skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A blog about burnout and recovery that chronicles my experiences going on an extended sabbatical for the last 3 years. The good, the bad, the unexpected, what I'd do differently, what I've learned along the way, etc.

I started the project 1.5 years ago after many people I spoke to expressed interest, but life got complicated and I had to focus on health among other things. It's now back on the front burner, and I'm hoping to launch it later this spring or early summer.
Because passengers panic, and that makes the job of the crew harder?
Yes. I didn't really notice that, but now that you mention it it's very clear.
> EDIT: I see you've engaged in the very frustrating practice of editing your comment to reply to my comment. This time with even less etiquette than normal

You should blame HN for that, not tw04. The site specifically promotes it.
As a student currently, I'll also throw in this perspective. The colleges themselves make it feel transactional and not about learning even if I'm interested in doing so.

For example, I'm taking a physics course right now (electricity and magnetism). The concepts are difficult for me and I was hoping that the homework would help. So, I go to do the homework, but the homework is online. With the online homework I get five chances to get the problem correct, but there is zero partial credit, zero feedback, and every time I get the answer wrong, it negatively impacts my grade.

I have no chance to make mistakes and learn. At least with homework that was handed out back in the day, there was at least the possibility of partial credit being handed out. So my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg.

Additionally, since students have been cheating, I think it gives professors a skewed perspective on how much time is actually needed to get work done, so the deadlines get moved up. This means I get even more pressure put on me when I'm just trying to learn and be a good student.
It seems like we've spent the past 25 years trying to solve the big headache this creates: you have 100 blog posts, which means 100 html files. Any structural change you need to make to the site involves touching all 100 files. CSS came along and helped separate the presentation from the information a bit, but it still sucked to maintain 100 html files on the server.
> Notably, they haven't been "disappearing" people in the manner that would have to be happening here.

Not that we know about yet. Someone's got to be the first of that sort of government action to be discovered and come to the notice of more than just their friends and family, and it's highly unlikely to be discovered the very first time it happened.

I'm reasonably confident that if this news manages to get covered widely enough. there's going to be a bunch of "me too" reports of coworkers or family that have disappeared under similar circumstances in the last 3 or 4 weeks. I'll be curious to see what other nationalities and professions show up in those reports.
> There’s a difference between your job being replaced by AI and your employer being disrupted by AI

Technically yes

But the difference is not really meaningful to the people who are out of work, is it?
~2006 I've built a fuse fs that used mysql as a backend, kept all file hashes (not blocks, just whole files) and did deduplication. good old times.
Watch John Mulaney's standup about his college asking him for money. He mentions how much money it cost for him to go to school but yet he didn't read and just did drugs. I remember students in class not reading the material either when I was in college in the 2000s. I agree with the article, just adding how things were bad before and now it's worse with phones.
Are u talking about incurring technical debt from the generated AI code that vastly out prices the original low cost of using AI. I cannot answer ur question on how big is one compared to the other but I have an idea that can sideline them. I don't think it will matter, AI is so exceptionally good at generating just good enough spam, so exceptionally good at delivering a shitty minimally viable product that it might warp the expectations and needs of consumers. Where the new shittyness becomes the new norm because it drowns out everything else around it with shear volume. People around me prefer to generate their Dungeons and Dragons characters and cities with AI because it good enough even though it looks painfully bad and often doesn't completely fit their vision. Music songs are being composed for small communities almost constantly at the moment because people do not want to bother to go out of their way to find a real human composer.

It's easy, it's fast and it gets the point across. Quality is only encouraged socially, people don't really care that much about quality. Rather people have 100 things they care about in their lives - an app for their groceries, a small game of their own idea to show to friends and play, a piece of music about that one time their group of friends got drunk and went into the mountains to fight a bear that in the end turned out to be some old granpa's cow. And only one or two which are important enough to spend the effort to find a quality product.

For software - the places where hard identifiable metric matter... Sensors, weapons, performance, networking, etc. They won't be replaced by AI's any time soon but so many other types of product imo will be assimilated by the machine. All desktop apps for regular people, all websites for blogs, posting, sharing. Probably most IoT related things in your own home

It is hilarious that the machines will first devour the industries that need more feelings and ideas rather then raw precision.
Support for democratic institutions and the rule of law has gone down in USA thanks to the MAGA movement. Is that cultural?
The official training video by the FAA outlines that crew should extinguish the fire with onboard equipment and keep it cool with water to prevent it from thermal runaway again. In one outline, FAA doesn't endorse putting it in a bag or touching it any further than it needs to be, and another in response to commercial "FAA approved" products for lithium battery fires, does not endorse nor discourage using such products.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/26/mike-johnson... ("Mike Johnson floats eliminating federal courts as Trump faces judicial pressure")
We're increasing the brain's restorative function during sleep.

Over the last 4.5 years, we've been developing slow-wave enhancement technology which increases the effectiveness of deep sleep.

We've developed the full stack, our own hardware, soft conductive dry (no paste or gel) electrodes, comfortable EEG headband, embedded sleep stage classification and stimulation models, the list goes on and on.

We're currently ramping up for a pre-sale, and getting the marketing inline, along with finalizing industrial design, prepping for manufacturing, etc, etc,
> Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though.

Would you want a RUD of nuclear waste in the atmosphere? That's the key thing with sending stuff to space, we are nowhere near close enough in terms of reliability and cost to what would be needed to send the stuff away.
I'm working on a geography guessing game. This is mostly in order to learn the technologies that the team I manage is working on, as I don't get as much hands-on time as I'd like at work. But it's a fun game and it's improving at a rapid clip. I'd love your feedback.

https://guesshole.com/
> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit.

Only so long as the college doesn't devalue the credential.

If I interview a few people with a CS degree from College A and I find they don't know the basics of programming - then the credential loses value; why would I bother interviewing people from such a college?

So colleges have to balance the needs of their stakeholders - employers/ graduates want the credential to be a sign of education; and current students who want good grades and less work.

The "implied terms of the transaction" have always been that current students have to learn enough that they're not devaluing the credential.
Well you could have a dropdown with reasons when flagging, and hope that people select the real reason they are flagging it.
haha, I did not know that. The first time I saw it, it was actually used against my point here on HN.
I replied to this argument in response to a sibling. I'll link my reply instead of repeating myself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43527605
> and is looking down the barrel of a second dissolution as we speak.

Where is there evidence of this?
I grew up without TV, computer, Playstation etc in a fairly rural area. It was great most of the time, till I had to go to school. I spent most of my time at home or around the farm, and my 2 other siblings. Very rare to see others outside our fam. And if anyone did visit I would hide from them, not knowing how to interact with them.
I never learnt how to socialize, and was very shy as a kid (and still am to a degree). I was even afraid to enter shops, and would only go into ones I had been to before with parents, if I had to. Wasn't till my early 20s that I built up enough courage to enter new stores without intense fear.

I started off at a school which I was bullied allot, never learnt anything, eventually was pulled and put into a traditional state school where I did much better (but far behind other kids). Though still bullied a bit, but teachers there actually cared, most bullying didn't last.

But once I got to High School (and to a degree primary) having such a different upbringing to all the other kids made it very hard to make any friends. Or have anything to in-common to talk about.
It also made parts of learning in school harder, because teachers would talk about xyz pop culture that 99% of kids knew about (e.g. popular movies), and I was just like.. what, I've never seen that.

The last 1-2 years of school once I was allowed a computer I had no self control, and binge watched SOO much tv/movies, in an attempt to catch up to kids my age, and have something to talk about. It would take many years to get it mostly under control.

I think for my kinda upbringing to work, you need to live somewhere where everyone is doing it too, otherwise it's a painful upbringing for the kids, which effects them for life, in a bad way in my case.

Maybe there is a middle ground to take here that would work better, idk.
but where to leave to?

Many of them are basically refuges which did use their nogen to be able to escape the Chinese regime and find a home without technically being refuges at any point.

Some grew up in the US.

Many have family and children in the US, thus which very well might be US citizens.

For many they do not have a place to go, the US is their only home.

Even for thus which where involved in spying not all of them did so of their free choice. It's not a secret that China secret police is present in most countries with larger China ethnicity including the US and there had been more then one or two cases of them threatening and blackmailing ethnic Chinese people (including such with full US citizenship). Including e.g. kidnapping their children.
I think we all know this old story. The engineer building it was getting permission denied so they gave it all the permissions and never came back and right-sized.
I’m curious if you think plants, single-cell algae, or single-cell animals like amoebas will be simulatable?
How about Trump pardoning Ross Ulbricht? The dude was a massive drug dealer. How about pardoning J6 convicts? We all watched the crimes on TV, they had due process and trials.
What rights of minorities have been targeted? If the only example is trans rights, it's dumb to think it's a simple issue of trampled rights. There are two competing sets of rights, you grant one set you take away from the other. There isn't a good solution.

If you think all the people advocating for small government must be fools or hypocrites, you don't understand the issues an any depth.
> Apparently the US spends twice on healthcare for the same outcomes compared to comparable nations with universal healthcare.

Sure, but I was talking about costs in other developed countries, not USA. Healthcare in Australia is about 1/4 of government expenditure with welfare being another 1/4, for example.

> Therefore the concern about costs does not add up.

Non-sequitur. Costs obviously do and I explained in very simple terms why (e.g., you could double welfare payments for about the same cost). Please explain your reasoning if you want to support the claim that cost is not a concern.
If that's true, then that seems to be the simplest explanation for what happened here? (Honestly asking.)
Relay - A real-time collaboration plugin for Obsidian. [0]

Relay transforms Obsidian into a collaborative environment with real-time collaborative editing, comfortably private folder sharing, offline support, and self-hostable Relay Servers.

[0] https://relay.md
Here is a very short video of the event:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLZ2gp1XszU
If you're always looking at things through that lens, the government can never do anything at all, and you'll be left with "complete freedom" to just die from easily preventable issues.

There's absolutely no need to resort to a slippery slope here. We have plenty of examples around the world for things that work without anyone invoking a boogeyman.
> It will become a role with a large pool of low-skilled coders who move forward with AI and a few specialists that will unblock those coders when stuck as well as address performance bottlenecks for production-scale.

You see this already in medicine. Anesthesiologist can oversee up to 6 concurrent cases, with NP’s or CRNA’s doing the actual work.

This only works for straightforward, not medically complicated cases. The more complicated cases (pregnancy, cancer, obesity, etc) are still typically fully managed by an MD /DO.

The results are controversial. Healthcare systems can save cost, but patient care is hit or miss.
It’s not just that people disagree on whether or not to do these things, it’s also that they disagree on what helps people/the world.

An evangelical and an atheist will probably disagree about the helpfulness of spreading the gospel, for example.
BlinkMore, an open-source macOS app to help with digital eye strain:
https://github.com/oxremy/BlinkMore
We're building the killer app for books

Starting with a native iOS app to to track and discover books [1]

Focusing on notetaking and cozy social this year as we try to grow from 100k to 1m+ users

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6737528718
Well I thought your reply was both amusing and technically relevant...

I'd never be caught dead with that lanyard haha so it's amusing to see it recommended, though I don't blame others for using one!

I've not considered it, but with the rise of phones and e-ink and so on, I assume pocket protectors are even less common than they were prior?
It’s helpful for preserving the focused element when updating the UI state. AFAIK, that’s not a trivial problem.

Other than that you can pretty much get away with a small createElement helper like this one:

https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton/blob/main/src/Dashboa...
You're right, I've updated my comment to be less authoritative on the residency status.
Expecting anyone to model and quantify in a hacker news comment is borderline unrealistic.

But hot-takes are another matter:

4 is basically #1: Every "non-traditional" investment can be made into an ETF (and for that matter, mutual funds) provided it aligns with SEC and/or exchange rules. Still, PE funds probably won't get a lot of takers by individual company's fund admins even if they're allowed. They're quite conservative, and rightly so.

2 & 3 would both cause the equivalent of modern bank runs. American financial institutions would be in tatters.

And as an individual why not? I can withdraw from a 401k, with just a 10% penalty plus income tax. Rationally, this is still better; especially if the highest tax brackets are favorably cut-down thanks to our conservative madmen. Which means the safest course of action is to withdraw it in chunks; then place it into safer investment vehicles and nations.

Of course, what would really happen is something more catastrophic as this withdrawal dovetails from thousands to millions.

Finally, with so many nations and wealthy also invested into the US, this then turn into more than just a US problem as it becomes hard/impossible to offload US financial assets.
I haven’t seen a system that has GCC but lacks make
We did the same. We created bespoke web sites entirely in C. One of which you may have visited (years ago). And we used C for the same reasons the author mentions and agree with his last paragraph.

Why? At the beginning we were frustrated trying to find one true solution--granted, the perfect solution--to what we wanted to do and how we wanted to work for 20 years. We found that C interfaced with everything, worked everywhere, every programmer knew it, and it could do anything we wanted it to do. If there wasn't a library for something, we could easily make our own.

I could go on and on but I won't. I closed shop just a few years ago cause my reasons for doing that work went away.
Myself.

Been a freelance dev for years, now going on "sabbatical" (love that word) shortly.

Planning to do a lot of learning, self-improvement, and projects. Tech-related and not. Preparing for the next volume (not chapter) of life. Refactoring, if you like, among other things.

I'm excited.
50k is in the ballpark for a 200kW GPU rack, which they are quite obviously not running.
We're building https://tripjam.com after being frustrated with planning trips in regular group chats and trying to organize information across multiple apps. It combines:

- Group chat that keeps all travel discussions in one thread

- Interactive maps where everyone can pin locations and add notes

- Collaborative itineraries that sync with your calendar

- AI travel assistant that suggests activities and helps optimize your plans
That's generally because those diplomats can't be tried for their activities in the host nation, and also because said diplomats are running spies, not stealing secrets themselves.

In other words, they aren't the traitors, their agents are. And those agents are the ones who get tried in the media circuses we're all so familiar with.
If checks and balances are not being enforced, I failed to see the distinction you’re trying to make.
It's not meant to compete with anything. It was made to fit my needs to have a media viewer for local directories that does zero processing of the files.
The cleanup on aisle 9 when this whole thing is over is going to be biblical.
> I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware

As a young teenager in the early-mid 2000s, I learned the hard way what the little standoffs are for by killing a motherboard by screwing it directly into the steel case :')

Never made that mistake again, that's for sure. And I share all the same experiences as yourself
> compilers require a bunch of arcane flags to actually do something useful

$ gcc lolno.c && ./a.out
lol, no
$
- Semi-automated job finder for a job site focused on non-mainstream programming languages [1].
- Eiffel-inspired programming language [2].

It's hard to juggle between the two.

[1] https://beyond-tabs.com
[2] https://github.com/andreamancuso/rivar-lang
The article author attempted to get the court order but could not find one. This is common when the order is made as part of an ongoing investigation, or else criminals could just watch for their names in PACER to know when to fire up the shredders.
Through the API - in particular the info endpoint[1], combined with the fact that Reddit IDs are base36 encoded sequentially increasing integers[2]. You can get 100 objects at a time, so if you make ~3 requests a second it's enough to get all of the new posts and comments.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#GET_api_info

[2] https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#fullnames
You're making me really curious what you think the purpose of eating is.

Also, what you think cheese consists of.
I did say the likeliest explanation is no government involvement, but that USA involvement is still likelier than China‘s involvement given recent pattern of conduct.

Chinese exfiltration is also a conspiracy theory. In fact chinese exfiltration requires a larger conspiracy than USA disappearance. If you want to apply Occam’s Razor (which you shouldn’t), you should actually favor disappearance over exfiltration (but really you should favor no government involvement).

> There is a long series of scientists in the US that were secretly working for the Chinese government.

If that is so, can you provide me with a list. That list would actually have to be pretty long to make exfiltration the likeliest hypothesis. Like there would have to be more than a couple of dozen cases this century.

EDIT: I did quick googling to find any sources which backs your claim. This NY Post article is the strongest one (https://nypost.com/2025/02/20/us-news/us-science-labs-face-g...) it is basically a propaganda piece citing far right US politicians who claim extraordinary numbers (like 8000 scientists) without any evidence. As we know extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And why would that be a problem or impossible?

Maybe 80% of the people are good people and 0.1% of people are responsible for most of the world’s misery.