MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by socketcluster | 2026-01-06 04:07:32+00:00
I was just speculating in this case but my understanding of this industry is that if the product earns money then everyone gets promotions and bonuses. It's not about individual ability.

My point is that there is no correlation between the financial success of the product and the skill of the UX designer or developer; yet financial success is the main metric which is used to determine rank and pay for these specific roles.

I'm happy for sales-people that their pay fully correlates with their performance but as a software developer, it really sucks. My pay correlates much more with the performance of my colleagues in sales than with my own performance. If I'm unlucky, the correlation may in fact be inverted.

I've seen this over and over. I worked in blockchain space; the developers before me wrote TERRIBLE code, the thing was literal spaghetti code, full of vulnerabilities and it's a miracle it didn't get hacked. But the timing was right and many of those early developers earned big money as crypto prices soared in the early days... The people who joined only a few months later and pulled off a heroic redesign/refactoring effort and did an amazing job in record time got peanuts because the hype was dying down. So the fact that they improved the product 100x didn't matter at all. It's like there was 0 recognition.

Bad luck compounds. I could write an entire book about this effect... But that book probably wouldn't sell; ironically, a victim of the same effect it would be describing. People only care about success stories. With good luck; not only do you get to be successful but you get to sell books about it which makes you even more successful. Good luck compounds too.
by nijave | 2026-01-06 04:08:17+00:00
Yes and no. Least privilege has existed in databases for a very long time. You need to implement correct DB privileges using user/roles, views, and other best practices. The MCP server is more like a dumb client in this setup.

However, that's easy for people to forget and throw privileged creds at the MCP and hope for the best.

The same stands for all LLM tools (MCP servers or otherwise). You always need to implement correct permissions in the tool--the LLM is too easily tricked and confused to enforce a permission boundary
by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-06 04:09:06+00:00
A nerdcore hip hop song I listened to when I was a teenager went:

Fuck the MP-double-A

Fuck the RI-double-A

Fuck the suits behind the PSAs

And fuck 'em all for the DMCA

("Fuck the MPAA" by Futuristic Sex Robotz, which is still online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv3GihnduUw&list=PL1CD8E178A...)

I don't particularly like or trust Google, but I can't say I'm broken up about the fact that they refused to de-list a website who someone claimed was hosting pirated content, and told them to go after the website owner directly. False and malicious DMCA takedown requests absolutely happen, and in any case I don't think it should be the responsibility of a search engine to remove links to websites hosting content that is illegal in some jurisdiction.
by jaswise | 2026-01-06 04:09:35+00:00
Location: US, Canada Remote: Yes (preferred) Willing to relocate: Not right now
Technologies: Next.js, React, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, Node.js, Python, FastAPI/Flask, PostgreSQL, Firebase/Supabase, Vercel, AWS, automation systems, workflow engines, and AI integrations (OpenAI/Groq). Experienced with building dashboards, platform UIs, internal tools, and AI-powered business features.

Résumé/CV: Available on request Email: jason.lee.dev[at]outlook[dot]com Portfolio: https://jasonleebuild.com

Summary: I’m a full-stack engineer who specializes in building fast, clean MVPs and shipping product without the corporate overhead. I’ve helped founders and small teams build AI-powered platforms, automation tools, and SaaS dashboards from zero → production. I’m comfortable owning features end-to-end — front-end, back-end, architecture, deployments — and working async across time zones.

I’m looking for roles where I can collaborate directly with founders, move quickly, and build software that actually gets used. Contract, fractional, and full-time opportunities welcome.
by Abishek_Muthian | 2026-01-06 04:09:40+00:00
I actually moved to Zed for AI, Claude integration is seamless and the IDE is so fast and crisp. I can use what ever agent I want, when I need them instead of being asked to use Copilot.

Except for few language related extensions, I don't have any other extensions on Zed. Which means I worry less about which of those extensions will be sold off to a malware developer.

I had more issues with official extensions on VSCode (looking at you flutter) than not having any extension on Zed and having to rely on the terminal (which feels much closer to the system than it did on VSCode).
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-06 04:09:50+00:00
The sibling comment has the correct, more detailed answer, but the high-level answer is that the M-series chips are SoCs with all the RAM on-die. That lets you push way more data than you can over a bus out to socketed memory.

The tradeoff is that it's non-upgradeable, but (contra some people who claim this is only a cash-grab by Apple to prevent RAM upgrades) it's worth it for the bandwidth.
by nawgz | 2026-01-06 04:09:51+00:00
> There's doublespeak in what the article is reporting on.

Right, so the interesting thing that can be discussed and inspire our curiosity that is contained in the article is supposed to be what exactly?

> The article isn't; do you have a difficulty distinguishing the two?

You are leaning on this single observation so overtly it makes me wonder if you understand what the point of an article is - are you here to discuss the author's prose or the subject the writing describes?

> > We seem perfectly aligned.

> Do we, now?

I suppose I have to agree with you now. You seem to think this type of article will foster interesting discussion; I think it's only likely to flair emotions and surface a few people who have fallen for the propaganda. Certainly, I don't think anyone will have a new and interesting observation on the topic or any adjacent ones. The content of the thread would support my stance, and the fact your only participation in it is posting meta-defense of the article staying up rather than discussing the article perfectly aligns with my point: clown politics where might makes right are inherently boring to discuss, displeasing to think about, and when they are as insignificant and absurd as this action they will bring no insights to either the reader or the commenter.
by tmoertel | 2026-01-06 04:11:26+00:00
> There's nothing wrong with this choice [to work extra hours to get promoted].

But if there are limited slots for promotion, and that's generally always the case, the resulting competition among deserving engineers makes the extra hours more or less mandatory. Say that Amy is a better engineer than Jim and gets a third more done per hour. If Jim puts in 60 hours instead of the expected 40, then Amy isn't going to beat him for a slot unless she also starts working extra hours.

In the end, promotion becomes more about grinding than being effective. That's not great for company culture or retention of top talent.
by elbci | 2026-01-06 04:12:45+00:00
Ah, NYT... it's years since I read anything in legacy MSM but it all came back now... the wall of text taking you all over the place from Truman to Candance Owen to Soviet Union, offering an unexplained explanation akin to 'religious fashions changed' and a one sentence euphemistic mention of the real issue buried towards the end: "images from Gaza" as in the ongoing genocide against Palestinians
by toviszsolt | 2026-01-06 04:13:17+00:00
I built clsx-react because I got tired of importing clsx or classnames in almost every component just to handle conditional classes.

It's a tiny, zero-dependency custom JSX runtime (configured via jsxImportSource in tsconfig/jsconfig) that intercepts the className prop. It automatically applies clsx logic at the runtime level.

Before:
import clsx from 'clsx';
<div className={clsx('btn', active && 'active')} />

After (with clsx-react):
<div className={['btn', active && 'active']} />

It keeps imports clean and supports arrays/objects natively in TSX/JSX. I'd love to hear your feedback on this approach to DX!
by zarzavat | 2026-01-06 04:13:19+00:00
This is the reasoning deficit. Models are very good at generating large quantities of truthy outputs, but are still too stupid to know when they've made a serious mistake. Or, when they are informed about a mistake they sometimes don't "get it" and keep saying "you're absolutely right!" while doing nothing to fix the problem.

It's a matter of degree, not a qualitative difference. Humans have the exact same flaws, but amateur humans grow into expert humans with low error rates (or lose their job and go to work in KFC), whereas LLMs are yet to produce a true expert in anything because their error rates are unacceptably high.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-06 04:15:01+00:00
Yep. Mine is always charged at home, and so I've never needed to use a charging station locally. They're around just by virtue of the area being part of a major metro, but I haven't needed them.

I haven't yet done a cross-country drive but would like to and have plotted out routes with ABRP, and yes, there's more in the midwest states than you'd think. Enough that just about any EV with EPA 250mi range or better can manage a long haul trip without too much trouble (just with a few more bathroom/snack/coffee stops).
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-06 04:16:01+00:00
I can't possibly be the first - several other comments here are saying the same thing including the one I was trying to clarify with you.

I don't dislike it per se. I think it's an improvement over not having it but I also think that it's sub-optimal in many scenarios when compared to simply failing the build. Since it's a tradeoff to prevent bugs at the expense of language brevity I don't think it should be surprising that not everyone agrees about it.

My personal preference is the "void" that D has for uninitialized in addition to empty braces or something similarly terse for default initialization.

Slight tangent but somehow C++ ended up with the worst of all possible worlds. Some types uninitialized by default, other types default initialized, terse initialization syntax variants that look highly similar but do different things, and much of it context dependent.
by GWBudenbauer | 2026-01-06 04:16:12+00:00
Author here. Thanks for engaging with this seriously - your Venezuela example is precisely the thinking I'm after.

On your questions:

1. "Who are mature civilizations?" - I'd argue we haven't seen one yet at scale. Japan comes closest in some ways (maintenance culture, long time horizons, aesthetic restraint), but still operates within the juvenile global system. Traditional societies often had mature characteristics (indigenous land management, craft traditions that prioritized duration over novelty) but lacked the technical capacity we have now.

The question isn't "which civilization is mature" but "what would maturity look like with modern technical capacity?" That's what the mobile rooms are about - demonstrating that sufficiency can be designed, not just preached.

2. "What's the playbook?" - That's the harder question. I don't think you can make a civilization mature through policy or persuasion. But you can build material alternatives that make maturity visible. When housing costs force people into a perpetual state of economic adolescence (renting, moving, instability), they can't mature, even if they want to.

The Venezuela example you raised is perfect: juvenile foreign policy (grab resources, export costs beyond time horizon, prioritize novelty/impact over coherence/durability). A mature foreign policy would ask: "What do we need to sustain ourselves without injury to others?" But that requires redesigning systems at every scale - including how individuals live.

Re: "a bit abstract" - fair criticism. The abstraction is necessary to diagnose the pattern, but the prescription has to be material. That's why I've spent all these years on the rooms - to show that philosophical maturity has to become structural, not just attitudinal.
by donavanm | 2026-01-06 04:17:25+00:00
I'd +1 incentives, primarily P&L/revenue/customer acquisition/retention, with a small carve out for "culture." I've worked places, and for people, where the culture was to "do the right thing" or focus on user experience as the objective which influenced decisions like paying more (time and money) for better support. For the SDEs and line teams it wasnt about revenue or someone yelling at them, they just emulated the behavior they saw around them which led to better observability/introspection/reliable/support. Which, of course, we'd like to believe leads to long term to success and $$$$.

I also like the call out of SLOs (or OKR or SMART goals or whatever) as a mechanism to broadcast your priorities and improve visibility. BUT I've also worked places where they didnt work because the ultimate owner with a VP title didnt care or understand to buy in to it.

And of course theres the hazard of principal agent problems between those selling, buying, building, and running are probably different teams and may not have any meaningful overlap in directly responsible individual.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-06 04:19:18+00:00
I wish the standard way of using shared libraries would be to ship the .so the programs want to dynamically link to alongside the program binary (using RUNPATH), instead of expecting them to exist globally (yes, I mean all shared libraries even glibc, first and foremost glibc, actually).

This way we'd have no portability issue, same benefit as with static linking except it works with glibc out of the box instead of requiring to use musl, and we could benefit from filesystem-level deduplication (with btrfs) to save disk space and memory.
by nijave | 2026-01-06 04:19:51+00:00
>How often does the typical user write to the DB

Turns out a lot when you have things like "last accessed" timestamps on your models.

Really depends on the app

I also don't think that calculation is valid. Your users aren't going to be purely uniformly accessing the app over the course of a day. Invariably you'll have queuing delays above a significantly smaller user count (but maybe the delays are acceptable)
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-06 04:20:01+00:00
Nissan is skipping the US for the 2026 model year due to tariff issues, but their Ariya is reasonably close to "a car, just electric". They designed it specifically to make transitioning from an ICE car less abrupt, including making the acceleration curve more gentle. Its cabin design leans minimal, but more in a luxury Japanese zen style than tech bro style.

The 2026 Leaf, which is based on the same platform, is pretty good in this regard too.
by eru | 2026-01-06 04:20:28+00:00
> The tradeoff is that it's non-upgradeable, but (contra some people who claim this is only a cash-grab by Apple to prevent RAM upgrades) it's worth it for the bandwidth.

That, and if you come at it from the phone / tablet or even laptop angle: most people are quite ok just buying their computing devices pre-assembled and not worrying about upgrading them. You just buy a new one when the old one fails or you want an upgrade.

Similar to how cars these days are harder to repair for the layman, but they also need much less maintenance. The guy who was always tinkering away with his car in old American sitcoms wasn't just a trope, he was truth-in-television. Approximately no one has to do that anymore with modern cars.
by mizzao | 2026-01-06 04:20:43+00:00
Yep, it's converging to the same system...

In China government is controlled by chosen members of the ruling party who become wealthy through it;

In the US the government is controlled by billionaires who become powerful through it.

Neither is a "government by the people" nor a "democratic people's republic" and both are enacting more and more similar policies.
by mandevil | 2026-01-06 04:21:17+00:00
There are something like 20,000 airports and heliports across the US. While not all of them can handle 747s probably there are several thousand fields that can take one of them, especially if there is no need for it to fly again.

And even if all of those fields are destroyed in the US, the 747s modified for AF1 (VC-25s) are capable of in flight refueling, they can stay up for about three days before the oil needs to be changed on the engines and they are forced to land. So they can still reach Australia or some place far away from the US if the rest of the US is totally destroyed.
by dpc_01234 | 2026-01-06 04:21:28+00:00
It's not about memory/CPU/IO, but latency vs throughput. Most software is slow because it ignores the latency. If you program serially waiting for _whatever_ it is going to be slow. If you scatter your data around memory, or read from disk in small chunks, or make tons of tiny queries to the DB serially your software will be 99.9% waiting idle for something to finish. That's it. If you can organize your data linearly in memory and/or work on batches of it at the time and/or parallelize stuff and/or batch your IO, it is going to be fast.
by sandeepkd | 2026-01-06 04:21:48+00:00
On a tangential note, I have a concern with all such advices from a technology standpoint. These are all ways to understand the rules and constraints for upward mobility and make them work for you. More and more people are bubbling up in technology roles and roles impacting the long term outcome for technology by using the ~smart/outcome driven/cheat sheet. Building thoughtful systems require long term vision and commitments, not sure if any of this fits in that picture though. Lately everything is just A MVP.
by snaking0776 | 2026-01-06 04:21:58+00:00
This is an interesting insight I hadn’t thought much about before. Reminds me a bit of some of the mechanistic interpretability work that looked at branch specialization in CNNs and found that architectures which had built in branches tended to have those branches specialize in a way that was consistent across multiple training runs [1]. Maybe the multi-headed and branching nature of transformers adds and inductive bias that is useful for stable training over larger scales.

[1] https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/branch-specialization/
by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-06 04:21:59+00:00
A person I know is upset about EVs because they are built around the assumption that every system in the car will phone home to the car manufacturer (or perhaps the cops), and basically require you to have a proprietary smartphone app in order to interact with EV chargers and perhaps the car itself. Of course, this is also true of new ICE cars, but it's at least possible to continue driving an older ICE car with more limited telemetry, whereas effective, mass-available EVs basically came onto to the scene at the same time that spyware car computer systems did.

I personally do want an EV, but I have qualms about the smartphone-ification of such cars as well. More importantly, the place where I currently live doesn't have a parking spot with an EV charger (there's a limited number of such spots, you have to join a waitlist to get one). If electric cars really could be charged to be ready to drive 800 miles in 5 minutes, that wouldn't be a problem - but even if this press release is being more or less accurate about the battery claims, I can't buy an EV with this technology today, and as far as I'm aware it still takes significantly longer to charge an EV than to fill up with gas to an equivalent amount.
by pc86 | 2026-01-06 04:24:41+00:00
That doesn't make the promotion more about grinding because the company doesn't care about how much work you get done in a set unit of time compared to other employees in the same set unit of time. The company cares about how much you get done, period.

If the only differentiating factor between Amy and Jim is quantity of work done (this is never the case in real life), most companies will prefer a Jim that works 60 hours to an Amy that works 40 if Jim is producing 5% more.
by abdullahkhalids | 2026-01-06 04:26:59+00:00
Think of something like home owner insurance. Your insurance rates depend on exactly how your home is built, what type of heating system it has, where it is, etc. The rates, carefully calculated by actuaries, act as a signal to you as to how dangerous your house is to yourself, but also to others. If you set your house on fire due to negligence and cause the next house to burn, you might be liable for damages there as well.

Forcing everyone to buy such insurance forces everyone to fully pay for the expected cost of the danger inherent in their house. Over time, this causes houses to be constructed in a safer manner. If people are not forced to buy insurance, they don't buy it, and so this evolution over time does not happen. Also see [1].

Some financial tools are amazingly clever - whether they are morally good or bad. Bits about Money is a great blog to build insight into some of these constructions [2].

Another example for your initial question is car seats for kids. If you don't force em, nobody buys em. Then their kids die.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

[2] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/
by moron4hire | 2026-01-06 04:27:39+00:00
Lately, it seems like all the blogs have shifted away from talking about productivity and are now talking about how much they "enjoy" working with LLMs.

If firing up old coal plants and skyrocketing RAM prices and $5000 consumer GPUs and violating millions of developers' copyrights and occasionally coaxing someone into killing themselves is the cost of Brian From Middle Management getting to Enjoy Programming Again instead of having to blame his kids for not having any time on the weekends, I guess we have no choice but to oblige him his little treat.
by oefrha | 2026-01-06 04:28:48+00:00
I have some experience in this regard, and Google, even though it’s known for nonexistent human support, isn’t even the worst. I helped a Chinese creator friend DMCA takedown a bunch of accounts on YouTube/Instagram/TikTok straight up stealing her content / impersonating her. TikTok’s response was fastest, one account was taken down within eight hours (to my pleasant surprise), another was taken down in three days. YouTube was all right, accounts were taken down in a week or so. Facebook/Instagram was the worst. They asked for the least info upfront in their takedown form, sent a bunch of follow up emails, then eventually just ghosted me. I initiated new email chains referencing the case ID but never heard from anyone. I had to negotiate with the account holder but that went nowhere either since my threat to take down the account turned out to be a joke. To this day the infringing account is still up.
by afavour | 2026-01-06 04:28:49+00:00
I’m an OG Pebble user converted to Apple Watch… couldn’t resist placing an order for the Round 2 because it looks amazing but I worry I’ve grown too accustomed to the feature set of the Apple Watch (deep OS integration, contactless payment). Maybe it’ll be my “dress” watch.

All else aside I hope this might inspire Apple to try with their watch design. The first watch felt lazy and it’s basically unchanged since then.
by wcfrobert | 2026-01-06 04:28:50+00:00
I don't see how AI can bring about 10%+ annual economic growth, let alone infinite abundance, without somehow crossing the bit-to-atom interface. Without a breakthrough in general-purpose robotics - which feels decades away - agents will just be confined to optimizing B2B SaaS. Human utility is rooted in the physical environment. I find digital abundance incredibly uninspiring.