skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Burnt Out. Whats Next?
Generally I wouldn't ask a question like this, but I'm genuinely curious about a larger like-minded community's opinion. So here goes.

I've been coding for most of my life, I'm 37 years old. I studied electronic engineering and I really loved embedded/firmware development at the time.
After graduating, I ended up in web development for most of my career, I did move to Germany so taking whatever opportunity came my way made sense at the time.

As time went on, I became burnt out from working in web development roles. I was pretty unbalanced and gave it my all. I was annoyed at the waste at my last major employer, and felt like I could honestly work a lot more efficiently and turn out more results if I just worked by myself. No project managers, no team mates, politics, dramas, just me. I really dislike power dynamics and socialising with people in work contexts. My experience with work environments has been quite lacking to say the least.

So, rather than looking for another job, I wanted to do something more challenging, solo. So I decided to start a small business designing, coding, manufacturing, and selling electronic music instruments.

Running a business has been as immensely rewarding as it has been stressful. I wanted to wear more hats and learn more about the world, I learnt Rust intimately, learnt PCB design and manufacturing, not to mention all the business related stuff, logistics, customs, marketing and sales etc... But at the same time I feel like my baseline of stress over the past 3 years has has risen a lot. My mental health has declined sharply and I wake up at 4AM most nights with feelings of despair and being trapped now by the business, it also doesn't help that my finances are treading water at the best of times.

My family has given me the advice to get some space and relativity from the project, to allow new opportunities to enter my life but right now I'm in the trenches trying to get my bills paid and I feel like its all consuming. I do have some runway left but its daunting me.

So I don't really know what to do, I feel like typical employment isn't for me because I'm too entrepreneurial now, and I want to be my own boss.
I've considered freelancing or starting a consultancy, which might be my best option although Im not entirely sure my EE skills (RF, high-speed etc) are at that level yet. I do feel quite confident in my embedded knowledge though.

If anyone has any advice for me, I'd really appreciate it.
No longer EU owned though, bought by IBM
Restrict Mutability of State
Same with minimum wage. Whites were tired of blacks underbidding them, so they just outlawed their jobs by making unskilled labor valued below X illegal.
Whereas i agree that the current regime of "licensing" is not good, I simultaneously find it incredibly selfish to believe that one has the right to any content one likes.

"Own nothing" is bad, but so is "access and share anything." Both positions are too extreme.
Preventing people from using their preferred tools — tools which are extremely widely used in the real world — does not seem like a useful application of time and effort.
Good question. HN flagging either needs more transparency or an overhaul.
> They at least attempt to follow the law internally.

What you are describing are successful attempts to subvert the law, avoid letting know they are subverting the law, and carefully crafted legal defenses in case they have to fight the real law’s enforcement.

That isn’t remotely what trying to follow the law looks like. It shows no respect for what the writers of the laws meant or the law’s purpose.

It shows no good faith attempts to firewall legal interpretation from parties interested in stretching the law. Blatant legal corruption used as a standard process.

It demonstrates no honest or genuine curiosity for collaborating on legal interpretations with other relevant constituencies.

Relevant constituencies for good faith legal interpretation include the law’s writers, the legislatures who passed the law, the courts who are ground truth for interpretation, a wider audience of constitutional experts in the executive branch beyond limited specific lawyers chosen to stretch the law, or citizens.
Yes, they SHOULD be adding Fortran, another language that has stood the test of time, to the Linux kernel.

Or... Maybe it's good that they add a new (still 10 years old) language with security and DX improvements occasionally. 50 years ago, that language was C...
Interesting.

Any code you want to share?
I tried https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR for my own use case (scanline images of parcel labels) and it beat Tesseract by an order of magnitude.

(Tesseract managed to get 3 fields out of a damaged label, while PaddleOCR found 35, some of them barely readable even for a human taking time to decypher them)
Yes, because Dang unflagged them manually. Those threads still sit dead for hours, as I explain in the very comment you replied to. This biases against those posts and prevents many people who check once daily from ever seeing them.

Just because we have a competent moderator doesn't mean they aren't abusing forum mechanics to suppress those threads? Nobody claimed they were entirely silenced.

And it is entirely disingenuous for you to sit here and say this didn't happen to the very first posts on the topic.
Advanced users can modify the source code to disable things that get in their way. Anyone not capable of that is not capable of knowing when it is safe to turn off safety defaults.

Chromebooks at least get this one thing right. You can disable firmware signing, but only if you are comfortable taking the laptop apart to remove a magic write protection screw. That is something a scammer cannot easily convince a grandma to do.
I don't think the ease really matters when we're talking about nation-states who look at the outcome of US elections as having a major impact on their country's future. Ease matters for regular people. Nation-states are prepared to do whatever it takes, regardless of cost or manpower.

A good, obvious and well-documented example is that both British and German agents were spending millions to impact US elections in the WWII period. There are obviously today hundreds of lobbying groups dedicated to producing propaganda and swaying legislation in the US that benefits their country. Some of it is aboveboard, some of it is not.
No, in most countrys you have no right for a bank accouny. So when you do something the bank does not like, you will fall complete out of the system. You cannot go to work, you cannot buy anything.
Pure libertarians are no more blindly idealistic than pure anything else. Elegant solutions are attractive, perhaps especially to those working in stem. I once had someone assert to me that the standard model of physics couldn't be true, because it wasn't elegant enough. You could say that was Dunning Kruger, but while they were working in SW, their PHD was in particle physics. Reality doesn't really care what we find elegant it seems. Still that tendency is no worse than pure socialists. Perhaps it is the same tendency even. Real solutions are messy compromises. Trying to refactor an old codebase I worked on taught me that as I added back hacks for all the corner cases a second time to my new elegant design.
I do hope somebody has made a movie, or written a novel, or started a band -- or, ideally, all three -- called 煩悩の光 .
Might as well totally shut down the site with that logic? HN is not a place to "do anything" about anything. It's a place for discussion and sharing news/content.
Not sure. I lost about 4 months of work, rest was time where I didn't have other work offered to me so the opportunity cost was 0.

But consider if I hired someone, I would lose 30% of my earnings to taxes. And then 50% of what I pay others goes to insurance/licensing/taxes/transportation etc. So really your labor costs should be about 30% if you bill your own time since it is tax free both ways and no overhead.
You might be interested in the work of Andrew Head, in particular his team's Formula Formatting Language: https://andrewhead.info/assets/pdf/ffl.pdf - I have not tried it myself though.
I recently took a picture of the ingredients list on my multivitamin and fed it into ChatGPT o1-pro (at least that was the config.) and it made up ingredients and messed up the quantities.
https://archive.is/Tcc1J
Canada might see significant movement on licensing restrictions soon. There's a big movement to reduce inter provincial trade barriers in the face of potential American tariffs. It's a good political sound bite: replace American trade with Canadian trade.

But in physical goods almost all of the barriers have already been demolished. Liquor is the maon exception.

But the service industry is now bigger than the physical goods industry and there are lots of barriers in it, licensing being perhaps the biggest. Licensing is a provincial responsibility. Hopefully the rare unity the country has experienced since Trump's inauguration can be harnessed to unify and rationalize licensing country wide.
I could, but nobody is going to trust my binary. And they shouldn't.

The build should come from the official maintainer. Period.

And participating in open source? Oh, I can assure you I am a seasoned open source contributor, but I am not going to just contribute to a random project. Wasted too much time on issues and pull requests that nobody looked at.

Easy to criticize other people, right? What have you done?
Location: Pakistan Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Adobe Creative Cloud (Illustrator, Indesign, Photoshop AfterEffects, XD etc.), Figma, Google Suites, Microsoft Office Suite.

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gI4eOy5qntfA8u3LQiZCckeSpvD...

Email: waqasabbasi04@gmail.com

About me: I am a skilled visual/graphic designer with over five years of experience focused on design and brand development. Throughout my career, I have effectively collaborated with cross-functional teams to produce compelling designs for a wide range of clients. I am committed to creating high-quality visual assets that elevate user experiences.
He also mentioned 50 node processes, so it would be way higher than 100 MB of RAM, I agree.
SSH is a fundamental protocol. If students can get through our program without learning what SSH is and how to use it, that's a problem.
An independent or govt run location service is the way ahead ... more than ever given how fickle some services might end up in regard to international relationships -- especially now one country that likes to pretend it's the land of non censorship and freedom is in the process of heading down a rather strange rabbit hole.

I'm not sure what service drives any google navigation service, but in Australia, google maps and google location are two separate things - most delivery services and address checking services derive their answers by way of google location services - it's the result if one enters the address in google's search bar and not the map search. It has caused me no end of grief the last 10 years or so, until finding out a few years ago what was behind it all. Despite google maps listing the correct address on their maps, their location service had my address in another neighbouring district. However I know it must be a lot more since many to the to the door delivery services that used to deliver to similar rural address, simply stopped the practice in my locale. When I checked a random number of addresses, it confirmed google location had a significant percentage of addresses quite wrong.
Redox is drama-free because Redox has very few developers working on it. In the last 12 months, Redox had 7 contributors that touched more than 100 lines of code.

Hard to have too much drama if you have a handful of developers that do code changes, and no users to complain about any of your decisions.
As I responded in a sibling comment, that is true when you are being targeted: for blanket surveillance of innocent citizens, it will work wonders.

The problem with just doing encryption is that it can be made illegal and it's obvious when you are using it with a cloud platform. The same is true for steganography (you can make it illegal), but someone would have to know you are using it to apply the same tactic.
Extracting money. Delta between billed rate and minimum wage is pretty massive. There is lot of money to be extracted from that gap. And from pushing the billable rate and hours up at same time.
Lawson is big in Thailand, but I only see them at the BTS Sky Train stations. Well, I might have seen one in a mall but I'm not 100% sure, also in an airport.

Interesting to hear they're from Ohio. Their logo is incongruousy milk-just-like.

Here's their Insta, it seems to be their main online presence:

https://www.instagram.com/lawson108thailand/
NIH fixes indirect rates on new grants to 15%
I've been using a mix of Claude and Deepseek via the Kagi assistant to great success. Usually adding relevant sections of the docs alongside my question and reminding it to use svelte 5 syntax.
Seems like the UK really does need Musks help(1).

1: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1876174862747930717?lang=en
I struggle when trying to solve math problems without context. I learned enough trigonometry to pass the final exams in high school, but I didn't REALLY understand it until I took a graduate-level graphics programming class.

Some people enjoy the process of solving equations and math problems. For me, it's a tough process. Unless I have a tangible goal, I struggle to visualize the problem.

Starting with basic algebra, it would be more effective if mathematics were paired with some practical problems. Computer graphics, engineering, construction, finance and the analysis of data would be good areas to do this in because it's exactly where you'd need said math!
I too have these fond memories, and I enjoy passing it on to the next generation :)
To me, on OpenBSD that kind of breaks the purpose of unveil.

Firefox and chrome on OpenBSD is patched to use pledge and unveil. That restricts where these programs can read/write data. I would not want a program to have access to all cache data for every program.

To me, if you see dir cache, you can clear it. In fact, I have a cron job to clear cache data older than a week for Firefox. No issues doing this for many years.
France, UAE to drop €50B on AI mega-datacenter. Still nowhere near US $500B bet
The shitshow that has washed over the internet is about to become a parched wasteland as human eyes turn away, towards AI ux. The internet will become a place for AI agents to search out services to provide to their users through their own UX , be it voice, audiovisual, text, or some kind of universal AI “desktop OS” interface.

API endpoints will be the new UX, and adversarial prompt engineering will be the new “dark pattern”.

The internet will become a place that your AI goes to discover and do things for you.
Linux kernel community is afraid of drama? I've been using Rust as a primary language for years now and would agree that the community is lead by immature drama queens. However, the linux kernel team would be the best comparison.
ChatGPT does not carry expensive malpractice insurance. The Radiologist is human in the loop for reasons other than their pattern recognition ability.
The world Milton Friedman lived in was very different than the world we have now. Much of what he had to say no longer applies, today. Its analogous to reading philosophy from pre-enlightenment or pre-naturalist philosophers. Academically interesting, but totally irrelevant.

Economists like to masquerade as hard-scientists, but once you get past supply and demand and behavioral economics, its just academics making things up that sound good.

The world we live in is globally interconnected with civilization and planet-sized problems. The actors squabbling in today's world are no longer small local groups, focused on community-sized problems, as they mostly were pre-1900. They are impossibly large, country-spanning, corporate entities with huge reach and influence.

Public institutions need to be sized appropriately to solve modern problems and to properly contend with their corporate competitors.
Tiny pre-WWI-sized governments are not going to cut it with post-WWII-sized problems.
I believe extensions are actually installed on the host itself! At least when I use vs code remotely it shows "install on xxx" for each extension if I haven't installed it yet
Show HN: Crossing The Lexicon, a fun Wordle-inspired daily word game
I'm excited (and a fair bit nervous) to share my new game! I'd been thinking about this project for a while and decided to embark on what I thought would be a quick weekend side project. I could not have been more wrong! It’s been a fulfilling (and at times exhausting) journey and I’ve learnt a lot going through the process.

I hope you'll appreciate the game as a lot of effort and collaboration with friends went into it to refine it. For me, this side project started as all of mine do, and surely yours. In a race to rapidly complete the side-project before I lost the motivation and enjoyment of development. I threw in haphazard code generated by the o1 model which was surprisingly much more competent than I had originally expected, especially compared to the non-reasoning models.

The AI model unfortunately quickly stalled as the files became too big and complex for it to work effectively, and would get stuck alternating between offering 2 unworkable "solutions". At this point my rapid prototyping came to a screeching halt with tech debt having compounded to dangerous levels. Thankfully I got my first prototype out without too much extra work, and the interest and feedback I received encouraged me to keep iterating and improving.

On the architecture side, while I started with a simple EC2 instance, I ported it to AWS Lambda with ‘scale’ and ‘cost’ in mind, and with a very shameful import of the serverless-http library to wrap the express app. It was way too slow, doubling latency from 40ms to 80ms. I pushed static content onto S3 and used CloudFront to handle caching and compression, but had to admit that the move to Lambda had been naive, and was forced to drop it and re-setup EC2 with proper autoscaling and regional deployments.

So that’s been my one-weekend-turn-two-week side project! I’ve been challenged but never insurmountably, a great experience all up.

Happy to field any comments on the game itself or my development of it, thanks!
To sling autism as an insult is disgusting. Maybe you can do better.
Prerequisite of 1,000 hours of classroom instruction to qualify as a barber in Rhode Island. [216-RICR-40-05-4.4 C]:

"Students enrolled in programs of hairdressing/cosmetic therapy or barbering may enter into a work-study arrangement after they have completed at least one thousand (1,000) hours of classroom instruction."

https://rules.sos.ri.gov/regulations/part/216-40-05-4
Fraud can be proven. But its a process and its not as easy than just claiming something to be fraud. We (hopefully still) have a justice system, with due process for the same reason.

That $9B is just a number. Whether it is reasonable or not can only be determined by looking into the details:

- What accounts as overhead?

- What were decisions that lead to that overhead?

- Were there alternatives that would have costs less?

- Why and how were those decisions made?

- Can we learn for future decisions?

- Was there actual fraud?

- When there was fraud, why wasn't it referred to DOJ to be investigated properly?

"Administrative overhead" is not bad by itself. Outside government, its simply called "Operating Expense" and "Cost of Revenue" (not a concern of government luckily). I am certain, if you look into SpaceX' or Tesla's expenses, you would find fraud too.

Because Musk and his brainwashed followers can claim stuff on Twitter doesn't make it true. And it certainly MUST NOT be basis to destroy Democracy and democratic processes.
So help the official maintainer. Become the official maintainer of the Windows build.

If you don't want to, or can't be bothered with the time commitment, that's fine, but realise that every time you complain about an OSS project's failings, you're really complaining about your own inability to contribute, not their's.
If other, safer language would have existed the same time as C, I don’t think it would have stood the time as you say.
My wife cut hair professionally for twenty years. Between COVID, the birth our first child and going back to school she stopped.

Now she wants to go back part time to make some extra money, but her license expired and that means she has to get her license back. That includes having to attend over 100 hours of class, for a slightly above minimum wage job many people do themselves, at home, with zero experience.

It's absurd. Maybe an hour or two refresher is justifiable, but I assure you she had not forgotten how to cut hair to the extent that she needs 100+ hours of retraining. It's deeply embedded in her psyche at this point.

My wife says she basically just needs to go hang out at a cosmetology school to make the hours but doesn't need to actually do anything while she is there.

It is absolutely a racket.
If the Kernel stopped all development it would still not fade into the sunset in our lifetime.
What about if someone says that they felt a sauna session was good for them, or cold plunge benefited their health, etc?
Every senior developer is still a junior developer depending on the domain at hand. If you want a lateral move into another job, imho it is ok to take a pay cut and become a junior again, e.g. webdev into C++ games. I don't see why people are scared of temporarily taking pay cuts but it has always been the nature of being a dev.
What are you basing that on? Elite mobility coaches like Kelly Starter recommend daily - even hourly -mobility and stretching workouts, with the goal of being constantly mobile.
It’s shit and string. Gone back to vim.
I would recommend going abroad, taking a gap year, experience new things, do things that you were not open to in past and feels like a new life experience.

While doing that, you can build something on the side, but thats not the main things. Enjoy the life, be in the current moment and go with the flow.
You don't know what you're missing then and I'm not sure such opinions count. It's probably for the best to refrain from criticizing things one has no experience in.
Just going from memory, but something in support of that is that when a country puts out more people with advanced degrees, this does very little to increase GDP. It does much less than how much an individual gains in income with an advanced degree.

This hints it’s not actually making people more productive. It just lets them get a bigger piece of the pie.
The pricing is phrased weird

> €0,05 per asset forever

That makes it sounds like I need to pay that forever. Instead compare to:

> €0,05 one-time fee per asset

Makes it sound like I just pay it once and it is good forever.
Right now it’s congress that is restricting the supply of doctors. The AMA’s (which only represents about 15% of doctors btw) current position is that we need more doctors and they have been actively lobbying congress to provide funding for more residency slots.
Surely if there were insufficient established context for a reviewer to easily follow a large patch the correct response would be a swift rejection with a request that such context be established prior to submitting again.

It sounds like there was willingness to meet any requirements, but submitters end up in a position of not knowing what the requirements are and if they have met them or not.