MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by braza | 2025-12-25 15:57:03+00:00
I used to related with what the OP says and if he’s under 35 makes sense to jump to another adventure.

Anyways, a friend of mine told me the complete opposite than the OP after not being selected to a promotion 2x: He stayed competitive enough to the market in case of any issue, but at the same time he slightly moving to the “Dead Sea” existence where the tenure created a small co-dependence between himself and its employer.

His employer knows that he’s working at a discount in comparison to offshoring his job, but at the same time even being a L4 like can enjoy a lot of free time and agency to know when and where to throttle his productivity.
by bbarn | 2025-12-25 15:57:31+00:00
I had a similar issue living abroad. My wife had a work visa (which was the reason we we moving) and I was allowed to go being a spouse, but once there getting a permit to work for myself was impossible without a job, and a job was impossible without a work permit.

There were ways around it, but it took finding a job at a really big company to make it work - they had dealt with it and had HR people that specialized in it. Once "on paper", I was pretty free to move around. I would not be surprised if their method was just putting in all zeros in the system or something until the permit number came back.
by amazingman | 2025-12-25 15:59:02+00:00
Blanket statements like this are unhelpfully tribal. Ruby has its uses, and underpins one of the most successful (and cloned) MVC frameworks of all time. But yeah, Python received the attention of data scientists early on and now it's a lingua franca of sorts in that domain. Since AI is so hot right now that makes Python seem superior, but really that's just contingency.

If you're going to make claims, support them.
by sheepscreek | 2025-12-25 15:59:13+00:00
> I’ve seen merit as a component of success a minority of the time

Small but an absolutely necessary correction. “Merit” or being at the top of the academic ladder absolutely does open doors for you that are closed to others. But that’s all it does and everything you’ve said is applicable from that point on.

Put in other words, merit can help you get a job at Google, McKinsey, Jane Street, CERN or what have you - but your success after that significantly dependends on your innate survival skills and some luck. The latter is indiscernible and very hard to quantify but it’s what we say is being in the right place at the right time (or the opposite of it).

All that to say that in OPs case that his daughter hasn’t done anything wrong. He hasn’t done anything wrong. Times are changing and during the transition phase with the adoption of AI (and current geopolitical climate), companies are weary of making any significant investments and realigning their cost structures towards resilience. Except for certain pockets, there’s less spending on R&D, non-cash cow BUs being folded down, etc.

IMO, OP should suggest and encourage therapy or some kind of a professional with a “coaching” angle (life coach, career coach, emotional coach, …) to support her and keep her motivated through this - like any professional athlete after a major setback.

Bottom line is this - she’s do great - just needs to get through this, survive now to thrive eventually.
by znpy | 2025-12-25 15:59:32+00:00
Merit isn’t a matter of executing a playbook and ticking off boxes. That approach is fallible.

I know this is rough advice, but: her approach isn’t working. She should try something different. Stuff is different right now, you/she can’t expect the 2016 playbook to work unchanged in 2026.

I’m not a junior so i’m not sure what to advice specifically, but something other than “the playbook” is needed.
by dustingetz | 2025-12-25 15:59:40+00:00
Timing imo. I think the tech labor market bottom is in the past, venture capital is flowing again, companies that over hired have corrected it, interest rates are on their way back down, and a bunch of huge IPOs are lining up for 2026 - Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Databricks, Canva, Discord - which is going to inject a bunch of liquidity into tech capital markets. And the jury is still out on AI, very much at the top of a hype cycle, CEOs and boards have prematurely declared to their customers and the world that AI is working (because saying that makes their stock price go up) but the enterprise outcomes don't seem to be there.

My advice to your daughter: to try to make software into a fun hobby, watch a ton of coding youtube, AI and youtube are tearing down hurdles to learning, make a twitter, talk about your hobby, farm those likes. What were her favorite courses at MIT?
by alsetmusic | 2025-12-25 16:00:20+00:00
I'm reminded of a coworker who spoke to his device with an upward inflection when asking a question. He sounded like he was talking to a human when he prompted, "what time is it?" I told him he could ask in a flat tone because it's a computer and it doesn't care if he's polite. I don't remember how he responded, but I've run into that conversation with someone at least once after him when I was accused of being rude to Alexa.
by thesz | 2025-12-25 16:00:53+00:00
https://timharris.uk/papers/2005-ppopp-composable.pdf - Composable Memory Transactions.

Page 13 discuss why imperative approach like Rust's may fail in delivering transactional memory and why arbitrary-side-effect-free transactions in Haskell are, in fact, very composable due to effects separation inside STM and IO monads.
by BadCookie | 2025-12-25 16:01:02+00:00
I think it is a mistake not to celebrate the holidays. You don’t have to pretend that everything is okay in order to celebrate each other.

I am similar to your daughter in some ways but much older. Lately, I have felt that I have reached a dead-end in my career (though I am still employed). I have a few thoughts that might be useful. One is the concept of ikigai: finding the intersection of what you enjoy, what you are good at, and what the world needs. For a long time, it seemed like building software hit all three marks for me, but in the last couple of years, it no longer seems to hit the last one very well.

When I was younger, my reaction to difficult things was to simply try harder. I’d throw myself at the problem repeatedly until it yielded. That can be the right thing to do, but with age I have gained enough wisdom to realize that sometimes it’s better to go after the lower-hanging fruit.

I am not suggesting that your daughter give up, but if I were you, I would help her identify a back-up plan. Help her get excited about the possibilities in case plan A does not work out. If she feels that she has other options, she may regain her confidence regardless of what happens.
by tsoukase | 2025-12-25 16:02:09+00:00
For small(ish) kids there is a certain correlation between play- and clean-up-time. If there was a toy which deviated, it would become blockbuster and there are hardly any such. Electronic screens are popular as nannies because of this.

Personally I choose all types in rotation. One toy of high duration is Play-Doh but afterwards needs a cleaning machine.
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-25 16:04:23+00:00
> That's intentional, corporate raiding (or by its legal name, leveraged buyouts and similar strategies).

But that's not what they did as far as I know. They just implemented some braindead policies that caused income to grind to a halt overnight, because those policies worked so well in the other countries ther were in.

The good employees jumped ship early. I had a limited contract which didn't get renewed due to hiring freeze.
by mackeye | 2025-12-25 16:04:27+00:00
(i worked a _little bit_ on dwl) each wlroots upgrade is a pretty small diff on the dwl source. the annoying part is, as dwl is configured with patches, every patch author has to update their patch to the new 0.x, as dwl is quite minimal, and thus has no stable api. that being said, obviously, dwm doesn't have this problem :)

also, for dwl, the issue is that the initial author (not the guy that wrote that notice) is sorta mia, and he has control of the repo on codeberg, so we'd probably need to fork to be safe, and he may not want to take on project lead. (he checks every patch for merge conflicts with one another and upgrade breakages, god bless him lol)
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-25 16:05:02+00:00
The equity in almost all startups has already been a bait and switch for more than a decade. Most will refuse to answer you about % of equity share anyways, but if they did it's tiny tiny amounts, and in the end half the time it's up to the acquiring entity just how seriously they end up taking it. If you landed at an entity like Google (as I did from the place I was working 15+ years ago) you could be treated well. Elsewhere, not great.

During boom times it made more financial sense to go straight to a FAANG if you could.
by SergeAx | 2025-12-25 16:05:27+00:00
My desktop PC has been constantly evolving for about 15 years now, literally the ship of Theseus. Currently, following the latest upgrade in September, it's an absolute powerhouse.

During the same time, I burned through four laptops (for travel purposes), all of which were mostly weak, with a maximum of 16 GB RAM, no real GPUs, and 14"-15" screens, expensive, and had poor resale value.

My next travel computer will be Framework 16.
by kasey_junk | 2025-12-25 16:05:54+00:00
Multiple share classes are the norm even before the new acquisition types we see here. It’s extremely common in an acquisition for employee shares to be worth nothing while investor and founder shares are paid out.

But these new “acquisitions” aren’t even that. They are not acquisitions at all. They just hire the talent directly with perhaps an ip rights agreement thrown in as a fig leaf.
Why do so many "agentic AI" systems collapse without persistent state?
by JohannesGlaser | 2025-12-25 16:06:29+00:00
I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s currently called “agentic AI”. Many systems try to achieve agent-like behavior through planning, tool use, orchestration layers, or increasingly careful prompting. In practice, what I keep running into is that these systems don’t fail because models can’t reason or plan, but because they lack stable state. Without persistent state, coherence has to be re-established every turn. The result is longer prompts, retrieval pipelines, guardrails, and corrective instructions — all of which help access information, but don’t really solve continuity over time.

I’ve been experimenting with a different approach: making state explicit and persistent outside the model, but directly attached to the assistant’s working environment. Append-only logs, rules, inventories, histories — readable files that the model initializes from every run. Not queried opportunistically like a vector DB, just present as working context. Once state is stable, a lot of “agentic” behavior seems to emerge naturally. The system stops reacting moment by moment and starts behaving coherently across longer timescales.

I’m curious how others here see this: Is persistent state under-discussed compared to planning and tooling? For those building agents with RAG / LangChain / similar stacks: how do you handle continuity across days or weeks? Am I underestimating what current agent frameworks already solve here?

Would love technical perspectives or counterexamples.
Ask HN: Why is savannah.gnu.org down so much and what are the alternatives?
by ILoveHorses | 2025-12-25 16:06:37+00:00
I'm trying to get my hands on some of the source code for GNU SW. I really need to access the ORIGINAL source code uploaded on GNU and not one of the mirrors available on GitHub. It seems like savannah is the only place where version-controlled source code is hosted but I cannot access it at all; I've tried several times over the past few days. Is this some IP issue or is the website down that often?
by saghm | 2025-12-25 16:07:09+00:00
I think you're overestimating how much making $800k versus $300k would actually make most people happier. You're welcome to disagree with me, but there's plenty of research indicating this might be the case (from a quick Google for "happiness self reported by income" this is the first result: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/does-more-money-correlate-g...).

If you think that everyone is the would either agrees with you or is "dense" without doing any sort of cursory investigation on whether the alternate view might actually be common or supported by evidence, I'm honestly not really sure why you're bothering to engage in discussion in the first place.
by devilbunny | 2025-12-25 16:07:29+00:00
They phrase it oddly, I think to try to get people to buy a controller, but you only need it for setup, and the free software controller works fine for that. You only really need a hardware controller for a business environment where you expect to manage multiple sites remotely (it can be done remotely but isn’t worth the $80 you save vs having a hardware controller on site). Once configured, the devices will keep on doing their thing after reboots. You will have to fire it up for upgrading devices, but that’s no different from running Unifi without a controller with only AP’s - there has to be a provisioning controller somewhere to get them to work as a true network with seamless handoffs and the like. Otherwise, running in standalone mode, they are just like running consumer AP’s individually.

I have a hardware controller, but I will probably end up putting it in my in-laws’ house because software is fine for where I live. I actually set the whole thing up via software controller and transferred the config when it was all set and I would only be making small changes.
by anthonj | 2025-12-25 16:08:02+00:00
If you launch a rocket at escape velocity the momentum and potential energy you create never dissipates.

Certain chemical reaction endotermic reaction require energy to start. This energy is absorbed to generate molecular bond.

Also in the generation and absorption of high energy radiation there are non-thermal processes that can transfer energy.

Even something like bending a metal bar is not 100% a thermal process.
Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
by meridion | 2025-12-25 16:08:57+00:00
Thread for 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509408

Thread for 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782613

Thread for 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33873800

Here are mine:

Technical skills:

- Among my last year's goals was to take on VR dev, which sadly I did not get to. Punting it to 2026. I'm thinking to get the Samsung Galaxy XR and experiment with some VR apps and learn the fundamentals of spatial computing. As an Android mobile developer, that feels like a natural extension.

- Complete the "UCSanDiegoX: Computer Graphics II: Rendering" computer graphics course. I did the first course in the series and found it enlightening (no pun intended)

- Create an e2e project that earns money as a side gig. It's time to put my product and technical knowledge to practice and actually build something people want.

- Leverage AI across all my endeavors. AI tools are here to stay and the more I know how to use them effectively, the better. The speed boost in learning a new framework/concept is phenomenal.

Non-technical skills:

- Expand my social circle - the unstable tech climate made me realize the importance of maintaining a healthy social network. My goal is to connect with more people both inside my company and outside, by both proactively reaching out and going to meetups in my area. In fact, I invite fellow NYC-based HN-ers to contact me at cybercreampuff at yahoo dot com, in case you want to meet up!
by paulryanrogers | 2025-12-25 16:09:00+00:00
> I will never feel like a "normal" person, they will make sure I never will.

Saying "make sure" suggests intent. I would hope the discomfort causing reactions are an unintentional side effect of ignorance. Because if so then there's hope that even the masses can learn to be more considerate and inclusive.

Ultimately, nearly all of us will develop some physical or mental impairment due to accidents or aging.
by sokoloff | 2025-12-25 16:09:09+00:00
This was the first toy I expected to see on the list. Can agree that, though they are somewhat expensive, our kids played with them frequently for the better part of a decade and then we passed them along to cousins who completed the decade of play and then some.

We got some fabric bins to store them in, which made cleanup a 2 minute affair if adults helped or 5 minutes if the kids did it alone.

Highly recommend.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-12-25 16:09:31+00:00
> Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer.

Does this mean that people are having to trade Alzheimer in exchange for high risk of cancer? Or does this mean that we need better precursors that don't require that trade off?
by mrob | 2025-12-25 16:09:33+00:00
The set of toys I spent the most time playing with was a big bag of wooden blocks my grandfather gave me when I was very small. They are well designed, with a good selection of different shapes, e.g. it has cylinders and arches and thin planks as well as cuboids. They got a lot of use because they're so flexible in combining with other toys, e.g. you can build roads and garages for toy cars, or obstacle courses for rolling marbles. The edges and corners are rounded and the wood tough enough that clean-up was just dropping them back into the bag.

I've since given them to a nephew and I'm happy to see he gets just as much entertainment out of them as I did. Plain wooden blocks can represent almost anything. There are no batteries or moving parts to fail. Mine got a little bit of surface wear but they still work just as well as they did when they were new and small children don't care about perfect appearance. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting passed down to another generation and continue to provide the same entertainment. I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-25 16:09:54+00:00
Big problem with modern LEGO for me is that so many modern sets are almost all teensy-tiny pieces, so they look good on the box—the adult-aimed ones have always been like this since they started targeting that market, but now it’s like 95% of all their sets; also, they seem to hate exposed nubs, which is silly if the set is for play.

Larger (like tall 6x2) bricks are uncommon outside buckets, and a lot of larger pieces like dedicated wall-sections or big vehicle nose-bits or car undercarriages are now rare.

The result is that my old sets are a mix of everything from large contoured structural plates down to tiny pieces, but my kids’ bins of legos are like 98% tiny pieces. They use them less than I did, I think because it’s hard to sort through the loose pieces when they’re mostly very small, and with less variety there aren’t as many large pieces to use as jumping-off points to start a build, and making, say, a house-height wall or the front of a space ship is slower than when we had more bricks that could kinda short-hand those pieces and let you skip the middle, if you will, to focus on both the big-picture and fine details. I doubt I’d have liked Lego so much if mine had looked like theirs.
by jevonlipsey | 2025-12-25 16:10:01+00:00
OP. I spent the holidays building a native PICO-8 emulator for iOS because the standard web player suffers from significant audio latency and input lag on mobile Safari, and there just hasn't been anyone else creating an emulator for this console that has infinite free games.

The core engineering challenge was reconciling the asynchronous nature of iOS file I/O with the synchronous requirements of the PICO-8/WASM virtual file system.

A few technical details on the implementation:

1. Bootloader Hijacking: To bypass the default "JELPI" demo cart, I intercept the Emscripten `Module.preRun` lifecycle, manually injecting user code into the WASM heap before the runtime initializes.

2. State Persistence: Instead of standard "Save Games" (SRAM), I implemented a system that dumps the simulated RAM (200+MB) into a GZIP-serialized blob (<1MB). This allows for instant "Save States" that persist exactly where you left off, even if the app is killed.

3. Audio/Input: By bridging the C++ runtime directly to Swift via a custom layer, I managed to eliminate the WebAudio latency that usually plagues PICO-8 on iOS. Games run as if the device was a native pico console itself, very cool!

The project is open source and can be sideloaded via AltStore/SideStore. Happy to answer questions about the WASM/Native bridging!
by meesles | 2025-12-25 16:11:33+00:00
In what ways is it inferior? Neither Ruby or Python are 'fast', so if that is one of your qualifiers you've already made a suboptimal choice.

As for a bigger community, what does that serve? The large python community adds misdirection and more voices to a language that lacks some basic features still. Async/sync code models are still being finalized whereas Ruby has been stable in this regard for 10+ years. Same with tooling - the Ruby side is more consistent and stable: Sidekiq for background jobs (Celery is barely coming to maturity), Bundler for dependencies (pip? poetry? uv?). Mature auth + other frameworks like Devise.

Having worked in both languages professionally, I strongly disagree with your take.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-25 16:12:20+00:00
Googling for this, apparently Tesla do try to recognize police gestures, and are getting better at it.

I wonder who gets the ticket when a driverless car does break the law and get stopped by police? If it's a Taxi service (maybe without a passenger in the car) then maybe it'd the service, but that's a bit different than issuing a traffic ticket to a driver (where there's points as well as a fine).

What if it's a privately owner car - would the ticket go to the car owner, or to the company that built the car ?!
by whast_in_a_name | 2025-12-25 16:12:59+00:00
It happens to everyone

people get laid off, let go etc

the trick is to bounce back

maybe go for Masters? Phd at MIT?

maybe she can apply to an adjacent job, in qa, product management etc

maybe apply to a job she is over-qualified,

maybe take 1/2 a loaf

when I graduated it was a bad recession, all my friends were not getting jobs,

I stayed in school as long as I could,

then I got first job of testing some phone games with high school dropouts at min wage....I was the one with a grad degree in engineering

I kept applying and I got a job that I was happy

and I didnt have my family, parents, friends etc to cheer me on or I sure was not an MIT smart
by acemarke | 2025-12-25 16:13:03+00:00
I've never seen this kind of benchmark graph before, and it looks really neat! How was this generated? What tool was used for the benchmarks?

(I actually spent most of Sep/Oct working on optimizing the Immer JS immutable update library, and used a benchmarking tool called `mitata`, so I was doing a lot of this same kind of work: https://github.com/immerjs/immer/pull/1183 . Would love to add some new tools to my repertoire here!)