skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Farisa's Crossing, by a member of our community, is worth reading
I’ve been following the technology economy since the 1990s, and I’ve always had a fascination with online communities like this one, where I’ve been a reader for more than ten years.

One of my colleagues convinced me to go through the blog posts of someone who, although overall obscure, used to be prolific here. I hadn’t heard his name for a while, and when I learned that he had written a novel, I decided to read it. At first, I didn’t have high expectations. I studied English literature in college, and my experience with “techies who write” is that most of them underestimate the difficulty of crafting a compelling story.

Farisa’s Crossing surprised me. Truly, it did. The Royal Road version (https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/85592/farisas-crossing) is a free ARC, so there are a few typos, but they’re very minor. The book is ambitious, strange, and also... solidly written. I’ll definitely buy a copy when it comes out.

The author is gifted at characterization. Pann Grackenheit is the best incel character I have ever read. Hampus Bell, the villain who never swears, makes the banality of evil so banal it is almost infuriating. Farisa, the heroine, is a shining presence. She is conceited, impulsive, and occasionally reckless, but you end up loving her for her kindness, intelligence, and sheer drive to overcome malice and adversity. The worldbuilding is also rich, with religions, literature, and language given such detail you feel as if this vast universe must exist somewhere.

Of course, the book has weaknesses. The maximalist prose, dark subject matter, and ambiguous antagonist make it hard to describe succinctly. If I were its publisher, I do not know how I would market it. The pacing is slow by the standard of single-genre fantasy readers, but I doubt I’d be able to convince my wife’s book club to read a book with magic and orcs in it. A steampunk fantasy with brutal social commentary, existentialist theology, and a modern understanding of mental illness... feels like an attempt to create a new niche, which is always risky.

The ending is sure to be polarizing. The Global Company arc reaches a well-executed but absurd anticlimax. The last chapter feels like Farisa’s dark confession, in disguise. The novel is demanding and sometimes bleak, but leaves me with a strange feeling of hope. The joke-that’s-not-a-joke is that the Global Company’s world, with its oppressive two-facedness and pointless cruelty, is our world. Still, if the Global Company is secretly real, so must be Claes, Andor, Mazie, and Farisa, perhaps numbering each in the millions.

If anyone had told me this community would produce a serious literary novel one day, my response would have been condescending doubt. Intellect is not in short supply here, but artistic sensitivity is incompatible with cutthroat industries, including this one. Thus, it surprised me to find that there are people in this tribe, however on the margins, who can actually write. That, I believe, counts to our credit.
There are moments in which you will need to know Erlang to debug issues on an Elixir application.
As a native Floridian, still living in Florida, I am over the state of the state.

The elderly have routinely voted against their best interests. I have moved on from social security, medicare and plan on not having any government support by the time I retire.

We cannot vote to fix our insurance costs, adapt to climate change, or provide any form of transit other than your own car.

They even voted the guy who's company commited medicare fraud into governorship, and then into congress. You cannot even make this shit up.
> Burn out is hard to manage; its something that happens in the cruisy 20-something hour a week job

Usually burn out is also caused by bad management. For instance, noisy open plan office where developers are mixed with sales and other departments to "cross pollinate" and have "creative juices flowing". Most people can't really focus on work and then are blamed for poor performance. If you have bills to pay, you often actually work after work, when you go home, to meet deadlines. Other instance I saw - "busy" meetings throughout the week, repetitive stuff, so certain people can be seen as they are "managing", also peppered throughout the day so you don't get more than an hour of uninterrupted work. Then again blame "why this and that is not delivered?".

> and its a lot easier to get there if you meet in person frequently.

I accept that some people struggle to adapt to online asynchronous communication, but in person meetings are inefficient from creative point of view. They disrupt flow and don't give opportunity for everyone to be heard. Some people can give answers or ideas instantly (not necessarily a good ones) others need information to simmer in their heads for a while. You of course get a sense of achieving something, but this won't be optimal. Basically just cheap dopamine.

> its harder to answer "why are we doing this?"

Answer is actually simple. To pay the bills, have roof over one's head, to have kids in good school, to enjoy life outside of work. If you are employee or contractor, you are not building your own thing. It's good to always remember that and keep a healthy distance.
Hi everyone, just a quick update: we've now integrated full support for the OpenAI Agents SDK with our Smart Library, aligning perfectly with our core philosophy of reuse, evolve, and create—fully orchestrated by the System Agent and unified with robust firmware and guardrails. While the Agent Bus is still in its preliminary stages, this enhancement marks a significant step forward in ensuring seamless interoperability and smarter evolution strategies across frameworks. Your feedback has been invaluable, and I'm eager to hear your thoughts on this latest development as we continue to iterate and improve the system.
It really feels like we are in a time where EU countries are taking front and center on the world stage with cool, progressive and unified stuff, and the US is in the ally snorting crack. Saying this as a disappointed American. But yeah…really cool to see governments collaborating this way.
Good point. But pushing it as a product with that knowledge still puts it in a weird spot for me.
For what it’s worth, the “normal” value of max-height is none, not inherit or 100vh.
The article doesn’t explain how it works. It only lightly covers what was disproven

Also title is wrong, this isn’t a Data Science conjecture. Data Structure or Computer Science is what it is.
As a very simple example, here's aiohttp making 10,000 http requests (HEAD requests to a list of different urls) in a single thread but asynchronously vs. ThreadPoolExecutor making them synchronously but across 32 workers (I had to drastically reduce the number of urls in order to make sitting through it bearable): https://asciinema.org/a/MkoOVQBSeBanRRZtsu3xe5FUk
I remember another brand, JTS, from the 90's. While Connor was bad, JTS was the undisputed king of data loss. They didn't last long as a company.
When I meant take over everything: I meant industries like cars, solar panels, chips, software etc.
There's a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI to Cheat
Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoid being eaten
First get your head out of the r/creditcards/ThePointsGuy bubble. Most people aren’t fooling around with multiple cards trying to eke out which card gives them the best multiplier and keeping track of rotating categories BS.

I know the game - unlike most people - and even I got tired of worrying about multipliers and which card to use.

All my spend either goes on the card I’m trying to get a sign up bonus for or my Delta Reserve to get MQDs toward Platinum Medallion.

For instance, I can worry about juggling multiple cards for points, or I can just sign up for a Chase Ink card and get 90K points by spending $8000 in 3 months. The alternative is spending $30K to $90K chasing multipliers. (https://johnnyafrica.com/multiple-chase-ink-business-cards/)

I use to talk to my friends about my credit card optimization strategy when I did it. They still just said they would use their one card.

And banks don’t make money from credit card optimizers

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wells-fargo-may-pull-plug-113...

The goal for credit card companies is for a consumer to have their one card as top of wallet. Any point multiplier over 3x - especially for cash back cards - is a lost leader hoping that you will use the card for all of the 1x categories.
It seems to be very common to use a personal phone for work 2fa or lots of other workplace tasks. Employers seem mystified if you request a corporate device when you obviously already have your own. I even see this a little with personal vehicles.

The idea of separating work and personal seems to be becoming old-fashioned.
How did I forget textual, thank you! It might be a good solution as I can imagine Claude Sonnet vibe coding interesting UIs with it...

Am also investigating xterm.js currently.

Anything that uses too much CSS (eg tries to 'construct' layouts with it rather than just rending text) seems a little fragile.
I’m not sure there is a huge advantage at the beginning, perhaps even a disadvantage because of the ease of use of Elixir. As you get more advanced you start using Erlang here and there to access things not in Elixir. For example, Elixir only has lists not arrays, so if you need a good indexed data structure you end up using some Erlang. Also once you start getting into Mnesia etc, Erlang is the way. All this said, still very early on my Erlang journey.
I think I just learned why Amazon gives out free bananas now!
Huh I assumed this was based off The Little Lisper. I have no clue why in retrospect.
Looking at how much infrastructure needs to be spun up, I don't really see this as a good solution for personal note taking. If you use the Docker environment, you spin up 10 or more containers... including KeyClock. I get that this is intended to by hosted by a company or an organisation, but plenty of people are using Notion just as individuals.

Most people would be better of with Obsidian, Bear, Notion or even Apple Notes.
It’s $104k+ to house a senior? Is that in line with what it costs in other countries?
This is in effect the easiest means of crowd dispersal. It's a stunner if now they don't install it at the White House and Capitol buildings.
Show HN: Quickly connect to WiFi by scanning text, no typing needed
I travel and work remotely a lot. Every new place—hotels, cafes, coworking spaces—means dealing with a new WiFi network. Sometimes there's a QR code, which is convenient, but usually, it's a hassle: manually finding the right SSID (especially frustrating when hotels have one SSID per room), then typing long, error-prone passwords.

To simplify this, I made a small Android app called Wify. It uses your phone's camera to capture WiFi details (network name and password) from printed text, then generates a QR code right on your screen. You can instantly connect using Google Circle to Search or Google Lens. You can also import an image from your gallery instead of using the camera.

Currently, it's Android-only since I daily-drive a Pixel 7, and WiFi APIs differ significantly between Android and iOS.
Play Store link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yilinjuang...

I'd appreciate your feedback or suggestions!
We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene.

I think you're witnessing it rather getting back in touch with reality than collapsing. Multi-trillion out of jsx generator was too much from the beginning. You folks just don't know what to do with too much money you have.
I've used both heavily and I'd have to say no. You are in general better off with Elixir, with easy access to all Erlang and Elixir libraries, all BEAM functionality, a better package manager and build tool, and a more modern feeling / easier to learn programming language. Also starting to see a progressive type system and just a much faster developing ecosystem in general.

I think by now there's also more open source Elixir code out there, which means LLMs will be somewhat more proficient in Elixir (they're not great at it though, but enough to help).

It's harder to work in Erlang and incorporate Elixir libraries than the reverse, although it's certainly possible (you would use the mix build tool from Elixir to do so).

My main pros for Erlang are that it's a simpler language than Elixir with less "magic" and fewer footguns. I still use both, in the same system even, but most new code in the system is written in Elixir.
It's not just golf buddies - it's investors.

Capital often outstrips actual business acumen as a factor in the success of a business. That's partly because we live in a world where word of mouth, reviews, online presence, etc. are all commodified, partly because tech (like the Industrial Revolution before it) has greatly increased the growth potential and concentration of capital, partly because of investors actively intervening to ensure the success of their other investments, partly because of increasing and increasingly-naked corruption, and partly because of the importance of network effects. (I don't know which of these factors is the most important.)

The more important capital becomes relative to the actual functioning of a product, the more disconnected from reality a business can (perhaps must) get. Their actual business becomes selling a pitch to investors, not selling SaaS, because their actual product is investor returns, not long-term viability or value. And because a big part of that pitch to investors is the rockstar founding team, founders have to (or at least feel they have to) do the golf-buddy shit. It's literally their job, or at least, they think it is.

Post-ZIRP doesn't kill that because capital being scarce just increases demand for it even more.
I find it weird how Elon's firing 50% of twitter is rarely brought up. Even the linked article's reference only mentions the layoffs starting jan 2023...
Aggregating and synthesizing models, does it work?
I often see news debating which ai model is best or find myself switching between different models when one doesn't quite get the answer. For example, sometimes o1 isn't getting it so I go try with deepseek and it gets it, or vice-versa.

I even started copying outputs from one model to another, pasting and asking "What do you think of this response and thinking, could it help us solve the issue?"

That got me thinking: rather than focusing on finding the single "best" model, why not leverage multiple top models simultaneously and synthesize their combined insights?

I've been testing this approach with common "challenges" such as the how many "r" or "l" letters are in a word, or the generate falling balls in a rotating hexagon, as well as more difficult problems. The combined responses have consistently been excellent.

What do you think?
I have been working in IT for over 30 years. What is happening is not new. Late 1999 was a very go-go time, early 2022 was a very go-go time. Alternatively, things were dead in 1991, in 2001, in 2009. Things were briefly dead in some ways for some people in spring/summer 2020 when Covid hit. 2022 went from go-go in the spring and summer to massive FAANG layoffs in November. Massive FAANG layoffs continue into early 2023, and things have kind of been stagnant since them. Things seem to have gotten worse at the beginning of this year, although it varies, some people with certain AI-related skills are doing well.

In 2000-2001, dot-com startups were hit harder than the rest of the economy. I worked for Internet startups and dot-coms from 1996 until the end of the summer 2000, where I started consulting for a large investment bank. I figured Internet-related startups were not going to make a comeback in the short term and I was right. The Fortune 500 was kind of starved for technical talent at the time, especially outside the Bay Area, so you could shift. There were some difficulties getting hired - I knew a lot about Red Hat Linux and Apache web servers and Java application servers, and I moved into a world of Solaris e4500 servers and NFS mounts and RAID 10 arrays and middleware. There were later shifts - for backend, things began shifting from monoliths and SOAs to microservices. Ruby on Rails was big from 2007 until 2013 until Javascript web front end began picking up more. Then native/hybrid mobile began cutting into the dominance of web front end. Now AI is coming in. So there are economic ups and downs, but what skills they are hiring for shift as well.

Unless society is entering some major transformative period like the 1930s, these shifts of the business cycle will keep happening. While the general tech market has been stagnant since November 2022, Nvidia stock has gone up 800%, as it has gone from the 15th most valuable company in the world (by market cap) to the 2nd, behind Apple. I have a strong feeling it will surpass Apple in the coming months and years as the most valuable company in the world. Programmers programming CUDA for them and whatnot, programmers programming Pytorch for FAANG and AI startups, and these kinds of jobs are open now, and in a few years companies might be offering $200k TC to people coming out of college who can program that. Or maybe LLMs will hit a wall in the short term and that won't happen. But something will happen - I've seen IT hit a slump a bunch of times and it always comes back (unless, as I said, we get into a situation like the 1930s).
Depends on the org I think now the controls are more fine grained. For example I have teams and outlook on my personal phone and the only thing they can do is delete the apps, taking a screenshot is blank, copy/paste doesn’t work etc.
Including yours. Your landing page has no architecture, model, or performance comparisons. It's non-existent. You need something more tangible for us to believe in.

Remember that scientific method requires us to reject everything by default. Only after rigorous review of a working theory or prototype do we treat it as truth. Build what you want us to believe in. Let us see it smoke the competing models of similar size in key metrics. That will do more for you than anything else.

Again, I hope you're right and I get to see energy-based models being highly competitive. I haven't.
This is how I learned Erlang and the BEAM back in the day, and I'd still recommend it.
> Common sense would indicate that ticking of the box overrides the browser setting

In theory, the /.well-known/ file could have its timestamp updated to reflect to the browser that the situation has changed and the user may perhaps need to make another choice. In practice, every website with trackers will just always pretend things have changed and browser controls will be useless.

> Except now apply that logic to the mess of “we respect your privacy, click here to allow sharing your data with our eleventy bajillion trusted partners” popups on so many websites. So, again, by default opt-out and asking for their permission to opt-in. So this setting does absolutely nothing to stem that tide? What’s the point of it then?

This is why I prefer what Microsoft attempted to do with P3P instead. Of course no website ever bothered implementing it, but Microsoft came up with a protocol to at least list a display privacy policies for every partner website.

If browsers came with UI to manage which trackers the user accepts by default, with specific website overrides of course, this mechanism could be extended to in-browser privacy popups that can have their defaults be "no, fuck off" without the ambiguity.

The protocol could even be extended to permit the website to request changing the sharing setting, for instance when you sign up for a newsletter. As long as the UI is gatekept enough (say, once per x minutes after user interaction, up to y parties at once, otherwise the notification will be a little icon in the URL bar), it might just automate away the entire cookie popups.

Of course you'd need to convince the EU and California to declare these protocols as mandatory, but I think that's going to be a lot easier with a protocol where users have more choice than with this unary GPC header.
Reddit seems to puppet humans via engagement farming to do what LLMs do in some cases. Posts are prompts, replies are responses.

Of course they vary widely in quality.
Is this supposed to be an endorsement or an indictment?
PS As some examples:

The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/subscribe - "Fewer, better ads!"

The Guardian: https://support.theguardian.com/eu/contribute - "Far fewer asks for support" - Uh this is with the 12 euro per month support plan :X If I'm supporting you already, why do you still need to ask for more?? And they also don't even offer the 'digital edition' newspaper in EU, only the weekly magazine.
It is amazing how open DeepSeek has been. They deserve our gratitude. They make ClosedAI and Anthropic look horrible in comparison.
> What is an "ad"

Considering YouTubers have to disclose paid promotions, this isn’t nearly as grey as your question suggests.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/154235
If I felt obliged to correct every single misconception I read here, it certainly would be tiring. Instead, I generally allow myself one comment and maybe a response. And that's not limited to work-related posts; it's how I budget social media.
I hope this was a good gift for you. ;)
I miss the good ol days when I'd have text-davinci make me a table of movies that included a link to the movie poster. It usually generated a url of an image in an s3 bucket. The link always worked.
ooo~ Remarkably similiar to nullboard
https://nullboard.io/preview
https://github.com/apankrat/nullboard
it sounds about comparable with housing prisoners? you pay less in security and more in medical care and on call nurses, I imagine.
Indeed, one point for MacOS! I use GNOME.
I love Marks posts. They are always starting from absolute nothing and then just builds up everything, so you can replicate everything he does. It's absolutely amazing writing and very educational.
Damn, those little cars are so fricken adorable. Wishlisted.
I think this “coding will be automated” is that “the interview(hard) the job(easy) meme” but backwards.

It seems very obvious that an AI will solve all the hardest coding problems first because they’re all documented really well, but fuck if I can get Claude to figure out a basic css layout. In wrestling with Cursor and tailwind now.
> Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved?

Unless you're building the next Facebook or other billion users scaled service, mysql or postgresql will be more than enough for everything, at least until you hit 100k-1M users. And by that point you have enough real-world experience to accurately judge your needs and if you need to roll your own stuff.

As for distributed data - RDS and a multi region database has that problem solved. Unless you're a real time bidding ad broker, your app can get away with a few milliseconds of replication latency.
A 6502 emulator written in busybox ash
Musk is killing Tesla more effectively than China is so America's still ahead!
LiquidFeedback – a free software for political opinion formation and decisions
Create free QR codes instantly for URLs, WiFi, vCards, and more! Customize designs, add logos, and track scans—no sign-up required. Perfect for businesses and personal use. Generate scannable codes in seconds and bridge offline & online worlds effortlessly!
It was 10B 20 years ago when China was significantly poorer. And it is not just money. It is planning, oversight and various care and feeding activities (china-style, including executing officials for corruption) for almost 10 years before that part of the system became mature and economically self-supporting.
You can render JS only websites using chromium headless like this:

chromium --headless example.com --disable-gpu --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw --dump-dom --virtual-time-budget=10000 --window-size=800,600 | sed "s|<head>|<head><base href=example.com>|g" | lynx -stdin