MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bee_rider | 2025-05-24 20:16:05+00:00
I don’t think you should let them off the hook with this fiduciary duty idea. If anything, they should be aware of what their company’s concrete plans are for firing off 90% of their engineers. If they are saying something like that, and it doesn’t happen… they are lying. There’s no duty to lie to everyone (including shareholders) for… their own good? (Not that I see how it would be for their own good).
by graypegg | 2025-05-24 20:16:47+00:00
I do sort of miss bower [0] for this reason. It was really just a way to download javascript and plunk it into your application. It was standard practice to check all of your vendor dependencies into SCM. [1] Of course a good chunk of it was transformed through something like Gulp or Grunt before being added to the bower repository so you were unlikely to maintain those once checked in, but there was still quite a few packages (small jquery image gallery plugins and the like) that were just some un-transformed javascript someone typed up and threw at bower verbatim.

[0] https://bower.io

[1] https://addyosmani.com/blog/checking-in-front-end-dependenci...
by fabianlindfors | 2025-05-24 20:16:49+00:00
> What this project is doing allows one to represent each row (tuple) as a FDB key/value, giving you finer-grained control. But it comes at a cost of having to implement all the access methods, including index scans, in terms of FDB.

That's absolutely right! mvsqlite is a cool project but it doesn't make good use of FoundationDB in a way, which I find a bit unfortunate what a nice piece of software it is!

> This is presumably why database metadata (DDL) isn't currently persisted, because those structures aren't normal tables.

Yes, although perhaps a fun fact that all database metadata in Postgres is actually stored as standard tables, the so called system catalog: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/catalogs.html.

I'm still mulling over how to implement DDL persistence but one possible way would be to change the actual system catalog tables to be backed by FDB instead, and rely on some cache on the nodes to avoid round tripping to FDB to get metadata for each query.

As you can imagine though the system catalog is quite deeply intertwined with Postgres as a whole so remains to be seen if this is even doable. The alternative would be a more complicated design where the data is stored in some custom format in FDB and then synced by each node into the system catalog.
by neilv | 2025-05-24 20:17:00+00:00
In an early startup, there shouldn't be fiefdoms nor (intra-company) empire building.

Everyone should be focused on the shared goal of the startup being successful.

What you're working on is triaged constantly, with everyone contributing what they can, learning as necessary.

Everybody wins, or everybody loses. And if you don't work together as a team, it's probably the latter.

(These are not just empty platitudes. For example, when I say everybody wins, that means I expect everyone to have meaningful equity shares -- not a successful exit makes the founders filthy rich, while everyone else gets a small consolation prize for contributing.)

Behind the anecdote, there were unusual and complicated reasons that someone felt and did some things as they did. I tried to carve out a standalone piece for HN, without getting into the more sensitive and irrelevant stuff.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-24 20:17:15+00:00
This works if you’re young and healthy. Which is possible. I didn’t have health insurance for the first 45+ years of my life and saw a doctor maybe 4-5 times before my mid-50s. Must not have spent more than $5k total on medical in 30 years including dental. If you live a healthy lifestyle (much easier out there than in the city) and are relatively lucky genetically then lack of health insurance isn’t the bugaboo that most Americans seem to make it.
by charcircuit | 2025-05-24 20:18:38+00:00
>Can you point to a particualr security feature that would stop functioning and that needs to have an account and that couldn't use a hardware security key for 2FA (if 2FA is a requirement)?

No, as the security key can provide the identity instead of the Microsoft account.

>Helping users use the app store which the majority are capable of should be sufficient

If you want to provide a good user experience you shouldn't stop at sufficient.

>Those users which aren't capable of operating the app store

It's not about a binary yes or no. It's about making it easier to accomplish what users want to do.
by tecleandor | 2025-05-24 20:18:49+00:00
Yep, what I felt from the last articles I read in the 3 or 4 years before dismantling them, is the problem wasn't that the building had an expensive maintenance per se, but maintenance being delayed for years and years.

They didn't even have hot water for years. That, plus the low occupancy, so the repairs are split between less people. Plus the land ownership, that maybe it was split from the apartment ownership and you'd need to pay additional fees. And I didn't know (or remember) what you commented about the inability to remove pods that had another pods over them, that's a maintenance bummer.

It's like a car (or your teeth), when you begin to delay maintenance. It's not only the cost of the summed delayed maintenance, but the additional surprises that could appear because the unmaintained property degrades faster.
by mcnamaratw | 2025-05-24 20:19:00+00:00
Yeah. Ok. You want the fine print? Reinvent the wheel … for your own learning and fun. Or invent a different kind of wheel.

Don’t reinvent the wheel on a tight deadline while the rest of the team does useful work. Don’t reinvent the wheel and then expect to be rewarded or respected as if you had really invented something.
by DavidVoid | 2025-05-24 20:19:30+00:00
There's a great Random ASCII blog post about an obscure FPU issue like this [1].

- The crash was in a FPU that Chrome barely uses - The instruction that crashed Chrome was thousands of instructions away from the one that triggered the exception - The instruction that triggered the exception was not at fault - The crash only happened because of third-party code running inside of Chrome - The crash was ultimately found to be caused by a code-gen bug in Visual Studio 2015

I've run into this kind of thing once myself (sharing a process with other companies is fun!). It was real confusing to get a stack trace showing our code suddenly crashing on a line of code that was doing the exact same thing with the exact same values as it had always done before.

[1]: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/everything-old-...
by simne | 2025-05-24 20:19:35+00:00
> RAM size growth would probably continue.

True. But note - very long RAM grows ~ periodically doubling one chip size, and first chips don't have controller inside, so require very short traces to bus chip or CPU.

And usually, old chip becomes for example 10% cheaper, but twice size priced ~50% more than old, and to adopt new chips you need new memory controller with additional pins.

> At the time there wasn't really any established trend of progressive growth in graphics resolution or colors

Unfortunately, only partially true.

You may hear about RAMDAC on video forums topics. It is partially palette, but also generator of video signal, reading from RAM very fast.

Problem is that first "fast page" DRAM have very slow interface, so when larger chips become available (and with cheaper kilobytes than older, this was real logic of semiconductor technology progress), speed of RAM was not grow. And unfortunately, this once become bottleneck, it limits grow pixelrate, so even with twice RAM you could not got twice resolution.

In past, I few times calculated speed of RAM need to give classic 60 FPS, and at least up to (and including) first SDRAM machines just show their screen was enough to eat significant share of main RAM throughput, so internal graphics could even affect CPU performance.

On consoles problem was not so harmful, because limited resolution of consumer TV, but on few consoles used expensive frame buffer inside graphics chip.

On modern GPUs problem of RAM throughput solved by used overclocked designed VRAM chips and with extremely wide RAM bus, so chips run in parallel - in computers typical ~64bit, but GPUs start with 128 and top models have 512 or even 1024 bits.
by hansmayer | 2025-05-24 20:20:16+00:00
My man, if I ever pushed or worked on something as pointless as NFTs, I'd be careful to keep my mouth shut and not imply it's others who have a "lack of comprehension". So you somehow got a clueless editor at a "national magazine" to publish your opinion piece (which does not actually translate into "writing for"), good for you and your ego! Only that this fact is completely irrelevant to the main issue at hand - promoting worthless tech either out of pure incompetence, or desire for profit or both. I am not sure which is worse.
by deergomoo | 2025-05-24 20:20:42+00:00
> you end up in the interface's declaration so you have to jump through additional hoops to get to it

Bit of a tangent, but this really annoys me when I work on TypeScript (which isn't all that often, so maybe there's some trick I'm missing)—clicking through to check out the definition of a library function very often just takes me to a .d.ts file full of type definitions, even if the library is written in TypeScript to begin with.

In an ideal world I probably shouldn't really need to care how a library function is implemented, but the world is far from ideal.
by a_w | 2025-05-24 20:21:22+00:00
I do this often:

```ruby

if (user = User.find_by(email: 'abc@example.com'))

user.update(status: 'active')

end

```

Is it better to do this instead?

```ruby

user = User.find_by(email: 'abc@example.com')

user.update(status: 'active') if user.present?

```
by Mofpofjis | 2025-05-24 20:21:31+00:00
> Now try to contribute to OpenGroup.

Funnily enough, I had ended up contributing to POSIX without trying to. I just participated in mailing list discussions and in the public bug tracker (reporting issues, commenting on tickets etc), for which I only needed to register a no-strings-attached account -- the absolute minimum for participating in any bug tracker. Unexpectedly, I got named in the "Participants" section of the standard. My head is still spinning.

Here are some links for you:

- SUSv2: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/idx/index.ht...

- SUSv3, 2004 Edition: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/nfindex.html

- SUSv4, 2024 Edition: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

You can find links to earlier editions of SUSv3 and SUSv4 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Exte...

Austin CSRG landing page: https://www.opengroup.org/austin/

Join the group: https://www.opengroup.org/austin/lists.html

Bug tracker: https://austingroupbugs.net/view_all_bug_page.php

I don't know where the SUSv1 PDFs are, I have local copies; but in 2025, they're at best of historical interest.
by Someone | 2025-05-24 20:21:45+00:00
FTA: Another widespread source of influence was IBM Common User Access from 1987, which among other things introduced […] the ellipsis ("...") to indicate menu choices that opened a dialog window.

I think that the Mac, possibly even the Lisa had that before the CUA. https://andymatuschak.org/files/papers/Apple%20Human%20Inter..., page 23: “A dialog box appears whenever the user chooses a menu item that is followed, in the menus itself, by an ellipsis (…)”
by fabianlindfors | 2025-05-24 20:21:47+00:00
> I've not paid much attention to the Postgres extension API, but I'm pleasantly surprised it's that flexible. I've been hearing for years about how Postgres pluggable engine interface isn't flexible enough to implement certain features, but it actually looks really rich. Maybe some of those improvements come from recent work by the OrioleDB people, and others like Citus who develop various alternative table engines?

I was also pleasantly surprised by this! I've actually been working on this project for more than a year now with a few false starts trying to find the "right" way to integrate with Postgres that fits well enough with FoundationDB.

Yes! There is a lot of ongoing work on Postgres extensibility and it keeps getting better. The ecosystem is really amazing. I'm for example excited about work being done by Enterprise DB to make custom index access method more generically pluggable, which would allow them to be used for primary keys amongst other things: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/E72EAA49-354D-4C2...
by unnouinceput | 2025-05-24 20:22:24+00:00
They definitely tried that with MSSQL. Didn't worked so far. But M$ tactic is always the same. Copy, throw money, copy some more, throw more money. If doesn't work, change the CEO, throw more money until the rival is dead. So yeah, they are throwing money to try to suppress PGSQL from existence. They did that tactic with Delphi (bought the main guy from Borland and that's how we got C#), MSSQL is their answer to PostgreSQL, ASP is their answer to PHP and so on. Oh, and if you think "MS loves Linux" is anything but this tactic, think again - WSL/WSL2 is the proof they still trying to kill Linux.
by Analemma_ | 2025-05-24 20:22:33+00:00
Spotify’s ultimate goal is to move you completely away from listening to recordings from actual artists, and instead listening to a stream of 100% AI-generated slop that they don’t need to pay any royalties on.

Letting you go from a song you like to its respective album (or really, doing any navigation other than “start/pause this algorithmic playlist”) is counterproductive to that goal and so needs to be disallowed, or at least made as difficult as it can be.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-05-24 20:22:54+00:00
I don't think sousveillance will do a thing to avoid the following scenario:

The criminal underclass becomes even more 'under' as fairly large numbers (integer percentage of the population) of people are forced to avoid known camera locations. All of a sudden someone's kid can't take the bus to work/school because they have a failure to appear warrant stemming from apprehension in a flashmob or participation in a sideshow or some other 'lifestyle' crime associated with certain ethicities, which inevitably adds to the political spice level. Essentially everyone in certain areas will start wearing shiesties/masks, which is unlikely to ease tensions. Involvement with the criminal justice system will now carry even more of a 'weight' as being flagged by the system can happen anywhere, not just in traffic stops.

You'll have massive complaints when accountability comes crashing down on the significant population of Americans who are frequent fliers with the criminal justice system. This will be true even if cameras only alert on known faces in preloaded databases (e.g. active warrants), something that's going to be pretty hard to argue against with most of the standard arguments used against license plate readers — hard to argue a violation of privacy if it only alerts on known bad guys and doesn't keep any history.

And in terms of sousveillance, plenty of people would happily stand up and claim credit for a system that alerts only on known 'bad guys,' so deanonymizing them won't work. Further, it's really hard for politicians argue against it when the counterargument is "you literally want to protect known murderers, kidnappers, and child molesters from being apprehended."
by wcfrobert | 2025-05-24 20:22:57+00:00
Reinventing the wheel is the best way to learn. But imo that's really the only context where you should.

I love my rabbit holes, but at work, it's often not viable to explore them given deadlines and other constraints. If you want your wheel to be used in production though, it better be a good wheel, better than the existing products.
by westurner | 2025-05-24 20:24:25+00:00
Newtonian gravity (classical mechanics).

Two-body gravitational attraction is observed to be an inverse square power law; gravitational attraction decreases with the square of the distance.

g, the gravitational constant of Earth, is observed to be exponential; 9.8 m/s^2.

Atmospheric pressure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure#:~:text=P... :

> Pressure (P), mass (m), and acceleration due to gravity (g) are related by P = F/A = (m*g)/A, where A is the surface area. Atmospheric pressure is thus proportional to the weight per unit area of the atmospheric mass above that location.
by mnky9800n | 2025-05-24 20:24:39+00:00
I think there’s two schools of thought. The models will get so big everyone everywhere will use them for everything and they will make lots of money on api calls. The models will get cheaper and cheaper computationally on inference that implementing them on the edge will cost nothing and so an LLM will be in everything. Then every computational device will have one as long as you pay a license fee to the people who trained them.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-05-24 20:25:21+00:00
I don’t know for sure since we don’t know who has access to that data, but if I were an auto insurance company, I would love to know which of my customers tend to go out in inclement weather, or after midnight when the roads are statistically more dangerous.

Took me less than a minute to think of that example. I’m sure there’s more ways that information could be used against my interests.
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by buildinext | 2025-05-24 20:25:34+00:00
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by CLPadvocate | 2025-05-24 20:26:02+00:00
Let's just agree that you're pretty biased. Israel runs no campaigns in Germany, the German-Israeli-Society is a German organisation, with mostly Germans as members, supported by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and having members of German Parliament as Directors. So, let's assume, it's run according to the highest standards regarding political correctness in Germany.

But as you may remember, German television specifically targeted Germans on vacation in Spain (specifically Mallorca) and also Germans living close to the borders to vote for Germany from abroad on multiple occasions in the last years, which can be considered voter fraud without any grey areas.

On the other hand, you didn't join the German-British-Society or the German-Swedish-Society or any other society to check if they behave according to your self-defined standards, so I would say, you need to check your own moral compass.
by not_maz | 2025-05-24 20:27:07+00:00
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.

That's fine. The ideas transmit, the words are forgotten. He doesn't need to use memorable sentences if he's saying what he's trying to say.

Paul Graham is a very skilled communicator. He's not a writer's writer like YKW, but he doesn't need to be.
by Mofpofjis | 2025-05-24 20:28:23+00:00
I agree with you about the seriousness and heft of POSIX (and I definitely know your name from comp.lang.c[.moderated], so I respect your opinion); however, there is no arbitrary gate-keeping around POSIX. If anyone is willing to put in the time and effort, they're welcome to join. This couldn't be more different from other standards orgs where you can only join as a (voting, or observing) representative of an employer that pays an exorbitant yearly membership fee.
by AstralStorm | 2025-05-24 20:28:33+00:00
Except your toy model or toy version of the model will barely work to talk to you, much less write code. I've done this experiment with a much beefier set of GPUs (3080 10 GB + 3060 12 GB) allowing me to run one step up bigger model.

It's not even comparable to free tiers. I have no idea how big the machines or clusters running that are, but they must be huge.

I was very unimpressed with the local models I could run.
by WorkerBee28474 | 2025-05-24 20:28:51+00:00
> Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out... we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testing, contract tracing, masks, and isolation.

I think it's accurate to say the world took option #4 - stop caring. Yes there was a vaccine, but the vaccine didn't mark the end of the pandemic; the pandemic ended when people stopped caring that there was a pandemic.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-24 20:29:31+00:00
Especially about your own significance.

I think PG's essays are (mostly) well-written, and are worth studying as examples of persuasive rhetoric.

But rhetoric has no morals and no relationship to truth.

Persuasion is what salespeople do. Grifters, lawyers, PR firms, politicians, and CEOs all make a living from being persuasive.

That doesn't mean you can trust them not to lie to you.

It also doesn't mean flawed rhetoric means flawed beliefs. Implying it does is itself a misleading rhetorical trick.
by nindalf | 2025-05-24 20:29:38+00:00
The author is up front about the limitations of their prompt. They say

> In fact my entire system prompt is speculative in that I haven’t ran a sufficient number of evaluations to determine if it helps or hinders, so consider it equivalent to me saying a prayer, rather than anything resembling science or engineering. Once I have ran those evaluations I’ll let you know.