MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iamthepieman | 2025-04-28 17:52:34+00:00
Framing the whole thing around costs is the problem. Frame it around better quality, better service, buy it for life etc.

There's no way I'm going to buy 3 times the cost for the exact same experience. I don't care about free returns I want something that has no returns because it's reliable and better engineered and made. I'd much rather have 2 widgets that I never have to worry about again (or they can be repairable that's fine too) than 10 widgets, two of which I need to find a box to return them, one of which has intermittent problems that don't quite make it worth it to return OR use, one of which was cheap enough I bought on a whim but was never really going to use anyways etc.

Actually more expensive, fewer, better, things sounds great now that I've written this out. Less mental and physical clutter.

But of course most people don't see it that way and business have to earn trust around these alternative ways of thinking about our relationships with our "stuff". Slapping a "Made in the U.S." sticker on something is gonna do nothing though.
by BuyMyBitcoins | 2025-04-28 17:53:24+00:00
“Wokeness” is an elusive term that is the best attempt to describe a wildly variable but seemingly consistent pattern of beliefs and actions. My left-side friends disavow “wokeness” but still agree with many of the problems “woke folk” identify.

As an outsider, it seems like the moniker of woke best applies to the pattern of thinking that broad problems have a simple and heavy handed solutions. Furthermore, criticizing such solutions will put you in the same camp as those committing the offense, even though you may agree about the problem.
by TheTaytay | 2025-04-28 17:53:43+00:00
(I'm not affiliated with this project.)

I like using Markdown for all sorts of "human and machine readable" tasks these days. Text-only formats are really, really nice, and Markdown has formatting-for-display built in, so using it as a text format for defining slides seems like a natural extension to me.

Maybe you're saying, "You shouldn't use slides. You should be writing a memo!" I guess that is a different take from my assumptions which was: "Sometimes I want to make slides. I'd like them to be easy to author and edit in text. Maybe Markdown would be nice..."
by juliansimioni | 2025-04-28 17:54:11+00:00
Like many, I also had an experience like this in my younger days: obviously unfit product, early prototype made by bottom-of-the-barrel contractors, co-founders who can't code, no salary, no users.

I got lucky, and spent only a few months while not working that hard.

But at the same time, this quote hits home:

>I was doing a startup. I was executing, and for the first time in my professional life I wasn’t insulated from the results. I didn’t achieve my destiny of great things, but I’d built something.
by light_triad | 2025-04-28 17:54:11+00:00
OpenAI has a massive brand advantage because the general public equates their products with AI.

Even if they don't 100% figure out agents they are now big enough that they can acquire those that do.

If the future is mostly about the app layer then they'll be very aggressive in consolidating the same way Facebook did with social media, see for example Windsurf.
by roguecoder | 2025-04-28 17:54:12+00:00
Really? Because I've seen the opposite: the cost of fixing AI code is significantly higher than fixing human-generated code, because step one of refactoring is understanding the code and verifying the tests cover all the behavior. And AI doesn't produce code optimized for any human to read it.

Even the worst programmer understands their own code, whereas AI produces code no human has ever understood.
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-28 17:54:16+00:00
yeah there are many legal problems:

no work authorization to being paid by a US company

sanctions violations

misrepresenting at all (I think tech hiring should be double-blind though)

and given that some employers combat this by asking candidates to insult Kim Jong Un, this is a legal problems in North Korea if the candidate passes!

but to me, these are all fake problems. these are competent human beings that are just doing the job description. not leaving backdoors, not taking trade secrets. just “owning” the signup page of the same pointless copycat startup as any American dev.
by chgs | 2025-04-28 17:54:17+00:00
Is life, specifically intelligent life, signiant on a cosmic scale?

If so there’s a strong chance that Earth is the most significant place in the galaxy at least. It’s possible we’ll screw ourselves up before we make it to other star systems, but of we do manage self sustaining interstellar ships then within a cosmically tiny amount of time humans, or the evolved dwacwndents, will occupy every star in this galaxy.

Maybe that’s common, maybe that’s insignificant on a universal scale, maybe reaching the level of development humans have is quite common, but it’s quite possible that Earth is, or will be, very significant on a galactic scale if nothing else.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-04-28 17:54:24+00:00
That's awesome.

The majority of people in my MSSE program were also heavy on work experience. It made for a far more interesting peer group than the few that had just come in from undergrad. Having that work experience meant that you could look at the coursework from the framework of how it would play out in an actual corporate environment.

It was really fun discussing how to apply the SQA and Project Management coursework in the workplace with people from very different companies.
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-28 17:54:54+00:00
I remember talking to my ex's dad about his job, which involved planning refuels of a large nuclear-powered generation station in the Lower Midwest.

The words "it's a miracle it works at all" routinely popped up in those conversations, which is... something you don't want to hear about any sort of power generation - especially not nuclear - but it's true. It's a system basically built to produce "common accidents". It's amazing that it doesn't on a regular basis.
by zie | 2025-04-28 17:54:55+00:00
I agree that transfers(like the high speed buses) have some checks to ensure transfers happen properly, but that doesn't help much if the data is/was corrupted on either side.

> If most filesystems don't do integrity checks it's probably because there's not much need to.

I would disagree that disks alone are good enough for daily consumer use. I see corruption often enough to be annoying with consumer grade hardware without ECC & ZFS. Small images are where people usually notice. They tend to be heavily compressed and small in size means minor changes can be more noticeable. In larger files, corruption tends to not get noticed as much in my experience.

We have 10k+ consumer devices at work and corruption is not exactly common, but it's not rare either. A few cases a year are usually identified at the helpdesk level. It seems to be going down over time, since hardware is getting more reliable, we have a strong replacement program and most people don't store stuff locally anymore. Our shared network drives all live on machines with ECC & ZFS.

We had a cloud provider recently move some VM's to new hardware for us, the ones with ZFS filesystems noticed corruption, the ones with ext4/NTFS/etc filesystems didn't notice any corruption. We made the provider move them all again, the second time around ZFS came up clean. Without ZFS we would have never known, as none of the EXT4/NTFS FS's complained at all. Who knows if all the ext4/NTFS machines were corruption free, it's anyone's guess.
by Scoundreller | 2025-04-28 17:55:12+00:00
Dunno about Spain/portugal, but in North America they’re usually just for elevators/alarms, partial hallway lighting & maybe water pumps (for firefighting).

Maybe a tech company with servers will pay extra for full backup, but it’s not typical.

Without fail, during every grid outage, some will fail to start and there will be elevator rescue calls throughout the city.
by kelnos | 2025-04-28 17:55:14+00:00
I feel like there's some middle ground that OP is missing. Perhaps intentionally, but that might not be for everyone.

I worked for software/hardware companies for 21 years. Some were stable income for me, but nothing amazing. A few were startups where I worked hard but they didn't go anywhere (fortunately I earned a stable, market-rate income before they failed). One turned out to be reasonably life-changing, and I'm very lucky for that. On and off over that period of time I worked on open source projects, some that didn't go anywhere, some that have been successful.

Right now I'm building something to try to sell. I'm not going to take any VC money or pursue high growth. I'm not chasing the latest whiz-bang AI whatever. I'm building a fairly boring product (that is still fun for me to build), using the tech stack that I want, to the standards of quality that I want. Right now I'm working hard on it, but the goal is that, once it's "done" and has customers (fingers crossed I manage to attract paying customers), I'll be spending no more than 10 hours a week on it (and hopefully less on average). If it "only" gets to $500k/yr in revenue or so, after some number of years running it, I'll consider that a fantastic success. If I can run the entire thing on one or two VMs, and it never grows past that infra-wise, that's a fantastic success.

You can listen to both the angel and the devil and still control your own destiny, outside of the scraps your employer will throw at you. Who knows, though, maybe this idea of mine won't work. But I'm happy I'm giving it a try.
by brazzy | 2025-04-28 17:55:22+00:00
I very much doubt that GOG makes enough on such old titles to justify thorough QA.

And I absolutely fault the developera for it, because it's a stupid, counterproductive thing to do - if nobody knows it happens because the game is pirated, it will just get a reputation for being buggy and deter honest buyers just as much as pirates. So why do it? To secretly "get back" at the pirates?
by floxy | 2025-04-28 17:55:34+00:00
Anyone have a guess as to how much less material intensive a dedicated robotaxi might be? Right now ride share cars are the same as ever other automobile. But maybe a robotaxi could be smaller, like the 2 seat Cybercab. So you are saving on the cost of materials, and weight. And if you are just mostly running around town at low speeds, maybe you only need a small 30 kWh battery? Again that saves cost and weight. And if it is mostly in-town driving, your robotaxi might have a much smaller motor than what most consumers would find acceptable if they were buying a car for themselves? Also with the around-the-town-and-not-at-highway speeds, you could get by with less sound insulation (less wind noise), and maybe harder tire rubber compounds that are more efficient (less rolling resistance, but noisier) and have longer wear life?

What other potential savings might be available? You could remove some things, like the outside mirrors, saving slight cost and gaining on aerodynamic efficiency. Removal of the steering wheel, brake / accelerator pedals, inside rear view mirror. Get rid of the instrument cluster display. Get by with a very low cost speaker setup to make announcements only?
by 59nadir | 2025-04-28 17:55:39+00:00
For any given singular project "gluing libraries together" is not a particularly interesting critique, but as a default way of doing things it is very relevant to the resulting skill levels of people as well as their respect for quality. I have enough experience with former coworkers to understand which attitude results in which and it's with that backdrop in mind I've written the post. I stated my assumptions pretty clearly and why I've made them as well.

I absolutely think gluing libraries together is a substandard default way of working that leads to poor results, by the way. "[...] everything in software is someone's abstraction" is a cop-out that ignores the massive gap that exists between finding the lowest level you can execute (in many cases an OS call that cannot be split up into a smaller part, or calls into the lowest API you can find like OpenGL, Vulkan, etc., where we have to play by a driver's rules) and executing a function in a library that calls a library that calls a library that calls the OS or the like.

Taking on the cost of countless layers of function calls, potentially manager code, etc., just because "everything in software is someone's abstraction" is, to use your phrasing, a "nonsense" excuse for poor work and not taking ownership of the code that will execute.

I have a former coworker that elected to use a tokenizer/parser library that clocked in at about 6k lines of Rust code, where I personally decided to simply write one in about 600 lines (in Odin, which probably is considered more verbose). The 600 line one was faster, used less memory and naturally was easier to understand (easy enough to understand for someone who literally had never written a tokenizer/parser before to use and extend). It's defensible to use a library for a tokenizer/parser, of course, because "everything in software is someone's abstraction", but do you see the problem here where we get worse software and no one ever learns how to make better things if everyone just decides to `cargo install` readymade solutions?

I'm not saying that my colleague could at that moment have written the Odin solution in this case, but he would certainly be more likely to if he implemented things from scratch as a way of practicing, or decided to otherwise take ownership of the code that runs in work projects.
by trott | 2025-04-28 17:55:59+00:00
> The AlphaFold3 analysis (the AI contribution) literally accounts for a few panels in a supplementary figure - it didn't even help guide their choice of small molecule inhibitors since those were already known.

(Disclaimer: I'm the author of a competing approach)

Searching for new small-molecule inhibitors requires going through millions of novel compounds. But AlphaFold3 was evaluated on a dataset that tends to be repetitive: https://olegtrott.substack.com/p/are-alphafolds-new-results-...
by fulafel | 2025-04-28 17:56:29+00:00
First-gen district heating was steam, then moved to hot water. It didn't go away [1] but there's regional differences. In cold climates there are oil based simpler backup plants that can cover for the normal CHP[2] and elctric+heat pump based generation. It's a good way to buffer and use cheap energy in periods of cheap electricty from eg high wind production[3].

[1] https://www.wedistrict.eu/interactive-map-share-of-district-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
by throwup238 | 2025-04-28 17:56:30+00:00
Are you planning on licensing the IP core? It would be great to have your core integrated with ESP32, running alongside their other architectures, so they can handle the peripheral integration, wifi, and Python code loading into your core, while it sits as another master on the same bus as the other peripherals.

Do you plan to have AMBA or Wishbone Bus support?
by tptacek | 2025-04-28 17:56:33+00:00
Median-quality code is extraordinarily valuable. It is most of the load-bearing code people actually ship. What's almost certainly happening here is that you and I have differing definitions of "median-quality" commercial code.

I'm pretty sure that if we triangle-tested (say) a Go project from 'jerf and Gemini 2.5 Go output for the same (substantial; say, 2,000 lines) project --- not whatever Gemini's initial spew is, but a final product where Gemini is the author of 80+% of the lines --- you would not be able to pick the human code out from the LLM code.
by Apocryphon | 2025-04-28 17:56:41+00:00
It's funny that the "economic anxiety" thesis for the rise in populism might also apply to tech elites. They hardly cared a few years back when the NYT and other liberal media organs started bashing tech nonstop while the boom was in full swing. Then they started swinging to the right just as the previous administration started unwinding ZIRP.
by rawgabbit | 2025-04-28 17:57:09+00:00
Having lived through the Texas electricity fiasco in 2021, I would blame cost cutting, the reckless drive for “efficiency”, and maximizing shareholder value.

In Texas, the electric providers cut staff and maintenance to maximize shareholder value. They will not have redundant systems and redundant plants out of the goodness of their hearts. The Texas marketplace actually allowed them in the odd event of an outage to charge astronomical spot prices thinking this will incentivize them to have redundant systems. This was a foolish fantasy.

Now in Texas, discussion of how to cost share redundancy have taken place. But no one wants to pay for it. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/01/texas-power-market-p...
by Aurornis | 2025-04-28 17:57:36+00:00
This is the classic dead-end startup story from beginning to end. It checks all the boxes:

- 3 non-technical cofounders

- Flurry of activity for everything other than acquiring customers

- Attempt to outsource development followed by disappointment

- Relentless scope creep

- Zero go to market plan, just an incessant belief that more features in the app will solve all problems

There is also one less obvious point that is buried in the article:

> Simultaneously, my underpaid mid-level consultancy role passed me up for promotion again. I wanted out, double-time.

I did volunteer mentoring for a while. Few people went all-in on unpaid startup jobs as their primary role, but many were tempted to do it as side projects. They always believe it’s less risky. The risk they don’t see is that it distracts them from their main job, either slowing career growth or risking a PIP or layoff.

The common thread I kept coming back to was this: Ignore the side projects. Focus on career growth at your day job. Put your primary energy into growing your career or finding a job where you can.

Something about the side hustle continues to lure people into thinking it’s a way out, until they burn themselves out and sabotage their day job while doing it.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-04-28 17:57:48+00:00
If you haven't heard of it before, also check out Goal-Oriented Action Programming. I was looking at that for giving NPCs essentially their own questlines. So you have some random event happen ("Grug the orc steals Marf the orc's prized club!") and that would generate a quest for Marf to find his club. So he investigates; he sniffs the air (orcs have good noses). He strolls around and interviews the other orcs he sees and asks them if they've seen his prized club. Eventually, he might find his way to Grug the orc and they have a confrontation. Now, all of this is while you're sneaking through the orc hideout to retrieve some MacGuffin...
by gruez | 2025-04-28 17:58:44+00:00
>but to me, these are all fake problems. these are competent human beings that are just doing the job description. not leaving backdoors, not taking trade secrets. just “owning” the signup page of the same pointless copycat startup as any American dev.

Going back to my previous comment, do you think a chinese manufacturer labeling their products as non-chinese is also a "fake problem"? After all, if the product works as advertised, and is the same quality as the japanese/german equivalent, who cares?
Show HN: I made a platform to debug Puppeteer (JS) crashes visually
by ivanalemunioz | 2025-04-28 17:58:46+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Ivan. I've been working on a solution to visually debug my own https://pptr.dev/ crashes, and this week I opened it to the public: https://buglesstack.com/.

If you have any questions or suggestions to improve it, feel free to contact me at ivan@buglesstack.com.

Thanks for reading! <3
by MisterTea | 2025-04-28 17:59:12+00:00
When the northeast blackout hit in 2003 in NYC I dont remember any panic. We still had house phones and they still worked in the blackout thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability.

I stopped by a friends house and we then went on a walk. Some stores were open and cash was accepted. We hung out later that night and had a few beers. The sky was amazing as there was next to no light pollution. Next day was totally in the dark as well and again, no panic. More beers were enjoyed.

The choice to move to electronic everything without having to give a shit about reliability is a failure of modern government. Move fast and break society for a dollar.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-04-28 17:59:40+00:00
Palantir is an excellent, AMAZING name for that company. It screams "we spy on people around the world: their pasts, their present, their very thoughts. We serve corrupt powers that pretend to be pure and good. We are a tool to enable the strong to dominate the weak. The data we produce will be misinterpreted to disastrous results."

I dont know if Thiel intended to convey that, but it's exactly the same name that I would've picked for that company.
Ask HN: Examples of LLMs building with primitives MCP?
by tmaly | 2025-04-28 17:59:55+00:00
I saw several posts of Claude wired up to Blender via MCP and making these impressive models.

Here was one repo https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp

I was thinking, or more hoping the LLM was actually providing instructions via primitives to make the 3d models. But digging into the code, it seems they are just calling text to 3d model LLMs under the hood.

Has anyone seen any examples where the LLM is using primitives via MCP to make something truly impressive?
by Suppafly | 2025-04-28 18:00:21+00:00
>Physics degrees still mean you have very decent maths, but CS degrees are not necessarily as strong a signifier of it.

That and they necessarily have to learn a lot of CS just to do their own degree work. It's like wondering why cross country runners perform well at other sports too, their sport incorporates the 'hard' part of most sports, the running and endurance aspects.
by ajross | 2025-04-28 18:00:35+00:00
> Complaining about wokeness doesn't make you right-wing, much less reactionary.

Honestly given the impact, I'd say complaining about "wokeness" pretty much defines "reactionary". Pronouns and flopsy straws never hurt nobody, and kids have been calling their elders racists and rapists and whatnot for generations.

Something happened to convince tech folks that "wokeness" was somehow a threat, when it clearly wasn't and never will be. And that something is interesting, and probably of a piece with whatever was going on in the echo chamber these folks found themselves in.
by fooker | 2025-04-28 18:00:48+00:00
> Does it matter?

Yes.

> online CS degree.

No.

Most of the value of a degree is the connections you build and get opportunities through. You're not going to get much better at software development.

You'll learn some core CS/math concepts that can help later if you want to get into niche roles though. But that's not something most people benefit from, by definition of 'niche'.
by fsiefken | 2025-04-28 18:01:01+00:00
yes, with the latest linux kernel it's not really possible, even though gpt4o mentioned it might be possible if you hand compile the kernel, leave out all the modules and strip out everything you don't strictly need so there's some memory left for something like busybox.

At that point it'd be cheaper/easier to arrange 64 Mbyte of RAM in the old pentiums. With Raspberry Pi's having 4 GB these day it'll be perhaps just be a painful exercise.