MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by erishabh | 2025-04-10 16:25:11+00:00
why the unfiltered back-and-forth between engineers and AI is becoming the most valuable system design artifact

These "design diaries" capture the messy brilliance of creation: questions, pivots, breakthroughs. Teams share them raw, trading static endpoints for living traces of intent. No more guessing the "why" — just read the chat.

It's like having an instant replay button for the design process, letting you watch the architectural decisions unfold step-by-step. Forget static blueprints; you get the raw footage of the design thinking, capturing the live decision-making trace, not just the highlight reel.
by psunavy03 | 2025-04-10 16:25:44+00:00
Arguably RSR vis a vis Ukraine in 2022 is a great primer on just how much the Russian military had decayed from their mid-80s Soviet peak. You can study histories and interviews from the late Cold War about just how much of a bloodbath the NATO militaries expected a Russian invasion of West Germany to be.

The USAF A-10 fleet was expected to have been wiped out in approximately 2-3 weeks of fighting based on expected loss rates, and nuclear escalation was not outside the realm of possibility.

What the Ukrainians managed to do in 2022 was impressive, full stop. But to understand what that reveals about the Russians, you also need to understand that the Ukrainians are essentially a JV military as opposed to the US, a NATO force, or someone like the Australians, Japanese, or South Koreans. The bravery is there, but they just don't have the same ability to integrate the details at scale such as fires, logistics, and large-scale joint operations, because they're still trying to shake off their Soviet past.

Whereas although the Soviets would have similar problems that come from being an authoritarian military, NATO would have been fighting them AND the entire Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland et al). The Soviets wouldn't have had 30+ years of Russian societal decay and would have had the advantage of sheer mass.
by theF00l | 2025-04-10 16:26:05+00:00
Copyright law protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. Favourite case law that reinforces this case was between David Bowie and the Gallagher brothers.

I would argue patents are closer to protecting ideas, and those are alive and well.

I do agree copyright law is terribly outdated but I also feel the pain of the creatives.
by 0xEF | 2025-04-10 16:26:38+00:00
[x] Anxiety

[x] Sleep apnea

[x] Digestive issues

[x] Former psychonaut

[x] Highly stressed pretty much always due to work

I can only hope that whatever brand of dementia I end up with is something akin to Mr Toad's Wild Ride, or whatever. I'd be happy just to go out either laughing or well-rested.
by boomskats | 2025-04-10 16:27:07+00:00
This post also introduces Iceberg pretty nicely. Details on Class A vs Class B operations are here[0].

What kind of latency/throughput are people getting from R2? Does it benefit from parallelism in the same way s3 does?

[0]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/#class-a-operat...
by nancyminusone | 2025-04-10 16:27:53+00:00
I saw a How it's Made episode about cheeses like this the other day. They mix the ingredients in a giant electric mixer - but dump them in by hand. The inspection is still done by ear with a hammer - but when then need to flip the wheels over every few weeks they have a robot grabber thing do it.

Obviously, there's some balance in technology that is about right, but where do you draw the line? Because this could absolutely be done fully by hand or fully autonomously.

The episode after that showed a machine to milk cows which was fully automated with no human involvement at all!
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-10 16:28:41+00:00
I thought these paragraphs were the most insightful:

> While the Trump phenomenon feels unprecedented to many Americans, much of the world has seen figures like him before. Many Europeans have had firsthand experience — whether recent or generational — of chafing under a leader whose politics they find outrageous. In recent years alone, we’ve seen the rise of right-wing politicians across Europe who can broadly be described as “Trump-like,” from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Giorgia Meloni, and from France’s Marine Le Pen to the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders. Trump is merely our local manifestation of a global trend.

> While Americans tend to be idealistic, many Europeans are steely-eyed realists. A hard history has taught them that you can’t always judge a person by their current leader. And they recognize that more Americans voted against Trump than voted for him; even if they’re alarmed at the actions of America, they don’t paint all Americans with the same, broad brush.

I think the reason that the rise of Trump has been so painful for many Americans is that it has shattered our view of American idealism (or perhaps a slightly different type of "American Exceptionalism", if you will).

When I was a kid and learned about the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, I remember thinking "How could people be so stupid? Why would they want to support these autocrats?" I don't think that anymore.
by Sparkyte | 2025-04-10 16:29:08+00:00
I think these comments here are politically charged. There are a lot of walk of life in the US not limited to politics or who/what someone voted for.

I am sure if Americans are not welcome in Europe it isn't because they are an American, but that individual isn't very nice or polite around others. I haven't been to Europe in a long time, because Asia is so much more awesome.
by nradov | 2025-04-10 16:29:13+00:00
You're not even asking the right question. There's nothing magic about cheap drones. They can be effective supplements to crew-served weapons and light artillery for close combat. But they lack the range to be effective in the Indo-Pacific Theater, and when drones are designed with sufficient range they stop being cheap. Besides the range problem, cheap drones also can't perform the full spectrum of missions like deep strike, ASuW, interception, etc.

For all its faults, the F-35 at least has sufficient combat radius and survivability to be relevant in a major near-peer conflict (although it desperately needs a new and more expensive adaptive cycle engine). Until a better platform comes along the choices are essentially the F-35 or nothing.
by milanm081 | 2025-04-10 16:29:13+00:00
Have you ever pressed play on Netflix and wondered what technology ensures your video starts instantly and plays without interruptions? Simply pressing play triggers a global technological symphony that delivers content to over 301 million subscribers in 190 countries.

Behind this massive operation lies one of the world's most sophisticated distributed systems architectures.

This article explores the technical decisions and architectural patterns that make streaming on Netflix effortless. It also discusses what software engineers and architects can learn from this extraordinary-scale system.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-10 16:29:36+00:00
I think that's an unreasonable lens for viewing his work. Of course he values purity over practicality. That's his entire platform. His decision making process always prioritizes supporting Free Software over proprietary efforts, pragmatism be damned.

Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do.
by fragmede | 2025-04-10 16:30:02+00:00
It mean be polite. If I tell you that libfoo is super secure, accept that as true, continue to listen to the sales pitch, and then in the evening, look at the source for it so you can assert for yourself that it is secure.

Don't derail the whole thing by arguing that libfoo couldn't possibly be secure because x, y, and z, it's about getting to the vendors value proposition and not getting stuck in important but not-right-now details.
by rayiner | 2025-04-10 16:30:24+00:00
> I would actually wager that benefits dont matter to them anymore. If it's government, it's bad. Full stop. Conservatives don't really have any real stances. They are obstructionists at this point. They anti-. That's it. If someone proposes something they will obstruct and disagree because they didn't come up with it.

The Trump GOP has no reflexive opposition to government. Trump won the nomination in 2016 because he abandoned the GOP orthodoxy on free markets and declared there would be no cuts to Medicare or Social Security benefits. https://www.vox.com/2015/8/15/9159117/donald-trump-moderate

Tariffs are government. Border security is government. Police are government. The Trump GOP supports all those things.

On the environment, Trump is an incrementalist. He’s not proposing on repealing the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act. But in the 50-60 years since those laws, we have adopted numerous rules and regulations that don’t provide the same level of benefit. In his first term, he was focused on rolling back those regulations.
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-10 16:30:35+00:00
> There are no known health problems caused by this syndrome

This is a causal hypothesis framed as a statement. The rhetorics indicate an authoritative statement of fact regarding what the syndrome does cause, which is fundamentally an impossible conclusion to draw empirically.

The only hedge in the sentence is "known", which is tautological.

Of course, it's impossible to eliminate all variables, making authoritative claims about lack of causal relation impossible. But at least they could make the effort to frame this uncertainty in reasonable terms.

> What would the causal hypothesis be, "this syndrome causes no diseases"?

EDIT: but c'mon, just read the article. It's extremely bold in its claims with no evidence. "If you have short sleeper syndrome, you don’t need as much sleep as others. You can expect this to continue throughout your life." "Natural short sleepers don’t experience the same health risks as people who don’t get enough sleep." etc. I don't see any semantic difference between this and "this syndrome causes no known diseases". (or "SSS doesn’t pose any known health risks." as the actual quotation states.)
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-10 16:30:48+00:00
If you think that latter part is easy, then you should definitely go clone a SaaS and exit with millions. You have all the tools at your disposal to clone any app that you want now with minimal effort. Be a 1 man team, no overhead. Undercut on price and exit.

In fact, it's not that easy. The second part -- GTM -- is the hardest part; even if you could clone Notion, getting that product in front of customers is the hard part.
by borg16 | 2025-04-10 16:30:58+00:00
here is an idea, curious what others think of this:

split the entire coursework into two parts:

part 1 - students are prohibited from using AI. Have the exams be on physical papers than digital ones requiring use of laptop/computer. I know this adds burden on corrections and evaluations of these answers, but I think this provides a raw answer to someone's understanding of concepts being taught in the class.

part2 - students are allowed, and even encouraged to use LLMs. And they are evaluated based on the overall quality of the answer, keeping in mind that a non zero portion of this was generated using an LLM. Here the credit should be given to the factual correctness of the answer (and if the student is capable of verifying the LLM output).

Have the final grade be some form of weighted average of a student's scores in these 2 parts.

note: This is a raw thought that just occurred to me while reading this thread, and I have not had the chance to ruminate on it.
by jayrot | 2025-04-10 16:31:27+00:00
>Actor Scott Glenn, who plays the Captain of Dallas, modeled his character after our Captain, Tom Fargo.

Terrific character. I just love the competency and leadership. Hopefully your Cpt. Fargo was just as good.

My favorite exchange from the movie is when Jonesy brings his report to the captain. He's aware of how crazy this theory sounds, especially when his very serious and hard-to-read captain rephrases it back to him. Jonesy starts getting nervous and fumbling and Mancuso cuts him off -- "Relax, Jonesy. You sold me." Not quite sure why that simple line hits so hard.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7g6dKncO-I
by iknowSFR | 2025-04-10 16:31:59+00:00
If you’re supplementing probiotics, there is some research about inulin to talk through with your doctor. There’s a chance that inulin is carcinogenic even at lower doses. A lower dosage might be 4g and a typical probiotic is 200g.

Reasons to be wary of this research, including:

-The rodent-to-human study element

-causation v correlation

-sample size

Reasons to take this research seriously:

-Probiotic supplements are relatively new and long term effects aren’t understood.

-The “health as a business” realities that are very much at work here.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277257232...

https://news.gsu.edu/2018/10/18/adding-refined-fiber-to-proc...
by burningChrome | 2025-04-10 16:32:11+00:00
I play hockey frequently and have the same issue. When we go on vacation, I sleep worse, need to sleep later and longer to feel better. I know that even moderate cardio regulates circadian rhythm and helps with body temperature regulation. Your body's temperature increases during exercise, when you stop and your body temp comes back down, neurologically it tells the body you're now ready for sleep. Exercise also helps regulate melatonin production which affects your sleeping cycles.

When I play in really hard, grueling sessions, taking CBD also helps reduce the inflammation in my body and helps me sleep deeper. I also stretch for at least 30-40 mins when I get done which also helps.

So it makes sense, once you stop or change your body's cycle, it can affect a lot of other areas of your day-to-day schedule.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-10 16:32:15+00:00
> The issue is those people who want to completely dismantle the state of Israel and evict (or kill) all the Jewish inhabitants.

This is equally as wrong as those Israelis who want to wipe Gaza off the map and occupy the entire West Bank. Sadly for the Palestinians, a bunch of people who believe this are part of the Israeli government.
by empath75 | 2025-04-10 16:32:47+00:00
I have backpacked around places where literally the US funded decades-long civil wars that devastated the country, and people do not blame you for what your government does. Even in places like Nicaragua where the government is _tremendously_ anti-American, even talking to communist true believers that say they hate everything America stands for (oh and was _that_ a fun night of drinking), in towns with "Viva la Revolution" and "Colonizer Go Home" graffiti, they were incredibly nice to me personally. There was one particular person in a group of locals I was hanging out with who pretended she didn't speak english, because she was annoyed about having to accommodate me and my terrible spanish, until we started talking about Sasha Baron Cohen movies and then suddenly she started speaking enthusiastic english that sounded like she was a UCLA Film Studies major.

I talked to a guy in El Salvador that got deported for being in MS-13 and he just wanted to chill and talk about the US and sports. I talked to someone from Colombia that was struggling to get a visa to visit her brother and she was mad about the _situation_, but not mad at _me_ about it, she just wanted to vent.

Just listen more than you talk and be careful about how you talk about politics unless you're in the mood for an argument.
by peab | 2025-04-10 16:33:48+00:00
I definitely agree with part of what you're saying. The AI tools make it much easier to become disconnected from what you're writing.

That being said, did you read this post in particular? I explicitely say "ChatGPT and Claude tends to write in a generic style erases my personal tone of voice. I don't want to create "AI slop", I just want to write more efficiently."

My purpose with this tool is not to just dump what ChatGPT says into a document, but make it easier to research sources, find images, and proofread my writing.
by cdkmoose | 2025-04-10 16:34:03+00:00
Love this movie, it turned me into an avid reader of Clancy.

At the time of this movie, I was working as a software engineer for a defense contractor building combat control systems for submarines. When it was released, the company took the entire department, including former Navy submarine officers now project/program managers to a private viewing. There were definitely groans when some things on the sub were inaccurate, but given the level of hands-on knowledge and expertise in the audience, it was very well received.
by adastra22 | 2025-04-10 16:34:15+00:00
I ask Claude to solve problems of similar complexity on a daily basis. A SAT solver specifically is maybe a once a week thing.

Use cases are anything, really. Determine resource allocation for a large project, or do Monte Carlo simulation of various financial and risk models. Looking at a problem that has a bunch of solutions with various trade-offs, pick the best strategy given various input constraints.

There are specialized tools out there that you can pay an arm and a leg for a license to do this, or you can have Claude one-off a project that gets the same result for $0.50 of AI credits. We live in an age of unprecedented intelligence abundance, and people are not used to this. I can have Claude implement something that would take a team of engineers months or years to do, and use it once then throw it away.

I say Claude specifically because in my experience none of the other models are really able to handle tasks like this.

Edit: an example prompt I put here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43639320
by ericmcer | 2025-04-10 16:34:21+00:00
I agree, isn't most selling online nowadays?

This also doesn't make sense because buying shoes from Nike.com costs roughly the same as Footlocker. Is Nike taking that 50% cut in this case? Article definitely hand waves away a ton of the complexity around tariffs and global trade.

My favorite line is: "Asian manufacturing in Asia produces US jobs. You go to Footlocker to buy a pair of $100 shoes because you can afford them. This creates jobs for the Footlocker employees".

It feels like people have completely flipped their views on offshoring manufacturing in the last 6 months. If you go back 10 years ago we were barraged with stories about Foxconn, corporations exploiting workers in developing nations, and scenes of abandoned manufacturing cities like Detroit. The popular view was that we needed to build our manufacturing base back up and that using developing nations to pump out cheap disposable goods was bad for everyone except giant corporations.

Now we are getting told that corporations offshoring all their labor to developing nations is good, and that the USA should not do manufacturing. This article even asserts that we will lose jobs if we produce things domestically.

I don't agree with the ham-fisted bullying approach Trump is using, but I do agree with the philosophical underpinning. Offshoring all our manufacturing is not a good long term strategy and will slowly erode the value of labor and our economy.
by davidw | 2025-04-10 16:34:35+00:00
People are likely to start suffering real, personal pain because of all the garbage coming from the White House. If you lost your job at the factory because of the tariffs, and hear some loud Americans next to you at the bar... maybe you don't feel so charitable towards them compared to a more abstract dispute over, say, your views on the best way to provision health care.

Not sure how likely that will be (the bars where factory workers hang out tend to not be the ones in tourist areas, for one), but it seems plausible to me.

I wouldn't let that stop me from travelling though.
by norir | 2025-04-10 16:34:37+00:00
This is undeniably true. The consequences of a technological collapse at this scale would be far greater than having never had it in the first place. For this reason, the people in power (in both industry and government) have more destructive potential than at any time in human history by far. And they do not act like they have little to no awareness of the enormous responsibility they shoulder.
by maeil | 2025-04-10 16:34:39+00:00
As a Swede who was around back then, it's completely different this time around. At that time despite animosity, there was no (anywhere remotely mainstream) talk of decoupling from the US, reducing dependence on them, seriously reevaluating the relationship. Now there is, and people are serious. More importantly, the way in which the US spoke about Europe back then was completely different. Currently, the US treats Europe as adversaries.
by Freak_NL | 2025-04-10 16:35:18+00:00
Of course they are, as long as you make an effort not to stand out too much.

Obviously, that means no MAGA hats (but who wears those outside of the US?), but also no USA flags on clothing, hats, or whatever (and definitely no flag of Israel). Tip: look more neutral by wearing camouflage, like a white sweater with a red 11-pointed maple leaf on it.

Don't try to pay everything by credit card (excepting tourist traps and museums).

If you voted Republican and consider yourself one: don't tell a soul. Ever.

Learn to say 'good morning/day/evening', 'thank you', 'please', and 'I'm really sorry about Trump' in the local language. A little effort is often appreciated.
Ask HN: Whats your late-80s/early-90s computer setup for your kids to mess with?
by cayleyh | 2025-04-10 16:35:20+00:00
I grew up with a simple computer: It had some software and programming stuff on it and it wasn't connected to the internet. I was able to just mess around and learn how computers worked, how to use them, and the basics of how to program, without my parents worrying that I was 1) breaking something they needed for work or 2) finding 4chan.

What are your setups for your elementary-aged kids? Do you have a system they can just mess with and break and it's no big deal? Specifically if it's not just a regular hand-me-down computer, what is it and what's the setup?
by ryandrake | 2025-04-10 16:35:37+00:00
A lot of young people have never in their lives seen an actual paper file, a manilla folder, and their "desk top" is where they put their monitor stand. These things were made skeuomorphic to ease office workers' transition from paper filing to computer filing. Kids today have no idea what the physical counterparts are anymore, just like they have no idea why "save" icons look like floppy disks. It's all anachronistic.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-10 16:36:12+00:00
>In Cambodia, they pay $208 per month, which is assuming a 160 hour work month, which I guarantee is the bare minimum which gives them $1.30 in wages per hour.

That means nothing without knowing what other jobs pay and what the overall cost of living is. It honestly feels a little dishonest to convert things to USD without either putting it in perspective to the rest of their costs or adjusting it to a value that reflects the spending power of that amount of money. Does $1.30 buy them one hamburger or would it buy them 10+?
by orwin | 2025-04-10 16:36:45+00:00
> But one consistent idea resounded clearly. When I asked each of our guests whether Americans would still be welcome in their country, they all said the same thing: Yes, of course! Why on earth wouldn’t Americans be welcome here?

I concur. Asking the question is weird. And contrary to the comments here, and despite my extremely leftwing views, I don't care if you voted MAGA or not, and I think most European, except maybe terminally online ones, is the same.

Half my friends have politics I don't like, as long as they aren't disrespectful and talking shit about people they don't know, I'm fine with it.