MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soraminazuki | 2025-04-05 23:43:24+00:00
If labeling claims as "tired" makes it false, not a single fact in the world can be considered as backed by evidence. I'm not flipping anything around either, because again, it's squarely on you to provide proof for your claims and not those who question it. You're essentially making the claim that transformers can reverse a non-reversible function. That's like saying you can reverse a hash although multiple inputs can result in the same hash. That's not even "unbacked claims" territory, it defies logic.

I'm still not convinced LLMs are mere abstractions in the same way programming language implementations are. Even though programmers might give up some control of the implementation details when writing code, language implementors still decides all those details. With LLMs, no one does. That's not an abstraction, that's chaos.
by mncharity | 2025-04-05 23:43:37+00:00
> silica

For anyone else curious, it's from the hydrazine tank's rubber diaphragm. Tubes inside the thrusters, which direct fuel to the catalyst beds, had openings taken from 250 um diameter down to 35 um.[1]

The 28" spherical tank[2] has a rubber hemisphere to separate hydrazine from pressurant (He? N?). The diaphragm is EDPM that's teflon and silica filled.[3] The silica particles are for (tensile?) strengthening. It has a leaching issue (discussed in [2] page17).

PSI was a small SoCal company. Derivative tank used for Shuttle APU. Same material used since 1975.

[1] a story https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/voyager-1-team-accomplishes-tr... [2] nice paper https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=review+and+history+of+p... [3] meh, color pic Low cost derivative tanks... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=AIAA+99-2831
by Scene_Cast2 | 2025-04-05 23:44:22+00:00
I'd love to hear how people write tests for ML. When I'm doing a greenfield project with a new model, a lot of issues are very statistical, e.g. incorrect downsampling - the model will run and train, just less optimally than normal.

I can't put optimality bounds because I don't know how well the model _should_ train, and when it doesn't train, that's not necessarily because of an incorrect implementation. And, actually training a model for a test is quite resource and time heavy.
by cassianoleal | 2025-04-05 23:44:34+00:00
> Which makes it actually really hard to talk about political propaganda

In Portuguese, I never found it difficult - mostly because, as the OP suggests, there is no material difference. If you want to talk about political propaganda, either say "propaganda" and let the other person deduct from context that you mean political propaganda, or explicitly say "political propaganda" (propaganda política).

In some ways, it might even be better as it will require you to actually characterise whether you mean political in the party-electoral sense, or in the ideological sense, etc.

The first time I heard the word "propaganda" in the English language, I assumed it was a less used synonymous for "advertisement". Despite having lived in an English-speaking country for over a decade, I still see them both as one and the same.

I sometimes feel like the separation is mostly used as a means to purport corporate and commercial advertising as legitimate, good and desirable (or at least acceptable) whilst keeping the idea of political and ideological advertisement as evil.

Both are bad. Both are means to manipulate an individual's opinion in favour of the advertiser. Commercially it is so I feel compelled to trade a portion of my life and health (in the form of money that I earned through work) to them in for a good or a service that I may otherwise not have thought worth the exchange.

Politically it's the same, only this time instead of my money they want my vote or my support for a certain policy that might even be against my personal or collective interests.
by spwa4 | 2025-04-05 23:44:48+00:00
I've been to a lot of places and this is actually how the majority of the world looks. China looks like this. The Philippines looks like this. Turkey looks like this (though the streets are far cleaner than average for 3rd world or even 2nd world). South Africa looks like this. Congo, if you adjust your opinion of what richess is, and what poverty is, down, looks like this.

You can find far, far more luxurious hotels in South Africa or the Philippines than in Switzerland or England.

Some days I think the difference between 1st world and 3rd world is not so much wealth, but the division of wealth.
by pstuart | 2025-04-05 23:44:55+00:00
Bike-shedding is your counter argument?

Here's an interview with Thiel and Vance's guru on "democracy": https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-in... -- the word democracy is used there as it is by most who use it in the context of the US (including myself).

And the person they picked for this is a charismatic narcissist who clearly only cares about himself? The examples of previous "dictators" all clearly believed that what they were doing was for the benefit of the country as a whole.

Those opposed to Trump holding office don't do so because he's in the "wrong party", they oppose him because he is eminently unsuitable for the job. Note that even hard core conservative members of his party advocated for voting for his opponent. That's a first, and there's a reason why.

Note as well that he's making noise about ignoring a constitutional amendment that would prohibit him from the office after this term.
by ivanmontillam | 2025-04-05 23:45:30+00:00
> if you “win” a negotiation through power then you will likely find later you lost when you get paid back for winning through strength.

Could you please provide an example of said scenario?

> if either party feels that someone won and someone lost, then that will be a bad start to the relationship. Negotiating salary is about finding a salary that both employer and employee feel happy at.

Yes, I second this. It once happened to me that I "won" by getting an over-budgeted salary, but had to quit 3 days later because one of the bosses leaked in a meeting that they intended to overwork me since they felt hustled by me during the salary negotiation.

Said and done, they assigned me more work than initially scoped, as to adjust the "bang for the buck" balance (and had to quit shortly after that).
by simonw | 2025-04-05 23:45:32+00:00
If the way you write automated tests is slowing you down rather than speeding you up, you need to rethink the way you are writing tests.

In my opinion tests are the ultimate productivity hack for building software. In exchange for a relatively small up-front cost (if you know what you are doing) they let you move so much faster! You can make changes with confidence that each change won't break your existing functionality, without having to spend hours on manual testing for every change you want to ship.

This goes for smaller personal projects too. I gave a talk about this a few years ago, originally titled "Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests" but then renamed (after I'd pitched the talk but before I presented it) to "Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder". Video, slides and notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/
by mplanchard | 2025-04-05 23:45:33+00:00
I love this. We are a rust shop and we use clickhouse a fair bit. We’ve been quite impressed with its speed and flexibility. I’m glad to see this kind of direct, real-world feedback around both the benefits and difficulties of mixing rust and C++, which we have also had to do a bit of (albeit in the opposite direction: a smattering of C++ in a sea of rust).

I’m not sure if the poster here is the post author, but it would be great if the author would consider filling out this survey that was recently released asking for feedback on the future of rust’s vision: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/04/04/vision-doc-survey.html

I’d love to see rust become the de facto standard for cross-language portable code by virtue of its ease of use, but as this and our experience highlights, there’s some way to go yet!
by vessenes | 2025-04-05 23:45:48+00:00
cool. I would so happily pay you guys for long context API that aider could point at -- the speed is just game changing. I know your arch is different, so I understand it's an engineering lift. But, I bet you'd find some pareto optimal point in the curve where you could charge a lott more for the speed you guys can do if it's long enough for coding.
by neilv | 2025-04-05 23:45:49+00:00
Sorry, that was a confusing choice of term by me, when the article already used the term "rule". I mean the courtship dynamics.

When it's a buyer's market -- or the buyers think it is -- some of the candidate tactics are going to play differently.

Even the old advice that, once the company decides they want you, that changes the dynamics, and now opens up negotiation. The dynamics maybe don't change as much as they used to. If candidate A doesn't take the offer, B, C, D, etc., are lined up and waiting, and probably not going anywhere.

I suspect that a lot of techbros who only know/remember the sellers market of a few years ago are going to be hit by the pendulum swing, when a lot of employers will be similarly cocky and fickle.
by m463 | 2025-04-05 23:45:52+00:00
I remember asking folks for tests for their stuff, and they didn't want to do it because it would take too much time and effort. And I said "It doesn't have to be perfect, just do a simple sanity check".

It's possible people on the opposite ends of the perfectionism scale might view tests differently.

The perfectionists want 100% test coverage which takes a serious commitment of time and effort, while the fast-and-loose folks don't want to bother with tests at all.

I wonder if the best way to test is to have the fast-and-loose people make fast-and-loose tests, and then let the perfectionists iterate on the tests as time goes on.
by georgeck | 2025-04-05 23:46:41+00:00
I tried summarizing the thread so far (339 comments) with a custom system prompt [0] and a user-prompt that captures the structure (hierarchy and upvotes) of the thread [1].

This is the output that we got (based on the HN-Companion project) [2]:

LLama 4 Scout - https://gist.github.com/annjose/9303af60a38acd5454732e915e33...

Llama 4 Maverick - https://gist.github.com/annjose/4d8425ea3410adab2de4fe9a5785...

Claude 3.7 - https://gist.github.com/annjose/5f838f5c8d105fbbd815c5359f20...

The summary from Scout and Maverick both look good (comparable to Claude), and with this structure, Scout seems to follow the prompt slightly better.

In this case, we used the models 'meta-llama/llama-4-maverick' and 'meta-llama/llama-4-scout' from OpenRouter.

--

[0] - https://gist.github.com/annjose/5145ad3b7e2e400162f4fe784a14...

[1] - https://gist.github.com/annjose/d30386aa5ce81c628a88bd86111a...

[2] - https://github.com/levelup-apps/hn-enhancer

edited: To add OpenRouter model details.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-04-05 23:47:45+00:00
Context matters.

If you are a startup without customers/users then writing tests is a bad idea - you need to focus everything on getting working code and users. You may be throwing your code away because you still don't even know what your users really want.

On the other hand if you are writing a banking system then sure, testing is not negotiable.

"Should we be writing tests?" cannot be answered without also knowing what the software is, what the company does and the context in which the software is being written.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-05 23:48:25+00:00
Would you happen to know if by "private investment" they suggest battery developers paying to fix this part of grid operator infra? Because I'd think that they might also be able to go to the carbon markets to recoup this cost as well potentially (considering the CO2 emissions projected offset by more aggressively managing low carbon generation and resulting energy that would've otherwise been curtailed over a window of time, versus carbon emissions business as usual).
by devmunchies | 2025-04-05 23:48:32+00:00
Related to the "blissful" feeling, an under emphasized criteria when choosing current tasks for engineers from a backlog of tasks is which feature are they more excited to work on right now.

The motiviation and tinkering can be similar to a side project, and results in higher quality work IMO. Obviously there are urgent tasks, but it's an ignored vector in the "weighting system" for choosing work for engineers.

If you wait to assign the task in the next sprint, the excitement for that particular task might be gone.
by davely | 2025-04-05 23:48:46+00:00
> Companies generally respect candidates who negotiate

Is this really the case? If a company is giving you an offer, presumably they want to hire you. At that point, does the recruiter, your hiring manager, your skip level, the CTO, the CEO even care at that point? Does this respect ever come into play in future performance reviews? I personally don’t think so, but I’ve only ever worked for larger companies.

I’ve always thought you should negotiate because you’re potentially leaving money on the table, since companies will often try to lowball your offer.
by fred_is_fred | 2025-04-05 23:48:56+00:00
I like the idea of the shared list, right now it’s paper and SMS and maybe Apple Notes at my house. One question- It’s not clear to me whether the idea is that you were supposed to go to 3 different stores to find the lowest prices?

Also “me had a recurring problem” sounds wrong presumably. That’s how you know it’s not “me and my wife”.
by mplanchard | 2025-04-05 23:49:37+00:00
Oh one more note, regarding hermetic builds: I have tried to package clickhouse in nix for our dev environment and CI, but its build is pretty complicated, so I resorted to just pulling the precompiled binaries.

Nix, via the standard rust integration or via something like crane, is actually quite nice for building rust/C++ combo projects, so it’d be awesome if the team might consider this as a means of achieving reproducibility. I’d imagine they’d have an easier time of it than I did, given they are more familiar with their own build process.
by epidemian | 2025-04-05 23:49:43+00:00
Not really, or at least i don't see how. Advertising can at most tell me which companies are spending a significant portion of their budget in ads instead of in making a good product or service.

To put it another way: where i live, ads for cheese or meat are non existent (while ads for fast food or cigarettes are very common), and yet i know that those products are available on supermarkets or other food stores. And i can find cheeses and meats of many brands, qualities and prices on those stores.

I don't see how having ads for those things would be an improvement. In fact, i suspect that ads would be used to convince people to buy products of less quality, or downright toxic, as seen on the rampant fast food and cigarette ads.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-05 23:51:38+00:00
I don't think it's exclusive to advertising. Humans in general desire stability (myself being no exception), and anything that disrupts a system they've become accustomed to can very quickly become perceived as a threat.

My theory is that the people who fight against changing the status quo are just fundamentally opposed to change itself, not necessarily supporting the system as it currently stands. They know the ins and outs of the current system, and changing it means they have to dump knowledge and re-learn things - which they're fiercely opposed to doing. The enemy you know, over the enemy you don't, in a manner of speaking.

Those of us who can visualize futures starkly different than a continuance of the present day are a threat to those people who demand indefinite complacency and an unchanging world. Unfortunately for them, the universe is chaos and change is inevitable - so finding your own stability amidst the chaos is a skill more people need, such that necessary change might be embraced.
by fsckboy | 2025-04-05 23:52:23+00:00
>>me: when you import, you send your currency overseas to pay for the goods.

>you: As a general rule, this is false. Mexican importers do not pay for U.S. goods in pesos

initial conditions: americans have only dollars. mexicans have only pesos.

american sellers demand to be paid in dollars. any mexican who wants to buy american goods must convert their pesos to dollars. where do they get dollars? see initial conditions, they must get them from americans by sending their pesos overseas.

it's that simple.

now, when you run these economies with several million people importing and exporting in both directions, sure, there would be dollars in mexico and pesos in america. but why would you complicate a simple analysis with all of those other transactions when the simple case influences the outcome in the right direction and makes it easy to see what's happening?
by II2II | 2025-04-05 23:52:36+00:00
I suspect the size hung around for a while for a couple of reasons.

The physical size (on screen) didn't vary by much. If I recall correctly, 72 to 120 dpi dominated until the introduction of Retina/HiDPI displays, and 120 dpi was pushing the limit since scaling wasn't really a thing. (When it was a thing, it tended to be handled by applications where it was important, such as desktop publishing/graphics design applications, and it only extended to the content area.)

Add that to the purpose of these buttons: they were intended to be unobtrusive messages about which browsers were supported, or which browser the site owner prefered. Going bigger would not have much of a point. (That said, they were as obtrusive as heck to those of us using unsupported browsers!)
by moralestapia | 2025-04-05 23:52:46+00:00
I don't drive a car.

But on the spirit of a good conversation (see @dang, I'm behaving :)) to your point of whether I have ever broke the law or not ... most likely yes, but not consciously.

Many times I have refrained from doing things for the sole reason that it would be unlawful, even though I disagree with it.

There's a big difference between that and choosing to consciously break the law for a menial pleasure.

Edit: So weird to be on the hot pan for defending the rule of law, lmao. What a terrible status quo.
by MarkMarine | 2025-04-05 23:53:39+00:00
If you’re good at running your interview process you will have 3-4 at a time. That’s usually where I’m at, I’m interviewing with 12 and get it necked down to 3 or 4 getting to the offer point. I try to stretch out the fast movers and speed up the slow ones but just be honest with recruiters. You’re in the pipeline with other companies and you’re not ready to respond yet.

Edit: I saw other comments. I am both “old” and I have a mechanical engineering degree (not CS) and I do just fine interviewing with startups. I worked really hard at the practice of interviewing, this has more rewards and lower risk than basically any other skills you can learn so invest it.
by esperent | 2025-04-05 23:53:56+00:00
You're trying to make this sound very complicated but it's not. In this world without paid advertising, ABC can advertise their own shows. They cannot advertise things for other companies, whether they own them or not.

A network of TV stations could cross-promote across all stations. Yes, that would be unfair, but no more unfair than the current situation where whoever has more money can have their ads seen everywhere. Fairness between companies isn't the goal, it's less manipulation and noise for the rest of us.

There's an example of a TV station that already has to follow these rules: the BBC.
by aozgaa | 2025-04-05 23:56:00+00:00
This is addressed in the article:

> Turns out, it doesn’t matter that much where your first offer is from, or even how much they’re offering you. Just having an offer in hand will get the engine running.

> If you’re already in the pipeline with other companies (which you should be if you’re doing it right), you should proactively reach out and let them know that you’ve just received an offer. Try to build a sense of urgency. Regardless of whether you know the expiration date, all offers expire at some point, so take advantage of that.

Anecdotally, I have seen this work many times to great effect.
by harrisoned | 2025-04-05 23:56:05+00:00
It is. A friend of mine has this. It took her so much time to actually seek help, despite the excruciating pain, and she got part of her digestive system removed because it spread too much.

Nowadays, after 2 years of the surgery, she manages it with a restrict and healthy diet, and the pill. It takes a big toll on the well being even after the pain is gone, and she is almost always tired because of it, the body is constantly fighting the inflammation.
by enriquto | 2025-04-05 23:56:50+00:00
> The second and third books leave something to be desired

Also got this feeling on the first read... but now I remember them very fondly! I like to think that this trilogy happens in the same universe as Dune, being a prequel to the events of Dune. The homage to the Dune universe by the author is obvious (the names of the books, the notion of "other memories", etc). But many notions fit together, with some effort in your imagination. The second book of the trilogy provides a mechanism to explain the other memories in the form of nodal biology. The octopi ftl technique is reminiscent of the guild navigators. The third book hints subtly at a reason why the butlerian jihad could have happened.
by andrewstuart | 2025-04-05 23:57:59+00:00
“Just to clarify, I said in an email that I’m looking for $150k to $160k depending on the role. Now that we’ve talked about the job I feel like the $160k is the right amount given my skills and experience.”

That’s how to handle it, with the caveat that you should not be using that as a ploy to get the higher rate, never having had the willingness to take the lower rate. If you give a range, you should expect to be offered at the lower end and you should be happy to accept that offer. If you’re not happy with the lower end then you put forward the wrong numbers.

And if they say no, shrug and move on.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-05 23:58:55+00:00
While I agree testing in general is a must, I'm still not sold on unit testing as a general tool.

For stuff like core libraries or say compilers, sure, unit tests are great. But for the levels above I'm leaning towards integration tests first, and then possibly add unit tests if needed.

After all, you can't not have integration tests. No matter how perfect your Lego bricks are, you can still assemble them together the wrong way around.
by gerdesj | 2025-04-05 23:59:24+00:00
The UK, outside of cities is largely devoid of bill boards a la the US. Milan is not "Europe" either!

I have driven/travelled across a lot, nearly all, European countries and the other one - the UK.

You do not get those huge screens on stilts anywhere that I have seen in Europe, that seem to be common across the US.

To be fair, I've only driven across about 10 US states. However, I do have Holywood's and other's output to act as a proxy and it seems that US companies do love to shout it from the hill tops at vast expense and fuck up the scenery with those bill board thingies.

Try driving around La Toscana and say Florida. I've done both, multiple times and I'm a proper outsider. I love both regions quite passionately but for very different reasons. FL has way more issues in my opinion but we are discussing bill boards so let's stay on task.

Billboards require power as well as the obvious physical attributes. They are an absolute eyesore and in my opinion should be abolished. Turn them into wind turbines and do some good - the basics are in place.

However. I know FL quite well. It has a lovely climate (unless it is trying to kill you). Florida man almost certainly invented air conditioning and FL man being FL man took it to the max when confronted with a rather lovely climate.

FL man is a thing and it turns out that CA Pres. can be weirder than anything seen before.

US - remember your mates, we remember you as is and don't hold you accountable for going a bit odder than usual for a while.