MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EarthLaunch | 2025-04-12 08:45:09+00:00
I appreciate the answers. For others reading, I also just ran across another thread where you posted relevant info [0]. In the case of my game, I'm going to consider SSE, since most of the communication is server to client. That said, I already have reconnects etc implemented.

In my research I recall some potential tradeoffs with SSE [1], but even there I concluded they were minor enough to consider SSE vs WS a wash[2] even for my uses. Looking back at my bookmarks, I see that you were present in the threads I was reading, how cool. A couple WS advantages I am now recalling:

SSE is one-way, so for situations with lots of client-sent data, a second connection will have to be opened (with overhead). I think this came up for me since if a player is sending many events per second, you end up needing WS. I guess you're saying to use UDP, which makes sense, but has its own downsides (firewalls, WebRTC, WebTransport not ready).

Compression in SSE would be negotiated during the initial connection, I have to assume, so it wouldn't be possible to switch modes or mix in pre-compressed binary data without reconnecting or base64-ing binary. (My game sends a mix of custom binary data, JSON, and gzipped data which the browser can decompress natively.)

Edit: Another thing I'm remembering now is order of events. Because WS is a single connection and data stream, it avoids network related race conditions; data is sent and received in the programmatically defined sequence.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657717

1: https://rxdb.info/articles/websockets-sse-polling-webrtc-web...

2: https://www.timeplus.com/post/websocket-vs-sse
by Dementor430 | 2025-04-12 08:45:49+00:00
Didn't really have good managers so far. Reading this makes me question my choices. Maybe it's time to move on. On the other hand, this is a cluster of greatness and for every 15 good comments there's a thousand bad stories.

So let me ask this instead: How would you go about finding a job with a good manager? And whats the reason behind it?
by tmcb | 2025-04-12 08:46:24+00:00
> I am directly threatened by their program. […] Could the left imagine being a little more democratic and making a few more concessions towards… omg, white males?

I am not from the US, I am originally from Latin America. I am considered a “white male” there. I am now living in Europe as I am a dual citizen. This kind of position is interesting to me. What is so bad about being a white male in the USA at the moment?

I’d like to elaborate further, but I want to engage in an honest conversation so I would like to hear your opinion.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-12 08:46:36+00:00
I think this article confuses an absence of "heated arguments" with a lack of constructive, critical discussions. I've found that in mature teams with high trust, people don't have heated arguments precisely because they are not afraid that their voices will be ignored. There is no need to become heated because you trust that the other people on the team will hear you out and consider your viewpoint.

>code that nobody questions usually crashes in production

I don't understand what that means.
by yard2010 | 2025-04-12 08:46:37+00:00
I'm using usenet and a bunch of FOSS (*arr) and I'm never going back. This way I OWN my library, there is no chance that in November I will lose the ability to rewatch the office due to some uninteresting bullshit.

Whenever I physically can I buy DVDs or digital downloads.

I guess I just didn't understand the Netflix model - why would I want to rent something that I can just buy and have for life? Especially with the enshitification these days - it means I have to pay a massive amount of money (over 5 years say), for a shitty experience, ending up having nothing when I cancel the subscription? That's just a recurring bad deal, in my opinion.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-12 08:47:04+00:00
> this Vacheron-Constantin will likely be around 200 years from now, it will still be a testimony of the refinement and engineering

Usual playbook of the luxury watch market since marketing somehow made it relevant in the mid to end of the 20th century. Thank Haye for not being able to stand near a Swiss mechanical watch without someone uttering the world "timeless". This is the second best achievement of marketing after making people believing that diamonds are valuable.

These watches use small mechanical pieces (which are still very far away from the state of the art - a watch is an engineering achievement by the standard of 200 years ago). They require very regular maintenance to keep working and this maintenance is very expensive. They are not in anyway "timeless".

This is an expensive piece of jewellery, subject to everything related to expensive pieces of jewellery including fashion. It’s basically a Veblen good signalling wealth.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-04-12 08:48:30+00:00
Obviously it doesn’t initially ask for a range if it starts from the beginning of the video, but it starts playing video immediately without requiring the whole file to download, when you seek it cancels the current request and then does a range request. At no point does it “have” to cache the entire file.

I suppose if you watch it from start to finish without seeking it might cache the entire file, but it may alternatively keep a limited amount cached of the video and if you go back to an earlier time it may need to re-request that part.

Your confidence seems very high on something which more than one person has corrected you on now, perhaps you need to reassess the current state of video serving, keeping in mind it does require HTTP servers to allow range requests.
by flexie | 2025-04-12 08:49:24+00:00
Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI to throw them decisively off the AI throne, just like another company would need a far better search engine than Google to throw them off the search throne. ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio?

Brands matter, and when regular people think AI, they think of OpenAI before they think Google, even if Google has more AI talents and scores better on tests.

And isn't it good? Who wants a world where the same handful of companies dominate all tech?
by paradite | 2025-04-12 08:50:13+00:00
The author mentioned AlphaGo and Alpha Zero without mentioning OpenAI gym and OpenAI Five.

Those products show OpenAI was innovating and leading in RL at that stage around 2017 to 2019.

https://github.com/openai/gym

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-12 08:51:10+00:00
> it's their project and they're entitled to set whatever rules they want

This is not the point.

Projects are free to ban vim users if they want and I’m free to say it’s utterly baffling and should be none of their business.

Rules don’t magically become acceptable because the people who put them in place were allowed to do so.

It reminds me of the opposition to static analysis I used to see sometimes a decade ago because people would be too dumb to sort out the real cases from the false positive. I’m always impressed by how change averse the field is.

> if you read the article this is is their primary concern

That’s my whole point.

They are basically implying that I’m too stupid to use some tools to produce quality code and they being the clever ones they are should shield us poor fools from ourselves.

That’s the insulting part. At least the copyright infringement angle makes sense.
by procaryote | 2025-04-12 08:52:42+00:00
Erlang at least used to come with an in-memory database called Mnesia, that in the places I've encountered it depended on replicating all the state to every server, which usually caused some scaling issues.

There's nothing outright stopping you from doing proper design and building separate erlang services that exchange state with regular protocols, but there does seem to be a temptation to just put all erlang in one big monolith and then run into very hard memory and scaling issues when usage and data grows.

One high profile erlang user in the payment industry was mainly constrained by how big a server they could buy, as all their code ran on a single server with a hot standby. They have since moved to java, and rethought how they managed shared state

Facebook managed to get ejabberd, the xmpp server written in erlang, to back their first Messenger, but it involved sharding to give each ejabberd-instance a small enough data set to cope, and a clever way to replicate presence data outside of erlang (storing it in compact memory blocks on each ejabberd server, and shipping them wholesale to a presence service at a regular cadence).

Pretty soon they tore ejabberd out, metaphorically burned it in a field and salted the earth... but how much of that was the fault of erlang itself, and how much it was the issue of having one corner with erlang in a largely C++ world isn't known to me.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-12 08:52:42+00:00
No, that's not at all obvious because building products for any given market is a radically different competency than research, and the kind of basic, fundamental research that tends to win Nobels is actually a competency a step further removed from product than normal corporate R&D; outside of Google-scale orgs, it's mostly (whether or not of Nobel quality) done at universities with both product-oriented research and actual productization done in industry, often based largely on published academic results, but generally with no strong direct connection between the people doing the basic research and the people winning the competition for successful commercial products.
by guenthert | 2025-04-12 08:52:50+00:00
Well, how many "it works on my machine" does it take to make it a general statement? It works on all of my machines, from dirt-cheap lenovo EDU series ThinkPad to portable workstation Dell M6800 and Pixel Chromebook in between.

It generally doesn't work for people buying computers from vendors who use hardware were the manufacturer doesn't disclose the documentation. Just don't give money to those who seek to prevent free software.
by tuna74 | 2025-04-12 08:52:52+00:00
"So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a catalog of reliably-profitable franchises. Especially when many of those franchises were born decades before Netflix even existed."

They could try. The budget for the first seasons of Friends was the same as any other sitcom of that era.

Sitcoms would be perfect for streaming companies but non of them seem to get that for some reason.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-04-12 08:53:43+00:00
Or they do use their products and they don't like them or the company's policies. Why is this so hard for you to believe? Given a lack of hard evidence either way other than our own anecdotes, you're essentially falling into conspiracy theorizing, accusing people of being liars based on precisely fuck-all. Even going so far as to suggest it's organized, a "sport".

It's delusional.
by illiac786 | 2025-04-12 08:53:47+00:00
That does not scale. We cannot ask every single citizen about every single decision. You want to decide on each funding. The next will want to decide on every tax law change. Government decides, and if majority of population thinks they’re doing a shit job and someone else can do a less shot job they get replaced after a couple of years. Otherwise it’s micromanagement hell.
by tirant | 2025-04-12 08:57:38+00:00
That is actually incorrect. What you call public funding has been before produced by private individuals or private companies. The State barely generates any money itself. And when it does in large amounts by printing new money it’s actually analog to extorting money to everyone else in the society by impoverishing them via inflation.

There is a common believe that humans would never be generous, altruistic without a State forcing them. And that’s actually quite the opposite. Humankind would have never made it if that was the case. You can observe it clearly still in lots of societies populating earth, specially the poorest ones without public services.

It’s actually the unconditional access to public services that has incentivized the individuality of our society nowadays. If I’m already supported by the State why should I make any effort towards my society? In the past without public services, interaction with your local community was a must.

But it’s also a problem as a donor or supporter: how can I support or donate to any cause if the State is already taxing 50% of my wealth and I have barely any money to buy a house?
by ReptileMan | 2025-04-12 08:59:50+00:00
Just a fun I had with Gemini 2.5 pro. I asked him to create a code for a toolchain that uses some ai at a point and it stubbornly used OpenAI api and refused to generate code using Gemini apis instead. Also it said it is model trained by google. Didn't knew its name and when asked to generate code for "youself" defaulted to openai.

Probably sending people to spend money at your competition is not the surefire way to market dominance.
by globular-toast | 2025-04-12 09:00:23+00:00
It is surprising that it's such a small number, but upon reflection maybe not so surprising. Stock markets were invented to allow massively capital intensive businesses like railways to get off the ground. You can't grow a railway organically by reinvesting profit like a regular business; it needs to be fully built before it can bring in a penny. Naturally there can only be so many of these businesses. In the case of railways they usually become natural monopolies. So being publicly owned was a really great thing.

But most businesses don't need such large capital injections anyway. They can grow organically, and there's very little reason to sell a profitable company. Although it does happen, of course, Google being a prime example, having gone public when already profitable.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-12 09:00:54+00:00
I agree with one big exception, the refocus on COM as the main Windows API delivery mechanism.

It is great as idea, pity that Microsoft keeps failing to deliver in developer tooling that actually makes COM fun to use, instead of something we have to endure.

From OLE 1.0 pages long infrastructure in Windows 16 bit, via ActiveX, OCX, MFC, ATL, WTL, .NET (RCW/CCW), WinRT with. NET Native and C++/CX, C++/WinRT, WIL, nano-COM, .NET 5+ COM,....

Not only do they keep rebooting how to approach COM development, in terms of Visual Studio tooling, one is worse than the other, not at the same feature parity, only to be dropped after the team's KPI change focus.

When they made the Hilo demo for Windows Vista and later Windows 7 developers with such great focus on being back on COM, after how Longhorn went down, a better tooling would be expected.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/
by rapnie | 2025-04-12 09:00:56+00:00
The speed with which things are ending are most important I think. For decades there has been a slow decline in US power. Today we have the BRICS trade block representing more than half of the world's population. And countries hold a basket of reserve currencies, where the dollar is still a large percentage, but not nearly as large as it used to be. If all these pillars of American empire are carelessly self-destructed, crashing the world order, it will be hugely disruptive. It forces other powers to act and move to occupy the power vacuum, while lacking the economic weapons may force US'es hand to engage with military force, to reestablish itself.
by Riskofrain | 2025-04-12 09:01:10+00:00
I think that Lottie is much more flexible than Rive, at least as a format.. But I believe that neither Rive nor Lottie have really proven to be useful for games in cases of extensive use-I would love to see something like that. Even Rive's performance did not seem to live up to what they promise. Not in Flutter.
by Almondsetat | 2025-04-12 09:01:13+00:00
Capitalism actually thrives where there is only 1 regulation: total transparency. After all, if we go by the classic definition of free market competition we have customers who have perfect knowledge of every product and the products are very similar and etc. etc.

Who cares if someone at the WH does insider trading? In a transparent system people would be able to trace back every transaction and realize something is brewing and they could act accordingly.
by jononor | 2025-04-12 09:01:48+00:00
I agree with you. There is also a move toward "agents", where the AI can make decisions and take actions for you. It is very early days for that, but it looks ike it might come sooner than I had though. That opens up even more potential for influence on financial decisions (which is what adtech wants) - it could choose which things to buy for a given "need".
by masklinn | 2025-04-12 09:02:07+00:00
> Both systems pushed the clock rate much higher than PCs at the time.

Intel reached 3.2GHz on a production part in June 2003, with the P4 HT 3.2 SL792. At the time the 360 and PS3 were released, Intel's highest clocked part was the P4 EE SL7Z4 at 3.73.
by pabs3 | 2025-04-12 09:02:35+00:00
There was a multi-machine single-Linux-kernel-instance distro many years ago called Kerrighed. The company behind it died unfortunately so it hasn't kept up with Linux kernel patch rebasing. It offered a "view of a unique SMP machine on top of a cluster of standard PCs".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerrighed https://sourceforge.net/projects/kerrighed/
by earnestinger | 2025-04-12 09:04:03+00:00
Technically, they are the same. As in: people with power want to control the narrative.

This was so, is so and will always be so, everywhere.

But but but… details matter. A lot.

The west has traditions how and when to apply power, which is distinctly different from Russia.

I hand-pick two illustrations of Russia:

1. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/27/moscow-police-accu...

> Officers “beat up Kamardin very badly and stuck a dumbbell in his anus,” according to Novaya Gazeta Europe.

2. Bald man claim to power was accompanies with mysterious explosions of apartment buildings after which Chechens were declared enemies and war started.

Some interesting bits from wikipedia:

> Three Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents who had planted the devices at Ryazan were arrested by the local police.[6] The next day, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev announced that the incident in Ryazan had been an anti-terror drill and the device found there contained only sugar, and freed the FSB agents involved.[7]

And

> 13 September 1999: Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov makes an announcement about the bombing of an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk that only takes place three days later

> 16 September 1999: Bombing in Volgodonsk, 17 are killed, 69 injured

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombi...
by jsemrau | 2025-04-12 09:04:46+00:00
Thank you for your insightful reply. I am also registered as an Expert to the EC. I fully agree with you that completing all requirements in a 40-pager is hard. Which I think is exactly my point. It's competitive (that's good) and time-consuming. But I also believe grant applications are a muscle a startup should have when they want to do business with the government. In SpacecTech, Defense, and AI (my areas) this is largely unavoidable.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-04-12 09:04:48+00:00
Yes, but I also disagree to some degree because it's a similar argument to "I can watch philosophy TikToks and learn".

Certainly, philosophy TikToks are better than "boyfriend caught cheating prank" TikToks, but to some degree the medium is the message. And the question is whether we want the message of "everything is a short video, everything has a simple explanation and you can always swipe away and something else will be provided for you"
by tirant | 2025-04-12 09:04:59+00:00
Well, you would be surprised how many issues in financial education would 100 random people off the street have.

But the contract plan is not aimed at them, but at literate computer users most of them working as freelancers (so with at least some financial knowledge).

The same way a Pilot Operating Handbook cannot be judged by the understanding of random 100 people off the street.
by nabla9 | 2025-04-12 09:05:41+00:00
The reality is more nuanced.

Take China for example. People do criticize the government online all the time. It's just that criticism magically disappears before it reaches critical mass. Generally China does not throw people (Han Chinese, minorities are different) into gulag for posting against the government. They are just constantly censoring and shaping the discussion. Only after they can't contain something they step up. Even then, there is often a phone call first. They try to be efficient.

People have rebel fantasy that US tuns into fascist dictatorship. What really happens is that US turns into illiberal democracy like Hungary. There is constant headwind going against the government or voicing your opinion, you don't get fair treatment and opportunities. Most people just stop resisting when it's somewhat inconvenient. You can still post anything but it is drowned by algorithms.
by snegrus | 2025-04-12 09:06:42+00:00
If I would start college today I would use all the models and chat assistants that are easily available. I would use Google and YouTube to learn concepts deeper. I would ask for subjects from previous years and talk with people from same and higher years.

When I was in college students were paying for homeworks solved by other students, teachers and so on.

In the article "Evaluating" is marked at 5.5% where creating is 39.8%. Students are still evaluating the answers.

My point is that just got easier to go in any direction. The distribution range is wider, is the mean changing?
by jq-r | 2025-04-12 09:06:58+00:00
There is a whole industry in Croatia specializing in EU money extraction. Hundreds of agencies writing proposals to get grants for their clients and taking their cut. Tons of those are grifts with money directly landing into people's pockets, seaside villas being bought, hotels being made. It's so blatant that politicians accuse each other for not extracting as much money as they’ve could. After decades of blatant stealing EPPO (European Public Prosecutors Office) got involved. When they go for small fish that’s fine, but when they start investigating government politicians they (government) take the case from them and those guys get a slap on the wrist. There are just so many cases that EPPO can do only a fraction of them. Terrible situation, and I don’t think it’ll change because EU doesn’t give too much of a care about a small country like that. And it’s not their money in a sense, so they care even less.
by michaelt | 2025-04-12 09:07:31+00:00
Kodak was well placed to profit from the rise of digital imaging - in the late 1970s and early 1980s Kodak labs pioneered colour image sensors, and was producing some of the highest resolution CCDs out there.

Bryce Bayer worked for Kodak when he invented and patented the Bayer pattern filter used in essentially every colour image sensor to this day.

But the problem was: Kodak had a big film business - with a lot of film factories, a lot of employees, a lot of executives, and a lot of recurring revenue. And jumping into digital with both feet would have threatened all that.

So they didn't capitalise on their early lead - and now they're bankrupt, reduced to licensing their brand to third-party battery makers.

> You can display relevant ads in LLM output or natural language web-search.

Maybe. But the LLM costs a lot more per response.

Making half a cent is very profitable if you only take 0.2s of CPU to do it. Making half a cent with 30 seconds multiple GPUs, consuming 1000W of power... isn't.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-04-12 09:07:47+00:00
The problem is either network effects (in social media) or massive CapEx (Spotify, Netflix).

In categories where neither is the case, you can usually find beautiful alternatives from indie makers or small businesses.

The issue with streaming and social media is that they represent 90%+ of our cultural narrative now, so it feels like there's no escape.