skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Have you ever taken a career break or gap year to hack?
Have any of you taken a career break or gap year just to hack on interesting projects?

I'm thinking about doing this for my own mental health, whether they be open source projects, fun projects, or projects that might be eventually monetizable and turn into a business (but without the pressure to necessarily do so). After burnout in the corporate world it would be nice to just do what I feel like doing for a while.

Financially, I'm good to do this for a certain amount of time, but at some point I'll need to work again -- my savings is fine for some years, but nowhere close to retirement.

Have any of you taken this kind of gap? Did you ever feel that your lack of a line on your resume caused the constant influx of recruiter emails to slowly start dwindling, and your "I can always get a job" lifeline started vanishing at some point?

Or did you feel it was a non-issue, and that recruiters continued to see your technical abilities without the job title?
It's about enforcing that people follow standards. Which is still an uphill battle, but at least it's based in something sane. Their work on this has resulted in improvements to a whole slew of popular feed readers that should make life easier for a chunk of the internet, not just OP's own site.
This is the Asian giant hornet. Apparently they had to make a euphemism that would obfuscate the continent of origin, when being from the wrong continent is precisely the reason it needed to be eradicated.
I liked it a lot as well, but do remember it being gloomy most of the time.
The article is a big pile of nothing. Just re-hashing history for 90 % and the rest is :
- GPT5 not as smart as they want, according to rumors
- They are trying reasoning (yes we know they showed o3)
That's an interesting take. Didn't think of that, but I appreciate it. Thanks for sharing. He's aware that it's not his land, and he thinks about who owns it.
FireCracker has a jailer: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...
> exactly my point

Ok, so you’re saying that because bad things would happen anyway then it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal? So you’re just going to ignore how much worse it would be if there were just no laws at all? Corporate scumbags will push any system to its limit and beyond, and if you change the limit, they’ll change the push. Just look at the milk industry in New York City before food adulteration laws took effect. The “bad things will happen anyway” argument makes total sense if you ignore magnitude. Which you can’t.

> anti capitalist

If you think pointing out the likelihood of corporate misbehavior is anti-capitalist, you’re getting your subjects confused.

> 2021

Anywhere else you want to move those goalposts?
I'm working on a nostr-based discussion site that should be (very) familiar to Hacker News users:

https://oddbean.com/
You will come to regret this comment when you realize later how much you wish the way things are now ( as we near the true peak ).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

> The origin of copyright law in most European countries lies in efforts by the church and governments to regulate and control the output of printers.

I'll confess to assuming that that's why they wanted to regulate the output of printers. But what non-cenaorship reason could they possibly have had for wanting to do so?
One issue is that the "local pub" is less local, since building places like that (or even cafes) in the neighbourhoods where people live is illegal. I loved having a corner pub when I lived in Dublin.

Though regarding membership - maybe check out an Elks club?
Glad to hear someone else shares these feelings! I've met very kind and amazing people in the area, yet there is just nothing that brings people together. You'll hear from the people in local facebook groups about some small gatherings, but it's just still all "planned". It doesn't replace that "ah, i'm done with work, i'll quickly grab a drink and see who's around!" chats.

I've had incredible nights through just going to the same bar a couple of times during my travels, and people all around the world made me feel welcome. Yet here? No such thing, yet everyone, including me, complains how we yearn for such a social atmosphere.
> So LLMs finally hit the wall. For a long time, more data, bigger models, and more compute to drive them worked

We can't say whether there is a wall, since we don't have anymore data to train on.
It makes sense that teaching patients to live with and question their delusions rather than fighting them head-on could lead to better outcomes
For what it's worth, with the uom[0] crate you can represent that type equality. It represents units as powers of SI units, so m^1s^-2. It does not have the nice error messages though

[0] https://docs.rs/uom/latest/uom/
Yes, about a decade ago. Why do you ask?
I saw last night, in a French documentary, a middle aged man who lost 90% of his friends few months after he lost his job.
The proper knee-jerk reaction would be to ban this kind of work, but that would also mean disallowing content sharing on Facebook.

That is why this type of work will not go away.

And AI is just not good enough to do this, I fully agree.
What strikes me most is how your approach intertwines personal meaning and physical embodiment. Whether interpreted through a mystical lens, as you’re exploring, or as an imaginative and deeply personal form of visualization, it seems to function as a powerful motivator for change and self-awareness
I live about a mile north of the border and I saw one of these on my deck last summer. I am not sure I believe their timeline.
It's one of many reasons I love Go.

The amount of arbitrary glue, configuration and "cool things" I need to learn-and-forget for every new project is an order of magnitude less than any other language I've used in anger.
The First ChatGPT Video Device
For what it's worth, https://www.gotokernville.com/ says at least some people there consider it a town: 'Our town of Kernville ...'

Just because it's a census-designated place doesn't mean that Kernville is not a town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town notes: "The United States Census identifies many census-designated places (CDPs) by the names of unincorporated towns which lie within them; however, those CDPs typically include rural and suburban areas and even surrounding villages and other towns."
Correct. See: my experience with pre-existing condition denial.
Documentation can be utterly useless, if taken to the extreme.

Like e.g. in Java it was common to have a comment on a simple (!) setter, telling you "this sets X"

No shit, captain obvious! Never would have guessed that.

I like a combination of "literate programming" (in a light form at least), that leads to readable, self explanatory code that's still fast and well (not prematurely) optimized.

But reading docs about the most trivial things: Brrr!
Everyone has intrusive thoughts or experiences moments of mental noise
Modern parenting in a nuclear family is a profoundly lonely experience.
This is the self-described strategy that John Nash [1], the Nobel Prize winner, ended up using in his latter life to face his serious mental condition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.
What works during recovery or in milder phases of psychosis might not work in its more extreme manifestations. Recognizing and respecting those limits doesn’t diminish the value of this therapy
That's a great idea! What a marvelous one - a way to honor, but also surprising that no one seems to have thought of it before. Imagine coming across that, would be beautiful.
I live in one of the densest neighbourhoods in NA, and I definitely agree with you how it's mostly illegal to open a pub in extremely residential zone. That being said, there are like 10 bars I can think of that's around me. But none cater for that "local pub" atmosphere.

What's Elks club? My googling only led me to something in New Westminster, if that's the thing you're talking about.
I did compliance for a fintech under heavy regulation.

If we used AWS, we could skip months of certification. If we use a custom data center, we have to certify it ourselves (muuuuuch more expensive).

From this standpoint, cloud beats on-premise.
It’ll probably sit in the human hybrid phase for longer than with chess where the AGI tools make the humans better and faster. But as long as the tools keep getting better at that there’s a strong flywheel effect
Yes! I have a completely unfounded theory that sounds right to my gut that basically all that matters is time and focus. If you want to learn something all you need is time and focus, you can't get there with just one of those two, you need both.

The night before an exam, I can focus really hard and get a bunch of info crammed into my head, but it's all gone a week later. I haven't tried Blinkist but I struggle to imagine how it's any different.

A long books beauty is the path one takes to get to the conclusion the auther arrived at (over a much larger period of time themselves!), the debate, the details, the story, that's where the real "lessons" are. You can't just rip a page out of here and there, read them and call it a day. I mean you can, you just need to be honest with yourself in terms of what you're really doing.

There are no shortcuts to learning, you are always trading something away.
A fascinating and sharp commentary on how society defines "sanity"
That was the case long before Musk took over. Twitter has always been an observer-hostile site, that's the whole reason why nitter and co exist.
Mm, classic! Still in a world that sometimes might seem more like that it's nice to have Frost by your side.
Today I learned chat.com redirects to chatgpt.com
Oh so you mean I have at my fingertips a tool that can generate me a Scientific American issue on any topic I fancy? That's still some non-negative utility right there :).
Complains about traffic, sends 0.5mb of everything.

That’s my kind of humor.
Wow! Not even communist China censors freedom of speech and thought like Musk does
Just for context, are you vegan?
I live about a mile north of the border and I saw one of these on my deck last summer. They are massive. I do not buy the official timeline.

Not “confirmed” of course. Just like the report from 100 miles south of here 2 months ago. “Not confirmed”.

They do not believe the “eradication” announcement either clearly as they plan to continue search and trapping efforts throughout 2025 ( from the article ).
My thoughts exactly. Python was supposed to be this ultra-portable thing. But... I am finding myself having to write patches to get my software to work on different Python versions.

People who have Python 3 installed can be on many different versions. The thing is, depending on the version, quite often bug fixes included in later versions aren't in older versions. So if you want to make your code work -- got to get the patches in manually, monkey patch broken code, and do it that way. Then there's the seemingly random deprecation of standard library modules / other breaking changes.

I take python version support seriously because if people install your packages you'll be outsourcing all of the above crap to the user. They might not even know how to 'upgrade' python. Or end up on the wrong version. If your package doesn't work when they install it they'll just move on to something else. Python is a total shit show for packaging.
Depends entirely on what kind of connections you have. The government will happily waive rules to let you off the hook, or raid your dwelling early in the morning with guns drawn, then stage evidence if need be.
And C++, C#, and JS use arrow for lambdas, so there's precedent for both.
Google inference is a lot cheaper since they have their own hardware so they don't have to pay licensing to NVIDIA, thus their free tier can give you much more than others.

Other than that the catch is like all other free tiers, it is marketing and can be withdrawn at any moment to get you to pay after you are used to their product.
I see it as an example of stopping a crime before it happens by removing the ability of everyday people to even make the choice to commit the crime.

This seems necessary when the penalty for being caught after the fact is insufficient to stop people from doing it. Either because penalties don’t work in preventing behavior, or because current society has difficulty implementing sufficiently harsh penalties because it feels too mean.
They are absolutely devastating to bee hives.
Not sure I follow you. If you're building a computer system where the "user" is intended to be another computer, why would you need anything besides an API? Or are you talking about a system where both humans and other computers are meant to consume it's services? If so, that would be somewhat interesting I guess.

But it seems to me that if you're going to use an LLM to "use" some other software, the way to go is use tool-calling support to call an API, and/or something like Anthropic's MCP (Model Context Protocol) stuff. There's some exiting work to, around "agent to agent" communications that one could use to integrate one kind of AI system with another computer system (whether or not the other system has any AI abilities). They range from things like FIPA-ACL, KQML, KIF, etc., through all the SemanticWeb standards, to some more recent specs that are being worked on. For example, the forthcoming ECMA TC56[1][2] standard for Natural Language communication between agents. And a similar'ish effort is mentioned in a recent arXiv paper[3].

[1]: https://ecma-international.org/technical-committees/tc56/

[2]: https://github.com/nlip-project

[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05828v1
Incorrect information by itself is at best useless. Incorrect information that is thought to be correct is outright dangerous. Objective truth is crucial to science and progress.

We've come too far since the age of enlightenment to just give it all up.
You're selectively moving groups around with your statistics to try and use simple numbers to make it seem like you're always right. 20% of every single person in the US being sort of into Nazis has very little to do with the vast majority of people under 40 (military age) finding it ok with Brian getting shot. The first group includes people who are getting government funded healthcare on top of not having spent most of their lives dealing with insurance companies run by MBAs

Edit: Just noticed statistical manipulation is your job and you're maybe in a similar tax bracket

>> Trade private equity. Former aerospace investment banker, and before that, algorithmic equity derivatives trader. FinTech + Space + B2C angel & seed investor. Jackson Hole local; frequently in New York and the Bay Area.
> But psychoanalysis is literally psudoscientific nonsense. You got spooked.

OP got spooked to stop suffering and love life instead? Is that your cautionary tale?
> complete devotion to the task at hand.

Sounds like an alignment problem. Complete devotion to a task is rarely what humans actually want. What if the task at hand turns out to be the wrong task?
I find PhD dissertations to be a good fit for this. They are usually required to provide background on the field, an argument for why the covered research is state of the art and some actual example of original research. 80-200 pages depending on the field.
For sure, I remember that. I remember that even the most popular, non-techie kids got on ICQ, though it was probably more around 1999 by that point, but every kid that had a computer at home had an ICQ account (though how often they could actually go online and use it was another question, thanks to dialup lol)

Though, still, only the geeky kids like myself were spending numerous hours online and having a high % of socializing occuring online, even then. The non-computer-geek kids would come online for like, an hour or two. I had already been online for hours before them, and would still be for many hours afterward (it helped that we got ADSL in 1998, after so many years of 14.4/28.8 dialup)
> Like e.g. in Java it was common to have a comment on a simple (!) setter, telling you "this sets X"

Given the prevelance of mutating functions in Java this is welcome
what law is it again? where if you want the right answers to come out, spam people with wrong answers? lol
> But that's the point - we don't build robots that can do a wide range of tasks with ease. We build robots that can do single tasks super-efficiently.

Because we don't have AGI yet. When AGI is here those robots will be priority number one, people already are building humanoid robots but without intelligence to move it there isn't much advantage.
How do you differentiate yourself from Langfuse?
Nothing similar in Bangalore. Quelle suprise...
Though we have something along the lines at work "Chai/Sutta par charcha"
n is some value depending on the size of the input, so if you have a look up table that is O(n), then that memory needs to be initialized somehow. If you have a fixed size lookup table then it is O(1), even if it is big.
Presumably they meant "never going to back to not including these tools in my daily workflow".
I live in the PNW, but come from Croatia. When I went back after a long time away (about 7 years) and having grown up, I observed something with complete disbelief:

My friends from there, would go to their friends' ice cream parlour, grab some coffees and a beer at 8 PM. For the next four hours, they would do nothing but tell funny stories and laugh until they couldn't laugh any more. These guys literally spent 4 hours laughing together.

They did this the next day, and the next, and many more until I had to reluctantly go back to the airport and fly back to the PNW.

Nothing even remotely like this has happened since last going back. Every time I think back to it, it seems like some impossible other reality.
Topographic complexity: New insights for conservation
I also live in Hamburg and yeah it’s extremely difficult to meet people here considering it’s such a huge city, especially if you live south of the Elbe
Reducing the broad category of "experience" to "computable functions in the mathematical sense" is quite, hm, reductive.
Original title: Topographic complexity drives trait composition as well as functional and phylogenetic diversity of understory plant communities in microrefugia: New insights for conservation
Quite honestly I'd tell you not to mix threads with asyncio. As you note: IO bound tasks aren't CPU hogs and there's little benefit to mixing it with threads. It will lead to unnecessary bugs, complexity, and problems with event loop management.

Asyncio can run tens of thousands of tasks if its used properly. If you think something will block it you should check out "process pool executors." Note that its very tricky to share resources like sockets between processes so its kind of another reason to avoid stuff like this.

I think Python 3.14 will have interpreter pools for even more concurrency options.
Bloom filters are great, I wish more people knew about them. The most important part about a bloom filter:

They will never have a false negative (and only sometimes a false positive).

We used this to vastly improve render times for comments pages on reddit. We used two tricks. The first was to store the time of your last vote as a first class property on your user object. If you loaded a comments page for a link that was submitted after your last vote, we knew that you couldn't have voted on any of those comments.

But if you had voted afterwards, we had to look up every single comment on the page to see if you had voted on it (we couldn't only do the comments made before your last vote because we didn't know the creation time until after we looked up the comment, and it was faster to just look up the vote).

But with a bloom filter, we could very quickly look up all the comments and get back a list of all the ones you voted on (with a couple of false positives in there). Then we could go to the cache and see if your actual vote was there
(and if it was an upvote or a downvote). It was only after a failed cache hit did we have to actually go to the database.

But that bloom filter saved us from doing sometimes 1000s of cache lookups.
I'm not sure about your local laws, but at least in Lithuania it's completely legal to give a wrong advice (by accident, of course)... Even a notary specialist would at most get to pay a larger insurance payment for a while, because human errors falls under professional insurance.
OK, will do. I was just imitating others that seem to be doing the same.

Is there such a thing as an acceptable number of accounts per year? (Not fond of the karma system.)
> matrix multiplication, which is O((n^2)log(n))

Isn't the fastest theoretical algorithm something like O(n^2.37) ?
The second you start serving alcohol, you start being liable for things people do after they leave your establishment. Or even in your establishment. Your personal assets are at stake, and at that point, it doesn’t make sense to run something as a charity.
One interesting corollary of minimum wage that I don’t hear much about is something you might call the “minimum job”. In other words, I might pay someone $1 to do some menial ancillary task, but the cash register is really what needs to be done. If minimum wage is raised, I can either pay more for the same tasks or decide they’re not worth doing at all.

Where this really hits home is trash. So many US cities just have litter everywhere, even in well-trafficked areas. One solution is an army of people to clean up the garbage.

What matters more than the minimum wage amount is the cost of living overall. This is something CA is finding out the hard way. You can raise minimum wage to $30 an hour, even with regular hours (usually minimum wage restaurant workers have different hours every day) it won’t make housing affordable in the Bay Area. On the flip side if real estate is cheap it means rent is cheap for workers (willing to accept lower wages) and businesses (willing to hire more).
The article says:

> The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.

You might have heard the saying, common in policy and mechanism design: "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome."

If you want to reduce spam, you increase the marginal cost of posting spam until it stops. In general if you introduce a small cost to any activity or service, the mere existence of the cost is often a sufficient disincentive to misuse.

But, you can think through implications for yourself, no? You don't need me to explain how to think about cause and effect? You can, say, think about examples in real life, or in your own town or building, where a service is free to use compared to one that has a small fee attached, and look at who uses what and how.
> Providers drive all the costs in our system, not insurers.

I like your proposed solution that the state somehow engineer a way to drive down the costs billed by providers. Perhaps if the state operated a (pseudo-)monopsony wherein they exercise their leverage as the payer to drive down costs.

It could have a snappy name like if you combined medical and care? Or maybe medical and aid?

Anyway I also cannot fathom why anyone would hold ill will towards an industry that lobbies to stop that from happening. They are simply smol beans and the fact that there is no single payer monopsony means they are splitting a measly fraction of a trillion dollars per year. The fact that somebody else makes money too is proof that they couldn’t be a problem uwu
Dualism has nothing to do with it. There are more things on heaven and earth then just computable functions in the mathematical sense.

(In fact, the very idea of "computable functions" was invented to narrow down the space of "all things" to something much smaller, tighter and manageable. And now we've come full circle and apparently everything in the universe is a computable function? Well, if all you have is a hammer, I guess everything must necessarily look like a nail.)