MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thangalin | 2025-12-21 18:34:19+00:00
In tough job markets, submitting 100 résumés before getting hired is not uncommon. Of possible interest is my Creating Catchy Cover Letters blog post, which uses my Markdown editor, KeenWrite (https://keenwrite.com), to create PDF files styled to match a company's branding:

https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/10/15/creating-catchy-cover-...

A handful of prospective managers told me that my cover letter stood out among hundreds of applicants.

Here's the full shell script I used to build cover letters (you'll need to point "theme dir" to the directory where the cover letter theme---aspiros---is found). With this script, creating a cover letter went from about 20 minutes down to 5. If you have any troubles getting it to work, contact me via https://whitemagicsoftware.com/.

#!/usr/bin/env bash # This script builds a cover letter based on a company's branding. The # parameters include: # # $1 -- The company name as a directory, containing colours and logo. # $2 -- The company name (normal case). # $3 -- The company role (job title). # $4 -- The relative path to the cover letter to typeset. # # Example: # # ./build.sh corp Corporation 'Job Title' template/cover-letter.md readonly SCRIPT_SRC="$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[${#BASH_SOURCE[@]} - 1]}")" readonly SCRIPT_DIR="$(cd "${SCRIPT_SRC}" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd)" readonly COMPANY_DIR="${1:-template}" readonly COMPANY_NAME="${2:-Template}" readonly COMPANY_ROLE="${3:-Job Title}" readonly PATH_COVER_LETTER="${4:-climate/cover-letter.md}" readonly EMPLOYEE_NAME="${5:-Your Name}" readonly EMPLOYEE_ROLE="${6:-Your Role}" read -r COLOUR_FG COLOUR_BG COLOUR_AC < "$COMPANY_DIR/colours.txt" readonly COLOUR_FG COLOUR_BG COLOUR_AC magick \ signature-black.png \ -alpha extract \ -background "#${COLOUR_AC}" \ -alpha shape \ -define png:color-type=6 \ signature.png rm -f ${HOME}/.local/share/keenwrite/logo_svg_*.pdf keenwrite.bin \ -i "${PATH_COVER_LETTER}" \ -o cover-letter.pdf \ --set=employer.company.name="${COMPANY_NAME}" \ --set=employer.position.role="${COMPANY_ROLE}" \ --set=employee.name="${EMPLOYEE_NAME}" \ --set=employee.role="${EMPLOYEE_ROLE}" \ --set=employee.contact.phone="555-1212" \ --set=employee.contact.email="email@hostname" \ --set=employee.portfolio.url="gitlab.com/YourName" \ --set=employee.address.line.1="address 1" \ --set=employee.address.line.2="city, province" \ --set=employee.address.line.3="postal code" \ --metadata="foreground=${COLOUR_FG}" \ --metadata="background=${COLOUR_BG}" \ --metadata="accent=${COLOUR_AC}" \ --image-dir="${SCRIPT_DIR}/${COMPANY_DIR}" \ --theme-dir="${HOME}/dev/java/keenwrite/themes/aspiros" exiftool \ -overwrite_original_in_place \ -Title="${EMPLOYEE_NAME}" \ -Author="${EMPLOYEE_NAME}" \ cover-letter.pdf

This saved me about 19 hours of work; hopefully it will save you time, as well. See also: https://xkcd.com/1205/
by bdunks | 2025-12-21 18:34:49+00:00
It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.

I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)

I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.

I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-21 18:35:35+00:00
Sorry, that wasn’t my intent. I was trying to add context to explain that this piece is from the perspective of someone who built a career upon being a guru and influencer, not run of the mill fame.

That doesn’t mean all of the advice in the post doesn’t apply to other forms of fame, but I do think it’s helpful context for the writing.

I also think it’s helpful to attach context to certain authors who functions as gurus/influencers because their writings like this aren’t entirely selfless acts of standalone advice. Every piece of writing is meant as a hook to potentially get readers to also subscribe to their podcasts, their e-mail list, or buy their books. Delivering the big picture in parallel with the hook can help people make better informed decisions.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-12-21 18:36:29+00:00
> landed a $10 billion software contract with the U.S. Army

The United States has ~$38,000,000,000,000 in debt which means a baby born in the US will get $1000 in Trump Bucks to invest in S&P 500 along with a $111,000 share of that debt with its $3,000 a year interest per person. Can someone explain to me how long this will be sustainable?

I'm a little sad that I'm not getting any free borrowed money in order to funnel it into $100M mountain properties. However, I'm trying to be objective. Given this situation what is the investment with the little bit of wealth that I have acquired? Do I need to worry about this not being sustainable and crashing?
by nicbou | 2025-12-21 18:36:33+00:00
My entire stack is meant to let me work offline in random locations. Until recently it was meant to run smoothly on a 12" Macbook. The output is also made for users on spotty internet connections. This comes from years of working while travelling. I can work offline for weeks if needed.

I sometimes do "iPad work", which is essentially researching, reviewing and annotating content on my iPad Mini. I will hop on my bike and work an hour or two in different locations, over coffee or in the sun. It's a relaxing break from working on a computer at a desk.

I do think that people should work in different places. Perhaps we'd have apps that work better on slow internet.
by throwup238 | 2025-12-21 18:36:35+00:00
MSG is very safe in normal quantities with a similar safety profile to salt. You can drink MSG water to kill yourself but it’d be like drinking a gallon of seawater. It’s monosodium glutamate. Monosodium as in NaCl (table salt) and glutamate as in the amino acid and neurotransmitter. Once they disassociate in water, they’re both some of the most basic molecules used by all life, including for protein production.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-21 18:36:44+00:00
Dupe, previously submitted 3 times in the last day.

- Tips for Buying Servers in 2026 (rackout.net) 4 points by matt-p 1 day ago | 4 comments

- Example cheap NVMe and RAM options for servers (rackout.net) 1 point by jammo 1 day ago

- Tips for buying servers in 2026, cheap NVMe option (rackout.net) 3 points by jammo 1 day ago

Submission history of user "jammo" suggests that it might be an alt account of the submitter, cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rackout.net and https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=react-networks-exampl...
by Eridrus | 2025-12-21 18:36:47+00:00
I generally recommend the book Founding Sales (available for free online), but it's targeted at SaaS founders.

But you're actually doing something even more common: running a consulting business, and there's plenty of content on that for just that reason, so I would go find content on how to scale a consulting business, e.g. this seems like the start of a thread to pull on https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...
by BeetleB | 2025-12-21 18:36:56+00:00
I think two factors are in play:

The first is that there is likely more diversity the deeper you go down the intellectual hole. You and I may read much more sophisticated books, but the books you read and the ones I read differ significantly. Thus, the list is biased towards the more popular (it is, after all, a popularity list).

Second is this:

> for engineers to be detached of liberal arts?

Most of us just haven't found value in the other types of books. It would help if you gave some examples of books that should be here. For me (perhaps as an engineer), I like books to kind of get to the point. When it comes to fiction, I'm a very firm believer that, although a given novel may give great commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book will always do a better job.

I've yet to find someone "changed" because of fiction. Those I know who claim to already had the sentiments before they read that piece of fiction, and the story was merely preaching to the choir. What they are glorifying is how well the story depicted an issue.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-21 18:37:05+00:00
> there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ".

Thats also a fair theory to explain the lack of real data. Given the frequency with which I've had similar conversations it feels off to me, but that may just be my bias.

It certainly seems to be a very interesting problem to researchers. Thirty years later it is still cited frequently enough that Elsevier is having to hunt and destroy papers that cite it.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/10/elsevier-rev...
by tanvach | 2025-12-21 18:37:13+00:00
Coincidentally we were on the Robotaxi during the black out (didn’t know about it, we were going to Japan town from the Mission). Noticed that it navigated through the non-working traffic lights fine, treated it like a stop sign junction. One advantage of building unsupervised system from public version that had to deal with these edge cases all around the country.

Though the safety driver disengaged twice to let emergency vehicles pass safely.
by lukeigel | 2025-12-21 18:38:21+00:00
Thank you! I tried to optimize scrolling through the photos the most. Avoided any virtualization library, used Cloudflare for image transformations and for caching, etc. The masonry layout and polish you see here is all https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=walz though

Specifically at https://www.jmail.world/photos
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-21 18:38:27+00:00
> if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing

They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking.

> They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait

Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums for self-driving cars.

There are productive responses to this episode. None of them involve flipping out on X.
by giardini | 2025-12-21 18:38:46+00:00
ggm sez >"I'm going to give blowing willow smoke up my Anus a miss, if that's ok. "<

Speaking of which, here lie several drawings of people blowing smoke up a miss's ass FWIW:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/blowing-smoke-up-your-ass

While more hygienic than mouth-to-mouth resuscitation + CPR, I suspect legal complications would render the technique non-preferred today.

BTW the lady depicted in the first drawing has few, if any, clothing undergarments for a married woman of the year 1746. Indeed for any woman, any year.
by mattmaroon | 2025-12-21 18:39:05+00:00
I have DEFINITELY noticed an increase in public usage yeah. Which is strange because that was not legalized in Ohio. Smoking a joint in your car going down the road or at the park is as illegal as it ever was.

I’m sure overall usage numbers are up because I know a lot of people who started using it after they could buy it legally, but those people are all also infrequent users and I’m sure are not driving high. The people who would be deterred by weed being illegal are probably all in the “won’t drive stoned” category. (I’m sure many infrequent users pre-legalization, myself included, were never much worried about the legality but don’t drive high because we like being alive, and we continue to not do so now.)
by seinvak | 2025-12-21 18:40:22+00:00
> I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and one generally negative in 2025.

You are quite correct! Crafting Interpreters actually has the highest average sentiment score across all books with more than 10 comments. This is the average sentiment score of all three( range being -10 to 10) :

Crafting Interpreters(7.8) > SICP(4.3) > Clean Code(-3.2)
by horizion2025 | 2025-12-21 18:40:48+00:00
"The young tanning bed users had more skin mutations than people twice their age, especially in their lower backs, an area that does not get much damage from sunlight but has a great deal of exposure from tanning beds."

So in other areas than the lower back, everyone - tan bed users or not - have these supposed seeds of melanoma as well? And that is for a much larger area of the skin than the one mentioned.

Also I wonder about the quote that a mutated cell can never go back. The immune system could kill the mutated cells and thereby promote the unmutated ones. Though nothing is perfect of course. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/jan/analysis-protective-lung...
by scruple | 2025-12-21 18:40:58+00:00
I spent ~16 years with Ruby (as a non-primary language for the first 5 years, but then as my primary for the remainder), from ~2006/2007 til 2022/2023. I had a couple of hours free to spin up new personal project this morning. At first I was going to default to Python since I use it heavily at work. On a whim, I decided to see what Ruby 3.4 has to offer since it's been a few years. I am very happy with that decision. I really miss Ruby the language a lot, it's such a joy to work with.
by card_zero | 2025-12-21 18:41:18+00:00
Some more errors:

Revelations of divine love, recorded by Julian, anchoress at Norwich, A.D. 1373 wasn't really mentioned ever. Those mentions are of the book of Revelations in the Bible.

Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic poem, not a specific modern version by Seamus Heaney.
by Myzel394 | 2025-12-21 18:42:28+00:00
I was in Philadelphia for a week and also used my commute time (2 hours in total each day) to program. As a web developer who uses Github Copilot and often checks documentation online, I did not have such a good experience as OP had. Mobile data is pretty much nonexistent in Philadelphia in the subway and there are also no wifi Hotspots. Sure, it was better than nothing, but I would quite often find myself waiting for the subway to arrive at stations and hoping that there is at least some internet connectivity there.
by stavros | 2025-12-21 18:42:37+00:00
Codex (at least 5 and 5.1) is bad at asking for permission. Whenever it wants to run pre-commit or platformio, it tries to do that, that fails because of the sandbox, and then Codex decides something is wrong with the cache directory and keeps asking for permission to sudo chown ~/.cache, every time.

I have to specifically tell it to request permission for the command it wants to run, and then it works. Very annoying, and very annoying that it can't persist the permission, like Claude Code can, so it doesn't have to ask again every single time.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-12-21 18:42:43+00:00
Reminds me of this metafilter thread [0] where people asked/shared less usual work locations. Hotel lobbies are a great one, as have laundromats sometimes been in the past.

An intercity train with wifi/cell service (and tea!) is an incredible focussing function as well. You got 3 hours and a beautiful not too distracting view. Go!

P.s. I also suggested to Stephen that he gets a Nathan Fielder “laptop harness” for his subway work..? Has anyone tried this?

[0] https://ask.metafilter.com/316039/Ideas-for-workspaces-pleas...
by nicoburns | 2025-12-21 18:43:15+00:00
> we've already crossed the Rubicon with tools like Claude Code and Playwright MCP.

"we" isn't everybody here. A lot of us simply don't use these tools (I currently still don't use AI assistance at all, and if/when I do try it, I certainly won't be giving it full system access). That's a lot harder to avoid if it's built into Chrome.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-21 18:43:17+00:00
Calling a strike a strike does not blame the batter. It’s simply calling it for what it is. Even if the person corrects the wrong does not mean that incompetence or negligence was not the correct description. This entire being offended for the correct words used to describe things is tiresome. It’s like people being offended at being told they are ignorant. Ignorant does not mean stupid. Just because ignorant people are ignorant of the word does not make people using words correctly mean or bad or full of ill will.
by 382373idjdj | 2025-12-21 18:43:47+00:00
This caused me to delete the HN password on my main account. It was already disconcerting to be reminded by Karpathy (I cannot help but see this as bragging) in his recent post that we must be good because LLMs are watching: https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/auto-grade-hn/

LLMs will be used to deanonymize all internet users. The AI "visionaries" are already bragging about this. You have been warned.
by alexjplant | 2025-12-21 18:44:13+00:00
...that guy was in the throes of a psychotic episode [1]:

The long and full apology is inserted below. [...] He (?) also says he suffers from schizophrenia. I’m happy for “Al” that he’s getting help and tries to move on. For me, this apology at least finally proves that this threat is over and in fact never was intended literally. I hope I will never receive anything close to that again. The apology in full I am Al Nocai. When I contacted you initially, I believed you to be a Dan E., from texas, or a Dan S from delaware or a Dan from Minneapolis. I didn’t do my research, and when I found it was actually you and you had nothing to do with my situation, I became indignant and even more of an asshole. You had every right to be mad, and publish as you did. I’m not trying to justify what I did, there is none, I should have been a lot more cordial. I just want to provide context around what was happening, I believe I at least owe you why. I had to retire from my career do to schizophrenia. Again, I should have not let my delusions go to the point they did nor should I have acted the way it does. My illness doesn’t detract from the rashness of my actions.

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/08/09/nocais-apology/
by schoen | 2025-12-21 18:44:34+00:00
I wonder what you could usefully do with a Kensington lock on the train. I bought one for use in cafés although I haven't used it most of the time.

You could attach it to something bulkier or something that you could put under the seat, maybe. I don't remember if New York subway seats have an exposed bar underneath that you could lock it to. I'm sure locking it to the vertical poles in the center of the car would be extremely antisocial.
by justchad | 2025-12-21 18:44:55+00:00
This resonates with me right now. I helped build a unicorn startup over the last 10 years but feel empty and burnt out when I’m working now. I feel like I’m wasting my time in exchange for a paycheck. I recently turned in my notice, I’m going on sabbatical. I’m hoping to find my passion and follow that. Finding that is something I’m struggling with though. Anyways, great article!
by heinrichhartman | 2025-12-21 18:45:22+00:00
A post on this topic feels incomplete without a shout-out to Charity Majors - she has been preaching this for a decade, branded the term "wide events" and "observability", and built honeycomb.io around this concept.

Also worth pointing out that you can implement this method with a lot of tools these days. Both structured Logs or Traces lend itself to capture wide events. Just make sure to use a tool that supports general query patterns and has rich visualizations (time-series, histograms).
by malux85 | 2025-12-21 18:45:24+00:00
Don’t worry about it - you know why? Because if the entire thing crashes, then everyone crashes with it, and there’s a million people (or more) that have a lot more skin in the game, a lot more power, and therefore a lot more incentive to make sure this doesn’t crash.

This is not your battle alone, so don’t worry like it is.
by yorwba | 2025-12-21 18:45:31+00:00
The commentary on the translation also illustrates the pitfalls of learning about ancient medicine from medical treatises of the time, discussing the word ḏrḏ: "The rendering “leaves” is not wholly certain; the word might possibly mean “bark” (cortex), and indeed in the case of willow, the bark is medicinally more efficacious than the leaves."

If you use modern medical knowledge to inform the translation (and interpret the phrase "the feathers of birds and the ḏrḏr.w of trees" elsewhere as referring to how trees are covered in bark just as birds are covered in feathers; see commentary on this dictionary entry: https://tla.digital/lemma/185150 ) you potentially get a more accurate translation, but you cannot treat it as independent evidence for the use of willow bark as opposed to willow leaves. Hopefully at least the identity of the willow tree has been established in a less circular manner.
by adzm | 2025-12-21 18:45:42+00:00
I saw something similar on Reddit r/FoundPaper where a parody of twinkle twinkle little star had a hilarious divergence at the end. Not all mutations have reproductive fitness but it is fascinating to see in the wild.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FoundPaper/comments/1p7bvtz/found_n...
by nobody9999 | 2025-12-21 18:46:13+00:00
>This kind of test seems silly. It's going to be far too hard to remove the confounding variables. Much easier just to give people different levels of weed and have them do driving tests. Directly measure their driving skill instead of doing it by shitty proxy like this.

Given that differing levels of THC impact people differently both because of potential "tolerance" in frequent users as compared with occasional users and individual responses to cannabis (and even different cannabis strains with varied chemical profiles). There may well be other confounding factors as well.

Cannabis does not affect everyone the same way. It doesn't even affect the same people in the same way every time.

As such, while the testing you suggest may well be useful over the long term, it will require large populations and repeated testing at varying levels of both subjective intoxication and THC levels in the blood over extended periods to get good data about how THC use (both in temporal proximity and overall usage patterns) causes impairment.

As anecdata, I can absolutely say that lower levels of THC consumption results in much more impairment if cannabis hasn't been used recently and higher levels result in less impairment if there has been recent use.

That's not to say that driving (or any high-risk activity) is appropriate while actually high. It is not. Driving while impaired (by anything) is a terrible idea.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-12-21 18:46:14+00:00
“Workflow” is probably a bit generous to describe how they probably use Excel.

Having worked at a mom and pop ISP a couple of decades ago where we used Excel to track a lot of things, I can see how this might have happened.

To actually know who is allocated what is ultimately just a list.

And when there are only a few people who edit the list (and probably no more than 1 person at a time) you can get by with even a plain text file, but Excel is quite a bit nicer as you can do things like filtering and sorting easily, maybe even some formulas to help with things.

Building a program backed by a database might be nice, but hard to justify when the manual system has never been a problem before.

They’ve probably been thinking for a while they should, but it’s just never been enough of a pain point for them to invest the effort.

Looks like they see this incident as justification that they need a system with hard coded rules and constraints, no more manual checking.
by theturtletalks | 2025-12-21 18:46:36+00:00
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman

It’s a collection of his essays but the one quote that stuck out to me is:

I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize-I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it - those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.

It really got me to get over external validation and doing things for the sake of discovery and learning.