MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How Does Retirement Affect Your Workplace?
by andrewrn | 2026-02-04 04:41:31+00:00
I am trying to understand how long-tenured folks' retirements cause disruptions from loss of institutional knowledge. I've had some conversations so far, but I'd love to hear some more perspectives. I am particularly interested in fields that have embodied, tacit knowledge that walks out the door with retirees. Thanks in advance.
by defrost | 2026-02-04 04:41:57+00:00
Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom.

It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice.

They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.
by thrw045 | 2026-02-04 04:42:20+00:00
Reading this comment and other similar comments there's definitely a difference between people.
Personally I agree and resonate a lot with the blog post, and I've always found designs of my programs to come sort of naturally. Usually the hard problems are the technical problems and then the design is figured out based on what's needed to control the program. I never had to think that hard about design.
by gyomu | 2026-02-04 04:42:51+00:00
This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me:

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080

"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-04 04:43:38+00:00
No, it's not press either. First Amendment auditors do things like this: https://www.independent.com/2025/07/09/first-amendment-audit...

You say "harassment", but that's precisely the problem. Many things that any reasonable person would identify as harassment are protected speech under the First Amendment. So these auditors go around harassing people, knowing that they're causing people emotional distress, because they're bullies who want to make people feel bad.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-04 04:44:01+00:00
> So what? Who or what states they are entitled to have their changes visible as a request on my repo?

You did, by making the repo public. You didn't make a release tarball public, you made git repository, designed for collaborating on code changes public. In this case, other users of github (including the general public) are exposed to a repository and all that entails. If you have no intention to let others do PRs, you don't need to host a public repository, you just need to host public tarballs of your source code.

> they do not have a right to open requests on my page any more than people have a “right” to comment on a blog post or a YouTube video.

Youtube videos are one-way consumption of media. Git repositories have the concept of merging, which is taking remote repository content and assimilating it with your repo (as you know), that's PRs. public repo = public/open PRs, because that's how a vcs works. You're not hosting a social media content on Github, you're hosting a public version control system, and you have the ability to make it private.

Youtube is hardly a good analogy, perhaps twitter or blue sky is, although even then it's consumed content, not collaboration. In that example though, what you all are proposing here is similar to tweeting but turning off the ability to get "noted" by the community. You have the right to say whatever you want (within the site's policy), but others also have the right to make community corrections (notes) so you won't mislead others.
by osigurdson | 2026-02-04 04:44:21+00:00
Honestly, when working with computers, KiB, MiB, GiB, etc. just makes more sense usually. It is easier to reason about address space and page sizes are often delineated in 4KiB chunks. It does come off like "inside baseball" a little but there are practical reasons for it.

If you really want to come at it from an information theory perspective, even the "byte" is rather arbitrary - the only thing that matters is the number of bits.
by saagarjha | 2026-02-04 04:45:51+00:00
> Nobody's going to pay me (assuming I even had the skills) to optimize for consumer GPUs?

People will but probably less, not many people are doing AI at the edge that can pay the mega millions

> And likewise similar fundamental differences between consumer and cloud hopper (where the majority of the perf is the cloud one's ISA?)

I think Hopper was the version where they did a clean split and it’s only for datacenter

> So I guess I'm wondering if I should buy a GPU myself or should I just rent on the cloud if I wanted to start getting some experience in this field. How do you even get experience in this normally anyways, do you get into really good schools and into their AI labs which have a lot of funding?

You can do performance work on any system you have really it’s just that the details change depending on what you’re targeting. You can definitely learn the basics on like a 3060 by following blog posts
by RajT88 | 2026-02-04 04:47:12+00:00
I read comments like this and am always amazed at people's understanding of how protest works. I don't advocate for violence and destruction, but protest absolutely works because it makes things inconvenient for the people they are protesting.

When people complain about protesters getting in the way and being noisy and generally being inconvenient, they are bemoaning effective protest. That's a constitutional right.
by aabajian | 2026-02-04 04:47:27+00:00
I don't know enough about lighting, but if I bought five of these, would I reach 50,000 lumens? Is it just additive? This would cost $250.

https://www.harborfreight.com/10000-lumen-4-ft-linkable-diam...

Also, if you've ever been in a Walmart or Forever 21 at night, you'll know that constant LED white light is probably not the best thing for your eyes.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-02-04 04:47:44+00:00
It does seem ironic that a startup would immediately pivot to devoting some of its precious time and attention to becoming a hedge fund just as they've got the funding for their 'startup idea'. On the other hand, any big whack of cash should have an optimisation plan, lest it be wasted. Does YC provide templates?

Oversimplifying:

X = full amount of raised capital

Y = expected spend over 12 months

Z = $ value of percentage contingency for 12 months

Y+Z goes into use-it-however-and-whenever-you-want account (likely low to no interest)

X - (Y+Z) goes into a 12 month higher interest account, ideally staying untouched until maturity (stake the stablecoins in this context)

I'm skeptical of crpyto holding companies though, explicitly because of the lack of regulation. The likes of BlockFi, Celsius, and FTX gives me the cold sweats. Regulation in the US is notoriously lacking even in well established finance and banking, never mind the crypto 'industry' which was always high-percentage grifters, and now the Epstein files has added 'morally corrupt' tags to more of them.

Recipe for sleepless nights, which is already a problem for a startup founders isn't it?
by tayo42 | 2026-02-04 04:48:21+00:00
> I tried getting back in touch with physics, reading old textbooks. But that wasn’t successful either. It is hard to justify spending time and mental effort solving physics problems that aren’t relevant or state-of-the-art

I tried this with physics and philosophy. I think i want to do a mix of hard but meaningful. For academic fields like that its impossible for a regular person to do as a hobby. Might as well just do puzzles or something.
by Sophira | 2026-02-04 04:48:50+00:00
Firstly, I think you may have replied to the wrong person. I wasn't the one who mentioned the early diskettes point, I was just quoting it.

But that said, we aren't talking about sector sizes. Of course storage mediums are always going to use sector sizes of powers of two. What's being talked about here is the confusion in how to refer to the storage medium's total capacity.
Show HN: TIEP – Open Protocol for Cross-Platform Bot Detection
by Jamessfks123 | 2026-02-04 04:48:51+00:00
I built an open protocol for sharing bot detection intelligence across
platforms. When Discord detects a phishing bot, Telegram knows instantly.

- Decentralized (no central authority)
- Privacy-preserving (metadata only)
- Production-ready (deploy in 5 min with Docker)
- Python reference implementation + complete spec

Looking for feedback, pilot deployments, and contributors.
by bytesandbits | 2026-02-04 04:49:52+00:00
I will never understand why when you expect to sell a few hundred units of a product at most, you would decide to go and build something in china. There are instances where building in china might make sense. this is not one of them! you can easily hand assemble everything yourself in America, since this was a 1-year long time-frame. There is phenomenal CNC shops in the east coast (and also some in the mid-west) if you don't mind the lead times. You don't have to deal with tariffs, imports, and more importantly THEY SPEAK YOUR LANGUAGE. Yes this sounds dumb. Like, with Google Translate you shouldn't have a problem no? Think again! From my experience with Chinese metallurgic, they are clumsy and often mess up even straight forward designs. Yes, they are fast, but at what cost! They will redo it as many times as you need. But the headache, man the headache of dealing with it is not worth it. On the other hand some of the issues here are expected and fun! well maybe not fun, but part of the process, like the swapped components in the board. it happens to the best of us and that's okay! but it would always be easier to debug when you can drive yourself to the CNC factory, or at least have a video call with the tech in your own language. Also, regulations in china is whole different world and not at all straightforward to navigate for westerners, at all. I really don't like that people turn directly to china cause "that's what everyone does anyway". nu-uh. also, China is not the only option! Eastern Europe, such as Poland, can get you there too for reasonable prices, and have tons of phenomenal electronics and manufacturing engineers. Tons.
by ruhith | 2026-02-04 04:50:35+00:00
The DuckDB-as-a-storage-engine approach is clever because it lets you keep your existing MySQL connections, tooling, and replication topology while routing analytical queries to a columnar engine underneath. That's a much easier sell operationally than standing up a separate analytics database and building a sync pipeline. The real question is how they handle consistency between the InnoDB and DuckDB copies of the same data, that's where every hybrid OLTP/OLAP system either shines or quietly loses rows.
by shit_game | 2026-02-04 04:51:05+00:00
They certainly didn't have mills as we know them in the 1700s, but lathes, drills, and subtractive manufacturing had been in practice for millenia. You could say they were "machined by hand". Most early firearms (barring large-bore guns like cannons) were made from forged steel or iron, which is significantly stronger than cast iron due to its lower carbon content and regular grain structure. These forged parts were then worked on by gunspiths with cutters and abrasives to produce parts in tolerance for their mechanism. Cast iron (or more typically in early warfare, bronze) was suitable for cannons and large-bore guns due to the mass of the finished gun; more metal meant that the gun could withstand more shock, but even then they could fail catastrophically due to material fatigue or failure.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-04 04:52:24+00:00
You're thinking of outer space. At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space. there is plenty of altitude above the karman line where there is enough atmosphere to dissipate heat. Furthermore, i don't know if they figured it out, but radiation can dissipate heat, that's how we get heat from the sun. Also, given enough input energy (the sun), active closed-cooling systems might be feasible.

https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-cont...

But I really hope posts like this don't discourage whoever is investing in this. The problems are solvable, and someone is trying to solve them, that's all that matters. My only concern is the latency, but starlink seems to manage somehow.

Also, a matter of technicality (or so I've heard it said) is that the earth itself doesn't dissipate heat, it transforms or transfers entropy.
by hboon | 2026-02-04 04:53:43+00:00
Location: Singapore (UTC+8)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript (web frontend Vue + backend Fastify+Postgres) + Swift (iOS and some macOS) + LLM (Claude Code and Droid)

Résumé/CV: https://hboon.com/about/

Email: hboon@motionobj.com

Looking for part-time work as I build my own products. Especially interested in one-off ad-hoc architecture pre-ship reviews.

30 years experience in software development.
by josephg | 2026-02-04 04:54:18+00:00
I feel this too. I suspect its a byproduct of all the context switching I find myself doing when I'm using an LLM to help write software. Within a 10 minute window, I'll read code, debug a problem, prompt, discuss the design, test something, do some design work myself and so on.

When I'm just programming, I spend a lot more time working through a single idea, or a single function. Its much less tiring.
by zzrrt | 2026-02-04 04:54:23+00:00
I felt like you ruled out collision when you said they're not going to murder, though, granted, an accidental but predictable collision after repeatedly refusing orders is not exactly murder. I think the point stands, they have to be willing to kill or to back down, and as others said I'm skeptical France or similar countries would give the order for anything short of an imminent threat regarding the plane's target. If Musk doesn't want to land where they want him to, he's going to pay the pilot whatever it takes, and the fighter jets are going to back off because whatever they want to arrest him for isn't worth an international incident.
by johnfn | 2026-02-04 04:54:53+00:00
It's certainly a different style of thinking hard. I used to really stress myself over coding - i.e. I would get frustrated that solving an issue would cause me to introduce some sort of hack or otherwise snowball into a huge refactor. Now I spend most of my time thinking about what cool new features I am going to build and not really stressing myself out too much.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-04 04:55:41+00:00
Meanwhile, Trump: India is a dead economy.

It is inevitable that this happens. H1B workers already cost more on average, and were a lot more expensive once you count the legal fees and lawyer costs and all that. Now the new 100K fee just makes it too expensive to be practical.

So America is left with a choice. Let companies hire workers in other countries, or enact new barriers for that. But that’s no different than arguing for tariffs, a tax on consumers. And those countries may just remove market access for those companies.

But the real fix is to have much more aggressive taxation of the ultra wealthy within America to fund UBI, healthcare, education, etc. Inequality is getting out of hand. Musk is literally worth over 700B. And the mega corp are worth over a trillion now.
by mickael-kerjean | 2026-02-04 04:55:55+00:00
As a Frenchman involved in creating an open source Dropbox (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) that can connect to any kind of storage and can expose itself as not only a web client but also SFTP, webdav and S3, out of 60 customers, only 2 are French, the only people I see coming from France are only ever interested in open source because they don't want to pay anything (other countries in Europe are different though)
by snailmailman | 2026-02-04 04:56:47+00:00
One big part of this is that gcode isnt really a 3d model
its a set of instructions on how to move the printhead around.
You don't download the gcode directly, because that varies by printer. You download a model, and then a slicing program turns that into a set of printer-specific gcode. Any subtle settings changes would change the hash of this gcode.

And the printer doesn't really know what the model is. It would have to reverse the gcode instructions back into a model somehow. The printer isn't really the place to detect and prevent this sort of thing imo.
by binarycrusader | 2026-02-04 04:57:01+00:00
I ordered a custom Ryzen 9950X3D workstation in a full-size tower from Puget last year with 192GiB of RAM before the memory craze happened and I've been quite happy with it. Zero reliability issues and excellent performance.

Coincidentally, I also ordered a custom Tiki-based gaming system from Falcon NW for a family member and that's also been amazing.

I think I would be hard-pressed to choose between the two system builders, but Puget definitely has the edge for workstations since they offer Full-size towers and other hardware that Falcon NW does not. Conversely, Falcon NW offers custom cases and the very best of hardware for gamers with unheard of customization options like custom paint jobs.
by uzerfcwn | 2026-02-04 04:58:02+00:00
> When I run 'notepad dir1/file1.txt', the package should not sneakily be able to access dir2.

What happens if the user presses ^O, expecting a file open dialog that could navigate to other directories? Would the dialog be somehow integrated to the OS and run with higher permissions, and then notepad is given permissions to the other directory that the user selects?
by bariswheel | 2026-02-04 04:58:14+00:00
Good highlight of the struggle between Builder and Thinker, I enjoyed the writing.
So why not work on PQC? Surely you've thought about other avenues here as well.

If you're looking for a domain where the 70% AI solution is a total failure, that's the field. You can't rely on vibe coding because the underlying math, like Learning With Errors (LWE) or supersingular isogeny graphs, is conceptually dense and hasn't been commoditized into AI training data yet. It requires that same 'several-day-soak' thinking you loved in physics, specifically because we're trying to build systems that remain secure even against an adversary with a quantum computer. It’s one of the few areas left where the Thinker isn't just a luxury, but a hard requirement for the Builder to even begin.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-04 04:58:17+00:00
Instant upvote for a Philiip Mainlander quote at the end. He's the OG "God is Dead" guy and Nietzsche was reacting (very poorly) to Mainlander and other pessimists like Schopenhauer when he followed up with his own, shittier version of "god is dead"

Please read up on his life. Mainlander is the most extreme/radical Philosophical Pessimist of them all. He wrote a whole book about how you should rationally kill yourself and then he killed himself shortly after.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Mainl%C3%A4nder

https://dokumen.pub/the-philosophy-of-redemption-die-philoso...

Max Stirner and Mainlander would have been friends and are kindred spirits philosophically.
by josephg | 2026-02-04 04:58:23+00:00
Yeah, but thinking with an LLM is different. The article says:

> By “thinking hard,” I mean encountering a specific, difficult problem and spending multiple days just sitting with it to overcome it.

The "thinking hard" I do with an LLM is more like management thinking. Its chaotic and full of conversations and context switches. Its tiring, sure. But I'm not spending multiple days contemplating a single idea.

The "thinking hard" I do over multiple days with a single problem is more like that of a scientist / mathematician. I find myself still thinking about my problem while I'm lying in bed that night. I'm contemplating it in the shower. I have little breakthroughs and setbacks, until I eventually crack it or give up.

Its different.
by ruhith | 2026-02-04 04:58:50+00:00
The pattern here is clear: everyone loves the CDN, everyone worries about their track record shipping anything else. A database is the worst place to test whether that changes. CDN mistakes cost you cache misses. Database mistakes cost you data. The pricing model and EU story are genuinely compelling, but if the S3 compatibility timeline is any guide, I'd let this one run quietly for a year before trusting it with anything I can't afford to lose.
by sfink | 2026-02-04 04:59:00+00:00
I definitely relate to this. Except that while I was in the 1% in university who thought hard, I don't think my success rate was that high. My confidence in the time was quite high, though, and I still remember the notable successes.

And also, I haven't started using AI for writing code yet. I'm shuffling toward that, with much trepidation. I ask it lots of coding questions. I make it teach me stuff. Which brings me to the point of my post:

The other day, I was looking at some Rust code and trying to work out the ownership rules. In theory, I more or less understand them. In practice, not so much. So I had Claude start quizzing me. Claude was a pretty brutal teacher -- he'd ask 4 or 5 questions, most of them solvable from what I knew already, and then 1 or 2 that introduced a new concept that I hadn't seen. I would get that one wrong and ask for another quiz. Same thing: 4 or 5 questions, using what I knew plus the thing just introduced, plus 1 or 2 with a new wrinkle.

I don't think I got 100% on any of the quizzes. Maybe the last one; I should dig up that chat and see. But I learned a ton, and had to think really hard.

Somehow, I doubt this technique will be popular. But my experience with it was very good. I recommend it. (It does make me a little nervous that whenever I work with Claude on things that I'm more familiar with, he's always a little off base on some part of it. Since this was stuff I didn't know, he could have been feeding me slop. But I don't think so; the explanations made sense and the the compiler agreed, so it'd be tough to get anything completely wrong. And I was thinking through all of it; usually the bullshit slips in stealthily in the parts that don't seem to matter, but I had to work through everything.)