit card once and got a few months of grace with periodic notices, but no service cut and excellent customer support.

I'm also fond of their stance on pretend standards, like PCI compliance: https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html

IIRC I created the account for use as a git-annex remote, but I've used it for archival and sshfs, which is very convenient.
by walpurginacht | 2025-12-04 19:35:50+00:00
I think it's outright disrespectful to just assume people in such circumstances are just looking for external factors to step out of responsibility. Have you ever thought that they do want to make a move, but just cant because their minds are broken?

you cant apply the "you actually just have to step up and get out of your comfort zone" advice to people whose minds are severely altered by their condition. You fix the condition first, or give a remedy, then when they start to get a grip on things you move to making changes to get them out of the situation

thank god you only speak for yourself, please keep it that way