skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
High prices are due to supply and demand. While ZIRP can cause high demand (and high supply of currency to fulfill that demand), the underlying demand still comes from the fact that software has near zero marginal cost, near zero liability, the ability to easily collect rent, AND high barriers to entry. The ideal business.

This means a business that sells software solutions can earn high profit margins, which is a necessary component to be able to then pay high prices to labor sellers. A buyer has to be both able and willing to pay a high price for the seller to be able to sell at a high price.

If the labor buyer is only earning 5% profit margin, then the labor seller is going to have a harder time extracting more money. But if a buyer is earning 20%+ margins, and their business is growing to boot, the buyer will be able and willing to part with more, hence higher prices for labor sellers.
IPv6 isn't difficult to implement, and complexity is not the reason we're still stuck in IPv4 land.

We are stuck here because the Internet runs on devices no one cares enough/has enough budget to update.
I actually tried it a few months ago and I still using it (mainly for testing its capabilities), despite it not performing up to my standards.

I wrote my first impressions of Devin here: https://thegroundtruth.substack.com/p/devin-first-impression...
Assuming you have a Bandcamp store, have their zero fees Friday events been helpful to your band?
Yes, that's a good way to think of it---we need to come up with a valid / reasonable context in which to explore the function at all, which will subsequently let us look for other bugs (like the divide by zero in the blog post).
I feel like we took the wrong lessons from atrocities in history. We treat them like they happened before some special enlightenment that magically shields us from history repeating, so it's okay to face the early warning signs with apathy or paint anything as a difference in opinion. Surely someone will care when things escalate; surely there would be an outcry more loud than this if it was serious.

Maybe teaching about the holocaust should be accompanied with copies of daily newspapers from the late 1930s to demonstrate their mundanity.
If you have worked at a few companies and left on good terms, it shouldn't be that hard to contact them so you can go back. Otherwise, previous co-workers will be able to help out as well.
There are also things like mandatory arbitration, bans of reverse engineering, handover of copyrights and personal information etc etc hidden in the ToSs and EULAs and privacy policies (or in byzantine nagboxes). Often not even legally enforceable, but how many want to go to court with some megacorporation with the risk of having to pay huge legal fees?

The terms should be in law, not by whatever some lawyer army cooked up, whenever applicable and the enforcement should be done by public authorities.

And proposing legally unenforceable clauses in ToS and EULAs should be criminalized. They are essentially fraud.
The junior engineer asking “how can I become a VP?” is classic. Chances of you becoming a VP at the same place you worked as a junior engineer are slim. I know one person who did it, it took him 25 years, and he had been on the golf team in college, so he had a lot more exposure to company VIPs than most. Change employers while in middle management or you will spend a long time there.

And that’s assuming you even like being a VP. Sure, the money’s good, but there’s a lot of accountability and you either need to be good at taking it or good at avoiding it.
Let me remind you that the judge in that scandal is a free man thanks to the President of the United States.
I don't use Lua as much anymore, but there were a few years where I used Lua and C++ both daily and very quickly you can easily handle both zero and one-indexing, even while switching between languages frequently. As with most things it's just practice.
If you expand into tools for developing AI models, check out Kiln: https://github.com/Kiln-AI/Kiln

It includes synthetic data generation, fine-tuning and evals to help build your own models.
Flapping wings
I don't know what actually happened, but the current reporting is that he was turned back for other reasons:

U.S. Says Decision to Turn Back French Scientist Had Nothing to Do With Trump

The Department of Homeland Security said the academic was denied entry because he had 'confidential' data from an American lab, not because of his views on the president’s policies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/world/europe/us-france-sc... (https://archive.is/z7mhZ)
You're right, that doesn't work the way it is shown. Thankfully, a reader(I'm not sure if it's you) pointed this out with a solution[1] that I plan to add to the post shortly. Again, thanks for pointing this out!

[1] - https://github.com/danishprakash/danishpraka.sh/issues/30
Your historical examples are absolutely fantastic!

A more fictionalized dramatization might be season 4 episode 9 of _The Good Wife_ trying to get a DOMA test case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Wife_season_4) which focuses on the need to lose at the initial trial because SCOTUS is part of the appellate court system. (And, of course, you probably need to lose at state-level appeals as well.)
Yes, but right now I’m asking the person who said they wanted a proportional amount of value.

Either they can/will answer the question or they can’t/won’t.
https://www.hypefresh.com/tiktoker-hacks-self-driving-cars-w...
Building an Agentic Coder from Scratch
I wonder if this is a difference in perspective between people who use it as an ebook library manager and as an ebook reader. The ebook reader UI is terrible. Like how do you jump to a page:

1. Right click on the book to get menu at the top of the window.

2. Click go to

3. Pick which type of "go to" you want ("location")

4. You now get a full screen UI with a single input box

5. Now you get to enter a page number.

Other ebook readers, even the crappy DRM-encumbered web apps, give you a slider.

---

Also rendering a page is very slow, so you scroll to go to the next page, and apparently nothing happens for quite some time. Also it takes two ticks of the scroll wheel to paginate, even in the absence of any internal scrolling. So you're wondering if the page is rendering or if you need to scroll more and potentially overshoot.

---

Opening the bookmarks UI reflows the page, potentially pushing what you wanted to bookmark out of sight onto the next page.
I see you're not aware of `mknod`?

> Is it possible to do container escapes on occasion? Yes, but each of those is a bug in the Linux kernel that is assigned a CVE and fixed.

No bug, if you have permissions to run mknod it's an entirely by design escape that docker lets you do :)

I wasn't talking about kernel bugs, of course there have been a lot of those causing escapes. I am talking about the default configuration that does absolutely 0 sandboxing. And it's not a bug, it's as intended.

If you want to run as root and don't even touch capabilities… yeah it's root. 0 protection, the stuff in the container is running as root and can easily escape namespaces.
I like IPv6 addresses more because they force you to use copy-paste, which removes the risk of typing errors. And nobody would try to dictate me an IPv6 address via phone.
Show HN: Replacer is a go generator to find-and-replace in source files
Anything ad-supported. If this story was about a div-collapsing feature in software with a banner ad, the reception would be different.
Rock music no longer has a creative vibe? What
Maybe you live in a tropical climate but wood can last 100s of years as long as the roof is maintained. Unless it is a timber house the outer walls will need replacement every 100 years though.
> Ed. note: Trek bloggers, including Ananias, are not paid to post their blogs on The Trek.

Yes, but they don’t get paid
It's been a while since I saw anyone post that Philip K Dick quote, from the book Ubik... it's about time I feel.

The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
Funny story.

I started a new job in 2017 rewriting a rather large website with tons of functionality. The old one had to be replaced because it wasn't maintained and started to become a security issue.

I started doing JS and React/Redux for that job, and just as I was getting the hang of it React broke all my knowledge by coming up with "the modern way of writing React components", hooks. In my opinion there was absolutely nothing wrong with the old way of writing components. I never rewrote my now more than year old project, kept using the normal way of writing React components, which was still allowed. Two years later the depreciation messages started flashing by in the build process, and I was looking at a moutain of work having to refactor the complete front end.

Luckily I was able to move on to other things. But React always left the taste in my mouth of "don't, it auto-breaks after time".

I recently visited this old employer, and they have now hired a new coder to rebuild the old website, which is becoming a security issue.
I'm excited to share Eliorai, a project I've been working on to bring advanced AI capabilities directly into WhatsApp. As a solo founder, I built Eliorai to solve the app-switching problem for AI tools—now you can create custom songs, generate art, or get instant answers, all through natural WhatsApp chats.

One of my favorite moments was using Eliorai to make a thank-you song for my church after my daughter's christening. I wrote a few lines, and Eliorai's "Beast Mode" turned them into a soulful hymn in minutes. My church went wild when I shared it—people were crying and cheering! It showed me the power of making AI accessible where people already are.

Tech-wise, Eliorai integrates APIs like Udio for music generation, Flux and Gemini for image creation and ChatGPT for anything else, all running seamlessly in WhatsApp’s ecosystem. It’s been a challenge to optimize for WhatsApp’s API limits, but the result is a smooth, conversational AI experience. We’re live on Product Hunt today with a 3-day free trial, and I’d love your feedback!

What do you think about embedding AI in messaging apps? Any tips for scaling a solo project like this? #ShowHN
Yeah, but how many river crossing puzzles and murder mystery games was it trained on, and how many times do I actually need to solve a river crossing puzzle?
One of the problems I have with paid solutions is that they generally use open source softwares and don't contribute a dime to them once their paid solutions are generating cash.
Another strong win for South Korea's robot-powered future! Why the U.S. govt let this critical company get sold overseas is beyond me.
Permanent deletions use a "recycle" symbol, advanced search a cogwheel columns a stylised greek pillar (creative at least, that one), while download cover and input options share a downward chevron icon. There's lots of instances where the icons do more to distract you than help usability. Titles are shown underneath main toolbar actions, but not in the statusbar or modal windows, for example.

> I fail to see how that’s bad. Tree-like menus are extremely intuitive, and prevent having 50 items in a single column.

Stuff like "Edit metadata > Merge book records > Merge only formats in first selected book - delete others" feels extremely intuitive for you? Calibre tries to cram every workflow under the sun into tree menus, because it's the easiest way to make commands accessible in a GUI. Meanwhile, stuff like the book details panel is completely underused. And we didn't even talk about metadata plugboards yet.

I love Calibre for being the Swiss army knife of ebook management it is, but sometimes I want to have merely a humble knife to spread butter on my reading habits; something that lets me intuitively CRUD an ebook library without forcing me to think whether I want to add files to my book records, add data files to my book records, or add from folders and sub-folders.
I can assure you it is.

You get paid X. You deliver Y value. The proportion is X / Y. Sometimes that proportion is very high, sometimes it is very low. Sometimes it is negative. Sometimes you get a divide by zero error.

And again, the questions.

What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
might making it open source so people can help you with implementing the suggested thing in your reddit thread?
If you want to do MP3, bandcamp has digital downloads and days when 100% of the proceeds go to the artists.

And I understand about the movement to digital - I typically rip the CDs as FLAC files and put them on a hard drive.
> the annual cost to run a heat pump sits well between a natural gas furnace and resistive heating.

Why is that? Maybe I'm missing something fundamentally, but this should be a strict function of COP, $/kWh (elect.) and $/kWh (gas) right? The insolation thing is kind of red herring, because that saves kWh-needed and that goes into both, right?

And yes COP will probably be bad/worst on some days of the year. But on most days even Chicago should get a pretty decent COP from a low-temperature heat pump. Is natural gas just so cheap in Chicago?
Yes, that is a great reference — I should probably have included that! I'm even expecting to do the same for my next trips abroad a US citizen, to avoid trouble on returning.

My understanding is the French scientist was deported on arrival because he had a text complaining about the new administration's defunding of science. So, an even innocuous complaint about policy is politicized to an insane degree.

(and yes, I fully understand the implications of the North Korea reference. Unfortunately, it does not appear we can take it as a joke or exaggeration. All signs are this administration is doing everything possible to convert the form of govt from a democracy to a dictatorship)
Isn’t the most effective way to find out what you’ll be doing is by measuring how many people are going to be under you overall?

A “vp” at a startup with 20 people under them will likely have very different responsibilities than a faang director with 200.

I believe this is why you get asked how many people are under you when interviewing at these roles. The titles - as far as I’ve seen - are mostly meaningless. It’s about the scale of your decisions. I know the article talks about the type of influence/decisions you’ll be making. (Executing others decisions vs making the decisions) But I find it’s rare for these bigger companies to really give a shit about that. They care more about how many people you’ve had under you. It’s rare to see someone be VP at startups with a few people (and that’s their only experience) and then be VP at faang in their next role.
Interview with the author, winner Brouwer Medal 2020: http://algebra.hopto.org/wis/website/naw5-2021-22-2-085.pdf
They made it less useful because they were greedy. Before M1 we used to have laptops that had 16GB RAM as a base. With M1 the made base back to 8GB. In PC world before M1 and even before apple started soldering everything you could have easily laptop extended up to 64GB RAM for a cheap price. Those ram sticks are not expensive in retail price and should be even less expensive if wholesale and not full sticks as bill of material but just memory modules.

If last year they would make each macbook air as a standard have 32GB RAM and iPhone 16GB RAM + 250GB SSD as a base they would have the most capable hardware with big user base.

Sure they loose some money of people having upgrade models but they would sell much more Macs. As a reference they sell each year only ~20M Macs comparing to 60M ipads and 240M iphones. Macs are having only like what ~10% market share worldwide? They could easily double it but they protect their profit margin like virginity.
>But... expecting the rear guard to "take off" is misguided.

Uhh... not "taking off" is exactly the point.
I’ve managed a few people who have come to the same conclusion as you did there, and had a mixed success rate there.

It’s not about not asking questions, it’s about knowing which questions are appropriate to ask, and if you don’t know the answer to that it’s my job to guide you to finding it out.

I’ve never held back on a promotion because someone asked too many questions, but I have recommended we don’t promote because they’re asking questions that they should be answering themselves. The gauge of skill is “do you know what you don’t know”, basically.
This one is far better than the robots they had back then. Which, moreover, weren't using machine learning for control but handcrafted algorithms, which don't have the potential to scale as far as machine learning. The robot in the current video was explicitly trained with reinforcement learning.
I have sent complaints to my DPA. As I said, they don't even answer.

Sure there are some enforced cases, but the vast vast majority gets either stuck in bureaucracy or are simply ignored.

https://noyb.eu/en/5-years-gdpr-national-authorities-let-dow...
If there were no ChatGPT we'd be reading about a Google search here instead (or more likely we wouldn't, because it wouldn't be interesting enough to get traction among non-Koreans on HN). If the quotes in TFA are accurate he wasn't having a conversation with ChatGPT about it, he appears to have just entered some keywords and been done with it (and if he had had a conversation, it sure seems like that would come out!).

We can't infer any amount of trust from this episode except the trust to put the data into ChatGPT in the first place, and let's be honest: that ship sailed long ago and has nothing to do with ChatGPT.
I really don't see the point in all that money if you end up cucking yourself anyway. These tech billionaires who were doubtlessly complete losers growing up are in fact still losers when they're among the most powerful people on the planet. All that money and you don't even buy yourself a spine. It's so sad.
Titles are hard on hackernews :S It's a skill I swear!

"DB projects being implemented in C is nothing new, e.g., PostgreSQL is also dritten C."

I get it may seem like something not new but it's a challenge which I thought would bring more attention to the post itself.

I appreciate your comment.
I'm not a webdev, but still think it's shit. And I'm even old enough to know most of those Icons from the days in which they were considered modern. The whole interface is dated and with strange hacks. It's useful, but could be made better. But I think there are two different parts coming together here, namely UI and UX. The UI is old school and a bit ugly, while the UX is very basic and sometimes strange. And together they make a criticizable interface.

But actually, who cars? It's still doing its job well enough, while delivering a very powerful experience. On that level of ability, it's quite hard and demanding to build a good interface, and a dev who is so deep in CLI that he even builds his own terminal is unlikely to have the necessary competence in that area to make something better.
FWIW, the thing I've found as the slowest single factor on my machine, might not be the slowest on yours; I might have not noticed the real cause of slowdowns on your machine at all, and you may be the only one able to diagnose it.

(and for the record, I'm on W10 too.)

Also, my personal experience from optimizing https://ruffle.rs/ is that in many cases Firefox's wasm runtime can behave slightly faster than on Chrome for some reason; and performance issues are often instead caused by other APIs like the canvas.
When you absolutely could not come up with any plausible rationalization. They sidebarred it.
Ah, right, I fortunately slept on it long enough to get the DX version right away! The photographer side plot was amazing, especially with a Game Boy Printer :)
> reasonably designed mainstream language like Python

I think python is an excellent "first" programming language, but I'd resist calling it "reasonably designed"; especially when holding it up as more reasonably designed than the likes of lisp or haskell.

As a programmer who was forced out of the education pipeline due to the courses being taught exclusively in C++, and forcing OOP to the point that my natural propensity toward immutable functional programming was consistently reprimanded as "programming wrong", that my first programming language became Bash as it was what I could use to automate my Linux box.

I later picked up Python, to do mathematics, that eventually led me back into the profession of programming.

> weirdos like lisp [...] haskell

Years later I discovered Clojure and Haskell which validated my original love of immutability and functional programming making those languages feel like the most "reasonably designed" and sensible languages. Like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
Definitely give it a try yourself. It's very small and shouldn't be hard to test.
> I have a similar mindset though less focused on the type of questions being asked and more about how many times I have to answer the same question.

Yes, I completely agree and do that as well.

The focus on “type of question” has been something I’ve done more recently after helping someone out. Just reflecting on “what type of problem did I just help solve and how can I make it easier for them to solve on their own in the future”. Very often the answer is “more documentation” or similar, getting things only in my head down where everyone can benefit. On the other hand I walk away from some problems I’ve helped with frustrated that the answer was 1-2 Google searches away and the issue had nothing to do with “our stack”.
So I see people saying this all the time, but they forget one crucial factor - noise. Roads next to houses have lower speed limit not just because of people on the road or sharp turns, but because cars driving faster generate more noise(exponentially more noise in fact).
OSS contributors choose to give their work away, including allowing it to be sold. The "PMC" (sigh at othering term) can only make money by creating value. Their customers choose them over free because of that value.

You are more like the "PMC" in your statement than they are, because you just use other people's work. At least they add value.
2025 World Happiness Report shows U.S. in lowest-ever spot on list
Googling "Is google search bad?" I get at the top

> Reddit · r/google Is Google Search getting worse? Latest research and ...

The whole "Click here to find ten reasons why it is bad" style I've only come across in HN comments attacking what may be a bit of a straw man?
Yeah.

I mean its been obvious to many they're full of shit for decades, but that was the 'If anyone still thinks they aren't full of shit after this" line...
Software is very scalable and can provide a lot of value. If you look at the revenue per SWE for Microsoft, Alphabet, Netflix, etc, then it's hard to compare them to the person whose job isn't scalable, to say a truck driver, nurse, or bartender.