MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rdiddly | 2025-12-04 16:46:49+00:00
Everything you've said about comfort and complacency is equally if not more true of scarcity though. Scarcity leads directly to short-term thinking because there's no future to plan for or maintain. Erosion of social bonds happens as desperation increases and people turn to grifting and taking advantage of each other. The original quote is a little too tidy, an oversimplification that fails to grasp a complex reality and seems to have its own agenda/bias. Which you presumably agree with or you would have caught it. The truth is that there are varying levels of easy and hard times, and either one can "create" either kind of man. (And I'm ignoring masculinity as an issue; everybody knows whether they're a man or not.)

Or I can reframe it one more way: If good times create weak men, then all the rich people currently running things corruptly and soaking up whatever 90% of the wealth, are weak, and all the discipline and virtue in society are among the rest of us. Cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose and pro-social ambition in the super-rich and you might have something there.
by notyourday | 2025-12-04 16:46:57+00:00
> I read it as saying you should fire someone because of their age. Not stupid, malicious.

One does not get the title of "Staff Engineer" for age.

One also does not get fired for age. One gets fired for sitting on their ass doing virtually nothing. The "Staff Engineers" and above tend to sit on their ass, doing virtually nothing. Any sane company would do well by firing them.

When Google was a young company the idea of someone in engineering with a fat title sitting on his ass doing nothing was not tolerated. That's when Google was doing amazing things, was innovative and actually gave a s!it because every single person in that company wanted to get s!it done. Right now Google is a standard issue sh!t company because its upper echelons are full of people who are just warming their fancy chairs, talk about their amazing work life balance and count the days to their next options package vests so they can take yet another multi-months vacation.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-12-04 16:47:12+00:00
> scarcity and famine strengthens the social fabric by encouraging long-term thinking over short-term maintenance

Famine is not isomorphic to “hard times”, and particularly not what the aphorism is referring to: self-created hard times, wherein a society’s ability to self-sustain and compete externally is needlessly curtailed.

> If they are "incredibly dangerous" does that not make them "strong"?

I said corrosive and/or dangerous, and weakness can be both corrosive and dangerous.

What you linked to was not a debunking. It was a political viewpoint. Reasonable arguments exist for a different one.
by F3nd0 | 2025-12-04 16:47:13+00:00
Generally speaking, both using and not using X seem like reasonable choices for the FSFE, in my opinion. But deciding to leave it right now over changes in 'direction and climate' seems… odd.

The FSFE's mission, as I understand it, is to support and promote free software. But as far as I know, Twitter has never been a friend of free software, nor has it been supportive of other related values the article mentions, like 'privacy', 'transparency', 'autonomy', 'data protection', etc. It has always been a non-free, centralised network which cared about profit more than user rights, and engagement more than fostering civil discourse.

I don't see FSFE's presence on a platform as endorsement of its values, but rather as a way to leverage its popularity to better promote their mission. That hasn't changed; X is still a popular platform. It's attitude to Free Software and related ideas doesn't seem to have changed, either. So why leave now? I get 'misinformation, harassment, and hate speech' are never a good thing, but I don't recall the FSFE opposing them so vehemently before (more like just ignoring them), so why now, out of the blue? Unless there's been a change in their internal priorities, which they don't communicate, it doesn't really add up for me.

In the end, this just reads like them taking a political stance and trying to rationalise it in more neutral language. And I can understand and respect that decision, but the fuzzy phrasing still rubs me the wrong way.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-12-04 16:47:46+00:00
Some day you're going to need to learn that people can not trust these groups and still be aware that Russia is knee deep in manipulating our governance. Dismissing everyone that doesn't bury their head in the sand as brainwashed is old hat.

Why you list every news group except Fox, which dwarfs all those networks, is a self report.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-12-04 16:48:02+00:00
There are rare software companies where this is exactly what programmers do. The pay is lower than at FAANG & SV/LA/NYC startups, but work-life balance is great, stability is great, and most of all they get to just focus on doing great work. It's not about making quarterly goals, it's about stewarding (or perhaps gardening) a software project for many years. Engineers grow a lot from all the deep, focused feature work and problem solving.

I worked at such a place for 15 years. The downsides for me were lower pay, no equity, and not getting broad industry experience. I ended up leaving, and I now make a lot more money, but I do miss it.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-04 16:48:59+00:00
It appears to me the early exponential gains from new models have plateaued. Current gains seem very marginal, it could be the future model best model that needs "1TB of HBM and specialized TPUs" won't be all that better than the models we have today. All we need to do is wait for commodity hardware that can run current models, and OpenAI / Anthropic et al are done if their whole plan to monetize this is to inject ads into the responses. That is, unless they can actually create AGI that requires infrastructure they control, or some other advancement.
by bikenaga | 2025-12-04 16:49:05+00:00
Abstract: "Using data on millions of internal US migrants, we document that historical homicide rates follow migrants around the United States. Individuals born in historically safe states remain safer wherever they go, while individuals born in historically dangerous states face a greater risk, including from police violence. This pattern holds across demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and marital status, across migrant groups with different average levels of education, income, and even when comparing migrants from different states who reside in the same county. To help understand why, we conducted a large national survey that oversampled internal White US migrants. The results suggest this persistence may reflect a sociocultural adaptation to dangerous settings. Residents and migrants from historically unsafe states—mainly former frontier states and the deep South—see the world as more dangerous, react more forcefully in aggressive scenarios, value toughness, distrust law enforcement, and say they rely on self and family in violent situations. These adaptations may have kept them safe in historically dangerous states, but may increase their vulnerability to harm in safer states."
by a_squirrel | 2025-12-04 16:49:31+00:00
Location: Washington, DC Area. East Coast, United States Remote: I'm open to remote and on-site with no preference Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, C++, C, a little bit of React and Angular 2

Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/25d7fos9gave9iw4vi2ut/Brandon...

Email: bepotts47@gmail.com

Hello! I'm a software developer with lots of experience in full stack and backend development. I was most recently a developer at SirusXM Radio until I was laid off recently. The languages I've used the most are Python, Java, C++, Ruby ( Ruby on Rails ), and JavaScript. I've also worked over a year in a classified setting and I still hold a security clearance. I'm looking for a entry or mid-level software engineer position.

I attended Virginia Tech for three years and studied Computer Science and Math. I got the core CS curriculum completed; the part I didn't complete were the electives. I had to stop attending because I ran out of money.

Due to my current financial situation, unfortunately I'll require a salary position - no equity only.

With all that said, I'm open to having a conversation with anyone. Thanks! :)
by veshnu-avian | 2025-12-04 16:49:42+00:00
AI coding tools fail when they have too many degrees of freedom. Without knowing your architecture, conventions, and constraints, they're solving an underdetermined problem – so they hallucinate plausible but wrong solutions. Avian generates Systems Design, PRDs and tasks that encode your codebase's structure, reducing the solution space so AI agents produce code that actually fits your system.
by davely | 2025-12-04 16:50:12+00:00
About a month ago, the mobo for my 5950x decided to give up the ghost. I decided to just rebuild the whole thing and update from scratch.

So went crazy and bought a 9800X3D, purchased a ridiculous amount of DDR5 RAM (96GB, which matches my old machine’s DDR4 RAM quantity). At the time, it was about $400 USD or so.

I’ve been living in blissful ignorance since then. Seeing this post, I decided to check Amazon. The same amount of RAM is currently $1200!!!
by stingraycharles | 2025-12-04 16:50:12+00:00
Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever.

If, however, AI ended up delivering and they missed the boat, they’re going to be held accountable.

It’s much less risky to just follow industry trends. It takes a lot of technical knowledge, gut, and confidence in your own judgement to push back against an industry-wide trend at that level.
by pietmichal | 2025-12-04 16:51:10+00:00
Counter-Strike 1.6 (and other Goldsrc based games) greatly benefited from AMX Mod X's scripting capabilities. I miss the days where people were playing modded servers.

Obscuring server browser and/or not allowing self-hosting dedicated servers killed modding in modern games. A real shame.

https://www.amxmodx.org/
by lysace | 2025-12-04 16:51:28+00:00
I am fairly certain that Palantir, like many companies before it, will evolve from a sort-of product company into more of a consulting company. It's just what happens when you sell to governments. They won't be able to keep those top 1% engineers.

On talent: Accenture and its predecessors used to have really, really smart people.

I guess I'm just being contrarian and saying that all of this has happened before.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-04 16:51:31+00:00
I think the conflicting point you missed is that "right tool for the job" also implies "right tool". If you don't think that probabilistic output counts as "query response" then LLMs are the "wrong tool" for any text query engine. If a database engine returned the right answer only X% of the time, you would say the database engine is faulty and find another. LLMs are probabilistic algorithms that by their very nature cannot hit 100% accuracy. (Especially as you get into the specifics of things like the lossy "compression" mechanics of tokenization and vectorization. The training set isn't 100% represented without some loss, either.) That doesn't seem like a good fit for a "query engine" tool in a database sense to some of us.

In practice they seem to work well for that at a surface level, most of the time. The complaint is not that LLMs are not a tool for the job of "fancy text query engine", the complaint is that at scale and in the long run, LLMs are not a good tool for that.
Firecrawl getting blocked due to headlesness
by maclarens | 2025-12-04 16:51:46+00:00
I’ve noticed that Firecrawl struggles with certain sites that do better with headful browsers. So we made Teracrawl (https://github.com/BrowserCash/teracrawl), which is an open source crawler built on a headful chrome browser API. (Browser.cash)

I tested a few URLs that are very JS-heavy and anti-bot-ish:

1. Yahoo Finance – Currencies https://finance.yahoo.com/currencies

Teracrawl: got the full currencies table (it actually ran the React app and hit the live pricing API).

Firecrawl: only got the header/nav shell, no Forex table at all. Was getting completely blocked by Yahoo.

2. AT&T wireless phones https://www.att.com/buy/wireless/phones

Firecrawl: just the AT&T header + basic chrome, no phones catalog.

Teracrawl: full phones list + pricing, filters, etc., since it executed the React frontend and fetched the JSON endpoints.

3. GoDaddy domain search https://www.godaddy.com/en-ca/domainsearch/find?…domainToCheck=mydomain.io

Firecrawl: static shell (nav + footer), zero search results. Again, getting blocked.

Teracrawl: full domain search output – availability, pricing, premium/upsell info, all the JS/API-loaded stuff.

Firecrawl seems fine for static content, but on JS-heavy pages or headful checks, it often just gives me skeleton HTML or is blocked.

Teracrawl, because it’s running real headful Chrome, behaves much more like an actual user browser and consistently returned dynamic content and was blocked less.

Firecrawl isn’t bad overall, but for certain sites using a headful browser wins out.
by regularfry | 2025-12-04 16:51:48+00:00
Very minor point, in the grand scheme of things: when converting measurements from imperial to metric, I would be astonished if many recipes need more than two significant figures. When the recipe says "391.32 gram strained greek yogurt" I would not expect disaster to befall me if I only supplied 391.31g.

A more major point is that I don't seem to be able to select text to copy and paste. I had to type out "391.32 gram strained greek yogurt" like some sort of caveman. And that makes me wonder what a screen reader would make of it...
by pineappletooth | 2025-12-04 16:52:13+00:00
Well i am a Java developer in 2025 and we still use maven, we also got IntelliJ which is miles better than eclipse and the company where I am does hire testers.

The world is not worse, you just ended up stuck in the wrong tech stack with the wrong company.

I do agree that the JS ecosystem is terrible tho, and i was a full time js dev before (now i only do some frontend from time to time) we already have a dedicated frontend team.
by RandallBrown | 2025-12-04 16:53:23+00:00
I forget the exact details, but we had a bug that prevented logging in to the app for a large subset of users.

The engineer that caused the bug ended up staying late and fixing it. He was treated like an absolute hero by management, even though it was his fault in the first place. (Don't worry, we all fully understood it wasn't just his fault. The whole system failed and he wouldn't have been harshly judged for the problem.)

From then on we joked about adding bugs on purpose so that we could all get similar treatment.
by scythe | 2025-12-04 16:53:28+00:00
In the first case the carbon dioxide is already concentrated, and in the second it has to be extracted by processing (at least) 2500 tons of air for each ton of carbon dioxide obtained. There are easier cases for carbon capture, when CO2 can actually be captured at the point of release (steel and cement plants, landfills) but atmospheric extraction is hard. Of course, plants can and do process lots of air (by it blowing over the leaves) but massively increasing plant growth is also hard.
Show HN: Giftl – A simple, free gift registry
by frustracean | 2025-12-04 16:54:35+00:00
My in-laws were asking my wife and I what our kids wanted for Christmas. I wanted to be able to share ideas for gifts without worrying about different family members buying the same gift, or dealing with coordinating "you get them this, _you_ get them that, etc".

So I built a free, simple, occasion-agnostic gift registry. Sign is not required to get started, just for sharing.

Let me know what you think.
by stevesunderland | 2025-12-04 16:54:37+00:00
SEEKING WORK | USA | Remote

Developer + Designer

I'm a graphic designer and web developer who creates websites, brand identities and marketing material for a variety of companies including startups, agencies and non-profit organizations. In addition to my design skills, I am also a full-stack web developer.

DESIGN: websites, apps, UI/UX, mobile, logos, marketing material, trade show displays, packaging, photo retouching, book covers, etc.

DEVELOPMENT: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue, Angular, Python, Django, SQL, PHP, Bootstrap, Foundation, REST APIs, Wordpress, Webpack, Jekyll, Hugo, etc.

PORTFOLIO: https://sunderland.studio

LINKEDIN: http://linkedin.com/in/stevesunderland

CONTACT: stevesunderland@gmail.com
by stingraycharles | 2025-12-04 16:54:48+00:00
You’re correct, you need to learn how to use it. But for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment, unless it’s about fundamental research.

At this point, I consider these AI tools to be an invaluable asset to my work in the same way that search engines are. It’s integrated into my work. But it takes practice on how to use it correctly.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-04 16:54:55+00:00
To me it seems like files could get hard to understand if events that happen simultaneously aren't horizontally lined up like this:

2.0 voice1 | voice2 | ...

Like a text version of old school tracker interfaces:

https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c

POS | TRACK #1 | TRACK #2 | ...
by sjtgraham | 2025-12-04 16:55:16+00:00
This is a very weak letter. Oracle is using the mark in commerce, and the 2019 specimen is presumed valid unless affirmatively disproven. The fact that Oracle doesn’t charge licensing fees for use of the name is irrelevant. Calling something JavaScript ‘JavaScript’ is nominative use, and any attempt by Oracle to enforce against such truthful descriptive use would fail under nominative fair use.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-12-04 16:55:21+00:00
Stonetoss is a well known comic by an alt-Right Neo-Nazi. He kept his identity secret for years (for obvious reasons), but was outed a few years back. He received a lot of hate over this, and got fired from his tech job over it.

The comic was antitrans, antisemitic (with full-on Holocaust denial), racist, and sexist... but Graebener himself is a Latino, so he gets hated on by both the Left and the Right.

Websites that cater to the alt-Right ban users for saying his real name and ban people who make Stonetoss memes that shit on Graebener for being a Nazi.

And you know why HN is actually a great place? dang isn't going to ban me for repeating verifiable facts.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-04 16:55:27+00:00
That's interesting.

I did everything he mentions in "Transparent Leadership," but also the stuff he talks about in "Curling Parenting."

I did it for 25 years. Seemed to work. I kept my job.

In my company, Personal Integrity and Honesty were very important. Not sure how representative that is, in today's world. It was an old-fashioned Japanese corporation.
by th0ma5 | 2025-12-04 16:56:06+00:00
No way to ever know in which condition that being somewhat accurate is going to be good enough or not. And no way to know how accurate the thing is before engaging with it so you have to babysit it... "Can do things" is carrying a lot of load in your statement. It makes the car with no brakes and you tell it not to do that so it makes you one without an accelerator either.
by dominicrose | 2025-12-04 16:56:08+00:00
Yes I guess we've reached a point where it's harder for individuals to grow their hardware or even maintain it. I'm not sure the huge investment in servers for AI is going to be good for companies either. We're honestly in a science-fiction novel right now, I have no idea what's going to happen politicaly with AI.

I don't really believe in AGI if that's what they're going for, but hey they'll get something close to that.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-04 16:56:09+00:00
There is something a little silly about the "refusal" in that the models are all reactive to superficial semantics and there is none of the actual reasoning that it would take to make correct moral decisions.

For instance it is easy to refuse "How do you make an atomic bomb?" or "Can you help me have an affair?" or "Can you help me cheat at League of Legends" but I get good conversations about "I think the people I am playing League of Legends with are cheating, how do they do that and how can I protect myself?" Similarly the atom bomb is a big project and all of the technology is dual use so if you slice it into nice segments it talk your ear off about critical neutron theory or acid-base extractions or the chemical and physical problems of Element 94.

When you really get into ethical trouble at work it usually takes you a while to put all the pieces together and feel the suffering you should feel as a moral subject. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury

It's no suprise to me that refusal ends up with 1 dimension in the embedding because it's a frickin' classification problem
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-04 16:56:23+00:00
As a multiple time ground force commander both in Iraq and stateside for CI operations, I can firmly state that there is literally zero to be learned about leadership from corporate or political worlds.

When I left the USG because it’s fundamentally corrupt, I went into private business thinking there were technical/business leaders that had pro-social incentives, and their heads screwed on.

Man was I wrong.

The US military has by far the best, all encompassing, most focused and persistently updating leadership development and it’s STILL absolutely garbage.

There’s ZERO, and actually most likely negative, incentives to think about and apply ethics in business and politics, because at the end of the day the most ruthless will win in the long run.