MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by otikik | 2025-04-24 15:45:31+00:00
That is true but you have to be very specific about who your "users" are.

If your "users" are the guys in charge of showing more ads to people, then yes. People, on the other hand absolutely prefer watching their contacts' posts first. Recommendations related with their individual preferences, second. Random dopamine-inducing stuff, only from time to time. If you prioritize the third kind only is like someone said already on the commments here: like a restaurant that only serves candy. They will have customers for a while but eventually they will burn them down (or kill them).
by dheera | 2025-04-24 15:46:31+00:00
Once I had to send an international RMA that they wouldn't pay for the shipping. It went something like this:

0. Went to Fedex to check on the shipping cost for this tiny box. It was $120 so I passed

1. Went to USPS, found that they were closed, the only option was a 30 minute line to use the machine. Lined up for 30 minutes, found that it the goddamn UI on the machine did not support international shipments.

2. Went home to generate a USPS international shipping label. $25, much more acceptable. FedEx should be out of business.

3. I didn't have a 2D printer at home, tried to 3D print the shipping label with 1 layer of white and 1 layer of black but it wasn't high resolution enough in the X/Y direction for the label to be readable so I gave up

4. Went to FedEx to use their 2D printers but realized I forgot my USB drive at home

5. Went home to get my USB drive

6. Back to FedEx, realized I forgot my mask (this was COVID times, so no go)

7. Went home to get my mask

8. Back to FedEx, printed the 2D shipping label

9. Back to USPS, found out they had no tape

10. Back to FedEx to buy a roll of tape because I don't know where the hell else to buy tape same day, and all my tape at home are electrical tape, teflon tape, or Gorilla tape

11. Back to USPS and the stupid package drop box had a mechanical issue preventing it from opening more than a few cm, not enough to fit my package

12. Went to another USPS to drop the package
by esafak | 2025-04-24 15:46:32+00:00
There is nothing preventing you from expanding your group chat roster. It is just that random strangers can't drop in; you have to add them.

You would have to sacrifice the privacy of your group if you wanted to support serendipitous membership growth. Do you want to be constantly reviewing membership requests? That's what Facebook groups look like. And you have little information to judge the requests by, since the profiles can be fake, especially today. And when complete strangers can join the group, the dynamics change.
by DrBazza | 2025-04-24 15:47:54+00:00
It's a reciprocal agreement.

If my employer is decent and goes the extra mile, I'd be encouraged to do the same. If they're shitty, then they get what's in signed the contract, and that's it.

But... don't fall for the "we're family" nonsense. You're not. You're a disposable asset in a column on a spreadsheet somewhere.

"No-one's final words are ever: 'I wish I'd worked more'"
by partiallypro | 2025-04-24 15:48:00+00:00
This is kind of bad, because it makes it very hard to reach people for social events. I run a fan group for a European soccer team and it's very hard to do outreach because no one is really checking social media for that type of thing. Even meet-ups in general are difficult. There is of course meetup.com but it's niche and expensive.
by misswaterfairy | 2025-04-24 15:48:18+00:00
Really makes you wonder if/when Discord goes IPO, that Meta would buy a controlling stake in it?

Fortunately there are open source alternatives even if they aren't as popular as Discord at the moment, such as Revolt Chat: https://revolt.chat/

I miss the days of self-hosted forums; sadly it seems that algorithms, and the need to satisfy the need for 'instant' connection/information are ruining forums for young newcomers...
by ben_w | 2025-04-24 15:48:38+00:00
> Having to test every assertation sounds like a not particularly useful application, and the more variables there are the more it seems to be about throwing completely random things at the wall and hoping it works

That should be fully automated.

Instead of anchoring on "how do I test what ChatGPT gives me?", think "Pretend I'm Ansys Inc.*, how would I build a platform that combines an LLM to figure out what to make in the first place from a user request, with all our existing suite of simulation systems, to design a product that not only actually meets the requirements of that user request, but also actually proves it will meet those requirements?"

* Real company which does real sim software
by creata | 2025-04-24 15:49:02+00:00
Maybe ROCm is a bit of a mess, but AMD makes amazing graphics cards.

And they open sourced their GPU driver, which is a massive plus in my book.

If Radeon got virtualization support, it would make it the perfect GPU for running video games (or other GPU applications) in virtual machines - you wouldn't need to mess with PCIe passthrough anymore.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-24 15:49:12+00:00
> Some developers left. Most who stayed leveled up.

"Leveled up" is a subjective, loaded term. I assume what you mean here is "adapted to your way of doing things."

> And today, no one wants to go back.

Well, of course, because those who would have wanted to go back already left. This appears to be selection bias more than evidence that your approach is a good one.

To be clear, I'm not trying to imply that your approach isn't a good one. I'm just saying that the devs who remained not wanting to go back isn't evidence that it is.
by codingdave | 2025-04-24 15:49:14+00:00
I live in a rural area, so was surprised to see that there was already a marker where I live. And even more surprised to see that it indicated it was me.

Am I interpreting that correctly that there is no opt-in to having our location mapped when we hit the page? Just loading it publishes our location? Because if so, this is sketchy. Even anonymized, and even if my location is off by 7 miles from where I really am sitting, that is not far off for rural USA. This feels like a bit of a privacy violation.
by dheera | 2025-04-24 15:49:22+00:00
> is universally accessible by design

I disagree. It requires taking time out of business hours, and they don't pay you your salary while you line up multiple times for 30 minutes each. I've sometimes had to line up for 2 hours total (4 times) just to mail one thing. Once to ask "how do i mail this", once to ask for a pen (couldn't cut the line because a Karen wouldn't let me), once because I filled the wrong form, etc. Typical USPS experience
by perihelions | 2025-04-24 15:49:57+00:00
- "Battery makers have been working on sodium-ion batteries for many years, but the United States may have a long-term advantage in the technology. Almost all of the world’s naturally occurring geological deposits of soda ash, the raw material for sodium-ion batteries, are in southwestern Wyoming."

That's a really odd-sounding claim. Is there any basis to it? Sodium is dirt-cheap and it doesn't seem plausible it for to be a major factor in battery economics.

It's even odder that when I look into the statistics, China is actually the world's #1 producer of soda ash[0]. With the caveat that they don't mine it from geology, like the NYT is focused on; they synthesize it (meaning the carbonate salt, Na₂CO₃) from salt brine[1,2] (i.e., from NaCl).

edit to add: According to [3], the prices in China are below $300 a ton, for context.

[0] (.pdf) https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2024/mcs2024-soda-ash.p... ("China produced an estimated 29 million tons of soda ash in 2023 (most of which was synthetic) and was the leading producing country followed by, in descending order, Turkey and the United States")

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_process

[2] https://cen.acs.org/business/specialty-chemicals/synthetic-s... ("Can synthetic soda ash survive?" (2023))

[3] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/07/11/new-soda-ash-factory-... ("New soda ash factory in China to reduce solar glass prices" (2023))
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-04-24 15:51:04+00:00
"you'll still get paid and are still technically employed, but you'll not be working on anything and can't go to the office."

Oh noooooooooo, anything but that!

Joking aside, seriously, part of why this is all so traumatizing in the US is because the second you know you're getting laid off, you're not even thinking about the job or anything anymore. You're trying to guess how much COBRA is going to be and hoping you don't get seriously ill in the next N months.

Seriously, COBRA is often so fucking expensive that being laid off doesn't just mean loss of income, it means literally suddenly getting a NEGATIVE paycheck each month, as you now have to cover the % of the healthcare plan your employer was paying for. If I got laid off right now, i'd immediately start paying about $6000/mo for my current policy under COBRA. Then, if you do need to use it, it's still got a deducible and coinsurance!

So yeah, that's why summary dismissal is so painful in the US.
by alex1138 | 2025-04-24 15:51:06+00:00
Which is a horrible way to do it

Ok, let's say you're my friend on Facebook. I care about you (I haven't explicitly unfollowed you) enough that I want you in my feed

Do I now click Like on every post you make? Is that how I get the "privilege" of seeing more of you?

Some people may dislike Likes because it leads to narcissism, and ok, fine, whatever. But nobody knows what it does and how it influences what you see (Liking certain pages has in the past auto subscribed you to them) and I consider that to be broken behavior
by metanonsense | 2025-04-24 15:51:30+00:00
In our product, we have different strategies depending on the requirements. Sometimes, we just delete. Sometimes, we do soft delete with timestamps. Sometimes, we have a history table with or without versioned entities. Sometimes, we have versions in the table. Sometimes, we have an audit log. Sometimes, we use event sourcing (although everyone in the team hates it ;-)
by int_19h | 2025-04-24 15:51:56+00:00
Well, "A4" doesn't imply anything about the intended use. The format of the name also implies that there is A3, A5 etc, both of which aren't all that uncommon either.

But, yes, for most people it doesn't really matter - you go to the store, you buy paper, you shove it into your printer, and it mostly just works. However, it's also not all that hard to run into situations where things break. E.g. most PDFs originating from US are rendered for Letter size paper, which means that printing them outside of US generally requires setting "fit size" rather than "original" to ensure that nothing gets clipped. Vice versa also happens, but because US is so culturally dominant, Americans rarely run into that particular issue.
by ben_w | 2025-04-24 15:52:41+00:00
> Why can I copy-paste code and it compiles?

I think phrasing it like that is called "begging the question": you've already skipped past all the intelligence you had to apply to figure out which part of the entire internet constituted "code".

And not just any code, but code in correct language. If I copy-paste C64 Basic into the middle of a .swift file (and not as a string), it isn't going to compile.

And not just in the correct language, but a complete block of it, rather than a fragment.

> even Microsoft's own LLM.

"even" suggests you hold them in higher regard than I do.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-24 15:52:42+00:00
>Usually parking minimums are WAY too high in required parking spaces to make sense in most cases.

That hasn't been my experience. Anytime I've wanted to go somewhere halfway popular the lot is usually full or nearly full. On the flipside, the lots are often empty during times when the business is closed, but reducing the size of the lot would exacerbate the issue of not being able to park nearby when the business is open. You aren't going to stop the US from being car centric, so you either have to dictate that businesses maintain a reasonable amount of parking or you have to have the municipality maintain several large parking structures throughout the city. Most cities would rather have the businesses that need the parking pay for the parking and most people would rather park near the businesses that they frequent.
by vel0city | 2025-04-24 15:53:04+00:00
> Nope, because its like everything that could happen to me happening at once

No, because I can still drive home even if I lose my phone.

If you lose your wallet, you're not buying the groceries. If you lose your keys, those groceries aren't getting home anytime soon.

And even then, this is still a massively rare occurrence. How often do you smash your phone on the ground, daily? Weekly? Monthly? I'll gladly trade a slightly less convenient day once a decade+ for having to deal with all this business of having to carry extra junk every day of my life.
by b112 | 2025-04-24 15:53:18+00:00
There is no 'few orders of magnitude', because it's conquered, you're not allowed to settle there, and it's not a new frontier.

Yet Mars is a new frontier, and endless, massive numbers of humans would go to Mars in a heartbeat.

Frankly, settlers travelling to the new world in the 1400s faced a far more dangerous journey and living conditions than a trip to Mars.

We're talking first explorers here, so many died on boats, of starvation the first year, on and on.

Modern tech does not remove said risk, but it tips the playing field.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-24 15:53:36+00:00
I use it exclusively for announcements from certain brands with e.g. seasonal rotations or sales (small shops, especially, are often way more consistent about updating one or more social media accounts, often Insta, than their website, if they even have a website) and it's such a pain in the ass for that reason. I don't trust ads or their "algorithm" to promote quality (I reckon they're more likely to promote rip-offs and fly-by-night operations) so I super don't care about anything else they want to show me, even if it's directly related to the kinds of brands I'm following. I deliberately do not do new-stuff discovery in the app, because they have incentives to screw me.

The only thing I want out of it is to see the posts made by the accounts I'm following, since the last time I checked. That's 100% of the functionality I care about, and the app goes out of its way to not deliver it.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-24 15:54:09+00:00
Rich people's bubbles are thick, and their "outside-the-bubble" communication tends to be write-only. I highly doubt Zucc or Musk spends any time at all on places like HN or Reddit, and their comms on their respective social media platforms tend to be broadcast sending/writing and not reading comments or feedback. They rely on the sycophants in their orbit to give them the summarized, sanitized, positive feedback, and downplay/hide the negative.
by thrtythreeforty | 2025-04-24 15:54:14+00:00
OBS Ford F-150s do this and it's not common knowledge even among enthusiasts. The back 4 pins work the door, the front 6 or so pins work the ignition. A common problem is that the ignition barrel keyswitch dies and you have to replace it, but then you have separate keys for the door and ignition. I took the new ignition key to a locksmith and had him copy the 4 back pins from the factory key, and I was back to a single key!
by rsynnott | 2025-04-24 15:54:25+00:00
Our robot overlords are _terrible_ at anything financial. I'm on a financial forum where, lately, people are _constantly_ posting stuff that they got from The Oracle and asking what they're doing wrong because they don't understand the result, and the answer is inevitably that ChatGPT or whatever fed them plausible-looking rubbish (this is the _real_ AI safety problem; laypeople tend to take the output as infallible, even though it's usually rubbish.)

Though also as a sidenote Harvard's endowment probably wasn't put in a bank account with a flat 3% interest rate for a few hundred years...
by safety1st | 2025-04-24 15:54:27+00:00
For a start, and it might even be enough, you strictly enforce anti-trust laws which are already on the books that prevent sufficiently large firms from acquiring their competitors and doing exclusivity deals. These laws have largely been ignored for decades and I don't know what to call that other than blatant corruption of our government, but it's slowly starting to change, in a bipartisan way.

Microsoft escaped the worst of what the government wanted to do to them for their anti-trust violations. It may not go so well for Google as they hold the distinction of being the only company in US history to have been tried and found guilty in three separate cases of possessing three illegal monopolies all at the same time. Two example measures under discussion in the court at the moment are forbidding any renewal of their browser default deal with Apple, and forcing them to sell off Chrome. We will see soon enough what comes next.
by exhilaration | 2025-04-24 15:54:50+00:00
GPS jammers are less than $30 on Alibaba, truck drivers have been using them for over 10 years [1] to defeat their bosses tracking devices.

Multi-Band Jammers are $1000, burglary rings are using those to block all Wi-Fi, cell, GPS signals - check out this arrest report from last week in Pennsylvania [2]. If I was a high-end car thief, like in Gone in 60 Seconds, that's what I would use.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/12/feds_arrest_rogue_tru...

[2] https://dauphin.crimewatchpa.com/lowerpaxtonpd/3730/cases/or...
by acyou | 2025-04-24 15:56:04+00:00
Zuckerberg and co. always seem so basic. Settlers of Catan and Ticket To Ride? I can't imagine more flavorless, generic games.

Wait, those are the games that I play...

I remember listening to Zuckerberg speak at length about the various epochs of Facebook including the fast pivot to global, it's overall a fascinating and compelling story that the book surely capitalizes on well.
by Whoppertime | 2025-04-24 15:56:07+00:00
Foreign competitors is how you get competition usually. The big 3 auto companies can lobby Congress and discourage competition. When American Cars started installing tailfins (purely cosmetics) instead of competing on fuel performance, maintenance or price, they were opening the door for the Japanese auto industry to eventually take over, with the crisis of the oil shock being the instigating factor for people changing their consumption habits
by simion314 | 2025-04-24 15:56:18+00:00
>If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty quickly.

this is broken, I get stupid posts with same image, about body parts and english words for them, I marked it as not interested at least 3 times, but it appears again and again from other poster . So FB is incapable to now show me the exact same thing over and over again despite me telling them 3 times I am not interested.

Also I doing some math stuff with my son so now I am getting images with math in them, tracking really works
by corobo | 2025-04-24 15:56:32+00:00
I thought it was being insulting for a while but I guess I did pause on it to screenshot and make a witty post but I'm constantly getting Dull Men's Club, and more recently the knockoff versions haha

Facebook, I'm not into these, and I've told you so! It was just that "Suggested for you: Dull Men's Club" was funny the first time!
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-24 15:57:02+00:00
A “bonus” is not worth me consistently putting in more than 40 hours a week. That means I’m sacrificing time with my wife, family and friends, my vacation, my time at the gym, my time learning Spanish since we have decided to establish residency in Costa Rica and live their part time before and after I retire, etc.

I am going to give my employer 100% of my knowledge and close to that amount of energy for 40 hours a week. I love the company I work at now. It’s the best employer I have had (10 in 29 years). But I still treat it very transactional. They can ask me to go the extra mile occasionally. But only because they pay me well and stand by their word of “unlimited vacation as long as you meet expectations”.

The other the compsnies I really enjoyed were startups. But they always go to shit one way or the other - get acquired, get big and go public or go out of business.
by pja | 2025-04-24 15:57:14+00:00
My recent experience has been that the Vulkan support in llama.cpp is pretty good. It may lag behind Cuda / Metal for the bleeding edge models if they need a new operator.

Try it out! Benchmarks here: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/10879

(ollama doesn’t support vulkan for some weird reason. I guess they never pulled the code from llama.cpp)
by pixl97 | 2025-04-24 15:57:29+00:00
The problem with algorithms is they tend to be kept secret...

For example if I were trying to get a person hooked to the application I'd ensure they have a good experience. If there is someone like the parent poster that only opens the app at an infrequent basis it's probably not a good idea to scare them away.

But your FB junkie. It doesn't matter if they only click on their friends feed or not, show them ad after ad after ad because they are coming back anyway.

No evidence here on my part, since FB wouldn't really confess either way, but if I were manipulating people that would be one of the screwdrivers in the toolbox.
by pluc | 2025-04-24 15:57:30+00:00
We aren't being made fun of, we are being threatened with annexation and unprovoked economic warfare by an administration with collective the intellect of a public toilet. The entire world has lost respect for the US and I for one am glad. And before you say what they all say, "we're not all like that", you're all complicit until you run them out of the country.
Ask HN: Micro Tasks for Software Engineers
by truetaurus | 2025-04-24 15:57:30+00:00
So I am currently inbetween jobs and lookinf for micro tasks/work that could keep me going and earn a little money while I search for a new job.

Does anyone have any recommendations where to find micro jobs? So maybe like things that could take a day or two?

For reference I am a fullstack engineer with a lot of experience in frontend especially using React
by tialaramex | 2025-04-24 15:57:48+00:00
You shouldn't use degrees for Kelvin, it's an absolute unit, the degrees are needed for the relative units like Celsius.

Anyway, the French system isn't what people mean by "metric" in this context, they mean the SI system of units, and so in practice it's not so much that it wouldn't matter which you choose as that you don't have any option except SI.

If you wanted an independent system of units you'd need to do a lot of expensive metrication, and in practice Americans are too cheap for that, so the US "customary" units are just aliases for so-and-so-much amount of some SI unit, they aren't actually independent at all.

The reason people focus on metric is that for everyday people that's the part which jumps out as more intuitive. All these nice powers of 10, very tidy.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-04-24 15:57:50+00:00
Facebook has devolved to the realm of the unreal now.

I signed-in a few weeks back and the whole thing was just bizarre clickbait, ads, and bizarre clickbait generated image spam.

I really don't see how there's a future for this.

Is this (the abandonment and subsequent mass-sloppification) an American thing?

Is there a user base in other countries? It seems like a relic of a previous era.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-24 15:58:13+00:00
Yeah, I agree. But of what use is that money, if not to ensure that you can shape the consequences according to your vision? If you have to make things worse to make money, and you need money to make things better, then a sane person would course-correct.

Beyond a certain point, supposing that your investments continue to yield monetary returns at the cost of making others tolerate worse outcomes, it's just an indicator that you're a junkie.