MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by doyougnu | 2025-12-09 13:35:57+00:00
My recommendation: find and cultivate vision, then view the $JOB not as separate from _your_ work towards _your_ vision, but part of it. Its the part that funds you enough to continue to progress on your own plan.

Here's how I think of it: If I were a painter, I would paint, explore and experiment in my free time because its what I want to do. Maybe, as a painter, my vision is to improve the state of the art of some kind of dye or brush or canvas and that is my vision. But! That does not mean that I cannot be commissioned to work on a mural or put on a retainer for a museum or something else. The only difference is that in the latter you are being explicitly payed by a patron to produce something they want. And furthermore I need that work, I work for myself but still need projects to bring in money to do the work I care about.

I view my software dev as the same thing. I have a vision of where I want to be, what I want to do, and how I want to contribute to advance the state of the art of the things I care about. I do not care, and am unconcerned about the corporate needs of the thing I care about, its for me and for people like me. My $JOB is just one part of that larger goal and the path I walk towards that goal. Its an important part, sure, and I show up and give a good faith effort and my expert opinion, but its not the part that enriches me as much as my personal stuff. The distinction is that the $JOB is not separate, its a necessary and important part of my plan to execute on my vision.

Once you have vision I think you'll find its much easier to find similar people who want to work on the same things you want to work on. And I think you'll find it much easier to tolerate capitalist minutiae because you will reduce the things you need from $JOB.
by sveme | 2025-12-09 13:35:57+00:00
The German Personalausweis seems to offer something like this (basically returning a bool indicating whether a user is below or above a certain age), but it seems as if the service indicates which data it requests from the ID card. As a user, I would not be able to state that this or that porn site should only see this age verification. Not sure how the requestable data are in turn requested by the service.
by tim333 | 2025-12-09 13:36:13+00:00
Just invest 20 billion, get 20 billion back on its own isn't inherently a problem. The issue is it may inflate the figures and valuation for NVIDIA such that it collapses when the boom ends. If their sales rely on handing loss making companies like OpenAI money to buy their products then that may fall apart if things turn. Cisco did similar in the dotcom boom and bust. On the other hand if OpenAI doesn't collapse then the investment goes up and everyone wins. It's kind of a gamble on that sort of thing.
by InTheArena | 2025-12-09 13:36:38+00:00
I really want to adopt the world view of this developer, but the more I read it, the more this comes across as someone relatively new to a particular industry who really doesn’t care about his job. I can empathize with part of this - who doesn’t want to live in the rat race, but this feels entitled more then questioning. That said, if his boss has a yacht, maybe there is a more money at this company then I assumed.

So where do you go, if you don’t care about growth? it feels like a government job (especially in Europe), a academic, or a factory line worker in Southeast Asia might be a better fit then software developer.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-12-09 13:37:11+00:00
Sounds like the author is experiencing disillusion with the working world. (Not surprised to see that happening soon after their graduation. I had a similar experience myself.)

Here’s a parable that seems to illustrate what it looks like to find fulfillment in one’s work.[1] It helped me see the world differently.

> Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God.” The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.

And the trick is - from the outside, each performs the same work. But how each person views their work determines how much fulfillment they derive from it (and whether they succeed at reaching their long term goals).

Rather than searching for some magical job that fulfills you in all the ways you're not now, I would suggest focusing on how to make your current job more fulfilling first. Craft your role around the pieces of the work that move you.

If you can’t do that, no new role will fill that yearning, that emptiness, for you. You’ll just be searching your whole life for something that doesn’t exist, until you eventually give up.

Sure, a new job might be more interesting to you and might fit you better - for a little while - but all jobs, no matter how exciting they sound, are still jobs. They still have sucky parts that drain you and disillusion you and will make you miserable if you let them. And you need to learn how to persevere through that to find something to pull you out of it.

What I’m saying is: it might not be a job problem… it might be a you problem.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8663762-three-bricklayers-a...
by cztomsik | 2025-12-09 13:37:37+00:00
I guess there are different levels of meta-programming. You can go really far in Rust/C++ too but I think Zig is really unique that you can write a function, which takes a type, it does some imperative mumbo-jumbo and spits out another type, doing exactly what you want, without having to think about restrictions, trait bounds, or whatever.

For example, here's comptime dependency-injection container, which notably, can be configured and extended, completely in comptime, and the final glue is something which in theory the compiler could optimize away too (no idea if it does). https://github.com/cztomsik/tokamak/blob/main/src/container....

And regarding what they discuss in article, I did something similar for N-API, note how much you can do in few hundred lines, and I'd say that you can use it for most of what people do with napi-rs except that napi-rs is huge (and also unsafe, because it allows indirect recursion, which allows breaking all the rustc promises) https://github.com/cztomsik/napigen/blob/main/src/napigen.zi...
by fpotier | 2025-12-09 13:37:57+00:00
void employee_set_age(struct Employee* employee, int newAge) { // Cast away the const and set it's value, the compiler should optimize this for you (int)&employee->age = newAge; }

I believe that "Casting away the const" is UB [1]

[1]: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/const.html
by nullbound | 2025-12-09 13:38:14+00:00
<< They have always wanted us to magically know what parts are "good enough" and what parts can slide but for us to bear the burden of blame.

Well, that part is bound to add a level of tension to the process. Our leadership has AI training, where the user is responsible for checking its output, but the same leadership also outright stated it now sees individual user of AI as having 7 employees under them ( so should be 7x more productive ). Honestly, its maddening. None of it is how it works at all.
by rozab | 2025-12-09 13:38:21+00:00
All of the Google Docs icons are really thoughtfully designed, with distinctive silhouettes. Instead of making 5 tiny illegible variations on inserting a row/column/etc, they just use the + symbol. Because the symbol is the same, your eye is then drawn to the differing text on the right.

Some of the Apple ones really are ridiculous, like the ones around window management and copy/pasting. Even blown up to fullscreen size, you wouldn't have a chance of guessing what they do. But at display size, they are just plain illegible. Having them there is just a visual distraction.
by jakewins | 2025-12-09 13:39:01+00:00
I mean, I'm just some guy, but in my mind:

- They are not making progress, currently. The elephant-in-the-room problem of hallucinations is exactly the same or, as I said above, worse as it was 3 years ago

- It's clearly possible to solve this, since we humans exist and our brains don't have this problem

There's then two possible paths: Either the hallucinations are fundamental to the current architecture of LLMs, and there's some other aspect about the human brains configuration that they've yet to replicate. Or the hallucinations will go away with better and more training.

The latter seems to be the bet everyone is making, that's why there's all these data centers being built right? So, either larger training will solve the problem, and there's enough training data, silica molecules and electricity on earth to perform that "scale" of training.

There's 86B neurons in the human brain. Each one is a stand-alone living organism, like a biological microcontroller. It has constantly-mutating state, memory: short term through RNA and protein presence or lack thereof, long term through chromatin formation, enabling and disabling it's own DNA over time, in theory also permanent through DNA rewriting via TEs. Each one has a vast array of input modes - direct electrical stimulation, chemical signalling through a wide array of signaling molecules and electrical field effects from adjacent cells.

Meanwhile, GPT-4 has 1.1T floats. No billions of interacting microcontrollers, just static floating points describing a network topology.

The complexity of the neural networks that run our minds is spectacularly higher than the simulated neural networks we're training on silicon.

That's my personal bet. I think the 88B interconnected stateful microcontrollers is so much more capable than the 1T static floating points, and the 1T static floating points is already nearly impossibly expensive to run. So I'm bearish, but of course, I don't actually know. We will see. For now all I can conclude is the frontier model developers lie incessantly in every press release, just like their LLMs.
by flakeoil | 2025-12-09 13:39:10+00:00
> Perhaps serious finance professionals learnt double entry accounting, checks and balances etc. and know how to avoid those errors?

Sure, but they also use accounting software, not Excel.

> Software developers on the other hand never make mistakes Sure they do, but they use testing and typed languages etc.

The problem with Excel is comma vs dot, locales, fat fingering, out of range errors, too easy to change a cell formula by mistake etc.
by german_dong | 2025-12-09 13:39:11+00:00
You know, when the internet made distribution frictionless, all "knowledge work," most notably music, became feasibly free. The advent of AI now threatens to make not just the distribution but also the creation of such work feasibly free. For me, RMS will always be a duplicitous shyster, not to mention a lousy programmer. I'll concede he made the world a better place, much as Robin of Locksley did, but for all the wrong reasons.
Show HN: Hardwaretest.org – Browser-based peripheral diagnostics (no install)
by zylics | 2025-12-09 13:39:15+00:00
Hi HN,

OP here. I built HardwareTest.org because I was frustrated with existing testing tools that required downloading executables or were filled with ads.

It's a pure static site (hosted on Vercel) that runs entirely in the browser.

Features:

Keyboard Test: Includes a real-time Hz polling rate dashboard (I had to fight the browser event loop to get this somewhat accurate).

Dead Pixel Fixer: Uses Canvas to generate high-frequency RGB noise.

Mouse/Audio: Standard diagnostic tools.

I used AI (Vibe Coding) to help build parts of it, which was an interesting learning experience regarding the limitations of AI in handling precise hardware events.

Would love to hear your feedback on the accuracy, especially the Keyboard Polling Rate test!
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-12-09 13:39:27+00:00
This was in the US? As someone who didn't learn that rule, I've always found it very strange and, frankly, ugly.

From the article:

> There was just one space width available in the typewriter, so words and sentences were separated by the same distance. The double space was used to differentiate sentences and improve the readability of the text.

I would dispute this. Sentences are separated by a period as well as a single space character, and that's not the same distance as just a single space because the period doesn't have the same visual weight as a word character. A ". " still looks 'wider' than a " ", even if it technically isn't!
by nout | 2025-12-09 13:39:52+00:00
Bar tab is so very bad analogy here that breaks for multiple reasons:

- At the bar is almost always a single direction: customer pays the bar. Lightning is both directions - sending money between friends and sometimes to shops.

- In this (bad) analogy bitcoin would not be Visa, but bitcoin would be "dollars". Both the bartender and customer would say that they are using dollars for the tab.

- The tab analogy doesn't really match the fact that you establish a "channel" (e.g. both you and the bartender would put some bitcoin into this channel and then you can pay your grandmother in another country with bitcoin in this channel... see the analogy doesn't work here), you can resize ("splice") the channel if you want, you can swap in and swap out...

In most solutions your wallet monitors the chain and it automatically resolves any of the dispute (e.g. Phoenix wallet, or Zeus). The time scale is also different, so even if power goes out for multiple days and you are running your own very private wallet without any associated service (LSP), then you still have on the order of weeks for your wallet to automatically resolve any issue.
by radanskoric | 2025-12-09 13:39:56+00:00
Author here. Thanks for writing up your thoughts on this!

The "doesn't include non-active projects objections is easy", please check the Example 1 test again, there's a line for that:

``` refute_includes active_projects, projects(:inactive) ```

Hm, if you missed it, perhaps I should have emphasised this part more, maybe add a blank line before it ...

Regarding the fact that the test does not check that the scope returns "all" active projects, that's a bit more complex to address but let me let tell you how I'm thinking about it:

The point of tests is to validate expected behaviours and prevent regressions (i.e. breaking old behaviour when introducing new features). It is impossible for tests to do this 100%. E.g. even if you test that the scope returns all active projects present in the fixtures that doesn't guarantee that the scope always returns all active projects for any possible list of active projects. If you want 100% validation your only choice is to turn to formal proof methods but that's whole different topic.

You could always add more active project examples. When you write a test that is checking that "Active projects A,B and C" are returned that is the same test as if your fixtures contained ONLY active projects A,B and C and then you tested that all of them are returned. In either case it is up to you to make sure that the projects are representative.

So by rewriting the test to check: 1. These example projects are included. 2. These other example projects are excluded.

You can write a test that is equally powerful as if you restricted your fixtures just to those example projects and then made an absolute comparison. You're not loosing any testing power. Expect you're making the test easier to maintain.

Does that make sense? Let me know which part is still confusing and I'll try to rephrase the explanation.
by throwaway613745 | 2025-12-09 13:40:07+00:00
I almost always try to play on original hardware on an appropriate display (CRT) whenever I can. The deluge of remasters and remakes we've been getting can be nice - but I find a lot of the time that they can be hit or miss. They often feel like they've lost a lot of the magic created when the developers of the era had to work with the limitations of the hardware of the era. Pixel art on those old CRT's vs pixel art on new games with modern displays is a good example, when working on those old CRTs you just had to create your art in a specific way that just doesn't look good when you slap it onto a modern OLED display. Even the modern pixel art that's designed FOR the new displays just doesn't quite capture the same feel.

I recently played Panzer Dragoon Saga on original Saturn hardware and I have to say that was one of the most profound experiences playing an RPG I've had in my life and playing it on the Saturn itself was a big part of it.

It doesn't help that some of the porting studios sometimes just do shoddy work. Aspyr, for one, can be hit or miss. The Deus Ex remake that's coming out, from what I've seen, is particularly egregious. Just based on the footage I've seen the artistry of the game is completely ruined.

On the flipside - Nightdive doesn't miss. They're the only ones that I will buy their remasters without researching the port quality because they just "get it". The Nightdive remasters of Turok, System Shock, Rise of the Triad, Blood and even some of the more niche ones like Powerslave and Killing time have all been fantastic. Even their full remake of the original System Shock is phenomenal.
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-09 13:40:07+00:00
With that line of reasoning we arrive at the conclusion that all graphical elements of an interface should be removed, as the blind cannot see icons.

> If your UI requires someone to discern between the red and green versions of the same icon

Color coding has never been about this, only when implemented wrongly. It is just an extra differentiator for GUI elements which are already differentiated by icon shape and text labels.
by mrsubletbot | 2025-12-09 13:40:40+00:00
Maintaining a quality code base is more than just having tests and linters. It's about organization, right-sized abstractions, architecture and choosing the right patterns. There is no real way to automate the verification of these things. If an agent farts out a 2,000 LOC feature in a day but bifurcates the code base, duplicates functions or makes awful abstractions, it WILL eventually turn into a big ball of mud.

All that being said, if wielded correctly an LLM can contribute to a healthy repository, but it requires much of the same thought and planning that development pre-LLMs did. I promise you, if you stick with the same code base long enough using your approach and little consideration to its health, it will become a hellish place to build in.
by lionkor | 2025-12-09 13:41:31+00:00
I have a feeling that people who are genuinely impressed by long term vibe coding on a single project are only impressed because they don't know any better.

Take writing a book, or blog post; writing a good blog post, or a chapter of a book, takes lots of skill and practice. The results are very satisfying and usually add value to both the writer's life as well as the reader's. When someone who has done that uses AI and sees the slop it generates, he's not impressed, probably even frustrated.

However, someone who can barely write a couple coherent sentences, would be baffled at how well AIs can put together sentences, paragraphs, and have a somewhat coherent train of thought through the entire text. People who struggled in school with writing an introduction and a conclusion will be amazed at AIs writing. They would maybe even assume that "those paragraphs actually add no meaning and are purely fluff" is a totally normal part of writing and not an AI artifact.
by inesranzo | 2025-12-09 13:41:58+00:00
This project has potential but there are some issues with "Marketing" (I call this lying depending on how it's done)

Please stop with the false urgency and borderline lying to people saying there are 17 spots when they most likely aren't.

Doing this to sell more is unethical and dishonest.

I think if this project didn't do this it might work and go far.
by nowittyusername | 2025-12-09 13:42:02+00:00
You can change ANY sampling parameter once batch processing is off and you will keep the deterministic behavior. temperature, repetition penalty, etc.... I got to say I'm a bit disappointed in seeing this in hacker news, as I expect this from reddit. you bring the whole matter on a silver platter, the video describes in detail how any sampling parameter can be used, i provide the whole code opensource so anyone can try it themselves without taking my claims as hearsay, well you can bring a horse to water as they say....
by mrob | 2025-12-09 13:43:28+00:00
>The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity

It depends somewhat on personal preference, but also on genre. Classical music often has very high dynamic range, so analog recordings can have obnoxiously loud hiss in the quiet sections. This is probably a big reason why classical music labels were early adopters of digital recording, and why classical recordings often have a SPARS code [0] prominently displayed. Classical music was also much less affected by the loudness war, removing one incentive for buying on vinyl. You rarely see any preference for analog among classical listeners.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code
by bonzini | 2025-12-09 13:43:53+00:00
I did find some benefit in lowering the cost of exploratory work, but that's it—certainly worth 20€/month, but not the price of any of the "ultimate" plans.

For example today I had to write a simple state machine (for a parser that I was rewriting so I had all the testcases already). I asked Claude Code to write the state machine for me and stopped it before it tried compiling and testing.

Some of the code (of course including all the boilerplate) worked, some made no sense. It saved a few minutes and overall the code it produced was a decent first approximation, but waiting for it to "reason" through the fixes would have made no sense, at least to me. The time savings mostly came from avoiding the initial "type the boilerplate and make it compile" part.

When completing the refactoring there were a few other steps like where using AI was useful. But overall the LLM did maybe 10% of the work and saved optimistically 20-30 minutes over a morning.

Assuming I have similar savings once a week, which is again very optimistic... That's a 2% reduction or less.
by JohnFen | 2025-12-09 13:43:59+00:00
It's not at all about being "resistant to change". OneDrive has been around long enough that it doesn't really count as "change" anymore.

There are downsides to OneDrive. Topping the list is the risk of data loss. Every dev here has at least one story of OneDrive getting confused in a way that led to data loss (that's usually what got them to start avoiding using it). It can also be inconvenient and get in the way in more minor ways, such as causing path confusion with some applications.

The benefits, at least where I work, are pretty minimal. So, on the whole, people tend to keep their documents in unsynced folders. The only people I've talked to here that have anything positive to say about it are managers.
by stopbulying | 2025-12-09 13:44:04+00:00
Formaldehyde is carcinogenic. We know that because of embalming fluid, for example.

Turns out you have to ask for formaldehyde-free wood when buying building supplies.

Engineered I-beams / I-joists tend to use cheap wood with formaldehyde in it.

If you're building a new home and trying to minimize VOCs (to limit your chance of getting cancer and other conditions), you should use formaldehyde-free wood.

formaldehyde free plywood

formaldehyde free MDF