MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberax | 2025-12-25 00:06:39+00:00
> Do say: "I optimized a high-throughput distributed system to prioritize user retention metrics, reducing latency by 150ms through a custom caching layer."

Ugh. Pain. I'm hiring, and I've been filtering out resumes that are heavy on these kinds of metrics.

Because I literally get thousands of entries with these kinds of wording. Often with excessively precise numbers, like "by 23.5%".

My problem is that it's hard to tell the amount of real work it took to do that. It might have been as stupid as creating an additional index in the database, or it might have involved a deep refactoring across multiple systems with a zero-downtime gradual rollout.

I would prefer something like: "I worked as the hands-on leading developer to do a large-scale refactor on the highly loaded front-end network routing system, resulting in user-visible latency decrease on the Youtube front page".

For me the key words are: "hands-on" (and not just writing a product brief and getting resources for it), "large-scale refactor" (so likely not just creating an additional database index), "highly loaded".
by blazingbanana | 2025-12-25 00:09:13+00:00
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by sixspeedengine | 2025-12-25 00:09:42+00:00
> The results of that meeting? The same from the previous promotion decisions; “it’s unfortunately a no. You don’t have enough impact.”

Promotion at Google, as in many places, is tough. Status is allocated partially on level, so it sucks to not see that growth.

Sometimes lack of promotion can be not having the right opportunities.

It's fair to leave a company for whatever reason.

For any other L4->L5s, or anyone wanting to become a senior engineer, it's worth self reflecting on whether there's improvement that can be made from failed promotion attempts.

> people all across the org knew me and said I was indispensable to the company and were surprised that I wasn't already at an L5/6 level.

No one in a large org is indispensable, but many are very valuable. Many L4s are very valuable, but at doing L4 work. It's not a value judgement.

L4->L5 is a step of responsibility: can you be trusted to handle a multi quarter project, without much supervision.

> I helped launch/lead features on YouTube, I led teams, I designed and implemented systems that were still in use to that day by many people

The details aren't clear here, but sometimes an engineer can be leading projects, and need supervision: poor delivery, poor communication, poor outcomes.

"Too little impact" in this context can mean "you needed too much supervision" or "too little impact per $TIME_PERIOD" meaning you can have delivered great technical solutions, but not at the rate or level of independence needed to meet the mark.

Again, not meeting this mark isn't a value statement. It's a different type of work, but it happens to be incentivized with more $$$.
by asmor | 2025-12-25 00:10:55+00:00
I am not fucking around when I say incompatible with my existence. Of course I don't mean getting murdered, but advocating conversion therapy gets pretty close.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/bad-therapy-08849dc9

I wouldn't be around if this was policy where I live (Let's put aside that the UK is in fact pretty fucked on that)
by anonnon | 2025-12-25 00:10:59+00:00
> In the aviation world the fuel is very much still leaded.

In the general aviation world, to be precise: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...

The fact that GA is the quintessential arrogant rich man's hobby makes the environmental and human health externalities of it all the more disgusting. However, looking at it from a glass half full perspective, GA does exist at that sweet avocational intersection of "expensive" and "deadly," often putting a significant dent in the finances of those whom it seduces before killing them.
by mikewarot | 2025-12-25 00:11:07+00:00
I spent 5 years making gears, mostly bevel gears. If you see a Marvel 18" bandsaw made between 2015 and 2020, I probably cut the teeth on the band wheel and its pinion that drives it.

Some of the gears I helped make will still be in use in a century. I find great comfort in that for some reason. The job was rewarding, and interesting, but the pay and commute really sucked.

As for helping others, there were a handful of us in the job shop before it was bought by a bigger machine shop. It's a fairly solitary job.
by mullingitover | 2025-12-25 00:12:03+00:00
> every company is defacto under the states control.

This is kind of a nonsensical statement. Every US company is also de facto under US control, too. They're all subject to US laws. Beyond that, as demonstrated by the recent inauguration, the US oligarchs are demonstrably political pawns who regularly make pilgrimages to the White House to offer token gifts and clap like trained seals.

You can't hold up the US as some kind of beacon of freedom from state control anymore, for the past year all the major industrial leaders have been openly prostrating themselves to the state.
by roenxi | 2025-12-25 00:12:14+00:00
Hard to say, but probably not. Obviously limiting the model's access to history doesn't matter, because it is a given that models have gaps in their knowledge there. Most of history never got written down, so any given model won't be limited by not knowing some of it. Training the AI to give specific answers to specific questions doesn't sound like it'd be a problem either. Every smart person has a few topics they're a bit funny about, so that isn't likely to limit a model any time soon.

Regardless, they're just talking about alignment the same as everyone else. I remember one of the Stable Diffusion series being so worried about pornography that it barely had the ability to lay out human anatomy and there was a big meme about it's desperate attempts at drawing women lying down on grass. Chinese policy can't be seen as likely to end up being on average worse than western ones until we see the outcomes with hindsight.

Although going beyond the ideological sandbox stuff - this "authorities reported taking down 3,500 illegal AI products, including those that lacked AI-content labeling" business could cripple the Chinese ecosystem. If people aren't allowed to deploy models without a whole bunch of up-front engineering know-how then companies will struggle to form.
by eterm | 2025-12-25 00:12:25+00:00
It's a lot less ergonomic but there are source generators in C# :

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-c-source-g...

That said, for more complex results, you'd typically load a serialization on start.

I can see the value in this tool, but there must be a fairly limited niche which is too expensive to just have as static and run on start-up and cache, but not so large you'd prefer to just serialize, store and load.

It also needs to be something that is dynamic at compile time but not at runtime.

So it's very niche, but it's an interesting take on the concept, and it looks easier to use than the default source generators.
by kergonath | 2025-12-25 00:12:32+00:00
For context, the EU is a big place. You need every 27 countries to agree to get anything done, or a big push from the parliament. When it comes to environment regulations, EU regulations are pretty much the common denominator. The fact that this is still more stringent than the UK’s regulations says more about the UK than it does about the EU, unfortunately.
by PacificSpecific | 2025-12-25 00:12:55+00:00
They say it's vscode in the article. I can't say I've seen anything that egregious happen with unity in visual studio.

It's stuff like this though that keeps me from using vscode for code editing (I use it for markdown and JSON file editing only). I guess I don't know what I'm missing but it's never been a smooth experience for me. If I'm on Windows I tend to stick with visual studio.

Maybe I should consider rider...
by shermantanktop | 2025-12-25 00:14:16+00:00
>The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design.

>This duality is exhausting. It forces you to lie by omission to people you respect. You can't tell your team, "I can't take that ticket because I need to study dynamic programming." You just have to work faster.

Guess what promo will get you? More context switching. Maybe that’s a thing to work on.
by wormius | 2025-12-25 00:14:24+00:00
A few comments here touching on "disruption" (especially considering SV's historical mantras about "disruption" and "easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission").

So I think a good renaming is in order: Disruption of Government Efficiency

Slows it down to give them time to catch up, especially in this new tech era.

I read Wired in the 90s, I remember the Libertarian Logic.

The best part is "Oh gee, we might doom society, we should think about these things... hmm. OK, guys, let's keep building it."

Fuck it, let's straight up Stalin it, not just remove restrictions but FORCE these fuckers into slave camps building it all out, industrializing (Siliconizing? LLM-izing?) the future landscape.

We've already bent our "conservative principles" in the name of corporate expediency and fascistic tendencies (who doesn't love a little "public/private" co-operation).

The worst part is, most of these people have no principle and are merely opportunistic rent seekers bent on bending the rules for me, not for thee.
by koito17 | 2025-12-25 00:15:06+00:00
Merry Christmas, everybody!

Love seeing the custom HN theme every year. Sometimes after Christmas, I avoid refreshing an HN tab, so I get to see the theme just a little bit longer :)

This year is a bit special to me. I recently moved countries for a new job, but I moved a bit too soon. Now I am spending the holiday season alone for the first time in my life. Learned a lot of lessons the hard way over the past week.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-25 00:15:29+00:00
My first Christmas with mom gone was really tough. Stuck alone during COVID in 2021 in a really bad place. I couldn't sleep. And I happened to turn on the radio in the middle of the night and there was an Amy Grant interview. I almost turned it off, oh no, christian stuff I thought. But she talked about her first Christmas without her mom. Then they played her song about it. If I had been 5 minutes more trying to sleep, or given up on sleep 5 minutes earlier, I would have missed that.

Anyways, in case anyone needs to stumble upon something similar, I couldn't find something so perfect but...

hearing it now it's not as amazing as it was that night I needed to not be alone in grief, but here it is:

https://www.npr.org/2016/12/25/506715971/amy-grant-on-faith-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LOqLV6Om4A

Merry Christmas to you!
by tamimio | 2025-12-25 00:16:15+00:00
Exactly, that’s why I feel pity for the people who destroy their lives to get paid extra 5% and having a pizza party with good boy remarks, and of course making someone else wealthier too. It’s not a flex to sleep in a tent at work, while neglecting your health, family, friends, maybe kids, this “grind” culture is pushed by corporations for obvious reasons.
by scuff3d | 2025-12-25 00:16:24+00:00
This is why it's honestly not worth working that hard. Work hard enough to get noticed, spend the rest of the time making sure the right people know what you're doing. After a certain point it just doesn't matter anymore. The company has quarterlies to hit, and they aren't going to budge from whatever they have allowed for salary. And they're going to take the money they won't pay you and put it in an exec bonus package.

If you're that passionate focus the excess energy into your own projects, technical or otherwise. But don't give your life to a corporation that couldn't give less of a shit about you.

And this is also why you should be applying and interviewing along the way. Always keep your options open. The corporation is only looking out for itself, you need to be doing the same.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-25 00:17:27+00:00
> IMHO I think its not helpful to be comparing Framework's price to whats currently on the market. You are paying for sustainability.

But is it really more sustainable to have a poor quality but easily repairable/swappable laptop where you had to exchange multiple parts over e.g. 10 years, compared to a high quality laptop that lasted the full 10 years and didn't need any repairs? And that is not unusual, my 10 year old X1 carbon is still going strong, I just had to take change the battery at some point, but that was not very difficult.
by cyberax | 2025-12-25 00:17:34+00:00
> I have never worked anywhere with the L4/L5/whatever crap. No one I have worked with has either. It sounds downright dystopian that people are reduced to a basically a number (if you leave out the L).

This inevitably happens in any large organization. People just have positions like "Department Head" or "Chief Something-Something" instead of numbers.

If anything, engineering/research organizations are unusual because in "traditional" organizations your growth is basically linked to the number of people you direct. In technical orgs, you can be an individual contributor and be at a higher level than many managers.
by n8cpdx | 2025-12-25 00:19:26+00:00
Not a very clear issue report, but looks like a conflict between language features, copilot, and possibly snippets?

The project is open source and invites feedback in the form of issues, although sadly their issue report page is a bit of a cesspool - will really make you lose faith in humanity.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues

I think maybe vibe coders got to it and don’t realize that there are certain requirements to create useful feedback? Or maybe VS Code linking from the help menu is a bad idea.

This blog post is a step above the “doesn’t work is garbage” issues filed in GitHub, but only just one. What did the author try to fix? When did it stop working? What kind of projects? What extensions are installed?

Aside: in the spirit of Christmas cheer, I’ll share this fun meme, completely (un)related to the topic at hand: https://old.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to...
by mistercheph | 2025-12-25 00:19:28+00:00
It depends on what "premium"/"luxury" mean to you. For some, red leather that has been masterfully tanned and stitched lining the interior of their car is premium. For others, the ability to transport you hundreds of thousands of miles in any terrain and any conditions with equipment failures that are rare and easy to fix is "premium". Being swaddled in high cost materials while stuck on the side of the road in a snowstorm isn't exactly a "premium" experience.

Likewise, for some, there is nothing premium about a product that 1) becomes a paperweight when a single component fails or is no longer sufficient to satisfy the user's changing desires. 2) Hasn't had engineering time and BOM on high-cost materials devoted to making the device easy-to-repair, or has had engineering resources spent making the device hostile to repair.

Framework doesn't just give you permission to repair and modify their product, they have engineered and designed a product that is easy and intuitive to repair and modify, and made out of materials that are designed and selected to endure being touched and manipulated, one great example that probably comes to mind for many FW13 owners that have opened the device is the touchpad cable finger loop in the FW13.

As any technician or DIY enthusiast might tell you, the materials e.g. Apple uses that you interact with during disassembly aren't exactly robustly made, and there is no sign that care or good taste was used when designing the disassembly procedures. But again, it depends on what you want, for some fragility enhances their experience of an object as premium and they have no interesting in upgrading/repairing their own device so the quality of that experience is irrelevant.
by bbjs | 2025-12-25 00:19:53+00:00
I know I already made a comment but I am now going through the Amazon list and noticing some inaccuracies. Not rly sure if you guys care bc the point is to expose the things he was buying but I scrolled all the way back, saw the same inflatable pool toy twice, clicked on them, and realized one email was asking him if his purchase was good and the second was asking him to answer questions for other amazon buyers about the product. Neither actually show when the item arrived (though the first one does) and he didn't actually purchase it twice. I wonder if other issues are in there?

I also cant help but notice addresses in some. Did you check to make sure he was not sending any gifts to victims or did you just include them all?
by legerdemain | 2025-12-25 00:20:18+00:00
Tell me when they stop hiring 80% of their devs from the same 5 top CS schools.

Not "FDEs," not solution architects, not SREs, not BD/"Echos," not tech support. I get that it's a consulting org with a "boots on the ground" mentality. Tell me where their devs come from
by laurentlb | 2025-12-25 00:21:20+00:00
There's no specific filter. The main effect is blending the previous frame with the current frame. When blending, I modify the coordinates and add some noise. This makes the graphics look less basic and it creates this noisy trail when things move.

The source code is here: https://github.com/laurentlb/shmup8/blob/main/src/shaders/sc...

Blending is on lines 241, 242.

I didn't try to get a specific 80s look, I just played with formulas.
by tacker2000 | 2025-12-25 00:21:51+00:00
Yea whatsapp is just a cognitive overload nightmare. Everybody is now scheduling important stuff there, inbetween unstructured spam and whatnot, its the worst channel of them all.

You cant search properly, you cant flag or filter, the desktop apps are just slow and shitty, basically the whole thing is not optimized for productivity at all.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-25 00:22:31+00:00
I don't understand the author, on the one hand he complains about the repairability of the thinkpads (which is weird in itself, they are still the most repairable laptops bar framework, especially because it's trivial to find resellers for pretty much all the parts. If finding all the screws is a problem, then you can just look at the repair manuals which are freely available. But after complaining about repairability he the looks at apples as alternative, which are like orders of magnitude less repairable than thinkpads.
by GaryBluto | 2025-12-25 00:22:34+00:00
Some interesting and topical links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAD_Tracks_Santa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Nicholas_Church,_Demre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Christmas_Spider

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A4vle_goat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caganer
by browningstreet | 2025-12-25 00:22:48+00:00
> the constant lack of understanding of the core value proposition of framework both in this post and in many comments here on hn

That value proposition isn't good enough for the machine you have to live with day after day. I think a lot of people get the value proposition, but Framework just isn't a good enough machine. Even if it might be an interesting platform.

And, the world still needs better Linux laptops. The value proposition in that demand apparently isn't resulting in them.
by koito17 | 2025-12-25 00:22:59+00:00
United States to Japan.

I was a bit eager to start work after three months of waiting for the HSP 1b visa. Tried to keep myself busy with side projects, and got quite far with embedded Rust. But the lack of a "regular schedule" from a job was making me eager to start "proper work" again.

So far, it has been a mixed bag of trade-offs. Made it in time for various events, got to see a few friends for the first time in a while, etc. However, nothing beats the comfort and security of one's parents home, especially during the holiday season.

Probably obvious to everybody, but seriously do not schedule a move in December. If it is feasible, spend the time to make memories with your family and loved ones.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-25 00:23:19+00:00
I am all in on cloud, AWS specifically. I have been doing AWS consulting for five years.

But if I were doing a side project or starting a business, I would personally use a simple VPS. In my case I would use AWS Lightsail - it’s a simple fixed priced service with no surprises.

I’m not saying you should use AWS. But you definitely shouldn’t be taking advice from a chatbot when you don’t know what you’re doing.
by begueradj | 2025-12-25 00:23:53+00:00
>The problem of "doing more work and not getting compensated" is pretty well-known.

Yes, the reward for more work is always more work. Hard work is the best way to make yourself unseen. Those who get promoted are busy advertising themselves, befriending strategically and may even take credit of your work while you are busy sweating.

>My final conversation with my manager was heart-wrenching. I had prepared a script, anticipating a counter-offer or a guilt trip. Instead, I was met with soft and understanding empathy.

Too much naivety out there to mention empathy even in a startup, let alone when working for a shark as Youtube. That was rather a good news for your manager: no counter offer, but also the fact they never rewarded you internally (L5/6) was a way to push you to leave.
by gerdesj | 2025-12-25 00:24:26+00:00
Lovely idea but please spare a thought for people using a screen reader! Imagine having ASCII art spelt out to you character by character, line by line.

This really is a job for a LLM.

With apologies to screen reader users:
"space tab space space asterisk new line space space tab space new line space space space tab pipe new line ... forward slash o full stop full stop backslash ..."
by metalman | 2025-12-25 00:27:05+00:00
there is only one rule in China

dont mess with the brand.

and while china is all in for automation, it has to work flawlessly before it is deployed at scale
speaking of which, China is currently unable to scale AI because it has no GPU's, so direct competition is a non starter, and they have years of inovating and testing before they can even think of deploying competitive hardware, so they loose nothing
by honeing the standards to which there AI will conform to, now.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-25 00:27:06+00:00
But how common of a problem is this, now that Apple is well clear of the butterfly keyboard mess? I haven’t had to get my MacBooks repaired even once in the past decade and change, and that’s despite two of the machines I’d used during that time being the butterfly/touch bar models!

That being said, yes it’d be better if such a repair were quick and easy, but I’m not sure that it’s so valuable as to justify battery life being around a third what my MacBooks get or wrestling a buggy, immature BIOS and all the issues that come with that. A laptop that’s bad at being a laptop isn’t worth a whole lot…
by ddtaylor | 2025-12-25 00:27:13+00:00
The current benefit for a Framework is that you can swap out the entire inner/guts without being an expert and everything still works together. Most of the laptops I have provide 2 SO-DIMM slots and a slot for either NVME or SATA for storage.

So for me, there is little value in that in most scenarios. There are a few laptop chassis that I am very fond of and have wished I could "use that chassis with that hardware", but even then I haven't seen Framework chassis designs that give me that impression. I'm not saying they're crappy, but I'm thinking of different types of brushed metal, magnesium alloy stuff, etc.