skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if you disregard mandmandam's reply, decide to give Patterson benefit of doubt in him not being well-versed regarding how much is the world fucked up right now, and decide to only consider his academic career, he still fails to acknowledge that:

1. Competition for funding in academia is extreme nowadays. Your institute is fucked unless it has political backing. Quality of work is irrelevant, only connections.

2. Aspiring to-be PhDs are exploited as a cheap, expendable labor to help produce meaningless papers for people in Patterson's age bracket who run the departments.

3. In some countries (US especially), public sector has ramped up costs of higher education for students several times more than what could be attributed to plain inflation, effectively pricing huge swaths of population out of it.

I have multiple friends in academia. One left completely due to sexism and systemic exploitation. One hopped countries due to sexism and finally settled for Germany with best ratio of can-do-science vs. can-have-kids. Found husband with a PhD in the US and brought him here to EU, by the way. Another one only finished their PhD only due to being supported by their partner and extended family.

I also have multiple colleagues studying college and the huge amount of work they need to put into meaningless, artificial, ultimately useless chores in order to demonstrate skill acquisition in areas that are already obsolete footnote is staggering. And if they get in? If they make it? Publish or perish. Constant scoring. Keeping results secret of others, constantly looking over their shoulders so that nobody "steals their research" to get ahead. Faking results, faking data, just to stay financially afloat. With limited options to go elsewhere, because private sector is also fucked up and want you to know a framework on average 2x as long as it exists while completely ignoring your general skills.

So much elitism, so much gatekeeping, just to keep the small amount of money flowing in away from newcomers... academia (even more than private sector) is shit.
Show HN: Krita RGBA Tech – Exploring Filter Engines in Open-Source Art
Hello everyone! Last november, I made realistic metallic brushes for Krita.

This time, I dived into the "filter brush engine" to create convenient ways to add thickness to paintstrokes (e.g. emboss), something which can make digital art look more appealing or traditional.

I also created a special eraser which pays attention to the "height" of your brushwork, via an edge-detection filter + eraser blending mode.

If there are any FOSS artists around, feel free to try them out \╭◜◝ ᵕ ◜◝╮/

Previous Show HN Threads:

Metallics by Draneria: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104224
Low-margin businesses always have bad support, and there's nothing you can do about it.

High-margin businesses usually have passable or good support. If your vendor of choice does not, you have chosen the wrong vendor and should switch. There are other options that do a better job.
Make synthetic dataset with reposing
The interviewing company does seem like a dodged bullet at first glance, but:

- the requirements being weird might very well be modeling how weird things often get in reality. Rules are often not recorded and not repeated, and very often they seem arbitrary from the POV of the developers.

- the interviewers hinted that the direction was not what they were looking for

- a senior dev needs to apply his own common sense to understand what the truly appropriate solution is given the stated priorities (readability and maintainability were stated)

- not to mention the fact that if the interviewers don't understand your code, things won't go smoothly for you either way

The fact that they said, paraphrasing "..pick any esoteric language.." might investigate whether, given technical freedom (EG: to pick your own stack) you will build an incomprehensible codebase that will be hard for the company to deal with in the future

I think the author is indeed very clever and I learned a few things from reading this write up (thanks for sharing!) but I think the interviewers were right not be impressed.

If I were you, I'd try to dumb it down for your colleagues.
Sometimes. But if you have any real processing to do, it can be hard/impossible to do it quickly in ruby. You end up writing c extensions, or another app server in another language for the hard stuff.
Agreed, but irrelevant to the thread at hand.

The accent of the caller is not a useful signal.

The very fact that they called you is a pretty good indication that you do not want to talk to them. 99% strength.
If I think I just can't work without multiple monitors and a high-end office chair (and maybe printer), I probably won't travel or I'll get a co-working space of some sort. When I traveled a lot for work, it was some combination of the event/trip was my working and/or I just worked on my laptop wherever.

I'm semi-retired now but I'm temporarily staying in a Marriott property (Springhill Suites) that does have a usable desk and office chair which is just fine for writing at for me--though people with very specific requirements probably wouldn't like it.
Tim Gowers, one of the Fields medallists contributed problems to the benchmark dataset isn't happy about being misled about OpenAIs involvement. He retweeted this: https://x.com/Mihonarium/status/1880944026603376865?t=QN3i_X...
Land-to-sea indicators of the Zanclean megaflood
Sorry, I’m uninformed. Do you mean thaw the explanation could be completely unrelated to the actual “reason”
IEEE Credentialing Program
There is a highly relevant follow-up post by the author here, too: https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2025/01/23/io-inst...
> But as a suggestion to them: if an interviewer says "I don't think that will be a good idea" just take the hint that it won't be what the expect and change it.

Yep, as an interviewer I hated when I’d try to gently (then not so gently) nudge a candidate in a direction because I could see they were going down the wrong path and they insisted they knew best or refused to listen to my advice. I’m not looking for “loyal foot soldiers” who follow my every order, and I’m not looking for people to kiss my butt or blow smoke up it, but the audacity to push back on an interviewer multiple times when they’re trying to help you… (NOT what I think happened in the OPs case, I’m thinking of my own experience here).

For me it was a massive red flag. If I can’t get you to listen to my advice in a scenario where most people are trying their hardest to be “attractive” to a company then what’s going to happen when I ask you to change something in a PR? Or tell you that the approach you are taking is not going to work?

That and the person who argued with me about tabs and spaces after I made a joke about it and then proceeded to email me with more sources as to why one was better than the other. Honestly, this person was younger and I don’t think they meant to be so abrasive, but it came across very “know-it-all” and one thing I don’t like is people who come into a company and start trying to change things or do things “their way” without first getting the lay of the land and understanding _why_ things were done the way they were (aka Chesterton's Fence).
It all depends on the family, how close they are/were, their shared interests etc. Not sure we can pass generalized comments - what if my dad left me 40K books and he and I shared interest in books? It may not be rude for my dad then to leave me his collection.

On the other hand, if I am someone who hates to read, then yeah, even 40 books might be annoying much less 40K
Maybe professional content creators don't need to exist at all. I look at people like PewDiePie and MrBeast and I wonder if society really needs anything that makes those men possible.
Well said. Nothing will be able to really compete with TikTok or Instagram without reaching critical mass but the internet is big, with 0.1% of TikTok audience it is possible to have a feedback loop good enough to create something better than TikTok even if it takes 10 years. But we would need some 100 more pixelfeds to have one of them succeed.
Zed supports comments in the JSON file. I don't think I've seen any editor which uses JSON for configuration not allow comments in the file.
>But what’s the real value of short form content like twitter/instagram/tiktok

For users: dopamine hits.

For producers: attention, money received from marketing bureaus, free stuff sent to them to advertise, eventually hopefully enough popularity to kickstart whatever career path they may discover later. Many YouTubers used their YouTube viewership to launch books, for instance, and plenty of Tiktok famous people launched their own brands/scams.
Nothing new. I used to create fake, for example, myspace login pages, host them somewhere, harvest the credentials then redirect back to myspace.com login
It's easier and has better guarantees to just... not have them on a Wi-Fi at all.
I don't mind if people want to consume toxic slop. Its their business lol
> "just a hobby, won't be all big and professional like gnu"

while many gnu projects and linux itself started just like that
I guess I explained that poorly, I mean both are both. But the act of changing your behavior is nurture. And the fact that you have a harder time on some things can be nurture or nature.

> “a way for the rich to justify why poor people shouldn’t be making financial decisions“.

And yes, I believe your friend is right.
The article is fine, but I have one serious concern.

How on earth do you prefer tabs to curly brackets?!?!
Because it’s fun to create things like this in very little time. Some people wake up and play wordle in the morning, I like to spend 15 minutes making something fun and dumb with v0 or lovable.
Maybe I'm unaware of previous comments, but this user neither called Musk a Zionist nor an "anti-Jewish Nazi", so why ask him to answer for other people?
I pointed out here…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781871

…that it’s better if we don’t do that. We need to have honest, human conversations with these people.

What I might do is what some of them do. If I can’t answer, and it’s likely spam, the software could send a pre-made reply that tries to start a conversation about Christ or their life choices. The LLM scores responses to see if they respond positively to that. If so, it lets me know to take over. Otherwise, a polite reply that we’re not interested.
Fundamentally, all social medias have two purposes:

1) Connecting with family and friends... for me, messaging Apps already solve that.

2) Curating new, exciting and relevant content.

What I always find interesting is that most projects try to solve 2) by building a platform that is exactly like the competitor but "decentralized".

If such a system instead runs entirely on the users device the curation could even use data such as browser bookmarks or history without infringing massively on privacy.
Leaving Tiktok and YouTube aside, viewing posters on Twitter as "content creators" would be dangerous. We don't want to judge tweets by the metric of whether they are the most engaging
What's kind of amazing is those people who are "I wrote a small C compiler" and advocating for ultra-complex-syntax computer languages: They know they could _NOT_ have said "I wrote a ultra-complex-syntax computer language compiler"...
What? Do you not understand what flaky means…?
Growing my SaaS from 0 to 4k users in 5 months – what worked for me
When I started out building projects and was looking for advice, I always found that what helped the most was seeing how others had done it before who had actually seen success with the methods they were talking about.

Just getting that perspective used to help and motivate me. I knew that if we succeeded I wanted to help others who were in that same position as me, by sharing exactly what we did to get to where we are.

Now that we've hit some significant milestones, here's a breakdown of what actually worked.

The numbers

- 4,000+ total users

- 100+ paying customers

- $2,300 MRR

- 4 months since launch (5 months since MVP launch)

Reaching first 100 users

- Created survey to validate idea in target audience’s subreddits

- Offered value in return for responses (project feedback)

- Shared MVP with survey participants when it was finished

- Daily posts in Build in Public on X sharing our journey and trying to provide value

- Regular posts in founder subreddits

- Result: 100 users in two weeks

Getting to 1,000

- Focused on product improvements based on initial feedback

- Launched on Product Hunt (ranked #4 with 500+ upvotes)

- Got 475 new users in first 24h of PH launch

- Featured in Product Hunt newsletter

- Result: 1,000 users in about a week after PH

Scaling to 4,000

- Continued community engagement

- Strong focus on product improvements

- User referrals from delivering value

- Sustained organic growth

- Result: Steady growth to 4,000+ users

What actually worked

- Idea validation before building (saved months of work)

- Being active and engaging in communities (Build in Public on X + Reddit)

- Product Hunt launch

- Focusing on product quality over marketing gimmicks

- Being open to feedback and using it to improve product

Key insights

- Spending time making a great product beats everything else

- Community support helps a lot, especially in the beginning

- Provide value to people and you will get value in return

What's next

- Continuing to develop SEO for sustainable growth

- Working on major product updates

- Aiming for $10K MRR this year

- Continuously improving the product

I hope that getting some insight into how we did it can help you on your journey, even if it’s just with motivation.
I'm not sure if it is the same phenomenon but I was really disappointed with the performance of a python aiohttp server [1] when I went from the application serving an html page with maybe 2-3 small images that would stick in the cache (icons) and instead was serving 20-50 photographic images per page, particularly over the wrong direction of an ADSL connection.

I thought this was low CPU but it was not low CPU enough, in the end I switched to gunicorn (running in WSL) with IIS fronting and serving the images (woulda been nginix in a pure-Linux environment) I think the tiny amount of CPU to serve the images was still getting blocked by requests that used a little more CPU. With gunicorn I'm not afraid to add tasks that crunch on the CPU a little harder too.

[1] built a lot of mini-apps that worked great before
> You should be demonstrating how you would write code in the job

That was forbidden, check the rules given by the interviewer.
I think the platforms that do #1 well are not the same as the platforms that do #2 well. We call Instagram and tiktok "social media", but it's just media.
This same discussion was had a long time ago when python was being more commonly used. I figure people just get used to it, and now we're in the inverse.
Nevertheless, https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/program/getenv
I don't think this has much to do with intelligence. Imagine you were an interviewer, and you had two candidates. One passes the test using a well put together orthodox solution, and the other does so using an unorthodox one. Which would you hire? I think we like to imagine we would prioritise the more creative of the two, but practically you may struggle to run a business where everyone has their own ideas about how to do things. If you are going to actually get stuff done, then I think you need a certain number of drones—people who follow orders reliably to produce predictable outcomes. If you don't want to be a drone, then you probably shouldn't apply for jobs given that drones account for the vast majority of employed people.
Microsoft 365 Forced-Upsell: If You Don't Need Copilot, Don't Pay for It [video]
How a SQL Database Engine Works
Today, I'm sharing another insanely good o1-Pro scientific insight
What's the plan for the candidate choosing C when they hit rule 7 and simultaneously have to use strings but the `char` type is banned? How are they supposed to loop through the input array without an increment operation? Pointers are basically also numerical types, are those banned as well?
we wait for a whole lot of sorry for all the islamophobia and arabophobia coming from Hollywood...
That’s it and with every invention the percentage stays the same 90% consume and 10% create. The insane amount that gets put into options of image models to create the maximum amount of images per hour is the dumbest approach possible for the technology at hand. Nobody is there that wants to consume it.
If company is trying to hire people in other countries/cultures to save some buck, they should be mindful that communication may be a bit more of an issue, and try harder, too. Otherwise they'll have the same issue after hiring and not just during interviews.

It's not all up to the interviewee to decipher everything. Both should be trying a bit to get to the same understanding, prior to setting off to work.

Anyway, the company will be wasting money when the communication works out poorly, so it's ultimately up to them.
There is some proactive moderation on new servers in my experience. Servers belonging to certain controversial/unpleasant content groups are often blocked beforehand, for instance. Certain porn-oriented parts of the Fediverse basically exist as their own islands because nobody wants the moderation burden.

I think these federated platforms can use some kind of spam detection, though. A bunch of Japanese teenagers completely swamped most of the Fediverse with a shitty prank on another Discord server for instance, and there was that time someone automated posting CSAM across a few servers. It all kind of feels rather 1980s internet in a way, clearly not set up to deal with intentionally malicious people.
Well, thinking this way will likely lead to making assumptions:

1. The rule that more dollars = more GPUs = greater computing power = more advanced LLMs still holds true.

2. Strengthening restrictions on exporting high-end chips to China can effectively curb the development of Chinese AI
I would say it's non-programmers who THINK they can now program. As soon as the LLM stops being helpful, they're stuck.
LeCun has been saying basically this same thing since 2021-22.

It’s a lot easier to say what something is not than what it is.

His comments now are really sounding a lot more like sour grapes from someone who is ultimately behind in this race.

When was the last time he launched something truly new and innovative that isn’t just a copycat? Genuinely asking.

I used to pay a lot of attention to him but he’s like the Jim Cramer of AI. Always wrong.
>What does X offer for new users that Wayland doesn't?

(Besides stability) it offers more options. The PineNote is an e-ink stylus tablet that only supports Wayland, and I've been looking for a dead-simple mouse-driven compositor (because tablet). X had bucketloads of WMs, most of them long-since stabilized and featured complete. Wayland has nothing. Nothing in the Debian-stable (which comes shipped on the PineNote and is stable) repo, at least.

Is this somewhat niche? Sure! Is it a huge fucking pain in the ass? Also sure!

I'm not against Wayland, in premise - it supports process isolation (potentially useful for KDE Activities in some amazing ways) in a way that X just can't and never will. X is not the future. But frankly, neither is Wayland. It's barely even the present (ask wacom/Krita users, or anyone with accessibility needs, what they think of Wayland devs), and actually loses some features (multi-window stuff is impossible-by-design on Wayland, which means entire swathes of software will just literally never switch to Wayland), and while Wayland does gain features and possibilities, they're niche features just like the X features that Wayland broke.

The "X is a clusterfuck" argument becomes increasingly weak, since Wayland is more and more clearly a clusterfuck itself.

At this point, I think Arcan is the future (www.arcan-fe.com), although please note the main dev is specifically avoiding the limelight before v1.0 and thus writes in a deliberately dense and unapproachable fashion. It's super elegant and a genuinely groundbreaking project.
Isn’t python currently the most popular programming language?
If it can port c++ to C99+ and write correct 64bit risc-v assembly...
Cosmic rays and a lot of luck
> First and foremost, their statement about community on their homepage spoke to me

This will probably get me downvoted to hell, but here goes anyway. You know, sometimes I just want programming stuff to be about programming. If I want social justice I will go to the appropriate place. No I don't support Nazis or the like, but there's a shitload of other types of discrimination/injustices that I (and most others) also don't support, that we don't see plastered everywhere.
Let me rephrase.

They do have plans. But those plans involve uncertainty. They are adapting their plans as new information comes out.

That is uncomfortable and unpleasant. But there was no perfect alternative that did away with the uncertainty.
>You can’t convey a meaningful message in a limited amount words/seconds

You most definitely can convey meaningful messages in a limited amount of time, and that's exactly the point, enforcing conciseness you end up with higher information density.

Decentralization provides the additional value of resistance to censorship and algorithmic biases.
> Restate is open source and you can download it at...

https://github.com/restatedev/restate/blob/main/LICENSE#L1

> Business Source License 1.1

https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html

> The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license.

Suggest exploring e.g. https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-py
Missed opportunity not naming this ChatterBox.
I like all these langs that bring stricter typing to ecosystems that do not traditionally have very strict typing. Gleam for BEAM (Erlang), Kotlin/Scala for JVM (Java), Elm/PureScript/TypeScript for JS engines, Borgo for Go.

Life's too short for runtime errors.
Absolutely. This would be a no from me
Might you be interested in combining the two fields? If you’ve got an eye on tech consulting/startups in the EMT space, give me a shout out. My email is my HN profile at gmail.
I'm of the opinion that it depends on density. You could build a subway line in some US cities of 1M and nobody would ride it; you could build a subway line in a city of 50k and everyone would ride it. It depends on whether there is density to support walking directly to many things (businesses, residences, and other transit lines) or not.
> How on earth do you prefer tabs to curly brackets?!?!

In general, how is significant whitespace both a thing, and popular?
Original title (too long): Microsoft’s Sneaky Forced-Upsell to 365 Users; If You Don’t Need/Want Copilot, Don’t Pay for It

The video explains how Personal/Family 365 users can "downgrade" to a new plan (365 Classic) that has the same conditions as their previous one, minus Copilot, following its addition along with a significant price hike.
There a pretty neat free tool - http://pedestriancatch.com - that will also let you run walkability simulation anywhere with OpenStreetMap data. Great for when you’re moving or exploring somewhere new.
JavaScript (and variants) is
I don't know about that. More like a Democrat Twitter clone. Liberals prefer echo chambers. And I don't mean that as a slur. They don't want to see or engage with content they disagree with. Bluesky fills that need for millions.
Can you elaborate on why this is "clearly" the case?
> this how all those useless executives operate

Being visible in a positive way to the right people is 100% necessary for career advancement inside companies. The fact that this is abused by otherwise incompetent people is unfortunate, but good people need to understand and use this knowledge to advance also.