MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: ADPList – free mentorship platform for developers and designers
by felixlee97 | 2025-12-09 13:16:43+00:00
Felix here – founder at ADPList. ADPList is a mentorship platform where developers and designers can book 1:1 video sessions with experienced mentors for free, across topics like systems design, interviews, architecture reviews, and engineering management.

A few years ago, while working as an engineer and building products in a small team, it was surprisingly hard to get practical, unbiased advice from people who had “been there before”. Conference talks and blog posts were too generic, internal mentors were too busy, and paid coaching didn’t scale for early-career engineers or folks outside the US. Yet questions like “How do I design this service?”, “Is my promotion packet strong?” or “How do I move from IC to EM?” come up every week and often decide someone’s trajectory.

ADPList tries to solve this by making it trivial to talk to engineers who have already solved your problem. You browse mentors by stack, company, and topics (e.g. distributed systems, infra, security, data), see their calendars, and book a free session in a couple of clicks. Each session is a video call with notes, resources, and follow‑ups all in one place, so you don’t have to chase links or context across tools. Mentors include senior and staff engineers, EMs, and tech leads from companies like Workday, Swiggy, and others, many of whom run sessions specifically titled “Your career as a software engineer”.

Under the hood, most of the work has gone into scheduling and reliability. Time zones, rescheduling, and no‑shows are handled automatically, with reminders and calendar integrations so both sides actually show up. We’ve also focused on making discovery fast for engineers: instead of browsing marketing pages, you land on human profiles with tech stacks, years of experience, and availability, so you can get from “I need help with my backend design” to “I’m on a call with someone who’s built this before” in minutes. For mentors, there are tools to manage demand, set boundaries, and keep track of mentees over time, since many use ADPList as their main way to give back to the community.

What’s different from typical coaching platforms is that sessions are free for mentees and mentors opt in because they care about teaching and community, not hourly rates. That means quality can be uneven, so we’ve invested in public reviews, transparent profiles, and the ability to try multiple mentors until you find a good fit. The long‑term goal is a global, open mentorship graph where any engineer can find someone a few steps ahead of them, regardless of location or income.

Would love feedback from this community on:

What would make this more useful for you as an developers or EM (APIs, OSS hooks, company accounts)?

What data/controls you’d want if you brought ADPList into your team as an internal mentoring layer.

If you’re curious, you can explore mentors and book a session here: https://adplist.org/
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 13:17:01+00:00
Hm.

I only find that boggling in the context we both agree you're not using: relativity (block universe in particular).

In so far as we ignore all of relativity because it's so counter-intuitive and strange, "all moments of time being equally real" seems as trivial and straightforward as "all places in cartesian 3-dimensional space being equally real".

But yes, boggling is never compulsory.
by cbeach | 2025-12-09 13:17:52+00:00
So much to examine in this comment.

Firstly "homeland":

The last owners of "Palestine" were the British. But if we trace the history of the region further to see who the real indigenous people were, you'll find it were Jews, who were there for more than a thousand years before the religion of Islam even existed. The fact that there are mosques on this land is only a symptom of the colonial conquest of the land by Islam. If you want to know whose "homeland" this is you need to go back further in time.

Secondly "open air prison":

Egypt prevents Gazans from leaving Gaza over the Rafah border crossing due to the political and security issues Gazans have presented to Egypt - not because Egypt is deliberately "imprisoning" Gazans. Obviously, the Israeli border with Gaza has to exist, because if it didn't, the terrorist regime in charge of Gaza makes no secret of the fact they would repeat the October 7th attrocity, and many more thousands of innocent Israelis would be killed by Gazans. And that's on top of the rocket attacks from Gaza to Israeli towns, which have been going on for many years.

The fact Israel provides Gaza with energy, water, jobs, and telecoms always baffles me. Gaza's government literally wrote in their Charter that they existed to see the "annihilation" of the Jewish state. It is extremely magnanimous the Israel provides Gaza with ANY services whatsoever.
by d--b | 2025-12-09 13:18:14+00:00
Ok as you say yourself, you need work to pay the bills. That’s fine. Now what you want to look for is not what a company does, but who your teammates are. You’re going to spend a lot of time working, so the most important is that you like the people and people like you, especially if you don’t want to play the corporate game.

If you’re working with people who are fun to be with, it doesn’t matter if your work consists in circling numbers like they do at Lumon.

Work is not fun in itself, that’s why they’re different words. As my boss used to say: if you enjoy it, it’s not work. But if you can have fun while doing the work, it’s a lot better.

So yes go find nice people who are fun to be around, avoid the assholes and big corp and you’ll be fine.

Usually smaller companies are better, ones that have focus on good stuff, like a company that makes toys, or medical things.

What I chose to do is go to small finance firms. I get much much less than the CEO, but much more than I would anywhere else. That allows me to free up some time to do other stuff. There are a lot of nice people in finance (mostly cause everyone is well paid so noone really complains). 2 problems: sometimes people in finance are too money-driven, and that can be annoying, and the learning curve is steep.
by pera | 2025-12-09 13:18:37+00:00
Thanks for those links, I read a couple of the cited comments on those cases and still cannot find any mentions of restrictions for engineers who at some point in the past had access to the code.

Nordstrom Consulting v. M&S Technologies, which is possibly the most relevant case, describes a process for developing under a clean room environment and from what I understand it seems to focus on isolation of engineering teams and resources (except when required for interoperability). I did not find mentions of assessing the cohort of engineers for prior access to the copyrighted material but if I have missed that please let me know.

I also wanted to say that I am not asking this because I am thinking to start an unethical license laundering business, I am only trying to understand the meaning of making LLMs legally equivalent to human workers.
by adam_patarino | 2025-12-09 13:18:48+00:00
I keep using this excel analogy. When excel came out everyone said accountants were dead. Now we have more accountants than ever.

The analogy carries to what you’re saying here. Accountants or folks who know excel deeply can get a lot more from it than folks who are novice to it.

AI coding can be really helpful for an engineer. Keep at it!
by gwd | 2025-12-09 13:18:49+00:00
Thanks -- that's not at all clear in this post (nor is it clear from the link text that its target would include a more complete description of his position).

I've updated my comment in response to this. Basically: It seems his key test is "Is someone validating the output, trying to steer it towards ground truth?" And since the answer re ChatGPT and Claude is clearly "yes", then ChatGPT clearly does count as an AI with semantic understanding, by his definition.
by sbarre | 2025-12-09 13:18:59+00:00
To be fair, the whole job market has changed. Layoffs and the death of "a job for life" is not unique to IBM.

I think the pace of progress and innovation has, for better or worse, meant that companies can no longer count on successfully evolving only from the inside through re-training and promotions over the average employee's entire career arc (let's say 30 years).

The reality is that too many people who seek out jobs in huge companies like IBM are not looking to constantly re-invent themselves and learn new things and keep pushing themselves into new areas every 5-10 years (or less), which is table stakes now for tech companies that want to stay relevant.
by numpad0 | 2025-12-09 13:19:03+00:00
And it's not worth risking Windows 11 destroying it by slamming the irreplaceable robotic stuff into itself in such ways that NASA or NTSB would find fancy UI animations or virtualization based security culpable. You may insist that programs that control airplanes and nuclear reactors are supposed to be written in Rust + TypeScript on daily updated Linux installation that depends on AWS us-east-1, but they would insist it ain't stupid if it works.
by TypicalHog | 2025-12-09 13:19:23+00:00
Most Useful Use Cases

1.) Fan Coordination for Niche Interests: For obscure games or media (e.g., "XONOTIC"), high-RDV days can prompt spontaneous group sessions every few weeks, months, or even years, without needing calendars or servers.

2.) Media Reconsumption and Group Watches: Assign RDVs to movies, books, or videos (e.g., "SHREK_2001") for synchronized rewatches. RDVT adds timing for live streams or premieres, useful for content creators scheduling events at pseudorandom but shared times.

3.) Remembrance and Appreciation Days: Create special days for artists, events, or personal milestones (e.g., "YEAR_2000" or "HARRY_POTTER_SMOKES_WEED_Cdfkq2Nmb3c"). This could extend to historical events or personal tasks, providing a lightweight alternative to traditional calendars.

4.) Personal Reminder Systems: Integrate into apps or browser extensions to notify users about bookmarks or to-do items probabilistically, reducing notification fatigue. For instance, a threshold of RDV ≥ 2 ensures infrequent but timely prompts.

5.) Live Events and Scheduling: With RDVT, coordinate real-time activities like video calls or streams at exact UTC times on reminder days. This is especially useful for global teams or communities avoiding time zone conflicts.
Show HN: Casky,append-only key-value store with snapshots and incremental backup
by thesp0nge | 2025-12-09 13:19:26+00:00
Hi HN!

I’ve been working on Casky, a tiny, high-performance, append-only key-value store written in C. It’s designed for simplicity, speed, and safety:

* In-memory index with persistent append-only log * Support for snapshots and incremental backups * TTL (time-to-live) for keys * Compact operation to clean expired/deleted entries * Thread-safe with optional locking

I built it to explore safe persistence patterns for embedded C applications, while keeping the codebase minimal and hackable.

Everything is open-source, and you can check it out here: https://github.com/thesp0nge/casky

I’d love feedback from the HN community—especially on:

* API design for snapshots & persistence * Trade-offs in append-only logging vs. in-place updates * Testing strategies for key-value stores in C

Thanks!
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-09 13:20:11+00:00
We have seen this before with home grown VB apps, excel spreadsheets with VBScript, FoxPro etc. How has that turned out every single time as requirements changed and the number of people dependent on it grew?

I think in a couple of years we are going to same type of mess. We are already seeing a bunch of shitty AI companies getting funded with no technical cofounders. Look at a few of the YC companies
by henwfan | 2025-12-09 13:20:11+00:00
That is a good first approximation, but it is a bit more guided than a plain Anki deck. For each problem there is a structured study page and an interactive practice mode.

NeetCode 150 is a popular curated list of LeetCode problems that covers the core interview patterns people expect nowadays, like sliding window, two pointers, trees, graphs, and dynamic programming. I used that set as the base so you are not guessing which problems to focus on, and more problems and patterns are being added on top of that core set regularly.

On the study side, each problem has a consistent structure with the core idea, why that pattern applies, and a first principles walkthrough of the solution. On the practice side, the solution is broken into small steps. Each step has a clear objective in plain language, and you rebuild the code line by line by filling in the missing pieces. After you answer, you see a short first principles explanation tied to the line you just wrote, so you are actively recalling the logic instead of just reading notes.

You can repeat problems and patterns as much as you want, mark problems as solved or unsolved, and filter by pattern so you can focus on the ones you struggle with most. There is not a full automatic review schedule yet. For now you choose what to review, and the goal is to use that progress data to track weak patterns, guide what you should drill next, and add more types of focused drills over time.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-09 13:21:00+00:00
Or get a CRT if you live in a populous area, have the space, and a strong back! It’s gotten harder since Covid when they were seemingly everywhere, but if you’re lucky you’ll find a good curbed unit. Gave my buddy a 24” trinitron recently I just couldn’t keep around anymore and he is having a blast playing his PS2 on it with component cables. FFX really sings as do racing games.

That being said there are a lot of emulators and little pieces of hardware now that simulate it really well, which is a very viable option, especially when space is at a premium (or if your poor pet hates the whine of a CRT like my dog did ha)
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-09 13:21:18+00:00
Why in the world would colors discomfort you if you can't discern between them? Icons have until recently always been color coded. That doesn't make them a problem for the color-blind. You can look at the shape of the icons and read the text next to them. Would a pedestrian traffic light be better if it wasn't color coded? Would a white car be preferable to a red car?
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-09 13:21:34+00:00
I guess that's better than nothing. But now I'm unsure what your original comment was about, if your project doesn't use Jepsen for testing to "prove" it works fine, how is your project relevant to bring up on a submission about a Jepsen test of some other software?

If everyone who was making a database/message queue/whatever distributed system shared their projects on every Jepsen submission, we'd never have any discussions about the actual software in question.
by sunshine-o | 2025-12-09 13:21:38+00:00
I vaguely remember the author is a Nobel Price in Economics so he is supposed to be a intellectual, very wise man paid to warn us of incoming problems and opportunities.

Beyond the clickbait title I am not gonna judge is analysis (he is probably right) but ask the question:

Where were those people 20 years ago? before Meta became a 1.68 trillion business and others became some of the largest companies by marketcap?

Because any room temperature IQ person already figured out a long time ago social media were addictive. No need for a Nobel price. Ironically this is why people get their information from anybody on social media, precisely because they figured out they are not getting any real insight from Paul Krugeman.
by fch42 | 2025-12-09 13:22:01+00:00
Fighting wars (more than one, in fact) to force a country into permitting unrestricted sale of opioids has historical precedent of course. The victim then was China, which tried to enforce their laws on drugs ... to the dislike of English Businessmen with enough pocket money to buy the army.

I for one would prefer to buy wine in a Utah grocery store. Or maybe even just a NYC supermarket. Even if it's wine from Texas, though I know that really stretches the meaning of "wine". And I'd also like to carry the bottle publicly as least as proudly as someone can carry their gun.

(oh how easy it is to trigger libertarian impulses. I'm with Voltaire in that one, say what you want. I'll fight - alongside you for your right to do so, and against you when I disagree ...)
by busywaiting | 2025-12-09 13:22:34+00:00
> The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).

In theory, yes. But if you look at the examples in the article, the shapes are basically all similarly-sized circles.

In the Apple example, "System Settings" is circle (A gear with barely discernible teeth.) "Recent Items" is a circle (a clock.) "Force Quit" is a circle (a rounded! octagon.) "Sleep" is...a circle with a line through the bottom third. "Log Out" is...a human silhouette in a circle! (Why?)

It doesn't matter what the icon is as long as the icons are distinct, and today's icons aren't.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-09 13:22:53+00:00
Starting off with 10min of exposition is too much and it’s lazy. You don’t even know if you’re going to like the game yet. Do some en media res story telling and get on with it.

Most games I don’t care about the deep exposition. I’m fine with a vague notion and then starting from the main character’s insertion into it where the gameplay starts.

Not letting the player skip it is just hubris.
by saltwatercowboy | 2025-12-09 13:23:00+00:00
> Not lazily, clearly. You can argue he's not lazy, but this is a very lazy take about LLMs.

Feel free to check out a longer analysis [1] (which he also linked in the source).

> You are making that point for him. He is not. He is actively making this fruitless argument.

Are we reading the same thing? He wrote:

> Another reason to reject ChatGPT in particular is that users cannot get a copy of it. It is unreleased software -- users cannot get even an executable to run, let alone the source code. The only way to use it is by talking to a server which keeps users at arm's length.

...and you see no connection to his ethos? An opaque nondeterministic model, trained on closed data, now being prepped (at the very least) to serve search ads [2] to users? I can't believe I need to state this, but he's the creator of the GNU license. Use your brain.

> I don't get what you are missing here then. [...] I notice he conveniently puts some of his kind of work in this field as "artificial intelligence" that somehow have understanding and knowledge.

You're not making an argument. How, directly and in plain language, is his opinion incorrect?

> Can we? In a way we can test another thing [...] to exceptionally simpler systems.

Yes... it is one of very few foundational principles and the closest thing to a universally agreed idea. Are you actually trying to challenge 'cogito ergo sum'?

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Artificia... [2] https://x.com/btibor91/status/1994714152636690834
by komali2 | 2025-12-09 13:23:10+00:00
> there is no real world use case for a middle-ground (c) where you want someone with algo implementation details rote-memorized in their brain and without the very deep understanding that would make the rote-memorization unnecessary!

I was watching a video recently talking about how Facebook is adding KPIs for its engineers' LLM usage. As in, you will be marked negatively in your performance review if your code is good but you didn't use AI enough.

I think, you and I agree, that's obviously stupid right? I imagined myself as an engineer at Facebook, reading this email come through. I can imagine two paths: I roll my eyes, find a way to auto-prompt an LLM to fulfill my KPI needs, and go back to working with my small working group of "underrecognized folks that are doing actual work that keeps the company's products functioning against all odds." Or, the other path: I put on my happy company stooge hat, install 25 VScode LLM forks, start writing a ton of internal and external posts about how awesome AI is and how much more productive I am with it, and get almost 0 actual work done but score the highest on the AI KPIs.

In the second path, I believe I will be more capitalistically rewarded (promotions, cushy middle/upper management job where I don't have to do any actual work). In the first, I believe I will be more fulfilled.

Now consider the modern interview: the market is flooded with engineers after the AI layoffs. There's a good set of startups out there that will appreciate an excellent, pragmatic engineer with a solid portfolio, but there's the majority of other gigs, for which I need to pass a leetcode interview, and nothing else really matters.

If I can't get into one of the good startups, then, I guess I'm going to put on my dipshit spinny helicopter hat and play the stupid clown game with all the managers so I can have money.
by guitcastro | 2025-12-09 13:23:25+00:00
Fleet started as our attempt to explore a new generation of JetBrains IDEs, developed in parallel with those based on the IntelliJ Platform. Over time, we learned that having two general-purpose IDE families created confusion and diluted our focus. Rebuilding the full capabilities of IntelliJ-based IDEs inside Fleet did not create enough value, and positioning Fleet as yet another editor did not justify maintaining two overlapping product lines.
by usrusr | 2025-12-09 13:23:48+00:00
> At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.

Yeah, just as we forgot about the "paperless office" metric we seemingly forgot about MS Office file formats. "But can I open that file someone sends me?" hasn't been the central driver in quite a while.

But I guess it's a bit of a moat nonetheless: IT departments just not considering any other cloud solution that would (in addition to the pains of the cloud migration) also require weening employees off Excel/Word/Powerpoint. People don't even ask themselves wether that would (still) be hard or not, it feels like a safe assumption that it will.
by trial3 | 2025-12-09 13:23:59+00:00
> These things are now more important than ever

oh definitely. i agree here. can't wait to read the rest of the sentence, probably saying something meaningful about the creative benefits of unstructured writing, or the importance of relying on your own thoughts and language and unique voice in the era of LLMs

> as they can literally help fine-tune agents to help assist you using your personal style.

oh
by mercenario | 2025-12-09 13:24:04+00:00
> My goal now is to use fewer words to convey an idea. Everyone's interpretation of words is different, so using more precise language will just muddle your ideas. To use a metaphor from electronic communication—there's so much noise in the channel that modulating your signal doesn't provide any extra information.

This is really interesting. This is the opposite I do when writing for myself and what I would probably do if publishing a blog. I really like adding nuance when taking notes as it helps me when reading them later. But now I'll pay attention to not adding them when publishing.
by fenykep | 2025-12-09 13:24:31+00:00
Shameless plug, but I just wrote up an article about very similar issues, seems like me and OP are also around the same age. For me this realization was really freeing - bashing my head against "the market" for years, fighting with inconsistent values and expectations. Since I have accepted programming to be a hobby and looking for vocations without all the corporate shingles I am so much happier.

https://abelbodis.hu/lovecode.html (The whole site is very much in progress)