skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've said something similar for a while. That dual interview question "what is your greatest strength? what is your greatest weakness" is a very bad question.

Your strengths and weaknesses are joined at the hip, and they are the two sides of the same coin which is your personality.

In some contexts, your personality becomes a strength. In other contexts it becomes a weakness.

The trick is whether you are able to recognise under what circumstances your personality becomes a strength, and what you then do to allow you to play to your strengths, and maximize its effect, or obversely, whether you are able to recognise under what circumstances your personality becomes a weakness, and what kind of external mitigations do you or have you then put in place, to minimize the effect of that weakness.

So in that sense, the typical "I work too hard" passive-aggressive response is a bad response. A good response would be that you tend to be a hard worker, which is good when you need to be relied upon, but bad in terms of having work-life balance and getting easily burnt out. Hence the external mitigations should be a clearly negotiated work package which insists on sticking to work hours and allocated holidays.

Or, another example, adaptability. Adaptability is great if the role requires it. But it's a curse if you find yourself becoming the "go to" man for all bunch of unrelated things, which then distract you from your number 1 task and opportunities for growth. So the mitigation strategy is a clearly defined role and responsibilities.
Do you really think the American government isn't monitoring your Internet traffic?
Not only that. Life accumulated those over the eons, as the rocks eroded, the useful metals got saved by life, and the rest was washed down. So the natural levels are way higher. Life is good at hoarding these "heavy metals".

People in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43631251 have been arguing that these people must have been some top class elite, and I totally get it. They are too good looking. But, that's how it was. The typical of the past would be above celebrity looks today. A lot of curent idols look stunted in comparison.
Why? Just use different h1...h6 family tags depending on your structure.

The example in the article

<body>
<h1>Level 1</h1>
<section>
<h1>Level 2</h1>
<section>
<h1>Level 3</h1>
<section>
<h1>Level 4</h1>
</section>
</section>
</section>
</body>

can become

<body>
<h1>Level 1</h1>
<section>
<h2>Level 2</h1>
<section>
<h3>Level 3</h1>
<section>
<h4>Level 4</h1>
</section>
</section>
</section>
</body>
These posts from Varnish initially confused me because the only Varnish project I had heard of was a cache/accelerator like nginx.

TinyKVM is an impressive marvel and I wonder if it would help to separate the branding from the older name.
Might be a tongue cheek comment, but I built my practice around this idea. If you're going to do deep thinking work 48 weeks a year, you simply can't do it effectively 40 hours a week. Even a machine needs maintenance down time.
There’s a lot of money to be made in letting people order takeout from McDonalds while not feeling like the kind of person who orders takeout from McDonald’s.
I contemplated this last night as I sat and stared at the wall while waiting for my family to wake for their morning routine. After much deliberation and calculation and running many simulations I arrived at the conclusion that I am most probably not a robot.
Why Playwright's visual testing breaks down in teams
Playwright’s built-in visual testing (toHaveScreenshot) works well in small projects: it’s fast, simple, and local.

But once you start using it in a team with multiple contributors, it quickly becomes fragile:

- Snapshots live in Git and often conflict
- You compare against your last push, not production
- Test runs must be triggered manually to update screenshots
- Results are hard to review and trust without a proper UI
- Flaky diffs creep in due to platform and rendering inconsistencies

I wrote an article that breaks down the strengths and limits of Playwright’s model, and why it starts to fail at scale. It also explains how shifting to a CI-based approach (like Argos) changes the baseline, stabilizes results, and adds a real review layer.
It was a problem with the screen reader implementation in 2009 when the semantics were introduced.

In 2025 if no screen reader works right it's a problem with the spec.
The '24 budget was $842 billion.
Been there. Done that.

But it doesn't even stop there. It goes down to the SMB market as well. Granted not the S but in Medium and larger places.

I have been dragged into multiple sales calls with the agenda "we need an app".

Full stop.

Fun day to be the "Solution Architect" on call.
That would be one long commit description. I have had prompts in 1000s of word lengths!
The idea of pure functional programming is that you can really go quite far if you think of your program as a pure function f(input) -> outputs with a messy impure thing that calls f and does the necessary I/O before/after that.

Batch programs are easy to fit in this model generally. A compiler is pretty clearly a pure function f(program source code) -> list of instructions, with just a very thin layer to read/write the input/output to files.

Web servers can often fit this model well too: a web server is an f(request, database snapshot) -> (response, database update). Making that work well is going to be gnarly in the impure side of things, but it's going to be quite doable for a lot of basic CRUD servers--probably every web server I've ever written (which is a lot of tiny stuff, to be fair) could be done purely functional without much issue.

Display also can be made work: it's f(input event, state) -> (display frame, new state). Building the display frame here is something like an immediate mode GUI, where instead of mutating the state of widgets, you're building the entire widget tree from scratch each time.

In many cases, the limitations of purely functional isn't that somebody somewhere has to do I/O, but rather the impracticality of faking immutability if the state is too complicated.
Do you have any numbers to back that statement up?

E.g. I have solar panels and a home battery and pay less than a $100 a year for electricity.
And tragically most users prefer the auto playing previews. Theprimeagean has a YouTube video about how he tried to a/b test it before release thinking "no way that's what users would prefer" and was unfortunately wrong.
Visual Suite 2.0: Productivity, meet creativity
I don't disagree, but I think implementing this sort of review with software is dangerous in a different way than making bad behavior more efficient.

A parole board can have dissent and differing personal experience in its ranks. There can be disagreement, but that discussion might lead to a more right or more wrong outcome.

When you have the number spit out from some case management, there's no arguing with it. We just turned the programmers that wrote that bit of code into unassailable gods of the process, with whom we can only communicate with through Jira tickets. It isn't more right or more wrong, but it is consistent with the variables provided. That mindless consistency applied to human situations like this quickly becomes horrific.
One reason is the attempt of advertisers to psychologically manipulate you into wanting things you don't really need, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269.
A correlary to the Gelman effect, with govt spending , it all sounds important and reasonably priced unless the spending is in your circle of expertise
they will probably announce a new $5B contract with Palantir next week
I think since the complexity is high and you cannot run away from that other than making a very small box that not a lot of use cases fit into. The main use case of k8s is handling more complex use cases so you'd remove a large portion of your audience by constraining the config.
This is about the boardgame, not the language?
Apple is not a UNIX vendor. They checked off enough of a compliance list to pass in the legal and marketing sense, but in any real practical sense it's not usable as a UNIX system. It's not designed to serve anything. Most of it is locked down and proprietary. No headless operation, no native package manager, root is neutered... and so on. It's not UNIX.
Even if someone can transfer from lamp lighter to street light technician people will have lost their jobs, because you no longer need enough people to make sure all the lamps get lit within a reasonable space of time, you just need maybe a dozen people covering maintenance and repairs on a city full of streetlights.
We use Python to generate these configs at my work. Ends up working out pretty well. I previously worked on the biggest deployment of gcl (the inspiration for KCL, Jsonnet) at Google and it was a giant nightmare and the cause of many outages.
It's probably both. Browsers now have built-in DoH so they usually do their own resolving. Only if you disable "secure DNS" (or you use group policies) will you fall back to the system resolver anymore.
"Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology.... It just feels ham-fisted."

So like exactly what is happening with driverless car technology.

A technology that was in its infancy in lab settings; taken out of that context and thrust upon our public roads by capricious impulsive billionaires in "beta" form, which has predictably killed people; but instead of pulling back and having a discussion about the possible downsides, this technology is allowed to plague us; because thought or discussion about possible downsides are short circuited by platitudes about how you have to crack eggs to make an omelet.

Can't get a driverless car future free of car deaths without first killing some people with driverless cars, ya know?
The Hustler and the Nerd are the co-founding duo. Domain expertise is an obvious plus, but a “non-technical” Domain Expert is a third wheel.
No code is dead. Long live vibe coding
The problem in your example is threefold:

1) what are my rights, I.e. Against what constraints was the algorithm implemented?

2) "we have decided": who is "we", it's actually good that a particular entity is responsible for the output of the algorithm, computers can't be responsible for things.

3) is there appeal or human review?

If a bad algorithm is part of some process that affects me I'm going to ask what my rights are, who's responsible and where I can appeal, not the specifics of the algorithm.
Brain drain? Trump cutbacks force scientists to seek jobs in Europe
It's amazing how fast we can eat up new hardware capabilities. The old 6502 1-MHz CPUs were capable of running much more sophisticated software than most people today imagine, with 1/1000 or 1/millionth the hardware. And now we're asking LLMs to answer math questions, using billions of operations to perform something a single CPU instruction can handle.
Not sure why this really matters a ton if they announced a 100+ billion pentagon budget increase.
That's because you are likely a perfectionist. I've learned to let go and allow for there to be holes in my work (because 90% of my projects should be linear after requirements are known, but we live in a fantasy world where you're expected to put the shingles on the roof before the walls and roof are built).
No one really answered your question. We talk about endowments as a single pot of money the school can do anything with, but that's not really the case. Much of the time the money has to be used for specific purposes, and it's setup in a way that it can be used for that specific purpose in perpetuity.

Need is also an interesting question. A lot of the money that has been cut off across the federal government was already allocated, but just not paid out yet. So people won a grant, built out a service around the grant, and then they are getting stiffed by the government. Suddenly having to find another source for those funds is not tenable even if the school has an endowment, and thus you see everything shutting down. The worst part of the whole thing is this will eventually cost the US more money because the government will likely lose most of these lawsuits but then it costs more to stand the machinery back up once the grants are paid.
Devil's Advocate: isn't selling making people believe they do want your product and are willing to pay for it? The vast majority of sales people are (mostly) paid on commissions.
I’m from post Soviet space, bot. I first hand witnessed Putin’s regime and impact it had, do you seriously think I’ll buy what you’re selling?
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/pentagon-cuts-5...

"This latest announcement follows a March 20 declaration from Hegseth, where he detailed $580 million in cuts to various programmes, contracts, and grants. The overall reduction now amounts to nearly $6 billion as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, which aims to streamline Pentagon expenditures and focus resources on warfighting capabilities."
I feel the same about leaded solder for hobby electronics.
But a large portion of their beauty is reflective. The Countach was seen as a very ugly car by many when it was released. But it was lust-worthy for its performance. That lust-worthiness over time transformed the car's image, and now it's seen as iconic.
0.61% with just a few contracts
Also, engagement is a measure of how rich the oil field is for enshittifying the platform to extract ad dollars.
Doesn't mean to say it's not related:

>> The move comes amid a broader push by the Trump administration to implement Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives across federal agencies. [0]

[0] https://defensescoop.com/2025/04/11/hegseth-memo-dod-it-serv...

or:
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/15/doge-p...
Good riddance, and hopefully they won't be missed. Here in Canada these consultants are just leeches who suck up all the tax dollars which could actually be used for something useful.
Even 100ms slower reaction times doesn't put most people outside the normal range: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/133421/fnhum-09-0...

If that was too much, we wouldn't let people in their 50s drive.
Manufacturers Are Building ASICs That Look More Like Servers. Here's Why
Better formulated as: some weaknesses may be unintended consequences of your strengths under certain conditions. Rules of thumb like this are useful approximations of reality, but I wouldn't elevate them to the level of a principle that I would use in 1:1s. All the little phenomena that people like the author (myself included) in the tech/management world have observed and written about, would probably add up to several thousand. Human behaviour is complex. Sometimes you have no choice but to handle it on a case by case basis.
> Spotify today is... basically Netflix

Yep, Spotify keeps showing me podcasts right at the top, even though I've never listened to one on their platform ever. Sometimes with titles like "how we f**ed yesterday", while I keep it open on my work computer. It looks like they know better what I want!
I agree with some statements OP makes but not others. Ultimately, I write in lisp because it's fun to write in Lisp due to its expressive power, ease of refactoring, and the Lisp Discord[1].

> Lisp is easier to remember,

I don't feel this way. I'm always consulting the HyperSpec or googling the function names. It's the same as any other dynamically typed language, such as Python, this way to me.

> has fewer limitations and hoops you have to jump through,

Lisp as a language has incredibly powerful features find nowhere else, but there are plenty of hoops. The CLOS truly feels like a superpower. That said, there is a huge dearth of libraries. So in that sense, there's usually lots of hoops to jump through to write an app. It's just I like jumping through them because I like writing code as a hobby. So fewer limitations, more hoops (supporting libraries I feel the need to write).

> has lower “friction” between my thoughts and my program,

Unfortunately I often think in Python or Bash because those are my day job languages, so there's often friction between how I think and what I need to write. Also AI is allegedly bad at lisp due to reduced training corpus. Copilot works, sorta.

> is easily customizable,

Yup, that's its defining feature. Easy to add to the language with macros. This can be very bad, but also very good, depending on its use. It can be very worth it both to implementer and user to add to the language as part of a library if documented well and done right, or it can make code hard to read or use. It must be used with care.

> and, frankly, more fun.

This is the true reason I actually use Lisp. I don't know why. I think it's because it's really fun to write it. There are no limitations. It's super expressive. The article goes into the substitution principle, and this makes it easy to refactor. It just feels good having a REPL that makes it easy to try new ideas and a syntax that makes refactoring a piece of cake. The Lisp Discord[1] has some of the best programmers on the planet in it, all easy to talk to, with many channels spanning a wide range of programming interests. It just feels good to do lisp.

1: https://discord.gg/HsxkkvQ
Can someone explain what is Canva trying here? Taking on M$ Office and Adobe at the same time? I always thought they were targeting designer only.
And the 20% tipping, please leave that at home too.
Social impacts don't need to be tied to money.

Getting together with your friends and playing/creating music together, with/for yourselves, and for no financial gain is of tremendous value, for instance.
A short, compressed, small video that's edge-cached beats always out a 4K stream, so it even works as a tactic to keep you in that overview longer.
Kinda amusing that the general sentiment so far, in a forum filled with technology expertise, is that there is certainly waste in these budgets. But, when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
> It's always hard to parse if people mean functional programming when bringing up Lisp. Common Lisp certainly is anything but a functional language. Sure, you have first order functions, but you in a way have that in pretty much all programming languages (including C!).

It's less about what the language "allows" you to do and more about how the ecosystem and libraries "encourage" you to do.
Airdrop Distribution Models Comparison (2025)
Would someone really describe the LFA as "utterly soulless"?
Or more the more charitable Always Improving
A mention for Amazon search here. Which is a very slow horse and always has been, when even a horse that can walk would greatly benefit their customers.

I can only guess that for some reason Amazon think they make more money by not making search work. Work, generally, like only actually returning things with the search term or, work specifically, like letting you specify hard drive sizes above 6TB.

But I find it hard to believe this shit horse actually drives sales. I always end up looking elsewhere in frustration.
You’ve got bigger problems to worry about right now if you’re a US citizen.
Why is it live?
What were these contracts for?

Networking or day to day software/application maintenance? I get they were probably bloated (I did work for a defense contractor at one point) but presumably they were doing something. I mean isn’t Deloitte a accounting firm?

I’m a little worried about the “stand down” attitude against cyber attacks.
Yep. If they can’t get you to watch unknown, b/c grade content - you will quickly exhaust everything on the top shelf and log off.
"Lisp and Email" ... all languages grow a half-baked lisp, all programs expand to read email. Now: all content/social sites devolve to tik-tok?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law
>AI will make the masses richer, so society will not abandon it

This remains to be seen. Inequality is worse now than it was 20 years ago despite technology progressing. This is true across income and wealth.
Apple began its decline the instant Steve Jobs went on sick leave.

The sorry OS X Lion was the harbinger. From there, it has been one thing after another - FCP X, dongle-gate, rose gold, abandonment of the 4 quadrant system, flat design, yearly release schedule (and associated bugs), touch bar, no Mac Pro, then trash can Mac Pro... so many more.

The business press, and average consumer, hardly noticed the dip in product design. Apple raked in more money than ever, and had plenty of reputation to burn. Apple today is like a once-great movie studio that lives off sequels.

But Apple still has genius when it comes to fixing supply chain problems. They'll pull through this downturn. Even with the Trump tariffs, they'll be fine.
If it was just expense, then Koenigsegg would be a household name. Most enthusiasts will know them, but the average person won't. There's something more that leads culture in such a way to uphold a particular brand.
Agreed. YAML was a great upgrade to traditional ini files, but its usage beyond any non-static config use case was a mistake. Not just k8s configs, but also ansible (Chef's ruby was so much better, chef just lost because it required an agent), and GitHub actions.
Looking at the regional impact (40% SK, 15% Vietnam), you can see how internet topology creates these concentrated failure zones. We've had to work around these when designing different region interconnects at a previous life.
If you want a faster horse, your best bet is to make it yourself.

For media library, I use Jellyfin and host all my media files locally on a NAS.

I self-host all my projects on that same NAS, which works just fine and and makes me not need to subscribe to some offer or other from hosting providers.

I quit SmugMug last year, because it turns out, hosting my photos on the NAS costs nothing, and remaking the small part of the SmugMug web interface that I need is trivial.

And for vehicles, I also made myself a faster horse, by bolting a Bafang motor on an ordinary mountain bike. Things break occasionally on that thing, but I know how to fix them, and so I do.
Any solution would need to be multi-faceted

One facet could be increasing investment, VC and otherwise

_How_ you do that? I'm not sure, but I also doubt it's a completely unsolvable problem
"How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."

― Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Great, but it doesn’t matter too much as they’ll still vote in an increased budget that adds more debt. How about we raise taxes a bit and stop spending trillions of dollars that we don’t have each year.
Same here in Australia. Over the last decade we’ve systematically reduced the number of civil servants and increased the number of consultants in government by many times. The result is we’ve ended up paying through the nose for worse government.

The big consulting firms are leeches on the public purse. They should be used as little as possible.
>But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement

That really hit the nail. Advertising industry along has ruined web! Everything is for trigger what action we want user to do on the page, how can we see what user is thinking.

Very creepy indeed from a user perspective. Now days I don't care if telementary is aggregated or open or if it helps developer makes better software.

How about NO telementary!!! NO tracking!!!
Exactly. Gell-Mann Amnesia. The first thing that came to mind.