MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-04 15:51:02+00:00
You're doing the same assuming "good times = comfort = weakness" as a thing you already think, which is what the long reply I linked is debunking. What you said implies an opposite, something like: scarcity and famine strengthens the social fabric by encouraging long-term thinking over short-term maintenance. Actually it doesn't, scarcity leads to dog-eat-dog short-term survival tactics anything from stealing from neighbours, eating next year's seeds, up to eating the farm dog or selling the farm machinery or cannibalism, and leads to squalor, disease, and fire risks because nobody has time or energy or resources to spare on anything but the most urgent survival.

Abundance, by contrast, allows seed saving, food storage for winter, spare resources to use on washing and hygiene and medicine and recovering from illness, rule of law and enforcement, time away from subsistence farming and scavenging for food to enable things like developing metalworking skills, inventing, practicing archery, spending time on other society-building rituals like building churches and going to church.

> "A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing"

If they are "incredibly dangerous" does that not make them "strong"? These are supposed to be the "weak men" created by "good times", aren't they? Are they strong men created by weak times who are themselves creating weak times by rotting society? Or are they strong because they are men, independent of the times? Does this fit into the saying at all?
by dasil003 | 2025-12-04 15:51:35+00:00
This is a well articulated article and the OA makes some good observations about the differences in evaluation between a product engineering org and an infra engineering org. It's also clear he's got real technical chops to finish a masters degree and then make L7 at Google in just under 8 years, and clearly that doesn't happen without an ability to navigate some level of large org politics.

I will say though, that there is still a good amount of naivete in the reasoning presented. The bottom line is that these generalizations and rationalizations are based on a single vary large company and implicitly dependent on the viewpoint and priorities of a bunch of VPs and executives whose mental model may or may not align with how you see the world in the infra trenches. Now Google is an engineering-driven culture, so the author is probably not too far off, but it also represents a particular time and place. Google has enjoyed one of the strongest and most profitable market positions that was cemented years before he entered the work force, and so there's a level of comfort and sheltered existence that infra teams at most companies do not enjoy. Make hay during the good times, but always be aware leaderships attitudes and priorities can change very quickly due to market or investor pressure, and at that point you need to be ready to adapt and articulate your value in a new environment of greater scrutiny, or to a new company (in the case of layoffs).
by antiframe | 2025-12-04 15:52:50+00:00
Yes, you don't want to under spend on your tools to the point where you suffer. But, I think you are missing the flip side. I can do my work comfortably with 32GB RAM, but my 1% a year budget could get me more. But, why not pocket it.

The goal is the right tool for the job, not the best tool you can afford.
by malshe | 2025-12-04 15:53:46+00:00
> Partially because it feels like it comes from a place of authority, and partially because of how self confident AI always sounds.

To add to that, this research paper[1] argues that people with low AI literary are more receptive to AI messaging because they find it magical.

The paper is now published but it's behind paywall so I shared the working paper link.

[1] https://thearf-org-unified-admin.s3.amazonaws.com/MSI_Report...
by fulafel | 2025-12-04 15:54:07+00:00
Well, apps tuned for performance and apps using native code have more than a little overlap. Even back then there were a lot of apps besides games that used native code for the hot code paths. But games of course are huge by themselves, and besides performance you need to have good power efficiency in running them.

Here's some more details: https://www.theregister.com/2014/05/02/arm_test_results_atta...

(note it's a 2-part, the "next page" link is small print )
by xrd | 2025-12-04 15:54:10+00:00
I've been spending the last week casually looking at strudel.cc.

They have a notation that looks similar (basically a JavaScript port of the Haskell version).

I like this, but I'm curious why I would want to use this over strudel. Strudel blends the language with a js runtime and that's really powerful and fun.
by sigseg1v | 2025-12-04 15:54:18+00:00
This is what I'm most interested in. I have an application which has a smaller trimmed down client version but it shares a lot of code with the larger full version of itself. Part of that code is query logic and it's very dependent on multiple connections and even the simplest transactions on it will deadlock without multiple connections. Right now if one wants to use the Postgres option, it needs Postgres manually installed and connected to it which is a mess. It would be the dream to have a way to easily ship Postgres in a small to medium sized app in a enterprise-Windows-sysadmin-friendly way and be able to use the same Postgres queries.
by lemonwaterlime | 2025-12-04 15:54:25+00:00
I like to do data-oriented programming, and was just thinking about how I want to organize (and search through) the primary data structures/concepts for a project I'm working on. Part of that involved thinking about things like what information I might cache and what representations data might take. That lead me to looking into the nuances of things like B-Trees, AVL Trees, Quadtrees, k-d trees and so forth.

I've found the book "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" by Hanan Samet to be an excellent resource when looking for a slightly deeper dive than a more introductory algorithms course. It goes in depth on the nuances of these approaches, many of which are highly similar at a cursory glance.
by jppope | 2025-12-04 15:54:37+00:00
Just wanted to provide a useful link on the topic of leadership. The US army publishes its doctrine for free and updates it somewhat regularly:

https://talent.army.mil/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ARN20039_...

The doctrine is a no-nonsense, no-fluff document based on 200+ years of military tradition where the effectiveness of the leadership is actually life and death. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in leadership.
by hansvm | 2025-12-04 15:54:39+00:00
Most people who use computers for the main part of their jobs literally can't spend that much if they don't want to be homeless.

Most of the rest arguably shouldn't. If you have $10k/yr in effective pay after taxes, healthcare, rent, food, transportation to your job, etc, then a $5k/yr purchase is insane, especially if you haven't built up an emergency fund yet.

Of the rest (people who can relatively easily afford it), most still probably shouldn't. Unless the net present value of your post-tax future incremental gains (raises, promotions, etc) derived from that expenditure exceeds $5k/yr you're better off financially doing almost anything else with that cash. That's doubly true when you consider that truly amazing computers cost $2k total nowadays without substantial improvements year-to-year. Contrasting buying one of those every 2yrs vs your proposal, you'd need a $4k/yr net expenditure to pay off somehow, somehow making use of the incremental CPU/RAM/etc to achieve that value. If it doesn't pay off then it's just a toy you're buying for personal enjoyment, not something that you should nebulously tie to revenue generation potential with an arbitrary 1% rule. Still maybe buy it, but be honest about the reason.

So, we're left with people who can afford such a thing and whose earning potential actually does increase enough with that hardware compared to a cheaper option for it to be worth it. I'm imagining that's an extremely small set. I certainly use computers heavily for work and could drop $5k/yr without batting an eye, but I literally have no idea what I could do with that extra hardware to make it pay off. If I could spend $5k/yr on internet worth a damn I'd do that in a heartbeat (moving soon I hope, which should fix that), but the rest of my setup handily does everything I want it to.

Don't get me wrong, I've bought hardware for work before (e.g., nobody seems to want to procure Linux machines for devs even when they're working on driver code and whatnot), and it's paid off, but at the scale of $5k/yr I don't think many people do something where that would have positive ROI.
by sota_pop | 2025-12-04 15:54:56+00:00
It’s possible the model architecture influences the effectiveness of utilizing pretrained weights. i.e. cnns might be a good fit for this since the first portion is the feature extractor, but you might scrap the decoder and simply retrain that.

Can’t say whether the same would work with Transformer architecture, but I would guess there are some portions that could potentially be reused? (there still exists an encoder/feature extraction portion)

If you’re reusing weights from an existing model, then it seems it becomes more of a “fine-tuning” exercise as opposed to training a novel foundational model.
by Gormo | 2025-12-04 15:55:03+00:00
I'm not sure that's directly analogous, though. We're talking about people looking at specific cultural trends and making reasoned arguments about specific causes and effects, not just saying "X will happen". Specific models and assumptions about how human societies work are often validated by historical example, and don't just predict end states, but sequences of events that extend over longer terms.

When people say they see history repeating itself, it's worth hearing them out.
by niwtsol | 2025-12-04 15:55:12+00:00
This comment made me question the specifics of my mental model pushrod vs overhead cam engine. I found this site that has three nice gif’s which was exactly what my visual brain wanted to see for comparing the differences - https://www.samarins.com/glossary/dohc.html

Thanks for the comment as it was the impetus for me to expand my engine knowledge today!
by mvkel | 2025-12-04 15:55:32+00:00
But you can't remove something from the internet once it's there, so once it's released, it's expected that it always will be.

It's also impossible to guarantee a 100% secure infrastructure, no matter how good your product team is.

In the grey is a term of art: "best efforts."

If data is leaking, and it wasn't because hackers bypassed a bunch of safeguards, if it can be shown that you didn't use Best Efforts to secure said data, there is liability.
by TeaVMFan | 2025-12-04 15:55:33+00:00
The incredibly litigious company here is Deno. Deno sued on a whim, realized they were massively unprepared, then asked the public to fund a legal campaign that will benefit Deno themselves, a for-profit, VC-backed company.

This personal vendetta will likely end with the community unable to use the term JavaScript. Nobody should support this.
by quectophoton | 2025-12-04 15:55:41+00:00
> Docker Compose is simple: You have a Compose file that just needs Docker (or Podman).

And if you want to use more than one machine then you run `docker swarm init`, and you can keep using the Compose file you already have, almost unchanged.

It's not a K8s replacement, but I'm guessing for some people it would be enough and less effort than a full migration to Kubernetes (e.g. hobby projects).
by adventured | 2025-12-04 15:56:02+00:00
Sun systems were extremely popular in corporate Silicon Valley in the 1990s. VCs would push the more expensive systems onto their well-funded start-ups. Here's a big check, do what the other well-funded start-ups are doing and buy Sun. More cost effective Apache systems were very widely being used by start-ups on tighter budgets. But even Yahoo for example scaled itself on Apache, as did Geocities.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-04 15:56:08+00:00
But see, Claude can do nothing even better than it can choose between options. So why should that boss keep his job again?

"Bring me solutions, not problems" can mean "You are a competent, knowledgeable employee, who has identified a problem. You know enough to look at the alternatives and decide which is best, or at least which ones are workable. Bring me that, not just the problem."

And if it does mean that, it's empowering. You with your hands on the situation, you get to tell the boss what you think the best answer is, and the boss backstops you from deciding something that won't work in the bigger picture.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-04 15:56:12+00:00
This was written in 2002, I can’t fault Joel for not having perfect foresight.

But if I squint I can see the strategy. First you got to get rid of the industries dependency on Microsoft, if you can get developers comfortable with Java, Microsoft Windows was not going to focus on making Windows Servers the best place to run Java.

Java could have very well been the “nose of the camel in the tent”.

Javascript was definitely an attempt to commoditize “where you run applications” to get more people running apps in the browser.
by postit | 2025-12-04 15:56:26+00:00
One thing I’ve learned in my 25+ year career is that if you don't own your narrative and your work, someone else will claim it - especially in corporate America.

I have lost count of the brilliant engineers who were passed over for credit simply because someone less technically capable, but extremely popular, pulled the strings to steal the spotlight.

You don't necessarily need to be in the spotlight, but you do need to leave a paper trail. Claim your work and inventions both internally and externally. You don't need to be a 'LinkedIn thought leader' to do this, just submit talks to conferences and find peers at other companies who understand the difference between those who build and those who only talk about building.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-04 15:56:31+00:00
JavaScript is an interpreted language: write, run. No build steps required.

Building was introduced as a temporary measure, to handle cross-browser awkwardness (grunt and stuff like that). People overused it. We totally don't need it anymore. TypeScript is awesome but a major blocker to this return to a more nimbler ecosystem.

People in the 2000s discovered that mixing code with HTML tags was bad and big complexity demon mansion. By the end of the 2000s, this was fixed in the tools of that time. I consider JSX a best-practices regression. It feels like ASP.NET, but the kids don't notice because they have never seen ASP.NET.

For a while, we also saw npm as temporary. A better thing, more web-friendly, would appear. That never happened.

JavaScript could have been great.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-12-04 15:56:38+00:00
To me that reads 3x, not "almost 10x". The main differrence here is probably power. A desktop/server is happy to send 15W to the SSD and hundreds of watts to the CPU, while a laptop wants the SSD running in the ~1 watt range and the CPU in the 10s of watts range.
by pragma_x | 2025-12-04 15:56:42+00:00
I must have misunderstood what "Servant Leadership" actually is. I identify as such, but I also do just about all of the "Transparent Leadership" things called out in the article. I may have to re-evaluate my orientation.

There's only one place I disagree and that's when it comes to empowering the team to do every last thing within your charge ("become redundant"). Depending on the organization, there are some actions that only a manager is empowered to do. Someone still needs to be present to weigh in on disputes/arguments, break ties, handle performance, reviews, interviews, PIPs, dismissals, and handle _other_ managers when necessary. It's simply not possible delegate these things and in the case of dealing with other managers, can imperil a person's employment.

Also, I would caution anyone to avoid directly comparing management to parenthood, even as a metaphor. A lot of people have terrible parents, and so model the worst behaviors: they can't nurture a houseplant let alone a human being. I've seen people like this bring the worst possible models for management into the workplace this way, and they do a ton of damage to businesses, psyches, and careers in return. Instead, I urge anyone to look to the carpenter/gardener dichotomy and how good leadership requires a bit of both:

https://www.intellicoach.com/ep14/
by TinyBig | 2025-12-04 15:57:36+00:00
James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is a useful lens here. Scott argues that modern states flattened human complexity into legible categories so they could govern: surnames, maps, censuses, standardized occupations. You lose a lot of nuance, but in theory the trade-off is that the state can then build institutions that serve the public.

AI feels like a more extreme version of that flattening, but without the civic purpose that justified it. You end up with legibility without legitimacy. That’s the part I think we don’t have a good framework for yet.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-04 15:57:47+00:00
Read what you just wrote. You are just declaring a belief, not making an actual point.

Do you expect to learn? Get wiser?

If you do, you will eventually develop wisdom that younger people don’t have yet - or may never get. Younger people find new ways to do many things better, but regress in other ways. Lacking your (and your generation’s common) experiences.

Which is why the only old people who can’t see any real regression are … well I have yet to meet that kind of old person, other than those unfortunate to have dementia.

Also, every new better (or perceived better) way to do things has to reinvent many obvious things all over again. Things many won’t realize were already solved by previous practices. Which takes time.

So meanwhile, regressions.

And there is no assurance that new ways will really be better, after all regressions are addressed. Because it is impossible to see all the implications of complex changes.

Anyone who isn’t aware that the amount of today’s glue code, rewriting of common algorithms for slightly different contexts, the mush mash of different tools, platforms, and dependencies, and all their individual quirks, was a non-optimal outcome…

But the current pain points will drive a new way. And so it goes.

Progress is not smooth or monotonic.

It is a compliment to discount that you won’t also notice. Not a critique.
by neomantra | 2025-12-04 15:58:01+00:00
Thank you for sharing this. I started as a youngling on a 300 baud modem. 1200 baud upgrade modems had a zeitgeist of being just for piracy — who else would need so much bandwidth said those who charged by the minute. Information wasn’t flowing freely and resource-dense countries had advantages to spread it around themselves. Before HTTP and WWW there wasn’t much information architecture existent either.

But what makes me happy to hear is that - on the other side of the planet - random kids were also plugging in a modem, to get connected with each other and press at the edge of the future.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-12-04 15:58:10+00:00
You're reminding me of when Sun was using the slogan "The Network is the Computer," and even put it on a T-Shirt or two. Most tech-types I knew chuckled a bit. Someone had a T-Shirt printed up saying "The Network is the Network. The Computer is the Computer. Sorry for the confusion."

But I think what they were trying to say was "in the future, the data you use will be spread out all over the network," which, yes, was an advanced concept in 1995. And I hope it was a business strategy to try to sidestep MSFT's desktop dominance (otherwise they were doing it by accident.) I think Sun did a great job of helping create a world where your desktop OS didn't matter that much (I use FreeBSD, Linux, Win10 and occasionally macOS on a daily basis.) But it seems to me Sun really missed the mobile revolution. In the late 2000s, we had a Sun guy come and try to pitch the latest SPARC CPUs for mobile designs. IIRC, they had great per/cycle power numbers, but were just CPUs (not SoCs) and it was hard to throttle them down to the point where you could get decent battery performance. Alas, so much great technology, now wasted.
by khannn | 2025-12-04 15:58:19+00:00
"The price of eggs has nothing on the price of computer memory right now.". A dozen eggs went to ~$5. They are eggs and most people use what, max 12 eggs a month? Get out of here with that trite garbage. Everyone knew that the egg shortage was due to the extreme step the US does of culling herds infected with avian flu and that they were transitory.
by catapart | 2025-12-04 15:58:24+00:00
You only need a placeholder if you think the platform matters enough to hold space for. For example: they don't have a placeholder on MySpace.

But if your goal is to prevent other people from having the name altogether, the move I personally enjoyed engaging in was getting my account blocked. That forces them to hold your account only to prevent anyone from using it, lest you might sneak back in and say something "harmful" like "stonetoss is hans kristian graebener".
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-04 15:58:29+00:00
> AI is about centralisation of power > So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things,

There are open source models and these will continue to keep abreast of new features. On device only models are likely to be available too. Both will be good enough especially for consumer use cases. Importantly it is not corporations alone that have access to AI. I for-see whole countries releasing their versions in an open source fashion and much more. After all you can't stop people applying linear algebra ;-)

There doesn't appear to be a moat for these organisations. HN users mention hopping from model to model like rabbits. The core mechanic is interchangeable.

There is a 'barrier to entry' of sorts that does exert some pressure or centralisation particularly at scale. It conveniently aligns well for large corporations and it is that GPU's are expensive and AI requires a lot of processing power. But it isn't the core issue.
by sfink | 2025-12-04 15:58:49+00:00
Having an actual human who is a "brilliant private tutor" is an enormous privilege. A chatbot is not a brilliant private tutor. It is a private tutor, yes, but if it were human it would be guilty of malpractice. It hands out answers but not questions. A tutor's job is to cause the child to learn, to be able to answer similar questions. A standard chatbot's job is to give the child the answer, thus removing the need to learn. Learning can still happen, but only if the child forces it themselves.

That's not to say that a chatbot couldn't emulate a tutor. I don't know how successful it would be, but it seems like a promising idea. In actual practice, that is not how students are using them today. (And I'd bet that if you did have a tutor chatbot, that most students would learn much more about jailbreaking them to divulge answers than they would about the subject matter.)

As for this idea that replacing effort not being a problem, I suggest you do some research because that is everywhere. Talk to a teacher. Or a psychologist, where they call it "depth of processing" (which is a primary determinant of how much of something is incorporated, alongside frequency of exposure). Or just go to a gym and see how many people are getting stronger by paying 24/7 brilliant private weightlifters to do the lifting for them.