MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-04-23 11:11:07+00:00
Not really.

The end user devices are Windows 11, we use M365, but government services are mostly homegrown and the infrastructure runs on Broadcom (VMWare) and IBM (Openshift) software.

Replacing Windows 11 with some kind of Linux and M365 by an MTA is technically feasible, there is political momentum building against US-centric services, but here in Europe politicians are historically highly suspicious of technicians, so nothing gets done yet.

It's a rich country, COTS replaced a lot of technical excellence, but the trend can be reversed as we have bright engineers on the inside still.

In poorer countries and regions, the engineering excellence is way better and they are much more independent.
by codingdave | 2025-04-23 11:11:24+00:00
Yes, I think a software dev or even a non-technical person could absolutely farm sketches out to fiverr or another gig work site and return results in 7 days. And having worked on building gig work platforms, I think the devs who do the work on those sites would be thrilled to get consistent small projects, so it would be fairly reliable in terms of results.

On the other hand, a platform that is automating the process with AI could return something in minutes. And a single dev would return something in weeks or months. So a week for delivery time absolutely sounds like a wrapper around gig workers.

I also see that you have changed your delivery times on your latest post. (Which is too fast to re-post stuff on HN, BTW). Now, faster delivery costs more money. Which again makes it sound like gig workers.

There is nothing wrong with that, BTW - if you have a core team of people who can deliver for a few tens of dollars, that is awesome. But AI would not take days, so it sounds fishy to be offering that as a delivery timeframe for an AI-based system.

If my take on this is completely incorrect, great - but then you should be taking this as feedback on your marketing. It feels sketchy. (Pardon the pun.)
by echoangle | 2025-04-23 11:11:43+00:00
If you want to be pedantic, you shouldn’t say that the photosite has 4 sensors, depending on the color filter array you can have other numbers like 9 or 36, too.

And the difference is pure pedantry, because each photosite corresponds to a pixel in the image (unless we’re talking about lens correction?). It’s like making up a new word for monitor pixels because those are little lights (for OLED) while the pixel is just a tuple of numbers. I don’t see why calling the sensor grid items „pixels“ is misunderstandable in any way.
by sgerenser | 2025-04-23 11:13:26+00:00
I’m a SW engineer at Arm, and as far as I know (and what I see on levels.fyi) the hardware guys in the same level (e.g. Staff vs Staff) make about the same as I do. The apparent difference is probably more caused by the type of companies that employ lots of hardware engineers. Chip designer at google probably makes about the same as a software engineer at google, but both make way more than the chip designer at Intel. But Google employs mostly SW people and Intel employs mostly HW people.
by wingerlang | 2025-04-23 11:13:53+00:00
It's a view of cards, so I want to pull them left and right, I guess.

And.. well, I personally probably won't play it to be honest. Maybe if I had kids and the experience was a v1.0 instead of v0.2 I would be interested. Even then, it would be relying on my nostalgia around the Backpacker games. I'd definitely recommend getting feedback from people expressively interested in it.
by pydry | 2025-04-23 11:14:09+00:00
>If you write unit tests for what you're trying to achieve, and then after you achieve it it turns out you didn't get everything right and the code was supposed to do something different, then those unit tests were almost pure waste

And the code changes were pure waste too.

That's why it's important to try and reduce the risk of building to the wrong requirements wherever possible - fail fast and often, use spikes and experiments, use lean, etc.

It's why it's important to reduce the cost of writing tests and code as much as possible too.

Writing the test itself and showing bits of it to others can actually help uncover many requirements bugs too. That's called BDD.

However, if it turned out it was the right thing and you didnt write a test you've just made it much harder to change that code in the future without breaking something. The cost of code changes went up.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-23 11:14:21+00:00
> The EU fines could stoke tensions with U.S President Donald Trump who has threatened to levy tariffs against countries that penalise U.S. companies.

Mark Zuckerberg, in his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, specifically noted this as his goal for falling in behind Trump. That Trump would be the big-stick man that would protect Meta and other cos from foreign interference. Where "interference" is anything restricting that American exceptionalism "do anything we want, however we want".

Only then Trump started a trade war with quite literally the entire world -- aside from, predictably, Russia -- and now he holds, as he likes to say, no cards. The EU and anyone else can do whatever they want and Zuck and co can cry about the millions they wasted trying to buy a protection racket.

Of course Meta could just withdrawn from the EU. I wish they would withdraw from Canada. Their garbage misinformation platform is a massive net negative for humanity and has offered nothing but harm for the planet.
AI agent creation using screen recording and MCPs
by Dheerajiitr | 2025-04-23 11:14:40+00:00
Hi all,

I have been thinking about a problem and a possible solution to it so thought of asking it here.

I see a massive opportunity in AI agents for automations.Though the opportunity is there, why hasn't the adoption skyrocketed as of now ?

- Is it the talent density ? - or people don't know how they can leverage AI for their workflows ?

Also do you guys think, if I build something where "employees can upload their screen recording and maybe the platform can build sub agents to optimize their workflows using MCP/APi calling" would add value ?

-d
by locopati | 2025-04-23 11:14:55+00:00
With all due respect, you're being pedantic. No, we're not talking about official titles bestowed from on high. The US has been considered the world leader from WW2 until sometime in the 21st century, partly because nobody else wanted to claim it, partly because American foreign policy is aggressive, partly because the American economy was the most robust on in the aftermath of WW2.
by randomcarbloke | 2025-04-23 11:16:11+00:00
based on napkin math, the rotation they land on: 4.34 x 10^-20 rad/s is one order of magnitude (not a lot on a cosmological scale) slower than necessary for a causal disconnect at the boundary of the observable universe due to tangential velocity (at ~C) - obviously my maths could be off-by-one.

Is this a reasonable conclusion?
by tomn | 2025-04-23 11:16:38+00:00
The simple contextlib.contextmanager example doesn't really sell the benefits.

The main one is that it makes error handling and clean-up simpler, because you can just wrap the yield with a normal try/catch/finally, whereas to do this with __enter__ and __exit__ you have to work out what to do with the exception information in __exit__, which is easy to get wrong:

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#object.__...

Suppressing or passing the exception is also mysterious, whereas with contextlib you just raise it as normal.

Another is that it makes managing state more obvious. If data is passed into the context manager, and needs to be saved between __enter__ and __exit__, that ends up in instance variables, whereas with contextlib you just use function parameters and local variables.

Finally, it makes it much easier to use other context managers, which also makes it look more like normal code.

Here's a more real-world-like example in both styles:

https://gist.github.com/tomjnixon/e84c9254ab6d00542a22b7d799...

I think the first is much more obvious.

You can describe it in english as "open a file, then try to write a header, run the code inside the with statement, write a footer, and if anything fails truncate the file and pass the exception to the caller". This maps exactly to the lines in the contextlib version, whereas this logic is all spread out in the other one.

It's also more correct, as the file will be closed if any operation on it fails -- you'd need to add two more try/catch/finally blocks to the second example to make it as good.
by sokoloff | 2025-04-23 11:16:46+00:00
It’s a service or human engineering problem rather than a mechanical engineering or knowledge problem.

Contractors today put in over-sized equipment, set flow temps higher than needed, undersize emitters for aesthetics and cost, and run pumps at full speed to avoid callbacks for “it’s too cold”. You can’t afford the windshield time to drive over to tweak the system to extract maximum performance, because homeowners don’t want to pay for it and will go with the lower bidder enough times that your premium AI-powered service will struggle.

I’ve tweaked my reset curve 12 times the first winter and 2 more times since then (counted from my spreadsheet).

Realistically, if I gave up on the last 3% tweaking, we could have lived with it after 2 post-install tweaks, but at least one of those had to wait for seriously cold weather snap to fine-tune the low end.

My spouse would happily agree that the house is finally very comfortable and noticeably more than before. She’d also tell friends who asked that there were a few days the first winter where the house wasn’t warm enough and needed an adjustment. People who heard that story might conclude that their neighbor’s guy who never has a callback for “too cold” is a safer bet.

Over time, I think even the best mechanical contractors will start to lean towards avoiding callbacks and do that by running the system 5-10°C hotter than “correct” engineering requires. That’s still better than today, where flow is set to 80°C, pumps to max, and the thermostat cycles 4 times an hour but the house is never too cold.
by globular-toast | 2025-04-23 11:17:30+00:00
Mypy was designed to enable gradual adoption. There is definitely Python code out there with `def f(i=0)` where `i` could be any numeric type including floats, complex, numpy etc.. This is called duck typing. It's wrong for a type checker to assume `i: int` in such a case.

Pyright probably works if you use it for a new project from the start or invest a lot of time "fixing" an existing project. But it's a totally different tool and it's silly to criticise mypy without understanding its use case.
by eythian | 2025-04-23 11:17:46+00:00
I usually find it pretty terrible and so hardly ever visit, so let's try:

* 10 day old post from someone I know, involving other people I know

* a reel, with no origin specified

* People you may know

* a recent post from someone I know

* an old post from someone I know

* a recent photo from someone I know

* an old post from someone I know

* People you may know

* An old post from someone I don't know tagging someone I know

* then I scroll further and it does a weird jumping thing so I can no longer keep track of where I was

This is actually better than I remember in terms of "relevant" things, but I long ago lost the habit of facebook, and sometimes seem to get a whole lot of stuff that doesn't feel relevant which tends to put me off. Also that odd scrolling behaviour that starts happening after a bit.
by p_ing | 2025-04-23 11:17:59+00:00
APIs are the last reason there aren't 'major' games on macOS. You've got architecture changes; PPC to Intel was a big loss of game compatibility, and then again when x86-32 support was removed from OS X nuked most of a user's Steam library.

And there's the chicken/egg problem of gamers just not being present in large enough numbers on macOS. The platform already has a fairly small marketshare in the overall PC space, the number of gamers are vanishingly much smaller; Steam stats put macOS at 1.58%, less than Linux.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

All of the major game engines support Apple's Metal, so API compat from that perspective isn't an issue.
by echoangle | 2025-04-23 11:18:47+00:00
It’s a single value, but it’s an integral over the square, not a point sample. If a shine a perfectly focused laser very close to the corner of one sensor pixel, I’ll still get a brightness value for the pixel. If it were a point sample, only the brightness at a single point would give an output.

And depending on your application, you absolutely need to account for sensor properties like pixel pitch and color filter array. It affects moire pattern behavior and creates some artifacts.

I’m not saying you can’t think of a pixel as a point sample, but correcting other people who say it’s a little square is just wrong.
by neaden | 2025-04-23 11:19:17+00:00
I would need to see that in more context but even if Pascal didn't believe in the existence of Troy that would represent him having a weird conspiracy theory then a widespread belief, like pointing to flat earthers today. As I said it was an inhabited city until just a few hundred years before his life, there is no meaningful comparison to Atlantis.

I think you are confusing people debating the historicity of the Trojan war and the debate on the exact location of the ancient city with people thinking Troy was thought to be fictional and rediscovered. The latter never happened and people using it to imply Atlantis might exist are using the debunking of one conspiracy theory to prove another one. This is like using the Moon Landing being real to prove Roswell.

Edit: Troy, generally being referred to as Ilium (where we get the Iliad), or Troas is in the Acts of the Apostles as a place Paul went, it had a bishop who attended Church councils, it was part of the Roman empire, you can buy coins from there today https://www.coinarchives.com/a/results.php?search=ilium this is not at all comparable to Atlantis.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-23 11:19:17+00:00
It actually kind of makes sense.

The DOJ wants to break what it considers to be Google's monopoly, and Chrome is a prime target. The problem is that Chrome by itself is worse than worthless, it is a money sink and it only makes sense as a part of a system.

OpenAI is starting to feel the competition. ChatGPT is no longer the only game in town, DeepSeek happened, Google is becoming actually good, Claude is quite popular among coders, and Grok is not a joke anymore. They need something if they don't want to lose out, and buying the most popular browser to make it into a gateway into their service may be an option.
by Mossy9 | 2025-04-23 11:20:04+00:00
I think there could be a big market for a hosting+support provider that manages the patchwork of open source business applications. Once that's set up, the organization could spend money on the development of the systems they're hosting.

I'm thinking a portfolio of auth, storage, chat, email, code repository, project management... Everything an organization could in theory host itself but realistically does not have the personnel for.
by zahlman | 2025-04-23 11:20:07+00:00
> did you know __init__.py is optional nowadays?

It has an effect, and is usually worth including anyway. I used to omit it by default; now I include it by default. Also, you say "nowadays" but it's been almost 13 years now (https://peps.python.org/pep-0420/).

> since 3.13 there is a @deprecated decorator that does what you think it does

Nice find. Probably worth mentioning it comes from the `warnings` standard library.

> the time package has functions for monotonic clocks and others not just time()

There's quite a bit in there, but I question how many people need it.

Anyway, it's always surprising to me how when other people make these lists, such a large fraction is taken up by tricks with type annotations. I was skeptical of the functionality when the `typing` standard library was introduced; I've only grown more and more wary of it, even as people continue to insist to me that it's somehow necessary.
by ryao | 2025-04-23 11:20:21+00:00
The U.S. has never been the world leader. The U.S. has been a military leader for other democracies since the end of WWII. That is why the title, leader of the free world has been applied to the U.S. president, who is the leader of the various military alliances between various major democracies. If you claim the U.S. considered itself to be the world leader, then you are claiming the U.S. considered itself to be the leader of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw pact, North Korea, etcetera. That is absurd. The U.S. likely did consider itself the leader of Vietnam and Cuba before the democracies in those countries fell, although that was in a military capacity. That is why the U.S. intervened militarily in both, although both interventions failed.

Saying that the U.S. got its leadership position because no one else wanted it is historically incorrect. Following WWII, every other major democratic power was in ruins while the U.S. was the sole major power left in tact. Without any military attacks on U.S. soil, U.S. military strength had skyrocketed during the war. As the war progressed, the U.S. attained the status of a great power and by the war’s end had become a nascent super power. U.S. strength continued to grow after the war due to the threat of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the other great powers never fully recovered militarily since they focused on their economies while relying on the U.S. for security. The U.S. gained its leadership position because no one else existed that could claim it.
by dimonomid | 2025-04-23 11:21:43+00:00
I don't think there's anything wrong with this format, it looks good. The most important thing for nerdlog is that all components of the timestamp must be at the fixed offsets from the beginning of each line. So I believe it can be implemented, I can look at it on the weekend. Feel free to create an issue on Github (I won't be able to test it for real, so would need your help with that)
by jimjambw | 2025-04-23 11:21:51+00:00
The problem is if you go for a free market "vote with their wallets" approach, you end up with a problem like the US did with Microsoft having too high of a market share and control on browsers, media players and operating systems.

Customers can only really vote with their wallets when there is choice and no de facto standard. On top of that, many consumers don't really understand that things like their privacy and and choice has been taken away from them.

I do not agree with all parts of the DMA and I think it's overbearing in some areas but also lacklustre in others but I do think it's important that we don't let monopolies control our lives.
by that_guy_iain | 2025-04-23 11:23:23+00:00
> Not exactly. Once something come out you study it as much as it is necessary, you assess it, then you employ it smartly - that's how it should be done. Those "needing evidence" in your depiction seem akin to those who decide to date drug addicts, jump down buildings etc. because "they do not know yet, it could work out fine": the first problem that one has to pose is that those profiles should not manage - that should be the main background idea. Then, if the issue - at human resources level - happens, strategies must be implemented to contain damage. This implies, you do not talk about creating damage lightly. One bad experience for a counterpart makes you lose opportunities forever: the failed counterparts will go, "good to know, now next please".

I don't think you've ever actually done any of this.

> The first way is diplomacy. Show and reason. If it fails, then artillery. But in that order.

Letting someone do a trial is diplomacy...
by metalman | 2025-04-23 11:23:43+00:00
I have a land line that was installed as part of a simple alarm system for insurance purposes, that was only used to test the line and get the number, and never given out , and it is hitched up to an old answering/message center phone, so every time I walk past it I can see the calls pilling up. The real issue is that the whole phone system is porous, well realy ,all comunications and data, so we lurch along, the scams very much like a parasitic infection that is only an inconvienience to it's host species, to which we apply powders and salves, the question then, is there the will to rebuild everything with a real immune system that is effective enough to prevent any scam ecosystem from evolving to profitability. certainly we are all exasperated by the irritation and the inability to swat and squish the offenders and gain some sense of retrebution, giving the whole ordeal a singular grimmness
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-23 11:23:49+00:00
> On a typical "modern" (ie late 20th century) train like the mainline EMUs I would normally catch when I was a commuter decades ago, the equivalent "cut out" is a glass sealed MCB in the cab, a driver who wants to get rid of this safety feature has to destroy a tell-tale glass seal and company regulations will make them write up why it was necessary then replace it - and of course the automation records each occurrence because why wouldn't it. The paperwork is a faff, so is getting a new unique numbered seal, so drivers actually choose the non-risky option when it's available.

Fun fact: in Germany, the now-infamous company Die-Lei GmbH lost their license to run trains after a few accidents where a side finding was that their trains kept running with PZB (a magloop system halting a train when running a red light) disabled, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers and weeks worth of operating time. It never was a contributing factor in any of their incident, but the persistence of these findings was enough for the railway safety authority to yank their license for good.

YouTuber and former loco driver Alwin Meschede has a (German) video series where he narrates the investigation reports and the final license yank order, while drinking a gulp of wine for each violation [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Heigen1vnHA
by impish9208 | 2025-04-23 11:23:56+00:00
> Most consumers don’t give much thought about the supply chain when ordering online or buying a shirt in a store. But for each item, every stitch, label, fabric, quantity of fabrics, weight, button, whether it is a men’s or women’s shirt, how it was made, where it was made, where it originated, packaging, must be accounted for, said Geiger.

> On exam day, every minute counts. Candidates are allowed to bring one rolling crate or one suitcase and a shelf or rack into the exam hall to hold their reference material if they need more space than the provided desks. No electronics are allowed.

> “You don’t want to reach down to the ground for your notes,” said Jes Crownover, who works at a customs brokerage and compliance firm. She studied for eight weeks before taking the exam in 2021, bringing in a roller cart and stacked blank notebooks to prop up her reference material. She passed.